Chapter 1: Welcome to Dorley Hall
Notes:
This story engages with some reasonably dark topics, including but not limited to torture, manipulation, dysphoria, nonconsensual surgery, and kidnapping. While it isn't intended to be a dark or dystopian story, the perspective characters are carrying a lot of baggage, and the exploration of the premise might be triggering for trans readers.
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Chapter Text
2012 October 16
Tuesday
“I’m telling you, mate, I’m worried about your brother.”
“He’s fine! It’s just teenager stuff. That’s what Mum says.”
“We’re teenagers and we’re not like that.”
“Older teenager stuff, then. Something happens in your brain when you turn eighteen that turns you into a massive prick. It’s hormones. Or today’s turbulent job market.”
“Russ, I’m serious. He didn’t come to my birthday this year, fine, and he barely had one of his own, okay, but he won’t even reply to my texts!”
“Stef, seriously, it’s nothing. He’s probably met a girl or something and decided it’s uncool to keep texting his little brother’s best friend. It probably is, also, dude.”
“If you talk to Mark, can you please just tell him to text me back?”
“Fine, if it’ll make you feel better, but I’ve barely talked to him in ages. You’ve talked to him more than I have this year.”
“Russell—”
“Stefan! It’s fine. He’s fine. He’s probably just depressed about his zits. Now shut up; teacher’s coming.”
Stefan obliges, and stops glaring at Russell. He glares at his World History textbook instead, in the unlikely event that he can intimidate it into making sense. Next year he can finally drop this stupid subject and never look back, but for now he really needs to commit whatever a castellan is to memory, and decide from the evidence supplied whether they were in servitude to the counts or ruled over them with an iron fist. Assuming castellans even had fists. Or iron. They could have been giant cats for all Stefan knows.
He’s too distracted. Too worried about Mark.
It’s not normal to be close with your best friend’s older brother, especially when they’re four years older than you. But not only do the Rileys and the Vogels live on the same road, very nearly opposite each other — with the cardboard telescope from Stefan’s subscription to Junior Science Magazine (plastic lenses free with first issue!) you can watch TV in the Vogels’ house from Stefan’s bedroom window — but Stefan very nearly shares a birthday with Russell’s older brother.
Every year on September 2nd, Russell, Mark and their dad trek over the road to Stefan’s house to celebrate his birthday, and every year on September 3rd, Stefan, his mum, his dad and his baby sister return the favour, visiting Russell and Mark’s extended family for fun, festivities, and rather more expensive cake and presents than Stefan’s parents can afford.
But this year, on Stefan’s fourteenth birthday and Mark’s eighteenth, it didn’t happen, and no-one saw it coming. Sure, Mark had gotten more and more sullen over the last few months — longer, maybe — but come Stefan’s birthday he simply didn’t show. Disappointing, but not the end of the world; Mark’s own birthday was the next day! But when the next day came, Mark made only the most cursory appearance at his own party: he talked to no-one but his dad, sliced off an extremely large piece of cake, and disappeared back upstairs to his room, there to hide behind his blackout curtains with his computer and his plate of death-by-chocolate, with sprinkles.
To Stefan, for whom Mark had been not just his tutor in the sciences but the older brother he never had — his sister is eleven years younger than him, and just awful at physics — it was crushing. His last chance to see Mark before he left for university, and he didn’t even look him in the eye.
2012 November 8
Thursday
Russell’s been out of school all week, and no-one will tell Stefan why. He’s texted, he’s called, he’s asked the head of year and the lunch lady; he’s even stopped by the house and banged on the door for what seemed like hours.
Nothing.
So when his phone starts ringing and Russ’ name comes up, Stefan doesn’t care that it’s almost midnight, that he has school tomorrow, that he’s royally pissed off with Russ for ignoring him. He picks it up before the third ring.
“Russ? Is that you?”
“Stef. I’m at your door. Can you come let me in? I don’t want to ring the bell and wake your parents.”
“Sure, Russ, sure. I’ll be down in a second.”
Normally, Stefan would argue: he’s not allowed visitors this late. But Russell sounded so drained, so worn-out that he wants to see him in person just to make sure he’s not deathly ill. He throws on his dressing gown and some winter socks and takes the stairs down three at a time. Practically drags Russell into the living room and deposits him on the good sofa, the one that still has a nice bounce to it.
“Russ,” he says, “you look terrible.”
“It’s Mark,” Russell says. “He’s missing.”
It takes a while and the intervention of both Stefan’s parents, and two mugs of hot chocolate each, but Russell eventually gives them the whole story:
Mark hadn’t originally intended to live on campus. The Royal College of Saint Almsworth isn’t far out of town, and for a fraction of the money required to rent a dorm room Mark could have bought a reasonably terrible car and commuted. But Mark’s had a difficult year, and he wanted a fresh start — new friends. Russ doesn’t know what happened with Mark’s old friends, but they stopped visiting or texting a long time ago.
So Mark went off to live in dorms and had reportedly a fairly uneventful first month at Saints. But it wasn’t long before his professors started to find him ‘disruptive’ and ‘disrespectful’; he was asked to leave a lecture for the first time about a week before his disappearance, and by that Friday had stopped even showing up.
That Saturday, he didn’t return home to his dorm.
According to the police, Mark entered Legend — popularly considered the worst nightclub in Almsworth; also the cheapest — at 1924 on Saturday, November 3rd, and left at 0144 after collecting his coat. The attendant was the last person to see him.
“We’ve been waiting to hear something since Sunday morning, when they told us he was missing. But they have no leads, no evidence, not even a fucking suicide note! Sorry, Mrs Riley.”
“That’s okay, dear.”
“A suicide note?” Stefan says. “You think he might have killed himself?”
Russell shrugs. “That’s what Dad thinks. I mean, he won’t say it, but that’s what he thinks. I mean, it makes sense, right? His friends stop talking to him, so he moves out to the dorms to try and make new friends, and when he doesn’t, he gives up. On everything.”
“Jesus.”
“Stefan Riley,” his mum says, “you do not have the same leeway as Russell. You do not take the Lord’s name in vain in this house.”
“Sorry.”
2014 January 19
Sunday
Stefan’s mum never remembers to buy the stuffing.
They’ve been eating on the cheap ever since Dad was downsized and Mum was forced to cut her hours or join him on the dole, and while as a family they’ve become expert at providing acceptable meals on a budget — with help from the food bank — every so often Mum gets nostalgic for a real Sunday lunch, and saves up until they can afford a proper roast chicken with all the trimmings.
Plus, this one’s going to be a celebration: Dad might be going back to work! Fingers crossed.
But she always forgets the sage and onion stuffing mix. Just Stefan’s luck that he happened to be hanging around the house with nothing to do; the perfect candidate for the half-hour walk to the big Tesco near the university.
He’s waiting in line for a self-checkout machine to free up, exact change in one hand and box of stuffing mix in the other, when he sees her.
Stefan doesn’t normally talk to strangers. It’s not that he’s shy, necessarily — engage him in conversation on the phone or online and you might struggle to shut him up — but he’s not the biggest fan of being around people. He fidgets under inspection, and when pretty girls look at him it makes him feel hot and uncomfortable.
But this girl, one ahead of him in the queue and just now stepping up to a checkout, seems to be so anxious she’s having difficulty operating the machine. The checkout next to her opens up and Stefan nips in and watches her scan her food with shaking hands, sometimes needing two or three tries to get things to register.
Poor girl. He wonders what she’s so upset about.
He puts his stuffing through and is about to leave when she drops her debit card, and when he scoops it up for her and holds it out, she looks at him like she’s seen a ghost.
“Um,” he says, still holding it out.
“Oh!” she says, starting to come to her senses. “Thank you.”
God, but she’s pretty. Bright blue eyes, a river of blonde hair that frames her face and looks like someone put a lot of work into it, and a cute little nose that—
Stefan frowns. There’s something familiar about her. Something he can’t quite put his finger on.
The woman — Melissa Haverford, assuming it’s her debit card in his hand — shakes herself, takes the card from him, smiles her thanks, and marches out of the store. Wobbles a little as she rounds the corner to the exit, as if she’s not quite used to the modest heels on her boots.
Stefan watches her go, puzzling over the encounter. It takes him a second to realise she left her shopping behind. He mutters a word he’s still not allowed to say in the presence of his mother, drops his stuffing box into her plastic bag, slings the whole thing under one arm, and leaves Tesco at a jog.
She’s not far down the road.
“Hey!” he yells, wincing at how loud and deep his voice is. “You forgot your shopping!”
She doesn’t look around, starts walking even faster. Which turns out to be a mistake: it’s January and the pavements are slippery. She goes down onto her butt; it looks like a pretty painful fall, but at least it gives Stefan the chance to catch up with her and return her groceries.
“Hi,” he says, looking down at her. She looks every which way but back at him.
“Thanks,” she mutters, and Stefan frowns. Even her voice is giving him déjà vu! She’s said not three words to him but something about her alto tone is— that’s it! He finally places it: she sounds just like Russell’s mum! Her voice is still as etched into Stefan’s memory as anyone’s. It’s been a good few years since she died, but she always had a kind smile and a coke for him whenever he went over to see Russ.
Suddenly, Stefan knows exactly why everything about this girl seems so familiar. He offers her a hand up, and as she takes it, he says, “Do you know Mark Vogel?”
“W— what?” she says, her face now pale enough that the blush on her cheeks looks almost comical.
“You look like him,” Stefan says. “I thought you might be a relative, or something.”
She finishes standing up, but can’t find anything to say.
“Melissa, right?” Stefan says, and she nods dumbly. “Do you know Mark?”
“Oh, um, I used to,” she stammers. Her voice cracks a little, and Stefan suddenly feels guilty for mentioning Mark at all. For introducing a bit of scabbed-over grief into her afternoon. She clearly didn’t expect her grocery shopping to be interrupted by some pipsqueak fifteen-year-old interrogating her about her dead relative.
“Sorry. If it’s upsetting to think about him, I mean. I shouldn’t have… Sorry…” Stefan trails off. His cheeks burn as she looks at him. She doesn’t look scared any more; she’s actually smiling at him, the same indulgent, patient smile Mark would always turn on him when they went through his Science homework together and spotted an error.
“It’s okay,” she says. “He’s been gone for a while now.”
“Yeah. I miss him.”
The girl, Melissa, puts a gentle arm on Stefan’s shoulder, takes her shopping out of his hand. Gives him back the stuffing box. Favours him with another smile, broader, almost genuinely happy.
“I’m sure he’d miss you too, Stef,” she says, and squeezes his shoulder.
She’s halfway up the road and boarding the bus back to the university before Stefan realises he never told her his name. Confused, he watches the bus pull away, clutching his box of sage and onion stuffing, his shoulder still warm where she touched him.
2015 September 14
Monday
Stefan sits alone for his first class in AS-level English Language. Around him, his new classmates — some of whom he knows, most of whom he doesn’t — settle into their chairs, chatting, laughing. He doesn’t mind being alone, though; he needs to concentrate. His GCSEs were only average, and the next two years need to go well if he’s to get into the Royal College of Saint Almsworth and qualify for one of their small number of assistance grants.
Saints has a fantastic and highly sought-after Linguistics programme, and Stefan’s curated his choice of subjects at AS-level to give himself the best chance possible: English Language, English Literature, German and Psychology. He doesn’t have a second choice university; it’s Saints, or it’s nowhere.
He saw Melissa only once more, a year ago, outside his then-new part-time job at the Tesco near campus. She didn’t see him, or pretended not to, and climbed into a waiting car less than a minute after he spotted her. She looked different: more adult, more womanly, as if the first time he saw her she was still developing.
Stefan has a theory about that.
On his sixteenth birthday, his parents told him he wouldn’t need to get a part-time job, the way they’d all been expecting he’d have to. Dad was working full time again and Mum had been able to find a job she could do with a laptop from the front room, so she could keep Petra in her sight at all times. He could just concentrate on his studies if he wanted. But Stefan took a job, anyway, because working at the big Tesco gives him an excuse to wander over to the Saints campus on his lunch break, or on his way home, the better to look for Melissa, or Mark, or clues.
Mark isn’t the only boy to have vanished. Stefan’s painstaking research indicates that, going back at least two decades, between two and six boys vanish every year from the Royal College but, like Mark, they rarely disappear on campus. Some go out into town and never come home; some leave campus at the end of term and never get off trains they were seen boarding; some leave suicide notes and vanish into the night. Unruly boys, most of them, with reputations around campus. A woman in the admin office implied, when Stefan pretended to be a reporter following up on the disappearances, that the school was better off without them!
Stefan’s not convinced the school is without them, though. It wasn’t hard to get pictures of most of the vanished boys, and after a few nights spent memorising their faces, he was pretty sure he’d recognise them anyway, even if they… looked a bit different.
So far, he’s seen five. Five girls, all of them so startlingly exact a match to five of the missing boys that they’re either unusually similar-looking siblings, or they’re the missing boys. Six, if you include Mark, or Melissa.
Sure, some of them have definitely had some work done — a brow-reshape here, a tracheal shave there, in addition to a catch-up girl puberty to supersede their boy puberties — but if Stefan was given to gambling he’d stake all his savings on them being the same people.
He doesn’t have names, though. So he doesn’t have the first clue who’s doing this.
Who is helping these women?
He’s still pondering the question when he gets home. It preys on his mind as he collates his notes from the day’s classes, as he showers, and as he sits up in bed, reading on his phone, too wired to sleep.
Someone at Saints is clearly helping closeted trans women start new lives. And comprehensively, too: Stefan’s looked it up, and the facial surgery he thinks some of the girls have had runs to the thousands of pounds. And then there’s the faked disappearances and the new identities. Maybe whoever is doing this is prioritising girls with unsupportive families? It makes sense, thinking about Melissa; her dad’s nice enough, but got religion in a big way after her mum died.
It all lines up. Even the rumours of the boys being ‘unruly’ prior to their disappearances. Bigots infest every public sphere, and it doesn’t take much to misinterpret a dysphoric trans girl’s misery if you’re already given to dislike trans people. And didn’t Russ, years ago, say Mark was considered disruptive in lectures?
As for who is helping them, he doesn’t have any names. But he has an address: all the girls live at Dorley Hall, an older dormitory on the edge of campus. It’s reserved for girls from disadvantaged backgrounds; a bequest, apparently. And if anyone qualifies as disadvantaged, it’s trans girls so afraid of their own family and friends’ reactions that they fake their own disappearances.
Stefan closes the book on his phone — he wasn’t reading it, anyway; he’ll have to go back a couple of dozen pages to pick up from where his mind started to wander — and opens the camera app. He switches it to selfie mode and examines himself in the screen.
He needs to get into Saints. And he needs to find whoever is doing this, whoever is helping these women, because his parents, well, they’re nice enough, but they got religion the same way Russ and Melissa’s dad did, and if there’s one thing Stefan’s sure of, it’s that he’s not a boy.
In the camera, he runs a finger over his pronounced brow, his masculine jawline, his high hairline, and sighs.
He sure looks like one, though.
2019 October 12
Saturday
He hates how fucking cold his room is. It’s costing him £450 a month and the view out of his tiny window is mostly of an advertising hoarding but the worst thing is undoubtedly the way he has to do his assignments under the duvet if he doesn’t want his typing fingers to seize up. And it’s not even that cold out! It’s just that somehow the shape of the building contrives to funnel all the wind in the entire street right through the tiny window and into his room, into his bed, into his bones. He’d run his little oil heater all the time if he could afford it, but he can’t.
Two whole years at Saints. Nothing. Whatever the mechanism the Dorley people use to identify closeted trans women, it clearly hasn’t worked on him. And he’s looked! He’s looked everywhere. He spent all his spare hours searching, scouring, hoping, convinced there was some secret he hadn’t found, some code word he hadn’t learned, some sympathetic ear he hadn’t caught the attention of. He even went to Dorley Hall, asked to see Melissa or to talk to someone who knows her, pretending to be on some innocent errand, but they turned him away. He wasted enough time on his search that he nearly failed his second year and had to retake two exams over the summer, all the while staying in an overpriced and under-maintained house share with people he barely knows. He can’t even go back and live with his family to save the money because Dad got an amazing opportunity in the city back in 2018, and now his childhood home belongs to someone else.
It’s not like he has much of a home to return to, anyway, even before they moved away. His few acquaintances have all moved on, and Russ, the only one who hasn’t, doesn’t speak to him any more. Shouldn’t have told him his brother was still alive. Move on, Stefan. Get over it. Leave well alone. Shut the fuck up or fuck off!
His twenty-first was the most depressing birthday of his life. He couldn’t even afford a slice of cake from the Tesco he still works at.
Worse: he thought he looked unrecoverably boyish at sixteen, but it turned out puberty had a few more tricks left up its sleeve, and it deployed them at regular intervals. It’s not that he’s unattractive — before his third year at Saints, when he started wearing his bad mood on his face and not just under his skin, girls hit on him relatively regularly — but he’s so… male. He knows that’s not a very helpful way of thinking about it, but if what he sees glaring back at him from every mirror, window and piece of cutlery he encounters is at all accurate then even the world’s most accomplished plastic surgeon would have their work cut out. Probably a Nobel-worthy feat, carving an attractive, feminine face from his caveman mug.
“Not helpful,” he tells himself again, trying to divert his thoughts from the track that usually ends in alcohol and Netflix and his perplexing inability to cry, even though sometimes it feels like he’ll die if he doesn’t. “Not fucking helpful.”
He’s given up. Officially. He made the decision two days ago, but it’s harder than he expected.
He’s read about dysphoria, about the visceral get-me-out-of-my-body feeling many trans people describe, and while sometimes he’s certain he can relate, his attitude towards his body — even his face — has always been that he doesn’t have to like it to live in it. And while, yes, he’s still certain he’s not really a boy — say it: you’re twenty-one now; it’s not boy you’re failing at, it’s man — he’s never been able to say, categorically, that he’s a girl. That certainty, that rock on which to completely rebuild his life, has always eluded him. And all the time he’s obsessing over what he can’t have, he’s missing out on what he can.
Would he be happier as a girl? Almost definitely. But, he’s had to admit, it’s a dream, and he has to live in reality. Whatever happens in the shadows at Saints to give trans girls a new start has passed him by, or found him unworthy, or never existed in the first place, and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s time to make the best of what he has, and what he has is a masculine body and no money.
He’s told no one of his theory. Even if they — whoever they are — can’t or won’t help him, he wants them to keep helping others, and the secrecy is obviously an important part of that. He thinks of Melissa sometimes — beautiful; scared — and for her, and everyone like her, he’ll keep the secret.
Plus, if he told anyone, they’d think he was fucking crazy.
Fuck it. His housemates invited him out tonight and, as part of his deal with himself to get the hell over it, he’s going to go. Surprise them all: hermit gets drunk with other people for a change.
The party’s on campus, in one of the new luxury dorms out where the old Psychology building used to be. The place has been a building site since he started at Saints; it’s strange that it’s not any more.
Everything changes but him.
This was a bad idea.
But then someone from last year’s Psycholinguistics class spots him, waves him over, offers him something to smoke, and he re-evaluates his plans to leave. Maybe he’ll stay awhile, get high, reconnect with people. If he’s going to commit to his new goal, to just be a guy, or some approximation of one, then step one should be, stop being so fucking miserable all the time. Hang out with friends. Remember what it’s like to be a person.
Forget his obsession with something that probably was never real in the first place.
He meets Christine an hour or so later. She’s sitting cross-legged on a snooker table, drinking from a bottle, laughing with another girl. A mutual acquaintance makes the introduction and she pats an empty spot of green baize, inviting him up. Feeling a little light-headed, he hops up on the table. Almost loses his balance finding a way to arrange his limbs that doesn’t put him in potentially unwanted contact with the girl; a pointless exercise, since she giggles at him and stretches her legs out onto his lap.
She’s studying Linguistics, too! Planning to specialise in speech and language therapy. He doesn’t have any plans for his degree, and tells her so; she encourages him to look into speech therapy. Very rewarding, she says. There’s no money in it, but if it’s money you want, piss off to the Business School and become a heartless bastard.
He laughs.
She hops off the snooker table and beckons him to follow, snatching a half-bottle of gin as she leaves the room. The building’s unfinished, and dangerously exciting to explore together. They poke drunken heads into rooms marked as construction sites, stagger down flights of stairs that lead to doors that won’t open. Eventually end up on the roof.
There’s something calming about a clear, starry sky. The Royal College is far enough out from Almsworth proper that the light pollution from the town mostly doesn’t reach it, and as he looks up into the infinite he feels, for the first time in a long, long time, almost content.
He doesn’t have to be a girl. Maybe he doesn’t have to be a guy, either — that’s a thought for another day — but he can make friends, meet nice girls, and drink and smoke with them under the stars.
He tells her about his family, who still text all the time. His little sister’s ten now, and learning to play the trombone, both of which are existentially terrifying concepts. She laughs and kisses him on the temple. She’s glad she took a chance on a good-looking guy tonight, she says. It’s just a shame she has a lot of work on or they could stay up all night.
He offers to walk her home, but she declines with a smile. She’s not turning him down; she’d actually like to see him again. It’s just that she lives on campus. A very short walk. Whereabouts? Dorley Hall.
“Oh, hey,” he says, warm from the alcohol and loquacious from the weed, “I know a funny thing about Dorley Hall…”
2019 October 13
Sunday
The bright overhead lights aren’t the only reason he’s got a pounding headache when he wakes up — that he imbibed basically everything anyone handed him last night is probably a major contributor — but they aren’t fucking helping. Where is he, anyway?
He opens his eyes a crack, but can’t see anything useful until he forces himself to sit up and angle his head away from the lights above. Through the glare and the headache he identifies a small, hard cot: his bed for the night.
Not one he recognises.
Did Christine take him to her place? He looks around, but she’s nowhere in sight. The room itself isn’t much to look at: bare concrete walls on three sides, and a clear glass wall and door on the fourth. It looks like it leads into an equally bare, though less brightly lit, concrete-walled corridor, and when he stands up, staggers over to it and leans on the handle, it doesn’t move.
The floor is concrete as well, and cold against his feet.
Wait. Why are his feet cold?
He looks down: his shoes are gone. As are his socks and all his clothes, replaced by a green smock that goes down to just above his knees and just behind his wrists and appears to be all he has on.
He tries all the walls, the door again, the joins where glass meets concrete. He pulls the tiny mattress off the cot; he pulls the cot away from the wall. Nothing. Grudgingly he rebuilds the bed, sits heavily on it and cradles his headache in his hands, waiting for whatever happens to happen. Perhaps it can bring him a painkiller when it does.
A few minutes later, the shrieking of an intercom system obliterates the eerie silence, and a voice he doesn’t recognise addresses him over a speaker he can’t see.
“What do you know, Stefan Riley?”
Chapter Text
2019 October 13
Sunday
“I don’t know anything!”
“Don’t lie to us, Stefan Riley.”
“I’m not lying!”
“Tell us what you know about Dorley Hall, Stefan Riley.”
“Nothing! Is that where I am?”
“Tell us what you know, Stefan Riley.”
The voice is crackly and distant, like the hold music when you call a big company over a bad connection. It’s probably a woman’s voice behind the distortion but it’s impossible to be certain. And, God, he wishes she’d stop using his name like that. Like punctuation. Like a club.
“Nothing!” He really yells it this time, breaking his voice and hurting his ears when the tiny concrete box echoes it back to him.
Stefan doesn’t know why he lies. There are good reasons not to tell everything you know to a faceless person interrogating you over a loudspeaker that feeds into the concrete cell they’ve imprisoned you in, but none of them apply: he’s not trying for leverage; he’s not trying to avoid punishment; he’s not trying to outwit his captors. If he were rational, he might make the argument that he doesn’t know who captured him, and that if he reveals the scant information he’s gathered over the years it could threaten the Dorley girls, but he’s too tired and scared to look objectively at his thought process and start making excuses for it.
Simply: he’s overcome with shame. Telling them his suspicions about Dorley inevitably leads to him having to answer searching questions and ends with him confessing to this person that he kind of, perhaps, maybe, possibly wants to be a girl. And he’s never told that to anyone before; not even anonymously online, not even to a private diary. He’s never so much as whispered it to himself.
Anything to avoid making it real.
Because he knows what he looks like. What he sounds like. In his mind, even the most compassionate person would laugh in the face of his confession. Laugh at his face. It’s like a pro wrestler announcing a sudden career change to ballet. It’s ludicrous.
The demands for answers don’t stop coming, so he lies back down on the hard, cold cot and wraps the thin mattress around his head, to block out the voices from without and within.
* * *
Tap tap tap tap tap.
The sharp, echoing sound intrudes on his dream, incorporates itself, causing Stefan — at that moment, running from an unidentifiable dark shape through the endless corridors of his old school — to react unexpectedly to it: he falls off the bed.
It takes him a few seconds to come back to reality, and when he does, he wishes he hadn’t. He’s still in a concrete box and still wearing an ugly green smock made from some of the itchiest material he’s ever encountered; the only difference between now and this morning — assuming that had even been morning — is that there’s no-one yelling at him over the intercom, and an attractive woman is tapping on the glass door.
Sleeping gave him a chance to reset, to take his shame and self-loathing and cram it back in its box, so all that remains is a persistent discomfort with his embodiment which, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, this cell and these horrible clothes have heightened, but which doesn’t usually cause him to clam up in front of strangers. One of those unpleasant things you get used to, like tinnitus or a persistent toothache.
He’s not on show, is he? A quick check: no. The smock is making his genitals feel just as vaguely uncomfortable as the rest of him, but at least he’s not flashing the girl.
Tap tap tap tap tap.
He hauls himself to his feet. Runs the back of his hand across his face; stubble. Ugh. Horrible to be seen with all that shit on his face. He hasn’t seen a mirror since he got here, and can’t help imagining that the late night, the alcohol, the bad sleep, the brief but potent anxiety attack, the inability to access a shower and — most pointedly — the concrete prison have him looking more or less as awful as he’s ever looked.
“Yes?” he says.
The woman looks him up and down, so he looks right back. She’s blonde, the sort of blonde that takes bleach, and wears her hair short, in what Stefan thinks is called a pixie cut. He’d describe her as impish, but that might just be because of the hair. She’s white and doesn’t seem to be wearing makeup, although he’s hardly an expert on that; she might well have £200-worth of products on her face, creating the impression of flawless skin out of cheeks that are as blotchy as, well, his.
“Hello?” he says, after a while. He has the impression she’s evaluating him, but for what, and for what purpose, he can’t even begin to guess. It’s a reasonable bet he’s at Dorley, somewhere, but if that’s true, does that mean this girl is one of the trans women they help? Or has he been wrong about everything the whole time? The way she narrows her eyes, finds fault with him somewhere — Stefan can’t blame her; there’s fault to be found everywhere — further convinces him that, despite his years of research, he may have completely misread the whole situation.
“Was that you this morning?” he asks. “On the intercom?”
“No,” she says. A deeper voice than he was expecting. Somewhere in the low alto. It reminds him of Melissa’s. And, God, about Melissa, is he wrong about her, too? He was so convinced, for so long. Is Mark dead after all? “Who spoke to you on the intercom?” the girl demands, startling Stefan out of his thoughts.
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
He immediately regrets even the slightest bit of impertinence. Whoever this girl is, he needs information out of her, eventually, and the best way to get it is to play along without fuss. All she has to do is let him know, somehow, what game she wants him to play.
“Eat,” she says.
“What?”
She rolls her eyes. Points down. On the floor, by the door, is a metal tray with a banana and a cereal bar on it. Either it came up from under the floor or through the door somehow — unlikely; he can’t see any mechanism by which that could have happened — or she’d simply walked in and left it there while he was asleep.
“Right,” he says, and scoops up the tray. Places it carefully on the cot and starts pulling on the banana skin. “Thank you,” he adds. Keep her happy. Speedrun that Stockholm Syndrome.
She sneers at him, and spins on her heel, starts to walk away down the corridor.
“Wait!” he calls, slightly muffled by banana. When she stops, he swallows as quickly as he can. “What’s happening? How long am I going to be here?”
She doesn’t turn around. “You’ll find out everything, in time.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“You have to give me something!” he yells, as she takes another step. “Anything!”
She hesitates. “Don’t scratch your stomach,” she says, and keeps walking. It doesn’t take long before she vanishes from his sight, but he can still hear her, even through the thick glass; her footsteps remain evenly spaced until they fade out.
No stairs, then, at least for a good distance. Something to add to the puzzle of this place: one long-ass corridor. Not super helpful in isolation.
He finishes the banana and the cereal bar. It’s nothing like enough food, considering his body is both recovering from a hangover and positively vibrating with anxiety, but it takes the edge off. He puts the tray back on the floor by the door and resolves to keep an eye on it, to find out how they get the food to him. It’s occurred to him that they could have drugged the food, but he doesn’t consider it a serious worry. They’ve got him in a concrete box; why would they need to drug him?
She told him not to scratch his stomach. Why?
He turns away from the glass door and lifts up his smock, runs a hand across his belly. It has that irritated feel skin gets when you wear scratchy fabric for a long time, sure, but nothing seems—
There. Right there. A raised bump, slightly smaller than his pinkie fingernail. A darker spot right in the middle, where the skin has recently healed. He’s familiar with the sight: in the summer of his second year at Saints he got so listless he spent two weeks in bed at one point, only got up when his left leg started hurting, and only left the house when his left leg didn’t stop hurting. The doctor prescribed a course of anticoagulant medication, and told him to move around more and maybe avoid taking all his holiday hours at once in the future.
A red dot in the middle of a raised lump: exactly what it looked like after he injected Heparin, on doctor’s orders, into his stomach for a weekend.
He’s been stuck with a needle.
Stefan doesn’t care about being seen naked any more. Breathing heavily, he lifts the smock over his head and searches his body for any other telltale marks. He doesn’t find any until he pulls the garment all the way off and sees in the crook of his left elbow another red dot, this one in the centre of a flowering bruise. Like from a blood test.
They took some of his blood and they injected him with something.
What the hell are they doing to him?
* * *
He doesn’t see them take away the tray with the banana peel and the empty wrapper. Must have fallen asleep again. Or been drugged by the food; does it matter? His belly started to itch while he slept, and now he’s awake the urge to scratch it is overwhelming. He decides to distract himself by going over, in his head, what he knows.
What he thinks he knows.
The Royal College of Saint Almsworth has a problem with boys who disappear. It’s passed mostly under the radar because the boys mostly don’t vanish on-campus — and because it turns out that most universities across the country have people who end their lives or simply vanish. Inflection points like going to university are some of the most challenging events in anyone’s life, and it goes double for people who have to survive outside a structure and support system they’ve known all their lives, while enduring the tail end of puberty. If slightly more people vanish from Saints than most other places? Put it down to a quirk of the local area. In his second year at secondary school there was a memorial service for the oldest son of a teacher, who went out for a late-night stroll from his university dorm and didn’t realise he was walking on a frozen lake until suddenly he wasn’t any more. Stefan got his mum to help him make an apple crumble to give to the teacher; he’d hugged him, wept on his shoulder. These things, tragically, happen.
All of that: facts. But Stefan’s having to face that it’s the only genuinely verifiable information he’s got. The girls he’s seen, who look like some of the boys who went missing? They could be relatives. It could be coincidental. Or his memory could have played tricks on him, made him see similarities where none existed because with all his heart he wanted it to be true. He never took photos of the girls, so never actually got to compare properly.
And the barest hints of rumours he picked up about Dorley Hall? They could so easily have been about something else entirely. This, for example: kidnapping random people and doing… what? Psychological experiments? Is there someone out there watching him on a screen, waiting for him to snap, timing him against the last person?
What have they done, so far, really? They’ve put him in uncomfortable clothes, they’ve fed him, they’ve taken a blood test and they’ve (probably) injected something into his belly. He’s supposed to think it’s a tracking chip or an electric shock device or something; likely it’s just saline, and maybe a bit of inert material to make the skin swell. After a couple of days of this, there’ll be a form to sign, a pat on the back and a small cheque.
Stefan relaxes on the cot, pleased with his reasoning. So he was wrong about Dorley, and about them helping trans girls. So what? He’s no worse off than he was yesterday morning, and if he gets paid for his participation, then he’s actually up on the day. The unscheduled days off work might get him fired, but screw it. He hates that place. Maybe he’ll go work at the retail park instead. They have a gym there; he can get in shape, start his new life properly.
Kidnapping? Fake injections? Interrogations by intercom that one of the other grad students pretends to know nothing about? All very cleverly designed, but there’s no sense letting the imagination run wild.
Stefan closes his eyes. Gets some more sleep.
* * *
Clearly some part of this experiment has to do with enforced boredom — no phone, no books, no TV — and thus Stefan is supposed to be out of his mind by now with nothing to do but stare at the concrete walls, but he couldn’t have survived twenty-one years inside the body randomly gifted to him by chance and genetics without an understanding of how to pass time in difficult circumstances. Meditation’s good. Methodically thinking through the plot of books he’s enjoyed is better. But yoga’s best.
He’s not done it for a while — the last year in particular has been less about self-improvement and more about self-destruction; another effective way to pass time — but the mattress off his cot is thin enough to work as a mat, and there’s enough space in his cell to stretch out in most directions. It’s nice to get back to it. He always liked the way it makes his body feel: not entirely like itself.
The bleach-blonde girl comes back with another tray of food, and because of the position he’s maintaining he gets to watch her go from bored indifference to irritated astonishment.
“Hiya,” he greets her, upside down.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demands, losing control of her voice and wincing when she does so. In Stefan’s mind, he writes another note on the whiteboard: bleached girl’s voice gets deeper when she’s annoyed. Probably useless information, but not definitely.
“Yoga,” he explains, and carefully unfolds himself back into an upright position. Which ends with him facing away from her, so he turns with what he hopes is a gentle smile and adds, “It’s relaxing.”
“It’s time to eat,” she says, her alto lilt returning. “Step away from the door.”
He does so, and she opens it, almost throws the tray on the ground, and closes it again. Looks like a fingerprint reader or something; the locking mechanism is the only opaque thing on the entire front wall, and Stefan hasn’t been able to get a look at the front.
“Thanks,” he says.
“You’re not fooling me, you know,” she says. “Sociopath.”
She’s walking away when she says it, so doesn’t catch Stefan’s frown. ‘Sociopath?’ That’s not proper terminology, is it? He’s no expert — a Psychology A-level and, if you’re generous, one semester of Psycholinguistics is all the relevant education he has in the field — but isn’t that discouraged as a label? He can’t remember what its more appropriate replacement is supposed to be, but whatever it is, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have it. Maybe part of the study is to treat participants like patients, to be unsympathetic nurses, or to examine how people behave under misdiagnosis.
Shady.
Assuming it is a study, of course. Stefan’s had a pretty good run of being wrong about things; it’s important to remember his supposition is nothing more than a guess with a fancy name.
Well, he can’t do anything about it for now. He looks over the lunch/dinner/breakfast on the tray and decides that a bowl of soup and a glass of orange juice can wait a couple of minutes for him to complete a quick warm down.
* * *
The fading of the overhead lights brings Stefan back to awareness. Over the past few hours he’s eaten his actually-pretty-good vegetable soup, remembered his way slowly and carefully through the plots of pretty much all his favourite science fiction novels, obligingly stepped to the back of the room so the bleached woman can collect his empty tray, and spent a while fantasising about what his life would be like if he’d been born into Iain Banks’ Culture universe and not the rather more disappointing real world: Culture people can change their sex just by thinking about it, and couples can do terribly romantic things like switch sexes with each other, synchronise their pregnancies and the like; also they have, like, ray guns and live for hundreds of years and stuff.
It takes about half an hour for the lights to dim from their approximation of sunlight to a twilight glow, which brings with it some concerns. If they’re lining up their fake day-night cycle with the real one, it means Stefan’s been in here for about a day; he thought he’d been in here nearly two. Clearly, his time-passing techniques aren’t as good as he hoped.
He’s cooled on his theory that this is all an experiment, but hasn’t come up with anything to replace it yet, and can’t forever block out the voice in the back of his head that’s screaming at him to get really seriously worried, and perhaps even panic. He quiets it for the moment — how would panicking actually help him? — by reminding himself that they’ve still done nothing verifiable but steal his clothes and isolate him. They’ve even fed him, and the hearty soup put paid to his worries that they’re intending to starve him.
The bump on his belly is a concern, though. On cue, it itches. He scratches the back of his neck instead.
The lights in the corridor have dimmed as well, so it takes Stefan a while to realise that someone’s watching him from the other side of the glass door. She’s squatting, hands casually flopping over her knees, and she’s frowning at him. The sudden presence of another person flips a few more of the ‘panic!’ breakers in his head, but he closes his eyes for a second, concentrates on his breathing, calms himself, stands, and as casually as he can, walks the length of the cell to meet the woman.
He squats, imitating her, and as he does so she puts a phone on the floor, torch switched on and pointing up, providing enough light to see her face properly.
It’s Christine. From the party.
“I’ve turned off the cameras,” she says. “We need to talk.”
Notes:
This chapter brought to you by all those times I’ve had to self-inject Heparin. (And that one time I got a Goserelin implant.)
Chapter 3: Death by Chocolate
Chapter Text
2019 October 13
Sunday
It gets easier every day.
She won’t claim it’s not hard, being out in the world as a girl; as a woman. But it’s a thousand times better than what she used to be.
She used to be so angry.
She also, she muses, as she drums the first two fingers of her right hand against the bench, used to smoke, and right now she’s missing it more than anything else she’s had to give up. She makes a fist, calms herself, and watches the horizon.
The Royal College of Saint Almsworth sits at the base of Almsworth Hill, a shallow bump in the landscape only worthy of a proper name because the surrounding countryside is so persistently flat, and Christine Hale sits at its very top, on a bench dedicated to someone whose name has long since rubbed off, waiting for night to fall. She has a marvellous view of the campus, but it’s difficult for her to appreciate it properly.
Beware decisions made in haste. One of her father’s sayings. Some aphorism that impressed the other rich arseholes at his firm more than it ever had her; back home, Christine usually avoided having it or any other of his little wisdoms lobbed in her direction by never making any discernible decisions at all if she could help it, so generally he settled for muttering it at the morning newspaper, or her mother.
If he could see her now… The old bastard’d probably have another heart attack. Absently she clicks her left wrist in remembrance of him. It still hurts sometimes.
But the man had a point, and Christine hates him even more for it: she made a rash choice, didn’t think it through, and now she might have made everything worse.
She’d kill for a cigarette.
Her phone screen lights up: it’s Indira, her Sister. Her sponsor. God, won’t she ever be disappointed if she finds out what Christine did last night?
“Chris-teenie!”
“You know that’s not my name. You picked my name.”
“Wow. You’re in a mood.”
“Just, you know,” Christine says, drawing out the sentence while she thinks of a plausible reason for her equilibrium to be so shot. “Memories.”
“Sweetheart! You’re not… backsliding, are you?”
“No. God. Absolutely not.” Even the thought of it is enough to cause Christine to shudder.
“Do you want me to come home and look after you?”
“I’ll be fine. Really. Just thinking about Dad again. And I thought you were in London this weekend?”
“You know I’d come back for you.”
“You’re sweet.”
“Always!”
“So,” Christine says, standing up from the bench and stretching, “not that it’s not lovely to hear from you, but…?”
“Why did I call? Aunt Bea texted: there’s a new boy. Thought I’d warn you.”
“Oh? Who brought him in?”
“Pippa.”
Christine can’t help but feel sorry for him; she’s not set him up for an easy ride. But manoeuvring the drunk boy into the bushes outside Pippa Green’s window, screaming her best, most well-practised horror-movie scream, and running away… well, it had been the only idea she’d had that didn’t either confirm all his suspicions right off the bat, or leave him in a position to spill all their secrets anyway, the next time he got drunk. She could have gone straight to Aunt Bea, but there are too many ways for that to go spectacularly wrong for poor Stefan, so she struck that off her options list almost immediately. Better he only wishes he was dead, right?
It was God’s own luck that it was Christine he ran into last night. He got only a few incriminating words out before she kissed him, in a desperate attempt to shut him up, but in that time he revealed way more knowledge about Dorley Hall than any outsider is supposed to have. Clearly she needs to have a talk with Aunt Bea about opsec.
“Poor lad,” Christine says.
“Hey, Pippa’s probably raring to go.”
“I repeat myself: poor lad.”
“He’ll be right as rain in no time. Remember what you were like when you joined us?”
“Please, Dira, I thought we agreed Memory Lane was a bad place?”
“For you, not me.”
Sun’s going down. Time to move. “Look, Dira, I’ve got to go.”
“Okay, sweetheart. You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure.”
“And you’ve eaten?”
“Yes.” She hasn’t, but if there’s one thing Dorley Hall isn’t short of, it’s leftovers to heat up. She’ll take something up to her room later.
“Okay. Kisskiss.”
Christine, feeling conspicuous as always, says, “Kiss!” but doesn’t make the face to go with it. It’s hard not to feel like she’s always being watched. An inevitable side-effect, Indira told her; it’ll go away eventually, or she’ll get used to it. She slips her phone into her bag and starts walking the shallow stone steps down the hill.
Saints, as a campus, is a slapdash mixture of styles, ranging from the very old — the entrance to the Student Union Bar looks like a village pub because that’s what it once was — to the turn-of-the-millennium complex by the lake and the obnoxiously new Computer Science building, which Christine gives a wide berth; more bad memories. Dorley Hall isn’t of a character with even the oldest buildings, having been here before Saints was Saints; it’s a red-brick monstrosity, crawling with vines and wearing its origin as a private hospital on its sleeve — it looks, quite frankly, haunted — and isn’t actually on the campus proper, being set out at the edge of the grounds, where grassy scrubland meets dense woods, bracketed from the rest of the university by a thick semi-circle of empty land which, mysteriously, has never been earmarked for development.
It’s home, and it looms, reassuringly.
Two girls from the upper floors are vaping on the steps up to the main entrance, so when Christine lets herself in to the ground floor kitchen she smells like strawberry bubble gum. There’s no-one inside except Vicky Robinson, eating an omelette at the kitchen table. She smiles when she sees Christine, and surreptitiously drops the paper bag that had been sitting on the table in front of her into her lap.
“I didn’t see anything,” Christine says.
Vicky, through a mouthful of omelette, indicates gratitude, and Christine leaves her to her dinner, heading through the dining hall and the locked door to the floor below.
The security room’s empty. Not surprising for this time of night, this early in the programme. Everyone’ll be working on assignments or just relaxing somewhere, with a laptop open if they have to monitor their charges. Christine ducks in and flicks through the screens and finds the boy. Good: he’s sitting perfectly still. Dozing, probably. She scrubs back through the footage, identifies a suitable start point, and taps the information into her phone. It’s the work of another second to have her phone talk to her laptop, which is up in her room and already connected to the network, and loop the signal.
She loops the video for the connecting corridor and the stairs down, and disconnects the camera feeds for good measure. Her phone gets her through the biometrics on the door down to the basement and doesn’t leave any trace of her in the logs.
You can take the boy out of the hacker, but you can’t take the hacker out of the girl, no matter how many Linguistics lectures she attends.
* * *
“Where am I?” Stefan demands.
The girl, Christine, looks almost disappointed. “Where do you think?” She’s wearing a light hoodie unzipped over a pale blue t-shirt, dark grey leggings and a pair of running shoes. Appallingly casual and comfortable-looking, compared to Stefan’s scratchy smock. Like she’s popped in to see the prisoner after a nice healthy jog.
“Dorley Hall?”
“Bingo. You’re under it, specifically. Basement two. When all this was a hospital—” she waves a hand around her, causing the light from her phone to flicker eerily on her face, “—this place was the morgue. Or the laundry. I’m not sure.”
“Did you bring me here?”
She looks uncomfortable. “Yes and no. It’s complicated.”
“Well, then—”
“I know, I know. I’m working up to it.”
Stefan sits back from his squat, crosses his legs in front of him and rests his chin on tented hands. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Look. Okay. Look.” Strangely nervous for a kidnapper. “When you said to me, last night, that you know about Dorley Hall, what exactly do you know?”
“Ah. That was you on the intercom this morning.”
“Yes. Please answer the question? It’s important.”
Stefan considers stonewalling her — she’s not the one on the wrong side of a cell door, and he’s reconsidering his earlier resolve to cooperate — but after a moment’s thought decides against. He starts outlining his theory, and Christine’s increasing and obvious disbelief confirms to him that, yes, he’s got entirely the wrong read on things. Feeling foolish, he trails off.
“No, please,” Christine says urgently, “finish. I need to know everything.”
Stefan shrugs. “I mean, that’s more or less it. I thought this was a place that helps trans people get away from unsupportive or outright aggressive families and maybe helps out with transition stuff. But it’s not, is it? I’m just an idiot.”
“Why were you looking at Dorley so hard in the first place?”
“A friend disappeared,” he says quickly. Best that she doesn’t get the opportunity to consider why else an apparent man would look so hard for transition services. “My friend’s older brother. He was… kind of like an older brother to me, too. They lived across the road from us, and we were always in each other’s lives.” He smiles, involuntarily, remembering Mark as he used to be. “When he came here, to Saints, he went missing one night. No leads. Just gone. But then, a year later, I saw him. At least, I thought it was him. She looked exactly like what he would look like if he was a girl. And I thought, maybe… maybe he was a girl all along? Maybe the reason he was so unhappy the last year I knew him was that he wasn’t a he? God, I even started thinking of her as a girl! But I was fooling myself. Because he’s dead, isn’t he? And she was just some girl who looked a bit like him.” He blinks rapidly; whatever this place really is, he’s certain he doesn’t want to cry here.
“Shit,” Christine says, and flops back on her bottom, unintentionally mimicking Stefan. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I’m an idiot, Stefan Riley.”
He flinches. “Don’t call me that,” he says, before he can stop himself.
“Why not?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Whatever. Look. If you promise not to tell anyone what you just told me, ever, then I can get you out of here.”
“Why? How?”
“Why is because the lives and freedom of a hell of a lot of people, including me and people I care about, rely on no-one ever knowing what you know, and how is because I put you in here, in a roundabout way, so I can get you out again.”
“What I know?” Stefan blinks. “I was right? It’s real?”
Christine looks pained. “Yes and no. Look, do you agree, or not?”
It’s real. It’s fucking real! ‘Yes and no’ could mean anything, but if any part of it is true, that means Mark — Melissa — might still be alive! And it means Stefan, right now, has to face up to his gender fast, whatever it may be, before all this slips away from him. Before Christine gets him out.
But he can barely make his mouth move. He’s never told anyone before. Hardly even admitted it to himself. And he’s always been terrified that if he tells someone, if he actually comes out, if he actually tries to transition, and it turns out he’s wrong, if it turns out it was all just a fantasy, that he’s not trans after all, that it was just a delusion by an ugly, idiot boy who hates his life and can’t take responsibility for it, then he’ll have nothing left to live for. It’s the fear that eats him every night, the fear that’s taken him to twenty-one without seriously considering transition as something he could do, the fear that’s gifted him with nothing but an empty life, a cold, drafty room in a house he hates, and less than £16 in his bank account. Maybe it’s time to abandon it.
“Is it real?” he tries again.
She narrows her eyes. “What’s up with you?”
He has to know about Mark/Melissa. “Are you a trans woman?” It comes out blunter than he means, but he’s overtaken by an urgency he hasn’t known since he first saw Melissa, years ago.
Christine looks at him for a long time. Thinking. “No. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated.”
“Stop saying that!”
She’s frozen, and he wants to reach through the glass and poke her; impossible. He waves at her instead, and she nods her head aggressively. “I know, I know,” she says. “I’m trying to decide how to say it. I’m not exactly fond of just coming out like— Oh shit.” Her phone is vibrating insistently, and she swipes it up off the ground, frowns at it. “I have to go,” she says.
“What? Now? Why?”
“Someone’s coming, and I’m not supposed to be here. Can you survive one more day down here?”
“I guess. Nothing’s actually happened to me yet.”
“Yeah, well. It might.” Christine stands, and bounces on the soles of her feet. Full of nervous energy. “Listen, you can’t say anything to anyone about me — and that includes meeting me at the party — or about what you know about this place. You have to act like you don’t know anything! And I’m sorry, but people here will think you’re a horrible person.”
“What?”
“Just go along with it! Please! I can fix it all tomorrow! Shit!”
* * *
Christine ducks into the storeroom with only seconds to spare, and hurriedly taps through her home-grown app, re-enabling the cameras and cancelling the looping video. She brings up the direct feed and watches Pippa Green take the stairs down at a jog and march past Christine’s hiding spot without a glance.
Breathe out.
A bit of luck: if this had all happened a week ago when that Aaron kid was still in cell 2, she’d never have been able to sneak around like this.
As she stands she almost knocks something off a shelf with her elbow, something so ancient and crusted over she can’t even tell what it was; an empty bottle of bleach, maybe? Carefully she puts it back, and looks around the room properly for the first time. God, it hasn’t been cleaned in— are those bedsheets? Maybe this floor used to be the laundry after all. A shame; more symbolic weight to repurposing a morgue.
With Pippa in place and berating poor Stefan, Christine quickly sets the stair cameras to loop for the next thirty seconds and legs it as quietly as she knows how.
Vicky’s still in the kitchen, and this time her guilty expression has nothing to do with the paper bag in her lap and everything to do with the slice of chocolate cake on the table in front of her.
“Hi again,” she says, grinning. There’s icing on her lower lip, and Christine could just reach out and rub it off…
She takes a moment to compose herself. Most girls who graduate from the Dorley programme are attractive, but Vicky is something else. Christine carefully and firmly redirects her intense jealousy of Vicky’s girlfriend to something much more acceptable. “Where did you get that cake? It looks amazing.”
“I know, right?” Vicky says, slicing off a piece and holding it up. It looks like something off a baking show: four perfect layers in two shades of deep brown, clad in icing. “It’s Death By Chocolate. One of the second years bakes.”
How appropriate. Christine laughs. “That’s—”
“It’s not as feminine as you’re thinking. Aunt Bea was delighted when she heard; less pleased when she saw how this girl bakes.” Vicky mimes someone engaging violently with a bowl of cake batter. “It’s like a rugby tackle on the kitchen table.”
Aunt Bea, current custodian of Dorley Hall, is a firm believer in the healing power of femininity, and applies it to her charges at every opportunity. Christine would have scoffed, once upon a time, but she’s since had to admit that for a certain subset of people it does have beneficial qualities. Perhaps not when taken quite to Aunt Bea’s preferred extreme, though. She winces; memories. The programme can be tough.
Shit. The programme! Stefan bloody Riley’s downstairs being softened up by Pippa right now! And Christine put him there!
She shouldn’t have panicked and done that to him. But what choice did she have? He came waltzing into her life just as she’s finally starting actually to like herself, drunkenly babbling things no-one is supposed to know and — apparently unintentionally — threatening not just her future, but that of everyone she loves. What else could she have done?
I don’t know, talk to him like a normal person?
“Shut up, Christine,” she whispers to herself.
“Hmm?”
“Nothing, Vick,” she says.
“You’re okay?” Vicky says, reaching out and taking Christine’s hand.
It’s hard not to admire Vicky, who entered the programme the same week as Christine but graduated in an almost unprecedented two years. It was like she understood, from the first moment, what was being asked of her, and set out to achieve it as quickly and completely as possible. Her drive, her determination, her skill — her frosting-flaked lower lip — are all beyond impressive, and yet she’s unfailingly kind, straightforward, and helpful. She still hangs around Dorley, but it’s because she still has friends here; and because she can steal estrogen for her girlfriend.
Christine gave her the code for the secure medicine locker. Possibly the first thing she ever did in her life she can actually be proud of. She’s pretty sure Vicky pretends to get it online.
“I’m really fine,” Christine says. “Long day. Hey, how’s Lorna?”
She’s unable to stop herself smiling as Vicky launches into a delighted ramble; her love for her girlfriend is infectious. “She finally agreed to sing in front of me and, goodness, Tina, she’s so talented. She hates her voice but she worked so hard on it and she sounds so good and I wish I could just put her inside my head so she could see what I see and hear what I hear and then she’d know she’s the most wonderful girl in the world. With the sweetest voice! And we went shopping and I know I shouldn’t but I used some of my stipend to get some things for her and, well, um, it’s a cliché, but dress go spinny!” Vicky laughs and twirls a finger in the air. “She looked so beautiful and so happy I had to kiss her right there in the changing room. Then we had lunch at this pub on the other side of town and these two guys came up and were hitting on us and we got to do that thing, you know, where you hold hands across the table and you’re like—” she switches temporarily from her usual bubbly voice to a husky drawl that does things to Christine’s hindbrain, “—‘Actually, we’re together’, God, I could have died laughing. Oh, and we went through our Brain and Behaviour notes together and she’s so smart, Tina, I actually can’t bear it. She asks after you, you know; wants to know if you ever got round to playing Bloodborne. I said you haven’t yet, you don’t even have an XBox—”
“—PlayStation—” Christine whispers, through her grin.
“—but maybe when you come over you can play on hers?” Vicky phrases it like a question and Christine nods, playing along. She’s had a long-standing invite and, truthfully, she’d love to drop in to the house Vicky and Lorna share with two other girls — another measure of Vicky’s extraordinary prowess; Christine still feels uncomfortable away from Dorley, and can’t imagine living with, let alone dating, anyone who doesn’t know what happens here — and, among other things, finally see first hand this ‘Vacuous Rom’ Lorna’s been texting her about, but if what she did to Stefan ever gets out she’ll be surprised if she leaves Dorley before 2025. “We’ve got the place looking really nice now and it would be so lovely if you visited. Maybe bring Indira and Paige and Abby along? I’ve told her so much about them and she so wants to meet them.”
“I’d love to,” Christine says.
Vicky blushes. “God, I really just came out and said all that, didn’t I?” She pops the last bite of cake in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “You know,” she adds in a conspiratorial whisper, “I think there might be brandy in this cake.”
“They’re giving second years alcohol now?”
“I know!” Vicky squeals. “Doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
It takes several more minutes for Christine to disentangle herself from Vicky’s boundless enthusiasm, but she can’t deny that she needed the pick-me-up. Up on the second floor, where all the third-year programme girls live, she bypasses the biometrics on her dorm room door out of convenience rather than subterfuge: she’s got a plate of reheated curry in her left hand and chocolate cake in her right and it’s just easier to speak a command to her phone than to find a thumb.
Inside, she climbs onto the bed and arranges her tools in front of her: curry, chocolate cake, huge water bottle — Aunt Bea insists all second years drink eight glasses of water every day, for their skin, and it’s a habit that’s stuck — phone, laptop, nightly pills. She necks her estrogen and progesterone with a half-litre of water and starts on the curry as she loads the security feeds on her laptop.
She’s not a sponsor; she’s really not supposed to be able to do this. It’s lucky for Aunt Bea she believes in this place, or she could send a whole lot of people to prison. Starting with me, Christine thinks, as she calls up the view of the boy whose kidnapping she’s technically an accessory to.
Stefan Riley. She doesn’t know what to make of him any more. At the party, he’d seemed like a nice guy, a bit quiet and a bit shy, willing to let her take the lead in the conversation. He didn’t undress her with his eyes and he even appeared, through the haze of alcohol and weed, to be genuinely interested in what she said. In all, the kind of man she felt the least uncomfortable around; perhaps even the kind of man she might have taken an interest in independently, had Paige not encouraged her to talk to him.
Hah; encouraged! As if Paige hadn’t painted her up, beautified her hair, squeezed her into a low-cut top, made some cryptic comments about finally finding someone she likes, and dragged her out to the party with the sole intent of shoving her in front of pretty people. At least she picked a nice one.
Who then had to go ruin it by knowing too much. Not enough actually to be right about Dorley, but enough to get them investigated.
Looking for his friend. Not even; looking for the person who might as well have been his older brother. Did Stefan pick Saints as his university solely to investigate a disappearance?
Shit. This is looking more and more like a colossal fuck-up. Her colossal fuck-up. She should have dismissed his theories, sent him off home, and gone straight to Aunt Bea. But, no, she had to go and drag him into the belly of the beast, via Pippa of all people.
He’s lying on his cot with his knees under his chin and his arms curled around his legs. Foetal.
Christine scrubs back through the footage.
“I know about you, Stefan Riley,” Pippa’s saying. Christine zooms in, but the camera angle makes it difficult to get a read on her expression. Her voice is doing that too-level thing she does sometimes, when she’s so angry she can barely hold it in. Christine remembers it well, from when she moved up to the second year of the programme and Pippa, then in her third year, still argued with Aunt Bea. Most of Christine’s memories of Pippa, now that she comes to think about it, are of her arguing with Bea. “I know why you’re here. Do you?”
“This is a School of Psychology thing, isn’t it?” Stefan says. “A study on isolation, or something.”
“Yes, that’s good,” Christine mutters. “Play dumb.”
Pippa laughs. “Stupid boy,” she says. “Do you know what toxic masculinity is?”
Oh, no. She’s doing the whole spiel now? She's supposed to just psych him out! He’s supposed to stew for days before she starts in on him! Is she that eager to berate some poor guy—?
“I’m an idiot,” Christine says. “God, and I’m repeating myself, too.”
Pippa hated the programme. From what Christine heard from the Sisters in the year above her, Pippa fought the hardest, spent the longest time in isolation, had to be warned and restrained over and over again. And only someone very stupid would think her experiences, even now that she’s come to terms with them, has accepted them as a necessary part of her rehabilitation, would leave her the slightest bit of compassion for a boy in the position she’d once been in. For a boy who reminds her of the person she’s grown beyond.
He’s her sin in human form. She’s going to hate him.
“What have I done?” Christine whispers to herself, watching the scene play out on the laptop screen. “What have I done?”
Chapter 4: Room and Bored
Chapter Text
2019 October 14
Monday
It’s the intercom that wakes him, but it’s not shrieking with feedback this time, and the voice that comes out isn’t shouting.
“Are you okay?” Christine whispers, over the speaker. “Don’t turn over. We’re not supposed to be talking to each other. I’ve muted the microphone in your room, but the camera is active, which means someone’s watching you right now. You’re facing away from it; stay like that.”
He doesn’t want to say anything. After his interrogation at the hands of the blonde woman and a night of some of the worst sleep he’s ever had, all he wants to do is lie on the thin, uncomfortable mattress, stare at nothing and slip in and out of consciousness. Maybe wrap the ugly, scratchy smock tightly around his own throat.
He’s never before seriously believed himself vulnerable to dysphoria. Thought of his body as just the thing he lives in. Worried, in the back of his mind, that it means he’s not really trans. Periodically he even convinces himself it means his persistent curiosity about the female experience is nothing more than a fantasy, or a fetish.
Stefan’s never felt so horrifyingly male before.
The blonde woman lectured him for what felt like hours. Stefan kept silent, as much as he could, but it seemed like it only encouraged her. Stubborn boy. Not listening. Pathetic. He was an insect she’d found on the sole of her shoe, and no matter how many times she stamped on him, he wouldn’t cooperate and die.
She told him he was ugly. Violent. Dangerous to be around.
Clumsy. Oafish. An affront to grace.
She held his name against him with malicious glee, branded him with it, burned it into his skin.
She treated his body and his spirit as if they were interchangeable, both of them tainted by maleness. Manhood as weapon, wielded by him against all those around him. Manhood as disease, one he was too weak to recover from, too stupid even to recognise. Over and over again she put him in his body, exposed it to him, made his very nature despicable.
Stefan found it hard, in the end, not to believe her. So many of his own fears, barely articulated until last night, placed in her mouth and spat back at him.
He wants out. Out of this cell or out of this body. Either will do.
“I’m not okay,” he says.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Why did she say all those things?”
“She’s… very angry. At herself as much as you, I think.”
“She hated me.”
“It’s not supposed to be personal. It’s part of the programme here. Think of it like an entrance exam.”
“An entrance exam for what?” He raises his voice, can’t help it. If he could shriek loud enough to expel last night from his memory, from his body, he would. He itches in a way that has nothing to do with the smock.
“Don’t turn over! The camera will see you talking!”
Stefan freezes. Keeps his eyes closed and carefully moderates his breathing. Clenches a fist as hard as he can and concentrates on the pain in his knuckles; you can’t obsess over your whole body if you’re forced to deal with the one part of it that really, really hurts, right?
An old trick. Stefan wonders, too late, if someone who believes his life hasn’t been defined by dysphoria should have quite so many tricks like that.
Concentrate!
This place, whatever it is, has Christine so scared of being caught talking to him that she ran off before the blonde woman found her outside his cell. So scared that she’s hijacked the intercom system instead of coming down to see him again. Does the blonde woman, or whoever she works for, whoever she represents, have power over Christine, too?
“I’m sorry,” she whispers over the speaker. “I’ve made a huge mess.”
He releases his fist and rolls back over to face the wall again. “What is this place?” he asks.
“Long story. Look, I’m going to get you out. Last night made that process… a little more complicated than it has to be, but mostly only for me. You should have just had another night of isolation and shit food. Another couple of days of it, actually. But I think she’s accelerated the programme, and if she has, she might take you out of your room today, to visit the other boys.”
“There are more—?”
“Please just listen. If she does, you have to continue to act like you don’t know anything. It’s awful, I’m well aware. And the other boys, they’ve all done something. It’s why they’re here. Sometimes it’s something violent, sometimes it’s more like… social violence. The other boys will think you’re like them. Try to roll with it. And the girl who berated you last night, she thinks you’re like them, too. It’s part of why she hates you so much.”
“She thinks I’m violent? Is that why she said all those things?”
“Yes. I mean, it’s also because she’s, uh, working out some issues. But yes.”
“Why does she think I’m violent?”
“Because you’re here. Good men don’t end up here. Just go along with it for one more day, be the bad guy they think you are, and I’ll come see you tonight and get you out. I have to go.”
“Just tell me what this place is!”
“It’s a long story and I don’t have time. I’m still in the programme here myself, and I have inspection any minute. Sit tight, and I promise you’ll see me tonight.”
“What do you mean, you’re still in the programme?” Stefan says, but the slight hum from the intercom has ceased; she’s gone.
* * *
Tonight’s her last chance. The next step after the first session — the debasement Pippa subjected him to last night — is to introduce him to the other boys. The point is to move fast, to keep him off-balance. He’ll be shown the locked doors and the bare little dining area and the utilitarian bathroom facilities and made to understand that it will be his home until she says otherwise. And he’ll go back to his cell for one more night to stew, to get scared, to build up in his head the horrors that await him that have been up to that point only artfully implied.
It’ll be her last chance to catch him without anyone else around. Her last chance to get him out, to lead him quietly past every lock, to erase his data from the system. The implant in his belly will dissolve in a month or so. At most, he’ll feel a bit tired.
But Pippa is a problem. If she really is stepping up his introduction to the programme, then by tonight he will have seen the faces of all the other men taken this year. He’ll have seen the faces of several sponsors and possibly even their names. And he’ll know the exact layout of the cells and the common area and the bloody utilitarian bloody bathroom!
If only she’d gotten him out last night. She could have promised him all the answers he wants, snuck him off campus, told him some half-truths about the programme. Enough to convince him to stay quiet. Sure, Pippa would remember him, but it’s nothing a quick Photoshop job on their internal records and some fast talking couldn’t mitigate. There’d have been an investigation, and a tightening of security, and Christine would have had to back off from gleefully hacking Dorley’s network all the time, but she does little with her access but open doors she shouldn’t; no big loss.
But now… Now, when she gets him out he’ll want to go straight to the police. Armed guards? Men kept against their will? A whole underground facility? They look like a bunch of kidnappers! Worse: they actually are a bunch of kidnappers.
There’s only one solution: she’ll have to convince him of the worth of the programme before she walks him out. Make him understand it’s best for everyone if those boys stay put. God, it’s a big sell. Can she even be convincing enough? She believes in Dorley, sure, but does she believe in it enough to make an ironclad case for it? Does she really think every single one of her Sisters benefited the way she did? Does she genuinely, in her heart of hearts, believe the boys down in the basement will ultimately be better off?
“Or are you just saving your own hide, girl?” she whispers to herself.
Shit.
Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.
On the screen, Stefan is still facing the wall. He might be shaking. Last night hit him hard; harder than she expected, even when she saw how Pippa was going at him. Mostly the boys are indignant, defiant, like she had been. What’s different about him?
Maybe it’s just that he’s the first actually good person to be inducted into the programme. Well done, Christine.
The sound of the door just down the hall from hers opening and closing makes her jump; they’re done with Paige’s inspection. Quicker than she expected.
She shuts down the monitoring software she very much is not supposed to have, and takes stock: is she ready for this? No more or less than usual. Her room is in its normal state, tidy enough for anyone not pathologically obsessed with cleanliness, and therefore probably due a grudging C or C+ from Aunt Bea. Her laptop and phone are both innocently idle, all unauthorised software closed and lurking in a hidden partition, and her binder is open on her bed with the notes from her last Language Acquisition lecture facing up, written out in the looping handwriting that Indira, with some exasperation and amusement, encouraged her to adopt; she has to admit, it’s more readable than the scrawl with which she used to pollute the page. Ah, but she’s wearing her habitual casual clothes: a loose scoop vest, shorts, and white ankle socks. That’s probably going to lose her some points. Too busy worrying about Stefan to change into something with flowers on; hopefully the glittery fabric of the vest will be worth something, at least.
Too bad she has to go right after Paige. Paige, who already has thirty thousand followers on Instagram and a wardrobe full of influencer outfits. Paige, who very nearly graduated early, like Vicky, and was foiled only by a loss of composure near the end of her second year. Paige, who has blonde hair down to the small of her back and a heartbreaker smile. Next to her, Christine might as well be a donkey with a wig on.
Just as the lock on her dorm room door buzzes — the sound of someone other than her bypassing the biometrics — she quickly dashes to the cupboard, pulls out her plush pink penguin and her tiny fluffy rabbit and practically throws them at the pillow, adopting a relaxed, innocent, ‘just studying’ pose mere moments before the door opens and Aunt Bea strides in, followed by Abby.
Christine relaxes slightly. If Abby is acting as her sponsor today, standing in for Indira, this might not be so bad.
“Christine,” Aunt Bea says, opening with a broad smile, of the sort you might find waiting for you in a dark forest, surrounded by claws, “how are you this morning?”
Christine ostentatiously puts down her binder and places her hands carefully in her lap. “I’m very well, Aunt Bea.” Please don’t notice the concealer under my eyes, she thinks.
“Such a shame you are still in your pyjamas.”
“Oh, um,” Christine stammers, “this is just what I’m wearing today.” As soon as the words leave her mouth, she realises Aunt Bea was actually offering her an out: ‘Oh, yes, Aunt Bea, I was just about to get changed into my prom dress or my pink blouse or my pretty bloody pinafore, you simply caught me amidst my morning ablutions,’ or some shit. Too slow, Christine.
“Hmm. Rather… boyish, don’t you think?”
Christine affects a pout and stands up to look at herself in the full-length they all have in their rooms. “Do you think so?” she says, injecting disappointment into her voice. “I was going for… playful?”
“A lot of girls on campus wear very similar clothing,” Abby says, winking at Christine from out of Aunt Bea’s line of sight. A brave move; it’s never been proven that Aunt Bea doesn’t have eyes in the back of her head.
“I’m sure you’re right, Miss Meyer,” Aunt Bea says to Abby, and returns her appraising gaze to Christine, still making a show of inspecting herself in the mirror. “You look quite charming, Christine.”
“Thank you, Aunt Bea,” Christine says, hoping her smile of relief passes for genuine gratitude. And Abby gets to be ‘Miss Meyer’, does she? The privileges of rank.
“You’ve returned to classes, have you not?”
“Yes, Aunt Bea.” First year Linguistics. Her second shot at a degree here at Saints. Most girls who return to classes do so in the same subject they initially studied, relying on time, a second puberty, and surgical alterations to avoid being recognised; not Christine. Computer Science was judged to be one of the things she would have to let go. Too much of a contributor to her malfeasance. She’s not sure if she misses it or not. And her new courses are interesting.
“Would you mind summarising your most recent lecture?”
“Of course, Aunt Bea,” Christine says, bobbing down by her bed to collect her notes. She takes them to the dainty little folding chair by her desk and starts reading through, making sure to gesticulate in an expressive but feminine manner with her free hand, and carefully angling the page so everyone can see how beautifully curly her lettering is.
Aunt Bea listens attentively. She doesn’t carry a notebook or a phone or anything else on which to make notes; nevertheless, Christine can almost see the pen and paper in her head, making delighted check marks or disappointed crosses depending on the performance of the girl in front of her.
The custodian of Dorley Hall looks immaculate, as always. Her dress is modestly beautiful, her hair is artfully styled, her makeup is subtle and elegant. How much of the persona she presents to those still in the programme is an act, Christine doesn’t know, but she takes it very seriously. In Christine’s first year here, down in the basement, the boy who is now Jodie Hicks called Aunt Bea a MILF to her face and earned a week back in the starter cell. Christine’s always wondered if she still holds it over the poor girl. Jodie has the first room on their floor, so she’s always first in line for monthly inspection; did Aunt Bea look her up and down this morning and ask, in her prim and proper pronunciation, “Do you still consider me a ‘mother you’d like to eff ewe see kay’, girl?”
Christine’s never considered the acronym appropriate, anyway: she can’t imagine Aunt Bea doing something so vulgar as fucking.
“Christine?” Aunt Bea says. “Are you still with us?”
“Oh! Sorry.” Christine glances over her notes, buying some time to come up with an excuse for zoning out. “I was just remembering something the lecturer said, Aunt Bea. Something funny.”
“That is quite all right,” Aunt Bea generously allows. “I’m pleased to see you so absorbed in your studies. Would you mind repeating the joke? Assuming it is appropriate, of course.”
“Yes. Right!” Christine racks her brain. “It was, um…” Think, idiot, think! “Are you familiar with ‘Lad Bible’? It’s, uh, an obnoxious Twitter account that reposts other people’s videos and jokes and gets into trending a lot. Well, um, the lecturer, Professor Coleman, he said that Chomsky’s concept of the Language Acquisition Device is heavily contested, that is, it’s considered very much outside the norm these days, and he said those who stand by it without sufficient evidence are, I quote, ‘preaching from the LAD Bible.’ We, um, we all laughed.”
Christine holds her breath. The story’s true, except that the students received the joke with the grim silence it probably deserved; she has neither the energy nor the nerve to lie creatively right now.
“I see. Well! Thank you.”
Behind Aunt Bea, Abby bites her lip to stay silent while her face creases up, and Christine has to look back down at her notes to maintain her composure. So she misses it when Aunt Bea reaches out. Almost jumps when she crooks a finger under her chin and lifts her face.
“Let me look at you, girl,” she says.
Levity forgotten, Christine’s skin crawls and she struggles against the urge to screw her eyes shut. This is always the worst part: she didn’t ask for this body, and now she’s being judged on her upkeep of it.
“You have beautiful skin,” Aunt Bea says. “Although you really should try to get more consistent sleep. Drink more water, perhaps.”
“Or get better with concealer,” Christine says, taking a risk, hoping Aunt Bea takes it as a mild joke.
She does. Or she smiles, at least. Sometimes Christine thinks she appreciates the effort more than the result. “Quite.”
A gentle pressure on the back of her neck urges her to stand. She does so, and Aunt Bea moves her hand to Christine’s shoulder and pushes lightly, encouraging her to turn around, to give the woman the full three-sixty.
When she has to, Christine can move her body like a dancer.
“Beautiful,” Aunt Bea says. “Your mannerisms have come along wonderfully.”
“Thank you, Aunt Bea,” Christine says. Her voice doesn’t shake.
She’s asked herself how she feels about what was done to her. Whether she approves of the changes that, eventually, she agreed to participate in.
One night, early in her second year, when she was still developing, she investigated herself. Lying in bed she raised elegant hands to the starlight and winked out the heavens, finger by finger; she stretched out her legs, hip to toe; she explored her small breasts and her arched back. That night, alone in her room, one finger at a time, Christine discovered herself.
She likes who she is. Genuinely. Not just her new shape but her new mind, too. Christine is a better person to be around and a more enjoyable person to be than the boy who woke up in Cell 1 over two years ago. At the critical point she was given the choice they all were, to accept the programme or to wash out, and when properly she examined what was being offered, she took it without hesitation.
The boy was miserable. The boy hurt people. The boy, ultimately, had no future. The girl, the woman, is someone new. Someone better. And she’s her creation. The sum of her choices. And the life she now lives is hers alone. They might have given her the map, but it was Christine who made the journey.
But it’s hard to remember all that when Aunt Bea has a hand on her. It’s hard to forget how angry she was to be caged.
* * *
“Get dressed, Stefan Riley.”
Stefan hadn’t noticed the blonde girl walk up, hadn’t even noticed the glass door opening and closing, but now, on the floor by his cot, there’s a pile of clothes. Workout stuff, by the looks of it: loose joggers and a hoodie.
Had he been asleep? Or had he just zoned out that hard? Something about the last day — be it the isolation, the strange hours, the complete collapse of his identity, or the hope, yes, the hope that enough of what he suspected is actually real, real enough to help him, if he can just decipher this place — has obliterated his coping strategies. Boredom, fear, terrified optimism and abject self-loathing, mixed together, leaving him adrift and losing time.
He makes a fist again, out of sight of the blonde girl. Wake up, Stefan. Pull yourself together. Christine said he was going to be introduced to the other inmates, yes? Maybe he’ll finally get to find out what happens here.
He swings himself off the cot and looks pointedly at the blonde girl. “A little privacy?” he says.
She smirks. “You have nothing I haven’t seen before.”
At least he can turn his back. But he still feels her eyes on him as he pulls off the smock and starts getting dressed. There’s a t-shirt in the pile, and he can hardly put it on fast enough.
Even under the best of circumstances, Stefan does not enjoy being naked.
The socks go on last; he doesn’t really mind his feet being on show. Toenails could use a clip, though.
“Before I open this door,” she says, “there are some things you must know. One: every woman you see is armed, including me. Two: our tasers are locked to us and us alone; useless to you. Three: all the doors are locked and this whole area is monitored remotely. Four: if you are compliant, you will be rewarded. And five: violence against our staff will be not be tolerated. Every year, there are washouts. Those who wash out are never heard from again. Attempting to hurt any of the women in this institution is the quickest way to wash out. If you have aspirations to one day see the sky again, you will be docile and you will follow instructions. Say you understand and agree.”
Christine said, over the intercom, that he should be the bad guy everyone else will think he is, but how would a bad guy even behave in this situation? Yell and scream? Bang on the glass door? Try to disarm someone? Unattractive options. And someone could get hurt.
Aren’t bullies known to back down at the first show of strength? He’ll be that guy. He’ll back down.
“I understand and agree,” he says. He doesn’t have to fake his nervousness, at least.
The blonde girl smiles. “Then welcome to Dorley Hall, Stefan Riley.”
“Dorley Hall?” he says, remembering to feign ignorance, as the door buzzes and slowly swings open again. “On the edge of campus?”
“Under it.”
He steps out into the corridor. The blonde girl and the two others who are with her — tasers held casually in their hands, he can’t help but notice — put their backs to the wall and give him space. Like they think he’s going to attack them. They indicate for him to walk past, to lead the way, and so he does, hands in the pockets of his hoodie, broadcasting an absence of hostile intent as hard as he can.
He really doesn’t want to get tased.
* * *
After what seems like forever, Aunt Bea finally congratulates Christine on her dedication and her steady progress and, with a silently acerbic eye aimed at the untidy pile of textbooks by the desk, leaves. But Christine and Abby hold their breath: they’re waiting for her footsteps to fade, waiting for the faint buzz of the biometrics at the end of the corridor, and when finally it comes they almost collapse.
The tension exits her body along with all of her air, and Christine laughs until her chest aches.
“Oh my God,” Abby wheezes. She sits heavily on the folding chair and takes off her glasses to clean them. “The pyjamas thing! I thought she was going to make you strip, there and then!”
That’d be nostalgic. “I almost pissed,” Christine says, falling backwards on her bed and narrowly missing her laptop. “Thanks for the save, by the way.”
“I think it helped that I’m literally having a slob day.” Abby pulls on the fabric of her loose yellow t-shirt. It says Saint Almsworth Hockey — GO SAINTS! on the front, and her dark skin shows through in several places where the much-loved shirt has become threadbare. “Hard to get on your case for not being feminine enough when I’m wearing this.”
Christine sits up, puts on her best lecturing face and wags a finger. “You’re setting a bad example for the younger girls, Abs.” A giggle breaks through her stern frown. “How will we learn to dress like princesses and dance like angels when you keep reminding us of the existence of full-contact sports? And—” she fake-gasps, “—t-shirts!”
“Just be glad Liss isn’t here or you know Bea would have picked her instead of me.”
Melissa had been the star of her graduating class: too damn pretty and too damn well-dressed for her own good. Or, to be precise, for the good of every girl around her.
“It’s not fair,” Christine says. “I can be pretty! I can wear nice things, if someone else picks them out for me. I even kinda like it! I just…” She sags as her mood collapses. “I don’t like doing it for her.”
“Hey,” Abby says, picking up the folding chair and moving it closer, so she can take Christine’s hand; unlike with Aunt Bea, this is a contact Christine doesn’t shy away from, “you’re doing great. Not long to go, now. Then you can be pretty when you want and slobby when you want. Just like me.”
Christine squeezes her hand. “I’m going to be like Paige and Melissa: perfectly pretty all the time. I’m going to be so annoying.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Abby says. She hooks her other arm around the back of Christine’s head and gently draws her closer. Touches their foreheads together for a moment. “I’m proud of you,” she whispers. “And I know Dira is, too.”
Closing her eyes, Christine absorbs Abby’s touch. Abby, Indira, Vicky, and Paige; Christine feels indecently lucky. Their friendship, kindness and patience all seem like things she hasn’t entirely earned. If she has to live by Aunt Bea’s strictures for another year, well, perhaps it’s a small price to pay if she gets to stay with the first true friends she’s ever had. And her third year at Dorley has been by far the least onerous. The relatively casual monthly inspections are preferable to the constant moral and physical inventory she was required to maintain in her second year.
A shame she can’t be like Vicky, released from the programme a year early and granted the same level of trust as Indira, Abby and Melissa; trust she immediately started abusing, with Christine’s help, to supply HRT for her girlfriend. But with Vicky it had been as if the programme simply discovered the girl who’d been inside her all along; Christine had to go looking for hers.
Abby lets go of her hand and sits back. Christine instantly misses her.
“How’s Dira?” Abby asks, reaching over to Christine’s desk and stealing one of her bottles of Evian.
Christine raises an eyebrow and holds out a hand, refusing to respond until Abby hands her a bottle. Aunt Bea’s orders, after all. She cracks the bottle and takes a swig. “She’s good. Down in London for an audition, and visiting family.”
“God,” Abby says, “imagine being cleared to see your folks.”
“No, thank you.”
Indira’s parents and older sister were, a little under a year ago and after extensive lobbying from Indira and several other Sisters, visited by an associate of Aunt Bea’s and encouraged to believe their ‘son’ had always been a trans woman, who chose to disappear because she feared how her family would react to her transition. As a friend, the associate explained, they were willing to act as go-between on Indira’s behalf, and perhaps arrange a meeting in a neutral location. Somewhere safe for their first time seeing their new daughter.
At the meeting, her family embraced her with open arms, scolded her for vanishing for years and giving them the shock of a lifetime, and dragged her back home for a whole week, culminating in a party to which they invited several of the Dorley girls as well as, seemingly, the entire street. It had been Christine’s first trip outside Saints as her new self, and the first time she’d felt like she might be able to make it in the world as Christine, after all.
Indira’s sister took them both out clothes shopping for something to wear to the party. Christine keeps hers safe in a dress bag in the back of her wardrobe; a memento of one of her first genuinely good memories.
Visit any time, they’d said.
“You don’t miss your parents?” Abby asks sarcastically. She knows she doesn’t.
“Mine aren’t like Dira’s.”
“Are anyone’s?” Abby says with a giggle.
“Did you see her on the news last week?”
Indira’s mother, now a minor social media celebrity thanks to her enthusiastic and public support for her younger daughter, has been on Channel 4 News twice in the past year, once for an interview about her mother-daughter reconnection and most recently to provide the counterpoint to some new ‘gender critical’ celebrity on a post-cancellation media tour. Dira proudly sent Christine a screen grab of her mother in the chair opposite Krishnan Guru-Murthy, with the strapline, Aasha Chetry: Twitter Mum & Trans Rights Activist.
“Yeah, we had it on in the common room on third. She’s just fantastic.” Abby bites her lip. “So, did you get the latest update pack on your family?”
“About a month back.” Christine gestures at a folder on her desk. “I don’t open them any more, though; they’re all the same. Dad’s still sick, Mum’s still caring for the old bastard. No contact with the authorities. It’d be nice if they acted like they cared I’m gone, you know? Just a little bit.” Abby reaches out, takes Christine’s hand again. “How about you?”
“They’re still looking for the old me. They’ve got a private detective and everything. I’ve asked Aunt Bea if her ‘contacts’—” two manicured fingers make an air quote, “—can put out feelers. Assess their mood. She said she’d think about it.”
“You’re thinking of doing a Dira?” Christine asks, surprised. Is this going to be a thing from now on? Dorley graduates getting back in touch with their families?
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’d like to! I’m sure they’d be okay with it. With me.” Abby sighs heavily, scrunches her fingers up in Christine’s. “I’d hate to have to lie to them all the time, though. Not about who I am; you know how I feel about that.” Christine nods. Abby’s thoughts on gender have very much influenced her own. “But about where I’ve been, and stuff. I can’t say I’ve been here all the time, right? Even Indira had to pretend she spent a year couch-surfing, and Aunt Bea’s worried about bringing too much attention down on us.”
“Better to lie than never see them again, right?”
“Yeah. Right.”
“How’s work?” Christine says, to lift the mood.
Abby’s worked for the local paper for a couple of years, which is why she still lives at Dorley Hall and picks up some extra cash part-timing as an administrator for Aunt Bea; whoever owns the Almsworth Gazette clearly believes young journalists need experience and exposure more than food.
“It’s good!” Abby says, smiling again. “I pitched a piece deep-diving into the pay dispute at the council. You know, history of low wages, understaffing, inflation reducing the actual pound value of the work year-by-year.” She pauses, builds anticipation. “She said yes!”
“Oh my God!” Christine yells. Abby’s been trying to get her byline on something real for a while. “Congratulations!”
They hug, and Abby fills in a few more details, including the interviews she’s got lined up with various local notables. “Actually,” she says, “about the paper, I wanted to ask you a favour?”
“Anything.”
“You can still get at… things you’re not supposed to, right? On our network?”
“Yes,” Christine says, grinning, “but shush.”
“There’s a new boy, right? Downstairs? Do you have his profile? I want to keep us in the loop if he gets reported missing and we hear something at the Gazette.”
Christine nods, freezing her smile in place while her heart sinks. She calls up Stefan’s information on her laptop, using the app she’s shown to a select few of the Sisters, the one that implies she has access to only the less vital files.
There he is. Stefan Riley. He still looks kind of sweet. Christine swallows against the guilt.
“You’re kidding,” Abby says. “Christine, you’re sure this is the guy?”
“Hundred percent.”
“Fuck me, Chrissy. That’s Melissa’s friend!”
“You’re not serious. The kid? The one she always talked about?” He did say he was looking for someone; Melissa? Damn it, the timeline works out, doesn’t it?
Melissa was getting ready to leave Dorley while Christine was still in the first year of the programme, so she doesn’t know her particularly well — they’ve barely talked, and when they have it’s been awkward, like at last year’s disaster of a Christmas party, when a drunk Christine spent half the conversation calling her Sabrina; Melissa looks a lot like the girl from the nineties version of Sabrina the Teenage Witch — but Abby’s stayed in touch, and talks about her a lot.
“She always said he was the sweetest kid ever,” Abby says. “Said he wouldn’t hurt a fly, even if the fly wore a Kick Me sign and peed in his cereal. What happened to him? What did he do?”
“Do you… want me to try and find out?”
“No,” Abby says, closing the laptop and sitting back. “No. I’m not his sponsor and neither are you. Whatever he’s done, whoever he’s become… that’s what we’re here to fix, right?”
“Right,” Christine says, pouring as much enthusiasm into one syllable as she can muster.
Shit!
Chapter 5: A Machine Made of Meat
Notes:
Content warning for mentions of violence, vile misogyny, self-harm and suicide.
Chapter Text
2019 October 14
Monday
Stefan’s not surprised to see other cells, identical to his, lined up on his left as he walks slowly down the concrete corridor towards the double doors at the end. Each has the same glass wall, the same cot, the same thin mattress, like the world’s least hospitable capsule hotel. He counts ten, and an eleventh room of a different sort; an interrogation room? No. He cranes his neck by the dirty window set into the door and sees nothing but shelving units and dust.
Ten cells, then. What kind of place is this, that it has ten copy-pasted concrete boxes in which to throw people? What horror show has he stumbled into?
“Stand aside,” the blonde woman commands. “Face the wall.”
He complies, still playing the obedient but bewildered boy. Not much acting required! He flinches a little at the loud buzz of the locks triggering, and then he’s being ordered through doors that have now swung open. On his way past — “Turn right! Be quick!” — he gets a look at the mechanism: what looks like a fingerprint reader attached to a lock the size and shape of a brick.
There’s another one just like it on every door in the corridor he finds himself in, and — he glances left — another on the double doors at the top of the stairs up. He hopes Christine can open them all, and is genuine in her insistence that she can get him out, because it’s clear that he’s not going anywhere without her help. And he’s willing to bet that with all this concrete you can scream and shout all you want without being heard from the outside.
Chilling.
Christine said she was still in the programme here; does that mean she’s walked the same walk? Did she wake up in a similar cell? Is there another basement, a mirror of this one, for ‘bad girls’? What did she do to end up there? The boys — the other boys; whatever — are all here for ‘violence or social violence’, she said.
Try not to let your imagination run too wild, Stef, he tells himself, as the blonde woman opens another set of doors, leading into what looks like a common area. Before he can go through, one of the other women taps him on the shoulder, motions for him to stay.
“Stefan Riley,” the blonde woman says, and he’s too distracted even to notice she’s full-naming him again, “you’re not going to cause me any problems, are you?”
“Hm?” Stefan says, watching heads turn inside the room as the men realise someone new has come to join them. “Oh. No. I promise.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re remarkably docile, remarkably quickly.”
“Thanks. I try.”
She gestures at him with her taser, and he regrets being flippant. “Don’t be clever,” she says.
“Sorry.”
“In you go, then. Have fun with the other boys.”
He nods, puzzling over the emphasis on the word, and walks carefully through the double doors into a common area that reminds him of prisons he’s seen on TV, with a handful of metal tables, some large metal cupboards with red lights that suggest they’re controlled remotely, and a TV up on the far wall. There’s also a handful of sofas scattered about the place, which don’t seem like they fit the prison aesthetic, and most of the men in the room are lounging on the ones nearest the TV. A half-dozen women, all armed with tasers and batons and a couple of them with what might be guns or perhaps heavier-duty tasers, are sitting on or standing around another cluster of sofas nearer the door. Most of them are also looking at Stefan, waiting to see what he does.
“Would you look at that?” one of the men says, and waves. “Someone new!” His cheerful mood seems out of place.
None of this is what Stefan expected.
The one who spoke gets up from the sofa and approaches him, hands in the pockets of his hoodie. He slows as he gets closer; probably trying to work out what kind of person Stefan is. “So,” the man says, stretching out the vowel, “when did you get here?”
“Yesterday,” Stefan says, frowning. “Or possibly the night before. I’m sorry, but what’s going on? Who are you?”
“Oh, we’re just a ragtag family of naughty kittens, here to be neutered, clipped, tagged and released back into the wild.”
“Uh. What?”
“It’s Woke Jail,” says one of the other men. “What thoughtcrimes did you commit?”
“It’s not Woke Jail, Will,” another one says. “He keeps calling it that,” he adds, addressing Stefan directly. “It’s a ridiculous concept. I keep telling him.”
“Tell him what you think it is,” Will says, smirking. “Go on.”
“Shut up, Will.”
“He thinks these girls are part of a secret underground ring, working for the shadow government, and they kidnap men and drain us of our— sorry, what did you say it was called?”
“I was wrong, I admit it. I’ve refined my theory but I’m never sharing it with you again…”
The two of them bicker between themselves in low voices.
“What’s happening?” Stefan says to the man still standing with him.
“Ignore them. They’re a double act we’re all fucking bored of—” he briefly yells and then turns back to Stefan, “—but it’s okay because neither of them has managed to say a single thing of value since they got here. Hi. I’m Aaron. I was here first. Welcome to Woke Jail.”
He holds out a hand and Stefan, still confused, limply takes it. “Hi.”
“And…?”
“What?”
Aaron retrieves his hand and uses it to articulate his next sentence, which he enunciates like a primary school teacher, one word at a time: “My name is Aaron and your name is…?”
“Oh. Sorry. Stefan.” His stomach clenches when he says it. He doesn’t like the blonde woman using it on him and he doesn’t think he’ll enjoy the sound of it in Aaron’s mouth, either. “How long have you been here?” he says, to give himself anything but his rising discomfort to think about.
Aaron blows out through puffed cheeks. “Two weeks, nearly? I think? They fake the day-night cycle in here — I’m sure you’ve noticed — but assuming they’re not playing games with that, about two weeks. I didn’t even get to the start of the semester before… fwwwp!” He mimes being dragged away by his neck. “Woke up in one of those fun little cells.”
“In your cell, did you get the whole…?” Stefan doesn’t know how to ask what he wants to ask without sounding silly, but Aaron seems to understand, anyway.
“The ‘men are evil and so are you’ lecture? We all did. And then we all came in here stumbling around like confused idiots, asking each other the same question: ‘Did they put your dick in a vice, too? Yada yada yada.’ Well, they all came in stumbling around. I was here already so I just watched.”
“They put your dick in a vice?”
“It’s a metaphor, Stefan. They just lectured us all about toxic masculinity, chastised us for not regularly imbibing the respect women juice and threw us in here to get on each other’s nerves. So? What did you do?”
“What did I do?” Stefan asks.
“Leave him alone!” Stefan searches for the speaker and finds him sitting by himself, on the floor by the cabinets. “He doesn’t have to tell you!”
“Shut up, Murderer Moody! No-one cares what you think.”
“I’m sorry,” Stefan says, looking back and forth, “who is he and what do you mean, what did I do?”
Aaron looks at him for a second. “Right! Okay! You’re confused. It’s fine. Understandable! Sit.” He sits at one of the metal benches and slaps the table. “Sit! And I’ll introduce you around. First things first: we’re not just in here because of our ‘toxic masculinity’—” finger quotes, rolled eyes and shrugged shoulders leave Stefan in no doubt as to what Aaron thinks of the concept, “—or our poisonous Y chromosomes or our big meaty dicks. We all did something that caught the attention of this bunch of—” He pauses and hisses with his tongue inside his cheek, like he just stopped himself from saying something he shouldn’t. “Don’t zap me, Maria!” he shouts. “I didn’t say it!”
Stefan glances back at the women near the doors, but if one of them is Maria, she doesn’t react.
“What do you mean, ‘did something’?” Stefan says. “So, what did you do?”
“Sorry,” Aaron says, “you need way more paragon points with me before you unlock my tragic backstory. Besides, I’ve given you the lowdown; you owe me a funny story. What horrific crime against the female gender did you commit?”
“Nothing!” Stefan insists.
“Ah. One of those, are you? Like Raph.”
“Fuck you, you piece of shit channer,” says a man reading a magazine on another bench, without looking up.
“Raph here insists on his innocence! But we all know why he’s here, don’t we, boys?”
“Fuck you,” Raph says again.
“Our man got a girl pregnant when they were both seventeen, then made her get an abortion when she wanted to keep it. Then off he fucks to university and cheats on her with every Stacy he can get his hands on, which was a dumb fucking move because of course she finds out. It takes her two years but she does, and someone here gets word of it and snatches him up and now, here he is!”
Stefan doesn’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand, yes, he sounds like an arsehole, but he had the impression from Christine that every man here would be, if not violent, then perhaps on the verge of violence. Cheating is awful, but he’s not sure he can understand the moral calculus that imprisons a man because of it.
On the other hand — or, wait, is he back to the original hand? — Stefan can read a wrecked life between the lines of Aaron’s glib summary, so maybe this guy, Raph, deserves… whatever this place is.
Stefan’s forming a new theory, and he refines it while Aaron babbles on, arguing with Raph about the exact nature of his transgressions: it’s a scared-straight programme. Take bad men — bad people, he amends, remembering Christine — and lock them away for a while. Teach them that toxic masculinity — or toxic whatever-Christine-did — has consequences. Maybe there are talks or classes; lectures on how to be a better person. Keep them here until whoever runs the place considers them ready to go back to the world. Supervised for a while after, maybe; Christine, after all, attended a party despite still being ‘in the programme’ in some sense she hasn’t yet defined.
Unfortunately, there’s no space in this for his theories about trans women. Probably he was completely wrong about that, and Christine’s answer to his blunt question about her gender was noncommittal. Hell, he might have just confused her. Certainly none of the men down here seem like trans people looking for help.
He puts his half-finished theory aside and refocuses on what’s happening around him.
“Plus,” Aaron’s saying, “we all know Raph has rage issues. I bet plenty of those girls he fucked woke up the next day with a few extra bruises. Am I right, Raphael?” He holds up a hand as if awaiting a high five.
“I don’t have rage issues, shithead!”
“What do you call that?” Aaron says, pointing.
There’s a dent in one of the metal cabinets. It’s deep and many-faceted, like it was made by multiple strikes. Stefan looks hard at Raph, pictures him kicking it. He’s a big guy.
Stefan shudders.
“I call that, ‘fuck off or you’re next’,” Raph says.
“Ooh, scary,” Aaron says, making a mocking gesture. “Come at me, please; I’d love to see you get tased again.” Raph replies with a middle finger and returns to his magazine. “Well!” Aaron adds, turning back to Stefan with a wild grin. “That’s Raph done. Who’s next? Oh, yes, the double act. Will and Adam. I still don’t know what dreadful things they did but they’re really fucking annoying, so Maria and her pals probably did the world a favour by locking them up down here. Love you Maria!” he adds, blowing a kiss in the direction of the women by the door. One of them, an East Asian woman, waves a taser at him. “She loves me, really. But, yeah, unless you want to go completely insane or you really want to know everything there is to know about the demons who really did nine eleven, stay away from Adam and Will.”
“Which one is the demon guy?” Stefan asks. “Adam?”
“Does it matter?”
“Fuck you, Aaron,” Will says, and points at Adam. “You’re right, new boy. He’s the demon guy.”
“I’m not the demon guy!”
“You said yesterday that demons make people gay.”
“No, I said that demonic influence in secular culture is responsible for the glorification of homosexuality.”
“Fucking Westboro freak.”
“Godless sinner.”
“Aww, they’re fighting again,” Aaron says. “And yet they always sit together! I think it’s wuv.”
“Who’s left?” he asks, wanting nothing more now than to get this over with. Everyone here seems deeply unpleasant, with the potential exception of the women, the ones with the tasers. He’s not yet willing to commit to that assessment, though.
“Those two,” Aaron says, pointing to two men who’ve been ignoring the whole spectacle in favour of some TV show, “are Declan and Ollie. That one hit his wife, that one hit his girlfriend. No; other way round. Sorry. Fun fact: Ollie there has been zapped sixteen times!”
“Why?”
“He thinks if he can get a weapon off one of the girls, he can escape. But it’s pointless. They’re locked to their fingerprints, or something. And there are a couple of really big guys knocking around somewhere, waiting to jump on us if we need jumping on. Declan actually grabbed one of the girls last week and got fucking dogpiled.”
“Oh my God,” Stefan says. “Was she okay?”
“What? Uh, yeah. I guess so? Declan got the crap beaten out of him, though. Watch for his limp, it’s hilarious. Okay, okay, who are we missing? Oh, yeah. Martin Moody. The fucking foreveralone over in the corner there. If you ever need him just listen for the soft weeping sounds.” Aaron switches to a whisper. “He’s the only one with a body count. Like, a directly-attributable-to-his-actions body count! No, ‘Oh, he ruined my life,’” he adds, in falsetto, “‘and now I can’t go on,’ shit. He’s the only cold-blooded killer here. Unless you are, too.” He holds up his arms in faux-submission. “No judgement if you are!”
“A body count? What did he do?”
Aaron mimes pouring a bottle down his throat. “Drink driving. Killed a guy, injured his wife. Got off with a fine, which the queen bitches— sorry! Which our benevolent captors didn’t like. So! Here he is.”
“I didn’t ‘get off’,” the man mumbles, just loud enough to hear. “My family leaned on the court. I wanted to— I needed to pay for what I did.”
“Congratulations!” Aaron says, grinning wildly. “You’re paying for it now, and we’re stuck paying for it with you. And that’s everyone, I think,” he adds, turning back to Stefan. “Unless you want to tell me what you did…?”
“Nothing,” Stefan repeats.
“Suit yourself. Ah!” He points through the double doors on the other side of the room, that look like they lead to the world’s most depressing conference room. A woman is laying out plates. “Lunch time!”
* * *
Stefan’s surprised by the burgers — they look really good — but not by the plastic cutlery.
Aaron swings onto the chair next to him, apparently keen to keep exploring a bond Stefan would rather not develop. Good men don’t end up here, Stefan remembers, and tries not to think about what Aaron might have done. The list is bad enough already: two men who hit their wives or girlfriends, a cheater who forced his girlfriend to get an abortion she didn’t want, and a drunk driver. Not to mention whatever the two guys at the end of the table, Will and Adam, did, although given both the subject and tone of the running argument they’ve been having for the last several minutes, he’d rather not speculate. He’s uncomfortably reminded of the videos the YouTube algorithm keeps trying to get him to watch.
Carefully, Stefan looks at each one of the men in turn, fixing in his mind what he knows about them; he doesn’t want to forget who they are, even for a moment. Of all of them, the drunk driver, the one who’s actually killed someone, seems the least objectionable. Not a conclusion Stefan enjoys coming to. Maybe it’s just that he’s quiet.
“Don’t get too excited about the burger, mate,” Aaron says. “It’s veggie. Everything here is.”
“Meat’s too masculine,” says Raph, the cheater. “Too raw.”
Stefan very carefully does not make the obvious observation. Instead he attempts to spear a chip with his plastic fork; it bends.
“You can thank Declan for the plastic cutlery,” Aaron says. “You’ve seen that bump on your stomach? Well, so did he, and he got hilariously buttmad about it.”
“Why? What is it?” Stefan says.
“It’s an implant. Releases a drug called Goslafin.”
“Goserelin, you fucking imbecile,” Will says. “It’s a drug for men with prostate cancer. It lowers testosterone. They probably use it on us to make us less aggressive.”
“Does it work?” Stefan asks.
“Fuck no,” Aaron says.
“Shut up,” Will says. “Of course it does! Your body’s a machine made of meat. You can’t act like medication just doesn’t work on you.”
“Sure I can.”
Will says to Stefan, “Ignore him. My dad, the toughest man I know, he had it and it made him tired and depressed. Eleven months on it until the surgery. You’ve been on it longest—” and he grins, and points at Aaron with his plastic fork, “—so you should be the most emasculated one in here.”
“Whatever,” Aaron says, turning away from Will, who theatrically rolls his eyes and returns to his discussion with Adam. “Anyway, Declan over there found out his boy juice was being interfered with and tried to dig it out with a spoon.”
“Did it work?” Stefan asks, trying not to think about the idea that the thing in his belly might be suppressing his testosterone. The thought is almost too good to be true. And somewhat ironic.
“Hah!” Will says. “No. I told him it wouldn’t.”
“Fuck you, Will-i-am,” Declan says. He’s alone at the far end of the table, picking his burger apart with his fingers and eating only the bun and the cheese.
“And now we have plastic forks,” Aaron finishes. “Thanks, Declan.”
Stefan tries his burger. It’s pretty good. “So,” he says, swallowing, “now I know why you’re— why we’re all here; what is this place, anyway? What’s it for?”
“Are you slow?” Aaron says. “Think about it for a second! It’s a masturbatory fantasy by feminist fuckwits who want to believe they can take ordinary guys and make a bunch of pussies out of us. But it’s just all a big show. Fucking— fucking theatre. They get us all down here, put anti-cancer drugs inside us so we’re — thank you, Will — tired and depressed and floppy-dicked. They spend a few weeks lecturing us about what big bad boys we are, and then we’re supposed to go free as changed men. It’s not going to work, of course—”
“Why not?”
“What do you mean, ‘Why not’? It’s bullshit, man. It’s a fucking psychology experiment or something. Someone’s grad paper on masculine aggression. Someone found this bomb shelter or whatever under that girls’ dorm and had a big idea that really impressed a grant committee and now we’re stuck with it. We probably can’t even sue; I bet they had all of us sign something when we were high or drunk or, I don’t know, just really fucking sad like Murderer Moody. Where were you when they got you?”
“Uh, I was at a party,” Stefan admits.
“There you go. They’ll have got a girl to chat you up and make you sign something and then the next thing you know, concrete walls and veggie burgers and— and fucking weepy here.” He throws a chip at Martin Moody.
“He’s just guessing,” Martin Moody says, ignoring the chip. “He doesn’t know.”
“And he just wants this place to be, I don’t know, fucking purgatory.”
“This is my chance, Aaron,” Moody says. “So leave me the hell alone.”
“Cry more, murderer.”
Stefan takes another bite of his burger and tries to avoid listening to the conversation. One thing seems certain: if there’s anyone who understands less about what’s going on under Dorley Hall than Stefan, it’s the men sat around the table with him. Will says it’s Woke Jail, but hasn’t elaborated on what that means; Adam seems to think it’s a conspiracy, or possibly demons; Aaron thinks it’s an experiment and it’ll all be over in a month. But the cells, the setup with the common room and the dining room and what looked like at least one more corridor leading off, it’s all too elaborate for a grad student’s experiment; besides, if it’s connected to the missing boys Stefan’s been investigating, this place has been going for years.
He feels eyes on him and looks up, sees the blonde woman, out in the corridor, staring at him through the reinforced glass doors. He smiles and shrugs at her and she glares back, frowning slightly, like he’s a puzzle she can’t solve.
A lot of that going around.
* * *
After lunch and a few more abortive attempts at conversation, Aaron seems finally to get the idea that Stefan isn’t particularly interested in talking, and joins Will and Adam on the sofas near the television, back in the common room. Most of the other men drift over to join them over the next few minutes, leaving Stefan and Martin Moody alone together at the dining table.
“My name’s not Moody,” Martin says.
“What?” Stefan snaps, irritated to be distracted from his thoughts.
“My name’s not Moody. It’s Holloway. That little shit, Aaron, coined it on my first day out of the cell. ‘Moody Martin the Murderer’. And that’s who I am now.”
“Was he right?” Stefan asks, trying to keep the contempt out of his voice. “Did you kill someone?”
He nods. “I didn’t mean to. But you don’t mean to do a lot of things when you drink, and I was always drinking.” He talks without emotion, but there’s something in his voice, a hard edge that comes up occasionally, that reminds Stefan of how Mark and Russ sounded, reading from the letters their mother left them, after her death. “I thought I could drive home. Just two miles. But I lost control. Left the road right as they were leaving the restaurant. Their… anniversary dinner. He didn’t make it to the hospital, but she survived. A broken leg. He pushed her out of the way. Saved her. From me.”
“Jesus…”
“My family has money. Hired the best lawyer they could. Said I was a young man who’d lost his way. Said it wouldn’t be fair to snuff out my potential over a mistake. Even found a criminal record for the man I killed, to make him look like less of an innocent victim. And I got off light. I was supposed to go to rehab, but I couldn’t hack it.”
“And now you’re here.”
“Yes. And those guys, they’re all wrong. This is no experiment, and it’s not Woke Jail or whatever stupid thing Will Schroeder’s going on about. Something happens here. They keep us locked up, they suppress our testosterone, they take blood samples… Something happens here.”
“What do you think it is?”
Martin meets Stefan’s eyes. An unpleasant experience. “I don’t care,” he says. “Whatever it is, I deserve it.”
Stefan doesn’t find himself able to contradict the miserable man. He just stares back at him, feeling almost more uncomfortable in his presence than he had when the blonde woman was needling at every aspect of his supposed masculinity. Eventually Martin takes the hint, swings around on his chair and returns to the common room, leaving Stefan to push his empty plate aside and lean his forehead carefully on the table.
Jesus, these people. He’s tempted to ask Christine, when and if she gets him out tonight, to lock all the doors behind them and bury the key.
He gets almost a minute alone before the door through to the common area buzzes, locking him in the dining room. The blonde woman enters from the corridor, pocketing a remote.
Stefan can’t stop himself saying, “Oh, thank God.”
“What?” the blonde woman says, stopping before she sits down and giving him a quizzical look.
Fuck it. Tell the truth. “I was expecting another one of them. Another horror story with a face. But it’s just you, the woman who yells at me.”
At the door, another woman takes up a relaxed but ready position, taser in hand. The blonde woman nods at her, and sits. Steeples her fingers.
“Do you not like your new friends?” she says.
“They’re all awful.”
“You should fit right in, then.”
Stefan swallows his reply with a cough, remembering the role he’s supposed to be playing; although he’s not sure, any more, why he’s playing it. Surely all he has to do is tell this woman he’s not anything like those men?
He realises: she won’t believe him. Like Aaron. He saw someone like him, and so does she.
Deep inside, a small voice asks, Are you sure you’re not like those men? But it’s a voice Stefan’s got used to ignoring; his base assumption that nothing he believes about himself, good or bad, can possibly be legitimate. Old lies from an old liar.
“Can I ask your name?” he says.
“Why?”
He shrugs. Affects indifference. “You know mine. I know theirs.” He nods towards the common area. A few of them, Aaron included, are watching his conversation, but presumably can’t hear anything. “I’d like to know yours.”
She glares at him. Eventually: “Pippa.”
“Hi, Pippa,” he says, smiling.
His smile sets something off inside her. “Don’t think for a second that this is working on me,” she snaps.
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. The whole act. This.” She gestures in Stefan’s direction, her mouth curled into a sneer that suggests she doesn’t like what she finds there. Well, ditto, lady.
“I don’t understand.”
“The nice guy act! The smiles, the friendly chatter, the polite questions, the— the flipping yoga! You’re nothing but an act, Stefan Riley, and when girls fall for it, that’s when you get them.”
“I ‘get’ them?”
She hits the table. “Stop acting clueless! It won’t work on me but it will piss me off! You’re as bad as the rest of them. Maybe worse.”
“Worse than the drunk driver? Or the ones that hit their wives? Or that little scrotum, Aaron?”
Pippa rubs her hand. “Potentially. That’s the thing with guys like you: you’re all cute and cuddly right up to the moment you’re not any more, and then… you’re capable of anything. I’ve seen it before.”
You can’t win with her, Stefan thinks to himself. Stop playing.
“What’s my future here, then?” he says.
“That’s up to you. I heard one of the others telling you about your implant. He’s right: it’s there to make you calm. If you choose to remain in the programme, if you agree to commit to your rehabilitation, it will be re-administered whenever it runs out, and you can expect other treatments in due course.”
“Do I get to know what those are?”
“No.”
“Right.”
“This programme has one goal and one goal only: to improve you, and to protect people from you. You’re a threat, Stefan Riley. To women, mainly, but not only. You leave when we decide that the threat you represent is neutralised. What you get to decide is how you leave: either by completing the programme and becoming a new person; or by refusing to participate, or otherwise washing out. And—”
“—those who wash out are never heard from again,” Stefan says. “I remember. What do you do, send them on to a private prison or something? Put them in the veggie burgers?”
Pippa stands, suddenly all business. “Above my pay grade,” she says. “Now. Come with me. You will be shown the rest of the facilities and then returned to your cell, where you will remain until the morning. You have a lot to think about, Stefan Riley.”
* * *
At some point on the way down the stairs, Abby’s hand found Christine’s. Looking for reassurance. Because Melissa is precious to Abby — Christine didn’t know just how precious until about half an hour ago — and Stefan is precious to Melissa. And so Abby’s belief that Stefan’s transgressions should remain private faded away in the face of her absolute terror over what Melissa will think when she tells her.
Because she has to tell her.
The best Christine could do was talk her into a delay, at least until they’ve touched base with Stefan’s sponsor.
One of the hardest things to get used to, for many of the girls in the programme, is the requirement that they never see their family again. It’s not something that’s ever bothered Christine — residual guilt about leaving her mother with her father notwithstanding; besides, she chose him over her son/daughter/whoever, and the memory of that night plays out in Christine’s nightmares with some regularity — but it’s been particularly difficult for Abby, who’d been very close with her family. Like a lot of the girls, she’s derived hope from Indira’s reconnection with her parents, and from Indira’s mother welcoming her new daughter back into the family as if she’d never been taken from it.
Family photos fill Abby’s room. Letters she’s never sent spill out of her dresser drawer. And she’s petitioning Aunt Bea to let her follow in Dira’s footsteps, a request Christine privately believes will never be granted. Aunt Bea eventually will tell her, the way she tells all of them, to move on, and Abby will be sanctioned if she ever goes against this instruction. And so the hole in Abby’s kind soul that is her past, her family, continues to grow, continues to hurt her.
And now, down in the second basement, there’s a connection to the past. Not to Abby’s, but Melissa’s; almost as important. But it’s a broken connection, fucked up and soured by the unavoidable conclusion that Stefan, if he’s here, grew up to be a bad man. Not true, of course, but it would be the cherry on the shit sundae, to drag Melissa back into it all on the eve Christine gets Stefan out. If she even still can.
One mistake begets a thousand. She’s considered owning up, telling Aunt Bea everything, but she’s not sure what will happen to her or Stefan if she does. She never did find out where the washouts go, but she’s had nightmares about that, too.
Abby releases Christine’s hand as they buzz into the ground floor kitchen. Time to look casual.
“Hi everyone!” Abby gushes, waving at the women gathered around the kitchen table. They look, variously, exhausted, annoyed, and amused. They’ll have just got done supervising lunch time downstairs, and making sure their charges don’t cause trouble. Unlikely, given that the precipitating incident prompting them to switch out the metal cutlery happened early this year — one of the boys apparently attacked himself; points for originality — but not impossible. Christine immediately finds Pippa: she’s sat at the end of the table with a laptop open and a hot chocolate in front of her.
Marshmallows and chocolate sprinkles. Shit. The full calorie bomb; must be a difficult day.
Christine accepts a hug from Maria and a shoulder-tap from Harmony, two of the older women who both have responsibility for one of the reprobates in the basement. Maria in particular she hasn’t seen for a while, except on the cameras; she looks tired. Her guy must be a pain in the neck.
Abby bustles her way to the table, pulling up a chair, entirely coincidentally, next to Pippa. Immediately she cranes her neck to look at the laptop screen. “Oh!” she says. “Is that the new boy?”
It’s probably a good thing working for the local paper doesn’t require acting skills. Christine adopts an expression of indifferent curiosity and walks around behind Pippa so she can see the screen, too. Stefan’s back in his cell, doing stretches.
“Fitness buff?” she asks, as innocently as she knows how.
“He was doing yoga when I came to see him one time,” Pippa says. Half to herself, she mutters, “I can’t work him out…”
Abby turns the laptop so the screen is face-on to her, and watches Stefan carefully. It’ll be an interesting moment for her: for all that she’s apparently listened to Melissa talk about him for cumulative days, and seen multiple pictures of his younger self, she’s never before had a chance to see him as an adult. Christine glances at the screen; he’s touching his toes.
“What’s he like?” Abby asks.
“He’s different than I expected.” Pippa takes a long sip of her hot chocolate. Slurps up a marshmallow. “If he wasn’t, you know, here, I’d say he was just a normal guy. A bit weird. Pretty cute. Kinda sad? God, it’s so effed up; I want to like him!”
“That’s a bad thing?” Christine asks, playing dumb.
Christine shouldn’t be interacting with sponsors like this, according to the large, leather-bound book of precepts that sits on a shelf in the office, accumulating dust. Because, despite being on a long leash these days, with most of her freedoms returned, she’s still in the programme. Getting to see how the sausage is made — or unmade — is perhaps counterproductive, when you are, in a sense, the sausage.
She frowns. Bad metaphor.
It hasn’t worked that way for a while, anyway. Dorley isn’t all that big, and the job of acclimating Sisters to their new lives has become, by necessity, much more communal than it was under the reign of Aunt Bea’s mysterious predecessor, ‘Grandmother’, who moved on from the programme before Abby’s time. Rumour has it she’s working for the government in some capacity these days.
Rather more reliable rumour has it that Aunt Bea herself was Grandmother’s first subject, and Christine’s more inclined to believe that one. It’d explain the way Aunt Bea occasionally allows herself to be compromised by compassion for her charges, a defect that Grandmother reportedly did not suffer from. Turtles all the way down.
So Christine and the other third-year girls come and go as they please, hang out with the sponsors, and have access to basically all the inner workings of the programme. ‘Improves buy-in’, according to Aunt Bea. Better to be roaming the university and making friends than spending another year shut mostly inside the dorm, amassing resentments.
Still amazing that the place works at all. Christine half-expects one day to open a random cupboard and find a big box labelled Assorted Mind Control Devices (Point Away From Face).
“Yes, it’s a bad thing!” Pippa shouts. “I need to hate him!” She bangs on the table, and winces, like she just hurt an old bruise. Maria frowns at her. “Sorry, sorry. Damn; Christine, can you get me some paper towels?” Christine hops up as Pippa quickly holds the laptop up, away from the slowly spreading puddle of spilled hot chocolate.
They mop up the mess together. Abby starts massaging Pippa’s shoulders.
“It’s so weird,” Pippa says, when things are back to normal. “I gave him the first-contact spiel and it was as if it genuinely upset him. And I don’t mean the way it does with most of the guys; he didn’t get angry, or try to attack me through the glass, or call me a feminazi or a bitch or a you-know-what. It was like… you ever make a joke that’s in questionable taste, like a dead baby joke or something, and then it turns out someone in the room had a miscarriage, and they’re trying to hide it but you can tell they’re really genuinely upset, and you feel like the worst person in the world? It was like that. I didn’t even get through the whole thing because I started worrying I might be about to cause a suicide attempt before I even got him out of his cell! And then, just now, when I took him to lunch and to meet the other guys, it was like he’d just— just forgotten it all!”
“What do you mean?” Maria says. She and the other women are watching Pippa intently now, and Christine remembers that Stefan is Pippa’s first subject; is she being evaluated, too?
“It was like he hit the reset button overnight. Back to the personable, pleasant guy. Actually, no; he was until he met the other guys. Then he almost shut down. They really got to him.”
“So at least you have a lever,” Maria says. “Actually, it sounds like you have a bunch.” Levers are one of the things the sponsors look for: sore spots, sensitive issues; anything that can be used to promote a change in behaviour.
“I’m not sure I want one. God help me, I almost want to unlock all the doors and let him go.”
“Well, look,” Maria says, “it sounds like you need to adjust how you see him before your next session. Harmony said she watched how you were with him during the tour and she thought you did okay; what were you thinking about then?”
“I was kind of thrown off my rhythm, so I just tried to act like Ellie did with me those first few months.”
“Good. Keep it up. And remember, we’ve had these oh-so-charming types in before. They’re always looking to get your guard down. Try thinking about what he did. It can help.”
“What did he do?” Abby asks, clearly unable to contain the question any more.
Christine doesn’t close her eyes and bang her head against the wall, but she wants to. She knows where this is going. Letting Stefan out tonight is going to look like a fucking nuclear-level disaster. It was never going to actually look good — What was your plan, exactly? — but this is just awful. The entire current sponsor team knows him, and not just to look at; they’re actively discussing his fucking psychology!
Try thinking before acting next time, Christine.
“He was with this girl, right near the dorm,” Pippa’s saying, “and she starts screaming. Like, full-on, ‘Get off me!’ stuff. I look out the window in time to see her take off and he looks like he’s about to pass out in the flower bed. So I went down, grabbed Raj from the break room so he could watch out for me, and the guy, Stefan, is fully asleep by that point. I find his wallet, and by this point I don’t know what to do with him yet. Like, he’s asleep and I’ve got Raj with me so he’s not a threat, but the girl he was with was not happy with him so I kind of don’t want to send him on his way without checking him out. So Raj watches him and I look him up. His file’s— well, look.” She spins the laptop around so Maria can see it. “It’s sealed. And they only do that when there’s been litigation to cover up something nasty.”
Or when someone hops on the system five minutes earlier, does a bit of creative writing, and changes a single field in a spreadsheet from no to yes. Saints has reasonable network security, but the weak link is always the office staff. Every year there’ll be some poor fucker in IT pulling their hair out when they realise the class lists are in Excel again.
Maria reaches over, pulls the laptop towards her, scrolls around. “There are all these comments,” she says. “Kind of suggestive, no?”
“Exactly,” Pippa says, sounding relieved.
“Did we ever ID the screaming girl?”
“No. Camera deadzone. We have a couple of shots of her running away, but she has her back to us in all of them.”
“So,” Maria says, summing up, “we have a screaming girl running away from a drunk guy. We have locked records, indicating some major incident that’s been made to go away. And a tonne of comments on his file that stop short of actionable but which paint a picture that says, if you read between the lines, ‘Don’t leave him alone with women.’ It sounds pretty conclusive, Pip; you’ve got a real dangerous asshole there. And you know Aunt Bea’s looked at this same information and approved his stay. I mean, sure, it wouldn’t stand up in court, but—”
“But we’re not a court,” Pippa finishes. “I know. God. I feel stupid. I fell for his act, didn’t I? Flipping, flipping— fuck.”
“It’s okay. It happens. The important thing is, you talked to us about it. And you always can, you know?” Maria smiles warmly.
“I know,” Pippa says, nodding. “Thanks, Maria.”
“You’re going to be okay?” Abby asks her.
“Yeah. I’ve got this.”
“Then we—” Abby points at herself and Christine, “—have some late lunch to steal. Anything good?”
“There’s cauliflower casserole somewhere in there,” Harmony says, waving at the fridge.
“Yum,” Abby says, smiling at Christine and making prompting motions with her eyebrows.
“Thanks, Harmony,” Christine says, clenching her stomach. All those ‘suggestive’ comments she’d left in the open sections of Stefan’s file had seemed like such a good idea at the time; now she just feels like she’s run up to his executioner and handed over an even bigger axe.
Three minutes of microwaving later and they’re bounding up the stairs to Abby’s room on the third floor. Christine always feels a little strange coming up here, given that most of the girls from third on up were never in the programme — she can be awkward around cis girls; always waiting for them to see right through her — but today she’s got more on her mind. She smiles absently at a pair of women watching TV in the common area and lets herself be bundled into Abby’s room, noting once again how strange it is that none of the dorms on this floor have centrally controlled biometric locks.
“Fuck, Chrissy!” Abby says, dumping her plate on her desk and ignoring it. “Fuck! I don’t know what’s going to break Liss’s heart more: that Stefan is here, or that Stefan deserves to be here!”
“Maybe he doesn’t!” Christine says, too quickly.
“You heard Maria!”
Christine takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, giving herself the appearance of composing herself so she can think through what she wants to say. How can she divert Abby from making a decision that will make things even worse? “You know what Maria’s like,” she says, “always ready to see the worst in people. But her evidence is flaky as hell, Abs. His file is closed, and suggestive comments in the notes are just… suggestive. Even the girl yelling and running away, yeah, sounds bad, but it’s all circumstantial. Even Maria said it wouldn’t stand up in court.”
“I just… I can’t stand the thought of the innocent boy I heard so much about going through… well, what happened to us.” Abby wrings her hands together. She doesn’t talk about her time in the programme much; Christine’s got the impression her sponsor went particularly hard on her. And she’s never said what she did, beyond obliquely referencing ‘short guy syndrome’. Trying to imagine Abby as a boy, let alone a bad one, is so absurd it makes Christine’s head hurt. “But I also can’t stand the thought that that kid is gone. Replaced by a dangerous creep. And— and what if it’s because of us? Chrissy, we took Liss away from him! She was like a big sister to him — big brother, whatever — and we just lifted her out of his life. Made him think she was dead! God, Chrissy, we did this to him. I have to tell her…”
“Tell you what,” Christine says quickly, before Abby can dive for her phone again, “why don’t I look into it? I said I could try and find out what he did, and I meant it. I bet I could get his file open. I mean, even back then I never went that far into the university system—” Lies upon lies to tarnish my soul, she thinks, “—but Saints is hardly GCHQ. And then you can know for certain. And if it’s nothing, if he was brought in for no reason, if this is all just a big misunderstanding, well, then we go to Aunt Bea.”
Abby’s eyes, which are reddening, light up. “You can do that?”
There. That’s the exit strategy. A trusted programme graduate asks her to put the old black hat on one last time, out of concern for another programme graduate, and Christine reluctantly agrees. She finds a totally innocuous incident on Stefan’s file and an innocent explanation for all the sinister notes, and together they go to Aunt Bea to exonerate him. Maybe he can sign an NDA, or something; surely nothing too dreadful can happen to him now he’s had so many eyes on him?
“Yeah,” Christine says. “I can do it. Give me a day, and I can do it.”
2019 October 15
Tuesday
It’s two in the morning on Tuesday and her phone alarm is playing. It’d been wishful thinking to set it — she’s been running on adrenaline and caffeine since yesterday afternoon — but at the very least it startles her out of her reverie. And gets I Knew You Were Trouble stuck in her head.
All this stuff with Stefan has had Christine spending time in her memories. Skipping the bad stuff, mostly. Dwelling on the first time Indira ever seemed pleased with her. God, but that woman can make you feel like a new person with nothing but her smile. Makes you want to change your whole self, inside and out, to feel that kind of approval again.
She taps her phone and it goes silent. Checks the laptop, which has been tracking the movements of all the Sisters, both the sponsors and the volunteers who occasionally help out in the security room; all are in bed. The night-shift guys are dozing lightly in the break room on basement 1, and Christine breathes silent thanks to Aunt Bea’s streak of protective paranoia: the men she grudgingly hires from some PMC don’t have access to the security room or the cameras, and while they’re on Dorley’s network their phones can only receive calls, not make them.
She throws on a shirt. It can get cold down there.
Let’s go see Stefan.
Early in her second year here, Christine discovered that the electronic locks on all the doors can be cycled slowly, making them virtually silent. She even tested a script that would hook into the system and quietly lock every door except the ones closest to her phone, allowing her and only her to walk around Dorley Hall and its basements unimpeded. It worked perfectly, but she’s never used it: one person trying a lock and finding it broken can be explained away as a glitch, but if a dozen people do so then it’s fairly obvious someone’s just ratfucked their network. The script is the sort of thing it’s only truly safe to use if you don’t plan on ever coming back. And where would Christine go?
She settles for locking Pippa’s door only, looping as few cameras as she thinks she can get away with, and activating the alert script on her laptop. It’ll ping her phone if any of the biometrics activate. She should have a few hours; more than enough time.
She goes down the back way, anyway. Safer to use the triple-door, triple-locked fire escape on the other side of the basement than go down through the kitchen. She doesn’t enjoy going this way — she has to pass good ol’ Basement Bedroom 3, her home away from home for one difficult year, now housing some guy called William — but she’s more than earned a little discomfort.
Stefan’s waiting for her in his cell. Remarkably composed, which is a trifle irritating. At least he’s not doing handstands.
“Hi,” he whispers.
“You can talk normally,” she says. He’s standing, but she sits, all too aware that her lack of sleep is going to catch up with her at some point, and she’d like to be close to the floor in case it happens sooner rather than later.
“Okay. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“God. I’m not even sure where to start.”
Stefan mirrors her; sits cross-legged on the floor of his cell. If it weren’t for the glass door, they’d be close enough to touch each other. “Yesterday I asked if you’re a trans woman,” he says. “You said ‘sort of’ and then immediately had to leave. Maybe start with that?”
This is it. The point of no return. Shit. She’s been dreading this part.
“What I am,” she says, “and who I am, it’s all bound up with this place, and what happens here. When I came here I was… very different. Angry, afraid, and—” she recalls a phrase of Indira’s from her very first evaluation, “—capable of acts of great cruelty when I felt trapped and lonely. I was never physically violent, but I hurt people all the same.” This is not who you are any more. This is not who you are any more. This is not who you are any more, Christine! “And it’s because of that, because of the things I did, that I was brought here. For rehabilitation. That’s what the programme does. It takes dangerous men, men like, well, the ones you met today, and it turns them into… into…”
She can’t say it. It’s just too fucking much and she can’t say it. So she just holds her hands out in front of her, in the classic magician’s ta-da pose. Stares into his eyes as she does so. Can’t look away.
Don’t judge me. Please don’t judge me. Even though, God knows, I deserve to be judged.
“You mean, you—”
“Yeah,” she says.
“You really—?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“But you’re so—”
“Yeah,” she says.
“You’re a man?”
Now she breaks eye contact. “No.”
“But you said you’re not trans. Or ‘sort of’ or something.”
“My gender isn’t the issue here,” she says, holding herself still, willing herself not to react, even as her belly fills with bile, even as old wounds open all over her, even as memories she despises overwhelm her. She can’t stop it coming out: “But if you call me a man again I’ll walk away from this cell and leave you to rot!” She clamps a hand over her mouth. Stupid. So, so stupid. You’re supposed to be helping him! “Sorry,” she says, through her fingers. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, shit! Sorry!”
His eyes are on her, reducing her to the boy she once was, cruel and lonely and sad and scared, lashing out in public and then retreating to his room and making himself bleed. She’s changed, she wants to say, and she wants to believe it, but he’ll always be where she came from. The monster she’s forever trying to escape.
“It’s okay!” Stefan says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to— Oh, God, you’re crying! I’m sorry, Christine, that was— I shouldn’t have said that.”
She screws shut her eyes, wipes them with her sleeve. “Don’t be sorry!” she hisses. “I put you here! And I was just like those fuckers out there!” She presses her hands, balled up in her shirt, to her temples. “Hate me!”
“No!”
“Stefan, I—”
She hiccups, the way she does when she’s about to collapse into floods of tears, and the discomfort breaks through her misery, enough that she can hold her breath, count to ten, and regain control.
The shame. God, the shame. Still overwhelming, years later.
Christine didn’t expect coming out to Stefan to be so painful. With Indira’s family it had been different, so she hadn’t thought about it much — truthfully, had deliberately avoided thinking about it — until it was time actually to say the words. Foolish. Indira’s family believe her to be a trans woman, just like their beloved recovered daughter; a convenient lie, and one she can live with, take pride in. But as much as she wishes Indira’s family were right about her, they aren’t. She has nothing to be proud of. She didn’t choose this, didn’t fight for her own self-determination. She was captured and transformed against her will; a woman made out of a man so repugnant that someone took a long, hard look at him and decided the world would be better off if he simply ceased to exist.
And now Stefan knows.
“Christine,” he says, quietly, full of concern, and God, she doesn’t deserve that name. Doesn’t deserve to hear it spoken softly. There are many things she does deserve, but kindness? Absolutely not.
“Please,” he says, and she looks back at him, there on the other side of the door, stuck in a prison she put him in, and he’s holding a hand up to the glass, pressing it there like he wants her to reach forward and—
“Christine,” he whispers.
She holds up her hand. Places it against the glass. Closes her eyes.
It’s almost like they can feel each other.
“Shit,” she whispers, relaxing her shoulders. Moisture on her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I, uh, I wasn’t prepared for how hard that would hit me. Jesus, I thought I was over all that.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No,” Christine says, and sighs. “But it’s part and parcel of Dorley, so I guess I kind of have to.” She drops her hand, curls it up in her lap, cradles it. Watches the tendons twitch with the exhausted curiosity that finds her sometimes when she’s emotionally spent. Be kind to yourself, Christine. “The Sisters of Dorley. That’s us. Remade, all of us. Reshaped. Made better.”
“Made into women,” Stefan says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“All the guys out there. It’s going to happen to them, too? Like it did for you?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Does it work?”
“Worked on me.”
“For everyone?”
“No.”
“The washouts.”
“Yes.”
“How many are going to wash out?”
“It varies. This looks like a particularly shitty batch, for what it’s worth.”
“What happens to them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do they die? Or just get moved?”
“I don’t know.”
“And still you brought me into this.”
“Yes. I panicked. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t blame you. Not really. I spent years investigating this place. I wanted to find out everything about it. Even if I was, in the end, completely wrong about it.”
“I’m going to get you out. Tonight.”
Stefan doesn’t say anything for long enough that Christine, finally, looks up from her lap again. He’s looking her over. Examining her. For what? He doesn’t look critical; just curious.
“I have a few questions,” he says, when he realises he’s got her attention.
“Okay.”
“Melissa Haverford? She’s… Mark? Mark Vogel?”
“I never knew her by that name, but, yes.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s okay.”
“Does she… ever mention me?”
“All the time, I’m told.”
“You don’t know her personally?”
“Not really. We’ve talked a little.”
“Can I see her?”
“She doesn’t live here any more.”
“No, I mean, do you have a picture of her? Like, a file photo or something. I only have what’s in here—” he taps the side of his head, “—and it’s been a long time.”
“Oh, uh, yeah,” Christine says. “Give me a second. Abby sent me some pictures the last time she went to see her. Better than a file photo, probably. Here.”
She holds her phone up to the glass. On the screen, Abby and Melissa are posing, four times over, in a strip of photobooth shots: laughing; sticking their tongues out; Abby planting a big kiss on Melissa’s cheek; bunny ears. Stefan touches his finger to the glass.
“It’s really her,” he says. He loses his voice on the last syllable, and everything else comes out in a whisper: “She’s really alive.”
Christine loses control again. Sobbing quietly, holding up the phone, she watches Stefan as he stares at his old friend. His almost-brother. His lost sister. She never had that kind of connection with anyone, not until she came to Dorley, and the thought of having it and then it being ripped away is beyond heartbreaking. She looked up their respective ages, back in her room; Stefan thought Melissa was dead — or gone, at the very least — for seven years.
The silence holds for a while, but it can’t last forever. “We need to get you out of here,” Christine says, sniffing, and puts her phone away. “And, about Melissa: I can send you some more pictures, once you’re safe, but it’ll need to be a while before we can think about putting the two of you in contact.” She stands, brushes out the folds in her shirt, wipes her cheeks again. “Aunt Bea’s going to be antsy about you knowing as much as you do about this place, so you probably won’t be able to meet in person for—”
“I want to stay.”
He’s still sitting on the floor, looking up at her with a desperate need she’s never seen on anyone’s face before. She has to replay what he said a few times in her head before she gets it.
And still it doesn’t make sense.
“You want to what?”
Chapter 6: When I Get a Round Tuit
Notes:
Content warnings for Stef's internalised transphobia and cissexism, and references to suicide.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 October 15
Tuesday
She’s wearing ordinary sleeping clothes: a long nightgown with a cutesy pattern on it, leggings, and an open shirt, loose enough to hang off her shoulders, with the now-damp sleeves rolled a little way up her forearms. Her mid-brown hair, which hung around her chin when he first met her, is now brushed messily out of her eyes, with the longest strands gathered in a small ponytail. And her face, still slightly wet, shines red around her cheeks.
Stefan can’t remember the last woman he saw who was so beautiful.
To recentre himself he pulls back his sleeves and scratches at the back of his hand. An old habit: habitually he hides his hands from himself under shirts two sizes too big, pulled so far over his fingers that he wears out the fabric in weeks, but sometimes, when he needs the self-control, he’ll expose them. Run fingers around each other. Pick at the flesh at the base of the thumb. Examine the tight skin, the stubby nails, the veins that lace elbow to knuckle. Self-hatred as self-indulgence.
When he was younger, a teacher caught him stabbing himself in the palm with a compass. Sent him to the head of year for punishment. He hadn’t been able to tell her why he was doing it, only that he felt compelled to.
Christine’s hands, so graceful compared to his, are currently clasped in front of her, fingers intertwined and fidgeting, and they betray her mood as surely as his, now buried again in his lap and the sleeves of his hoodie pulled tight, betray his.
“Stefan?” she says. “What do you mean, you want to stay?”
Even the way her lips move…
“I need a moment,” he manages to say, pulling out the words like staples.
She nods. Raises a finger to tuck a lock of hair behind her ears, bites her lip. She’s worried about him, and he should be grateful for her concern, but all he can see in her now, all he can think about, is the girl he might have become.
Come clean with yourself, Stefan, while it’s not too late. Admit to yourself once and for all what you’ve been denying since you were old enough to sort men from women. Trust the part of yourself that knows you well enough to realise that this place, obscene though it seems, is the only place left that can help you.
What are your doubts? Really? That you’ve never been able to say, with no caveats, even to yourself, I am a woman? Does that even matter? Say I want to be a woman instead, because that fits, and you can go from there. Even I don’t want to be a man is enough. Why would it need to be more? Who’s judging you, really, apart from yourself?
You think you’ll be ugly? Unpassable? Does that even matter any more, in the face of the losing battle you’re fighting with yourself? Besides, if you’re going to take this place’s resources for yourself, well, every woman you’ve seen here is beautiful. And surely some of them must have started out like you.
You think you can’t do it? You think you’re not strong enough? Then what better place for you than right here, where they will make you do it?
Stefan swallows. Incredible that it takes a place like this to make it all so simple. Assuming he believes Christine, of course. Her claims, while they — somewhat perversely — explain the whole setup he’s seen down here, describe something so absurd he can still barely grasp at it. She’s a woman who was once a man, brought here against her will and… changed.
And so is Melissa.
He can just about imagine Christine as a trans girl who caught her testosterone puberty early enough to negate or mitigate the worst of its effects, or who got a very lucky play in the genetic lottery. It’s harder to imagine her as being like one of the men he met before, swaggering around the basement, revelling in unpleasantness.
She got upset when he called her a man. How can someone be transformed so completely?
What do you know, Stefan Riley?
Mark/Melissa was very unhappy for her whole last year of school and, looking back with adult eyes, for a lot longer than that. At the time, he’d believed she was just lonely, after her friends moved on and she didn’t replace them; with hindsight, he read it as dysphoria. But what if it was something else? Something darker? What if she came here to Saints, alone, and did… something? Something bad enough to be taken by the Sisters?
No. He knows her! No matter who she became in that time, she wouldn’t hurt anyone. Ever.
He only realises he’s shaking his head in disbelief when Christine says, “What is it?”
“I can’t believe you,” he says.
“What?” It bursts out of her as she spins on her heel and walks away from the cell a few paces, towards the far wall. “No,” she says, turning around again and pointing at him, “you have to believe me. Do you know how hard it was for me to just— just fucking tell you my history? You think I like talking about it?”
“Christine,” he says, pushing himself back up the wall, standing but leaning on the concrete for support, not trusting his shaking legs, “none of this makes any sense! I mean, look at you!”
“Yes?” she says, frowning. “So what?”
“When we met, I thought you were a cis girl. And I can believe you’re trans, just like, really lucky. Or incredibly rich. But then you tell me you’re a—”
“Careful, Stefan.”
“And Melissa?” he says. The dizziness is back; if he could dig his fingers into the wall he would. “You expect me to believe she did something so awful it warranted kidnapping and transforming her? She’s not like that, Christine! She’s a good person. She was never anything but kind to me!”
“She—” Christine starts, but she interrupts herself. Slaps the glass wall. “Shit. I should have guessed this would be a sticking point.” She glares at him. “Why do you want to stay, Stefan?”
“I’ll tell you when you start making sense!”
“I could just drag you out of here, you know.” She pulls her phone out of her pocket and waves it at the lock on the door. It buzzes open, startlingly loud even compared to their raised voices.
“I’ll shout!” Stefan says, desperate. “You’re not supposed to be down here, right? I’ll raise hell! Everyone will come running!”
“Shit!” she says, and kicks the glass. “What if I just leave you here to rot? You’ll find out just how much fun this place can be.”
“Good!” he yells.
Christine near-screams in frustration, and slaps a hand over her mouth. Swears under her breath. Closes her eyes and leans against the far wall. Her chest rises and falls as she calms herself.
When she opens her eyes again, she says, “Let’s talk.”
“I need to understand this place,” Stefan says, unprepared to back down just yet, “and you. And Melissa.” He realises he’s taken several steps forward, and carefully he steps back to the support of the wall, before his adrenaline collapses and takes him with it.
“Okay,” Christine says, making conciliatory gestures with both hands, “but you have to know: we’re running out of time. If I don’t get you out of here in the next hour or so, that’s it. You’re here for good. So ask your questions quickly, and don’t waste time bugging me if there’s something I won’t answer.”
“Why wouldn’t you—?”
“There are a lot of secrets here,” she says, “and not all of them are mine to share.”
“Okay,” Stefan says. “I get it.”
“Can I trust you, Stefan?” she says. When he nods, she pushes open the unlocked door and joins him in the cell, sitting heavily on the concrete and wincing as her outstretched hand takes more of the force of landing than she expected.
It’s the first time he’s been in the same space as her since the party. Her shampoo smells of strawberries. He sits opposite her, cross-legged. Less than thirty centimetres between them.
“All the raised voices,” she explains, pushing the door shut with a toe. “It makes me nervous. If I’m going to shout again, I want another layer between us and everyone else.” He nods again. “You want to understand Melissa?” she says. “How she ended up here?”
“Yeah. I can’t believe she became like Aaron or Will or Martin. Never in a million years.”
Christine starts tapping on her phone. “This is a huge no-no, by the way,” she says. “When someone leaves this place — or is on the verge of it, like me — her past is hers. It’s another country. Another planet. She’s someone new, with her own choices to make; the… the man who was here before is, for all intents and purposes, dead. And good riddance. This whole place fails, otherwise.”
“Got it. I won’t ask anyone.”
“But I need to make you understand Dorley, so, for you, I’m breaking that rule just this once. And only because I think Melissa will understand. Okay,” she adds, after frowning at her phone for a moment, “I’ve found it. Abby’s final write-up. Highly confidential. You need two-source authorisation to get at this.” She grins. “Or you have to be me. Good news: she didn’t do anything violent. Abby doesn’t go into all the dirty details — those’ll be in the intake files in the office upstairs; it gets purged from the database every couple of years — but it looks like Melissa was starting to go down a dark path. Isolated, self-destructive, yadda yadda…” She twirls a finger. “Questionable online activity. Nothing we haven’t seen before. After years of watching men like that grow up and seeing the things they end up doing, Aunt Bea started recommending we take them. Ah, and there might have been some kind of accident, reading between the lines.”
“Accident?”
“It won’t have been a serious one,” Christine says. “Maybe a near-miss? Something that could have gone bad but didn’t? No-one was hurt, whatever happened; the basic personnel files are marked if there’s been death or serious injury, and we generally don’t bring killers in, anyway. Yes, Martin, I know, but it wasn’t deliberate. Abby is being her usual self here — the woman could see the good in the devil, I swear — but reading through… yeah, I’m pretty sure I have the picture, now. We have men like her occasionally: nihilistic, lonely, mostly only a danger to themselves. A handful of them go on to do really terrible things. She must have done or said something to make one of us think she was potentially dangerous in the future, but still worth saving. So we brought her in. And, I’ve been reminded,” she adds, rolling her eyes, “we’re not a court of law, we’re a secret extrajudicial dungeon; our standards of evidence can be, like, half bad vibes.”
“Changing a man into a woman is about saving him?”
She looks at him like he just questioned the colour of the sky. “Well, yeah. Saved me.”
“And all those guys out there? They’re worth saving?”
She nods. “Aunt Bea thinks so, and, officially, so do Maria and Pippa and the rest. I mean, those guys are definitely all awful people, probably all of them bigger bastards than everyone in our intake except the one guy who washed out. I wouldn’t be sorry, personally, if every single one of them followed him. Washed out. Which is why I’m not and never will be a sponsor. Although I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew with some of these guys; wanting to change, wanting to be saved, is a part of it, and not everyone does. Sometimes someone is just too big of a piece of shit, too invested in their own supposed masculinity, too unable to see over their massive dick.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, well. Noble goals. Unpleasant methods.”
“I’m getting that.”
“You believe me now?”
“Maybe.”
“Enough to answer my question?”
“Maybe.”
“Please, Stefan,” she says. “I have to understand why you want to stay. I know I come off like a bit of a mean bitch, but I can’t stand the thought of leaving someone down here who doesn’t deserve to be here.”
“You don’t come off like a bitch.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve been thinking of you as pretty kind, actually.”
She laughs. It’s cynical and over almost as soon as it starts, and when it’s done she’s not looking at him any more. “Thank you,” she says quietly.
“As for why I want to stay…” he says, and lapses into silence. He considers prefacing his statement with the usual justifications he marshals when he imagines this moment: stories from his childhood and his difficult teenage years; his litany of self-loathing. But, it’s finally clear, those are all just excuses. A pre-emptive defence against his disclosure being considered ridiculous, or disgusting, or impossible. It’s bad enough for a boy to claim to be a girl; for a particularly masculine-looking boy to do so…
He bites his tongue to stop himself spiralling, and the pain returns him to the present. Christine’s looking at him again, her earlier irritation and anger replaced by honest interest, and he briefly tries to imagine her here. Waking up in the cell, as whoever she was back then. As a man. Almost impossible.
Except… she’s almost exactly his height; a couple of centimetres taller, maybe. He noticed when they were standing, yelling at each other. Noticed when she kissed him, when they first met. A single small way in which, despite the gulf between them, they are more or less alike.
Maybe womanhood isn’t so unobtainable, after all.
“I want to stay because I think I want to be a girl,” he says quickly, before he can take it back. And winces; he managed to force equivocation in there, anyway. A little doubt, a little wiggle room, enough to let him take it back, should he need to. Fuck that. “I am a girl,” he says. “A trans girl,” he adds. “As in, I’m a—”
“Understood,” she says, smiling, and then she blinks and her eyes widen. “Shit. It makes sense now. That’s why you were looking for this place: you were looking for Melissa, for your friend, like you said, because you thought she’s trans, and… God…”
“Yeah,” he says, matching her smile, “I thought you lot helped her transition.”
“I mean. We did. Just. You know. Not like that.”
“I was genuinely looking for her, as well,” he says. “It’s true that I wanted Dorley’s help, but I wanted to see her again, too. I missed her.” Warmth spreads in his chest as he remembers the last time he saw her close-up, pictures the smile on her face as she gave him back his absurd little box of stuffing, outside the Tesco. “I miss her so much.”
Christine holds out a hand and Stefan, after a moment’s hesitation, takes it. Her fingers are warm. Christine blushes, withdraws, and says, “So, uh, to be clear, because I think in this situation we need to be incredibly clear, you’re planning on undergoing biomedical and possibly surgical treatment to become a girl, yes? And yeah, I know, ‘become a girl’ is cissexist framing, but—”
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s the easiest way to be sure. Draw the stick figures first, paint on the detail later.” He giggles, feeling dizzy again. He always thought he didn’t have dysphoria, had never seriously connected the idea to the way he feels about his body; if his first encounter with Pippa, where she gendered him viciously male and forced him into dissociation, showed him how absurd that idea was, then sharing a space with Christine again is final confirmation. He wants what she has, wants it so desperately and completely it’s a challenge to think about much else. Now he just needs to make sure she doesn’t take him away from the place that can give it to him. “Oh, sorry,” he adds, seeing her frown, “that’s just something Melissa used to say, when she helped with my homework.”
“Abby says something very similar, sometimes,” Christine says. “Probably got it from Melissa.”
“They’re close, are they?”
Christine rolls her eyes. “Incredibly close. We often bond with our sponsors — Indira, my sponsor, is like my older sister — but they’re closer than most. Abby was a mess when Melissa moved out. And they talk, constantly. Like, if you’re in a room with Abby and you hear her tapping away on her phone, odds are she’s talking to Melissa. Sometimes she shows me the terrible memes she sends.”
“Good,” Stefan says. “I don’t like to think of her being lonely, that’s all. So, to answer your question: yes. I want to become a girl. Hormonally, surgically, whatever. In any and every way possible.”
“Then this is the wrong place for you, Stef,” Christine says, switching to the more gender-neutral version of his name. “We’re not set up for actual, real trans girls, and I have no idea what Aunt Bea would do to an outsider who knows so much about us. She might be benevolent and give you everything; she might, honestly, kill you, just to keep the secret. I’m scared of her, and I’m not the only one. Like I said, we don’t know what happens to the ones who wash out. God,” she adds, rubbing her face, “this whole situation won’t stop getting more fucked up. I’m so sorry I dragged you into this.”
“I dragged myself into this, remember,” he says. “And, besides, I don’t intend to tell anyone.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re saying what I think you’re saying.”
“I’ll be one of the arsehole guys,” Stefan says, spreading his hands the way Christine had when she came out to him.
“Stef, that’s insane. They’re already set up to think of you as a terrible person — a terrible man — and if you stay here, that’s how you’ll be treated. And we go hard here. Dorley Hall is where toxic masculinity comes to die. To be killed. By us. We hammer at them, over and over again, because the men we bring down here, most of them cling to their masculinity like—” she hesitates, then laughs weakly, “—like it’s a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean. Even as they get farther and farther from shore, they can’t bring themselves to let go, because they’ve never known anything else. We have to pry their fingers off, one by one. Force them to learn how to swim.” She looks away again. “It’s something Dira said to me. Several times.”
She’s resting her forearms on her knees, staring at the wall. She’s repeatedly flicking her forefinger against her other thumb, and she’s playing with her lower lip with her teeth. A collection of nervous habits; a picture of grace. Stefan balances jealousy with disbelief.
“You keep saying you were down here,” he says, “that you were a… not like you are now. I’m trying, but I still can’t picture it.”
“Good.” She shudders. “I don’t want you looking at me and seeing them. Even though maybe you should.” Before Stefan can interject to contradict her, she continues, “I know what I said, about saving them, but the guys down here, right now, are nasty, bigoted, small-minded, and either so astonishingly sexist they’re incapable of thinking of women as real people, or so blisteringly nihilistic they’re practically solipsists. And all of them have hurt people. Mostly women but not all. This place, Dorley, what it does… it makes people out of bastards.”
“By turning men into women.”
“By taking away their masculinity,” she says, prodding a finger into the floor with every word. “Their driftwood. These are men who have only one lens to see the world through, and it’s a fucking distorted one. A lot of them don’t even realise how skewed their view is. It’s perfectly possible to be masculine and a good person, but the official position here — explained to me at length — is that it’s almost impossible to reform someone whose masculinity has… curdled. It’s poisoning them and everyone around them, but they don’t know it. So it has to be completely excised. Extracted from their psyche with a scalpel, layer by layer, until there’s nothing left but whoever existed before they were poisoned. It, uh, doesn’t always come out cleanly.”
“I can’t believe it’s the only way to change them.”
She doesn’t get frustrated this time. She smiles wryly, like she thinks he’s naive. “Then you try it,” she says. “Fix them. Take one of those guys and fix him without changing anything else. And do it before he hits a woman.” She scowls. “Or hits another woman. Because almost none of them will reform on their own, not in a country so in love with toxic pigs that it puts them in government. That celebrates them on every front page. So, actually, don’t try it. Leave them here, and hope we can change them. But you should go.”
“I can’t.”
“Stef! This place will treat you like them. It’ll paint you with all their sins and their arrogance and their cruelty and it’ll punish you for it! And I saw how you were when Pippa got done with you; that was just a taste. She went easy on you.”
“She did?”
“Yeah. She thought she was triggering you in a way she wasn’t trying to trigger you, so she laid off. Which I’d think was a good omen for your future wellbeing except the other Sisters, the more experienced ones, told her you seemed a lot like one of those total psychos who do the wounded, innocent guy routine until the girl’s dropped her guard, and she should treat you just like them.”
“Do I really come across that way?”
“No! You seem, I don’t know, like a nice girl. Kinda sad, maybe—”
“Please don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t call me a girl.”
“But you are a girl. You said—”
“I don’t deserve it.”
“Stef, that is super fucked up. You don’t have to ‘deserve’ your gender.” Christine frowns as she says it, trips up a little in the middle of her sentence. “It’s just your gender,” she adds thoughtfully. “It’s yours.”
“Maybe that’s the wrong way to say it,” he says. Thinking it through as he goes, he continues, “I don’t like who I am now. Who I’ve been for the last, I don’t know, five years? More? I’m not dangerous, not the way the guys out there are, but I’m not anyone I can be proud of. I’ve never grown, Christine. I’ve wilted. I’m barely alive. And I don’t want this guy—” he jabs himself in the chest with an aggressive thumb, “—to be someone I carry through into my future. I want to start again. To become someone new. And, I think, if you call me a girl right now, it taints who I want to be. If that makes sense?”
“Yeah,” she says. “It makes sense. A scary amount of sense, actually. Which it shouldn’t, because my gender formed here, in this… pressure cooker.”
“You think it’s that different out there? For a closeted trans girl?”
She’s been leaning forward, and she catches herself, bites her lip again, and sits back. “Yeah,” she says slowly. “I don’t know. I never was one. But, yeah. Maybe it’s not. And, uh, if you don’t want me calling you a girl, should I start calling you Stefan again?”
“Stef’s fine. Melissa always called me Stef.”
“Okay. Good. I still think this is the worst possible place for you. I know you look at Melissa, or Pippa, or even me and think that because we turned out okay, you can, too, but we were very different from you when we came here.”
“I can’t leave,” Stefan says.
“This place will hurt you.”
He smiles. “I think you need to understand where I’m coming from. I’ve been denying myself for almost as long as I’ve been alive. There was always a reason: maybe every boy feels this way, I thought; maybe I’m not like those other trans people, the real trans people. And then later, as I grew up, it became: I’m too masculine-looking to transition; I’m not strong enough to transition.”
“Okay, but—”
“Listen. This is important. I’ve always known. And I’ve always denied it. And every year I’ve denied it, it’s gotten worse. Every year, I’ve made it harder for myself. And not just because I’ve got more and more masculine, although I have. Because I’ve got weaker and weaker. Less and less able to cope with just living. Let alone transitioning! It’s like there’s a cliff in front of me, and it keeps getting taller and the handholds keep getting farther apart. And I know I should have started climbing years ago, but I’ve never even tried, because I know I’ll fall.”
“I can help you,” Christine says, almost pleading. “I’ll get you out of here and then I’ll help you.”
“You can’t help me enough. Not unless I’m in here.”
“This place will kill you, Stef,” she whispers.
He laughs, suddenly. Surprises himself with it. But the adrenaline’s back, and carrying him through this bizarre confessional with a forthrightness he hadn’t imagined himself capable of. “I won’t pretend dealing with Pippa wasn’t hard. But if I know what to expect, I can prepare for it.”
“It’s more than just what she said to you. It’s a total psychological invasion. And there’ll be whole months where we make you feel shame for the changes we’re putting your body through. I’m still not quite over that myself!”
“You can’t make me feel shame for changes I want.”
“Yes, but…”
“What kind of changes are we talking about?” he says. “Specifically. HRT?”
“Um. Yeah. That’s already started, actually, with the anti-androgen implant. You’ll get a new one every so often. They dissolve.”
The little bump on his belly. Stefan places a protective finger over it. “How long on just the implant? And do they ever do anything to make the implant… not necessary any more?”
“Estradiol in, like, a month? Two months? It depends. And, uh…” She trails off, and then shakes her head. Looks irritated with herself. “Yeah. Orchi at the six month mark. Sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you about it. It’s kind of my default to assume anyone down here would find the idea terrifying. I did.”
“How did you deal with it when it happened to you?”
She bites a finger for a second, and inspects the tooth imprints. “Some of the others got really angry. I just shut down. I wouldn’t talk to Dira for a couple of weeks. Vicky talked me around, in the end.”
“Vicky?”
“She was in the programme with us. I don’t know what for, to this day. But she got it, right from the start. Where I was at the end of the first year, that was her after, like, a month.”
“Is she trans?”
“She says she isn’t. Just adaptable. And very eager to leave her old self behind.”
“I’m sorry it was all so hard for you,” Stefan says. “I know how it must feel, me coming here asking for all this.”
“No, no no no no,” Christine says. “You don’t need to apologise. I needed remaking. It hurt, but…” She sniffs. “And I don’t resent you, or anything. Not now that I understand why you’re here. I just think you’re making a huge mistake.”
“What else did you get?” Stefan says, returning to his point. “Hair removal?”
“Yeah. Laser for me, electrolysis for the blondes and the redheads, like you.”
“Facial surgery?”
“Yeah, for most.”
“You?”
She glares at him. “Yes,” she snaps, and then holds up a hand in apology. “Sorry. I’m defensive about it, but I probably shouldn’t be. Not with you, anyway. I, uh, had this bit shaved down—” she runs a finger across her forehead, “—and a nose job. Oh,” she adds, rubbing at her neck, “and a trach shave. I looked like a giraffe who just swallowed a tennis ball.”
“What about your voice?”
Her smile returns. “Oh, that’s all me. Hours of practise, every day. Even got singing lessons. I know all the words to almost everything Taylor Swift’s ever recorded.”
“Huh. Thought you’d’ve got vocal surgery or something. How did they make you do that?”
“What? Oh. They didn’t. I was cooperating by that point. More than cooperating; couldn’t wait to be a new person. Practically begged Dira to let me start the lessons early.”
“And that happens to everyone?” Stefan asks.
“Most. After a point, if you don’t get on board, you get put back to the start, or you wash out, and that’s that. We don’t all proceed through the steps the same way, though; every sponsor is different, every girl is different.”
Stefan nods. “So,” he says, leaning forward, “how much do you think all that cost?”
The question surprises her. “I don’t know,” she admits.
“Last time I looked I had less than twenty quid in my bank account. All that stuff? I couldn’t afford it in a hundred years. So, let’s math it out, yeah?” Christine looks suddenly like a small forest animal caught in the headlights of the night bus. Stefan starts counting on his fingers. “Hormones, that’s, what, fifty a month, getting them online? At a guess?”
“Maybe?”
“And as for FFS, I know some girls don’t need it at all to pass, but I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this face. I’m under no illusions: I need the works. Brow job. Nose job. Hairline. Jaw work. Chin work. Trach shave. Tens of thousands of pounds. And electrolysis? Chuck another grand on the pile.”
“What about—?”
“The NHS? Maybe I try it. Get hormones and bottom surgery for free. But they don’t do FFS and even speech therapy is hard to get, and the whole process is, from what I’ve read, frustrating, humiliating, and dehumanising. And do you know how long the waiting list is?”
“Yes,” Christine says, nodding, clearly on firmer ground. “Vicky’s girlfriend’s been waiting two years already. She gets her HRT out of our supply.” She bangs her head against the glass again. “Shit. Stef, I did not just say that. It’s a secret. But, actually, that’s it! I can do that for you!”
“You can get me free hormones?”
“Yes!”
“Free facial surgery? Free electrolysis?”
“Well. No.”
“Pay my rent? Buy my food?”
“No.”
“Because I need all that stuff. I’m not some wealthy student with transition resources coming out of my arse and a loving family backing me all the way. I’m falling apart, Christine. All that’s left of me is the front I put up. I’m probably already fired for missing work, but I was on the way to getting shitcanned anyway, and even with my job, which I hate, I can’t make rent for more than another few months. And maybe I could have done better — got more hours at work, got a better job, tried harder in my classes, whatever — but it takes everything I have just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Forget transitioning; I can barely survive. And if I somehow got on hormones? It wouldn’t fix anything else. Except now I’d be a complete hermit, because I know I’m not strong enough to transition out in the world. I don’t know how other trans women do it; I just know I can’t. The thought of people, people looking at me…”
“Hey.” Christine takes his hand again. He’s shaking, he realises. “Stef. It’s okay. Breathe.”
He almost snaps at her, but it dies in his throat. He takes a deep breath instead. Lets it out slowly. “And then there’s Dorley. Everything I need, all in one place. Wasted on guys like Aaron and Will and that drunk-driver piece of shit.”
“Not wasted,” Christine says. “It wasn’t wasted on me. Or Melissa.”
“But you didn’t ask for it, did you?”
“We needed it.”
“So do I! And so do any number of trans people.”
“I know!” Her shoulders slump. “God, Stef. I know. Don’t you think I’d love to just give our shit out to every trans person at Saints?”
“I’m not accusing you. But you can imagine what it’s like, yeah? Seeing this… this bounty get handed out while I can’t even afford a bloody estrogen pill?”
“I get it,” she says. “I wish it was different. But I’m not in charge; I just live here.”
“Christine,” he says, raising his voice, “I don’t understand; how are you not completely miserable? How are you not clawing at your own skin? You say you’re not trans, but they made you into a girl! I don’t even know your real name!”
“It’s Christine,” she says, hardening.
Stupid boy! Keep calm, idiot. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean it like that. Or maybe I did, but you’re making my head spin. I’m having to make myself remember that you’re… you know. You seem so normal and nice and then it hits me again and… I don’t get how this isn’t a living nightmare for you.”
“Why would it be? Being a girl isn’t so bad.”
“But—”
“I don’t think it’s the same for me as it is for you.”
“It can’t be so simple.”
“It isn’t, not really, but we don’t have time to get into it. For now, Stef, you’ll just have to accept that I’m fine. I’m happy! And so is Melissa. So’s Abby, so are my other friends, who you don’t know. Even Pippa.”
And there’s his opening. “I want to be happy, too,” he says. “Please, Christine, help me be happy.”
She raises a finger. Lowers it. Contemplates it for a moment. “Shit,” she says. “Shit, Stefan. I give in. Your… financial conclusions are impossible to argue with. We have obscene resources here, and it’s only right you should benefit from them. And you know what’s going on in your head better than I do. If you really think you can survive this place—”
“Honestly?” he says. “I don’t know if I can. But I know I won’t make it out there. This is my last chance, Christine. I have no money. No friends. I’m struggling with my classes. I need, at the very least, major facial work done—”
“You’re not being fair to yourself with that,” Christine insists. “You never know what HRT will do.”
“Oh? Now that I’ve seen you, do you think I could be at all happy out there, rolling the dice, hoping against hope that hormones will plump up my face enough to disguise all this?” He waves a contemptuous hand at his face. Can almost feel the ugly contours in the air that passes under his fingers. “You’re gorgeous, Christine. Absolutely beautiful. Don’t scowl; you are. And if I stay, I don’t just get to transition, which may very well save my life, I get the chance to be beautiful, like you. Out there, even if I start on HRT immediately and even if it ultimately changes my face beyond my wildest dreams, I’ve still got to live long enough to get there. Months and months. Years, maybe. Finding ways to make money, to go to classes, to struggle along with life, and those are all things I’ve already failed at. It’s terrifying, Christine, and I just can’t face it. I want— I need what you have.”
“Even if you have to go through hell to get it?”
“I’m in hell,” he says. “At least your hell has catering.”
* * *
“Christine, dear. Weren’t you endeavouring to sleep?”
Christine raises her head from the kitchen table and on the second try successfully props it on what is, at a guess, currently her most reliable hand. In front of her, in assorted states of focus, are an empty coffee mug, a half-eaten croissant, a half-dozen other girls looking on with concern and/or amusement, and Aunt Bea, standing in the double doors and frowning down at her like the Queen of Hearts sweeping into her court and finding it packed with Mad Hatters, Alices, and rodents hiding in her teapot.
At least two of the Alices escape while Aunt Bea’s attention is on her.
“I endeavoured,” Christine says, wincing at the gravel in her voice, “I really did. It didn’t help. And I have classes today.”
“Your studies are important, of course,” Aunt Bea allows. She makes a beeline for the coffeemaker. “A refill, perhaps?”
It’s not like Aunt Bea to wait on her girls. Christine doesn’t know whether to be flattered or concerned. “Thank you, Aunt Bea,” she says, holding up her mug and regretting not picking something more dainty and feminine than the chunky grey Round Tuit.
Aunt Bea pours coffee and oat milk, and grins at Christine’s choice. “Ah,” she says, “always a favourite of mine. Rather a fun joke.”
On the other hand, maybe Christine picked exactly the right one. Boomer humour! She smiles her gratitude and immediately drains half the mug, taking care not to slurp. Stef kept her up until five this morning, arguing, brainstorming, and eventually just talking. He might be an idiot for wanting to stay — for all that she ultimately came to agree that, in a world with no good options left for him, this might, absurdly, be the least awful — but he’s an enjoyable conversationalist. For a moment Christine wishes that, on the first night they met, they’d both been what they appeared to be. Cis girl and cis boy, meeting at a party. For an hour or so, she’d felt normal.
She finishes her coffee.
“Hi, all,” Pippa says, marching into the kitchen from the hallway and looking disgustingly chipper, like she’s just woken up from nine restful hours of dreams about how super horrible she’s going to be to Stef. “Oh, Christine, you poor thing. You look terrible.”
“You’re so kind,” Christine mumbles.
Aunt Bea is handing out coffees to all the Sisters in the kitchen, and picking only the most dubiously funny mugs off the mug tree. Pippa’s has a repeating pattern of a cartoon ant and bee around the rim, which takes Christine a second to get. Blearily she looks down the row of coffees on the table, all provided by the custodian of Dorley Hall, all in novelty mugs; one of them says, in thick black letters, You don’t have to be a girl to work here, but it helps!
Aunt Bea must simply be in an unusually good mood. A serotonin jolt from the addition of a new boy to the torture basement, perhaps.
“I’m actually very mean,” Pippa says, pulling out the chair next to Christine and bumping gently against her arm as she sits down, “and you know it.” Christine grimaces at her, prompting Pippa to rub her shoulder in gentle encouragement.
Christine hasn’t been in the third year of the programme for all that long, and up until the last few days has been spending time mainly with Indira, Abby, Paige and Vicky; maybe everyone being nice to her is just what happens when you’re no longer a second-year scrub. Suddenly just one of the girls.
Actually, she remembers, Vicky’s been hanging around with all the other Sisters since she started her second year. Possibly they’ve all been waiting for Christine to stop being quite so consistently antisocial, then.
“Yes, you’re very mean,” Christine agrees. They inhale their coffee in silence for a little while, until Pippa pulls out her phone and starts scrolling through her notes on Stef, and reminding Christine she has an obligation to fulfil before she leaves for her Linguistics workshop. “Um, Pippa,” she says, “I wanted to talk to you. About the disappearance. Have you done it yet?”
Everyone inducted into the programme disappears, as Stef noticed when he started his investigation. Engineering the circumstances of their disappearance and ensuring no suspicion falls on Dorley Hall is the responsibility of the sponsor. It apparently hadn’t occurred to Stef that he would be required to disappear, too, and the thought made him quite distressed; just because he isn’t close with his parents, he insisted, doesn’t mean he wants his family to think he’s dead. He’s just been scared of what they’ll say when they find out he’s a girl, that’s all. But no sooner had Christine thought she’d found the motivation that would wake him from his madness, the little shit came up with an idea, and an irritatingly good one, at that. If Christine had been half as together in her first week…
“Not yet,” Pippa says. Her eyes dart to Aunt Bea, who is buttering toast and paying no apparent attention. “I was just going to have him vanish on the way to work, you know? Keep it simple?”
“What if he doesn’t have to ‘disappear’ at all?” Christine says, leaning hard on the caffeine and wishing there was considerably more of it in her blood. “I had an idea. It requires his cooperation, but I don’t think it’ll be difficult to get it.”
“Oh?” Aunt Bea says. “Why would he cooperate so early in the programme? He’s been here less than a week, has he not?”
“Days, Aunt Bea,” Pippa says. “I accelerated his induction to bring him in line with the schedules of the others.”
“Wise. So, Christine, why do you think he will cooperate?”
There’s that adrenaline rush. Christine swallows, and locks her legs so they can’t run away without her. “I know him, a little,” she says, running through the story they concocted together. “He takes Linguistics, like me. Different years, but a girl in my advanced unit knows him pretty well from a module they did together last year. She, uh, wanted to set me up with him, actually,” she adds, laying on the shyness as thickly as she dares. If she could force a blush, she would, but the capillaries in her cheeks are as tired as the rest of her. “We talked a couple of times, and I kinda liked him. Not, like, that way, but I thought he was sweet. I was surprised to see him in here; he didn’t seem like the type.”
“They often don’t,” one of the others at the table says. Edy. Nice girl. Tall. Drinking from a mug that says, Shoe therapy is better than regular therapy. Borrowed one of Christine’s skirts, once. Never gave it back. Sponsoring someone this year; is it Adam? The demons-make-you-gay nut?
“What’s your idea?” Aunt Bea asks, with every impression of encouragement.
“I think he should ‘go travelling’.” Christine air-quotes with just one careful finger; she needs the rest to hold up her head. “He’s been having problems with his classes and with at least one of his professors. He had resits over the summer. And everyone knows he’s not been happy. It wouldn’t be hard to create the impression that he’s decided to just forget everything and take a year or three off. Go off-grid, backpacking around Europe or something.”
“If everyone knows he’s been unhappy,” Aunt Bea says, “why not take the suicide route? It’s considerably simpler.”
“Suicide means attention. Sometimes even more attention than a disappearance. And we’ve got a big haul this year; I’ve heard people talking about missing boys.” A lie, but one with a purpose; she really does think they need to be more careful, both with who they haul in — the ‘evidence’ she manufactured for Stef isn’t even the sketchiest she’s seen — and how they handle the cover stories. With any luck, she can prompt a rethink without ever having to suggest it herself. “Now, he’s not all that close with his parents, but he has a little sister, and when he talks about her, he lights up.” She can’t help smiling; the video he showed her on his phone, back at the party, of his sister playing the trombone, was adorable, and his love for her had been so obvious that she’d just had to— oh, God, she kissed him, didn’t she? No more alcohol for Christine for a good, long time.
“Christine?” Aunt Bea prompts.
“Oh,” she says, and shakes her head, making a show of clearing it. “Sorry. I was just remembering a conversation we had about her. He really does love her. And her thinking he’s dead? He’ll hate it. He’ll fight it. Might even resist the programme just because of it. So, instead—” she raises a finger, fatigue forgotten, “—you offer him an out. You outline the way things would normally go — he vanishes on the way to work, is eventually declared missing, family informed, grief, eventual memorial service, years and years of trauma for his little sister — and then you say, there’s another way.” She points at an imaginary Stef in the middle of the table. “All he has to do is hand-write a couple of letters, one for his family and one for the guys he lives with, saying he’s gone travelling. Gone to find himself. He can include a bunch of authentic personal details to really sell it. And then, no police. No investigation. No-one showing up at his family’s doorstep to tell them he’s ‘missing’. And his baby sister won’t have to grow up with a dead older brother, always wondering what happened to him.” Her phrasing is deliberate: Pippa has a cousin, and Abby says she misses her dearly. “Sure, eventually he doesn’t come back from Europe, or wherever, but we just don’t tell him that part.” Actually, Stef insisted to Christine that he can just leave once he’s got everything he needs from Dorley, and go see his sister in person, and if Aunt Bea deploys the usual threats to stop him, he can ask to have his records unsealed and show her that he — by then, Christine assumes, she — was kidnapped on a lie. Will it work? Only God knows.
Aunt Bea hums in thought. “It’s a workable plan,” she says, and Christine carefully doesn’t show her relief, “but it does tip our hand as to how long we expect him to stay with us, information that is up to the sponsor to deploy or withhold. Information he might pass on to the others. What do you think, Pippa? He is, after all, your charge.” He’s Pippa’s responsibility, she means. The buck (doe) stops with her.
“We’ll have to pretend he has a chance ever to see his sister again,” Pippa says, frowning, “but that’s probably a useful lever. Yes.” She nods to herself. “Once he’s written the letters, I can hold them over him. Say I’ll release information to his family that suggests he’s died while backpacking abroad, unless he cooperates fully with the programme. Carrot and stick. Handy for some of the more… complex elements of the programme.”
Christine sips some more coffee so doesn’t snort in amusement; if Pippa’s thinking about the orchi, she’s not going to have any problems with Stef on that front. The boy’s ready for the snip right now. She controls a wince, remembering her sheer panic when she woke up from hers; one of her hardest days.
“And I doubt he’ll tell the others anything,” Pippa continues. “He hates them. A lot more than I expected.” She looks thoughtful. “He might not like seeing himself in them. Hmm. Anyway, I can make his silence a requirement.” She stops contemplating her mug and looks up at Aunt Bea. “It’s a good idea.”
“Excellent, Pippa,” Aunt Bea says. “Proceed with my blessing. And well done, Christine.”
In a perfect world, Christine would be allowed to faint as the adrenaline leaves her system, but she has a subterfuge to maintain and a Linguistics workshop to get to. She takes the offered second refill from Aunt Bea instead, downs it, accepts a hug from a grateful Pippa, and manages not to stagger from fatigue until she’s halfway along the path to campus and safely out of everyone’s sight.
* * *
He’s not trying to antagonise Pippa by being caught in yoga poses whenever she visits him, but there’s nothing else to do in his concrete box besides sleep or grudgingly operate the horrible metal squat toilet. Except, perhaps, panic, and that’s possible to route around, for Stefan, now that he has a better handle on what’s going on. These concrete boxes clearly were designed to psych out people who’ve had less practise than him at carefully avoiding spending time alone with their thoughts.
She glares at him, and he glares back, trying to communicate nonverbally that if she doesn’t want to find him with his feet over his head then she should provide magazines.
She looks good, though.
Stefan’s sample size of Dorley women is currently at two, with background data provided by a few glances at the one he thinks is Maria and some others whose names he doesn’t know, and he can’t help but be intrigued at the way these women who were once, supposedly, ordinary cis men — men who were extremely unpleasant in unspecified but implied ways! — choose to present themselves. Christine, with the exception of the night they met, seems always to dress in simple, comfortable, unfeminine clothes, with little to no makeup, as Stefan might expect from a new-ish woman still acclimatising to her role. Pippa, by contrast, seems to live in dresses. Today’s is dark green, gathers around the mid-calf, and bears a pattern of roses down her left side. She wears heeled sandals — which, he notices as he stands to meet her, elevate her to almost exactly his height — and a simple, hand-made bracelet around her right wrist; it looks old and well-loved, and she’s worn it every time he’s seen her. She accentuates her pale skin with dark eye makeup that stands out brilliantly under her bleached pixie cut.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and after several hours of conversation with and verbal pummelling from Christine, he’s had to accept that the women of Dorley — the Sisters — genuinely are who she says they are; he’s also very much not supposed to know that at this stage of the programme, so he tries not to stare, and wonders if he can get away with complimenting Pippa’s eyeliner, because it’s great.
He remembers, moments before he opens his mouth, that he’s supposed to be confused, disorientated, and extremely unhappy to be locked in a basement. At least he has reassurances from Christine that Pippa, after some prompting from the more experienced sponsors, fully expects him to be more of a quiet and manipulative type than a full-blown raging arsehole, and while the idea doesn’t make him feel good it is at least easy to play, requiring little enough of him that he can focus his efforts elsewhere, like on preparing for her next attempt at wearing him down. The memory of the last time is vivid enough that it flickers a frown onto his face for a moment.
Perfect. Use it.
“Pippa,” he says.
“Well?” she replies. “Have you made your decision?”
Straight to business. “Stay or wash out, yes? And the washouts are never heard from again, correct?”
“Those are your choices.”
He shrugs. Pretends indifference. “Then I choose to stay.” He can’t resist adding, “You can’t keep me locked up forever, after all.”
Pippa fails to control her smirk at Stefan’s rebelliousness. “Good,” she says. “Come with me.”
Out of the cell, Stefan keeps his distance. Pippa doesn’t have guards this time, but he doesn’t doubt he’s being watched on the monitors by women with tasers and batons and other things he doesn’t want pointed or swung in his direction. There are male guards, too; trained professionals. Christine said they have them stay in a rec room a level up from here, cut off from everything but heavily armed and ready to charge in if needed. She said they’re kept intentionally ignorant of most of what goes on here, and rotated out regularly, bound to the sort of NDAs major corporations use when they fire people. Wise to keep them out of the loop; in Stefan’s experience, men are very protective of other men’s masculinity.
They round the corner and pass the reinforced glass doors to the communal rooms. Aaron, clustered around the television with some of the others, watches him pass, and fires finger guns at him with a wink that Stefan does not respond to. At the end of the corridor, opposite the entrance to the communal bathroom, there’s a pair of opaque double doors, solid and metal and much more like Stefan’s idea of a security door. Behind them lies another concrete corridor, painted in the duck-egg off-white he associates with cheap rental flats; colour theory for ‘you can live here, but you won’t like it’. There’s an emergency exit at the far end, described by Christine as leading to two more sealed ‘airlock’ rooms and a long passageway that eventually opens into a pair of bunker doors out in the woods, biometrically sealed and only to be used in, presumably, very slow-moving emergencies. And lining the walls are ten doors, five to each side, all decorated in wood-effect laminate. They look like ordinary bedroom doors that have just materialised inside a concrete bunker, and absurdly out of place. They all have the bulky biometric locks, but in deference to the homey atmosphere they’ve also been covered in laminate.
The door at the end is open and Pippa guides him into an ordinary dorm room, similar to the one he had in his first year at Saints; slightly nicer, even. There’s a generous bed, a wardrobe with full-length mirrors, a set of shelves, a metal desk with a computer — bolted down, on closer inspection — and a utilitarian-looking vanity and chest of drawers. There’s even a phone sitting by the computer, presumably with its cellular radio neutered.
Still no windows. Stefan makes a mental note to ask about vitamin D supplements.
Snaking out from under the bed and nestling in the middle of the duvet is something Stefan’s first dorm room definitely didn’t have: a pair of handcuffs on the end of a heavy chain.
Pippa’s been standing in the doorway, and when he sits on the edge of the mattress and weighs the cuffs in his hands, she says, “Behave, and you’ll never have to put them on. You can tuck them under the bed and it’ll be like they’re not even here. Antagonise me, and they go on and stay on until I—” she clicks a device Stefan hadn’t noticed she had, and in his grip the cuffs pop open, “—say they come off. So don’t piss me off, Stefan Riley.”
He puts them carefully back on the bed. “Understood,” he says, and unconsciously massages his wrists.
“We have more to discuss, but before we get to it, you need to take a shower.”
“Now?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Now.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. Must have gotten used to it.”
Pippa directs him to a bag of toiletries on the vanity, and fetches him a clean towel and a dressing gown out of the wardrobe. She escorts him down the hall to the communal bathroom and snorts when he asks for some privacy. He has, she informs him, nothing she wishes to see again.
When he saw the bathroom yesterday, on his short tour of the facilities, it put him in mind of the changing rooms from his old school, transplanted underground, shrunk a fair bit, and heavily cleaned. There’s a full-length mirror by the paper towel dispenser — they really don’t want the inmates missing a chance to observe their bodies in full, excruciating detail — and while normally Stefan would avoid his reflection, today he follows an impulse to examine himself. If, in the hands of Pippa and the Sisters, his body is going to be remoulded, he wants to familiarise himself with the starting state of the clay.
He disrobes, down to his underwear, and slings the dressing gown around his shoulders. Wonders where he’ll see the changes first: in the rough edges of his face? in his veined, wiry arms? in his taut, waxy belly, a legacy of poor diet and persistent poverty? He runs a hand through his hair, spills ginger strands across his forehead. Counts the freckles on his cheeks. His finger brushes against his stubble, which breaks the spell; that, at least, he can take care of on his own, right now.
He keeps looking at his reflection as he unpacks the little battery shaver. He’s been so used to viewing himself, his body, his face, as aberrations, mutations forced onto him by a puberty he didn’t want. Now? They’re still just as ugly to him, but perhaps they no longer represent a trap he can’t escape.
God, he even smells different. He’s been marinading in his own sweat for, what, nearly three days, and the odour isn’t at all what he expects. Is that even possible? After just days of having his testosterone blocked?
Maybe. Maybe not. Wishful thinking.
Will Schroeder interrupts his thoughts, ducking out of the shower annexe and rubbing his hair with a towel. In the small mirror over the sink, shaver in hand, Stefan can’t stop himself from staring; Will is well-built, and naked.
“What are you looking at, homo?” Will says.
Ah, yes. He’s also a prick.
Stefan buzzes the shaver and starts working on his whiskers, turning his back so he can’t see Will in the reflection. He doesn’t reply. Doesn’t trust himself not to break up mid-sentence, because now he can’t stop picturing the effects a year of testosterone blockers and estrogen will have on the muscle-bound piece of shit.
When finally the man leaves the bathroom, visibly irritated but not having said or done anything else, Stefan loses all control, and laughs so hard he drops the electric shaver in the sink.
* * *
She should be sleeping. Goodness knows she needs it! But Christine is glued to her laptop screen. It’s a pivotal time for Stef, after all: not just his longest conversation yet with Pippa, but the one in which they discuss the content of the letters he’s going to write. He’s playing his part tolerably, sitting cross-legged on his new bed and idly turning over the cuffs in his hands as he pretends to think about Pippa’s suggestions. To Christine, he comes across too innocent; even if she didn’t already know him, she wouldn’t take the boy on the screen for a creep, but institutional inertia is working in their favour. He must be bad: he’s at Dorley!
Pippa’s behaving a little strangely around him, though. She’s not being nice to him, heaven forfend, but the edge of controlled anger is gone from her voice. Good news for Stef, probably, as long as Pippa doesn’t figure him out.
She keeps playing with something on her wrist, and suddenly Christine gets it: Pippa’s thinking about her cousin, who made her the bracelet she never takes off. Shit. Playing on Pippa’s weak spot to get her to agree to the plan definitely seemed to work, but now Christine will forever have to wonder if such clumsy manipulation was even necessary.
She marks another check on her mental list of people she’s accidentally hurt as she flails around, attempting to clean up her own mess.
Christine slams the laptop lid shut. “Be kind to yourself, Christine,” she mutters. The hard part’s over! Stef’s in place, Pippa’s going along with it, and Aunt Bea approved the letter idea. Another normal year begins: eight boys in the basement, one of whom is, handily, already a girl, so that’s a time-saver; six newly-minted girls on the first floor, one of whom is, apparently, a capable and strangely violent baker; and six completely and utterly normal young women on the second floor, one of whom is, currently, not getting the sleep her body is crying out for, and chewing on a finger out of stress.
She rubs at the tooth imprints and dries it on a tissue.
Everything’s fine. Not so much for Stef, but he is at least getting what he asked for, even if he’s not going to enjoy it much.
“Relax,” she says to herself. When it doesn’t, unaccountably, work, she adds, “Relax, idiot!”
She’s still a mess, so she puts on 1989, pulls out her phone and starts going through her week planner. She moves her shoulders to the music, lets her tension out with the beat. She laughs, as she always does, at the one-minute-thirty-five mark: Everybody here was someone else before. It hasn’t yet stopped being funny.
Christine sings.
Four tracks in, her intercom goes off. She scrabbles to pause the music and check her room for incriminating evidence, and almost falls over a pair of shoes on the way to answer it.
It’s Abby.
Shit.
She forgot: she has one last obligation to discharge before things are genuinely back to normal.
“Chrissy!” Abby hisses, as soon as the door closes behind her. She wastes no time: “What did you find out about Stefan?”
“Okay,” Christine says, bouncing back onto the bed, “I have so much to tell you. But I might be getting a little manic from fatigue? So if I get weird, or fall asleep mid-sentence, just poke me.”
Abby pokes her, but Christine’s complaints fizzle out when she hands her a can of Red Bull. “I came prepared,” Abby says.
“God,” Christine says, downing half the can and deciding that with its help she can probably hold off unconsciousness for another hour or two, “thank you. Are you ready for something really complicated and really weird?”
Abby nods, sitting down on the chair she dragged over from Christine’s desk. “I came back to Dorley Hall. I live for complicated and weird.”
Christine belches, and grins at Abby’s mock-censorious eye-roll. She’s the only one here who doesn’t try particularly hard to get her to be more ladylike. “I thought you came back here so you wouldn’t have to pay rent?”
“I can have more than one reason. So? What’s going on with Stefan?”
Christine launches into the story she agreed with Stef. Helpfully, for her tired mind, it’s very close to the truth; he didn’t want Melissa’s best friend thinking ill of him, and Christine assured him that she’s trustworthy. They did, however, alter certain details so Christine doesn’t come off — in Stef’s words — like a psychopath. “He’s not a bad guy. Not Dorley material at all. No history of violence. No antisocial behaviour. He’s not here because he’s a bastard, Abs. In fact, you were kind of right: you said it was our fault he ended up here, and it kind of is. Because, years after Melissa vanished from his life, he saw her.”
“He saw her?”
“Yeah.”
“He saw her?”
“Yeah.” Christine smiles. “While they were both buying groceries. And, uh, that’s probably something we should be more careful about in the future? Just passing that up the chain.”
“I mean, it’s kind of a unique set of circumstances. Do you know when he saw her? What year?”
“Uh, yeah. About… two, no, three-ish months into her second year. Early 2014.”
“Well then,” Abby says, crossing her arms, “she was only half-done with the changes. And Stefan knew her basically all his life, and lived close enough to randomly bump into her. And she looks more like her old self than most of us because she barely had to get any work done. She was always beautiful, even before.” She coughs and looks away from Christine. “So, uh, it’s a perfect storm, really,” she continues briskly. “We’ll just be more careful when the girl is local. I don’t even know if it’s ever happened before, actually. I should check—”
“Can I finish my story?”
“Oh. Yes. Sorry.” Abby taps her temple. “Work mode.”
“So, they recognise each other. And they both know they’ve recognised each other. She tries to play it off like she’s not actually the old Melissa, she just knows her — sorry, that’s confusing, but I’ve forgotten what her old name was, except that it also starts with an M — but he says she knew his name without him ever saying it. And that sort of clinched it. He starts researching us.”
“Us?”
“Us. And he’s, what, fifteen at the time, so this is early work, but he’s a precocious brat.”
“Brat?” Abby says. “Isn’t he your age?”
Christine shrugs. “Yeah, I guess, but, like, I’m almost done with the programme and he’s just starting. It’s weird to think that we’re both twenty-one. Anyway. Stop interrupting me!” She swats at her Sister.
“You interrupted yourself!”
“Then stop encouraging me!” she says, laughing and belching again.
“God, Chrissy, you’re so feminine.”
“I know. I’m an example to the other girls. Okay. Right.” Christine closes her eyes for a moment, tamps down on the slight hysteria that’s been building inside her. Too much Red Bull; she finishes the can, anyway. “So, he researches us. And figures out we have kind of a vanishing problem, here at Saints, so maybe Melissa disappearing wasn’t just some fluke accident, maybe it’s part of a pattern. Yes, I know—” she holds up a finger, “—we don’t exactly come off as a competent and slick operation in this story, I can see it on your face that you want to say something, but don’t, because I’m not done. He looks into Saints, picks the degree here he thinks he’s most likely to make the entry requirements for, and studies his arse off. And he gets in! Starts attending classes, starts looking for Melissa. It takes him another two years to narrow it down to Dorley, though, so, you know, we’re not that sloppy.”
“All the same…” Abby says, knotting her eyebrows. “I think I might tag Maria at the weekend and review some procedures.”
“Good idea. So now he knows about Dorley — not all the facts, not even ten percent of the facts, but enough that we’re his natural focus — and he goes looking for help on the Dark Web.” Christine resists the urge to wiggle her fingers in a spooky fashion. Invoking the sinister ‘dark web’ had been her suggestion; Stef’s original idea had been, ‘I don’t know, Bitcoins or something.’ “He finds a hacker, they doctor his records so he looks shady as fuck, and he stages an incident. Below Pippa’s window, it turns out! And voilà; he’s inside, and ready to start investigating this place, looking for Melissa. But—”
“But she’s not here!” Abby finishes. “Oh, God, Chrissy, is all this really true?”
“As far as I can tell,” Christine says. “I checked up on his Dark Web stuff. It looks legit.”
“So he’s stuck here. We have to get him out!”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. But—” Christine pauses for effect, “—he wants to stay.”
“What?!”
“That’s also what I said. He’s trans, Abby.”
“Oh, God. Really?”
“Yeah. He’s a trans woman. He hasn’t been able to transition yet because he says he needs FFS and all that stuff but he’s too broke even to buy hormones, and he’s desperate and actually kind of pissy about how we have all these transition resources that we very deliberately don’t use on trans people except, you know, accidentally. And he has a point, there, Abs.” She has to admit, he took the words, had she ever had the courage to put them to Aunt Bea, right out of her mouth. Since Vicky started dating Lorna it’s rankled that all their procedures remain pointed stubbornly basementwards. “He wants to game the system. He’ll pretend to be like, well, us, at least until he’s gotten everything he needs.”
“That’s crazy,” Abby says.
“I thought so, too. But he really, genuinely believes he has no other option, and I’ve argued with him for ages about it and not changed his mind. He won’t let me take him out of here, so what choices do we actually have? We either tell Aunt Bea, or we don’t. And, Abby, I’m a bit scared of what Aunt Bea might do if we tell her.”
“You don’t think she’d wash him out, do you?”
“I don’t know that she wouldn’t. You know what she’s like. I was in the kitchen this morning and she was being all sweetness and light, handing out coffees to all the girls, and then she just raises the idea that Pippa should stage a suicide for Stef, solely because it’s the simplest option. That woman’s mind can go to dark places on a bloody dime, Abs. I know you’re closer to her than I am, but—”
“No,” Abby says, “no, you’re right.”
“So we stay quiet?”
“We stay quiet.”
“I mean,” Christine says, tapping her nails on the empty can, “ultimately, it’s his risk to take. All we have to do is pretend we don’t know anything.”
“God, this is fucked up.”
“I know.”
“He really can’t transition away from this place?”
“I went through it with him,” Christine says. “Numbers and everything. Honestly? I think he’s right. It sucks, but he’s right. Or right enough, anyway. You know how long Vicky’s girlfriend’s been on the waiting list?”
Abby nods, and goes quiet for a moment. Taps her thumb on the crook of her elbow, thinking. Then she smiles. “At least he’s going to get the care he needs. Even if it’s not in an ideal form. And we can assist him, help him weather the storm. Wait; shouldn’t we be calling her, well, her?”
“He actually asked me not to. Had a whole thing about it, which I won’t break your brain with. For now, he asked me not to change pronouns. He likes it when I call him Stef, though. Apparently it was what Melissa always called him.”
“Stef,” Abby says, frowning in concentration and muttering under her breath, the way Christine’s seen her do when a batch of girls moves up from the basement and she has to commit a lot of new names to memory. “Stef. Stef. Stef. Stef.”
Christine giggles. “I remember you doing that with me.”
“I did?”
“Yep. It was, like, a day or two after I moved up onto the first floor, and I was in the kitchen. Dira was supervising me as I made breakfast, but she got waylaid by a bunch of third-year girls and it was all really noisy and intimidating. I ended up just kind of huddled in the corner, feeling like one of the rabbits from Watership Down shortly before everything goes to shit, and then you came in and squatted down beside me, all, ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced!’ And you gave me your name like you’d never seen me before, and you were the first person I told my name to since Dira gave it to me, and you talked to me. Kept me company for like an hour. Made me feel like I wasn’t just some… some broken ex-boy.” Christine reaches out a hand; Abby takes it and squeezes her fingers. “How are you always so sweet?”
Abby looks at her, very serious. “I eat a lot of sugar.”
The distance between them is suddenly too great, so Christine steps off the bed and pulls at Abby’s hand. Abby joins her in the middle of the room and they embrace, arms locked around each other, Abby standing on tiptoes so she can rest her head on Christine’s shoulder.
No-one ever really held her until she came here.
“Thank you,” she whispers. “For everything.”
“You’re my sister,” Abby replies, and stretches as far as she can so she can kiss Christine gently on the forehead. “I love you.”
Christine steps away, and wipes her face with her sleeve. “Love you too, Abs.” She kisses Abby on the cheek and sits down again, slowly, enervated and not wanting to overbalance. Abby takes a step forward, offers her arm as support until she’s steady.
What was that about being indecently lucky?
“I meant to ask,” Abby says, returning to her chair, “how did you talk to Stef? Did you get on the intercom?”
Too tired and too buzzed to make anything up, Christine says sheepishly, “I figured out how to hack the biometric locks a while ago. So I waited until everyone was asleep and just visited him in his cell. Please don’t be mad at me?”
“What?” Abby says, almost shouting. “Christine!” She flaps her hands for a second, momentarily too overcome to speak, and then leans forward and adds in a whisper, “That’s amazing! What else can you do?”
Chapter Text
2019 October 15
Tuesday
Dear Mum, Dad and Petra,
I know what follows might sound bad, so I’m telling you upfront: I’m okay. I’m BETTER than okay! Happier than I’ve been in YEARS. But my degree isn’t working out, and I have to do something about it.
Things have been getting harder and harder for me. I know, I SHOULD have told you. But we haven’t seen each other much, especially since you moved away. For a long time I blamed you, but if I’m honest with myself, it’s MY fault. MY choice. I think I didn’t want you to see me so unhappy. You know how I struggled after Mark disappeared, and from there it just seemed like things kept getting worse. I started having trouble concentrating. I lost my motivation. I spent more and more time on my own.
After he was gone, I threw myself into my education. And that, I’ve only just realised, was the WRONG choice. I know, I know, my third year of uni is a BIT late to realise this, but at least I’m finally THINKING! It’s not even that I don’t like my degree; I do. But I’m burned out. I’ve been working hard for so many years that I don’t have any hard work left in me. I need a break.
So I’m taking one.
I’ve had to do resits but never actually had to repeat a year, so I can suspend my studies now and still access student loans when I return. And yes, I said return. Because I’m going on a trip.
I’m getting out of the country for a while. A year. Maybe two. I’m going TRAVELLING! I want to see Spain, Italy and Turkey. Maybe I’ll stay on somewhere, maybe I’ll keep going. I haven’t decided yet.
I won’t be taking my phone. I haven’t been able to afford credit for the thing for a while now, anyway.
As soon as I made this decision it felt like a weight I’ve been carrying for years just fell off my shoulders. I have hope, real hope, for the first time in a long time! I have a chance to find the real me.
So this is goodbye for a little while. But NOT forever. When I come back — and I will — I hope to be someone you can be proud of.
Petra, I love you SO much. I’ve seen your music in the videos Mum sent. You’re SO good! You inspire me, and not getting to see you for a while is the only dark cloud on my horizon. I’ll write again in a little while and tell you EVERYTHING I’ve been up to. Keep practising your trombone, work hard (but not too hard) in school, and we’ll see each other again before you know it.
All my love,
Stefan.
“Happier than you’ve been in years?” Pippa had said when she read it back.
He’d shrugged. “I’m selling it. They have to believe I’m serious, right? And, look, about Petra, I’ve said I’ll write. Can we do that? Every few months? Just so she doesn’t worry.”
“I don’t see why not,” Pippa said. “If you behave.” The whole time they’d been going over the letter she hadn’t looked at him much. Seemed more interested in playing with her bracelet, hooking a finger inside and turning it round on her wrist; a nervous tic?
“If you let me write,” Stefan replied, “I’ll do whatever you ask.”
Her little smile had been unmissable.
She left him alone after that. Said dinner would be delivered to him later, and suggested he use the time until then to get acclimatised to his new room. Stefan had been surprised, but now he’s had a chance to think about it, it makes sense: if the programme is about gradually eroding his supposed masculinity with a mix of hormones and manipulation — and surgery, eventually! — then it can’t all be someone getting in his face. He needs time to stew, to catastrophise. He wonders how the others reacted at this point; taken from a bare cell to a fully furnished room, shown the washing facilities and the limited entertainment options, it must have dawned on them that they’re in for a long stay. Away from friends and family. Away from the sun. No control over your meals, or your movements. Locks on every door. Handcuffs under your bed. They even pick your clothes for you.
None of them can have even the slightest idea what’s actually going on here. The weirdo who thinks it’s demons is probably closest.
When finally it becomes clear what’s going to happen to them, how will they react? It’s possible that if Stefan’s going to get through this, it’s his fellow inmates he’s going to need to understand and predict, not Pippa.
God, Pippa. Who did she used to be? He’s given up questioning that every woman he’s seen since waking up in his cell has gone through the whole process themselves, at least until an alternative and slightly less ridiculous reality presents itself; he’s more interested now in how they feel about it, having ‘graduated’. Christine is fiercely defensive of her gender. Proud of it! How does Pippa feel about hers? Does she truly not resent being grabbed off the street and forcibly remade? Christine said they get orchiectomies after six months; for someone who doesn’t want it, that’s mutilation! Did Pippa wake up one morning, slowly come to understand that something was terribly wrong, and start grabbing in pain and fear at her—
No. Horrible thought. Abandon it.
He laughed at Will. It doesn’t seem so funny any more; they’re going to castrate him. First chemically, which is reversible, but then with a scalpel.
Stefan balls up the duvet cover in his hands. He has to stop worrying about what happens to these people, because not only is he powerless to stop it, he’s not sure that he would if he could. Wife beaters, drunk drivers, misogynists. Bad men. At least, for now. Because that’s the other thing: believing Christine means believing that some or all of the men down here with him will eventually come to accept and embrace the new life that’s going to be forced on them. They’ll be rehabilitated. Christine insisted that was the purpose of this place: bad men, made better. She’s ashamed of having been like them, once. ‘Hate me,’ she said. Both her womanhood and her contempt for her old self, whoever he was, make a pretty compelling argument that the programme works.
Except for the dropouts. But, from the point of view of this Aunt Bea person — definitely the sort of name you’d adopt if you had a basement full of kidnapped men and wanted to add an air of respectability to the whole deal, while remaining comfortably anonymous — the dropouts are probably a key part of the plan. You take X bad men, you put them through the wringer, and by the end of the programme you have (X minus Y) women, reformed and ready to start new lives, where Y represents the men too bad, too stubborn, too inflexible to change. However large Y is, you’ve still removed X bad men from the world. Win-win.
Forget the morals for now. He can always blow the whistle on this place when he’s free, assuming he can find a way to do so without endangering Christine or Melissa. Or Pippa. Or any of the other graduates, probably. God, will he even want to, when he leaves? Will this place change him like it changed Christine? Will he leave not only as a woman, but as a true believer?
In a few years, will it be him standing on the other side of a glass door?
“Shut up, Stef,” he hisses to himself.
If the point of leaving him alone in his room is to make him spiral, then he’s right on schedule. Time for a distraction.
He takes inventory. Which didn’t pass much time when he was in his cell, but there’s considerably more stuff here.
The room is unglamorous, but comfortable. The wardrobe, which Stefan half-expected to be full of dresses, is mostly empty, with a few sets of near-identical outfits tucked away in various shelves: hoodies, t-shirts, jogging trousers, socks, in a handful of neutral shades. The shelves on the wall and the drawer in the bedside table are empty, and the vanity contains only a plastic hairbrush and his wash kit. There’s a small cabinet, or perhaps a dumbwaiter, set into the wall by the door with a soft green light — unlocked — that on opening contains a box of cereal bars and a large water bottle.
There’s even a rug on the floor between the vanity and the bed, and its slightly rubbery finish suggests it’ll make a serviceable yoga mat.
He laughs, remembering the look on Pippa’s face when he said this room is considerably nicer than his houseshare.
He fetches down the water bottle and a cereal bar, pulls the wooden chair over from the vanity to the metal desk, and starts investigating the computer. There’s a shortcut on the desktop labelled Message Sponsor, which loads a chat interface called Consensus. He can customise the name that’s been preloaded; he deletes the last two letters before he tries sending a message.
“Idiot,” he tells himself, as Pippa’s icon switches to idle. “Stop trying to be her friend.”
In search of further distractions, he browses through the directories on the PC, finding TV shows and movies (mostly romantic comedies), a large library of books (also mostly romances) and a handful of games: Stardew Valley, The Sims, Tetris, that sort of thing. Absorbing and, unless there’s something about The Sims he doesn’t know, largely nonviolent titles. The music folder is mostly women artists, biased towards pop, and everything bar the games seems also to be accessible through the phone.
He finds a pair of chunky, weathered headphones on an extremely long cable and plugs them into the PC, picks out a movie at random, and settles down on the bed.
* * *
There’s a kitchen on every floor at Dorley, bar the first — the new girls who live on the first floor are confined to a self-contained dorm-within-a-dorm, behind heavier locks than anywhere else above the basement, and are expected to use the ground floor facilities under supervision — and the one on the second floor, a short walk around the U-shaped corridor from Christine’s room, is particularly nice, with many advantages: low traffic, minimal chance of an Aunt Bea sighting, plenty of Weetabix, and a nice view out into the woods. What it doesn’t have, unfortunately, is a surfeit of leftovers, which is why Christine finds herself once again pushing aside the double doors into the ground floor kitchen on the hunt for something to heat up.
It feels like she’s spent more time down here in the past week than she did in whole prior months, even when she lived on the first floor. Still, with all her obligations discharged and Stef apparently settling nicely into his room, Christine will have time to do her own shopping again, and can go back to preparing her cheap little meals for one, in the blessed almost-solitude of the second floor.
It’s quiet down in the main kitchen, for once. There’s only Maria, eating her dinner at the big table and leafing through a binder, and some faint conversational sounds from the dining room next door. Christine realises as she relaxes that she’d been hunching her shoulders, and smiles sheepishly in Maria’s direction. Maria answers with a pinkie wave, so she doesn’t have to put down her fork.
“There’s salad,” Maria says, “and this sort of mushroom pie thing that I’m having, which is pretty good. And something with beef I’m not sure I can recommend.”
“Thanks, Maria.”
Christine’s still got her head in the fridge when someone grabs her from behind and hugs her hard enough to lift her slightly off the floor.
“Hi, Dira,” she wheezes, when her sponsor Sister puts her down again.
“Hi, Teenie!” Indira says, taking Christine gently by the shoulders and turning her around. “Sweetheart! When’s the last time you had any sleep?” she exclaims, when she gets a proper look. In Christine’s head, that guy from The Office wipes the number clean from a whiteboard which says, Number of hours since someone told me I look like shit.
Christine submits to the follow-up hug. “Last night,” she says, “but I don’t think it counted. It was like four hours. I have big plans for tonight, though.” She pulls away from Dira’s hug and smiles at her. “Big plans.”
“Cancel them,” says Paige, marching in from the dining hall and almost running up to Christine and Indira. She sings, “We got per-miss-ion!”
“Permission for what?”
“Aunt Bea said we can take you off-campus tonight,” Indira says, shutting the fridge and offering a steadying arm to Christine, who evidently looks like she might fall over at any moment.
“Off-campus?” Christine says, allowing herself to be steadied. Indira guides Christine’s bottom gently towards the kitchen table, where it parks itself without Christine’s conscious attention. “Where?” Off-campus means being out among people who don’t know what she used to be, and who won’t be minded to grant her any slack.
Not ‘what you used to be’; who you are, she corrects herself. She’s trying to be conscientious about that.
“Don’t worry, Teenie,” Indira says, tucking back a stray lock of Christine’s hair. “We’re going with Vicky and Lorna and some of their friends. Hasan was going to come but he has work, so you’ll just be one of nine or ten girls; no-one will look at you twice.”
“Thanks a lot,” Christine mutters.
“I mean,” Paige says, grinning, well aware of Christine’s faltering confidence and having none of it, “if you want them to look at you, we can make it happen. Make you look stunning! You’ll have to beat them off with the stick.”
“That’s Maria’s job!” Indira giggles. Maria, who up to this point has been ignoring the commotion, laughs and nearly chokes on a mushroom.
“I don’t want that,” Christine whispers, stiffening up, half-wondering if she’s going to leave fingerprints embedded in the kitchen table.
“But you’re so pretty, Christine!” Paige insists. “You could be gorgeous if you just let me at you.”
“I did let you!” Christine says, unwilling to give Paige any slack. “Just last week!”
“And you looked great.” Paige takes the victory and presses home her advantage. “You even pulled! What happened to that boy, anyway?”
“Oh, uh,” Christine stammers. Stalling, but also panicking. Idiot. Why bring up the party where she met Stef? She doesn’t want anyone thinking about that. “I kissed him, I sent him home. He was nice, but I’m not really ready for boys, you know?” Please don’t remember him, please don’t remember him!
“Wait,” Dira says, “she pulled? A real life boy? Tell me everything!”
Christine doesn’t know to which of them the question is directed, so she lets Paige pick it up. “There was a party on Saturday,” Paige enthuses, “in that new dorm building. Just a little thing; some people from the SU set it up. And you know I’ve been trying to get her to come out with me since forever.”
It’s true. Paige, social butterfly, has been cursed to live next door to Christine, the social equivalent of one of those burrowing creatures who only show up after midnight to eat the grubs the above-ground varmints don’t want, but persists in trying to drag Christine out of the dorm anyway. Probably because the only other options on their floor are all non-starters. Jodie, who dresses like Morticia Addams and who Christine generally only sees when she happens to catch her livestreamed World of Darkness games, has never willingly opened her door to Paige lest she be forcibly de-gothed. Vicky is already stunning, sociable, and capable of dressing herself, might defensively make Paige over instead, depending on who wins the tussle for dominance, and doesn't even technically live at Dorley any more. And Julia and Yasmin are both already trying to put their time in the programme behind them, having found jobs instead of returning to classes; once they’ve been officially released, Christine expects never to hear from them again. Yasmin, in particular, has an unaccountable reluctance to spend her leisure time with the people she spent a year locked in a torture basement with, Julia excepted.
Christine thinks it’s a shame, and doesn’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that she does. What she does know is that in the outside world she has nothing, but here at Dorley she has friends and family. Even if they are sometimes a little pushy.
“What did she wear?” Indira asks Paige, fully aware that Christine would prefer to die of anxiety or embarrassment than engage seriously with the question.
“I had a box come in from that place I was telling you about, and they had this beautiful scoop-neck brown top — I know, brown, but it was broken up with a repeating floral pattern in off-white that was just gorgeous—” Paige makes gestures around her chest to indicate that that wasn’t the only reason she liked the top; she has an obsession with getting Christine to show off her breasts, for some reason, “—so I put her in that with some Converse and a lovely loose cardigan in the same shade as that old skirt I’ve been carrying around with me since forever, you know the one, and I did her hair and her face. Hang on, I actually have pictures.”
Christine leans heavily on the table as Paige scrolls through her phone for a delighted Indira. She’s startled by a sudden warmth around her hand, but it’s just Maria, offering silent condolences. Or possibly congratulations. Difficult to tell without looking, and Christine would much rather examine the floor right now. She knows the pictures Paige will be swiping through for Indira, because Paige begged for permission to put them on her Insta and looked tremendously put out when she refused.
She did ask for copies, though. Nice to have proof that she can look good, with assistance.
“Teenie,” Indira says, “you look fantastic. You should dress up more often.”
Christine, wearing shorts, vest and shirt, nods silently. She’s not wrong. It’s just that, when she applies makeup, everything looks too bold, and when she chooses clothes, everything looks too showy. Trying to be beautiful and getting it wrong is so much more frightening than just throwing on a hoodie and putting up with the occasional boy at Saints asking her if she has a skateboard.
“Tell her about the boy,” Paige says, after a few more excitable back-and-forths with Dira.
“Oh.” Stalling again. But if she’s going to have to contribute to this conversation sooner or later, it might as well be with misinformation. “He was, um, tall, blonde. White. I liked his glasses.”
“And she talked to him all night,” Paige adds triumphantly, apparently not realising that of all the attributes Christine supplied, skin colour was the only correct one: Stef’s shorter than Christine, doesn’t wear glasses, and is strikingly ginger. Christine wonders if she should have given decoy-Stef a beard. It’s not that Paige is actually likely to remember correctly the face of the boy Christine kissed at the party, or connect him to the trans girl currently making terrifying decisions in their basement, but you never know. They used to get gangsters on tax evasion, after all.
“You said you kissed, right?” Indira asks, and as much as Christine loves her she wants to look away because she knows the next thing she says will put Indira’s energy level through the roof.
“A bit,” she admits, and tries not to grimace when Indira squeals and hugs her again. Ever since Dira started seeing her childhood friend Hasan she’s been romance crazy, and desperate to start matchmaking for Christine just as soon as she works out the sort of person she likes. Christine doesn’t see what the rush is; she’s been a woman for just one year, after all, and has spent most of that time inside. “He, um, didn’t really do anything for me,” she adds, silently apologising to Stef.
“You think maybe you might want to meet a girl instead?” Indira asks.
“I don’t know yet,” Christine says with a shrug.
“Then that’s exactly why it’s good that you’re coming out tonight,” Paige says. “You’re going to have fun with your friends—” she points an aggressive finger at herself and Indira, and a questioning one at Maria, who shakes her head and points to the binder on the table next to her plate, “—and you’re going to dance with hot people and see if any of them float your boat.”
Christine declines to comment on the state of her boat and whether or not it is capable of floating, even in theory. She has more pressing things to worry about: “What if they, you know, know?”
Paige rolls her eyes. Indira gasps. Maria puts down her fork, swallows, and says, slowly and patiently, “Christine, you could strip down to your underwear in front of anyone you care to name, and they wouldn’t ‘know’ anything. You have nothing to worry about.”
“They’d know you’re beautiful,” Indira insists, stroking Christine’s temple, “and sweet, and kind, and intelligent, and—”
“They’ll know all that just from seeing me naked?” Christine says, and Dira frowns at her; she’s told her off before for covering her insecurity with bad jokes.
“Okay,” Paige says, “then they’re going to know you have killer tits.” She bites the tip of her tongue at Christine.
Indira’s eyes flicker to the entrance from the dining room and Christine turns her head in time to see Aunt Bea step delicately inside, presumably intending to find out what all the noise is about.
“Aunt Bea!” Christine says, as a desperate last resort. “Help! They’re being mean to me!”
“Oh?” she says, packing a great deal of scepticism into a single syllable.
Indira leans on one of Christine’s shoulders, Paige the other. They both smile ingratiatingly at Aunt Bea. “We’re being very nice to her,” Paige says, “and paying her lots of compliments.”
At the table, mouth full, Maria silently nods, and Aunt Bea’s face assumes the pinched expression it often acquires when her charges are being playful: like she can’t quite believe her girls are so carefree; like she’s proud that they are.
Either that, Christine thinks, or she’s just going to the mental place boomers go when the kids are having too much fun near them.
“You’re going out tonight, I understand,” Aunt Bea says.
“We are,” Indira says.
“Take care of each other, then.”
“We will.”
With a satisfied nod, Aunt Bea returns to whatever she’s up to in the dining hall; paperwork, probably. She doesn’t like to eat in her office, and she doesn’t stop working, ever. Some of the still-new second-year girls are probably also being supervised alongside her. Her dislike of boys seems to extend to avoiding them as much as possible until they have become — at least nominally, in the case of the new second-years — girls, but once they are, she likes to be involved.
“See?” Indira says. “Official seal of approval.”
“I’m doomed, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Paige says, pulling on Christine’s wrist. “Now come upstairs and we’ll help you make yourself all pretty again.”
* * *
However soundproofed the basement is from the outside, the walls between the bedrooms are obviously thinner: when Stefan removes his headphones after a marathon of honestly quite entertaining Meg Ryan movies — he now knows what movie ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ comes from, and retroactively understands several jokes — he hears thumping from next door. Someone hitting the wall, in the bedroom next to his. It’s faint, but just about audible.
Intrigued, he cups his hands around his ears and listens. The thumps pause after a few more seconds and then, at the very edge of legibility, a ragged voice practically screams, “You won’t keep me down here forever, you fuckers! You can’t cage me! I’ll get you! I’ll get all of you!”
Optimistic!
It must be disorientating, to be stuck down here for a week and still not know what’s going on. Stefan can’t find it in himself to sympathise with the guy, but he’d like to know who’s in the room next door so he can add impromptu outbursts to the notes he’s assembling on his fellow basement dwellers. His information is currently very thin.
He slips his headphones back on, leans over to the computer, and cues up another movie, dipping out of the Meg Ryan folder for now and starting something called The Princess Switch.
It feels indecent to be so relaxed, and not just because of the commotion next door. Christine talked this place up as a house of horrors! And it undoubtedly was, for her. But for Stefan, the pressure’s off. No more testosterone. No more trying to remain conscious in a lecture after a late shift at work. No more work! No more bills. Sure, there are downsides, like the total lack of freedom, but Stefan’s never felt all that free, anyway.
Barely ten minutes into the movie — a second Vanessa Hudgens has just entered the frame, which is probably the most exciting thing that’s going to happen to Stefan for the rest of the day, unless the magical old man who is definitely not Santa shows up again — it pauses and minimises itself, revealing a pulsing chat icon.
* * *
The explosion of noise from Indira when Christine opens the door to her dorm room and finds Abby still sitting cross-legged on the bed, futzing with a laptop, has the same effect on Christine’s limbic system as a tin of Red Bull and a kick in her sensitive parts, so when the two of them join her on the bed Christine manages to make the transition without her legs collapsing under her, the way they’d been threatening to on the stairs. Indira, it turns out, missed Abby.
The two of them exchange hugs, greetings, and gossip about Dira’s boyfriend and Abby’s still unfortunately tragic love life while Christine balances herself carefully against the headboard and tries subtly to check the laptop screen to make sure Abby closed the chat app. With relief: yes, she did. Abby throws her a smile and a wink when Dira’s attention is on pulling something out of her bag, and Christine lets some of her tension earth itself in the bedsheets.
Either their conversation diminishes in volume or some of Christine’s senses check out for a while from exhaustion, because she manages to get in six whole minutes of sleep before Paige comes piling in with an armful of clothes and a determined expression.
“Okay, girlie,” she says, when Christine has been successfully roused, “get up and let’s make you look gorgeous.”
“I thought I could just go, you know, like this. Girls wear shorts to clubs, right?”
“Not like those ones,” Dira says, laughing and trying to poke Christine in the thigh.
“Christine,” Paige says, marshalling all of her six feet of height to look as unstoppable as possible, and borrowing Aunt Bea’s diction, “you are a beautiful young woman and I will not have you slobbing around in shorts for the rest of your life.”
“What if we make a deal? I start wearing dresses again when I’m thirty?”
“No.”
“Just give me nine more years.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Christine,” Indira says, in her ‘sponsor’ voice, which Christine’s always thought makes her sound like the beleaguered oldest sister in a certain kind of family sitcom, “Aunt Bea’s mentioned the way you’ve been dressing.”
Christine’s fingers twitch. She couldn’t have mentioned this before? “Shit,” she says. “What did she say, exactly?”
“She reminded me,” Indira says, rolling over on the bed so she can be closer to Christine, “that the freedoms granted to third years are conditional on their ‘continued feminine development’. I’m sorry, sweetheart; I was trying to be quietly encouraging, you know, positive reinforcement, carrot instead of stick, but it’s time.”
Christine decides her brain needs a jump-start, or possibly to be jolted right out of her skull, so she bangs the back of her head on the bed frame a few times. “Shit,” she hisses, in percussive accompaniment. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Oh, Teenie, no,” Indira says, and immediately starts gently stroking the back of Christine’s head, “she’s not mad. And she’s not intervening. She’s just… paying attention. She’s still leaving it up to me, for now. But she did like the idea of you coming out tonight.”
Christine attempts a smile, but it doesn’t come out quite right, so she shuffles up on the bed a little, leans her back on the headboard so she can gather her knees under her chin. Sometimes the impulse to take up as little space as possible is too strong. “I just want to be done, Dira,” she says.
“I know, sweetheart, I know.”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with me right now.”
“I know.”
Paige sits back heavily on the bean bag chair. “You know what you have to do, then,” she says. “You suck it up.”
“Paige,” Indira says sharply.
“I get it,” Paige says. “You want to be done, yesterday. And all of this, Aunt Bea’s expectations, everything? It’s fucking hard. I get it. You just want to be you, right? Then this is what you have to do.” She leans back and lifts Christine’s all-but-abandoned makeup box up off her desk. “This is the last wall you have to climb. The final class. Advanced Woman in the Modern Age. Makeup and nice clothes and smiling and looking pretty and going out and meeting boys. And doing it all yourself. You had Indira and Abby to help you out with it last year, but ever since they stopped coordinating you, you’ve given up. And that’s bullshit, Christine. Because you know you’ve got to learn this stuff. And don’t—” she points a finger, sensing Christine’s imminent objections, “—give me all that shit about how this isn’t how girls have to be. No-one knows that better than me.” Christine doesn’t miss Paige’s wince, quickly hidden though it is, and remembers what happened at the end of their second year in the programme. Paige thought she’d changed enough. Thought she was ready. Rebelled against Aunt Bea’s requirements. It got her locked in her room for over a week. Privileges revoked. Freedoms curtailed. Almost like being back in that cell again; almost like she hadn’t changed at all. “You don’t have to agree with Aunt Bea to understand her point of view,” Paige adds, “although lately, I have to admit, I’ve actually come around to it.”
Of course you have, Christine thinks sourly. Instagram queen.
Immediately she’s glad she didn’t say it out loud. It’s unfair, because they’d all talked about it together, but only Paige was brave enough to say it to Aunt Bea’s face, and suffered for it. Later, Christine learned from Abby that something similar happens every year, to every batch of new girls. All of them making the same mistakes. All of them walking in the groove their Sisters laid down in the years before them.
Dorley has more powerful rituals than the Catholic church.
The logic of Aunt Bea’s position is clear enough: she wants her girls to have access to all the skills they might need in their lives, not just the ones her charges happen to believe are relevant at the time; and she believes that because her girls were raised as boys — if raised is even the term for the neglect some of them suffered in their youths — then the things that girls are taught as children must be taught now, with no exceptions.
And you can argue, as Paige has, that the expectation that girl children learn to dress in a feminine fashion, experiment with makeup, and so on, is sexist. Backward. Slowly losing relevance. You can argue that many of these children hate it, and are harmed by it. And you can find large numbers of children raised that way who are not girls at all, just as you can find many girls, cis and trans, who describe wholly difference experiences. Surely, then, to be a girl, to be a woman in the modern age, these things are not a requirement?
But Aunt Bea’s girls will have every chance when they leave her care, because she is not sloppy with her rehabilitation. Her girls will know how to make themselves look feminine and beautiful even if, the very moment they leave, they decide to cut their hair short and wear only overalls. Her girls will understand the demands made of women in this country, even if some of them come eventually to realise that they are not girls after all.
Her girls will be in a position, when they graduate from the programme, to make the choice as to who they are.
Christine had been surprised to learn that not every graduate remains a woman. None, apparently, have ever become men again, but Abby said their graduate pool probably has a higher incidence of nonbinary people and non-gender-conforming women than almost any random, age-appropriate sampling of the greater population. And Aunt Bea, with every appearance of joy, welcomes those people back when they visit. Christine saw it, at the holiday bash where she met Melissa: Aunt Bea, custodian of Dorley Hall, laughing with a nonbinary graduate, chatting with them about their job and their partner, agreeing to wear a pronoun pin. Never once messing up their new name. Never once misgendering them.
The hardest thing for Christine to grasp, when she remembers being locked in a cell, or waking up after her first surgery, or listening to Paige cry through a door she didn’t dare unlock, is that Aunt Bea seems, genuinely, to care for all of them, in her way.
“Don’t forget,” Paige says, “the goal is to be yourself. Fully yourself, whoever that is. You’ve gotten rid of the armour—” that’s always how Paige describes her former self: a scared child, clad in armour that was forced upon her, and lashing out because she believed herself strong, invulnerable to pain or consequence, “—but you haven’t yet explored who you are without it. You don’t know what you can do, what tools you have at your disposal, because you’re still too scared to experiment.”
“Paige—”
“This is me tough-loving you, Christine. Put on the fucking dress and come out with us.”
Indira is holding Christine’s hand, and she squeezes it as Paige finishes her speech. Christine tries to imagine a flow of energy between them, reinvigorating her just enough to say what she needs to say, because she needs to push back. Not against the clothes or the makeup — it’s been coming, and she’s known it for a while; there really is no fighting it — but, and she almost smiles at how mundane it is, the timing.
“I’m exhausted, Paige,” she says. “I can’t even describe how tired I am. I actually want to come out with you—” half a lie and half not; Christine really doesn’t want to be a hermit forever, but the early steps are the hardest and she’s taken so few, “—but I’ve had almost no sleep. Since, I think, Saturday. Can I come along next time, instead? I know it won’t be with such a big group but it might actually be better, for me, if it’s just us four and maybe Vicky and Lorna. Please? I’ll dress up, I’ll do my makeup. I promise. I just can’t do it tonight.”
Abby, still on the edge of the bed with her feet up on the hamper and biting her lip, meets her eyes, and Christine tries to emphasise, in that brief connection, just how much she needs the rest.
“Dira,” Abby says, “you’ve been away for a few days. You don’t know what’s been going on with her. We think it’s just stress from her classes—” God bless you for lying for me, Abby, Christine thinks, “—but you know how these things snowball. She had an evaluation with Aunt Bea, as well, during all this — more stress — and it’s all piled up. Every day she looks more tired. I think we should give her a break.”
Indira, pulled between her responsibilities as sponsor and her affection for Christine, hesitates.
“I need a time-out, Dira,” Christine says quietly.
“Are you sure?” she says, concern flooding her eyes. It’s been a while since her last time-out; Dira probably hoped she’d got past the need.
“I’m sure.”
Long ago, before Christine graduated to the second year, before she was named, when first she flickered into life inside the spiteful, hurt boy who’d come to Dorley nine months earlier, Indira sat her down on the bed in her awful little bedroom and laid it all out. Soon: no more concrete walls; no more communal bathroom; no more unexpected surgical interventions. Your first taste of freedom is coming. But it comes with responsibilities, which must be lived up to. And when she outlined them, and scared the nascent Christine to her bone, Indira sat next to her on the bed and took her hand, slowly and carefully, so as not to scare her, because when Christine first arrived in the basement she flinched away from all contact, and made her a promise:
I’m not just your sponsor any more; I’m your Sister. If ever it gets too much, if you need a break, if complying with a request of mine will hurt you more than it will help you, and if you understand that there are expectations upon me to ensure your progress and commit to helping me fulfil them, then all you need do is ask. Ask, and I will do everything I can to help you and to heal you, and if I have to I will move this whole building to keep you safe.
“Then you’re getting one,” Indira says. “Paige, Abby, go meet with Vicky and have some fun. Christine and I will stay here—”
“No,” Christine says, “I don’t want to spoil your night. You only just got back today. You should have fun.”
“I can have fun with you,” she insists. “We can watch movies. You won’t have to talk.”
“I’ll be fine. I promise. I’m just tired. So tired I can barely think. I need to switch off, rest, hopefully sleep, and get ready for classes tomorrow.”
Indira squeezes her hand again. “Okay, Teenie. You’ll come with us next week?”
“I will.”
“We’ll all go out together.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“I’ll talk to Aunt Bea.”
“Thanks, Dira.”
“Be kind to yourself, Christine,” Indira says. A refrain as old as her name. Dira kisses her on the temple, pauses over her for a moment to stroke her cheek, then hops off the bed and silently gestures for Paige and Abby to follow. Abby offers a little wave on her way out; Paige mouths an apology. Christine smiles for all of them, watches as they close the door behind them, and rolls over on her bed, into the warm spot Indira left behind. She buries her face in her pillow, and lets go.
* * *
She’s been meaning to come up here since she moved to the second floor and legitimately was granted the run of Dorley Hall (and, in theory, the whole campus). It’s been do-able ever since she cracked Dorley’s security, but the roof has only one exit; not somewhere she ever wanted to get caught, unless she very quickly developed a talent for climbing down six storeys of vine trellis without breaking something, and even last year’s Christine had better self-preservation instincts than to test that.
There are two other people on the far side of the roof — two women, presumably, given that it’s Dorley, premier women’s dormitory on campus, please don’t ask about our wine cellar — so Christine gives them their space, and settles for the observation bench at the front of the building, which affords a wonderful view of the university grounds in general and the Student Union Bar in particular, its village-pub frontage cast in rainbows from the garish cursive Saints sign on the roof. The neon lights of home.
Dorley Hall’s roof is laid out a bit like a zen garden — an unknowingly ironic reflection of its basement — but Christine has no idea if it’s authentic or not. The central gravel square doesn’t seem to have any intentionality to it, being that its contents escape its boundaries on all sides, and she remembers reading somewhere that real zen gardens are supposed to reflect nature, which this one decidedly does not, so she settles on fake. There’s a set of white plastic garden chairs in the middle, anyway. The gravel square isn’t covered over but does have four brick pillars at its corners, and Christine’s heard that before the insurance got too expensive they used to drape a tarp between them and host official gatherings up here.
There’s a thick pathway around the central square, in which lurks the occasional clump of potted plants, wooden seating and tables, and every so often around the edge of the roof there are benches, each dedicated to a famous or notable alumni, all facing outwards.
Indira says you can have a wonderful picnic up here, in the summer.
Christine hopes Dira and the others are all having fun right now, dancing, drinking; she regrets missing out on the chance to meet Vicky’s girlfriend Lorna again, partly because she’s very sweet and partly because Christine’s now taken responsibility for a trans girl of her own and would love to ask Lorna a few discreet questions. Care and feeding, etc.
God, she wishes she was out there with them. Being normal. She pulls her hoodie tight, leans forward on the railing, and stares out into the night.
She doesn’t know why she isn’t better at being a girl by now. There’s nothing mechanically hard about putting on makeup or wearing a dress, and goodness knows she’s dressed up for parties and Dorley social events, under the instruction of Dira or Aunt Bea. Almost all her second year was spent prettied up at the hand of someone or other. And it’s not that she’s got any hang-ups left about participating in her own gradual transformation, either, because what was her voice training if not Christine enthusiastically embracing her new self, and the things she was required to do?
The first two fingers on her right hand twitch, and she curls them into a fist to keep them still.
It’s fear.
Well, no. Not precisely.
It’s true that she has no confidence in her ability to make herself look feminine without the help of her Sisters, that she remains steadfast in her belief that, left to her own devices and ordered to choose her own dress and makeup, she will render herself unavoidably clownish. Probably that’s a large component of what Paige called the last wall she has to climb.
But it’s not just that. It can’t be.
Maybe she’s just scared to let this place go. Becoming a free woman in the eyes of Dorley, in the eyes of Aunt Bea, means becoming a woman in the eyes of the world, too. And she wants that — God, she wants it, she thinks, stretching her left arm out in front of her, the sleeve of her hoodie pulled up, and smiling at the graceful fingers with the scrappily painted nails, at the beaded bracelet she made with Indira as part of a matched set, at the smooth skin that shines softly in the light of the stars and the Student Union’s neon sign; she made this woman, top to bottom, and she’s proud of her — but she fears it, too. Because what if, without the looming presence of Dorley behind her, encouraging her — forcing her, being honest — to be and remain the woman she’s become, she loses her? What if her womanhood crumbles, and Christine dies, and that boy, that vicious, lonely, evil little thing, rises again in her place?
“You’re being stupid, Christine,” she whispers to herself.
Maybe she’s just scared that without Dorley to tell her who she is, she won’t know at all?
Makeup, clothes, and the lessons in feminine grace they were all subjected to; Paige likes to call them her tools. She didn’t get all her tools from Dorley, she says, but Aunt Bea gave her a lot she didn’t have before, had never even thought about acquiring. And you can’t build yourself back up from nothing without access to all the tools available to you.
Think of them more like adjectives, Indira suggested once, that you can use to describe the person you eventually want to become. Who knows what possibilities you might miss, if you don’t have the words to witness them?
Put on the fucking dress, Christine.
“Hi,” someone says. “Are you okay?”
It’s the girls she saw earlier, walking up beside her bench. Christine only doesn’t jump because, a moment before one of them spoke, she smelled them coming: they’ve been smoking, and an ex-addict never gets fully desensitised.
She sits back and smiles at them. “I’m okay,” she says.
“It’s just,” the other one says, “we heard crying.”
“I wasn’t—” Christine starts, and then touches the back of a hand to her cheek. “Oh. Yeah. I was.” Too tired even to spot emotions when she’s having them; got to watch out for that. “Long day. Long week! Bad memories. I’m fine. I promise.”
“Good,” the shorter one says. She sits down on the bench next to Christine and pulls back her hood, revealing short black hair, golden brown skin and deep brown eyes. Christine can see the reflection of the neon pub sign in her irises. “I’m Naila and they’re Ren.” Naila smiles, the sort of beautiful, easy smile Christine always finds enviable.
“I’m Christine,” she says, and because she didn’t miss the pronoun Naila used for her friend — not two women, after all — adds, “she/her.”
Naila’s smile broadens, and Ren, leaning their backside on the railing, says, “I like your dress.”
Christine had almost forgotten about it. Paige left the pile of dresses when she left and, feeling guilty, she leafed through them, looking for something she liked, something she wouldn’t feel too self-conscious in; a Venn diagram with a very small intersection. She opens her hoodie back up, exposes more of the material. “Thanks,” she says. “It’s not mine. My friends were trying to get me to go out with them but… I just wasn’t feeling up to it.”
“They’re in there?” Ren asks, nodding their head sideways at the bar in the distance.
“No. Somewhere in town. Paige thinks I need to meet boys. I think I need to have a quiet evening at home. She got as far as putting a dress on me before my sis— before my best friend let me off the hook.”
“Oh!” Naila says. “You know Paige? From the second floor?”
“The floor with all those weird locks on the doors?” Ren says.
Christine’s fingers twitch again. Idiot. Too much information, always. Perhaps this is why she’s scared to leave the programme; she’ll meet someone socially and the first words out of her mouth will be, ‘I was force feminised in a secret basement and all I got was this lousy novelty mug.’ “Oh, yeah. I forget about the locks, honestly,” she says. “I think they’re a legacy thing.”
“I was wondering if we can ask the uni to pay for uberlocks for the fifth floor, too,” Naila says.
“You want to keep me out that much?” Ren says.
“They steal my cereal bars,” Naila mock-whispers to Christine.
“I’m a criminal,” Ren says. They recoil from Naila’s attempted grab and sit down heavily on the other end of the bench, with Christine between the two of them. Christine gets her first clear look at their clothes.
“I like your skirt,” she says, and Ren pulls at the hems in response, showing it off. It’s dark blue, near-black, with repeating patterns that look like tattoos would, if you could tattoo fabric.
“Thanks,” they say, beaming.
“They made it,” Naila says, “like, a week ago, and wouldn’t shut up about how awesome it is for days, so thank you for another few hours of—” she flaps her fingers, like the mouth of a Muppet, “—sound and fury.”
“Signifying fashion,” Ren says.
“I hate to ask,” Christine says, having finally given up wrestling with her temptation, “but can I bum a cigarette?”
Ren’s face falls. “Damn. You can smell it?”
“From a mile away. Sorry.”
Naila shakes a pack in front of Christine, dislodging a cigarette. “I told you deodorant doesn’t work,” she says to Ren, who rolls their eyes.
“Uh, can I get a light as well?” Christine asks sheepishly. “I’m supposed to have given up, like two years ago now, but…”
“Bad night,” Ren finishes.
“Bad week,” Naila remembers, sparking her lighter.
Christine ignites, inhales, and sighs. The smoke dissipates the neon light, casting them all into shimmering shadow for a moment. “I’m going to get such a headrush.”
“Just don’t fall off the roof,” Ren says.
“No promises,” Christine says, and inhales again.
“We have to go, actually,” Naila says, checking her phone and making significant eyes at Ren, “but it was nice meeting you, Christine.”
“You too.”
“Drop by the fifth floor common room if you want to say hi.”
“Or if you want to bum any more of Naila’s cigs,” Ren says.
Naila and Ren interlock fingers and return to the stairs. They respond to Christine’s wave by waggling their joined hands at her, before shutting the door and leaving her alone on the roof.
“See?” Christine mutters at herself, wreathing her head in smoke. “They both seemed nice and together and normal. Why not be like them? Which one?” She giggles in the mild cigarette high. “Pick one!”
She winces as the promised headrush is joined by a momentary stab of pain above her eye; her exhaustion making itself known. She should probably sleep soon.
But not yet. It’s not even midnight, and her first tutorial isn’t until eleven in the morning. She’s got some time.
Time to figure herself out. Time to ask herself the questions she’s been putting off answering. Time to lay it all out and get truly analytical. She takes a deep drag of her cigarette, watches the paper burn down, takes it in and holds it in her lungs. Lets it warm her, suffuse her, invigorate her, poison her.
She lets it go, and the smoke cloud catches the wind, rips itself to shreds, and billows away across the green.
“What do you know, Christine Hale?”
Notes:
They’ve kidnapped and feminised a lot of men, but Dorley Hall’s principal crime is movie piracy.
Chapter 8: Midday on Mercury
Chapter Text
2019 October 16
Wednesday
I did it. I came out to Christine. And to her friend, Abby, actually. Abby, who knows Melissa! Which is really weird and circular. But, I guess, thinking about it, there are only eight of us down here, and if there are similar numbers in previous years and they all stay in touch then the chances of interacting with someone new doesn’t—
Stefan irritably hits delete and starts again.
I want to be a girl. I’ve never written that down before. Barely even thought it. And I know I should be thinking more like, I AM a girl, but I don’t know how I can know that unless I’ve actually tried it. That’s not how I’ve seen trans women — OTHER trans women — describe their experiences, but maybe there’s different ways to be trans, or I’m just less trans, or—
Delete.
I don’t know what to think of Christine. On the one hand, she’s been understanding with me, and didn’t freak out when I told her I’m trans (okay she did freak out but it was a concerned-for-my-safety freakout, not a bigoted one), and she’s the reason I’m actually finally going to transition, and do it right. I mean, I’ve seen her, Pippa, Maria and about half a dozen other girls now, and even knowing what I know… it’s hard to see. It’s also completely fucking RIDICULOUS that, supposedly, none of them are/were trans. (Are they even trans now? Christine says she’s not, but do they wake up each morning and feel about their bodies the way I do about mine right now? Again, Christine says no. Which makes NO SENSE. Maybe I should ask Abby about it. Get a second opinion. “Hi, Abby, Stef here, I want to ask you some really personal questions about your gender! What’s that, you say? ‘Fuck off’? Okay!”)
But that’s just me looking back to what this place apparently DOES. Because on the OTHER hand, Christine’s first response to someone knowing about Dorley (even if I was wrong, or right in a really really wrong way) was to fucking kidnap them and bring them here to the place where men are basically tortured, and she’s wrapped up so tight in this place you can almost see it on her. The way she talks about how all these guys are going to be ‘helped’ creeps me out… Even if sometimes I do kind of think they deserve it. I mean, they’re all really bad guys! God, ‘bad guys’, that’s an infantile way to talk about them. They’re misogynists, woman-beaters, and drunk drivers with fatalities to their name. So taking these guys out of society, at least until they can be reformed? A good thing, unequivocally. (I guess? I don’t know. What even ARE ethics?) But THIS? I guess I can see that if you want to reform a misogynist then ONE way to do it is make him truly understand and empathise with — become, in this case! — the subject of his contempt, but it can’t be THE ONLY way. Is it???? If Christine and Abby have both been telling the truth, maybe it is?? God, I’ve been down here half a week and already I’m starting to be all, maybe the kidnappers have a good point? I don’t know, it just rankles because it feels like it cheapens the thing I need to survive to see it used to control people. And what ABOUT Christine, anyway—
Getting really off-topic, here. And it feels wrong, somehow unfair, speculating about Christine like this, when they’ve had only one actual conversation, if you don’t count the night when they met, when they kissed, when Stefan was pretending to be something he’s not. He blushes at the memory, clears the screen, and tries again.
Today is the first day of the rest of my—
Fuck it.
The phone bounces as it hits the mattress, and Stefan winces when it slaps into the wall, but on retrieval and inspection there are no scratches. Funny; when he dropped his own phone less than half a metre out of a chair, the front glass spiderwebbed into near-illegibility, and the back plastic dented so hard it never closed again properly. The phones here are obviously just better.
Like the mattresses. He hasn’t slept so well in years.
He’s still staring at the phone screen, trying to come up with something to say, some note to leave to his future self to help him make sense of how he’s feeling right now, when the thin red light strip on the edge of the ceiling, right above the bed, increases in intensity slightly. To indicate morning? He squints at the phone screen and watches the clock tick over from 0759 to 0800.
The alarm on the phone immediately starts going off, playing some pop song he doesn’t recognise. He quiets it and waits for whatever’s going to happen next to happen, but nothing does. He half-expected the rest of the lights in the room — the bedside lamp, the desk lamp by the computer and the four small lights embedded in the ceiling — to come on all at once, on maximum brightness; he imagined Pippa in some control room, cackling as she turned a dial from pitch black all the way up to midday on Mercury. Nothing. Apparently, it’s up to him to decide what to do with himself next.
Not something he has a great deal of experience with.
He lies in the near-dark for a few more minutes, illuminated only by the soft red glow of the light strip and the dull green LEDs on the locks for the door and the little dumbwaiter next to it. He taps through the quiescent phone and makes sure all traces of his attempts at a diary entry are gone; anything he saves to the thing will almost certainly be readable to Pippa and God only knows who else. The last thing he wants to do, when he and Christine have gone to so much trouble to obscure his origin, is actually be himself anywhere it might be seen.
So, how the hell is he going to track his transition?
The best he can do, he decides after a little more thought, is to take a daily photograph in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door and use the timestamps to track his physical changes; if Pippa confronts him about them, he can pretend to be concerned about the effects of the Goserelin implant on his beloved male body. As for the emotional effects, he’ll just have to do his best to remember them. Far from ideal, but the best he can do, under the circumstances.
He doesn’t look at the picture when he takes it; instead he throws the phone back onto the mattress and concentrates very hard on getting dressed. It takes a few minutes, and requires that he steady himself on the side of the wardrobe several times: just a glimpse of his near-naked body in the mirror brought bile to his throat and the old itch to his forearms. He wants to tear at his skin until he bleeds. Christine doesn’t look like this; Pippa doesn’t look like this. Why does he have to? And why do other people have to see him like this?
He settles on pinching himself. Upper arms. A couple each side. It’s far from enough, but a little control is better than none at all, and the red welts are easy to explain away should they be discovered. Stefan’s probably allergic to Dorley’s detergent, or something.
He glares at the marks as they form on his skin. The dysphoria has never been quite this bad.
He busies himself hunting around for something to keep his hair out of his eyes. There’s no product in the dresser; eventually he slicks moisturiser through his fringe, which works well enough, and the task is sufficiently distracting that by the time he’s done, the worst of the revulsion has faded.
“Took you twenty-one years to call it dysphoria, didn’t it?” he mutters to himself, with enough presence of mind to face away from where Abby said the cameras are. “Idiot.”
One more pinch. To be sure.
* * *
Dorley has a lot of rules. Fewer as you move through the programme, although even graduates are still restricted in certain ways: no contact with family or friends from before Dorley; no contact with the new boys until they become new girls, unless you have explicit permission from their sponsor or Aunt Bea; no deviating from your agreed NPH, or New Personal History. It’s up to the individual whether they want to present themselves as a trans or cis woman, once they leave, but it’s a decision that can be made only once.
Early in their second year, when they were all of them still fresh in their new names and identities and only Vicky seemed truly to have a handle on things, Paige wrote The first rule of forced-fem club is you do not talk about forced-fem club on the recipe board in the kitchen. Aunt Bea, quite unexpectedly, loved it; for a while, she talked about getting it printed on a novelty mug, but either she relented or she keeps it locked away in her office. If it’s bad opsec to list your crimes on a coffee mug, it’s worse to be caught drinking out of it.
Christine has a list of unofficial rules to go alongside, drawn up from observing the times the other girls got in trouble, and from her own multitude of mistakes. The one in force this morning: If you think you might be under suspicion of backsliding, put on a nice dress and stay in your room with the door open, so you look like you have nothing to hide. So, Christine, who declined last night to go out against not only all encouragement from her peers and her sponsor but also Aunt Bea’s explicit permission — and thus her implicit instruction — has been up since oh-seven-thirty, with another of Paige’s dresses on and the door and window open, watching the late summer breeze play with the pages of her textbooks, and practising her eyeliner.
She’s only poked herself in the eye three times so far; an improvement on last time. She’s wiping off her latest failure when Vicky pokes her head around the open door.
“Hey, Vick,” Christine says, and holds up her pencil. “Come to see me suck at makeup?”
“I just came by to see how you are,” she says, and then drops a gym bag off her shoulder with a guilty grin. “And to pick up a few things.”
“Is there anything even left in your room that’s actually yours?”
“The essentials,” Vicky says. “And, uh, a pile of dirty plates. Don’t tell anyone.”
Christine zippers her lips.
Officially, Vicky Robinson still lives in the dorms, two doors down from Christine; really, she lives in a nice place off-campus with her girlfriend and their friends, and returns only to visit, steal food and clothes, and to sneak out estradiol valerate for Lorna. With Vicky’s room mostly empty, Paige got permission from Aunt Bea to get her thumb added to Vicky’s lock, and uses the room as a walk-in wardrobe that just happens to have a bed and a desk in it; handy also for Vicky and Lorna, who are both only a couple of centimetres apart from Paige in height and thus haven’t had to go clothes shopping for months.
What Aunt Bea thinks of the arrangement she hasn’t said, but she wouldn’t have let Vicky graduate early if she didn’t think that Dorley’s rules, besides the obvious ones around disclosure, had become completely unnecessary for her.
One of many things about Vicky to be jealous of.
“Are you okay?” Vicky says, stepping over her gym bag and perching next to Christine on the bed.
“Yeah, Vick, I’m pretty okay.”
“Only pretty okay?”
Christine makes herself look away, because the shape Vicky’s lips form when she says pretty is not something she can witness and remain a hundred percent on-task afterwards. “Dira and Paige had a mini-intervention last night. Aunt Bea has been making comments about my continued feminine development.”
“Oh,” Vicky says. “Oh crap, Tina.”
“It’s okay, kind of. I mean, we’re not at drastic steps yet. But I’m behind everyone else. Not just you and Paige; everyone. Even bloody Jodie’s My Immortal-ass fashion sense is more developed than mine. I’ve been officially noticed.”
“Is that why you’re dressed up this morning?”
Christine nods, and leans back on the bed, inviting inspection and trying to stop her heart from fluttering. Vicky fucking Robinson is looking at her… “What do you think?” she asks.
Vicky laughs. “I think when you bite your lip like that, you could have anyone you want.”
Christine swallows. Can almost feel the Adam’s apple she once had bobbing in her throat. “I mean, um, about the dress.” She billows out the fabric around her thighs and kicks her legs lightly; it’s a shortish dress and Christine’s quietly proud of her legs. Comfort isn’t the only reason she habitually wears shorts.
“It looks lovely on you,” Vicky says.
Vicky and Christine have never kissed, never touched each other except platonically, and as far as Christine knows, Vicky’s never done anything with anyone from their intake, choosing instead to wait until she could go out and meet someone healthy and normal from the outside world. It probably had something to do with how quickly she took to the programme; by the time Christine and Paige were indulging in faltering experiments in horny and strangely adolescent denial — “I’m a straight guy,” Paige had said, although that wasn’t yet her name, “and so are you, but if we let ourselves forget what we know about each other for just a few minutes…” — Vicky had already booked her facial surgery, persuaded her sponsor to let her name herself, and had been allowed up to the kitchen to meet the second- and third-years at least a dozen times.
Difficult not to dwell on possibilities, though, when a beautiful woman says you look lovely.
“Um,” Christine says, and marvels briefly at her own eloquence before regaining full control of her mouth and continuing, “thank you. Paige picked it, but I, um, put it on. I mean, she brought a bunch of clothes around—” she flails an arm at the pile, “—but it was me who decided, hey, I like green today.” She touches the back of a hand to a hot cheek and looks away. “Sorry. I’m an idiot. And now I’m embarrassed.”
Vicky puts a hand on Christine’s knee. “Don’t be. You’re beautiful. You should be confident, too.”
Christine picks up the eyeliner pencil again and twirls it between her fingers. “Working on that.”
“You want some help?”
“It’s tempting, but I can’t.” Christine drops it back on the bed and blows a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I got help all through second year, and that’s why I still suck. I never learned.”
“Well, if you need to borrow anything, my door is always open.” Vicky scowls. “Literally. Paige never locks it.”
“You know, I might take you up on that.”
“Can I give you some advice?” Vicky says, removing her hand and lowering Christine’s heartbeat out of the danger zone. “Aunt Bea likes effort. Results are best, obviously, but trying and getting halfway there? Almost as good. All she’ll need to see, at least for now, is more variety in your clothes, and a spot of makeup. A bit of eyeshadow, maybe. You don’t need to worry about eyeliner that could kill a man just yet.” She grins and pokes Christine in the hip. “And dresses like this? Good choice.”
Christine sighs. “I’m going to miss my shorts.”
Vicky laughs and hugs her. “I won’t.”
Fending her off, Christine says, “Just eyeshadow?”
“For now. Maybe add a bit of lip gloss. But practise everything. Every day. Do a full face every morning. You don’t have to keep it on through the day if you do it before your shower. And it doesn’t matter if you look like an idiot if you wash it straight off.”
“And here I thought I was almost getting away with just eyeshadow.”
“It’s what I did, and it worked out for me. I think it will for you, too; better than Paige’s approach.” Which was to become an expert on every makeup type and tool individually, with hours of YouTube tutorials and written guides and whole evenings dedicated to, say, lip liner. “You never saw how silly I looked every morning, those first few months of our second year. Every week, I’d pick a look out of a magazine, or off Instagram, or anywhere, just something I liked, and I’d spend an hour each morning, trying to replicate it. By the end of each week, I’d have it, or I’d be close enough.”
Christine is saved from having to point out the flaw in Vicky’s idea — that she is Vicky and Christine is, regrettably, merely Christine — by an interruption.
“It’s good advice,” Aunt Bea says, from the door.
“Aunt Bea!” Christine says, feeling like she’s talking too loud but unable to hear herself properly over the rushing in her ears. “Hi!”
“Good morning, Christine, Victoria.”
“Hey,” Vicky says with a smile. “I’ll leave you two alone, shall I?” She stands, squeezes Christine’s shoulder, and retrieves her bag from the floor. “Oh,” she adds, “Lorna and I are going to the protest this afternoon. Want to come? She missed you and she’s giving a speech, so you can make up for last night and support her at the same time!”
“Oh,” Christine says, “uh, sure. I’m done with classes after lunch. Who or what are we protesting?”
“Professor Frost,” Vicky says. “If that’s okay, Aunt Bea?”
Vicky’s not in the programme any more and doesn’t need permission to do anything, but Christine is and does, and Aunt Bea grants it with a nod. All programme members, once they are judged to look different enough from their old selves that no-one who knew them before would recognise them, are cleared for social media — Paige was pleased to get clearance before anyone else still in the programme, months before Christine, seeing it both as proof that her old self was so buried that not even her own mother could find him, and as tacit approval to begin spamming Instagram and accumulating industry contacts — and Christine is no exception, but protests, where one might be filmed saying or doing something particularly notable, are a special case.
So is Professor Frost.
“Feel free to ruin her day,” Aunt Bea says, smiling.
Aunt Bea reserves a particular hatred for Professor Katherine “Oh, do call me Kat” Frost, author of Gender Dysphoria: the Psychological and Physiological Mutilation of Our Children, and Christine’s never quite decided if it comes from allyship, personal affront, or the fact that the quality of Professor Frost’s published writing is considerably more mediocre than her ascendant media stardom might imply. Months ago, when Professor Frost’s book — “Her supposed book!” Aunt Bea had howled. “It contains many of the attributes of a book, in that it has front and back covers, paper between, binding, and even endorsements from academics who should know better, but it lacks the quintessential feature that separates books from bricks: insight!” — first landed on shop shelves, Christine set up a search alert for the words ‘Professor Frost’ and ‘disappeared’, hoping to get out in front of any difficulties Dorley might experience if Aunt Bea ever followed through on her invective and found the spotlight-hungry History professor a new home in their basement.
“Thanks, Aunt Bea,” Vicky says, and throws a quick wave to Christine. “Three o’clock, Tina!” she shouts from the hallway. “Outside the Anthill!”
Aunt Bea shuts the door behind her, enclosing them both in a space that only ever feels small to Christine when she’s alone in it with the woman who is still, technically, her captor. Bea settles on the little sofa, on the far side of the room from the bed and farthest from the door; is it reading too much into it to think of that as a deliberate decision, to put Christine at her ease, to encourage her to feel like she can leave if she really needs to?
“How are you feeling, Christine?” Aunt Bea says.
Easy questions first, then. “Good. I finally got some sleep.”
“So I see,” Aunt Bea says with a smile. “You’re getting along with your studies?” To Christine’s confused frown, she adds, “Yes, yes, I know we talked about that the other day. But that was routine. An inspection. This, I assure you, is off the record. I just want to talk.”
“I’m enjoying Linguistics,” Christine says, nodding, still confused. “It’s more interesting than I expected. I can see myself finding a career in the field, I think.”
“Once you have graduated from our programme,” Aunt Bea says, “I think we may permit you to indulge your computing interests, if you would like. Some elective modules, perhaps?”
“Oh. Um. Thank you, Aunt Bea. But I’m not sure I would choose to. I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“I see. You believe you might find yourself open to temptation once more?”
“No!” Christine says quickly. That she might even think about hurting people that way ever again… The very idea is an insult to everything she’s become. She grips the bed to keep herself from shaking. Feels the pressure of her whole body in her knuckles.
“I apologise,” Aunt Bea says. “A necessary question.”
“I’m not him any more, Aunt Bea,” Christine says, losing control of her voice. “Not just because I don’t look or sound like him,” she continues, pausing for breath every few words, “but because he’s gone. And I don’t want him back. And he’s not in danger of coming back. Returning to that place… It would bring up bad memories, that’s all.” She pushes against the bed frame and empties her lungs, slowly, carefully. “When I’ve graduated. From Saints, not from the programme. I might look into it elsewhere. But. Not here. Sorry.”
“You’ve done no wrong, Christine,” Aunt Bea says. “I apologise again. I should not have asked. In fact…” She shifts her weight on the sofa, leans forward. “When Indira came to see me last night, to ask me to grant you some time to work on yourself at your own pace — a request I am minded to honour, especially in light of your conversation with Victoria — I took the opportunity to ruminate.” Oh no, Christine has time to think, before Aunt Bea continues, “And I realised, we haven’t really touched base, have we, you and I? You were, in every sense, a typical product of our programme: you were angry and bitter in all the ways I expect, rebellious in all the ways I expect, and ultimately compliant in all the ways I expect. And thus unmemorable to someone like me, who has seen many dozens of young women bloom. Even for your intake, you were apparently unremarkable: Paige fought me harder; Victoria flowered considerably earlier; Yasmin acquiesced more quietly but prefers to have as little to do with the rest of you as she can.” She holds up a finger, to forestall whatever objections Christine might have over her characterisation of her; Christine, for her part, is struggling for words. “We have engaged with each other formally, at inspections, and during your reviews, but Christine, I don’t know you. And that is entirely my failing.”
“Aunt Bea, no—” Christine says, following her instincts, all of which are screaming at her to contradict any self-deprecation the woman attempts in her presence.
“I want to know you,” Aunt Bea presses on. “And I want to know how you feel. About all of this: the programme; me. You. And I want you to be honest. Absolutely honest, with no regard for my feelings.”
Ah, Christine thinks, my strongest suit: honesty. “I don’t know where to start.”
“You dislike your former self,” Bea says, “with more vehemence than most of your cohort. Perhaps, start there?”
“‘Dislike’ is too weak a word,” Christine says, deciding to let Aunt Bea have all the honesty she wants, on this subject, at least. “I hate him. He… hurt people.”
“Try talking about yourself in the first person,” Aunt Bea suggests, quietly.
“I hurt people!” Christine says, trying hard not to grit her teeth. “And I know Dira says it’s because I wasn’t loved, because my father hated me, because he hurt my mother and because she still chose him over me, even after I— even after everything. And that’s all true, but it’s all just… reasons. I was always in control. I knew what I was doing. I just told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself I was getting something back from the world. What I was owed. I—” Christine jabs her finger into the mattress with each word, “—did those things. And I didn’t care who I hurt.”
“Indira would also say—”
“—that I was trapped and lonely. Also true. God, Aunt Bea, I was so lonely. I made my first real friends here, you know? And my first real family. I almost had to learn how to talk to people from scratch! But, again, those are excuses. I was angry, and I was hurting, and I made it everyone else’s problem.”
“You’re not angry any more?”
Christine smiles. “I’m a little angry at you,” she says. “And a little angry at Dira. For doing all those things to me.”
“If you were given the chance, would you go back? Instruct your former self to stay away from this campus, or even to refrain from your… activities for a time, so you wouldn’t be taken?”
“No,” Christine says quickly. “Absolutely not.” She meets Aunt Bea’s eyes for the first time since they started talking; she’s still leaning forward on the sofa, chin resting lightly on her hand. Looking for all the world like she gives a shit. “I was hurting people. And I was only going to escalate. I’ve seen what happens when people like that, people like me, don’t get corrected. Sooner or later, I was going to hurt someone in a way they couldn’t come back from. God, I still worry that I already did.” Defiant, and because she worries she hasn’t been quite clear enough, she adds, “I needed taking out of the world. Erasing.”
“You’re wrong about that. You needed help.”
“You say potato…”
“We’ve covered your past,” Aunt Bea says briskly. “How do you feel about yourself now?”
“Not bad,” Christine says, ignoring the twinge of guilt where Stef is concerned. He wants to be here! Be kind to yourself, Christine! “I’m… someone I can be, now. If you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“I mean that I like who I am,” Christine says, before Aunt Bea can move on. “I’m proud of myself. I’m sorry, it’s just, ‘I’m someone I can be,’ sounded so much like, ‘Oh, well, if I must,’ and that’s not it. I’m glad to be me.”
“Glad to be a woman?”
“Yes.”
“Proud to be a woman?”
“Yes. God, Aunt Bea… This life, this second chance, it’s a gift. It’s a future.”
“Do you mourn the man you might have grown to become? Absent your difficulties, of course.”
“No. He’s a fiction. A fantasy. Hmm. Give me a moment?” Christine raises a finger, and Aunt Bea nods. When Christine continues, she takes her time, chews over every word. “I can imagine a version of myself, taken out of my life when I was a child and placed elsewhere. I can imagine him growing up, going to university, getting a job, getting married. I can even imagine, if I were taken out of myself and placed into him, inhabiting him without complaint or inhibition. Living his life, quite content. But there’s no path from here to there, you know? There’s no way for me, as I am now, to become him, without becoming someone I no longer recognise as me. And if you were to tell me you have impossible magic that can make it happen, I think I would refuse. Because I don’t know him. I know me. And, when I let myself forget all my bullshit, all my guilt… I like me. I hope that all makes sense.”
“It does,” Aunt Bea says, smiling. “And yet, you are still angry at me.”
Christine snorts, and grins. “Well, you did cut my balls off. Without permission.”
“Would you have granted it?”
“I definitely would not have.”
The orchiectomy — the castration, the mutilation, as Christine thought of it at the time — had been a turning point. A whole swathe of possibilities for her life going forward felt like they had been cut away. There was suddenly no going back, and the changes she’d seen in her body would only accelerate. She lost whole days to a depression that threatened entirely to consume her. But she recovered — with help from Vicky, who’d been waiting with obvious and increasing impatience for them to get around to giving her the orchi, and Paige, who dealt with the loss of her testes with the same methodical thoroughness she applied to every other aspect of their imprisonment — and eventually allowed herself to consider the options that remained. A roadmap, which eventually she followed, seemed to sketch itself out in front of her.
A common inflection point, she learned later. And not entirely a coherent one: testosterone injections could have given back most of what had been taken from her. But no-one thinks about that in the immediate aftermath; it’s too visceral, too much of a shock. It’s not that the programme hinges on it — there are other ways to part a man from his masculinity — but it’s very convenient for your sponsor if you turn out to be susceptible.
Christine remembers chastising Indira for robbing her of the opportunity to have children; remembers Dira smiling and reminding her of the comprehensive ‘health tests’ they all had during the first few weeks underground. Christine can still have children, one day, if she chooses. And that moment, that realisation that there were paths that had in fact deliberately been left open for her, that it was not just about punishment but about building a new, different, better future, was when Dira began to reach her, when the new woman started to emerge from the burned-out husk inside her. And when a newly receptive Christine understood on an emotional level not just how much pain she had already caused but how much damage she had been on course to inflict, she would have done anything suggested to her. Her masculinity, not even a small price to pay; an irrelevance, weighed against the opportunity to throw away her old life, with all its mistakes and cruelties, and start again.
Masculinity had never been much help to her, anyway.
Aunt Bea looks thoughtful. “When Indira and I talked, we spoke about your daily presentation. And, as you know, I overheard your conversation with Victoria. At the risk of putting words in your mouth, I don’t believe your reluctance to dress in a feminine manner comes from, shall we say, a masculine reticence to indulge in femininity.”
“Absolutely not,” Christine says.
“When someone else helps you dress nicely, someone you trust, like Indira or Abigail, how does it make you feel? Take your time.”
“I like it. I really like it, actually. Aunt Bea, it feels like… It’s so different. Not just to how I was before, but to how I am the rest of the time. It’s not all good — I don’t like attention from men; most men, anyway — but it’s quite… liberating? I think? I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, though, given the choice; sometimes I feel more like I want to wear shorts and a top, and that’s not a laziness thing, that’s a… I don’t know, that’s a me that day thing? Sometimes I want to look how I always look, but sometimes I don’t, and…”
“And you’re frustrated that you have the skills to fulfil only the former desire, and not the latter?” Aunt Bea finishes, surprising Christine, who wasn’t entirely sure how much of that she’d said aloud.
“Yeah,” Christine says, and adds with venom, “I look like a fucking panto dame when I try it myself. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” Aunt Bea says with a smile. “Informal, remember? Just try to stay away from the c-word.”
The confirmation that Aunt Bea even knows about the c-word is enough of a shock to coalesce some of Christine’s scattered thoughts into something approaching legibility. “I hate feeling reliant on the other girls,” she says, “so I don’t ask their help any more. And when they offer, I usually refuse. And then I feel like a fake girl surrounded by real ones.”
“Understandable, but not insurmountable. It will take some hard work on your part,” Aunt Bea says, “but I believe you will overcome this obstacle. I trust you to pursue this, in your own time and in your own way, although I recommend the approach Victoria suggested. Don’t be afraid to ask for advice, and call on me should ever you need to.”
“I will, Aunt Bea.”
She nods, and adopts a grave expression. “There is one more thing. This morning, before leaving my office, I looked over your file. Start to finish. And I believe there is something you should know. Normally, this is information we withhold until graduation, but I believe it would be beneficial to air it now.”
“Okay?”
“The women you contacted, before you arrived here, the women whose testimony ultimately brought you to us, are none the worse for wear. They were reimbursed, which I think you know — mostly from what remained of your funds — and all of them are aware that your former identity is… gone from the world, as you said. Two of them, in fact, expressed sorrow that your former self could not be helped before it was too late, so, I believe, they would be satisfied with your current status.” She smiles, stands from the sofa, and crouches in front of Christine, putting herself on the same level. “You are not, and never will be blameless, and the harms you inflicted were real, but they were not lasting. The women have healed and moved on. You should, too.”
Oh, God.
She remembers their faces. How could she not?
“They’re all okay?” she asks, through a throat suddenly dry.
“They’re all okay. I would suggest, in fact, that if they were offered the opportunity, most or all of them would forgive you. Especially in light of your reformation.”
Oh, God. Christine loses track of the world for a while.
When she returns, she almost jumps at the realisation that Aunt Bea is sitting next to her on the bed, exactly where Vicky sat, and has an arm around her shoulder. Christine herself is leaning her head on Aunt Bea’s arm, and the fabric of her suit jacket is wet with Christine’s tears.
She pulls away, and Aunt Bea passes her a tissue.
“God, I’m sorry,” Christine says, blowing her nose and wiping her eyes.
“It’s quite all right,” Aunt Bea says. “I thought it important that you know.”
“Thank you,” Christine manages to say. “Yes. It’s good. I should know. Shit. God. I’ve been dreaming about them, you know? Not every night, not any more, but for years. God, that’s…”
“A weight off your mind?”
“I hope so. Too early to tell, I guess.”
“Indeed.”
“I’m not…” Christine starts, but can’t finish, because she wants to say, I’m not bad, not any more, but can’t summon the conviction. Perhaps it will come some other day.
They sit in silence for a minute or so, while Christine dries her face and collects herself, and Aunt Bea graciously spares her from active attention, busying herself with emails on her phone. Eventually, when Christine has more or less recovered, Aunt Bea stands, and beckons Christine to stand, too. Momentarily scared that another hug is approaching, Christine is relieved when Bea takes her hand and holds it between them both, almost like she’s about to kiss it.
“I’m very proud of you, Christine,” Aunt Bea says. “I’m proud of all my girls, of course, but you… You are quite something. There is a thoughtfulness in you that I, to my shame, never before noticed.”
“Thank you, Aunt Bea,” Christine says automatically. Something inside her makes her curtsey. Embarrassing.
“But there is something I wish you would try to internalise,” Aunt Bea continues. “Sometimes you think too much. I can see you blushing, and yet your curtsey was both appropriate and well-performed. The only person who is embarrassed by it… is you. I submit that this applies to more in your life than your curtsey.”
“I… Thank you, Aunt Bea,” Christine says again, injecting more warmth into her voice.
Aunt Bea releases her hand. In the doorway she pauses, looks back, and with a smile, says, “Smoking while on hormone replacement therapy is very bad for you.”
“Really?” Christine says innocently, and suppresses a sudden urge to cough. “Is it?”
“One of our girls, years ago now, started her habit again when she moved to the second floor. For three months she smoked nearly twenty a day, and only quit when, very early one morning, she woke screaming from a pain in her calf muscle so excruciating she could barely communicate her needs. Unable to speak properly, she rolled aside the duvet to reveal to us a raised area of flesh that she later described as being ‘the size and shape of a Cumberland sausage’. We took her to hospital immediately. Just something to think about.”
Can Aunt Bea smell the smoke, lingering on last night’s dress, hanging up by the window? Or does she just know? “The girl, was she okay?”
“Yes. Monica was lucky. We all were. Good morning, Christine.”
* * *
“Hey! New boy! You up?”
It’s a male voice, shouting through the door, disturbing Stefan in his amateurish search through the computer for some hidden place he could keep a diary.
“Yeah,” he says, deliberately not shouting; he can’t stand the abrasive edge his voice takes on when it gets loud. Christine said she trained hers, so maybe she can give him some tips. Not on actually developing a new voice, not yet, not while he’s down here, playing at being the bad little cis boy, but perhaps there’s some prep work he can do. Some exercises to expand his range. Anything to reduce the amount of time he has to spend listening to himself sound like this.
Anything for a crumb of progress.
Whoever it is raps on the door. “Come out and get your healthy breakfast!” Another knock. “It’s part of a complete, balanced diet!”
Stefan checks himself over quickly, with the sideways, fleeting glances in the mirror that are necessary on days like this. He hasn’t done anything daft like tuck his trousers into his socks, and his hoodie doesn’t look too obviously stretched from pulling the sleeves down over his hands.
It’s fine. He’s fine.
He fetches the phone from the bedside table and tries to open the door. It doesn’t cooperate.
“Uh,” he says, through the door, “how does this work?”
“It’s a door,” the voice says. “Just pull on it and watch the magic happen.”
“Yeah, okay, not working.”
“Did you unlock it?”
“The light’s green.”
“Your new best friend didn’t explain how it works?”
“No? It’s a door. I think she assumed I’ve seen them before.”
The voice mutters something too quiet for Stefan to hear, then continues in a lecturing tone, “You see the little black square under the green light? That is a fin-ger-print rea-der. Put your fin-ger or thumb on the rea-der and the door will o-pen.”
Stefan scans his thumb. The door makes the now-familiar ear-assaulting buzzing sound, and clicks open a couple of centimetres. Pulling it the rest of the way reveals the too-bright ceiling lights of the residential corridor, and Aaron, dressed similarly to Stefan except without the hoodie and affecting an expression of rapturous joy. “You see what can happen if you just believe?” he says, imitating an American preacher.
The urge to tell the little shit to fuck off is reasonably strong, but Abby’s right: Stefan needs to make a friend and, handily, the one she advised him to get close to is waiting for him right outside his door.
“Thanks,” Stefan says. “How do they know my fingerprints?”
“Well, I’m guessing — and this is just a guess, you understand — they took them during that time you were unconscious, when they brought you in.”
Stefan probably deserves the sarcasm; it was a stupid question. He smiles, to show he’s taken it in good grace, and asks, “So, what does the green light mean, if it doesn’t mean the door’s already open?”
“It means you can open it but, just for example, I can’t. You’re only actually locked in if it’s red; that’s when only your special assigned girlfriend can let you out. Red light means it’s piss-in-a-bottle time.”
“They really expect you — us — to pee in a bottle when they lock us in?”
Aaron shrugs. “Who knows? Half the fun of this place is figuring out the rules as you go along, and getting tased or at least very heavily bitched at when you guess wrong. We’ve only had lockdown once so far, when Declan went digging for Nazi gold in his nasty little Nazi stomach.”
“Wait. Declan’s a Nazi?”
“I dunno. Maybe. He seems like the type. Long, goose-stepping legs; tendency towards sudden and irrational acts of violence. Does it matter?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“Don’t talk to him, then,” Aaron says. “I don’t, if I can avoid it. He’s a fucking weirdo, anyway. But! My point: he does the whole belly-button fandango, they take him away to get patched up. They probably bang him around a little, too. I mean, I would.” He mimes slapping the air in front of him, and says, “‘Stop! Being! A weird! Little! Dick!’” in time with the slaps. “They took him away so quick, I didn’t even get to see the wound. Anyway, we were only in lockdown for an hour or so, and the only one who actually did piss in a bottle was Adam, and he probably does it all the time, anyway, to cleanse himself in the eyes of the Lord. Oh,” he adds, pointing at Stefan’s phone, “put that in your pocket, and leave it in your room next time, or they’ll take it away. Common room’s all about socialising.”
“Okay,” Stefan says, pocketing it. “Why?”
“Why do they want us to socialise?” Aaron says, pushing on the double doors to the dining room and guiding them both to seats near the entrance. On the table, there’s a box of Weetabix, some oat milk, and a pile of plastic spoons. “Haven’t you been paying attention? They’re trying to rehabilitate us! Get us all together in one room and have us waggle our dicks at each other for a couple of weeks until we’re good boys. Just like boarding school.”
“You went to boarding school?” Stefan asks, frowning.
“You’re thinking, ‘he doesn’t sound like a posh lad,’ aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Stefan admits, Weetabixing one of the plastic bowls.
“Dad got his business bought. Suddenly we’re rolling in money. Suddenly he’s too busy for me and Mum. Suddenly we’re moving from a two-up two-down to a big new house in a big new town and I’m being sent off to a big new school where all the Hooray Henries and Chinless Charlies go to learn how to tie their shoes and spell their names without smiley faces in the Os and run the country. And don’t they have a fun new target? That was a glorious four years. Believe it or not, I think this place is actually better: it’s warmer than the coal shed the posh boys liked to lock me in, and there are hot women to look at, even if they do all have tasers and hate me.”
“I’m sorry,” Stefan says. “That sounds awful.”
“Aww. Did I tug at your heartstrings? Did you hear a little violin playing? If I want your pity, I’ll ask for it.”
“It’s empathy, not pity.”
“That’s just ‘pity’ with more letters and a fucking viral TikTok channel,” Aaron says, stabbing his breakfast with a plastic spoon and not making a dent. “Inspiring videos of girls with too much money breaking down crying when they think about three-legged cats and the coming climate apocalypse.”
“Is he whining again?” Will says, from the other end of the table. He and Adam are the only others in the room, carrying on the same variety of murmured argument Stefan saw yesterday. Possibly it’s the same argument.
Stefan needs to make his decision. If he’s going to befriend someone — and he has to befriend someone, or he might end up like Declan’s belly — then it has to be one of the three men in this room. The other ones, based on his limited observation and Aaron’s narration, are each some combination of unpredictable, violent, or apathetic, none of which seem useful to Stefan right now. And of the ones who remain, Adam seems to believe in some strange stuff, and Stefan’s spent under two hours total in Will’s presence and has already been called a homo. Better the devil you could fold up and put under your arm…
“What do you care?” he says to Will, affecting a sneer, which comes easily enough. “I’m talking to him, not you.”
Not the most ringing endorsement of his conversation with Aaron. Baby steps.
“I don’t care,” Will says, matching Stefan’s contempt and returning to whatever he’s talking about with Adam. Demons, or being a massive homophobe and how cool that is, or something.
“Idiot,” Stefan mutters, and catches Aaron looking at him strangely for a moment, before the boy returns to his stubborn breakfast.
“So,” Aaron says, around a mouthful of dry Weetabix, “are you ready to tell me your crimes, yet?”
“Are you?”
“I feel like you’ll judge me. Will you judge me?”
“Yeah, probably,” Stefan admits.
“Hah! You really are like Raph. He judges me a lot, too, but I’m, like, seventy-to-eighty percent certain he’s knocked a bunch of women around, which is way more extreme than my thing. Except getting him to admit it is like pulling Goslafin implants out of Declan’s stomach.”
“It’s Goserelin, you fucking imbecile!” Will shouts, from the other end of the table.
“You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?” Stefan whispers.
Aaron replies, with a finger to his lips, “Ssshhh. Watch.”
Stefan looks back over. Adam’s put a hand on Will’s wrist, to quiet him, and Will waits a second before shaking it off. Adam looks put out for a moment, but rests his hand on the table next to Will’s, just centimetres apart. Their conversation resumes.
“What do you think?” Aaron says quietly. “Closet cases? Or just really, really repressed? Adam’s from this freaky Christian sect, the New Church of Something-or-Other, and William is a truly massive wanker.”
“The idea that all homophobes are closeted gay people is just a myth,” Stefan says. “A couple of big-name arseholes getting exposed doesn’t make it a pattern.”
“Whatever. I think they want to touch dicks.” He slaps his hands against each other a few times.
“That’s not how gay men have sex, Aaron.”
“Sounds fun, though, right?” Aaron says, grinning, and then adds, “Boarding school,” by way of explanation, and shovels more dry Weetabix into his mouth.
“Why haven’t you put milk on? Wouldn’t it make it easier to eat?”
“It’s oat milk. And this is Weetabix. I won’t pour oats onto oats. It’s perverse!”
“Weetabix is made of wheat, Aaron. It’s in the name. There’s even an oat version. Called Oatibix.”
“Oh. Never mind, then. Don’t tell Will I said that.”
“I heard, idiot,” Will says. “I wasn’t going to dignify it with a correction. Some things are just too stupid to bother with.”
Aaron shows Will his middle finger and turns back to Stefan. “So! How was your first evening at Hotel Feminazi?”
“Relaxing,” Stefan says, to be annoying.
“Well, good, because you’re going to be here a while.”
“What can I expect from this place? You know, day to day?”
Aaron adds milk to his bowl as he talks. “Boredom. If you’re down on your masturbation quota for the decade, this is a good chance to, you know—” he rubs a near-closed fist up and down the handle of his plastic spoon, “—catch up. It’s a shame Maria took away my FitBit or I could make my steps at the same time. They get judgy about sticky sheets, though, so you may want to nominate a sock to be your new bedtime pal.”
“What, they just leave you alone all day?”
“Mostly. I know, I was hoping for more, too, because Maria’s opening speech to me was highly enjoyable as far as failed attempts to make me feel guilty go, but there’s been nothing since. Maybe they’re hoping we all resort to cannibalism just for something to do. It’d make a change from Weetabix.”
“So? What do I do?”
“You don’t listen, do you?” Aaron says, mouth full. “You wank, you watch some TV, you wank some more. Sooner or later you get big angry sores on your dick so you give the wanking a rest for, I don’t know, the full length of a movie.” He pushes his bowl aside. “Oat milk on Weetabix is fucking disgusting. Come on, let’s go watch some TV, and then we can turn away from each other and be very quiet and respectful of each other’s privacy for, say, five minutes.”
* * *
The Anthill: a late-90s lecture theatre complex built as part of the campus expansion into its then-newly acquired lakeside land, the heart of Saints’ new campus-within-a-campus, an architectural marvel of interlocking brown domes and circular green skylights that has, since shortly after opening to the student population, been known as the Arthur Nathan Turner Halls on paper only.
Arthur Nathan Turner himself reportedly was not happy with the nickname, but expired before he could remove the Royal College from his will. Presumably he would have much to say about Saints’ quarterly cultural newsletter, which since 2004 has been titled News From the Anthill.
Christine’s seen the Anthill from above, via drone camera, and she thinks, as nicknames go, it could have been worse.
“Teenie!”
Poking out above a sea of student faces is an arm wearing a beaded bracelet that matches Christine’s, so she heads for it, and gets engulfed by Indira and her sign. It reads Protect Trans Kids! and is almost as big as she is.
“Hey, Dira!” Christine says, accepting her embrace. “I didn’t bring a sign. Is that okay?”
“You can yell, right?” Vicky says, joining in the hug from another angle. Christine, in the scrum, manages to nod. “Then that’s fine!”
“I’m so glad you could make it!” Indira says, squeezing hard. “You’re feeling okay? You got some sleep?”
“I’m good. Aunt Bea came to see me.”
“Vicky said. How did it go?”
“Pretty good, actually,” Christine says, as the three of them disentangle themselves. “She put my mind at rest about a few things, and endorsed Vicky’s suggestion on how to proceed with—” Christine hurriedly edits what she’s about to say, remembering just in time that she’s in mixed company, i.e. people who came about their current gender in one of the more usual fashions, “—you know, my thing I need to get better at.”
Indira squeals and kisses Christine on the cheek. “Proud of you,” she says, as she steps back.
“Thanks, sis,” Christine says, and they trail their hands against each other’s for a moment.
“Hi again, Christine,” Lorna says, and Christine looks round to see her standing next to Vicky, nervously playing with a much smaller sign. She’s changed a lot: where once she was all angles, she’s now filled out, and she doesn’t look as lost as she used to in clothes that, yes, have definitely been stolen from Paige’s second wardrobe. She’s becoming strikingly beautiful; a good match for Vicky.
“Hi,” Christine says, stepping closer so she doesn’t have to shout. “I wanted to ask you something, actually.”
“Maybe later?” Lorna says, and points at a picnic table a couple of people are carrying over. “I’m doing a speech soon and I’m kind of nervous? But I’ll be back down after, and then we’re going to the SU when the protest winds down?”
“Perfect,” Christine says. “Good luck with your speech! You’ll be amazing.” She turns back to Indira and asks, “When does the professor get here?”
“In about five minutes, supposedly. But people are saying she might not show.”
That might be preferable. Professor Frost’s public appearances are generally heralded by a flock of middle-aged busybodies whose favourite trick is to point their phone cameras at the trousers and skirts of all the women in a crowd of protesters and look for folds in the fabric they can draw red circles around and claim on social media are totally, definitely, one hundred percent positively erect penises, and that’s not something Christine wants associated with her own personal crotch. Self-consciously she swings her shoulder bag around from the side to the front, just in case.
Her trepidation can’t last long. The energy of the crowd is undeniable, and Christine finds herself buoyed up by it. She joins in a couple of chants, links elbows with Indira and Lorna, and excitedly greets Ren and Naila, who notice her from across the way and unwisely get within range of Indira’s hugging arm. They introduce each other around, and they all get caught up in the loud cheers for Lorna, who clambers up onto the picnic table in front of the crowd and accepts a microphone from someone with rainbow fingernails.
“Thank you, everyone!” Lorna says, and winces as the microphone feeds back. “I’m so happy to see you all here today! And we all know why we’re here: Professor Katherine Frost!” She pauses for boos, then opens up her script on her phone and starts her speech: “There was a time when Saints University used to stand up for the truth…”
“Isn’t she fantastic?” Vicky stage-whispers in Christine’s ear.
“She’s amazing!”
“I’m going to marry her, you know.”
“Really?”
“She doesn’t know it yet, but I do. I know it. She’s just… she’s perfect, Tina. I can’t imagine ever wanting anyone else.”
Christine lets her heart squeeze, just a little, before she replies. “I’m really happy for you,” she says, with all the warmth she genuinely feels. It’s not that she’s jealous of Lorna or Vicky, personally, for all that they are both breathtaking, but she longs to have that kind of connection with someone.
Vicky bumps shoulders with her, to say thanks. “Oh,” she adds, “if you’re still serious about coming out next week, we have something planned.”
“I am.”
“Good. She’s got a date for FFS and we’re celebrating.”
“Oh! That’s fantastic!”
“I don’t think she needs it, but I’ve, uh, stopped telling her that. She got kind of upset with me.”
Christine thinks of Stef, in the basement, asking why he should put up with anything less than what Christine was given. “Yes,” she says, “I think I get why.”
* * *
* * *
Chapter 9: Vertigo
Chapter Text
2019 October 25
Friday
“Best behaviour, ladies,” Indira says to the assembled Sisters in the ground floor kitchen, a mix of second-years, third-years, and sponsors. “We’re going to have a guest.”
Hasan, Indira’s childhood-friend-turned-boyfriend, has been imminent for over a week, constantly delayed by work, but, as Dira told Christine in a glowing voice this morning, he went to his boss and demanded a four-day weekend so he could visit his girlfriend, meet her friends, and see the sights in sunny Almsworth.
“Yes,” Paige says, elbowing Christine suggestively, “I’m sure we’re going to see so much of Hasan.” They’ve snagged two chairs at the kitchen table, not ordinarily a precious commodity, but in short supply this afternoon, as various second years mill about, preparing dishes, talking quietly to each other, and snatching the occasional shy glance at the third years. Christine, watching them, wonders what they think of her: do they see another woman? Or are they still fighting the programme, still viewing themselves and everyone around them as men too weak to stop themselves from being permanently altered?
Not particularly helpful thoughts. Christine does her best to ignore them. “What do you mean?”
“You know how she feels about him,” Paige whispers, and adds, to Christine’s raised eyebrows, an almost-too-quiet-to-hear impression of squeaking bedsprings. Christine, lightly and with love, hits her.
“Now,” Indira’s saying, ignoring Paige’s commentary, “you should all have had the standard visitor protocol explained to you. Yes?” Christine nods, to prompt the second-year girls, and after a few seconds most of them start nodding, too. “Good. The only slight wrinkle is that Hasan believes Christine and I are transgender women. So if he says something to one of the two of us that suggests he ‘knows’ anything, I can promise you, that’s all he knows. So don’t panic. That’s Christine there, by the way.” She points. Six second-years stare.
“Hi,” Christine says, waving with crooked fingers and wishing she’d worn a hoodie over her dress so she could cover her face and conceal her blush. She shuffles closer to Paige and whispers, “Hide me.” Paige, amused, just pokes her with her elbow again.
One of the second years waves back.
“Is he right?” another second-year girl says.
“Right about what?” Indira says.
“That you’re a trans woman?”
Indira smiles. “That’s closest to how I view myself, yes. It’s also how I’ve chosen to present myself to the outside world.”
“Wow,” the girl whispers.
“What about you?” the girl who waved says to Christine.
“Oh, uh, no comment,” Christine says.
“Christine is still in her third year here,” Indira says, “and has not yet been required to define her NPH; that’s her New Personal History, if your sponsors haven’t covered that yet.” Her frown at the confused faces in front of her suggests they should have. “So don’t hassle her about it. But she’s met Hasan before, and introduced herself to him as trans, so for tonight, and whenever Hasan is around, she’s a trans girl and so am I. He shouldn’t cause you much trouble, anyway; Aunt Bea and your sponsors will be available to help you, and for the most part you will be separated from him. Hasan will be with me, and my group. Paige, don’t complain.”
“I wasn’t going to!” Paige says, with an edge of sulk to her voice.
Paige collects fringe gender theories like Aunt Bea collects amusing coffee mugs, and the presence of an uncomplicatedly cis man inside the hallowed walls of Dorley will put a fairly large and unaccustomed restriction on her mealtime topic selection. Christine knows for a fact that she’s spent whole hours this week listening to a podcast by a guy who claims there is only one gender, that it is the gender of angels, and that men and women are merely aspects of it — because Paige came to her one morning to enthuse about its finer details while Christine was attempting to replicate a particularly annoying makeup look; a captive audience — and she also knows Paige has been waiting to talk about it with Abby, who is out of all of them the most ready to discuss gender apocrypha but who has been away all week at her ‘real’ job. Having to leave it until after Aunt Bea’s big birthday dinner, when they’ll all be too tired and sleepy properly to concentrate on its fascinating intricacies, will be torture for her.
Paige’s sponsor, Francesca, has told her off several times for cultivating so many unorthodox interests, to which Paige generally responds that the purpose of Dorley is simply to create women, not boring women. And besides, of the two of them, who has thirty thousand Instagram followers and who has sixteen?
There’s a reason they don’t socialise together.
“Think of it as good practise for being cisgender,” Indira says, and Paige sticks out her tongue in response.
Paige explained to Christine a while back that she’s stuck with her identity as a cis woman, that she ended up railroaded into it before she had a chance to think properly about the choice. When Christine asked why, Paige replied, “Marketability.” Her Instagram, and the contacts she’s made through it, are her ticket to a future in which she will, one day, she hopes, be able to do whatever she wants; too important to risk. Later that night, however, a drunk and talkative Paige cornered her, looked deeply and unsteadily into her eyes, and explained that her cisgender façade runs only as deep as it needs to, and that once she finds a partner she can trust with her life and her secrets she will reveal herself absolutely and completely to them. “Assuming they don’t know everything about me already,” she added with the intense seriousness of the very drunk, just before a distraught look plastered itself to her face and she rushed off towards the nearest bathroom. A concerned Christine followed her and spent the next half-hour holding Paige’s hair out of the toilet.
One of the second years puts up her hand.
“Yes,” Dira says, “Faye, is it?”
The girl called Faye takes a moment to reply. “Oh. Yes. Um. Who is this man, please? Has he come to evaluate us?”
“No,” Dira says, laughing. “He’s my boyfriend.”
Faye and the other second years take an understandable handful of seconds to process this. Christine hasn’t been keeping the closest eye on their development, but as far as she knows they all completed the move up from the basement to the first floor dorm rooms shortly before the start of the semester, and thus the slowest of them will have spent less than two months above ground. They’ll still be coming to terms with their new identities, might still even be mourning their old ones. They may well be capable of understanding that the third-year women looking up at them from the kitchen table with amused smiles (Paige) and worried frowns (Christine) are merely versions of them who have had longer to explore their womanhood, but the extra leap to the realisation that a woman who has gone through the very same programme is comfortable enough with herself to have a boyfriend from out in the real world is clearly one most of them are having trouble making.
“You should see them together,” Christine says, to fill the silence and let the girls off the hook. “They’re adorable.”
“Thank you!” Indira beams at her.
“You won’t have to talk to him,” Paige says, with a meaningful glance at Dira, “if you don’t want to. He’s just here to see his girlfriend and eat a nice meal. And then you won’t see hide nor hair of him for the rest of the weekend.”
“How come?” Faye, official spokeswoman for her group, asks. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she adds. She seems to have a bit of reflexive politeness going on; Christine wonders who her sponsor is.
“He’s her boyfriend,” Christine explains, hoping she doesn’t have to go into any more detail.
Realisation — and fascination, in at least two cases — dawns. “You’re allowed that?” one of the girls says. Christine’s pretty sure she hears another one whisper, awed, “Sex?”
“Of course we’re allowed!” Dira says.
“Indira graduated years ago,” says one of the sponsors Christine doesn’t know very well. “When you graduate, you will regain all the freedoms you had before, including the freedom to associate intimately with outsiders.”
“And you will be in a position to use your freedoms responsibly, unlike before,” Indira says, unwilling to be out-sponsored.
“And you’re really like us?” another second-year girl asks. “You really used to be a—?”
“Yes.”
“Gosh,” she says, and sounds both so innocent and so awed Christine can’t stop a snort from escaping.
“I’m sorry,” she says, controlling her laughter. “It’s just, I remember being you. Everything’s new and strange and, just when you’re starting to get some kind of a handle on everything, my lovely Sister here—” Christine directs a meaningful thumb at Indira, “—goes and drops a bomb like that on you. It’s a lot to take in.”
Indira blows Christine a kiss, which Christine fends off, and the chatter in the room moves on. Most of the second-year girls return to the dishes they’ve been nursing, but one of them steps closer.
“It gets easier, right?” Faye asks, and Christine finds in her voice memories of waking every morning in her new bedroom, looking out at the world through real windows, and wondering how she was going to learn to face the world as a woman when, after a year underground, even the idea of going outside was extraordinary.
“It does,” Christine says, putting all her conviction into it. “I promise.” She smiles, half to reassure the girl, and half because she can’t help thinking of Stef, a little over a week ago, asking if he really can be a girl. Different journeys, same destination.
“You’re Christine, right?” Faye says. Christine nods. “Do you… like your name?”
“I do. She gave it to me—” she gestures at Dira again, “—and it didn’t take me long to get used to it. A new name means no baggage, you know? It helps with sorting out who you’re going to be from now on. It helps you move on. Of course, it helps if you want to move on.”
Faye nods slowly. “I do,” she says. “I do want to.”
“Good,” Christine says, and then, to cement in the girl’s mind that they’re the same, that everything will be okay if she just keeps going, she adds, “So did I.”
“You’re very pretty,” Faye says, smiling shyly and curling a stray strand of hair around her finger.
“So are you,” Christine says. “You’re beautiful, actually.” Because she is: her jaw is still a little swollen from recent-ish facial surgery and her hair is still growing out, but she has the kind of girl-next-door beauty Christine has, on occasion, been told she possesses herself.
The girl’s smile broadens and she takes another half-step towards Christine before freezing in place, perhaps feeling like she nearly crossed a boundary. Christine stands, closes the distance between them, takes one of Faye’s hands and uses it to pull her into a quick, tight hug, trying to express with her body the things it might still be too early to say to Faye and her peers out loud: It’s okay to express your emotions. It’s okay that you stopped fighting this. You’re strong, not weak. Brave, not cowardly. You have a future. And it’s okay to be happy when someone calls you beautiful.
“You’re going to be okay,” she whispers to the girl instead, pulling back to look right in her shining eyes before releasing her.
* * *
“God, I hate this show.”
“Why are you back for it every day, then? I have a distinct memory of you practically skipping over here not twenty minutes ago.”
“What else am I going to do down here? Besides, you were already here, so my choice was either come over here and gradually expire from boredom in front of the telly or stay out there and die very, very quickly when one of the wandering dickheads decides it’s time for a spot of kicking practise.”
“You could just lock yourself in your room and wank. I thought that was your thing.”
“Didn’t I tell you about the friction sores? I’m sure I told you about the friction sores.”
“It’s possible I’ve forgotten, deliberately.”
“Well, okay, when a boy and his cock love each other very much—”
“Stefan, will you please shut your boyfriend up?”
“Aaron. Be quiet and watch your favourite show.”
“God. Fine. Whatever. I can’t wait to see if the guy will like the jacket.”
The two sofas by the TV in the common room have acquired a small pile of bean bag chairs and some large and only moderately uncomfortable cushions, fetched from the storeroom by Maria after Aaron refused to spend any more time in the vicinity of Declan unless his sponsor makes him take a shower, which neither her powers of persuasion nor her taser have proved adequate for. The bean bag chairs, he argued, would allow him and Stefan to position themselves far away from Declan’s odour wherever it may appear, and Maria eventually relented, returning from a side room with enough squashy living room furniture to furnish an Ikea, much of which has ended up spread around the common room and inhabited by Declan and his fellow unfortunates but some of which remains localised by the TV. He asked for a can of air freshener, as well, which Maria refused him. “Probably because it’s highly weaponisable,” Aaron said at the time, and described, largely with mime, the process of fatally decontaminating Declan with cans wedged into all of his orifices in such a ridiculous manner that Stefan, despite himself, laughed.
There are times, when Aaron goes whole hours without saying anything more than mildly objectionable, when Stefan has to remind himself that he knows exactly what the little shit did, because God help him if Aaron isn’t growing on him.
“Of course he’ll like the jacket,” Will says tiredly. “They always like the jacket. They don’t know how to dress themselves; they’ll like anything that doesn’t make them look stupid. It’s the same every time. Why do we watch this again?”
“Because we don’t control the TV,” Adam says mildly.
Stefan doesn’t know exactly how the four of them became a unit oppositional to the others, but after the run-ins some of them have had with Declan, Raph and Ollie over the past week, he’s grateful. Very nearly grateful, anyway. By unspoken agreement they pee, wash and shower in pairs: usually Stefan and Aaron, Will and Adam. It took a couple of days for the group properly to coalesce, but after Ollie had another go at getting his sponsor’s taser off her and got thrown in the cells, after Raph threatened Aaron in the bathroom because he claimed Aaron looked at his dick, and after Declan threw a plastic dinner plate at Adam’s head and bruised him quite badly, it was difficult not to acknowledge that there is strength in numbers, especially if those numbers comprise the most calm and least murderously unpredictable people in the basement.
Martin, the drunk driver, has been almost entirely absent, holed up in his room, indulging in his own self-pity. Stefan would have been surprised at his sponsor letting him skip the socialisation element of his rehabilitation, but on the few times he’s observed them together it’s been obvious that Ella, Martin’s sponsor, despises him. Probably hoping he washes out, whatever that entails; even now, with his two informants upstairs, Stefan doesn’t know. Everyone claims ignorance.
“What do you think I’d have to do to get Maria to give me control over the TV for one day?” Aaron says. Stefan, lying upside down with his head resting on a bean bag chair and his legs dangling over the backboard of the sofa, can feel the vibrations of Aaron’s voice in his ribcage: Aaron’s lying lengthways, with his feet tucked under Stefan’s back. The boy’s toes get cold, apparently.
“Reform,” Stefan says. “Pledge never to send another dick pic or harass another woman as long as you live.”
Aaron laughs. “I don’t think she’d believe me. And I still don’t get how you guessed that I did that.”
“You just look the type. Something about you just says: I send unsolicited photographs of my penis to random women.”
“He’s right,” Will says. “You really do look the type.”
Stefan bites the inside of his cheek for a moment. That pronoun is getting harder to deal with. But he’s talked it over with both Christine and Abby, trying out alternatives like they/them and zie/hir and even, at Christine’s insistence, consenting to be she/her for a night, but there’s nothing that doesn’t make him feel like an imposter.
He’s a he until he’s not, he told Christine, which seemed to piss her off enough that it was days before she contacted him again.
“Eat me, William,” Aaron says, showing him a finger.
“Shut up, Aaron.”
“I’m so glad we’re all getting along,” Stefan says, and Aaron turns the finger on him instead. “Now will you shush and watch the show? I’m invested.”
“How can you even see like that?” Aaron says. “You’re, like, upside down.”
“He can see fine like that,” Adam says before Stefan can say anything. “I used to watch videos that way all the time back home.”
“And where is home, Adam?” Aaron says, folding his arms.
“Just home.”
The three of them — well, mainly Aaron and Will — have been trying to nail down Adam’s origins all week, but they haven’t managed to gather anything more than Aaron told Stef on his first day: Adam was raised in a church that may or may not be a literal cult, and it’s called the New Church. Stefan asked Christine to look into it but she didn’t even bother Googling: “Do you know how many religious institutions are called ‘The New Church of Something Something’?” His childhood was clearly very sheltered and religious, religious enough to inculcate in him the belief that the ‘sins of the flesh’ originate in demonic temptation, but he’s already retreated from the slightly more antagonistic attitude he put on in Stefan’s first few days at Dorley, preferring to keep himself mostly to himself, although his near-whispered arguments with Will have, on occasion, expanded to include the others. A few days ago, unable to contain his curiosity, Stefan tested him, claiming as part of a story he was telling about his youth to have kissed a boy once, after school, but instead of the condemnation — or possibly the exorcism — he expected, Adam merely asked, quietly, neutrally, if he enjoyed it.
At least Will is simple. He’s a walking Reddit post who went home for the holidays after his first year at Saints, found out by accident that his younger brother had come out, got drunk, and hit him. Simple, but not actually pleasant. Tabby, his sponsor, thinks he’s an idiot and delights in antagonising him. She’s been pressing him about his brother: yesterday, in front of the four of them, she told Will he’d been declared officially missing, and that his brother had been seen to breathe a sigh of relief. Will didn’t take it well, and that night Stefan was subjected to another hours-long session of yelling from the room next door, which didn’t interrupt his movies but did give him a few extra things to write in the notes he keeps on his fellow prisoners.
The TV show wraps up, and Aaron takes it as his cue to roll off the sofa. “I need a piss and a shower,” he announces, and grabs at Stefan’s arm. “Come on, stop sitting like a weirdo and come with.”
They collect their washing kits, towels and dressing gowns from their respective rooms and meet up in the shower annexe, where Aaron startles Stefan by facing him and disrobing, underwear and all.
“Uh,” Stefan says.
“Look at me,” Aaron says.
“Why?”
“I want you to be honest: is the Goserelin having an effect on me?”
“What kind of an effect do you think it’s having?”
Aaron taps Stefan lightly on the cheek, to get him to stop looking away, and cups a hand against his chest, just under where a breast would be, if he had any. “Am I growing tits?”
“What? Why would you possibly think that?”
“Will said it lowers testosterone,” Aaron says. “So, am I growing tits?”
“Aaron,” Stefan says, “the implant’s not going to make you grow breasts. It’s just to, you know, calm you down.”
He doesn’t actually know for certain whether blocking testosterone results in breast development; whenever he tried to research methods of HRT he barely got beyond first principles before it seemed better for his immediate mental health to continue to deny everything. But it doesn’t seem likely.
It’s probably better for the Sisters if Aaron is redirected from worrying about breast growth, but Stefan deliberately doesn’t care about that. He’s not here to help them. He’ll stay silent if that’s what it takes to get what he needs — and in this, Stefan has decided, he is quite profoundly selfish, which is a character flaw he’s decided to face up to as and when he can also face up to his face — but fuck participating in the deception.
“On Fight Club,” Aaron insists, “the guy lost his balls, and grew tits.”
Stefan turns away from Aaron, his nonexistent breasts, and his naked body, and throws his robe and towel over the rail beside one of the shower heads. “I haven’t seen it,” he says. “But it’s a movie, right? Not known for being a hundred percent medically accurate.”
“But—”
“Will said his dad was on the stuff. Didn’t say anything about growing breasts, and that seems like the kind of thing Will would mention.”
“Listen—”
“Stop showing me your cock and have a shower.”
“I’m not—”
“I can hear it slapping around between your legs. Shower. Now.”
Whatever else Aaron says, Stefan ignores it. He stares at the reassuringly plain tiled wall while he undresses. It’s not pleasant to think about Aaron being changed against his will, even though he’s done awful things and, up until now, escaped the consequences. And if he’s to take Christine at her word, for all that she sounds occasionally a little too much like she’s in a secular cult of her own, the Cult of Dorley, then people like Aaron, unchecked, have a tendency to escalate. Maybe it is better to catch them early?
Stupid to think about. Stupid to dwell on. Who cares if this is a good place or not? Who cares if there’s another way to reform these men? All that matters is that Stefan, who hasn’t harassed anyone or hit anyone or manipulated anyone or run anyone over, gets what he needs. Screw these guys. Best to believe Christine: they deserve this, and they will, ultimately, be helped by it.
Unless they wash out.
He rinses out the shampoo, holding his head under the water for longer than strictly necessary, luxuriating in the heat, and thus completely misses Declan entering the shower annexe. He finally realises something’s happening when Aaron hits the floor by his feet.
“What the fuck?” Stefan yells, stepping back.
“Stef-an!” Declan yells. He’s wearing trousers and socks but no top, and thus gives Stefan his first look at Declan’s figure: he’s built like a guy who drinks beer every night but gets a lot of exercise. Literally barrel-shaped. You see a lot of guys like that if you live near a certain kind of pub, which Stefan’s family did while he was growing up; you don’t often see them this young, though. “Nice of you to join us! I was just telling Aa-ron here about my plan.”
“Uh—”
“Don’t ask him about his fucking plan,” Aaron mutters, scrambling to his feet and nearly slipping on the wet floor. He grabs Stefan’s upper arm to stay upright, and his dick slaps unwelcome against Stefan’s thigh. The combined weight of the two of them makes Stefan unsteady, and for a moment the tiled floor wobbles in front of him. “And, yeah, welcome back. You were seriously zoned out.”
“What’s going on?” Stefan hisses. Declan’s walking away from them both, towards the other end of the shower annexe, and he sticks his hand under Aaron’s still-running shower, washing dark liquid off his knuckles. Stefan makes the connection, takes Aaron’s jaw in his hand and turns it around, inspecting him: blood on his temple, a trickle out of his nostril. “Jesus, Aaron, did he hit you?”
“God,” Aaron says, “you really were in another world. Yes, he fucking hit me!”
“Aww,” Declan’s saying, as he makes an obscene gesture, “look at you two. You’re so cute! Do you sleep together, too?”
Stefan, sure now that Aaron is steady enough on his feet that he won’t fall down, carefully removes Aaron’s hands from his upper arm and steps back, away from the running water. “What are you on about, Declan?”
“Sitting together,” Declan says. “Showering together. Only one thing left.”
“Declan, you imbecile,” Stefan says, hoping to draw out this conversational break in the confrontation long enough for Pippa or Maria or someone to see them on camera, “this is a comm-un-al show-er.” He spaces out the syllables the way Declan does when he says someone’s name. “We have no choice but to shower together. It’s just like after PE at school. You remember school?”
“Fuck you, you patronising prick.”
“You’re antagonising him!” Aaron whispers.
“What’s your plan, mate?” Stefan says, ignoring Aaron, who closes his eyes in frustration, but it’s either keep Declan talking or deal with whatever happens when he stops. Where are you, Pippa?
“Oll-ie keeps going for the girls,” Declan says. “Stupid. Instantly piled on. Instantly taken out. But if he went for you, instead, the girls’ favourite little pet, and got a hand round your throat, they’d have to let him out.”
“Me?” Stefan says. “Why me?”
“Everyone else,” Declan says, “even the little wanker—” he gestures at a defiant Aaron, who is holding onto a pipe to stay upright, “—has been zapped. You? Never seen it. They protect you. You’re their watcher, or something. You work for them.”
“They haven’t tased me, and that makes you think I work for them? I just haven’t done anything to make them have to! There’s no point trying to fight them: they have weapons, Declan, and locks on all the doors. There’s concrete walls and no windows. It’s a prison. You don’t escape a prison with a ‘clever plan’. They’re built so you can’t.”
“That is exactly what their little bitch would say.”
“Nothing’s going to happen here, Declan,” Stefan says, taking another step away from the shower, towards the entrance to the annexe. “Just calm down and we can all walk away from this.”
“Fuck you,” Declan says, and rushes artlessly forward. Stefan tries to step out of the way, isn’t quite fast enough, and could have been badly hurt if Aaron hadn’t collided with Declan from the side. They struggle to stay upright: Stefan staggers back into the wall by the entrance, Aaron drops onto one knee and starts massaging the shoulder that made contact, and Declan slams into the side wall. It looks like he’s going to get his balance back first, but before he can do anything, Monica, his sponsor, steps into the annexe.
“Okay, Declan,” she says, sounding very tired. “Stop fucking around.”
“Can’t shoot your taser in here, Mon-i-ca,” Declan taunts.
“Hence this,” she says, unclipping her baton from her belt. “You two: scram,” she says to Stefan and Aaron.
“You sure?” Stefan says. “You going to be okay with him on your own?”
“I’m not going to be alone in a few seconds—” her eyes flicker down, and she smirks, “—so if you don’t want any other women seeing your junk I suggest you robe up and leave.”
“Right,” Stefan says, and pulls his robe over his shoulders. Aaron’s is lying on the other side of the bathroom in the middle of a large puddle of water, so Stefan throws him his towel. Aaron’s still tying it closed when Pippa and Maria follow Monica into the annexe.
“I didn’t start it, Maria,” Aaron says.
“I know,” Maria says, as Stefan catches Pippa’s eye and shrugs. “Go to your rooms and get dressed.”
“Have fun with Declan,” Aaron says, and Stefan puts a hand on each of his bare shoulders and pushes him out of the annexe.
“Three strikes, Declan,” Monica says, “and—” The closing bathroom door cuts her off. Stefan doesn’t want to speculate on what’s going to happen to Declan; he just wants to get to his bed before his knees succumb to the weakness he’s starting to feel work its way down his body as his adrenaline drains.
Unexpectedly, Aaron follows him into his room.
“Aaron,” Stefan says, sitting down heavily on his bed, “why are you in my room? Correction: why are you in my room, naked?”
“I’m not naked! I’m wearing a towel. And, don’t worry, I’m not all lewd under here; my dick is securely tucked back. It’s actually hiding. Trauma reaction.”
“What? To Declan?”
“Yes, to Declan! Don’t make him sound so trivial. Remember, he was the one who tried to fillet himself? Maybe if you’d seen it you wouldn’t be so fucking blasé about him.”
“I’m not blasé,” Stefan says, leaning forward and fishing a pair of trousers and a hoodie out of his wardrobe and passing them to Aaron. “Look,” he says, holding out his free arm, which shakes. “I was just trying to keep him talking until help arrived, or at the very least get farther away from him to increase the chances of him slipping and braining himself on the tile before he got to us.”
“Don’t say that,” Aaron says, dropping the towel on the floor, “he tripped me, remember. While you were off in your mind palace, or whatever. That could have been me, braining myself on the tile.”
Aaron doesn’t turn around to get dressed, so Stefan, judging himself steady enough to stand, picks out fresh clothes and faces the wall while he pulls them on, trying to make himself believe that just because he’s now seen Aaron’s penis twice, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s going to be a third time. A delusion, obviously; Aaron’s genital obsession borders on the pathological. No wonder he took all those pictures.
“Look on the bright side,” Stefan says, flopping back onto the bed. “If you die down here, no more women will have to be subjected to your… amateur photography.”
Aaron joins him on the bed, perching on the end nearest the door. “My what?”
“Your dick pics, Aaron.”
“Oh.” He laughs, still apparently unrepentant. “Those.”
“For fuck’s sake, Aaron,” Stefan says, sitting forward and grabbing the box of tissues from the bedside table, “you’re still bleeding.”
“Uh, what? Where?”
“Sit still,” Stefan commands, and when Aaron complies he dabs at the cut near Aaron’s eyebrow, cleaning the wound as much as he can with the wadded tissue. He takes another one out of the box, spits on it, and works on cleaning the blood off Aaron’s cheek and upper lip.
“This is weird,” Aaron says, watching Stefan with careful eyes.
“Grow up,” Stefan mutters, wetting another tissue, “and stay still.” Aaron fidgets, so Stefan stills him with a hand on his shoulder. Has he never been taken care of like this before? He’s acting like—
“Ahem.”
Stefan doesn’t jump, but Aaron does, and it smudges some of the remaining blood in a line along his jaw. Under Pippa’s gaze, Stefan licks his thumb and wipes it off. She doesn’t bother hiding her amusement.
“Hey, Pippa,” Stefan says, “can you look at this cut? I don’t think it needs stitches, but I’m no expert.”
She rolls her eyes, yanks Aaron’s head roughly to the side and peers at his wound. “He’ll be fine.” She releases him and steps backward, flexing the hand that touched him. “Since you’re both here, I can save Maria a job: you’re all going to have medical examinations tomorrow, so be ready and don’t muck around.”
“That sounds ominous,” Aaron says, raising a hand to dab at his wound and flinching when Stefan slaps it away.
“Don’t mess with it!” Stefan whispers.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Pippa says, before Aaron can complain. “You’ll have a physical exam, there’ll be some questions to answer, and we’ll be taking some blood — so drink the bottle of water that will be in your dumbwaiter in the morning. You’ll also need to provide a sperm sample, so, Aaron, it would be best if you managed to leave your penis alone for tonight.”
“No promises,” Aaron says. “What’s the blood test for?”
Pippa recites, rote: “We’ll be checking your general health and ensuring your Goserelin implants aren’t causing you any problems.”
“Yeah, what’s with that, anyway?” Aaron says. “Maria says it’s to help keep us calm.”
“It is,” Pippa says.
“Yeah, well, it’s not working on fucking Declan, is it? It’s not the first time he’s come at one of us.”
“Monica will deal with Declan. Now go away. I need to talk to Stefan.”
Aaron stands up, a little unsteadily, and steps around Pippa. “Don’t hurt him too badly,” he says, before winking at Stefan — an utterly baffling gesture — and departing. Pippa shuts the door with the back of her foot and leans against it.
“Jesus Christ,” Stefan mutters, throwing the dirty tissues into the bin and lying back on the bed, trying to force the tension out of his shoulders. When it’s just him and Pippa in the room, he feels safe: the worst she’s ever done is yell at him — and, yes, trigger a very bad dysphoric episode, but she didn’t know that was what she was doing — whereas the men, even Aaron, still have him on edge. Declan, today: a reminder of what most of them are capable of.
“What’s your deal, Stefan?” Pippa says.
“I have a deal?” Stefan props himself up on his shoulders and looks at her.
“Playing mother hen with the boy flasher there.”
“Oh, right.” He drops back down again, and starts stretching his fingers and toes. “I think I’ve adopted him.”
“You’ve adopted him.”
“Like a puppy. One of those ones that hasn’t yet worked out nibbling on the other dogs is bad.”
“You let him in your room.”
Stefan shrugs. “I didn’t mean to. I left the door open in case you needed a word after all that—” he waves an arm in the direction of the bathroom, “—was taken care of, and he just followed me in. And then he was bleeding, so I cleaned it up. Is there any reason we don’t have first-aid kits in these rooms?”
“Yes. Look, you know he’s dangerous.”
“To women.” It hurts to say. “Not to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s a sexual harasser, right? He’s not sexually interested in me, so—”
“It’s not about that, Stefan,” Pippa says, briefly closing her eyes. “It’s about power, it’s about the thrill. The target often doesn’t even matter. And it escalates: just taking pictures of his baby peen isn’t going to satisfy him forever.”
“I get that,” Stefan says patiently. “I know he’s a piece of shit. And I know he needs to change, and you hope — somehow — to change him down here. But he isn’t harassing me, and he literally doesn’t have a way to send me pictures here. I’m safe with him, I think.”
“Stefan,” Pippa says, perching on the chair by the computer and addressing him like an unruly child in his first regrettable detention, “we watch him on the cameras. He’s flashed you multiple times.”
“That’s just—” Stefan says, and then he starts replaying recent events, and realises he really can’t deny it. Even as a grudging veteran of the changing rooms at school, Stefan rarely had guys disrobe quite so blatantly in front of him. Sure, he got glimpses, everyone did, but that was it. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “I see what you mean. How many times?”
“Half a dozen, that we’ve seen. And that’s if you don’t count just getting undressed in the shower without turning away.”
“Oh. See, I was counting that,” Stefan says. Pippa smirks, and he adds, “Why does he do it?”
“Who the hell knows?” Pippa says, and breathes out heavily through her nose. “These guys, they’re just… unamendable, at least for now.”
“Yeah,” Stefan agrees, without thinking, “for now.”
Pippa nods, and then glares at him. “You know that’s you, too, right? You’re here for the exact same reason.”
“What?” Stefan says, caught off guard by the change in Pippa’s mood. “Flashing?”
“You’re dangerous,” she says.
“Oh. Yeah. Right. I’m dangerous.” Stefan digs his head a little deeper into the bed covers. “It’s too easy to forget that, when you’re talking to me like a normal person.”
“You don’t like the reminder?” Pippa sneers.
“Not really.”
* * *
It’s Aunt Bea’s birthday and, true to her habits, she has the second years making a huge celebratory meal. Also true to her habits, there’s a point to it: to assess how well the girls are settling into their new identities. Because it’s one thing to sit quietly in your room, with a friend or with a sponsor, and be comfortable; quite another to participate in a stressful and often confusing multi-person, multi-hour endeavour — like, say, preparing a four-course meal for your notoriously critical schoolmarm-cum-kidnapper — without reverting to old, toxic patterns of behaviour.
And it is hot in the kitchen. Four ovens, small windows (with bars on, artfully hidden from the outside with vines so none of the cis girls on the top floors notice anything unusual), and a dozen bodies milling around will do that. Christine, ducking back into the kitchen long enough to manoeuvre around a panicking second-year, steal a Pepsi Max from the fridge, and wink at Faye on her way out, is sweating by the time she makes it back to the relative serenity of the dining hall; she can’t imagine how badly the cooks are overheating. Except, obviously, she can. She’s done this already.
In the dining hall — the opulent opposite to the functional kitchen — various Dorley women gather in loose groups, awaiting the arrival of Aunt Bea. Abby, Vicky and Paige have claimed a small table in a quiet corner and Christine joins them, dropping into a chair next to Abby and cracking open her Pepsi.
“Jesus, it’s hot in there,” she says.
“Right?” Vicky says. “Remember when that was us?”
“I remember my soufflé collapsed.”
“No, no,” Paige says, “it was my soufflé that collapsed. You did the casserole that was cold in the middle and crunchy at the edge.”
“You’re right,” Christine says, and takes a large swig. “As usual.” She wonders how Aunt Bea feels about having her birthday spoiled every year by a gaggle of newly-in-knickers second-adolescent early-twentysomethings whose ability to cook an edible dish was not on the list of criteria for kidnapping. At least one of this lot can bake a credible cake. “When’re Dira and Hasan getting here?”
“Any minute,” Abby says, looking up from her laptop. Christine cranes her neck to look at the screen: Dorley admin stuff. Nothing she hasn’t seen before, on her occasional trawls through the secure files. “But it’s been ‘any minute’ for about the last twenty.”
“There was a derailment,” Paige says, tapping on her phone. “Not a bad one. It means minor delays, though.”
“Remember, Tina, you’re a trans girl tonight,” Vicky says, reaching around Abby to poke Christine in the shoulder.
“I know,” Christine says. “We had this conversation already.”
“Actually, why are you trans to Dira’s family but cis to my girlfriend?”
“Poor planning.”
“Really?”
“Exceptionally poor planning,” Abby says, peering through her glasses at the laptop screen and not looking up. Christine ignores her and drains her Pepsi.
A sudden crash from the kitchen forces a surprised belch out of her, and as she sits forward to listen to the commotion one of the second-year girls bursts through the double doors, runs through the dining room and out into the corridor on the other side. “Wait,” Christine says, “was that Faye?”
Before anyone can answer, Nell, Faye’s sponsor, follows her halfway through the dining room before stopping, throwing up her hands and turning around. “I have had it with that girl tonight!” Nell shouts.
At their table, Paige clenches her fists and looks away, and her reaction pushes Christine to her feet in less than a second; if there’s one thing no-one at Dorley needs, it’s an authority figure in a rage. Nell’s started walking in tight circles in the middle of the dining hall, working herself up as she goes, so it’s easy for Christine to plant herself in Nell’s path, stopping her short without having actively to grab her attention.
“What? Yes?” Nell snaps. “Christine, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Christine says. Back in the corner, she sees Vicky hugging Paige, who has sunk into her chair and is looking everywhere but at anyone. “I can go talk to Faye.”
“How would that help?”
Christine shrugs, affecting uncertainty. “I think she would benefit from talking to someone closer to her own age. And we already talked a little, earlier.”
“I remember. You think one hug is enough to build a rapport?”
“I’m an outside voice. A new face.” Out of the corner of her eye, Christine sees Pippa exiting the kitchen, taking in the scene in the middle of the room and walking over to where Abby and Vicky are still comforting Paige.
“You’re still in the programme, aren’t you? You’re not qualified for this; what will your sponsor say?” Nell makes a show of looking around. “Is she even here?”
“It’s fine, Nell!” Abby yells, closing her laptop and taking off her glasses, the better to glare. “Untwist your undies and let Chrissy talk to the girl!”
“I still don’t see what good it will do,” Nell says.
“I was her, only a year ago,” Christine says, choosing not to be visibly annoyed by Nell’s attitude. She is not this woman’s inferior just because she isn’t technically free yet. “I think I can relate to her on a level you, perhaps, can’t.”
“You won’t—”
“Nell,” Abby says, in her sternest voice.
“Fine,” Nell says, stepping aside. “She’s all yours. Knock yourself out on her thick fucking head.”
“I will,” Christine says, “just as soon as I check on my friend.”
Paige looks up as Christine approaches, and nods: she’s okay. Vicky’s holding her hand and gently stroking her upper arm, and Abby’s been having a whispered conversation with Pippa.
“Hi, Christine,” Pippa says, “I think this was partly my fault.”
“She’s having problems with Stef…an,” Abby says, just about managing to add the extra syllable to Stef’s name in time.
“I’m not having problems,” Pippa says. “That’s the flipping point. He’s so… I want to say docile, but that’s not it. He’s nothing but friendly to me, and now that he’s spending time with some of the other boys down there, he’s started, well, needling them.”
“Needling them how?” Christine says, looking behind her at Nell, who has declined to resume pacing in favour of glowering at her.
“He’s worked out what Aaron did to get here. Most of it, anyway. And he keeps bringing it up. Just throwing it in Aaron’s face all the time, like he’s trying to get it to sink in that what he did was wrong.”
“So? That’s good, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know! And he’s too damn kind. I walked in on him patching Aaron up after the little sod got in a fight! And you know how long it normally takes them to get to that level of empathy. Not to mention the physical intimacy involved!” She kicks lightly at a table leg. “I feel like I don’t understand him at all. And I need to, so when the treatments start — and they start soon — I have an idea how to coerce him, how to control him. I’m flying flipping blind, Christine!”
“You still have the sister thing,” Christine says. “You threaten to tell his sister he’s dead, like we said. Pretty potent means of control. Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go talk to Faye before her bitch of a sponsor gets impatient and goes after her. Pip, why not ask Abby to go down and talk to your boy? She’s got the sponsor experience, and she’s a blank slate as far as this intake is concerned. She’ll be a good second pair of eyes. Maybe she can see something in him.”
“That’s an excellent idea!” Abby says, beaming, radiating such absolute certainty that Pippa starts nodding before Abby even finishes speaking.
“We’re good?” Christine says. “Good. And don’t tell Nell I said she’s a bitch.” And she flees, following Faye into the rats’ nest of corridors that form the back half of the ground floor.
* * *
What is Pippa’s deal, anyway? He’d love to turn her question back on her, find out why she seems almost offended at his refusal to be confrontational, but he’s not sure the answer is worth pursuing: if the clues he’s picked up about the coming year are anything to go by, then every woman who’s been through Dorley has a period of pretty serious and sustained trauma in her recent past, and risking triggering Pippa just to satisfy his own curiosity would be cruel; it might also get him tased. And, as Declan pointed out, Stefan’s on a good run of not getting tased.
Hell, maybe if he does something provocative enough to get her to zap him, it might relieve her of some of her obvious tension.
The sound of the biometric lock startles him out of his thoughts, and he has time to wonder whether Pippa really has come back down to give him a quick tase just for the fun of it when an entirely unfamiliar face appears around the half-open door.
“Hi! Can I come in?”
No, not unfamiliar. It’s Abby, recognisable from the photobooth pictures with Melissa, but, Stefan realises as she enters in response to his confused nod — less than a fortnight in a basement and already he’s completely unused to the idea of someone asking for permission to enter his room — dressed somewhat differently. Instead of the casual clothes, bare face and tied-back hair from the picture, she’s wearing a loose dress in black and white with a repeating monochrome dandelion pattern that inverts at her waist as it crosses the matching belt. Her skin glistens and glitters around her eyes and her hair hangs in tight curls around her face, brushing her bare shoulders as she walks.
Stefan takes a breath and forgets to let it out for a few moments.
“Hi,” he says eventually, winded, as she closes the door behind her and settles carefully on the chair by the computer.
“Hi, Stef,” she says, and reminds him what a genuine, warm smile looks like.
On the bed, Stefan retreats behind his knees, wrapping his arms around his shins. Once again, faced with beauty, Stefan feels exceptionally ugly. “You look… seriously good,” he says, and is pleased to manage the entire sentence without the thick feeling in the back of his throat impeding him too much.
She smiles at him again, and he swallows.
“Before we say anything else,” she says, pulling a remote just like Pippa’s out of her purse, “let’s get some privacy.” With some ceremony she taps two buttons on the remote, and the red light strip on the wall goes green.
“I, um, didn’t know it could do that.”
“No cameras,” she says, “and no microphones. Real privacy.”
A ball of tension Stefan’s been carrying for over a week escapes him in a laugh, and he buries his head in his knees to stop it. “Sorry. That’s just a weird concept right now.”
“I know,” Abby says. “I remember.” He stares at her for a moment, making room in his head, as he has for Christine, Pippa, Maria and the others, that this relaxed, stunning woman was once imprisoned down here. The concept is yet to get any more believable. “It was a bit different, though, in my day. The beds were against the other wall, and we didn’t have a PC, just one of those wifi video player things. They were so awful.”
“When were you down here?”
“Ten years ago, I think?” she says, uncertain, looking up at the ceiling, as if something there might jog her memory. “Yes. Ten years. We’d redecorated by the time Melissa came through.”
“It’s completely mad, you know,” Stefan says. “You and Christine are both so normal, and yet you both talk casually about the time you spent down here, in this bloody dungeon.”
“Christine not always so casually, I imagine,” Abby says, frowning and crinkling one side of her mouth.
“Yeah. That’s true.”
“It’s fresher for her. And, Stef, I want to say, now that I finally have the chance to tell you in person: thank you for not revealing our secret. You could have broken us.”
Her fingers sit curled in her lap, the nails painted to match her dress, and he clenches his own until the knuckles crack. “Sometimes I still think I should have,” he says. “This place isn’t exactly ethical, is it?”
“No, but—” Abby starts.
“—It works,” Stefan interrupts. “Sorry, but I know.” His throat swells and his voice shakes but he continues, monotone, “I’ve heard it from Christine. And from you. Dorley works. Everyone gets better. It’s worth it in the end. Every fucking girl I meet down here is stunningly beautiful and fully invested in the betterment of mankind and thinks torture is completely and totally justified.”
“Are you okay, Stef?”
“Fuck, don’t…”
“Stef?”
“Please don’t call me that,” Stefan whispers, unable to look at her any more. He’s finally been able to put a name to the weight that’s been pressing down on him since she came into his room, and it’s the same thing that’s been assaulting him unpredictably but ever more frequently since he came to Dorley: dysphoria. He feels like his skin might boil away in shame and disgust.
Abby stands, or he thinks she does; he’s not looking. She makes noises consistent with standing, at any rate: the silken whisper of expensive clothes, worn well. Makes it worse.
“What should I call you?” she says.
“Nothing.”
“But—”
He has to make her understand so he glares up at her and sees only kindness and concern returned; undeserved but offered, anyway. His anger and his shame fail him, are burned away from him, and he bites his lip until blood comes. When she reaches for him, to comfort him, to help him, she breaks something inside him, and for the first time in a very long time, Stefan cries.
Impossible to say where he goes, but sometimes being looked upon kindly is the worst thing anyone can do to him.
The first thing he feels when he starts to come back is her arm around his shoulders. She’s resting her chin on the top of his head and gently stroking the back of his hand, and when she feels him move she releases her grip on him, but he doesn’t, just yet, want her to let go, so he pushes back against her, asking silently for just a few more minutes of real, human contact.
She keeps hold of him as he blows his nose, cleans his face, checks to make sure he hasn’t dirtied her dress — no; he pulled himself up so tight that he cried almost entirely into the fabric of his trousers and the sleeves of his hoodie — and, eventually, not wanting to impose, shrugs his shoulders and moves away, releasing her.
“Sorry,” he says, backing up against the headboard.
Abby returns to the chair by the computer. “It’s quite all right.”
“I think, maybe, I needed that.”
“I could tell.”
“It’s been a while.”
“You poor thing.”
“And you can call me Stef. I was just being— It’s fine. Really.”
“Okay, Stef. Thank you. Are you ready to tell me what hurt you so much?”
He forces a smile. “You. You’re beautiful. All the women here are, but since Christine they’ve all been… neutral towards me, at best. Which makes it a little easier to deal with, being around them when I have to be like this. But—” he holds up a hand when she opens her mouth, “—don’t apologise. It’s just my idiot brain doing cartwheels and landing on its arse.”
She nods. “I feel like I should know just what to say, here,” she says, “but I don’t. You don’t respond like anyone we’ve ever had come through here. For all my experience, I’m at a loss.”
Stefan laughs. “I’m kind of pleased to be an enigma.”
“Well, you’re definitely confounding Pippa.”
“Oh?”
“She’s why I’m here, actually. She doesn’t know how to control you. Came upstairs complaining about how lost at sea she is. Christine suggested I offer Pippa a second pair of eyes and I jumped at the chance. I wanted to check in on you in person. See how the subject of our little conspiracy is doing.”
“I think we’ve answered that,” Stefan says. “Not great. How is Christine, anyway? We don’t talk as much as I thought we would.”
“She’s been busy. Aunt Bea noticed she’s been slacking on some aspects of her development. So she’s been working hard on that.”
“Huh. I thought she was basically done with this place.”
“There are a few hoops she has to jump through before she can graduate. Most of them she’s been dealing with fine on her own. She’s very independent, but in a good way. Indira has the easiest sponsorship since, well, me.”
“Melissa didn’t give you trouble?”
“Almost none. When she came here, she was falling and she knew it. She just didn’t know how to stop. So I… caught her, and the rest is history. She was never aggressive with me. Mostly just confused.”
He wishes he had a copy of the photobooth pictures, or any other picture of Melissa, but he can still remember her face, and he finds it difficult to superimpose his memory of Mark on the person who came to Dorley, years ago. Better to think of her happy, anyway; graduated from this place, off in the world somewhere, living life.
Abby, wanting to talk about Melissa as much as he does, fills in the story behind the photobooth pictures; it’s amusingly, delightfully mundane. Stefan follows up with some stories from his childhood, from back when Melissa was still around, and after a while they settle into an easy back and forth. He hadn’t realised how much he missed having a normal conversation with a normal person. And Abby, like Christine, is shockingly normal, once you allow for the fact that their calibration for normal is balanced at least partly around their obvious belief in Dorley Hall, and everything that goes on here.
They agree on the story Abby will take back to Pippa: that Stef is compliant and helpful because he wants to be treated well, because whatever his own personal history he still finds the ‘other’ boys distasteful, and because he’s worried that if he isn’t, Pippa will follow through on her threat and tell his sister he’s dead. It’s little more than a restatement of information Pippa already has, but coming directly from Abby instead of via supposition, guesswork and Pippa’s own limited experience. “It’ll be enough,” Abby says, confidently, patting Stefan’s hand.
He asks her about the impending medical examination, and she fills in a few vital details: it’s to establish a baseline for their upcoming estradiol injections; it’s to make sure the Goserelin hasn’t had any unexpected side-effects; and it’s to provide sperm, for freezing.
“We want you to be able to have a child, in the future, if you want one,” Abby says, and Stefan shakes his head at the sheer absurdity of it: it really is possible to believe that Dorley wants nothing but the best for its residents, as long as you squint your eyes enough that the full year of torture and the nonconsensual surgery and the complete isolation from your old life and all the other violations and indignities fade out of focus.
She excuses herself not long after — it’s Aunt Bea’s birthday dinner, apparently, and she can’t miss it — but hugs him again before she leaves, and it’s all he can do to maintain his composure.
“You’re very sweet, Stef,” she says. “Melissa was exactly right about you.”
“Thank you,” Stefan says.
“Oh, and one more thing before I go,” she says, holding up the remote. “You’re going to be so pretty.” And she grins and reactivates the surveillance before he can respond with the disbelief such a ridiculous statement clearly deserves.
* * *
It doesn’t take Christine long to find her: people don’t normally come back here unless they’re heading down to the basement or getting something out of long-term storage, and very few people are audibly crying when they do so. Also, most of the doors are kept locked.
There’s a small conservatory at the back of Dorley’s ground floor. It’s poorly positioned and poorly insulated, having no view to speak of and no time of year in which it is actually pleasant to inhabit, so it’s become a storage room for old furniture, old books, old appliances, and anything else rarely or never used.
Faye, tear- and mascara-stained, sits cross-legged on a dust sheet that covers what probably was once a valuable chaise lounge before it was skeletonised by moths. She’s kicked off her shoes — heels far too high for her height, at least when it comes to preparing food comfortably on the kitchen surfaces, and the sort of thing only the stupid or the terminally glamorous would choose to wear while preparing a meal — and she’s holding her ankles tight enough in each hand that the skin has whitened.
“Hi,” Christine says quietly, because Faye hasn’t noticed her yet and she doesn’t want to scare her.
“Hey,” Faye says, and follows up with a revoltingly liquid sniff before continuing, “unless you brought Nell, in which case, uh…”
“No Nell. Just me. Can I sit down?”
“Sure.”
Christine sits on the other end of the chaise lounge, leaving a whole person’s-worth of space between them. She has no idea how comfortable Faye is with her body yet, this afternoon’s brief hug notwithstanding; any physical contact has to come from her.
“Did Nell pick those shoes out?” Christine says, pointing a toe at the ridiculous pumps.
“Yeah.”
“Bad choice,” Christine says, forcing a smile out of the girl. After a few more seconds of silence, she asks, “What happened?”
Faye’s grip on her ankles tightens. “I was stirring the batter, like Bex said to do—”
“She’s another girl in your group?”
“Yeah,” Faye says. “She’s my… friend.” Christine nods, encouraging her to continue. “I was stirring it, and then someone, someone I don’t even know, came charging into the kitchen, and she was angry, and it made me nervous, and you know how there’s just no space in that kitchen, and I think I took a bad step on those stupid heels because the next thing I know there’s a broken bowl on the floor and batter on Bex’s skirt and Nell is yelling at me and I couldn’t take it any more! She’s been such a— such a—”
“Bitch?”
“Yes! Like she still thinks of me as her enemy. And I’m not. I swear I’m not. Not any more.”
“You used to be?”
“Yeah. I hated her so much.” Faye sniffs. “But I guess I was kind of everyone’s enemy. I was just so angry, you know? All the time.”
Christine nods. “I was like that, too.”
“You?” Faye says, as if Christine said she used to be bright green.
“Me. I… did things, to end up here. Same as everyone.”
“Wow. I can barely even believe you’re like me.”
“Someone else said that to me, recently,” Christine says, smiling. “I’m getting better at believing it. I used to think I was… stained. That no matter how much I changed, there’d still be bits of the guy I used to be, riddled through me. But I changed even more than I ever expected, and the guy, he’s just… gone. I think you’ve changed, too, am I right?”
“I have,” Faye says, nodding. “I’m not like that any more. I just want to get on with people. I… I like it when I get on with people, you know? It makes me feel normal. But she… she won’t let me be normal. She shouts at me and sometimes I can deal with it but sometimes it’s like she flips a switch and wrecks everything. Like, the world gets louder and sharper, but everything’s also faded and further away. Like I’m on top of a high wire looking down and the ground is swinging back and forth underneath me. So I panic. And when I panic…” She looks away, grasps her ankles even tighter. “And I’ve asked her to stop, to just say what she wants from me, but she’s all, what do you know?”
“Faye?”
“Yes?”
“Let go of your ankles, please.”
“I mustn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I do, I feel like I’ll lose control again.”
Christine says, “Again?”
Faye sighs deeply, wetly, moves the mucus around her sinuses. When she speaks, she interrupts herself with sniffs, trying to clear her nose and restore her normal speech. She’s got that one-month-of-voice-training timbre, and Christine knows that at this stage it’s difficult to keep hold of the voice you want when your breathing is misbehaving. She’s still trying for it, though, hasn’t reverted to her old voice. An excellent sign. “You know those videos where the cat has its back arched up, and it’s hissing and padding around all over the place, and then suddenly and completely predictably it just leaps forward and goes for someone? That was me. That was how I felt. That was what Bex said about me.” Faye blushes for a second, and Christine bites her lip to control a wistful smile. “I was angry, and I’d try to hit people,” Faye says. “And every bit of progress I ever made got wiped out whenever something new happened. I’d go right back to being him. When they started the shots, I snapped. When my breasts started to come in, I snapped. When they took my— you know, after the orchi, I snapped. Every time. But Nell calmed me down, every time.”
“How did she do it?” Christine asks, leaning forward.
“By being the biggest bitch I ever met,” Faye says, smiling. “She’d yell at me and slap me and push me down. She’d put me in those cuffs. She’d tell me that if I didn’t learn to control myself and stop snapping over every little thing—” she pauses to laugh again, but it’s a laugh that scratches her lungs, “—that I’d wash out. And it worked, I guess. I went months. And then, one day, a few months ago, all my old anger came back, and Nell wouldn’t stop coming at me, you know, and before I knew it, I hit her. In the stomach, not anywhere dangerous; I had some control. She still put me back in the cell for a week.”
“Jesus,” Christine mutters.
“I know. I was so ashamed. I still feel like such a fucking… I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel like.”
“I don’t mean you,” Christine says, “although, yeah, kind of extreme behaviour. But you really think you’ve got it under control now?”
“Most of the time,” Faye says, nodding.
“I mean, she’s clearly setting you off. Making you regress, whenever she’s like this, because you’ve changed, but she hasn’t. And maybe you haven’t changed as much as you could have by now because she’s being stubborn. Your sponsor is supposed to modify their approach to you as you move through the programme. By this point it’s not meant to be such an oppositional relationship.”
“You mean, she’s still treating me like I’m in the first year?”
“Exactly.”
Faye turns the thought over. Flexes her fingers against her ankles; they’re probably getting tired by now. “Okay,” she says slowly, “but if that’s true, what can I do about it?”
“I can ask Abby to talk to her. She won’t listen to me — I’m still in the programme — but Abby’s quite senior.”
“Will she do it? She doesn’t even know me.”
“She knows me. And she’s one of my best friends.”
“You’re friends with a sponsor?”
Christine grins. “Abby’s not a sponsor, not any more. But I’m friends with Indira, too, and she is my sponsor. I know she’s, like, officially my Sister, but she’s also my sister. Her and Abby and Vicky and Paige. We’re a family. Formed right here, under this roof, in this weird fucking house.” Christine pauses for laughter, and gets it after a moment from a bemused Faye. “It doesn’t have to be the way it is between you and Nell.”
“That’s a nice thought,” Faye says.
“So,” Christine says, “the question is, if I talk to Abby, and Abby talks to Nell, and Nell lays off, maybe treats you more like a girl and less like an unexploded bomb, what will you do?”
“Stay calm?”
“Attagirl,” Christine says, smiling. “Shake on it?”
She shuffles closer on the chaise lounge and holds out her hand. Faye will have to release one of her hands in order to shake, and Christine wants her to do it soon, ideally before the pressure that’s built up inside the poor girl causes some kind of nuclear event. She does so, stretching out each finger as she lets go, loosening her elbows and shoulders and rolling her neck. Eventually they meet, shaking hands, and it becomes a hug, tight and warm, and as Christine shuffles backwards, releasing her, Faye leans upwards, towards Christine’s mouth.
“No,” Christine says, gently pushing Faye away. “That’s not what I’m here for.”
The girl, previously lost in the moment, returns to herself instantly, eyes widening. “Fuck!” she says, and shrinks away, steps off her seat to stand in the middle of the room, bisected by moonlight, clasping her hands in front of her. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Faye, it’s okay.”
“It’s just, with the other girls… God, you think I’m weird, don’t you? A pervert. A fucking rapist or something.”
“No!” Christine says. “No.” She claps her hands together, hoping the sharp sound will break into what looks like the beginning of the sort of spiral she’d hoped to arrest or avoid. The way Faye jumps suggests she’s at least partially successful. “Absolutely not.”
“I shouldn’t have kissed you.”
“You didn’t,” Christine says, smiling gently.
“I tried! And, um, with the other girls, I’ve done more than that.”
“Did they agree?”
“Yes!”
“Then that’s okay.”
“Is it? We’re— we’re men!”
“Are you?”
“I mean,” Faye says, on less certain ground, “we used to be.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes!”
“Whatever you are, whatever you used to be, looking for pleasure with someone is never wrong. As long as it’s consensual.”
“Fuck,” Faye says. “No. God. That’s not— I didn’t mean it like that. Shit, I sound so homophobic now. I didn’t—”
“What did you mean?”
“Can I have a second?”
Christine smiles. “Take your time.”
She nods, and walks around the room a little, clenching and unclenching her fists. A minute or so later, she stops, sits back down on the end of the chaise lounge, a chaste distance from Christine, and says, “I was a straight guy. Completely ordinary that way. Not in a lot of other ways, but I was straight. And when I look at you, or my— my Sisters, I see women. And even though I know, it’s like I don’t know. Or I can forget. You know?”
“I know,” Christine says. “I was the same.”
“You were?”
“While I was still getting used to this—” Christine indicates herself, “—getting used to me, this new body, this new identity, in my head I thought, I can be with the other girls and just not acknowledge who I’ve become. They’re women and I’m… me. And there was another girl who, for a while, thought the same way. I’m not telling you who,” Christine adds, grinning, remembering. “And it helped. It was a route to figuring out who I am now. One of many. And pleasure’s never a bad thing, if you both ask for it.”
“You, uh, don’t do that any more?”
“No. I and my… partner, we didn’t need the escape any more. Because that’s what we were doing: escaping from ourselves. And when we both became new people, new women, suddenly we had nothing and no-one to run from any more.” Christine leans her chin on her palm, following her old self through memories. “If my first year here, down there, was about letting go of my old self, of eventually accepting that, by the rules of this place, I needed to become a woman in order to truly kill him off, then my second year was finding out who she is, and becoming her. You know? Learning to live as her instead of in her.” She laughs. “You get the body before you get the soul.”
“I don’t feel like a girl yet,” Faye says, half to herself. “Bex says she does, but I don’t know if she’s serious or just trying to convince herself.”
“Do you still feel like a man? I know you called yourself one, before; do you feel it? Or is it just habit?”
Faye crosses her legs again, leans back against the dust sheet. “I would have said yes a month ago. Maybe two months. But now… it’s weird. In some ways, I don’t feel any different. But, at the same time, I really don’t feel like a man any more. And it’s not from looking like this. I don’t think so, anyway. A guy at my school was trans, and he always said that even though he had to see a girl when he looked in the mirror, he knew who he really was. I’m kind of jealous of that certainty now.”
“Were you friends with him?”
“No. I was a bastard to him.” Faye laughs. “A bitch, now, I guess. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been emptied out. I’m no-one.”
“You won’t always be.”
“Is that really possible? Can you really… become this? Not just accept it?”
Christine shrugs. “You can embrace it. It’s a choice, like everything here. And, sure, like everything here, the alternative choices are not enjoyable ones. But it’s a choice, nonetheless. What do you think, Faye? How are you going to choose?”
“I don’t know. I think… this? Being a girl? Like, even if I never feel it, there’s…” She scratches her chin, covering her hesitation. “There’s ways to live like this even if I never get there. I’ve been talking with Bex and we have some ideas. About the future. What we want to do.”
“Oh?” Christine says, radiating interest. Involve her in her own future, and she’s halfway there.
“Well, I’m good at, um, art, and she’s good with numbers, and Bella, Bex’s sponsor, she says we don’t have to do the same degrees we were doing before, so I’m going to do graphic design and she’s going to do accounting and we’re going to go into business together.”
“That’s great!” Christine says warmly, not having to fake her enthusiasm. It’s a good plan; better than hers, anyway.
“It’s just,” Faye says, deflating a little, “I don’t know. It all seems so… unfair?”
“I know, sweetie,” Christine says. “And it kind of is. We didn’t bring this on ourselves, after all. This was, clearly, something that was done to us. But I was a bad person. And so were you, if you’re honest with yourself.” Faye nods. “And that was unfair, too, on everyone around us.”
“Was this really the only way?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I definitely needed a hell of a kick to get out of all my bad habits, and there’s almost no bigger kick than this. And it’s worked. For me, for my Sisters, for my friends. I’m a better person now.” Say it again like you mean it, Christine. “And I’ll always be a better person.”
Faye, biting the end of a finger, nods again, and then blinks, reanimates fully. Gently she pats her face, feeling her damp cheek with the back of her hand. “Fuck!” she says. “I’ve ruined my makeup. I don’t care what Abby says to her, Nell will kill me for this.”
“Actually,” Christine says, “she doesn’t have to.” She pulls her phone out of her shoulder bag, drops into the group chat and types out a quick message. The reply comes back instantly, and she grins. “Why don’t you come upstairs, to my room, and Paige will get you all fixed up? You’ll be even more beautiful than before. You can really show off in front of Bex.”
Christine watches a blush bloom on Faye’s cheeks, and the girl knows it, because she tries to hide behind her hand. Busted, girly, Christine thinks.
“But, wait,” Faye says, frowning, “I’m not allowed upstairs.”
“I’m saying you are,” Christine says. “Just for tonight. And it’s my room, so what I say goes.”
“I’ll have to go past Nell, anyway,” Faye says glumly, “and she’ll see.”
“No,” Christine says, “you won’t.”
She stands and holds out her hand and Faye, confused, takes it, and follows her out of the conservatory and into the corridor. They stop together in front of a locked door and Christine holds up her phone again, brings up her private app, scrolls through until she finds the lock for the stairs that lead straight up to the second-floor storerooms, and taps. In front of a wide-eyed Faye, the lock rolls over.
Christine raises a finger to her lips. “Ssshhhh,” she says.
Chapter 10: Butterflies
Notes:
Content warning: discussion of abusive families
Chapter Text
2019 October 25
Friday
Paige is waiting for them outside Christine’s room, holding her clutch in front of her and tapping her fingers on the leather, leaning against the wall with one foot raised, the skirt of her butterfly-patterned dress flaring out against her elevated thigh. When she hears them approach, she pushes away from the wall, and the spiderwebs of gemstones in her stockings catch the ugly yellow light from the sconces and throw it out in rainbow colours at the walls, the floor, and Christine and Faye themselves.
Christine’s used to Paige, used to her effortless elegance and frankly unfair level of beauty, but Faye’s sharp intake of breath and embarrassed squeak remind her of how she used to be around her, back when Paige was flourishing and Christine was still learning the basics.
Just once, it would be nice to get that kind of reaction out of someone.
“Hey, Paige,” Christine says, taking the hand Paige offers and squeezing it gently. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Paige says quietly. “Nell just set me off. Vicky, Abby, they brought me back.”
“I’m sorry,” Faye says. “This is all my fault.”
“No,” Christine says, “it’s Nell’s. I’m going to talk to Abby about her.” She unlocks her door and kicks it open, wishing she hadn’t left so many of Paige’s dresses in such a messy pile. “Don’t say it, Paige. I know. I’ll take better care of your shit.”
“It’s fine,” Paige says airily, retrieving the dress bags she hung from the light fitting in the corridor and throwing them onto the bed as she marches in. “I have new things for you. For both of you.”
“Me as well?” Christine says.
“Yes, you as well! You need to change; you have sad girl on your dress. No offence, Faye.”
Faye just bites her lip and shakes her head. The reality of Paige — six foot tall, incredible dress sense, Instagram looks and practical attitude — can be overwhelming for people who haven’t yet been exposed to her, and that’s before she dresses them, puts makeup on them, or starts enthusing about her latest hyperfixation. Christine, by contrast, comes in a neat, instantly comprehensible little package. Just add anxiety.
Paige sits at Christine’s vanity and starts sorting through her makeup. “You don’t mind if we give Faye a few things, do you?” she says. “Eyeliner and stuff. You have a lot.”
“As long as they’re not already open, you can do what you like. Aunt Bea added me to the accounts.” Meaning Christine can order as much makeup and as many clothes as she feels she needs, within reason. A privilege Paige never had, which is probably why Dorley Hall is still intact and not, for example, crumbling under an apocalyptic pile of dresses.
Paige nods and continues dividing Christine’s makeup into piles. “How did you get up here, anyway? You didn’t come up the main stairs.”
Christine laughs and pulls off her dress — which, yes, does turn out to have sad girl on it, just under her bust, where she couldn’t see. “We came up the back stairs, the ones that come out by the old pantry.”
“Aren’t those normally locked?”
Damn. Of course Paige knows that. Below the cis floors, most doors are kept locked — Christine and Paige got their biometrics added to the access lists a few months ago — but the stairs from ground to second host four easily broken single-pane unbarred windows that lead to a short drop onto an old water tank in the courtyard, and thus are linked to Aunt Bea and the senior staff only; not even Abby can get in. An uncomfortable reminder that Faye is still a prisoner. Christine and Paige, though they might not have official access to everywhere under Dorley’s roof, can still walk out of the front door. “They were unlocked,” Christine says, smiling and dropping her soiled dress into the hamper by the bed.
Paige turns a sceptical eye on Christine, which only briefly flickers down to her chest. Gotcha, Christine thinks; the old game of near-naked chicken. She doesn’t get to win often.
“They’re never unlocked,” Paige says.
“Ask her,” Christine says, sitting down on the bean bag chair and pulling her legs up under her.
Both of them look at Faye, who is having multiple reactions simultaneously: to the size of the room, possibly — the second-floor rooms are much bigger than the ones Faye and her cohort will recently have moved into, and have their own bathrooms — or perhaps still to Paige, goddess of the second floor.
“Um,” Faye says. “Should I be looking away?”
“Why?”
“You’re naked, Christine,” Paige says, rolling her eyes.
“Underwear means not naked,” Christine protests, twanging a bra strap.
“What were you saying in the kitchen? About bombarding these poor girls with new experiences too quickly?”
“Oh. Sorry, Faye. You’re not used to this?”
“Only when we’re—” Faye starts, but then she looks at Paige and clams up.
“Only when you’re with someone you’re about to be intimate with?” Christine asks, choosing the most tiresomely appropriate phrasing. Must be a latent sponsor gene activating. Faye nods vigorously. “Sorry. Habit. I’m too used to just doing whatever around other girls.”
“But we’re not g—”
“Don’t say it,” Paige says quickly.
“I’m sorry!” Faye blurts out, looking at the floor, her demeanour almost instantly regressing.
“Come here,” Christine says, standing and stepping forward, beckoning the girl into her embrace, and feeling her breasts compressed against her chest by Faye’s; still a slightly novel feeling, after all this time. “It’s okay, Faye. But you need to watch out for that. I know I let it go downstairs, when it was just us, but Paige and me? We’re women. So’s Vicky, so’s Abby, so’s Indira. So’re most people around here.”
“I know,” Faye says, slightly muffled. “It’s just hard to get used to.”
“Then stop letting your brain override your eyes,” Paige suggests, and poses. “You see a man here?”
Christine glances behind her, to see what made Faye’s eyes widen and her breath catch. “Put those away, Paige,” she says, “or you’ll have someone’s eye out.”
Paige pulls the bust of her dress back into place and sticks her tongue out at Christine. “Says the girl running around in her bra.”
“Ignore Paige. She’s a monster.”
“Rude.”
“This is something Aunt Bea will want you to get used to,” Christine says, stepping out of the hug. Paige, modesty restored, unpacks one of the dresses. “It doesn’t come easily to begin with, but she will want you to feel comfortable around women. And, just so you know—” she wags a finger, “—three girls can change clothes in the same room without anything erotic happening.” Paige snorts, amused. “Now, go see the tall lady. She has a dress for you.”
“I do,” Paige says, holding out something in red and black.
While Paige dresses and gilds Faye, Christine carefully removes her makeup and starts reapplying the basics, which after a week of practise is something she can manage well enough without supervision.
“How did you know?” Faye says, in a tone of voice that suggests she’s remaining very still while Paige works on something sensitive, somewhere on her face.
“Know what?” Christine says, rubbing primer into her jawline and idly remembering when, in another life, it felt scratchy under her fingers.
“That you’re a woman?”
“Remember I said it was a choice? I chose. It was either that, or fight Dorley. And that meant fighting Indira, who I already loved, even back then. She was pretty much the first person ever to show me kindness, after all.” Christine dabs under her eyes, grateful that the dark circles from last week have receded. “And what would I be fighting her for? The chance to remain that stupid kid? Nah. Screw that guy.”
“Womanhood is both an identity and a social position,” Paige says, more slowly than usual; she’s concentrating on Faye’s eyes. “I discovered quite quickly that I enjoyed occupying the social position of womanhood. Actually being a woman, in my head, is a little more conditional. But, one day, out on campus, chatting with someone after class, I realised that he was responding to me as a man would to a woman, and that I was fine with that.” She shrugs. “Sometimes you don’t need to actively choose a gender. You can just be you, and accessorise.”
“Ask her again next week,” Christine suggests, “and she’ll have changed her answer.”
“And then there’s Vicky,” Paige continues. “She’s simply a girl.”
“You mean,” Faye says, “she was already trans when she got here?”
“She says she wasn’t,” Christine says. “And I believe her. I’ve shown her every egg meme I can find, and she said none of them were relatable.”
“If you’re looking for a big moment,” Paige says, “where you suddenly realise, ‘Oh, I’m a girl,’ then you may be disappointed. For some of us, it never happens. For others, it happens gradually.”
“And some of us make it happen,” Christine says firmly. “Paige, I think I’ve done all I can without making my face actively worse.”
“Okay,” she says. “Good timing. Stand for me, please, Faye.”
Faye obliges, and looks like she would be biting her lip if it wouldn’t spoil her lipstick. Paige has her in a knee-length black dress with red trim around the bust and the hemline, and has done her face to match.
“Bex is going to love that dress,” Christine says, and enjoys the burn on Faye’s cheeks as Paige guides her away from the vanity and over to the wardrobe, which opens out into two full-length mirrors. Paige, prescient, is supporting Faye by a shoulder, so when the girl staggers a little on her borrowed heels, knocked off her balance by her own reflection, she doesn’t fall.
“Is that… me?” Faye says, waving experimentally at herself.
“What do you think?” Christine says, as Paige grins the smug but enchanting grin she always does when she has successfully inflicted fashion on a fresh victim.
“Incredible,” Faye says slowly, unable to keep a smile from spreading across her face.
“I think we have another girl on our hands, Christine,” Paige says, watching Faye smooth her elegant dress down around her hips.
Christine steps up from the desk chair, grabs Paige’s free hand and pulls her away from Faye. “Now, make me beautiful,” she says.
“Your wish,” Paige says, tightening her grip on Christine’s hand and yanking her over to the sofa, pressing her down into the cushion. “My command.”
Faye says something muffled about needing to pee and shuts herself in the bathroom, leaving Paige and Christine alone, and Christine wants to make a smart comment, but Paige is already frowning, clearly daunted by the sheer amount of work ahead of her. Paige, taller already than Christine and sitting at a higher elevation, leans down over her such that Christine has to look up, and the angle puts their faces rather closer than Christine’s been used to recently. Paige’s slow, steady breath warms her face.
The woman’s skin still has no flaws. Not even a pimple. Unfair.
She does have a long strand of hair falling down across her face, though, and no amount of blowing upwards will tame it, so Christine reaches carefully past Paige’s busy hands and tucks it back behind her ear, where it belongs.
“Thank you,” Paige says, as she paints.
“It was in your way.”
Paige’s mouth twitches, amused. “Not for that.”
“What for, then?”
“For Nell. For making sure I was okay. For helping get Pippa under control.”
Christine tries to smile but Paige puts a warning finger on the edge of her mouth: don’t mess with art. “That was mainly Abby and Vicky, though.”
Paige stops brushing, pulls back. “They wouldn’t have been there if not for you.”
“They would have!” Christine says, confused.
“They’re my friends because they’re your friends, Christine. Abby, especially, would barely know my name without you. People coalesce around you; you must have noticed.”
“Paige? Are you really okay?”
“Yes,” she says, nodding to herself and fetching another palette. “Just feeling like maybe I concentrated on the wrong thing.”
“Paige—”
“It’s okay. Maybe… maybe you have to learn this from me, and I have to learn something from you.”
“I can give you lessons in fucking everything up, if you like.”
“Quiet,” Paige scolds, and leans in to quickly kiss her above her hairline. “I’m working.”
“Yes, boss,” Christine whispers. Why the kiss?
The makeup doesn’t take long, and while Christine inspects her painted face — she’d almost forgotten how good Paige is when she really goes at it; the party the other week was nothing compared to this — Paige retrieves the new dress from the bed and lifts off the protective bag.
“Shit,” Christine says, finally witnessing the dress in all its glory. “No, Paige, I can’t.” The dress is not only more elaborate and brightly coloured than Christine’s old dress, it’s just like Paige’s, with the same cut and butterfly pattern, but in contrasting colours. A robe for a goddess, presented to a commoner. “You want me to wear the same thing as you? Paige, please. Seriously. There’s no way I can pull it off.”
Paige hangs the dress up on the hook by the bathroom door and carefully cups Christine’s cheek in her hand. A forefinger on her jaw, a thumb tucked gently under her chin. Christine’s skin glows hot under the contact.
“You are beautiful,” Paige says, smiling. “How many times must I tell you before you believe me?”
“Maybe a couple of hundred more,” Christine says, eyeing the dress. It’s incredible, she has to admit; it’s just that it requires someone like Paige to pull it off.
“I’m not taking no for an answer,” Paige says, smiling. “Arms up.”
Christine knows she’s lost. Any real resistance would be token, anyway; no Indira to save her today. She complies, and Paige drops the dress over her head, carefully guides it past her face, smooths the fabric across Christine’s bust and belly, and billows the skirt around her thighs. Wordlessly she hands Christine a pack of jewelled stockings, and when Christine sits on the stool and starts rolling one of them up her left leg, Paige starts work on her right, hooking them in place and pulling out the creases in the nylon, resting a hand for a moment on the inside of Christine’s thigh, but moving it before she can comment. Shoes are next — a low heel, thank God — and Christine slips them on and stands up, her heart already in her chest at the thought of seeing herself in the mirrors, an imitation Paige, next to the real thing.
“Sorry I took so long,” Faye says, ducking around the bathroom door, back into the room. “I’m still not used to redoing my— oh.” She pauses in miming the action of tucking when she sees Christine standing uncertain by the sofa, Paige’s steadying hand on the small of her back.
“Faye?” Paige says. “What do you think?” But Faye’s only response is a sharp breath and a high-pitched noise, and Paige giggles, proud once again.
Maybe Christine can get that reaction out of people, sometimes. With help.
* * *
“Hey,” Faye whispers, as they descend the stairs — the normal stairs, the ones they, bar Faye, are actually allowed to use — to the ground floor, “when we see Bex, you should call her Rebecca.”
“Oh?” Christine says, managing to tear her eyes away from her reflection in the windows; Paige did a really good job.
“Bex is… it’s my name for her.”
“Does she have a name for you?” Paige asks, exchanging looks with Christine.
Faye blushes and says, looking down into the bust of her borrowed dress, “She calls me Effie.”
“That,” Christine says, “is ridiculously adorable.”
They round the corner at the bottom of the stairs into the main foyer, their shoes tap-tap-tapping on the tile, catching glimpses of themselves in the night-dark windows and, in Christine’s case, resisting the urge to pose.
The kitchen comes up all too soon, and while Paige fiddles with the notoriously twitchy biometric lock on the door — it gets weird when it’s had a lot of fingerprints to process, and there are a lot of people in Dorley Hall tonight — Christine takes Faye gently aside.
“How are you feeling, Faye?”
“Good, I think.”
“Confident?”
“Definitely not.”
“Ready to see your sponsor again?”
“Definitely not.”
“Let me text Abby, then, and ask her to ask her to keep away from you for a little bit.”
“All right.”
Christine, a veteran phone operator, texts with one hand and with the other turns Faye towards her reflection in the large glass doors that lead out to campus. Catches the girl smiling at herself, again.
“Feeling like a girl yet?” Christine whispers.
Faye twists, examining herself in the glass. “Maybe.”
“Good enough.”
“Was it Paige?” Faye asks.
“Was it Paige what?”
“Who you used to…”
“Oh. I understand. And I’m not telling you.”
“You seem so close.”
“We are. But we’re also pretty different.”
“But—”
“Ready to go?” Paige says, forcing Faye into silence. Christine nods.
By unspoken agreement, Christine and Paige bracket Faye protectively as they pass through the kitchen and into the brightly lit dining hall. A mere ten seconds or so off from seeing her own reflection in the window and feeling quite good about herself, Christine almost wants everyone instantly to fall silent and gaze at the three of them in awe and wonder, but the desire dissipates the very moment she feels eyes on her. She feels, suddenly, clownishly unfeminine next to Paige — back in her accustomed position — and wants nothing more than to scuttle over to their table and hide from everyone, bury her nerves in wine. Butterflies in her belly, butterflies on her back.
Indira, bless her and curse her equally, wolf whistles, triggering a wave of imitations from the room.
Aunt Bea stands up from her chair at the central table, silencing the hubbub without having to say a word, and approaches them, causing Christine’s heart to cease its embarrassed bounce and switch to a nervous one.
“Christine,” she says quietly. “A quick chat?”
“Yeah,” Christine says. “Oh; give me a second.” She points as subtly as she can to Paige and Faye, splitting off and heading for a group of girls at a table on the other side of the room, sitting with a few sponsors Christine recognises — but no Nell. A girl who can only be Rebecca greets Faye with a gentle kiss on the cheek, and a careful hug that preserves the lines of Faye’s dress. They release each other and Rebecca talks excitedly with Paige while Faye turns brighter and brighter shades of red and glances around the room for something less effusive to look at. She finds Christine, who gives her a small wave and then nods to Aunt Bea that she’s ready for whatever she has to say.
“Sit down, please,” Aunt Bea says, walking Christine over to the kitchen table and pulling out a chair. Wordlessly, Christine complies. “You took a second-year out of the permitted area, without consulting her sponsor. And you involved Paige. Why?”
There are several baskets of bread sticks on the table, ready to be delivered to the dining hall when dinner proper commences. Christine fetches a bread stick from the nearest one, turns it over in her fingers, bites off a small piece and chews it. She needs something to do with her hands while she thinks, and she can’t have a cigarette.
“Remember how Francesca was, with Paige?” she says. Francesca, Paige’s sponsor, remained hostile to her charge through most of their second year, for reasons none of them could understand, and it took Paige petitioning Aunt Bea directly to get her removed from duty. Paige hasn’t had an official sponsor for months. “Nell’s worse.”
“The other sponsors have noted that Nell’s approach is somewhat antagonistic,” Aunt Bea says.
“More than somewhat,” Christine says flatly. “She’s triggering Faye. Whether on purpose or by accident, I don’t know, but that makes her either cruel or incompetent. Take your pick as to which is worse.”
“Triggering her how?”
“May I be blunt?”
“For the moment.”
“We fucked up,” Christine says, and breaks her bread stick in half. “And I know I’m not trained in stuff like this, but I know my own life, and my guess is that Faye comes from an abusive family. Assuming she needed to come here at all — which is a decision out of my hands and over my head — she needed a completely different sponsor. Someone capable of dealing with those kinds of triggers. She needed an Indira, someone able to redirect her anger without turning irritation into outburst; she got Nell, who seems like another Francesca. Faye told me stories about Nell, how she ‘helped’ her early on, and yeah, sure, while she conceptualises it that way, I don’t. What she described to me… Look, I know we have to do what we have to do, but there are ways to do it without…” She stumbles over her words, trails off, struggles to express her thoughts without implicating the foundations of the programme, something to which Aunt Bea is rather attached; and so, if she’s honest, is she.
“I thought you were being blunt? Say what you need to say, Christine.”
Fuck it. “I think we took a traumatised girl — or boy, or whoever — and recreated the circumstances of her abuse. Her sponsor, the stand-in for her parents, shouts and yells and locks her up and even knocks her down, seemingly at random! That’s not reform; that’s just… changing the colour of the wallpaper in purgatory. I’m amazed, no, I’m dumbfounded she made it through the first year without washing out. Or worse! And that would have been a tragedy because, Aunt Bea, she is such a sweet kid.”
“Hmm. A degree of hostility, even outright aggression, can be warranted during the early stages of the programme.”
“Can be. Case-by-case assessment, right? You don’t get a Christine out of my, uh, raw material by using the same methods that got you an Edy, yeah? I think Nell went in angry, took it out on Faye, and never stopped. Or maybe she saw something in Faye that made her think acting like that was somehow the right move. Like I said: cruel or incompetent. And, I shouldn’t need to point out, Faye isn’t in the early stages of the programme. She’s two months into her second year and her sponsor, who is supposed to be her friend at this point, is still triggering her. You know what? I think she reformed despite us. Not because of us. Maybe her friendship with Rebecca saved her; maybe Rebecca’s sponsor, too. But not Nell.” Christine throws both halves of her bread stick down on the table. “Look: Paige and I both come from homes that were emotionally abusive. Occasionally physically so. We both responded very poorly to raised voices when we came here, and I think it’s no surprise that of the two of us, it’s me who doesn’t flinch any more when somebody shouts, and Paige who does. Because I got Indira and she got Francesca. And Faye got Nell.”
Bea picks up one of the scattered halves of bread stick and regards it. “Are you done?”
I might well be. “Yes.”
She smiles. “Thank you, Christine,” she says.
Christine, realising she’s stood halfway out of her chair with both palms planted on the table, sits down sharply and says, “Uh?”
“A good sponsor must know how to tailor her approach to her charge,” Aunt Bea says, almost absently. “At the very least, she must know when to withdraw. I will talk to Nell. I’m not sure I agree with your assessments regarding her conduct during the first year — although I will look into it, I promise, and I will be quite thorough — but she does seem overdue for a re-evaluation of her methods.” She sighs. “We’re having staffing problems. Were you aware?”
“Um, no. Not really.”
“It’s hard to assign appropriate sponsors at the best of times, and normally Maria would be taking a more active monitoring role, but with the large intake this year and the amicable departure of several of our more experienced sponsors, and with her research commitments to the university, she simply hasn’t had the time and we haven’t had the people. I can’t solve the latter problem, but I’m going to solve the former.” Aunt Bea nods to herself. “I’m going to assign Indira as monitor.”
“Indira?” Christine says. “My Indira? I mean, obviously, she’s great, but—”
“Do you believe in the programme, Christine?”
Christine, taken aback, says, “Yes,” automatically.
“And you are making progress in the areas we discussed?”
“Yes. Every morning.”
“Then I think you, like Paige, have evolved beyond the need for a sponsor. Don’t you?”
“Oh. Um. Yes?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Bea says, “you haven’t graduated yet. But you have a strong support network, and you will, I imagine, continue to see Indira socially.”
“Yes. Definitely. She’s my sister,” Christine adds defensively. She hates that she’s fallen into exactly the sort of relationship she was supposed to have with her sponsor, that her friend group is composed entirely of people inside Dorley; that she is, as Stef said, a true believer. But she is what they made her. The other choices were always worse. “She’s my family.”
“Of course,” Aunt Bea says, and Christine could swear there’s genuine pride in her voice. It still doesn’t always feel good to please Aunt Bea, but it’s probably better than the alternative.
“Indira’s new role will, of course, come with a pay raise.”
“Good for Dira,” Christine mutters, still coming to terms with the concept: no sponsor. Very nearly free.
“I do hope so,” Bea says, placing the bread stick half carefully on the table. “And I’d be interested in your read on Faye. How is she progressing?”
“She’s a sweet kid,” Christine says again, distracted.
“I mean, how do you think her gender is developing? Out of everyone, bar perhaps her friend, Rebecca, you’ve had the most intimate conversation with her.”
Christine clears her head. Pictures Faye trying to kiss her, talking nervously about Bex, dumbfounded by her reflection. “I think she’s warming to womanhood.”
Aunt Bea nods. “You have an instinct for sponsorship, it seems. You proved quite adept at gaining that girl’s trust.”
“Hey,” Christine says, raising a hand, “I wasn’t trying to gain her trust—”
“I know.”
“I just… She was hurting. I needed to help her.”
Bea smiles. “How much you’ve changed, Christine.”
* * *
Christine doesn’t get to sit down straight away. Indira, not content with announcing her presence by wolf whistle when they first came down, makes Christine stand at the side of the room with Paige, to show off their matching dresses and makeup. Positioning them under one of the more dramatic landscape paintings, Dira busies herself with arranging them both, conveniently too distracted to notice Christine’s nonverbal but increasingly desperate pleas to let her out of this obligation. So Christine acquiesces, but when she and Paige pose with each other — Paige gracefully, Christine awkwardly — it’s not just Indira’s flash that goes off.
“Make sure you edit the pictures before you post them,” Aunt Bea calls out.
Christine catches Hasan asking Dira why that would be necessary, and Dira starts rattling off a practised line about Dorley Hall’s draconian privacy policies. Christine misses the end of it because Vicky starts yelling out suggestions for more elaborate poses and Paige, clearly having enormous fun, shamelessly abuses the leverage granted by her extra height to manoeuvre Christine into position for each one, waiting for everyone to get their photos before moving on to the next.
“Did you plan this?” Christine whispers to Paige, as the taller girl leans down to kiss her on the cheek; thanks, Vicky, for that idea.
“No,” Paige says, her breath flowing lightly across Christine’s face and down her neck, igniting a warmth in Christine’s chest that is only part memory. “But it’s exciting, isn’t it? Being the centre of attention.”
“I want to die.”
“You big baby,” Paige says, and nips her once more on the cheek before straightening up.
Christine’s fingers twitch. She wants to rub her face where Paige kissed her, but almost everyone looking on knows they have a history together and she doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction. There’s almost definitely a betting pool on whether or not they’ll get back together — not that they were necessarily together in the way, say, Vicky and Lorna are — because the sponsors are just like that.
“Now do Charlie’s Angels!” Maria shouts from the next table. Her face is already a little red and she’s being lightly supported by Adam’s sponsor Edy; with her nightly obligations to Aaron discharged, she’s been at the wine.
“What’s that?” Christine yells back, mostly to be annoying. Maria, the oldest sponsor, can be prickly about her age.
Paige says loudly, “We need a third!” and before Christine can protest that a) she genuinely doesn’t know what a Charlie’s Angels pose even is and b) she would quite like to sit down and get a chance to recover from the events of the last twenty minutes, Vicky’s joined them, interposing herself and pointing with finger guns out into the room. Christine follows her lead, but when the flashes of two dozen phone cameras die down she breaks formation and slumps into an open chair before anyone can make her do anything even more embarrassing, although she struggles to imagine what they could possibly pick that would be worse.
You okay? Abby mouths at her from across the table, and Christine nods that, yes, despite everything, she’s fine, or she will be, once her heart retreats from her throat. You look amazing, Abby mouths. Christine smiles and, temporarily too tired to lean forward and talk normally, forms a heart with her fingers, earning a delighted beam from Abby.
She permits herself a moment to close her eyes. She doesn’t know what to conclude about her conversation with Aunt Bea. Sure, Nell’s going to be re-evaluated, whatever that means, and Indira’s going to be assigned to watch over the sponsors, but Christine’s come away with the uncomfortable impression that she’s being recruited. Was this how it was for Pippa? Did she, one day, show concern for someone and suddenly find herself facing down Aunt Bea, congratulating her for her empathy and implying that she may have a productive future in boy acquisition and torture?
Christine’s actually ahead of the game, there: she’s managed to put someone in the basement before she even graduates the programme. Granted, not a boy and, granted, situation normal all fucked up, but still; Christine is already, unofficially, recruiting for Dorley.
A buzz against her hip: her phone. She extracts it from her purse and finds a text from Abby, who is waving her own at Christine with what she probably thinks is an extremely clandestine look on her face.
Across the table, Abby grins at her and taps exaggeratedly at her phone, erasing the conversation. Christine resolves to check it later, to make sure she did it properly. Can’t trust anyone’s opsec but her own.
“Christine,” Hasan says, shifting his chair closer to hers now that she’s done with her texting. She gives him her attention; he gives her his broad smile, the one she’s willing to bet Indira fell in love with long before she came to Dorley. “How have you been? Cruel and unusual punishment aside, of course.”
It takes Christine a second to realise he’s talking about the ridiculous poses Indira, Paige and Vicky made her pull and not, for example, the cruel and unusual punishments that are inflicted with some regularity under the dining hall. “I’m doing pretty good, actually,” she says, and nods gratefully at Indira, who is pouring Christine a large glass of white wine. “First year Linguistics is going well. Early days, I know, but so far it’s everything I hoped.”
“I’m glad,” he says. “This one—” he intercepts Indira on her way back to her chair and hefts her onto his lap; she squeals, “—said you were doing a lot better this year.”
The fiction, as far as Hasan is concerned, is that Christine’s first year as a student at Saints — her second at Dorley; first above ground — was a foundation year. Hasan thinks Indira discovered Christine at a support group on campus, struggling with her transition, and took her under her wing. Dira argued for and got Christine a place in Dorley Hall, the residence for women from disadvantaged backgrounds, and essentially adopted her. There she could study for her foundation year in peace, surrounded by supportive friends, and without the abusive family life and dysphoric depression that afflicted her during her A-levels.
It’s not a million miles from the truth. Christine was a mess when Dira first picked her up. The deception, and their particular choice of story, make her uncomfortable, though.
“You look fantastic, by the way,” Hasan’s saying. “Really stunning. That dress is amazing! And I know this isn’t something you’re supposed to say, but you were so worried about it when we met, so I’m just going to say it: I’d never know.”
“Really?” Christine says, unable to stop herself greedily absorbing reassurance from someone outside her Sisterly circle. That she’d been struggling with her womanhood when she first met Hasan is not part of the lie, although she wishes it was: it was her first time off-campus as a woman, and her already shaky confidence took a fatal knock when a drunk man on the train clocked her, shouted at her, and pursued her, Indira, and their friends through two carriages before they could find a member of staff to officially encourage him to please, sir, sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. Christine arrived in London in tears, and will forever feel a little guilty that the first time Indira’s mother got to see her daughter, alive and well, she was busy comforting a crying, insecure little thing who wasn’t even sure, back then, if she was a woman at all.
Sad girl on her dress.
“Really.” He says it sincerely, kindly, like he knows exactly how much it means to her.
“Thank you!” Christine says, pushing warmth into the words by pitching down and expending a little effort to move her voice from its usual slightly lazy top-of-the-throat position to the front of her mouth. The sort of intonation that can, with enough breath behind it, fill a cathedral (or the large bathrooms attached to the Saints rec centre, where Christine did a lot of her voice training, after hours). “And you do, too. Look great, I mean. Like, really, really good.” He’s dressed semi-formal, but the shirt is fitted and he has a great figure underneath. He’s tall, taller than Indira — who, like most Dorley women, is taller than average — and the way he casually embraces his girlfriend makes Christine’s throat tighten whenever she thinks about it. He probably makes Indira feel so safe.
Hasan gives her a mock-bow, the deepest he can manage without dislodging Dira, who is absorbing their conversation with obvious and slightly tipsy pleasure. Indira considers Christine to be effectively her family and has suggested that if she ever wants to consider the Chetry family officially her own, all she has to do is ask. Aasha, Indira’s mother, asks after Christine weekly, and occasionally shyly forwards memes to her newest daughter’s Sister on WhatsApp, along with local gossip and sincere encouragement.
Christine, who never wants to see her own family again, who doesn’t bother checking the info packs on them any more, has considered asking, several times.
After a few minutes of small talk, Dira excuses herself to the bathroom and Hasan leans forward, close enough to Christine to touch her, and says quietly, “Thank you for being there for her. I think she really needed someone like you. Getting to be your big sister, having you be hers—” he glances towards the bathrooms, smiling, “—it’s been healing for her. She never had that, growing up; just a lot of heartache none of us could ever seem to resolve. Siji loves her, of course, but didn’t even know she was still alive, let alone her sister and not her brother, until last year. So, Christine, thank you.”
He stands and holds open his arms, inviting Christine to step into his embrace. She does so, grateful for the excuse not to look at his beautiful, kind face. She hates the lies so much. Can’t imagine ever feeling comfortable about them, for all that they are necessary and, for Indira, freeing: she can be with her childhood crush, she can be a sister to Siji and a daughter to her mother and father; she can be alive, and all it takes is a handful of falsehoods. Indira was always a girl. She ran away out of fear. She chose this. The smallest price to pay for so much happiness.
Christine hugs him more tightly. A silent apology.
“I was lucky she found me,” Christine says, taking refuge from the lies in absolute honesty. “She changed my life. Saved it, probably. And you!” she adds, as they separate and return to their seats. “Look at you! Last time I saw you in the flesh, you were wearing that huge coat and making shy eyes at her across the garden, asking me to ask her if she possibly maybe happens to remember Hasan, the boy from three doors down, who thinks she looks just gorgeous.”
He laughs. “I was lucky, too,” he says. “Lucky she remembered me, lucky she was interested in me. Lucky I didn’t take the overseas job and stayed home, when I heard she was alive, when I heard she was… her.” His smile deepens as, on cue, Indira returns from the bathroom, Abby in tow, and perches herself on Hasan’s knee again, encircling him in her arms.
“What are you two talking about?” she says.
Hasan kisses her. “You. And I really hate to do this—” he places a hand on each of Dira’s hips and lifts her off his lap; Christine’s throat tightens again, “—but now I have to visit the little boys’ room.”
They watch him go.
“Goodness, I love that boy,” Indira says.
“He’s absolutely smitten with you,” Christine says.
Dira can’t stop the giggle from bubbling up. “I know! I’m so lucky.”
“Yeah. We talked about luck. You seem to bring it with you.”
“Glad to be of service,” she says, taking Christine’s first two fingers, the ones that twitch, and gently massaging them. “He’s always been kind, you know,” she continues, looking away, living somewhere in the part of her past Christine carefully doesn’t ask about, “even when we were kids. Even when I wasn’t always so kind in return.” She shakes her head. “Of course, these days he says he must always have known I was a girl, deep down, and that’s why he was so drawn to me.”
“Why do you think he was drawn to you?”
“He’s a lot like you, Christine. He can’t bear to see someone in pain.”
“God. Dira, I hate lying to him.”
Indira reaches for her glass, refilled by Hasan while she was away. “If, knowing everything, I’d go back and do it all again, then are they really lies?”
“I, uh, I’m not sure.”
“I know you’re the same. I know the things you regret all took place before you came here.”
“Mostly,” Christine says. Dira applies gentle pressure to the tips of her fingers, rolls them in her own, draws out from Christine something that’s been lurking inside her since she talked to Faye. “I’d be less of a bitch, if I got to do it all again. Yell at you less. Cooperate a bit more, a bit earlier. I made life so difficult for you, for a while.”
Indira laughs quietly. “That would have been nice. You called me such terrible things.”
Christine leans forward, balls her hand into a fist, gathering Dira’s fingers inside it and squeezing. “I’m really sorry. I was awful to you.”
“I love all the things that make you you, Teenie. Even the things you’d rather forget. I’ve never once been anything other than glad I was chosen to be your sponsor.”
“Actually,” Christine says, “you might want to chat with Aunt Bea soon.”
“Oh?”
“You’re getting new responsibilities. You’re officially relieved of the burden of Christine Hale.”
“Oh, sweetie!” Indira squeals. “I’m so proud of you!” She hooks her free hand around Christine’s shoulder and pulls on the fingers Christine’s still grasping, drawing her up and into her arms. “You’ve become an amazing woman,” she whispers.
“I wouldn’t be here without you,” Christine replies, not knowing if she means I wouldn’t be a girl without you, or I wouldn’t be alive without you. Both are Indira’s gifts to her, and she cherishes them.
“And you were never a burden, Christine. Never ever.”
That’s something Christine could stand to hear more often.
Dira gives her a final squeeze. “I’m going to go talk to Aunt Bea before Hasan gets back,” she says. “If they come round with the starters, make sure we both get one. You know what I like; he likes the same.” She pecks Christine lightly, on the back of her jaw. “Kisskiss.”
“Kiss,” Christine whispers back, pressing her cheek hard against her sister’s, blinking her eyes clear.
* * *
“So, Hasan seems like a nice guy,” Paige says quietly to Christine.
“Hmm?” Christine says, mouth full. Unlike Paige, who’s been on a diet since the start of the second year, Christine maintains her usual weight by forgetting to eat some days, so when something gets put in front of her that’s actually pretty good, she’ll generally eat and keep eating until every plate in the local area is clear. She picked the curry for her main course — given the choice, Christine will always pick the curry — and it’s a lot better than she could have made with the same ingredients. Definitely better than what her cohort managed, last year. “Oh, yeah, he’s sweet, right?”
“He likes you a lot,” Paige continues, elbowing her gently in the ribs.
“Hey!” Christine says. “Be careful with the bits of me that have food in! They might burst!”
“Pig,” Paige says with a grin. Christine replies by leaning close and doing her best porcine impression, which causes Paige to respond in kind and the rest of the table to give them an interesting selection of looks.
When eventually she finds her dinner straining against the fabric of her fairly snug dress she sits back and surveys the room. They aren’t the only friend group who’ve staked out one of the smaller tables in the corners. On the far side, Jodie from down the hall — who spots Christine looking at her and exchanges waves — sits in a surprisingly colourful dress with her sponsor, Donna, and some of their friends. At least one of them isn’t a Dorley girl, and thus is probably a vampire enthusiast; looking harder, Christine recognises xem from Jodie’s World of Darkness streams, and catches Jodie leaning over and pointing her out. Another wave. She probably should go say hi, later; ask where xe got xyr vampire teeth.
Most of the other small tables host people Christine doesn’t know, or knows only by face. Graduates, probably, who live upstairs, off-campus, or away from Almsworth, having moved on from Saints as well as Dorley. People who live in the real world. Scary.
Faye and Rebecca catch her sweeping the room and Christine waves again.
In the middle, at the largest table, with Aunt Bea at its head, are most of the sponsors whose charges are unable to participate in the birthday event due to being locked up in the basement. There’s also a scattering of women and nonbinary people who Christine mostly knows, or knows of; the terminally Dorleyed, the ones who haven’t left, can’t bring themselves to leave, or return every chance they get. It’s like Lorna said once: when all your friends are queer, you forget how to relate to cishets. What if all your friends were resocialised in a secret underground facility?
Pippa, sitting near Maria and looking somewhat overwhelmed, catches her eye and makes please come over hand gestures, hidden by her body so only Christine can see. Paige is busy discussing with Abby her plans to start learning self-defence — Christine makes a mental promise to herself to spectate, both to show her support and to enjoy watching the svelte, delicate-seeming Paige kick a succession of unsuspecting men in the face — so Christine just pokes her until she moves her chair out of the way, and gets up to see what Pippa needs her for.
At the central table, Maria is holding court, gesturing with a fork and complaining about her research supervisor. “Every time he pulls me up on something stupid or for being five minutes late I get a little bit tempted to maybe, kinda, possibly, uh, bop him on the head and drag him here.”
“Maria,” Edy says, leaning with both elbows on the table and looking at least as full as Christine feels, “are you saying you want to force-feminise your supervisor just because he’s pissing you off?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“Maria thinks forced feminisation is the solution to all her problems,” Harmony says.
Maria shrugs sheepishly. “When all you have is a hammer…”
“Hi, Christine!” Pippa says brightly, before another of the assembled sponsors can say something disturbing. “You wanted a word, yeah?” She cocks an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” Christine says, recognising someone who needs a break, “you want to come over? We have room, and I don’t think Dira and Hasan are going to stick around for dessert, anyway.”
“Oh, Christine?” Aunt Bea says, while Pippa rounds up wine glass and purse. “Could you ask Indira to bring Hasan over, before they retire? I would very much like to meet him.”
“Warn him!” at least three sponsors say, almost in unison, collapsing into giggles at their shared hilarity.
“Hey,” Christine says, pointing at the table, taking advantage of her light drunkenness to be mildly rude to people who still could, technically, order her around and expect to be obeyed, “don’t be rude when he comes over. He’s a lovely man. Don’t scare him.”
Maria sits up from her slouch and drags Edy back up with her. “Best behaviour,” she promises.
“Best behaviour,” Christine repeats, and escorts Pippa back to their significantly less raucous table. “Jesus,” she mutters, when they’re out of earshot, “they’re all so drunk.”
Pippa snorts, and nods. She drops into a spare chair at Christine’s table. “It’s like Christmas with the extended family,” she says, “and that’s the table where all the embarrassing aunts get quarantined. And all they talk about when they’re not being rude is work! Work, work, work.” She glances at Hasan, who is watching with polite interest. “Schoolwork, I mean. I thought tonight was going to be about getting away from all that.”
“I think they’re all a bit institutionalised,” Christine says, sitting back down next to Paige, who immediately leans her head on Christine’s shoulder. Christine playfully pushes her off; Paige pretends to take offence and goes back to talking to Abby.
“They’re the ones who should be able to leave, but don’t,” Vicky says, looking up from her phone. She smirks and adds, “The living failures.”
Paige turns around. “Vick, I know for a fact that that’s a Bloodborne reference. Stop it.”
“Paige—”
“I know you miss your girlfriend.”
“I—”
“But you’re seeing her tomorrow night, so stop texting her and be sociable.”
“Don’t wanna. Oh,” Vicky adds, consenting to lay her phone on the table but not actually turn off the screen, “you’re still coming, right, Tina?”
“Tomorrow?” Christine asks. “Lorna’s thing? Yes. I remember. And, yes, I’m coming.” Pippa, who is suddenly directing all her attention towards playing with her bracelet, prompts Christine to give Vicky a meaningful look.
“Pippa?” Vicky says, picking up on it. “Wanna come? Tomorrow night. Clubbing. Just us Dorley girls. And my girlfriend.”
“Really?” Pippa says. “I’d love to!”
“Come to Vicky’s room on the second floor,” Christine says. “We’ll all be getting ready there. Except Vicky, because she doesn’t actually live in her room any more.”
Pippa nods vigorously, which helps to hide her startled reaction when Hasan leans across the table to talk to her.
“I’m Hasan,” he says. “I’m hers.” He points to the side, where Indira, Paige and Abby are having an animated discussion.
“Pippa,” she says. “I’m a friend of— I know Christine.”
Christine elbows her. “She’s my friend,” she says, and throws in a glare for good measure. Pippa flushes, and Christine wonders how close she is with the others from her intake. Probably not very; most of them fled the nest, choosing to finish their degrees away from the Hall that made them. Hints dropped by one of the other ones who stayed, and who pops down to the kitchen every so often, suggest to Christine that Pippa’s cohort had a rather tense time of it in general. Three washouts; scary stuff.
Exactly how lonely has she been all this time? Christine’s barely seen Pippa talk to anyone who wasn’t Aunt Bea or another sponsor, now that she comes to think about it. And then there’s her bracelet, the one she always wears, the one she’s still wearing tonight even though it clashes with her dress, the one she’s slowly turning around her wrist as she talks to Hasan. Very much like the bracelets she and Indira share, only the owner of the twin to Pippa’s doesn’t know if she’s alive or dead.
God fucking damn it, Christine; why did you have to go and dump a problem like Stef in this girl’s lap?
“I’m studying Philosophy,” Pippa’s saying to Hasan. “It’s not been so bad up until now, but this year, all of a sudden, it’s been confusing, difficult, and I don’t know how to respond to it.” Hasan leans farther forward, bringing Indira’s hand, enmeshed in his own, with him. Dira laughs and disentangles herself, kissing her boyfriend on the cheek as she does so. Pippa, looking inward, doesn’t notice, just continues talking almost to herself. “I wasn’t going to do it this year. Third year uni is hard enough as it is, you know? But she asked me to be on standby, just in case, and when it looked like it wasn’t going to happen I was so relieved. And then, suddenly, all this responsibility just drops in my lap and I’m running around with no idea what I’m doing except that I know I’m doing it all wrong.”
“That sounds rough,” Hasan says. “Which module is this for?”
“It’s a group project,” Abby says, switching chairs to sit next to Pippa and taking her by the hand. “And it’s a hard one. Why don’t you let me help you, Pip? Like I did earlier. All you have to do is ask, and I can talk to… your supervisor. Make it official.”
Pippa closes her eyes, exhausted, and leans gratefully against Abby’s shoulder. “I’m asking,” she whispers.
Yeah. Well fucking done, Christine.
* * *
As predicted, Indira and Hasan make their excuses before dessert, as do several others. The second-years are permitted to stay and enjoy their own cakes — no less delicious for being, probably, quite violently made — but are gently encouraged to leave by some of the more sober sponsors before Aunt Bea’s speciality coffees come out. Faye and Rebecca excuse themselves from the frankly adorable procession of new girls and trot over to where Christine and Paige have been roped into the effort to drag all the remaining tables into the middle of the room.
“I wanted to say hi,” Rebecca says, in a clear, high-pitched voice. More developed than Faye’s. Either her sponsor okayed the voice surgery that Dorley very occasionally hands out, or she’s been training her voice longer than the rest of her cohort. “And thank you. To you, Paige, for making Effie look so beautiful.”
“You’re quite welcome,” Paige says, strangely formal.
“And to you, Christine, for helping her. She told me all about you.”
Lost for platitudes in the face of someone so genuine, Christine resorts to a curtsey. She’s been relying on these too much, lately, but Aunt Bea seems to like them, and Paige’s bloody butterfly dress is so tight around the hips it’s almost the only manoeuvre she can reliably perform.
“Thanks, Christine,” Faye says. “For everything. Um, is it okay if I contact you some time?”
“Any time,” Christine says, more at home with Faye’s nervous stammer than Rebecca’s sincerity. She rattles off her Consensus ID, and starts reciting her phone number until Paige reminds her that second-year girls don’t yet have fully enabled phones. “Aw. I was going to forward you all the terrible memes Dira’s mum sends me.”
“Dira’s… mum?” Faye asks. “She’s allowed to talk to her family?”
“That,” Christine says firmly, “is a long conversation for another day. Ask me on Consensus.”
“Okay. Oh, Paige: when should I give the dress back?”
“Do you like it?” Paige says.
Faye glances shyly at Rebecca before answering: “Yes.”
“Then it’s yours.”
Paige’s reply prompts an excited hug from Faye and a small amount of commotion from Rebecca, which continues until Bella, Rebecca’s sponsor, arrives to drag them up to bed. Bella shoots a smile at Christine and mouths, Thank you, and Christine, unaccustomed to so much gratitude in one night, replies with a hesitant nod.
“God, they’re cute, aren’t they?” Paige says, as they take their seats around the newly enlarged central table, between Pippa on Christine’s left and Abby on Paige’s right.
Christine avoids Aunt Bea’s knowing grin, and replies, “Yeah. They kind of are. Hard to believe we were ever like that.”
“That was only a year ago, for you,” Maria points out, sounding a little more sober.
“Seems like longer,” Christine says.
“I don’t know why we bother with the basement at all,” Abby says. “Just give them to Paige for an hour and they’ll walk out the door the most enthusiastic women you ever saw.”
“Well—” Maria starts, but she’s cut off by Aunt Bea, tapping a coffee spoon on the side of her mug, calling for attention.
“Good evening, ladies,” she says, and smoothly adds, when someone at the other end of the table coughs, “and nonbinary individuals. Thank you all for coming, and thank you all for staying with me, to ride out this long evening to its end. I know some of you had no choice—” she smiles at Maria, sitting at her side, who rolls her eyes and noisily slurps on her coffee, undercutting whatever gravitas Bea is trying to impart to the moment, “—but the rest of you did, and stayed anyway. My special thanks go to those who have returned from far afield—” several people, including the one who coughed, raise glasses and coffee cups, “—and to those who are yet to graduate from our programme.” Surprised murmurs from the far end. Bea points her spoon at Christine. “Christine Hale and Paige Adams. Thank you both for indulging an ageing woman on her birthday.”
Shit. They really are the only non-graduates at the table, aren’t they? “Hey,” she says, pointing around Paige to Abby, “I just go where she goes.”
Polite laughter ripples across the table. “And you, Miss Adams?” Aunt Bea says.
Paige points at Christine. “I go where she goes.”
Christine slaps her ankle against Paige’s, lightly enough to keep from hurting her but hard enough to say, Hey! Paige responds by hooking her ankle around Christine’s. Unexpected. When Christine looks at her, Paige looks back with a somewhat intense and only slightly unsteady expression.
“And an honourable mention, of course,” Aunt Bea says, “to Victoria Robinson, our first two-year graduate in quite some time.”
There are one or two gasps this time. Vicky, much more accustomed to attention than Christine, accepts the smattering of applause and says, “Well, the sales pitch was just so good.”
Has everyone been taking public speaking lessons except Christine? Or is this just something she’s expected to be good at by now? She covers her continued embarrassment by diverting her attention to the coffee in front of her, which is definitely better than the stuff out of the coffeemaker in the kitchen.
Aunt Bea draws all attention back to her when she continues, “As many of you know, this is an important year for me. Not only is it my fifty-fifth birthday, but this year also marks fifteen years since my predecessor officially handed control to me. I know not many of you were raised under Grandmother’s hand—” is it Christine’s imagination, or did Maria just flinch? “—but I like to think that my… modernising touches and adjustments to our recruitment parameters have improved not only our retention rate, but the wellbeing and overall happiness of our girls.” Another cough. “And nonbinary individuals. Thank you, Amethyst, again, for the welcome reminder.”
Across the table, Amethyst, dressed for their name in a dark tuxedo with a purple bowtie, says, “You are quite welcome, Beatrice.”
Christine almost inhales her coffee. She’s never heard Aunt Bea addressed by her full forename before; she wasn’t even sure she had one. Clearly, when one has been away from Dorley for many years, one becomes cheeky.
“And what are your pronouns, my dear?”
“Quite mundane, I promise you: they/them.”
“Wonderful!” Aunt Bea says. “Do we have anyone else here tonight with, shall we say, pronouns other than the traditional?”
Another of Amethyst’s group holds up a hand. “I’m a she/they now, actually.”
“Oh? And how does that work?”
Whether from alcohol, tiredness, or whatever’s in the coffee she can’t stop drinking, Christine’s completely lost the ability to tell whether or not Aunt Bea is being genuine, but Amethyst’s friend continues as if she’s been asked a serious question. “Some days I feel more like a she, other days, a they. If on a particular day I have a strong preference, I’ll tell my friends, but otherwise I’m happy with either pronoun set.” She pauses to listen to Amethyst whisper something in her ear. “That’s just how it works for me, by the way. I know a few she/theys who take a different approach.”
“How fascinating!”
“I know! Gender’s fun, isn’t it?”
“That is not,” Aunt Bea says gravely, “the official position of Dorley Hall.”
“You know what? Back when I lived here, that serious face of yours used to scare me. But I’m worldly, now. I can see the grin you’re holding back.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re just a big shitposter, aren’t you?”
“Margaret,” Aunt Bea says, dropping into a slightly more severe tone of voice, “please remember there are girls here who are still supposed to be intimidated by me.”
Ah. Still joking, then. Christine, entirely genuinely, says, “Don’t worry. I definitely still am.”
“Bless you, child. And you, Margaret: are you feeling she or they today?”
Standing up to reveal a flowing red dress with crystalline details and twirling around, raising the hem above her knees — dress go spinny, Christine remembers — Margaret says, “Today, I’m emphatically a she.”
This prompts a conversation amongst the half-dozen people at Margaret and Amethyst’s end of the table and Aunt Bea, wisely, decides that her speech has thus concluded. She exchanges a few murmurs with Maria before addressing Christine and Paige as one. “How about you two?” she says. “Will either of you be adopting new pronouns when you graduate?”
“No,” Paige says. “I’ve examined myself thoroughly—” she’s definitely had more alcohol than Christine; she’s stumbling over the multisyllabic words, “—and determined myself to be, socially, rather binary. I don’t expect to change pronouns any time soon.” She frowns. “I don’t like the way I have to have strangers think I’m a cis woman, though, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I’ve already established myself that way; I’m stuck with it.”
“Just say you’re AFAB,” Maria says. “You don’t have to tell them the B stands for ‘basement’.”
Edy, sat on Maria’s other side, delivers a mild tap to the side of Maria’s head. Deserved. Apparently the studious and sensible senior sponsor develops a bit of a mouth when she’s had a drink.
“And you, Christine?” Aunt Bea asks.
Christine shrugs. This, at least, is easy. “I’m a girl,” she says. “Sometimes I’m a tomboy; sometimes I’m a girly girl. Always a girl, though. A she/her.”
In Aunt Bea’s widening smile Christine reads pleasure, possibly relief; not quite as tolerant as you try to be, are you? Newfangled pronouns sticking a little in your gut, are they? Paige, perhaps seeing the same thing, nudges Christine’s foot again, as if to say, At least she’s trying. Christine suddenly has to hold back laughter, imagining the headline: DIVERSITY WIN! KIDNAPPER RESPECTS YOUR PRONOUNS!
Aunt Bea moves on to Pippa next, and Christine feels the girl tense when the questions start. Pippa gives a rough rundown of Stef’s stay in the basement up to this point, and repeats some of her frustrations. She admits to Aunt Bea and the table, as she had obliquely to Hasan, that she’s feeling overwhelmed. Towards the end of her summary, Aunt Bea reaches over to take her hand, and Christine feels Pippa go from tense to completely immobile.
“We are so grateful that you stepped up, Pippa,” Aunt Bea says, “and I’m aware that your plate is… rather full, what with your final year studies as well as your duties as sponsor.” She takes a sip of coffee. “We’ll have Maria assist you, when needed. She is the most experienced, and many of her overall responsibilities have been shifted, as of now, onto Indira.”
“Oh,” Pippa says, “um—”
Abby pipes up. “Actually, Aunt Bea, I was going to offer my support. I’m available to spend a lot more time here, and—”
“Nonsense!” Aunt Bea says. “Your offer is greatly appreciated, Abigail, but you have your career to think of. Maria’s, happily, is based on campus.”
“But—”
“And, might I remind you, your sponsorship methods are… singular. Should young Stefan require a firm hand, could we trust you to administer one? Maria has much more experience in tailoring her approach.”
“She’s saying I’m a bitch,” Maria stage-whispers from behind her hand.
Aunt Bea rolls her eyes. “You young people do persist in putting the most awful words in my mouth.”
“Yeah,” Maria says, pretending misery, “I’m a bitch.” Edy comforts her.
“Pippa, my dear?” Aunt Bea says. “Are you happy with this arrangement?”
“I am,” she says. “Thank you, Aunt Bea.” It can’t only be Christine who hears the tension in her voice, can it? She’s bringing the conversation to the quickest close she can manage. She wants to reach out, reassure her, but she doesn’t know her well enough to predict her reactions.
When conversation resumes around the table, though, Christine feels Pippa relax, and engages her on a deliberately light-hearted topic.
“Hey,” Abby says a little while later, leaning around to speak to Pippa, “where’s Monica? I wanted to talk to her.”
“Oh, uh, it’s her boy, Declan,” Pippa says. “He got to three strikes today, so she left after the main course.”
“Three strikes? Already?”
“A sponsor’s work is never done,” Paige says, and finishes her coffee.
* * *
“My house is your house,” Christine says, pushing open her bedroom door with the flat of her bare foot and throwing her shoes in the rough direction of the wardrobe.
“Are you sure this isn’t a bother?” Vicky says.
“You can still sleep in your room, Vick,” Paige says, closing the door behind them and immediately stepping out of her dress, “if you don’t want to impose.”
“No,” Christine says, leaning against the wall and declining to undress until the room consents to stop slowly rotating. “Her room is cold, it’s lonely, and it’s full of your clothes, Paige.”
Vicky, by the time coffees were polished off and a third round of sherries politely refused, declined from morose to depressed, and had all but outright asked if she could stay in Christine’s room rather than sleep alone. Paige made an acid comment about how she ought to be able to cope for just one more night before Lorna returns from her parents’ place, but Christine insisted; Vicky gets scared sometimes, more so when she’s alone, and the last thing she wants is the girl having a crisis born of alcohol and loneliness, with no-one there to help her. So they agreed: Christine’s room tonight.
When the three of them left the dining hall, arm in arm, Christine glanced back and took in with one glance Aunt Bea’s satisfied expression and Pippa, surrounded by empty chairs, watching them walk away.
“Reminds me,” Christine mutters, and pulls out her phone.
“Abby says g’night,” Christine says, throwing her phone back in her bag and her bag onto the desk.
Paige, unsteadily crossing the room in her underwear, leans down and says, “Good night, Abby,” to the phone, before placing a hand on each side of Christine’s waist, turning her round, and unzipping her dress.
“Thanks, Paige,” Christine says. “Oh, Vick,” she adds, as Vicky finishes dropping the component parts of her two-piece outfit onto hangars, “spare toothbrushes are in the cupboard under the sink.”
Vicky flashes her a thumbs up and makes it through the door to the ensuite on her second go. Paige makes impatient motions with her hands that Christine eventually interprets as a request to step out of her unzipped dress. They manage to get both of their dresses back into the garment bags and hung on the wardrobe door before the alcohol in Paige’s bloodstream gets the better of her and she staggers, almost falling.
“Woah, there,” Christine says, looping an arm around her and positioning one of Paige’s around her shoulders. “Let’s get your teeth brushed and then we can all sleep this off. Vick? A little help?”
Between the three of them they manage to pilot Paige from bathroom to bed, and they both fall in next to her, Christine in the middle.
“Thanks, Tina,” Vicky whispers, blowing her a kiss and turning over to face the window. Almost immediately her breathing turns heavy and regular.
“And she’s out like a light,” Christine says. “You okay, Paige?”
“’m fine,” she mutters, shuffling over under the covers and looping one of her legs over Christine’s. They’re both still wearing their sparkly stockings, and the sensation is strange.
“Um,” she says, “Paige?”
“Sleep,” Paige suggests, and folds an arm under Christine’s bosom. It’s not long before her grip goes slack and she starts to snore, the same soft growl Christine remembers.
It takes her a while to fall asleep, but the curtains are open and the stars are out, so Christine counts the lights in the sky and considers, with Paige’s arm around her and Vicky’s cold foot occasionally lightly kicking her in the knee, how little she deserves the bounty she’s been handed, and how lucky she is to be here to receive it.
Chapter 11: Friction Burns
Notes:
Content warnings: dysphoria, self-harm, dehumanisation, medical sexual assault
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 October 26
Saturday
“Up! Up! Up! No fucking dawdling! Mummy’s got a hangover and the sooner you little shits climb into your hamster wheels and start running, the sooner I can go back to bed!”
Maria’s voice, hoarse and echoing in the concrete corridor, drags Stefan out of his nightmare, and he’s already halfway out of bed when the door opens and Pippa, looking very much the worse for wear, enters. Tactfully she looks away, gives him time to climb back under the covers before she settles against the wall and leans her head against the brick.
“Good morning,” she says. Sounds like an effort.
“Good morning.” Stefan keeps his voice low, mirroring her mood in the manner that’s become habit. He tightens the sheets around his chest, gathers his knees under his chin. “You have a hangover, too?”
“No,” Pippa says. Her denial is undercut by her wince. Aunt Bea’s birthday last night, Stefan remembers. Kidnappers getting together for a nice meal and a bit of a drink. Bizarre to imagine them having such normal things in their lives as birthday parties and hangovers. “I’m fine,” she insists, louder, and he looks away, realising his scepticism must have shown on his face.
Pippa’s hard to predict. Sometimes she seems like someone he can get on his side. Other times she’s as perfunctory as Maria usually is with Aaron. And occasionally she seems so angry she might ignite. Which is the real Pippa? No way to know.
He’s learning what to watch for. When she plays with her bracelet, she’s more emotional, more receptive, more apt to talk to him like a person. This morning, headache aside, she’s all business, hands folded over her chest.
“Medical examinations today, right?” he says. Keep it factual.
“Yes. Don’t bother dressing; you’ll be showering in twos this morning. Supervised. We’re re-examining some of our security procedures after Declan’s little episode. For now, your unmonitored shower privileges are revoked.”
Stefan nods. Locks his jaw so he doesn’t give away his reaction again. Just what he doesn’t need right now: more eyes on him. “Can you turn around, so I can put on my robe?”
“I’ll see it all in a minute, anyway,” Pippa says. She’s still inserting that sneer into her voice, but it’s even less convincing than usual today. “Why bother?”
“Please?”
“Fine. I’ll wait outside. If you’re not out in two minutes—” she yanks on the door, “—we’re coming in and dragging you out, whether you’re fully clothed or buck naked.”
She slams the door on her way out. He hopes it makes her headache worse.
Quickly he throws on his dressing gown and assembles his wash kit. He uses the rest of the time to buzz his chin with the electric razor. Being watched is one thing; being seen shaving, quite another. He’s never been able to put his finger on exactly why, but he doesn’t have the luxury of questioning his neuroses. His composure is fragile enough right now.
His shower buddy waits in the corridor, under guard. “Morning, Mother Theresa,” Aaron says. “How are the healing hands?” He’s got a plaster over the cut near his eye; Maria must have got it for him. Stefan tears it off — it’ll come off in the shower, anyway — and ignores Aaron’s whimper as he inspects the wound: almost healed.
“Looks good.”
“Hey!” Aaron squeals. “Personal space! Personal space!”
“Like that matters here,” Stefan says. Pippa glances his way; he pretends not to notice.
“I mean, yeah, okay, sure.” Aaron folds twitchy arms in on themselves and looks up at him. “You okay, Stefan? You seem kind of tense.”
When did Aaron ever ask him that before?
Stefan weighs the pros and cons of telling the truth, finds the whole exercise exhausting, and shrugs. He dreamed of Declan last night, attacking him and Aaron in the shower — and him and Christine at the party where they met, him and Melissa in Melissa and Russell’s childhood home, even Abby and Pippa, once or twice, in various iterations of the nightmare — and no matter how often he woke and forced himself to think of other things, Declan would be waiting for him when he fell asleep again. He even watched a movie, in pieces, between dreams. Didn’t help; just got Happy Working Song stuck in his head.
He’s probably had even less sleep than Pippa or Maria.
“Hey,” he asks Pippa, “what are we waiting for?” The question earns him a prod in the small of his back from one of the women standing guard behind him. The impertinence of asking questions.
Maria, leaning lazily against the wall by the open double doors, replies for Pippa, who has her eyes closed. “We’re waiting for that,” she says, and nods at the door to the bathroom, which bursts open a few seconds later, heralded by some troublingly masculine shouting.
It’s Declan, and he looks like he’s fallen down a flight of stairs, been taken back up to the top and thrown down a couple more times, for fun. He’s naked, and barely a square centimetre of skin is unbruised. His hands, cuffed behind him, shake, and he drips water on the floor as he staggers past the end of the residential corridor, trailed by Monica and three other sponsors, all armed with tasers and batons.
“Hey!” he yells. “Aa-ron! Stef-an! Why don’t you fucking poofs fight? They wouldn’t be able to keep us here if we all—!”
Monica interrupts him with a baton strike to his chest, and for a second he looks like he might retaliate, start a brawl right there in the hallway, but he backs down when the other sponsors level their tasers at him. Slowly, reluctantly, he faces front and hobbles back down the main corridor to the cells, followed by his escort.
Aaron breaks the silence. “He has a point. We should definitely fight. What do you think, Maria?” He balls his fists, raises them like a newsreel pugilist. “You want to go a few rounds?”
Maria, massaging the bridge of her nose, says, “No.”
“You sure? Best two out of three?”
“Go. Shower. Now. Before I put you and your friend in the cell next to Declan just for annoying the piss out of me when I’ve got a hangover.”
Pippa and the others escort them in but Maria stays behind, to coordinate with the other sponsors or possibly just to indulge in her headache. Stefan’s always been perversely irritated that the guards don’t have any kind of uniform to distinguish them from the sponsors — because, according to Abby, they mostly are sponsors, but to second- and third-year women who don’t need constant supervision any more, filling out the numbers so not every first-year sponsor has to be on the job all the time; Stefan’s been waiting to see Christine’s sponsor, Indira, amongst them, but so far few have been South Asian and none have matched his hazy memory of the picture Abby showed him over Consensus — but today one of them is wearing particularly nice clothes, and it’s all he can do to keep his eyes away, to stop comparing himself to her. Pippa’s habitual dresses are bad enough; this girl’s outfit makes his chest hurt.
He needs a distraction, so he asks Pippa what happened to Declan.
“He got three strikes.”
“I heard. But what happened to him? He looks like he lost a fight with a brick wall.”
“What happened to him is what happens after three strikes. Privileges taken away. Supervision increased. Carrot removed, stick emplaced.” She nudges at Stefan with an elbow, and the contact makes him flinch. “Now go join your little friend in the shower before I push you back out the doors and let Maria use you for headache relief.”
Stefan nods. Stops halfway into the shower annexe. “Do you really have to watch us shower? Can’t you just leave the room? Or look away?”
“No,” one of the women he doesn’t know says. The other one, scrolling on her phone, rolls her eyes.
“Sorry,” Pippa says, sounding almost like she means it. “I’m just as unhappy about this as you.”
I really doubt that.
Aaron — his ‘little friend’; great, they’re inextricably linked! — is already washing, facing away from both of them, for once not taking advantage of the situation to waggle his dick around. Maybe he feels the gaze of all three women, too.
He takes the shower at the far end, putting as much distance between him and the sponsors as possible. Maybe they all need glasses and won’t be able to see him clearly? Wouldn’t that be a lovely thought?
His skin prickles anyway.
“You didn’t answer me before,” Aaron says. Stefan risks a glance: the boy’s facing the wall, angling himself away from Stefan and sponsors both. Shy, all of a sudden. “Are you okay? You really did seem tense out there. And then there’s Declan—”
“Why do you care?” Stefan asks. There’s no hostility in the question — he really, truly does not have the energy to spare — but he’s curious. He turns the tap to its hottest setting and ducks under.
Only lukewarm, but getting warmer.
“Why do I care? Because we’re buddies! Compadres! Fucking… friends, man. Aren’t we?”
Water’s getting hotter.
“Aren’t we?” Aaron repeats.
“You shouldn’t antagonise Maria like that.”
“What? Man, you’re really—”
“You want to end up like Declan? Back in a cell? Bruised and limping? Three strikes, Aaron. How many do you have?”
“One.” Aaron’s usually lively voice, already somewhat depleted out of apparent concern for Stefan — what a joke! — flattens completely. “You weren’t here yet when it happened.”
“Oh yeah?” Stefan starts rubbing in the shampoo, leaning away from the flow of water, which is starting to make his skin throb when it strikes. “What did you do?”
He leans against the tile to rinse his hair. Fingers are already pink.
“Uh,” Aaron says. “You don’t want to know that.”
There’s a feeling Stefan gets sometimes, when he’s being watched. It’s a heat in the back of his neck. More a rash than a blush, it stings like an insect bite, itches like a burn. At his job, about a week before he came here, the feeling hit him so powerfully he had to abandon his till and excuse himself to the staff toilets — obviously the men’s! — and lock himself in a cubicle so he could slam the back of his head (where the bruises don’t show) into the stall wall, over and over again, until pain overrode discomfort.
No such privacy here, but there are other ways to cause pain. How hot can the water here get? Time to find out.
Pippa and the other two women, standing at the other end of the annexe, watching him. Witnessing him. He can’t stop imagining how he looks in their eyes: pathetic; broken. Their nonchalance amplifying their contempt. Another man, brought here to be corrected. Another boy.
“If you don’t tell me what you did,” he says to Aaron, “I’ll assume the worst.”
“Yeah, well, you’d probably be right.”
Stefan laughs and water floods his mouth. He spits. “You showed her your dick, didn’t you?”
“Only a little.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Aaron.”
“That’s why she hates me. I mean, it’s not the only reason, but it’s, y’know, enough.”
Stefan threads conditioner through his hair, leaning his head against the wall. Hot water scalds his bare back.
“She probably should hate you, Aaron,” he says. Whatever filter he usually tries to apply to his thoughts is long gone. “Hell, I should hate you, too. Don’t know why I don’t. Don’t know why I’m even a little bit happy to see your stupid face every morning.”
“Aww. You’re happy to see me?”
“Don’t get too excited. Who else am I going to talk to? Fucking Declan? I hated you, Aaron. And now, for some reason, I don’t.”
“Well, I’m flattered, but—”
“I hated you,” Stefan continues, because the only way to stay in control is to keep talking, keep spitting out everything in his head, keep his mouth too full of bile to scream, the way he wants to, “because you’re a prick. A misogynist prick who harasses women.” Shower water flows into his mouth again, and little roots of pain burrow into his gums and teeth. Hands on the tile again. Steady. “You sent pictures of your dick to a woman who did not ask to see them. And not just one picture! Pictures fucking plural!” Water sears his back, burns through his skin, exposes muscle and fat and warped, fragile bones, all of them the wrong shape, too big, too clumsy. He can feel his body’s weight, pressing him down, holding him in place. “Did you find the best light, Aaron? Did you find the right angle? Did you trim your fucking pubes to make your cock look bigger?”
“What? No. That’d be weird, dude.”
“Oh! That would be weird, would it?”
Stefan can’t hold himself still. A body reacts to pain, tries to save itself, and he fights to stay under. Locks his limbs to keep from shaking. He needs this. Deserves it. He straightens, slicks back his hair, raises his face to the boiling water. Stretches up on his toes, elevates his whole body, feels it like acid rain on his shoulders, his neck, his cheeks, his chin—
“Stefan!” Aaron’s seen the colour of Stefan’s skin and he’s running over, almost strobed by the film of water obscuring Stefan’s vision, steadying himself on the taps of the showers in between. “Stef! You’re hurting yourself!”
“Fuck off, Aaron!” He tries to push Aaron away, but the boy is pulling at his arm, wincing as the hot water sprays over him, dragging them both away from the shower and into the clear space in the middle of the annexe. Stefan tries to get rid of him, but Aaron holds on. “What the fuck are you even doing here, anyway?”
“What do you mean?” Aaron practically screams.
Finally Aaron has to let go, for the sake of his own balance. Stefan, relieved of the weight, slips on the wet floor and falls, lands on his rear. Barely even registers the pain. Fuck it; embrace it. He rearranges himself on the tile, legs crossed, leaning back. Exposed.
You all want to see this wreck? Want to witness it? Then here it is. Look at it. Fucking look at it.
“I mean,” he says, “that you’re a fucking idiot, Aaron. Don’t you see how stupid all the shit you keep doing is? How unnecessary? It’s not a part of you. You’re just fucking around. It’s not in-trin-sic!” He strips the word apart, hits the floor with closed knuckles on every syllable. “You didn’t have to do any of it. You could have just been a regular guy. You didn’t need all that shit!” He looks up, fixes the confused Aaron with a sneer. “Why’d you do it? Were you bored? Lonely? Did you just fancy her that much?”
Aaron flails his arms as he replies. “I don’t know, all right? I just do things sometimes!”
Stefan laughs. The water, still running, pools around him. There’s a little red mixed in, and he inspects his knuckles. Bleeding.
“You’re a likeable enough guy, you know, Aaron?” he says. “You’re nice looking, you can be fun. You even have money! You could have just been you. Got along fine. You didn’t need to be a fucking prick. But you were, anyway, and it got you dragged down here, under all this… fucking concrete.”
Aaron crouches. His eyes quickly cover Stefan’s body. Looking for what? “I didn’t get along,” he says quietly. “Nobody liked me, okay? Nobody. For a million reasons. I know what I’m like, but what the fuck else am I going to do?”
“Oh, boo fucking hoo, Aaron. ‘Nobody likes me so I harass women.’ That’s sad.”
“Fuck you, Stefan,” Aaron says, straightening up.
“No, fuck you, Aaron, you little perv.”
Aaron throws his wet towel on the floor of the shower room, wraps himself in his robe, and leaves the annexe as quickly as the slippery floor will allow. Stefan, uncaring, hangs his head back and stares at the concrete ceiling.
“What are you doing, Stefan?”
It’s Pippa, advancing on him, leather boots kicking up spray. Frowning. Great, he’s a puzzle again. She holds out a hand to help him up. He ignores it, pushes up from the floor on his own, returns to his shower. But it’s not helping any more. It’s just really fucking hot water. He closes the tap.
“You’re red,” Pippa says, with a gasp in her voice. “All over! Doesn’t it hurt?”
He smooths his hair up and out of his eyes and slips his robe back on. The rough fabric scratches as it drags over his scalded skin, and he bites the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out. As soon as he’s covered, as soon as he’s hidden again, he follows Aaron out of the bathroom.
Of course it hurts. That’s the point.
* * *
Christine’s managed to forget that Indira’s thumbprint is registered to her door lock, so her entry comes as something of a surprise. It shouldn’t: it was her habit for a long time, and Indira’s always been prone to nostalgia for the earlier days of their relationship; now that she’s reassigned, she’s probably feeling rather more sentimental than usual.
“Hi, Teenie,” she says. “Hi Vicky, hi Paige.” She’s dressed for a day out, in the light colours she prefers, sunglasses atop her head, knee-length skirt billowing in the breeze from the open window. “Remember when I used to wake you all the time? Well, I have a helper now.”
In the second year, it was a common occurrence for Indira to wake her with a tray of breakfast, some good cheer, and the details of whatever aspect of her feminine bearing she had to attend to that day; usually Dira would reminisce about how good Christine had it, because in her day they’d yet to phase out the archaic mannerism training — hours of learning such irrelevancies as how to stand gracefully from a chair while wearing a short skirt — whereas Christine and her cohort were lucky enough simply to be handed a pair of high heels each, given access to the dress-up box, and left more or less to their own devices. If it hadn’t been for Paige meticulously trying on every type of garment at least once, and Vicky enthusiastically putting together something beautiful or fun and encouraging the others to model something similar, Christine would probably still have trouble walking in heels. Even if it sometimes took a little encouragement from Paige to get her to stop playing with the new phones they gave them — smartphones changed a surprising amount in a single year — and start taking the whole business of being a woman at least slightly more seriously.
She raises two fingers to her lips in memory. They are, Vicky aside, different people now. And yet still always together.
“Beatrice said you might need fluids,” Hasan says, following Indira through the door with a tray laden with drinks and cereal bars.
“This is very nice of you, Indira, Hasan,” Christine says, pushing up in bed and making sure to take the sheets with her; there’s discarded underwear on the floor and she’s not about to take the slight pressure around her chest as evidence that it’s not hers without a visual inspection, “but we’re in kind of a compromised position, here.”
Indira refuses to be scolded. “Aunt Bea said you all ended up in here.” No need to ask how she knows: the corridor cams. A reminder to hop into the system later and make sure she and Faye weren’t caught on video using the back stairs; there’s no cameras around those doors that she knows of, but it’s possible they might show up in the corner of the conservatory camera, accessing an area they shouldn’t.
“And she suggested,” Hasan continues, “that at least one of you could use some hangover care.”
Paige, the guilty party, shuffles up onto her elbows, curling a section of sheet around her chest with one hand and fetching a glass of orange juice with the other. She smiles her gratitude at Hasan, passes the glass to Christine, and retrieves the other for herself.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Vicky says, not yet sitting up, “but could we have a little privacy now? We’re all rather, uh—”
“We’re naked,” Paige says, and takes a deep drink from her juice.
“And I’m pretty sure we all have headaches,” Christine adds.
“Say no more,” Hasan says, and takes Indira’s hand. After some minor negotiations — yes, Christine will come down to the kitchen within the next hour to see her off; yes, Vicky can give them a lift because she’s going that way, anyway — they leave the three girls alone.
Vicky rubs her face and groans. “Why do embarrassing things always happen around you, Tina?” Vicky says. “No-one’s boyfriend sees me in my underwear at home.”
“Because I’m cursed,” Christine says. “Do you even allow men in your house, anyway?”
“It’s not like a rule. It’s just coincidence.”
“‘No men except by appointment’.” Christine mimes nailing a plaque to a wall. “What do you do if a stray wanders in by accident? Do you even have a basement?”
“Bad taste, Tina,” Vicky says, throwing off the covers and revealing herself to be, out of all of them, possibly the most clothed — she must have dug through Christine’s drawers at some point and borrowed the cami she has on — and thus, by a process of elimination, which Christine participates in by rolling her chest and feeling her breasts move inside last night’s bra, establishing Paige as the least. “We have an actual trans girl in my house. No feminisation jokes allowed.”
Christine bites her lip against the temptation to retort that they have one here, too, and her throat tightens momentarily. Medical exams this morning, right? She’ll have to check on Stef later. “That’s literally my entire repertoire,” she says. “I run on gallows humour. And estradiol. Actually, Paige, can you pass me my pills? They’re in the drawer.”
Paige complies, popping one out for herself. “Exactly how much did I drink last night?” she says, mostly unimpeded by the pill; they’ve all had considerable practise at talking normally while estradiol dissolves under their tongues. “I feel worse than I did after the Christmas bash.”
“Too much,” Vicky says.
“There were sherries,” Christine says.
“And those little alcoholic chocolates.”
“And you had, I’m pretty sure, more wine than me and Vick combined.”
“I hate myself,” Paige mutters.
“Consider it a valuable life lesson,” Vicky says. “Tina, can I borrow some clothes?”
Christine waves her permission and Vicky starts digging, eventually pulling out a pair of white shorts and pairing them with a sky blue top, a combination that reliably makes Christine look like she’s off to play sandcastles at the beach and so, obviously, looks incredible on Vicky.
Wordlessly Christine drains her orange juice and then drops an estradiol into her mouth, trying not to think about how much work she still has ahead of her if she wants to be as effortlessly and consistently feminine as Vicky. Step one might be to become an entirely different person, but she’s done that once already and isn’t keen to repeat the experience.
“I,” she announces, “need a shower.”
She’s not all that surprised when Paige follows her into the bathroom and sits heavily on the toilet. As Christine finishes pulling off underwear, throwing bra and knickers at the small hamper in the corner and hanging the beautiful borrowed stockings carefully over the towel rack, she marvels once again that Paige, with her elegant figure and torrent of dark blonde hair — still at least half extensions — can make naked look like high fashion. As usual, Christine is the clumsy, unfeminine Hobbit amongst serene, pristine Elves.
The frosted shower door saves her from any further unflattering comparisons.
“When, exactly, did I take off all my underwear?” Paige asks eventually.
“I have no idea. You were still wearing your stockings when I fell asleep.” Christine doesn’t add that she knows this because Paige trapped her with her leg for at least half the night. “If you need clean stuff you can borrow some of mine. I’m dying to see how much better my bras look on you.”
“They’ll look worse,” Paige says. “You’re bigger than me, there.” She doesn’t sound quite like herself. The hangover?
“Sports bras, then.”
“Okay, thanks,” Paige says, and falls silent for a while. It’s not until Christine gets done shaving her legs that she says anything else. “Christine, what are you going to do when you leave the programme? Aunt Bea is very close to giving you your freedom, I think.”
Christine’s reply bubbles in her throat as she rinses out the conditioner, so she doesn’t answer until she steps out of the shower to see Paige still sitting on the toilet, knees together, uncharacteristically pensive.
“I don’t know,” Christine says, carefully. “I’ll probably keep living here until I graduate Saints; maybe longer. Paige, is something up?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. “After Nell… I’ve been thinking. About the last couple of years. About the way I’ve been. About who I’ve been. And about us. As friends, I mean. All of us. Remember what I said last night? About how our friends are actually just your friends?”
“I remember disagreeing,” Christine says, wrapping herself in a towel and wincing slightly. Her nipples are still a little sensitive.
“I feel like I’m about to lose everything,” Paige says. “Vicky’s already drifting away. She spends more time with Lorna and her other friends than with us. And now you’re not being actively sponsored any more, you’re a step closer to leaving, and then will I even see Indira or Abby again? I just— I don’t want to be alone, Christine.”
Christine holds out her hand and waits patiently until Paige takes it. She tugs gently, encouraging her to stand, to accept the hug. “You won’t be alone,” she says into Paige’s shoulder.
“I feel so pathetic,” Paige says. “Everyone else is moving on, and even though I have these plans and I can step through them, point by point, I can talk to brands and do photoshoots and put myself out there, but all I can think is, what’s the point? If I come back here to my room and I’m the only one here, what’s the point?”
“Hey! One, you have a plan and you’re actually executing it, which is… beyond amazing, Paige. I don’t have plans; I have vague intentions. And, two—” Christine pulls away a little so she can look up at her, “—you’re not the only one who doesn’t have anyone outside these walls, okay?”
“That’s not all I am, though, right? Not just someone you live with? Someone you know, someone you… went through some stuff with.” Paige hiccups. “Someone you experimented with.”
“No.” Christine keeps looking up, into beautiful amber eyes that don’t look back. “You’re one of my best friends, Paige. I never, ever thought, when I was— when I was how I was before, that I would have someone like you in my life. That I would ever be so lucky. You’re incredible, okay? I’ll always choose to have you in my life.”
Paige leans into the hug, drawing Christine back in, pressing whole-body against her. “Okay. It’s just… I realised that my plan, the one you’re so impressed by, it doesn’t have people in it. Just me. And I couldn’t stand it. And I can do it, I can go out there, be the cis girl I’m supposed to be, but I need a life, not just a career. And I need people in it who are real. Who belong to me, not to the persona. I want to stay close to them. I want to stay close to you.”
“Are you saying you want to be one of those women who leaves uni and moves straight into a flatshare with her dorm girlfriends?”
“More or less.”
“Let’s do it, then. Let’s add that to the plan. You and me. Abby if she wants to come. We’ll live near Vicky and Lorna.” Christine draws distracted circles on Paige’s back. “You know what?” she says. “I might be at least as scared of the future as you are. Making a life? As Christine? I want it, but it’s terrifying. I know how to be me, sure, but mainly I know how to be me in here. And I don’t want to be like Maria and Aunt Bea, never leaving Dorley Hall, calcifying in here. I want to get out there. And, Paige, if I can do that with you, with Abby, with Vicky, with Indira, that’s, like, half the terror factor gone, instantly.”
“Good,” Paige says, muffled; she’s buried her face in Christine’s wet hair.
“You know what I’ve never been scared of, though? Being alone. Not really. I’ve never doubted we’ll stay together, all of us, in some way. I’m fully expecting to be ninety and still have you in my life. You, Dira, Abby, Vicky. We’re family, Paige. We always will be.”
“You mean that?”
Christine stands on her toes and whispers into Paige’s ear, “Let’s be crotchety old ladies together.” She’s instantly hugged tighter, lifted almost off the floor and held there until Vicky bangs on the bathroom door, breaking the spell.
“I’m going downstairs!” Vicky yells. “I need medicinal amounts of coffee.”
Paige puts her down and steps back, smiling. “I’m incredibly naked, aren’t I?”
Christine lifts the hand she’s still holding, brings it to her lips, and kisses Paige gently on the knuckles. “Babe, you are so fucking naked.”
* * *
“You’re an idiot, Stefan. What are you? A fucking idiot. Why do you — schhh! — do these things to yourself? These people — gchhh! — are going to see every inch of you by the end of the day! So why — fuck! — can’t you just cope?”
Taking off his robe dragged a layer of skin off with it, or felt like it did, and now Stefan sits gingerly on the chair in his room, dabbing carefully at himself with a towel, trying to dry himself without making anything worse. There’s a tube of moisturiser by the computer, and every time he gets a new patch halfway dry he rubs a handful into the pink, stinging flesh.
“Had to mouth off at Aaron, too, didn’t you? Idiot. You have one friend down here, and just because you’re too stupid to compartmentalise, you might have alienated him for good. Keep — fucking piece of shit! — your mouth shut!”
He didn’t get a chance to collect himself. That’s what it was. Straight from bed to the shower, from alone to naked and surrounded by people, and faced with Pippa and Aaron and Maria and fucking Declan in quick succession. No time to prepare himself. No wonder he got caught in his worst attack yet of…
Stefan’s never known what to call it. He’s looked it up online but nothing’s ever felt adequate. It’s being witnessed, known, understood; reduced. As if he exists in a quantum state, balanced equally between the things he is and the things he is not, and the act of observation collapses him into only the things he is not. Unmakes him. Pulls him out of himself, leaving only grotesquerie behind.
Best prepare, then. Because diving into the shower on its hottest setting and waiting for his skin to sluice away from his body is not a coping strategy he can use long term.
By the time his door opens and three women file in — Pippa, Maria, and another, older woman he’s never seen before — Stefan’s dried, dressed, slightly less pink, and marginally more prepared for what’s about to happen. Abby described it: there’ll be a full-body examination, although she was light on the details — he would have pressed her on it, but something about her phrasing suggested she didn’t want to relive it — and then he’ll have some blood drawn and provide some sperm.
The sperm thing is a worry.
Pippa leans against the wall and Maria, the door. No getting out except through her. The nurse shoos him off the chair so she can sit down.
“Strip,” she says, as he perches on the end of the bed.
“Hi,” he says, running through his prepared script. “I’m Stefan. Would it be okay if it was just you and me in the room, please? I’m uncomfortable being naked around so many people, and I promise I won’t give you any trouble.”
“Ah-ha!” the nurse says, half-turning to grin at Maria. “This one’s polite, isn’t he?” She turns back. “They stay. Now strip. The third time I have to ask for anything, I do so with this.” She pulls a taser out of a pocket; it has the same touch-sensitive strip as the ones the sponsors have, although it’s a bulkier unit. A heavier charge? And still usable only by sponsors and, evidently, nurses.
Stefan nods, and turns away from them to undress. He’s not wearing much — less weight on his sore skin — and it takes only seconds to drop the t-shirt and trousers onto the bed.
“Underwear too,” the nurse says, waving her taser. As Stefan complies, she turns back to Maria. “Wow. What happened to him? Some new protocol I’m not briefed on? He looks like he’s got five sunburns.”
Stefan can’t help twitching at the question.
“The shower water was too hot,” Pippa says.
“That’s it?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Pippa shrug. “I think he was distracted, and didn’t notice until it was too late. One of the other boys was needling him. You know how it is.”
“Hmm. There’s scabs on his knuckles, too.”
“Y—yes,” Pippa says. Apparently she hadn’t seen those. “He fell.”
“He fell? You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. All right, boy. Turn around. All the way round. To face us.” The nurse sighs. “And move your hands!” She strikes the back of Stefan’s wrist with a biro.
Stefan complies, forcing stiff hands behind his back, exposing himself, keeping his mind as blank as he can. He’s a robot, following instructions. He’s a mannequin, a poseable doll. He’s not here. He finds a spot of wall near the door to look at, but can’t stop his gaze flickering every so often to Pippa. She looks… concerned? And either she really hadn’t understood what happened in the shower annexe, or she just lied for him. Why?
“Okay,” the nurse says. “Let’s go. Tasers up, please.”
Maria and, a second later, Pippa raise their weapons and keep them raised, pointing right at him, as if he might suddenly become dangerous, and Stefan understands why when the nurse leans down and cups his genitals in her hand.
He forces his teeth together. Balls his hands into fists behind his back.
“What’s this, Karen?” Pippa says.
“It’s just procedure,” the nurse, Karen, says, rolling Stefan’s testicles around in her fingers.
“You didn’t do this to m—”
“—to your last boy?” Karen finishes. Stefan’s almost too occupied keeping himself frozen to notice Pippa’s slip-up. “No, I imagine not. But I heard your Barb retired. So, now you have me.”
“This is too—”
“Maria, do we need to have this girl removed?”
Maria moves her steady, practised gaze to Pippa, although her taser remains focused on Stefan. “No,” she says. “Pippa’s fine.”
“Yeah,” Pippa says, and locks eyes with Stefan for a moment. He doesn’t know what he reads there, and she looks away quickly. “I’m fine.”
“Good!” the nurse says, and rummages in her bag for an iPhone and a measuring tape. Stefan manages not to react when she pulls his penis out to its maximum length and holds the cold tape up against it. “I must say, Pippa,” she adds, tapping a number into her phone, “he’s a credit to you. Very docile. Normally we’d have had to knock them down at least once by now. About half these exams are on boys who are unconscious. I’m sure you remember. Well done.”
“Thanks,” Pippa says.
Stefan closes his eyes. No-one comments on it, as far as he’s aware. He stops listening to the nurse, tries to listen to the sound of his own heart instead, and by feeling his pulse in his wrist he’s able to do so, or so he imagines. He lets his body be guided into whatever positions are required, he breathes slowly and carefully, and he concentrates on being nothing but a functional automaton.
A machine made of meat, he remembers.
Muffled, the nurse goes about her inspection, has him stand on a scale, notes down his height and weight with a comment that both are ‘very suitable’, and pushes him down into a sitting position on the edge of the bed so she can examine his head and neck.
The sharp rap of a biro on his forehead forces him back into the room.
“Boy! Hold out your arm and make a fist! If I have to ask again, I’ll shock you first!”
God, it’s bright in the room. Stefan, still naked, still being watched, takes a moment to pick something new to look at — the computer, fine — then unlinks his fingers and holds out his arm, fist still clenched. The nurse gives him a strange look, and starts pinching at his forearm until she finds a vein.
Five vials.
Another rap on the forehead. “Hey! Brain-dead boy! Put your clothes back on. None of us enjoy looking at all that.” He controls his flinch. At least this time he can turn away while he dresses. Puts on a clean hoodie this time, no matter the weight on his skin; the more armour, the better. When he’s done, the nurse drops a collection cup and an iPad onto his bed. “I imagine that’s his first porn in weeks,” she says. “Make sure he doesn’t blow his load before he can get it in the cup.”
He doesn’t look up as they leave, just sits down carefully on the bed again and slowly leans back, keeping his feet on the floor, resting his head against the duvet. He’s aware of a mild commotion outside, but occupies himself counting the cracks in the concrete ceiling.
At least he has some time while they talk. How long will it take to become properly human again? To reassemble his imitation of a functional person?
But then the lock cycles again and Pippa quietly re-enters, closing and locking the door behind her. Stefan, barely limber, finds himself locking up again.
Whatever. At least he’s dressed.
Pippa sits delicately on the end of the bed, moving the cup and the tablet onto the desk. “I’m sorry about her,” she says. “They didn’t do the… the crotch stuff before. That’s new. I would have warned you.”
“Why?” Stefan’s voice is dry, and difficult.
“Because!” Pippa says, indignant. She makes a fist, like he did, but releases it. Starts messing with her bracelet instead. “I know I haven’t given you much reason to trust me. And I feel like… this… might have put us back where we started. Worse, even.” Stefan snorts. “But I’m here to help you, Stefan. Here to make you better. This place works, if you let it. I’ve… I’ve seen it.”
He has nothing to say to that. He knows too much, and isn’t in a frame of mind to edit. And her suddenly earnest face reminds him of Christine. He’s surrounded by true believers, and all of them, even the nice ones, want to tell him the good news about Dorley fucking Hall.
“Why won’t you talk to me, Stefan?” Pippa says, kicking the bedframe.
“Because,” he croaks. He doesn’t mean to antagonise her, but he’s in no position to be the person — the man — he’s supposed to be right now. He needs time to get himself back; surely that’s obvious? How can she not see he’s been freaking out all morning? Is he that good at hiding it?
He knows he’s not.
Pippa looks at him. He feels it on his skin, like boiling water. “Breakfast time,” she says.
“I’m staying here.”
“You won’t eat?”
Eating means Aaron. It means Will and Adam and all the other fuckers out there. It means sponsors, looking at him the way Maria and the nurse look at him. “No.”
“I could count this as a strike.”
Stefan pulls the covers over his head, would keep pulling if he could, more and more layers. He’d bury himself; anything to be even more comprehensively hidden from the world than he already is, here in this concrete dungeon.
“Do what you have to do, Pippa,” he says.
He can only guess at her reaction. After a minute or so the mattress shifts as Pippa’s weight leaves it. The door opens and closes quietly and, finally, grants Stefan peace.
* * *
The mug tree’s been emptied of all the joke ones. For security purposes, obviously; when there are outsiders in Dorley Hall’s main kitchen and dining hall you don’t want them discovering anything that even hints at the place’s true purpose, like a mug that says, Don’t feminise me until I’ve had my coffee, or Maria when she’s had too much to drink. So Christine sips from something disappointingly plain, with koalas on it — “Smoothest brain of all mammals,” she was informed by a revitalised Paige when she picked it — and smiles indulgently at Indira and Hasan, who are failing horribly at their stated goal of leaving to visit some of Hasan’s extended family in the next county, because they’re perched on the end of the kitchen table, kissing again.
“You’re going to be late,” Christine says.
“You’re going to make me late,” says Vicky, who is driving them to the station.
“Fine,” Indira says, between kisses, “fine, fine. Look! We’re done.”
“She says that,” Hasan says, pecking Dira on the cheek, “but just wait until we’re in the car.”
“No!” Vicky says, wagging a finger. “No canoodling on my back seat.”
Canoodling? Christine mouths to Paige, who’s mostly been ignoring the commotion while she absorbs caffeine. She shrugs and smiles, with the little one-sided grin she used to throw Christine’s way all the time.
Dira tugs on the strap of Christine’s tank top — she couldn’t be bothered to dress femme, not before she’s finished waking up, and if Aunt Bea has any complaints then she knows where the appropriate retort is printed on the side of a mug — and drags her up and out of her seat, into a hug. Indira’s going away again, and when she comes back their relationship will have changed forever, so Christine squeezes her former sponsor as hard as she can, coaxing a surprised squeak out of her.
“Sorry.”
Indira draws back, and kisses the end of Christine’s nose. “I’ll be back in a few days,” she whispers.
“I know. It seems like you’re always away, though.”
“I know.”
“And when you get back… things will be different.”
“I’ll always make time for you, Teenie. You know that.”
“I know. Sorry for being clingy.”
“Shush. And welcome to your first day as a free woman.”
A final squeeze and Christine releases her. “Have a good trip,” she says, and kisses Indira on the cheek. Another change. Another inflection point. Too many of those in too short a time. She knows how Paige feels: everything’s suddenly moving fast. You’re not panicking about being girls any more, so get out and make room for the next lot!
Not actually how it works — the programme couldn’t function if dozens of programme graduates didn’t stay on, or come back to visit, and it would probably actually be healthier for some of them if they took a year away from Dorley and found themselves a new hobby — but it’s hard to remember sometimes. Christine rebuilt her whole life on a foundation that now feels unstable.
So when she cries, watching Indira step out of the front door, blowing kisses and waving, it’s entirely natural that Paige embraces her, rubs the back of her neck, sits her carefully back down, and refills her coffee. They share wordless smiles and keep fingers entwined on the table as they drink, listening to the sizzle of the coffee machine, the mechanical mutterings of the dishwasher, and birdsong from somewhere outside the barred windows.
Old ladies together.
A few minutes later, after a pair of haggard-looking sponsors pass through the kitchen on their way downstairs, Pippa barges her way through the doors, deposits herself at the table and buries her face in her folded arms.
Christine exchanges glances with Paige, who puts a tentative hand on Pippa’s shoulder.
“You okay, Pippa?” Christine says.
She breathes heavily through her teeth. “I’m not cut out for this,” she says.
“You want to talk about it?”
“No.” She sighs with her whole body, lifting her shoulders and letting the tension ripple down her spine. “But I should. It’s Stefan. I’m just completely lost.”
“Is he okay?”
“Right now? Absolutely not.”
“What happened?” Paige asks.
“He was just… different today. The whole time up to now he’s been no trouble. At all. The worst he’s ever given me is, I don’t know, flipping sarcasm.” She lifts her head, props it on her wrist, and accepts with her free hand a fresh cup of coffee from Christine, who sits back down on her other side and mimics the light touch Paige has been maintaining on Pippa’s shoulder. “And that should be exactly what I want, yeah? But he keeps, I don’t know, short-circuiting me, because I remember what I was like when I was in his position, and he’s just completely different. And I remember what everyone else in my intake was like, and he’s not like them, either. He’s not like anyone I’ve seen in the files, and I’ve read everyone’s files while I try to work him out. You two included; sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Paige says, and smiles at Christine over Pippa’s head. “We’re not those people any more.”
“He’s not even like Melissa! Even she was a little trouble, at the start. Not combative, not if you believe Abby, but she argued. Or at least sulked, I guess. I don’t know; Abby’s redacted a lot. But Stefan! He just sits there and takes it. We get them up early, and he just goes along with it. We send them to their rooms, and he just goes along with it.”
Christine relaxes a little. She’s been tense ever since Pippa mentioned Melissa: there are too many things that join her and Stef together, and only the routine redaction of biographical information from the daily files seems so far to have kept them from being obvious. But Pippa merely mentioned her as an example, and moved on instantly. There’s no indication that she knows anything. Paranoid, Christine, she scolds herself. “But that’s good, isn’t it?” she says. “His sister—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Pippa says. “His sister who he loves so much he’ll suffer any indignity for her. Feels a bit unlikely, but I get it.” Turning her bracelet around on her wrist again. “So it didn’t really feel like it matters that I’m always messing up with him, because he never actually makes trouble. But I’ve still been worrying about it because, when push comes to shove, I need to know how he works to help him through the steps; but I’ve not been too worried because, you know, I’ve got time. They only start on the estradiol tonight, and it’s going to take a while for that to bear fruit. And he’s so steady, you know? Just keeps going and going, watching his movies and reading his books. He’s even been a moderating force on the three boys he hangs out with. Kind of.” She laughs for a moment. “I think it’ll take a hundred-mile-an-hour wrench to the head to change Aaron. Just knock out the chunk of brain that compels him to— uh, never mind.” She coughs, and Christine rubs her shoulder: It’s okay. “So I’ve felt a little, in just the last day or two, like I’ve been establishing a rapport with him, but this morning, everything came crashing down.”
“How so?” Paige asks. Christine’s biting her lip, looking away to mask her concern for Stef.
“When he woke up this morning — when we woke him up, earlier than usual — it was like whatever gets him through the day just didn’t wake up with him. He yelled at Aaron, and it might have been bad enough to seriously screw up the fragile friendship they’ve been building. He scalded himself badly in the shower, deliberately, I’m sure, like it was some kind of self-harm thing, like he really, really just wanted to hurt himself—”
“Hey,” Christine says gently. “Slow down. Take your time.” Pippa’s been tensing, raising her voice, and rising out of her seat; especially with Aunt Bea in the next room, calm is preferable.
“Thanks. Sorry. He wouldn’t talk to me, after the shower thing, just marched back to his room. And for the physical, it was me and Maria, she’s helping me out, now, I don’t know if you remember her getting the assignment—” a pair of nods reassures her that they do, “—but the new nurse… She’s horrid. She gave him the physical and he completely shut down. It was like, you know how some people get after the, uh, after the, um, you know, down there—”
“Pippa,” Paige says, “neither of us are sensitive about our orchis any more. You can say the word.”
Christine wants to argue — she reserves the right still to be pissed off about it, even if she’d definitely get it done voluntarily if she happened to need one and was asked, say, today — but she keeps quiet.
“Well, the, uh, the orchi,” Pippa says, apparently at least as sensitive about hers as Christine is, “hits some of us like an invasion, right? Like, no matter all the changes that have happened up to that point, it’s the first big one, the first real, total disruption of bodily integrity, yes?”
“It’s mutilation,” Paige says. “If you don’t ask for it, it’s mutilation.”
“Right. Yes. Well, Stefan behaved just like that. Like he was being… invaded. And the only way he could get through it was just to switch off. To wait it out. Like he was being, um…”
Christine can guess what Pippa wants to say. She’s not going to say it. But Christine’s thinking it, and she’s wondering if there’s still a way she can get Stef out, because this is far from the last time someone is going to do something like that, and punish him if he makes even the slightest fuss about it.
“Who’s this new nurse?” she asks.
“Barbara retired. The new one, Karen, I don’t know her. I assume she’s, you know, one of us, but she’s old, older than Maria, I think, and I’ve never seen her before. And she talked about Stefan like he wasn’t even there, like, like she was a vet and he was a dog, and she—” she lowers her voice, “—handled his genitalia. Inspected it. Measured it.”
“Oh,” Christine says.
“That’s new,” Paige says.
“Afterwards, he barely said a word. Wouldn’t go to breakfast. I apologised to him for… how it was, and said I would have warned him if I knew, and he said, ‘Why?’ and I was really angry with him because why wouldn’t I be, and then I saw myself through his eyes and it just made me feel so flipping wrong. But it was like I couldn’t keep a lid on it. I even, and I don’t know why, threatened him with a strike if he didn’t go to breakfast, and he didn’t seem to care.”
“What did you do?” Christine asks.
“Left him in his room. Couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“Did you give him a strike?”
“No!”
“You know what I think?” Paige says. “I think you need to forget about him for a while.”
“Paige!” Christine says.
“I’m serious! He’s not going anywhere, and if he’s in his room, he’s safe. Hungry, maybe, but you can ask one of the duty girls to send a couple of cereal bars down in the dumbwaiter. He might be miserable right now, but you know what always helped me when something happened that I just couldn’t deal with?”
“What?” Pippa says.
“Time. Give him time. Don’t bother him while he’s recovering. And come out to Almsworth with us instead of sitting around, worrying about him.”
No. Not this. Christine’s willing to go along with Paige’s assertions and not bother Stef for the moment, but this is beyond the pale. “I said I didn’t want to go shopping, Paige. I said I wanted a nice, sleepy day where absolutely nothing happens. Until tonight, when we’re going out, I guess.”
“That was before. Now we have two reasons to go: to get you some clothes, which you need, and to give Pippa a chance to de-stress, to get away from all this.” Paige catches Christine’s eye when Pippa looks away, and there’s a request there.
“Fine,” Christine says. “But I still don’t see why I need clothes; I have all yours.”
“First: presumptuous. Second: I’m two inches taller than you, Christine. You need clothes that fit, and your selection of nice things is pitiful. Besides, this is—” she makes quotes with her forefingers, “—a fun bonding activity for girls. It’s in the manual. Back me up, Pippa.”
Pippa blinks and takes a second to gather herself before answering, and Christine’s forced to agree with Paige: the girl really needs some relief. From the situation Christine put her in.
“Yes,” Pippa says. “Not exactly that wording, but yes. Group bonding while engaged in traditionally girly activities. Rerunning being a mid-teenager, but in your early twenties. And with more money.”
Christine holds up her hands. “I’m already beaten. We’re going shopping.”
“Good,” Paige says. “You don’t know how long I’ve been looking forward to putting you in something cute and taking you into town and buying you something nice, and this might be one of the last sunny days of the year. Go ask Aunt Bea for the card.”
“Why me?”
“You’re the one who’s been put on the accounts.”
Christine drains her coffee and pushes away from the table. The other two follow her into the dining hall, flanking her as she heads to the central table, where Aunt Bea is eating breakfast with the second years and some of their sponsors.
No Nell. An enforced break? Or is she downstairs, applying her signature brand of unpleasantness to the boys running around down there? Not including Stef, hopefully.
Faye and Rebecca beckon her over, so she joins them at their end of the table, an elbow on the back of each chair, leaning between them and accepting quick hugs from a pair of girls otherwise preoccupied with toast and coffee. Most of the second years are still wearing exercise clothes with hoodies and shirts thrown over the top, in order to be presentable for breakfast, and Christine grimaces; she doesn’t miss being rounded up with all the other second years, four times a week, at various times of day, to run on the treadmills and lift hilariously small, pink weights in the first floor exercise room. It might have been necessary — a year underground with no easily-weaponisable gym equipment leaves you quite out of shape — but it’s a chore she’s grateful to be free of, even if her own exercise regime has degraded to the occasional run around campus.
Paige quietly explains their plans to Aunt Bea, whose eyes flicker to Pippa and then to Christine, with a smile. “You’ll be well-behaved, I trust?” she says.
Christine straightens up and draws a cross on her chest. “Like saints, Aunt Bea.”
“And this evening? Your plans?”
“We’re meeting up with Vicky and Lorna,” Paige says, “and going out.”
“Exact destination TBD,” Christine adds.
Aunt Bea nods, reaches into her bag and, after a little rooting around, passes a credit card across the table. Six pairs of second-year eyes follow it into Christine’s hand. “Don’t go mad with it.”
Christine squeezes Faye’s shoulder and steps away from the table, linking back up with Pippa and Paige. “No promises!” she calls, and on her left, Pippa laughs.
* * *
There’s a selection of white noise files on the phones they hand out, and Stefan’s been plugged into one — rain_valley_3hrs.mp3 — since shortly after Pippa left. Eyes closed, lying on his back under the covers, clenching and unclenching his fists, calming himself down.
Despite the duvet he’d still felt exposed, so, after a little while, keeping his headphones in to the best of his ability, he added a long-sleeved top over the t-shirt and put the hoodie back on over it all. He lies there now, layers over layers, too warm but safe. Even if they spy on him through the cameras, there’s nothing to see but his face.
Stefan wants badly to berate himself, but there’s no reason and no point: there’s no version of him that could have borne the examination gracefully. So he tries instead to blank his mind and listen to the rain.
I’m not here.
Aaron knocks, ninety minutes of rain sounds later. Yells through the door that he just wants to see what’s up. Stefan struggles out of bed — he’d got more wrapped up in the duvet than he realised — and lets him in. Doesn’t cover up again when he sits back down, though. Aaron looking at him isn’t so bad; he doesn’t make judgements.
At least, he didn’t before.
Aaron kicks the door shut behind him and sits on the chair. Like Stefan, he’s wearing more layers than usual; maybe the examination got to him, too?
“Soooooo,” Aaron says. “How’re you doing? You wank yet? Ah—” Aaron spins on the chair and picks up the sample cup from the desk, “—evidently not. Me neither. Something about having an evil old hag digitally masticate my meat-and-two-veg, it just doesn’t put me in the mood, and no amount of heavily curated iPad porn is going to change that.” He balances the cup on his finger, spins it like a plate, and catches it when it threatens to escape. “I don’t know why they even need the cup. I have this patch on my wall I got pretty good at hitting. It’s like a sport, or making your own entertainment, the way our ancestors did. If I hit the spunk spot, it’s a good wank; if I don’t, I just have to keep going until I do, or until the blood from the friction burns gets too distracting. Anyway, they have whole gallons of my precious, precious baby juice soaking into the paint that they could have come for at any time.” He starts flipping through the iPad. “Huh. Yeah. They gave you the same shit they gave me. I was hoping you got better stuff, but this is just, like, swimsuit models, blowjobs, blah blah fucking blah. Would it kill them to have given us some sexy aunts or rubber maids or girls using toys on each other or trans girls sucking each other off? This is all so fucking vanilla; no wonder the women here all act like they’ve had no fun in years. And no wonder I couldn’t get it up. Look at this one! It’s just a chick, sitting on a rock, hair all billowy in the wind. Like a commercial for shampoo. I can feel myself getting softer just looking at it. Hell, I’m practically inverting.” He throws the iPad onto the bed next to Stefan. “So, quick question, not really very important at all, don’t worry about it if not, but have you been finding it hard to get hard, lately? Trickier than usual, I mean? Because I feel like I’ve got no petrol in my tank and nowhere around here is selling premium unleaded. Talk to me, Stefan. You dismissed my very real and valid concerns about my pecs getting flabby and I don’t want you to dismiss my incredibly tragic erectile dysfunction with the same nonchalance. Seriously: quality of wanks, getting better, getting worse, about the same…?”
“I, uh, haven’t tried yet,” Stefan says.
“Not at all? Not since you came here?” Stefan shakes his head and Aaron coughs nervously. “God, if I’d known I was masturbating for two I wouldn’t have wasted all that time sleeping. No wanks? Not even a quick toss after waking up with a boner? You really haven’t just lain here, put on one of those lame-ass movies they loaded us up with, found the part that’s most suggestive and just kept hitting the go-back-ten-seconds button with one hand while getting yourself off with the other? No dick flick to a chick flick? Shit, man, I know this place is hell on the libido but that’s something else. You know it’s not November for another week, yeah?”
“Um. What?”
Aaron launches into an explanation of No Nut November — of which Stefan was already aware; Aaron strongly disapproves, because suppressing the natural urges is how you get serial killers and electro swing bands, man — and Stefan just listens, inserting the occasional syllable where it seems to be required to keep the flow going but otherwise letting the stream of consciousness flow over him. It’s calming; way better than forest sounds.
“So,” Aaron says, mid-monologue, bouncing himself onto the mattress at the other end of the bed from Stefan, “that medical exam was weird, huh?”
Fuck it. Might as well come to terms with it: he’s friends with the little bastard. And talking to him is better than the alternative. “Right?” he says. “The nurse was even freaking Pippa out. And I don’t know why I had to be naked the whole time. You don’t need to be naked to have your blood drawn.”
“It’s a power play. Maria’s been giving me these books to read about, like, toxic masculinity and stuff, expanding my vocabulary, so now I can say with confidence that the whole thing was carefully planned to disempower us—” he says the word like he just learned it in junior school, with a grin, “—to make us feel vulnerable and completely at their mercy. And also kinda cold.”
“I’m amazed you read any books Maria gave you.”
“Yeah, well, she temporarily deleted all my movies and all the books on my phone. No choice. What’s Pippa been making you read?”
“Um. Nothing?”
“Really? What is she doing, then?”
“Literally nothing. I just watch movies and read books when I’m alone. I don’t have any homework or anything like that.”
“God. Swap?”
“Yeah, like they’d let us. Maybe the lesson I have to learn is about dealing with extreme boredom.”
“Yeah,” Aaron says, and shifts a little closer. “Missed you at breakfast, man. Weetabix and oat milk isn’t the same with just Will and Adam to stare at. And Raph is still lurking like a big fucking weirdo. He walks past, looking at me, and the music from Jaws plays. So, what do you think? Come to lunch?”
Stefan stretches, keeps the sleeves wrapped around his fingers, feels the fabric grow taut across his back and scratch at the sensitive skin. It’s energising; he’s still here, still alive, and here’s the pain to prove it.
He’ll be ready for the next thing. He won’t get caught out like that again.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Okay!” Aaron jumps up from the bed. “Good.”
“I’m sorry about this morning.”
“Hey,” Aaron says, standing by the door, waiting for Stefan to open it with his thumbprint, “it does me good to look my demons in the face sometimes, even if they are naked, damp and strangely earnest. Besides, this place gets to all of us, eventually. Some of us have a freakout in the privacy of our own rooms, others of us try and give ourselves second-degree burns in the shower. You still sore from that?”
Stefan prods the biometric reader and hauls on the door. “Little bit, yeah.”
“Here?” Aaron says, poking at Stefan’s shoulder as they head out into the corridor.
“Ow! Yes, I’m still sore there.”
“What about here?”
“Ow!”
“How about…?”
“Hah! Missed!”
“Hey! Come back! You were mean to me and I need to punish you! It’s the only way I can get personal satisfaction! It might be the only way I can cum in the cup!”
“Leave me alone, you psycho!”
Stefan evades him, dodging away from Aaron’s fingers and rounding the corner into the main corridor, almost tripping over Maria, and the perplexed look on her face only makes him laugh harder.
Notes:
A good time to note that this story now has fanart of Christine, Aaron and Steph!
Chapter 12: Queen of Hearts
Notes:
cw: dysphoria, references to assault, passing anxiety
Chapter Text
2019 October 26
Saturday
“We’re really not going to talk about it?”
“We’re really not going to talk about it.”
“Really? Because I feel like a little group therapy session, a lot of sharing of our feelings, maybe a group hug—”
“Discussion over! Go snuggle with your boyfriend if you want to talk about it so much but right here, right now, over my tomato soup, we are not. Fucking. Talking about it.”
“Hey, Stef; you hear what Will just called you?”
Stefan regards his spoonful of tomato soup. Regards Will, who seems more full of compressed rage than usual; Adam, quieter than usual; Aaron, considerably more talkative, but with his normal level of tact.
“He doesn’t necessarily mean me,” he says.
“Oh, babe!” Aaron says. “You wound me!” He gets a kick for his trouble, under the table. If it’s harder than it might otherwise have been, well, that’s just revenge for poking Stefan on his scalded shoulder.
“He definitely means you,” Adam says, almost too quiet to hear. “There’s no-one else who’ll put up with him.” Stefan’s careful to laugh, to show he appreciates the joke. Of all of them, Adam has the hardest shell, reveals the least of himself, but he’s been opening up little by little over the last few days, and as soon as Stefan saw it was happening he decided to encourage it, if only to find out what he did, why he’s here. A smile, nervously returned, is Stefan’s reward.
“No-one at this table has any appreciation for the therapeutic process,” Aaron says. “I’m trying to open up, people! To live in my moment!” He’s been trying to get Will to respond to his theories about Karen the nurse — he thinks the whole thing was a display of power, to teach them to submit to female authority — but Will is uncharacteristically reluctant to engage, and every time the topic is raised, Adam becomes more withdrawn. So Stefan, sensing another round of argument, puts a cautionary hand on his arm, and Aaron only flinches a little.
The four of them sit at the lunch table in their usual places: Stefan and Aaron near the door to the main corridor but with their backs to the wall, Will and Adam a few places down, facing the door to the common room. Two pairs of eyes on both entrances. They’ve maintained this habit for almost a week, the better to warn each other should something unpleasant seem about to happen. Declan, Raph and Ollie, their oppositional group, take their lunch at the tables in the common room, and for the last several days have declined to cause any trouble at mealtimes, apparently acknowledging that four beats first three and now two, with Declan out of the picture. Because while Adam is quiet, Stefan scrawny and Aaron scrawnier, they have Will, who, despite considering himself a man of words — which prompted Aaron privately to comment, “He’s a rare breed: a dude capable of calling himself ‘a man of words’ both without irony and without being forced by his own sense of self-satisfaction to immediately bend over and blow himself to orgasm over just how thoroughly intellectual he is.” — is easily the physical equal of anyone in the basement, and all they have to do to keep him around is put up with the occasional homophobic remark.
Stefan senses a moment of tension from all of them when the door from the corridor opens, but it’s only Martin Holloway, clutching a tray and hovering in the entrance like a schoolchild searching for the safest seat in the canteen. Martin normally eats alone in his room. More out-of-character behaviour from one of the boys; probably a reason for that.
“Moody!” Aaron says. “We’ve missed you, buddy! I was trying to figure out just the other day what was missing from the lunch room and at first I thought it was ketchup but then I realised: it was your intense aura of crippling depression. Please, come, sit; engulf us.”
“Hello, Aaron,” Martin says, monotone, and with a nod to the table picks a chair and dumps his tray in front of it. “Hello, everyone.”
Stefan’s grateful that Martin sits closer to Will than anyone else. He still can’t stand the man. Maybe it’s just a lack of exposure, maybe if he’d been subjected to a little bit of Martin every day he might have built up a tolerance, like with Aaron, but maybe not; all Stefan can think of when he looks at him is that the sad bastard’s left a dead man and a grieving widow in his wake.
“Uh, Stef?” Aaron says quietly. “Aren’t you being incredibly rude?”
Stefan nods and dips some bread in his soup. “Yep.”
“Oh. Good. Okay. Just checking. FYI, I’m calibrating my morality off of yours, so you’d better not steer me wrong. I don’t want to blink and end up a serial killer or a member of the Conservative Party or something.”
“Says Captain Dick Pic.”
“Hey! You can’t kill with those.”
“No, but you can hurt someone badly.”
Aaron drops his plastic spoon in the bowl, splashing his hoodie with soup. “When are you going to stop needling me about that? Seriously, Stefan. It’s getting old.”
Stefan shrugs. “When you show some remorse.”
It’s a risk: Stefan’s already made Aaron mad at him once today, and it was Aaron who extended the olive branch, not him. But he’s still going to keep at it, and keep making Aaron be the one to make peace, until he gets the result he wants. He’s not sure exactly why this is so important to him — beyond the fact that it bothers him to be friends with someone who would do something like that — but it would definitely be satisfying to reform Aaron before Dorley gets to him. Two fingers to the whole bizarre programme.
“Why are you always so self-righteous?” Aaron mutters.
“I thought you were calibrating your morality off me?” Stefan says innocently.
Aaron snorts. “You shit. I’ll find out what you did, eventually. You’re a bastard, too, somehow.”
Stefan nudges him with his elbow. “Don’t be rude. Eat your soup.”
Aaron blows him a kiss and starts dismembering his bread roll.
“Hey, uh,” Martin says, “Stefan?”
“Yes?” Stefan says, not bothering to hide his irritation. Across the table, Will looks annoyed and Adam upset, and Stefan realises he probably should have paid attention to their conversation instead of testing Aaron’s malformed conscience. Fucking idiot Martin Moody.
“I, uh, just wanted to ask: how many times did they tase you?”
“I’ve never been tased, Martin.”
“Not even this morning, with the nurse?” Martin says, turning his plastic spoon over and over in his hands. It’s clean; he hasn’t touched his soup.
“No.”
“Not even when she—?”
“No, Martin.”
“I don’t believe this,” Will says, standing up out of his seat and ignoring Adam pulling on his sleeve, trying to sit him back down. “You didn’t fight back at all?”
Declan, bruised, walks past in Stefan’s memory. Why don’t you fucking poofs fight? “Of course I didn’t,” Stefan says.
Will bangs the flat of his palm on the table, making Adam jump. “Why the fuck not?”
“Calm down, Will,” Stefan says.
“What the fuck did you say, you little homo?”
“Jesus, Will.” Stefan points past him. “Look at Adam!”
Will twists, finally seeing it: Adam, withdrawing, pulling his hands away from the table, pulling his legs up under him. Reducing the amount of space he takes up. “Fuck,” Will says, instantly dropping the attitude. “Adam. I’m sorry.”
Adam whispers something too quiet for Stefan to hear.
“No,” Will says, sitting down, moving his chair away from Adam, giving him some space, “I said I’d do better.”
“What’s happening?” Martin says, but Will silences him with a glare.
“What’s happening,” Stefan says quietly, as Adam slowly uncurls, “is we all got assaulted.” He continues, not for Martin’s sake but for Adam’s, Aaron’s, even Will’s, “Just because I didn’t fight back doesn’t mean— Look. I had a bad morning. Aaron knows how bad. And on top of that, we saw Declan being taken back to the cells, looking like he’s been beaten. Badly. He got his third strike when he came at Aaron and me yesterday, and that’s apparently what happens to you after three strikes. No more comfy bed. No more movies. No more lunches at the table where we bicker about whatever stupid shit is bothering us that day. No more afternoon telly. You just get the living shit beaten out of you, and then you get escorted to the showers, washed, and escorted right back to your cell, where presumably they carry on beating you.”
“But that’s Declan,” Will says. “You don’t care about Declan.”
“No. But I care about me and, God help me, I even care about you lot. Declan’s our canary: he gets violent with the metal cutlery, they take it away; he misbehaves too much, they beat him until he stops. He’s a message to the rest of us: don’t fuck around or you’ll end up like him. And so that’s what I’m thinking when the nurse strips me naked and starts fondling me: put up with this or you’ll get the Declan treatment.” A lie, but a believable one, and probably more useful than the truth. “So I take it. I don’t fight back.”
“That’s the point of this place,” Aaron says, gesticulating with his hunk of bread and spraying the table with droplets of tomato soup. “To make us not want to fight back. To train us to put up with whatever shit they feed us. And I admit, man, I was sceptical at first. Plush bedrooms and free food? What, they’re going to bore us until we submit? No. Turns out, being bored is the reward. The punishment is being made to look like a mouldy orange that can’t walk straight. So, yeah. Some old bitch of a nurse wants to feel me up? I’m going to lie back and think of England. Hell, it wasn’t my worst wank.”
“I pushed her,” Will says. “Got my first strike and got tased. When I stood up, Tabby hit me, and warned me I’d get another strike if I tried again.” He pulls his t-shirt back, revealing a raised welt on his right pectoral.
“I tried to get away,” Martin says. “Tased.”
“I didn’t,” Adam says, and all heads at the table turn to him again. He’s got his hands locked together, arms touching at the elbows. Like he’s in prayer. “I didn’t try to stop her.” He sounds almost like Martin in his monotone. “I didn’t try to get away. Even though I wanted to, I couldn’t. I froze up, like when— like when—”
“Adam,” Stefan says, standing slowly, “it’s okay.” He shoots a look at the others at the table. “You guys want to go watch some TV?”
Aaron takes the hint first, dragging Martin with him into the common room.
“I’m not leaving,” Will says. His fingers are twitching, as if he wants to comfort his friend but can’t bring himself to display even a small amount of physical intimacy.
“I’ll bring him through,” Stefan says. “I promise. Just, please, give us a minute?”
Will glares at him. “Fine,” he says eventually.
As Will reluctantly joins Aaron and Martin in the common room — Aaron’s already turned on the TV; there’s a baking competition show on — Stefan sits carefully in the empty seat next to Adam. Gently he cups Adam’s shoulder in his right hand and rests his left hand on the table, open and available.
Adam, with some hesitation, takes it.
“Do you need to talk about it?” Stefan asks.
Over the next twenty or so minutes, Adam hesitantly tells Stefan a story. It’s unclear, incoherent, and ultimately doesn’t leave Stefan with significantly more information about Adam’s past than he already had, but it makes one thing certain: Adam is the person in the basement least able to deal with someone like nurse Karen. Stefan, at least, has ways to compartmentalise, but Adam has nothing. No coping mechanisms, no structures around which to rebuild himself. He’s almost a blank slate, albeit one on which his church has scrawled around the edges a lot of nonsense about demons and subservient women and the requirement to procreate and the primacy of the unadulterated human form.
It’s not hard to imagine how a man like Adam, inculcated with such bigotry his whole life, might say or do something that would put him on Dorley’s radar, but it’s impossible for Stefan to believe that he deserves it. And while escape from this place, for Adam, is likely impossible — for the moment — Stefan can at least do his part to make the next year or so a little less pointlessly traumatic for him. For all of them.
He waves for Will to come and take Adam into the common area, and when he’s alone in the lunch room he checks the light on the biometric lock on the door to the corridor: still green. Outside, two sponsors are leaning against the wall, keeping watch on the basement residents as usual. Tabby, Will’s sponsor, is lazily messing with her phone, obviously bored, but Edy, Adam’s, anxiously meets Stefan’s eyes as soon as he steps out into the corridor.
“I’m Stefan,” he says, stopping a safe distance away from them and folding his arms around his waist, to seem as nonthreatening as possible. “I’m Pippa’s— um, I’m her responsibility, I guess.”
Tabby rolls her eyes. “We know.”
“Good. I want to speak to someone in charge, please.”
* * *
Almsworth town centre is concentrated around a hill even more shallow than the one graced by the university, with a small cathedral at its apex and a cluster of smaller, Church of England-aligned buildings giving way, halfway down, to a shopping district that connects directly to the old town houses by the river. The large bus station is the newest building, emerging recently from the shell of a department store. It’s become a minor social hub, extending towards the railway station on one side and the cinema on the other, with chain restaurants and small shops on its upper level and a covered walkway on the ground floor that crosses three side streets and provides shelter to people queueing for the town’s most popular nightclub. It’s one of only two truly modern sprawls in the town centre, which otherwise comprises mostly brick buildings abutting each other, three streets thick along the river, separated by the occasional cramped alleyway. Smaller chain stores and an ever-increasing number of estate agents inhabit the antique buildings in the manner of hermit crabs, their flashy fasciae protruding from shabby, crumbling brickwork.
The other modern building is the main shopping centre itself, which climbs the street closest to the station and embraces the angle of the hill like a collapsed layer cake: each level is roughly equal in size and each juts out from under the floor above, a giant’s staircase leading up to the cathedral, against which the shopping centre’s top-floor semi-open-air café squats as closely as is legally permitted. The cathedral fights back against the noise of shoppers and diners with a skirt of thick trees and bushes, voluminous and several layers thick on the graveyard side and trimmed back almost to the bare branch where they intersect with the shopping centre property line.
Paige took Christine and Pippa straight from the bus station to the café, insisting on a real coffee — meaning one with two shots of sugar-free caramel and a swirl of something fluffy on top — before serious shopping can possibly feasibly commence.
Christine doesn’t especially enjoy being away from the university grounds, a whole bus ride away from her bolthole at Dorley Hall, but it’s nice up here, with the rain shutters pulled back and a light wind rippling through the surrounding greenery, lending the café a lush, earthy smell and providing occasional glimpses of the magnificent cathedral grounds. She drinks daintily from her caramel coffee, trying not to get too much lipstick on the straw — Paige won two rounds out of three; Christine had to put on makeup and had to try Paige’s favourite coffee, but she got to wear shorts out — and concentrates on her friends and not, for example, the roomful of strangers who might at any moment make unfavourable judgements about her.
Pippa, who chose a plain black coffee and seems not to be regretting it, leans back in her chair and stretches. “I really needed this,” she says when she leans on her hands again. “My world’s basically contracted to just the library, the Philosophy buildings, and Dorley flipping Hall.”
“I’m not sure I needed this at all,” Christine says, trying to keep her tone light. A pair of younger men sat at the table behind them a few minutes ago, and their presence is inhibiting in more ways than one. She remembers when that was her, although she’d be alone; hoodie up, headphones on, innocently circling the food court and the surrounding shops with the exploit running on her phone, waiting for—
No. She was different then. She wasn’t herself; she was still him. She closes her eyes, edits the memory. Inserts her old self in her place. Funny; she’s starting to forget what he looked like. Even though it seems like everyone out here who gives her so much as a passing glance can see him perfectly.
“It’s okay,” Paige whispers, stroking her thumb gently on the back of Christine’s hand. “You’re safe with us.” Christine concentrates on the sensation, skin against skin, forces herself to inhabit the present, to remember the face in the mirror. The boy’s dead; let him stay buried.
I know who I am now, she tells herself. Another little litany from Indira’s repertoire. “Am I that obvious?” she says aloud
“To me, you are.”
“I hate this, Paige. I feel… conspicuous.”
“No-one thinks there’s anything strange about you. You’re just another girl.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Only because I’ve had the practise. You need to get out more.”
“I should be better at this by now,” Christine says, and slurps some more coffee to give her hands something to do.
“Paige is right,” Pippa says, offering a tentative smile and an outstretched hand, which Christine takes, feeling absurd to be accepting comfort over something so elementary. There are probably second-year girls who are better at being out in the world than she is. “None of us was instantly good at any of this.”
“Except Vicky,” Christine says.
“Even her,” Paige says. “She was the most immediately natural of all of us, but she still had to learn how to…” She trails off, considering her words, and Christine resents yet again the entire outside world, a place where none of them can truly drop their guard. She imagines a life spent that way, always careful, and understands why people like Maria and Aunt Bea retreat to Dorley, to a world that gets them. That’s not going to be her, though. Even if she forgot quite what it’s like to be out here. “Vicky had to learn how to leave the Hall,” Paige continues, still reassuring Christine’s stiffening fingers, caressing her from nail to knuckle. “She had to learn how to be Vicky, out here. Lorna did, too, when she transitioned. It’s jarring for all of us.”
“That’s not the same,” Christine whispers. “Lorna’s trans. Actually trans.”
“It’s close enough. I know you believe there’s a huge difference between you and her—”
“Yeah, because she’s authentic and I’m not.”
“—but there isn’t.” Paige leans closer. “You may have come by your genders differently, but the material effect is still the same. You know she’d tell you that, if she knew your history.”
“She doesn’t,” Christine says. “And she can’t, ever. So she won’t.”
“It gets easier, you know,” Pippa says. “I went out once a month, to start with. Into town. I’d go to random places, like a coffee shop or Waterstones or that place by the river that sells paintings of cats, and I wouldn’t let myself leave until I talked to at least one person. About anything.” She grins into her coffee mug. “I learned a lot about cats.”
“How do you stop feeling like a fake?”
“It fades.” She takes a sip, looks at Christine, takes in the casual, ordinary girl who left Dorley and immediately forgot herself, and reaches out, takes Christine’s other hand. “I don’t know you all that well, Christine, but I think you’ve said before that you see yourself as a girl, right?”
“At Dorley, yes, I’m a girl,” Christine says. “Even at Saints. If it gets bad in a lecture, I can just leave. Go straight home. But, out here, I feel fucking trapped. Here, I’m a girl only as long as no-one asks me any difficult follow-up questions. I hate this, Pip.” She’s too visible; she imagines herself easily disassembled, breasts and pretty face torn away as messily as they were once applied, reduced to a thin, scared boy in girls’ clothes. Obvious to everyone.
Behind her, the men finish their drinks and stand up, startling her, causing the tooth biting her lip to break the skin. She frees a hand, wipes away the blood with her thumb and inspects it: pleasingly real. An anchor.
“I forgot it could be like this,” she whispers. “I think I want to go home, Paige.”
“No,” Paige whispers, moving her chair close and making contact with Christine, shoulder to shoulder. “You’re staying here. As long as it takes. You need to.”
“Because Aunt Bea wants me to?”
“Because I want you to. And because it’ll help.”
“Are you sure about this, Paige?” Pippa says.
“Yes. She’s my— my best friend, and she fades as soon as she steps out of our front door. It kills me to watch it happen.”
“Did you know it would be like this?”
Paige nods; Christine feels her weight shift. “It’s easy to forget, when you’re around her,” Paige says, and resumes gently stroking Christine, a finger along the length of her bare forearm, “but she’s only at the start of her third year. In some ways, she’s as advanced as anyone I’ve met at Dorley, and at home she’s confident, sweet… fully herself. But Indira wasn’t great at pushing her to difficult things, especially after they grew close. A lot of the time she forgot to act like a sponsor. I remember being jealous: when Francesca was making me walk the grounds of Saints, still swollen from surgery, Christine and Indira were watching movies together in Indira’s room. But, as awful as she was, Francesca prepared me for life out here. Practically rubbed my face in it. But Christine… Everyone loves her too much.” There’s a smile in Paige’s voice. “No-one wants her to hurt.”
Christine shifts her weight, leans her head against Paige’s shoulder. The gentle soprano of Paige’s near-whisper is as effective a balm as anything else she can think of. Nevertheless: “You’re talking about me like I’m not here, Paige,” she says.
Paige squeezes her forearm. “Sorry.”
“How are you doing?” Pippa says.
“I’m… riding it,” Christine says. “The longer I’m here, in one place, and nothing happens, it gets a little easier. Maybe I’ll try talking to someone in a minute. About cats.”
“Would you like to know my method?” Paige says. “None of these people matter.”
“That’s your method? No-one matters?”
“Some people do.” Paige lets Christine’s arm go and lays her hands out on the table. “I sort people into two groups: those who matter—” she curls one hand into a ball, “—and those who don’t.” With her other hand she describes a huge volume. “And I choose who matters to me. Right now? Here? That’s you two. Christine and Pippa. The rest of them might as well be cardboard. And no-one cares what cardboard thinks, do they?”
Christine nods slowly. Enjoys the sensation of her hair rolling across Paige’s shoulder and tickling her cheek as it falls. “I think I’ll try the cat thing first,” she says.
They sit that way for a while, slowly drinking their coffee, Pippa filling Christine’s silence with complaints about her Philosophy dissertation and her millennial supervisor — “He made a ‘can has cheeseburger’ joke last week. I had to Google it.” — and Paige contributing chatter about her History with Human Rights modules and a professor who she thinks keeps trying to look down her top. Eventually Christine feels able to join in, and when she leaves to use the women’s bathroom and realises she forgot to feel at all anxious about it until after she gets done washing her hands, she announces to Paige and Pippa, feeling a little chastened, that she’s ready to get on with things.
“You’re a star, Christine,” Paige says, rising to embrace her and punctuating her praise with a kiss to the temple. “Now,” she adds, gathering up her bag and her phone and dragging Christine along by the wrist as she strides towards the exit to the rest of the mall, “who wants to shop?”
* * *
They put him in the cells. It’s not punishment — although he can hear Declan’s moans from the other end of the corridor, which is unpleasant enough — but it’s best none of the boys know where he is or what he’s doing, and the cells are the only place down here where that can be accomplished without locking down the whole basement. They left the door open for him, so he can stretch his legs, even go look at Declan if he wants; he has a reputation as the one who’s no trouble, Edy said.
Stefan doesn’t go look at Declan. Remembering his first nights under Dorley, he does a little yoga instead. He’s been neglecting it.
He’s been running through the encounter with the nurse, over and over, and still he finds no sense in it. Granted, today’s been Stefan’s first actual encounter with the methods they use to reform and transform their patients; it’s possible they’re all like this, one invasion after another, that they have nothing in their future from here on out but constant violation. That doesn’t ring true, though. They can’t possibly induct their charges into womanhood with an assault.
Pippa said it was new. That she hadn’t expected it. And — although the nurse interrupted her before she could finish her sentence — that she hadn’t had it done to her, when she was down here. And she spent the whole time shaking, Stefan remembers. Two hands on the taser to keep it steady. Like she was angry. Or scared.
He lies back on the cot, hoping someone cleaned it after the previous inhabitant of this cell moved on, and thinks through what he wants to say to whoever comes down.
He hears her before he sees her: echoing footsteps in the corridor, the twin-tone click-clack of heels on a hard surface. Something about her gait suggests an older adult, and images of severe schoolmarms and society proprietresses merge in his mind. It’s a surprise, then, when a friendly looking woman, aged somewhere above the mid-forties, raps gently on the side of the open door and smiles when he meets her eyes.
She wears a light dress, low heels and no tan on her pale skin, she cuts her blonde hair to the shoulder, and she stands like she owns the place. Aunt Bea, he presumes.
“Knock knock,” she says. “I’m Beatrice. I run this establishment.”
He looks at her outstretched hand for a moment before taking it. “Stefan,” he says.
“I’m aware,” she says, and her smile falters as she looks around. In his cell, down the hall, Declan yells a string of particularly potent expletives. “I do hate this place,” she adds, and pulls on his hand, encourages him to stand. “And there’s nowhere to sit, unless we’re to share that horrid little cot. Why don’t you come with me?”
Her suggestion startles one of the girls waiting outside, someone Stefan doesn’t recognise. “Aunt Bea—” she says.
“Oh, we will be quite safe,” Beatrice says. “Won’t we, Stefan Riley?”
Stefan Riley, full-named for the first time in a while and temporarily lost for words, crosses his heart instead, a gesture which unaccountably makes her chuckle.
He follows Beatrice out of the cell corridor, through the doors at the end and up a winding flight of concrete stairs. He’d expected her to lead him into a room in the first basement, the one Christine said functions mostly as admin and security, but she keeps going, and soon they emerge into a dining hall of the sort one might find in a National Trust property.
Stefan unconsciously ducks away from the high ceiling. Agoraphobia! That’s new! Too much time underground. Beatrice notices his reaction and takes his hand again, pulls gently until he moves of his own accord, and eventually sits him down at a rustic, wooden table in a bright, airy, lived-in kitchen. There’s a small pile of dirty dishes on the table and a mug that says, Once a Princess, Always a Princess — the first double-s has been mostly scratched off — which is quickly cleared away by the other occupant, who turns out to be Abby, wearing rubber washing-up gloves.
She’s standing at the sink, behind Beatrice, and is thus in a position to mouth the obvious question: Does she know? Stefan shakes his head, both to answer Abby and to pretend amazement at the opulence of his surroundings. “This is so much nicer than the basement,” he says to Beatrice, who smirks.
Abby rinses the incriminating mug, stacks it on the drying rack with several others, and drops her rubber gloves over the edge of the sink. “I expect you’ll want the room,” she says to Beatrice.
“Thank you, Abigail. This is Stefan; he’s our guest, downstairs.”
“Actually,” Abby says, “we’ve met. Pippa asked me to check on him. Hello again, Stefan.”
“Hi, Abby,” Stefan says. “How was the birthday dinner?”
Abby considers for a moment. “Alcoholic,” she says. “Would you like some coffee, before I go?”
Beatrice shows her a professional smile and, as Abby pours coffee into two plain mugs, turns it on Stefan. It shouldn’t be a surprise, particularly, but Stefan nonetheless is a little perturbed that the woman in charge of the place that took eight boys against their will — correction: seven and Stefan — and immediately subjected them to unwanted hormone treatment is able to meet his gaze steadily and without apparent difficulty. Is her conscience really so clear that she can look calmly in the eye someone who is, on her instruction, about to be permanently altered? Or is she just that confident in the results she gets?
Abby — living, breathing exemplar of the results Beatrice gets — nods at both of them and scurries from the room, no doubt texting Christine as soon as she gets out of sight, and a part of Stefan has to admit that Beatrice might have a point: Abby is still graceful and gorgeous, even in a hurry and a battered GO SAINTS! t-shirt. And she’s never seemed anything other than happy.
“First things first,” Beatrice says, clasping her hands together on the table; terribly sincere. “I would like to welcome you to Dorley Hall. Officially.”
How should he reply? He was expecting, despite the fondness with which Abby always speaks of her, a harridan, a tyrant, not this affable and attractive older woman, with her coffee and her light and airy kitchen and her novelty mugs. How might one of the boys respond? How might Aaron?
Stefan quickly decides against the idea of attempting to channel Aaron. “I don’t know if I can thank you for that,” he says, with precision: he can thank Christine for it.
“In time,” Beatrice says, smiling, “you will. Our programme can be quite transformative.”
Ah; they’ve reached the stage of the conversation where the vampire starts talking suggestively about ‘wine’. Earlier than he expected. “I suppose I’ll have to see it to believe it,” Stefan says, hoping his performance of ignorance is adequate.
“I’m sure you will.”
Stefan gets the feeling Beatrice isn’t done with her little routine quite yet, so he sips his coffee and rehearses the points he wants to raise. Her gaze is uncomfortable, and he tries not to squirm under it; angry he may be, but that doesn’t mean he’s any happier meeting yet another new person while still his unmodified, unsatisfied self.
“You intrigue me, Stefan,” Beatrice says, narrowing her eyes a fraction. “Your record suggests that you are, frankly, dangerous to be around, but in the two weeks since you arrived, you have calmly followed all instructions and made no trouble for anyone. You claim to love your sister so much that the thought of her believing you dead is enough to guarantee your submission, but you frequently go beyond what is asked of you. I hear you’ve been pushing particularly firmly against the Holt boy’s unpleasant habits.”
“Um,” Stefan says, “the Holt boy?”
“Aaron.”
“Oh. Yes, well. He shouldn’t have done what he did, and if I’m going to be friends with him, I need him to acknowledge that.”
“And what precisely will that achieve?” Beatrice asks, tapping lightly on her mug.
“I’ll feel a bit less gross when I laugh at one of his jokes.”
“Why, Stefan? Why are you so pliable? Why do you try to do your friend’s sponsor’s job for her? And why, after your only incident of aberrant behaviour to date, did you ask immediately to see me?”
He sips his coffee again, playing at savouring the flavour. It’s an obvious ploy for time, but he wants to seem intimidated by her, a cover for his mounting discomfort. The back of his neck itches again, and he scratches at it distractedly.
“I don’t see what other choice I have,” he says. “The doors are locked; the girls are armed. There’s nowhere for me to go. Besides, you provide food, a bed, washing facilities; as long as I’m safe, I have no reason to push back.” Beatrice nods. Doesn’t give anything away by her expression. “As for why I’m here right now…”
“Do enlighten me.”
“Your nurse sexually assaulted us this morning.”
“Is that how you would describe it?”
Stefan dumps his mug heavily on the table. “Yes. She came to each of our rooms, had us strip naked, and groped us. We were given no option to refuse, and we had weapons pointed at us the whole time.”
“Karen Turner is a medical professional.”
“Medical professionals ask permission,” Stefan says, looping both hands around the mug and pressing hard. The heat is a useful reminder. “She didn’t. Not only that, but she enjoyed herself. Treated me like an animal. And Pippa, a woman I’ve trusted up to now, let her. You say this programme is transformative? If this is your example, I have to wonder what you’re transforming us into. Perhaps,” he adds sweetly, expending much to maintain a steady voice, pressing his fingers harder into the hot mug, “you intend to teach us to submit quietly and without complaint when we are touched intimately under threat of violence?”
Beatrice looks him directly in the eye. “We most definitely do not.”
“Then help me understand. Pippa came to me afterwards and told me that this nurse’s methods are new. I didn’t want to listen to her at the time because it was all so fresh, but if she’s right, then I’m even more confused.” Is he playing this too innocent? Hard to say; Beatrice is difficult for him to read. She stays silent, inviting him to continue. “Can I be blunt?” he asks.
“I am suffering from an overabundance of bluntness of late,” Beatrice says. “Oh, go on,” she adds, waving a hand at his confusion, “say your piece.”
Controlled breaths. He closes his eyes, to block out as many senses as possible; better for remembering the second half of his prepared thoughts, better to feel less conspicuous. It doesn’t matter that she gets to see him struggling; it probably pleases her. “I think this was unintentional. The nurse, Karen, she said the old nurse retired, and I bet it’s hard to get replacement staff here. Most nurses would report you immediately. So my guess is, you take whoever you can get. And that’s Karen: a vindictive old pervert who gets off on exerting power over people less than half her age. Who likes to traumatise people. Boys. Men.”
“You would consider yourself traumatised by your experience?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“My emotional responses are not a consideration,” Beatrice says, and then snaps her head around. “Yes, Abigail?”
Abby stands in the doorway connecting the kitchen to the vast dining hall, nervously shifting from foot to foot. “He’s right, Aunt Bea,” she says. “It’s wrong.”
“Thank you, Abigail.”
“You never did anything like that to me.”
Stefan and Beatrice realise at the same time that there’s only one possible conclusion to be drawn from Abby’s statement: that she was once under Beatrice’s control, just as Stefan is. A little gift from Abby: another thing he doesn’t have to pretend ignorance about. He wants desperately to thank her, and hopes she doesn’t get in trouble for helping him.
“Times were different,” Beatrice says.
Abby shrugs. “We weren’t.” She doesn’t wait to be dismissed, just turns and marches back into the dining hall.
Stefan picks up the cue he’s been given. “Abby was in the programme?” he says, with just the right amount of incredulity. Having watched her leave, he keeps looking at the door into the dining hall, trying to give the impression that he’s wondering if the handful of other women he saw in there were in the programme, too.
Beatrice maintains a creditable poker face. “She was unruly. Girls can be too, you know.”
“That’s so hard to believe. Last night, she was very kind to me.”
“That’s the whole point,” Beatrice says, her composure briefly faltering. She sighs and picks up her drink with both hands. “Since you were so generously blunt with me,” she continues, “I will be blunt with you. You’re correct: we don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to nursing staff, and from what you and some of my sponsors have described to me, her methods differ from her predecessor’s more than I expected. I do not condone the actions of nurse Karen Turner. She will be contacted and disciplined.” She sips from her coffee, carefully places her mug back on the table, and pinches the bridge of her nose. “What a day,” she says, her voice losing some of its pitch and accent. “I’m having my authority undermined by a twenty-one-year-old child.”
“Don’t worry,” Stefan says. “I’m still extremely intimidated by you.”
Beatrice goes still for a moment, looks placidly at Stefan, and then bursts out laughing. “Good!” she says. “Good. Although,” she adds, almost to herself, “it’s likely not the best sign that several people have told me that lately.”
Abby’s briefly visible in the dining hall, checking up on Beatrice’s laughter from a safe distance. “And,” Stefan says, realising there actually is something he can do to reduce the likelihood that Abby gets censured, “it really helps, knowing Abby went through the programme.”
“Does it now?” Beatrice is still smiling, still coming down from her mirth, but something of her edge is returning.
He nods. “It’s proof that I’m not going to be down there forever. Proof that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.” And the light’s coming from a kitchen right out of an AGA brochure. “And she’s sweet. Kind. A role model.”
“I will be sure to let her know,” Beatrice says. She finishes her coffee. “Pippa’s agreement with you, to guarantee your good behaviour: I’m invoking it.”
“Okay,” Stefan says, thanking Christine once again. Whatever feat of manipulation she pulled off to get Pippa and Beatrice to agree to the letter, and thus absolve him from having actually to behave like a bastard, is going to be hard to repay. When he’s done, when he’s finally a girl just like her, he’s going to find out what she likes and buy her a hundred of it.
“You did not meet with me,” Beatrice says. “You do not know that some of the residents of Dorley Hall are programme graduates. And whatever you might have inferred about the duration of your stay, you will keep to yourself. Say you understand and agree.”
“I understand and agree.”
Beatrice stands briskly. Holds out her hand for Stefan’s empty mug, places it upside down in the sink next to hers. She leans against the sideboard with both hands. “You met with Abigail, not me. You discussed this morning’s events. She passed on to you the message that the nurse will be disciplined. And tonight’s vitamin jab will be administered by someone else. That is the information you will take back down with you. This and nothing more. Say you understand and agree.”
“I do. I mean, I understand and agree.”
“Good. You really are an interesting boy, Stefan,” Beatrice says, before raising her voice and calling, “Abigail!” While they wait, she turns a smile on him and adds, “I find it particularly fascinating that, in your whole time here, you haven’t so much as glanced at the way out.” She points to the other exit from the kitchen, through which a pair of external doors and the Saints campus are visible. Before he can respond — before he can even decide what she means — Abby’s returned. “Abigail, please return young Stefan to the facility.”
“Of course,” Abby says. “This way, Stefan.”
Beatrice watches as they leave the room, but Stefan doesn’t relax until they’ve passed through the double biometrics and started heading down towards the first floor basement. He holds up a hand, asking for a moment, and leans bodily against the wall, closing his eyes.
It’s something about how Beatrice looked at him. It was like the way Pippa and Maria looked at him, back when they thought he was going to be just like the others — as opposed to whatever they think of him now — but both more intense and more impersonal. It makes sense: this place has been rehabilitating men, by its own curious methods, for a long time, so Beatrice will have seen dozens of boys go through the programme. Dozens of boys just like him. She probably only bothers learning their faces when they get new ones.
Awful, always, to be counted among their number.
“You okay, Stef?” Abby says, not quite in a whisper. “We’re mostly out of camera view here, so we can stop for a while if you’d like. Everyone will understand needing a moment to get yourself together after your first encounter with Aunt Bea.”
“She really wasn’t all that bad,” he says. “This is mostly me stuff.”
Abby touches him gently on the forearm, almost as a request. He covers her hand with his, and she firms her grip. “Like last night?” she says.
“Like last night. Like this morning. I kind of thought I’d be stronger than this, that I’d be better prepared.” He scratches at his neck again. “I picked the wrong time to crack.”
“May I hug you, Stef?” Abby says, and when he nods she embraces him. It’s a while before they release each other, and Stefan wonders, with his face buried in her shoulder, how many times she’s done this for Christine.
* * *
Context is everything. No matter how much your world changes — no matter how much you change with it — when your world consists only of Dorley Hall, the mini-supermarket on campus and the well-trodden paths to the Anthill, the Student Union bar and the Linguistics department, you can adjust to anything, given time. Christine became a girl there, among other women like her, and draws comfort from familiarity and routine.
The fitting rooms in the upscale section of the largest department store in Almsworth Mall are a quite different context in which to be a girl, and Christine clings to Paige’s arm as she looks at herself in triplicate, stuffed into a mid-thigh dress which makes only the barest contact with several important parts of her upper body. It’s beautiful, and causes the small part of her that still remembers what it was like to be a (nominally) straight man to want to wolf whistle, but the prospect of wearing it out tonight is not one that sits well with her.
“Paige!” she hisses. “This dress is missing large chunks of dress!”
“So?” Paige says.
Paige spent an hour patiently guiding Christine through the racks and watched her pick out calf-length skirts, low-heeled shoes and other attractive but disappointingly ordinary attire until she just couldn’t take it any more, irritably snatched Christine’s bag away from her, pinned her against the wall, and told her quietly but firmly that if she doesn’t select something stunning and sexy to go with all the sensible skirts and Sunday-lunch sandals then she’s going to start a bonfire right there on the border between lingerie and the designer dress department, throw all of Christine’s modest purchases on top, and use the smoke to call Vicky for aid.
“So,” Christine explains, “usually those parts of me are covered up?”
“We’re going clubbing,” Paige says, untangling herself from Christine’s grip and pushing her closer to the triple mirrors, “not to church.”
“But—”
“All the stuff you picked out is really nice,” Paige says, standing behind her and holding her still by the shoulders, trapping her in the mirrors, “but none of it really makes a statement. Except, ‘I work the front desk at a funeral home,’ perhaps.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Oh, it’ll please Aunt Bea, I’m sure. But it doesn’t please me.”
Christine decides to get to the heart of the matter. “I look stupid.”
Paige’s fingers stiffen on her shoulders for a second, and then she turns Christine around to face her. “You don’t. You look sexy. You look gorgeous. And you’re also not going to be alone. I’m going to be wearing something at least as immodest, and I heard Pippa making appreciative noises over something highly revealing.”
Christine tries very hard to let that sink in. What’s the most vital thing about becoming a girl at Dorley? You don’t have to do it alone. And tonight she’s going out with Paige and Vicky, the two girls who helped her through some of her darkest moments. So what if she has to show off an alarmingly large section of hip?
Besides, she has to get good at this. Step one, stop panicking that random cis people — she’s never quite worked out where the Dorley women stand on the cis-trans spectrum, but she’s certain that whatever she once was, she’s not cis now — can see a boy in you: in progress, and currently going pretty well, because she keeps not being found out, and even Christine can’t maintain that level of anxiety over something that steadfastly fails to make itself into a problem. Step two: be confident!
Trickier.
Be kind to yourself, Christine, she tells herself, and appends, this time, but don’t be a bloody wimp.
“Okay,” she says, prying Paige’s fingers off her shoulders and turning around; the reflections help, and she’s never seen her bottom from quite this angle before, or in quite so perky an outfit, “I’m done wussing out. I’m good. I’m buying this.”
Paige does not exhibit the delight Christine expected. Instead she holds up another net bag. “Not just that one, I hope. I have more for you to try!”
“Paige—”
“Come on, Christine. For me?”
It’s generally easiest to let Paige have her way, so Christine agrees to step in and out of anything Paige hands her. Eventually they narrow it down to three dresses, all of which will be joining Christine’s selections — and a few other things Paige picked up while Christine wasn’t looking; she needs variety in her wardrobe! — on Aunt Bea’s credit card bill.
Christine’s shrugging off the last dress when Pippa joins them, twitching aside the curtain to make sure no-one is too on show — for which Christine is grateful, as she would have been moments away from showing her underwear to the whole shop — and then entering with a giddy smile, smoothing down something in an attractive blue-green and requesting critique. She has a few other options, of course, but this—
Paige stops her. It’s perfect. She doesn’t need to change a thing.
Christine holds a couple of her chosen dresses up against her body so Pippa can enthuse about colours and patterns while she gets changed, until Paige hands Christine her bag: it’s buzzing.
She unlocks her phone and scrolls through her messages. There are a lot. “It’s Abby,” she says, flicking through. “Holy shit.”
“What?” Pippa says, re-clasping her bra.
“Stefan asked to see Aunt Bea.”
“What?”
Pippa drops the rest of her clothes on the floor and races over to where Christine’s sat. She makes insistent gestures with her finger until Christine scrolls back up and they both read through everything together. “Oh, Jesus,” she says.
“Anyone want to explain?” Paige asks. She’s dividing their purchases from the clothes to be returned to the rack and looks about five seconds away from complaining that no-one’s helping her.
Christine explains quietly as Pippa swipes up and down through Abby’s texts, and then, when her own phone starts buzzing, reads through her own messages from Abby, as though they could possibly provide any additional information. “Oh, Jesus, God in heaven,” she mutters. “Oh, Jesus, Mary and flipping Joseph.” She shrugs off Christine’s comforting hand on her shoulder. “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have come. This is a flipping disaster…”
“It seems like it’s actually okay,” Christine says, re-reading the texts. “Abby was there, and it sounds like Aunt Bea agrees about the nurse. No harm.”
Pippa throws her phone back in her bag and buries her face in her hands. “Aunt Bea’s going to think I’m a terrible sponsor.”
“So? Screw Aunt Bea. You’re not a sponsor for life, are you?”
“Goodness, no. It’s just a one-time thing until I’m done with Saints.”
“Then why care? Be like Abby: do it once, produce an amazingly girly girl who annoys everyone around her with how effortlessly feminine she is, and quit while you’re ahead.”
Paige, with a shopping basket hanging off each elbow, passes Pippa the dress she wore out this morning. “She’s right, you know,” she says. “You don’t have to be a ‘good sponsor’ for him. You don’t have to follow the scripts. I’m not convinced everyone needs that kind of constant pressure, anyway, and besides, you’re not Maria and this isn’t your career. This is just pocket money, right?”
Pippa stands and drops her dress over her head. “It was supposed to be paying it forward,” she says. “And how come Abby texted you first, Christine?”
“She texts me about everything!” Christine says, covering. “Sometimes I know what she’s having for breakfast before her stomach does. And I know Stefan, remember? I asked her to keep me in the loop. I want him to get through this okay.”
“Okay,” Pippa says. “Good. I do, too.”
“You think he will?”
Pippa sits back down on the bench, turns her bracelet around on her wrist a few times. “Last night I would have said yes, guaranteed. But this nurse situation… It hit him hard, Christine.”
“It does seem like he calmed down, though,” Paige says. “He asked to see Aunt Bea, and they took him up to the kitchen. You don’t do that with someone who’s falling apart; you don’t put him in a room full of sharp knives.”
“Sharp knives and novelty mugs,” Christine says.
“I think he’s okay,” Paige says, warming to her theory. “Remember what I said this morning? That he just needed time? I think he got it. And now he’s up and advocating for himself? He’s fine.”
“Coping, anyway,” Christine says.
“Come on,” Paige says. “Let’s go abuse Christine’s credit card privileges. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we can get home and Pippa can check up on Stefan. Christine: you’re still naked.”
“Shit; so I am.”
* * *
“Sit still!”
“This is why I need to practise doing my own makeup,” Christine says, “so you’ll stop torturing me with all your brushes and sponges and things.”
Paige swats her on the shoulder. “Sit still means no talking,” she says. “And they’re your brushes and sponges and things; hygiene, Christine.”
Christine frowns at herself in the vanity as Paige leans away to find a better brush, sponge or something. “This is a lot heavier than last night’s foundation, Paige,” she says, resisting the urge to poke at her cheek.
“Of course,” Paige says, painting a careful line along Christine’s nose. “Different looks for different nights.”
“This heavy, though?”
“It’s a simple equation. Last night was an elegant dress plus refined company — don’t laugh, please, not now; some of them count as refined, anyway — plus warm, dim lighting. I enhanced your natural features and chose colours to suit your outfit. Tonight is a sexy dress plus dancing plus club lighting. I’m not going for elegant, I’m going for hot.”
Christine eyes the dress. They did buy the one with the cutouts in the end, but it’s not the one Paige wants her to wear tonight. Paige’s choice is worse: strikingly red, even shorter than the other dress and even more attention-grabbing. Something to do with the colour looking just right with Christine’s deep brown hair, although that’s probably just an excuse.
She decides to deflect from one source of anxiety to another. “Natural features, Paige?” she says. “I don’t have any natural features. I was made.”
“No, Christine,” Paige says, frowning as she works, “I was there, remember? I know what you looked like before and after. Estrogen changed you enough that when you went under the knife they took only millimetres off you, made changes so subtle it took until the swelling went down to see what was different. They didn’t ‘make’ you; they just… brought you out.”
“They took much more than millimetres off of here,” Christine says, unsure why she’s stuck on the subject but needing to follow it to its end. She taps the spot on her neck where her Adam’s apple used to be, marked now by the faintest scar.
“True,” Paige admits. “But it was big.”
“It was. I kind of hated it, actually.”
Paige puts the brush down, and traces Christine’s frown along her brow with the back of her finger. “I’ll get you to believe you’re beautiful if it’s the last thing I do, Christine,” she says. “Besides,” she adds with a businesslike air, turning back to her tools, “if anyone here is artificial, it’s me.”
Shit. Well done, Christine. “Paige, no.”
“I had a lot more work done than you. I think that’s how you found it so easy to sleep with me, early on; I was like a completely different person. Rebuilt from scratch.”
“No, that’s not it. Paige, you were my—”
“I wonder sometimes if that’s why I had an easier time adjusting,” Paige continues distantly, still rummaging in Christine’s motley makeup pile. “When you looked in the mirror you saw you, but different; someone who might have been your sister. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a stranger.”
“Paige—”
“It took me a long time to come to terms with it,” Paige says. “Hours looking at myself, feeling almost like my thoughts were coming from someone else. A monster in my own labyrinth.”
“Paige, please— Oh, you fucker.”
Paige turns back to Christine with a grin and wags a finger. “Got you,” she says, and sticks out her tongue.
“You cow!” Christine says, nudging her with a foot. “I knew ‘monster in my own labyrinth’ was too melodramatic for you.”
“Here endeth the lesson,” Paige says, once she’s put her tongue away. “Be careful who you complain about your extremely minor alterations in front of. I made peace with my plastic long ago; others haven’t.”
“Yeah. Okay. You got me. And you’re right. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologise,” Paige says, returning to her work. “Just rein it in when you’re around Pippa, okay? She’s coming by soon.”
“Is she… sensitive about the work she had?”
“Very. I was talking to Willow, and she said—”
“Willow?”
“Yes. She graduated with Pippa. She does outreach now for one of the brands I work with. I’ve mentioned her, I’m sure?”
“I don’t think you have,” Christine says.
“I’ve mentioned her.”
“If you say so.”
“Willow said she’s glad Pippa’s making friends at last.” Paige worries at her lip for a moment. “She was — is — kind of a loner. And she said she has a real thing about how much she had done. She wants to see her cousin again someday, and she’s terrified she won’t be recognisable.”
“God,” Christine says, glaring at herself in the vanity mirror, “I’m an idiot.”
“No,” Paige says, swatting her again. “Idiots don’t know when to stop.”
“Point taken.”
Pippa arrives with Abby several minutes later, and they find Christine sitting very carefully on the end of her bed in full make-up, dress and sandals, with her largest and puffiest coat — Paige’s only concession to the late October chill — folded up on her knees, and Paige prettying herself at the vanity with the staggering efficiency of someone who absorbs new makeup techniques like other people absorb oxygen. It takes Christine a second to notice them come in because Paige, consumed by concentration and sitting with crossed ankles in a dress at least as daring as Christine’s, is a sight so arresting she has difficulty looking away. Abby has to cough, politely, knowingly, for Christine to recover herself sufficiently to greet them.
Pippa’s wearing the blue-green dress she tried on earlier, and gone light on the accessories, with the exception of her ever-present bracelet. She’s done a lot of work on her face, especially around the eyes, where an iridescent swipe of eyeshadow connects her eyelids to her temples. She returns Christine’s finger-wave and perches nearby on the edge of the bed, radiating nerves. Abby, however, is still inhabiting her favourite ratty old t-shirt, and plants herself on the sofa behind Paige, decently positioned to look suggestively from Paige to Christine and back again, a gesture packed with significance that Christine deliberately ignores.
“Hey girls,” Abby says. “Guess what?”
“You’re not coming tonight?” Christine says.
“Yes, but—”
“Abbyyyy,” Christine whines, abusing the final syllable and feeling gloriously childish. Something about Paige’s scolding has left her energised, and while she can’t claim to be feeling confident, she is, for once, excited to leave campus and shake what Paige and three carefully aligned mirrors all insist is a very nice booty. “You have to come! You said you’d come!”
“No, you sent me eight — sorry, nine — texts informing me that I’m coming.”
Christine pouts. “Fine,” she says. “But at least stay with us until we go.”
“Actually,” Abby says, and grins at Christine’s exasperated expression, “I’m here because Maria’s coming up. We have news.”
Christine glances at Pippa, but she doesn’t react; just continues to look like she’d rather be anywhere else. Clearly she already knew.
“News about what?” Paige says.
“The nurse. She’ll be up in a few minutes.”
Rumours of the nurse — her actions, their subsequent consequences — spread through the Hall while they were out, enough that five sponsors dived on Pippa when they got home, and pestered her with variations on the theme of: Did she know her boy came up to see Aunt Bea? After being here only two weeks?
It didn’t take long for them to discover that the rumour mill held little information they didn’t already have, so they excused themselves upstairs, reasoning that they might as well be putting on their faces while they wait for Abby to come up with the goods. The goods, apparently, being Maria.
“Pippa,” Christine says, to break the nervous silence, “I thought you were going to go see Stefan?”
“I was. But I need to know what Maria has to say and, anyway, Stefan seems fine. I checked the feed and he’s watching TV in the common room, sitting with the usual people, chatting away, and Edy and Tabby and a couple of others have an eye on them. I kind of didn’t feel like intruding.”
Christine nods, and goes back to watching Paige put the finishing touches to her makeup.
A few minutes later and they’re all arranged in varying states of comfort around the room — Abby with Pippa, Paige having gravitated quietly towards Christine — while Maria paces.
“First off,” she says, “this goes nowhere. I know, I know, everyone will know by tomorrow morning, but I’d like to at least pretend we have some semblance of opsec around here. Christine, I can see you trying not to smirk.”
“Sorry.”
“So, the nurse. Karen Turner. She’s not one of us.” Maria pauses for reactions, and gets them: everyone at Dorley is a graduate; that’s how it works. “Barb, the old nurse, who you remember, if not fondly, she was one of us. Older than me, actually. Which means that, like me, she came up under Grandmother, an experience which instilled in her a profound sense of empathy and a strong desire to rescue the next generations of girls from the people who hurt her here. People like her nurse. And her nurse — and mine — was Karen Turner.”
“Shit,” Christine says. “She’s one of Grandmother’s people?”
“Yes.”
To the best of Christine’s knowledge, the only people still knocking around Dorley Hall who came up under Grandmother’s regime are Maria and Aunt Bea herself, neither of whom are habitually loose-lipped about prior operational procedures. But enough older graduates have come back now and then, whether for events like Aunt Bea’s birthday dinners or to serve as nurses, electrolysis technicians and the like, that bits and pieces of information about the old programme have trickled out.
By all accounts, it was a bloodbath.
Under Aunt Bea’s selective recruitment criteria — the first of her many reforms to be implemented — they stopped taking in murderers and serial rapists, the ones Grandmother used to refer to as ‘punishment detail’. Aunt Bea prefers to focus on those she believes salvageable, those for whom masculinity has been a double-edged sword, a source of pain as well as strength, and still there have been years where nearly half the recruits proved inflexible, beyond help, and had to be washed out.
Under Grandmother, Dorley took in new recruits twice a year, from all over the country, in far greater numbers. Most didn’t last six months. Training methods were brutal, solitary confinement was commonplace, humiliation a daily chore, and the men were usually castrated on arrival. They were dressed up, photographed, taunted, sexually assaulted, and beaten for the slightest infraction. Their final genders, for the few who survived to complete the programme, were generally not respected.
Grandmother, Christine has long inferred, had the tendency to view womanhood as inherently degrading, at least when applied to those who’d been assigned male. To her, Dorley Hall was a place to enact punishment and indulge her desire to humiliate men, and she surrounded herself with people whose proclivities matched her own. It was only when Aunt Bea — a young graduate who had in her years away developed enough contacts and honed enough skills to create for herself an entirely new identity — returned to the fold and started to make reforms, that graduates like Maria were allowed to stay on and attend Saints as ordinary women. Christine’s long suspected Aunt Bea has something on Grandmother, some leverage that made her hand over control, but what, she can’t hope to guess. Reportedly, the few years when Bea and Grandmother ran the place together were turbulent.
“She worked for Grandmother?” Pippa says urgently. “She’s cis, then?” Maria nods. “Jesus. She’s cis and she knows about us. About me.”
“Yes,” Maria says.
“No wonder she looked at me like that.”
“I promise you, briefing and debriefing her in the security room was just as little fun.”
“Why did we allow her back?” Pippa says.
“We didn’t have much option. And she promised she’d cooperate.” Maria rolls her eyes. “More fool us. She knew once she was down there she could do whatever she wanted. We couldn’t stop her without making the whole place look weak. Imagine the boys seeing us squabble amongst ourselves?”
“Is that why you bottled it?” Christine asks. “Why you let her assault Stefan and the others?”
“I didn’t ‘bottle it,’” Maria says, glaring at Christine. “I made a decision.”
“We can’t get Barb back?” Pippa says, as Paige puts a hand on Christine to calm her.
Maria leans against the wardrobe. Tired. “Barbara’s husband got a job in Canada and she’s going with him. Fifteen-odd years helping out? She’s done her bit.”
“Wait,” Christine says, “our identities can survive international travel?”
“Of course. We’re understaffed, not incompetent. Regardless, the point is, Karen is never coming back.”
“So,” Paige says, “what are we doing for a nurse, then, if we can’t have Barb and we don’t want this Karen woman?”
“I don’t know,” Maria says. “But, Pippa, you’re comfortable with doing a basic injection, yes?” Pippa nods. “You’ll be doing Stefan’s jab tonight. All of us will be doing it for our boys. And unless we have any unexpected problems, we have a little while to secure a new nurse. One of our graduates is in nursing; she might be willing to transfer to a hospital nearby.”
“This is such a fucking disaster,” Christine says, leaning back on the bed. “You know how fucked up what she did is, right?”
“I was there.”
“This is a delicate time for those… boys.”
“I know. I was there. And unless you want to volunteer, Christine, your input is strictly advisory.”
“I’m just saying, I would have turned my taser on the bitch if I’d been in charge down there.”
Maria offers her a brittle smile. “Yes, well, perhaps one day you will be.”
* * *
Christine spends most of the bus ride back to town silent, working her forefingers against each other, thinking. Paige, in the seat next to her, knows when she needs to be left alone and merely offers her hand.
She’d been all set to go after Maria, to confront her alone about the nurse, to demand to know why she didn’t do more to protect Stef, but Abby stopped her, took her aside — shut them both in Christine’s bathroom — and asked her to give Maria time.
“She’s probably not dealing very well with this,” Abby had said, sitting on the toilet lid.
“She definitely isn’t,” Christine said, feeling awkward, unable even to lean on something for fear of staining her diminutive dress; she doesn’t clean her bathroom as often as she ought.
“Don’t be too angry with Maria.”
“But I really, really want to be, Abs.”
“What I mean,” Abby said, “is that we don’t know what it was like back then, under Grandmother, and she does. Did you know, Maria is the only Dorley woman to have spent time in the cells after graduation?”
“She— what?”
Abby leaned forward on her knees. “She told me the story once. She was celebrating some milestone or other, went out drinking in Almsworth with friends — other girls from the programme, some of whom she helped sponsor. They were very close. They still keep in touch. Some of them are… pretty conveniently placed, for us. Anyway, on their way home they stole a sign from outside an employment agency. Wrenched it off the wall and brought it back here, intending to put it up in the security room downstairs. They thought it was hilarious. Grandmother didn’t.”
“I thought she wasn’t in charge after Maria graduated?”
“She wasn’t, but she hung around like a bad smell. Insisted to Bea that Maria be punished. Bea relented; I don’t know why. Maria said she’ll always remember being marched down to the cells, still drunk, and locked in by Grandmother. ‘As an example to the other boys,’ she told her. She was down there two weeks.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“What was the sign? Is it still around?”
Abby smiled. “It said, ‘Transition Services’ and yes, it’s still in one of the storerooms somewhere.”
Christine snorted. She had to admit, in Maria’s position, she might have stolen that.
They’ve arranged to meet up with Vicky and Lorna at the bar that hangs off the back of the station complex, a cheap place that gets rowdy later in the evening but which, for now, is host mostly to shoppers knocking back a quick drink before their train arrives. While they wait, sitting carefully in their stunning dresses and idly playing with their drinks, Christine fills Paige and Pippa in on everything Abby said.
“I think the whole thing was a twisted power play,” Christine says. “Karen was a nurse under Grandmother, right? From before the reforms? So that makes her a sick bitch who gets her kicks humiliating men, just like Grandmother. She comes back, ‘just to help out’, makes promises about being on her best behaviour and then immediately reverts to type as soon as she gets her hands on someone.”
“And she was flipping smug about it, too,” Pippa says. “Complimenting me on making Stefan ‘docile’, when anyone could tell the poor boy’d practically left his body by that point. Jesus, actually, she said something like, ‘Half the boys are unconscious for this. I’m sure you remember.’ I thought that was directed at me, but…”
Paige picks up the sentence where Pippa dropped it. “It was obviously aimed at Maria. A reminder: ‘I know who you were.’”
“Maria said the debriefing in the security room was no fun,” Pippa says. “I wonder if Karen deadnamed her?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Christine says. “The whole performance, it wasn’t just about her power over the— over the boys, it was about her power over us. All the unworthies of Dorley, from Aunt Bea on down. All the unreal women. Shit.” She pulls out her phone. “I’m going to find her Facebook. Fiver says she’s a TERF.”
“You know,” Pippa says, stirring her drink and looking into the middle distance, “you get locked up for a year, you have your sex changed against your will, you get a new name and a new face and you can’t ever see your family again, but it’s not until after you graduate, after you turn around and start doing all that to someone else, that you finally find out what a flipping snake pit the place really is.”
“Was,” Paige says.
“Is,” Pippa insists. “As long as people like Karen can still come back, I’m sticking with the present tense.”
“Yeah,” Christine says, putting her phone down on the table, “about that. Abby said she’s going to talk to Aunt Bea. She’s worried that someone like Karen, someone who’s still bitter after two decades that we’re no longer her evil little playroom where she gets to take the toys apart, might make things difficult for us.”
“You think Aunt Bea might try to shut her up?” Pippa says.
“She thinks Aunt Bea might have her killed,” Paige says. “Right?”
“Yeah.” Christine nods, as Pippa gasps. “She knows everything, Pip, and she’s kept quiet up until now for some reason — loyalty to Grandmother, maybe. But whatever it is, her incentive to keep quiet, especially after all these years, has to be way weaker than ours. We have no choice but to stay silent, but Karen might throw caution to the wind, especially if she sees Aunt Bea ending her contract as a snub. It might call for drastic measures.”
“What exactly do you mean,” Pippa says, “about us having an incentive to keep quiet?”
“It’s the cold logic of Dorley,” Paige says, having finished her drink. “Whatever we—” she indicates the three of them with her glass, “—think of what happens there, what was done to us, what we’re currently doing to a whole new batch of people, we all have attachments there, right? That’s part of the sponsor bond, or it’s probably supposed to be. Christine’s never going to go to the police, or the media, or dump all our secrets on Pastebin, because even though she and I are arguably victims of Dorley, she doesn’t want anything to happen to Indira or Abby.”
“Or you,” Christine says to Pippa.
“Me?”
“You’re part of it, now,” Paige says. “Another reason for us to never blow a whistle.”
“That’s… cynical.”
“It might just be a happy accident,” Christine says. “A lucky side-effect that just happens to benefit Aunt Bea. But the fact remains that even when we leave the programme, our whole world is Dorley. Our friends.” She glances at Paige. “Our family. The freedom of everyone we love is reliant on the wellbeing of Dorley Hall. Even Indira, who has her family back, who’s dating a nice cis guy who’s probably never even heard of forced feminisation, she’s tied to the place. To me. And, hell, I might not like Maria that much but I don’t want her arrested.”
“We all have a reason to stay silent,” Paige says. “To keep the place going, year after year. If you discount wherever Aunt Bea gets her money from — do you know, Christine? No? — then we’re effectively self-sufficient at this point. Aside from the major surgeries, and this Karen woman, all the roles that keep the programme going are filled by Dorley graduates.” She twirls a finger in the air. “We’re an endless loop: girls femming girls femming girls. A snake biting its own tail.”
Christine can’t resist. “Not its own tail, Paige.” She snorts into her drink.
Paige hits her lightly. Christine’s about to respond with some mild violence of her own when Pippa points towards the door: Vicky and Lorna, looking stunning as usual, are waving and grinning wildly. Christine’s happy to drop the subject; she’s found nurse Karen’s Facebook and discovered she’s a member of an organisation called Women Run The World, who have some worrying content on their social media posts. Quickly she forwards a few screenshots to Abby, bags her phone, and does her best to put the whole thing out of her mind, because Lorna is striding towards her, arms out, and it’s time to be a cis girl for the rest of the evening.
* * *
Legend — still popularly considered the worst nightclub in Almsworth; also still the cheapest, which is important because Christine’s access to Dorley’s accounts isn’t supposed to cover nights out — is packed, and Christine can’t decide whether she finds the crowds reassuring or intimidating. And being bundled along with Pippa and Lorna to the women’s bathroom swiftly becomes an education on the subject of how many women can fit in front of one mirror; she feels, once again, a little childish when Lorna deals with attention from excited and complimentary cis girls with grace and humour while Christine hides in a stall, controlling her breathing.
Better at this doesn’t actually mean good at it, not yet.
“The secret is to have really good eyeliner,” Lorna says to her, as they make their way back to the tiny table Paige and Vicky are guarding. “Cis people love it when you have good eyeliner.”
“Do they?” Christine says, and mentally kicks herself for saying ‘they’ and not ‘we’. Fortunately, Lorna doesn’t seem to notice, and Christine successfully delivers her back into the arms of her girlfriend without making any more obvious mistakes.
Lorna and Paige dole out drinks and Christine leans forward on the table, grasping her bottle by the neck and then, when Paige makes fun of how phallic it looks when she takes a swig, moves her grip to its base.
“How did your chat go?” Lorna says, over the music, which is quietest in this corner but still loud enough to inhibit conversation.
“My chat?”
“With the trans group. About your friend?”
“Oh! Good. They were really helpful.”
“How is your friend? Do I get to know her name yet?”
Stef’s name hasn’t been decided on; ‘Stefanie’ isn’t a foregone conclusion. “She’s, um, really private,” Christine says. “I don’t have permission to share anything much.”
Lorna nudges her with an elbow. “Don’t break any confidences on my account. I’m just— I wanted to thank you.”
“Oh? What for?”
“For taking an interest. For wanting to help. And for not assuming you already know best just because you’re cis.”
“Um,” Christine says, looking away, “it’s— I just— I hate seeing her be miserable.” She congratulates herself on hitting the right pronoun. Bloody Stef and her— his insistence on valuing self-loathing over identity. “Oh,” she remembers, “congratulations on the surgery date. That’s what we’re celebrating, right?”
“Right.”
“Is it okay to ask what you’re having done?”
She laughs. “It’s probably not okay? I don’t mind, though. Here, here, here and here.” She points at a few spots on her face: hairline, brows, nose, jaw. Essentially the same work Christine had done. “They’re just making tiny changes, but it’s enough.”
Christine nods. “I’m looking forward to seeing you get even more gorgeous,” she says, and Lorna giggles and bites her lip. Vicky, Christine reflects, is lucky.
“I was asked to ask,” Lorna says, “are you with someone?”
“With someone? Like, a girlfriend? No.”
Lorna grins. “You like girls, then?”
“I don’t actually know!” Too much alcohol — two drinks; lightweight — making her too honest. “My last relationship was with a woman. But I’m still figuring myself out. I want to be better at being me before I inflict myself on someone else again.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did it end badly?”
“Kind of,” Christine says. Paige took the break-up calmly, kindly, and didn’t talk to her for two weeks.
“Anyone I know?” Lorna asks. Christine leans closer, so she can point to Paige, currently dancing with some guy, without anyone seeing. Lorna’s eyes round out and she giggles. “Paige?” she whispers. “Wow.”
Christine nods. “I started getting messed up about who I was, what we were doing together, what it ‘meant’—” she finger quotes viciously, “—that we were together. And she didn’t have any of those problems herself. She knew exactly who she was. Which made me a little bitter, for a while. I dealt with it badly, and I didn’t exactly take it out on her, but it didn’t help, either. She can do better than me, anyway.”
“Tina,” Lorna says, borrowing Vicky’s nickname for her, “I’ve seen the way she looks at you. You might think that. I don’t think she does.”
“Who asked you to ask, by the way?”
“Oh, it was— oop!” Lorna’s interrupted by Vicky swooping in behind her, looping her arms around her and dragging her laughing away from the table, allowing her back only briefly to put her drink back down, and then they’re gone, dancing, leaving Pippa and Christine alone to guard their rickety little outpost.
“They have so much energy!” Christine says to Pippa, who’s been looking thoughtful. “I can’t stand it.”
“I know!”
“What’s up?”
Pippa shrugs. “Just thinking about Stefan,” she says.
“I thought you said he was fine?”
“Yeah, no thanks to me. I just stood there, Christine. I watched that— that bitch hurt him, and I did nothing. Said nothing. I should have helped him, but I was too busy being his stupid sponsor.”
Christine takes her hand, squeezes it. “Remember what Paige said?” she says. “Earlier on, in the changing rooms? You don’t have to be a good sponsor for him. You don’t have to be like Maria. I think he probably just needs a friend more than he needs someone to point out all his masculine failings.”
“Yeah, well,” Pippa says, “I flipping suck at that, anyway. I go too hard or I don’t go at all.”
“So don’t try! I bet you’ll make more progress talking to him than lecturing him or, God forbid, doing all that shit where you’re supposed to make him hyper-aware of the way his body’s changing.”
Pippa slumps a little on the hand that’s holding her head up. “I wasn’t looking forward to that. You really think I can just drop all the sponsor stuff?”
“I think so. But, more importantly, Paige thinks so, and Paige is always right.”
“Paige is always right,” Paige says, descending on them. She’s got her hand around a handsome guy, slightly taller than her, clearly already and understandably besotted, and she’s dragged him back to their table. “What am I right about this time?”
“Pippa and Stefan,” Christine says.
“Oh,” Paige says. “Yeah. Just hang out with him, Pippa. Now, come on; I’ve got us a couch! This is Nadeem, by the way.”
It doesn’t take much of Paige’s persuasion to get them to abandon their tiny table and decamp to one of the couches in the bar area, where Nadeem and his friends — mostly men, with a couple of girls — are gathered. Paige immediately claims an empty space at one end, pushes Nadeem down into it and perches on the cushioned arm of the sofa, knees hooked over his legs. Christine and Pippa take stools by the nearby table, and one of the girls greets them and introduces them around. They’re Saints students, most of them at the start of their third year, pissing away their student loans.
“You should warn your friend,” one of the girls, Rani, says to Christine as they return to the couch with a new round of drinks, “Nadeem isn’t the relationship type.”
“It’s okay,” Christine says, “Paige isn’t, either. Not with boys, anyway.”
“Oh?” Rani says, grinning widely. “She likes girls, too?” Something in Christine’s face gives her away. “You?” Rani squeaks.
“Yeah. For a while.”
Two of the men vacate the couch, giving Rani and Christine a place to sit and relieve themselves of their armfuls of drinks. “Is it hard, seeing her with someone else?” Rani says.
“I wouldn’t say I like it,” Christine says, necking half her bottle, “but it was me who ended it, so I don’t really have a leg to stand on.”
“What are you two talking about?” Nadeem says, leaning around Paige to collect their drinks.
“You!” Rani says. “I was telling Christine here that you’re not into commitment.”
“Nope!” he says. “Too young, too gorgeous.” He kisses Paige on the cheek, and Paige leans into it, laughing.
“Me neither,” she says, as Pippa, Vicky and Lorna cluster in to retrieve their own drink orders. “Besides, boys are for fun!” She takes Nadeem’s jaw in her hand and twists it so she can kiss him on the mouth. “And that’s all!”
“That’s kind of cold, isn’t it?” Pippa says.
Paige stops kissing Nadeem long enough to grin at her. She reaches her free hand down into Nadeem’s trousers. “Nope!” she says. “Pretty warm.”
Christine rolls her eyes, ignores Pippa’s concerned look, and goes back to talking to Rani; she’s taking Electrical Engineering, which Christine knows just enough about to be able to understand her, and which is a fascinating enough topic that it distracts from Christine’s incipient fear that Rani — beautiful, confident, and almost definitely cis — will see right through her.
I know who I am, she tells herself, when Rani playfully pushes her in response to a terrible computer science joke she couldn’t resist telling, and it takes almost a full second for Christine to start panicking that she will somehow turn out to have male bones, detectable by the slightest touch, by which time it’s already obvious that Rani thinks nothing is amiss. I know who I am, and I’m definitely getting better at this.
Behind her, Paige and Nadeem finish their drinks and Paige drags him back out to dance, allowing Vicky and Lorna to claim their spot on the couch and resume kissing.
“Being single sucks, right?” Rani says.
Paige is dancing with her back to Nadeem, pressing herself against him, exuding confidence and sexuality and inspiring in Christine the usual mixture of envy and interest. “Yeah,” she says, “it really fucking sucks.”
Later, when a few more of Rani’s friends have arrived and monopolised her time, and Vicky and Lorna are off dancing again, Christine and Pippa sit together on the end of the couch, having fended off two random men each.
“This is the club where Abby’s girl got taken from, you know!” Pippa says, to break up an awkward pause in the conversation.
“Can we talk about something other than Dorley, for once?” Christine snaps. “Sorry,” she adds quickly, and puts an apologetic hand on Pippa’s knee. “I’m just trying really, really hard to be a normal girl. It doesn’t necessarily come easily, especially somewhere like this.”
“You don’t need to apologise,” Pippa says. “I’m kind of running out of things to say, anyway.”
“How about,” Christine says, glancing back at Rani and her friends, who look to have the couch under their protective custody for the foreseeable future, “we go dance, instead?”
“Um,” Pippa says. “Okay?”
“You don’t want to?”
“I’m no good at it.”
Christine stands and holds out her hand, inviting Pippa up as if she’s a debutante. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from looking out there—” with a flourish she directs her free hand towards the dancefloor, “—it’s that if you’re pretty, you don’t have to be good at dancing. Just move around a bit, and the boys won’t be able to keep their eyes off you.”
Pippa allows herself to be lifted off the couch. “Girls,” she says, following Christine, still holding her hand.
“What?” Christine yells, over the music.
“Girls! I want the girls to look at me!”
Christine manoeuvres them through the throng and finds Vicky and Lorna, enraptured by each other near the middle of the dancefloor. “I think we can arrange that!”
* * *
Three trips up and down from the dancefloor and Christine, exhausted, falls into the middle of the couch between Vicky, who looks like she wants to fall asleep, and Pippa, who is talking animatedly with Rani and has one hand on her thigh. She meets Christine’s eye and smiles, looking happier than Christine’s yet seen her, so Christine winks and starts to lift herself back up off the couch, intending to give her some space. She’s intercepted by Paige, alone.
“Hi, Christine,” Paige says.
“Hey. You having fun?”
Paige takes her hand, pulls her along with her, back towards the dancefloor, but slowly, keeping them for the moment in the quieter bar area. “Yes,” Paige says with a smile.
“How was he?” Christine says with, she hopes, good humour.
“Fun!” Paige says, leaning down so she can talk at a normal volume. Her breath tickles the fine hairs on Christine’s neck. “And that’s all. How about you? You okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s not as scary as I thought it would be.”
“Of course it’s not,” Paige says, wrapping an arm around Christine’s waist and closing her fingers around her hip. “You’re beautiful. No-one is ever going to think otherwise.”
“Paige—”
“Come with me,” she says. She unwinds Christine from her arm, a dance in miniature, and catches Christine’s hand again, leads her through the thinning crowds.
“Paige, I don’t—”
“Come with me.” It’s like a spell. It carries Christine to the middle of the dancefloor with her.
Their spot claimed, Paige holds Christine in place and dances slowly, in half-time with the music. Wickedly smiling, she runs her free hand around Christine’s jaw, down her neck, eventually rests it on her back, and pulls her gradually forwards, one heartbeat at a time.
“What’s happening?” Christine says.
Paige presses her lips against Christine’s ear. “We’re not the way we used to be,” she says. “We’re not confused, we’re not finding ourselves, and we’re not scared all the time. We know who we are now. Both of us. Don’t we?”
Christine moves with her, her hands finding tentative spots on Paige’s hips. Paige is still leaning down, her face buried in Christine’s hair. “Yeah,” Christine says. “We do.”
“This doesn’t have to be any specific thing,” Paige says. “It can be whatever you want. But I miss you. And, just for one night, I want to feel like you miss me, too.”
“I do, Paige. I do.”
“Then be my girl, Christine. Just for tonight. Please?” Paige’s voice is shaking, and she breathes carefully between each sentence. “Let me have you. Just for one night. Will you do that for me? Will you let me have you?”
Christine looks up and Paige steps away, and suddenly she loathes the instincts screaming at her that this is too soon, that it’s not right, that she’s not ready. She digs her fingers into Paige’s hips, refusing to let her retreat, pulling her back in, stepping into her and kissing her on the collarbone, once, twice, then moving up, warming Paige’s neck and allowing herself to be pushed away, just a little, just enough, so Paige can kiss her back, first on the jaw, then on the chin and then, finally, their lips meet and Christine is, for the first time in a long while, and maybe just for tonight, Paige’s again.
“Good girl,” Paige whispers as they part, but it’s only for a moment, enough time to look into each other’s eyes, enough time for Paige to raise her hands to the back of Christine’s neck, enough time for Christine to think, Yes, I know exactly who I am, and then they’re kissing, once more, once again, and it’s nothing like it used to be.
* * *
The door closes behind him. The biometric lock engages. Perhaps the most welcome sound Stefan’s heard all day.
Abby dropped him off in the common room and he told Aaron, Will and Adam exactly what Beatrice asked him to. The news that the nurse would not be the one to administer the promised vitamin injection released a tension from the room that Aaron had been covering with nervous babble and Adam with wary silence. Even Will seemed relieved, relaxing his neck and sitting back on the sofa, and when Adam joined him and leaned his shoulder against Will’s, he didn’t move away, instead accepting the other boy into his space without comment or fuss.
It was easy to hang out with them all afternoon. To talk about nothing. To watch a cooking show, a makeover show, a dating show, a couple of light comedies. To laugh at the bad jokes and at Raph and Ollie sulkily stalking out of the common area, lost without Declan’s chest-thumping idiot bravado. Even Martin, sitting on a bean bag chair a safe distance from all of them, didn’t seem so bad, offering some commentary on the TV shows that, while not actually especially interesting to Stefan, showed more of a commitment to participating than he’d shown at any other point.
But that was then, and this is now, and he’s alone, with nothing but the memory of the nurse and the look on her face when she touched him.
The advantage of the thick concrete walls: you don’t need to muffle yourself when you cry. Stefan lets it all out. Everything from Mark’s disappearance to his own growing masculinisation to meeting Christine to waking up in the cell; everything since. Eventually his stinging skin, pink from the hot water, drags him somewhat out of it, and he’s drying his face and applying another layer of moisturiser when there’s a knock on his door.
He gets up, opens it, but it’s not Aaron. It’s Pippa.
“Hi,” she says. Quiet. She’s wearing a lovely blue-green dress with eye makeup to match, although her lipstick is a little smeared, and when his eyes flicker to her lips she covers them shyly with her fingers. But only for a second. No sense hiding it when he’s already seen it. “Can I come in?”
Stefan opens the door the rest of the way, returns to his bed and slips his hoodie back on, covering his upper body. Not something he particularly wants her to see under any circumstances, but especially after this morning. His skin is peeling in a few places; uglier than usual.
“Does that hurt?” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
“How are you treating it?”
“Moisturiser. It’s all I’ve got.”
“I’ll get you something better in the morning.”
“Thanks.”
Pippa sits delicately on the chair and shuffles it closer to the bed. She puts her bag down by the computer desk, and the little plastic container she had under one arm she deposits by the keyboard.
“Is that the vitamin jab?” Stefan asks. If Abby’s right, that’s his first shot of estradiol. He can barely take his eyes off it.
Pippa nods. “Are you ready for it?”
“I am.”
It doesn’t take long, and for all that Pippa has obviously had a little to drink, she has a steady hand. She settles awkwardly back on the chair and looks away while Stefan pulls his trousers back up and retreats to the corner of the bed. He imagines the estradiol suffusing him, curing him, fixing him. Sternly he reminds himself not to expect quick results. Everyone responds at their own pace, he remembers; it would be foolish to imagine his body will change at anything but the slowest possible rate, given its track record.
“Once per week, for the foreseeable future,” Pippa says, boxing up the needle and putting away the swabs. “Are you okay with me being the one to administer it from now on?”
“I understand and agree,” Stefan says, to be annoying.
“Don’t— You don’t need to say that.”
“Oh?”
Pippa shifts on the stool, like she wants to sit more comfortably but is restricted by her dress. Normally she wears things with a little more room. “Damn,” she says to herself. “Should’ve got changed.”
Stefan smiles, waves a hand at his wardrobe. “I have more hoodies than I can wear in a week, if you want to borrow something.”
She blinks at him, surprised. “You wouldn’t mind?”
He laughs. “It’s your stuff, anyway. Take what you need. You can lock all the doors and change in the corridor.”
“I’ll, um, change in here, if that’s okay,” Pippa says, pulling a hoodie out of the wardrobe and draping it over herself, so she can drop her dress under cover.
“Oh,” Stefan says, “uh, shit. Just a second.” He pulls his knees up and turns around on the bed, faces the wall, and stays that way until the sounds of Pippa struggling with fabric have ceased.
“Thanks,” she says, now wearing much more modest clothes that don’t go nearly as well with her eye makeup. “I didn’t want to change outside.” She folds the dress a few times and drops it into the main compartment of her bag, then crosses her legs under herself and leans back in the chair. She stares at him for a few moments, and he has time to wonder what exactly it is she sees, before she says, suddenly, quickly, “My apology was crap.”
“What?”
“Earlier. After the nurse. I didn’t give you time to breathe, I just came at you, and when you didn’t immediately accept my apology, I got mad. I’m sorry. Sorry for the crappy apology, sorry for the nurse, sorry for… me.”
“For you?”
She breathes through her nose for a second, thinking. “What you need from me, down here, is consistency,” she says. “Like Maria, with Aaron. She’s been a sponsor for a long time, and she’s good at it. I, on the other hand, am terrible at it. I hate being strict — unless I get angry, and then I’m a complete and total cow — and it makes me… unpredictable. And that’s the worst thing for you, when you’re already trying to cope with everything else down here.”
“No,” Stefan says, allowing himself to smile, “the worst thing is what Monica’s doing to Declan.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Too much time around Will. I’m getting pedantic.”
She matches his smile. “The least of your worries, down here.”
“True.”
“That was brave of you, by the way, talking to Aunt Bea.”
“She wasn’t so bad. Bit of a softie, really.”
Pippa snorts. “Don’t let her hear you say that.”
“Actually,” Stefan says, grinning, “I get the impression she’d find it kind of funny.”
“Yes, she probably would. Look, Stefan; are you okay?”
He shrugs. “I’m not. But I’ve been not okay for a long time.”
“This morning—”
“Can we not talk about that?”
“Of course,” Pippa says. “I just— Can we start again?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you like hot chocolate?”
“Um. Yes?”
Pippa pulls her phone out of her bag and taps away at it for a few moments, texting someone. “Wait for it,” she says with a smile, putting her phone away and stretching. “I asked for marshmallows, too, if that’s okay.”
A few minutes later — time they fill with awkward small talk about the TV shows he watched that day — the light on the little dumbwaiter by the door goes green, and Pippa extracts a pair of hot chocolates, in plain mugs, piled high with marshmallows. He takes his, and it’s hot enough that he has to put it on the bedside table for the moment.
“So,” Pippa says, blowing on hers, “I was saying, I want to start again. From the top.” She takes a sip, winces at the heat, and sets it down by the computer. “I’m Pippa. I’ll be your sponsor. Hi.” She holds out a nervous hand, and Stefan resolves to talk to Abby about her, ask if anything’s up, because she seems anxious for Stefan’s approval, which when previously offered tended to be thrown back in his face.
What the hell. “I’m Stefan,” he says, taking her hand. He adds, “Stef, actually.”
“Hi, Stef,” Pippa says. “Hey, do you want to watch a movie?”
She doesn’t give him a chance to reply, just passes him her hot chocolate — he puts it down next to his — and practically leaps onto the bed next to him, stretching out her legs so her feet dangle off the side. She leans forward, fetches the mouse and hands it over, silently offering him the choice of what to watch.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Stefan says, giving her back her hot chocolate as A Christmas Prince starts playing. “You really want to start again?”
“I do. I got some advice from some friends of mine — Christine and Paige; you’d like them — and I’ve decided, sod being a bad sponsor. I’m just not going to be a real sponsor at all.”
“That’s, uh—”
“You don’t need to know how to feel about it right away,” Pippa says. “Take your time. Now shush! I haven’t seen this one.”
Stefan shrugs, and settles back into his small pile of pillows, extracting one and handing it over before he gets too comfortable. Pippa stuffs it behind her head, smiles her thanks and starts working on her hot chocolate, and the smell of it is too much to bear. He sips gingerly at his, expecting it to scald his tongue, but he’s not at all prepared for the marshmallow that gets stuck to his nose.
He leaves it there for a whole minute before Pippa notices and laughs long enough and loud enough that they have to rewind the movie.
Chapter 13: Driftwood
Chapter Text
2019 October 27-31
Sunday
Day 1.
No boobs yet.
Monday
Day 2.
No boobs yet.
Tuesday
Day 3
No boobs yet!
Wednesday
Day 4
No boobs yet.
Thursday
Day 5
No boobs yet.
Aaron knocked on my door this morning and asked if my nipples were sensitive, but I think he was just trying to get me to look at his chest again. He’s DEFINITELY not developing faster than I am. It’s only been five days!
2019 November 1
Friday
Day 6
No boobs yet.
Maybe Aaron IS developing faster than I am? It’d be just my luck.
Christine’s notes: Don’t do this to yourself, Stef.
Stefan’s notes: Stop reading my diary entries and stop hogging all the double-strength estrogen.
Christine’s notes: Maybe you can gaslight Pippa into injecting you twice on Saturday? Once in the morning, once in the evening? Just make sure to present the other thigh.
Stefan’s notes: Were you born unhelpful or is it a skill you developed in some kind of torture basement?
Christine’s notes: I cultivated it entirely on my own. You have to be a little bit of a douche every day. It’s a whole regimen.
Stefan’s notes: You’re doing really, really well.
Christine’s notes: You know, we could have this conversation over Consensus like normal people.
Stefan’s notes: We’re not normal people. Besides, I’m enjoying how passive-aggressive this is.
Christine’s notes: I have to admit, your punctuation is better in this format, for some reason.
Stefan’s notes: How’s my punctuation now?
Christine’s notes: I’m viewing these on my phone and it messes with the line structure so I’m going to assume you’re breaking out the ASCII art solely to express your undying love for me.
Stefan’s notes: It’s a middle finger. In a way, it DOES express my undying love for you.
Christine’s notes: How sweet. I’m impressed, though. You couldn’t have Googled that; does that mean you know how to type it in from memory?
Stefan’s notes: It’s literally the only transferable skill I retain from my junior school computer classes.
2019 November 2
Saturday
Day 7
One week on estradiol. I’m due my second injection today sometime. Probably this morning; I know Pippa’s seeing Rani tonight and she won’t want to be weighed down with sponsor stuff in the evening. It’s their first real date since they met a week ago. I hope it goes well, but I admit to being a bit jealous. It’s lonely down here. Yes, I have Aaron and the others, and that’s fine, in its way, but I have to be the same edited version of myself that I was with Russ. The same version of myself that I am with Pippa, even. I hate that I never see anyone who KNOWS me. The last time was with Abby, though, and I freaked out at her, so maybe it’s better I keep myself in check.
It hurts to see other people getting on with their lives while I’m… stuck. Oh well. At least I’m dot dot dot stuck with bloody estradiol and goserelin swimming around inside me. Even if their effects on my body thus far have been underwhelming.
I can feel it in my head, though. Starting goserelin was a bit like turning off a pair of speakers that had been blaring awful music into my head, all my life. And I was in silence for a little while, there. Now, estradiol’s starting up new music, music I like and fuck, this metaphor sucks ASS.
I hope Rani’s good enough for Pippa. She deserves some happiness. Sometimes she seems so sad and I really want to hug her, but we’re not there yet. I think sometimes she still sees the Bad Guy when she looks at me, like she remembers who I’m supposed to be. Not often, but enough to keep a little bit of distance between us.
Still, she held my hand when she found me crying that one time. Okay, those two times. I’m doing that a lot more, now. Before it was like a, I don’t know, a storm, a really bad one, one of the ones they have to name, that comes once a year and knocks down buildings. Now it’s like normal, boring rain showers. I still get wet, but it’s not the end of the world.
I am terrible at metaphors. I’m discovering this about myself. Glad I took Linguistics and not Creative Writing.
Christine, if you read this, you nosy, nosy cow, I’ll come at you with my morning Weetabix. You won’t stand a chance: it’s hard as a rock and barely qualifies as food.
Christine’s notes: Ah, the many cruelties of Dorley.
2019 November 9
Saturday
Alarm at seven. It’s loud, and mindlessly musical, like an orchestra warming up. He has no control over the time it goes off — nor the music, nor the volume — but he refused Pippa’s offer to ask permission to change it. Keeping the same schedule as everyone else is good, for the role he’s playing, for his stability. Because when he rolls out of bed and checks himself over in the mirror and sees no progress, no changes, it’s hard to swallow it all and prepare for another day of doing, essentially, nothing. Routine keeps him in check where optimism fails him.
He came here, he stayed here, he gave up years of his life for this: to break this body, strip its flesh, burn it back to the bone and start again. To become new. And so he waits.
Stefan covers himself. He wears joggers and a robe to the showers so he doesn’t have to be naked until the last possible moment and he pulls them on, stretching the sleeves to the knuckles, closing the robe to the neck. He buzzes his face with the electric razor, picks up his wash kit and heads to the bathroom. They still have designated time slots to wash up in the morning; thanks to Declan, supposedly, but he’s rarely allowed out of the cell and never when anyone else is around. Showering in shifts is, like the plastic cutlery, just another step in a gradual tightening of restrictions that was always, one way or another, going to happen. Christine said something about that: that Dorley, especially in the first year, is like a checkers board. There’s only so many moves to be made and, sooner or later, as a group, you’ll make all of them.
At least the sponsors wait outside while they wash now. Pippa’s doing.
Aaron, late as usual, takes the shower next to his and starts running through his routine at double speed, making up for lost time. Stefan, hair and body already washed, conditioner soaking in, enjoys the hot water — below scalding, this time and every time — and laughs as the shampoo bottle slips out of Aaron’s soapy hands.
“I’m going to have to bend over to get this,” Aaron says, “and before I do—” he presents a cautionary finger, “—I want you to know that there is no unsexy way for me to do this. I’m just going to have to bend down, and you, somehow, are going to have to cope.”
Stefan nonetheless retreats to a safe distance. “You could bend at the knees instead. Very unsexy.”
“What?” Aaron says, his rear end elevated. “I can’t hear you down here!” He wiggles his bottom for emphasis; Stefan resists the temptation to step forward smartly and slap it. It’d be funny, probably, but the message it would send is not one Stefan wants to endorse.
Because over the last couple of weeks, Aaron’s got more physically demonstrative — a lot more forward with his backside — and Stefan can’t decide if the boy is just teasing him, or if he is genuinely trying, perish the thought, to flirt.
The idea is distracting enough that he almost swallows shower water, and he coughs it up with the help of a few slaps to the back. He decides, when Aaron’s hand doesn’t linger, when the little perv behaves exactly as one ought in such a situation, that he’s imagining things.
Besides, Aaron likes girls. That’s what all those dick pics were about. Life down here is strange enough without convincing himself that Aaron, of all people, is coming on to him.
“So,” Aaron says, straightening up and starting work with the shampoo, “did you hear we’re due our next round of dick deflation?”
“Um. What?”
“The Goserelin. You know, the implant? The thing they stuck in our bellies when we got here that suppresses all our snips and snails and severely limits the function of our puppy-dog tails. It’s been a month — longer for me, actually — and I don’t know about you, but I’m itching for a new belly bump.” He finishes rinsing out the shampoo and then puffs out his stomach, cradling it in his hands like an expectant mother.
“I didn’t know.” Stefan pretends to think about it. “But it makes sense.”
“Yeah.” Aaron holds out the conditioner bottle. “Rub it in for me?”
“What? Why?”
He makes a show of stretching. “I slept funny. My shoulder’s sore. My World War One injury is acting up. I have a fear of reaching above my head. My wrists only move counterclockwise. A bottle of conditioner killed my father. I’m very weak and don’t think I can rub hard enough, and you have those long fingers—”
“Aaron.”
“Just help me out, would you? I’m tired—” he interrupts himself with a huge yawn that doesn’t inspire one in Stefan; faked, “—and I kind of want to do nothing more than sit down and stare at something interesting until it does the magic eye thing. Like you; I bet you’d look like a Picasso.”
“Fine.” Stefan snatches the conditioner bottle out of Aaron’s hand and, with a firm grasp on the shoulder, turns him away. When he starts spreading the conditioner through Aaron’s hair, the boy makes moaning noises. “Aaron, what are you doing?”
“Relax,” Aaron says, twisting his head as far as he can to grin at Stefan, “I’m just teasing.”
Stefan turns Aaron’s head back towards the front. “Don’t.”
“Aww. But you seem so secure in your masculinity. I can’t help but give it a little prod.”
“What does masculinity have to do with anything?”
“Stef,” Aaron says, trying to turn around again and failing; Stefan’s palms lie flat against the sides of his head, holding him in place, “it has everything to do with everything in this place. Like with the second round of Goserelin: what are the chances, do you think, that we’re in for another round of very manly rebellion from Will and Raph and all the others who fought back before?”
Stefan shrugs, rinses his hands, turns his own shower to cold and starts finger-combing his hair under the water until it runs clear. He’s almost pleased to have to give a moment’s thought to a sensible question, for once. “After the nurse? Low. Unless the mean girls try something.” ‘Mean girls’: Aaron’s nickname for Raph, Ollie and Declan. Not one Stefan would have chosen; too obvious, although if it has a saving grace it’s that none of the boys appear to have seen the movie.
Maria smirks every time Aaron says it.
“Exactly my point!” Aaron says, whirling around, finger-first. “That nurse was softening us up. We had weapons pointed at us and were borderline sexually assaulted—”
“—no ‘borderline’ about it—”
“—and now we’re all just going to calmly submit to the next indignity! We’ve been manipulated into suppressing our natural masculine responses for fear of reprisal.”
Stefan can’t help it. “You have ‘natural masculine responses’? Where?”
“Maria!” Aaron shouts. “Stef’s being mean to me again!”
Maria, waiting around the corner, just out of sight, yells back, “Good!”
“Everyone’s a critic.” Aaron rinses his conditioner — too soon, in Stefan’s opinion, but he always times it so they finish their showers together, and Stefan just got done with his — and shuts off the water. “Anyway, Stef, we’re all kind of… softening up. In more ways than one. I know you’ve noticed. And you, just for example, don’t seem to be particularly bothered by the prospect of another month on the floppy dick juice. Less bothered than I am, even, and all it’s done for me is made my wanks more challenging.”
Stefan’s bad at remembering to dislike the implant. Principal among its many beneficial effects is that he hasn’t had an unwanted erection for weeks, although the downside was that it took him four days to fill the sperm cup, given his reluctance to ‘coax the old boy into life with a bit of soft music and gentle yanking’ as per Aaron’s suggestion. Pippa, for reasons she hasn’t yet explained, covered for him with Maria, claiming to have dropped his first sample.
“What would be the point in caring?” he says. “I feel like I say this over and over again, but they have the tasers, Aaron. And the batons. And the keys to the many, many locks.”
“You don’t think we should fight even a little?”
“No.”
Aaron claps him on the back. “Good! Hah! Shit, Stef, that’s all the excuse I needed to just sit down and take it. Fighting’s for idiots, you know?” He quickly wraps his robe around himself. “Maria! I’m ready for my emasculation now!”
Pippa, waiting with Maria, intercepts Stefan as they leave. “Hey,” she says, touching him gently on the shoulder, “I heard you talking about the new Goserelin shot. Are you really ready for it? I know it’s not a good thing—” she looks sideways at Maria, who is preoccupied with Aaron, “—but it’s the rules. We can do the, um, the vitamin jab at the same time. Get it all over with at once, you know? That way, you won’t be waiting around for—”
She’s starting to babble. “Yeah,” Stefan says, cutting in. “Sure.”
Her eyes are everywhere but on him, and he has to remind himself: she doesn’t know. She thinks she’s deceiving him. The ‘vitamin’ shot! Maybe that’s the barrier between them? Not her perception of him, but her perception of herself.
Her fingers stiffen on his shoulder. “I can get one of the others to do it, if you’d rather.”
“It’s fine,” Stefan says. The smile is easy to make genuine, and he reaches up to cover Pippa’s hand with his own. “I’m not going to make a fuss.”
“Maybe you should,” she whispers, and bites her lip.
“Hey, Pip,” he says. “I won’t.”
She looks at him at last, is pleased to discover him smiling, and brightens. She matches his smile, comes back to life, and pushes him away with a laugh, shaking water off her hand. “Ew, Stef! You’re all wet!”
He squeezes out a few more drops from his hair and flicks them at her — she evades, giggling — as he leaves with Aaron.
“So,” Aaron says, out in the corridor, nominally alone together, “are you two kissing, or what?”
“Who? Me and Pippa? No! She’s just… We’re friends. Besides, she’s dating someone.”
“How do you even know that?” Aaron shoves him gently. “You really do have the Stockholm Syndrome, don’t you?”
Stefan plasters on his toothiest grin. “What, you don’t hug Maria?”
“No. I think if I tried, I’d set off a bunch of booby traps hidden in her clothes. And, hey, speaking of boobies—”
“Nope,” Stefan cuts him off, and turns away to unlock his door before Aaron can get his nipples out again, “I don’t know why I have to keep telling you this, but reducing your testosterone is very unlikely to make you grow breasts. You’re still just as flat-chested as I am. Now go and, for the love of God, put some clothes on.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Maybe several extra layers, to be safe!” Stefan yells, as Aaron’s door closes behind him.
He can’t help checking himself in the mirror again. Aaron definitely isn’t swelling up on the chest — he had ample opportunity to check, in the showers, and did so, to calibrate his expectations — but, unfortunately, neither is he.
A few minutes later, when he’s dried and dressed, Pippa enters, carrying the ‘vitamin’ injection kit and the slightly more intimidating Goserelin implant needle. Smiling apologetically, still remorseful about the lies. So he keeps up the chatter with her, tries to make it feel as normal and routine as possible.
One in the thigh, another in the belly, and he’s out the door again, waving Pippa goodbye and heading to the dining room for his rock-hard Weetabix.
Aaron doesn’t waste any time getting to the point. Ever since Will and Adam seemed finally to resolve their ideological differences — Adam doesn’t ever mention demons any more, and Will hasn’t called him a ‘religidiot’ for weeks — it’s generally Aaron who cuts through everyone’s morning haze. The boy’s mouth has no brakes.
“It’s come to my attention,” he says, “that my ‘sponsor’—” he air-quotes with a Weetabix, for emphasis, “—is aloof, highly critical, and physically undemonstrative, and I consider myself discriminated against in this regard. Thoughts?”
“No thoughts,” Stefan says. “Eating.”
Aaron uses his Weetabix as a pointer. “Stef has movie nights with his. Meanwhile, Maria treats me like a disobedient child.”
“Perhaps if you didn’t behave like a disobedient child,” Will says, “she might upgrade you to deeply unpleasant adult?”
“You’re one to talk. I’ve seen how Tabby treats you. If she could get you behind a big sheet of glass and only touch you with those big rubber gloves they use to manipulate nuclear material, she would.”
“That’s called professional detachment, Aaron. She’s got a job to do and, no matter how much I don’t like it, no matter how much I don’t particularly like her, she’s doing it.”
There’s a whistle as the speakers set into the ceiling activate and Tabby, amid a small amount of microphone whine, says, “William, that’s the most sensible thing you’ve said this week.”
Will nods, satisfied.
“Hey!” Aaron yells, looking up. “Tell Maria I want hugs from now on!”
The circuit clicks off with a loud thump and a spit of feedback. Stefan imagines Maria, in the security room, hitting a rocker switch slightly too hard.
“No hugs for you,” Adam says, and Will grins, nudges him with his elbow.
“I’m getting it from all sides today,” Aaron says. “Martin, what about you? You best buds with Ella? Does she tuck you in at night?”
“She hates me,” Martin mumbles.
“Yeah, well. You did kill a guy. Adam? How’s Edy?”
“She combs my hair,” Adam says. He’s not eating, just drinking a glass of oat milk and leaning his chin on his hand.
“It’s true,” Will says. “She combs his hair. I’ve seen it.”
“That’s it,” Aaron says, throwing down his plastic spoon. “Maria!”
The speakers remain stubbornly silent for the rest of breakfast, denying Aaron his catharsis, and when Maria arrives to escort them into the common area she doesn’t respond to Aaron’s outstretched hands and pleas to ‘just hug it out’.
It’s a little concerning that she’s there; for the last week or so they’ve largely been watched over remotely and left to their own devices, except when one of the sponsors has something they want to say in person. Pippa says security room detail is preferable to standing around in the corridor or sitting on the sofas at the back of the common area because they don’t have to expend the extra effort to appear competent and menacing and can just talk, catch up on schoolwork or, more likely, as long as at least one girl stays alert to the screens, nap.
Maria ushers the five of them over to the sofas by the television, the area Stefan’s group has essentially colonised, and Stefan’s alarmed to realise that a lot of the other sponsors are back: Edy, Adam’s sponsor, leans against the wall by the TV; Tabby, Will’s sponsor, sits on top of the cabinets by the storeroom; Jane and Harmony, attached to Raph and Ollie, are positioned at one of the central tables, watching over their charges who are sitting at another; and a handful of faces Stefan doesn’t have names for — sponsors to second- and third-year girls, most likely — are lounging around near the entrance to the room.
All of them are armed.
What the hell is going on?
Stefan’s not the only one to notice it, and conversation around the television is subdued. Adam and Will huddle slightly closer than usual, and Aaron’s complicated arrangement of legs is reduced simply to hugging his knees. Stefan, looking around, catches Maria’s eye and mouths, What’s going on? but her only response is to shake her head.
“I don’t like this,” Adam whispers, leaning back against Will’s shoulder. “It’s too tense.”
Stefan nods. He’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since their first estradiol injection. When one of the boys finally realises he’s growing breasts it’s all going to kick off, and that’s presumably where the slow development of trust with the sponsor comes in, but how anyone who doesn’t want it can be talked through it is still a mystery. Although Christine did warn him, weeks ago, that part of the process of rehabilitation was— how did she put it? Prying their fingers off the driftwood of masculinity and forcing them to learn how to swim?
He’s known all along he’s living in the calm before the storm, but he’s not ready for everything to go to shit just yet.
Eventually, the reason for the amped-up security becomes clear, and it’s not that, say, Martin is getting a little chesty: Declan, escorted by Monica and two others, saunters back into the common room like he never left. He’s wearing his hoodie open, with no shirt underneath, and while he looks perhaps a little leaner, he’s no less intimidating a figure than he was when he attacked Stefan and Aaron in the showers and started all this.
“I thought you said he was so bruised he looked like a mouldy orange!” Will whispers, edging away from Adam and causing the other boy to have to shift his balance. Stefan couldn’t have missed the dismayed look on Adam’s face if he’d been a hundred meters away.
“That was two weeks ago, Will!” Aaron whispers back. “I assume they eventually stopped beating him when they found out you can’t cure dickhead with a baton.”
“Hi, Aa-ron,” Declan says, sauntering over and leaning on the back of Stefan and Aaron’s sofa. “Hi Stef-an. Nice to see you both again.”
“Hi, Declan,” Aaron says, angling himself out of Declan’s reach. “How was life in the cell? Read any good books?”
“You’re so funny, Aa-ron!”
“Well, you know, I try.”
“It won’t help you.”
“All right,” Monica says, tapping Declan on the shoulder with her baton, “come on. Let’s get you settled back in your room.”
“I’m coming back for you,” Declan says. “You too, Stef-an.”
“No, you’re not,” Monica says, hooking an arm around Declan’s elbow and pulling. He steps back, shrugs her off and raises his hand, and for a second it looks like the shitshow is about to start, right here in the common room, but every sponsor in the room points their taser at him and he smiles, flattens his palms in surrender, and allows himself to be walked out of the room. He throws Aaron and Stefan a grin as the door closes behind him.
“You really had to let him out?” Stefan says to Maria. “Couldn’t have kept him in there another couple of months?”
“That’s not how things work here, Stef,” Maria says, and she follows Monica, Declan, and half the other sponsors out into the corridor, leaving them almost alone.
“Fuck,” Aaron says.
* * *
The rooms on the second floor and up are arranged in twos, so their bathrooms can abut and share plumbing, and one of the consequences is that, for Christine, waking up in Paige’s bed can be disorientating: the room is laid out in perfect mirror image to her own.
Once upon a time it would also have been the room with the most clothes in by far, but since their first shopping trip together two weeks ago Christine and Paige have been twice more into town, to look through the smaller shops down by the river, and once down to London, to poke around the massive cathedrals of commerce on Oxford Street. All in the name of both acclimating Christine to being seen as a normal girl — and a pretty girl, Paige insists — by a variety of cisgender strangers, and accelerating her through six months of feminine development in a fortnight. Christine’s room bulges with bags, boxes, and piles of clothes, cluttering to the point where Paige cleared her a small space in Vicky’s room, now also almost consumed.
Clothes, it turns out, are fun.
“What time is it?” Paige moans, rolling over in bed and flopping her hand over Christine’s chest.
“Ouch!” Christine pushes her off for just long enough to pull Paige’s arm tightly around her waist, where it can do useful things such as embrace her and not, for example, brush roughly against her sore nipples. “I’m aching again. Be careful,” she scolds.
“Sorry,” Paige says with a grin, and uses her advantageous new position to kiss Christine on the cheek. “If this is another growth spurt, I’m going to be so mad at you.”
Christine waits for Paige to pull back a little and then she turns over, meeting her face-to-face and kissing her on the lips. “Stay mad,” she whispers.
It’s warm in the room despite the November chill — Dorley Hall’s centrally controlled heating is too miserly for Paige, who feels the cold, so she runs an electric heater on a timer and probably wipes out a reasonable percentage of the money saved in the process — so Christine kicks off the blankets, enjoying the sensation of the high thread count sheets (another influencer bonus) gliding smoothly over her waxed legs and suppressing a giggle: her old self would never have got to discover how good that feels.
Paige rolls over again, onto her back, causing her teardrop breasts to flatten against her chest, and it’s too tempting not to ambush her, to push up with an elbow and let the momentum carry her onto Paige’s side of the bed, squashing one of her own breasts against Paige’s ribs, slipping a cheeky hand into her underwear, searching.
Thin scars buried under pubic hair; new since the last time they were together, in their second year. Christine’s discovered them, kissed them, run her fingers over them, blessed them in every way she knows how, added a third finger in the middle and coaxed from Paige sounds Christine never wants anyone else to hear. Those moans, those squeaks of delight, are hers.
Christine has scars to match; Paige has returned the favour, and because she treasures everything about her, she calls them beautiful.
“Scars are powerful,” Paige said a few nights ago, when they lay next to each other out on the green, soaking in the starlight. “Scars mean survival.”
Christine doesn’t like to think of herself as someone who survived — she prefers reborn — but Paige is all about the redefinition of self, so she hugged her and kissed her and took her back to her room. She had to run back out the next morning before class, to retrieve the dewy picnic blanket before the heavens opened.
Today she contents herself with a quick and playful caress before dropping a kiss on Paige’s nose and skipping off to steal her shower.
A minute later, Paige joins her, opening the frosted glass door with a shyness Christine feels she’s the only one ever to have seen and whispering, “Tease.”
They take their time getting ready.
Her makeup, when eventually she applies it, receives Paige’s approval on the first attempt, and together they head downstairs for breakfast, on the way exchanging greetings and smiles with Julia and Yasmin, who they catch returning to Yasmin’s room; their rekindled relationship apparently melting the hearts of even the second floor’s most dedicated loners.
“Christine!” Aunt Bea says, as they flop into chairs at the packed kitchen table and accept coffees in plain mugs from a second-year girl Christine only sort of recognises. “You look wonderful. Paige must be rubbing off on you.”
At the other end of the table, Jodie hiccups and inhales her orange juice. Christine, probably visibly bright red under her light foundation, doesn’t believe for a second Aunt Bea doesn’t know exactly what she’s implying.
That Aunt Bea! What a jokester! Christine can almost ignore the many disturbing things she knows or suspects about her, to which she’s recently added the discovery that the nurse Karen Turner’s entire electronic profile has vanished. Facebook: gone. LinkedIn: gone. Her staff page at the local hospital: gone. She’s not even on the electoral roll and, when Christine used a random (and, miraculously, still functional) London payphone to call the council, she turned out to not be on their records, either. The woman’s just gone. The suggestion that Aunt Bea, or someone she’s close to, is able to perform such a feat is more than a little disturbing, and Christine spent a whole afternoon last week making triple-sure her unauthorised escapades around Dorley Hall have had all their digital footprints wiped clean.
Whatever. Aunt Bea could be a mafia don and there’d still be nothing Christine can do about it. And if she did have the nurse killed and her presence scrubbed from the internet, all that means is there’s one less devil in the world. She puts it out of her head.
She’s surprised to see Jodie downstairs, though. It’s not that she’s unsociable, like Julia and Yasmin; she just has other friends. She also looks considerably less goth than usual. Is someone at Dorley attempting a teen movie glow-up on her? Is Aunt Bea? Christine hopes it backfires, and that she returns to her usual all-black-with-frills by next week. Jodie, patting her chin dry with a kitchen towel, notices Christine’s attention and rolls her eyes in good humour.
Pippa wiggles her fingers at them. She’s sitting next to Jodie with a bowl of porridge and a mug that reads, It’s all fun and games until someone loses their— and Christine would ask her to turn it round so she can see what the last word is, but she can guess; to describe Dorley’s institutional sense of humour as monomaniacal would be appropriate but leave you with no words to describe Dorley’s institutional approach to the male gender. Pippa’s not normally one for the novelty mugs — she takes a more reserved view of the whole process than most of them, which is perhaps why Aunt Bea asked her to be a sponsor — and Christine regrets missing the look on her face when it was handed to her.
Aunt Bea meets her eyes. Raises her eyebrows, expectant. Whoops.
“Thank you, Aunt Bea!” Christine says, belatedly. “That’s very kind of you to say.” She takes a deep sip of coffee so she doesn’t have to expend the effort to make her smile look genuine. Aunt Bea’s right, though: she does look good. Paige suggested a skirt-and-top combo that is in practical terms equivalent to her habitual shorts-and-t-shirt, especially with a pair of bike shorts underneath, but actually makes her look — and still she struggles sometimes to say the word even in her own head — cute. She likes the feeling, especially when Paige takes her in with a smile. “How’d the new Goserelin injection go?” she says to Pippa. “That was this morning, right?”
Pippa swallows her porridge. “Easy as pie,” she says.
Aunt Bea drums her fingers on the table for a moment. “He’s still cooperating?”
“He told me he wouldn’t make a fuss, and he didn’t. And I overheard him talking to Aaron.” She blushes into her novelty mug, gives up fighting the pleasure straining at the edges of her mouth. “He said we’re friends.”
“Excellent work, Pippa!” Aunt Bea says, causing a frown to flicker across Pippa’s brow. No happy moment unsullied: Aunt Bea has a way of making any friendship between sponsor and subject unpleasantly transactional. “How do you believe he will respond when the physical changes become apparent?”
“I’m, um, still not sure. He didn’t seem comfortable when Aaron challenged his masculinity this morning. It might be a problem.”
Aunt Bea finishes her coffee. “Then your priority is to continue to deepen your rapport. If you’re his friend, become his best friend. And when the changes start, don’t forget: they are mandated by us, not you. You are there simply to help him through an ordeal you are powerless to prevent; we are his enemy, you are his ally.”
That’s not the way it’s usually done. Bea must have discussed this strategy with Pippa, though, because she nods calmly. Whether or not she follows through with it doesn’t especially matter, but it does at least have the benefit of not putting Pippa at odds with a Stef who glares at his chest morning and evening, willing it to swell. Christine’s more concerned about Stef’s acting skills; it’s going to be hard to coast on fake apathy when everyone around him is panicking.
She still feels bad about reading the diary entries he vouchsafes to her care, but after the showers, after the nurse, she was worried about him, and it’s now become another of the games they play, another board on which to clash. Christine smiles, remembering a three-page tirade on the subject of Will’s tiresome Reddit atheism which, if you took out all of the insulting asides directed specifically at her, would read like a first-draft essay for medium.com.
God, she hopes it’s a game they’re playing. She likes him a lot, but has no real idea how he feels about her. For all she knows, he could hate her, and his little jokes might be his only way of expressing that. She needs to find a way to see him in person again, to recalibrate. Text-only friendships — if that’s even what this is — suck.
His ‘true believer’ jabs are the only ones that really hit home. They remind her of the awful things they’re in the process of doing to everyone down there with him, things she could put a stop to at a stroke, if she were willing to pay the price; she’s not. ‘Dorleypilled’, he called her, and the worst thing is, it’s accurate: she looks around the table, at Pippa, at Jodie, at Bea, and most especially at Paige, and can’t imagine any of them any other way.
Fine; she can imagine Jodie a little more goth. She’s wearing light blue and it’s weird.
“No! Maria! It’s fine!”
The shout echoes in the dining hall but probably comes from the basement stairs. It sounds like Monica, and it’s accompanied by the staccato steps of someone wearing medium-high heels and a seriously bad mood.
“I just need ten minutes away from that odious piece of shit! Ten minutes when I don’t have to breathe his stink! Ten fucking minutes of peace and fucking quiet!”
Monica, charging into a full kitchen as she finishes yelling behind her, flushes when she realises how many people — including Aunt Bea — witnessed her outburst. She stands almost to attention for a moment; Christine wonders if she was ever a soldier, or just an overexcited boy scout. “Sorry,” she says. “Won’t happen again, Aunt Bea.”
“See that it doesn’t. Now; are you okay, Monica dear?”
“I’m okay,” Monica says, dropping heavily onto the rickety wooden chair by the door, the one they stand on to change the bulbs. “It’s Declan. He’s back among the boys as of a half-hour ago and he’s learned nothing from his time in the cell.”
“Declan’s out?” Pippa says, dropping her spoon in her porridge and getting halfway out of her chair before Aunt Bea stops her with a hand to her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Pippa,” Aunt Bea says. “It’s all under control.”
“Yeah,” Monica says, leaning her head back against the wall and closing her eyes, “not exactly. First thing he did was threaten Aaron and Stef.”
‘Stef’. Even the other sponsors call him that now. Pippa started it and now everyone does it, including half the boys downstairs. On the day he finally extracts his head from his arse and starts thinking of himself as a girl, he’s going to have the easiest name transition ever. Unless he decides to go by something completely different. Some people have strong opinions about their names. Christine hadn’t; she had Indira pick it, with her only specification being that it share no syllables and no initials with her deadname, deeply buried and quickly forgotten.
Pippa shakes off Aunt Bea’s restraining hand. “He threatened Stef? What did he do?”
Monica’s still got her eyes closed. “He said, ‘I’m coming back for you.’ Don’t worry; Maria’s still down there and so are, like, ten more of us, and the PMC guys have been told to stop napping and watch their phones. Stef’s safe, Pip.”
“All the same,” Pippa says, “I’m not going to the library today. I’m staying here.”
“So, if he’s under control,” Paige says, innocently sipping her coffee, “what’s got you so pissed off?” Aunt Bea directs a frown at her that Paige ignores.
“I’m pissed off because I have no control, Paige,” Monica says, leaning forward on her knees and clenching and unclenching her fists. “I’m pissed off because I shut my eyes and helped turn a man into a bag of bruises and he just fucking grinned at me while I did it. I mortgaged my conscience for that piece of shit and he doesn’t even have the decency to care. And now he’s wandering around down there, knowing full well that we just threw everything we had at him and he didn’t break.”
“That’s not everything we have,” Christine says. “Has he been getting the shots?” Monica nods. “Then he’s going to have a fun surprise soon enough.”
“He’s not going to make it that long,” Monica says. “He’s going to revert right back to his old behaviour — except worse, because we’ve made it clear that he’s a block of concrete and we’re a rubber fucking hammer — and create ten times as much work for the rest of us trying to keep him under control. That place is a— a— a shitpit of tension, now that he’s out. The other boys are all on edge, except for Raph and Ollie, who have their big, tough role-model back, and that means we need to be on active duty again, twice as many of us, at all times, just when things were starting to feel nice and calm down there.”
“Yes, well,” Aunt Bea says, “it doesn’t do for our subjects to get too comfortable.” Pippa bites her lip. “And, besides, the reintroduction of an undesirable element can be a catalyst.”
“He’s a fucking catalyst all right,” Monica says, standing heavily and kicking off her shoes. “I’m going upstairs to get some proper shitkicking boots on, and then I’m going back down there to spend the next six hours looking very much like I’m ready to kick some shit. Pray for me, girls.”
“I still don’t understand why we don’t just wash him out,” Pippa mutters, angrily re-engaging with her breakfast. “I mean, I know that’s the last resort and everything, but still.”
“Everyone deserves a fair chance,” Aunt Bea says. “Four or five, even. If we washed people out as soon as they became difficult to handle, this house would be empty.”
Monica yanks open the door to the entrance hall. “Not quite,” she says, pausing on the threshold. “It’d just be Melissa, sitting alone at the kitchen table like the bloody Twilight Zone.”
* * *
The bedrooms in the basement are, as Stefan originally observed, laid out and sized like mid-budget dorm rooms, and thus comfortably can seat two — one on the bed, one on the chair — and even three if two people don’t mind sitting together on the bed. At four, they get cramped.
Stefan’s taken the head end of the bed, after stuffing his pillows into the wardrobe to protect them from Aaron’s roaming feet, which unfortunately are still attached to Aaron, camped out at the other end of the bed and twitching nervously. Adam’s perched on the roller chair and Will’s sitting with his back against the door, long legs almost interfering with the computer desk. Martin, to Stefan’s relief, didn’t follow Stefan and Aaron the way Will and Adam did, and is presumably locked in his own room, doing whatever he normally does in the eighteen hours a day he spends in there, only perhaps with added Declan-related anxiety.
None of them seems to want to start the conversation. Not even Aaron, who stops fidgeting after a little while, draws his feet up under himself, and starts quietly drumming his fingers on his knees. Stefan puts some music on — one of Pippa’s playlists; it’s mostly Taylor — and decides that if no-one else will break the silence, it’s up to him.
“So. Declan.”
“Declan,” Aaron says quietly. “Again.”
“What do we do about him?”
“We go back to the old system,” Will says. “We’ve been getting slack, anyway. Getting soft. We stay in our group.” He whirls his finger around the room, encompassing all of them. “This group. Fuck Moody Martin; he’s useless. He can fend for himself.”
Adam reaches out towards Will, but Will ignores him. “What if Martin needs our help?” he says, covering for his dismay.
“He doesn’t deserve our help,” Aaron says into his chest. “Hands up everyone here who’s killed a guy.” No-one raises their hand. “Exactly. I’m a bastard, Will’s a bastard, and it’s anyone’s guess about Adam and Stef, but none of us are killers. So Declan can have him, if he wants him.”
“He doesn’t,” Stefan says, and then frowns when they all look at him. He said it quickly, but it feels right, so he interrogates it. “Declan never went for him. None of them did. Because he wouldn’t fight back.”
“Exactly,” Will says. “It’s no fun when you know they can’t fight back.”
“Yeah,” Aaron says. “Martin’d take a punch and beg for another.” He raises his hands in pretend plea, but drops them again almost immediately. Doesn’t even have it in him to shit-talk Martin properly, which is almost heart-breaking.
“Why did they let him out, anyway?” Adam says. “I’ve been thinking about it, and it doesn’t make any sense.” He leans forward on his chair. “People, when they get taken like that, they don’t come back.”
“I don’t know, but it’s fucked their authority right up,” Will says. “Maybe not with any of us — I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend two weeks getting the shit kicked out of me in a cell and I have a healthy respect for those tasers — but Declan’s got them beaten. They’ve spent a fortnight repeatedly fucking him up, and now he’s back.”
“What about washing out?” Stefan says.
Will waves a dismissive hand. “That’s the bogeyman. Always lurking, never seen. The big threat they never deploy.”
Not true, unless Abby and Christine both lied, which seems unlikely at this point. The washouts go, and they don’t come back, and given that anyone who went through what Declan did and subsequently got released would go straight to the police, it’s not likely they go anywhere good.
“I’m choosing to take the threat of washing out seriously,” Stefan says.
“Suit yourself.”
“No, but seriously,” Aaron says, “what is their plan with Declan? With all of us? I mean, we all got our new Goserelin implant, right? So we’re here another month. And then another. And another. What’s the endgame here? Unless we all wash out in the end, some of us are walking out. And then we, what, don’t go to the cops? Or the papers? Out of the goodness of our hearts? And are they even going to stop with the Goserelin? Are we going to start getting psychotropic shit next, or something?”
“What are you saying?” Will says. “That we’re here forever? You said you thought this was an experiment or something, that we’d all been gotten drunk and made to sign a consent form. Eight weeks max, you said.”
“Yeah, and you thought it was ‘woke jail’ and you thought it was demons and I have no idea what Stef thought it was because he never opens his fucking mouth unless it’s to needle me about my fucking dick pics and for Christ’s sake I know that’s a messed up thing to do, Stef, of course I do, and I’ve had more than a month in a concrete hole to think very very hard about how absolutely and comprehensively I’ve fucked my life up and you know what I realised? I’m exactly like Martin the fucking murderer. His loving family leaned on the court; my shitty family made it all go away. He ran off from rehab because he wanted a drink; I started straight back up with my shit. I’m exactly as pathetic as he is and I have to live with that and, to be brutally fucking honest, I’m almost pleased to be facing some kind of real consequence for it, if only because it’ll piss off my family, but I still go to bed every night thinking about it so will you please stop bothering me about it every single fucking day?”
“Yeah,” Stefan says. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“I get it. You don’t want to hang out with a little freak pervert.”
“No! You’re— shit, Aaron, you’re my friend.” No pretending like he’s not, not any more. What’s that saying? There are no atheists in foxholes? Well, maybe there are no truly healthy friendships in the Dorley basement. No ethical fraternity in late-stage feminisation.
Anyway, his moral high ground is a lie. All of them here fucked up and hurt people. Including Stefan. He barely knows his parents any more, and his sister — his excuse — is a near-stranger because he decided closing himself off completely after Melissa left was a better option than facing up to his shit. Sure, it felt safer at the time, to burn away quietly over years and years rather than take a risk, but there’s no such thing as self-immolation without collateral damage. No son/daughter for his parents. No older brother/sister for Petra. No best friend for Russ, when he needed one the most. All his fault.
He hurt people. It almost feels good to realise it.
“That’s a joke,” Aaron says. “We’re not friends. We’re just… here at the same time.”
“No,” Stefan says, reaching forward, risking the contact. Aaron doesn’t flinch at the hand on his arm. “I mean it. Look, I’ve been alone for a long time. I wrecked everything, out there. Lost everyone. Was barely even talking to my housemates by the time I got dragged down here. And actually meeting you — all of you — has been… I don’t know, healing? I used to have two best friends; one left me, the other one I left, and I’ve been missing them ever since. In you, I have something I haven’t had since I had them.”
“Uh—”
“I’m being serious, Aaron. You’re my friend. I fucking like you, okay? And don’t give me that look, Will, unless you think the emotion we call friendship is queer or something. I’ve not been as close to anyone since Russ or Melissa.”
“Oh, shit,” Aaron says, “are we finally getting your tragic backstory?”
“No,” Stefan says, and then remembers: “Not enough paragon points.”
“Hey! No callbacks.”
“So, I’m sorry. I won’t bug you about it again.”
“Good,” Aaron says. “Thanks. Fuck. And, hey, sorry about the feelings, William.”
By the door, Will throws up his hands in exasperated surrender. “You’re all gay,” he says.
Fuck it. Stefan takes Aaron’s hand, meets his eye and cocks an eyebrow. Aaron nods, and together they look over at Will. Stefan makes a kissy face and says, “And that’s why you love us,” and is relieved when, after a moment’s conflicted hesitation, Will laughs.
* * *
Stef’s screwed. He has to be. He’s down there, under pressure, having already cracked at least once, having tried to hurt himself in the shower, having been made practically catatonic by that nurse’s assault, and now Declan’s back, throwing his weight around, making insinuations and threats. Amping up the stress levels. Monica called it a ‘shitpit of tension’ down there; how long until Stef, trying to adjust to yet another new normal, fucks up and exposes his true self? To a man already predisposed to violence towards him? Will even Maria and Monica’s twenty-four-hour attention be enough to protect him from the consequences of that?
God, and if Stef accidentally outing himself gets back to Aunt Bea… that’s everything Christine wanted to prevent in the first place. There’s no telling what Bea would do. If anything, the ambiguous fate of the nurse has left Christine more scared of her than she used to be.
Shit.
Shit!
Christine’s well aware that she’s spiralling. She excused herself from the kitchen table and practically ran upstairs, shut herself in her room, faked a forgotten assignment when Paige messaged her, and now she’s lying on her bed, drumming her fingers on the frame, wishing for a cigarette.
She needs to situate herself when she gets like this. She needs context, needs information. But she’s already messaged Stef and got no reply. She’s messaged Abby for moral support; no reply there, either. And with that, she’s got nowhere to turn to except the security feeds. She’s out of confidantes.
No. Almost out of confidantes.
She yanks her laptop open, loads the Consensus app, and starts thinking through how to translate Stef’s situation onto that of the anonymous ‘friend’ she invented, weeks ago.
Christine’s halfway through her next message when the door slowly opens and Paige steps carefully through. She smiles, but it’s a nervous smile, one that causes Christine’s heart to lurch, so she quickly types out a grateful goodbye, closes her laptop, and stands up from the bed. Paige takes a step back, leans against the door, and Christine, limbs going cold, doesn’t move any closer. She doesn’t know what’s going on, but Paige hasn’t seemed this brittle since the end of their second year, when Aunt Bea locked her in her room for a week.
“Paige—” Christine says.
“You don’t have an assignment due, do you?” Paige says. She’s hugging herself, balling her fists in the fabric of her long dress, drawing it up almost to her knees.
Shit. “No,” Christine says.
“You seemed so scared when you left the table. More than you would be just for schoolwork. It was more like the way you used to get, years ago, when you thought you’d done something wrong. When you were just waiting for the consequences to find you. And when you—” Paige sniffs, and Christine aches, “—when you lied, and told me you had some assignment to do—”
“It’s not anything bad,” Christine says, wanting desperately to move towards her but anchoring herself with the fear that if she does, and Paige bolts, and she can’t get to her, this might all end. Paige, the girl who has endless confidence and boundless grace, until suddenly, sometimes, she doesn’t.
“Are you seeing someone else?” Paige says.
Christine’s reply is instant. “No.” They never agreed to be exclusive, never even really talked about whether or not they’re girlfriends, and yet they both know they are. They fell in deep with each other, almost too quickly for Christine to really think about what she was doing.
Almost too quickly. Because the lies, like the guilt, have been weighing on her.
Paige nods. “Okay,” she says. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Christine nods, confused. “Yes.”
“Good. Because there’s something going on that I don’t know about. Something that makes you really scared sometimes, something that makes you close your laptop when I look over, something that is really important to you, but which excludes me. And I need to know what it is, Christine. So I’m going to go around the corner to the kitchen and make us both a cup of tea, and when I come back, I want you to have decided whether or not you want to tell me. Okay?”
Christine sits down on the bed, slowly, moving every limb with care so as not to overbalance. She looks up at Paige, sees the tear tracks on her face, and knows at that moment that she will never keep anything from her ever again.
“Okay,” Christine says.
* * *
Will predicted that Declan, Raph and Ollie would have taken over the sofas by the TV and, sure enough, when the four of them returned to the common room, there they were, slouching across as much space as possible, marking their new territory. But it didn’t take a lot of four-versus-three intimidation to get them to shift back to their usual spot on the metal tables; between the numbers disadvantage and the roomful of women with weapons, Will’s gamble worked. Declan might not be intimidated by the worst Dorley can dish out — as far as he understands it, anyway — but clearly he doesn’t want to go straight back in the cell before enjoying a single night in a soft bed.
“They’ve never actually properly thrown down with any of us, right?” Will said, back in Stefan’s room. “Yes, they’ve chucked the odd plate, they’ve made threats, but correct me if I’m wrong: the only time any of them actually came at us was Declan, with you two, in the showers, right? And all he really managed then was knocking you on the floor, Aaron.”
“And then Stef made him look like an idiot,” Aaron said, grinning.
“Not the point. With anyone else, I’d expect them to respect you for outsmarting them, but Declan’s thicker than a pig’s knuckle; that won’t even have occurred to him. But what he does know is, we’re all basically unknown prospects, yes? I’m about his height and at least as built, and Adam’s slim but not at all weak.”
“We arm-wrestled,” Adam said.
“And I only just won. And you two, you’re both kinda small, but anyone who’s been in a real fight knows you can’t discount the skinny guys. It’s the skinny guys who’re quick. It’s the skinny guys who’ll break a bottle over your face.”
“Or shove a plastic fork up your nose,” Aaron muttered.
“So,” Will continued, ignoring Aaron, “we’re a united front. Like before, only moreso. We do everything together. No exceptions. If one of us has to piss, we all have to piss. I don’t care, Aaron, before you say it, if it makes us look like a bunch of girls. You’ll have to learn to make sacrifices if you don’t want to get your face split open. Declan and his cheerleaders are going to want to get us alone and we just don’t let them. Agreed?”
Stefan, sitting in his usual spot on the sofas and filtering out the vast majority of the baking show on the TV, is still a little surprised they were able to push Declan’s lot back to the tables, and reluctantly he gives Will a few points on his internal scoreboard. It was him who did most of the talking, after all. Stefan’s not able entirely to relax, though, not just yet, not with his back to the room and Declan undoubtedly irritated. So he keeps his ears open, half to Aaron’s prattle — reassuringly resumed after an unsettling period of keeping his thoughts mostly inside his head — and half to Declan, Raph and Ollie’s conversation, in case there’s anything of value to be found there.
He’s never listened to them before, not really. And mostly they talk about what he would have guessed: a mishmash of sexist and racist jokes, some bravado about a time in their life they kicked a particularly large amount of arse, that sort of thing. After a while, and a lot of tedious and unpleasant chat Stefan is already trying to forget, Declan starts dominating the conversation, going over a time when a former girlfriend — one of the ones he hit, apparently — returned to his place to pick up some of her things, and Declan had had a lot to drink that night, and she had a smart mouth on her, and he was feeling—
Oh. Oh God.
Declan is describing a rape.
And he thinks it’s funny.
It’s over in less than five seconds. Almost before he knows what he’s doing, Stefan’s vaulted over the back of the sofa and launched himself at Declan, catching him hard enough in the face to knock him off his seat and onto the floor. And as Declan stares up at him, confused, clutching his nose, as Stefan cradles his fist in his other hand, flexing his thumb — he punched with it inside his fist; rookie move — and as the room around him slowly starts to react, Stefan realises that he doesn’t regret hitting Declan at all.
Not even if he gets back up.
Not even if he balls those huge fists of his.
Not even if he shouts his name with venom and spittle.
He wants a fight?
Fuck it.
He can have one.
Chapter 14: The Sense God Gave Her
Notes:
cw: mentions of rape and abuse
Chapter Text
2019 November 9
Saturday
Declan gets tased. Stefan doesn’t. He wonders, as Declan’s face spasms, as his legs fall out from under him, as he crashes to the floor by Stefan’s feet, momentum carrying him far past the point of bodily sensibility, if he owes such favouritism to Pippa and perhaps Christine, or if the sponsors heard what Declan was saying and decided that, of the two of them, Declan is by far the most objectionable. Stefan, following the quartet of women who are carrying the unconscious man back to the cells, can’t get it out of his head: the fucker revelled in the power he had over that woman, and not just his physical power, either; she kept coming back to him, again and again, caught in a cycle of moving out when he abused her and moving back in when he put on sufficient charm, when he persuaded her that, this time, he’d changed.
Repulsive.
Stefan’s never wanted so much to hurt someone. It’s not a pleasant feeling.
He doesn’t even look up as Maria places him in a cell. It takes him several minutes, minutes he spends getting his heartbeat under control, breathing slowly until his pulse stops thumping against his temples, gripping the edge of the awful little cot so tight he thinks his fingers might bruise, to realise she left the door open.
Pippa’s there. Watching him. For how long?
“You okay?” she says, and her tone suggests she’s asked him once already. She’s flushed all the way up to her bleached hair, like she’s just run a marathon. Or like she’s been crying. Her voice has that delicate lilt some people get when they’re trying not to strain it after pushing it too hard; Stefan wonders if that still applies for someone who’s had as much voice training as Pippa’s obviously had. Maybe it goes double.
He remembers hearing shouting, now that he thinks about it. Down the corridor; not directed at him.
“I’m okay,” he says. He lets go of the edge of the cot, flexes his fingers. Winces as the pain from the base of his right hand reminds him of his mistake. “I think I almost broke my thumb,” he adds, sheepishly holding it aloft.
“Did you hit him with your thumb inside your fist?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not how you throw a punch.”
“First time.”
Pippa holds out a hand; her left, to take his, to pull him up off the cot without hurting him more than his inexperience already has. He accepts it, and wobbles a little as he finds his feet again. Never had an adrenaline rush like that; never had a comedown like this.
“Come on,” Pippa says, tugging on his wrist. “Let’s get you back to your room.”
“No punishment?”
She yanks on him again, so he follows. “Not from me. He deserved that and ten times more.”
He looks to the right as they walk down the main corridor. In the common room — locked; red LEDs on the doors — Aaron, loitering, obviously trying to find out what’s happening so he can relay it back to the rest of them, grins and gives him a thumbs up, pressing his hand against the glass. Stefan reaches out and touches the glass as he passes, returns Aaron’s smile.
You okay? Aaron mouths, comically over-enunciating.
Stefan nods. He doesn’t know if he is or not, but there’s no sense in having Aaron worry. At least Declan’s back in a cell. No more danger.
Aaron mouths something else, but it’s too complex a sentence and Stefan is no lip-reader, so he just shrugs, points to Pippa, still dragging on his other arm, and leaves the boy to it. They can catch up later.
In his room, he collapses onto the bed, having staggered the last couple of steps as the last of his energy drained. One punch took a lot more out of him than he expected! Pippa closes the door behind them, pulls up the chair and drops onto it, slumping forward immediately, elbows on her knees, hands supporting her chin.
“What a day,” she says.
“Are you okay?” Stefan asks. She’s still red, although it’s faded a bit. She’s so pale that even the slightest hint of colour dominates her face.
“I’m supposed to be. I’m your sponsor. Your authority figure.”
“Pippa—”
“Yes. I know. It just… We ran the video for him. In the cell. Playing what he said, before you hit him. Over and over again. And I had to listen to it. Over and over again. Brought back a lot of memories, you know? Bad ones.”
Stefan shoves himself up painfully. Now the adrenaline’s spent he feels sore and over-worked, a machine without oil. It’s worth the effort, though, to move closer to Pippa, to hold out his left hand, the way she did in the cell, to offer something for her to take, if she wants to.
“You can talk about it,” he says, “if it would help.”
Pippa sniffs grotesquely and reaches out to grip his fingers. She hooks hers into his, not so much holding hands but creating and reinforcing the bridge between them, the one they’ve both slowly built over the past two weeks.
“I have a cousin,” she says. She’s quiet, steady, talking almost to herself. “Three years older than me. We were always close; she made this, actually. It’s one of a pair.” She reaches over with a finger and spins her bracelet around the wrist locked in Stefan’s grip. “She always took care of me. Even when things got bad, she’d be there for me, to calm me down, to talk me through it. But it all ended when she met a man a bit too much like Declan.”
She pauses for a while. Chews on her lip, flexes the fingers connected to Stefan, testing their link. He waits. She doesn’t need his contributions, just, perhaps, his presence.
“Some men have a way of making themselves a woman’s whole world. And some women are vulnerable to it. My cousin, Sarah, she was definitely vulnerable to it. He was her first, and he used that to control her, to make her think that if he left she’d never find someone else. He hit her, and she didn’t leave. Wouldn’t leave.” She shifts on the chair, moving her weight around, looking for comfort, finding none. “He took her away from us a little at a time. Away from me. First, I got to see her only at the weekends. Then, once a month, maybe. And when I did see her, she was different. Reduced. Less and less and less of her every time. And she would have… bruises.”
“I’m so sorry, Pip,” Stefan whispers, and she tightens her fingers in his.
“It was all so stupidly predictable,” she says. “We all saw him coming. Even me. He got angry at the slightest thing. A horrifying mirror, actually, for me, although I didn’t truly realise that until much later. But we all tried to tell her: me, my dad, her mum, we all tried. And Sarah, she’d say, ‘It’s only when he’s had too much to drink,’ or, ‘He’s trying to change for me,’ or, ‘You don’t understand him, but I do, because I love him.’” Pippa clenches her fingers. Stefan feels her nails dig into the skin. Welcomes them. “One day,” she continues, “she texted me. Said she was going to leave. But she didn’t. It took us almost a week to find out why. Dad found out, in the end. Her boyfriend, he raped her. He found her trying to leave. Trapped her. Hurt her. And when my dad beat him into the hospital, Sarah took his side. Testified against my dad. Prison for six months.” She rubs at her eyes with her free hand. Her ever-present eye makeup is a wreck. “All for a monster who took advantage of her kindness and her naivete and her terror of being alone. A monster who hurt her and hurt her and hurt her, because he never cared enough to stop. A monster we all saw coming.”
“Is she okay now?” Stefan asks.
She sniffs again. “I don’t know!” she says. Too loud. Too raw. “She moved away with him. Left me all alone. Left me with no-one. Left me to find out I was seventeen and had no real friends. You know how lonely you get when someone you’re that close to just leaves? You find out that you don’t know how to function without them. You don’t know how to talk to people. You barely know how to live. And if you’re like me, and you get angry a lot, without her there, it gets out…” She shakes her head, terminating the memories. “So I came here. Started fresh. And now I sponsor. Terribly, apparently.”
“You’re doing great. Really.”
She looks at him, smiles. “I still don’t know what you did to end up here, Stef,” she says, freezing his heart for a moment before she continues, “but it doesn’t matter. I know you’re not like him. At this point, I think that’s all I need to know.”
She keeps smiling at him, looking for someone in him that he hopes he can be for her, and he leans forward, using their entwined fingers to pull her closer, slowly, making a request out of it, one she answers by matching him, stepping off the chair and onto the mattress next to him. As they embrace, as he holds her, as she leans on his shoulder and cries gently, he thinks he can see her whole life:
A troubled girl, closer with her cousin than anyone else, left suddenly alone. She seeks a new start, leaves home for Saints, and loses control of the anger her cousin helped her manage. She takes out her misery on someone or something she shouldn’t, and gets picked up by Dorley. And wears around her wrist every day her remembrance of her cousin, her grief.
Stefan grieves, too, for the person she might have been, had she been given the chance to heal without being taken and changed against her will.
Pippa pulls away, borrows a tissue, dabs at her eyes and grimaces at the dark makeup left behind, and Stefan has to make himself remember that his imagined younger Pippa is not, in fact, a girl. Because she wasn’t always like this: that younger, broken, angry Pippa was a boy, a boy whose name he’ll never know, and whose path to redemption was decided for him by someone else. Baffling, still, because she seems so complete. But fragile, today. The cracks showing on traumas that, whatever else happened to her here, never quite healed.
Fuck Declan for triggering her memories. When he washes out, which he probably will, Stefan hopes it fucking hurts.
“Stef?” Pippa says.
“Oh,” he says, “sorry. Got caught up in my head for a second there.”
“I know.” She taps him on the forehead with her free hand. “I know exactly what that looks like on you. If you’re back in the land of the living…?” She pauses and he nods. “I asked if it’s okay if I stay here a little while.”
“Sure,” he says, and they separate. Pippa finishes wiping her face, using some of his moisturiser as makeshift makeup remover. Stefan distributes pillows around so they can sit in their usual position, propped up against the wall, facing the computer. “What was that movie you were talking about?”
“Legally Blonde?” Pippa says. Without her makeup she looks strangely young; that might be why she wears it so heavily.
“That’s the one.”
“It’s a classic.”
“So, show me!”
She finds energy for the first time since she came in, and grabs his phone off the bedside table before swinging back onto the mattress next to him. She sits closer than usual, shifting her pillow along, and scrolls through the movie list on the phone. When she starts the movie she folds her arms around her belly but her elbow touches Stefan’s, and he makes sure to maintain the contact.
The movie is ridiculous and fun, and laughing together helps them both.
About an hour in she pauses it, in need of a toilet break. She locks down all the other doors so she can use the basement bathroom without one of the boys walking in on her.
“Come with me?” she says.
“Are you sure?”
“I feel kind of antsy being down here alone. Even with all the doors locked.”
“I know the feeling.”
She takes his hand and leads him out of his room and down the corridor. Stefan has the strangest feeling that he’s being conspired with, like they’re two kids sneaking down to steal cookies from the kitchen in a vintage newspaper comic strip.
In the bathroom, he leans against the wall that backs onto the shower annexe while she closes herself in a cubicle and sits down.
“Thanks for this, Stef,” she says, echoing a little.
“No problem.”
“I feel stupid for letting him get to me like that. Declan, I mean.”
“I get it,” Stefan says. “I mean, not in the same way. But he set something off in me. Like I said, I’ve never hit anyone before.”
She laughs. “You are the least toxic person we’ve ever had down here, I swear.”
“Hey,” he says, “what’s going to happen to Declan?”
“I actually don’t know. At the very least he’ll be kept in the cell for the time being. He’s been nothing but trouble since he got here, and your safety will be valued considerably higher than his freedom.” She coughs delicately. “His relative freedom, anyway.”
“That’s a relief. We were making these ridiculous plans to stay together all the time, in case he followed up on his threats. We’d even piss as a group! I wasn’t looking forward to getting up every forty-five minutes so Will can drain the snake. For such a big boy he really has a small bladder.”
Pippa flushes the toilet. “When did you make this plan?” she asks, emerging from the stall a minute or so later.
“Earlier on, in my room, after Declan made his entrance. We all crammed in there like sardines, to strategise. And, uh, get yelled at by Aaron, actually.”
“Who did? Will?”
“Me. Apparently I’ve been pushing him too hard about his dick pics.”
Pippa doesn’t say anything else until she’s finished washing and drying her hands. “Listen, Stef,” she says, playing with her bracelet again, “can we finish the movie another time? I need to, um, check in with Maria and Aunt Bea. Get the whole post-debacle debrief.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sure.”
She steps forward, takes his hand again. “Thanks again, Stef, for helping me. I really needed it. And, yes, I know, I should have been helping you, but—”
“No problem,” he repeats with a smile, and squeezes her hand.
She returns both gestures, then turns and skips out of the bathroom, in an obvious hurry.
Back in his room, Stefan closes down the movie player, puts on some quiet music, and lies down, closing his eyes and letting his mind go blank.
He’s okay. Pippa’s okay. Declan’s in the cell again. It’s all over; normality, or what passes for normality down here, can return at its own pace.
* * *
It takes three cups of tea; Christine goes with Paige to make the second and third, unable to stomach the thought of leaving her side, and stands on the other side of the second-floor kitchen, looking out at the woods while the kettle boils. The November cold has set in, and the trees are brittle. By the third cup, they’re standing closer together.
There’s a lot of ground to cover. A lot of explaining to do. Paige wouldn’t initially move from her position by the door, a place from which she could bolt if she needed to, and cradled that first mug of tea as if it was her only source of heat. Eventually, as Christine’s story continued, Paige consented to move to the sofa, to sit next to her.
For a moment, Christine remembers Paige before she was Paige: scared, angry, far too thin, and ready to batter down any obstacle in front of her, no matter the consequences.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she whispers. Paige takes both hands in hers, shows her a smile that might shatter, and that’s all the reply Christine needs. She cries. Falls into Paige, forces her to catch her. She knows it’s her fault, that it’s Paige who deserves comfort, but the weight of her mistakes has fallen on her and it’s impossible not to collapse under it.
In Paige’s arms, she shakes.
After a while, fingers tangle in her hair, and Paige begins carefully and slowly to run her hands from Christine’s temple to the back of her neck, smoothing out the locks, with every stroke thawing the fear that’s kept Christine frozen in place. Eventually her tears dry, but when Paige hooks her fingers back around her neck so she can draw Christine back, meet her eyes, and kiss her forehead once, twice, Christine weeps anew.
She hasn’t lost her.
“Paige?” she says, her voice unsteady and wet.
“Christine,” Paige says, “it’s okay.”
“It is?”
“I won’t say I’m not hurt. But if there’s one thing I don’t ever want, it’s to lose you again.”
Christine squeaks Paige’s name and dives back into her. She makes the only promise she can under the circumstances: she’ll never again be so stupid, and Paige will never lose her again.
Their third mugs are still warm by the time they retreat from their embrace, and Paige takes a heavy drink from hers, deliberately puncturing the gravity of the moment with appalling slurping sounds and making Christine laugh.
“God,” Christine says, “I feel like this is my first chance in a month to catch my breath. Between Stef, Aunt Bea, makeup practise, schoolwork, shopping, clubbing… it’s been non-stop. And that’s not an excuse for not telling you,” she adds quickly. “It’s just—”
“I know. Don’t forget how well I know you.” Paige grins, her slightly elongated canines cheekily resting on her lower lip. “You don’t plan; you react. And with Abby barely around, you’ve been reacting on your own, every time.” She tucks a finger under Christine’s chin. “But you’re not on your own any more. No more rash decisions, okay?”
“Okay,” Christine says, feeling the pressure of Paige’s finger against her jaw.
“And no more lies.”
“No more lies.”
Paige nods, sets down her empty mug, and draws Christine into her, wrapping long, lithe arms around her shoulders. “I love you, Christine,” Paige says, and Christine has a moment to realise that this is the first time either of them has said it this way before she answers in kind, instinctively, finding it obvious, putting all her apologies and all her love into every little prayer she whispers into Paige’s hair.
Eventually Paige releases the tension in her arms, prompting Christine to draw away, each of them stealing kisses before they fall out of reach, collapsing into the cushions on opposite ends of the sofa, tired. Still holding hands.
They sit together for a while, reconnecting, Christine mostly staying quiet, not wanting to intrude on Paige’s thoughts: she’ll be sifting through the emotions raised in her today for a while yet. Paige isn’t good with feeling abandoned or isolated, not after her parents, not after a week locked in her room. Not after Christine, last year, left her for stupid reasons. Another wound on a girl more delicate than she makes herself seem.
So she lets her set the pace, gives her the time she needs, and holds in the voice that scolds her over and over for hurting Paige again. For almost ruining the best thing ever to happen to her, again. She’s almost succumbed to her exhaustion and fallen asleep when Paige stirs.
“Just when I think this place can’t get any weirder…”
Christine takes the cue. “Rule one: this place will always get weirder. That’s why I don’t bother adjusting to new normals any more.”
“Wise.” Paige sits forward. “Show me.”
“Hmm?”
“I want to see what you can do! Show me how you break into our systems. The cameras and everything.”
“Oh,” Christine says, “yeah. Definitely.”
She sets the laptop up on top of the bean bag chair, drags it in front of the sofa so they can both see the screen without contorting themselves, and walks Paige through the software she cobbled together. As she goes through the basement cameras she drops in on Stef, who looks to be napping and thus taking Declan’s return with more aplomb than Christine expected.
“I can’t believe we finally hooked a girl,” Paige says, peering at Stef. “At least, someone who knows she’s a girl already,” she adds, grinning, “and not just a painfully obvious uncracked egg like Vicky. A real-life, self-aware trans girl! What’s she going to think of us when she moves upstairs?”
“Actually,” Christine says with a shrug, “she’s already told me.” She preens. “I’m ‘surprisingly normal’.”
“She must not know you that well, then.” Paige leans over, kisses Christine delicately on the temple. “You’re the furthest thing from normal. That’s your appeal.”
“I have an appeal?”
“Don’t push it,” Paige says, nudging Christine with her elbow. “You’re cute, but you’re not that cute.”
Christine pushes it. “I’m not cute?”
Paige giggles, pulls her in, kisses her again. “Fine. You’re adorable.”
Christine nuzzles her back, then remembers: “Oh, it’s he, by the way. For Stef. She prefers he, for now. Just in case you ever meet her. Him! Fuck.”
“That’s weird.”
“Right?”
“Shoe’s on the other foot at last,” Paige says. “Remember all your pronoun confusion, back then? This is the universe getting you back for all those times you forgot, and misgendered Vicky.”
Christine snorts. “At least she stopped kicking me. I was worried I’d have a permanent limp before we even got out of the basement.”
“I asked her to.”
“Oh?”
“I knew you weren’t being malicious. Just slow.”
“Thanks, Paige.”
On the screen, Stef sleeps. It’s good to see him calm and untroubled, even if he has to be unconscious.
“I’m glad we’re getting to do this,” Paige says. “We should help more trans people.”
“Preaching to the choir,” Christine says, taking control again and flipping through the rest of the basement cameras, trying to get up to speed. Wait, that’s weird… “Huh. Declan’s back in a cell. He was out, right? Monica made a big fuss, Pippa panicked. He was definitely out.”
Paige hovers her fingers over the trackpad. “Mind if I—?” Christine nods and gets out of the way, and Paige starts flipping through cameras with far more expertise than someone who’s been exposed for only a few minutes to Christine’s janky, home-built software should be able to manage. “Where’s Pip…?” Paige mutters to herself, and goes through the cameras on the above-ground floors until she finds her.
Pippa’s in the office, which is, apart from her, as empty as Christine would expect on a random Saturday afternoon. She’s cross-legged on the floor next to an open filing cabinet, referencing something on her phone against a file she has open on her knees, running a finger down the printed text and whispering to herself, too quiet for the microphone to pick up.
“That’s not good,” Christine says, fighting against sudden shortness of breath for the third time today. The archives contain the original, largely non-redacted records on all Dorley graduates: the information considered important to have on file somewhere, but best not left lying around on an easily accessible server. Aunt Bea decided long ago, when she started using the girls as sponsors, that she didn’t want them able to look up each other’s pre-Dorley histories on their laptops every time one of them irritated another at the breakfast table. There’s nothing in there on Stef, or any of the boys, that Pippa doesn’t already have access to on a phone or laptop, from the comfort of her own bed. Which means she’s looking for information on a graduate.
She’s got to be looking into Melissa. Stef must have slipped up somehow, revealed too much information on one of their cosy movie nights.
Shit!
“Is there a way to zoom in?” Paige says, looking over the controls.
“It’s an optical zoom,” Christine explains, balling a hand into a fist, “and an old camera. She’d hear the motor and know someone’s watching her.”
“Maybe we should— wait,” Paige interrupts herself. “She’s getting up.”
They watch on the screen as Pippa lays out a few sheets of paper from the file, takes pictures with her phone, puts everything back in its proper place, and marches out of the room. Paige follows Pippa around the building with the cameras and Christine leans against her, borrowing some of her body heat and forcing breath into her lungs, one heave at a time.
Why can’t things be normal for just one day?
* * *
Pippa wakes him from a dreamless sleep by sitting down heavily on the end of his bed and startling him back to consciousness. She throws her phone, unlocked and showing a paused video file, onto the mattress next to him. He blinks a few times, wishing for coffee or possibly something to hide behind — Pippa’s face is rock-still, and he’s seen her kick walls and hit tables when she gets like this — until he starts getting his focus back.
“Who are you really, Stefan?” she says, and he shakes his head, pretending not to understand the question, buying himself a little more time. He picks up the phone, squints at the screen, and drops it back onto the bed as he pushes up on his elbows, discards the sheets, and disentangles himself, ready to run, should he need to.
The question of where enters his head, but he ignores it. One problem at a time.
“You said you made a plan with the other boys,” Pippa says, “and I might not be much of a sponsor but if four of you are doing things like meeting in a bedroom and making plans, then it felt like something someone might need to know about, and I figured it was better that I looked into it first rather than have someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t care about you stumble over the footage in the archive review, because if you say something you shouldn’t and it’s something I can protect you from, then that’s something I want to do. So I looked. And I heard that.”
She nods at the phone. Stefan looks at it properly for the first time: the video is frozen on a top-down view of his room, earlier that day, with him, Aaron, Will and Adam packed in. He’s paused in the act of saying something, as difficult to look at as ever.
He decides to look at Aaron, instead. Fear clogs his throat: what could any of them have possibly said to upset Pippa so?
She reaches out and taps the screen.
“—the emotion we call friendship is queer or something. I’ve not been as close to anyone since Russ or Melissa.”
“Oh, shit, are we finally getting your tragic backstory?”
“No. Not—”
Another couple of taps to rewind the footage and show it again. Three times, before she scoops up her phone and drops it into her bag.
“Russ and Melissa,” she says. “Russ and Melissa, Stef!”
“I know!” he says, making sure his arms are free in front of him, in case he needs to defend himself. Her shoulders are rising and falling too fast as she takes short, quick breaths. “I heard!”
“You have thirty seconds to tell me how you know Melissa,” Pippa says, “or I’m taking this straight to Aunt Bea.” She’s speaking levelly but every so often her control wobbles and a word hisses out through clenched teeth. He’s never seen her like this.
He swings his legs out of bed, rests his hands in his lap. “I followed her here,” he says, telling as little of the truth as he thinks he can get away with; it’s not just his future on the line but Christine’s, too. “To Saint Almsworth, not to Dorley. If… if you know we’re connected, then you know we were close. She disappeared when I was young, and I never believed she was dead, the way everyone else did. I was convinced if I came here, if I attended Saints, I might be able to find out what happened to her. But I never did, and I— I got depressed, started behaving badly—”
“Stef,” Pippa says, looking right through him; hearing him but not seeing him, “stop lying.”
“I’m not—!”
Pippa punches the mattress, making Stefan jump. “Her name wasn’t always Melissa and you fucking know it!” She whips her head around. “I know you knew her before she was Melissa, from her file. Your name shows up in there as much as her own brother’s. But she — he — vanished from your life. So. How. Do. You. Know. Her?” She emphasises the pronoun by slapping the mattress again.
He works his mouth uselessly, silently, swallowing down the rushing in his ears. That was probably the worst mistake he could have made. He’s too damn used to thinking of Melissa as Melissa! A favourite phrase of his mother’s drops into his head: Engage brain before opening mouth. And of his father’s: Stupid boy!
“I know,” he says, editing his story again. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I got used to thinking of her that way. Years ago, I saw her, out near the supermarket. She recognised me and I recognised her. She dropped her debit card, and I picked it up, saw her name. I was never completely sure she was the same person as Mark, but it was better than believing he was dead.”
“What are you saying?” Pippa says, her eyes focusing on him again at last.
“Abby said some of the people who live upstairs have been treated here. Not here here, not the girls, anyway, but she was in the programme, and that’s when I finally put it together, that Melissa really was Mark, and she had a difficult transition, and came here for treatment, and—”
“Shut! Up!” Pippa yells, throwing her bag across the room, switching so quickly from stillness to violence that Stefan hiccups in surprise. She stands, fists clenched by her sides, quivering with rage, a wire of uncoiled energy with nowhere to strike. “You keep lying! I can see it in your eyes! You’re panicking, trying to find a version of the story that will make me go away! Jesus, Stef!” She kicks out at the chair, knocks it over, starts pacing in the tiny area of floor between the door and the bed. “I thought we were close, Stef! I thought we were friends!”
It comes out before he can stop it. “Then why do you keep lying to me about the injections?” he shouts.
Pippa freezes. Stefan, too.
Stupid boy.
“What do you mean?” Pippa says, quietly, slowly. Almost inaudibly.
Stefan reaches up with a stiff hand and presses hard on his chest, massaging movement back into his body. It’s obvious there’s no point in continuing the charade any longer: she has more than enough information, one way or another, to get to the truth, or something close to it, with or without him. And if he tells her now, himself, in his own words, he has at least a chance at regaining some of her trust.
“I know about the estradiol, Pippa,” he says.
She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move.
“It’s in what you say— what you’ve been told to say is a vitamin injection. Once a week. It works with the implant in the stomach, which you’ll move us off before too long.”
“What else do you know?” she whispers.
“I know how you move us off the implant.”
Pippa, a marionette with her strings cut, almost falls as she staggers towards the bed. Stefan intercepts her, helps her sit, piles cushions behind her, gently lowers her until her head and neck are supported.
“You know everything?” she whispers.
“More or less.”
“And when you say you know what comes after the implant, you mean the orchi.” It’s not a question.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know how I was going to deal with that,” Pippa says, glassy-eyed. “I didn’t know how I was going to send you into that room, knowing what’s going to happen to you.”
Stefan takes a risk: he holds her hand. She grips it like a life preserver.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“It’s not okay. It’s barbaric.”
“You survived it.”
She sits halfway up, stares at him, and then her energy leaves her and she falls again. “Jesus,” she says. “You really do know everything.”
“Look,” he says, “Pippa, you don’t have to worry about that, for me.” He finds himself smiling. It’s different, coming out to her; he’s had weeks to think about it, weeks to be certain that, finally, he knows himself. And Pippa’s not a near-stranger like Christine was, in those early days. She’s his friend. “The truth is, I really did seek this place out because of what happened to my childhood best friend. She became Melissa; I wanted that for myself, too. I needed it. I’m transgender, Pippa. I’m a girl. Or I should be.”
It’s like she forgets how to breathe for a moment. She can’t take her eyes off him, and stills completely, her only movement in her knuckles as her grip on the sheets tightens. “This isn’t a joke, is it?” she whispers.
“No.”
Laughter bursts out of her like a firecracker, and she rolls over, wraps herself suddenly around him, encloses him with her whole body. All her energy now directed into holding him tight, the way Abby did. The way no-one else really has for a long time. “Stef!” she says, pulling away, cheeks flushed, hysterical. “You’re a girl! My goodness, Stef. Wow. God. Stef. What the hell? You’re a— you’re a flipping girl.”
“Yep,” he says, shrugging.
“You could have told me.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“No,” she says, “it’s okay. I understand why you didn’t.” She rolls onto her back again and empties her lungs with a long, coarse, descending whistle. “Wait; you didn’t tell anyone about this place, did you?”
“No. No-one.”
“Good. Because that was a scary thought.” She chews on her lip for a second. “I had sudden visions of police showing up, all of us being dragged away in cuffs…”
“I wouldn’t do that to you. Even if I, uh, don’t exactly agree with what happens here.”
“It’s worth it in the end.”
“So I keep hearing.”
“I still don’t understand, though,” Pippa says slowly, cracking her knuckles and resting her hands on her stomach, looking for a moment like a corpse prepared for a funeral; she’s still too pale. “How did you find out about this place? I mean, I guess you staged that thing outside, with the girl screaming, and you passing out in the flower bed, but who was she? Stef, if you have an accomplice, we need to know, before—”
He’s saved from having to think of a new lie, a new way to keep Christine out of it, by the whistling of the speaker set into the strip above the door.
“What—?” Pippa has time to say.
Christine’s voice, a whisper loud enough to fill the room, says, “Pippa, it was me.”
* * *
Christine hasn’t been back up to the roof since the night she met Naila and Ren — who are now staples of Vicky and Lorna’s social group and joining the clamour for Christine one day to play Bloodborne, if only because Naila thinks Eileen the Crow is hot — and it was much warmer then. She shivers inside her jacket and wishes for the wisdom of Paige, who pulled on a calf-length woolly cardigan and a blazer and still looks amazing; Christine, in her huge, puffy coat, looks like an M&M’s mascot, and is still cold.
She did little talking in the end. Her intervention gave Stef permission to tell the whole of the truth, and so he did, in detail, holding Pippa’s hand and laughing with her about some of the sillier parts; skipping over the bits where Pippa was personally unpleasant to him. When he was done, Pippa thanked him, nodded up at the camera, and left. They tracked her through the building on the cameras and when it became clear she was headed for the roof, they followed, at speed.
Pippa’s not leaning dramatically over the railing, as Christine feared. She’s not even near the edge; a week ago the fifth floor had a party up here and left behind a tarp spread over the central gravel garden and an assortment of old couches. Pippa’s pulled the clear plastic off one of them and she’s idly playing with a loose thread on its arm, staring at nothing in particular.
Paige gives Christine’s hand a final squeeze before they uncouple, and gives Pippa the spare coat she brought. Wordlessly Pippa accepts it, struggles into it without getting up, and slumps back into the cushions. Paige sits next to her; Christine, not wanting to crowd her, sits cross-legged on the couch opposite, not bothering to remove the plastic cover. The roof is both empty and lacks microphones, so they have more privacy here than almost anywhere else in the Hall.
“Hi,” Christine says.
Pippa turns red eyes on her. “You know,” she says, “I’m almost too relieved about Stef to be angry at you. Almost.” She laughs, hoarse. “She’s not going to be mutilated. She’s going to be saved. And,” she adds, rolling her eyes, “yes, I know, that’s the point — all of us were saved — but she wants it. She needs it. This might—” she coughs, her voice straining against a dry throat, “—actually be a good year for me. I get to do something unequivocally good, not just good-with-an-asterisk, like I expected.”
“Good-with-an-asterisk is still good,” Paige says.
“Pretty flipping big asterisk, though,” Pippa says.
“True.”
“Pippa—” Christine starts.
“No. I still want to say my bit. You lied to me, Christine. All that stuff with the letters, the manipulation, the whole, ‘Oh, I just had a great idea about how to deal with Stef!’ thing… And that’s not even why I’m angry at you, really. You made me think I was your friend, Christine.”
“You are my friend!”
“Maybe that’s how it turned out. Maybe that’s how it will turn out, again. But give me some time, okay?”
Christine nods. “Okay.”
“I get it, though,” Pippa says. “Stef is… I don’t know. She makes me want to help her. Always did, ever since I stopped screwing my eyes shut to yell at her, trying my hardest not to see what was really there. So I understand why you did what you did. But just… time.”
“Time. Of course.” A much more generous reaction than Christine deserves, probably.
Paige says, “Stef likes to be called he.”
“I know,” Pippa says. “I’m not doing that. I haven’t told her that, yet, but it’s my price: no self-pitying denial of your own gender, or I’ll get really annoying.” She smiles, rubs at the corner of her mouth where the skin on her lip has split. “Without the guilt, without worrying I’m going to hurt her in a way she can’t handle, I’m free! She has no idea what she’s unleashed.”
“A force of pure meddling,” Paige says.
“When we’re alone together, she’s going to be a she, and I’m going to make sure she knows it.”
“That’s probably exactly what Stef needs,” Christine says.
“Damn right. And at least it all makes sense now,” Pippa adds, rolling her head around in the couch cushion and messing up her hair. “Even the way she’s been bugging Aaron about his crap.”
“I think Stef’s trying to beat us to it,” Christine says. “Win a moral victory. Reform Aaron before we can turn him into a girl.”
“No. I mean, that might be a tiny part of it, but I’ve seen them together. In person, not just over the cameras. She likes him. And she can’t stand having a friend with such a glaring moral blind spot. So she’s been working on him, bit by bit. There might even have been a bit of a breakthrough, earlier today.”
“Wow. Go Stef.”
“We need a plan,” Paige says, leaning forward on her knees and interposing herself between Christine and Pippa. “There are four of us who know now, including Abby, and we need to decide how to move forward.”
“Uh,” Christine says, nodding towards the door down to the dorms, behind Paige and Pippa, “that might be a moot point.” It’s just swung open and spat out Maria, who frowns and hugs her belly as the cold air hits her.
“Girls,” Maria says as she approaches, and Pippa and Paige twist in their seats to look at her, “can you give me a few moments alone with Christine, please?”
* * *
Stefan’s put some quiet music on — another of Pippa’s playlists — and is tapping at his phone, starting and restarting another diary entry to send up to Christine. He wonders how she’s doing, now that her part in all this has been laid completely bare to Pippa, warts and all, rather than the edited, sanitised form they supplied to Abby. Pippa, for all that she was happy not to have to lie to him any more, seemed pretty angry with her.
He shrugs. Nothing he can do about it, except perhaps to ask Pippa to give Christine a chance. She didn’t ask for him to come barrelling into her life, and he’s demanded an awful lot of her.
The music is suddenly obliterated by the noise of the lock cycling, and Stefan wastes a whole second panicking. Quickly he pauses the song and throws his phone under the pillow while he wonders who it could be. Even Maria knocks before she comes in these days; perhaps it’s Monica or one of Adam or Will’s sponsors?
No. It’s much worse.
Beatrice, custodian of Dorley Hall and the woman with, ultimately, the power of life and death over him and almost everyone else he knows, enters with grace and poise, taking up position between the door and the bed, arms folded over her chest. Blocking the exit. She lets the silence roll out until it threatens to suffocate him and then says, with a pleasant but deliberately neutral tone, “Hello again, Stefan. Or would you, perhaps, prefer Stefanie?”
Yeah. Okay. Now it’s over. Her voice reminds him of Pippa’s, when she’s angry. It’s too level. Too controlled.
“Just Stef is fine,” he says, struggling to speak through a throat suddenly thickened by fear.
Beatrice hooks the chair with a foot and drags it over, sits daintily on it, still positioned such that Stefan, should he wish to leave, would have to go straight through her, would not be able to open the door without first moving her. “Well then! Stef.” She says his preferred name in the manner of a waiter suggesting the best and most expensive item on the menu. “I’ve had the most intriguing evening. Maria came to me with a problem: we’ve been used.” She smiles. “What do you think we should do about that?”
His breath freezes in his throat, and when he tries to speak he manages only a strangled, undignified noise.
“A short while ago, Pippa — wonderful girl; very loyal — left your room and headed straight to the roof. Didn’t even stop at her room to pick up a coat, and it is such a cold evening. Unusual behaviour, to say the least. So, naturally, she looked into it, first by searching through the camera footage and then by discussing it with her directly, and do you know what we discovered? One might term it a conspiracy! Between you and Christine. To hide from—”
“Please,” Stefan says, forcing the words out, “this isn’t Christine’s fault. I forced this on her. Don’t punish her.”
“Relax, child. Christine may well have been running around right under my nose for the past month, lying and scheming and making an enormous mess that she will, I guarantee, be required to clean up, but she appears to have acted entirely out of compassion and concern. She protected this house, she protected this programme; she even tried to protect you from yourself. Her most major mistake was that she didn’t come to me immediately, but I can understand that. I am, I’m told, rather intimidating sometimes. Frankly, I’m quite proud of her. So don’t worry about Christine.” She smiles her quick, predatory smile again. “Worry about yourself.”
He coughs when he tries to speak, and Beatrice rolls her eyes.
“For goodness’ sake,” she mutters, and pulls a bottle of water out of her bag, throwing it onto the mattress next to Stefan. “I’m not that scary. Drink. I haven’t come here to punish you, either.” She rolls her eyes at his confusion. “Yes, yes, I’m upset with you, Stef, obviously. But we can help each other, as long as you abide by the new rules. Drink!”
Stefan obeys, almost unable to feel the lukewarm water in his throat. What new rules?
“Now,” Beatrice says, settling back on the chair, making herself look somehow comfortable and relaxed on the horrible, rattly thing, “before we get to the point, you need to understand something of how the programme works.” She pauses for a reaction; Stefan nods. “It works because we, all of us, believe in it. We get up every morning and we go to bed every night secure in the knowledge that the suffering we inflict is temporary, that it is all for a purpose; that, ultimately, we are helping those we appear, superficially, to be hurting. If we didn’t believe in the work, we could not continue. Nevertheless, it is work, and it is difficult, especially for thoughtful young women like Pippa, who do not relish the hardships we must visit on the young people in our care. I understand you are au fait with our methods? Then you are aware that, not long in the future, you and the boys will undergo orchiectomies? Good. I would like you to imagine how Pippa, sweet, kind Pippa, would feel, escorting you into that room, knowing — or believing she knows — that you are ignorant of what is to come.”
“I didn’t—”
“I am not finished!” She’s suddenly a teacher, scolding a disruptive child, and Stefan instinctively retreats farther into the pillows stacked up at the end of the bed. “Every hour she has spent in your company has been coloured by the knowledge that she has had to lie to you, to maintain your ignorance, so that your reform can proceed in the manner that it should! And that means sleepless nights! Stressful days! Endless worry about how you will respond to the treatments! It is a considerable burden, and she took it up for you! You understand this, yes? Then how dare you inflict that suffering upon her for no purpose!”
“I didn’t want to!” Stefan yells, finding the tiniest crack between sentences. “And I was trying to be her friend!”
“For your own sake! You offloaded all the responsibility for your life, your transition, onto her, and you didn’t even marshal the grace or the sense God gave you to tell her the truth.” She leans forward, glares at him. “That is supremely selfish.”
Screw it. “I’m selfish?” Stefan says, gathering himself, pushing up out of the pillows. “I’m selfish? You’re sitting on the mother lode of boutique transition services and you’re hoarding them for your awful little pet project! Do you know how many trans women would kill for this? How many have died for the lack of it?”
“Yes!” she yells, and pauses, finger raised, reconsidering, the anger vanishing from her face. “Yes,” she repeats, and sits delicately back on the chair. “Of course I do, Stef. I’m… sorry for shouting.”
“Um,” Stefan says, unable to keep up with Beatrice’s rapidly switching mood, “what’s happening here?”
“I’m sure we do look selfish, to you,” Beatrice says, sounding almost wistful. “But there are reasons. I expected you to have intuited them,” she adds, with a little of her former sharpness. “Dorley Hall has a history, and an awful lot of graduates. For the most part, they’ve melted seamlessly back into the world from which they were taken, but they all share a common point of origin: this house. Our shared vulnerable point. And while I would deeply love to provide our care to those who would request it as well as require it, I inherited a responsibility when I took over this house, a responsibility to everyone who passes through our doors, to protect their new lives and keep their old secrets. And it is an unfortunate reality of transgender medical care in this country that any facility which falls outside the jurisdiction of the NHS comes under sustained and hostile investigation.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Ask Pippa to look it up for you. Or do it yourself, when we remove the restrictions on your computer. We can give you lists of names: providers of private transgender medical care who have been hounded. It is an inevitability, for those who would follow that calling. If one of the cockroaches who scurry around the centralised mental health system doesn’t report you, then one of the professional busybodies who comprise most of our national press will run a piece on you for pennies, and before you know it, you’re under investigation. I’ve seen it happen every time—” she slaps her fist onto her open palm to emphasise each word, “—a new practice starts. Five years, they last. Ten, if they’re extraordinarily clever or taking advantage of some loophole. And we can’t withstand that kind of scrutiny. Every one of us would be exposed. Many would go to prison.”
“I don’t understand how you’re even still here,” Stefan says, “if you’re so vulnerable.”
“Because we are a family, Stef. We take care of each other. We are reliant upon each other, even those of us who leave and never return. We provide stipends, references, documentation. A complete new life, but one that has its foundations here, at Dorley Hall. If the Hall falls, everyone falls with it. We are, I admit, a house of cards, but thus far we are a resilient one.”
Of course. It makes a kind of sense: an interdependent group, all complicit. And all made to start their lives again from scratch, at Dorley, to find new family and friends here and only here; if you get it into your head to turn on the others, who do you have left?
Forced feminisation on the honour system.
Stefan’s still certain they could find ways to treat trans people at Dorley without risking the safety of the existing graduates, if they applied some of the effort and enthusiasm to the idea that they currently reserve solely for growing breasts on unwilling men, but Beatrice is clearly unreceptive. She’s had years — decades — to stew in her own bullshit; the chances of him arguing her around are slim.
But it’s slowly sinking that he’s not actually doomed. She talked about ‘new rules’ he’ll have to follow, and this conversation has gone on far longer than it would have if she planned simply to wash him out. The realisation is almost calming. And it means he’ll have time to work on her. To work on the others. Make some suggestions, here and there. Improve things, maybe.
There’s something he has to know, though: “Why? Why do this to men in the first place?”
She smiles. “I admit, it’s unorthodox. And the series of events by which we came to it, even more so. But it works. You’ve met countless examples of that. And it’s necessary.”
“No,” he says, “I don’t accept that. Look at Pippa, right? She was just this lonely kid, struggling with loss and grief and immense family turmoil, but she makes one mistake and she gets kidnapped, gets slung down here. I can’t bring myself to believe she deserved it.”
“You know her so well, after a month?”
“I think so.”
“You don’t even know what she did.”
“It doesn’t matter. You never gave her a chance to change!”
“This was her chance. And she took it. Struggled with it, yes, for a while—” a smile flickers across her face, and Stefan almost doesn’t want to think about what she might be remembering, “—but she prevailed.”
“But—”
“Christine,” Beatrice says, counting on her fingers. “Abigail. Monica. Edy. Tabby. Every other sponsor you’ve met down here. All of them, at one time, were like Adam, William, or your Aaron. Some of them were even like Oliver or Raphael or Martin. All of them, reformed. All of them, happy.”
“They couldn’t have been happy as men?”
“I don’t see how that matters.”
Stefan laughs, bitter. “I think it matters a lot!”
“You think William’s happiness mattered, when he found out his younger brother was gay, and beat him? When subsequently he took out his guilt on other students? You want to send him back out there, to spiral, to hurt people, to find his happiness on the bodies of those weaker than him?”
“But—”
“Or what about your Aaron? Did his happiness matter, when he inflicted himself on women who barely even knew him?”
“He does regret that,” Stefan protests.
“Right now, he regrets it, but purely because you require it of him, and you are his only friend, and he’s stuck down here with you. Do you think your… tinkering will last, out there?”
“It might.”
Beatrice laughs. She extracts another water bottle from her bag and takes a long drink from it, makes a show of looking around the room. “It won’t,” she says. “Are you familiar with Charlotte Church?”
“No. One of yours?”
“Not one of ours, no. She is a singer, one from, I now realise, considerably before your time. Goodness, but you all get younger every year.” She sighs, and blows a strand of hair out of her face. “Charlotte Church was — is — a Christian singer. She became famous in the nineties for her angelic voice and sweet manner. Famous enough that it was, for a time, quite difficult to relax in front of the television on a Sunday evening without encountering mention of her.” Beatrice grins. “That’s something we used to do, by the way: switch on the television and watch whatever was put in front of us. I know that’s hard for someone your age to understand.”
“Yeah, actually.”
“Charlotte Church was eleven when she made her debut,” Beatrice continues, “and she became a constant presence in the media. A mascot for chaste, Christian — and very, very white — innocence. And then, four years later, when she was just fifteen, our largest national newspaper published a huge photograph of her, taken from an angle that emphasised her chest, above the headline, ‘She’s a big girl now’.”
“That’s… disgusting.”
“Precisely! Here was a girl, fifteen years old, known to us all since she was eleven, and the publishers of our largest newspaper were so eager to post pictures of her developing bosom that they were unable to make themselves wait until she was an adult. That is the environment in which we all have to live, Stef; the sea in which we all swim.”
Driftwood, Stefan remembers. Driftwood in the ocean. “What are you getting at?”
“In this country we prioritise — celebrate — the objectification of women while simultaneously condemning and even legally punishing women who have the nerve to take their lives or their sexuality into their own hands. Women speak out about the abuse they’ve received and are pilloried on television. Sex workers are forced to operate at great personal risk to themselves while the men and women who run our media salivate over children. At every level the message is the same: women’s bodies are not women’s property. How do you expect a young man who has become like the men we induct into our programme to reform in the outside world, when it is run by and for those exactly like him? Men like your Aaron infest our culture, and at every level they grant permission to themselves and those who follow in their footsteps to be as repulsive as they please. It’s easy to be an abusive man in Great Britain, Stef. Horrifyingly easy. And it escalates with privilege. I believe Aaron himself sidestepped responsibility for his repeated exposures, did he not? Excused consequences on account of being wealthy, white, and male?”
Stefan nods. He’s been searching for a counter-argument, but all he has is torture is wrong, actually. Nothing in his education prepared him to have to support that statement, and in the face of the reminder that Will beat up his younger brother — and others besides, it sounds like — he’s less sure than ever that he even wants to any more.
“Imagine returning Aaron, as he is now, to the world,” Beatrice says. “Can you really guarantee that he wouldn’t backslide? Renege on his meagre progress? In a country that elevates behaviour like his, excuses it, rewards it?”
“Okay,” Stefan says, “maybe not. But not all men are like that—” He groans as Beatrice interrupts him; did he really just pull a not all men?
“And that would be a good point if we had all men in our basement, Stef. We do not. We are selective.” She leans forward, smiling gently, adopting the air of a concerned guidance counsellor. “Stef, if I may be blunt — and everyone around me is, constantly, so I believe I shall indulge — you are a woman. You have always been a woman, whatever your external appearance might suggest. You have, therefore, experienced masculinity, and particularly the kind of grasping, possessive, abusive masculinity that we as a society have decided is appropriate to teach our young men, as nothing but a curse, correct? An unpleasant and often entirely irrational system of behaviour to which you have been expected to conform, and uphold in others.”
“Um,” Stefan says, trying to control his reaction to being called a woman, to having his womanhood recognised so casually, acknowledged so completely. “Yes, I suppose.”
“Would you agree that your compliance with masculinity has been, shall we say, coerced? Not something you would have chosen for yourself?”
Stefan nods, and carefully avoids getting lost in memories.
“Then I suspect you will find it hard to believe how… seductive it can be,” Beatrice says. “Imagine that you are a boy. Masculinity, as expressed by the patriarchy, all the way from the repulsive man who currently occupies the office of the prime minister down to your peers at school, your family, and the men you see on the television, tells you what you are. It dictates your behaviour, lays out the rules around which you must structure your life. But in return it offers power. Power over other men, should you make yourself strong enough; power over women, almost by default. ‘You are strong,’ it whispers to you, as you grow taller than the girls at your school. ‘You are powerful,’ it tells you, as you get into your first fight. ‘You deserve her,’ it insists, as you look at a pretty woman at a bar or in the street. And, to those who will listen, it says, ‘Even if she refuses you, she is nonetheless yours. Take her!’” Stefan jumps a little when she raises her voice. “‘Take her and do with her what you will, for it is your right.’
“Most men, of course, are not so ruled by their desires that they will act on every impulse. And many men are capable of ignoring those messages entirely, filtering them, discovering a healthy masculinity inside the radioactive dust that infests our social atmosphere. But, as you have seen, there are men who are overwhelmed by these messages. Who are shaped by them so completely that there is practically nothing else left inside them. They are… broken people. Excellent vessels for the — oh, what did that absurd scientist with the honey fixation call it? — the meme of masculinity. The infectious idea that burrows into the brain and takes over.
“The problem for these men is that masculinity — toxic masculinity, if you will; violent, virulent masculinity — is a seductive lover but an abusive husband. Once you are in its grip, you can never be strong enough, never exercise enough power, never hurt enough people. You find yourself trapped between two destinies.
“Some of these broken men, they despise themselves. They victimise others because they are too weak not to, and they loathe their weakness. Many of them manage to put up a front — brusqueness; belligerence; humour — but the self-hatred eats away at them, and eventually they will be destroyed by it, consumed by the parasite.
“Others become nothing but the violence. They have contempt for their victims, and admire only strength and cruelty. They are, essentially, monsters.
“The one who hates himself, who lives with the weakness and the guilt and the shame, even if he takes them out on others, he can be fixed, but only if he is willing properly to purge his masculinity. To confront his abuser. Extract his parasite. The monsters, however, are irredeemable, and must be dealt with accordingly.” She rests her chin on her hand, drums her fingers against her lips. “The programme, in its early stage, is designed to tell us who among the boys we have taken in is a monster, and who is a victim. Who is lost, and who can be saved. And also, to a lesser extent, who is malleable enough to accept the transformation, and who is not. A difficult task, at the best of times.”
“And one that I’m currently… complicating,” Stefan says.
Beatrice laughs. “Your amateur meddling thus far has had little to no effect. But you can, I believe, be of use to us in the coming months.”
Stefan coughs. “Of use to you?”
“Yes. And please don’t let my pleasant manner deceive you into thinking you have room to decline. As I said: you used us. You used Pippa, particularly; made her into an accomplice in your torture. Made her hurt you. Made her stand there and watch as the nurse assaulted you. A very difficult weight to hang around the neck of someone as kind as she. That kind of carelessness comes with a price, Stef. You owe us. You owe Pippa. You owe me.”
Lanced with guilt, Stefan nods.
“It won’t be a difficult job,” Beatrice assures him, returning to her earlier bright tones. “Mostly you’ll carry on as you are now. And except as much as is required to keep up appearances, you’ll be exempted from anything unrelated to your biomedical transition, which we will, of course, continue to provide for you, as we would have had your deception remained undiscovered.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome. But there will be times that are particularly difficult for the boys. The true onset of their second puberties, for example, and our surgical interventions.”
“You mean, the castration.”
“The orchiectomy, yes. And it is in those times that a positive example can work wonders. Someone who takes to the changes with, if not pleasure, then without the sense of apocalyptic doom that invades even those who are ultimately saved by our methods. Someone who can talk them through their feelings, help them to grow comfortable with their changing bodies. You’ll be our Judas goat.”
“‘Judas goat’?”
“It’s an archaic term. Put simply, it is an animal, kept in comfort, trained to lead the other animals, with a minimum of panic, into the slaughterhouse.”
“That’s… startlingly appropriate, actually,” Stefan says, prompting a rather less appropriate laugh from Beatrice.
“You are inside the boys’ trust,” she says, still smiling. “They view you as one of them, and as such they will accept reassurances from you that would sound empty and self-serving from the rest of us. I also suspect it’s nothing you weren’t planning to do already. Your empathy for these boys is commendable; I doubt you would be able to witness your Aaron, for example, in distress without attempting to help him.”
“This is a lot to ask,” Stefan says. “Staying quiet is one thing, but helping you mutilate these people…?”
“My dear Stef,” Beatrice says, “I am not asking.” She spreads out her hands. “These are the new rules. If you comply, you will live in comfort, your transition will be paid for, and you will exit this house with the same rights and privileges afforded to all our young women. If you do not comply, you will leave this place in the same manner as young Declan.”
“Declan’s washing out?”
“Yes. He is a rapist. An unrepentant and persistent one. By his own testimony he has damned himself. But that’s beside the point: this is not a negotiation. You have no hand to play. Do you know how many boys have passed through this basement? Would you care to venture a guess at how many of them have never been seen again, in any form? Your disappearance, should it be required, would not present any difficulties at all. I don’t like to waste people, Stef, but I do require your compliance. You have, ultimately, the same choice all our girls have to make, at one time or another: to accept my methods, or reject them.”
Stefan forces a few breaths. Buries shaking hands in the folds of the duvet to keep from giving himself away. “That’s no choice at all.”
“Exactly,” Beatrice says. “And relax! You’re getting everything you wanted. So, Stef Riley, do we have your cooperation?”
Stefan, out of options and quite possibly out of his mind, shrugs. “I suppose we do.”
There. Now he’s complicit. Just like Christine.
“Magnificent.” Beatrice brushes some imaginary crumbs off her skirt. “I’m looking forward to seeing how you turn out; you have such pretty features buried under there. And your progress through the programme and your influence on the boys will make for an interesting case study! Oh, and don’t worry about the nurse. I’m grateful that you helped bring her to my attention. She won’t be bothering anyone again, thanks to you.”
“Um, what? What did you do to her?”
Beatrice contorts her mouth, like a smile. “I had her removed.”
The implication is clear. Stefan bites the inside of his cheek for a second, and nods. Complicit in that, too.
“Now, if that is all,” Beatrice says, “you have a new future to prepare for and I have other tasks to accomplish tonight.”
“Oh, yes, fine,” Stefan says, hesitant, still imagining a dozen possible final fates for the nurse. “Um,” he adds, sheepishly feeling like he should say something more, “thank you for the opportunity.”
Beatrice stands, smooths out her clothes, and steps over to the bed. She holds out a hand and smiles a bland, corporate smile.
“Welcome to the team.”
Chapter 15: Simply Irresistible
Notes:
Content warnings: references to abuse, assault, death
Chapter Text
1988 July 30
Saturday
It’s a dangerous thrill, being outside, and still rather a novelty. And she can’t keep doing this forever: they fixed the rusted lock on the conservatory door and two weeks ago they finally replaced the loose pane in the front hallway. Today she took the back route, slipping out of the window halfway up the rear stairs and dropping onto the water tank, and while she doesn’t think anyone saw her, it’s very nearly the last escape route she has left, and every one has an expiry date.
Better make tonight count, then.
At least it gets easier every time. When she first struck out on her own, months ago now, she was so scared she could barely meet the gaze of the girl behind the bar in the Student Union, had to keep looking away, hiding her face with her fingers, in case her recent past was somehow obvious, was written on her skin — and it is, in burns and scars and in the very shape of her, but she dresses to hide the obvious marks and, as for the rest of it, she thinks she looks more or less like a girl. Enough to pass. Enough to start learning to get by with smiles and nods and bashful looks. Enough that when she ties up her hair and exposes her slender neck she’s treated like something beautiful; of such experiences a facsimile of confidence is born.
It’s her ninth time out of the house, and she’s a seasoned explorer now. She smiles at a couple of girls and they greet her in kind, easing the extant remnants of her anxiety. It’s exciting to be normal, and it’s all good practise for the day she finally follows through on the promises she makes herself, takes up the handful of stolen coins and paper money she’s hidden away, and leaves, never to return.
A light breeze picks up as she passes the old Chemistry building and she laughs, wants to dance with the wind, and so she does: she skips, spins, lets it billow out her sleeves and play with her hair, and when the brief burst of energy it granted her fades she leans for a moment against the wall, breathes it in, fills herself with it, relishes it, delights in the grassy odour it’s picked up from the mown college green and the damp edge it’s skimmed off the lake. It feels alive; nothing like the perfume-clogged haze of the dining hall, which primes her for humiliation and degradation and cigarettes stubbed out on her back; nothing like the stale and bitter air of the bedrooms, which invades her dreams and tastes of uncountable nights spent underground, carrying in its stulted grip the bloody remnants of every wound inflicted upon her.
She’s supposed to be serving drinks tonight — waiting on those old bitches and trying not to choke on their stink, accepting from them without complaint any vice they might choose to indulge upon her body — but the last time she got out she found a flyer and for the whole week she’s thought about nothing but the party by the lake. Music! Dancing! Girls drink for free! She’s not invited, she’s not a student, she’s not even a woman, but for one evening she can play at being all three, for a while.
The lakeside promenade doesn’t belong to the university and doesn’t share its character. It reminds her instead of the places she grew up, all of which came into her life aged and shabby and growing more decrepit every year; bricks crumbling dusty into the weeds at the edge of her childhood playground. Iron posts driven into cobblestones and strung together with chain follow the riverbank to an overgrown car park and a squat little building, remnant of a gentlemen’s club that closed down in the early seventies and which these days is held together more by dirt than mortar. It is, by virtue of being the last plot of land in the area that hasn’t been lavished with money and inflicted with architecture, undeniably the coolest place around.
Music and raised voices drift towards her as she descends.
Someone’s rigged up a gadget that broadcasts the signal from a tape deck out through a portable radio, and she passes a car as she enters the promenade, tuned in and bellowing through its open doors a song she doesn’t recognise. Dotted here and there are other cars, and between them they surround the makeshift dancefloor with music. There’s a bar set up against the outside wall of the gentlemen’s club, and she pushes through a throng of drinkers to get there, borrowing the swagger and confidence she’s seen in the best of the real girls, and waves to catch the attention of one of the men handing out bottles.
So many people!
She wanted to wear a dress for this, but the box of scavenged outfits they’ve spent the last year carefully assembling had none that fit, so she’s doing her best in a denim skirt and a cream top with loose sleeves and a scoop neck that sits wide on her shoulders and makes her breasts look fantastic.
That’s what Val used to say, anyway, in the moments they stole together. If she could see her now…
So many men!
Back at the house they regularly throw her at men and she’s tried to enjoy it, she really has, and she’s gotten pretty good at faking it, but here, where her choice actually matters, she turns away three guys in the first ten minutes, and stops disguising her irritation after the second one. All she wants is to have a drink and listen to music and pretend to be someone she’s explicitly forbidden from becoming; how hard is that to understand? So when the fourth guy comes strolling up she’s ready to yell at him, to take out the last four years on him, but before she can, a girl, walking over with a ready-made sneer, takes the sleeve of his shirt between two delicate fingers and tells him in no uncertain terms to piss off.
He protests.
“She’s not interested, mate!” the girl says, making shooing motions.
He leaves them alone and she smiles, nervous.
“I’m right, though, aren’t I?” the girl says, turning back to her. “You weren’t interested, yeah?”
She shakes her head.
“Good. Right. I’m Anita.” Anita presents a brusque hand. “Call me Annie, though. Everyone does.”
She swallows, tenses up her throat, and hopes like hell that Val’s illicit midnight voice lessons aren’t about to let her down. “Hi, Annie,” she says, and takes the girl’s hand.
Annie cocks her head, waiting, grinning. “Isn’t this the part where you introduce yourself?”
“Usually!”
“But you’re not going to, are you?”
“I shouldn’t,” she says. There’s no way to tell Annie that she has only one name, that it ceased to describe her long ago, and that she hasn’t yet had the courage to choose something new.
“Hah! A girl with a bit of mystery to her; fantastic!”
They’re still holding hands, and Annie does something that causes her to lose her grip, and then grabs her by the wrist instead, the better to pull her away from her ineffective hiding spot. She tenses, almost tries to shake her off, but all Annie wants to do is drag her out onto the promenade; she follows, revelling in the thrill of granting consent, of not fighting the hand on her. Annie turns halfway, walks backwards, looks her up and down with a half-smile that makes her chest tight, and then laughs as the song ends and a new track thumps against the cobblestones.
“I love this one!” Annie shouts, releasing her hand and toasting her with a beer, lips playfully lingering around the rim of the bottle. “It’s so cheesy!”
“I don’t know it!” she admits. She doesn’t know anything much.
“It’s Robert Palmer! It’s new!”
She shrugs, laughing, and drains her own beer to the line She’s anything but typical. Discarding the bottle on the grass at the edge of the promenade, she skips back to Annie who greets her with a wicked grin and a hand on her skirt.
Simply irresistible, the song goes, and she takes the cue, leaning in for the kiss Annie is obviously inviting, and Annie reciprocates, pressing soft against her and nipping lightly at her lip. A group of onlooking men whoop and whistle at them, probably thinking it’s a show meant for them, but Annie’s tongue in her mouth, Annie’s hand on her hip and Annie’s low moans confirm to her that it’s anything but.
It’s the first kiss she’s chosen in her life.
The lyric She’s so fine, there’s no telling where the money went makes her laugh, makes her giggle hysterically against Annie’s lips, because if there’s one thing that’s been made explicit to her it’s exactly where the money went: when she woke up, almost two years ago, in pain from all corners of her body and with dressings cocooning her face, they told her she was beautiful and they made sure she understood just how much her beauty cost, what each part of her altered body was worth and how much money each donor had contributed, and where once that knowledge made her feel like a possession, now she throws it to the wind with the glee of someone who is, for tonight, free.
2019 November 9
Saturday
When someone’s washing out they lock all the doors that connect to the cells and they keep it dark. It’s tradition, and like many traditions its origins are a little stupid: fifteen years ago, when she was still finding her way, still writing the new rules, a fuse blew on the night of their first failure, blacking out the whole cell wing. And you have to honour traditions in a place like this, no matter how silly, or you’ll eventually lose your mind.
These days, they leave one light on for the condemned man.
The cell wing is completely different now: minimally comfortable with a bed and a toilet in each room, and the girls have been instructed, in all cases but the most severe, to escort the residents to the bathroom every two or three days, to shower. It was rebuilt along with the rest of the underground, a process that took years and required some complicated juggling to keep operating during the disruption, but every ounce of effort expended to wipe Grandmother’s scars from the walls was worth it.
She might have done it with her nails, gouged them into illegibility herself, if it would have helped.
The years since have changed the place as much again. The walls have new marks now, new scars, relics from a new regime that is, she hopes, cruel only when it has to be.
The shudder of glass reminds her why she’s here and she quickens her step, comes face to face with Declan, leaning against the door of his cell, kicking it idly, illuminated ugly by the single light.
“Who the fuck’re you?” he says.
“I’m here to tell you how it ends,” she says.
2004 August 8
Sunday
It’s difficult, coming back, walking amongst these buildings again, assaulted by memories. But she’s older now, more experienced, less easily shaken; and she came in via the new entrance by the lake, the one that leads her through the parts of the university that have changed the most, the one that backs onto the new lecture theatre complex that students nicknamed the Anthill, the one that was built over the demolished remnants of an old gentlemen’s club and a decaying promenade where she once kissed a beautiful girl.
Like all good things back then, it didn’t last.
Her sponsor caught up with her in the end. Frankie — short for Frances or Francesca or something; she doesn’t actually know, and the one time she asked she got a ringed fist in her mouth for her impertinence — yanked her out of Anita’s arms just as the evening was winding down and dragged her away to the edge of the promenade, forcing her to wave Anita away, to act as if Frankie was just a friend saying hi, and not someone likely to lock her underground for a month to teach her a lesson.
“David! Such a surprise to see you away from home.”
“That’s not my name.”
“Funny, because I’ve got your birth certificate, and guess what it says on it?”
“What do you want?”
Frankie leaned in, imitated with impish glee the closeness she’d been enjoying with Annie just moments before, and whispered, “To remind you of what you are, of course!”
“And what am I?”
“You’re mine, David. Mine, until I say otherwise.”
“I could scream!” she’d hissed back, full of foolish defiance but tired of being touched and used and claimed and never getting to have a body or a moment that was truly her own. “I could shout out for Annie to save me from the pervert molesting me!”
“Oh, David,” Frankie whispered. “David, David, David.” Frankie’s hands tightened around her hips, fingers digging in. “You don’t want to do that. Because if you do—” Frankie tugs at the fabric, “—I’ll pull down your skirt and show them all, including Annie, which of us is the pervert and which is the innocent girl.”
They could have bulldozed the place twice and it wouldn’t have been enough.
She takes her time walking the university grounds, calming herself. She’s dressed as she prefers these days: loose trousers, a light jacket over a cami, low heels, hair up. Subtle makeup. When she left she had to learn how to dress, style her hair and make herself up almost from scratch, like a teen would. It was hard, and humiliating in its own way.
She walks with real confidence now; of all the things she had to learn, later in her life than most, that was by far the hardest.
But she’s still a little shaken by the approach to Dorley Hall.
It’s insultingly unchanged, wearing the years in nothing more than a few extra vines, a handful of cracked flagstones, and double-glazing in the entryway. It remains six storeys of brick monstrosity, mostly empty, a fake finishing-school-within-a-school, an aristocratic wart on an already unpleasantly upper-class university. It backs onto the forest behind and wears the tree cover like a cloak, under which it hides its worst excesses.
The entryway is held open, a concession to the August heat, and as she strides up the steps she carefully doesn’t look down, doesn’t let her eyes stray to the spot in the corner where she and Val hugged on Val’s last night, gripping each other with the fear and the rapture of those who will never meet again.
Grief never quite fades; it lingers in the spaces it was first forged, and she can’t afford, today of all days, to be weak. She dismisses the memory. Dismisses them all. All she needs is the hatred.
Deep breath.
The kitchen doors slam open in front of her and a pleasure she thinks she’ll never forget blooms in her belly when, toast slipping from hands and glasses spilling their contents across the table, Grandmother and her assorted cronies look up and face the beginning of the end of the easy lives they’ve enjoyed.
Frankie, at the far end of the table, contorts her face with familiar disgust.
Grandmother recovers first. “David!” she says, gathering all her wizened bonhomie. “Where have you been?”
The name doesn’t hurt any more, and as a barb it’s pathetic: first on the list of things she expected the old woman to say. No originality to her cruelty.
She takes two quick steps over to the table, glares at one of Grandmother’s underlings until she consents to get the hell out of her way, and drops a folder, open at the appropriate page, onto the table. At the top of the facing document her name is spelled out in bold: BEATRICE QUINN.
“I’ll thank you to call me my name,” Bea says, “in my house.”
2019 November 9
Saturday
Grandmother left scars everywhere, not just on the walls of the Hall, and her other legacies have been much harder to live with, impossible to cover with concrete. But even those fade with time: Bea hasn’t felt the need to hide her back from her lovers for years, and Maria, who’s always been sensitive, started wearing short-sleeved tops a few years ago — and even a swimsuit, once or twice, in Saints’ expensively equipped swimming pool.
Scars fade; memories remain, and mingle with the outraged boy she left behind in the cell, screaming her name.
Bea’s second gin of the evening finds a home alongside the first.
“If you’re going to drink,” Maria says, from the doorway, “can’t you at least use a glass? It’s more dignified.”
Bea hadn’t noticed the door open. Too absorbed in her own worries; a pattern, lately.
“What’s wrong with my mug?” she says. She doesn’t pay much attention to the mugs, unless one of them has a particularly good joke on it. She certainly didn’t think to look at what was printed on this one when she grabbed it from the kitchen on her way up. She’s not even sure who buys them, and in her more fanciful moments might believe that no-one does, that a house this large and this old just acquires them, like spiders.
Maria raises an eyebrow, steps over to the desk and picks it up. Holds it out wordlessly; it’s printed with the text, Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or an aunt what’s in her basement.
Bea laughs, at least partly because of Maria’s silent exasperation, and her reward is for her senior sponsor to swipe the bottle off her desk and return it to the liquor cabinet in the corner.
“Hey, I needed that!” Bea says, half-serious.
“Really? How was it helping, exactly?”
“It was telling me that the fate I just promised that boy is justified.”
Maria pours herself a single shot of vodka and necks it. “He’s not a boy, Auntie. He’s a man. And a rapist. And unrepentant.” She wipes the glass with a cloth and sets it back on the cabinet. “Cruel, violent, and a bad influence on the little squad he assembled down there. The world is better off without him.”
“And who are we to decide that, Maria?”
“You’d rather someone else took responsibility for him? I don’t see a queue forming. Aaron called them the ‘mean girls’, by the way. I’m beginning to think everyone in that bloody basement is getting a little too self-aware.”
“Mean girls? Like the movie?”
“Yes, but I don’t think he or any of them have seen it. Correction: I’m pretty sure Stef has, actually. The kid keeps locking eyes with me every time Aaron says it.” She frowns. “I suppose now we get to find out what the other two do without their Regina George.”
“Oh, Maria,” Bea says, scolding. It’s a little early to make jokes about Declan’s absence.
“That’s me,” Maria says, walking back to the desk and gently pushing Bea’s chair back on its castors. “Come here, Auntie.”
There’s little choice but to accept the hug, and so she does, sinking into the girl’s arms. No-one here knows her like Maria; no-one else can spot when the responsibility is getting to her. Admittedly, no-one else tends to see her drinking gin out of a novelty mug.
“My beautiful Maria,” she says. “Are you okay? Has your supervisor stopped bothering you? Because you know you don’t have to bother with his nonsense; we can increase your salary here—”
“Auntie,” Maria says sharply, and punctuates her rebuke with a squeeze to Bea’s ribs, “I’m fine. Just take the hug? You don’t have to be in charge all the time, you know.”
“Fine,” Bea says, hiding her smile and closing her eyes.
Eventually Maria releases her, sits her down, and relaxes into the chair on the other side of the desk with a stretch and a moan of discharged discomfort. A long day for both of them. Bea glances at her phone and is startled to realise it’s not even eight in the evening yet; considerably more day still to go. A cereal bar and a bottle of water appear suddenly on the desk in front of her, and when she looks up Maria is dropping her bag onto the floor and swigging from a bottle of her own.
Bea looks at the cereal bar. It has cartoon hazelnuts with faces and full sets of limbs on it.
“Eat,” Maria says.
“You’re sponsoring me,” Bea says. “Stop sponsoring me.”
“As soon as you stop wallowing in guilt.”
Bea unwraps the cereal bar and takes a bite. “Never,” she says, through a mouthful of oats and nuts.
2004 August 8
Sunday
Grandmother reacts predictably: “What is the meaning of this, David?” But Bea, distracted, can’t stop staring at the thick age lines around her mouth, as if the woman spent so long contorting herself with contempt that her sneer etched itself permanently into her face. “David!” Grandmother repeats, banging her mug on the table.
“I told you to use my name.”
“Fine, ‘Beatrice’. What is the meaning of this?”
Bea taps a finger on the folder, laid open on the table, sheafed papers spilling out. “The meaning, I think you’ll find, is spelled out quite clearly on pages one through six of this document.”
“You can’t take the Hall away from me!” Grandmother snaps, but undermines herself by leaning forward and snatching up the folder. She reads, flips through, and laughs bitterly. “This is signed in a fake name; it can’t be valid.”
“My identity is watertight, I assure you.”
“Nevertheless,” Grandmother says, leafing through the papers, “Dorley Hall is mine.”
“Actually, it’s the property of the Lambert family — or it was.”
“David, you can’t—”
“Beatrice,” Bea snaps, opening a folder of copies and turning it around so her name, printed clearly atop the first page, is visible to everyone in the kitchen, including the line of girls standing nervous and confused against the far wall. “My name is Beatrice. It’s right there. You can read, can’t you, Grandmother?”
One of the girls snorts and quickly covers her mouth.
“Beatrice,” Grandmother says, “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but there is no way that any of this is legal. This… stunt serves nothing more than to deliver you back into our hands. A mistake, by the way, in case you were wondering.” She raises a thumb and middle finger, ready to snap, a gesture that would, sixteen years ago, wordlessly require sponsors to step forward and restrain Bea, to prepare her for punishment, but Bea’s ready for this, and drops a hand into her bag as soon as Frankie stands. Holds it there, just for a second, to make them worry about what kind of weapon she might have, and takes advantage of their hesitation to step back, out of reach.
She pulls out her phone, snaps it open with her little finger, and hits the speed dial. When it picks up she says two words: “Your turn.”
Frankie, awkward and half out of her chair, looks at Grandmother, waiting for instruction, and Grandmother irritably waves a hand, sitting her down again. Wise: if Bea’s bluffing, if she’s alone, then another few minutes indulging her won’t make a difference, and if Bea’s not alone, if she did indeed summon a friend with her brief phone call, then it’s best for Grandmother if she doesn’t start a fight she might lose. The thought of being taken is enough to revive the butterflies in Bea’s belly, though, and she wonders briefly what the cells look like these days; remembers waking for the first time locked up in one, naked, confused, castrated.
She distracts herself by inspecting the line of girls standing ready against the wall, all but one of them confused and nervous. The one she’s looking for stands at the end, an East Asian girl, trying and failing to hide her smirk. She also keeps her arms folded, in an attempt to hide the marks. Some of them look recent and quite deep, and Bea wishes for a moment that she’d come today for a massacre and not a coup.
“Maria,” Bea says.
Maria nods, takes a smart step forward, and crosses the room to stand next to Bea. She’s as beautiful as Bea imagined she would be — for all her perversions, Grandmother has a good eye and good surgeons — but the malicious, satisfied gleam in her eyes is a welcome surprise. Bea knows a fighter when she sees one.
“Nic!” Grandmother gasps. “How dare you step out of line!”
“My name is Maria, you sadistic old hag.”
“Fantasies,” Grandmother dismisses.
“That’s not your legal name, though, is it?” Frankie says, sounding confused, as if recalling Bea’s frequent excursions outside and wondering if Maria somehow left and filed a deed poll without anyone finding out.
“It’s at least as legal as anything else under this roof,” Maria says, and gives her the finger. Bea, inside her own head, gets out the pom poms and starts cheering.
“You’ll regret your insubordination, young man,” Grandmother says.
“No, she won’t,” Bea says, and waves her folder. “You don’t run this place any more.” Bea turns, dismissing Grandmother, and says to Maria, “It’s good to finally put a face to the voice. How have they been treating you?”
“Appallingly,” Maria says. One of the girls can’t hold in her giggle, and wilts for a moment when Frankie glares at her, only to start up again straight away. How quickly authority crumbles when challenged! “But that’s nothing new.”
“And your friends?”
Maria makes a show of surveying the girls. If Bea’s information is accurate, most of them are younger than Maria; they certainly seem less confident. Several bear marks from recent physical punishments. Every one of them looks as if all their holidays have come at once. “They hurt us,” Maria says, “over and over. But they don’t break us.” She looks at Grandmother for the first time: blank, disinterested, as if examining an insect. “And they never will.”
“You will have a month in the dark for this, Nic!” Grandmother spits.
“I don’t think so.”
“What have you been doing, Nic?” Frankie says.
“I’ve been passing information to Beatrice, obviously. That wasn’t clear?”
“What kind of information?” Grandmother asks, noticeably paling.
Bea extracts another folder from her bag. This one is considerably thicker, and makes a satisfying thump when she drops it on the table. “Everything we could possibly need,” she says.
2019 November 9
Saturday
“How did it go with Declan?” Maria asks. They’ve settled into something less like an intervention and more like one of their regular briefings, and Maria’s leaning back in her chair, having wheeled it over to the side of the desk, kicked off her boots and put her feet up next to Bea’s laptop, daring her to push her off, daring her to make her behave like an employee or a subordinate. But Maria, like Bea, has been at Dorley for more years than either of them care to count, and formality doesn’t last. The other girls who stayed on when Bea took over have all gone, one by one — Barbara, the old nurse, straying farther away every year and finally taking off for Canada, being the last — but Maria’s the oldest, the most tied to this place: she was, in a sense, born here; she found her family here; she’ll probably die here. Just like Bea.
And so they sit together in Bea’s flat, connected by their experiences as much as their long association. They both live in the house of their abusers, still flinch occasionally at the ghosts around each corner, still find themselves incapable of leaving.
Bea finishes her bottle of water. “The way it always goes,” she says. “He gave me the big blah blah, the strong-man-weak-woman speech; I chastised him for throwing away all his last chances; he called me a bitch. I told him when he could expect his last meal under our roof, and I left him to it. Last I heard from him, he was yelling and kicking the glass again.”
“When do they come to pick him up?”
“Monday. You’ll keep everyone out of the cell corridor until then?”
“Of course.”
“He was making a lot of noise,” Bea presses. “It could be distressing to the others if they know he’s still—”
“I’ll look after it, Auntie.”
Of course she will. Bea couldn’t ask for anyone better in her corner. Even though she’s cheeky. Even though she’s sometimes almost too practical for her own good. Even though she’s the reason everyone calls her ‘Aunt Bea’, a nickname she found distasteful at first — Grandmother’s familial affectations were calculated to manipulate and disgust in equal measure, and the last thing Bea wanted to adopt for herself — but eventually grew to tolerate. You accept the name your family gives you.
“How’s Pippa?” Bea asks.
“She’s fine. More than fine: she’s ecstatic. And a little smug, actually. She’s been convinced since Stef got here that she’d been assigned a nice boy by mistake — with all of us constantly trying to persuade her otherwise — so she’s delighted to find out that she was very nearly right all along. She told me to ‘suck it’, although she was smiling at the time, so I didn’t take too much offence. She’s, uh, planning to shout at you, though.”
“Oh? And what have I done?”
“You should hear it in her own words. Hold on a second.” Maria fumes with her phone for a moment. “I have the recording right here.”
“Recording?”
“I suggested that this might not be the best night to pick a fight with you, but she still wanted to say her piece, so.” She waggles her recalcitrant phone: evidence.
“Because of Declan? Am I so fragile?”
“In the face of Pippa with a bellyful of fire? Fragility isn’t the issue; ductility might be. Ah, here we are. I hate the file system on these things…”
She sets the phone down on the table and taps a button on the screen. Pippa’s voice, tinny over the speakers, says, “Aunt Bea. It’s Pippa. Hi. Um.” The pause is just long enough to spark a smile from both of them. “Look. I’m grateful you’re letting Stef stay. I don’t know what I would have done if you’d, uh, done something drastic, but I’m glad I don’t have to find out.” Bea raises an eyebrow at Maria, who just grins at her. “But,” Pippa’s voice continues, “Aunt Bea, stay out of her way, would you?”
“Are you sure you want to say it quite like that?” Maria’s voice says, on the recording.
“Absolutely sure, Maria! Aunt Bea, I want you to know, whenever you listen to this: I’m honestly disgusted with you! Stef’s had enough to deal with, what with losing Melissa, and coming here, and the nurse, and the thing with the showers, and— and me, let’s not forget me and all the awful things I said to her and all the awful things I let happen to her, and the last thing she needed was for you to start implying— no, actually, outright stating that she’s somehow responsible for all that stuff! That she should feel guilty for giving me a bad time! That’s not just cruel, Aunt Bea — although it is, it’s really cruel — that’s setting us up against each other, and— and— Why? Why would you—?”
Maria taps the phone again and Pippa goes silent. “That goes on for a while.”
“I get the gist,” Bea says. “You’re frowning at me, Maria.”
“The thing with Stef? Not your finest hour, Auntie.”
“No,” Bea says, pushing back in her chair and examining the ceiling, so she doesn’t have to face Maria’s glare for a moment. “No, probably not.” ‘The problem of Stef’, which just a few hours ago had seemed so urgent, is now clear to her: the girl wants help with her transition and has a vested interest in keeping the secret of Dorley, for Melissa’s sake if no-one else’s; they help her, she helps them. Such an easy equation.
Bea’s got too used to manipulating people. Show her someone simple, someone with straightforward and clearly stated needs, and she looks for the lies.
“Sod it,” she says, sitting forward. “Pippa gets what she wants. She gets full autonomy and I’ll stay out of the way. As long as they both stick to the rules, I won’t stick my oar in. Sound good?” Maria nods. “Good. You’ll keep an eye on them both, yes?”
“Of course.”
“We’re not going to tell Melissa, I imagine.”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea,” Maria says. “Not yet, anyway. She was always very attached to Stef. Talked about him— about her all the time. When we tell her we have the girl who was basically her little brother down in our basement, being coerced into listening to Taylor Swift medleys, I want it to be in a controlled environment. Like defusing a bomb. Maybe with Stef in the room, or at least on WhatsApp or something, so Melissa can see she’s okay, that she wants to be here.”
“Strange to have someone using she pronouns after a month. I suppose we’ll have to get used to a lot of firsts, before the year is out.” Bea laughs. “Our first walk-in!”
“You should know,” Maria says, “Stef prefers he for now. Hence my… pronoun confusion.”
“Oh?”
“It’s this thing about not wanting to be a she until— God, I don’t even understand it, and I’ve seen the video where she explained it to Pippa. Guilt, self-loathing, et cetera. Pippa’s already decided she’s having none of it: something about showing the girl it’s okay to be a girl.”
“Good,” Bea says. “You’ve got to nip that sort of silliness in the bud, early.”
“Have a lot of experience with trans women, do you?”
“Enough to know that if you give them an inch they’ll steal ten years from themselves.”
“Well, Pippa’s got a real bug up her arse about it, so I think she probably agrees with you.” Maria brushes the back of her hand against her forehead, as if warding against a headache. “She had a whole thing, up on the roof. I told her I’d defer to her judgement. It’s almost like she’s trying to beat Vicky’s record for the fastest self-claimed she pronoun.” She giggles and says, in a voice that suggests Bea should know what on earth she’s talking about, “Awesome Girls Done Quick.”
“I’m sure that’s very funny, but I don’t get the reference.”
“It’s a speedrunning joke.”
“Speed-running? As in, exercise?”
Maria sighs. “Where’s Christine when you need her?”
The worst thing, for Bea, about surrounding herself with millennials and zoomers is that occasionally they’ll be outright incomprehensible and then act as if she’s terribly old and out of touch when she surreptitiously has to Google new terminology under the table. “Actually,” she says, putting the joke out of her mind, “what about Christine? What did she say?”
“She’s thinking about it.”
“Do you think she’ll accept?”
“She likes the idea of you paying her.”
“Did you tell her the money comes from a trust?”
“No,” Maria says. “I think it helps her to imagine it being dragged reluctantly from your pockets every month. I think the image will encourage her to accept.”
Bea rolls her eyes. “When did I become such an ogre, Maria?”
“Somewhere around 2005, Auntie.”
“Brat.”
“Harridan,” Maria says, and sticks out her tongue.
“Tell me,” Bea says, “why didn’t we think of the letter thing before?”
“The letter thing?”
“The idea Christine cooked up with Stef, to pretend the boy — the girl, in this case — has run off to soul-search and make a nuisance of themselves in another country.”
Maria shrugs. “We can’t exactly use it often. Once every few years at most. More men fall drunkenly into freezing lakes than spontaneously go backpacking.”
“Still. Put it in the handbook. Save it for the ones with close familial relationships.”
“A lever,” Maria says, nodding. “It’s a risky manoeuvre, though. You’ve always said, and it’s been borne out by my observations, that they have to be completely removed from their old support networks. That the complete isolation is part of what makes it work.”
She has a way of repeating Bea’s own instructions back to her, phrased to make them both sound like terrible people. “I think,” Bea says slowly, “that hope can be similarly powerful. For the right boy. From time to time.”
“Fair enough. Oh, I thought we’d do the all-hands tomorrow, at lunch? Get the second-year girls to cook, lure everyone in with the promise of free food and wine, and hit them with the news just as they’re getting sleepy.”
“You’re planning to tell the second years, too?”
“Yes? I wasn’t going to send them away from a meal they just cooked.”
“You don’t think that will erode their trust in us?” Bea says. “We locked up a genuine trans girl, closeted but fully aware and actively exploiting our facilities, and it took us a month to notice.”
Maria counts on her fingers. “One, they’ll find out sooner or later, and it’s better that it comes from us and not rumour. Two, don’t forget, the kids come in knowing more gender terminology than had even been coined back in my day; we just tell them she’s both an egg and an idiot and they’ll understand. And, three, it was Christine who brought her in and Christine who helped her hide from us, and the second years love Christine.”
“They do?” Bea laughs. “They beat us to it, then.”
“You ever wonder if you’re getting old and slow?” Maria says.
“No,” Bea says, with such certainty that she forces a smirk out of Maria; admittedly not a terribly difficult thing to do. “I’m as canny and alert as I ever was.”
“Of course.”
“Why do the second years love Christine so much?”
“Remember the thing with Faye’s sponsor and her inappropriate rage-outs?” Maria prompts. “It was Christine who calmed Faye down and Christine who brought the matter to you.”
“Of course,” Bea remembers. “Maybe I am getting old.”
“Hell, Christine even roped Paige into getting Faye all dressed up. Arguably helped actualise Faye’s gender.”
“Why isn’t she a sponsor already?”
Maria snorts. “She’d never do it. Getting her to run our tech is a hard enough sell.”
“True. And it’s been good to see her becoming close with Paige again. Roping her into things, sitting together at breakfast.”
“Close? Auntie, they’re together.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Maria says, sounding wistful. “Paige has been besotted with her since, I don’t know, their first year, maybe, and never stopped. But the difference this time is that Paige has learned how to ask for what she needs, and Christine’s learned how to listen.”
Year by year, the girls become new. Find themselves and find love. It makes it all worth it. “That’s genuinely wonderful,” Bea says.
“It’s disgustingly sweet, is what it is,” Maria says, and Bea is reminded that Maria’s been stepping out in the evenings herself, discreetly, but not so quietly that an old busybody like Bea wouldn’t notice, eventually.
“And what about you?” Bea asks. “I’ve seen you with Edy, lately; how is she?”
Maria, as always, deflects: “Disgustingly sweet.”
2004 August 8
Sunday
Bea’s had a long time to perfect her womanhood, to understand it, to claim it and inhabit it, but Elle Lambert has a way of making her feel like an ingenue. Her heels announce her presence, crisply clicking on the flagstones outside, and by the time she reaches the kitchen doors, Barb — another one of Maria’s circle, who adopted the rather old-fashioned name Barbara with an enthusiasm entirely familiar to Bea — has already stepped smartly forward to let her in, as if she’s royalty, and the abused girls of Dorley her retinue. Elle steps elegantly through the door and smiles at the girl, inspiring in Barb a blush Bea thinks could probably cook an egg, and hands her a shopping bag.
“Gifts for the girls,” Elle says to her, and Barb rushes back to the women standing by the wall, who look equal parts delighted and scandalised.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Barb says, as the other girls rifle through and pull out tops, skirts, shoes. She performs an exaggerated curtsey, which earns her a glare from Frankie that no-one bar Bea seems to notice.
“Please call me Elle.”
Elle steps forward and deposits a portable hard drive on the kitchen table. She’s short — shorter than Bea and the younger Dorley graduates; shorter even than Grandmother and most of her people, too — but she commands the room effortlessly, with a manner that belies her twenty-five years and which Bea, despite being over a decade her senior, has been trying to emulate since the day they met. She’s pale and subtly made-up, and her rich, thick waves of dark hair break on the shoulders of a suit worth enough, in Bea’s judgement, to feed a family of four for a year. The only woman in the room who doesn’t look dowdy in comparison is Maria, who has today assembled with unexpected skill an elegant outfit from the meagre scraps allowed the girls; Grandmother’s coterie, already given to a particularly English variety of rural tweed anti-fashion, look positively antique. “Elle Lambert,” she continues, addressing the room. “My grandmother is — was — guardian of the family holdings and, with her death, that responsibility has passed to me. My first action upon reviewing the portfolio was to note that this house, Dorley Hall, has been severely underutilised, and the decision was taken to transfer the deeds to the newly formed Dorley Hall Foundation, of which Beatrice Quinn is sole trustee and administrator; though she will, naturally, be free to hire her own staff.”
“Maria, Barbara,” Bea says, on cue, “welcome aboard.”
“Thank you, Beatrice,” Maria says.
“Um, yes, thank you, Beatrice,” Barb says, after a nudge from Maria.
“I’m not leaving,” Grandmother says. “I have assurances from—”
Elle forces Grandmother back into silence by clearing her throat. “Yes, yes,” she says, “we know all about your assurances. Only one remains; insufficient for you to retain control, but enough to permit you to retire with… some dignity.”
“That’s not—”
“I represent sixty-four percent of your current — excuse me; my mistake — your former funding, which as of this morning is no longer available to you. Account access revoked, credit lines withdrawn, et cetera, et cetera. And the majority of your other benefactors were most displeased upon reviewing portions of the information vouchsafed to us by our contacts.” Elle leans on the table, palms flat. “You’ve been very selective with the truth, haven’t you, Dorothy?”
Grandmother shrugs. “Say what you came here to say.”
“Only the Smyth-Farrow grant is still available to you,” Elle says, standing upright again, “for the time being. Per Mr Smyth-Farrow’s request, you will be allowed to retain your flat on the premises and act as consultant during the… administrative transfer. Your influence over day-to-day operations will be limited, but your valuable experience may, of course, prove useful to the new custodian.”
Elle’s dismissive hand-wave is intended to suggest that this constitutes a triviality of business that she, the money, does not care about. In fact, the Smyth-Farrow grant represents their one failure. Had they convinced the old bastard to withdraw his support then Grandmother would be out on her ear tomorrow, but their intelligence going in had been incomplete: they’d thought him another clueless aristocrat, but the man knew everything that went on under Dorley; he even played them videos of his favourite cruelties, and looked upon Bea with a hunger that made her want to climb out of her skin. He dismissed their legal threats — “I’m too old to care; by the time you scale the mountains my lawyers will erect in front of you, I’ll already be in the ground.” — and he’s too well-protected for Elle’s other measures to stand a chance. In the end, the best they could do was tie up his grant renewal with red tape, and thus restrict his lease of the flat on the first floor to the two years remaining. He still complained, and vowed to fight them: Grandmother’s shipped him many playthings over the decades, and much gratitude is owed.
Bea wondered aloud to Elle, when they were safely away from his mansion, how many of her sisters were buried there.
Elle brushes her palms together, as if removing a few specks of bothersome dust. “The Lambert family and our considerable holdings will be providing the Dorley Hall Foundation with a yearly grant, to be administrated by Beatrice Quinn and her staff. Dorley Hall will be operated as a dormitory for exceptional but disadvantaged young women who might otherwise miss their chance at an education at this first-rate college. Your people will leave; ours will replace them. You will be free, Dorothy, to sulk in your flat for the two years left on its lease. And that—” she smiles pleasantly at Grandmother, “—is that.”
Grandmother glares back, fists stiffening on the table, and for a moment Bea wonders if she’s going to go for it, to throw everyone she has at them — which would be interesting, considering the four armed men from Elle’s organisation who’ve been waiting outside for such an eventuality — but instead she stretches her fingers, unclenches her jaw, and says with a growl, “You can’t do this. I don’t care how much money you control. I know people.”
“I am people,” Elle says. “And not only do I know everyone you know, I’m one of them; you’re just a wannabe. A tweed torturer carrying out petty brutality in your sad little castle. They respect me, whereas even the few who accept your tawdry products laugh at you behind your back. I also—” she points at the hard drive, which has been sitting on the table like an unexploded bomb, “—have that. Review it, and the paper summary provided by Beatrice, at your leisure. We don’t just have your names and your financial records, Dorothy; we have photographs, we have video, we have your phone conversations and your text messages and your emails. We even have some of the bones, Dorothy. We have enough evidence to put you away for life. To splash your face across the front page of every newspaper worldwide. And we know some well-connected families who are grieving mysterious disappearances and who would likely be minded to ensure your stay in prison, after your international humiliation, is a short one. And that goes for all of you.” She sweeps a hand around the kitchen, taking in the rapt glares of a half-dozen sponsors. “There’s not a one of you whose life we cannot comprehensively destroy.”
“Then why don’t you?” one of them snaps. Bea recognises the nurse, Karen, from Maria’s files, and forces herself not to shudder: she’s read all about that woman’s proclivities; she seems a worthy successor to the sadistic medical examiner from Bea’s time.
“Because that is our bargain,” Elle says. “You’re free to leave, to return to your lives — or to squat in your flat on the premises until the lease expires, if that is what you prefer — and if you never breathe a word about Dorley Hall to anyone outside these walls you will all die old and free. But if just one of you makes a move against us…” She taps a nail on the hard drive.
“You still haven’t explained why,” Grandmother says.
Elle steps back, places herself by Bea’s side. Brushes the back of her hand against Bea’s: encouragement.
“Because we’re reforming Dorley,” Bea says. “Under your hand, it’s a charnel house. You torture men because you find it erotically appealing. You change them, humiliate them, exercise your vile pleasures on their bodies and then, when you’re done, you spit them out.”
“You deserved it!” Frankie hisses. “You’re a criminal!”
“I was a shoplifter. And the criminality was just an excuse. An excuse to waste people. But we have a different idea. You hurt men for fun.” She looks from Elle to Maria and then back to Grandmother. “We’re going to save them.”
2019 November 9
Saturday
They never meet in Almsworth. A deliberate choice: it’s best no-one knows they’re still in such intimate contact. No-one except Maria, who handed Bea her bag and told her, with every appearance of innocence, to have fun. So it’s always a hotel, in a different city every time, and because Elle is Elle, it’s always an expensive hotel.
Dorley Hall is, more than anything else, comfortable, wearing its relative wealth in fittings and fixtures that have become worn and scuffed but never actually broken, despite years and years of often tempestuous new girls using, abusing, and sometimes colliding with them; stepping into Elle’s life for a night is an amusing reminder that other people — a select few other people, granted — are never far from someone who will call them ‘ma’am’ without smirking.
There’s a Lambert family estate somewhere in the country, and various apartments in various cities worldwide, but Elle lives mostly out of hotels, which means Bea, when she wants to see her, has to call for a car, and be delivered. At least it’s relatively close tonight; sometimes there’s plane travel involved.
“Beatrice!” Elle calls, standing up from her seat at the bar and beckoning her over. She’s wearing a loose jacket over something dark and layered, which billows interestingly around her body when she moves and reveals itself to be in two pieces when she raises her arms for a hug and exposes her taut belly. “It’s been too long!”
Bea accepts the embrace when it comes, breathes in her scent and the memories it provokes, and leans back for a kiss, cheek-to-cheek. “Elle,” she says. “I’ve missed you.”
“What you missed,” Elle says, sitting back down and making hand gestures at the bartender, which almost immediately result in fresh drinks being deposited, “is my fortieth. I’m certain I invited you.”
“Apologies. There’s been so much going on—”
“Relax.” Elle places a calming hand on Bea’s, and leaves it there, fingers knotting carefully around fingers. “I’m teasing. It was boring. You would have hated it.”
“You’re probably right,” Bea says, sampling her drink with the hand Elle hasn’t trapped. “I would quite like to make it up to you, anyway, if you’ll let me.”
“I look forward to it,” Elle says, releasing her. “Have you eaten?”
“Nothing especially satisfying.”
“After dinner, then.”
A few minutes later and they’re being seated in what is undoubtedly the hotel’s costliest and most exclusive restaurant. Elle orders a bottle of wine for the table with the detached but knowledgeable air of someone who does this all the time, and Bea looks over the menu for something light, preferably with mushrooms.
“So,” Elle says, when they are alone in their candlelit corner, “how’s life in Almsworth, tall girl capital of Great Britain?”
“Quiet, until recently.”
“And how are the girls?”
“Unruly, as always. How’s your girl?”
“Self-denying, as always.”
Bea smiles. “God,” she says, “look at you.”
Elle places a manicured hand on her chest. “Look at me? What did I do?”
“Aged better than I have.”
“Ridiculous. Those little lines around your eyes rather suit you.”
“That’s very kind of you to say. How’s the world of high finance and international intrigue?”
“Dreadfully dull. And rather annoying. At least in your line of work, when someone gets a smart mouth on them you can, you know…” Elle makes a snip-snip gesture.
“We usually reserve that for the ones whose attitude problem goes somewhat beyond rudeness,” Bea says, grinning.
The waiter returns, pours wine, takes orders, collects menus, and glides away, leaving them alone once more and giving Bea the opportunity to drink in both wine and moment. Elle really has aged magnificently: if Bea didn’t know better she’d swear she looks the same at forty as at twenty-five, and she’s retained her aptitude for rendering Bea fumbling and adolescent in her presence.
“Tell me about this girl,” Elle says. “The one who just showed up one day and got your whole house in a frenzy.”
“Oh, yes,” Bea says, “Stef. The subject of my every other conversation, lately.” She gives her the short version, which takes long enough for her stuffed mushrooms to arrive and partially disappear. Throughout the tale Elle looks on, fascinated, indulgent, offering a comment here and there but content, for the most part, to let Bea talk. She asks to see a picture; Bea has one, from Stef’s first lunch downstairs. The girl is enduring Aaron Holt, and looking skeptically at a veggie burger, eyebrows raised on a forehead that will require, despite her insistence otherwise, minimal alteration. Even in such unflattering lighting, her potential is clear.
“They’re friends now, actually,” Bea says, when Elle hands the phone back. “Her and the little flasher boy.”
“I can see why. He’s sort of cute.”
“She’s trying to reform him.”
“You think she’ll succeed?”
“No,” Bea says, and rolls her eyes at the face Elle pulls. “I have to say that, don’t I? If she manages it, it calls our whole operation into question.”
“Not from just one boy,” Elle says.
“As long as she stops at just one,” Bea mutters.
Elle chews thoughtfully on the last bite of her omelette. “I’d like to meet her. Not now, of course. I’m sure she’s got enough on her plate without me barging in on her just to satisfy my… professional curiosity. But, later, when she’s ready, I’d like to meet her. And do send me a photo every so often, won’t you? You know how I love seeing them bloom.”
They revert to small talk: upkeep of the Hall, Saints gossip, complaints about some Duke or Lord or something — Elle doesn’t know which and doesn’t care — who thinks Elle can cure him of bachelorhood. Neither of them raise the elephant in the room until dessert:
“I’m concerned about Grandmother,” Bea says. “I think she’s going to try something.”
Elle nods. “I concur.”
“Thank you for dealing with the nurse, by the way.”
“Beyond my pleasure,” Elle says. “People like her give me indigestion.”
“I think she was a shot across the bows,” Bea says. Elle raises her eyebrows, so Bea continues, “I think Grandmother persuaded the nurse to disregard her obligations. A little reminder: I’m still out here, and I’m still watching you. I imagine Karen was only too eager to agree; I bet she jumped at the chance to have a bit of old-time fun with the residents. I suspect Grandmother either downplayed the potential consequences for her, or overestimated her own hand.”
“Do you think Dorothy will leave it at that, when she’s made to understand what happened to the nurse? I’d love to believe she’ll go gentle into that good night, but you know her better than I.”
“Honestly? I don’t know.” Bea chews thoughtfully on her cheesecake; it is distractingly excellent. “If she’s dying, we can’t rule out her pulling the ripcord and taking us down with her. Flooding the internet with information, or sending it to the papers. And you know what the climate in this country is like right now; having what we do exposed? It’d be TERF Christmas, and she knows it. That bloody Frost woman’ll burst a blood vessel from excitement, and going to prison will be traumatic enough without having to see her smugly pontificating on breakfast TV.”
“Exposing you — us — exposes all of her associates, too,” Elle says.
“She can’t care for them that much, judging by the stunt with the nurse. I think she’d happily see them all jailed or dead or bloodily dismembered if it meant seeing us suffer, too.”
Elle nods. “I’ll put someone on it. A full investigation. She’s got to be reaching the end of her funds by now, and all her old patrons are long dead. We might even be able to— Magnificent, thank you!”
Bea manages not to be startled by the sudden waiter, and mumbles something to support Elle’s effusive praise of the food, the service, the decor and the ambience. Elle gives her a significant look and another nod, which Bea reads as confirmation that she will, in fact, have one of her mysterious people, the same people who made the nurse Karen Turner disappear, attempt a similar magic trick on Grandmother, and the subject does not come up again.
At Elle’s door — the elevator leading to the penthouse suite, naturally — Bea fights against temptation and, as always, loses. So when the doors open and Bea doesn’t step away, Elle nods, drags her by the lapel of her blouse into the lift, and presses the appropriate button with an elbow, because as soon as the doors close she needs all hands available to start removing Bea’s clothes.
Backwards they stagger into Elle’s room, Bea’s top layer already discarded, her bra already unclasped. She intercepts Elle as she reaches for her skirt, splays their fingers together and redirects her hands, pushing her upwards, using her considerable extra height to her advantage, controlling her with one hand and reaching out with the other to knock Elle’s jacket off her other shoulder, trapping her awkwardly in the fabric. Elle grins and rolls her shoulders, freeing herself from Bea’s grip and shrugging off the jacket, letting it fall where it may as they keep stepping backwards together.
The lamps are automatically lighting themselves as they move around the suite, illuminating Elle from below, sharpening her features and making her grin seem almost demonic as she takes control again, slipping hands inside Bea’s skirt and pushing it down, causing them both to trip, laughing, landing shoulder-to-shoulder on the bed in the middle of the suite.
Floor-to-ceiling windows surround them on three sides and a skylight spans half the ceiling above them, and for a moment Bea feels the old terror of being seen, of being discovered compromised and near-naked and deserving of punishment, before she realises that the building is the tallest one around, and that the only things watching them are the stars.
Elle, still mostly clothed, lunges for her, and Bea grabs her instead, runs fingers up her arms and into her top, lifts it up and over her head in one movement, and then, finally, they’re almost equal. Elle relents, kisses her quickly on the lips, and stands to drop her skirt to the ground and step out of her boots.
Bea rolls onto her back. Looks up at her, resplendent, half in lamplight and half in moonlight, and Elle matches her appreciative smile and steps back once more, the better to give Bea a view as she reaches behind herself and unhooks her bra.
The bed is in a small, stepped depression, the centrepiece of the room, so when Bea stands up from the bed and reaches forward to embrace her, to push her back and up another step, their faces are near-level, a novelty and clearly a delight to Elle, who laughs and throws arms around Bea’s neck, leaning forward across the space between them as Bea puts one leg up on the bottom step, to steady Elle and to anchor herself.
Elle’s fingers dance across Bea’s back, around her waist and across her belly, and then she pulls closer, dives her fingers into Bea’s underwear and begins slowly to massage her, assaulting her equilibrium with every slow pulse until she falls again, back onto the mattress, and Elle falls with her.
“You’re glorious, Beatrice,” Elle breathes, twitching her fingers, coaxing from Bea a moan that ends only when she kisses her.
Bea, caught in the rhythm, begins moving her hips in time, until the pressure that starts at Elle’s fingers and ends at the tip of every nerve is provided by both of them, as one, a single organism with a single purpose.
Elle kisses her again, finding her collarbone, her neck, her jaw, her chin and her mouth, and when Bea opens her eyes a memory returns, of her first kiss, back before she was free, under a different night sky, in a place that no longer exists, as a person who no longer exists, and she revels in it, exults in it, and laughs against Elle’s lips.
“Simply irresistible,” Bea whispers, a thirty-year echo, and kisses her harder still.
Chapter 16: What She’s Looking For
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 November 9
Saturday
Everyone will know soon. All the women of Dorley, from Beatrice on down, will know about him. Already he can feel their eyes on him, stripping him, flaying him, judging his womanhood, finding it wanting; finding it absent. And what if they’re right? What if, now that he’s been exposed, he’s discovered as a fraud? How can you know, Stefan, what it is to feel like a woman when you’ve spent your whole life hiding from it?
What if it was just a fantasy all along?
Stupid boy. Stupid, lucky boy. Doubts are meaningless here. His gender was decided for him, long before his clumsy confession, and no amount of denial or fear can break down the ironclad procedures of Dorley Hall. He’ll be transitioned whether he likes it or not. Whether he participates or not!
Isn’t that why he’s here? He’s too weak, too broken, too ashamed to do it himself.
And they all know that now.
He twists in the bed, ties the covers in knots. So stupid, to let himself be discovered. Sure, keeping up the façade had been painful, and his assumed maleness — not to mention his invented and redacted but still vividly implied recent history of abuse — had been an obstacle to his friendship with Pippa, but there’d been a comfort in it all the same, one he recognises only now, when it’s gone. When they thought him a man they expected nothing of him.
Horrible to realise that misery has a comfort all of its own, a predictability.
He doesn’t know how to be a woman, doesn’t know how to act, who to be. And they’ll see this and they’ll know that of all the broken boys taken in this year, this one is by far the most pathetic. This one dreams…
Stupid girl! Stupid, spiralling girl. Why would any of them think that? He told Pippa, confessed everything to her, and she didn’t judge him, didn’t pity him. She was delighted!
But she had reason to be, didn’t she? Sponsoring him’s been hard for her. She’s a true believer, the same as the others, and considers herself without a doubt to have benefited from her sponsor’s intervention, but surviving the programme is one thing; putting someone else through it is quite another. His coming out untangled the knots in her conscience. So she isn’t, necessarily, a good barometer.
So what about Christine, then? Her reaction, now he thinks back to it, was a lot like Pippa’s: she believed him quickly and easily and moved on to practical matters.
Almost as if people can see it in you, idiot.
Like Pippa, she didn’t judge him; she simply accepted him. Tore up her life just to help him. Abby, too; she’s known about him almost as long as Christine, and she’s never acted towards him with anything but compassion.
Pippa’s kindness, Christine’s, Abby’s, all genuine. If he thinks carefully about it, if he stops assigning malicious intent to people who have displayed no evidence of it — towards him, anyway — then he has no reason to believe any of the women at Dorley Hall will think unkindly of him for this. Nor to believe any of them will have expectations of instant, perfectly performed womanhood; they were once boys, just like he tried to be. Worse: abused and abusive boys, all of them.
He frowns at his ungenerous description and discards it. It’s a relic, his own self-hatred pushed outwards, imprinted on women who have only ever acted in what they believed was his best interest. Better instead to embrace the truth: they’re women, without caveats or qualifiers or the stains of their former identities. Christine claims and clings to her gender as fiercely and with as much conviction as any woman Stefan’s ever known — despite her insistence that she’s not trans, which carries with it hints of an inferiority complex Stefan’s wanted to interrogate for weeks now; hah! like he has room to talk — and berated him for being gauche enough to draw attention to her once-maleness. Pippa likely would react similarly, though Stefan’s gut recoils at the thought of accusing her as harshly as he once did Christine, back in that cell.
‘Not trans’. What are they, then? Do they even have a word for it? ‘Coercively reassigned female’?
Perhaps just call them women, Stef, and leave it at that.
He stretches some of the tension out of his limbs, rolls his neck, cracks his fingers. Concentrates on the physical sensations, imagines nerve endings firing, blood vessels flowing, lungs inflated. Positions himself firmly in his body. The exact inverse of his older mechanisms for dealing with dysphoria, back before he was capable of properly naming it, adapted for his new circumstances; because it’s not really all that bad being in this body, now he knows it’s changing under him. As long as he doesn’t do anything stupid, like let self-loathing convince him that a building full of women who once looked very much like he does will judge him for wanting to follow in their footsteps.
So.
What now?
At least he can talk to the sponsors without them treating him like a monster. As much as things have been moving that way for a while — helping Aaron after Declan knocked him down in the shower seemed to change something in Maria’s attitude, at least, if the exasperated glances she’s been sharing with him recently are anything to go by — knowing that it’s over for good is a profound relief. They know now that he’s exactly like them.
Mostly like them.
In broad terms.
A chime from his PC startles him out of his thoughts, and when he’s untangled himself from the wreckage of his bedsheets and sat up he can see a prompt on the screen, requesting he create a PIN. That’s new. He pushes off the bed, grateful for the distraction — he’s spent a solid hour deep in thought, most of it unproductive and highly self-critical, and has come up with nothing more useful than ‘stop overthinking things’; laudable in concept, unworkable in practice — and taps in a PIN. He picks the number from his old debit card, presumably cut in half by Pippa, because it’s the only four-digit code he can reliably remember.
The PC makes another noise and quickly reboots, and when the desktop reappears — after prompting him for his PIN again — there are twice as many icons. There’s also a text file, placed centrally on the screen, labelled, Read me! – Christine.
Hi Stef!
Congratulations on putting the cat among the pigeons, depositing the fox in the hen house, shouting fire in a crowded theatre, etc. Things are weird here again! Abby’s thrilled. So’s Maria, I think. She’s got this smirk on her face that I’m pretty sure you put there, and it makes sense: she’s been basically running this place for years, and you’re the first genuinely new thing to happen since we stopped tweaking the intake guidelines. If you hadn’t come along I think sooner or later she would have invented you just to relieve the monotony.
So, as of the moment you entered that PIN you gained a hell of a lot of access privileges. You’re actually on a custom profile I’ve set up, because Maria is being cautious and wants granular control over your shit.
To break it down:
- Your door access is unchanged, so for now you can’t let yourself out of the basement or into the boys’ rooms. Anything with a red light is still locked for you. We don’t want you accidentally using the wrong biometric reader because you’re sleepy and letting yourself into, I don’t know, Martin’s room by mistake. But you WILL be able to leave the basement on request. It’ll require a bit of organisation – we don’t want one of the boys seeing you strolling up the stairs – so you can’t do it on a whim, but it’s something we can make happen (and I should probably warn you, now you’re ‘officially’ in on the joke, they might ask you to attend the Christmas party, apologies in advance for that, I suggest you start thinking up an excuse NOW). Only thing you won’t be able to do is leave the Hall without an escort – you’re on second year rules, basically.
- As for networking, your PC has an unrestricted mode – which you’re in now, reading this – and a restricted mode. Hit the shortcut on the desktop to switch between the two, or slap ctrl-alt-delete if you’re in a hurry. In unrestricted mode you can access our network and use our streaming accounts and you can go online. BUT: no social media, no email, no nothing. Consider the internet a read-only resource for now. And we monitor that shit, so just be sensible about it.
- If you want to get a head start on things like voice training – not shifting your pitch, obviously, unless you want to spend the next several months whispering to the boys and pretending you’ve got a REALLY sore throat, but expanding your range, practising your breathing and finding your head voice will all be helpful to you when the time comes, believe me! – there are training documents and videos on our network, all open to you in unrestricted mode. Have a poke around, there’s all sorts of useful shit on there.
- Your phone is unchanged for now. Like the door locks, it’s a precaution, not a lack of trust: it’d be too easy for you to slip up and accidentally show someone something he’s not supposed to see. Maria says we can revisit this stuff when you’re more accustomed to being a free(ish) woman.
Pippa’s okay. She’s mad at ME because I’ve spent a month lying to and manipulating her, and that’s fair enough I suppose, so I kind of want to ask you a favour: be her friend? She’s lonely, and I fucked it all up.
Anyway. That’s everything. You can reach me on Consensus if you want to but otherwise, congrats! You don’t need me any more.
Take care, Stef,
Christine
He reads the last paragraph through a couple of times. ‘Congrats! You don’t need me any more’? That’s unusually self-deprecating, even more than he’s come to expect from her. Does Christine think he’s angry with her? He’s perplexed by her, sure, and feels ugly and masculine in her presence, but he sees a lot of beautiful, confusing women these days and he’s a lot more on top of the discomfort he feels around them than he used to be.
Before he can hop on Consensus and call her an idiot, someone knocks on his door. He grumbles under his breath — he’s getting a little sick of people dropping by today — and considers pretending to be asleep, but then the knocking starts up again and doesn’t stop.
Fine.
He takes a second to make sure the computer’s back in restricted mode, looks quickly around his room to make sure nothing’s amiss, and then opens the door to a nervous Aaron, still knocking, now waving his hand uselessly against air.
“Hi,” Stefan says, stepping aside to let him in.
“Hi, Stef,” Aaron says, hovering at the perimeter, reluctant to step inside. He starts twisting his hands around each other, and he looks smaller than usual.
“What’s up?”
“Hey. So. Look.” Aaron looks left and right, as if checking for witnesses, and then continues in a whisper, “Are you okay? Feeling good? Or good-for-the-basement, anyway? Nothing ticking over in that head of yours, waiting to explode? Are you going to seem completely fine and then snap like a fucking twig and scare the shit out of me again?”
“What are you talking about?” Stefan says, frowning and sorting through the apparently endless events of the day.
“Declan!” Aaron says, finally coming inside, ducking under the arm Stefan’s holding the door open with and perching on the edge of the bed. “I’m talking about Declan.” He looks at his hands as if suddenly and for the first time noticing his habit of gesticulating along with his speech, and sits on them, holding them still. “And about what happened after. It’s been hours, Stef, and we only just got out of lockdown and I spent the whole time thinking they were lining up to kick the crap out of you. You didn’t hear me banging on my door, yelling your name?”
“Oh. No. Sorry.”
“Not your fault. I guess the soundproofing has to be pretty good here. But you’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“Because, man, they dragged you away! Back to the cells! Like you’d done something wrong by smacking the world’s dumbest rapist in the teeth! And all I got from you after was a thumbs up through the fucking common room door, and for all I knew they could have made you do that, and I know there’s another exit near the bedrooms and I don’t know what happens when you wash out and I thought I was going to be alone down here again and—”
“I’m okay, Aaron.”
“No beatings?”
“No.”
“And you’re not going to freak out and try to hurt yourself again?”
“No.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Jesus’s big fat floppy dick,” Aaron mutters, and flops back on the bed. “Stef, mate,” he continues, voice slightly strained from the unusual position his upper body’s ended up in, “I thought I was going to have to talk you down from, I don’t know, something drastic and awful. Or I thought I’d never see you again. What happened?”
“I got the talking-to of my life,” Stefan says, slightly taken aback by the intensity of Aaron’s reaction. Possibly the boy just doesn’t want to be left with only Will and Adam to talk to, an understandably horrifying concept. Stefan sits down at the head of the bed and arranges the pillows for comfort, throwing one to Aaron and using the time it takes to situate himself to cover for the thinking he needs to do. He knows he’ll have to wing this conversation, to feel out what elements of the truth he can use to spin his latest lie, and he suppresses a moment’s irritation that Beatrice didn’t leave him with any instructions beyond, ‘Don’t tell them anything.’ Perhaps improvising a cover story is his first task as an official collaborator. “But that was all it was. I had to promise I wouldn’t hit anyone else.” He shrugs. “It was more about Declan than me. He was on his last chance, and he blew it: he’s washing out.”
“For good?” Aaron says, breathing out heavily. “You know this for sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Who told you?”
“Pippa. And Maria, a little bit, as well,” Stefan adds, borrowing a bit of her authority, certain that if Aaron asks her to confirm any of it she’ll lie as smoothly and professionally as she does when she tells Aaron he’ll leave Dorley ‘a changed man’.
Fuck. Because that’s still happening, isn’t it? To Aaron; to all of them.
Aaron, sitting up against the wall himself now, head resting on the pillow Stefan gave him, ankles tucked under, frowns at Stefan as if he senses his disquiet, and well he should: it’s different now. Which doesn’t entirely make sense — Stefan’s been lying to Aaron since they met — but now that Stefan is, officially, on the side of the sponsors, now that he’s been upgraded from prisoner to prison guard, it’s different. How could it not be?
Welcome to the team, he remembers with a shudder.
Aaron blinks at him, looks almost comically innocent, and Stefan wonders how the punishment can possibly be proportional to his crime. It seems catastrophically unjust.
Except it’s not supposed to be punishment, is it? No, it’s rehabilitation, or Beatrice’s twisted idea of it, one she’s recruited generations of women into helping her carry out — simultaneously beneficiaries, employees and justification for her ideology; convenient — and in Stefan’s mind it’s transformed over the weeks from barely believable to straightforwardly horrifying.
He can’t stop looking at Aaron. They’re going to change him. They’ve already started.
“So, um,” Aaron says, uncomfortable under his gaze, “did Pippa or Maria happen to tell you what ‘washing out’ actually involves?”
Stefan swallows some of the tension out of his throat. “No,” he says, and he’s relieved it comes out sounding almost normal. “I asked. But no.”
“Because I have a theory.”
“Oh?”
“I think they hunt us for sport, dude.”
“Aaron—”
The boy snorts. “That wasn’t serious. Okay, actually, maybe it was a little serious? Because we’re never leaving here. You know that, right?” He drums his fingers on his thighs. Allocates all his attention to the task. “I’ve been thinking about this. They’re never going to let us go. They can’t, or we’ll go to the police. I don’t care how many books on feminism Maria makes me read, none of them have a bit that’s made me any less likely to call 999 the second I get out of here and start ugly crying about kidnapping rings until the operator sends someone with a box of tissues and a SWAT team. And that means ‘washing out’, or whatever bullshit excuse they eventually use to get rid of us, means either being shipped off somewhere else — somewhere worse — or they’re doing a Dexter and dropping us into the sea in bin bags.”
“I’m not sure—”
“I don’t want to die, Stef!” Aaron says, and Stefan notices for the first time that his eyes, normally always a little puffy from poor sleep, are red: he’s been crying. “I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to sit around in this fucking dungeon watching people get carted off, one by one. I’m ready to tear this place up! Run at someone and just get tased over and over again! Because what’s the point in being a good boy, staying out of trouble, keeping my pecker in my pocket, reading all Maria’s books and eating every spoonful of shit they shovel at me, if my grand reward is that I’m the last one to leave? Do I get to sit in the common room and watch while they drag you away? Because I had a preview of that today, Stefan, and I didn’t like it one fucking bit.”
“Hey,” Stefan says, leaning forward, not touching him but closing the gap between them. Sincerity by proximity; show him he’s not scared. “I’ve been talking to them. No-one’s dragging me away. Or you. Declan’s a fucking monster. You’re not and neither am I.”
“Not even for—?”
“No.”
“Then how do we leave?” Aaron shouts. “Because I can’t come up with a way that doesn’t involve body bags and meat cleavers.” He’s stopped drumming on his thighs and instead wrapped his arms around his waist, shrinking himself. Stefan’s had enough experience to spot someone trying to hold down rampant panic, and he’s torn between concern for Aaron and anger at Maria and Beatrice and all the others for allowing this to happen.
But that’s the point, right? That’s the benefit of someone washing out: the threats are suddenly real. The boys start fearing for their lives, not just their freedom. They can’t pretend it’s just a psychological experiment any more, or Woke Jail, or anything else. Will called washing out ‘the bogeyman’. Not any more. Stefan finds himself wondering at the convenience of the timing; just when it’s starting to sink in that they’re going to be down here a long, long time…
It can’t be true that Dorley takes in one extra boy per year with the express intention of washing them out, can it? Beatrice said she doesn’t like to waste people, and if she’s to be believed — and Stefan has to trust her credibility, else the promises she made about his own future start to look suspect, and this place becomes even more of a horror show — then such an action would be abhorrent to her.
He can believe she’ll seize on any useful side-effect, though. A shame one of the boys had to go, but what a splendid motivator for those who remain! Everything’s a lever.
He wonders, suddenly, if they ever lose boys from the fear they stoke in them. If that counts as a failure or another kind of success; another bad man off the streets forever. Would Aaron, convinced that the same fate awaits all of them, do something drastic?
“Can I tell you a secret?” Stefan says quickly, stomach lurching, needing to do or say something to make it better, and rapidly deciding what exactly that is.
Aaron, looking down at his knees again, nods.
“And you’ll keep it to yourself, just for now?” he says.
Aaron nods again.
“Because I was explicitly instructed not to tell anyone about this, and it could hurt me badly if it gets out that I did.”
Aaron nods again. “I won’t hurt you, Stef,” he whispers.
“Remember, after the thing with the nurse, when I asked to speak to someone in charge about the way we were treated, and I met a woman called Abby?”
“Yeah.”
“She said she was down here, once,” Stefan says. “Down here like we are. Kept here, just like us, until she reformed. She said it was years ago, and that there have been a lot of people down here between her and us. Enough people that, if all of them really had disappeared forever, it’d be a national scandal.” Granted, all of them actually have disappeared, with Stefan and his supposed backpacking holiday as the sole exception; they’ve got to be bribing someone, surely? Lots of someones. “She survived.”
“She got out?”
“Her and dozens of others, over the years. They stay down here, they reform, they move on.”
Aaron’s breathing slows a little. “You didn’t happen to meet any more of these ‘others’, did you?”
“No. But she didn’t seem like she was lying. And I think she was telling me more than she was supposed to, you know?”
Aaron nods. “So, what, do they have girl intakes and boy intakes? Or are they normally mixed and we were just really unlucky and got a no-girl one? Or is there a whole other basement?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say. I think she was more interested in reassuring me. Maybe she knows everyone gets scared about this, at some point.”
“So, if she got out, why’s she still around?”
“She said it’s cheaper than renting. And she has friends here.”
“Don’t suppose she said what she did to end up down here?” Aaron says.
Stefan pretends to remember, sorting through ways to repackage the things Abby’s told him about her life before graduation. “She said she had behavioural problems. Bad ones. She said she hurt someone. And that she fought against this place to begin with, but eventually came to realise that being made to change was the only way she was ever going to change.”
“Is that really it?” Aaron says. “We change, we leave?”
“It’s a pretty big change they want, I think. Like you said, they don’t want us running off and dobbing them in the second we get out. We need to believe we’re better off than we were before. Better people.”
“This is sounding kind of like a cult, Stefan. Are we going to end up worshipping a moon goddess or something? Is there going to be a spaceship you can only get aboard via mass suicide?”
“I’m sure she would have mentioned if there was a suicide spaceship.”
“We just… change,” Aaron says.
“Yes.”
“Become better men.”
“Yes,” Stefan says, looking away.
Aaron unwinds a little more, stretches his legs out in front of him, lays his hands in his lap. “Maybe, then… maybe you had the right idea, going on at me about my shit. Maybe I shouldn’t have given you grief about it.”
“I don’t think it’s so granular. I think it’s a whole process and they’re only just getting started. Although, I suppose deciding never to do it again couldn’t hurt.”
“Way ahead of you.”
“Good.”
“Fuck,” Aaron says, after a moment spent playing with his lower lip with his teeth. “Down here a while, then?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“This Abby, is she hot?”
“She’s beautiful,” Stefan says. “Like, model-pretty.”
“Nice. You think maybe guys don’t call the police because they get to live in a big house full of hot women, after?” The grin Aaron turns on Stefan is half-smug, half-cheeky, the way he usually is, and Stefan is so relieved by the apparent return of the boy’s equilibrium that he laughs out loud, lets the pressure out of his chest with an undignified snort that turns into a hysteria that takes a good few seconds to recover from. When he does, Aaron’s crossed his hands behind his head, looking up at him, still smiling, and it takes everything Stefan has not to hug him.
“What’s so funny?” Aaron says, play-acting offended.
“I,” Stefan says, between breaths, “have no idea.”
Aaron shrugs. “At least you got a laugh out of it. It’s a nice change of pace; I’ve spent the evening feeling like the mousetrap is about to snap shut around my neck. Just this impending and inescapable sense of doom.”
“You’re not doomed.”
“Let’s hope,” Aaron says, half-joking.
“You’re not doomed,” Stefan insists, losing his levity as fast as it came. He knows exactly what it’ll take for Aaron to get out of here.
“Aww. You do care.”
“I do, actually,” Stefan says, looking at Aaron in profile and wondering, as the guilt ties itself around his spine, how Aaron will look as a girl, whether he’ll survive long enough for them both to find out, and what exactly would happen if Stefan just told the truth right now, if he admitted everything. Would Aaron tell the others? Try to escape?
Would he hurt himself?
“You mind if I just hang out for a bit?” Aaron says. “Kinda don’t want to go back to my room right now.”
“Yeah,” Stefan says, the confession freezing on his lips and his fingernails biting his palms as he realises that the truth has to be kept from Aaron, lest he try something drastic enough, one way or another, to end his own life or wash out. So Stefan will keep the secret. Lie to him. Spin stories. Cooperate with Maria. Be complicit. And comfort him when, one day soon enough, Aaron wakes up mutilated. “Sure.”
2019 November 10
Sunday
“I feel weird about this.”
“It’s fine, Aaron, really.”
“No, it’s not fine, not at all. They got really strange about us showering unsupervised, remember? They made us always go together, at the same time every morning? It was a whole thing? I know you remember this, Stef; have you gone wrong?”
“Please stop tapping on my head.”
“I’m just trying to find the bit of you that’s gone crazy.”
“It’s fine, Aaron. Really! Those rules were because of Declan, right? Well, he’s gone now. Gone gone.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“I think I should, because you seem to have forgotten. We’re safe. Whatever happens to him isn’t ever going to happen to us, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“So?”
“Yeah. Fine. We’re safe. There’s always Maria, though. Showering at the appropriate time, that’s her rule. And she likes rules. Loves them. Probably sleeps with a big book of them. Probably strokes its sexy hardback spine and—”
“Remember the microphones, Aaron.”
“Good point. Still, Maria, though.”
“I’ll protect you from Maria.”
“My hero!”
“Get off me!”
“My knight in shining armour!”
“I’m your neighbour in a bloody dressing gown, now get off me.”
“My knight in a… greenish-black robe!”
“I said, get off me— ow!”
“What? What’s up? What did I do?”
“Oh, uh, nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing, Stefan.”
“It’s just… my chest is a little sore, that’s all.”
“Huh. You too?”
They’d talked for a bit. Watched a movie together, Stefan keeping a careful eye on Aaron until the anxiety seemed genuinely to leave him. He threw in a lot of reassurances about how nice and normal Abby seemed, how probably there are others at Saints who’ve been through the same thing, and that the reason they never heard anything about it before they ended up here is because the people who leave are grateful, not dead. Partway through the movie, Aaron switched position, moved closer to him, and while it was a little uncomfortable, in the way personal contact with Aaron can be — Stefan’s long since rejected the idea that Aaron might be flirting, having decided instead that he’s just drawn to the novel sensation of being close to someone who’s nice to him — mostly it made Stefan aware of how much the day’s effort and anxiety caused him to sweat. So, somewhere after two in the morning, he persuaded Aaron to come along for an illicit late-night shower, because sitting in your own stink is bad enough in an ordinary bedroom and downright appalling in the poorly ventilated basement rooms.
“Yeah,” Stefan says, turning his back on Aaron and hanging up his dressing gown on one of the pegs in the shower annexe, “I’ve been sore for a couple of days. Probably just a side-effect of the Goserelin.” He makes a show of massaging his chest; is it his imagination, or is there a little development there? The flesh seems more firm, even if there’s nothing visible just yet.
“Hah!” Aaron says, triumphant, disrobing and, following Stefan’s example, turning away. It’s been a while since Stefan was last intentionally subjected to the sight of Aaron’s penis; the thought of it is almost nostalgic. “I knew it! You said it can’t make you grow breasts!”
“It can’t.” Stefan ducks under the water and wets his hair, and then ducks back out to add, “But maybe it can make your nipples hurt.” He shrugs. “I’m not a doctor.”
“No, Stef,” Aaron says, picking the tap next to Stefan’s and starting the water, “you are not. Jesus, this feels good.”
Stefan ducks his head under. “It really does.”
“No, you don’t understand. This feels really good.” Aaron turns to him and holds out his arms, as if to demonstrate, and then sheepishly turns away again, cheeks red, when Stefan’s eyes unavoidably flicker downward for a moment. “I’ve never had a shower like this. It’s like the water’s kissing my skin!”
Stefan laughs. “Maybe you’re just in a good mood.”
“Yeah,” Aaron says, rubbing in the shampoo and half-turning his head to grin at Stefan without danger of further exposure. “That must be it. I’ve got the basement euphoria. Common medical condition that comes from being entombed in concrete for weeks. You’d know about that, being a doctor and all. Or,” he adds, rinsing it out, “it’s just from knowing I’m not going to die down here. Kind of a relief, really. You okay to do my conditioner?”
“Sure,” Stefan says, shrugging. Earlier, while they were watching the movie, Aaron confided that he really does have difficulty raising his left arm over his head for more than a few seconds. He can stretch okay, he said, and wave and all that, but he can’t apply pressure and he can’t lift things. He hasn’t said why; Stefan assumes it’s an injury from boarding school, from when the other boys used to delight in hurting him. Whatever the reason, Stefan’s happy enough helping him with rubbing in his conditioner. “Come here and stay still.”
“I’m going to ask Maria if we can start taking our phones into the common room,” Aaron says, squirming as Stefan massages the conditioner through his hair; it’s getting longer, starting to look more like Stefan’s unkempt thatch, and the shorter hairs on the back and sides are getting shaggy. Aaron normally keeps it slicked back, but when it’s wet it falls in his eyes, and when he shakes his head to clear them it’s almost cute.
“Okay. Why?”
“For the cameras, Stef! Imagine if I’d been able to get you on video, smacking Declan around! You should have seen yourself; fucking glorious. Just whap! and he’s on the floor like a fucking, I don’t know, a black-and-white-cartoon banana-peel-assisted ass-plant, and you’re standing over him, all, ‘Come on then.’ You deserve to see that. Spank bank material for life.”
Stefan slaps him lightly on the side of the head, both as reprimand and to let him know he’s done with the conditioner. “I wouldn’t mind forgetting it, actually. My thumb still hurts.”
Aaron laughs. “You hit him with your thumb inside your fist?”
“Why does everyone keep on at me about that? It’s not like I’ve been in a lot of fights.”
“Hey,” Aaron says, holding up a pair of soapy hands, balled up with the thumbs inside, “no judging. I would have done the same.”
“I thought you got in fights at your awful school?”
“Oh, sure, I got in fights. I just didn’t get much opportunity to fight back.”
“Jesus,” Stefan says, turning around to wash himself in the place he doesn’t like to think about. “I’m sorry, Aaron.”
“Yeah, well, the joke’s on them.” Aaron starts rinsing the conditioner. “Now they’re all licking taint to climb the political and corporate ladders and I’m having an illicit shower in a kidnapper basement with my best bud.”
“They’d be so jealous,” Stefan says, giggling into the water.
“And I bet their nipples don’t tingle at night, either,” Aaron adds, shutting off the tap and shaking the hair out of his eyes. “They really are missing out.”
* * *
“That was weirdly fun,” Stefan says, hanging up his wet towel and pulling on a t-shirt. Aaron hadn’t wanted to return to his room, not even to pick up spare clothes, but he did agree to get changed with his back turned and is already stretched out on the end of the bed, clad in Stefan’s too-big-for-him jogging bottoms and hoodie, scrolling through Stefan’s phone, looking for another movie.
“Yeah, actually, it was,” Aaron admits.
“It was like sneaking out from a school trip. Clandestine in a really basic kind of way, you know?”
“Aww,” Aaron says, “you’re always so wholesome. I can picture it now.” He raises a hand to the ceiling and continues in a narrator’s voice: “A trip to Chessington, a cruel and heartless Geography teacher who makes the boys and girls take separate buses, and you, a brave thirteen-year-old, sneaking out of the boys’ floor to find out where the girls are sleeping.”
“How did you know my Geography teacher was cruel and heartless?”
Aaron shrugs. “Aren’t they all?”
“You’re wrong about Chessington. Our school could never’ve afforded it. Wrong side of London. We did once go to that place where all the wattle-and-daub houses used to be.”
“Isn’t that mostly just a big field?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Your big school trip was to a field.”
“It was a different field to the ones around where I grew up.” Stefan says. “Novelty value. Anyway, I never sneaked out on any trip, except to call a friend of mine back home. Never even sneaked out of school. I was very well-behaved,” he adds primly.
“Man, what did you do to end up here?”
“Corporate espionage,” Stefan says.
“Liar.”
“Art forgery.”
“I’ve seen your doodles; you can’t draw.”
“I colluded with the French, to—”
“Will you stop? I’m trying to find a movie that isn’t quite saccharine enough to make me vom and you’re being very distracting.”
“Sorry.”
Aaron drops the phone on the bed, giving up. He rests his head on his crossed hands. “You might have been sweetness and light at school,” he says, “but I wasn’t. I mean, I guess you know about the recent stuff—” he coughs delicately, and looks uncomfortable, “—but I mean, before. When I was a teenager. When I got transferred to hell.” Stefan doesn’t ask what he means by that; it seems clear. “Hey,” Aaron adds, “did your parents have, like, a life plan for you?”
“A life plan?”
“Yeah, like, what did they want you to be?”
Stefan shrugs. “I don’t know. I never asked. It’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever wanted to know.”
“Huh,” Aaron says, contemplating Stefan’s response as if it’s by far the least relatable thing he’s ever said, which it might well be. “After Dad’s business got sold and we were suddenly rolling in it, they developed plans for me. Big plans.” He waves a hand around. “I was going to be in business. I was going to be in politics. Jesus,” he adds with a derisive sniff, “they wanted me to be prime minister. Didn’t matter what I wanted, obviously, or that they’d moved me away from my friends and made me hyper-fucking-miserable. That was a bonus, actually: no ‘distractions’. So off I go to a brand new school, a fucking sardine tin of dickheads that twists open and rains them down on me as soon as I get there, and oh yes, I have to live my entire life there, too. Can’t be prime minister if you don’t network. Stupid, obviously.”
“How come?”
“None of the posh boys gave a fuck who I was. And Dad, well, he sold, didn’t he? Wasn’t in business any more. He had more money than sense even when he didn’t have any money, and now he was rolling in it he didn’t understand that family connections matter to those people, and he didn’t have any, ergo, I didn’t have any. And I sounded wrong. I even looked wrong. You know that look aristos have, like someone not too far up the family tree fucked a trout and had a lovely clutch of fish babies, and the glassy eyes and floppy jaw become dominant genetic traits? Yeah. You know the one. Didn’t have that, either. Nothing about me fit.”
“That sounds awful, Aaron,” Stef says, extracting two bottles of water from the stash under his bed and waggling one at Aaron, who takes it.
“Thanks,” Aaron says, cracking it open and taking a drink. “And, yeah, it was pretty fucking awful. If the other boys weren’t locking me in the coal shed, they were aiming a kick at me in the hall or randomly taking my stuff or— or doing other shit. And I guess I could have told my dad, you know, said it wasn’t working out, but as far as I was concerned he stopped giving a shit as soon as he slammed the car door and drove away. Probably not actually true — looking back, I think he would have moved me on if I made enough of a fuss, like if I really made a problem for him — but when you’re a stupid kid, you’re a stupid kid.”
“Right.”
“So I start exploring, looking for places to be left alone. And, yeah, I found lots of little nooks and crannies, loads of secret spaces… all of which had already been comprehensively mapped by generations of posh twats. You know, like, ‘Son, this is the room where I first played soggy biscuit and made Dumpy Doggins eat it,’ that kind of thing, and Dumpy Doggins is in parliament now.”
“What’s soggy biscuit?”
“Don’t ask. Anyway, my only choice is to get the hell out of hell, so that’s what I do. I start sacking off classes and just go wandering. I skip breakfast, I skip dinner, I sneak back to the dorm late at night. I show up to just enough lessons not to get kicked out, and that turns out to be not very many, because posh school? Not exactly academically rigorous.”
“Really?”
“Yeah! I expected to be behind when I started there but it turns out those boarding schools are just big kindergartens for the well-bred. They don’t need to know things; they just need to learn how to hide their sociopathy in a suit. Takes years to teach, too. That kind of cruelty takes a lot of sanding down. Hey,” he adds thoughtfully, “why aren’t there any of them in here?”
“There might have been, in other years. Probably not, though. Harder to kidnap someone if they’re related to the queen. God,” Stefan adds, giggling, “imagine waking up to another ordinary day in the basement, and Prince William is there. Maria standing in front of him, like, ‘Imperialism is just another facet of toxic masculinity.’”
“Anyway,” Aaron says, and Stefan makes apologetic gestures for the tangent, “I started exploring away from the school, and there was a small town a mile or so down the road. I ended up going there a lot, because there was nowhere else even close. Middle of nowhere, literally. And there was nothing to do in town, so I started hanging around at this corner shop. I’d go there in my shitty little uniform and buy a Mars Bar instead of actually having dinner, and after a while they started noticing me. And when I asked if I could use their kettle so I could make a Pot Noodle, they started talking to me, asking how I am, making sure I get something a bit more substantial to eat. Well—” and he blushes, looks away from Stefan at the ceiling, starts turning his hands around each other again, “—Elizabeth did.”
“Elizabeth?” Stefan asks, into the sudden silence.
“Yeah. She was the eldest daughter of the family who ran the place. And she was… kind to me. And interested, you know? Like, she actually cared. We’d talk, and she’d listen and offer advice, and she was so fucking pretty, Stef, you don’t understand, like, I’d gone from being a child at a normal school where the girls were kids just like me, to this shitpit full of posh boys, none of whom I’d have wanted to touch even if they didn’t ritually kick the crap out of me all the time, and then there she was: a woman. And she was kind, confident, intelligent… All the things you’d want someone to be. Just hanging out with her was a life-changing experience.”
“Did you, uh—”
“Did we do it?” Aaron finishes, looking vaguely scandalised. “No. Christ, no. She was in her twenties. Much older than me. I just, you know, fancied her a bit, I mean, obviously I did, she was gorgeous, but she was also a nice, smart, interesting woman who made a bit of time for me. Maybe the first and last person to be kind to me. Until, uh, well…” He coughs. “But the family lost the shop and had to move. Rent went up or some shit. And we meant to stay in touch, but the posh boys stamped on my phone and that was it, you know? When I eventually got out of hell I tried to look her up on Facebook and realised I never even knew her fucking surname.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Years ago. I had a lot of school still to get through and nowhere to escape to, after she left.”
“I’m sorry, Aaron.”
“You know,” he says, rolling back over and making himself busy with the phone again, “that’s the good thing about this place: people can’t leave me. They literally can’t. Locked in.”
“I wouldn’t leave you, anyway.”
Aaron stops scrolling. “Really?”
“Really. Remember? I said we were friends, and Will called us gay?”
“Yeah. Huh. Cool. So, uh, wanna watch something called Desperately Seeking Susan?”
* * *
Since yesterday, Christine’s been holding Paige’s hand a lot. She needs the reassurance: she came close to wrecking their relationship, close to wrecking Paige herself — Christine’s had to get over her innate disbelief that anyone, let alone Paige Adams, could like her that much, because clearly she does, and sooner or later you have to let go of your own self-loathing before it hurts someone who matters — and now that they’ve reaffirmed their bond she doesn’t want ever to be out of contact with her. Paige’s slender fingers anchor her, keep her safe, and she’d worry she was being too clingy if Paige didn’t need the connection just as much. Maria poked gentle fun when they came down for breakfast and didn’t unlink to pour cereal; given that they are both right-handed, this required some ingenuity.
But, because Paige takes her classes very seriously — she’s already impressed one of her History with Human Rights professors enough that she’s practically been guaranteed a spot on one of the summer placements, which makes Christine ache with both pride and pre-emptive loneliness at the thought of losing her for three whole months — they’ve been forced to detach from each other, so Paige can concentrate on her work. She’s still within sight: perched at one of the smaller tables around the edge of the dining room, laptop and binders scattered in front of her, frowning, typing, occasionally singing under her breath. Christine can’t think of anything she’d rather look at, and suppresses her irritation when two more of her Sisters, sounding distressingly chirpy, enter the dining room and make a beeline for her table.
Indira kisses her on the top of her head and sits on her left; Abby deposits three coffee cups on the table in front of her and folds into the seat on Christine’s right. Christine almost doesn’t want to look at the mugs, because she knows Abby will deliberately have picked out the ones with the worst, most awful jokes on and, sure enough, when she picks hers up to take a sip it says on the side, You Have a Special Way of Making People Smile. With depressing inevitability the word Smile has been crossed out and replaced with Girls, apparently at the printing stage. Cute, for certain (very localised) values of ‘cute’.
“You’re very sweet together,” Abby says, nodding at Paige, “you and her. I do love to see it. She was miserable, you know, last year, after you broke things off.”
“I know,” Christine says. “I don’t really want to talk about it, if that’s okay? I’ve spent enough time recently cataloguing my mistakes. The list is long.”
“She’s testy,” Indira stage-whispers over Christine’s head. “No sleep.” Indira’s response to discovering Christine had been hiding a whole trans girl from everyone except Abby had been, mercifully, confined to Christine’s bedroom and thus was moderated by Paige’s presence, but it had still been rough, even if it ended in hugs.
“Oh?” Abby said, raising her eyebrows and smirking, but Indira cuts her off, shaking her head.
“Bad dreams,” she explains, and squeezes Christine’s shoulder.
It’s true. Nightmares jerked her out of bed several times overnight. If it hadn’t been for Paige, gently rubbing her back, stroking her hair, kissing her, promising her that everything’s okay, Christine wouldn’t have got more than a single hour. It was one of the factors that moderated Indira’s reaction: when she walked in, Christine was curled up in Paige’s lap, clinging to her like she was the last woman on Earth.
“I’m worried about Stef,” Christine says.
“You shouldn’t be,” Indira says. “Maria’s on her side, and Pippa was already on her side; she’s safe.”
“Physically, maybe. But haven’t we officially recruited her? What’s that going to do to her brain?”
“We’ll watch her. Don’t worry.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t go see her in person,” Abby says, “just for the reassurance.”
Christine smiles. “I thought about it. But I checked the feed and Aaron was with her all night. I wouldn’t have been able to see her without prompting some awkward questions.”
“All night?” Indira says. “They slept together? That’s… early.”
“No,” Christine says, and pulls out her phone, bringing up the appropriate footage. “See?” She scrubs through it, covering hours in seconds. “They watched a movie, washed up, watched another movie, and eventually fell asleep. That’s Stef in the bed; Aaron’s curled up on a pile of hoodies on the floor.”
Indira giggles. “Like a puppy.”
“Stop,” Christine says, dropping her phone on the table. “That’s not an image I ever want in my head.”
“It’s right there,” Abby says, ever helpful. “Look.”
Christine drinks her coffee, eyes to the ceiling. “You can’t make me.”
Indira, aware more than anyone else of the shortness of Christine’s temper when she’s tired, engages Abby with local gossip, and Christine shoots her a grateful smile before letting herself zone out. She rests her chin on her free hand, sips her coffee and returns to watching Paige, a pastime she’ll never tire of: Paige is sweetly deliberate in everything she does, and as Christine watches she swipes on her laptop’s touchpad, peers at something in her written notes and starts typing, all with the same careful, controlled gestures so typical of her. That little dent between her brows when she frowns: Christine wants desperately to kiss it.
She’s still singing to herself, too.
God, how did she let herself almost ruin this? How did she nearly miss it in the first place? All those times she thought Paige was just being pushy, she was actually supporting her, fighting for her, caring for her, the way she’s always done, since before she was Paige.
A woman she’ll never deserve. Best start trying harder, then.
The sound of fresh coffee being poured wakes her up, and when Abby sits back down, putting the cafetiere aside for one of the second years to pick up later, she gently strokes the back of Christine’s neck, where her hair becomes wispy and fine, and kisses her on the cheek.
“Sleepy little thing,” Abby says.
“Who are you calling little?” Christine mumbles. “I’m taller than you.”
“I think you should know, I refilled Paige’s mug just now and she didn’t spot me coming, so I got to hear what she’s been singing to herself half the morning.”
“Oh?”
“It’s You Belong With Me, but she’s changing the lyrics. I’m pretty sure she made them about you.”
Christine looks back at Paige, and it doesn’t take long for her to start up again. Now that she has context, she can guess the words:
I wear short skirts, she wears t-shirts
I’m cheer captain and she’s on the bleachers
Dreaming about the day when she wakes up and finds
That what she’s looking for has been here the whole time
“Chrissy,” Abby says sternly, “if you break her heart again, I will be so very cross.”
“Same,” Indira says. “This is your second chance with her, and take it from me: second chances are precious.”
“She’s made herself very vulnerable,” Abby says, “opening up to you again. Don’t forget.”
Christine drinks her coffee, deliberately slurping it, to be rude. “It’s possible to have too many older sisters,” she says.
“Nope,” Indira says.
“I haven’t heard that,” Abby says.
“Me neither.”
“Sounds like a myth.”
The table is a much nicer place to rest her head than on her hand, and if she closes her eyes she can pretend that two of her dearest friends and closest family aren’t ganging up on her. Someone — Indira, probably, judging by the angle — starts rubbing her back, and she wriggles into the movements, accepting the comfort. Wonders, the way she sometimes does, what her old self might be doing at this moment; doubts he would have been surrounded by people who love him as much as Abby and Indira love her, even if they are capable of being, from time to time, mildly irritating.
Her old self; she’s starting to struggle to remember his name. Good.
Over her head, the conversation’s moved on from Christine’s love life and her litany of errors and onto just where the hell Abby has been the last few weeks.
“I’ve been around,” she says.
“Not much,” Indira says. “We’ve missed you.”
“I’ve been working!”
“And not sleeping in your room?”
“Well, no. I have an actual budget for this article, and it’s taking me all over the place. I’m getting to know the Travelodge network much better than I ever wanted to.”
“Huh,” Christine says. “I assumed you’d been staying with Melissa.”
Abby looks away. “No,” she says. “She’s, um, seeing someone. And she doesn’t want to see me again. For now.”
“Oh. Shit. Abs—”
“It’s fine, Christine.”
“But still—”
“Can we change the subject?”
Indira jumps in again, discussing her new responsibilities and noting that Nell, Faye’s sponsor, has been effectively suspended with pay, reduced to filling in on the basement rota; Dira is co-sponsoring Faye with Bella, Rebecca’s sponsor, which doesn’t take up much of anyone’s time as Faye and Rebecca are inseparable, and practically sponsor themselves.
“As bad as these two?” Abby asks, twitching her finger back and forth to indicate Christine and Paige.
“Worse,” Indira says. “Sometimes they have… guests.”
“Gosh,” Abby says, sitting back. “Your year wasn’t like that, was it?”
“Not really. Yours?”
“Definitely not.”
“They’re very sweet, though,” Indira says. She nudges Christine. “They talk about you a lot.”
“In what context?” Christine asks warily, remembering Faye’s aborted attempt to kiss her.
“They were asking if they could come up to the second floor to see both of you again.”
Ah. Good. That sounds innocent. “Any time,” she says. “But I’ll see them soon, won’t I? Aren’t the second years cooking today?”
“Yes,” Abby says, in her primary school teacher voice, “and that means they’ll be busy. Cooking is hard work, Christine.”
“No, it’s easy,” Christine says. “You take the leftovers, you put them in the microwave, you eat the leftovers.” She sticks her tongue out and earns a light smack to the shoulder.
In fact, Faye and Rebecca can do little more than wave at Christine as a line of sponsors escort them and the other second years into the dining hall a couple of hours later, bearing Sunday lunch (and vegetarian option) and a few bottles of wine, which prompts Paige, sitting down next to Abby and frowning politely at her until she agrees to swap seats with Christine, to complain once again that this batch of second years are getting way more opportunities to exercise their alcohol privileges than she and Christine ever did.
“Confirmation bias,” Indira says, leaning around Abby and gesticulating with the nut cutlet on her fork. “You remember every time we pulled you, kicking and screaming, out of the liquor cabinet, and you extrapolate from there.”
“One time,” Paige says, presenting the appropriate number of fingers. “One time. I just wanted a whiskey.”
“And she wasn’t kicking and screaming,” Christine says, loyal to the end but resisting the urge to kiss her, lest she cover her in gravy.
Aunt Bea pokes her head around the door from the kitchen just as Christine’s finishing her chicken, and exchanges a few meaningful nods with Maria before retreating. Something about her demeanour and dress — stiff movements, sunglasses, very long coat — suggests a hangover, and she whispers as much to Paige.
“Or a booty call,” Paige whispers back. She giggles, and adds even more quietly, “A Bea-ty call!”
“Cover your mouth when you say things like that!” Christine hisses, grinning.
After dessert — a strange sort of pudding-thing, soaked in alcohol, which Christine decided was intended to knock them all out — Maria taps a spoon on the side of her glass, for silence, and a roomful of sleepy women give her what passes for their full attention.
“Where’s Pippa?” Paige asks Christine quietly, as Maria gives the room the run-down on Stef’s arrival at Dorley.
“No idea. Maybe she didn’t want the attention.” Christine smiles at the surprised faces that turn her way when Maria summarises exactly how Stef remained hidden for so long. “I know the feeling,” she adds through gritted teeth. Paige hooks fingers with her, under the table.
Mercifully, Maria moves on, efficiently covering the last month, editing out most of Stef’s difficulties — the nurse included — and Christine relaxes her shoulders again.
“Excuse me,” someone on the other side of the room says. It’s Rebecca, raising a hand.
“Yes?” Maria says.
“How will her treatment differ from ours?” Rebecca asks. Christine could swear she and Faye are holding hands under the table, like she is with Paige.
Maria shrugs. “It’s what you’d expect, really. She’s excused the resocialising stuff, unless she’s with the other residents. And she’ll know in advance when… certain procedures are scheduled.”
Christine’s about to whisper something sarcastic to Paige about how Maria is still euphemising the orchiectomy to a room of women who’ve all had one, when she notices how quiet most of the second years have gotten. Rebecca in particular has lost a little colour, and Faye’s whispering in her ear, rubbing her upper arm. So much fresher for them than it is for her, Christine remembers. Being reborn fucking hurts.
Maria gives them some time.
Indira suddenly snorts and covers her mouth with her hand. She makes conciliatory gestures towards Maria, who rolls her eyes and, looking to the second years to see if they’re ready to continue, starts covering the rules around interaction with Stef: don’t seek her out, unless you’re a sponsor or she’s visiting upstairs, which, yes, she will be allowed to do. At the second-year table, mild indignation replaces upset.
It’s not until Christine, Paige, Indira and Abby are decompressing in Indira’s room on the third floor, arranged in comfortable piles on the double-size couch, that Indira explains what caused her almost to inhale her alcoholic sponge pudding: they should all have known Stef was a white woman, she explains, the second she asked to see the manager.
2019 November 14
Thursday
Declan’s departure — confirmed by Pippa to have finally occurred overnight; there was a delay of several days before he could be ‘picked up’, a term which seemed deeply to disturb her — hasn’t reduced tension as much as Stefan hoped it might. Will’s been talking about Declan as if he’s dead, holding forth to the whole common room, and Stefan’s reassurances that none of the rest of them are likely to share his fate seem only to piss him off. Perhaps because Stefan only half-believes them himself. He can’t stop thinking about the false choice Beatrice offered him, the night she found him out, and how it’s the same choice facing the boys, though they don’t yet know it: to accept her and her methods, or to wash out.
In the face of that, what can Stefan do? Beatrice asked that he help the boys acclimate to the alterations, that he make himself complicit in every aspect of their changing bodies, and he’s realised that even without her he would have a moral obligation to do just that, else she might wash them out.
The most disturbing thing, the thing that’s been keeping him up at night since long before he accidentally came out to the whole building, is that there are dozens of girls up there in the Hall, and none of them have ever attempted to rush Beatrice, remove her means of control — whatever it is — by force, and take over. None of them feel strongly enough about what goes on down here, it seems. And it’s obvious why they don’t: they all survived it, and they think themselves better people because of it. Why would they deprive anyone the opportunity to change and grow, as they did?
True believers.
Ollie and Raph remain the most spooked. Since Declan left they’ve spent most of their time in their separate rooms, and in the common areas they huddle together as if afraid someone might attack them, a thought Stefan initially dismissed as ludicrous before remembering that the most recent punch had been thrown by him. His thumb still aches a little.
Will and Adam have paired off again. Will’s been volubly irritated by Aaron’s dismissal of his concerns and Stefan’s equivocation, and where Will goes, Adam goes; along with one of the TV-side sofas, dragged a few metres away and set up with its own small pile of bean bag chairs as a makeshift table.
So Stefan and Aaron are a twosome once more, sitting together at lunch and in the common room, and spending most evenings in Stefan’s bedroom. Aaron generally returns to his own room to sleep, but not always. (Stefan’s visited Aaron’s room just once; Aaron suggested he might not want to sit down anywhere unless he had access to a blacklight and a mop.) It’s meant that Stefan’s time with Pippa has been reduced largely to quick check-ins, which Stefan would consider more of a shame if she didn’t insist on gendering him female when they’re alone together, which causes his dysphoria to flare up; he’s been meaning to ask her to stop, but she’s seemed delicate of late, and he hasn’t had the heart. If she’s still fighting with Christine — or ignoring her, at least — then he might be all she’s got.
This afternoon he’s lounging on the sofa with Aaron, laughing at the awkward reality show on the TV — Pippa called the two of them ‘a pair of giggling schoolgirls’, and Stefan, after consideration, chose to take it as a compliment — when Monica, free of her responsibility for Declan and thus, according to Pippa, now first in line for all the most irritating sponsor jobs, blanks the screen with her phone and tells Stefan and the boys to shut up and pay attention.
A handful of other sponsors take up positions by the doors, as if anticipating an escape attempt. The last one into the room, escorting Martin, sits him down at one of the tables.
“What’s this?” Aaron whispers.
“No clue,” Stefan replies, shrugging and pulling himself up from his slouch.
Monica taps her phone again and, with the unmistakable ripple of a PowerPoint transition effect, the words What Is Feminism? appear on the television. Off to the side, in his castle of bean bag chairs, Will groans.
“Okay!” Monica calls, in a clear, room-filling voice that makes Stefan think of school assemblies. “Before we begin, I would like to address a few concerns about Declan. Yes: he has washed out. No: this does not mean he’s dead, or turned into burger meat, or sold into sexual slavery; yes, William, we heard your lurid little fantasies and this is the only time we will dignify them with a response. All this means, as far as you are concerned, is that he is no longer around, and that he has gone to a place that is considerably less pleasant than the basement of Dorley Hall. If you do not wish to share his fate, if you wish to continue your rehabilitation in comfort, I advise you to avoid assaulting us or your peers.”
“What about Stefan?” Raph shouts. “He hit him!”
“Stefan—” and Monica flashes her eyes momentarily to Stefan’s, as if to apologise for using the unambiguously gendered version of his name, “—has been instructed that any further outbursts will be punished to the full extent of our abilities.”
“That’s it? He floors Declan and gets off with a bitching out?”
“If you will recall,” Monica says, raising her voice again, “Declan attacked Stefan and Aaron first. We’re viewing Stefan’s actions as… pre-emptive self-defence. Keep your hands to yourself and you will have no problems with him, I am sure.”
“She means Declan started it, idiot,” Will says, in a surprising display of solidarity. Stefan tries to shoot him a smile but he’s too busy glaring at Raph.
Is Declan alive? Stefan has no idea whether to believe Monica or not. She’s not as senior as Maria, as far as he knows, but she’s older than many of the other sponsors, and necessarily more in the loop than mere graduates; she may well know things Pippa and Abby don’t. He also doesn’t know her at all well. Would she lie? Well, yes, she would; isn’t she lying right now, to everyone here, pretending that they have a route out of here that isn’t abhorrent to them?
Isn’t Stefan?
Shut up. Unhelpful thoughts.
“And with that over with…” Monica says, tapping her phone again: the words What Is Feminism? are now underlined. “What is feminism?” She gestures at the screen with each word.
Aaron puts his hand up. “Oh!” he says, full of enthusiasm. “I know this! Maria made me read all about it.”
“Go on,” Monica says warily.
“‘Feminism is the radical notion that women are purple.’”
“Very funny.”
“Thank you!”
“I’ll tase you if you’re that funny again, okay?”
“Uh,” Aaron says, “yes, ma’am.” He turns and adds to Stefan in stage-whisper, “I like her.”
Monica ignores him and returns to addressing the room. “Now,” she says, “we find that men like you—” her eyes flicker to Stefan again; he shakes his head minutely, trying to indicate his indifference, “—come to us with a, shall we say, somewhat inaccurate impression of feminism. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been misinformed by your peers or online or by some other source, the fact remains: you are wrong about feminism and you are wrong about feminists. What you will need to learn, in order to leave this place as better people, is not just why you are wrong, but how you came to be wrong. In this course — and, yes, this is a course, and from next week we will be assigning note sheets and homework — we will begin with your misconceptions, move on to the mechanisms that misinformed you and how to recognise common radicalisation techniques, and finally cover the histories of the movements that make up various feminisms and related social movements worldwide, up to the present day. Any questions?” Without looking, Stefan reaches out and pulls Aaron’s arm down from its raised position. “No? Good.” Monica taps her phone again and the TV moves on to a photograph of a woman with bright red hair and glasses — Stefan recognises her from any number of insulting memes — with the caption, You Have Been Lied To.
* * *
Aaron, citing feminism fatigue, retires to his room, presumably to wank away any lasting impression Monica’s extensive first session might otherwise make on him, so Stefan finds himself alone in the early evening for the first time since Declan washed out. Not a situation he enjoys: Aaron’s surprisingly sweet when he’s not performing for an audience, and without him Stefan’s responsibilities weigh heavy. He’s started imagining the boys — Aaron especially, but Will and Adam and even the others, occasionally — in three states: as the women Dorley wants to make of them, as free men after some hypothetical and almost definitely impossible escape, and as black-bruised corpses. He feels an undue influence over them, as if poised perpetually at the cusp of each of their futures, able to grasp their lives and twist them one way or the other at a whim.
He tells himself, as severely as he can, that his perception of power is an illusion, that the outcomes for these boys are practically predetermined, and the best or worst his presence can achieve is to help or hinder their acclimation.
He also pinches himself on his inner thigh. Pain helps, and marks there are easiest to hide, even from Aaron.
Stefan puts on some music. He’s discovered that movies are a terrible distraction, but music, with the headphones up as high as they’ll go — probably terrible for his hearing, but if he survives to be an old woman at least she’ll be alive to appreciate the tinnitus — chases away almost all thought. Helps him to concentrate on one thing at a time, to dissect himself without interruption.
Hours later, after letting the mix wander through the tastes he shares with whoever put the Dorley playlists together and those he doesn’t, he stops the music, drops the headphones onto the floor, and stretches, feeling the acid in his limbs boil away, feeling clear, feeling renewed. Because it’s all quite simple, in the end.
It’s one thing to know you have no choice but to help the people you’re trapped with adjust to their own mutilation, but another to accept it, and Stefan, who has spent years as a closeted and barely-out-to-himself trans woman, knows there is both grace and strength in survival, should you wish to claim it.
There’s only one real choice, offered to him as it is to them all: to live with it, or die because of it. He’s going to help everyone choose properly.
He yawns, cracks his jaw, and sits up, collecting himself. His phone screen is a forest of notifications: Christine and Pippa have both tried to get in touch. Pippa just checking in, Christine asking if she can visit. He shoots off quick replies to both, suggesting that Christine can come see him any time, as long as he’s alone and as long as she promises to try talking to Pippa again, because she really is lonely and he doesn’t have as much time for her as he wishes. Christine’s response is laden with considerably less sarcasm than usual; she acquiesces, and warns him to expect her and Paige in a few minutes.
Stefan’s heart skips up as he contemplates how little time he has to get ready, but he can’t bring himself to turn her down; there’s no escaping the fact that he’s grown accustomed to having Aaron around in the evenings, and without him the place feels almost comically large.
How much his horizons have shrunk, that such a small room could be so vast!
Quickly he checks himself over, and immediately abandons the idea of brushing his hair: it’s not yet long enough to put into even the world’s smallest ponytail, so it’ll just have to hang loose and unstyled. The rest of him looks about as presentable as he gets, lately — he’s very much enjoying the clearer and softer skin — so he takes the rest of the time to quickly buzz his jaw again with the electric razor. Every little helps.
Christine lets herself in — obviously — but she has the good grace to knock a couple of times first, so he can yell out that he’s presentable.
He almost doesn’t recognise her. She always shows up in his memory in the clothes she wore for their longest talk, back when he came out to her: nightgown, leggings, flannel. Tonight, she’s wearing a tennis skirt with a black and white repeating design around the hem, a black, long-sleeved top cut quite low and exposing collarbone and cleavage, and a pair of ankle boots. Her face is made up and her hair, a little longer than the way he remembers it, is artfully arranged.
“Wow,” he says, almost involuntarily, “you look great!”
Christine grimaces under the praise. “Thanks,” she says, “but this isn’t my idea.”
Another girl follows Christine through the door, embracing her as she comes and saying, “Don’t act like you don’t love it.” She’s tall, and her dark blonde hair is brushed carelessly out of her face in a way that would, on Stefan, look like he’d gotten caught in an updraught. She’s wearing a loose jacket, a simple white top, a denim skirt and tennis shoes, and her beauty absolutely short-circuits him. How was someone like her ever like him?
“Jesus Christ,” he says.
Christine snorts. “No,” she says, “Jesus was a boy.”
The other girl — Paige, presumably — grins, resting her canines on her lip, and kicks the door shut. “Hi, Stef,” she says. “I’m Paige. I’m with her.”
“Hi,” he says, still reeling.
It takes them a minute or so to get organised, given the limited seating in Stefan’s room. With Aaron or Pippa he’d share the bed, but despite talking to Christine at least once a week since the day he arrived he doesn’t feel close enough to her for that to be appropriate. He resolves the debate by bouncing out of bed and claiming the computer chair, positioning it so that with the wheels locked he can put his feet up on the bedside table without spinning out across the floor, and he makes get on with it gestures at Christine and Paige until they reluctantly take the bed.
“I feel bad about this,” Christine says, leaning against the wall with her legs sticking out. “We’re kicking you off your own bed.”
“It’s fine. I promise.”
“But—”
“Christine,” Paige says, “it was her decision.” She pokes Christine on the shoulder as she takes up position next to her, sitting close enough to take one of Christine’s hands in hers and entwine their fingers. “Respect it.”
“Fine,” Christine says, rolling her eyes and smiling. “You see what I have to put up with?” she adds to Stefan.
“You poor thing,” he says. Paige turns amber eyes on him, interested and kind, and he finds himself shrinking away from her.
“What’s up?” she says, instantly concerned.
Why didn’t he wear a hoodie? At least then he could hide more of himself. “Oh, uh, it’s nothing.” She continues to look at him. Fine. “It’s just… it’s weird, being, um, seen by more of you. When it was just Christine, when I first got here, that was one thing, but then it was all the boys, and Pippa and Maria and all the other sponsors, and then Abby, then Beatrice, and now you… I feel foolish. And stupid, claiming womanhood in front of all of you when I look and sound like this and you look and sound like you. And I worry, now that you know me like this, you won’t be able to see me as a woman later.”
“Is that what your pronoun thing is about?” Paige asks.
“Maybe? A bit?”
“Stef,” Christine says, “I don’t want to be mean, but you’re being silly. Look at who you’re talking to.”
“I am. That’s the problem.”
“So, remember where we came from! Do you think we, of all people, will ever have trouble thinking of someone as a woman, just because of how she started out?”
He wants to protest, to tell her off, to insist that she doesn’t know how it feels. But maybe she does? At some point Christine will have had to realign her perception not just of several of her friends’ genders, her girlfriend’s included, but her own, too. She’ll have had to reckon with the world in a whole new way, and feel her way to a new understanding of herself.
He thinks of his coining for Pippa and Christine and all the Dorley girls — ‘coercively reassigned female’ — a term that, mouthful though it is, still doesn’t adequately encompass even the little he knows about the process of going from someone like Aaron to someone like Paige. They’ve been here, possibly in this very bedroom, and now they’re women, out in the world. In broad strokes, there can be little about him they haven’t seen in each other before.
“No,” he admits, “probably not.”
“Does that mean we can call you a girl?” Paige asks. “I know I pronouned you earlier — habit, sorry — but I really won’t do it if you don’t want me to.”
“I mean, I felt weird when Pippa was doing it, but I think that might have been kind of silly. Running on autopilot, you know?” He exhales, counts a heartbeat, and breathes again, drums into himself with the new breath the idea that the women in front of him, casually beautiful though they are, have more in common with him than almost anyone else he’s ever met, and they’re not interested in judging him.
He groans. ‘Hate me,’ Christine had said, when he was still in the cell, before she even knew about him. He looks at her again and recognises in her unsteady gaze the same concerns she had a month ago, when she first revealed herself to him: her insistence that he ought to find her repulsive, because of her past, because of who she is; a notion as ridiculous now as it was then.
Either they’re both judging each other, or neither of them are.
“I’m an idiot,” he says.
“Oh?”
He blows out his cheeks. “Long story. The short version is, like I said, that I’m an idiot. You don’t need the details. Call me… call me whatever’s most comfortable for you.”
“Then… she/her?” Christine says, and when he nods she smiles broadly at him. The relief is similar to when he resolved Aaron’s concerns about washing out, except that this time the panicking idiot with the incorrect assumptions is him, and has been him for a whole month. It’s a delight to let them go.
“Thanks for coming down to see me,” he says, finding some warmth for his voice. “Really. I appreciate it.”
“You’re okay?” Paige says.
He laughs. “About this? Yeah. I think I actually am.”
It still takes another few minutes of slightly stilted conversation for them to hug, though. Christine jumps in first, kicking off her boots so they’re very nearly the same height, and whispers to him as they embrace, “Welcome to Dorley, Stef. And I don’t mean that the way Bea means it, all loaded with obligation and shit. I just mean, you’re our Sister now—” the capital letter seems to slip in via a slight emphasis, “—and that means we’re your family, and you’re ours. We’ll help you with anything you need. No matter how small.”
He’s only just managed to thank her when Paige joins them. She’s unable to mitigate her height, instead angling herself so she doesn’t shove Stefan’s face into her chest, and says, “Nice to finally meet you,” to him as they part.
“God,” Christine says, putting her feet up on Paige, who pouts and rearranges them for greater comfort, “it’s weird being back in these rooms. I did not have a good time in here.”
“She didn’t,” Paige says to Stefan, shaking her head. “She said the rudest things to poor Indira.”
“It’s still strange,” Stefan says, “thinking of you two, down here, with everything still to come. And then thinking about how it’s all still to come for them, too.” He waves a hand at the door.
“How are you feeling about that?” Christine says.
Stefan shrugs. “I hate it. I really hate it. But, short of an upstairs coup that takes Beatrice out of action — no sign of that, I take it?” Two heads shake in unison. “Damn. So, yeah, I know it’s going to happen. And I know what’s going to happen. So, do I help them deal with it or not? Morally, I don’t think I have a choice.”
“And it’s what Aunt Bea wants from you,” Paige says.
“She doesn’t have to do what Bea says,” Christine says. “You don’t,” she adds, looking back at Stefan. “Everyone knows about you now. I think if she tried to wash out an actual trans girl she really would get deposed. Besides, she likes you. I think she doesn’t know exactly what to do with you, and when she came down to see you that night she was still kind of flailing, but she likes you.”
“Really?” he says.
“In addition to your general novelty, you know who you are, Stef, and what you want, and you’re in a position to help the people in your intake. That’s a huge leg-up! That’s, like, a good thirty percent of what she tries to drum into us once we get into the second year and we’re finally mostly over the whole, ‘argh, my precious balls!’ thing.” She covers her groin with a protective hand.
“Actually, that’s something I want to know: how do I help them with that? I can’t see Aaron reacting well to the orchi.”
“He won’t,” Paige says. “None of us wanted it at the time, except for Vicky.”
“The best thing you can do,” Christine says, “is reassure him — all of them — that there’s still a future. You don’t need nuts to have a nice life.”
“Put that on a mug,” Paige says.
“They can all even still have kids. As for the immediate aftermath,” Christine adds, frowning, “everyone’s different. Some people shut down. Others become violent.”
“What did you do?” Stefan says. “If it’s okay to ask.”
“It’s fine. I shut down for a while. Paige and Vicky helped me through it. In a way, it was the start of me. A thing you need to understand, Stef, about boys, about cis boys—”
“Nominally cis boys,” Paige interjects.
“—is that losing their testicles is a violation so profound it can prompt some serious soul-searching. It’s a shock to the system like no other. For me, it made it easier to discard the person I used to be.”
“I’d already done that,” Paige says. Like Christine, she’s wearing a slight frown, expressed in the tiniest pinch between her eyebrows. “It didn’t mean I wanted the orchi, but I was prepared for it, when it came.”
“When she worked out what was going to be done to us,” Christine says, “long before the big snip, she went very quiet, and stayed that way for a while. And, yes, she was quiet before, unless we were alone together — me, her, and Vick — but she sort of retreated into her own brain. When she came back out, it was like she’d cleared the deck, got herself ready for anything.”
Unexpectedly, Paige plants a quick kiss on Christine’s temple, pulling away before a giggling Christine can respond, and holding her at bay as she says to Stefan, “I worked it all out, once we started developing our new secondary sex characteristics. The logical next steps. The likelihood of escape. Weighed next to how much I’d liked my life up to that point — not that much — it made sense to acquiesce. Quite a relief, actually. To stop lashing out because people didn’t understand me. To discard my armour, and forge the new tools I needed to live the new life I was being encouraged to accept.”
“Strength in survival,” Stefan says, nodding.
“Precisely,” Paige says. “And, besides, I’d finally found someone who understood me. I’d do anything to stay by her side.” She lets go of Christine, who overbalances for a second and then vengefully kisses Paige on the lips before returning to something like an ordinary sitting position. “It took coming down here for me to feel seen for the first time.” Christine loops an arm around her waist, and Paige continues, “I never used to think of other people as properly real. Perhaps because none of them treated me like I was real. Christine did. From our first week together.”
Stefan’s eyes flick to Christine. “I’m glad you have each other, then,” he says, squashing his jealousy, over their beauty as well as their connection, as firmly as he can.
“Me, too,” Christine says.
They talk for a while longer, mostly covering the practical side of transition. Stefan’s never taken the opportunity to talk, face-to-face, about what he can expect from transition with other trans women before — or whatever; close enough — and he can’t conceal his fascination when they reveal they’ve both had bottom surgery.
“Of course it feels like a part of me,” Christine says, as he leans in, rapt. “Because it is. There’s nothing there I didn’t already have, it’s just… rearranged.” She smiles wistfully. “When it was first healing up, when I was still getting used to it, I remember finding a patch of darker skin on my… uh, on me, and experiencing this sudden swelling of joy, of completeness, because I remembered exactly where that patch of skin used to be, and it was like, oh, yeah, it’s there now. A comforting bit of continuity. And, yes, for a while I got these sensations, like itching or whatever, and it seemed like they were coming from something I, um, didn’t have any more, but that didn’t take long to stop. Those feelings relocate quite quickly. Now it just feels like a part of me, like I’ve had it all along.”
“It’s warm and fuzzy,” Paige says, and grins her toothy grin.
Later, as Christine is scrolling through the unlocked movies and TV shows on the network, looking for something they can watch together that’s not on the approved list for the basement’s girls-to-be, and Paige is on her phone, asking one of the duty girls to send some popcorn down in the dumbwaiter, Aaron starts banging on Stefan’s door. He knows it’s Aaron without asking; it’s not that he has a special knock, but he’s the only one who doesn’t stop knocking until Stefan consents to open the door. He doesn’t open up this time, though, just waves the girls into silence and says, through the door, “Yes?”
“Uh,” Aaron says, muffled, “can I come in?”
“It’s late, Aaron,” Stefan says. “Can we talk about whatever it is in the morning?”
Behind him, Paige whispers, “Did you forget to put the other rooms in lockdown?”
Christine says, “I didn’t forget; it just seemed like overkill.”
“Oh, right,” Aaron says, “is ‘it’s late’ code for ‘I’m finally masturbating’? Good for you, Stef.”
Stefan’s glad he’s facing away from Christine and Paige, so they can’t see him blush.
“No!” Stefan says, louder than he intends. Christine laughs; Paige shushes her.
“Look, uh,” Aaron says, “I wanted to talk to you about that, actually.”
“What a surprise.”
“No, I mean, really. I’m serious. Are you, uh, can you, um—”
“Out with it, Aaron.”
“Can you get it up? Dick-wise, I mean.”
“I really haven’t tried.”
“Okay. Could you maybe try for me?”
“For you?”
“Yes. Because I can’t, is the thing. For a good few days, now. It’s not happening. Doesn’t matter what or, uh, who I think about. Doesn’t matter if I stroke it or rub it or fucking sing to it. It doesn’t do anything any more. I try all my best moves, and all my worst ones, too, and no matter what, the snake won’t come out of the basket.”
“In your metaphor, you’re a basket?”
“What? Maybe? Does it matter?”
“I’m just trying to fully understand the picture you’re painting, Aaron.”
“Fine. I get it. You’re tired. You’re being a bitch. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Sleep well, Stef.”
“You too.”
It’s just about possible to hear Aaron’s door opening again, and when it closes Stefan leans gratefully against the wall. On the bed, Christine is only barely holding in a serious attack of the giggles.
“You see what I have to put up with?” he says.
2019 November 22
Friday
It’s been a week since Aaron formally informed Stefan of his inability to maintain an erection, a momentous enough event that Aaron’s started dividing time into BF and AF (Before Floppy and After Floppy), but nothing much else has changed. Aaron’s been dwelling overmuch on his erectile difficulties — “I told Maria and she laughed and said it was just the surroundings getting to me, and yeah, okay, that’s definitely true, but I feel like my balls are like one of those baseball pitching machines, and it’s broken, and it just keeps racking up and racking up and it’s starting to shake with how overloaded it is and one of these days it’s going to explode and shower a small American town with baseballs.” — so to distract him they’ve been watching progressively sappier movies; they’ve seen The Princess Switch three times now, and have started to develop some esoteric theories about the genetics of it.
Will’s continued to agitate, and he’s started talking to Raph and Ollie, which Stefan would be more concerned about if he hadn’t also relented and started talking to him and Aaron again, too. It’d be nice to imagine them all getting along, or at least never attacking one another again, and Adam’s been happy to run interference on Will’s worst days.
From Saturday to Wednesday, almost everyone had a cold, which dampened Will’s revolutionary fervour somewhat and reduced the common room to a chorus of dull sniffles and slurps as they drank hot lemon and watched TV from under the blankets Maria eventually agreed to let them drag in from their bedrooms.
Aaron’s still spending most evenings in Stefan’s room until very late, but tonight he’s decided, the way he sometimes does, to get an early night. Stefan’s under no illusions about what he does — or tries to do — alone in his room, and prefers not to think about it if he can avoid it. He settles down instead for an evening of internet, catching up on what’s been happening in the outside world since he started living mostly underneath it, and he’s just started to wonder whether or not he should ask Pippa, Paige, Christine or Abby down — maybe see if he can finally meet the famous Indira — when Aaron’s repetitive knocking starts shaking his door.
Aaron’s got Stefan’s hoodie, the one he borrowed and never returned, wrapped tight around his body, and he’s twisting his hands around each other again. Stefan stands aside and the boy immediately enters and starts talking as soon as the door closes, pacing back and forth on the carpet.
“So, please stop me if this is too much information, because I’ve been made aware that generally I just, you know, say stuff, and that sometimes that stuff is a lot for people to really take in, and Maria especially has told me she experiences conversations with me the same way someone standing in a river experiences water, but, anyway, the thing is, I was undressing, getting ready for bed and, you know, maybe thinking about having another go at a cheeky wank, see if I can really blow the doors off, but before I could even try I took off my t-shirt and, so, the thing is, and I don’t care what you said about this before because my chest has definitely been feeling a little puffy lately, and, anyway, long story short, I touched my nipple and I came in my pants.” He stops pacing and faces Stefan, flushed and wide-eyed. “Thoughts?”
Notes:
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 17: Afterglow
Notes:
Content warnings: violence, mention of cancer (no-one has it)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 November 22
Friday
“You just—”
“I touched my nipple and I came in my pants,” Aaron repeats. “Simple concept, Stef! Oh yeah, and it’s messed up! It’s wrong and very, very strange. Men’s nipples aren’t supposed to do that! I’ve thought back through the handful of girl-on-guy videos I’ve seen and every TV show where the attractive Americans rub together and also my extensive history of touching myself in every possible place a human male can touch himself and I can’t come up with any counterexamples. My nipples are supposed to be decorative. Non-functional! They’re like a pair of ornate vases on either side of my own personal mantelpiece, too small to keep anything in, too attractive to ignore, just, sort of, you know, present. And, after I finished having a fun little panic attack, I came up with a very short list of possible causes. You ready?” He starts pointing in the air at an imaginary chalkboard. “One: It’s the Goserelin implant. I know, I know, you’ve pooh-poohed this idea a thousand times already but I’m really squishy under here, Stef.” With the hand that isn’t pointing he fondles his chest and then withdraws it like he’s just suffered an electric shock. “In a way I never was before! And it’s not just regular body fat, either, because I did comparison squeezes on my arse and on my chest and after I nearly passed out I came to the conclusion that they are not the same. And the only things about my life that’ve changed are getting dragged down here and getting the implant, so unless men spontaneously grow little tiny titties to get through the harsh sunless Scandinavian winters, like a camel, kinda, then it’s got to be that in the absence of testosterone my body’s decided, oh, whoops, we need hormones to live, let’s make some, and flipped a coin and picked the wrong one.”
“I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen.”
“Really? You’re pretty sure? Because it’s only the integrity of my chest on the line, here, Stef. Okay, let’s go to option two.” Aaron moves his pointing hand. “Ball cancer. That’s got to be it, right? I’ve got fucking ball cancer. It makes you grow full-on tits — and I know you have a low opinion of Fight Club but it’s basically a documentary where this is concerned, and since I don’t have any other ideas I’m going to believe it with both sides of my sore and puffy chest — so if it’s not the implant, it’s ball cancer! Oh, God, Stef, I’ve got ball cancer. Cancer of the balls, Stef! Are they going to have to cut them off?”
“Aaron!”
“Yes?”
“You do not have ball cancer.”
“Then what is this, Stef?”
“To be clear: you brushed against your chest and just immediately came?”
“Yes!”
“Really? Immediately?”
“Well…”
“Aaron.”
He closes his eyes and leans against the desk, waking the computer when he sits on the keyboard. On the screen, the text editor starts filling up with consonants. “Don’t make me say it,” he says. “It’s embarrassing even for me.”
Stefan, aware that Aaron is compelled to fill silences with information about his erogenous zones even when it isn’t pertinent to the topic at hand, sits down on the end of the bed, cross-legged, hands in his lap, looks up, and waits. After a moment, to force the issue, he raises an eyebrow.
“Fine,” Aaron says. “Fine!” He bounces back up off the desk and into a pace that takes him in wobbly circles through the small portion of space between the desk, the bed, the vanity and the door. “Yes, my hand brushed against them and, yes, it felt good, but that’s been a thing for a while. It didn’t immediately Jackson Pollock my boxers. What’s changed is that this time, it felt better than good. It felt… really, really good. It felt… Listen, Stef, because this is important, and I think it qualifies as mitigating circumstances, okay? Like when you miss an essay deadline and you fill out the little form and you provide the evidence and you have a little cry and they look at you all sympathetic and tell you, ‘It’s not your fault’? Well, that’s now, because I’m telling you, it felt so good. ‘Good’ is actually underselling it. ‘Great’ is underselling it. How can I put this…?” He stops pacing and leans against the desk again. “You know how, when you wank, and when you do it right, when you don’t just go at your prick like a jackhammer because you have nought point eight seconds to have an orgasm before one of the other boys comes into the dorm and starts hinting about how you can finish him, too, when you really spend the time, when you make love to your dick, and the tip just keeps getting more and more sensitive, especially if you keep stepping back from the, you know, the critical moment, until eventually it’s like you’ve got your big toe on a garden hose and you can feel the pressure building up and all it would take is for a pretty girl to blow gently on it and you’d have no choice but to let go and ruin the neighbours’ barbecue?” Stefan, who only touches himself to keep clean and, occasionally, to provide sperm samples for kidnappers, nods. Aaron returns to pacing. “Well, if we call that heretofore unbeatable sensation a ten and the starting position a zero, then just touching my nips when I’m in the right kind of mood has slowly been climbing from a two to a six. And that’s a straight up six, no prep work, no porn, just some thoughts I’m maybe a little uncomfortable about, and, you know, if your body starts handing you sixes for doing basically nothing then you owe it to yourself to see where things are going, right? Especially if the traditional body part for handling hot sweaty nice feelings has been taking a vacation in the land of one-point-five. I’m absolutely not questioning where that six is coming from, not in the moment, anyway, because I’m too busy taking that six out to dinner, showing her a good time and a bottle of wine, seeing if I can’t get her up to a seven or an eight, so obviously I go in for another stroke, you know? It would be a crime not to! Am I drawing a clear enough picture for you?”
“Yeah. Vivid.”
“So I immediately drop my trousers,” Aaron continues, miming but not reproducing the action, “because I’m starting to feel a little nasty downstairs, for the first time in a while, but when I go to drop my boxers as well, I realise that what’s going on down there is fine but it’s got nothing on what’s happening at balcony-level so I think, fuck it, although being honest I’m not really thinking anything coherent at that point because the finger I’ve got walking around upstairs is giving me sevens and eights while my dick is stuck on failing grades so I just go for it, and before I know it I’m lying on my back with both hands on my chest playing Spirograph with my nipples and that’s basically the point where I’m wondering if my chest has always been quite this soft and bouncy but I don’t care because I’m eighting, nining and I’m starting to ten and, God, Stef, I’m feeling warm all over, and that’s completely new and kind of exciting, and eventually when it finally happens, when I let go and, you know, flood my sunken cavern, I’m at a fucking eleven and it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” There’s a hint of hysteria to Aaron’s laugh. “I mean I normally come like an electric guitar riff, you know? It’s loud and it’s sort of complex and it’s really high-pitched but it’s also quick. Like, it’s over, and the echoes are nice, but that’s it. Sometimes I wonder afterwards why I even bother. Sometimes they even feel like discharging a chore my body’s handed to me because I happened to see a bread roll that looks like a sexy bottom and it turned me on. But this? This was like, man, I don’t know. Like I’m surfing a huge wave with full orchestral backup and one of those heat patches strapped to my back, and the ocean keeps throwing me around and the strings are getting louder and the heat is spreading out all through me and it just keeps going and until eventually I’m riding a wave a hundred metres high and when I finally hit the beach I destroy every little striped hut and hot dog stand and give all the sunbathers a nasty surprise. It was a life-changing orgasm, Stef. A fucking religious experience. And the afterglow, oh, God, the afterglow. I bask in it and I bask in it and I bask in it, until I finally start coming down, and then, suddenly, I remember exactly how I got there.” He pauses for a second before returning to his anxious circling. “I’m scared. I’m fucking scared, because something’s happening to me and either they’re doing it to me and won’t say why or my body’s doing it to itself, and I don’t know if it’s going to stop. And it’s all I can think about! This is not normal, Stef!”
Well.
Fuck.
He knows how this is supposed to go: he’s to act to support the sponsors, and for most intakes the sponsors just pretend nothing’s happening until it becomes impossible to deny it any longer. Christine said that in her year they worked it out early, thanks to that girl Vicky, who caught on and immediately started evangelising girlhood to the rest of them; a potential option, if Stefan wants to play Vicky’s role, but he’d have to clear it with someone first. He’s also got the impression that Christine’s intake lacked a Declan or a Will, that it was practically wall-to-wall introverts who’d been swept up by Dorley for violence Christine called social rather than physical. Stefan imagines trying to sell Will on the positives of growing breasts; it doesn’t end well.
Time to deny everything, then.
“Aaron,” he says, hoping the slight wobble in his voice isn’t audible. “You need to take a breath.”
“Oh, I took a breath,” Aaron says. “I took several.” He demonstrates, closing his eyes, breathing heavily and moaning softly for a few moments. “It was quite sexy, actually, Stef, you should have seen—” and then he cuts himself off, like his own mouth has run away from him, like he forgot for a moment that he should be panicking.
“Sit.” Stefan pats the mattress.
“Sit?” Aaron asks, tilting his head.
“You’re catastrophising,” Stefan says. “You need to calm down.” He frowns, wonders why that ordinary phrase sounds so strange, and it takes a second for it to hit him: Pippa’s bloody playlists. And Christine’s, too. This whole house has a Taylor Swift problem. Aaron’s still looking at him, quivering with the energy walking in circles has thus far failed to release, so he adds, “You’re not going to solve anything pacing around, talking without thinking.”
“But that’s my whole thing,” Aaron says with a weak grin.
Stefan ignores the joke. He grabs Aaron by the wrist and yanks him down onto the bed. The boy bounces, collides with Stefan’s shoulder and rights himself by grabbing, with various hands, the bedframe and Stefan.
“Sit,” Stefan says.
“Jesus,” Aaron remarks, twitching his hand away from Stefan’s thigh and cradling it in the crook of his arm like a wounded animal. “I thought that was a suggestion, not a fucking command.”
“You were making me dizzy, going round and round.”
“Yeah, sorry, but question, Stef: why am I the only one who’s panicking?”
“You’re not,” Stefan says with an exaggerated shrug. “Will is. You’ve seen him on his doomer soapbox.”
“Yeah, and the only reason I haven’t joined him is you, and your insistence that there’s a way out of here that isn’t, you know, horizontal.”
“Look.” Stefan rearranges himself, hopping backwards on the bed so he can twist to face Aaron, and gauge his reaction in real time. “This stage, the running around like headless chickens stage? It’s clearly part of it. They want you to panic.” This is, perhaps, pulling back the curtain a little too much, but if he dresses it up as speculation, that’s probably fine. “We’re repenting of our sins, remember? Got to spend a little time in hell for it to really stick.”
“You think?”
“I mean, they could just be planning to take us all out back and shoot us one by one, but this is a very spendy setup just for that. They want something from us; this is part of how they get it.”
“Okay,” Aaron says, breathing out slowly and matching the action with his hands, the way Stefan’s come to learn he does when he’s trying to calm himself. “Okay,” he continues, after a few more shallow breaths, “but the chest thing, Stef. My chest; yours. You said your chest was sensitive the other day. Have you, uh, tried to, you know, touch them? Your nipples?”
“No.”
“You want me to try?”
“No.”
“So. What about our mutual chests? What are you going to say when you start having surprise orgasms? When you start feeling uncomfortably fleshy? Hell—” he laughs briefly, “—what am I going to say when you come panicking about it to me?” Aaron switches to a deeper voice. “‘Son, you’re finally becoming a man. This is just what that’s like. The men in our family are very chesty.’ Or—” he switches to falsetto, “—‘Darling, you’re a woman now, and your body is changing. Don’t worry about that blood in your knickers.’” He coughs, suddenly embarrassed. “What is there that makes this better?”
Stefan blinks, remembering something he stumbled upon while exploring the limits of his new access to the internet (he can go almost anywhere online, but he can’t post, which is fine by him because he never did). An excuse good enough to buy a little more time. Another deception, but whatever; you can get used to any cruelty with repetition. “Gynecomastia,” he says.
“What. The fuck. Is gynecomastia?”
“It’s the not-actually-that-rare phenomenon where adolescent boys grow—”
“I’m twenty-one! This is a pretty fucking late adolescence!”
“I don’t mean that’s what we have,” Stefan says, rolling his eyes, over-acting his exasperation. “I mean, it’s common. Boys growing small, uh…” He mimes a pair of invisible breasts on his own chest, and eats the anxiety spike: it’s dangerously close to telling the truth about himself, but if he’s doing this to Aaron he deserves to feel bad about it.
“So?”
“So, it’s manageable! It goes away as they grow up. As puberty takes hold.” Stefan pauses for effect. “It goes away with testosterone.” He doesn’t actually know this for sure — he didn’t exactly read the page in detail — but how the hell is Aaron going to check his facts? It might as well be true. “And you know what’s going to happen when we leave? When the last Goserelin implant just dissolves or washes out with our pee or whatever?”
It takes Aaron a second to get it, but he does. “You really think it’ll just… go away when we get out of here?” Is Stefan imagining a look of slight disappointment on him? Yeah, he definitely is. Wishful thinking, Stef; it’d be so convenient to think of one of the boys down here as being a little bit like him. Nicer still if it were Aaron. But no: he’s the only girl in a prison that will eventually be full of unwilling women, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
It surprised Stefan to realise, late one night, face buried in his pillow and body covered up with sheets so no-one could possibly see or hear him, that if it was only his future on the line he’d give it up in a heartbeat if it meant Aaron, at least, wouldn’t have to be mutilated. But it’s clear that nothing he can do can save any of them. He could tell the truth and get washed out himself, or he can keep participating in the lies; neither choice gets Aaron out of here intact.
Eye on the prize, Stefan, and the prize is survival. For everyone.
“Yeah, it’ll go away,” he says, upbeat and hopeful.
Faking it, anyway.
2019 November 25
Monday
They haven’t spent much time alone together since their conversation about Aaron’s inopportune orgasm, so the knocking at Stefan’s door is a surprise. They haven’t even showered together, and when he opens the door to him, it shows: Aaron’s hair looks lifeless, like he rubbed in the conditioner with one hand and couldn’t massage it properly. But he’s needed space to reflect, and Stefan’s opted to give it to him, staying out of his way, keeping to light conversation at meals and in the common room and going back to his room alone, confident that if Aaron really needs him, he’ll show up again, panicking and grasping some part of his body, like usual.
Aaron’s not panicking tonight, though. He looks calm, his face set in its usual resting smirk.
Stefan steps aside to let him in, and Aaron sidles in. Rather than pace or sit on the bed or lean on the desk, he arranges himself on the floor, looking up. He seems calm, and almost still, for Aaron. He’s dressed the way he usually does the last few days: in the larger t-shirts he’s borrowed from Stefan, which don’t chafe quite so much.
“Hey,” he says, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I wanted to apologise.”
Stefan shoves the chair aside and sits on the floor facing him. If he’s going to apologise — if this is going to be one of those conversations — he wants them to be level, neither of them looking up or down. “What for?”
Aaron’s concentrating on a spot on the rug. “I haven’t been around. And we haven’t really talked. I just kind of unloaded on you and then went quiet.”
“It’s fine, really. I thought you might need some time to think. This place can get to you.”
“Never seems to get to— Oh, yeah.” Aaron’s clearly remembered the time, weeks ago, that Stefan had a serious try at slaking his skin off in the showers. The boy shudders, and Stefan has a traitorous thought: considered cynically, hurting himself in so relatively public a fashion was a smart move, given that it’s cemented him among the boys as someone who’s already had his breakdown. “Sorry. We don’t really talk about that, either. The shower thing. How have you been doing, since then?”
“Good.” A lie, and a particularly unpleasant one. “I guess I’ve realised that, well, I’m stuck down here. The worst has already happened.”
“I guess. No more evil nurses yet, anyway.”
“Fingers crossed. How have you been, Aaron? If we’re talking about the deep stuff again.”
The boy shrugs. “Well, Stefan, I’m growing tits.”
Stefan makes a show of squinting. “Not really big enough to call tits, surely?”
“Hey!” Aaron protests, holding his hands up to his chest. “My body, my rules!”
“And how do you feel about your—” Stefan leans forward, pretending to inspect him, “—magnificent jugs?”
He’s trying to keep the tone light, and either Aaron’s willing to be persuaded by it or he really is more sanguine than Stefan expected. “I thought about it,” Aaron says. “A lot. About what you said, about teenagers with gynecomastia, and how it goes away during puberty. And then I thought, what if it doesn’t? What if we’re past puberty so it doesn’t work like that, even when the testosterone comes back?”
“Aaron—”
“No, wait.” Aaron holds up a finger. “And then I thought, what about trans men? What do they do?”
“Pretty sure they bind, and eventually get them removed.”
Aaron claps his hands. “There it is! That’s what I thought! So that’s my, I guess, worst-case scenario here. Yours, too. Get them removed.”
“Like a trans man?”
“Sure. Why not? If it works for them, it’ll work for me. And that’s only if it gets bad enough. If it’s like you said, that they’ll go away on their own… that’s fine, too. Hah!” Aaron looks up at the ceiling, having either guessed or been told there are cameras in the rooms, and grins. “You wanted me to panic?” he says, to the ceiling. “Guess what? Not panicking any more.” He looks back down at Stefan, energised. “We’ve got this place all figured out. And, you know—” he looks away again, trying to hide his grin, “—in the meantime, since I’m stuck with, you know, whatever’s going on under my t-shirt, I might as well take advantage.”
It takes Stefan a moment. “You’ve been touching them again, haven’t you?”
“Non-stop,” Aaron says.
“Oh my God.”
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In your pants.”
Stefan hits him. “You dick! All this time you’ve been hiding away in your room, I thought you were fucking depressed or something!”
“I was! I was really, genuinely depressed! Just, you know, in between visits to the lemonade factory.”
Stefan leans back on his hands, finding it difficult, between Aaron’s dirty grin and the mental image of his last few nights, to keep his composure. “I can’t believe you, Aaron,” he says, stifling a giggle.
“Dude, I’m growing tits! What do you want from me?”
2019 November 27
Wednesday
“This is it,” Maria says. “If the shit’s going to hit the fan any day, it’s going to hit it today. And you all know what that means: Edy, Monica, Jane, Harmony, Ella, Tabby, you’ve all gone at least one round with this. And Pippa, well, I’m sure you remember what it was like. Christine: you’re in reserve.”
Pippa, sitting serious on one of the briefing room stools with her clipboard and phone out on the table in front of her, nods and worries at her lip. Christine, frowning, worries at her coffee instead. She’s chosen not to comment on the mug she’s been given, which is decorated in a faded pink with an illustration of a woman in silhouette floating from an umbrella above the words, in embossed and nearly rubbed-off cursive, Super Femmy, Fabby Lipstick, Castrate the Atrocious! The thing’s got to be over a decade old, and thus dates Dorley’s appalling sense of humour to at the very least some time before Christine’s first puberty.
Maria’s called the sponsors down to the briefing room on the first-floor basement, and ignored much grumbling and slurping from novelty mugs before she dropped the bombshell: something’s probably going to happen today. And even Christine, who’s never been involved in any official capacity before and whose intake was, to hear the other sponsors bitch at Indira about it, unusually relaxed — not that it had felt that way at the time — can guess what that means: one of the boys has worked it out. Some of it, anyway.
Christine’s here because, even though she still hasn’t properly accepted Bea’s job offer — to fill a new role that’s a cross between Head of Network Security and Helper Monkey — she’s been getting roped into more and more sponsor-aligned work. Her fault, really. She’s been spending evening after evening down in the security room with laptops hooked up, patching the holes she used to exploit, which has meant a lot of time staring into space or scrolling on her phone or chatting with friends while she waits for code to compile or archive searches to complete. Maria was always going to notice. Roles around here tend to expand to fill the space available, and the devil always finds work for idle hands.
She’s glad to be sitting with Pippa, though. There’s still tension between them, but better her than the other sponsors, whose cynicism Christine finds wearing after a while. The youngest one is Indira’s age but lacks Dira’s charming tendency to give Christine enough rope to hang herself with and then catch her before she falls, and the rest are, well, everything Christine expects from sponsors. She likes them as people, mostly, but at work they expect both confidence and detachment, and while they don’t actually criticise her for her occasional squeamishness, they always seem dishearteningly surprised by it. Pippa, for all that she has yet to forgive her, shares with her the oil-and-water beliefs that, yes, Dorley’s work can and will help these boys, and that, yes, it’s still really, really awful.
It’d be nicer still if Paige were here, but Paige has classes today and, occasional visits to Stef aside, refuses point-blank to get involved. She said so, loudly, in the middle of the dining hall, and seemed quite irritated when Harmony and a couple of the other sponsors made light fun of her principled objection.
“How many of them have developed?” Monica asks, looking up from her clipboard. Without Declan and in addition to her duties as the basement’s lecturer on Feminism 101, she’s moved into something approximating Indira’s current role, maintaining a watch on all sponsors and subjects. Christine doesn’t know her that well yet, but Pippa checks in with her a couple of times a week and says she’s guarded but nice enough. Groups of sponsors that work well together tend to keep working together, and cliques like that can be hard to break into.
“Aaron, Adam and Stef,” Maria says. “Yes, I know,” she adds, to a murmured chorus of mild surprise, “that’s a lot at such an early stage. Adam’s the most recent. We’re talking only tiny bumps, here; barely Tanner 2. Stef’s been wearing hoodies to hide her own development and protect herself from accidents and knocks, and she’s talked Aaron out of panicking about it — I swear, at this point that boy would jump off a cliff if she asked him to — and managed to persuade him to keep it between the two of them. Well, mostly between the two of them.” She sighs. “Aaron asked me for a bra yesterday.”
“Um, breakthrough?” Jane says.
“No,” Maria replies, sounding tired. “No. He’s just being a little shit.”
“Poor Maria,” Edy says, patting her on the back.
“So, what’s so special about today?” Monica says. “None of those three are rabble-rousers.”
Maria nods at Christine, who hits the play button on her phone. The main screen in the briefing room comes on, showing Will’s room.
“Last night,” Maria says, gesturing at the screen, “Adam went to see William. Now that, in itself, is not unusual; they’ve been talking to each other about their sensitive chests and the other little changes most of the boys have noticed. Quietly, in private, the way it normally goes with bonded pairs. They’ve come to similar conclusions to the ones Stef encouraged in Aaron: it’s just the Goserelin. William’s history’s helped us here. He’s always been very firm that the Goserelin was going to have some kind of an effect on them, drawing on both his experiences with his father and his, uh, didactic nature when it comes to what I believe his fellow Redditors would term, ‘Science, bitch’.” Her finger-quotes are almost as arch as her tone. “It doesn’t mean that he’s been enjoying the experience, but so far it hasn’t energised him enough to become a topic for his little speeches.”
“Except for the time Aaron needled him about his reduced muscle mass,” Monica points out.
Will’s been soapboxing to the whole common room, on themes of injustice, disproportionate punishment, the need for a robust corrections system that nevertheless does not include unexpected kidnapping rings operating out of innocent-looking dormitories, and so on. The unpleasant fate of Declan, which initially worried Will into a blessed near-silence, eventually had him standing by the TV, shouting over the reality shows until one of the sponsors either told him to shut up — which tended only to encourage him — or consented to hit the mute button. Tabby dragged him back to his room a couple of times to give everyone some relief but general agreement’s been that dumping him in a cell just for being loud would set an unfortunate precedent. Mostly they’ve been letting him get it out of his system.
“Adam asked Will to feel his chest,” Edy says, “and Will very nearly put two and two together on the spot.”
“Now he’s had a chance to sleep on it,” Tabby says, “he’ll almost definitely have come up with something close enough to the truth.”
“As his sponsor,” Maria asks, “what’s your guess on his reaction?”
Tabby shrugs. “His response to the Goserelin’s mostly been to yell a lot, but he’s a very… masculine individual. To a point of overcompensation, in my opinion. Certainly he’s already sensitive about his muscle loss, although he’s attributed it fifty/fifty to the Goserelin and to the lack of exercise equipment. Confirmation that Adam’s growing breasts? The expectation that he will, too? He might hurt himself; he might even try to hurt someone else. It could be bad.”
“Fantastic,” Harmony says. “Another time-bomb boy.”
“Yeah,” Ella says, poking her. “He could be worse than you were.”
“Ladies,” Maria says, “try to remember, we wouldn’t have taken him in if we didn’t believe he was worth helping. So let’s keep an eye out and try and save him from himself, okay? Any questions?”
As the others talk, Pippa wakes her phone and taps the shortcut to the cameras in Stef’s room. She keeps them out of active monitoring, normally, just spooling straight to disk — one of the privileges of being an acknowledged and actualised woman is a slightly higher degree of privacy — but with activation in easy reach, in case of emergency. Christine can see the screen and shares Pippa’s relief to see Stef alone and still in bed and thus, for now, safe. Pippa taps out a message to her, summarising the briefing, and they both get a giggle out of Stef’s disgruntled reaction to her PC waking up and playing the alert sound over and over.
Stef stops flipping the bird at the camera when she starts reading Pippa’s message. When she’s done she looks up at the ceiling, smiles — at the wrong camera; Pippa taps the screen a couple more times to clip that so she can tease her about it later — and starts collecting up her things for her morning shower, pausing to check under her bed for her pocket taser, test its charge, and slip it into the lining of the hoodie hung up on the wardrobe door.
Last resort, Pippa said when she handed it over. Christine hopes Stef remembers that.
* * *
Pippa meets Stefan’s eyes as he passes her in the corridor on the way to the dining room. She’s asking if he’s okay; in response, he shrugs. It’s a complicated question, and not one he feels up to answering.
Aaron’s not at the table yet, but the others are. Adam’s on his own at the end of the table he usually shares with Will, and a quick glance shows why: Will’s eating with Raph and Ollie, hunched in a conspiratorial circle, one or other of them occasionally glancing around to make sure they’re not overheard. Stefan doesn’t know what they could possibly be discussing that would have any hope of achieving anything, but checks the weight of his hoodie against his hip anyway, feeling for the little taser. He’s practised, and he can pull it from its slightly awkward inside pocket and have it ready in about two seconds. He hasn’t actually used it yet, but he’s fairly confident he knows which end is which.
He sits next to Adam, because the boy looks lost without Will, and they share what he hopes is a companionable silence. He still feels inhibited from talking to Adam a lot of the time; especially today. Maybe it’s the tension in the air. Maybe it’s the boy’s tendency to insert religious metaphors into longer conversations. Maybe it’s because every word out of Stefan’s mouth lately makes him feel like a liar.
Appropriate: he is a liar.
Aaron slumps into the chair next to Stefan and starts pouring porridge, managing a decent ratio of oats in the bowl to oats on the table considering how tired he looks. When he’s done he sits back and raises an arm; Edy, Adam’s sponsor, steps over from the little cart parked by the door and pours out hot milk from a thermos. It’s the compromise they struck after everyone got sick of the Weetabix: they can choose porridge some days, but only if a sponsor keeps control of the hot milk and Aaron promises never to summon them with an imperious snap of his fingers or ever again refer to them as his ‘mummy milkers’.
They eat in near silence, interrupted only by the occasional exclamation from Will’s sibilant huddle and Martin slouching in to conduct his daily Weetabix penance.
“Hey, Stef,” Aaron whispers.
“Yeah?”
“Does it feel weird today, or is it just me?”
Stefan makes a show of looking around, taking in the nervous sponsors, a downcast Adam, and the three irritated faces on the other side of the room.
“It’s not just you,” he says.
“Any idea what’s going on?”
“Nope.”
“You think Will’s got…” Aaron trails off, but gestures with his elbow towards Stefan’s chest.
There doesn’t seem much point in denying the possibility. “Maybe,” Stefan says.
“You, too?” Adam hisses, grabbing on to Stefan’s sleeve and pulling it; the first physical contact they’ve ever had that Stefan himself didn’t initiate.
Stefan shrugs. “I’ve been a little swollen,” he whispers, just loud enough to be heard from the other side of the room. “I think it’s something like gynecomastia, from the Goserelin.” Time to see if the lie works twice.
“What’s that?” Adam asks.
“Breast-like swelling,” Aaron says, pointing at Adam’s chest with his spoon. “Happens to up to seventy percent of adolescent boys at some point or another in their development. Goes away on its own during puberty in seventy-five percent of cases. Occasionally caused by other factors. There are options for removal, if necessary.” He picks up on Stefan’s raised eyebrow. “What? I can’t do the reading? I asked Maria to get me a screen grab of the Wikipedia page.”
“It goes away?”
“Yes.”
“None of you know shit,” Will says, raising his voice and glaring at the three of them. He keeps eye contact with Aaron for a moment before returning to his huddle, shaking his head and muttering, “Gynecomastia…”
Well. It almost worked. Edy, still guarding the hot milk, gives Stefan a half-smile when none of the others are looking.
* * *
Will clearly planned it carefully.
The sponsors’ shift changes have never been particularly timely, a consequence, Pippa says, of Dorley’s staffing shortage, and the fact that almost every sponsor has responsibilities elsewhere: their studies, for the younger girls and some of the postgrads, and actual honest-to-goodness part-time jobs, for Maria and some of the other older ones. Sometimes sponsors are late and sometimes they are distracted, especially if it’s been hours since a briefing that warned of potential problems that, despite a little tension at breakfast, have yet to emerge. The most professional people in Dorley’s employ, according to Abby, are the contracted PMC guys, and they spend ninety-nine-plus-percent of their time goofing off in the basement one break room, isolated from the actuality of Dorley’s work by air gapping and a PlayStation 4. To them, Dorley’s just one of a number of secretive assignments with eccentric security requirements, but as contracts go it’s quite sought after as it offers the most amount of free time on the job to, for example, play video games.
After breakfast they trooped into the common room, subdued and in two groups: Will, Raph and Ollie taking up station on the metal tables, and Stefan, Aaron and Martin coalescing around the bewildered Adam, who kept looking across the room as if Will might at any moment renounce his dubious association with Raph and Ollie and return to whatever relationship he’s been cultivating with Adam over the past two months.
One of the sponsors flicked on the television and Stefan’s group tried to concentrate on the brace of reality shows, bringing Adam in for as many conversations as they could on the subjects of whose cake should win versus whose actually did, which dress she should say yes to, and which date was the least cringe-worthy. It worked to distract him for a little while. They even got him to express a slightly baffling opinion about one of the men on the dating show: “Unworthy of God’s grace.”
During the early hours after midday — it’s difficult to keep accurate track of time in the common room, with phones still officially discouraged — a handful of sponsors responded to reminders and left, eventually paring the supervisory staff down to three: Maria, Edy and Pippa. They took up position at the back of the room, a sensibly wary distance from Will’s group, but made the mistake of turning in on each other to talk without being overheard.
Stefan didn’t see or hear the signal Will gave, and so didn’t understand what was about to happen until all three men were out of their chairs and running across the room. He didn’t have enough time to find his taser, or put himself in their way; all he could do was shout, “Look out!” and then it was too late.
He’s sitting cross-legged now, with a hand under Maria’s head to keep it off the concrete as Edy checks her airways and Pippa directs the hired soldiers while keeping her taser pointed at Aaron, Adam and Martin, who for the moment all seem too stunned to react. Stefan hopes none of them wonder why no-one’s pointing a taser at him.
There’s blood on his hand and he’s trying desperately not to look at it.
The military contractors drag first Will and then Raph off to the cells, and by the time they return for Ollie, Aaron’s recovered enough to yell out, “They’re keeping us locked up! Help us!”
The soldier holding Ollie’s legs directs a withering look at Aaron, says, “Yeah, well, it looks like you fucking deserve it, don’t you?” and lets the door shut on Aaron’s outraged expression.
In the quiet, Stefan strokes Maria’s hair while they wait for help to arrive.
* * *
The whirlwind of activity drags Christine with it as it passes through the kitchen, with sponsors summoned from elsewhere on campus rushing in through the front doors and the two PMC guys — not anyone Christine’s met, and not anyone she’s likely to meet again; they’ve seen rather too much and will find themselves moved on before long, bound by NDAs and, rather more pertinently, threats — laying Maria down gently on the kitchen floor. Paige, back for lunch between classes, gets roped into swelling the ranks of sponsors downstairs while Christine helps keep Maria comfortable on cushions brought up from the break room.
“Move over a little, please,” Edy says.
Christine shuffles out of the way and Edy, frowning in concentration, stamps as hard as she can on the tile, cracking it. She retrieves a knife from a drawer and swipes it quickly across her forearm, then squats down and squeezes the wound, carefully dripping blood onto the crack in the floor, which she then smears with a finger.
“Edith!” someone yells from the front door, diverting her attention and giving Christine a chance to respond to blood the way she usually does, with deep, controlled breaths and averted eyes. When she looks back, Edy’s wrapped a sheaf of paper towels around her arm and is directing the soldiers back down to the first basement, there to stay until relieved.
“Christine,” Edy says, crouching back down, returning to Christine’s eye level. “Take a taxi to the hospital, please.”
“Of course,” Christine replies. No thought necessary; Edy may sound and look calm but her girlfriend’s lying on the kitchen floor, conscious but incoherent. Anything she needs, she gets.
“I’ll join you when I can.” Edy waits for Christine’s nod and then shouts to the whole ground floor, “Will someone please call Indira, Monica and Beatrice and get one of them back here to relieve me?” Edy’s the most senior sponsor on-site, bar Maria, and a stickler for the rules; others might disregard everything in this situation to go with the ambulance, but Edy will make sure her responsibilities are covered before anything. Christine would admire that if it wasn’t stupid as hell.
Jodie, leaning on the doorjamb and observing the situation with obvious distress, agrees to call anyone and everyone, and takes her phone outside to get away from the hubbub.
“Christine,” Edy says, turning to face her again, “there’s one of ours at the hospital: Rabia. She just started there recently, and she’s our new house nurse. She’ll be embedded in the hospital systems by now, so can you check in with her and make sure nothing untoward is recorded? We need everyone to think Maria—” her voice cracks, but she recovers, “—fell, and fell here.” She points to the cracked tile. “There was no Will, no attack, and if she says anything about him while she’s incoherent, someone needs to be there to cover for her. That’ll be you, for today.”
“On it,” Christine says.
“You know the nurse?”
Christine pulls up the relevant record on her phone, already updated with her new position. She shows Edy the screen. “I have her name, picture, job title; everything. I’ll find her.”
“Good. Thank you. I’ll have someone tell her to expect you.” Edy raises her voice again. “How long did they say for the ambulance?”
“Should be only another couple of minutes,” someone says, and Edy nods, locks eyes with Christine again for a second, and then returns her attention to Maria, who is mumbling under her breath and looking at nothing.
“Stay with me, baby,” Edy says, crouching down and taking one of Maria’s hands. “Look at me. Listen to my voice. Stay with me. Please, Maria. Stay with me.”
* * *
The image of Maria’s head hitting concrete is impossible to shake. There’s still blood there, on the floor, between his knees; he wonders if it will stain. If it will be the last mark Maria leaves on this place. If Will and the others will wash out, if the sponsors will become more cruel, if this is the beginning of the end. She seemed to wake before the soldiers carried her out, but even though her eyes looked at him he doesn’t think she saw him at all.
Still a little blood on his hand, too. He wipes it on his trouser leg. It doesn’t entirely come off.
What a place this would be to die.
He’s aware of movement, of people filing in, but it’s a hand on his shoulder that forces him to focus on anything but the floor in front of him. He looks up, startled by the contact; Paige has taken him by the arm and is tugging gently, encouraging him to stand, holding out her other arm to support him.
Paige?
The absurdity of it is enough to completely clear his head. If there’s one thing she’s been clear about, it’s her refusal to even consider ever participating in the sponsor process.
He checks to make sure the boys are still on the couches, behind him, and whispers, “What are you doing down here?”
“Filling in. I’m not happy about it.”
“Is Maria okay?”
“No news yet. She’s being taken to the hospital. But she was unconscious for less than thirty seconds. There’s reason to be hopeful.”
“Good,” Stefan says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it.”
Paige makes a show of letting him stand on his own, of checking him over for harm, and when she’s done she turns him around so she can face him. “I don’t think there’s anything you could have done, Stef, and I’m glad you didn’t try, or we might have been sending two women to the hospital today, and you’re considerably less explicable.” She smiles weakly. “You’re supposed to be out of the country, remember?” He nods; she’s not wrong. If he gets hurt he’ll have to be treated on the premises, because leaving Dorley would create problems big enough that Beatrice might just write him off. “Go join the others,” she says. “Edy will be down again soon.”
Oh, God. Edy! Isn’t she dating Maria? Pippa’s kept him up-to-date on Dorley gossip — she likes to talk, especially when she’s sleepy — and according to her, Edy and Maria’s long-standing friendship became something more after Beatrice’s birthday dinner, when Edy put a happily drunk Maria to bed and never left. After that, it escalated: spotted holding hands in the dining hall; seen walking together on campus; caught leaving Maria’s room again and giving up on keeping the secret.
How’s she going to react? She’s always been, next to Pippa, the most calm and kind sponsor; she brushes Adam’s hair, for goodness’ sake! What will this do to her?
At some point, while Stefan was sitting on the floor, Adam and Martin dragged the second sofa back to its usual place by the TV, and with Aaron they’re sat in an anxious circle, ignoring the muted television and the women who keep coming in, in ones and twos, whispering to each other.
“This is fucked,” Aaron’s saying, as Stefan sits down next to him. “This is so fucking fucked. And you, Stef!” He whirls on Stefan. “Why would you warn them?”
It comes out too loud. “Because I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, Aaron!” Stefan says, and winces against his voice. Too fucking deep. He bites the inside of his cheek. To go to pieces over voice dysphoria at a time like this would be stupid as well as selfish. Keep it in, let it out later, when it can’t hurt anyone else. A mantra, lately.
“But what if it had worked?”
Irritation overrides self-disgust. “You mean, what if Will outright killed her? Or held her hostage? You saw those army guys, right? And you see how many people are down here now, right?” He throws an angry arm in the direction of the almost two dozen women at the other end of the room, and takes a moment to wonder if Dorley needs to reconsider its work/life balance if it can field this many women only after the worst has happened. “You think he could fight his way through all that? Even with the idiot twins on his side? Even with help from you and you and you?” He points at the boys in turn; Adam recoils from his finger. Into the silence he starts counting, tapping his hand on his forearm with each point. “There are guards. They have batons. And tasers. And there are armed men. At least two; maybe more. And they have fucking guns, Aaron. Real guns that shoot real bullets! There are doors and locks and stairs and— and— Jesus Christ, Aaron, do I really need to say all this again? If you don’t get that this was nothing more than a demonstration of how fucking stupid Will is capable of being, how pointlessly violent, then what’s even going on in that head of yours?”
He pushes against Aaron’s temple. The boy offers no resistance, instead holding up his hands. Conceding. “Stef, I get it, that was a dumb thing to say, but, please, calm down—”
Stefan recoils at the sheer idiocy of it. “Is that going to help? Being calm? Will that make it so Will didn’t just slam a woman’s head into a concrete floor? Aaron—!”
He’s interrupted by Aaron grabbing urgently at him, taking his hand and squeezing it until he shuts up. It’s so unlike Aaron that Stefan bites back his anger and focuses on the subject of Aaron’s gaze, which turns out to be Adam, curled up in the corner of the other couch, making himself small the way he does when someone has triggered a memory from a past none of them have yet been able to understand, beyond guesswork.
“Shit,” Stefan says. He smiles at Aaron — a thanks; an apology — and swaps seats, sits down next to Adam and, slowly, holds out a hand, making clear that it’s an offer, not an obligation. “I’m sorry, Adam. I won’t raise my voice again.” He’s aware of a couple of the sponsors looking on, but that’s not important at the moment.
“No, it’s okay,” Adam says, quietly, finding the few words an effort. “I’m sorry for my reaction.”
“You’ve got nothing to apologise for,” Stefan insists, injecting as much sincerity and kindness into his words as he knows how, leveraging the breathing and pitch exercises he’s been doing in his room to raise his voice to a near-whispered alto. Anything to seem less threatening, less male: Adam doesn’t respond the same way when sponsors raise their voices, and Stefan’s come to the obvious conclusion about the gender of Adam’s tormentor, whoever he was, in the life he left behind. There’s a part of Stefan that wants to rub his own nose in that, to crow about how he, a supposed woman, is so easily able to emulate the man who hurt the boy, but he ignores it as much as he can. Self-hatred can be so self-indulgent, and Stefan has more important things to do. It works, anyway: after a few more quiet reassurances, Adam finally takes his hand. “The fault is entirely mine,” Stefan continues, “and I’m genuinely sorry. I was angry and I was scared, and because of that I raised my voice, but I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I’ll try to do better.”
“This is all my fault,” Adam says. “If I hadn’t gone to see Will last night, Maria wouldn’t be hurt. If I hadn’t told him about my—”
“His actions are not your responsibility,” Stefan says quickly. Adam’s chest is not a subject he wants to deal with right now. “And neither is Maria.”
“Edy likes her,” Adam whispers.
“I know.”
“I’m so scared for her.”
“Did you see the girl who helped me up?” Stefan nods at Paige, hovering nearby and, for all that she has a taser, absolutely failing to look menacing. She’s not paying much apparent attention to them, seeming mostly focused on her phone, but it’s clear she’s listening. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Aaron staring at her, and wraps up his irritation with that along with all the other things he doesn’t want to think about right now. Aaron can look at pretty girls if he wants to. “She told me Maria’s probably going to be okay. She wasn’t out for long.”
“But the blood!”
“There wasn’t much,” Stefan says, showing him his other hand, the one he’s been keeping in the front pocket of his hoodie, so he doesn’t have to look at the drying blood, so he can feel the weight of his taser. There’s very little left on it now; more must have rubbed off inside the pocket. “See? I had my hand under her head, covering the wound. It was just a trickle, really.”
“You really think she’ll be okay?”
Stefan flicks his eyes back to Paige, who nods. “I do,” he says.
Adam smiles. Relaxes his grip on Stefan’s hand a little. Absorbs the knowledge for a moment. “What’s going to happen to Will?” he asks.
“That depends on them.” Stefan tilts his head towards the door, where Edy’s just entered and is talking animatedly with some of the girls. Relieved smiles on several faces; a good sign. “He did a really, really bad thing, but it could have been a lot worse. And he thought he was protecting you, I think.” Protecting Adam or protecting himself?
Adam gasps, holding in tears, and Stefan knows the drill: he pulls on his contact with Adam, drags him into an awkward hug, and lets him cry on his shoulder. There’s a lot of tension to let out, and after a little while the shuddering gulps become ordinary breaths, still saturated with moisture but indicative of someone who has passed through the worst of it. Aaron surprises Stefan by coming to sit on Adam’s other side, placing a tentative hand on his back, and stroking his spine. He makes searching eye contact with Stefan, asking if he’s doing it right. Stefan nods, mouths, Thank you, and Aaron smiles.
What a sight they must be. A far cry from the day Stefan met them all.
They remain that way for some time. On the other end of the sofa, Martin stays silent, his legs hitched up under his chin, his thoughts a mystery as usual. Stefan can’t find his usual resentment for him; they’ve all had a scare. Maybe he’ll try to pick him apart some time, find the man beneath the misery. Preferably before Dorley removes the man entirely, Stefan adds to himself, and disguises his laughter as a cough.
The gallows humour here gets everyone eventually.
When Adam’s mostly dried out and sitting back and Aaron’s returned to the other sofa where there’s more room, Edy sits down in front of them on one of the bean bags. She looks like hell: makeup smeared and rubbed off, eyes red, and there’s a dressing on her forearm which confuses Stefan as he’s sure she didn’t get hurt in the altercation. She also looks vulnerable, unarmed and sat in front of them, which feels foolish on a day like this, but Stefan quickly checks and there are several sponsors behind them with tasers aimed, just in case the basement’s least-likely rebels decide they want to have a go.
“Are you okay, Edy?” Adam asks.
She smiles at him, brittle but genuine. “I’ve had better days,” she says, “but I’ll be okay.” They link hands for a second, before Edy drops hers back into her lap with the abrupt motion of someone who’s been running on adrenaline for a long time and is starting to reach the end of her reserves. “Now,” she continues, addressing all of them, “since it’s just you four, I won’t give you the big speech. Nor will I give you the one I’m planning to give to the others, which is an even bigger speech. The short version is, none of you are in trouble. Not even you, Aaron, for questioning why Stef would try to warn us.”
“I panicked,” Aaron mumbles, into his chest. “It was a shitty thing to say.”
“It’s understandable; we’re your captors. You don’t have to like us. But, and I believe I am summing up general sentiment here, if anyone tries anything like that ever again, we won’t bother formally washing them out, we’ll just bury them in the woods and walk away happy.” Adam hiccups, and Edy adds, “Sorry. But you need to understand the… depth of feeling here. You all might want to be on your best behaviour for a bit.”
“You don’t have to worry about us,” Stefan says. “Right?”
Adam nods, Martin remains quiet, and Aaron crosses himself.
“Good,” Edy says. “Now, Maria’s been taken to hospital, but we don’t, for now, believe her life to be in danger. William, Raphael and Oliver are in the cells and will remain there until we can evaluate them. No-one’s washing out just yet, but their future depends entirely on how they respond to this. When you speak to them — and you’ll all have the opportunity to visit, with our supervision, if you want, and I encourage you to do so — it would be helpful if you could impress that upon them. Do it for their sake—” she shoots a withering glance at Aaron, who closes his mouth and makes a conciliatory gesture, “—not ours.”
“He’ll be okay?” Adam asks.
“That’s up to him. I’m sure you know by now that his past is not a pretty one and that, as he is now—” Edy allows a snarl to creep momentarily into her voice, “—the world would not miss him. Certainly his brother wouldn’t, nor the students he assaulted.” She closes her eyes and takes a breath before continuing. “But he, like Oliver and Raphael, is not done yet, and we are dedicated to releasing the potential hidden inside such troubled boys. I promise you, we don’t throw anyone away on a whim, no matter how… angry we might be, in the moment.”
“Troubled boys?” Aaron says. “Are we ‘troubled boys’ too?”
“If you’d like to dispute the label,” Edy says, “be my guest.”
“No, well, it’s just that it’s very Dickensian.”
“Well,” Edy says, standing up and stretching, “we are an old-fashioned operation.”
* * *
Christine needs a fucking cigarette.
Rabia, the nurse, met her out of the taxi, and they greeted each other with the usual Dorley-solidarity hug, the one that says, I know some really weird shit about you and you know the same stuff about me and we’ll never, ever tell. Fully briefed and prepared, Rabia gave her the latest on Maria’s condition: awake, not exactly lucid but aware of where she is, and being kept overnight at minimum. Christine introduced herself as the new Head of Network Security — reasoning that if she’s going to keep getting drawn into things like this she might as well take a salary for it — and Rabia quickly went over her integration with the hospital systems as they took the lift. There’s no need for Christine to check the work unless she wants to, as it was set up by Elle’s people. Christine nodded and pretended to know who Elle was. Another graduate? Since when did any of them have ‘people’?
In Maria’s private room they positioned Christine, truthfully, as a dorm-mate of Maria’s, here to keep her company until family arrives, and Christine greeted the doctor, settled into one of the bedside chairs, and held Maria’s hand. She spent the next few hours talking quietly to her when she seemed receptive, reassuring her that everything’s taken care of back home, and trying to ignore how much the whole setup, private room and all, reminded her of visiting her mother in hospital, years before Dorley, after another fabricated fall.
Rabia offered to cover for her for a while at the end of her shift and that was all the excuse Christine needed to leave the building at a near-jog, find a quiet spot in the parking lot with a railing to lean on, and glare out at the late-night traffic.
She really, really needs a fucking cigarette.
The addiction’s long gone, wasn’t even sparked up again by the smoke she bummed off of Naila on Dorley’s roof, over a month ago, but the emotional need will never leave her. A final gift from the boy they burned out of her: his need, always, to be occupied.
Her fingers twitch.
Smoking was a way to hide from his regular bullies, or from his dad’s temper, or from his mum and the marks on her arm and face. He’d smoke behind the pool maintenance shed at school or on the back balcony at home or on the roof of the phone repair shop in town. One cigarette after another. And there was a difference: at school it was a prop, an excuse to get away, a reason to occupy his hands, and he could make one last forever, or until the bell went, taking little drags and watching the cars go by, wondering what would happen if he just walked out onto the road; on the balcony he’d smoke as quickly as possible, to satisfy the need before his dad found him; on the roof, a place no-one knew about except the guys in the shop, who owed him a few favours and asked no questions, he’d smoke five, ten in a row, substituting cigarettes for self-control.
It was to the roof he escaped after he caught his dad’s hand, practically broke his own wrist in one last desperate attempt to give a fuck, to keep his father’s hands off his mother’s body. He’d had to fight his way out of the man’s grip as the bastard apologised: didn’t mean to hurt his son; didn’t mean to hurt another man.
Look at me now, Dad! Want to take another swing?
She remembers the last time he saw him and her fingers twitch.
Dad got sick after she disappeared, Indira told her, during her first year at Dorley, and she always wondered if she was the cause. There are times when she hopes she was, when she thinks she might have poisoned the old fuck with her absence.
Indira also told her how her mother stayed by him. Always devoted, despite everything; always an idiot. But it eats at her: if she hadn’t disappeared, if her mother hadn’t lost her son, might they have left together, when he/she was old enough and able to support her? Could she/he have saved her instead of giving up, turning all his bullshit out on other people, becoming the kind of person Dorley scoops up for reform? Would her mother even have come? It kills her that she could find out; she could go see her mum and drag her away from her father’s bedside, leave him to fucking rot, and all it would take is breaking Dorley’s strictest rule and exposing herself to more humiliation than she thinks she could stand.
She imagines meeting her mother again, coming out to her, packing her suitcases and taking her away from that huge, empty house, and her fingers twitch.
She thinks of the info packets piled up on her desk, the updates on her family, unopened. Maybe one of them says he finally died. Maybe her mother’s free, and better off without the both of them.
“Hey,” says a warm, familiar voice, accompanied by a hand closing over her fingers. “I thought I’d find you out here.”
Shit. Should have stayed with Maria. Lived with the memories. Another bad decision made in haste.
An arm encloses her, turns her around, makes her look down into soft brown eyes. “How are you doing?” Abby says.
“The usual,” Christine says. “Having a minor breakdown over shit I can’t control. Jonesing for a smoke. Hating my dad. Did you see Maria yet?”
“Yes. She seems to be doing okay. The nurse, Rabia, she sent me looking for you. She said you seemed upset.”
“She’s perceptive.”
“It’s nice to have one of ours here.”
Christine nods absently. “She seems to know her stuff, too. Speaking of, who’s Elle?”
The quizzical look Abby adopts is one of her less convincing deceptions. “I don’t know,” she says.
Christine rolls her eyes. “I’m on staff now, Abs, against my better judgement. I’m allowed to know shit.”
“Perhaps, but I’m not allowed to tell.”
“Fine. Be mysterious. I’ll just look it up, anyway.”
“Come on inside,” Abby says.
“No. Wanna be cold and miserable.”
“There’s hot chocolate…”
“No.”
“And baked goods…”
“Fine!” Christine says. “Foul temptress. Evil hussy.” She succumbs, as she was always going to, to Abby’s mischievous grin, and consents to be dragged inside, but because she still has her pride she keeps up a string of insults until Abby presses a hot drink and a warm pastry into her hands.
* * *
They’ve got the lights low in Maria’s room. It’s late, but the room is warm and the murmur of the television hanging from the ceiling keeps them company when none of them have the energy to talk. Maria, lucid again, sips water from a bottle Christine got her from the vending machine. Abby, having stuffed herself full of sweet things, sleeps on Christine’s shoulder.
A couple of hours ago she snapped a picture of Maria, sitting up and smiling, head wrapped and fingers v-signing, and sent it to the group chat. Almost immediately she had to turn off notifications, because her phone wouldn’t stop vibrating with messages from Dorley graduates across the country, asking her to pass on their good wishes and their relief, and she’s glad she didn’t say how exhausted Maria looked from the effort of smiling for a few seconds. Let her remain, to everyone else, as invincible as she always has been; it’ll be their little secret.
It seemed to make her happy when Christine told her she was officially accepting the job, too.
God, what a long day. Christine checks her phone: ten to midnight. She’s been going since five in the morning! She had to get up extra-early to make herself look beautiful before the briefing, and while she’s a lot better at it than she used to be, it still takes time and effort and a setting on her alarm she deeply resents. Worse, the other girls, Paige aside, have stopped complimenting her on her efforts, but she knows that if she stops, if she starts slobbing around in shorts again, someone will notice. Officially.
At least the skirts and things are comfortable, and she likes how she looks in them, and you can layer them in the cold weather.
Maria whispers something and drops her capped water bottle onto the bed, apparently unable to stay awake any longer. Christine’s briefly alarmed, but she’s read Rabia’s briefing through three times: only if there’s a sudden and unexpected change in Maria’s condition should she call a doctor; normal sleep is downright encouraged, and this looks normal enough. Careful not to dislodge Abby, she reaches forward, retrieves the bottle and sets it down on the table, settling back in her chair without waking her sister.
She checks her phone again: midnight.
It’s not so bad here, really. With a belly full of hot chocolate and pastries. With the lights down and Maria and Abby quietly snoring next to her. With the knowledge that Maria really will be okay.
It’s not even very much like her mother’s room in the private hospital any more. Too many people. Too much love.
Maybe she’ll run some searches on her mum when she gets home. Maybe she’ll finally open those info packets. Maybe she’ll look into the past she’s been trying so hard to forget, and make peace with it.
Maybe, just for a minute, she’ll close her eyes.
Notes:
I complain about how long each chapter takes me on my Twitter, if you’re curious.
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 18: We Don’t Take Boys For Fun
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 November 28
Thursday
The crack of Christine’s spine as she stretches is astonishingly sharp in the near-empty hospital foyer, and she curses under her breath: she shouldn’t have spent the night in that horrible chair! Her arse feels almost bruised where the padding was worn thin, and when she pulls up her sleeves she has marks on her elbows from the bare wooden arms, and — Christ! — her back is killing her. She should have moved, should have decamped to the couch in the corner of the room, but by the time she thought about it, Abby was fast asleep on her shoulder. And now her whole body feels like a knuckle she can’t get to pop, and her top is damp from where Abby dribbled on it.
She rolls her spine again, moans loudly at the pain and ignores the irritated glances from the handful of people dotted around the room, and suddenly she has to stifle a giggle because she’s realised that a bunch of strangers just looked at her and she didn’t care about it in the slightest.
They looked at her and she brushed it off! She used to run, she used to hide, and when she was trying to become a better woman she’d do her best simply to ignore it, suffering through lectures and workshops and visits to the Student Union Bar while hyper-aware of everyone around her. They could all see through her, she thought, to the boy inside, and all it would take would be for her to say the wrong thing or move the wrong way or laugh at the wrong joke and suddenly everyone’s suspicions would be confirmed.
But today: nothing. Now she comes to think about it, she spent the whole night here, and much of the previous day, interacting with doctors and nurses and orderlies and random people in the queue for the vending machines, and not once has she feared discovery. Not once has the possibility even occurred to her!
She’ll have to tell Paige; she’ll be delighted. Ever since that day at the mall with Pippa, the day they got back together, Paige has been working on her. She’s dragged her to clubs, bars, shops and cafés, she’s walked her around the art gallery and the university grounds, she’s provided all the evidence Christine could ask for that she is, as far as anyone else is concerned, simply another ordinary girl. And the fear that someone might somehow intuit her maleness has, in the face of Paige’s patient and loving efforts, simply faded away.
Hell, they kissed on the escalator in the middle of Almsworth Mall and the most anyone did was hiss at their six-year-old — those girls are kissing! — to stop staring.
Just an ordinary girl. Well, damn. Finally, she has the invisibility she once craved. A small, perverse part of her chafes at the idea of being assumed to be just like everyone else, but it’s easily ignored. She can be a weirdo back home, where it’s safe, with all the other weirdos.
Another thing she owes Paige.
The bad sleep starts to catch up with her again and robs her of her balance, punishing her for the moment of introspection, so she leans against the wall, outsourcing the job of keeping herself upright to a hundred thousand tonnes of brick, concrete, and tacky glass frontage. If she makes it to tonight without dropping face-first into a bed, a couch, or a comfy enough brace of cushions, it’ll be a miracle. She pictures the edifice of Dorley Hall rising up in front of her as she staggers the last few metres home and has to stop herself laughing at how completely the place has taken her over.
Dorley Hall: her home. It would have been an incomprehensible thought just two years ago.
“Coffee,” Abby says, announcing her presence and her purchases.
“Coffee,” Christine agrees, jerking away from the wall for long enough to accept a paper cup and then slumping back. She points an accusatory finger. “You dribbled on me.” It’s okay to say it, now that they both have coffee and thus have upgraded themselves from non-functional to pre-functional and able to absorb mild critique.
“It’s not my fault you’re so comfortable.” Abby sits in one of the chairs bolted to the foyer floor in rows. “You don’t have to stand, you know.”
“I do.” Christine winces, and rubs at her back like an octogenarian. “I feel like I have burning insects crawling around in my spine. Why’d they have to kick us out, anyway?”
At oh-six-hundred on the dot they were woken by a nurse who shooed them out of Maria’s room and insisted they go get some air and come back at eight and, stumbling, half-awake, they’d obeyed. They barely spoke in the elevator down, each of them still blowing the cobwebs out of their brains, and on the ground floor Abby immediately left in search of someone or something that would sell her some coffee and Christine just sort of stopped for a few minutes, reactivating every little while like a toy on low batteries to stretch her back and to be grateful that nothing was currently drooling on her.
Abby raises an eyebrow. “They were always going to kick us out. This is a hospital, Chrissy.” Christine would be offended by the patronising tone if she didn’t think, in her current state, that it was probably warranted. “Just be grateful this isn’t the NHS or we would’ve been out on our ears last night, and Maria wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to when she woke up at three.”
“Wait, Maria woke up at three?”
“She thought she was being attacked again.”
“Fuck.”
Grimacing, Abby says, “I’m getting the feeling this might have unearthed some bad stuff she’s been keeping buried. She looked kinda wild. But I talked her down. You helped, actually.”
“I did?”
“It was really sudden: she sat up, far too fast for my comfort, and she looked like she was going to yell out, but then she clapped a hand over her mouth and held her breath. She was all wide-eyed and, honestly, I thought she was terrified, but then you started talking in your sleep.”
“Um. What?”
Abby grins. “I think the disturbance sort of half-woke you. You were talking to Paige, I think, in your dream. And listening to you calmed Maria down enough for me to get through to her. She said to tell you, you’re very cute when you’re asleep.”
“Good,” Christine says, and takes a sarcastic slurp. “Great. Thank you. Message conveyed. I’m cute.”
“Come on,” Abby says, nudging her, “you know Paige loves it.”
“Paige isn’t mean to me,” Christine says, and takes the plastic lid off so she can blow on her coffee, more to punctuate the retort than anything else. “Would they really have kicked us out if this was an NHS hospital?”
“Yes?” Abby says. “Visiting hours are a thing. You’ve never been in an NHS hospital?” When Christine shakes her head, Abby pokes her. “Rich girls!”
“Hey! I was a rich boy, thank you very much. As a girl, I’ve had to take a job down in the boy-torturing mines to make ends meet, just like everyone else.”
“Uh, keep your voice down?”
“What?” Christine says. “Why?” It takes her a moment. “Oh, shit. Sorry. I think I’m too tired to filter.”
“No-one noticed, I think,” Abby says quietly. “Maybe restrict yourself to nods until your brain starts working?”
Christine nods. It’s fortunate for her and Dorley both that their secrets are so ridiculous; the odd slip-up just flies over people’s heads.
* * *
They’re finally allowed back in around half past eight, and by then Christine’s spine is even more sore, but it’s worth it to see Maria sitting up in bed, eating Weetabix and smiling at them.
“When I come home,” Maria says, as Christine and Abby sit down, “I want us to diversify the boys’ breakfasts. Away from Weetabix. And not just to porridge three times a week.” She regards her spoonful, frowns at it, and lays it carefully back in the bowl, contents uneaten. “We should get them something nice. Something that distracts them a bit from what we’re doing to them.”
Abby leans forward. “I don’t think cereal would—”
“Did you ever have those variety packs? They were a treat. Like, when you’d go on holiday with your family and wake up and look out at this whole beautiful new place, and then downstairs the bed and breakfast would have a little buffet out, but you wouldn’t care about toast or eggs or anything because in the middle of every table there’d be a multipack of portion-sized cereal boxes, all cellophaned together.” She smiles, and her eyes wander the room, wincing when they come into contact with the thin shaft of light the closed curtains admit in the centre. “Abby,” she says, “can we get more curtains in here? Is that something we can do? It’s so bright, Abby. It’s so bloody bright. Can we call Elle and tell her they’re not giving me enough curtains? Can we—?”
Abby leans over and pulls the privacy shade around the bed, all the way along to Maria’s feet, blocking out more of the light. Maria sighs and visibly relaxes, lets her torso sink back into the mattress. Christine hadn’t even realised she was so tense; Abby had, clearly. Christine’s reminded once again that while she doesn’t know Maria all that well — except as something of an antagonist during her second year at Dorley, when Maria became more actively involved with Christine’s intake — Abby’s been a part of things for a lot longer and knows a lot more. Including who this Elle person is, probably.
“Thank you, Abigail,” Maria says, smiling wide and appearing to get momentarily distracted by the sensation of her front teeth resting on her lower lip.
“Bea will be here soon,” Abby says, sitting down again. Out of sight of Maria, she reaches out for one of Christine’s hands and squeezes. The gesture is nice and Christine knows the reason behind it, but the more time she’s spent here the less she’s reminded of her mother. For one thing, Maria isn’t dazedly begging for her abuser to come back to her; she’s dazedly reminiscing about cereal.
“When?” Maria asks urgently.
“Soon,” Abby repeats, and Maria nods and settles into the pillow.
“I remember it so clearly; sitting at the table in the bed and breakfast. Red and white squares on the tablecloth, like something off the TV.” Maria giggles. “It was so stupidly perfect. Like when you’d watch a show and wish you could be in it and suddenly I was. I can see myself, breaking open the wrapping, picking out a box of Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes and pouring out the blue-top milk, which I was allowed, because we were on holiday. Mum smiling at me as I eat. Dad assembling a breakfast plate which fit the maximum amount of food without spilling over the edges.” She meets Christine’s eye. “Sorry. I think my mind’s wandering a bit.”
Christine smiles at her. “Yours and mine both,” she says. “At least you have an excuse. I’m just sleepy.”
“I miss my mum,” Maria says. Christine’s never heard her talk about her family — her old family — before. Judging by the look on Abby’s face, neither has she. “I miss her so much. She had the sweetest laugh. I could tell her the stupidest joke, the most page-one-of-the-joke-book crap, and she’d laugh just because it was me telling it. And Dad. He could cook. He’d make soy sauce chicken once a week because I always asked for it, and he’d start a whole thing with me about how he was so tired, he’d worked so hard, and wouldn’t I prefer something quicker, and then he’d laugh and tell me I could have it if and only if I agreed to do all my homework. And I would promise, and get all my books out on the kitchen table, and he’d prepare it in front of me. And we’d eat it together, the three of us.” She sniffs, and winces against the pain. “Always together. Sitting in the front room, eating chicken, watching telly, the sunset streaming through the blinds… How is it possible to miss something so simple so much?”
Abby reaches into her bag and hands tissues to Maria, who doesn’t seem to know what to do with them, so Abby takes them back and dabs gently at Maria’s eyes until she comes back to the present, smiles weakly at Abby, and takes over the task herself. When she’s done she shuffles around in bed, sits up a little higher, rearranges the covers for comfort.
“You okay, Maria?” Abby says.
“Yeah,” she replies, after consideration. “I’m going to close my eyes for a little bit, if that’s okay?”
She does so, and Christine, who doesn’t feel up to checking the Dorley group chat, the private Consensus channels or her personal messages just yet, leans her head on Abby’s shoulder, and catches up on a little sleep of her own. Hopefully she’ll drool.
It’s a little after nine that Aunt Bea arrives, bursting through the door and looking considerably less put together than she usually does, having come straight from some car or train or plane delivering her from wherever she spends her days away from Dorley. She rushes to Maria’s bedside, taking the chair Abby vacates for her. Christine groggily manoeuvres her own chair out of reach, uncomfortable with being too involved in what’s undoubtedly about to happen.
“My Maria,” Bea says, running a finger down Maria’s bare arm.
Maria cracks her eyes open. “Hey, Auntie,” she says.
“How are you feeling?”
Maria opens her hand and lets Bea lock fingers with her. “Oh, I’m thriving. Turns out having a dickhead slam your skull into the floor is incredible for productivity.”
Christine can’t see Bea’s face, but can imagine her reaction to Maria’s flippant description of her assault in the way she flinches. Christine finds the sarcasm reassuring: so much of growing up (again) in Dorley is about looking to the older women who surround you and drawing confidence from their comfort, and to see Maria, the most constant adult presence in Christine’s recent life aside from Indira and Beatrice herself, so vulnerable has been unnerving.
“He’ll be punished,” Aunt Bea says.
“Okay,” Maria says, “but, Auntie? Don’t wash him out. Or his pals. The whole thing was mostly my fault.”
“Don’t say that!” Aunt Bea says.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Abby says, at the same time.
“We push them,” Maria insists, leaning up out of the pillow, “and we change them, all the while denying it. And we expect them to push back.” She locks eyes with Bea. “It’s part of it. It’s how it works. How it has to work, for some of them. I just got careless.” She drops back again, energy spent, and continues, sounding out of breath, “I gave a big speech in the morning about how it was going to be the day the shit hit the fan, and then when nothing happened in the first few hours, I let my guard down. I let people go before their replacements arrived. Yes, they all had good reasons — getting to work, getting to class, blah blah blah — but it’s not procedure. And then—” she closes her eyes for a moment, summoning more energy, “—and then I turned my back. My fault.”
“I don’t accept that,” Bea says.
“We had two cushy years in a row,” Maria says, smiling again, “where the biggest troublemakers were girls like Faye and Jodie and Paige and, well, you.” Christine realises she’s being referred to, and smiles sheepishly back. “You made a fuss, of course you did — how could you not, with what we were doing to you? — but you didn’t attack us.”
“Of course not,” Christine mumbles, looking away, playing with her wrist.
“We got complacent. I—” Maria tabs at her chest with a thumb, “—got complacent. We picked up some guys with histories of violence and then treated them like we did you. After all, the kid gloves mostly worked on Faye, and she was… okay, nothing like Will or the others, but she was a step above you, Christine.” She shakes her head and winces, hand to her temple. “I was stupid.”
“Not at all,” Bea insists.
Maria shrugs. “We can talk about it another time. But no washing out, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Keep them in the cells, though. But do the enrichment programme and—”
“We’re already on it,” Bea says smoothly.
“I was thinking we could run split population for a while. Will and Ollie and Raph on one schedule and Stef and the free range boys on another. It’s more work, but—”
“We’re already on it,” Bea repeats. “And Edith can handle it.”
Maria blinks, apparently caught short by someone having anticipated her ideas. But then she grins. “Actually, she can’t,” she says. “Put Indira on herding duty; the second years are all just one big cuddle pile at this point. I want Edy here. With me. And taking me home when it’s time. So I gave her the week off.”
“The hell you did.”
“The hell I did,” Maria confirms. “Remember when you gave me—” she switches to a sing-song tone, picks up her phone and waves it in time with her voice; it’s open on the timetabling app, “—op-er-a-tion-al con-trol?” Before anyone can reply, she winces, drops the phone, and holds a hand to her forehead, closing her eyes again.
“Maria!” Bea says, leaning in closer.
“I’m okay. It comes and goes.”
Aunt Bea strokes Maria’s cheek. “My poor little angel,” she says. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“I am too, Auntie…”
Their voices drop to whispers. Abby pulls on Christine’s hand, dragging her up from her chair and out of the room. She closes the door quietly behind them, leans on the wall opposite and exhales deeply.
“I think we don’t want to intrude on that,” Abby says.
“Yeah,” Christine says. “They’re… close.”
“Like mother and daughter.”
Christine laughs, without humour. “I feel like everyone misses their mum except me.”
“You really don’t miss her at all?”
“I miss something. But my whole life before the Hall was so fucked up… I’m not the same person I was when she knew me. Even if I wanted to, I feel like—” Christine’s fingers twitch, and she wishes once again for a cigarette, or anything to do with her hands beyond knot her fingers together; she makes a fist and presses it against the wall, “—like I don’t get to miss her. Like I don’t deserve to miss her. The boy who had that right, he’s gone, and they stopped looking for him a long time ago.”
“Christine?” Abby says, and when Christine looks up she’s close, really close, with a gentle hand on her shoulder she hadn’t even noticed. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Christine says. “I am, actually.” She points at her forehead. “Some good shit’s been happening in here. Just, you know, some less good shit, too. I’ve been thinking about stuff.”
“Like you were last night?”
“Yeah. Feeling kinda shitty about going to pieces in a crisis.” She shrugs against the weight of Abby’s hand. “Mum stuff. Like I said. Which comes with Dad stuff.”
“Hey,” Abby says, squeezing Christine’s shoulder and letting her go, the better to gesticulate, “Edy wouldn’t have sent you here if she didn’t trust you. And you did everything you needed to do. In fact, you’re so together I can see why the sponsors keep forgetting you still haven’t, technically, graduated. You seem more like them than the other girls in your year.”
“You take that back!” Christine says, but she smiles, in case her tone didn’t make the joke clear. Only kind of a joke, though, she adds silently.
“I’m serious. Vicky graduated, sure, nice and early, like the girly girl she almost definitely would have become at some point without our help, but then she immediately left Dorley, and only comes back for meals or to steal our food and our estradiol — and yes, Christine, I think everyone knows about that by now; she’s not as sneaky as you. Jodie is on a pretty standard trajectory, goth version, and Julia and Yasmin are the deal-by-not-dealing sort. They’ll graduate and leave and I expect we’ll only hear from them when they want to renegotiate their stipends. That leaves you and Paige, and Paige is, for all her gifts, less… temperamentally suited to this stuff.”
“And she’d never do it in a million years.”
“As is her right,” Abby says.
Christine nods, and wonders if Abby, too, feels like a morally compromised monster whenever Paige voices her objections; objections Christine shares, in theory, but which never actually seem to matter when it comes to her day-to-day interactions with the programme.
“You two still doing okay?” Abby asks, and then, observing the inevitable blush that floods Christine’s cheeks and the shy smile she can’t keep down, says, “I’ll take that as a yes.” She pokes Christine, who squeals and wriggles away, batting at Abby’s fingers.
Bloody Abby. Always able to make things better.
Through the narrow glass window in the door, Christine spots Bea sat right up against Maria’s bed, leaning on the mattress and stroking Maria’s forehead with her thumb. They really are close.
“Would it be so bad to let Maria reconnect with her real parents?” Christine says, voicing the thought as soon as it crosses her mind.
“We can’t!” Abby says, suddenly serious, grabbing Christine by the shoulder and firmly dragging her away from the door, out of Maria’s line of sight. “And be careful when you say stuff like that!”
“But surely she, of all people—”
“No, she can’t,” Abby says, and steps closer before she continues. “Because they’re dead. We’re all she has. Beatrice, Edy and the rest of us. All she has.”
Maria in the bed, fingers linked with Aunt Bea. Like mother and daughter.
Shit. No wonder it seems like she’ll never leave. Maria’s one of the last graduates from Grandmother’s time, and while Christine still doesn’t know much about that period, she knows Grandmother didn’t exactly prioritise making sure the girls were socially functional. The survivors have been gradually peeling away from Dorley Hall over the last decade and a half as they acclimate to the world away from Grandmother, establishing lives for themselves elsewhere, but Maria’s never shown the slightest indication she might follow her Sisters, and Christine’s never known exactly why. Her close bond with Aunt Bea has always been her best guess, followed by the assumption that Maria is essentially institutionalised, which is starting to look a little unfair of her.
“What happened to them?” she asks.
“You probably shouldn’t know this,” Abby whispers, “and I know I shouldn’t, but the hierarchy around here keeps shrinking and it seems really keen on gobbling you up, so in the interests of avoiding you putting your foot in your mouth: Maria’s parents were killed by Grandmother.”
“Grandmother—!” Christine claps her hand over her mouth.
“Yes. Or her people. Same difference.”
“Did she kill everyone’s family?” Christine asks, as the bloody history of Grandmother’s regime expands in her mind to include roomsful of children, parents, grandparents, all dead for one woman’s satisfaction.
“No. It was a punishment reserved for the most unruly. And a stupid one, too, because once you’ve done it, you can’t do it again, and the girl now knows you’ve nothing left to hurt her with. But they did it anyway, because Grandmother’s lot were cruel. Cruel for the sake of it. Cruel for fun. Cruel just to see what would happen. Maria fought them, and they killed her parents and showed her the proof.”
“How the fuck did Grandmother get away with shit like that?” Christine hisses.
“She had money and connections,” Abby says, “just like we do. But she also made sure she picked up boys with criminal convictions. Usually something minor. Shoplifting, purse-snatching. Enough to get them in the system. Police won’t look too hard for some missing working class twenty-year-old at the best of times, but if he also has a record? Barely worth them getting out of their seats for. And if the devastated family, years after he vanishes, vanish themselves, or ‘commit suicide’? Well, that’s all very explicable, isn’t it?” She spits it, unable to keep her snarl contained. “Especially if those boys, those families, just happen to be poor and from… backgrounds the authorities feel the country could do without. Practically natural causes.”
“Jesus.”
“In my darker moments,” Abby says, “I’ve told myself that we’re no different to Grandmother, just with a shiny coat of girlboss paint and stupider crockery. But we don’t take boys for fun; we take them because we think they can be saved, and to protect the people around them. And we make sure their families have access to therapists, get money to them if they need it, et cetera.” She sighs. “I have so many justifications.”
“Do they help?” Christine asks.
“Sometimes. At least we have Indira’s pilot programme now, for reconnecting with families.”
“That’s a thing we’re doing? I thought it was just that Dira made a huge pain in the arse of herself until Bea finally gave in?”
“Well, yeah,” Abby says, smiling. “That’s how it started. But we’re watching the situation. If, in five years, it all seems okay, we can start to think about reuniting more people.”
“But never Maria.”
“No.”
“Five years,” Christine says. “That’s a long time.”
“Yeah,” Abby says, after a pause, and leans her head against the wall. “It really is.”
“What about—?”
“Oh, shit; shush!”
Christine, still operating on poor sleep and feeling very slow on the uptake, is about to ask why, when the door to Maria’s room opens and Aunt Bea steps out, damp-cheeked and tired. She looks away while she wipes her face with a wet-wipe; Christine and Abby do her the courtesy of concentrating very hard on the floor.
“Thank you both for staying with her,” Aunt Bea says.
“Any time,” Abby says.
Bea gives her a quick nod and turns to Christine. “Victoria has agreed to pick you up on her way into campus. She’ll find you in the car park in, oh, about ten minutes.”
“Fine,” Christine says. “Um, thank you for arranging that.” She hadn’t given much thought to how she was going to get home.
“Abigail, I’d like you to stay with me a little longer, if you please. Until Edith finishes up.”
Christine pops her head back into the room, but Maria’s asleep again, so she hugs Abby, gives Aunt Bea an embarrassed smile, and finds the ground floor again on her first try. Feeling increasingly fatigued, she wobbles out to the railing in the parking lot to wait for Vicky and her distinctive car. It doesn’t take long for the hatchback with the one blue door to pull up, and for Vicky to leap out of the driver’s side and envelop her in a hug, and when Vicky lets her go, Christine has to fend off Lorna, too.
Lorna’s face is slightly rougher against her cheek than Vicky’s. Maybe they can get her some money for laser or electrolysis or something? Christine can’t get the families out of her mind — years of wreckage left in Dorley’s wake — and it would be nice to do something unambiguously good for a change.
Deposited in the back seat, Christine fills them in on Maria’s condition, and as they pull out of the car park she finally checks to see how the group chat and the Dorley Consensus server are doing.
1,047 new messages.
Okay, then. Maybe she’ll deal with her personal stuff first.
63 new messages.
Fuck it. Christine ignores them all, messages everyone on her internal contact list with a quick update on Maria’s situation and a stern warning that anyone who happens to find her asleep later today — no matter how unusual the position or location — and decides to wake her up will be subscribed on all their accounts to every recipe newsletter, grey-market video game key-selling service and off-brand bulk sex toy website she can find, and switches to the Consensus app.
She scrolls past pages and pages of messages from anxious Dorley women, who are both worried about Maria and indulging in some rather lurid revenge fantasies with Will, Raph and Ollie in starring roles. She stops to read Edy’s pinned post rebuking them, adds a reaction emoji, and continues scrolling. The photo of Maria smiling and showing the V sign is everywhere, and by 3am, after Abby hopped into the channel and posted an update to confirm that Maria is still okay, the few people up late or awake early started to meme on it, pasting Maria into other images and designing the odd mug. Relief makes people giddy; it also makes them bad at Photoshop. Christine saves a few of the better ones and jumps straight to the bottom so she can make a post for anyone not on her contact list.
One of the last messages is from Monica, enquiring about Maria’s hormones, and Christine watches Edy’s reply pop up: she’ll be taking them over when she starts her week’s leave — good for her! — in a few hours.
“Shit,” Christine says, swiping the app closed and dropping the phone back into her bag, “I didn’t bring my pills last night. Vick, I don’t suppose you have any on you?” It takes her a while to process the silence in the car and she looks up to Vicky, in the rear-view, giving her the most intense stare she’s ever— Shit! Lorna’s not supposed to know about that! “I feel terrible if I don’t take my vitamins,” she adds quickly.
Vicky affects exasperation. It probably doesn’t take much effort. “Why would I have vitamin pills in my car, Tina?”
“Uh, I don’t know.” Christine waves a mollifying hand. “Sorry,” she adds. “My brain is completely fried. I slept in a chair last night, and Abby slept on me. I was babbling away in the lobby, too. Just ignore me.”
“Let’s get you home, then,” Vicky says, “and you can eat all the vitamin pills you can find.”
Christine hopes the strange look Lorna’s giving her is harmless and innocent and not, for example, a sign that she’s made a huge mistake, and rather than say anything else and make the situation worse she directs her attention firmly and uninterruptibly out of the window for the rest of the drive, watching the outskirts of town become the long tail of the Royal College of Saint Almsworth campus and, eventually, the parking lot nearest Dorley Hall.
Home.
* * *
It’s Pippa who wakes him, tapping him on the forehead with — he squints, in lieu of focusing his eyes properly, which is a feat that is clearly beyond him this morning — yes, her taser.
“Wake up, sleepyheads,” she says.
“Do you have to wield that thing at me?”
“What thing?” Pippa says, and then finally notices what she’s holding. “Oh. Sorry. We got a lecture about keeping them on hand, after— uh, you know.”
“It’s too early for tasers.”
“It’s way past nine.”
“Still too early for tasers.”
She backs off and gives Stefan room to wriggle around in his sleeping bag, freeing limbs that got trapped in the folds overnight. To his left and right, disgruntled noises suggest the boys are waking up, too, stretching, yawning, and bumping into furniture they pushed out of the way to make room for their impromptu sleepover.
Last night, things became rather less structured than Stefan or the boys have become used to. With the common room full of sponsors — and people like Paige, who are definitely not sponsors but didn’t, she told Stefan in a quiet moment, run away fast enough when Edy was rounding people up — Adam started getting antsy, and it fell to Stefan and Aaron to try to keep him calm and distracted. Stefan tried not to let his heart sink as he imagined how much of his near future was going to involve managing Adam; Aaron’s been enough work on his own!
When it became clear to the assembled Dorley Sisters that none of the four who remained were likely to try anything funny, the room mostly cleared out; a relief, given how many of them had tried to talk to Stefan, or looked at him in ways he found uncomfortable. He suspected that at the first opportunity he was going to quietly go to pieces over how just how fucking seen he’d been, so when Pippa suggested to Edy that the ‘boys’ sleep together in the common area rather than face the night alone, he enthusiastically backed her.
It had been Edy who supplied the spare pillows, roll-out mattresses and so on, with Jane’s help. Jane, Raph’s sponsor, took the opportunity provided by laying everything out to complain to the room about always getting the difficult ones, about having to get up early the next morning to feed ‘a fucking pillock’, which Stefan suspected was only half about letting off steam and half about making a point to the remaining boys: behave.
Edy, meanwhile, took Adam aside and spoke to him quietly. At the end of their conversation, they hugged, and Edy stroked Adam’s hair, clearing it out of his eyes and smoothing it down at the sides. Stefan’s been meaning to ask someone what the hell’s going on with those two.
“Come on,” Pippa says, gesturing with a finger, her taser now reassuringly hooked into her wide belt, “up up up! Breakfast in ten.”
“That’s not the enticement you think it is,” Aaron mutters.
There’s a smell Stefan associates with groups of boys who’ve gone too long without a shower — the one time he agreed to sleep over at the house of one of Russ’ other friends, in the rec room with five boys, the room reeked in the morning — but the common area has none of the musky odour he expects. Is that something that changes with estrogen? Or the lack of testosterone? Or is it something else entirely, something to do with their diet, and he’s just looking for reasons to believe it’s the HRT taking effect because it comforts him?
Self-consciously he turns away and presses softly around his nipples: still sensitive; still fleshy; still nothing you could really yet call a boob. Patience, in this place, where he barely has time to adjust to the status quo before it changes under his feet, and where he seems to keep accumulating new responsibilities, feels like an imposition.
It takes them a few minutes to clear up the sleeping bags, and then Pippa’s ushering them into the dining room, ignoring Aaron’s complaints that it would better preserve the sleepover atmosphere if they got to eat in front of the TV and maybe put some cartoons on.
Edy’s sat there, at the head of the table, with Pippa on her left and Indira — Stefan recognises her from the staff files — on her right. Indira catches him looking at her and smirks, raising an eyebrow. Christine’s sponsor, he knows; she’s had only good things to say about her.
“And then there were four…” Indira says, putting on an ominous voice. Edy nudges her and shakes her head, which only broadens Indira’s smile.
“Good morning,” Edy says. “We have some announcements to make; you might want to start on your breakfast.”
“Do we have to?” Aaron gripes, as Stefan drops a couple of Weetabix into a bowl and pushes it and the oat milk in front of the boy, ignoring Indira’s undisguised amusement. Aaron grudgingly pours milk and Stefan fills a bowl for himself.
“Yes,” Martin says. Surprising; he rarely interjects. Rarely says anything much. He’s smiling when Stefan glances over, which is beyond unexpected and firmly in creepy territory. He’s also helping Adam with his bowl, which is the point Stefan decides that the events of yesterday have so upset the balance in the basement that his ability to predict events has dropped to near zero.
“How’s Maria doing?” Stefan asks, before Edy can say anything else. He can guess that she hasn’t taken a downturn, judging by the fact that Indira seems to be having a whale of a time just watching him make sure Aaron eats breakfast, but it’s better to know for certain.
“She’s awake and she’s talking,” Edy says, “and she’s asked that, whatever the vengeful instincts of… certain people, William, Raphael and Oliver are not to be washed out.” She directs that to Adam, who closes his eyes in relief. “She is also going to be taking a leave of absence to recover, and since I will be helping to take care of her in the short term, Indira will be in charge down here. She’ll also be taking over sponsorship of you, Aaron.”
Aaron, clearly painfully aware of the broad, innocent smile on Indira’s face, nearly chokes on his Weetabix. “Hi,” he says, when he recovers.
“Hello, Aaron,” Indira says. “I’m looking forward to getting to know you!”
“Last night’s indulgence will not be repeated,” Edy continues, borrowing Beatrice’s tones, “so expect to sleep in your own beds tonight. Nonetheless, we do recognise that none of the four of you have yet to engage in violence against another resident or any of the sponsors, with the exception of Stef.”
Aaron grabs Stefan by a shoulder and shakes him. “Yeah, killer!” Stefan pushes him off.
“Continued good behaviour comes with privileges. More media on your computers, more varied food, that kind of thing. Obviously, the opposite is true. You won’t be seeing the others for a while. That doesn’t mean we’re doing anything sinister with them,” she adds quickly. “I know you saw Declan. We’re not doing that. Not yet, anyway. But their presence is disruptive, and they need individual attention.” She sighs. “It’s more work, of course.”
“I’m super sorry you kidnapped us and then we gave you a really hard time about it,” Aaron says.
“Thank you!” Indira says. “You’re much more thoughtful than Maria said.”
Aaron blinks, and Stefan wonders if he should be taking notes.
Edy stands and walks around towards Adam, trailing her fingers idly on the table. When she reaches him she places a hand on his shoulder. “Adam,” she says, “I’m going to be away for about a week. Indira will be here to help, and if you need to reach me you can ask her or any of the other sponsors, okay? The rest of the time, Stef will take care of you, right?”
She glances at Stefan, eyes wide. He nods. “Yeah, Adam,” he says. “I’m, uh… Anything I can do. Just ask.” Edy thanks him with a smile.
“I don’t want to be a burden,” Adam says quietly.
“You’re not,” Stefan says.
“Stick with her— him,” Edy says, correcting herself and going momentarily still, controlling her reaction to the error. “Sorry, Stef,” she adds. “Long day, long night.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Teacher’s pet,” Aaron whispers, grinning, as Edy leaves the room and the other two sponsors start talking between themselves.
“Better a teacher’s pet,” Stefan replies, “than stuck in the cells with Will.”
It’s the wrong thing to say, and he realises it a second later, when Adam almost chokes on his Weetabix.
* * *
Before there was the Anthill and the redevelopment by the lake, there was the central quad, the sixties project which transformed a collection of disparate teaching buildings and other facilities — only one of which had properly been part of the Royal College of Saint Almsworth — into a real university. Its crowning feature: a brutalist spike driven into a square of green space and surrounded on all sides by administrative and office spaces and what had once been the main library, now repurposed as a student hangout and study area. The central tower, no longer the jewel of the Royal College and slightly shabby with age, now houses a laundromat, a small supermarket, one of two bookshops, and on top retains its only original feature: Café One, a restaurant which never caught on as the trendy social hub the architects intended, and which now mainly sells sausage sandwiches, baked potatoes, and other cheap, portable food to hungover students for prices which render it only slightly more cost-effective than taking a bus into town and going to a real café.
“If you keep pouring coffee into me I’ll never get any sleep,” Christine says, glaring at her cup and at her abandoned, half-finished sandwich.
“That’s literally the idea,” Lorna says.
“You can go, you know,” Christine says, leaning on her hand, unable to keep her mounting exhaustion under control. “See your friends and stuff. I can just slouch here until they kick me out. Someone’ll eventually take pity on me and drag me to the front steps of the dorm.”
Lorna snorts. “Nope! Vicky’s meeting us here and she’d be kind of annoyed with me if I wandered off, don’t you think? Besides, you are my friend!”
“That’s very kind of you to say.”
“It’s true!” Lorna taps Christine on the wrist, almost destabilising her. “You’re even worse than Vicky, Tina. Does everyone at your dorm have massive self-esteem issues, or is it just you two? And Pippa?”
Vicky? Self-esteem issues? Christine wants to ask her if she’s talking about the same bubbly, outgoing girl Christine knows. Instead she says, “Just us. Why do you think we all know each other?”
“I’m guessing, support group for the terminally shy?”
“We meet once a month,” Christine says, and sips her coffee. How many cups so far today? She’s losing count. “With paper bags on our heads. And with the—” still holding her cup, she twirls her little finger in a circle near her eye and almost overbalances, “—shit! Sorry. And with the holes cut out, so we can see.”
Lorna gives Christine the same look she gave in the car, the same one Christine’s sure she could interpret better if she wasn’t so fucking tired. And she needs to do better in front of Lorna: it’s one thing to be confident and undetectable in front of cis people who, by and large, haven’t got a bloody clue about anything, and quite another to be friends with a trans woman. Christine feels a little like she did back at the mall, when Paige and Pippa dragged her out to buy dresses, except that Lorna isn’t likely to be cruel if she clocks her, just confused. Confused in a way that would end in major problems for Vicky and Dorley.
Why’d you have to fall in love with a trans girl, Vick? And why’d she have to be so nice? I can’t even resent her for making me nervous!
Lorna chews on her own sandwich for a while in silence, still giving Christine the look. “Is Vicky… okay?” she asks eventually, and bites her lip.
“Yes?” Christine says. “I think so?” Uncomfortable under Lorna’s scrutiny, she starts fiddling with her remaining sandwich, tearing off hunks of bread and turning them over in her fingers. She considers eating a bit more; if she really does fall asleep as soon as she gets home, this might be the only thing she eats all day. Hopefully Indira’s put the standard email through to her lecturers, or she’ll wake up to the same bullshit in her inbox she remembers from when she was a bad student the first time around.
“Are you lying to me, Christine?” Lorna says, her voice suddenly hard, and Christine’s glad she didn’t yet get around to stuffing any more food in her face because she would have choked, for sure.
“I mean, she hasn’t said anything to me,” Christine says carefully.
“It’s just… All right, so, in the car? You asked her for pills. ‘Vitamin pills’.” Christine watches her air-quote like a rat watches a cat. “The ones you forgot, and thought she had.”
Quality fuckup, Christine. “Uh, yeah?”
“You weren’t asking about vitamin pills, were you?”
The caffeine hasn’t done anything for Christine’s mental acuity, because in her anxious need to fix things she says the first thing that comes to mind, which is, “Why wouldn’t I have been?” which is exactly the kind of thing she’d say if she were trying to be evasive. She puts down her coffee and holds up her hand, asking for a moment. “Yes,” she says, thinking as fast as she can under the circumstances, “you’re right. Not vitamins.”
“Has Vicky been lying to me?” Lorna asks. Quiet and steady. She’d be meeting Christine’s gaze if Christine was at all prepared to meet hers.
Yes. Ever since you met her. “No. Not as far as I know.”
“But she’s taking something.”
“Yes.” Two things, actually: progesterone and estradiol. Christine never gave much thought as to how Vicky hides her HRT from Lorna. When does she find the time to dissolve the estradiol under her tongue? Christ, what does she say about the scars on her labia?
“And you know what it is because you take the same thing,” Lorna says, with a sigh in her voice, already almost as tired of this as Christine.
“Yes, but—”
“I know you don’t want to let her down, Christine, or break a promise, or whatever, but… I can’t deal with lies.” Lorna leans forward, so she can speak quietly. “I had a girlfriend, before I transitioned. And she lied to me. She pretended she was fine with what— with who I am, with the changes I was just starting to go through, but she was lying her arse off. She was already seeing another— a guy, but she was too chicken to tell me. Scared of how I might react. And when I eventually found out, she was all—” she holds her arms up in front of her face, protectively, “—like I might attack her for it. Like I might beat her. She cried about how scared she was of my reaction. Like I was some abusive boyfriend, not a trans girl ten times as scared of what she might do than the other way round.”
Shit. “I’m sorry,” Christine says. “I didn’t know.”
Lorna sniffs. “Yeah, well. Now you do. I’m done being lied to, Christine. And I know you and Vick have a bond, some shared experience or something, I see it with you and her and Paige and even Pippa when you’re all together, and I’ve never asked because I know she has shit in her past just like I have in mine. I know what she’s like when she gets scared.” She must notice Christine’s flinch because she reaches forward, takes Christine’s hand, and modifies her tone. Softer; less accusing. “And I’m not asking about that, about whatever happened to all of you. But I need to know about this pill thing. I need the truth.”
There are procedures for this. There’s evidence, ready-made and available in the lockers back home. Scripts to recite. Christine never put much effort into memorising any of it, because she never expected to end up with someone who didn’t know her, past and present, which was obviously a mistake equal in stupidity to all the other mistakes she’s made recently.
Fuck it; improvise.
She covers Lorna’s hand with hers, squeezes, and sits back in her chair, implying discomfort, which gets Lorna to let go. She nods, pretending grudgingly to accept that now is finally the time to tell the truth while she rearranges herself such that she can drop a hand into her bag and hit the button on the side of her phone. Christine made sure she got the brand of phone with the superfluous extra button, which as standard summons a proprietary voice assistant that approximately one percent of this phone’s owners actually use, but which on hers has been set to launch a voice recorder app. A double press, later, will end the recording, zip it up and encrypt it, and bounce it to the security room at Dorley, where someone will pick it up and act on it, if it seems necessary.
Improvise with backup.
“I was really out of it in the car,” she says, looking down at the table, ignoring the guilt constricting her throat, “as you saw. Partly because I was really tired. And partly because I missed my pill last night.” She meets Lorna’s eyes, hopes she can keep her gaze steady. “Venlafaxine. Those are the pills I take. The ones I asked her about. It’s an SNRI. I’ve been taking it for years, and so is Vicky. At least, I thought she was. I don’t actually know if she still does. We took it together, a long time ago. But never talked about it much. My choice. I’m, uh…” Christine rubs the back of her neck. “I’m kind of ashamed of it? Needing the help? And I know I shouldn’t be, I know lots of people take this stuff, I know it’s normal, but I’ve never been able to get over it. And in the car, I was so knackered, I wasn’t thinking straight, and just blurted it out. Vicky wasn’t lying to you, Lorna, when she went along with my story about it being vitamins. Not really. She was just protecting me.”
“Protecting you… from me.”
Christine shrugs. “From myself. Not you. She knows I’m neurotic.” Finally, a spot of truth.
Lorna sits back heavily. “Why wouldn’t she tell me about them? I’m not some ableist piece of shit who’s going to care that her girlfriend takes something that helps her. I’d be a pretty big hypocrite if I did, if you think about it.”
“Yeah,” Christine says, “I guess. And she might not take them any more, anyway. Like I said, we don’t really talk about it.”
Like a switch being flipped, Lorna’s face breaks out into a smile. She reaches across the table and touches Christine’s hand again. “Thank you, Christine. And I’m sorry for pushing. It’s just… you know how it is. The shit in your past never quite lets you go.”
Christine nods. Matches Lorna’s smile. Squeezes Lorna’s fingers. Displays sincerity. And with her other hand she hits the button on her phone twice, sending the audio file back to Dorley where someone will listen to it and shoot Vicky a message through the Dorley build of Consensus, which will manifest on her phone as a notification about a system update and open the messaging app in a floating window that will disappear as soon as she acknowledges receipt. Before she meets back up with them at Café One she’ll have her story straight and ready to tell.
“I get it,” Christine says. “When you’ve been lied to before, it’s hard to trust again.”
* * *
“Hey, baby. Did you miss me?”
“Edy?”
“Hi, Maria.”
“Edy!”
“Hey, don’t sit up so fast! Let me come to you.”
“Where did Bea go? And Abby?”
“Aunt Bea’s taking Abby home so they can get a bit of distance and a bit of rest, respectively. Which means that for the next little while I’ve got you all to myself.”
“Good! That’s… that’s really good. Sorry about that, by the way. I wake up hard at the moment. Takes me a second to get orientated.”
“How do you feel?”
“Honestly? Like complete shit. Even with the curtains shut it’s too bright in here. And these headaches keep coming and going. Not to mention — ouch! — the small matter of the dent in my skull.”
“Don’t touch it!”
“Yeah. Sorry. I haven’t been seriously hurt like this since— fuck, since Grandmother’s time. I’ve lost all my helpful wound care habits.”
“Poor baby.”
“Can you— uh, Edy, can you do me a favour?”
“Anything, Maria.”
“Sit with me? Up here? Maybe hug me a little? Auntie’s been wonderful, obviously, but she’s been treating me like I’m made of glass. I just want—”
“I’ve got you. Come on. Move over.”
“You, uh, might have to help me with that, too.”
“Okay. You just— no, lift your— no. Okay. I’ve got it. Just lie still, Maria. I’m going to pull the sheet, and you with it.”
“That’ll get the sheets all messed up.”
“So?”
“So, someone will have to fix it.”
“Let them! They can bill it.”
“Elle’s money isn’t infinite.”
“It might as well be! Besides, how much can it cost? Item: fitting new sheets after scandalous hospital bed lovemaking episode, ten dollars.”
“Lovemaking, Edy?”
“If you play your cards right. Now, stiffen up; I’m going to pull.”
“Edith, you’ve already pulled. Get it—? Aahh!”
“You had to make the joke, didn’t you, baby? Couldn’t stiffen up like I asked. Had to exercise your smart mouth.”
“It’s the only thing on my smart face that still works.”
“Okay. Lie still. I’m going to join you on— Woah!”
“Edy! Are you okay?”
“Yes. Just spectacularly uncoordinated. Give me a moment?”
“Shall I call someone?”
“No. It’s fine. I’m fine. See?”
“Impressive. Standing on your own two legs.”
“Don’t make fun, Maria.”
“You’re right. And you’re doing better at that than I am, right now. I suppose concussed women in glass hospitals shouldn’t throw, uh, plastic jelly containers?”
“Rules for life. Okay. I’m taking my heels off this time. I learn from my mistakes.”
“You’re so wise.”
“And you’re so mean.”
“It’s how they made me. Seriously. It was a design goal. It required quite a lot of beating.”
“Hey! Maria. Don’t joke about that.”
“Sorry, but I’m going to, always. My dark past, my rules.”
“What if I kiss you? Will that make you stop?”
“Maybe. Let’s try it.”
“Mmmm.”
“Yeah. Yeah, Edy, I think that worked.”
“Shall I keep going?”
“Yeah, just— just gently.”
“Very gently. Very, very gently.”
“Ouch!”
“Sorry!”
“No. It’s okay. I’m okay. But let’s maybe just lie here for a while? Together?”
“Let’s. I have get well cards?”
“Hmm. Who from?”
“Uh, let’s see. One from all the second years — look! Faye drew you something!”
“Okay, that’s actually really sweet.”
“Right? And there’s one from the sponsors, and, uh—”
“What’s that one?”
“It’s from Aaron.”
“How did he get a card in the first place?”
“Indira.”
“Of course. I feel like it’s a good thing I can’t focus well enough to read his scribble. What does it say?”
“‘Life down here just isn’t the same without you judging everything I do. Sorry about your head. Hope you don’t get any weird scars.’”
“Huh. Surprisingly polite.”
“Yeah. Oh, and there’s one from—”
“Edy? Maybe no more cards for a little while?”
“Sure.”
“We could, uh— did you bring your phone?”
“Of course. Why?”
“This is probably the best time for you to sell me on one of those bands you’re always going on about.”
“Really? You’d let me? You wouldn’t run screaming?”
“Can’t.”
“Right. Of course. Yeah, just let me find the right track. Here we go.”
“Oh! Oh. Yeah, this is okay, Edy.”
“You really thought my taste was that bad?”
“Yeah? Kinda. You tried to make me listen to Lit, once.”
“That was the automatic playlist thingy!”
“Lies. Who’s this, then?”
“Placebo. I was so into them when I was, like, thirteen. The singer? He’s so hot. Or he was, back in the nineties. He might not be, any more; I haven’t looked. I really wanted posters of him. Wasn’t allowed.”
“‘Him’? Aren’t you incredibly gay?”
“He’s my exception.”
“Do I have competition?”
“Absolutely not. You’re hotter.”
“You’re so sweet. What’s this song called?”
“Every You Every Me.”
“I like it.”
“Good.”
“Edy?”
“Yeah?”
“You think the boys will be okay? I mean, this feels like it’s going to be a difficult year, and—”
“The boys will be fine, Maria. I promise. We’ll take care of them.”
“All except Declan, right?”
“He was… beyond us.”
“I hope so. I don’t like that we have to do that.”
“Me neither, baby. But we help the ones we can help.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, Maria?”
“Yes?”
“I was so scared.”
“I was, too.”
“We’ll be more careful from now on.”
“We will. I love you, Edy.”
“Love you too, Maria.”
* * *
* * *
“I never thought I’d miss the simmering air of barely controlled rage, but I do. It gave every afternoon a certain structure, like we couldn’t just fall asleep on the couch, digesting our veggie lasagne and trying very hard to ignore the telly, because at any moment Will might jump up and start lecturing us on the evils of incarceration or how ACAB applies even to hot lady kidnappers or how it’s okay actually to beat the shit out of your brother if you’re super homophobic and/or a really big closet case. He may scare the bejesus out of me half the time but at least he has passion. What am I passionate about, Stef? I barely have any strong feelings that aren’t about sex or how much I hate Weetabix, and down here there’s only so much sex I can’t have and so much Weetabix I can throw at Martin and I’m bored! Look at me, Stef! It’s only half past dick in the afternoon and already I’m sitting on the couch like you do.”
“Get down from there.”
“Make me.”
“You’ll hurt yourself if the sofa tips over, which it will, because your centre of gravity’s all wrong.”
“How come it’s okay for you to sit like that, then?”
“I’m taller. Longer legs.”
“Some people have all the luck.”
“Agreed.”
“Stef! I’m so bored!”
“I know.”
“I can’t even be mad about the chest thing any more! I’ve gone through all that and now it’s just, welp, I have erogenous nipples now. I’m kinda used to it. The absolute banality of life down here has utterly overcome my ability to stay angry. Like, I’m still pissed off, don’t get me wrong, but it comes in waves. Just like me.”
“What—? Oh, fuck you.”
“Hah! You laughed!”
“Fuck you.”
“Got you.”
“Yeah, you got me, Aaron. I thought, for a brief second, that you might be expressing an emotion.”
“Idiot.”
“Yeah, yeah. You want to go to my room and watch movies?”
“Sure, but I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye out for Adam? And thus, by extension, so am I?”
“Yeah, but who knows how long he’s going to be talking to Will? Indira can just knock on my door if she wants me to watch him again.”
“Indira, huh? You know her name already? Suckup.”
“Shut up.”
“Kiss-ass.”
“Shut up.”
“Mwah! Mwah! Mwah! That’s you, kissing sponsor butts.”
“Yeah? Then why did you ask if you could send Maria a get well card?”
“That’s just basic human decency, Stef. And I’m a model citizen.”
“Uh huh.”
“I am! Ask any of the boys who used to beat the shit out of me. They called me a ‘girly little goody-two-shoes’ and I’m pretty sure that qualifies me to go straight into the priesthood without all the hassle of seminary.”
“Aaron, if I ever meet any of the boys who used to beat the shit out of you I won’t be asking them polite questions. I’ll, uh, I don’t know, probably yell a lot?”
“My hero!”
“Get off me!”
“Okay, God, fine.”
“You know I’m sensitive there.”
“And yet still you refuse to try them out.”
“Hah! Shows what you know.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Come on, let’s go pick a movie.”
“No, Stef, tell me, what do you mean by that?”
“Nothing, now come on!”
“Tell meeeeee!”
“Nope!”
“Stef, I’m serious: have you, in fact, wanked yourself to completion using only your nipples? Stef? Stef! Come back! I need to know! It’s for science!”
* * *
* * *
“Hey, kids!”
“Um, hey, Indira.”
“I’d love to just drop in for a chat but I actually need your help, Steffie. With Adam. He won’t talk to me, and Edy’s at the hospital with Maria. So it has to be you.”
“What happened?”
“He asked to see Will.”
“Yeah, we saw.”
“I was a fool to let him. I know, I know, I said we would and we have to honour our promises, but it was a bloody idiot move on my part to let them see each other again so soon. Adam was already pretty freaked out, and Will was all steamed up, and Raph and Ollie were there in the other cells contributing the occasional nugget of wisdom, like a pair of bears shitting in the river, so all that happened was they upset each other. So much yelling. I’m almost surprised you didn’t hear it.”
“We were watching Clueless. And there’s quite a lot of concrete between us and them.”
“I said ‘almost surprised’. Look, Steffie, I hate to be a pain, especially as we barely know each other, but I really do need you to talk to him. Urgently.”
“He’s that bad?”
“He’s not talking.”
“Ah. You’ll let me into his room?”
“Of course! Come on. Oh, and Aaron, I’m afraid you’ll need to go back to your room, or the common area. You can’t stay in someone else’s room on your own! Rules.”
“It’s okay, he’ll probably just go jerk off.”
“Hey! I mean, accurate, but, hey!”
* * *
There’s nine. Two on her desk, seven in the drawer. One per month, so nine months. That’s how long it’s been since Christine last opened a report on her old family, her old life. And now here they all are in their black folders, spread out on the bed in front of her like massive, ugly tarot cards. She snorts at the mental image, imagines shuffling them and dealing out a hand, analysing her deliberately abandoned past via the mystical arts.
The last one she opened, ten months ago, was the one that confirmed they’d dropped any pretence of searching for her. Abandoned one last time, first by a father who didn’t give a shit, then by a mother who stood by her abusive husband, and finally by them both, forgetting her/him, consigning their son to a memory.
Abby’s parents, the last Christine heard, are still looking. Still got a private investigator on the case. Christine’s both jealous of the relationship Abby had with her parents, and impressed with Dorley’s obfuscation of her past: after so many years, you’d think they would have had some success. Stef found them, and she’s just an amateur!
Except Stef got lucky, didn’t she? Her surrogate older sister (brother) was taken, and they happened to run into each other. The whole thing is ultimately Abby’s fault, if one were inclined to assign blame, both for taking on Melissa and for letting her off campus: sponsors are supposed to be more wary about locals, both when it comes to picking them up to begin with, and in allowing them out.
Stef got lucky, and if there’s one thing most Dorley girls can be said to lack, it’s luck.
Abby. The poor girl. At least Christine’s curiosity is driven mostly by guilt and nostalgia; Abby wants nothing more than to have her family back.
Fuck it. No more pontificating. She slides a finger through the seal on the most recent folder, delivered only days ago, and drops back onto the bed, open on its first page.
The picture is hard to look at.
Christine’s clearest memory of her father is from the day she took a blow meant for her mother. She’s dreamed dozens of times of the way his face twisted, transitioning from anger through disbelief and into, of all things, shame, as he cradled his son’s injured wrist in his hands. These last couple of years the dreams have all ended the same way, diverging from reality: her father’s apologies die in his spittle-soaked mouth as he realises what his son has become and raises his arm once more.
There’s a carer in the photo, tending to him, captured in the act of feeding him. In Christine’s long absence, the downstairs study’s been converted into a bedroom, and he’s lying in a narrow bed, surrounded by medical equipment. Christine, fresh out of Maria’s hospital room, can almost hear the quiet, insistent beeping. Her mother’s nowhere to be seen.
Turn the page.
There she is: Christine’s mother is weeding, in dungarees and the ugly sun visor she got in Portugal, squinting into the bright morning, fuzzily out of focus but still obviously less than half her former size. Her clothes look comically large on her.
Wasting away, both of them.
Get out! She wants to yell it at the photograph. Leave him! Let him rot! Let him die in the tomb he built around himself, the enormous house that greed and stress and three fucking heart attacks bought.
Her mother’s not even forty-five yet. Twenty-odd years younger than him. She could still have a life. But she won’t, because where would she even go? She’ll potter around the old house doing the same old chores until, one day, the worthless piece of shit she married finally dies and, alone, probably she’ll follow him.
Christine doesn’t realise she’s crying until Abby peeks in through the half-open door and lunges for her, practically collides with her, throws aside all the papers and photographs and unopened folders, and scoops Christine into her arms. Suddenly aware of Abby’s presence and of how desperately she needs her, Christine clings to her sister, buries herself, wants to scream into Abby’s shoulder but keeps it quiet and continuous.
“She’s so fucking stupid, Abs. She always was. She could have left at any time. Could have taken me with her. Could have got us both out. She had money before they met. Not loads, not like him, but enough, definitely enough. I know. I looked. I even, fuck, I even took some for myself, once, when I hated her, when I had to be around her all the time and hear her bullshit excuses. I saw her with bruises still loving that fucker and I hated her, so I took from her. Abs— Abby. How could I do that to her? I gave it back. All of it. I did. But that was all I did. I didn’t help. I didn’t get her out. Just like she didn’t get me out. But I should have! The last time I saw her, not long before— before Dorley, before me, before this, she looked so fucking brittle, like the slightest touch would break her, and I remember thinking that as soon as Dad got home he’d do just that, and I didn’t want to see it, couldn’t see it, so I ran out without even saying goodbye. And now there she is, not even living. Just a fucking automaton, traipsing around that fucking house, doing the same stupid shit she always did, waiting for him to die, and there’s nothing I can even do. I even know what I would do if I could! God, Abs, look at her. Look at her! There’s nothing left of her. Just… just look.”
Abby holds her, strokes her back, whispers nothing words to her, lets her get it all out, and as the tears fade from Christine’s vision she can see something else: one of the photos Abby scattered ended up near the head of the bed, right in front of Christine as she leans on Abby’s shoulder, and its glossy paper catches the light, lending the depiction of Christine’s childhood home an ethereal quality, like a place that belongs to the afterlife.
Later, much later, when they’ve tidied up the pictures and put the folders away, when they’ve watched some stupid cartoons out of Edy’s network folder, when Paige has texted to say she’ll be late because she’s gone to the library and to ask if Christine would like her to pick something up for dinner, Christine and Abby sit, shoulders against each other, on the floor of Christine’s room, leaning their heads on the couch behind them, spent but calm.
“You could go see her, you know,” Abby says.
Christine shakes her head. “No. Rules.”
“As if they matter to you.”
“What would I say? She’s not exactly the kind of person who embraces queer people. And I definitely can’t say I was turned into a girl against my will.”
“She thinks her only child is dead. That changes people.”
“Enough?”
“Sometimes.”
“No,” Christine says again.
“Think about it.”
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Christine says, “Abs, I really don’t want to think about anything right now.”
“Sure,” Abby says. “I won’t push.”
“Thanks, Abs. Love you.”
“Love you.”
Later, after Paige texts to say she’ll be up in ten minutes with curry, Abby pauses the music and repositions, facing Christine and looking very serious.
“Christine,” she says, and takes a deep breath, lets it out, and looks like she doesn’t know how to continue.
“Yes?”
“So. I haven’t been around much. You know that. And I want to tell you why, but I need to do it my way. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“You free Saturday?”
“I can be.”
Abby reaches into her bag and pulls out a page from her notebook with an address written on it: a restaurant in Almsworth, according to her neatly penned note. Not one Christine knows. “I’ll be there one o’clock. Meet me?”
“Um. Okay. What’s this all about, Abby?”
“Pay for the taxi with cash. Don’t use your card. And don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”
“You want me to spoof the tracker on my phone?”
“You can do that? I’ve just been turning mine off.”
“Yeah. I can do that.”
“Good. Yes. Please. Do that.”
“Abby,” Christine says, smiling, “this is beginning to sound dangerously criminal.”
Abby snorts. “Little bit, yeah.”
* * *
It feels wrong to shut Aaron out again, but Stefan needs everything to stop for a while. No more questions, no more worried eyes, entreating him for answers he can’t give. It was bad enough when it was just Aaron; Adam, lost without Will, upset by his friend’s rejection of his concerns, fearing for Will’s life, begged Stefan for reassurance. And Stefan gave the only reassurance he had: bullshit.
Endless, endless bullshit.
He puts on some white noise, closes his eyes, and drifts.
The first time he knew there was something wrong with Mark was shortly after their shared birthdays, on Stefan’s thirteenth year and Mark’s seventeenth. Their birthdays fell on a weekend that year, which was serendipitous: weekday birthdays suck, even for the lucky ones whose birthdays don’t fall inside the school year. On Stefan’s birthday, the first of the two, Mark had been his usual quiet but considerate self, and he’d even brought a friend, a girl called Shahida, who he’d talked about on and off for years. It was lovely finally to meet her, and Stefan put on his best behaviour, wanting to impress this woman who might or might not have been Mark’s girlfriend, while Russell made fun of his exaggerated politeness. She was kind, and laughed with him, not Russell, and took Mark away on some errand.
She looked forward to seeing him again.
But on Sunday she wasn’t there. Mark’s birthday came and went without her, and when Stefan asked after her, Mark just said that sometimes things change, sometimes relationships don’t work out, and maybe it’s for the best. They weren’t right for each other, he said. They were both going to move on, he said. He hadn’t said it like he believed it; he said it like he thought it might be the last thing he ever said.
That was the start of it, as far as Stefan saw. Probably it really started years before, but childish eyes see only the obvious. Whatever eventually brought Mark to Dorley Hall, it was a long time in the making.
There’s pictures of Melissa on the network, and Stefan pages through them on his phone. She seems happy in most of them, even the earlier ones, the ones where she looks more like Stefan remembers her, a blur of her past and future selves, the girl-still-learning he met in the supermarket that day.
God, he hopes she’s happy.
She doesn’t know he’s here. Abby always said it’d be a bad idea to tell her, and she’s Melissa’s only link to Dorley, more or less. When she left, she left. Stefan can’t decide if it’s good or bad that she doesn’t know, but after half the population of the building got a close look at him yesterday he’s happy that at least someone doesn’t get to see what years of fear and denial made of him.
She’ll see him when he’s worth fucking seeing.
He rolls over onto his back, glares at the ceiling, tries to imagine the white noise becoming a physical presence, overlaid on the concrete like static on an old-style television.
There’s something about Adam that reminds him of how Mark was in that last year. Maybe it’s just the obvious loneliness. Loneliness as habit. Loneliness as defence. Loneliness that, briefly, Will kept at bay.
People pair off down here, that’s what Pippa said. Him and Aaron, unlikely as that would have seemed a few weeks ago. Christine and Paige. Abby and Melissa. Adam and Will. But Will shouted at Adam. Called him a collaborator. A broken man. A weakling. And several words out of the vocabulary that Will had, up to that moment, seemed to have abandoned. A cornered animal reaching for all its weapons, no matter how grotesque. Adam left in tears.
There wasn’t much of a conversation to be had. Yes, Will’s a piece of shit. Yes, he’ll be okay if he learns how to cooperate. No, Stefan doesn’t know if he’ll ever actually do so.
No, Stefan doesn’t know what’s happening down here. No, he doesn’t think they’re all going to die eventually. Yes, he really does think they’ll all be released when their sponsors think they’re ready.
No, Stefan isn’t going to leave him. No, Stefan isn’t stupid enough to assault a sponsor. Yes, we can say your prayer together.
Stefan was surprised by the wording: Your grace is your most precious gift. Please, Lord, make me worthy of it. Not one he encountered back at the church he avoided attending.
Yes, we can watch movies. Adam likes these cheesy TV-movie rom-coms, painfully straight and filled with Christmases and horrible sweaters, and Dorley has a whole folder full of them.
As they watched, Adam told Stefan where he came from. It came out in fragments, whenever something or someone in the movie reminded him of something. Stefan put the fragments together like a puzzle, and quite lost the thread of the movie.
Adam’s the first son of a founding family, and thus the church — and where Adam says church Stefan hears cult — laid expectations on him from birth. Colossal ones. And in his younger days he bucked them, but not out of arrogance or confidence; Adam’s kind, and there’s only so many times you can force a kind boy to tell strangers they’re going to hell before you break him.
Stefan’s parents got religion back when he was in primary school. It was the quiet, local kind, and Stefan never found it particularly restrictive until he caught a sermon, on one of the Sundays he lost the stay-home-and-watch-cartoons argument, about the sins of homosexuality. It was difficult after that, as his self-realisation grew, not to feel like the enemy lived in his own home. Whatever he was, whoever he eventually became, he realised, he would no longer be welcome.
He turns the phone over and over in his hands, watches as the pictures of Melissa he’s not even really looking at any more play catch-up with the screen, bouncing from portrait to landscape and back.
Stefan is exhausted. Hard even to be upset any more. Like Aaron said, you can’t stay angry forever. Even if he turned it into a joke, he was right.
Can’t stay angry forever. Can’t stay guilty forever. Can’t even be dysphoric forever; after a while, the hands holding his phone, the knuckles he hates the shape of, the bony wrists, become almost geometric. Abstract. Repetition dulls the sharpest edge.
His phone buzzes. He almost drops it.
Pippa Green: You okay, Stef?
Stef: not really
Pippa Green: I came by and knocked but you couldn’t hear me with those headphones on.
Stef: kinda the point
Pippa Green: I know. I thought I’d give you your privacy.
Pippa Green: But I wanted to update you, all the same.
Pippa Green: Indira’s with Adam. He’s talking to her now. Thanks to you.
Stef: I’m glad
Stef: why is he even here?
Stef: yeah I get that he’s probably said a bunch of phobic stuff because his church slash cult is evil as shit and filled his mind with garbage
Stef: but you just get someone like that away from their abusers and help them adjust
Stef: you don’t turn them into a girl
Pippa Green: I actually don’t know why he’s here.
Pippa Green: Edy brought him in. And she’ll have had Maria’s approval. And Aunt Bea’s.
Stef: I can’t help feeling you lot are getting too casual with the whole forced feminisation thing
Pippa Green: Maybe. This is my first time on the supply side of feminisation and I’m not exactly happy about it.
Stef: pippa
Stef: I want to stop lying
Stef: I hate it
Stef: I feel like it’s killing me
Stef: it’s worse than the dysphoria, at least that’s just hurting me and no one else
Stef: now adam’s starting to trust me and I’m lying to his face
Stef: I even prayed with him!
Stef: and I know exactly what’s going to happen to him and I pretended I don’t
Pippa Green: I’m sorry.
Stef: don’t be sorry just fix it
Pippa Green: Okay.
Pippa Green: I have an idea.
Pippa Green: Give me a bit. I have to go see Aunt Bea.
Pippa Green: And then can I come tell you about it in person? I hate talking by text. It makes my thumb hurt.
Stef: okay
He puts on a show, something random off Netflix, and doesn’t watch it. When she knocks — and of course she does, even though he gave her permission to come in, because she was serious when she said she didn’t want to be like a sponsor any more, even before the truth came out, and that means never taking her presence in his space lightly — she does so with her customary identifier: three knocks, a pause, two knocks, a pause, two knocks. Her sweet insistence on using a special knock so he knows it’s her makes him laugh despite his mood.
“Come in, Pippa!” he shouts, sitting up in bed and belatedly pushing the covers back.
She enters, smiling broadly, and sits in the free space at the end of the mattress, drawing her feet up under her so she can face him. “She said yes!” she says.
“Yes to what?”
“Oh. Whoops. I thought I told you. Bea says we can do disclosure soon. Tomorrow or the day after, maybe, but in the next few days for sure.”
“Is that what I think it sounds like?”
“Yeah,” Pippa says. “We come clean.”
“Just like that?”
Pippa holds out her hands, like the assistant on a cheesy game show. “Just like that!”
“Wow.”
“We were planning on doing it in the next month or so, anyway,” she says. “Now that things are, uh, starting to develop, that starts a clock, you know? We’ve ended up bringing everything forward a little.”
“So, how does it go? You line us all up and say, ‘Sorry, lads, you’re going to be girls’?”
Pippa laughs. “Yeah. That’s basically how it was with my year. More words, same gist.”
“How did you take it?”
Now she looks away, some of her enthusiasm sapped. “We rioted.”
“Oh.”
“But that’s not going to happen,” she says, looking back at Stefan, trying to regain her former good mood, “because we’re running split pop now, and all the guys who are likely to cause serious trouble are already in the cells.”
Stefan leans back, thinking. “Adam and Aaron might not cause trouble,” he says slowly, “but will they be okay? Isn’t, uh, suicide a risk at this point?”
She nods. “We watch very carefully. Two in the security room at all times watching the cameras. Except yours, obviously.”
“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.”
She watches him for a moment, and then shuffles closer. “You okay, Stef?”
“Yeah,” he says quickly, surprised. “I’m actually— shit, Pip, I’m actually really relieved. I think I’m just tired.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Yeah. How’s Maria?”
“See for yourself,” Pippa says, and hands him his phone. Within the confines of his room, he can get at the same network resources as he can on the computer; a location-sensitive upgrade Christine put quite a lot of time into, apparently. He must remember to thank her. “Just hop on Consensus. There’s a new picture pinned.”
He does so, and brings up a photo of Maria and Edy, lying next to each other on Maria’s hospital bed, holding hands and grinning at the camera. It’s not clear who took the picture until he swipes onto the next one and finds a selfie of Abby, sticking her tongue out and holding a multipack of Jaffa Cakes just out of Maria’s reach. There’s another, of the three of them — Abby in a chair, Maria and Edy still on the bed together — and Beatrice on the other side, watching what looks like The Lord of the Rings on a laptop. It’s taken from Abby’s perspective again, and Beatrice is very reluctantly v-signing with the rest of them.
“Cute,” he says.
“Right? Oh, I have something for you.” Pippa reaches into her bag and pulls out a wad of tissue paper, which she drops into his lap.
“Thanks?”
“Unwrap it, doofus.”
“Oh. Right.”
The tissue paper eventually gives way to something that makes his heart leap when finally, in the dim light of the bedroom, he recognises it: a little rubber elephant, in faded blue, with tiny heart imprints under its feet and a keyring and chain embedded in its mouth like a giant piercing. There’s another lump of tissue, separately wrapped, and while he knows what it’s going to be, he’s still delighted when the green frog with the keyring through its belly drops out.
His frog and elephant. The first gifts his sister ever got him, when she was old enough to have pocket money, but not old enough to have much pocket money. A year before Stefan left for Saints they went to Colchester Zoo together, one of the few family trips outside Almsworth that wasn’t paid for by the school, and Petra persuaded their mum and dad to let him escort her. She came alive, the way she always did when away from parental supervision, and skipped through the zoo, identifying animals by sight without having to look at the plaques or the videos. She was a Wikipedia animal section veteran, explaining to him as they went what each animal was, the foods they liked, their lifespans, and whether or not they took kindly to humans.
She tarried longest around the elephants.
He learned later — three months later, on his birthday — that she managed to get away from him at some point, sneaked into the gift shop, and bought with almost all her money a pair of keychains, the elephant to represent her and the frog to represent him. When he opened the gifts on his birthday morning he planted his sloppiest big-brother kiss on the top of her head and asked, “Why the frog, though?”
“You seem like someone who likes frogs,” she said.
Carefully Stefan rolls the little rubber animals around on his palm, remembering. He doesn’t have many genuinely good memories, but that one’s near the top. And the keychains have always been an anchor, a reminder that, despite everything, there were bright spots.
“Thank you,” he says.
“I told you I’d keep them,” Pippa says.
Stefan laughs. “Yeah. You said, ‘For now…’ like a real sponsor.”
“Don’t remind me,” Pippa giggles. “I remember typing that and feeling just so pompous.”
“I’m glad you sucked at being a sponsor.”
“Yeah. Me too. I’d hate to be good at something like that.”
“I don’t know,” Stefan says. “Indira seems nice.”
“True. So—” and Pippa drops her bag on the floor by the bed and pushes up to the wall, closer again to Stefan, “—what are you watching?”
Stefan frowns. “I, uh, don’t remember.”
“You want to find something else to watch?”
“I think I’m bored of Netflix.”
“You want to listen to some music instead?”
“Sure.”
“Any thoughts on what?”
“Anything but Taylor Swift.”
“You’d be surprised how many of my playlists you just dismissed.”
“I really wouldn’t.”
“Okay, then. I have something. Edy’s been all over the group chat, going on about finally getting Maria to listen to her music, and I meant to give it a try. You game?”
“Yeah,” Stefan says, “why not?”
Pippa fiddles with her phone for a second, trying to hook it remotely to the speakers, but gives up and just starts it on her phone speakers instead, turning them up until they distort and then backing off one notch. It’s not too loud. It’s fine.
Synths, a guitar, and a reedy voice fill the room. Stefan reaches around her and pulls the covers over them both, and Pippa leans on his shoulder, dropping the phone between them.
“I kinda like this,” Pippa says.
Stefan just nods, smiling, and rests his head on Pippa’s. For the first time in a very long time, he’s almost content.
No more lies.
Notes:
Revised 7th January 2023. Slightly changed the Consensus chat formatting to hopefully make it more readable.
Chapter 19: You’re Just Someone I Was Forced to Know
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 November 29
Friday
It’s the chorded message chime from two phones that wakes him, but it’s the arm around his belly that causes him to jerk upright and hit his head on the wall, which doesn’t do wonders for the headache he discovers when he opens his eyes. Even the dim red light from the strip in the ceiling feels bright. He pulls at the sheets, intending to cover his head, finds them trapped by something, remembers the arm around his waist and almost falls out of bed.
The arm around him, which belongs to someone considerably stronger than him, saves him. Its owner responds to his thrashing with quiet, insistent moans and a firming of its grip.
He resorts to clearing his throat.
“Hm?” Pippa says, sounding like she prefers her arm exactly where it is. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry, Stef. Do you need to pee?” She releases him and the mattress clinks as, suddenly unsupported, he almost falls out again.
“No,” Stefan says carefully, and rolls over to face her. It’s tricky; the bed isn’t exactly wide, and it’s a squeeze to fit two people lengthways. He settles for a strange hopping manoeuvre on his hip, which Pippa watches him perform, bemused. The mattress coils don’t poke him quite as hard as he expected.
Pippa grins at him. “Hi.”
“Um, what did we do last night?”
“What did—? Oh!” She snorts, and then grimaces and massages her forehead. “Ow. You don’t remember? Look on the table.”
She helps him turn over again — “I’ll keep my hands decent,” she whispers with far too much delight as she steadies his shoulder and back — and when he’s in position he sees two wine glasses and two empty bottles on the bedside table, next to his little elephant and frog, and both their phones.
Memory returns. “Oh,” he says. There’s a third bottle, discarded on its side under the computer desk, where it must have rolled. The effort’s made his head throb again, and he closes his eyes to say, “Pip, that was probably an outstandingly bad idea.”
“It was fine,” she says, and Stefan can hear the smirk in her voice as he sits up and, still with his eyes closed, swings his legs off the bed.
“I hope you can support that thesis,” he mutters.
“You’re a fun drunk.”
Hmm. No trousers. “I’m amazed I was a conscious drunk.” He opens his eyes again, halfway, to give them time to adjust. The only light in the room is still from the lighting strip, which Pippa’s changed to a candlelight yellow with an app on her phone. “I wasn’t exactly a drinker before, and I’ve had a bit of an enforced dry spell. I don’t know if I told you about my dry spell?” He checks, and in addition to a t-shirt he is, in fact, wearing underwear. Thank God.
“Oh yeah,” Pippa says, “I heard. Some chick found you in a flowerbed and thought you could use a few months’ time-out in an exclusive underground spa.”
They listened to Edy’s playlist last night, which was mostly 90s and early 2000s stuff. When they both got the message that disclosure was set for the coming Saturday, so Maria and Edy could be back in the building for it, Pippa called upstairs for a bottle and some glasses to be sent down in the dumbwaiter. “No lectures tomorrow,” she said, clinking her glass to his, “and Maria’s going to be fine. I’m letting my hair down.”
“What hair?” Stefan had said, and made to ruffle her pixie cut, only backing off when she threatened to pour white wine on his head.
After the first bottle they switched to one of Pippa’s playlists. Stefan let her keep just the one Taylor Swift track: 22; “It’s my song,” she insisted, “because I’m twenty-two.” He didn’t argue with the logic.
“At least you got some drinking practice in,” Pippa says, stretching and climbing over him, out of the bed. She’s dressed almost identically to him, having borrowed one of his t-shirts last night, and she pulls it off and over her head without turning around, and giggles when, freed, she sees he’s turned away. “Don’t be silly,” she scolds, and kicks up last night’s dress from the floor, catching it and dropping it over her head.
“What if I don’t want to practise drinking?”
“You’ll need it. Now you’re officially one of us, they’re going to start roping you into our social functions. They tend to get boozy.”
“Yes, Christine warned me about those. I was planning on making excuses. You know, dentist appointment, family emergency, essay due; kidnapped.”
“Ah,” Pippa says, stepping into her shoes, “the classics.”
She’d dumped her dress and shoes halfway through the second bottle and climbed into bed next to him to watch a show a friend had recommended, a recent one; definitely not on the approved list, full of attractive people making terrible decisions. She nudged him with her elbow when a trans girl character — “Played by an actual trans woman!” she hissed — came cycling onto the screen. It’d made him pay a little more attention, despite the alcohol complicating matters.
Right now he can’t even remember what she looked like.
His head throbs again.
“Hangover?” Pippa says. “Same. Just chill here a few minutes and I’ll get someone to send some painkillers down. We need to get you a lockbox or something to go under the bed to keep stuff like that in,” she adds, half to herself.
He’s perfectly happy to go along with her instruction to stay put; even getting up from the bed would be an insurmountable challenge. “How are you so chipper,” he says, “if you’re hungover, too?”
“I might still be a little drunk. I finished the last bottle while you were snoring away.”
Stefan nods, slowly and carefully, so as not to dislodge any more headache. “Is it not going to be weird if one of the boys sees you leaving my room?”
She steps over, taps him lightly on the forehead. “Nope. How many times have I come down here in the morning? Just because none of them saw me walk in, doesn’t mean I didn’t.”
He flops back onto the bed, twisting so he lands lengthways and doesn’t brain himself on the wall again. “You’ve thought of everything.”
Pippa smiles. “That’s why I’m the… incredibly experienced, not at all winging-it Dorley graduate. I got a good grade in girl.”
Her impish grin and the little bounce she does to accentuate her joke make him laugh. “Clearly.”
“Anything else you need before I go?”
“Um, yeah, actually.” He raises himself up on his elbows, tries to borrow a percentage of her energy as he voices a thought that’s been worrying at him for the last few minutes. “It’s not weird for us to spend the night together, is it?”
She frowns at him, sits back down on the bed and hauls on his hand until he sits up next to her. She doesn’t let go of his fingers, and starts rubbing her thumb along their length. “Sponsors stay overnight all the time. Sure, it normally takes a lot longer for that kind of closeness to build, and, yeah, I’m not actually your sponsor any more — if I ever was — but, absolutely, it’s normal. Doesn’t happen for everyone, but Indira and Christine, for example, used to have sleepovers all the time, towards the end of the first year. Ask Christine to braid your hair when it gets longer; she’s good.”
“You said ‘closeness’,” he continues urgently. “Does it ever get… sexual? This isn’t me asking for anything with you, it’s just—”
“I know, Stef,” she says with a languid smile. “And, no. It’s rare, and highly discouraged. There’s a little bit of a power imbalance.” She pinches off a tiny volume with thumb and forefinger. “Rather unethical. And ethics, as you know—” she interrupts herself with a giggle, “—are so important here.”
“It’s just, I had the impression that Abby and Melissa are, uh, you know…”
“Yes, I do know. And they’re… complicated. And very close. Until Melissa left, anyway. Now she’s elsewhere, and Abby’s restless. Even more so these last few months.”
He nods again, and lets Pippa drag him all the way out of bed and into a hug.
“You going to be okay?” she whispers.
“Yeah. I’m not super excited about another day pretending ignorance, but I’ll manage.”
She squeezes him. “Spend the day in your room, then. Say you’ve got a headache; not much of a lie, there. Or ask to come upstairs. Like I said, you’re one of us now. You’re a Sister. You have, within this house, as much freedom as you ask for. My advice is to start asking.”
“I don’t feel much like a sister.”
Pippa kisses him lightly on the cheek. “You will.”
* * *
When Stefan finally consents to open his door after what feels like five full minutes of irregular but increasingly frantic knocking, he’s not surprised to find Aaron, in a hoodie zipped all the way up and the hood over his head — he’s been complaining about the cold, lately; most of them have — rocking back and forth on his heels and glaring up at him.
“Yes?” Stefan says, leaning into his sleepiness. He’d gone back to sleep less than half an hour after taking Pippa’s painkillers, sent down with caffeine-free tea in one of the kitchen’s less hilarious mugs.
“Where have you been?”
“Asleep.” On cue, the need to yawn and stretch takes him. Indira, leaning against the opposite wall and currently out of Aaron’s eyeline, winks at him.
“I’ve been up since seven,” Aaron says, yanking a thumb in Indira’s direction; she smirks. “How come you get to sleep in?”
Indira pushes off from the wall and walks quietly up behind Aaron. “Extreme favouritism,” she says, making him jump. “We do it on a random rota. Keeps you all on your toes.”
“Really?”
“No.” With a hand on each shoulder she manoeuvres Aaron to the side and nudges him back towards his room. “You smell like a sock. Go get your washing stuff. It’s shower time.”
“Jesus. Fine.”
“How’s your head?” Indira whispers to Stefan when Aaron retreats into his room and slams his door as best he can.
“Better now,” Stefan says. “How’s Pippa?”
“Tabby said she was riding pretty high until about an hour ago, and then she fell asleep in the security room. Almost faceplanted into her bagel. She put a blanket on her. She’s fine.”
“Good.”
“Sorry we’re not doing, you know, the thing today.”
“It makes sense to wait,” Stefan says. “And it’s only one more day. I’ll live.” He winces as his headache lances him again; the painkillers are wearing off. “If the hangover doesn’t kill me, that is.”
Indira smirks at him. “You’ll fit right in here if you keep drinking like that.” She mimes knocking back too many glasses of wine.
“So Pippa tells me.”
“Hey, you should come to the next—”
Whatever event she was about to invite him to goes unnamed; Aaron is back, as is circumspection. He raises his eyebrows and his wash kit at Stefan, who takes the hint and ducks back into his room to collect his shower things. He rubs quickly at his face as soon as he thinks he’s out of sight, and decides he can probably get away without shaving. He hasn’t gone a day without since Pippa moved him out of the cell, but he has to admit that there are days when it’s mostly ceremonial.
“Have fun!” Indira shouts at them as they close the bathroom door behind them; Aaron flinches again.
“So?” Stefan says, while they undress. “How do you like your new sponsor?”
“God,” Aaron says, dropping his underwear on the pile of clothes. True to recent form, he mostly faces away, now that he’s naked. “Don’t.”
“That good?”
“Stef, she’s driving me up the fucking wall.”
“Oh?”
“She’s so… so…”
“So…?”
“I don’t know!”
Aaron ducks under his shower and Stefan, after taking a moment to check he’s set the temperature properly, turns away to hide his smile. Christine’s talked about Indira’s methods, about how in the early days especially she had ways of ‘weaponising niceness’, which disarmed all the terrible things Christine wanted to say to her. It didn’t stop her saying them, obviously; it just compounded the guilt she felt afterwards.
They wash in silence.
It’s becoming difficult to predict Aaron’s moods. For all his insistence that the drudgery of life down here has flattened his responses to the changes his body’s been forced through, it’s hard to believe he’s not bothered by them. Sometimes the boy is his familiar self, the chatterbox, the wind-up toy whose stream of consciousness and endless innuendo can be interrupted only by food, sleep, or a good movie; sometimes, like now, he’s quiet, keeping even his eyes to himself. Stefan imagines him in his time alone, examining himself, repeating to himself the mantra that it’s just gynecomastia or something like it, that the swelling on his chest can only go so far, that it’ll go away on its own, or be easily removed. Comforting lies; Stefan’s poisoned gift.
Stefan lets him have his quiet. It’s the last day of this. Tomorrow the sponsors kick over the board, reveal the game the boys have really been playing this whole time, and everything changes.
“What’s with the name, anyway?” Aaron asks, breaking the silence and handing his conditioner bottle to Stefan.
He squeezes some out into his hands and starts massaging it through Aaron’s hair. “What do you mean?”
“Stef. Everyone calls you that now.”
Where’s he going with this? “‘Stefan’ is kind of a mouthful, don’t you think? I’ve never liked it. Makes me feel like I’m back at school, like when the teacher calls you up in front of the class.”
“Yeah,” Aaron says, squirming under Stefan’s fingers, “but isn’t ‘Stef’ kind of… girly?”
Stefan tells the honest truth. “No-one’s ever mistaken me for a girl.”
Aaron snorts and mutters something under his breath.
“What?” Stefan says, nudging him.
“Oh, uh, nothing. I’m just wondering how it started. You being Stef, I mean.”
“My friend, the one who went away.” Stefan briefly stops rubbing conditioner into the tips of Aaron’s lengthening hair. Even with everything he knows, and even though it won’t be forever, her absence eats at him. “She called me that.” Because, the very first time they met, she saw Stefan wince at his full name and somehow intuited that he might prefer something else. “It spread from her.”
“Melissa, right?”
“Right.”
“Your first cru-ush!” Aaron sings.
Stefan pokes him in the back of the neck, to reprimand him and to suggest that Aaron can go back to his own shower now. “Gross! She was like my sister. My much older sister.”
Aaron starts washing his undercarriage, leaning his head away from the water stream. It’s taken weeks of patient nagging to get him to understand that conditioner doesn’t really do anything if you immediately rinse it out. And from what Stefan’s observed of the Dorley girls, most of them keep their hair long — those still in the programme are probably under instructions to do so, come to think of it — so this way Aaron will at least not have to deal with tangles alongside his forcibly applied new gender.
“What was she like?”
The smile comes automatically. “Kind,” Stefan says. “And smart. Really smart. I’d have done terribly in all my science subjects without her help.” Because the memory of the supermarket invades him yet again, he continues without meaning to. “And pretty. So fucking pretty, Aaron.”
“Sounds like you did have a crush.”
“No.” I wanted to be like her from the moment I saw her again. “She was just…”
“So fucking pretty?”
“Hard not to notice.”
“You miss her?”
He turns away. Washes himself below the waist. Directs his flattening mood at the task. “Like a part of me rotted away, yeah.”
“How long did you know her?”
“Since I was ten.” Rinse away the soap. Wash the feet. Be methodical. Be a machine. Be not present. “She left when I was fourteen.”
“You never said why she left.”
“I never knew.”
Aaron leaves him alone after that, and Stefan finishes up. But when they’re towelled and robed and about to leave, he shyly grabs Stefan’s forearm, stopping him by the sinks. His hand, damp against Stefan’s wrist, trembles a little; this must be hard for him.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “About Melissa. I’ve told you about Elizabeth, yeah? I knew her for, like, no time compared to you and Melissa, but I still miss her every day.”
“People say it gets easier,” Stefan says. “I’m still waiting.”
“Look,” Aaron says, “I’m fucking terrible at this, but I’m trying to express sympathy and empathy and all that shit, so I, um…”
Fuck it. Stefan interrupts him by pulling on his hand and dragging him into a hug. Aaron squeaks in surprise and stiffens, like a lost creature, freezing to protect itself from unknown predators, but when Stefan whispers, “Thank you,” he relaxes, and loops his arms around Stefan’s back.
“I never found her again,” Aaron says. “I lost her number, never knew her last name. I’ve been worrying, lately, that maybe she looked for me, maybe she found me, maybe she heard about what I did. Decided she wants nothing to do with me.”
Stefan wants to say that she won’t find him in here, that he can look for her when he leaves, that they could see each other again, but that’s a lie too far. He hugs the boy more tightly instead.
Later, at their delayed breakfast, they discover their usual Weetabix has been augmented by a cellophane-wrapped variety pack of cereal, sitting in the middle of the dining table on a wooden tray, along with porcelain bowls, metal spoons, and blue-top milk. Over his Coco Pops, Aaron talks about much, but does not mention Melissa, Elizabeth, or the hug.
2019 November 30
Saturday
Getting up before the sun sucks, but today’s the big day: disclosure. All hands on deck. And with Maria delivered back to her room yesterday evening, even Edy — nominally still on leave — is making herself available. As the new Head of Network Security, and as Stef’s friend, Christine can’t sit this one out.
And she’s got a slide presentation to prepare for Monica.
She slips out of bed, lifting Paige’s hand off her hip and kissing her silently on the tip of her nose, showers quickly and dresses quietly. She picks clothes she can move easily in: a loose blue dress with a few handy pockets, leggings, trainers and a wide belt; she wants to be unrestricted in case things kick off. It’s not likely, not unless Adam, Aaron or Martin have an undiscovered propensity for (non-vehicular) violence, but it’s not impossible, and they’re doing things by the book now. She slips the taser she was issued into the largest pocket, grateful that Paige is still asleep; she hates that Christine has to have it. Hates having it in the room. A reminder of their past; other people’s present.
Simple makeup. Her skin looks okay today so she skips foundation and just deepens her naturally pale lips and adds a little eyeliner. She pulls out the scrunchie she wore in the shower, takes one look at her hair and puts it back in, pulling out a few strands around her face and leaving the rest up. It doesn’t look spectacular, but it’s fine enough. They’re supposed to look at least somewhat aspirational — sorry boys, you’re going to be girls, but maybe you can be pretty girls, like us — but, fuck it, perhaps Christine can be the role model for girls who probably should have washed their hair this morning.
“Why did I take this job?” she asks herself, and Paige answers in her sleep with such sweet and gentle grumbling that Christine has to force herself to grab her laptop and leave the room immediately before she succumbs to the urge to just climb back in with her, forget about disclosure, forget about Stef, and tell Aunt Bea to take her salary and shove it.
Twenty thousand, though! Net! And no rent or bills! A safety net for the two of them, over and above the stipends they can expect.
She closes the door and creeps down the corridor to the kitchen, aiming to fill herself with coffee before she has to face another human. She dumps her computer on the table and starts checking over the intake files, assembling photos and records and dates into slides, irritated at herself for not doing this yesterday (but Paige had brought some new dresses around to show her, and one thing inevitably led to another). At least the task is brainless.
She’s on her second cup and finishing off a bowl of cereal when her phone chimes: Vicky.
Victoria Robinson: Hey Tina. Won’t be around much for a bit. Lorna and I are taking some time to be together. Straight home from lectures. Staying in at the weekends.
Victoria Robinson: There have been some BIG talks.
Christine Hale: Oh shit babe
Christine Hale: Anything you need, shout
Christine Hale: I’m here for you
Christine Hale: We all are
Victoria Robinson: Thanks.
Victoria Robinson: I’m so fucking scared. This is WAY beyond the vrenaflaxine thing. She says she’s been noticing things for a while, and I’m having to pretend to be baffled and gaslight the shit out of her while inwardly crapping myself, looking back on everything I’ve ever said and done around her, trying to work out if any of it betrays the Big Fucking Secret.
Victoria Robinson: She even brought up the donation. The very large and completely anonymous donation that put her FFS fund over the finish line.
Victoria Robinson: She must have been thinking about that for ages.
Victoria Robinson: Tell me there’s nothing to find there, please.
Christine Hale: It’s watertight, Vick
Christine Hale: Processed through our most anonymised payment lines
Christine Hale: You’d have to be a state-level actor to trace it back to us and even then I wouldn’t give high odds
Christine Hale: If you have friends in high places you can get really fucky with finance
Christine Hale: Does she have any ideas about who sent it?
Victoria Robinson: I don’t think so, not any more. She asked if I knew, and I said no, and that was a WHOLE conversation.
Victoria Robinson: We got onto my family, my school, everything. All the stuff about me that’s fake as shit. It’s like she’s going through my whole life, looking for the cracks.
Victoria Robinson: Tina.
Victoria Robinson: I’m ALL cracks.
Christine Hale: Did you stick to your NPH?
Victoria Robinson: She asked about my SCARS, Tina! My GRS scars on my fucking labia! I didn’t think they were even visible enough! I can barely see them myself in the mirror with the torch on my phone and I know what to look for!
Christine Hale: Shit
Victoria Robinson: Damn right, shit.
Victoria Robinson: And yeah I fell back on my NPH. I could practically see those laminated fucking NPH sheets I spent all that time memorising.
Christine Hale: Good
Christine Hale: Those are unimpeachable
Victoria Robinson: I know, Tina.
Christine Hale: Right
Christine Hale: Sorry
Victoria Robinson: It’s fine, I’m just so scared.
Victoria Robinson: She tells me she still loves me. And that word ‘still’ in there, it’s like it won’t stop echoing in my head. It means she knows there’s things she has to forgive. It means
Victoria Robinson: Shit.
Victoria Robinson: It means she doesn’t see me as the same person she used to.
Victoria Robinson: I’ll always be someone who lied to her now.
Victoria Robinson: She keeps telling me she still loves me. And it’s not like she’s trying to convince herself. She really does love me.
Victoria Robinson: But it’s clear she doesn’t trust me any more.
Victoria Robinson: Maybe it’s just too many lies, all at once. Maybe I sound different when I’m talking about the last year or so, to when I’m listing off all the fake bullshit I’m supposed to pretend is my life.
Victoria Robinson: Maybe I sound like a liar every time I open my fucking mouth because I am one.
Victoria Robinson: She’s everything to me. The most special girl in the world. And I’m scared I’m just going to lose her. I’m scared she’s going to decide I’m too broken, too untrustworthy, and just leave. All I want is to tell her everything and I JUST CAN’T
Victoria Robinson: I hate this I hate this I hate this
Christine Hale: Do you want me to tell one of the senior sponsors about this? Maria’s back, she might have an idea
Victoria Robinson: NO
Victoria Robinson: Keep those people out of it. Especially Maria.
Victoria Robinson: If I have to I’ll ask them for help but not yet
Victoria Robinson: Please say you won’t Tina please say you’ll keep this between us
Christine Hale: I won’t say a word
Christine Hale: I promise
Victoria Robinson: Thank you.
Victoria Robinson: Okay she’s out of the shower, no more texts, I have to delete everything
Christine drops the phone on the table and turns her attention back to her coffee, trying to put her worries about her friend out of her mind; she won’t do anything without permission, especially not since it was her slip that kicked all this off. Even if it was, apparently, something that’s been festering in Lorna for quite a while.
Does Lorna suspect her? They’ve been nothing but friendly with each other, but Christine’s hardly an expert on her. For all that Vicky is one of her best friends, her girlfriend — her future wife, if they can weather this and if Vicky gets her wish — is still mostly a stranger.
“Hey,” someone says from the doorway. “Mind if we come in?”
It’s Julia, which means Yasmin’s probably either around the corner or still getting dressed in one of their rooms. Christine hasn’t seen either of them for weeks; they keep away from their Sisters as a matter of course. She’s pretty sure one of them must have gotten hold of the lecture schedules and worked out times to duck in through the front door and up the stairs to the second floor without being spotted.
“It’s not my kitchen,” Christine says, and immediately realises how she sounds. “Sorry. Bad morning.” She picks up and waggles her phone by way of explanation.
Julia sets about preparing some kind of egg dish on the corner hob, with onions and red peppers. It doesn’t take long for the aroma to make Christine regret her choice of Weetabix.
“That’s an early breakfast,” Christine says after a while. Julia nods. “You, uh, going out today?”
“No, I’m here all day,” Julia replies, in the hesitant manner she uses when she’s concentrating on something and which ignites in Christine a brief spark of nostalgia; the last time she heard it, they all lived underground together and Julia was training her voice in the echoey acoustics of the dining room. “But Yas is on call, so…” She wiggles her fingers; a you work it out gesture.
“Hey,” Yasmin says, appearing on cue around the corner, kissing Julia on the back of the neck and slumping into a chair opposite Christine. “Long time.”
“Yeah,” Christine says. Awkward. Sure, the few times Christine’s seen Yasmin and Julia recently they’ve exchanged smiles and hellos — a vast improvement! — but that’s been more or less it for the last year; not really a foundation on which to rebuild a rapport, or even just to have a conversation that doesn’t make Christine cringe with inadequacy. The two of them have been in a stable relationship since the first year, and in work since their major restrictions were lifted; Christine feels adolescent around them.
Julia, her back turned to both of them, continues to cook. Yasmin props herself up on her hands and stares at Christine, chewing on her lip. Thinking. Christine doesn’t squirm under the examination, but she wants to. She pays attention to her coffee instead.
“So,” Yasmin says eventually, “I have to ask your advice.”
Christine blinks away her surprise. “Oh! Sure.”
“Me and Jools,” she says, “we should have graduated by now, right? I mean, you think so, don’t you?”
Both Yasmin and Julia are, as far as she’s ever been able to tell, model examples of the women Dorley aims to let loose on the world, and she’s been at a loss as to understand why they’ve been kept here. Sure, in most previous intakes the third-year girls have stayed on until the end of the third year, but the loosening of guidelines across the board has taken effect here, too: Vicky, graduating in two years; Paige and now Christine, effectively sponsor-less; Jodie, socialising extensively with people from outside the programme. It’s sobering to realise, as Christine suddenly does, that she’s on course, out of everyone in her intake, to become the least likely ever to leave this place.
No. She’s going to leave. Her and Paige. Growing old together. Somewhere away from here.
“Yeah,” she says. “Definitely.”
“Well,” Yasmin says, still watching Christine’s face carefully, “we finally found out why we’re still stuck here. Identities and accounts held hostage.”
“Be careful, Yas,” Julia says.
“We were supposed to work it out for ourselves,” Yasmin continues, “but, of course, we didn’t, because it’s stupid, just like all their… extra-curricular crap. We’re supposed to ‘socialise’.”
“Oh,” Christine says. “But you do socialise, right? You have whole lives away from Dorley. You just… don’t hang out with anyone here. Which is valid.”
“Thank you for your approval,” Julia says.
“We have lives,” Yasmin says, “but we don’t have friends. We have coworkers. And we have… whatever you lot are to us.”
Christine, through her shrug, attempts to communicate that her lot can be taken or left, as one pleases.
“They told us we have to spend time with you,” Julia says. “Sally and Lisa, ganging up on us as usual. We’re ‘insufficiently socialised’.”
“And we said, like you, that it’s bullshit. And it’s not like— Okay, so, no offence, Christine, but I don’t especially want to hang out with you, or Paige, or Vicky, or anyone in your circle.”
“Um. None taken.”
“You didn’t exactly make it easy for us down there,” Julia says. “It’s a bit difficult not to remember that, just, like, looking at you.”
Christine frowns. “We mostly left you alone, I thought.”
“Exactly,” Yasmin says. “It was always you three and Jodie, and even when she broke off to spend more time with Donna, it was still always you three. And us, at the periphery. And Craig, I suppose, before they killed him.”
“He washed out,” Christine corrects. “We don’t know—”
“They might as well have killed him. Not that I miss the guy, but that’s not the point. We shouldn’t have to spend time with a bunch of— of sponsors, or the girls who ignored us while we were getting tortured and reshaped, just to go free! We’re ready now!”
“Yasmin,” Julia warns again.
“How much socialising did they say?” Christine asks.
Julia waves a dismissive hand. “Not much.”
“They’re not requiring you come out clubbing with us, or anything?”
“No.”
“So just switch to using the downstairs kitchen for a bit, then. Eat lunch in the dining hall at the weekends. Paige and I are usually around, and Jodie, too, so there’ll be people you know. Even if you don’t like us very much.”
“It’s not that we don’t like you,” Yasmin says. “We just, you know…”
“You were there at the worst part of our lives,” Julia says, dropping a plate in front of Yasmin and sitting down next to her, “and you didn’t help.”
“Sorry,” Christine says. “I was a mess back then. We all were. But I should have—”
“The past is the past,” Yasmin says. She chews on her breakfast for a bit — it smells amazing — and adds, “Perhaps we can come down for lunch today. See how it goes.”
“I thought you were on call?”
“It rarely amounts to anything, and if it does, I can usually handle it remotely.”
“Oh, shit, actually,” Christine says, “today might be a bad time to start coming down for lunch. They’re doing disclosure today, and—”
Yasmin drops her fork and sits back in her chair. “Fucksake!” she says, “This is exactly why I didn’t want to do this! You can’t spend five minutes around a ‘Sister’ without getting sucked into all this bullshit again! That’s what this requirement’s actually about: it’s to gaslight us.”
That word again. “What do you mean?” Christine asks.
“We’re loners. We have each other, and that’s all we’ve ever needed. But you know what that means? We have no ties here. No reason to think fondly of this place. And that’s unacceptable, so they want us to spend time with you — okay, fine, not actually you, but you know what I mean — and start seeing this place through the eyes of the programme. See the first and second years as they come up. Understand the sponsor point of view. Stop viewing our lives, our experiences, our memories of what was done to us through our own framing, and start adopting Beatrice’s.” She picks up the fork again and stabs at the air with it. “Stop thinking of the rest of you as just people we were tortured next to and start thinking of you as our Sisters.” She spits it with a sneer. “The family that spays together, stays together!”
Christine winces. She’s seen that mug.
“Yas—” Julia says.
“They’re such manipulative bitches! They want us thinking of our torture and mutilation in purely administrative terms, with nice innocent words like ‘disclosure’ bandied around to mask what’s actually being done: revealing to a group of vulnerable boys, ripped out of their lives and taken captive, that they’re going to be held against their will for at least the next two years, that their bodies are going to be taken from them and ripped apart, and that their minds are next on the chopping block. It’s fucking—”
“Yas, please!”
“Jools!” Yasmin says sharply. “She’s not going to tell on me! Are you, Christine?”
Christine emphatically shakes her head.
“No, Yas,” Julia says, “the cameras…”
Yasmin throws down her fork again. “Shit,” she says. “Sally’s going to be annoyed with me again.”
“Just a moment,” Christine says, picking up her phone and loading up her app. She almost loads her old custom app — legitimacy is a difficult habit to instil — but she chooses the correct one and waits impatiently for the feeds to load in.
“What are you doing?” Julia asks.
Being manipulative, Christine thinks. Out loud, she says, “Wanna see?” She pulls out her chair and swings it around to the end of the table, sitting down again at right angles to Yasmin and Julia, close enough that if she angles her phone they can both see well enough. As they watch, she calls up the last five minutes of footage, scrubs around in it to show Julia and then Yasmin entering the kitchen, then defines start and end points and tags it corrupted footage. A tap sends it straight to the archive; another puts all the second-floor cameras into a full reboot cycle.
“Christine—” Yasmin says.
Christine wags a finger. “Not done,” she says. Now she loads her custom app, finds the archived footage and scrambles it. “There.” She looks up, grinning, to a pair of confused faces. See? Someone on the inside is your friend…
“How come you can do that?” Yasmin asks, half-accusing, half-astonished.
“I took a job here. Head of Network Security. Bea and Maria have been really unsubtle about how badly they want me to be a sponsor; this way, I get them off my back, I make some money, and I don’t end up in the basement next year telling some poor lad I’m going to cut his balls off.” Her smile widens. “But I’ve also had control of pretty much the entire network for a while now, since way before I took the job. I have a whole suite of tools for fucking with the surveillance here. The door locks, too.”
“Wait,” Yasmin says, gesticulating with her fork again, “you’re doing tech support for Dorley? You’re in charge of it?”
“Yep.”
“Do you know how much you could make in the private sector, with those kinds of skills?”
“Is it better than twenty thousand, after tax, with no rent and bills, for a brand new hire with no relevant qualifications?”
“I mean, no, okay, wow. After tax?”
“Hey! I saw this job first!”
“Sure, no worries. Wouldn’t want it anyway.” Yasmin smiles at Julia. “We’re out of here as soon as they let us.”
“I have to ask,” Christine says, cupping her mug in both hands to still her fingers; what she’s about to say feels uncomfortably true believer, “and I mean, my job requires me to ask: you’re not security risks, are you?”
“Hey!” Julia says. “You said you wouldn’t report us!”
“I did and I won’t. And you’re obviously ready to leave. Have been for ages. You deserve your lives. So, if you’ll let me, I’ll argue for that, officially; I’m on payroll now, after all. You should talk to Indira as well. She’ll listen, and we can both bring your case to Bea. All I ask is that, when you leave, you move on. Forget about this place, if you need to. But all the people I love are tied to it, one way or another, and as much as I want to take all of them with me when I go, I’m fairly sure that’s not going to happen. Losing any of them to someone else’s grudge—”
“Don’t worry,” Yasmin says. “All we want is to move out.”
“Anyone who tells on this place would become the most newsworthy person in the world, anyway,” Julia says. “And that’s unpleasant enough for regular people, let alone people like us, people with… our histories.”
“You’re really planning to leave?” Yasmin asks. “I assumed you’d stay forever, actually.”
“Nope,” Christine says vehemently. “I’ll probably stay here while I finish my degree, since Aunt Bea seems to want to throw money at me and Paige and I can get a double room up on the fifth floor and still pay no rent, but when I graduate Saints, I’m leaving. For where, for what, I don’t know.” She smiles. “My future’s with Paige, and the family I made here; it’s not with Dorley itself.”
“Good for you.”
“We have another reason to keep the secret, anyway,” Julia says. “We heard about the trans girl. No matter how mad we might be at the rest of you, we wouldn’t want to hurt her.”
Christine laughs. “Yeah. Dorley’s first innocent.”
“How’s she doing?” Yasmin asks. “I’ve been sort of worried about her. Is she okay?”
* * *
The basement’s still bifurcated — ‘split population’ is the official Dorley term — with Will, Raph and Ollie living out of the cells for now. The plan is to keep them confined for the time being, with minimal entertainment but no other punishment, until they’ve gotten over themselves, and while the cells aren’t quite as austere as they were when Stefan first woke up in one, having been reconfigured for a longer stay — Pippa described a nicer mattress, voice control over the lights, and a tablet — they’re still not exactly pleasant places to spend weeks or months at a time. When it’s time to rejoin the rest of them, Stefan imagines Will, Raph and Ollie will be less likely to try anything, lest they find themselves sent right back to the cells.
Difficult to care about them right now, though; it’s disclosure day! At last!
The four of them — him, Aaron, Adam and Martin — are spaced out in the common room, one at each of the metal tables, feet tucked under the seat, separated and more or less immobilised. Their sponsors stand at their sides, tasers cupped in ready hands, with Edy back for Adam but Indira still standing in for Maria. At the edges of the room, also with weapons ready, stand almost as many sponsors and other Dorley girls as had appeared after Will attacked Maria; no Paige, but Christine sits on the sofa by the door, laptop balanced on her crossed legs, frowning at the screen. She shoots Stefan a grin when none of the other boys are looking, and wiggles her fingers in greeting.
They’ve been positioned so they’re facing the doors into the dining room, and that’s where Monica comes in from, all smiles, carrying with her a stool that Stefan recognises from his brief glance into the rooms on the first floor basement. She drops it, sits down with heels resting on the bottom rung, and places her hands carefully in her lap.
A sitting position from which she can easily and quickly stand and step away. Wise, after Maria.
“Good morning!” Monica says, looking around at Stefan and the boys like a substitute teacher greeting the class the other teachers warned her about. “It’s time for the big speech. But first, a reminder: violence will not be tolerated. If you attack your sponsor or any other employee, there will be consequences. If you attack each other, there will be consequences. I believe, Edy, you summed our institutional attitude up as, ‘we’ll bury you in the woods’?” Edy nods, embarrassed, and pats the back of Adam’s head. “Absent that, you must understand that we are not offering you a choice. And—” she laughs cynically, “—we are not accepting comments or criticism at this time. There are two ways to leave this place: complete the programme or wash out, whether through resistance or violence. Any questions, before I begin?”
“Define ‘resistance’,” Aaron says. “Do we get to, like, ever actually complain about shit, or are you going to delimb me and bury me in five bin bags the moment I raise my voice?”
“You can yell and scream and complain as much as you like, later. Just keep your hands to yourself. Anyone else? No? Okay!” Monica leans forward on her stool, hands clasped in front of her. “By now, you’ll have noticed certain changes in your bodies. Perhaps you feel the cold a little more than you did; maybe you’ve found you’re more sensitive in some areas and less in others. These changes are deliberate, and there will be more to come. You remember your Goserelin implants? Those have been suppressing your testosterone since you arrived. It’s a procedure we’ve used in other years, with other male intakes, to reduce aggression, but our success with them has been… mixed. In fact, in all the years Dorley has been operating as a rehabilitation facility—” Aaron snorts, and Indira reaches out without looking and slaps him lightly on the shoulder, “—we have had considerably poorer treatment outcomes with our male intakes than with our female intakes. Put bluntly, the endemic violence of toxic masculinity is extremely difficult to cure, and we have been forced to wash out the majority of our subjects. So, this year, in the interests of being humane, we’re trying something new.”
Monica pauses, to let the boys’ minds race. So far, this is everything Stefan expected: Pippa explained that they prefer every intake believe they’re the first ones in Dorley’s history to be feminised, lest the boys in question draw (correct) conclusions about their sponsors. It’s crucial, Stefan read in the guidelines, for the boys to feel like their only allies, the only ones who can understand their plight, are each other; to bond under the attractive boot heel of the sponsors. Only later, when the subject is at their lowest, will the sponsor reveal that it was all just another ruse, that she, too, was once the same. She will present herself as proof that future, family and friends all await, if only they can push through.
But at least Stefan won’t have to pretend about most of it any more.
“In addition to your testosterone suppression,” Monica continues, “for the past month, we have been administering estrogen in appropriate doses. We intend to continue this regimen indefinitely.”
Another pause, punctuated almost immediately by Aaron attempting to stand and hitting his knee on the underside of the metal table. “You fucking what?” he yells, and starts trying to untangle his legs; for what purpose, Stefan can’t imagine.
Indira puts a hand on his shoulder. “Sit.”
“No!” He tries to shake her off. “You’re not going to fucking—”
“Sit!” Indira repeats. “I will not tell you a third time, Aaron Holt, and if you don’t return to your seat right this instant I will make you sit down.”
He doesn’t immediately comply, but he does stop struggling against her grip. “All right!” he says to Indira, and puts flat palms on the table to steady himself and lean forward to address Monica. “You’re not serious; estrogen?”
“I am completely serious,” Monica says. Stefan wonders if any of the boys have noticed the edges of a smirk playing about her mouth. “As I said, you’ll have noticed some of the physical changes already; they are not caused by testosterone suppression alone, as I know some of you have speculated. These changes will continue. We have informational pamphlets should you wish to educate yourself fully.” She gestures to a small pile on the cabinet nearest the TV. Stefan, twisting to look, turns his laugh into a cough: the pamphlets have NHS branding.
Indira uses Aaron’s moment of paralysed outrage to push him back down into his seat. He lands with a surprised squeak and glares at her. Held down by her, he can do nothing but complain. “Stef! Why aren’t you helping?”
“What would I even do?” Stefan says, remembering at the last moment to push a scowl onto his face, as if he’s equally angry. He points around the room. “Taser, taser, taser, taser… and a roomful of big guys with actual guns, somewhere.”
“I don’t mean fight,” Aaron says. “I mean— fuck, I don’t know. Why not get Pippa to help? You have this whole psychosexual thing going on with her—”
“It’s called having a friend, Aaron.”
He hits the table. “Then why isn’t she, as your ‘friend’, stopping this? They’re making us into fucking girls, Stefan! That’s what estrogen does.”
“How do you know that?”
Aaron looks like he’s going to hit the table again, and Stefan has to admit that he’s probably pushing the pretence of ignorance a little far.
“Have you ever been online? Estrogen’s what trans women take. It’s what makes them women.”
“Actually—” Indira starts.
“Yes,” Aaron interrupts, “Jesus fucking Christ, I know, they were women already, is that really the point?”
“You should always endeavour to be accurate.”
“Oh my fucking— You see, Stef! You see what she’s like? I’m being menaced by a pedantic primary school teacher!”
Monica claps her hands to force all eyes to return to her. “Are you done?” she says.
“Not even remotely,” Aaron says.
“We can escort you out. Put you in the cuffs in your room, and leave it to Indira to give you the rest of the information, if you’d like.”
“Fuck. No. Fine. I’ll be quiet. Tell us your plans for us, Mo-ni-ca.”
She frowns at him, irritated but not unsettled by Aaron’s reference to her former charge. “Before I continue, you should know that we did not come to this decision lightly; nor were you chosen at random. Some of you are here because you’ve hurt people — very badly — and others because your lives were on harmful trajectories. Aaron, since you have chosen to be so vocal, I believe we will use your case as the example. Christine?”
“One second,” Christine says. Stefan glances over: she’s tapping at the screen of her laptop, biting her lip in concentration. “There.”
When Christine hits a key on her computer the TV clicks on, showing a picture of Aaron, taken some time before Dorley snatched him. He’s at a bar — not one of the ones on campus; perhaps this was taken in his home town? — and he’s drinking from a half-empty bottle of light beer. His hair’s shorter and he’s wearing a suit jacket over a loose shirt. Stefan wants absurdly to protect the boy in the photo, to warn him what’s coming, to make him change his ways. Pippa steps closer and squeezes his upper arm. With the boys all staring at the TV screen, he feels safe to reach up and take her hand, just for a second.
“Aaron Holt,” Monica says. “Twenty-one years old as of July. Geology student. Prolific harasser of women.”
“Do we really have to do this?” Aaron asks. He’s not looking at the screen.
“You have, I believe, extensively covered the topic of your dick pics with your peers, so I won’t go into much detail except to note that your expulsion from Saints was countermanded by your parents, as was any hint of actual disciplinary action. A large donation, forming the last leg of funding required for what is probably now going to be called the Aaron Holt Memorial Tennis Court. Be proud, Aaron; your name will live on. Christine: next, please?”
Another tap on her computer and Aaron’s photo shrinks into the top-left corner, replaced in the centre by an unfolding list of dates, events, and pictures of women.
Monica points at the screen. “These women were spared the indignity of your penis, but did not escape your other avenues of harassment. Most of it surprisingly chaste, but all of it rather misogynist. We don’t even know what some of these women did to piss you off, Aaron, but there are rather a lot of them, aren’t there?”
“Stop it,” Aaron mumbles, resting his head in his arms.
Stefan knows he has something to say here, a knife to twist. “Aaron,” he says, “there are so many…”
“Shut up,” he says. “I know.”
Indira pats him on the shoulder and leans down. “It’ll be over soon,” she whispers.
“Next,” Monica says. More dates, events and pictures scroll onto the screen. “Next.” The list updates again.
“Stop it,” Aaron says again.
“Next. Here’s the list of websites we pulled off your laptop, your phone, and your mobile provider. Notice a theme?” Monica waves her hand at the screen, and Stefan does indeed notice the theme. When Abby and Christine called Aaron an incel he hadn’t realised they were actually describing him so accurately. “Next.”
“Stop it!” Aaron yells, pushing Indira off his shoulder and glaring red-eyed at Monica. “I get it! Next! Next! Next!” He bangs his fist on the table in time with his chant. “You have every bad thing I’ve ever fucking done up there!”
“Not just that,” Monica says. “We also have this.” Her voice is a little softer, and when the screen flickers again it shows a list of incidents from his boarding school. Aaron’s name is in the victim column this time, opposite the kinds of names that are destined to accumulate inherited honorifics as their owners age. Bullying, intimidation, theft, and seven assaults. Three of them—
Stefan looks away from the screen.
“We have more,” Monica says. “Incidents dating back to primary school, where you switch back and forth between aggressor and victim.”
“Fuck you, Monica,” Aaron says. “If you’re trying to say I’m the way I am because I got bullied in school, fuck you.”
“No, Aaron. You are the way that you are because your worst traits have been encouraged at every step of your life. Neglectful parents. Poor role models. People who hurt you, and people who encouraged you to hurt others. And the one true friend you had, well, she left you.”
Aaron, looking at the table again, sticks a middle finger up in Monica’s rough direction.
“You don’t have to be this way,” she continues. “You never did. You are bright, quick-witted, and even capable of empathy. But you were failed, repeatedly. Taught to be impulsive rather than wise. Resentful rather than thoughtful. Never offered better options, or a better way to behave; shown only loneliness, violence, and an extremely unhealthy view of women.” She nods at Christine, who returns the screen to its starting configuration. “And we know what happens to boys like you, left alone: you implode or you explode. You go quietly or you go very, very noisily. I know you hate looking at that screen, Aaron, and seeing everything you’ve done in one place. Well, you’re only twenty-one. Imagine how much longer those lists will be in a year; two; five. Imagine yourself at thirty; do you even recognise him? How many people has he hurt? How badly has he hurt himself?” She lowers her voice. “Is he even still around?”
“Fuck you,” he says again, dropping his head back into folded arms.
“We’ve been taking groups of troubled and troublesome people into our care for a long time now,” Monica says. “Our aim is always to reform, to provide resources, to map out alternate ways to live life. To find people who are on the edge of atrocity, and bring them back. But we have been, as I said, considerably more successful with women than with men. From the very start, in fact. And we’ve tried many different methods with the men, trying to replicate our results with the women; nothing works. As a society, we are simply too ready to forgive men — white cisgender men, it has to be said — for any harm they might commit, especially if they are of means. And you, Aaron — and I do genuinely apologise for singling you out again — are a textbook case for failure. A white cisgender man with money, looks, charm, and absolutely appalling habits. You’ll keep getting away with it until, eventually, either you can’t live with yourself or someone else doesn’t survive you.”
“I can change,” he whispers.
“Can you, now? What would you be doing, right now, if we hadn’t taken you in? Be honest.”
“I can change. I want to change!”
“But you won’t. This country won’t let you. Have you, by any chance, heard of Charlotte Church?”
And Monica launches into a spiel almost word-for-word identical to the one Beatrice subjected Stefan to, which leaves him free to tune her out and concentrate on Aaron, quivering in the nest of his forearms, stripped and laid bare by Monica’s evidence against him, by her confidence in the inevitability of his recidivism, by her mournful enumeration of his failings.
At around the halfway point, Indira waves to get Christine’s attention and beckons her over. Christine puts down her laptop, pulls a taser out of her pocket with visible distaste, and stands where Indira stood. Indira sits on the chair next to Aaron, joins him in his space, encircles his shoulders with one arm and his hands with the other. Christine looks at Stefan and mouths, Are you okay? He nods. He’s not sure if he actually is; it’s hard to watch Aaron go through this, but harder still to see Aaron’s victims.
There really were a lot of them.
“This year,” Monica says, finishing up, “we have decided, finally, to act in accordance with the data we’ve been collecting for almost two decades. To attempt to rehabilitate you as males would be to abandon you. So we’re trying something new.”
At his table, Martin, heretofore silent, snorts and shares a look with his sponsor, Pamela. She rolls her eyes at him, displaying only an echo of the disdain Stefan remembers from the last time he saw them interacting. But that was weeks ago. Things change, including, apparently, Ella’s disgust for her charge.
Things change, including all the boys.
“Excuse me,” Adam says. He’s raising an arm, and supporting it with his other hand as if he thinks he might have trouble holding it aloft without help. Behind him, Edy rubs his shoulders. “By something new, you mean, with the estrogen, and the— the—”
“Goserelin,” Aaron supplies, muffled by his arms.
“Yes,” Monica says, before Adam can continue. “Rather than resign ourselves to another pointless year of failed male redemption, we are going to rehabilitate you as women.”
“How far will that go, please?” Adam says.
“All the way.”
“A— all the way?”
“All the way.”
Adam stiffens for a moment, and then turns to Edy and says, so quietly Stefan almost can’t hear, “I’d like to return to my room, please.” Edy nods, steps back to let him stand, and follows him out of the common room, her taser still clipped to her hip.
“‘All the way’,” Aaron says. He raises his head again. “This is fucking ludicrous, right? You see that, yeah? Your solution to toxic masculinity or chronic dick waggling syndrome or— or whatever the fuck is wrong with me, is to make me into a girl?”
Monica shrugs. “Yes.”
“Stefan?” Aaron turns to face him. “Do you have anything to say about this? At all?”
“I’m, uh, still processing it,” Stefan says, caught out.
“Of course you are,” Aaron says. “Indira, I take it from Adam’s exit that going to my room and staying there, sans handcuffs, is an option?” She nods. “Let’s go, then.”
Stefan does his best to avoid Aaron’s glare as the boy leaves, walked out of the room at taser-point. That last part could have gone better.
With just him and Martin remaining, the sponsors visibly relax. Edy returns from delivering Adam to his room; Monica hops down off her stool and walks over to talk to her. Christine’s eyes flicker down to meet Stefan’s again, and he does his best to answer the question he sees there silently, with a quick quirk of his eyebrows, because Martin’s looking at him, and he still has a role to play.
Why is Martin looking at him?
He excuses himself from Pippa, who half-heartedly waggles her taser at him, and joins Martin at his table. Ella nods to the both of them and joins Christine and Pippa, leaving them alone.
“I saw you laughing,” Stefan says, after Martin doesn’t say anything. “Kind of laughing, anyway. What was so funny?”
Martin smiles. It’s a bitter smile, and quite shallow, but it’s not as disturbing as it might have been had Stefan not observed the dour man’s mood unaccountably improving over the last few days. “I was right,” he says.
“About what?”
Martin rests his chin on his hand. “About this, Stefan. About their plan for us.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone?”
“Neither did you,” Martin says.
Stefan, perpetually wrong-footed this morning, can only answer, “What?”
“I know you saw this coming, too.”
“You’re just going to let it happen, then?” Stefan says, ignoring the accusation. “I saw more pushback from bloody Adam than from you.”
Martin gestures towards the assembled sponsors. “It’s like you always say: they have the tasers and the keys. Besides, I don’t think they’re wrong, necessarily.”
That is emphatically not in Stefan’s script. “About rehab through womanhood?” he says.
“I wasn’t just a drinker who had a bad accident one day,” Martin says, meeting Stefan’s eyes with as steady a gaze as he’s ever seen on the man. “She could have put me up on the screen and, sure, my list wouldn’t have been as long as Aaron’s, but the fact remains that I’ve always gotten away with things. Because of who I am. Who my parents know. I’m… borderline aristocratic. And I hate it. I’m just not strong enough to push back against it. Except in the most terminal way, if you get my meaning. As weird as it is to say, coming here might have saved my life, for all that there’s anything there to save.”
“But,” Stefan says, unable to let the thought go, “you don’t want to be a woman, right?”
Martin’s eyes harden and his hands, placed harmlessly on the table, tighten into fists. But he relaxes again before Stefan can respond, returns to his former equanimity. “Stefan,” he says, “I don’t want to be anything.”
* * *
Two days ago, Abby gave Christine the address of a restaurant in Almsworth. Today, it turns out to be a pub: The Fallen General, hooked into a back street deep in the winding alleys that spread out from the river like cobbled veins. According to the menu, the pub is named after a poorly anchored statue, erected in the centre of what is now a small roundabout, which blew over and washed away in a flash storm sometime in the late nineteenth century, taking the memory of whichever luminary it commemorated with it. The head, neck and one shoulder of the statue, recovered decades later, are on display under a reinforced glass dome, positioned amidst the spirits behind the bar, looking out on the patrons with faded, weatherworn eyes.
The Fallen General, with its exposed wooden beams, generous outside seating, cutesy signage and desecrated conversation piece, is as much a tourist pub as it is a drinking pit for locals, and as such contains on a bright Saturday afternoon about as many people with backpacks as without. It’s probably why Abby picked it: good camouflage. Or, perhaps, good for witnesses.
But for what?
“How did disclosure go?” Abby asks, as Christine swings down onto the bench next to her. She’s staked out a table by the front window, the better nervously to stare out of it, and spotted Christine before Christine spotted her, waved at her with fake enthusiasm. Abby’s nervous and trying to hide it.
“Could’ve been worse. Monica victimised Aaron. Not unfairly, considering his rap sheet; he was probably the best case study to make the point she wanted to make.” It’d still been hard to watch the boy crumple up in his seat. “There was a bit of shouting, and then one by one the boys all got escorted back to their rooms while everyone else stayed behind to chat with Stef. I made my excuses.”
“No riots, then?”
“No. I doubt it’ll go as well this afternoon when they tell the guys in the cells.”
Abby smirks. “If they riot, the worst they can do is brain themselves on those nasty little metal toilets. You want something to eat?”
Christine shakes her head. “I want to know what I’m doing here, Abs. And, no, I’m still riding breakfast. I could murder a Coke, though.”
“Me too, actually. No, I’ll get it; you sit. And, yes, I promise I’ll tell you what this is all about when I get back.”
She squashes back as far as she can to let Abby out, and people-watches while Abby arranges drinks for the both of them. She quite likes the atmosphere here; the place is reminiscent of the kinds of pubs her mum liked and would drag her to when she was a child: safe, rural-themed, and able to supply large baskets of chunky chips slathered in salt and vinegar. She smiles, picturing her mother digging in, the fat, greasy chips contrasting with the delicate white wines she preferred, and kicks the table to dispel the memory. That was before everything: before it all went to shit; before her father started hitting her mother; before Christine disappeared and consented eventually to be remade. Back when she’d had a family.
Best forget it all, really. Fuck sentimentality, fuck memories and fuck her mother, too; she’s here for her Sister and nothing and no-one else.
When Abby returns, depositing Cokes on the table and sliding back down onto the bench, it’s impossible not to notice her hands shaking.
“You okay, Abs?”
“I’m fine!” Abby says, too loud. “So. Okay. We’re meeting a couple of people for lunch. Just lunch. Nothing else. You’re here for moral support.”
“Mine or theirs?”
“Mine!”
“Define ‘a couple of people’.”
Abby stalls, takes a swig from her Coke. Christine elbows her. “Remember how I said my parents hired a private investigator?” Abby says, and preemptively winces. “Well, I, uh, kinda sorta contacted him.”
“Abby.”
“Yes, Christine?”
“These people, they’re your parents, right?”
Abby nods. “Yeah,” she says, “yeah, they are.”
“They don’t know about you, right?”
“Nope.”
“Do they even know anything about who they’re meeting?”
“Nope.”
“What are you going to tell them, and is it better than the truth?”
Abby blinks, confused for a second, and then the words all come out in a rush. “I’d never tell them the truth, Chrissy! You think I’m stupid? I have a story, and it’s a good one, and you’re in it, so please stay and don’t run off! I need someone here and you’re the only one I can trust, so—”
“Relax!” Christine interrupts. “I’m not running off. And you couldn’t trust Dira?”
“Not the way I trust you. I know you won’t tell Bea. I’m merely very certain she wouldn’t.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“She’s a sponsor,” Abby says. “She has obligations.”
“I’m an employee, too.”
“Yeah, but, like, you’re not exactly… scrupulously loyal, are you?”
Christine weighs her answer. “Let’s just say, I’m loyal to the spirit, not the letter.”
“Exactly,” Abby says triumphantly, and then wilts under Christine’s glare. “Fine! If this goes well, I’ll think about bringing Indira in.”
“Good,” Christine says. “So, if you’re telling a story, what’s my role in it?”
“You’re— shit! They’re here!”
Of course they are. Everything in Christine’s life operates on impeccably awkward timing. “I’ll wing it,” she says. “Is that them?” She points at an older man and woman, both Black and conservatively dressed, climbing out of a hatchback parked just down the road. “Abs?” she prompts, when Abby doesn’t say anything. “Is that them?”
“What?” Abby says, quietly and as if unsure, suddenly, of everything. Christine pokes her again. “Yes. Sorry. Yes. It’s them. And… someone else?”
Someone’s climbing out of the back seat, into the shadow cast by the buildings on the other side of the road: a man (almost definitely), in his early twenties (probably), and of about the same height and skin tone as Abby and her parents (as far as Christine can tell). With a practised shake of his wrist he extends a cane and puts his weight on it with every other step as he rounds the car and joins Abby’s parents. They cross the road together.
“You have a brother?” Christine says.
“No.”
Christine’s out of time for guesses, because they cross the street quickly and head straight for Abby’s table as soon as they enter the pub. She must have told them which table to look for; how long has she been sitting here? She smiles at them as they sit down, Abby’s father opposite Christine, Abby’s mother opposite Abby. The mystery man pulls up a chair and sits opposite the window, effectively blocking either of them from leaving.
No-one says anything. Abby’s parents are waiting for her to open, and Abby herself has frozen.
Fine. “Hi!” Christine says, leaning into her voice training for a nice, clear, bright voice, forward in the mouth and high-pitched; feminine and friendly. “My name’s Christine Hale. I’m—” Shit! Did Abby even give them a name? “—I’m with her.”
“Understood,” Abby’s father says. He points at himself. “I’m Robert and this is Diane.” He’s decided that Christine is the one in charge; understandable, given Abby’s complete silence. She’s staring at the younger man, frowning slightly. Robert continues, “Carl, our investigator, said you have information about our son. Please, we just want to know if he’s okay. Carl says he’s alive, but—”
“Oh my God,” Abby says, quietly but with such force that it shuts her father up. “Are you… Derek?”
“Yes,” the man at the end of the table says. He matches her frown.
“You would have been, what, fourteen when I left? Goodness, look at you!”
“Please,” Robert says, “if one of you knows something, you have to tell us. Or if you’ve been leading Carl on a wild goose chase… we have to know.”
Abby shakes herself, head to hands, which she then places on the table in front of her, clasped. Her knuckles tighten. Under the table, Christine places what she hopes is a calming hand on Abby’s thigh.
“Yes,” Abby says, looking from her father to her mother, “okay. Sorry. This is… oh, fuck, this is so hard.” Christine squeezes, and Abby glances quickly her way, smiling in thanks. She takes a deep breath. “Mum,” she says. “Dad.” And then, absurdly, she suppresses a giggle. “Cousin Derek. I asked you here today because I wanted to see you again. Because I wanted to see my family again.” She closes her eyes. “It’s me.”
Abby’s mother, Diane, leans forward, staring intently at her daughter. “What do you mean?”
“I’m—”
“Gareth?”
She says it quietly, incredibly so, but for Abby it’s a shout; she jumps like she just bit a live wire and her breathing audibly quickens, but before anyone can react she waves her hand to say she’s okay. Diane’s got a hand on the table and Abby reaches out to take it, draws her mother’s hand into the middle and holds it with both of hers.
“Yes,” Abby whispers. “It’s me.”
“We thought you were dead.”
“I’m not. I’m just… different.”
“Let me look at you,” Diane says, and Abby holds still. She’s wearing her hair out of her face for this, in her habitual bun, gathered in tight curls just above the nape of her neck, and it leaves her whole face visible. She smiles nervously, tightly, with her lips almost pursed, expending a great deal of effort to keep herself under control. Christine doesn’t know whether, if Abby had room to move, she’d leap forward and embrace her family or run out of the pub and never look back.
“That’s you, Garry?” her father says. At the end of the table, Derek leans on his elbow and just stares.
“Yes,” Abby says.
“I see him,” Diane says. “In her. I see him in her.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude; you must have a new name?”
Abby nods, but doesn’t say anything. Christine’s still wondering if she should interject, perhaps even take over the conversation, when Abby suddenly comes alive again, retreats from her mother’s hand, sits back and exhales deeply. “My name’s Abigail,” she says, smiling brightly, smiling the way Christine’s used to, smiling like her sister always should. “Abby,” she adds. “I took the surname Meyer.”
“Grant not good enough for you?” her mother says, but there’s a tease to her tone, one Christine recognises from Abby herself. She looks from Abby to her mother; they look so much alike.
Abby laughs. “No,” she says, “no, it’s good. But I had to disappear. I—”
“Garry?” Derek says, grabbing Abby’s hand. “Seriously? Garry?”
“Hi, Rick,” Abby says. “But, uh, call me Abby, if you’re going to shout, please?”
“Oh.” Derek lets go of her hand and smiles sheepishly. “Right. Yeah. I know the drill.”
“What do you mean, you know the drill?” Abby’s father asks.
“One of the guys at work is trans,” Derek says. “Mick. He’s a good guy. You met him, at the—”
“Tell us about him later, dear,” Diane says.
There’s a moment of embarrassed silence, broken when Robert Grant slaps the table. “Right,” he says. “Now that we’re all over the big surprise, why don’t we get some lunch in, and some drinks, and we can talk about the last decade without—” he points at Abby, “—leaving out why you pretended to be dead. So, what do you fancy, Gar— Abby? Roast beef sandwich, like always, or do you eat dainty little salads now, like your mother?”
“Roast beef sandwich sounds great, Dad,” she says, and covers the side of her mouth to whisper to her mother, “I skipped breakfast.”
Robert collects lunch orders for all of them — Christine agrees to try Abby’s order of a roast beef and cranberry sauce sandwich, and has her offer to pay waved away — and bustles off to the bar to find someone to serve him. Christine recognises in his attitude the sudden and necessary busyness of an older man who has something difficult to deal with and needs to occupy his hands so his mind can work away in silence.
“So,” Diane says, “Christine, was it?” Christine nods. “How do you know our— our daughter? Are you two, um…?”
“Oh, no!” Christine says quickly. “We’re just friends. Really good friends. Sisters, almost. I mean, not even almost. I think of her as my big sister, really.”
“Then you must be a remarkable young woman.”
“I try.”
“How did you and Abigail meet?”
Christine’s impressed. Barely a hint of a pause before her daughter’s name that time. Then she parses the question. “Uh, Abs? You want to take that one?”
Abby nods. “It’s sort of part of the whole story,” she says. “Why don’t we wait for Dad to get back first?”
He returns a few moments later but doesn’t want to talk about any of the ‘big stuff’ until their food arrives, so they fill the time with small talk about Derek’s job — he’s in Quality Assurance at a software company — and Christine’s degree, until four sandwiches and a salad arrive, plus a large basket of enormous chips, which makes Christine smile despite herself.
Abby’s story is simple, and like all the best lies is constructed partly of truths: she was an unhappy child, a restive teen and a disruptive university student, and she came to a true understanding of herself after hitting rock bottom, early in her degree. The fictions are that she left Saints for a long time so she could transition up in Manchester, which is where she met a young, pre-transition Christine.
“Oh,” Abby’s mother says, “you’re like her, then?”
Christine shrugs. “On my best days, I’d like to think I get close. She’s the kindest person I’ve ever met, Mrs Grant.”
“Oh, do call me Diane.”
Christine didn’t miss the half-second’s surprise on Diane’s face: that her former son could be seen as aspirationally kind is perhaps almost as big a leap for her as the gender thing. Which is ludicrous to Christine — she’s seen Abby’s file, and read in there mostly deep depression and the occasional self-destructive impulse — but the worst years of Abby’s past are Abby’s alone to share, and she’s always preferred to forget her former self.
Abby explains her extended silence by leaning into Aunt Bea’s justification for keeping Dorley’s resources to herself: she was helped to transition by a small collective of other trans people, who have to guard their privacy very carefully, especially in this age of increased stigmatisation — “We’ve seen some very unpleasant things said in the papers,” Diane says, nodding seriously; “Nothing but nonsense in there,” Robert confirms, with a disgusted shake of his head — so she kept the secret to keep them safe, at least until she could complete her transition and leave.
“Does that mean you’ve had your, um…?” her father asks.
Everyone at the table knows what he means. “Yes,” Abby says. “I have.”
“Understood,” Robert says, swallowing.
“But when I was nearly done,” Abby says, continuing her story, “I met Christine. She’d left her abusive family and was looking for help, so we helped her. I stayed behind to look after her for a while, and then I came back down here to finish my degree at Saints, under my new name. She joined me a few years later.”
Christine nods. “She made this place sound so great. And, well, she really does feel like a sister to me. I go where she goes.”
“I should have told you about myself back then,” Abby says, frowning, regretful, “but secrecy was a habit, and also… I was ashamed, mum. I treated you badly and then I disappeared without a word. It took me a long time to get over that. To realise how stupid I was being. I’m sorry.”
“We’re going to talk about that,” Robert says, “but not today. Today, I’m just happy to have my son back. Even if he’s… different.”
“I always wanted a little girl,” Diane says. She’s been holding Abby’s hand across the table for the last ten minutes, ever since the plates were cleared away, and it’s only the alarm on Abby’s phone that forces her to let go, so Abby can extract it from her bag and silence it.
They have a few more minutes, Abby tells them, but she’s meeting a source for work and she can’t be late. Which dovetails neatly, as Abby no doubt planned, into a discussion about what she does for a living. She shows them her newspaper bylines on her phone and extracts much parental pride from the remaining time.
They all swap numbers — Derek asking shyly enough for Christine’s that she has to make a point of noticing a text she has from her girlfriend, which the man takes in good spirits — and part with smiles and a promise between Abby and her parents to meet up again in a few days, somewhere they can really talk, where they can spend more than just a few hours together. Abby deflects the question of where she lives as a topic for another time, and hugs are shared all round.
While Abby’s checking the bus timetable, her mother takes Christine aside and asks her quietly, “Is she happy?”
“Yes,” Christine says. “She’s happy. Not just that, but she’s kind, thoughtful and funny. She’s helped me so much, and she’s helped a lot of other people, too. She’s a treasure. She’s my sister, Mrs Grant, and I love her.”
“Diane,” she corrects with a grin. “And, I have to say, I wouldn’t know. With her, I can see my son — although I have to look pretty hard! — but with you… I wouldn’t know.”
Christine’s starting to expect this from cis people now. A compelling argument for copying Paige and Vicky and becoming a cis girl permanently. “Thank you!” she says warmly.
“Do you think she’ll find someone? Someone who loves her for who she is?”
“That’s not in doubt. She’s wonderful, Diane.”
With promises that, yes, she’ll take good care of herself and Abby, Christine extracts herself from Diane Grant and joins Abby at the bus stop, waving back at Abby’s family, who are standing around their car and fidgeting, seemingly about to come and wait with them. But then the bus arrives and the Grants and cousin Derek watch them alight with unmistakable tears in three pairs of eyes, and Abby’s family is gone from view.
“So, I’m trans to Indira’s family,” Christine says quietly, settling into a seat and making a show of counting on her fingers, “and now to your family, too, and I’m cis to Lorna… Am I forgetting anyone?”
“You could go see your mother,” Abby says, “and be trans to her, too.”
“I’m thinking about it! I said I’d think about it, and I’m thinking about it.” Not entirely accurate.
“Good.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Honestly?” Abby says. “Like I just ran five marathons. It’s going to take all evening for my heart to slow back down.”
“You did well.”
“Thank you.”
“So did they, I thought.”
Abby smiles. “I knew they’d be okay with me. I hate the lies, but I’ve been thinking about what to say for a long time, and I know what they’re like: now that they have me back, they won’t push. If there’s holes in my story, they’ll give me privacy about it. They always did.”
“This is going to be a regular thing, then? Seeing them?”
“Yes. I’ve got my family back, Chrissy, and I’m never letting go. Oh, and did I see Derek getting a little cute with you?”
“You did. I mentioned my girlfriend. He didn’t whine.”
“He’s a good boy. Good man, now, I should say. Oh, and about that name they called me…”
“I did not hear it,” Christine says. “I’ve already forgotten it.”
“Bless you, Christine.”
* * *
Stefan eats a late lunch in the common area, with Pippa, Martin and Martin’s sponsor, Pamela. Pippa evidently shares Stefan’s fascination with Martin’s apparent ambivalence towards his upcoming and inevitable feminisation, and asks a couple of questions, none of which fill in the picture to Stefan’s satisfaction; the man genuinely does not seem to care. He leaves for a shower and a nap after lunch, and Stefan follows a little while later, agreeing, for the sake of appearances, to spend at least some time in his room, in case one of the boys — Aaron — decides to call on him. But no-one does and, bored, he heads back out to the common room to find Monica, Tabby and Jane lounging on the couches, playing poker. They offer to teach him, and deal him in.
He’s terrible.
He asks, during yet another hand in which he folds early, if Martin’s attitude is unusual. Not particularly, Jane tells him; it’s not every year they bring in someone so traumatised or guilt-ridden that they submit willingly, but it’s hardly unknown. They don’t tend to stick around after, preferring to live away from the Hall and make new lives for themselves elsewhere in the country, but all of them are, last anyone looked, as happy as people in their position can reasonably be expected to be.
“Still doesn’t make sense to me,” he says, dropping another hand of cards on the table, scarcely any better at poker than he was when they dealt him in. “I just can’t wrap my head around it.”
“You know what I think it is?” Tabby says. She’s sitting cross-legged on the other couch, guarding both her cards and her pile of improvised betting chips — buttons — on the cushion in front of her. “I think it’s because you’re trans.”
“Oh?” Stefan says.
“Explain, Tabitha,” Monica says. She’s lying on her back on the floor, with her head on a bean bag chair and her knees elevated. Stress, she explained. Tabby suggested they put whale noises on over the common room speakers, to really help relax her, and Monica threw a button at her. Tabby accused her of trying to bribe the clearly superior poker player.
“Thank you, Monica,” Tabby says, imitating Monica’s lecture voice with a smirk, “I will explain! Stef, as a trans woman, your gender is pretty strongly defined, wouldn’t you say? Something you’ve always been aware of, even if you didn’t always know what exactly it was. I mean, dysphoria, depression, depersonalisation, dissociation; it all comes from a pretty extreme body/gender mismatch.”
Stefan shrugs. “Yeah, I suppose.”
“I think — and, you have to understand, I’m speaking from personal experience, here — the opposite of that state isn’t being cis, necessarily,” Tabby says. “It’s being indifferent.”
“What?”
“Some people just don’t care.”
“Very technical, Tab,” Jane says.
“It’s true, though,” Tabby says.
“Well, yeah, probably.”
Tabby leans forward more, throws her cards down on the table, the game temporarily abandoned for the discussion. “There are people who are guys solely because they are guys. And girls who are girls because they are girls. They’ve never thought about it. They don’t have a particular attachment to the shape they currently are, the social role they currently occupy, it’s just… theirs. It’s like their car, or their house. They may like it fine enough, but if someone like us comes along and says, hey, sorry, it’s time to move house, they’d just ask about the new address and for a week to box up their stuff.”
“It’s a tautological gender,” Monica says, from the floor.
“That doesn’t help.”
Stefan’s trying to imagine it. The idea of being simply indifferent. “That’s so alien to me.”
Tabby smiles at him. “That’s just it. Gender, and the fuckery of it, has defined your whole life. And there’s a lot of cis people who feel the same, except without the dysphoria and the need to transition; they really, really feel like a girl or whatever, and they get really into being a girl. I’m sure you can think of people like that.”
Stefan shrugs. He hasn’t known all that many people.
“We don’t get a lot of people like that,” Monica says. “It’s practically an instant washout. It’d be pointlessly cruel to try and get them to change.”
“We go for the middle ground,” Jane says. “Boys who can change, even if they don’t want to. Whose identity, under all the cultural conditioning, is flexible enough. But, yeah, sometimes we get Martins, who just don’t care, whether because they’re like that naturally or they’ve been made that way by guilt, trauma, blah blah blah.”
“You think even Declan was like that?” Stefan says.
“He was a pretty big fucking question mark, to be honest,” Monica says. “But he was a piece of shit. Getting him off the streets seemed like a pretty potent priority, and we didn’t even know about the rapes. Just the violence.”
“Jesus.”
“No-one else is going to wash out, though,” Jane says.
“That’s hardly a foregone conclusion, Janey,” Tabby says.
“It is!”
“Ignore her,” Monica says. “She’s just saying that because she got Declan and only Declan in the pool.”
Jane nods. “I’m going to win two hundred quid.”
“So,” Stefan says, “the ones who aren’t like Martin, they’ll adapt?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“You just… do,” Tabby says. “You accept it. You move on. It’s better this way, anyway.” She makes a show of extending her arms and flaring out the loose material of her sleeves, which are a bright cream-white and contrast beautifully with her dark skin, even under the unflattering basement lights. “Nicer clothes, softer skin. And the company’s better.”
“You learn to live with it,” Jane says, “when you have no other choice. And it’s not like any of us were living nice lives before we came here. Remember, we don’t just snatch guys randomly off the street. We put in the hours, do the research. We go for guys who’ll benefit, and who’ll survive.”
“What would Will have to go back to?” Tabby says. “I hate the fucker right now, but it couldn’t be more clear he’s drowning in guilt and doesn’t know how to deal with it except to hurt more people, which then makes him feel even more guilty. When we’re done with her, she won’t be that guy any more.”
“Yeah. You don’t hurt people like he does if you’re happy.”
“Masculinity is a prison,” Monica says. “We have the key.”
Stefan frowns. “Do you ever wash out guys who, maybe, could change who they are, but not the way you do it?”
“Not often,” Tabby says quietly. “But it’s happened.”
“We’re better at avoiding that than we used to be,” Monica says.
It still seems like a high price to pay. Stefan doesn’t say it, but Tabby sees it in him, anyway. “It hasn’t happened for years,” she says, reaching across the couches and taking his hand. “We’re very careful.”
He nods. There doesn’t seem to be any other appropriate reaction.
“Well, girls,” Monica says, sitting up and stretching, “game’s over, I think.”
“Aw,” Tabby says.
“Really?” Jane says.
Monica slips a band off her wrist and ties her hair into a ponytail. “Really. We can’t put this off any longer.”
Jane groans like a teenager whose curfew has been brought forward, but hops up off the couch, anyway, offering a hand to Tabby and pulling her up. “You ready to give another speech, Mon?” Jane says, aiming a swipe at Monica and missing.
“Stop,” Monica says. “No. I miss Maria.”
“Well,” Tabby says, “you can take it out on the guy that hurt her. Come on.” She smiles at Stefan, gives him a tired little wave. “It was nice to finally get a chance to talk to you properly, Stef.”
“Hey!” Edy shouts, poking her head through the door that leads to the bathroom, as the three sponsors head out to the corridor. “Are you—?”
“Yes,” Jane yells, “we’re doing the thing.”
“Make sure you tell—”
“We know!” Tabby and Monica say in unison.
“They’re supposed to tell the security guys where they’re going to be,” Edy says to Stefan, “and I know they forgot.”
“How’s Adam?” Stefan asks, turning around properly on the sofa so he can rest his hands on the back cushions.
Edy shakes her head. “Not good. I’m giving him some privacy to pee, but…” She sighs, and rolls her shoulders, pushing tension out of her body. “I really thought he’d do better with this.”
“With what? Being made into a girl?” When Edy nods he adds, “I’m sure he’ll get used to it in time.” Silently he scolds himself for being too damn nice about all this. It’s too easy to get sucked in, to be on the sponsors’ side, when they’re offering him everything he wants, when he’s just seen a list of sins longer than a supermarket receipt scroll by on the TV.
Edy beams at him. “You’re sweet, Stef. Oops, gotta go!” She ducks back into the bathroom, leaving Stefan alone in the common room.
Adam’s having trouble and Martin doesn’t care; what about Aaron? He was distressed during disclosure, understandably, and hasn’t left his room since, not even to urinate.
Worrying. He should look in on him.
He should check with Indira first, though, before he goes banging on Aaron’s door. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and sends her a message, and while he waits for a reply, he tidies the common room. Bean bag chairs in the corner, couches straightened up, deck of cards back in the cabinet. Dirty plastic mugs go in the dining room, for one of the girls to pick up later. He’s wondering if there’s a vacuum cleaner somewhere around — they must clean the place during the night, or early in the morning, because he’s never seen them do so — when he laughs at how ridiculous he’s being: he’s cleaning the torture basement. Voluntarily.
Feeling rebellious, he drops back onto the couch and reads a book on his phone, studiously ignoring the dust bunnies in the corner.
It takes a while for Indira to get back to him, and she does it in person. She gives him the bad news: Aaron’s not eating or drinking, he’s not watching a movie or listening to music or reading; he’s not doing anything. Just sitting on his bed, staring at nothing. And ignoring all of Indira’s attempts to get his attention.
“I tapped him on the head. I stood in front of him and said his name. I waved in front of his eyes! I even put water bottles and cookies on the bed next to him, in case he gets hungry or thirsty. I stopped short of actual physical violence, but I’m willing to try anything.”
“You can’t just leave him alone? This is a pretty big bomb that got dropped on him today. Maybe he just needs time.”
“Time is fine,” Indira says, leaning against the wall, “as long as he takes even the slightest bit of care of himself. But all he’s had today is a bowl of cereal and nothing even to drink since then, and if this becomes a whole twenty-four hours without food and water, then we have to start looking at drastic options, and those are…”
“Drastic?”
“Strapping someone down and making them eat and drink doesn’t help. It keeps them alive, but it’s just more trauma. They don’t recover. You get into a vicious circle. The threat of it is useful,” she adds, frowning, “but if you actually have to follow through, you’ve lost.”
The answer’s obvious. “Why don’t I talk to him?” he says.
* * *
Aaron’s sitting cross-legged on his bed, surrounded by the detritus of Indira’s attempts to get him to engage: water bottles, paper plates with cookies on, a couple of wrapped cereal bars, and some scattered cushions.
Indira insisted repeatedly to Stefan that he doesn’t have to do this, that this goes beyond Beatrice’s instructions for him, that this is sponsor stuff and not something he should be taking on. But what other options are there? Despite everything, Aaron is his friend, and he’s currently facing something no-one should have to face alone.
“Hi.”
Aaron says nothing.
“Indira let me in. I said I was worried about you after Monica really went in on you in the common room. That was pretty fucking intense, right?”
Aaron says nothing.
“They’re telling Will and the others now. Same speech, probably. I bet Monica uses Ollie as her example. Probably got a big chart of all the times he made his wife’s life a living hell. Or is it a girlfriend he had? I bet both. I bet he had a wife and a girlfriend, and was fucking horrible to both of them. He seems like the type.”
Aaron says nothing.
“I kind of want to be a fly on the wall for that? And I kind of don’t. After Declan and Will I think I’ve had my fill of sudden, unpredictable acts of violence.”
Aaron says nothing.
“I bugged Pip for details, but she just gave me one of those pamphlets and, like, I get the mechanics of it, I think? I just want to know why they think this’ll possibly help.”
Aaron says nothing.
“Did you know those pamphlets are from the NHS? Isn’t that ridiculous? As if this is a legit operation or something. Government-funded. Like what they’re doing to us is on the approved treatment list put out by the World Health Organisation.”
Aaron says nothing.
“Did you eat? I ate. I wasn’t really in the mood, but I was hungry and I decided I could still be scared shitless on a full stomach. There was meat in the lasagne actually. I think they decided to give us a treat to make up for all that stuff they said, but it might not have been a good idea because after weeks and weeks of vegetarian food I think my gut bacteria’s forgotten how to deal with beef. I feel a bit uncomfortable.”
Aaron says nothing.
“Aaron,” Stefan says, taking another step closer, “talk to me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m worried about you!”
“Oh, yeah? You want your little mate back, is that it?”
“I’m just worried.”
“Yeah, well, you fucking saw it, didn’t you?” Aaron leans back on the bed. He’s still cross-legged and his hands are buried in his lap. “Up on the screen. All the shit at school. What they liked to do to me. Want to know a funny secret? That’s just what I reported. I stopped telling on them after a while. No point. No evidence, unless you counted me having bruises or needing to shower in my uniform to get the blood out. They were all little lord fuckfaces and archduke dickheads, anyway. No-one was ever going to punish them. And, no, if you’re thinking, ‘Ah, that’s his origin story, that’s why he’s a bastard!’ No. I threw that in Monica’s face because I could. I don’t actually believe it. It was all just shit on top of shit. I wasn’t a good guy even before I went to that school, and getting victimised there… I kind of thought it was karma for a while, you know?”
“Aaron—”
“You know what I’m thinking about? I’m thinking about how they used to just casually hit me in the corridors. How they chased me down sometimes when they were bored. How they— how they did other stuff. And I’m thinking, what if I’d been a girl back then? What if I’d been a girl, like Monica and Indira and Maria all want to make me, surrounded by those boys? What would they have done? How much further would they have gone? I know what estrogen does, Stef. And I know what happens when you drain a body of testosterone. It’s why trans women don’t win Olympic medals. They’re making us weak, Stef. Weak, and then they want to send us out there, changed so we have no chance of fighting off people like that.”
“Women don’t have to be weak, Aaron—”
“For fuck’s sake, Stefan! You’re giving me that, too? You’re asking me to be fair and even-handed and glug the fucking respect women juice in the middle of all this? Are you actually Indira in a shitload of makeup and a ginger wig?”
“Sorry.”
“Look at me: I was smaller than most of the women here when they kidnapped me, and I’m only going to get weaker. It’s all part of the punishment, that’s what it is. One big power play. It’s the long game, and it ends with us dead, or worse, whatever we do.”
“You don’t think they’re sincere?”
“You do? Stef, that’s the stupidest question you’ve ever asked. And, yes, fine, it doesn’t fucking matter if they’re lying or not because tasers, guns, locks, et fucking cetera, I know. But there’s other ways to fight. Other ways to hurt them. They want me to take those hormone shots? They’ll have to put me to sleep first. They want me to get another Goserelin implant? They’ll have to tase me. They want me to eat? They’ll have to put a tube in me.”
“That’s your strategy? To make yourself miserable?”
“It’s not a ‘strategy’. It’s a ‘fuck you’. If they’re going to be like those boys at school, if they’re going to hurt me for their own reasons, then they’re going to have to do what those boys did and hold me down while they do it. I’m not going to consent. I’m not going to salve their consciences. They’re going to see me screaming when they close their eyes at night; I’m going to make all of them into monsters. Just fucking watch me, dude. They can do whatever they want to me. They can grow tits on me, they can cut off my dick; whatever. They’ll just have to live with it.”
“They didn’t say they were going to cut off—”
“Jesus, Stefan! Read the fucking room! Monica said, ‘All the way.’ Twice! What do you think that means? They’re going to teach us how to paint our faces and wear frilly knickers? No. They’re going to pump us full of hormones until we look like the sisters we never had and then they’re going to cut off our fucking dicks. It’s not just about a chest I can wank with and a bit of swelling any more. It’s real. It’s irreversible. And don’t think I haven’t noticed how well you’re taking this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know why Martin doesn’t care: he’s practically anaesthetised by his own self-loathing. Adam’s probably putting all his energy into praying he wakes up somewhere less fucking psychotic. But you; I don’t get you.” He half-smiles. “Okay, sometimes I do. Sometimes you seem just like me. But other times, like now, it’s like you’re from another planet. Like you’re a Stepford wife. Like you’re standing in front of me as a distraction because you’re in league with the insect queen, and she’s behind me, ready to implant her eggs. Why don’t you care, Stef?”
“I care. But what would I do?”
“Don’t give me the whole routine again. I don’t mean that you don’t try to escape. You’re friends with these girls, dude! You and Pippa are practically brother and sister, and I’ve seen you smiling and talking with the others. It’s like you like it down here, or something.”
He’s right. Stefan’s act has been absolutely terrible. Beatrice echoes in his mind; can’t be the Judas goat if he’s not believable. And if he can’t do that for them, if he can’t survive Dorley alongside them, then how will they get through it? Aaron’s already making plans to resist; they really could wash him out.
“You’re so calm about everything,” Aaron insists.
But how can he explain himself? How can he position himself as Aaron’s peer once again? How can he sell this?
“They’re going to do everything to you they’re going to do to me, so why don’t you care?” Aaron says.
An idea occurs. It starts itching in his mind as soon as he thinks about it; a diseased thought that needs to be expelled. It’s probably the worst thing he could do to Aaron right now. It’s manipulative and it’s cruel.
But it’ll sell it.
“Can I sit down?” he says.
“Sure. Whatever.”
He clears aside the cookies and the water bottles and sits on the bed next to Aaron. Closer than Aaron expected. Close enough for their thighs to touch. Aaron shifts uncomfortably, but doesn’t move.
“I’m not okay with this, Aaron,” Stefan says, breathing out heavily and slumping his shoulders. “I don’t exactly understand everything about what they’re going to do, but I know enough to know I don’t want it. And, yeah, actually, you say I’ve been talking to the sponsors? This is a big fucking betrayal. They’ve been talking to me, acting like my friends, all while knowing this was what was coming… It’s sick.” It’s not hard to spit the word. “Maybe they think we can all be gal pals after, or something. I don’t know. But what I do know is, I can keep going. I always keep going. I’m good at keeping going, Aaron. I’ve been doing it all my life. All I need is a reason.” He leans back on the bed, shoulders against the wall, hands cupped in his lap. He wants to seem open and honest. Nothing to hide. “When I was a kid and I was getting bullied, spending time at home was my reason. When Melissa disappeared, being strong for Russ was my reason. And when my friendship with him fell apart, studying was my reason, to get to Saints. And when I was lonely at Saints, graduating and getting a good job was my reason. I’ve always had a reason to keep going, and I always make sure I do. Because if I don’t have a reason, if I don’t find a reason, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“So,” Aaron says, leaning back, matching Stefan’s pose, “what’s your reason now? What’s a good enough incentive to keep going when those girlboss psychos are getting ready to castrate you?”
Aaron’s looking at him, so Stefan looks back. Holds it. Two, three, four seconds. Five. Aaron opens his mouth, and Stefan pre-emptively interrupts, looking away as he does so.
“You,” Stefan says. “You’re my reason.”
* * *
It would have been nice if it’d gone another way. If Aaron had accepted Stefan’s affection. If they’d hugged it out. If they’d even, Stefan has to admit to himself in the most guarded corner of his mind, kissed. If Aaron hadn’t recoiled from him, hadn’t pushed him off the bed. Hadn’t thrown cookies and water bottles and pillows at him until he left.
Hadn’t screamed ugly words down the corridor until Stefan burst into the common area and slammed the doors shut, quieting him.
But he bought it.
Stefan’s okay with being forcibly transitioned because he’s fallen for one of the boys suffering alongside him? An incredibly believable lie, it turns out.
Indira and Edy come through from the dining room and pull him back up off the sofa. One hand in each of theirs, they lead him out of the common room, up the stairs, past the security room. Through that cavernous dining hall. Into the kitchen, where he spoke with Beatrice, long ago. Pippa, Christine and Abby are there, Pippa kicking her chair back and almost running for him as soon as he comes into view. Indira and Edy hand him off to her, and he falls into her arms.
She holds him until the tears stop.
Gentle hands help him into a chair and he sits, leans both arms on the kitchen table, and wipes ineffectually at his eyes until someone — Abby, he thinks — passes him a box of tissues.
“I’m so sorry, Stef,” Pippa whispers, sitting down next to him and rubbing the back of his neck.
Indira puts a phone on the table, the view from one of Aaron’s room cameras on the screen. “He’s eating,” she says. “Cereal bars. You broke his resolve. He’s eating. You helped him.”
“You did amazingly, Stef,” Christine says, taking a hand and massaging his knuckles.
“Here,” Paige says, passing a mug around, through Abby’s hands and Christine’s and onto the table in front of Stefan. Hot chocolate. Marshmallow. He threads his free fingers through the handle and drinks.
“He’ll be okay,” Indira says, sitting down opposite and smiling.
“And so will you,” Abby says.
He blows on his hot chocolate. The reflected heat is nice, and eases the soreness around his eyes and the salt-dry skin on his cheeks. He imagines he’s red all over, his fair and lightly freckled complexion burning.
“I hope so,” he says.
“You will,” Pippa says.
“We’re all here for you,” Christine says.
“Forget what Aunt Bea asked of you,” Paige says. She’s still standing by the microwave, where she heated the milk, and looking down at him with crossed arms. “Don’t burn yourself out trying to help people who don’t want to be helped.”
“That’s our job,” Indira says.
“I want to help him, though,” Stefan says,
“And you did. He’s eating. He’ll get through this. And,” Indira adds, glancing at Edy, “just because we don’t want to strap him down, doesn’t mean we won’t, if we have to. He’s only hurting himself.”
“And he won’t do that forever,” Christine says. “He reminds me of me, a little. After the orchi. He’ll work it out. Even if it gets worse for him before it gets better, it’ll get better.”
It’s still a little alarming to remember that they’re all in on it.
One of the other sponsors — someone attached to the second or third year, someone he’s seen around in ancillary roles downstairs but doesn’t know by name — passes through the kitchen on her way out, and smiles at him as she goes. Another product of Dorley. Another woman who might once have been strapped down, been made to drink water, been made to eat, been made to accept injections. Been mutilated. Another one who is, like the rest, in on it.
Another one who’s happy now.
Aaron, throwing things, sending him away, rejecting him. Rejecting his help and, yes, his affection. Screw him. There’s too much evidence casually walking the halls of Dorley that says he’ll be okay, eventually. That he’ll live, in some form or other. And that’s all that matters. Stefan can’t spend every waking minute worrying about him.
He wipes his eyes again, and drinks his hot chocolate.
* * *
The girls slowly scatter, Christine and Paige up to Christine’s room — “You should drop by some time,” Christine said on her way out, “and I’ll show you the view from the second floor.” — Abby out on some errand, and Indira back down to the security room, to keep an eye on Aaron and Adam and to link up with Monica and the others.
Edy sits down next to him, when it’s just the two of them left in the kitchen. “We were going to take you down, too,” she says, “to meet with Monica and watch the footage of the second disclosure, get your thoughts on it, but I think that can wait, don’t you?”
He nods. it’s about all he has the energy for; he’s emptied out, exhausted from stress, from crying, from Aaron. Edy gets him some coffee and toasts him a bagel, and eats with him. Various other women pass through the kitchen as he eats. Two of them, a pair of girls named Faye and Rebecca, tell him how exciting it is to have him around, and ask him if Christine’s a good dancer; he has to admit that at the party where they met they mainly drank, smoked, and wandered around a half-complete building site together.
“That’s cool, too,” Faye says.
“Say hi to Christine from us when you see her next,” Rebecca says, as their sponsor collects them and escorts them out of the kitchen and into the main hall. Edy explains that, as second years, they don’t yet have the run of the place.
“But they seem so… normal,” he says.
“You should have seen them a month ago,” Edy says. “This place is nominally a dorm for adult students, but sometimes it’s like a hostel for horny adolescents.”
He finishes his bagel and coffee, and cleans his face with the moist wipe Edy offers.
“Aaron,” she says. “You love him, don’t you?”
He screws up the wipe and drops it onto the empty plate. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe. Maybe not. I feel… protective of him. Despite what I saw on the screen today. Despite everything.”
“Don’t over-analyse it. Lots of us formed attachments down there. And, with only a few exceptions, none of us were exactly great people, either. It’s okay to love a bastard, Stef. Here, bastards reform.”
“Why do I like him, though?” Of all people, of everyone he’s ever met, why Aaron? He’s been chewing on that along with his bagel, and come up with nothing.
“Why Maria, for me?” Edy leans on her wrist, smiling wistfully. “I’ve been here a long time, Stef. On and off. Known Maria longer than I’ve been a woman. And, my goodness, we weren’t friends to begin with. Emphatically not. I was one of Aunt Bea’s first, you know. Things were still a bit rough, back then. I spent eighteen months in the basement, under Maria and Bea’s authority. Had rather a hard time. So, even after I graduated, I avoided her. Through my first sponsorship I mostly interacted with her by text message. And when I got restless and left, back in 2013, I didn’t even say goodbye. I just left. Did my resignation by phone. But in the end, I came back. I missed this place. And why wouldn’t I?” She makes a show of looking around the kitchen, taking in microwave, food processor, AGA. “We have all the fancy equipment.” She sighs. “When I got back, things were different. More relaxed. Nicer. And it had been so long since she was the face of my rehabilitation that I couldn’t see her that way any more. That’s when I finally started talking to her properly.” Edy’s staring into the distance, now; into memory. “She apologised. I told her it wasn’t necessary. I told her I did things out there, out in the world, as Edith, that I never could have done before. Had experiences I never could have had. I thanked her, and that was the first time we so much as hugged. But it still took us until this year to get together. It was just, finally, the right time for it. We were both ready. And sometimes that’s all it is: it’s the right time, it’s the right place, and it’s the right person — no matter how unlikely any of those seem — and you fall in love.”
“Maybe,” he says again.
“Do you think your affection for him will survive the changes he’s going to go through?”
“I’m more worried he won’t survive.”
“He will,” Edy says. “He’ll live, and he’ll be a woman. Are you okay with that?”
“For his sake? No. Never in a million years will I be okay with that.”
“And if he comes to accept it? To embrace it? Like I did?”
Stef sighs. Imagines, once again, Aaron in a year’s time. It’s difficult; he can’t get around the idea that he won’t make it, that he’ll wash out, that he’ll be one of Dorley’s check marks in the failure column.
“I still don’t understand how you lot work,” he says, “even though you all keep taking a run at explaining it to me. But, yeah, I get what you’re asking. And I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Come on,” Edy says, standing, pushing her chair back, and holding out her hand for Stefan. “Maria wants to see you.”
“Because of today?” he says.
“She just wants to touch base.” Edy rolls her eyes. “And she’s a compulsive meddler who is probably watching us right now.” She looks up and blows a kiss at the almost-perfectly disguised camera set into the cornice. “But it’s not because of today, no. You just haven’t had a chance to really talk yet. C’mon.”
Stefan consents to be dragged out of his chair, and as Edy lets go of his hand she spins around and scrutinises him, screwing up one eye and grinning. “Your changes are well underway, Stef,” she says. “And not just on your chest. Have a look at your face, later.” She takes a step back. “Have a look at your whole body.”
“That’s something I prefer not to do.”
“Not for long!” Edy replies, and grabs his hand again, suddenly energetic. She pulls him along, not through the double doors into the hallway like he expected, but back through the dining hall and into a corridor on the other side. There’s a staircase at the back of the building, and as they ascend he catches glimpses of the woods through circular windows. He laughs: on one side of Dorley Hall there’s the university, more built up every year, full of activity even at night, and on the other side, only silent trees. He thinks of home, of the suburbs that end at the street he used to live on with his family and Melissa and Russ. The little places they would escape to, to study, to talk. A little piece of safety, before Melissa came here and Russ stopped talking to him and his parents moved away.
Careful, Stef. You don’t want this place to start feeling like home.
Edy leads him off the stairs and into an L-shaped corridor with frosted glass doors at either end; an isolated space, a small section cut away from the rest of the third floor. Christine said that ordinary students, who have nothing to do with the programme and no idea what happens in their dorm’s basement, live up here; on the other side of those locked doors, no doubt.
“My room,” Edy says, pointing. “Monica’s, Tabby’s. Aunt Bea’s down on first and the rest of the sponsors are scattered all over the place, but we’re the oldest so we get the nicest rooms. And here—” with ceremony she opens the door in front of them, “—is Maria’s flat. And my home away from home,” she adds in a whisper.
“I can hear you gossiping, Edith,” Maria says.
“I’m not gossiping! I’m being informative.”
Maria’s flat is larger than Stefan expected. The main room is laid out as a bedsit, with a large bed on the left — which contains Maria — and a living and study area on the right. An open arch on the nearest wall leads to a kitchen and against the far wall, on the other side of the bed, doors open into what looks like a utility room — she has her own washing machine! decadence! — and a bathroom.
“Hi, Stef,” Maria says. As Stefan approaches the bed and sits in the office chair Edy directs him to, he notices her eyes are sharp and her smile steady. Good. Maybe this view will replace the one of her head hitting the floor in his dreams.
“Hi,” he says, returning her smile. “Um. Nice place.” There’s a framed picture up in the utility room, above the toilet, and he can almost make it out, but the light from Maria’s bedside lamp reflects off the glass and obliterates the image. Edy, when she sits down on the other side of the bed, reaches behind her and quietly closes the door.
Right. It’s probably not polite to stare at a woman’s toilet. Especially if she has, second only to Beatrice herself, the power of life and death over you. Double especially if she’s convalescing.
“I wanted to touch base,” Maria says, “and— hey!” She makes a grab for the laptop which Edy, taking advantage of her distraction, has snatched off her lap.
“No work!” Edy says, holding the computer out of reach.
“I was just checking, Ede.”
“You were meddling. Everything’s fine.”
“What’s this about Aaron hiding in his room? What’s Indira doing about it? Monica?”
“Ignore her, Stef. She’s just being smug that it took three of us to take over her duties. Which I have, since I got back—” Edy wags a finger at Maria, “—been trying to imply means she’s been overworked this whole time!”
“I was thinking of getting him up on the intercom—”
“No.”
“I just want to check in with him.”
“No!”
“Fine.” Maria dismisses Edy, turning away from her with only the barest hint of a smirk. Edy rolls her eyes, places the laptop sufficiently far out of reach, and heads over to the kitchen area. “How are you, Stef?” Maria says.
“Um,” he says. How is he? “A bit shaken. I didn’t think Aaron would take it so hard. After all, he adapted to the, uh, the chest thing pretty quickly.”
“It’s always different after disclosure,” Edy says, from the kitchen. She pours water from a filter jug into a kettle.
“The fact that it’s permanent is a shock to the system,” Maria says. “An intentional one, I should say. And the first of many.”
“Seems a little cruel,” Stefan says, “to drop it on them and just let them deal.”
Maria shrugs. “Don’t forget, we’re not just changing them physically. We’re changing them mentally, too. Helping them become better people.”
“At the point of a taser.” Stefan can’t help saying it.
“The process isn’t pleasant,” Maria says. “But it works.”
“So everyone keeps saying. And I know I don’t have to like it. I just have to be the Judas goat.”
“About that…” Maria leans forward and fluffs up some of the pillows behind her, to better support her head as she sits up. “Auntie didn’t make the greatest of impressions on you, I know. We’ve asked her to back off. Leave you alone. For a while.”
“‘We’?”
“Pippa and me. With reinforcements from Christine, Abby, Indira… You’ve got quite the fan club up here. Bea… She tries, she really does. But she’s had a rough life, and her instincts aren’t always the most helpful. She believes in protection above all else. It can make her lose sight of her ideals, make her forget who we should be protecting, because it’s not just ourselves.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying, ‘don’t be the Judas goat.’ If you’re going to be down there, you’re going to be transitioning alongside the others, and you’re going to be around them all the time; it’s not practical to pretend to be horrified by everything all the time, and I hope you won’t be offended if I say your acting skills are in need of development.”
“No argument there.”
“What I’m saying—” she glances at Edy, who is pouring tea from a pot into three mugs, “—is that you should have the chance to get out of there. Permanently.”
“Do you have permission for that, babe?” Edy says.
“Nope!” Maria says, smacking her lips with satisfaction on the plosive. “My plan is to move fast and break things.”
“Please don’t move fast, Maria, not in your condition. Stef? Milk and sugar?”
“Um, just milk, please,” Stefan says, and turns back to Maria. “What do you mean, ‘get out of there’?”
“I mean,” Maria says, accepting a mug from Edy and wrapping her fingers around it, “that we can pretend to wash you out. It wouldn’t be hard to make it nice and believable for the boys. We get you a room somewhere in the building — on the first or second floors, which are secure — and you can have a normal, boring transition, away from all the chaos downstairs.”
“You think Aunt Bea would go for that?” Edy says. She passes Stefan a mug — it’s just about cool enough to hold; she added a lot of milk — and takes her own around to her chair on the other side of the bed.
Maria juts out her lower lip like a pouting child, and says, “Yes, of course! Because I have a head injury! I bet I could ask her for my own helicopter and she’d be texting Elle for the funds before the evening’s out. I could probably get two if I started dripping blood again.”
Edy reaches out and gently rubs Maria’s head, over the bandana-style bandage. “What did I tell you about dark jokes?”
Maria grabs Edy’s wrist and strokes her hand with her thumb. “That I should try to cut down?”
“Um,” Stefan says, unwilling to interrupt them but needing rather urgently to make his point. “It’s nice to be invited up here, but… what about Aaron? What are we going to do about him?”
Edy frowns. “Didn’t he reject you pretty roundly, earlier?”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not still fond of him. Doesn’t mean I want him to struggle with all this. And he will: he doesn’t get on with any of the other boys. He thinks Will’s a wanker and he thinks Adam’s a weirdo and he hates Martin. And Raph and Ollie, unless they’ve become very different people over the last couple of days, are actively antagonistic towards him. Not only that, but he’s got a history with being stuck in an environment he can’t leave with a bunch of boys. Boarding school was basically hell for him, and I know that because I’m literally the only one he’s opened up to.” Stefan shrugs. “And, honestly? If he’s wary of me for a while, after what happened—” Don’t think about it, Stef, “—then it makes it easier for me to be objective. To help him without dying of guilt.”
“You think you can do that? Stay down there, be around him; around all of them? You were having a pretty hard time, before.”
He takes a sip of tea. The mug says, amid stylised clipart of dresses, If you lived here you’d be a girl by now. Of course it does. “I can back off. Let Indira mostly interact with him. She can do the sponsor stuff, the day-to-day stuff. Force-feed him if she needs to, even. But I’m not leaving him all on his own. Even if he never speaks to me again, it’ll be better for him just to see me dealing with it. There needs to be someone down there, someone he doesn’t h—” Stefan swallows against the lump in his throat and tries again, “—someone he doesn’t hate, so he can see it’s possible to cope with what’s coming. I couldn’t live with myself if I abandoned him.” He shrugs, pretending a greater indifference than he feels; it would be so nice to turn his back on everything and transition like a normal girl, up here somewhere. “So I’m staying. Sorry.”
Maria nods. “Then let us know if there’s anything we can do to help,” she says. “When we say you’re one of us, now, we mean it, and we support our own.”
“I mean,” Stefan says, looking around, “time away from the basement is nice.”
“Yes,” Maria says, “it really is.” She drinks her tea and scrutinises him. Her mug says, in large, red letters, Gone Feminisin’, but the caricature of a fisherwoman is mostly hidden by Maria’s fingers. Which is a good thing; Stefan doesn’t especially want to see what’s hooked on the end of the cartoon fishing rod. “Have you given any thought to your name?”
“Um. What do you mean?”
“Do you intend to keep going by Stef — which would, I suppose, mean picking some variant of Stephanie — or will you switch it out for something different?”
Stefan laughs. “I haven’t given it much thought. I kind of like being Stef, I think.”
“Well, nothing’s set in stone. Don’t think that just because we’ve got used to calling you one thing, we can’t switch. We’ve all done it.”
“Monica’s on her third name,” Edy says.
“To be honest,” Stefan says, “it’s a little difficult to think about. I can’t really imagine who I’ll be after all this. Feeling like a girl… It’s hard. Difficult to get a hold on, you know?”
“You’re still having problems with dysphoria?” Maria asks, bluntly. He nods stiffly, tensing up just at the mention of it, and as she goes quiet, biting her lip, clearly thinking about something, he forces himself to look around the room again, to give himself something else to concentrate on. He finds nothing new but he describes it all to himself in detail anyway, reviving an old game he used to play in class just so he can’t think too hard about his answer to Maria’s question. Yes, he still has problems with dysphoria, thank you, Maria; yes, when he tries to think of himself as the woman he’s supposed to be he finds himself almost unable to move, becoming so paralysed by even the tiniest sensations that any motion might prompt drastic action. He’s become used to waiting these feelings out, or chasing them away by forcing himself to think about something else, anything else, no matter how trivial.
The kettle in the kitchen: it’s bright red and has an oddly geometric design. It’s not what he thinks of when he pictures the platonic kettle; his would be shorter, rounded off, and in an earthy, homely colour. Dark green, perhaps…
“Stef?”
Someone’s trying to get his attention. Edy. She’s waving at him. He blinks. Smiles for her. Concentrates on the now.
“Can you keep a secret?” Maria asks.
“I’m decent at it.”
“Then can I tell you a story? One I think you might find… interesting?” He nods, wondering what she wants to tell him. “I’m a woman,” she says, “unequivocally and irrevocably. And I was assigned male at birth, like you. Like Edith. But, except in the strictest, most mechanical sense, I’m not really a trans woman. I know some of our girls embrace the label; it’s never fit me.” She wiggles a hand back and forth to indicate something like, it’s complicated. “There’s an implied gender trajectory there that just doesn’t work. But—” she leans into Edy, who is offering her shoulder for support, “—I understand dysphoria. All too well.”
Edy frowns. “Are you going to tell her what I think you’re going to tell her?”
“Yes,” Maria says, rubbing Edy’s hand but not taking her eyes off Stefan. “I don’t know how much you know of the history of this place, Stef, but Beatrice didn’t always run it. She took over fifteen years ago. How she did so is a long story for another time; all you need to know is that, before her, Dorley was run by the self-styled Grandmother. A vicious old bitch for whom this was her sadistic little playground. It was she who transformed me, and her methods were… more brutal than ours.” She passes her mug to Edy and rolls up her sleeve. Rocks her arm left and right in the lamplight. Faint lines criss-cross her forearm all around; without the direct light, they’d probably be invisible. “My captor, the one who brought me in, she liked to play around the vein. To threaten to make her cuts deadly but to never actually follow through. And she liked to surprise me with it; I’d wake up and she’d be there, with the blade, already cutting. Unlike most of them she didn’t seem to get a sexual thrill out of it; she just enjoyed hurting people. Hurting me, at the time. Many dozens of women and men before me. All of us toys for her pleasure.”
“Women and men?” Stefan says, trying and failing to wipe from his mind the image of Maria waking to some faceless torturer carving into her. Despite what she does for a living, Maria’s always seemed gentle, in a pragmatic sort of way; the idea that Will’s assault was merely the latest injustice in a life filled with violence is abhorrent.
“Yes. And that’s what’s important here. In the current iteration of the programme, we encourage men — grown boys, really, given their general level of emotional development — to grow into women. To break away from the toxic masculinity that empowered them to abuse others, and which abused them in turn. Yes?”
“I have… quibbles, but sure.”
“Grandmother emphatically did not want that. She preferred men in women’s bodies. She believed that for a man to become a woman is the ultimate humiliation — and for many men it absolutely is, which was exciting for someone as titillated by the concept as Grandmother. She treasured the man behind the eyes, inhabiting a body he no longer recognised. She saw his panic, his all-consuming self-disgust, and she got off on it. But she discovered — thanks to Bea, actually, and a girl she was close with — that, despite her efforts, womanhood blossomed inside some of us. And so there were the rules, always being refined and adjusted, designed to keep us from becoming the women they made us look like and, when that proved ineffective, designed simply to force us to hide it.” The bitterness in her voice, at bay until now, overflows, and she spits her next words through a sneer. “To make us play along with their fantasy. We were punished when we named ourselves or when we treated each other as women, even in private. They even started to hurt us for walking, sitting or standing in ways they viewed as ‘too feminine’, things which once they would have celebrated as humiliations; they got me on that a lot. Rules upon rules upon rules to dictate our behaviour, to keep us male, because if we adapted, it just wasn’t fun any more. But we adapted anyway. It was almost fractal, and most definitely farcical: a woman, inside a man, inside a woman.”
The picture of Maria under the thumb of a single torturer, already difficult enough to deal with, is replaced by one of Maria and several other women — Stefan’s mind populates Grandmother’s Dorley Hall with Edy, Monica, Tabby and Jane — trapped in an ever-changing bestiary of cruelty, subject to indignities and violence he’s glad he has difficulty imagining. He stares at Maria, trying to override his mind’s eye with the image of her, today, safe and alive, but his eyes keep flicking to her bandaged head, to the ancient scars on her forearm, and he wonders what else might have been done to her and the women she once lived with.
“Stef?” Maria says. While he’s been imagining horrors, she’s been calming herself, and there’s no pain left in her voice now. “If that was too much for you—”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry, Maria.”
“It’s okay, Stef.” She sounds so much like his mum would when he skinned a knee as a kid. Reassuring; loving. Like nothing bad could happen ever again. “Memories fade, even the awful ones. Not completely, and—” she glances at Edy, who rubs her shoulder with an intimate smile, “—sometimes they come back with reinforcements, but, mostly, they’re just memories.”
“Is there anything I can do?” he asks. It sounds idiotic as soon as he says it.
With a quirk of her lip, Maria says, “You’re doing it. You’re here and you’re listening to me. It’s good to tell the story again. It’s… validating to see someone react with—” and she smiles again, “—the appropriate amount of horror.”
Grandmother’s Dorley. Christ. Aunt Bea’s is the nice version.
“How many?” he says, hoarse. “How many people did Grandmother take?”
Maria frowns and Edy clasps her upper arm, comforting her. “You don’t want to know,” Maria says. “We do have the numbers,” she continues automatically, eyes unfocused. “Aunt Bea and her people did a lot of digging. We got most of their files. And there were the stubs of police reports and things. Missing persons. Parole records.” Her voice grows even more distant. “She looked. She looked for her for so long. ” She shakes her head, fixes Stefan with a glare he wants desperately to escape. “You don’t want to know. It’s not worth the nightmares.”
Stefan nods. Nightmares seem inevitable at this point, but he doesn’t push. Maria had seemed, if only for a second, even more vulnerable than she had on the floor of the common room. He can’t stop himself from asking one more question, though: “Who was she looking for?”
“Hmm?”
“You said she was looking for someone.”
“Oh,” Maria says, “yes. Valerie. Beatrice’s… friend. Valerie didn’t escape, unlike Bea. She was taken away, and Bea didn’t get out until months after; it’s likely she was already dead.”
“That’s— that’s just awful, Maria.”
“That’s what it was like, back then,” Maria says, patting Edy’s arm and leaning forward, reinvigorated. “I survived in Grandmother’s Dorley by understanding exactly what was being done to me and refusing to be broken. Refusing to be ashamed of it. The more they tried to put me back in the role they wanted for me — the scared, cowed man, emasculated and afraid of nothing more than the continued erosion of his masculinity — the more I embraced my womanhood. I chose a name. I invented a whole new history for myself. I created a new life. I asserted, at every point, no matter how much they cut me, burned me, humiliated me, tortured me, that I am Maria, and that their sad, angry little attempts to exercise their rage on me, or entertain their pathetic fetishes, meant nothing.” She leans even closer. “And this is my point, this is why I wanted to tell you all this: I know what it is to see a stranger staring back at me when I look in the mirror, Stef. I know what it is to want so completely to escape my own skin that I scream, that I tear at myself, that I throw myself against walls until no unbruised flesh remains. I know what it is to feel like every word spoken to me is meant for the shell I’ve been forced into. I know what it is to speak and to shudder at the sound of my own voice.
“That’s dysphoria, Stef. It’s what they gave to me, it’s the tool they used to try to make me into what they wanted, but it lies, Stef. Dysphoria lies. And you can choose not to listen. To fight it. Mock it. Assert yourself. Be yourself. Because to give in to it, to let it control you, is assuredly as repellent a torture as any I experienced.”
“But,” Stefan says, “I still look and sound like—”
“Fuck that, Stef,” Maria says with such vehemence that Stefan almost jumps. “How you look will change. How you sound will change. Everything about you will change. And I know how much those things matter, how much they matter to you right now, how much the hope of a happy future is difficult to hold on to when you look at yourself and feel… mutilated. But it’s transitory. Your dysphoria wants you to believe that it’s forever, and that’s a lie it will keep telling you, making you believe the changes you’re waiting for aren’t happening when they are. And you know one of its other lies? It wants you to believe the worst of other people, it wants you to think that it knows what they see when they look at you, but ask any of us who we see and we’ll all tell you the same: we see you. We see Stef. We see a girl. The girl you were before you got here, the girl you are now; the girl you could not more obviously be. And we don’t see her out of pity, or because we know the way you’re going to change; we see her because she’s there. She’s you. And if you can’t see her… Well, sorry, but you’re outnumbered. You’re a fucking girl, Stef.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that. Doesn’t know what to think about it. It feels like too much to fit in his head. A good thing he’s sitting down or he’d be on the floor by now; as it is, his knees tremble weakly and his hands grasp uselessly at each other.
“Maria,” Edy says, “are you force-feminising her?”
“I think we established that I have only one hammer and a surfeit of nails,” she mutters, and then grimaces. “Sorry, Stef; I think I need some rest. Talked a bit too long. Got a bit het up. Just— just fucking claim yourself, will you? You’re a woman among women; act like it. Tell your dysphoria the same thing I told mine: you won’t win. Name it as your enemy and kill it.” She closes her eyes. “Ede, can you make sure she gets put on the locks for the stairs, the ground floor, et cetera? And maybe set up a room for her, somewhere she can go to spend time with the other girls? I want her to have some freedom. I want her to feel like she belongs.”
“Of course, baby,” Edy says, rising and reaching out an arm for Stefan as she rounds the bed. “Get some rest.”
“Way ahead of you,” Maria whispers.
Stefan accepts Edy’s hand, rises out of the chair, and thanks Maria quietly, exchanges goodbyes. Those words, at least, are available to him, the rhythm of small pleasantries something easily recalled.
“You okay, Stef?” Edy asks as she leads him out of the room. He glances behind them and sees Maria settling back in bed, closing her eyes, and then realises she asked him a question.
“Oh,” he says, “um, yes. Probably.”
“A lot to think about, huh?”
He nods. It’s all he can think of to do.
Edy leads him downstairs, past a handful of sponsors eating a late dinner in the dining hall — Tabby jumps up out of her seat to give him a quick hug — and back into the basement. Indira, on duty in the security room, waves, and he waves back, almost overbalancing; he hadn’t realised he was quite so tired. But if he still hasn’t got his thoughts in order, the journey back downstairs has made them all seem somewhat less immediate and less overwhelming, and he can function well enough to perform minimal self-care.
“You want me to call Pippa?” Edy says, when they reach his room.
“No,” he says, “it’s okay. I’ll probably crash soon. Long day.”
“Okay. Sleep well, Stef.”
She blows him a kiss as she leaves, and he summons the last of his energy to fetch his toothbrush and toothpaste, throw a robe over his top, and stagger to the bathroom to clean his teeth. He watches himself in the mirror as he does so, a departure from habit, and thinks of Maria, trapped by Grandmother, forced back into a role that no longer fit her, play-acting for sadists. It’s a less visceral image this time; it really does help to remember that she’s upstairs, in her own flat, surrounded by laptops and silly mugs and her own washing machine, with Edy rushing back to her.
The role that doesn’t fit him is clear. And Maria’s right: he lives in a house full of women who know exactly who he is, who would never treat him the way they would treat a boy. So why is he treating himself that way?
Habit?
When he gets back to his room, his computer screen is lit up; a message from Maria. It reads:
I saw you squinting at the print I have up above my toilet. Thought you might get a kick out of it. Tell Pippa, Edy or Indira if you need anything at all, and remember to put yourself first. Leave the boys to us; just be an example for them.
Attached is an image: an idyllic sunset beach scene, overlaid with the text, in cursive:
One night, a woman had a dream. She dreamed she was walking along the beach with her auntie. Across the sky flashed scenes from the last several months of her life, and for each scene, she noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; one belonged to her, and the other to her auntie.
When the last scene flashed before her, she looked back at the footprints in the sand, and noticed that many times along the path of her life there was only one set of footprints. In the lowest and most difficult parts of her life, it seemed, she walked alone.
“Auntie,” she said, “you said that once I came to you, you’d walk with me all the way. But when I look back at my life, I see that you left me to face my greatest hardships alone.”
“My precious child,” her auntie replied, “I love you and would never leave you. When you see but one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”
“Thank you, auntie,” the woman said, looking back again and deriving great comfort from the view, until she saw something in the distance, just before the longest stretch of solo footprints. Puzzled, she asked, “Auntie? What are those little lumps in the sand back there?”
“Oh,” her auntie replied, “those are your balls. Sorry about that.”
He doesn’t know if it’s stress, exhaustion, or the relief that Maria, despite her injuries, despite her horrific history, is still able to send him something so ridiculous, but he has to cover his mouth to muffle the laughter. He laughs until his throat burns, his chest hurts, and his cheeks ache, and lets the enervation carry him, weak-limbed, to bed.
On his phone he finds a message from Edy, letting him know a room is being set aside for him on the first floor, and that his thumbprint will take him out of the basement and up the back stairs. And one from Indira, thanking him again for helping Aaron. And one from Pippa, joking about their ‘excitingly psychosexual relationship’ and suggesting they meet up tomorrow night in his new first-floor room; he’ll like it, she says, because it’s the only one on the floor apart from Aunt Bea’s flat that has an ensuite. He can shower on his own, guaranteed. Finally, a message from Christine: five hug emoji, a reminder to bug her on Consensus any time he wants, and a sticker that says, You go girl!
It really is so much easier, so much more comforting, to find community with the women of Dorley than with the men down here. So what’s stopping him? His embodiment? Changing all the time. Aaron? He can help him without being such a constant presence in his life.
Dysphoria?
If Maria can beat it, so can he.
He remembers himself under the nurse’s hand. Surprises himself with the memory. Doesn’t know why it came up. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? If the nurse was from Grandmother’s time, then she was a part of what happened to Maria. Might even have participated in it. Did Maria stiffen as the nurse examined her, too? Did she, too, try to make herself into an unemotional automaton, a nonconscious machine of meat, just surviving, not experiencing?
He swings out of bed again, energised but aware that these are perhaps the last of his reserves for the day. Borrowing from tomorrow, maybe. He hooks open the wardrobe with his toe, examines himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door. Kicks off his trousers, pulls his shirt tight around his body.
He remembers how he looked on the day the nurse was here: pink from burning himself in the shower; hunched and dysphoric after the examination. He’s different now to how he was then. He better understands his place here. Better understands the girls here. Better understands what they went through, and what will happen to Aaron and the other boys.
He pulls his t-shirt tighter, exposes his shape fully to the mirror. He was always too thin; money and misery conspired against his appetite. But almost two months of regular meals and one month of estradiol has shaped him, changed him, grown him. He’s fleshier in more places than just his chest. His hips are a little rounder — is that why his legs and lower back have been aching recently? — and his belly is a little less flat, skin once taut now relaxing around the faintest suggestion of shape. And his jawline is softer, his cheeks more full. In all cases it’s the tiniest hint of change, mere millimetres, but it’s enough that his reflection is comfortingly unfamiliar.
They all see him as a girl, do they? Maybe it’s time to try it for himself. He closes his eyes, tries to clear his memory and reset his image of himself. He thinks of Maria, the woman within the man within the woman, defiantly spitting at her captors. He thinks of Christine, Paige, Pippa, Indira and Abby, of all of them standing where he now stands, examining themselves in the same mirror. He thinks of Melissa, not as he’s seen her in the pictures on the network, the ones he looks at most nights, but as he saw her that first time, nervous and new, at the supermarket where he used to work: a girl, still developing, still learning, but as kind and generous as ever she was.
The bridge of his nose tickles; oh yeah, hair’s getting long, too. He blows at it, curling his lip to direct the air, but it keeps falling back into place. He runs a hand through it, smooths it away from his forehead, and suddenly he remembers, years ago, in the old house, his reflection in the dark screen of his phone. Remembers the sharp bones of his cheeks, the waxiness of his adolescent skin, the greasiness of the hair his mother made him cut. How foolish to remember that boy and think of himself as the same person, unchanged despite the years! How different he is now!
He is different, isn’t he?
He bites his lip. Still nervous. Afraid that when he opens his eyes, in defiance of all logic, the same boy will glare back at him, the teenager broken by secrets and self-hatred. But he can’t stand here forever.
Fuck it. If the women of Dorley can do this, so can he.
He opens his eyes, looks himself up and down, and steps unconsciously back.
It’s too much.
It’s impossible.
It’s unreal.
But there she is: the girl the others all say they can see.
A step forward again. Fingers reaching out, making contact with the glass. Making it real, making it tangible.
“Hi, Stef,” she whispers, and the girl in the mirror whispers back.
Notes:
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 20: All the Little Pieces of Me
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 December 2
Monday
Stef. Stefanie. Stephanie. Stephenie?
There aren’t that many variations on the name that she can find, and most of the ones that deviate do so mostly in the unique and creative abuse they can heap on the letter e. And she’s scrolled through the name list on the network, and hopped onto the web and clicked at random through baby naming websites; nothing. Besides, Stef just fits. She can’t imagine abandoning it. Adding to it, perhaps, but it’s not just that it’s a connection to Melissa, it’s a connection to her whole past, to her sister, her parents, to Russ, to the memories she made in the little house on a stump of a street on the edge of a city.
It’s barely five in the morning but she’s up before her alarm again, walking barefoot around the basement. Her room’s fine enough — and would still count as the nicest place she’s had to call her own in years if not for Maria’s recent gift of another bedroom, up on the first floor — but changing her scenery helps her think. The lights are low, with just one spotlight in every four on at one-third brightness, and it’s quiet.
She runs an idle finger along the wall of the main corridor, and turns off into the common room. She imagines whichever poor girl pulled the night shift watching her on a screen up in the security room and laughing to herself: Stef’s wandering the halls again.
Stef. Stefanie. Stephanie.
The name is hers, belongs to every version of her, so why would she change it? She never expected continuity to be something she desired, something she needed, and she winces as she remembers protesting to Christine that she wanted a clean break from ‘this guy’ — she’d jabbed a thumb aggressively into her chest, back there in the cell with her — before she could even consider adopting a new pronoun, and now, here she is, embracing her womanhood but still claiming the same old name.
You don’t have to deserve your gender. It’s just your gender.
Seven weeks to internalise such an incredibly simple lesson. No wonder Christine got stressed out with her, way back when! Idiot.
No. She shouldn’t torture herself, she decides, and then breaks out into giggles, imagining a deadpan Maria informing her that torture is explicitly not in her job description, that the responsibility of torture merits a considerable pay bump, and Stef’s basically an intern.
Stupid Dorley sense of humour. It’s wormed its way into her brain.
She leans on the back of one of the couches by the TV, pulls her phone out of a pocket and checks the time. 05:04. Perfect; the automated daily updates will have gone out. She swaps through the sponsor apps, checking for alerts (none) and news (little). Indira’s report on Aaron says he spent the night the same way he spent all Sunday: alone in his room, drifting listlessly from sleep to wakefulness and back again; putting on a series of movies and TV shows he clearly isn’t watching; eating the bare minimum; turning away from the cameras to cry.
It’s hard to stay away. But Indira’s asked her to and so she will, for a little while. At least he’s eating, and at least his plan to resist the treatments didn’t manifest on Saturday night; he accepted the week’s estradiol shot without fuss, in what Indira described in yesterday’s report as ‘death-glare silence’.
She scrolls around on her phone, twisting the fabric cord around her finger and bumping the frog and elephant against her wrist; already habit, after just one day. Pippa got her a phone case and a braided cord to loop through it, and now Stef can take her little keepsakes wherever she takes her phone, so long as she’s careful to hide the case and its companions from the boys. Technically it’s a bit of a risk leaving the case on while out here, in the common room, but who else is going to go for a wander at five in the morning? Who else is going to come out of their room on their own at all, except Martin?
Still. Best not to tarry. Stef kicks off from the couch she’s been leaning on and heads back to the bedrooms, pausing in the main doorway and looking down the line.
Aaron’s door. One down from hers, on the other side. And she has to pass it on the way to her room, so she can’t be blamed for stopping to listen for a moment.
Steady breathing, just about audible. He’s sleeping, good; the confirmation silences the violent thought that’s been coming to her every so often since he rejected her: that he might hurt himself badly enough and quickly enough that no-one could save him. She keeps listening to the breaths: in and out, in and out, with a grumble on the inhalation that suggests he’s sleeping on his back.
She could have checked on the cameras — and she does, several times a day — but this is more real.
Her fingers trace patterns on the door. Maria and the sponsors gave her a lot of trust when they opened up her access. Her thumb opens almost every lock between Aaron and freedom, and it probably wouldn’t take too much to get through the kitchen doors, especially if they worked together. She could just… take him. And, at this time in the morning, there’s probably only the one night-shift girl in the security room, sleepy and slow, and Stef has a taser. They could be out the front door before anyone else caught on.
A list of names and dates on a screen.
He needs to change. Forget the other consequences — Dorley exposed, Pippa and Christine and the rest of them taken away, Stef left once again at the languid mercy of the NHS — Aaron would go back to being the person he was before all this. The piece of shit she remembers from her first day here, who made jokes about the women Raph hurt and the man Martin killed.
And he rejected her. Let’s not forget that.
She checks to make sure he’s still breathing like he’s asleep — he is — and forces herself to walk away, sparing a sheepish glance at the camera as she does so. The sponsors all seem to know how she feels, anyway.
Back in her room, she slumps onto her bed, lies on her back, scrolls around on her phone. Another day to fill. Without Aaron, she’s been at a loose end. Adam’s been leaving his room in Edy’s company only, and does nothing but stare at the television, eat whatever’s put in front of him and ignore all attempts at conversation. And Martin? She spent an hour Sunday morning going over the pamphlets with him, discussing the mechanics of transition and watching him absorb the information with the dispassionate acceptance of someone looking over a utility bill that’s come to the exact amount expected. It’s almost as if the man isn’t there when she talks to him; he’ll answer questions, even hold a coherent conversation, but that’s about it. If somehow she managed to stab him somewhere sensitive with a plastic fork, he’d probably do nothing more than coldly examine weapon and wound, and perhaps return the fork. It’s like he’s decided to make a head start on becoming a new person by dissolving the old one.
So she spent much of Sunday upstairs, in her new room. It’s a vast improvement on the one she came back downstairs to sleep in, that’s for sure: it’s on the corner, which explains its funny shape and why it’s large enough to have its own ensuite, and looks out both onto the woods and the edge of campus. Pippa told her the wardrobe and drawers have been stocked with clothes in roughly her size, but Stef wasn’t brave enough yesterday to check, fearing for the fragility of her newly embraced womanhood.
After lunch, Christine gave Stef her first voice training lesson. “I’m the best in my year,” she’d said, standing up straight and bullying Stef until she did so, too, and favouring her with a song in near-perfect soprano.
“Were you a choir boy?” Stef had asked, before the inappropriateness of the question occurred to her, but Christine wasn’t offended, instead flicking him lightly in the shoulder and impishly shaking her head.
“We weren’t religious, and I think if I’d set foot in a church I’d have melted like the witch from The Wizard of Oz. I’ve just had a lot of practice.” She smirked at him. “Which I’m going to have a lot of fun inflicting on you. Now, chin up! Breathe in; in the chest, not the shoulders! And give me an Aaaaah.”
Stef gave her an awful lot of Aaaaahs.
When they broke for dinner — and to make time for Christine’s obvious pining for Paige — she praised Stef’s progress. “You’re speaking from the right place,” she said, “most of the time. And your projection isn’t bad! So practise every day, up here. It’s soundproofed! All the rooms on first are, or Aunt Bea would have gone crazy by now. Just make sure you slip back into your boy voice when you go back downstairs or you’ll give the guys a hell of a shock. You’ll be able to use them both side by side for now, as long as you keep up the practice, but you’ll probably only see a major pitch lift when you abandon your old voice for good.”
“So I won’t be able to sound like a girl?”
“Of course you will! Lots of women have deeper voices, and if you don’t want to lift your pitch, that’s fine, too; you’re really not that much lower than Pippa. I’m just saying, you won’t be able to do this—” and she slipped briefly into a descant do-re-mi, “—until you stop pretending to be a boy altogether. Which, yes, I know, is horrible, but it was you who wanted to stay down there.”
“Sometimes,” she’d said, “I’m an idiot.”
“Oh! You noticed!”
Stef chased her out of the room for that.
Stephanie.
She likes that one. Likes the ph. More different from her old name than Stefanie. Maybe she’ll try it out for a bit, see how it fits. Like Maria said, her first choice doesn’t have to be her only choice.
The quiet click of her bedroom door startles her, but only enough that she drops her phone on her chest and winces; every time she thinks her nipples have become as sensitive as they’re going to get, they find more spare nerve endings lying around. She sits all the way up and greets her fake sponsor with a smile.
“Hi,” Pippa whispers, shutting the door and tiptoeing into the middle of the room. “Maria wants you at the briefing this morning, but it’s not for a while and I woke up early and I was kinda bored and I thought maybe we could break the seal on your new wardrobe. Get you in something other than a hoodie for a change. You don’t have to, though,” she adds, frowning. “It’s just a suggestion. I’d never want to push you. Actually, I really shouldn’t push you. I was reading that you need to let trans girls take things at their own—”
“Pip,” Stef says, interrupting her before she builds up too much steam, “it’s fine. It’s a good idea, and I could do with a shower, anyway.”
They don’t talk again until they’re out of the basement and ascending. Stef, out of curiosity, pokes her head into the security room as they pass but the woman in there is someone she doesn’t really know; the woman smiles and waves, anyway, looking exactly as bored and tired as Stef would expect from someone on the night shift. Nell, she thinks she’s called. Nell returns to her ebook and Stef and Pippa continue on up, taking the back stairs to the first floor and Stef’s other, nicer, more above-ground bedroom.
When she’s done showering she finds Pippa arranging a selection of outfits on the bed.
“I was thinking modest, but flattering,” Pippa explains, and starts explaining her logic for each choice. Stef, as she does so, can’t help but notice the full set of underwear draped over the back of the chair: sporty, light grey, and with some padding in the bra. That’s fine; it’s not like she has much to fill it out with, otherwise.
She’d always thought her first time wearing appropriate underwear would be revelatory somehow, but the bra and knickers slip on easily, fit comfortably, and are thoroughly unexciting. Pippa’s visibly pleased with how she looks in them, though, which prompts a blush from Stef she can’t control.
“What’s up?” Pippa says, when Stef looks away.
“Um,” Stef says, flapping a hand, unable to find the words she needs.
“If we’re going too fast, we can stop.”
“It’s not that. It’s, um…” She closes her eyes, places her hands on her belly, and runs through Christine’s breathing exercises. Pippa, bless her, gives her the time. Once calmed, Stef opens her eyes, meets Pippa’s gaze, and does her best to explain. “When you looked at me… it felt different. Not bad different. Or weird different. I felt… warm? Like, okay, so you’ve obviously seen me naked, right?”
“Yeah,” Pippa says darkly.
“Not your fault!” Stef says quickly. “Sponsor crap! But you’ve seen me without anything on. And you’ve seen me with all the jogging crap we have downstairs on. But this is the first time you’ve seen me in, well, girls’ clothes. And I know it’s just a bra and stuff and it’s like the simplest thing ever but, Pippa, they’re really comfortable, and when you looked at me it was like I knew you were looking at me, the me I want to be when I’m looked at, and—”
Pippa collides with her, hugs her tight, and when Stef hugs her back, Pippa sniffs, loud and liquid, and says, “I love this for you, Stef.”
They separate, so Pippa can blow her nose, which she does enviably delicately, and then it’s back to work. Between them they choose a loose blue dress — “It’s perfect for you, Stef: it’s right opposite your hair on the colour wheel!” — with a skirt just past the knee and a wide belt in matching colours, to give her developing waist a bit of help. Pippa suggests leggings underneath, for confidence and to keep out the cold, and brushes Stef’s hair, teasing the locks between her fingers and occasionally blasting it with spray, while Stef fiddles with the belt, finding a comfortable compromise between borrowing a figure from it and having it pinch the tops of her hips.
She can’t resist a little spin.
Pippa giggles and bounces over for another hug. “Stef, you look wonderful!” She turns Stef to face the mirror, the one she’s been avoiding since she got up here, and Stef takes in her worst-case scenario: sharing a reflection with Pippa, one of the most beautiful women she’s ever met.
Actually: not awful! Sure, there’s fuzz she missed when she buzzed her face, and her hair is still a lot shorter than she’d like, and she still looks mostly the way she did when she first got to Dorley, but mostly isn’t entirely, and with a dress and a positive attitude she isn’t the disgusting troglodyte she feared she might be.
The girl in the mirror is still there.
Shyly she turns back to Pippa. “Um,” she says, intensely aware of the blush once again flowering on her cheeks, “can you call me Stephanie?”
“I’d be delighted!” Pippa says, her excitement obvious and infectious. “Stephanie.”
Stef turns back to the mirror and confirms the blush has more or less taken over her face. “I just want to try it,” she says quietly.
“You can try it all you want, Stephanie,” Pippa says. “You have so much time to find yourself.”
The slight frown that pricks at Pippa’s eyebrows is suddenly all Stef can think about, and she breaks out of Pippa’s grip and drops hard onto the end of the bed, avoiding the rejected outfits, tucking her legs under herself. Making herself small. “I’m sorry,” she says.
Pippa’s frown deepens. “I don’t understand. What are you apologising for?”
A heavy breath controls her burgeoning shame. “It’s like you said. I have all this time. I have it. This place, Dorley, it was always this big gift-wrapped present that I just needed to fake being a boy a little while longer to get, but now…” Another deep breath. The buds of her breasts move inside the bra; the cushioning feels good. “Shit, even this!” She tugs at the strap of her bra, pulling it out from under the neckline of her dress. “Free clothes, free underwear, and everyone’s falling over themselves to be nice to me!” She risks a look at Pippa; she’s still confused. “I’ve been here seven weeks. And I can’t stop thinking about you at seven weeks. Or Christine, or Paige, or Indira, or Tabby… Didn’t you say your sponsor basically abused you—?”
“Stef!” Pippa says sharply, and stands right in front, makes herself impossible to ignore. “Stephanie. You’re the only one making that comparison, I promise. I don’t resent you for getting what you need from this place; no-one does.”
“That’s not what I mean! They hurt you, Pip. And here I am, beneficiary of all the things they hurt you with—”
“Stephanie,” Pippa says, emphasising the final vowel. She squats down on her knees and places her hands in Stef’s lap. “You need to stop thinking of it that way. I mean,” she adds, smiling, “if you’re worried about me, just remember, I was expecting to spend the whole year with someone like Raph or Ollie. You’re the biggest and best surprise I ever had.”
“But—”
“No buts! Never forget: I was brought here because I needed help. And you came here because you needed help. And this place? It helped me. It’s helping you. Just because the medicine stung a little when it went down for me doesn’t mean I regret being brought here.”
“‘Stung a little’?” Stef says. “I saw Declan, after three strikes.”
“They never did that to me. Or Christine, or Paige, or basically anyone who’s still here. That was… drastic measures.” She reaches up for Stef’s cheek, strokes the downy hairs below her eyes. “Stephanie. You need this. I needed this—” she nods down at herself, “—and I’ll never stop being glad I got it. We all feel the same, and we’re all glad to see you getting what you need. Okay?”
Stef nods slowly. “Okay. Sorry. I just… I like you a lot, and I hate to think of you in pain. You’re like, um…” She doesn’t want to say it. It’s embarrassing.
“I’m like the older sister you never had?” Pippa guesses. Stef nods. “And that’s how it should be. And don’t worry about my old self, and what had to happen to make him into me. He’s still here.” She taps her heart. “At least, the parts of him worth keeping are. And he’s happy — I’m happy — to be here, right now, with you.”
It’s foolish, always thinking about who the girls around her used to be, when they themselves would rather she see them as they are. When they’ve repeatedly asked her to do so! Stef nods again, and together they rise and embrace, and she concentrates on Pippa, the woman in her arms, and nothing else. There’s a moment’s idiot guilt, and then it’s gone, and Stef luxuriates in the warmth of her sister.
“Better?” Pippa says, pulling away.
“Yeah.”
“Then how about trying some makeup?”
Without waiting for an answer, Pippa grabs her wrist and drags her over to the vanity. Stef lets herself be sat down, but fidgets. “You don’t think I’ll look silly?”
“Why?” Pippa asks. “Are you saying I suck at this?”
Stef snorts. Pippa’s eye makeup was the first thing she ever noticed about her. “No,” she says patiently, “I think I’m very good at looking silly.”
“But you’re already so pretty, Stephanie,” Pippa says, dragging a stool over and sitting down next to her. “And you’re only going to get prettier.”
She avoids her face in the mirror. “I look so masculine, though. Less than I did, I guess, enough for me to see—”
“Stephanie,” Pippa says severely, threatening Stef with — Stef squints at the label — a tube of primer.
“Yes?”
“You’re a pretty girl.” She uncaps the primer. “Deal with it.”
“I just can’t see it. I can see a girl, if I try, but a pretty one? No.”
“Well then,” Pippa says, smearing clear gel onto her fingertips, “maybe we need to get you some glasses, pretty girl.”
* * *
She’s never wanted to see the place before. Actively avoided it, despite how large it looms in Vicky’s history. Because it’s Vicky’s place. She doesn’t know what happened to her while she lived here, has never wanted to push for that knowledge, and Vicky’s never offered it. All she knows is that Dorley Hall is part of Vicky’s past, part of the person she was before they met, part of how she got hurt. Part of what makes the love of Lorna’s life whimper in the dark.
It’s also part of the lies. The lies which keep unravelling, splitting off into more lies as they come apart, tearing at the seams, slowly revealing… something. Lorna doesn’t know what it is yet, but the shape of it is becoming clear. Everything she can actually verify about Vicky’s life is from the time after she left Dorley Hall, with the odd snippet from when she still lived there. As for her life before the Hall…
Vicky’s on file at the school in Thelingford, but the teacher Lorna spoke to, slipping her name in among a dozen others, making suggestions for a reunion, didn’t remember her. Vicky’s parents, both only children, died together in an accident. The only childhood friend who responded to Lorna’s contact on Facebook did so with a terse message about some falling-out that soured their relationship for life, and signed off with a request to have her information deleted from Lorna’s phone.
And then there’s the time Vicky spent travelling, explained as a need to get away after the death of her parents. Vicky has stories of couch-surfing around Australia, working on her tan and taking cash jobs in bars, but not a single friend from that time has ever got in touch. And the idea of Vicky, who isn’t exactly an introvert but who is practically the definition of careful, sensible and diligent, throwing everything away to bum around a country half a world away has never quite fit.
Finally, Dorley Hall. Where everything converges. The place where she met her closest friends — where she met all the friends she has that she didn’t meet through Lorna — and yet the place she doesn’t like to talk about.
It’s also the place Vicky goes back to a lot, despite claiming to hate it. To see her friends, to bum free food off the kitchen, and to get Lorna’s estradiol from some girl who also likes her secrecy. And that girl is Lorna’s natural next target. Sure, she doesn’t know her name, but she does know another girl who still lives in Dorley Hall, who is best friends with Vicky, and who recently has acquired a mysterious trans woman friend who probably would quite like some estradiol of her own…
Lorna works hard to be nice to Christine. It’s not that the girl is unlikeable — quite the opposite — but it’s difficult not to feel jealous. Christine’s pretty, she’s sweet, and she’s never given Lorna the look Victoria sometimes gives her, like she feels sorry for her. Like she wants to wrap her in cotton and protect her from the world; which, yes, very kind, but Lorna doesn’t want pity. Besides, Christine was there for some of the hardest parts of Vicky’s life. Something to be jealous of, sure, but it also makes Christine a keeper of secrets. Secrets Lorna needs.
It’s bright and clear but cold, and it’s early enough that the sun is barely grazing the university grounds. Dorley Hall skulks in the half-light, a brick monstrosity barely restrained by vines that climb from basement to rooftop, as if the earth itself is trying to drag it under. Vicky said it used to be a private hospital, the sort of place you got sent if you were an aristocratic woman who happened to be inappropriately mad or inconveniently self-interested, and it shows. Lorna, approaching in its shadow, feels as if it might swallow her.
But the entryway is brightly lit, and when she pushes through the double doors into the hall, the wall immediately to her left hosts a battered corkboard covered in the usual paper paraphernalia of dorm life: party fliers, instructions for residents on how to dispose of their garbage, emergency procedures, ads for voice lessons — singing lessons, she assumes — and other such mundanities. Pleasingly ordinary. The locked kitchen doors are unusual, though, as is the fingerprint reader next to the mechanism. Perhaps, out here on the edge of campus, they’ve found they need to be more security-conscious than they were back in the famously always-open Windsor Tower, Lorna’s home for her first year at Saints.
She peers into the windows set into the kitchen doors. At the large table that dominates the room, a Black girl is in conversation with a South Asian girl and a plate of pastries. The Black girl looks irritated and the other girl seems sympathetic. Lorna doesn’t want to interrupt, but after a minute it becomes clear that the discussion is still far from a natural break, so she raps on the window and gives an embarrassed wave.
It’s the Black girl who gets up. She lets Lorna in with a thumb to a reader on the other side of the door.
Biometrics inside as well as out?
“Hi,” the girl says. Lorna revises her first impression: she’s older than she thought; late twenties, at least. Grad student? She looks tired and annoyed, which Lorna takes as evidence for her conclusion.
“Hi,” Lorna says, finally assembling her wits a full second after they would have been useful. “I’m Lorna. Vicky’s girlfriend?”
“Hi!” the South Asian girl calls, leaping up from her chair and near-running over to her, only to stop and linger, chastened, about a metre away from Lorna’s confused frown. “Sorry. We all know her, is all. We’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Indira; this is Tabitha.”
“Tabby.” Tabby extends a hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
Lorna takes her hand, noting a slight stress on ‘finally’. Have they all been bugging Vicky to bring her over? Vick’s never mentioned it. “Hi,” she says again, uselessly, and shakes for too long.
This is so awkward.
Over Tabby’s shoulder — the girl is tall but Lorna’s taller — she can see another set of double doors, propped open, that lead to a large dining hall and a closed, heavy-looking metal door inset in a concrete arch. She only just has the chance to read the sign — it says Maintenance and must, she decides, be a materials-cheap late addition, judging by the extreme contrast to the otherwise well-maintained and consistent aesthetic; she imagines the custodians of this place apoplectic before what looks uncomfortably like a portal to hell, smashed through the wall of their immaculate dining hall, and berating some poor contractor — before Tabby’s head obscures her view.
“Victoria’s not here,” Tabby says, smiling to make it sound less dismissive. “Do you need to leave a message with us, or—?”
“I know!” Lorna says, too quickly. She’s put her finger on the source of her nerves, and it’s not just that she’s in Dorley Hall: if Vicky’s talked to these people about her, they might know. And while Lorna’s not exactly stealth, here on campus — impossible to be, when she stands on chairs at rallies with a dozen phone cameras pointed at her — she also likes her perception to be at least somewhat under her control. Out and proud among her peers; play-acting a boring little cis girl when she goes to buy her oat milk. Especially when, as the paranoid voice in her head — the one she hates but nonetheless credits with helping her survive those months when just going to the shops had been a terrifying and almost superhuman exercise of will — insists, she worries she’s far more clocky than she wants to be.
FFS in less than three months. People love to tell her she’s beautiful, that she doesn’t need it, and she’s long used to ignoring them. If you haven’t had someone come up to you in the street, block your path, stare at you for twenty-plus seconds and then shout as loud as they can, because they want to see if they can make you jump and they want to hear the noise you make when you do, then you don’t get to have an opinion. Appearance is safety, and right now, she doesn’t feel safe.
She chews the inside of her cheek. She’s being stupid. This place isn’t dangerous; these girls aren’t her enemies. And this is just a perfectly normal building filled with perfectly normal people. That Vicky sometimes whispers its name in her sleep is coincidence and nothing more.
“I’m actually looking for Christine,” she says. “I would have texted her, but I cracked my phone and it’s being repaired.” Quality lie, Lorna.
“Oh!” Indira says. “She’s, um, probably here. I can call her, if you’d like?” Lorna nods, and Indira bustles back over to the table and makes the call. “Hey, sis,” she says into her phone. ‘Sis’? “You’re home, right? Well, you’ll never guess who’s here, in the kitchen, asking for you! No. No. No! No— Teenie, I said you’d never guess! Look, just— no, Christine, please stop being clever. Yes, you’re very funny. It’s Lorna, Teenie. She’s here!” Indira’s eyes meet Lorna’s for a moment. “Which is exciting. I’ve wanted to meet her for so long. Yes, she is very pretty.” Those eyes roll now, and she points at her phone in exasperation, turning her pointing hand into one miming a voice that will not, for the love of God, shut up. “I was thinking,” she says, interrupting whatever Christine’s saying, “you could have her up there? In your kitchen? There’s only Tabby and me down here, and we both have things to do. Yes, ‘things’. What did I tell you about being funny? Yes, I’ll send her up. Yes, unlock them. I don’t know, three minutes? If you’re not wearing clothes, it’s time to find some, unless you want to form a polycule with her and Victoria. Hey! I’m allowed to be funny, too, you know! Yes. Yes. Love you. And be careful, sweetheart.”
“All arranged?” Tabby says. She’s been leaning on the table, with an eye on Lorna, tapping her fingers on her folded arms, a human avatar for the tension Lorna feels in the room. As if visitors are a bad thing, as if her arrival is cause for alarm.
Don’t be stupid, Lorna tells herself. She’s had a difficult weekend, bad sleep, and she feels like she doesn’t know who her girlfriend even is any more. Any one of those could make her paranoid; all three together are making her feel fifteen again, like when her mum still lived with them, and she’s watching for danger behind every door.
“All done!” Indira says, beaming. She drops her phone into a bag on the table and rushes back over to Lorna, grasping her hand and shaking before Lorna really knows what’s happening, all her prior reticence gone. “I wish we had more time to spend with you, Lorna. You must visit again!”
“Um, I will.”
“Just go up the front stairs,” Tabby says, waving a hand at Indira, who releases Lorna and steps back, still smiling, “until you get to the second floor.”
“Christine’ll meet you there,” Indira says.
“Thanks, Indira, Tabby,” Lorna says, and looks at them for a moment longer, making sure to fix their faces in her memory alongside their names. She always makes an effort with that; it’s always seemed important. And she can ask Christine their pronouns later.
Tabby buzzes the doors open for her and smiles again, and Indira wiggles her fingers in farewell.
Once she’s backed out of the kitchen and gotten her bearings, she hears Tabby, muffled by the closing doors, say something like, “What was that?”
“What was what?” Indira says.
“You called her ‘sis’! Did you panic?”
“It’s my day off. You can’t expect me to…”
And that’s all Lorna gets, as the curve of the stairs silences what remains of their voices.
* * *
The security room’s laid out like the kitchen, which it sits directly under. Where the AGA and the food cupboards would be is a large, custom-fitted security desk, of the sort Stef’s seen in a hundred movies: four large screens, each divided into multiple camera views, a control console for the screens and the cameras, and an open space which tends to fill up with laptops and phones. And where the kitchen table would be there’s a pair of tables, like the ones in the common area, only with padded seats. There’s also another table, added after the room was professionally fitted, which looks like it came from Ikea and which pushes up against a pair of long couches. It’s the one Stef’s most often seen sponsors at, with a couple of laptops in front of them and, inevitably, a plate of snacks. No-one pulling a long shift on monitoring duty wants to sit in the chairs by the security screens when there’s a sofa on which to lounge.
She and Pippa are early.
“Oh, thank God,” Nell says, looking up from her ebook. Stef wonders if the dark circles under her eyes have gotten deeper since she last saw her. “Can I go now?”
“Go!” Pippa says, shooing her. “We’ll watch the screens until everyone else gets here.”
“You’re a doll, Pippa.” Nell pushes herself up, slowly and painfully, and stretches with audible cracks. “Hi, Stef. That’s your name, right? I’m kind of behind on events.”
“Hi,” Stef says, “and it’s Stephanie right now? I’m, um, trying it out.”
“Stephanie, huh? Suits you. I’m Nell. I’m on shit duty. Anyway.” She puts her e-reader in her bag and scrapes her hand along the edge of the table, dropping laptop, pens and notepad in behind it. “Toodles, kids.”
“She seems nice,” Stef says, as Pippa slides into the end spot on the couch.
“She’s not,” Pippa says, and sighs at Stef’s bemused expression. “She’s working on it. Shadowing the rest of us, one at a time, and taking more graveyard shifts than anyone else.”
Stef sits down next to her and leans back into the soft cushion. “How come?”
“Because she wasn’t nice. Bad sponsoring technique.”
“Oh, not like your soft touch, then?”
“No, not like— Are you making fun of me?”
Stef shrugs. “A little.”
Pippa reaches down beside the couch and pulls out a laptop, which has the battered and unloved look of an institutional device. It boots slowly, and she makes coffee for both of them with the pod machine in the corner while they wait.
“How are you doing?” she asks, gesturing backwards with her head at the screens behind her.
Stef, who hasn’t been able to look away from the two cameras monitoring Aaron, groans. “Am I that obvious?”
“A little,” Pippa says.
“God,” Stef says, as Pippa drops back down onto the couch and hands her a coffee in a plain red mug, “I feel stupid.”
“Why?”
“He rejected me.”
Stef’s got a hand on the table, fingers tapping on the surface, and Pippa covers it, silencing her. She squeezes. “I’ve seen him with you,” she says. “He doesn’t know what he feels. About you. About anything. He’s a big ugly ball of repressed everything, and your confession… it pulled on a string. It was like that for a lot of us.”
“You?”
“Me,” Pippa says firmly. “My trigger was different — and who I was when I came here was very different from him — but I recognise a lot of his behaviour. He’s facing up to the knowledge that he’s going to leave here an entirely new person, and on top of that, he’s got you: a friend, who wants more. I’d bet a hundred quid he’s never had someone express that kind of interest before. He doesn’t know how to feel about it. He doesn’t even know how to feel.” She coughs delicately. “Masculinity, for boys like him — boys like I used to be — is an iron maiden. It’s a shell that protects you, but it hurts you as well, and when you’re hurting that much, vulnerability — genuine emotion — is a liability. We can tear away the armour and give him room to breathe, but his wounds have to heal, first.”
“What can I do?”
“Wait for him to come back to you. Be an example for him until he does. And don’t push. Indira’s a great sponsor, and so’s Maria. They’ll know when he needs a nudge, and when he needs to be left alone. But—” Pippa raises a warning finger, “—you should know, things are going to get worse for him before they get better, and you’re going to be down there with it. It gets messy down there when the boys start really changing; we’re still mostly in the warm-up phase.”
“I can deal with it,” Stef says.
“Okay. Just, maybe, practise calling him her?”
“Not until he asks me to.”
“Maybe—” Pippa starts, and then zippers her mouth and nods at the door. Stef turns to see Edy and Maria walk in, slowly and carefully, with Edy holding Maria’s arm and Maria’s face set with an expression of amused tolerance, as if letting her girlfriend look after her is equivalent to granting the greatest of favours. Still, when she sits down next to Stef, she seems relieved to get off her feet.
“Hi,” Stef says.
Maria sits forward, folds her arms on the table and rests her head on them, half-closing her eyes until Edy darts over to the console and lowers the lights. “Hi, Stef,” she says.
“Stephanie,” Pippa says.
“I’m trying it out,” Stef says.
Maria smiles broadly. “Hi, Stephanie. How are you doing?”
“Good. And, um, thanks for the advice. It really helped.”
“Any time,” she whispers.
It’s impossible not to notice how tired she looks. “Can I get you anything?”
Maria smiles, half-visible through the crook of her arm. “You can take the second years off my hands, if you like. I agreed to take some of the admin responsibility for them while I’m spending so much time bedbound, and Mia’s begging me to let her stream.”
“Stream?” Pippa says. “Stream what?”
“I have no idea what game it is,” Maria says, grimacing. “All I know is, she bugs the other girls to play it with her on the LAN here, and wants to take her skills online. But I’ve told her a thousand times: no streaming until you stop making jokes about your huge hog.”
Edy sits down next to her, smooths down her hair and drapes a flannel over her head, for which Maria thanks her. Stef looks away as Maria turns to Edy, not wanting to intrude on their intimacy.
The other sponsors start filing in. Jane waves at her, Indira squeezes in next to Edy and leans around her to wiggle her fingers at Stef, and Monica gives her a smile. Pamela pulls a stool out from under the table and sits down on it with the aura of a woman who will only get back up if ordered to, loudly. The last one in is Tabby, wheeling in an office chair from the storeroom across the hall and collapsing dramatically into it with an exaggerated sigh and a cup of coffee she only just doesn’t spill. She nods at Indira, who nods back and waves her phone, which is open to a set of cameras elsewhere in the building. Some private problem, Stef assumes.
Tabby’s almost blocking the entrance, and even Stef, who doesn’t know her that well, can tell she’s not having the best morning. Everyone in the room is looking at her now, with the exception of Indira, who’s watching the feed on her phone, and into the expectant silence Tabby says, “No-one’s going to ask why I’m pissed off?”
“I think we’re all just waiting with bated breath,” Maria says, from underneath her flannel.
“Didn’t you come in, like, super late last night?” Jane says.
“She had a da-ate,” Monica sings.
“Spill,” Edy says. She’s been setting up laptops in front of her and Maria, with security feeds on one and action points on the other.
“Men fucking suck,” Tabby says.
“Ah. One of those kinds of dates.”
“I thought it was going well with Barry,” Maria says, struggling more upright and leaning on her hands. “What did he do?” Edy removes the flannel from her head before it falls off.
“It was going great,” Tabby says. “And, well, he hasn’t really done anything. Shit. Sorry. She hasn’t done anything.”
Monica snorts into her coffee.
“Ah,” Edy says.
“Not again, surely?” Jane says.
“Again,” Tabby says darkly.
“She told you last night?” Maria asks.
“Yeah. She invited me to dinner, she cooked, it was going to be a whole special evening and I thought it might be something else as well. And then she starts with the whole, ‘Tab, there’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time…’ and I just fucking knew. I had to sit through the whole thing and smile and hug her. And that used up all my supportive girlfriend energy, so today I’m just going to be bitter and alone.”
“You should put her in touch with your last boyfriend,” Edy says.
Tabby laughs. “They already know each other! They had a girls’ night last week! Just to see what it was like!”
“Does she know you’re—?”
“Straight? Yeah. I gave her the usual — God, how stupid is it that I have a ‘usual’ for this? — and we’re going to be friends.” She groans. “I’m taking her shopping next week with Belinda and Kelly. It’ll be like a reunion! All Tabby’s ex-boyfriends turned ex-girlfriends, together again!”
Jane snorts. “You’ll have fun. You know you will.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s nice helping trans girls find themselves. But why do they have to keep finding themselves inside my boyfriends?”
Harmony, arriving late, wordlessly reaches into the paper bag she’s carrying and hands Tabby a croissant, which she attacks with irritated fervour.
“Did she tell you yet?”
“Yes,” several people say.
She lays a caring hand on Tabby’s shoulder. “I do know someone,” she says, “if you’re looking to get back on the market.”
“No,” Tabby says. “Like I said, men suck.”
“Tab,” Jane says, “it might be time to accept that you’re just gay. Join the winning team.”
“To be fair,” Edy says, “none of her boyfriends have actually been men.”
“That’s just it!” Tabby says, and gestures towards one of the security monitors, the one focused on Will and Raph. “Men suck, and we’re all intimately acquainted with how much men can suck, so it makes a twisted kind of sense that the men I’m drawn to eventually all turn out to be women.”
“Tell you what,” Maria says, blinking carefully against the still-too-bright lights in the security room, “the next guy you find interesting, just bring her straight here. We’ll give her the ol’ Stephanie treatment. It could save you a lot of time.”
Tabby scowls at her, snatches the empty paper bag from Harmony, screws it up and throws it at Maria’s head. Edy intercepts it with a frown. Then Tabby blinks, and says, “Oh, hey, Stephanie! You decided to switch up your name? Good for you.”
“I’m trying it out,” Stef says. Various sponsors smile for her, or give her a thumbs up, or groan something unintelligible from their state of near-unconsciousness (Pamela).
“I like it,” Monica says. “But,” she adds, to groans from the assembled sponsors, who can spot a businesslike tone when they hear one, “I’m afraid it’s time we got down to it.”
“Boo,” Harmony comments.
“Actually,” Indira says, standing up and relieving the pressure on the couch, which was struggling to fit the five of them between the arm rests, “there is one thing, before we begin. Tabby and I met Lorna Fielding this morning. She interrupted us just when Tabby was telling me—” she throws a grin across the room, “—about her woes. Lorna’s going out with Victoria. They’ve been dating a long time, and things were going well until recently: Lorna now suspects Vicky of keeping secrets from her. Not funny, Harmony.”
“I didn’t laugh!”
“You smirked. Don’t. This has the potential to hurt Lorna, to hurt Victoria, and to blow up in all of our faces if the situation isn’t contained. Lorna’s an outsider, she’s not cleared, and while obviously we have a profile on her, the contents aren’t encouraging. She’s highly politically motivated, with contacts among notable activists. She’s only a handful of degrees of separation from some fairly well-known journalists.”
“That’s the downside,” Maria says. “What’s the upside?”
Indira smiles. “She loves Victoria. It’s why we didn’t discourage the relationship; Victoria’s one of the most accomplished graduates we’ve ever had, and they fell deeply in love very quickly. Our initial assessment was that their attachment would override Lorna’s need to ‘do the right thing’.”
“Neither of you are with her right now, so I’m assuming you’ve assigned someone?”
“Yes,” Indira says, nodding. “We sent her up to talk to Christine.”
Stef thinks she feels Maria tense for a moment. “How do you see that going?” Maria asks.
“Christine will handle it.”
“You don’t think she’ll crack? Tell her everything?”
“No. She’ll calmly and rationally assess the situation, and then tell her everything. We’ve done it before.”
“Christine hasn’t done it before, though,” Edy says.
“If Indira thinks Christine’s got this,” Tabby says, “she’s got this.”
“They’re friends,” Indira says. “Christine knows her pretty well, she knows Victoria better than any of us, and Christine’s track record of making out-of-the-box decisions that nonetheless benefit and protect us is sitting right there at the table.”
Stef, on cue, waves.
“Christine will find a way to tell her,” Tabby says, “that doesn’t make her fly off the handle.”
“And what if she does?” Edy asks.
“Don’t worry,” Indira says. “My Teenie’s not stupid. She’ll have made sure all the doors are locked before they even start talking.”
* * *
Lorna’s visited almost every other building on campus. Some, like the old residential towers, seem held together only by the tension between the steadily increasing funding required to keep them upright year-on-year and the potential payout should they collapse with students inside. Others, like the Anthill, wear the money spent on their construction ostentatiously, in curved fascia and internal viewing windows and lecture theatres large enough to hold twice as many students as ever attend her Psychology modules.
Dorley Hall’s different, in every possible way. She’s been told it predates the establishment even of the university’s ancestor college, that it’s served a number of functions over the years, and that it’s never spent more than a handful of consecutive years vacant; from this she has inferred that the amount of money it’s absorbed could build a whole second Anthill, possibly a whole second university, with some left over.
From the outside, it’s imposing. Inside, it’s lavish in the manner of a well-maintained National Trust property: old-fashioned, polished, dignified. The walls of the main staircase are tiled with green ceramic, treated in some way that makes them look almost crystalline, and where the brick has been deliberately left bare, it has none of the dusty sheen she associates with exposed brickwork. The place is out of her league.
Out of Vicky’s, too, but that’s supposed to be the point: she’s just one of many disadvantaged girls who got subsidised rooms in a dorm that’s not technically part of the university and thus can write its own rules. A lot of people stay here for their whole degree, and beyond.
What happened to her here? That something did, and that it was awful, is easier and easier to believe as Lorna ascends; the affluence dripping from every tile, every brick, every fixture lends the building an air of impersonal malice, drills into her more and more by the second that this is one of those old-money buildings built centuries before she was born. An outpost of the ageless English aristocracy, a name bigger than anyone who temporarily inhabits it; this is Dorley Hall, and it will outlast her by generations.
She imagines the lights flicking suddenly off, plunging her into darkness, absolutely alone, and hurries her step. It takes her several more before she feels foolish.
Too many horror games, Lorna.
Christine’s waiting at the exit to the second floor with a shy smile and an oversized checked shirt over a cami and pyjama bottoms. She waves, and Lorna, trapped between her anxiety and her need to be polite in all situations, waves back.
“You really weren’t dressed yet, then?” Lorna says, and Christine rolls her eyes.
“You overheard Indira, huh? I should have words with that woman. Who am I, without my mystique?”
Lorna skips up the last couple of steps, allowing herself to be energised by the sight of a friendly face. They embrace on the landing. “You don’t have a mystique. I know you’re a nerd.”
In Lorna’s arms, Christine shrugs. “It’s true. Come on, let’s get something to drink. The kitchen’s just round the corner.”
Christine leads her down the corridor and Lorna looks around, eyeing the fingerprint locks on the doors. So much security! Why? The kitchen, at least, is open and airy. Less like the one on the ground floor, more like the kitchens in the best dorms on campus: utilitarian, but with fittings and fixtures of the highest quality. Christine nods at the table in the middle and flicks the kettle on, then starts rummaging in the fridge.
“Have you had breakfast?” she asks. “We have cereal, or I could attempt something with eggs. You like them kind of thrown haphazardly into a frying pan, right? Overhand or underhand? Shell?”
“Just a tea is fine, Christine,” Lorna says, and grins when Christine turns around, holding an egg. She was worried Christine would be weird around her, after their conversation in Café One, but she’s acting like her usual self.
“You sure? I kinda wanted to experiment.”
She looks so cheeky Lorna can’t stop the laugh. “I’m sure. Just tea.”
“Your loss. Tea it is.”
The tea takes a couple of minutes to make, which they pass with small talk. Lorna mostly lets Christine babble about introducing Paige to her favourite childhood books, and waking up one morning to find that Paige had stayed awake most of the night and made a serious dent in the stack of novels on the bedside table. Christine talks with her hands a lot, and has to interrupt her flow more than once to sweep her messy morning hair out of her eyes. After the third time, Lorna wordlessly pulls a hair tie out of her bag and hands it over.
“Thanks,” Christine says, ties a ponytail, and starts fishing out tea bags. She looks open and expectant, and why wouldn’t she? Only Lorna knows why she’s here. Only Lorna knows she’s about to risk her nascent friendships with all the girls who live here — not just Christine, but Paige and Pippa, too; they all seem to come together — on a hunch that Vicky is lying to her.
It’s a pretty fucking well-founded hunch, yes, but Vick’s had explanations for everything she’s been willing to answer so far and, as for the rest, absence of evidence is not blah blah fucking blah.
“So,” Christine says, dropping mugs of tea on the table and sitting down opposite, “what’s up? Everything okay? Is this about what we talked about the other day?”
Lorna sips her tea; too hot. She hadn’t thought this far ahead, hoping the right questions would simply come to her. Running for days on no sleep and a mixture of aggrieved self-righteousness and genuine fear of what she might discover hasn’t left her with significant reserves.
“You know what?” she says, putting down her mug. “Fuck it. Yeah. Things have been rough with Vicky. But you don’t know how rough, unless she told you.”
“She told me,” Christine confirms, looking at her tea and not Lorna. Yeah, she would have. They were friends before Lorna even arrived on the scene. “I’m sorry for my part in it.”
“You had no part in it. I’ve just been… ignoring things for a long time. But you do know things I don’t, and I know you lie for her.” Lorna chews on her cheek for a moment. “I know betraying confidences is, like, the worst thing you can do, but— oh!”
She’s interrupted by two other girls, entering the kitchen and stopping short at the sight of her.
It’s the white one with the deep red hair and the trouser suit who speaks. “Um,” she says. “Hi.”
“Hey,” Lorna says, hesitantly.
“Sorry, are we interrupting anything?”
Christine saves her. “Julia, this is Lorna, Vicky’s girlfriend. Lorna, this is Julia and that’s Yasmin.”
The other one, Yasmin, waves from the sideboard, where she’s assembling a basic two-person breakfast. “Hi, Lorna,” she says. “Uh, if you’re looking for Vicky—”
“I know,” Lorna says, sharper than she intends, and smiles in apology. Yasmin nods and Julia leans over and whispers something in her ear, something which makes them both giggle.
“Uh, listen,” Julia says, “we overheard some stuff as we were coming up the corridor—”
“Julia—” Christine says.
“And we know what it’s like to be looking for answers,” Yasmin says.
“We know some of what you need to know,” Julia says.
Christine covers her face with her hands. “Oh, God.”
“I’m just going to come out and say it,” Julia says. “There’s a secret basement here where they turn men into women.”
Yasmin turns around, holding a tray of cereal and coffee. “I used to be a rugby jock called Andrew.”
“She’s lying,” Christine mutters.
“Yeah,” Julia says, “that was never her name.”
“Will you two please go to work and get out of my hair? You’re not helping.”
“We’re just cutting to the chase,” Julia says. “Putting the poor girl out of her misery.”
Yasmin, standing in the doorway with her tray, beckons Julia with her head. “Come on. Leave Christine to show and tell.”
Julia waves.
“You’re only making things harder!” Christine yells, leaning around the table to direct her voice out of the door.
“Good!” Julia yells back.
“It’s payback!” That was Yasmin.
“This is shitty thanks for covering for you!”
“Oh!” Yasmin yells. “Right! Sorry!”
A door slams, leaving them both in embarrassed silence. Christine breaks it. “Sorry about them.”
Lorna winces. At least she and Christine are both bright red; she can’t bear the thought of being overheard, of knowing random people are aware of the problems she and Vicky are having. “Kind of a double act, aren’t they?” she says, wanting for a moment to talk about anything else.
Christine rolls her eyes. “Yeah. They’ve been together ever since we were all, uh… They’ve been together a while.”
Oh, for God’s sake. Christine brings it right back to secrets. “No,” Lorna says, pointing a finger, surprised by her own vehemence. “No, you can’t just trail off like that! I’ve had it from Vicky all weekend! Constant allusions to shit I can’t know, and I’m fucking sick of it, Christine! They’re involved in it, aren’t they? Or they were there. They know about what happened to Vick. You all do! Should I be suspecting those two girls in the kitchen downstairs, too?” She realises her finger is shaking, and drops it into her lap. Ignores her cooling tea. She takes a deep breath and says, with more control, “I realise I must sound crazy to you. Like I’ve gone off the deep end. But I’ve done nothing but think about Vicky’s past, her life, and this place all weekend.”
Christine nods. “You’re sure you’re not better off hearing this from Vicky?”
“I’ve tried! She just shuts down. She goes into this quiet state and I can almost see what she’s thinking. Sometimes it seems like she wants to talk, but she just… doesn’t.”
“We share a lot of secrets. Sharing hers is sharing mine, too.”
“And you see how frustrating that is? You’ve always had these pieces of her, loads of them, and I’ve never gotten to know about any of them. I only get to see how they hurt her. And I’ve lived with that — I’ve made myself live with that — because I love her. But now they’re hurting us, they’re breaking us apart, and if she’s bound by your secrets…” Lorna can’t finish. She knows what she’s asking, or she can guess. She watched Christine, that time they went clubbing, and until Paige came for her she was… twitchy. Wary. It switched on and off: she’d be carrying on a normal conversation, or she’d be dancing with Pippa, or she’d be walking back from the bar, and suddenly she’d be afraid. She hid it well, but isn’t that just another sign of someone who’s learned to live with trauma?
“Okay,” Christine says, her eyes flicking from Lorna, to the table, to the door. “Okay. I’ll tell you.”
“I’m sorry,” Lorna says. “This must seem selfish to you.”
“No,” Christine says instantly. “Absolutely not. If you take one thing away with you today, make it that: you are not being selfish.” She goes to run her hand through her hair, then remembers she tied it up. Her hand hovers uselessly above her head for a second and then she shakes it, like it’s not supposed to be there, and digs in her pyjama pocket, pulling out her phone. “I want to show you something first,” she says, and messes with it for a little while. “Okay.”
She passes it over. Lorna doesn’t take it, just leaves it where Christine puts it, because her eyes instantly lock to the screenshot Christine’s loaded up, of a text conversation between her and Vicky:
Victoria Robinson: It’s fine, I’m just so scared.
Victoria Robinson: She tells me she still loves me. And that word ‘still’ in there, it’s like it won’t stop echoing in my head. It means she knows there’s things she has to forgive. It means
Victoria Robinson: Shit.
Victoria Robinson: It means she doesn’t see me as the same person she used to.
Victoria Robinson: I’ll always be someone who lied to her now.
Victoria Robinson: She keeps telling me she still loves me. And it’s not like she’s trying to convince herself. She really does love me.
Victoria Robinson: But it’s clear she doesn’t trust me any more.
Victoria Robinson: Maybe it’s just too many lies, all at once. Maybe I sound different when I’m talking about the last year or so, to when I’m listing off all the fake bullshit I’m supposed to pretend is my life.
Victoria Robinson: Maybe I sound like a liar every time I open my fucking mouth because I am one.
Victoria Robinson: She’s everything to me. The most special girl in the world. And I’m scared I’m just going to lose her. I’m scared she’s going to decide I’m too broken, too untrustworthy, and just leave. All I want is to tell her everything and I JUST CAN’T
Victoria Robinson: I hate this I hate this I hate this
Lorna reads it through three times. Reaches out for the screen, like she can touch Vicky, comfort her just by proximity to her words. Of course she loves her!
She reads it once more, her eyes catching on the fake bullshit I’m supposed to pretend is my life.
“I know showing you that might seem a bit manipulative,” Christine says slowly, taking the phone back and locking it, “and, yeah, maybe it kind of is. But you need to know, before we get into this, how much this has been killing her. She had to make a decision, before you met, that she can’t go back on, and it’s been the source of a lot of this. So she’s carrying guilt, she’s carrying regret, but most of all, I think, she’s carrying shame.” Christine coughs. “All of us are.”
Lorna nods. “How bad is it?” she whispers.
Christine hesitates, and Lorna reads more into that than into the single word she eventually speaks: “Bad.”
“I won’t see her differently,” Lorna says. “I won’t. I won’t!” she repeats, to Christine’s frown. “She’s my Vicky.” It’s hard to maintain her anger after reading Vicky’s texts, seeing something she was never supposed to see.
“I believe you’ll want to see her the same way. I think you might have to work at it, when you know everything, but I do believe you.” Christine shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “Look, um, there’s one other thing. Before we get into everything. Two other things really, but they sort of rely on each other. This is going to be pretty fucking heavy, so, Lorna, are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“There’s literally no going back.”
“I’m ready!”
“Okay. We’re all part of an… organisation here. And we’re backed by money. Serious money. Which buys serious influence. The secrets I’m about to tell you are also backed by that money and that influence. The sort of money and influence that can make people disappear.”
Lorna breathes in sharply without meaning to, a hiccup that turns into a cough, but she raises a hand when Christine makes to stand up and help her; she’s okay.
People disappearing? How big is this? It’s starting to sound like Vicky’s a fucking spy or something. Is that anything Lorna wants to get involved in?
Yes. For Vicky, yes. She may have kept secrets, she may have lied, but Lorna knows her. There’s no-one else she can imagine in her life. The line I hate this I hate this I hate this keeps nearly superimposing itself on her vision.
“That’s thing one,” Christine says. “And this moment, here, now, is your last chance to leave before I read you in to everything.”
“Christine,” Lorna says carefully, “I appreciate that you’re looking out for me here — I think you are, anyway — but I need to know. I’m all in.”
“Okay. Thing two.” Christine taps on her phone again and holds it out. The screen this time shows an official-looking document, black on white. Lorna reaches over and swipes: it goes on for several pages. “This is an NDA, or something like it. The gist is, if you breathe a word of what I’m about to tell you to anyone who isn’t already in the know, we come for you. With the biggest legal guns money can buy. Look it over, if you’d like.”
Lorna swipes back and forth. The text is tiny. “I trust you, Christine. Just tell me: if I sign this, am I fucked?”
Christine sighs and makes a show of looking around. “You’re here. And you know something’s up. So you’re fucked already, Lorna. But this doesn’t make it any worse.”
“Way to make a girl feel safe,” Lorna says, trying to keep her tone light as she navigates to the last page, taps in her name and the date, and records her thumbprint on the phone’s sensor.
“Okay!” Christine says, taking the phone back and pocketing it. “You’re officially in the loop. Which, yes, I know all this has been a bit scary, but you’re now in the same position as Vicky. And me, and the rest of us.”
“She couldn’t tell me anything because she signed an NDA?” Ludicrous.
Christine snorts. “Not exactly. We’re kept under control by… other means. We sign something similar, yes, but it’s not the paperwork that does it. The secret is too big; no amount of paperwork could keep it hidden. It’s just protocol. Legal fancy dress for the real threat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember how I said the money can make people disappear? It’s done so twice in the last month.”
Lorna’s chest tightens. What has she gotten herself into? “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“No. Bad people. Very bad people. A rapist and a… a person possibly even worse than him. A woman who hurt someone I care about, and many more besides. But—” Christine looks away, raps her fingernails on the table for a moment, “—we are capable of doing it to anyone. Remember that. Anyway!” She adopts an almost businesslike affect. “Your NDA is different from ours. Yours is more like what the PMC guys sign.”
“‘PMC’?”
“Private Military Contractors. Soldiers. You know, like in Metal G—”
Every time it seems like it can’t escalate, it does. “You have soldiers?”
“Two on duty at all times.”
Lorna nods, and breathes carefully again, counts five in and five out, until she’s— well, she’s not calm, but she’s riding it. If this is Vicky’s world, if this is the shit that makes her cry out at night, then she needs to know it all. And if she can’t tell anyone else, on pain of being ‘disappeared’? Fine. She and Vicky can keep the secret together. At least they’ll have each other again.
“Okay,” she says eventually. “Tell me.”
“Vicky’s secrets are hers to tell, if she wants to,” Christine says. “And she will want to, now that you’re a part of this. But these are mine.” She takes a long sip of lukewarm tea. “I can’t believe I’m doing this twice in two months,” she mutters.
She looks so uncomfortable that Lorna wants to tell her it’s okay, that she can stop, that they can take a break, but she doesn’t. She just listens.
“I was a boy,” Christine says. It’s like all emotion’s drained from her voice. “And not in the way that you, for example, were assigned male. I was just… a boy.” If her voice is motionless, barely moving from monotone, Christine’s fingers are hyperactive, tapping against and winding around each other. “Not a nice one, either. I hurt people. Not physically, but I hurt people. I was cruel, vindictive, and barely functional. And I was found and brought here. For rehabilitation.”
Lorna’s breath fails in her throat. She listens, increasingly faint, as Christine tells the story of her life. The boy. The childhood. The abusive family. The violence, all directed at his mother, with one exception: when he stood up for his mother, took a blow meant for her, and his mother defended his father, against him. The loneliness. The isolation. The obsession with computers and technology. She gets the pronouns mixed up a few times, but Lorna follows along without issue.
Christine can’t look at her for the next part, seems barely able to speak, and jumps when Lorna reaches over and holds her hand.
She said the boy hurt people? Time to say how. She doesn’t go into his motivations; not important, she says. Stupid adolescent bullshit, she says. The violent logic of the young man who knows no other way to process his grief, his anger, his pain, she says.
And then, capture. Indira, talking to him in the basement under Dorley Hall. Six other boys. One of them, she says upfront, doesn’t make it. The others do. And what they do to the boys, in the basement under Dorley Hall…
Lorna loses the thread for a while. The warmth leaves her body, the clarity leaves her hearing, the moisture leaves her mouth.
She drinks her cold tea. It’s something to do. Across the table, still holding her other hand, Christine’s crying undemonstrative tears, and when she sees Lorna notice them, what remains of her façade crumbles. She rips her hand out of Lorna’s and covers her face.
Lorna can’t stay in her seat after that. She joins Christine on the other side of the table, embraces her, and waits for the grief and the shame to pass. She doesn’t know how real any of this is — Christine’s story fits the facts, but it’s completely ludicrous — but at least some of it is close enough to reality to hurt Christine, and thus likely hurt Vicky, even to retell.
“Sorry,” Christine says after a while, wiping her eyes with tissues from her pocket, and Lorna has to tell her over and over that apologies aren’t necessary. She senses Christine needs some time to recover, so she makes tea for them both, and when she’s done, most of the Christine she knows is back.
Forget all this stuff about ‘rehabilitating bad boys’. If Christine once was a boy, once was someone she hated, if that part is true — and of all of it, it’s the most believable — well, Lorna knows a little something about that, doesn’t she? When you transition you take what you can of your old life with you, no matter how small the shreds you have to tear it into, and Lorna couldn’t take much, just a battered and bruised relationship with her father and stepmum, still on the mend, all long silences and deadnames and embarrassed apologies in the times she goes home to visit; Christine, from what she said, took even less.
“Thank you,” Lorna says as warmly as she can.
“If it were solely up to me,” Christine says, sipping her tea, “you’d have been told all that months ago.” She smiles. “If it were up to Vicky, she would have told you a week after you met.”
“It’s still all too ridiculous.”
“And yet all real.”
Lorna doesn’t know if she’s ready to make that leap just yet. “Jesus fucking Christ, Tina,” she says.
“If he came here,” Christine says, “he’d have to change his name, too.”
* * *
“So? How was your first briefing?”
Stef flops down onto the bed in her first-floor room, kicking off her shoes and enjoying the muted thud-thud as they hit the rug. “Exhausting,” she says. “And what do you mean, ‘first’?”
Pippa laughs. “You’ve a perspective the sponsor team sorely needs,” she says, kicking the door closed behind her. “Expect to get called on again.”
“Just let me have an ibuprofen first next time, okay?”
It was at the hour mark that she realised how much her impression of the sponsors had changed. She’s always assumed — from no evidence but the slightly haphazard way things looked from her side, back when she was one of the boys — that they mostly just winged it, but in the meeting they went over the boys’ psychology and recent actions in incredible detail, with each sponsor chiming in with her own opinion, often backing it up with surveillance footage. Stef hadn’t contributed much, comparatively, but her thoughts on Aaron, Adam and Martin generated much discussion.
“What did you think about Will?” Pippa asks, sitting down on the chair by the vanity and stretching. “Interesting, huh?”
Active discussion about Will’s response to disclosure had been tabled for the next meeting, with Edy asking everyone to check the archives for boys who responded similarly. Stef, who’d expected to be asked her opinion, had been grateful for the reprieve.
“Weird, more like,” she says.
Ollie and Raph had responded to disclosure the exact way Stef expected. Shouting, swearing, kicking the glass doors to their cells, overturning what little inside the cell could be overturned — mostly just the mattress, although Raph had a good go at detaching the cot from its housing — and otherwise vindicating the sponsors’ decision to keep them separate. They’d had the contents of the NHS pamphlet read to them, and eventually succumbed to the exhaustion of rage, alternately sleeping (Ollie) and sitting on the cot, rocking back and forth (Raph).
Will had been different. The now-familiar disbelief gave way very quickly to something that quite disturbed the sponsors who hadn’t been present for it, and they watched the rest of the footage in silence. It was as if Will had been switched off; he went completely quiet and absolutely still, not even reacting when Tabby told him an orchiectomy would be scheduled for some time in the next few months. She eventually resorted to describing for him what an orchi is and how it is done, in the apparent hope of getting some kind of reaction out of him; nothing.
From the overhead camera angle, Stef had been reminded of Martin, but Tabby, narrating, switched to the head-on angle, in which Will’s face was just about visible, demonstrating nothing like Martin’s placid, dead-eyed acceptance. Will was despairing.
He remained silent, ignored them when they came by to check on him later, and — aside from silently climbing into the cuffs so they could open the cell door to leave food for him — barely moved for the rest of the day. Tabby loaded a video file, audio gain cranked all the way up, and played for the assembled sponsors the only thing Will said for the entire rest of the day, a whisper so quiet Tabby said she barely heard it in person: “It’s not fair.”
Even Adam had asked questions.
“Oh, hey,” Pippa says, “head voice!”
“Shit.”
The reminder is useful: twenty-one years of not really caring how she sounded — except to make sure that as few people as possible had the opportunity to hear her — is a great deal of inertia to overcome in just a couple of days. Stef aahs and hums and gets herself back in the zone.
“You want to make this a practice session?” Pippa says. “We’ve still got some stuff to go over with your treatment plan, and talking is better practice than anything else.”
“Sure.”
“Okay!” Pippa throws her phone down on the bed next to Stef, with the recording app already running. “Let’s talk about electrolysis.”
“Oh, God,” Stef says. She’s heard horror stories.
“First off, at Dorley it’s not quite as bad as you’ve heard. It takes a long time for most trans women because scheduling it can be difficult, and long sessions are costly and painful.” Pippa grins. “But you don’t have to work, and money isn’t an issue.”
“That still leaves ‘painful’, though.”
“It’s not as bad as all that. We can load you up with painkillers and apply numbing cream. But there is an unavoidable downside that we can’t really mitigate.”
Stef laughs. “Of course there is. Go on?”
“Growing out the hair before your session, and caring for your swollen, itchy face after it.”
“Fabulous,” Stef says.
They discuss the arrangements. Stef wants to start sooner rather than later, so Pippa texts the girl who does the sessions — a Dorley graduate, naturally — and she agrees to visit next week for a consultation. Like everyone else, she’s intrigued by the idea of a trans girl at Dorley and, Pippa relays, she’s looking forward to not having to have someone strapped down, right from the start. Stef, unfortunately, will have to avoid shaving for three days beforehand, and she grudgingly makes a note on her calendar. As for the boys — Aaron — if it comes up, she’ll tell the truth: electrolysis is both inevitable and uncomfortable, so why not get it out of the way as soon as possible?
“What’s it like?” Stef asks a while later, as Pippa comes back in with cups of tea. “When you start getting back out there?”
“Hmm. You want to know what it’ll be like for you, or how it was for me?”
“For you.”
Pippa sips her tea, and thinks. “Strange,” she says. “Incredibly strange. All of us here had our social development curtailed, even reset completely, depending on how you think about it. We have the whole second puberty thing to deal with — you know about that — but the strangest thing is learning how to be a normal person. Learning how to talk to normal people. That’s part of why we encourage our girls to go back to school here: you get to mingle with all kinds. It helps if you have a frame of reference that’s not completely limited to Dorley Hall, because, well, we’re all a bit weird.”
Stef laughs. “God. I can’t imagine the bravery it takes to step out of that door for the first time. Hard enough for me, and I want this—”
“Don’t forget,” Pippa says, “by the time we take that step, we want it, too.” She frowns. “Or we’ve accepted it, at least.” She sits back in her chair, looks out of the window. “Sometimes I think we have more in common than I originally thought. You and me. You and all of us. Like, most of us were pretty effing miserable as kids, for one reason or another — it’s literally on the list of things we look for — and then we come here and suddenly we have to adjust to our futures becoming something very, very different to what we expected.”
Stef shrugs. “That doesn’t sound too far off,” she says, and grins at herself; there was a time she might have found the comparison offensive.
“You ever feel like you never got to be a teenager?” Pippa says. “Properly, I mean? Not like, a bad decisions teenager on TV, but just a kid who had friends and hung out and did stupid stuff. I never did any of that. And then I came here and lost three years of my life and now I’m a girl, I’m old, and I’m surrounded by transsexual wine mums.”
“You’re old?” Stef says, incredulous. “Aren’t you, like, a year older than I am?”
“Yeah, but…” She slumps in her chair. “I suppose I just wish this all could have happened in time for me to really be a kid. Restarting your whole life as an adult effing sucks. Sometimes I watch those shows and get upset I didn’t get to go to school as Pippa.”
Stef sits up and reaches out for her hand. “When I’m done,” she says, “when I’m ready, let’s go out and do stupid shit together. Let’s be teenagers.”
She absorbs Pippa’s broad smile, and suddenly can’t imagine being anywhere but here. It’s like she’s supposed to be here, like she has a place here: she needs their help, sure, but it’s more than that. Pippa needs a sister. Aaron needs a friend. The sponsors need her perspective. The boys need an example. And she can do all that while remaining herself; while becoming herself.
Like Pippa, it’s easy for Stef to feel like she never got to be a kid. Always too busy performing as the boy everyone around her expected to see. Here, though, she fits in without even trying, without having to change a thing.
Figuratively speaking.
They make plans after that. Pippa pulls a laptop out of a desk drawer and calls up maps of the university and of Almsworth, and they decide on their future excursions: to the Student Union bar; to the library and the cafés and all the places on campus from which to see the sights; to the club in Almsworth where Christine and Paige got back together; and farther, to London. Pippa’s always wanted to visit the Natural History Museum.
Stef’s phone eventually interrupts them; she puts the call on speaker. It’s Christine.
“Hey, Stef. Got a favour to ask. You know Vicky, right? You know of her, at least.”
“Sure.”
“Well, her girlfriend’s here, and she’s getting read in to the whole Dorley thing, and I think she could really benefit from your perspective.”
“What do you mean, ‘read in’?”
“I think the meaning of ‘read in’ is obvious, Stef.”
“She means,” an unfamiliar voice says, “that she’s told me the most completely insane story I’ve ever heard, and I only half believe it. She thinks you, whoever you are, can sell me on the other half.”
“Yeah,” Christine says, “so come quickly, please. I think she’s about ready to jump out the window and come back with napalm.”
“To be clear,” Stef says, “she didn’t know about Dorley… and now she knows?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Pippa says. “No way, Christine! She’s— Wait, can Lorna hear me?”
“What, am I stupid? No.”
“Lorna’s nice and all, but she’s an outsider. I don’t want to put her in front of an outsider yet.”
“You’re not her sponsor any more.”
“No, but I am her advocate.”
“Okay, but Lorna’s not an outsider; she’s Vicky’s girlfriend.”
“Who Stephanie hasn’t even met yet—”
“‘Stephanie’?”
“I’m just trying it out,” Stef says.
“—and she might be in a highly volatile state,” Pippa finishes.
“You’re not volatile, are you, Lorna?” Christine asks.
“Didn’t I just sign something that says I’m not allowed to be?” the other voice, Lorna, says.
“See? She’s not volatile, she’s not an outsider, and she’s a trans girl. She’s safe!”
Stef, looking sideways at Pippa, shrugs. She’s still not entirely clear on what’s going on, but if she can help Christine, she wants to. She owes her so much.
“Okay,” Pippa says, “but I’m coming with.”
* * *
Whatever she expected, this is worse.
Lorna still suspects Christine of lying, of covering up something terrible with something… also terrible, but ridiculous, farcical, unworkable; insulting. Like she went online, read a fiction summary from the sorts of websites Lorna visited before she came out to herself, and regurgitated it verbatim. But why would she? If it is a lie — and at least some of it has to be — then why invent such an outrageous story? Besides, Lorna likes to think that she knows Christine, at least a little, and she’s never seemed like the sort of person who would spin a transition-as-punishment yarn in the presence of an actual trans woman. And she told her story, her history, with such conviction!
It’s a stupid lie, or it’s the truth.
Lorna taps her mug with a nail. The surface of the tea responds to every strike, and she watches it, momentarily transfixed by the interaction of ripples, wondering again if she should have followed her other passion, gone to study Physics. But if she hadn’t chosen Psychology, hadn’t chosen Saints, she would never have met Vicky.
“Christine,” she says. “This is ridiculous. And it’s monstrous! The story you’ve told me, I feel like I should be calling the— fuck, no, not the police, but, I don’t know, someone. You want me to believe you and Vicky are part of some kidnapping ring! I don’t— I can’t believe you.”
Christine frowns. “You sound just like someone else I know. Actually, wait a minute! I know who can help you get a handle on this!” She holds up a finger, and with her other hand scrolls down the contact list on her phone. “Just… hold that thought. The one about all this being ridiculous and monstrous.” She hits call, and before she holds the phone up to her ear, adds, “I agree, by the way.” And then she’s on the call: “Hey, Stef. Got a favour to ask. You know Vicky, right? You know of her, at least. Well, her girlfriend’s here, and she’s getting read in to the whole Dorley thing, and I think she could really benefit from your perspective.” She rolls her eyes again, and smiles at Lorna. “I think the meaning of ‘read in’ is obvious, Stef.” Christine covers the microphone with her thumb and whispers, “Newbies.”
Lorna indulges her frustration. She leans across the table, pushes her voice to the very front of her mouth — her phone voice; her public speaking voice — and says, “She means that she’s told me the most completely insane story I’ve ever heard, and I only half believe it. She thinks you, whoever you are, can sell me on the other half.”
“Yeah,” Christine says, “so come quickly, please. I think she’s about ready to jump out the window and come back with napalm. Yes. What, am I stupid? No.” She mouths, Sorry. Lorna shrugs. “You’re not her sponsor any more. Okay, but Lorna’s not an outsider; she’s Vicky’s girlfriend.”
Lorna sits back in her chair, unsure as to whether or not she wants to relinquish her ‘outsider’ status. Wait; fuck. She signed that stupid NDA thing, didn’t she?
“‘Stephanie’?” Christine says, in the manner of a stockbroker asking, ‘How many billions am I up?’ She gives Lorna a thumbs up, obviously realises how baffling that must be, shrugs, and says, “You’re not volatile, are you, Lorna?”
“Didn’t I just sign something that says I’m not allowed to be?” Mum would kill her for being such a bitch. But she’d kill her for being a bitch, first, so screw her.
“See? She’s not volatile, she’s not an outsider, and she’s a trans girl. She’s safe! Okay. Okay! Good. See you in a minute.” She returns the phone to the table. “They’re on their way.”
“I’m ‘safe’, am I?” Lorna says acidly.
“Well, yeah, I think so. I’m fairly sure you’re not going to attack me—”
“Um, no!”
“—and you have literally no way out of here without one of us, so…” Christine shrugs theatrically.
“What do you mean, ’no way out of here’?”
Christine tries to run her hand through her hair, fails, and irritably tugs at her ponytail, freeing her hair to be messed with again. Sheepishly she passes the hair tie back across the table. Lorna slips it over her wrist and raises an expectant eyebrow.
“It goes with the whole kidnapping thing,” Christine says. “You saw the locks on our bedroom doors, right? And on the kitchen door? We have a portion of the third floor and all of second down to ground locked down. With biometrically linked, networked locks. With a few taps on my phone I could open every lock on the loop and you could walk straight out.”
“But you won’t do that?”
“I will. As soon as I know you’re not a danger to us. To the programme, to me, to Vicky.”
“I would never put Vicky in danger!”
“She’s a product of this place, Lorna. Her safety depends on our secrecy.”
Lorna looks at her for a second, then stands, walks over to the sink and washes her face with cold water. It might mess up her makeup, but — and she almost laughs — she can probably borrow something from Christine before she goes. Right now she needs to be alert. She feels disconcertingly like she did that time she got kicked in the head.
She turns around and leans on the wall by the window, in time to see Christine putting her phone down again. “I like you a lot, Christine,” she says. “But I can’t just believe you about this.”
“Will you believe Vicky?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because she just texted asking if I’d seen you. I said you’re here. She’s worried, Lorna.”
Lorna kicks her foot back against the wall. “I’m worried!” she yells. “I’m fucking terrified, Christine! It just keeps getting worse and worse and— Oh, for fuck’s sake. You, too?”
Pippa, poking her head into the room, says, “’Fraid so.”
“Jesus. This is looking less and less like a bad-taste joke at my expense.”
She steps into the room, leading another girl— no, a boy. No, a girl, Lorna decides, taking in the girl’s presentation. She looks in transition: a couple of months of hormone therapy at the most. Pretty. Also, definitely rather nervous.
“I know the exact feeling,” the girl says.
“Oh my God,” Lorna mutters, as Pippa and the girl find seats at the kitchen table, and the girl pulls her legs up under herself to sit cross-legged, arms folded in front of her, taking some of her weight, “you really are doing it, aren’t you?” If there’s someone here who reads like a trans girl early in transition, and if Christine’s been telling the whole unvarnished truth, there’s only one possible explanation. “Hey, um, you. Kidnapped person. I don’t know your name, but say the word and I’ll get you out of here. Somehow.”
“How nostalgic,” the girl comments, mostly to herself. “You’re Lorna, right?” Lorna nods. “I’m Stef. Stephanie, actually. I’m trying it out.”
“You’re trying out a girl’s name? They’re making you do that?”
“Christine,” Stephanie says, looking sideways, “did you tell her anything about me?” Christine, pursing her lips, shakes her head.
“She’s disbelieving everything else I said,” Christine says. “I thought I had her convinced, but she kept… walking it back. So I decided it’d be better coming from you. And then from Vicky, when she gets here.”
“I haven’t met her, have I?”
“Vicky? No. You’ll like her. She’s a sweetheart. Although probably somewhat preoccupied at the moment.”
They both look back up at Lorna.
“What’s going on?” Lorna says.
Stephanie — Lorna’s going to keep thinking of her that way until a better option presents itself, perhaps during an escape attempt — leans on her wrist and says, “Assuming Christine’s told you the whole story—”
“—I’ve told her most of it—”
“—then you know they scoop up new batches of bad boys at the beginning of every academic year, yes?” Lorna nods. Christine didn’t actually say when they kidnap the men, only that they do, on a regular cadence. “I, uh, got wind of this place, and what it does. Actually,” she adds, looking down at the table and smiling, “I was mostly right about what they do, but incredibly wrong about who they do it to. I got myself kidnapped.”
“What?” Lorna says.
“She’s a volunteer,” Christine says.
“What?” Lorna says.
“It’s true,” Pippa says.
“I’m trans,” Stephanie says, smiling.
“You’re a trans girl?” Lorna says. This, at least, is a comforting point of familiarity in an increasingly insane world.
“Yes.”
“As in…?” She has to be clear.
“I was assigned male at birth. I hated it. More or less gave up on life after my twenty-first birthday. And—”
“You didn’t tell me that!” Pippa interrupts. “What do you mean?”
Stephanie takes Pippa’s hand and squeezes it, and Lorna frowns. If all this is true, this makes Pippa and Christine both complicit. And she’s friends with them?
“I mean,” Stephanie says, “that I decided transition was a pointless dream. That I was—” she laughs cynically, “—too manly for it to work out for me. I was going to try and live as Stefan. Forever. That’s why I went to that party in the first place; that’s how I met Christine. I was trying to be a normal guy, and normal guys go to parties when their housemates invite them. Yeah, sure, as plans go, it sucked, I know. I couldn’t have kept it up for more than a few weeks. And then I don’t know what I would have done. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to find out.”
“Yeah,” Pippa says slowly. “Fortunately for you, you came here and I put you in a cell and—”
Stephanie shushes her, rubs her hand, whispers something Lorna can’t make out. It ends with Pippa and Stephanie hugging each other awkwardly, and Stephanie complaining about poking herself in the tit with the corner of the kitchen table.
“Where were we?” she says, rubbing herself carefully.
“I was about to ask you how you can possibly accept this place,” Lorna says.
The girl shrugs. “The boys down there, some of them are vile. One guy, Declan, attacked me and Aaron, and—”
“Aaron?”
“He’s, uh, a guy who’s down there right now.”
“Forget Declan, then,” Lorna says, seizing on Stephanie’s suddenly downcast expression, “how do you feel about him?”
“None of your business,” Stephanie says, quickly, sharply.
Lorna notes her blush, and says, “No, I mean, how do you feel about them… transitioning him?”
She sighs. “I’m pretty fucked up about it, to tell you the truth.” She looks away from Christine and Pippa — the sponsors, Christine said — and bites her lip. “It used to be that I didn’t want him to change, the way everyone else wants him to. And whatever I said, people would tell me, oh, we have data, we have experience, he’ll benefit in the long run. And they always point to themselves as an example, and I’ve never known how to argue against that.” She holds up both hands, palms flat, like plates on an old-fashioned scale. “It’s wrong versus it works.” She mimes the scales tipping this way and that, and coming to rest roughly even. Christine reaches out and pulls one of her hands down, and Stephanie laughs and shoves gently at her. “But I know he needs to reform, somehow. And especially as I spend more time with Pip and Christine and all the others, it’s like I’m starting to see this future laid out for him, you know? In theory, I still object to what this place does, but it’s become almost a mechanical objection. Like, my morning routine: get up, brush teeth, object to the programme, participate in it anyway. Did she tell you everyone here went through it?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Everyone. Even Beatrice and Maria, the ones who’re in charge. Although—” her face firms, “—they didn’t exactly go through the same thing as Christine or Pip. Even if I wasn’t just plain tired of staking out my position, you try living with a bunch of girls who got cured of toxic masculinity and tell them it can’t be done.”
Lorna’s had her own thoughts about that, although nothing so severe as kidnapping boys and forcibly changing them; hers have gone in more of a PowerPoint direction.
“It’s rehab,” Pippa says suddenly. “What she doesn’t like telling you, because she’s too close to us, is that all of us were dangerous. All of us had either hurt people, or were extremely likely to do so. And, Stephanie—” she smiles at her friend, “—I know you worry about my lost potential, about what the old me might have become… I promise you, he would have just got more and more bitter and angry. As much as the methods have left their mark on me, that mark’s fading, and in exchange I got a life, Steph. Trying to turn Pippa, to turn me, back into him would, at this point, be more injurious to my psyche, to my wellbeing, than becoming Pippa was in the first place.”
Lorna’s legs feel weak. This is madness.
“I know how you feel, Lorna,” Stephanie says, standing and taking a few steps towards her. “When I came here, seven weeks ago, I thought I’d found a place that helps trans people who’ve escaped toxic families.” Another step. “And I shouted, and I protested, and I said it was awful. I even questioned Christine’s gender, right to her face. I still think about that.”
“It’s okay,” Christine says, behind her.
Stephanie briefly looks back. “I’ll always think about that.” And then she’s advancing on Lorna again. “But that guy I mentioned? Declan? Rapist. Manipulator. He made himself into a trap some poor woman kept willingly walking back into, until Dorley took him away. And he was actually beyond the pale; he’s gone now.”
“Gone—?” Lorna says.
“Gone. But the others are still here, and all of them are better here than out there. I’ve read all the files. Ollie. Constantly getting in fights. Married his teenage sweetheart, which was bad news for her because he hit her a lot. Got on our radar when he hit her so hard her head bounced off the bar.” Behind Stephanie, Christine mouths, Our radar? to Pippa, who shrugs. “Raph. Another guy who just seems to get off on controlling and hurting women. Will.” She frowns when she says his name. “When his brother came out, he beat him into the hospital. Martin! Killed someone driving while drunk! And then there’s Aaron.”
“Your friend.”
“My friend. He’s sweet, and he’s clever, and he’s actually quite shy under all the babbling and the bluster. But he sexually harassed a lot of women. So many I still can’t quite believe it. And his rich family shielded him from all the consequences.”
“Stephanie,” Christine says. She’s wearing her disbelief on her face. “I look away for five minutes and you become a true believer?”
Stephanie leans against the wall, next to Lorna. “I’m not a ‘true believer’,” she says, voice cracking. She swallows, concentrates for a second, and then continues in a clearer tone. “If I had my way, I’d… well, I don’t know what I’d do. I wouldn’t release the boys, because you’d all get arrested, and your faces and mine would be all over the internet. It’d end our lives, basically. And I wouldn’t get to transition.” She looks at Lorna. “Yes, I know. I’m selfish. But we wouldn’t take anyone else. If I had my way, this year would be the last one.”
Lorna can’t seem to stop shaking. “I don’t get how this isn’t just a fucked-up punishment,” she says. “You’re taking those men — yes, terrible people, I get it — and inflicting lifelong dysphoria on them! I don’t get how you can go along with that, Stephanie!”
“Ask me about my dysphoria, Lorna,” Christine says, but doesn’t give her time to ask anything. “I’m fine. We all are. I’m not saying it’s not an adjustment—”
“It’s a heck of an adjustment,” Pippa mutters.
“—but I’m not clawing at my skin, trying to get out of my body. In many ways, I like it a lot more than I used to, and not just because I exercise now.”
“You exercise?” Pippa says, as if Christine suggested she can fly.
Before Christine can reply, a loud yawn comes from the corridor. Paige follows it in, and Lorna hides her groan; Vicky’s entire friend group lives here! And they’re all—?
She can’t even think it to herself. Stephanie said she once misgendered Christine, and Lorna realises how wrong that concept is. She can’t imagine Christine or Pippa as boys, especially because it leads inevitably to the conclusion that Vicky was one, too.
Oh, Vicky.
“What’s the racket?” Paige says, blinking rapidly to chase the sleep out of her eyes. “I’m charging all of you bitches serious money for waking me up on the morning my lecture got cancelled. Oh, hey, Stef.”
“Stephanie!” Pippa and Christine say in unison.
“I’m trying it out,” Stephanie says.
“I like it,” Paige says. “And you look great. And, um, Lorna. Hello?”
Lorna brushes her hair out of her face and sighs. “Hi, Paige.”
Paige looks around the room. “What don’t I know?” she asks.
“We had to tell her everything, babe,” Christine says. “You want some coffee?”
“I’ll make it.” Paige fetches a cafetiere down from a shelf and starts filling it with coffee while she waits for the kettle to boil. “Everything about Vicky, or…?”
“Everything,” Christine says.
“Including…?”
“Yes,” Lorna says, “I know why you’re all here.”
Paige drops the spoon heavily into the sink. “Well, ignorance was bloody bliss for a while,” she whispers. Christine stands up and hugs her from behind, resting her forehead against Paige’s back.
“The thing about us,” Pippa says, “is we’re not who we were. We all made a choice to change.”
Paige snorts. “Not Vicky.” She half-turns her head; Lorna’s alarmed to see tears in her eyes. “The thing you should know about Vicky, Lorna, is that she’s not like us. Like Pippa said, we all made the choice to be the women you know now, but Vicky was always a girl.” She turns all the way around and practically picks Christine up to position her more favourably, head to Paige’s bosom. She encircles her with her arms. Protective. Protecting her from what?
Oh, Lorna realises. From me. I’m the threat. The thing that came into their lives, demanding answers to questions that hurt them. Tears in Paige’s eyes, still. That she put there.
She latches on to the last thing Paige said. “What do you mean about Vicky?”
“I mean, she didn’t learn to be a girl like I did,” Paige says. “And she didn’t embrace it like Christine. One day, down there, early on, it was like she woke up from a bad dream, and she was just… Vicky.”
Once again, Lorna’s legs feel weak, and this time she acts sensibly, pulling in a chair and sitting heavily on it before she falls. “What are you saying? Vicky’s a trans woman?”
“No,” Christine says.
“Yes,” Paige says, at the same time. She’s blinked away the tears now, but she still looks vulnerable, and when she speaks she’s more hesitant than usual. “I’ve been thinking about this, ever since Stephanie came out. There are ways in which ‘trans woman’ is the most appropriate descriptor for all of us here, and there are ways in which it is… inappropriate. My womanhood, no matter how accustomed to it I am, was coerced. But Vicky’s wasn’t.”
“She’s always insisted she’s not trans,” Christine says, turning around in Paige’s arms to face out into the kitchen again. “She says she had no dysphoria, no eggy feelings or anything. And I’ve tried to respect that.”
“You’ve literally made fun of her for it.”
“Yes, but—”
“You showed her all those egg memes.”
“And she didn’t find them relatable!” Christine says.
“I think she would have if she let herself think about it,” Paige insists. “But I also think that a subreddit is not a diagnostic tool. Yes, Lorna, I think she’s trans, like Stephanie is. Like you are. She might have lasted another five years, even ten. Maybe even decades, if she put herself deep into denial. But I think she would have died by her own hand, or lived to be a woman. The programme simply found it inside her, ahead of schedule.”
“Paige, I don’t—” Christine says, but Lorna can’t stop herself.
“You really think that?” She doesn’t know why it’s important, but it is. If Vicky’s trans, the way she is, then does any of this really matter? Vicky as a boy, transitioned against his will… that makes no sense. But if she was always a girl, if she’s trans, if she’s like Lorna, that changes the nature of all of it. That makes the lies she was forced to tell much more like the lies Lorna’s told herself, the ones imposed upon them both, to make them boys against their will.
If Vicky’s like her…
And the image Paige conjured, of Vicky dead by her own hand, is not one she’ll ever forget.
“Yeah,” Paige says.
Lorna laughs. It’s a bitter, broken release of tension, and threatens to become a crying fit, so she hugs herself and bites the inside of her cheek for a second. “You mean to tell me,” she says slowly, when she has herself under control, “that I have to tolerate this… abattoir, because it cracked my girlfriend’s egg?”
“Yes. That’s the position you’re in. I’m sorry.” And Paige does look sorry; looks almost haunted, forcing Lorna for the first time to wonder what it’s like to come out on the other side of this blood-soaked programme’s coerced regendering, and face life again. “There are no good options for you. Only compromises. You can’t hurt this place without hurting— Ah.”
Lorna’s blood runs cold. She turns slowly in her chair and there, standing in the entryway, is her girlfriend.
“Hey, Lorna, someone said you’re up here, and—” Vicky starts, still out of breath. And then she looks at Lorna, absorbs the tension in the room. “Oh no. Oh, God. Christine, what have you done?”
Still unsteady, Lorna makes the couple of paces over to the door without issue. She takes Vicky’s hands in hers, steps right up to her and looks carefully, unflinchingly into her eyes. They’re level with each other — Vicky was always tall; something else that suddenly makes sense — and Lorna punctuates her silent reassurance with a quick kiss.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she says.
“What’s going on?” Vicky whispers.
“They told me everything.”
And the weight in her arms increases for a second as Vicky overbalances, almost falls, and has to steady herself against the door frame, against Lorna.
“Lorna,” Vicky says, “oh, God, angel, I’m sorry.” She starts babbling, the words coming out of her in time with her tears as she buries her head in Lorna’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, you shouldn’t have to be part of all this, all this endless fucking bullshit, you’re too good for this place, you’re too good for me, you should run, you should get far away, you should forget about me and Saints and fuck I’m so sorry I dragged you into this…”
Lorna shushes her, strokes her between her shoulders, and accepts from Paige a guiding hand, leading them into the privacy of one of the bedrooms and shutting the door behind them.
On the bed together, she whispers to her lover that she’s glad she finally knows all her secrets, and that maybe it’s time she told some, too.
* * *
They give them some time alone, while they share a plate of snacks (courtesy of Indira) and talk amongst themselves. Stef’s had time to think about what it means to her to finally meet another trans girl and to immediately try to persuade her of the relative merits of the kidnapping ring with whom she has thrown in her lot. And that’s a scary enough thought that she welcomes Christine, Pippa and Paige’s distractions.
“Shoot,” Pippa says, interrupting Paige’s story about Christine’s first time in high heels, “it’s almost three. Sorry, Stephanie; I have a tutorial.”
“It’s fine,” Stef says, pushing back from her chair and stretching. “You need to change?”
“No, but I need my laptop. Come upstairs with me?”
“To the third floor?”
“Fourth, actually.”
Stef hesitates. There are non-Dorley people up there, right? Ordinary people, who’ve never even been in a basement except to look for the plastic Christmas tree. And she’s…
No. Screw it. She’s Stephanie today, and — she suddenly decides — Stephanie is confident! Stephanie takes risks! Stephanie goes places, like fourth floors, that Stef would fear to tread.
“How do I look?” she asks.
“Lovely,” Pippa says.
“Beautiful!” Christine says.
She turns to the last girl. “Paige?” she says. “How do I look?”
“You look great,” Paige says, “and also like you’re in early transition. But I don’t think you’ll be recognised. You were in your third year, and no-one upstairs shared a class with you before; the non-programme residents usually move on after their first or second years. And it might be good for people to start seeing you as Pippa’s friend. It’ll give you more freedom to move around the dorms.”
“Assuming you want to be trans as part of your NPH,” Christine says.
Stef doesn’t have time to ask. “New Personal History,” Pippa says. “We all have to decide if we’re going to be cis girls out in the world, or trans girls. Being a trans girl is non-optional if you don’t get bottom surgery, but if you do, it’s open season.”
“I am a trans girl,” Stef says, and finds she likes saying it, likes claiming it, likes the feel of it. Lorna’s a trans girl, too. And so’s Vicky, if Paige is right, and from what Christine says she generally is. That’s good company to keep. “So, uh, that’s probably fine.”
“Come on, then.” Pippa takes Stef by the hand and leads her out of the kitchen and back through the corridor. Stef tries to open the door to the stairwell with her thumbprint, just for the novelty of it, but it doesn’t let her through. Pippa nudges her aside and unlocks the door. “I’ll ask for you to be added to these doors,” she says, as they start heading up. “All the doors. It’s ridiculous for you to have, like, half access.”
The fourth floor isn’t like the first or second, which are arranged around a single long corridor that threads through the building like the Snake game on the emergency phone back home, and they’re not full of unused rooms, either. She and Pippa walk out into a large common area, organised around a handful of sofas and a TV — connected up to a PlayStation and what looks to Stef’s uneducated eye like a nineties Nintendo console — which leads off to a large, open-plan kitchen-dining area to one side. On the other side, regularly spaced doors suggest bedrooms, and twin corridors extend down from the common area, leading to more rooms.
“Wow,” Stef says, and she’s glad she kept her head voice up because two people playing a vintage video game — a Star Wars racing game? — turn around on the sofa and smile at her.
“Hey, Pip!” one of them says, waving.
“Hey, Naila,” Pippa says. “Can you keep my friend company for a minute? I’ve got class and I need to grab my stuff. Stephanie, this is Naila and they’re Ren. Visiting from the fifth floor for what I can only assume are nefarious reasons.”
“How dare you!” Ren says.
“Hi,” Stef says, waving back. Noting the pronoun Pippa used, she adds, “She/her.”
“Ditto,” Naila says, smiling. “You want to play?”
“Um, does it matter if I’m terrible?”
“It’s preferable,” Ren says, waving her down onto the couch and handing her the oddest-looking game controller Stef’s ever seen. They talk her through selecting a pilot and, despite the fuzzy graphics, Stef recognises some of the designs.
“Is this… a Phantom Menace game?”
“This is where the fun begins,” Ren says, and Naila hits them.
“That’s from Episode 2!” she says.
“Actually,” Ren whispers, “it’s from Episode 3.”
It’s relaxing, playing the game, chatting, joking, and being apparently instantly accepted as a woman, as who she is; it’s hard not to think of it as another gift from Dorley, one which she will have to pay back — which she has chosen to pay back — by returning to the cold, depressing, concrete basement and performing boy, but what if…? for Aaron and the others.
Pippa taps her on the head a few minutes later, and Stef lets herself get dragged up from the sofa. She hands back the controller before she gets her legs tangled in the cord, and Naila and Ren resume playing against each other.
“What are you two doing down here, anyway?” Pippa asks, before they leave.
“We came to see a friend,” Ren says.
“But they weren’t in,” Naila says.
“And you guys have an N64.”
“And a load of free crisps in the cupboard.” Naila indicates the decimated foil bags on the table.
“Someone has to pay for those, you know,” Pippa says, and she slings her laptop bag over her shoulder and leads Stef out into the stairwell. She closes the door and checks quickly around them before she speaks again. “So? How did you find it?”
“What?” Stef says. “The pod racing game?”
She laughs. “No, hanging out!”
“Just teasing. It was nice, actually.”
“Just that?” Pippa hops down a few steps, so she can turn and stare back up at Stef. “Just ’nice’?”
Stef briefly sticks her tongue out. “Okay. Fine. Better than nice. Like… a preview of what it’s going to be like. When I’m a girl.”
“You’re—”
“When I look more like the girl I am inside. Better?”
Pippa snorts. “Paige would say you’re a very binary thinker, Stef.”
Stef takes the last stairs down into the main hallway two at a time. “And what would you say?”
“I’d say, I get it,” Pippa says. And then she wags a finger. “Which I shouldn’t, because I’m me and you’re you, so, you know, think about it.”
“I don’t have to think about it. Gonna be a girl whatever happens.”
Pippa swipes at her, but Stef intercepts her hand and hugs her instead. “Have a good tutorial,” she says.
“I will!” Pippa sings, and waves as she kicks open the main doors and marches off into campus. Stef’s almost tempted to follow her, to add to the euphoria of being treated in an absolutely mundane and ordinary fashion by two complete strangers by going out there and finding other people to gender her correctly, but she turns on her heel instead and jogs back up the stairs.
On the second floor, she has to knock to be let back in. Christine opens the door for her, and Stef follows her to where Paige is standing outside one of the bedrooms, struggling with whether to enter.
“They’re still in there?” Stef whispers. The other two both nod. “You want to check on them?”
“We’re not sure,” Paige says.
“Lorna might throw things,” Christine says.
“That’s Vicky’s room. Nothing in there to throw but my clothes.”
“And some decomposing kitchen detritus,” Christine says. “There might be forks.”
“Maybe we should tell her we can probably get her free bottom surgery now?”
“Bribes are unethical, Paige.”
Stef pushes past them. “Cowards,” she says with a grin, and knocks on the door. “Lorna? Vicky? It’s Stephanie? And the other two.”
The other two? Christine mouths at her.
“You can come in,” someone says through the door.
Paige lets them in, and there they are, Lorna and Vicky, wrapped around each other on the bed — with a pile of clothes shoved roughly off onto the floor, which Paige immediately picks up and quickly sorts through — red-eyed and so tightly entwined they’re almost one person.
“Hi,” says Stef.
“Hey,” Lorna says, reluctantly disentangling herself from Vicky and getting into a crossed-legged position on the end of the bed.
“So,” Paige says, “you’re both fully debriefed?”
Lorna nods.
“Almost,” Vicky says. “She wouldn’t let me tell her my old—”
“You don’t know mine,” Lorna says, “and I don’t want to know yours. From what you were telling me, and from what you said, Paige, Vicky was always kinda sorta in waiting. The girl in hiding. The… bad stuff, the things she did, that was her beating on the walls of her prison.”
“Apt,” Christine whispers.
“I still can’t believe you’re accepting this,” Vicky says.
“I’m accepting you,” Lorna says. “You’re my Victoria, you’re my girl, and I’m— I’m fucking glad to know you, at last. To see behind all the secrets they made you keep.” She turns an angry finger on Christine. “You lot very nearly fucked up a perfectly good trans girl, you know.”
Christine holds up her hands. “Not guilty,” she says. “We were in the same intake. I couldn’t fuck her up; I was catatonic because they took me away one day and castrated me.”
“Oh,” Lorna says, covering her mouth, “shit. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m mostly over it.”
“That’s the other side of the coin,” Paige says, pulling a stool over and arranging herself on it. “Whatever you think of us — the rest of us, that is — you have to remember that we were all remade here. All of us. And the scars are worse for some than others.”
“What she’s saying is, be kind to us. We’re new.”
Lorna leans forward, cupping her chin in her hands. “I still think this place can’t work. That it shouldn’t work.”
Christine shrugs. “We put a lot of work into making sure we only take people we think can make the adjustment. Some people just can’t change. We don’t try to make them.”
“And some people have to,” Stef says, and giggles. Lorna looks affronted, so Stef swallows and coughs, to drown out the laughter that still wants to come out. “Sorry,” she says to Lorna, “I’m still riding kind of a high. But also… I think I want to make a point, if that’s okay?” Lorna nods warily. “I just went up to four with Pippa, played old video games with a couple called Ren and Naila—”
“Oh?” Christine says. “How are they?”
“Good! I stole a bunch of their food. And it was just… It was so normal, you know? Just me, as me, playing a video game with people I’d just met, and they just… I was Stephanie. I wasn’t Stefan, the guy who hangs around with Melissa — or Mark; whatever — and I wasn’t Stef, the trans girl pretending to be a guy down in the basement here. I wasn’t even Stef, the girl all you lot know. I was just me. And that—” she hiccups, and her throat tightens; this is more difficult to talk about than she expected, “—was something I’ve never had before. And it was so fucking random.
“And now I’m thinking,” she continues slowly, mind racing, “that it’s not just that Dorley gave me that experience. All those guys down there are going to have it, too. Lorna, you haven’t met them, and I guess neither have you, Vicky, although you know what sort of people come through here.” Vicky nods. “Those boys have been living poisoned lives. And, yes, sure, most of them poisoned themselves, but still, they’ve barely got a single un-fucked-up relationship between them, familial or otherwise. They’re all of them eventually going to get to do what I just did: they’re going to sit down on a sofa and play Nintendo games with complete strangers, and it’s going to be one of the first truly normal things in their whole lives. They need that.” She shrugs, surprised by her own vehemence. “I want them to have it. They might have been hurt differently to me, but, here, the cure is basically the same. Just a bit more bitter, for them.”
“God,” Christine says, “You are so fucking Dorleypilled. And I remember when you used to call me that.”
“If you can’t beat them…”
“If I can make a request?” Lorna says, shuffling back across the bed to put her arm around her girlfriend. “Don’t try and sell me on this place any more, okay? Not for now, anyway. I don’t know, maybe I’ll get like Stephanie here, and see the sunny side of a bit of light torture, but… eh, probably not.” She squeezes Vicky around the shoulders. “But she’s my Victoria. I came here thinking this place hurt her, and yes, it did, very much so—”
“It really fucking did,” Vicky says.
“—but it seems like it found her, as well. And brought her to me. I’ll… I’ll keep your secrets. Just promise me?”
“What?”
“Those boys, the ones down there. They’re going to be okay?”
“Lorna,” Stef says, “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they’re okay.”
* * *
Aaron. Erin? Ellen? Karen?
He’s run every variation through his head, every cutesy modification of his name to make it into something appropriate to what they claim to want him to become. He’d ask someone for better ideas, but he doesn’t know who he’d even ask any more, and he knows no-one has anything suitable. Alien names, all of them, names for a version of him who was never created.
No. Names for the person who will succeed him.
God, he wishes he could turn off that stupid light, the one above the bed that does nothing but slice day from night and deny him true darkness, like he’s a child who needs a nightlight. Like he’s an animal who needs constant supervision.
Well? Doesn’t he? Didn’t he tell Stef his whole plan? Passive aggressive resistance, emphasis on the aggressive? Fucker’s probably told Indira by now. Or Pippa. They’ll have shared Aaron’s secrets like they share everything else, giggled over it, made it part of that weird bond they have, the one Aaron can’t work out if it’s between lovers or a brother and a sister. A bond he aches for, wants to reach out and snap whenever he sees them together, wants to twist and use against them if only he can find a way.
A bond he once felt was in reach. Still, he’s good and fucked that, now, hasn’t he? Stef offered you closeness and you threw it back at him, didn’t you? Who gives a fuck that he scared you? Because now he’s gone.
It’s too much like it always is. Too much a part of the pattern. He arrives somewhere, and he misbehaves because what the fuck else is he going to do? And then they hurt him. Who they are differs every time, as does the manner of it, but it doesn’t matter. It never matters. All that’s real is that he, Aaron, fucked up again, and now he’s paying the price.
And he’s sanitising it. He knows he is. He keeps thinking of Stef’s face as he watched the names and dates scroll past on the screen in the common room; his horror had been obvious. Narrow escape for you, mate. You almost got close to this.
Monica’s voice stays with him, too. Dispassionately evaluating his future along with his past. The harm he would inevitably cause. And wouldn’t he love to argue? Wouldn’t he love to throw it back in her face, like he tried to do with the accusation about the abuse he suffered? But all he’d had were insults and anger, and in the time since he’s not come up with anything better.
Who cares if she’s even right? She feels right, and that’s the worst thing. Maybe he wouldn’t have continued to spiral, continued to lash out, continued to hurt people — women — over and over, because he could and because he always got away with it and because it was a little glimmer of power in a life bereft of it? Maybe he’d have grown the fuck up, like his disappointed mother always wished? Maybe, without this place, he’d have finally become something, someone worthy of… anything.
He laughs. What a fantasy.
The other reality, the one Monica painted in the common room, the one she repaints every time he lets himself dream, the one she claims they’re saving him from, that’s the one that feels real. It’s all too easy to look into the future and see Aaron, thirty years old, settling into a sinecure thanks to his father’s residual contacts, some pointless position where he does nothing of use and experiences nothing he’ll ever remember except for the slap of his hand on his secretary’s arse, a piece of insectoid superiority to get him through the day.
Maybe one day he’ll fuck her.
Aaron hits himself. Open palm, nothing too flashy. Right in the cheek. He hopes it’ll leave a mark, and wants to do it again and again and again, like he’s taking revenge for this woman he imagines, but it’s as pointless and stupid as anything else he’s ever done in this room. He sits on his hands instead, presses his weight onto them, holds himself in place.
His other self. His older self. His past self. Him. Always him. Hurting people for the smallest amount of unimpeded sensation. It’s like pinching yourself to wake from a dream, only someone else feels the pain.
Stupid.
He’ll never become that man now. And as he pictures him, with his shiny-arsed suit and his unchecked casual cruelty, he’s glad of that. He hates him. If he could reach into his future and strangle him, beat him, claw at him until he rips into pieces, he would. In less than a heartbeat.
His hands twitch under him.
But the other future, Monica’s future, Maria’s future, Indira’s future, the one they’re forcing on him with indifferent calculation and undisguised irritation and what feels disconcertingly like love, he doesn’t want it, either. He rejects it as thoroughly as he does every other possible version of himself.
He won’t be the older man, hurting people. He can’t be any kind of man, not any more, not if they’re telling even the slightest fraction of the truth about their intentions. And he refuses to be what they claim to want. He’s looked in the mirror, seen the slight but, now he knows what he’s looking for, unmistakable signs of estrogen working its way through his body, and tried to see himself altered to their specifications: bigger here, rounder there, softer everywhere. Whether he sees a misshapen, ugly creature (as he did yesterday) or something that could actually be mistaken for a woman (as he does today), he rejects the vision entirely.
Why not leave him be?
Idiot. You know why.
He knows what they see when they look at him, when they open him up, look past the surface; they see a serial sexual harasser. They see a rich boy, graduate of a prestigious private school, who walked into a well-regarded university and proceeded to amuse himself at the expense of the women around him, secure in the knowledge that his parents’ money would make any and all consequences vanish.
Well, rich boy, here’s a consequence you can’t escape, at last.
That’s what they see; what does he see when he looks inside himself? If he has to be honest — and what other choice does he have, here, in this prison, where all directions lead right back to this concrete cell? — he’s not sure there’s anything inside him to find. He’s barely a person, just a collection of bad habits and poor self-control, masquerading as human.
But Stefan…
Stef.
He acted like he mattered. Like he could see something, someone there. Someone to care about, to befriend. Someone to — and let’s fucking say it, Aaron, right here in the near-dark — love.
You broke that like you broke everything else.
Fuck it.
Fuck him.
‘You’re my reason.’ Fuck off! Friends don’t do that to each other. They don’t step over that line, no matter what.
Sent him away. For good or ill, he’s gone and he’s not coming back. Just you now, Aaron.
Not Aaron for long, though…
The funny thing is, now that he’s started thinking about the woman they want to make from him, he almost can’t stop. His mind’s eye ably lengthens his hair, swells his body in the appropriate places, dresses it in clothes like the girls here wear. The woman wears her hair loose and her nails painted and she smiles like the world’s a joke only she understands; she walks out of here with Stef and the others, and doesn’t look back.
He can see her, but he’s not her. She’s someone else, someone better, someone new. And for a moment he’s happy for her, in a way he can’t imagine ever being for himself.
He opens his eyes, embraces the dull light, dispels the image. She’s a dream, a fantasy, a person he can’t ever become. Maybe it’s the idea of the new start he hasn’t earned; maybe it’s the thought that there’s a way out of here that doesn’t end in death. Maybe it’s the womanhood, the transition; maybe that’s the chasm he can’t cross, the thing he can’t withstand, the fate he’ll fight against with everything he has.
Maybe it’s because he knows, more clearly than he’s ever known anything, that he doesn’t deserve it.
Notes:
If you find typos or other errors, please let me know in the comments here or at https://twitter.com/badambulist
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 21: Gunpowder Boy
Chapter Text
2019 December 5
Thursday
She fell asleep last night with her phone by her head and the alarm set to vibrate, but she wakes early, anyway, and silences it before it has a chance to wake her companion. She quickly checks to see if the night shift left any urgent messages — no, all quiet — and sets the phone down carefully on the bedside table, turning over after to make sure Maria’s asleep. She is, and Edy steals a few moments with her.
The bandage came off yesterday, and the skin underneath, while still bruised and swollen, looks healthier now than it did when they inspected it together last night. Edy checks it over again, just to be sure, reaching out and flipping up a corner of the curtain behind the bed to let in a little more light, and shielding Maria’s eyes with her other hand so as not to wake her. Everything looks fine. Maria turns over in her sleep, prompting Edy to drop the curtain and move aside, to give her the space she needs, and her gentle snores give way to long, slow sighs.
Edy can’t resist leaning over a little more, until she’s inches from Maria’s cheek. She mouths a silent prayer and kisses her as softly as she can, lips barely grazing the skin, indulging in the barest contact, in the reassurance that Maria, her Maria, is fucking alive. Slowly she turns away, swings her legs out of the bed and hops silently to her feet.
“Right,” she whispers to herself. “Back to work, then.”
She tiptoes her way around, quietly assembling her morning routine. The low light doesn’t matter; she knows this place like she knows her own room. She’s been spending her nights in Maria’s flat for far longer than just the past week of Maria’s convalescence, and there’s talk, should their relationship prove stable in the long term — she snorts, insulted, at the suggestion they might ever break up — of moving her stuff out of her room and giving it to one of the other long-time sponsors. Edy’s failed to come up with a decent reason for being allowed to keep her own place when she barely uses it any more — “I need it to store my shoes!” is not, apparently, sufficient, even given the size of her collection — so she’s resigned herself to the loss. She glances at Maria again; if she has to sleep here for the rest of her tenure at Dorley Hall, she’s not going to complain.
Cami and knickers go in the hamper; necklace goes in the wicker basket by the sink; Edy goes in the shower.
She leans out of the bathroom door when she’s done, to check if Maria’s still asleep. She is, and that’s good, but it does mean she can’t blow dry her hair. She towels it vigorously instead, scrunches some curling gel into it, and ties it up, finger-twisting a few bangs out around her forehead, because she knows Maria likes it like that, and because it alleviates Edy’s fear about her hairline. Which, yes, has never to her knowledge outed her, but it’s been a source of considerable dysphoria since her transition, since before she would even acknowledge that the word dysphoria might mean something to her, since before she truly accepted her new name, her new role. She remembers examining herself in the mirror after eighteen months of hormone therapy, disappointed that the one thing estrogen didn’t change was the thing she’d always disliked about her appearance. She could get it fixed, sure, but the prospect of letting someone take a scalpel to her face is beyond intimidating! It doesn’t matter how many Dorley girls get work done every year and survive with nothing more than a bit of swelling and a spot of bruising and a lot of complaining about not being allowed to sniff for weeks, she’ll never so much as follow them into the consultation room. She’ll instead take pride in being pretty despite her unaltered face, she’ll tease out her hair to de-emphasise her hairline, and she’ll curate a folder on her laptop of photos of professional models with tall foreheads.
She double checks her reflection. It’s fine. Like always, it’s fine. “Silly girl,” she chastises herself for the thousandth time, and blasts her bangs with hairspray.
She reclasps her necklace, adjusts the crucifix so it sits properly in the hollow at the base of her neck, and pauses to reflect on it for a moment, and to say another prayer, asking to be blessed with good fortune. Maria’s made good-natured fun of her for her beliefs, but she’s always insisted that not everything she was taught was wrong, that there’s value especially in the things her mother whispered, before her father got to her.
All done. Time to get dressed! Most of her clothes are still back in her room, but she and Maria are basically the same size and have been sharing clothes for a long time, so it’s entirely possible that the stretchy jeans and peach top she digs out of the wardrobe are hers, actually.
No, she decides, as she checks them over; definitely Maria’s. She’s the one who likes the big department store in the city, and the tags suggest expensive brands. She smiles as she pulls them on, imagining Maria justifying spending the extra money on them because they’re just that fucking cute and it turns out, as she poses in the mirror on the back of the door, that she’s right.
It’s not as if either of them has rent to pay, anyway.
Her earbuds are charging off the laptop in the kitchen, and she sticks them in, re-syncs them to her phone and loads up one of Maria’s bands. “We must continue your modern cultural education,” Maria said, when she came home from the hospital, “if you’re going to keep subjecting me to your emo nineties shit. Give and take, Ede; the foundation of a healthy relationship.” Which means listening to Maria’s playlists at least half the time. Some of it’s grown on her, though. She cues up a recent favourite and hums along as she puts the coffee on, throws bread in the toaster, and digs in the fridge for the butter and jam. She has some time while the bread toasts and the coffee percolates, and she spends it leaning on Maria’s kitchen counter, listening to Maria’s music and watching Maria sleep, her chest rising and falling as she breathes.
Goodness, but she loves her so much. There’s no-one stronger and definitely no-one more beautiful and it still astonishes Edy sometimes that it took them so long to recognise their feelings for each other. But Edy had to become first someone worthy of love and then someone ready for it, and Maria had to let her guard down. Damaged women, both of them, but carefully and lovingly mended. They both know how and where they’ve been hurt and they press gently on each other, always; Maria, especially, can’t always keep her wounds hidden, sometimes can’t walk or speak or breathe for the memories that overwhelm her, and Edy’s there, every time, to help her come back to herself, so that for the next day, and for the next month, the next year, Maria can be Maria again.
The woman she loves is so fucking strong.
Edy prides herself on being a kind woman — the requirements of the programme permitting — but sometimes when Maria sleeps she speaks her memories aloud, relives in her dreams the burns and the cuts and the girls she couldn’t save, and in those moments Edy wishes for nothing more than the means to find old Dorley’s so-called Grandmother and hurt her, hurt her the way she hurt Maria, hurt her so badly she never recovers. At least the nurse’s fate was grimly satisfying. The woman deserved no less than what she got: segmented and buried in pieces, her fingers and teeth thrown in bags into the sea.
Ah! The toast is done. And the smell of it wakes Maria. Edy pauses the music, butters and jams the toast, pours the coffee, and carries it all over on a tray to the bed, where Maria’s piling up pillows behind her head, smiling at Edy, and bouncing upright with an energy she hasn’t shown since before the attack. That’s good; that’s great! She’s healing well, returning to her old self, and when she’s better she can go back down into that dank, awful basement and confront Will fucking Schroeder and make him face up to what he did to her.
Edy pushes down the flash of rage — it’s neither Godly nor becoming, it helps no-one, and it’s actively counterproductive to get angry with the boys, even when you’re not around them; she remembers well what it was like to be them — and concentrates on arranging the tray so Maria can eat her breakfast and drink her coffee without issue.
“Hey, baby,” she says, squatting down by the bed.
“G’morning,” Maria says, and Edy wants to exult: she left the lights on in the kitchen, they’re right in Maria’s field of view, and she’s not squinting! Another good sign. Maria reaches out, cups Edy’s cheek. “Coming back to bed?”
“I can’t,” Edy says, pouting. “Back to work today, for real.”
Maria slowly blinks away her sleepiness. “I could unilaterally give you another week off,” she says. “I still have that ‘head injury’ get-out clause; I can basically do what I like.”
“I think Monica might expire aggressively at me if I take any more time off.”
“Fine,” Maria says, leaning into the word with a grin, “I will generously allow your highly important work to take you away from me. For a while.”
“You’re so magnanimous, baby.”
“Those boys won’t rehabilitate themselves,” Maria adds, and takes a bite of toast.
Edy lingers while Maria eats, and they share the idle joy of mundane daily tasks undertaken with the one you love, but then work does indeed take Edy away, out of the door and down the corridor and into the third floor proper, where she greets a handful of early birds, up making coffees and teas and filling thermoses and bagging sandwiches; people to whom she is Edy, the grad student. She waves to a friend who really is what she merely pretends to be, reconfirms their plans to meet for lunch later, and taps her earbud; the song starts up again, and gets to the chorus.
She treasures these mornings. It’s not just about time with Maria, it’s about time as herself, as the woman she gets to be ever since she was saved from herself, saved from the confused, angry, lonely boy, prone to bigotry, zealotry, and all the other things that were stained onto her flesh as a child. It doesn’t matter how many years she puts between herself and him; she’ll always be grateful that it’s Edith who greets the morning sun and not that broken, spitting, desperate child who once sneered with her mouth and hated with her voice and hurt with her hands.
Every day’s a victory.
On the stairs down the music pauses itself; Aunt Bea’s calling. She’s been checking in every morning since she was finally persuaded to stop moping around the house, sent back to her responsibilities with a promise that Maria will definitely take it easy and absolutely won’t return to work until she’s fully healed, and Bea wouldn’t be Bea if she didn’t call every day to confirm that Maria’s keeping that promise.
“Good morning, Aunt Bea,” Edy says. “Just a moment.” She ducks into the second floor and hurries around the corridor to the kitchen; she doesn’t actually know who’ll be awake at this time of day, not without pulling up the timetables, and she doesn’t want to disturb anyone by carrying on a loud conversation outside their door. Julia and Yasmin are breakfasting at the kitchen table, but as soon as she comes in, they clear out, ignoring her conciliatory gestures and whispering to each other. It’d be nice if they didn’t hate her and the other sponsors quite so much, but at least Christine’s started getting through to them, thank the Lord. “Okay. Ready.”
“Edith,” Bea says. “How’s my Maria?” Straight to the point, as ever.
“She’s sitting up, she’s eating toast, and given that I’m obediently listening to one of her playlists right now she’s probably listening to one of mine, God help her.”
“No signs of—?”
“None, Aunt Bea. I know what to watch for.”
“Sudden changes,” Bea says, in a voice tinny even over the expensive earbuds Maria bought her, “repeated vomiting, seizures—”
“I have the list,” Edy says.
“Sorry.”
“She’s fine. She’s recovering! And, once I’ve been to work this morning—” and discharged an obligation to a friend, Edy doesn’t add, because Bea doesn’t need to know about every single one of the deceptions and accommodations they all have to make in their lives outside the programme, or the guilt would eat her alive, “—I’ll be back with her, watching out for her. We might play some board games.”
“Be careful with that, Edith.”
Edy laughs. ‘Board games’: code for sex. For all that Bea’s role as the prudish custodian is almost entirely an act, she still doesn’t like to think of the woman who is almost her daughter doing such things, and neither Maria nor Edy want to raise the topic with her; they arrived at a succession of polite euphemisms almost by accident.
“Light board games,” Edy says, and hopes Bea understands that she’s teasing her, or she might end up like the nurse.
Bea sighs down the phone. “You’ll be the end of me, you two,” she says. “If the current lot don’t get there first.”
“Which current lot? The first-floor hooligans or the… eclectic mix in the basement?”
“Please. The worst thing the second years have done is somehow defeat the sound dampening on their rooms. I’m talking about the trans girl who, I’m told, is now volunteering to stay in that concrete hole because she thinks we can’t be trusted with the care and feeding of her horrid little friend.”
It’s almost entertaining, the way every conversation in the house seems to come back to young Stephanie. Almost. “It’s okay,” Edy says. “Maria will be back with Aaron soon, and Indira’s doing a great job in the mean—”
“Is she wrong, Edith?”
Uncertainty from Aunt Bea; unsettling! “What do you mean?”
“Stephanie’s actualising, growing, so fast. She’s a perfect example for the boys, better even than Victoria! So why do I feel like her every victory is a defeat for me?”
Edy puts her weight on the kitchen table. “I still don’t understand.”
There’s a long pause on the line, and when Bea finally says, “No, no, I suppose you wouldn’t,” it’s with the weight of years, and she sounds for the first time like a woman of fifty-five, to whom life has not been especially kind. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just second-guessing everything I’ve done in my life.”
“Aunt Bea, no! One precocious trans girl doesn’t change anything.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No.” Edy says the word with as much certainty as she can. “She doesn’t change the good you’ve done, the lives you’ve turned around. Aunt Bea, you saved Maria, you saved me, you saved, goodness, I don’t know how many girls—”
“Did I? Or did I just… make assumptions? Put my pet theories into practice?”
Edy bites down on her immediate reply. Says instead, “Are you alone out there? Or is Elle with you?”
“It’s just me right now,” Bea says. “Just me.”
“Maybe you should come home. Or maybe one of us should come out and stay with you.”
“No. No, but thank you, Edith. You’re very kind.”
“It’s the way you made me,” Edy says.
“Edith… You made yourself,” Bea says. “Maybe… maybe I will come home. There are no leads, anyway.”
Fruitless tasks undertaken for loves lost become ritualised so easily, and Bea’s search is an annual memorial. Always conducted during the first week of December, always ending in failure and renewed grief. No-one expects a fifty-three-year-old woman — or however she might choose to conceptualise herself, this long after she was taken away — to resurface after so long, but her memory is owed, and Bea obliges. It probably wasn’t the best idea for her to go so soon after the trauma of Maria’s attack, but she wouldn’t be talked out of it. Edy’s always been surprised Elle still allocates funds to the task, but the woman is nothing if not sentimental — sentimental and ravenous, she remembers — and considers the disappearance of Valerie Barbier a major loose end.
Or, perhaps, she’s simply indulging Beatrice. Edy’s never found herself in a position to ask.
“I’m so sorry, Aunt Bea.”
“Edith, please. Just Bea.”
“If there’s anything I can do, Bea…” She leaves the sentence hanging. Aunt Bea’s story’s changed a few times in the telling, and Edy doesn’t know if that’s because she prefers not to remember it vividly or because the experience was so traumatic that the memories simply never fully formed, but one thing’s always been consistent: Val and Bea named each other. They were, in a sense, in the only sense that matters to Bea, born together under Grandmother’s hand, and there’ll always be a part of her that believes they might still, one day, die together.
Bea’s quiet for a long time. And then, with a sniff rendered crackly and loud by the poor connection, speaks with the businesslike tones Edy’s come to find almost reassuring from her. “Edith, my dear,” she says, “if I thought there was something you could do that you weren’t already doing, I would have docked your pay. Good morning. And… thank you.”
Edy doesn’t start the music again until she’s back on the stairs, because she stopped to listen to the faint sounds of argument coming from Yasmin’s room. She taps a reminder into her phone — someone needs to check in on Yasmin and Julia, and it needs to be someone other than their sponsors, who share at least some of the blame for their isolation; perhaps not the long-suffering Christine, though, considering the rate at which she’s been accumulating responsibilities — and takes the rest of the stairs at her leisure, singing along quietly until the much-interrupted song ends.
There’s no-one in the downstairs kitchen, which isn’t all that surprising for the time of day, but Monica, an earlier riser than anyone, has left two thermoses in a clear carrier bag by the sink. She opens them, sniffs to check the contents — the pink one with red hearts and happy faces on is hers; cute, Mon, if Edy was six years old — and goes to find Monica, to thank her, swinging the bag from her little finger. Monica’s in the makeshift gym, out in the rat’s nest of rooms behind the dining hall, midway through her cardio, so Edy restricts herself to a few sardonic gestures, absorbs Monica’s answering grin, and steps up to the treadmill to share a high five.
Time to go to work!
She drops in to the security room on the way past — Nell’s on the night shift again, as she has been for a while and will be for at least a little longer — and then it’s down into basement two, past the corridor to the cells where Will, Raph and Ollie still languish, and onwards, to the bedrooms. Stephanie, rushing past on her way to the bathroom and probably trying to get done before any of the boys wake up, smiles at her, and Edy smiles back.
Is she wrong, Edith?
Edy shakes her head to dispel the errant thought, and watches Stephanie disappear into the bathroom. She’s no existential threat to the programme; she’s just a girl, doing what she has to, muddling through with guesswork and good intentions, just like everyone else. Just a Vicky who worked herself out years earlier, and who, with luck, will choose a less problematic girlfriend.
Besides, Edy likes her. And it’s nice to help someone who’s actually aware she’s being helped.
She knocks on Adam’s door. He doesn’t answer, but she knows he’s awake, so after an appropriate pause for him to cover his nakedness — not that he’s ever completely naked, even in private, except during his ablutions; ungodly — she rolls the lock over and greets him with coffee and a hug.
He still looks so sad.
He’s been withdrawn since disclosure. Not as badly as Aaron but worse than she hoped. Still tied up in his conception of manhood, his perception that his worth, his entire self, is bound up in his man’s heart, his man’s soul, and that silly little thing between his legs. It’s what they taught him, and with rather more focus than is usual. Patriarchy’s messages are implied, insinuated, inserted into TV shows and playground bullying and open-palm slaps from your father, but Adam… For him, they made it explicit, codified it, made him learn it rote, dressed it up as virtue and love and holiness. Edy’s still not worked out if the method of his indoctrination is going to make it easier to get it all out of him, or considerably harder.
She hugs the boy tight. At least he’s stopped trying to push her away, like he did right after disclosure. He releases her earlier than he used to, though, and she takes her tongue between her teeth for a moment to hide her disappointment.
Baby steps, Edith.
She sets the bag with the thermoses down carefully on the dresser and motions for him to join her at his bedside, kneeling on the rug they repositioned for comfort on his first day. He kneels without hesitation and she arranges herself next to him, knees on the rug, ankles tucked under, hands clasped over her heart, just like him.
The prayer’s a simple one, an entreaty for strength to face the coming day, to withstand troubles, carry burdens, and so on, recently rendered into modern English by some luminary. She smiles as she always does at the closing lines: Your grace is your most precious gift. Please, Lord, make me worthy of it. Isn’t that the point? To make him actually worthy of the Lord’s grace? To sift through the poisonous muck they pumped into him and find whoever’s left underneath it all?
He taught her the prayer at the end of the first week and said it aloud with her at the end of the second, a sign that her attempts to develop a rapport with him were bearing fruit. He showed her how to kneel, how to hold her hands, which words to emphasise; talked through with her the meaning behind every line.
She didn’t tell him she already knew it.
* * *
Christine’s frowning at her reflection when Paige squats down next to her, reaches out and delicately takes the open tube of primer out of her hands.
“I want to do your face today,” she says.
“Why today, all of a sudden?” Christine says, leaning forward to inspect herself more closely in the mirror set into the vanity. She lets Paige keep the primer; she’s more interested in whether that’s just a bit of discoloured skin by her nose or— yes, it’s a zit.
“I want to do your makeup every day,” Paige says, bouncing on her toes and continuing in a childish whine, “and I haven’t gotten to for ages.” She turns a toothy grin on Christine, who looks at her supposedly adult girlfriend in mild astonishment. “Please?” Paige stretches the word out, distorting the vowel as her smile widens under Christine’s scrutiny.
There’s no defeating her when she’s set her mind on something, but Christine makes a token effort. “I’m supposed to be doing it myself. Aunt Bea said so.”
“And you’ve got pretty good,” Paige says, straightening up and moving to stand behind Christine, encircling her with her arms. Christine raises a sceptical eyebrow, and Paige squeezes her in response. “Yes, you’re no makeup artist, but—” she punctuates her faint praise with a kiss into Christine’s hair, “—you’re at least as good as half the cis girls out there on campus. I’ve seen the looks you’ve been doing.” She rests her chin on top of Christine’s head. “It’s no secret that I spend a lot of my time watching you.”
“But—”
“And Bea’s not even around!”
Leaning into Paige’s embrace, Christine looks up at her — dislodging her as she does so — and says, “She has eyes and ears everywhere, you know.”
Paige takes advantage, plants another kiss on Christine, this time on her nose, and pushes her head down again. “Don’t you have admin access to her eyes and ears?”
“Not the ones in Edy’s head.”
All it takes, in the end, is for Paige to bring her face down level with Christine’s, meet her eyes in the mirror, and press their cheeks together. “Please, Christine?”
It’s all Christine can do not to blush. They’ve known each other for years and been back together more than a month and still Paige can render her helpless with nothing more than a little bit of physical contact. “Fine.”
Squealing with excitement, Paige reaches out with her foot and hooks in the desk chair, rolling it over so she can sit next to Christine. She starts sorting through Christine’s supplies, pausing occasionally to kiss her again, and her affection soon has Christine laughing.
“I missed you,” Paige says, when she has Christine sitting still with her face immobile; trapped.
“Sorry.” It’s a word you can say without moving your mouth much.
It’s true that between their classes, Paige’s obligations towards her Instagram account — a new box of clothes from some brand or other arrived on Tuesday, prompting a flurry of photo sessions with Abby behind the camera and Paige in front of it — and Christine’s job here, they’ve seen each other only mornings and evenings this week. Mostly it’s been Christine’s fault: in a fit of post-Lorna conscientiousness, she identified a security hole even she never knew about, and the tedious work of patching and updating software, checking the logs for intrusions (none recorded) and the files for signs of tampering (none so far) has kept her in the security room from early until late. It hasn’t escaped her notice that it’s also put her in contact with almost all the sponsors at one point or another; the very mechanisms of her job keep embedding her deeper and deeper in the programme. At least she had the chance to talk to Nell again, in the brief windows where their duties overlapped. Nell thanked her for pulling her out of a destructive spiral, and claimed already to have asked Rebecca’s sponsor, Bella, to apologise to Faye on her behalf. Christine, a girl designed by nature — and Indira — to be terrible at holding grudges, forgave Nell with hugs and a promise to have lunch some time. “In the new year,” Nell had said with a sigh. “Maybe March, I don’t know. When I’m off the night shift and I’ve stopped falling asleep at ten in the morning.”
“Not your fault,” Paige says, “and you don’t need to be sorry. But I’m going to pretend that it is, and you do,” she adds, in the voice she uses when she’s concentrating, “so I can make you let me dress you, too.”
There’s no way for Christine to refuse, not with Paige so close, so beautiful and so presumptuous. To be taken care of like this is a reaffirmation of her new life as well as their relationship, so when Christine replies, she leans forward and takes Paige’s free hand in a rush of emotion. “Please do,” she says.
Paige likes to push things. “Please do what, Christine?” she whispers.
“Please dress me, Paige.”
* * *
The fucking strip light in the ceiling. It’s all he’s looked at with any consistency for days now. Night/day. Night/day. Night/day. Red/yellow. Red/yellow. Red/fucking/yellow, like a playground rhyme. Closing his eyes and listening carefully he can almost hear cadence in its electronic hum, and he could easily believe that if he recorded it on his phone for an entire day and sped it up the waveform would coalesce into something legible, and Aaron knows for absolute certain that it would sound exactly like the ticking of the old grandfather clock in his parents’ house.
He hated that thing. An antique, apparently, but he always thought it was artificially aged, all its imperfections painted on or scraped deliberately into the wood. It was just like the manor house, with its wooden beams and grand staircase and suspicious similarity to three other manor houses on the same cul-de-sac. Just like the supposedly vintage carpets they laid down. Just like the fancy clothes they started wearing. Affectations all, fake and utterly pointless, because his father sold, didn’t he? Made enough money to live like a complete bastard for ten lifetimes, and all it cost him was his influence. The man didn’t know what he had until it was gone, and now, even though the family had more money than anyone he grew up with ever imagined was possible, it wasn’t enough. None of the toffs were interested in them. What use to the truly influential is a man with a pot of cash but no name, and no business venture with which to shape the world? Mere money isn’t enough, or lottery winners would be Lords.
So his mother and father sent him off to boarding school, hoping he could become what they never could, and while he was getting the crap kicked out of him and having his shit stolen and being forced to do things he despised, they bought a fucking grandfather clock. When he went home for the holidays he wrapped a shirt around the pendulum.
Red/yellow. Night/day. The distinctions are meaningless; he sleeps when he sleeps (but mainly during the day) and he pisses when his bladder fills (almost always at night). The rest of it’s a mire of dead introspection, self-hatred and shit movies. Nothing especially new; another purgatory. How did he survive the last one? By being evasive, bloody-minded and at least twice as clever as the other boys in the dorm, and, oh yeah, there was Elizabeth for a while, too. As much a friend as an idea into which he could escape; proof that the other world, the ordinary world, still existed.
How about here, then? It’s just boarding school all over again: people with power over him, imposing their will. And, instead of Elizabeth, he has—
Yeah. He doesn’t have anyone, not any more.
Best not to think too hard about that. Best not to think too hard about anything! Think of the consequences! A relentless focus on his own poor decisions, bad behaviour and knee-jerk responses to unexpected advances might lead to something drastic! Yeah! He might be kidnapped and stashed underground and forced to take estrogen and eat vegetarian food!
You know what? Fuck this place. Fuck the implant, fuck the estradiol. Fuck this stupid room and the stupid light strip. Fuck the inoffensive romantic comedies on his computer and the girl-pop music on his phone. Fuck Indira, fuck Maria, and especially fuck Stefan.
And, fuck, he stinks. How long’s it been since he had a shower? How many days? And why isn’t Indira making him do it? He sees her wrinkle her nose up when she comes in!
That’s stupid. Are you always going to wait for someone else to fix it? Or are you going to take care of yourself for once, Aaron? Are you going to regain a tiny sliver of pride? If they’re so intent on erasing you, on erasing Aaron, and replacing you with some girl, some stranger, then why are you fucking helping? Wasting away in your room until one day you just cease to be and someone else walks out is possibly the most pathetic way you could have responded to your predicament.
Get off the bed. Turn on a real light. Take off those clothes and — he sniffs them; gross! — throw them in the corner. Gather up your stuff and put it away. Brush your greasy hair. Fuck it; bundle up those bedsheets, because they’re probably crusty as shit, and throw them in the corner, too. Put together the wash kit, throw on a robe, and let’s fucking go.
Aaron’s composure lasts long enough for him to open the door, stride out, and almost walk right into Stef in the corridor.
Staggering backwards, Aaron loses his footing and follows his canvas wash bag to the floor, spilling plastic bottles, his electric shaver and his toothbrush across the concrete. He goes down hard, even with the small amount of padding his arse has acquired thanks to those fucking injections, and the pain conspires with surprise to rob him completely of any notion of what to do next.
“Sorry,” Stef says, pulling her— no, his robe tight, and frowning down at him.
Aaron opens his mouth and something fucking stupid falls out. He doesn’t even know what; probably nothing more than a lungful of idiot vowels, the kind of noise you make when your body needs to react to something but your brain is busy with more important matters.
Like: who the fuck is that?
He can’t stop staring, because Stef looks like a different person, and that’s completely ridiculous because it’s been less than a week since they saw each other last, since Aaron threw him out of his room, threw things at him, for having the audacity to claim to care, to boast of an emotional response higher up the curve than mere artless cynicism and chatterbox prevarication, to demonstrate an affinity for something actually fucking real and not the evasions and excuses behind which Aaron habitually hides, shunting anything about himself that might be worth a damn into places from which it can’t escape. Stef’s standing there looking down at him and he looks different, he moves different, he’s smiling and bending down a little and Aaron’s struggling to keep the pronouns straight in his head and to come up with a word to describe him that isn’t—
“Aaron?” Stef says.
No, no, the Stefan Aaron knows is twitchy, moves awkwardly, folds his arms into his body and wears his hair artlessly, but the person looking down at him, wearing an approximation of Stefan’s face — and it’s close, it’s really close, but it’s like the sharper edges have been filed down just a little and the harder lines have been filled out — doesn’t glance around like Stefan does, doesn’t seem to have that need to constantly check for people watching her, doesn’t make herself small like Stefan does, and her hair… It’s damp from the shower and finger-combed out of her face, but it’s… different.
“How are you doing that with your hair?” He asks the question as soon as it occurs to him, because it’s better to grab onto some minute piece of trivia and examine it in detail than to try to process the whole picture at once, the entire fucking person standing over him.
“What?” she asks. “Oh, yeah, Pip got me some mousse. You just rub it in, then sort of lean over and shake your head and deal with the stragglers after.”
“Oh,” Aaron says. “Huh.” Not, in the end, especially helpful.
Stef — and it definitely is Stef, even though his voice is more clear than before, even though he stands and moves differently, even though Aaron spotted before he tightened his robe that he wears his towel higher on his body — starts rounding up Aaron’s wash kit from where its constituent pieces fell, and Aaron would help, or get up and run away, or swear at him, or do something, but his disbelief can’t be overridden. He can’t stop staring; it’s been less than a week! How can one man — or something — change so much in so short a time? Or has he been changing all along, little by little, week by week, and Aaron’s just been too self-absorbed to notice?
“Aaron?” Stef says, crouching down right in front of him and tipping bottles into Aaron’s wash bag. “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”
Why would he have—? Oh. Right. He fell. He has a sore arse. “Not really.”
“Then budge up!” Stef says, making shooing gestures. “You’re sitting on your toothbrush.”
Still only half-aware, Aaron lifts himself up an inch and dumbly pulls his toothbrush out from under a buttock.
“Give me that,” Stef says.
“Why?” Aaron asks, holding the thing like a week-old dead fish.
“It fell on the floor,” Stef says, in a voice so dripping with derision Aaron almost laughs. “It’ll be dirty. I’ll get you a new one.”
Aaron doesn’t respond, so Stef just reaches forward and snatches it, straightening up and grinning at him. Stef’s hair — it’s not longer, it can’t be, not in any meaningful way, there hasn’t been enough time, but it looks longer, and softer, too, and doesn’t seem constantly to fall in his eyes any more; mousse, apparently — haloes him in the ceiling light, its mid-orange colour blazing like the morning sun.
“Um,” Aaron says.
“Tell you what: why don’t I go to the storeroom and get you a new toothbrush, and when I’m done, you’ll be back on your feet, and we can talk? Catch up? Okay? Aaron?”
Aaron nods, and Stef turns on his heel, takes a right at the end of the corridor. Heading for the storeroom, the one in the common room, which apparently Stef can just walk into now. Another change, since he’s been gone.
And what the fuck, Aaron, was that?
He replays the encounter. It’s easier to believe, on review, that Stef is still basically the same person, because Aaron’s seen this new Stef before, in little flashes, when he let his guard down, when he forgot to be worried, when he felt safe… and that would be a reassuring thing to realise, except that Stefan fucking Riley is flowering into a self-assured, confident and attractive person down here, in this obscene concrete pit where the pretty girls smile at you as they hold you down and hurt you.
The sound of Stef’s bare feet skipping back up the corridor reminds him that he has a job to do, and that job is to stand up and reassemble something like a working brain, so when he comes face to face with Stef again he doesn’t say anything dangerously stupid, like, hey, Stef, why are you suddenly so fucking—?
“Toothbrush,” Stef says, rounding the corner and holding it out. It’s blue, and still in its packaging. The cardboard’s peeled a little at the edges, and Aaron wonders how long it’s been in the storeroom. Do toothbrushes have use-by dates? Is that even a thing? How would that even work? Would the bristles just fall out, or—? “Toothbrush?” Stef repeats.
Aaron jumps, then takes it. “Toothbrush,” he agrees. “Um, thanks.”
Stef’s grinning at him, like what he said was funny or something. He leans against the wall with his shoulder, hands clasped behind his back. “So,” he says, “are you up and about again? Or is this just a one-off?”
Aaron shrugs. “I, uh, hadn’t thought that far.” He points down the corridor and hefts his refilled wash bag. “I was just going to have a shower.”
Stef snorts, and wrinkles his nose, just like Indira did. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but, yeah, maybe go do that.”
Fuck. Yeah. Of course he noticed. The first time since Saturday he’s left his fucking room, smelling like an armpit’s arse, and he runs into Stef! Literally! Probably left gross sweaty patches all over Stef’s nice, clean—
“Yeah,” he says, limply waving his new toothbrush, “I’ll just go wash up, then.”
“You do that.” Stef unlocks his door with his thumb and pushes it halfway open. Aaron can see inside: it looks as tidy as ever; oh, yeah, and it doesn’t stink, either. “I’m going to go get dressed,” Stef continues, “and if you want to talk, I’ll be in the common room when I’m done. No pressure.”
Aaron nods, backing away. “I might join you.”
He can’t miss the way Stef’s face lights up. “Really?”
“Yeah. But no gay stuff, okay? And I don’t mean that all homophobically, I’m not trying to get all hate crime-y or anything, you know, I support the gays, I think everyone should get to choose their own sexuality, or, you know, born this way, whatever, it’s just that I, personally, am not into it.”
Stef bites his lip and frowns lightly and Aaron hates the way the rush of blood in his ears and the sudden dizziness combine to almost obscure Stef’s reply: “Okay, Aaron. Sure. No gay stuff.”
Aaron practically runs for the bathroom.
* * *
He’s back. He’s out of his room and he’s talking to her and he’s back. He was looking at her kind of funny, out there in the corridor, but that’s not important. That’s just a detail. It doesn’t matter, because the little shit’s not going to rot away in his room, after all. Even if he kind of smells like he has been, a little bit.
The sponsors were right: what Aaron needed was time and nothing more. Irritating. Stef makes a mental note to listen to them a bit more in future; they basically wrote the book on making happy girls out of sad boys. And with only a — she attempts the maths in her head, but quickly gives up — fifteen-ish percent failure rate!
She examines herself in the mirror. Decent enough, considering. Eyebrows still a little bushy, obviously, but she didn’t miss any spots when she shaved, and her skin looks pretty clear.
That failure rate, though; it’s worrying, and it’s why she’s still down here. All the reassurances, all the promises, all the statistics in the world won’t make her abandon that boy entirely to the care of people who, no matter what they say, have seen a hundred boys like him and probably aren’t all that attached to any specific one. Not until he becomes more like them, at any rate.
So, how should she deal with him, now everything’s (mostly) out in the open? She’ll have to be careful not to be too feminine around him; she’ll be the first to admit she’s rather let that slide, since it’s just been her and Martin.
And ’no gay stuff’! She giggles; she can work with that. Keep her distance, that sort of thing.
She critically examines the contents of her wardrobe. It sucks. Upstairs she has skirts and dresses and leggings and jeans and some things she’s not entirely sure of the names of yet, and anything she doesn’t have can be borrowed or bought, but down here it’s nothing but fitnesswear; male fitnesswear, at that. At least she has nicer underwear now — still very nearly possible to explain away as briefs, should it come to that — and sports bras, so she doesn’t poke through the t-shirts.
The bras are harder to explain away than the other underwear. She plans to claim, if anyone — such as Aaron — pulls her up on them, to have very sore nipples and to have gotten fed up with them rubbing against the t-shirts, which isn’t all that far from the truth. The boys will all be getting bras of their own, anyway, sooner or later, and for the same reason. Pippa said they prefer to wait until someone snaps and asks for one, and when Stef raised a doubting eyebrow she said it usually happens eventually, notwithstanding Aaron’s early (terrible) jokes. It was Pippa who did so, in her intake, which didn’t make it any more pleasant to be around the others. “I swear we had nastier t-shirts than you,” she said, rubbing one of Stef’s tops between her fingers. “It was like sandpaper on my nips. After a month, I couldn’t take it any more.”
Stef dumps everything out onto the bed and sorts through sizes and colours. There’s not much variation in either, but with a little experimentation she comes up with an outfit that is, at the very least, presentable: a dark green t-shirt (to hide the sports bra), the baggiest pair of joggers she has (for comfort, and to exaggerate what little contrast there is in her figure), and a hoodie, tied around the waist (to cinch the t-shirt tight). She brushes out her hair and experimentally tries bunching it up behind her head; still not quite long enough for a ponytail, although she can gather a few strands if she really yanks on it. Another few weeks, maybe. She scrunches it, instead, and shakes her head again to even out the slight wave.
In the mirror she looks… androgynous. Barely any more feminine than she looked when she woke up! Not an outcome she particularly likes, but Aaron’s back, so for the moment she needs to strike a balance between looking how she wants to look, and looking so masculine she wants to claw at herself. She catches herself wondering if she can speed up his development so she can dress the way she does upstairs, and then frowns and has to stop herself from kicking the wardrobe; necessary or not, she won’t celebrate Aaron’s feminisation. Not prematurely.
“Fucksake,” she mutters. Why does everything good have to come with a side-order of shit?
Never mind. There’s no changing his trajectory, so it’s better just to forget it. Forget it and help him acclimate to now. The future’s a worry for another day.
She pulls the case and the charms off her phone, locks them in the drawer, puts her computer to sleep, and heads back out.
Aaron’s not in the common room yet — she thinks she heard him pad wetly down the corridor while she was agonising over her hair — but she chooses to trust that he’ll show. No-one else is around yet, so she declines to turn on the TV and fetches instead a book from the pile in the corner. Relaxed restrictions in the time since Will and the others got put back in the cells have meant a slow widening of the scope for entertainment in the common room, and the unlocked cabinets now give them access to chess and draughts sets, a Monopoly board, a delightfully dated early 2000s Trivial Pursuit claiming to be the ‘Cyberspace Edition’ that she wants at some point to torture Christine with, and a healthy supply of romance books, from battered and ancient het stuff Stef’s been ignoring, to newer queer romances. She undogs the page she was on in her latest read — she described it to Martin as ‘lesbian baker meets bisexual barista’, which information the man received with the same dispassionate placidity as he does everything else; God, it’ll be good to have Aaron back — and settles down on the couch, arranging herself so she’ll see Aaron when he comes in. She scans the page and picks up where she left off.
Ah, yes: the bakery and the upscale coffee shop are duking it out in the town’s annual Croissant Contest.
* * *
Aaron determinedly recentres the he pronoun in his mind as he pushes through the doors to the common room and sees Stef curled up on one of the couches, his elbow on an elevated knee and his temple resting on his wrist, doing that little fucking frown again, and reading a book with a pink, purple and blue cover, illustrated with a cartoon pastry in the shape of a heart. He looks unguarded, relaxed, and ridiculously feminine. Which still makes no sense: he looks barely any different from how Aaron remembers, so what’s changed?
“Aaron!” Indira squeals from behind him, running up from the direction of the stairs. He turns around and backs away from her into the common room, but she follows, letting the doors shut behind her and leaning on them. Does she know she’s blocking his way out, or is she just being ditzy? Impossible to tell. “You’re out of bed!” she enthuses. “And—” she sniffs, “—you washed!”
He holds up his hands, as if to ward off evil. “I did,” he says, hating the way he stammers over the words and finding nothing else to follow them; whatever part of his brain ordinarily does the talking for the rest of him is obviously horribly out of practice. It doesn’t help that her boundless enthusiasm and limitless energy are both turned all the way up this morning; come back, cynical, sardonic Maria! All is forgiven! Even these fucking tits!
Shit. When did he get so bad at dealing with overwhelming people? He survived years of boarding school, years of braying halfwitted posh fucks with no conception of personal space or consent without losing his grip this badly!
Yeah, but you never spent almost a week in the dark with only your phone screen for company back at school.
“What’s the occasion?” Indira says, but before he can reply and before she can say anything else, a hand — Stef’s — closes over his shoulder.
“Hey, Dira,” Stef says, moving forward into the space Aaron occupies and subtly pulling him back at the same time. “Do you mind if I borrow him for a bit? We have a lot to catch up on.”
“Of course,” Indira says, beaming at the both of them. “Why don’t I go upstairs and let them know there’ll be one extra when they start on lunch?”
“Thanks, Dira.”
When she’s gone, and when he’s collapsed on a couch, opposite from Stef, tired out from even this much contact with — he counts — two people, he manages a smile for Stef.
“Thanks for the rescue.”
“No problem,” Stef says, retrieving his book, folding the corner of a page over and throwing it onto the other couch cushion. “She can be a bit much, sometimes.”
“Only sometimes? She’s like if you could fill a nuke with niceness instead of radiation and explosions. And that only makes it scarier when she turns it off and threatens to feed you through a tube.”
He tried the passive resistance thing a couple of times, leaving his food uneaten and then, when she switched him to the nutrient shakes, waiting until the early hours and pouring them down the toilet. The first few times she cheerily provided more food, more milkshakes, and waited with him until he choked at least some of it down. And then, one time, she didn’t bring anything. She let him go hungry, all night and for most of the next day, and came back in the evening with a new milkshake. Before she handed it over — and he was alarmed to find himself instinctively grabbing for it — she gravely informed him that if he didn’t cooperate, she’d have him taken to a spare cell, strapped down, and tubed. It was enough to make him reconsider his still-forming plans to resist the injections.
“Jesus, Aaron,” Stef says.
“Yeah, well, I’m getting used to her. Never thought I’d miss Maria, though.”
“Careful,” Stef says, nodding in the direction of the nearest camera array, “someone will record that and send it to her.”
Aaron smirks, cups his hands around his mouth in a makeshift megaphone, and yells, “I miss you, Maria! Come back and save me!”
Stef laughs. It’s a real laugh, too, reaching his eyes and rocking his body back a little on the couch. It’s good to see. But then he curls up, suddenly too serious, and bunches his knees up under his chin, the way he used to, back before he learned to relax; just the sight of it makes Aaron’s heart lurch.
“So,” Stef says, “what about me? Am I too much?”
Oh. Yeah. That. “Sometimes,” he says. He doesn’t want to push Stef away, push him further into the arms of the sponsors — they seem to have gotten to know each other even better in his absence; he calls her Dira! — but lines have to be drawn, you know?
Stef looks away. “Sorry.”
It’s Aaron’s turn now, to lean forward, to lessen the distance between them. “Hey,” he says, “no, look. I get it.” Stef looks at him again, and Aaron’s uncomfortably transfixed. Did Stef always used to bite his lip so fucking much? There’s something going on with him. Something beyond the tits and arse they’re all being forced to grow. But whether it’s new or whether it’s not, it’s distracting, and Aaron’s got to look down at his knees or he’ll mangle his words. “I really get it. And I’m, you know, maybe a little bit flattered? Maybe a lot? It’s good to be noticed and stuff, but suddenly—” his throat goes dry, “—suddenly I’m thinking maybe you never did notice me that way, and I’ve just been stewing on a misunderstanding for nearly a week, like, maybe you were just sort of awkwardly expressing a desire for good, manly company and honest friendship among best bros or some shit, but I read it the other way, the uncomfortable way, and I’m sorry for that, for assuming, and also sorry for overreacting? Oh, yeah, and when I say stewing on it, I mean it’s only one of the things I’ve been thinking about. One of many things. You know. In my room. In the dark.”
“You didn’t have your lights on? For five days?”
“Not the point. I’m sorry, okay? You apologised to me for, you know, that thing you said that I totally misinterpreted, and now I’m apologising to you for, uh, I guess for throwing things. It’s just that I’m not gay, and I probably still have all this latent homophobia, like Maria’s books talked about, and I was having a bad day… We all were, actually, because that was when the truth about all this came out and, shit, I need to say sorry for that, too. I basically said you were fine with all this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Stef says, and Aaron looks up to confirm that the lighter tone of his voice does in fact mean he’s smiling. “You were kind of right. I… adapt. Like I said. I keep going. It’s not necessarily a healthy coping mechanism, but it works.”
“Yeah. Yeah, no, I get it.”
Stef unfolds again, tucks his ankles under his backside, his hands under his calves. Still a little closed in, maybe, but not seriously so. Shit, has Aaron ever paid such close attention to someone’s body language before?
“For the record, though,” Stef says, and the blush is right there on his stupid freckled cheeks, “I did notice you ‘that way’.”
Well.
There it is.
Okay then!
This is absolutely something he needs to nip in the bud right away; he needs to clarify his position, confirm that they’re just going to be friends, pals, buddies, mates, and no more, because if there’s one complication he doesn’t need while he’s sitting down here underground like a fucking potato growing unexpected tits, it’s—
In his haste to come up with something to say, Aaron swallows air. It bursts back out of him in a hiccup, and he slaps his chest a couple of times, to steady his breathing. Unfortunately, even striking himself right in the centre of his ribcage causes the sensitive parts of his chest to react, which makes recovery more difficult. “Fuck,” he gasps, airless, faint and tingling unpleasantly. “Fuck.”
“Sorry!” Stef says, for the hundredth time, and releases one of the hands he’s had trapped under himself to wave defensively. “I won’t bring it up again!”
Aaron shakes his head, massages his ribcage, and swallows experimentally. “No,” he wheezes, “it’s fine. We can talk about it. Maria always said I should talk more.”
Now it’s Stef who looks like he’s about to faint. “Maria said that? To you?”
Aaron coughs. God, that hurts. “Talk more about important things, she said. Quote: ‘If you paid half as much attention to the contents of your mind as you did to the contents of your underpants you might one day find you have something useful and intelligible to say.’” He frowns. “That’s not an exact quote. I think she stopped in the middle to sigh at me. She used to do that a lot, you know, like get halfway through a thought or a lecture and just look at me like I’m the world’s biggest disappointment — which, fair — and do this little sigh, like…” He demonstrates. Hams it up a little, for Stef.
“You legitimately miss her, don’t you? For real.”
What, actually, is the point of pretending otherwise? In a few months or a few years or however long it ultimately takes, he’s not even going to be him any more. He won’t be around to remember the embarrassment, so why not just say it? “Yeah. Kinda.” Stef’s watching him, not smiling, merely attentive, and Aaron fills the silence. “She always seemed like she took me seriously, you know? Like, however much she disliked me — hated me — she was invested in me. And, even now, knowing this was their plan all along, their big experiment, or whatever, I think she was genuinely rooting for me. Behind the frustration and the, you know, the very real hatred. Indira… it’s more like she’s babysitting me. Which, I guess, she sorta is. Keeping me fed, keeping me breathing, for when Maria gets better. You think she’ll get better?”
Stef nods. “I’ve been getting updates from Pip. She’s on the mend.”
He’s surprised at the intensity of his relief. “Good.” And then not surprised at all by his need to change the subject. “So, uh, you’re gay, then?”
“Dunno,” Stef says, shrugging. He doesn’t seem all that bothered by the question. Of course: while Aaron’s been hiding, Stef’s been working on himself. And his hair. “Maybe? Or bi. It’s never come up before.”
And why did that make him feel better? “Dude. Seriously? I’m your first?”
Stef laughs, a little too loud. “What? No. I’ve kissed people before.”
“Oh, have you now?” Aaron says, smirking. “Very convincing.”
“Girls,” Stef clarifies. “I’ve kissed girls.”
More than Aaron’s done. “Yeah, well,” he says, suddenly bitter, “you’re going to be one soon enough, if these maniacs get their way. And I don’t see any way to stop them.” Getting strapped down and fed through a straw does not appeal. “I don’t suppose you’ve come up with a way to get out of it, have you?”
Stef shakes his head. “Nope. Locked doors. Tasers. Outnumbered like five to one, at best. They have a whole houseful of women trying to make me more like them, and I was never a fighter, Aaron. If anyone threatens to strap me down, I’m going to do whatever they say. I’ve been making my peace with it.”
“Hence the hair mousse.”
“Yes,” Stef says, laughing. Actually laughing about it!
“Jesus tapdancing Christ,” Aaron says. “It’s beyond surreal, you know that, right? You’re all confident now, with your hair mousse, and your…” He flounders. “Okay, so maybe that’s the only thing, but still, I remember when you first walked in here, all scrawny and glancing around you like a— a—” God, he’s not doing well. “Right, um, you know when you catch mice? Like, the humane way, not with traps. You get a tall bucket and a long ruler and you put some peanut butter on the end of the ruler and when the mouse runs up it to get the food the ruler tips over—” he mimes it, pivoting his joined arms at the hands, “—and the mouse falls in the bucket. And then you get out of bed and reset the ruler for the next mouse. Anyway, in the morning, when you come for the bucket so you can take them out of the house, and you look down to see if they’re okay, they do this thing where they run around, testing the walls to see if they can climb out or otherwise escape, and they constantly stop what they’re doing to check on you, to make sure you’re not a threat. Like, scurry, look, scurry, look.” He mimes that, too. “That’s what you were like when you got here.”
Stef’s watching him, eyes soft. “You used to catch mice in a bucket?”
He’s blushing, he knows it. He squirms into the couch cushion. “Our old place, before we got rich, it was near a pub. Pubs get mice. So we did, too. And I didn’t want to catch them and put them out the back door because pubs also put down traps and poison and stuff.”
“What did you do with them?”
Now he’s really blushing. He remembers a boy at school — his old school — making fun of him when they caught him with his mice. Took them off him. “I put perforated paper over the lid of the bucket, put the bucket in a rucksack, and walked a few miles down the road to where there was an old farm. Lots of stuff around to eat, no-one putting down traps.”
“You’re so kind, Aaron,” Stef says, and the warmth in his voice is almost enough to push Aaron back to his room right away.
“You’re different now,” Aaron mutters. “That’s all I was trying to say. You’ve changed. Become, I don’t know, more… Look, you’re not all skittish any more. It’s weird. It’s like you’re happy, even though you’ve given up.”
“I haven’t given up. I’ve just… Look, okay, it’s like the trolley problem, right?”
“Right. What?”
“The trolley problem, the thing with the two tracks, and the lever, and—”
“I’ve seen the memes.”
“Okay. So there’s a guy on both tracks, right? And in this example, he, well—” he smirks, “—he gets made into a girl whatever happens. But by pulling the lever, I can change it from an experience that’s a huge, painful struggle from beginning to end, to something that’s just kind of not so bad. I chose to pull the lever.”
“Stef, that’s— that’s actually bullshit. It’s also not how the trolley problem works.” Maybe if it was Declan on the other track…
“It’s just what works for me,” Stef says quickly.
“Yeah, well, I think I need to find another thought experiment,” Aaron says. “Maybe one with a big fucking drill I can use to escape this place. I don’t want it, Stef. I don’t want what they’re doing to me.”
“I know,” Stef says quietly. “How are you doing with that?”
He has to laugh. “Honestly? Fucking terribly. It’s like I can feel these fucking tits growing, Stef. Yeah, I know there’s barely anything there right now, but I know how this shit goes.” He starts counting on his fingers. “They’re pumping me with estrogen, they’ve been completely suppressing my testosterone for months now, Indira’s been talking about introducing progesterone soon, and I’d ask where it ends but I know where it ends. ‘All the way,’ that’s what they said. And I know exactly what that means, because like a fucking idiot I asked: they’re going to take my fucking balls, Stef, and when I close my eyes that’s basically all I can think about.” He winces; it’s exactly a half-truth. “For a while I managed to pretend to myself that it was all just a ploy, a game, all part of some grand punishment. Some fun they were having with our bodies and minds, seeing who breaks first, who lasts longest, and so on. Grind our boners to make their bread and all that. But Indira convinced me: they’re fucking serious, Stef. They’re turning us into women because they think it’ll help us. Make us better people. And you want to know the worst thing? I blame myself.”
“What? No, Aaron—”
Impossible to stop it all coming out now. “I blame myself, and I fucking should! There were eight of us in this place, with, what, three of us from the university itself? Four? I forget. I didn’t ever care enough about the others to remember. It doesn’t matter. Point is, there were eight of us. All of us bastards; even you, apparently, although I struggle to see it. And that’s the other thing I can’t stop thinking about: if I’d been just a little bit less of a prick, if I’d kept it in my fucking pants, if I’d kept my head down, some other poor fucker would be down here and I’d still be walking around out there, not a care in the world. It’s like this place is a natural disaster, a fucking tornado or something, and I was the idiot running up to film it on my phone, and the footage of my fuckup will circulate on the internet forever with a timestamp that will only get more poignant with the passing years. I’m the idiot disappearing into the swirling clouds while my phone drops from my hands.”
“You don’t deserve this, though.”
“Didn’t say I do. But I fucking might, Stef. I really might! I thought about my future, about the man I was going to become, and I hated him. I hated how inevitable it was that I was going to be him some day because I have — had — have no self-control, and I hated him.” Clenching his fist is involuntary and inevitable. “I hated his guts. It was like coming here let me see myself from the outside for the first time ever. I finally see myself, but only as I’m getting sucked into the fucking tornado. I mean, I always knew I was a bastard, sure — I told you, as a kid I thought those fuckers at school were some grand retribution from the universe — but I never knew I was so fucking pathetic. I’m a slimy little fuck who takes no responsibility for his own shit, imagines karmic retribution because it’s easier than facing the people he’s hurt… I took pictures of my own cock, for Christ’s sake. What they’re doing to me? I don’t want it. I hate the thought of it almost as much as I hate myself right now, but I can’t pretend I didn’t bring this on myself.”
Silence for a little while. Stef’s just looking at him, compassionate.
“You know what I don’t get?” Aaron says. “Why you like me. Even now. Especially now! They gave you a whole fucking PowerPoint presentation on my shit.” Stop talking, Aaron. “What is there to even like about me?” Stop talking now. “There’s nothing to me, Stef. Nothing there. Take away the bad shit and there’s nothing left.” It doesn’t matter that they’re in the common room any more, doesn’t matter that someone might come in. Doesn’t matter that all this is probably being recorded. It’s all coming out and that’s that. “And that’s what scares me, you know? Even more than everything else. More than what they want to do to me. I’m scared I’m just a hardened shell of shit around nothing. I’m scared because I know it’s true.”
He expects Stef to come over, to hold his hand or pat him on the arm, the way he used to, occasionally, but he doesn’t. On the other couch, miles away if he’s an inch distant, he stiffens up, plays with his hands. He looks lost, but when he talks, it’s with a conviction Aaron’s not sure he’s ever heard from him.
“Who’s talking to me, Aaron?” Stef says. “Right now, who’s talking to me?” Aaron doesn’t answer; he doesn’t know. “Remember, weeks ago, when Declan attacked us? Who was it who charged him, pushed him aside, stopped him from seriously hurting me? When I hurt myself, when I tried to bloody scald myself all over, who brought me back to my senses? Was it the ’nothing’ inside your shell? Or was it you, the real you, the one who doesn’t need to do all the shit you used to do? The one who isn’t defined by what you’ve done, or what people say about you, or even what’s going to happen here?” Stef doesn’t get up, but he does move to the other end of the couch, almost close enough to touch. “I hated you when I first got here. Like, really hated you. Because I saw the shell. Like Maria did, and the other sponsors. But when we got to know each other, I started seeing you, and God help me, I like you.” He pauses, knots his eyebrows again. “I think Maria sees you, too. A bit. Maybe not the way I see you, but she does.”
It pulls a smile out of Aaron. “I never understood you,” he says. “You’re too good for this place.”
Stef smiles. “I got some help recently. While you were in your room. And it helped me realise just how much we filter when we look at ourselves, when we think about ourselves. I got so used to seeing myself one way…” He trails off. Is that why he seems so different? Someone helped him to see himself in a different way? Here? That seems… risky.
“What other way is there to see yourself?” Aaron asks. “As a— as a fucking girl?”
“No. As someone with potential, not as someone whose life has been squandered.” Stef leans back a little, and Aaron resists the instinct to lean forward to match. “I always saw myself as someone kind of… waiting around for life to start. Everything was awful and kept getting worse, and it was like, if I waited long enough, maybe everything would just work out. Even though I knew it wouldn’t. Stupid as hell, I know. And then, obviously, I came to Dorley.” Stef shakes his head. “I made everything so complicated, up here—” he taps his temple, “—but it’s pretty simple, really. The guy I was, he was an idiot. But I don’t have to be him any more. Not if I don’t want to.”
“I mean, that’s not really optional, is it?” Aaron says, without thinking.
Stef rolls his eyes. “I don’t mean it like that. Although, I guess, kind of a little bit like that?” he adds, looking thoughtful. “Whatever. That’s not the part that matters.”
“Not the part that matters? Stef. Stefan.”
“Yes?”
Fuck it. “Never mind.” It’s starting to become clear now: the different way he stands, his confidence, the hair mousse… Stefan’s been spending too much time around women. That’s why he bought into his trolley problem bullshit; the women around here are simply too nice to him, whereas the men are sub-fucking-par. It’s too easy for him to see men as the failure state. That’s got to be it. What man does Stef even have, if not Aaron? Adam? Martin? Tweedles Dee, Dum and Dickhead in the cells?
“Aaron?” Stef says. “You okay?”
Is he? It’s getting to be a complicated question. “Yeah. Sort of. I don’t know. Look, uh, Stef. I’m going to head back to my room now, for a bit. And I mean just for a bit!” He adds quickly, to combat Stef’s obvious disappointment. “It’s not going to be like it was; I’m not going to go all fucking hermit again. I need a bit of time to get back up to speed, you know? After so long on my own, it’s kind of tiring just being around people.”
Stef nods. “Sure,” he says. “Sure. Just don’t be a stranger, okay?”
“I won’t,” Aaron says, standing up and stretching limbs made stiff and sore by tension. “I’m, uh, glad I didn’t fuck things up between us completely. You know. The other day.”
“Yeah,” Stef says, unfolding from his couch and hopping to his feet, “I’m glad I didn’t, either.” There’s an awkward moment where neither of them seems to want to look at the other one, and then Stef blurts out, “So, um, hug?”
“What?”
“I’ve missed you, man.”
“That’s still so weird. That you miss me. That anyone would.”
“Elizabeth missed you, right? When you saw each other regularly. She missed you when you weren’t there.”
“I suppose.”
“And that was strictly platonic. So’s this.”
“You want a platonic hug?”
“Yes.”
“Because you missed me.”
“Yes.”
“Fine.” Aaron doesn’t know quite how to proceed, so he loosens his arms and waits.
“Okay, just, if you come over, like—”
“Oh, sure. Shit, I’m stuck in the sofa.”
“So move your foot?”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“You have hugged someone before, haven’t you?” Stef says, embracing him. He sounds all too smug for Aaron’s taste, so he steps lightly on his toes for a moment.
“No trick questions.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay. We’re done.”
“We’re done.”
“Yeah. Just let me step back—”
“Sure, and I’ll—”
“Hah!”
“Don’t laugh.”
“Now you’re stuck in the sofa.”
Aaron sidesteps out from between the couches, to give Stef the space to extricate his foot from the troublesome spot where the flap of fabric intersects with the front leg of the couch. When he’s done, Aaron nods, smiles, and scurries out of the common room. Halfway down the corridor he turns and yells back at the closing doors, “Tell Indira I’m sorry I’m going to miss lunch! I’ll have something later!”
Stef yells back, “Sure!” and Aaron wonders, as the doors close, how he got his voice to sound so clear.
* * *
She sits back down on the couch after he leaves, sinking heavily into the cushions and thinking furiously: he seemed… okay? Still railing against the changes, obviously, but surviving. Making jokes. Even reflecting on his past! And she saw the look on his face when she did her best to ram home that there are things about him that are real, that are likeable, that are worth preserving. He looked like she’d offered him a frozen hippo. Like she’d presented him with a concept he never considered before.
Stef retrieves her book and flicks through it but leaves the page corner folded because she knows she won’t be able to concentrate on anything else. She runs the pages against her thumb as she thinks.
Could she have supported him more vocally against the programme? Perhaps. He’s definitely still dwelling on the changes that are to come. But there’ll be time to talk to him more about that, if he’s true to his word and doesn’t disappear into the dark for another five days. Maybe tomorrow, now the air’s cleared, they can talk in more detail about his future.
That went pretty well!
“I don’t think any of us could have done better,” Indira says, flopping down onto the other couch, into the exact spot Aaron just vacated. “You brought him out of himself just enough.”
“He did that himself,” Stef argues, sitting forward again. “I didn’t get him to leave his room. We just… bumped into each other.”
“I saw you lingering in the corridor when you heard him banging around in there, so take some credit. It’s okay, Stephanie, really. Seeing him again is good for both of you.”
“Do you have to make everything I do so transactional?” Stef says, and when Indira laughs, adds, “What?”
“Think about what you just said, Steffie. Play it back in your head. Slowly, if you have to.”
“I still don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“Everything you do is transactional. By definition. Because you’re doing them. They’re trans actio—”
“Oh my God,” Stef snaps. “Really? Now? After…” She waves her hands around as she tries to think of the right word to sum up colliding with Aaron, dressing for him, talking him through his self-hatred, and having to watch him leave again. It takes a few seconds before she realises her brain, still running on useless adrenaline, isn’t, in this instance, going to be helpful. “After that?”
“When you’ve been here as long as I have,” Indira says, “you learn to see the humour in everything.” Her tone turns mournful, inspiring Stef to look back at her; she’s frowning, and twitching her upper lip. “You have to, or it’ll all get too much.”
“You could just stop, you know. If it’s all too much. I know you’re kind of committed with this lot. But why not close it all down when we move on?”
“Are you kidding?” Indira says, blinking hard and wiping at her eyes. “The programme will go on as long as we can make it go on. I know you’re still sceptical, but we do good work! If we hadn’t intercepted this intake — yourself excluded — Declan would still be assaulting his girlfriend, Ollie and Raph would still be Ollie and Raph, Will would be wandering around campus like an unexploded rage bomb, Martin would be, admittedly, mostly only a danger to himself as long as he stayed away from cars, and Aaron… Well, you know what he was up to.”
“What about Adam?” Stef says. “I’ve never been able to get a handle on exactly why he’s here.”
She shrugs. “Adam spent his entire life being wound up like a toy by a Christian sect of fanatical bigots. He was on the verge of being unleashed on the country as a deeply conflicted young man with prejudice practically tattooed onto his bones and the need for righteous justice drilled into his head. He was a walking hate crime, Steph. The way he was raised, he had almost no choice not to be. At the very least, we’ve saved a few Pride parades and abortion providers from being picketed by him; at worst, we’ve prevented something truly awful.”
That’s close to Stef’s conclusions about Adam, put together from the pieces he gave her when she went to see him in his room a week or so ago, but it’s still startling to hear it confirmed. “Yeah,” she says. “Point made.” Not exactly, but it’s not a conversation Stef’s keen to have over and over again.
“And ‘transactional’ is still funny,” Indira says, smiling again.
“It’s not.”
“I’m going to have it put on a mug.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to inspire one of those bloody things.”
She pulls her phone out of a pocket in her dress and taps at it for a moment. “Too late!”
“Shit.”
“Sorry.”
“I meant what I said, though,” Stef says. “I don’t want to think of everything I do as so… cynical. Even if some of it has to be.”
“You sound like Pippa.”
“Well… that’s fine. She has good instincts.”
“She does. And she knows when to suppress them, just like you. You got your foot stuck on purpose, didn’t you?”
No choice but to admit it, really. “Yeah. I wanted to keep the tone light. He got his foot all wrapped up in the fabric under the sofa, and it seemed like a good thing to copy. Don’t grin at me like that! I don’t like manipulating him.”
Indira switches couches, sits next to her and wraps an arm around her shoulder. “It’s okay,” she says. “He needs it. He needs to have a friend, an ally, just as he needs me to play my role and Maria, hers. When Aaron leaves here — and she will, with your help — she’ll have a life she could never have dreamed of. The fact that he never knew to dream of the exact life we’re giving him isn’t as important as the opportunities she’s going to have.”
Stef would protest, but what would be the point? She nods instead, and sinks into Indira’s arms, allowing herself to be comforted. Like she said to Lorna, her objections have become routine; everyone here knows them, herself included. It’s exhausting to keep trying to fly into the wind. She’s not exactly Dorleypilled, like Christine said — like she used to accuse Christine of being — but she’s one woman against a whole platoon, whose commanders are all true believers and whose troops are, at best, just going along with it for the sake of a quiet life. She can’t beat them; why not join them?
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Indira whispers. “He’ll be okay and so will you. We’re all here for both of you.”
Besides, it’s nice, here in Indira’s arms. Easy to see why Christine loves her so much.
They decide to go upstairs for lunch. No point hanging around the basement, Indira said, if there’s no-one else to hang around with. Christine and Paige join them out of the security room, with Christine packing up three laptops to bring with her, “So no-one messes with them. You people have no instinct for opsec.” Indira responds with an injured look and an exaggerated finger pressed to her breast that makes Christine giggle and lunge for her, and the two of them arrive in the dining hall ahead of Paige and Stef, because Paige wants to add a little more volume to Stef’s hair and try some eyeshadow colours on her, and pointedly holds Stef back to get her permission before doing either.
“Yes, yes,” Indira says, “you’re so ethical. I’m very impressed.” She ignores the rude gesture Paige directs at her, and asks, “Who wants pizza? I want to order in.”
A show of hands — including from two other groups of women in the dining hall — approves the idea, and Indira goes around the room, taking orders. Christine, Paige and Stef claim a smaller table near the kitchen, so Stef can meet people coming and going and get another precious glimpse of the outside world through three sets of double doors, and Paige unwraps a new-looking eyeshadow palette and bids Stef sit very still.
“Thank you, Stephanie,” she says.
“Oh, uh, no problem.”
“I’ve been wanting to try these shades,” Paige says, frowning in concentration, “But there aren’t many here with your colouring. Would you mind if I took a picture afterwards? I won’t upload it anywhere.”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Stef says. “If I look okay, can you send it to me, too?”
“You’ll look more than okay, Steph,” Christine says, poking her in the upper arm. “You’re really pretty already, and only getting prettier.” She giggles. “We saw how Aaron responded when he saw you. Like you were a sexy cartoon fox and he was a skunk with his jaw dropping to the floor.”
Stef wants desperately to close her eyes, but Paige is still layering colour onto them, so she settles for having a minor, perfectly stationary panic attack. “You were watching?”
“On and off. Didn’t listen, though. Just wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to lunge at you, or something.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“All the same,” Christine says, “it’s my job now. I have to be responsible.” She sighs grandly, holding the back of a hand to her forehead. “It’s awful.”
“It actually is,” Paige whispers.
Christine stretches, giving Stef another chance to look at her outfit. “You look great, Christine,” she says, taking in the eye-catching makeup and the artfully faded green dress with the faint white spots down each side.
“I know, right?” she says. “I was Paige’s first victim of the day. Did you see the shoes?” She angles her feet so Stef can see: white sandals with black soles and black detailing on the straps. “The shoes are my favourite part.” She covers one side of her mouth with her hand and stage-whispers, “I’m keeping them.”
“I already said you can keep them,” Paige says absently. “You’re not a rebel.”
“She thinks I’m not a rebel,” Christine says to Stef, shaking her head.
“Life is hard,” Stef sympathises.
“Her feet are smaller than mine, too,” Paige says. “Those shoes are literally useless to me.”
“Paige, you have lovely feet!” Christine says, a little too loud. She slaps an embarrassed hand over her mouth, too late to stop the entire dining hall overhearing.
A girl on the other side of the room, wearing a hoodie and pink and white thigh socks, yells, “Woo! Yeah!” before her friend silences her by pulling her hood, which has cat ears on, down over her head. Stef giggles at Christine’s mortified face, now mostly hidden behind her hands.
“Thank you, Christine,” Paige says, and air-kisses in her direction.
“Why is it,” she says, “that I can spend a year in a dungeon and have my testicles nonconsensually removed, but it’s only at times like this that I want to die?”
Indira, returning from her rounds, sits next to Christine and rubs her between her shoulder blades.
“So, how is Aaron?” Paige asks, while Christine copes with her mortification.
Stef tries to shrug without jolting Paige’s hand. She’s moved on from Stef’s eyes and is doing something around her temples. “He’s struggling. But he’s out of his room, as you saw. I presented my acquiescence as me simply acceding to the inevitable, and he was… well, he wasn’t okay with it, but he didn’t throw things at me, either. And we talked about his guilt, his self-hatred, stuff like that. Progress, I think.”
“I never would have expected you to like him,” Paige says, as she does something to Stef’s cheek.
“Me neither,” Indira murmurs, still comforting Christine.
“Yeah, well,” Stef says, trying to frown without moving her face too much, “I kinda do. So we all just have to accept that I have terrible taste in men — or whatever — and move on.”
Paige grins, sits back, and extracts from her shoulder bag a truly massive phone in a sparkly pink case. “Moving on. I’m done! Say cheese?”
Stef obliges, and has to admit, when she sees the picture, that she looks pretty good. A lot like Pippa’s makeup from the night she came home from the club, but in a mixture of oranges and blues that feather away from her eyes. “Did you put something sparkly on my cheeks?” she says.
“I put something sparkly on your cheeks. Don’t worry; I have stuff in here to get it all off you before you go back down.”
A part of Stef, the part that wants to throw all her responsibilities to the wayside, move upstairs and indulge herself, tempts her to tell Paige not to worry about it. She ignores it, thanks her again, and turns to Indira and Christine, who are still wrapped up in each other.
“Hey,” she says, “I’ve been meaning to ask… Melissa doesn’t know I’m here, does she? I know she didn’t before, but…”
“No,” Indira says, shaking her head, “and that’s intentional. Abby was all set to tell her about you, back when she thought you were one of our—” she smiles toothily, “—more ordinary residents, but she changed her mind after Christine told her the truth about you.” She elbows Christine. “And hey, Chrissie, sweetie, I’m still offended you told her and not me.”
“Sorry,” Christine says, stretching out the final vowel. “But I was still your job, back then. I didn’t want to have to make you choose.”
“She didn’t tell me, either,” Paige says, smirking.
“Stop stirring, babe.”
“Never.”
“Why wouldn’t Abby want Melissa to know about me?” Stef asks. She’s assembled, from talking to Abby, about half an explanation, but Christine was right when she said Abby prefers to see only the best in everyone.
“The programme was difficult for Melissa,” Indira says, leaning forward on her wrists. “She came in late, and she was very obviously of a different character to the others. Steffie, about Melissa… this might be difficult for you to hear.”
“I’ll be okay,” Stef says, reaching out to touch Indira’s elbow where she’s resting it on the table. “I want to know. If it’s about her, I want to know.”
Indira nods, and double taps her phone screen to wake it. “Pizza in fifteen,” she says, reading off the website on the screen. “Ish. Okay, the thing with Melissa is that Abby thinks she got to her just in time. That she might only have been months, even weeks, from doing something drastic.”
“To someone else?” It comes out quickly, but the idea of Melissa hurting someone on purpose has to be dispelled.
“No. Not unless it was collateral damage. It’s why Aunt Bea okayed such a late entry; the chances of her surviving another year were slim. Did you know that sometimes, with people like Melissa, we don’t necessarily bring them in straight away? One of us will try to befriend them, steer them gently towards better outcomes. Find them a therapist, pay for it if necessary; we have access to all sorts of very believable fake grants. As much as some here might fervently believe that womanhood is the preferable state for anyone who can handle it—” Indira rolls her eyes, and Stef wonders who, exactly, thinks that, “—it’s not actually our first choice. Sometimes lives can be turned around with the most minimal of interventions; a few targeted acts of kindness. I have a friend who graduated from Saints last year who still doesn’t know we helped him. Definitely doesn’t know what we do here. But with Melissa… She was in real trouble. Abby said you could see the end in his eyes. And, um, sorry about the pronoun. It’s just that I remember the exact way she said it. Hard to forget, actually.”
“It’s okay.” ‘You could see the end in his eyes’ — it really had been that bad, then? “Is that why it was so hard for her here? Because she was… close to the end?”
“That’s how it started. But she came in late, as I said — in November; imagine if we added someone new around the time your lot started getting your first estradiol shots — and that meant slotting into a developed dynamic, and she wasn’t exactly an assertive girl. And it was kind of a rough intake, and she was an easy target. So she spent most of her time with Abby. And because the sponsors assigned to her year had their hands full with the other residents, and Abby was a first-time sponsor who really wasn’t cut out for the job… It was a recipe for isolation and heartache. Melissa left the first chance she got, and she’s barely been back since. Broke poor Abigail’s heart.”
“I thought they were still friends?” Stef says, thinking of the photobooth pictures.
“Friends, yes,” Christine says. “But Abby wants more. Always did. She told me the story of how they first met, properly, outside the club, and I think she fell in love with her right there and then.”
“The club? The one where Mark disappeared?” The deadnaming’s accidental, and Stef winces, but there’s something about the period between Melissa retreating from her life and her disappearance — the part of Melissa’s history she has no access to — that’s indelibly stained with Mark. She decides to do better; she’s the actual trans girl in this bloody place! She should be better at this than the rest of them.
“Yeah.”
“I thought she would have just knocked her out? Isn’t that what you did to me?”
Christine smiles. “It’s probably best if Abby tells you herself. Or if Melissa does, when you see her again. Because you will see her again. When you’re both ready for it. I think Abs has a plan to soften her up, to slowly prepare her for the idea of you, here. And, hey! I didn’t knock you out! You just can’t handle your drink, Steph.”
“I think the overall impression,” Indira says, “from Abby and the sponsors, including me, is that if Melissa found out you were here, she’d come barrelling in and try and get you out, by any means necessary. And you don’t want to leave yet, do you?”
Stef gets a flash of Aaron in his concrete room, in the dark. “No,” she says. “Not yet.”
“Abby thinks she’ll think it’s her fault you’re here,” Christine says.
“Which is true,” Paige says. Indira glares at her. “What? It is! I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. If she hadn’t come here, Stephanie would never have even thought about us.”
“And Melissa’s got a rather… poor view of her younger self,” Indira says, rolling her eyes at Paige and returning her attention to Stef. “It’s yet another thing that colours her view of the programme.”
“She’s okay, though, isn’t she?” Stef says. She knows she is — she’s checked her file often enough — but sometimes it’s better to hear it than read it.
“She is. She’s got a nice life. She’s up in Manchester now. Doesn’t seem to have a steady girlfriend — a handful of short relationships, Abby says — but she’s got a job and, of course, Abby visits constantly. It’s fifty-fifty, if Abby’s not here, whether she’s at work or she’s up with Melissa. Right now, for example, I haven’t seen her for days, so I assume that’s where she is.” Indira smiles with her tongue between her teeth. “Pining.”
“They could be together,” Paige says idly. “Romantically, I mean. You don’t know.”
“They’re not,” Christine says. “Abby would be insufferable if they were.”
“True.”
“Hey, kids,” a voice says, and Stef looks around to see Tabby approaching, clutching a steaming, bright red mug in one hand, and a laptop in the other. “Mind if I join?”
The four of them wave various hands and Tabby sits at the end of the table, rests her elbows and cradles her head between them, groaning theatrically. Indira shifts her chair over, pushes Tabby’s things out of the way and starts rubbing her back the same way she rubbed Christine’s. Stef reaches over to move the mug farther away from the laptop, in case of spillage, and takes the opportunity to look at the design: it says, in capitals, KEEP CALM AND CAPTURE MEN, and where the crown would normally be is a stylised cartoon prison cell. Just once, Stef would like to see a mug with something innocuous printed on it. Christine’s promised her there’s the odd mug with simple boomer humour on, and the occasional innocent visual pun, but Stef’s decided Christine probably imagined them.
“You okay, sweetie?” Indira says.
Tabby, with her head still facing straight down, continues moaning and groaning. On the other side of the table, Christine picks up her phone, unlocks it, and frowns. Stef isn’t quite sure what to pay attention to.
“I hate those bloody boys,” Tabby says. “Oh, avoid Harmony. Ollie pissed her off so much I think she was headed out to the campus gym to beat the crap out of something, and if anyone gets in the way she might unload on them instead.”
“Are they really that bad?” Paige asks.
Tabby straightens up. “They’re… difficult. Ollie’s worst. Raph is merely obstructive. And Will… Fuck. Stephanie, I’m glad you’re here, and I’m glad Dira is, too, because I need to ask a really big favour.” She drinks deeply from her mug. “Will’s asking to talk to you.”
“To me?” Stef says.
“He said he has to talk to someone, and that it can’t be me. I asked him, who then? And he picked you. Instantly. But I didn’t say yes. Didn’t even say I’d think about it, or that I’d ask you. So he has zero expectations here.”
“It doesn’t seem like the best idea, Tab,” Indira says. “But Pippa’s out today, so I’ll cosign it with you if Steffie agrees.”
Stef’s thinking. Why would Will want to talk to her? They didn’t exactly part on good terms; she shouted a warning to Maria that might have saved her life and certainly ruined Will’s escape plans. Admittedly, those plans were pre-ruined, and she merely hastened their demise, but still: he has good reason to hate her. And she has no reason to help him.
Except for Adam.
Damn it.
“I’ll do it,” she says. “When’s best?”
“Really?” Tabby says, loud with relief. “That’s brilliant, Steph! And after lunch is fine.”
“You’re sure?” Indira says.
“He’ll be behind a locked door, right?” Stef says, and Indira and Tabby both nod. “Then I’ll be perfectly safe.”
“Thank you so much,” Tabby says. “I feel like I should give you a present. Um, I could make you some lunch?”
“Pizza’s on the way, actually,” Indira says sheepishly. “You just missed it.”
“Damn.”
Christine, who’s been whispering with Paige for the last minute or so, raises a hand. “You can have mine, if you want, Tab. You like spicy beef?”
“Love it. What’s up?”
Christine turns her phone around, showing a half-dozen texts from Vicky.
“We have to go do Lorna damage control,” she says. “Again.”
* * *
Christine really should learn to drive, and then she wouldn’t have to keep roping Paige into these things. They signed out one of the Hall’s handful of cars, and Paige didn’t complain for a moment about the need to chauffeur her girlfriend to their friend’s troublesome girlfriend’s house, and miss out on her pasta salad. She keeps glancing at Christine, the frown that lightly puckers the bridge of her nose firmly in place.
Paige finishes lurching the hatchback through the roundabout and onto the bypass, settles into a steady seventy, and asks the question Christine’s been dreading.
“How much shit are we in, exactly?”
Christine scrolls up and down the text messages from Vicky for a moment — all, apart from the ones exchanged after Christine got in the car, variations on a theme: Lorna’s working herself up to do something to force Vicky’s release from her responsibilities — and eventually admits, “Quite a lot. It’s not as bad as it could be, since she hasn’t actually done anything yet and she’s still centring Vick’s wellbeing, so she shouldn’t do anything rash, but… I did half a job, I think, when I read Lorna in. I was trusting Vicky to do the other half, and I know she’s tried, but she’s too close to her.” She shrugs. “My fault. My responsibility.”
“Not your fault,” Paige says instantly. “The sponsors are too eager to get you to do things like this. I know Lorna asked for you, but this kind of thing is too much to drop on your shoulders.” She drums her fingers irritably on the wheel. “She’s your friend, too; reading her in should not be your sole responsibility. And, yeah, I love Vicky, obviously, but she should have been more careful and she should have done the work. She didn’t.”
“I can’t be too upset with Vicky—”
“I can. I won’t show it, but this is her mess you’re stuck with — and it’s our day together she’s intruding on.”
Christine nods. “That’s not all I’m worried about. Lorna knows about me, Paige. I told her everything. And I remember how she looked at me, after. She sees him when she looks at me, and I’m… not good at handling that.”
Paige reaches over the gearshift and squeezes Christine’s thigh. “But you’re not that person any more. You’re Christine. You’re amazing. If she sees some stranger when she looks at you, some guy she only knows about because you told her about him, that’s her problem, not yours.”
“I think all of Dorley is her problem.”
“Well,” Paige says, “she never lived through it. She can’t understand, no matter how much she claims to love Vicky.”
“You don’t trust her, do you?”
“I’m keeping an eye on her. It’s just a shame we can’t lock her in the basement with no outside ideological input and wait for her to come around to the Dorley worldview. Vicky would get very upset with us.”
“Paige—”
“Worked with Stephanie, didn’t it?”
“Paige Adams, that’s the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Am I wrong, though?”
Christine’s forced to think about it for a second. “No, not technically. But it wasn’t on purpose!”
“All the same.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“Obviously,” Paige says, grinning. “Vicky would never let us do it.”
“God,” Christine says, massaging her temples. “I’m so tired of these constant adrenaline spikes. I want one normal week. I want to go to class and relax with you and not have anyone’s girlfriend threaten to out us as kidnappers and torturers. One week. To relax.”
“It’s a shame we don’t have more time,” Paige says, “or we could pull over and I could help you relax right now.” With her left hand resting on the wheel, she raises the first three fingers.
“Are you being filthy again?”
“Yes.”
Christine smiles, forced once again out of a bad mood by Paige, and whispers, “Later.”
Vicky and Lorna live with their other housemates in a four-storey terraced house on the other side of Almsworth, a long way from most of the city’s student-aimed accommodation and actually quite nice, for a student rental. Paige pulls up in the first available space, a little way down the road, and Christine takes the opportunity presented by the short walk to the front door to calm her nerves. It’s just Lorna, right? She’s a fundamentally nice person, right?
A fundamentally nice person who is convinced that Christine and everyone else involved with Dorley — with the sole exception of Vicky — is complicit in kidnapping and torture. Which, once again, yes, but it’s not that simple!
Hmm. Very calm, Christine. At least she has her lines of attack prepared.
Lorna opens the door, looking irritated. “Hi,” she says, packing a lot of insincerity into one syllable. “Vicky told me she texted you.”
“And you wish she hadn’t,” Paige says.
“Astute. Well, come in, then.”
The ground floor’s laid out exactly as Christine expects, with the main space divided into nominal dining and living areas, with enough furniture for several people and a stack of cheap-looking wooden chairs in the corner for guests. At the back of the room, one door leads into an L-shaped kitchen extension and another out into what is probably an extremely small garden. Vicky emerges from the kitchen as Lorna shuts the front door behind them, carrying a tray with four mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits.
Christine has to smile. Vicky always did like to play the host. It had been barely a week into their second year before she had the two of them and Jodie over to her room, and had them sit in communal confusion while she served drinks and snacks and engaged them all in enthusiastic conversation about what they were going to do with their new lives. At the time, Christine assumed Vicky was just revelling in feeling normal again, after their year underground; now, looking back, it seems more likely that she felt normal for the first time in her life.
Those small but sunny first-floor rooms already feel like a lifetime ago. Not a care in the world, except for the requirement to construct an entirely new self out of the scraps left to her.
Vicky silently hands out mugs, slides the tray onto the coffee table, and curls up in an armchair. Defensive.
“She shouldn’t have texted you,” Lorna says flatly, pointedly sitting in another chair on the other side of the table and embracing her mug of tea with both hands.
“Lorna—” Vicky says.
“Vicky! You can’t just call on your kidnapper mates for help when you lose the argument.”
“Lorna,” Christine says as kindly as she can, “yes, she should.” She and Paige are perched together on the central sofa, because if nothing else Christine’s going to need Paige’s reassuring warmth as close to her as possible. “You have to understand what’s at stake here. Whatever you’re planning—”
“I’m going right to this Beatrice woman,” Lorna snaps, “and I’m going to tell her I’ve got files on a flash drive mailed out to a friend in another country, and if she doesn’t give Vicky complete freedom, then my friend will make those files public. Vicky needs to get away from that place, she needs to be allowed to see family and friends from before she was kidnapped, before she was tortured; she needs to be able to tell people she’s trans; she needs to be able to live her life!”
“Lorna, darling,” Vicky says, half out of her chair in alarm, and Christine wonders if Lorna’s never actually vocalised her plan before; she’d assumed Vicky was being circumspect via text for opsec reasons, which, now that she comes to think about it, was probably foolishly optimistic of her, “that’s such a bad idea! You can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
Vicky’s falling over words in the haste to get them out. “You know why the programme still freaks me out so bad? Why I got out as soon as I could? It wasn’t just because I didn’t need them any more, it’s also because I knew the lengths Aunt Bea will go to in order to protect it! It was drilled into me! She’s capable of some really dark things, Lorna. You have to let this go.”
“You know I can’t.”
“I’m fine. Really!”
“And you know that’s a lie. You’re not fine, Vick.”
Christine, pinching the bridge of her nose, leans forward on the sofa. “Lorna, okay. There’s some stuff you need to know. Stuff we only touched on before. But, first, have you mailed the flash drive yet?”
“I haven’t even made it yet,” she says, affronted. She glares at Vicky and adds, “I wouldn’t have done it without talking to you first! You know that.” She looks back at Christine. “You didn’t need to bring in these… people.”
Great! Christine gets to be ‘people’; an upgrade from ‘kidnapper’. She rubs her fingers together as she breathes slowly. Vicky glances over at her, nervous about her reaction; Paige takes a bourbon cream from the plate.
“Vicky’s right, Lorna,” Christine says. “You have to drop this. Remember how I told you about the people who were made to disappear? One of them was just a violent rapist who was already in our custody, but the other… I need to tell you about Karen.”
Lorna sits back in her chair. All defiance. “Who the fuck is Karen?”
“Karen was a relic. A remnant of the old days, before Aunt Bea took over, when the programme at Dorley was about nothing more than sick pleasure for the people in charge. Long story short: she was trained as a nurse, and we needed her this year, for routine medical examinations. Awful person or not, she was in the know already; we can’t exactly contract out. And from what Maria’s said, not everyone who used to work under the old regime was a true sadist; she thinks a few of them were as under the thumb of the woman in charge as she was. But not Karen. She was a sick woman, Lorna, and I mean sick. She loved to humiliate people, loved to hurt them. And she hurt our boys, and she hurt Stephanie.” Another controlled exhalation. The briefing on Karen’s fate hadn’t been pleasant. “And she was also a game piece, a way for the old custodian of Dorley — the one who is actually sadistic and cruel — to remind us of her influence. Maybe as a prelude to some other action; we don’t know yet. So Beatrice… took her off the board.”
Lorna shifts uncomfortably, behind her mug. “What do you mean?”
“Bea had her killed. Through her contacts. Her very rich contacts, who can do more or less whatever they want. It wasn’t just because she hurt us, although she did. It was because of who she was, what she represented. And Karen wasn’t just anyone; she was connected. They had to be careful how they went about it. You, Lorna, with the greatest respect, are not. If Bea perceives you to be a threat, you will be controlled. Through insinuations, through threats, through restrictions placed on your freedom and your movements; possibly even through death. Bea doesn’t like to hurt people and she doesn’t like to waste them, but she has generations of women and other graduates to protect, and their loved ones, and their livelihoods, and I cannot promise you that if you go up against her, she won’t hurt you.”
“Tina,” Vicky says, “do you really think—?”
“Yes,” Christine says. “You said it yourself: Aunt Bea is capable of dark things, and you’re absolutely right to be wary of her. She might seem like an affable middle-aged fuddy-duddy, but she scared the crap out of me even before I found out what happened to Karen.” Memory makes her shudder. “I will not show you the pictures. Bea’s dangerous, Lorna. Please believe me, and please don’t do anything to piss her off.”
Lorna, in her armchair, nods. Sniffs noisily, wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Thank you, Christine,” she says. “Thank you for showing me exactly who you are.” She leans forward, dumps her tea mug on the table, and folds her arms. “I kept thinking about you. After I got back home that day. And all the others, sure, but especially you. I was fixated on you. And I couldn’t figure out why. Until I woke up sweating, because it all came together: you, Christine, locked me in! You told me, right there in the kitchen, that all the doors were locked! You told me you had control over them! And then you told me the worst shit I’ve ever heard in my life, fucking torture and kidnapping and nonconsensual fucking surgery, and you threatened me. Exactly like you did just now. You told me all the awful shit your precious programme is capable of, and told me it could all be directed at me, should I step out of line.
“And you told me about yourself, and the more I think about you, the more I get it. The boy who threatened women for money! Pathetic and disgusting and — oh look! — incredibly familiar! You think you’ve changed, Christine? You think you’re a better person because they abused and gaslit you into thinking you’re a fucking girl now? You’re not. You’re him. The boy you claim to hate so much. The boy who threatens women. You just do it for Aunt Bea, now, instead of for yourself. And that’s even more sad.”
Vicky shouts at Lorna and Paige tenses but the room fades away, becomes irrelevant, useless. Christine wants to argue, she wants to fight, she wants to step up out of the couch and scream. And she wants to run out of the room and find a dark place and never come out, she wants to scratch at her arms until they bleed, she wants to tell Lorna she’s wrong, she’s wrong, she’s so fucking wrong! but nothing comes out, nothing makes sense, because she’s right, she has to be. Christine’s him and always has been and always will be, no matter the shapes they bend her into or the dresses they wrap around her.
While Lorna spoke Christine could feel her jaw tighten and her limbs shake and her head lighten and her belly ache, and now she unravels, is unmade, piece by agonising piece, skin and senses stripped away until near nothing is left, and when Paige’s arms close around her she’s almost surprised to find she can feel the heat of her at all.
* * *
The absolute fucking gall!
Lorna watches as Christine crumples in her seat, as Paige wraps her arms around her and whispers in her ear, as Vicky yells and reaches out— towards Christine! As if she’s the injured party here! She comes barging in, bringing the whole horror show with her, and immediately starts making the same threats she made before, as if everywhere is her domain, as if every house in the city belongs to Dorley fucking Hall, and fuck that.
Paige and Christine are intertwined and Vicky’s sat back in her chair, having decided against going over to join her friends on the couch; she’s watching them both instead, fingers tented in front of her mouth, anxious and concerned.
Ugh.
Lorna kicks the table to get everyone’s attention, spilling some of her tea. Paige and Vicky look at her; Christine’s still a motionless mass in Paige’s arms.
“For fuck’s sake, Christine,” she says, “don’t just—”
“Shut up,” Paige says. She’s crying, but not silently like Christine; Paige is crying in ugly gulps, and they make her voice uneven.
“She fucking—”
“Shut up, Lorna!” Paige shouts. “I will not tell you again!”
It’s enough to make Lorna obey, to dry her protests in her throat, because Paige isn’t just shouting, she’s holding herself still, making herself into a rigid cage around Christine and looking at Lorna with an expression of absolute fury, contorted into a sneer by the tears she’s still getting under control.
“Paige…” Vicky whispers.
“When she told you about herself,” Paige says, and her voice is quieter now, steady and controlled, and Lorna would prefer she was still shouting, “she made herself vulnerable. Incredibly vulnerable. And she did it because she thought of you as a friend. She liked you, Lorna. She really did. And you have the wrong reading of your conversation on Monday; it was you who came into our house, asking questions. She gave you several chances to leave, but you insisted, and she let you in. And, as part of that process, she made herself vulnerable to you because she thought it would help you understand.”
“She’s a—”
“If you interrupt me again I will send the recording of this conversation to Beatrice and let the cards fall where they may. Clear?” Lorna doesn’t even nod, she just stares, and Paige continues. “She liked you, and so did I. But I thought you were brighter than this, Lorna. This behaviour… Do you know how much you’re scaring Victoria? Do you even know what she risked, starting a relationship with you? Of course you don’t. But she loves you and she thinks you’re worth it, and so here you both are.
“I dislike the programme, Lorna. I refuse to participate. I have been, with one or two minor exceptions, the cooperative, compliant woman Beatrice intended to make of me, and that is because I want to leave. I want to take Christine and I want to move away and discover who we both are without that place constantly weighing on our thoughts. But I am also a product of the programme at Dorley. Before the programme, my self-destructive behaviour threatened to hurt people and my limited outlook prevented me from recognising that. They took me in. They showed me another path. I took it. I chose womanhood, or my interpretation of it, and I am, thanks to them, the woman I always could have been, but never would have been. I am the possibility no-one else thought to offer me. I owe them my continued life, just as Christine does, just as Vicky does. I am no cheerleader for the programme as it currently operates, but I have no argument with the results. So, do you think you can try to understand my position, the way I try to understand yours? You can answer.”
Lorna frowns. Paige is so certain… “I can try. You… like who you are now. You like who Christine is now. You’re glad you were kidnapped and manipulated.”
“Try harder,” Paige says, and stops for a moment to consider her next words. “Christine told you her story. But she’s Christine; she is not one given to the most generous interpretation of her own history. She described to you a monster, a man who hurt people for no reason. So I want to tell you who I saw, the first day we met, in the basement under Dorley Hall.”
And Paige does. In her even, steady voice, as she comforts her girlfriend, she describes a wounded boy, defensively crass and instinctively aggressive. She talks about the day he first walked into the main area of the basement, arms wrapped protectively around himself, where Paige and Vicky — or the people who were to become them — greeted him cautiously and he responded in kind. She talks about how he gradually opened up, how he talked about his family, how he shouted at Indira and then apologised the next day, genuine in his regret, terrified that he’d made the one wrong move that would wreck their fragile developing relationship.
“She makes no excuses for what she did,” Paige says, “and I intend to offer none of my own. But she was broken, Lorna. She’d been hurt so much that there was almost nothing left of her. She lashed out at people because, inside, she was bleeding to death; she just couldn’t see it.”
“And you could?”
“Indira could. She saw her potential almost as soon as she met her. She told me once that she had a clear vision of who she would become, that she knew they would be sisters. And they are. And that brings me to my second point, now that you are, I trust, aware of just how cruel it was to dig up her trauma and throw it back at her: she and Indira are sisters, and not just in the way that, for example, Victoria and I are sisters. Christine is so close with Indira’s family that they have done everything short of formally adopting her.” She’s been tapping away at her phone as she speaks, and now she holds it up. There’s a photo on there, someone Lorna recognises. “And you may know of Indira’s mother: Aasha Chetry.”
No. Fuck no. “Is that the same Aasha Chetry who—?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck. I don’t know of her; I know her!” They’ve been to protests together; she once said Lorna should meet her daughter, Indira. “Aasha Chetry’s trans daughter is a fucking Dorley girl?”
Paige nods. “And she and Christine are family.”
“Shit.” She hadn’t even noticed the familiar name, back in Dorley Hall’s kitchen, when Indira introduced herself; it would have been absurd to even consider it.
Christine leans up from Paige’s lap, moving slowly. Paige brushes her hair out of her face, kisses her on the forehead, and leans her carefully back in the sofa cushions. She keeps one arm around her as Christine closes her eyes and wipes her face with a tissue Vicky hands her.
“These are the people Dorley saves,” Paige says. “People like Indira Chetry. You’d love her, if you got to know her. Assuming, that is, you can get over your habit of seeing people like us as who we used to be.”
Paige doesn’t have to spell it out; her tone does it for her. She thinks Lorna should respect the identities of the Dorley girls the same way she expects people to respect hers. But it’s different for them than it is for her; it has to be! On some vital and important level, it’s fucking different.
How, exactly? she asks herself, forcing a moment to herself to try and be at least a little generous to Paige and Christine. How many times has she told some struggling egg or some nervous newbie there’s as many ways to be trans as there are trans people? How many times has she fought back against the pathologisation of transness? How many times has she insisted that rigid categories are the enemy of true gender diversity?
It’s still different! She is not going to grant a bunch of reformed bad boys the same access to transness as her and— and—
And Vicky.
Vicky, who came from the same place as Christine and Paige. Who is best friends with both of them. Who can’t be claimed to be meaningfully different to her friends, as much as Lorna wishes it to be true. And why can’t Christine be just like Vicky, why can’t she be an egg who never realised she was being cracked? She’s a fucking idiot; does that count?
And who said access to transness is yours to grant?
She kicks the table again. “Fuck it,” she says. “I get it, okay? You’re good girls now, or whatever. I fucking get it. God, I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“You don’t, actually, because I haven’t even got to the point yet. If you start digging, if you make threats, if you release information, then you risk outing all of us to the whole country. All of us including Indira Chetry. Forget what those idiots in the papers would say about the rest of us; how do you think they’d react if it comes out that trans campaigner Aasha Chetry’s beloved trans daughter is actually… one of us? Actually a man.”
“She’s a trans woman, Paige,” Christine whispers. Her eyes are still closed. “She sees herself that way. She’s very serious about it.”
“Yes,” Paige says, “I know, but that’s how they’ll spin it. Normally they have to make things up in order to portray transness as illegitimate; this will be a gift to the grift. They’ll get weeks of coverage out of it. Months. Katherine Frost will probably write a book. The damage done to trans rights in this country will be catastrophic.”
And the principle of trans collective guilt means every trans person in the country would be tainted with Dorley’s shit. Lorna groans; justified or not, the place would be at the centre of a proxy war for trans rights nationally. Globally!
There really is only one response. “Fuck,” Lorna says. She leans back in her chair, rubs at her tired eyes. “Fuck! Why couldn’t you lot have shut down years ago?”
“Not our decision, darling,” Vicky says.
“You should know,” Paige says, “that I’m not threatening you; all I’m doing is relating the consequences of outing Dorley. And Christine wasn’t threatening you, either. She was describing our reality, the one you insisted on stepping into. We graduate from the programme as part of a delicate and interdependent web of people, and we survive because we trust each other. And if we don’t trust each other to be compassionate — and every graduate I’ve met is — then we at least trust each other to not work against our own interests. No person in the web can break it without exposing themselves.”
“She’s right,” Christine says, sounding delicate. “I wasn’t trying to threaten you. Not at all. Just warn you.” Lorna risks a look, and she seems so small. And Lorna did that to her! Well done, Lorna! Well fucking done!
She can’t hold on to her anger; the more time she spends around the girls, the more ordinary they seem. It’s like when she left Dorley Hall on Monday all over again: Christine and Paige are once again just Christine and Paige. Only in her head, in her nightmares, do they become anything else.
Except she knows she’s not being fair to them, doesn’t she? They’re just trying to live, day to day, the same as her. With many of the exact same problems, day to day.
But they torture people! Okay, maybe Christine and Paige don’t, but they’re part of a system that does. Some kind of bizarre, generational Omelas where everyone takes a turn at being the child at its heart, and comes away full of praise for the experience.
“All of us have restrictions on our behaviour,” Paige says. “You’ve opted into some of them. Nothing more. If Vicky, for example, were to get it into her head to run to the papers and spill everything, we’d be trying to persuade her otherwise just as fervently.”
“What about coming out to people?” she asks. “Vick can’t tell anyone she’s trans, can she? Because of some stupid form she signed.”
“No,” Paige says, and Lorna wants to leap out of her chair, to seize the remnants of her rage because that, if she’s honest, is the crux of the whole thing, that she has a girlfriend who is even more like her than she ever thought, but she can’t tell anyone, has instead to keep living lies she thought she threw aside when she transitioned, but Paige continues, with a stricken look on her face, “and neither can I.”
It’s like cold water thrown in Lorna’s face.
Christine, still moving slowly and carefully, takes Paige’s hand and cups it between both of hers, and Lorna aches suddenly for Vicky. So, as Paige talks, Lorna stands up and makes her way over to Vick’s chair, where she is accepted with an embrace she decides right there and then she’ll never leave again.
“I worked out what I wanted to do when I was still in the first year,” Paige says. “I knew I wanted to get into fashion somehow, and I knew I wanted to do humanitarian work. We get access to a stipend when we graduate, enough to live a comfortable life in the dorm or a frugal one outside it, and I decided I wanted to volunteer. I still plan to, for as long as I don’t have to pay my own rent. And the two vocations, they dovetail.” She tries to touch her index fingers together, but Christine won’t let go of her hand, so she brings the other one down to meet it and crosses her fingers in Christine’s lap. “As a minor fashion influencer, I have a following. I can use it to shine a light on issues and communities that need it.” She shrugs, smiling. “And I don’t have to pay for clothes. Useful, for someone on a fixed income. To that end, I took a long, hard look at the relative rates of engagement for trans women and cis women in fashion, and the relative safety of trans versus cis women, in this country as well as worldwide, and made up my mind quite quickly. I don’t like pretending to be cis, but if everyone important to me knows who I really am, then why should I care what my followers think? Or what some NGO thinks?”
Christine nuzzles her, whispers something in Paige’s ear that broadens her smile, and they share a kiss. Lorna feels foolish — worse: cruel — for the things she imagined about Christine. For the things she said to her! And why, she asks herself, is she inventing enemies in dorks like Christine, when real ones abound, for someone like her? What’s one potentially misguided boutique forced feminisation operation against the shit out there hurting people on an industrial scale?
But they still kidnap people! And yet here she sits with three kidnap victims; two of them are kissing each other, and the third cradles her in her lap. And all three of them are planning to leave, which the kidnapping ring actually permits…
Screw it. She squirms around in Vicky’s lap and meets her lips, squeezing a very sweet sound out of her girlfriend and consolidating her advantage by throwing her arms around Vicky’s neck and pressing up against her.
Maybe there really is something to worry about at Dorley. But maybe it’s just not her fucking problem.
* * *
The cell corridor looks different than she remembers. Much more cluttered: there’s a love seat at one end, paired with a couch and a small stack of chairs; a small table with unfolded wings has been pulled away from the wall, and bears evidence of a foil-packed lunch; and there’s a sheaf of power packs on one end of the couch. No plug sockets in the cell corridor, apparently. Sloppy! Stef has notes for version three of the basement.
She passes Ollie’s cell first. He’s asleep, and twitching. His cot, pulled out into the middle of the cell and bolted back down — the cells seem much more modular than she thought! — has straps hanging from it, currently unattached, in position for all four limbs. They’ve been force-feeding him, Tabby said, and it shows: Ollie’s sleeping topless, and below his shallow not-quite-breasts unmistakable ribs stretch out bruised and discoloured skin. Are they beating him, too? Or is he doing that to himself?
Raph is next. His cell’s less bare than Ollie’s, with a soft-looking duvet on his cot and a pile of books under it. He’s sitting on the floor, on a small square of carpet, clothed and healthy-looking, holding a tablet like he’s watching something on it. He doesn’t seem to notice her walk by, which is a relief; Stef doesn’t know what she’d say to him, and now she doesn’t have to find out.
Will’s on the end, in the cell Stef first woke up in. It’s laid out similarly to Ollie’s, with the cot against the far wall, and he’s already wearing the shackles that are bolted to its base. Even with his legs stretched as far as they’ll go he can’t reach even halfway down the length of the cell, Tabby reassured her, and that’s good because Stef agreed that if she’s really going to listen to him and if it’s really going to do him any good, she’ll have to enter the cell. Join him in his space. It worked when Christine did it with her.
They insisted she take protection, so Tabby temporarily issued her a taser. It’s larger than the one locked in her bedside drawer, and heavier in the hand; she holds it up, makes certain it’s ready for use, and knocks quietly on the glass door.
Will, lying on the cot and staring up at the ceiling, sits up, frowns at her for a moment and then nods, and she lets herself in with the biometric reader set into the wall. Will’s door unlocks with a click and hangs open by a couple of centimetres.
“Hi,” Stef says.
The last time she saw him, he had the look of someone who exercised daily, and his muscle tone had survived the testosterone suppression better than she thought it would. Now, though, it’s hard to tell: he’s dressed in layers, the way she used to, and it hides everything but his head and hands.
“Hello, Stefan,” he says.
“May I come in?”
He frowns. “You’re asking if you can enter my publicly viewable cell?”
She doesn’t recoil from his snarl. A little hostility is to be expected. “Yes.”
“Sorry,” he says, and she’s not prepared for that. He clinks his hands in the shackles, makes a show of testing them. “I’m safe. You can come in.”
She doesn’t question the apology — later, perhaps — and hooks the door more widely open with her toe, stepping inside and letting it latch behind her, still hefting the taser but not pointing it directly at him. Making her capabilities and her intentions clear.
“They gave you one of those, huh?” he says.
“Just for this.” Stef leans against the closed glass door, tests it, and leans against it, sliding down until she’s sitting with her feet together and her knees elevated. She rests her arm on her legs, taser ready. Just in case. “Before you ask, we can’t use it to escape. They’re watching on camera, and as soon as that cell door locks behind me again, it gets deactivated. I could throw it at someone, maybe. Although people always said I throw like a—”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” Will says. He’s quiet. Not like before. Maybe time in a cell has calmed him down. Maybe it was disclosure. She remembers his reaction, when they told him everything: total silence. Eerie. “I like your eyes,” he adds, after an awkward silence. “The makeup, I mean.”
She’d almost forgotten about it. Christine and Paige left in a hurry, and then there was pizza, and then Tabby and Indira were talking her through what she needed to know… It’s probably fine that she left it on. One of them would have mentioned it if they thought it was important. Probably. Hopefully.
On her internal chalkboard, Stef bypasses the column labelled carefully choreographed operation and adds another check mark under shitshow.
“Yeah,” she says, “thanks. Pippa asked, I said yes. It’ll wash off in the shower, she said.” It’s an easy lie. Will’s not been around; he doesn’t know Pippa’s busy today.
“It’s… pretty.”
“What’s up, Will? Why am I here? Tabby comes up to me before lunch and tells me you want to talk to someone, and it can’t be her. So why me? You want to unburden yourself of your guilt for attacking Maria? Or your brother? Or those other people?”
He winces each time. “No. I just wanted to talk. And I can’t talk to them.” He nods sideways.
Stef can’t resist rubbing it in. “I thought Ollie and Raph were your new buddies, after Adam was insufficiently violent for your needs.”
“Stef—”
“He’s miserable without you, by the way.”
“Please.”
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m here to listen. Really. I’ll listen.”
He closes his eyes, tips back his head and breathes deeply. “I don’t even know where to start. Except to say that I do feel bad for Maria. And for my brother. And the others. The ones they know about and the ones they don’t. I see them a lot, Stefan.” He taps his temple. “I’ve hurt a lot of people.”
“Why don’t you tell me about your brother? Wasn’t he the first one you, um…?”
“Attacked? No, he wasn’t the first. But, sure, I’ll tell you about him. He’s called Christopher. He likes to be called Topher. He’s funny, he’s kind, he’s creative as hell, and everyone always said he’s going to do something incredible with his life. I hope he does. I hope he forgets about me, and lives an amazing life, and I hope I die here.”
“But didn’t you beat the shit out of him? Why do you care about him now?”
“Do you want to hear this, or do you want to ask stupid questions?”
Stef surrenders, two palms raised. “Talk.”
“It was in June. We were supposed to be out of our place the first week of July, right?” Stef nods; the academic year ended with the last full week of June. Some landlords like you to pay for the whole year, others — including the uni itself — kick you out the week after the end of the semester, so they can get the industrial hoses in and rent the rooms to conference-goers over the summer. “I left early. I was done. Tired out. Just wanted to go home. See my family. Catch up with some of the lads, you know? I had a job lined up, full time, and I didn’t want to go straight from uni to work; I wanted some time for myself.” Stef nods again. She’s been on the go more or less non-stop since she left home, but some people’s summer jobs buy luxuries, other people’s pay the rent. “So I’m home a few days earlier than anyone expected. My parents are both at work when I get back, so I let myself in, have a piss, make a tea, all that stuff. I’m going up the stairs when I hear… noises. Coming from my room. Obviously I barge inside, ready to kick off, and there’s Topher. On my bed. With a guy. And they’re fucking.”
Stef says nothing. She just waits. Will’s been shifting on the cot as he talks, unable to find purchase on his story, on his body, and firing out staccato sentences in time with the twitching of his fingers.
“I throw my tea at them,” Will continues. “It’s hot. Of course it is. Not as hot as it could have been — I added milk — and most of it got on the wall where the mug smashed. But some of it got on Topher. On his face. In his eye. And in the moment, I really didn’t give a shit. He was like a blur in front of me.”
She’s frozen still now, terrified that any movement, any reaction, could break the spell. Will’s talking in a rhythmic monotone, lost in his recollection.
“I was empty, growing up. Never knew what to do, where to go, who to be. Followed what everyone else did. But never felt anything about any of it. I was just there, and empty. And everyone… put things in me. Expectations, hopes, dreams; whatever. Sometimes I thought I could feel it happen. Could even see it when I closed my eyes. Fizzing, popping, glowing things, dropped into me. And I took it all in. Like I was a cheap knock-off of real people, like I couldn’t function without it. Not like Topher. People would tell him what they wanted from him, and he wouldn’t have any of it. He’d fight back. He’d tell them who he was. What he wanted. Me, I didn’t know. But I didn’t have to. Mum put things in me. Dad. Teachers. Other boys at school. Girls. And every time something happened—” he raises his voice suddenly, becomes animate, grips the frame of the cot with both hands and stares through Stef, “—it set some of them off. All the things they put in me. Fizzing, popping, glowing, lit specks of gunpowder. Chain reaction. Uncontrollable. Explosive. The first time it happened was when a boy set me off by the football pitch out back of the school. He said something to me and it was like a spark. I put his fucking face in the mud. Hand on his head—” he mimes the action, “—and the other hand on his back. I put him in the mud and I didn’t let him up until he started wheezing. Got suspended for that. Dad said I did a good job. Said I needed to be prepared. Said if I was going to get in fights I needed to get in shape. Bought me a set of weights and hung a punching bag in the garage. Stood by me while I learned how to use them. Just… putting things in me.” Will holds up a hand, palm flat and facing upward, and with his other flicks an imaginary bit of grit into the air, away from him. One of his fizzing, popping, glowing, lit specks of gunpowder.
“There’s a moment,” he continues, “after I get set off, where it’s like everything goes white. And it’s like I’m not there. You’ve seen videos of when they set the nukes off? There’s a flash of light too bright to see and a shock wave that obliterates everything for miles around. I’m there. At the centre of it. And then I come around and I see what I’ve done and I’ve got two choices: I act like I fucking meant it, or I run.
“Topher was the first time I ran. I beat him, man. Worse than I ever beat anyone. I don’t know if it was just the surprise of it, or if I’m really that much of a piece of shit that my first and only reaction to finding out my brother is gay is to almost blind him and nearly kill him. And I started seeing him everywhere. In everyone. His blood, his dislocated wrist, the red marks on his face. And it just kept—” he hits his open palm with his fist, “—happening. I got fired because I lost it at some woman who wanted to know where the printers were. Then some guy bumped me in the street and I started shit with him right there. Fought him and his three mates. Mum wanted to kick me out but Dad was proud of me and that might have been the worst part. He was always proud of me. Even after Topher. Never even occurred to me before, that Dad might be homophobic, but of course he is, Stefan. Of course he is. And he saw himself in me, and why wouldn’t he? He spent years pouring every bit of himself he could find into me. And I saw myself in him and I couldn’t stay there.
“So I left. I went to live with a mate for the rest of the summer. I heard from Mum that Topher didn’t want anything done to me, he didn’t want me committed or arrested or anything. He just never wanted to see me again. Well. Getting his wish, now, isn’t he?”
“I’m sorry, Will.”
“Save it.” It comes out with a pointed finger and a wince; he forgot about the shackles, pulled his wrists too tight. There are red marks around them. He must do that a lot. “I got taken down here after I blew up at some first-year kid outside a lecture. He just walked into me. Not his fault. But I was angry and I was guilty and I made it his fault, yes? Same as when, staying with my mate, talking myself in circles with him, I made it Topher’s fault. He shouldn’t have been in my room. He should’ve told me he’s gay. That kind of shit. It’s easy to make yourself believe things that let you off the hook, right? He got me reading his shitty ‘philosophy of manhood’ book, too. All sorts of excuses in there. Easy to believe. And then, two days after I’m let out into the common area here, I’m talking to Adam, and he tells me, ‘Your actions are yours alone’.” He shrugs. “I’d heard it before, obviously, or some variant of it. But he meant it, and that made it mean something to me, as well. And it’d be great if I could say, that was it, that was me, I’m a better man, hallelujah! Of course I’m not. It’s still just someone putting things in me again. I didn’t really think about it until Maria.”
Stef’s been wondering when they’d make it onto the woman Will nearly killed. She keeps her mouth shut; there’s only so many interruptions she can risk.
“Maria was the end. I was isolating myself; you know that. Talking to Ollie and Raph’s like yelling into a cave: your own bullshit coming back at you, distorted. I pushed Adam away after he came to see me the night before, and I already missed him, but I couldn’t say it. That was all the shit Dad put in me, right? You don’t miss people. You don’t make room for people in your life. You stand alone. Bullshit. And I worked it out, by the way. I already knew what testosterone suppression does, and what it doesn’t do. Adam showed me his chest, and I thought about it. Thought about the way we were all starting to look. I put—” he laughs, loudly, unexpectedly, and Stef jumps, “—two and two together, and got it mostly right. After that I was just… waiting for it. Waiting to go off. But it didn’t happen. I never lost control. I got angrier and angrier and I was waiting for it to happen and it just fucking didn’t. When I did that to Maria, I was in control. I chose it. My fucking decision. My action and mine alone. And I was so angry with you, Stefan, for warning her. But I’m glad you did. I almost did something a lot worse. Tabby says she’s okay, now.”
“She is. She’s doing better. Edy’s back to work today.” Will frowns, and Stef realises she’s being way too candid.
“I’d ask how you know this stuff,” Will says, “but I get it, now. I never understood you before. Always too docile. Too friendly. Too ready to buy into their whole rehab pretence. But I know now: you’re like me.” Stef, as patiently as she can, waits out Will’s pause, the time he needs to gather his thoughts. If she says anything, if she moves a muscle, she might reveal more than she wants to a suddenly dangerously perceptive Will. “You worked it out. You lied to Aaron and Adam, and you tried to lie to me, to keep us calm, because you worked it out. You knew what they were doing, and you were just letting it happen, weren’t you?” Stef just stares. “I get it!” Will whispers, hoarsely. “I get it. Who I am—” he jabs both thumbs into his chest, “—who I was, who I was made into, was a fucking hollow shell, for people to fill with whatever they wanted.” He brushes his hands together, as if cleaning the dust from them, and he smiles. “All their little sparkly bits of gunpowder, all their violence and expectations and desires. Waiting for someone to light my short fucking fuse. And if they—” he nods upwards, “—want to rip me apart and put me back together as someone new? Good. Maybe they know how to fill all the empty spaces inside me with something less volatile.”
“You’re… okay with it?” Stef says.
“Not really.” Will pulls up his sleeves on both arms, exposing rashes and scratches and cuts, doubtless from scraping ragged nails across the skin, over and over; Stef’s familiar with the wounds, and what’s required to make them.
“Jesus, Will.”
“You should see Ollie.”
“I’ve seen him. How’ve you seen him?”
“They take us showering in threes. I think he charges the walls in his cell. Don’t know why. Maybe he’s trying to knock his idiot head off.” He rolls his sleeves back down. “So, no, I’m not okay with it,” he says. “Or, actually, sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m not. But—” he makes a show of looking around the cell, “—it’s not like I have a choice, is it? Maybe what comes out the other side of all this isn’t someone who does this to themselves. Who does what I did to other people.” He breathes deeply. “And I might not be okay with it, but, Stef, I’m not sure I even care any more. It’s not worth it, being me, not any more.” He looks Stef in the eye, suddenly intense. “Yeah. Decision made. I quit. I’m done. As of right now. They can have me. Tell Tabby. I know you talk to her, or you wouldn’t be here. Tell her what I said.”
“All of it?”
“Just the last part. That I’m done being him.”
“Yeah,” Stef says, “yeah. I’ll tell her. You’re done. Okay.”
“I mean it. I’m cooperating. I know she won’t let me out of the cell, but if she does, I won’t make trouble.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “I won’t want to, anyway.”
This is so much more than she expected. “Look,” she says, standing too quickly and staggering for a moment from the head rush, “I’ve, uh, I should go.”
“You get it, though, right?” He’s too kind, too gentle, and it’s more than disconcerting from Will; it’s like the whole building shook, and it’s trying to take her feet out from under her. “You understand me?”
“Um,” she says. “Yes. A bit?”
“Hey,” he says, smiling, reaching out. “Don’t worry, Stef. You don’t need to say anything else. Not yet. Just… come back and see me again, yeah?”
Stef nods one last time and lets herself out, controlling the urge to run until she’s out of sight of all of them.
* * *
The room Lorna and Vicky share is the largest one in the house, taking up the whole top floor, with windows out to both the street and the laughably small back garden, with a segment cut out for the stairs up and another for their bathroom, which juts out into the room by the back window and reminds Christine of her ensuite, back at Dorley Hall; the whole place is like her room at home, scaled up by a factor of two. It’s nice.
“You want another tea?” Lorna says, heading straight for a long table set up under the front window, with desk chairs, laptops, kettle and mini-fridge; a place to work, Christine assumes. Lorna pours water from a filter jug and starts the kettle without waiting for an answer.
“I like your room,” Christine says, sitting cross-legged on an errant chair and enjoying the light, airy atmosphere. The windows are open and a December wind is blowing through; normally she’d be too cold, especially in the minimal clothes Paige picked out for her, but for right now the chill air is welcome.
“I can’t believe you’ve never seen it,” Lorna says, searching through a small pile of mugs for clean ones. Christine half-expects them to be like the mugs back home, with appropriate slogans and jokes on: Me, Myself, the Bedbugs and I, or, I Joined the Waiting List at the Gender Clinic So I Could Bequeath My Place in Line to My Future Daughter, or, Bad Bitches Live Here!! (and so do we), which is a mug Christine’s seen in an Almsworth charity shop and would have bought and brought home if she hadn’t been a hundred percent certain it would have disappeared within a week and turned up again in the downstairs kitchen, altered by whoever it is at Dorley who gets her kicks that way. “We invited you over often enough.”
“Yes, please,” Christine says, when Lorna speculatively holds up a milk carton. “And I never came because I never wanted to intrude.”
The statement seems to surprise Lorna. “Really?”
“I love Vicky, and I miss her terribly, ever since she moved out, but this is her space. Your space. I’m… I’m part of her other life, I guess. The one she wants to forget.”
Lorna carefully places the mugs on the floor and then bounces over to Christine, lifting her up out of the chair and hugging her. She’s as tall as Paige, and Christine struggles to find an appropriate place to fit her face.
“She doesn’t want to forget you,” Lorna says. “And neither do I. I’m sorry.”
“I am, too.”
“I mean it. I’m really sorry.”
When they release each other, Lorna hands out cushions and they sit on the floor together, luxuriating in a patch of sunlight like cats, warming themselves against the breeze.
“I don’t see you as him,” Lorna says suddenly, and reaches out to touch Christine’s hand. “I don’t. I know what I said. I was mad, and scared. Scared to fucking death, honestly! I still am, a little. But there’s a version of you in my head, which was just getting scarier the more I thought about everything, and then… there’s you. It wasn’t fair of me to make you into the monster I imagined.” She looks down. “And, shit, I get why what I said hurt you so much. Down there, after Paige got done talking, I put myself in your shoes, imagined you saying that to me, and… Fuck, Christine. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” Christine says, turning her hand over in Lorna’s grip and squeezing her in return. “I admit, I was going to ask if you really did see me that way. As, uh, him. Because I kind of obsess over that stuff. But you didn’t really know the old me, so you can’t ever see him in me, not really. All you did was pick the scabs off some old wounds.”
“I’m still sorry. Do you… want to talk about it?”
Christine lets go of her hand and leans back, closes her eyes in the sunlight. “I think it’s good for me to remember him, sometimes,” she says. “I’ve been thinking of him as something dead. Something I killed. Like a stain that got wiped away. And I never really squared that with how I think about my Sisters. And, yes, I know calling them that sounds kinda culty, but they’re the only family I have now.”
“Indira’s very nearly your sister for real.”
“Yep.” A broad smile takes her, and she lowers her head, hides her shyness. “She’s my big sister. My closest family. But that’s what I mean: I love her more than I love anyone except Paige, and there’s no way I can think of Indira as having this dead creature in her past. And Paige, too, I remember who she was, and that person didn’t die either; she grew, she changed, she— she bloomed, Lorna, into this wondrous, caring woman, who I don’t know if I can ever love too much. A woman I’m going to spend my whole life with. And I remember Vicky and she was the same. I don’t know if she really was always trans or not, but, just like Paige, she made herself into someone she wanted to be. Someone she needed to be. And Paige is right about me: I’m… not generous with myself. So you’re right to say that the boy is still me, because he is. I didn’t kill him; I was him, and he’s me. If I killed him, if he’s not a part of me… then maybe that makes me more likely to repeat his mistakes? And I do wonder if I’ve been coming close to that, lately. Once or twice.”
“Not from what I’ve seen.”
“Paige says that, too.”
Lorna giggles nervously. “Paige kinda scares me.”
“She wouldn’t have sent the recording to Bea. I don’t think she was even recording at all, actually. She’s just protective of me, that’s all.”
“As am I, of Vicky.” And Lorna smiles, takes Christine’s hand again. “We’re lucky, aren’t we?”
“Lorna,” Christine says, “I’m constantly bowled over by how lucky I’ve been. I never, in a million years, thought I would deserve what I have now, let alone be handed it all for free. I’ve accepted the restrictions placed on me because… Well, would you complain if the boat that saved you from drowning had some finicky rules about who you’re allowed to say saved you? I’m sorry you’re inside those restrictions, though. All the pain in the arse with none of the benefits.”
“Hey, I got Vicky. Like you, I can’t believe my luck.” She snorts, pats Christine’s hand, and withdraws to drink her tea. “I’m still going to think of you all as trans, though, whatever you say. It makes my brain hurt less.”
“Hell,” Christine says, “maybe we are. Maybe the word can encompass girls like us. Or maybe it doesn’t have to; I’m happy being a girl, being Christine. Like Paige said, everyone important to me either knows the truth. Or, uh, knows something close enough to the truth that I’m fine with it.” Lorna raises an eyebrow, so Christine explains, “Indira’s family think I’m trans, like her.”
Lorna smirks, and says, “Let me get this straight.” She holds up the hand that isn’t holding her mug and counts down fingers as she withdraws them into her fist. “You were assigned male.” Christine nods. “You were uncomfortable with your life before transition.” Christine nods, but wiggles a flattened hand, to indicate, it’s complicated. Lorna sticks her tongue out. “You transitioned to womanhood, which you initially found difficult but eventually grew to find comfort and happiness in.” Nod. “And now you live as a woman and prefer to think of your old, male self as something you transcended.” Nod. Lorna pulls in her thumb, the last digit standing. “And some people think of you as a trans woman, and you’re fine with that.” Christine nods again. “There. Problem solved. I diagnose you, Christine, with being a fucking trans woman! I’m calling it. I’m claiming you. You’re trans.”
Christine shrugs. “If you say so.”
“I do!”
“You should tell Steph that. She’s been trying to square that circle with me for weeks.”
“I thought she was going by Stephanie now,” Lorna says, frowning.
“We talked about it. She wants people to alternate. Which usually means Bea calling her ‘Stephanie’, everyone else calling her whatever they feel like, and Pippa calling her ‘Stephanie Middlename Riley’ when she’s annoyed.”
“She doesn’t have a middle name?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“God. She should pick one.”
“She should!”
“It’s so weird that she’s down there, with those boys.”
“You should come see her,” Christine suggests.
“What?”
“Come see her! And you can meet more Dorley girls. Come hang out at the dorm.”
“Maybe.”
She looks evasive, so Christine doesn’t push it. Instead, she suggests, “Actually, maybe just come visit once. Next week. Steph’s having her electrolysis consultation, and we’ll be bringing in someone to talk to her about what surgical options she wants, too. She doesn’t know that yet, though. It’s a surprise. You should come! Talk to them, too.”
Lorna blinks. “About what?”
“Your FFS is booked and funded already, right?” Christine says, and Lorna nods. “What about GRS? I don’t know if you want it, but if you do, or you want an orchi or anything, now that you’re in the know, we can probably help with that. No charge.”
“You’re kidding,” Lorna insists.
“Nope.”
“You’d pay for it?”
“Not me, personally, but yeah.” Christine doesn’t actually have confirmation yet, but if Maria or Bea make a fuss, she’s certain she can make Lorna’s case. It’s like Paige said: they can’t keep her in the basement until she comes around to their point of view, but they can tie her to them with gratitude. And one visit for a consultation will become another and another and, sooner or later, Dorley Hall will just be the place Vicky lived for a while. The place her other friends still live. The place that paid for her bottom surgery.
“Shit, Christine,” Lorna says. “I mean. Fuck.”
“No pressure, obviously.”
“Fuck that! Give me all the pressure. Jesus. I want GRS, Christine. I really want it. I only picked FFS first because I value my physical safety. I was resigning myself to a years-long waiting list or doing another fundraiser or just never getting GRS and living with it, but… But! Fuck! Christine! Fuck!”
Christine laughs, and Lorna laughs, and they put their mugs down and share an awkward hug, reaching over from their respective pillows. Lorna’s sweet when she’s not being paranoid.
“I meant to say, by the way,” Lorna says, once they’ve finished their tea and put away their pillows and they’re heading down the stairs to the living room, where Paige and Vicky are playing a racing game on the PlayStation, “how nice you look.”
“Thanks! Paige caught me this morning and wouldn’t let me go until she made me beautiful.”
“Well, she does good work.”
“She really does. Hey, do you want to get food in? We were about to have lunch when Vicky texted.”
Lorna nods, stepping aside so Christine can navigate the narrow first-floor landing. “Are you okay with ordering for my housemates? They’ll probably be back soon.”
“Sure.”
“Are you going to bill it to the torture dungeon?”
“Obviously.”
“Cool! Then what’s the most expensive takeaway in town? Oh!” Lorna bounces down the last few steps and into the living room, drawing the attention of the other girls. “Vick! Remember that artisanal burger place we saw?”
Paige drops her controller and rushes over to embrace Christine. On the screen, her car crashes spectacularly into a tree.
“You’re okay?” she asks.
“I’m good,” Christine says, nuzzling Paige’s shoulder and squeezing her as tightly as she can. “We’re good.” She stands on tiptoes and whispers, “We’re going to get her in to see the consultant about GRS.”
“I’m glad,” Paige whispers back. “But she’d better not hurt you again…”
“She won’t.”
“Then I’m happy we can help her.”
Christine nods, still on her toes, unwilling to leave Paige’s embrace or lower herself from a place where she has contact with her, cheek to cheek, just like this morning. Eventually they separate, and they’re finding places to sit when the front door opens and Lorna and Vicky introduce the first of their flatmates around, inviting her to join the debate over which place to order in from. Vicky raises an eyebrow and a controller and Christine’s taken it before she realises Vicky switched the discs and Bloodborne is loading and Lorna is excitedly sitting down next to her, perched practically on top of an indulgent Paige, explaining to her how the gun-parry timing works and recommending which builds to choose.
Today, Christine reflects, as she designs a striking, tall, blonde hunter and wonders if she can find a striped waistcoat and majestic hat for Paige to wear in the many boxes of clothes in her room, could have gone a lot worse.
* * *
“Who’s talking to me?” he whispers. “Right now, who’s talking to me?”
Aaron’s lying on his bed, stretched out and almost satisfied. Indira brought him lunch, which turned out, bizarrely, to be pizza. And good pizza, too! And then the pizza made him tired, as it always does, and the grease made him feel gross, so he had a second shower and retired again. He tried looking at himself in the mirror, but he still has good reason mostly to avoid it, especially if he has been changing the way Stef has — and he has, all but inevitably — so there he lies, inspecting the parts of himself he can stand to look at in the lamplight and asking himself the same question, over and over again.
It’s not that it’s especially revelatory; it’s basic therapist stuff, probably. Identify the root of the patient’s self-loathing, question it, ask if the terrible things the patient attributes to himself, considers a vital part of himself, actually constitute load-bearing pillars of his personality or if he is, in fact, a whiny little bitch.
Aaron’s never been to therapy. But his guess is, he feels, probably accurate.
So, if it’s not revelatory, then why does he care? Maybe because it was Stef asking the question. Stef, the guy who all but declared his interest in him, and who doubled down on it today when offered an out! Stef, the only guy who’s ever really given him the time of day without extracting from him a heavy price in return, usually paid in humiliation or pain. Stef, the guy who seems genuinely to care what he thinks.
The guy who thinks he can be better.
Oh yeah, one catch: you’re here, so, better or not, you’re going to be a girl.
The sponsors ruin everything.
But still. He has a friend. A friend who might want something from him he can’t give — he’s never, even accounting for his defensive overreaction when Stef first told him, at which he thinks his imaginary therapist would probably meaningfully raise their eyebrows, been into guys — but who doesn’t seem too bothered about that. And here, especially here, Aaron will take any friend he can get. Screw the complications.
He’s gearing up to put on a movie, something mind-numbing, like one of the romances they clutter the hard drives with, when there’s a knock at his door, and there’s really only one person it can be. He hops off the bed without hesitation and opens the door to Stef, still looking like a—
Um. That’s new.
“Hey, Stef,” he says. “Nice… eyes?”
Stef blinks, and then laughs. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Forgot about that. One of the girls wanted to get some practise in, and she cornered me. Apparently no-one else in the building quite has my colouring. I kinda like it!” He runs a finger across his cheekbone. The skin seems to sparkle in the low light.
“Yeah,” Aaron says. “It’s, uh, pretty, I guess.”
“Thanks,” Stef says, beaming, and Aaron’s thinking of ways to puncture the mood, because it’s weird for Stef to be so happy about being slathered in makeup, when Stef’s expression sours anyway. “Can I come in? I don’t want to be alone right now.”
Aaron stands back to let him in, but has to ask: “You sure you want to be with me? You don’t want to call Pippa, or one of your other sponsor pals?”
He shakes his head. “No. Right now I don’t really want to be around anyone who’s… involved in all this. Just kinda want to give my head a break, you know?”
Yeah. Aaron knows. He holds out a welcoming arm, like a fucking greeter at a restaurant or something, and Stef stops loitering at the door and walks nervously in, sits down on the end of the bed before Aaron can stop him.
“Hey, you, uh, might not want to sit there, I mean, maybe it’s okay since I changed the sheets this morning, but, uh, actually, just sit right exactly there, okay? Right there and don’t move. Like, a muscle.”
“What do you—?” Stef asks. “Oh. Right. Yeah. I remember. Last time— actually, the time before last that I was in here, you were very, very worried about me sitting in your, uh, what did you call it? Your ‘spectacular nightly leavings’.” Aaron winces at Stef’s grin. “It’s fine, Aaron. I’ll sit in the spunk.”
“So,” Aaron says, closing the door and sitting at the other end of the bed, a nice, safe, chaste distance away, “what’s up?”
And Stef lays out, with a weird flat affect and a look of stress that almost makes Aaron want to repeat their awkward hug from earlier, what just happened. Will baring his soul! Ollie being force fed — emphatically not an empty threat, then — and hurting himself. Raph… just sort of existing, apparently. And Stef, shaken enough by the experience, by something he’s not telling Aaron, coming straight here, not even pausing to wash off his sparkly eye makeup.
“Fucking hell,” Aaron says. Stef’s slid down off the bed by this point, and is sitting on the floor, leaning back on the mattress, supporting his head with his hands. He looks nice from that angle; Aaron wishes his cheekbones looked half as good.
“Yeah,” Stef says heavily, stretching his toes out.
“What now?”
“Now, I think,” Stef says, “I want to do absolutely nothing. I don’t want to think about this place, or Will’s shit, or Ollie’s bruises. I know this might be a little selfish of me, to come running back into your room like this, but I want an evening like we used to have. Brainless. Stress-free. But,” he adds, pushing up from the floor, “if you’d rather be on your own, I can—”
“No,” Aaron says quickly. “No. Stay. We’ll watch mind-numbing crap. It’s fine. I, uh, I missed that, too.”
“Cool,” Stef says, leaning his head back against the mattress and cupping his hands in his lap. Aaron’s heartbeat returns to normal. “What shall we watch?”
It takes a few minutes to decide, and they end up picking a vampire romance TV show with nine seasons on tap, all of them likely to be entertainingly terrible. Aaron, to be closer to the screen, moves up on the bed, sits close enough to Stef’s head to be able to prop a pillow behind it, for which Stef thanks him profusely. As they watch, as the girl on screen talks about her upcoming prom, and then gets enveloped in eldritch vampire fog and menaced by crows, Aaron slides down into a more comfortable position, with his legs dangling off the edge of the bed and his head barely vertical enough to see. When teen vampire number three makes himself known, stalking prom with a single drop of blood on his lip, Aaron feels a pressure against his leg. Carefully he levers himself up on his elbows and sees Stef’s head leaning against his calf, and he’s about to make a fuss, or a joke, or push him away, or kick him and order him to leave, when he hears snoring. Faint and slightly troubled snoring.
Fuck it.
He turns down the volume a bit, turns on the subtitles so he doesn’t miss any subtleties of plot or characterisation, and lets Stef sleep, clutching Aaron’s leg like a plush toy.
Stef’s been going non-stop lately, it seems. Best to give him a break.
* * *
Hard floor. Kinda cold. And there’s… snoring? She’s leaning on something. A bed. Her bed? No; Aaron’s bed. Aaron’s bed!
The realisation causes her to try to stand, quickly, but her back complains enough that she has to cover her mouth to keep from whimpering. Sore! Keeping her silencing hand in place, she massages the small of her back with the other hand, and the movement is sufficient to wake Aaron, if only a little.
“Hey,” he says, from up in the sheets somewhere. He sounds barely conscious. “I left my duvet on the floor. Just lay it out and roll yourself up in it, like a sleeping bag.”
“You sure?” Stef asks, coming to a crouch as she starts gathering up the duvet, the spare pillow he left for her, and a couple of hoodies that don’t smell the cleanest but will do as a makeshift mattress. “I can go back to—”
“Shut up and go to sleep,” he says, and she hears a smile in his voice so she doesn’t push it.
He’s snoring again before she finishes assembling her bed, and it’s not long before she joins him, falling asleep in the company of her friend and content to know that he’ll probably, maybe, hopefully be okay.
Notes:
You can keep up with my nonsense on my twitter.
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 22: Waterslide
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2007 August 7
Tuesday
Sometimes all it takes is getting away from your life for a while, and going for a dip.
Surrounded by hundreds of acres of woodland and bisected by a wide, slow-flowing river, Peri Park is the home counties’ premier self-contained holiday resort: a sprawl of villas, apartments, restaurants, plazas and play areas, clustered around an entertainment village which has at its heart an enormous multi-level swimming complex, domed under glass, teeming with tropical plants and complete with its own wave machine, over a dozen waterslides, and nearly two dozen poolside bars, eating areas, and family-friendly chill zones.
It’s about the best thing thirteen-year-old Shahida’s ever experienced.
For most of her life she lived with her parents in Essex, in a village awkwardly positioned for all forms of entertainment, but most especially swimming, being far enough from both the beach and London that every excursion was an expensive compromise. Worse, the visits to see her gran’s sister’s family in Edinburgh, to take advantage of the pools there, were forever promised but never delivered, and holidays farther afield, to see their extended family in Lahore, similarly always seemed to fall through. Time and money, work and responsibilities; Shahida tried not to complain. She swam instead in the pool in the nearby town, but couldn’t find much joy there: her mum said the council never funded the place properly, and that plans to extend and expand it always ended up abandoned, but whatever the reason it was a miserable place, squat and dirty, always packed too full of people, with an unpleasant smell and a strict time limit for swimmers. Dad took her every couple of weeks anyway, so she could keep her form up and practise her diving, and it was fun enough, in the absence of better options. Stopping in the park for an ice cream after was reliably the best part.
And then Dad died, and Shahida forgot about swimming for a while.
Six months later, almost to the day, she and Mum moved out of the old house. They went farther inland, to a new suburb on the outskirts of a city called Almsworth, into a nice new-build house, semi-detached at the garage, done up in mock Tudor cladding and with room to expand. It could have swallowed their old house twice over. Mum explained that Dad’s life insurance was pretty good, and Shahida decided to view the place as his last gift to them.
Life began again: Mum went back to school and so did Shahida, excited for her new start in a new city.
It’s not been everything she hoped. She’s had difficulty making friends; there aren’t that many kids her age in the suburb, and while there are a couple of local prospects she’s cultivating it’s hard to get truly close with people when you only see them at school. She’s playing the flute again, but doesn’t find the music the school band selects especially interesting. And her schoolwork’s continued the way it always has, unchallenging and boring. Bit by bit she’s made a life, but mostly she finds it notable for the things she wishes for, the lost puzzle pieces: a real, close friend; a challenge; and some bloody excitement!
And she still doesn’t get many opportunities to swim! Not until now. Not until the combined incomes of Mum and her new boyfriend finally grant them the opportunity to take the first real holiday of Shahida’s life. Not until Shahida begged Mum and Edward to take her to the biggest waterpark in the country, handily located less than forty miles from their new home. Not until here!
Dad always said he wanted to take her somewhere like this, but while it’s not quite the same without him, she can’t bring herself to feel sad any more; two years is a long time to mourn. Eventually she found a spot for him inside her, and remembers him solely the way he asked to be remembered: happily, and with love. He resurfaces from time to time, and it’s like she can feel his arms around her, comforting her, telling her that he’s okay, that she’s okay, and everything about that has just become normal now.
Shahida smiles, taps her heart in remembrance, and returns to the view looking out over Peri Paradise.
She already knows the place well. On their first full day at the park she stood in her swimsuit at the entrance and looked out over the stepped pools, building a mental map of all the activities available to her and planning her route. Today’s adventures start at the topmost level of Paradise, a rocky outcrop that hosts two restaurants, a sunning area festooned with palm trees and pink people, and this, the viewing platform, which backs onto the Grand Flume and from which you can watch the crowds ebb and flow like the tides.
The sun, diffused by the great glass dome that bends closer here than anywhere else, glows warm and comforting on her bare shoulders. She’s about to head off for the flume when someone catches her eye:
Leaning against the railing a little way along from her, but looking down over the edge rather than out across the strata of swimming pools, is a boy, about her height and thus probably about her age, with blond hair plastered wet to his cheeks. Under his loose t-shirt and long swimming shorts he looks thin, almost delicate, but Shahida might still have approached him if he’d been twice her size; she’s never been intimidated by boys the way people expect, probably because, unlike the girls at school, she has no investment in whether or not they like her. Besides, other kids her age, alone and unsupervised and pensive, are inherently interesting!
He looks up as she leans on the railing next to him, and he returns her welcoming smile with the sort of blushing nervousness she likes to see on a boy.
“Hey,” she says, rolling sideways on the railing so she’s propping herself on one elbow, and pretending like she only just noticed him. Nonchalance works best for befriending the shy ones, and the shy ones are her favourites. “It’s pretty great here, isn’t it?”
“Hmm?” he says, and then almost laughs when she gestures out at Paradise. “Oh, yeah. It’s nice.”
“’Nice’ is absolutely an understatement,” Shahida says, turning again to rest her back on the railing, to indicate that this boy, this stick-thin kid who still has yet to look right at her, is as of now more interesting than all the myriad delights behind and below. “Coming here was my idea, and now Mum and Edward are already talking about coming back next year. Because there’s nothing like these pools anywhere else in the country!” It’s true: Edward’s an accountant, and when he explained to a very serious Shahida the kind of budget they were working with for their first holiday she almost screamed. They could have gone anywhere in the country — and many places abroad — but, as luck would have it, the best swimming in England turned out to have been right on their doorstep for two years. Shahida knows this for certain; her research was very thorough. “There’s other stuff to do here at Peri, like walks in the woods and horseback riding and stuff, but you can do that in a hundred other places. I don’t know why you’d bother when you could come and enjoy—” she straightens, spins around to face out across the dome and throws her arms in the air, “—this paradisical place!”
The boy screws up his face, giggling. “‘Paradisical’? Is that a proper word?”
“Who needs proper words,” she says grandly, “when you have a tropical swimming complex maintained at exactly twenty-nine-and-a-half degrees centigrade!” She’s aware she’s over-egging it a bit, but her enthusiasm’s genuine, and it’s fun to let yourself get carried away; besides, she got a laugh out of him, didn’t she? She lowers her voice to a whisper and adds, “The ideal temperature for swimming.”
“You haven’t swum yet,” the boy says, pointing to Shahida’s bone-dry swimsuit and then blushing and looking away, obviously feeling like he was just hugely inappropriate. So cute!
“Not today,” she says, flicking at the flared skirt of her suit. “Not yet. I have a plan!” She smiles at him again, draws out another blush. “What about you? Which pools have you tried?”
“Um,” he says, pointing, “just that one.”
She follows his finger and frowns in disbelief. “That’s the kiddy pool,” she says flatly. “You don’t want to go in the kiddy pool.” Exaggeratedly she widens her eyes, pretending to have been struck with sudden inspiration. “You should come with me! I can show you the good stuff!”
He looks over towards the gaggle of parents hiding their sunburns under the parasols that surround the plaza. “I’m supposed to stay with—”
“Oh, come on!” Shahida reaches for his arm and drags him away from the railing. The queue for the Grand Flume isn’t far, and if she can get him there, away from any family members who might object to her borrowing him, she’s home free. He offers basically no resistance, and she pulls him across the stone tiles. “Let’s ride the flume and then I’ll show you all the sights.” Keep him talking; keep him distracted. “How long have you been here?”
The boy staggers a little under her grip; his wrist is so thin! “Uh, we got here two days ago. We didn’t come to the dome until today, though.” He smiles at her and she smiles back, to encourage him. “We went horseback riding yesterday,” he adds sheepishly.
“Mistake!” Shahida says, laughing. “Clearly you need to stick with me. I’ll show you everything in the proper order.” She lets go of his wrist as they approach the queue, skipping around behind him to trap him in place. She turns him around to face her. “You have to see things the right way, or you won’t get the full experience. You should ride the slides and then try out the relaxing whirlpool baths, not the other way round. Oh, and at three, they empty out the wave pool for an hour so people can ride mini jet-skis! We’re not old enough for that, unfortunately.”
“How old are you?” he asks.
“I turned thirteen in March,” she says triumphantly.
“Oh!” he says, rubbing his wrist where she grabbed it. “Cool! I turn thirteen in a month.”
“That’s perfect!” Shahida says. “It’s clearly fate that we met. I needed a friend to share this place with and you—” she turns them both around again and points to the gaping mouth of the water slide; there’s only one person in front of them in the queue now, “—needed to try that. It’s the tallest flume in Europe!”
She’s clearly won him over, because he says, “You’re such a dork for this place,” and laughs again, and it’s the kind of laugh she wants to hear over and over, so she broadens her smile. She wants him to feel comfortable around her.
“What’s your name?” she asks. As he tells her, the attendant indicates that it’s her turn to go, so she steps forward into the maw, looks back over her shoulder and says, “One thing you should know about me, Mark, is that I’m a dork for everything.”
And then there’s nothing but the thrill of the descent.
2019 December 11
Wednesday
Dorley Hall’s still so fucking intimidating.
The rain doesn’t help, sure — it’s one of those very English days where the sky will occasionally just open the fuck up for a half-hour or so at a time, and Lorna and Vicky’s trip from the car park was spectacularly ill-timed — but even in the best of conditions the great brick beast of a dorm makes her nervous. More so, now she knows exactly what goes on beneath. She wonders as they approach if, right now, under her feet, some unwilling boy is being subjected to—
She shudders.
Vicky reaches for her hand and squeezes. Lorna takes the opportunity to latch onto her whole arm, to sink into her, to steady her soul against her as well as her body. She becomes a weight against her, slowing them both to a stop.
Rain collects in the collar of Lorna’s shirt. She doesn’t care. Right now, she’s holding Vicky, and nothing else matters.
It’s still tense between them sometimes. Less so as the days pile up, as Lorna manages to keep her shit contained, as she stops just unloading on people who don’t deserve it, but she still despises the distance between them and takes every opportunity to close it. Christine’s visit and Lorna’s apology did a lot to reassure Vicky, so Lorna’s been actively keeping up the connection; texting with Christine, meeting her for lunch when their timetables allow for it, and making arrangements for her to come visit again.
It honestly feels good to have Christine as a friend again. Bit of a shame she’s not going to be around this morning; a catch-up meeting with one of her professors, apparently. Even Dorley’s connections can’t get you out of missing that many lectures.
“We can just go,” Vicky says, positioning herself between Lorna and the Hall. “You don’t have to take what they’re offering.”
Lorna shakes her head, and yanks sopping hair out of her eyes with the hand that’s not keeping them both anchored. “I already did,” she says. “We wouldn’t have covered FFS without them.” It still rankles, finding out that the large, anonymous donation to her crowdfunder came from Dorley. “Not to mention all the estradiol you steal for me. And, God, Vick; I’m fed up with waiting to start my life! They can give me bottom surgery! For free!”
“We really can—”
“No,” she says, wriggling out of Vicky’s grasp. She forces a laugh. “I’m being silly, Vick. I’m letting my imagination run away with me. Whatever they do underground is none of my business. It can’t be, not if I’m going to know about this place and stop my brain from dribbling out of my ears. And if I don’t care, they don’t care. Nothing’s going to happen to me in there that I don’t want to happen.”
“I wouldn’t let it,” Vicky whispers. “And we can still make it work without them.”
“I know. Vick, you’re sweet, you’re, God, you’re so fucking sweet, and I love you to pieces. But I’m here now, and I’m already in on the joke and stressed as hell about it, so I might as well reap the rewards. Come on; I’m drenched and so are you.”
She reaches for Vicky’s hand again and drags her towards Dorley Hall, trying to ignore the way the place still looms so large, and failing: she hunches her shoulders against its bulk as they come up to the entryway, but soon they’re inside and hanging up sopping wet coats and squeezing out soaking hair and too busy for Lorna to spend all that much time worrying about it any more.
“‘In on the joke’?” Vicky says, grinning.
Lorna groans. “I’ve been talking to Christine too much.”
Vicky’s still reaching for the fingerprint lock when a girl bursts out of the kitchen doors, wraps her in a hug and then immediately steps back, shaking her arms exaggeratedly to dry them. “Ew!” she squeals. “Victoria! You’re so wet!”
“You noticed?” Vicky says. “Lorna, this is Jodie, from my intake. Jo, this is Lorna.”
“Oh my God,” Jodie says, leaping forward and grabbing one of Lorna’s hands. “I’ve wanted to meet you for so long! Victoria’s told me all about you!”
Lorna smiles, limply accepts a kiss on her knuckles, and says, “Hi.”
Jodie’s dressed mostly in black, with matching wine-red stockings and hair, and she jangles when she moves quickly: jewellery, apparently.
“Jo runs a World of Darkness stream,” Vicky says, “and—”
“Right!” Lorna says, making a show of remembering. “You’re that Jodie! I caught a little of your stream, once.” It’s a lie, but only just; Vicky’s been briefing her on people she’s likely to run into — fighting against the impediment that is Lorna’s terrible memory for names — and showed her some screenshots of the stream. Jodie dresses up for it. “I like the hat you wore.”
“Which one?”
“Oh, the, uh, it was like a sun hat, but black, with, um, a pink accent? Like a gothic, vampiric sun hat.”
“Isn’t it great?” Jodie says, bouncing on her heels. “I got that locally, actually! Normally I get my things online, because, yeah, Almsworth, not exactly the goth capital of the world, but there was a whole outfit in the window of a charity shop in town and it was just gorgeous so we went inside and they had boxes of this stuff they were still putting out. It was like an awesome old lady witch just died and her familiars were donating all her clothes.” She mimes something complicated which, if Lorna uses her imagination, could possibly be a raven delivering a box of clothes. “Very sad. Anyway, we got first pick and I got so many great things for the stream. I can show you sometime, if you’d like?”
“Oh! Yes. Maybe?”
“Hmm,” Jodie says, frowning at Lorna and picking limply at a wet lock of hair, “you’re here to see the consultant, right? Well, she’s always running late, so how about you come up with me and get yourself sorted out?”
“Sorted out?” Vicky asks.
“Yes! Both of you! You’re soaked. You need showers, fresh clothes… Victoria’s got her own shower, of course, even if she does have to climb over fifty boxes of Paige’s stuff to get to it, so you—” she points at Lorna, “—can use mine!”
“Jo, it’s really okay—”
“It’s decided!” Jodie says, and drags Lorna towards the stairs. “And don’t worry about missing anyone; you’ll be done with plenty of time to catch up.”
Lorna half-turns and shrugs at Vicky. Getting cleaned up would be nice — she hadn’t exactly been looking forward to facing this place while looking and feeling like a drowned rat — and she’d much rather accept a shower from this Jodie girl than ask one of the sponsors. So they both follow her up to the second floor, where Vicky disappears into her room and Jodie opens the door to hers in the manner of someone presenting an ancient tomb on the day of its first unearthing.
It’s surprisingly normal inside. She does have a vase of black roses on her windowsill, though.
“So,” Jodie says, “bathroom’s there, and everything you need should be on the caddy in the shower cubicle; there’s a clean towel on top of the basket by the sink; and when you’re done I, um…” She intertwines her fingers nervously. “I have something to confess.”
Ominous.
But the shower’s hot and the water pressure is downright fantastic and when she’s done, and found the set of clean — and not particularly vampiric — clothes left outside the bathroom door, and dressed herself and started drying her hair, she feels content and comfortable and not especially concerned about whatever it is Jodie has to confess.
Jodie re-enters the bedroom backwards, with two mugs of tea, pushing open the door with her bottom, and smiles when she sees Lorna’s new, much less bedraggled appearance.
“Looking good!” she says, and sets out a coaster and a mug of tea on the dresser.
“Thanks,” Lorna says. “And thanks for the clothes, too.”
“Okay, so, the thing is,” Jodie says, waving away Lorna’s thanks and settling down on the end of the bed, “I had an ulterior motive for asking you up here. I wanted to get you on your own, because I need some advice.”
Advice? Not where Lorna thought this might go. She nods, and embraces her mug of tea with both hands. “If I can help,” she says, “I’d be happy to.”
Jodie chews on her lip for a moment. “So,” she says, “I haven’t done my NPH yet. That’s, uh— you know what that is? Yeah, okay. And it’s not actually unusual to leave it so late, like, last year, Pippa’s year — you know Pippa? — it was gone Christmas before some of them were making their final decisions, but this year, this intake, everyone’s a prodigy, right? Yasmin and Julia did theirs a while ago, Paige even earlier, Victoria did hers last year — which I guess you know! — and, sure, Christine’s a holdout like me, but she’s also the world’s most adorable disaster and has let way too many people think of her as trans to be anything else at this point. But. Anyway. It’s not really my NPH that’s the issue? I mean, I’m sort of fixated on it, but delaying it’s a symptom, not the actual problem, right? The problem is— oh, God, this is awkward…”
“Hey,” Lorna says gently, “relax.” Jodie’s not at all what she expected from a random bad-boy-turned-girl. She considers for a moment that she might have been encouraged, or outright ordered, to put on an act for the benefit of the dangerous outsider, but dismisses the thought as useless paranoia: after a certain point, you have to assume either that everything is Machiavellian manipulation from a houseful of devious kidnappers, or that the girls are, for the most part, what they appear to be, and Lorna’s experience with Vicky and the other members of her intake strongly suggests the latter interpretation. And even if it is sensible to assume the worst from the sponsors, none of Vicky’s intake are in that role. “Whatever you want to say, you can say.”
“Thank you,” Jodie says, nodding emphatically. “So. I haven’t finalised my New Personal History, right, and that means my identity is still sort of in limbo? Like, I’m enough of a person as far as the uni’s concerned that I can go to lectures and stuff, but my bank account is still controlled by the programme, I don’t technically have a birth certificate… all that crap.” She waves a hand: unimportant. “But it’s my identity that’s the question. I’ve been… thinking about it.”
There’s enough of a pause that Lorna has to fill it. “About… being a girl?”
Jodie’s eyes go wide. “No! No, that’s, um, very much decided. I like me this way. I love me! But, well, also, my history is kind of important to me? Not the stuff that brought me here, the bad stuff, the stuff I won’t even try to foist on you until we know each other way better, at least, assuming you even want to know me— Shit, that was a presumptuous thing to say, actually!”
“Not at all,” Lorna insists, stifling a laugh. There’s something very engaging about Jodie, for all that she talks like she’s a can of Coke and someone shook her up before opening her. “You’re a friend of Vick’s right? And Christine’s?” Another emphatic nod from Jodie. “Then you’re a friend of mine. We can work out the details later.” She wonders for a moment if she’s going to regret this, and then decides it probably doesn’t make any difference. At this point she’s knee-deep in Dorley Hall; why not make friends?
“So,” Jodie says, “I’ve been toying with ways to describe myself, should I ever meet another trans woman. Another one I can actually talk to about being trans, I mean! Because I can’t go unloading on that girl in the basement; she’s got enough to deal with. Have you met her? She’s really nice, but she’s crushing hard on this boy down there? And she knows what’s going to happen to him but she can’t say anything? And he’s starting to see her for who she really is and he’s denying his feelings and he’s refusing to accept what’s happening but you can see the little glimmers of who he might become, right? And she’s helping keep him stable and he’s helping her in his own way and, God, Lorna, it’s so sweet and so sad and I’m so addicted and where was I? Shit. Yes. How to describe myself. So.” She holds up both her hands, one with her thumb touching her forefinger in an oval shape, the other curled into a fist, and wiggles them. “Trans people. You have eggs, right?” She nods at her more open hand. “Well-understood concept. And then you have me.” She nods at the closed fist. “I’ve been thinking of myself as having been something more like a seed. A girl in potentia, right? Now, an egg is fragile, yes? Vulnerable to moments of revelation, random events or people that will crack her shell and reveal the gooey girly mess inside, right?” Lorna, bemused, nods, and Jodie grins and drops her egg hand. “Well, a seed is tougher. And there’s not really any stuff inside, right? It can last years without breaking. Lifetimes, maybe. And it’s fine like that! It can happily be a seed until, eventually, it biodegrades. Circle of life! Even if you break it apart, crack it like you would an egg, there’s just bits inside. Crumbly little seedy bits. But.” She plunges her seed hand down into her lap, buries it between her calves. “If you plant the seed, if you water it, nurture it, love it, then maybe, after a while, you get a little plant. And if you keep watering the plant, if you care for it until it’s strong enough to stand up on its own, you get a flower, right? And maybe… maybe the flower is beautiful, and enjoys being beautiful, and likes the feel of the sun on her leaves… You get the idea?”
“I think so.”
Jodie sips her tea, looking out of the window as she does, at the rain lashing against the pane. “I could’ve gone my whole life as a seed, happy enough, with not a moment of dysphoria and not a second of questioning my gender. I even played a girl in a play at school and that’s egg-cracking ground zero, but it did nothing for me. But this place planted me and took care of me and helped me grow, and now… Now I’m happier than I ever was! More me than I ever was. Free of restrictions, free of expectations. Free! But my history, the guy I spent the first twenty years of my life as, he’s still important to me, too, right? He messed up, yeah, absolutely, and I’d want to take him aside and give him the sternest talking to if I ever met him, but he’s still me, and he’s still important, and I don’t want to forget him. He’s still inside me, in memories, in habits, in some of the things I like, in some of the things I say… Just because I, um, grew out of him, doesn’t mean he’s gone, yes?” She’s frowning slightly. “And this is what I wanted to talk to another trans woman about. And not someone like Victoria, either, or Donna, my sponsor; they’re both lovely but they’re also both from here, you know? Wonky perspective.” She wobbles a flattened palm from side to side. “I need a normal trans woman, like you.”
“Oh,” Lorna says, unused to being considered normal. “Sure. Go ahead?”
“I’m trans,” Jodie says. “I’ve done a lot of thinking and it just fits, yes? I’m a trans woman. It feels right to say. But that’s not my question. It’s the setup to my question.” She squirms, wrinkling the bedsheets. “What I want to know is… Being out, is it worth it?” She raises a finger to forestall Lorna’s answer — unnecessary, since Lorna hasn’t yet formulated one; she’s not even sure what question Jodie’s asking, exactly — and then taps herself twice near the base of her belly. “I’m still intact. Down there. Not my balls, obviously—” a giggle bursts through her otherwise serious demeanour, “—but otherwise I’m shipshape. And I kinda like it that way? For a while I thought I didn’t, I thought I’d want to get rid of it like Christine and Victoria and all the rest, but then I just kind of got used to the idea of being a girl with a penis, you know? Another thing that just felt comfortable, felt right. But if I want to keep it, and if I want to be known as a trans woman, which I do, those are both things that dictate my NPH, you know? I have to fill it out as a trans girl. Officially.”
“You mean,” Lorna says, “if you don’t want bottom surgery, you have to be trans? That’s… coercive.”
“Not really!” Jodie says quickly. “I mean, think about it: if they construct a watertight identity for me as a cis woman and then I, say, want to go swimming or something… Well, I can’t ever go swimming. Because if I get found out, then my identity gets looked into, and if it gets back to here…” She waves her hand again, and Lorna understands.
“Suddenly everyone’s in danger.”
“Yes.”
“Because of your penis.”
“Yes. And I’m not fighting that, Lorna, I’m really not, and I understand why it’s the policy, but this is why Donna’s been telling me to take my time thinking about it even though I know she’s waiting for me to choose, because it’s scary, Lorna! I want to be trans, for real, on paper. I want to be me! I’ve seen what it’s cost Victoria and Paige to have to pretend to be cis girls and I don’t want that for me but, also…” She shrugs. “I’m scared of it. Scared of being out. Because of transphobes. TERFs. The bloody Tories! I’m scared of all of them! So I think what I’m asking, what I want to know, is can I be me, and still be safe? And, if I can’t, if that’s a sacrifice I have to make, is being in community with other trans people worth the risk of having to be trans in this country?”
Well, Lorna? Is it?
Jesus fucking Christ.
That’s a hell of a question to have to answer so early in the morning.
* * *
Therapy’s a mirror and a refusal to look away.
Five foot six (and a bit). Aaron’s been five foot six (and a bit) since he stopped growing, years back. He’d been one of those boys who shot up early in puberty and then just stayed there, increasingly emasculated as the other boys outgrew him, and increasingly frustrated as his mother measured him against the door frame of his old bedroom in the old house, marking notches closer and closer together. When he went off to boarding school he lost track of it, and endured much from boys both older and larger than he, with his diminutive nature a particular sticking point. So, one summer holiday, staying at his parents’ new house, he waited for them to go out, and rummaged in the drawer under their bed for the rolled-up greaseproof paper he saw his mother pack on their last day in the old place. She always had been sentimental, not that it ever helped him, particularly; he always felt like he was her son aesthetically more than spiritually or biologically or whatever, like she clung more to the idea of him more than to the ugly reality of Aaron himself. So she ritualised their relationship, performed it, and one of the things mothers do is keep track of their growing boy’s height. She traced the height marks onto paper before they moved out, and kept it safe. For all he knew she got it out occasionally and imagined what the version of him she preferred was getting up to. Pencil marks on greaseproof paper, describing the boy she wished she had.
He rolled it out and lay on it, flattened down his hair and marked off his new height: a fraction of an inch taller than when they left the old place, years ago. So that was it, then: already his adult height at fifteen.
He tore the paper up, scattered the remains on their bed. He kept his resolve when he heard her crying over them; she didn’t cry when the head of the house at school called them in to tell them he’d had his arm broken, but she weeps over paper?
Five foot six (and a bit). That’s how tall he was at fifteen, and that’s how tall he was when he came to Dorley Hall. And when he found out about the Goserelin implant, and got the lecture from Will on its effects, he marked his height next to the mirror, stood with his back to it and scratched it into the wood with his fingernail. Just in case. Because that’s what happens with old people, isn’t it? After they’ve run their bodies dry of testosterone or estrogen and begun supplementing with oils and tinctures out of cans with peeling paper labels and sell-by dates from the seventies, they shrink, right? Denying your body testosterone, it’s like the male menopause, or something.
Whatever. Will called him a moron when he asked about it. He probably wouldn’t even have bothered making the marks if this concrete girlboss purgatory hadn’t been so fucking boring, if he hadn’t been filling the brief periods between wanks with whatever he could find to keep himself busy. It’d been the wildest of precautions.
Not so wild, after all.
His eyes flick from the new scratch by the mirror, to his naked reflection, and back again. His imaginary therapist has been telling him to face up to it, to understand every detail of what they’re doing to him, to document it, and while he despises the impulse to do so he has to admit that it’s better than hiding from it and letting his imagination run wild. Even if what he sees in the mirror is horrifying, it could probably still be worse.
Compared to how he was when he got here, his chest is unmistakably swollen (in two places), and his arse and hips are getting fleshy (which might be why his lower back hurts). His face is a little softer (in the way Stef’s is) and his arms… those are probably the most different. He used to be proud of his arms, the way the veins stood out, like they do on body-builders. He might have been short and average-looking and physically unimpressive no matter how many push-ups he did, but he had veins like the ripped guys had, and that was enough. And it was sort of fun to press down on them and watch them pop back up again. Gone now, though. Melted into his softening skin. Another piece of himself he won’t get back.
That, and the height.
Five foot six (and nothing). And that’s being generous.
He asked Stef his height once, and got an answer in centimetres. Not helpful, for Aaron; at the boarding school they insisted on teaching primarily in imperial units — one time, he’s certain, his History teacher cried when he was telling the class how the glorious British Empire gifted its weights and measurements to the world — and while he’s happily converted for almost everything else, human heights are a black box to him. Stef laughed when he came up with a conversion that put Stef at over six foot, and put him out of his misery: Stef’s five foot nine. One hundred seventy-five centimetres. Which would make Aaron…
How should he know? He’s a Geology student. Whatever he is in centimetres, he used to be at least one more.
And it’s exhausting to stay angry. It’s coming up on two weeks since they came clean about their intentions — and more than two months since they started suppressing his testosterone! — and, God help him, it’s sunk in and then some. Yes, he hates it, and he renews that hate every time he sees his reflection, every time he brushes against a sensitive nipple, every time he gets naked to wash and has to feel his arse and his thighs and shave his softening face, but nothing can bring that early anger back. It drained out of him, along with his resolve to fight. And that’s probably for the best: keeping up his rage felt like feeding a cancerous organ, a growth inside him that poisoned his bloodstream and offered him nothing but pain. And he has examples, in Martin and Adam and the others who’ve been shut away in the cells, of the futility of fighting against it, whether mentally or physically. So: resentful resignation, that’s where Aaron’s landed, firmly and decisively.
He snorts, and prods at his bottom. Firmly indeed.
His second phone alarm goes off. 9am. Late for breakfast, so where the hell’s Indira? Usually she’s bustling around him by this point, asking friendly but pointed questions, making veiled threats, ruffling his hair. Is this another one of her little lessons? Is he expected to intuit something from her absence?
Or maybe there’s been some kind of horrible plague, and everyone upstairs is dead? Hmm. Wishful thinking. And it’d suck for Stef, who inexplicably has friends up there. And everyone down here would all die of hunger.
He shrugs, noting in the mirror the slightly different way his chest moves now when he does so, and returns to his routine. He takes his daily photo, saves it out to the computer, throws the phone lightly onto the bed, then turns away from the mirror and rummages in the carefully arranged piles of clothes in the wardrobe. He spent a while late last week sorting through the clothes in there, checking for softness, testing for thickness, trying them out, and eventually settled on a selection of five long-sleeved cotton t-shirts, which he keeps apart from everything else. He grabs one, stands up straight and wraps it carefully around his chest, looping the arms all the way around himself and tying them tight over his belly. He bunches the material up around his sore, swollen parts, and rolls it tightly underneath for a little extra protection.
He’s gotten good at avoiding his reflection during this part, because he knows what it looks like when he wraps his developing chest like this. A few days ago, just to mess around, he posed in the mirror, pulling the t-shirt wrapped around his breast buds tight, like a crop top, and moments later wished he’d had breakfast so he had something inside him to throw up besides acid. He turns his back on the mirror instead, pulling out a short-sleeved t-shirt and tugging it over his head, and finishing with a hoodie and joggers. Then he looks at himself, from every angle he can attain in the mirror, and confirms that he looks more or less like he used to, with perhaps a little extra bulk from the improvised support. Blame it on hormonal weight gain.
Aaron might not be able to stop what they’re doing to him, but he’s fucked if he’s asking for a bra.
* * *
The direst warning about Dorley Hall: it’s makeover central. The first and second floors in particular are swarming with girls who are still learning, or who have become expert and enjoy exercising their talent, or who have become expert and enjoy inflicting on others the tortures their sponsors subjected them to. Jodie, at least, asked first.
Lorna’s quite enjoying being pampered, actually. And the prep’s given her time to assemble her thoughts, so she can answer Jodie’s question honestly and thoroughly.
“It’s worth it,” she says firmly. “For so many reasons, it’s worth it. For one, you get to be part of a community of people who understand you, who share some of your base assumptions. You talked about Vicky before, and you’re absolutely right that play-acting as a cis girl hurt her; especially because she felt — was made to feel — like she had to do so in front of me. But that’s shit you already knew, or could guess.”
“Mm-hm,” Jodie says, nodding. She’s been sorting through foundations on her dresser, looking for a match for Lorna’s skin; they’re close in colour, but Lorna’s less inclined to accentuate her pallor. She dabs a couple of colours on the back of her hand and lifts a lock of Lorna’s hair, to check the foundation against her skin, and brushes accidentally against the small spot of stubble Lorna’s been letting grow the last couple of days. “Oh. You, uh, missed a spot.”
Lorna bats her hand away, gently but quickly. “Sorry,” she says immediately. “I hate anyone touching that. I hate feeling it on me.” Jodie’s innocent fingers brought with them a familiar cascade of unpleasant memories, the most vivid of which is always the man at the hospital where she worked admin for a while, who reached up from his bed, grabbed roughly at her face and rubbed at her chin and cheeks, checking for facial hair; evidence of maleness.
Jodie, wide-eyed, shakes her head: an apology. “You want to talk about it?”
“Not right now?” Lorna says, rubbing at the fine hairs herself to dispel the sensation. “I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.” Repetition helps. She forces a smile. “I grew out a bit of beard because I want to see Stephanie’s electrolysis consultant today.” She shrugs, sheepish. “Laser didn’t get everything, and I’ve been meaning to get finished off for ages…”
“…and if Dorley’s going to pay, why not take advantage?” Jodie finishes.
“Exactly! It’s not too noticeable, is it?”
“No. I had to lift up your hair to see it. You’re fine. After your consultation, if you want to get rid of it, you can come back up here. I have clean razorblades and stuff, and I’m done with my lectures at eleven.”
“Thanks, Jodie,” Lorna says, and Jodie beams at her and starts dabbing spots of foundation around Lorna’s chin.
“I can avoid the whole area, if you’d like.”
“It’s fine,” Lorna says firmly. “I’m expecting it now. I’ll be fine.” Jodie nods, and Lorna puts her thoughts back together. “I was talking about community, right? And why it’s worth it. And I think it’s because community is safety, Jodie. Your question’s backwards: it shouldn’t be, ‘Is community worth the risk of being yourself?’; it should be, ‘Can you safely be yourself without community?’ If that makes sense? Okay, so, I’m thinking aloud here, but Dorley Hall, the programme, it’s failed you. All of you! It’s all set up to make cis-like women out of you, to push you out into the world to live as cis women, to pretend that the first two decades of your life never happened. And you can live that way, I’m sure — I don’t doubt there are reams of success stories — but, Jodie, it hasn’t escaped my notice that a lot of graduates still live here.” It had been quite startling, when Vicky was first going through the names of the people she might run into, just how many women and nonbinary people still orbited Dorley Hall well into their thirties. “They still live here, or they come back here a lot, and they spend most or all of their time around other graduates. And that’s not a criticism of them! But I think it’s a criticism of the process. Because it’s not just that Dorley girls are the only ones who understand Dorley girls; it’s that the understanding keeps you all safe!” Lorna nods to herself. She likes sorting through her thoughts like this, aloud and preferably with an audience, even if Vicky sometimes has to banish her up to the bedroom when she’s working on an essay. Jodie steadies her head with a hand, and Lorna remembers she’s not supposed to be moving. She continues, as Jodie sponges makeup around her jaw and neck. “Dorley Hall’s like the trans community in microcosm. You’re a big found family — kidnapped family, I suppose — and you all look out for each other and instinctively understand each other’s needs and tell terrible jokes that only make sense inside these walls.” Jodie bites her lip, and nods. “And everyone comes back here because here’s the only place where they can have that. But. But. If you come out as trans, if you embrace it, if you make it your, uh—” Lorna waves a hand, forgetting the terminology.
“—New Personal History—”
“—New Personal History, thank you, then you can still have that when you leave Dorley. We, the great and intermingled and heavily dysfunctional LGBTQIA-plus community, we have our own shit jokes and our own support networks, and we will look out for you, just like your Sisters do. Yeah, we’re far from perfect and we have a fresh bout of infighting every other Wednesday, but we’re out there, Jodie. Dorley Hall doesn’t have to be the only place that understands you.”
“But I could still be cis,” Jodie says, slowly and uncertainly. “Not cis like Victoria or Paige, where they hate it, but cis like Julia and Yasmin. You know them? They’re just down the corridor — only not right now; right now they’re at work — and they’re cis in the world, but to each other they’re just… Julia and Yasmin. They don’t have to pretend with each other like Victoria did with you, and they get the benefits of being, you know, cis.”
“But you don’t want to do that, because…” Lorna says, and pauses for a moment as she decides exactly how she wants to continue. “Because! Jodie, you’re not cis! None of the people here are! And the more I learn about you, the more of you I meet, the clearer it becomes to me that you have trans experiences. Trans lives. It doesn’t matter that you wouldn’t have chosen transition on your own; if you were a seed, like you said, or a pine cone, or a— a— a fucking potato! It doesn’t even matter that you pass well enough that you can fake being cis! Because this country — fuck, most of the fucking world, Jodie — imposes from top to bottom a gendered system on bodies and lives that are incredibly diverse, and when you go out there you’re going to have to survive in compliance with it. You’re going to have to live in a world premised on an assumption that’s hilariously false, that takes as a foundational component the belief that man and woman are two simple and separate categories with no crossover, no complication, no nuance, no third or fourth or four-thousandth option… You’re going to have to exist inside that system just to earn money, to pay rent, to live, and that’s before you even think about actual personal fulfilment! And facing all that down alone is hard, Jodie, it’s so fucking hard, because when you’ve seen the eighth and ninth and tenth colours of the rainbow, you can’t go back. You need the community, because we create little bubbles of reality in the mad, structured chaos of the cis world; places where you can exist as yourself, people around whom you don’t have to keep up the act. And we’re— we’re—” And Lorna stops, snorting as she tries to hold in a laugh and not upset Jodie’s steady hand, keeping herself as still as she can while her shoulders shake. “Sorry,” she continues, once she’s got herself under control. “I just realised I dropped into a speech I wrote a few months back. Imprinted on my brain, you know? You get my point, though, I think. Community is safety, but it’s more than that. It’s a place, and it’s a conceptual space, and it’s a huge group of people who are downright excited for you to be yourself, no matter how weird and delightful that is, and who will help you live that way. We’ve housed people; we’ve funded surgeries; we’ve provided guidance and roadmaps and medication and— and fucking love, Jodie. When I say I wouldn’t be cis, even if it meant no-one would treat me weird in the street any more, even if it meant better employment prospects or not bracing for a heart attack whenever I open Twitter, it’s because I can’t imagine giving up the community. Giving up the knowledge that there’s more to life than cis gender mythology. Giving up all those extra colours in the rainbow. I love being trans, Jodie, because it’s me and because it’s real. I love it! And I think you will, too.”
Jodie wants her to present her lips to be painted, so Lorna does so, consenting to be silenced. Jodie dabs at her, still frowning, in concentration and contemplation.
“I think you’re right,” Jodie says after a little while. “Um, do this?” She pops her lips, and Lorna copies her. Jodie nods again, smiling, and starts putting things away as she talks. “I think you’re absolutely right. God, Lorna, you don’t know how long I’ve been obsessing over this! And I’ve bugged Donna about it and Tabitha and the handful of other grads who are officially trans and they were just like—” she lowers her voice a little, dropping into an impression of someone Lorna can’t identify, “—‘Oh, it’s easy, Jodie, it’s just better this way,’ which was, you know, reassuring but not actually helpful, and I suppose I could have pressed harder and got into an actual conversation about it but I’ve caused Donna enough trouble over the years and Tabitha’s so busy, and kind of intimidatingly pretty, actually, like, God, have you met her? I hate that she’s straight, shit. Unfair. But, yes, wow, Lorna! I’ve been chewing over this for so long and it’s like you just reached into my head and pulled out all my thoughts and picked them apart for the good ones and threw the rest away because, shit, yes, I’m going to do it.”
Lorna blinks. “You’re…?”
“Lean back?” Jodie says, and Lorna, confused, obeys; Jodie douses her in fixing spray. “I’m going to be a trans woman. Legally. Paperwork-ly. I’ve decided. And I always wondered, if I do decide to get bottom surgery one day, but I go trans on my NPH now, will I regret being out? And I think, now, actually, that I won’t. Although I also, y’know, think that I won’t get bottom surgery. You know?”
Lorna sorts through her words for the salient ones. “You’re going to be a trans woman?” she says. “That’s great! Jodie—!”
She’s interrupted by a raised finger. Jodie’s digging in her bag for her phone, and when she finds it she places it on the dresser and dials out, on speaker.
“Hi,” an unfamiliar soprano voice says, picking up after just two rings. “Everything okay, Jo?”
Jodie, suddenly overcome with excitement, seems unable to speak. Lorna prods her, unblocks her, and it all comes out at once. “I’m ready, Donna. I’m ready to do my NPH! I’ve been thinking and talking and I’ve decided and, Donna, I’m going to be trans. I’m keeping it and I’m going to be trans, Donna!”
There’s a moment of silence, and then Donna replies, “Really? Seriously?”
“Yep!”
“Fuck yes, Jodie! Welcome to the winning team. What tipped you over?”
“Remember I told you about Vicky’s girlfriend, Lorna? She’s here, and she talked me through it. She helped me make up my mind.”
“God. I’m going to buy that girl a present.”
“She can hear you, Donna.”
“Hi,” Lorna says, hesitant.
“Oh! Hi, Lorna! I’m going to buy you a motherfucking present! Well done! Jo, I have to get back to work, but I’ll drop by tonight and we can go over everything, okay?”
“Sounds great,” Jodie says.
“Proud of you, sweetie.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too,” Donna says, and the line clicks as she hangs up. Lorna, for a moment, envies the connection the two of them seem to have. What was that about found families?
Jodie turns back to Lorna with a huge smile on her face, and almost tackle-hugs her, leaning back at the last moment so she doesn’t mess up the makeup job. “Thank you,” she whispers, and kisses Lorna behind the ear. “God,” she says, sitting back, curling her legs up under herself and spinning from side to side on her chair, “there are so many people I can’t wait to tell!” She squeals. “I can come out on stream!”
“That’s really something it’s okay to do?” Lorna asks.
Jodie flaps a dismissive hand. “Oh, yes. Donna’s been hoping I’d jump this way. She’ll have everything ready, and we can have preliminary documents done by the end of the week, probably.”
“How does that even work?”
She shrugs. “Don’t know, actually. Never really been all that interested in the mechanical side of things, you know? I think we do birth certificates from hospitals that have since been demolished, or something? Paper-only records, electronic filing mislaid, et cetera. Donna says the machinery of the British state is like all other machines made in Britain: unreliable and full of holes.” She stops fidgeting on her chair for a second and reaches out for Lorna’s hand. “You think it’s okay for me to do this, right? To be trans? Like, specifically a trans woman? I’m not appropriating anything?”
Lorna laughs, and pats her hand. “Jodie, we’ve known each other for about an hour, and we’ve already talked about my beard hairs and your penis. You’re definitely trans; no-one overshares like us.”
Jodie giggles, and takes in and lets out a lungful of air, blowing her hair out of her face and leaning back on her chair. “God,” she says. “Weight off my mind.” She flips her phone screen-side up on the dresser and pouts at it. “Ugh. Why can’t it be lunchtime already?”
“Hungry?”
“It’s when my partner gets out of lectures. I don’t know if you know xem? We do the stream together.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lorna says, concentrating. “Connor, yes? With the big vampire teeth.”
“Xe’s known I’m trans since we first met,” Jodie says. She blushes. “I, um, sort of broke the rules to tell xem, but I told xem I was still deciding if I wanted to be stealth, and xe said my secret was safe with xem. Actually… You know what? I’m going to wait until Friday night. We don’t stream until Saturday, and on Friday, Connor’s making us dinner, so I’ll make it into an event.” She giggles. “A night to remember. God, I’m so excited to be open. Really open. No more existential crises for me, at least until we can decide whether to use my stored sperm.”
Lorna can’t help but look away.
“Oh,” Jodie says, “sorry. Sore point?”
“A little. I couldn’t afford to get any stored.” Lorna chews on her cheek, thinking. “Actually, I guess, maybe I could, now?”
Jodie nods vigorously. “Yep. We’d pay for it. Ask Auntie MILF.”
Lorna coughs. “‘Auntie MILF’?”
“Just my little revenge,” Jodie says, grinning. “I called her a MILF in my first year and got an earful and a week in the cells. But now that I’m a girl… She likes us to be a little rebellious.”
Lorna cross-references that assertion with the thing about being put in the cells for a week. “She… likes it when you call her a MILF?”
“She pretends she hates it. But I’ve known her a while now. Beatrice angry and Beatrice pretending to be angry are very different. Donna says she likes being busted out of the role she plays, that she mainly puts it on to help the first and second years acclimate, and to remind the rest of us to play our roles.”
“God,” Lorna says, “this place is so weird.”
“I know. We’re the mice who chased off the scientists, and now we control the maze. But the street mice say we’re kind of odd. Come on!” Jodie grabs at Lorna’s hand, pulling her up from the chair. “Let’s go back down to the kitchen; I want to tell Tabitha.”
“Tabitha?” Lorna says, smoothing down her borrowed clothes. Jodie’s mentioned her a few times; Lorna’s blanked on the name each time.
“I thought you met her? Black, about your height, somewhere in her thirties, tragic love life? Crazy pretty?”
“Oh,” Lorna says, stretching the vowel as realisation dawns, “Tabby. Yes, I met her.” The one whose ex-boyfriends are all ex-girlfriends, Vick said. Lorna had a thought about that…
“She’s a darling. Now come on!”
Lorna, closer to the mirror, peers at the makeup Jodie applied: heavy eyeliner, dark lipstick, and contouring — something Lorna never learned how to do. “You’ve made me look a little bit goth, haven’t you?”
“I think it suits you!”
“You know what?” she says, grabbing her bag from the bed and following an ecstatic Jodie out of the room. “I think it suits me, too.”
* * *
Like everything else down here, the dining room’s gotten a little more plush since the more violent boys had their batteries taken out and got put away in their boxes. Metal cutlery’s still a rare treat, but the chairs have sprouted cushions, the lights have dimmed and warmed from their prior harsh blue-white, and a few plants have appeared on the sideboard; plastic, Aaron assumes, and shudders to think what Declan might have achieved with access to a ceramic pot, fake dirt, and some fake leaves. Breakfast these days has also been upgraded, and now includes a choice of cereals, toast with butter and Marmite, fruit, and orange juice. Even the coffee tastes better.
Just a shame Stef isn’t around to eat with him this morning.
No-one is, actually. No Stef, no Indira. Edy, sitting with Adam in the common room and comforting him after his morning cry — or possibly his morning tantrum; the soundproofing between rooms is pretty good, and all Aaron can see is the doubled-over Adam’s shaking back — is keeping a discreet half-eye on him, and brought him coffee when he first stumbled in, but aside from her he’s had no human contact since bidding Stef goodnight. Martin, may his personality rest in peace, is probably knocking around somewhere, although Aaron’s long since given up keeping track of him, ever since it became clear that he wasn’t going to do or become anything interesting any time soon.
Where is Stefan? Since Aaron finally emerged from his room they’ve spent a lot of time together, enough time that Aaron’s having a hard time not thinking about how close they’ve gotten. But it’s only natural that they’d intensify their friendship, right? The two of them are basically the only sane ones left, what with the drunk and the church boy taking turns being the least functional person in any given room, the interchangeable violence twins Ollie and Raph rotting away in the cells — with one of them, according to Stef, smacking himself around for reasons and gratifications Aaron can’t fucking begin to imagine — and Will… Will asking for Stef, unburdening himself like he’s a sensitive boy with real feelings and a real human heart inside his wooden body, despite being the one who slammed Maria’s head into the fucking floor.
Jesus, this place.
Stef, though. Yes, it’s normal and natural that they should be so close, but he finds himself thinking about Stef when he’s not around, and that’s crossing a line, surely? He shouldn’t look forward to seeing another guy quite so much, right?
Hah; if Stef can even be thought of as ‘another guy’ any more. Aaron’s seen him with little bits of makeup on a few times now, when he hasn’t washed it all off properly. Every time, he wants to grab him, drag him away from Pippa and the others, shut him away in his room and provide for him a space where he can be a fucking man for a while, away from the pervasive and pernicious influence of the sponsors, of his so-called sister.
His sister. Stef’s been calling her that. And he means it! Aaron knows he does because he made fun of him and Stef, very seriously, doubled down. He had to agree to be nice to her, to treat her the way he’d treat Stef’s actual sister, but, if he’s honest, he only put up a fight for the look of the thing. Because what’s the point of being rude to any of them, anyway? What does it get him? A moment’s satisfaction, which down here goes about as far as he can spit. And the few times he’s really pulled it out, when he’s dug deep into the worst things he can think of and tried actually to hurt one of the girls for what they’re doing to him, it’s reminded him of before, of the faces of the women who didn’t deserve it, so much so that it’s ruined the simple joy of calling his captor a bitch.
And what would those women think, anyway? The women he persistently harassed? If they knew the little shit who persisted in broadcasting his dick at them had been locked in a basement for months, that he was on course to have his fucking balls removed? Would they care? Would they call the police?
He rolls his eyes and shovels another plastic spoonful of Coco Pops into his mouth. No. Only two people have ever gone to bat for him: Stef, who is stuck down here with him, and Elizabeth, who no doubt would react with disgust if she found out about the things he did after she left.
So he’ll stop trying to antagonise the sponsors, because it gains him nothing. And he’ll be a little nicer to Pippa if Stef asks it of him, because it costs him nothing. Pippa’s cute, anyway, if a little sharp-featured. Aaron likes his girls a little softer, like—
No. Cut that thought right the fuck there. Stef’s his friend. Nothing more.
Where the hell is Indira?
He’s working on his coffee when he gets his answer: Maria walks carefully into the room and sits down at the table opposite him, and he has to lock his legs to stop himself from jumping up and giving her a hug. She’s okay! Yes, Stef said she was, Indira said she was, and so did Pippa and Monica and Jane and Harmony and Ella and Edy and everyone else he’s not-so-subtly asked about her, but knowing it is one thing, seeing it quite another. Lies are hardly unusual here.
“Hi, Aaron,” she says.
“Maria! You’re back!” He looks around the room, hunching his shoulders suddenly, as if Indira might jump out from behind a chair or a cereal box or a plastic potted plant and drag him off to be tubed.
“I’m back. But you’ll have to be gentle with me.” She’s talking quietly, without the edge he remembers, and he nods almost unconsciously. “I’m still sensitive sometimes,” she says, tapping the side of her head, where the flesh is discoloured and still healing, and Aaron blinks as the memory of her hitting the floor returns in technicolour. He hadn’t exactly behaved well that day. He winces, remembering shouting for the guard guys to help him; he should have been helping her… Like Stef did. “And I still get dizzy occasionally,” she continues, directing a slightly puzzled frown at him, like she can see his thoughts, “but that does not—” she points at him, “—comprise an invitation to try anything funny, Aaron, should you catch me in a moment of weakness.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says quickly. “Seriously. Where would I even go? And I don’t want to hurt you,” he adds, annoyed with himself for how true that is, “I just, you know…”
“Consider it a test,” Maria says, dropping her finger and smiling. “I am unpleasantly vulnerable at the moment. If you can be around me without exploiting that, I’ll consider relaxing more of the restrictions on you. You’d have more freedoms.”
“Like Stefan?”
“Like Steph.” Maria softens the f, somehow. “Although probably not as many. She’s— he’s been cooperative for longer.” She realises Aaron’s noticed the pronoun slip, and winces.
“That’s his reward for cooperating, then?” he says, allowing a little venom into his voice, leaning into Maria’s error. “He gets girled more quickly?”
“Bluntly?” Maria says. “Yes. You both know what’s happening here, Aaron. Warts and all.” She gives him a second to acknowledge that yes, in fact, he does know about the estrogen and the tits and the impending mutilation, that he hasn’t somehow forgotten, or forfeited his intellect entirely, like Martin. “So, just the same as Steph, you have a choice: are you going to make it harder for yourself, or easier? Indira will have shown you the lengths we’re willing to go to.”
He nods. “When I refused to eat,” he says, keeping his voice controlled, “she played along for a while, acted like it was all a game, and then, before I knew it, it was a day since I’d had anything and she was threatening to strap me down and feed me forcibly. I, uh, didn’t pick that option.”
“We’re serious about this,” Maria says, nodding, satisfied with Indira’s manipulation. “And that is the least of what we will do if you are uncooperative. The most is Declan.”
“Yeah, yeah. You don’t need to drop his name. He’s fish food, I know.”
“So?” Maria says, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling. Aaron hates how pretty she is, how much he wants to please her, how glad he is that she’s okay.
“So what?” Aaron says, projecting annoyance.
“Are you going to make it harder for yourself, or easier?”
“I’ll take option three.”
“Aaron,” Maria says, frowning at him.
“No, listen. I know the choices. And I can see the consequences. Martin’s unpersoned himself; Adam’s cried so much I don’t know how he hasn’t shrivelled up like a grape from dehydration; the psycho gang are all in literal solitary confinement—”
“They have entertainment,” Maria interrupts. “And visits. It’s not literal solitary confinement.”
“Hey!” Aaron raises a finger. “You got to list all my crimes without interruption, didn’t you?” She looks at him. “Okay, marginal interruption.” She looks at him. “Okay! But you still had tasers! Just… just let me finish, okay?” She nods, and he sips lukewarm coffee to moisten his throat. “I get it. I understand the limited room I have to work with. I fight back, I get put in what is, whatever you say, basically solitary confinement. Solitary confinement with iPads, or whatever. I fight back too much, I end up like Declan. And I’m not stupid, no matter what you all think of me, so—”
“—no-one thinks you’re stupid—”
“—so I’m not going to do anything that restricts me further. But I have a loop, Maria. I have a friend, and I have meagre entertainment, and I have the scraps of my pride. I’m not going to risk all that. And, yes, I know Stef has accepted what you’re doing. He—” and he leans nastily on the pronoun, to make a point, “—explained to me how he’s trolley problem’d the whole thing out, come to the conclusion that the best thing for him, personally, is to embrace it, to treat Pippa like his fucking sister, to put on makeup and act different and— and change from the man I knew… and I hate to watch it. I hate that he seems to be happier. And I understand that I’m supposed to be like him, to see him thrive and decide to follow in his footsteps, okay? It’s so obvious, you might as well have put it up on the fucking screen. But I’m not going to. I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready. And I told him, I can see how it might work for him, but it can’t work for me. I can’t just accept this.” He wants to pull at the fabric of his hoodie, to tent it out in the appropriate places and accentuate his point, but he doesn’t; it might unbalance his DIY bra. He settles for flapping his fingers at his chest. “That’s… that’s what I told him.”
“You also told him you hate yourself,” Maria says. It’s not an accusation. More like an acknowledgement. He can see the compassion on her face and it makes him want to run. Into the fucking wall, like Ollie. “You said you imagined your future self, and you hated him.”
“You watched the videos, did you?” Aaron spits. “Have a bit of reality show fun?”
Maria nods. “Not fun. But yes, I watched the videos. We talk about you, you know. Up there. And the girls who hated you at first, who thought you were — and I’m sorry to be rude — a worthless piece of shit… some of them are rooting for you now.”
“They’re rooting for me? To become a fucking girl?”
“To change,” Maria says, leaning forward. “To throw aside the abusive man you used to be, and the even worse man you know you were going to become. And you’ve changed a lot already. You see that, don’t you?” Aaron takes the fucking fifth. “I remember the boy who came here. He was flippant, arrogant, actively ran away from his feelings—”
“Maria, I want to run away right now! That’s all I want! I have dreams, I have fantasies about waking up and finding all of you unconscious or something, because Will got out, or someone pumped the building full of knock-out gas, or aliens invaded or what-the-fuck-ever, and all the doors are open, and I walk up those fucking stairs like it’s the end of the movie! I want to get out of here, Maria! I want to go back to my life!”
“Do you? Do you really? Now you’ve seen yourself clearly for the first time — and I know you have, because I know you, Aaron — do you think you could go back out there? You know what’ll happen. Maybe you’ll report us, sure, and maybe some or all of us get arrested, and maybe Steph does, too, for cooperating with us—” no, no, do not play the Stef card that way, “—but then you’ll be in the same position you were in before. Same family who don’t give a shit about you. Same empty life. Same crappy future everyone’s trying to shoehorn you into. The man with a bit of money in a very smart suit. And slowly, surely, your old habits will come back.” She can’t know this. Just because he fears it, because he sees it when he looks past the changeling in the mirror into the eyes that are still his, that still belong to the boy who did those things, doesn’t make it true. “Only it’ll be worse, this time, because you’ll see yourself doing it, and you’ll hate yourself for it. You’ll push against the temptation but you don’t know how to be anyone else, Aaron; you haven’t learned how yet, so eventually you’ll give in, and that will be it.” He remembers it, sees it, feels it in the pulse hammering in his palms: the hundredth hour alone in a room barely any more homely than his hole down here, only from there he can look out of the window and see all the people living lives they want to live, being the people they want to be, and how dare they… “Before you know it you’ll be that piece of shit guy again, hurting women because you’re bored and lonely and borderline suicidal and you hate yourself. Is that what you want to run back to?”
“Stop, Maria,” he whispers. “Please?”
“All right,” she says. “I’ll stop. I’m not here to make you miserable, believe it or not. I’m here to help you.”
He sniffs. It’s getting hard to talk. “You’re helping me? By making me into a girl?”
“You have to break the cycle, Aaron.” She raises both hands like she’s holding a thin piece of wood, and mimes snapping it. “You have to break free. And you can’t do it on your own. And you can’t do it and remain as you are.”
“How do you even know that’ll work?”
“Because it has to. Because I’m not throwing you back out there to die.”
“I won’t.”
“You’ll die,” she says, quietly, evenly, “or you’ll wish you were dead.”
He only has so many denials in him, and he has nothing useful to say in response. Whatever. Whether she’s right or wrong, she has the keys to all the locks. So whatever.
Why does she care?
What is there, under all this, to care about?
“Aaron,” she says, and he looks up, realising she’s said his name a few times, that he went somewhere for a while. “Hey.”
“Hi,” he says.
“You okay?”
He shrugs, smiling. “I’m here, aren’t I? Of course I’m not okay.”
She nods, and pushes up from her seat. “Finish your breakfast. I’ll be in the common room when you’re done. We have a group activity planned.”
“Will Stefan be there?”
“Steph is on a different schedule today. Don’t worry; you’ll see each other later.”
“Wait,” he says, before she can leave. “About Stef… He told me about Will. About going to see him. Going to see him in his cell. Why would you risk that?”
Maria leans against the wall, regards him for a moment before she answers. “There was no risk. Will was cuffed in place, and we gave Steph a taser. Part of Will’s rehabilitation is going to involve visits, now and then, if we can persuade people to make them.”
“Okay, fine,” he allows, “just not Stef. Not ever again.”
“You’re not the only one who needs Steph, okay? Will is—”
He hits the table hard enough to hurt his hand. “Fuck Will! Don’t risk Stef’s safety again! If you must use him, if absolutely no-one else will do, then send someone with him, keep him on the other side of the cell door, I don’t know, just be more careful.” Maria’s still watching him, her expression controlled. “He’s my friend, okay? He chooses to be my friend. Even after all the shit you put in his head about me — which, yes, I know, is all true, don’t even say it — he still wants to be my friend, and you know how many people I can say that about? One. Him. I had one other good friend, and she never really knew me, and she left, anyway. Stefan stayed. So take better care of him, okay? Or I really will make trouble.”
She smiles, steps forward, reaches down and takes the hand he used to hit the table. He goes limp, unwilling to trust himself, and she holds it, massages the part that hurts. “We’ll be careful, Aaron,” she whispers, and lets him go. She pauses at the door. “We won’t risk Steph. We won’t risk any of you. You’re all important to us. That’s what you need to understand.” She smiles. “Oh, and we can get you a sports bra,” she says. “So you don’t have to improvise.”
Fuck. She noticed. Idiot; she always notices things. “No thanks,” he says, as smoothly as he can.
“You did ask for one, once.”
Does she have an encyclopaedic memory, or does she just rewatch old surveillance videos for fun? “That was a joke. A bad one.”
She shrugs. “Not one of your best, I agree. You’re sure?”
“I’m fine the way I am,” he says.
“Suit yourself,” she says, and then she’s gone, striding into the common room to link up with Edy, leaving him alone with the cold dregs of his coffee.
* * *
Breakfast in the kitchen’s always nicer than breakfast downstairs. Actual sunlight, for one thing; no boys, for another. She hopes Aaron isn’t too lonely, though, eating breakfast alone. Maybe Maria’s return will do something for that; Stef cheered with the rest of them when Maria came through, announced her return to work, stole a croissant from a complaining Monica’s plate, and threw up V signs on her way down to the basement. She wonders how the reunion’s going. Aaron definitely missed her, and not just because Indira drove him up the wall; he’s gotten… softer, over the last week or so. He’s still not okay with what’s happening — he might never be, despite what every sponsor claims — but he’s dealing with it better. He’s changed.
It was horrible, when Monica put Aaron’s abuses up there on the television for all — for Stef — to see, and sometimes she looks at him and he looks back at her and she can almost see him thinking about it. He’s always wondering what she sees in him, why she chooses to come back to him every day, why she pursued his friendship. She can see the shame written all over him. Christine told her that shame is one of the sponsors’ most powerful tools, particularly for certain types of people, and the way she avoided her eyes suggested to Stef that Indira leaned hard on it, when it came to finding Christine in the remains of her former self.
She really hopes he isn’t too lonely, even with Maria to keep him company.
God. Croissants! They don’t get pastries downstairs, but the main kitchen appears to have a never-ending supply. This morning’s are apparently courtesy of Aisha, a second year with a passion for baking, and her sponsor, Charlie, who, according to Pippa, supervises Aisha’s baking from a suitably safe distance. Stef doesn’t get why that’s funny, but some of the other sponsors laugh, and Pippa leans over with her phone and another croissant to show her a video of Aisha treating cake batter as if it personally wronged her. That the final result looks impeccable seems to Stef to contravene the laws of physics.
When Lorna, Vicky and Jodie return, stumbling through the doors in a congenial huddle, Stef, trying to be a welcoming presence, catches Lorna’s eye and smiles at her; Lorna’s returning smile, though, has none of the hesitation it had the last time they met, and Stef wonders what’s turned her around on this place. Surely not just the offer of free surgery.
Stef’s smile turns into a laugh as she remembers how annoyed Christine was when Pippa spoiled the surprise that she’d be seeing the surgeon today as well as the electrologist. “That’s not the kind of thing you just spring on people, Christine!” Pippa had said, and then dissolved into giggles as the whole room collectively and simultaneously pointed out to her that, at Dorley, it is exactly the kind of thing they just spring on people.
Jodie’s announcement — that she’s decided to be a trans woman, officially — prompts hugs and congratulations from the table, a high five from Tabby, and sincere thanks from Indira, who claims that with Christine now the last holdout she’ll have to sign her NPH before too long, and then Indira’s mother finally can boast to her friends of her daughter’s beloved almost-sister, who is sweet and kind and beautiful, and who swept all the viruses off her computer and set her up with free movie streaming.
“Hey,” Lorna says, settling down at the table with a cup of coffee and leaning over to Tabby, “I heard you were single, and looking?”
“Oh,” Tabby says, clutching her croissant defensively, “I’m, um, flattered, but I’m—”
“I don’t mean for me!” Lorna says quickly. “I just, I was told that, uh, you’ve been having some trouble with, um…”
“Oh, God.” Tabby buries her head in her hands. “Does everyone know? Has someone been putting up posters on the corkboards? Was there an announcement on the uni website?”
“Vicky told me,” Lorna says, as Indira muffles her laughter.
“I’ve been helping her get up to speed about everyone,” Vicky says, from her position by the door. “I made a spreadsheet,” she adds, blushing.
“What’s Tabby under?” Indira says. “Expert egg cracker?”
“Indira Chetry,” Tabby says, “I will bury my croissant in your hair if you don’t zip it right now.”
“So,” Lorna says, “I know someone. He’s thirty-four, single, and he could not be more of a guy. And I don’t mean that in a bad way; I mean that he is absolutely, definitely, no doubt in the world a guy.”
“You can’t know that,” Tabby says gloomily.
“I can. He went to a lot of trouble to be a guy.”
“Oh,” Tabby says, perking up. “Oh! Fuck. Yes. Set us up. I promise I know how to be super normal, not like all these other weird bitches.”
“Hey!” Indira says. “I’m normal!”
Tabby wordlessly points to Indira’s coffee mug, which says WORLD’S BEST KIDNAPPER on the side. Indira sticks her tongue out.
“Oh,” Tabby says, “is he okay dating T4T?”
“You’re trans and out, right?” Lorna asks. “He won’t want to deal with stealth shit.”
Tabby nods. “First one here to try it. Got my Gender Recognition Certificate and everything. Government registered trans woman.”
Lorna and Tabby settle down together to swap details, and Lorna starts telling her about her friend, pausing only to receive from Vicky, who has to go to lectures, a kiss that lasts long enough to make Stef feel a little uncomfortable. At the mention of lectures, Pippa, who’s been complaining all morning about her workload, groans and leans back in her chair.
“Three lectures today, Stef,” she says, as Stef hugs her. “Three! And a workshop. Why did I go to university, again?”
“Because,” Indira says, picking up coffee mugs and pastry plates to wash them, “deep down, you really, really wanted to be captured and feminised.”
“That wasn’t in the prospectus,” Pippa mumbles, and rests her head on Stef’s shoulder.
* * *
“Fuck, that’s actually terrifying.”
It’s Lorna’s first time seeing the basement entrance up close, and it’s not making a more positive impression than when she saw it, briefly, from the other side of the kitchen, on her first visit to Dorley Hall. An extrusion of concrete supports surrounding a metal door, it’s both uglier and more crude than she remembers, and creates an impression that anyone stepping through might not ever emerge again. And Stephanie lives down below, almost all the time? Shit.
“Pippa says they can hide it,” Stephanie says, “in case the authorities ever visit.” She’s leaning against the closest table, watching Lorna with an unavoidably amused expression on her face. “See those bookcases? They move, but they’re not on wheels, because that leaves marks in the wood; there’s a metal support behind them, set into the wall, and at the push of a button they just sort of—” She mimes two enormous bookcases arcing up and along the walls and back down again, meeting in the middle. The mental image is amusing, and Stephanie rolls her eyes at Lorna’s laughter. “It’s not that quick. Takes about two minutes, I think. You can see the guide rails in the concrete, look.”
Lorna looks. “That’s fucking wild, Stephanie.”
“Right? I kinda wanna see it.”
Indira returns from the kitchen with two thermoses and escorts them both down, through the horrible concrete arch and into the first basement. It’s surprisingly cool; Lorna expected the underground areas to be warmer — possibly because she can’t get the gates of hell imagery out of her mind — but a light breeze flows over their heads, carrying dust motes through the spotlights. She reaches up and feels it tickle her fingers.
“Air con,” Indira says. “We don’t want the boys to boil, do we?”
Lorna’s still working on her response when Stephanie starts making smothered gasps, and she turns around to see the girl leaning against the wall, hands over her mouth, making apologetic eyes at Lorna.
“Sorry,” she says, when she gets her breath back. “It just hit me: cool and unusual punishment.”
Indira snorts. “You’ve been here too long, Steph,” she says.
“No arguments there,” Stephanie says, and massages her chest.
Indira’s got it into her head that Lorna will benefit from a tour of the facilities, so she gets dragged around the first floor basement and witnesses all the amenities: a security room with more computers than she can quickly count, a comfortable-looking couch and table arrangement, and two girls Lorna doesn’t know but who Stephanie peels off to talk to; a rec room, done up with wallpaper and softer lighting, more couches, and a TV hooked up to a battered laptop and a couple of games consoles; a break room and bathroom for the PMC soldiers, with its own stairs up to the back rooms on the ground floor and an access door to the rest of the basement that doesn’t even unlock unless a sponsor hits the panic button; various storerooms, unused spaces, and a small bathroom with shower facilities; and, finally, the medical area.
“Waiting room,” Indira says, guiding Lorna in, sitting her down on one of the ubiquitous couches, and pointing at other doors leading off, “surgical rooms, recovery rooms, storerooms, and other stuff that’s yet to be developed. We don’t do any actual surgery here, yet, beyond the orchis, but we’re slowly getting set up for it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you setting up a full surgical suite is easy.”
“The, uh, orchis?” Lorna says, before realising: oh, yeah, the nonconsensual surgery. The mutilation. It happens here. Fucking hell. “There’s none scheduled for today, I hope?” she adds, attempting to sound light and failing.
“No,” Indira says. “Not for a couple of months yet, unless Steph wants to get hers done before the rush.” She pulls up a plush stool and sits, cross-legged and leaning forward, and Lorna feels suddenly like a kid at summer camp, about to be lectured on safety procedures by the teenager in charge. “I know it makes you uncomfortable. I’m not going to give you the speech about how necessary it is. I just want to remind you that I had mine done here, too, and I didn’t ask for it.”
“Would you want to undo it, if you could?” Lorna asks. She knows the answer — all the Dorley girls seem to feel the same way — but asking feels like an obligation.
“No,” Indira says, and smiles. “In fact, I’d ask why they didn’t do it sooner. I’m told you know my mum.”
“Oh,” Lorna says, wrong-footed and stumbling to keep up, “yes, uh, I don’t really know her, not as a friend, but we’ve been to protests together. Chatted a few times, you know.”
“I’m surprised we never ran into each other,” Indira says. “Although I suppose this place does keep me busy,” she adds, thoughtful. “And I’ve been spending a lot of time with Hasan…”
“Hasan?”
“My boyfriend.” Her smile turns wistful. “A childhood friend, actually. He’s… he’s wonderful, Lorna.”
“What does he know? About you, I mean.”
Indira doesn’t seem to mind the question. “He thinks I ran away, came here to finish my education, and finally contacted my family again when I felt ready. He doesn’t know what we do here. He knows I’m trans, though, obviously; he knew me when I was a kid.”
Lorna nods slowly. “Christine said you think of yourself as a trans woman. She said you’re very serious about it.”
“I am. I may not have come to it by the same path as you, but—”
“No, no, I get it,” Lorna says, holding up surrendering hands. “After Vicky — and now Jodie — I can’t possibly dispute it. Actually, it was Christine who made up my mind on that front.”
“About that,” Indira says. “About what you said to my Christine…”
“I know. I was awful to her. I apologised. To her. A lot.”
“Yes,” Indira says, waving a hand irritably, “I’m aware. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have let you in the building. I would have blocked your access to surgeries and whatever else you think you’re going to get out of us and I would have found a way to make your life hell.”
It takes Lorna a second to come up with something to say. “What?” she manages, eventually.
“I know you have it in you to ruin us, if you choose,” Indira continues, “and you know very well that we can ruin you back, ten times harder, before you get the chance to do anything.” She’s talking levelly, like she’s dictating a shopping list. “But I don’t care about that. I care about Christine. I love the others, too — all of them are my Sisters — but Christine is my sister. And I will defend her like family. You hurt her bad, Lorna, with your little speech, and I know you think you made it all better, but Paige told me she’s been crying at night again, like she used to, and—”
“Oh, fuck, I’m—”
“Do not apologise to me!” Indira snaps, letting out all the fury she’d been keeping contained. “Yes, you helped draw something out of her that needed to come out. She’s needed to stop hiding from who she used to be for a long time. But it’s a process, Lorna. It’s something that needed to happen carefully and over time and you—” she points at Lorna, who jumps, “—yanked the plaster off all at once. Irresponsible. Don’t forget, she’s been in transition for just over two years and she’s identified as a woman for even less time than that; she needs to be cared for, not… assaulted. Now, she’s coping. She’s dealing. Because she has Paige, and she has me, and she has all her Sisters, and she’s surrounded by people who love her. But you need to know how close you came to lighting a bomb, Lorna, because if you’re going to be here, around our girls, and especially around girls who have yet to graduate, you need to learn to think before you speak. Say you understand and agree.”
“I do. Fuck. I understand and agree. Indira, I’m— I didn’t mean it. I was frightened and confused and— and—”
“We’re a rehabilitation facility.” Indira’s voice is calm again, but not neutral any more. She’s talking like a teacher now: brisk, indifferent. “And that means we have within our walls and under our floor a lot of people who are processing massive amounts of trauma. Some of it self-inflicted, some of it lifelong, and, yes, some of it inflicted by us, as part of the process. Their relationships to their Sisters, to their own bodies, to their own minds, can be tenuous, and the last thing they need is someone wielding their past against them as a weapon. Especially someone who should know better.”
She should defend herself. She should fight back! This place is a fucking kidnapping ring, for Christ’s sake, and one of the chief kidnappers is lecturing her for not being sufficiently respectful! And yet… what would be the point? It’s the same old dance, one she’s been going through the motions of for weeks, and she’s tired of it. What was it Stephanie said? That her objections to the programme had become mechanical? That had been a horrifying thing to hear at the time; now, it sounds absolutely reasonable.
After all, if she’s not going to bring the place down, brick by brick, abuse by abuse — and she’s not — then she can at least try not to trigger the victims. Especially if they happen to be her friends.
“I’m listening,” she says, leaning forward, because even though she doesn’t especially enjoy being so close to Indira when she’s in this kind of mood, she wants to make clear her sincerity. “I fucked up. I realise that. But you lot could have done a better job with the initiation, Indira. Adjusting to the existence of a place like this? Hard. Realising there’s nothing I can do about it, or I’ll start an avalanche that will consume innocent people? Harder. Finding out that the love of my life was… helped… here? Hardest of all.” She snorts. “Even if sometimes I feel like I should thank you for her, like I should find her sponsor and fucking kiss her or something. But Christine… I know what I said to her was wrong. And not just because it hurt her; she and Paige and Vicky made me realise it was factually wrong. I was working off incomplete information and a hell of a lot of assumptions, and I was panicking, spinning out. But she— Christine— Fuck, Indira… I saw all of her. I saw how wrong I was. I saw how badly I hurt her. And, fuck, if she’s crying now, because of me, then—”
“It’s moved beyond just what you said,” Indira interrupts. “It was merely the trigger. The thing is, Lorna, she was hurt so much when she was a boy, and she never dealt with it. Never faced it, not properly. She always concentrated more on the terrible things she did, on the ways she lashed out and externalised her pain. Now she’s facing up to all of it. All at once. That she’s still mostly the same kind, cheerful girl we all love is a testament to her strength. And in the bad times… She has Paige. She has me.” She almost smiles. “We’ve got her. We’re taking care of her. Christine will be okay. I just need you to know: it can’t happen again. With anyone here, not just her. Clear?” She says it kindly, sweetly.
“Clear.”
“Well done. And thank you again for talking with Jodie. We haven’t, historically, had much chance to incorporate positive outside influences into the programme.”
Lorna nods, acknowledging the thanks silently because she doesn’t feel up to more than single-syllable responses right now. Christine… She needs to apologise again. Or talk to her again. She didn’t say anything about having a hard time!
Fuck. Maybe she doesn’t trust you with that, yet? She’d be well within her rights.
Fuck!
She rubs her eye with the back of her hand, and isn’t surprised that it comes away damp. She has that stinging feeling all through her head that suggests her whole system’s building up to a big cry. She swallows, and takes a few seconds to breathe and calm herself. Indira sits back, gives her the space she needs.
“Sorry about this,” Lorna mutters, swallowing, popping her ears, flexing her jaw; getting herself back under control.
“Take all the time you need,” Indira says. “And your point about our initiation methods is well taken; I will give it some thought. And Lorna, I do apologise if I was… a little harsh. Remember Aaron? Steph’s ‘friend’?” She doesn’t finger quote; she doesn’t have to. “I’ve been filling in as his sponsor after Maria was attacked, and I’m still a little bit in that mode.”
“It’s okay. I, uh, think I’ve needed someone to really yell at me about it, to be honest. Paige was angry, but she’s, y’know, my friend. Kind of. I think. I hope she still is!”
“She is,” Indira says. “But, like I said, I’m sorry if I pushed too hard. Christine’s my sister. She’s my weak spot. And she’s so special. She might well be the future of this place.”
“I don’t think she wants to be.”
“Not in its current form, no,” Indira says, shrugging. “But Dorley can change. It’s changed before; ask Maria what her transition was like.”
“Still. I think she wants to take Paige and get the hell out.”
“She does. But she’s young. And, yes, I know I’m not that much older than either of you, but those years do bring perspective. I never thought I’d sponsor, but I’m good at it. I’m good at finding the woman inside the boy; good at finding boys who need to change, and who can come to accept it. Not a talent I ever expected to develop.”
“What does Hasan think you do for a living?”
“He thinks I’m a grad student and live-in Big Sister to all the disadvantaged girls of Dorley, paid by a charitable trust. Both things are, broadly, true. Now, how about you nip down the hall to the bathroom and get yourself cleaned up, and I’ll tell Steph she can come in.”
“Did you ask her to give us some time alone together?” Lorna asks, standing and wiping at her eyes again.
“Yes,” Indira says, with a toothy grin, “I’m very devious. Come on.”
Stephanie’s waiting alone in the room by the time Lorna gets back, with repaired eye makeup — she’s already texted an apology to Jodie for ruining her excellent work; Jodie had to be dissuaded from ditching to come down and redo it for her — and for all that she understands Indira’s position better than Indira thinks she does, she’s grateful not to have to face her again.
“Hi,” she says, and Stephanie looks up from her phone, puts it away in a pocket and smiles at her.
“Hi!” Stephanie replies. “Sorry to leave you alone with Dira. Did she say what she needed to say?”
“Hoo yeah,” Lorna says, flopping down onto the stool Indira vacated. “She really fucking did.”
“You okay? She’s lovely, but she can be… intense.”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” Lorna stretches. Stephanie’s quite a calming presence, sitting as she is in very basic clothes and no makeup and still very obviously early in transition but with the newfound confidence many early transition girls have: she’s discovering herself for the first time in her life, and loving it. Lorna’s experiences during the same period of her life were rather tainted, and she’s come to enjoy experiencing it vicariously through other trans girls. “Did you hear about what I said to Christine?”
“Yes. From her. No details, but I don’t think I need them. You’ve made up?” Lorna nods, and Stephanie smiles and says, “Good. I owe my life to Christine, I think.”
“Oh?”
“How much did I tell you about how I ended up here?”
Lorna frowns. “Not much, actually. I think you said you got yourself kidnapped? Or something? I remember being kind of overwhelmed at the time and, uh, not following up on things I probably should have followed up on.”
Stephanie tells the story: how she struggled with her gender all her life; how she refused to accept her womanhood, largely on the basis that she simply didn’t believe she could pass or be happy with the resources available to her; how her surrogate older sister — and she corrects herself: older brother, at the time — vanished, and how she traced the disappearance to Saints, to the doors of Dorley Hall itself; how she followed her lost friend, didn’t find her, and gave up on ever transitioning.
And then Christine. Stephanie accidentally revealing that she knew something was going on at Dorley Hall, and waking up in a cell. Lorna’s prepared to rekindle a little of her outrage until Stephanie gets into how Christine repeatedly put her own safety on the line to try and get her out again. How when she found out Stephanie was trans she basically begged her to let her rescue her. How she ran all of Dorley Hall, including her own beloved sister and Aunt Bea, around in circles, keeping Stephanie hidden, until Steph herself fucked up and exposed herself.
“You ever think this place could use its resources to help trans girls?” Lorna says, slowly, thoughtfully.
“Aside from us, you mean? Yeah, and Beatrice has an answer to that: you know how the NHS is always going after private transition services?”
“Fuck.” Yeah. Obviously. The political and medical establishment in the UK seems set on keeping the population of happy, alive trans people as low as possible, and gatekeeps access to transition services jealously. No private transgender diagnostic service has survived more than a few years without invasive and, in most cases, terminal investigation. Not something Dorley can afford. “Shit, Stephanie, that’s— God. I hate it. This stupid fucking country.”
“Yeah,” Stephanie replies heavily, nodding.
“So,” Lorna says, attempting to lighten the mood, “what did attract you to the sinister basement that offers free FFS, GRS, electrolysis and hormones?”
“The view.”
“Well, yeah.” Lorna looks around at the walls. “I can’t imagine living in this place. I’m barely getting used to above-ground Dorley Hall, which is plush and posh and full of friendly, happy people who are… Well, okay, I’ll be talking to someone who seems completely normal and then someone else will say something that’s just a little off and I suddenly remember: oh yeah, they kidnap boys here.”
Stephanie laughs. “I know what you mean. The sponsors are like this whole houseful of nosy older sisters who love you and want to help you, and it’s easy to get used to thinking of them that way, and then one of them hands you a cup of coffee in a mug that says, An Apple a Day Keeps the Missing Persons Unit Away. It’s jarring.” She shrugs. “They kind of remind me of teachers, though. Or nurses, maybe. They’ve got a difficult, stressful job, which they mostly see as a calling, and they feel a deep obligation to the boys. Yes, they make rude jokes about them sometimes, but they’re committed. You can ask questions about what they’re committed to…” She grins. “But I think I’m a convert, overall. I’ve not met a single one who isn’t happy, and I’ve met most who are in the building. Even the second years, the ones who’ve accepted themselves as women for only a few months… They seem happy. Genuinely so. They even bake! Chalk it up to selective entry procedures, I guess.”
“God,” Lorna says, absorbing it all. “God. What’s it even like, down here?”
“Well, I spend most of my time one floor down,” Stephanie says, pointing at the floor. “I doubt Dira’ll want to give you a tour of that place. It’s mostly just kinda boring, though. I hang around, I talk to… well, mainly I just talk to Aaron because Adam’s in his own little world, Martin’s completely checked out and the others are still in the cells for attacking Maria.”
“I heard about that.”
“She’s okay now. But, yeah, I hang out, I read, I watch TV… I pretend to be one of the lads. And if it all gets a bit much, I go upstairs and spend time with Christine and Paige and Pippa and the sponsors. Or go to the upper floors and see people who don’t even know what happens down here. Get a slice of normality. Be Stephanie for a while.”
“And you got to see your friend again,” Lorna says, conversationally. “That must have been nice.”
“My friend?”
“Melissa? I think?”
“Oh. Yeah. No. She doesn’t come back here much. She’s actually a bit of a stranger to most people here, Abby says.”
“Abby?” Lorna asks, frowning. She hasn’t met an Abby. Mentally she searches through the lists of names and faces Vicky showed her.
“Abby was Melissa’s sponsor. And from what everyone says, they won’t let her sponsor anyone again after that.”
“Too mean?”
“Too nice. Jane says Abby got lucky with Melissa but Tabby says they were well matched. Said that ‘Mark’—” finger quotes, “—was the most docile boy they’d had in years. Whichever; they were very close, to the exclusion of almost everyone else. And then Melissa left and Abby stayed. Kinda stayed. She works, but she’s still around sometimes.” Stephanie taps her chin thoughtfully. “Haven’t seen her much lately, though. Anyway, Melissa doesn’t like this place, and she’s got her own life, and, honestly? I’m glad. I’m glad she’s happy, and I’m glad she doesn’t come back here.”
“Don’t you want to see her again?”
“Oh, I do!” Stephanie says. “I really do. I dream about it! She was basically my sister, only I didn’t know it, and she didn’t know it, and she never knew the real me… And that’s the thing. I want her to meet the real me. I don’t want her to see me like this.”
“But you’re so pretty!” Lorna says. She’s not lying or exaggerating: Lorna doesn’t connect beauty to cis-passing, and Stephanie’s rather captivating.
Stephanie laughs bitterly. “I’m waiting until people stop putting the ‘but’ in that sentiment. Until I do, too.”
“Ah.” Yeah. Lorna’s been there. Still is there, to some extent. Because while other trans women can be beautiful, she can’t, not while she structures her life around avoiding places that will subject her to cruelty for looking trans. “I understand.” She nods, vigorously, holds a hand out to Stephanie, who takes it. “Maybe more than anyone else here can, I get it.”
Stephanie returns her nod, and Lorna stands up from the stool and joins her on the couch, where they settle into a friendly hug. Lorna’s not quite sure who needs the comfort more: Stephanie, missing her sister, stressed out from having to play a role; or Lorna herself, still shaken from Indira, still conflicted about accepting help from this place. But it’s nice, it’s companionable, and it gets them through the next ten minutes of small talk before the consultant and the electrologist arrive, and they hurriedly disentangle.
The electrologist winks at them anyway.
* * *
Maria’s promised group activity turns out to be another instalment of Monica’s much-interrupted series of lectures on feminism, and Aaron’s protests — that he’s read all the books Maria gave him, that it’s ridiculous even attempting to give lectures when, with Stef off on some unspecified other task, he’s the only person in the room capable of giving coherent responses — fall on irritated ears. So he decides to display his conscientious objection to and contempt for the whole process by giving deliberately wrong answers. It’s hard to concentrate, though, because Maria, sitting at his table with him, keeps laughing at his bad jokes.
“What’s with you?” he hisses to her, after Monica calls a break and swipes near — but not at — Maria’s head on her way out.
“I don’t actually know,” Maria admits. She’s leaning her chin on her hands and looking at him from just one chair over. Too close; he wants to warn her that she’s not safe here, that the last time she let her guard down—
“Maria!” he says, forcing the memory out of his head. “You’re actually scaring me a little. Where’s the arch sarcasm and hyper-critical nagging I’ve come to know and love?”
“I don’t know,” Maria says, and bites her lip as she thinks. It’s both an attractive gesture and one that reminds him of Stef, and he directs his attention firmly towards the metal table until she starts talking again. “I think I’m different. Or my priorities are.” She walks her chin forward a little on her elbows, so she’s closer still to him. “When I was young, I spent a long time thinking I was going to die. So much that it became background noise. And when you live with something dark and horrible like that for so long that you get used to it, it shapes you. You think it doesn’t — because you barely think about it at all any more — but it does. I was… kind of hard. Not hard as in uncaring; more like unyielding. But then Will happened, and hospital, and recovery, and for the first time since I was young, I got scared. Scared for my life. Because I have someone who loves me, someone who’ll be hurt if I die. Someone to live for.”
“Jesus,” Aaron mutters. It doesn’t cross his mind to wonder if she’s lying; she’s never seemed so sincere. “What happened to you, when you were younger?”
“I’ll tell you,” she says. “Someday, I’ll tell you all of it.”
He nods. God, someone must really have hurt her, way back when. Who? He needs the knowledge like he needs oxygen, and why is that? What’s changed? Is it just that she says she wants to help him? Does it not even matter any more that her methods are the most twisted he’s ever heard of? Is the expression of interest, of investment, all it takes?
Yeah. Maybe.
He lays out his right hand, palm up on the table, for her to take if she wants.
She does. She shifts her weight so she’s only propping her head on one hand, and clasps his with the other, interlacing their fingers. Their hands are almost the same size, he notices. Both of them are relatively small people.
“It’s not just my recent brush with death,” she says. “There’s… new people in my life, making me reassess the way I think about things. I’m proud of you, by the way.”
“You’re… proud of me?” Around him, he’s aware of Edy leading Adam out of the common room, and Martin following Ella, but it’s hard to concentrate on anything but Maria’s clear, brown eyes looking directly into his. “Why?”
She squeezes his hand. “You’ve been here a little over two months, and already you’re well on your way to being a new person. Not in the way you’re about to say,” she adds quickly, her smile broadening. “I don’t mean your gender. But you’re different. More thoughtful. More careful.”
“I was always those things,” he mumbles, unable to look away.
“No. You always had the capacity to be those things. You just… weren’t. You built this character to hide behind, this shell, this idea of the funny guy, the sarky guy, the rude little misogynist. You built him to help keep yourself safe.”
“Didn’t work then, did it?” Aaron whispers.
“You don’t think that, though,” she says. “I know you don’t think that. You’ve always believed, deep down, that if you dropped the act, if you let yourself find out who you actually are, the bullying, the isolation, the alienation would all get worse. That the man you built really did keep you safe.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t lie to me, Aaron,” she whispers. “And don’t lie to yourself.”
This is too much like Stef. Too much like his notion that there’s more to Aaron than the front he puts up. Are they comparing notes on him? Is she deliberately mirroring his arguments after watching videos of his conversations with Stef? Or is he just that easy to read?
“I’m not lying,” he says, aware of how unconvincing he sounds. Who’s talking right now, Aaron?
“You know you’re better than the cruel, careless, ugly person you used to pretend to be.”
“No,” he says, matching her whisper, fighting to breathe properly through a thickening throat. “I’m not.”
“You will be.”
He knows what she means. He’ll keep changing. Without and within. Whether he asks for it or not.
“There’s no way out of this,” he says, “is there?”
“No,” Maria says.
“I still don’t understand why you think this can possibly work.”
“You will.” Maria rebalances again and, still holding Aaron’s right hand with her left, reaches out with her other hand and tucks a stray hair behind his ear. “In the end, you’ll get it.”
“You can’t know that.”
She runs her knuckles down the side of his face, takes his chin between her thumb and forefinger, and cups his jaw, gently moving his face from side to side. He can no more stop her than he can raise the dead.
“You’re going to be so very beautiful,” she whispers.
There’s a long pause before he feels able to reply. “I don’t want this.”
“I know.”
She releases him, frees both hands, and shuffles closer again, hopping over onto the seat next to his, close enough for their shoulders to touch. With her right hand she fiddles with something in her pocket, and she nods at the corner of the room. He follows her gaze: the light on the camera bump has gone red. He looks around, and all the cameras are the same. Switched off.
“We’re alone, Aaron,” she says.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because you haven’t been alone in a long, long time.”
“But you’re not safe with me…”
She reaches for him. “I trust you,” she says. “And you need this.”
She’s right, he realises, and as she takes him into her arms, cradling his head between shoulder and palm, as he grips her right back, clinging tight to her belly and her shoulders, as he cries into her clothing, as he takes great gulps of air and expels them into her embrace, he wonders who will come back from this: the hateful, vindictive man Stef and Maria say he constructed to protect himself, or the thoughtful, kind person they both claim to see, deep inside him.
* * *
It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Lorna saw the electrologist first, while Stephanie saw the surgery consultant, and then they swapped. The electrologist agreed that her remaining finer, lighter hairs were best taken care of with electrolysis rather than laser, arranged with her a timetable structured around her lectures, and even offered her a choice of where to attend: here, in basement one, or at the clinic where she sees her usual clients. Lorna, surprising herself, picked Dorley, which turned out well; the electrologist has to come to the Hall, anyway, for Stephanie and anyone else they can persuade to get started with hair removal, so this way she gets to block out a whole day for it.
The surgeon’s a more complex proposition. She introduces herself as Mrs Prentice, and shakes Lorna’s hand like a steam piston. They cover GRS, including timetables, realistic expectations and a possible date, allowing a few months for her to recover from FFS first.
“My calendar’s reasonably open,” says Mrs Prentice, as Lorna flips through a leaflet, feeling lightheaded, “but we should probably make a decision sooner rather than later.”
“Um,” Lorna says, and shakes herself. “Yeah. Summer, probably. So I’m not missing any lectures? I’m missing some for FFS already so that’s non-optional. How’s August?”
“August…” Mrs Prentice flips through her phone calendar. “Yes. I can do August. How about the seventeenth? Get it done on a Monday and you’ve got the whole week free!” She laughs, and it fills the room. “Sorry. A little surgery joke. No, you’ll be flat on your back for days. The seventeenth do you?”
“Yeah,” Lorna says. “That’s good. I can do that.”
“Excellent! We’ll do the operation out of a little private hospital in the city. One of the girls here—” she pronounces it ‘gels’, with a hard g, which makes Lorna smile, “—can give you the details. You’ll come in on the Monday, fast for the day, have a lovely enema and poop your guts out — marvellous fun! — in the evening, and we’ll do you first thing Tuesday morning. Did you talk to the electrologist about de-hairing down there?” Lorna nods. It’s going to take up the bulk of their sessions; fortunately, they have numbing cream. “Excellent! I look forward to it.” Mrs Prentice snaps shut the leather cover on her phone and drops it back into her bag. “I must say, it’s nice to discuss this with someone who actually wants it, for a change.”
“Do you do all the, uh, boys down here?”
“They’re gels by the time they come to me, but yes. I do the face as well as the bits downstairs. The facial consultations can be a bit dicey, and some of them call me all sorts of colourful names, but by the time it comes to the vagina installation they’re generally here by choice. Still. You sure you don’t want me to tackle your face, too? It’d make a lot of sense to keep it all in-house, so to speak.”
“Oh, no,” Lorna says, “it’s fine. We’ve raised the funds, paid the deposit, done the consultation… I’m happy with the surgeon I have for that. No offence.”
“None taken! But do think of me if you decide to have any revisions. Ms Quinn pays above market rate.” She waggles her eyebrows suggestively. If Lorna had been closer, she’s certain Mrs Prentice would have elbowed her, too.
“Ms Quinn?”
“I believe you know her as ‘Aunt Bea’?” She smirks, as if it’s the most wonderful joke.
“Oh. Right. Um…”
Mrs Prentice’s smirk broadens into a knowing smile. “You have something to ask, don’t you?” she says. “Well, gel, out with it!”
“Are you really… okay with operating on people who don’t want it?”
Mrs Prentice laughs. “Quite okay with it, gel, quite! Oh, I had some qualms in the beginning, at least until my palms were crossed generously with silver, but it’s something else when the gels come to see you a year later, looking like butter wouldn’t melt, and they thank you for your good work. One gel, who was truly a pleasure to work on, she hugs me every time we run into each other, and, goodness, I have to say, she came out beautifully.” She leans back on her chair. “And she had strong features, before. Pronounced brow, prominent eve’s apple, all the stuff young gels these days worry about. I knew what she’d look like when the swelling went down, but when she came running up, when she hugged me, when I saw how happy she was, when she gave me the address of her ‘picture-gram’ account, or whatever it’s bloody called, well, that was a true pleasure. You know, with some of the gels here, I feel like I’m tinkering, making tiny adjustments, but with her? We practically remade her. Gave her a whole new life! And she loves it. It’s rather an intoxicating feeling, I have to say.”
Lorna presses on a few other topics, satisfying her curiosity — no, Mrs Prentice doesn’t do work on the NHS, but she has discounts available for ‘friends of the Hall’; no, she doesn’t do the orchiectomies, but she knows the gel who does, and she’s ever so good — and returns to the waiting room with rising excitement.
FFS in less than three months; GRS in nine!
2020’s going to be an incredible year.
* * *
Ten test hairs, all at the back of her jaw in the patch of stubble she grew out just for the occasion, and each one of them hurt like hell. Stef felt the needle go in, even before the blast of intense pain. She was ready for the test session to stop after less than a minute and practically begging for it after two; awful to know she has hours and hours of this ahead of her. At least the electrologist promised numbing cream, codeine, and headphones so she can distract herself with an audiobook.
She’s committed to genital electrolysis, too. At least Lorna’s going to suffer with her on that front. When she left to go back upstairs, Lorna was suggesting she bring a bottle of schnapps to share, to get them both through the pain; she’ll drain half and go in for her appointment, and then when Stef comes up she’ll polish it off. Collaboration!
The surgeon talked her through the orchi — “Don’t worry about it! It’s so simple and quick, it’s like pulling an olive out of a jelly salad!” she said, and made a popping sound to accompany her mime — and agreed to table the GRS option for now. But Mrs Prentice was enthusiastic about Stef’s face. She took photos from all angles, pointed out the bits she wanted to shave down and the bits she wanted to build up, and then showed her a photo manipulation that made Stef want to leap across the room and embrace her right there and then. Mrs Prentice saved the pictures out to the network — Stef quickly moved them to her private folder — and told her with every appearance of pleasure that she looks forward to working with her.
So now she’s sitting in the security room, practising her deep breathing, calming herself down, preparing to pretend, for the benefit of the boys downstairs, that an upper-class megaphone of a woman hasn’t just changed her life. Maria finds her there, and sits quietly at the other end of the table until Stef’s ready to speak.
“Hi,” Stef says, eventually.
“Good session?” Maria asks.
“Electrolysis is awful,” Stef says, poking gingerly at the aloe-covered patch of skin on her jaw, “and the surgeon is… a lot. But the FFS projections kind of blew up my remaining doubts. I might actually come out of this looking okay.”
Maria grins. “Haven’t we all been telling you that?”
“I have a very thick skull,” Stef says, affecting the most serious voice she can, “which impedes the efficient transfer of information. Fortunately, Mrs Prentice is going to shave it down.”
Maria throws an imaginary pastry at her; Stef fields it, takes a bite out of it, and beckons her over to show her the pictures.
“So,” Maria says, when they’re done with their small talk, “I know you were probably planning to, anyway, but I wanted to ask you to drop in on Aaron when you go back down.”
“Has something happened? Is he okay?”
“He’s okay,” Maria says, making mollifying gestures. “We connected, actually. He let me hug him! And he cried into my shoulder.”
“Oh,” Stef says. “Oh. That’s huge, Maria. That’s actually huge!” She silences the jealous voice that says it should have been her Aaron hugged. She was up here, wasn’t she?
“The next few hours will be important for him, Steph. He needs to feel like what he did was okay, that it wasn’t taboo, that it wasn’t a mistake. You can help him with that.”
Stef frowns. “You’re asking me to cooperate in his… regendering.”
“I’m asking you to be his friend,” Maria says. “Nothing you weren’t going to do anyway. I just thought some context might help.”
Nodding slowly, Stef stands. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. He’s all right, though?”
“He’s fine,” Maria confirms, with a slight frown.
“What about you? Are you all right?”
“I’m adjusting. Strange being back at work. Do you know how long it’s been since I had a holiday?” Her mouth twitches, and for a moment she’s looking at nothing at all.
A few minutes later and Stef’s on her way back down to basement two. As she takes the last step down into the main corridor she trails her fingers in the air-con, like Lorna did, and smiles. Lorna seemed more comfortable this time, despite her encounter with Dira; hopefully she’ll get over the last of her reservations with more regular exposure to the mundanities of the programme. Because it’s like she said: life down here really is mostly boring.
She whips out her phone and checks her face and hair with the selfie camera. She didn’t do anything special this morning, aware that she was going to be both poked and prodded by the electrologist and photographed and analysed by the surgeon. But she’s had a tendency recently, which Aaron and the girls have all pointed out, to trend feminine in her presentation, and the last thing she wants is to look too much like she chose to be here.
Aaron opens the door quickly when she knocks, and he practically drags her inside.
“Where’ve you been all morning?” he spits, kicking the door shut behind her and then, when the safety hinge kicks in and the door slows to a crawl two centimetres from closing, irritably pressing against it with his toe until it’s fully shut.
Stef, not wanting to antagonise him, waits for them to have a semblance of privacy before answering. “Busy,” she says. Does she want to tell him? He’s agitated, and his hands are trembling, but he’s also got damp hair and he smells of mint; he’s showered, and that’s not something he does when he’s having a hard time.
“‘Busy’,” Aaron mimics.
“Do you want to know?” she asks, flopping down on his bed at the pillow end, leaving plenty of room for him to either join her, sit down on the chair, or pace, as he prefers.
He joins her on the bed. “Fuck. I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Did something happen?”
“Stef,” he says, tucking his feet under and leaning back against the wall, “I’m worried about Maria.”
“Did she hurt you?”
“What? No!” He looks away, hunches his shoulders, hugs his belly. “She’s just being stupid, that’s all.” Then he explodes outwards, gesturing wildly with his hands. “And I should hate her! Stef, I should fucking despise her! Look at what she’s done to me!” He unzips his hoodie and pulls up his t-shirt and there, underneath, is… another t-shirt? Wrapped and tied tight around his chest?
“Aaron, what’s that?”
He drops his shirt again and glares at her. “You can’t guess? It’s the DIY version of the thing they have you in.”
“You mean, this?” she says, pulling off her t-shirt and throwing it onto the bed between them. It’s a risk — ever since their first interaction after Aaron’s self-imposed solitude, she’s made at least something of an effort to present mostly neutrally; revealing her sports bra is a big step away from that — but he’s evidently seen it under her clothes, so why not?
“Yeah,” he says, not looking directly at her, “that.”
“Sorry,” she says, not putting her top back on, “but it’s better than having my nipples rub against—”
“Damn it, Stef, I know! Why do you think I wrap a fucking t-shirt around my chest? Like, ten percent of the time, when I’m in the right mood, which I’ll have you know is getting rarer and rarer, I’m sensitive there in a way that’s kind of exciting, but the rest of the time it’s like having an itch I can’t scratch the size of two flattened tennis balls! It’s infuriating.”
She points at the rumpled material, now clearly visible under his top. “Does that… help?”
“It’s better than nothing.” He shrugs. “Kind of. Not really. I have to sit leaning forward so there isn’t as much pressure. I have to think about it all the time. No, actually, that’s not right. I used to think about it all the time. But I think it’s become habit.” He frowns, taps a finger on his knee. “It’s like Maria said…”
“Tell me about Maria.”
“I told you. I’m worried about her. She’s not behaving like herself.”
“Well, she had a pretty bad fall.”
“She was attacked, Stef! Will attacked her! And you! You did the right thing straight away. You helped her! Me, I just sat there, watching, complaining.” He clenches a fist. “And that’s… fuck. I want to say it’s only fair. Because she’s the one holding me here. I know, I know, it’s actually a whole building full of sexy prison guards, but it’s always felt like it was mostly her. She was the one I saw the most. And when Will attacked her… I was happy, Stef. I was fucking happy. She was getting what she deserved.” He’s been looking away again, and when he looks back at her his eyes are wet and the muscles in his jaw are tense. “She has someone who loves her,” he continues, clearly having trouble keeping his voice under control. “She has someone who loves her.”
“She does,” Stef says, nodding.
“You know? Of course you know. You know everything around here. You’re practically a sponsor.”
“Aaron, I—”
“No,” he mutters, “I don’t care. You’re coping, in your own way. I don’t hold that against you. That would be so aggressively stupid, right? That would be just like a judgmental little prick like me, to decide the way someone’s playing the hand they’ve been dealt is wrong, just because I wouldn’t do it that way, wouldn’t it?”
He’s gesticulating again. Stef catches his closest hand by the wrist. “Aaron,” she says, when he’s been startled into shutting up. “It’s okay. It’s fine. You can disagree with how I’m doing things if you want.”
“I don’t know what I want, Stefan!” He snatches his hand back and lifts himself up off the mattress, so he can sit facing her, cross-legged. “That’s just it!” He starts counting on his fingers. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who I am. I think the guy who came here is fucking dead, and I’m just what’s left, trying to figure out how to relate to people from first principles, and the corpse of the fucker I’ve been raised from is no help because he never knew, either. She turned the cameras off, Stef!”
“What?”
He plunges his hands into his lap, makes himself small and undemonstrative. “She turned the cameras off,” he says. “Everyone else left the room and it was just her and me, sitting at the table together, and she was telling me all this stuff about how she was feeling, and she turned the cameras off. It was… so stupid of her. I could have done anything to her.”
“So?” Stef says. “Did you?”
“No,” he whispers.
“Would you ever?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“She trusts you. And I think she’s right to.”
“She says I’ve changed.”
“She’s right about that, too.”
“Stef,” Aaron hisses. “Stefan. Stef. I’m so fucking scared, man! Everything’s shifting under me! Even my fucking mind! I know what I want to say! I want to say I haven’t changed, or I don’t want to change, or… or fucking something! But I can’t stop dwelling on all the shit I did, and saying I don’t want to change is a lie, because the guy who came here? If he’s dead then I’m glad and I will piss on his grave, but, Stef, I’m starting to have trouble recognising myself. I look in the mirror—” he unearths a hand from his lap and flails in the direction of the wardrobe; Stef intercepts it as he brings it back, holds onto it, keeps it as a point of contact between them, an anchor for him, “—and everything’s different. Different like you’re different. Only I can’t shrug it off like you! I’m, God, Stef, I’m even shrinking. I’m shorter than I was. Isn’t that fucking ludicrous? I’m shorter and I’m softer and I’m changing and I’m alone with Maria and she’s acting like I’m… like I’m a…”
“A friend?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“We hugged, Stef! She hugged me and I just fucking clung to her and cried like a little girl.”
He’s whispering still, urgently, his voice hoarse and his whole body leaning towards Stef, as if he can make her understand through proximity and urgency alone. She shifts closer to him, keeping hold of his hand.
“And boys don’t cry?” she asks.
“Boys might. I don’t.”
“Tell me why, Aaron.”
“Because!” he snaps. “That’s my reason. Fucking because. I don’t know.”
Only son of nouveau riche, social-climber parents. Boarding school kid picked on for his height and his accent and his family’s lack of connections. Forced to hide his sensitivity under so many layers of shit that he forgot how to access it.
“Because it’s not safe to be seen as weak,” Stef says. “The places you’ve lived, and the people you’ve been around, have put you under pressure to be strong, right?”
He shrugs. “Maybe.”
“Well, it’s safe here. In this room, with me, it’s safe. When you’re with Maria, it’s safe. What use is strength, down here? Why not let yourself be weak?”
He doesn’t answer, just curls up more tightly. But he doesn’t take his hand back again, and Stef, not at all sure that this is the right thing to do, carefully pulls on it. Aaron looks up, his face a mess, and Stef holds out her free hand. Hesitantly he takes it, shuffles closer to her on the mattress, and lets himself be accepted into her arms.
“You’re safe,” she whispers, gathering him up, feeling his arms tighten around her, resting her chin on the top of his head. “It’s just me here. No-one else. You’re safe.”
He’s buried in her now, his shoulders heaving with quiet but insistent sobs, and she holds him, strokes his hair with loose fingers. He stiffens for a moment, likely wondering if it really is okay to be doing this with another guy, and then he relaxes, pulls on her waist with both hands, and lets it all out again.
* * *
The lasagne really is very good. Lorna’s been waiting in the kitchen for Vicky to get done with her lecture, and she’s met several new residents and several new ex-residents, who apparently all have developed the habit of just dropping in when they’re in the area and hungry, and she can only watch so many people rummage in the fridge and un-foil and microwave something that smells delicious before she succumbs. The atmosphere reminds her very much of her first-year home in Windsor Tower, only with much better food.
And, yes, everyone here but her is technically a kidnap victim, blah blah blah. The refrain’s more than tired.
“So?” one of the new girls says. “How are you finding the infamous Dorley Hall?”
She does wish people would stop asking her that, though.
“We’re not ‘infamous’, Bella,” says the woman who introduced herself as Rabia. “That’s the whole point. Infamy implies fame, and we’re a secret underground feminisation operation. Sec-ret.” She accentuates the syllables with her fork, extracted from her moussaka.
“Right,” Bella says, slapping herself on the forehead. “I only hope the other places keep quiet, too.”
“Other places?” Lorna asks.
“Well, yeah. We don’t know anything for certain, but you hear rumours. And I doubt Grandmother got the idea all by herself, you know? Besides, forced fem in fiction is a really weird thing to just come out of nowhere; that’s always felt like cover, to me.”
“This is like the bit in the vampire movie,” Rabia says, grinning at Lorna, “where the woman in the catsuit explains they planted the stories about Dracula so no-one would take the idea of vampires seriously.”
“Don’t be silly,” Bella says. “Vampires don’t exist.”
“What about the one upstairs?” says one of the second years clustered around the other end of the table.
“That’s just Jodie,” says another. “And, Lorna, they’re messing with you. We’re not a franchise.”
“This has got to be the only place like this,” says the first one.
“Yeah,” says a third, “if there are other forced fem shops around the country, then why was I taken from Cardiff University?”
“I was on my holidays,” Bella says, with her mouth full.
It’s strange to watch the second years, who’re barely months out of the basement, uniformly pretty and almost uniformly a little nervous, interact with the older women with close to the same level of flippant disregard for their experiences as she’s used to from Christine and the others. One of them catches her looking and smiles shyly.
“I made that,” the girl says, nodding at Lorna’s plate.
“The lasagne?”
“Yep. Bex and Aisha helped, but I made it. What do you think?”
“It’s lovely.”
The girl beams at her. “Good! Because layering the pasta took ages. I wanted to make a spag bol, but Bex—” she nods to her right, at the girl sitting next to her, currently chatting with the girl on her other side, “—she said she really wanted lasagne, so…” She spreads her hands in front of her, saying, Who am I to disagree?
Lorna grins.
She’s almost done with her lunch, and chatting with Rabia about her degree, when a pair of hands close over her eyes, accompanied by a kiss on the top of her head and the second years saying, “Aww!” in unison.
“Hey, Lorna,” Vicky says, leaning down and scooping up some of what remains of Lorna’s lasagne with a finger.
“Hey, Vick,” Lorna says. “And, hey! Get off my lunch!”
“I’m hungry!” Vicky protests. “And, wow, this is good.”
“Thank you!” a voice from the other end of the table pipes up. “You want me to wrap some up to take home?”
“Oh, goodness, Faye, would you?” Vicky says. “I haven’t had time to eat.”
The girl nods and jumps up and Lorna returns her attention to her girlfriend, who’s pulling her chair back and crouching down next to her.
“How did it go?” Vicky asks.
“Good!” Lorna says. “I’ll tell you later.”
It’s not long before they’re heading out, hoping to beat the next rainstorm, with Vicky clutching a portion of lasagne in tupperware. “Really,” she says, when the kitchen doors close behind them, “are you okay? I hated leaving you alone in there.”
“It was actually fine,” Lorna says, dodging around a woman pinning something to the corkboard by the entrance and pushing open the front doors. “Seriously. You don’t have to worry about me while I’m— Hey, Vick, you okay?”
Vicky’s tarrying, beckoning for Lorna to come back. “Yeah,” she says, “I’m fine. I just forgot something, that’s all.”
Lorna holds the door open for the woman, lets her through, and then joins Vicky by the corkboard. “Seriously, Vick, what’s up?”
Wordlessly, Vicky points to the poster, pinned up by the woman who just left. Around a central picture of a delicate-looking young man and above tear-off slips with phone numbers and email addresses, are the words:
MISSING: MARK VOGEL
Last seen November 2012
in the vicinity of ‘Legend’ nightclub in Almsworth
If you have ANY information, please contact:
Shahida Mohsin-Carpenter
Rupa Mohsin-Carpenter
Edward Mohsin-Carpenter
Notes:
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 23: Forget Me Not
Notes:
Content warnings: disordered eating, self-harm, suicidal ideation
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 December 11
Wednesday
“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”
“Uh, Vick? Usually I’m the sweary one.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“This is bad, then?”
“It fucking might be.” Vicky tears the poster from the corkboard and examines it up and down. She checks the back, as if it might become less terrible on closer inspection. “I can’t believe this. Shit!”
Lorna holds out her hand for the poster, and looks it over. The man on the front wasn’t, by the looks of him, much more than a boy when the picture was taken, and a pretty boy at that. She rereads his name: Mark Vogel. “Who is this guy?”
Vicky takes the poster back, and with her other hand pages through her phone. “Melissa,” she says. “Used to be Mark, obviously. Graduated years ago. Ah.” She stops swiping through and taps on an image. “Graduated 2015. Left the same year. Within days of graduation. Technically she kept a room here while she finished her degree, but that ‘technically’ looks very technical, and—” she peers at the screen, “—she never actually finished, I guess. Reading between the lines, she came back as little as possible until she just… stopped coming back.”
“Jesus, Vick, is every missing person around here a girl now?”
She shrugs. “Mostly only the ones who weren’t girls already.” She must be distracted, or she wouldn’t be quite so flippant about Dorley’s history around Lorna. “Here,” she says, holding up her phone and showing Lorna a photo of a beautiful blonde girl, recognisably related to the boy on the poster. She’s smiling and hugging a Black girl who is, Lorna notes with tired inevitability, also beautiful. A girl could get a complex hanging around this place.
“That’s him?” she asks, uselessly.
“Her,” Vicky confirms. “And, look.” She scrolls down, and Shahida’s name is listed, along with Stephanie Riley’s and a few others — although for Steph there’s a note that says her surname is placeholder — in a column marked PTA.
“Parent Teacher Association?” Lorna asks, feeling stupid.
“‘Pre-Transition Associates’,” Vicky murmurs. “What’s interesting is you can go onto your file entry and make notes. I have, and so’ve Christine, Paige, Pippa, Jodie; all of us. Melissa doesn’t seem to have done anything. Someone else must’ve updated Steph’s name.”
“What does that say to you?”
Vicky shrugs. “Maybe she hasn’t touched her file because she left this place and never looked back?”
“I like her already.”
“Yeah. Same. Come on. We need to talk to this Shahida woman.”
“Do we have to?”
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but you know the consequences of letting this kind of thing slide. For us; for her…”
Christine’s warning echoes again. “Fuck,” Lorna says. “Yes. I know. Fuck.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
Lorna leads Vicky out, kicking open the doors and heading for the path that leads to the campus proper. She knows, logically, awfully, that she has to become part of protecting this place so Vick doesn’t get outed, along with Christine and her other friends here. Hell, even the evil bitches who stuck around to torture boys are kind of okay when you get to know them, and they’re paying for her GRS and they make a mean cup of coffee; probably she should keep them safe, too. So she’ll help check on this woman and try to find out what she knows, and if she happens to kick the main doors to Dorley Hall open with enough force to rattle them on their hinges, well, that’s probably just a fucking coincidence, isn’t it?
“Hey!” she shouts, when she judges them close enough, thanking God and her extensive voice training that her yell is clear and comes from the head; she repainted her face after the electrologist got done with her, and she judged herself as passing about as well as she does normally, i.e. middling-well, but she doesn’t know this woman, doesn’t have any clue how she might feel about trans women, and Lorna’s discovered that sounding ‘right’ can push cis people into gendering you correctly, and that it can even help if they clock you. The kind of people who respond to trans women with violence are sometimes mollified by a feminine voice, and have been given to sort her into the nonthreatening category because of it.
Roll on FFS. A life without these constant calculations, where her gender is in her own hands and not in the grip of strangers’ prejudices, sounds pretty fucking sweet.
The woman turns around. “Hi?” she says, stopping and waiting for Lorna and Vicky to catch up.
“Shahida, yeah?” Lorna says. “That’s your name on the poster?”
“It is,” Shahida says, frowning but not hostile.
“Um, am I saying it right?” Lorna says, lowering her voice, understanding suddenly that while she was running the talking-to-cis-people calculus in her head, Shahida may well have been running the talking-to-white-people equivalent in hers.
Shahida smiles gently. “Right enough. Do you have any information?”
“Oh,” Lorna says. “No.” Clever! Came running. Didn’t have a plan.
“We wanted to ask you about Mark,” Vicky says quickly. “Since you’re looking for him and all. I used to live in that dorm, and we know a lot of people there, and they know even more people, et cetera. Was Mark a student here?”
“Yes,” Shahida says. “But not for very long. He started in 2012, and… left the same year.”
“We probably know someone who knows someone who was around back then,” Lorna says. “We can ask around, put the poster in the group chat, tell people to message you, all that stuff.”
“Thank you,” Shahida says, nodding. “What did you want to know?”
Crap. What do they want to know? And are they helping this woman get closure, or just getting her away from the Hall? She gestures to Shahida’s shopping bag full of posters. “Where are you putting those up?”
“Everywhere. Every dorm, and every major building here at the university. Outside that bloody club in the city. The bus stop where they found his iPod. The station. And anywhere else I can find a corkboard or a spot of spare wall.” She shrugs, looking at the floor. “I’m not stupid,” she says, subdued. “I don’t expect to find him. I think… I think I always expected it to end the way it did. Mark was always like that. He was ephemeral; like snow. Something… someone you appreciate in the time you have, because you know it can’t last.” Lorna wants to reach out. Can’t help feeling it would be unwelcome. Shahida’s in her own world for a minute; best to wait for her to return on her own. When she does, it’s with a quick shake of her head and a businesslike smile. “I just want to know whatever there is to know. And I want something to tell his brother.”
“His brother?” Lorna asks. She remembers another name on the list on Vick’s phone, and almost says it aloud.
“He’s got a younger brother,” Shahida says. “Probably about your age, actually.” She waves a loose hand at Lorna and Vicky. “I’ve been checking in with him, now and then; just emails, mainly. That poor kid…” She starts counting off on her free hand. “His mother dies when he’s just a boy, like, eleven, or something. And he fights a lot with his brother about it, because they’re both dealing badly with it in their own special ways, and then he disappears, and then his best friend just ups and leaves—”
“His best friend?” Vicky asks.
“Kid called Stefan. Met him once, but Mark could barely shut up about him; he was more like a younger brother to him than Russ was. And he and Russ weren’t talking, haven’t for ages, but it’s one thing when someone you always meant to make up with is just up the road, and quite another when he’s halfway round the world. Which is,” she adds, frowning, “a little worrying, given what I know about him. But whatever; he’s gone, and he’s taken any chance they had to make up with him. And Russ’ dad’s been a mess — a big mess — since his wife died, and worse since Mark disappeared.” She clenches her hand into a fist. “Russ’ world just keeps retracting, year after year after year. I want to give him some closure, if I can.”
Lorna doesn’t trust herself to say anything. That one act, taking Mark/Melissa, keeps snowballing, and all these poor people, people who loved a boy who doesn’t even exist any more, are left hurting and alone. Fucking Dorley.
“Russ asked you to put these up?” Vicky says.
Shahida smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “No. I think he’d get pretty mad at me if he found out what I’m doing. This is all me. I got back into the country a few weeks ago, and just… being back in Almsworth. It brought it all back. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Mark ever since. Besides, it’s almost exactly seven years since he went missing. Anniversaries, you know?” She kicks at the dirt at the edge of the path. “And we didn’t leave it in a good place. Now he’s gone, and that’s where things will always be.”
A part of Lorna, a part she hates, cheers at this: no new evidence, no long chain of people all searching; just one woman, fondly remembering someone she used to know. She glances sideways at Vicky, thinks she sees the same relief — and the same disgust — pass through her girlfriend, and resolves to hug her as hard as she can as soon as this is over.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay.” Shahida swings her shopping bag in idle circles, transfers it from hand to hand almost like a juggler, apparently without paying attention. “I’ve got nothing. I know it. But I’m going to look, anyway. Ask around. I have to.”
“Yeah,” Lorna says. “Yeah. I get it.”
Small talk carries them a few more minutes, and Lorna feels every one of them. Thunder splits them eventually, rolling in the distance and threatening a return of the rain, and Shahida excuses herself, rushing off towards the car park and leaving Vicky and Lorna free to walk unsteadily back to the safety of the Hall.
“What do we tell them?” Lorna says, when the doors have closed behind them and they’re alone in the echoing entryway.
Vicky swallows. “Everything she said. And then we walk away. Whatever happens, I want no part of it.”
“Yeah,” Lorna says. “Agreed.”
Hands find hands. For a moment they stand together, holding each other up, and then it’s time.
* * *
“No,” Vicky says, irritated, “I don’t know her! She left before I even got here!” She’s leaning forward on the kitchen table, head cradled in her arms and with a laptop open in front of her with a list of contact numbers on the screen; Melissa’s is highlighted, but all of them have tried her phone, Lorna included, and she isn’t answering.
“And don’t yell at Vicky,” Lorna says.
“Okay, fine,” Rabia says, “keep your knickers on. If you don’t know her, you don’t know her! I just thought that since we have exactly one sponsor here right now—” she jerks a thumb at Bella, sat in one of the chairs in the far corner of the kitchen, hissing into a phone, with the girl Lorna thinks is called Rebecca rubbing her between the shoulder blades, “—we could maybe give her a bit of a hand.” She’s drinking from a mug which reads Boys: Just Raw Material for Girls, which strikes Lorna as rather tasteless, considering the conversation she and Vick just had.
“Where’s Indira?” Vicky says.
“Security room, keeping an eye on Steph and the boys.”
“Get Edy, then!”
Bella covers the phone with her hand. “Edy took Maria to bed for a nap. In my opinion, this does not constitute the kind of emergency we want to wake up the concussed woman for.”
“What about Tabby, then?” Vicky says. “Or— or— Where are the third year sponsors, anyway? We haven’t all been released, have we? Someone must be on duty.”
“Your sponsor’s taken the year off,” Rabia says, peering at the screen of another laptop. “Christine’s been released from Indira, who’s downstairs, anyway, and Francesca’s off… somewhere. Everyone else is at their other jobs.” She jabs at the trackpad. “Izzy, babe, there’s only two girls on call today, Abby and Christine, and neither of them are picking up.”
“They’re both out today,” Bella says, having finished her phone call. “This was supposed to be a quiet day. Everyone’s off running errands. Going to class. Going to work. Even on-call people.”
“Seems short-sighted.”
Bella laughs. “If you can find us twenty more staff, you go right ahead,” she says. Rebecca offers her a hand and she takes it, moving with Rebecca’s support over to the table, where she slumps into a chair, rests her chin on her hand, and drums her fingers on her cheek. Thinking.
“I don’t see why this is such an emergency,” Lorna says. “All she wants is closure. She won’t find it; she’ll stop.” She clenches her stomach against the bile that threatens to rise over such a glib summary, but it doesn’t make sense for the poster to have incited such panic!
“Attention is attention,” Rabia says. “A name that could be connected to us comes up after, let’s see—” she flips screens on her laptop, eyes darting as she reads, “—seven years, and people start talking. Normally we deal with all this kind of stuff while we’re still here, but Melissa, if I’m reading this right, basically ghosted us after doing the bare minimum. This Shahida woman was already on the outs with her before she came here, and by the time you know what happened she was at a uni at the other end of the country. Sometimes things don’t get resolved cleanly; sometimes they fester. And when they pop, we deal with them.” She glances at Bella with a smile. “The last one I was involved with, though, we had more people around to deal with it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bella says. “You try telling the current crop of third years they should stick around to usher the next generation into womanhood. Julia and Yasmin’d laugh in your face, Jodie might honestly actually bite you, Paige would ignore you, Christine’d follow Paige wherever she goes, and Vicky…” She points across the table. “Well, she already left.”
“Still,” Rabia says, “you could make it easier on yourselves by being more careful with these local pickups. Melissa lived locally before she was a student here, and that means local roots. Tearing those up is always going to be messier.”
“You’re welcome to become a sponsor, you know, if you have all these suggestions.”
“Sorry. Just a nurse.”
“Anyway,” Bella says, “I’m barely older than Melissa. Address your complaints to the management.”
“There has to be someone around,” Vicky says.
“What about Nell?” Rabia says, tapping on her screen. “Says here she’s a sponsor and she was in Melissa’s intake. If we can’t get hold of Abby, why not try her?”
“Bad idea,” says one of the second years. Faye? She folds her legs up under her chin and Rebecca immediately starts comforting her.
“Agreed,” Bella says, and leans far enough away from the table to hold Faye’s hand for a moment. “Nell wasn’t on good terms with Melissa.”
Faye mutters something that sounds like, “She’s not on good terms with anyone.”
“She is working on herself, Faye,” Bella says firmly. “And she gave you your second chance—”
“—so I should give her one,” Faye recites, with foul humour, but she unfolds a little and leans into Rebecca’s hug. “I know, I know.”
Lorna wonders if she can get Christine to give her access to the files or the logs or the diaries or whatever the hell they keep around here, because now absolutely is not the time to ask for the backstory on that, and she knows she won’t stop wondering until she finds out. Maybe Jodie knows…?
“Anyway,” Rebecca says, slightly muffled by Faye’s hair, “Nell’s probably still asleep. Night shift.”
“Punishment detail,” Faye mumbles gleefully.
“She’s been given time to cool off,” Bella says, “that’s all.” She’s trying for a censorious voice and failing; there’s a hint of glee. Apparently she doesn’t like Nell, either.
“Oh,” Lorna says, remembering, “something else that might be important: Shahida says she knows Stefan. They met only once, but supposedly Mark talked about him a lot. And she knows Stefan’s gone to find himself, or something, but she seemed like she’s worried about him, too.” Vicky nudges her. It takes Lorna a moment to get it. “Shit! Stephanie. Melissa! Her, not him. Hers. Both of them! Shit.”
“Don’t worry about the names and pronouns,” Rabia says drily. “You get used to rapid context-switching around here, especially in emergencies.”
“Oh? Deal with a lot of grieving relatives, do you?”
“Yes,” Bella says. Faye snorts, cynical.
“Of course you do. Of course you do. Jesus fucking Christ, what am I involved with?” Lorna lays her head on the table, and Vicky scrunches her fingers in her hair, the way she likes. She reaches behind her neck, grabs Vicky’s hand and holds it. Together. They survive this madness together.
She is better at dealing with names and pronouns than this, anyway. Obviously! It’s just that, up until recently, most of her friends and acquaintances were people who’ve never in their lives been kidnapped and forcibly regendered, and Lorna rarely gets involved in situations that require her to use deadnames and old pronouns.
She frowns, and counts in her head — including Vicky, she’s close with at least five Dorley girls — and confirms that, yes, while it is still true that most of her friends have never been kidnapped and regendered, the ratio’s closer than she’d like.
The conversation’s been going on around her. “What do you think, Rab?” Bella’s saying.
“About what? You’re the sponsor; I’m just the nurse.”
Vicky leans closer to Lorna, so she can whisper. “Yeah, right. Just the nurse, I’m sure.”
“If this Shahida woman’s got her mind on Stephanie as well,” Bella says, as Lorna wonders what exactly Vick could mean by that, “then we have a potential point of escalation.”
Rabia nods. “Yes. If she starts investigating her, too, she might poke a hole in that backpacking story. If that falls, then she’s got herself a very easy game of join the dots.”
“Yeah.”
Someone clears their throat, which makes Lorna jump. Judging by the way the kitchen table scrapes slightly across the floor, almost everyone else in the room reacted similarly. In the doorway into the dining room stands Mrs Prentice, smiling and peering in.
“’scuse me, gels,” she says, “but I was told to expect a lift. I didn’t want to disturb you as you seem to have a crisis on, but—” she taps her wrist, “—time’s getting on, and all that.”
“Shit,” Bella says. “I was going to drive you, but I’m caught up in this.”
“We can,” Vicky says quickly, raising a hand. “We’re no use here, and our car’s not far.” Lorna wants to kiss her; anything to get away from all this ghoulish speculation.
“Wonderful!” Mrs Prentice announces, beaming. “Tanya’s just getting her things together — she won’t be a moment — and then we can all head out together!” She looks around the room, at tense faces. “I’ll, um, help her get everything packed up, shall? Yes. Good. Back in a few!”
“Okay,” Bella says, clapping her hands as Mrs Prentice heads back downstairs, “I’m putting together a plan. It’s not ideal, but until people start trickling back in, we work with who we have. So. Rab, are you okay holding down the fort here for a little while?” Rabia nods. “Good. I have to go and have a long and probably horrible conversation with Elle’s point woman, to let her know we have a minor crisis on our hands. Vicky and Lorna—” she points, “—are taking our friends home. So… Rebecca. How are you feeling today?”
“Good,” Rebecca says. She and Faye are less wrapped up in each other than before, but they’re still holding hands. “Pretty good.”
“Do you think you could manage a trip across campus?”
“What?” Faye says, as if Bella just asked if Rebecca could go for a dip in a volcano.
Rebecca’s startled by the question but assembles her wits quickly, putting on a confident face and nodding. “I think so,” she says. “Can Faye come, too?”
“Would you be okay with that, Faye?” Bella asks.
“Yes,” Faye says, fierce. She stands, pulling Rebecca up with her. “Yes, definitely.”
“Good. You know the offices on the far side of campus? The ones where they warehouse some of the lecturers?”
“The Halliday Building?” Faye confirms, and Lorna swallows a cynical retort. The Halliday Building is only barely on campus; there are car parks with greater prestige. It doesn’t surprise her to learn that Christine’s Linguistics lecturers have offices there, rather than in the newer, considerably more plush, and considerably more central quad offices, reserved for those who teach more fashionable degrees. Saints’ Linguistics programme might well be one of the best in the country but it’s still, in the university administrators’ likely opinion, only Linguistics.
“Yes. Go there, find Professor Dawson’s office. She’s on the third floor, if I remember correctly. Christine’s got a meeting with her today. Go there, tell her we have an emergency, and we need her, and bring her back here, okay?”
“Christine’s not a sponsor, Isabella,” Vicky says, as the two second years nod. “I know she’s on call, but she’s just tech support!”
“I’m aware, Victoria,” Bella says patiently, “but we need an expert on Melissa and Shahida, to tell us whether this is a complete shitshow, or just a—” she waves a hand distractedly as she searches for a way to complete the metaphor, “—just a speck of stubborn stuff on the bottom of the bowl. Abby’s our expert. No-one else got close to Melissa in her time here — don’t give me that look, Victoria, I wasn’t on staff then and I wasn’t in her intake — and Abby wasn’t the most thorough record keeper. By design, probably; she and Melissa kept secrets. So we need her, and she’s not picking up and she’s not answering her messages and we don’t know where she is, which is troubling, because we should. But Christine’ll know where she is, and even if she won’t tell us — she and Abby share secrets, too — she’ll be able to get in touch. So.”
“You really think this is urgent enough to pull her out of her meeting? She’s going to fail the year if she misses much more.”
“Please. You and I both know that girl could recite her textbooks backwards. We’ll lean on the staff if we have to. That sort of thing is what the crisis fund is for. Rebecca, Faye, you’re sure you’re up to this?”
“Yes,” Rebecca says.
“Yes, Bella,” Faye says.
“Then go. And—” Bella raises her voice as they head for the door, which Rabia stands up and opens for them with a thumb and an eyebrow cocked at Bella, “—take umbrellas from the pot in the hall! And no running away!”
“You’re sure they’ll come back?” Rabia says.
Bella shrugs. “All their stuff is here.”
“Be serious. Please?”
“Yes. They’ll come back. They’re committed. And they won’t want to leave Aisha and Mia behind. And they quite like me, too. They’re good girls, Rab. It’s fine.”
“If you say so.”
“Jesus,” Vicky says, watching the girls walk stiffly down the path, hands held tightly, folded umbrellas wielded like weapons, looking furtively around as if monsters might leap out from behind every bush. “That’s unexpected.”
“It’ll be good for them,” Bella says. She’s paging through her phone, frowning.
“What’s the big deal?” Lorna asks.
“It’s December,” Rabia says, “and they’re second years. Still healing from the FFS, still barely out of the basement. No-one goes out solo — or even in an adorable twosome — this early.”
“Melissa did,” Bella says.
* * *
Christine doesn’t like to stand out. At school, it was a way to get hit; at home, a way to get hurt. So she kept to herself as much as she could, kept her interests to herself, and returned home every day to dodge her father, complete her schoolwork in the quiet of her own room, and escape to the balcony or the shop in town, to smoke, to switch off, to retreat from consciousness and become nothing more than a need, fulfilled by her cigarettes. She missed a lot of meals, claimed at home to have eaten at school, and at school simply avoided the cafeteria.
Whenever she talks about her school days in front of Paige, the conversation has a tendency to end in hugs and tears.
But now Professor Dawson’s looking at her like she might be someone, and Christine’s fear of standing out collides with her awareness that she has yet to complete her NPH; technically, she’s no-one. She hopes the professor doesn’t get it into her head to look her up. She’s sure her provisional identity can stand up to the scrutiny — she’s run the usual tests on it herself — but the fear of it won’t leave her.
“Ms Hale,” Prof Dawson says, leaning forward on her desk and swiping away the course list Christine’s been rolling up in her fingers, “while I am both grateful and impressed that you are so up to date on the material, despite your absences, our tutorials and workshops become rather more vital next semester, and your presence will be required.” She smiles, to soften her words. “Marks are assigned according to contribution, and the weightings are fixed; when I say required, I mean required. Unless you plan to submit mitigating circumstances forms on a weekly basis.”
“No,” Christine says. “No, Ma’am, I don’t.”
“Good. Because that would give the panel one hell of a collective headache.” When Christine nods solemnly, Prof Dawson shakes her head. “That was a joke, Ms Hale. You’re allowed to smile.”
“Sorry, Ma’am.”
“And please, call me Professor. Or Marianne!”
“Sorry.”
“You’re not at school any more, Ms Hale, and a measure of independence in your work is a good thing. It’s a valuable skill to cultivate and something we — I — recognise. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to start showing your face again, or I will be required to follow up. Yes,” she adds with a grin, “there’s that word again: required. I can no more dodge the obligation than you. So, while I’m perfectly happy to allow you your privacy when it comes to your… extracurricular activities — whatever it is that keeps you out of my lectures — you have to meet me halfway.”
Christine’s refused to explain her absences, tried instead to imply she’s got a job, that she needs the money, and when Prof Dawson pointed out that Christine lives in Dorley Hall, famously a dorm that does not charge for its accommodation, Christine shrugged, tried to look haunted, and hoped the professor’s imagination would fill in the rest: terrible debts, perhaps, or a stricken family who can’t provide for themselves. Sometimes the best lies are the ones other people come up with themselves.
She wonders which truth the professor would find most appalling: that Christine watches the saved videos of her lectures while monitoring the inmates of an underground prison, or that she watches them at 200% speed.
“Um,” she says, speaking thickly through the treacle in her throat; for some reason she can rattle off course materials and lecture notes with ease, but asking anything of an authority figure always spikes her anxiety, “could you, perhaps, put that in an email?”
Prof Dawson raises an eyebrow. “I’ve put it in several.”
“No, I mean, that wording exactly.”
“I don’t follow. How will that help?”
Christine swallows her irritation and pulls her laptop out of her bag, quickly typing up a spec email that covers the salient points: Christine will be required to attend two tutorials and one workshop per week, at these times, and there can be no allowance made for rescheduling; Christine’s final grade is dependent on her attendance; Christine will be investigated if her absences continue to pile up.
The professor peers at the screen. “What precise wording, Ms Hale.”
“Please?”
“Oh, fine,” Prof Dawson says irritably. She snaps a picture of the screen with her phone. “You’ll get the email before the day is out.”
“Thank you, Ma’am,” Christine says, letting another Ma’am slip out in her relief. Something concrete to show to the sponsors, to get them off her back, to perhaps even force them to admit that since the security audit is complete and the network patching is done, Christine can go back to being mostly an ordinary student once more, and earn her salary on call. She wonders if she ought to have added something about attendance is considered crucial for Christine’s continued feminine development, but that would probably be pushing it.
“Are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to tell me, Ms Hale?”
Christine shakes her head, but her reply is interrupted by furious hammering at the professor’s door.
“Oh, good grief,” Prof Dawson says, and raises her voice. “I’m with a student!” The knocking pauses to absorb this information, and then resumes. The professor hangs her head and shares a resigned roll of her eyes with Christine, who doesn’t know entirely what to do with it. “Fine. Come in!”
The noise ceases and the door creaks hesitantly open. Behind it, holding hands and shyly examining the floor, the professor’s bookcases, and all other points of interest in the office bar the professor herself, stand Faye and Rebecca.
The second years.
From Dorley.
What the hell? Christine almost wants to check the date on her laptop, to make sure she hasn’t lost track of time justifying her absences to Prof Dawson and accidentally let six to eight months slip by.
“Yes?” says the professor.
“I, um, know them,” Christine says, and then tries to force some levity into her voice; if they’re here, now, something’s happening. “Hi, girls. What’s up?”
“Hi, Christine!” Faye squeaks, and Christine returns her little wave as Rebecca swallows hard and prepares to speak.
“Um,” Rebecca says, “we need to borrow Christine, Professor Dawson.”
Top marks. Barely a stutter.
“May I ask why?” Prof Dawson says, leaning forward, interested.
When she gets back to the Hall, Christine’s going to find whichever sponsor had the bright idea to send the girls after her and attack her with something dense, like Aaron. The professor’s already curious about her; this can do nothing but make it worse! And as for the effect this could have on the girls…
“We need her,” Faye says, cowed into monosyllables by— well, by any number of things, Christine realises, as this’ll be her first time out since she was taken. She remembers her first time leaving the dorm; terrifying. The fear of discovery around every corner. Only Indira, whispering reassurances into her ear, kept her from bolting immediately for the safety of the Hall, the prison that became home.
She starts packing up her things. “Sorry, Professor,” she says, and silently congratulates herself for strangling the Ma’am on its way out. “It must be important. Could we continue this another time?”
“We were more or less done,” Prof Dawson says. “Look, Ms Hale. Christine. If there’s anything going on at home, or in your dorm, or—”
“There isn’t!” Christine promises, remembering to fetch up her umbrella from the coat stand by the door on her way out. “Thank you so much for seeing me!”
“I’ll be pleased to see you again,” the professor shouts at the closing door, “in my lectures!”
In the corridor, Christine grants herself a moment to lean against the wall and pinch the bridge of her nose, before more pressing concerns take over: the girls. She checks up and down the corridor to make sure they’re alone, and whispers, “Hey. You two okay?”
Faye nods, biting her lip.
“First time out, huh?” Christine says. “You’re doing way better than I did.”
“Really?”
“Really. I was a basket case after ten minutes. Dira practically had to drag me around campus. I’m proud of you.” She turns to Rebecca. “Both of you.”
“It feels silly,” Rebecca says, “that it’s such a big deal. I mean, going out was never like this before.”
“Well,” Christine says, “it is a big deal. And you know why. It’s not silly in the slightest to feel like this is a big step. Yes?”
“Yes,” Faye says.
“The first few minutes were hardest,” Rebecca says. “But then we were just, like, talking, concentrating on each other, and it was… less awful? Even though I’m still kind of puffy in the face. I’m amazed nobody said anything.”
“You are not puffy!” Faye says, startled into animation by Rebecca’s self-deprecation. “You’re beautiful! Bex, you’re so beautiful. It’s me who’s puffy.”
“Nope.”
“Neither of you is puffy,” Christine says. It’s true: it’s been long enough since FFS that the most obvious healing is largely done with, and it takes a practised eye to spot where the girls are still slightly swollen.
“Anyway,” Faye says, “I kind of thought walking past Café One was hardest.”
“Oh,” Rebecca says. “Yeah. Actually, I think you’re right.”
“What happened outside Café One?” Christine asks.
“Some boys started yelling at us. Calling us dykes. That kind of stuff.”
“It’s 2019!” Faye says, indignant. “You can’t say that stuff in 2019.”
Rebecca smirks and pokes her. “Didn’t you say you used to—?”
“Nope. Nope. Never that.” Faye relents under Rebecca’s poking, and attempts to escape. “Yes. Okay! I said other stuff! Really bad stuff! But not that! I’m technically correct!”
Christine corrects for the instinct that’s telling her to take the girls’ hands like they’re a pair of toddlers, despite them both being almost as old as she is — and ignoring the other instinct that says she needs to drag the still-wriggling Faye away by her ear — and leads them out of the Halliday Building. Thankfully, the rain hasn’t yet returned.
“Lesson one about being a pretty girl out in public,” Christine says, once they’re clear of the building and can talk relatively freely, “is that men will comment on you. Sometimes they’ll try to touch you. So you have to be ready for it. And that goes double if those men think you’re gay.”
“That really sucks,” Faye says, with an edge of guilt to her voice that makes Christine wonder exactly how much of a little shit she used to be.
“Yeah,” Christine says, “it does. Welcome to the gender everyone looks at.”
“We were holding hands,” Rebecca says to Christine. “Maybe they’d’ve left us alone if we weren’t?”
“They’ll take any excuse,” Christine says, as they walk up the steps up towards the quad. “You just have to learn how to not let it get to you. Which is a lot harder than saying it makes it sound. And,” she adds, switching into a rote, sponsorly voice, with an appropriately exasperated expression which makes the girls giggle, “you’ve learned your lesson from when you used to do things like that, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Faye says, in a primary school voice.
“Yep,” Rebecca says, “that’s exactly why I was basemented. For yelling ‘dyke’. I would like you to believe that with your whole head.”
“I will,” Christine says, and Faye snorts. “Come on. Let’s get back home, and then your idiot sponsor can tell me why she packed you off to fetch me in such a hurry.”
Faye tugs on her sleeve, and Christine slows up enough for her to whisper in her ear, “Melissa.”
“…Of course.”
Melissa, whose disappearance ultimately sent Steph to their door, whose absence has Abby so lonely she’s risking contacting her family without permission — which, thankfully, seems to be going well, and thus has probably used up their institutional supply of good luck for the rest of the year — and whose spectre has seemed to hang over the place for years; why can’t you be pretty and compliant, like Melissa was?
Everyone admires her, no-one knows her.
Melissa. Always bloody Melissa.
* * *
Meal replacement shakes suck. She’s tried every kind, and they’re all the same: chalky, thick, and with an aftertaste that can’t be masked no matter how much chocolate or red berry or banana flavouring they throw at it. She drains it into the sink, half-drunk, and guesses she got maybe 200 calories out of it. Not quite enough. Whatever. She’ll add a bit of garlic bread to her dinner tonight, make it up that way. A memory of Abby rises up in her head: You have to eat, Mark!
No. No, we are not feeling nostalgic for Dorley today! Hard not to think about it, what with all the phone calls, but she’s capable of being dispassionate, damn it; she’s capable of remembering what the place was really like. That her second year wasn’t too bad and her third actively quite nice doesn’t change the fact that her first year, even with Abby’s support, was hell.
God. Yes. The phone calls. Several of the girls from there have been calling for the last half hour. She’s ignored them, obviously; probably someone from her intake is visiting and reminding everyone of The Girl Who Left. Perhaps Nell’s telling stories about her again.
It doesn’t matter. If it’s anything important, Abby will call.
And she’s not supposed to be thinking about Abby, either! Abby’s consented to give her the space she asked for, so why isn’t she cooperating with herself?
She rinses the horrible milkshake bottle and throws it and its plastic cap a little too hard into the recycling bin.
“Lunch piss you off?”
She whirls, smiles, laughs it off.
Zach. Her immediate boss. Lovely guy. Took her aside on her first day and explained, ‘to get it out in the open’, that he’s trans, he’s in a relationship with another trans man, and that anything she reads about him in the papers is probably a lie. “The perils of activism,” he said, and showed her a tweet from a History professor at Saint Almsworth that made her breath catch in her throat both from the association with Dorley Hall and the repulsiveness of Professor Frost’s mode of expression. She even questioned his choice of name! “I wanted a name that was a little unusual for the UK,” he’d said, “because I like to stand out. But I didn’t want one of those trans guy names, you know? And of course the good professor had to needle me on it.” And she nodded politely and schooled her face and pretended not to know what the hell he was talking about. And that led to a five-minute primer on trans man naming conventions of the mid-late-two-thousands. Eventually he showed her screenshots of Tumblr posts on the subject, and she let herself laugh.
That had been an interesting first day.
“Never go on a diet, Zach,” she says. “You have to eat literal garbage.”
It’s her explanation for the meal shakes and the times people have noticed her counting calories on packet lunches and emailing conference organisers for nutrition information: she’s on a diet. No-one questions it, even though she’s still technically slightly underweight; diets are virtuous.
“Not literal garbage, surely?”
She kicks at the bin. “My ‘healthy soy milkshake’ had the consistency of that gross, thick liquid I’m always cleaning out of the teabag graveyard.”
He places an innocent hand over his heart. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sure.” With his other hand he picks up and hides the metal tin, the one he keeps by the sink and dumps his used teabags into.
“I can still see it,” she says, grinning. “You’re— Zach—” she leans around slightly as he passes it from one hand to another, behind his back, “—you’re terrible at this.”
“Fine,” he says, returning it to the counter. “I’ll empty it next time. But I’m docking your pay.”
“You pay me to scrape mouldy tea bags into a plastic bag and take them down to the skips?”
“You do that?” Zach says, gasping. “God. I’m so sorry. I’ll do better.”
“See that you do,” she says, but can’t maintain the stern attitude without laughing. The laugh turns into a cough. “Ugh,” she says, patting herself at the base of her throat, “I think some of that horrible milkshake got stuck.”
“Poor girl,” Zach says, rubbing her shoulder. “Hey, are you still seeing, oh, what was her name… Joyce?”
“She likes Joy,” she says. “And no. It didn’t work out.”
As per usual. She can’t let herself get to know them, no matter how much she wants to; she’s too much like she used to be. Almost a decade since Shahida, and she’s still stuck in the same pattern, even if the reasons are different this time, even if the secret is a new one. It’d be funny if it weren’t so heartbreaking.
“Sorry, kid,” he says, and she laughs and pushes him off. He’s older than her, thirty-seven to her twenty-five, and likes to remind her at every opportunity. She doesn’t mind.
He opens the door for her, at once chivalrous and reminding her that her lunch break is over, and she follows him out of the tiny corner kitchen and back to the office, where she drops into her chair, shares a smile with him as he slips back into his room, and dumps her phone back out of her bag onto the desk.
Two more missed calls.
She scrolls through. Just like the others, they’re from women associated with Dorley; she gets the updated directory every time there’s a new intake, which is a delightful yearly reminder of what still goes on under those antique floorboards. Rabia, Victoria, Lorna, none of whom she knows, and Bella, who she’s pretty sure was gearing up to sponsor someone for the first time when she left. Or perhaps it was when she was in her third year? God. Who even cares? What does it matter which exact batch of people she tortured?
She hates that she’s thinking about Dorley again. She’s long gone — even if sometimes it feels like her mind never left — and they’re not supposed to be bothering her. Whatever! Her phone will play a tune if Abby calls; for everyone else it’ll stay silent. She flips it over, places it face down on the mouse mat. Out of sight, out of mind.
She kicks up from her desk, walks over to the counter, pulls up the blind and smiles at the first student of many, shuffling nervously up to the counter, paperwork in hand.
“Hi,” she says, “I’m Melissa. How can I help you?”
* * *
“Bloody blonde bitch still isn’t picking up.”
“Still? Does she have the world’s longest lunch break, or what?”
“World’s longest, blondest pain in my arse, more like.”
The first thing Christine hears when she opens the kitchen doors and ushers a subdued Faye and Rebecca inside is Bella complaining about — who else? — Melissa. She didn’t get much out of the girls on the way home, having decided that keeping them comfortable and safe took priority over whatever slow-motion disaster’s engulfing the Hall this week, so they kept up a light-hearted chat all the way through campus. Just three girls, walking home, joking, laughing; perfectly normal. A good lesson for them.
For her, too, if she’s honest. Technically, she hasn’t graduated yet, for all that the sponsors seem content to heap responsibilities on her. Sometimes she forgets how little time she’s spent as a woman; sometimes that terrifies her. The thing with a basement transition is that you don’t get gradually acclimated to the attentions of unruly straight men and cis people in general, as someone transitioning out in the world might; you’re dumped straight into it. Sink or swim. And sometimes she still feels like she’s drowning.
She needs her Paige. Unfortunately, it seems she has shit to do.
Christine waves away Bella’s attempt to say something to her and instead escorts the second years into the dining hall and sits them down together on one of the couches at the far end of the room. Almost immediately they cling to each other, and Aisha and Mia, who look to have been absorbed in what Faye and Rebecca ought to have been doing instead of gallivanting around campus on the whim of their irresponsible sponsor, abandon their laptops and rush over, flanking their Sisters.
“You girls okay?” Christine says.
“Yeah,” Faye says. “Yeah.”
“I don’t want to do that again for a while, I think,” Rebecca says.
“What happened?” Aisha asks. She’s sitting on Faye’s right, stroking her shoulder.
“We saw you were gone,” Mia says, “but we didn’t know where.” She’s on Rebecca’s left, holding her hand.
“Give them some time,” Christine says. “I’ll go get Bella. She’ll take you all upstairs, get you some tea or something.”
She’s turning to go when Faye grabs for her, finds her hand, and pulls her back. “Thanks, Christine,” she says. “Not just for this. But for everything. At the dinner. Everything after. I’m… I’m really glad I met you.”
Rebecca nods emphatically, and the other two echo a moment later. Christine smiles as warmly as she can. “I remember being you,” she says. “It was only a year ago. Seems longer. So I want to help.”
“It’s so weird you’re only a year on from us,” Mia says. “You’re so… together.”
Christine snorts. “I’m a mess. Ask anyone.”
“Maybe,” Mia says thoughtfully, “but maybe I want to be a mess.”
“Live the dream,” Christine says. “Message me if you need me, girls.” She pulls away, but Faye keeps hold of her, leans forward, and kisses her on the knuckles.
“Seriously,” Faye says, “thank you.”
Once again, Christine wonders if this is how Pippa became a sponsor: you keep trying to help, and someone always has to notice how bloody helpful you are, and before you know it you’re being handed the keys to some poor kid five minutes into adulthood whose only mistake was being a complete bastard.
She halts the thought. Now’s not the time to be thinking about mistakes. Because hers were many, and weren’t really mistakes at all but decisions made in desperation and cruelty, and she needs her girlfriend, her sister, or something to drink or smoke if she’s going to contemplate them.
Everyone here has a similar story. Everyone except Steph.
She shuts the kitchen doors behind her, and rounds on Bella before either of the older women can say anything. “Isabella Callaghan, if you send those two outside without an escort again any time before, I don’t know, Valentine’s Day, I’ll make a very unsatisfied report to Aunt Bea.”
“Christine—”
“You could have waited. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes, maybe. And I’d have been done and checking my phone again.”
“The day’s getting on, Christine,” Rabia says. “And she is the sponsor here. If she thought it couldn’t wait, it couldn’t wait.”
“This isn’t some clever psychological ruse to get me to say I’d be a better sponsor than her, is it?”
“No,” Rabia says. “I’m not involved with that side of things. I’m just the nurse.”
“Why not send someone from upstairs to get me, then?” Christine says.
“Upstairs?”
“You know, the cis floors.”
“The cis floors?” Bella repeats, amused.
“Does that mean you think of all of us as trans?” Rabia says.
“I think we need a whole new word for us, but until we get one better than just capitalising Sister, I’m cleaving closer to trans than I am to cis. And if you call yourself a cis girl while you’re under this roof then we’ve effectively expanded the definition of the term beyond usefulness. And we’re getting off the point.”
“We can’t involve outsiders in Dorley business,” Bella says.
“You. Don’t. Have. To. Loads of people up there know me! Hell, some of them even know Steph!”
“Wait, what?”
“Oh, sorry, did we not run that one past the good decisions gang down here?”
“Christine, that’s an unacceptable level of exposure—”
“No, it’s giving Stephanie the opportunity to hang with outsiders and socialise as who she is, with people who can see she’s a trans girl and don’t care. It’s healthy. And she won’t expose us.”
“Whatever,” Bella says, “the point is, I don’t mean ‘outsiders’ as in people who don’t know you, I mean people who mustn’t be involved in our operation in any way.”
Christine wants to scream. Wants to take Bella by the lapels and shake her. She slumps into a chair instead and glares at her, hopes the sheer psychic energy of her frustration will reach her.
“You tell them I have a family emergency or something,” she says. “You’ll be drowning in volunteers. Why are all you sponsors so bloody stupid?”
“Christine,” Rabia says, calmly, quietly, with a hand laid on the table between Christine and Bella, “you know you’re not being fair. We’re between a rock and a hard place today. Staff out or sick, you and Abby both on call and yet both unavailable, and we needed Vicky and Lorna to drive the surgeon and the electrologist, and, well…”
“We don’t trust Lorna yet,” Bella finishes, exchanging a glance with Rabia. “She has just enough knowledge to fuck us, really hard, and—”
“Wait,” Christine says. “You had Vicky and Lorna here and you sent second years out to get me? Fuck it. Conversation over. I’m making the report today. No—” she raises a finger to shut them both up, “—don’t say anything. I’m on staff. I have the authority. Bella: go into the dining hall and fetch those two girls and their cute little polycule back to their rooms and sit and talk to them about their experiences out there, because they need you. They need you to be their big sister, so go do it. Rabia will brief me, and I will do everything I can to help. And if I hear from Faye and Rebecca — and maybe Indira, too, when she gets looped back in — that you did your job as a sponsor, I will erase my draft report and make a new one that says you did the best you could in a difficult situation. And next time, I don’t care how sweet we have to keep her, the surgeon can take a bloody taxi. Now, Bella, go. Do your job.”
She glares at Christine, mutters, “You’re Indira’s kid sister, all right,” and leaves.
“Proud to be!” Christine shouts after her.
“Go easy on her, Christine,” Rabia says.
“Why? She ought to have enough experience by now with getting yelled at by someone younger than her. Personally, I think you’ve all forgotten what it’s like to be brand new. Go easy on them.” She jerks a thumb towards the dining hall. “They’re the ones who need accommodations made for them. Now, talk me through it.”
Rabia shrugs, clearly unwilling to escalate, and fills her in: Shahida showing up outside with the posters; Lorna and Vicky asking her some questions — “Not our idea,” she makes clear; their inability to reach Melissa; their inability to reach Abby; finally, their inability to reach Christine.
“Yeah,” Christine says, “I get it. You need Abby because everyone else here was a complete freak to Melissa because, I don’t know, she was too pretty, or too kind, or too sad, or too weird, or something. And Abby’s not around, so you need me to go get Abby so she can talk to Melissa and work out how scared we need to be about this old girlfriend, or whoever she is.”
“That’s about it,” Rabia says. “But I think it was more complicated than that, with Melissa—”
“Don’t care. We brought her here; we have responsibility. Abby’s talked about her at length, and I know things got better for her in the second and third year, but what was that thing Aunt Bea used to say? ‘Only necessary trauma’. I think we inflicted way more than was necessary, out of carelessness, or from being too busy or whatever. Stretching the duty of care to breaking point, because this place has no staff and no time and it runs on the edge of the catastrophe curve. I’m amazed it all hasn’t fallen apart yet.”
“Money,” Rabia says, shrugging. “Papers over a lot of cracks.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it does. Okay. I’ll go get Abby.”
“You know where she is?”
“Of course.”
“And why she’s turned her phone off?”
“Of course.”
“And you’re not going to tell anyone?”
“No.”
“Fine,” Rabia says. “Fine. I get how this works. You have your little clique, you run around doing whatever you want, and Aunt Bea lets you get away with it because you have useful skills and a pretty face and she’s desperate to keep enough girls around to keep this place running ‘on the edge of the catastrophe curve’.”
“Yeah,” Christine says, tiredly, “we all have our little cliques. This whole place functions because it’s a bunch of interlocking little cliques.” She meshes her fingers to illustrate. “That’s the whole point. That’s why we don’t rat each other out, because for every person who drives one of us up the wall, there’s someone else we love more than life itself. Rabia, I’m not trying to fight with you!”
“Yeah. I’m not, either.” Rabia shakes her head, runs her hand through her hair. “Just stressed. And it’s… weird being back. For more than just a visit, I mean. I’m still settling in at work and now all this, and… and I’ve been trying not to let it get to me. Sorry, Christine. I shouldn’t be rude; I barely know you.” She stretches her arm as far as it’ll go. “Stressed out,” she says.
“Back at you,” Christine says. “I go straight from a frankly terrifying meeting with my course supervisor to this shitshow, via a pair of second years who couldn’t have been more freaked out if they tried. So. Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”
“Will they be okay? The girls?”
Christine nods. “Yeah. I know them both pretty well. And it’s nothing we didn’t do, once upon a time.”
Some of the tension eases, and Rabia smiles. “I remember my first time out. Later than theirs, obviously. April, maybe? I remember it was just about the nicest day so far that year, and I was so happy to be out in the sun again. Trish took me to Café One. We had omelettes.”
“Trish was your sponsor?”
“She was. She’s moved on. Sells houses. We keep in touch.”
“Huh. Don’t suppose she’d consider coming back?”
“Fuck, no!” Rabia laughs, and Christine smiles, grateful that Rabia doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge. It’d suck to have the new nurse as an enemy. “She visits, and we talk all the time, but she’s living the normal life.” She sighs. “Much like I was.”
“How bad is it, being back?”
She looks away, plays with a stray lock of hair. “I mean, I get to see Bella again. Pick up where we left off. So that’s good. And the hospital here’s actually nicer than my old work. Being here again? That’s more complicated. I didn’t like who I was when I came here, even before I had it all thrown in my face.” She grins, and adds, “By Trish.”
“Yeah. I get that. Most days the Hall feels like home; occasionally it still feels like the prison where all that shit was done to me. But I met Paige here, and Indira, and Vick, and everyone else, and even if I do occasionally lose my shit and yell, it made me a better person. So… yes. It’s complicated.”
Rabia nods. “Go on, then,” she says. “Go get Abby, and we can get this shitshow on the road. I’ll make sure Bella isn’t too mad at you. I think she’ll realise you have a point.”
“Thanks. And, um, apologise for me, will you?”
“I will.”
“What will you do while I’m out?”
Rabia raises her hands and takes in the whole kitchen, strangely quiet now it’s just the two of them. “Hold down the fort, as instructed,” she says, “and that’s all. I’m not a sponsor; I’m just the nurse.”
* * *
A pressure around her midriff wakes her, and she stirs, stretches, and tries not to dislodge whoever it is who has an arm around her waist. Pippa? She’s been known to latch on when they drop off together. No, Pippa’s busy today. And Stef hasn’t seen her much lately, anyway; she’s been buried in schoolwork and dividing her time between the library, the university’s many small kiosks, and her own bed, for what she’s described as a series of increasingly short and unsatisfying sleeps. Pippa’s been so absent from Stef’s life she actually apologised! Stef shushed her: they see each other all the time, still, like at breakfast this morning; movie nights and sleepovers and gossipy catchups and all the other things Pippa shyly calls ‘sister stuff’ can resume when she has the time.
So. Not Pippa, then.
Her hand automatically finds the one holding her and she closes her palm over it, realising as she does so that there’s only one realistic candidate remaining.
Aaron’s hand twitches. Unconsciously, he curls his fingers through hers.
There’s not a lot of light in the room, but there’s enough to make her momentarily regret opening her eyes. They switched from the overheads to the bedside lamp as they talked, as he let her hug him, as the setting became more intimate and warm from their shared body heat. It might well have been late morning, and it might now — she leans her head up enough to check the time on Aaron’s phone, charging on the table — be only mid-afternoon, but Aaron’s tears, and the long, difficult conversation they had after, had the feel of a post-midnight confessional. They said to each other the sorts of things you say late at night, when the alcohol or the weed is wearing off, when sleep is only minutes away.
She told him again that she likes him. That she thinks about him when he’s not around. Tried to reinforce that there really are things about him to like, aspects of him that are worth saving, and for once he didn’t argue back. Progress? Looking back, she still doesn’t know. But she’s pretty sure she fell asleep first, and that means it was him who hugged her.
But now she has to answer the question: does she want him to wake up with her in his arms? Will the delicate balance they achieved just hours ago have survived? Is it even safe for him to rouse and to realise he’s been hugging his— his friend for hours? Or does he genuinely not care about that any more? Before she can come to a decision, Aaron moans, squeezes her for a moment — she’s being held tight around her naked belly she’s being held tight around her naked belly! — and then with a sheepish smile withdraws his hand and shuffles a little way back. It’s not to get away from her; it’s so he has room to sit up.
“Morning,” he says, sleepily, with a delightful curl to his lip that Stef has to hold herself back from leaning forward and kissing.
“Afternoon,” she corrects, and she’s amused to note that it comes out in something like the head voice she’s been practising. He’s seen her in a bra, now; little point in pretending she isn’t changing in other ways, too. Fine work, Judas goat. “It’s a little after three.”
“Don’t care. I could sleep forever.”
“I couldn’t,” Stef says, stepping up off the mattress. “I’m hungry, and I’m pretty sure I smell.”
“You do not.” Bless him, he actually sounds offended on her behalf.
“I do!” she insists. “It’s warm in here, and even hotter with, uh…”
“With the two of us under one duvet,” he says, unbothered.
“We got all sweaty,” she says, wondering how to respond to an Aaron who appears to have suddenly dropped all or most of his misgivings. “Or I did, anyway, and—” she lifts her armpit to sniff it and exposes to Aaron, if he hasn’t already noticed, that she’s shaving her pits now, “—it lingers.”
He humours her, sniffs himself through his shirt, and grimaces. “Me too,” he says. “I might not be wearing just a sports bra—” he briefly adopts a we’ll-talk-about-it-later tone of voice, “—but I can still kinda smell it, even through the shirt.” He closes his eyes, and sounds something closer to conflicted when he speaks again. “It’s the fucking hormones. Everything smells different. Including me. And don’t ask me how I’m dealing with that. I’m dealing by ignoring. For now.”
“I wasn’t going to ask anything of the sort,” she lies.
“Convincing,” he says, curling his lip again, and Stef has to turn away because there’s a warmth in her belly that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with his lips and the memory of his arm around her. So she’s not looking when he hops out of bed and brushes by her with the kind of casual closeness she’s never seen from him, even at his most convivial. But he’s not paying her any attention at all: he’s collecting his wash kit from the dresser; she was just in the way. Disappointing.
“I’ll, um, get my stuff, shall I?” she says.
Back in her room she has to lean against the door for a minute so she doesn’t yell out. He held her! It’s not just that he didn’t object to her hugging him, he flat-out full-on fell asleep with his arm around her waist!
Is she ready for this?
Fuck no.
Will she follow it wherever it leads?
Extremely yes.
And while she could certainly pretend to herself that she’s trying to help him acclimate, that demonstrating physical closeness even as his body changes under him might make it feel less alien to him, she’d be lying to herself and she’d know it. As bizarre as it would have seemed to the Stefan who first met him, she wants to kiss the little fucker and she wants him to kiss her back.
Robe. Shampoo. Conditioner. Shower gel. She buzzes her face again with the razor, just in case — avoiding the little patch of longer hairs that the electrologist told her to leave alone for at least a day; horrible, but necessary, since some of their number have been zapped, and the dead follicles could get infected if she messes with them overmuch — and practically leaps for the door.
He’s waiting for her with a smile, right on the other side. Shit! She tries not to stagger, manages to pull up to an embarrassed stop, and steadies herself on the door frame.
God. He’s smiling. How is he still smiling? “What’s changed?” she asks, unable to stop herself, and when he laughs, she laughs too, at the absurdity of it.
Everything’s changed. Silly question!
When they’ve calmed down he shrugs, and she follows him down the corridor to the bathroom as he talks. “I just realised that I can’t stop this. They have all the power, and I have none. Except… Maria put herself in my power today. Sat close to me, turned the cameras off—” he shrugs off his t-shirt and throws it haphazardly into the corner of the shower annexe, and Stef has to smile; whatever else has changed about him, he’s still messy, “—made sure I could see her injury’s still healing… practically dared me to try something. And I didn’t want to.” Fully naked now, he picks a shower, turns on the water and steps under. “I felt sick at the thought of it.” He starts lathering up, and Stef realises suddenly that she’s just standing there, still mostly clothed, watching him wash. Thank God her mouth hasn’t been hanging open. “Obviously I’m not going to do anything to get out of here, so why not surrender to the inevitable?”
She nods, stepping out of her trousers and stacking them on the wire rack, and carefully pulling off her sports bra. She has to contort her shoulders to get it off without grazing her sensitive chest too badly, but she’s become more flexible since the hormones; it’s getting easier to make her body do what she wants. Pippa says to expect that to get even better, and she can’t wait. “That makes sense,” she says. “And, listen, if there’s anything I can do to help—”
“There’s something I wanted to ask you, actually,” he says.
Stef channels her reaction into setting herself up in the shower next to his. It’s hard not to compare their bodies; they’re really not all that different. She has a little more development in the hips and the butt, he has more in the chest, and if she’s any judge she’d say his face has changed more than hers: there always was a nice shape to his jaw, and the way it’s starting to round out is… nice. Really, really nice. And his eyes, which had been kind of sunken when they first met, are brightening. He’ll always have quite pronounced eyelids, but not only do they suit him, she thinks they work better on a face that is gradually feminising. And his—
Stop, Stephanie!
Whether he’s putting on a brave face or not, he doesn’t want this. The least she can do for him is to stop fantasising about him, stop obsessing over the way his forcibly altered body pleases her.
Shit. He said something, didn’t he? How long has she been standing under the water, watching him?
“Um,” she says, having failed to find anything actually useful inside her head.
He pauses in soaping under his armpits, and smiles at her. “What should I call you?” he asks.
Okay. She was wrong. Before, she was a picture of eloquence; now she’s lost for words. “What do you mean, what should you call me?” she manages, eventually. She’s vaguely aware of warm water sluicing down her face, and she absently brushes her hair out of her eyes.
“Don’t you think you should, maybe, wash?” Aaron says wryly.
“Oh. Yes.” She unhooks her shower gel from the pipe and starts applying it. His eyes follow her hands as she does so, and even when she soaps up her chest he doesn’t look away.
“Funny feeling, isn’t it?” he says, prodding at his own swelling chest. “I kinda like the tingle when the water flows over them.” He grins, refusing to answer her question just yet, prolonging the moment a little longer, just to be a jerk. Finally he puts her out of her misery. “What name should I use for you?”
“What name?” He can’t mean what it seems like he means…
“Stef,” he says, rolling his eyes, “you’re wearing a sports bra, you’re doing your hair differently, you’re doing something with your voice, and I’ve seen you in makeup enough times that I feel I should be marking on my calendar the days I’ve seen you bare-faced, like I’m in a black-and-white newspaper cartoon marking off the days until some obscure American holiday no-one’s heard of and all of a sudden your cute dog comic’s been taken over by kids wearing huge buckled hats.”
“What?”
“You said yourself, you’ve decided to stop struggling. And we both know what that means: you’re going to be a girl, like they want. You’re getting ready for it, right? The voice and everything, and I can see the sore skin you’re trying to hide; electrolysis, yes?”
She nods, no longer even pretending to wash. She’s just standing there, watching him talk, addicted to his voice, wishing the moment could never end, that this incarnation of Aaron — barely altered, much more calm, and apparently entirely accepting of her womanhood — could freeze, could last forever, could leave Dorley with her.
“It suits you, you know,” he says. “You’ve seemed more alive lately than ever before. Which, I guess, makes you… lucky? That you’re taking so well to this. So… what should I call you? If you’re going to be a girl? Just Stef?”
“I’m trying out Stephanie,” she says, almost so quiet that the water drowns it out.
He chews on his lip, tries it out in his head. “Stephanie,” he says, and nods to himself. “I like it. It suits you… Stephanie.”
“Really?” She knows the smile that captures her face is broad and goofy and probably really stupid-looking but she couldn’t keep it down if you offered her the world.
“Really.”
Fuck it. She leaps forward, almost slips on the wet floor, and hugs him, pulls him in tight, as tight as he held her in bed, tries to pour into the contact all her gratitude, all her affection, and her perhaps vain hope that he’ll find a way to follow her.
“Thank you,” she whispers. She has to lean down a little so she can whisper in his ear. “Thank you. It’s been so difficult down here. This… this means the world, Aaron.”
“Just don’t go asking for my new name,” he says, his voice wavering.
“I won’t.”
“Um, Stephanie?”
“Yes?”
“We… um… fuck… we’re touching, Stephanie.”
She’s about to say something like, ‘Of course we are; we’re hugging,’ and then she realises what he means and releases him, backsteps carefully, and wonders if her blush has reached her legs yet. But when she regains her courage and looks him in the face again, he’s smiling, and blushing a little too, and that makes it all the harder not to just step back in and hug him all over again.
They were touching, were they?
Shampoo. Do your shampoo, lady, and stop being weird about the poor man.
“Sorry,” she says, when she’s rinsing it out.
He shrugs. “Occupational hazard,” he says, and while maybe he has to force it, he’s making the effort, God bless him, and she’s so fucking proud. When he asks her to do his conditioner, like always, like before, he sounds normal, like his old self, and she catches a grin as he turns away.
She wants to say it, but she can’t, and maybe she’ll never be able to, and maybe it’ll never be wise, so she won’t, but she mouths it instead, as she massages conditioner into his hair and feels him quiver ever so slightly under her fingers: I think I love you, Aaron Holt.
* * *
It’s been a while since Christine was last in the Anthill, which is damning because she’s supposed to have two lectures a week on the second floor. She really has been busy lately. With any luck, Prof Dawson’s email will be persuasive enough — and Christine can prostrate herself pathetically enough — that Maria and Edy will take pity on her and stop giving her jobs. She’s not behind, not at all, and it was gratifying to have the professor acknowledge that, but if nothing else, going to lectures gets her out of Dorley Hall. The cis people who comprise the bulk of the student population may intimidate and occasionally confuse her, but they probably have better taste in mugs.
Paige’s lecture is on the third floor, and Christine opens the door quietly, intending to find her and catch her attention somehow. Unfortunately, the lecturer finds her first.
“A late arrival?” he says, interrupting himself. “I’m not sure I know you.”
“You don’t,” she says, and flinches against the attention of a whole lecture hall’s-worth of students. “I’m here for Paige Adams?”
“Do you have a message for her, or are you here to take her away from us?”
There’s something about the phrasing she doesn’t like, and she squints at him. Wasn’t this the guy who kept looking down Paige’s top? Men are so fucking gross. And they do have spare cells back home…
“Minor family emergency,” she says, trying to sound apologetic, trying to keep herself from fantasising too hard about locking the man behind a reinforced glass door and making him write I will not perv on girls one third my age a hundred times on the concrete wall. “I need her for the rest of the day. Sorry.”
“Fine! Fine.” He throws up his arms, and then turns on the smarm to say to Paige, down in the third row, “Ms Adams, you’ll find notes and a transcript on the intranet. Come to me if you have any questions. And do please leave quietly.”
Paige nods for him, throws her bag over her shoulder, and trots quickly up the stepped rows. Christine, watching the lecturer’s eyes track Paige all the way up, holds the door for her and covers the last metre or so of her escape with her body.
“What a fucking creep,” she says, when they’re safely away.
“I know,” Paige says. “But this is the only module I’m ever going to have with him, so I only have to put up with him for two more semesters.”
“Should we be worried? He was giving you…” Christine waves her arms, trying to find the right word, and fails. “…a look,” she finishes with a sneer.
“Probably not. The TA approached me in the second week, when it was clear it was me he’d fixated on, and advised me to request that our one-to-ones happen down in the nook, rather than in his office.” The nook: a cosy, rounded area on the ground floor of the Anthill, home to a scattering of desks, vending machines, and booths for conducting impromptu meetings.
“That sounds like he does this every year.”
“With most of his classes, too.”
“Jesus.” Christine doesn’t ask why Saints doesn’t do anything about him; he’s a prestigious name. “We could basement him.”
Paige pretends to consider it. “No thank you,” she says. “I need him to finish out teaching the module, and he might be too upset with me to do that from a cell. Kidnap him after.”
Christine mimes writing a note. “Kidnap professor pervert… when do you think, around August time?”
“September,” Paige says. “Let him have some fun in the sun first. So, what’s my ‘family emergency’?”
“I’ll give you the quick version in the car.”
The quick version reminds Christine just how irritated she is. She yelled at Bella! And every time she doubts she deserved it, she doubles back and gets irritated with herself for peacemaking with Rabia. Because they should be more careful with the second-year girls! And Christine should stand up for them if no-one else will! God, if only Indira hadn’t been stuck down in the security room, if only Bella hadn’t been borderline panicking and making poor decisions, if only Christine hadn’t agreed to see her professor today…
“Christine,” Paige says quietly, turning down the music, “talk to me.”
“It’s nothing,” she mumbles.
Paige smiles, the loving smile reserved only for her, and reaches for her hand. “Nothing’s nothing. We’ve got time before we get there. Tell me.”
So she does, filling in all the details she’d left out of her summary, and notes Paige’s jaw clenching a few times as she listens.
“You were right,” Paige says, the hand gripping Christine’s tightening for a moment and then releasing her, to change gears. “Pippa’s the only new sponsor; everyone else is at least three years out from being in Faye and Rebecca’s position. They’re forgetting what it was like to be so new. I see it sometimes when some of them talk to you. I’m… going to propose something to Maria. I don’t know what yet.”
“A kick in the head for every sponsor?”
“Maybe.” Paige drums fingers on the wheel as she turns the car onto the high street. “I’m going to talk to the second years,” she says. “Ask them how they’re doing. What their plans are. How they feel about what was done to them, how they feel about the programme, how they feel about each other. Whether they feel ready to go out. I think they’ll talk a little more readily to someone like me. And then—” she grins, “—we’re going to take them out.”
“Out?”
“Yes.”
“Out where?”
“I don’t know yet. Somewhere fun. Somewhere very not-Dorley. We could book out a roller-skating rink, for example.”
“You want to take the second years roller-skating.”
“Yes.”
“Even though Faye and Bex had a hard time today.”
“Yes. They’ll be with all their friends. And me, and you. And if we book somewhere out, they’re not going to run into all that many people. I’m certain it’ll be good for their resocialisation.”
“I suppose?”
“And we’ll take a lot of Dorley girls to keep them company and keep them safe. No sponsors. Only those of us who are ‘just girls’.”
Christine shrugs. “I’m on staff, so—”
“Yes, but the second years love you, anyway.” She pauses for a moment to concentrate on downshifting as she pulls into the multistorey car park in the city centre. “Jodie’ll help, I’m certain. Vicky, too, I suspect, and where Vicky goes, Lorna follows, and that’s good, because she’s an outside presence who is known to be friendly. We grab Abby, Pippa — yes, she’s a sponsor, but she’d be the first to say she’s not much of one — and anyone else amenable.”
Christine nods, thinking it through. “Maria or Bea will insist on a sponsor,” she says, “and they’ll say Pippa’s too junior and Abby’s too retired and I’m too not one.”
“We get Donna, then. Or Indira.”
“Maybe not Dira. She’s been working with them. They might be nervous around her.”
“Donna will do it,” Paige says, pulling up into a parking space. “She’s always been considerate with Jodie. I’ll roll up a plan over the next few days and bring it to Maria.”
“Are you sure you want to do this? This is much more engagement with the programme than you’ve ever had before.”
“It’s not for the programme,” Paige argues. “It’s for the second years. And it’s for me. I want to help them. I’ve been feeling guilty about just leaving them to it.”
“Sweetheart!” Christine says, bumping up against her as they exit the car park and head out into the city centre. “You should have said.”
“If I’d said,” Paige says fondly, “you’d have tried to help. Because you’re wonderful. But also very, very busy. I didn’t want to pile anything else on you. When we do this, it’ll be me who puts it all together, liaises with the sponsors, books the venue, everything; you’ll just have to come along and have a good time.”
“And help show the second years there’s life after castration?”
Paige leans down, shoulder-hugs Christine, and leads them both over the road at the pelican crossing. “They already know that,” she says. “We’ll show them there’s life after Dorley.”
* * *
Lunch is takeaway pizza, which is a surprise. Indira shuttled it down in three boxes, and Stef’s about to point out that three larges is way more than the two of them could eat — and possibly more than all four of them could comfortably manage if Martin and Adam miraculously were to reappear — when Indira lays them all out and opens the first box: two-thirds empty.
“We’re burning the midnight oil upstairs,” she says, by way of explanation. “No-one has time to cook. The metaphorical midnight oil,” she adds quickly, clearly sensing Aaron about to say something clever about the time; it’s almost four. She points at the boxes in turn: “Barbecue beef, pepperoni, and a veggie one, with peppers and mushrooms and things.”
“Thanks, Dira,” Stef says, and Aaron nods his gratitude.
Stef wonders if Indira sees anything different in Aaron’s body language when she’s around. It’s like he’s afraid of her.
“Shall I do us a slice of each?” Aaron says, pointedly looking away from Indira and reaching for Stef’s plate. She nods, and decides against asking what’s going on that’s so important it’s taken over the kitchen; Dira wouldn’t be able to give details with Aaron around, anyway. Whatever’s happening, Stef pictures piles of empty pizza boxes upstairs, and sponsors gathered around the table, talking, arguing, working the problem, and to her surprise she feels drawn to them. She almost catches Indira’s sleeve as she leaves, to ask if there’s anything she can do to help, but thinks better of it. They have more than enough people upstairs. Aaron’s her priority, and she refocuses on him in time to take back the proffered plate, now laden with pizza.
He’s so different.
After showering, Aaron propped his door open and got dried and dressed in full view, and Stef still hasn’t been able to get a read on why. At the time, she took her cue from him, stepping out of eyesight only when she had to be completely naked; despite them sharing a shower, it felt important, somehow, while she was dressing, to hide from him her genitals and the exact contours of her chest. Something about being in her bedroom made his gaze feel more intimate. Still, if he wanted to look at her, whether he was trying to prove something by it or — and her heartbeat quickens just to think of it — simply to enjoy the sight of her, she was going to let him, damn it, she was going to give him a show, and she stepped back out of the shadow of the door as soon as she was in her underwear and sports bra.
She knows what she looks like; she has the barest of curves, very little development in the chest and her face isn’t all that different from how it was two months ago, but the differences are there, and they’re important to her, important enough for her finally to accept herself and gain a modicum of peace inside her body, and apparently they’re visible enough to Aaron for him to flip his perception of her. So, fuck it, she’ll stand in his eyeline in her sports bra, arching her back and brushing out her hair, and if he doesn’t like it he can turn away or close his door.
He did neither. He dressed himself and then he watched as she donned jogging trousers and a loose hoodie. And when they walked into the common area, before Indira ambushed them with pizza, he called her Steph, and insisted to her he said it with the ph, and when she pushed playfully against him, to thank him, to tease him, he pushed back in equal spirit.
And now, here he is, experimentally chewing on vegetarian pizza, and smiling at her when he catches her watching him.
What’s happened?
He’ll deflect if she asks. He always does. He’s talked recently about how he doesn’t want to do the awful things required to have even a chance of escape, and he’s talked about surrendering to the inevitable. But the details are never there.
For now, it’s better if she doesn’t push.
“This isn’t bad,” Aaron says, through the remains of his first slice. “There’s these tiny lumps of meat-like substance, hidden under the peppers, and they’re actually okay. I think I’ve had them before, actually, these geometric blocks of this-is-meat-we-swear extruded fungal substance. At Elizabeth’s. When it was her turn to cook for the family, she always made them have it, because she insisted it was better for her dad’s heart than real meat, and she’d marinade it in… Fuck.” He frowns. “That was a stupid place for my memory to go.”
She reaches for him, and he lets her take his hand for a moment. But then he whips it away, out of her reach.
“Sorry—”
“No,” he says, and laughs. “It’s not… whatever you’re thinking. I’m greasy. From the pizza.”
Stef forces a smile. “I’ll be greasy, too, before long. It’s fine.”
“Try the veggie slice,” he says.
She obliges, aware of his attention as she tastes it, and when she nods at him he grins broadly.
“Right?” he says. “It’s not bad.”
“I still like real meat more,” she says, switching to a pepperoni slice. She takes a bite, but stops chewing when Aaron snorts into his beaker of water. “What?”
“Nothing!” he says, wiping his face with his sleeve. “Nothing.”
“Aaron—”
“Stephanie,” Aaron says, leaning into the final syllable, “I’ve got to watch my tongue, now that there are ladies present.” She can’t help looking around, and he rolls his eyes at her. “You’re ladies,” he clarifies.
“Hey,” she says, “I might be… adjusting, but I’m not that different. I’m still me, still Steph. Remember when you came up to my door and without preamble just started talking about masturbation? I like that Aaron. So, if you’re thinking something—” she lowers her voice and leans towards him, “—disgustingly reprehensible, I want to know about it.”
“Well, now it’s just embarrassing.”
She uses a trick she learned from the voice training documents on the server to push her voice all the way to the front of her mouth. “Please?”
He chews on his slice for a moment. “Fine,” he says, “but I’m still not going to say it. I’m going to make you work it out.”
He has to talk her through it in the end. Maybe she’s just slow on the uptake because her relief that Aaron seems to be adjusting is overriding her ability to see the bloody obvious, but it takes him almost thirty seconds to get her to absorb the humorous implications of ‘liking real meat’ in light of her recently embraced gender. When understanding dawns, she snorts and tries to pinch him, and he dodges.
“Aaron!” she exclaims. “That sucks! That’s so My First Innuendo.”
“And that’s why I didn’t want to explain it,” he says, returning to his slice and rolling his eyes at her. “Bad jokes get worse when you explain them; for shitty innuendo it’s, like, that but with logarithmic scaling, or something. Exponential? I don’t know; I study rocks.”
Stef shrugs. “I study language. When the books get mathsy, I glaze over. I always leaned on Melissa for the hard science stuff. I liked it, and I was sorta good at it, but I’ve forgotten a lot since school.”
The thought of Melissa is a hard one, and one that’s been preying on her since Lorna brought her up in the waiting room upstairs; it’s not just that she doesn’t want to be seen by her until she’s ready, it’s that she is, in no uncertain terms, cooperating with the sponsors, with the programme. What will Melissa think of her?
She doesn’t flinch when Aaron takes her hand, but it takes conscious effort. She’d almost forgotten he was there.
“I’m sorry you lost her,” he says. “I know how important she was to you.”
“I’m, um, sorry you lost Elizabeth,” she says.
“You don’t need to reciprocate.” He looks away, looks inward, looks truly unsettled for the first time.
“I do!” she says. “I need to. I want to.” She shrugs. “It’s natural! It’s you.”
He shakes his head, but in apparent contradiction says, “Yeah.” It’s a long time before he continues, and Stef almost says something more times than she can count, but his eyes are sharp, and she doesn’t want to provoke him into doing or saying or thinking something that will cause him to — what’s the word Christine used? — backslide. “Yeah,” he says again, leaning back in his chair, away from her. “Sorry. Still adjusting, you know? To the new world. To the whole new situation. To the, um… You know what, Steph? I’m still kinda tired. All this shit’s taken a lot out of me. I’m going to have a nap. You can finish my slices; I’ll get Maria to bring me something later, if I turn out to need it.” He pushes his plate away and stands, but puts a hand on Stef’s shoulder when she copies him. “No, you should eat. Really. You won’t be missing much; I’m just going to be sleeping. Loud snores. Very obnoxious.”
“Okay,” she says, and doesn’t reach for his hand.
He’s halfway out of the room when he turns around and asks, “Steph, you’re okay with this, right? With what they’re doing to you? With what they’re making you into?”
Hesitantly, and with what she hopes is just the right amount of introspection, she nods. “Yes. It’s new, but it’s, um… I’m okay with it.”
“Good,” he says, turns away again, and then he’s out of the door and walking briskly down the corridor. She listens to him go, and so she hears him hesitate, turn around, and come back into the lunch room. He dawdles at the doors, not looking at her, and she wants to say something but she’s frozen absolutely, pizza slice dangling comically in her hand.
Like he’s come to a decision and he wants to act before he takes it back, he darts forward, encircles her with gentle arms, and kisses her softly on the forehead.
“I’m happy for you,” Aaron whispers, and then he’s gone.
* * *
“Christine!” Robert Grant bellows, when she and Paige tentatively poke their heads through the front door. She quickly takes in the scene: Robert, seated in a decadently plush recliner; Abby, two other younger women, and Diane, Abby’s mother, all arranged around a Monopoly board; and another woman, older than Abby, holding a baby and sitting a safe distance away from the easily swallowed houses, hotels, boots and boats. Christine instantly wants to hold the baby, and just as instantly realises she won’t have time.
The atmosphere is so damn familial it hurts.
Robert leaps up from his recliner and marches over. She manages to say, “Hi, Robert,” in time to get it out before all the breath is squeezed out of her, but not quickly enough that the last syllable doesn’t come out as a wheeze. When he releases her she adds, “Hi, Diane, Abby, and, um, everyone,” raising her voice so the room can hear her.
“Hello again, Christine,” Diane says, standing up from the Monopoly board and encouraging the younger women to follow suit. “And who is the lovely young lady by your side?”
“Paige Adams,” Paige says, with a curtsey. “Christine and I are together, and I’ve known her and Abby for a while now.”
“Paige Adams,” Diane says, smiling and stepping forward to take one of Paige’s hands in both of hers. “It’s wonderful to meet you. Are you, um, are you like Christine, and our Abigail?”
“No,” Paige says, and only Christine hears the hesitation. “I’m just Paige.”
“Well, come in and have a cup of tea,” Diane says, as Robert steps aside to make room, “and tell us about yourself.”
“Um,” Christine says, watching the frown that’s been developing on Abby’s face deepen, “we’ll have to take you up on that another time, I’m afraid. We need to borrow Abby for the rest of the day.”
“Oh,” Robert says, with innocent concern, “nothing bad, I hope?”
Abby, skilled at decoding messages contained entirely within Christine’s tone of voice, is already sharing a hug with one of the girls around the Monopoly board. The woman with the baby passes up a handbag from the sofa.
“We hope not,” Christine says. “One of the other girls, from where we come from, she’s having a hard time, and she needs Abby.”
Robert claps his hands together. “Say no more!” If Abby and Christine have their own coded language then so do Robert and Diane, because by the time Abby’s halfway to the front door they’ve coordinated a carrier bag full of foil packages.
“Straight into the freezer with these, Abigail,” Diane says, and Abby nods seriously.
It takes a few more minutes to extract her. Abby’s family are demonstrative and generous with their affection, and even Paige receives hugs from everyone present, bar the baby, who Christine doesn’t get to hold but does, with permission, get to kiss on the wispy hair atop his head. The Grants and the other women — cousins by close association, not blood, but just as important, judging from how firmly they and Abby embrace — extract from Christine and Paige a promise to visit properly next week, before the Grants return home for Christmas and Robert’s extended sabbatical comes to an unfortunate end. No rest, he says, for the wicked. “But some rest for the lovely,” his wife says, hugging him and smiling at Abby, Christine and Paige.
“I hate leaving,” Abby says, as they round the corner at the end of the street and disappear out of sight of her waving family. “I really could live with them. They don’t care, Chrissy. They’ve forgiven me and they don’t care at all that I’m different now. They love it, actually! Mum keeps saying how much womanhood suits me.”
“I’m so happy for you,” Christine says, with generosity and genuine feeling and absolutely zero jealousy.
“They do seem nice,” Paige says.
“They are,” Abby says, exhaling all her remaining warmth. “And, since you’re here, Paige, when did Christine tell you about my family?”
“About two seconds after I got home from meeting them,” Christine says. “No more secrets from Paige, remember? Ever again.”
“Yeah,” Abby says, “I remember. Sorry, Paige. I know you’re trustworthy, it’s just… they’re mine. And I’m surprised by how important that is to me.”
“I think I get it,” Christine says. “And you know Paige; she won’t tell a soul.”
Paige says, “I’m a vault,” and punctuates the sentiment with the double-beep from the remote lock on the car.
Abby takes in the situation, which Christine explains as Paige drives them back towards Saints, with extreme tension. “It had to be Shahida,” she mutters. “Had to be her.”
“Who is she?”
“I’ve never met her. But Liss has told me all about her. They were… something. Something complicated, something close… something that ended really, really badly. I’ve had our people give me annual reports on her; last I heard, she was in the States.”
“Vicky and Lorna said she’s just recently got back,” Christine says, “and started feeling all nostalgic.”
“Fuck.”
“That’s what the rest of us said, too. How dangerous could this get, Abby?”
“For us?” She wiggles a flattened palm at around knee height. “Not very. But Liss says she’s persistent, intelligent, and the reports say she’s earning decent money, so she has resources. She could make herself very difficult to deal with humanely.”
“Melissa won’t let us do anything to her, surely?”
“No,” Abby says. “And neither will I, and Maria will step pretty hard on the idea, too. No-one wants to harm an innocent woman.”
“Which means we have two realistic options,” Paige says. “Fob her off, or brief her and hope she doesn’t go immediately to the police.”
“I’m strongly on Team Fob Her Off,” Christine says.
“Same,” Abby says. “God. Why now?”
“What do you mean?”
Abby watches the city go by for a while, and when she replies, it’s slow and painful. “Melissa was my world for a long time. We fell in love. At least, I did. And I thought she did, too. And, yes, I know how unethical that is. We kept it a secret from the other sponsors, and from the rest of her intake. A bad secret. I think everyone knew. It felt like everyone did, anyway. We were happy, though, or happy enough. But as soon as she could, she left. Left Dorley; left me. And we still talked, sure, and I still visited her, and she still came back from time to time, since she still officially lived on-site, and when we saw each other it was just like it used to be, and I know most of her decision was just that Dorley was… not kind to her. But, still, distance changes things. And she wanted it to. She said to me once that she didn’t have a way to know—” she has to stop for a second, to wipe her eyes, to swallow, to breathe, “—to know that we were ever real. So she started seeing other people. To, I think, find something that felt real to her? I don’t know. She was never super clear about that, and I didn’t want to go on at her, because, I mean, we really shouldn’t have gotten so close, not in the way we did. She was right, really. How could it be real? She was in the worst place of her life, and I was the one who held her hand through it. We should never have so much as kissed.” She sniffs. “She asked me to step back from her life a few months ago. No calls, no visits. No contact, unless she initiates it.”
“Abby…” Christine had known some of this and guessed a lot of the rest, but it’s hard to hear all the same. She shouldn’t have sat up front, next to Paige; she should have sat in the back, with Abby, so she wouldn’t have to say all this alone.
“And now… I was just feeling ready to start my life again. I have my family back. I’m moving on. I’m even doing well at work! So, of course, here’s Shahida, and here’s Melissa again, and here I am… A fucking wreck in the back of a car, stupid and vulnerable and— and—”
“It’s okay, Abs,” Christine says.
“It’s not. I’m excited, you know? Like an idiot, I’m excited to talk to her again. To have an excuse to call. Even though it’s been only months since we talked, and even though it’s because of the girl who loved her before I even knew her. I haven’t moved on, it turns out. I’m pathetic.”
It takes longer than expected to get back to the Hall, because Paige stops the car and they both join Abby in the back seat, to make sure she knows she’s loved, she’s needed and she’s appreciated, and whatever happens with Melissa and Shahida, that’s something that will never, ever change.
* * *
Her phone’s been face down on the desk all afternoon and has over the last couple of hours acquired the quiet menace of an unexploded bomb. And with the counter having closed twenty minutes ago and all her work either completed or yet to be started, she’s having trouble filling the last hour in the office without engaging with the bloody thing. Eventually she decides she’s had enough, throws it into her bag with a brief glance at the screen — there’s at least a dozen more missed calls; damn! — and grabs her coat from the rack.
“Zach!” she calls. “I’m taking time in lieu!”
“How dare you!” he shouts back. “Get back to your desk and chain yourself there!”
She smiles, and a couple of the other girls in the office giggle. If he were serious, he’d be far ruder. He pokes his head out of his office and she blows him a playful kiss, which he pretends to be horrified by.
“You’re way ahead, anyway,” he says. Of course she is; nothing else in her life but work. “Nothing serious going on, I hope?”
“No. I’m just tired.”
“See you tomorrow, then.”
She says her goodbyes to the other girls and bundles up, taking the stairs down from the second floor two at a time. Melissa doesn’t live far from the university, which is nice on most occasions but wonderful on a rainy day like today; when first she started working here she had to get the tram in, and there’s little more miserable than squeezing onto packed public transport when you’re soaking wet. She folds up the hood of her raincoat, steps out from the shelter of the admin building, and is immediately brought up short by the tune coming from her bag.
Abby’s ringtone. I Knew You Were Trouble. An in-joke she hasn’t wanted to drop. Abby played it for her, down in that cold, concrete room, when Melissa was finally ready to laugh.
She hates how her heart leaps to hear it. She backtracks until she’s under cover again, pulls out her phone, plugs in her headphones and drops it back into her bag, thumbing the answer button on the cord.
“Hello?” she says, like she doesn’t know exactly who’s calling.
“Liss,” Abby says, and Melissa’s bombarded by memories. Hearing her voice again is like coming home, and that’s why she’s all the way up here, over a hundred and fifty miles from Almsworth, because that voice, that face, that generous heart have enough control over her that she needs the distance to fight back.
“Hi, Abs,” she says, stepping back out. On her hood, the rain drums static. “What’s up?”
“Are you somewhere you can talk?”
It makes her chest tighten: something really is going on, and they need to talk Dorley business. What could possibly have happened? She doesn’t know whether she feels foolish, having ignored the calls from the sponsors, or viciously righteous; they should be able to solve their problems without her! It feels underhanded, getting Abby involved, since she isn’t even a sponsor any more. She just helps out with admin sometimes, or something.
As far as she knows. They last saw each other before the start of the semester. More than enough time for everything to have changed. Maybe Abby’s a full-time sponsor again. Maybe Melissa successfully put enough distance between them that Abby got lonely enough to go back to Dorley and take on a new girl.
And that would be your fault, wouldn’t it? Selfish, stupid, short-sighted Melissa.
It’s hard not to tell herself out loud to shut up, but she manages it by tightening her free hand into a fist and focusing on the pain of the nails digging into her palm.
“I’ll be home soon,” she says.
“Okay.”
Silence on the line. Melissa wonders how she sounds to Abby; the short, cold breaths of someone hurrying along streets drenched with rain, the splashes as she kicks up water with her boots, the clicking sounds she makes with her tongue as she heads off all the things she wants to say. Things like, I’m sorry. Things like, Have you found someone else? Things like—
“How are you?” Abby asks. The suddenness makes Melissa, currently trying to open the door to her apartment building, drop her key fob, and her irritated mutterings are audible on the line. “Oh, sorry,” Abby says. “Bad question?”
“No,” Melissa says, scooping it up and jabbing it at the sensor again, “no, it wasn’t you. I’m just dropping things as usual. I’m okay, Abs. Not brilliant. Money’s tighter. My roommate moved out. Looking for a new one.” She checks her mail nook; bills. She leaves them there to steep for a few more days. “Work’s fine; Zach’s still great. So I suppose I’m fine. Just fine. Absolutely fine. How’s, um, things with you?”
“That,” Abby says, “is a very complex question, and most of it’s classified. But there’s one thing I can say, before we get into the reason for my call, as long as you promise to keep it to yourself?”
“Who would I tell?” Elevator’s broken again. Five flights; fun. “It’s just me up here.” Her voice echoes in the stairwell.
“I’m back in touch with my family, Liss,” Abby says, with bad timing: Melissa misses a step and has to grab onto the handrail to avoid falling over.
“You are?” she says, when she’s no longer in danger of braining herself on the tile. “Is that even allowed?”
Abby laughs bitterly. “No. They’re treating Indira as a five-year test case. Five years, Liss! I didn’t want to wait.”
“What will you do if anyone finds out?”
“I have no idea. Christine knows, though, and she’s helping me keep the secret. You remember Christine?”
“Little brown-haired thing? Terribly nervous?”
“She’s come into her own since you met her,” Abby says, with a fondness that makes its way into Melissa’s belly and twists itself into intricate knots. “And she’s not little; she’s taller than you! She’s dating Paige now, and they’re very cute together.”
“Paige?”
“Paige Adams, the Instagram girl.”
“Ah. Good for her.”
Melissa doesn’t ask if Abby’s good fortune means there’s any way she might see her own family; she’d rather not. Russ is her only family who matters, and he’s better off without her. Her disappearance opened rifts between him and everyone in his life, but according to the last report — the last one she could bring herself to open, anyway — he’s back on his feet, with new friends and a steady job and a flat. Living away from their father. And she never got on with Russ, anyway, not really, not like brothers should; he always said she liked Stef more than him.
Probably true.
It would be nice to see Stef again, but he’s another person on a long list of people who are, ultimately, probably better off without her. Another memory: a boy, shivering in the January cold, sheepishly holding out a bag of groceries, asking her questions she can’t answer, and all she can do is comfort him one last time.
Worse than useless, always.
“Liss?” Abby asks urgently.
Melissa hiccups, finds herself breathing heavily, pitched forward on the stairs and supporting herself on the railing. “Drat,” she says, straightening up and leaning against the inside wall of the stairwell, unsteady. “Sorry.”
“Breathe, Melissa,” Abby says quietly, and counts for her.
This is why she left. Dorley Hall comes back into her life and suddenly she’s a mess.
With Abby’s encouragement she makes it back to her flat, shuts the door behind her, shuts out the world and Dorley and her family and Stef, and listens to Abby as she talks about her parents, and the family friends from down the street who’ve grown up and one of them has a baby, and cousin Derek and how he’s a man now, and Christine and how much she’s changed since Indira first dumped her in a cell.
It’s still strange to Melissa that Dorley works, but she’s seen too many destructive boys go on to become happy women to fight against it any more. Almost a shame, if she’s really honest with herself, that she can’t count herself among their number.
After a few minutes she puts Abby on speaker, dumps her raincoat on the peg and her bag on the rack to dry, kicks her boots off onto the mat, and collapses onto her bed, face first, wincing as she always does at the stinging pain from her chest, a daily reminder that she needs to break that childhood habit. She drops Abby down on the sheets and curls up around the phone, keeping her on speaker and closing her eyes, so it’s more like she’s really there. More like she’s not alone.
“Go on, then,” she says. “Give me the bad news.”
On the line, and in the bed next to her, Abby sighs deeply. “It’s Shahida. She’s back from America and plastering Saints with missing posters, and they’ve all got your old face on them.”
All Melissa has in her is, “Oh.”
So it’s not just Abby and Dorley Hall that are back in her life, then.
* * *
The kitchen’s tense. As soon as they got back, Abby vanished up to her room to make a phone call she insisted not be recorded, and to that end Christine’s slumped at the kitchen table with a laptop in front of her, monitoring the live feed for the entire surveillance system, confirming in real time that no-one’s sneakily switched on the circuit that covers Abby’s room, and that no-one’s tried anything stupid like hacking into Abby’s phone while Christine’s around and in a bad mood.
Neither of those eventualities is especially likely, but Abby likes her privacy, and Christine likes Abby.
A handful more sponsors and hangers-on have drifted in since they got back. Pippa, the most recent arrival, sits sucking down coffee and looking very much like someone who just got done with a full day of classes and came home to find her dorm in panic mode, and Christine feels her exhaustion on a spiritual level. Maybe all of them can just go fall into a bed somewhere and sleep for a week after this; Pippa can go get Steph and Christine can get Indira, and they can fetch Abby together and all ball up into a sisterly cuddle pile.
“For the record,” Pippa says, inserting herself into the conversation currently happening somewhere over Christine’s head and pointing a pizza slice at Bella, “she’s right. It’s too early to send second years out without support.”
“I know, I know,” Bella says. “I’ve had my kicking. You don’t need to join in.”
“I volunteer, by the way. If you need to talk to someone for whom all that stuff is still pretty recent, call me. Christine’s still, somehow, busier than me, and she hasn’t even graduated yet.”
“Yes, please,” Christine says, aware as she does so that her voice sounds a little slurred; God, she’s tired. “Pippa can be Dorley’s conscience for a while. From now on, I’m tech support only.”
Pippa pats her hand and Paige, sitting on her other side, kisses her on the temple.
“How long do you think she’ll be?” Rabia asks.
“Abby?” Tabby says, from her position leaning languidly against the door frame into the dining hall. “Talking to Melissa? Could be hours. I know you hate waiting, but—” she sucks air between her teeth, “—sucks to be you.”
“Tabitha Forbes, you malign bitch—” Rabia starts, but she cuts herself off when Tabby makes a rude gesture. “Shit. I’m too tired to throw things at her. Volunteers to do it for me?” Tabby retracts her middle finger and makes a heart with her forefingers and thumbs instead, and Rabia blows her a kiss. “Awful woman,” Rabia says, giggling. “Just awful.”
“Lovely to have you back, Rab,” Tabby says.
“Oh sponsor, my sponsor,” Rabia says.
Before anyone else can contribute, Christine holds up a hand. “She’s done.” She leans hard into Paige’s shoulder for a second, absorbing as much energy as she can from the contact, and then pulls her personal blocks out of the security system, puts it back how it was when she found it. “This was so much more fun when I wasn’t supposed to be doing it,” she mutters, slamming the lid of the laptop shut, and Paige kisses her again.
A few minutes later, a drawn-looking Abby, her face now bare of the makeup she wore to visit her family, returns to the kitchen and accepts the chair Bella pulls out for her.
“Thanks,” she says. “Okay. First things first: Melissa’s going to stay in Manchester. She’s not coming down.” A handful of people around the table sigh with relief; some of the sponsors had been convinced Melissa would immediately come back to Dorley and thus put herself and the Hall in danger of exposure, but Christine hadn’t thought it likely and neither had Abby. “I’ve agreed the story we’re going to tell Shahida; it’s essentially the one the public already knows, but with a few extra details. We’ll call her, arrange to meet somewhere quiet but close by. Christine and I will go see her, talk her through it.”
“Why Christine?” Bella asks.
Abby illustrates with her fingers a chain of connections: “Lorna and Vicky talked to her. Said they know people who live at Dorley. Christine’s going to be the girl they know. And she knows me, and I know— I knew ‘Mark’.”
“Should we get Lorna and Vicky, too? Since Shahida met them already.”
“I thought you didn’t trust Lorna,” Christine says.
“I just don’t know her,” Bella says, exasperated. “But you do — a lot of you, apparently — so I suppose I’m fine with her. Someone call Lorna and Vicky?”
“Let’s not chuck a half-dozen white girls at her,” Abby says. “It’ll just be us two. Me, the one who knew Mark; Christine, the go-between.”
Unspoken: Christine, the one Abby trusts. She can almost hear every sponsor in the room thinking it.
“Fine,” Tabby says. “Approved.” She fends off a dirty look from Bella with, “I’m senior sponsor on duty. If you want to go wake up the concussion patient, be my guest, but I’m a hundred percent certain Maria will back Abby and me. Edy will, too.”
“No,” Bella says, “I meant— never mind. Can we at least have the initial contact on the record?”
Tabby nods. “Yes. Abby, you have your work phone? Good. Disable privacy, just for the call, please. Christine, confirm.”
Christine resists the urge to groan loudly and merely opens the laptop again, brings up the network entry for Abby’s phone, and gives Tabby a thumbs up when she’s done switching off all the features that protect her, a graduate and ex-sponsor, from the eyes and ears of Dorley.
The call is brief. Shahida accepts the meeting but disputes Abby’s suggestion for a location, countering with a large café within walking distance of the university called Egg Nation. Christine, thinking back to Abby meeting her parents in a touristy pub in the city, finds herself nodding: large space, plenty of staff, plenty of witnesses; safety. They both get wired, a process far less grandiose than the terminology makes it sound; Bluetooth microphones in their bags. The recordings will still be muffled, but it’s better than relying on the tiny mics in their phones. And then they’re off, Abby waiting indulgently on the front steps while Christine says goodbye to Paige. It’s a half-hour walk to Egg Nation, and when they’re sufficiently far from the Hall and Christine’s pulled out her second phone to check them both for any active signals she doesn’t expect (none, but better safe than sorry), she asks the question on her mind.
“I know that look. There’s something you didn’t tell them, isn’t there?”
“Melissa asked me not to tell Shahida that she’s dead. Just that she’s gone.”
Christine nods. It’s against procedure for a reason, but she’s not exactly surprised. “She won’t be happy with that. She’ll keep looking.”
“I know,” Abby says. “But she begged me, Chrissy.”
They walk in silence for a little while.
“You know you should tell her Mark’s dead, right?” Christine says, without much conviction. The good employee.
“Yep.”
“And you’re not going to.”
“Of course not. Melissa asked. And I love her, Christine. Even if she pushes me away. She went over it again, Chrissy. Just now. All the same stuff that sounds like she’s reading off a notebook or something. She said she still doesn’t know—” she coughs, and rubs at her throat, “—if we were ever real, or if it was just this fucking place pushing us together. And she’s right. Bonding within the intake is one thing — we’ve had a lot of healthy, lasting relationships come out of there — but what we did was quite another. I had control over her life. Control over her body. Yes, it was mutual, but even so…” She kicks at a stone, watches dispassionately as it bounces down the road. “I want her to be happy, Christine, and I’m okay if that means she finds someone else. I really am. But she’s not happy. She’s making herself miserable.”
“And you, too.”
“Yeah. And me, too.”
* * *
Shahida hates going out alone sometimes, especially in smaller cities like Almsworth. Yes, she grew up here, mostly, but the shine’s gone off the place since she’s been away. Maybe it’s just seeing it with adult eyes. Maybe it’s just that her best friend, the boy she thought she might spend her life with, probably died here. Maybe it’s that, after so much time in Los Angeles and San Francisco, everything in this country looks… squalid. It’s not that Almsworth and even London feel cramped and small after America, although they do; it’s that they feel old. Worn out. Neglected over centuries, with the cracks in the brickwork and the crumbling and poorly maintained façades inexplicably called heritage, and cherished.
And there are other things about England that have gotten uglier over the years.
Really, she doesn’t know why she’s doing this. She misses him, and there are fragments of him almost everywhere she looks around here, but he’s dead, and that’s all there is to it. By his own hand, if that’s what you call walking away into the night and never returning. She’s seen him a lot, over the years, in her dreams, vanishing into the darkness; it mingles with the memory of seeing the scars on his wrists, the last time she saw him.
Stupid. The worst thing in the world happened here, in this city, and she came back anyway. Exorcising her demons by marching right up to them and daring them to blink first. How did she think she would feel?
She checks her phone: twenty minutes since the woman, Abigail, asked to meet. It’s not fair of her to be so impatient — she has a car, was close by, and suggested the venue herself; Abigail said she and her friend (friend singular, Shahida confirmed) would have to walk — but she doesn’t care and resents her for it, anyway. Which is part of the toxic thought loop her therapist talked about, actually, so maybe she should be firm with herself and try to be generous.
Or she could distract herself.
Yeah. Better.
She dwells a little on yesterday, spent with her aunts. Her mum’s sister and her wife had a daughter who Shahida had thus far communicated with only over the internet, and who turned out in person to be perhaps the most adorable child Shahida’s ever seen. She allowed herself to be clambered all over while her aunts filled her in on everything she missed in her years away, and fed her enough that she still doesn’t feel particularly hungry twenty hours later. It had been hard to leave, even after Auntie Mona tried to get Suzain to call her ‘Shahida MC’, which was definitely not funny.
She glances down: twenty-five minutes.
Okay, time for her primary travelling hobby.
Shahida, a veteran of airports, railway stations, metros, and nearly flat expanses of tarmac and dirt on which one might, if one is lucky, find a bus, likes to watch people. Likes to imagine lives for them, stories which just happen to be playing out their most crucial moments right in front of her. Turning a commuter who is late for his train into a panicked father rushing to deliver the ransom for his kidnapped son keeps her mind off the fact that her own immediate future is mundane, as it was when she returned nightly to her small and empty San Francisco flat, or actively depressing, as it is now, chasing dead leads on a dead friend in a town she’d rather forget. So she looks around Egg Nation, and dreams:
The white woman in the severe suit, she’s on her way home to her loving wife after a difficult job interview, stopping for a snack before the long train journey. Tonight they’ll drown their sorrows in wine and each other, fall asleep together, and wake to find a message from her future employer on her phone. Jubilation! But also complication, because now they have to rip up their lives and move halfway across the country, and is another thirty thousand pounds a year worth it? It might not be, except that they’ve been thinking about IVF…
The Black woman in the fashionable dress and the large canvas bag, well, she’s obviously a buyer for a local art museum. It’s not a huge name yet but it has funding behind it and some of the bigger fish are interested but she doesn’t care about that, because she’s just commissioned an up-and-coming young artist for an installation that will, she’s certain, change both of their lives. The woman’s building a stage for the girl, dedicating a whole wing to her vision, waiting impatiently for the day the work is finished and the art world will come to Almsworth and be forever moved by what they’ve seen…
The two white girls talking in hissed whispers a few tables over, they’re sisters, running away from home, and the older and more confident one is waiting to meet a broker who can provide new identity documents, while the younger and more apprehensive one keeps watch for vengeful relatives, who might appear at any moment to drag them back to the horrors that await them in the locked dungeon of the family home…
The blonde girl in the corner of the café, staring unblinkingly at the other customers with an uncomfortable intensity, she’s obviously a serial killer. No ordinary person moves so carefully and so deliberately, and— The girl catches her eye and smiles, and Shahida looks quickly away.
Hmm. What about the Black woman and the white woman, just now walking in and looking around? They could be…
Oh. Right.
She refused to send a picture of herself, but Abigail snapped a selfie during the call and texted it over, and there she is. So the white woman must be her friend. The girl Vicky and Lorna know.
Shahida waves. Might as well get this over with.
They seem friendly enough when they sit down, but Shahida picked a table visible from the counter, anyway.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m Shahida.”
“Abigail,” Abigail says.
“Christine,” the other girl says.
“So!” Shahida says. “What did you have to tell me?”
Abigail shrugs. “What did you want to know?”
“For starters, how do— how did you know Mark?”
She smiles, and Shahida wonders if they were close like she and Mark almost were, and instantly hates her for it. “I was just finishing up my degree when we met,” Abigail says. “And we didn’t meet in class — I was a journalism student and he took Physics. As you know, I’m sure. I was actually working on something for my internship: I interviewed new students at Saints, asked them how they were coping with the classes, what it was like living away from home, that kind of stuff. A puff piece for one of the junior writers at work.”
“And work was…?”
“Work still is the Gazette. You can see my byline there sometimes.”
Shahida nods, notes the pride in Abigail’s voice, and gestures for her to continue.
“Mark was one of the first students I interviewed,” she says. “And from the start, something felt different about him. It was like he had something he wanted to tell me, something he needed to tell me, but he couldn’t find the words to say it. We had this incredibly mundane conversation where he supplied absolutely the most generic answers you can think of, and the whole time all I wanted to do was ask him, ‘What are you really thinking?’ But I didn’t. We chatted a little, after the interview, and then… that was that, I thought.” Abigail crosses her arms, leans forward on the table. “And then I saw him the next day. And I kept seeing him after that. Just around. He was taking a couple of modules in the building I worked out of, and you know how it is, once you know a face…”
“Yeah,” Shahida says.
“He always seemed so sad. No—” Abby frowns and chews on her lip for a moment; a professional actor could not have performed thoughtful better, “—not sad. More like… empty. Like the thing he couldn’t tell me about, the thing he couldn’t find the words for, was his whole life. And it got worse. Quickly. He started blocking people out. Didn’t smile at me in the hallways any more; didn’t notice me. He was always head down, both hands on the straps of his backpack, get to the lecture, get away. And, one day, in the Anthill, he—”
“The Anthill?”
“It’s what the students call the lecture theatre complex down by the lake,” Christine says, breaking a silence which she’s spent carefully watching Shahida’s reactions. “It, um, looks like an Anthill. Or kind of a big poo.”
“Right.”
“One day,” Abby resumes, “he’s walking up the main steps, head down like usual, going fast, and he bumps into a girl. You know, like you might do if you’re not paying attention to where you’re going. And he wasn’t a big g— guy, but he was charging up those stairs, and she was standing right next to the railing, and she almost went over.”
“I didn’t know any of this,” Shahida says, and starts taking notes on her phone.
“The girl was fine; her friends grabbed her and she didn’t fall. But she got a scare, and maybe a bruise or two, from the railing. She yelled at him, understandably, and… I was there. I saw it all, and you could see him taking it all in, right there. If you’re… empty, then sometimes the worst things come along and fill you up, you know? It was just an accident, but I think that was it for him. I tried to catch up with him but he got nabbed for a debrief by the security guard at the Anthill and then… then I never saw him again.”
“That’s it?”
“Not quite.” There’s a cruet laid out on the table, and Abigail takes the pepper pot and starts turning it around in her hands. “I was worried about him, so I went to his dorm, asked around, and someone said he went out, to that club.”
“Legend,” Shahida supplies, with a sneer she doesn’t even try to resist.
Abigail points with the pepper pot. “Yes. So, call me obsessive, I went after him. Never found him. He was just gone. I found his iPod, though. That was me. Just off the pavement, in the grass, at the bus stop by the uni. He’d stamped on it until the screen was smashed, but it was easy to recognise. On the back of it, there was—”
“A sticker. The blue flower with the circlet of skin.” Shahida doesn’t have to think hard to imagine it. After Mark’s father got the iPod back from the police, she asked him for it. He practically threw it at her, along with a few boxes of books and other sundries. He had to concentrate on Russ, he said. Whole lot of good that did either of them.
The music player had been his mother’s. The family bought it for her when she started getting sick, to replace her original model, because the new one could play video. Mark spent a whole week torrenting TV shows and learning how to use transcoding software so he could compress them to fit as many as possible on the hard drive, with enough space over to copy the entire library from her old one. It was, he told her, her lifeline through years of repeated hospitalisation.
Days before she died, she called him into her room, gave him her music, and showed him the sticker on the back. She’d had it made, a variant of a logo from the cover of her favourite band’s first album, but with the flower in blue instead of red, and with her own words on the paper double-wrapped around the stems, here rendered as torn and tattooed skin:
My Dearest Mark,
Forget Me Not.
Sometimes Shahida plugs a pair of earbuds into the broken device and listens to the soft and muffled hiss of silence.
“He never changed a single song,” she says, and in the burning of her cheeks becomes aware of the stares of the other women. “Sorry. Memories.”
Abigail’s biting her lip again. “I quite understand. When she— when he disappeared, I was consumed with guilt, with the idea that I could have done something different. I kept playing back his last days, thinking I should have tried harder to talk to him after the accident…”
She keeps talking, but Shahida’s not listening. She’s watching the other girl, Christine, instead, whose reaction to the pronoun slip was to jump as if she’d been kicked, and then go very still. Under her scrutiny, Christine visibly relaxes and returns to nodding along with Abigail, but something about her mannerisms can’t help but ring false. Maybe it’s because the girl refuses to respond to Shahida’s staring, which has passed curiosity and is now bordering on the rude.
Abigail’s still talking. Shahida’s not even there any more. She’s in LA again, and it’s only her third month in the States. This guy, Travis, her first fling in the new country, has invited her on an outing someone at his work is organising, and it’ll be their last night out and their last week together, although neither of them know that yet. Still, she’s frustrated with him, and leaving his side more and more to mingle, to meet people, to find the kinds of strange stories she’s been craving. She finds an older man, much older, with pimple scars on his cheeks, a dense but well-trimmed beard, and strange horizontal scars on his chest that are fully visible under his loose denim jacket, and he’s surrounded by people who all look far more interesting than Travis’ work colleagues, so she joins in a conversation on the periphery, makes herself automatically novel by virtue of her accent, and soon enough she’s talking to the big guy, who sits holding court on a bench and occasionally shares kisses and loving touches with another man, not quite as big as he, and somewhat androgynous.
The big guy’s name is Nathan, and he’s transgender. He tells her so when he catches her looking at his scars; don’t worry, he’s used to the attention, and if she’s not going to be rude, neither will he. No, he doesn’t normally show them off like this, but not because he’s ashamed; the judge would yell at him if he turned up to work without a shirt on. Why are they celebrating? Well, this guy here — another bear hug for the other man — finally worked out that they’re supposed to be husband and husband and not husband and wife! After thirty years of marriage! Isn’t he handsome now? He’s still picking a new name, so just call him Dumbass for now. No, he won’t mind; he’s a dumbass. Come, girl, have a drink with us, and tell us about yourself.
She met more trans people after that, and a lot more other kinds of people besides, through Nathan and his now-husband, through their friends, through work, and she returned home a lot more worldly than the Shahida who left a provincial British city to find herself. And now she wonders, as Abigail’s talking, if that’s been the answer all along, if that’s what she was too naive to see at the time. The trans women she’s spoken to talked about dissociation, about depression, about isolated childhoods and dysfunctional familial relationships, about bullying and loneliness; about their antipathy towards being touched. And the older ones, they told her about the way things used to be done, the way they still are done sometimes, if things are bad, if you have the resources or you’re desperate enough: you leave home, you move across the country, you cut all ties with your former life, and you reinvent yourself.
Is she reaching if she thinks it all just fits? And if she thinks the women in front of her know more than they’re telling her?
Is Mark not dead, after all? Is he really just… gone?
* * *
It’s dark in here again. Better this way, with the new curves on his body barely illuminated, with the reflection of his new shape just a silhouette, a shadow, flat and empty and dead.
The girl. His future. He reaches out, fingers making contact with the glass, and traces the outline of his body.
He withdraws. He doesn’t want to touch her.
Aaron doesn’t punch the mirror. Maria, back when she first showed him out of that nasty little cell and into his room, she said it’s safety glass, or perspex, or plastic, or fucking mithril or something, and it has to be because then angry boys like him can’t smash it and use it to hurt themselves, and he fucking wants to, he wants to take everything out on it, to see which breaks first, him or the glass.
Angry boys like him.
Not so angry any more. Not so anything any more.
He doesn’t punch it but he imagines himself punching it, like a man would, a hulking fucking man like the boys at school who came at him in the dark, like Will used to be, like Declan, with his beer barrel body. He doesn’t punch it and instead he sits perfectly still, and tears the door clean off the wardrobe. He hugs his legs to his body and bites his tongue and closes his eyes, and drops the mirror on the floor and stamps on it until cracks appear in its polished surface. He opens his eyes again, looks at his reflection, shattered in his mind’s eye but in front of him unbroken, and wonders which version of him, which version of the mirror, he prefers.
Academic. He’s where he is, he’s who he is, and what’s happening won’t change. Can’t fight it. Accept it, or don’t.
Steph. Stephanie. The girl coming out of the man like she was there all along, just waiting for someone to help her, and he didn’t help, did he? No, he didn’t see it until she’d already seen it herself, and all he could do was acknowledge her. What a helpless, useless little boy he is. Does she dream of turning back the clock, reversing the changes, returning to the man she was? No. No, she doesn’t and no, she shouldn’t. She’s better than him. Always will be; always was.
Hurt people hurt people.
It’s what the school nurse said, the first and only time he went to see her, with his bloody nose and his bruised jaw and the raw skin on his buttocks where they hit him with the improvised cane. She said those boys must be so miserable to have felt the need to inflict such pain, and he wondered then if anyone would ever use that excuse for him.
And then he got to find out, because he hurt people. And they found a hundred ways to explain it all away.
Oh, that poor lad. He must have had his reasons. And he has such a bright future!
He wants to spit blood. Fuck her, fuck them, and fuck that poor lad. Never saw an impulse he didn’t chase, and he chased them all the way to Dorley fucking Hall. Except this place gave him something nothing and nowhere else ever has: clear eyes. And with them he’s seen himself, an infinite reflection of mean, nasty, brutish deeds, moments of joy extracted from the pain of others.
Hurt people hurt people.
But he’s not really a person, not any more. No more excuses.
Aaron’s glad he didn’t kick the mirror, that he wasn’t like Declan and Will and the boys who bullied him, because then he’d be scattered into a million imperceptible shards, and that would be like hiding from himself again. And he can’t do that. Not any more and never again.
Here, at the end, he wants to live in the world. For the first and the last fucking time: he wants to live in the real world.
* * *
Edy’s in the shower, and that gives Maria time to catch up on work without being on the receiving end of a well-meant lecture on recovery protocol. She can always hide the laptop under her pillow if Edy gets done more quickly than she expects. Abby, Christine, Tabby, Bella and Rabia have all submitted reports on the drama of the day, and if one combines them into, as it were, one massive document in one’s head, the synthesis is that, basically, things went okay, and Bella should have been more careful about sending Faye and Rebecca out on their own. Still, Indira’s checked in with the girls and verified that they’re okay and watching movies together in Faye’s room, and Abby’s confirmed that the encounter with Shahida went to spec, so that’s fine.
Bea would tease her, echo her own words back to her: see, this place can function without you for one measly day!
Maria sips at her tea and, looking away from the screen for the first time in a while, notices that Edy brought it to her in her favourite mug, a present from one of the younger sponsors, who got hold of some unsold and genuinely vintage Royal College mugs from the brief period in the 1980s when Saints had a gift shop. The girl had it customised in such a way that the modifications have withstood dozens upon dozens of trips through the dishwasher. The original text, floating over generic geometric shapes, reads, Come to the Royal College of Saint Almsworth and find yourself! The girl added, in blood-red letters, IF WE DON’T FIND YOU FIRST!!
It makes her smile every time.
She and Beatrice are the first to admit that the unusual circumstances of their respective transitions have left them with a shared sense of humour that borders on the macabre, but they were surprised when most of the girls who came up under their new regime seemed to share and embrace it. Bea commented at the time that it might mean they were doing something wrong, but by then someone had found her mug collection, and the first imitation — which read, To Reinvent Yourself Takes Balls! — had appeared on a shelf in the kitchen, and it seemed most sensible just to run with it, to let the girls indulge themselves. Maria said at the time it might help them adjust. After a while it became nothing more than a silly tradition, a way for graduates to one-up each other on major gift-giving holidays, or to extract adorable frustrated noises from some of the younger, more sensitive girls.
In the end, she doesn’t manage to put the laptop away before Edy gets out of the shower, but her partner favours her with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a promise to make her another cup of tea when she’s dried her hair, and Maria goes back to combing through the day’s reports. So she’s got her eye on the computer when Consensus chimes: Indira on a voice call.
“It’s Aaron,” Indira says, without preamble. “He’s whispering to himself, but it’s too quiet to pick up. He’s been acting unusually all day — I’ve been keeping half an eye on him, despite the palaver — and now he’s back in the dark in his room, and he won’t look away from his mirror.”
“How long?” Maria asks, calling up the camera feeds. Edy shuts off the kettle and returns to her side, frowning down at the screen. Aaron is indeed staring at himself in his mirror, legs tucked up under his chin, arms circling his shins. He’s completely still.
“Only about twenty minutes. I was helping out upstairs by the time he started. Nell got on shift and called me immediately; he must have started during the switch-over.”
They’re still sloppier than they should be, as an institution, but Maria doesn’t say it. Five, ten years ago, they had enough staff that they’d spot things like this instantly; now, they’re perpetually playing catch-up.
“What’s your assessment?” she says.
“I think you need to go to him, Maria,” Indira says. “I think you need to go now. It’s time.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Dira.”
“Call me if you need me,” Indira says, and the connection closes with the familiar descending chime.
Before Maria can say anything, Edy’s already thrown an outfit on the bed and is offering her a hand up. Maria dresses, brushes her teeth, puts her messy hair in a tail and tests herself for steadiness. This far out from the incident, the moments of disorientation and weakness are rare, but she has a cane if she needs it. Not this evening, though.
Edy walks with her, all the way down past the kitchen, where the impromptu crisis management team are reheating cold pizza and someone’s broken out a bottle of wine, and the security room, from which Nell waves and Indira nods seriously at her. As they enter the second-floor basement, Edy peels off, finding Adam out of his room, conducting a subdued conversation with Stephanie in the common room, so Maria has a moment alone to prepare herself before opening Aaron’s door.
She knocks. Aaron needs the illusion of privacy. It’s more than she ever had, and she’s seen how much it helps them to have their personal space respected, even when they know they’re being watched all the time. And he’s not the same as the boy who arrived here, not any more; he’s earned some respect.
He doesn’t answer. She’s got her phone in the other hand, watching him from above, and she can see that he doesn’t react at all. So she lets herself in, taps on her phone for some low lights to come on to supplement the dull glow from above the bed, and closes the door carefully behind her.
Still nothing.
Indira’s right. This is different. This is new, for him.
Maria’s a connoisseur of toxic male fragility, and she knows by now all the ways such a psyche can shatter, all the points into which one must hammer one’s nails to turn holes into cracks and cracks into waves of broken glass. Aaron’s someone she originally expected to break much later, months from now, around the time of the orchiectomy; probably she has Stephanie to thank for his accelerated development.
Aaron does, too. The sooner they realise they’ve stepped over the hard line between their past and their future, the better. Vicky and Christine, to take two examples who’ve been on her mind a lot lately, illustrate the point: Victoria established a new future for herself early on and was much happier for it; Christine, though, sank about as low as Aaron has, and it took the orchiectomy, the clean break with her past, for Indira and her friends to bring her around.
Take away a vital part of them, create that hard line between the old self and the new. It doesn’t have to be anything physical.
She crouches down in front of the silent boy.
“Aaron.”
Aaron unwinds in shudders. He looses his hands from around his calves and places them on the floor behind, he lays his legs down flat, and he raises his head. “Maria,” he says.
“Talk to me, Aaron.”
He nods slowly. Every movement a great effort. “I need your help.”
“Okay. Do you want to sit more comfortably?”
“Sure.”
She stands and reaches for him and he pulls himself up on her arm, staggering away as soon as he’s on his feet and waving his hands at her. She’s confused until she realises he’s spluttering an apology, but it’s barely audible.
“Aaron,” she says, more firmly than before, allowing a little bit of sponsor voice to creep in, “you don’t have to apologise.”
“I do,” he says, still waving her away. “I fucking do, I shouldn’t be pulling on you like that, shouldn’t be using you, you were attacked, I can still see it on you, I can see it in the way you walk, and it’s like you said, you have something to live for, someone who cares for you, and you’re worth it, Maria, and I shouldn’t just—”
He’s cut off when she grabs his arm by the elbow, trusting in the physical contact to break him out of the shame he’s talking himself into, and he looks at her with wounded innocence.
“Aaron,” she says.
“I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted, if you insist on repeating it. Shall we sit down?”
He nods, and she guides him to the bed. He sits with his legs crossed, easily falling into a comfortable position, and she insists on propping some of his pillows behind him, so he can lean against the wall. He asks why she’s fussing over him.
“You’re worth it,” she says, rolling the chair over and sitting down opposite him.
“You both think that. You, Stephanie. Indira, too, actually, although she had a funny way of showing it. You all think I’m worth it. And I haven’t been able to bring myself to believe it. Because it’s stupid, Maria, and all of you, you’re too smart to miss that. So you’re all lying, or you’re all seeing something that’s not there. But it’s okay, because now I understand.”
“What do you understand?”
He breathes deeply, almost smiling as he looks around the room. “I told you. I’ve seen who I would have become. And I understand now who I was, before I was brought here. I can fill in the details, all the terrible things I’ve done, all the terrible things I was going to do, and it makes an ugly fucking picture.” He laughs. “It’s not one I want anyone to see, not any more. So, I understand: I had to be taken out of the world. It’s better off without me. And I know that, to you, that’s half the job. You want to see me change. You want to see me grow. But I can’t. So I won’t.”
“You can, Aaron,” Maria says, reaching for him but retracting her hand when he flinches away.
“I can’t. I’ve seen how it’s supposed to go, okay? I spent the afternoon with Steph. With Stephanie. And she’s a… a she, now. I can see it, and so can she. Fuck, actually, I don’t know how I didn’t see it weeks ago. Being with her, acknowledging her as the woman she’s becoming, it unblocked something, you know? Inside me. Like pulling all the hair out of the plug and suddenly the bath’s draining properly and that’s just it, Maria, I’m fucking empty. Take away the mask, take away the armour, the bad habits, everything, and there’s just a fucking void. I’m just this. And that’s all I’ll ever be. I don’t want to drag this out over days or weeks. She’s falling for me. God only knows why, but she is. And the longer I’m around, the more it’ll hurt when I’m gone. Because I won’t survive this, Maria. I won’t make it through. I won’t be a girl like Steph. Something in her has learned to want this. Maybe it was in her all along. And you know what? I can look into her past and I can see it all. Maybe she only acted like a piece of shit because she had something inside her that made no sense, that defied all understanding, that wouldn’t come loose when she picked at it or when other people picked at it for her, and no-one could tell her what it was, and then she’s brought here and injected with all sorts of dumb shit and suddenly that thing inside her that was always coiled up and taut and— and fucking strangling her is loose and pliable and free and she realises: oh shit, I’m a girl. And I’m so happy for her, Maria. Jesus, I’m so fucking happy. And I think that’s a good note for me to leave on, you know? I’m happy for my friend. I’m happy she’s becoming the person she was always supposed to be. I think I showed her that today. And that’s how I want her to remember me. Not as this empty shell. Not as me.” Still leaning away from her, he breathes, dry and empty. “What I want from you, Maria, is your help. I want to end it, and I need you to help me.”
“I won’t do that.”
“You’d do it for Declan but not for me?”
She doesn’t quibble. “Yes.”
Now he leans forward, now he reaches for her, but she denies him. She won’t support him in this.
“You can do it painlessly,” he says. “You have anaesthetic here, right? Just stick me with needles, put me under, and end me.”
“Aaron,” Maria says, as kindly as she knows how.
“And promise me you’ll take care of her, Maria,” he says, reaching again for her hands; again denied. “Promise me! She’s the one good thing in my life and she does not deserve to be dragged down with me. Because, look, I nearly fucked up today. I almost ruined it. I got wrapped up in my own shit and I almost let it show and I almost shouted at her just for being happy, just for accepting herself, and I can’t do that again. I kept seeing it in her eyes, you know, or I was afraid I would see it in her eyes, the disappointment that I’m not living up to what she thinks I can be, so I bottled it and ran back here before I fucked up, terminally. And that took everything I had! I’ve got nothing left for the rest of it.” He sits back again. “It’s Steph’s fucking trolley problem, Maria, only she’s on the safe track and I’m under it. And that’s where I should be. I’m happy there, Maria. I know what needs to be done. I’m waiting for the wheels. I’m ready for the release. But that means you have to do it for me. Because—” he loses control, and the last words come out in a breathless gasp, “—because I’m too much of a coward to do it myself.”
“I won’t help you like that.”
It’s not even a whisper now. Barely a sound. “Please.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I think I will love you, Aaron. Not like Steph does, nor how she will. But I’ll love you like family.” That’s his trigger point. His lever. Like a lot of the girls, his family has been cruel or indifferent towards him, expected things of him he couldn’t possibly supply or become; chosen for him a future in which cruelty is an inevitability and happiness an afterthought. There’s a missing piece in the boy’s life, and she and Stephanie and all the sponsors are ready to provide it, if he’ll let them. There’s only one requirement. “I’ll love you like a sister,” she says.
He doesn’t even flinch. “You won’t,” he whispers. “I won’t make it.”
She holds out her hand, makes him place her palm against hers. Accepts him on her terms. Lances her fingers between his, captures him, holds him. He looks like he wants to pull away, but he doesn’t follow through.
“There’s something you should know,” she says. “Look at our hands. Look at my fingers and look at yours. You see how they’re the same? And remember how you asked what happened to me when I was younger?”
He says nothing, he just keeps his eyes fixed on hers.
“Aaron,” Maria says, “can you keep a secret?”
Notes:
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 24: Everything Must Go
Notes:
CONTENT WARNINGS:
This is quite a heavy chapter, and contains references to suicide attempts and suicidal ideation, self-harm, dysphoria, disordered eating and purging.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
2006
New house. New town. New school. He screwed up, back in Cherston, and he knows it, and while both his parents promise it’s not the reason they moved, the timeline’s pretty clear: they completed the move less than two months after the incident in the school changing rooms. It’s obvious. His fault. Russ knows it, too, and won’t be mollified by Mum’s reassurances that it was just time for a new start.
No-one even liked the old house, anyway!
He was lucky the rocks got him mainly in the back of the head, Mum says, because the stitches, and the scars they’ll one day become, are mostly hidden, although as they’ve healed they’ve made the hair the doctors shaved off grow back funny. He’s been thinking of growing his hair longer, to cover the scars and make the parts that stick out at weird angles easier to hide. Like some of the guys in Mum’s music. Dad fought her on that, but Mum won. It’ll suit him, she says.
The cut above his eyebrow — the first one; a punch thrown, a thumbnail grazing — has healed already, almost invisibly. A shame, Dad says, because girls like a boy with a scar they can kiss. He said it over dinner, and Mum hissed, “Matthias! He’s eleven!” quietly enough that he doesn’t think he was supposed to hear her. The idea of it made him angry, like before, and he wanted to dare his father to say something about the other wound, the one his father carefully never mentions, the one healing at the same rate as the wounds on the back of his head; the one on his wrist. He couldn’t summon the courage.
He’s supposed to wear a watch over it. It’s angry raw red under the bandage, and it itches.
But he shouted and he threw things and he ruined dinner, so it was up to his bedroom with no dessert while Russell stuck his tongue out through a smirk. It didn’t matter. Dessert was just jelly, anyway, and Mum brought some up on tiptoes while Dad was watching his shows.
School starts in three weeks. Intimidating. But nobody knows him here, and Mum’s checked online: the old school made them delete the posts about him. There’s nothing left to follow him any more, except for the still-healing wounds on the back of his head and the nick on his eyebrow and his itching wrist.
New house. New town. New school. New start. All he has to do is not screw up again. And he’s getting a handle on it, on the bursts of melancholy that strike him from time to time, on the shakes, on the urge to just scream as loud as he can. He’s excused from PE until his stitches are judged completely healed, which might be months, the doctor says, and that’s for the best; being forced to get changed in front of the others was what started this whole thing in the first place.
He hadn’t meant to hit Vernon. Hadn’t meant to respond with such rage to his jokes. Even though, when he recounted them to Mum, days later, her face had darkened and she’d carefully drawn his shaking body into the most delicate hug she’d ever given him, and whispered, “You mustn’t believe those kinds of things about yourself. They’re not true.”
But they were just jokes. Vernon said so, and so did Dad.
After the first couple of days they visited him separately in hospital. Mum would cradle his wrist; Dad would ignore it. The onset of puberty can be a turbulent time for any boy, the doctor said. Especially a sensitive boy, Mum said.
Just ignore what the other kids say.
He wishes he could. It’s hard when they won’t stop saying it. Hard when you know it’s true. Eleven and broken already.
Everyone’s quiet now. He’s supposed to hide the jelly bowl until Mum can pick it up in the morning, so he stashes it in the second drawer of his desk where she’ll know to look for it. He ties his shoes, pulls the hood over his head, tests the bedroom door, and stops still to listen.
No-one reacts to the almost-sound, the near-silent creak of the spring inside the handle. It’s safe.
He moves through the house, balancing on the tips of his toes, avoiding as he goes the floorboards in the landing that creak, the stair near the bottom that wobbles, the threadbare patches of carpet in the hall that make footsteps artificially loud; he’s been testing them during the day, writing down his notes and hiding the pad under the wardrobe. Dad wants to ask the landlord about replacing the carpet, but they’re new tenants and Mum says it wouldn’t be wise to make waves, not yet. For now, he knows where not to tread.
He mustn’t be heard, and not just because he’s sneaking out; these hours are his, are the only time he gets any peace. Being seen, being spoken to, being around people, it all gets in the way. Makes the noise from the world muffle in his ears, makes the tinnitus take over, as if something inside him is so desperate to protect him from other people it does everything it can to block them out.
Around Mum, sometimes, it’s okay. When it’s just her.
The kitchen door into the garden opens silently, as it’s supposed to. A week ago everyone else went out for a whole day, and he waited for them to be gone before fetching the can of lubricant he stole from Dad’s toolbox over a year ago; the one that rode in the bottom of his school backpack when they moved out (he had to take his bag into the bath with him one night, to get the smell out). He ran through the same steps he had at the old place, spraying the lubricant liberally across the hinges and the handle and into the keyhole, and then propping the door open to let the wind dissipate the smell. By the time his family got back there was nothing left to notice, and his route out of the house was secured.
This is his first time testing it, though, and he’s relieved when it closes and locks as quickly as it opened. He pats his pocket, checking for the spare key, and hops down off the concrete step into the garden.
It’s a long garden, and damply messy.
They moved to the city without actually moving to the city. This whole place, Rectory Street and the ugly curl of residential roads to which it connects, comprises the outskirts of the outskirts, an old hamlet barely absorbed, clinging to the very edge of Almsworth and seeming to fade away as streets terminate into nothing. Their house, like every house on this side of the road, trails a thin garden down to a band of scrubland that, eventually, according to the map he looked up online, becomes woods, and he escapes into the dark, wending an experimental route through the undergrowth, hopping over the stream at the bottom of the shallow incline and leaving home behind.
The watch Dad makes him wear is an old one, digital, from the nineties, and the screen lights up when you press an indented button on the side. It’s practically busted, but the green glow is enough to see the time out here and he confirms: it’s Friday morning, 2am, and he doesn’t have to be home again, doesn’t have to be around his dad or his little brother again, doesn’t have to see himself in mirrors or windows or the eyes of his family again, doesn’t have to be Mark again, for hours.
2007
The stitches heal and the scars start to fade and he doesn’t get out of PE forever. He’s ready for it this time, though; the sensation that undressing around others forces into his belly and which works its way out through his throat, all bile and revulsion. He can swallow, he can breathe carefully, he can keep himself calm. And no-one gives him trouble in the changing rooms here. Maybe it’s because, a whole school year on, the other boys are more grown up, less apt to abuse someone for being too thin, too small, too unwilling to mess around the way the others do. Maybe it’s because it’s a much bigger school; he’s just one of over a hundred boys in his year, and there are other targets.
They don’t even mock him about his hair, even though it’s getting pretty long. One of the other boys, Gary, asks him about it after football one afternoon, and he answers mostly honestly: he has scars on the back of his head that make the hair grow out funny, and keeping it longer helps with that. The story he supplies, of falling through a glass coffee table, which he recalls on the spot from one of Mum’s books, is sufficiently gory to satisfy, and results in the other boys asking to see his scars and then showing off their own, complete with embellished and often gruesome reenactments. Football cleats through the palm; tripping on a rockery; losing a fight with a garden fork. Several of them got theirs from their brothers: younger ones who left toys on stairs; older ones who responded poorly to losing at some video game. They judge his scars to have the fifth best story out of almost two dozen.
It’s nice. Almost makes him feel like one of them. And he has an easier time at school, now he has people to sit with at lunch, people who will greet him by name in the corridor. At the old school, even before it all happened, he always felt the target on his back.
But it’s still a relief when the school year ends, the summer holidays begin, and the weight of people in his world reduces. He doesn’t have to be Mark quite so much, can be himself instead, the unnamed and shapeless something who looks out through Mark’s eyes, speaks with Mark’s voice, hides inside Mark’s skin; lets Mark take the bruises and the scars meant for him. He wonders sometimes what it would be like to be Mark for real, to be able to make real friends, share real thoughts, but he knows how dangerous that is; rocks thrown at his head.
Mark’s pretty good at football because he can run fast. Mark sits with the other boys at lunch. Mark’s fun. It’s not all bad, pretending to be him.
And then his parents announce a surprise holiday, a proper one — not just a trip to the beach or one of Mum’s museums — and they all pile into the car for the surprisingly short journey to Peri Park, which is where he meets her.
Shahida. She finds him on the barriers at the top of the water park and pushes her way into him, reaches for him with her smile and her hands both, drags him away from the drop and shows him everything. Peri Park has much to see and do, and she knows all of it, takes him everywhere, occasionally pulls out an annotated map in a waterproof sleeve to illustrate for him some element or other of the resort, all the time talking, asking questions, being interested, not just in him but in everything, but sometimes, he can’t help but feel, especially in him. He’s the first boy ever to intrigue her, she says, and she does so with such arch confidence he can’t help but be flattered. It’s scary at first, but she proves time and again that she wants to know him, and he decides, with care and some thought, to acquiesce, to open up, and she couldn’t be happier. And though when he’s with her he still uses Mark’s name, he’s not quite the same person around her as he is at school, and he finds himself wanting to spend time with her as much as she apparently does with him.
She’s also possessed of an independence which astonishes him. She checks in with her parents every hour on a mobile phone — stored in another waterproof bag, in another compartment of her hip pouch — and her parents, generously, pass on their location and their choice of activity to Mum; the compromise reached after the flaming row when he returned after his first long day with Shahida.
She’s very responsible, Shahida’s mum said. She’ll take care of your boy.
They spend most of their time in Peri Paradise; she considers a day without a dip to be a wasted one, and doubly so when there are flumes and rapids and heated pools to occupy her attention. But tonight, Friday, the second to last night, her family’s taking his out to dinner, and in a rare restriction to her usual freedom Shahida isn’t allowed to attend a restaurant smelling of chlorine. So they’re walking the trail at the perimeter of the park, taking in the sun — Shahida’s got a spray bottle of suntan lotion, and she applies it liberally to both of them, even persuading him to lift up his t-shirt so she can give a good coating to his chest and belly and back, insisting that thin cotton is not, Mark, the defence against sunburn you might assume — and enjoying the rustling quiet of the woods. There’s a viewing point, one of many spread around the edge of the park, and this one’s empty of people and thus perfect; she pulls on his wrist, takes him up the wooden steps and over to the fence at the edge of the outcrop. She leans over, toes extended, daring him with her eyes to join her, to risk it all, to turn belly-up over the forest below, nearly to fly over the countryside, and when she looks at him streaked with laughter and with watery eyes from the wind he knows that if they were to go over together, they might not fall at all.
The family dinner’s special. Dad’s glowering but Mum’s effusive enough for both of them and Mr and Mrs Mohsin-Carpenter are generous. It’s their treat! Try the chocolate cake! Shahida and Mark share a slice, giggling at their icing-smeared chins and at the scowl his dad’s wearing.
Two mornings later he runs over to her cabin and they exchange tearful goodbyes and email addresses. Her mum, Rupa, sits him down and tells him very seriously that if he or his charming little brother ever need help, they can give her a call, and Shahida shows him on her laptop that she’s already emailed him with all the relevant contact numbers.
Hugs all around. It’s hard to let go.
When he gets home the first thing he does is archive the email, saving it out to a USB stick like Shahida suggested, on the off chance that Dad looks on his computer, the way he’s always threatened. He doesn’t reply, though, until later that night, after the family meeting, because that’s when Mum and Dad finally tell him and Russ why they spent so much money on an extravagant holiday:
Mum’s sick. She’s sick and it might have been her last opportunity to go somewhere amazing and do something special. She’s sick and she promises her children it’s no-one’s fault, that it was always coming. She’s sick and they found it late, and there’s a chance it’ll all be okay but there’s a chance it won’t, and the two of them need to prepare for that.
She’s sick and she holds him in her arms and whispers her love for him and tells him that if the worst happens he needs to be strong, he needs to be the older brother, he needs to take care of Russ, and he needs to help her around the house; and he betrays her, thinks of himself instead, understands that now she’s looked into him and loved him and named him and given him a vital role to play that he can’t be anything but what she wants and needs from him, and that continuing to pretend otherwise would be selfish.
He’ll never be anything more, now, than the thing he’s been running from ever since he learned how to run. Because that’s what he needs to be from now on. Her precious boy. The man of the house. Her Mark.
So he writes to Shahida and tells her everything and he runs to the bathroom before his roiling stomach betrays him.
2008
If you’re going to vomit up most of your meals, you need to be careful. You need to have a plan. Stomach acid eats away at the teeth, and the body’s bad at subsisting on nothing at all, so he keeps the upstairs bathroom stocked with mouthwash and he hides sports drinks and cereal bars and vitamins and supplements under his wardrobe, behind the wooden slat you can take out. He knows not to brush his teeth immediately after purging; he knows to line his stomach if he can stand it; he knows to take collagen so his nails and hair stay healthy. There’s no such thing as safe purging, but his options are limited.
He’s still getting on well enough with the boys at school. They’ve accepted him into the periphery of their groups, but the more he talks to them, the more he listens to them, the less he understands them. They don’t hate the way they look or the way they talk; in fact, judging by the way they jealously compare themselves to each other, and the way they speak of this or that aspect of their masculinity, they’re proud of it all. He likes them well enough, but he can’t call any one of them a real friend; they’re too different from him in some fundamental way he can’t properly express. He’s been waiting for a teacher or a counsellor or one of the therapists he sees occasionally to chance upon the words that explain it all, that describe him, that he can use to identify himself and find others like him, but it never happens, and in the meantime he interacts carefully with people who joyfully inhabit a world he can barely comprehend.
He’s fourteen, growing taller and thickening and changing, and every new month seems to bring with it some new horror, some repulsive artefact of puberty. He can slow it, he’s read, by eating as little as possible, keeping the creature his body is trying to become from nourishing itself on his flesh; starving it. And he can hide it in the clothes he chooses, with sleeves to cover thin wrists and layers of t-shirts to conceal his frame. He hides from himself; he hides what he’s doing to himself from everyone else.
It’s because he’s weak, Dad says sometimes, when he’s drinking, when he dares to talk to his oldest son, when he’s quiet and lonely and his thoughts come up in mumbles and spittle, when Mum’s too tired to sit with him. Weak, soft, and too much like his mother.
Dad’s wrong. One of the few useful gifts his occasional therapists have given him is the understanding that there’s more to strength than physicality, and the responsibilities he’s taken on since Mum got sick are evidence of that. It’s Dad who’s the weak one. He never helps at all.
Besides, if they’re not going to allow him to leave on his own terms, if they’re going to snatch him up off the floor and knock the knife from his bloody hands like they did when he was eleven, if they’re going to make him into the person they need him to be and not the person he is, whoever that might have turned out to be, then he’s going to have to find his own way to survive. That’s strength. That’s resilience. Not ending each day at half past six, asleep on the sofa, drunk and useless.
And there’s a virtuous high that comes from hunger, from the knowledge that his body is trying to grow and change, and that he’s fucking stopping it.
At first, his methods for safer purging were gathered carefully online, with obfuscated searches — Dad’s got their internet provider sending him logs — but then he started babysitting for Jenny Yau. She recognised him as bulimic the first time he showed up at her flat, and agreed to keep the secret if he promised to follow her comprehensive guide to taking care of himself. “You’re Laura’s boy,” she said, “and that makes you special. It means I have a duty to take care of you. I also won’t have my babysitter fainting on the job.”
When, a few weeks later, she realised he’d spent almost all the money he earned on supplies, she started stocking him up for free, but the supplies came with a requirement: every Tuesday and Thursday, before her night classes, when he comes to sit for baby Ada — an absolute squish of a thing, a beautiful person in perfect miniature who likes to suck on his fingers and responds marvellously to raspberries blown on her belly — Jenny sits him down for a light meal. She shows him the calorie counts and describes the ingredients and what they do for his body and makes him promise to keep it down. He doesn’t want to disappoint her, and he needs the money she pays him, so he does.
Two good meals a week, and whatever he can manage in between.
Mum felt well enough to eat with them tonight, so he sat with her and talked and tried to eat as little as possible, and now here he is, standing up from the toilet, wiping the last fragments of dinner from his lips. He flushes, drinks his diet sports drink and washes out his mouth. He bags his trash and hurries back to his room to stash it under the wardrobe, to be pushed to the bottom of his backpack and thrown out on the way to school tomorrow.
Chatter from downstairs draws his attention. Oh yeah, Russ brought the kid from over the road home for dinner. A new friend. Russ insisted on them eating separately, in front of a DVD on the PlayStation in Russ’ room, because Mum and Dad would only embarrass him, but they were dragged back down to the living room after, to be nominally sociable.
He should say hi.
The kid, Stefan, is sitting on his own at the cleared-off dining table, books and papers spread out in front of him; Russ is watching TV with Dad. Stefan, Mum excitedly informs him, has a birthday within a day of his! She’s already making plans for them to visit each other’s parties next year, and even Dad’s joining in when the TV’s quiet. It makes sense: Russ has been pretty lonely, and this Stefan could become a close friend; his first since the move.
Stefan himself, it’s impossible not to notice, is uncomfortable under all the attention, pulling frayed sleeves down over thin fingers, knotting ragged fabric around knuckles, looking towards people but not at them, and saying little.
Too familiar.
Mark takes the chair next to him at the dining table almost on impulse, wanting to build a wall between the boy and everyone else. At least the dining room, even with the double doors open, gives them something like their own space, and if Mark can engage him in conversation, something private, just between the two of them, then everyone else will go back to watching TV.
Stefan’s been using the homework, Mark would bet all his money, as an excuse not to talk to the adults.
“Hi,” Stefan says. “You’re Mark?”
“That’s what they tell me,” he says, with aggressive honesty. It’s not funny, not even humour, but the kid laughs, and draws from Mark a genuine smile. He looks over the books spread out on the table. “What subject?”
“Oh,” the kid says. “Um, Science.” Hard not to laugh; at Stefan’s age, it’s just one subject, the marvels of the universe crammed into a couple of hours a week and simplified almost beyond usefulness.
“My favourite. You need help?”
He asks without thinking, but the offer’s genuine. Stefan, eyes wide, thinks for a second and then nods.
God, there’s so much about this kid that’s familiar: he’s withdrawn, almost hiding, every possible centimetre of skin down to his fingers and up to his neck covered twice over and pulled tight; he’s shy but, Mark quickly discovers, possessed of infectious enthusiasm that reveals itself the moment someone takes a genuine interest. It’s like looking into the past. Guiltily he thinks back just ten minutes, to throwing up his dinner, cleaning up, and all the methodical steps he takes both to break himself more completely and to conceal from others how broken he’s become, and he hopes like hell he’s seeing things in Stefan that aren’t there.
Still, maybe he can help. Stefan’s ten; a whole year younger than Mark was when everything in his life went to shit. Maybe Stefan’s path doesn’t have to be like Mark’s.
Stefan shows him the homework question and Mark sees immediately that it’s worded confusingly, so they go over the relevant pages together, in the process drawing Stefan further out of his shell: he starts moving his hands when he talks, smiling, making eye contact.
Another thing that’s too familiar: dark red spots on Stefan’s palm, wounded skin circling a central point, five times over. Whether someone else did that to him or Stefan did it to himself, ten years old is too young for that kind of wound. On Mark’s wrist the scar itches and crawls and he wants to take Stefan’s hands in his and promise him that no amount of blood will make anything go away unless it’s all of it, all at once, but only a monster would say something like that to a kid, so he pulls his sleeves tight, sits closer, and concentrates very hard on the work in front of them.
It’s good to have something to do, even if it’s something as banal as Key Stage 2 Science. He pulls out passages from the books, suggests conclusions that might arise from them, shows him how to build out an idea into an answer.
“The trick, Stef,” Mark says, and doesn’t miss the way the boy smiles at the diminutive nickname, “is to draw the stick figures first, and paint on the detail later.”
Stef nods like he gets it, and frees his fingers from his frayed sleeves, to make it easier to write. Mark finds himself looking at the boy’s wrists, checking for scars; nothing but clear, healthy skin.
A relief.
And then Russ is bounding back into the dining room, complaining about the content of whatever TV show it was that just finished, and Stef shuts down a little, returns to a slower and more considered and, now that Mark knows what to look for, less real version of himself, and Mark has to make his excuses and leave before bitter memory overwhelms him.
2009
For the last few months their tiny dining room has been a bedroom, and for the last few weeks Mum’s left it only to go to the hospital. Dad put curtains up over the glass doors, found the dining table a cramped new home behind the sofa, and with the help of Stef’s parents brought home a second-hand bed from the church’s supply of donated furniture.
It’s one of the safest places in the house. No-one wants to lose their temper and upset Mum.
She’s been getting weaker, thinner, and tires more easily, so Mark takes his hours with her when they can both find them, after school and at weekends. It’s a natural progression: last year he ran errands for her, helped her out in the kitchen, went to the supermarket with her to help carry home the groceries; this year he does all those things in the background, on his own, out of view, and gives his remaining time to her. And with exams coming up, the quiet, secluded room is a restful place to study.
If only he could concentrate.
“My boy,” she whispers, and he looks up from his book to find her awake and reaching out with a trembling hand, knuckles almost tearing paper skin. He takes, covers it, lends her his warmth. “My precious boy.”
“Hey. How are you feeling?”
“Crap.”
“Oh, Mum.”
“I feel,” she says, rallying, “like I’m a bucket of gourmet ice cream, and some bastard’s been scooping out my insides with a silver spoon.”
He laughs, because she needs to hear it — Dad hasn’t laughed at her jokes for a long time — but it’s an effort. She talked before, when she had more energy, about the curious sensation of being consumed from the inside, and the imagery’s been difficult for Mark to forget. The medication keeps her numb, but it can’t hide what’s been taken from her.
“Do you need anything?”
“Just you. Just you, dearest Mark.” And she smiles and more of the mother he remembers comes back, all impish charm and inappropriate glee. When he was a kid they used to bounce on the mattress together, daring Dad to have a problem with it. “I have a present for you,” she whispers, “but I need my hand back to get it.” She wiggles her fingers, and he releases her. She sticks out her tongue at him, a picture of adolescent rebellion.
“Was that the present?” he asks. “Your incorrigible rudeness?”
She grins at him and then, in one of the rapid mood shifts he’s become accustomed to, grabs at his wrist before he can pull it away and runs a thumb over his fading scar.
“Precious,” she says. “So precious.”
“I know, Mum.”
“Never again, Mark.”
“Never again,” he promises, and it’s her turn to release him, to allow him to take himself back and hide from her not only his scar but wrists that are almost as thin as hers. She’s seen them, there’s no doubt, but she’s not said a word. He’s wondered if she ever talked to Jenny Yau about his weight — she must have; they’ve been friends since forever, since long before Dad — but he hasn’t wanted to ask.
He looks away as she leans over on the bed and rummages in the drawer, swearing under her breath. She doesn’t like to be seen to struggle; doesn’t like to be the source of pain in other people’s lives, even as her own is coming to an end.
“Here,” she says, and he looks up again. She’s holding a box, about the size of a small notebook, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a powder-blue bow, and when he doesn’t immediately take it she shakes it, biting her lip, amused at his hesitation.
The bow he unties carefully and, borrowing a little of her cheekiness, ties it around his wrist, covering the scar. “Look, see?” he says. “Gone.”
“Brat,” she says, giggling. It turns into a cough, and he waits until she waves a hand: get on with it.
“Yes, yes,” he says, pretending everything’s fine, and pulls at the paper. Inside the box is—
Oh, Mum.
“It was mine,” she says. “Now it’s yours.”
“Thank you,” he whispers.
It wasn’t long after their vacation at Peri that the hospital visits started in earnest. Dad got her an iPod, the new one that could play video, and with Mark’s help she filled it with TV shows and, especially, her music, downloading some but ripping most of it off her piles and piles of stained and battered CDs. He even used the scanner from Dad’s computer to replace the normal album art with scans of her CD sleeves, many of which were covered in scrawled, colourful messages from old friends.
He smiles, remembering the first time they listened to her music together. “Your father doesn’t approve,” she’d whispered, dragging his head roughly over so she could whisper, “but what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.” It was all stuff from the nineties and the early years of the new century, and as she played it, one earbud each, she showed him pictures from her teenage years, all smeared eyeliner and dyed hair and sloppily customised t-shirts with spray-painted slogans like DESTROYED BY MADNESS and ANXIETY IS FREEDOM. Across the top of one page of the photo album lay a pair of polaroids depicting her and Jenny Yau posing in t-shirts which read, when they were standing next to each other, THERE IS NO TRUE LOVE / JUST A FINELY TUNED JEALOUSY. Mum’s cheeks were covered in lipstick stains.
He’s never understood why she married Dad. They’re so different. Jenny said once that when she went off to university and Mum stayed behind, Matthias was just there, and filled a void. “I told her,” Jenny said, “that leaving her alone was the biggest mistake of my life, and she said that if she hadn’t met your father, she wouldn’t have had you. Remember that, kiddo.” At least when they moved house they moved back near Jenny, and Mum got to see her again, before she got too sick to leave the house much at all.
Jenny’s not allowed over, not unless Mum wants Dad to make a fuss.
“I left all my music on there,” Mum says, tapping on the iPod’s scratched screen. “If Dad asks, I deleted all the rude stuff. He won’t be able to check; he never could work it.”
“Mum…”
“Turn it over.”
On the back, affixed so securely to the metal battery cover that it almost looks like it was fitted at the factory, is a sticker: a flower, ringed with the words, My Dearest Mark, Forget Me Not.
“Your birth flower,” she whispers, in a thick voice overflowing with tears. “Dazzling blue, like your eyes. Remember?” She’s losing her voice again, choking on the memory, but she repeats herself insistently: “Remember? Remember when we found the flowers?”
He’d been barely seven. He and Mum snuck away from a school trip she was helping chaperone to explore around the railway sidings and look for hidden places, and they found a huge flower bed, practically untouched. Carefully she pulled up one of the beautiful blue flowers and held it between them both: the colour of their eyes. Russ’ eyes, like Dad’s, are green; Mark is blue, and so is she.
“Of course I remember,” he says. “I remember the field; I remember hiding from the other kids; I remember the bollocking I got from the teacher the next day…”
He doesn’t cry. He hasn’t been able to for a long time. But as he crawls up onto the bed next to her and embraces her as gently as he can, he wishes as she shudders that he could cry, so he could share this moment properly with her. She doesn’t complain, though, doesn’t ask anything of him he can’t give, and slowly and with faltering grip takes his hands in hers.
She lingers for five more days, speaking little, and Mark takes every minute he can with her. On her last day, hours before the end, she whispers her last words to him, and has to repeat them three times before she can make herself loud enough to be heard.
“Forgive me?”
All he can do is nod and kiss her, and then it’s Dad’s turn to stay with her. He steals one last look, and runs upstairs to his room to listen to her music and wait for the end.
* * *
Shahida knows the potted history of Rectory Street. Almsworth, like most places in the UK, has a wiki and a rival wiki and a small website run by someone who’s at least ninety and who has access to all manner of otherwise-lost information — like black and white photos of the high street when it was used principally as an avenue for the transport of coal — and between them she’s assembled what is probably a reasonably accurate accounting of the last hundred or so years of the history of Almsworth and the tributary villages and hamlets it’s swallowed as it’s grown. Her own suburb, for example, is technically and for the most part just thirty-three years old, whereas the village of Aybury, which provided the raw material around here, was one of the oldest permanent settlements in the region when it was absorbed.
The local church is positively ancient, but she has no plans to visit; once you’ve seen one thirteenth-century stone church you’ve seen them all. Like the nearby university, it’s named after ‘Saint’ Almsworth (‘Arms-Worthy’, and she sure rolled her eyes when she read that), one of those hyper-local figures of myth who turn out, when you look into it, to be eighty percent fiction, five percent fantasy, and fifteen percent landowning legacy family.
It’s a decently sunny day and the walk to the suburb of Aybury’s been pleasant, but she’s starting to get sweaty and is looking forward to the shade provided by Mark’s house, which she’s never visited but which she’s seen in pictures, in the background of some of the photos Mark’s (very, very occasionally) sent her, and on the overhead map she found online.
The house at number 64, like all the houses on Rectory Street, has had many lives. Its most recent one began shortly before Mark’s family moved in. The new landlord modernised the structure by having all the interior walls on the ground floor knocked in, save one accent column in the centre, which was both in style and load bearing. To this fashionable open-plan layout he added extensions front and back for a cramped downstairs shower room, kitchen and dining room, and raised rents.
The renovations, which started in the late nineties and rippled slowly down the road as the years progressed, are technically still ongoing: Mark says Mrs Jessop at number 90 tied the landlord in red tape when she was asked to move out, so hers remains the only structurally untouched house on the street. The connecting road joins near the Jessop place, so Shahida makes a small detour to peer from a discreet distance through the open curtains. Comparing it to the other houses she’s seen into, it looks dark and unpleasantly wood-panelled, and she wonders if it’s sacrilegious to, on this issue and this alone, agree with a landlord.
Her mother and stepfather both have strongly held and regularly expressed opinions on landlords, which Edward attributes to his history as a tenant and her mother to having a functioning moral code. Should the family ever become rich enough to afford a second home as expansive as their current one, Mum says they’ll invest in something slightly more ethical than landlording, like flying killer sharks.
Shahida skips up to the porch of number 64 and prods at the doorbell. It plays an unpleasant rendering of the line In England’s green and pleasant land from the hymn Jerusalem, which mercifully is cut off almost immediately by the sound of a hand slapping at something on the other side of the wall. The hymn dies with a comical descending wail, the front door opens and Mark, red-faced and over-dressed as usual, greets her with a half-wave.
She hugs him. It’s been so long since they last saw each other in person, and things have been so shit for him lately.
“Hi, Ess,” he says, pretending to struggle against her iron grip.
“Hey, Em,” she replies, pulling back and presenting him with her toothiest grin. “Show me around?” She leans past him to take in the layout, to see how it matches the examples she found on the letting agent’s website for another place farther down the street, and it lines up perfectly. Despite the remodelling, the main room downstairs is still fairly small; after the extensions and the stairs have taken bites out of it, the living room struggles to accommodate a pair of ragged sofas, a reluctant television on a table by the front window, and a huge pile of cardboard boxes, piled up behind one of the sofas, sealed and labelled.
The boxes dent her good mood somewhat. They’re Laura’s stuff, waiting to be sold or donated or put into storage or junked, variously. She can’t imagine why Mark’s dad would be getting rid of so many of her things, so soon. Mark said he had to steal a couple of photo albums out of a box marked for the bin men.
Mark hasn’t answered, so she salvages her smile and adds, “Please?” in her most ingratiating voice. “I want the tour!”
“Sure,” he says, returning her grin after a moment, and stands aside so she can explore. It’s dark, despite the summer sun; the near-black curtains on every window are drawn almost completely and Matthias Vogel peers over at her from one of the sofas, where he sits surrounded by scattered papers.
“Hello, Shahida,” he says.
He doesn’t like her and she knows why but she greets him anyway, with the plastic smile and the empty words she reserves for people who could make her friends’ lives difficult if she makes a fuss. The implied insult she puts in a box with all the rest; trash. She wishes she could have seen Laura again, the way they planned in their sporadic communications, but first she was sick and then she was too sick and then it was all over.
“Hey,” Mark says, “you wanna come—?”
“She’s not allowed in your room, Mark,” Mr Vogel says sharply, and Mark flinches.
“The kitchen, Dad,” Mark snaps. “I was asking if she wants to come into the kitchen. For a drink. She’s hot; can’t you see that?”
“Oh, she’s hot all right,” another voice says, and Shahida finds Russell Vogel peering down at her from the landing halfway down the stairs. “Mark’s got a girlfriend.”
“She’s just a friend, Russ,” Mark says. Always disappointing when he says it, but perhaps she can change that today.
“Mark’s got a friend,” Russ corrects, without removing the leer from his voice. “You should feel privileged, Shahida,” he adds. “You’re the first. First one his age, anyway.”
“Ignore him,” Mark says, turning away from her and retreating into the kitchen. She follows. Like everything in this house, it’s small, and dirty at the edges. “Sorry about the mess. I’m trying to stay on top of it, but no-one helps, so…” He shrugs and she wants to hug him again, but she accepts instead the orangeade he offers, fresh from the fridge, in old-fashioned glass bottles. “We get them from the church. And they get them with the milk.” He shrugs again, meaning, who knows why? “You want to go for a walk?”
She doesn’t; she wants to stay here, see more of his home, maybe sneak up to his room, but Mark’s hunched up, shoulders turned in, making himself small, protecting himself, the way she remembers from years ago, at Peri, whenever he had to be around someone other than her or his mother, so she smiles and nods and lets him lead her out the back way.
“Home in an hour!” Mr Vogel yells from the living room.
“Jesus,” Mark mutters, straightening out and stretching. For a moment his long sleeves retract and she expects to see the scar on his wrist again, but it’s hidden under a blue bow. The wrapping for the iPod, she remembers; a remembrance of his mother, worn in such a way as to obscure the memory of the other worst day of his life. “I’m sorry about him. He’s got worse since… Well, you know.”
She shrugs, forcing indifference. “I’m used to people being weird,” she says.
He takes her down the garden but not through the woods — neither of them have the shoes on for it — and instead leads her across a rough path the neighbours have made with flat stones laid in the dirt, until two houses over they intersect with a passageway between gardens and return to the street, safely hidden from Mr Vogel’s eyes.
“That’s Stef’s house,” he says, pointing at an identical semi-detached on the other side of the road.
“Stef!” She giggles. “I thought he was a girl when you started talking about him.”
“It’s just short for Stefan.”
“I know!” she says. “I’m only teasing. You’re still tutoring him?”
They start down the street, away from both houses, towards the other connecting road that leads back to what would, in a larger suburb, be the high street, but which in this place is merely a conurbation of three shops, a cash machine, and the empty building where the post office used to be. If you live here and you need something you can’t get locally, you can walk to the big supermarket near the university. “It’s not really formal like that,” he says. “But yes. Every couple of nights. He’s a good kid,” he adds, with the grandiosity of a fourteen-year-old talking about a ten-year-old. And then she giggles at herself: he’s nearly fifteen and she’s barely six months older than him; neither of them has a vantage point from which to be pompous.
“You still worried about him?” she asks.
“Not really. Not any more. He’s come out of his shell a lot this last year. When I met him, he seemed so sad, you know? So I was worried. But I think he’s going to be okay.”
She hugs him, quickly looping an arm around his waist, bumping against him, and releasing him before he can tense up. “You really want to go home in an hour?” she asks.
“I really don’t,” he says. “I’m not sure I ever want to go home again.”
“Well then,” she announces, pulling him to a stop and moving to stand in front of him, “I have an idea.”
“Shahida—”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes?”
“Then forget this stupid place and your stupid brother and your stupid dad and come with me!”
Amy’s parents won’t be around, and it’s a lovely day, perfect for a dip in Amy’s pool. And Rachel’s bound to come join them if they make a thing of it. She smiles at Mark, willing him to agree, and when he nods she hugs him again, ignores his reticence, and holds him until he holds her, too.
* * *
“Ca-non-baaaaaaall!”
“How many times, Rachel?” Shahida says, flapping her hands in the air as if to ward off the splash. “If you keep diving in like that,” she adds, imitating Amy’s mother, “there won’t be any water left for swimming!”
From below the edge of the pool two fingers rise, and Rachel’s grinning face follows them. She inverts them, uses them to brush wet hair out of her eyes, and shouts, “Up yours, Mohsin!” But Shahida’s surname comes out distorted and bubbly, because Amy chooses that moment to sweep a wave of water right into Rachel’s face.
Beside her, Mark, the only person in the garden still fully clothed, laughs. Shahida turns, anticipating the smile on his face, but it looks pained, and he’s clutching his belly like his insides are going to fall out. They’ve been here almost half an hour already, and still he won’t join in. She’s been holding off on jumping in herself in an attempt to persuade him. It’s subliminal, or something.
“Em,” she says, “you should swim with us.”
“I don’t have anything to wear,” he says. They’re repeating themselves.
Shahida tries a new tack. “You can—”
“I’m not borrowing anything of Amy’s,” he adds quickly. “Unlike you, I don’t have the figure for it.”
Shahida giggles. When his humour comes through — and it does, sometimes, when he’s had time to relax, to become more like the person he usually tries to hide — she encourages it as much as she can. And mentioning her figure is the closest he’s ever got to flirting with her; she wonders what she can do to get him to do it again.
Softly, slowly, carefully. That’s been her approach. He’s not like any other boy she’s ever met.
“I was going to say,” she says, “you can swim in your boxers, can’t you? Take everything else off, swim in your boxers, and we’ll leave them out to dry in the sun when we’re done.”
He frowns, and he’s going to refuse, she knows it, so she steps closer and smiles again. She’s becoming familiar with the effect she has on him, and she knows she makes his heart beat faster and his cheeks redden. He’s very bad at saying no to her.
This is probably the biggest thing she’s asked of him, though. She guessed his body issues day one, when she saw him in that ugly t-shirt and those oversized swim trunks, up on the rise in Peri Paradise. She’s always wanted nothing more than to reassure him but she knows, from researching online and from watching minor disasters play out at school with some of the other girls, that the impulse to interfere can often be counterproductive, that to accidentally press too hard on someone’s triggers can be a cruelty in itself. So she waits, and watches, and hopes to glean a little more from him every time they talk.
“C’moooon,” she says, rubbing her shoulder against his. Amy, watching from the pool, laughs, and Shahida shoots her a warning glare. Mark’s not facing her, thankfully, so doesn’t see when she zippers her lips, nods in apology, and dives back under the water. Shahida doesn’t want him to know she’s treating him with kid gloves. She wants him to think that being around her is, for both of them, the easiest, most natural thing in the world.
“Maybe?” he says.
“Then come inside,” she says, calling that a victory and grabbing him by the sleeve and dragging him into the kitchen.
Amy Woodley, Shahida’s first real friend at the girls’ school, has a house far grander than Shahida’s. The oldest and largest in the suburb, it lays credible claim to the Tudor heritage the other houses merely appropriate, having been a minor country manor long before Almsworth crept up to meet it. Not that you’d know to look at it: after extensive renovations, extensions, and a whole new wing just for a garage, the Woodleys’ place looks as fake and tacky as every other house in the area and, if the sign over the game room door that says F**k English Heritage is anything to go by, the defiantly new-money Woodleys are proud of it. Their swimming pool — not quite Olympic-sized but still impressively proportioned and surrounded by weather-safe speakers and a covered barbecue pit and rugged electrical sockets and all the other amenities required to satisfy any whim that is possible to satisfy legally and safely in an English back garden — brings as many teens to the Woodleys’ house as their wine cellar brings upper-middle-class families; it’s debatable, Mrs Woodley says, which group makes the most noise and leaves behind the least mess, but at least the kids don’t make arch comments about how if one were to tear the wood-effect beams from the ceiling and throw them at the floor, they might bounce.
Today it’s just Amy and Shahida, their mutual friend Rachel Gray, who lives down the road in a house almost as large as Amy’s but attends Mark’s school — her parents claim to want her to get the kind of grounded teenage experiences one can only get at a state school, although she does, to her persistent dismay, also have tutors — and Mark, sweating in his many layers.
In the kitchen, he says, “I can’t, Shy. I can’t get undressed in front of them. I’m… I’m kind of…” He tugs lamely at a sleeve.
“Thin?” she supplies. He nods. “I don’t care. They won’t care, and they won’t be mean to you about it. Amy and I go to a girls’ school, remember? Half the girls there are—” she pauses for a second, takes care with her words, “—struggling with their weight. It’s normal.” She switches to a whisper. “And besides, I don’t think Rachel even likes boys that way; you could have a toast rack ribcage and she wouldn’t even notice. Then there’s Amy, who’s still lusting after that posh idiot Charles Carstairs — you don’t know him; be glad — so she’s not looking. Which just leaves me.”
She’s been watching his face the whole time; he’s been biting his lip and, she’s pretty sure, chewing on the inside of his cheek as she talks. But she’s got him.
“I’ll look after you,” she says smoothly, pressing into her voice every ounce of the authority granted by the six months she has over him. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”
He agrees to undress down to his boxers as long as she turns away, and when he’s done she wishes she hadn’t made the toast rack joke. She knew he was thin, thinner now than when they met — puberty seems barely to have touched him, aside from to deepen his voice — but she never expected… this. He’s not as bad as some of the girls at school, and if he were a girl she might not have such an extreme reaction, but there’s still next to nothing to him.
“Mark…” She reaches for his ribs, and realises her mistake when he steps back from her, his arms returning to their protective grasp of his belly. “Sorry!” she blurts. “Sorry. You’re just…”
“Thin.”
“I didn’t know.” A lie. She suspected. Nothing like this, but she suspected.
“I don’t talk about it.”
“Are you sick?”
“No,” he says. “Just thin.”
She’s been wearing a shirt over her borrowed swimming costume, and she takes it off and holds her bare arm up against his. “I’m thin, too,” she says, pretending for a moment that there’s no difference between toned muscle, shaped by an active lifestyle, and… whatever Mark has going on.
Wrong tactic. It works to reassure him, or he acts like it does, but he closes off the conversation. “Thanks, Ess,” he says. “And don’t worry about me.”
“I sort of want to worry about you, a little.”
“I’m just thin,” he repeats.
There’s more to it than that, obviously, but he’s said all he’s going to say, and the house is air-conditioned; it’s nippy in all senses of the word to be standing around in the kitchen, with him in his underwear — with a button fly, thank goodness! and she hopes he doesn’t notice her eyes flicking down to check — and her in her cossie, so she takes him back outside, not dragging him this time but holding out her hand and waiting for him to take it.
“Thanks, Shy,” he says, just before they step back into the sun.
She wants to kiss him. She stuffs the urge back down inside herself.
Amy wolf whistles as they emerge, and Shahida decides it’s meant for her, out in the garden without her covering shirt on for the first time. She curtseys, and she’s about to tell Rachel off for the burst of laughter until she realises that, next to her, astonishingly, Mark’s curtseying too, a wild smile on his face.
They take a moment to rub on sunscreen, after Mark attempts to demur but wilts in the face of three simultaneous lectures — although he does insist on applying it himself, accepting Shahida’s help only with the spot between his shoulder blades — and then they’re ready.
“Ca-non-ball!” Amy chants, splashing flat palms against the water’s surface. “Ca-non-ball! Ca-non-ball!” Rachel, sitting on the edge of the pool and kicking her feet in time with the chant, joins in, and moments later both Shahida and Mark are jumping in, legs curled up under their chins, making a mess.
When he surfaces, smiling and pushing off from her to swim a couple of carefree laps, stronger and more graceful than he’s ever been, Shahida buries her uncontrollable joy under the water, and races him.
Over the next couple of hours Mark’s phone rings a couple of times and plays the message chime over and over, but it’s muffled by the pile of clothes on top of it and Shahida’s pretty sure she’s the only one who heard it. Mark needs a good day, especially after the year he’s had, so she doesn’t tell him. The boy needs to make some positive memories for a change!
She watches him fondly: he’s sat cross-legged on one of the poolside plastic chairs, with Shahida’s shirt over his shoulders to protect against sunburn but otherwise apparently unconcerned about displaying his bare — and still terribly thin! — chest, eating microwaved hot dogs and chatting to Rachel about Physics, their mutual favourite school subject. It’s too bad he’s a year behind her, Rachel’s saying, because he knows everything he needs to know for the class she’s taking; she suggests he look into being advanced a year, and he shrugs and says he’ll think about it, but he has his hands full at home so it’s helpful to be able to coast a bit at school.
Amy, who keeps shooting Shahida meaningful looks, makes sure Mark gets a second round of hot dogs, and they both watch him eat. They’ll be talking about him all night, speculating, worrying; he’s either starving himself or, worse, he’s purging.
Maybe it’s grief, Amy suggests in the kitchen, as they fetch a four-pack of chocolate fudge cups from the fridge. Maybe they shouldn’t interfere. Maybe they should let it run its course, and decide to worry again this time next year if he’s still having problems. Shahida chews her lip and can’t decide.
He eats the chocolate fudge pudding, though, and doesn’t shy away when she links cautious hands with him.
The sun’s going to be up until at least nine, and today’s forecast to be one of the hottest days of the year, so none of them want to go inside when finally they’re done swimming. Instead they reapply sunscreen and Amy brings out a laptop with a DVD drive, a pile of movies, and a basket of snacks. They lie on the grass together, Shahida and Mark spread under her shirt, shoulders touching, watching bad movies they can barely see on a laptop that’s probably dangerously close to overheating despite the umbrella balanced over it, and it’s exactly the sort of thing she wants to be able to do with Mark every day. She wants an endless summer with him, to have him open up to her a little more each time they meet, to coax from him secrets he might not even know himself. And, damn it, he’s just fun to be around, and he gets on well with Amy and Rachel, and even if she wants more from him than she will ever get, she wants him with her and her friends, away from his rude little brother and his ugly mess of a father. She wants some normal for him.
She leans into him, nudges him with their joined shoulders, and he laughs and nudges her in return, and they share a look and then they’re back to watching the movie and waiting for the sunset.
For now, at least, she can do this for him.
* * *
He gets the bus home with borrowed money — although Amy insisted he doesn’t have to pay her back until 2020, and she doesn’t charge interest; “Think of me more as a public cooperative than a bank. An extremely sexy public cooperative, who you want to tell all your eligible male friends about.” — after getting dressed at the end of a long afternoon and finding several missed calls and a litany of unpleasant text messages. He shot off a quick reply to the most recent one, exchanged reluctant goodbyes and group text invites with Amy and Rachel, and set off for home, and consequences.
And, on the way, borrows some of the spirit of rebellion from Shahida and her friends, decides that consequences can go screw themselves. He got to spend a whole day feeling almost normal for the first time since Mum died — since a long time before, probably — and whatever punishment Dad has planned for him can do nothing but spoil it. So when he steps off the bus at the top of the road he starts planning how he’s going to sneak into the house. If Dad wants to tell him off, he can do it in the morning.
He gets as far as the landing on the stairs before he’s spotted.
“Mark!” his dad yells, standing from where he’s been sitting on the top step, waiting for him, phone grasped in his fist. “What the hell did you think you’re playing at? You can’t just run off like that! I said one hour and one hour only!”
He wants to shout back at him, but he can’t. He’s never been able to, not with Dad. Not with anyone. And as he gathers his breath and thinks about how to respond, Russell sticks his head out of his bedroom door, eyes red like he’s been crying.
Shit. Naturally, with Mark not around, Dad’s anger earthed itself on the other easy target.
Selfish. Stupid. Short-sighted.
“I didn’t run off,” he says quietly. “I was with Shahida.”
“Yes,” Dad says, “and for the last time.”
“What? No! You can’t control my friends.”
“I’m not having you pal around with that— that—”
Oh, fuck him. “That what, Dad?”
“—that girl, especially not if you’re going to stay out all day without permission, ignore my calls, ignore my texts—”
“I’m almost fifteen,” Mark says, standing straighter, raising his voice as much as he dares. Going back down a step. Behind Dad, Russ winces.
“Don’t you take that tone with me, young man!” his father roars. “And don’t you walk away from me!”
“I’m not,” Mark insists, backing away, taking the stairs down two at a time as his father advances. Dad’s always had a temper, and managing it’s become habit, but this is new; he’s never seen him this angry.
“Stay right where you are!” Dad’s following him now, down the stairs, seeming to take up all the space up to the ceiling.
“I just need to—”
“Mark Vogel, you will stay right where you are!”
He’s at the bottom of the stairs now, on safe and level ground again. Dad’s still coming, but at least Mark, shaking with adrenaline, is no longer in danger of falling. Dad out-masses him by some insane degree, he knows, so right now his best option is to placate him. He starts running through arguments, justifications and promises he might make, his thoughts made quick by fear.
Dad steps down off the last stair and Mark takes another involuntary step backwards. As he does so his hand goes wide and hits the top box on the pile behind the sofa. In slow motion it wobbles, it falls, and the sound of breaking glass echoes through the house.
“How dare you!” his father shouts. “Those are your mother’s things!”
Russ, watching from the landing, can’t stop looking at the fallen box.
“Then why are they out here,” Mark yells back, “in boxes, waiting to be got rid of? Do you even care that she’s gone?”
His father’s slap is open-handed, and Mark feels the impact of the wedding ring most of all, the hot scrape of it against his cheekbone. The blow knocks him almost off his feet, and he collides bodily with the central column. He steadies himself on it, stares up at his father, almost unable to believe what just happened. It felt like the whole house shook.
He’s never hit either of them before.
“Mark,” his father says, hesitant, no longer shouting but entreating, “I’m…”
He rubs the back of his hand against his cheek and it comes away bloody. His dad moves as if to grab him, corner him, keep him where he is, say whatever stupid justifications he’s come up with for hitting him. Fuck that. He summons every last bit of energy he has, screams, “Get the fuck away from me!” and runs around his father, up the stairs, past Russ, into his room. The thunder of his father’s pounding feet follows him, and he gets the wooden chair under the door handle just in time. As the handle rattles he pulls the bed away from the far wall, struggling and sweating as it protests against being uprooted from the grooves in the carpet. He switches to pushing it, swearing under his breath as it lumbers across the room in ungainly, sudden starts.
He gets the end of the bed against the door just as the chair dislodges, and with one last shove beats his father’s attempt to get in, forcing the door closed again and pushing with all his strength until it blocks it completely.
His father gives up trying to get in and starts banging on the door, and it doesn’t take long for his apologies to turn back to anger when Mark refuses to reply. The only thing to do is block him out, so Mark retrieves his mother’s iPod from the bed, presses the earbuds in as far as they’ll go, and turns the volume all the way up. As the music plays and his father rages, he stares at the open window on the other side of the room and wonders what would happen if he just walked straight out of it.
* * *
2010
The uniform code at East Almsworth Community School had been, up until recently, blessedly lax, requiring in practical terms only that students’ trousers or skirts were suitably dark and that shirt colours were reasonably close to white. Officially, a pullover with the school logo was required; in practice this was unenforced, and most students, Mark included, wore hoodies or jackets. Ties were most generally found in pockets, or left at home. The only exception was for official visits from the government. In the week before an OFSTED inspection one year, the art department put up posters around the school which read, ‘The government is coming! Hide your contraband, look pretty, and behave!’ and then, after the inspectors left, held a vote to decide which of the posters had been defaced most creatively.
Mark always appreciated the leeway, the official permission to dress more or less how he wanted for school. But they’ve been tightening up lately. Rumours abound: they’re chasing funds to refurbish the sixth-form facilities and open them up to adult learners; they’re planning to become a technology college; the new headmaster has a fetish for ties. Whichever; hoodies and non-approved pullovers have been banned outside the coldest winter months, and Mark stands at the bottom of the driveway, watching the stream of students walk up to the row of bus stops, exposed and uncomfortable in his shirt and tie.
He turns the blue ribbon round and round on his wrist. He doesn’t get shit for it, even though it’s not exactly masculine; everyone knows his mum gave it to him, days before she died.
Rachel found him again today.
She means well, she really does, but since the start of the spring term she’s repeatedly ‘just happened’ to be in the corridors outside his classes, or visiting a friend near his house and thus getting the same bus to school in the morning, or passing by his lunch table, and she’ll have a spare sandwich or a bag of crisps or an apple or a whole packed lunch she doesn’t need or doesn’t want, and would he like it? And he’s forced to eat it in front of everyone or she’ll make a fuss.
She means well.
He’s been seen often enough with her that the boys at school have started asking about the hot girl from the year above: has he kissed her yet? has he seen her in her underwear? and why him, anyway? He hasn’t told them Rachel doesn’t even like boys.
She gave him a cheese sandwich today, and his stomach twists uncomfortably around it. She looked for him after school, too — at lunch she gave him a look that spoke of how worried she and Shahida and Amy are about him — but this place around the side of B Block is secluded, and he watched her shrug and head for the buses.
He should ask her to stop. He should ask them all to stop worrying about him, to stop wasting their time on him. It’s not like he hasn’t had the opportunity; they visit him after work most Saturdays, and they text each other and talk on the computer all the time. But they’re his only real friends, and he’s scared of alienating them, scared of making them realise how much better off they’d be without having to worry about him all the time. Scared of accidentally letting them glimpse the anger that boils away inside him all the time. Scared they’ll realise he’s not like them; that he’s not like anyone.
Scared they’ll see the bitter jealousy he feels when he looks at them.
The last bus pulls away, with the last student running to jump on before the doors close, and Mark steps away from the wall, slings his backpack up onto both shoulders, and starts the journey home. Better to walk alone than brave the bus on a day like today, when the anger and the envy feel dangerously close to the surface, when any random interaction might cause him to break and ruin everything, the way he did years ago. They can’t afford to move house again. Dad wouldn’t do it, anyway.
The walk isn’t so bad. He’s sweating and aching by the time he finally pushes open the front door at number 64, and that’s good: he’s read that exercise wears away at your muscles, that they have to rest and repair themselves after, and even if his work today will be undone by the natural mechanisms of his body — ever his enemy — it’s nice to think that, for a little while, he’s pushed it hard enough that it wilts. And if people are going to insist on feeding him in places where he can’t safely purge, he’ll take anything he can get.
He showers with a towel over the bathroom mirror and luxuriates in the fizzing in his muscles. Imagines himself melting away, coming apart, sluicing in bloody pieces away with the shower water.
Can’t stay in here forever, though.
Mark Vogel doesn’t have a life; he has a schedule. Things he must do, people he mustn’t let down. Shahida and Amy and Rachel; Stef; Jenny Yau and little Ada; his job at the Beachway; even Russ. He cycles through them, one after another, each of them a reason to live another day.
Tonight, his reason is Stef.
His hair’s still damp when he goes over, but he’s tied it up and it’s not dripping, so it’s fine. Mrs Riley lets him in, happy to see him as always — Stef’s teachers have been thrilled with his work — and notes what a shame it is that he arrived just after dinner. He politely declines the offer of leftovers and heads upstairs to Stef’s room, accepting from the boy the nervous hug he always gets, and settling down with the books and the laptop and Stef’s rapt attention.
It’s fun, tutoring Stef, even if the role Mark occupies has mutated into something more like a big brother than a tutor. They study, they chat, Stef seeks advice, they watch a show or play a game on Stef’s PC; Mark is reliably terrible at the games, so Stef considers it a challenge to find one he can be good at, or which they can play together. It’s very different from the time he spends with Shahida and their other friends — for one thing, the only person trying to feed him is Stef’s mother, and she’s much more easily dissuaded — and Mark treasures these evenings.
Sometimes a reason to live can become something more.
Back home, Russ is on the PlayStation again, and yells a distracted greeting through his half-open door as Mark ascends the stairs, and Dad’s locked in his room, doing whatever the hell it is he does in there. Mark washes up, says goodnight at each door and shuts himself in his bedroom, putting on his music and closing his eyes.
It’s been like this for a long time. All of them shut away in their own worlds, in their own lives. More like roommates than family.
Probably better that way.
And then the weight of the day collapses on him.
There’s something that’s like crying, but isn’t; it’s what your body resorts to when you can’t cry, when everything is so wrong and distorted and broken that crying is beyond you; it’s catharsis without relief, self-injury without pain, death without release.
He curls up in his bed, head under the covers and arms around his belly, and soundlessly shrieks.
* * *
She gets the call early afternoon and picks up immediately. No-one calls any more, not unless it’s her mother, or someone trying to sell something, or an emergency; Rachel’s ringtone is therefore cause for extreme concern.
“Rach,” she says, ignoring the fuss Ms Fuentes is making about one of her girls answering her phone in class, “what’s going on?”
“It’s Mark,” Rachel says, and that’s all it takes for Shahida’s heart to skip, for her head to feel heavy, for her to slump forward, elbows jammed against the edge of the desk. She doesn’t even feel the pain. There’s a part of her that’s been waiting for this call, and now all she can do is catalogue her mistakes: she should have helped him more; she should have pushed him less; she should have done something! It takes a good few seconds for Rachel to break through and convince her Mark’s not dead, just missing.
Mark, apparently, was ‘being disruptive’ in class, which in Rachel’s opinion means he probably just zoned out, the way he does sometimes, but today the teacher singled him out, yelled at him for a good couple of minutes, and ignored the objections of a couple of the other boys in Mark’s class. The teacher, frustrated with the way Mark just sat there and took his bollocking, slammed a fist down on the desk right in front of him, and that was when Mark suddenly stood up, yelled back, packed up his shit and left the classroom. The teacher followed, and there was a minor tussle in the hallway, with the teacher grabbing Mark’s arm, Mark trying to shake him off, falling, and scrabbling away when the teacher let go of him.
“And he just legged it out of school. They’ve been trying to find him ever since. It’s all anyone’s talking about; I heard about it from some of the girls in his year. They all know I talk to him, see?”
“Yeah,” Shahida says, trying to control her panic. Running off isn’t the worst thing he could do — she thinks, as she often does, of the scar on his wrist — but it’s up there. “Did anyone call his dad?”
“Probably. Which, petrol on the fire, y’know?”
“Okay. Thanks, Rach.” She ends the call. “Hey, Ms Fuentes?” she says, addressing a teacher and class who’ve been watching her warily. “I’m sorry for the disruption. I have an emergency situation to deal with. Can you tell the dean I’ll pick up all my homework tomorrow?”
“Of course, dear,” Ms Fuentes says. The dean’ll call her parents about this, but Mum and Edward will back her up on the phone and grill her about it later. It’s fine. And even if it wasn’t fine, would it matter? It’s Mark.
She shovels all her books out of her backpack to make space; she has an idea where he’s gone, and she’ll need to pick up a few supplies on the way. Thankfully she had PE today, so she’s got trainers in the bottom of her bag. She kicks off her school shoes and drops them on the table next to her books. With a quick nod she acknowledges one of the girls scraping her things into a carrier bag and promising to give them to Amy to take home for her, and then she’s out of the classroom door and calling for a taxi.
Mark’s been keeping busy lately, and between her and her friends, his babysitting, the kid Stef, school and work, he’s scheduled most days. But some of the Saturday shifts at Beachway don’t start until early afternoon, and he likes to go for walks, likes to get away from people, likes to disappear into the woods or up to the north, by the railway tracks. She’s the only one who knows where he goes.
And she wouldn’t tell his dad for a million quid.
North of the university the countryside gradually gives way to a long stretch of woodland which becomes, at various points along its length, a wildlife park, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and a nature reserve, and Mark’s been walking off the paths there for the last few months. He’s shown her his annotated map — rather, a grainy photo of his map, taken with his antique phone — and talked of showing her around someday. Privately Shahida’s always believed he was showing her so it would be her who brought him back, should he one day disappear.
Today’s the day, then.
The taxi drops her off at the north end of the nature reserve, and she sets off, thanking her lucky stars she remembered to charge her phone. It takes her a few minutes to figure out the GPS — she’s never had occasion to use it — and the map isn’t especially detailed, out here in the middle of nowhere, but it’s enough.
It still takes over an hour to get to the bridge.
The passenger and freight rail lines both run around the westernmost edge of the nature reserve, fenced off on the reserve side, and local law requires bridges every few hundred metres, and a ramped, disabled-access bridge every kilometre. She walks the length of the line, checking bridge after bridge, and finds him at the third one, leaning over the railing.
He watches her approach. He doesn’t call out so neither does she. She joins him instead, resting her arms on the railing, mimicking him. It’s a memory: the two of them atop Peri Paradise. She stands closer now, though, and when the next train goes by underneath and she sees the look on his face she loops an arm around him and pulls him tight.
“Twelve,” he says. “That’s train number twelve.”
She doesn’t say anything. After a little while he leans his head on her shoulder; he’s still slight, still shorter than her, and she tightens her grip. He’s not going anywhere. She can, if necessary, probably overpower him.
The days are getting longer again, and warmer, and it wouldn’t be so bad, just standing here with him, her arm around his waist, if she could stop herself thinking about why he came here. Mark’s delicate, he’s vulnerable, he has difficulty with the things other people take for granted; all of it’s been obvious to her since they first met and all of it’s only become clearer now that they spend more time together. And she knows why he has that scar on his wrist. But she never seriously thought he’d try again.
And now here he is, in the place he comes to look death in the face.
Another train. They watch it rumble past underneath them, feel the rhythmic thump of the wheels crossing sections of track, struggle to keep their footing against the shaking of the bridge. It makes her feel connected to it; she wonders how it makes him feel.
She risks another glance. No, she doesn’t have to wonder. She can see it in his face, the fear and the longing, and she knows he doesn’t have it in himself to stay up here forever. Sooner or later, despair will win, and he’ll throw himself joyfully over.
“Em,” she says, and pulls at him. “Have you eaten?”
“Ess—”
“Have you?”
“Fuck,” he whispers, and kicks at the bottom of the railing. “Fuck. No. No, I haven’t eaten.” He looks at her for the first time since she joined him, and his shoulders slump. “Dad’s going to go mental, I know it.”
“Forget your dad,” she says, still pulling him, dragging him away from the edge and down the steps and back into the nature reserve, with the tracks on the other side of the fence and her bag sitting in the grass where she left it. “I have food.”
“I’m not hungry,” he lies.
“You walked for miles,” Shahida says, “and so did I, and I’m hungry, and I had lunch, which I bet you didn’t. Come on.” She lets him go, half-afraid he’ll run right back to the bridge, but he doesn’t, so she starts unpacking her stuff. “I stopped at the shop on the way, and got some—” and she has to stop because he’s laughing. There’s a hysterical edge to it, but he’s laughing, and it might be the most beautiful sound she’s ever heard.
“You—” he says, and chokes on his words, doubling over, coughing and holding his belly. “You— you brought a picnic blanket?”
“Yes?” She pauses in the act of laying it out and examines it. It’s a little cheesy, a little clichéd, with the classic red and white squares and the frilly edges, but it was all they had. “I stopped at the shop,” she repeats, confused.
“You brought a picnic blanket,” he wheezes, “to a suicide intervention?”
It’s a shock to hear him say the word, and it has an instant sobering effect on them both. She rushes over to him, guides him with hands on his shoulders to sit down on the blanket, brushes loose strands of hair out of his face, and when he’s stilled she finishes unpacking. It’s good to keep doing things; good to keep moving. Because he said the word, and even if they’re not going to talk about it right now, it’s out there, and nothing’s ever going to be the same.
Mark came out here to die.
“Only you, Shahida,” he says, and when she looks over he’s smiling, red-cheeked and exhausted and so, so thin, but he’s smiling, and her self-control breaks and she cries, leans forward and cries into his lap while he holds her and gently strokes her spine.
* * *
They don’t talk about it. Not yet. They eat egg and cress sandwiches out of a cooler bag and they sit on her absurd picnic blanket and they probably look like something off a postcard in the nature reserve’s gift shop, and they don’t talk about it. Shahida tells him about her day, instead, about getting the call from Rachel in the middle of class, about fielding panicked texts from Amy while she was in the taxi, about the man behind the counter in the petrol station shop who leered at her. She tells him about Amy’s dad falling in the pool last night while he was skimming it and Amy’s mum laughing too hard to help. She tells him about her aunts visiting a few days ago and how ecstatic Rachel was to meet them and how bad she is at pretending to be straight around Shahida’s parents, who wouldn’t care anyway; Mark has to point out that she can’t be that bad at it, because no-one at the school they share can possibly know about Rachel’s sexuality or they wouldn’t constantly ask him if they’re together, and they talk through it, both of them grateful for something to discuss, and in the end they decide that straight people must just assume everyone else is straight until proven otherwise, even to the point of absurdity.
Not all straight people, though, Shahida insists. Just the ignorant ones. Not us.
It’s the ‘us’ that makes him laugh, the aggrieved innocence, the irritation at their fellow straights. And she keeps doing it, making him laugh, again and again, drawing from him a humanity he sometimes doubts he even possesses, making herself his reason, for today and perhaps for every day.
He wants to rub the tear tracks from her face, but they dry on their own in the afternoon sun.
On the way back, in the taxi, he turns his phone on again, ignores every missed call and text and types out a reply to the most recent one, but before he can hit send Shahida snatches his phone and alters the message:
Mark Vogel: I’m safe. I’m staying over at Jason’s tonight. I’ll be home after school tomorrow.
“Who’s Jason?”
Shahida shrugs. “No-one. But you’re not going home tonight—”
“—I’m not—?”
“—and I don’t want your dad showing up at mine, making demands of you. Or of me. So, wild goose chase. And I checked; there’s no Jason in your year, so there’s no way he can just barge in on some rando guy.”
“God, I hope not. Wait; how did you check?”
She pulls her iPhone out of her bag and wiggles it. “You can get the internet on phones now.”
“Ha ha.”
The taxi drops them off at the end of Six Oaks Estate, nowhere near Shahida’s house, and Mark asks why.
“Two reasons,” Shahida says, holding out her hand and waiting for him to take it before she continues. “One, this is going to be your first time seeing my parents since you were, what, twelve? I want you to have some time to psych yourself up. And two, it’s best not to show strangers exactly where you live.”
“Really?” The thought had never crossed his mind.
“Call it an overabundance of caution, if you like,” she says, leading him down the road.
He’s never been to Six Oaks, but he’s visited the area before. Six Oaks itself is a little less grand than the street Amy and Rachel live on, but all the houses, Shahida’s included, could swallow his twice over. She’s told him about her family’s circumstances, of course: they’re not exactly rich, but two decent incomes plus a fully paid-for house is, to Mark, close enough that it makes no odds. It’s not as if she’s not generous with her money, though; Mark’s room hosts a half-dozen gifts from her, and she’s promised him her phone when she inevitably upgrades. His can barely even take photos.
“Ready?” she says, on the doorstep. He nods and she lets them in, standing aside with her arms stretched out and announcing, “Welcome to Chez Mohsin!”
The inside’s surprisingly normal. After Amy’s open-plan borderline-mansion, with the huge central stairs up and the half-dozen miscellaneous rooms of mysterious purpose — especially to Mark, who runs out of names for downstairs rooms after ‘kitchen’, ‘dining room’, ‘living room’ and, at a stretch, remembering something he once saw on TV, ‘drawing room’ — an ordinary hallway with doors open to rooms on either side is almost a shock. He peers through the nearest one and finds a large but still very comprehensible living room.
“Shahida,” a voice calls from upstairs, “is that you!”
“Ye-es!” Shahida responds in kind. “I’ve brought a friend in need, if that’s okay?”
“Of course! Who have you—?” Rupa Mohsin-Carpenter reaches the banister at the top of the stairs and peers down over her reading glasses. “Mark! It’s been so long! Have you eaten?”
“He’s eaten,” Shahida says, squeezing his hand.
At the bottom of the stairs, Rupa reaches for Mark with both hands, and Shahida releases him so he can be inspected. “Are you sure?”
Screw it. He never was much good at resisting peer pressure. “Well,” he says, “I did only have sandwiches.”
Rupa — she asked him when they first met, back at Peri Park, not to call her ‘Mrs Mohsin-Carpenter’ or anything else equally unwieldy — needs no more prompting to drag him by the wrist into a warm kitchen, arranged around a worn but sturdy wooden table.
The food is amazing.
“Should we expect anyone?” Rupa asks, as they eat.
Shahida shakes her head. “Probably not. His dad’s… his dad, you know? It’s hard to guess whether he’s going to go completely bananas or just ignore the whole thing, but it doesn’t matter; he thinks his son’s staying with a completely different person, who doesn’t exist.”
“He does know about you, though,” Mark says. “He might still come here.”
“True. But it’s a long journey to make on a guess.”
“If he calls,” Rupa says, standing up from the table, “I won’t tell him you’re here. And if he shows up, we’ll pretend ignorance and send him away. Excuse me; I should let Edward know.”
When they’re done eating — Shahida doesn’t say anything about the food he leaves on his plate, bless her — she gives him the quick tour, which includes poking their heads into the upstairs suite to say hi to Shahida’s gran, who waves at them from a rocking chair, and eventually terminates in her room.
“Wow. Big room.”
“Yeah,” Shahida says, throwing a half-dozen cushions from the bed onto the floor. When they’ve both made themselves comfortable — Mark arranging himself carefully around a stomach that feels bloated but which is, he knows, just full the way it ought to be — Shahida fixes him with a serious look and asks the question.
* * *
“What’s wrong?” she says.
The boy — and she’s never felt as much older than him as she does now; he looks frail and tired and young, and she wants more than ever to find a way to place herself between him and whatever it is that hurts him — squirms uncomfortably, skittish centrepiece to an explosion of cushions, and doesn’t look at her.
“Mark— Em. When Rach called today, when she said your name, I almost blacked out. She had to reassure me, promise me, that you weren’t dead. And I realised, right then, that I’ve been waiting for that call, that I have been all along. That I’ve been waiting to hear you’ve died.” His eyes flick up to hers when she says it, and she smiles, gathers him into her with all the warmth she has. On his cushion he blinks at her, but a tiny echo of her smile appears on his lips, just for a moment. “Seeing you up on that bridge, large as life—” he snorts cynically at that, “—was the greatest relief I’ve ever felt, but I need to know, Em; are you going back there tomorrow?”
“No,” he says quickly, and reaches down with his hands to gather up knots of cushion in his fingers. As anchors go, Shahida’s semi-ironic My Little Pony pillow isn’t the best, but it’s all she has to offer. Apart from herself, and as much as she aches for him, it has to be Mark who chooses that. “No, I’m not going back. It’s too much.” She allows him the silence, gives him the time, watches him knead the cushion fabric. “Too tempting,” he adds in a whisper, and Shahida stills herself completely lest she leap at him, grab at him, hold him down and never let him go. She imagines some vital part of herself straining, bleeding with the effort of holding the rest of her in place. “I’ve been going up there, through the reserve, for months now. Following the tracks for weeks. But that bridge… It would be so easy. I went up there three weeks in a row. Just stood there. Watching the trains. And at first it was only a fantasy, you know? Because I have people. You. Stef. Amy and Rach. Jenny and Ada. I’d think of you, all of you. I try to think of what it would be like for you all, after. At my funeral, or whatever. But I don’t get that far. I drop in front of the train and it goes dark and it’s the end. An end I don’t get to have.”
“Em—”
“It’d be so cruel. So selfish. I read a thing online, ages ago. A driver, a truck driver. He hit someone. Not an accident; the guy stepped out in front of him. Deliberate. He had debts or something. But the driver… He talked about what it was like to be complicit in someone’s death. To be made complicit. He said he’d lost someone before in an accident, someone close to him, and he used to obsess over the things he could have done different, the ways he could have saved him. Coincidences he could have engineered, if he had his time over again. But he didn’t have that with this guy. Not because he didn’t know him. But because it was inevitable. That man was always going to kill himself. And it was fate, the driver said, that he chose him. He was almost happy about it, glad that it was this sixty-year-old guy and not some kid who got made responsible.” Mark’s voice sounds painfully dry; a practical part of Shahida’s mind tries to remember if she has any water bottles left in the drawer under the bed, or if she’ll have to go downstairs and bring back a glass. “The driver died, too. There was an update on the article. He died. Not long after. Deliberately. Closed up his garage, sat in his car. Sent a timed text to the police so no neighbour would have to find him. So only someone trained would have to deal with him.” He looks at her, eyes steady. “When you die, when you choose to die, you make a dangerous choice. And you don’t necessarily make it just for yourself. On that bridge, I wasn’t thinking of my funeral, of crying relatives; of you, grieving. I couldn’t get that far, not in the immediate future. But I managed to make myself think months, years down the line. Think of someone else facing it. Someone else… going dark.” He breaks eye contact, breathes heavily, frees a hand from the pillow and massages his chest, like his lungs need the help. “There’s no such thing as a clean death.”
His voice is cracking and she can’t stand it any more, so she leans back, rummages in the drawer under the bed, finds two unopened bottles of water and passes one over. She takes the excuse to shuffle her cushion closer to his. He thanks her, cracks his bottle open, drains half.
Again they sit in silence; again she allows it. For a while.
“Em,” she says, “I’m glad you’re not going to do anything — I’m so glad I feel like bloody dancing — but you have to tell me why. What’s wrong that you want to do that in the first place? What makes you starve yourself? I want to help, and I’ve been waiting to help almost since I met you, but I can’t if I don’t know what’s wrong.”
He laughs. It’d be inappropriate if it didn’t sound so hollow, like there’s nothing left inside him but whatever this is.
“I can’t tell you,” he says, cradling the half-empty bottle in his lap, “because I don’t know. I’ve never known. It’s like there’s something everyone else has that I don’t, something that makes them able to live in their bodies, to stand being looked at, being touched… being called their name. I mean, that’s why you call me Em, right? Because you saw how much I hated being called Mark.”
She nods, grateful for something she recognises. “When someone says it, it’s like they’ve zapped you with a live wire.”
“It’s part of why I used to worry about the kid. About Stef. He lit up when I shortened his name, and I ended up calling him Stef enough that almost everyone in his life calls him that now, at least some of the time. But I think I was wrong about him. I think he just likes having a nickname. Like it’s proof someone cares enough about him to bestow one on him. And that’s good, Shy, that’s so fucking good. I’m glad he was just lonely, and not… like me. Because I don’t know what ‘like me’ even is.”
“When did it start?”
“Years ago. Around the time of this.” He raises his wrist and pulls back his sleeve; Shahida knows what she’s going to see before she sees it, before he pulls back the pale blue knot of fabric he wears there: his old scar, faded and pale, like it’s been rubbed clean over the years, like it wants to disappear. “I saw a counsellor, you know, right after? Three sessions. That’s all the NHS would pay for. You know what he told me? That a bit of turmoil was perfectly normal, and puberty should sort me out.” He laughs again. “It emphatically did not. It made it worse. So much worse.”
“And that’s why you don’t eat.”
“Oh, I eat. I just—” he mimes sticking a finger down his throat. “But responsibly. It’s why my teeth still have enamel.”
“How long have you been purging?” Not an image she enjoys contemplating.
“Since I was… shit. Thirteen? That’s when I started doing it properly. People notice when a twelve-year-old starves themselves. But I eat in front of people — even more so, these days, thanks to Rachel — so I think people tell themselves I’m just a—” it’s like he chokes on the words; he coughs, swallows, and tries again, “—just a growing boy. They’re all waiting for my growth spurt.”
The wry smile on his face makes her giggle. He’s taller now than he was last year, but so’s she, and she still has her height advantage over him. She wonders then if he wants to be small, not just so thin she worries for his health, but as short as he can be, given his genetics. His dad’s somewhere over six foot, and while she doesn’t remember his mother very well, she knows she was taller than her mum and Edward both.
How tall might Mark be now, if he hadn’t been starving himself since thirteen? It’s hard to imagine; he’s always been delicate.
She’s missing something, though. He’s describing symptoms, not causes. Not because he’s hiding anything from her; he doesn’t know. And that’s most devastating of all: how can you be so miserable that you attempt suicide as soon as you start puberty, and not know why?
“Ess?” he says. “You’re staring.”
“Sorry. Did you ever see anyone else about this? Other than the useless counsellor guy, I mean.”
He nods. “My GP is ‘concerned’ about my weight, and every time a new financial year starts, I get a handful of sessions with some new therapist.”
“And none of them have been able to tell you what’s up?”
“What’s to tell? I’m a fifteen-year-old boy with depression and anxiety, I dissociate, I have nightmares; I have an eating disorder I don’t tell them about but which they can definitely guess. There’s a million of me. The therapists all say the same thing, that I really need long-term assessment, and then my GP does the referral, and then we wait. I’m waiting now, actually. Usually, it comes up that there’s nothing in the budget.”
She shuffles closer, takes his hands, which are still clutching the bottle in his lap, in hers, feels the contrast between the lukewarm plastic and his fingers, which seem to be radiating pure heat. “I want to help,” she says, stroking his knuckles with her thumb.
“Why?” His question comes out too quickly, and he winces, like he wants to take it back.
“Because you’re my friend, and I love you,” Shahida says, squeezing his hand in rebuke. “Because I don’t want to see you hurting, and if I do have to see that, if there’s nothing either of us can do to stop it, then I want to help you manage it. I want to help you find ways to survive it. Because, Em, if you died, it would hurt so bad. I’d never forgive you.”
She’s worried for a moment that she’s piled on a little too much guilt, but he smiles at her and she decides, fuck it, now’s the time. She half-stands, pivots onto the cushion next to his, and takes him by the shoulders, pulling lightly on him so he can, if he wants, fall into her. He resists, but only for a second, and she drags him into an awkward sideways hug.
“I know things are hard at home,” she whispers, “and at school, and everywhere. But here — my house, my room — will always be safe. You can always come here. Whenever you need. Come here, come to me, and you’ll be safe.”
He breathes deeply and she waits for him to say something but it’s just the prelude to the shattered exhale of a good damn cry, so she loosens her fingers, intending to reach out for the box of tissues, but his composure’s gone and he leans completely into her, pulling on her physically for maybe the first time ever, reciprocating and not just accepting her affection. She leans back, lets him find his comfort and holds him as he shakes, as he cries in heaving, airless shudders.
It’s almost as if he’s never cried before.
2011
It’s strange being back in his house again. Only her second visit, after his father’s hostility, but she doesn’t get a chance to look around properly because Mark’s dragging her up the stairs and into his room so they can get a second lockable door between them and Mr Vogel.
Except there’s no lock. Shahida realises this when Mark drags a sturdy length of wood out from under the bed and wedges it under the door handle. It’s dirty and old and in deference to these facts he’s wrapped it in plastic, with pillow cases at the top and bottom to give it traction. With a start she realises what it is: a sleeper from the railway tracks up by the bridge.
She doesn’t mention it.
“There,” he says. “Privacy.”
Shahida flops onto a bed she’s seen only in grainy video chats. “Your dad’s still at the party, though, right?”
Mark frowns at her. “How long do you think that’ll last when he realises you showed up and, half an hour later, we skipped out together?”
She hadn’t intended to stay at all, had meant to just show up and grab him, but it was her first time meeting Stefan — Stef — and it didn’t take her long to be charmed by the kid. Thirteen now, officially, today, and railing against his parents’ wishes for him to dress smart and be respectful at their staid little party with mostly church guests in attendance. With Mark and Shahida’s encouragement he’d taken off the tie he claimed volubly to hate, and thrown it over the fence.
Plus, there was cake. And little hot dogs.
“I tried to tell you,” she says, flipping up the corner of the duvet to inspect the sheets (white) and casting around the room for anything else interesting she might have missed (a corkboard behind his computer, covered in photos, mostly of her and the girls, and Stef), “he fell asleep after his third beer. Mrs Riley put a sun hat on him.”
She realises that at least two of the photos on the corkboard are group shots Mark was definitely present for, and that he’s folded them over so he’s not visible. She covers her reaction with what is, on reflection, a terribly faked cough.
He doesn’t seem to notice. “Oh, he’ll love that.” He sits down backwards on the dilapidated office chair and spins it around until he’s facing her. “So! Why did you pull me away from the party of the year?”
He’s leaning his chin on the backrest and drumming his fingers on the plastic. He’s cute. Always so cute. Why does he hate himself so much?
“I pulled you away,” she says, “for a much, much better party!”
“What? Really?”
She giggles. “Well, much better might be overselling it. Rach’s parents are away and her kid brother’s throwing a thing for one of his mates who just had a birthday. It’s going to be pretty tame, because they’re all fifteen and sixteen—”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Sure,” she allows, “but in six-and-a-half hours you’ll be seventeen. What I mean is, it’s going to be chaperoned — you know what her parents are like; they’d never leave the house if they didn’t live in the safest suburb in the south of England — but the shaps are Rach’s older brother and a couple of his friends. Who are, you know, still young enough to be okay. And Rach and Amy’ll be there, but no-one else you know, which is, I feel, pretty key.”
“Pretty key for what?”
“For getting you to have some bloody fun!” she says, forcing as much enthusiasm as she can. Mark’s been doing better, as far as she can tell, but he keeps himself so busy that, between school, work, tutoring and babysitting he has basically no time to himself. It’s been difficult to see him this year, and every week without him has been frustrating. A little scary, too; despite his improvement, Shahida dreams regularly of finding him on the railway tracks. “Now, you need something to wear.”
He gives her an exasperated smile and waggles the loose sleeves of his hoodie at her. “I have something to wear.”
“Nope. Nope. Absolutely not. It’s ragged; look!” She reaches forward and pokes a finger through a gap in the fabric at the elbow; he evades her, covering the hole like a wounded limb.
“Everything I have is basically like this, though.”
“Well,” she says, “I don’t believe that for a second.”
She hops up off the bed and opens his wardrobe, rummages through, finds, yes, mostly battered hoodies and loose jeans and school clothes and very little else, just as he claimed. Her toe pokes a panel under the wardrobe, knocking it out of position, and he reaches down to pop it back into place.
“Is that where you keep your… stuff?” she asks. She knows all about his mitigation strategies, his methods for ‘safer’ purging. She also knows he’s not supposed to be doing it any more, after they agreed a calorie-counted regimen, tracked daily on his phone; her old one.
“Yeah.”
“How long’s it been?”
“About six weeks.”
“Em!” she squeals, turning around and lunging at him. So much better than she expected. From what she’s read, most people relapse way more often, especially early on. “That’s amazing!” He mumbles thanks into her elbow and she releases him; the angle was awkward, anyway, with him sitting down and still, despite everything, shorter than her. “But you’re right; I give up. There’s nothing in this wardrobe. And you’re not going as you are.”
“I could just… not go?”
“Absolutely not. Your party tomorrow is going to be Stef’s little kiddie party, version two, with more expensive cake.” Mark’s dad, nominally cleaned up and promoted at work, has been throwing the money around a bit more lately, magnanimously letting Mark off the hook from having to help with rent, and leasing a new and rather ostentatious car. “Okay,” she says, spinning around again and extracting the least awful things from the pile of clean clothes at the bottom of the main shelf, “you can get changed at mine. I have something you can borrow to go with this.” She waves the mid-grey tank top she found at him.
“What? Ess, no; I’m not wearing your clothes.”
She giggles. “I don’t mean a skirt or anything, you perv. I just have a couple of shirts that’ll look nice on you and should go with that tank top; nicer than that bloody hoodie, anyway.”
“Shahida…” he says, unable to mask his exasperation.
“Mark…” she says, matching his tone, and then slaps a hand over her mouth. “Shit. Sorry, Em.” He waves away her apology. She’s still not clear on exactly why he doesn’t like his name — neither’s he, seemingly — but she takes care not to use it anyway.
“I didn’t even know I had this…” he mutters.
“Well, it’s about the least awful thing you own.”
He rolls his eyes, stands up from the chair, which rattles as it pushes away behind him, and accepts the clothes she’s holding out. “I’ll put it on here,” he says, in a tone that dares her to disagree, “and I’ll wear a hoodie to yours. If — and it’s a big if — you have something I like, I’ll wear it.”
Shahida wants to hop on the spot. The boy needs to come out of his shell, and if he’s not going to do it himself, she’ll bloody well yank him out.
She starts sorting through the stack of trousers.
* * *
The tank top she found is heaven only knows how old, and clings uncomfortably to his chest. She told him not to worry: it looks good and it’s not actually all that tight; he’s just been wearing clothes that are two sizes too large for so long he’s forgotten how it feels to wear something that fits.
Still, he pulled his hoodie back on for the taxi ride to her place. He agreed to the trousers she picked out, and to wear the tank top, and all the time she looked so happy, so pleased with his compliance that he swallowed his objections and smiled for her.
It’s been so fucking hard to be around her lately. With every passing year she’s more beautiful, more driven, quicker and funnier and sharper and so much more clever, and he’s… stuck. Unchanging by design. A bundle of failing coping mechanisms in clothes that don’t fit. And he lied: it’s been just a week since he last purged. An achievement, absolutely, even though the food he chokes down keeps him awake at night, and when eventually he does fall asleep it finds him there, too, in nightmares of a thickening body, of becoming tall, of filling out.
He grew over an inch in the last year alone. It’s like puberty is finally catching up with him, inflicting wound after wound, tearing at his flesh, and with every month it becomes harder to resist the urge to starve himself until there’s nothing left.
He has other things he can do. He works weekends and one night at the Beachway. On the tills, rather than the position at Cycling he applied for, because there was a shortage of cashiers, and because learning to repair the bikes had been easy but lifting them onto the clamp had been almost impossible. Owen, the dickhead from Automotive, likes to call him one of the ‘checkout girls’, and the derision in his voice is one of the many things that drives him, after his shifts and on his weekend lunch breaks, to hide out in the men’s staff toilets and hurt himself.
He shouldn’t purge any more, and he doesn’t cut. But no-one questions bruises. Even if Shahida raised an eyebrow at the discolouration on his upper arm and his thigh. He could have gotten those anywhere. He could have fallen. All very explicable.
She asked him to tell her everything and he promised he would, and he lies.
“So?” she says, spreading her hands out in front of her, gesturing at the shirts she’s lined up on her bed like game show prizes.
“Uh…” He doesn’t know how to have an opinion on this. He doesn’t even really know why he agreed to this in the first place, why he didn’t insist on keeping his hoodie on, except she smiled when she asked, and despite the static hiss in his ears and the light-headedness that comes on when he’s around her, he wants to please her more than anything. “Maybe you should choose.”
She hums to herself, looks from Mark to the shirts a couple of times, and mumbles, “Blonde hair, blue eyes, very pale skin…” before yanking a checked shirt off the bed and throwing it at him. “That one,” she says.
He catches it. “It won’t be too small?” She’s so graceful, so thin, and he’s—
“Em,” she says sharply. “I’m bigger than you! In every direction,” she adds, grinning and jutting her chest out, and giggling when he looks away and busies himself with putting it on. She’s been doing that more lately, emphasising the way her body’s developed, and it’s one of the most difficult things to bear.
The shirt’s comfortable, with a soft lining that feels wonderful against the skin on his arms and shoulders. He dithers with it, unsure whether to wear it open or button it up, but before he can make up his mind, Shahida bats his hands away.
“Wear it like that,” she says, fluffing it out and then standing back to take a look at her handiwork. She’s frowning as she looks him up and down and Mark wants to ask what’s wrong, and then it’s too late because she’s right back in his face again, standing way too close and grinning all the while, and he freezes because she’s right there and he should say something! And then she tugs at his hair, pulls out the rubber band keeping it in a short ponytail, and starts brushing it with her fingers.
“Um,” he says, “Shy?”
“Yes?” Too innocent.
“Why?”
“Because!” she says, and sticks her tongue out at him. He glares at her but she just laughs and says, “I wanted to see what it’d look like. You keep your hair long but you always just tie it back and shove it into your hood. And — wow! — what a waste!”
She steps around him, takes him by the elbows, turns him slowly until he’s facing the full-length mirror on the back of her door, the one he’s been avoiding. He feels her satisfaction when he takes a sharp breath, but whatever she thinks he’s feeling, he wishes she’d tell him, so he could have something to guide his own response; the experience of seeing himself in that moment is just… baffling.
He doesn’t look like himself. She’s teased out his hair so it falls around his face, and with the open shirt and the high-necked tank top underneath, worn over slightly oversized trousers, he looks—
Fuck. No. No, no, no. He’s too veiny; he’s too tall; he’s too angular; he’s too broken. The image in the mirror comes together again, reassembles itself into him, into his flaws, into his sharp edges, into all the pieces that are pressed together wrong, and his stomach heaves and the stupid hot dog and the sickly slice of cake force their way up into his mouth.
* * *
He’s hugging his belly again and looking around nervously as they cross from Six Oaks Estate onto Rachel’s road, appallingly named The Dell, and she wants to grab his hands, pry them away from his body and put them around hers. But she doesn’t, because he still stiffens when she touches him, and if she really is going to get him out of his shell it’s going to have to be gently, one step at a time, and always leaving him the option to step back, should he need to. Resolutions to be firm and decisive always seem to crumble when he gets that look on his face.
But he did agree to keep the shirt on rather than go back to hiding in the hoodie. And it was definitely just nerves that made him rush to her ensuite to throw up. Nerves and that rich death-by-chocolate cake on a near-empty stomach. Still, it had been unsettling to help him deal with the aftermath: they followed his rules together, finding mouthwash in her parents’ bathroom and cereal bars in the pantry; he even ate a couple of slices of toast, complete with peanut butter, to line his stomach.
And wow, he looks nice, with his hair down and with the shirt open. He looks healthier, more filled-out than usual; despite his protests and especially in combination with the shirt, the material of the tank top is thick enough to imply a slightly bulkier upper body; if she could get one thing through his skull it would be that loose clothing can be more revealing than clothing that fits, given that what he’s trying to hide is just how underweight he is. He still looks thin, sure, but the shirt sleeves cover his narrow wrists and the bases of his palms, leaving only his slender fingers on show, and the slightly oversized jeans lend his lower half a little weight. He’s never looked so good, so much so that when he glances at her for reassurance she finds herself biting her lip as she nods.
She’s such a cliché. Confident and outspoken girl, attracted to boy, becomes suddenly shy and flirty. What’s next? Will she start laughing too loud at his worst jokes? Already she keeps making mistakes around him, keeps speaking before she’s quite thought through what she wants to say — keeps doing stupid shit, like encouraging him to eat the bloody birthday cake that he threw up in her bathroom — and as someone who’s always thought of herself as being pretty together and in control, it’s distressing to realise that all it takes is one pretty boy (one pretty boy she’s known since they were both barely teenagers, one pretty boy she’s grown into adulthood alongside, one pretty boy who’s always needed her) to go to pieces.
“Nearly there?” he asks, his voice pleasingly steady.
“Nearly there,” she says, holding out a hand for him to take. He does so, and to disguise her delight she points with the other hand to the house on the end of the cul-de-sac. “That’s Rach’s house. Chez Gray.”
He giggles and squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back and thinks in her most private mind, What if tonight’s the night?
Rachel’s house is unusual for the area. If Amy’s house is the blueprint for most of the faux-Tudor piles in the surrounding streets and Shahida’s house is a perfect exemplar, Rachel’s is the odd one out. Another place that predates the estates, the Grays’ house has been extended in all directions, embedding the farmhouse it once was inside a large and lazy capital L, with a two-storey main building facing the road and, trailing into the back garden, a single-storey tail which once had been stables and other associated outbuildings but which now is a contiguous and grandly high-ceilinged brace of rooms with the original timber intact. Shahida’s been here many times over the years, and leads Mark around the side of the house and into the garden, where the party’s still getting started. The rooms on the rear extension have all had their double doors propped open — with the exception of Rachel’s bedroom suite, which will no doubt be locked up tight — and the kitchen and hall of the main building are both also directly accessible.
“Does everyone have a massive house except me?” Mark whispers.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Shy!” Rachel shouts, and they both look over to see her advancing on them from the kitchen. She’s cut her hair short — she’s been threatening it — and she’s dressed similarly to Mark, except her shirt’s tied around her waist. She’s pink-cheeked, like she’s already been drinking. “Heeeeey,” she says, as they meet by one of the wooden benches in the middle of the garden, and Shahida experimentally smells her breath when they hug; yes, she’s already started. “And hey, Ems,” Rach adds, pulling Mark into the hug. “You look really nice.”
Rach and Amy have both in the past year picked up on Shahida’s preferred nickname for him, and both have modified it appropriately. Mark, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind, which is a relief, because redirecting Amy in particular from a nickname she’s grown fond of would be an effort doomed to failure.
“Hi, Rach,” he says. “I like the hair.”
“I know, right?” Rachel breaks the hug and runs a hand through it. “I’m fucking hot, yes?” Shahida smothers a laugh and Mark, clearly struggling with how to respond, merely nods. “Yeah, well,” Rachel says, flicking at Mark’s hair, “so are you. Come inside! Amy’s still getting ready upstairs.”
‘Upstairs’ means Rachel’s second bedroom. Technically her first, but she colonised the guest bedroom in the downstairs extension as soon as Tom, her older brother, moved out. He’d been rather annoyed to return from university to find all his things crammed into the comparatively small spare bedroom; even more annoyed to find his sister had stolen his treadmill and free weights. ‘But look at these guns,’ was not, he insisted, adequate justification for theft.
“Birthday boy!” Amy squeals, when they bundle through the door into Rachel’s second bedroom. Mark’s spared a hug because she’s still finalising her makeup, perched on a plush little stool at Rachel’s vanity, and it’s probably a good thing, because every time Shahida looks at him he seems more overwhelmed. He suffers through a little more enthusiasm from Rachel and Amy before Shahida takes him by the sleeve back out into the hall.
“How are you doing?” she asks. “I know I dragged you here, and I want you to have fun, but say the word and we go. Back to mine. Or back to yours. Or anywhere.”
He shakes his head, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m okay,” he says, with more confidence than Shahida expected. “It’s a nice change, you know? And I haven’t seen much of you — any of you — in a while.” He smiles, and relaxes his shoulders. “I’ve missed you. I’m glad to be here. It’s good. It’s fine.”
“Good,” Shahida says, and before she can talk herself out of it she leans over and kisses him quickly on the cheek. He doesn’t seem put out, he doesn’t stiffen up and he doesn’t recoil; and why would he? It was just the sort of kiss she might give Amy or Rach. Just a kiss between friends. “Love you.”
* * *
There are more people here than just Rach’s younger brother’s friends, Shahida knows that much, and she wonders if word got around at the kid’s school. But it’s nice; it lends the party a more anonymous feel. Amy and Rach are leading them both down the stairs and straight to the kitchen; Rach’s losing her buzz and Amy’s looking to find one.
“We have lager,” Rachel says, walking backwards and counting on her fingers, “and cocktail tins—” she makes a face; not her favourite, “—and a whole load of different types of chemically fruity things. All alcoholic, naturally. Shy? Ems? Better make your choice now, because we’re going to jump the queue.”
“I could drink a chemical fruit thing,” Mark says.
“Boom,” Rachel says. “Done. Good. Shy? Amy?”
“Fruit thing,” Amy says.
“She’s more drunk already than I thought,” Shahida whispers to Mark, and he nudges her with an elbow in response.
Well. That’s more voluntary physical contact than she usually gets out of him!
Rach leads them past a queue of younger teenagers — some of whom complain until she points out that she lives here, she’s bigger than them and she’s probably much meaner, too — and up to her older brother, Tom, who is leaning against the counter while one of his friends guards the fridge.
“Hey, Tommy,” Amy says, stepping in front of Rachel with a grin. “What are the rules?”
“Four for you.”
She puts a hand on his, linking their fingers. Amy’s always had a thing for Tom; Shahida’s never seen the appeal. “How about an extra drink or two? You’d look the other way, just once, for an old flame, right?”
Tom pushes her hand away. “We kissed once,” he says flatly.
“But it was so good,” she insists, pressing herself against him. “I still think about it.”
“Once,” he repeats. “And then,” he adds loudly, for the benefit of the watching teenagers, “someone told me how old she really was.”
Amy plays this game with him every time, dancing around his discomfort. Shahida privately thinks it’s in bad taste, but Tom seems to handle her well enough. Perhaps he knows she and Rach will step in if Amy ever tries to take it beyond a joke. Perhaps he knows he could pick her up and without much issue carry her bodily to somewhere she can take a cold shower.
“I’m old enough!” Amy insists, attempting a sultry expression. “Three years is nothing.”
Tom brings their hands together so he can unpick her fingers from his, one at a time. “It’s more like four years, and it was a lot when I was almost nineteen and you were fifteen—” Amy’s smile widens as he pauses, “—and it’s just as much now.”
“If you’re not careful,” Amy stage-whispers, standing on tiptoes to be closer to his face, “you’ll lose your chance with me.”
Tom pushes her back down onto her heels, hands on her shoulders. “I’ll find a way to live with it.”
“Well, fine,” Amy play-pouts. “I have a boyfriend now, anyway.” It’s a lie; Amy barely knows any boys except Mark and that dickhead Charles Carstairs. The perils of attending a girls-only school. Not that Shahida minds, particularly.
Tom’s smile broadens. “Good for you! Now you definitely get only four drinks.”
“Bastard!” Amy laughs.
“Give Greg over there your wrist so he can stamp it, and take your pick.” He points to where his friend is guarding the fridge. “And don’t flirt with him,” he adds.
Amy wiggles her bottom at him as she walks away. “No promises!” she calls.
“Amy,” Shahida says, as they link up again, “that was just sad.”
“Yeah, mate,” Rachel says, “have some dignity.”
“Oh, lighten up,” Amy says, and presents her forearm to Greg. She waves her other hand, and, eventually getting the message, Shahida, Rachel and Mark raise their wrists. Shahida checks, and finds Mark’s got his other wrist, the one with the ribbon still wrapped around it, worse for wear but carefully washed, held behind his back.
“Hi, girls,” Greg says, and then stands up straighter to yell over their heads. “Hey, Tom! How old are they?”
Tom points at each of them in turn. “Seventeen. Seventeen. Seventeen. But her, I don’t know.”
There’s a moment’s confusion and then Shahida, not entirely sure she’s thought this through thoroughly enough but convinced she has a better response ready than anyone else, puts a hand on Mark’s shoulder and says, “Seventeen tomorrow. It’s why we’re crashing; her actual birthday’s going to be boring.”
Mark shoots her a look; Shahida rolls her eyes, hoping the message gets across: Just go along with it. Better to be mistaken for a girl in front of two guys he’ll probably never see again than make a scene in front of a kitchen full of people.
He shrugs.
“Okay,” Greg says. “That’s fair. Four all round.” He picks up a white stamp from the sideboard, presses it once against each of their wrists, and opens the fridge. Amy lunges inside, grabs four bottles in assorted colours, and leads Rachel, Shahida and Mark out of the kitchen, pausing to make a kissy face at Tom, who pretends to dodge it.
“You girls keep an eye on Amy!” he says.
“We will!” Rachel shouts, as they exit through the double doors into the garden.
* * *
A wall of heat hits them as they step out into the garden, and it’s briefly confusing until Mark spots the bonfire someone’s been building out at the end of the garden. He remembers Rachel saying something about there being a large shed full of timber, garden trash and debris from the orchard, all of which build up and need periodically to be burned. He looks down the length of the garden, which meanders off into the dusk and terminates in a fence dotted with gates. It certainly looks like a garden that could plausibly connect to an orchard.
“Hey,” Shahida says, as they walk in formation down the garden, past where someone’s setting up a pair of speakers on a wooden table, “Em, are you okay?”
“Um, yes?” he says. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“He thought you were a girl!” Rachel whispers.
“And Shahida covered for you!” Amy says.
He shrugs. “It happens. Why do you think I tie my hair up?”
It’s not the reason, actually, and it doesn’t happen all that often, not any more, as a genuine mistake and not just Owen from Automotive being an arsehole, not since the growth spurt made him almost one-seventy-one centimetres. Besides, he’s generally bundled up in hoodies and padded with extra t-shirts, with his hair tied up at the nape of his neck; for someone of such indeterminate shape, gender is uncertain, and thus defaults in most people’s minds to man.
“You don’t mind?” Shahida says.
“Not really?” Not entirely true. It makes him feel obscurely ugly whenever it happens, which is why he tries to avoid it, but it doesn’t insult him, which is what she’s probably getting at. “I have my hair down and it’s not exactly lit up in that kitchen; I’m also dressed exactly like Rachel. I wasn’t surprised. In those situations I mostly just try not to say anything.”
“Jesus, Em,” Amy says.
“You really don’t mind?” Rachel asks. As one, they’ve stopped by one of the benches, close enough to the fire to feel the warmth but not choke on the smoke, close enough to the speakers to hear the music but not be deafened.
Their insistence on talking about it is starting to make him feel uncomfortable, and he’s about to say something when Shahida catches his eye and takes over the conversation, deflecting onto the story of how Amy first met Rachel’s older brother, how she added years to her age with makeup and low lights and a lot of lying, how when he found out he simply got up and walked away from her, returning to his friends.
“It was only one kiss,” Amy whines.
“Friends don’t make friends’ brothers into cradle snatchers,” Rachel says. “And if you didn’t keep flirting with him whenever he comes home, we wouldn’t bug you about it.”
“Whatever. I’ll get him sooner or later. When does a three-year age gap—”
“—it’s four years, Amy—”
“—become not weird any more? When I’m eighteen?”
“Twenty,” Rachel says. “At least.”
“Twenty?” Amy fake gasps. “I can’t wait that long, Rach! He might find someone!”
“Which is a good thing,” Shahida says. “You want him to sit around lonely for four years, waiting for you? Anyway, by then you’ll have realised it’s just a little baby crush on someone you barely know.”
Amy pokes at her. “Hey! I know him fine.”
“Oh yeah?” Rachel says. “What’s his favourite food?”
“Me!”
Mark laughs. The alcohol’s settling in his belly, warming him, and as the mild evening sets in he welcomes it. He even agrees to go back to the kitchen with Shahida and Amy for more rounds of drinks, and doesn’t complain when Amy insists on calling him ’Emily’ in front of Rachel’s brother and his friend. Shahida teases his hair out even more, tries to give it volume, and sprays it to hold it in place. He draws the line, though, at letting them put makeup on him and having him try to seduce Greg, but by that point he’s drunk enough to find anything funny — three colourful bottles on a near-empty stomach — and he, Shahida and Amy collapse in giggles at the thought of it when they get back to the table Rachel’s grudgingly holding for them.
A few more of Tom’s friends have started to trickle in by this point, and the music’s been turned up, and Mark’s had enough to drink that when Shahida takes him carefully by the hand and leads him shyly farther up the garden, closer to the music, he leans into her and they dance, lazily and hopelessly out of time with the music, lost in their own world together.
* * *
The stamp system breaks down, as it was always going to, and no amount of preparation — stocking the fridge with (X multiplied by Y) plus Z bottles and no more, where X is the anticipated number of attendees, Y is the anticipated average permitted consumption (Shahida would guess at a value of no more than 3.4, given that the age spread at the party is heavily biased in favour of Rach’s little brother’s friends) and Z is an amount sufficient to guarantee enough slack to account for unplanned guests, such as Shahida and Mark; say, forty — could have prevented all the little squirts from drinking more than they were supposed to. Rachel, spotting with a practised eye the exact moment her older brother’s vigilance breaks down, recruits Amy to help her liberate another three bottles each before anarchy seriously ensues, spiriting them away to the mini fridge in Rach’s downstairs kitchenette and relocking the door.
Anarchy, it turns out, consists mostly of the handful of boys who drank more than their tolerance throwing up in bushes, on benches, and into the dying embers of the bonfire, Amy jeering at the lightweight kids from her vantage point behind the CD player she’s taken over, and Mark lying on his back on a nearby picnic table, singing along to the music in a voice Shahida could listen to for as long as he has breath.
Eventually the party empties out, with most of the boys setting up camp in a forest of sleeping bags in the rec room on the other side of the house. Rachel, who out of all the people who live here is definitely the most together, organises a few of them to stamp on the embers before they retire, and hauls a tarp out from the shed to cover the music system. And then the four of them are dragging each other sleepily into Rach’s downstairs bedroom and cracking open a bottle each from the supply stashed barely an hour earlier.
Shahida’s been here before, many times, but Mark hasn’t, and Rachel shows him her treasures: not just the exercise equipment she liberated from her brother, but a huge DVD and VHS library, two televisions — a modern kind with a flat screen and an old and terrifyingly heavy tube TV — and a handful of old game consoles.
“Before it was Tom’s room it was Dad’s playroom,” she says, “and I kept everything.” She shuffles through NES cartridges and selects one, holding it out to Mark. “Here; blow.”
“Why?”
“Have you never used an old game cart?” she asks. He shakes his head, frowning, and she giggles. “You have to blow on the contacts before you play.”
“It’s lucky,” Amy says. She’s pulling the couch at the end of the room apart and arranging cushions on the floor.
“It’s to clean it.”
“It’s a myth,” Shahida says, “and it’s bad for the cartridge. I looked it up.”
Rachel ignores her. “Blow!” she insists, and Mark complies, still confused, blowing on the cartridge like it’s a birthday cake. She performs the best version of a chivalric bow she can while crouching on the carpet, and rams the cart into the NES; a Kirby game boots up on the old TV, bathing the four of them in flickering light.
Shahida, sitting heavily on one of the couch cushions and shuffling closer to Mark, ignores the game, ignores Rachel and Amy teaching it to him — “It’s the perfect introduction to platform games; you can’t die! You just float over everything!” — and watches him instead, watches his careful fingers find a comfortable way to hold the angular NES controller, watches, fascinated, as the tendons in his wrists react to his button presses. The borrowed shirt’s been falling off his shoulders all night, and in response he’s pushed up the sleeves, which hasn’t helped, and now she can see his forearms almost up to the elbow and his shoulder where it’s loose. She smothers a laugh, feeling like a prudish Victorian, obsessed with a few visible inches of ankle, but she can’t stop looking. At some point he borrowed a hair tie from someone and put his hair up, but it’s not in the messy, deliberately unshowy ponytail he usually wears; it’s high up, pulling most of his hair back from his face but leaving a few locks loose. She wonders who did that. Not him, surely? Amy, almost definitely.
He’s beautiful. It’s struck her before, repeatedly over the years, but never so powerfully. He’s so fucking beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful person she’s ever seen.
His Kirby falls out of the level.
“How are you bad at Kirby?” Amy demands. “How is anyone?” She attacks him with a pillow and he acts to rescue his half-finished bottle before it spills and the moment’s gone, and yet Shahida can’t stop thinking about it, not even after Rach hands her the controller and Mark settles down with his head by her feet and his legs all curled up and she can feel his breath on her calves, and she turns out to be terrible at Kirby, too.
Amy calls him Emily a couple of times, like she did in the kitchen, to get a reaction, but she stops when he doesn’t give it to her, and Shahida wonders why he doesn’t protest until he needs help to stand and get to the ensuite so he can pee and she realises just how drunk he is. She turns her back while he sits on the toilet and berates herself for missing the obvious: yes, he’s at least a bottle behind the rest of them, but it’s not like he’s had much to eat at all and he’s probably unused to alcohol. She, Amy and Rach are always around each other’s places, always sneaking bottles out of various pantries and spending cold suburban nights giggling drunkenly in front of terrible movies, and Amy’s family in particular crack open a bottle of wine with practically every meal, but Mark’s not only a year behind them at school, despite being only six months younger than Shahida — your school year, she’s noticed, has more influence on the perception of your maturity than your age — he also spends most of his time busy: running what remains of his family, keeping the house clean, doing the laundry; working or babysitting or studying or attending school; squeezing in time with Shahida and Stef in the hours he has free. He simply hasn’t had the opportunity to get acclimated to alcohol.
She helps him up off the toilet and they wash up together.
Rach gets the message with one look at him and starts pulling ingredients out of cupboards in the kitchenette, and before long they’re all — peer pressure — eating soft cheese sandwiches. Bread’s good; it’ll help soak up the alcohol. He rather spoils it by cracking open another bottle straight after, but at least he has something more in his stomach now.
When they’re flagging badly and no longer able to play even the simplest games, Rach and Amy unpack extra sheets and pillows and rearrange the floor cushions into a makeshift mattress for the two of them. Shahida and Mark take the bed, Shahida with her back to the wall, and Rach puts on a DVD, something dumb, at an almost inaudible volume.
The girls murmur to each other while Mark sleeps.
Later, when Amy and Rach are both snoring quietly, wrapped around each other the way they have at sleepovers since they were kids, and Shahida’s reading a book on her phone, Mark snorts, wakes himself, and rolls over in the bed.
He’s so close to her.
“I forgot to say,” she whispers. “Happy birthday.”
“Hmm?”
“It was midnight hours ago. Welcome to being seventeen.”
He smiles the loose smile of the still drunk and presses a hand to his mouth a moment later to cover his laugh so he doesn’t wake the girls, and the proximity of him, his levity, his openness, it’s all so overwhelming. He catches her eye and looks away, blushing, still quietly laughing. She’s never seen him like this, and she wants nothing more than to give him this calm, this joy, this freedom every night of his life from now on.
She was wrong before. Now, with his hair loose and messy from the pillow, with the soft light from the lamp playing across his face, and with just the tank top on and with one of its shoulder straps escaping to the side, he’s the most beautiful person she’s ever seen.
She kisses him.
And wonders for a moment, a horrifying, endless moment, if she’s just screwed everything up, but then he returns her kiss and it’s sloppy but it’s wonderful. She finds the small of his back under the covers and pulls him closer, presses their bodies together, and he responds with a hand on her cheek and another kiss, one that he initiates this time, showing her that, yes, he chooses this, too. His other hand on her back; her other hand under his top, moving upwards, tracing his taut belly, suddenly still, and his smooth chest—
Mark lunges away from her. Falls out of bed. Barely misses landing on Amy, who jerks up and pulls away from him. She’s looking at him, betrayed, like he’s done something, and Shahida wants to say he hasn’t, he’s fine, they were just kissing, but his eyes are wide and his lip is bleeding and she replays the last few moments and realises that when she put her hand under his top he froze, froze the way he used to when she hugged him, when she got too close.
He’s scared. No, not scared. He’s hurting, and not from when he bit through his lip; it’s like he’s hurting all over, like every old wound opened up at once. He turns away, wraps himself in the shirt, covers himself. He can’t look at her, and foolishly she reaches out for him.
He recoils, bolts for the door, and by the time she’s disentangled herself from the sheets, he’s gone.
2012
Almost six months. That’s how long it’s been since the party, since he ran away from her, since her horrible, stupid mistake. She showed up at his front door the next day, to return the phone he left at Rachel’s, to apologise, to see him, and his little brother turned her away.
“Sorry,” Russ had said, suddenly grown up and serious, “but he’s upset. Really bad. And Mum says, when someone’s so upset they can barely talk, you drop everything and you keep them safe.”
“But—”
“He’s been like this before.”
“Russ—”
“He’ll let you know when he’s ready to talk.”
He never did.
Amy and Rachel have both been by a couple of times to talk to him, and either they’ve missed him or he’s pretended not to be home because they came up empty. So here she is, against his wishes — or his wishes as expressed by his little brother — to try again.
She doesn’t even know if he’s going to be home. But it’s the start of the summer holidays; his dad will be at work and Russ will still be at school. He probably won’t have got his summer hours at work yet; he should be home.
Shahida worries at her lip, and then stops, wipes her mouth dry. He bit through his lip that night, trying to control himself. Trying not to react. Because she touched him. The image won’t leave her.
She rings the bell. Same old tune. But when Mark opens the door she can’t control her reaction. He’s thin again. Really thin, like he used to be. The dark circles are back under his eyes, his cheeks are too sharp, his knuckles are too taut, and his belly’s visibly emaciated even under the loose shirt he wears.
“Hi, Shahida,” he says. He sounds so tired.
“Hi, Em.”
He stands aside to let her in. “Mark is fine.”
Inside the house is the same as it was when she last saw it, and that feels perversely like a violation; it should be a wreck, it should reflect his deterioration! But she sees why when he leads her into the kitchen: there’s a pair of yellow gloves on the edge of the sink, and dishes soaking. He’s still cleaning. He’s wasting away and he’s still fucking cleaning.
“Tea?” he says.
“Um. What? Oh. Shit. Yes, please.”
She’s silent while he runs through the tea ritual, passing him a pair of mugs from the cupboard over the kettle, pointing when he holds up the box of breakfast tea and the box of Earl Grey.
Her mug gets milk, his doesn’t.
“You didn’t reply to my texts,” she says, walking into the main room and expecting him to follow.
“No. Sorry.”
She sits down on the armchair, the one facing the biggest couch, so he doesn’t feel like he has to sit next to her. Again, from this vantage, the place is unchanged, like the whole house has been excavated from her dreams; except for Mark, gaunt, enervated, no longer himself, taken from her nightmares.
“I’m sorry,” she says, concentrating very hard on the ugly carpet. “I made you come to that party, I made you wear different clothes, I kissed you—”
“Shahida,” he says sharply. He breathes deeply, closes his eyes, puts his mug down on the table, clasps his hands together. When he speaks again, it’s in the same monotone as before. Shahida would prefer he yell at her. “You did nothing wrong. You gave me a wonderful night. It was me who wrecked it. Because I wasn’t in control of my shit.”
“And you are now?”
“Yes.”
“Does that mean you’ll start talking to me again?”
“No,” he says. “Sorry.” It could be a recording of the same words he said earlier; he’s on a loop. How can she break through to him?
“Em—”
“It’s Mark.”
“Whatever!” she snaps, and takes it back with a gasp. “Shit. Sorry. I’m just… You’re purging again, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got it under control.”
“Will you ever talk to me again?”
“Maybe.” He reaches for his mug, sips at his black tea.
“I’m worried about you,” she says.
“You don’t need to. Really. I promise. You don’t need to worry. I just need time.”
“Time,” Shahida says, but she can’t remember what she was going to say next, because he’s drinking his tea again, and raising the mug pulls back the sleeves of his shirt, exposes his forearms, and even if he still wore the ribbon it wouldn’t have been able to hide the second scar on his wrist, slashed scarlet through the first, a crucifix in torn skin.
It has a twin on his other wrist.
She has to get out. She has to get out. Just looking at him is painful now, and in his automaton movements and controlled speech there’s nothing left of the boy she loves. Nothing left of the boy she hurt, over and over again, with her idiot insistence on helping him her way, bringing him into her world, when she should have tried harder to step into his, tried to understand him on his terms.
She kissed him and she ended him.
She’s stammering, she realises, and he’s watching her blankly.
“Em— Mark,” she says, swallowing to take control of her voice, “I should go. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have disturbed you. I should go. Just. Call me. Or text me. Or email me or whatever. When you’re ready. When you want to talk. I’ll be there. I promise.” She’s at the front door and he’s halfway out of his seat, paused, waiting to see what she’ll do, if she’s really going to go, if she’s really going to hurt him and run from him.
What’s left of him in there? Is there anything?
“Forgive me,” he says, sounding like a shadow of himself, and she almost runs from the house, with its awful stippled cream walls and its threadbare carpet and the injured boy she failed to help. She ducks into the alleyway he showed her once, a place overlooked by no-one, the only place she can be properly alone until she gets back to her room, and kicks at the wooden fence until her feet hurt.
2012 November 4
Sunday
It’s all too much.
He didn’t mean to push that girl.
Didn’t even know she was there.
Rushing like always.
Staying up too late and rising too early and drinking too much and showing up late to lectures.
Like always.
And she looked at him like he meant to do it.
And she shouted at him and for the briefest moment he wanted to tell her it wasn’t fair.
Bullshit.
You know what wouldn’t have been fair?
If she’d fallen.
If she’d died because of his carelessness.
He deserved every word of her anger.
He should have looked where he was going.
Should have thought.
But he doesn’t think.
Never does.
Never thinks; still makes it all about him, all the time.
She was just the latest to get hurt.
Well.
She’ll be the last.
He hurt Shahida.
Amy.
Rachel.
Stopped talking to Stef.
And then it was just him and Russ until Russ stopped talking to him.
Shouldn’t have screamed at him that Mum died years ago.
Shouldn’t have begged him to stop talking about her like she’s alive.
Shouldn’t have shouldn’t have shouldn’t have.
His little brother.
Wounded and still walking for so many years.
And he didn’t even see it.
So self-absorbed.
So self-obsessed.
So broken.
Selfish, stupid, short-sighted Mark.
Yeah.
The name’s a fucking bomb.
The name and everything that goes with it.
It’s a bomb and tonight it goes off.
No.
Not a bomb.
Never again a bomb.
Tonight he goes, but he goes quietly.
Too late.
Too late not to have hurt so many people.
But better now.
So he can’t hurt anyone else.
Should have walked onto the railway tracks.
Should have cut deeper.
Should have swallowed those pills and not spat them out.
Should have pitched over the railings.
Can’t hurt people if you’re not around.
Stupid.
Always a reason.
Always a reason to delay the inevitable.
No such thing as a clean death.
Too many people to hurt.
Well.
No-one left now.
Just him.
Just Mark.
* * *
The girl’s been there all night. The same one who’s been in the corner of his vision for weeks. The same one who interviewed him when he first started at Saints, who seemed interested. He shut her down, of course; the last thing anyone needed was to be interested in him.
His new start hadn’t been going all that well.
Abigail. That’s her name. She’s around campus a lot, and he goes out to this shitty club in town and there she is again, like she’s following him, but when he decides to confront her she’s gone.
Doesn’t matter. It’ll all be academic soon.
He doesn’t bother collecting his coat — why would he need it, where he’s going? — but when he leaves the club she’s there, on the pavement, waiting for him, wrapped up in a parka and with his coat folded over her forearms. She holds it out for him and he puts it on.
“Are you drunk?” she asks.
“Not really.”
“High?”
“No.”
“Would you like to come with me?”
“Why?”
“Because, Mark, I think I can help you.”
He considers just walking away, going to the river like he planned, but what can possibly happen? If she thinks she can help him, she’s welcome to try; Shahida couldn’t, and he certainly couldn’t help himself, but he’s the very definition of someone with nothing to lose. Even if this is a kidnapping, even if she’s taking him somewhere to kill him, at least he won’t die alone.
He follows her up the hill, to the grounds of Almsworth cathedral. It’s some ridiculous hour of the morning so obviously the gates are locked, but she knows a place where the trees have warped the fence enough that if you bend the branches aside you can get through. She holds them up for him; he shrugs and ducks through the hole. She takes him to a bench at the back of the grounds which overlooks another part of the city, away from the major built-up areas, where terraced houses describe interlocking semicircles, like a chain made from brick and pottery and thrown at the hillside. It’s almost like looking at home.
“It’s pretty up here,” she says.
“Cold, too.” He’s shivering inside his coat.
“Do you remember me?”
He nods. She’d be memorable even if he hadn’t kept seeing her lately; she’s beautiful. “Abigail,” he says.
“Abby,” she says. “Abby Meyer.”
He watches their breath mist and combine in front of them, watches it temporarily haze out the view of the city. “Why are we here, Abby?”
“I can help you. Like I said. I’ve been keeping half an eye on you, Mark, since we met; since the interview. Because I have connections to an organisation that helps people, and you… you seem very much like you need help.”
“What kind of organisation? What kind of help?”
She doesn’t answer straight away. She leans back on the bench instead, smiles at him. “They helped me,” she says. “I was a lot like you. Angry. Lost. Alone. And alone because I’d made myself alone, because I’d made mistakes and dealt with them poorly. No friends left, and I didn’t feel like I could ever face my family again. I was just marking off time on the calendar, waiting for the day it all got too much and I either took myself out, or did something stupid enough that someone else did it for me.”
“What changed?” he asks.
“The sisters found me.”
“The sisters? Are you a nun?”
She laughs. “Emphatically not.”
“Then what are you? What’s this organisation? Who are the sisters?”
She reaches out for his hand, and he lets her take it. “I can take you to a place,” she says, “where you can change. Grow. The same way I did. All the holes in you, Mark, all the missing pieces you see when you look at yourself, we can help you fill them in. We can show you a new life.”
“Are you from a cult?”
She pauses for much longer than he likes. “No. We’re not organised around a god, and we don’t have an absolute leader or anything like that. But we do have rules, and we do have secrets. If you come with me you’ll be committing to abide by them and keep them.”
He waits for her explanation to continue; it doesn’t. “That’s all you can give me?”
She looks at him for a long time, the suggestion of a smile on her face. She’s thinking, he can tell, trying to work out what she can say, and he has all night — it makes no real difference if he dies tonight or tomorrow or next week — so he waits quietly for her decision. He watches her in return: she’s beautiful, and the way her jaw moves when she thinks is charming.
“If you come with me,” she says eventually, “you’ll be committing to changing yourself entirely. To becoming someone new. You’ll still be you — we’re not talking brainwashing or anything! — but it’s like you’d be… another version of you. A you with the broken bits mended, or mending.”
“What if I don’t come?” he asks. He doesn’t really mean it, but he wants to test her.
She breathes out heavily. “Some of my sisters — most of them, actually — would force you to come. I don’t want to be like them, even though I understand why they do the things they do. If you say no, I’ll walk away. I’ll leave you up here on this cold bloody bench, even though I’m pretty sure if I do that I’ll never see you again. Except as a face in a newspaper, maybe.”
He nods. What would be the point of denying it?
“You should know,” she says, her voice firming, “that if you decide to come with me, we’ll make you change. It’ll be hard, and sometimes you’ll hate it, and sometimes you’ll hate me, the way I hated my sponsor sometimes.”
“But it works?”
“It worked on me. It worked on my sisters. It works.”
He nods again. She’s still holding his hand, so he stands up, tugs on it. “Where do we go?” he asks.
He has nothing to lose. And if it’s awful, if it doesn’t work, if it’s just more misery upon misery, he can always leave.
2019 December 11
Wednesday
If she didn’t have the scars on her arms, faded almost to nothing but still visible, still perceptible as the slightest of bumps on her skin, if the fingers interlocked with his weren’t almost exactly the same size and shape, if she didn’t speak with absolute conviction, if she hadn’t cried when she described the things that were done to her, Aaron wouldn’t have believed her. Even with everything that’s happened, even with what he’s seen happening to Steph, to himself, to Adam and the others, he wouldn’t have believed her.
But she’s so certain, and she tells him her story in such detail and with such sorrow, that he can’t maintain his scepticism.
Kept in a dungeon, ancestor to this place, and tortured for fun.
They took her from outside her home. On her way back from the fucking shops. Small family, struggling to make ends meet. No bother to anyone. But the police got the son on some petty theft charges, really petty, and he got six weeks in jail after a guilty plea, and he was barely home a week when they took him. When they took her.
They took her and they kept her in the dark and they changed her.
They took her and when she refused to be what they wanted they killed her family.
They took her and she told him everything and he held her as she did, feeling his comfort and company entirely inadequate but all he had to offer. And she smiled and wiped her eyes and thanked him for listening, and he nodded in silence and tried to return her smile, and she kissed him on the cheek. It’s still warm there, he thinks.
She’d been a man, and they took her and changed her and she fought back by choosing to accept it, embracing a womanhood as radical to them as any violence could ever have been.
Who would do something like that to her?
“This is where the lies end, Aaron,” she says. “All of them. And this is where trust starts. Now my secret’s yours to keep.”
It takes him a while to find his voice; he hasn’t spoken in what feels like hours. “I can’t tell anyone?”
She squeezes his hand, lets go, takes a long drink from the bottle of water by the bed. “I can’t stop you. I won’t stop you. But it’s best the other boys learn the truth at their own pace; your timetable is not everyone’s timetable.”
“Does Steph know the truth?” he asks, and she laughs and he wants desperately to disbelieve her story because no-one who laughs like that should be so hurt.
“I said ‘the other boys’, Aaron,” she says. “Unless you think she’s—”
“No.” Maria, Pippa, Monica, Tabby, all of them… And now Steph, too. “No,” he repeats, shaking his head. “She’s… not a boy. Not any more.”
“Are you?”
He snorts at that, holds out his arm as if to inspect it, as if he can find something of use there, not just the afterimages of his imagination, the echoes of the cuts inflicted on Maria by some grinning sadist. And then it hits him; the absurdity.
“What kind of a question is that?”
“The kind you’ll have to answer for yourself,” she says, closing her fingers around his forearm, pressing it down into his lap. She’s being so fucking gentle with him and once again the desire rises to throw it all back at her, to mock her kindness, but such impulses have never helped him.
Wait… Does Maria mean that Steph knows…? “How long has Steph known what I know now?”
Maria nods to herself, like he just passed or failed some test. “She’s being briefed right now,” she says. “Pippa’s with her. By the time you see her next, she’ll know everything you know.”
“Is that because you’ve judged her ready? Or is it because I am, or you think I am, and you know I’ll tell her, no matter what promises I make to you now?” Careful, Aaron; that was a little too honest.
She leans against the wall and he follows her, both of them nesting in the pillows she put in place. “Loneliness kills, Aaron. It’s as true down here as it is up there. So we like to see people form bonds. You and Steph. Will and Adam. Ollie and Raph, sort of, although we’re having to encourage that a bit. Sometimes it’s groups of three or four. Occasionally it’s the whole bloody basement. But mostly it’s twos. So, mostly, you’re briefed in twos.”
“What about Martin?”
“Pamela’s getting close to him at the moment.” She shrugs. “Sometimes it has to be the sponsor; sometimes bonds just don’t form, otherwise.”
“Pamela?”
“His sponsor. Ella.”
“Oh. By bonds, you mean—?”
“Friendships.”
“Right. Friendships.” He kissed her. He fucking kissed her. Yeah, it was intended to be the last action of a dead man, but—
He bursts suddenly into laughter, has to clutch himself to keep from hurting, because it squeezes the breath out of him and pinches at the small of his back, in the sore spot.
It really had been the last action of a man.
“Aaron?” Maria asks, a hand on his knee.
Everything he knows tells him she has to be lying. Everything he knows about her tells him she’s telling the truth.
“You promise you’re not shitting me with this?” he asks.
“I promise. I was like you. Not entirely like you — different selection criteria — but I didn’t choose to be a woman. I, too, had womanhood thrust upon me. Hormonally. Surgically. And… via other methods. Methods we will not be employing.”
There’s only one reasonable question to ask. “Why? If it was such torture, then why continue? Why not just pack up the whole place after you ran this Grandmother bitch out of town? Why do this to Steph? To me?”
“Because it works, Aaron. I was a product of the old regime, yes, but all the other women here, all of them, transitioned under my supervision. All of them were men on destructive paths, all of them too twisted up to change without radical action. All of them happier now than they ever were before.”
“You are absolutely positively definitely shitting me, Maria.” Steph was quite pretty when she got here, now that he looks back with an appropriate eye, and she’s looking better all the time, and from what Maria says they have access to the kinds of surgeries needed to smooth out the little bumps and things that mark her out as someone who spent twenty-one years on the other side of the gender divide. But he’s… him. What seems feasible for Steph is ridiculous the moment he tries to apply it to himself. He is what he’s seen in the mirror, when he cares to look: a boy/man/whatever. No matter what else changes, it’s stamped all the way through him. Indelible. Like a stain.
“I’m not. Ask Pippa.”
“I’m a fucking man. That’s not going away, no matter how many injections you give me, how much you cut off—”
“I’ll help you. Every step, I’ll be here. For the next three years, I’ll be here. I’ll teach you how to walk; I’ll teach you how to talk; I’ll teach you how to dress; I’ll teach you how to live, Aaron. Being a man, in the way you’ve been taught, has done you terrible harm. You can just… leave it behind. Like old clothes.”
“I’m not a girl. I can’t be a girl. Maria, I’m me.” Barely a breath left in him. “I don’t understand how that can change.”
“I’ll look after you. And so will Steph; you know she’ll help you. You can change, Aaron. You can be someone new. We don’t take in people who can’t do it. We don’t.”
“But—”
“The voice inside you,” Maria says, leaning closer, “the one that says you can’t do this, that you’re a man, and men can’t change, men don’t change, that it’s weak and pathetic even to consider it, the voice that’s been telling you that you’re better off dead than as a woman… It’s the same voice that tells you to hit back when you’re hurt, to cause pain to stop feeling it, to isolate yourself instead of seeking help. Has it ever, in your life, been right? Or has it just brought you more misery?”
Well?
Has it?
“Uh…” he says, but he has nothing.
There’s a knock at the door and it swings open almost immediately, and he’s going to protest but it’s just Steph, with Pippa’s thumb on the lock, letting her in. On her face is nothing but concern and, shit, the red cheeks and bloodshot eyes of someone who’s been crying, and he wonders if they’ve told her everything, everything including what he asked of Maria, and he’s afraid she’ll hate him, despise him for almost leaving her alone down here, but she crosses the tiny room with quick steps and before he knows it he’s standing, locked in her embrace, arms all around, and she’s crying again and so’s he, and he knows now that he can’t leave, that he’s missed his chance to end himself, because this girl — yes, this girl — is someone he can’t bear to hurt like that, and damn him for ever considering it.
Maria quietly closes the door on her way out.
2019 December 12
Thursday
It’s long after midnight and she has work in the morning but she can’t sleep. Everything’s running together in her head: from Zach’s breezy attitude at work — and the way he ‘educated’ her about trans issues; the way she had to pretend to know nothing — to the calls from the sponsors and, finally, to Abby. Always Abby.
And before, when she was still Mark, or Em, or Emily, or Stef’s best friend, or Russ’ absent brother, or his mother’s son. When he ran from Shahida after she touched his chest and he felt a new and even more bitter revulsion for his body than he’d ever felt before and couldn’t stop feeling afterwards no matter how much he starved himself, no matter how much he hurt himself. When he lay on his mother’s bed and couldn’t cry as she lay dying. A hundred nights when he walked into the woods or up by the railway tracks or out into the wilderness or along the back roads, most of the time not willing to take into his own hands the responsibility of ending it, but not exactly bothered if he might happen to slip on a log crossing a river or get stuck on the railway tracks or get hit by a car without its lights on.
Abby leading him back down the hill from the cathedral, back to the university. All the way through campus, past the Student Union Bar to that girls’ dorm, the one rumoured to give out the special grants. Through the front doors, through the kitchen and down into the dark while she whispered reassurances and promises that things would get better, as if he wasn’t numb to it all, as if he’d been capable of feeling anything.
She’s got her phone awake with the last call screen open. Abby’s name, Abby’s number. It’s past two in the morning but she could call and Abby would be there for her, the way she always promised. Hers for life, she said.
The first two weeks at Dorley had been bewildering. He came to understand quite quickly what the place was, what it did, and the types of boys it brought in, and he was angry with Abby for days. The boys were hateful and stupid and he dedicated himself to avoiding them.
But then they put him on the estradiol and everything changed.
It was as if a screeching noise he’d been hearing all his life had ceased. As if dust occluding his vision had been washed away. As if limbs made heavy and clumsy by fatigue were suddenly energised and capable. He asked Abby what exactly it was she’d injected him with, and she made him promise secrecy, made him swear on his life, and then she sat him down and explained what it was, what it did, and what effects he could expect.
And Melissa understood.
God, she understood, suddenly and completely.
The anger didn’t go away. It intensified. The idea that this simple chemical was all she’d been missing her entire life, that none of the so-called doctors or mental health professionals or even her friends had ever raised it as so much as a possibility… it was almost too big a failure to comprehend. And the idea that this sudden peace, this ease, was what normal people felt like all the time had been truly staggering.
She’d known a little about trans people. Everyone did. You saw them on TV occasionally; glamorous girls on talk shows having their pasts revealed to titillate the audience. But they never felt real. They never felt like someone you could turn a corner on the street and bump into. Never felt like something she could be.
She turned her anger inward, the way she has since Dad hit her, since she learned never to speak her mind, never to admit her thoughts. The others of her intake decided she was unjustifiably aloof and intensified their verbal attacks on her; the pussy, the emaciated boy who wouldn’t look them in the eye, became the snob, the little prince who thought himself too good for them. The boy who was to become Nell cornered her a few times, never physically hurting her but threatening it, making her aware that he was capable of it, that her every step should be taken with the knowledge that it could end abruptly and in pain. It took until disclosure, until their understanding caught up with hers, for the insults to stop. One of them, months later, even apologised, although most didn’t properly come around until the second year. She remembers Nell waiting for her outside her room, a lengthy apology written on notepaper, and the frustration the new girl had difficulty controlling when Melissa closed the door in her face.
Only Abby came close to understanding her, and even then Melissa kept from her the depths of her relief and the exhilarating highs of the vicious rage that still took her from time to time, made her silent and unmoving. Lying to the people who cared about her was second nature, a habit impossible to break, especially in such an environment. But she was a friend, a confidante, and a lover of terrible old movies. They said they would tell each other everything.
Abby told Melissa everything; Melissa, as was her habit, lied.
The sponsors and the other boys-become-girls read her refusal to engage with the rest of her intake as quiet compliance, which was for a while privately amusing, especially considering the way the others fought amongst themselves. Even after disclosure, even after some of them had been significantly reshaped, still occasionally they would fight and be punished, separated, put in cells or sent to their rooms, and Melissa would return to her own room, to an environment she could control.
Stuck up, snobby little prince.
But she didn’t need them. She didn’t need the other sponsors, either, or the other Sisters. It was deliberate, and better that way: she would keep her head down, learn everything from Dorley there was to learn, and get the hell out. Friends? She could make friends after graduation, back in the real world, away from the madness.
And then she fell in love with Abby.
Abby…
They should never have done anything. But Melissa found herself in the role she finally understood had been Shahida’s, that of the infatuated girl denying her crush. And she resolved it in much the same way: in her second year, in a nicely decorated room on the first floor that was starting to feel almost like home, after an evening spent watching movies and hitting the wine, after shutting the door in Nell’s face and then seeking her out to accept her apology, her hug, her meek little cheek kiss, after the whole damn place seemed to soften around her, she leaned in and kissed her sponsor.
Abby pushed her away. Asked if she was sure. And Melissa, never sure, didn’t answer, leaned in again, kissed her again, took Abby’s hands and placed them on her developing body, writhed under them, kissed her again and again, testing her final hypothesis, waiting for the disgust and the revulsion to take her away from Abby the way they took her from Shahida; they never came. Undeniable confirmation that, yes, this was what she’d been missing. This was who she was.
All her life she’d been a girl and no-one told her. No-one even thought to raise it as a possibility. Sometimes a joke, sometimes a mistake, occasionally an insult; never real. Until Dorley fucking Hall.
Abby tried to put a stop to their relationship the next day, but Melissa pushed. What they had was important, she insisted. Abby said to her one day that she, the older girl, the sponsor, should have said no, and Melissa agreed that she, the younger girl, still becoming a woman, shouldn’t have asked, but neither of them had been strong enough to walk away.
Until Melissa, one day, did.
She moved to Manchester, she got a job. They still saw each other. They were still together, sort of. They were still happy, mostly. And so, obviously, like with everything else, Melissa had to break it. Her obsession, growing in the time they spent apart, that she could have a life completely disconnected from Dorley, that she could be absolutely free, and her suspicion that despite her feelings her love for Abby might have been misplaced, encouraged by the programme, unreal after all, made her tear herself away. First she started seeing other people. Not enough. So, then, disturbed anew by how happy she’d been when Abby last visited, she cut off contact altogether.
Stupid, selfish, short-sighted. Always.
And the other girls she’s dated? Disasters. Mistakes. Always wary of getting close. Too scared of doing something wrong, of being revealed as an unreal girl, a construct. The scars on her labia are so faint now as to be almost invisible but they’re there, and if you know what you’re looking for you might recognise them. Abby’s always insisted they’ll fade to nothingness, like hers, but Melissa’s long since stopped betting on the best outcome.
Fuck.
She turns her phone over and over in her hands, thumb hovering over the call icon.
No, Liss. Leave her be. Haven’t you hurt her enough?
She locks the phone, yanks her laptop’s charging cable out, dumps it onto the bed and logs onto the Dorley intranet. She gets only the graduate version up here, heavily disguised and with very little actual information, but it’s enough. She calls up her intake and laughs when Nell’s first on the list. She’s prettier than she used to be, more put together, and it’s kind of nice to see. It took the girl a long time to get her anger under control.
Melissa used to envy her ability to turn her rage outward, to not have it fester inside.
There’s Autumn, pictured in a formal dress, holding hands with some tuxedoed man and surrounded by beautiful people in beautiful clothes. A charity fundraiser, according to the caption, hosted by someone credited only as ‘Elle’.
And here’s Tash. Name officially shortened from Natasha, pronouns updated to they/them. Like Autumn, they’re pictured with a partner, but the event looks much less reputable; much more fun. Tash had been another quiet one when they’d all been together in the first year, but integrated themselves into the group better than Melissa ever could. Another one to envy.
Ah, she’s next. Melissa. She snorts at the surname ‘Haverford’ the way she always does; it might be hers, officially, but it’s never felt all that comfortable. Mind you, neither did ‘Vogel’ when that was her name. Doomed to fail to fit in wherever she goes.
She scrolls her profile, amused to note that it’s been kept relatively up to date, probably by some duty sponsor doing file maintenance to stave off boredom on the graveyard shift. Her job is noted, but the picture is one from before she left Dorley. Strange that Abby didn’t give them something more recent.
She wonders, suddenly, how Russ and her father are doing, how Stef and Shahida and Amy and Rach are doing, but there’s no way to find that on here; she’d have to call up and get a new secure password — unfeasible for this time in the early morning, or at the very least deeply embarrassing, depending on who’s on duty — or go digging through the packets they still send her, the ones she files straight under the bed.
Never mind. She can satisfy her curiosity in the morning. She scrolls down, finds their names under ‘Pre-Transition Associates’. Shahida and Amy are there, unchanged; Rachel’s got a double-barrelled name now; Russ and Dad, still there. Stef—
Stephanie R. [placeholder surname]
Oh no. Oh fucking no.
It can’t be.
There has to be another explanation!
Would the Stef she knew transition of his own free will? Possibly. But, she realises, ‘placeholder surname’ can mean only one thing: Dorley Hall has him. No-one else has placeholder surnames. No-one else spends three years minimum in limbo, unnamed, unmanned, legally dead.
A quick search doesn’t find any notices of his death or disappearance, so she expands the search parameters, plugs in everything she can think of, every gambit she saw employed in the service of invisibly kidnapping people, and eventually she finds a tweet from someone dated just two months ago, complaining about his roommate leaving suddenly to ‘find himself’. Scrolling up, she finds another tweet from the same man mentioning a Stef, and another, praising his new roommate Stefan for bringing home free cake from work.
They have him.
They have him, they’ve renamed him, and they’re not done with him.
Why didn’t Abby tell her? Probably not her fault. Probably ordered not to. Beatrice can be scary as hell when she wants to be, and the ever-present hints about powerful backers — not to mention the way the washouts just disappear — always made it clear that if Bea asks something of you, you don’t say no.
Shit. Abby. What did she say when Melissa asked how she was? She said she had things to tell her but most of it was classified. Shit. Shit! Was that Abby trying to tell her something? Was it a warning?
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Okay.
December. It’s only December, and this is his first year in the programme. That’s, what, a couple of months on estradiol? And no orchi yet. There’s still time.
Still time for her to go back down there and get him out.
Notes:
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 25: Like an Angel
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 December 12
Thursday
She’s such an idiot. She should have known!
For as long as she’s been down here with him, Aaron’s been practically a force of nature, rarely stilled, even more rarely silent. A creature of energy, always needing to talk or move his hands or pace, and when she thinks of him — and she thinks of him often, more often than she would ever have thought likely — he’s in motion.
And yesterday he was almost calm. When they talked, when they showered together, even when he darted back to kiss her. Too still. Too controlled. Too much like something vital inside him had simply faded away.
She should have known.
How long have they stood there, with him in her arms? Minutes or hours; Stef could believe either. Pippa held her back as long as she could, explained that the thing with Maria was a process, that this was a point a girl sometimes hits — and Stef had pulled snarling out of her grip at that; ‘a girl’! — before she can truly start to organise herself into something new.
If Stef hadn’t been so weak with tears she would have pushed right past her.
“You mustn’t interfere!”
That was what stopped her. That was what put her right back in her seat and wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her head in her thighs. You mustn’t interfere.
Implicit: she already has.
Pippa didn’t say it. She didn’t have to.
If this is all going to happen, and it will — it has to; it’s unstoppable; there are too many women all willing to look in and say everything’s perfectly fine because they were abused to within an inch of their lives and they turned out fine — then she’s making it worse by interfering.
But how can she not?
Eventually Pippa let her go. Decided the time was right. And she didn’t think of it before but maybe this is all part of it. Maybe this is her role. Maybe this is how Aaron becomes a girl, from her intervention. And what would Melissa think of you?
Some intervention. She burst in and Maria cleared out, and now here she is, and here he is, in her embrace at last, and he’s all cried out but she sure isn’t, and he moves only to breathe while she squeezes him tighter, unable to stop and unable to let go, whispering his name in tight and sore breaths so quietly he might not hear.
He gave her one last good day, and he kissed her, and he asked Maria to help him die.
Her belly lurches and her throat constricts and she says his name again, louder and clearer this time, and he sniffs loudly, shifts in her grip as much as he can, and looks up at her. He’s smaller, or he seems that way. Reduced. Like he found a way to miss a fortnight of meals in the hours between the kiss in the lunch room and now.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“No.” She pulls him back in. “I’m not accepting any apologies from you. You’re… you’re a fucking innocent in all this.” She knew this was happening; she’s known since the start; she remembers thinking maybe they all deserved it…
He shivers, and it takes her a moment to realise he’s laughing. It’s an ugly laugh, wet and painful, and she wants to silence it before it somehow injures him, but it doesn’t last long. He goes limp in her arms, weaker even than before. Nothing left of him.
She’s all that’s holding him up, and she’s not doing that well herself. She loosens her grip, reluctantly lets him go, and he takes two steps back to lean against the wardrobe.
He won’t look at her.
Aaron says, “I’m not an innocent,” and Stef doesn’t care that it’s true, that he wouldn’t be here if it weren’t, because she wants to burn anything and everything she has to, to get him out and away from the place that made him ask Maria to help him die.
It happens to a lot of them. It happened to Pippa. She was okay. He’ll be okay. Don’t interfere. Don’t interfere. Don’t interfere.
She wants to hit herself. Nothing justifies this.
“Aaron—”
“Don’t,” he says. “You can’t tell me I’m innocent. It’s—” he coughs, and it almost sounds like he’s laughing again, “—it’s a bad fucking joke. I know what I’ve done.”
Stef looks around at the concrete walls. “None of it warrants what they’re doing to you.”
He shrugs. Actually fucking shrugs, like none of this matters! Or like he doesn’t care any more. But then he flaps his hands at his sides, unable to find anything to do with them. He looks around. He even smiles at her. Little discharges of energy. Signs he’s still in there, despite appearances, despite the way he’s put all his weight against the wardrobe, absolutely drained, useless, used up.
Is this what Pippa meant? Does he see a future, even slightly? Is this the start of it?
“What are you thinking?” he asks, like he’s curious.
Stef laughs. “Fucked if I know.”
The effort of laughing exhausts her in a way no tears could, and she walks quickly over to the bed before she loses her balance. Wouldn’t it be nice if he were to follow her, if he were to show her that the affection he showed her yesterday wasn’t just inspired by his guilt, wasn’t just put on to make her feel good?
How long has she known him? Mere months. And she can’t imagine the world without him.
She chokes through fresh tears because it almost happened. He came close enough that he asked Maria for death and Maria refused him and promised him there’d be no more lies.
No more lies.
“Aaron,” she whispers, in a voice made harsh as she remembers Maria talking around her, lying for her, making the promise and then lying to his face because of her.
Christ, she’s a weight on this fucking place. She’s a black hole, distorting everything around her. She should have let Christine get her out, accepted her offers of help, found a way to transition on the outside. But her weakness, her cowardice, her self-centred stubbornness forced Christine’s hand, and now she’s here and the sponsors are helping her and just by her presence she’s hurting the boys… She’s hurting Aaron.
Stupid boy! she admonishes herself, in the voice of her father. She came here, inserted herself into a process that’s run smoothly for years, and she meddled and she put herself first and she didn’t even consider that the others might have needs that matter because they’re bad men and then she fell in love.
And now he’s asking to die. And Maria’s still lying to him. Lies of omission, sure, but lies are lies, even if it’s Aaron telling them to himself, on her behalf.
She coughs on her tears, but before she can wipe her face, before she can look at him again, he’s sat down next to her, right up against her, arm around her waist, pulling her in, offering his shoulder for her head, placing a tentative hand on her thigh. Comforting her.
“Aaron,” she says again.
“Stephanie,” he says back. His voice is kind, and shaking only a little.
“This is wrong,” she whispers. “This is fucked up. It shouldn’t be you comforting me.”
“Why not?” he asks, and the question’s enough to silence her. “If there’s one thing this place has shown me,” he continues, emboldened, “it’s that the one whose needs are most urgent can change on a fucking dime.” He squeezes her thigh, and his continued comfort forces out of her a bitter breath. “I’m actually kind of calm right now. And you… you’re not.” She leans on him and he smirks. “If there’s two things this place has shown me, the other’s how to jerk off without being seen by the cameras. Now, amateurs, posers, they might say, ‘Just do it under the duvet,’ but to them I say, what if the urge takes me while I’m having a shower? Or watching TV in the common room? Or pacifying myself with inedible breakfast cereal? And what about our changing sensitivities? Sure, I might have got some of the old downstairs magic back — and I have, by the way; you’ll have to tell me how you’re doing in that regard — but honestly I’m bored by the one-dimensional wanks of old, like, I need a challenge, and simply yanking one out with your right hand under the covers while browsing on your phone with your left is fucking easy mode, and doesn’t take into account the additional—”
“Aaron,” she says once more. He’s trying. It’s sweet.
“Yes?”
“You really wank in the lunch room?”
“No,” he admits, “but I have a plan for it. Always Be Prepared; isn’t that what the boy scouts say?”
She laughs, and he lets go of her thigh, but he doesn’t push her away. Bodies touching, they sit together on his bed. He’s smiling at her, and despite what he says and despite what she knows he looks too damn sweet, too damn innocent.
“I have to tell you something,” she says, “and you’re going to hate me for it.”
“Steph,” he says, “I don’t want to know what you did to get chucked in here. I don’t care. Not any more.”
“That’s not—”
“And I know Pippa shows you stuff, too. On her phone.” It’s like he’s going down a list. “It’s why you’re here at all tonight. You’ve been close with her for ages and she’s been letting you in on stuff. Showing you the cameras. It’s fine. I mean—” he shudders for a second, and Stef forces flexibility into her arm so she can hug him loosely, “—it’s not like I like that you’ve probably seen the footage of me apologising to Maria for her helping me up, or me asking her for… for what I asked for.” He laughs again. “Jesus, though, this is so fucking embarrassing. Like, we’re always recorded here, I know that, but the whole point of wanting to fucking die is that you don’t have to deal with the aftermath!” He’s talking louder now, but before Stef can intervene he calms himself, and continues softly, “Especially the way I wanted to do it. I wanted to just fade away. But now I’m still here and so’s that fucking aftermath and, Steph, I feel like a complete idiot. How do you move on from wanting to die without, you know, having to ever think about it or talk to anyone about it ever again?”
“Aaron—”
“All anyone’s going to think when they look at me is, oh, there goes suicidal ideation boy, what’s the matter, gonna—?”
“Aaron!” Stef interrupts, more sharply than she intended. “I know what else Maria told you tonight. That everyone here was once like you. Like us. I think maybe a lot of them have been where you are. I think it’s actually quite normal.” Thank you, Pippa, for putting the words in my mouth. She’ll have to apologise later for not accepting her advice with grace.
“Yeah,” Aaron says, frowning, “fuck. Yeah. I keep forgetting. It’s like my brain doesn’t want to hold on to the information. It’s all of them, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Stef says, “it really seems like it is.”
And there she goes, reflexively prevaricating again. Did you ever think you’d become such a persistent liar, Stefan?
“What?” Aaron says quickly, his hand on Stef’s shoulder so quickly she doesn’t notice it’s there until he squeezes it. “Steph, what is it?”
“Hm? Oh. Nothing.”
“Steph,” he says, using his free hand to cup her cheek and turn her to face him; the action is strangely intimate and, with only the weakest control over her body right now, she shivers. “Steph, you froze.”
She looks down; her hands are balled into fists, and as she carefully unsticks them she finds the imprints of nails in her palms. Any harder and she would have broken the skin. “Shit,” she says. “Sorry.” Deadnaming herself in her own head; unhealthy, probably. “Stupid stuff.”
“Nothing down here is stupid stuff,” Aaron says. “Or everything is. Come on.” He drags on her shoulder. He has no chance of moving her without her permission, so she grants it, and he lays them both down on the bed, pulling the covers up partway. He’s got his back to the wall and she’s facing him, although there’s a good amount of mattress between them. “Tell me.”
“I— I can’t, Aaron.”
“Stephanie,” he says again, in his sternest voice. “You don’t have to keep secrets from me. Who am I going to tell?”
“It’s not that.”
“I know you’re trans, Steph,” he says, and that brings her up short. It shouldn’t, because it was part of his confession to Maria, part of his request, that he saw her adapting in ways he never could, and that’s why he wanted to die—
“Oh God…” she whispers.
“No, seriously,” he says, as she wraps an arm around herself, “I know you’re trans, or something like it, or whatever. I mean, it’s obvious, right? I feel stupid for not seeing it before. It’s really fine. I’m not, like, bothered, or anything.”
He’s too close to it, he’s too close to me…
“No,” she says, because she has to say something before his train of thought leads him around to the lie, the big one, the one she tells every day, the one she makes even Maria participate in, but she doesn’t know what she’s going to say and it’s dangerous to let her mouth just fucking run on like it wants to, “I shouldn’t be here, I should go…”
“I don’t care,” Aaron says, reaching out a hand towards her and pausing it when she shuffles back. “Really.”
She rolls farther back anyway, almost falls out of the bed. She disentangles herself from the sheets and stands up, puts distance between them.
Aaron hasn’t moved.
“I’m hurting you, Aaron,” she says, and there’s no stopping it all from coming out now. “I’m hurting you just by being around you and that’s exactly what I was trying to stop from happening but I’m fucking it up and I’m sorry, fuck, Aaron, I’m so sorry…”
“You’re not hurting me.”
“You said it yourself! To Maria! You saw me… changing, and it made you realise you never could, which is stupid, Aaron, because you can, because all of them did it, and I’m making everything happen too soon, I’m pushing you into shit before you’re ready, maybe all of you, because I’m stupid and selfish and—”
“Steph!” he says. She looks back and he’s sitting up, both hands on the mattress. “You’re babbling. You’re not making any sense.”
He looks so innocent. He looks so fucking innocent. And she’s lied and she’s lied and she’s lied. She wants to break her chest open, she wants to scald herself with the shower water good and fucking proper this time, she wants to get away from him get away from get away from him before she makes things worse the way she has over and over and over.
“I knew!” she shrieks.
It’s his turn to freeze. “What do you mean?”
She can never take this back, but she doesn’t want to. He deserves the truth. Even if it hurts. Even if he never speaks to her again. He deserves it.
More than she deserves him.
“I knew,” she says, quieted and cold. “All along. About what happens here. About what was going to happen to you. That’s why I came here. I wanted what they’re forcing on you. I wanted it for me. So I knew. And I kept the secret. I lied and I pretended to be something I’m not and I’m—”
She can’t even tell him she’s sorry. It’s too big for that.
It’s the work of a moment to escape his room, and then she’s alone in the corridor, considering her options. She could go upstairs, to her other room, but she doesn’t want to see it right now, doesn’t even want to think about it, because it’s something she has that he doesn’t and nothing could be more representative of the unjustified and ugly way she’s elevated herself above him; and, besides, she’s exhausted, has almost no control over herself. Imagine climbing the stairs on these legs! She’d fall and hurt herself.
Maybe she should, then.
No. No, and don’t be so fucking stupid.
She lets herself back into her room, across the way from his, and lets the door close slowly on its own as she throws off her outer clothes and falls onto the bed. She keeps expecting a hand to stop the door, for Aaron to have chased after her, but eventually it finishes closing and the lock engages with a muted thump.
Stef presses her face into the pillow and screams.
* * *
Melissa jolts awake to the sound of some bloody Taylor song on the radio and she wants so badly to pick up the cheap alarm clock and dump it out the window that she can visualise the arc it describes on its way down to the pavement and thus she’s surprised, seconds later, to find herself still face down in her pillow, still sore where she slept on her chest, still surrounded by printouts and half-wrapped in the charger cables for her phone and laptop, with her clock radio untouched and still playing Back to December. It makes her think of that time in her first year when Abby discovered the theory that Taylor Swift’s had multiple relationships with women that she’s had to keep secret for the sake of her career, and woke Melissa early on a Saturday to tell her about it.
Barely two hours sleep. It’ll have to be enough.
Stefan — and she won’t use Stephanie, because that’s a coerced name if ever she’s seen one; the kid’s sponsor probably suggested a name similar to his real one as a way to get him used to the idea of being a girl — barely has an internet presence, and hours of searching hasn’t turned up much more than memories of growing up in Almsworth that Melissa would prefer to forget. Friends she let down; places she never wants to think about ever again. Certainly she’s found nothing to suggest that ‘Stephanie R.’ exists anywhere except inside — under — Dorley Hall.
The radio rolls on to something more recent, and finally she finds the motivation to slap the silence button and roll out of bed. She’s got a full-length mirror set up by the wardrobe in the corner and she’s not surprised to find she looks like complete shit. And while she’d love to say that it doesn’t matter, that what she has to do today doesn’t require her to look her best, the early days of the second year, which instilled almost at the instinctive level the need to make herself up so she won’t be read as male, have never entirely left her. She shuffles off to the bathroom for a shower, remembering with a snort that all the makeup in the world didn’t protect her from Stef’s recognition, outside the Tesco that time.
Under the hot water she grimaces, because that was the other thing that kept her up most of the night: what if Dorley taking Stef was her fault? Vanishing without a trace is one thing, and she knows from the old information packs, from when she still opened them, that the kid took it hard. But he had his family, and even if he lost touch with Russ he still had his education, which by all accounts he worked hard on.
He still recognised her, though. Saw a dead man in a woman’s face. And who knows what that does to someone? The reports from his time at Saints said he was quiet, working diligently towards getting his degree and having some academic difficulties; they hadn’t gone into any more detail because there was no more detail to provide. They didn’t have anyone tailing him or collecting any specific information and they didn’t dedicate more than a line or two to him in the monthly update packs, because he was exactly what he appeared to be. There weren’t even any surveillance photos.
But he’d always been a quiet boy, and he’d always turned things over in his head before acting on them. Just like her. Whatever he did to get on Dorley’s radar must have happened suddenly but built up inside him for a while.
The causal chain leads inexorably back to her.
How dare they take him!
Routine carries her through the rest of her morning, but although she loads up her bag with her usual makeup she goes as light as she dares on her face, because she can’t keep herself from crying for more than a few minutes at a time and she has, unfortunately, shit to do.
It’s raining. Perfect. She pulls down her hood, lets the light spatter coat her face and hair; easier to hide that she’s upset. She just got caught in the rain, that’s all.
Zach, her boss, is early as always. He lives at the other end of a tram journey and prefers to avoid the crush. Good for her, today. No-one else around to see her humiliate herself.
She dumps her stuff — clothes, money and supplies, in a wheeled suitcase and the largest of her shoulder bags — by her desk, and avoids his eyes as she walks towards his office. The door’s open, like usual, and he saw her come in, laden down. The question’s clear on his face. She answers it before he has a chance to ask.
“I have to quit, Zach,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” he says, standing up from his chair and walking towards her. He pauses when she freezes, and makes it look like all he wanted to do was stand on the other side of his desk and lean on the wood. “What’s up?”
“I have a… a…” Melissa waves a hand. She couldn’t come up with a story that sounded good, no matter how many times she rehearsed this moment on her way over. “A family emergency,” she tries. Never mind that she’s never spoken of her family with him; maybe that’ll make it seem more authentic.
“Liss,” Zach says, “you’ve been crying.”
“It’s just the rain.”
“Don’t tell me stories, kid.”
She concentrates on the floor. He’s been good to her and the job’s been better than she expected to get, given that her qualifications stop at A-level. Horrible to have to tear everything up because of Dorley.
“There’s something going on,” she says, slow enough to think through her words, “back home. I have to go deal with it? Find out what’s going on?” Damn. Her intonation isn’t exactly convincing.
“Is that what all those calls were about yesterday?” he asks, and she jumps guiltily. “I’m not that unobservant, you know.”
“Sorry.”
“Melissa, if there’s something going on—”
“I just need to leave, Zach. I don’t want to, but…” She leaves it there. This is harder than she expected.
Zach nods, frowns at her for a moment. “Okay. For starters, you’re not quitting. I’m signing off—” he leans back, pulls Melissa’s holiday card out of his desk drawer and starts scribbling in the appropriate boxes, “—on all your remaining days of holiday, and you’re taking your time in lieu as well, and…” He bobs his head from side to side as he thinks, and Melissa has to smile: he always does that when he counts under his breath. After a moment he leans back again and pulls out another card, this one yellow and quite a lot larger, with more boxes to fill in. “And today and tomorrow, you’re sick. Very sick. It might last all weekend. I do hope it doesn’t ruin your Christmas holiday, which starts Monday, in case you forgot.” He shuffles the holiday card back out from under the sick leave card and waves it at her.
“Zach—”
“Speaking of,” he continues, interrupting her with a grin, “silly me; I forgot to pass all this up the chain. I’m supposed to have all holiday cleared a week in advance, but…” He shrugs. “My bad. I’ll get it all processed today.”
“Zach,” she says, “you don’t need to do that.” The admin office will, at the very least, be irritated with him; someone might yell. Someone might send a passive-aggressive email.
“Melissa, whatever’s going on, it’s clearly important, and you need to deal with it. And everything’s winding down now, anyway. You’re ahead on your work, and you know classes are over soon. We’ll fudge it until January. I can manage one mit circs meeting without you. Just make sure you’re back for the start of the semester.” He drops both cards on his desk and stands up, hugs her before she can get away. “Go sort things out, drop me an email to let me know you’re okay every so often, and I’ll see you on the sixth, all right?”
“Thank you,” she mumbles.
“Safe journey, Liss.” He releases her and gives her a gentle flick on the cheek. “And you might want to cough a bit on the way out. Just to sell the ‘being sick’ thing.”
He would have let her leave right there, but she’s overcome and simply must hug him, so it’s almost five minutes later before she’s walking back out into the rain, coughing occasionally as she goes, and heading for Manchester Piccadilly. She doesn’t get the train; she’s never known exactly how extensive the Dorley panopticon is, whether anyone’s really watching her even now, but on the off-chance she has eyes on her she hires a car with cash, throws her bags in the back, syncs her burner phone to the Bluetooth, and takes the little Ford Fiesta out of the city, heading down to Almsworth via Sheffield. It’s less direct than taking the motorway, but a little extra caution never hurt anyone, and if she is being watched, they’d probably expect her to take the M6.
She spent a long time a few years ago recreating her mother’s playlists as best as she could remember them. She puts one on now, turns the music up, and she sings, and swallows hard when she thinks she might cry again.
She’s going home.
* * *
The Student Union Bar at The Royal College of Saint Almsworth is tacky, ugly, and closed; an outrage, considering the opening times posted on the pub-effect entryway clearly say they should have opened five minutes ago! And it’s raining, and it’s cold, and she’s tired.
Everything links back to Dorley Hall. Everything! She’d had no bites on her missing posters, had nothing but shrugs and condolences from the people she’d spoken to, until she put a poster up on the corkboard in the entrance to Dorley Hall. Then, all of a bloody sudden, two girls — one probably cis but one definitely trans, which is an interesting data point — come bursting out of the place, only barely not panicking, and start asking questions about Mark. They promise to put the word around at the dorm and then later the very same day Shahida’s talking to two more girls from Dorley Hall, both of them (probably?) cis but very keen to let her know that Mark’s disappearance was a terrible tragedy, absolutely awful, and that he unambiguously walked off into the night on the very date the police say he did, and whoops let’s accidentally misgender him and very poorly pretend like it wasn’t incredibly revealing to do so.
Not misgender, though. Not if she’s right.
It kept her up all night: if he— if she transitioned, why didn’t she get in touch? Why did she let everyone think she died?
“Because,” she mutters to herself for the fiftieth time, “Shahida, you bloody idiot, his dad hit him and his brother was practically a stranger even before he left and you… you basically forced yourself on him.”
There was nothing left for him back home. Except Stef, maybe, and that, too, is suggestive. Didn’t Russ break off that friendship because Stef kept insisting Mark was alive? There’s got to be something there. Only now, quite conveniently, Stef’s out of the picture, off ‘finding himself’.
Yeah, right.
A flustered girl opens one of the heavy wooden doors with her backside and apologises for keeping her waiting, and Shahida smiles at her like she’s not in a mood at all and hurries inside, depositing her raincoat on the back of a chair and her bag on the wood-effect table. She’s claimed one of the handful of seats that look directly out of the front windows, partly for the light — cut into diamonds by the plastic leading; pretentious and tragic at the same time — but mainly because the Student Union Bar’s out on the edge of campus, right on the path, and anyone leaving Dorley Hall for their morning classes will almost definitely walk right past her.
Maybe she can spot one of the women from yesterday again.
The girl takes her order and quickly returns with coffee, a rather dry bagel and another apology, and Shahida unpacks her things: laptop, phone, notepad and pens. There’s a pair of outlets on the wall by her feet, which will likely come in handy later, and the password to the university’s guest wifi on the chalkboard above the specials, which she will not be using; she prefers her internet in megabytes per second, not kilobytes, and unmonitored. She shares her phone’s connection to her laptop instead, boots it up, and hops into the old shared chat server for the first time in what’s likely years, to leave a quick message.
She doesn’t have to ignore her unpleasant coffee for long before Rachel replies.
Shahida lingers on the screen for a moment, running two fingers idly up and down on the touchpad, scrolling through Rachel’s messages and back up into conversations Rachel and Amy had without her. Years of them.
It’s good that she’s home. She can find work around here easily, and reconnect with more people than just those in her family. Re-establish the life she ran from.
She checks the time again — closing in on half nine — and calls her mother.
“Shahida!”
“Hi, Mum.”
“Shahida, you’re spoiling me! We saw you just a few days ago—”
“You saw me this morning—”
“Yes, darling, but briefly, as one observes a raindrop or a bird in flight or a ready meal with a yellow sticker. You might even have blurred as you ran past me on your way out, you were so fast—”
“Mum—”
“It’s probably for the best. I might perhaps be overstimulated! After years and years of my only daughter being in the States I’ve become accustomed to infrequent and indifferent communication. You must give me more time to acclimate.”
“You’re so funny.”
“I like to think so,” her mother says. “Now, tell me: nothing’s wrong, I hope.”
“No,” Shahida says, leaning back on the fake-wooden bench and finding the padding surprisingly comfortable. “Remember I said I was going to see if anyone at the university knew anything about Mark’s disappearance?”
“I do, and Shahida, you know what I think about chasing him after so long. You’re only going to create more heartache for yourself. I remember when he disappeared, you were inconsolable for—”
“Mum?” Shahida interrupts. “I do actually have something specific I’ve called for?”
“Ah. Sorry, sweetheart. Don’t let your poor, lonely old mother babble away, just because the echoes are all I have to listen to in this cold, empty house.”
“Mother…”
“Do go on, darling.”
“I thought you were used to infrequent communication?”
“Can one ever get used to abject loneliness?”
“Where’s Edward, anyway?”
“Making breakfast.”
Shahida can picture the grin on her mother’s face, and rolls her eyes at it. When she’s in a playful mood, simple conversations can take forever. “Mum,” she says firmly, “I need more pictures of Mark. I only have the one with me, the one from my phone, and I found someone yesterday who might know something, but he needs a few more photos to jog his memory.” She delivers the prepared lie smoothly. It’s true that she has only the one photo — it became too painful to carry more around with her, and even then she’s lost the occasional evening to it, staring at it on her phone screen, wondering what might have become of him — and she needs a wider selection for what she has planned.
“What can I do, dear?”
“Go to my room and look in the left desk drawer. There should be a USB hard drive in there. I’d like you to email me the folder labelled ‘Mark’.”
Her mother was out of her chair as soon as Shahida mentioned her room, judging by the sounds coming down the line, and it’s not long before she’s sitting heavily back down in her seat and plugging the hard drive into the nest of adaptor cables coming out of the single free USB port on her terribly impractical laptop.
“Mark…” her mother mutters to herself while she looks through the drive. There’s years and years of files on there. “Mark… I don’t see a folder labelled ‘Mark’.”
Oh shit. Did she delete it after he disappeared? “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. There is a folder here that’s called ‘Mark’ but there’s also a less-than sign and a—”
“Yes, Mum,” Shahida says, sighing and massaging her chest and wishing she’d remembered to pick up the bloody USB drive on her way out this morning. “That’s the one.”
“Okay, dear. Just give me a second. Aaaaaand… sent!”
“Thanks, Mum.”
“Shahida, dear, what’s the password for this folder called ‘Work files’?”
“Mum, actually, I’ve forgotten.”
“Are you sure? The computer says it’s very large. Could be important.”
“No, Mum, it’s fine.”
“I’m going to image this drive—”
“No, Mum, you don’t have to do that—”
“You can’t have a single-source backup, Shahida; you know that. I’m going to image this drive and then I’ll put it all on the cloud and then, well, do you remember young Kripesh? He works for a data recovery firm now — I’ve been doing their taxes — and he can have that folder open for you in a jiffy.”
“Mum, really, it’s okay. I think I have the password written down somewhere. And don’t image the drive, please? I’ll do it this weekend, I promise.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“Mum.”
“Well, you know best, I’m sure.”
As soon as Shahida’s managed delicately to reverse out of the conversation with her mother she drops into her emails and extracts the photos of Mark to the desktop. And, goodness, there really aren’t as many as one might expect from such a long friendship. She’s got Mark bundled up in his hoodie; Mark lying on the grass in his boxers; Mark sheepish in his shirt and tank top at that final party. More group shots than pictures of him on his own. There are enough of the sort she needs, though — standing or sitting more or less upright, looking at the camera — and she drops the appropriate ones over the wifi to her phone.
If Mark really has transitioned, well, there’s an app for that…
Shahida fiddles with the results for the duration of her coffee, lightening the hair to account for the way the sun always used to bleach it, throwing on a few age filters to account for the fact that he/she will be twenty-five. When she’s finally happy she transfers them back to the laptop and arranges them on the screen, alongside the most recent untouched photo of Mark she has: him holding the NES controller in Rachel’s room, happily drunk and so pretty and carefree in his loose shirt and tank top he almost doesn’t look different enough from the manipulated pictures that surround him.
“Huh,” the girl from earlier says, as she deposits a fresh cup of coffee and collects the empty one, “she’s pretty. Girlfriend?”
“No,” Shahida says absently, “just a friend.”
She’s right, though; Mark’s beautiful. Just as he always was.
* * *
“Jesus, I look awful.”
The dingy bathroom of a chain burger joint on the A1 isn’t the best place to fix her makeup, so Melissa doesn’t bother, resolving instead to sort out her face when she gets back to the car and has access to both natural light and surfaces she can probably sterilise without overwhelming the antiseptic wipe. It explains why the girl behind the counter frowned at her when she bought her black coffee and bacon butty — absurdly, the lowest-calorie offering on the breakfast menu — and why she hasn’t attracted the unwelcome attention she usually does when she dines alone in places with lots of people coming and going; she’s pale, sickly, and the dark circles under her eyes look almost like bruises.
Just like the vampires in Shahida’s bloody video game, she remembers. Shahida spent about six months obsessed with Vampire Queens: The Seven Great Houses. She bought a 3DS just to play it; she got in trouble for levelling side characters in class; she explained the lore to her and Amy and Rachel in great detail multiple times, online, via text message and in person. She got every ending, romanced every possible character, played all the DLC. Melissa’s never touched the game herself, but she thinks that if asked she could name the heads of each house, their special moves and which gifts are key to their black and rotten hearts, just from association with Shahida.
She leans on the sink and pushes away the indulgent memory. Just another piece of her past; another thing she can never get back, and not just because of the rules of Dorley Hall.
What would Shahida think of her now?
Damn it! She thought she’d stopped crying!
Quickly she washes her hands again, wipes her face, and makes it out of the restaurant without anyone stopping her to ask if she’s okay. She knows she could swallow this if she really needed to, could find that broken piece of her that just about got her through her teenage years and that’s never quite gone away, let it harden her and take her over for the rest of the journey down to Almsworth, but Abby was right when she said not all coping mechanisms are healthy. Many of them hinder more than they help, and more still merely delay the pain, cause it to curdle and spoil inside.
Melissa locks herself in her rental car, puts on another playlist, and indulges in the memories until they recede on their own and leave her spent, dehydrated, and late.
* * *
He doesn’t know how he fell asleep. It was like someone reached into his brain and pulled out the power cord and left him to flop back onto his bed. He should have chased her! He should have demanded to know what she meant!
Except it’s obvious, isn’t it?
There’s no other possible interpretation, is there?
Fuck.
She knew. She really knew, right from the start, and pretended not to.
No, he knew. He’s not going to grant him the courtesy of the gender he claims.
Is he?
Lashing out because you’re feeling angry and isolated again, Aaron?
Fuck it. Who’s he kidding? Steph’s Steph, and no revelation, no matter how appalling, can change that. Steph’s Steph, and she’s a fucking liar.
Oh, she’s a liar, is she? Maybe she can join the club!
Poor Aaron. You’re not pissed off because she did a bad thing, are you? You’ve always assumed she did something awful to end up here, same as the rest of you, and you already decided you didn’t care. No, you’re pissed off because she did something bad to you, a man — hah; a person — who’s done enough bad things to fill a fucking spreadsheet.
Weigh the balance, boy. Sins in each palm. Weigh her shit against yours. Watch your hand fucking plummet.
“It’s not like I can just make myself okay with it,” he mutters, carefully feeling at his sore chest, stretching his aching back, all evidence of the things done to him, things she knew about all along.
He needs to talk to her, at the very least.
Yeah.
He’ll talk to her and she’ll have a reason. A good one. Even if it’s just that he, as someone bad enough to warrant erasing from the fucking world, never deserved the truth! That’s fine! She can explain and they can laugh about it and it’ll be back to how it always was, before he knew all the girls here used to be just like him; before he knew his best friend spent months lying to him; before he asked to die.
She’ll have a reason.
At least he was right that she’s trans, though. Or close enough. He’s not completely imperceptive. Which is… good? For him. Because she was too damn adaptable, too damn good at this too quickly, and yeah, actually, thinking about it, maybe she is partially to blame for his—
“Shut up, Aaron.”
Scolding himself. Whoever’s watching the camera feed will love that. He flips her the bird, whoever she is, and jumps out of bed to rummage through his wardrobe. The shirt around his chest came loose while he was sleeping and he can’t be bothered fixing it; he dumps it on the floor instead and selects his loosest hoodie.
Even with it zipped up he can see the tiny bumps on his chest in the mirror.
He meant what he said: he’s happy for her, that she’s going to be a girl; that she is a girl, really, and that this place is making it happen. She’s already wider than he is around the hip — he runs a hand down his side, pressing into flesh that’s thicker there than it was a month ago, and wincing again at the pain in his lower back — but her waist is just as narrow as it always was. He had his arm around her, earlier, and she concaved pleasingly under his hand. She’ll keep developing that way, and they’ll burn away all the wispy ginger hair on her chin and cheeks and…
And they’re going to rip her open and grind away the excess bone on her face.
He shudders.
“She wants it, you idiot; she fucking wants it.” And isn’t he supposed to be pissed off with her, anyway?
They’re going to take a scalpel to her…
They’re going to cut her open.
He’s out of his room and banging on Steph’s door moments later.
“He’s not in.”
“Fuck off, Martin,” he says automatically. Then, “What? Who?”
“Stefan. Pippa took him away.”
Aaron steps back from Steph’s door, looks Martin up and down. Another shock: he’s wet from the shower and wearing a robe open around a towel, and it makes it horrifyingly clear how much he’s changing, just like the rest of them, and that seems fundamentally fucking wrong somehow; Martin should always and forever look the way he shows up in Aaron’s memory, like someone crossed a minor, disgraced and reasonably inbred royal nephew with Snoopy.
“Okay,” Aaron says, “where did she take… him?”
The man just shrugs. It would be so, so easy to kick him in the balls, really hard. And super satisfying. And it’d probably save the girls upstairs a bit of surgery money later on, if he aims carefully enough.
“When?” Aaron asks instead.
“About ten minutes ago. Excuse me.”
It’s the work of a couple of minutes to search everywhere Aaron has access to — the bathroom, the common room, the lunch room, both corridors; the bathroom again, because he forgot to check the shower annexe the first time — and unless Steph’s hiding in the locked storeroom or Martin’s full of shit and she’s just holed up in her bedroom, ignoring him, then she’s fucking gone.
That’s it, then?
She’s just gone?
For want of anything else to do — what, like he’s willingly going to talk to Martin? like Adam has anything of interest to say? — he heads back to his room to find Maria waiting outside with a plastic cooler.
“Hi, Aaron,” she says.
“What the fuck is going on, Maria? Where’s Steph? And did you know she knew all along?”
She thumbs the pad by his door, nudges it open and walks inside, expecting him to follow. He does, and she’s already unpacking cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and bottles of water.
“I’m not hungry,” he says, kicking the door shut, once again irritated that the safety mechanism makes it impossible to slam.
“It’s after midday,” she says. “You slept in quite late.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Maria shrugs. “Fair enough.” She drops the sandwiches back into the cooler, closes it up and passes him a bottle of water.
“If you’re here for a lecture,” he says, “I’m not in the mood.”
She’s sitting on the chair, and when he drops dismissively onto the bed she rolls a little closer and cracks open her water. “I’m not here for a lecture. Just to talk. And, here, so you know I’m serious…” She swivels around on the chair, taps a key on his computer to wake it up, logs in with some key combination he doesn’t quite see, and brings up what are apparently the live feeds from all the cameras in the basement. She flips through, one by one: lunch room; common room; cell corridor, with Will just about visible, reading or watching TV on a tablet. “And here’s your room. Camera one—” the view of his bedroom disappears, replaced by a blank blue screen, “—and camera two.”
“You’ve turned off the cameras?” he says. She nods. “Okay, Maria, look, you keep taking these risks with me—”
“Am I in danger?” she asks, turning around to look at him with a raised eyebrow.
“…No.”
“Well then.”
“What are you here to talk about?”
“Stephanie. I know what she told you.”
“Yeah,” he growls with renewed bitterness, “that she’s a fucking traitor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because!” He throws his bottle, unopened, onto the bed. “Because I thought she was my friend. Because I thought she liked me! Because I…”
Going to say you deserve the truth? Fuck. No. Isn’t that the point, Aaron? That you don’t deserve anything?
“Stephanie’s motivations have always been… complex,” Maria says. “More so since she got to know you. And the requirement she keep the secret has weighed heavily on her.”
“Boo hoo,” he says, but without much feeling.
“Does she strike you as someone who would intentionally harm you?”
He doesn’t feel he can answer that without jeopardising his rhetorical position.
“I can tell you about her,” Maria says. “Everything, from how she came to find us, to the deal Aunt Bea struck with her so we wouldn’t take punitive action; everything.”
“‘Punitive action’?”
“Do you want to know or not?” Maria asks. He nods and she continues, “Okay. Don’t be afraid to ask for a break. Not all of this is going to be fun for you to hear.”
* * *
Pippa had to practically drag her out of her room, make promises that Aaron would be taken care of, talk her through every step up the stairs from the basement, but it’s all going to be worth it. Steph’s been stuck down there too long, and it’s not good for her to be surrounded by all that concrete, nor does she benefit from spending all her time around boys who seem, frankly, considerably weirder than the usual cohort. And that’s even taking the current crop of second years into account!
Steph’s safely out of the basement for now, away from Aaron and any consequences, external or self-inflicted, and that’s good and that’s fine; and if Steph’s talking to herself loud enough for Pippa to hear it from the bedroom, over the noise of the shower, that’s probably okay too. The girl’s not had enough sleep — not had any sleep, as far as Pippa can tell, fast-winding through surveillance footage of a night spent tossing, turning, crying and staring at nothing — and she’s just made rather an idiot of herself, in her own eyes; in the eyes of the boy she cares about. So she can talk to herself, she can get it all out, and when she’s done she can have a nice, calm day with the girls. No basement; no boys; no Aaron.
Christine and Paige are up for it. It’ll be just the four of them.
Ultimately, it’s good that Aaron knows at last. It’s been killing Steph to keep it from him, and Maria can deal with Aaron. She’ll give him the real story, the one she, Pippa, Christine and Abby spent a good few hours getting right a couple of weeks ago. And it’s good that Aaron hears it from Maria and not from Steph, too, because goodness knows if Stephanie had to convince her flipping breakfast of her value, be an honest advocate for her own hunger before it would let her eat it, she’d starve.
She can hear snatches through the open bathroom door:
“Stupid. Stupid. So, so stupid. You should have kept the secret, shouldn’t you? Should have protected him like you said you would. Like you promised yourself!” These last two words are punctuated by what sounded an awful lot like Stephanie stamping her foot on the tile. “But that was all vainglorious nonsense, wasn’t it? You were protecting yourself. You were afraid to get hurt. So you hurt him instead, didn’t you? You just blurted it out! Where’s your self-control? Idiot! Stupid, stupid boy!”
Okay. Perhaps that’s enough.
“Steph?” Pippa calls. “Stephanie? Are you done in the shower?”
There’s a wet slapping sound, as if Steph suddenly realises where she is and what she’s supposed to be doing, and stumbles.
“Um, maybe. Oh. Oh fuck, I’m a prune!”
“Come on out. I’ve got tea waiting, and I’ll do your face.”
She emerges a minute or so later, towel wrapped around her chest, hair wild and wet, legs still hairy. Pippa doesn’t comment; she left the shaving kit in the cubicle, but if Steph doesn’t want to shave her legs — or if she was too distracted to notice it — then all that does is slightly limit her choice of outfit.
Stephanie sets the pace, always.
“Feeling any better?” Pippa asks, pushing the little plush stool over with her foot. She’s been populating Steph’s room with nice things, dipping into her own funds when she can’t requisition something from storage; she wants it to feel homely up here. She’s already secured a promise from Aunt Bea that Stephanie won’t be required to move out into one of the smaller first-floor rooms, the ones that lack their own bathrooms, when the rest of her intake move up, so it’s worth the time and expense. The other new girls can be jealous if they want.
“A little,” Steph says, perching on the stool and dredging up a smile from someplace particularly deep inside. “Do you really think Aaron’s going to be okay?”
“Maria’s with him. She’ll take care of him. He’s started to really care about her, have you noticed?”
Steph nods, despondent. “Good,” she says quietly. “Because he won’t ever talk to me again.”
“He will.” Pippa leans over, takes one of Steph’s hands and rubs her palm. “He’ll come around. Maria knows what to say.”
“You mean, she’ll gaslight him until he comes around? That’s not better, Pip!”
Pippa bounces herself along the edge of the mattress, careful to avoid the ends of the outfits she’s laid out. “She’ll tell him the truth and nothing more,” she says.
“How can you know?” Steph protests. “She’s turned the cameras off!”
With a finger under Steph’s chin, Pippa raises her face. “Stephanie Middlename Riley,” she says, invoking their in-joke to lighten the mood, hoping for and getting the slightest of smiles, “would you say you are a particularly good liar? On today’s evidence?” Steph shakes her head. “Even if she were inclined to lie, Maria knows it’s better for both of you if you don’t have to pretend any more. She’s not going to embellish the truth and she’s not going to leave out anything big. From here on out, whether he wants to talk to you or not, you can be completely unguarded around him. No more editing. No more worrying if he’s going to see through the latest story you’ve cooked up.”
Steph’s mouth twitches. “That would be nice.”
“And don’t forget,” Pippa says, removing her finger from under Steph’s chin so she can wag it at her, “we share the blame. You’re the first completely self-aware trans woman we’ve ever had — self-aware from the very start, I mean — and you’ve become… fond of one of the boys. We’re all paddling in uncharted waters here, and we’re drawing the map and refining the, um, the design of the boat as we go.”
“You don’t think I’ve fucked it up?”
“No. Aaron’s ahead on his timeline, for sure. Normally we wouldn’t expect this level of, um, self-disgust for quite some time. The orchi was the trigger for most of us,” she adds quietly, lost momentarily in the vivid memory of Ellie, her sponsor, coming to her the morning after her operation, helping her dry the tears and handing over her morning tea in a mug inscribed with Let It Go and decorated all over with the two cherries emoji. Step one of recovery, Ellie claimed, was learning to laugh about it.
It didn’t surprise Pippa to discover she was Ellie’s first and only subject. She’s off doing something or other in New England at the moment, and Pippa’s happy for her; happier still there’s an ocean between them.
“He’s ahead on his timeline,” she recovers, “but that’s not really good or bad. And also not entirely down to you. Remember, he had a very strong reaction to Maria’s injury, once he had a chance to think about it. It was a powerful motivation for him to reconsider his attitude.”
Steph nods slowly, frowning. She’s getting through!
“He’s a very empathetic and caring person,” Pippa continues, “even though he was forced to bury it deep down. With his core exposed, with all his old excuses stripped away, he’ll find himself.” She pats Steph’s hand. “You’ll see.”
“I hope so.”
* * *
The inside of the rental car is stuffy and claustrophobic and, with the engine shut off and the near-constant rain still battering on the roof and the windscreen, rapidly becoming cold, but Melissa can’t bring herself to get out. Not yet. Because the parking lot at the far end of campus is the closest she’s been to Saints and to Dorley Hall in a long time, and the thought of opening the car door and setting foot on the pavement here again is one that’s dominated her dreams.
The path into campus from here is the one taken when you come in by bus or on foot. It’s the one Abby walked her down on her last night as Mark; it’s the one Mark walked up on his way to the city to die, music roaring in his ears.
Melissa shakes her head. That stupid, stupid boy.
It’s difficult to remember how it felt to want to die. When she tries she finds nothing but rage in her memories; rage, followed swiftly by guilt, both of them obliterating the suffocating silence with their all-consuming intensity. Rage at her mother, for not sticking around to protect her, for dying and leaving her with Dad, for labelling her the man of the house and thrusting unwanted responsibility into the lap of a bewildered kid who barely knew who he was. And guilt, born from her rage, for daring to exorcise her decaying spirit on the memory of her mother. The woman she carried with her always, in her last gift.
She ruined that, too. She stamped on her mother’s iPod as soon as she got off the bus, glad to be rid of the memories, convinced she was walking out into the last night of her life.
In the end, it was just the last night of his life.
Melissa laughs bitterly; that’s a very Dorley framing.
She knows how few Dorley girls conceptualise themselves as trans, and fewer still as having been girls all their lives. Just another way for her to be different, alone. The others were discovering someone new inside them, a vast store of potential, waiting to be explored; Melissa, by contrast, found someone who’d been buried, who’d had the life near crushed out of her. It never felt fair.
They’d thought her stuck up, but in the end she envied their joy.
At least the rain’s letting up.
She’s already redistributed the things she needs: most of her makeup kit and her burner phone are now in a pocket of her luggage, and in her shoulder bag she now carries a taser. It’s a Dorley model; Abby’s, from back when she was still a sponsor, set to Melissa’s thumbprint and couriered to her shortly after she moved up to Manchester, for protection.
She won’t need it.
She’ll just walk in and make her case. Stef doesn’t deserve this, and if they let him go he won’t tell anyone because it’d blow back on her. And, by the way, she’s left a letter for her boss, which he’ll find if she never comes back. So it’s best for everyone that she’s allowed to leave. With Stef.
She thumbs the taser into life, checks the charge level, turns it off and drops it back into her bag.
She won’t need it, but it’s best to be prepared.
She doesn’t start shaking until she’s past Café One and taking her first step onto the path that leads to Dorley Hall. Memory impedes her vision, and the night Abby brought her here seems clearer than the overcast skies of the early afternoon. Past the Student Union Bar (Mark stumbled, tired, overwhelmed, and so hungry he’d almost forgotten how it felt to be full; Abby caught him and supported him the rest of the way) and over the slight bump in the paving that marks the crossover from land owned by Saints to land owned by the benefactors of Dorley Hall (Mark paused, still confused, still asking questions and receiving evasive but reassuring answers) and up to the double doors.
Deep breath.
Here we go.
* * *
“You really think I look okay?”
“You really do.”
“I feel silly. And male. And stupid. And ugly and clumsy and—”
“Steph,” Pippa says, taking her hand again, “you look lovely.”
They finally settled on a simple outfit: a long skirt with pleats over a pair of plain leggings; a wide belt, one of several Pippa’s stocked Steph’s wardrobe with, to help define her waist; and a rather nice patterned top with a sensible neckline, which exposes Steph’s shoulders and her slender, graceful arms while flattering her underdeveloped chest.
Stephanie looks beautiful. Not that Pippa’s biased or anything, but occasionally she imagines what it would be like if they threw an end-of-basement event for all the first years, had a fancy dinner, dressed them all up, had a pageant and so on; in her imagination, even with nine months more development for the boys, Steph wins by a mile.
“Sorry,” Steph says. “No sleep. Stressed. It makes me jittery.”
“No-one can tell,” Paige says from across the table, as Pippa pats Steph’s hand. Once Steph had got herself dressed, Pippa took one look at the state of the girl’s skin and enlisted Paige to help with her makeup. She looks impeccable now — Paige even managed somehow to de-emphasise the brow bumps Stephanie hates so much — and not at all tired, except for the occasional moments when her eyes close and her head slumps forward.
Just as long as she doesn’t do it in the lasagne Christine’s fetching them.
“I really look okay?” Steph asks again.
“You’re beautiful,” Pippa whispers.
* * *
Christine’s waiting for the microwave to ping on the last of the meals she’s warming up for herself, Paige, Pippa and Steph, when a woman with a face straight out of the archives barges through the front doors, spares her a single glance and marches on through the kitchen, looking around with an expression that could be determination and could be fear.
Shit!
With a grunt of irritation Christine abandons the lunches, logs on to a laptop someone’s abandoned on the kitchen table, sets the building-wide biometric clearance to sponsors only, and starts writing the messages that will summon Abby and the other girls back from voting and the sponsors who are still around back from other parts of the building.
What a day for a general election!
* * *
Maria’s phone vibrates on the bedside table, an obnoxious enough noise even if it weren’t bumping against Aaron’s phone — and Steph’s; she left it behind in her rush to escape the room last night — that she picks it up straight away, apologising to Aaron as she swipes over the notification.
“S’okay,” Aaron says quietly. He’s sitting on the bed next to her in a sea of pillows and sandwich crumbs, and she reaches for him, to make sure he doesn’t think she’s abandoned him even for a moment. He takes her hand with trembling fingers and curls them desperately into hers.
He’s holding up okay. He’s going to make it, and she’s so, so proud of him.
Turning her attention back to the phone she reads the message, bites down on her annoyance, and taps the name at the top of the sponsor list.
Tabby picks up. “I just got the alert,” she says, all business.
“Can you take the lead on this?” Maria asks.
“Done,” Tabby says, and the line clicks off. Thank goodness for her.
Melissa’s back! What wonderful timing! At least there’s a limited amount of havoc one woman can cause. Tabitha can handle it; Maria has more important things to attend to.
“Sorry, Aaron,” she says, and he nods at her, eyes shining wetly in the low light.
* * *
“Bloody Melissa,” Tabby mutters, taking the stairs two at a time. She couldn’t have picked a more convenient time to visit? She knows that Shahida girl’s been poking around, doesn’t she? Abby claimed she told her! Said she agreed to stay up in Manchester, safe in her extended sulk! And now here she is! “Bloody Melissa. Bloody Abby. Bloody everyone!”
She’s supposed to be calling Levi tonight!
* * *
Shahida’s watched and restarted this three-second video a dozen times at least, and the more she watches, the more certain she becomes.
She’s lucky she got the video in the first place. She’d only recently gotten uncomfortable on the other seat and switched to the one that faces into campus, and she just happened to be mucking around with the face-morphing app again when the girl came striding into view. Flipping her phone into camera mode took less than a second.
Blonde hair. The right height. And very, very familiar.
Mark?
Why would she be here? It can’t be coincidence. Abby and the other girl, Christine, they must have tipped her off that someone from her past was poking around and now Mark — or whoever — has come back from wherever she’s been to do… what?
That can’t be him. Can it?
Shahida restarts the video again, pauses it at the clearest frame, a three-quarter profile which is only a little blurry, screenshots it and dumps it over to the laptop. She lines the picture up with the others that she made and some of the untouched originals.
It’s Mark.
* * *
When the emergency notification goes off and isn’t immediately picked up, Dorley-issued phones get increasingly obnoxious until their owner pays attention to them. Not usually a problem, but Rabia’s with a patient and the persistent vibration in her pocket is monumentally distracting.
She finishes up, smiles at the elderly man and exits as quickly and quietly as possible, to find a private place to tell the notification that she is busy, that they have way more people than just her on call today, and that they can bother Bella if they really want to.
Rabia makes a mental note to ask Maria to take her off the emergency rota and put her on the real emergency rota — do not call unless the Hall is sinking into the Abyss — and turns off her phone. Goes back to work.
Just lucky the emergency hadn’t kicked off an hour ago, when she was literally wrist-deep in crap. That would have been really annoying.
* * *
Stef’s a little more awake now — being on the receiving end of a well-meant lecture from Paige on how to dress a body that doesn’t yet have its full complement of curves is unsurprisingly invigorating — so she notices as soon as Paige’s eyes widen. She’s facing the kitchen and Stef isn’t, and when Pippa starts making a commotion next to her she’s almost afraid to turn around.
When Charlie, the sponsor escorting the second years at the table opposite, stands up out of her chair, though, it’s impossible not to look.
Bearing down on her table and looking about ready to strangle someone is the woman she’s seen almost every night on her phone screen, the woman she dreams of outside the Tesco at the retail park, the woman who is functionally her older sister, from way before she acquired a whole building of them.
Melissa.
She’s here!
Right fucking now!
Melissa’s frowning at her, obviously taking a second to recognise her because, sure, she looks kind of different, and then Stef realises that Melissa’s fucking looking at her and she’s looking at her when she’s like this: two months on hormones, shapeless, masculine, ugly, and stuffed into beautiful clothes made comical on her horrific, angular body.
It’s hard to move.
It’s hard to breathe.
She barely feels Pippa’s hand on hers.
All she can do is look up at Melissa.
* * *
What have they done to him? Stefan’s wearing their clothes, they’ve done something to his hair, and they’ve put makeup on him… And what the hell is he doing up in the dining hall?
Oh fuck.
She’s been away from Dorley too long, and she always stops Abby when she tries to talk shop, and they haven’t talked in months, anyway; Melissa’s just assumed the programme still functions the way it used to. Maybe they take them at some other time of year now, instead of at the start of the autumn semester. Maybe they have some kind of accelerated programme for cooperative boys. Maybe she misread the website and he’s been here a lot longer than she thought.
Maybe they’ve already operated on him.
Maybe they’ve already mutilated him.
Stefan’s standing, backing up, eyes wide and breath uncertain, and the skinny girl with the short bleached hair is supporting him, and all Melissa knows right now is that she needs to get him out of here, so she darts forward, grabs him by an unresisting forearm and drags him out of the dining hall into the maze of rooms at the back of the building, pointing her taser behind her so no-one can follow.
* * *
Christine finishes sending the last of the alerts, drops out of the secure session, closes the laptop, and near-runs into the dining hall. She skids on a wet patch of kitchen floor and has to grab the doorjamb to stay upright, and as a result enters the dining hall staggering and out of breath just in time to see Melissa bloody Haverford yanking Steph out of Pippa’s confused hands and away to the back rooms, waving a taser around as she goes. In the suddenly quiet room her breathing is the loudest noise, so all heads turn to her, Paige’s and Pippa’s and even bloody Charlie’s included, and she has a moment to thoroughly despise how everyone seems to bloody well delegate to her, even when there are actual sponsors present.
Shit! Shit shit shit.
She holds up a hand and tries to say something but it comes out as a wheeze, so she gives herself a second to get her breath back.
At a table on the other side of the room, Mia throws out a hand and yells, “Who the fuck was that?”
* * *
Abby knew they should have left earlier. The university’s sports centre has been commandeered as a polling station for Saints and all the nearby postcodes, and she and a dozen other Dorley denizens have been queueing for almost an hour now. At least the stewards look equally miserable, having spent the entire morning hiding under umbrellas or clipboards, without access to the extended veranda that plays host to bake and book sales in the summer and exclusively to a cold and miserable queue on voting day.
“Mankind was not meant to queue,” Bella says. She’s the only one of them to have had the presence of mind to bring a small folding chair along, and the group’s been moving around her as the queue moves up, shuffling her from the start to the end of their little gang of sponsors and graduates, so she doesn’t have to get up every time someone votes.
“Who are you calling ‘mankind’?” Donna says, poking at her and making her drop her phone in her lap. “We’re womankind; we’re the ones who inherit the Earth, remember? What? It’s true. I saw it in an old movie. With dinosaurs. And that guy from Thor: Ragnarok.”
“Donna,” Edy says, “either shut up or stop making me feel old.”
“Ede’s feeling the cold, dark embrace of her mid-thirties,” Bella says.
“Don’t worry, Edith,” Monica says, “we’ll never put you in a home.”
“I hate you all,” Edy says. “Not you, Abby; you’re fine.”
“Thanks,” Abby says absently.
The queue shuffles along another few people and Bella, with an irritated sigh, uproots herself and drags her chair noisily over to Abby’s position at the front of the group.
“Hi, Ab,” she says, but before she can move on to whatever she was going to say next the phone in Abby’s bag vibrates, and it takes Abby a moment to realise why it sounds so loud: all their phones are going off at once.
“Drat,” Donna mutters, quickest to check hers.
“All right, ladies,” Monica says, “that’s our cue.”
“I wanted to vote,” Bella protests.
Edy, already walking away, shrugs as she turns around. “It’s not like Almsworth was ever not going to vote for the fucking Tories. Come on.”
* * *
It’s been almost five minutes but she’s finally happy with the wording of the email: it has to seem innocent if accidentally opened early, but still suggestive enough to inspire action. Shahida reads it through one more time, nods to herself, and calls Rachel.
Voicemail. Probably better, actually. The poor girl’s likely stuck in some interminable group activity.
“Rach,” she says, balancing the phone on her shoulder as she starts packing up her things, “it’s Shahida. This might sound like I’m mucking about, but I’m not. I said I might have a lead on Mark; well, I do. I really do. I’m going to go check it out. If I don’t call again by the end of the day, open the email I’m about to send you. Otherwise, delete it without looking. Okay? Okay. It’s… twenty-five past one, December twelfth, and, shit, I forgot to vote. Never mind. I forgot to register, anyway. Open the email if I don’t call; ignore it if I do.”
* * *
Stefan offers no resistance as she drags him through the back rooms. She’s not been through here in years, but nothing’s changed — just like on the first and second floors there’s at least a dozen unused rooms and several more filled with nothing but old crap no-one could ever want. Actually, something’s changed; one of the rooms is now a mini-gym.
She keeps looking back at him. They’ve dressed him up! How dare they! He’s not wearing anything especially showy, not like the stuff she was shoved into when they first left the basement, but the long skirt and the top are unambiguously women’s clothes. Probably one of their humiliation rituals, one of the ones Abby only pretended to do with her; dress him up, note how he no longer looks like the man he claims still to be, all that crap.
They’re doing a bad job, though, because as much as she hates to admit it, he looks good.
“Wh—” Stefan says, and the effort of even that seems to overwhelm him, causes him to trip and nearly fall, and when she catches him he winces as his chest collides with her forearm. God; he’s sensitive there, and he’s sensitive there because they’re making him grow fucking tits! It takes all her willpower not to turn around, find out which one of those bitches back there is Stefan’s sponsor and slap her full in the face.
They reach the conservatory together, Melissa walking for both of them, and she deposits him on a sheet-covered chaise longue that’s seen better centuries while she looks around for an exit. She slips the taser back in her bag, keeping the grip sticking out in case she needs it in a hurry, and tries the fingerprint reader by the expansive double-glazed doors that lead out into the courtyard; it flashes red. Unsurprising. She was probably purged from the system the second she let herself in unannounced.
Still, the doors themselves look like plastic over a wooden frame. Maybe if she kicks at the lock…
She turns around to check on Stefan and can’t immediately find him because he’s no longer where she left him. Instead he’s crouched behind an old armchair, arms over his head, whimpering.
Jesus. When she’s done getting him out she’s coming back to burn this place to the fucking ground. Whatever it takes.
* * *
Tabby’s just finishing up checking the outer perimeter when Shahida, the girl who put yesterday’s cat amongst yesterday’s pigeons, comes striding up the path from campus, too fast for Tabby to duck inside and pretend not to have seen her. She tries the casual approach anyway, just in case.
“Hi,” she says, waving and holding open the main doors.
“You live here, right?” Shahida says, still approaching and talking too loud for Tabitha’s taste.
“I do. Grad student.”
“I just saw Mark Vogel walk past, on his way here. You know him?”
Yeah. Way too loud. “I do,” Tabby admits.
“Tell me about him.”
Shahida Mohsin-Carpenter’s standing off a metre or so outside the Hall, arms folded, glaring. Tabby runs through all the standard scenarios in her head, circles all that apply and discards the rest. She reread Melissa’s file last night, after everything, and she’s fairly certain the girl would take a dim view of her childhood friend being, for example, thrown in a cell, if the option’s there simply to make her a cup of coffee.
The level of disclosure’s up to Melissa, though. Unless Ms Mohsin-Carpenter does something extremely stupid. Or Melissa does.
“I can tell you about him,” Tabby says quietly, “but not out here.”
“Why not?”
“Would you want your private life discussed out in the open like this?”
The girl hesitates. “You should know,” she says, “I’ve left a message with a friend to raise hell if I don’t contact her again today.”
Stupid god damn sensible precautions. “Understood,” Tabby says, and pointedly doesn’t scream in frustration, turning instead her most placid look on the girl.
Shahida nods hesitantly, looks around — for what, Tabby doesn’t know — and consents to be led through into the kitchen. Tabby closes the doors behind them and is relieved to hear the double locks engage. Shahida hears them too, and her head whips around to glare. Tabby merely smiles in response.
* * *
Yes, she’s probably dragged Steph through to the conservatory, since it’s the room farthest from everywhere else — although what she plans to do in there is a mystery — but Christine kicks open every door she finds anyway, to check for Melissa. The job goes quicker when she realises she can deputise the gaggle of second years who are following her like a line of lost ducklings, and assigns them in twos to check all the rooms, leaving behind Charlie, the sponsor who’s been escorting them today, to keep an eye on them and liaise with anyone higher up the chain of command who might happen to pop by.
She’d love to have Paige with her, or Pippa, but Tabby already borrowed the two of them to help her manually confirm the lockdown’s in place and Christine’s the only one of the three of them who can play Dorley Hall’s security system like a grand piano. She’s already found a missing taser in the system which is almost definitely the one Melissa’s been pointing at people — it’s registered to Abby, naturally — and she’s remotely deactivated it, so Christine’s martially unimpressive physique and lack of natural fighting skills aren’t the disadvantage they might normally be in such a situation; from what she remembers from the files there’s little Melissa Haverford can do to her except be aggressively blonde at her.
She checks another door: nothing. On to the next…
* * *
It’s like he’s not even there. Stef’s shaking, he’s whiter than the dust sheets surrounding them, and he’s chewing on the inside of his cheek. But when Melissa crouches down in front of him and reaches out a hand, he jerks away in a manner that forces images into her head of the party she went to with Shahida, of the way it ended.
They must have hurt him bad if he can’t even stand to be touched.
“Stef,” she whispers, as gently as she can, “I’m here to get you out. I’m sorry they found you. I don’t know why they took you, but I think it was my fault, and I can’t let them keep you. I can’t let them do to you what I saw them do to everyone else. I just can’t. So give me your hand and together we can kick through this bloody lock before anyone comes and drags you away from me and back to—”
“I want to stay.”
It escapes from him like a curse, the hissed sibilant stretched to breaking point, and he’s looking at her for the first time since their eyes met back in the dining room, focused and sharp. She has to replay what he said a few times in her head before she gets it.
And still it doesn’t make sense.
“You want to what?”
* * *
The kitchen’s nicer than it seemed yesterday, when she took a peek through the double doors while she was putting up Mark’s poster. It’s larger, too; it can probably comfortably fit more than a dozen people around the main table, and with the chairs stacked at one end, more up against another wall, and room to stand as well as room to cook she wouldn’t be surprised if you could fit thirty or even forty people in here, in a pinch.
It’d probably get really hot, though, with the AGA going.
The Black woman, who introduced herself as Tabitha and tapped out a quick message on her phone before bustling around the room putting on the kettle and extracting mugs from a cupboard, leans on the sideboard next to the AGA and regards her with a neutral expression Shahida bets has been practised for hours in the mirror.
“That sound was the door locking, wasn’t it?” Shahida asks. Tabitha nods. So, her earlier worst-case estimation of the possible level of security implied by the effectively instant mobilisation of four different people to throw her off the trail wasn’t just paranoia, after all. “I can’t leave?”
“Not yet.”
“Can I have my things back?” she says, shifting her gaze pointedly to her bag, taken from her arm as she entered with a smooth motion she almost hadn’t noticed, and now hanging on a coat hook by the door.
“Later. Would you like a drink?”
“That depends on how safe it’s likely to be.”
The woman’s expression cracks for a moment, and Shahida marks a single victory point on her side of the board in her head, which admittedly puts her quite a way behind Tabitha, who in less than two minutes has both successfully locked her inside Dorley Hall and confiscated all her stuff.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not going to poison you. But there’s a whole other very dramatic thing happening on the other side of the building right now, and we have to deal with that before we can deal with you. We’re not the most fully staffed organisation in the world.”
“Ah, so you are an organisation of some sort!”
“We’re a privately run women’s dormitory,” Tabitha says from behind a poker face. “I’d say that qualifies as an organisation, wouldn’t you?”
“Fine.”
“Don’t go looking for ulterior motives.”
“Can I leave, then?”
“I said don’t go looking, not that there aren’t any.”
“Who are you?”
“Tabitha Forbes, thirty-two, born and raised in Southampton.”
“I’m looking you up, you know. When I get my stuff back.”
“By all means. So, drink?”
“Fine.”
“Tea? Coffee?”
“Tea.”
“Croissant?”
Shahida sighs, and the woman offers her a self-satisfied smile. “Yeah,” Shahida says, “sure. I’ll have a bloody croissant.”
* * *
“Stefan? What do you mean, you want to stay? Why would you possibly—”
Christine interrupts Melissa via the simple expedient of rushing into the conservatory with six second years and a sponsor in tow, all of whom take up positions to block the exit back into the rest of the building (Charlie) and more efficiently observe whatever the hell’s going on (all the second years apart from Faye, who steps up to stand protectively by her side; cute). As ever, despite the presence of an actual sponsor, Christine appears to be in charge; she ignores the impulse to groan.
“Melissa,” she says, holding up her hands to show she has no weapons, only a phone, “this is all just a big misunderstanding.”
Wrong choice of words. Melissa stands from where she’s been crouched in front of Steph and practically shrieks, “Misunderstanding? You took him—!”
“We didn’t,” Christine insists. “You just need to calm down, and—”
Melissa glares at her, reaches into her bag for something; Christine can guess what. “You’re his sponsor, aren’t you? You’re the one doing all this to him.”
Christine takes a step forward, aiming to put herself between Melissa and Steph. “I’m no-one’s sponsor,” she says. “I’m just a third year—” another step, “—and I’m her friend—” and another, “—and I think you’re scaring her.”
Melissa’s reply is low and quiet. “Don’t call him her.”
Steph’s loud sniff is a warning sign, and Christine quickly covers the rest of the ground needed to stand in front of her. There’s probably no need to physically protect her from Melissa — the two of them were supposedly as close as siblings, growing up — but it seems best to take the precaution, at least until everyone involved calms down.
“Melissa,” Christine says, “Steph is trans. She’s not like anyone else here, okay? She’s different. She’s different and we all know it. She’s not a prisoner. If she wanted, she could leave.”
“You’re lying,” Melissa says. “He’s innocent, he’s just a kid, he shouldn’t be here, it’s all my fault… Look at him!”
Melissa’s obviously expecting everyone to turn their heads towards Steph, because she takes advantage of the distraction to pull the taser from her bag, and even though it’s useless — assuming it is, in fact, the one Christine deactivated — it’s still a mildly intimidating thing to have pointed at her face.
And then she can’t see it, because Faye’s suddenly put herself in the way.
“Whoever you are,” Faye says evenly, “you need to calm down.”
“Yeah,” Mia says from the back of the room, barely audible, obviously talking to the girl next to her, “who the hell is she?”
“Look at him,” Melissa says again. “He’s just a boy. He doesn’t belong here. You’ve taken him in and— and— and dressed him up like a fucking—”
Steph interrupts her, interrupts what Christine was going to say, stuns the whole room into shocked silence. “Please don’t,” she says, quietly, insistently, in a voice with the pressure of intense pain behind it. “Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
“Look what you’ve done to him!” Melissa shouts, waving the taser in time with her words. “I need to get him away from you!”
Fine.
Christine turns to the second years, mostly gathered around what looks like it might be, under the dust sheet, an ancient harp. “If any of you take this opportunity to run away,” she says in her best approximation of a sponsor’s voice, “I will be really fucking cross.”
“We won’t,” most of them chorus. In front of her, Faye shakes her head.
Christine holds up her phone where everyone can see it — still not a weapon — and taps through until she finds what she’s looking for.
Behind Melissa, incredibly loud in the almost silent room, the conservatory doors unlock and swing open.
* * *
“Just so you know,” Bella’s saying as they walk up to the Hall, “if the Tories get in tomorrow, I’m going to ask for a do-over.”
“Face it, Izzy,” Monica says, holding the main doors open for the rest of them, “the last general election was terrible for the Tories and our local dickhead still got sixty-two percent. Our votes are ceremonial at best.”
“Oh my God, whatever,” Bella says sourly, buzzing open the kitchen doors.
Inside, Tabby’s got Shahida Mohsin-Carpenter sat at the kitchen table, and she moves to stand behind her and block her in when everyone approaches. It seems like an unnecessary precaution; Shahida’s calmly sipping at a mug of tea and there’s a half-demolished croissant on a plate in front of her. She has the air, Abby decides, of someone who will wait all day for answers, so long as she eventually will receive them, and thus she doesn’t feel too bad when the kitchen doors double lock behind her, sealing the girl in with the rest of them.
“Disclosure?” Monica says to Tabby.
Tabby shakes her head. “Not yet. It depends on what Melissa wants.”
“Yes,” Shahida says, “who is Melissa, and what does she want?”
“Right now?” Tabby says. “To make a big bloody mess.”
* * *
The last few minutes have been tense. They always are these days, when something involving Dorley Hall comes up, but the difference from before is that the tension seems more on Vicky’s side than on Lorna’s. It makes sense: Vicky has a whole year of bad memories there and another of merely tepid ones, whereas Lorna has integrated the Hall and the programme and the histories of some of her new friends into her worldview quite quickly.
Alarmingly quickly, Vicky said last night. Lorna responded with something like, if you can’t beat them, join them, and they had a minor argument, resolved by kissing.
But now Lorna’s phone is buzzing again, and she picks it up, dropping her half-finished sandwich back on the plate.
“It’s Tabby, this time,” Lorna says, reading from the notification and tapping to open it up.
“What does she need now?” Vicky says, frowning at her. They’d had another small fight about Lorna asking Christine to put her on the alert list, but as Lorna explained, patiently and at length, she feels obligated to help protect the Hall, the girls, and Vicky. Besides, if Dorley goes down, who’ll pay for her bottom surgery?
Vicky hadn’t found that funny. Lorna had insisted she wasn’t joking.
“Shahida’s back. And in the kitchen. Demanding answers. I think we should go.”
“You really want to?”
Lorna shrugs. “Not especially? But we do bring a genuinely outside perspective. We might be useful.”
Vicky gathers up their trash onto a lunch tray and stands, pausing beside Lorna to kiss the top of her head. “How are you already so Dorleypilled?” she whispers.
“They put drugs in the coffee,” Lorna says. “It distracts from the mugs.”
* * *
The back doors are open. Wide open. It’s an almost offensive sight, one she knows half her cohort would have done terrible things to see when they were still in Stef’s position. Even into the start of their second year, some of them, probably. She glances over; all the current second-year lot — they’ve got to be second years, considering they were eating together under supervision, and a couple still look swollen from FFS — are focused on Stef, with the exception of the loyal one, the one who put herself between Melissa and—
Oh, shit. She finally recognises the girl who’s been trying to intervene: Christine Hale. Abby’s friend! They’ve even met before, once or twice; she really is just a third year as she claimed, and one who was, the last time she and Abby talked about her, struggling a little.
And Melissa’s pointing a taser at her. More accurately, she’s pointing a taser at a bloody second year who has inserted herself into the space between them. A second year!
Well done, Melissa.
A panting, wheezing sound impinges on her consciousness, and finally she registers that Stef, still crouching down, is breathing shallow and quick and might well be hyperventilating. Christine’s comforting him, but as she looks down and he looks up she lets herself properly examine him for the first time and something in his gaze is different. He’s been running on pure panic since she saw him, and now he’s coming down.
“Stef?” she says.
“Hi, Melissa,” Stef says.
“Are you okay?”
“…Yeah. Kinda.”
“Were you serious when you said you wouldn’t leave?”
“Yeah,” Stef says. He sounds winded and he realises it, so he closes his eyes, forces a stronger, steadier breath — Christine’s careful hand on his back raises and lowers in time, and Melissa feels suddenly jealous of such sisterly intimacy — and then looks back up at her and, in a stronger voice with clear hints of resonance training, says, “I won’t run. We can go outside if you like, but I’m coming back if we do. This is my home now.”
The hissing in her ears is back, threatens to shut out the world, but she swallows, reaches out for a random bit of covered furniture on which to steady herself. She’s vaguely aware of another body piling into the room, and that’s way too many people; she’ll never get Stef away now, not without cooperation, and that’s never going to happen, not now, not after she saw her friend in girls’ clothes and just fucking lost it.
And Stef doesn’t want to leave anyway.
“Is it true? You’re trans?”
Stef blushes but doesn’t look away. “Yeah.”
“Fuck.” Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. “Fuck, Stef. I’m sorry. I’m so… sorry…”
Colours fade and hiss obliterates sound as her knees weaken and her head sways and she drops the awful little taser and she might have fainted, might have fallen and badly hurt herself, if not for the tall blonde girl who walks smartly up behind her and steadies her, loops a lithe arm around her waist.
“Got you,” the girl says.
“I’m sorry,” Melissa says again, shaking her head, consciousness slipping from her grasp, and she’s grateful to the girl holding her up because Melissa fucking Haverford or Mark fucking Vogel or whoever the fuck she is has just made another stupid, destructive and absolutely avoidable mistake, and all she wants to do is collapse.
As the blonde girl lowers her carefully to the floor one of the second years, a girl in a cat-ear hoodie, says, “No, seriously, who is she?”
* * *
The tall white girl with the dark blonde hair, the impeccable makeup and the interesting style choices returns to the kitchen and leans against the door frame. She glances quickly at Shahida, acknowledges her with a nod — Shahida finds herself nodding in return — and raises her eyebrow at the crowds of women who have been pouring into the room from all directions over the last few minutes and who have arranged themselves in a protective huddle around the exit door.
The girl catches Tabitha’s attention with a discreet cough.
“Under control?” Tabitha asks.
The tall girl nods. “Christine’s with them. Steph’s in a bad way—” she pauses as Tabitha jerks her head at another girl, shorter and bleach-blonde, who immediately exits wordlessly into the massive dining hall, “—and Melissa’s freaking out. She almost fainted. I caught her.”
“A religious experience for Melissa, I’m sure,” one of the other women calls out. Tabby waves her into silence.
“Christine?” Shahida says. “From yesterday? Her friend?” She points at Abigail, who’s been trying to hide in the crowd.
“Yes,” the tall girl says to her, before turning back to Tabitha. “Look, Tab, Christine responded as soon as Melissa arrived, alerted everyone, disabled her taser—”
“—her taser—?”
“—and calmed her quickly and effectively. And now she’s taking care of Steph. Despite Charlie being present.”
“Charlie’s priority is the safety of the second years,” Tabitha says. “I won’t fault her for it.”
“Not my point. If you’re going to have Christine constantly go above and beyond, you need to pay her more.”
“She’s still a third year. Still unreleased. She’s lucky we pay her at all.” The tall girl snorts at that, and Tabitha smiles. “That’s the official line. And it’s not our fault she keeps taking responsibility for things.”
“You keep leaving responsibilities in front of her. What’s she supposed to do, just watch as this place falls apart?”
“Excuse me,” Shahida says, leaning forward and glaring at the tall girl, “but what’s going on?”
“Tabby, have we not told her yet?” the tall girl asks.
“We have to ask Melissa what she wants,” Tabitha says.
“Right now she’s incapable of articulating anything useful.”
“Who’s Melissa?” Shahida demands. “Is that Mark? Is that his— is that her name now?”
Tabitha closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. She mutters something inaudible and then says, “Right. Fine. Okay. Everybody out! Everyone except Paige and Abby. Go on; get moving!”
She makes shooing gestures at the assembled women, who disperse, talking animatedly amongst themselves and collecting mugs, computers, phones, and other accessories on their way, leaving Tabitha, Abigail and the tall girl; Paige, presumably.
“Abby,” Tabitha says, “go find your girl. Sort her out. And keep her out of here until we’re done. Stephanie is Pippa’s responsibility; Melissa’s yours. Christine can stay or go as she pleases, but I suspect she’ll want to stay, at least until Steph is feeling better.” Abigail nods and follows the other women out, with an apologetic shrug for Shahida as she passes. “Paige? You and me, we’re doing disclosure. Right now. I’m not waiting for Melissa to get her shit together.”
Paige pushes off from the door frame and lands in a chair at the end of the table in a single, enviably easy step. She arranges herself gracefully, leaning back in the chair, hands in her lap. “I’m not happy about this,” she says to Shahida.
“Um,” Shahida says, “I’m sorry?”
“My past is my past.”
“Okay?”
“Paige,” Tabitha says, “I know you don’t have a sponsor any more and you’re only technically still in the programme, but you’re quick-witted and level-headed and you’re generally actually present, so occasionally you’ll just have to do something you don’t want to do.”
“Because you want me to consider being a sponsor next year,” Paige says.
“Nope. You’d never do it. We know.”
“Good. Pay me for doing this then.”
“Okay.”
“Ahem,” Shahida says.
Paige rolls her eyes, leans forward and holds out a hand for Shahida to shake. “I’m Paige,” she says. “Apparently I’m helping her talk you through our operation.”
“Shahida,” Shahida says, taking her hand. “I just want to know where Mark is.”
“That’s a question with a very long and complicated answer,” Tabitha says. She’s been rummaging in a bag and she pulls out a tablet. A few taps and she’s sliding it over the desk for Shahida to read.
It’s a contract, or something similar, and it’s long.
“Read it,” Tabitha suggests.
“My parents are accountants,” Shahida says, tapping at the glass. “That means they’re very nearly lawyers. If they read this, what holes will they find?”
“None. Because they won’t read it.”
Paige says in a bored voice, “You’ll find telling anyone about this is one of the things you’re about to agree not to do.”
There’s knocking on the kitchen doors as she reads, and two women are waiting out in the entryway, waving at Tabitha. They’re women she recognises; they’re the ones who came out of the dorm yesterday to ask about the flyer, the ones who started this whole mess. Or this latest phase of it, anyway. One of them’s holding up a thumb, visible through the window, and pointing at it, questioning Tabitha with her frown.
It takes a moment for Tabitha to pull out a phone from somewhere and tap away at it, and then the girls are letting themselves in.
“Hi,” the trans-looking girl says. Lorna, Shahida remembers.
“Disclosure?” the other one says, whose name Shahida has completely forgotten. She’s looking at the tablet and frowning.
“Yes,” Paige says.
“My sympathies,” Lorna says, and then walks over to Tabby, leans on the table next to her. “Can we help?”
“Actually,” Tabitha says, “yes. I’m parched, and I bet Shahida and Paige could use a drink. Milk and sugar, if you would.”
Shahida, caught even in this situation in the trap of politeness, reaches for her mug from earlier and finds it gone; swept up by the sea of women when they left for other parts of the building, presumably. She shrugs, names her tea preference, and carries on scrolling.
“I meant more like, with disclosure,” Lorna says, although she starts filling the kettle anyway. “I do have relevant experience.”
“Would you be happy with that, Victoria?” Tabitha asks. The other girl, Victoria, shrugs. “Then, yes, please, stay and help us out.”
“I don’t especially enjoy being the only exhibition,” Paige says drily, and that’s such a mysterious comment that Shahida returns to reading the document. Most of it’s concerned with keeping secrets and the consequences of failing to do so. Some of it is rather ominous. She barely notices when Lorna sets her tea down in front of her.
“Sorry about the mug,” Lorna says. “It’s the least appalling one I could find. Tabby, where do you even keep the normal ones? I know you have some.”
“Cabinet on the other side of the fridge,” Tabitha says.
Shahida looks up from the tablet again, to inspect the mug. It says, in cursive and surrounded by lipstick kisses, Be the Girl You Want To See in the World (or Else!).
Strange, strange place.
* * *
“What’s going on up there?”
He doesn’t mean to just blurt it out. He’s been trying to listen as quietly as he can, because the story of Steph’s life, as assembled by the sponsors, hasn’t seemed like something he has any right to comment on. His anger, already a sputtering flame, went out when she played him the surveillance from Steph’s cell, from one of her first nights here, showing Pippa giving what he now realises is a standard introductory spiel on the evils of masculinity and the generically awful things he was assumed to have done with his privilege and his body.
When it had been his turn, Aaron received the lecture with jovial confusion, with the same shield of passive-aggressive bullshittery he always puts up — that he always used to put up — when he’s in a situation he can’t control. Maria’s words had been water off a duck’s back; he remembers assuming this was all for the Psychology department or something, and he’d be getting a cheque and a glare and some grudging thanks for doing his part to portray the incorruptibility of the male ego.
Steph, in the video, takes it like an attack. She doesn’t cry, like he assumed she would, like he expected she would, given Maria was showing him the footage as the opener in her attempt to mollify him; she seized up, and that was much worse. Maria narrated, made it clear to him that this wasn’t simply the reaction of an innocent to an accusation of guilt; this was someone for whom masculinity had been a suffocating chain around her neck being casually and cruelly informed that she had in fact wielded it with pleasure and satisfaction as a weapon; someone whose body had for her whole life betrayed her having her body used against her. Aaron was unavoidably reminded of the morning she turned the shower water up too high, tried intentionally to hurt herself, and he had to ask Maria to pause the playback so he could get himself under control. Back then, helplessly reaching for her in the showers, he hadn’t known what he was seeing.
He should have.
He used to follow a few trans women on social media. He followed a lot of women on social media! Mostly women who posted porn! He was — past tense — a growing boy, and growing boys have needs! And while none of the trans women he followed ever posted videos discussing dysphoria, they wrote about it occasionally, had discussions with other women that he happened to see. He wondered at the time what it felt like, and since he found out what the programme was about, he’s been idly waiting to feel it for himself. But he’d never really recognised it until today, when he watched Steph react to Pippa’s lecture like an insect under a blowtorch, when he remembered how she tried to hurt herself.
So, no, he doesn’t feel like he has a right to talk back. But Maria’s called for a break and she’s checking her phone again and if he doesn’t fill the silence with something he’ll fucking lose it because he can’t stop thinking about all the times he treated Steph like a guy, and all the times she played up to it; how much did it cost her?
At school, he was targeted a lot. Not every day, but constantly and consistently, and in his experience the banality of repetition dulls the senses. By the time he left that school it felt like he’d protected himself so well he barely felt the pain; he barely felt anything. It took until Maria, Steph and Indira to open him back up again.
He sees that in Steph. In the video. And in the other videos from earlier in the year, where she’s reduced. She’s less. She’s a creature of survival. And he understands that the woman he’s met just recently, the one absurdly full of life despite the dingy fucking basement they find themselves in, the one who seems inexplicably to like him, is the woman who was always there. Hiding. Protected. Unable to be herself.
He’d go to her right away, had he the ability. He needs to talk to her.
“What’s going on, Maria?” he says again.
She sighs, but looks up from her phone, meets his eyes, and that same compassionate smile, the one he’s become used to and almost dependent on, lights her face. She reaches out a hand for him and he takes it, thinking there was perhaps a time when he would have felt ashamed to be so nakedly needy, and deciding that such shame is obviously incredibly fucking stupid.
“It’s a crazy day,” she says. “That, in itself, is not unusual. When you run a place like this, you get used to crazy days.”
“How crazy?”
“Today, on a scale of one to ten, is perhaps a six. Maybe a seven.”
“What’s happening?” When she doesn’t immediately answer, he continues, not entirely sure that he should but feeling obliged to ask and even a little freed by the concept that he can ask, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Her smile deepens. “What you can do,” she says, “is finish your water and have another sandwich. Upstairs can take care of itself; you’re what’s important to me, and you’ve barely eaten.”
He nods, and tries his best to feel important, and she passes him another cellophane-wrapped package from the cooler.
* * *
The second-year sponsor, Charlie, finishes clearing out her charges from the conservatory — with Christine exchanging hugs with her defender, a girl called Faye, who glares at Melissa on her way out — and promises no interruptions for the time being.
“Just close the bloody doors, would you, Christine?” Charlie says, lingering in the doorway. “It’s December. Nice to see you again, Melissa.”
Is Melissa supposed to know her? Was she a sponsor while she was here? Year above? Year below? This is what happens when you isolate yourself. She waves anyway, and tries not to look as embarrassed as she feels; Charlie smiles and follows the second years out.
“Fuck,” Melissa says, and leans back on the unidentifiable antique furniture that’s supporting her.
“Yeah,” Christine says. She’s squatting next to Stefan. Next to Stephanie. And holding her hand. Something Melissa should probably be doing, if she hadn’t created the whole situation in the first place. “Agreed. What happened? Why’d you come barrelling in here with a bloody taser?”
“Oh God. I’m sorry about that.”
“Melissa, you are far from the first girl to point a taser at me. You wouldn’t have cracked my top fifty most traumatic memories even if I hadn’t remotely disabled it.”
“I’m still— Wait. What?”
“Try it.” Christine fishes Abby’s taser out of her pocket and slides it across the wooden floor. The conservatory’s not been cleaned much and definitely hasn’t been polished for a while, so Melissa has to get up and take a few unsteady steps in order to pick it up. She notes, with a little relief, that Stephanie doesn’t flinch when she comes closer this time. Not like earlier.
She thumbs the biometric sensor; it flashes red. “Huh. You did that?”
“Remember how I opened the back door with my phone? I’m running security around here.”
“Ah.”
“She could do that even before they gave her the job,” Stephanie says, and she sounds unsteady, uncertain, and her voice — which she’s clearly still training — cracks on the last word. “She’s really good.”
Christine hugs Stephanie, kisses her briefly on the temple. “Just rest, sweetie,” she whispers. “You can talk me up to the older girls later.”
Stephanie nods, closes her eyes.
“She had a hard night,” Christine explains. “No sleep.” She looks up as the skinny bleached girl enters the room. “Hey, Pip; how’re things out there?”
“Insane,” the girl says. “Same as always. Steph, are you okay?”
“I would like to sleep for a million years, please,” Stephanie groans.
“Will you, actually, if I put you to bed?”
“Probably not.”
Christine mouths, She’s really wired.
“Well—” the girl crouches down next to Stephanie and offers her arms; Stephanie supports herself on the girl and on Christine, who mirrors the action on the other side, “—let’s at least get some food in you.”
Between them they lift her up onto her feet, and Melissa’s just wondering if there’s anyone around who can do the same for her when Abby rounds the corner and stops dead in the entrance, locking eyes with her.
“Hi, Abs,” Melissa says, mouth dry.
Abby shakes herself. “Hi. How are you?”
“Fucking things up. You?”
“I’m okay.”
“Pip,” Stephanie says, yanking Melissa’s attention back to her again, “I don’t want to eat in the dining hall.”
The skinny girl, Pip, exchanges looks with Christine and says, “What about the kitchen on the second floor? It’s quiet, especially at this time of day, and we can send Melissa up in a little bit.”
Stephanie nods and Pip helps her out of the room. She smiles at Melissa on her way past, embarrassed, and Melissa does her best to smile back, still scarcely able to believe that Stef’s here. And that she wants to be.
Christine follows them, and then Abby and Melissa are alone.
“Oh, Liss,” Abby says, sitting down next to her and coaxing her into a hug, “what are you doing?”
She wants to say, she panicked. She wants to say, she spent all day yesterday anxious about Dorley Hall, she’s spent months trying and failing to find a life after severing her last remaining connection to the place, she’s spent years trying to decide who she really is and what she really wants and failing at both. She wants to say, she let paranoia and anxiety and trauma lead her into a stupid decision. She wants to say, she should have called, she should have known Aunt Bea wouldn’t really have done the things she feared, she should have remembered how much of it’s an act, how much lenience and goodwill the programme extends towards its graduates. She wants to say, she’s overwhelmed and tired and scared of what it means to be back here. She wants to say, she doesn’t know whether she’s terrified for Stephanie or terrified of what it means that she, a supposed trans girl, absolutely hated a good third of her time here while Stephanie’s already lunching with sponsors and third years and dressing nicely and calling the fucking place her home.
She wants to tell Abby how good it is to see her again, how she feels almost whole again with her in the room, how all her efforts to rip out the parts of her that belong to Abby were always doomed, always futile, always stupid.
She wants to do anything but fall into the embrace of her former sponsor, former lover, former best friend, and cry, but that’s the thing she needs most right now and it’s the only thing she’s really capable of, and as Abby’s arms protect her, as her adoring whispers soothe her, she forgets everything else for a little while, and wonders why she ever left her in the first place.
* * *
“You have to stop interrupting, or we’re never going to get anywhere.”
“I’m not interrupting, I’m just — does anyone have another colour of pen? thanks — I’m just making sure I have everything straight.”
“You know we can’t let you take that pad out of here, right?”
“Yes, but writing things down as we go helps me focus, it helps me remember. So, Tabitha, you were saying?”
This is turning out to be one of those days that feels like it’s never going to end, and considering tomorrow’s likely to deliver a Tory majority and probably a third consecutive minor disaster for the Hall, Tabby’s seriously considering doing a Melissa and moving halfway up the country and pretending to be a cis girl with a large and completely unsuspicious gap in her resume and a nice innocent hobby, like collecting bobblehead dolls or raising chickens or something.
“I was giving you the long version,” she says, “and you kept interrupting, so here’s the short version: we take young men, generally between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five but occasionally down to eighteen if we feel it’s justified, who are on highly destructive paths and who are unlikely to reform, and we…” She waves a hand. “We make women out of them.”
“And that helps, does it?”
Shahida’s taking it in stride, which Tabby might have been surprised by, but then she’s already seen off Abigail’s ham-fisted attempt at placating her, she’s literally seen Melissa’s face — she made Tabby unlock her phone and watch the video she took — and she’s just recently watched a houseful of busybody weirdos close ranks around her. Not much of a leap, really.
“It’s not just any bad boys,” Paige says. “We don’t bring in shoplifters or bank robbers or art forgers—” Tabby controls a smirk as, across the table and behind Shahida’s back, Vicky mouths Art forgers? to Lorna, “—because such things are rarely motivated by toxic masculinity.”
“Toxic masculinity?” Shahida says, pausing in her note-taking to look quizzically at Paige, who looks quizzically right back and thus at least partially defeats her. “That’s your excuse? Do you kidnap men for explaining women’s jobs to them on Twitter?”
“Violently destructive masculinity, then,” Paige says. “It manifests differently in different boys, so if you’re looking at all of us and picturing rapists, don’t.”
“We don’t bring in unrepentant rapists,” Tabby says, “as a rule.”
“But,” Shahida says, “to be clear, you—” she points at Paige, “—are a former bad boy?”
“I am,” Paige says, “but, again, be careful what you are picturing.”
Shahida frowns at her. “I’m not picturing anything, particularly.”
“Good.”
“So everyone here is a, uh, a bad boy turned good girl?” Shahida looks around the table, her gaze landing on Lorna.
“No,” Lorna says. “I’m a good girl turned very annoyed girl. And, look, Shahida, Dorley doesn’t take in monsters and it doesn’t take in angels. It mostly selects for young men who have been, frankly, damaged by hegemonic masculinity and the dangerous and often contradictory demands it makes on the growing psyche. Now, I’m not a man — I was never a man, and I’ll thank you to remember that — but as someone who had to pretend to be one until I escaped my godawful mother I understand what it’s like to be profoundly unsuited to the roles made available to ‘young men’—” she finger quotes and Tabby swallows to keep from laughing at her pomposity, which would be terribly rude considering how helpful she’s being, both in lecture and affront, “—and how violent and coercive an experience it can be attempting to conform to them, even if only as a disguise. One I wore exceptionally poorly, by the way. It’s like putting a mouse in a maze and rewarding it with food only when it finally consents to bite the other mice. After a while, after enough behavioural reinforcement, the only way to fix it is to—” she mimes picking up a struggling animal, “—lift it out of the maze altogether. Radically change its whole context.”
“We should talk more, Lorna,” Paige says.
“This is ridiculous,” Shahida says, dropping her pen on the table in frustration. Huh; maybe not entirely in stride, then.
“You know what?” Lorna says. “I said exactly the same thing. I found out about this place, shit, how long ago?”
“Last Monday,” Vicky says.
“Seems longer. I found out about this place really recently, and I thought it was completely and totally fucking bananas. And I was ready to burn it down, I really was. Even after the NDA and the legal threats and all that crap. Because my girlfriend comes from here, and she’s the sweetest, kindest, most generous-hearted person I know, and the idea, the very idea that she could have been what they were telling me she once was? I didn’t just find it offensive; it was a— a— a fucking violation. But you know what? The people who are brought here are often as much victims as they are victimisers, only they need the kind of help no-one else can provide and, God fucking damn it, I had to face up to the fact that it works. Yeah, sure, it wouldn’t work for everyone, and yeah, the process can be—” she leans against Vicky, and the two of them exchange a glance Tabby looks away from, “—difficult, but it works. It takes boys who’ve been hurt, really badly hurt, and who are turning that hurt out on other people, who are potentially building up to something really, really awful, and it saves them. First it saves other people from them, but then it saves them from themselves.”
Vicky holds up a hand to attract Shahida’s attention. “I don’t like to talk about this,” she says, in a voice so quiet everyone else at the table leans forward to hear it better, “but that was me. I was the boy who was going to go off. A lot of us were. My best friend, Christine, she was lashing out, too. Differently to me, but she was. And she was saved.”
“Me too,” Paige says.
Tabby’s about to try to bring the conversation back on topic — drifting into justifications is a temptation she can understand, but collectively they have enough that they could spend all day on them — when Christine enters from the dining hall, walks up behind Paige and leans down to kiss her girlfriend on the top of her head.
“My ears are burning,” Christine says.
“Oh, it’s you,” Shahida says. “From Egg Nation. Does that mean Abigail is a former boy, too?”
“Most of us are. It’s just a thing you have to get used to around here.” Christine directs her attention back down towards Paige, kissing her again, and that’s good, no, that’s great. Vicky and Lorna are, understandably, still a little highly strung, but Christine and Paige are a picture-perfect couple, beautiful and caring and reasonably normal-seeming; the ideal advertisement for the programme. She glances over at Shahida and is pleased to see her watching with interest and… envy?
“Hi,” Paige says, leaning to the side so she can kiss Christine on the cheek.
“You okay?”
“Been better. I don’t like talking about it.”
“I know. I have to take some meals upstairs, okay? And then I’ll be right back down.”
Paige mumbles something which makes Christine giggle and nuzzle her nose in Paige’s hair, and Tabby hides her smirk behind her coffee mug — rather unfortunately printed, in the style of the logo for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with the phrase Feminising Torture Basement, and she subtly checks to make sure the logo’s on one side only; it is, thank goodness — because the two of them are behaving so much like she would wish them to, she almost wonders if it’s deliberate.
Christine props her head on top of Paige’s for a moment, and says, “By the way, Shahida, a lot of us are quite sensitive about our pasts, so I’d be careful throwing around phrases like ‘former boy’. We’re making ourselves extremely vulnerable for you; please try to remember that.”
It’s fortunate Paige picked the seat she did; only Tabby can see Christine’s hand clenched into a fist under the table. Being so open about her status is costing her. It’s costing all of them. They’re all still so new, she remembers; they don’t have Tabby’s long years of cynicism shielding them. Fuck it; everyone’s getting a bonus for this. Well, all the ones on Dorley’s books, anyway. Lorna can get an extra operation or something. Maybe she’d like perkier tits.
“Anyway,” Christine says, and kisses Paige one final time before pushing up and heading for the fridge, “it was lovely to meet you, Shahida. Didn’t mean to interrupt.” She rummages in the fridge for a moment, extracts some tupperware, and carries a wobbly pile of the stuff carefully back out into the dining hall, presumably planning to microwave it all upstairs.
“Where were we?” Tabby says, before anyone else can say anything. “Yes, our intake procedures. Now, Shahida, I’ll let Melissa tell you her story in detail if she so chooses, but she was enrolled on November fourth, twenty-twelve. A very late admission, but it was the judgement of her sponsor that she constituted an urgent case. She would very likely have died by her own hand if not for our intervention.”
To her surprise, Shahida nods, but then they knew each other reasonably well, didn’t they?
“Should I be thanking you, then?” Shahida asks.
“That,” Tabby says, “is another question you should ask Melissa.”
* * *
“I’m all wet. ‘How do you know you’re back at Dorley, Melissa?’ Oh, because I’m hiding in a dark corner, crying. It’s a clue.”
“Tissues,” Abby says, passing over a handful. “Blow.”
“Be honest: how fucked up is my face right now?”
“Blow. We’ll unfuck your face in a minute.”
Melissa makes a noise that echoes unpleasantly off the glass conservatory doors, and drops the used tissue into a plastic bag Abby’s silently holding out. She takes another, wipes down her eyes and cheeks, and disposes of it.
“Thanks,” she says.
“Thank me later,” Abby says, dabbing at still-damp spots on Melissa’s face. “You’ve got people to see. You want to go get ready? Christine’s left the back stairs unlocked; we can go all the way up to my room without seeing anyone.”
Melissa nods, and accepts Abby’s help to stand.
She confessed, wetly, to the chain of logic that brought her to this point, and Abby, charitably, didn’t point out how incredibly stupid it was; it sounded even worse when she came to say it aloud. Instead Abby gave Melissa the rundown on exactly how much she messed everything up: Stephanie’s upstairs, being calmed down by her sponsor — “She’s sort of her sponsor, anyway; it’s a long story, and I’ll let her tell it.” — and, worse, Shahida’s in the kitchen. Abby overheard Tabby announcing that she and Paige were going to do disclosure, so by the time Melissa sees her again, she’ll know the whole sordid truth.
At least she doesn’t have to tell it.
On the way upstairs she gets a summary of how Stephanie ended up here, and it’s almost too much to hear until Abby reminds her: Stephanie’s trans, she wants this, and it’s both Christine and Pippa’s opinion that stumbling into Dorley’s only slightly spiky embrace, despite her initially incorrect assumptions, probably saved her from something much, much worse.
She really was a lot like me, then.
Up in Abby’s room she cleans up and borrows some fresh clothes. She doesn’t put on makeup, despite Abby’s urging; her hands are still shaking a little too much.
“Food,” Abby diagnoses, and leads her down to the kitchen on the second floor, where Christine’s left a lunch for her in the fridge.
Before they turn the corner Melissa halts them both, gathers both of Abby’s hands in hers and holds them in front of her chest. “Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you for always putting me back together.”
“Always,” Abby says, and they kiss, awkwardly, both of them going for the lips and then reconsidering, but it’s fine, it’s sweet, and they laugh and hug and then Abby pulls her by her clasped hands around the corner to the place where Stephanie’s eating something that smells absolutely delicious.
Melissa lingers in the doorway. “Hi,” she says, nerves still piling up, aware that of all the reintroductions she could have made, she picked perhaps the worst in the history of the Hall. Certainly she’s never heard of anyone else charging back in, years after graduation, and trying to steal a first year.
Stephanie, to her relief, has a smile for her, and nods at one of the chairs. Melissa sits while Abby starts the microwave going.
“Let it stand for two minutes when it’s done,” Abby says quietly, though neither Melissa nor Stephanie is actually talking, just watching each other. “I’ll be around the corner with Christine, in her room, if you need either of us.”
“Hi, Melissa,” Stephanie says, when they’re alone. Her voice sounds less strained than it had downstairs. “I’m sorry for how I reacted.”
Melissa’s grateful she doesn’t have her lasagne already, or she would have choked. “How you reacted? Stef— Stephanie—”
“Just Steph is fine,” she says, interrupting. “I’m not sold on Stephanie yet? Although,” she adds, grumbling, “I think everyone else is. I was just trying it out!” she protests, to the air.
“Just Steph,” Melissa says. “Gotcha. Look, Steph, can we do something? Can you just put your fork down for a minute?”
Stephanie complies, frowning, but doesn’t comment when Melissa stands up out of her chair. She gets it when Melissa tugs on her sleeve, and pushes her own chair back, standing — still a little unsteadily — to accept the hug.
It’s like going back seven years. More. It’s all the things they never said, all the times they never held each other like sisters would; it’s all the moments of affection that made them both ashamed, because boys weren’t supposed to behave that way, and because Steph’s mum would scold them if she caught them hugging.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Melissa whispers, and Steph’s grip on her tightens. She hears her wince, just a little, but the girl — and, God, doesn’t that feel good; the girl — just giggles at it this time. Still getting used to being sensitive up there.
“I’ve missed you too,” Steph says.
They’re well-matched in height, with Steph a little taller — she must have grown quite a lot since Melissa left — and that just makes it more like hugging a sister.
“Seven years I missed,” Melissa says. “You’ll have to tell me all about them.”
“They weren’t all super fun.”
“Just the good bits, then.”
“Deal.”
She can almost feel Steph’s pulse through her thin clothes, and it’s magical. The sweet little boy she used to tutor. The girl she’s excited to get to know. A piece of her past she never thought she’d get back, right here in her arms, vibrant and smiling and alive, and healing in all the ways she needs to. And if today could have gone better, well, it could have gone a whole lot worse, and Melissa’s doing nothing but counting all the blessings that have returned to her.
And then her lasagne’s done, and the ping of the microwave breaks the moment.
* * *
There’s a knuckle stroking his wet cheek and a palm cupping his jaw and he’s not ever felt so vulnerable, not even with Steph. But he’s safe with Maria, and whatever else she might do to him, she really does want what’s best for him, and even if it conflicts absolutely with what he always thought he wanted out of life there’s a relief in letting go, a freedom in giving your life over to someone who has a plan for it, and if she’s going to love him like a sister, then so be it.
He knows about Steph now. All about her. And while it doesn’t change the fact that she lied to him, Maria’s point is and was completely clear: what, ultimately, would have changed?
And he’ll accept comfort from Maria, who put him here.
He swore at Maria a few times when she pointed that out, and she pushed his head back down into her lap. Made him silent again, and asked him if he’d have done anything different if he’d known she was keeping the secret. Would he have let Declan attack her? Would he have left her on the floor of the shower room, scalded and shaking?
No.
No. Obviously not.
Well then.
He swore at her again.
And she pushed him back down again and they spoke of boundaries. And initially he was dismissive: they’ve talked about this before; he’s read extensively on the subject in the books she gave him; as an experienced boundary violator (retired) he’s an expert. But she kept talking. And eventually she posed the question that unravelled him.
What does it mean to have your boundaries violated?
She talked about them like they’re the walls and locked doors of your house, how everyone to a greater or lesser extent lives inside an illusion of comfort and safety, how especially women and most especially marginalised women — women of colour such as her; trans women such as her, effectively; disabled women and gay women and immigrant women and traveller women — are more aware of the transitory nature of the illusion than men generally are, but that the truth is that anyone can smash a window or break down your door or drive a vehicle through your wall and expose you, blow your fucking house down, little pig, leaving you alone and without even the fragments of illusionary protection remaining.
And she didn’t have to tell him the rest because it was suddenly so obvious and so inescapable what he did to those women, what he took from them, and more importantly what he left them with; in their lives, on their campus, in their lectures was a man prepared repeatedly and without apparent shame to violate their boundaries. And why wouldn’t you fear such a man? Why wouldn’t you watch for him around every corner? Why wouldn’t you change your life to avoid him? Because here is a man who knew who they were, who hurt them for no more reason than his own satisfaction, and who might on any random night decide harassment isn’t enough for him any more.
All those women, waiting for him to escalate.
Blow your fucking house down.
He doesn’t know this. He can’t know that, say, Paula Conrad stopped leaving her flat because she was scared he might come looking for her. But she might have done. Any of them might have done! Any of them might have stayed home or dropped classes or dropped out or put their whole lives on pause for fear of him. And even if none of them did, even if all of them tried to put him to the backs of their minds and continued about their lives as normal, he’d still invaded them in a manner more repulsive than he ever realised, than he ever considered, even after he came to Dorley.
He thought he knew what he’d done. He thought he knew why he was here. He thought he knew the man he’d become, the thing they’re trying to excise. But he hadn’t even the slightest idea until today.
“It’s okay,” Maria says, stroking his cheek. She’s still sitting cross-legged on his bed; he’s still lying lengthways, his head in her lap. “It’s okay.”
He’d tell her it’s not, that it never will be, that these will always be the things he’s done, that to set himself up as someone who can judge anyone for anything is ludicrous, but his breaths are coming out in gulps and hiccups and every time he thinks back to something he did, something he laughed about, something he joked about, he wants to just fucking—
Her hand stills on his jaw as if she can tell what he’s thinking, and he knows without her having to tell him that she wants him to get through this, that she needs him to, that what he asked for last night and what he desperately wants to ask her for now is not something she’s ever going to provide for him, because she wants him to live, she wants him to change and grow and, yes, germinating inside him is the faintest hint of determination that he just fucking might, because if the man who came here is someone who could do that to people, over and over, then he’s not content to wait for Maria to take his hand and drag him away from his past; he’s going to take those steps himself. Cautiously and reluctantly because he still doesn’t know how he’s going to do it, how he’s going to become someone he can survive, but he’s going to do it. Because fuck that guy.
And Maria’s going to love him like a sister.
As she whispers reassurances to him, as he gasps for air through the heaving of his chest, as he looks back on his life with disgust, he understands finally that last night wasn’t the end, wasn’t the point of no return; this is.
He doesn’t know how long he lies in her lap, her hands surrounding him, creating a cradle for him, but she knows when it’s over before he does. She releases him with a final, gentle caress of his cheek and he sits up, skin stretched dry and salty, lungs aching, head almost clear.
She smiles and opens her arms to him and he shuffles along the bed and accepts her, wraps his arms around her shoulders, returns her affection as someone who might one day be considered her equal.
“Maria…” he whispers. It’s all he has.
Not a bad place to start.
* * *
Stef knew Melissa would be beautiful. She didn’t expect her to be so sad, and when first she saw her again she really was as miserable as she’s ever seen anyone, but when they come up from one of the longest hugs she’s ever had and Melissa’s face is shining with tears but smiling — and giggling at how inappropriate it is that their reunion’s been interrupted by her bloody dinner — her joy is infectious and Stef can’t stop herself from kissing her quickly on the cheek before she finishes untangling herself and sits down again.
After all this time. There she is. Giddy and graceful and nervous and shy and blowing delicately on the lasagne on her fork. And it’s actually reassuring that she came charging back into her life on the wings of a huge misunderstanding, knocking from its pedestal the unrealistically serene image of her that Stef’s been nurturing for so many years. Better that Melissa’s a disaster, like her.
But people do keep interrupting them, and while it’s sort of fun to see Melissa exposed to Jodie’s bubbly stream of consciousness, Stef would rather have her to herself for a little while longer.
“I can’t believe you just… go places,” Melissa says, as Stef thumbs them out onto the stairway. “I couldn’t get out here on my own until my third year.”
“What about when I saw you outside Tesco that one time?”
“When was that? January? That might have been my first time out alone. Well, almost alone. And Abby was waiting for me. And I was only allowed because I’d been—” her voice becomes bitter, “—so good.”
They climb in silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry it was so hard for you here,” Stef says, buzzing them out onto the top floor so they can cross over the hall to the roof stairs. She walks them quickly, hoping they won’t run into anyone she knows.
“I made it hard for myself, honestly,” Melissa says, after the metal fire door leading to the roof stairs closes behind them. “I sort of did what you did, but the stupid version.”
Stef pushes open the roof door and checks they’re alone — they are — before continuing. “You knew about this place before you came here?”
“No, but it didn’t take me long to work it out. I hid it, though. From everyone, including Abby, as much as I could. Not recommended.”
Someone’s been hard at work prepping the roof of Dorley Hall for winter: the plastic-covered couches that have for a while been squatting on a tarp in the middle have acquired another tarp above, spread out over the brick pillars that mark the edges of the gravel square, the one Christine’s described to Stef as being ‘fake zen’. A few smaller waterproofed areas have been set up around some of the benches at the edges of the roof, with tarps hung from light fittings and rocks sewn into one end, so today’s ever-present rain has somewhere to go, and it’s to one of these that they hurry, their steps lit more by the dim roof lamps and the tacky neon sign on top of the Student Union Bar more than by the dark and overcast sky.
“You want to talk about it?” Stef asks, brushing off the bench and sitting down.
Melissa joins her, shaking her head. “Nah. Maybe some other time? I still need to get myself situated, sort out where I’m staying tonight, move my rental car to the parking lot near the lake, grab my stuff, email my boss, all that kind of stuff. And I need to set aside a good half-hour to really freak out over how much I embarrassed myself today.”
Stef leans over, finds Melissa already leaning into her, and they rearrange themselves on the bench so they can stay in contact. Neither of them has a jacket; they’ll need each other’s body heat to stay warm.
“You can stay in my room,” Stef says.
Melissa snorts. “No offence, Steph, but I don’t want to spend the night in the bloody basement.”
“No, no no,” Stef says, waving her free hand, “I mean my other room.”
“Your other room?”
“I have one on the first floor, with the second years. It’s got its own bathroom and you can access the kitchen and dining hall and everywhere.”
Melissa doesn’t say anything for a second, and when Stef looks over she’s biting her lip, her cheeks are going red, and she’s clearly trying to keep herself from laughing. “You have your own first-floor room? And you’ve been here two months?” Stef nods. “God. I made the wrong decision. I should have come out to Abby. Think of the perks I missed out on!”
“I mean, there’s a little more to it than that. Beatrice was kinda scary when they first found me out.”
“Hah. Yeah. She does that. It’s an act. Mostly an act.” Melissa frowns. “It’s an act until it’s not. But she never really turned that shit on me, and she’ll likely never turn it on you.” She shakes her head a couple of times and then leans on Stef’s shoulder. “I was so fucked up about her for the longest time.”
Stef nods, carefully, so as not to disturb her. It’s more intimate here, despite the cold, despite the openness; there’s a curtain of rain around them, there’s soft light from the lamps, and there’s their little circle of warmth. Seven years vanishing in a heartbeat. Mark and Stefan; Melissa and Stephanie. The way it was always supposed to be.
The way it’s going to be forever.
“I never actually came up here before,” Melissa says softly. “It’s nice.”
“This is my first time,” Stef confesses. “Christine likes it up here, though. She comes up here to not smoke. She says it’s like a bigger, bougier version of somewhere she used to hang out when she was a— ugh, you know, when she was a teenager.”
Melissa smirks. Stef can feel her cheeks round out against her neck. “You get hung up on it, too? How to talk about the other girls’ former lives?”
“Mostly I don’t talk about it,” Stef says. “Pippa, my sponsor, she’s told me about her past, but only the once. It doesn’t seem important, you know? It’s like fixating on what subjects someone did at GCSE when they’re an adult.”
“It’s still weird that you say stuff like ‘sponsor’. That you know Dorley terminology. I’ve always thought of this place as drawing a hard line between my old life and my new one, and now here you are, talking about sponsors and having bloody roof access. I’m actually really proud of you, Stephanie.”
“I didn’t want you to see me, you know,” Stef says suddenly. “Not yet. I didn’t think I was ready. And I was worried what you’d think of me.”
Melissa leans away, looks at her. “What did you think I would think of you?”
A shrug. “I don’t know. That I’m a bad person for cooperating with the programme? That I’m weak for choosing the cheery concrete girlboss torture box instead of transitioning out in the real world? That I’m—”
“I’m sorry,” Melissa says, taking Stef’s hand to take the sting out of her laughter, “the cheery concrete what?”
“It’s what Aaron calls the basement. Or variations on that theme. God. Fuck. That’s the other thing. That’s why I was so fucked up when you came. I messed up badly with him last night and I didn’t sleep at all and then Pippa and Paige dressed me up and… I mean, I’ve had this whole thing I’ve been trying to get over where I don’t want people to see me — especially you, but also just, you know, people — while I’m still so early in transition, because I feel sort of ridiculous and ugly and male, all that shit. And I’m working on it, but… I didn’t want you to see me,” she says again. Melissa doesn’t say anything. Like she doesn’t want to prompt her. But it’s important she knows this; it’s important Stef expel it. “I never wanted you to see me as a guy again.”
“Steph—”
“It’s just so hard, you know?” Stef continues, caught in the need to see it through. “It’s been wonderful getting to know the girls and Pippa’s amazing and so are Christine and Paige and Maria and all the others but it’s hard to look at them and then look at me, like all the shit I hated when I was growing up is still there, and I’m changing but I’m not changing fast enough, and then I feel guilty raging about that because if I’m not changing fast enough then what does that say about— about— Fuck.”
“Steph?”
“Aaron. Everything I want for me is bad for him.”
Melissa lets go of her hand so she can turn around on the bench, tuck her legs up underneath and properly face Stef, properly look at her.
“Okay,” she says, “first, Stephanie: you’re beautiful. You are.”
“I still look male.”
“You look in transition. You look like most other trans women who’ve been on hormones a couple of months. I know there are things about your face you don’t like, and there are things that are— are tells. I know because I had them, too! But you’re beautiful, Steph. You have wonderful features. Only an idiot would call you ugly, and only a complete idiot — or a cis person — would call you male. And do you see any cis people around here?”
She’s so sincere. She’s so fucking sincere. It’d be so easy to believe her. So tempting.
So why not believe her? Stef’s struck suddenly by the vivid memory of the night after she talked to Maria in her room, when she saw herself in the mirror for the first time. What good does denying that do her? And what does she care, in this place, with these girls, if she doesn’t look cis yet?
“Okay,” she says.
“Just ‘okay’?” Melissa asks, poking at her.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Steph…”
“Really! I will!” She’s been leaning forward, so she deliberately relaxes, returns her back to the bench, and Melissa moves in, closing the space between them again. “I can’t promise instant results, but… it’s a process, you know?”
“I know. Just remember—” and Melissa pulls Stef’s face around so she has to look in her eyes, “—I think you’re beautiful. And I’ve known you a long time, girlie.”
Stef nods dumbly.
“Now,” Melissa says, “tell me about Aaron. Tell me how you messed up.”
Another shrug. “He’s my friend. Down there. And I feel stupid about him because he’s this complete fucking jerk and he’s done terrible things and, Liss, I love him. I love him and I want to help him and instead I lied to him, pretended I was just like him, and yesterday…” Stef sucks in a cold, wet lungful of air. “Yesterday he asked Maria to help him die.”
Melissa takes it all in with much more calm than Stef expected. “That’s not uncommon,” she says quietly. “A lot of the girls in my intake had something like that.”
“That’s what everyone keeps saying to me. I just… I don’t get why it has to happen.”
“Abby explained to me once, when I asked her why everyone else in the basement was being such a dick to me, why so many of the boys the programme targets have similar life stories. You know, neglected childhoods, distant or abusive parents, victimisation at school or church or wherever, a history of having to prove themselves and a habit of choosing the most — oh, what was the exact phrase she liked to use? — the most culturally convenient psychological defence mechanism.” She smiles, and tucks a lock of Stef’s wind-blown hair back behind her ear. “I didn’t realise, the first time we spoke, that she was talking about herself, too. It’s different for Black kids, of course, because her… youthful misadventures were punished pretty severely while the white kids in the basement have mostly gotten used to getting away with shit, but still. Sometimes those for whom masculinity isn’t intrinsic but still forms a fundamental part of their socialisation, their training for the world, have the hardest time imagining life without it. It’s their foundation. Their framework for understanding what the world expects from them. Losing it, as everyone here does eventually, is traumatic. Terrifying. They feel lost, like they have to start again literally from scratch. And, fuck, Steph, if there’s anything I understand, it’s feeling like there’s no way forward, wanting to just stop.”
Stef snakes out a hand and grips Melissa’s. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I never knew it got so bad for you. Until you disappeared.”
Melissa smiles. “It’s not like I told anyone. And the ones who worked it out, I pushed away.”
“Still sorry. I would have helped if I knew. And that’s just it; I knew this was all happening to Aaron, and I just… let it happen. That’s my big fuckup. Not telling him. The icing on the shit sundae.”
“Could you have stopped it?”
“Well…”
“He’ll get through it, Steph. He will. And I don’t just say that because we can both point to dozens of women who’ve survived it. I’m saying it because that feeling is a lie. And it’s a lie that can’t survive the gradual realisation of the truth, which is that there is a way to live, and live well. That’s why they do big intakes. And, honestly, if he’s reached that point and he’s being coached through it, he’s halfway there.”
“What’s the other half?”
“‘Don’t be a girl,’” Melissa says, with air quotes. “So much of what’s taught to boys, especially boys with the sort of fucked up relationship to masculinity that the programme tends to sweep up, is based around not being a girl, not being a pussy, whatever. In many ways it’s harder to unlearn than the defence mechanisms. They all have to learn that being a girl isn’t shameful or weak. They have to learn that the thing they were taught their whole lives to be afraid of is actually… fine. Just completely one hundred percent normal and fine.” She rolls her eyes. “Personally, I think it’s clearly the better choice, but that’s the advanced class.” She grins, shows her teeth, but doesn’t quite break Stef’s mood. “You can help with that most of all, I think. Show everyone you can just… be a girl.”
“I guess.”
“Do you want him to stay as a boy? Is that why you like him? Because he’s a boy?”
“I don’t know why I like him at all,” Stef says. “I never have. He just… takes up all my thoughts. It makes me happy to be around him. I don’t think I care if he’s a girl or a boy, but I care that he cares.”
“Then maybe the best thing you can do is let him figure it out for himself. With his sponsor.”
Stef wants to contradict her, wants to confess more, wants to keep pulling out chunks of herself until she can find something to throw at Melissa that will make her judge her. Instead she just wriggles against Melissa’s body and tries to diagnose why it’s so important to her that she disappoints the woman she’s been looking for all these years.
In her head, she draws a circle around the whole conversation and compares it to what she said earlier, about feeling too male to be seen by her, and nods to herself. Reflexive lying; reflexive self-hatred. Got to watch for those.
“You okay, kiddo?” Melissa asks.
“Yeah,” Stef says, nodding slowly, telling herself firmly that Melissa’s right, and of course she is, because she’s as close to an impartial observer as she’s ever going to find, and if she thinks Aaron will be okay, that’s something she can cling to. “Yeah, I actually am. You know, it’s weird hearing you defend the programme like that. Abby always said you hated it.”
Melissa shakes her head. “I do. I did. But it works, mostly. It’s a fucking trauma factory sometimes, and you can definitely argue there are better ways to achieve similar results, but, by its own standards, it works.” She shivers.
“You want to go indoors? It’s getting cold.”
“Um,” Melissa says, frowning, “not yet?”
Stef twists in her grip. “Are you okay?”
“You mean, aside from making a colossal idiot of myself today?”
“Come on, no-one thinks that.”
“I think everyone thinks that.” She smiles weakly. “But that’s not what I’m antsy about. Shahida’s here. Downstairs.”
“I know,” Stef says, nodding. Christine filled her in.
“I feel a bit like you, honestly,” Melissa says, repositioning again so she can look out into the rain. “I don’t want her to see me like this. Not because I’m ashamed of being like this — far from it — but because… because I feel stupid.” She pokes a thumb into her chest. “I’m a trans girl who didn’t work it out until it was too late. I was hours away from ending it when Abby brought me here. By rights, I should have died seven years ago. Except, actually, by rights, I should have died even before that.”
She’s quiet for long enough that Stef nudges her. “What do you mean?”
“Shahida saved my life. I was going to end it, and she stopped me. She had this—” she laughs, suddenly, “—this daft little picnic blanket, and she chattered at me and she took me home to her family and she saved me, and for years I took that with me.” She clenches her fist over her heart. “For years. It was only when it all went wrong with her, and I didn’t know why, because I’m trans but I’m stupid and never worked it out, that I started to really fall again. I didn’t have that to hold onto any more.
“I don’t want to see her because I hurt her so bad, Steph. I know it. At the time I thought it was fine, it was better, because it was me, and I knew I did nothing but bring bad things into people’s lives. Hers especially. I thought it was better that I just vanish. That I just fade away.” Another deep breath. “It took me a long time to get over that. Way longer than it did to work out I was trans. It was Abby, in the end, who got through to me. Who showed me I had value, that I really was, I don’t know, a real person. Not just a hole in the world. Shahida tried to show me, too, but I was missing this— this vital puzzle piece. I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know why I hated myself, I didn’t know why it killed me to look at her sometimes, or why when she touched me it made me feel…
“God. You know, I actually can’t remember how it felt. I still struggle sometimes with feeling fake, or less good compared to other women, but I can’t remember any more what it was like to have a girl I might have loved touch me like I was a man.” She sniffs. “She touched me, and I ran.”
“I’m so sorry,” Stef says.
“I can’t help feeling that when she sees me, that’s all she’ll think about. Not that I was a man or a boy or whatever, but that I ran. I ran because I was stupid.”
“She won’t,” Stef says, with sudden confidence. Melissa looks at her like she’s going to say something, so Stef continues before she can. “She won’t! She’s been looking for you. Putting up posters all around town. Seven years later she’s still thinking about you. She thought you were dead, Liss! Do you think she’s going to judge you for things you had no control over when you were a teenager?”
“Maybe?”
“She won’t,” Stef repeats, taking Melissa’s hand and standing up. “Come on. Come see her and prove it.”
“But—”
“Come on!”
“Steph!”
“You need to do this, Liss. Not just for the woman who’s been papering Almsworth looking for you, but for you. You need to know that she’s nothing but happy to see you. She’ll understand. I promise.”
It’s easy to be confident about that. Tabby would likely have sent Shahida packing if her attitude suggested she was here to get revenge or something.
Melissa nods, and allows Stef to pull her up off the bench. They’re standing together at the very edge of the protection provided by the tarp, and Melissa’s haloed by technicolour neon light shining through rain.
“How do I look?” she says.
Stef grins. “Melissa, I’ve been dreaming of seeing you again for, what, nearly six years? Ever since I saw you outside the supermarket. And I’ve always thought of you as this… ethereal beauty. Like an angel, or something.”
“And I’m a disappointment?”
“No,” Stef says firmly. “You’re better. You’re real. You’re my fucking sister, Liss, and for the first time in seven years I can talk to you, I can hold your hand, I can hug you. And you’re beautiful. Right now, with your eyes kinda red and your cheeks all flushed, you’re beautiful.”
“I am?”
“Yes,” Stef says, and pulls on her, drags her out into the rain, towards the door that will take them back down into the warm, “now come on!”
There’s a sudden lightness to Melissa, a quickness to her step, and when Stef looks back through the rain she’s laughing quietly and skipping along behind her, holding onto Stef’s fingertips with the barest of contacts. It’s like she’s been made anew. And that’s what this is for all of them, she realises: a chance to go back seven years, to erase mistakes, to start again.
Maybe she can do the same with Aaron tomorrow. There’s not seven years of mistakes there, but there are enough.
They head back down the main stairs, and as they approach the kitchen they can hear voices. Lots of voices. Enough to make Melissa hang back in the lobby, nervous again. Stef smiles, instructs her with a raised finger to wait, and lets herself in.
“Hi, everyone,” she says, as a kitchenful of women turn their attention to her. She silences them — at least five of them are surging forward or asking if she’s okay — with a wave of a hand. “I’m fine. I’m going downstairs for some bloody sleep.”
“Amen,” Pippa says quietly.
“But before I do, I have someone here who wants to see Shahida, but kind of doesn’t want to be crowded. Oh, and I said she can use my room on the first floor tonight, so could someone sort out the biometrics?”
Tabby nods. “No problem,” she says. “All right, clear off, everyone. And, Steph—” she points to Shahida, “—don’t let her out yet, will you? We only let her have her phone again because she had this whole dead woman’s switch thing going on.”
“Right,” Stef says, as the other women file out into the dining hall, most of them waving or winking or otherwise greeting her on their way. “Um, hi, Shahida. I don’t know if you remember me, but—”
“Hi, Stephanie,” Shahida says, smiling warmly. “I’ve been told all about you.”
Stef laughs. “Of course you have. Are you going to stick around? I’d love to chat. Just, you know—” and thinking about how tired she is prompts a yawn, which she tries and fails to keep down. “God. Sorry. Just not tonight.”
“Yes,” Shahida says, hesitant, “I think I’ll stick around.”
“Good.” Stef leans heavily on the table, fatigue making her heavy. “I was going to do this a bit more gracefully, but… Cover your ears?” Shahida complies, and Stef yells, “Liss! Come in!”
A few moments later the kitchen doors open again and Melissa enters, nervous but smiling, and Stef might as well no longer exist as far as Shahida’s concerned. She lifts herself up from the table as quietly as she can and follows the rest of the girls out into the dining hall so she can take the stairs back down to the basement, but she hesitates just beyond the threshold, unable to resist eavesdropping.
“Hi,” Shahida says, enraptured, and there’s a scraping sound as Melissa pulls out a chair to sit down. “Um, Melissa, right? Does that mean I can still call you Em?”
“Sure,” Melissa says. “Em is fine.”
* * *
He’s pretty sure he’s never felt so nervous about anything in his life, and he’s trying to keep down the hysterical laughter that keeps threatening to bubble up at the thought of what he’s about to do, but like Maria said, you can stop still or you can go forward, and after everything today the thought of stopping still scares him stupid.
He knocks on the door.
Maria left him alone in the end, with the cooler and the last of the sandwiches and the promise of a small favour and a dwindling reserve of certainties, of which only two are relevant right now: he’s going to survive, if only out of spite for the person he once was, and he has to do this.
He knocks on the door again.
“Oh. Hi.”
He jumps, because the voice comes from behind him, and there’s Steph, wearing a skirt and a nice top and looking pretty but really, really tired. He steps aside, lets her unlock her bedroom door, and waits.
She turns when she’s inside her room. Frowns at him. “Aaron,” she says, “I know you deserve to kick seven kinds of shit out of me for what I’ve done, but I’m exhausted, so could it wait until morning?”
“I’m not going to do that,” he says, and his voice comes out like claws on cardboard. He’s barely used it today but his throat’s wrecked all the same.
Shit. He’s going to have to start learning to talk the way she does. Something about chest resonance? Sounds hard.
“Um,” Steph says, “okay?”
“Can I come in?” he says, a little more clearly. “I’m not going to yell or anything.”
She nods, confused but too tired to make an issue out of it, and he steps inside, waits for the door to close behind him.
“I asked Maria to buzz me when you got back down,” he explains, sitting on the edge of her bed.
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Needed a piss.” She starts undressing with her back to him, pulling off the skirt and top but leaving on the leggings and the bra. She drops a loose t-shirt over her head before she turns around again.
“Brought you your phone,” he says, holding it out.
“Um. Thanks.” She takes it, lays it on the table and sits down on the bed, on the far end from him. “Look, I’m sorry about—”
“Don’t, Steph,” he says. “Maria told me everything. I’m still a little mad? But I get it. Rock and a hard place. I get it.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“I know. You told me willingly, though.” And that’s important. That’s something he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about. Someone else would have just kept lying. It would have been the easiest thing in the world.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Because she loves him.
Maria told him that. He knew it anyway, even if he didn’t really believe it. But she told him, and that’s important, too.
Steph breathes out, almost wheezes at the end, like she’s trying to clear something nasty out of her lungs. Before she can get her breath back, though, before she can apologise again or say something else unnecessary or ridiculous or self-flagellating, he moves up on the mattress towards her.
To her frown, he says, “There’s some stuff I want to talk to you about. And you don’t have to talk back. You just have to listen.” She nods, perplexed but compliant, and makes herself more comfortable in the bed, wordlessly handing him a couple of cushions for his back and arranging some for herself. He holds up the edge of the duvet, waits for her nod, and drags it over both of them, enclosing them in a single shared space.
She closes her eyes for a moment. “You can tell me anything,” she says.
“Not up until now, I couldn’t,” he says. He’s been thinking about how he wants to say this, how he wants to start, and at the last moment he abandons his plan and just fucking goes for it. “George Rollins. Georgina. She was the first. She—”
“I know about what you did, Aaron,” Steph says, leaning forward, touching the back of his hand. He turns his hand over, takes hers, and she’s surprised — she’s still expecting him to yell at her, probably — so he seizes his momentary advantage to interlace their fingers.
“You don’t,” he says. “You’ve seen… names and dates and summaries on a screen. You don’t know. And I can’t compartmentalise all this shit, you know? I can’t put all the things I’ve done in a box and call them separate from the rest of me because they are the rest of me. And what I said and did down here, to Maria, to myself, to you, it’s just another part of all of it, and I have to get it out, Steph. I have to get it out.”
“Okay.”
“It’s just… this is important.”
“I’m listening,” Steph says, smiling.
“So,” he continues, “it was primary school. George, she was in the year above. She and her friends called me something, I don’t know what, probably a gaylord, that’s what a lot of the other kids called me back then, you know, like, ‘Hey, gaylord, show us your dick,’ that kind of shit, and I hated it, Steph, I really fucking hated it, and one day I waited behind the shed, out by the car park…”
It’s not a long story, but it’s the first of many. Too many for Steph, who listens as attentively as she can for as long as she can before she slumps over, asleep in what looks like a position guaranteed to wake her with muscle cramps after a few hours. So he moves her, carefully and slowly, keeping her head on a cushion and lowering it until she’s in his lap, her legs instinctively curling up under the covers. He billows the duvet out to catch her splayed arms, shuffles a little so her head is comfortable, and reaches down to pick up her corded headphones.
He sends Maria a message, asks for one more favour: that she put something on Steph’s computer for him to watch, because he doesn’t dare interrupt her sleep. A minute or so later he gets a winking emoji in reply, and Steph’s computer wakes up and starts playing, of all things, The Little Mermaid.
He wonders if there’s a message in that.
Probably not.
Notes:
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 26: The One That Got Away
Notes:
Content warning: references to sexual violence and things done without consent
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
1985 March 20
Wednesday
He hadn’t wanted to come to the UK. Did anyone? Cold and windy and wet and miserable, and you can’t get a good cup of coffee, and the boys are rowdy and the girls are worse. Perhaps it’s just his upbringing, but he’s always preferred the pace of life, and the taste of it, in Paris. But he’s old enough now at nineteen to start learning the way his parents do business, and the townhouse is lonely without his parents, so grudgingly he agreed to cross the channel with them.
Don’t be a snob, his mother insisted, when he gagged on borderline inedible British hotel food.
It’s just your imagination, his father told him, when the drunken lads jeered at him in the street and their girlfriends laughed along.
Fucking England.
He closes his eyes again, tries to forget about the concrete ceiling and the iron bars and the single recessed light bulb that burns a harsh yellow-white, too bright and with an unpleasant and incessant buzz, and remembers his mother and father. They come to him as he saw them last, ugly red dots dead-centre forehead, tongues hanging stupid.
He was useless when they killed them. He practically hung there in the arms of his captors, paralysed by fear, willing his feet to run or his hands to strike and finding nothing inside him but white-hot static.
The cold efficiency of it all! The emotionless practicality! Against street thugs or opportunist thieves he and his father might have had a chance, but the first act of the ones who attacked them had been to place a gun to his head, and against that all three of them were powerless.
His mother had begged. His father had attempted to bargain. Instead they were made to walk through darker and darker streets to a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere and stand facing the end, and he could do nothing. Not until the guns fired and he finally broke his captors’ grip and ran to them.
Couldn’t even catch them as they fell.
He rolls over on the hard cot, screws up his face, fights the tears. His father always told him to hide his weakness, but that’s a consideration long in the past. He’s just so fucking tired of the headaches.
He finds a better memory. Four nights ago. Dinner at the hotel. More slop, and his mother scolded him for the judgement. Her half-smile, the eye contact she shared with his father, indulgent and fond. His father’s chuckle, and the way he leaned across the table to make his promise. They’d eat at his favourite restaurant when they got home. Just one more thing to do, while we’re here.
“Vincent!”
Fuck. Her again. Her voice, guttural and deep, saturated with the unthinking arrogance of the English upper classes and their retinue. He’d loathe it even absent context. She says his name again, rapping metal-on-metal on the bars of the cell with the end of the cane she carries as an affectation, and she says it with the same satisfaction as she did when she greeted him two nights ago, when she strode into that dingy little room, swinging her cane like a ringmaster’s baton and regarding the death of his family as one might look upon the contents of a grisly but necessary mousetrap.
His parents’ business partner in this country; their murderer. Dorothy Marsden.
“Vincent Barbier, you will look at me when I speak to you, or it will not end well for you!”
Two fingers to her.
She claps her hands twice, sharp in the still underground air like fucking gunshots. Footsteps on concrete as underlings step forward and the door to the cell slams open. Rough hands grab at his limbs, pull him out of his cot, press him against the wall, and there she is: Dorothy, who insisted with ridiculous pomp that he call her Grandmother, who has taken his parents from him and thrown him in a cell to starve, who approaches him pinned like an insect and presses the end of her cane to the wall between his legs, locking eyes with him and smirking as she drags it up, scraping it on the concrete and forcing him to the tips of his toes as the cold metal begins to press painfully up against his genitals.
“Vincent, Vincent, Vincent,” she says. “What are we to do with you?”
Does it matter? Two days without food and one without water have made clear what she wants from him, so what even can she do, in this space between life and death, that is worse than what awaits him?
He spits dry in her face. Nothing but the barest flecks reach her, but on her nod they beat him to the floor, anyway.
2019 December 12
Thursday
The girls all clear out at Stephanie’s instruction, leaving the formerly bustling kitchen suddenly open and intimidating, the massive table and the camera in the cornice and the carefully innocent-looking doors out to the entryway all reminders that Shahida’s locked into a place she doesn’t belong, where the motives of her hosts are something she has to take on trust, where someone’s always watching. Not even Melissa’s presence is enough to dispel her unease, and she nervously reintroduces herself while trying not to look at the massive biometric bolts on the only exit.
She left voicemail for Rachel, instructing her to disregard both email and previous message. That might have been premature.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Melissa says, settling in the chair she’s pulled out next to Shahida, crossing her legs under her, just the way she used to. “It’s like a normal kitchen, and then you start noticing things.”
She saw her looking at the locks, then. “It’s not so bad,” Shahida says, wanting to disabuse Melissa of the notion that Shahida is in any way unnerved; this is her home, this is somewhere she feels safe, and the least Shahida can do, after everything, is not taint it. “The AGA sort of reminds me of home.”
Melissa rolls her eyes. “It gets so hot in here when people are cooking. It’s a nightmare.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Shahida says quickly, and Melissa snort-laughs, covers her mouth and looks wide-eyed at her. Shahida sighs. “Shit. Sorry. I’m trying too hard to make this—” she looks around, her gaze encompassing reunion and torture house both, “—normal.”
“Shy,” Melissa says, and Shahida warms at the nickname, the one she likes even more than the others Melissa has for her, “this place is unbelievably weird. You’re allowed to be freaked out.”
“They were telling the truth, then?” It’s not that Shahida doesn’t believe Paige, Tabby and the others, not after everything. But doubt is proportional, and the truth is… Well, it’s ridiculous.
“Did they tell you this place is a good girl factory?” Melissa asks from behind a wry grin, and Shahida nods. “Then, yes, they told you the truth. The details are… messy.”
“They didn’t say much about the process. Mostly focused on results.”
Melissa nods. “Wise.” And then animation takes her and she leans back, swivelling on her chair to face Shahida properly. “Jesus, Shy, you look amazing!”
There’s Mark there, in all the details of her: in her nose, delicate and with the slight kink removed; in her eyes, just as intensely blue as ever but topped now with shaped eyebrows and a brow that seems subtly different; in her smile, broad and genuine and so fucking real it chases away the dregs of Shahida’s nervousness. Because it’s all true, and here’s the proof, beautiful as he always was but alive in ways he never was, and she doesn’t care what it took to make it happen because it fucking happened.
She needs to say something and she does, mumbling thanks or something superficially like them but she’s distracted now by Melissa’s voice, which is light and melodic and again so much like the best of Mark, the way Mark was when she or Rach or Amy dragged him briefly out of his shell and into the light with the rest of them, and she’s torn between exulting in just getting to hear it and her sudden and intense curiosity as to how she did it, how she gets her voice to do that; did she have surgery (Shahida’s read it’s not ideal), or did she train it? And if she trained it, which method did she use? When first exploring her theory Shahida watched a video of a trans woman demonstrating something called ‘head voice’, and meant to watch more, to try to gain a more intimate understanding of the mechanisms by which Mark had become the woman she desperately hoped he’d become, but fell into a tangent of wondering if she, a cis woman, spoke in head voice automatically, or if it was solely a way to hack vocal cords that had been subjected to an unwanted testosterone puberty.
And when she moves her hands and her fingers, when she reaches out, there again is the echo of Mark, but there’s a confidence there, a solidity, where Mark had always seemed a little unreal, like if she stopped looking at him, stopped keeping him in her thoughts, he would fade away—
“Shy?” Melissa says, and Shahida refocuses. Melissa’s close, so damn close, and leaning closer, reaching for her, creating in Shahida a giddiness that displaces all else. “Shy, what’s up?”
Shahida grabs Melissa’s hand, just to feel the fingers, just to feel the anchor of the real fucking person in front of her, and forces herself to close her eyes, to breathe deeply, to still herself, and the intoxicating energy that’s been threatening to overwhelm her finds its balance, finds stability through her contact with her friend. Opening her eyes, she still feels at the crest of a wave that might crash at any moment, but she’s riding it now.
Melissa’s seen this in her before, once or twice, and she’s been waiting quietly. To hold her hand as she processes is enough.
“I’m okay,” Shahida says. “Too many inputs,” she adds, and Melissa nods.
“Do you need time?”
“No. I’m fine. It’s not even— I’m just— Fuck.” She holds up a finger, asks for a moment. Melissa nods again. “I’m looking at you, taking you in,” Shahida says, unable to stop herself from smiling at how lewd that sounds. “And it’s like I’m seeing all seven years at once. I want to know everything, and even the idea of how much everything there is… It’s overwhelming.”
Melissa pats her hand. A disappointingly platonic gesture. “There’s no hurry,” she says. “Before I, um, rushed down here, I told my boss I had an emergency to deal with. He’s given me until the start of the next semester off.” She frowns. “Used up all my holiday days, though. And I should email him, actually.” She shakes her head. “Later. What I mean is, I don’t need to leave any time soon. I know you probably have a thousand questions; we have time for all of them.”
More like a million questions. Shahida feels childlike; she’d expected to be the together one in this situation, even if she can’t put her finger on exactly why. But then, Melissa’s been living this life for seven years, which is almost as long as Shahida’s been running from hers.
She looks around the kitchen. It’s still just as empty, with only the two of them in it, but it seems friendlier now. Context is everything.
“It was good to see Steph,” she says. “I was worried about her.” Shahida congratulates herself on hitting the correct pronoun and then struggles not to scold herself for what Melissa might infer from her statement: that Steph might have been in trouble because she left.
She doesn’t seem to mind, though. “It was really good to see her again,” she says, withdrawing her hand so she can prop her chin on it. “She’s doing so well here. Which is incredibly weird, but it kind of makes sense. She always felt like she needed the right environment, and she’d thrive. She’s… she’s making jokes about this place, and she has friends, and— and I feel so stupid.”
Melissa’s blinking fast, like she’s trying to hold back sudden tears, so Shahida breaks the boundary between them again, puts a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay, Melissa?” she asks, and even through her concern she thrills at the name. Em is good, and it’s wonderful to be able to use it again and revel in the restored connection to their shared adolescence, but Melissa’s the name she chose for herself, and it fits so marvellously. A Melissa would have those long, graceful arms; a Melissa would have those delicate eyebrows, those full lips, that soft peach skin. A Melissa would be so beautiful it almost hurts to look at her.
“Yeah,” Melissa says, “I’m okay. I made a colossal idiot out of myself today, but I’m okay.” She smiles at Shahida, and she’s no longer close to tears, instead radiating serenity. “And I make an idiot of myself a lot. The saving grace is that this place is built on acts of colossal idiocy. It just sort of absorbs them. I point a taser at this lovely girl, Christine, and she tells me it’s fine, she’s deactivated it, she’s had tasers pointed at her by people who are far more intimidating than I am, and, oh, by the way, she’s controlling the security for the entire building from her phone. So that’s me dealt with. And then I misgender Steph because I’m congenitally incapable of reading a room, and she just forgives me. I come charging in here—” she mimes, on the table, a little version of herself running across the wood, “—all bad plans and faulty weapons, and I just bounce harmlessly off a bunch of airbags.” Her mimed self flies backwards and lands on its butt. Shahida giggles.
“You should know,” Shahida says, “three different women made it very clear to me that they understand what happened completely. They know you and Stephanie are close, and that Christine girl — she’s lovely, I agree, although mostly I spoke with her girlfriend, Paige — complained vociferously about how some ‘bored, second-rate sponsor’ updated the records without checking the notes first. She said she put flags all over your file specifically relating to Stephanie, and they just got ignored. She also said something about wanting to quit and go live in a nice, normal house with only the people who were around this table at the time, because everyone else in the building is—” Shahida brings up her quoting fingers for the second time, “—‘criminally incompetent’.”
Melissa snorts. “That sounds about right. They have to run this place entirely with graduates — because who else could you bring in? — and it means everyone has to be a Jill of all trades and a, uh, mistress of none. God. That’s probably a mug, actually. Anyway, if this place seems chaotic, that’s why.”
“Christine said something similar, actually.”
“Oh?”
Shahida laughs, remembering the outraged look on the girl’s face. “One of the older women told her to calm down, said it can’t be that bad, and she said—” she takes a moment to remember Christine’s exact words, “—‘Dorley’s a shambles and opsec is shit and pretty soon I’m going to have to find a way to be in five places at once or we’ll be on the cover of News From The Anthill by the end of next year.’”
Melissa nods, and pushes up out of her chair. She stands for a moment, pensive and hesitant, and Shahida almost asks what’s up before Melissa says, “Um, Shy? Can I, um, have a hug, please?”
“Of course!” Shahida says, too loud. She stands and collects Melissa into her arms, privately amused that, after all this time, she’s still taller than her. And then Melissa’s almost squeezing the breath out of her so Shahida returns the passionate contact and for a little while, they say nothing.
“Steph didn’t want me to know,” Melissa whispers, loosening her grip but not breaking the embrace. “And I get it. I know why. I don’t blame her. It’s hard to be seen while you’re all in between, and I get that. I do. When all you want, all you need, is for people to look at you and see a girl, but you’re still working on it yourself… It’s really hard. But it’s everyone else. They agreed I shouldn’t know, because I wouldn’t trust them with her, because even if I knew she chose to be here I’d come running anyway and fuck everything up. And I don’t know if I’m more upset that they think that of me, or that they’re bloody right.”
“Em…”
“They made the right decision. I think. Fuck, I don’t know.”
“What’s done is done,” Shahida says, wincing at the cliché, “and you’re here now, and so am I, and so is Stephanie… It could have gone a lot worse.”
“Yeah,” Melissa says, nodding into Shahida’s shoulder, “yeah. And I guess it’s not the only reason they didn’t tell me. I asked Abby for some space a while before Steph even showed up. She was just doing her best to respect that.”
“I talked to her, too,” Shahida says.
“Abby?” Melissa, smiling, steps out of the hug and leans casually on the edge of the kitchen table. “What did she say?”
Shahida, hiding her disappointment, mirrors Melissa, and taps her fingertips on the wood. What should she say about Abigail? Should she tell her that Abigail and Christine tried to throw her off the trail, but messed up? Should she tell her that Abigail’s love for her is so written all over her face that it broke Shahida’s heart a little? Because, goodness, Abby’d been so agitated during their conversation that after a while Christine had to give her a shoulder massage. She’d terminated their conversation with a simple, “Please take care of her,” before leaving the room at speed, with one of the other girls trailing her, which Shahida thought a more eloquent summation of her designs on Melissa’s heart than anything she could have said.
A rival. And one who knows Melissa better than anyone, even Shahida, ever knew Mark.
“She said you’re amazing,” Shahida says.
“So’s she.” Melissa looks up at the ceiling. “She saved my life. Much the same way you did, actually, at the bridge. She found me right on the edge, and she rescued me.”
Shahida tries hard not to be bitter. “Except she had the resources of a mysterious organisation with methods laser-targeted to meet your needs, and I had… a picnic blanket.”
Melissa reaches for her, takes the hand that’s tapping idly on the table, meshes their fingers together. “To be fair, it was a very funny picnic blanket.”
The contact turns Shahida’s thoughts incoherent. “I still don’t get that,” she mutters. “It was just a blanket.”
“I know,” Melissa says, and the warmth, the fondness in her voice is calming. And then a yawn catches her, and she pulls her hand away to stretch, leaning even farther back. It’s another human moment, a grounded and boring and simple thing, and it reinforces once again Shahida’s relief: she’s here, she’s alive, and everything else is unimportant. Even if they can never have the relationship Shahida once dreamed of, Melissa is whole.
Smiling at the apex of her stretch and enjoying the release of tension in her limbs, Melissa looks over again, illuminated perfectly by the overhead lights. She looks wonderful. And tired. So damn tired. All Shahida’s protective instincts fire up, replacing Melissa for just a moment with the image of Mark, from the last time she ever saw him: thinning, exhausted, wounded.
Unfair to think of her that way. Mark was always the shell around Melissa, and now she’s here, and while Shahida never knew how to help Mark, it’s pretty clear what the girl in front of her needs.
“We’ve both had a hell of a day,” Shahida says, when Melissa’s done stretching, “and Stephanie gave you her room. Why don’t we go somewhere with more comfortable chairs? And a little more privacy?”
“That sounds great,” Melissa says, sighing, “but I’ve got to go move my car to the long-term car park, I’ve got to bring in my things, I’ve got to email my boss…”
“Actually, Tabitha sent one of the other girls to move your car and bring in your luggage. The athletic-looking one with the really long black hair?” Shahida holds a level hand over her head, to also indicate tall.
“Monica,” Melissa says, nodding and prodding at the shoulder bag she dumped on the table. “How did she get in? I’ve got the key card.”
“How do these people kidnap eight boys a year without anyone noticing?”
“True.” Melissa looks away. “They really did give you the rundown, didn’t they? You know all of it. You and Steph. That’s so strange…” She flexes her fingers for a moment, releasing tension. “I’m a little surprised at how much they told you, actually. Institutionally, we’re given to thinking of outsiders with information as pretty dangerous to us.”
Shahida shrugs, trying to say with her body what she can’t bring herself to say aloud because she still doesn’t quite believe it of herself: that she hasn’t even considered trying to take this place down, because all she cares about is that Melissa’s alive, and if Dorley is important to her continued safety then everything else, moral quandaries included, can go hang. “I heard from several victims who assured me that they’re happier now, better off, better people, and so on, and I also met some of their girlfriends, and then one of those girlfriends, an extremely determined young thing who swears she only found out about this place a fortnight ago, stridently defended the very concept of therapeutic kidnapping. I had no chance.” She nods at the notebook sticking out of her bag. “I did make an org chart, though, and graphed the process out a bit.”
“Of course you did,” Melissa says, sounding stunned.
“So,” Shahida says, “why don’t you email your boss and I’ll make us some tea or some hot chocolate or something, and then we can go upstairs? Monica dropped your luggage off in the dining hall; we can pick it up on the way.”
Melissa nods, still frowning a little, but after a moment her expression clears, she smiles at Shahida, and extracts a phone from her bag. She switches it on and waits through the bootup while Shahida, taking the absence of an expressed preference as a vote for hot chocolate, finds oat milk and a clean saucepan.
“Steph said she’s got an ensuite in her room,” Melissa says, while she swipes around on her phone. “I’d kill for a shower. And it might wake me up a little.”
“Or make you even sleepier,” Shahida points out. “That’s how it usually works for me.”
“I remember.” Melissa might be trying to hide her smile or she might just be typing her email but either way she looks sweet, tapping away at the screen. “Oh,” she adds, “they do actually have mugs here that aren’t a complete embarrassment.” She puts down her phone, looks around the kitchen. “I’m, um, not sure where, though. I think they redecorated? Everything looks kinda different.”
“They’re in the cabinet by the fridge,” Shahida says, quickly shooting a grin at Melissa before returning her attention to the milk. You mustn’t allow oat milk to boil or it becomes unpleasant, and on an unfamiliar stove it must be watched carefully. When Melissa laughs again, though, it’s very difficult not to throw the bloody milk in the sink and start again after, just so she can spend a couple of minutes drinking in the elixir of Melissa’s pleasure. She’s missed this so much.
“Okay, it was odd that Steph knows stuff about this place I don’t, but you…”
Shahida shrugs. “I listen.”
It doesn’t take long for the milk to heat up, nor for Melissa to finish her email to her satisfaction, and soon enough Shahida’s arranging mugs on a tray and beckoning for Melissa to follow, only realising after she steps into the dining hall that she has no idea where to go from there. But she has time to get her bearings while Melissa finds her luggage and checks everything she needs is where it should be, so Shahida keeps careful hold of her tray, waits for her to be done, and stares at the place.
It’s so damn big…
Dorley Hall looks large from the outside, sure, but aside from its slightly incongruous architecture it could be any institutional building. Yesterday, before she put up her missing poster on the corkboard — damn; she’ll have to run around taking those down, unless some poor underling from here has already done so — she’d assumed it was another grand old university building, probably an administrative one, and populated it in her imagination with rows of orderly offices, cavernous conference rooms and cute little kitchenettes, in which harassed staff would gather mid-afternoon to complain about recalcitrant students or some new piece of unworkable guidance come down from above.
It was only after she got a look into the kitchen and met Victoria and Lorna that she’d realised it was a dorm. It’s incongruously large and opulent-feeling for student accommodation, and that alone would have been enough for her to search it out online had Abigail and Christine, also associated with the Hall, not come to talk to her. It sat like a celestial object in the centre of her theories, dragging them all into its orbit; how could she not lose a few hours to investigating it?
It turns out that Dorley Hall isn’t and never has been owned or administrated by the university. Instead it’s passed through multiple private hands, all of them obfuscated behind generic organisations and guarded by financial firewalls, the dirty tricks of old money with something to hide; distressingly common in the UK. The most she could find out was that it last changed ownership in 2004, and since then has been the property of a trust set up to provide accommodation and financial assistance to women and nonbinary people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
She smirks. What a cover! Still, someone’s paying for all this, and at least now she understands why something so apparently straightforward is veiled in such secrecy, even if she still doesn’t have a clue as to the motives behind the money. There are cheaper, simpler and less risky methods of reform, surely?
Except Victoria, Lorna, Paige and Tabitha all argued quite persuasively that, in their collective opinion and regarding the inhabitants and graduates of the Hall, there is not.
Melissa taps her on the shoulder, nods to confirm she has everything she needs, and leads her quietly across the dining hall, smiling at the few remaining women who, blissfully, keep their interactions to waves and returned smiles. Probably because they’re mostly older ones who look like they have actual work to do, with laptops and notebooks spread out on tables. Tabitha, huddled with Monica on a small couch by the unlit fireplace, nods at them as they pass.
Dorley Hall’s got a total of three staircases up from the ground floor — and one down — and Melissa’s leading her towards the one at the other end of the dining hall that goes right up through the building’s centre and leads, according to Paige, who gave her a very quick rundown of the layout, directly to the first and second floors, the locked-down areas for the girls who are still in the programme and not yet technically granted their freedom (Tabitha had laughed at that; Paige had scowled at her for it). There’s another at the back of the building, locked to everyone but the senior sponsors, which will take you up to the third floor if you have access, and finally there’s the main staircase at the front of the building, publicly accessible, backed up by a small elevator and leading to all five above-ground floors. Third years like Paige and Christine are supposed to use the central stairs unless they’re actually leaving the building, but rarely do; the main staircase is simply closer to all their rooms. No-one, Paige said, wants to walk all the way down the corridor and around the corner, past a load of unused rooms, and then walk all the way back through the building when they get to the ground floor.
What surprised Shahida was what an ordinary, everyday concern that was. Here’s Paige — tall, beautiful; a transformed man, supposedly — and she lives in the house of the people who forced change upon her, who compel her behaviour still… and she complains about the layout of the staircases, about having to walk past all the rooms that lie empty because of the need to house each year separately from each other.
She found herself liking Paige a lot. The others, too, but Paige especially, with her earnest nature and the emotions she wears clear upon her face. Shahida felt she ought to fight it, to stand up for reason and morality and all that other stuff, but almost immediately found the impulse absurd, given everything she’d seen. And that’s the point of it all, they told her; to build responsible, thoughtful, happy people out of irresponsible, careless, miserable young men. The girl thing is almost a side-effect.
Almost.
But it does seem to work.
Paige: helpful, sincere; dating Christine and incapable of hiding how much she revels in that fact. When her girl had leaned over her, kissed her, demonstrated her love, Paige had beamed like she’d won the lottery and blushed right through her foundation. It was adorable.
And then there’s Vicky: shy but friendly, and once she realised Shahida wasn’t judging her for her past almost immediately started to discuss things with an enthusiasm Shahida wanted to bottle. And she’s dating Lorna, a girl from outside the Hall, to whom she clings with a fierceness that makes Shahida’s heart ache.
And Tabitha: level-headed and pleasingly straight-talking, willing to hand Shahida most of the information she asked for; a little difficult to concentrate around, because her smile is—
“First floor,” Melissa says, to break Shahida’s concentration and prevent her from automatically continuing on up; she would have done it, too, just kept climbing until her head bumped into a wall or ceiling. Too much new information to absorb.
“Thanks,” Shahida says, smiling and following Melissa into a wide corridor dotted with labelled rooms. She can hear voices muffled almost into silence from behind one of the closer ones, labelled Faye and decorated freehand with sharpied stars and hearts.
The door opens as they approach, to reveal a girl, one of the second years, stepping half out into the corridor and leaning back on the jamb. Behind her, dotted around the room and making it look quite crowded, are various other girls; and, yes, they are all unambiguously girls, in that they feel very adolescent to Shahida, despite all having to be, per Tabitha and Paige, at least nineteen but likely twenty or older.
“Hi,” Melissa says, stopping with her luggage and looking only a little like she’s hiding behind it. “Faye, right? I’m sorry about earlier. I was, um…”
“You were worried,” Faye says, smiling, “about Steph. It totally makes sense.” Her voice is husky; Shahida can’t help but compare it to Melissa’s and wonder how long the girl’s been training it (if that is, in fact, what they do here; Shahida needs to get into the mechanics of everything, and as soon as she finds someone willing to give her a whole afternoon of their time, she will). The girl glances behind her. “We all have someone we’d break into an evil feminising torture facility to save.”
(The girls break out into giggles. “Oh my God, so evil,” one of them says.
Another holds up two hands in surrender and squeals, “Rescue me, Faye! I’m your damsel in distress!”
A third leans back on the bed and pretends to struggle against an invisible enemy. “Help,” she moans, “I’m… being… feminised… right now!”
“Shut up,” another says, leaning forward to swat her on the knee. “You picked those stupid socks out yourself.”)
“Of course,” Faye continues, meeting first Melissa and then Shahida’s eyes and shrugging, “the girls I’d want to rescue are already all here, and they’re being—” she raises her voice, in volume and pitch, “—super annoying! So maybe I’d just leave them here.”
(“Guys, stop it!” the girl on the bed stage-whispers. “We’re embarrassing Faye in front of the crazy lady!”
“Melissa’s not crazy, Mia,” the first girl says. “She’s passionate.”
“Well, I think it’s romantic,” says the damsel in distress, hugging a cushion.
“She’s not in love with Steph, Aisha. They’re, like, sisters, or something.”
“I don’t mean romantic like that, I mean romantic like, you know, throwing everything away on a quest to save someone. It’s epic. Like an old movie.”
“Okay. That’s it. Get the pillows.”)
“Sorry,” Faye says, “I’m needed. Pillow fights get messy without even teams. I hope you get a good night’s sleep, Melissa. We’ve apparently—” she air-quotes, “—‘defeated the soundproofing’, so just ping me on Consensus if we’re keeping you up. I don’t have a surname yet, but I’m the only Faye in the directory.”
“Have a good pillow fight,” Melissa says to the closing door.
“She doesn’t have a surname yet?” Shahida says.
“They— We have to pick a new one. You can’t keep your old one, obviously — hence Haverford — and there’s a big book of safe names, somewhere. Ah; here we are.”
The door just before the corner, labelled Stephanie, opens to Melissa’s thumbprint and reveals a room that’s bigger than Faye’s but not enormous, with a second door inside that Shahida assumes leads to the ensuite. She deposits her tray of hot chocolates on the dresser so she can claim a bean bag chair and give Melissa, who looks more tired by the minute, the bed. Melissa, having stood back to let Shahida through, toes the door closed, dumps her luggage and bag by the wardrobe, kicks off her shoes, and drops face first onto the mattress. A muffled giggle follows, which confuses Shahida until Melissa rolls over and sheepishly rubs one of her breasts, through her clothing.
“I never got out of the habit of just flopping into bed,” she says, “and I still get sore around here sometimes, so…”
Shahida, eyes wide, nods. Yeah. She cured herself of the same habit during puberty, for the same reason, but it took a while. She laughs suddenly, the realisation hitting her for the dozenth time and with absolute clarity that Melissa is alive, and she’s the person she used to see sometimes when Mark could fully let go, and with a lightness in her chest she retrieves the hot chocolates and passes one of the mugs over.
“‘ROGB: Rapid Onset Girl Basement,’” Melissa reads off the side of hers. “I thought you said you knew where the normal mugs were, Shy.”
Shahida snorts. “Yeah, but they’re no fun.” She rotates hers so Melissa can see the slogan: Boys Will Be Boys (Without Prompt Intervention), superimposed over a silhouette of a man, circled and crossed out in red.
“Oh my God,” Melissa says. “I should have known you’d get into the mugs.” She shuffles up on the bed, displacing pillows and plush toys, and pats the mattress next to her, nodding when Shahida frowns questioningly. “It’s weird with you all the way over there.”
That’s good, right? The whole time Shahida’s been worrying that Melissa won’t want her close for some reason, that Abigail provides for all her emotional needs, that the hug and the other brief contacts they shared were one-time deals… so this is good. She scrambles to her feet, carefully holding the mug out in front of her, with another hand underneath when it threatens to spill, and climbs onto the bed, reaching forward to put her drink on the table so she can flop forward onto the pillows, turn over, and shimmy up the headboard. She feels playful; she feels seventeen again.
It helps that Melissa’s been smiling at her. “What?” Shahida asks, when she’s in position.
Melissa runs a hand through her hair, and she looks so much like she did that night at Rachel’s. Except her hair’s loose and longer than it ever was, her cheeks are more full, she’s had some work done on her face, she looks smoother and softer and she has breasts… Fine. She looks different. But she feels like the same person to Shahida, the person she understands at last is and always was a girl, who related to her like a girl, who might just have loved her like a girl.
Who might still, with time.
“It’s just… It’s nice to see you,” Melissa says, and then shakes her head and laughs at herself. “Understatement. It’s amazing to see you. And you’re just like I remember, Shy. You move like you always did. You talk the same. It’s like nothing’s changed.”
Shahida smiles and pokes at her belly. “Some things have changed.” She’s bigger than she used to be, but she likes the extra weight.
Melissa giggles and pokes herself in the chest. “Two can play at that game,” she says.
Can I join in? she wants to say, and she swallows it. She might feel seventeen again, but she’s not, and twenty-five-year-old Shahida is better at controlling her impulses. Mark always responded oddly to her playful flirting, and now that she knows why, she’s angry at her past self for ignoring the signs and indulging herself anyway. No, she’s going to be careful, the way she always wanted to be, and being careful is emphatically not flirting on their first evening together. They haven’t even talked about sexuality yet! Melissa probably thinks of her as the same straight girl she always claimed to be, and if she flirts with her…
If Shahida flirts with her, Melissa will think she still sees her as a boy. And that could hurt.
She sips at her hot chocolate instead, and Melissa does likewise. It’s warm in Stephanie’s room, and pleasingly decorated, and with the white noise from the rain battering at the window it’s among the most comforting places Shahida’s ever been. She smiles at Melissa again, wriggles her shoulders against the headboard, and grins when Melissa copies her.
It’s nice.
It’s so bloody nice.
“You don’t have to say or do anything, you know,” she says, into the companionable silence. “The girls have given me enough to think about. You don’t have to talk about any of it if you don’t want to. You can just… hang out.”
Melissa nods slowly. Drinks some more hot chocolate. “What do you think of the girls?”
Shahida breathes out carefully, watches the ripples in her mug. “When Paige told me about who she is — or, actually, who she used to be — I expected that to affect how I looked at her. But, you know, it just didn’t. I like her. I like Tabitha; I like Victoria. I like Lorna, although she’s not from here.”
“She’s not? Which one is she?”
“She’s dating Victoria.”
“And Victoria is…?”
Shahida giggles. “Victoria’s Vicky; I just think she looks like a Victoria. Elegant, you know? She’s the third year who isn’t a third year. She finished the programme in two years, moved out, and started dating Lorna. And a couple of weeks ago — less a few days, I think — they had this whole disaster I don’t know much about, which ended up bringing Lorna into the fold. She’s quite the ambassador on Vicky’s behalf. And between them they seem to know everyone.”
Melissa nods, and that doesn’t seem unusual until she doesn’t say anything, just keeps rocking her head. She sets down her mug on the table beside her and pulls her knees up so she can hug them.
“Em?” Shahida says. “Em, what is it?”
It comes out in whispers. “That’s all stuff I could have done. If I hadn’t been so stubborn. If I hadn’t been so stupid.” She relaxes a little, lets her legs sag, leans against the headboard and looks sideways at Shahida. “It wasn’t just you I ran from. I ran from everything. From my own shit. From Mum. From Dad and Russ and my whole life. And then, here, I had as little to do with everyone as I could, and I signed myself up to be a stupid fucking cis girl and I ran from here, too. I keep—” she slaps her knee in time with the words, “—making things hard for myself. Because I don’t stick around to make things work. I just… run. And before I know it I’m faking being cis around a boss who’s a trans man and I’m trying to date but I can’t because I’m scared of being seen and understood and— and fucking real. Shy, I am so stupid and so prone to overreacting I saw Steph’s name on a screen and drove all the way down here to get her out without stopping to think for even a second, and the only way that deviates from my usual shit is that I was running to and not from for once.”
“Hey,” Shahida says, when the words dry up and Melissa’s left staring at nothing, looking past her into places Shahida doesn’t want to visit, “you’re being way too hard on yourself, Melissa. And even if all that’s true, you can just stop running. You’re home, or whatever this place is, and it’s not all that scary here, really—”
“Shy—”
“It’s not! Tabitha locked me in and for a split second I was worried and then she made me tea and fed me croissants and was pretty apologetic about the whole thing; and Steph’s here, Em. Steph’s here, and I’m here, and— and Abby’s here, and you don’t need to run. You don’t need to pretend to be a stupid cis girl—”
“—sorry—”
“—and you don’t need to be on your guard. You can just… be.”
There’s another gasp from next to her and Melissa’s gaze refocuses on her, and before Shahida knows it Melissa’s reaching for her and wrapping her so tightly in a hug it takes her a second to rearrange her limbs so she won’t pinch a nerve, because the last thing she’s going to do is let go of this beautiful, sweet, damaged girl ever, ever again.
1986 February 14
Friday
They brought in the new mirror last week. Toughened glass or something, so he can’t ever do again what he threatened to do with the old one. They don’t know it was only a bluff, the last thing he had left to damage them with after his failed attempt to get at Karen’s carotid artery with a shard of broken glass. Four of them to tackle him; overkill, obviously, but clearly it’s important to them that he not turn any weapons he might find on himself, and that’s useful to know.
Truth be told, he only shattered the old mirror because of what he saw in it. Everything else had just been opportunistic. Satisfying to cut the bitch Karen, though, in the same way she delights in cutting him. She loves to threaten his veins, loves to dig into his wrists, loves to restrain him and kiss him and touch him in the places they’ve mutilated him; loves to hold his life in her hands.
He got her in the shoulder. He hopes it scars.
And now he has a mirror he can’t break.
What he sees: a beautiful woman, with blonde hair almost to her shoulders, a choppy fringe cut to her eyebrows, an artfully sculpted face, and the remains of messy colour only partly wiped from her lips. She’s slight-hipped and slim-shouldered, stands on crooked legs and shivering ankles, and wears a soft green nightgown draped over her small breasts. Some of the cuts on the back of her wrist have opened up again, staining the hem of her gown and smudging her palms red.
When he first saw her he despaired, for he understood then that there was no way back. She’s everything they’ve taken from him.
The other girl consoled him. Offered him a rare moment of comfort in this nightmare. And then, like the others, she was taken away.
All the girls who were here when they brought him in, all the girls who were once like him, are gone.
Except he’s not much like him any more, either.
She consoled him because once you’re ready, once you’re healed, once you’re done, you don’t have long. She looked at him with death already clouding her eyes and made him promise to defy them to the end and he didn’t even see them take her away. Her room was just empty, the door open and the few books and other scraps she’d accumulated cleared out.
She never even had a name.
But despair can’t last down here. Dwelling on it will kill you as surely as the bitches upstairs eventually will take you away. He wished her a quick and painless end, and did his best to forget her.
That was two days ago.
“Vincey-boy!”
The shout’s accompanied by a banging on his door, intended presumably to wake him up; pointless, since he barely sleeps and Karen knows that, but sometimes she gets it into herself to pretend to be civil, to knock before entering, to allow him to clothe himself, and today might be one of those days. It usually presages other forms of unpleasantness, but he’ll take the little reprieves where and when he finds them.
He coughs before he answers, forces some bile into his throat. He’s been experimenting with his voice, with projecting it the way his old singing teacher taught him, but he doesn’t want them to know. The last girl gave him the idea. Defy them to the end, she said; well then. He knows there’s one thing they don’t want from him.
Idiots should have put microphones in the rooms.
“I’m awake,” he yells. Good. Just as deep as always.
Karen kicks the door open. It crashes into the concrete wall and rattles there, loud enough to wake the whole floor, if there were anyone left but him. Karen’s in her tweed, a class affectation as fake as her accent, and he hides his irritation; dressing up usually means guests, and guests usually means he has to perform for them. Put on something titillating, serve drinks, answer any question put to him in his man’s voice for their tittering amusement. Display the only parts of Vincent that are left, for their arousal. Sometimes they masturbate. Sometimes they involve him in their debasements.
“But you’re not dressed, are you?” Karen announces, glaring at him. “Come on. To the back with you.”
He complies, stands with his back to her at the far end of the room, hands flat against the wall, head down. Making himself safe so she can rummage through his clothing chest.
“Did you shave, boy?” she demands.
“Yes,” he says. She doesn’t mean his face. It doesn’t need it any more.
“Then dress yourself.”
She drops her choices for him on his bed board and leans against the door, clearly planning to watch him change out of his nightgown. She’s like the rest of them: obsessed with his body, with the alterations they’ve made to it, with the changes that continue to happen. She’s got a sheaf of photos, some of them candids from the cameras behind cages in the main room, some of them posed, and she likes to show them to him in order; a sadist’s flip book.
See your shame, she tells him. So he pretends to.
He hates what they’ve done to him, but simply having been made to look like a woman is nothing to be ashamed of. He’d ask his mother why English women are like this, if they hadn’t had her killed.
He dresses. She has at least selected for elegance today: a black skirt with a wide belt, cut to below the knee but tight enough to slightly restrict his movement, a white blouse with billowed shoulders, and white sandals with a low heel. She’s put out his makeup colours as well, and sneers at him as he paints his face. They think he should be ashamed of this, too.
When he’s done, he stands, examines himself from head to toe in the shatter-proof mirror. His hair falls easily and is controlled with a little finger combing, so he considers himself finished, and turns around to be evaluated.
“You’re like Lady Di fucked Stevie Nicks, Vincent,” Karen says. “We are fucking artists.”
He winces when she uses that name, and her smile deepens. She loves that. Loves to feel like it harms him whenever she uses it. Loves to imagine that the dichotomy between body and name causes him pain. But it means nothing any more, and describes someone long dead; she could name him anything and it would mean the same. But she likes to hurt him, and she thinks it a weapon, so when she calls him by that name he winces, and he controls her, just a little.
She beckons him to follow, and even though she’s walking ahead of him, he can picture her glee at the sounds his heels make on the concrete. Every artefact of femininity she forces onto him gives her shivers of pleasure. Childish impulses in adult bodies, all of them. This prison is a playground for cruel and artless English girls who never tired of crushing bugs with rocks.
The underground area’s laid out around an L-shaped central corridor, which tapers off past the bedrooms into an eventual exit to somewhere unknown, and which terminates just past the main room in a double-locked iron door blocking the stairs up into the main building. Some old hospital for the rich and secretive, Karen said on one of her more loquacious days. It hasn’t officially served patients for many years but — and she made snipping motions with her fingers — they keep the equipment bang up to date. That was a month before they operated on his face.
Karen leads him off the main corridor and into the central room, an ugly affair of benches and seats and restraints and discarded devices, somewhere he and his fellow girls are allowed to congregate after hours; somewhere they are abused.
Dorothy’s there, waiting in the centre of the room. All up in her tweeds, too; another wannabe aristocrat. And with her, bent under her hand even though he’s taller than anyone else present, is a boy. He’s skinny, malnourished even, and his messy black hair’s pushed back from his face with the remains of whatever product he had in it when they took him. It has a blue sheen, suggesting hair dye, and a ragged cut; probably doesn’t quite reach his eyes when brushed flat. He has healing puncture marks in his earlobes and one eyebrow; they’ll have removed his piercings when they brought him here.
But it’s his eyes that are inescapable. The fury in them, the sheer, concentrated hatred.
And the beauty. The boy’s eyes shimmer in the light, green-grey and sparkling with tears, flicking around the room, searching for answers. Or escape, perhaps.
He’s breathtaking. The boys they take always are. Except for the one who’d been Vincent, who used to regard his reflection with the interested indifference of one who planned to age into his looks. He still doesn’t know why they bothered with him, why they didn’t kill him with his parents, especially since Karen took pleasure in informing him just how much work it took to make something pretty out of him, and how much money. Their jobs are so much easier if the boys are already delicate and feminine.
The boy is these things and more, and can’t have been able to put up much of a fight when they took him. Although the bruises blossoming ugly on his exposed arms and upper body suggest he tried, anyway. Good for him.
“Vincent!” Dorothy commands. “Attend!”
He steps forward, realising as he does so that Karen’s hand is around his upper arm, the better to control him, and he fights off a sneer. This is not the time to try anything stupid.
The boy’s eyes bore into him. Probably trying to work out if he’s prisoner or captor. Either that, or trying to puzzle out why Dorothy used a man’s name for him.
“This,” Dorothy says, “is David. He belongs to Frankie.” She nods sideways, and he spots the ginger one lounging by the entrance, twirling her weapon around one finger. She’s clumsy; he hopes she drops it and zaps herself. “But while he is down here, he is your responsibility.”
“Mine?” he asks. Shit. The golden rule: say as little to the bitches as possible. Karen giggles at him; the boy doesn’t react except to frown slightly.
“Yeah,” Frankie says loudly, her crass voice carrying as it always does. “Yours. Idiot boy.” She’s the odd one out amongst them all, the only one who doesn’t pretend to an aristocratic accent, but he doesn’t like her any more for it.
“He’s a little older than we normally do,” Dorothy says, twisting the boy in her grasp like an attractive ornament she wishes to show off, “but just look at him! Frankly, I couldn’t resist.”
Karen leans closer and whispers, “Happy Valentine’s,” before releasing him. She’s still laughing, and he wants to puncture her pleasure somehow, perhaps by prodding at her bandaged shoulder, but that would not end well, not for him, not for the boy.
“Make sure he knows what’s expected of him,” Dorothy says, turning to leave. “Oh,” she adds, “and do ensure he’s properly dressed. Or you know what happens.”
He nods as the women file out, leaving him alone with the boy.
The first time they gave him the run of the place, after they turfed him out of his cell with no more instruction than to comport himself appropriately, the four girls lounging despondently in the main room descended upon him and greeted him with sympathy and compassion, and when he asked why he’d been imprisoned with four beautiful women they informed him, sadly, that that is not what this place is for.
“It’s a toy factory,” one of them said, “and we’re the toys.”
“So are you, now, sweetheart,” another said.
“We’ll teach you how to live with it,” the third said. “At least for as long as you can.”
The fourth said nothing, but embraced him and cried on his shoulder.
They cared for him, they taught him, and they were taken away.
Looks like that’s his job now. He steps forward, holds out a hand.
“You don’t need to be scared of me,” he says, leaning into the accent Karen keeps trying to beat out of him, the better to differentiate himself from their captors. “You’re… David?”
“Davy,” the boy says.
The boy hasn’t taken his hand yet, so he takes another slow, careful step forward. Eventually Davy accepts it and he guides the boy to one of the clumps of chairs in the far corner of the main room. It’s minimally comfortable, with cushions and a handful of books, the bitches upstairs having presumably realised that you need to provide some entertainment or your prisoners will lose themselves before you’re done having fun. He sits, crossing his legs at the knee in the manner that’s become unnervingly comfortable ever since he healed from their first mutilation. Davy sits to attention, like a schoolchild.
Start with the basics.
“How old are you, Davy?”
“Twenty-one.”
A stab of jealousy. At least the boy got to finish his teenage years. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Davy stares at him.
“What does it matter?”
“Indulge me.”
“Why do you sound like that? And why’s your name Vincent?”
He frowns. “What’s the last thing you remember, Davy?”
“I was at home,” Davy says, sullen, “with Mum. I just got off probation. We were going to celebrate. She went out for food. She was only gone ten minutes. Then the doorbell went and then I was fighting for my fucking life. And then I was here.”
It takes a heavy breath to get him through what he needs to say next. “Davy… how long have you been here?”
The boy shrugs. “Woke up about an hour ago with that old woman in my face. One of the other ones, the ginger one, she brought me food, then they dragged me in here.”
Damn it.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. How do you feel? Any… unusual sensations?”
Another shrug. “Not really. Bollocks are kind of itchy.”
Double fucking damn it. There goes any hope that they haven’t done to Davy what they did to him…
“Seriously,” Davy says, “who the fuck are you?”
They can break someone in a year. It’s a common boast of Dorothy’s, one she likes to relay with embellishments to the drunken old fucks she makes him serve sometimes. And she’s been right so far, or close enough: the girls who were taken from him had been here a maximum of fourteen months; enough time for their surgeries to heal — or heal enough — and for a course of hormone treatment to soften them up, the way Dorothy prefers.
But the other girls all gave up.
If today’s Valentine’s 1986, then it’s been almost a year for him. A year of abuse, of mutilation, of unending degradation… and he’s still fighting. Not in the way the other girls fought, because Dorothy and her bitches are ready for that. He’s fighting simply by refusing to become what they want, and he knows they’re starting to see it.
He won’t be humiliated. He won’t be made ashamed. And maybe, from now on, he won’t react to the name they use for him, either.
How long can he last? Because now he has someone to protect. Someone to help. Someone who might be able to fight them the way he’s learning to.
It’s been a year and they haven’t broken him? He decides, right here, right now, that they’re never going to. And the agitated innocent in the chair next to him, glaring fear and confusion with those beautiful eyes?
They’re not fucking breaking him, either.
2019 December 13
Friday
It’s satisfying to lie here, one arm around her, feeling her belly rise and fall in slow time with her deep breaths and her whimpered snores, and to do so without conflict, without confusion. He knows exactly who she is. She’s not a girl through adaptation, like Maria or Monica or the other women here; she’s a girl because she’s always been one. She’s a girl no-one could see, and she unveiled herself here, in this absurd place.
She showed herself to him. How could he be angry about that? How could he deserve to be angry about that?
Aaron chooses to feel special instead. Because she picked him.
She picked him, despite everything. Despite all he’s done, despite his behaviour towards her, despite—
No.
She knows. That was the point of telling her, yes? That was the point of fucking bleeding out in her bed, telling and retelling the stories of the women and girls he’s wronged. The final challenge, the one which nearly killed him when he faced it himself: know me; know all of me.
She saw his remorse. She saw how absolutely and completely the knowledge had broken him. She saw his determination, raw and unsteady and new but real, to mend himself, to make something out of the wreckage of Aaron Holt.
God, he hopes that’s what she saw. But she fell peacefully to sleep in his lap; she wouldn’t do that if she hated him, right? He told her everything, or as much as he could, and she persisted in looking at him like he’s someone.
Steph fell asleep in his lap and he lay back and stroked her hair and watched the movie Maria picked for him and tried very, very hard not to cry at all the stupid romantic bits. She messaged him when it was done, asking if he wanted her to put something else on, but he said it was fine, and wished her goodnight, and she sent him a hug emoji.
All of this is so new. How ridiculous to feel at peace in the place that imprisons him.
So now he lies sleepless in his friend’s bed, with his arm around her, to make certain she doesn’t turn over in her sleep and fall, and thinks about mermaids.
Everything’s a lesson down here. Everything’s a tool. Even the accidents; especially the accidents. Steph being here in the first place, a trans woman thrown to the misanthropic, misogynist and occasionally outright violent wolves: a tool. A lever. If Maria’s to be believed, not one they even knew about for a while, but a tool nonetheless; a moderating influence on the boys. It had worked on him! And Maria’s attack: another tool. Aaron had been forced to undergo Indira’s tender ministrations, and face up to the ugly implications of his own grim satisfaction at seeing Maria hurt. Not something a good man would enjoy.
And now here’s the bloody Disney cartoon. He wondered as he watched who he was supposed to identify with. Is he the Prince, centre of a love story that becomes convoluted when the full details of the girl’s backstory are revealed? Or is he Ariel, asking the impossible — to walk on land; to be forgiven — and trading the only life she knows in return?
He’s not the Prince. The man’s barely a character in his own right, and the love story is almost incidental. He’s just the reason why Ariel chooses voluntarily to sacrifice a part of herself.
So is he the mermaid?
You want dick pics? I’ve got twenty!
Fuck it. Maybe he’s the fish.
Steph grumbles, and he loosens his grip, lets her fidget a little, listens to her mutter something incomprehensible and sweet. Smiles because even in her sleep the voice exercises she’s been doing are changing the way she sounds.
She’s going to be beautiful.
Of course, they say that to him, too.
Maria talked about the voice inside him, telling him he’s a man, telling him men can’t change, but while it’s definitely there, it’s not been the whole of the problem.
It’s the choice. The one that’s implicit in everything Maria’s said, in everything she’s not said, in the evidence of the other girls: Pippa, Tabby, Edy; Steph. Fuck, even the others, the nameless women who help out sometimes, who point tasers and bring food and scowl at him when he cracks jokes. The girls who came down when Maria got hurt — once again his throat almost ruptures at the thought of it; his emotions are so close to the surface these days — like the tall blonde one Steph seems to know. All of them, avatars of the choice. All of them women who, at one point, chose the same thing.
It’s the choice and it’s the only one left: accept it or don’t. Refusing to participate isn’t enough; they’ll just keep injecting him and changing him no matter what, and Maria will be disappointed and Steph will grow distant and they’ll probably bring Indira back to grin at him and feed him through a tube and he’ll be a girl-shaped hole in the world. No.
It’s the choice and he knows what Elizabeth would say, if she somehow knew everything and could still, afterwards, bring herself to speak to him. The only time she ever shouted at him was one afternoon when he was lamenting his awful fucking school. He was complaining like he always did but she was different, and he didn’t see what was going on with her until she raised her voice. Tell your parents you don’t want to go any more, she said. And if they don’t listen, run away from the bloody school! Make them listen! Make yourself a problem and make them or bloody social services solve it! Do the hard thing! She shouted at him and fled to the back room in tears and when he followed her and placed a nervous hand on her shoulder she apologised. They lost the shop barely six weeks later. She must have known what was coming, and still she made time for the windblown rich boy refusing to properly evaluate what’s in front of him. Do the hard thing, Aaron.
It’s the choice and it’s terrifying and it has implications he hasn’t even begun to examine and even though he knows Maria and Steph and all the others will be there for him every step of the way he still doesn’t know if it’s something he can do without losing his mind completely. But Maria said it: it’s not just Steph and the girls he knows; the girls upstairs are rooting for him now. The ones who used to view him with contempt. A family. His for the joining.
It’s the choice and he made it without meaning to. And it’s only now, looking back, here with the girl who might love him curled up in his arms, that he understands how and when he made it. Because the choice to grow, to become someone new, to reject the person he once was and all his excuses and all his bullshit, the choice to live with it, is one and the same as the choice to become like Steph, like Maria. And he rejects the comparison even as he makes it, not because it’s inaccurate but because if he’s going to do it, if he’s really going to do what Maria asks of him, then he’s not going to hide from it any more, especially not in his own head. Yes, he’s going to be like them, but he’s going to be his own person. His own creation.
It’s the choice and he made it.
He’s going to be a fucking girl.
1986 September 9
Tuesday
She rarely knows the exact date, but sometimes they give her just enough information to keep track of roughly what time of year it is. She knows when she was brought here, and she knows when Dee got here, and that idiot Frankie was going on about her birthday a few weeks ago, which means it has to be September by now.
She’s beaten Dorothy’s much-vaunted timetable by half a year. She can almost see the bitches getting desperate.
Karen took all her things away, including her clothes. Said they were for visitations only. But camera coverage down here is laughable and their staff of sadists is small enough that she was able, with the help of Dee and one of the new girls, to hide away a few items in a box behind a cabinet in a disused and filthy room a little way past the bedrooms. They’ve even got money in there, and a passport; Frankie was stupid enough to bring her purse down with her a few months back, and the downside of drawing your captive population from the ranks of petty criminals is that some of them can pick pockets.
She closes her eyes for a second. The girl who stole it for her didn’t make it. Learned she was about to go on the table, that the countdown to the end was about to start, and took the other way out. Smart or stupid?
Academic, really. She’s running on guesswork most of the time herself.
At least she doesn’t have to pretend shame to Karen any more. No, she spits the names and the pronouns back in her face. Karen wants him to be humiliated by his woman’s body and his man’s soul? Fine; he’ll embrace the body, he’ll teach himself to revel in it. And he’ll even begin working on the soul. Anything to survive. Nothing else matters.
She still needs a name, though.
“Vincent!”
It’s Karen again, waiting outside her room. The bitch doesn’t even come in here any more, not since it was rendered empty. None of them do. They take away her clothes and make her walk around in underwear and find their pleasures on her body as they like, and still it infuriates them that she refuses to bend to them. The slightest bit of independence is an outrage.
In the corridor she finds her ‘sponsor’ waiting with a sneer and robe, and she is quickly and roughly clothed. Karen hooks an arm around hers and drags her towards the stairs, up through the first basement and into the house proper, through the dining hall and into the corridors at the back of the building that led eventually to the surgical suite, and for a brief moment she’s terrified Dee’s died on the table. The boy’s been up there for days, recovering from facial surgery, and she’s tried not to show it but she’s been scared for him. The bitches have been too successful with him, hurt him too deeply. She’s helped him as much as she can, but there’s a block, something he can’t get past, that’s preventing him from adapting the way she has. She understands — identity is a difficult thing to discard — but it leaves him vulnerable to their manipulations and their scorn.
Maybe he just needs more time. Not something that’s in vast supply here.
“David’s been asking for you,” Karen says, pulling on her arm again to stop her outside the recovery room. “Begging for you, actually. It’s very sad. But Grandmother likes this one. Doesn’t want him to have an episode.” Karen shrugs, with the indifference of one who doesn’t care if any of the girls lives or dies, as long as she can watch it happen. “Fix him.”
“Alone,” she says, and enjoys the deepening of Karen’s scowl. Bitch hates it when she uses her new voice.
“Obviously,” Karen replies in what she likely hopes is a withering tone. She kicks open the door and shoves her charge roughly through, but there’s no time to give consideration to her treatment because there’s Dee, lying there on the incongruous hospital bed and propping himself up on his elbows.
She waits for the door to close before she speaks.
“Hi, Dee.”
The boy has a smile for her. “Hi.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like someone filled my head with cotton wool and my chest with— uh, what’s a ball that’s bigger than a tennis ball but smaller than a football? Never mind.”
“They won’t feel like that forever.”
“But they’ll be in me forever,” Dee says. “Frankie’s already taken great pleasure telling me how much it cost to make me look like a ‘slag’.”
“Ignore her.”
“You know I can’t.”
She pulls a stool over, sits by the bed with her elbows on the mattress, and takes one of Dee’s hands in hers. “You can. You can embrace this.”
“I can’t. I don’t know how you do it. Fuck—” and he tips his head back, ripping his hand away from hers and grimacing at what’s probably only a fraction of the pain that’s to come, when they take him off the drip, “—they’ve fucking unmade me, Vince! They keep coming at me and taking things and changing things and even before this I didn’t recognise the face in the mirror and now…” He struggles against the short chains that keep his hands away from his face. No touching the merchandise until it’s ready.
“That’s not my name, Dee.”
Dee glares at her. “Yeah, well Dee’s not mine.”
“David is a weapon for them to use against you,” she insists, grabbing at his hands, getting them both under her control, “and so’s your old sex, and so’s your shame, and so’s your ego. You can do what I did. You can just forget it all. You have to, if you’re going to survive this. But more than that, it’s freeing, Dee. And it really, really annoys them.”
“Is that a good thing?” Dee says, irritable but calming down. His complaints never last long; he knows she’s right. He’s just not ready to accept it.
“They’re going to put cigarettes out on your back whatever you do, Dee,” she says. “At least you can make them hate it. Look at how they are with me. They want me to be Vincent. They need it. We’re here at their pleasure, so why not deny it?”
“Because you lose yourself?”
This again. She responds the same way she always does. “What’s left to lose? Half the agony of this place is from trying to hold on to your manhood.”
There’s not much for Dee to say to that. There never is. And he’s so close! What does a construction like manhood get you, anyway, when they’ve taken your balls and reshaped your body and taken a chisel to the bones in your face? How can it possibly help you, at this point? Why not simply let it go?
He looks away and she sighs. It’s easier said than done. She knows that, too.
She expends a lot of effort to seem more comfortable than she is, but the truth is she misses her former self so much that sometimes she thinks she can hear him, scratching at the edge of her consciousness, trying to break back in. But he can do nothing but weigh her down now, and she needs to be nimble to survive. Cut it all away.
There’s only one thing for her to discard.
Vincent’s not her name any more, hasn’t been for a long time, but replacing it’s harder than the pronoun shift, harder than accepting herself as something more akin to woman than man. There’s something so final about it…
And then she laughs at herself suddenly — clamping her teeth shut to keep it inside — because if she can’t take that final step then she has no business berating Dee for his reticence.
At least she’s thought about it. At least she has ideas.
One idea in particular.
She almost laughs again; it seems so simple. Why didn’t she name herself months ago?
She leans forward a little more, lets one of his hands go but keeps the other, squeezes it. “I’ve actually been thinking about names, Dee,” she says.
“Really?”
“I need a new one. I can’t be nobody forever. But I need your help.” She doesn’t, but she wants to involve him. Wants him to see naming yourself as something powerful, perhaps even something joyful. She’ll present a choice to him, involve him in the process, and hopefully encourage him to think harder about his future, and the new identity he’ll build for himself. “I have two I’m thinking of,” she says. “Béatrice and Valérie.”
“I like them,” Dee says. “Why those two in particular?”
“Béatrice was the name of my first tutor, when I was young. She was kind, she was pretty—” she grins, “—and she helped me learn your awful language. And Valérie—” now she affects a sigh, deep and mournful, “—was the name of the older sister I never had.”
Dee frowns at her. “What happened?”
“My mother miscarried. And then she had me, and the doctors told her not to risk another. She told me to keep the name for any daughters I might have one day.” She risks a wry smile. “And since I’ll never have any daughters…”
“You should use it,” Dee says quickly. “It suits you. You should be Valerie.”
“Valérie,” she corrects. “You really think so?”
“I do. It’s a shame, though,” he adds, frowning thoughtfully. “Beatrice is such a pretty name. Especially the way you say it. Maybe you should keep it for a middle name.”
A pretty name, is it? “I don’t need two.” She stands, leans down to whisper in his ear. “I think you should have it. If you want it.”
His breath catches in his throat and she knows he’s considering it, and even if it’s only for a moment it still feels significant. She wills him to take the name, to embrace it. Tries to imagine what he could be, free of this place. If they were free of this place together…
Valérie rises, remains close enough almost to kiss him, and watches as his wide eyes lock with hers.
“Think about it,” she says. “Béatrice.”
2019 December 13
Friday
She wakes in the morning to Melissa, standing in the light streaming through the window and repeatedly interrupting her sunshine halo as she rubs her hair dry with a powder blue hand towel. She’s brushing her teeth with her other hand and staring at a random patch of wall as she does so, and she’s not noticed Shahida’s awake, so Shahida can watch her do her thing.
Melissa’s dressed in simple clothes, although whether they’re from her suitcase or borrowed from Stephanie’s wardrobe Shahida has no idea. She’s wearing loose jeans and a high cut grey top that exposes her shoulders and, damn, she’s still thin, but it works for her, and Shahida’s almost hypnotised by the little motions she makes as she cleans her teeth and dries her hair. It’s like Rach’s bedroom all over again, with Shahida borderline obsessed with every movement Melissa makes; this time, though, Shahida’s not going to push, and Melissa’s not going to run.
Eventually she’s caught staring.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” Melissa says, surprisingly articulate despite the mouthful of toothbrush. She balls up her towel under one arm, raises a finger to ask Shahida to wait, and darts back into the bathroom. After a few seconds of spitting and rinsing, she emerges, damp but unencumbered. “How did you sleep?”
“I slept well,” Shahida says, choosing not to mention how disappointed she was that, despite both of them having fallen asleep together, when Shahida woke up in the middle of the night, Melissa had moved to the couch. She’d even found a blanket from somewhere, now carefully folded up. “Better than I’ve slept in a long time, actually,” Shahida admits.
“Oh?”
She can’t say what she wants to say: that even after she finally moved on, sometimes, late at night, she couldn’t help but remember the dead, and wonder if there was something she could have done, wonder if something else could have happened instead of the obvious, the inevitable. On those nights she barely slept, and she’s had a lot of them since coming back to England.
Instead she forces a laugh. “I think I dreamed that this—” she waves an arm at Melissa, the room, the building, “—was all just something I imagined.”
Melissa smiles, and turns to rummage in one of Stephanie’s drawers. “It does have a sort of unreal quality to it, doesn’t it?” she says, straightening up and looking for a wall socket for the hair dryer she’s found. She pauses in her search, meets Shahida’s eyes, and adds, “It’s really good to see you too, Shy. I think I said that a lot last night, but it is. It won’t ever stop being good to see you. It’s amazing, actually.”
Shahida’s glad the stunned silence is broken by Melissa blow drying her hair, because there’s nothing she can say to that.
It’s not that she expected Melissa to be mad at her, even though part of her, for the longest time, has thought that an entirely appropriate response to her ham-fisted adolescent meddling. It’s that in some way everything since then has been shaped around the hole Mark’s death punched through her. Her achievements, her relationships, her life have all been in part in his memory, and now here she is, walking around the room brushing her hair and looking for all the world like a Disney princess threw on jeans and a t-shirt for an incognito trip to the mall.
Changed utterly, and yet still exactly the same.
‘Amazing’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Shahida resorts to the banal. “What’s the time?” she asks, when Melissa starts carefully putting the hair dryer away.
“Um,” Melissa says, looking around for a phone and failing to find one. “A little after eight, probably?”
“Eight? Neither of us have anything in particular to do today, do we?”
“Not as far as I know,” Melissa says with a shrug.
“Then why are you dressed and ready at eight in the morning?”
Melissa taps at her bare cheek. “I’m not quite ready yet. But it’s wise to be awake. The day starts early around here, especially on this floor, and I thought you might want to have a chance to get your shit together before the inevitable— Too late!”
As if scripted, there’s a knock at the bedroom door. Melissa grins and shakes her head, glances over at Shahida to check on her — she’s still in bed but she’s sitting up and she’s got on a baggy sleepshirt she found in a drawer; she’s fine — and runs her hand through her hair before she opens the door. Strands of golden blonde shimmer through her fingers and cascade over her shoulders and Shahida shakes herself: she’s got to stop finding every damn thing the girl does unspeakably hot or she’ll never make it to lunchtime.
It’s Faye again, once more heading up a small crowd of girls who, Shahida gets the strong impression, would be clambering over each other to see inside were they not also, between them, carrying pastries and mugs of coffee and other items of breakfast paraphernalia.
“Morning, Faye,” Shahida says, waving.
They’re all in various states of night dress — the same things she saw them in last night, actually; they must have had a sleepover or something — and at least two are yawning, but they manage to enter with their cargo and drop it off on the bedside table without spilling anything. When Faye takes a step back they all step back with her, almost but not quite out into the corridor.
“I made the croissants,” says one. “I made them yesterday, so they’re not the most fresh, but they should still be pretty good.”
“They’re amazing,” another one says. “Aisha’s just modest.”
“Modesty’s a virtue, dork,” Aisha says, and a minor scuffle precipitates at the rear of the group.
“I made the coffee,” Faye says. “But it’s just instant. The machine’s busted, and the other machine’s busted, and someone didn’t wash the cafetiere—” two of the girls point, giggling, at the one wearing a light pink hoodie and stripy socks, “—and I didn’t want to bug Christine this early to see if we could use the one from her kitchen. So. Instant.”
“Instant’s fine,” Melissa says. “Thank you. All of you.”
Shahida has to ask. “Do you always travel as a pack?”
The one standing next to Faye, the one who brought the milk jug, replies, “Not always. But you’re interesting! And it’s been a while since anything new happened here. Just Steph a little while ago, and then a whole lotta nothing.”
“Didn’t you all get…?” Shahida doesn’t want to say forcibly remade, but she waves her arms around a little and the girls seem to get it.
“Yes,” the one in the hoodie says, “but that was ages ago.”
It takes a couple of minutes for the girls to file out, still talking amongst themselves and breaking off into smaller groups, presumably returning to their own rooms to get dressed, and Melissa can’t hold in the giggles, which burst out into laughter just after the door closes.
“Oh my God,” she wheezes, sitting heavily on the bed next to Shahida, who shuffles up to give her space, “oh my God…”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” Melissa rubs at her chest. “It just… It makes me so happy to see that.”
“What? The girls?”
“Yes,” Melissa says. She’s got her breath back and she’s grinning at Shahida, who is still dealing with her annoyingly persistent disbelief that the pack of giggling schoolgirls used to be boys. “We weren’t like that in the second year. I mean, I wasn’t, obviously, but even Nell and her lot… It took them a lot longer to get used to things. And it makes me think…”
Shahida touches the tips of Melissa’s fingers, to prompt her. “Yes?”
“Maybe this place got better. I want it to be better, and my intake was a long time ago. Maybe the sponsors are just better at it now. I hope so.” She presses herself into the soft headboard, stretches, and picks up her coffee mug. Plain, this time; disappointing. “I want this place to be good, Shy. They always said they were helping the other girls. And they were, sure, but it took a long time. And a lot of pain. I think… I think I want this place to feel like home. Abby’s here, and Steph’s here, and you know about it, and… I just want to have what Abby has here. What Steph’s building here. What the second years have. I want to get to know Christine. I want to try to connect with my intake. I want a family, Shy. I want it so much.”
Shahida takes her hand again, curls her fingers around her wrist. “I think you can have it,” she says. “Everyone I’ve talked to wants you to have it. No-one seems interested in punishing you for what happened yesterday, and my overall impression is that a lot of the girls find you kind of… interesting? They want to get to know you, anyway. I think, if you asked for a room on a more permanent basis, or even just for permission to visit more, or however it works, they’d give it to you without a second thought.”
“You’re probably right,” Melissa says, leaning against her. “The longer I’ve been away, the more my memory has populated this place with monsters. But they’re just people. So maybe the problem’s me. Maybe it wasn’t always, but maybe now it is.”
“You’re not a problem,” Shahida insists. “You’ve just had a hard time.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Keep telling me that. Every half hour or so, please.”
Shahida laughs. “It’s actually weird how normal this place feels. Ignoring the locks and the silly mugs and what I know is going on in the basement… Once or twice I’ve thought it was all a conspiracy, quickly whipped up, to make me, personally, believe everyone here is just a normal but kind of neurotic woman. Paige and Christine, Lorna and Vicky, the sponsors working away on their computers, all the second years, last night and this morning… No-one seems like they’re here against their will. And that, in itself, feels a little suspicious? And then I feel very stupid for thinking that,” she adds, releasing Melissa and fetching her own coffee before it cools, “because everyone here quite clearly is a normal but kind of neurotic woman.”
“Don’t forget the nonbinary grads,” Melissa says, sipping from her mug.
“You have those?”
“Oh, a bunch.”
“They’re still neurotic, though, right?”
“A hundred percent of them, probably.” Melissa frowns. “I really wish I’d gotten to know my lot more.”
“So do it now. You’re back; take advantage of that! Message people. Say hi. Bury the hatchet.”
“The scalpel,” Melissa corrects.
“Em,” Shahida says, “that’s so crass.”
“Hey, you liked the mugs…”
Shahida hops into the shower after coffee, and Melissa waits just outside the bathroom, keeping her company, letting the steam out of the window, and passing her a towel when she’s done, with respectfully averted eyes.
Shahida doesn’t have a change of clothes with her, and she’s still taller than Melissa, so she borrows a top from Stephanie’s wardrobe to go with her trousers. Melissa does her makeup while Shahida dries her hair — and, goodness, it’s fun and a little bizarre to watch Melissa paint her face with confidence and competence — and then they swap places, with Shahida at the vanity applying slightly more makeup than she generally wears and Melissa sitting beside her on the couch, talking about nothing.
It’s like the old days, except Shahida isn’t worried about her any more, and Melissa’s free.
“Oh, hey,” Melissa says, as Shahida’s finishing up and contemplating going upstairs to disturb Christine so they can borrow the third years’ coffee maker, “your phone just lit up.”
Shahida makes gimme gestures, and Melissa feigns reluctance, getting up from the couch and retrieving the phone from the bedside table. Shahida wants to lean up and kiss her as she hands it over — it would be the most natural thing in the world — and frowns at herself in the mirror instead. Go slow, Shy.
“Was that really a good idea?” Shahida asks. Melissa, sitting cross-legged on the bed with a laptop open in front of her, shrugs.
Melissa points at the screen. “She’s on campus,” she says. “She was always going to open that email, you know.”
“I know,” Shahida says. “I was panicking. Sorry.”
“It’s not like you knew what you were getting into. This is all kind of my fault, anyway. I should have reconnected sooner. Avoided all this.”
“I thought you weren’t allowed?”
“No, but—”
1987 January 22
Thursday
It’s so fucking hard to move. The bitches upstairs had guests over last night, and while it was one of their look-but-don’t-touch evenings, one of the guests overrode Dorothy — and was able to override her! — and took an interest specifically in Val. He liked to stroke her hair, squeeze her buttocks, slap her, call her Vincent. He used her full old name, too, Vincent Barbier, which she hasn’t heard since her very first days down here. He used it like it was important to him, like just saying it while touching her was a sensual experience to rival the finest wines.
She learned his name, too. Smyth-Farrow. Smyth with a fucking y, like that means anything in this bastardised language except that its bearer is old money and wants everyone in the country to know it.
He asked her how much sensation she still had in her penis and she spat in his face, and that was when Karen hit her.
So many bruises.
She slept in the main room overnight, with Dee and the others, and while everyone else eventually returned to their rooms, Dee stayed, spent an undoubtedly uncomfortable night in a lumpy old armchair, since Val took the only sofa long enough to sleep on. And now she’s stiff, and Dee’s still sleeping, and all she wants is a mouthful of water.
Correction: all she wants is to return in kind every abuse inflicted upon her for the last two years. All she’s likely to get is tepid, metallic water from the fountain in the corner.
If only she can get up off this fucking sofa.
That’s all you want, is it?
Shut up.
I’m offended you don’t want me back.
Shut up and go away. I’m tired and I’m hurting and I don’t want to think about you at all.
Then don’t. And try not thinking about pink elephants while you’re at it.
Fuck off and die again.
With a grunt she pushes up from the sofa, ignores the pain as best she can, staggers across the room while shielding her eyes from the motion-activated lights, and leans heavily on the water fountain.
The water’s horrible, as usual.
Weakling.
The voice isn’t real. She doesn’t hear it, within or without, and the personality it represents is long dead, a relic of the teenager who never got the chance to grow up. But she creates it nonetheless, succumbs irresistibly to the temptation, and the more she pushes back against the parts of herself she needs to forget, the louder she protests, in the voice of the boy she buried.
Failing completely to remake herself. Just another failure among many.
They took another girl away last week. Here one day, gone the next. She still doesn’t know where they go, what happens to them. She hopes they die, quickly and painlessly, but she reminds herself in Vincent’s voice that they probably go to the country manors of merciless bastards like Smyth-Farrow.
She swore to save all of them, to teach them to be like her, and yet she loses them anyway, and inside herself, she rebels. What’s the point of surviving when everyone around you gets taken away?
Moving slowly on bruised and tired limbs, roughly piloting the stranger’s body she’s still doing her best to convince herself is her own, she makes her way back to the sofa and collapses onto it.
She’s losing the fight. If they want her defeated, they almost have her.
At least Dee’s still here. They’ve talked names, several times, and Dee’s rejected them all. Too big a step. But she’s been experimenting with new pronouns, and yesterday morning, before the men came, she asked if Val would teach her to speak the way she does, and shared her plan in whispers. In substance, it’s the same as Val’s: the weak point is when they take you, when they move you out of this concrete prison, so if there’s ever a chance to get away, it’s then. Fail and get killed? You’ve lost nothing. But succeed? Escape? Now you’re a man out in the world who looks like a woman, and if you can’t make yourself also sound like a woman and act like a woman, you’re rolling a set of dice weighted heavily against you.
It’s progress. Maybe Dee can do it even if Val can’t. So she’s going to teach her, and Dee’s going to survive.
2019 December 13
Friday
One of the sponsors corners them in the kitchen on their way out. She quickly closes her laptop as they approach — Shahida gets a glimpse of what might be camera feeds — and rises to offer a hand to Melissa, which Melissa can hardly refuse.
“Indira Chetry,” she says. “You probably don’t remember me.”
“Hi.”
“I’m Christine’s sponsor. Or I was. The bloody girl’s so precocious they set her free and now I’m doing odd jobs for Maria, picking up slack, et cetera. I assume I don’t have to give you the lecture about pointing a taser at my Christine, do I?”
“Um,” Melissa says, still limply holding Indira’s hand, “no?”
“Good girl. Don’t do it again.” Indira releases her. “And Shahida! Welcome to England’s premier women’s college.”
“I thought Saints was co-ed?” Shahida says, frowning and borrowing a habitual Americanism.
“Give us time. Now. Girls. Where are you off to?”
Ah. She’ll be the gatekeeper, then. What should they tell her? Are they even allowed to do what they’re about to do?
“Before Shahida knew about us,” Melissa says, stepping subtly between Shahida and Indira, “she sent an email to an old friend. Very vague stuff, no details, but it was suggestive enough that the friend’s come here to make sure she’s okay. So we’re going to do damage control.”
“I see,” Indira says, nodding, her expression neutral. “What’s your plan?”
Melissa runs through it, talking quickly to forestall any objections. There’s a ‘standard story’, which Melissa intends to stick to: she hit rock bottom, she ran out on her degree, she travelled to another city, realised she’s trans, and transitioned with the help of some friends. She’s come back to Saints to visit an old friend; running into Shahida was coincidental. And she never got in touch before because, once she realised she’d been officially declared missing, she decided it was better that way.
“Mark was bad for everyone he touched,” Melissa concludes. “He should stay dead.”
Shahida wants to protest, but Indira preempts her. “Are you okay, Melissa?” she says. “We can send someone to delay your friend if you need some time. Not to delay her in a bad way,” she adds, glancing at Shahida. “They’d just strike up a conversation, buy her a drink, accidentally spill something on her, that sort of thing.”
“I’m okay,” Melissa says, smiling. “This is just bringing up memories.”
“Understandable. Just remember, you have all the resources of this house available to you; you need only call on us. I’ll be on duty all day. Speaking of: do you have the app suite on your phone?” Melissa shakes her head. “Download it soon. Christine can help. In the meantime—” she leans over and reaches into a cloth bag hanging from a peg, “—take this.”
Melissa takes a rather chunky looking phone from her and unlocks it. “Should I, um…?”
“Yes. Hit record now, drop it in your bag and forget about it. It’s in a battery case; it can record all day.”
“It’s going to record us?” Shahida asks. “Isn’t that rather invading our privacy? And Rachel’s?”
Indira, smirk firmly back in place, mimes pulling out a notepad and pen. “‘Invading privacy’…” she mutters to herself, pretending to write it down. “There. Now it’s on the big list of crimes, under ‘kidnapping and mutilation’ but above ‘movie piracy’.” She waves the pretend notepad in the air. “Go! Bring us to justice!” When they just stand there, she shoos them off. “Seriously, it’s fine. I’ll review the recording myself, and delete it when I’m done. Christine can vouch for me.”
“And who vouches for Christine?” Shahida asks.
“Me,” Indira says, and shoos them again. They take the hint this time.
“Are all the sponsors so weird?” Shahida says, after Melissa’s buzzed them out.
Melissa laughs. “Abby’s not weird,” she says, “but she’s not a sponsor any more, so… maybe they are all weird, actually.”
Abby. Yeah. “Will she back us up, if it comes to it? If Indira finds something on the recording she doesn’t like?”
“She will.”
“Will we… see her again?” Will she take you away from me?
“Abby’s giving us some space for the moment,” Melissa says. “We texted a bit, this morning, while you were sleeping. She doesn’t want to be a third wheel. I told her she’s being ridiculous, and that’s when she stopped replying.” She shakes her head, stops still on the path. “I hurt her, Shy. She saved me, and we— we fell in love, and then I ruined it, like I ruin everything.”
“Em, no,” Shahida says.
“It’s okay. I’m not spiralling. I’m better at heading them off than I used to be. Thanks to her, actually. But I’m serious: I hurt her badly by running off. And probably even more by coming back here for Steph and not for her. And yesterday she still helped me, comforted me, and stepped aside so you and I could reconnect. Without her in the way. She’s… she’s fucking selfless, Shy.”
“You’ll talk again,” Shahida says, massaging Melissa’s shoulder, clenching her stomach against the thought of Melissa loving someone else, reminding herself once again that her affection has never brought anything good into Melissa’s life. “You’ll talk again,” she repeats. “She has other friends she can turn to?” Melissa nods. “Then let her. When she’s ready — when you’re both ready — you can fix things.”
“Yeah,” Melissa says. “Yeah. You’re right.”
It makes them a little late, but Shahida keeps Melissa there on the path, in the shadow of Dorley Hall, talking quietly, holding each other, until the smile returns to her face. It feels as natural as breathing.
Rachel meets them outside Café One, runs across the quad towards them and envelops Melissa in the first tackle hug Shahida’s seen in a long time. It doesn’t take Melissa more than a fraction of a second to reciprocate, and when Rach comes up for air her eyes are red and she’s grinning like an idiot.
“Melissa!” she says. “Melissa. Mel-issa. Me-lissa. I’ve been practising under my breath. Good choice of name.”
“Thank you!”
“So now,” Rachel says, “you have to tell me everything about where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing and why—” she leans in and whispers, “—you’re dead.”
“Hi, Rach,” Shahida says, poking at her.
“Hi, stranger.”
“Do you want to go somewhere quiet? To talk?”
Rach jerks a thumb behind her. “We can’t talk in the café?”
Melissa meets Shahida’s eye, and she jerks her head subtly towards her bag, and Indira’s phone. Shahida decides she means that Indira won’t like it if they discuss Melissa’s recent past — or supposed recent past — in a crowded space.
“What about up on the hill?” Melissa says.
Rachel makes a show of looking around. “There’s a hill?”
“Hillock, then. It’s nice. There’s a bench. There are rabbits.”
“Ooh!” Rach squeals, seeming to lose a decade in an instant. She links arms with Melissa, pulls on her, and says, “Take me to the rabbits, Melissa!”
1987 August 24
Monday
“You just have to be careful with it.”
Dee waves the hairbrush irritably. “I know. I know. I hate it. I keep thinking I’ll pull the extensions out.”
“I know, sweetheart. But you won’t, not if you’re careful. Here; put your hand in mine.”
Val holds her hand out and Dee, with only a moment’s hesitation, lowers her hand, hairbrush and all, into Val’s palm. She lifts both their hands up and starts brushing through Dee’s hair, detangling the tips first and working up.
Dorothy decided Dee needs hair extensions; her natural hair’s still too short and tends to spike out at all angles. And it fell to Val, who’s been wearing extensions since her third month underground, to teach her how to care for them. She’s wondered if the bitches upstairs have noticed how close she’s become with Dee, or if they care at all. Because this is about as intimate as she’s ever been with anyone.
The other girls have experimented among themselves. And why wouldn’t they? In such a place you find comfort where you can, and homophobia doesn’t last long when the only other people who care if you live or die are other men who look like women. But Val’s never done anything more with the other girls than a little amateur fumbling; first, because she was alone for so long; second, because of Dee.
There’s no pretending she isn’t in love with her.
She guides the brush through Dee’s hair. Carefully does it. The girl’s sitting on the shorter of the two stools in Val’s room, and looks up with her deep grey-green eyes. She’s still wearing a little of the makeup Frankie slathered on her, even though she’s supposed to take it all off before bed; Val’s going to have to take her to the bathroom later on to wash it off. But she’s delaying it, because that will mean the end of the night, and Dee looks irresistible.
They haven’t done anything. Val doesn’t even know if Dee would be amenable, and doesn’t want to ask; Dee’s femininity has developed slowly but surely since her surgeries, and helping her understand and embrace it has been all that’s kept Val going. Arguments with the memory of Vincent; dreams of the day her parents were murdered; open wounds and itching scars. All of it wearing her down. But she keeps it together. For Dee.
She releases Dee’s hand and returns the brush to the utilitarian vanity.
“Thank you,” Dee whispers, in the voice Val’s been teaching her.
“Of course,” Val says, and resists the temptation to reach out and touch her just for the sake of it. Showing her how to care for herself, that’s fine, but she mustn’t indulge herself on the girl. It would be foolish to risk everything on the chance of a night’s pleasure.
She’s beautiful, though. And it’s hateful to see her that way. The boy who was brought here, freshly unmanned and glaring defiance, would not thank her for it. They taunted him when he first woke up after surgery. Told him the things they would force him to endure, so he could pay for the cost of making him beautiful. And that was almost the end for him. It’s only since, with Val’s help, that the girl has recovered some of herself, has found her resilience and her hatred once more, but she still stumbles. Several times Val’s had to help a near-catatonic Dee get dressed or eat, while the bitches watch, amused.
“What will you do,” Dee asks, when everything’s put away, “when you get out?”
It’s not a question; it’s a game, one Dee plays when she doesn’t want the day to end, when she doesn’t want to return to her room and shut herself in, alone with the girl they’ve forced her to become. Val does her best to respond differently every time.
“I will go back to Paris,” she says, “and I will learn to cook. I will apprentice at a terrible restaurant, and when I am good enough I will apprentice at a mediocre restaurant, and when I am—” she laughs at the look on Dee’s face, “—no, listen, when I am good enough I will apprentice at a reasonable restaurant, and when I am good enough I will apprentice at an excellent restaurant. And then—”
“Valerieeeee—”
“—I will open my own restaurant.” She points at Dee. “And I’ll need an apprentice.”
Dee giggles. “Will I have to start at a terrible restaurant first, or can I go straight to yours?”
“You’re making unfounded assumptions about the quality of my restaurant, dear Dee.”
Dee, still laughing, opens her mouth to say something, but the whine of the intercom cuts her off.
“Enough gossiping, boys.” It’s Karen’s voice. The bitches can’t hear them talk, but they can see them now. Innovations. “David, go to your room. Vincent, go to sleep. I have a job for you in the morning and I want you rested and looking your best.”
Val winces, because the fragile state of Dee’s rebellion is always challenged when they assert her maleness, but for the first time Dee doesn’t seem upset. Instead she nods at the crude little camera above the door and stands up from the stool, stumbling on her feet and holding out a hand for Val to steady. She takes it, and Dee falls easily into her embrace.
“Thank you,” Dee says.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. This is helping. You are helping. It’s— I’ve— No-one’s ever been so kind to me, Valerie.”
Val squeezes her, relishing the contact and reminding herself that it’s just a hug: an emotional high, not a sexual one. “You’re a wonderful girl, Dee,” she whispers, and Dee twitches only a little. “And you’re stronger than them.”
“You’re… you’re a wonderful girl, too,” Dee says, stepping back but not releasing her. They stand a forearm apart, holding each other at the elbow.
“Thank you,” Val says, and risks it all, leaning forward to kiss her quickly and lightly on the forehead.
For a moment Dee looks like she might reciprocate, and those grey-green eyes are suddenly intense, stripping Val almost to the bone, but then she smiles, ducks her head, and walks quickly for the door. It closes behind her with a click and Val is alone again, with the girl she’s made out of herself.
2019 December 13
Friday
The swimming complex at the university sports centre is no Peri Paradise, but what is? Not even the arguably even more magnificent water parks she visited while in the States could measure up to the domed tropical wonderland she visited when she was thirteen. Understandable; it was her first real holiday; it was her first major outing since Dad died; it was where she met Mark.
Shahida looks over at Melissa, who is currently suffering through a bout of extreme Rachel enthusiasm over which swimsuit she should buy from the shop at the university’s sports centre. Rach is enthusing over a two piece; Melissa’s unsure and clearly needs rescuing, so Shahida steps in and makes her own, considerably more modest suggestions.
Rachel absorbed Melissa’s story with a thoughtful frown and a shrug, and dragged her into another hug when she was done, saying as they embraced that she really needs to meet her wife and what does she do for a living and how long is she in town and does she have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a theyfriend or any other kind of partner and oh my goodness they need to reconnect with Amy and re-experience the wonder of her parents’ pool. And Melissa made the mistake of mentioning that Saints has its own pool — its own swimming complex, in fact — and from there her fate was sealed.
Shahida hasn’t been swimming in ages.
Whereas Melissa, it turns out, when they burst into the changing rooms together with their newly purchased swimsuits, hasn’t been swimming in more than seven years.
“This is so fucking scary,” she whispers to Shahida, yanking her into the cubicle and confessing.
“Really? Seven years?” It’s hard to imagine.
“Longer. Not since the last time we went to Amy’s together.”
Shahida knots her eyebrows. “How come?” she asks. And then she feels stupid, because the answer’s obvious.
“When you’re early in transition,” Melissa says, as Shahida manages not to berate herself for not guessing slightly faster, “and you’re, um, intact… it can be actively dangerous. So even though I missed it, I just kinda gave up on it.” She shrugs nervously. “And then not swimming became a habit.”
“We don’t have to do this—”
“No. I want to.” Melissa forces a smile. “And so do you. Just maybe stay with me? At least until I get used to it?”
Shahida wraps her arms around Melissa’s shoulders, pulls her in close and holds her, feeling once again fiercely protective. She wants to go back to the Hall and find Abby and shout at her for all the things Melissa’s had to experience, but the more she thinks about it — the longer she holds her — the more she realises that this isn’t a Dorley thing. It’s just a people thing. It’s what people have always been like, when you don’t know them, when you’re marginalised in some way they don’t share; sometimes even when you do know them. Each one a potential threat.
Melissa’s not been able to go swimming…
“Um, Shy?” Melissa says.
“Oh! Sorry!”
Shahida releases her, and she’s half-turned the lock on the cubicle door before a hand on her shoulder stops her.
“Stay?” Melissa says. “Please?”
Dumbly, Shahida nods, and turns around in time to see Melissa turning her back, pulling off her top. She should look away, and she knows it, but she doesn’t, and the lacquered walls of the cubicle are just reflective enough that she’s sure Melissa knows she’s looking.
Without her top on it’s clear that while she’s still thin, she’s not thin the way Mark once was, all ribs and too-taut skin. She’s supple and smooth, and if Shahida had to pick one word, one over all others to describe her, it might be healthy. Or tantalising, perhaps.
Or hot.
Off comes her bra, and Shahida realises that perhaps she should get changed herself, or else Melissa’s going to be standing there in her swimsuit and Shahida’s going to be fully clothed, still staring at her, and won’t that be awkward? So she turns away, strips, and pulls on the black suit she bought, and when she’s done, so’s Melissa, who smiles bravely and poses for her.
Every time she thinks Melissa can’t get more beautiful…
Shahida remembers when she first started thinking of herself as gay. It was after Travis, after Vivek, and after, finally, Austin, who cheated on her with a girl from his gym and who even before that had irritated her with his dull manners and grating, ungenerous spirit.
And she remembers realising that all the short-lived relationships she’d had with men were nothing more than attempts to recapture what she’d had with Mark, to find somehow in someone else the fleeting spark that charged the air between them, that leapt electric from her skin when she touched him, that made her make stupid, reckless decisions, that made her excited to wake up every morning because she might get to talk to him, see him, be with him. Man after man after man, nothing more than a series of disappointing, dispiriting boys.
Maybe Mark had simply been special. Unique. Maybe there were no other men like him, anywhere.
Maybe men were just fucking boring.
And when Austin’s sister Jordan made kitchen cocktails with her and drank in memoriam of her jackass brother’s fidelity, when she took Shahida by the hand and into her cramped bedroom on the top floor of her sweltering Los Angeles apartment, when she touched her in places no man had ever bothered to, Shahida realised she had a whole world to explore, and people to explore it with who interested her far more than any man ever had.
She tore off the label straight with gleeful abandon, and when she and Jordan amicably broke up she told the next girl she was bisexual, and the next, and the next, and the one after that she told she was gay, because there really was no doubting it any more; women were who she wanted, who she would always want.
Except for Mark. As she grew older she tried to think of him less and less. She lit candles for his birthdays and on the anniversary of his disappearance, and gradually she forced him to become the boy she once knew, the boy she couldn’t help, the boy who vanished from her life.
Until she came home from America and saw his memory everywhere.
Mark. Her first and never was.
And now here’s Melissa, standing in front of Shahida with swimsuit and nervous smile, and everything makes sense at fucking last.
Sometimes the only boy you’ve ever loved is a girl, too.
Melissa’s tied her hair up in a bun, ready for the swim cap, but she’s done it imperfectly, and Shahida wants to reach forward and tuck the stray hairs back, smooth them down against her neck, draw her in and kiss her, and she realises she’s chewing on the inside of her cheek when Melissa asks her something, says her name, breaks the spell.
“Oh my goodness, Em, you look bloody amazing, like, shit, you just… You look fantastic.”
Melissa laughs and says, “You look great, too. But I asked if you’re ready to go.”
Shahida coughs. “Ah. Yes. I am.” Salvaging her dignity, she unlocks the door and holds it open, and to her delight Melissa laughs again and curtseys her thanks before stepping daintily out into the changing rooms and finding Rachel waiting for them around the corner, and if Shahida’s a little put out that Rachel gets to hug her — again — she’s gratified when Melissa escapes Rach’s clutches quickly and almost skips the rest of the way into the main complex, excited to swim for the first time in years.
There’s two pools in the main area, one Olympic-sized and the other a shallow, warmed pool for relaxing, and Shahida hears the splash of Melissa diving into the larger one and starting to swim delighted laps almost before she gets the chance to take in how everything’s laid out. It’s nicer than she expected, with a glass roof letting in the dull December sun, and she gives herself a moment to absorb all the sensations that batter her, to smell the chlorine; to watch Melissa swim.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Rachel says, quietly.
“She’s a miracle,” Shahida says. Melissa always loved to swim, even when she had to cover herself in oversized shirts and swimshorts. She’d always seemed at her freest in the water.
“You got changed together, I saw.”
“She was nervous.”
“She doesn’t seem nervous now,” Rachel says, and something in her voice makes Shahida turn around. “Her story’s bullshit. You know that, right?”
Taking care to control her reaction and relieved that Indira’s phone is back in the locker room, Shahida says, “What do you mean?”
“It’s too much! People don’t get declared dead and then just show up. Is she working? Does she have a job?”
“Um, yes.”
“Then her National Insurance number, her records, everything, will connect her to Mark! And Mark wouldn’t be dead any more.”
“Rach—”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
Shahida glances back to check that Melissa’s still swimming. She is, and as she reaches the top of a lap she grins and waves at her; Shahida waves back.
“Look,” she says to Rachel, leaning in closer to whisper as quietly as possible, “I know her story’s bullshit, okay? I know. We talked about what to tell you; that’s what we decided on.”
“Why lie?”
“Because the real story is about more people’s secrets than just hers. She can’t go spreading it around, and neither can I. So you just have to trust me, Rach.”
“I doubted she was Mark. Just for a second. But, you know, I doubted. I was worried about you. Thought you might be getting scammed or something.” She sighs. “But she looks like him. Even moves like him.”
“It’s him,” Shahida says. “It’s her, Rach. She’s Melissa, and she’s… Look, we spent the night together last night. Just as friends, before you say anything. She slept on the bloody couch, without me even asking. We talked, and we— we hugged. But mostly we talked. She’s the same, Rach. She’s the same and she’s more. She’s not going to hurt me.”
“Okay,” Rachel says, and bumps shoulders with Shahida. “I won’t push. And I do trust you, Shy. And I want to trust her.”
“So do it. Trust us both, leave me to handle the dark and scary truth, and you can just… be her friend?”
Rachel nods, smiling. “Sure. Sure.” She nods again, firming up her resolve, and Shahida almost sighs with relief; Rachel doesn’t lie about her intentions. She might be very rude about them, a lot, but she doesn’t lie. “But you two have to workshop out some of the holes in that story before we bring Amy in on this.”
“Yeah. Yeah. We will.”
“You know what she’s like. She pokes at things.”
“We won’t be in such a hurry for Amy. We’ll work it out. I owe it to her not to half-ass this.”
Shahida starts at the sudden contact on her other shoulder, but it’s just Rachel wrapping an arm around her. They both watch Melissa swim.
“I see how you look at her, Shy,” Rachel says. “I see you staring.”
“Yeah,” Shahida says heavily.
“Is she— Does she like women?”
“She was in love with another girl. So yes. But I’m not going to try anything, Rach. Last time I almost fucking killed her.”
“That’s bullshit, Shahida, and you know it.”
“Still. I just want to be friends. That’s enough.”
“Enough for now.”
“Yeah. Enough for now. Come on; let’s swim.”
1987 December 2
Wednesday
It’s four in the morning when they come for her, when they drag her roughly off her hard bed at gunpoint — and they’re real guns; not the usual bulky tasers or that ridiculous shotgun Dorothy brings out sometimes, but sleek pistols of the sort that killed her parents, years ago. She’s still taking stock when a woman, the only woman out of the six people standing either in her cramped room or out in the corridor, steps into her field of view to hand her some folded clothes and waits patiently for her to dress herself, and it’s only when she drops them onto the bed and unfolds them that she realises they’re the most ordinary things she’s been given to wear since she arrived: blue jeans, a white bra and t-shirt, a black jacket, some nondescript underwear and a pair of grey tennis shoes; the kind of clothes she’d be relieved to wear if it weren’t under such circumstances.
As she dresses she looks at the faces watching her and recognises none of them. The woman is small, unassuming, dressed for the office; the men wear casual outfits that all have, she can’t help noticing, enough give in critical places to conceal more weapons than just the pistols she can see. All of them are professional in a way Val’s not used to; not one of them, for example, has sneered at her or touched her inappropriately. The woman even possesses, if one stretches one’s imagination to the limit, an ounce of sympathy.
Val decides to test it.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
No-one answers. Oh well. Worth a try.
This is it, then. The day it all ends. She finishes dressing, feeling foolish. Her plans all hinged on the day they finally came for her, the day they took her away from these concrete walls; she would break free and run, screaming for help, because Dorley Hall’s near some university, right? Someone would hear. But she assumed tasers, wielded by the careless bitches upstairs. Dorothy’s battered shotgun. Against professionals with pistols, she can do nothing.
She yells anyway, for all the good it will do, but all it does is wake Dee, and as the girl kicks uselessly against the inside of her locked bedroom door, Val feels like a horrible man/woman/whatever for rousing her, terrifying her, and leaving her with nothing she can do to help.
Because she can’t. Because this is the end.
They lead her up the concrete staircase, past the still-new security station where Frankie gives her a sardonic little wave, and up into the main hall, and it’s only as they’re manoeuvring her carefully through the kitchen that she hears running feet behind her. Bare feet. Unusual.
And then more hands are grabbing at her from behind, just for a second, and there’s a smack and a thud as whoever it is gets pulled off her, hit, and falls to the floor behind her. One of the men holding her lets go, turns around, raises the butt of his pistol and is about to strike downwards when Frankie’s distinctive voice stops him.
“Don’t hit the fucking merchandise, you idiot!”
There’s a girl on the ground behind her.
Dee?
What the hell?
“What’s she doing up here?” the woman escorting her asks, pointing downward.
“I let him out,” Frankie says, out of breath and seemingly almost as intimidated by the weapons as Valérie. “Look. Her worship’s sweet on this one—” she points at Dee, staring up at Val and wiping blood from her mouth, “—so that means, one, do not fucking hit him, not in the face, and, two, let him say goodbye to his friend, for Christ’s sake.”
“What do you care?”
Frankie steps forward, places herself absurdly between Dee and the men. “I care because his welfare is my welfare,” she says, and Val notices she’s got her taser switched on and ready. One taser against all these people! How much power does Dorothy have over her, that she’d risk herself this way? “Grandmother. Likes. Him.” She jabs the air with each word. “And she wants him broken, not catatonic. So give him five fucking minutes, before my headache turns into a migraine and before my boss calls your boss. Okay?”
Five minutes.
Nothing like enough. There are no words to exchange, no sentiments to share. Val could tell her to be strong, to always fight back, but where’s that gotten her? She can see the lorry, made up to look like a refrigerated transport, parked up right by the double doors out of the Hall, and she tries not to focus on it as she cradles the precious girl in her arms. Her end is coming, and she can think of nothing to say to Dee to make it okay.
Five minutes, over all too quickly. And then Dee’s being dragged back into the kitchen by Frankie and Val’s being pulled towards the back of the lorry. She looks wildly around as they effortlessly contain her struggle: there’s more men waiting, guns ready, blocking any possibility of escape. She never had a chance at all. So she locks eyes with Dee until the doors close, and then all she can do as they drive her away is listen to the sound of the tyres as the vehicle transitions from gravel to grass to smooth tarmac, and wonder where, exactly, they’re taking her. Maybe Dee will do better; maybe she’ll choose a name, make a life for herself somehow.
Maybe it doesn’t matter any more.
Maybe nothing does.
In the absolute dark of the back of the truck, no illusions remain. Dee will share her fate, as will all the other girls under Dorley Hall. And all that waits for Valérie or Vincent or whoever or whatever it is that clings vaingloriously to life inside her abused and altered shell is degradation and death.
The only hope she allows herself is that her end will come sooner rather than later.
2019 December 13
Friday
Christine raises her head from the kitchen table long enough to read the text from Professor Dawson. She’s offering a friendly ear and as much office time as Christine needs, if there’s anything she needs to get off her chest, but, please, do try to stop missing her lectures.
“I’m going to do it,” Christine says, laying her head back on her upper arm, which is splayed out across the table.
“Do what?” Tabby asks. She’s looking annoyingly fresh, awake and attractive, which seems unfair for — Christine glances back at her phone — eleven fifty-eight in the morning.
“I’m coming out to my professor. Going to tell her I was — what did Maria call it? — coercively assigned female in a basement. I’ll tell her about the hormones, the orchi, that week where I tried walking with the book on my head; everything. Maybe then she’ll stop bugging me to unburden myself on her.”
Tabby’s quiet for long enough that Christine expends the effort to move her other arm out of the way, and when finally she can see her, she’s got a smile waiting for her.
“The book thing hasn’t been required for a long time, you know,” Tabby says.
“Yes, but you walk with such grace, Tab; I, on the other hand, stumble around like a drunken baby elephant looking for the light switch.”
“I think Paige would disagree. But I suggest you don’t tell your professor about it, even if you did choose it yourself. She’d think us a terribly old-fashioned forced regendering facility.”
“‘The rain in Spain…’” Christine mutters. “Fine. I won’t out us to my Linguistics professor.”
“By George,” Tabby says, reaching forward and tapping her playfully on the arm, “she’s got it.”
The clock on her phone ticks over to midday, and shortly after another text arrives from Prof Dawson. This one suggests she contact the counselling service, and Christine makes a mental note to never ever talk to the university’s counselling service, before shooting off a quick reply to the effect that she overslept, and it won’t happen again.
“You need some coffee?” Tabby says. “The second years cleaned the cafetiere.”
“Oh, God,” Christine says. “You’re the best sponsor. Yes. A thousand times yes.”
Tabby’s already filling the kettle. “I think William would disagree.”
“How’s it going with him, actually?”
“Not bad,” Tabby says. “Get him away from boys who clap like seals when he says something clever or does something stupid and he becomes quite different. And ever since he admitted his guilt to Steph, he’s been cooperative.” She turns to fill the cafetiere. “We’re thinking of moving him back to his room soon. Privileges restored, and so on.”
“Will that be safe for Steph? For Maria?”
Tabby nods. “We’ll have more people down there. And—” she shrugs, “—Maria says Aaron’s become quite protective of her lately. I don’t think William’ll be a problem.”
A couple of minutes later and Tabby’s laying a large cup of coffee down in front of Christine, and tapping her on the shoulder to wake her. As Christine’s eyes refocus and she forces herself up onto her elbows, she blearily reads the words SOME PEOPLE ARE KIDNAPPERS. GET OVER IT! on the side of her mug.
“Cute,” she says. It’s not one she’s seen before. Then she clears her throat; she sounds like she’s been gargling nails.
“You okay, Teenie?” Tabby says, sitting back down opposite and borrowing Indira’s pet name for her.
Christine puts off her reply until she’s had something to drink. Tabby went above and beyond: there’s cream, there’s chocolate sprinkles, there’s sugar, and under it all there’s what tastes like double-strength coffee. Normally Christine would choose something a little plainer, but right now she appreciates the calories and the caffeine.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she says, as her stomach warms.
“I know. Dira said the thing with Lorna shook you up.”
Christine nods. “Not entirely her fault, though. We put her in a very difficult position and I… handled it poorly. And we’re friends again, so—” she wags a tired finger, “—don’t yell at her.”
“Indira already did.”
“Yeah. Kinda told her off for that.”
Tabby smiles, and sips coffee. “She’s just protective.” Her mug’s pink, and when Christine squints at it Tabby swings it around so she can read the cursive: Do everything a man can do, but ball-less and in high heels! “Do you want to talk about it? The thing that’s keeping you from sleeping?”
“Are you sponsoring me?”
“I’m being a friend, doofus.”
Christine needs more coffee for this conversation. She finishes the whole mug, and then while Tabby makes her another, she tells her about her sleepless nights. The memories of her old self, flooding back. Paige waking up to find her staring out of the window, crying noiselessly and watching the rain catch the light from the lamps on the path. Paige looping arms around her, protecting her, reminding her who she is.
And then Melissa came storming back to Dorley, waving a taser around and trying to abduct Steph, and reminding Christine that, yes, anyone can go home.
“We’re going to ask Dira to take us,” she says, halfway done with her second cup. “Paige and I, we’re going to go back to Brighton. We’re going to visit my old school and my old village. All the places I used to go. I need to say goodbye to him, Tab.” Her eyes are stinging; she swallows and rubs at her face. It’s not like she has any makeup on to ruin. “I think… I think I need to forgive him.”
She jumps as arms wrap around her. She hadn’t even noticed Tabby get up, but now here she is, embracing her from behind, so she pushes out from the table and stands. Tabby gives her room to move, and draws her back into the hug when she’s ready.
Impossible not to cry now.
“That’s okay, isn’t it?” she says, finding room between heaving breaths. “He— I did such awful things. And I don’t ever want to forget them, but—”
Tabby shushes her, strokes her hair. “It’s okay,” she says. “You need to forgive yourself. It’s important. And—” she squeezes Christine tighter, “—it’s good. You deserve forgiveness, Christine.”
“Really?”
It’s childish, to ask for confirmation like that, to be held in someone’s arms and be reassured and still ask for more, but it’s never something that’s been discouraged, and Tabby’s whispered, “Really,” is all that’s needed for Christine to cling to her, like the mother she always wanted, and let everything out.
When finally they release each other, and when Tabby drops a sisterly kiss on Christine’s temple and departs for the security room — to check on Will and to chat with Indira about Christine’s plan — Christine flops back down onto her chair, less tired than she was but more drained. Fortunately there’s enough coffee in the cafetiere, and it’s on the table in front of her, so she fills her mug for a third time and downs it in one.
She giggles. She’s going to forgive him. She’s going to forgive herself.
She’s also had three cups of coffee and she needs to balance it out with something to eat before she starts vibrating. She checks the time — twelve forty; good, Paige will be out of her lecture soon — and makes herself some nice, mundane Weetabix.
A couple of minutes later she’s roused from mindless Twitter scrolling — the Tories got back in, because they were always bloody going to, and her timeline is despairing — by the doors banging open, and looks up to see, rather than Paige or any of the other girls she was expecting, Aunt Bea. She’s steadying herself on the frame, looks as exhausted as Christine feels, and is assisted by two women, one whom Christine doesn’t recognise and another she’s seen only in pictures.
“Ah,” says Elle Lambert, “Christine, isn’t it?”
Oh shit.
Christine’s got sponsor-level access now, which means she knows who Elle is: the money. But not just the money; she’s involved, right at the top, and members of her family were connected to Grandmother. Yes, dead members of her family, it has to be said, and reading between the lines it seems like Elle might have killed at least one of them herself, but the link to Dorley Hall’s previous, sadistic custodian is close enough to be unsettling.
There’s also the obvious and unanswered question: what the hell is Elle Lambert doing all of this for? None of the answers Christine’s come up with have been reassuring.
She stands, supremely glad for Tabby and all her revitalising coffee, and realises as she does so that she’s barely out of sleeping clothes: shorts and a tank, and thick socks with rubber paw prints on the soles. Not the best state in which to make a first impression on the money.
“Um,” she says, “yes. I’m Christine.”
“Elle Lambert,” Elle says, as if it’s at all necessary. She glances at her companion, who gives her the slightest of nods, and steps out from under Beatrice’s arm. The other woman doesn’t seem affected by the increased weight she has to support, and starts helping Aunt Bea across the kitchen.
“Good evening, Christine,” Bea says, as she passes.
“Is Maria available?” the unknown woman asks.
It takes a second for Christine to call up the information on her phone. “She’s in her flat,” she says, “on the—”
“—the third floor,” the woman finishes. “Thank you.”
Elle, meanwhile, has been pouring herself a glass of water, and sits down at the kitchen table. Christine reminds herself to try not to look nervous.
“Christine Hale,” Elle says. “Third year. Recently joined the staff, officially.” She’s staring slightly to one side, as if reading from a notebook only she can see.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been following your career with interest. Impressive that one so young has already acquired so much responsibility.”
“Thank you,” Christine says, because complaining about all the jobs that keep falling into her lap seems unwise right now. And Elle Lambert’s ‘following her career’? Does she have a career?
“Will you do me a favour?” Elle says, and Christine nods, probably slightly too emphatically. “Bring Beatrice something to eat in a few hours?”
“Is she… okay?”
“There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s just very tired. We thought we had a lead; we did not. Emotional stress exaggerates physical exhaustion; you understand.” Christine indicates that she does. “But we did discover something troubling.”
“Troubling, Ma’am?” Christine says, wincing at the involuntary Ma’am.
“Security at Peckinville is implicated,” Elle says, and Christine can’t control her reaction; Peckinville Associates has been run by a consortium headed by the Lamberts for over four decades now, and it provides the men who spend the majority of their time playing PlayStation in the rec room downstairs. “Not seriously so — you do not have to worry about the staff assigned here; all are personally vetted. But any breach is concerning.” She frowns, and sips at her water. “Any theft is concerning. And the fact that it’s taken so long to be uncovered? Deeply concerning.”
Breach? Theft?
“Why are you telling me?”
“My assistant will brief Maria once Beatrice has settled in, and thus all the senior sponsors will be briefed in turn.” Elle smiles, and it’s not the most pleasant smile Christine’s ever seen. “I imagine, therefore, with your skills, that you’ll discover this anyway. I simply wish to assure you that I approve of your initiative.” She raps on the table, signalling the end of the conversation. “Good work securing the system, by the way; I have no expertise in the area myself, but my assistant was quite impressed. You have a promising future ahead of you, Christine Hale.”
“Oh,” Christine says, “thank you.”
Elle finishes her water and stands. “You can thank me, child, by living a full and happy life.”
“On it.”
“And by continuing to help your sisters.”
Christine doesn’t trust herself to say anything helpful, so she just nods.
2005 October 7
Friday
The central courtyard of the Smyth-Farrow estate is entirely enclosed, surrounded on all sides by the building itself, exhibiting on each of its four main walls an anachronistic mix of styles from decades and centuries past, and covered overhead with wire mesh over thick, stainless steel bars. The bars are the newest addition, just ten years old, added after Crispin Smyth-Farrow caught her climbing the naked brick, using handholds she’d carved diligently with cutlery. So no more metal cutlery and no more sky, and no more escape from the deep dirt of the central courtyard, where the bodies are buried.
She tried to help the first ones, she truly did. They’d arrive, terrified and shaking, shipped in from Dorley Hall in civvies, to be dressed immediately by her in the uniforms Smyth-Farrow prefers, the ones that emphasise what they’ve been given and what they’ve lost, and she would press upon them the need to survive, to spit his perversions back in his face, to fight him. But one of his many ‘little cruelties’ — his words; his ghastly, minimising words, whispered always through a delighted sneer — was to delight in taking the girls away from her just as she became close with them, just as she broke through their fear and their shame and their self-disgust, as she once did with Dee. He’d take them away and she’d never see them again, and all he’d tell her was that they’d outlived their usefulness.
Eventually her kindness and her optimism ceased to amuse him, and he desired more to make her suffer instead; he made her bury the next one in the central courtyard, knowing that when she dug deep enough she would find the wet and decayed bones of the others, an ossuary of dirt hidden under paving slabs and braced with ancient foundation.
And so she buried her, she stroked the girl’s cheek before covering her with soil, and she wondered as she worked if there was a better way to help these girls, if to insist they resist was to hasten their ends. So she made herself cruel, unwelcoming, cold. And they lasted a little longer, and he left her alone a little more. Her reward for becoming more like him.
She never decided which was worse for them: six months more life or six months less misery. But it was academic; for the sake of her own soul, she numbed herself. The girls he dragged in front of her became nothing more than dead women walking, wounded men with nothing to offer her, and without emotion she showed them their roles and their uniforms and the punishments they would have to endure. Sometimes she entertained the notion that one of them would escape and bring the authorities down on the manor, name her as accomplice, torturer, murderer. Sometimes she dreamed of it.
She knows why he kept her and none of the others. She asked, after the third girl, and he told her: she was a commission. Her parents had been an inconvenience in one of Smyth-Farrow’s ventures, and she, the boy who’d just become a man, masculine for his age but with so much potential, had been too tempting to kill. He told her this as he bent over her, trapping her arms at the wrist, and she spat on him, smashed her knee into his groin, and that time made it as far as the inner gate.
But that was years ago, and the old man slowed down, and no more women came. He confided in her that the money was running out in perfect sync with the rest of his days, and that he was delighted it be so; his bastard children wouldn’t see a lick of inheritance, he said, for he spent every last penny on pleasure. On the most disgusting pleasure money could buy.
“You…” he said to her, wheezing and weak, through the reinforced glass that protected him. “You were worth everything. To see you suffer, to experience your hatred, to look upon your body and see you in there… It was worth everything.”
At least she got to watch him die.
But the manor is and always was a fortress, and getting through the glass and out into his wing of the building wasn’t enough to free her. The locks and the bars are all still in place and the children he despised never returned, so she shut his body in the room he kept her in, and rationed everything as she searched for a way out.
She ran out of food after three weeks.
Now she waits, as weak as he became at the end, starving in absurd luxury, spending her remaining time looking down from his bedroom window at the courtyard that imprisoned her. She’d try harder to keep her eyes open, but sleep is easy and willpower is difficult to come by, so the days slip quickly away.
And then there are voices. Echoing: coming from the cavernous entry hall. It seems impossible, seems like a hallucination, but with little left to lose she summons everything that remains, staggers out of the master bedroom and down the long corridor, legs shaking, ankles near collapse. After what feels like hours she finally makes it to the balcony over the hallway and she’s about to lean on the banister, about to rest, when she puts names to the faces staring up at her and the voices shrieking in delight.
She tries to back away, starts making plans to run, to slip around them and out of a front door they might miraculously have left open, but she’s weak and she’s slow and she falls, drops backwards onto the carpet, has to sit there unable to move, has to listen to the thump of feet on the stairs, until Dorothy Marsden’s looking down on her and Karen the sponsor’s laughing like a hyena.
“That evil old bastard,” Dorothy says. “He really kept you? All these years? I thought you dead, Vincent.”
She’s not heard that name in a long time. Old Smyth-Farrow forgot it as his faculties fled him, leaving him nothing but his self-satisfied malice, and she was glad to forget it, to finally leave behind the last vestige of the life that was stolen from her.
In Dorothy’s mouth it’s despicable, a corpse exhumed, and Valérie would spit, if only she could.
2019 December 13
Friday
The second years got the morning off. Indira and their sponsors have apparently been briefing them on how situations like yesterday’s kerfuffle with Melissa are supposed to go, and Stef likes to imagine Indira in full schoolteacher mode, sitting with crossed ankles on a desk at the front of the room and asking questions like, “Can anyone tell me how to disarm taser-wielding blonde women?” while, say, Mia lurks in the back row with her hood up, hoping she doesn’t get called on because she hasn’t done the homework.
It’s left no-one to do the cooking, though, and the fridge has been depleted of all but a few bare scraps of leftovers, so Edy and Christine have been heating up batches of stew, which they’ve had volunteers ferrying in from a chest freezer somewhere. And when Maria came downstairs for her session with Aaron and sent Stef up so she wouldn’t distract him, she got roped into a production line of chopping and buttering a huge pile of French loaves.
The stew’s really good, though, even if she does have to intercept a few well-meaning questions from the second years while she eats. It’s understandable; the last time any of them saw her she was immobile and sobbing on the floor of the conservatory, and they have concerns. Pippa insists she shouldn’t be embarrassed about it, and Faye backs her up, and gradually all the girls at the table start discussing their own most mortifying moments at Dorley. Pippa’s: on her first time out as Pippa she spotted someone she used to know, panicked, hid in a bush, realised eventually that it was, in fact, someone else entirely, and returned to the Hall with her tail between her legs and twigs and leaves stuck in her hair.
“Is that why you had it cut so short?” Aisha asks, and Pippa pretends to throw a hunk of French bread at her.
“At least you had your tail removed shortly after,” Faye says, and Pippa gives in to temptation and the second year gets buttered bread all over her top.
After lunch, Christine hands Stef a container of stew to take downstairs for Aaron. Edy’s prepping one for Adam and Ella’s supposed to show up in a minute, so Stef lingers in a kitchen for a moment; it’s been a while since she last had a chance to talk to her.
Which means she’s there when Melissa and Shahida re-enter the building, all energy and damp hair, and as soon as she catches Shahida’s eye the woman’s got her in a hug. Melissa, a few seconds later, carefully nudges Aaron’s stew a bit closer to the middle of the table, so Shahida doesn’t accidentally knock it over in her exuberance.
“Hi,” Stef says. “You, um— Wow, you smell of chlorine.”
Shahida stands back, briefly lets her go and then grabs her by each shoulder. “I do, Steph,” she says, grinning. “Hi.”
Behind Shahida, Melissa waves, and Stef smiles at her.
“Good swim?” Stef asks.
“The best,” Shahida says, punctuating her words with squeezes of Stef’s shoulders. “It’s so good to see you, Stef! Especially now you’re so pretty!”
“Oh, um, thank you!”
“I always wanted a chance to get to know you,” Shahida continues. “And then Em disappeared and that was kind of all my life was about for a while. Eventually I realised that without her I’d never have a reason to see you again, and you’d grow up and so would I and that would be that. But now…” She looks back at Melissa. “Now I have the chance!”
“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Same.” Shahida squeezes one more time and then steps away. Stef briefly rocks in place, suddenly unsupported. “I’m going to be around for a while, at least until I find a job somewhere, so we’re going to have time, we don’t have to rush anything, but I just wanted to say… Hi.”
“Hi,” Stef says again.
“Hey, Stef,” Melissa says, walking up behind Shahida and looping an arm around hers. “I’m sticking around, too. Until early January. So come see me, okay? Or maybe—” her smile turns nervous, “—maybe I’ll come down there and see you.”
“We’ve done so much with the place,” Edy says, watching with detached amusement from another corner of the kitchen.
“R— really?”
“No,” Stef says, “it’s still horrible.”
“We restuffed the couches!” Edy protests. “Actually, Melissa, we’re prepping a room for you, up on the second floor. It’ll be a bit bare for now, but after tonight you won’t have to squat at Steph’s again.”
“Perfect!” Shahida says, spinning around to take both of Melissa’s hands, and making Stef instantly feel like a third wheel. “I can go home, get some cushions…”
“Thanks, Edith,” Melissa says.
“No problem,” Edy says. “Someone’ll point you at the right place tomorrow, and we’ll get Shahida put on the system; just entry and room access, for now. As long as we can trust you!” She adds in a light tone, smiling and pointing a finger at Shahida.
“I’m here for Melissa,” Shahida says. “And Steph. And I like Paige and Tabitha and Victoria and Lorna, too.” She shrugs. “I’m not interested in making things hard for anyone.”
“Just remember,” Edy says, “we’re very powerful, we have friends in high places, we can ruin you with a stroke of a pen, and so on and so forth. Ah!” She looks over Melissa’s shoulder and spots Ella about to buzz herself in. “Steph, we should deliver our dinner before it gets cold.”
Stef’s swept up in Edy’s aura of busyness, and allows herself to be guided out through the dining hall and back down the stairs. She extricates herself at the security room, though, spotting Pippa, and remembering something she wanted to do.
Pippa’s still setting her things out on the table, having left the dining hall only minutes before Stef, so she doesn’t feel too bad about interrupting her work. She’s spreading out what look like lecture notes, and Stef catches her attention when she fails entirely to suppress a giggle at how organised they are: printouts with text inside multiple nested bullet points and further annotated in neat but cramped handwriting in multiple colours.
“Hey, Steph,” Pippa says, an easy smile spreading across her face even though they saw each other barely ten minutes ago. Her eyes flick to the stew in Stef’s hands. “For Aaron?”
“Oh,” Stef says, remembering it, “uh, yeah.” She leans back, places it carefully on a flat spot on the security console. “Pip, can I hug you?”
Pippa’s smile widens, and she stands quickly, stepping forward and into the embrace. Stef remembers once being amused and a little bitter that she’s taller than Pippa, but right now it’s comforting, because right now she wants nothing more than to hold Pippa like a friend, like a sister, and that little extra height makes her feel protective.
Melissa’s back, and now Shahida’s back, and Christine says she’s thinking of visiting her old city, and it’s been hard to watch all of it happen and know that she is, at best, years away from being able to see Petra again, or Russ, or her parents. Harder still to think of Pippa, longer isolated from her family than either Stef or Christine. And she’s lonely. It’s been obvious in the amount of time she spends at the Hall, more than is required for her duties — especially now that Stef is, in large part, being sponsored by all of Dorley — and while her isolation’s abated somewhat, with Stef no longer in an adversarial role, with her repaired friendship with Christine, and with Rani, Stef still sees her sometimes, staring at nothing, running her fingers over her bracelet, turning it around on her wrist. So until something changes, until Pippa finds a way to see her family again, or until things get serious enough with Rani or some other girl that she starts a new family, Stef wants to be her sister, wants to be her friend, wants to be her comfort.
“You okay, Steph?” Pippa whispers, and Stef pushes closer into the hug.
“I’m okay. And you’re okay. I just…” She presses her cheek against Pippa’s. “I’m glad of you, all right? I’m happy we met. I’m so happy we’re friends. And even though it’s only been a little while, I’m happy to call you my sister.”
Pippa makes a strange sound, and starts stroking the small of Stef’s back. “You are my sister, Steph.”
“And Christine said Tabby might be reintroducing Will, soon, so it’s going to change down there, and I might not be able to get away as much with him knocking around, so I wanted to jump on this opportunity while I still have it.”
“You’re sweet,” Pippa says, and starts to withdraw, kissing Stef gently on the cheek.
“Love you, Pip,” Stef says, grinning and stepping away and wiping damp eyes with her sleeve.
“Love you too, Stephanie,” Pippa says.
Stef leaves her to her work, retrieving the stew and waving at her as she leaves. On the way down she spots Edy and Ella pouring out a bowl each for Adam and Martin in the lunch room and finds Maria and Aaron sitting at opposite ends of one of the couches in the common area, bickering.
“I’m still trying to understand the moral you were trying to teach me with that.”
“There was no moral. I promise.”
“No, see, because there has to be, because everything’s a tool, right? I was thinking about it and while, yeah, often there’s no malicious intent—”
“—‘often’—?”
“—there’s always a point to the things you say and do, yeah? So, like, I got to thinking, what was the point of the movie you picked?”
“I thought you might like something sweet and brainless to fall asleep in front of?”
“No, no, Maria, there’s no way it’s that simple, I’ve been down here for months now, I know how you work. What I’m getting at, right, what I think is the lesson, yes, is that you’re Ursula.”
“I’m not Ursula.”
“Can you sing?”
“I’m not Ursula.”
“No, you totally are! Who are your little eels? Is one of them Edy?”
“I’m going to smack you.”
“I’m so not scared of you.”
“I’ll send for Indira.”
“Fine. I give up. You’re not Ursula.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re the crab.”
As Aaron reaches towards her, Maria holds out a hand to keep him at bay and pulls her phone out of a pocket in her cargo pants. She dials — or pretends to dial — and says, “Hi, Indira? I have a disobedient little mermaid here, and I’d like to discuss a deal vis-à-vis exchanging their voice for something.”
“Don’t listen to her, Indira!” Aaron shouts, play-struggling against Maria’s outstretched hand, and Maria keeps up the poker face for another whole second before a snort breaks through, and then laughter, and she meets Stef’s eyes.
Aaron slowly turns around, cheeks red. He shrugs.
“I brought you some lunch,” Stef says.
They take it into Stef’s room in the end. Aaron argues against them going back to his room, because he hasn’t yet had the chance to ask Maria for that UV light and pack of cleansing wipes, so they make an impromptu table out of the chair and sit either side of it on cushions, keeping it from rolling away with their toes.
“I’m going to ask someone for more furniture,” Stef says, looking around the room. If she really is going to be more limited by Will’s presence — and Ollie and Raph’s, eventually — then maybe she can make her downstairs bedroom a little more like her upstairs bedroom. More pillows. A couple more chairs. Maybe a plushie.
“You really ate upstairs?” Aaron says, before spooning the last chunk of beef into his mouth and pouring the remains of the gravy after it.
“Yep.”
“You really can go everywhere, huh?”
“I can’t leave,” Stef says. “I mean, I could, probably, but it wouldn’t be wise because I’m supposed to be a secret. I’m supposed to be in Eastern Europe or somewhere. But, like, I suppose technically I can leave? Except they’d immediately come fetch me back and then I couldn’t leave any more, I bet. But yeah. I can go upstairs.”
“Because they know you won’t run. And they know you won’t tell anyone.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
He waves a hand at her. “No, no, yeah, no, I understand. You have friends here. I get it. And, besides, I, uh…”
She reaches out, takes his flailing hand, and smiles at him when he looks at her. She knows she blushes, can feel the heat in her cheek, and unconsciously she bites her lip. He’s so fucking cute. How is that even possible? How is he the same boy she met all those weeks ago?
“‘Besides…’?” she prompts.
Trapped in her eyes, he stares at her for a while before shaking his head. “I have no idea where I was going with that.”
He picks up the plastic container and places it by the computer, and pushes the chair out of the way. It rattles across the floor and bumps into the bedside table behind him.
“You okay?” he says.
Everyone keeps asking that today. She gives it a moment’s thought; coming from him, it means something a little different. “Yes,” she says. “Thank you for last night. Not just for, um, telling me all that, but for giving me another chance.”
She’s still holding his hand, and he examines it, frowning. “You should have told me,” he says slowly, “but I know why you didn’t. And last night I was all, I can’t be mad at her because I’m such a piece of shit and I don’t deserve the truth, and that’s not at all a productive way to think about myself.”
“Is that Maria talking?”
He squirms out of her grip and rolls his eyes at her. “That was from me discussing with her some of the thoughts I had while someone was sleeping and missing all of The Little Mermaid, thank you very much.” Stef raises an eyebrow. “Fine,” he adds. “It’s her words. But it’s my sentiment. Thinking of myself as inherently worthless, while it might be technically correct, is not actually helpful. So!” He repositions, rolls his legs under himself, moves his cushion closer to Stef. Unintentionally, perhaps. “Now my thing is that I’m not mad because I’m capable of viewing your actions through a more objective lens. I know what I was like when you got here. I know what the others were like. I wouldn’t have come out to me, either. So then it’s just a matter of timing. And Stephanie—” he smiles, and she might have expected otherwise, but it’s a fond smile, a warm smile, “—your timing sucked.”
“Sorry,” she whispers.
He shuffles closer again. “Apology accepted.”
“Really? Just like that?”
“Hey, you brought me stew.”
“Aaron—”
“Stephanie.” Her name in his voice. She wants to hear it over and over again. It’s more than validation; there’s a thrill to it, a shiver that takes over her spine and makes her want to reach for him and touch him.
She sits on her hands.
“I said to Pip,” she says, thinking as she goes, “when I ran into her just now, how happy I am to know her. And that goes for you, too. I know we haven’t known each other for long, but…” She bites her lip again, rewinding through everything she’s thought about him, all the realisations… All the fantasies. “You say you know what you were like when we met. Well, so do I. And I know you now. And you might say you’re not that different, but I can see the ways you’ve changed, and it makes me—”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Aaron says quietly.
“Say what?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m not different. Not any more. Steph, I’m so different.” He collects his hands in his lap, looks away. “I’m so different that I think if I saw the Aaron you met when you got here, if I saw the Aaron who lived out there, I’d kick his arse. I’d drag him down here myself. Sure, I might just drop him off and leave out the back door, but since that’s not an option I have…”
He’s filled with energy again, and it’s earthing itself through his hands. He’s turning them over in his lap, wrapping his fingers around his wrists, rubbing his thumbs together. Always moving, even though the rest of him is still.
She waits for him to collect his thoughts.
“I think I’m glad I’m here,” he says, almost silently. “I think I’m glad Maria — or whoever it was — stuck me with that needle. I’m glad I had to face my own shit. I’m glad I saw it reflected in crazier and crazier ways in Will, in Ollie, in fucking Declan. Seeing the urge to hurt people taken down different paths. You can’t deny you’ve hurt someone when you’ve fucking hit them, you know? But you can do it if all you’ve done is pushed yourself into her life, made her feel a bit less safe, made yourself into someone, something she has to worry about. You can pretend. Until you see the same urge with a different outcome and you understand. It’s all the same. Lashing out. Excuses. Reasons to cause pain. Reasons not to feel.”
“You know what they’re going to do to you, though.”
“Yeah,” he says, snapping his head up, looking her right in the eyes. Intense but not frightening. “Yeah, I know.”
“You want to be a girl?”
“No. Not at all. But it’s a way away from it, you know? And there’s something easy about it, too. Maria and them, they’ve done it to countless boys. They’ve done it to each other. They’ve got a system. With instruction manuals and step-by-step guides and when you give up, when you decide that what matters to you isn’t some gender you got slapped with basically at random when you were born but becoming someone new, well, suddenly it’s simple. They’ve got the guides. I just follow them.” He taps a finger on his knee. “Step by step. And what’s so scary about being a girl, anyway, right? You’re doing it. Maria did it, and she didn’t even want to. And it’s not like girls are worse than guys, either. Weaker or whatever. I’ve never thought that. Even if I pretended to.” He snorts. “Truth is, I always kind of thought they were better than me. Got a bit bitter about that. Let it drive some… some nasty shit. So no; I don’t want to be a girl. But I don’t have a route to being a better version of Aaron. I literally wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“We could find one—”
“Stephanie,” he says again, smiling. “I’m trying to tell you—”
“No,” she protests, angry suddenly that he just seems to be accepting it, that there isn’t anything she can do, and feeling stupid because she seems stuck in this endless cycle where she goes from wanting to get him out, to run from Dorley with him as fast as she can, to wanting him to get through the programme, to change the way he seems to want to, to become a new person, but that means—
There’s a finger under her chin. Pulling her in. There’s a hand on her cheek. Filling her with warmth. And there’s pressure on her lips and she realises she’s closed her eyes in her frustration and so she opens them again and there he is, pressed against her, and the finger under her chin presses harder so she follows it up, climbs dumbly to her feet. Her chin drops; he’s no longer pushing on it. Instead his hand finds the small of her back and she arches it, accepts his touch, pushes herself into him. She forces life into her limbs, touches him in the places he’s touching her and, finally, feeling like she’s been waiting for this for hours, days, years, she kisses him back.
2019 December 14
Saturday
There’s a uniform waiting for her on the chair by the door. Strange. It’s been years since she was required to wear anything in particular, since the enmity faded to mundane, brutal hatred through the tedium of endless repetition. Granted, the old fuck’s been in a worse mood than usual, stomping about her stolen estate with surprising vigour, slippered feet making comically soft noises on the carpet and made all the more amusing because Val still remembers when the bent and tired Dorothy was actually capable of being intimidating.
She despises the brutal practicality that keeps her here: she has the run of the house, keeps an ordinary bedroom far away from the hole Smyth-Farrow stuck her in, has a library of books, music cassettes and VHS movies; lives almost as Dorothy’s carer, trapped in her service and inside these walls by the locks on the windows and doors and by the nine-digit code known only to the old woman and her dwindling cadre of sadists, themselves also ageing, decaying. Unable to leave but able, sometimes, to take petty revenge on the old Dorley lot. She hasn’t seen Karen for a long time, but Dorothy dresses only for comfort these days, and Frankie, Karen’s replacement, dragged back into service from whatever corner of this horrid country she’d been skulking in, looks every one of her sixty-three years and more; Val delights in making herself up when she can, the better to emphasise that their abused prisoner still cleans up better than any of them.
The wages of sin is shitty skin.
They could take it out on her. Stop her estradiol. Restrict her food. Lock her back in her old room. But the fight’s gone out of all of them, and Val’s kept her hatred burning safely in the back of her mind, limiting herself to spitting in their food and laughing at their attempts to hurt her. Indolent old bitches. She could outrun and outfight them on her worst day.
And yet today there’s a uniform. It’s not one of the old ones, thank God, the ones Smyth-Farrow used to delight in; borderline fetishwear with cutouts in titillating places. It’s just a housekeeper’s uniform: beige dress cut to below the knee, white apron, dark tights.
They probably have visitors.
Dorothy still finds her pleasures sometimes, and Val wonders if she doesn’t take something, if her orgasms are entirely medicated, if her eighty-one-year-old body can’t even delight in deadnaming and misgendering Valérie any more without serious pharmaceutical assistance. She’s sharper on those days, anyway, and it’s always when someone comes to visit, when the old woman wants to pretend she’s still the fierce and powerful Grandmother, and not a revenant, hiding in a mansion, waiting to follow its last true owner to an ignominious end. Hated by all; feared by no-one who still matters.
Val dresses. Does her makeup for good measure. There’s pleasure in looking nice, and even at fifty-three her face is an excellent canvas.
The old Smyth-Farrow estate is essentially four buildings in one, each added decades after the last to expand the mansion and enclose the courtyard, and the failed attempts with each addition to match materials have become increasingly obvious as the place ages, as it crumbles along with Dorothy and the rest of them. She had money once, Val knows, but she suspects the bulk of it goes on protection, with none left for maintenance; the old woman has enemies still, which is presumably why she claimed Smyth-Farrow’s place for herself: even in its death throes it remains a fortress.
Val’s room is in the servants’ quarters on the far side of the house from the front hall and the main suites, and she strides through the place as if she owns it, because it annoys the hell out of Dorothy when she does.
But the old bitch looks pleased. Ecstatic, even.
“Vincent!” she exclaims. Ah. Back to that, are we? Val tries to examine her pupils from afar, to see if she’s on something. “It’s good to see you in uniform once more. It’s about time we had some more discipline around here!”
“What do you want?” Val says, taking up station near the corridor that leads away towards the parlour and the main kitchen. If this is a trick, if there’s someone waiting for her, she knows the estate well enough to lead them on a merry chase.
“I have a present for you, Vince!” The woman’s grinning like a child.
Val props her arms on her hips and waits and Dorothy, realising that she’s got all the reaction she’s going to get for now, claps her hands. Frankie steps through into the hall from the entryway, dragging a near-naked woman behind her.
No.
Not a woman.
But not a man any more.
Valérie would recognise a Dorley girl in the early stages anywhere. The girl Frankie deposits roughly on the tiled floor, who drops limply to her knees and looks off into the distance with the stare of someone who has no particular use for anything they can see, has a relatively large frame. She’s got the slightly loose skin of too-rapid weight loss and the pallor of one who’s been starved. Val looks for the telltale scars near the crotch and finds them, still raw and new, for the girl makes no effort to hide herself. She’ll have been castrated, kept without food and with very little water until all fat has dissolved and all muscle has wasted away, and then put on a high estrogen dose, to encourage development in the ‘right’ places. The only item of clothing she’s wearing is a bra, one of the large, sturdy sort you have to wear after breast surgery, and a slight redness to the skin on her cheeks and neck suggests she’s had some hair removal treatment as well. Her forehead and nose are clad in bandages that make Val think of Dee, looking up at her from the recovery bed back at Dorley Hall. Most tellingly of all, though, her face is marked with despair, the sort of despair Val hasn’t seen since Smyth-Farrow last dropped a new girl in her lap with the twisted grin of one who is already fantasising about how he will murder her.
Grandmother’s modus operandi. Clear as day. She just never thought she’d see it again.
Dorothy’s cackling and Frankie’s smirking but Val ignores them both, walks over to the girl and crouches down in front of her, lifts her face until she can look her in the eye.
She won’t be like she used to be, under Smyth-Farrow. She can’t be that cruel any more.
“Hello,” she says. “I’m not like them. I won’t hurt you.”
“You might not,” Frankie says, in her appalling accent, and laughs her gratingly unpleasant laugh.
“Why is she here?” Val asks, glaring at Dorothy.
The old woman’s face turns sour. “Because of Elle,” she says. “Because she took from me. Again! So this time, I took from her in return. I’m not entirely without resources.”
“She started something,” Frankie says with satisfaction. “We’re just firing back.”
“You’re going to train him,” Dorothy says. “You’re going to make him into another you. And you’ll do it, or we’ll shut you in your old room. No books. No tapes. No food.”
Val nods. Old threats. She turns a little, shutting the old women out, trying to make it so it’s just her and the new girl in their own little world. Trying to make it safe. She wishes she’d guessed this was about to happen so she could have brought a robe or a towel or something to cover the girl’s nakedness, but if she’s going to be living in the servants’ quarters with her, there’ll be something.
“Hey, sweetheart,” she says quietly, holding out a hand to the girl and, when she doesn’t respond, placing it slowly and carefully on her forearm. “What’s your name?”
The girl doesn’t meet her eyes. Barely moves, except to shift her weight, to subtly accept Valérie’s hand on her.
“Declan,” the girl says.
Notes:
Revised 7th January 2023.
Chapter 27: Everything a Body Needs
Notes:
Here we are, officially the first chapter of book three! And also the first birthday of The Sisters of Dorley, more or less. It’s been a ride!
We’re probably somewhere around halfway through the story. Maybe less? I have no idea, honestly.
Chapter Text
1988 September 5
Monday
She’s almost out of chances.
They fixed the lock on the door out of the conservatory. They replaced the loose pane in the front hallway. They caught her slipping out of the window in the rear stairs, and when they yanked her back inside and threw her roughly against the wood panelling she scraped her upper arm on the metal window frame and bruised her shoulder on the wall. The other routes she and Val and the others mapped out, the ones she had yet even to try, have all been closed off, too.
New boys are coming, Frankie said. It’s time to stop fucking around. Time to stop indulging any idiot dreams of a life outside the boundaries that have been drawn for her. They added new, larger locks to the doors up to the main hall and the fire exit at the end of the basement corridor, and Frankie delighted in showing her how sturdy they are now, how invulnerable to hairpins and a well-placed elbow. They were watching the whole time, following her around campus, letting her play at escape. After her little display when they took Val away, the nurse suggested that some carefully managed freedom might be good for her — read: might prevent her from losing her mind completely, and that got their attention, because a mad toy is a useless toy — so they allowed her a handful of little jaunts, a stolen kiss with a pretty girl; a few evenings of near-normality. It had been fun, Frankie said. And funny!
But new boys are coming, and the money’s getting more serious about securing the place, so additional funds have been provided to lock it all down, and not before time, too; Frankie showed her a rickety old lock, newly replaced, that they hadn’t even known about. Why, she could have slipped away entirely undetected and they wouldn’t have known how!
“Oh, well,” Frankie said, and ruffled her hair with that curious mix of sentimentality and contempt she’s lately been given to, “them’s the breaks, David. I’ll kind of miss you, you know. When you’re gone, and all that. So make the best of the time you have left, okay? Make hay while the sun shines,” she’d added, and then looked up at the concrete ceiling. “Metaphorically.”
That had been six nights ago. She’s still puzzling over it.
Frankie, whatever else she is, whatever else might be going on in that thing she calls a brain, is fortunately still an idiot, and wasn’t careful with all the replacement keys. The stolen set’s been a lump under the mattress for weeks now, ready for her to make her move. And her move has to come soon, because she really is almost out of chances.
Even before they started locking the place down, she knew she couldn’t keep playing at escape forever. Frankie and Karen and the others have been telling her she’s Grandmother’s favourite for as long as she cares to remember, but that favour can only last so long, especially now she’s in the same position Val was when she arrived, more than two years ago: the last one left. And that can mean only one thing: they want her to help a new group of battered boys adjust to the mutilation, humiliation and deprivation of Dorley Hall. And then, when she’s fulfilled her role, they’ll ship her out. She’ll go wherever Val went, and she’ll die.
At that point, she thinks, she’ll be ready for it.
So her reticence finally to commit to getting the hell out has to end, because even though she finds it almost impossible to imagine building from scratch a life in the outside world, a life as a woman, no less, it has to be better than what awaits her here.
There’s an upside to her hesitation, at least: Frankie said they were watching her. They watched her explore the university, watched her learn tentatively to talk to people, watched her dance with Annie at the party by the lake. They were waiting for her to try to run away. If she’d tried a week ago, they would have caught her.
Now? They might not.
Unless this is all a setup. Unless she was supposed to pickpocket the keys. Unless they’re waiting for her to try for real so they can laugh at her again, hurt her again.
Only one way to know for certain.
She’s never been allowed an alarm clock in her room, so she’s been lying on her bed with her hair brush under one thigh and the stolen keys under the other, trusting in the discomfort to keep her more or less awake. She doesn’t have an exact idea of how long she needs to wait; just long enough for the bulk of the upstairs residents to go to bed or go home or do whatever it is they do when they lock everything down. She’s been murmuring the whole time, narrating to herself in a whisper versions of the life she’ll lead when she gets out. All fantasies, as silly as the ones she used to share with Val, but they’ve kept her busy and, in concert with the sharp objects poking at her legs, very nearly alert.
She knows enough about the security system here at Dorley Hall to know that it’s far from sophisticated. She’s seen the monitor in the room by the stairs, and aside from the cameras in every bedroom and the handful in the main room, coverage is spotty. There are motion sensors — she overheard Frankie (who else?) talking about them a few days ago — and it’s probably those that let them know when she left the Hall before, when she took the long way up through the main building, when she took her time being quiet, greasing locks with hair conditioner, carefully easing open doors and windows. She made it so easy for them, and she didn’t even know.
Still. She knows about them now, and that means she can plan for them. She’s been deliberately triggering them most nights: getting up, stretching, walking in circles in her tiny bedroom, returning to bed; creating the impression that she’s become a restless sleeper. The assumption might only gain her a few extra seconds, but it all counts.
Okay.
Call it.
Time to go.
She’s planned her route as far as her knowledge will take her — which isn’t particularly far, but it gets her out of the building — and she executes it as quickly as she can. She slips her fingers into the keyring, finds the keys she needs and readies them, and then she throws off the covers, leaps for the bedroom door and unlocks it. She’s out in the corridor before ten seconds have passed. Whoever’s in the security room has by now probably put down their coffee and rubbed their eyes and squinted at the screen, presumably expecting to see the timid boy in bedroom four stretching or pissing in his bucket or something. There’s no alarm she can expect to hear, not down here, but whoever it is will either come running right for her — having to stop to deal with a brand new and very heavy lock on the way — or call frantically for help. Either way, the clock’s ticking.
She turns right, up towards the so-called emergency exit — she’s quite certain that in the event of a fire, Grandmother’s favourite or not, she’d be left to burn — and kicks open the door to the abandoned room; door three of nine, equally spaced on either side of the sloping corridor, picked at random a long time ago. She and Val and the few others who’ve been in here always walked carefully to avoid kicking up the dust and keep their intentions concealed, so it’s a novelty she doesn’t have time to appreciate simply to run in, yank the old cabinet away from the wall and pull out the supplies.
It’s a pair of pillowcases, nested inside each other for strength and containing shoes, money, Frankie’s passport, and a handful of other bits and pieces collected over the years. Each item represents an ungodly investment of effort and time. Pain, too; not all attempts at theft were successful, and punishments for those that failed were always severe. Each item also represents a girl who is no longer here, but there’s no time to think, there’s no time to mourn, because she’s got to fucking go.
The stolen keys get her out of the doors at the end of the tunnel in time for her to hear someone shouting from somewhere inside the basement, so she slams the fire door, relocks it, and leaves the keys. She considered, while formulating her plan, breaking them off in the lock at this point, but decided against trying it: relying on tactics you’ve seen in movies will get you caught.
She slips her feet into the running shoes, velcros them tight, and runs off into the woods, heading in what she’s certain is the right direction for the city of Almsworth, and the last thing she hears as she vanishes into the trees is Frankie, standing in the open fire exit, shouting back into the building that she can’t see where David went, and loudly damning the rain.
2019 December 16
Monday
A kiss draws Christine back to consciousness, out of a formless dream and into the gaze of her girlfriend, who smiles and kisses her again, on the lips, on the cheek, on the tip of her nose, and Christine luxuriates in the extended moment of mixed perception as the real world slowly imposes itself in the form of Paige, kissing her again and again and laughing at the faces she pulls and the grumbling noises she makes in her throat as she wakes, finally, and returns the affection with still-sleepy insistence and confused limbs.
Hmm. Morning breath.
“Hi, Christine,” Paige says, and nips her once more playfully on the chin before rolling over and landing back on her pillow with an enthusiasm that shakes the bedframe. She sighs. “Another day in paradise.”
The need to stretch takes Christine, and it’s a moment before she has control enough to push herself into an upright position. “What time is it?” she asks, leaning forward a little so Paige can arrange pillows behind her head.
Paige shrugs. “Sometime after seven,” she says. “And I have a thing at nine and you have a workshop at ten, so I thought: why not be on time for once?”
“Paige, you’re always on time.”
“And you never are,” Paige says. She tenses her upper body so she can fully stretch the kinks out of her legs, and the duvet falls away as she lifts them, exposing her from hip to toe. She grins at Christine and wiggles her toes.
“Seven o’clock?” Christine says, feeling light. She hasn’t even gone on her trip with Paige and Indira yet, to visit her old city of Brighton, to tour the places she grew up, the places she was hurt; the places she hurt people. But it’s as if the therapeutic effects have travelled back in time; she feels complete, for the first time in her life. Her old self isn’t the enemy, isn’t some monster who had to be killed, its corpse fuel for the growth of her new life; he was just a sad, injured, misunderstood boy. Reintegrating him always felt like it might reintroduce his fear, his loneliness, his flashes of blinding, misdirected malice, but here he is, in his entirety; part of her.
She has a few little scars, faded white, on her hip, remnants of the other ways the boy tried to control his mounting, devastating isolation, and she’s always thought them ugly. Now, though, she finds them beautiful, and she let Paige touch them for the first time last night.
She also downloaded a copy of the game he was obsessed with onto her laptop, and spent a few hours moving tiny 3D fantasy armies around a map, remembering who the boy was before everything went to shit. Because he’s in here as well, and he’s precious to her. Precious to Paige, too, who found her fighting an epic unicorns vs demons battle on the windswept ramparts of a ruined castle, and wrapped her in a hug so tight Christine thought she might never escape it.
“Seven o’clock,” Paige confirms.
Christine reaches over, takes her hand. “So we have a little while, then?”
Paige, an impish smile all over her face like she planned it this way — inevitably she did — nods and allows Christine to draw her in, and for the hundredth time Christine contemplates just how lucky she is.
It’s taken her a long, long time to understand she might actually deserve it.
It’s shortly before eight when they reluctantly split up for their showers, with Paige stopping in the door before returning to her room, grumbling good-naturedly about Christine’s academic responsibilities, about her other responsibilities, about how the English language isn’t going anywhere and surely doesn’t need to be picked apart for its secrets at quite so alacritous a pace, about how the boys in the basement ought to be expected, after so many weeks in captivity, to feminise themselves for a morning or two. Christine kisses her again, pushes up against her, stands on her toes to reach into Paige’s mouth with her tongue, and when Paige steps back into the corridor Christine ducks away and shuts the door.
“Cow,” Paige comments loudly, and it’s hard not to giggle.
She washes gingerly; she’s still sensitive down there.
After her shower Christine throws on a tank top and shorts, squeezes on a pair of tennis shoes made tight by her thick winter socks, and finger-combs her hair into something approximating a style. She would have washed it but she decided she didn’t have time to properly dry it and deal with the frizz, so she left it as-is and resolved to fix it later, after her workshop. It’s not as if standards haven’t been lax, lately, anyway; it’s been chaos.
Nice to properly meet Melissa at last, though, and not just as a nervous wreck still feeling her way through her first months as Christine. And Shahida’s sweet, and the girl Rachel, who she’s been assured knows some things but not enough to hurt herself or everyone else and who has promised not to ask, was very nice to her, even if Christine could tell she was being looked at a little too hard, up there in Café One.
She throws a lip gloss in her pocket, as much to protect against the cold weather as to look glamorous or as preventative against any unexpected Aunt Bea encounters, and heads out of her room and down the hall to the kitchen, where she knows she’ll have a good twenty minutes to kill before Paige gets done dealing with her hair extensions. She’s not halfway there when she hears a familiar voice:
“—so first up you’ve got to choose your clan, and that’s maybe the most important choice! Not only does each clan grant certain special traits, it’ll be the starting point for your roleplaying style! I mean, it’s not that your clan dictates what kind of vampire you’ll be, but there’s a certain range, you know, a particular flavour to the vamp-ness? Sure, you could be a lovable hugs-and-kisses Lasom—”
“I thought I just had to put points in dexterity and stuff,” says another voice, and Christine swallows to keep from reacting. Yasmin? She must have been ambushed.
“I mean, yes, you do, but that’s not until later! Look on the screen, have a read about the different clans, and— Hi, Christine!”
Busted. “Hey, Jodie,” Christine says. “Hiya, Yasmin.” She stops lurking in the doorway and steps inside, finding Jodie and Yasmin sat around the small kitchen table with empty mugs and scraps of breakfast. Jodie’s her morning self, with her red hair tied back and her fringe tucked under an Alice band. Yasmin’s wearing a suit, a nice one, with a pale yellow blouse and a black skirt to the knee. As usual, she looks very adult, very together, and Christine’s glad she got dressed before searching out coffee, or she’d feel even more childlike compared to her. She wishes she’d worn something a little more feminine than her old-habit shorts and tank, though.
“Oh crap,” Jodie says. “What time is it?”
“Eight fourteen,” Yasmin says, reading off the laptop screen.
“Crap! I have to get ready!”
Christine and Yasmin watch her buzz out of the kitchen and back to her room, and share a smile; a slightly strained one, in Christine’s case. She never knows how Yasmin will respond to her presence. She offers the best olive branch she knows: “Wanna tea?”
“Sure,” Yasmin says, and Christine’s grateful to have the mechanical process of tea-making to occupy herself. After she sets the kettle boiling she retrieves Yasmin’s mug, rinses it, and grabs two clean ones from the mug tree for her and Paige.
“Julia’s gone to work?” she asks, deciding it’s probably a safe enough topic.
Yasmin nods. “Um,” she says, and Christine notices she’s staring very carefully at the kettle and not at her, “Christine. Fuck. I’m so bad at this.”
“Bad at what?”
“Thank you,” Yasmin says, still deliberately not meeting her eyes. “Thank you for getting Indira involved. She spoke to Beatrice for us.”
“Oh?”
“Our timetable’s been moved up.” Yasmin shrugs. “March. You did that. Well. Indira did that. But you got her onside. Three months and we’ll be free to leave. We already signed the paperwork.”
“You’re really leaving?”
“Three months,” Yasmin repeats.
Concentrating on pouring hot water onto tea bags and squishing them against the sides of the mugs, Christine fights the sudden wave of vertigo. Sure, they never really got on, but Yasmin and Julia have been a part of her life for so long that she just assumed they always would be, even in the face of their repeated confirmation that they want nothing to do with Dorley Hall or its residents and would rather just leave. But now it’s real: they’re leaving. Three months!
Just once, Christine thinks, I would like things to stay the same for a while.
Quickly she shuttles three mugs to the table and sits down before her weak legs betray her, and a hand, closing on hers, startles her.
“You okay?” Yasmin says.
Christine stares at her hand. When was the last time Yasmin touched her? Was she even Yasmin then? “Um,” she says, “yeah. Just… things changing, you know?”
Self-consciously Yasmin removes her hand, smiles guiltily at Christine, and occupies herself with her mug, cupping it in both hands, blowing uselessly on it, sipping gingerly at the hot tea. “That’s just it, actually,” she says, after a little while. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. That’s why I was in here, waiting. For you.”
“And Jodie,” Christine says, to cover for her confusion. Waiting for her?
“She was just a bonus,” Yasmin says, one corner of her mouth curling fondly. “It’s been… nice catching up with her. But it’s you I wanted to see.”
“How come?” Christine asks neutrally.
Yasmin becomes even more awkward, which Christine hadn’t thought possible. “We talked. Me and Julia. After Indira told us we’re getting our strings cut, after we signed all the prelim stuff. Indira… She said some things. Stirred some stuff up.”
Christine nods. “Yeah. Indira does that.” She always did know how to climb into someone’s psyche and prod them in the right direction. A good thing she doesn’t use her powers for evil.
Mostly not for evil, anyway.
“Anyway, I realised…” Yasmin drinks deeply from her tea and winces; too hot. So she puts the mug back on the table and drums her fingers, accompanies her hesitant words with the percussive tap-tap-tap of carefully shaped nails on polished wood. “We have each other, Julia and me. And that’s the way it’s always been. Since the start. Julia and me, me and Julia. You and Paige and Vicky and Jodie, kinda. And Craig. And me and Julia. I mean, you practically shut us out—” The drumming fingers halt. “Sorry. Sorry. Fuck. Doing it again. Relitigating the past. Seeing it from only my point of view. Stupid. Habit.” She plays at her bottom lip with her teeth, and Christine grounds herself in the sight of it, reminds herself forcibly that Yasmin, the girl she’s walked on eggshells around for the longest time, is just a girl like her, finding her way. “I’m supposed to save this stuff for my therapist,” Yasmin adds suddenly, smiling.
Christine’s glad she’s not got a mouthful of tea, or she would have spat it out. “You have a therapist?”
“Yes. Just started. And don’t worry; I just say we were in a girls’ school together. Far from home. Dormmates. The sponsors are head girls, teachers, bullies, et cetera. Secret’s safe. It’s fine. But, look, that’s not the point. The point is, it’s always been just us. And I kind of… I don’t want it to be any more.” Another sip of tea, another pause. Christine gives her time to organise her thoughts. This feels important. “We don’t have families. Hers wouldn’t accept her, and mine… You know what happened with mine.”
Christine doesn’t, not exactly, but she knows there was a falling out, years before Dorley, and the boy who would become Yasmin ran away, stayed with friends, hid from them. And then, just when he wanted to try for reconciliation: tragedy of some kind. Yasmin’s eyes always darken when she alludes to it, and Christine’s never wanted to push.
“Yeah,” she says, to keep things moving, and risks covering Yasmin’s hand, currently resting on the table, with hers. Yasmin accepts it.
“We don’t have families, and we don’t really have friends apart from the people at work, and we spend so much time on call or working offsite that we hardly see them. And I think— we think we need a foundation. Something solid to build our lives on. So that’s what we’re going to do, before we leave. And I’d like your help with that, Christine. I’d ask Jodie, but…”
“Jodie’s friends are mostly from outside,” Christine finishes. She doesn’t know Jodie as well as she’d like, but the girl seems to hold zero grudges about what happened to her here; Christine expects her to keep showing up for birthdays and holidays and quick visits more or less indefinitely, so there’s time for them to grow their relationship beyond the superficial. And a lot of time for Christine to learn everything there is to know about vampires.
“I want to meet the new you,” Yasmin says. “I only really know the you who came here. And that sucks, actually! I want to get to know you. And Vicky. Even Paige.” Christine raises an eyebrow; Yasmin and Paige had been the first to fall out, downstairs. “Yes,” Yasmin adds with a grin, “even Paige. She’s a totally different person now! Even I can tell. And Julia’s out today, and I’m on call—” she gestures at her jacket, to explain why she’s dressed for work but still lounging around the second-floor kitchen, “—so I thought it was a good opportunity. To hang out. Start again. But I understand if you have classes, or whatever—”
“I have a workshop,” Christine says, “but I bet we can find you people who don’t. You can get to know more people than just me, Paige and Vick if you come downstairs, you know.” Not entirely sure she’s making a good decision, she stands, hefting her half-full mug with one hand and pulling on Yasmin with the other.
Yasmin doesn’t move. “People,” she says. “You mean, sponsors. I don’t— I can’t do any sponsors. Not yet.”
“They’re not the people you remember them as,” Christine insists, internally crossing her heart; it’s mostly true. “And I can tell them not to talk shop, if that helps.”
Nodding slowly, Yasmin rises from the table, not letting go of Christine’s hand. “Right,” she says. “Fuck it. Let’s go downstairs.”
“You okay with me fetching Paige on the way down?”
“Yeah,” Yasmin says with a smile. “Get your girlfriend. And then…” She sighs, squares her shoulders, and retrieves her hand from Christine so she can smooth down jacket and skirt. “Let’s go see the sponsors.”
“It won’t just be sponsors,” Christine says, leading Yasmin down the corridor to Paige’s door and knocking on it. “We’re like a hotel these days. Or a convention centre. We get all sorts.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, yeah.” Christine nods, grinning. “Sponsors, second years, random hangers-on. Indira’s boyfriend and the guy Tabby just started dating. Melissa, the girl who made all that fuss a few days ago, and her friend Shahida, who knows everything. Maybe even her friend Rachel, but be careful what you say around her. Oh, and Steph, probably, at some point. She’s basically unstoppable.”
* * *
“I’m just saying, my clothes are more comfortable. And just better in general. You’ll look great!”
“And I’m just saying, not on your life. Not yet. You’re confusing ‘acceptance’ with ‘enthusiasm’ again, and I, for one, am not ready for skirt go spinny. My centre of gravity is changing; I’d fall down.”
“You’ve barely changed, Aaron.”
“Tell that to my arse, Steph!”
“Okay.”
“Stop that!”
“You really want me to?”
“No. Ugh. Fuck. I can’t believe you sometimes.”
“Who? Little old me?”
“Yeah, right. I can’t believe I ever bought your innocent act. You’re a monster, a deviant, an incorrigible creature of— Ai! You pinched me!”
“No being mean.”
“Yeah, well, no doing that.”
“Fine.”
“Can I go get dressed now?”
“Just try on one skirt? Look at this one! It’s cute, right?”
“Steph, just because you’re a girl now—”
“—always was—”
“Fine, yes, sure, absolutely. You’ve always been a girl. Agreed. Can I say my thing, please? You’re not going to interrupt me again?”
“No, no, go right ahead. I shouldn’t have distracted you.”
“But just because—”
“Sorry.”
“But just because—”
“I just think it’s important to be accurate.”
“But just because—”
“I’m still sorry though.”
“You’re not funny.”
“Sorry. Genuinely! Please. Say your thing.”
“I feel stupid now.”
“Aaron, I want to hear it.”
“Okay. Look, I agree: it’s a lovely skirt, and I’m sure it will look very good on you. But not on me! How do you even walk in a skirt? And don’t say ‘one foot in front of the other’! I can see you thinking about it. It’s just— Look. I’m going to be serious for a second. Actually serious. I’m not ready for it. Any of it! Clothes and stuff. Not ready. One step at a time, okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You’re right. One step at a time. Which is, incidentally, how you walk when you’re wearing— Ow!”
“I’m not sorry.”
“I am. I won’t push.”
“You can push. But I’m going to push back. You might be a girl, but I’m not yet, not up here, no matter how sensitive my nipples get or how many pairs of knickers Maria passive-aggressively stocks my wardrobe with. My huge, manly bollocks would appreciate a few more months to hang free and easy in tracksuits and boxers, thank you very much.”
“You’re taking orders from your testicles? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I don’t know how you can say that with a straight face.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“I wonder how you’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“When you do feel like a girl. Up there.”
“Steph, I barely know what it’s like to feel like an Aaron up there. My personality—” and he dodges her grab because it’s obvious she’s guessed what he’s going to say next and she’s going to interrupt it if it’s the last thing she does, “—is stored—” he oversteps and trips, and the calculating look on her face turns to panic, “—in the balls.” She hooks an arm around his waist just in time, and it’s not enough to catch him but it is enough to push him onto the bed, where he lands, bounces once, and protects his head with his hands as he bumps against the wall.
He comes to rest with a smirk and she glares at him, clearly torn between the need to apologise for almost knocking him down and the need to attack him again for his terrible jokes.
“I thought you were being serious,” she says instead, crouching down in front of him and resting her forearms on his knees.
“I was!” he insists, and to break her attempt at a scowl he adds, “For a whole five or six seconds.”
She grins at him, rolling her eyes, and then steps away, stands up, looks at the floor. “Um,” she says, “your towel’s open.”
Whoops.
Steph’s had a towel wrapped around her chest since they got back from the shower and Aaron, choosing to take the enforced changes to his gender and his identity at a more leisurely pace, has his tied firmly around his waist, which he knows is fucking stupid because showing his nipples to the whole basement — or the whole basement as expressed as the contents of Steph’s locked bedroom — is probably more obscene than hiding them behind a towel, but if he’s going to be a girl, he’s going to do it on his terms, and that means holding off on the new clothes and the makeup and the hair and the towel position and stuff until he’s good and ready.
And he doesn’t think he could stand it if he tried any of it too early, and looked stupid.
She’s still looking away so he closes the towel and chews on his cheek for a moment, trying to stop himself from being embarrassed and failing. But it’s okay because so’s she, and she’s seen it all before, anyway, even touched some of it before in flailing little moments, and besides, as he insisted to her in the shower, they’re he/him titties.
For now.
Steph runs a hand through her hair and smiles at him, still flushed. She looks radiant, as she often does these days, with the residual heat from the shower still pink on her skin and her wet hair slicked back out of her face. Sure, she’s got all those markers of a testosterone puberty that she hates, that she’s complained about to him multiple times, but he can see past them, or through them, or they don’t matter, or something. They don’t detract from her. Stephanie’s a woman bursting with potential, and you’d have to be mad or stubborn to miss it.
He whispered as much to her last night, when in a vulnerable moment she shut the wardrobe door too hard, not wanting to see herself in the mirror, not wanting to experience herself, fighting with her need to throw him out so she could be miserable on her own. He told her she’s beautiful, she’s elegant, she takes his breath away. He told her about the day he saw her again after hiding away, how he could barely believe she was the same person as before. He told her how she shines.
And when she felt better she responded, she held him and she told him how she saw all he could be, and for the first time the idea was actually a little affecting. He’d blushed and, feeling exceptionally childish, briefly hid his face in a pillow. But that’s what Maria said, isn’t it? One of her many little nuggets of wisdom: you’re starting over, not quite from scratch but close to it, so it’s fine to be a little childish sometimes. It’s expected. It’s encouraged. Experiment. Play! Find the new you. It’s bound to be a bit silly sometimes.
He’s not up to playing, not yet. But Steph is, and he can help her, and encourage her, and fend off her enthusiasm for skirts, and maybe enough nights and mornings like this will be sufficient to encourage him to try something, someday.
He really should cover his tits, though.
She waves a bra at him, pointedly, letting him know she’s getting changed, and as he stands up to leave she turns her back to drop her towel, so he punishes her by leaning in and planting a kiss between her shoulder blades, making her squeal and jump and scold him. They’ve been doing that a lot lately, since they first kissed: little displays of affection. He doesn’t yet know exactly what they are to each other — they haven’t really talked about it — but he figures they can take whatever it is nice and slow. It’s not like they’re hurting for time.
He’s not even sure he’s over the thrill of being wanted. If every stage of a relationship or an intimate friendship or whatever this is can be so intense, he might not be able to handle moving more quickly.
She’s not going to wear any of the things she was teasing him with, anyway; Maria and Pippa got in touch shortly after they woke up and told them both — mainly Steph — to dress neutral, which is easy enough for him but will be a bit of an imposition for Steph, who’s got used to wearing nicer things. On Sunday, with his encouragement, she wore a dress and leggings out of her room. Wore it all day. Lunch and dinner and watching crap TV in the common room and everything. Martin almost cracked an emotion when he first saw her.
“Dress neutral,” he mutters to himself as he sorts through his wardrobe. The collection of bras on hangers is new, and divided half-and-half into sports and starter. He picks out a sports bra, same as usual, and is about to struggle into it when he remembers how hard the damn things are to get out of, especially without help, and how painful it can be when, halfway in or out of it, the elastic gets stuck dragging over his extraordinarily sensitive nipples. “Fuck it.” Starter bra it is.
Maria showed him the easy way to put them on: backwards, and turn it round when the clasp’s done up.
He looks in the mirror when he’s done, never quite sure what to expect any more. He doesn’t see the man in women’s underwear he feels instinctively he ought to see; instead there’s just him, Aaron, in a towel and a bra, curiously ungendered. Something in his belly twists, and he doesn’t know what to make of that either, or the lightheaded feeling that threatens to topple him.
He drops his towel. Doesn’t look away. And there’s the rest of him! He squints: is it smaller? No. Just his imagination. He’s barely been on the damn hormones long enough to grow more than the suggestion of tits — and for a golf-ball-sized lump of flesh behind each nipple to become approximately as sensitive to both pain and pleasure as the tip of his lately neglected dick — and from what Maria said, it takes a lot longer than that for the genitals actually to shrink. But then she also said, ‘Use it or lose it,’ and he hasn’t had the will for that lately, so maybe it is going to shrivel up like a prune.
“Idiot.”
The running commentary isn’t helping. Sternly he instructs himself to shut the hell up, and selects underwear (men’s, and not from the recently added selection of what Maria swears are called ‘boyshorts’, either), t-shirt, loose jogging trousers and a hoodie, throwing them over himself in a rush to be done.
But before he goes he runs fingers through his hair, musses it up like Steph does sometimes to add volume to its meagre length, and poses in the mirror. With his hoodie unzipped and open he reaches behind his back and pulls the t-shirt tight, exposing his shape. Something about the cotton, the way it conforms to his body, makes the subtle changes in his shape more obvious.
It’s a race made up of more than one hurdle, he knows, learning to see himself as a girl, and it’s going to take more than some buds on his chest and a minute amount of fat distribution to get him there but, God, if he tries he can almost see it.
It doesn’t even occur to him until he’s almost out of his door again that he flashed Steph, that his towel fell open when she was practically on top of him, that, accident or no, he did to her what he did to all those women. Her face ripples in his mind’s eye, replaced for a second with the other women, the ones whose lives he pushed himself into, and it’s enough to take his feet out from under him. He’s still there on the floor, minutes later, when Steph finds him, helps him up onto his bed, and strokes his hair while he cries.
Because that’s another thing Maria said: now he’s accepted responsibility for his actions, now he’s properly understood them, they’re going to come back to him when he least expects it, in bits and pieces and for a long time to come. He didn’t get to die because of what he did, so now he’s going to have to live with it, and that’s another thing entirely.
* * *
“I don’t want you to go.”
Christine writhes in Paige’s arms, presses her face into Paige’s shoulder, braces her hands behind Paige’s back; if she never lets go, Paige can’t leave the building, right?
“Christine,” Paige says, reaching behind and tickling Christine in the crook of her elbow, which causes her instantly to lose her grip, “I have a one-on-one. I can’t miss it.”
“What if I was really sexy?” Christine says, looking up and bouncing on her toes. “What if I ran upstairs and put some actually good clothes on? What if I did my makeup? Would you stay?”
Paige leans forward, kisses Christine on the top of her head. “You’re always sexy,” she whispers. “But,” she adds, extracting herself entirely from Christine’s grip, “you’re not always stylish. Look at these shorts; you’ll freeze!” She pinches Christine’s exposed thigh.
“It’s not that cold,” Christine insists. “It’ll just make me hustle.”
“Goodbye,” Paige says, kissing her on the cheek and pushing her gently away. “I’ll see you this evening.”
“I hate school,” Christine says as Paige opens the doors and takes the steps down onto the path at a light jog. “We should drop out!” she yells, propping open the closing door. Paige waves a backwards hand. “I love you!”
Paige turns, her whole face lit up, and blows a kiss. Christine blows one back, and Paige laughs and pretends to catch it, like they’re two lovebirds in a corny old movie.
“I’m glad you’re back together,” Yasmin says, from behind her.
Christine whirls, ashamed that she’d forgotten Yasmin was there, that she’d carried on like a lovesick teenager while professional, adult Yasmin was standing beside her. But she doesn’t seem all that put out that she had to stand there through what had probably been a solid three-to-four minutes of cuddling, kissing and unpleasantly sappy noises, most of which had been generated by Christine. Small mercies.
“Oh,” Christine says, “um, yeah. Me too.”
“Well, obviously.”
Yasmin’s a little strained and nervous, fiddling with the lapel of her jacket, and tapping her heel on the tile, but she’s trying. When was the last time she lingered on the ground floor, anyway? And now she’s agreed to join Christine in the main kitchen, to see who else is around? And potentially stay with them, when Christine goes down to the security room? It’s unprecedented.
Sort of the point. No shop talk, though. That’s vital.
Christine says it, when she lets them both through the doors into the kitchen, before she even registers who’s inside: “No shop talk, please.”
“When have you ever known me to talk shop?” Vicky says, waving a slice of omelette on her fork at Christine, and eating it. “Hi, Yasmin!” she adds, and talking with her mouth full helps her sound slightly less surprised. She swallows. “Everything okay?”
Yasmin stands up a little straighter, clenches jaw, and commits. She strides a little too quickly over to the nearest chair at the central table. “Yes,” she says as she sits. “I’m just… getting out of my comfort zone a little.”
“Good for you! This—” Vicky yanks a thumb in the direction of the AGA, where Lorna is fussing with a frying pan, “—is Lorna. Have you met? I forget. She’s not from here, if you know what I mean, but she knows about it.”
Yasmin shades her eyes. “We’ve met,” she says. In the silence that follows, Christine joins Lorna at the AGA, gives her shoulder a quick squeeze in greeting, and prods speculatively at the coffee maker.
“It’s fresh,” Lorna whispers.
“Thanks,” Christine whispers back, and fetches some mugs — plain, for the sake of Yasmin’s temper — and pours some for them both.
“I’m sorry, Lorna,” Yasmin says, stumbling over her words. “I’m really sorry.”
Lorna checks on the frying pan and then turns to look. “What for?”
“When you were being, um, read in to the programme. Julia and I, we were kind of flippant. Rude. You were being asked to accept something huge, and we… we were dicks about it.”
“Apology unnecessary,” Lorna says, throwing her a quick smile and returning to chase the half-cooked omelette around the pan. “I’m not going to judge how the victims of this place deal with the trauma of it. I tried that for a while,” she adds, with a sidelong glance at Christine, “and it sucks. Besides, I’ve made the same Faustian bargain as everyone else now. Maybe even a worse one, since I don’t have to be here.” She shrugs. “But I’m here, I’m all in, and I can hate myself for it when I’m old. Tina, if you’re hungry I can make you an omelette.”
Christine, who’s been rummaging in one of the cupboards, emerges with a cereal bar. “No thanks. I need something portable.”
“Got work?”
“Got work,” Christine confirms. “Getting some routine security monitoring crap out of the way. Then I’ve got a Linguistics workshop. Then a lecture. And then something else; I forget.”
“You’re a great student, Tina,” Vicky says, and Christine flashes her the most passive-aggressive (yet feminine) smile Indira taught her.
“Thank you!” she says falsely.
“Hey, Lorna?” Yasmin says suddenly, urgently. “I wasn’t a victim. You said I was a victim of this place? I wasn’t. I don’t like it that much, and I think the way things are done could use some… adjustment, but when I came here I needed it. I was a, um, a really fucking—”
“You don’t have to say it,” Lorna says.
“You don’t know what I was like.”
“Raise your hand if you have skeletons in your closet,” Christine says. “And she knows about mine, Yas, and they’re worse than yours.”
“No, Christine,” Yasmin says, frowning, “that’s not true. I was—”
“And,” Christine interrupts, “this counts as shop talk.”
“No comparing trauma at the breakfast table,” Vicky mutters, and Lorna covers her mouth, tries not to laugh. “What?”
“You really are a bunch of bloody trans women, aren’t you?” Lorna says, and snorts, undignified but unbothered about it, into her closed fist. “Straight from, ‘Hello!’ to, ‘A horrible thing happened to me on the way to the gender this morning.’”
“Guilty,” Vicky says.
“Yasmin here,” Christine says, before Yasmin can have a third go at describing her crimes, “wants to hang out today, and I have to work. Who’s sticking around?”
“I’m not,” Lorna says, decanting her omelette onto a plate. She sits down, leans over to kiss Vicky on the cheek, and starts cutting up her food. She points at her girlfriend with her fork. “But she is.”
“Lorna has lectures and things most of the day,” Vicky says, chasing the last of her omelette around her plate, “but I’m at a loose end until three. If you want to hang, we can hang.”
“Can we?” Yasmin says, immensely relieved and immediately self-conscious about it.
“We can,” Vicky says, standing to wash her plate. “And we can hang wherever you like: in the kitchen, the hall, out at uni somewhere, or upstairs. And would you like an omelette? I have free hands now and there’s, like, a billion eggs.”
“Please?”
“Okay,” Christine says, dumping her empty mug in the sink, “you kids have fun today. Some of us have to work for a living.”
Yasmin snorts, and Lorna says, “Have a good day in hell.”
“Just a half-hour or so,” Christine corrects. “Half an hour in hell. And then two hours in a Linguistics workshop, which might be worse.”
“Poor thing,” Vicky says, reaching out to grab Christine’s sleeve as she passes. “Oh, hey, Tina. Guess what Maria gave me this morning? For Lorna?” Without waiting for an answer she reaches into her bag and pulls out a paper bag, which she rattles: pills. Lots of them. The same ones she used to sneak out of the secure medicine locker. “We’ve gone legit!”
Christine laughs as she leaves. Maria’s just handing out free HRT now, unprompted? Dorley’s in danger of becoming entirely too nice.
* * *
Another day in paradise. Dorothy’s acquisition of the boy Declan’s got her in fine form, bustling about the manor with an energy Valérie hasn’t seen in her in years. She spends half her time talking on or tapping at her weird light-up portable telephone and the rest in discussion with one or both of the brick-thick men who brought Declan in, who’ve hung around to keep an eye on things. Odd that Dorothy’s taken little interest in the boy thus far; she threw him at Val and then apparently forgot about him. But then, she was like that when she had Dorley, too: with a handful of exceptions, the new ones seemed to bore her until they’d spent some time in her manicured care, and Declan’s an especially rough example of the art, with his surgeries still healing and his body barely yet altered by the hormones. Most likely she wants him to have progressed further in his feminisation before she deigns to delight herself on him.
Lucky boy gets a break.
She doesn’t know where Karen’s gone, though. The nurse — though God knows why she went into that profession, being one of the more vicious and self-satisfied of all Dorothy’s hangers-on — vanished a while back, which precipitated a dip in Dorothy’s mood severe enough that Val genuinely feared she might kill herself, leaving her alone and starving in this vast, near-empty house. Again. She’s almost glad Dorothy’s got a new lease on life; at least she’s not going to have to have another debate with herself over whether she can stomach eating partially decomposed human thigh meat.
With Declan came Frankie, whom Val hadn’t seen for decades. She doesn’t know if Frankie’s the new favoured daughter or simply subbing in for Karen, but either way she’s here, skulking around, making the odd arch comment but keeping mostly to herself. She hasn’t been meeting Val’s eyes on the few occasions they’ve interacted, but after Dorley, after Smyth-Farrow, after decades upon decades of this shit, Val prefers not to dwell on the motivations of her captors. Better to imagine them as forces of nature to be prepared for, endured, survived, and not as living, breathing people, people who decide to abuse you the ways that they do.
The two men look like soldiers, or ex-soldiers. Not that Val’s an expert. But she’s seen movies and TV shows — all from the eighties and nineties, admittedly — and she remembers what the guys from Smyth-Farrow’s PMC were like, and they move like she thinks soldiers should move, with economy and caution and with reference to one another. They also look at her with undisguised lust, which could become a problem.
“You’re half my age,” she snapped at one yesterday, when he stood too close while she prepared Sunday lunch. It was an exaggeration: that one, the mouthy one, looks mid-thirties at the very least, and his partner’s older. But she’s at least a decade their senior, no matter what.
“Just means you’ve got more experience,” he said to her, leering. She laughed in his face at that, which surprised him, and got on with the roast beef.
Fucking English. She’s cooked more roast beef in her life than she cares to remember, and with the guards around she can’t even spit in the gravy any more. At least today’s leftover day, which means beef sandwiches with all the trimmings; easy and quick. She has to bake the bread herself, but she’s done that enough times she barely has to watch what she’s doing.
The same goes for everything she does here. Sometimes she fancies she can see a groove worn in the tiled floors where her life has left its mark.
In the corner, in his stupid maid outfit — more revealing than hers; he has more to reveal, Dorothy’s taste in modification having taken a turn to the crass in the decades since she was made — Declan barely moves. Not since she put him there and started on the bread has he so much as spoken or raised a hand. And it’s been the same with him since he got here. Ten words she’s gotten out of him, and she’s had to control the urge to shake him, to hit him, to do something to pull him out of his stupor, but she knows that doesn’t work, because she’s seen this before. The violence of the sudden alteration, the absolute powerlessness; there are some men it simply kills.
Here, at least, she has a little more control than she had under Dorley. Here she has the run of the place. She can dress him in the mornings, undress him at night. She can guide him to the toilet every two hours so he doesn’t piss himself. She can feed him and she can wash him and she can make sure he lives, and maybe if she keeps it up for long enough, something of him might come back.
And he might know something that could help her get them both out.
She’s wrapping the sandwiches in cling film when the older, quieter guard approaches the kitchen from the direction of the main hall. He whispers something in the ear of the mouthy one, who jerks up from his near-sleep, leaning against the door frame, and gestures at Declan.
“Come on, love,” the loud one says. “Time to go see Ms Marsden.”
Val hides her smile. ‘Ms Marsden’; couldn’t get the hired help to call you Grandmother, then? Declan, unsurprisingly, doesn’t respond, not even when the loud one yanks him off his chair. His feet, in their tacky Mary Janes, don’t seem competent to support him, and when the loud one makes to let go Declan almost falls.
“Don’t be cruel,” Val says sharply, but the loud one ignores her as he half-drags Declan out of the kitchen, the boy’s feet eventually finding purchase and settling into an inelegant stumble, block heels tapping on the tile.
The quiet one takes up the loud one’s post, leaning against the jamb with the air of someone who could stand there all day. Not his first guard job.
“That one deserves it,” he says.
Val finishes putting the sandwiches away in the fridge before she deigns to respond. “What?”
“The lad. Declan. Rapist, isn’t he?”
She’s glad she’s got her back to him, because that’s not something she wants to know. She wants Declan to be an innocent, like her, like Dee, like every other girl taken and altered and ultimately killed by the aristocratic horrors who’ve controlled her life for three decades. If he’s cruel, if he’s like them, then caring for him’s a wasted effort, and investing hope in him is futile.
But it might just as easily be a lie.
She calms herself, closes the fridge, turns around and leans on it, feeling suddenly very exposed in Dorothy’s hideous uniform. Unlike Declan’s, it’s not cut to the crotch or the chest — she has to actually work in the damn thing after all — but it’s still revealing, and she still hates it.
She folds her arms around her waist. A measure of protection.
“Would you mind repeating that?” she asks, in her clearest and most feminine voice, the one that annoys Dorothy the most.
“He’s a rapist. This—” the man jerks a thumb in the direction of Dorothy’s suite, “—is his punishment.”
“This isn’t a punishment,” she spits. “This is a game. He’s just a piece in it. It doesn’t matter to her if he’s a rapist. Wouldn’t matter if he were a murderer or a saint. She just… does this to people.”
The quiet one has the residual decency to look uncomfortable. “She did this to you?”
She can’t tell if it’s a question or a confirmation. “What do you think?” she sneers. “I’m not here for my health.”
“Right,” he says. “Jake said… Shit. I didn’t believe him.”
“You know it for sure?” she says, busying herself with cleaning kitchen surfaces that don’t need to be cleaned, to keep her back to him. “That he’s a rapist?”
“Saw his file. He had a girlfriend. She kept coming back, he kept assaulting her. And it probably wasn’t just her. You know what they’re like, those types.”
“Not really.” She lifts the kettle and the toaster and wipes under each one, the cloth coming away clean.
“What did you do?” the quiet one asks suddenly.
“Does it matter?” she snaps, freezing in place.
“If he was a rapist—”
“I was dragged away from the corpses of my parents in nineteen-eighty-five,” she says, unmoving. “The bitch upstairs castrated me and kept me and now, thirty-four years later, here I still am. Powerless. Trapped in a role she created for me. One which, I might add, she delights in subverting solely because she gets off on it. So—” she throws the cloth down on the counter and turns around, pins him with her glare, “—I ask you again: does it matter?”
“So you’re a— a— fuck, I don’t know the right word. You’re a transgender?”
She shrugs. “Nineteen-eighty-five. That’s when I stopped learning anything she didn’t want me to. So if, in the meantime, someone’s coined a word for a person whose family was murdered and who was turned into a woman against her will and who has been trying and failing to escape for three decades while watching others even less fortunate than her be similarly tortured and then killed, assume I have not been apprised.” She leans into her accent, dredges it up from her memory. It sounds fake. Too much time around the fucking English. The quiet one looks away, and Val lets an irritated click slip her lips. “What’s your name? I can’t keep calling you ‘the quiet one’ in my head.”
That gets him looking at her again. “I’m ‘the quiet one’?”
Val holds up two hands, looks from one to the other. “The loud one and the quiet one. If you wanted to take up more space in my head you shouldn’t have taken the job of being my latest prison guard.”
“I’m not—”
“Do not even pretend to— Oh!” Val interrupts herself. “Did she lie to you? Or are you simply very ill-informed? I am the prisoner—” she taps a hand to her breast, “—and you are the guard. Or shall I make it simpler?”
“No,” he says quickly, quietly. “No.”
“Did she tell you all her boy-girls are like Declan?” Val says, approaching him, pressing her advantage. If by some chance the man does have a guilty conscience she wants to fucking spank it; it might not help, but goodness fucking gracious if it wouldn’t feel good to hurt one of these people for a change! “Evil men being justly punished?”
“She didn’t—”
She starts counting on her fingers. “Owen. He took a handbag off a wealthy-looking woman. Kieron shoplifted a Walkman. Imran. Pretty sure the police got him for something he didn’t even do. And Louis. She was sweet. She liked to be called Lou. She got in a fight and got booked on a drunk and disorderly, lost her job, lost her flat, had to steal to make ends meet. She loved to read the classics and she was obsessed with The Breakfast Club and she is buried in the fucking courtyard.” She’s struggling to keep her voice under control. “Oh, and Dee. She was the last one I saw before I was brought here. She was passionate and kind and we always said we’d escape together. It’s just possible I might have loved her, and she’s been dead for thirty years. And as for me? As for my crime? My parents’ business was in competition with the man who used to own this place. That’s it. For that they got murdered and I got thirty years in hell, so tell—me—your—name!” She’s right up in his face now, and she claps her hands in front of him, startles him out of his astonished silence.
“Vincent, I’m sorry, I—”
“Is that what she told you to call me?”
“What—”
“My name is Valérie and if you call me anything else I will shut your head in the fucking oven.”
He holds up his hands, seeming strangely threatened by someone he could probably fold up and tuck under one arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
Val turns away from him and marches back across the kitchen. “How could you know? After all, this is just a routine assignment, right? Live-in guard, room and board provided, plenty of hot water, help keep a couple of abuse victims captive. I bet your last five jobs were just like this, weren’t they?”
“I get briefed on the road,” he says. “I don’t get a chance to say yes or no. It’s not in my contract. And my name’s Callum.”
She laughs and holds out a dainty wrist, as if introducing herself at one of the society functions she dimly remembers. “Callum, Valérie. Valérie, Callum.” Then she turns from him again and starts noisily preparing a cup of tea, slamming drawers and cupboards and taking out her anger on things which are not paid to hit her back. When she reaches for the kettle she finds it already out of its charging socket; Callum’s filling it from the tap.
“Let me help,” he says.
“Put it down,” Valérie growls. He pauses, puzzled, and lets the kettle overflow. She slams a fist into the countertop. “Put it down,” she says as steadily as she can, “and go stand over by the door. You are the guard and I am the prisoner and unless you plan to change that relationship I suggest you do not try to get on my good side.”
“Okay,” he says, putting it down and backing away. “Of course. I’m sorry.”
She wants to shriek. She wants to scream. She wants to fucking batter him. A guard with a guilty conscience! She glares at him as she empties the kettle, fills it again from scratch, slams it down into its charger and flicks it on.
“You can keep me here against my will,” she whispers. “You can bar the windows and lock the doors and seal the gates. You can beat me with that baton, you can stun me with that taser, you can shoot me with that gun. You can mock me. You can leer at me. You can even fuck me. I can’t stop you.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“Just don’t try to be my friend, Callum.” She starts wiping dry the cutlery in the draining rack, starting with the bread knife. His eyes track it until she puts it away in the drawer, and Val extracts a little nugget of pleasure from the way his shoulders relax now she’s no longer armed. He opens his mouth to say something else irrelevant; she ignores him, turns her back, returns to her work, shuts him out. Just another fucking jailer.
“I liked you better when you were the quiet one,” she says.
* * *
He’s still feeling weak so she loops his arm around her shoulders, takes his weight. He thanks her, sheepish but not ashamed, because he knows he can cry around her, he knows he can tell her anything and she won’t respond with scorn. She smiles, kisses him on the cheek, and stands up from the bed.
Aaron holds onto her, and Stef near-carries him out of his room and down the corridor to the bathroom. He needs to wash his face; he got all snotty.
“You doing okay?” she asks, depositing Aaron by the sinks.
He nods, red-eyed, tired out. “Yeah. Yeah, Steph, I think so.” He sniffs again. “It just hit me. Too much like when I used to, uh… you know.”
“It’s different, though,” Stef says, covering his hand in hers. “You know that, right?”
He nods again. “I know. But it’s like veterans who jump when a car backfires. It doesn’t have to be the thing to remind you of the thing.”
Yeah. Yeah, she knows that. Intimately. She ducks in and hugs him again, kisses him on the forehead and brushes his hair back out of his face. “Getting long,” she says, grinning and tugging at a loose lock.
Aaron smiles, bats her hand away, and checks himself over in the mirror, takes in the mess he’s made of himself and starts washing, running wet fingers through his hair and rubbing at his sore eyes. Stef leans against the dividing wall, watches him.
She loves watching him, especially now he’s more like himself again. He doesn’t know the grace he’s capable of; he doesn’t know how much his personality comes out in his movements. He cups his hands under the tap, throws a last palmful of water at his face before shutting off the water, and looks at himself again, smiling this time, and then he catches her in the mirror, watching him, and she can’t stop herself from giggling, from launching herself forward and wrapping herself around him.
He wanted to die. And Maria wouldn’t let him. And now he’s here and he’s Aaron again, and it’s everything she wanted.
“Hey!” he says, laughing and trying to pull away. “You’re going to get wet!”
“Don’t care,” Stef says into his hair.
Eventually he succeeds in pushing her off, and they walk back to her room together to fetch towels and for her to change out of her damp top. She doesn’t turn away from him this time, doesn’t feel like being cheeky or teasing him, just wants him to know how comfortable she is in his presence. Before he can do the polite thing and leave her to get changed she’s already pulled off her top, maintaining eye contact the whole time.
He looks down at her chest for a second, and then back up.
“You like them?” she says, cupping a hand under a breast that’s rather more impressive than it ought to be, and bouncing it a few times. “Bra boosters. Pippa got them for me. They look like little chicken fillets.”
“Very effective,” Aaron says, sounding strange. “I thought we were supposed to dress neutral?”
“I am!” Stef protests, finding another t-shirt and throwing it over her head. “Look,” she adds, posing in the mirror, “you can barely see them. But they make me feel good, so.”
He nods. “They, um, look good, too.”
“Do they now?” she says, smiling, stepping close to him, reaching out for his cheek. He’s been letting her do things like this lately, letting her touch him, kiss him, and often he kisses her back. Sometimes he even initiates it! And every time it’s precious, and every time it’s over too soon, and—
There’s a knock at the door.
“C’mon, kids!” Tabby yells, without opening it. “It’s time!”
The two of them sigh in unison, and Stef permits herself a moment to run fingers down his jawline before releasing him and rolling her eyes.
“Another day in paradise,” Aaron says, and she laughs, steps around him, opens the door, and holds out her hand for him to take. “You sure?” he asks.
They’ve talked about whether to make their (tentative, slow-moving, exploratory) relationship public, running through all the possible ways it could go horribly wrong, but didn’t come to any conclusion about how to proceed. But Stef’s itching with the need for contact, to have him with her today, and she doesn’t think it’ll come as any surprise to anyone that their friendship has become something deeper. Aaron was worried about Will’s reaction, since they know he’s coming back, so Stef asked for and got a recording of the strange conversation she had with him, and decided after skipping back and forth through it a few times that he probably wouldn’t make trouble. He probably wouldn’t even think to.
The man was drowning in self-loathing.
She hasn’t seen him since. But even if she is a little worried about his reaction, she’s also sick of hiding, sick of lying. She’s done enough of that for a lifetime.
“I’m sure if you are,” she says.
Aaron takes her hand and pulls on her, bumping against her affectionately, and they leave the room together.
1988 September 24
Saturday
She sits up and stretches, shucking off the ugly brown coat Mr Choudry gave her and laying it out on her knees. It’s dewy, like her face, but she doesn’t have a towel or a dry piece of clothing to rub at it so she just rolls it up, carefully keeping most of the damp parts facing outward, and stuffs it into a plastic bag. It’s difficult to get a clear idea of what the weather’s going to be like from inside the copse she slept in, but the air’s muggy and tendrils of mist have been creeping in through the dense branches, so she surmises it’s going to be another miserable day in London, and considers herself lucky she didn’t get properly rained on overnight.
Sleeping in the park’s a risk and she’s been almost caught twice, but despite her exhaustion and pain she’s nimble and determined and rather good at climbing fences, and if it’s light enough to be this bright even through the haze, it’s late enough in the morning that the gates should be open. She can stroll out with the dog walkers, just like a normal Londoner. Not that anybody will be under any illusion as to what her situation is, but she feels insulated from the judgement of strangers: they see a girl sleeping rough, in dirty clothes, and that’s what she wants people to see.
She’s been wrestling with the question: can she even do this? Can she be a girl, be a woman, out here in the real world? And how can she be a girl? Who is there who will teach her?
Back at Dorley it was simple. There was Val, and Val knew everything, and Val was amazing, so the idea that her route to survival was to become more like Val was an easy one to grasp, even if it took a while for her truly to accept it. But Val’s gone, and she still needs help, but she doesn’t even know exactly what kind of help she needs, and even if she did she daren’t ask for it.
She wasn’t prepared for this.
But she wasn’t prepared for Dorley Hall, either, and she survived that.
She laughs at herself, shakes her head at her foolishness. She got this far, didn’t she? She can just keep going. Solve one problem at a time, until she’s who she needs to be.
It’d help if she could get something to eat, though. Hopefully the church is open this morning.
She stands, pushing herself up on the tree trunk and wincing as every part of her aches. She hasn’t hurt this bad since the worst nights back at Dorley, and at least then she knew the origin of her pain: some sadist with a belt or a cigarette or some other desire they needed to fulfil on her. Today, as with most days since she got here, she just fucking hurts.
Almost three weeks without the injections. Frankie used to say she’d need them for the rest of her life, and at the time she’d wondered if it was another lie, but here she is, aching and hot flushing and feeling like absolute shit. Another problem to solve, somehow.
She finishes securing her things, such as they are, in the pillowcases, wrapping them up so they don’t show and then shoving them into another plastic bag. Then she checks herself over, makes sure her hair extensions are still tied up and her jeans are still zipped shut and the rip in her t-shirt is still concealed under the large men’s shirt — another gift from Mr Choudry — and, satisfied, she vaults the small iron fence into the park proper and joins the sparse crowds of Londoners.
No-one gives her a second glance.
She’s getting used to London; this part of it, anyway. She’d planned to stay in Almsworth, but that hope was dashed on the second night of her escape, when she asked to use the phone in the hostel’s cramped reception. Mr Choudry overheard her conversation and, as soon as she was done, hustled her into his office and instructed her to wait right there, and to hide in the attached restroom if anyone came in without knocking four times on the door first. The cops, he said, often visit people who call from the hostel. An unfounded suspicion of the homeless, he said. An effin’ injustice, he said; pardon his French.
The cops didn’t visit, but someone else did. A white woman with long curly hair and an Essex accent, he said, but she worked it out even before he re-entered the office with four knocks and a cup of hot tea. She’d heard enough from her hiding spot and had won a battle with herself over her desire just to jump out of the second-floor window and take her chances with the pavement. The sound of that voice made her skin crawl, humiliated her anew.
Frankie.
She had enough money left in her meagre stash to buy an overnight bus ticket to London, so she got the hell out of Almsworth, but not before Mr Choudry insisted on gifting her the coat, the shirt, a bundle of socks, and a small pouch containing toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap and a pack of tampons. She thanked him, hugged him, leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, imagining for a moment her old self cringing at her, but dismissing his presence in her mind immediately; the only remnant of her boyhood was securely tucked back inside two pairs of knickers, and was about as relevant to her life now as every other part of him. She delighted in prompting an embarrassed chuckle from the man, and she laughed along with him, enjoying the sound of his deep voice in his chest, resonating all the way through her.
Her own voice cracked a few times while at the hostel and it terrified her every time, but if he noticed, he didn’t say. He asked her for a name a few times, and she demurred every time, as she did on her way out, for the last time; she simply did not have a name to give him, she said.
He understood, and wished her well.
In London she slept rough the first few nights. She got her bearings, asked around for information, begged bits and pieces of money from strangers, and ran from drunken groups of men when they clocked her voice. An older woman told her of a church where the parishioners and other volunteers cook meals, provide washing facilities, and sometimes even let you sleep there, if you’re lucky and arrive at the right time. And a few times she did, sleeping on one of a dozen cots in a damp, dark room, surrounded by strangers, speaking as little as possible.
She heads there now, her stomach cramping painfully.
She’s always thought of churches as great old stone monstrosities, populated by the kinds of people who pretend to righteousness but who shunned her and her mother when they needed help, but First Baptist is different: all brick, relatively modern and squat; about the size and shape of her old school’s gym building. She can’t help but smile as she approaches, because the doors are open and Mr Lewis is outside, lounging on a picnic bench, smoking. He’s been kind to her before. Not in the way Mr Choudry was, but still kind. He lets her eat, lets her get cleaned up. It’s more than she ever got at church before. She swallows, pre-breathes, and prepares to speak.
“Good morning,” she says. Scratchy, but tolerable. Probably passes muster.
Mr Lewis jerks his head towards the doors. “Breakfast in twenty,” he says. “Go get cleaned up.”
She nods enthusiastically, and a few minutes later she’s joining the queue of women outside the shower room at the back of the building, and avoiding the eyes of the men waiting their turn on a selection of mismatched chairs. Something in her wants to pull Mr Choudry’s coat out of its bag and put it on, the better to hide her shape from the men, but she has a feeling that acknowledging their interest at all could be unwise. So she bundles up her bags, crosses her arms under her breasts, and waits.
There’s only three showers and five sinks and a lot of people, so the queue moves slowly. She’s not going to use a shower — far too risky — so when it’s her turn she can be quick: she’ll strip off her top layers, wash her face, armpits, neck and under her breasts, and soap up her hair from temple to top; the ponytail can take care of itself. She washed her crotch yesterday in a building site portaloo so she’s good there for a while.
She wishes she could have a shower — she’s dreamed of it — but she’s not confident she can hide what’s between her legs.
“Stacked, aren’t you?”
It takes her a second to realise the woman in front of her in the queue has turned around, and is looking intently at her chest. Idiot! Hasn’t she learned to pay attention by now?
“Um, yes, I suppose,” she says, and winces; that didn’t sound good. As subtly as she can she pulls the shirt tighter, covering herself more.
“What are you doing here with a figure like that, love?”
She tries to lubricate her mouth before answering, but she’s not had anything to drink for a while and it feels like there’s nothing liquid left inside her. She tries anyway.
“What do you mean?” It comes out too deep. Way too fucking deep.
“Listen, darling—”
“Excuse me,” says a new voice, one she doesn’t recognise, and a tall, dark-skinned, dark-haired woman cuts in, places herself between the two of them. She’s wearing practical clothes and carries a huge sports bag. “Can I ask you some questions?” the woman asks, looking down at her. Six foot three, at a guess. “Linda will keep your spot.”
She doesn’t trust herself to speak, not any more, so she just nods and allows the tall woman to take her out of the queue while the other woman, Linda, takes her place. Linda’s shorter, white-skinned and wispy-haired and wearing a slightly incongruous baseball cap, and smiles widely at her.
The tall woman leads her around the corner into a small office, where she sits down and waits for whatever’s about to happen to happen. It’s not ideal to be here, in an enclosed space with a stranger who clearly wants something from her, but she knows better than to make a fuss in public, especially when she’s losing control of her voice.
“I’m Teri,” the woman says. “Teri with an i.” She dots the letter in the air with a finger. “And the other woman, Linda, is my partner. What’s your name, child?”
She swallows again, but her voice is long gone, and she doesn’t know how to get out of the situation without speaking. Starved for options, she shrugs.
Teri smiles, clicks the lock closed on the door, drops off her bag and pulls up a chair, delicately crossing her legs. “You’re a transsexual, sweetheart, aren’t you?”
Her heart freezes. She’s been found out! She should have worked harder on her voice, she should have listened to Val, she shouldn’t have come here for breakfast…
She knows bits and pieces about transsexuals. Val said they’re men who weren’t actually men, who were always women inside, who take medicine and undergo surgery to make the outside match the inside. Val hadn’t believed they were real, had thought they were just an invention of the television and the lurid magazines some of the boys at school passed around, the ones with the adverts in the back pages for colourfully described services from men, women and transsexuals who could, for a price, make you feel incredible things. The idea of turning a man into a woman sounded like something out of science fiction. But then she’d been brought to the Hall and been made to learn first-hand just what a few milligrams of sex hormones and a little surgery can do, and she dug deep into her memory for every scrap of information she’d ever encountered that might help her survive.
Val said the plan was to pretend to be an ordinary woman, and if that failed, only then to play the part of a transsexual. It’s riskier, she said, remembering a film she’d once seen on the television, that she’d originally believed to be fictional: people are cruel to transsexuals. People are cruel to genetic girls, too, but no-one likes to feel like they’ve been tricked, even if the trick is all in their heads.
“It’s okay,” Teri says gently.
Hard to believe. But she doesn’t move, because what could she do? The windows are all closed, and the door is locked. She stiffens, braces herself, waits for the first strike to land; it won’t be the first time she’s been hurt.
But instead Teri backs away from her, scrapes her chair across the floor until she reaches the cavernous sports bag she dropped by the door. She pulls out a thermos, unclips the two plastic cups from the top and pours two cups of tea. She drinks deeply from one and leans forward, passes the other over.
“Have something to drink,” Teri says, “and I’ll tell you what I think. Sweet girl, you are a transsexual. Relax; it’s not obvious to anyone else but me and Linda, but, sweetheart, you need to be more careful. I saw you here last week, washing with the other girls, and I don’t care that you have an impressive chest because unless you are somehow living on the streets at your age with a vagina already, you don’t want to risk taking off any clothes around genetic girls. They will tear you down if they figure you out. And that’s even before we get to your voice. You’re not safe, child.”
“I know I’m not safe.” It’s a whisper, but it doesn’t sound all that bad. The tea’s helping. “I’m being careful.”
“I know, sweetheart,” Teri says, cupping her hands around her tea, “I know. But I also know what it’s like to be in your position. These guys, these people, these ‘Christians’—” the word comes out from between bitterly curled lips, “—are not good people. They play at it. They claim it. They put it on their tax returns and they tell Jesus all about it, but it’s a lie. You have to be even more careful around them than around regular people because they are nosy and they are self-righteous and they are dangerous — and I mean ship-you-to-a-psych-ward dangerous — for transsexuals like us.”
She almost chokes on her tea, and in her scrabble to keep hold of the plastic cup she’s suddenly fumbling, she betrays exactly what she’s thinking.
“Yep.” Teri grins. “I’m like you. Linda, too.”
“Like me?”
Teri pokes herself in the chest with a thumb. “Transsexual through and through. Couldn’t tell, could you?”
Behind Teri, a silhouette appears in the frosted glass window set into the office door, and someone behind it says, “Teri? It’s me.” Teri unlocks the door without looking, and her friend — her partner, that’s what Teri said before — walks in, closing it as soon as she’s able.
“Hi,” Linda says. “Sorry. Lost your space in the queue. One woman got pretty argumentative.”
“That’s okay,” Teri says. “She can shower at our place, can’t she?”
“You were right?”
“Of course I was right!” Teri turns her attention away from Linda again. “What do you say, sweetheart? Want to come stay with a pair of disreputable transsexuals for a while? Get cleaned up, learn to speak like we do? We have frozen pizza.”
“Actually,” Linda says quietly, “I was going to make stew today.”
What should she say? How should she respond?
“What’s your name, child?” Teri says softly.
What is her name? She’s considered so many, recited them as she goes to sleep every night, tried to remember every girl she went to school with, every teacher, every random acquaintance, and every character on her mum’s soap operas, but in the end there’s only one possible choice, and now’s the time to choose it, to remember the girl who helped her survive the worst years of her life, who offered her a name precious to her, who taught her how to remain someone when her old identity, her old sex, her old life was stolen from her. Who hadn’t even been offended or upset when she hadn’t been strong enough to take the name when she was offered it.
Well?
Is she strong enough now?
Does it even matter? Can’t live without a name, and at some point she really does have to start living.
Sink or swim.
“Beatrice,” she says.
2019 December 16
Monday
He made a pattern with the bean bag chairs: a wide, flattened, lazy circle around a central pair, like an eye. He had to push the couches out to create the space he needed and he had to rope in Stephanie to help move everything, but he’s learned by now that when he has a perverse idea, when it presses on the inside of his head for days, he has to follow it through.
Once, of course, he’s thoroughly examined it for the sorts of motivations, complications and compulsions that characterised his old perverse ideas.
It was because of something Maria said as part of bringing him entirely into her confidence: that most intakes, year by year, end up roughly the same. And he wasn’t and still isn’t inclined to disbelieve her, not even in the interest of being contrary, because it’s not an observation he found original. Early on, someone else down here, he forgets who — although it was almost certainly Steph — said it felt like they were all stepping through expected points of rebellion and acceptance, and although theirs may have played out roughly uniquely, since probably in the whole country Declan is/was the only person stupid enough to try to dig out a Goserelin implant with a spoon that still had a little bit of Weetabix on it, the results tended to generalise. Someone acts out with the metal cutlery; it gets replaced with plastic. Someone attacks someone else in one of the communal areas; restrictions are imposed. Someone repeatedly refuses to calm the fuck down and play nice; they are put in a cell, beaten, and eventually washed out. Mice, running down the most obvious and direct routes in the maze, looking for food.
Aaron had rolled the idea around in his head all weekend and decided he felt like being different. Like making a statement. Like being unpredictable. So he pushed out the couches and rearranged the bean bags into something like a conversation pit and sat down with Steph in the middle, waiting for a reaction from the first sponsor to walk in. It had been Edy, and she’d just grinned at him. Disappointing.
Still, the task had filled the back half of a boring Sunday, and at least the place looks different now. He hasn’t had the courage to ask if it’s been done before, but even if it has, fuck whoever did it already and fuck their shitty conversation pit; his is better.
His has Steph.
The common room, once laid out as if on a grid, now has the couches that previously had braced the wall-mounted television pressed all the way up against the closest of the metal tables, and the circle of bean bags intersects them on its way past. One can choose to recline on a couch and lay one’s feet on a comfortable bean bag chair, or one can opt to laze on one of the many cushions strewn throughout the white of the ‘eye’, or, if one has access to a Stephanie, one can claim together the double-bean-bag centre seat, the pupil of the eye, and watch television in a decadent and slightly scrunchy haze.
Another thing that’s changed: they get breakfast TV. It’s on a short delay, Maria said, so someone up in the security room can blank the screen and mute the audio, so it’s only available on the days someone can be bothered to do that, but it’s appreciated, even if this morning’s news is dominated by the election and the Tories and Brexit and all sorts of other things that he never paid much attention to before but which has Steph and several of the sponsors rather agitated.
“Oh well,” Edy says to Maria, “this probably makes it easier for us. Regulatory bonfire equals all our loopholes get bigger.”
“Optimist,” Maria replies, and kisses her.
Like Steph and Aaron, Maria and Edy are no longer hiding their relationship, although there was likely never any need; the only people to whom it might have been a surprise are Adam and Martin, and even if either boy were mentally capable of being scandalised — or even understanding what it means when two girls have very special feelings for each other — the only people they could tell already know.
And it’s pretty sweet, really.
Maria and Edy are sitting together on one of the couches, shoes shucked off somewhere in the sea of cushions, and Maria’s kicking her feet idly in one of the bean bag chairs, apparently enjoying curling the material between her toes. So they’re close enough to Aaron to overhear, and seemingly comfortable enough with his presence to let him overhear.
Should he find that reassuring? They’re his captors.
But they’re being nice to him. Who the hell else has ever been nice to him?
Yes, but they’re being nice to him now. Because he acquiesced. Because he’s agreed to become who they want him to become.
No, because he agreed to change. Maria’s not dictating what kind of girl he eventually becomes — and a shiver runs through him as he thinks it, physical enough for Steph to grab his hand and squeeze — and she’s never going to. She’s simply provided a general direction of travel: he’s moving away from, not towards.
Yes, but—
“You’re thinking too hard,” Steph whispers, nudging him. “I can feel it.”
“I’m thinking just hard enough.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“Same old.”
“Girls!” Maria says sharply, and when Aaron looks around to glare at her, she’s smirking at him. She’s been more light-hearted with him lately, even teasing him from time to time, and when he first called her on it she pretended great offence and insisted it was just part of the process. He had to think of her as his big sister, she said, and big sisters tease. He responded that big sisters don’t generally force feminise their younger brothers, which led her to question the quality of his upbringing. He’d been forced to admit that, if nothing else, at least Maria was taking an interest.
And he never had a big sister before.
When he burst into tears at that simple realisation she comforted him, and didn’t even make him tell her what upset him so much.
God fucking damn this place. Everything stupid becomes profound; everything profound becomes stupid. And in the middle there’s Aaron, unsure what to do with any of it.
“What?” he says, aware that Maria’s waiting for a more comprehensive response.
“Make yourselves respectable,” Maria says, rooting around in the cushions for her shoes. “We’re about to have company.”
* * *
They’re reintroducing Will today, decanting him from his cell and dumping him back into the common areas with Steph and the others, and that was all Christine needed to hear. Abby and Indira, breakfasting in the dining hall, told her so conversationally, like it was nothing she needs to worry about, but it’ll be a long time before she can think of the boy as anything other than potentially lethally dangerous. Yes, sure, Tabby’s his sponsor and yes, sure, she’s experienced and level-headed and a good shot with a taser and she would not let him loose on the others again if she were at all worried about him, but the sound of Maria’s head hitting the floor is one Christine never wants to hear again, so one extra warm body between Will and anyone he wants to hurt can only be a good idea, even if it does mean she has to stay the whole day, miss her Linguistics workshop and get in trouble with the professor again.
She takes the steps down to the basement slightly too fast. A thought strikes her halfway down and she redirects her stumbling feet, bounces off the wall opposite the security room and nips inside. Nell, surrounded by three empty chain-store paper coffee cups and looking very much like she needed them, intuits her need and has the drawer by the main security console unlocked and open by the time Christine skids to a stop. She grabs one of the duty tasers, smiles her thanks at Nell when she looks up to find she’s already pairing it to Christine’s identity, and takes the remaining stairs to basement two at a more sensible pace, feeling very prescient for being lazy enough to wear shorts. Although when she shoves the taser in the front pocket it deforms the fabric in such a way that she’s unavoidably reminded of the morning erections she’ll never have again, so she pulls it back out and throws it in her back pocket instead, lest she have an entirely inappropriate giggle attack when something serious is going down.
She arrives to see Steph and Aaron sitting at the far end of Aaron’s curious bean bag construction, backs to the wall and looking about as ready for action as they can while still sinking slowly into the chairs. Edy’s just entering from the bedrooms with a subdued-looking Adam, his hair still wet from the shower, and she guides him onto the couch closest to Steph and Aaron. Maria’s perched on the edge of one of the tables, taser in the palm of her hand.
Martin, less dishevelled than usual, as if he’s been persuaded to care about his appearance again, enters next, with Pamela walking behind him. She guides him to the other couch, sits down with him, holds his hand. Curious; didn’t she hate him before?
“Hi, Tina,” Steph says, waving, and Christine waves back, smiling at the nickname. Steph’s been talking to Lorna, and probably picked it up from her. Why no-one apart from Paige can just bloody well call her Christine, she doesn’t know.
“Don’t you have a lecture?” Edy says, and under her arm Adam flinches. She immediately moves to comfort him.
“I have an hour,” Christine says, taking up position on the table next to Maria’s. “And it’s a workshop. I can miss it.”
“It’s only Will,” Aaron says. He sounds unsure, and Steph hugs him, rubs his leg. “Steph thinks he won’t be any trouble.”
Huh. Has Aaron ever addressed her directly before? Have they ever even interacted? To be encouraging, she smiles for him and says, “I’m taking no chances, Aaron,” and gets a wink from Steph for her trouble. Maria catches her eye and, when she’s sure Aaron’s looking away, Christine quickly shrugs.
She doesn’t know if it’s a big deal for Aaron to volunteer information at this stage or not. She’s pretty certain she wouldn’t have, and aside from her own experience she has little to go on. She’s deliberately avoided reading any of the files on the psychology of basementing, because that would indicate a willingness to stick around, and Christine still plans to graduate from Saints and leave. With Paige. And Vicky and Lorna. And Pippa. And Abby, depending on how things shake out with her family. And Indira, if she can drag her away. She smiles to herself; the last time she talked about her plans, Paige commented drily that it sounded like she was intending to poach enough talent to set up a competing feminisation dungeon in another city, an observation which had earned her a particularly vicious punishment kiss.
And then the door from the corridor opens and Will enters, bracketed by Jane and Harmony and led by Tabby. They walk him in like a shackled prisoner, and though he’s free, as far as Christine can tell, he moves like a man in cuffs, with short steps and careful attention paid to the women escorting him.
No, she realises, as he lifts his head and looks around the room, as Adam burrows into Edy’s embrace, as Maria stiffens, as even Martin frowns and exchanges looks with Pamela… Not like a prisoner. Like a bomb. Like any sudden movement would be like cutting the wrong wire and unleashing hell. Will’s scared.
Scared of himself.
Jane and Harmony fan out, Jane moving to one of the as-yet-untouched-by-Aaron couches near the door and Harmony to the closest metal table, and Tabby leads him through the room. She has him wait in the clear area in the middle of the room while she fetches a chair. Tabby sits him down, retreats to the cabinet on the wall, taser in hand. Christine spots a lump in the thigh pocket of Tabby’s cargo pants; she probably has one of the smaller, close-range tasers in there, too. Christine looks around and realises that all the sponsors have today, entirely coincidentally, worn clothes with lots of pockets.
Yeah. Maybe she’s not necessary after all. Maybe she worried over nothing. Idiot; this is how people get recruited: they just start helping out and before they know it, bam, someone’s handing them a Martin.
Silence for almost a minute. Will in the chair, knees together, hands in his lap, palms up. Head down. Almost comically penitent. He’s smaller, and it’s not just in the way he carries himself. Christine imagined him emerging from his cell looking like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, all muscle and sinew, a greater and more powerful weapon than he’d been when he was first isolated. But it’s as if he’s barely moved in there, barely eaten, and has been thus reduced.
Will’s small.
He’s still at least as tall as Paige or Vicky, and he’s nowhere near as thin as either of them, and looked at with objective eyes he’s still a big guy, but it’s like he made a play for the record for quantity of mass lost in just under three weeks. He feels small. It’s shocking.
Welcome to the other intakes, I guess, she tells herself. Not all of them can be like hers, proceeding almost entirely without serious incident. Sometimes, some years, someone goes into a hole and comes out… different.
Will clears his throat.
“I’m not going to say I screwed up,” he says, his voice dull and heavy. “I’m not going to say I made a mistake. I’m not going to say I learned a lesson. I’m not going to excuse what I did.” There’s a long pause. Next to her, Christine can hear Maria’s careful breathing. “I’m sorry,” Will continues. “I’m sorry, Maria. What I did to you was wrong. Premeditated, cruel, pointless. Wrong. I don’t expect forgiveness, nor do I ask it. Tabitha tells me you’re on your way to a full recovery. I’m glad it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I’m glad I didn’t take you away from the people who care about you. I know why you’re doing what you’re doing to me now, even though I struggle to understand why anyone thinks I am worth the effort to salvage.” He’s looking up only briefly, eyes darting around the room, never quite alighting on any one person. The speech, such as it is, sounds rehearsed, and Christine imagines him sat in his restraints in the cell, repeating it over and over to the wall. “Adam,” Will says, “I’m sorry I proved unworthy of your trust. I would like a chance to regain it, but that gesture is yours to make, not mine to demand. Stefan, thank you for visiting me. I know you came only because you were asked, but you listened. That was important. That helped me.”
“You’re welcome,” Steph says, leaning forward. Aaron’s got a restraining hand on her knee, like he fears she might get up and go hug Will, but she’s not moving; she’s frowning at him, thinking.
“Thank you all for your time,” Will says, and then he stands up, nods at Tabby, and waits patiently for her to walk up behind him. Jane and Harmony join them, and together they walk towards the door out to the corridor, in the same formation in which they entered. Before they leave he holds up a hand to request they stop, turns around, and says in a wavering, cracking voice that finally betrays his emotional state, “I’m so sorry, Adam.”
Adam’s not able to see him; his couch is facing away from the door, and he’s plainly not willing to move from Edy’s embrace. “You hurt Maria,” he says. It’s quiet but it carries.
“I know.”
“She’s Edy’s friend.”
“I know.”
“She’s Edy’s girlfriend,” Adam says.
“I… didn’t know that.”
Whether it’s Will’s uncertainty prompting a change in Adam or whether he’s just been boiling over in his seat, Christine can’t guess, but the boy twists out of Edy’s grip and leans towards Will over the back of the couch. They’re on opposite sides of the room, far out of each other’s reach, but still Will flinches.
“I hate you!” Adam shouts. “I fl— I fu— I fucking hate you!”
“Adam!” Edy cries, opening her arms to him, not pulling him back but offering him a place to bury himself if he needs to, and he does, turning firmly away from Will with a finality Christine finds almost disturbing. “Ssshhh, sweetie,” Edy whispers, as Adam starts crying softly into her chest, as she rocks him gently, stroking his back and occasionally kissing the top of his head. “Ssshhh. I’ve got you. It’s okay. I’ve got you and you’re safe. You’re safe and you can release your anger. Release it. Release it. Grace is a precious gift.” She starts repeating the mantra, quieter and quieter: “Grace is a precious gift. Grace is a precious gift.”
Adam replies, through thick tears and liquid breaths, “And it’s ours, not God’s, to give.”
Will, having watched it all, turns away, leaves the room with his sponsor and their escorts, and Maria almost inaudibly sighs.
* * *
Well, she sure felt useless for that.
Christine unregisters the taser, throws it back in the drawer, and sticks around in the security room long enough to watch on the monitors as Tabby, Jane and Harmony deposit Will in his room. The sound’s off on the feed — with two sponsors in the room with him and one covering from the door, weapon at the ready, Nell apparently doesn’t believe she needs to listen in — but no-one seems to be saying much, and Will’s involvement’s restricted to nods and shakes of his head. A moment later and he’s alone again, and he lies back on his bed, closes his eyes, rests his hands by his side, palms up again, and appears very plausibly to fall asleep.
“Well,” Christine says, rolling her shoulders to release some of the tension, “that was anticlimactic.”
“I don’t know,” Nell says. “Adam going off was something, I thought.”
“Something good?”
Nell shrugs. “Maybe. Some girls— some boys need to let it out.” Her cheeks redden a little, and she smiles. “Others need to learn not to.”
Things have cooled between Christine and Nell since the night Christine got Faye removed from her supervision. After her month of night shifts, Nell’s been doing odd jobs around the Hall — mostly more security shifts, but during waking hours now, since Aunt Bea wants her kept separate from the second years for the time being — and she’s been bumping into Christine rather more than chance would suggest. At first, she wondered if Nell was up to something, but then she decided she’s probably just a bit lonely.
“That was most of us,” Christine says, returning Nell’s smile. “Hey, you know Melissa’s around again, right? Wasn’t she in your intake?”
“Yeah,” Nell says, crossing her arms over her chest, “and I was a bitch to her, too. I’ve been avoiding her. I mean,” she adds, looking inward, “I did apologise to her way back when, but so much has happened since then. I feel like it doesn’t count any more.”
“So find her and apologise again. You might have to do it early, though; she skips out at breakfast time to find Shahida most days.”
“Shahida? That girl she was in love with as a kid?”
“Wow,” Christine says, parking her butt on the edge of the security console, “you are out of the loop, aren’t you?”
“Deliberately,” Nell says. “I’m taking everything real slow, Christine. And that includes hanging out with people again. I realised even my friends here were getting kinda sick of my shit.” She’s loosened her arms again, and it’s put one of her hands within reach; Christine takes it, squeezes her fingers. After a moment, Nell squeezes back. “Thanks.”
“Don’t spend too much time alone,” Christine says. “It’ll make you strange.”
She laughs. “Don’t worry about that. Bella and Rabia are taking me out this weekend. Sort of a get-to-know-you-again thing. I’ll be fine. I’m just… being careful. I’ve got the time, after all.”
“Oh?”
“I’m not sponsoring again until next year, with the new intake. And I’ll be under Indira’s supervision. So… kind of humbling? Hopefully I won’t get someone who’s basically a tiny version of me, so I can’t fuck her up like I was fucked up.”
“Oh,” Christine says. “Well, um, good luck?”
Nell’s smile turns wistful. “Thanks. Don’t be a sponsor, Christine.”
“I really won’t,” Christine promises, and makes the most graceful exit she can. She checked the time on the security monitors and she has ages to go before she has to be at her workshop; she can finally experience the transcendental state of not being late for something that Paige has described to her! If she’s early, she might get a chance to talk to Caroline, the non-Dorley and very probably cis girl she’s almost made friends with; she’s twenty-one, unusual in a workshop otherwise filled with eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, which helps Christine feel a little less out of place. Now all she has to do is summon the courage to start a non-academic conversation…
Distracted, she almost walks into Aunt Bea on her way through the kitchen, and has to take a few extremely apologetic steps back. The older woman’s leaning against the cabinet next to the AGA, close enough to benefit from its heat but not so close as to be uncomfortable, and, apparently, until Christine interrupted her, talking with Yasmin. Vicky’s there, too, sitting next to Yasmin at the kitchen table, and she waves at her.
“Ah, Christine,” Bea says.
God, she looks so damn tired. She’s not as bad as she was when Elle and her assistant returned her, barely upright, to the Hall — Maria said she spent most of the weekend resting — but the Beatrice Christine knows and might ordinarily be rather intimidated by still seems absent, replaced by, of all things, an old woman.
Christine knows about the annual search for Valerie Barbier; just one of the many pieces of Dorley’s history she’s read up on since she got official access to the archives. So she knows about Grandmother and she knows something of what she was really like; she knows that the transfer of power she’d had described to her by Indira was a bloodless lie, that it had been more like a coup; and she knows bits and pieces of what it had been like, back in the eighties, to be forced through an unwanted and decidedly nontherapeutic transition under Grandmother’s coterie of sadists.
A bond forged under such circumstances probably could survive death. Three decades on, Beatrice still looks for her, and Christine understands; if Paige had been dragged from her arms like that, she’d never give up the search.
“Good morning, Aunt Bea,” Christine replies. “How are you feeling?” She wants to ask if there’s been an update on the Peckinville thing, but that’s probably a conversation best saved for Maria. Besides, if there are no notes on the server tagged for her, then there likely haven’t been any developments.
Two missing soldiers. Scary. She looked them up: not anyone she’s met.
“My age, Christine,” Beatrice says. “I’m feeling my age.”
“Can I get you anything?”
Bea waves a hand. “No, no. I’m quite capable of feeding and watering myself, still.”
“How did it go, downstairs?” Vicky asks.
“It was pretty uneventful,” Christine says, grateful for the diversion. She has time for a cup of tea before she goes, so she fills the kettle and waits for it to boil, leaning on the counter on the other side of the AGA from Bea. “They escorted him in, he gave a short speech, they escorted him out. Adam got angry, though,” she adds, frowning, “which is unusual.”
Yasmin runs a hand through her hair. “I’m so pleased I don’t know who any of those people are,” she says. “And, Vicky? That counts as shop talk, too.”
“So it does,” Vicky says.
“While we are on ‘shop talk’,” Beatrice says, “or something very much like it, it’s good to see you down here, Yasmin.”
Yasmin blinks. “Oh,” she says, “uh, yeah. It just… It felt like the right time, you know?”
“Indeed.” Bea nods to herself. “Yasmin… I would like to apologise. You and Julia were the subject of many heated debates among the sponsors and I, during your first year. We saw the way things were developing between the two of you and the others of your intake, and we chose not to intervene. It was my suggestion, in fact.” Beatrice smiles, as if her ‘suggestions’ are not gospel to most of the sponsor team. “Sometimes it’s best, with certain types of girls, when they develop a bond such as the one you and Julia share, to let them heal each other. Let them grow as women together, to the exclusion of all others. Inevitably, this can lead to a certain level of isolation from the rest of the group, depending on how the dynamics shake out.” She stops for a moment, takes a laboured breath.
Christine snatches a mug off the drying rack, drops in a tea bag, pours on the water and begins violently squishing the tea bag against the sides of the mug, so she doesn’t have to concentrate too hard on the uncomfortable atmosphere in the kitchen.
“What are you saying, Aunt Bea?” Yasmin says.
“Just Bea,” Bea says. “Or Beatrice. Please. Right now I feel old enough already.” She retrieves her drink from one of the AGA’s hot plates and brings it with her to the table, where she sits opposite Yasmin and takes a dainty sip. “And what I’m saying is sorry. We do what we can with what we have. What we had, back then, was you and Julia and a whole intake of other girls, and not enough staff. Same as always. You benefited from your close relationship with Julia — as did she — but you also grew apart from the others in your group. We could probably have done better by you, and for that, I am deeply sorry.”
“It’s… it’s okay, Aunt— Beatrice,” Yasmin says, drumming her nails on the table again. She talks slowly, thinking as she goes. “I won’t say it wasn’t hard. And I won’t say I haven’t carried a lot of anger over the way I was treated. But I’m working through it, and I’m— Fuck, it feels so hard to say this to you, but I’m better off. Me and Julia. We both are. We’re better as we are now. And we owe that to you.”
Bea, cupping her tea in both hands, nods. Holds the mug up just below her face, warming herself on it. “We’re releasing you, I know,” she said. “Indira asked for immediate release; I asked for three months. In the hope that you might consider… this.” She releases a few fingers, indicates the whole room, herself, Vicky, Christine. “Reconnecting.”
Yasmin stops tapping on the table, rests her chin on her hand instead. Seems deliberately to still herself. “Connecting, really,” she says, nodding at Christine. “We’re all different people now.”
“Thank God,” Christine says, finally comfortable enough to stop torturing her tea bag and sit down at the table to drink.
“I’m glad,” Bea says. “I don’t like to think of our girls going out into the world alone. That’s—”
She doesn’t finish her thought; Vicky, at the other end of the table, snorts, covers her mouth, and tries urgently to signal something to Christine, her eyes bobbing back and forth from Christine’s tea to Yasmin.
“What?” Christine says.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Yasmin says, but she’s amused rather than, as Vicky clearly feared, insulted. “I can’t believe we still have those.”
“Maybe don’t show that one to Julia,” Vicky says.
Christine turns the mug around, the one she picked at random and without care off the drying rack, and reads:
Great hair ✓
A winning smile ✓
Balls ✕
…Two out of three ain’t bad!
She turns her attention to Yasmin, meaning to apologise, but she’s staring, bemused, across the table at Bea, and when Christine looks she realises that the wheezing sound she’s been hearing for the last couple of seconds is Beatrice, leaning bodily on the table and laughing so hard she cries.
1988 September 24
Saturday
It’s a three-storey terraced place, like the houses at the end of the street where she used to live with her mum. They always seemed much grander than her mum’s flat, but when she visited inside one they turned out to be divided into flats even more cramped than her own, and just as in need of repair. The surrounding road is familiar, too, down to the council-clipped trees suffocating in tiny patches of grass; different city, same world. She feels like if she explored she’d find around the next corner the very same boys who used to hang around by the rec centre, or the older guys who colonised the car park by the doctor’s office.
Strange, in such a context, to have become something so entirely new. She knows how David would have walked this world, would have dealt with those boys, would have responded to Teri and Linda; how would she?
Her mum would warn her not to enter a stranger’s home. Would probably have a fit if she knew she was about to do so with a pair of transsexuals. But she’s not here and she never will be, and besides, for all her mother’s fear of queer people, it wasn’t Gay George from down the road who kidnapped and castrated her, and it wasn’t the woman her mother called The Dyke who thought putting cigarettes out on her back counted as foreplay, so maybe her mum never did know anything useful.
Fuck. She’s never going to see her again, is she? Frankie said her mum moved away, or was kicked out, or something, and without money, without an identity, she doesn’t know how she would even start looking for—
“Beatrice? Honey?”
Ah. Yeah. Beatrice. That’s her. Bea. The name she’s going to wear for the rest of her life; she should probably get used to it. She tastes it, rolls it around in her head, imagines introducing herself to new people with it. Imagines telling Val about it. Imagines the look on her face.
She should have embraced the name Val chose for her while they were still together. It could have been something special, not just a remembrance.
“Beatrice?”
“Oh,” she says, realising she’s been frozen in front of the house for maybe a minute. “Sorry.”
Teri’s standing on the step up to the front door and holding out a hand. Bea looks past her, looks at the front door. Yellow. Clean. Recently painted. Seems respectable. Mum would approve.
“We’re not going to bite, you know,” Teri says.
The thought of it is comical, and Bea wants to tell her she’s been bitten by people far larger and scarier, and then she’s laughing, releasing the tension she’s unjustifiably let build inside her.
Her fear is stupid. Teri and Linda are just a couple of friendly local women, volunteering their time and their home to help someone who needs them. They are exactly what they appear to be.
It’s almost as if being captured and castrated has given her trust issues!
“You okay there, honey?” Linda says.
“Yeah,” Bea says, patting herself on the chest and forcing a few coughs. All those nights in the cold and the damp have made raucous laughter rather painful, and she needs to redistribute some mucus. “Yeah. Just having dumb thoughts. That’s all.”
“We can try this later, if you like,” Teri says, lowering her hand. “Plenty of light left.”
Bea smiles, holds out her hand in return, waits for Teri to take it. “Don’t forget,” she says, when Teri’s fingers close around hers, “you promised not to bite.”
It’s nice inside. Bigger than it looked from the outside, and while none of the furniture looks especially new, it’s tidy and it’s been arranged to make maximal use of the space. There’s a kitchen through a door at the back of the room — probably an extension — and stairs up on the left.
“Our house is your house,” Linda says, smiling at her. They got rained on a little on the way back, which is probably why Linda’s taking off her cap and— Oh. She’s not got much hair under there; it only starts to thicken at her temples.
“Don’t stare, kid,” Teri says.
“Oh, it’s fine,” Linda says, flapping a hand in Bea’s direction. “Everybody looks the first time. Lost half my hair by twenty-four, figured out who I was at twenty-six. Very tragic. But—” she raises a finger, “—it’s not all bad. Be right back!” She starts up the stairs, cupping her hands and yelling as she climbs, “Ashley! We have company!”
Teri takes off her jacket, shakes off the excess water over the mat by the front door and hangs it on a hook, and encourages Bea to do the same with Mr Choudry’s coat. Teri then heads for the kitchen and Bea, not wanting to be alone in a strange place, follows her. Inside it is, once again, shockingly familiar: standalone oven and fridge, chest freezer in the corner, enough pots and pans and plates and bowls that the slim cupboards can’t fit them all. A row of windows looks out onto a small back garden, overlooked by the terrace behind and dimly grey in the late morning drizzle.
“Tea or coffee, Beatrice?” Teri asks. Clearly noticing something in Bea’s expression, she adds, “And do you prefer Beatrice, Bea, or something else?”
“Tea,” Bea says, and shrugs. “And either’s fine. Bea or Beatrice. I, um, haven’t had the name long.” An hour, perhaps. However long it took them to walk here from the church.
“Bea, then,” Teri says, and giggles. “Tea for Bea!”
It’s such a stupid thing to say that Bea laughs, too, and accepts the mug with both hands when it’s done. It’s not all that warm in the house, and it’s nice to hold something so hot, even if she has to cup her fingers out a little so she doesn’t get uncomfortable. Teri arranges the other three mugs on a tray and carries them back through into the main room, where Linda’s waiting. She’s changed out her top for something lower-cut and more flattering, and she’s changed out her hair.
“Like it?” she says, striking a pose, and Bea, her mood still lifting, nods enthusiastically. The wig’s styled perfectly to frame Linda’s face, and the red-brown waves that tumble to the small of her back are striking. She looks almost like a different person. “I have lots,” Linda continues, as Teri guides Bea to an armchair in the corner which accepts her with the voluminous embrace of well-loved but well-stuffed cushions, “so I have one for every occasion.”
“Every year she buys a new one,” Teri says.
“Why not wear one today, then?” Bea asks, and sips gingerly at her tea; still too hot. “Sorry if it’s rude to ask.”
“It’s your first night,” Linda says, hopping onto the couch next to Teri and tucking her feet up under her bottom, “so you have a free pass on rude questions. Get them all out. And I didn’t wear one today because, well, it can sometimes get a bit rowdy at the church. I have enough ‘real’ hair—” she finger-quotes with the hand that isn’t holding tea and rolls her eyes in time, “—that I look fine with a hat on, and then if someone yanks on me it doesn’t damage anything expensive. I don’t wear one to go to the corner shop, either,” she adds with a grin, “and I often don’t wear one when it’s just us, so get used to it.”
“I will,” Bea says, hoping she sounds as earnest as she feels. She’s seen boys in every stage of unwilling transformation; thinning hair isn’t ever going to phase her. Her voice cracks a little again, probably from pushing it too hard.
“You’ll need to work on that,” Teri says. “Your voice. You’re pretty as hell and you’re not even all that tall, so the voice is all you need, and then you’re set.”
“All I need for what?”
“Life!” Teri says, spreading her free hand out.
The conversation turns to small talk as they drink their tea and warm themselves from inside to out. It’s a strange experience: Bea’s struggling to remember the last time she just talked with someone, when it wasn’t hissed and frantic exchanges of information in a camera blind spot, or coming up with the most minimal possible response when one of Grandmother’s guests wanted something from her to titillate or amuse.
Not since Val, probably.
When the tea’s done with, Teri suggests she shower. They’ve got ample clean clothes spare so they’ll leave some out, and they’ll get hers washing when no-one needs the hot water any more. Following instructions she finds a towel and a bathrobe in the airing cupboard on the first floor, and on her way to the bathroom she meets the house’s final occupant.
Ashley’s white, blonde out of a bottle, attractive, and tall enough to turn heads. She endears herself instantly to Bea by not wrinkling or covering her nose when they almost collide with each other outside the bathroom door; Bea’s under no illusions as to how she smells at the moment.
She introduces herself and Bea gives the name she’s starting to get used to, and Ashley shoos her into the bathroom with a smile. “Wash up!” she says. “Get clean. And then we can chat. Oh,” she adds, louder, through the closing door, “and don’t use the green bottles; those are mine. Special for dyed hair.”
Bea hasn’t showered alone in years.
As she washes, a few long strands of hair threaten to block the plug. She pulls them out, wraps them in tissue paper and dumps them in the toilet. The extensions Grandmother had glued into her hair have been coming out in clumps for a week or so, and she’ll be glad when they’re all gone. Her natural hair is almost shoulder-length now, and that’s more than long enough.
Laid on a rickety wooden chair outside the bathroom door is a full set of clean clothes. She dresses, towel-dries her hair, finger-brushes it and throws a few more extensions into the toilet, leaves her old clothes in a pile in the corner of the bathroom as requested, and heads back downstairs to another cup of tea and three expectant faces waiting for her.
The whole walk back from the church Bea had been thinking about her story, about how she can explain her inconsistent transition to a trio of transsexuals, because she knows she doesn’t make a lot of sense: she’s had years of physiological changes and some rudimentary voice training, she’s decent at applying makeup and styling her hair, and she’s even been castrated — Teri informs her with a frown that it’s called an ‘orchiectomy’ — but she knows nothing about actually living as a woman, she’s completely ignorant of transsexual terminology, and she can’t even say for sure the names of the hormones she’s been taking.
She doesn’t get far into the story before she has to stop for a moment, to wait out the tightness in her chest. This was Valerie’s idea, and she remembers the night she laid it all out: they were in Val’s room, practising makeup the way they were supposed to, and throwing silly stories back and forth, the way they always did. The idea of her being dead, of someone taking her and using her and discarding her the way they did with all the others, is enough to stopper Bea’s throat. And she can’t even get justice! Call the police and fucking Frankie shows up! How can you fight people with such leverage when you barely even exist?
“Hey, hey,” Teri says, leaning over and placing a hand on Bea’s thigh, and not making a fuss when Bea jumps at the unexpected contact, “it’s okay. You don’t have to tell us.”
Swallowing, lubricating her throat with one of the endless mugs of tea, Bea pushes the memories away.
“I’m fine,” she says, and she’s disappointed to note that her voice has returned almost to how it was before she started Val’s lessons. “Fuck. Sorry. I’m— I sound wrong. I know.”
“We’ll help you with your voice,” Teri says.
“We can teach you,” Linda says.
Ashley says, an octave below her normal speaking voice, “They will, you know.” She grins at Bea’s startled expression, and returns to normal to add, “They’re very good.”
“Wow,” Bea says. “I hadn’t even… I’m stupid.”
“What do you mean?” Teri asks.
“It didn’t even occur to me that those aren’t your natural voices. You all sound so good.” Not even Val had been that good.
“Thank you!” Ashley says, pitching up a little bit into something more like a little girl’s voice and approximating a curtsey from her position on the other armchair.
“But you should know,” Teri says, “there’s nothing ‘unnatural’ about the voice I’m using now. I’m using the same vocal cords God gave me, just differently to how I used to. It’s only a matter of training. You wouldn’t say an opera singer’s voice is unnatural, right?”
Bea shakes her head and apologises again.
“For now just put a hand on your chest,” Linda says, “right between your breasts, and feel for resonance there. That’s like, vibrations. Feel for vibrations. Don’t try and ‘do’ anything; just get used to how it feels when you speak now.”
Bea nods, puts her hand in place, and tries to pay attention to it as she relays the story. “It was me and— me and Val. Valerie. We had someone. Someone who paid for stuff. Helped us out.”
“A sugar daddy?”
Bea shrugs. “Maybe?”
“But he wanted something in return,” Ashley says flatly.
It’s not a question, and Beatrice responds to it with all the vehemence the memory of Val’s last night conjures up in her. “Yeah,” she says. “He wanted something. From her, first. He— he came for her.” And her throat tightens again: Val had said they should obscure the gender of their captor, to make it harder for someone to check up on the story, and she’d said so while waving a blush brush around in the air, like she was conducting an orchestra. She could be so expressive, so alive.
And now she’s gone.
And so are all the others but Val most especially is gone.
Bea doesn’t notice she’s crying until the tears splash in her tea. Almost immediately someone takes the mug from her, comforting hands find hers, and Teri perches on the arm of the chair and whispers calming things.
Get used to it, Beatrice. This is just the way things are now.
Val’s gone.
She’d always expected to find Val waiting for her. It wasn’t a realistic dream, and on every rational level she knew she’d never see her again, but a shard of hope, which survived everything Grandmother could do to her, claimed every night as she fell asleep that Valerie is out there. When she ran out into the woods, that part of her expected to see her, running up to meet her with supplies and fresh clothes and whispering for Bea to come with her. When she found the hostel and met Mr Choudry, that part of her expected to turn the corner to the dormitory and see her sitting up on one of the cots, discarding a half-read book and leaping up to embrace her. Even when she came down here, to London, that part of her insisted Val had done the same, that she’d escaped to the big city, that if Bea just asked enough people and looked in enough places she’d find her, already established, with a place for her in their shared new lives together.
But Val’s not here, there, or anywhere. She’s just gone, and Bea has to do this alone.
The cold core of her heaves with loss, and in the overstuffed chair in the little terraced house, with the women who’ve taken her in holding her hands, Beatrice lets go of Valerie Barbier.
Maybe it’s not for good.
Maybe one day, when she’s back on her feet, she can look for her.
Maybe she’s still out there somewhere, waiting for her.
But maybe she’s not.
2019 December 16
Monday
She doesn’t know quite why she’s doing this, except that Will left the common room flinching under Adam’s disapproval, and she hates to think of anyone, even Will, having to be alone down here. Everyone needs at least one friend.
Tabby escorts her, raps twice on Will’s door and pushes it slowly open.
“You have a visitor,” she says.
“Wait, please,” Will says, and Stef can’t see what he’s doing but she can hear the clink of metal. After a few seconds he says, “Okay, I’m ready.”
“Shout when you want to leave,” Tabby says, and stands aside.
Will’s room is right next to Stef’s, so unlike Aaron’s it’s not mirrored from what she’s used to. It’s less messy, though; Stef’s clothing supply is starting to overflow out of her wardrobe, and both she and Aaron keep acquiring cushions from somewhere. And while, yes, Will just got back, she gets the impression his room was always like this, ordered and neat. His cell was like that, too, and she sees the same pile of paperbacks he’d had in there, stacked here by the foot of his bed. There are considerably more of them now.
“Anything you want to borrow, you can,” Will says.
“Uh. Sure.”
Will’s sat in the middle of his bed, cross-legged and with his hands once again palm-up in his lap, the way they were when he gave his speech in the common room. In here, though, they’re locked in the chained handcuff, the one attached to the underside of the bed in every room. Stef had completely forgotten about them.
“Don’t get any closer than the computer desk,” Will says, and demonstrates the give on the chain. There is, indeed, about enough that he could feasibly grab someone who came any closer.
“You don’t need to do that,” Stef says. She obeys his instructions, though, rolling the chair over from where it’s been parked by the vanity and sitting down a half metre or so into the room.
“I want you to be safe around me. More than that, I want you to feel safe.”
“I can take care of myself, Will.”
“Against Aaron, maybe. But against me?”
He has a point: even reduced — Tabby said he ate little and did zero exercise while in the cell — he’s still an intimidating presence. All the same… “I did punch Declan in the face, you know,” Stef says.
“Yes. And you nearly broke your thumb. Because you’ve been in exactly one fight, which was broken up by the sponsors, and I’m… That’s why I’m here. So I’ll keep the cuffs on, thank you.”
“Okay,” Stef says, shrugging. It doesn’t seem worth pushing it.
“Did you ever find out what happened to him?”
“Who, Declan? No. He’s just gone.”
Nodding, Will says, “Right. So. Why are you here?”
“I thought you might need a friend.”
“I hurt my friends, Stefan.”
“It’s Steph.”
“What? Who cares?”
“I do.”
“Why—? Fuck. Yeah. Of course you do.” Will mimes writing on an imaginary piece of paper. “And how do you spell that, Steph? With an f? With a ph? Is there a y in there?”
“Fuck off, Will. If you’re going to be a dick, I can leave you to it.”
“Stefan—”
Stef leans forward, brings the chair with her, gets closer to him, inside his reach. Will backs off, away to the head of the bed, into the corner. “I hoped you’d changed, Will,” she says. “I hoped all that time alone would have given you a chance to think. To decide to change. But if you’re the same mouthy piece of shit who came here, the same guy who beat his brother into the hospital—”
“Please move away.” It’s quiet but it’s insistent.
“Have you changed?”
“Move away, please.”
“Fine.” Stef kicks off from the end of the bed, rolls backwards on the chair. It bumps into the computer desk and she pushes it a little farther. Out of his reach. “Well?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You already said that part, out in the common room.”
“How do I know?” He’s still quiet, but his edge, his perpetual sneer, has gone. “How do I know if I’ve changed? I’ve thought I have before. And then I kick the shit out of someone and I’m just the same fucker I always was. How can I know?”
Stef remembers his monotone confession, back in the cell. He told her how he’d snap, lose control, and when he came back to himself there’d be blood; rarely his.
“You said you were in control,” she says. “When you attacked Maria. You said you chose it.”
“Did I?” He’s frowning. Probably the days start to flow together when you spend so much time alone, no matter how many books you read or TV shows you watch.
“You did. I watched the surveillance video.”
Will laughs. “Are you a sponsor now, Stefan?”
“Steph.”
“Sorry. Shit. Fucking— It’s habit. It’s habit and it’s stubbornness. You can’t just change the name you call someone.”
“I can,” Stef says. “It’s easy. You just do it. You recognise that it’s something important to them and you just… call them the new thing.”
“No, look,” Will says, leaning forward from the wall and raising his voice, “the neural pathways—”
She interrupts him with a laugh. It’s not entirely a genuine laugh, but the boy is so fucking ridiculous. “You can’t call me by my name because of your neural pathways?”
“It’s how it works.”
“It’s an excuse,” Stef snaps. “You know, maybe that’s why you don’t change. Even if you want to. You talked about everyone putting things in you: what they wanted from you, what they thought you could be. I think you do it, too. I think you’re always watching yourself. Always trying to be the cleverest one in the room. The quickest, the most well-read. I think, if you want to change, you should drop it.”
Stef has to give him credit; he doesn’t get angry. He sits back again. “I don’t know exactly what you mean,” he says.
She breathes out through her nose. Laughs again. “Will,” she says, “I think you need to fucking relax, man. You’ve called me ‘Stef’ before, you know. Yeah. It’s on the video. But you’re overthinking it. You’re getting weird about it. Consider: you just don’t have to get weird.”
“That,” Will says, and there’s the first hint of a smile, “is easy for you to say.”
Stef keeps having to redirect her expectations. Even after watching the video, reminding herself how completely devastated he’d been in the cell, she keeps forgetting. Back here, in his room, he’s more like he used to be. Except this is the same Will who apologised to Maria and Adam. Who seemed genuinely uncomfortable under the gaze of so many people in the common room. Who’s handcuffed himself to his bed, just in case.
Both of him are in there, the humbled boy and the arrogant piece of shit. And she remembers the other things he said, too.
“You’re going to be changing on the outside, too,” Stef says. “You know that. You said you were okay with it.” No; the wounds on his forearms, self-inflicted. “You said you were sometimes okay with it. Why not all the time?”
“Because it can’t work.” He looks up at the ceiling. In the cuffs, his fists clench, “It shouldn’t work. It’s fucking insane, Stef.” Ah; the correct name at last. His eyes flicker down and she smiles, to let him know she appreciates the effort. “It’s— Okay, yeah, so Tabby’s gone on at me enough about it that I understand the argument that it says it ought to work. In theory. But we’re not talking about perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum here—”
“—perfectly spherical boys in a basement—”
“—we’re talking about real life. And it’s impossible. But…” He waves his joined hands limply.
“But?”
“But what the fuck else am I going to do?” He rests, slumps against the wall. “I don’t want to do that shit any more. And I don’t know how to stop. This has no chance of working. Or maybe it does, but the person who comes out the end isn’t me any more. But that’s fine. Like I said — and I do remember telling you this — I’m fucking done being the guy who hurts people. Whatever it takes. Even if it kills me.”
She lets his words linger for a moment. She’s not entirely sure what to make of them — she’ll be requesting the video of this conversation, too, no doubt — but there’s something there, something more animated than the desolate creature she spoke to back in his cell. Something, perhaps, worth saving.
“You can’t keep those on forever, you know,” she says, nodding at his cuffs.
“Just for now.”
“Okay. You want to watch some TV?”
“What?”
Sighing, Stef wheels her chair around. Not close enough to alarm him. Just so she can see the computer screen. “Olive branch,” she says. “Friendship overture. You want to watch some TV?”
“Right,” he says. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.”
“Oh, and for the record,” she says, “it’s Steph with a ph. Short for Stephanie. I’ve been trying it out for a while. And I think I like it, actually.”
Is this really how she’s going to stop dancing around the name? In a conversation with Will, of all people? Is this really how she’s going to claim it for good?
Fuck it. Why not? She’s Stephanie now.
And the look on his face is hilarious.
1988 September 24
Saturday
Teri and Linda don’t make her talk any more. When she’s cried herself out they retreat back to the couch, promising her she can tell them anything, anytime, or nothing, never. All at her own pace. Ashley throws a teacloth at her so she can dry her face.
They tell her their own stories instead. Teri was lucky, she says; the luckiest transsexual she’s ever met. Her parents didn’t disown her. They didn’t even disapprove! They live close by, they’ve met Linda, and the next time they visit they’ll meet Ashley and, if she feels she’s ready for it, they’ll meet Beatrice, too. They even found another church for her, so she can attend with them once a month — or more often, if she can afford the bus fare — and worship in a place where no-one knows who she used to be.
Linda lived with her father in this house until the day he died, transitioning right under his nose. She used to keep her outfits and her wigs at Teri’s old flat; it was her staging area, she said, for many a raucous night out. And, yes, she did have to hide her figure from her father, but it wasn’t difficult: it’s amazing what you can do with a bit of breast binding, some loose clothes, and the ironclad denial of a man. When she inherited the house she changed her name, began living full-time as Linda, and told all her surviving relatives to fuck off.
Teri’s in her late twenties and Linda her late thirties but Ashley’s around Beatrice’s age, and she ran away from home around about the time Bea got kidnapped, a coincidence Bea’s surprised she can laugh at. While Linda gets dinner going in the slow cooker and Teri fusses with housework, so she can ‘leave you girls to it’, Ashley tells the story of how she ended up at Teri and Linda’s. They found her at the same church they found Bea, only she’d been living rough for much longer.
“I’m going to school,” Ashley says. “A-levels. Didn’t have the chance before. I thought it would be really weird because of my age, but I’m not the oldest one there by a long shot. And Teri and Lin say I can stay with them as long as I need to, so it’s not so bad. Better than anything else, right?”
Bea nods. “Teri said the people at the church are dangerous?”
“Don’t I know it. I’ll tell you the story sometime. Not today. But I look better now, more like a genetic girl, and I sound like one, too. I’ve changed my name and, even though I can’t change my birth certificate, I’ve got a bank card and a school ID in my real name, so it’s fine. It’s enough. Teri says that when I start work I just need to call Inland Revenue and tell them I’m a sex change and they’ll lock my records so even if someone from the Job Centre or whatever looks up my National Insurance number they won’t know.”
“That’s really all you need to do?”
“Yep.” Ashley grins, confident. “I have everything ready. Going to get my A-levels and get a job and live a quiet life. I’m going to woodwork. That means,” she adds, when she sees Bea frowning, “living so no-one knows you’re a transsexual. It’s all about norms. Like, yeah, being yourself is important, but so’s surviving, and people’ve heard about transsexuals now. So you need to not seem transsexual. And if you’re a bit tall like me, you’ve got to be more careful. I’m going to get a nice, low-profile job with good long-term prospects. Start as a bank teller or something, and move up. I find a big institution with lots of room for lateral movement as well as upward, and I dig in. Go on every on-the-job training course they offer me. Live a normal life.” She taps Bea on the knee. “I know you might not want to hear this, but dream small, Bea. Unless you want them to find you and kill you, dream small.”
“Okay, doombug,” Linda says, approaching from behind the couch and ruffling Ashley’s hair. “She’s got a good head on her, this one,” she adds, addressing Bea, “but she doesn’t half see the bad side in everything.”
“I’m being prudent,” Ashley says, pouting and swatting at Linda’s hand.
“Is Ashley being depressing again?” Teri calls down from somewhere upstairs.
“Yes!” Linda shouts.
“You’re terrible mums,” Ashley says, and returns her attention to Bea. “So. That’s what you should do. Oh! Shit. It’s nearly lunchtime, right?” She holds up a finger. “Hormone time.”
“Here,” Linda says, passing her a handbag. Ashley rummages around inside and comes out with a single white pill, which she swallows dry.
“Three times a day,” she says, “come rain or shine. Do you need to take yours?”
Shit. “Yeah, probably.”
Linda leans on the back of the couch. “Do you have any?”
“Not for almost three weeks. I used to get injections, from the, um—”
“Gotcha,” Linda interrupts, so she doesn’t have to say it. “Well, we can’t get you injections — I’ve never even heard of anyone who gets fancy hormone injections — but we’ll give you a spare box now and we’ll get you in to see the pharmacist as soon as we can.”
“The pharmacist?” Bea asks, as Linda throws her a small white box. It falls open when she catches it, and two trays of white pills, just like the one Ashley took, fall into her lap.
“We know a guy,” Teri says as she walks down the stairs.
“He’s a pharmacist,” Linda explains, grinning. Ashley swats at her again.
“He always ‘accidentally’ overstocks on birth control, and sells us the extra.” Teri points at the pills in Bea’s lap.
Beatrice wants suddenly to throw the pills across the room. “Birth control? I thought we—”
“Relax,” Linda says, as Teri flops down onto the couch. “It’s just hormones.”
Ashley reaches forward and picks up the pill box, turns it over so Bea can read the brand name: Ovran. “Birth control is, like she said, literally just hormones,” she says. “When genetic girls take these, their bodies are tricked into not getting pregnant. Shut up, Lin, I know it’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s not, really,” Linda whispers.
Teri takes the box from Ashley and waves it back and forth. “These’ve got everything a body needs, or modern science’s synthetic imitations thereof: estrogen, progesterone, sugar…”
“You have to supply your own spice,” Linda says, smirking. From the way Ashley reacts, Bea gets the impression it’s an old joke.
“You can have these for free,” Teri says, handing the box back to Bea, “but we’re not exactly rich, so at some point you’ll need to help us pay for more.”
“Don’t worry about paperwork. There are places around here that will pay cash.”
“Wait a few weeks, though. Practise that voice. The way you look, if you can crack the voice, you won’t have to worry about anyone finding you out.”
“Not unless she drops her knickers, Teri.”
“Yeah. Don’t do that.”
“Unless someone’s paying you to.”
They make a little ceremony out of her first birth control pill, with Linda insisting on making her another cup of tea to wash it down with and Teri insisting that they need new mugs, as the current batch is starting to turn unpleasantly brown. So Bea sits with Ashley, the pills waiting on her lap, and tries to plan her life, starting from now:
She can’t risk doing what Ashley did, or what she’s planning to do — go to school, get a job — because the implications of Dorley’s instant response to her 999 call are clear. If they have someone in the police, they could have someone in position to pass on information from any arbitrary government department. The moment Bea gets official work is the moment her National Insurance number gets attached to her updated name and current address and then the risk’s not just on her head, but on the heads of everyone around her.
But there’s cash work, Linda said, so that will do for now. She’ll fix her voice, she’ll learn from Ashley and Linda and Teri everything she needs to learn, and she’ll start bringing in money.
It’s not much of a plan; it takes her a few months from now, if that. But it’s more of a future than she’s had since Dorley took her, years ago, and it represents freedom.
Now that, Beatrice, is a heavy, joyful concept. Freedom. And she can thank Val that she survived long enough to experience it.
Her final gift.
She’s roused from her thoughts by Teri and Linda as they return from the kitchen with four cups of tea, and as promised all three of them make a great deal of fuss over her first hormone pill. She swallows it down, chases it with the tea, gives her audience a cheeky little curtsey, and sits back in the armchair. Odd to be taking the hormones willingly, but she hasn’t the first idea of how to go about becoming a man again, and she’s not sure that’s something she even knows how to be any more.
The other women steer the conversation back towards Ashley’s week at school, to take the pressure off Bea for a while, and she’s content to sit there, drink her tea, and enjoy the company. Until she reads the slogan on the mug she’s holding, and frowns; she can’t make sense of it.
“You okay, sweetheart?” Teri asks, leaning towards her again.
She turns the mug around so they can all read it. “I don’t get it,” she says.
Linda takes the mug from her and explains: “Well, okay, so you see how it says, ‘A Round Tuit’?” She underlines the slogan with her finger. “What that means is, you know how people say, ‘I’ll do such and such when I get around to it’, yes? Well, this mug is ‘A Round Tuit’, so now that you have it, you have no excuse for not doing whatever it is you said you were going to do!”
Linda holds up the half-full mug like it’s the prize on a game show, and waits for reactions.
“Lin,” Ashley says, “that joke gets less funny every time you tell it.”
But Bea can’t take her eyes off it. A Round Tuit. It’s so… so absolutely, completely and totally stupid. So innocent. So cheesy and fun and so unlike what her life has been for more years than she wants even to think about. She reaches out, takes the mug from Linda, places it carefully on the table by the side of her chair and stands up. Linda’s hands are still raised and Bea takes them, pulls the older woman up from the couch and into a hug.
“I love it,” she whispers. “It’s amazing.”
Teri snorts, Ashley shakes her head, and Linda, returning the hug, says, “See, Ashley? Someone appreciates my funny mugs.”
Chapter 28: Old Soldiers
Chapter Text
1994 April 8
Friday
It’s good to be home. Bea’s had few places she thinks of that way, in the years since she escaped Dorley Hall, and the little house on Handale Road is the most constant. It’s the one she cherishes above all others. It’s the first place she felt safe since she was snatched from her mum’s flat. It’s the first place she ever felt normal, or like normal was even an attainable goal for her. It gave her hope. It gave her a life. She likes to think she’s living it well, within her limited options, and she knows Teri and Linda agree, and are proud of her, even if they don’t exactly approve of her vocation.
“Someone’s got to do it, love,” Linda would say. “And if you’ve got a structure, if you’ve got people looking out for you, and if you’re careful… I’m still going to worry.” And then Linda would hug her, and Beatrice would feel childlike.
She doesn’t get to visit as much as she wishes nor as often as she ought, but when she’s here she treasures every moment.
The council’s been by again since she was last here. The trees had been getting messy, littering the street with leaves and scratching the paint off vans with their branches; they’ve been trimmed, tidied away, put back in their isolated islands of earth. The house on the end of the street burned half-down, and for almost a year had terminated the terrace with its cracked brick shell and exploratory blackened floorboards; it’s now tarped and braced with scaffolds, and something about the bulk of the tarpaulin suggests there’s been structural work underneath. The house next door, the one where the tenants had to be moved, now has lights in the windows and an Easter bunny by the front door.
Amused, Beatrice counts days in her head. Easter’s just gone, if she’s remembering right; she doesn’t watch much TV and lives mostly week by week, so most major holidays tend to pass her by. She’d miss Christmas if the local high street didn’t make itself so thoroughly obnoxious with fairy lights for the entire month of December, and if her flatmate, Sammy, wasn’t so absolutely and insufferably entranced with the season.
Most of the houses she passes have lights on, and a group of primary-school-aged children watch her with owlish eyes as she taps past on her heeled boots, before returning to their private and undoubtedly complicated game. Chalk markings on the pavement; unevenly piled jumpers and bags and coats marking out the perimeter of their playspace.
Beatrice always feels so warm when she comes here.
She’s dressed down for this. The boots, her leather jacket, a pair of faded jeans, a simple black top. There are no expectations here. Although someone is going to comment on her hair for sure. Not because of the colour for once; today and for the last couple of months she’s worn her hair in simple black, darker than her natural colour but not by much, and with a blue sheen she adored when she first saw the results because it reminded her of how she used to colour it, back in the eighties, before Grandmother. The shop only had a couple of boxes left, so the next time she went by she bought all that remained, just in case, and now they clutter the cabinet at home, and she had to threaten Sammy with dire punishments should ey even think about nicking any.
No, Linda especially will comment on how short she’s cut her hair. But it’s not like she planned this style. It just happened, almost too quickly for her to realise it. Call it a moment of weakness, call it a depressive incident, call it, like Sammy does, a colossal failure of nerve, but two weeks ago she couldn’t stand the sight of herself in the mirror. Worse; she almost couldn’t recognise herself. And Sammy keeps eir hairdresser’s scissors in the bathroom so she grabbed them out of the drawer and took off eight inches there and then.
It only made her reflection all the more unbearable.
Sammy found her a little while later when the bar called, asking why she was late for her shift, and ey made excuses for her and held her until she was herself again, but the damage was done. Together they tidied it up, redyed it, experimented with styles and drank three bottles of plonk, and in the morning Bea still had her bar job and enough time to sober up before her first client. When she looked in the mirror again, biting her lip against the fear of what she might find there, she thought she looked pretty fucking good again. Better than before, maybe. Certainly by the time a client told her she looked like a boy she was sanguine enough with the results that she had to pinch herself on the inner thigh to maintain her self-control while she finished him off, and when he finally left she laughed until she cried.
She remembers what she looked like when she was a boy, and it was nothing like this. And it’s the nineties, anyway; genderfucking is in. Everyone’s a little bit androgynous.
Ashley must have been watching for her out of the living room window because she emerges from the front door before Bea’s even reached the tiny paved-over front garden, runs up to hug her and draw her inside, takes her hand and her rucksack.
“Bea!” she squeals, her voice hitting a high note Beatrice has never quite managed, even after years of practise. “You look amazing!”
Stumbling along behind her enthusiasm, Bea says, “So do you!” and absorbs some of Ashley’s false self-deprecation; the woman’s beautiful and she knows it.
The living room’s no different to how she remembers, although the TV’s been replaced since she was last here — perks of a three-income home, she assumes — and Ashley practically shoves her into the same overstuffed armchair she sat in all those years ago, fresh out of that awful church.
“Tea’s up!” Linda yells from the kitchen, and there’s a thunder on the stairs as someone new comes running down, someone relatively small and quick; a teenager. She — Bea assumes — is followed by Teri, shouting imprecations for running on the stairs and rolling her eyes at Beatrice when she comes into view.
“Hey,” Ashley whispers, leaning over from the other armchair, “don’t mention what you do, okay?”
Bea contains her laughter. Of course she wouldn’t; the kid looks no older than fourteen! She doesn’t have time to say it, though, because the teen vaults the back of the couch and lands with a bounce on the middle cushion.
“Hi!” she says.
“Susan, this is Beatrice, an old friend,” Teri says, approaching the girl from behind and attempting to ruffle her hair; Susan dodges it, and responds to Teri’s congratulatory finger guns with a giggle.
“Former resident,” Ashley puts in.
“The one you won’t tell me about?” Susan asks.
“The very same,” Linda says.
“Call me Sue,” the girl says.
“Bea,” Bea says, smiling. How old is the girl? If she’s a transsexual like Ashley — and like her; Bea’s turned out to have more in common with every transsexual, genderqueer, drag queen and androgyne she’s met over the last few years than with any of the straight men she’s been obliged to encounter, despite being at one point in time an ostensibly straight man herself — then she’s either on hormones or she hasn’t started to masculinise yet, and she looks awfully young to be on HRT.
“She’s fifteen,” Linda says, setting down a tray of mugs and a plate of custard creams. “And tremendously precocious.”
“And she’s a complete pain,” Ashley adds, but she’s smiling. Sue sticks her tongue out at her.
“And there’s no-one else like me in the whole city,” Sue says, taking three biscuits from the plate and starting on the first one. Despite her calamitous entrance, she eats delicately.
Bea knows a prompt when she encounters one. “Surely not?” she says.
“I’m a transsexual,” Sue says. “And I’m fifteen. And I’m on hormones. Ask me how!”
“How?”
“Uh-uh.” Sue wags a custard cream back and forth censoriously. “I need you to promise me something first. I knew you were coming. Asked about you. And Teri and Lin and Ash wouldn’t tell me a thing about you! So we’ll do it like an exchange: I tell you my story, then you tell me yours. And don’t leave out anything.”
Behind her, still leaning on the back of the couch, Teri mouths, Please leave out some things. Bea nods to both of them and leans back in her chair with her cup of tea as Susan, with assistance from the others, tells her story.
Susan had an ordinary childhood in Barnet. Nice house, only child. Mum died, but she’d been too young to remember her. Dad had a good job, though, and kept them comfortable on a single income. There was talk of private college, when it was time for her A-levels. But she always knew something was different about herself. She never liked hanging around with the boys and never had much opportunity to hang around with the girls. So she was lonely, but she studied, and if the boys used to bully her then that was sort of okay, anyway; she avoided them, staying behind after school, doing her homework in the library, reading ahead in all her subjects.
Top marks. Dad bought her a Sega Mega Drive and, two weeks later, a portable telly for up in her room, so he could go back to watching the football.
She always had her homework done before she got home so she spent a lot of time playing games and watching TV, and if she kept the volume down and rolled up an old t-shirt under her door then Dad couldn’t see the flashing lights and she could watch telly well into the night.
“And that’s when I saw them. Transsexuals! On the bloody telly! And they looked so beautiful and so glamorous and so real and the presenters were even giving them little kisses just like they did with normal girls, and I just knew that was me. I knew I had to become like them. Well, not exactly like them,” she adds, “not with the nipple tassels and that. But like Ash. And Lin and Teri and like, um, you?” Bea nods and raises her mug of tea in confirmation, and Sue grins, delighted to have her suspicions confirmed.
“Shouldn’t have been watching Eurotrash at her age,” Linda mutters, through a tolerant smile.
“Anyway,” Sue says, smirking at Linda, “I knew it was possible to become a woman. But I didn’t know how. Not yet. So I bunked off. Went to the big library. Looked it up.” She sighs and blows her fringe up. “It took ages to find the right books, but in the end it was simple: it’s just pills. Or injections or patches, but in the UK it’s pills.” She shakes her head, recalling her disbelief. “That’s all it takes! To get boobs and soft skin and curves and for your face to change! No surgery! Not unless you want, like, humongous knockers. Just pills.”
The next part of the story’s not so pleasant, and Teri takes over, holding Sue’s hand as she narrates. Susan went to her family doctor, armed with photocopies from multiple books, and was told flatly by the old man that such interventions were not permitted in one so young. She’d have to submit to years of psychiatric evaluation and then, perhaps, when she’s older and financially independent, the topic could be revisited. Sue, who’d started to find her body distinctly unpleasant to live in the moment she realised there was a viable alternative, ran home in tears. But there was no sympathy to be found in her father: the doctor broke confidentiality and called him at work, and while Teri holds off on describing the fallout, the way the confident and bubbly girl folds in on herself and squirms deeper into Teri’s arms tells Bea all she wants to know.
“She ran away,” Teri says quietly, “and lived rough for a while; like you did, Bea, except she wasn’t dressing like a girl to begin with. She was going into pharmacies and asking for contraceptive pills, claiming her bedbound mum needed them, offering to pay with cash she’d begged.”
“It worked, too,” Sue says, her voice soft but smug. “Don’t even have a mum. And it worked even better when I started looking more like a girl. I could say they were for me.”
“Word got around,” Linda says. “The pharmacies caught on to her scam, and our man hears about it and lets us know.”
“Next thing she knows,” Ashley says, pointing at Sue and then poking at Teri, “these two busybody transsexuals are waiting for her outside the hostel.”
“And the rest is history.”
“How did you know to ask for birth control pills?” Bea asks. It would never have occurred to her.
Sue, recovering from the worst part of the story, smiles weakly. “Simple. Ethinylestradiol, levonorgestrel; an estrogen and a progestin. The library’s got a copy of the British National Formulary and I just looked it up.”
“Everything a body needs,” Bea says.
“Or the synthetic equivalents,” Teri reminds her.
Sue nods, satisfied. “Exactly!”
Linda gets up to make more tea at this point, and Sue insists on turning it around, makes Bea tell her story before she gets to hear the end of Sue’s. Bea obliges with a smile and another custard cream, sanitising for teenage ears her usual account of how she ended up homeless in London and what she’s been doing since.
“Why do you only work for cash?” Sue asks, slurping on her new, hot tea, brought to her by Linda in a mug that reads, I put the tea in transsexual!
“If you get paid ‘officially’—” Bea finger-quotes and almost drops her biscuit, “—then you have to pay taxes on it, and everything’s registered to your official identity. Your National Insurance number. And the guy who came after me has… contacts. If I show up on government records, he could find me.”
The sanitised version of the story has no room for Val, and it feels like a betrayal to omit her, but Bea doesn’t want to upset the kid. She can’t help but feel that Sue’s upbeat personality is stretched thin over some serious trauma; why add more? The kid doesn’t need Bea’s shit dumped on her; she needs taking care of, and that’s why she’s here with Teri and Linda and Ashley, and not with her family or her friends or any of the other people who have abandoned her.
Bea takes care to keep her hands from shaking. Sometimes she thinks the cruelty she’s witnessed since she left Dorley Hall is worse than anything Grandmother inflicted on her. Dorothy, as much as she was perplexingly fond of Bea, never claimed to love her as she abused her.
“That sucks!” Sue observes, pouting.
“It’s not so bad,” Bea says, deliberately pushing warmth into her voice. “Working the bar is fun, and I met Sammy there, and now I sublet off of em. And because I don’t pay tax, I keep all my money!”
“And Sammy’s really a drag queen?”
Bea nods. “Ey keeps stealing my dresses and stretching them out.” Another lie; ey only did it once, and she had to admit ey looked better in it than she did. But she’s found people respond better to her stories if the funny parts are emphasised and the bad parts are merely suggested. And she really does work the bar on slow nights, for extra cash and to meet people she’s not being paid to fuck.
The rest of the day goes by quickly, far more quickly than she likes, quickly enough that when Linda suggests she stay the night, she agrees readily. Sammy’s out tonight and Bea doesn’t have any clients lined up, which means she has the choice of a cold, lonely flat, or Teri and Linda’s place.
Teri and Linda and Ashley’s place. She always expected Ash to move on, but she never did. Works in insurance now, still lives with the women who rescued her. They’ve fitted out the attic since Bea first came here, made it into a proper bedroom — the grandest in the house, Ashley claims — and that gives them two rooms spare, open to any wayward queer or transsexual who happens to need them. Linda’s words.
Teri nips down the road for fish and chips and Sue fills in the rest of her life while they wait.
“I don’t go to school like this, obviously,” she says, pausing to slurp noisily at her tea from another of Linda’s funny mugs; this one says, Yeah I’m XY: S E X Y, which doesn’t seem terribly appropriate for a fifteen-year-old. “The ponytail clips on,” Sue continues, running her hand through its length. “The school wouldn’t let me go as a girl. They don’t even know I take hormones; they think I have a condition. The straights are so stupid! But they still made me cut my hair and I had to promise to strap down my boobs and—” she lowers her voice, “—talk like this.” A delicate cough restores her normal speaking voice. “I hate it, but I only have to stick it out long enough to get my GCSEs and then I’m free!”
Linda quietly clears her throat. “You’re getting your A levels, young lady,” she says, smiling. “You’re a smart young woman and you will have every opportunity we can give you.”
Sue mouths along in time with this, and when Linda’s done talking she covers the side of her mouth with the back of a hand and stage-whispers to Bea, “Linda wants me to go to college.”
“Good for Linda,” Bea whispers back.
Later, after fish and chips, when Teri’s enjoying her well-earned relaxation in front of the telly and Sue’s curled up next to her working on her half-term homework, Linda takes Bea upstairs to get fresh bedding from the airing cupboard.
“You’re okay staying with Ashley tonight, on the sofa bed?”
Bea nods, taking the sheets and hugging them to her. Warm, like everything else here. “Sure. I thought there was another room, though.”
“There is, but it’s not done yet. We’re still gearing up to fit in a fifth. And then, if we find a sixth and a seventh and an eighth, we’ll have to buy bunk beds.” Linda gasps in mock horror and Bea wonders how Ashley, almost thirty, would cope with a teen or early-twenties transsexual girl bouncing around on the top bunk.
“I meant to ask,” Bea says, clearing the image from her mind, “what about Susan’s father? How is it she can go to school from here?”
“Jail,” Linda says, starting up the stairs towards the attic bedroom. “When Sue ran away and her no-good excuse for a father—” she spits the word, “—could no longer beat her for not being the good and dutiful son he wanted her to be, he took his anger out on everyone else instead. He got in trouble at work and lost his job, and then he’d drink. One night, a pub brawl turned into a street fight turned into him punching a policeman in the face. And this all happened while Sue was on the streets! By the time we found her, he was already in jail awaiting trial. So then all we had to do was get her into the foster system and then back out again in a way that wouldn’t destroy who she is.” She opens the door into Ashley’s room and gives Bea a moment, both to absorb the information and to admire the airy, spacious bedroom, with its double bed, slanted windows and varnished wooden floor. The sofa bed is against the far wall, opposite Ashley’s bed.
“You’re fostering her?” Bea says, blinking as she examines the idea. It seems strangely mundane; too straight, too much a part of the vast spectrum of human community that is in her experience entirely and deliberately locked off from queers, transsexuals and other undesirables.
There’s a padded lever on one side of the sofa that releases the mechanism, and Linda kicks it with the side of her foot. She winces, but judging by her expression the act was satisfying. “It was hard,” she says, pulling on the seats. Bea positions herself on the other side, to help unfold the bed. “Everyone’d rather she were a boy, you know? Even though five minutes with her would show any right-thinking person she couldn’t be more of a girl. It’s like they want her to run away again! Like it’d be better for her to be on the streets, or— or blimmin’ dead than be who she is.” She pushes down on the frame, snaps it into position, and starts dragging cushions back into place. “And we could have just kept her, you know? Our little secret, safe and warm and able to be a girl all she wants. But the girl needs her education. So we made the decision to try. We all made the decision. Together.” She’s finished with the cushions, and she leans forward on them, looking at nothing. “It was hard,” she repeats. “And for a while we thought we might have made a huge mistake. But they can’t all be like you; living outside the system. And the system, Bea, it blimmin’ sucks.”
Bea hurries around the bed, wraps her arms around Linda from behind. “You’re the best, you know?” she says, stepping back so Linda can straighten up and return the hug. “Who else would have taken her in? Hell, who else would have taken me in?”
“You were adorable,” Linda says. “And you were of age. Someone would have, especially if you batted those pretty eyelashes of yours. Sue, on the other hand…” She lets out a sigh, before shaking her head, regaining her mood, placing the past firmly back in the past. “Oh, actually, that reminds me.” She gives Bea a squeeze and lets her go, sits down on the extended sofa bed. It creaks. “Dahlia wanted to know your current work name and contact stuff; she’s getting the snip in a few months and she needs to start moving some of her clients, the ones who go to her specifically because of her… you know… because of her something extra.” She wrinkles her nose and wiggles a little finger.
“Dahlia?” Bea racks her brain. Too many names, over the years. Hers and other people’s. “Where’s she based?”
“Cambridge.”
“Oh. That Dahlia.” Tall; gorgeous; Greek, she thinks. They’ve run into each other a few times, flirted as a game. “And in Cambridge! She’ll have me sucking academic dicks, then; maybe I’ll learn something.”
“Aristocratic dicks, actually,” Linda corrects her with a smile, and Bea raises an eyebrow at the unexpected lewdness. “Hey,” she adds, well aware of what Bea’s thinking, “just because I generally choose not to say the words, doesn’t mean I don’t know them.”
Bea laughs. “Cambridge, though,” she muses, consulting her not-terribly-accurate mental map of the UK. “That’s a bit of a journey. Normally I like to stick to the bus or the tube.”
“Yes, it’d be a trek,” Linda says, nodding. “But these guys, Dahlia says they pay. They pay for the experience, they pay for the regular schedule, and especially they pay for discretion. Dahlia’ll reassure them you’re reliable, discreet, and so on, if you agree.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. Have her call the club before my shift on Saturday and ask for Scarlett Meadows.”
Linda giggles. “‘Scarlett Meadows’?”
“Scarlett Meadows,” Bea confirms seriously. “With two ts.” She draws the letter out in front of her, crossing it with a flourish. When she gets the laugh she’s fishing for, she affects a wounded expression. “It’s a sexy name, Linda. So I’m told. Sexier than Beatrice, anyway.”
“Why did you choose that name, anyway, if it’s so unsexy?”
Bea sits down on the bed next to her, and leans on Linda’s shoulder. “A friend gave it to me.”
2019 December 16
Monday
They’ve been having her dress Declan in revealing clothes ever since he got here, but the outfit she found waiting for them as she dragged them both back to the servants’ quarters is the worst one yet, and makes Valérie wonder what other proclivities Dorothy’s decided to explore now she has access to someone young and pliable again, someone who won’t laugh in her face and dare her to hurt her again. Val’s been told she rather takes the fun out of torture, and she couldn’t be more proud.
There’s nothing laid out for her, which means she’s expected to wear one of her uniforms, but for Declan Dorothy’s prepared a ridiculous catholic school girl ensemble: black sandals, white socks, a white shirt with a black and red striped tie, a red bra, which doubtless will be highly visible through the thin shirt, and, worst of all, a micro-miniskirt in black with red trim. And no knickers.
Val remembers exactly this kind of shit from Dorley, and from her time with Smyth-Farrow: the aesthetics of soft-core pornography, tweaked for maximum humiliation. She’s always found it pathetically revealing of the psyches of her captors. The schoolgirl aspect is new, though, and concerning. Dorothy’s already charging about the place with more enthusiasm than Val likes; if she’s renewing the plumbing of her own personal depths, Declan might be in for a rough ride.
And why should she even care? Declan’s a rapist, Callum said.
Callum kept up a monologue even after she tried her best to dismiss him with her most archly performed indifference. It had been important to him that she know everything he read about Declan in his file. Ridiculous man. He’d wanted to salve his conscience or he’d been instructed to tell her, and either way she’d wanted no part of it.
But she couldn’t help hearing. About how Declan wasn’t just a rapist, he was a serial rapist. How he used to beat his girlfriends. How he used his dumb charm to win women, how he used to look specifically for women who, his experience told him, might keep coming back, even after he lost control. How he learned to love it.
How they tore all this information from him after they woke him up for the first time, pretending to have rescued him from some unspecified fate.
The girls have never been rapists before. Petty criminals, usually, the better to be yanked out of the system, pronounced dead or missing. Young men from marginalised backgrounds, the sons of immigrants, of the poor, of the incarcerated, of the dead. Karen complained about this once, right to Val’s face; inelegant methods. She preferred it when the boys were offered up to her, for a fee, for fun, or to get them out of the way. At the time, Val hadn’t realised she was talking about her.
But if Dorley had relied on commissions its sadists would have been left with idle hands, so her people perused police reports and court documents and fostering records like a menu, choosing only the most attractive young men, the ones with the most potential. Spread out across the country and confined almost entirely to populations considered disposable, the disappearances were effectively invisible; the supply endless. No shortage of lost boys.
The girls Val’s lived with, the girls Val’s loved, the girls Val’s mourned: innocents, all of them.
And here, in her room, indecently alive and uselessly immobile, sits Declan, right where she put him when she marched them both back here, staring insensibly up at her. Rapist. Woman beater. Placed into her hands, not Karen’s, not into a pair of hands that delights in inflicting pain.
He’s alive. He’s alive. No matter that he’s mutilated, he’s fucking alive. Kieron. Imran. Lou. Dee. All the others. All of them dead. She’d swap him with any of them in a heartbeat.
What do they want from her? Do they want her to know this? Do they want her to see in this wounded man everything that was done to her, everything that was done to her sisters? Or do they want her to see someone cruel, someone who might even be deserving of this fate, delivered to her broken and vulnerable and ready for her rage.
Are they trying to make her into one of them?
Or have they even thought about it at all?
Dorothy abuses her as easily as she breathes, and as reflexively; with as little thought or care. None of them are inclined to understand her.
None of them give a shit what she thinks about them, or Declan, or anything. He’s just another fucking toy, isn’t he? Like her, only less defective.
Fuck.
None of this is getting the little bastard ready for dinner, and the door’s open a crack and that weasel Callum is watching her from the outside, and she’s just been standing rigid in the middle of the room, trapped in memory and in anger.
She has to get Declan cleaned up, because he went up to Dorothy’s room and came back dirty.
She sits down on the bed, just for a moment. She’s too tired for this. She’s been cooking for hours, ever since Dorothy decided on an apparent whim that they were going to have a ‘family dinner’, which sounds like it has the opportunity to be one of the most fucked-up things she’s ever experienced. She’s prepared the food and that in itself would be enough work for three people but the evening isn’t even half over because now she has to prepare the boy and participate in this sham ritual, this farce, and she’s just too fucking old for this.
Thirty-four years.
Thirty-four years of this.
It never ends.
She’s drawing blood in her palms as the nails dig in and it never ends and it’s never going to end and it’s not as if she even has anything she’d class as a desire any more, is it? All she wants is to be left alone, to have food and shelter and to be left the fuck alone, to discover who she might be, under everything, under the makeup and the dresses and the stranger’s face she’s worn for three decades. She used to imagine she could hear her old self but she barely remembers Vincent any more, remembers nothing but Karen and Dorothy and Smyth-Farrow and Dorothy again, endless death and endless pain and loneliness so acute it’s burrowed into her soul, a splinter worked in too deep to remove.
It never ends and now here’s Declan, waiting for her, without volition and without awareness, and he’s here because she can’t even have time to herself in her own room any more, because this man needs cleaning and painting and dressing and leading around the manor like a pet and why didn’t the rapist little shit have the decency to die like so many of his betters have? And if he can’t die then maybe he can impose himself even slightly less on her, make fewer demands on her time and her energy and the dwindling remains of her compassion for him? Why can’t he move a fucking muscle on his own? Why not be a corpse if he’s going to be so pathetic, so switched off, so utterly useless? Why can’t he just fucking die?
She’s shoved back down on the bed.
Callum’s put himself between her and Declan.
Declan’s dropping back onto his chair, and the angle’s all wrong as he falls and he collides hard with the wooden seat like a broken toy, and it’s only Callum’s intervention that prevents him from falling farther.
Callum’s chest is heaving like he just ran a marathon; so is hers, and her heart is thumping in her fingers, in her ears.
“What the fuck?” she spits.
“What do you mean, ‘What the fuck?’” Callum shouts, and she realises he’s holding a nightstick. Brandishing it. At least it’s not the gun. “You were shaking him!”
Was she? Val thinks back, but there’s nothing there. Just like there’s been nothing there for decades. Like it even matters, anyway.
And Callum’s face, red with effort, is suddenly funny to her. “Someone had to!” she says, and laughs, remembering that it was mere hours ago she told the last one not to be too rough with the boy. If she’d only known. “The little shit can’t even stand up on his own!”
“You must not manhandle him like that!”
Okay. Fuck this idiot. He doesn’t expect her to move, because he’s stupid, and stupid men assume that a weapon gives them power; and it might have done if he’d had his gun out, if he’d kept his distance. But he’s too close to her and he’s got the physique of an ex-soldier who hasn’t kept up with his exercise. Strong, maybe, but slow, and Val’s been working this house for decades. Quickly she stands, gets easily inside his reach, blocks his baton strike with her left forearm and grabs his crotch with her right hand.
His eyes go wide.
She pushes him and he staggers.
She has only seconds before he comes to his senses, before he realises what she’s done and how much weight he has on her and how much more strength he can bring to bear, but she also has his testicles in her hand, and for now that means she still has some control. She shoves him with her left elbow, walks him backwards so quickly he almost falls, directs him roughly with her knee so he winds up pressed against the wall, and applies pressure.
“Let me get one thing clear, Callum,” she says, leaning back a little so he can see her face as she addresses him. “I don’t care any more. I don’t. But you do. You’re a man with your whole life ahead of you and I’m a woman who might as well be dead, so you can give me all the orders you like, but unless you can enforce them, unless you are willing to hurt me, I won’t follow them.”
“Valerie—”
“You say my name like an Englishman,” she hisses.
“Look—”
She squeezes harder, and her reward is an anguished whimper. “You know what the first thing they did to me was, Callum? When I was nineteen? Barely a man? You know what they took from me?” She squeezes again and he nods. “Well, I discovered something interesting: they don’t matter. They don’t matter, Callum. They’re not the centre of your world; they’re not a part of your mind. Without them you can still walk, talk and think. They. Don’t. Matter.” Another squeeze; another whine. “Losing them is still a bit of a shock, though. Would you like to try it?”
He finally gets himself together enough to push her off, and she lets go of him just before his nightstick comes down. It strikes nothing as she steps away from him, laughing at his stupid red face and his pathetic, panicked wheezing.
“That was sad, Callum,” she says.
“I wanted to help you,” he says.
“Oh yeah? Wanted the other guy to put a bullet in your head as you help me out of a window? I’ve seen you walking around the place; you don’t have the codes, you don’t have the keys. I don’t care if you suddenly grew a conscience in your withered little soldier-boy brain; you’re useless to me, Callum.”
“Fuck you,” he says, still out of breath.
“Get in line.”
“Fuck it. Do what you want. I’m not paid enough for this.”
She doesn’t get in his way as he leaves. Instead she watches him go with a broad grin that’s only partly faked for effect, and when he’s shut the door behind him she whirls around. Declan’s still looking up at her, but something about his face seems a little more clear, and when she claps her hands with delight he jumps.
“I feel better for that,” she says brightly, and it’s a half truth: she feels clearer, more steady, more placed inside herself than she has in years. She holds out a hand for the boy and he takes it, his grip limp in hers. Maybe he’s a rapist; maybe not. Maybe nothing matters any more. Maybe they want her to train him like she did the others; maybe she’ll burn this house down, with all of them still inside. She leads him into her little bathroom, turns on the light, sits him down on the stool by the sink and wets a washcloth. “Now, Declan, let’s get you cleaned up.”
* * *
“This is ridiculous.”
“Repeat them.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Repeat the rules, Rach.”
Rolling her eyes, slapping the upholstery, and borrowing the manner of a child asked to tell the three times table, Rachel recites the rules: “No asking about anyone’s past. No asking any questions that might be even a little bit about someone’s past. Stick to the kinds of conversation topics that I might encounter at a bus stop or in the waiting room at the dentist: simple, straightforward, detached. And if anyone gives an answer I think is evasive, I’m not to question it. Um…”
In the driver’s seat, Shahida twirls a finger in the air: carry on.
“It’s just a dorm for disadvantaged women, and if I think I see anything weird, no I didn’t. If any of the girls seem nervous around me, I’m not to ask if they’re okay.”
“And…?” Melissa prompts. She’s sitting in the passenger seat of Shahida’s mother’s Volvo, and she’s wearing one of the outfits they bought today, picked out for her by Shahida who worked on her for ten minutes until she finally agreed to let her dress her. Her long black skirt and matching loose black top are paired with grey leggings (for the cold weather) and a light pink tank (for a splash of colour, and because Melissa was asking Shahida serious and embarrassing questions, like, are you on your vampire kick again, because this is looking seriously goth). Her makeup is light and elegant, and her lips are…
Shit. Shahida’s staring again, and she’s lost the thread of the conversation. Again.
“Melissa,” Rachel says, “I still don’t understand; how do you suddenly have a room at this exclusive dorm when you haven’t lived there for years and you’re not even a student here?”
“That counts as a question, Rach,” Melissa says, grinning. She’s having fun with this.
“Didn’t you drop out? Because you definitely disappeared.”
“Also a question,” Shahida points out.
“Oh my goodness fucking gracious,” Rachel mutters, from the back seat.
“Look, it’s easy,” Melissa says. “Just assume everyone you meet inside the walls has a mysterious past—”
“—like you—”
“—and that if you ask about it they’ll get suspicious of you. And maybe have you locked up somewhere dark and unpleasant.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Just live in the moment, Rach,” Shahida says.
“Living in the moment requires preparation, Shy,” Rachel says. “Who am I, Amy?”
Shahida says, “No; we would not bring Amy to Dorley Hall,” and in the other seat Melissa laughs, leans forward and laughs with her whole body, and Shahida has to keep revising upwards her opinion on what the most beautiful thing this wonderful, ephemeral creature has done because she keeps raising the bar. Strange that she has Dorley Hall to thank for this.
And what did it cost? a voice inside her asks, but it’s one she can ignore easily. The human cost of the programme at Dorley Hall, to the extent that it’s been explained to her, sounds horrific, for sure, but the women who explained it to her were beneficiaries of it, and it’s hard to maintain a position of healthy scepticism when Paige Adams, very nearly the most breathtaking woman Shahida’s ever met, is outlining just how much happier she is now. A place that can not only help women like Melissa but also women like Paige, Tabitha and Victoria is a place that can do whatever the hell it wants.
And she laughs along with Melissa, because who cares about anything else? Certainly the girls of Dorley Hall don’t, and she’s not about to tell them their own business. She thinks of Christine, leaning over behind Paige, kissing her indulgently…
Over the weekend, after another encounter with Paige, Shahida asked Tabitha if Christine knows how lucky she is, and Tabby smiled and said the girl speaks of little else, if given the opportunity.
She’s not going to second guess that kind of happiness.
Melissa’s prodding her, then, returning her to the conversation, and she realises she can’t have missed anything important because Rach is already out of the car and Melissa’s about to join her.
It’s a grey December evening and the semester’s almost over, but the campus is as loud around here as it always is, with the Student Union Bar blasting music loud enough to hear from the turnoff to Dorley Hall. Melissa and Rachel are walking ahead, having sensed that Shahida wants to dawdle, and she does, wanting to take in the surroundings. There’s a different mood tonight, and despite the damp she feels alive; the first time she came here she was putting up posters, searching for a friend long dead; the second time she was in a near-frenzy, scarcely able to believe the bizarre conclusions she’d come to, but unable to disbelieve them sufficiently to stop herself.
Melissa and Rachel are holding hands, and Melissa’s pointing out what landmarks are visible, creating for Rachel the impression that this is a place she returns to often, that she thinks of fondly. Not entirely true, but Shahida hopes to see that change. Melissa needs roots, needs family, and with the question of what to do about her real family unanswered — there are rules, she explained, and many people who need protecting — then her Sisters, with a capital s, can fill in.
As can Rachel and Shahida.
She skips to catch up, takes Melissa’s free hand and endures the playful complaints; she was just about to point out the brutalist clock tower! How can she point when both her hands have been captured, Shy? Shahida raises Melissa’s hand to her lips, kisses it on the knuckles, and points out the clock tower herself.
Rachel is suitably amused.
Her presence here at the Hall has been okayed. Shahida’s idea, after Rach bugged her by text, and she raised it with Tabitha and obtained permission before suggesting it to Melissa, so as not to get her hopes up. As long as Rachel can abide by the rules, she’ll be allowed. They do allow visitors, Tabitha said; it’s not like they run a prison, or anything.
Shahida had giggled at that, and made it halfway back up the stairs before realising she ought to be more disturbed than amused. And then she’d shrugged, because Melissa was waiting for her, and she could smell fresh coffee.
She’s not convinced Rachel is attached enough to Melissa to be so morally flexible.
“Shahida!” Tabitha calls, cleverly opening the kitchen doors as they approach, to make the chunky biometric locks less obvious. “Melissa! And… friend?”
Shahida rushes forward for a hug from Tabby, whispers, “Thanks!” and turns around to introduce Rachel to Lorna and Vicky and a girl she doesn’t know.
“Yasmin,” the girl says, and Shahida repeats the introductions.
Rachel’s cooing over the AGA — “Belinda and I have been dreaming of one ever since we moved into our flat! It’s lovely but we just don’t have the square footage, you know? And it seems a shame to be making plans to move again after just three years and all that effort, so we’re being firm with ourselves. It does mean no AGA, though. They lend a certain warmth to a home, you know?” — and Melissa’s talking to the girls at the table, so Shahida takes the opportunity to slip past, into the dining room and over to the tables where the second years are sat with their sponsors. Most of their sponsors, anyway; Shahida recognises and greets Isabella, Charlie and Nadine, and Rabia (who’s not a sponsor, as far as she can tell, but she comes from here, anyway, and she’s probably dating Isabella). Rabia aside, they’ve run into each a lot over the weekend, whether down here or up in the first-floor corridors, and all of them seem like perfectly nice and reasonably normal women.
Four more ticks under the kidnapping is fine, actually column.
“Best behaviour, please,” she says quietly to Bella, who nods and repeats the words to the second years. She waits for and receives grudging acknowledgement from the younger girls, and grins up at Shahida. It’s a code phrase she’s been taught, and for anyone in the know it simply means outsider present.
“Try the casserole,” Nadine says, in her clipped, prim tones. Shahida doesn’t have her figured out, yet, except that she’s unfailingly polite and seems permanently exasperated with her girl, Mia. Tabitha promised her the dirt on all the sponsors just as soon as the semester ends, so Shahida smiles in response and makes another mental note: Nadine, still very polite, likes casserole.
“I may well do so,” she says, unintentionally falling into the voice her mother uses when she needs to sound especially English.
Back in the kitchen, Yasmin’s huddled in the corner with another woman she doesn’t recognise, holding a conversation in whispers, Vicky’s helping Melissa reheat some of the casserole, and Rach is sat at the table, talking to Lorna.
“…You just put your hand right there and you feel for resonance,” Lorna’s saying, and her eyes flicker up to meet Shahida’s, accompanied by a momentary smirk; she’s taking advantage of her status as a trans woman who didn’t transition under Dorley to suggest to Rach that Melissa’s like her, to mislead her, to tell her half-truths without actually doing anything at all. Lorna, like Shahida, has someone in her life who relies on the big secret; keeping it is everyone’s responsibility.
“Ummmmmm,” Rachel says, contorting her face to try to look down at the hand on her chest without bending her neck. “No. I don’t feel it.”
“Good! You shouldn’t. It took me six months of practise to get there.”
“Stop showing off,” Vicky calls, from where she’s bent over in front of the microwave.
Lorna reaches over and slaps her on the behind, and Melissa giggles.
“Well,” Rachel says, a few minutes later, as they carry their trays carefully into the dining hall, following Melissa to a table near-ish but not adjacent to the second years, “they’re all very nice!”
“They are, aren’t they?” Shahida says, deliberately upbeat.
“The one you hugged; grad student?”
Melissa pours each of them a glass of water from the jug on the table. “That’s a question, Rach.”
“Right. Sorry. Forgot.”
Shahida’s sitting opposite Rachel, but Melissa’s sitting next to her, and she senses Rachel stiffening up before Shahida does. “Don’t stress about it,” Melissa whispers. “Just eat, and talk about whatever.”
“Melissa,” Rachel hisses, “everything I want to talk about is in this room!”
“So talk about the casserole,” Shahida says, pointing at hers with her spoon. It’s very good. She makes a mental note to thank Nadine for the suggestion, even though it had been Melissa who picked dinner.
Rachel sighs, visibly forces herself to relax, and says, “Sorry. I don’t like not knowing things. But I get it.” She fills her spoon with casserole and blows on it. “I’ll be good. I’ll talk about the casserole.” Popping the spoon in her mouth, for a moment she makes a show of swilling the stock around, tasting it like a wine snob might, and then her eyes go wide and she swallows. “Um. Wow?”
“Good, isn’t it?”
“Shy, you might have trouble stopping me talking about the casserole.”
“Yes, by the way,” Melissa says quietly.
“Hmm?”
“Yes, Tabby’s a grad student.”
“Oh. Hmm. Thanks.”
Melissa and Shahida share a smile and Rachel nods to herself.
They’re mostly done with their dinner when Christine, Indira and Abigail enter the dining hall from the kitchen, inadvertently interrupting a good-natured play-fight over food that erupted at the second years’ table after two of the sponsors left together, leaving a protesting Bella and a resigned Rabia in charge. Christine and Indira peel off to greet the second year table, and Abby starts hesitantly towards Shahida’s table, picking up speed when Shahida smiles her most welcoming smile.
“Hi!” she says, as Abby approaches. “How’re things? You should eat with us! Em, she should eat with us!”
“Hi, Abs,” Melissa says sheepishly. “Um, want to eat with us?”
“I’d love to,” Abby says, “but I’m pre-booked for pizza and movies with those two.” She jerks a thumb at the other table, from which Christine and Indira are now approaching.
“You sure?” Shahida says, and she can feel her slightly over-the-top smile fade as genuine disappointment replaces it. Abigail’s a huge part of Melissa’s life. It doesn’t matter that they dated, or that they might still date — there’s been a lot of awkwardness around that question — Shahida wants to know her.
“She’s sure,” Christine says, leaning on the top of Abby’s head and smiling at Shahida. There’s something else there as well, something in the way Christine’s looking at her, and it only takes a moment for Shahida to work it out: they’re keeping Abby busy. Keeping her from getting lonely.
How can Shahida say thank you without saying it?
Abby, unaware of the communication passing over her head, says, “I made a promise to spend the evening with her girlfriend—” she pokes at Christine, “—and her boyfriend—” Indira dodges Abby’s elbow, “—and whomever else they can scrape up.”
“Naila and Ren are coming,” Christine says, drumming her fingers on Abigail’s shoulder. “Probably Pippa too, and Charlie.”
“We’re going to watch all the Shreks,” Indira says.
“All of them?” Melissa says, her hand on her chest.
Christine pins Melissa with a very serious look. “All of them, Melissa.”
“I suspect we’ll be drinking heavily, too,” Indira says, pretending offence.
“Because you’re watching all the Shreks?” Melissa asks.
“Yes,” says Christine.
Following an impulse, Shahida takes Abigail’s hand, ignores the slight start when she does so. “You’ve got my number, right?” she says, looking up at the woman, who nods slowly. “So text me, okay? I still want to chat sometime.”
“I will,” Abby says. “Um, good to meet you, Rachel. Hi, Melissa.”
“You said that already,” Shahida whispers, feeling playful. She gets a smile from Abigail for that, a genuine smile, broad-cheeked and beautiful, and Shahida can see clearly in her all the things Melissa saw. She wonders how it happened, their first kiss, their first faltering mutual affection. She has the broad strokes from Melissa, but she needs details…
“Have a good night,” Melissa says, reaching over the table and taking Abby’s free hand. Shahida tries not to jump, and lets go of Abby’s other hand. Looks carefully at the table for a moment. “And drop by tomorrow, okay?” Melissa continues with a grin. “Maybe tomorrow afternoon, if you’re going to have a hangover.”
The three women head back upstairs, via the middle staircase this time, waving at the second-year table and at another small group of women by the inactive fireplace. Opposite Shahida, Melissa breathes out carefully.
“History?” Rachel asks.
“A lot of history,” Melissa says. “We used to date. Abby and me.”
“And they’ve been avoiding each other ever since I showed up,” Shahida says. “It’s not fair, Em, on either of you. I don’t want to get in the way.”
“You’re not! We’re not together. Not any more.”
Could have fooled me, Shahida thinks. Out loud, she says, “I don’t mean like that. You’re friends, Em. And you’re barely talking. And I want to get to know her, and I think—” and remembering Nadine, she switches to her most prim voice, her answering-questions-for-teacher voice, “—it’s very rude of you to keep us apart like that!”
It works: Melissa’s tension breaks and she smiles again, and props her chin on her wrist, staring intently at Shahida for just a moment before shaking her head and returning to the remains of her casserole.
“I want to see her again, too,” she says. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Bloody hell,” Rachel says, looking from Melissa to Shahida, “you’re so into her! Liss, we have to work out a way to tell Amy that you’re back and alive and everything, because I can’t wait to rub in her face that we’re back up to four again and she’s still the only straight one of all of us.”
“Oh, God,” Melissa says, “she’s going to be so annoyed with me.”
2002 August 2
Friday
She’s wearing something from the work closet. Cut to the thigh, tight where required and yet still loose enough to run in, should it become necessary; it’s a new client tonight, vetted but still anonymous, so it’s best to be prepared. There are gems sewn into the seams — rhinestones, mostly, but artfully arranged and polished — and they draw exactly as much attention as she prefers.
She’d prefer to have a weapon, but she can’t afford to be caught with one again, for all that it was two professional names ago. She doesn’t resent having to be even more careful than most of the other girls she knows, who’ve collectively systematised their paranoia and shared with her their expertise; she’s still grateful merely to be alive.
Besides, the other girls she knows are jealous of her complexion, and refuse to believe her when she tells them her age.
The woman waiting for her in the hotel bar can’t be older than twenty-two, and while part of her rebels at the prospect of taking someone fifteen years her junior to her breast, the greater and more practical part of her is aware that of all the power dynamics at play, age is the only one in her favour. Beatrice is expert at dressing artfully, to conceal her relative poverty; this woman, her unnamed summoner, simply wears her money and wears it well.
She’s aware of the woman’s eyes on her, but her approach is practised and second nature. She’ll take her cue from the client, and she’s standing at the bar, not sitting, so Beatrice does likewise, leaning a single elbow on the polished wooden surface.
They’re close enough to address each other without being overheard, and she has a role to play.
“Aren’t you a young one?” she says, modulating her voice deeper and adopting the aristocratic accent she borrows from her other clients.
The woman shrugs, beckons with a tilt of her head, and Beatrice follows her out of the bar and across the lobby to an elevator. They ascend a dozen floors in silence and step out together into an opulent penthouse. Lamps light themselves at her clap, and she strides briskly to a sunken lounge area, where she sits and indicates for Beatrice to join her.
“My name is Elle Lambert,” the woman says. “Not an alias.” Beatrice controls her reaction; you can often judge someone’s nobility by their voice, but Elle Lambert’s is controlled, flattened. She speaks like someone whose money has been inherited a dozen times over, but who finds herself at least somewhat ashamed of her position. Shortened, coarsened vowels fight with precise, trained diction. “You can look up my precise position in the peerage later, if it pleases you. And you… are Beatrice Quinn.”
Stunned, Beatrice nods. That’s her name, her real name, inasmuch as she has such a thing, but it’s not the one she uses for work, and it’s certainly not a name anyone who recommended her to this Lambert woman should have known. Her mostly male clients prefer to use false names and habitually forget the names she gives them, but here’s a rich and elevated woman engaging her services under both their real names.
“It’s as good as any other,” she says, to cover her confusion.
“Understand,” says Elle Lambert, “that I do not use your name as a threat. I simply wish for you to know that I know about you, Beatrice Quinn, and I offer my own name as… balance. I would like you to trust me, Beatrice.”
Bea’s no stranger to the first-appointment negotiation; her richer and more well-connected clients often wear their nerves on their faces, as if anyone they do business with would actually care that Lord Someone-or-Other likes girls like Beatrice. Most of their peers have probably, at one time or another, engaged the services of one of her peers.
“I understand,” she says.
“I would like to discuss a contract.” Elle Lambert leans back on the sofa she chose, spreading one arm out over the back. Demonstrating openness. Beatrice, to play along, leans forward, elbows together and perched on her crossed knees. Elle continues, “I find myself in regular need of fulfilment of a sort only one such as yourself can provide. I am also imminent heir to a fortune of both money and influence and I am, and will remain for the next several years, particularly vulnerable to those who might abuse my generosity, or seek to acquire leverage over me, or simply be… indiscreet.”
Simple enough. She wants a fuck buddy who won’t talk. Beatrice’s speciality. “I understand,” she says again.
“No,” Elle says, standing suddenly and looking strangely out of her element. “No, you don’t.” She walks for a moment, heels on wood betraying imperfect rhythm; not at all like the woman who escorted her from the bar just minutes ago. She halts near the kitchen area and turns around. “I know about the Hall, Beatrice. I know where you come from.”
Professionalism departs her. “What?”
“Dorley Hall. The Toy Factory. The Fanny Farm.” Elle waves a hand. “One of my family’s little side-projects. Not entirely ours, of course — these kinds of things never are — but for the last decade or so, since the untimely and obviously tragic death of one of the primary partners, we have maintained significant interest in the facility, all of it so that the monstrous creature in charge can indulge her whims.” Her upper lip contorts for a second, victim of Elle’s inconsistent control. “And so the partners can, too.”
Beatrice can’t move. If this woman, this slip of a girl, barely an adult, is involved in Dorley Hall, then this is it. This is the end. She’s walked right into an environment she doesn’t control with someone who ought to have raised far more red flags than she did, and soon Karen or Frankie or one of the others will come strolling in, greet her with a name she hasn’t used in over a decade, and put her back under their control.
“I’ll die before I go back,” she says. It’s too quiet, too drained, too dry, as from a throat that can barely open enough to allow breath to pass through, and for a moment she thinks she hasn’t been heard, but then Elle Lambert is on her, walking the few feet from the kitchen to Beatrice’s couch, confidence returned.
“I do not approve of what was done to you, Beatrice, as much as I might appreciate the woman you’ve become, and I am not here to return you to Dorothy Marsden.” She sits down next to Bea, too close, but Beatrice still can’t bring herself to stand. “You are safe. I make that promise with all of my wealth and influence.”
The persona Beatrice wears to these introductions is gone. Her real name shattered it, and the revelation that sitting next to her on the sofa is one of the controlling interests in Dorley fucking Hall scattered the pieces to the wind. She feels young again, like the girl who ran into the woods, chased by torturers and ghosts.
“I’m safe?” she says.
“You’re safe,” Elle repeats, and reaches out awkwardly, once more uncertain, and pats her on the knee. Then, apparently realising her proximity is the source of at least some of Beatrice’s discomfort, she lifts herself from Bea’s couch and sits opposite her again. “Let’s not talk of this for a moment. And let’s not be… who we are. For a moment.”
Bea snorts, and then covers her mouth, horrified. Such a sentiment — the client embarrassed to be the one engaging the services of a tranny — is so familiar to her as to be mundane, and where normally she would soothe the client, bolster their confidence, reassure them, show them that there’s really nothing different about her save the one thing they’re most interested in, this time she has no control. The rich and the aristocratic famously lack a sense of humour about their station in life, and she is normally careful not to insult them with so much as a mistimed glance; a laugh, a contemptuous snort, is a disaster.
But when she looks at Elle Lambert, the woman is smiling.
“Is that a cliché?” she asks, and shakes her head. “Of course it is. You’ll have to forgive me; of the two of us, I’m by some distance the amateur.” There’s a clutch on her couch, which due to its size Beatrice hadn’t even noticed. Elle extracts from it a slim phone, flips it open, and taps out a quick message. “Allow me to level with you, Beatrice Quinn. ‘Aristocratic heir’ is as much an act for me as I suspect ‘high-class escort’ is for you, and it’s one I prefer not to keep up, not when I find myself in tolerable company. I would much rather discuss things—” and she pauses to check behind her as a door opens, continuing once she’s confirmed the woman entering the room is who she expects, “—over a nice cup of tea.”
The woman Elle summoned walks near-silently to the table, deposits a tray of ornate teapot and delicate tea cups, and exits as briskly as she entered. Elle takes on the task of pouring, holding up milk and sugar and waiting for the nod and the shake of Bea’s head. Satisfied with her work, she leans back with her cup, drinks a third of its contents in a single sip, and rests the cup and its saucer on her knee.
“Much better,” she says.
Bea decides that there would already have been several simpler ways to dispose of her than poison, and mimics Elle. Beatrice the escort — or, more accurately, ‘Danielle’, this year, at least; it’s long been an amusement of hers to ensure her work names all contain paired letters — is as much of an act as Elle guessed, but she feels outclassed by the Lambert heir, even in her more relaxed mien, and takes care when she sips from her tea to lay the saucer as daintily as Elle.
“Thank you,” she says, smiling more naturally. She’d been expecting Earl Grey, or some blend available only to aristocrats, but what she just drank she might have bought herself at the Asda on the corner.
“I apologise for ambushing you,” Elle says. “But how does one raise the subject? ‘I know the name and address of the one who tortured you’? Every option that came to mind… lacks grace. All the same, it was indelicate of me.”
Bea inclines her head. “Apology accepted. I must admit, I didn’t come here expecting to revisit that chapter of my life.”
“A defining chapter, one might say.”
“More like…” Bea sips tea as she thinks. “Stuff it; I can’t extend the metaphor. It’s where my life began. This life, I mean. The other life, his life… Whatever it could have been, it ended there.”
“Is it so bad?” Elle asks. “The life you live now, I mean.”
A shrug. “I don’t know anything else,” she says. “It’d be nice to be able to take legal work, but the world’s only gotten more computerised since I escaped; even if I’d’ve lucked out back in nineteen-eighty-eight, I’d definitely have been found by now. And endangered a lot of people along the way.” She finishes her tea, and when Elle doesn’t say anything — the woman looks like she’s hanging on Bea’s every word, and is impatient for her to continue — she adds, “I don’t know what he would have done. His prospects weren’t great, I have to admit. He may well have ended up like his dad.” Elle raises an eyebrow, but Beatrice doesn’t want to keep following that thread. “Do they really call it the Fanny Farm?”
Elle nods. “I’m aware of the irony.”
The tray on the table is empty but for the teapot. Bea returns her cup and saucer, privately reflecting that if Elle really was a woman of the people, there would have been biscuits.
“Why am I here, Ms Lambert?”
Elle smiles, and finishes her tea before she answers, delicately returning her cup to the tray. “I wish to retain your services,” she says, looking Beatrice in the eye. “But not only in the manner to which you are accustomed.”
“That’s half an answer, then.”
“Dorothy Marsden — ‘Grandmother’ — is untouchable, Beatrice Quinn. She sits atop an empire of cruelty, funded by some of the richest and most secretive people in the land; certainly the most well connected. But this state of affairs will not continue.” She pours herself another cup, and hesitates with the teapot over Beatrice’s cup; Bea shakes her head. “My grandmother controls our estate. My parents are, sadly, dead. I am sole heir, and when control passes to me…” She sips grandly from her cup, smiling at Beatrice over the rim. “We can snatch Dorley Hall for ourselves.”
Beatrice allows herself a moment. Control the Hall? “Why would you want to?”
Elle quirks her lips, looks away. “I grew up on the Cambridge estate, quite near here. My grandparents had a whole wing to themselves, and as a child I spent much time there; it commanded the best views, and the kitchen staff were kind. And in that time I made friends with a succession of serving women who were universally beautiful and, Beatrice, they were miserable. To a woman. They lived with my grandparents, they attended to their needs, and sometimes… sometimes they disappeared. One day they were my friends, the next they were gone. And it kept happening. Every question I asked about them was rebuffed. It wasn’t until I returned to the estate last year after completing my education and spoke to the latest girl, spent some time with her, that I learned the first pieces of what I now know.” She replaces her cup, half full, on the tray. “She was killed for that indiscretion.”
She was killed—? “What was her name? Please?”
“Kelly.”
“Not Valerie? No trace of a French accent? She would have been comparatively short, and—”
“No. Kelly, God rest her soul, was over six foot. And none of the girls I remember was named Valerie, nor spoke with a French accent. She is… a friend of yours?”
Beatrice lets out a long, cold breath before she speaks again. “She was. We were there together.”
“Then this is exactly why I need you!” Elle says, suddenly passionate. She leans forward, makes a grab for Bea’s hand that Bea lets succeed. “Help me, Beatrice! Help me take this place from them and free their captives and turn it to a new purpose! A better purpose! For Kelly! For Valerie! For— for you!” She releases Beatrice’s hand and sits back again. “I’ve been living a year with the knowledge that my family, my flesh and blood, the bearers and bestowers of my name, not content with facilitating the deaths of countless innocents overseas, have bloodied their hands here. In my family home. And they paraded their… acquisitions in front of a child.” She shakes her head. “I don’t mean to imply that my experiences overshadow yours, or that of the women they killed. I just… Sometimes I cannot believe the enormity of it. The audacity.” She looks up at the ceiling, as if through it she can see the stars. “I know something of your recent activities, Beatrice. Your clients have been quite moneyed of late. I fear you may have inadvertently returned yourself to their clutches sooner or later, simply through the network of—” she waves a hand idly, deciding on her phrasing, “—old-money perverts.”
The thought had occurred. Usually early in the morning. “What do you propose we do?” Bea asks, to chase it away.
“I have the bones of a plan,” Elle says, her focus returning. She picks up her tea again, and sips it between sentences. “I’m not supposed to know any of this, officially. When I heard of Kelly’s death, I convinced my grandfather not to tell my grandmother that we had spoken, because by some miracle the old fart thought he was sparing me her censure by waiting to talk to me about it first. I gritted my teeth as he described her death to me, and I contrived to suggest to him that I was… titillated by what poor Kelly told me. I pretended to be excited at the prospect of — I’m sorry — men transformed into women, for the purposes of pleasure. I pantomimed sufficient arousal that the bastard believed me and promised to keep my secret, and I kept up the act long enough to have his heart stopped.” She spits the word, voice hardening. “And now all that stands between me and control of the Lambert finances, and thus control of the Hall, is my grandmother’s faltering grasp on life. When she… passes, I will be in a position to increase our stake. Take it over. But—” she raises a finger, “—I must have information. I cannot simply wade in. There are accounts leveraged in the Hall that are frustratingly vague to me, individuals who are unknown. Powerful individuals, most likely. And I must retain my appearance of ignorance.”
“This is where I come in, I take it?” Bea says.
“Yes. I wish to retain your services.” Elle smiles. “I would ask two things of you. First, that you investigate the Hall. Its history, its current activities and personnel, and its customers and funding sources. You’ll have access to protection from my personal service, and you’ll have a staff. You know more about Dorley Hall than anyone I’ve yet encountered, Beatrice, and I want you to use that knowledge. And then, when the time is right, when we know everything there is to know, I will end my grandmother’s life and erase this stain on my name.”
“That’s…” Words once again fail her. “That’s a fucking lot, Elle,” Bea says, her original accent reasserting itself momentarily.
“It is,” Elle says. “And I don’t require an answer immediately. But you should know: I’m willing to offer any incentive. Any incentive. The longer we wait, the more innocents will die. And if you walk away, I’ll understand, and I will not punish you for it, but my chances of successfully toppling Dorothy Marsden and her other backers will be significantly reduced.”
“I’ll think about it,” Bea says. “And I’ll think quickly.” Any incentive? A flat with a bathroom that doesn’t leak would be nice.
“Please. And,” she adds, smiling, but with none of her earlier hesitation, “I have another request. One that is more in line with your expectations for this evening.”
“Oh?” This is a more comfortable topic. Bea offers a smile of her own, tight but inviting.
“We aristocrats are simple creatures,” Elle says, standing. “We have simple pleasures, and we indulge them to the best of our considerable capacity. Mine are of a nature that is quite specific, and requires services that are difficult reliably to engage.” She extends a hand. “Come with me, Béatrice.”
2019 December 16
Monday
Will doesn’t talk much while they watch TV. A few questions here and there. He’s less smug than Steph expected when he realises his earlier instincts about Steph have been validated: that she’s a girl, that she ‘worked it out’. She doesn’t tell him what she told Aaron; she lets him believe she was, at least to begin with, as much a prisoner as the rest of them.
She doesn’t move any closer, though, and he stays in his corner, pressed against the wall. Afraid of himself. Afraid of her, and what she might force him to become, should she make a wrong move, should she wake up the thing that lives inside him, that takes control away from him; his monster.
Steph stifles a laugh: she’s over-dramatising it. Will’s just a guy. A guy who was taught violence and who chose it repeatedly, so often that it became an instinct. She wonders how many men like him Dorley’s seen. He’s probably routine. Tabby probably has a standardised flow chart or something: [violent subject]—[violent father figure]—[frequent outbursts]—[violence coddled and approved of]—[homophobic (route: repressed)]—[huge dickhead]
The third episode ends and an ache in her belly tells her it’s time to move on. Moving with exaggerated care, she pushes her chair back towards the door before standing up, and the action jolts Will out of the reverie he’s been stuck in ever since the main girl in the show told the main guy he’d have to choose between American Football or her.
“I should eat,” Steph says.
“Cool,” Will says, nodding.
“Are you going to be okay?”
He laughs unpleasantly. “I don’t really think it matters, do you?”
“I think it matters if you’re going to change.”
“We’ll see.”
He’s looking at her strangely, so she decides, fuck it, and walks over to him quickly, ignores how he shrinks away from her, looks away, folds his arms around his waist and traps them with his knees.
She lays a hand on his calf, the closest part of him she can reach. Into his heavy-breath silence she says, “You can change, Will. It’ll take time. But you can do it. And one day you’ll look back and realise it’s been longer since you last hurt someone than ever before.”
He’s not going to look at her, not going to move, so she steps away again, backs slowly out of his reach. When she reaches the door he relaxes.
“Be more careful, Stefan— Steph.”
“There. You can say it. You can change.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I,” she says, and then turns and lets herself out of his room, waiting until the door fully closes and the lock engages before letting herself go limp.
The whole time it had been so easy to imagine him suddenly lunging, reaching for her, ending her.
Best not make a habit of this.
She finds herself walking down the corridor on tiptoes, and interrogates herself for a moment before she understands why: she feels despicably free, with her thumbprint access to almost every door in the building — including all the exits, she’s confirmed with Pippa — and while Will’s extreme immobility is self-inflicted, she doesn’t want to rub his nose in it. It does mean that she spots Aaron and Pippa before they spot her, and she takes the opportunity to watch them interact.
Aaron’s sitting on one of the couches near the TV, cross-legged and comfy, surrounded by cushions. Pippa’s sitting in front of him, lounging on a bean bag chair with her legs splayed out and her head rocked back so she can very nearly look at him while they talk. She’s in a colossally vulnerable position relative to him, and Steph almost says something before she realises that Pippa almost definitely sat that way deliberately. It’s like Maria did with Aaron: she’s handing him power over her, and he’s not using it.
The TV’s on but the volume’s so low the reality show is a murmur, and the two of them are talking instead about Aaron’s plans for after he leaves here, and whether or not he’s going to finish his degree. He takes the news that he’d have to start over again, whatever he decides to do, with apparent calm, and makes a joke about confounding the professors by falling asleep in every lecture but still submitting top-quality work.
Pippa mock-frowns at him. He should strive to avoid drawing attention to himself, she says. Ah, he says, and he is so naturally talented at remaining unnoticed.
Aaron’s doing his best to appear nonchalant, but he’s sitting on his hands and his shoulders are locked still. Keeping himself under control; a mirror of Will and his cuffs. And Steph can’t help the smile that spreads across her face: he’s making an effort. He’s trying so hard. After everything, after what they’re going to do to him, after what they’ve already done, he’s bloody well trying, and whether it’s for his own sake or for her, she’s proud of him. The Aaron she met straight out of the cells would have laughed at the very idea.
“Hey,” Pippa says, noticing her at last and rolling over as she speaks, which causes the elongated vowel to fluctuate as her chest compresses against the bean bag. “How did it go?”
Steph shrugs. “He handcuffed himself to his bed.”
“We saw,” Aaron says, and frees one of his hands so he can spin a finger in circles next to his temple.
“This one,” Pippa says, trying to poke at Aaron but, disadvantaged by her new position, missing by a mile, “wouldn’t stop pestering me until I showed him the security feed.”
Aaron backs away from her flailing hand anyway, shuffling up the sofa and landing on the corner cushion. “I was worried! And, hey, Stephanie, did you really watch that cheerleader show with Will? How did he cope with not lecturing you about the pointlessness of school sport or the fatuous nature of cheerleading or the—”
“It’s not about cheerleaders, though,” Steph says, frowning.
Pippa wags a finger. “Spoilers, Aaron; she doesn’t join the cheer squad until, what, episode six?”
“Shit,” Aaron says.
“How much of it have you watched?” Steph asks, leaning on the back of the couch and grinning down at him.
Aaron looks sheepish. “Remember how I said I’d find the most appropriate moments in the tepid movies and stuff they give us and, uh, keep hitting the ten seconds back button? Well there’s this bit in the middle of the first season where she’s trying a new move and, you know, she’s nervous and she didn’t have time to practise because she had to break up with her boyfriend and he took off in the big Jeep with the stupid horn, and the other guy, the one from the band with the hair, he drove her home but the car broke down so they were out all night, and so she’s really tired as well, and the head cheerleader has it out for her because she’s so pretty and she’s also really small and light and easy to throw. Anyway, she’s doing the move at the top of the pyramid and at the last moment the head cheerleader deliberately fumbles the hold and the girl, Madison, she has to support herself on just one foot, so she pushes off from the other girl holding her up because the other girl’s clearly starting to struggle and she does this triple flip and lands perfectly, like, practically en pointe, a full-on Olympic gymnast landing, and the head cheerleader is so pissed off and it’s just so emotionally satisfying.” Steph and Pippa give him the silence he needs to hang himself. “And right after that the head cheerleader attacks her in the locker room while they’re only wearing underwear. I love angry women.”
“Never doubted you for a second, Aaron,” Steph says. “You two hungry? Fancy screaming up the stairs about neglect until someone brings us something to eat?”
* * *
Dorothy’s putting on a show. For the benefit of whom, Valérie doesn’t know. It can’t be Declan, since the boy is still largely unresponsive. The closest he’s come to a glimmer of life since the first day, when he told her his name, was earlier tonight when she was dressing him and applying his makeup; he caught a glimpse of his reflection and she saw the disgust in his eyes. He looked away quickly, looked down at himself, seemed briefly to register his breast implants and the clothes he’d been put in, and then that was it. Val’s seen this in many girls before, and she had to press down on the urge to help him, to tell him to fight it, to warn him that self-hatred is the very thing Dorothy desires from him, but he’s not like the other girls she’s known and she’s doing her best to remember that. To see them in him is to do their memories a disservice. If he really is a serial rapist, he and Dorothy deserve each other.
But Dorothy doesn’t want him just yet. She summoned him up to her room and he returned too quickly for her to have gained much satisfaction from the experience.
It’s possible Dorothy’s throwing this dinner to show off for the guards, Callum and the other one, the bulky ex-soldiers from Silver River Solutions, but it’s not especially likely. (And that’s one of the pieces of highly useless knowledge Valérie has acquired over the years: she doesn’t know why those portable phones need such large, glowing screens, or if the hole in the ozone layer was ever dealt with, but she knows about the late Smyth-Farrow’s private military company and its habit of scooping up disillusioned ex-soldiers in the wake of Britain’s every failed military endeavour, of which she understands there have been several.) And Dorothy’s not in the habit of lavishly entertaining Frankie or any of her other remaining underlings.
So it’s either for Val herself — unsettling; it suggests the old bitch is renewing her efforts to get under her skin — or it’s purely for Dorothy’s own satisfaction.
The dinner’s spaghetti bolognese, or the bastard English imitation of it, prepared by Valérie to a recipe she was provided, and when she returned to her room to clean and dress Declan she understood the point of it immediately: the boy is to fail to eat his meal tidily, and Dorothy will have her petty little fun nitpicking his table manners and forcing him to change his white shirt in front of everyone.
Good luck to her. Val had to hold his arms out herself when she put it on him.
Stenordale Manor, Valérie’s prison for the last thirty years and the main building on the Smyth-Farrow estate, has no fewer than four dining rooms, all grandly appointed, all festooned with trinkets and oddments and valuables, all an absolute arsehole to keep clean and all far too large for such a small gathering. Val instead deposited Declan in his seat in the private dining room on the first floor, near the main bedrooms, took a moment to sneer at the other preparations — napkins and table ornaments artlessly arranged, no doubt by one of the soldiers — and returned to the kitchen to check on the ragu and start cooking the spaghetti and preparing the garlic bread.
Callum’s there again, watching her from the doorway. She hopes his balls are still sore.
“I’m watching you, Vincent,” he says. Marvellous; he’s back to using her old name against her. She rolls her eyes and is about to retort when her salvation arrives in the unlikely and unwelcome form of Frankie, hanging up her raincoat on the hooks by the main kitchen door and shaking out her damp hair.
“Fuck off out of here, Callum,” Frankie says.
“I’m to keep an eye on him.”
“No-one cares. You think she’s going to stab me or something?” She waves a hand in Val’s direction. “I’d never get to taste her spag bol then, and she worked so hard on it. Piss off, Callum.”
The man sneers at both of them, shakes his head and leaves without a word, and Val can’t quite suppress her smirk. He’s reverted to type after she rejected him and his ‘help’, and as much as it would have been nice to believe that someone with an actual conscience had filtered through into Dorothy’s service, Valérie is not so naive. He was either acting on orders to get close to her, or he wanted a fuck. Either way she’s pleased to have denied him.
“No need to thank me,” Frankie says. “I hate those blokes. Give me the fucking creeps.”
“Is that because you can’t take their will from them?” Val asks, leaning on the counter and glancing at the timer on the oven. “Can’t make them into facsimiles of women just for fun?”
“Val, my darling,” Frankie says lazily, running fingers through wet hair, shaping it, “I’ve lived out in the world for fifteen years; you’d be amazed how many men I’ve encountered who still have both testicles.”
Valérie laughs and hates herself for it.
She does actually threaten Frankie with one of the kitchen knives when she offers to help load up the cart, but Frankie ignores her and starts getting things ready, leaving Val standing there with her weapon out feeling like an idiot. She puts it away after a couple of seconds and makes herself busy with the final preparations, and when she turns around again Frankie’s got the warming tray set up on the cart. She shrugs and plates out the food and doesn’t even comment when Frankie takes it over and sets it all out on the tray. And then they’re done: Val takes off her apron and smooths down her uniform; Frankie throws her shoulder bag on and disappears into the pantry for a moment, handing Val four bottles of wine to place on the cart and returning for more.
They wheel the food to the tiny elevator in silence.
She doesn’t know Frankie all that well. Back at Dorley she was in charge of Dee, and took a gentler hand with her than Karen had with Val, but that means little; almost all Dorothy’s minions were gentler than Karen. And she risked herself — not much, but a little — so Val and Dee could say goodbye on the night Val was taken from Dorley for good.
But then she was also in charge of Dee, which means that whatever Dee’s ultimate fate — and Val has no illusions as to what it must have been — she was the one who took that fierce and rebellious young man to his breaking point and beyond, just to satisfy whatever unpleasant urges put her in Dorothy’s employ in the first place. And it means that she’s just as responsible for Dee’s death.
So sending the guard away, calling Val by her name, helping her in the kitchen; none of that seems out of character. But she’s not kind, or she wouldn’t have done what she did to Dee.
She’s sentimental. Val nods to herself; sentimentality is the compassion of the cruel. She used to see it in Smyth-Farrow: the softening of the eyes, the tone of indulgent mercy, the occasional offers to take the night off, to rest, to recover. All so she would be ready, come morning, for the indignities and insults to begin anew. Never a kindness without purpose. She wonders what Frankie’s might be, and laughs to herself: maybe she wants a fuck, too.
“What?” Frankie says, frowning at Val as the lift judders its way slowly up a single storey, her broad Essex accent flattening the vowel and making Val laugh again; Dorothy, the snob, must have been desperate to go calling on her least-favoured sycophant, the one who never quite fit in.
She doesn’t answer, and the doors open onto the first floor and it’s time to lay the table.
* * *
Someone, bless their heart, brought a patio heater up to the roof and installed it under the tarp in the centre, plugged into a weatherproof socket Christine hadn’t known was there. And because December is really starting to bite, they’re all clustered there, on the beaten-up couches and the plastic lawn chairs and whatever else they can find to sit on. Their little movie night exploded out of the bounds of Abby’s room and had to be moved to the fifth-floor common area, and now they’ve decamped to the roof they’re surrounded by people from what Christine still thinks of as the cis floors — although she shouldn’t, not with Ren and several other nonbinary people living there — and circumspection is required, reducing Christine’s contingent to whispers.
She doesn’t mind. Paige is perched with her bottom on the back of one of the couches, facing out across the campus, and Christine’s nestled in her arms. The enforced intimacy just makes what they have, the secrets they share, feel all the more special.
There’s music playing on someone’s phone, pushing the built-in speakers almost to distortion, and Paige is swaying in time, carrying Christine with her. Pizza-plump and content, Christine feels like nothing could make this evening better.
“I can’t believe Shrek died on his way back to his home planet,” Paige says, resting her chin in Christine’s hair.
“Were you even watching the movie?”
“Not really. I remember the donkey.”
“This is a university, Paige,” Christine says. “You need to pay attention; you’re here to learn.”
“I couldn’t help being distracted,” Paige says. “There was something in my lap.” She kisses the top of Christine’s head. “Something warm—” another kiss, “—and sweet—” and another, “—and about five nine. She occupied all my attention.”
Christine wriggles to dislodge Paige’s grip, so she can turn in her arms and look up at her. “She sounds interesting, this mystery person.”
“She is. And her lip gloss tastes—” another kiss, this time on the lips, “—like cherries. I would very much like to spend more time with her. In private.” Paige leans down so her lips are next to Christine’s ear, and in the winter night Christine experiences her hot breath as a wave of ecstasy that ripples down her spine and swells up inside her. “Alone,” Paige whispers, “Without Shrek.”
Giggling, warm for reasons that have nothing to do with the patio heater, Christine grabs Paige’s hand and drags her out from under the tarp, towards the door that leads back down into the building. Paige waves to their friends on her behalf, but Christine gathers up what remains of her attention to check on Abby, to make sure she’s okay, and she is: she’s sitting with Indira and Hasan and Tabby and Monica, and she’s smiling like she’s sharing a joke. Thus reassured, Christine puts all other concerns to the back of her mind as they hurry down the main stairs to the third-year corridor, and Paige’s room, and Paige’s bed.
There’s a moment, late in the night, when Paige is tired and lying flat on her back, hair splayed out around her and belly arched in an exhausted but contented stretch, when Christine’s looking down on her, damp with sweat and aching from exertion and with her cherry lip gloss no doubt smeared across her cheek, when everything is just absolutely perfect, when Christine can’t stop herself from saying, “I love you, Paige.”
With a broad smile and a deep breath, Paige replies, “I love you, too,” and then she runs her still-wet fingers up Christine’s chin and into her mouth, draws her down to her, and begins anew.
* * *
They cleared Melissa out a room on the second floor in the end, so she and Shahida wouldn’t have to share washing facilities with the second years, and the only downside there is that the rooms aren’t as thoroughly soundproofed as the ones on first, so Melissa, Shahida and Rachel hear the giggling couple as they burst roughly through the door from the main stairway and, after a few moments of lip-smacking, slam another door with such gusto that Rachel laughs.
“How gay is this place?” she asks.
Melissa exchanges a look with Shahida. “Rach,” she says, “it’s so incredibly gay, all the time.”
Shahida snorts.
Melissa’s room is bare but comfortable. It’s around the corner from the others, opposite the kitchen and thus only just inside the zone of activity on the otherwise almost empty second floor. Most of the rooms nearby are storerooms, full of junk so old Tabby said they don’t even have inventory for most of it, but some, like hers, were lying empty, with just an empty bedframe and a couple of chairs. An IKEA visit later — “Not just for your benefit,” Tabby said, when she was helping Melissa, Monica and Jane haul everything into place. “We’ve been meaning to start furnishing these rooms, anyway.” — and it’s cosy enough, with a couch, a dresser, a rug and a mountain of throw pillows. The walls are still bare white and the only bedside tables are Melissa and Shahida’s suitcases, but the ensuite is nice and the bed fits three and the door, crucially, locks.
There’s a laptop open on a chair by the bed, showing a movie, but none of them are paying any attention.
“Is it really okay if I stay here tonight?” Rachel asks.
“As long as you—”
“—obey the rules, I know. Cool.”
“Your wife’s okay with you staying out?” Shahida says.
“Of course!” Rachel says, grinning and poking at her. “We’re kind of open, anyway, but she knows I’m just visiting old friends. And, no, she doesn’t know I’m still on the Saints campus. I just said you live in Almsworth.”
“Thanks, Rach,” Melissa says.
“I still don’t get the secrecy, though!” Rachel says, pouting. One of the sponsors came around with wine as they were finishing their dinner, and Rachel’s had just enough to be loquacious. “This place is weird, sure, but—”
“Weird how?”
Rachel shrugs. “I dunno. It’s a dorm but there are women here in their thirties.”
“Grad students.”
“And everyone seems really close.”
“Grad students who’ve lived here a long time.”
“Liss, be straight with me.” Rachel sits up in the bed and crosses her arms. “Everyone here’s like you, right? Trans? I mean, I wouldn’t have guessed, but there’s you, there’s obviously Steph, and there’s this whole air of secrecy… It’s all I could think of.”
Melissa almost groans. Steph and Pippa had come up from the basement, looking for food to take back downstairs, and Rachel had been looking right at them when they emerged. And that meant Steph coming over to say hi and Melissa having to indicate as clearly as she could without actually saying it that Rachel’s clearance is emphatically not the same as Shahida’s clearance. They got away with it, she’s pretty sure, but Steph, while beautiful, is also quite early in transition and thus her presence, taken together with Melissa’s own history and Lorna, who helpfully talked Rachel through the process of voice therapy because Rach was obviously curious, becomes rather suggestive.
Another cock-up. She has to get better at this.
She shares another look with Shahida, who rolls her eyes and with a slight tip of her shoulder silently communicates, Whatever you say is up to you.
“Yeah,” Melissa says, after affecting a moment’s hesitation. It’s probably the best thing for her to believe; it plays directly to Rachel’s queer solidarity. “The people here are trans. And you’re not supposed to know that, Rach. So you have to keep the secret. And—” she adds, interrupting Rachel before she can finish formulating a reply, “—it’s not everyone in the whole building, okay? Just this floor and the floors below. Most of the people you’re likely to see in the kitchen or the dining hall are transgender. On the third floor and up, if they’re trans it’s just a coincidence. But they’re trans like me, Rach; they don’t have other homes to go to. Some of them have pretty awful pasts, and they came here to escape and start again. Remember what almost happened to me?”
“Yes,” Rachel says quietly.
“Tip of the iceberg.”
“Which is why we don’t want you asking people random questions,” Shahida says, taking Rachel’s hand. “The women here seem close because they are, but also because a lot of them don’t have anyone else.”
“You’re a guest in a safe space,” Melissa says, and her stomach clenches at the irony.
“So,” Shahida says, keeping up the momentum, “you see why all the secrecy? You see why it’s so important?”
Rachel nods slowly. “So what’s with the kidnapping jokes, then?”
“What?”
“I heard, like, five, just over dinner. One girl, that one in the stripy socks and the cat ear hoodie, said to her friend, and I quote—” Rachel stares upwards, the way she does when she’s remembering something exactly, “—’No, you can’t have my baked potato, I earned that potato, I was a good girl for that potato, I spent a whole year in an underground prison for that potato, I was kidnapped off the streets of Basingstoke for that potato, I was castrated for that potato, get your own, slut.’”
Melissa closes her eyes and groans.
“How do you do that?” Shahida asks.
“You know what I do for a living,” Rachel says. “I had to learn how to remember stuff. Anyway, then another girl at the table held up her potato, said, ‘Castrato,’ and laughed so hard she nearly choked on her dinner.”
“It’s an inside joke,” Melissa says. “So many of us don’t see our families any more — by design — that it’s become kind of a meme that we were kidnapped.”
“So,” Shahida says, nodding enthusiastically, “if you happen to see any, say, novelty mugs with jokes to that effect on them—”
“—it’s just the meme,” Melissa finishes.
Rachel doesn’t look convinced, but to Melissa’s relief she moves on. “Speaking of family,” she says, “what are we going to do about Amy? About Russ? About your dad?”
“Forget her dad,” Shahida says quickly, covering for Melissa’s probably obvious anxiety spike. “He hit her when she was just a kid. As far as he’s concerned, Melissa doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah,” Melissa says heavily. And she doesn’t want her father looking into things here. Shahida’s adjusted remarkably quickly because she’s attached to her, is ecstatic to have her alive and back in her life; her dad doesn’t have that kind of investment. Moreover, she’s willing to bet he’d prefer her to detransition, and her refusal would probably… radicalise him. He needs to stay in the dark. Forever.
“That complicates telling Russ, though,” Rachel says.
“Yeah,” Shahida agrees.
They sit in silence for a moment, until Rachel says, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring the mood down.”
“It’s fine,” Melissa says. “I have to think about this shit sooner or later. Maybe we can do a trial run with Amy? Work out a way to bring her in without… well, without fucking everything up.”
Rachel nods, and leans over Shahida to take Melissa’s hand, apologising again. “How about we hash it out on Consensus? And not think about it any more tonight?”
“That sounds good.” Melissa’s unable to keep the relief from her voice.
“It’ll be okay, Em,” Shahida says.
“We’ll help you,” Rachel says.
“I love you two,” Melissa says, resting her head on Shahida’s shoulder. “I really do.”
Melissa and Rachel are still holding hands, and Shahida reaches down, takes their joined hands in hers and presses them to her belly.
“We’ll make it okay,” she says.
* * *
They’ve got the common room to themselves again. Pippa ate with them, and Adam, Martin, Edy and Pamela stayed in the room long enough to polish off their baked potatoes, with Pamela complaining to Martin in her soft, deep alto that some idiot gave them butter replacement instead of butter — Martin, astonishingly, responded like a human being, laughing lightly and suggesting she add more salt — but now it’s just them, just him and Steph, lying on the bean bags spread out in front of the TV and propped up enough that they hopefully won’t get stomach aches, and for the last five minutes of the last episode of season two of Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues, after Madison Blue finally told her twin sister Melody she never wants to see her again after Melody slept with the musician and Madison caught them together in Melody’s bedroom, Aaron’s tentatively been holding Steph’s hand.
Her fingers are so damn soft.
And it doesn’t matter when she cues up season three on her phone that he’s stopped paying attention to the screen, because all his thoughts are tied up in his connection to her and he’s seen up to season four, episode six, anyway. Although it is kind of funny that ever since she stopped pretending to be one of the boys, stopped pretending that she’s not getting preferential treatment — and there’s no more rancour left in that thought because she absolutely deserves it — she’s been revealing more and more of her special access. Yes, she can leave the basement any time she wants, as long as she’s careful not to let anyone who shouldn’t know about that see her, and he’s known that for a little while; what shocked him is that she can not only control the common room TV, she can play anything from her own personal library, which she has assured him is a considerable subset of the Hall’s vast media collection. She could probably put porn up on the screen.
But she put on Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues, because she’s hooked now.
“Do they ever start talking to each other again?” she asks, and he realises he’s been fixated on her hand, on their point of contact, on the place her consent for him, her desire for his presence, is confirmed in four long, graceful fingers and one thumb that she’s let the nail grow out on a bit. He looks up, resisting the temptation to take his time about it, to linger on her shallow curves, and finds her with wet eyes and a trembling lip.
He replays what she said and glances up at the TV to check where they are; paused a couple of minutes in to the first episode of season three. “Yes,” he says firmly. “They do. They don’t hate each other for long.”
“Good,” she says, nodding, her head making little crunching noises in the bean bag. “Good.”
She has a younger sister, he remembers. One she had to leave behind to come here. One she doesn’t expect to see again for a long time. “They work it out,” he says, aware he’s sort of repeating himself.
“Good,” Steph says again, and then seems to come back from wherever it was the stupid fucking cheerleader show sent her. She laughs lightly, and Aaron feels the vibration of it through his fingers, through her hand, through the faintest of contact with her hip. “Sorry, Aaron. Very wet of me.”
He doesn’t laugh with her, but he smiles, and he wants her to smile, too, and it makes his voice gentle. “Yes,” he says, trying briefly to sound serious and failing, “very wet of you. You should be punished. Do you know anyone with a torture basement?”
“Don’t be silly,” she says. “Those’re a myth.”
He rolls over, summons all his confidence, and wipes at her damp cheek with the back of his finger. “Seriously, Steph, are you okay?”
And she rolls over herself to face him, forcing him to release her hand and interlinks her fingers in front of her chest. “Just thinking. You know. Sister stuff. Thinking about Petra. Thinking how unfair of me it was to just leave her alone like that, how I could be doing important big brother shit like helping her with her homework—”
“You’re not a big brother, Steph,” Aaron says sharply.
“I know, but she doesn’t know that. She doesn’t know she’s got a sister at all. And I was kind of watching this stupid show and laughing at how ridiculous everything is and then the sisters fell out and I didn’t realise how much I was invested in their relationship. And I’m—” she smiles, just a little, at the corners of her mouth, and it’s heartbreaking to see her so uncertain, “—not really ready to think all that hard about family stuff. About sister stuff. Because then I start second-guessing everything and worrying if I’m weak or a coward or—”
“Steph. You’re none of those things. You were in an impossible situation.” She’s told him parts of it, and with Maria’s help — and her reminders that Steph is not exactly inclined to paint her own actions in a generous light, especially when her emotions get the best of her — he’s put the rest of it together. “Maria says the NHS waiting lists are over five years now, and you said yourself you didn’t even have enough cash to buy yourself a slice of cake on your birthday, let alone buy hormones online. Coming here was your best option.” He reaches for her again, lays his hand on her upper arm, slowly slides it down, stroking her skin as lightly as he knows how, until he can place his hand between hers, pry apart her fingers, break open her tension, and take her hand again. “And that’s me saying that, and you know what a fun time I’ve had here.” Her smile broadens momentarily, and then deepens, drags her brows into a frown, and he interrupts whatever self-hating bullshit she’s about to throw at him. “Don’t say whatever you were about to say, Steph. I know you feel guilty. I know you feel all sorts of dumb shit. But, look, fuck it, okay?”
Steph snorts. “Fuck it?” she says, her eyes creasing up.
“Fuck it,” he confirms. He wants to reach out and smooth over the wrinkle between her eyebrows. “What, you thought I had a big speech ready? I don’t think that far ahead, Stephanie. But that’s my honest opinion: fuck it. Don’t worry about shit, you know? Just lie back and let it happen. Your sister will get to know you again soon enough, and I’m doing okay, too.” It’s close enough to the truth to not count as a lie. Because he’s coping. Just still working on actually wanting all of this, because he’s not a girl. Not yet, his inner Maria points out. “And also, Steph, I need you here. I do. I’m calling dibs on you, over Petra. She’s got your parents. I’ve just got you. And Maria. And if all this unstoppable shit is going to keep happening to me, I need your help to be okay with it. To see a way through.”
Her frown’s back, and she’s going to say something stupid about how he’s not trans. Which, no, he’s fucking not, but as has been established a hundred times, that’s not the bloody point.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”
2003 July 19
Saturday
It’s sweltering. They say there’s a heatwave coming, and she can believe it; it’s probably still over twenty-five even now, with the evening well underway, and the room above the King’s Head is packed and sweating.
Not long until it starts.
Bea’s got a front-row seat, next to Teri, but she doesn’t want to sit down yet, because that would make it real, make it immediate, and she’s done so well not to cry up until now. She also feels inappropriately well-dressed, and wishes she had time to run back home to get something shabbier; except she has nothing like that any more. Elle gave her access to a personal shopper and a line of credit that may as well have been infinite and Beatrice went a little crazy. She smiles, remembering Linda’s reaction to the hip-hugging, indulgently expensive red silk gown she wore for her once; the woman had quite literally bounced up and down, before insisting the five of them go somewhere classy, somewhere Bea’s red dress would fit in, somewhere extraordinary. And then Susan got involved in the conversation and they ended up going bowling, and while she’d been tempted to wear the dress to All Star Lanes she couldn’t bear the thought of damaging it; jeans all round.
Elle laughed when she related the story, weeks later. “You should have worn it, Beatrice. Shown all those boorish men throwing their heavy balls around what they’re missing.” And Bea had gotten drawn into another one of Elle’s lavish evenings and the dress was forgotten.
She lingers.
The King’s Head, their irregular haunt for the last few years, agreed to throw the bash, to rent them their gathering space for the evening almost for free, and as it fills up it’s easy to believe that the entire queer community of North East London is here, and some from beyond, too; Bea spots Dahlia exchanging hugs with Teri, near where Beatrice is supposed to be, and catches her eye. They smile at each other, the way people do at times like these, and then Dahlia continues her rounds and Bea continues lurking near the entrance, in the pool of shadow created by the busted wall light. Watching.
They ran into each other a few months ago, downstairs in the pub, and she asked Dahlia what it was like, being post-op. The woman was full of enthusiasm, suggesting Bea stop by the next time she’s in Cambridge and take her for a test drive. Bea had to explain that she doesn’t get up there much any more, that she passed most of her regulars on to Arabella, and that her boss has her working out of London and Almsworth.
“Ah, your unknown benefactor,” Dahlia had said, winking at Bea and making a suggestive two-finger gesture.
Here’s Dahlia now, actually, jolting Bea out of her memories and sharing a quick cheek kiss with her. But she’s not here for her, and Bea realises why a moment later when Dahlia takes the arm of a tall and very thin person in a suit tailored for a man one-third-again their width.
“Cynthia?” Dahlia says, and the person — Cynthia, Bea corrects herself, because when Dahlia says her name Bea suddenly recognises the hesitant and very new woman who’s been coming by the pub recently — starts, and then relaxes into a nervous smile.
“Hi, Dahls,” Cynthia says, in a husky, sweet-sounding voice. “How are you holding up? It’s all so—” But her voice breaks and she can’t sustain it any more.
“Sshh, Cynthia,” Dahlia whispers. “Sshh.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just… I’m here. And I’m like this.”
“You didn’t have to come like this, Cyn.”
“I did. I have… nothing black in my wardrobe. It’s all… Fuck. You know what it’s all like.”
“Hey,” Dahlia says urgently, “hey, it’s okay. Why don’t you come with me? Joy and I brought some things. We’ll find you something.”
Cynthia can’t hold the tears any more, and she collapses into Dahlia’s arms. “Oh, God,” she gasps, “thank you! I didn’t want to say goodbye like this, but…”
Dahlia shushes her again and starts leading her towards one of the side rooms. She shares another smile with Bea and then they’re shut behind the door, whatever they’re saying to each other lost in the quiet but insistent hubbub.
Everyone loved Linda.
The funeral was elsewhere. Across the city. None of them went.
When it starts, when Beatrice finally takes her seat next to Teri, when Cynthia’s come stumbling out of the back room in a tasteful black dress and heels considerably lower than the last ones Bea saw her in, when the plastic chairs have all filled up and all the empty spaces by the windows and on the piled-up DJ equipment at the back have been taken, it’s Ashley who speaks first.
“I couldn’t,” Teri whispers, as Ashley climbs the trestle-table stage, “I just couldn’t.”
“This is not a funeral,” Ashley says, outwardly confident but gripping the microphone stand so hard her knuckles are white. “We don’t do those here. We never have. Funerals are for the straights, and they had theirs earlier today. They buried someone who died decades ago, and they took back his home and they put his name on a stone, and right now they’re wailing and weeping and wondering why he never wanted to see their boring, ugly faces, and not one of them has thought to ask us why that is. And that’s probably a good thing, because we’d tell them—” she leans closer to the microphone, “—the man they think they remember has been dead a long time.” She leans away from the mic to sniff. “That sort of thing tends to upset them.”
The audience laughs softly. There’s a tension in Ash’s voice, and it doesn’t all come from Linda’s death; Linda’s old family are legally manoeuvring to take back the house.
“This is not a funeral,” Ashley repeats, “because Linda doesn’t need burying or burning or putting out to sea. She doesn’t want it. She was very clear on that. She told me so herself, she said, ‘Ashley Spratt, if I catch any of you standing maudlin and miserable around a big hole in the ground I will march right back down there and clip all of you behind the ear.’” More laughter. It swells and ebbs as people catch hold of themselves for just long enough to laugh.
“This is not a funeral,” Ashley says, “because she wouldn’t let anyone be sad for long, and certainly not for a whole evening. If she were here now, tonight, she’d be up on the stage telling us pages one through fifty of the joke book, or she’d be running the bar table and writing silly little puns on the plastic cups, or she’d be going from row to row, cheering each of us up in the way only she knew how. And she could do that. Because she knew us. She knew all of us, and she loved us, and what could we do but return the favour as best we knew how?”
She turns around, picks up from the stage a bottle of peach schnapps and a mug, and Bea’s already smiling despite herself because she knows which mug that is; Linda showed it to her with great delight a few years ago, said it was a present from a girl she helped navigate the complicated and unpleasant NHS transition process. Ashley turns back to the audience, unscrews the bottle and with great ceremony fills the mug almost to the brim.
“This is not a funeral,” she says, and despite her shaking hands, despite the way her cheeks glisten wet, despite her reddening eyes, she grins broadly and wildly. “Because funerals are sober affairs, and I intend to get very, very drunk.” Someone in the crowd cheers, and there’s a moment of silence before a few more people pick it up. Ashley waits for it to peter out before continuing, theatrically tapping her foot on the stage.
“Linda was special. Linda was kind. Linda helped all of us here in some way or other. So let’s celebrate her life the way she would have done, by getting absolutely, monumentally, disgustingly plastered.” She takes a long sip from her mug and makes as if to step off the stage, and then turns back to the microphone. “Oh, yes,” she says, leaning into the mic again, “I forgot something. I forgot to gloat!” A couple of people in the front row jeer. Bea looks around Teri and sees Susan and another girl laughing and making rude gestures at the stage; this was undoubtedly planned. “Linda might have been generous to all of you, not that most of you degenerates deserved it…” She looks around the room, pausing to build tension. “But she left me her most prized possession, because I’m the only person suitably equipped to inherit it!” She holds up her mug of schnapps and turns it around, so the text — in bold black-on-white type — is visible and the little cartoon is clear. Some people at the front are already laughing, but Ashley reads it aloud for the benefit of those at the back, running her finger along the letters as she goes. “It says, ‘I cheated on my Real-Life Test—’” she shifts the mug to her other hand, and with her free hand she cups and bounces one of her ample breasts, “‘—and the examiner gave me a double D!’”
The cheering starts up again, and then someone claps and a few others join in, and within moments the room is filled with noise. On the stage, Ashley drains the mug, curtseys with a final smile, and carefully climbs back down. Sammy, Bea’s old flatmate, takes Ashley’s place, and ey launches straight into a speech about the first time ey met Linda, back at the club where ey and Bea both used to work, and how by the end of the night Linda was dancing on the stage with the queens and attempting spins on Sammy’s pole.
“Not that pole,” ey says, waggling eir eyebrows. Bea shouts something rude at the stage and Sammy shows her eir middle finger.
Others take the stage in turn, their speeches becoming less and less comprehensible as the room in general becomes more inebriated. Beatrice, one of the last to speak, has kept herself relatively sober, but still she chooses to sit on the stage rather than attempt to stand. Susan, bless her, hops up behind her and retrieves the microphone, hands it over, and returns to her seat, her girlfriend and her drink, and Bea holds the mic close to her mouth and speaks quietly.
“A friend of mine, a close friend, long gone but never forgotten, she showed me how to… how to be a girl. Times were different then. It was the eighties, and people were more cruel and more ignorant. It was… a matter of survival for both of us. She figured it out first and I—” she looks out into the room, and with the lights dimmed she can see Teri and Ashley watching her, hands held, unsteady smiles on their faces, “—I followed her. I would have followed her anywhere; to follow her into womanhood was an easy choice.” She laughs cynically. “That’s not to say it wasn’t a choice that took me a while to make.”
This is more than almost anyone in the room has heard about her past, and it feels dangerous to share this way. But while she’s not falling-down drunk she’s both talkative and riding the high of so many people speaking so generously and with such love, and for once she wants to drop her guard and speak. To be known.
Thirty-eight years old and no-one since Val has ever really known her. Except, sometimes, Linda. Linda who saw things but never pried. Linda who knew how important secrets could be. Linda who welcomed her into her family without prejudice or hesitation. Linda and Teri; almost mothers to her. Ash; almost a sister.
“But that was what I had to do to survive,” she continues. “I had to be a girl. And then I escaped. Lived rough for a while. A very short while, in the scheme of things. Because Teri and Linda found me, and saw immediately who I was, because I was not good at woodworking in those days.”
Someone shouts that they call it ‘going stealth’ now, and another wave of laughter rolls gentle over the audience.
“My friend showed me how to be a girl, but Linda and Teri showed me that it could be fun. That there is a joy and a freedom in… in this. And they also taught me how to dress myself, and how to talk without constantly losing my voice like a teenager, and that was useful, too.
“Linda would always take me aside. Ask how I was. Ask if there was anything she could do. But she wasn’t just relentlessly practical; although she was, and I think all of us here know that. She cared about me. She was interested in me. She was even interested in what I did, even though she didn’t exactly approve.” Someone at the back wolf-whistles, so she adds, in a deeper and quieter voice, “You could not afford me, sweetheart.”
More laughter. Beatrice allows it to embrace her.
She leans back on one hand, looks around the audience again. “When I was a child, I had my mother. And then, for the shortest, cruellest time, I had my friend; the woman I think I loved.” She shakes her head. “And then, for the last fifteen years, I’ve had Linda and Teri and Ashley. Because that’s the other thing she showed me.” She wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “She showed me that if you don’t have a family of your own any more, you go out there and you bloody well make one.”
And that’s all she can do. Carefully she lays the microphone on the trestle table and hops down, staggering a little before two pairs of arms catch her and steady her and she doesn’t have to hold herself up any more, doesn’t have to try, because she and Teri and Ashley are united, together in grief, together in love.
Right there, she decides. Time to be known.
“I want you to come stay with me,” she whispers as they embrace.
Teri says, “We can’t possibly impose—”
“I insist,” she says. “The last thing you need right now is to have to deal with rental agreements and transphobic landlords and all that.”
“You’re really sure?” In Ashley’s voice Beatrice hears hope.
“I’m sure. I’ve got the space for both of you. I have two apartments, you know.”
“Yes,” Teri says. “Your mysterious new job.”
“I’ll tell you about that,” Bea says, sure suddenly that this is the right move, because without Linda in their lives Teri and Ashley will more than ever need security, safety and certainty, and that’s something she can now, finally, provide. “I’ll tell you everything. What I’ve been doing. What I’m going to do. Where I come from. All of it.”
“All of it?” Ashley asks.
God, she hopes she’s not making a mistake.
“All of it.”
2019 December 16
Monday
He can’t believe she let him kiss her before. He can’t believe he was bold enough to try it, but he’s a new man now — or something — and he’s been trying to lay down a few grounding principles, one of the most key being: take what you want (but get permission first). He’s had so many wants in life and indulged mainly the most base, the wants that didn’t challenge him, the wants that bubbled up from the sewer of disgust and wounded pride and a helpless, instinctive, brutal emulation of the masculinity of the ones who hurt him.
So it had been time to try something new. To establish that this new person, whoever he becomes, isn’t simply defined by the things he chooses not to do. It had been time to kiss the girl. And she kissed him back and even the small part of him that couldn’t believe he was kissing what an even smaller part of him, the part of him he’s trying actively to smother, still saw uncharitably and unrealistically as a boy, or at the very least a girl incomplete, revelled in it.
But it was just a kiss.
This is more.
In his room, he takes a little control. Maybe he’s going to be the sort of person who does that, who directs their lover, who holds her down and asks questions with their eyes and receives answers in smiles and kisses and the grateful and joyful return of touch. He flexes his fingers in hers and reaches up to kiss her, finding her just out of reach; maybe his height will be something the person he becomes will learn to work around.
She’s teasing him. She’s overcome her initial hesitation, born of confusion and of a mood switched quick, and now she’s teasing him, standing on her toes, making him work for every centimetre of distance between their mouths, but he can fucking deal with that, can’t he? He can keep hold of her hands and keep pushing her firmly until the backs of her legs meet the edge of his bed and she buckles, falls, carries him with her, returns to him the initiative.
There she is in front of him, below him, in his power, pinned with both hands, flushed and looking up at him with an expression he never thought he’d see directed at him. And then she goes and doubles down and bites her lip, a gesture he’s never been able to cope with on her, even back when he thought she was someone else entirely; when he thought he was, too.
She uses his hold on her to pull herself up and kiss him quickly, holds herself there for just long enough for him to open his mouth and then drops away, leaving him waiting, leaving him wanting.
He can’t let her get away with that!
But when he tries to unlink their hands, to regain his advantage, he can’t. She’s holding him still, keeping him where she wants him, and the thought of it ignites him almost as much as the sight of her.
And she can see it in him, too.
He’s never felt so totally and completely vulnerable. He shakes with it.
“I love you, Steph,” he says, because it’s obvious but it still needs to be said because it’s also incredible, it’s ridiculous, it’s revelatory. It’s everything.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah you fucking do.”
And in the silence before she laughs at his indignant expression, before her giggles spill over into more kisses, before she twists her fingers to break his grip, before she reaches up and takes his body in her arms and turns him over easily and quickly, before she climbs on top of him and compresses his thighs between hers, before she reaches into his underwear and takes what’s left of him in gentle and insistent fingers, before she takes back the control he never really fucking wanted anyway, there’s the quiet but distinctive click of the cameras switching off.
* * *
“I hate that fucking woman.”
“Really? ’Cause you hide it so well.”
“Please. If Dorothy Marsden hasn’t learned by now to expect raw hatred from the boy whose parents she murdered then she doesn’t deserve this beautiful house. Which she doesn’t.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“Funny that you say ‘boy’ and not ‘man’.”
“See a lot of man in me, Frankie?”
“No. No, not really.”
“Good. Now help me with the door.”
Dinner with Dorothy had been an obscenity, an end-to-end celebration of the ancient woman’s disgusting habits. Valérie was right: the choice of dish was motivated entirely by Dorothy’s desire to see Declan spill it all over himself and his ridiculous catholic school girl outfit, thus providing an excuse for her to manhandle him, to coddle him, to treat him as a girlchild and thus, it was clearly her hope, to awaken in him the masculine self-loathing she desires so much.
And when Declan barely responded, Dorothy hesitated only a second before making her touches more and more intimate, until even Frankie had had enough, slamming her wine glass on the table and asking her boss if she wants the boy to be non-functional forever.
It was as if Dorothy had forgotten everything she knew about torturing men, Frankie said. If you send them somewhere you can’t follow them, then where’s the fun in that?
A dangerous few seconds passed, and Val had wondered if she was about to see the old bitch lose her temper, but she calmed herself, smoothed down Declan’s rumpled clothes, and returned to her seat to finish her dinner.
Val remembers Callum and the other soldier relaxing, their shoulders dropping, as if under the table they’d taken their hands off their guns and batons.
Dorothy spent the rest of the evening needling Valérie instead, to the amusement of the despicable Callum, and Val had responded in the only manner for which she could muster the enthusiasm: she drank as much of Dorothy’s wine as she could.
Hours later, when the remains of the meal lay congealing on their plates and the soldiers were returned to their accommodation and Dorothy’s age almost put her to sleep right at the table, Frankie and Valérie were instructed to return Declan to his room, and the unresponsive man, a difficult enough burden at the best of times, was even more sluggish when the three of them had polished off several bottles of a pretty good red.
“You sure you’ve got him?” Frankie says. “I don’t want you dropping him and giving him a concussion.”
“Lectures on tending to prisoners from you? I’m amazed you have the audacity. Yes, I’ve got him.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve got him. You get the door. Jesus of Nazareth, there’s nothing to him; how can he weigh so much?”
“Big bones, I s’pose.”
“Bones’ll be all that’s left of him if he doesn’t learn to feed himself.”
“Bring him through. I’ll hold the door. Y’know, I think he’s going to look pretty good, when the swelling goes down.”
“Good for him! Tell you what, Frances, you wait until he’s come back to his senses and then you lock yourself in a room with him and you tell him that.”
“Don’t worry, darling; you’re prettier.”
“I know. You’re not, though.”
Frankie helps her drop Declan onto the bed and then blows her a kiss. It’s a faintly obscene gesture, coming from her, and Val does the adult thing and ignores it, not just because she feels like if she does or says anything too momentous right now she might genuinely fall down.
“You wanna undress him?” Frankie asks. “Get him washed up?”
“No. Let’s just turn him on his side and leave him be.”
“What if he vomits in the night and chokes on it?”
“Lucky escape for him, then. Come on.”
There’s already snores from the bed before they’re finished quietly closing Declan’s door. The lad hadn’t had much wine at dinner, but they restricted his diet down almost to nothing while they were forcibly transitioning him, and even now he barely eats; two glasses of wine, sloppily imbibed, is clearly plenty.
It’s probably for the best. Val knows he hasn’t been sleeping well.
She doesn’t get to close her own door on everything, though, doesn’t get to shut everything out as easily as Declan just did, because Frankie, fucking Frankie, follows her into her room and drops onto the end of the bed.
“Uh, Frances?” Val says. “Don’t you have your own room?”
“It’s so far away, Val.”
“Right.”
Fuck it. Some problems require too much physical and mental coordination to solve. Val piles up her pillows against the wall, a dangerously difficult operation in her current condition, and sits down at the head of the bed, with as much distance between her and Frankie as possible. She sinks into the cushions, with relief allows them to take over the task of holding her up, and closes her eyes for a moment, hoping to find the ceiling a little more stationary when she opens them.
“Christ,” Frankie says, and Val can feel her moving cushions around, getting herself comfortable on the end of Val’s bed, “that woman just does not stop.”
“That meal,” Val says, her eyes still closed and her fingers finding reassuring purchase on the mattress, “was the most awful thing I’ve experienced in a long time. It was a two-hour masturbation session. It was pathetic. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite so much contempt for your ‘Grandmother’, Frankie.”
Val’s hoping for a rise, but doesn’t get one. “Yeah,” is all Frankie says.
Remembering Frankie’s half-hearted defence of Declan during the meal, Val says, “Tension in the ranks, then?”
“Fuck off, Val.”
“You control the doors, not me. Maybe—” she belches delicately, “—you should be the one who is to fuck off.”
“I don’t, actually. Not the exits, anyway.”
Val opens her eyes, glares at her. “Don’t lie to me. Not now.”
“I’m serious. If I want to leave I need Dotty to give me a code or a key.”
“You came in with wet hair, Frankie,” Val says. Christ, she’s tired of this song and dance.
“Yeah. I was out in the Run. Fenced in.”
The Run is a dog training space that takes up about an acre of land directly adjacent to the newest wing of the manor. It’s not been used for its original purpose the entire time Val’s been here, but the high wire fences and full surveillance setup meant she was allowed to go for walks there, to stretch her legs away from the macabre central courtyard; but not before Smyth-Farrow had the fences reinforced. He didn’t want her cutting through with a kitchen implement, he’d said, wagging his finger at her.
“Right,” Val says. “The Run.” It could be the truth. It could be another lie. What’s the difference any more? “I hate you, Frankie. I really fucking hate you. But I don’t care any more. It’s like I said to Callum, that pipsqueak soldier boy. I got his balls in my hand and I squeezed—” Frankie giggles messily, and wipes dribble from her chin, “—and I told him I don’t care. And I don’t. I really fucking don’t. ’S too much effort.”
“Want to know a secret?” Frankie whispers, too loud. “I don’t either. I’m sick of this shit. Too old for it.”
“Me also.” Valérie laughs. “I’m too old to care and you’re too old to care. So why is the only one who does care that fucking… octogenarian chaser bitch?”
Frankie hiccups. “That’s a story even I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the beginning.”
Valérie says, “Oh?” It takes her a couple of tries properly to enunciate. But this is interesting: she’s never known how far the operation at Dorley Hall went back; she always assumed the ones running it when she was captured had been together the whole time.
“I was a new hire,” Frankie says, and then she looks around, like she’s checking for surveillance, before reaching unsteadily into her bag and pulling out another bottle of wine. “If I’m going to talk about this,” she adds, patting her pockets, “I need something else to drink. Ah!” Gripping the bottle between her thighs, she pulls from a pocket in her skirt a bottle opener of the classic sort, metal with the spiked screw and the plungeable arms. She tries three times and fails three times to jam it into the cork, gives up, slumps back onto a cushion, and hands over the bottle opener. “You do it. I’m clearly too fucked up.”
Val takes it, turns it over in her hands; almost drops it. “You realise I could put your eye out with this, yes?”
Frankie snort-laughs, ejecting more spittle, which she wipes away. “Go on then,” she says. “Put me out of my misery.” She rolls her head so she’s facing Valérie directly. “Right through the eye into the brain, if you can, please.”
“Give me the bottle,” Val says. Frankie doesn’t immediately comply, so Val reaches over and yanks it out from between Frankie’s legs, which prompts another ugly laugh.
“Noooo,” Frankie says, her voice distorted by drink and mirth, “my dick.”
“Some would view that joke as being in terribly bad taste.” Val makes quick work of the cork, although she has to concentrate quite hard on the task. “You see?” she says, as Frankie produces a stack of crumpled plastic cups from her bag and, in an impressive feat of dexterity, gives Val three of them. “If you’d spent thirty years in menial servitude you wouldn’t be so bloody cack-handed.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Don’t push it.” Val’s holding the bottle between her thighs the way Frankie did, and Frankie reaches over and grabs it — laughing again, of course, in her coarse, loud manner — and pours some wine out for both of them. “Cheers,” Val says.
“Bottom’s up,” Frankie says.
Valérie, not entirely sure why she’s spending time with one of her captors but fairly certain that if she tried to kick her out they’d both end up on the floor — with Frankie likely finding the situation hilarious — drinks from her three nested plastic cups and enjoys the warmth of the wine. It tastes less bitter away from Dorothy, away from Declan and the two ex-soldiers, and it’s not hard to let her inhibitions go a little. What can Frankie do to her that she or one of the others hasn’t already? More to the point, what is Frankie physically capable of doing right now?
“You really squeezed that Callum guy’s nuts?” Frankie asks.
“I did.”
“Fucking incredible.”
“Tell your story, then,” Val says.
“My what?”
“You were telling me about Dorothy. How you didn’t know her—”
“Right!” Frankie waves her own set of stacked cups, and spills a drop of wine on her skirt. “Right. It all started before me. Her and some other bitches, women who were more like her age. All I know about that is that Smyth-Farrow brought me and a bunch of the others in to replace the outgoers. Y’know how they hired us?” She hiccups again. “Police and court records. It’s how they got me, anyway. I stabbed a guy. In the dick. And bit him on the cheek. Because he hit my sister.”
“They hired you because you stabbed a man in the dick?”
“Stabbed his mate, too. I was underage so I got off light, considering, and then I had enough of a rep that when some other bloke got stabbed they brought me in for questioning. Smyth-Farrow got me released that time, or his lawyer did, and he offered me a job. They were looking for…” She waves her free hand, frowning, searching for the word.
“Psychopaths?” Val suggests.
Frankie laughs again. “Yeah. Psychos and sadists and man-haters and that. And they explained the whole setup to me when I got there and— and— Fuck, Val.” She leans back into the cushion again, lets her cup of wine drop onto the duvet next to her; more spills. “I thought it was funny.”
Val’s still got the bottle opener, held in the hand on the other side of her body, hidden from Frankie’s view. Idly she starts to play with it. “‘Funny’,” she says.
“They said criminals,” Frankie says, closer to monotone, for the first time drained of her drunken bonhomie. “Criminals. Bad men. And then I found out that it was pickpockets and purse snatchers and shoplifters and that. Early on, though, I still didn’t really care.” She looks over at Val again. “That’s what you have to understand about me, Val: I’m a— well, I’m a cunt, really. I was having fun. Early on. I was angry at men, and not just the wanker who hit my sister, like, all men, and I’m short and I got pushed around a lot as a kid, at least until I stabbed that guy, and I had a chip on my shoulder the size of Dorley Hall itself. You could have fed a family of four for a month on the chip on my fucking shoulder, Val.”
“I don’t think it means ‘chip’ like a food chip,” Val says, stumbling on the ch sounds.
“Who cares?” Frankie levers herself up again, refills her cup and holds out the bottle to Val, who accepts the refill and thinks very hard about suddenly lunging at the woman with the bottle opener.
Fuck it. She’d probably miss, anyway. She drops it, steadies her now-full stack of cups with both hands, and nods for Frankie to continue, sipping carefully at her wine.
“You can’t stay young and stupid forever, can you?” Frankie says, sitting up even farther and twisting herself around on the bed to face Val. “I was getting sick of it before you showed up. It was always the same crap. Bring ’em in, do the big chop-chop, spend a year moulding them and breaking them and that, and send ’em off. And then I found out what happened to them, when the people we sent them to were done with them.”
Valérie’s breath catches. “You claim you didn’t know?” she says, quietly and through her teeth. “Out there in that fucking quad are so many dead girls. Some of them I buried myself. My sisters. Most of them wouldn’t thank me for calling them that but I had to become this—” she gestures at herself with her cups, “—or I’d go mad, so I had to think of them that way, too. All of them dead. All of them.”
Frankie’s looking down at the duvet. “Like I said: young and stupid. I didn’t wanna know. I didn’t wanna care. Because I was starting to get scared and the only way I could not be scared was if I just carried on like normal. And then I found out in a way I couldn’t explain away and it was worse. I couldn’t pretend this was a big lark any more. Showing the men what it’s like on the girl side of the fence. It was murder. This was before you.”
“Didn’t stop you, though,” Val says, poking roughly at Frankie’s knee. “You still did it all, didn’t you? You still— Frankie, you castrated Dee.”
“You think I had a choice?” Frankie spits, and drinks more wine before continuing. “You know how long it’s been since my life was mine? There’s been a knife at my neck ever since I first got to Dorley Hall and I was too stupid to even see it for years. I went there out of stupid, childish, petulant indulgence and then it was my life. Because it had to be. Because if I tried to walk away, she’d have had me killed. You know it, right? You have to see I’m right.”
Val shrugs. She probably is; Val will never admit it.
“When we lost the Hall it was a dream come true,” Frankie says. “I wanted to put it behind me and never look back. Smyth-Farrow wanted to carry on somewhere else but the old bastard was almost dead by that point, as you well know, and all I wanted was to put distance between me and fucking Almsworth. You know how men say they feel guilty after a wank, yeah? Like they suddenly realised what they did? That was me. Except it was decades of it. Constant over-stimulation. Because even when I knew everything, even when I wanted out, the only way to survive was to just throw myself into it even more. With some exceptions, I s’pose. But in the main I shut my eyes to everything that was going on and I just… indulged myself. Sorry, Val; I won’t pretend I didn’t take my pleasure where I could. Karen, that bitch, I think she burned out whatever morals she had left on her first day. Hah.” It’s not a real laugh this time, but a bitter grunt. “She’s dead. Karen. Old Dotty doesn’t want to believe it. Thinks she’s just held hostage or some shit. But she’s dead. Elle Lambert plays at least as hard as we always did, and she’s got more action figures in her toybox than we do. Anyway.” She drains her cup again, and offers the dregs of the bottle to Val, who shakes her head. Frankie shrugs, and drinks it straight from the neck, finishes it off. “I went to Newcastle. Got a job at a dog shelter, and— What?”
Val can’t help herself. She hates the woman, she really does, but there’s only so much horror you can experience before a vital part of you starts processing it differently, and right now there’s only one thing she can think about. “What did you do to the dogs?” she splutters, through wheezing laughter. “Did they leave as cats?”
Frankie’s eyes widen, and for a second she looks like she might yell, and then she snorts down her nose, drops the bottle on the carpet, and leans forward into her lap, almost horizontal, laughing like a blocked drain and holding her stomach. “Jesus Christ, Val,” she says, between struggling breaths. “Jesus. Fucking. Christ.”
It takes a moment for them to right themselves; and Val despises the idea of including herself in the category of them with Frankie, but she has to admit that this is the most normal conversation she’s had since she buried the last girl. Yes, Frankie was once — still is — her captor and, technically, her torturer, but they’re both too damn old. The scars have all faded, and even the deaths are becoming hard to remember. She wonders what it feels like for a veteran of an unjust war to meet, decades later, a conscript from the other side; they both know full well which of them was the victim and which the oppressor, but after so many years, who else is left who can possibly understand them but each other?
Ugly thoughts to be having about Frankie. But the woman’s in her sixties, and she’s slow, and even in this context, in the manor where Val is trapped, Frankie is practically harmless. And, very likely, almost as much a prisoner as Val.
Frankie’s leaning sideways, into the cushion again. Since she’s still cross-legged and facing towards Val she gives the impression of someone sitting below decks on a listing, storm-struck boat.
“You know Dorley Hall’s still going?” Frankie says, and Val doesn’t have time to react before she continues. “Not like we ran it. Not after they took it from us. It’s not run for anyone. Except maybe Elle fucking Lambert. No, they take bad men, men who really did do terrible things, and they make girls out of them. To reform them, Val. Isn’t that funny? It’s like a mirror image of our Dorley. They want these guys to identify as girls. To embrace their womanhood. To become new people, to go off and live out in the world as happy, healthy women. But we…” She pokes herself in the chest. “We wanted prisoners.” She glances at Val. “Sorry. Preaching to the choir.”
Val’s frowning and rolling the empty, crumpled plastic cups between both hands. “You’re saying they’re allowed to leave?”
Frankie nods enthusiastically. “They take, say, a guy who hit his wife—” she mimes the process with a pair of cups, “—and they do kinda what we did to you, only it takes longer and it’s supposed to be much more humane, if you can believe that. He spends a year underground—” she drops one of the cups off the bed to illustrate, “—and then he comes back up—” she realises she can’t reach the cup she dropped, so switches to the other one, the one that had been the wife, “—and he’s a girl now. They’ve taught him all about toxic masculinity and how great it is to be a woman and a couple of years later she — because he’s a she now — goes off and gets a job and gets married and just does, yeah, normal girl stuff.”
Val chews on her lip. “That can’t work.”
“Kinda worked on you,” Frankie says, and then holds up her hands — and her cup — when Val leans forward to shout at her. “I don’t mean all this shit! No, I mean, you’re a woman now, right? Have been since before those Silver River blokes came for you, yeah? Wouldn’t you say?”
“Don’t know,” Val says honestly. She adds, nastily, “Show me a real woman to compare myself to and I’ll let you know.”
“Ha ha. I mean it though, Val. You’re a girl. You’ve been one for longer than you were ever a boy, let alone a man. Yeah, I know you did it to survive, but so do these guys. Except it’s a nurturing environment and all that. So it works. Mostly.” She smirks. “Declan’s a reject. They found out he’s a serial rapist. The new lot, they don’t do rapists and murderers. Just men they think are worth ‘saving’. They sent our Declan off to Elle, for her little project. That’s when Dotty nabbed him and had him all snipped and stuff. Almost fun again, when the fucker actually deserves it.”
“Declan’s a Dorley reject?”
“Too much of a bastard to reform,” Frankie says, and then frowns. “I don’t disagree. I visited new Dorley Hall once,” she continues, running a hand through her hair. “Couple of years ago. Or three. Or four. I don’t know. Had to wait until a few of them were out, ones who might have recognised me on sight. It was stupid because my face is probably on all their computers and shit but I just wanted to see, yeah? Wanted to know. Walked right up to the kitchen doors and looked in. This girl, beautiful, Indian I think, lovely hair, she was chatting with another girl at the kitchen table and I knew, I just knew she was one of the girls. Not from anything about how she moved or looked or talked or nothing. I just knew. And she came up to the door and buzzed me in and it was like walking into a fucking graveyard, Val. It was the kitchen at Dorley Hall, where we used to sit and discuss all the shit we were going to do, and talk about contracts and castrations and shit, and there were these two girls just… chatting. And I could hear more girls in the dining hall. Talking and laughing like everything was normal. So I asked for directions to some other building on campus and I got the fuck out of there and I almost drowned myself in the lake. And you know what?” She glares levelly at Valérie, her eyes more steady than they’ve been in hours, and then she looks back at the wall and drains her plastic cup. “I wish I fucking had, Val old girl. I wish I fucking had.”
“A little late to grow a conscience, Frances.”
“Consciences—” she belches loudly, “—are for people who’ve done less bad things than I have. This was just… very very practical disgust. Only reason I didn’t top myself was I thought it was over. I thought Dorothy would die here and the new Dorley girls would just keep at it and I could carry on being nobody. And then Karen gets fucking segmented and I get roped back in.” She scratches herself under the chin. “I’m not sorry, you know. Not really. That’s something else that kinda got… burned away. Intellectually, I know what I did. What I’m still doing, I s’pose. But I can’t pretend remorse. I’m just… fucking done with it all. Done with hurting people. Done with living with what I did. It’s fucking exhausting, Val. Being on my guard all the time. Looking over my shoulder. I came back here because she’d prob’ly kill me if I said no and now here I am. Same old, same fucking old. There needs to be an end somewhere, Val.”
Val thinks of the way she used to switch herself off when the new girls came, and nods. “I think I can understand that.”
“Fuck Dorothy,” Frankie says suddenly. “Fuck her for dragging me into this. Fuck her for not letting you go when she found you here. Fuck her for Dorley Hall and for all the shit I did. And fuck me, too.”
“Agreed,” Val says. “You’re so right. Fuck you.”
“I saved a few of them, you know,” Frankie says. “One or two. Anyone I could get away with. Starting with your little friend, actually.”
Val feels suddenly sober. A white-hot spark begins to crawl slowly up her spine. “Which little friend?”
Frankie frowns. “Shit, Val; you didn’t know? Nobody told you? Christ. I bet the old cunt’s been saving this one up for years. Although—” her frown deepens, “—she probably hasn’t, actually. She doesn’t remember shit like that, like connections between the girls. Never thought it was important, unless she had to break it. And for all that she was sweet on her when she was ours, it was like she just scrubbed her out of her brain just weeks after she escaped—” Frankie leans over, almost topples, and rights herself, “—and what I mean by that is, after I helped her escape… You should have seen me, Val; the girl was hiding out in a shelter and when we got the tip I insisted on going myself and I stomped in there making all the noise I could. Kid was hiding in the office. Hilarious, actually.” She laughs to herself, and Val wants to fucking strangle her. “Funny really, the way she just completely ceased to exist for Dotty. As if the old lady thought the kid would wander into one of our nets, sure as the sky is blue, and we’d get her back. But she never did, not since the shelter. Not until she came back on her own. Not until she came back and took over. God, that was a day.”
“Frances,” Val says, pushing herself up the wall into an almost upright position, “who are you talking about?”
“David,” Frankie says. “Sorry, didn’t I say? I’m sure I said…”
“Dee? You mean Dee, right?”
“Beatrice now. Beatrice Quinn. She looks good, Val.”
“Dee’s alive?”
Chapter 29: The People We Once Were
Chapter Text
2019 November 13
Wednesday
It’s his third year on this assignment, and it’s not so bad. It’s easy money and light work and it keeps him and his partner on call and thus in the country and off the active roster; the only thing better than being paid to be a soldier in a secretive private military company known for its discernment and care in choosing its contracts and spending the lives of its people, is being paid to be a largely indolent one.
Boredom’s a problem, though. The other guys from training are posted all around the world now, sunning themselves and sleeping around and posting photos to the intranet, and only one of them’s dead. His partner, Perry, insists the boredom’s a gift, for the same reason. Sunny climes give you wrinkles and attract bullets, he says; here in the UK there’s no sun to speak of and no-one worth shooting, or at least no-one worth shooting who can’t also afford to hire a PMC of their own to protect them. There are supposedly several high-placed individuals whom Perry has described as being like the king or queen in a game of chess that’s yet to begin, and so far no-one’s sacrificed the first pawn.
“That’s why you want the Dorley job, Trevor my lad,” Perry said, a few months into the first year. “Never once had to fire my gun.”
It’s still boring, though. At least it’s given him the chance to get his degree from the Open University, and now he’s studying Japanese. Perry thinks it’s because he wants to watch anime without the subtitles on, which is a lie he’s pleased to have had believed; there’s a Japanese grad student working the bar at Legend in Almsworth, and they’ve shared glances a few times and spoken with each other twice, and he wants desperately to impress him, and that’s exactly the kind of thing he’ll never tell anyone else at Peckinville Associates PMC, lest they tease him even more than they already do.
The day Perry happened upon his unlocked phone and realised he’s gay was the day his nicknames at the PMC changed for the worse. He was the kid, the shortarse, the pretty boy, the guy whose surname is ‘Darling’; now he’s the fruit. But one time when they were all out together and a local called him the f-word, his squad beat seven shades of shit out of the bloke, and that was sort of sweet.
It’s benevolent homophobia, he tells himself. Nobody’s allowed to call him a poofter but the squad.
No Perry today, though. Rung in with food poisoning. A lie: they were out last night and well into the morning, him and Perry and some of the others, and while Perry didn’t seem to drink more than he usually does it wouldn’t be a surprise if he’d kept going on his own and splattered his wits all over the carpet. So at half past ten at night Trevor’s sat in the driver’s seat of the special van, drumming his fingers on the wheel, parked in the woods out back of the Royal College of Saint Almsworth with a guy called Jake, just back from a bodyguarding gig in Portugal and sporting a tan and a cocky grin and a whole lot of stories about Portuguese women, stories Trevor wishes he’d tell with a few decibels less gusto, lest the ringing in his ears overpower him completely.
He matched Perry almost drink for drink last night, and he’s only a little more than half the old man’s size. The hangover finally hit mid-afternoon and has yet to quite fade.
“Sorry, mate,” Jake says, interrupting himself to grin at Trevor’s aching skull, now resting fully on the wheel. “Too much fun or not enough?”
It’s the first question the man’s asked since they got in the van together back in Watford. Trevor doesn’t mind; he likes to keep information about his personal life to a small, select circle of burly and objectively quite unpleasant men. “I wouldn’t call it fun. Perry’s separated from his wife again. It was vitally important that we drink about it.”
“So that’s why it’s me here and not him?”
Trevor shrugs, a manoeuvre which causes an alarming constriction at the base of his throat; he decides not to do it again. “Probably,” he says. “The old man called in sick before I did which means I have to run around pretending I didn’t get blackout drunk while on call.”
Jake nods. One man off with ‘food poisoning’ is an inconvenience; two in the same unit is an investigation.
“So, you done this job before, then?” he asks.
“Yeah.” It’d be lovely if storytime could wait until after Trevor got hold of some more painkillers and maybe an antiemetic but clearly none of his wishes are being granted today. “The last three years.” He holds up the appropriate number of fingers. “The job’s always the same: show up, pick someone up, transport them. The exact day varies but it’s usually only once or twice a year and usually late in the year, like now. Perry’s been doing it longer; he says one year he had to pick up three.”
“You don’t do anything else?”
In lieu of shrugging again, Trevor waves a flattened hand. “Odd jobs. A bit of bodyguarding when one of the VIPs is in the area. Deliveries. Et cetera.”
“Pair of lucky bastards.”
And there it is. The other guys always think he and Perry pulled the cushiest job around, and they did, it’s true, but it’s not a total doss. On the other hand, protesting would just extend the conversation.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“I bet it is, mate,” Jake says, and falls blessedly silent for a while.
It’s nice out here. He parked the van up in the usual spot, in the scrubland at the terminus of a barely there dirt track through the woods, and if Trevor ignores the bulk of a brick university building in the middle distance and doesn’t look in his rear-view then there’s nothing around them but trees. It’s cold out but not unbearable, and with a glance at Jake he winds down the window and transfers his weight from the steering wheel to the door, leaning out a little and looking around. So what if Jake thinks this is a weird thing for him to do? He’s not even from his unit; they might never see each other again after today.
“Birdwatcher, are you?” Jake says, amused.
“Maybe,” Trevor mutters, “when I’m done learning Japanese.”
If Jake has an opinion on that, he doesn’t share it.
It’s a while longer before the job phone on the dash buzzes, but when it does, it’s time to stop lazing around. Trevor shoves his headache and his exhaustion firmly to the back of his mind and drops down out of the van. Jake’s in place on the other side, weapon ready, and together they open up the back of the van. They parked up in front of a pair of bunker-style doors set into a concrete riser, and when they open Trevor tries, as he does every time, to glean a little more information about the other side of this assignment; all he sees is more concrete, again.
Perry always told him not to crane his neck. Don’t go beyond assignment parameters. Don’t be a nosy little fruit.
Same as always, there’s two more guys from Peckinville — two guys he’s never seen before, because they always pick people from opposite ends of the country for this stuff, so no-one can share information — and they’re carrying a third, younger, dressed in plain clothes, lolling as if he’s been sedated. This one’s a big bloke, and Trevor doesn’t waste any time wondering what he did to deserve his ultimate fate; it’s obvious. He’s seen guys like him in every pub, on every street, and he makes it his business to avoid them entirely when he’s out of uniform. Guys like him enjoy controlling people, and if they can’t do it with idiot words they’ll as happily use violence.
In the back of the van there’s hand and leg cuffs, and the sedated man makes no trouble as they get him locked in and tie the gag; and that’s a damn good thing, because in Trevor’s current condition, if the big lad had started anything Trevor doesn’t know if he’d punch the guy in the face or throw up on him. And then the doors are slammed shut and Trevor’s staggering a little on his way back round to the driver’s seat.
Jake puts a hand on his wrist before he can climb in.
“You’re fucking knackered, mate,” Jake says. “Why don’t you let me drive?” They’re not supposed to swap assignments. The senior soldier watches the prisoner; the junior drives. Reading his mind, Jake adds, “That one’s doped up to the nines. He’s going nowhere. It’s fine. Besides, Trev, if you fall asleep at the wheel you might actually kill us.”
“Yeah,” Trevor says, nodding, accepting the insistent push Jake’s giving him to walk around the bonnet to the passenger door, “yeah, fine. Thanks, Jake.”
“Pay me back sometime,” Jake says, climbing up and settling into the seat. “On my next job, in Barbados or wherever, you can come mix me a pina colada or something.”
“Deal,” Trevor says, leaning back on the headrest. He flicks on the dash monitors so he can keep an eye on the shackled guy in the back of the van, but the man’s eyes are closed like he’s sleeping, and it’s not long before Trevor succumbs as well, letting his headache be soothed by sleep and the sounds of the van being driven off the dirt track and onto the B-road that leads to the A-road that leads to the dual carriageway that leads, eventually, to the facility where they always take these guys.
He’ll sleep for just a little while.
* * *
The room in which he wakes is pure white and it blinds him. He comes around like a pistol shot, all sudden violence and ear-rending noise, but it’s just panic providing the sensations because when he calms, when he can focus his eyes again, when he can orientate himself sufficiently to look away from the bright light in the ceiling and towards something else instead, like the plastic ferns or the cheap-looking table or the cuffs around his wrists, everything dulls and coheres, and the rushing sounds that have blocked out all else resolve into the background hum of a decent-sized facility and the figures in the corner of his vision resolve into Jake, standing ready with his weapon slung over his shoulder, and an old woman, gazing at him with what he’d call, if it made any sense in this context at all, hunger.
“Sorry, mate,” Jake says. “Wrong place, wrong time.”
2019 December 16
Monday
It’s not like Valérie hasn’t had the opportunity to drink. She served old Smyth-Farrow’s table for years, usually while dressed in something demeaning, and he liked to keep her around while he ate. The first time she snatched his wine glass from him and drained it, daring him to retaliate, he laughed his awful braying laugh and fetched another glass; the second time he smirked at her. Before she could transgress a third time he instructed her irritably to just get another bloody glass and another bloody bottle and to stop making him make multiple trips to the bloody wine cellar every bloody night. She thinks she remembers spitting the wine at him for that, but that might have been another night. It was a very long time ago.
But she’s always been careful to maintain her faculties around her tormentors, and not just because she has more freedom when they are insensate and she is merely buzzed; there’s always been the chance that one of them, whether Smyth-Farrow or Dorothy or Karen or Frankie or the soldiers, might slip up while in their cups and leave open a vital door, or be persuaded to relate the codes for the locks.
Valérie levers herself up off her pillow with a disgusted grunt. A wasted hope, assuming Frankie’s been telling the truth: Dorothy’s the only one with the codes and always has been. Both their lives — and the rapist Declan’s — are tethered to the heartbeat of the increasingly frail and desperately cruel lady of the manor. Just like old times.
Truth be told, she hasn’t been wasting much of herself on hope, lately. There hasn’t seemed like much point in it. Too many people to watch her now, and all of them, Declan aside, allied against her. If she’d still had hope she would have been playing the game last night, encouraging Dorothy’s indulgences in the hope of provoking a mistake. But she was out of hope and at the end of her will, and so she drank, and when she returned to her room she drank more, and Frances, a feature frequently of her nightmares and some of her most brutal memories, fell asleep alongside her.
She remembers something her mother used to say, back when she was Vincent and she had a family and did family things, like enjoy long, lazy dinners together: ‘White can be experienced alone; red prefers company.’ Or, to be more precise and contextually useful: don’t drink several bottles of red wine on a stomach lined with only the barest minimum of food, or the hangover you acquire will be ungodly.
At least, at some point during the night, Frankie fell out. She’s curled up in her voluminous skirt on the carpet, snoring hideously and drooling on the wrist propping her head.
The curtains glow with the dim morning sun, and it’s enough to see by without turning on any lamps or anything else which might hurt her eyes. She can certainly see well enough to step out of bed and over Frankie and into the bathroom, and she leaves the door open to its fullest extent, to take advantage of the natural light.
And she realises she’s still wearing that awful fucking servant uniform! She swears under her breath. It was ugly and uncomfortable last night, and the creases from sleep and the smell of stale wine haven’t improved it any. She sets to tearing it off, takes out her irritation on the thing, feels stitches rip and fabric tear, and when she’s done it’ll likely never be wearable again. The awful pantyhose join it in an ugly pile on the bathroom floor and so does the cami she had on underneath it all. Maybe she’ll dump the whole ripped and wine-soaked abomination in the middle of the dining table just so Dorothy can appreciate the depth of her contempt. Because she’ll never wear it again, or anything else like it. The bitch can kill her if she wishes, and try to mould Declan or even Frankie in her personal servant in Val’s place, but she’s done with not caring and she’s done with not hoping; she’s done with living only for the rare moments of dim satisfaction; she’s done with all this shit.
Because Dee’s alive.
Not Dee. Béatrice. A name like the rising opening note in the best song Val’s ever heard, a name which Dee took and made her own after she escaped — after Frankie apparently helped her escape — and now she’s running the place that started all this and Val wants nothing more than to get away from the manor and go back to Dorley Hall and find out just what the actual fuck is going on.
She needs to look Béatrice in the eye and understand. Because she’s responsible for Declan, the human wreckage just one wall away from her, the wounded boy she’s been able to get maybe two dozen words out of. Yes, Frankie said that all Bea’s people actually did to him was a month or so of testosterone suppression, that when they found out he was a repeated and unrepentant rapist they kicked him out and sent him off to this Elle woman’s mysterious ‘project’ before they could do any of the things they usually do, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s still doing it to other boys.
Years and years of other boys.
Who, Frankie says, are allowed to go free but often stick around to help with the next lot. Out of the kindness of their hearts.
Which makes no sense. So Valérie needs to understand, and she can’t do that from in here, no matter how much information Frankie thinks she has. Because it’s all screwed up and the two factions, the one controlled by this Elle woman, for whom (with whom?) Béatrice is working, and Dorothy’s, are taking the kind of potshots at each other that generally lead to war.
Frankie laid it out: they had an urgent need for a staff nurse; they took Karen, on agreement that she fucking behave herself; Karen, obviously, could not. So then Elle and Bea’s faction had her disappeared and probably killed, and Dorothy retaliated by taking Declan from Elle, transforming him for her amusement and stashing him here. But to what end? A lot of effort and risk to go to just to give Elle and Bea a bloody nose, isn’t it?
All she knows is she wants as little to do with him as she can get away with. She feels dirty every time she touches him; the thought of treating someone who has done what he has done the same way she treated the girls who came before him is unbearable.
But maybe he can be a distraction.
And then her head throbs again and the red wine squirms in her stomach and she realises she’s been standing in the middle of the bathroom staring at the floor.
It’s too early to think about all this. And she still has a full bladder.
As she has for the last three decades, she tucks her little dick back to pee. After a little while, she closes her eyes.
“Jesus Christ, Val.”
Val moves her head a little too quickly and reality takes a moment to catch up, but when it does, Frankie’s there, leaning on the jamb, peering down at her through crusted eyelids.
“What?”
Frankie gestures, but only briefly; she needs both hands to guide herself, and as she wobbles back into position on the door frame, Val looks down at herself and realises she’s wearing nothing but her underwear.
Oh well. Frankie’s one of those who’s seen it all before.
“Naked looks good on you, Val,” Frankie says. “The hangover doesn’t.”
Valérie scowls. “We drank an awful lot last night.”
“Yeah, we fucking did,” Frankie says. “Too much to hope you’ll be done on the bog any time soon, I take it?” Val nods. “Fine.” Without ceremony, Frankie drops her skirt onto the floor of the bathroom next to the remains of Val’s uniform, steps into Val’s shower, squats, and pisses.
“You English are all so disgusting,” Valérie mutters.
Frankie blows her a kiss.
2019 December 5
Thursday
He’s been counting the days and he knows he missed a few at the start but it’s definitely been more than two weeks and probably at least three. They won’t give him a phone or a tablet and they keep the TV over his bed set on a feed of movies that is either completely random or has been designed by a total maniac because Citizen Kane (1941) was preceded by Critters 2 (1988) and immediately followed by The Decagon Conspiracy (????), which judging by the production values was made for a niche cable TV channel in the early days of the twenty-first century, so while he’s been getting a comprehensive cultural education what he hasn’t had is access to anything that will tell him what day it is.
But he’s pretty sure it’s been three weeks.
Jake’s not been around much. No-one has, but it doesn’t matter because he’s been cuffed to the bed by his wrists and ankles, so even when the nurses come around to change out his catheter or the attendants bring him food there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s studied over a dozen ways to escape a facility, but all of them involve the freeing of his hands and feet. A shame; an escape attempt would really relieve the monotony, and save him from any more terrible made-for-TV movies.
And then the door opens and today’s different: the old woman is back, the one who was there the first time he woke up here. She walks briskly over to his bed with more assurance than he would expect from someone her age, and leans over him. At least the lights aren’t blinding him any more, so they don’t halo her the way they did on that first day, a grotesque angelic parody; his welcome to whatever new life they have planned for him. Because that was the only thing she said to him that first day: “Welcome to your new life.”
He hadn’t been able to answer her at the time. His throat had hurt too much.
Today she says, “Very nice.”
She steps away, steps aside for a medical functionary he hadn’t even noticed, and with a mechanical whirr his bed starts to elevate, lifting his head and upper body out of the horizontal position he’s been kept in for far too long. His head is still relatively immobilised, but from this position he can see much more of the room, get a better idea of where he is, and it’s roughly what he thought; he can see nothing to contradict his initial impression that this is an ordinary enough hospital room, probably in the medical wing of a secure facility.
The nurse (or doctor or whoever) frowns at him over a clipboard, makes a couple of notes and snaps a picture with her phone. She gives him a quick, professional smile and then leaves, offering Trevor a precious moment to glimpse through the closing door the environment outside his room: more institutional white walls. More important is that the door itself is thick, with a secure locking mechanism; if he is indeed in a medical facility, then he’s being kept in a room intended for prisoners.
And he’s almost definitely not at a Peckinville facility. The medical uniforms here are different.
“Trevor Darling.” It’s the old woman again. He can see her more clearly now that he’s sitting upright and she’s just standing there, leaning casually on a cane he’ll bet is an affectation: she’s in her seventies at the very least, and she’s gaunt in that way you get when you’ve lived well for a very long time, and she’s smirking at him. “Twenty-four years old,” she continues. “History degree from the OU; impressive. And learning Japanese on your phone! Very impressive. I never could get the hang of learning from an app. Too damned fiddly. And you signed up with Peckinville three months after finishing your A-levels. Interesting timing.”
Not that interesting. He missed the grades for his chosen universities, and by the time clearing came around he’d been outed to his family and his friends and found himself alone and bitter and decided, in a fit of nihilism, that he’d rather blow up the world than participate in it, and started looking into how you join the army. PAPMC contacted him, told him he had potential and offered him better money than the British government and slightly less chance of getting shot, and he jumped at the chance. He’s not going to tell her any of that, though. He’s going to grunt at her instead. That that’s all his sore and dry throat can manage is an unrelated issue.
“Trevor… Darling,” she says again, smiling at his surname. “You can call me ‘Grandmother’.”
He wants to laugh at that. How ridiculous. She’s old enough for it, but in his experience Grandmothers don’t sit comfortably in front of prisoners in private medical facilities; they bake cookies and disown you for being gay.
“I won’t,” he manages to say. He sounds awful.
“Suit yourself.” Something about her manner makes him want to tear himself bloody from his handcuffs and strangle her; something more than just her deeply suspicious presence here, in this place. She comes closer again, and the feeling intensifies. “You’re a pretty boy, Trevor,” she says, running a brittle finger down the side of his face and over the bandages that wrap his forehead and his jaw. “Very pretty. And you know what that makes you? Lucky, Trevor Darling. Very, very lucky.” She leans her elbows on the edge of the bed and props her chin on her hands. “We were going to kill you. Spoof your location to Peckinville for a while and then dump you in a river or something. Soldiers are not good raw material, you see, generally speaking. Too bulky, too scarred and beaten; too old, mostly, by the time they become accessible to us. But you… When I saw you, I personally countermanded the order to have you disposed of, and brought you here. Rather a risk to me, I might add. But I had an inkling my backer would see your potential, once you were brought to his attention, and he did. He agreed to fund your transition, as long as I oversee your retraining.”
“My what?” It’s a croak.
‘Grandmother’ doesn’t answer straight away. She just looks at him, that same expression on her face from the first time she saw him.
“It all worked out,” she says, cryptic. “Instead of just taking one thing away from Elle, I take two.” Elle? Does she mean Ms Lambert? Rumours say she practically runs Peckinville, or at the very least directs its goals. “We feed her a little false information, pretend that you and Declan are both precisely where you’re supposed to be, and you, Trevor my boy, you get to live, and you get to be beautiful.” She leans closer again, touches his face again, and he would crawl away from her if he wasn’t shackled to the bed.
“What do you mean,” he rasps, “my ‘transition’?”
“Oh, Trevor,” she says, “there’s a very important man out there, and you’re going to be his girl.”
2019 December 18
Wednesday
A soft, insistent sound draws Steph out of sleep, intruding on her dream in the manner of a phone ringing or a fire alarm sounding or the need urgently to urinate; characters in the narrative begin crying, the hotel in which various dream people have been murdered starts filling up with water, and Steph is yanked out of her role as the omniscient witness and suddenly, jarringly embodied, to cry uncontrollable tears of her own and stumble into wakefulness with stinging eyes and a dry throat.
For a moment she’s confused, wondering what could possibly have spilled out of her dream to make her so sad, and then she realises: in her arms, his legs curled up to his chest and his whole body shaking and his hands grasping hers so tight it almost hurts, Aaron weeps.
She draws him closer, though he’s already close enough she imagines he can feel her heart beating against his back, and whispers, “Hey.” She doesn’t know if he’s dreaming or if this is all real to him. “Hey, Aaron.”
“Don’t call me that!” It comes out raw and wet and bleeding and it pierces her, strikes deep, makes her want to respond with reassurance and love and searching questions about what might have made him say such a thing; but she suspects she knows, so she stays silent.
She remembers rasping almost those exact words, months ago, in her room. Abby, beautiful Abby, had come down to see her, made up and dressed up and absolutely radiant, and Steph had been just Stefan, ugly and trapped and taut like a wire under tension. She’d wanted to scream at Abby, wanted to release the poison inside her, wanted to spill blood and disgust and toxic vapour from inside her body, but instead she’d shut down, curled up on her bed, and Abby had waited for her.
It’s hard to think back to those days. Harder still to know Aaron might be living through them right now, and that his release may be longer and more painful in the making than hers had been. The woman she is now was always waiting inside her; Aaron has to construct his almost from scratch from the remaining pieces of himself.
It must be terrifying.
He’s still shaking. He feels so fragile. Steph blinks away the tears in her eyes, swallows the thickness out of her throat, and squeezes him tight, kisses the back of his neck where his shaggy, unkempt hair plays messily over skin beading with sweat. He begins eventually to calm, and she waits for him, nothing more or less than a warm and loving presence that doesn’t require anything of him that he might not be able to give.
Just live, she wills, pressing her lips to his neck. Just live.
* * *
She’s started treating him like a girl.
It’s not all the time. It’s not even most of the time. And it’s natural, too! Or understandable, at the very least. Down here all of them are changing, and while in some of them you still have to look for it to see it, in Steph it’s been obvious and encouraged and, God fucking help him, he’s been following her. Because of the role models available to him in this awful bloody basement, Adam’s a space case and Martin’s a blank slate and Will’s a nightmare and Ollie and Raph aren’t even out of the cells yet and all the rest are girls, and at least Steph is a girl who kisses him and touches him.
Even if she is a girl who kisses him and touches him like he’s a girl.
He’d expected the dynamic to change when Will came back, but even after he stopped keeping himself entirely to himself things have remained largely the same. It’s like the guy’s trying to fit in, trying not to take up as much space as he used to, and what’s either alarming or encouraging is that when he pointed out to Will’s face that this has become literally true, that his formerly impressive stature is starting seriously to fade, Will didn’t snap at him, didn’t argue, didn’t call him a fucking idiot or an incel or any of his other preferred insults.
Will just shrugged.
He doesn’t know how to deal with a Will who just shrugs at stuff like that.
Harmony, Ollie’s sponsor, said both of them, he and Will, are starting to drop their masculine interpretation layers. She said it because she’s been taking the cleaning rotas recently while Ollie’s still locked up, and she surprised him with a feather duster and made him shriek at a pitch he instinctively cringed from; he doesn’t have to care about that kind of thing any more, she told him. No-one gives a flying monkey’s if he gets startled or if he cries or if he does something else he’s always been told is tellingly feminine, like grow tits. The requirement to police his behaviour for appropriate levels of masculinity is gone, she said, and all he has left of it is the habit.
Easy enough for her to say, he told her. With no structure to his interpersonal relationships he feels like someone dropped into a foreign culture with no phrasebook and no Google Translate.
“I know,” she said, and he got annoyed with her for being smug about it. He told her she was behaving like someone who climbed the world’s biggest mountain five years ago, and now she’s sat at its base wearing merch she bought at the summit and drinking from a World’s Best Mountain Climber mug, making snide remarks to the poor chumps strapping on their snowshoes and oxy tanks and who are just now understanding what it is they’ve signed up for. Nine years ago, she corrected him, and that’s not what it says on her mug, but she left him alone; not before ruffling his hair, though.
They all do that now.
So interpreting behaviour’s recently got a lot harder for him but he’s pretty sure he’s got a good handle on Stephanie, on the way she thinks and more specifically the way she thinks about him, and he’s come to the conclusion that, while she takes care to treat him neutrally, she’s having to make an effort to do so; she’s started thinking of him, in some way, as a girl. As a girl in potentia, if not yet in fact.
But when her guard is down, when she’s tired or annoyed or, most pertinently, when she’s aroused, she can’t control herself to quite such an extent.
They had sex, and she treated him like a girl.
It’s fair enough, really. He’s going to be one; he’s already developing in subtle but noticeable ways. He feels it in his hips when he walks, in his squishier arse when he sits down, in his sensitive chest when he dresses, in his softer skin when he shaves. And Steph’s kind to him and she’s generous with her time and her emotions and she kisses him and puts hands on him the way no-one ever has, but she does it like she’s a girl making love to a girl.
He’s going to be a girl. He decided! He fucking accepted it! So why is he doing this to himself?
He could almost laugh: he’s finally, at twenty-one, having someone touch him like he’s someone who fucking matters, and he’s agonising about it because she’s touching him in ways that don’t validate a masculinity he doesn’t even care about any more. Maria and Harmony and all the others would say that this is the crux of it, that this is the fulcrum, that his need to satisfy the demands of masculinity has him fighting against something that feels good; that he’s being ridiculous.
He is being ridiculous. Knowing it makes it, somehow, worse. He almost misses his ignorance.
Men don’t behave that way is the entire bottom row of the house of cards that is/was his personality, and he knows there’s nothing beneath it, that the man he was/is was always a construction, always just inventions on top of justifications on top of suppositions, and he feels even more foolish for having finally agreed to sweep away all the cards, to expose the fragility of it all, and yet still waste his most vulnerable moments searching for the damn things, trying to build them up again, because the house of cards is all he’s ever known.
It’s just how he was trained.
They had sex and she treated him like a girl, and why should he care about that, again?
He wonders if this is all part of it, in that intentional/accidental way the sponsors find levers, weapons and coercion in everything: accept your pleasure, accept your love, and with it accept that you’ve become less like a man.
He sometimes thinks he should name the voice that screams at him from the back of his mind at times like these. The thing that tells him that a man would push Steph away, that a man would walk out of her room, that a man would slam his door and punch the wall. That a man wouldn’t sacrifice his identity for mere pleasure. That a man would be miserable and unloved and alone and better for it.
Better, but not better off. Because satisfying the voice, the creature, the thing is the whole of it. The virtue in and of itself.
He can almost see Maria’s soft smile, her spread hands. You see? she’s saying. You see what you would have to give up? And for what?
Like Harmony said, there’s no-one left to care, no-one left to be impressed by what’s always passed for his manhood. And he’s looked at it, he’s pinned it up against the wall and really examined it and realised he doesn’t need it. It’s something that was forced on him — or presented to him as something with no alternative; same difference — by people who never even gave a shit. He’s never been rewarded for his performance of masculinity, merely punished whenever it was deemed insufficient.
Punishment without reward, because the reward is supposed to be that you are empowered to take what you deserve. (But when he took, he just made things worse, for himself but more importantly for a lot of other people.)
Men don’t behave that way, but it’s stupid. It’s pointless. It doesn’t fucking matter. And so, for three nights now, he hasn’t fought it, he’s leaned into her embrace, he’s kissed her and touched her and allowed himself to be touched by her, and with almost every part of himself he’s adored it, adored her, and felt at peace for the first time in his life.
And then later, in the night and in the early mornings, the unnamed voice shrieks at him.
He can’t even talk to her about this. She’d understand. She’d listen and she’d comfort him and she’d be so wonderfully herself that he whimpers just thinking about it, but then their nights together would change, and there’s nothing in the world he wants less than that.
She whispers to him and tightens her embrace and he realises he’s shaking and he’s crying snot and salt and he’s gone and fucking woken her up and maybe even made her cry, too, and in his guilt and his shame and his misery he demands not to be called that awful fucking name, that dreadful sound, that pair of vowels begging for a proper anchor, the thing that’s always represented the void he tears in the world wherever he goes.
The thing he’s supposed to be getting away from.
She kisses him on the back of the neck and the contradiction of it kills him. She’s so gentle and he’s throwing it all back at her and she doesn’t even know.
At least now he knows the name of the voice that nags at him, that sees him trying to escape, that reaches for him with claws and teeth and with blood on its breath and tries with all its might to drag him back into the dark.
2019 December 16
Monday
He hates Stenordale Manor more than he hated the medical wing at the Silver River facility. That was where they kept him. Jake told him right at the end, the day before they moved him. Silver River Solutions, another PMC; not one Trevor’s ever interacted with. It’s small and lightweight, Jake said; agile. Like a tiger.
Jake made tiger claws with his fingers when he said it. The fucker thinks it’s all so funny. What they’ve done to him. What they’re still doing to him. Worse, Jake doesn’t just find it funny, not since they took him here and gave him normal clothes again; Trevor’s seen the man tenting his fucking trousers when he brings him his food, and looking over his altered body, and it makes him nervous. He’s still trapped, still cuffed — only by a single ankle this time, and on a long cable, but still cuffed, still confined to a handful of rooms — and he has no way to escape if the older man decides to try something.
He hates Stenordale Manor because he ought to be able to see the forest from out of his single window, but the place rises like a wart on the grounds, dominates the view, renders ugly and artificial the few remaining artefacts of nature he can see.
He hates Stenordale Manor because he spends even more of his time by himself than he did on the ward at Silver River, and even though he’s counted at least four people in the manor itself and perhaps as many as six, he’s only been visited here by Jake. Not even the old woman, Dorothy, has been by; ‘Grandmother’ as he still refuses to call her.
He hates Stenordale Manor because at least in the medical wing he could request drugs and sleep, and when he woke he was mostly attended to by people who didn’t take obvious joy in his plight.
Finally, he hates Stenordale Manor because there are mirrors in all the rooms here, and he can see exactly what’s been done to him.
“We call it the quickie,” Dorothy told him, back in the medical wing. “We do the bones in the face and the nose, we do the chest, we do the balls; all the things we don’t need and two things we very much do. In the outside world it’s not really the done thing, to do the surgeries before hormone therapy has had a chance to get going, but we’re old hands at this, and besides, there are some obvious ways the male skull can be improved; we don’t need two years of estrogen to know that your brow ridge needed to go, or that your nose needed to be properly tipped, or that your jawline needed to be smoothed out. It’s as much art as science, you know. Sometimes we guess wrong, but not often and not, I think, in your case. You’re already quite beautiful, Trevor Darling.”
The mirrors here, in the bedroom and bathroom of the little bungalow on the grounds of the Smyth-Farrow estate, show someone who looks half-and-half. His face, while still recognisably his face, has been altered, rounded off, smoothed out, and while he can see and feel the residual bruising from the operations they performed, it would still, he thinks, look more like a woman’s face than a man’s if he deigned to shave it. His chest sports two breasts that jut out jarringly from his slim frame. They’re not all that large, when considered in proportion with the rest of his body, but they feel god damned enormous. They also feel tight in a way he’s sure things inside your body shouldn’t feel, tight enough that he hasn’t felt brave enough to rebel against the requirement to keep the support garment on at all times. The old woman promised him that in a matter of months they’ll look perfectly natural, as if he’d grown them at puberty like most breast-havers; he finds that difficult to believe. And they took his fucking balls, of course, so he’d be reliant on the hormones they provide.
But he’s still built more or less like he used to be; like a man. They’ve been restricting his diet, because they want him to be petite as well as short, but he still has no hips and relatively broad shoulders. That’ll change, though. “Details,” Dorothy had said, when he told her what an ugly, shapeless woman he would make, back on the ward. “Mere details. Hips, thighs, waist… You’ll develop. You’ll be quite shapely. I have experience, Darling.”
That was the last he saw of her.
But not the last he saw of Jake. The man keeps coming round. Every day. He could just leave the food but he likes to come in, he likes to talk, he likes to leer. He’s started calling him ‘Theresa’ and touching his leg when he sits next to him.
Trevor’s thinking about trying to overpower him. Not to escape; he’s under no illusions about that. It’s not just that he’s shackled to the wall: all the windows are barred, and there’s a fenced-off dog run connecting the bungalow to the manor, which no doubt contains more of Dorothy’s people. The whole place is probably an adjunct to a Silver River facility. No, Trevor wants to overpower him just to prove he fucking can.
2019 December 18
Wednesday
It’s a cold morning, and Christine’s breath makes patterns on the car window, fogging the scenery as it zips past, as Indira drives them south, towards the M25, taking the big loop around London and the bridge at Dartford and grazing the northernmost edge of Kent until they wind up in Brighton, on the coast, where Christine grew up, and she’ll get to see the sea again. She’ll get to see her school and the shops and the pier and her old house again and maybe, from a distance, if Indira judges it safe, her mother.
She’s in the back seat, happy to be travelling but nervous about the destination and she would rather have sat up front, but she can’t drive, and Paige gets carsick on journeys this long and needs to be able to watch the road, and Indira’s a bad passenger, so Christine’s in the back seat by default, headphones in, eyes on the outside world, studiedly ignoring her sister and her girlfriend as they talk and occasionally glance at her.
They’re worried. They shouldn’t be. This is everything she’s wanted for a long time.
Indira booked out one of the Hall’s largest cars, one of its most comfortable, a BMW 7-Series, and it’s spacious and plush and is full of little sockets to plug your phone in and generally gets used to ferry around people who are important enough to be driven but not quite important enough to have their own fleet of vehicles. In its luxury, though, it unavoidably makes Christine think of her father’s car, and she would have mentioned it but decided, at the last moment, that it might help her get into the spirit.
Not necessarily a bad move, but an intense one.
She’s back in that liminal period between finishing your A levels and starting university, where the other boys she’s aware of are making the most of an idle summer to see their friends and their girlfriends and to pretend they’ll all stay in touch once they’re scattered around the country. She’s feeling superior because, having no-one, or almost no-one, means there’s no-one for her to miss once she leaves, once she gets the fuck away from Brighton and all its memories and all the things she’s done to pass the time and get out of her own head. She’s going to the Royal College of Saint Almsworth, and her father’s proud of her because it’s not the easiest uni to get into, but she did it entirely by accident. Put a pin in a list of prestigious colleges and turned out to have the predicted grades. She’s got accommodation lined up and she’s wondering what her dormmates will be like, and if she’ll be able to keep making money in the manner she’s lately been perfecting; money she doesn’t need, money she doesn’t even particularly want, but it’s a way of keeping score. Christine vs the world. So far, she’s winning.
(That’s not her name, though.)
She’s thinking about all this because it’s easier than thinking about where she’s going, where her father’s driving her. She’s leaving for uni in a few days, and her mother likely won’t be out of care when she goes, so she’s saying goodbye.
“It’s not a hospital,” her father says abruptly.
“I know,” she says, in the tenor voice she used to have, the one which she now knows she could have trained into a wonderful singing voice, had she ever had the inclination or encouragement. “It’s a facility.”
“It’s called—”
She doesn’t remember what he says it’s called. Meadow Gardens or Shady Oaks or whatever, something pastoral and reassuring. They do rehab there, and they do other things. Her mother’s there for the other things. Principally, getting her away from Dad.
He talks for a while and she ignores him for a while, preferring to watch the landmarks big and small as they crawl by in the distance, but eventually he says, “I’m proud of you.”
It’s such a ridiculous thing for him to say that she has to pay attention to him. “For what?”
“For stopping me. For knowing how.”
He means, when she put herself between him and her mother. When he apologised and her mother took his side and he hit her again a while later anyway, and they never spoke of it again. Until now.
“Didn’t do much good, did it?” she says. She doesn’t mean to; she’d prefer to keep quiet, but bitterness has a pressure of its own.
“Watch it, son. All I’m saying is, you knew what to do. I’m proud of you. And I’m… glad you won’t grow up to be like me.”
“You mean, big man in a big house with piles of cash and a beautiful, bruised trophy wife?”
“I said, watch it,” he says, before retreating from his rage. “You should call your mother when you get to uni. Face To Face or whatever it’s called. I got her a new phone, one that can do it.”
She knows. She already went through the suitcase in the boot while Dad was upstairs. She doesn’t correct him on the name of the video chat service; what would be the point? She doesn’t say anything at all, not until he clears his throat to prompt her and she snaps, “I’ll fucking call her, okay?”
“You know how it works? I can get Miss Begum from the office to show you.”
“Yeah, Dad,” she says, “I know how to use a phone.”
There’s a tapping on the window, incongruous with the memory, and Christine blinks and there’s Paige, rapping on the glass and smiling at her. Christine refocuses, shakes herself, and looks past Paige to see Indira walking in circles, stretching.
“We’re there?” she says.
“No.” Paige is almost inaudible through the window, so Christine unbelts and opens the door and climbs out, stretching like Indira. “This is the services at Thurrock,” Paige says. “I need a wee and Dira needs breakfast. Fancy some American-style pancakes?”
Christine hugs her, reminds herself that her dad, his BMW — not even the same model as this one, now that she comes to look at it again — and her mother and that awful hospice in Surrey are all in the past.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’d love some pancakes.”
* * *
Pippa’s father used to say that ‘hurry up and wait’ was the method by which hell could most effectively torture its captured sinners, that being made to hope for something, to put one’s life on hold in anticipation of it, was a pain more exquisite than losing a finger. He liked to brandish his right hand at her when he said that, with its missing ring finger, and wiggle the stump at her.
No, she remembers, pausing outside the entrance to the security room and rolling her bracelet in idle rings around her wrist, he used to say that to him. To his son. Her father liked to make his terrible but still moderately pious jokes to someone who is no longer real, who perhaps was never real, was merely a construction of convenience, a paper person burned away. If she walked up to him today her father would not recognise her, and nor would anyone who was once precious to her.
She leans against the wall, digs her shoulder blades into it, tries to carve chunks from the concrete with them, and reminds herself sternly that there are people to whom she is precious now. That it took until many months after her graduation from the care of her sponsor for her properly to become close to some of them is as much an indictment of the isolation she imposed upon herself as it is the processes of the programme, and, for goodness’ sake, she didn’t even meet Stephanie until she’d been elevated to the status of sponsor herself.
Pippa snorts in amusement. Arguably, she didn’t meet Stephanie for real until a month into her sponsorship.
There. Embrace that levity. Use it. Melancholy doesn’t get you anything except more melancholy. Remember what you have now; remember who you have now. And remind yourself that, one day, you might have your old family again. The consensus on that seems to be ever-changing, after all; if Indira’s careful, process-led pathway for reintegrating with her former family showed that the wall erected between the old life and the new didn’t have to be a permanent one, Shahida’s arrival and abrupt inclusion in the Sisterhood suggests the viability of an alternative, more radical approach: just effing do it.
And perhaps she will one day.
In the meantime, she has responsibilities. Hurry up and wait, indeed.
She shrugs off the memory, waves at Jane, who’s running the security room today and discussing something over Consensus with what looks like about five other people — probably, Pippa realises with a stab of concern, the imminent release of Raph and Ollie back into the basement population; she makes a mental note to check that Steph’s been keeping her pocket taser charged — and continues down the stairs, buzzing herself in to basement two and giving herself a moment out of the sight of any cameras to breathe in, to steel herself, to become Pippa, the sponsor, and not Pippa, the girl who misses her family.
She still rather hates it down here. But at least she has company; others who have no choice but to spend their days, weeks and months anticipating something that will come to them only eventually. Stephanie, now revealed to Aaron as well as everyone upstairs for who she really is, no longer in hiding but still forced to watch her body change agonisingly slowly; Aaron himself, struggling through the early stages of acceptance and spotted on surveillance this morning crying ugly and loud in Steph’s arms; Will, who seems to have decided that he can, in fact, become someone who isn’t either dangerous or deeply irritating to be around but has yet to understand the mechanism by which it might happen. There’s a tremendous urgency to the stated goals of Dorley Hall — to remove dangerous but pliable and ultimately redeemable boys away from the people they are hurting or whom they might hurt, and teach them another way to live — and simultaneously a depressing lack of alacrity to its methods.
You introduce the boys to estrogen, to new friends, and to enforced self-reflection, and you and the boys together all hurry up and effing well wait.
Maria would tell Pippa she’s being reductive. But what the heck; she never wanted to be a sponsor, anyway.
The first boy she sees is Adam, sitting with Edy at one end of the table in the lunch room and eating his breakfast with trembling eyes looking at everything in the room bar whoever is at the far end of the table from him; that turns out, as Pippa steps into the room to greet Edy and Adam, to be Will, quietly spooning porridge into his mouth and looking at nothing in particular. Edy offers Pippa a crinkle-fingered wave, which Pippa returns and which Adam, after a moment, imitates. Pippa decides that’s as good a cue as any and sits down a few chairs away from the boy, smiles, and leans nonthreateningly on her elbow.
Edy says Adam’s doing better lately, and that’s good. Pippa’s always felt she should have found more in common with him than she has, being that they’re both from religious families, but hers was simple Church of England with an occasional side of imported Evangelicalism (for the songs, mainly) whereas, from what she’s gleaned, Adam’s family squats at the head of a small and isolated sect of the sort that encourages its sons to hold signs outside women’s health clinics.
Pippa, uncomfortably, suspects she has more in common with Will than anyone else down here this year, despite his loudly and repeatedly professed atheism.
“Hi, Adam,” she says. “How are you doing?”
He glances at Edy for reassurance. She provides it with a nod, so he says in a small and polite voice, “I’m okay. Thank you for asking, Pippa. How are you?”
I’m stuck in a loop of mournful nostalgia and wistful hope, she thinks, through her smile. “I’m good,” she says out loud. “Steph’s doing well, and I’ll be going over there in a moment. I know you haven’t spent much time together lately; do you have a message for her—” Damn; almost the wrong pronoun. “—I mean, for Steph?” Wonderful save. Flawless. Sponsor of the year.
Edy’s eyes sparkle with amusement at the mistake. Pippa feels she isn’t granting the situation the respect she deserves, and aims a light kick at her under the table. She misses.
“Um,” Adam says, thinking hard, “just to say hi. And thank you for listening, those times.”
“Consider it passed on.” Pippa reaches out to touch his fingers, just for a moment, and he doesn’t take his hand away and doesn’t react poorly. He smiles at her instead, which feels good, especially for this stage of the programme. She’s pretty sure she was still barely holding herself back from attacking her sponsor at this point.
So much like Will.
She feels herself react to the thought, in her gut and in the way her back stiffens and her free hand momentarily clenches, but she’s pretty sure none of it reaches her face. Edy sees it anyway — of course she does — and she raises an eyebrow, asking silently if Pippa’s okay. Pippa answers by standing and walking the other way around the head of the table, briefly grasping Edy’s shoulder and squeezing: Yes, I’m okay, and thank you for asking. As she lets go, as she passes, Edy’s eyes meet hers with compassion and grace.
It’s good to feel known like that, to feel understood, to feel cared for and approved of. Pippa gives in for a moment to the need for a mother, for someone who can fill that position, and though Edith doesn’t have quite enough years on her to make that possible, she’s close enough and kind enough and altogether Edith enough that Pippa finds herself buoyed, once more feeling like someone who graduated from this place and not like someone who still needs it.
And she giggles quietly at her word choice: buoyed. Not any more, mate.
Embrace the levity, always, or you’ll go bloody mad down here.
“Hey, Will,” she says, on her way out. “You okay?”
“What do you care?” he says, and it’s so unlike something she would have said at the time — more adolescent insolence than the aggrieved aggression she was given to — that she smiles, grasps his shoulder, too, and just shrugs when his head whips around, full of questions.
“I just do,” she says.
At Stephanie’s door she knocks in the pattern she always uses, and Steph calls out that it’s okay to come in. Inside, Aaron’s still there, still in Stephanie’s arms and they’re still lying down together, though they’ve made themselves more comfortable, arranging pillows and cushions, and they’ve had some TV show on. Aaron’s the one to pause it — Pippa hides her smile at the incredibly poor opsec involved in allowing an ordinary programme inductee to use Steph’s fully enabled phone, but all the procedures have been thrown out of the window for these two — and Pippa crouches down by the bed, near to him but not too near and putting herself below him. Hopefully it’ll help him feel safe.
“Hi,” she says warmly, reaching for the tone of voice her mum always used to use when she was a child and had a nightmare. “Rough night?”
He looks at her and a moment later his expression mangles, like he’s suddenly realised there’s a sponsor in the room and he looks like absolute shit! And then he looks guiltily around at Stephanie, realising, if Pippa had to guess, that she’s spent the last couple of hours comforting someone who is rather more mucus than human, and Steph gives him a kiss.
He turns back to her, a little more relaxed, and Pippa smiles. They’re so good for each other. Unexpected, but wonderful.
“Rough night,” Aaron agrees, sniffing. He recoils at the disgusting sound his nose makes. “Just bad stuff, you know?”
“I know,” she says.
She and Aaron haven’t talked much, overall. They’ve had conversations, especially after he and Stephanie started to grow close, but they’ve always been about ordinary, everyday stuff; she’s been striving to help the both of them feel as normal as possible while they’re down here, and she likes to think she’s done as good a job with that as can be expected, but the flip side is that she doesn’t really know him. She’s read his intake file, sure, but he’s different enough from when he came to Dorley Hall that she no longer considers it a particularly accurate read on his personality.
Maria said she’s going to schedule a meeting, soon, for just the two of them, so they can touch base. The semester ends today, so they’ll finally have the time.
Aaron asks, “How did you do it?” It’s quick and sharp, like he wanted to get it out before he changed his mind, and the frown that creases his forehead suggests he regrets the question almost immediately. Pippa smiles gently for him, trying to reassure him that it’s not a bad question to ask, and she makes sure to show on her face that she’s thinking seriously about how to answer him.
“With a lot of fuss and a lot of friction,” she says eventually, more honestly than she’d planned. “Steph knows what happened to me before I came here; you can ask her if you like, and it’s fine, Steph, if she wants to know.” Pippa hadn’t meant to use the pronoun — habit from Steph, probably — but Aaron doesn’t flinch at it. Should she tell Maria about that? Part of her feels like it would be a betrayal; not everything the boy does ought to be analysed to hell and back. “Actually, if I’m going to be frank, I— What?”
She doesn’t smile, doesn’t telegraph her intentions in any way, but she put a subtle emphasis on the word and he picks up on it, laughing like she hoped he would. Yes, the liquid snorts that shift around his small frame the phlegm of a morning spent crying sound really gross, but it’s what she wanted.
“You can’t be Frank,” Aaron wheezes. “You’ve been here too long.”
Steph strokes his hair, pulls damp strands out of his face and pats them down. She’s smiling at the joke, too.
‘To be Frank’; a stupid joke, but it can both break the ice and serve to reinforce the notion that, down here, ceasing to be a man is ordinary, natural, and expected. Rather underhanded, really, but Ellie, her sponsor, used it on her to much the same effect.
You really do have to laugh.
“Seriously, though,” she says, “you’re doing better than I was at this point.”
“Maybe I’ve just given up,” Aaron says, and despite the levity still present in his voice she knows he’s half-serious. He’s asking for permission, or an endorsement. She provides both.
“You’re doing great,” she says, touching his hand the way she touched Adam’s. “Maria’s proud of you. She says you’ve exceeded her expectations, and you know she doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean. I don’t know exactly what upset you this morning—” although she can guess, “—but I want you to know that doubts are normal. Bad thoughts are normal. No-one changes overnight.”
“I still feel…” Aaron can’t finish the thought, just frowns again and splays his fingers out against the edge of the mattress.
“Lost?” Pippa asks, and he nods. “Also normal. Which, yes, I know, doesn’t make it any less difficult to deal with.”
He shrugs, and Steph squeezes him again, kisses him on the back of the head. He pushes against the mattress and sits up, Steph moving with him, arranging herself around him, moving herself entirely in reference to him (and Pippa suddenly misses Rani, wishes they had a deeper relationship; the sex is nice, but Pippa thinks she likes Rani more than Rani likes her, and, worse, she’s gone back home to Liverpool for the holidays).
Aaron’s nose, responding to gravity, drips. “Oh, God,” he says, “I’m disgusting.”
“You’re not disgusting,” Steph insists, nuzzling him, loyal to the end.
“Stephanie,” he says with a whine, and Pippa has to hide her delight that he uses her full, unambiguously feminine name, “I’m all sticky. I’ve spent, what, half the night crying—” he hesitates only a little over the word; well done, kiddo, “—and now I’m absolutely covered in snot and I don’t even want to know what I look like, so get your paws off me and let me go shower and we can continue my epic breakdown when I’m in clean, dry clothes, okay?”
Steph, incorrigible, kisses him again. “Okay,” she says, and opens her arms so he can stand up without her dragging on him. He succumbs for a second to the playfulness that’s always seemed to Pippa to infuse him from head to toe whenever he relaxes enough to be himself, and kisses Steph on the forehead, dodges away from her before he can be grabbed, and nips out of the door without another word.
He’s not wearing a top; Pippa notes that he’s definitely started to develop in the chest.
“Seriously,” she says, turning back to Stephanie, “is he okay?”
Steph nods, but she doesn’t look all that confident in her assessment. “Yeah…”
“Steph? Are you okay?”
The question seems to startle her, but she puts herself back together and answers with renewed confidence, “Yes, Pippa. I’m okay. I’m happy, actually. The more he comes to terms with… uh, with what’s happening to him, the more I do. I don’t have nightmares about finding him dead any more.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Pippa says automatically, and stands up to draw Steph into her arms. “You’re taking such good care of him. I’m so proud of you.” She says all the things she wanted to hear her sponsor say when she was down here; or all the things she wants to hear again from her mother and father. Then she pulls back so she can look Steph in the eye. “Just make sure you take care of yourself, too.”
“Isn’t that your job?” Steph asks, grinning.
“Yes, and you know what a terrible sponsor I am.”
“True,” Steph says, and drops back onto the mattress. “I wish there was more I could do for him.”
Pippa sits next to her, makes a space for Steph to lean on her, which she does, fitting her head into the crook of Pippa’s shoulder.
“There might be something we can do,” Pippa says thoughtfully. “He asked how I did it, and, sure, I can tell him. I can tell him in detail if he really wants, but at the end of the day… we’re quite different people. The thing is, though — and I know you love him, Steph, so don’t take too much offence at this — he’s not that original. We’ve probably got half a dozen girls knocking around upstairs who were just like him once. I can ask Maria for suggestions. See if someone can come talk to him.”
It’s something they do a lot, just not usually this soon. Edy says that early in the programme, once the first waves had graduated and some had consented to stick around, they tried to match sponsor to subject, like for like, and that turned out to be a huge mistake. But it is helpful for the boys to have access to someone who can think the way they do, who can empathise directly, from experience.
It had been Abby, for her. Strange that it still took them a while afterwards to become friends.
“Would you?” Steph says. “You’re amazing, Pippa.”
“I’m doing my best.”
Pippa closes one arm around Steph, and rolls her other arm on her thigh, nudging the bracelet up enough so she can play with it with her two longest fingers. She likes giving comfort, being the one people can turn to, but she can’t deny the growing hole in her life where once there had been people who took care of her; her sponsor had done, all things considered, a good job, and more importantly had been the right person to do it, to draw Pippa out of herself, but Ellie hadn’t exactly been a hugger.
Maybe she’ll call Ellie later, though. It’s been a while.
Goodness, she envies Indira. And today, particularly, she envies Christine, who’s taken Indira and Paige on a trip down to Brighton, to visit and perhaps exorcise some of the ghosts of her past, and maybe even to see her family, if only at an extreme distance. She can’t wait to hear how that goes, even if she thinks that if she were in Christine’s position, if she were to see her mother once more, they’d have to enlist all the sponsors in Dorley Hall to hold her down, because she would run to her without a second thought.
* * *
“I don’t wanna.”
“Yes, well, I never wanted to, either, and yet here I am.”
“But it’s…”
“It’s what, Declan?”
“It’s fucking gay.”
Valérie has decades of experience controlling herself, of analysing her first reaction and deciding whether it would be prudent, safe or helpful to allow it through, and she decides that, yes, her instincts in this moment are both entirely correct and likely to prove incredibly satisfying. She slaps the boy, hard, on the cheek.
She’s been expecting him to get his voice back, to reassert himself — he’s by no means the first new girl she’s been expected to guide through his response to such extreme and sudden surgical alterations — and he has. He’s used it mostly to object to his new life. Val finds such objections entirely understandable, of course, and ordinarily she might have chosen to empathise with them, but the boy is a piece of shit and she has other things to think about.
Dee is alive…
Clasping an outraged hand to his reddening cheek, Declan tries to stand up, to confront her, to outmass her, which even after the starvation diet and the month or so of estrogen therapy he is still perfectly capable of doing, but Frankie’s hands on his shoulders press him down.
“Sit, rapist,” she says.
“I didn’t fucking do anything!”
“Yes you fucking did, and you know how I know this?” Still pushing down on him, Frankie leans over to make herself louder to him. “I called around, didn’t I? Your girl, the one who kept coming back to you, well, she finally talked to someone, didn’t she? Yeah, she reported you missing months ago, but after a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks without you, she saw her GP. Got a referral for a therapist. And you know what I think she’s getting therapy for? It’s not because you left. It’s because of what you did, you little shit.”
She told Val about this last night: Béatrice’s bizarre reinvention of Dorley Hall sends people out to befriend some of the victims of the boys it takes in for reform, encourages them to seek therapy, helps them monetarily. Frankie doesn’t know if this is what happened in this particular case — she obviously doesn’t have access to Dorley’s records any more — but it seems likely, and she’s been able to confirm Declan’s ex-girlfriend’s medical appointments through Dorothy and Silver River. Easy to justify: if the man you’re trying to break knows the world is moving on without him, it’s harder for him to fight back.
If the man is fucking weak, that is. Valérie fought back for years.
“She fucking asked for it,” Declan insists with a sneer.
Valérie slaps him again. “Just like you asked for that?”
He pushes up against Frankie’s hands, but she’s putting all her weight on him and he, for all his size, is not at all as strong as he once was.
“Stay where you are,” Frankie hisses, “unless you want us to have a problem.”
“You should listen to her,” Valérie says. She’s sitting back now, folding her arms, watching him struggle against Frankie and allowing her amusement to show. “She once stabbed a man in the penis.”
“It’s true,” Frankie says. “And since you still have yours — for now — you should be careful around me, and not tell lies, and not act like you’re going to attack my friends, okay?”
Declan’s sullen and bitter and humiliated and scared and belligerent and all of it shows on his face, but he’s not brave and doesn’t seem like he ever was, and all that remains of his former bulk is his height; he seems finally to be realising that he really is in the shit, and that together the women around him aren’t intimidated by him and aren’t inclined to offer him the benefit of the doubt.
Val wonders what was going through his head when he was almost catatonic. Was anything?
She’s probably being unfair, she knows; but she doesn’t think it’s possible to be unfair to someone like Declan, to someone who’s done what he’s done. Or, if it is, she doesn’t care in the slightest.
She does want him functional, though, even if it’s only so he can have the run of the place without her constant supervision.
“Look,” she says, “you came from Dorley Hall, right? And they kicked you out because they found out you’re a rapist piece of shit, yes?” Frankie knows a reasonable amount about Dorley’s new operating procedures under Béatrice; Val’s spent as much as she can of the last two days quizzing her about it. It still seems strange, turning boys into girls for their benefit, but as Frankie pointed out more than once, Val acclimated to being a woman, and if she can do it, maybe any man can.
Declan grunts in response, and Valérie amends: maybe some men can.
“So this is the last chance saloon, yes?” she says, clenching a fist and steeling herself for what she has to say next, for the spirits she’s about to invoke. “There’s nothing after this place. And I mean that literally. All the other girls who came here are dead. Some of them I buried myself. So if, Declan, you want to die, go ahead and fight us. Insist until the fucking cows come home that you’re a man, that you don’t want to do anything gay—” she leans on the word, mocking him, “—and wait for the old bitch upstairs to get tired of you and instruct her soldier boys to kill you. If you want to live, learn how to behave yourself.”
Declan’s eyes intensify and his mouth tightens, and Val reads this as his fear jacking itself up another notch. Good. Fear will control him, and the last thing she wants right now is the little bastard making a problem out of himself.
“You know what?” Frankie says, pushing down on him again. “This is a learning opportunity right here.” She releases him and points at the collection of creams and powders on the vanity. “Do your own makeup.”
“That,” Val says, before Declan can react, “is an excellent idea.” She stands up. “Make yourself beautiful, Declan.”
“I don’t know how,” he says, and that’s better than the outright refusal Val expected.
“You saw that girl you assaulted up close, didn’t you?” Frankie says. “Got a good look at how she prettied herself, I bet?”
“You have everything you need right there,” Val says. “Just do what she did and make yourself beautiful. And choose a dress; there are several in your closet.”
“Don’t come out until you’re done,” Frankie says.
They leave him sitting in front of his vanity with his collection of cosmetics and a dumbfounded expression.
As soon as they close the door to his room, Val recoils from Frankie, marching several steps away from her. Mere proximity feels repulsive.
“When you called me one of your friends,” she says, leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor, “I had to clench my stomach so I wouldn’t throw up.”
“Sorry,” Frankie says, putting on that expression Val’s had to start reading as at least moderately apologetic.
“Christ alive,” Val says, and she closes her eyes and gives in for a moment to the other thing that’s been threatening her equilibrium, the surging cold, the grasp of the dead, because she used the lives of the girls she knew and cared for as a threat, as a tool to keep a rapist in line, and now she sees them all, every cold face, every matted black clump of dirt she used to cover them.
“Val?” Frankie comes closer and Valérie doesn’t have anything with which to stop her.
“Jesus fucking Christ and his angels,” she mutters, and she knows she’s shaking but she can’t stop. She was supposed to be past this, she was supposed to be nothing but a mass of scar tissue, all her wounds healed over and stronger for it, but now here she is, soft and weak and trembling. Frankie stands there, within arms’ reach but doing nothing; helpless but clearly wanting to help. “It is an obscenity to even think about them in front of you,” she adds, trying to find venom to spit at Frankie but coming up only with desperate, aching, biting cold.
“The girls?” Frankie says, gently and hesitantly, and that makes it even more obscene, because she was fucking part of it, and who cares if she was under the control of another monster? If someone hands you a gun and tells you to point it at someone else or at yourself and you oblige them by choosing, you’ve missed the very obvious third person you could have pointed it at.
But Frankie’s the only one within fifty miles who gives even the slightest portion of a shit about her. Sometimes you have to walk with monsters or you don’t walk at all.
“Yes,” Val says. “It’s the girls.”
They spoke of them two days ago. It’s not friendship, whatever it is that’s developing between them, but they’re both prisoners here, both trapped in Dorothy Marsden’s lifelong game, and that means they need each other. It also required Frankie, if Val was going to spend actual time with her, to properly understand.
So she took her to the courtyard and showed her the flagstones that come up if you pull on them and told her again how many girls she’s buried.
Valérie’s never considered herself especially religious, except in the lapsed Catholic sense — communion is hard to come by when you can’t leave your prison to go to church — but when she stands over their graves she can feel the spirits of the girls under her, and when she examines the tiny stone markers she left to commemorate each of them she can feel their eyes upon her.
And it felt like Frankie finally got it, finally took in all of what she’d done, what she’d been party to. “I really should have drowned myself in the fucking lake,” she’d muttered, and she’d turned to Valérie for comfort and Val, unable to believe what she was doing, provided it.
“I hate this fucking prison,” Val mutters. “It was bad enough when it was just me. And then there were the girls, and now it’s that piece of shit back there and— and you…”
“There’s someone else, Val,” Frankie says quietly. “I checked on it yesterday. There’s a gate at the end of the Run. And there’s an outbuilding behind it. I saw movement in there, and I know you and Dotty and Callum and that bastard Jake were all still in here.”
Val shakes her head, forces her ghosts to depart. “You really think there’s someone else here?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“Who the fuck knows, Valerie darling? Could be another guard. Could be another prisoner. Could be Declan’s long-lost twin-brother-turned-sister. Whoever it is, they might present an opportunity.”
“An ally, you’re thinking?”
“Only one way to find out,” Frankie says.
* * *
Steph’s waiting with him in the lunch room. He’s taken the chair farthest from the door, on the short end of the table, so he can see whoever it is as soon as she looms in the glass and thus have the maximum amount of time possible to prepare his reaction, and still he’s nervous because Steph said that Pippa said they both think he should talk to someone, someone other than Steph (who is a trans woman and, though she may love him, cannot necessarily relate to how he feels about his gender and especially not about his inexplicable lingering attachment to maleness) or Pippa (who claims she is/was nothing like him when she came here, that she was some completely other flavour of awful, and damn right he’s going to ask Steph for her story once the day is done with and he’s safely back in his or her room because that sounds fucking fascinating) or Maria (who to hear her tell it was never a bad person at all and who discarded her maleness so long ago she can, she says, barely remember what it was like to be seen as or behave as a boy).
So he’s waiting, antsy and trying not to be irritable, because he knows they’re trying to help, but he thinks probably the most helpful thing Pippa did was to tell him that it takes time, that he doesn’t have to have everything sorted out immediately just because he wants to or he feels like he should; and then she had to go spoil it all by heading upstairs and looking for someone to whom he will, supposedly, be able to relate and who, crucially, will understand him, too.
He hears her first, tap-tapping high heels in the corridor, and Steph kisses him on the top of his head before disappearing quietly out of the other door, leaving him entirely alone and unable to formulate a helpful response to the woman who enters, looking around with an expression of distaste but smiling warmly when she sees him.
It can’t be the case that all the women here were once men like him, right? He’s just about gotten used to it with Maria and Pippa and Edy and the others, and when he attempts momentarily to consider her objectively the woman tapping her way past the row of chairs towards him is no more or less attractive than, say, Maria, but she’s an attractive he hasn’t had the chance to acclimate to and he’s pretty sure that if he tries to say anything right now it will come out as an embarrassing collection of insensible vowels.
Her near-black hair is tied up in an elegant twist at the back of her head, and a few items of hair jewellery that Aaron is certain probably have special names are positioned near her temples. Her copper skin is radiant even in the harsh overhead lights of the lunch room, and her subtle makeup enhances what he’s willing to guess is a pretty considerable natural beauty to something approaching knockout status. She’s wearing a business suit, of all things, with a reddish-purple skirt to the knee and matching jacket, which she removes and places carefully over the back of a chair, revealing a white, short-sleeved blouse and softly muscled upper arms. Around her neck she wears a chain with a small locket, and he wonders if it’s the sort that has a photo in, and who it might be, if so.
She sits, pulling out the chair on the corner, positioning herself close enough to talk normally but not so close that they might accidentally touch.
“Aaron, right?” she asks in an accent Aaron places on the east coast somewhere; Norfolk, maybe.
He nods, and then, feeling tongue-tied, impresses himself by managing to say, “Yes. Hi?”
She laughs. It’s a sweet laugh, and Aaron outright refuses to believe her throat ever produced a voice like his. “Hello,” she says, and leans her elbows on the table. She’s set down two mugs, and he smells coffee. “I’m Yasmin. Pippa and Maria asked me to come down for a chat.” She eyes the mugs and pushes one toward him. “The coffee was my idea. Pippa asked Stephanie how you like it.”
He grabs it and inhales deeply. “Incredible idea,” he says, and sips carefully at it; too hot, unless he wants to scald his tongue.
“Excuse the outfit,” she says, as if such an ensemble has any need to be excused or explained. Aaron thinks he could stand to see a lot more women dressed similarly, preferably on a regular basis. “My idiot boss decided he wanted to see us all for a one-hour in-person meeting on a random Wednesday morning in mid-December. Normally I’m not so dressy for work.”
“You look good, though. Really good.”
Yasmin smiles broadly. “Pippa was right about you; you’re sweet.”
She lifts her mug with slender fingers tipped with a pale pink short-nailed manicure, and blows on her coffee before taking a delicate sip. She closes her eyes to savour the taste and inhale the vapour, and it gives Aaron the opportunity to read the slogan on the side of the mug. It says, Pain is just testicles leaving the body.
That’s… inappropriate. He looks down at his, too, and finds a simplistic image of a pile of bricks and what looks like a small scalpel, superimposed with the text, For the love of God, Montresor! Those were my balls!
So, a theme, then.
“Oh,” Yasmin says, frowning. “Sorry about the mugs. I wanted plain ones, but the second years have been making mug brownies or something and they’re all absolutely caked in muck. I swear, sometimes it’s like living on the set of Blue Peter around here, what with all the random projects they have the second years do to keep them busy and socialise them.” She snorts. “Like the Blue Peter set only much, much hornier.”
“You don’t think these are in bad taste?” he says, holding his mug up so she can read it. “Are we all just one big joke to the girls upstairs, is that it?” He doesn’t want to get angry — he hasn’t really done so in a short while, not at anyone or anything other than himself, and the sensation is surprisingly unfamiliar and unwelcome — but he can’t stop himself. “This is actually kind of—”
“It’s not at your expense,” Yasmin says quickly, putting a hand on his wrist and slowly lowering him and his mug back to the table. “These jokes — and they are very stupid jokes, I think we can both agree — aren’t about you; they’re about me. And Julia. And Christine and Paige and Maria and everyone else. All of us were down here. All of us were once… you. Or someone like you. Maria, perhaps, aside,” she adds, tilting her head. “The mugs and the memes and Maria’s silly poster, they’re like getting someone to sign the cast on your broken arm. Except we all have the broken arm, and we’re all signing each other’s cast, and that’s a terrible metaphor; sorry.”
“Still seems a bit… gross?”
“It’s acclimation,” she says firmly. “It’s affirmation. It’s, ‘I survived!’ And it’s bonding, actually. You never made a joke about something awful that happened to you?”
Aaron shrugs. He can see her point.
“I hated them for the longest time,” she continues. “I hated all the cutesy, twee, memey shit that grew around the trauma we all carry. And I kind of hated the other women here; or, at least, I wanted nothing to do with them. I transitioned with a girl called Julia, and we became very special to each other, to the point where we decided we didn’t need anyone else. And, because we became quite self-sufficient, just the two of us, the sponsors left us to it. They’ve told me since that they made a mistake, that they should have taken more care with us.” She sips her coffee. “I can’t say I disagree. But I’m trying to fix it. To engage more. To understand more about how my— my Sisters think. And I’m trying to show Julia that talking to the people we came up with isn’t necessarily a bad thing, not any more, not since everyone… chilled the fuck out. And that—” she grins at him, “—is why I was sitting at the kitchen table like a chump, drinking from a novelty mug and watching the second years make brownies when Pippa came in looking for someone to talk to a little wayward boy down in the basement.” She laughs. “She said she would have asked Christine — everyone always seems to ask her for everything — but, good for her, she’s not even in town today. I volunteered before I could be guilted into volunteering. And besides,” she adds, “you and I have a lot in common.”
Aaron takes her in again, and shakes his head. “That’s… hard to believe.”
She doesn’t say right away what she means. Instead she says, “You know what’s coming for you, don’t you?”
“The Estradiol Express? The orchi? Yeah, I know it. We’re all going to be you.”
“And Maria said you’ve been… coming to terms with it?”
“That’s the thing,” Aaron says, deciding to go follow this conversation wherever it leads; better to talk about it all with a stranger than with Steph, whose feelings he might hurt, or with someone who might, meaning well, tell Steph everything he says. “It’s yes and no. I feel so fucking weak, you know? I decided that, yeah, I’m going along with this, I mean, not that I have a choice but I’m definitely going along with this, because it didn’t take fucking long for Maria and Steph and all the others to make me realise that I was a grade-A bastard before I came here, and Maria and Monica both said that if I go back out there with a freshly raised consciousness but nothing else different about me that the entire world will conspire to turn me back into that guy, and they said it enough that I believe them. No; fuck it; that’s glib. They said it a lot but I decided they’re right, because I know I’m not strong enough to go against that kind of thing, you know? And I don’t have a solution, but they do, even if it’s fucking weird. So I’m going to do the girl thing if that’s what they think will work, and I realised that when I really look inside myself I’m not actually all that attached to being a guy, anyway, I mean, it’s never actually brought me happiness, just a load of misery and bullshit. But then, suddenly, I’m doing stuff—” he looks around furtively, “—and I mean, sexual stuff, with Steph and like a whole half my fucking brain starts screaming at me that this is wrong, that it’s not supposed to feel good, and I thought I was done with that shit, you know? But I can’t seem to shut it off.”
Yasmin’s been nodding as he speaks, and when he takes a break to collect his thoughts she inserts, “Growth isn’t a straight line, Aaron. It’s wiggly. It’s filled with potholes and detours and you go back and sideways as well as forward. And you’ll get lost and you’ll think it’s all hopeless and that the sponsors are all idiots and what they’re trying to get you to do is impossible, even if the day before you thought the exact opposite. You just have to stick with it.”
“Easy to say. Not so easy to do,”
“I mean,” Yasmin says, “you don’t have much choice down here. That’s the beauty of it. Maria will drag you to girlhood kicking and screaming if she has to. She would just, I suspect, prefer the alternative.”
“What about you, then? Were you dragged kicking and screaming?” Aaron tilts his head, takes her in again. “I mean, Jesus Christ, I can barely believe you’re not a model, let alone that you were once a— a—”
“Man? Relax yourself, Aaron; I was never a man. I never made it quite that far.” She leans back in her chair and holds her coffee with both hands, warming herself on it even though it’s not cold down here. Aaron recognises the body language of someone getting ready to settle in for a long conversation, so before she can say anything else he suggests they move somewhere more comfortable.
* * *
The BMW’s parked up in an open space near the beach — or near what Brighton calls a beach; in Indira’s mind, a beach shouldn’t have quite such a powerful smell — and now they’re walking the promenade, with Christine indulging her memories and Paige and Indira trailing along in her wake, Indira tightening her long coat against the wind. And it is bitterly cold, the sort of cold that makes Indira long for the kitchen back at Dorley Hall, for the AGA that makes it too warm in the summer unless you turn on the AC or open the barred windows, but which in the winter makes pushing open the double doors and returning home into a feeling she savours all season.
“Teenie,” Indira says, as Christine slowly approaches another apparent landmark, “I want you to know that I love you, and that Memory Lane is extremely cold.”
“I used to come here,” Christine says, slowly and without inflection, as if she’s in a trance, “after school sometimes. Most days I’d go straight home because a lot of the other guys walked back along this way but sometimes I stayed late, and by the time I got here they were long gone. There was a sausage guy just there.” She points and Indira looks at a patch of concrete that currently hosts a stand selling novelty rock candy, keyrings and phone cases. “Those were the days I’d skip dinner and I’d just have a sausage in a bun and a Sprite and I’d sit on the railing and watch the sea. Pretend I was someone else.”
Paige laughs, so quietly Indira thinks Christine didn’t hear it, and then approaches her from behind, looping her arms around Christine’s waist and waking the girl from her memory. “It’s a lovely view,” Paige says, in defiance of all good sense, because whatever virtues the seafront at Brighton may have, Indira would have to stretch the definition of the word intolerably to call it ‘lovely’.
‘Pestilent’, perhaps.
She joins Paige and Christine at the railing, listens to Christine relate ever more gloriously irrelevant details about her school life — rather, what she did when she was escaping school and home both; what she did when she was walking around town on her own, a teenager unmoored and restless and with nowhere safe to go, inside her head or without — and she lets herself smile. She looks away so Christine doesn’t see, but hearing the girl tell stories from her teenage years, stories which crack her voice on the telling, is even more wonderful than she expected.
Christine’s needed to heal for a long time, but it’s only recently that she’s been ready, and now she’s here, and she’s able to view the things that happened to her and the things she made happen to other people as part of her, part of her history, part of herself, and not as the ghastly acts of a life she wants to escape, or as the half-remembered thrashings of a monster she killed in order to rebuild herself from its grisly entrails.
Her beloved sister is healing at last, and it’s a good thing the salt wind is affecting all of them equally, or Indira might have a hard time hiding the tears she no longer wants even to try to keep back.
* * *
Yeah. The boy’s changes are definitely becoming apparent. He walks like she remembers Julia walking, early on, when the weight redistribution was starting to kick in. They’ll have switched him and the other boys — and the girl, Stephanie — from the low-calorie diet they always start them on to a higher-calorie one now, to give the hormones something to work with, and it shows on him primarily in the way he’s had to start moving his hips. He also pays conspicuous attention to his bedroom door, and Yasmin bites her lip in amusement; he’s barely a centimetre or two thicker around the bust than he probably used to be, but it’ll be enough to throw off years of muscle memory, enough that he probably grazes his sensitive chest every time he tries to nip through a small gap, like, say, between a closing door and its frame.
Goodness, she remembers that. She remembers collapsing on her bed after the umpteenth time, clutching herself and giggling madly, Julia looking on in shock; she couldn’t believe she was finding humour in any of it. Neither could Yasmin, really, but it had all just been too much.
Oh, Julia. Yasmin almost wishes she was down here with her, because without the fear of the imminent unknown, without the almost insurmountable anxiety over leaving her old self behind, it’s just an ugly basement with too-bright spotlights in the ceiling and, here in the bedroom corridor, nasty laminate covering the concrete walls. It’s just a place and nothing more. But Julia rejected even the idea of using the downstairs kitchen.
She’ll get there. Yasmin’s come around to the notion that they need to socialise with their Sisters, largely because so many of them are so despicably sweet and kind. Godsdamned delightful shower of girls; even Christine, whom both of them disliked for so long for reasons that were, probably, in the cold light of day or even in the harsh overhead lights of the basement bedroom corridor, rather petty.
Aaron returns from his room with a pair of jogging bottoms for her. She asked him, when he suggested they move their conversation to the common room, to find her something more comfortable to wear, and to his credit and her surprise he hesitated only a moment before agreeing. But then she overheard Pippa giggling that Aaron and Stephanie have been sharing clothes for a while; he’s used to it. He hands them over with a sheepish smile, and she’s pleased to find a pair of woolly socks folded in with them.
In the common room he preemptively turns around so she can change, but she just kicks off her heels and yanks the trousers up under her unzipped skirt, stepping out of it as soon as she’s decent.
So much better, even if Aaron Holt’s jogging bottoms don’t reach her ankles.
The common room’s as etched into her memory as any other down here, but for her the couches hadn’t usually been in this configuration, positioned next to each other, in front of the TV. During her first year and after Craig washed out, her cohort divided into, depending on how you counted it, either two or two-and-a-half cliques: Yasmin and Julia and their sponsors; Christine and Paige and Victoria and their sponsors, although mostly it had been Indira who spent social time with them; and Jodie and her sponsor, Donna, who were partially attached to Christine’s group but who increasingly spent their time alone together. They had the sofas up against opposite walls, with a cluster of cushions, books, discarded mugs and other detritus surrounding each one, each their own separate social area. If you wanted to watch TV, you went and sat at one of the tables. It hadn’t really been out of enmity, since that sort of ebbed and flowed as the year went on; the two groups had just been too different, too unable to understand each other.
Nowadays she wonders if they were, in fact, too similar. If she was too much like Christine; if Julie was too much like Paige. There’s a reason she’s second choice after Christine to talk to Aaron. Too damn alike.
She gets comfortable on one of the couches and stretches out her legs and Aaron does likewise, only he also pulls up a bean bag so he can elevate his feet, and she stifles a laugh; her basement wasn’t anywhere near as bean-bag-centric as this one appears to be.
“I read your file,” she says, and he flinches.
“We don’t need to go over that stuff,” he says.
“And we won’t. But you should know that I read it, and I know everything… and that I get it.” Hidden in her lap, she clenches a fist. From nostalgia to self-disgust in ten seconds flat. “And I hate that I get it, because I don’t enjoy thinking about what I did to end up here. But it’s almost definitely helpful for you to talk to someone who was in more or less your exact position relatively recently, and that’s me, so here I am. You could ask Maria to set you up with Christine when she gets back, if you like, since she’s like the shorter, more nervous, whiter version of me.” She laughs. “I was going to add ‘less neurotic’ to that list, but I honestly think that one would go to the judges.”
The boy rolls his hands around themselves. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
Adorable. “You’re sweet, like I said. But you need to hear this, because it’ll help you get to one of the harder truths we all have to deal with, sooner or later: we’re not unique. Growing up the way we did, as a boy who is fucking bad at it, who acts out for approval and for self-esteem, but who never actually gets either so acts out all the harder, is rather mundane. Dorley Hall could take in a hundred guys like us every year—” she points from him to her and back again, “—and still have spares, and then it’d be even more clear: we’re all fucked up, and we’re all fucked up in rather the same way.”
He looks even more uncomfortable. “Weird to hear you call yourself a guy.”
“Don’t get used to it. The point is, reading your file was like reading my file with the names changed.”
“What did you do?”
She gives him her professional smile, the one she uses when her boss stands too close to her. “Made life difficult for a lot of women. More than that, I’m not going to tell you. Not because I don’t want to — though I really do not — but because it’s not all that important. What’s important is what came before.” She shuffles her shoulders, gets comfortable in the couch cushions. “I grew up in a village near Thelingford. Close to Vicky, actually, though we never met before Dorley. It was a tiny village, and I was the only Iranian girl—” She stops herself, guards her laugh with her hand, and shrugs at his scrutiny. “Not a girl back then, obviously,” she says. “Consider that a little preview; in less than a year, talking about your past is going to be really confusing.”
“I’ve been talking with Steph about her school days; I’m used to it.” He smiles. “She kept calling herself he and Stefan like it was a fucking Hail Mary, you know? Like she was admitting to some great sin, like growing up as a boy — or faking being a boy — was something she had to make sure I never forgot she did, and I got a bit fucked up about it, actually. Had to kiss her until she stopped talking and then make her promise to stop bloody doing it.”
Yasmin bites her lip. Too much like what Julia used to do for her, once they moved up to the second year and had truly begun to embrace and explore their new selves; each other. Julia said she wanted her, wanted Yasmin, not the litany of confessions attached to a name and a body that didn’t even matter any more.
“Well done,” she says vaguely.
He shrugs. “I don’t like it when she hates herself,” he says.
Has it really been only two months since the two of them met? Remarkable. “Where was I?” she asks rhetorically, wanting to move on. Aaron lets her. “Right. Yes. My tiny village, and my family being the only Iranian family around. And in that situation, as a teenager — as a teenage boy — you’re under pressure, and pressure to fit in. But you can’t ‘fit in’ when you’re different and everyone knows it. You have to do more than that. You have to be—” she grimaces, “—cool. Do you know, Aaron, how tragic it is when a dorky teenage boy tries to be cool?” His expression matches hers. “Ah. Of course you do.”
She used to feel like the village of Medsham, the whole village and everyone in it who mattered even a little, revolved around the pool club. It was the most important place there; everything else was just an accessory to it. A famous retired guy from some punk band played there occasionally, that’s how important it was. Of course, viewed with Yasmin’s eyes it was actually nothing more than a squat, dingy building with a handful of pool tables and a bar that was okay selling to underage drinkers, but the boy she’d been was enamoured with it. The pool club was everything, and what the guys at the pool club thought of him was the most important thing of all.
He’d been underage when he started going there. The club was on a direct line between the school in Thelingford and his house in Medsham, and every time he walked past it he became more curious about it, especially when the guys hanging out on the bench out front, smoking and drinking, would yell out at him. He flinched away from them at first, because it was too much like when some of the boys at school had targeted him, but after a while he learned they didn’t mean anything by it, that they hassled everyone the same way.
That was what they said, anyway.
One time, one of them jokily suggested he join them, and in the spirit of inquiry — and even more in the spirit of not wanting to go home yet — he did, and that was that. He became a fixture there after school. They taught him to play pool, and though they found it funny when he missed his shots, they let him keep trying until he became first good, then really good. They gave him his first taste of beer — real beer, they said; locally brewed ale, not any of that imported German shit — and of gin, whisky and whiskey, cider, snakebite and black, and anything else he showed an interest in. They gave him his first cigarettes. They even provided a place to go when things at home became difficult; and again, when things at home ended. They let him be one of them.
“The condition,” she says, pointing at Aaron with her near-empty coffee mug, “was that to be one of them I had to be more like one of them than any of them were. I couldn’t be the first one to pass out drunk, I couldn’t be the first one knocked out at pool; you know what I mean. And you can keep that up for a while, especially when it helps you deal with the bullshit elsewhere. It was easier to deal with school because I felt above it all. I had other friends. Cooler friends. Older friends. Everyone else was just a kid.” She sniffs and shrugs. “Of course, actual friends wouldn’t have got me to do the things they got me to do. I’m glad I’ll never have to see any of those fuckers ever again.” She looks down at her cleavage. “Mind you, if they ever saw me again, I’d be one of their marks, I expect.”
“You’re really not going to tell me what you did, are you?”
She looks at him sharply enough that whatever further comments he’s been preparing fizzle out. “You’ve always done what’s easy,” she says. “I know, because I see a lot of myself in you, and that’s exactly what I did, too. That’s something I had to learn here: how to do the hard things. How to do the things that require effort every day, effort which might not pay off for months. Like you, I decided that I wanted to change — although I was nothing like as early as you — but then I got disheartened because it didn’t happen. I was still me, still the person who got sucked into all that stupid shit. But I’m down here now to tell you—” and she steps up from the couch and over to him, crouches down in front of him, takes his hand, “—from one easily led complete fuckup to another, it’ll happen. Don’t panic. Work on it but don’t force it. Don’t try to copy Steph’s progress right away, because she’s always going to be ten steps ahead of you because of who she is. Just be you.”
“That’s the problem,” he says, trying to snatch his hand away. “I don’t want to be me.”
“Actually,” she says, releasing his hand, “you do. I think you want to be you more than anything. You want to be the person you could have been without all the bullshit, yes?” He’s frowning but he’s receptive. “That’s what I wanted, too. And that’s what I eventually became. But it takes time, and it takes work — even the ‘drag them into girlhood kicking and screaming’ method requires something of you eventually — and more than anything else it takes understanding yourself. Picking out the parts of yourself that are real and not just more of the bullshit. Think of this as another shot at adolescence. It actually is, in many ways, since the basement can be a lot like a very small residential school and your body really is going through a whole lot of changes. Your first adolescence wasn’t quick, was it? And was it easy? No. You’re growing up all over again, as someone kinda new and kinda not, and you can’t rush these things.”
Aaron pushes himself up on the sofa cushions, sits up a bit more straight, and crosses his legs under him. He looks like he’s thinking so she doesn’t say anything else, just waits for him to finish getting comfortable and sits next to him on his couch.
“It’s Yasmin, yes?” he says eventually.
“Yes.”
“…How did you pick it?”
She laughs. “You’re thinking about names already?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Well,” she says, smiling conspiratorially at him, “I tell everyone it was a great-grandmother’s name — and it was — but I actually got it out of a movie.”
“Which movie?” he asks quickly.
“Sorry, Aaron,” she says, “but I’m taking that secret to the grave.”
He laughs with her, and she’s glad his mood’s come along for the ride. He’d been invested in her story, and she could tell, though he downplayed his reaction, how close to home some aspects of her old life hit for him. She hopes he’ll think about it, draw more comparisons between the two of them and maybe see himself in her a little. He’s going to be a girl or he’s going to wash out, and Yasmin might be biased but she thinks being a girl is by far the better option, and the sooner he starts actively imagining a future for himself, the less likely he is to catastrophically fail.
Besides, the little weasel is cute. She can see why Stephanie likes him. She squints at him, pictures him with a full year’s hormone therapy and maybe a little facial surgery, and suppresses her smile: she’s going to be so pretty.
Pippa comes by after a while with more coffee, interrupting their conversation, and for Aaron it seems like it signals the end, because he starts looking around himself. Probably wondering where Steph is, or Maria; wanting to get away from the intimidatingly pretty lady with the horrifyingly relatable stories.
He drinks his second cup of coffee quickly, but when he’s almost done he asks, “Yasmin, are you happy?”
A serious question deserves a serious answer. “Happiness… is not a function of transition at Dorley Hall. Most of us are happy, for sure, and all of us are happy we’re not the people we used to be.” She sips at her coffee, pretends to think it over; she’s talked this over with Julia many times and her thoughts on it are almost pat. “Happiness is something you have to find for yourself. For Dorley girls and cis girls. For trans girls. Even men. It can’t be given to you; you know this already. But what I learned here, what I gained, what I was given… was the capacity for happiness. For contentment. I was encouraged to become someone who understood herself.” She snorts, bitter. “Someone for whom the act of understanding herself was no longer deeply appalling. Someone with potential, replacing someone who had none.”
“Yes, but are you happy?”
She smiles for him one more time. “I’m working on it.”
* * *
It’s the same enormous house, and even from the car she can tell it’s mostly empty. It’s the same long driveway, lined with potted plants and braced on both sides by lawn. It’s the same street, where every plot is divided by a high brick wall and a cloud of tastefully varied foliage.
But the house looks even colder and less alive than she remembers, and the plant pots around the driveway are empty, and the lawn is unmowed and the trees and bushes are wild and unkempt.
The agreement was that she wait in the car while Paige and Indira go to the door. She can get out her phone and she can zoom all the way in with the camera and she can behave like a suspicious creep but she has to wait in the car. So, naturally, when she sees movement in the kitchen window, Christine leaps out of the rear door and runs to join Paige and Indira, too late for them to stop her, too late even for a reprimand from her former sponsor, because the front door is opening and, suddenly, here’s her mother.
She has pictures of her in the surveillance packets, pictures in which she looks frail and tired and old, and up close she can still see all that, but it’s modified by motion, by the smile that spreads across her mother’s face, by the hands that prop themselves on her mother’s hips, by her voice. She seems… okay. Not brilliant, not by any stretch, but she’s not the gaunt wreck Christine had been half-expecting. And she always did love to get visitors, if they were the right sort.
Christine almost catches her eye, and shuffles behind Paige a little more. She lets Indira do the talking, running quickly through the script they workshopped together: they are adopted sisters, checking out the neighbourhoods near where their parents are considering buying a house.
“Daddy’s so naive,” Indira’s saying, chattily. She can play the innocent and indulgent daughter to perfection; those acting classes paying off. And Aasha loves it when her daughter bamboozles people. “He thinks that just because a neighbourhood is rich, that means it’s safe! But—” and here she looks briefly around and then leans in, lowers her voice, brings Christine’s mother into her confidence, “—not everyone is the right kind of person, even if they do have money.” Dira sniffs disdainfully, as if mere money can be a reliable indicator of worth, and Christine’s mother nods.
That was one of the things they discussed: Christine’s father’s always been an arrogant prick, so convinced of his own value that if someone questioned him for any reason he’d likely as not laugh in their face. But her mother was always different. She worried about what people thought of her, of her house and the way she kept it — or paid to have it kept — and she was deeply concerned, always, about what people thought — Christine’s hand tightens around Paige’s — about her son. The son who did such terrible things, and then vanished.
She cared what people thought of her son. She never seemed interested in what her son thought about himself.
Careful, Christine. Be kind to yourself.
It’s a lever. Indira’s including Christine’s mother in her estimation of the right kind of person, and Christine’s mother is reflexively including Dira in return.
Christine’s mother starts her reply by evaluating her direct neighbours. She talks up their charitable contributions, the lovely meatballs they brought to the harvest festival four years ago, and how she hears they still attend neighbourhood watch meetings every week, but something’s not right, and it doesn’t take Christine long to spot it: everything’s past tense. Her mother’s not describing anything recent.
Nothing, she realises, from the last two or three years.
The conclusion that follows, moments later, is inescapable: Christine left, and her mother cut herself off from everything and everyone.
Just her and Dad.
In the big empty house.
With dust in the crannies of the skirting board and dead trees in the garden.
Mum’s alone.
She looks at her mother’s face again, and it’s the wrong move because Mum looks right back and as their eyes meet the image of Dad striking her, over and over for years, is almost overpowering, and yet there are no bruises anywhere she can see; even the broken red veins in her cheeks, the ones Christine had come to think were natural, something she might develop herself one day, are gone. Did she really always have red cheeks because Dad used to slap her there?
Mum asks, “Sweetheart, are you okay?”
Are you okay, Christine?
She wants nothing but to take her mother’s hand and drag her away, deposit her in the car, return and fill a suitcase and take her… somewhere. Anywhere. She can hear a faint hum in the background, almost drowned out by the distant sound of a television, and she’ll bet anything it’s from the machines around Dad’s bed, and it’s the perfect opportunity: leave! He can’t stop you! Leave! Why don’t you leave?
“She’s our newest sister,” Paige says, pulling on Christine’s hand, while Indira encloses Christine’s shoulders with a loving arm, “and it’s sometimes difficult for her. She—”
“My mum,” Christine says quickly. “She died.” There’s an inevitability to this; it’s like a car accident in motion, too late to stop. Later she’ll probably be thankful that her voice and mannerism training was so thorough and the changes from hormones and facial surgery significant enough that she really does seem like a completely new person (a completely new and completely perfect person, as Dira always says), but for now there’s only what needs to be said. “My Dad died, too, but he was the bad one. My whole family, gone in an instant.” Her Dad’s arm, crossing with hers, as she makes one final attempt to be a fucking man about it before the walls come crashing down. “I know you shouldn’t say that about a parent. That he was bad, I mean. People always said he tried his best. But he wasn’t trying. He just… did things, and he was so appallingly fortunate that they always seemed to work out for him. Until the end. But Mum… She took his side and I never wanted her to but she always did.” Mum’s in a bed in the hospital/in an armchair at the hospice/drinking tea in the conservatory and her son/daughter/whatever is trying to talk to her but she won’t listen, and now Christine’s thinking back she remembers something she never did before: fear. Fear in her mother’s eyes, in her demeanour. Fear burned into her soul. “I don’t think she even knew why she took his side, but she did, and I couldn’t bear it, so I left. And while I was away, she died. They both did. And I keep thinking, if I’d stayed, would I have changed anything? Could I have helped?”
She always expected, if ever she saw her mother again, to react with either uncontrollable rage or inconsolable sorrow. She should be screaming! She should be crying! What is this? Why can’t she stop just… talking?
“I love my new family,” she says, monotone and heartbroken, “and they love me, and I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. But when I look at— when I— Shit. Sorry.” She is crying now, and Paige wordlessly hands her a tissue. Christine dabs at her eyes with it. “When I remember what I used to have, when I remember my mummy, I feel selfish.” She laughs without humour, the spell breaking. “I’m sorry. You don’t need this.”
And Christine’s mother does something she never really did after Christine became a teenager, after she became the second man of the house: she steps over to where Indira and Paige are holding her and she cups Christine’s cheek with her hand and she says, “Why don’t you come inside and I’ll put on a pot of tea, and we’ll get you all fixed up?”
When her mother’s hand comes away it’s wet, and Christine understands suddenly where she is and what she said and who she said it to, and she can’t hold any of it back any more, and she’s helped into the house she grew up in, step by wounded step, by her sister, and her lover, and her mum.
* * *
“Theresa, my girl!”
He’s started saying that. Trevor doesn’t know if he thinks it’s funny or what, but Jake’s attitude towards him continues to deteriorate, from his original vaguely sympathetic but ultimately callous amusement to something much more dangerous, something that really genuinely scares him.
“Not my name,” he snaps.
“It should be,” Jake says, closing the front door of the bungalow behind him and throwing a rucksack on the floor. “Pretty little thing like you shouldn’t be called ‘Trevor’, right?”
Trevor laughs. Forces it, to try and annoy him, goad him into making a mistake. “‘Pretty’? I have mirrors, Jake. I look like a cross between me and my sister, and not the good bits of either of us.”
“Would you prefer ‘fuckable’?” Jake says. He opens the blinds to all the windows, lets the light in from all angles, makes it harder for Trevor to ignore his reflection in the bolted-to-the-wall mirror that’s not quite opposite the couch.
“I’d prefer Trevor,” he says. “Or Trev.”
“Well, ‘Trev’, you and I have got jobs to do today. You’re getting a visitor later on and that means you have to look presentable and so this—” Jakes been edging closer to Trevor the whole time he’s been talking, and he suddenly lunges at him, only to flick at the messy beard Trevor’s been growing, “—has got to go.”
They’re going to give him a razor blade? He can fucking use a razor blade. “Oh?” he says, innocently.
“‘Oh?’” Jake mimics in bad falsetto. “I know exactly what you’re thinking because I’d be thinking it, too, except I wouldn’t be fucking pansy enough to get myself stuck in your position. No, I’m going to shave you, and you’re going to sit still and let me.”
Trevor backs up. “Touch me, Jake, and I’ll kill you.”
“Darling, you couldn’t hurt me on your best day, and I think your best days are behind you, don’t you? So be a love and behave.” The arms of the couch are bare metal bars, and Trevor’s been wondering why. Jake provides the answer, taking from his rucksack a straight razor and accessories, a towel, and two pairs of handcuffs. “Spread ’em,” Jake says.
Reluctantly, Trevor holds his arms out to their fullest extension and allows Jake to cuff each wrist to the couch. Jake grins lopsidedly at him, then walks around behind the sofa and pushes it out into the room, creating a space for him to stand behind. Trevor tries to look around, to see what he’s doing, but Jake puts both hands on his forehead and pulls him back until he’s leaning into the cushion and looking up. Holding him still with one hand, Jake applies shaving cream with the other, and then readies the straight razor.
Trevor can’t take his eyes off it.
“Don’t worry, Theresa, I’m good at this; I used to do my dad.”
* * *
Christine clearly expects her mother to lead them through to the living room, because she starts walking in that direction, towards the open archway at the other end of the hall, and Indira has to tug on her hand to get her to switch directions. Christine’s still running on whatever it was that had taken her over on the porch, because it takes her a moment to get it, to wake up, and she corrects for her mistake with a frown.
Indira checks, but it doesn’t seem like Christine’s mother noticed.
The kitchen, when Christine’s mother opens the door and bustles them all inside, looks exactly like Indira expected. The house itself is one of those Edwardian jobs, all brick and bay windows, and she’s used to them being fitted out a certain way, with the kitchens taking pride of place, and Christine’s old house is no exception: lavish fittings, modern appliances, acres of prep surface, and a rack of pots and pans full to bursting. There’s a gas stove with a couple more pans discarded on top, and Christine’s mother clears them away as they enter.
“I’ve been teaching myself to cook,” she explains, with the same blush Indira’s seen a thousand times on her daughter. “I have a lot of time to myself these days, you see, and, can you believe it, I never knew how! Not really.” She shakes her head. “We used to get deliveries from a service, because… Well. Richard worked late and our son was never home and it was just easier to have someone else do it. How things change. Now, why don’t you—” she takes Christine’s hand, “—sit yourself down here, and I’ll put the kettle on.”
Christine allows herself to be sat, and as soon as her mother’s looking away Indira sits next to her, squeezing her hand under the table. Paige sits on her other side and, Indira would have bet a hundred pounds, already has Christine’s other hand in hers.
“Thank you,” Christine says, “Mrs…?” It was supposed to be Paige who asked for Christine’s mother’s name, should they happen to get invited inside, but they’ve been veering off script ever since Christine came running up behind them and Indira’s been reacting more slowly than she expected. It’s too easy for her to give Christine the benefit of the doubt, even when she gets herself invited into her own mother’s kitchen!
Christine’s mother’s shoulders tense, and she doesn’t turn around when she answers, just concentrates on filling the kettle from a large filter jug. “Please, call me Helen.”
Christine says, quietly, “Thank you, Helen,” and her hand stiffens in Indira’s.
Christine’s mother — Helen — leans on the counter while the kettle boils and looks at them, her gaze flicking from girl to girl, and Indira’s heart thumps so loudly she wonders if anyone else can hear it. Christine’s here and her mother’s looking right at her and is this going to be a problem?
Shit. Christine was one of the girls who really blossomed on estrogen, who had relatively subtle FFS, and Indira’s realising that, yes, Christine really does look just like the sister she never had; or, to put it another way, she looks an awful lot like her mother. Too much for them to claim coincidence.
This is why I wanted you to stay in the bloody car, Teenie!
Her fault, probably. Christine always did have a bit of a rash streak. Isn’t that how Stephanie ended up in the bloody basement in the first place? The trip down here was a good idea and she’s been able very nearly to watch her sister’s open wounds close up as she walks around, as she tells them stories about her past, as she places herself squarely and firmly back in her life. But this was too far, this was a mistake, and, worse, she’s pretty sure Christine knows it…
Hold on.
She’s having an idea.
Indira lets the conversation go on around her while she thinks.
“I’m so sorry about your family,” Helen’s saying to Christine as she fills the teapot. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
And Indira’s distracted from her thoughts for a second as her sister looks her mother in the eye and says, levelly and without a hint of the emotions that are starting to hurt Indira’s fingers, “Christine.”
“That’s a lovely name. And I know how you feel, Christine. I lost someone, too. Not quite as recently as you have, I think, but I’m still trying to get used to it. I’m afraid I became a bit of a recluse even before Richard’s turn for the worse.” She takes a quick, decisive breath, a sort of huff, a noise and action which when Indira’s mother makes it indicates she’s about to commence a displacement activity. Immediately she starts filling mismatched mugs with tea and placing them on the table, and Indira makes a note to visit home again very soon. With Christine. “I had a son,” Helen says, when she’s sat down. She’s still looking intently at Christine.
“What happened to him?” Christine asks.
“Killed himself, I’m sorry to say,” Helen says. “My fault.”
Paige says, quickly, to preempt Christine’s reaction, “I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Oh, it was. I’m very sure. The police, they said he disappeared, but…” Helen smiles. “This is the part where, on the television, the good and dutiful mother says, ‘I know my son,’ but that is unfortunately the point. I never did. Oh, maybe when he was younger and so was I, but I allowed myself to become distracted. I got absorbed in my own problems and my boy just… drifted away.” She points at Christine, and then directs the finger at Indira and Paige in turn. “Be careful about the kind of man you end up with, girls, or you might become so wrapped up in him that you miss entirely what your son — or daughter — is going through.”
Indira, feeling that as the token straight woman she ought to say something, says, “My sisters and my friends have all vetted my boyfriend.”
“Good,” Helen says, with feeling. “Make sure they keep doing that. Joan — one of my friends; she lives up in Glasgow now — warned me about Richard, warned me about me. I didn’t listen.” She turns her attention to Christine again. “You know, my son was about your age… How old are you, sweetheart?”
“Eighteen,” Christine lies, and Indira lets herself breathe normally for a moment; did she remember she’s supposed to be recently adopted, and that she needs to be young enough for that to have happened? Or did she just get lucky? They both know you can’t adopt a legal adult in this country or Indira’s own mother would have done so with Christine.
“Just a couple of years older…” Helen muses. “You look a little like him, you know.”
“Oh,” Christine says.
Well, that came slightly earlier than Indira expected. She doesn’t have a complete plan yet, but when has she ever? Worst case, they can read her in and hope.
“It’s true,” Indira says. “She does.” Christine’s head whips around to stare at her; Paige, the better actress, remains neutral. “We lied about why we came here, Helen. Sorry. We are adoptive sisters, and Christine here is our newest, but our family isn’t thinking of moving here. It’s… This is difficult to say.” She makes a show of turning to Christine. “Would you like to tell her, or should I?”
Christine, wide-eyed, says slowly, “I think it might be better if you do it.”
Indira nods and returns her attention to Helen. “We’re quite a well-off family, and our legal advice is quite… particular about new additions. We want to make sure our new sisters don’t have anything in their past that could be used to hurt them, you see, or to hurt us, through them. Not so we could discard them, you understand; just so we can be prepared. So our lawyers conducted a thorough audit, went through every document. We adopted her before it was done — she would have turned eighteen before the process finished had we waited — so we’re only just finding out now.” She’s found that when you’re trying to convince someone of a lie, adding irrelevant little details helps a lot. If you just come out and say it, you’re less believable. “Christine’s birth father, it turns out, wasn’t her biological father. He was… um… How should I say this?”
“He was impotent,” says Paige, who’s guessed where Indira’s going with this.
“Paige!” Indira snaps, suppressing her grin. “Yes. My very rude sister is correct. Christine was conceived via donor. Her birth parents never told her, and when we found out, we started looking.”
“It was Hamish, wasn’t it?” Helen says. Whatever ideas she might have been entertaining, she seemed to discard them as Indira spoke, and now she’s leaning her elbows on the table and smiling. She doesn’t look puzzled any more; she looks wistful. “Bloody Hamish. Christine, sweetheart, was your family— your birth family, sorry, were they American?”
Christine jolts into life. “Half and half. Dad took a job there. Met mum. Moved back here when I was three.”
“My brother,” Helen explains, “Hamish. Older than I. Went to America to find himself. Said he was going to be famous. Used to send us all sorts of silly messages about what he was getting up to. Then he got hit by a car. Jaywalking, the American authorities called it.” She shrugs. “He never said he donated you know what—” she says it with a wrinkle in her nose that’s so quintessentially Christine that Indira has to stop herself from laughing, “—but it doesn’t surprise me. Dad refused to support him while he was out of the country so he was always struggling for money. Christine; we’re family, then?”
Christine nods slowly. “I think we are, yes.”
Indira does her best to not look surprised. She didn’t know about Hamish; she’d planned to imply but never state that Christine’s father had been the donor, and rely on the fact that the man is supposedly not terribly verbal and not expected ever to be so again to carry them through.
“We didn’t come here to get anything out of you,” Paige says. “We don’t need money or anything like that. She just wanted to see what you looked like.” She nudges Christine with her elbow. “She was supposed to wait in the car.”
“Oh, I didn’t think that for a second,” Helen says, reaching across the table.
Christine untangles her fingers from Indira and Paige so she can take her mother’s hand. “I just wanted to see,” she says.
A moment passes between them, and Indira feels that in that moment anything could happen, that Christine could confess it all, that Helen could throw them out, that bloody aliens could descend and take them all prisoner, and then it ends, and mother and daughter release each other and sit back.
“I’m glad you came,” Helen says. “It’s good to know there’s a piece of him out there.” She laughs. “Just remember to look both ways before you cross the road and you’ll do better than him.”
“I— I will.”
They manage small talk for a little while, and then Christine asks to use the toilet. Helen gives directions to the downstairs cloakroom, and Christine departs; to explore, presumably. When the kitchen door closes, Helen says, “She really does look a lot like him. A lot like me, too, I suppose. And an awful lot like… I’m sorry.” She dabs daintily at her eyes. “I shouldn’t burden you with this.”
“It’s okay,” Indira says. “If you need to talk about it…”
“She looks like my son,” Helen says flatly. “If he hadn’t taken his own life, if I’d been more attentive, if Richard had been a bit less, well, himself…” She sighs. “I made a dreadful mistake, girls, and my son paid the price. It’s been over two years and I’m still not even close to forgiving myself. But you don’t want to hear that,” she adds quickly, “and neither will she. Do you think she’d agree to visit again? I miss having someone her age around.” Before Indira can answer, Helen continues, “I’m thinking of fostering, actually. Richard’s sick, terribly sick, and there’s not long to go now.” She says it in the same matter-of-fact manner she used to discuss her son’s suicide. “Not long at all. And I’m going to need something to do, and I have this house and all this time and… well, I can’t say I really miss being a mother because I never really was one, but I’d like to do it right.” She smiles brightly. “I think I’d be good at it.”
“I think Christine would love to visit you again,” Indira says. “She misses her family, even though she wasn’t very happy while she lived with them. I think she longs for that kind of connection.”
“She gets lonely,” Paige says.
“Then I would love to help with that,” Helen says.
They make their excuses when Christine returns, exchanging phone numbers — Christine gives her the number to her real phone, Indira notes, and not the one attached to her secure, programme-monitored line — and promises to keep in touch, and Christine doesn’t breathe out, doesn’t relax her shoulders, until the BMW’s halfway out of Brighton and heading home.
“You okay?” Paige asks her.
“My room’s still there,” Christine says, staring out of the window. “Untouched. Even the Deep Space Nine poster with the rip in it. It’s all there. Like it’s waiting for me.” She shakes herself. “Sorry. Yes. I’m okay. I waited outside the door a bit while you were talking. I know what she said. I’m… glad she’s surviving. She looks better than she did in the surveillance pictures. I hope she gets to foster. And I hope she’s a better foster mother than she was mother to me.”
“We have some connections in the foster system,” Indira says. “We can keep an eye on things, if you’d like. I can ask Auntie Ashley about it.”
“Thanks,” Christine says absently.
“Do you think you’ll visit her, like she asked?” Paige says.
“Probably.”
“Teenie?” Indira asks. “You’re really okay?”
“Yes.” Christine nods, seeming to shake herself, to ground herself, to return fully to the present. “Yes, I am. Seeing her, seeing the old house, it was… intense. But I’m glad we did it.”
“We’ll have words about how we did it later, young lady,” Indira interjects. She’s careful to sound playful, so Christine knows she’s not in too much trouble.
“She’s not my mum any more,” Christine says, “and I don’t want her to be. But it’s good that she’s moving on. Or thinking about moving on. Or whatever. I’ll visit her, I’ll be her long-lost relative, and I’ll help check on her foster kids, if she goes through with it, and that’s all I’ll be.” She laughs. “Did you see her face whenever she mentioned Dad? I never thought I’d see her as ready for him to fucking croak as I always was.”
“Did you see him?” Paige asks. “When you were looking around?”
“Yeah,” Christine says. “I saw him all right. He looks dead as hell. That’s the other reason I’m glad we came: it gave me the chance, one last time, to give the old bastard the finger.”
Paige laughs, and Indira checks the road ahead to make sure she’s not going to need to shift gears any time soon, and reaches back with her left hand. Christine reaches forward and they touch for a few seconds. Not long enough for Indira — when they’re home she’s going to want to hug Christine for long enough to become very annoying — but enough for the reassurance she craves, that her sister is as she appears to be: healthy, happy, healing.
Atta girl.
* * *
“Val. You ready?”
“I still don’t see why I’m the one who has to do this.”
“Because Dorothy’s more likely to have me killed than she is you, isn’t she?”
“You really think so?”
“Of the two of us, who is nicer to look at?”
“Point taken.”
Jake, the older and even less pleasant soldier, came in through the side entrance ten minutes ago, the one that connects tangentially to the Run, the one he would use if he was trying to be subtle but not actively to be sneaky, and now he’s replacing Callum on watch upstairs; Dorothy’s taken to having at least one of them on guard any time she isn’t locked in her suite for the night, having presumably realised that Valérie and Declan could cause quite a problem for her if they decided to team up.
Not that that’s likely ever to happen. Declan with his faculties returned to him is far more annoying than Declan catatonic. In an ideal world, Valérie would walk out of here and leave the whole damn lot of them to enact their various pleasures and frustrations on each other; in a less ideal world, Frankie would come, too.
“Did you decide how you’re going to distract Callum yet?” Val asks.
“Yeah,” Frankie says. “I’m going to teach Declan to bake.”
Val laughs sharply. It’s not a bad diversion: they’re supposed to be teaching the boy how to perform Val’s duties, after all, and while Dorothy has directed Val and Val alone to the task, she’s unlikely even to comment on Frankie pitching in. She seems to hardly notice Frankie a lot of the time; Val’s envious.
Five minutes later, she’s leaving by the same door Jake used.
There are cameras all over the Run; Valérie hates being out here. She’s used to being watched, used to being constantly assessed and critiqued and drooled over, but it’s one thing to be on camera when you’re cooking dinner or performing on request and another to be caught where one ought not to be. Those were the times she was disciplined, and she doesn’t think she’d have the patience to humour it any more; if Dorothy comes in with the riding crop, like Smyth-Farrow used to, she thinks she might bite her.
Shouldn’t be a problem. Frankie promises she can delete the files later, and she also insists that no-one really looks at the footage. There’s only the six of them, and of that number only two are even officially guarding the place. No time to sit and scrub through surveillance, and no real impetus to, either; it’s not exactly a large operation.
Seven of them now, assuming this mysterious person Frankie swears exists is even real.
She tries to ignore the cameras and walks briskly by the fence. It’s mid-afternoon and the sun’s low enough that there’s not much light, but not so low that the spotlights have come on; she’s about as hidden as she can reasonably expect to be. If she wants to return to the house under the same favourable circumstances, she’d better be quick about this.
The door to the bungalow opens quietly, and Val takes in an ordinary residential property: one large main room, with kitchen towards the back and a living area in the middle; several doors leading off, most of them open to bedrooms and a bathroom; a mirror given pride of place in the main room next to the television; and a figure on a couch glaring up at her.
He’s wearing a dress — a curiously conservative one both for this house and for the woman he’s presumably wearing it for, but a dress nonetheless — and there’s a pair of high heels kicked off near his bare feet. He’s got the same residual swelling Declan has and his breasts look compressed under the dress, so he’s probably wearing one of the support bras new implant patients are supposed to wear; very likely he’s had the exact same procedures as Declan, and at the exact same time. She’s caught him in the act of daubing blush on himself; there’s a foldable mirror on the coffee table in front of him, the kind with lights set into the frame, and he’s surrounded by the mess of a first makeup attempt gone wrong.
“Jesus Christ,” Val says. “Not another one.”
“Ah,” the man says, “I was told to expect a visitor. Is that you? Come to have some fun?”
Valérie closes the door behind her. “If you knew what you were asking,” she says severely, “you wouldn’t have asked that.” He frowns at her, confused, so she says, “No!”
“Then who are you and why are you here?”
Now that she’s closer she can see he’s managed to get the eyeliner on okay, but the blush is way too extravagant and the lipstick’s lopsided and he’s not covered up his beard shadow. He’s done a better job than Declan did this morning, but that’s hardly a surprise. Valérie could probably train a dog to apply makeup better than Declan, and with less whining.
“Not bad,” she says absently. “But not good, either. You’ll need to learn. Quickly.”
“Who are you?” the man repeats.
“You’re the newcomer,” Val says. “Who are you?”
“Trevor Darling, Peckinville Associates.” He scowls. “Though not any more. I think I’ve been declared dead. That’s what that dick Jake says, anyway.”
Val thinks quickly. They took Declan from Béatrice — from Elle — and Frankie didn’t know exactly how except that there was subterfuge involved. Is she looking at another victim of the same scheme? Some soldier who was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be?
Promising.
“Well, Trevor,” Valérie says, “I think very much that you and I are in the same boat.”
He looks her up and down and his frown deepens. “Say what you mean.”
She waves a hand at him. “They did that to you a month ago, am I correct? Or thereabouts?” He nods. She says, “They did it to me more than thirty years ago. Topped and tailed and sanded down and made to look as they please.”
“No,” he says. “No. Bullshit.”
“Yes,” she says, crouching down by the couch and starting to tidy up his makeup supplies. “No bullshit. I was taken when I was still a teenager, and I have been their performing bear since the late nineteen-eighties.”
“You’re like me?”
“Actually, it’s you who are like me. And I can tell you your future. Not exactly what it will entail, but the shape of it, the feel of it, the—” she allows a sneer to cross her face, “—smell of it. It will not be pleasant.”
“Yeah,” he says, looking away, letting her take the blush brush out of his limp hand, “I guessed that when Jake the Dickhead shaved me and laid out a dress for me and told me I need to make myself look pretty or there’ll be consequences.”
Valérie nods. “Not a life you would have chosen for yourself, no?” She’ll give him some pointers. Get him up to speed as quickly as she dares. Tell him what Dorothy expects so he can learn when to play along with it and when to subvert it. And then…
“Doesn’t sound like much of a life at all.”
“It is not,” she says. “So, Trevor Darling, what shall we do about it?”
* * *
He waits a while in the common room after Yasmin leaves. She offered him a hug before she left, and he accepted, and he realised as she held him that he expected her to feel different from Steph and from Maria and the other women who’ve hugged him; expected her to feel artificial somehow. Fake. Unreal. Because she was right: he really can see a lot of himself in her, and he doesn’t have to try hard to do so at all, and that’s…
Aaron doesn’t know how to feel about it. Not yet. It’s too new and too raw. But he sees her running from her school and from her home to the pool club and he sees himself escaping the boarding school to Elizabeth’s shop and the images blend. Yes, Elizabeth was uncomplicatedly kind to him whereas the older men at the pool club definitely had a more transactional relationship with the younger Yasmin, but the things they both ultimately went on to do… She never did specify, but Aaron can guess. The things a clever young mind can achieve when it absolutely, positively, definitely does not value itself at all.
Stephanie is wonderful and Maria is becoming like the older sister he never had and Pippa is sweet and even the other sponsors have been treating him well lately but Yasmin’s like him and that’s…
Yeah. That’s something. What, he doesn’t know. Not yet.
But she’s got a job, and a girlfriend who loves her, and she has a life, and there’s nothing artificial or fake or unreal about her, and that’s something, too.
Eventually his arse starts to fall asleep, and rather than rearrange himself again he leaps off the couch and tidies his clothes and heads back to the bedroom corridor, where the sounds of muffled chatter are coming from Steph’s room. The lock rolls over before he can knock, and as it swings open there’s Maria standing behind it, putting her phone away and smiling.
What the hell. He hugs her. She feels just the same as Yasmin. Except shorter.
“Good talk?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Useful?”
“Don’t know yet. I think, maybe?”
She squeezes him and steps back. “Take your time,” she says. And then she finger-waves at Steph and together she and Pippa leave and he’s there alone again with her, and he silently walks forward into her arms, accepts her soft and quick kiss, and together they sit down on her bed.
“What were you talking about?” he asks.
“Christmas,” Steph says. “There’s a thing on Christmas Eve. They want me to come.” She wrinkles her face up. “Booze. Food. A big fire. Pippa said it’s like the annual get-together of Dorley wine mums; I said I’d rather spend Christmas Eve with you.”
“Where is it? Upstairs?”
She nods. “The dining hall.”
“Behind lock and key, then? Safe, and stuff? Private?”
“Yes. Why?”
It’s a new idea but it grows more solid the more he thinks about it. “What if we both go? Together. Like, as a couple, maybe. I can ask Maria. She can keep an eye on me. You can keep an eye on me.”
Steph pulls away from him for a second so she can look at him properly. “You really want to?”
“They might not let me, but if they do, I want to.” He leans into her. “And I think it could be good for me. Helpful, you know? For what’s to come.”
He still doesn’t know how to be a girl. Still instinctively feels it’s probably impossible for someone like him. But Yasmin’s like him, and she did it, she made it. She likes herself. It’s not just that the people around her tell her she matters, tell her she’s real, tell her she’s got a future; she knows it. Inside. He wants that so he can become someone good enough for Steph. He wants that so he can make Maria proud. He wants that for himself.
God, he wants that.
* * *
Finally, everything’s going her way again. The new boy, Declan, showed up in full makeup and a rose-coloured pinafore to kitchen duty, cheeks burning with disgust and forced quite effectively by Frankie, she has to admit, to keep his ruder comments in check. She had Callum record the whole sorry effort on his mobile phone, for the resolution; the surveillance feeds are just ghastly for quality. She’d have had them upgraded to the new whatsit, 4K, but the man from Silver River gave her a quote and it was bloody shocking and that was it for that idea. She doesn’t have infinite money.
Not yet, anyway.
They’ll see her worth soon enough. They always do. She’s proved it, hasn’t she, time and again? A shame to have to, especially at her age, but the men are the ones with the money and the power and with that comes paranoia. They need her. Men like them always have.
It’s the women who do the dirty work, the dangerous work, who stick their hands in deep and get filthy. The real women, the ones who bleed and birth and bloody well die for this world, not the jumped-up fakes like Vincent Barbier. Or like Beatrice whatshername, the little tart who administrates Dorley Hall these days. So much better when he was David, when he was controllable; now he’s running around like he owns the place, thanks to Elle Lambert.
Hah. Ms Lambert’s got such a nasty surprise coming. The money trail’s so well hidden even the men at Silver River promise they couldn’t find it if they didn’t know exactly where to look, and God if it wasn’t satisfying to give Lambert a smack in the mouth. She’ll still be worrying about how she did it. She’ll be going to her sources, wasting money, giving herself ulcers.
Lambert’s an idiot, of course. She should never have kept Dorley Hall running, let alone allowed David to release the boys after! Fifteen years of boy-girls charging around the country with their fake documents. The whole circus is becoming far too bloody visible. People are noticing.
The men at Silver River say they’re ready to step in, should Ms Lambert and Peckinville miss a trick.
Three discreet knocks on her bedroom door. That’ll be Jake. Good boy. Enthusiastic. Ugly as sin, which is a shame; leaves him only one possible end. But, for now, useful. She saw a fellow sadist as soon as she laid eyes on him. Much like Karen, really, only likely less inventive. But an acceptable substitute until she returns.
He escorts her through the manor and out into the Run and over to the bungalow where their latest acquisition lives. A pain in the arse; she would have put him in the servants’ quarters, but she was told to keep him apart and so here he is. It’s not the worst thing, since there are benefits to isolation when it comes to acclimating the new boys, but she’s also supposed to be training him! She asked exactly who it is who shall train him, and was rather brusquely informed that that was her problem. Her problem indeed! Her tools are limited: she has two idiot soldiers, her most disappointing assistant from the old days, the boy Declan, and Vincent bloody Barbier!
Hmm. Maybe Vincent could be useful here.
No. Vincent shouldn’t be allowed access to him; he’s been quite feisty the last few days. Might have to be disciplined. It’ll be Frances, may God forgive her many inadequacies.
Inside the bungalow the soldier, Trevor, waits for her. On his feet. Good boy. Defiant. Proud. He stands the way they all do at first, as if they can masculinise themselves and their garments and their pretty new faces with a wide stance and set shoulders and clenched fists. But his eyes… Good God, his eyes.
So afraid.
He’s had time enough to examine himself properly, to look himself head to toe in every mirror, to understand exactly what’s been taken from him. She told him, of course, in great detail and with greater pleasure, but there’s no substitute for witnessing one’s fate with one’s own eyes. He knows what’s happening to him. He knows there’s no escaping it. He knows permanent alterations have already been made.
And he knows it’s her doing it to him.
Delightful.
There’s slack in his ankle chain, so she doesn’t step inside his reach. Instead she nods at Jake, who walks up to the boy, binds his wrists together behind his back and forces him to his knees, and as it always does the fear in the boy’s eyes intensifies. If he could get his hands free, if he could escape the man holding him down, she knows he would tear her to pieces and then turn his rage on Jake and then on himself.
But he cannot. He is bound. Controlled. Trapped, in the most complete way it is possible to trap someone, in a body they desperately wish to escape, in a body that is changing day by inevitable day into something they cannot abide or comprehend.
A curse escapes through his clenched teeth.
Goodness, she’s missed this. To think! She might have died without bending another arrogant young man to her will, without being energised by their rage and their shame. If the prospect of revenge, revenge against Elle, against the new regime at Dorley, against everyone who took from her, was enough to bring her back from the dead, then this man, this boy, this cowering creature, is enough to make her feel young.
Dorothy places a finger under the boy’s chin, twists his face from side to side.
“Beautiful,” she says.
Chapter 30: Home Away From Home
Notes:
Content warnings: dysphoria, misgendering and deadnaming, use of an anti-trans slur, and the view of someone on the supply side of forced feminisation.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 December 24
Tuesday
The cell corridor’s gotten cluttered since they stashed Will, Oliver and Raphael down here almost two months ago. Sponsors who’d gotten used to interacting with their charges in the relative comfort of the common area suddenly had to reacclimate to what is essentially a concrete hole in the ground, and immediately decided that the stacking chairs and folding tables usually piled at the far end absolutely would not do. So Pippa picks her way past a pile of board games shoved untidily against the wall, manages not to disturb the forest of empty paper coffee cups that are forming a decomposing lump on a table she recognises as having been borrowed from upstairs, and hopes that when it comes down to it, it’s not her who has to clean all this mess up.
Maria follows her with inevitable grace. She’s regained all her former composure and then some, and no sign remains of the assault that put her in the hospital and the two men they’ve come to visit back in the cells. She is, once again, the woman Pippa always imagines when she thinks of her, a source of reassuring solidity in the foundations of Pippa’s world.
There’s a couch at the end of the corridor, amid other out-of-place accoutrements, and Pippa sits. Performs automatically the checks required of her before she speaks casually in such an environment: the cameras are on, the intercom hooked up to the cells is off, and the drapes, added to the rails in front of the glass cell doors to afford the inmates some privacy, are drawn closed.
“I still think this is too early,” she says.
“You’ve been saying that for a week now,” Maria says, catching up and leaning against the wall next to the couch. How she doesn’t knock over the stack of tupperware containers right by her feet, Pippa doesn’t know; she didn’t even look! “We can’t keep them in here any longer. We try to emphasise the ‘unusual’ in ‘cruel and unusual’.”
“You don’t think reintroducing them could be disastrous for Will? Or Adam?”
Maria raises an eyebrow. “You think Aaron’s immune to their charms?”
“Well, yes.”
“Me too, actually. But Edy’s taking care of Adam and Tabby’s babysitting Will and we’ll lock them in their rooms tonight. It’ll be fine, Pippa.”
“I hope so.”
“We might be a little rusty on rough intakes, but it hasn’t been that long since yours.”
Pippa nods. And if she shudders for a moment, it’s probably from the breeze caused by the air conditioning. “Yeah,” she says.
“I notice you didn’t express concern for Martin.”
“Maria,” Pippa says, “I have no idea what on Earth is going on with that boy.”
Maria shrugs. “Pamela says he’s doing better. Sometimes they just… go into a black hole. The sponsor helps them out of it.”
“I still don’t understand how she can even look at him, after—”
“It’s what’s best for both of them. She had to move on. He had to change. And if she wasn’t involved — deeply, personally involved — she’d have carried that hate around for the rest of her life. She sees him now and, thank the bloody saints, so does he. God help them both, they rather like each other now.”
“What, like—?”
“No, Pippa,” Maria says quickly. “Definitely not like that. They’re more like sisters now. More like you and Steph.”
Pippa can think of several things to say in response — primarily she wants to fight back against the notion that what she has with Steph could be at all similar to any kind of relationship someone could have with Martin — but the arrival of Jane and Harmony, decked out in their padded jackets and with holstered tasers and remarkably casual expressions, interrupts her. She’s fond enough of Jane and Harmony but she doesn’t know them near as well as she does Maria, has been more talked at than with in her time with them, so it’s best, for now, that she keep her opinions to herself, even if she still doesn’t understand how Ella can work with Martin after he hit her best friend’s husband with his car.
Although she does sort of get the desire to remove his balls.
“You know,” Jane says, “the literature would have you believe that being force-feminised is an opportunity to attend glamorous galas, become a world-famous model, or pick up hotties on the beach, not hang around in dingy concrete basements pointing tasers at people. And the outfits?” She adjusts the collar on her puffy coat. “Yeesh.”
“The literature?” Pippa asks. “What literature?”
“C’mon, Pip… The literature.”
Shaking her head, Pippa says, “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do,” Maria says, as Harmony laughs. “Can we please just get ready?”
“Yes, Maria,” Jane and Harmony say in chorus.
Pippa stands just in time to catch the bulky, long-range taser Harmony throws to her — Maria catches the one thrown by Jane — and registers her thumbprint, checks the charge and assumes the ready pose. She and Maria nod their readiness and Jane hits the button that grinds the tiny, cheap motors on the curtain rails and exposes Raph and Ollie’s cells. As aftermarket additions to the basement go, the drapes aren’t the most elegant.
She can see Raph but not Ollie from where she’s standing, and she wonders for a moment what would happen if one or both of them were to make a run for it, how far they would get before taser darts hit them in the back, what the sound would be like when they hit the floor.
No. Inappropriate, Pip. You’re supposed to be reforming everyone you bring down here, not just the ones you like.
She glances at the cell that once held Declan. Everyone who isn’t an effing rapist, she amends.
When she looks back, Raph’s noticed her, is peering at her through the glare on the glass with interest. He looks more or less like he did on the surveillance: like the Raph from before, but shrunk in most dimensions. He shrugs with one shoulder and one eyebrow, a gesture that’s so Jane-like Pippa has to stop herself from reciprocating.
And then Monica’s here, too, in an even bulkier jacket, and it’s time. Pippa and Maria take their positions towards the back, tasers aimed, and Jane and Harmony stand closer. It’s Monica who’ll open the cells, but before she does so, Harmony speaks up.
“Oliver,” she says, “how are you feeling this morning?”
He grunts at her. The amplification system that lets them communicate through the reinforced glass door gives it a scratchy, guttural sound.
“Oliver,” Harmony repeats, allowing impatience to sharpen her voice, “answer me.”
Pippa can see both boys now, and when Ollie responds it’s a chance to look at him properly, too. He sits up on his cot, discards the sheet covering his naked upper body, and Pippa can’t stop her breath catching in her throat: he’s still hurting himself.
Should he even be in the cells at all? Is it doing more harm than good?
She remembers Edy explaining it to her over lunch one day, that in cases like his and Raphael’s, with men who have difficulty controlling their temper and who are easily led, a month or more in the cells after a violent incident is standard. A baseline for punishment is thus established, and it’s made clear to the subject that future infractions will mean more time in the cell. And if Ollie’s still hurting himself, that’s unfortunate, but at least his choice of targets can’t be faulted.
“But I was violent,” Pippa had said. “I was never given anything like this much cell time.”
“Oh, honey,” Edy had replied, “you tried to hit Eleanor in the stomach, you missed, and then you broke down crying at her feet. You were never like them.”
Harmony raps on the door rather than repeat her question again, and Pippa reminds herself that Oliver is not her problem, that Harmony’s done this before, that she has the backing of even more experienced sponsors; that she’s Ollie’s best chance.
“What?” Ollie says.
“How are you feeling?” Harmony repeats, enunciating with deliberate care.
“What does it matter?” Ollie says.
“Because it’s Christmas Eve, Oliver,” Harmony says. “It’s the time for happiness and joy and peace and love and everything.”
“I don’t care.”
“And we’re fed up of visiting you in this place. It’s a bit depressing, don’t you think?”
Ollie sneers. “Out of one concrete box, into another. All the same.”
From the other cell, two doors down, Raph yells, “Will one of you please get him to stop fucking whining?”
Pippa directs a look at Maria; Raph shouldn’t ordinarily be able to hear all this. Maria nods at the microphone array above each cell door, which Pippa takes to mean that the full loop has been switched on, that this is intentional. She nods. Raph always was a little more tractable, a little less in thrall to Declan, to Will. She supposes she shouldn’t be second-guessing any of this; Jane and Harmony have been strategising their approach for weeks, dragging Monica and Edy in sometimes.
“Fuck you, Raph!” Ollie shouts, and then there’s nothing but yelling for almost half a minute. Monica eventually quiets them both by shutting off the circuit.
“This is another reason we’re not concerned about releasing them back to the others,” Maria whispers. “They hate each other.”
* * *
Steph’s a little worried. She’s not entirely sure why; Will’s reintroduction went relatively smoothly, despite Adam’s — entirely reasonable — outburst, and since then he’s been quiet, thoughtful, and very careful. But, on the other hand, why were Ollie and Raph kept in the cells longer than him, if not because they’ve been uncooperative? Maybe there is something to fear from them that there wasn’t from Will?
Except, she corrects herself — again; she’s been running her brain in circles all morning as she thinks about this, or, if one were to believe Aaron’s baseless teasing, she’s been ‘shitting everywhere like a nervous gazelle’ — that Ollie and Raph are followers, not instigators. It was Declan who came for Steph and Aaron in the showers, and it was Will who planned and took the lead in the attack on Maria. And neither of those two men is available to follow any more: Declan has vanished to parts unknown — “And with the exact configuration of his parts also unknown,” Aaron pointed out over breakfast, miming what Steph thinks was probably supposed to be a penis removal surgery with his fingers — and Will’s sitting right here in the room with them, curled up on a bean bag chair against the farthest wall, intent on his book and paying no-one much attention, a far cry from the man he used to be. If Ollie and Raph do somehow fall in behind him again, they’ll end up reading — Steph squints to read the title of Will’s book — the same baking romance novel series that briefly entertained her a little while ago.
It makes sense to not be worried! Look at Will! He doesn’t even sit the way he used to! And he certainly doesn’t lecture them all on whatever thoughts have recently passed through his head, which was once a daily occurrence; Tabby complained to Steph that Will’s voice had been so loud it was a wonder he hadn’t been faintly audible in the offices of the Almsworth Missing Persons Unit. Thank God, Tabby had said, that it is understaffed.
But she’s worried anyway, even if she has no rational reason to be, and so she’s seeking comfort, half-sitting and half-lying on one of the couches, with Aaron close to her. He’s nervous, too, despite his ribbing; they decided after much discussion that they wouldn’t hide their developing relationship, that tiptoeing around their affection for each other would quickly grow tiresome, and that given Will’s reaction to their coupling had been simply to roll his eyes and mutter, “Yeah, that sounds about fucking right,” they don’t anticipate any serious trouble from Ollie and Raph. And if there is, that’s what all the women with tasers are for.
They’ve tidied for this day, put away most of the bean bags — Jane said they were starting seriously to impair her ability to get around the basement without tripping, and she also said that she’s regularly quite well-armed and so people should listen to her when she drops hints — and angled the couches by the TV so they’re both facing towards the empty area by the doors to the lunch room, which is where the stools for Ollie and Raph’s reintroduction have been set up. On the other couch, Edy and Adam are sat together on one end, talking quietly together, and Pamela sits at the other. Martin, for some reason, sits on a cushion on the floor, cross-legged and looking for all the world like he has nowhere else to be.
The man’s still a mystery, one Steph has yet to solve. Not her fault; she’s been busy.
“Fuck this,” Aaron says, drawing out the opening consonant and breaking the silence loudly enough that Adam jumps. “Can we please just get this farce over with? We all know how it’s going to go: they’ll shuffle the Brothers Dipshit into the room, we’ll all gawk at them, they’ll gawk at us, they’ll call us pussies, and then one of them will try something horrifically violent, fail miserably at it, and dribble on the floor for a while with more taser darts sticking out of them than an acupuncturist has needles. Let’s just do it, and then they can go back to the cells and we can get on with the important business of, uh, what is it we do here, Edy?”
“Make bad-taste references to the time our friends got injured,” Edy says.
“Right. Shit. Sorry. Should’ve thought of that.”
“Maybe we can try hoping that their time in the cells has caused them to reconsider their actions,” Edy suggests.
“Now you’re just being silly.”
“Nervous, Aaron?” Martin asks, leaning his head on the sofa cushion next to his sponsor’s crossed legs.
“Absolutely not.”
Martin nods. “You’re nervous.”
“Don’t be insightful, Moody. It’s creepy.”
Frowning, Martin says, “Don’t call me that.”
“Why not? You still only have one mood. It’s just a different one.”
“Because it’s not—”
Martin’s interrupted by Pamela’s hand on his shoulder, and she leans down to whisper in his ear. He nods, reaches up to pat her hand in thanks, and smiles at Aaron.
“What just happened?” Aaron asks.
“Never you mind,” Pamela says to him, and she shifts on the couch, creating room for Martin, who climbs up to join her. “Stephanie, can you get him to shut up for a minute?”
“Sorry,” Steph says, and tightens the arm she has around Aaron’s belly. “Sometimes he just talks.”
“You could put a hand over his mouth.”
“Now, listen here, Ella…” Aaron says. “Ella…” He twists around in Steph’s grip to face her. “What’s her last name?”
“Cunningham,” Steph whispers.
“Listen here, Ella Cunningham—”
“Pamela,” Pamela says. “Or Pam.”
“Okay?”
“Everyone calls me Ella. I’m tired of it.”
Aaron tries again. “Pamela Cunningham—”
“Pam,” Tabby says, from her place at one of the tables, “you’re not thinking of changing your name again, are you?”
“I’m just tired of it,” Pamela repeats. “And you’re not one to talk.”
“I’ve had the same name for nine years—”
“Think of the paperwork, Ella,” Edy says.
“What was I even saying?” Aaron says.
“You were trying to be performatively outraged,” Pamela says, and Martin giggles.
“Steph,” Aaron says, looking at her once again, “please kidnap me away from here.”
She just hugs him harder.
God, she’s glad to be here. It still seems absurd sometimes, when she remembers that there’s solid concrete on all sides and a whole other level of basement before the ground floor, when she remembers that everyone she sees from day to day is in some way trapped here, whether literally or through obligation. But she’s found a sister here in Pippa, and many more women she’s becoming close to, and she met Aaron…
…who is, right now, making rude gestures at Martin. She’s missed the conversation, she realises, but that’s probably for the best, and the bickering has served to deflate some of the tension. All the same, when the door from the corridor opens and everyone suddenly shuts up, she fights the urge to rearrange herself, to unwrap herself from Aaron, to sit up straight and cis, to be normal, and that’s an unpleasant reminder of her life before, when she was alone and spent every day pretending to be a boy, pretending to cope, pretending to live.
Ollie enters first and glares at her, so she glares right back at him and resolves to blame him and him alone for inspiring such impulses in her. She can resent him for it rather than give herself any more shit.
He stops in his tracks, like he’s seen something in her he doesn’t understand and wants to examine, and Steph has the strangest desire to stick her tongue out at him, to tease him, to egg him on. Here, alone amongst them all, he doesn’t look intimidating any more. He looks small. Weak.
Without breaking eye contact, she rests her chin in Aaron’s hair, makes clear her allegiance and her affection, to prove to herself she isn’t scared; to claim him in front of Ollie and Raph: mine.
“What the fuck happened while we were locked up?” Ollie says, still looking at her.
Raph, who’d stopped in the doorway to take in the room, looks at Steph for only a brief moment before shaking his head and continuing on, bumping into Ollie’s shoulder hard enough to make the man stagger. From the way Ollie rears up from his slouch and raises his hand, it doesn’t seem like it was an accident, nor does it seem like the first time one of them’s antagonised the other.
Harmony clears her throat and gestures with her taser, and Ollie transfers his glare to her for a dangerous second before rolling his shoulders forward once more. He lets her direct him to one of the stools. Raph sits at the other, a few metres away.
They look reduced, both of them, the way Will did when they let him out. Will said they restricted his calories considerably while he was in there, which he initially took to be a method of control but soon realised was intended to thin him out and reduce his muscle mass. And he didn’t say it out loud, but Steph’s pretty sure Will knows that now he’s started putting the weight back on it will be in more… appropriate places. She squints at Raph and Ollie, wondering if the process has started for them, too. Raph’s the tidier of the two, wearing the usual Dorley-issued jogging trousers, socks, t-shirt and hoodie. Ollie’s wearing a hoodie open over nothing, and no socks.
“Oliver and—” Harmony begins, but Ollie cuts her off.
“No, seriously,” he says, pointing at Steph and Aaron, “what the fuck happened here?”
Raph snaps, “What do you think, Ollie, you fucking ret—” He catches himself before he says the word Steph thinks he was going to, and she spots Jane smiling at him. Forget what happened in here; what the hell happened in those cells to teach Raphael Pittman self-control? He looks back at Ollie and says, “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“They’re all over each other,” Ollie says. “Stefan and Aaron. He’s got his hand around him and he’s— he’s— Fuck, man. They’re fucking gay.”
Aaron stiffens. “Ollie,” he says, and hopefully only Steph knows he’s trembling, with fear or anger or both, “you know what? Your mate there stopped himself from saying something off the big list of no-no words, but he’s right: you’re a simp-le-ton.” Is he trying to evoke Declan by stripping the word apart like that, or is he just expressing his contempt? “You did get the same lecture the rest of us did, right? You do know what’s happening here, yes?” Aaron looks over at Maria, positioned by the door with Pippa, tasers held in the ready position. “Maria, you lot did tell him, didn’t you?”
“We did,” she says.
“Then you know what’s going on here.” He sits up a little; Steph loosens her grip so he can. He points from her to himself to others around the room. “She’s a girl. Same as I’m going to be. And him and him and him and you. But where you don’t seem to have advanced beyond the See Spot Run stage of intellectual development, she is smarter than all of us. Smart enough to know that the people with the weapons make the rules. And—” he crosses his arms over his chest, trapping Steph’s hand underneath, “—if she’s a girl and I’m, uh, still a guy, then this can’t be gay, can it? Simple logic.”
“Fuck you, Aaron,” Ollie says.
“Fine. You can follow Declan into the burger machine.”
“Should have made the logic simpler, Aaron,” Raph mutters.
“We don’t want to wash you out, Oliver,” Maria says, taking the cue from Aaron, “but we will if we have to. Either way, you can’t fight us forever.”
“I can,” Ollie says.
“No you fucking can’t!” someone shouts, and Steph almost hiccups from surprise, from the breath she’d been holding coming out in one sharp burst. She twists, looking for the speaker, and there’s Will, having thrown his book to the ground and stood up. He’s not quite the presence he used to be, but he’s still tall and he’s still loud. “You can’t, Ollie. You can’t fight them. That’s just how it is. I know, I know, you’re a big man—” he says it with a sneer in his voice, the same sneer he used to reserve for flat-Earthers and creationists and people who didn’t go Fuck yeah, Science! when he lectured them about self-driving cars, “—and you don’t think a few chemicals can change you, but they will. They’re changing you right now! You do see that, I hope? You have looked down, right? They’re in control, Oliver, and they have all the weapons and all the keys and all the drugs. You can’t win, and if you keep trying to be the hardarse you’re so proud of being, they’ll just wash you out. They’ll send you away just like Declan, to be killed or taken somewhere even worse. Remember how Steph used to try and tell us what I’m telling you now? About the tasers and the locks and the sheer weight of numbers stacked against us? Remember how I thought that was bullshit, that there was something we could do about it? Remember how that got all three of us locked up even tighter? I know you’re an idiot, Ollie, but you don’t have to be a fool.”
“Fuck you, too.”
Will turns away, massages his ribcage for a moment. Steph watches as he takes a few controlled breaths. “Eloquent,” he says. “Tab, I’m going to my room.”
Tabby nods. “Sure. I’ll bring you some lunch later.”
“I would appreciate that.”
“You fucking pussy!” Ollie shouts. Will ignores him.
One of the other sponsors, one Steph doesn’t really know because she normally sponsors someone in another year — her name’s Donna or something — holds the door open for Will. Before he leaves, he turns around, says formally, “I apologise for losing my temper,” and exchanges another nod with Tabby.
That’ll be the new Will, then. Removing himself rather than continuing to escalate. An improvement. Steph pictures him holding himself straight until he’s safely out of sight and then staggering under the weight of released tension. She hopes he’ll use some of the white noise and ASMR videos she showed him.
Adam watches him go — and Steph wonders if he and Will are ever going to talk to each other again — then turns back into Edy’s arms, unwilling to be a part of anything going on this morning.
“Will’s right,” Raph says.
Ollie gives Raph the finger, and Steph looks at Raph properly for the first time. Ollie’s had her attention since he came in, and for good reason: even if he’s enough under Harmony’s control to back down when she tells him to, he’s still belligerent and stubborn and thus worth keeping an eye on. Ollie’s far slimmer than he used to be, and has the barest hint of chest development, less even than she and Aaron have. He’s also clearly been pulling at his hair as part of his efforts to frustrate Harmony, and sore, balding spots are dotted across his head. She remembers Aaron saying on her first day that Ollie had already been tased sixteen times.
But Raph’s different. Physically, he’s similar, just without the bruises and the torn-out hair, but where Ollie is on edge, stiffly grabbing at the seat of his stool and constantly checking on the sponsors who are watching him — Steph suspects he’ll be made to use the shackles in his room, the ones Will uses voluntarily — Raph is calm. At some point while Steph wasn’t watching him he must have dragged his stool over to the supply cupboard, because now he leans against it, ankles tucked under, shoulders casual, every inch the man who isn’t going anywhere and has no interest in entertaining the option.
He also, very clearly, loathes Ollie.
When did that happen? Was it after Will returned to the rest of them, or before? What happens to two habitual followers when they have no-one to follow? Or was it simply that Raph is smart enough, quick enough, pessimistic enough, or whatever, to accept reality, and Ollie isn’t?
The sponsors are staying quiet, like they did when Will was reintroduced. Pippa said it’s to help the ‘boys’ rebuild bonds with each other, and Steph thinks, right now, that it’s probably a good idea. In fact, she can probably help with that. Maybe what Raph needs, after all that time with Ollie and their respective sponsors, is for someone to talk to him like an equal.
“Raph,” she says, and the man looks at her, surprised. Aaron turns a little, not enough to look at her but enough to register his concern. She squeezes him, hoping to be reassuring, and he subsides. “How are you doing?”
He laughs drily. “How do you think I’m doing, Stefan? I’ve been chemically castrated. I might not be headbutting the wall like Ollie, or decorating little murderer dolls with the hair I ripped out of my head, but just because I’m not fighting back any more doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”
“Pussy,” Ollie mutters, giving his favourite word another outing.
“Psycho,” Raph counters.
“Girl.”
“Not yet, shithead.”
“Will you two cut it the fuck out?” Aaron says, backing up farther into Steph’s arms. “You’re a worse double act than Adam and Will used to be! Yeah, we get it, Raph’s the realist and Ollie’s the dickhead and you hate each other but guess what? No-one else cares. No-one.” He’s shaking, but he keeps talking. “You know what it’s been like down here since the broken toys got put away? Actually kind of bearable! We’ve been able to have conversations and eat lunch and do big, girthy shits without Will barging in and well actually-ing us or one of you calling us gay for speaking in complete sentences! We got the briefest glimpse of a future that doesn’t completely fucking suck! And now you’re back, insulting each other and looking ready to dent yourself on the furniture again. Thank fucking God, you know?”
Raph says, “Look, dude—”
At the same time, Ollie says, “You fucking—”
“Shut up!” Aaron shouts, and he’s pressed so tight against Steph that his shoulder hurts her chest. “Shut up! Fucking hell! Me stopping talking was not a cue for you to start your whole thing up again! Blah blah fucking blah! Shit!”
He has nothing else to say. She can almost feel him searching, looking within himself for something else to yell, because he knows that if he yields the floor to them they’ll keep going and never stop, but he finds nothing. Steph holds him, presses her chin against his head, shushes him, whispers to him; hopefully quietly enough that the others won’t hear, but if they do, fuck them. Aaron’s life has been calm for the first time in years, and he’s had the time to explore a side of himself he’s spent his whole life being forced to neglect, but now Raph and Ollie are back and so’s the tedious, pointless, never-ending masculine chest-beating. Steph’s tired of it but for Aaron it’s worse; for Aaron’s it’s destructive.
He’s stiffened his limbs as much as he can, controlling his body’s response to stress so it doesn’t show, but the position he’s in right now is unstable; he’ll need to sit up to be comfortable. So she helps him, climbing out of the sofa cushion she’s been pressed into and manoeuvring him so he’s sitting cross-legged in the dent she left, and then she walks around to the other end of the couch, faces Raph and Ollie, and half-sits on the armrest, extending her legs out in front for balance and crossing them at the ankles.
Just as she hoped, she draws their attention. She’s no longer mostly hidden by Aaron’s body, so they can see how she’s dressed, and she’s much closer now, so they can see what she’s put on her face. Ollie swears and Raph’s eyes widen and she smiles for both of them.
She’s wearing a cami and capris, sports socks so she doesn’t have to walk around barefoot on the concrete floor, and one of the bracelets Pippa made for her, and while it’s been just about long enough since her last electrolysis session that she can safely wear makeup again, she’s still far from an expert, so she’s just put on some tinted moisturiser, to cover the redness, and a spot of eyeliner, to practise. She knows exactly what she’ll look like in Raph and Ollie’s eyes, and while she is unambiguously a woman in transition she is also very clearly someone who is looking and dressing the way she pleases. Emphasis, she adds to herself as she looks at Raph, on the motherfucking pronoun.
It had been her first decision when she heard they were coming back, even before considering how visible to make her relationship with Aaron: screw the boy costume.
“Jesus, Stefan,” Raph says.
“Stephanie,” she says flatly. She refuses to be nervous for this guy!
“Je-sus,” Raph says again.
“Also not my name.”
“Oh, shit,” Ollie says, “you are a fucking f—”
She interrupts him quietly but firmly: “Ollie, if you don’t get yourself under control I’ll come over there and belt you like I did Declan. I don’t care about sponsors, I don’t care about tasers, I don’t care about any of that, I will hit you.”
“Jesus Christ,” Raph says.
“Thanks, Raphael,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sure.” He sounds distracted.
“Oh, fuck you, Stefan,” Ollie says. “Just because you sucker punched Dec once doesn’t make me scared of you. You hit like a girl, Stefan. And what’s with your voice?”
Steph ignores that last part. “I don’t want you to be scared of me, Ollie, for fuck’s sake; I just want you to slow down. To think. Everyone keeps telling you what’s happening here; everyone! And you know there’s no way out. No way except the ways they provide.” She stands up from the armrest and steps closer, and Ollie leans back a little on his stool. He’s really not scared of her, though; Steph would recognise anywhere the cis disgust reaction she’s feared ever since she was old enough to know who she was. She couldn’t bring herself to transition for the fear of it, isolated herself because of it, and now she has to face it here. In the place where she finally became herself. Anger gutters her voice. “Don’t be stupid, Ollie. You can’t fight this. You’re going to be a woman or you’re going to wash out. That’s the equation here. There’s no secret third option.”
“He’s gonna be burger meat,” Aaron sings, and Steph glances back at him; he’s looking flushed, but he’s still sitting up and he’s holding himself more casually now. He’s recovering. Good.
On the other couch, Edy and Adam are standing up and collecting their things.
“No,” Ollie says. “No. No. No. It’s stupid. I don’t care how much you love it, I’m not going to let them make me into a poof.”
“It’s not about him, idiot,” Raph says, with the air of someone who’s had this conversation a hundred times before.
“Her,” Aaron corrects him, as Edy and Adam quietly leave through the exit to the bathroom. Steph wonders why that door for a moment, and then realises: it’s getting unpleasant in here, and it’s the nearest exit. Martin, meanwhile, is still sitting with Pamela and looks… quietly amused?
“Whatever,” Raph says. “For fuck’s sake, Ollie, you know I don’t want this — no-one wants this — but what do you want to do? Do you want to go back to your cell and keep throwing yourself at the wall? Or do you want to do what he— she— what Stefan says and calm the fuck down?”
“Fuck that,” Ollie says, “and fuck all of you. I’m not going to be a little fairy girl like him.”
“Yes,” Steph says. “Yes, you are.”
“Calm down, you idiot,” Raph says.
“Little fairy girl,” Aaron says. “Little fairy dress. Little fairy wings. Little fairy glitter all over your—”
Ollie stands up, kicking his stool away behind him, and every taser in the room that wasn’t already pointed at him raises. Harmony takes a few steps closer, her own weapon aimed squarely at his torso.
“Oliver—” she starts, but she’s interrupted by a click and a whine: the speakers in the ceiling have switched on.
“Mister Bradley,” a voice says, in such arch and accented tones it takes Steph a moment to place it: Beatrice. But not the Beatrice she’s spoken to; this is Aunt Bea, the act, the matriarch, the creature of power and money and unusual taste in rehabilitation who directs the operations of Dorley Hall. Even at the kitchen table, the first time they met, before Steph accidentally outed herself, she didn’t sound quite like this. Into those four syllables she poured enough scorn, enough precisely accented derision, that the bloody Queen would take notice. “If you do not sit down and behave yourself I will summon the soldiers from the floor above and they will ensure your compliance. You’ve encountered them before, I believe, so unless you are exceptionally unobservant — which is, I grant, not hard to believe of one such as yourself — you will be aware that they carry… heavier weaponry than mere tasers, and they are authorised to use them.”
“Who are you?” Ollie shouts.
“Dear me, Mister Bradley, there’s no need to yell. I’m the one who instructed that you be placed under the care of this institution. I’m the one who formulated your treatment plan. I’m the one who can order your removal, Mister Bradley, if you do not comply. Now, the girls, they’re compassionate; they see potential in you. I, bluntly, do not share their optimism. I had Declan removed and right now the only thing preventing me from having you removed is my trust in your sponsor. So I suggest, Mister Bradley, that you pay her a little more attention and a little more respect, lest you wind up back in that cell, alone, awaiting my presence.” Her voice intensifies and softens at the same time, as if she’s moved closer to the microphone and dropped to a near-whisper. “Because if you ever give me cause to come down here to see you, Oliver, I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.” Finally, in a more ordinary tone, much more reminiscent of the Beatrice Steph’s met, she says, “Girls, take him to his room and cuff him. Give him some time to think.”
The circuit clicks off.
A moment of silence passes, and then the sponsors move into action, with Harmony moving around to Ollie’s other side, remaining at arm’s reach and with her taser ready. Pippa and Maria move closer, but it’s Maria who first sees Ollie going for Jane’s weapon and thus it’s Maria who fires her taser.
There’s a thump as he hits the ground, gurgling.
The circuit clicks back on and Bea, sounding tired, says, “Fine. Put him back in the cell. Give him a week to think about it.” As various sponsors surround Ollie, lift him and drag him from the room, Aunt Bea says, “Good morning, Raphael. I do hope you won’t be as much of a bother as your friend.”
“He’s not my friend,” Raph says.
“Then there’s hope for you, yet.”
* * *
The woman’s back. The blonde, pretty one. Seems to be in her early forties, calls herself Valerie. No; Valérie. Fucking French. Trevor should have paid more attention in school, then he might have fewer issues pronouncing what she insisted to him is a perfectly common name.
She also insisted to him that she’s fifty-three, which is frankly unbelievable and which has given him cause to suspect her of lying, of being part of the old woman’s games. She claimed to be like him, to have been kidnapped and altered over thirty years ago, but is she another Jake, another false friend?
“Where the hell have you been?” he demands, as she closes the front door and shivers against the cold. He’s being rude, yes, but even if her claim to be a fellow prisoner is true, she’s the one walking around free and he’s the one chained by his ankle to the wall. Hard to put your best foot forward when you can’t move it more than a few metres.
“Do you think I can come and go as I please?” she snaps, shaking out her hair. She’s wearing light makeup, but she doesn’t need any more than that to look stunning; if she is like him, she either already looked like a girl before Dorothy got to her, or the surgeons Silver River has access to really are as good as the old woman claims. “I am here against my will, same as you. My movements are constrained and I must be careful.”
“It’s been a week.”
“Don’t be such an old woman about it.” Valérie flicks the corner of the curtain aside with practised fingers and peers through the sliver of clear glass she’s created. “That’s my job.” Satisfied with what she sees — or doesn’t see — she folds the curtain back into place and turns to face him. “Apologies; the joke was there, I picked it up.”
“Who are you?”
He doesn’t know if it’s a wise question to ask, but it’s not as if he has any cards left to play; either he’s at this woman’s mercy or he’s at Jake and Dorothy’s, and this woman at least has yet to press herself upon him or alter him surgically.
“I am Valérie,” she says. “Va-lé-rie. I could write it down for you?”
“I know that,” he says. “I mean— Look. You said you’re like me. I find it hard to believe.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, Trevor Darling,” Valérie says severely.
“You said you’re fifty-three!”
Her brows pucker minutely. “I am.”
“Bullshit. I guessed forties and I was considering going lower.”
“I have not been outside for more than a cumulative day in thirty years. And I moisturise. And I’m not a muck-eating English. It all adds up. Trevor, I thought you might perhaps be smarter than this, but since you willingly signed up with a private military company I’ll grant that there is a greater than even chance that I was wrong. Everything I told you last week — everything — was from my experiences; my life, or the lives of people I loved. Who am I?” She points a finger at him. “I’m what you get when a teenage boy has his parents killed in front of him and is slowly and surgically and hormonally turned into a girl against his will. I’m what you get when that boy lives with it long enough to learn how to live with it, to become the girl they made of him.” With a deep breath she concludes, “I’m what you get when that girl becomes a woman, becomes old, and yet remains in the service of the bastards who abused her. My age isn’t a lie, Trevor, and neither is anything else, and I’m tired. I want to leave this place, and with you and the evil bitch Frances I might actually have a chance.”
“I’m—”
“Or I might die trying,” she adds, almost casual. “That is a distinct possibility. But, on balance, I prefer to live. There’s someone I want to see.”
“Sorry,” he says. He doesn’t know if he believes her or not, but there’s something to her. Something he hasn’t seen in Jake or the old woman. He thinks of soldiers in the First World War, climbing up out of their trenches to run into gunfire, unaware of whether or not they were running to their deaths; Valérie has the feel of a woman who has survived for much, much longer than she ever expected to.
“Do not apologise. Apologies get us nothing. What is important is what we do.” She gestures at the box of makeup supplies on the table. “Have you been practising your makeup?”
“Fuck no.”
She kicks the leg of the table hard enough to make him jump. “Trevor! What did I say last time?”
“I, um, don’t remember.”
“It is fine for you to look like a mess once, twice, even three times. But Dorothy expects compliance. She likes compliance. She likes you to obviously hate yourself for going along with it, but if you do not eventually accede to her ‘requests’ she will choose other methods. In my day, that meant cutting at my skin, sleep deprivation and starvation, and putting aside the fact that none of these are things you want to experience — especially if you are going to be in fighting shape for our escape — the mad old pervert has had three decades in which to become more creative. Do you think you would enjoy discovering what a sadist with no oversight and no interest in your wellbeing will do to you when she starts to find you boring?” She holds out a hand, and he frowns at it, wondering why she wants to shake, and then she turns it palm-up and beckons him with her fingers. “Stand,” she says, “and show me your wardrobe and I’ll dress you up like someone who gives a shit, and then we can paint your face so you look like you’ve been practising your makeup.”
Her voice cracks a few times as she talks him through the clothes and the makeup she chooses for him. She’s putting everything on her hope of getting out of here, and using him to do it, and he could tell her it’ll never happen, that in his experience the sort of people who chain you to a wall don’t tend to give you opportunities to run off, nor leave holes in their surveillance to exploit, but she’s been a prisoner for a long time, so why disappoint her? Why not play along? It’s not as if things can get much worse for either of them.
* * *
“Lads, it’s your lucky day.”
Aaron leans his head back to look at Maria, and for a moment they face each other, each one upside down. Then she pokes him gently on the nose and stands up from where she’s been leaning on the back of the couch.
“Is it?” he asks, twisting around on the couch until he can see her again. “Does that mean we get to leave?”
She swats idly at the air near his head. “No. Don’t be a shit.”
He sticks his tongue out at her. He’s feeling light. Free. A little giddy. Raph and Ollie came back and Ollie was a complete dick and got sent back to his cell like a disobedient child and Raph was only kind of a dick and thus was allowed to stay and the rest of them therefore get to continue on as they were before, their personal and particular journeys — or whatever Martin calls his absolutely fucking baffling personality reset — uninterrupted. The last thing he needed today of all days was a huge injection of stress and it looks like they’ve all gotten away with it.
Because today he’s going upstairs.
Maria said yes.
“Sorry,” he says, unapologetic and unable to keep the smile from consuming his face.
Steph aims a gentle kick at his exposed backside; Maria gives her a thumbs up. “Tomorrow,” Maria says, taking a few steps back to address the whole room, “you get Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, but today everyone upstairs is busy, so you get a choice of frozen meals. We have chili, lasagne and veggie lasagne, and a sort of sausage and Yorkshire thing. And we have stew. Because we always have stew. Oh, and don’t let the ‘frozen’ fool you; these aren’t supermarket meals. Someone made them. With love. And then we mass-froze them and put them in the big freezer out back. Hands up for chili?”
Raph says, “Beef chili?”
“Yes.”
“Real beef? None of that fake shit?”
“Real beef, Raphael.”
“Fuck yes. I’ll have some chili, then.”
Martin selects the vegetarian lasagne, and Steph and Aaron ask for stew. They aren’t getting it: this is the afternoon of the big Christmas Eve dinner, stretching into the Christmas Eve party, and while the other boys are eating in their rooms, Maria will be helping Aaron get dressed; Steph’s meeting Pippa in her room up on the first floor.
“Still can’t believe you, man,” Raph says, when Maria and Pippa have both left and the other sponsors have returned to their quiet conversation at one of the tables.
“Believe who about what?” Martin asks.
“Shit,” Raph says, “I was talking about Stefan, but why are you so fucking cheerful all of a sudden?”
Martin’s lying on a couple of bean bags in front of the TV, and he’s spent most of the conversation idly paging through a paperback, but for this he sits up a bit, looks directly at Raph.
“What do you care?” he says. “I mean that genuinely, by the way; why do you care? Even before you attacked Maria we barely spoke, and you made it quite clear I was beneath your contempt. Actually, for someone who always claimed to hate Aaron, you picked up on his nickname for me pretty quickly.”
“That’s because it’s funny,” Aaron says, “and objectively true.” Steph pokes him.
“I don’t care,” Raph says. “I’m just— Okay, so I’ve been doing some thinking.”
“Did it hurt?” Aaron asks. Steph pokes him again.
“You know what? Fuck you, it did. Contemplating everything these psychos are doing to us hurt quite a fucking lot.”
“Poor baby.”
“Shut up. Stefan, control your boyfriend.”
Steph says, “My name’s not Stefan.”
“Oh, for— Christ! This is what I mean! You’re all insane!” Raph sits forward on the couch, animates his words with his hands. It’s enough for Jane to cough quietly and gesture with her taser. “I’m not going to do anything, Jane, for fuck’s sake.”
“Precedent is not on your side, Raph,” Jane says.
“So why let me out at all?”
“Because, you arse, we’re trying to help you.”
“By taking my balls away?”
“Yes,” Aaron says, before Jane can reply. “By taking your balls away. And I’m all for it; it’s rare that I’ve encountered someone so desperately in need of having his testicles ripped off. Although—” he pretends to think for a moment, “—I would have preferred for it to happen to you in a hilarious accident.”
“Oh, fuck off, Aaron.”
Aaron shows him a finger.
“So?” Martin says, after giving Raph a few seconds to glare at Aaron. “Why are you talking to me all of a sudden?”
Raph pinches the bridge of his nose, reminding Aaron just for a moment of Maria, when he first came here, when he was a problem for her to solve and not… not whatever he is now. An entity of some sort. Possibly even a friend.
“There’s no way out, Martin,” Raph says. “Ollie might be stupid enough to have another go, but I’m not. Which means… it’s going to happen.” He’s crawling into himself now, tightening his arms around his waist, no longer looking at anyone. “It’s going to happen to me. And I don’t want to be alone for it, okay? And Will hates me and I hate Ollie and Adam hates everyone—”
“Not really,” Steph says quietly.
“—so that leaves you three.”
“I’m touched,” Aaron says.
“Fuck off, Aaron.”
“Aww. We’re friends already.”
Raph unwinds and punches the arm of the couch. “How are you still so fucking— so—?” Unable to complete the thought, he hits the couch again.
“Charming?” Aaron suggests.
“Aggravating?” Martin says.
“Pushing your luck?” Steph whispers in Aaron’s ear.
“So fucking smug,” Raph finishes. “They’re doing to you what they’re doing to me! And you! Martin! Why is everything so funny to you now?”
“You really want to know?” Martin says, tenting his book on the floor.
“Yes! Jesus Christ, yes I do.”
“Okay, then. Serious answer: I’m a murderer, Raph.” The jocularity’s gone from his voice; he sounds more like the Martin Aaron had almost gotten used to: almost affectless; almost dead. “Worst person here by some margin, especially now Declan’s gone. Oliver hit his ex-wife and you fucked over your girlfriend and, I’m willing to bet, hit her, too. Don’t deny it; I don’t care. All of us are bad, but only one of us left a grieving widow behind. And I think maybe it’s worse that I didn’t mean to do it; that I was careless.”
“You were drunk, Martin,” Pamela says, from over at the tables.
“I was drunk,” he agrees. “Drunk in charge of a vehicle. And not for the first time. Even after I killed him, even with help, I couldn’t stop. Too weak to stop drinking. Too careless to not drive. And too well-connected to be put away against my will by normal procedures. Bluntly, I don’t trust myself with my own life.” He looks up, nods at Pamela, and something in his face relaxes. “I trust her,” he continues. “That’s the difference. I put my whole life in her hands. What she does with it is up to her. Who I become is her decision. It’s… freeing.” He laughs weakly. “I won’t pretend I didn’t lose it for a while. I won’t pretend I wasn’t barely hanging on. But the thing is, I wasn’t a recovering alcoholic who’d been forcibly removed from temptation; I was just an alcoholic who can’t get a bloody drink. Maybe when I leave here I’ll actually be in recovery. For real.” He plays with his hands for a little while. “That was the other thing we agreed; if I’m not ready, I don’t leave. I don’t even leave the basement.”
“Seriously?” Steph asks.
“Seriously. Life in her hands, like I said. I can’t be trusted with it.”
“But you trust her,” Raph says, pointing at Pamela, “even though she’s going to make you into a girl?”
Martin shrugs. “Well… yes. But she’s doing more than that.” He leans forward, and even though he’s several metres away, Raph leans away from him. “She’s giving me a complete reset button on my life. No more family, no more of my old friends, no more excuses and no more of the people who made them for me. No more access to the money that let me do, functionally, whatever I wanted. No more Martin.”
“You’re a fucking tranny,” Raph mutters, “like Stefan.”
“If you say that word again,” Jane says loudly, “you’ll go to your room with no real-beef chili. And I’ll tase you a few times. And maybe let Steph kick you.”
“Sorry, Jane,” he says. It sounds rote.
“Apologise to Stephanie, not me.”
“But—”
“No, listen,” Jane says, standing up and walking over to him, her taser held steady, pointed at his chest, “because I thought we worked this out back in the cell. You agreed to be polite and civilised and follow the others’ example. You promised me! So, what do you think? Does calling Steph the t-word sound like polite, civilised behaviour?”
Raph breathes out heavily. “No, Jane.”
“Does it, in fact, sound like the behaviour of a man who’ll go back to the cells if he doesn’t get his shit together?”
“Yes, Jane. Sorry, Stef… Stephanie.”
“It’s fine,” Steph says, and Aaron bites the inside of his cheek for a second because it’s not fine, but what’s anyone going to do, run over there and hit him? That’d put Raph right back in his comfort zone, and honestly… it’s kind of fun watching the fucker squirm.
“You’ve got to be nicer, Raph,” Aaron says, and he feels Steph’s grip on him stiffen; she can tell he’s about to be, as Maria said, a shit. “We’re all girls here, after all.”
“Christ, Aaron,” Raph says. “You’re just as bad as the others.”
“Really?” Aaron asks brightly. “You really think so? You think the sponsors just happened to pick up a bunch of unruly lads who all secretly wanted to be girls and you and Ollie are the only real men out of the lot of us? Or are we all just… adapting? Don’t you keep saying you’re not stupid?”
“How can you adapt to this? Accepting you can’t stop it, that I understand. But you’re acting like it’s all fine.”
“Maybe it is,” Martin says. “Maybe they’re right.”
“No,” Raph says. “Fuck no. They’re on some SJW men-are-evil shit. They’d kidnap a thousand men if they could.”
“Yeah, probably,” Pamela whispers, giggling.
Raph leans back again, inclines his head towards the ceiling, and sighs heavily. “Fucking kill me,” he says. “Do all of you really think it’s justified that they’re doing this to us? Just because we’re men?”
“What kind of a question is that?” Aaron says. “Especially coming from you. This isn’t because we were men, Raph; it’s because we were bad men.”
“Nah,” he says, still staring upwards. He sounds exhausted. “They think all men are evil.”
“Not true,” Jane says, though she sounds a little uncertain.
“I’m sure the sponsors would agree that there are some good men,” Aaron says. “Like, uh, Keanu Reeves! He’s a good man. Gives all his money to, like, the key grips, whatever they are. A band, I think. And that guy? From Bournemouth? From earlier this year? He saved those dogs from being crushed up, or something.”
“Crushed up?” Jane says, frowning. “Wait— Bournemouth? Oh, goodness, Aaron; what is it you think a puppy mill does?”
“Not important,” Aaron says, making a mental note to ask someone. “The point is, men can be good. But us, Raph, you and I, we can’t. Yeah, there’s a way to navigate all the male training that got shoved our way and come out the other side as someone who isn’t a complete bastard, obviously because loads of— many— some men manage it just fine. We didn’t. We fucked it, Raph. Failing grade. We’re like Martin: addicts. Well, I’ve got my One Week Not A Man chip and, you know, I’m still conflicted about it, but what’s different about me now is I understand that there are guys out there who can just… drink in moderation. But I can’t and neither can you. So, cold turkey, dude.”
“Fuck off, Aaron.”
“Raph, you’re failing the Turing Test, here.”
“Boys!” someone calls, and when all heads turn it’s Maria, standing in the doorway to the corridor with Pippa. There’s a gym bag slung over one shoulder, and Aaron finds it difficult to look away from it.
“Dinner time,” Pippa says, and raises a significant eyebrow at Steph.
Around them, everyone starts to get up, but before anyone can do more, Aaron grabs at Steph, pulls her back down to him and kisses her. It’s not a good kiss — it’s sloppy and clumsy, both from the angle and from Steph’s complete unpreparedness — but Aaron doesn’t especially care. It still feels special to kiss her.
“Gross,” Raph says. “Did you kiss your boyfriend just to annoy me?”
Aaron releases Steph, allows himself to be helped up, and kisses her again, on the cheek.
“One,” he says, “she’s my girlfriend; two, yes.”
* * *
This is beyond fucked up.
The first time Trevor wore a dress, he was fifteen. The boys at school decided, apropos of nothing he’d actually said or done, that he was gay, and therefore he should wear a dress. Satisfied with their flawless logic, they cornered him between classes, dragged him behind the community centre and stripped him. He fought back — he got a couple of them good — but when eventually he was alone again he’d been left with bruises, an awful flower-print dress that barely covered his crotch and which they must have stolen from the drama department, and a choice: go to his afternoon classes naked, or wear the damn thing.
The second time he wore a dress was for Dorothy. Jake made him put it on after he shaved him, and he wore it with poorly applied makeup and an attitude to match, an attitude he expected her to hate but which seemed, absurdly, to excite her. He caught glimpses of himself in the mirror that evening, and he saw roughly what he expected to see: a man, surgically altered, shoved into a dress. He’d looked comical.
The third time’s today, after Valérie chose his outfit and sat him down and painted him. At the time he wondered if a straight man would have found the experience perversely enjoyable, because as much as she’s more than twice his age she’s still an extraordinarily attractive woman, and even under such circumstances he’d found being taken care of almost relaxing. It had certainly been better to be touched with care than to suffer Jake’s hands.
But when she escorts him to one of the bungalow’s many mirrors, when she shows him her handiwork, when he sees the person he’s supposed to grow to become if Valérie’s unlikely hope of escape is ever to come to fruition, he wants to scream at her until his lungs weep blood. He wants to throw up until his stomach inverts. He wants to tear at his skin and rip himself to shreds and he settles for punching the glass until it shatters.
He knew Dorothy had instructed the doctors to alter his face, but under stubble and then under his inexpert makeup the changes hadn’t looked so drastic. Now…
Now he’s gone. Erased. Replaced with someone else, someone with a softer jaw and a smaller nose and brighter eyes and a pair of fucking tits, and the girl in the mirror reflects his horror, his utter, complete and all-consuming need to get out of here.
Except he can’t escape, because the prison is his body.
Glass tinkles as it falls to the floor around him, and Valérie takes a delicate step back. She closes her hands around his shoulders, gently but firmly, and he wonders why she’s shaking until he understands, no, she’s fucking not.
“Trevor,” she whispers.
“That was me,” he says.
“I’m afraid so.”
“How did you survive this?”
“There is a sense,” she says, “in which I did not.”
He wants to turn around but her grip hardens and he’d have to push her down to move and he can’t — yet — bring himself to be violent towards her. “That doesn’t help, Valérie. I just— I can’t— There aren’t words for what this is like.”
“Yes. There are.” She releases him, gives him the space to stagger on his awful three-inch heels over to the couch. “Dorothy wants you to know,” Valérie says, “that this is your life now. She wants you to understand it. And I think, now, you do.”
His head finds his hands and it’s almost too much effort to hold it up. He wants to collapse, to cease to exist. He’s shaking still, he knows it, and when he gathers enough strength to look up at her again she’s frowning at him like she’s angry or disappointed.
“I can’t do this,” he says.
“You can. I did, and I’m sure a big, strong soldier such as yourself is capable of rising to the challenge.”
“No.” He pushes the word out through gritted teeth. “No! She can just— She can kill me.” He starts to stand. “She can kill—!”
Valérie slaps him. Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough that his head snaps around almost as far as it will go. Hard enough to drop him back down into the couch cushions.
He should fight her. He should hit her back. But all he can do is cradle his cheek and watch her as she stands over him.
“There are three ways forward for you, Trevor,” she says. “One: you die here like so many of my sisters. Two: they ship you off to whatever pervert decided he liked the look of you, and you either die at his hand or you wish you had. Three: you escape. And—” she kneels in front of him, too close, like she wants him to push back at her, “—if you want to escape you need to understand everything. You need to know how bad it can get. And you need to get used to seeing that in the mirror. To looking down and seeing yourself in pretty dresses and your feet in nice shoes. She wants you upset and off-balance and angry and riddled with self-disgust, Trevor; it’s what makes her excited. And it’s what makes you a good… product. But she doesn’t want you catatonic, or so miserable you can’t paint your own face.”
“You want me to participate in this… fucking charade?” he asks, so hoarse his voice is almost silent. “I can barely think straight.”
“Perfect,” Val says, standing up. “Use it. And you should clean up the glass. It shows willing.” She can see his face start to crease up again and she rolls her eyes. “Look, I am sorry this is hard for you. It won’t be forever, not if you do it right.”
“I’m a fucking man, Valérie!”
“Yes? Take me to a mirror you didn’t ruin, and show me, then. Point to the man you see.”
“What? I can’t—”
“You are a soldier, yes? Paid to go to other countries and kill people?”
“I never did that.”
“But you were fully prepared to. Think of this as… payback. And an opportunity to earn back your life.”
What remains of his energy exits in a bitter and painful exhalation. “You’re not a very nice woman, are you?” he says.
“Trevor,” Valérie says, picking up items of makeup and throwing them in a bag, “no-one has ever suggested I am.”
* * *
Her mother used to say it was ‘bracingly cold’ on days like these, and took the temperature as an opportunity to stamp around the garden in her wellies and her long skirt and tidy up. There was always something to tidy up in that sweet little garden, when Christine was young, before her first puberty took her mother away from her and delivered her into the uncertain and unreliable affections of her father. Always weeds to pull or flowers to prune or, occasionally, muck from the neighbour’s cat to bag up. And then the real money came in, investments and deals paying the dividends her father always promised they would, and the larger house they moved to had more grounds than her mother could reasonably cover and a gardener who could do it all better than she ever could.
But when she was a kid, when she was nongendered the way children are and accessible to her mother’s affections, she used to sit out on the bench at the back of the garden in the old house, and read aloud from her book for her mother to hear, and blow hot breath into the cold air for her mother to run up and catch, laughing.
She lets her breath mist in front of her again, remembering things forgotten; people forgotten.
The Royal College of Saint Almsworth is laid out below her, a scattering of mismatched buildings and argumentative architecture, almost empty and with the remains of the morning frost still clinging. Christine sits on the bench at the top of the hill with her knees under her chin, and misses things.
The second years are going to be at the dinner this afternoon, and the party after. It’ll be nice to see them all again, even though they inspire the strangest nostalgia in her; fond memories of the simplicity of her early years at Dorley Hall, when all that was required of her was to survive, to change, to grow, to carve a new selfhood. Now that she’s her, now that she’s Christine, and known and loved by more people than she thinks ever even spoke to her in her old life, she has to choose a path for herself, to decide what she wants to do, and seventy or eighty years have opened up in front of her like a chasm.
She never thought she’d get this far.
Her mum texted her before. Wished her a Merry Christmas. She already asked, earlier in the week, if Christine wanted to visit for the holidays, but she took the negative in good spirits, understanding that the woman she met has another family. Today, Christine replied with a string of emoji and her mother wrote back almost instantly with a photo of herself and her new friend Pat, helping out at the local food bank.
She’s feeling energised again, her mother said, for the first time in a long time. And these young families around Brighton, she had no idea they were struggling so!
Christine’s had the picture up on her phone the whole time she’s been sat on the bench. Her mother, the woman Pat — who seems much younger than her — and a table full of boxes. Her mother’s making a tentative v-sign and Pat’s laughing with her.
Things change, and then they change again. They’re not mother and daughter, but maybe they’re becoming something else. Something healthier for both of them.
Shit. Time’s getting on and Christine’s still got to shower and put her face on. She doesn’t have a role to play this evening except as a dinner guest — a whole host of graduates have been preparing things all day, with the assistance of the second years — but there’s still pressure to look good, to be the perfect young lady in front of Beatrice. At least tomorrow is for nothing but sleeping in, opening presents, and possibly a roast turkey, if someone feels energised enough to operate the AGA. It won’t be Indira, though. A creature of infinite energy, she’s been organising things today, and she’ll be at the meal and the party tonight and then at her family’s tomorrow. She asked Christine to join her, and didn’t completely hide her disappointment when she declined, but she understands. Christine’s first real Christmas with Paige, after all. Next year they’ll have spent the day in London together for sure, and Indira’s also secured from Christine promises for Diwali 2020 and Indira’s mother’s birthday.
Heading down the hill, back into campus, she thinks unavoidably of the start of summer, of life at the Hall when she was still coming into herself, when she could walk the grounds and find almost no-one around; a way to build confidence without having to fight through the termtime crowds. It didn’t last then and it can’t last now — then it was because the university transitioned relatively quickly into a conference centre for the whole month of August; now it’s because the Christmas break is relatively short, no matter how much the whole month of December seems to orientate itself around it, even for those who don’t celebrate — but when it’s just the Dorley live-ins and die-hards, it’s like another world.
She lingers by the empty buildings, touches brick and concrete and stone as she passes, indulges herself; lives, for a little while, in a world that’s just her, and the people she chooses to bring with her.
And then she’s back at the Hall, a bustle of activity, with the doors open to the air to let out the heat and goodness knows how many people cooking in every available kitchen, and it’s also nice to be around her Sisters again, even if it takes her a moment to squeeze past a few she only barely knows, taking a break on the steps, gossiping, laughing, appraising her as she pushes through. She hurries past, takes the stairs up two at a time.
Dira’s waiting for her in her room, and now that Christine’s had her fill of silence she wants to be with her family again.
* * *
Pippa steers her directly towards the ensuite when they enter her room on the first floor, and Steph wonders for a moment if they really have time for her to shower before dinner before realising that the other woman in the room, the one opening curtains and arranging makeup items on the little table, is Paige, and that therefore this whole operation has likely been planned down to the minute, and asking silly questions would only introduce delays which would cause her to frown at her. And she doesn’t want Paige to frown at her, because she doesn’t need to be any more attracted to Christine’s girlfriend than she already is.
She’s as quick as she can be in the shower, but shaving her legs still takes a while.
She towels herself dry, dons the robe Pippa left for her, and makes it almost two steps out of the ensuite before Paige and Pippa take a shoulder each and guide her to the stool from the dresser, which has been placed in the middle of the room in good light. Paige wordlessly hands her a tube of moisturiser and points at her face, and while Steph sets about applying it, Paige squeezes liberally from another tube and starts rubbing it into Steph’s legs. Pippa, meanwhile, gets to work with the hair dryer.
She can see the dress they want to put her in. It’s laid out in a garment bag on the bed, and it’s black and alarmingly short; she’s pleased, therefore, to see a pair of modesty shorts included in the underwear piled up next to it. She has a momentary worry about the one-inch heels on the calf-length boots sitting at the end of the bed, but dismisses it: she’s in good hands, and if Pippa and Paige think she can walk in what is, ultimately, a pretty low heel, then she almost definitely can.
Aaron’s in good hands, too, with Maria. Steph just hopes he isn’t too uncomfortable.
* * *
“What do you think? Is it nice?”
Because it’s just the two of them, and because she knows he’s the last person who’d ever harm her, Adam gets the real ceramic plate and the real metal cutlery, and he’s lingering over his vegetarian lasagne.
“It’s lovely,” he says, in the quiet and understated manner that’s been his since perhaps his third week down here, since he dropped the orator’s inflection he was taught at home. Edy doesn’t know if he did so as willingly as he did because he hated speaking that way, or because he witnessed Will’s adoption of the bully pulpit and realised how silly it sounded, but she’s so glad he did. In his first weeks, as much as her compassion for him has always been endless, he was quite difficult to be around. Too much like the men they both escaped.
“The second years cooked it,” she says.
She’s sitting on the floor near the door, her back to the wall and her knees gathered up in front of her, watching him eat and, as ever, evaluating him. She’s looking forward to a time when their interactions aren’t so calculated, but for now, he needs it and he needs her. And this is both a lesson he needs to learn and the right time for him to be confronted with it.
“The second years?” he says, pausing with his fork halfway to his mouth.
She nods. “The girls.”
“The… girls who used to be boys?”
“Just like you will be, yes.”
She told him his intake isn’t actually the first to be regendered and she swore him to secrecy, and with wide eyes and a trembling voice he placed his hand on hers and promised, and she hated herself for lying, or for at least omitting the greatest and most important truth: that she used to be almost exactly like him. It’s useful for him to believe he knows something the others don’t — and he does, for the most part, Aaron and Stephanie excepted, although Ella has said she thinks Martin suspects — because that’s the way he was taught back home. You have secrets, Adam, and they must be protected until the world is ready for them.
It’s also important he doesn’t know about her. Not yet.
His fork remains still.
“They… made this?”
Transsexuals and transgenders and other gender deviants are devils of the secular world who must be resisted most thoroughly, and while Stephanie, bless her, has made inroads with Adam — even claiming to him to have kissed another boy! — there are some mental blocks Edy’s having difficulty breaking. They are unclean, as are the things they have touched.
The fork trembles.
“They didn’t have a choice to be girls, though,” he says. “Did they?”
“That’s the thing,” Edy says, willing him to make the leap, “they did. We gave them the bodies; they became girls by choice.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are a boy, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Despite the way your body is changing?”
He hesitates. “Yes.”
“Their bodies changed the same way, and when they were in your position there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t have claimed with vehemence to be a man. But now… Now not one of them wouldn’t call herself a girl.”
Adam closes his eyes. “Girls by choice,” he says to himself. “They are girls by choice. They made this.” He repeats it a few more times; Edy waits for him. Eventually the cooling slice of lasagne makes its way into his mouth, and he opens his eyes as he chews and swallows. “Please,” he says, with less difficulty than Edy expected, “thank them for me.”
“I will,” she says.
“Edy…”
She stands and walks carefully over to him. He takes another bite and she crouches down beside him, a hand on his knee, the other steadying herself on the computer desk. She trusts him, but she’s always ready to bolt, just in case. Some of the things he was taught run deeper than they ever did with her.
“You’re safe, Adam,” she says. “You’re safe here. You’re safe with me. The old lies can’t hurt you. Your father can’t find you.”
“Grace is a precious gift,” he whispers, placing his fork on the side of the plate. “Grace is a precious gift. Grace is a precious gift.”
Edy replies, “And it’s ours, not God’s, to give.”
He returns to his food, and within a minute or so he’s eating with his earlier enthusiasm. Well done, Adam. Edy didn’t get over her conditioned fear of transgender people until she could no longer deny she was one, and that had been a confrontation with herself she’d been lucky to survive. No-one knew how to talk to her about it, but she’s had years to think about how to deal with Adam. He’ll have all the opportunities she didn’t.
She rises, tucks a lock of his hair back behind his ear — he can’t escape her, the way he sometimes tries to when she mothers him, because of the plate in his lap, and she’ll take full advantage — and kisses him on the forehead. “What will you do tonight?”
“I thought I might write in my diary,” he says. “And then play that game. The one where you run a farm.”
Edy smiles, proud and satisfied, and kisses him once more. She closes the bedroom door quietly behind her and hurries up and out of the basement. There’s a dress upstairs waiting for her, and she needs to be in it with her face and hair done double time so she can help Maria get ready, once she’s done with Aaron.
She shakes her head and squashes a laugh. A first year attending the Christmas Eve dinner! Yes, they all expected it of Stephanie, but Aaron…!
What a year it’s been.
* * *
She had him shower and shave and wash his hair and she told him he’s lucky there aren’t any accessible plug sockets in the basement rooms or he’d be getting the same kind of hair dryer abuse Steph’s undoubtedly suffering upstairs, and he said he wouldn’t have minded that because the longer his hair gets the longer it takes to air dry and really it’d just be quicker and simpler for everyone if they had hair dryers in the basement because then it’d take them all a lot less time to get ready in the mornings and also Ollie would have access to something he could take into the showers and use to electrocute himself.
“He’d need a hell of an extension cord,” Maria said, and pulled off the robe he wore out of the shower and handed him a towel and that’s where he is now, standing in the corner of his room drying every crevice and fold and strangely sensitive swollen bit.
“Is it too late to back out of this?” he asks, eyeing the bag hanging from the cracked-open wardrobe door.
“After I went to all the trouble of finding something in your size?” Maria says. “Yes.”
“Drat.”
“Think of all the fascinating people you’re about to meet.”
“The downside is, they have to meet me.”
Maria taps him on the shoulder and he looks at her. One of many reasons to like Maria: she’s one of the few people he doesn’t have to look up at. “Is this one of those moments of funny self-deprecation or are you actually having a hard time right now?”
“It’s both,” he says. “Always both. Hey, it’ll be okay, won’t it?”
She takes his hand, guides him over to the bed and makes him sit, and so he does, feeling very naked in his wrapped-around towel. Before she joins him she opens the dumbwaiter hatch and retrieves two mugs, steaming with what turns out to be hot chocolate.
“There’s a little Baileys in these,” she says, handing him the blue mug. “It’s good for the nerves. Yes, Aaron, it’ll be okay.”
He nods and sips at his drink. Once, he might have made a dismissive crack about Baileys being a girls’ drink, but such jokes — if ever they contained enough humour to survive such a classification — have lost their lustre, and it’s not as if he isn’t presented daily with a hundred more appropriate opportunities to be crude.
Come to think of it… He remembers his conversation with Yasmin, and holds up his mug to the light, rotating it so he can read the worn and faded caption. The mug is either old or has been designed to look old, and over a silhouette of a 1950s-looking woman applying lipstick are the words, The most revolutionary things a girl can do are find herself, love herself, be herself… The end of the sentence has been crudely blanked out and replaced with, and turn boys into girls in her basement.
“How many of these do you lot even have?” he asks.
“A lot,” Maria says, and shows him hers: My other mug is an admission of guilt. “Sorry. I asked for hot chocolate; I got… this.”
Aaron laughs and almost spills some. “You can’t get the staff these days.”
“Genuinely, you can’t.” She sips from hers and adds, “Seriously, we’re running low on sponsors.”
He drinks deeply. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and the alcohol seems to enter his bloodstream directly. He laughs again, quietly and to himself: he’s getting a buzz off hot chocolate. Maria leans against him, shoulder to shoulder.
“What will the other sponsors think of you letting your subject attend an upstairs party?” he asks, when his mug is almost empty. “Will they think you’re losing your edge?”
“Are you kidding? You haven’t even cracked your first three months here and you’re already going on excursions out of the basement. You’ve made incredible progress, Aaron. Better than I predicted. Better than I hoped.”
She feels warm against him. It’s nice. “You make it sound like I did something huge, Maria. I just… stopped making excuses for myself. And as soon as I did that…” He doesn’t want to vocalise it. It doesn’t matter. Not important. In the past.
“I’ve had girls coming into the second year who haven’t made the intellectual and emotional leaps you’ve made. Yes,” she adds, because he stiffened a little, “girls. That’ll be you. Like you said—”
“It’s a fun thing to taunt Raph with,” he says. “Still an intimidating concept to contemplate, you know?”
“Trust me,” Maria says, “I know.”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course you do.”
“Aaron. Seriously. I’m proud of you. The other sponsors are going to be so jealous of me tonight.”
The intercom clicks and a voice says, “I’m not. Christine’s still better.”
“Go away, Indira,” Maria says, but she’s smiling and rolling her eyes, and when the speakers click off again she nudges Aaron with her shoulder. “You ready to get dressed and meet your admiring public?”
“Fuck it.” He drains his mug, and takes it and Maria’s back to the dumbwaiter. “Let’s do this,” he says, throwing off his towel.
“Okay,” Maria says, “but for the record, in the future I want you to put on underwear before you do that.”
She guides him: this loops around here, these hook into these, and this pulls tight. It’s uncomfortable and it’s unfamiliar and it sits strangely on his hips, but it’s only for one night. He reaches for the wardrobe door, so he can look at himself in the full-length mirror inside, but Maria catches his hand.
“You can admire yourself later,” she says. “Sit down. Carefully, so you don’t wrinkle anything. It’s time to do your hair…”
* * *
“Stephanie,” Paige says, “do I have your permission to tie your hair in a tight ponytail?” Steph nods, frowning, and realises she’s let her confusion show when Paige continues, “It can be uncomfortable after a while, is all. But I have a plan for your hair, and that plan requires that I pull most of your hair back as far as it will go. It’s just about long enough.”
“Why don’t we try it and see?” Pippa suggests.
Steph nods again and Paige gets to work, gathering up most of her hair and pulling it back to sit high on the back of her head. She’d intended to protest that she can never quite tie a ponytail herself, that she’s still waiting for the length to come in, but Paige pulls it higher than Steph ever thought to, wraps it expertly with a thick hair tie, and steps back to admire her handiwork.
“Good,” Paige says to herself. “Right. Excellent. Be right back, girls.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Pippa says. When Paige is safely out the door, she leans closer and whispers, “You doing okay there, Steph?”
“Yeah,” Steph says. “Still getting used to this, I suppose.”
Pippa kisses her on the cheek. “I know the feeling. Don’t worry, we’ll be fussing over you for the rest of your natural life; you have plenty of time to grow accustomed to being loved.”
Pippa’s already dressed and made up, and she’s done something with her hair — noticeably longer than it was when they met; she’s been growing out her pixie cut — that makes it sparkle in the light, to match the gems in the neckline of her dress. Always pretty, today she looks stunning, and Steph feels something like the way she did when she first met Abby: diminished, ugly, and irrevocably mannish.
“If I ask to leave—”
“We’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” Pippa says quickly. “Back to the basement, up to the roof, into the woods. Aaron might miss you, though.”
“Yeah.” Shit. She’s committed.
“You can talk to me, Steph.”
Steph exhales, empties herself, breathes out until she feels the strain in her chest, imagines her tension dissipating. She’s being stupid. Everyone here was like her once.
Melissa called her beautiful. Yes, so has practically everyone else around here, but Melissa said it, up on the roof, the day they reunited. She acknowledged that Steph looks in transition — how could she not? — but she made it clear that it doesn’t matter, that Steph is beautiful anyway, and not even the slightest bit male. Only a complete idiot would call you male, she said. Steph memorised it.
The dresser’s off to her left so Paige and Pippa can work on her in the best light, so Steph can’t look at herself head on, but the unfamiliar angle helps. In the old-fashioned oval wooden surround of the dresser Steph’s face is reframed, and she has to agree with Melissa: only an idiot, or a cis person, would think her male tonight.
No cis people at Dorley. Not for long, anyway.
She laughs, and realises Pippa’s been watching her for however long she’s been thinking. “Sorry,” she says. “Just sort of drifted away there for a second.”
“More like a minute. Everything really okay?”
She glances at herself again. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”
* * *
Something to be proud of: just two months ago, on Aunt Bea’s birthday, Christine had to rely on Paige to make her look the part, to help her feel like a woman who knows what the hell she’s doing and not like a girl who slobs around in shorts and tank tops all the time. And, true, now that the pressure to make an effort has eased somewhat, Christine’s found her way back into the lazier parts of her wardrobe, after much practise she is, finally, capable of going all-out without assistance. Although she did ask for Indira’s help with the eyeliner; she has a steadier hand. The dress is Dira’s, too, and while in some ways it’s more revealing than anything she might have picked for herself it is at least more modest than the butterfly dress Paige put her in that night.
It’s a shade of blue-green Indira called ‘aqua’, and it hangs from Christine’s left shoulder as if the waterfall of silk that wraps her breasts, her hips and her thighs flows wholly from that point. When she moves the folds of the material shimmer and glide across her skin, and when she examines herself in the mirror she feels almost like someone else entirely.
The woman looking back at her is stunning, way too much so to be her, so when Indira walks up behind her and clasps a silver necklace into place, Christine’s almost surprised when she feels the sensation herself. But she shouldn’t be, should she? Isn’t that what Paige has been telling her daily, not just with her words but with her fingers and her tongue, her very presence in her life? That she’s beautiful, that she’s worthy, that she’s, well, Christine, but not Christine in the way she sometimes still thinks of herself, as a survivor, as a geek, as an only occasionally presentable girl surrounded by goddesses; Christine in the worshipful way that Paige says her name, with reverence and love. Deliberately she places herself in her body and in that body too, in the one she can feel and the one she can see. Reminds herself who she is, who she’s become, and the warmth of pride swells again in her belly.
“Christine,” Indira whispers, “you’re lovely, you know that?”
Christine nods. “You’re right,” she says. “I actually am.”
“And modest.”
Whirling, facing Indira and grinning madly at her, Christine says, “Jesus, Dira. If I’m lovely, what are you?”
Indira twirls for her, and her black off-the-shoulder dress spins out at the mid-thigh, exposing her long, toned legs. She doesn’t get them out all that often — doesn’t show off her figure that much at all, preferring practicality for work and loose clothing in the evenings — and Christine might forget how beautiful her sister is if not for moments like these. Indira’s breathtaking, and Christine wonders for a moment what will happen to the country, to the world, if her sporadic auditions bear fruit and she one day appears on TV.
“I clean up nicely, don’t you think?” Indira says, and Christine wants to launch herself at her, but she doesn’t; that might wrinkle their dresses, ruin their makeup. So she allows her smile to broaden yet farther, and takes Dira by the hand, leads her out of her room and down the stairs towards what is likely going to be a moderately mortifying evening full of wine-drunk sponsors, graduates and other associated hangers-on.
At least the food smells incredible.
* * *
Strange how the dress that looked so fucking scary when it was laid out on the bed feels so ordinary now. But then, Steph’s been dressing up in women’s clothes since—
No. She frowns at the phrasing, borrowed from her mother, from the time a boy from church Steph knew only by name played a girl in a play at the local prep school. Her mother spent weeks afterwards bringing it up at the oddest moments, like when Steph and Petra were playing a princess game on one of the chunky child-safe tablets Petra’s school just started handing out to its kids, as if she could exorcise the memory of the scandalous performance by ensuring that her children would never, ever consider such a thing. Dressing up in women’s clothes: frivolous but forbidden; artifice yet amoral. Don’t cross that line, boy.
Wow. That’s a memory she didn’t expect to find today. She wonders how that kid is doing now.
Steph’s been dressing as she wishes for a while now, gently encouraged by Pippa, Paige, Christine — hell, basically every woman she knows — and while they explicitly haven’t been pushing her, whenever Pippa’s been the one to suggest the outfits she’s always included a showier, more feminine option, more like the clothes Pippa generally chooses for herself, and Steph’s sometimes worn it, for the pleasure that comes from dressing nicely; for the look on Pippa’s face when she does.
So a dress is hardly new territory for her, even if wearing it in front of so many people is; and when she thinks of that her stomach clenches and her head hurts so maybe let’s just concentrate on how we look in the damn thing, okay? Which is, actually, pretty fucking good.
They didn’t want to go too showy or to give her anything difficult to wear, Paige explained, when she removed the dress from its bag and held it up against Steph’s body. No long skirts to manage; no gathered sleeves to accidentally dip in the turkey gravy; no low neckline to make her feel self-conscious or require her to assemble a cleavage out of a chest that, even with the chicken-fillet fillers, is more tell than show. They’ve got her in a simple sleeveless black dress with a high neckline and a skirt to just above her knees, and in deference to her established concern about her pallid legs — not only is she naturally pale but she doesn’t seem to get much sun these days — they’ve got her in a pair of patterned stockings, too. The garter belt is unfamiliar but Paige says it’s better than rolling down your tights every time you have to pee, and the pattern is, well, it’s cute, right?
Steph’s been forced to admit that, yes, it is cute, and another fragment of her lifelong conditioning breaks away.
“You’re posing,” Pippa says.
“So what if I am?” Steph replies with a grin. “I’m pretty!” She’s not sure how powerfully she believes this, but it doesn’t hurt to say it. She’s learned that when she gets self-deprecating, beautiful women frown at her.
“Oh my goodness!” Pippa slaps her forehead with the back of her hand, dramatically. “I’ve created a monster!”
“Yes,” Paige says, approaching Steph from her other side, “well done, Pippa. Steph, put your boots on and let’s go.”
* * *
“How is he?”
Val drops into the ratty old armchair in her room and accepts from Frankie the mug she offers. She doesn’t know what it contains, except that it’s from Frankie, so it’s probably warm and slightly alcoholic, and that’s what’s most important right now. She’s cold to the bone, and not all of it’s from the temperature.
“You remember how we all were?” she says. “When you’d bring us in, castrate us, and throw us out into the common room with a bunch of other injured boys? He’s like that, but worse, Frances, because he’s on his own.” She drinks, and keeps drinking: Irish coffee; just what the doctor ordered. “He’s angry, he’s scared, he’s dysphoric as hell.”
Dysphoric, a word one of the last girls to come to Stenordale Manor taught her, and a useful one, in Trevor’s circumstances. Even in hers, to a point: there’s not a week that goes by that Valérie doesn’t look in the mirror and feel a sorrow she can’t even begin to express for the life that was stolen from her, the man Vincent might have become. She used to imagine sometimes that she could feel the physical sensations the girl described, but she realised today as she watched Trevor recoil from himself in horror that such strength of feeling is utterly beyond her now.
She wouldn’t offer good odds that she’d ever felt it quite so fiercely even when she was young. After so many years she can’t regret losing access to the man’s body she might have had; just his life, his freedom, his family.
His money, maybe. She doesn’t know what she’d spend it on, though.
“I remember,” Frankie says, drinking from her own mug. She’s not supposed to be anywhere in particular right now, having discharged her duty to Dorothy when she prettied up Declan’s face and put him in a frock and packed him off to entertain the old horror show of a woman for a few hours. What Dorothy actually expects of her is that she insult and needle Val while Val works on the boy, but they’ve agreed between the two of them that, if asked, they’ll confirm that, yes, Frances is an evil bitch and, yes, Valérie hates her down to the bone and, yes, Frances enjoys very much the arts of humiliation and degradation; handily, not a word is actually a lie.
“He criticised me for taking a week to come back to him,” Val says. “I am ashamed to say that, in the course of assisting him, I slapped him around the face. Hard.”
Frankie snorts, splashing coffee out of her mug and across her cheek. “Well done, Val!” she says, wiping her face with her sleeve. “I knew you had it in you.”
“I did not enjoy it. I am not like you. I was just… frustrated. I hate myself for it. I can still feel how his cheek felt on my palm.”
“Yeah, well,” Frankie says, “you can learn to live with it. For a while, anyway.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Yes! Yes, Val, it fucking is! But you don’t have to do it for long. I’m ninety percent certain Dotty’s going to bring me in on the whole Trev situation, and then he’ll be my responsibility. You can go back to painting up our little Barbie Doll Declan so old Dorothy can leer toothlessly at him and all will be right with the world. Until we make our grand escape, of course. However we end up doing that.”
Valérie leans forward in her chair. “You’re looking forward to it, aren’t you?” she says. “Training Trevor. It’ll be like a nice holiday in a simpler world for you, won’t it? Back when Dorley Hall was your playground and we were your toys.”
“Believe it or not, Val, I’m expecting to hate it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Scout’s honour.”
“You hate men! And you love toying with them!”
Frances shrugs. “Yes, kind of.” She swirls the coffee around in her mug, inspects it, and then extracts from the depths of her clothes a flask. She tops up her drink and offers it to Val, who nods and holds out her mug. “Thing is, Val, I had it all wrong. Men are dicks, yes.” She slurps from her mug and winces as the suddenly much more alcoholic coffee burns on its way down. “But what could the men I grew up around do? Slap me around? You know how that went for them. And the Dorley Hall boys, you know they were all just innocent kids. No, Val, the men I hate, they’re the real fucking freaks. They’re Dorothy’s customers. They’re like the dickheads I used to know, but they’ve got money and influence and they can do whatever the fuck they want. And what they want is what the bastard who hit my sister wanted.”
“Explain.”
“They say they want women, Val, but they don’t. They fucking don’t.” She gestures with her mug; Valérie wonders how much she drank, alone in this room. “They want something woman-shaped, but with no opinions, no thoughts, no nothing. It’s best if she doesn’t even need watering or feeding, but if she does, well, that’s fucking chicken feed to these people. Actually,” she adds, frowning and swilling her drink around again, “that’s not quite accurate. Some of them want that, and that’s disgusting, and that’s half of what we were doing: making women-shaped people, people who were completely and totally under control. The titillation of the used-to-be-a-man, thing, for most of them that was just the gravy on the beef, right? But the other men, the ones like Smyth-Farrow, though he was by far not the only piece of shit we delivered to, they want all that and more. They don’t just want a subservient companion, they want something they can abuse without shame, something so far below the category of human that they don’t have to give a shit even when they die. Fuck, Val, they learn to enjoy it.”
“Yes,” Val says, eyes closed, willing herself not to remember. “They do.”
“So that’s what I’ve been thinking about today,” Frankie finishes. “Powerful men and the fucked-up things they want. And I’ve been thinking about you.”
She has to open her eyes at that, and there’s Frankie, sitting forward, tipsily sincere.
“Me?” Val says.
“You. You were made to be a male fantasy. By us. But you never were. I think old Smyth-Farrow would’ve bumped you off if you hadn’t been, uh, who you used to be. If he hadn’t had that extra layer of satisfaction.”
“Probably,” Val admits. He came close, she knows.
“So here’s to you, Val Barbier, for never fulfilling a man’s fantasies, for resisting every bit of hamfisted brainwashing we tried on you, for remaining a cantankerous, opinionated, obnoxious bitch for more than three decades.” She holds out her mug. “Cheers, Val.”
What else is there to do? Val clinks her mug against Frankie’s.
“Cheers.”
* * *
“This campus is stupid.”
“It’s not.”
“It clearly is.”
“Shy, why would you think the pool would be open on Christmas Eve?”
“I don’t see why everything has to shut down for bloody Christmas.”
“Preaching to the Jewish choir here, Shy, but it’s always like this.”
“Yes, and I always get to gripe about it. I just thought—”
“—Shy—”
“—because the campus shop is open—”
“—Shy—”
“—that maybe the other facilities would be, too.”
“Shy!”
“I want a dip, Rach. Is that such a crime?”
“Yes, now shut up, because I need to ask you something.”
“…Go on.”
“Where are all these women going?”
They’ve been sitting below Café One in the central quad — no longer actually central, not since the Anthill was built, and even less so now — waiting for Melissa to come back, and for the last half-hour or so a steady stream of people have been walking by, from the car park by the main road, through the quad, and down towards the path by the Student Union Bar. Most of them are dressed up, many of them are lugging carrier bags with distinctive box-shaped, present-like cargo inside, and all of them have been animated and happy.
Shahida knows exactly where they’re all going.
“Not sure,” she says. “Why?”
“We’ve been bumming around campus all day,” Rachel says, swivelling to face Shahida and crossing her legs under herself on the bench, “and there’s been practically no-one around. Now, suddenly, hot women in party dresses are everywhere.”
“It’s one or two every couple of minutes, Rach. I wouldn’t call that ‘everywhere’.”
“There’s a party,” Rachel says. “Somewhere. A Christmas party.”
Shahida shrugs. “Probably?”
Rachel narrows her eyes. “Shy?” she says. “It’s at Dorley Hall, isn’t it?” Shahida doesn’t answer, and Rachel slaps the arm of the bench in triumph. “I knew it! Wanna crash?” Shahida still doesn’t answer. “Shit, Shy; you’re going, aren’t you? You were invited, weren’t you? That’s why you didn’t want to come back to my parents’ for Snakes and Ladders and latkes tonight!”
“Yes,” Shahida says, “I was invited, but please, Rach, keep it down?”
“Why? Oh, yeah, the whole secrecy thing.” She cranes her neck, spots a couple more women walking up behind her. “Chag Sameach,” she says, with the kind of genuine sincerity probably only Shahida can see right through.
“Pardon me?” one of the women says.
Her friend nudges her and says to Rachel, “Happy holidays.”
“Merry Christmas,” Shahida says, smiling at them both. “I like your hat.”
The taller woman of the two — and she is really quite tall — pats her woolly hat with her free hand. It’s red, and there are Christmas trees on it. “Oh, um, thank you,” she says.
When they’re out of earshot, Rachel says, “Traitor!”
“What?”
“Honestly, you sod off to America for years and you come back all… cosmopolitan.”
Shahida snorts. “Rach, who are you channelling right now?”
“My uncle. You haven’t met him; be glad.”
“I am. Profoundly.”
“So… you get invited to the Dorley Christmas Eve party and I don’t?”
“It’s more of a meal.”
“Even so.”
“Rach, I…” There’s no way she can think of to say, ‘I know the secret,’ without implying that there is a greater secret to know than the one Rachel reasoned herself into — that Dorley Hall is a refuge for transitioned and transitioning women escaping abusive families that also just happens to function as a university dormitory — so Shahida doesn’t, hoping Rachel will infer a meaning that supports the story she understands.
“Right,” Rachel says, frowning.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay! It’s fine. Like I said, I’m at my parents’, anyway. And I’m round at Belinda’s tomorrow, for turkey.”
“I thought you hated Christmas.”
Rachel pokes Shahida. “And my wife’s family doesn’t,” she says.
The next two people to walk past them are a woman and a man, interrupting the unbroken stream of women, but before Rachel or Shahida can comment on it, the woman turns back and rushes towards them, pulling down her hood and unzipping the front of her coat and revealing herself to be Tabitha Forbes.
“Shy!” she says, reaching out for a hug and obliging Shahida to stand and accept one. “Hi!”
“Hi, Tab,” Shahida says, hugging at least four layers of clothing that contain, somewhere inside, a Tabby.
“Happy hols,” Tabby says, stepping back. “Hi, Rachel. Ladies, I’d like you to meet Levi.”
The man steps forward, pulling down his own hood and smiling for both of them. “Hi,” he says. “You’re friends of Tabitha’s?”
“Yes,” Shahida says.
“Friend of a friend,” Rachel says, pointing first at Shahida and then at Tabitha. Shahida accidentally-on-purpose kicks her in the ankle as she sits back on the bench. Rachel winces, rolls her eyes at Shahida, and asks, “You’re going to the party at Dorley Hall?”
“It’s more of a meal,” Shahida says.
“I am,” Tabby says. “He’s just dropping me off.”
“I’m a glorified taxi driver,” Levi says.
“Are you coming?” Tabby asks Rachel.
“No,” Shahida and Rachel say simultaneously. “She doesn’t celebrate,” Shahida continues.
“Nor does she,” Rachel says sweetly.
“I like turkey.”
“Me too,” Levi says, “and that means I need to get going, Tab, or I won’t make it back home before midnight and my ma’ll punish me with nut cutlet.”
“Okay,” Tabitha says, turning away from Shahida and Rachel to embrace him. She whispers something Shahida doesn’t hear, and then they kiss — Tabby having to bend her knees a little — and he’s walking briskly back towards the car park. “Safe journey!” she calls after him; he acknowledges her with a wave. “He’s going home to Edinburgh tonight,” she says, after he’s disappeared around the corner. “It’s a long drive. I hope he’ll be okay.” She smiles. “Isn’t he gorgeous, though?”
“Probably, yes,” Shahida says.
“Sorry,” Rachel says. “We’re lesbians. We can’t tell.”
“Right,” Tabitha says. “So, why’re you hanging around out here in the cold? Holiday blues?”
“We’re waiting for Em,” Shahida says. “For Melissa, I mean. She got a call from the car rental place reminding her to drop the car off. She didn’t want to pay another extended fee, so.” She shrugs. “She’s probably in an Uber back here now.”
“We would have gone with her,” Rachel says, “only someone wanted to go swimming.”
“Swimming?” Tabitha frowns. “On Christmas Eve? Is it even open?”
Rachel whacks Shahida’s thigh with the back of her hand. “See?”
“Rachel Gray, you leave me alone.”
“Rachel Gray-Wallace,” Rachel corrects her.
“You two are adorable,” Tabby says, and to Shahida’s amusement, Rachel scowls at her. “Ah,” Tabby adds, pointing towards the car park, “your girl’s here.”
Your girl. If only.
Melissa waves and breaks into a light jog, and it’s an opportunity to watch her without feeling self-conscious. She’s dressed for the December cold in a beige coat, a tartan skirt, leggings and knee boots, with a woolly hat and earmuffs to finish it off. Shahida once again thinks that Melissa is quite the most beautiful woman she could ever hope to meet.
But then, she’s realised, she’s always thought that. Even when Melissa was Mark, Shahida thought that.
Melissa collides with Shahida as she stands up to greet her. They manage to turn it into a hug, and disengage quickly, embarrassed to be observed.
They’ve been touching each other a lot lately. Just casually, a hand on a forearm, that kind of thing. Nothing for Shahida to get too excited about. Nothing to make her heart swell or her head light or her knees weak, and yet routinely she is betrayed by her biology. Melissa had to catch her the other day as she almost swooned, and landing heavily in her arms did nothing to alleviate the situation.
Worse, Rachel keeps badgering Shahida about it. Only when Melissa’s not around, thankfully. In Melissa’s presence she limits her commentary to her eyes and, occasionally, to the sorts of lascivious mimes Shahida wishes she could unsee.
“So,” Melissa says, “it’s impossible to get an Uber on Christmas Eve.”
“I could have told you that,” Tabby says.
“I got the bus. It was fine; no drunks.”
Tabby and Rachel both snort; the bus line connecting the university to the city is notorious for being packed with unruly students. But, Shahida supposes, it would be empty now, because the university’s empty. Everyone’s gone back to their families. Except Melissa, and the graduates of Dorley Hall…
The thought makes her grab Melissa’s arm. If only things could have been different. If only she’d been smarter, been less ignorant, had put together the signs which only seem obvious with hindsight. Then Melissa might still have the remnants of a family.
As if she can tell what Shahida’s thinking, Melissa closes a hand over one of hers. She always did know when to comfort her.
“Okay, girls,” Rachel says, “I have to run. Dad’ll be here soon.”
Melissa tears away from Shahida again to hug Rachel, who leans in and whispers something in Melissa’s ear that makes them both laugh. Rachel then pulls back, air-kisses with Melissa and Shahida, waves at Tabby, and heads off towards the car park where her father’s scheduled to pick her up. With luck, he won’t have any strange questions as to why his adult daughter is hanging around the campus of a university neither she nor any of her friends attended.
“Come on,” Tabitha says, nodding in the direction of Dorley Hall, “it’s not getting any warmer.”
The three of them start walking, Shahida and Tabitha bracing Melissa protectively. Habit on Shahida’s part and, since she’s a sponsor, probably on Tabby’s, too.
Shahida nudges Melissa. “What did she say to you?”
“She put on a posh voice and said, ‘All right, then. Keep your secrets.’” She looks sideways at Tabitha. “We, uh, were talking about the Hall again, earlier.” Rachel has more questions for Melissa every time they see each other — and sometimes over Consensus — but has agreed to abide by the rules; if Melissa insists something remain private, private it will remain.
Tabitha glances around, and says quietly, “She’s not going to be a problem, is she?”
“She’s mostly but not entirely convinced it’s a refuge for abused trans women,” Shahida says, “but we’ve asked her not to pry and she won’t. She knows Em’s safety depends on it. She’s just—”
“She’s just being Rachel,” Melissa says, looking back along the path, as if she can still see her.
“We can poll the sponsors,” Tabby says, “and discuss bringing her in. That’s the usual way we do things,” she adds, leaning around Melissa to look at Shahida. “Although, lately, women have just been sort of barging in.”
“Excuse me,” Shahida says as they pass the shuttered Student Union Bar, “I didn’t ‘barge’ anywhere; I was invited in. By you, actually!”
“Potato, pot-ah-to.”
* * *
Steph’s still new enough to heels that the stairs are rather tricky, but she has only one flight to manage, and with Pippa and Paige steadying her, each taking an arm, it’s not so bad. And she feels like a débutante when she walks unsteadily into the dining hall, a beautiful woman on each arm (and, she sternly reminds herself, a beautiful woman herself balanced carefully between them), which is a sensation worth almost tripping and breaking her neck for.
The dining hall’s been relit with candles and fairy lights, and while on closer inspection the candles are all fake — presumably to prevent the many florid sleeves she can see from precipitating disaster — the effect is still quite magical. Since she last passed through someone’s set up a Christmas tree near the fireplace and decorated it in the traditional fashion, although Steph suspects the angel on top is probably altered in some way, in service of one or other of the Hall’s apparently endless (and exceedingly tasteless) running gags. She decides not to ask about it.
Before they can step over the threshold into the hall, one of the sponsors Steph very nearly recognises holds out her forearm to bar them from entry.
“Hold on,” she says, while Steph admires her pant suit and tries to remember her. She identifies her as Charlie, one of the second-year sponsors and the one who was on duty the day Melissa came home, in time for her to pluck from over the doorway a telltale green leaf. “Mistletoe,” Charlie says, waving it. “Indira had the second years take it all down earlier. Apparently they missed one.”
“That seems a little mean,” Steph says. “Aren’t they helping cook, too? They seem to get all the shit work.”
Charlie shrugs. “It was almost definitely them who put it all up in the first place.”
“Where did they even get it? They’re not allowed outside yet, right?”
“Mostly not,” Pippa mutters.
Nadine, one of the second-year sponsors Steph knows only by sight, swishes up in the fanciest dress Steph’s yet seen — it has a train! — and loops her arms around Charlie’s waist. “The mistletoe’s plastic,” she says, over Charlie’s shoulder. “One of the second years got into the boxes of decorations in storage.”
Charlie nods. “We’re also missing a whole pack of fairy lights and a rubber Santa.”
“And yes,” Nadine says with a shudder, “before you ask, we have checked Mia’s room.”
Charlie leans her head back to rest on Nadine’s shoulder. “You poor thing.”
“Almost two more years of Mia to go,” Nadine mutters. “Kill me.”
“You could always graduate her early,” Pippa says. “Surely she’s girly enough for Bea already?”
Nadine breathes heavily through her nose. “Pippa, it took me thirty minutes to give Aunt Bea the background in the relevant memes and—” she grumbles in her throat for a moment, “—‘shitposts’ — pardon my French — to comprehend the concept of ‘programmer socks’, and at the end of it all she looked at me over her gin and she said, ’Nadine, that simply will not do.’ I’m to turn Mia into a proper lady if it’s the last thing I do, and it might well be.”
“You don’t have to take everything Beatrice says so seriously,” Paige says.
“Spoken like someone who has never had to explain certain very specific memes to Bea.” Nadine tugs on Charlie, pulls her away into the room so the girls have room to pass. “Pippa, Paige,” she says, “you look lovely, as always. Steph, you look wonderful. And…” She pauses for a moment, and Charlie nudges her and nods. Nadine continues, more quickly, less sure of herself, “I wanted to thank you.”
“Oh?” Steph says. Pippa squeezes her hand.
“I’ve been thinking about how to put this,” Nadine says, half to herself, before looking Steph in the eye. “You’re a transgender woman. One who knew herself before she even walked through our doors. One who had to live with the knowledge of herself as trans for twenty-one years. I can’t imagine how lonely that must have been. How difficult. And yet—” she makes the little noise in her throat again, the one Steph’s starting to think is how she creates a pause so she can assemble her words, “—you don’t judge us. Since you were outed, since our respective truths became clear, you haven’t once impugned our womanhood—” Charlie coughs and nudges her again, “—or whatever other genders we might coalesce around, and it would have been entirely your right to do so.”
“Um,” Steph says, “I don’t understand.”
Charlie’s the one to hug Nadine now, with careful attention paid to the lines of her dress.
“We are all here for a reason,” Nadine says, “and you know this. But you have steadfastly refused to use it against us or to elevate yourself above us. For the sake of our second years, I must thank you. Their senses of themselves, even their genders, are still… delicate. Judgement, even implicit judgement, could have harmed them. So…” She curtseys, slow and deep, and Charlie stifles a giggle. “Thank you, Stephanie Riley.”
“Well,” Steph says, knowing she ought to respond and buying time to come up with something, “the thing is, um, well, it’s just… I know what it’s like to need to, um, to become—”
“I know,” Nadine says smoothly. “You don’t need to say it. You could so easily have been less generous with us, Stephanie, and it would have hurt our girls so much.”
Lost for words, Steph resorts to the only thing she can think of: she returns Nadine’s curtsey. It feels a little strange to do it in heels, and really it’s more of a dip, and she has to rely on Pippa’s steadying hand to be sure she doesn’t wobble, but Nadine is delighted, anyway, and that’s what’s important.
“Bless you, Stephanie,” Nadine says.
“You get used to her,” Charlie stage-whispers.
* * *
It hurt to leave Rachel back there, to be picked up by her dad and go back to a family that doesn’t know anything about, well, anything, but it would be worse to bring her to the Christmas Eve dinner. Melissa’s been to these before, twice when required and once, unaccountably, of her own accord, and she knows how rowdy they can get; the story Rach has been telling herself about Dorley would simply not survive contact with the assembled sponsors of Dorley Hall.
Which sucks. Because now she’s back here, now she’s starting to tie together the threads of her lives old and new, Melissa’s getting greedy; she wants everyone to know her, and she wants everyone precious to her to know each other.
Impossible, yes, but she can dream. Shahida might well have come to terms with the operation here with surprising ease, but Rachel’s still an unknown, one she doesn’t have the right to risk.
Confine your selfish impulses to your imagination for once, Melissa.
She’s so lost in her thoughts she doesn’t notice the approach of the Hall until she’s almost inside the front doors, and Shahida catches her instinctive flinch. There’s a residual intimidation to the place, one Melissa hasn’t quite purged, and while normally she has it under control, it retains its tendency to unsettle her.
“You okay, Em?”
Melissa nods as decisively as she can. Rationally, there’s nothing left here to scare her. Her intake have matured into the people she might have hoped they would, had she allowed herself to dwell on their futures overmuch, and even Aunt Bea’s mystique has worn away with time. And Abby… She’s not here tonight. Christine says she’s been avoiding the place lately, and Melissa’s inferred she’s been spending time with her family. Her real family.
And that hurts, too. That’s what they used to call each other.
“Yeah,” she says, “I’m okay. I just haven’t been to one of these big get-togethers in a while.”
“I sympathise,” Tabby says, waiting in the doorway. “I’d much rather be spending Christmas Eve with my boyfriend than with you bitches — no offence — but, alas.”
“Poor you,” Shahida says. “Really, Em? You’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
Shahida clings to her all the way inside, both hands wrapped around Melissa’s left arm, plausibly for warmth. Melissa leans into her, choosing to be grateful for what and who she has.
Shy’s here. Steph’s here. Abby, Rachel, Amy… Dreams for another day. At least they are all within reach.
They have to separate as they enter the kitchen, and not just because of the heat from the AGA; there are enough people ferrying things around that they’re obliged to wait to be allowed to pass, and by the time Aisha finally waves them through, Melissa and Shahida are both sweating. Tabby, rather more sensibly, has taken the front stairs, but Melissa wants to check something: someone said Steph was going to be here tonight.
They haven’t spent as much time together as either of them wanted. It’s understandable. Steph’s busy with Aaron, who by all accounts has been undergoing a series of pivotal identity shifts — ahead of schedule — and, what’s more, she has to keep up appearances for the rest of the boys, who still think her one of them. She can’t exactly go for jaunts above ground whenever she chooses. And Melissa’s been occupied with Shahida and Rachel. Yes, she could and probably should have taken matters into her own hands and gone downstairs to visit Steph, but she doesn’t ever want to see that ugly concrete prison ever again.
At the thought of it she has to stop for a second, and Shahida stops with her, still holding her, still providing an anchor.
The time pressure’s getting to her. Not long until she has to go back to Manchester, back to work, back to a life that doesn’t have room for Steph or Shy or Rachel or Abby, a life that feels increasingly threadbare the longer she stays away from it… So she needs to confirm for herself that Steph’s going to be here tonight, or else she’ll need to start making serious plans to swallow her fears and re-enter the basement.
When they step through into the dining hall — and are immediately encouraged to step to one side, so the flow of people in and out can continue — it takes Melissa long enough to locate Steph that Shahida finishes struggling out of her own jacket and starts pulling Melissa’s off her shoulders. Eventually she spots her, all the way over at the other side of the dining hall, entering from the stairs with Pippa and Paige and talking with a pair of sponsors.
One of them’s Charlie, who was there the day Melissa made an idiot of herself. Maybe she’ll wait.
Shahida bumps shoulders with her and passes over her folded-up jacket. “How long do we have before we need to be ready?” she asks.
“A bit over an hour, I think,” Melissa says, trying not to sound too preoccupied.
“That’s good, because— Oh! Look! There’s Steph! She’s… she’s curtseying! Em, do you know how adorable that is?”
Melissa smothers a laugh, because, yes, the sight is so adorable she thinks she might die.
When Charlie and the other sponsor leave Steph and her friends to it, Melissa and Shahida give them a few moments to themselves before trotting up. Melissa can’t help the smile on her face: Steph looks incredible.
She’s wearing a chic black number that artfully covers for her flat chest and developing figure, and she’s paired it with a pair of boots Melissa badly needs to borrow. Her makeup is accented to match her hair colour and her hair itself is tied back, with a fringe teased out and a ponytail that curls ringlets around the base of her neck.
Steph rushes forward to embrace her, stumbling on small heels she’s unaccustomed to, and Melissa and Shahida catch her together.
“Sorry,” Steph says, and she sounds better than she did the last time they saw each other, clearer and more confident, and that’s great; it means that not only has she been practising, but she has access to somewhere she feels safe to do so.
“No running in the torture facility!” someone calls out from the other side of the dining hall, and Steph, once she’s freed from Melissa and Shahida’s support, throws a finger in their direction, to much laughter.
“Someone’s started early,” Shahida mutters.
“Someone always does,” Melissa says. “Hey, Steph. You look great.”
“Thanks!” She takes another step away from them and attempts a slow and careful twirl. “Don’t you just love the dress? And the hair! The hair’s my favourite part. It’s kind of a preview of what I’ll have in, um—” she pauses as she comes to rest, steadied by Pippa’s hand, and frowns as she thinks, “—like, maybe two years?”
“It’s not real?” Shahida asks.
“Everything before the ponytail is hers,” Paige says. “The ponytail is hers, too, but it comes off for cleaning.”
“Ta-da,” Steph says, wiggling her hands.
“Gorgeous,” Melissa says, and Steph beams at her.
“You two need to get changed,” Paige says, checking the time on her phone before slipping it back into a slim, dark green shoulder bag that matches her dress, and while Melissa’s aware she probably should answer she suddenly can’t because she’s properly looking at Paige’s dress for the first time and it’s temporarily robbed her of all reason.
It looks like it ought to be obscene. Paige is taller than Melissa by a reasonable distance and almost as thin, and her dress hugs tight to the shape of her, emphasises the curve of her back and her buttocks, clings to her shoulders and her upper arms. But it covers her from shoulder to ankle, with a modest slit to the lower thigh, and while the fabric sheers in a few places it is mostly opaque. All that’s actually exposed is her clavicle.
Paige, aware of the scrutiny, juts her hip out and smiles.
“Wow,” Shahida says.
Melissa can’t help but agree. “Um,” she says.
“Stop gawking,” Steph says, “both of you. She’s spoken for.”
“Speaking of,” Pippa says, poking at Steph and pointing across the room, “look who it is.”
All of them turn around at once, to see someone tentatively emerging from the basement with Maria. Melissa’s seen pictures of Aaron so she knows what he looks like — or what he looked like when he first arrived at Dorley, anyway; she hasn’t wanted to go scrubbing around the security footage, and she’s not even sure she’d be given access if she asked — but even disregarding the highly unusual nature of his presence here at all, she never expected to see him looking like that.
“Holy crap,” Steph whispers.
* * *
Stenordale Manor’s not the largest single building he’s ever done guard duty in, but it’s by far the biggest he’s ever had to patrol as part of such a small team. Still a cushy job, though, what with the access codes and the keys being restricted solely to him and Dorothy Marsden, and with the building being an ostensibly civilian dwelling that nevertheless can be locked up almost as tight as any Silver River facility. On any other assignment he’d be checking in with staff, he’d be walking his routes, he’d be watching the cameras, but here? They have exactly three prisoners in two groups, and neither group knows about, nor has access to, the other. And the staff? A nervous but obedient soldier, also from Silver River and subordinate to him, and a pair of old bats who are content to let him get on with things as he sees fit. He’s due a visit from his CO at some unspecified point in the future but the assignment is considered high priority but low risk, and the chain of command runs, unusually, right through the civilian, Dorothy Marsden. Fine by him; one more thing he doesn’t have to think about. If the doors stay locked and the windows stay closed, he’s done his job.
They make him confine his smoking to the room out by the quad, though. He and Callum have designated it a rec room, dragged in a telly and some sofas and chairs, plugged in a mini-fridge, and replaced the locks on all the doors, just in case any of their charges happen to wander this way. Wouldn’t matter if they did, of course; even if they somehow got in and caught him smoking and got out the window before he could stop them, they’d be in the quad, and there’s nowhere to go from there. And then he’d get to try out the taser he’s been issued.
The room next door even has a snooker table, and last week he found a box full of DVDs of some of the weirdest porn he’s ever seen. It’s the fucking life.
Well, not quite. There’s a tin of Guinness with his name on it, but he’s technically on duty for another few hours yet, and while the old woman spends a lot of time asleep and the slightly younger one, Frankie, gets her kicks mostly from bothering the maid, there’s always the chance he’ll be needed for something. Callum, the prick, cracks open a Foster’s and shoots him a shit-eating grin; he’s been off-shift for over an hour already.
“Cheer up, mate,” Callum says, as he pours his lager into a pint glass and absolutely wrecks the head, “it might never happen.”
“What gives you the impression that I’m glum, Callum, son?”
Callum throws the empty Foster’s tin at the bin and misses. The lad is absolute shit, honestly. “It’s the way you’re staring into space and saying absolutely fucking nothing,” he says.
“I’m thinking, aren’t I? Contemplating.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Right.”
Jake ignores the sceptical face Callum’s pulling and snatches up his cigarettes and lighter from the table beside him. “Crack the window, would you, Cal?” he says.
“You’re supposed to lean out when you smoke those,” Callum says, but he puts down his pint and he gets up and he fucking does it anyway. “It stains the wallpaper.”
Jake lights up. “What does her nibs even care about that, anyway? It’s not like this is her place. And when she shuffles off and head office take full possession they’re not going to care about the fucking wallpaper, are they? Especially not when it’s of this—” he leans forward in his chair, squinting, pretending to examine the wall with an expert’s eye, “—uninspiring vintage.”
Callum shrugs. “I guess it is ugly.”
“It looks like my nan’s bedroom,” Jake says, “and she decorated in the nineteen-seventies. And she’s dead.” He tries to blow a smoke ring and fails. “Whole house has got old woman smell, anyway. Silver River’ll probably rip out all the wallpaper just to get rid of the stink.”
“Right.” Callum hops channels on the muted telly for a minute and sips at his lager. “Look, Jake,” he says eventually, “is this… right?”
Here we go. The young ones get like this sometimes. And, yeah, it’d be a stretch to call Callum young, but he’s got that young feel, that sliver of childlike wonder that suggests to Jake that he hasn’t been punched in the face enough. Time to humour the stupid bastard. “Is what right?”
“Valerie— Vincent. Fuck, I don’t know. The maid. She said she was innocent. She said she’s been in captivity for over thirty years. She—”
“You believe everything a pretty woman tells you, Callum?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Hah, sorry; a pretty man.”
“Hey. She’s— Hey.”
Jake’s laugh becomes a cough, the cigarette smoke exiting him in vaporous, staccato gasps. “I saw the video, Cal. You walked right up to her and you called her by her— fuck, what do they say these days? I remember from sensitivity training. Tip of my tongue. Hah, Cal, I know what you want on the tip of your tongue.”
“Jake—”
“Deadname! You deadnamed her, Cal, and good for fucking you. If you want her, you need to establish power over her, mate. It’s a good start.”
“I don’t want her.”
“Leave it. I’ve seen the other video. The one where you practically tried to get in her girly little knickers.”
“That was orders.”
“Orders were to win her trust,” Jake says. “Which, I might add, you royally screwed up. Oh, don’t worry—” he waves a hand, scatters ash on the carpet as he does so, “—the old woman doesn’t give a shit. I was there when she reviewed the footage. She thought it was funny. In fact,” he adds with a leer, “I think she was a little bit turned on. Vincent Valerie Barbier the Maid knows she can’t expect anything useful from you and that’s almost as good as stringing her along.”
“What’s the other woman doing with her, then? Frances?”
“Frankie?” Jake shrugs and stubs out his cigarette. “No clue. She and Dorothy are thick as thieves, though. She won’t be doing anything that hasn’t been sanctioned. Not unless she wants to end up like everyone else who ever came through here.”
Callum finishes his beer, and burps. “That’s just it. Doesn’t matter if she’s a man or a woman or whatever. This feels wrong.”
“Does it?” Jake exclaims. “Does it, indeed? Cal, how many people’ve you killed?”
“Two.”
“Name them.”
“What?”
“What were their names, Callum?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they have wives? Kids? Dogs? A school run? Were they on the PTA?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what that tells me, Cal?” Jake says. “That you don’t actually give a shit. Let me guess, they were in the way of the job, so you did them, yes?”
“Yeah. Mostly.”
“Because the job — and your precious little life — was more important than whoever those poor bastards were, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then. It’s the same deal. She’s the job. Val’rie. And so’s the kid, Declan, and the wanker from Prickinville. And this is a priority assignment, Cal; don’t let the small size of our little gang fool you. If you fuck up, you’ll get sanctioned. Do you want to be sanctioned, Cal?”
“No.”
“Then do the fucking job. Don’t start developing morals, Cal. Don’t start thinking. Just do the job. And cheer up! Your little maid wife Vincent’s making us Christmas dinner tomorrow.”
“I’m not interested in her!”
Jake snorts. “Why not?”
“Because she’s— he’s a man.”
“Does she look like a man, Cal? No? Then does it matter? We’re here for two years, lad, and it’s not like we get a lot of time off to go on the pull. Beggars can’t be choosers. If you want to have a go, don’t mind me. I won’t tell a soul.”
“She’s got a dick, Jake.”
He puts on his most patronising voice and says, “Then ask her very nicely if you can do her up the arse.”
“I don’t—”
“Shush, now,” Jake says, nodding at the laptop, which shows Dorothy Marsden walking the corridor down to the rec room with her usual slightly surprising speed — not exactly fast, but fast for her age — with Declan in tow. “Company.”
Minutes later, he’s escorting Ms Marsden out to the bungalow at the end of the Run, a blue rucksack slung over his shoulder and his anticipation rising. She asked him if he’s had the standard field medical training, and he said yes. She asked him if he knows how to perform a simple injection, and he said of course. And then he realised what she was asking, and now he’s walking carefully, his boredom replaced with a kind of excitement he’s only just starting to become familiar with.
At first he didn’t get it. With Declan she just calls him up to her room, or wherever it is she’s currently decaying, and has him serve her, or listen to her talk, or dress up for her, and the first couple of times he retained his disinterest, sitting in the corner of the room with his gun ready, in his usual role as the implicit threat, the punishment for noncompliance.
But, a few sessions in, as Declan started to become verbal again, as he started pushing back in the most minor ways, as he started to fight, Jake started to see the appeal. To take someone like Declan, the kind of man you might see down the pub or even work with at somewhere like Silver River, all barrel-belly and attitude, and transform him into your servant, girly and submissive and eager— no, desperate to please… There’s power there. Power and, he had to admit to himself, arousal. And then, one session, when Dorothy secured a minimum level of cooperation from the lad by promising that if he behaves she can one day set him right, put him on testosterone, give him back (almost) everything that was taken from him, Jake had to relieve himself in the nearest bathroom immediately after. The last traces of defiance had departed the man, but not the fear, not the hatred, not the determination, and Jake’s known for a while that when someone loathes you but must still conform to your whim, it’s intoxicating. What he didn’t know, what he’d never had the opportunity to find out, is that when that person, that creature, is also becoming week by week a compliant and beautiful woman, well, that’s not just the cherry on top; that’s the whole fucking cake.
Maybe the perfect woman can’t be found. But you can make her. And who knew the tools to do so were in the hands of someone like Dorothy Marsden?
The promise to Declan is a lie, of course. There’s no help coming for him, no testosterone injections, no eventual re-masculinisation, and if the lad was halfway bright he would have realised this. He would have taken one look at Valerie and understood he was looking into his future. But he’s proud, and proud in a way that Jake can almost relate to: men don’t let this happen to them. But perhaps a man would survive, would refuse to give in.
That’s probably why Valerie seems like such an ordinary woman; she was always a pussy, even before. And where’s the fun in that? Declan, however, a man so much like Jake that to read his file is like looking back to Jake’s own youth, now there’s the sport. His attitude, his hatred… He’s practically begging to be broken.
Trevor’s injection passes for Jake in a blur. Dorothy made him promise: kid gloves. Trev’s earmarked for someone else, and he’s going to be trained and then he’s going to be shipped out, and while, sure, forcing his compliance and injecting him is relatively satisfying, Jake can’t get another face out of his head: wide-eyed, dark-haired, and with an expression of painted, pained loathing.
Declan’s the new Vincent, and Dorothy’s not got the energy to train him as she’d like, and from now on, Frankie’s going to have her hands full with Trevor. So what if Dorothy lets Jake have a go at him?
He’ll ask. He’ll make his case. But he’s pretty confident. He knows he can make a pretty fucking good woman out of Declan Shaw.
* * *
He almost has a heart attack right there in the doorway. The dining hall — what he has to assume is the dining hall, anyway, since it matches Steph’s description and it’s full of people in pretty dresses and it’s right where he was told to expect the dining hall and, Jesus, he’s feeling really faint — is so fucking huge and the ceiling is so fucking high and it’s so packed with people, and, wait, the ceiling is high? How does that work? It’s like a whole extra storey! Does it extend into the next floor, and the rooms on the first floor just have to snake around it? Or is there, like, a secret extra floor with storerooms and stuff, because it doesn’t look like the kitchen is unusually tall, so maybe—
“Aaron?”
Maria takes his weight as he staggers, and he clears his head, wants to apologise to her for needing her in such a way when she’s still technically in recovery from her injury, but it’s just these shoes, man, and it’s not that they’re especially unusual but, come on, he hasn’t worn shoes at all for so long and now his toes are getting pinched and his heel is all tight and he wants nothing more than to stretch his arches and how, honestly, actually, is he supposed to concentrate on walking when he’s just been dressed and primped and dragged out into a room the size of a school gym after being cooped up in a basement for three months?
“Aaron!”
There’s so many beautiful women in the room — and, yes, attractive nonbinary people, too, he’s had the lecture from Maria and the reminder from Steph and he knows that not everyone who graduates is or remains a woman, but it’s fine because Donna, whom he doesn’t know but whom he is assured is very nice, she’s Jodie’s sponsor, and he doesn’t know Jodie either, but he’s assured she’s very nice as well, Donna made pronoun pins, and while probably not everyone will be wearing them, Maria told him he could rely on anyone who prefers something other than she/her to indicate it somewhere on their person, because it’s just less awkward that way, and he can do it, too, if he wants, but when Maria asked if he wanted Donna to make him up a he/him pin he prevaricated for long enough that Maria kissed him on the forehead and told him not to worry about it.
“Aaron?”
Start again. There’s so many beautiful people in the room, and so many of them are looking right at him, and he feels suddenly both presumptuous and out of place, like he dared to walk into this hall as himself, dressed the way he is, the way he asked Maria to dress him, and the laughter or the derision or the cruelty is surely just about to start—
“Hey, Aaron,” Maria says, right in his ear, and her breath and the startling loudness of her voice is enough to—
“Aaron!”
Steph?
“Wake up, kid,” Maria says, squeezing his arm, and he looks at her, responds to her smile with one of his own, finding within himself enough remaining certainty to make it through this one meal, this one evening, because it’s important. For a hundred reasons, it’s important. And here comes Steph, with Paige and Pippa alongside her and a couple of people he doesn’t know who either haven’t got dressed up yet or are both attending the Christmas Eve party cosplaying as that one American Instagram woman who goes viral every autumn for her beige overcoat and her warm boots and her pumpkin spice Starbucks, but who cares about the others because Steph’s wearing a fucking dress, and she looks incredible, and if he wasn’t feeling faint before — and he fucking was — then he’d surely be practically falling over now just from the sight of her.
“You’ve got this,” Maria whispers. “Just remember: I’m proud of you, and so is she.”
And Maria lets him go, lets him stand on his own two feet, and he thinks she should probably be even more proud of him for managing it.
He steps forward and doesn’t stumble.
Fuck yeah.
Aaron takes a deep breath, straightens his tie, smooths down his tuxedo, and holds out his hands, ready to accept the embrace of the woman he loves.
Notes:
I talk endlessly about writing this story (and other things) on my twitter: https://twitter.com/badambulist
Chapter 31: Skin and Bones
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2004 December 24
Friday
She remembers being burned here. She remembers being cut here. She remembers being hit, stroked, taunted and groped here. She remembers being dressed and painted and given drinks to serve and men to obey, and refusing, and suffering consequences as varied as they were demeaning. She remembers exactly where she was standing when she was first thrown to the floor, when she was first marked, when her soft new skin was first torn open, here in the dining room at Dorley Hall. And she remembers the other girls, who obeyed more quickly, who succumbed more readily, who were taken away, who left her behind, a toy that wouldn’t be wound up, a pet who wouldn’t behave.
Not submissive enough (she cultivated a pride they couldn’t penetrate).
Not broken enough (she never let them break her).
Not ashamed enough (she wears this body like a scar).
Maria sits at the head of the table, in the seat that was once Grandmother’s, and surveys the dining hall: the dent in the floorboards from when she tried to drive her brand-new high heel into Karen’s foot; the dark spot from when Barbara was told what awaited her after Penelope was finished moulding her and vomited up her dinner; the tear in the wallpaper from when Sarah threw a plate at Frankie. Other memories stain the room, memories attached to names long gone, but Maria tries her hardest to forget them; best to linger only on the girls who survived.
The scar cream on her forearms itches. It’s not that she hates her scars, exactly; Maria is emphatically not what they made her, but what she made herself, and the scars are a record of that struggle, the price she paid. Sometimes she runs her fingers over them, each rough line of closed and knitted flesh another victory. But when she looks at herself she wants to feel new.
They have rooms on the third floor now. Still a novelty to look out from unbarred windows. Maria opened up one of the spare rooms and put out photos, set up candles, laid out some personal items that Grandmother’s people never burned. She goes in there sometimes and lights the candles and remembers; the rest of the time, she keeps herself locked up tight.
Eleven candles. Eleven girls — or boys, or something else; does it even matter any more? — the world will never see again. And she knows there were more before her time. Beatrice has the numbers; Maria doesn’t care to. Not yet.
Beatrice Quinn. The woman who marched into this place not five months ago and took it out from under Grandmother’s hands. The living, breathing proof that there’s life after the programme, that their whispered promises to each other don’t have to dissolve with the daylight, that one can be an unwilling woman and still walk the world with pride.
Maria will never forget the look on Grandmother’s face when Beatrice walked back in after a decade and a half; like the ghosts of all her victims had returned to her at once.
Beatrice reclines in another of the wobbly old dining chairs, her feet up on the table, and whether it’s a calculated insult to the studied and ultimately fake gentility of Dorley Hall’s above-ground operations under Dorothy Marsden or whether it’s just for comfort, Maria finds satisfaction in it anyway. Picture us, you old hag, putting our filthy hands all over your things, marking your precious antique furniture with our shoes.
They chased her out the day they took over, and while she’s been promised — against everyone’s will — continued use of her flat on the first floor, they have control of the locks now and they’ve shut her out of everything, even the dining hall and kitchen; she can cook her own damn food. She knows only what they wish her to know, and while Beatrice has said that this state of affairs probably can’t continue forever — the Smyth-Farrow estate has too much influence, and the man himself is too belligerent, too used to having his desires satisfied to remain forever quiescent — the old woman can’t, for now, force anyone’s hand but her own. Now that the Hall is under new management, Bea said, the estates of Smyth-Farrow and Lambert are in a state of cold war.
They just have to wait her out. Two years. They don’t even have to bring her in on anything until they start the programme up again, in whatever form it eventually takes.
Around the table: Maria, at its head; Sarah and Barbara, her best friends from under Grandmother, to her left and right; Natalie and Trish, fellow survivors; Beatrice and Ashley, representatives of the new controlling interest; and at the other end of the table, Teri. Maria doesn’t know much about Teri, save that she knows Bea and Ashley, and that she regards this place as one might a mass grave. And that, if Maria steps outside herself for a moment, is perhaps the most comprehensible attitude towards Dorley she’s yet encountered.
Teri’s yet to say much. She’s just been sitting at the table with her mug — which says Tranny Granny on the side — and subjecting each of the girls present to the odd searching look. She doesn’t approve of the plan, that much is clear, but beyond that her thoughts are a mystery.
“We’re not yet committed,” Beatrice is saying, “but in the new year we have to have our costing and staffing ready for review, so this is it: this is volunteer time.”
“I already said I’m in, Bea,” Ashley says. She’s been unusually intense recently, and Maria has a few reservations about her motivation for joining up, but she’s not short of ideas. She also insisted on the wood-effect laminate wallpaper for the basement residential corridor, which struck Maria as a strange choice the moment she saw it, but for now it covers up the stains and the dents and they’ve blown their budget on the other restorations, anyway.
“I’m… still uncomfortable,” Natalie says. Not a surprise: Nat, of all of them, had the most difficulty adapting and was the closest to being shipped out when Elle and Beatrice took over. What is a surprise is that she’s still here at all; enough of them walked out with Elle on that first day, never to come back, that it’s a wonder they have enough people for their little endeavour at all.
“I’m not going to say we don’t need you,” Beatrice says, “because we do. But you’re also under no obligation.”
“Say the word,” Teri says, breaking a long silence, “and you can come home with me. You won’t even have to go work for Ms Lambert. I have spare rooms and I’m a good cook. You don’t have to be involved with this… monstrousness.”
“Teri—” Ashley starts.
“Save it, Ash. I can’t believe you’re going along with all this.”
“After the year I’ve had? I’m almost offended you’re staying out of it.”
“It’s not right.” Teri taps her fingers on the table. “I know I’m not the only person who sees it.”
Ashley glares at her. “You don’t think most men would have their attitudes improved if they became women?”
“That’s a platitude, Ash, not a way of life. And women can be awful, too; it wasn’t just men who took Linda’s house from us, remember? I know you’ve had a hard time, but that’s no excuse for—”
“A hard time? A hard—! No. Okay. Whatever, Teri. If not for me, then think about them.” Ash gestures towards Maria; Maria wishes she wouldn’t. “Barb went out into the world for the first time and she got groped! And when she objected—”
“Ash,” Barbara says, speaking up for the first time. She’s hugging herself tight under the table.
“Sorry, Barb. The point is, Teri, there’s nothing that works against guys like that. Nothing except… what Elle proposed.”
“It’s madness, Ashley,” Teri says.
“You’re not going to report us, are you?” Barbara asks.
It’s enough for Teri to back down. “No,” she says after a while. “Not at all. I’m sorry, all of you; I shouldn’t have raised my voice.” She drinks for a moment, to punctuate, to create space. “I’ll never report you. I might disagree with… with what you’re planning, but I’d never throw any of you to the wolves like that.” She shakes her head. “Never. The same system that protects men like that would not be fair or kind to any of you.”
“It’s the condition, Teri,” Beatrice says, leaning on her wrist. She sounds tired. “We do this: monetary support for life. We don’t: someone else does it anyway, with methodology we don’t control. And we weren’t exactly flush with legal identities here, not until Elle Lambert came along and—” she waggles the fingers on the hand she’s resting on, “—waved her magic money wand. She says jump, we’re obligated to ask how high.”
“Sounds almost as bad as—”
“No,” Maria says, more sharply than she intended. “Don’t finish that sentence, Teri. You weren’t here.”
“Nothing can justify this.”
“You. Weren’t. Here. And neither was Beatrice, actually, not recently, but we’ve compared notes and let me tell you, whatever you heard about this place from her, we had it worse. And I have no family and no home and if some secretive aristocrat wants to pay me and put a roof over my head in exchange for running a rehabilitation programme and taking a few men who are genuinely dangerous off the streets, what am I going to say? Sorry, rich lady, you can keep your money, I’ll just go stay with my dead family?”
“You can stay with me.”
Maria thumps the table. “And who the fuck are you? Some random woman who thinks she knows best? The ‘tranny granny’? Do people even say that word any more?”
“And what would you know about that?”
“Be nice to them, Teri,” Ashley says. “Everything’s still fresh for them. You remember what that was like, right? They’re just like we used to be.”
“Are they?”
“Yes!”
Barbara’s been holding Maria’s hand, the way they used to, downstairs in the dark, and Maria draws strength and stability from the connection. “No,” she says. “We’re not like you, not really. Not all of us. I wouldn’t have chosen to be Maria. But she was… something like a pressure valve. An escape hatch. And she’s the only person I can be now.”
“There’s such a thing as testosterone, you know,” Teri says. “You can be a man again, and—”
“Stop. No. I know what’s possible. I know, biologically, that I could have back most of what I used to have. But I don’t want it. The man I used to be is dead, Teri. He died with my family. This—” she thumps the table again, “—is who I am now.”
“You’re serious? You’re really serious?”
“Completely. I didn’t fight to be Maria just to have you come along and offer to take her back like she’s a fucking jacket that doesn’t fit.”
“See?” Ashley says. “They are just like us.”
“I don’t understand how you’re all okay with this,” Teri says.
“The ones who weren’t are gone,” Sarah says, in her slow and deliberate way. “We’re not the success story of Dorley Hall, Teri; we’re the rejects. The ones they didn’t want. The defective products. They turned us into girls and we were the ones, for whatever reason, who said, ‘Fuck you, okay then,’ and did our best to be girls.”
“How is that not what they wanted?” Teri asks, and Sarah laughs.
“You’re a good person, Teri,” she says. “I hope you don’t leave us forever.”
“They wanted us to hate ourselves,” Maria explains. “We were supposed to grovel and beg for our old bodies back, we were supposed to look at ourselves and weep. We refused. We found a way to live with it. To embrace it.”
“And yet you still want to inflict this on other people?” Teri says.
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“It’s nuanced.”
“Look at it this way, Teri,” Ashley says. “Worst comes to the worst, we’re still getting rid of abusive men. It’s a win-win.”
“You’ll be making them less abusive by… forcibly turning them into women?”
“Yes!”
Trish, who’s been playing with a pencil the whole time, says quietly, “It works.”
“I’ll never believe that,” Teri says.
“They picked us up for nothing offences,” Trish continues, turning the pencil over and over in her hands. “Pickpocketing, shoplifting, getting in a fight at the wrong time. The offence didn’t matter. What mattered was that we went through the courts or the cops and we got on their radar. They sifted through the data. They found girls— boys like us. Minor crimes. Indicators of disadvantaged backgrounds. Not a one of us wasn’t poor. But I wasn’t quite like the others. I hurt people. Badly. And I…” She hiccups, and Maria notices for the first time that she’s crying, crying so cleanly it’s almost impossible to see in the low light. Natalie rubs her shoulder. “I was a big man,” Trish says, injecting so much venom into the words that she spits. “A big man in a little boy’s body. And I was running on automatic. I hurt people because that was what you did. And that nightmare woman Dorothy — fucking ‘Grandmother’ — may have mutilated me but I fucking— I—”
Natalie shushes her. “It’s okay. You don’t have to.”
Trish nods. Covers Natalie’s hand with her own. Looks back at Teri. “I’m better now. I’m different. I didn’t want this. But now that I have it? I’m never going back.”
“Well,” Teri says, and in that drawn-out syllable Maria can see someone gathering her thoughts, creating a space in which to do so. “I can definitely understand why someone would prefer being a woman.”
Trish shrugs. “Honestly? Woman or man feel about the same to me. But the obligations are different. The expectations. I’ve got… more room.”
“We’re not going to be like Dorothy,” Maria says. “We’re not hurting people for pleasure. We’ll be—” she taps her chin for a moment as she decides how to word it. “We’ll be creating a second chance for the kind of young men who need it, but who would refuse it if it were just offered to them.”
“It’s like a scholarship for bastards,” Ashley says unhelpfully.
“We’re in control. We even have a good idea of what to look for. There’s one guy I’ve had my eye on who I think would be perfect. He’s been menacing women outside a health clinic. Abortion protester. Very intense. Comes from some culty church up north. He’s young, like eighteen or nineteen; young enough for us to steer him in a new direction. If we pick him up, we wouldn’t just be saving the women he goes after; we could save him, too. If we leave him alone, in ten years we could be looking at a bloody nail bomber.”
“Except,” Teri says levelly, “by ‘pick him up’ you mean kidnap him, harm him permanently, and hope against hope that at the end of it you have a woman and not a basket case.”
“Give us credit,” Maria says. “We all lived it. We all saw who made it and who didn’t. And we had nothing to do down there but talk amongst ourselves. We’ve got a good idea of what it takes to be suitable.”
Teri nods, mostly to herself, and stands. Pushes her coffee mug towards the middle of the table. “I’m sorry, girls,” she says, “but I’ll have no part of it. I’ve said my piece, and now—”
“Were you serious?” It’s Natalie, half out of her chair, being pulled down by Trish but staring urgently at Teri. “Were you actually serious about letting us come with you?”
“Nat—” Trish says, standing with her.
Natalie hugs her. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I just can’t. I’ll visit. I will. But I can’t stay.”
“Don’t visit,” Trish whispers. “Don’t make yourself come back here. I’ll visit you. Every week, okay? I love you.”
“I love you more than anything.”
It takes a few minutes for Trish and Natalie to collect Nat’s meagre belongings from the room they’ve been sharing, and then they’re gone, Natalie and Teri. Neither of them looks back.
Trish shuffles closer to Sarah, who hooks an arm around her and draws her closer still, and Barbara and Maria continue to hold each other, and that’s it until Beatrice draws a slightly unsteady breath, and the meeting continues.
Against the wall, by the unlit fire, they’ve set up a small Christmas tree, with presents for each of them scattered underneath, and Maria finds herself watching the fairy lights draped through the branches flicker on and off, rather than meet anyone else’s eyes for the next little while.
2019 December 24
Tuesday
Aunt Bea intercepts them on their way down the stairs and for a moment Christine’s heart freezes. Is she not feminine enough? Did she do her makeup incorrectly? Is there something wrong with her dress? It takes her only a second to snap out of it, to remember how much of the ‘Aunt Bea’ persona is an act, intended to scare impressionable young men, and how really, if Christine was truly ready to graduate, she would have grown out of this reaction by now, and—
“Teenie,” Indira whispers, and squeezes her hand.
“Oh,” Christine says. “Sorry.”
Beatrice smiles softly. “There is no need to apologise. I simply wished to ask a favour of you both, but, first, I think I’m going to mandate that you, Christine, take a fortnight off in the new year. Paid, of course.”
“Um.”
“Decompress. Attend to your studies. Visit friends, and do so without the need urgently to run back to take care of some—” she curls her lip, “—picayune technical issue.”
“Are you sure?” Christine asks.
“We survived fifteen years without your expertise, Christine, dear; by the skin of our teeth at times, I must admit. For two weeks, we will be fine.” Bea must be able to see Christine’s doubt in her face, because she adds, “We’ll contact Elle’s people if we have any problems.”
“Okay, but don’t just contact her people, go straight to Ja—”
“Christine! We will be fine.”
A fine organisation wouldn’t have been so ramshackle as to allow a twenty-one-year-old idiot with a phone, a laptop and an anxiety disorder to walk through their locks as she pleased. Christine doesn’t say it, though. She just smiles and nods. Indira’s grip on her fingers loosens, and Christine realises that her sister’s standing subtly in front of her, having placed herself between Christine and Bea, and the swell of love she feels once again for Indira displaces all else.
“You had a favour to ask?” Indira prompts.
Beatrice blinks, interrupted in her quest to extract as much information as she can from Christine’s silence, and says, “Oh! Yes. Would you mind meeting Teri and Ashley? They’re just parking, out by the lake. I’d go but—” she smiles mischievously, seeming suddenly younger and more agile, like the Beatrice Christine’s been encountering more and more these last couple of months, “—I have a first impression to make.” She flicks at the lapel of her pea coat to reveal a surprising quantity of décolletage for one her age. Her dress, presumably, is under there somewhere.
“That depends,” Christine says, “on how slippery it is out there.” She leans on Indira and waggles one of her feet back and forth. “These are pretty high heels for me.”
“You’ll be fine,” Indira says.
And she’s right: bundled up in a long winter coat that reaches almost to her feet, Christine’s able to concentrate more on walking than on not freezing to death, and by the time they reach the car park by the lake she’s as comfortable in her heels as she would be in any other mildly awkward shoe. She wonders if that was the point, if this was another lesson in femininity she has to pass before Bea will let her graduate, if Indira received instructions to that effect earlier today, but dismisses the thought as mere speculation: there really is no way to know whether any given thing around here is part of a fiendishly thought-out and cunningly executed plan to make you into the girliest girl around, or a total coincidence.
Indira nudges her, and Christine looks up from contemplating her feet to see a chunky, old-looking Volvo pull into the car park. From the driver’s side climbs a bottle-blonde woman with soft features and pale skin. She waves at them and starts fussing with a wheelchair stored in the boot, while another woman, older, Black, equally arresting to look at, opens the passenger-side door and waits patiently as her seat whirrs slowly and steadily out until she’s perpendicular to the car, ready to transfer to her wheelchair.
Teri and Ashley. Indira gave her the very, very quick version on their way out here: Teri as in the legendary Teri and Linda, who took Beatrice in when she was living on the streets; Ashley as in Auntie Ashley, one of the first sponsors and instrumental to the early design of the rebooted programme. Neither have been involved in almost ten years and Teri, Indira said with a grin, officially disapproves.
Indira offers to help Teri into the wheelchair but she’s waved off. Ashley simply parks it next to the extended passenger seat and Teri, with a grunt of effort, quickly moves herself from one to the other.
“Don’t bury me yet, Indira,” Teri says, as she wheels closer.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Indira says. “Teri, Ashley, this is Christine. My sister.”
“Hello, Christine. Pretty as the rest of them, I see. Now, tell me, whatever it was you did to end up here, you’re not going to do it again, are you?”
“Um,” Christine says, feeling heat rush to her cheeks as she tries to decide how she’s supposed to respond to such a question. She doesn’t hear Ashley rebuke Teri, or whatever Indira says to her; it’s not that she’s insulted or embarrassed, more that she’s… irritated? Outraged? Dira would probably say that’s a good thing, that she’s moving on from the shame that’s characterised the last few years, but expressing it probably isn’t the best move here. Bea didn’t invite one of her adoptive mothers here for Christine to snipe at her, after all. She tries for a simple, emphatic, confident denial instead. “No, Ma’am. Wouldn’t even occur to me.”
“Polite little thing, aren’t you?” Teri says.
Christine can’t stop herself smiling. “It’s how my sister raised me,” she says, which prompts a throaty laugh from Teri. Without another word, the old woman starts down the path towards the Hall and looks back, expecting Christine to walk with her. Behind them, Ashley and Indira fall in step, carrying on a quiet conversation.
“I apologise for the question,” Teri says, nudging Christine in the hip with her elbow, “but someone has to be the conscience for this place, and since no-one else has ever stepped up, I have to do it. This whole enterprise needs an outside eye on it from time to time.”
“Actually, we have a few new consciences. You’ll get to meet them tonight; they’ll all be sitting together.”
“A few! Fascinating. Well, go on, then, Indira’s sister Christine; tell me about yourself…”
* * *
He doesn’t know what’s worse: the time before, when Jake was too close to him, when he shaved him and made him dress up, when he told him all the things that he, the soldier, the man with the gun and the taser and all the keys and the big fucking dick, could do to him if he so pleased; or tonight, when Trevor tried his hardest to do as Valérie suggested, and cooperated, suggesting that he administer his own hormone injection, and Jake had laughed and hit him.
It was so fucking desultory. Like his heart wasn’t in it. “You must think I’m stupid, love,” Jake had said, pushing him face-first into the couch cushions and roughly spiking his thigh with the needle. “I’m in control and I stay in control. That means I’m the one that handles the sharps, right? Don’t want you getting any ideas about attacking me, do I? Christ, whatever even gave you the idea I might say yes? This shit was covered in training, darling. Prisoner protocol. It’s fucking elementary. Maybe if you’d paid attention you wouldn’t be a bird.” And then he’d slapped Trevor’s arse, said, “All done,” and left immediately.
The old woman didn’t even stick around for long. Probably sensible, given her age and frailty, but he still feels uncomfortably abandoned. The entire encounter was so rote that for a while he thought Valérie’s predictions had come true, that he hadn’t broken quickly enough or in the right way and they’ve become bored of him already. Mutilated and left to rot.
Except that’s not it. On her way out the old woman told him to expect someone to come train him. Someone to whom he’d better give his respect. Someone who would have the power of life and death over him.
He’d almost asked if it was Val. Almost blown everything right there.
Blown what, Trevor? Her impossible dreams of escape?
Fuck.
Another soldier, the one Valérie said is called Callum, came back with the old woman a short while later, and Trevor was briefly frightened that the leering, unpleasant man was to be his new handler, but all he did was replace the smashed mirror. And then Dorothy informed him curtly that any further infractions would result in loss of privileges. Ordered him to look at himself. “Really get to know your new body, Trevor, my lad,” the old woman had said. “There’s no going back, and I think you know that, but you don’t know it yet.”
More or less what Valérie said, but with a self-satisfied sneer.
Double fucking fuck.
Not content with altering him, imprisoning him, injecting him with poison, now they want him to look at himself. And there’s a good fucking reason he hasn’t been doing that.
Trevor looks. And struggles to hold himself together.
* * *
Okay, so, everyone’s looking and a lot of people are talking, and by ‘a lot of people’ he means more people than he’s seen in one place since Maria got hurt, and the memory of that, the vivid sensory echo of her hitting the floor, makes him reach behind and take her hand again, even though the rest of him is locked in Steph’s embrace, because the last thing he needs right now when he’s under so many eyes is to relive that moment.
Maria’s hand in his; Steph’s arms around him. Anchors. Connections to the real and to the present and not to the thing who crawled into this place months ago and celebrated when his friend was injured.
Yeah. They’re all looking. All the girls and all the women and all the nonbinary people— Because, yeah, that’s what Maria said, that not every Dorley girl remains a girl, and he’s wondered a few times why they okayed her telling him that, why they wouldn’t think he would take any alternative path to the one laid out for him, and he’s come to the conclusions either that they have great faith in him to choose the path that best suits him, whatever happens (hah!), or that they know Stephanie will tell him everything anyway (more likely), or that Maria wasn’t necessarily supposed to tell him but did anyway because Dorley is disorganised as hell and/or because Maria does whatever the hell she wants (bingo).
Maria squeezes his hand.
They’re all looking and they know why he’s here, and if they don’t know exactly why then they can probably guess, they can read it in his guilty eyes and his fearful stance and the fact that he’s a man or something like it who came up from under the dining hall instead of through the fucking front door and that means he’s done something awful enough to warrant the risk of removing him from the world altogether, and they know that, and—
“Aaron,” Maria whispers. “Relax. Remember what I said.”
He nods, and as Steph releases him, he replays it: almost everyone here was once like him. It helps.
And then Steph kisses him right on the lips — someone at one of the tables yells something appreciative — and steps back to admire him again and he blushes under her inspection and on the tingle of her lips on his and he forgets momentarily about all the other girls, about any other girls.
He wishes he’d done more than just skim the material on voice training but it’s too late to feel guilty about that (again) so he experimentally pushes his tongue down and tries to lift the muscles in his throat, and when he says, “Hi, Stephanie,” it comes out sort of okay. He’s not sure what he’s going for, really, like, perhaps simply not sounding like that guy, like the guy who wanted to see Maria hurt. The guy all these graduates used to be just like.
They understand. They have to understand.
“Hi, Aaron,” Steph says, and darts forward for another kiss. Right on the lips again. It’s too quick — he wants to linger, wants her to pull him in, to force his body into shape with hers — but it’s enough for now. And everyone’s still watching, anyway; he’s pretty sure he can hear giggling.
“Um, Aaron?” Maria says, holding up their conjoined hands. “I need to go get changed. That means you have to let go of me.”
“Oh,” he says, still experimenting with his voice, “sorry.”
She wiggles her released fingers at him, kisses him on the temple, and practically skips off towards a pair of double doors on the other side of the room. Has he ever seen her like this? It makes her seem so young.
Everyone’s looking. But he’s riding it: if he thinks too hard about them then their collective gaze becomes like holding a microphone up to a speaker until it screams, but he has other things to concentrate on. It helps that some of them have turned away, returned to their own conversations, but it also helps that of the ones who are still looking, none of them seem unhappy to see him, an experience hitherto rare in his life.
Maria wants him here. Steph wants him here. And these other people seem nice, too. A greater contrast — between the people filling out the hall, resplendent in their dresses and other outfits and chatting happily with each other, and the sullen, grudgingly nonviolent Raph back in the basement — he can’t possibly imagine.
Hah; what would Raph say, if he could see all this? In the absence of Ollie and most especially in the absence of Will’s entire personality, Raph’s reverted to someone more like the man who first arrived in the basement, someone capable of acting like a relatively normal, if blokish, guy; although he remains someone who got his girlfriend pregnant, instructed her as to what she should do with the baby and then fucked off, and probably hit her, too, though there’s no more proof for that than what he did to the supply cabinet and one of the toilet doors, what he tried to do to Maria, and what every instinct screams when he walks into a room. What would that man say to someone in a tux with a sports bra underneath, so his nipples don’t chafe?
The silk shirt is nice, though. He asked Maria how she even found one, let alone the rest of the ensemble; all he knew was that she didn’t rent it.
“Some of the girls have boyfriends, Aaron,” she’d said.
“And they’ve somehow resisted the temptation to make them into girls?”
“You said it yourself: not all men are bad.”
And he’d had to point out that he’d specified only Keanu Reeves and the guy who saved a bunch of dogs from the big dog masher, and Maria had slapped him lightly on the arm and then pulled him into a hug so sharply it made his chest hurt a little. She’d whispered something to him he hadn’t been able to make out, and he didn’t ask what it had been. Preserving the moment seemed more important.
“You look great,” Steph says.
“You don’t think it’s too much? Or too little? I think Maria was a little disappointed that I didn’t ask her for, I don’t know, a full Christmas ball gown, but it’s like I told her, I don’t have the hips for it, not yet, and—”
“Aaron.”
“Um?”
“How do I look?”
Part of him wants to tease her, to extract from her the embarrassed squeals and frustrated affection he’s become so fond of, but they’re not in her room and there are people watching, so he gives it to her straight. “You look so fucking beautiful, Stephanie.” It bursts from him with such energy he mangles half the syllables, but he means it more than any thought he’s ever tried to express.
It doesn’t matter that what he said was half nonsense because she squeals and hugs him tight again, and they both have to pull back because both their chests hurt, and that’s funny, too.
One of the girls who came over with her, flanking her on her right, coughs politely, and he looks at her properly for the first time. She’s one of two: darker-skinned, probably South Asian, with large, expressive eyes, an amused smile and a sweet little bump in her nose; she stands with a blonde, white, thin-as-hell woman, who’s drinking in the scene in front of her with undisguised delight, and who looks quite a lot like Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All, which he got briefly addicted to in reruns while avoiding his primary school homework.
“Hi,” the South Asian one says, “you must be Aaron.”
He shrugs. Yeah, he must be.
Steph takes charge, moving around to stand next to him and placing a possessive arm on his shoulders. “That’s Shahida,” she says, “and that’s Melissa. Yes. My Melissa.”
Steph’s Melissa beams at them both, and he’s briefly overwhelmed, because that’s Melissa, the one Steph’s been talking about all this time, and the implications are just too damn much. A piece of Stephanie’s life, a piece of her soul, back in her life to stay.
There’s so much he wants to say to her! Thank you for caring for Steph when she was young. Thank you for being her big sister. Thank you for putting her on the path that led her here, to the place that saved her, that allowed her to in turn save him. Thank you for coming back for her. Thank you for loving her so fiercely that you would risk everything for her.
There’s so much he wants to ask her! What was Steph like when she was a kid? Was she just as quietly, insistently sweet? Did she have those moments of sudden confidence yet, those times when she’ll just lash out with her opinions or the things she wants to make happen or (one time) with her fist, or are they new? What was it like to just hang out with her in her childhood room? Are there any embarrassing photos?
“H— Hi,” he says, and fumbles it, stuttering slightly.
Shahida giggles. “You’re cute,” she says.
“I am?”
“Yes,” Steph whispers, and he fucking loves it when she does that, because she has to lean down a little to make herself heard, and the angle of her breath means he feels the heat of her all down the side of his neck. Fucking goosebumps.
“Well,” Melissa says, pointing back and forth at herself and Shahida, “we need to go get changed, but we’re at your table, so we’ll see you in, what, forty-five minutes?”
“Go,” Pippa says, waving a hand. “We’ll get them seated. And we’ll try and boost Aaron back up to polysyllables, too.”
“He’s normally much more talkative,” Steph says.
“I’m sure,” Shahida says, laughing again.
* * *
God, he’s doing so well.
Steph doesn’t want to let go of him, though, because it’s easy to believe that the reason he hasn’t turned tail and fled back downstairs under the pressure of so many eyes on him is he’d have to throw her off to do so. He’s not even shaking, discounting the brief shiver when she whispered in his ear again.
It’s good to see him in something other than the basic joggers, t-shirts and hoodies they pile up in his wardrobe downstairs, and as she looks down at him again, in his tux, with his hair slicked back and his hands nervously clenching and unclenching she feels once again the shock that Aaron Holt is, inexplicably, the one for her.
She’s never given much thought as to what kinds of person she’s attracted to. The gender question dominated her life for so long that all other aspects of her personality were of secondary importance, and while she doesn’t think she’s ever been attracted to a man, she’s never ruled it out. Although it would be difficult, even now, to describe Aaron as a man in the same way that, say, Will was a man when he arrived at Dorley. Honestly, Aaron’s not the man he used to be, either, and not just because he’s started to reject the identity; his face and his body have started softening, the way Steph’s have, and she’s spent the last five minutes debating with herself whether she should tell him that the tux, on him, is less James Bond and more…
Well. Less James Bond, at any rate.
He looks good, though. And she doesn’t think he looks good in a way that would excite, for example, most people who are attracted to men. And she wonders if he’s seen that for himself, if that’s part of the reason for his nerves.
She squeezes him more tightly around the shoulder, and he looks up at her, smiles for her.
He’s doing so well.
She’s a little surprised that she is, as well. Less than three months ago she would have been making a beeline for the alcohol or whatever else she could get her hands on to help her cope with the fear and the disgust that always crept across her skin when she became the centre of attention, but today it’s different. Maybe it’s that the ponytail grazing the back of her neck is a sufficiently constant reminder that she doesn’t look the way she always assumes she does. Maybe it’s because she’s transitioning, she’s on her path, and only time separates her from the person she wants to be. Maybe it’s just that she’s become used to spending time with beautiful people.
It also helps that every third person she meets tells her she looks lovely. It’s good for the soul.
She does wonder if they should move on from their awkward little huddle by the basement door, though. Paige and Pippa are shifting on their heels and Steph’s definitely starting to feel a little uncomfortable.
And then, sweeping in through the main doors from the kitchen, is Beatrice as she’s never seen her before. That dress!
Steph’s dress is lovely and she adores it, but she knows that’s at least partly because it compensates for her still-developing figure. Beatrice, it turns out, has no such issue, and her dress practically writhes across her body, hugging shapely hips and toned thighs, plunging to indecency across the bust, and training out slightly around her ankles, not quite trailing on the floor but instead exposing jewelled sandals with straps that entwine her calves. The dress is a mid-grey, and it shines in the low light, practically glitters, and where it is belted tight around her waist the material ruches and shimmers. Around one wrist she wears a simple silver bracelet, which matches her necklace and earrings, and her hair has been swept back from her face, the better to display her understated, elegant makeup.
She looks like she should be attending the Oscars. Or declaring war on the world from inside her volcano lair.
Next to Steph, Aaron whispers, “Holy fucking shit.”
The noise level in the dining hall drops almost to nothing. Conversations stop and people nudge each other and point and stare, and Beatrice drinks in the attention, commands the room with an easy smile, and the sound of her heels fills the room as she crosses the floor. Pippa and Paige stand aside as she approaches and she stops a metre or so away from Steph and Aaron, hand on her hip, fingers tapping on her clutch.
“Good afternoon, Stephanie,” she says. “You look magnificent.”
“Um, hi, Beatrice,” Steph says. “Thank you.”
“And Aaron! I’m so pleased you felt able to join us. I understand you asked my Maria specifically?”
Aaron doesn’t reply until Steph squeezes his shoulder again, at which point he says, “Oh, um, yes, I wanted to see how the other half lived, you know? Or the same half. The half I’m going to be. I think. That is, if it’s okay by you. I’m, shit— God! Sorry. Swearing. Swearing in front of, um…”
Beatrice favours him with an amused smile and beckons him forward. Steph releases him, rocking a little on her heels as she regains her balance, and he steps closer, looking up at her.
“How are you finding your accommodations?” Beatrice asks.
“My— my accommodations? Oh. The basement.” Aaron links his hands behind his back. Steph wants to reach out and take them but doesn’t. Beatrice is being theatrical, and Steph’s certain she doesn’t want to interrupt her performance. At least, not yet. “They’re fine,” Aaron continues, hesitant but growing in confidence. “It’s not where I expected to be spending the academic year, but, it’s, uh… It’s fine.”
“I’m pleased. Let me look at you, darling.” And she reaches out with a finger and takes Aaron by the chin, directs him to look up, left and right, examines him as one might a potentially impressive puppy at a dog show. “You’re coming along nicely.”
“Beatrice,” Steph says, surprising herself, all reticence fleeing at the sight of Beatrice’s hand on Aaron. “Don’t.”
Beatrice laughs. “Ah. Your rebellious streak.”
“I’m not rebelling, I’m just…” Steph steps forward, takes Aaron by both shoulders. “Would you please let go of him?”
Beatrice does not let go. She holds him there, as if with finger and thumb around his chin she can exert more pressure, more control, than Steph can with both hands. “Answer me this, Stephanie,” Beatrice says. “Do you trust him?”
Without hesitation, Steph says, “Yes.”
“Do you trust me with him?”
“I trust Maria with him.”
Beatrice nods, the slightest and briefest inclination of her neck. She looks Aaron in the eyes for the first time. “And you, Aaron, do you understand what is expected of you?”
“Yes,” he says. Sharp, quick. Confident.
“And, finally, Aaron — and do take your time with this question; I don’t necessarily require your answer tonight — do you consent to it?”
“Yes.” Exactly as quick as before.
A broad smile. She’s pushing him. “All of it?”
He pushes back. “Yes.”
She releases him. Aaron stumbles and Steph catches him, embraces him protectively. Takes possession of him back from Beatrice.
“I’m impressed, Aaron,” Beatrice says. “I can’t recall the last individual under our care who responded so positively.”
“I had incentive,” Aaron says.
“Indeed. And, Stephanie, while I must commend your… passion, I suggest you learn to keep your counsel at moments such as these.”
Steph presses herself against Aaron, flexes her fingers in his hand. “I remember asking you, once,” she says, “if the intent of this place is to teach us to submit without complaint when we are touched without permission. You said that it is not. Did that change?”
“No, Stephanie.”
“Then you will ask before you touch him again.”
“Steph, it’s okay,” Aaron says.
“It’s quite all right, Aaron, dear,” Beatrice says. “Your little firecracker has, once again, made a good point. I promise to ask, Stephanie.”
“Good,” Steph says. “Thank you.”
“Aaron, Stephanie,” Beatrice says, curtseying, “have a wonderful meal.”
* * *
In addition to the pronoun pins Christine’s seen a few people wearing, someone took the time to prepare personalised place cards for each of the tables, complete with pronouns, and as Christine smooths her layered skirts to sit she notices with interest that while Steph’s card displays both her full name and her pronouns, Aaron’s simply says, ‘Aaron’.
Interesting.
She looks for him, if only to find out what he’s wearing to dinner, and is amused to find that he chose to wear a tux, in the slightly less dapper ‘tie’ variant, but before she can get up to go talk to him, Bea enters from the kitchen, looking even more stunning than she did on her birthday, and strides directly towards him.
Oh. Wow. Time for an inspection, is it?
She’d almost forgotten what the regular check-ins with Aunt Bea were like, back when she was obliged to suffer them weekly (for most of her second year) and monthly (for a total of four times, after which her soft release from the programme, still ongoing, began), back when the woman she’s still only just starting to understand as a complex and, underneath it all, rather sad woman was still the terrifying Aunt Bea, custodian of Dorley Hall, ultimate architect of Christine’s womanhood and final judge of same, with the power to have her thrown back in the cells or out on the streets or even to wash her out, and it doesn’t matter how toothless those threats were ultimately proven to be, Christine can feel her spine straightening and goosebumps blooming on her forearms as she watches Beatrice crook a finger under Aaron’s chin and twist him this way and that.
Aaron’s got all that bullshit to come.
And then Christine snorts, and contorts her stomach to hold back the laughter, because suddenly Steph’s intervening on his behalf. Maybe Aaron’s not going to have to deal with all that; maybe it’ll be different for him. Dorley’s changing all the time, and it feels like it’s changing faster than ever lately. The third year, for example, used to be far more rigidly structured, with greater requirements and higher levels of discipline, and most of that has fallen away, to the point that Christine’s intake all have about as much freedom as they could wish for. And that’s without taking Vicky’s two-year completion record into account.
She’d always expected Dorley and the programme to undergo a wrenching transformation at some point in the future, some calamity wherein everything catches up with it, some vital element is compromised, or some girl refuses explosively to cooperate and the Sisters unite behind her, but perhaps it’ll go on the way it always has: changing bit by bit until it is, one day, unrecognisable.
Christine briefly locks eyes with Dira, who split off from her with a kiss and a promise that she looks — yes, Christine, please stop doubting yourself — absolutely beautiful to go join Charlie and Nadine at the second years’ table; Indira grins, white teeth bright behind her dark lipstick, and rolls her eyes. Business as usual: Aunt Bea’s scaring the newbies again.
Aaron’s clearly shaken by the experience, because after Beatrice takes her leave he leans into Steph’s embrace, almost overbalancing them both, and then the two of them allow Paige and Pippa to guide them to the table.
Theirs is one of the larger tables in the room, to accommodate a higher than average number of people who would throw a sulk if they didn’t get to sit together for Christmas Eve dinner, and places have been set for Christine and Paige, Pippa, Steph and Aaron, Vicky and Lorna, and Melissa and Shahida. If Abby had stuck around and Indira had decided to be stubborn, they might have had to roll out some of the plastic garden furniture from the storerooms.
Abby…
Christine frowns and checks her phone again. No reply to her message. Christine doesn’t have to ask where she is — where else would she be but with her family — but she wants to know if her friend is ever coming back. Melissa’s return, and her reunion with Shahida, did something to Christine’s Sister, and she doesn’t know exactly what.
“Hey, Christine,” Steph says, and Christine clears her head. Abby can wait. She’s with family; so should Christine be. She stands and starts pulling out chairs, pausing to air-kiss Steph and, after an embarrassed pause, Aaron. And then Paige is giggling and pressing her back down into her seat and nuzzling against her cheek and Christine’s distracted.
When the two of them come up for air, the others are all seated, Aaron’s addressing a glass of wine and Steph’s leaning on both hands, watching her and Paige kiss, grinning like she’s won the lottery.
“You two are adorable,” she says.
“Quiet,” Christine says. Her follow-up, which would have been significantly more cutting, is muffled by Paige, and even Aaron laughs at her then. Between kisses she manages to say, “Sit, Paige.”
She plants a final kiss on Paige’s pout, and exaggeratedly turns to Steph, Aaron and Pippa.
“She’s right,” Aaron says. He sounds a little subdued. “You’re both… cute.”
“He’s covering,” Steph says, and leans over to kiss him on the cheek. “He’s scandalised.”
“It’s true. Two women? Going at it? Gross. Never imagined that, ever. Never had dreams about that, ever. Never—”
“Aaron,” Paige says, “you can stop after the first thing.”
“How little you know him,” Pippa mutters.
Steph kisses him again. “Is this all of us, then?” she asks, sitting back down in her chair and gesturing at the empty seats.
“Vicky and Lorna, last seen doing each other’s hair,” Paige says, pointing at the appropriate place cards, “and Melissa and Shahida.”
“They just went upstairs to get changed,” Aaron says. “Melissa… She seems nice.”
Steph laughs. “You said two words to her.”
“It was just…” He waves his hands vaguely. “She was so… Fuck, I don’t know, Steph; I’m just glad she’s here. I’m happy you get your big sister back.”
Steph scoots her chair closer to Aaron and hugs him gently. She whispers something to him, something Christine can’t make out, and he smiles and nods and they kiss again.
It’s good that their relationship going so public hasn’t inhibited them. She and Paige’s early fumbles, the first time they got together, were something it took Christine a good few weeks to become comfortable talking about much even with Paige; but, again, things have changed. In two short years, things have changed so much.
There’s a tap of heels on hardwood: Indira coming back over, smiling at Aaron who, to give him credit — Christine’s heard a lot about Indira’s brief period as Maria’s replacement — doesn’t flinch when he realises it’s her.
“Hi, Aaron,” Indira says, leaning on the back of an empty chair. “So, you survived your first encounter with Aunt Bea! How are you feeling?”
Aaron swallows, but when he talks, he sounds the same as always. “Better than Declan.”
“Hah! Yes. Considerably so, I imagine.”
“She’s not so scary. I only peed a little.”
“Did she have to do that to him?” Steph asks. “Get all… touchy?”
Indira shrugs. “It’s what she does. You might not agree with her methods, but with them she’s raised a generation of girls to womanhood.”
“They started as boys, though.”
“Details!”
“Sorry you have to babysit the second years, Dira,” Christine interjects. Indira’s given Bella the evening off so she can spend Christmas Eve at Rabia’s table.
“I don’t mind. At least I can drink them under the table. Well—” Dira leans over, beckons for Christine to rise with her, and kisses her on the forehead, “—I’d better get back to my table. See you after dessert.” She halts a few steps away from them. “I’m proud of you, Aaron,” she adds, turning around to look directly at him. “I expect you’ll hear a lot of that tonight. Don’t let repetition reduce the impact: we’re all proud of you. Maria most of all, with the possible exception of Stephanie here.”
“Thanks,” Aaron says, with excessive politeness. “And, um, thank you, Indira. For looking after me after Maria was hurt. I know it took a load off her mind to know you were helping out.”
Indira blows him a kiss. “It’s what I do, sweetie.”
* * *
It’s quickly become routine to observe with delight that Aaron’s doing okay, but he is. He’s talking with the girls at the table with growing confidence and, sure, he’s asking questions more than answering them, and thus not spending a lot of time actually talking, but when Steph stops to think about it, it makes sense. He’s been under constant surveillance since he arrived here and had daily reports filed on his progress; there can be little anyone at the table doesn’t know about him. Little they’d feel comfortable asking in polite company, anyway. But, to him, everything up here is new. He’s met Christine and Paige before, sure, but only briefly, and Lorna, who recently emerged from the stairwell with Vicky in a pair of predictably lovely dresses, fascinates him.
“So you found out about this place and, what, decided not to burn it to the ground?”
“Oh, I wanted to,” Lorna says, swilling her wine around and sniffing it. “But when the woman you love—” she nods at Vicky with a smile, “—owes her life to the abattoir, it takes all the fun out of ripping down the door and setting all the pigs free. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I am a pig.”
Steph’s chair still abuts Aaron’s, and she plans to keep it that way until the food arrives, because then she gets to hug him. She squeezes his shoulder and says, “You were a pig.”
Aaron nods at Lorna. “Correction: I haven’t been a pig for, oh—” he pretends to look at a watch, “—several minutes.”
He can’t escape her kiss, and Lorna giggles at them. “This place keeps surprising me,” she says. “First it was Christine. She told me everything, starting with the fact that she, herself, is a fine product of the nightmare factory. She told me about all this horrific shit that was done to her — without her permission — over a cup of tea in a bloody dorm kitchen. Then my girlfriend turns out to be one, and she tells me that without the literal mutilation she might never have discovered who she really is. And then I meet the second years, for whom all of it should still be really fresh, but they’re also having a wonderful fucking time, so they’re no good.” She points at Aaron. “Finally I turn to you, someone who’s been here mere months, and you’re… here. In a nice suit with a glass of wine. Chatting happily with the women who kidnapped you, despite them being the women who kidnapped you.”
“Actually,” Aaron says, “the woman who kidnapped me is— Shit, is Maria still getting changed?”
“I think so,” Paige says.
“Damn. I kind of wanted to point to her, you know, to be precise?”
“I know who Maria is.”
“I do plan to chat with her again when she gets back down, if that helps.”
“One person,” Lorna says, leaning on her wrist. “I just want to meet one fucking person who acts normally around here.”
“What is normal?” Steph asks, and when the whole table looks at her she releases Aaron to spread her arms wide. “Genuinely asking! I try not to make as many assumptions as I used to. I’m not Dorley’s usual clientèle. Everyone keeps telling me that.”
“’Normal’ would be someone who’s screaming and yelling and trying to escape and generally acting like, fuck, I don’t know, like they’ve been tied to the railway tracks and there’s a big train labelled like a political cartoon with feminisation coming right at them.”
“You should have met me a month ago,” Aaron says.
“You’re not even a little conflicted about all this?”
“Oh, I’m conflicted. Inside me there’s about nine million wolves and they all have contradictory things to say, but almost none of them think Maria doesn’t, you know, have kind of a fucking point. About me, specifically, but also about basically everyone else down there.”
“Everyone gets pilled eventually, Lorna,” Vicky says. “Even you.”
“I know,” Lorna says, leaning her head on Vicky’s shoulder. “I hate it.”
“You could come down and meet Ollie,” Steph says. “He’s very vocal about how much he hates it here.”
Aaron nods. “That is a man who is cruisin’ for a castratin’.”
“Aaron, how are you, of all people, so casual about this?” Lorna asks. “Her—” she points at Steph, “—I can understand, but you…”
“Disclosure was, what, almost a month ago? I’ve had that long to get used to the idea that someday pretty soon I’ll be taking my trip to the vet to get fixed. And you can’t spend a whole month screaming, or you’d lose your voice.”
“It’s still a bit of an unpleasant day, though,” Pippa says.
“I plan to enjoy it happening to Ollie,” Aaron says. “Having to undergo the procedure myself will merely be the opportunity cost. I’ll do anything for a laugh.”
“Christ,” Lorna mutters.
“I don’t know how Harmony’s going to deal with Ollie, to be honest,” Steph says. “He got zapped again today, and chucked back in the cells. And Beatrice told him off over the intercom. At least Raph’s finally leaving his please-tase-me phase.”
“That’s optimistic,” Aaron says. “Fairly sure his oh-so-reasonable act is fake as shit.”
Steph kisses him. “I choose to be hopeful.”
“Didn’t you yell at him a few hours ago?”
“Mainly at Ollie.”
“Right.”
Lorna’s still leaning on Vicky, and Steph mirrors her, nestling her head in the crook of Aaron’s shoulder and feeling him press back on her, almost unable to believe what her life has become. She’s transitioning, at last, and she’s beginning to see the effects, at last, and she’s been put in nice clothes and had her face and hair done up and she’s with Aaron and her Sisters, so why wouldn’t she feel good? The day could last forever and not be long enough.
The only people missing are Melissa and Shahida, and they’ll be back down soon.
Aaron and Lorna talk for a while longer, and while Christine, Paige and Pippa mostly listen in and provide comments, Steph prefers simply to enjoy herself. And to tug on the skirt of her dress, which is still a novel enough sensation that it serves as yet another reminder of how much her life has changed since she followed the breadcrumbs Melissa inadvertently left her, and found the Sisters.
“Hey, kiddos,” someone says, and Steph realises she closed her eyes at some point; almost too relaxed. Opening them finds Donna and Jodie, dolled up in emerald and in black and red respectively, standing at the empty end of the table. Not people Steph knows especially well. “Someone has something to say.”
Donna elbows Jodie, who laughs nervously and then leans forward on the table, palms down, facing Lorna. “So,” Jodie says, “I was talking with Donna, and I know you heard the genesis of the conversation but we really got together and brainstormed and it was hard, Lorna, because you did so much for me, you helped me make maybe the most important decision of my life, and—”
“Wait,” Lorna says, “slow down. Is this about your new history thingy?”
“My NPH, yes, and whether to be trans or cis.”
“That’s the most important decision of your life? Not whether to be a girl at all?”
Donna snort-laughs, and Jodie says, “Oh, no, that was barely even a decision, and it happened so gradually that by the time I realised it was something I could make a viable decision about, I’d already made up my mind! Like, I was just sitting there, towards the end of the first year, and they’d done the big snip and they were talking to us about face surgery and, you know, whether we wanted it, whether we’d consent to it — because you don’t want to give that surgery to someone who doesn’t, or they might not do the recovery properly!” Donna looks a little uncomfortable at this, and Steph would put money on Beatrice’s Dorley not always having been so generous regarding consent for FFS. “So, okay, yeah, I was sitting there in my room, and we had it looking nice at that point, we had some posters up and things, and Donna came in and she asked me if I was okay, and she used to do that every day, just taking care of me and stuff, and I looked at her and I said, ‘Yes,’ and that’s when I started to know. I felt pretty and I felt happy and I wanted out of that bloody basement, for sure—” she giggles, “—but I didn’t want to go back, only forward, and she knew it, too, because that same day she took me upstairs and showed me my new room, and I threw open the windows and looked out on my new view and breathed in fresh air and… and I named myself. Right there and then. In my head. Not out loud. That took another couple of weeks, I think?”
Jodie turns to Donna for confirmation, and Donna says, “Three. You were making breakfast with Paige, and—”
“Oh,” Paige says, “I remember this. She was scrambling eggs for both of us. She put the plates out on the table and asked if I wanted pepper and said, ‘I’m doing soy bacon. Call me Jodie.’ Then she did the bacon. I wasn’t a fan.”
“It was kind of stiff,” Jodie says. “I’ve found a better brand since. So, yes, Lorna, that was the easy part. It was natural and simple, like opening a window and looking at the blue sky for the first time and knowing it’s a girl’s skin the sun’s shining on and a girl’s hair the wind’s blowing about. You helped me with the difficult thing, the thing I had a real and practical choice about, and I haven’t had a moment’s doubt since, and I’m so happy, and Donna and I, well, we wanted to get you a present.”
Donna one-handedly hugs Jodie. “But what do you get the girl who has everything?” she says. “Or, at least, the girl who will have everything, probably by the end of next year. We talked about it for a long time and, I have to confess—”
“We asked some of your friends!” Jodie blurts out. “Sorry! Not Victoria — we didn’t want to hand her any more secrets to keep — but some of your other friends, and they were so helpful, and I hope, I really hope you’ll like it.”
Donna, who’s had one hand behind her back this whole time, reveals a gift-wrapped present, which she passes to Lorna. Once the paper’s off, Lorna holds a green DVD box, which confuses the hell out of Steph until Lorna says, “Holy shit!” and turns it round for the rest of the table to see.
“You like it?” Jodie asks.
“Holy shit! Jodie, Donna, how the fuck did you get a signed launch copy of Fallout: New Vegas?”
Donna smirks. “I know a girl who used to be a guy who knows another girl who, uh, didn’t.”
“Wow…”
Their end of the table dissolves into hugs and cheek kisses at that point, and Pippa snaps a few photos of the four of them — Lorna, Vicky, Jodie and Donna — posing with the DVD box. Jodie and Donna return eventually to their table, pausing to greet Melissa and Shahida, who appear in the stairwell at exactly the right time.
Steph gets a good look as they walk over, and decides that between the two of them they could probably give Beatrice a run for her money in the glamour department. They both wear flower-print dresses, in different shapes to best flatter their respective figures. Melissa’s hangs from the shoulder and gathers at her waist, rounding out her skinny body and adding more shape to a bust that, Melissa’s privately told Steph, ‘could be bigger’. She wears soft white flowers in her hair and white low-heeled sandals. Shahida wears a deep red dress printed with white-petalled flowers. It leaves her shoulders bare, cinches at the waist, and flowers out from the hips; Steph’s certain that if Shahida were to spin, the skirt would billow out around her. In her hair she wears flowers that are, Steph suddenly realises, the same colour as the flowers on Melissa’s dress.
They match.
Are they making a statement of some kind? Are they together? Or is this just coordination for fun?
Someone on the other side of the room whistles, and Shahida and Melissa curtsey together before sitting down in the two remaining seats, giggling conspiratorially the whole time.
Steph wants desperately to tell them how amazing they look, and to ask if there’s, you know, any symbolism to the matching dresses, but Beatrice, at the centre table, taps a spoon on her wine glass and silences the room.
“Ladies and other friends,” she says, as the last of the hubbub quiets, “welcome home. Some of you have come far—” someone cheers, “—others have merely come downstairs. Two of you—” she raises her glass to Steph and Aaron, “—have come upstairs, which is quite without precedent. The vast majority of you came into yourselves here, within these walls. Some, however—” she places a hand on the shoulder of the woman sitting next to her in a wheelchair, who laughs and bats her hand away, “—did not require our assistance. And while most of you are women—” Shahida, lost in the moment, wolf whistles loudly, and is frantically hushed by a grinning Melissa, “—many of you are not.” She raises her glass again. “But there is one thing we all share. We are a family, bound not by blood but by choice, by obligation, by bonds wrought of love. And when you strip away all the… Christian paraphernalia, that is the real reason to come together at the end of the year, when the days are cold and the nights are long.” She drinks deeply from her glass, regards it for a moment, and frowns, as if about to say something else. Then, appearing to reconsider, she says, “You are my family, and I love you all,” and takes the hand of the older woman, accepting her help to return to her seat.
“That was more emotional than I expected,” Pippa says quietly.
Christine shrugs. “She’s had a rough year.”
“True.”
Someone puts some quiet music on — not, thankfully, anything too Christmassy — and the second years wheel carts out to each table, each laden with the dinner options everyone requested, set out on heated trays.
Faye, when she delivers to their table, winks at Steph.
* * *
* * *
Ash looks around at their table, which has fewer familiar faces than ever. “No Maria this year?”
One of the younger girls points to the table directly behind her, at which Maria and the rest of the first-year sponsors are eating. “She’s dating now, Auntie Ashley. She wanted to sit with her girlfriend. Who,” she adds with a smirk, “I think you know.”
Ash looks through the press of people at their table in time to see Maria place a hand on Edith’s forearm, apparently in response to something she said, and can’t help but smile. About time that girl found someone! And Edith was always so kind, so polite, after her initial struggles. A good choice.
The girl who spoke is familiar to her, but a stranger nonetheless, and she’s struggling to remember where she knows her from. “I’m so sorry,” she says, drawing on her years of association with Bea and the habits and mannerisms they both picked up from the aristocrat who provides their funding, overriding her natural accent in an attempt to sound properly contrite, “I can’t quite place you.”
The girl laughs. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “And you don’t need to be ‘on duty’ with me. I came here the year before you left.”
Images return to her: a philanderer, quite the sex pest for one so young, and a bout of inebriated rage which drew the attention of the Hall; a combative boy, aggressive even after the orchiectomy; a relieved and rather cheeky girl, sunbathing on the roof of the Hall, flirting nonstop with anyone who came by. “Jane!” she says, remembering. “Nat’s girl.”
“Bingo,” Jane says with a smirk, punctuating the word in the air with her fork like she’s bursting a balloon.
“Apologies,” Ash says, tapping her forehead. “Getting old. Names are harder to find than they used to be.”
“Shush, Ashley,” Bea says, interrupting her conversation with Teri to scold her. “If you’re old then so am I, and I’m very much not old.”
“Quite right,” Teri says, from Bea’s other side. “Now, as I was saying…”
Jane grins at Ash. “Be told,” she says.
Ash play-pouts. “Fine. I accept your premise that I am crammed top-to-toe with youthful vigour. So…” She spears a roast potato and readies it. “You’re a sponsor now?”
“I am. I’m with Maria’s lot, actually, so normally I’d be sitting with her, but I’m getting my face time in with the boss instead because I’m due to take over in the security room in a bit. No dessert for me.”
The girl— Ash covers her grimace by over-chewing her roast potato; she can’t keep thinking of her that way! It’s infantilising; the woman’s got to be in her thirties. The woman, Jane, is frowning a little now, her bonhomie revealed at least partly as a front, and years of abandoned sponsoring instincts return to Ash in a flash. She wants to tuck Jane’s pretty hair behind her ears; she wants to make sure she gets enough to eat; she wants to reassure her that she’ll always be beautiful, that she has all the potential in the world, that she doesn’t need to be a man to succeed. Nor does she need to find one.
She settles for being intrusive. “Darling,” she says, “are you okay?”
Jane nods, and finishes her slice of turkey before answering. “I am. Just… I’ve been thinking of making this my last intake. I feel like I’ve been doing this forever.”
“How many have you…?”
“Raph will be my third.” She starts vigorously cutting up the rest of her turkey. “And he’s fine. He’s fine. He’s so much like the others, so I know he’ll be fine.” She points down with her knife and taps at a handful of different points on her plate. “He’s hit every mark I’ve expected of him so far, with the exception of the attack on Maria.”
“I heard about that,” Ash says, nodding to keep up Jane’s momentum. She doesn’t need to say she’s glad Maria’s okay; it’s obvious, and Maria herself is a perfect picture of health. Jane deserves all her attention. This feels important, like this is the first time the girl’s expressed these thoughts out loud.
Jane parks her cutlery. “But I went to his funeral, Auntie Ashley. I went to another fucking funeral. And I can’t do it again. I can’t see another weeping mum and know I did that. So he’s it. He’s my last. I’m helping Raph and then I’m done. Out. Gone. Which—” and the girl chews on her lip for a second, “—fucking sucks because then Maria and everyone will be short-handed.”
Ash lets out a few of those sponsoring instincts. Reaches across the table for Jane’s fidgeting hand. “Don’t worry about that,” she says, pouring love and reassurance into her voice. “Focus on him; focus on yourself. Let Bea worry about staff. She said there might be some graduates interested in taking a spell at sponsoring and, well, even if that falls through, they can always do smaller intakes for a while.”
Jane writhes, but Ash keeps hold of her hand. “I hate that. I hate the idea that we might not pick up some guy who’s hurting people, some guy who could be saved, because I’m… fucking flaking out.”
“Don’t,” Ash says sharply. “What did Elle call this? Triage on the world. We’re performing triage on the world, Jane, and that takes its toll on anyone.” She shakes her head, half playing the role of consoling sponsor, half in genuine sorrow. “Lord knows it did on me.”
There’s a silence between them for a moment. Ash is aware of Bea’s eye on them, even as she carries on talking with Teri and some of the others at their table.
“Can I ask…?” Jane begins hesitantly.
“Ask anything, dear.”
“Why did you leave?”
Ash allows a rueful smile onto her face. “Because I wasn’t angry any more. And without the anger it was… It was too hard.”
It’s been a long time since she told her story to anyone; but then, it’s been several years since she came back to Dorley Hall, and every time she returns it’s harder to leave again, to walk away from the family here, the bonds of mutual trust. But Teri insisted on one last visit, and she doesn’t have many years left, so they came back together, mother and daughter. Teri said she’s got to reassure herself that things are still being run as humanely as they can be, and if Ash is honest with herself, so does she.
She starts from the beginning, and Jane listens attentively to the story of a trans woman who had everything going for her, who had a plan, who had a career, who had a life. Even children hadn’t seemed impossible. And when Ash gets to the part about the man who betrayed her, who assaulted her, who outed her, who robbed her of opportunity and companionship without so much as an apology, who acted as if he were doing the world a favour by hurting her, who left her without a home and without prospects, undefended by anyone who might, had she not been trans, have taken her side, Jane’s rage is satisfying, and her clenched fist under Ash’s hand is comforting.
Dorley Hall was here when she needed it. It gave her direction again, it gave her hope again, and it gave her a constructive outlet for the feelings that might otherwise have consumed her.
But nothing lasts forever.
* * *
She’s got the calorie breakdown on her phone and she’s checking everything on the plate in front of her, the plate Shy loaded up with no apparent awareness of what she was doing. Melissa doesn’t actually believe that for a second; this is the woman who bugged Rachel until she practically threw sandwiches at her at school, and she will have overloaded Melissa’s plate on purpose. But it’s okay. It’s good. She’s supposed to be eating more, anyway, and she even made sure to pick out a dress with a loose enough waist to accommodate it, because nothing makes the old feelings come back like a belly trying to escape confining clothes.
This is how she’s done it ever since Abby. Ever since that day down in the basement when she got the mirror back and understood with a certainty she’s since built her whole life on that her body had changed, that it was no longer her enemy, that it needed to be cared for. And she’s tried her hardest to take care of it. Even if sometimes she’s had to take shortcuts.
God, the turkey’s going to make her so sleepy.
This is the other way she’s done it: start eating and stop thinking about it. Harder than it sounds, but she’s had practice. She looks around the table. Shahida’s talking to Lorna and Vicky, Steph’s talking to Paige and Pippa, Christine appears to be texting, and the boy, Aaron… is watching her.
She gives him a little wave. “Hi,” she says.
He’s not what she expected Steph to pick, as much as she’d ever given much thought to her little sister’s choice of partner, and while a part of her wanted to reject him on sight, back when he came up from the basement, purely because he came up from the fucking basement, and she knows what boys are like when they still live there, she knows Steph wouldn’t choose someone without value.
She wouldn’t, would she?
And does he know what he looks like in that tuxedo?
“Hi,” he says.
“So,” Melissa says, and gives herself time to think with a Brussels sprout. “So.” And then she laughs, and almost does something very undignified with her half-chewed sprout, because all she can think of to say is something like, ‘How did you meet my sister?’
“Are— Are you choking?”
She swallows. “No. Definitely not. Hi, Aaron.” She winces; she’s starting to repeat herself.
“Hi,” he says. “Um. Is this awkward or am I massively misreading the situation?”
“It’s awkward. But that’s on me. So, uh, Steph’s told me a lot about you?”
The boy grimaces and his voice drops, losing the timbre he’s been trying to hold on to and plummeting into his chest. “Christ, I hope not.”
It’s enough to make Melissa wish she was choking. Idiot! He’s up here, just three months into the programme, because he’s changed! Because he’s already becoming someone new. And projecting your discomfort onto him could hurt that progress!
She takes refuge in cliché. “She’s told me only good things, I promise.”
They both eat. Melissa has another sprout, a slice of turkey, a potato, and a forkful of string beans.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron says, quite suddenly and with his attitude somewhat restored and his mouth full of potato, “I know I’m staring, but… Fuck. Is it weird to say I’m excited to meet you? Like, not even excited.” He swallows. “Happy. I’m happy to meet you and confirm that you’re, like, real and stuff.”
Melissa makes a show of looking down. “Yep. Definitely real. And stuff.”
“No, I mean it. This is actually a huge deal for me.” He’s properly animated now, and conducts his words with cutlery. “Like, she’s been talking about you forever. Before I knew she was here on purpose, before I even knew she was a girl, she was talking about you. You’re, like—” he leans forward, away from Steph, and drops to a whisper, “—the whole reason she was able to keep going. And it’s absolutely fucking crowding out everything else in my head every time I look at you that all I want to do is thank you and hug you and kinda sorta platonically hump your leg because she’s here, she’s fucking alive, she survived long enough to make it here, and you did that. And it’s like it’s fate? Which is bullshit because everything is just a string of stupid coincidences, but the fact is that you, her sister, are not only a girl the same way she’s a girl, but you found this place first and like test-ran it or whatever, and it’s so—” he waves a hand around, and then frowns at himself and removes the fork from it so he can continue waving it more safely, “—so fucking cosmically satisfying. And I’m also glad because, you know, she loves her family and it’s been killing her that she can’t see her little sister until she’s done with all this, and even then she knows she’ll have to lie to her and she doesn’t say that part much but I can see her thinking it, you know? She’s the world’s least subtle thinker and she’s terrible at hiding shit from me. But she gets to have you now. Her big sister. Not just family but closer than that, more important than that; someone who’s been where she needs to go, who can help show her the way. That’s fucking incredible, Melissa. I’m so fucking happy for her. And I’m a little jealous. My version of you, she’s gone, and there’s no way to find her, and it’s presumptuous of me to even call her that because she was a much smaller part of my life than you are of Steph’s. But it’s still a little, you know, hard. But, mostly, I’m happy as hell. So,” he adds finally, nodding to himself and sitting back, “thank you.”
“Oh. Um.”
“No, no,” Aaron says, slipping into an easy grin and giving Melissa, suddenly, an idea of what might have attracted Steph to him in the first place, “take your time. I know I’m a lot.”
“I get it,” she says, half to herself. “Yeah. I get what she sees in you.”
“Really? I still haven’t worked it out.”
* * *
Christine drops her phone onto the table and looks around, obviously hoping to have gone unwitnessed but meeting Steph’s eyes, and she looks so sad that Steph asks the question by raising her eyebrows.
Christine checks around again and mouths, It’s Abby.
Oh.
Right.
Yeah.
That’s all Steph needs to know. Abby, Melissa’s sponsor, her lover for a while and always her friend, who left the Hall soon after Melissa came back and who has barely been seen since.
Abby, who did so much for Steph.
She waits for a moment in Melissa’s quiet conversation with Aaron when neither of them is looking in her direction, and mouths, You okay? back to Christine.
Christine nods, blinks rapidly like she’s holding back tears, and deliberately puts her phone back in her clutch. Steph reaches out under the table with her foot, hooks Christine’s ankle, and hopes, with a brief second of contact, to convey the message, I’m here whenever you need to talk, which seems a little too complex to deliver any other way. And Christine smiles at her and leans into Paige for a hug, and that’s that for now.
* * *
“It’s frustrating,” Lorna’s saying, over an almost empty plate, “all the secrecy around this place.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Shahida says, nodding. In truth, she doesn’t share Lorna’s annoyance, whatever its source, and the reason for that is holding her hand under the table as she talks with Stephanie’s cute little butch girlfriend.
“Oh, I don’t think you do,” Vicky says, grinning fondly and, when Lorna pierces her with a look, taking refuge in her glass of wine, like she’s saying, hey, I can’t possibly respond to whatever accusations you might throw at me, I’m way too busy drinking.
“Tell me,” Shahida says, squeezing Melissa’s hand before she lets go, so she can prop herself up on both hands and appear appropriately studious.
“So,” Lorna says, “okay, yes, sure, I could use a few hundred extra eyes on the moral calculus of this place, because I can’t escape the feeling that I’ve been bribed with a girlfriend and free bottom surgery so I don’t look too hard at this literal house of horrors — don’t laugh, Aaron; I can hear you — but the other thing is, well, there’s a hell of a thesis here!”
“A thesis?”
“Yes! Probably dozens, actually. I mean, just for an example, and not to go straight for the obvious one, but we don’t normally say, oh, it’s fine that some guy punched some other guy in the face because the other guy eventually agreed he deserved it—”
“We do, actually. We have this thing called ’not pressing charges’.”
“That’s not an ethical judgement, though! That doesn’t usually happen because the victim became convinced that his face really needed punching. It’s just… practical.”
Shahida doesn’t say anything to this, just jerks her thumb at Aaron, who seems desperate to say something but is having trouble with a large piece of turkey.
“She’s got a point, Lorna,” Paige says, looking up from her whispered conversation with Christine. “The programme is nothing but practical.”
“No, okay, so what about the implications of inter-Dorley relationships?” Lorna says.
It takes Shahida a second to work it out. “You mean, relationships where one participant is an outsider, and the other isn’t?” She does her best not to look round at Melissa, who, despite Shahida showing off rather more of herself than she would normally be comfortable with, has frustratingly shown absolutely zero amorous inclination.
“Right. It’s a seriously crunchy topic.”
“Is it ever,” Vicky mutters.
“Who do you tell? When do you tell them? What do you tell them? Because it can’t be the truth, not unless you have leverage over them or are convinced you can sway them to your side before they call the police.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Shahida says quickly. “Em’s coming back to mine for Christmas lunch tomorrow and we’re just going to say she went away for a while.”
“No, that’s— Wait, what?”
“Melissa,” Vicky says, “you’re going to see someone else you used to know? Are you trying to pull down our knickers in front of the whole country?”
“No,” Shahida says, “just my mum. Look, I told Tabitha. She’s like my liaison here.”
“What did she say?” Lorna asks.
Shahida makes quote marks with her fingers. “‘On your head be it.’ She trusts us.”
“Or,” Melissa says quietly, “she knows the only way to stop Ess doing whatever she wants is to tie her up, and she’s not nearly kinky enough for that.”
“This kinda scares me,” Vicky says. “Like, kinda really scares me, you two.”
“What have you told your mum already?” Lorna asks.
“Nothing,” Shahida says.
“Nothing?”
“She knows I’m bringing a friend. Someone who has no family. Someone who is—” she takes Melissa’s hand again, “—special to me.”
“And you’re just going to… present Melissa?”
“Yes!”
“I do actually think it’ll be fine,” Melissa says. “We’re just going to say I had some problems, and that Shy tracked me down and talked me into coming back. She knows what my dad was like; she’ll think that’s the reason for the secrecy.”
“My mum loves surprises,” Shahida says, nodding enthusiastically, “and she loves finding out people she thought were dead are actually alive.”
“Does she?” Vicky says.
“Well, I assume.”
* * *
Another mirror.
The thing with mirrors is that you can get used to them. You can get used to anything with enough exposure, and certainly his body and face have been changing slowly enough that the full-length mirror in his bedroom downstairs has long since ceased to be as intimidating as it once was. It’s always shown more or less the same person in exactly the same context, barely any more different from day to day than any random person might be, and he’s often found himself paying closer attention to some detail of the rumpled sheets behind him, or spotting a paperback that fell on the floor and got scooted under the bed.
But this is a new one, in the bathroom on the ground floor, just around the corner from the dining hall, and it’s impossible to deny the truth:
He’s different now. And the kicker of it is, he’s so accustomed to his new face that he can’t say how it differs from his old one, not unless he finds a bloody photo and holds it up to compare. Is it his eyes? Does he look more awake now? More alert? Ironic, considering he’s three glasses of wine in and his tolerance has gone to shit.
Everyone watched him when he came up from the basement. Everyone watched him again when Aunt Bea spoke with him. And when he stood to walk the entire length of the dining hall on his way to the toilets, every fucking person in the room watched him do so. He could feel their eyes on him, evaluating him, and what’s strange, what he’s really going to have to sit with and fucking analyse, is that he felt suddenly really stupid in his tux.
Like he didn’t fit in.
This was a mistake.
He’s touching the surface of the mirror with his fingertips, practically stroking the glass, when the toilet in another stall flushes and, guiltily, he withdraws his hand. Starts washing it again, just for something to do.
He needn’t have rushed. Muffled swearing starts to fill the room, and he’s drying his hands with a paper towel by the time the stall opens and a tall girl steps out, clad in greens and blues and still adjusting her bust.
“Never wear an elaborate dress to any event where you might have to piss,” the girl says, looking right at him and causing him to realise that he’s staring at her chest, wondering if she grew those things herself, or if the doctor helped.
“Shit,” he mutters, “sorry. Rude.” He looks away, exaggerates the movement so he’s practically staring at the floor. At least he had the opportunity to spot her she/her pin.
“Don’t worry about it,” the girl says, leaning towards him and grinning. “We’re all girls here.”
From another cubicle — another one he hadn’t realised was occupied; normally he’s not quite so self-involved, he’s pretty fucking sure — someone coughs, loud and fake.
“We’re all girls and nonbinary people here,” the girl amends.
“I’m not exactly—”
“We’re all proud of you,” the girl says chattily, washing her hands. “No-one’s ever been allowed up so early.”
Well. The record needs correcting, then. “It’s not just me. Steph’s here, too. And she was in the basement less time than me. I’m just following her, really.”
The girl shrugs, then holds out a hand. It takes a second for him to understand that she’s asking him to pass some paper towels.
When she’s done drying her hands, she looks at him again, closely, like she’s searching for something in him. “Steph’s doing great,” she says slowly, “but she’s just another girl, you know? She is what she is. What she was always going to be. Or what she always should have been, I suppose. But you… I look at you, and I see me. Except—” her face breaks into a smile, “—you’re up here! You’re doing amazingly! It just feels like vindication, you know? Are you still Aaron?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you picked another name?”
It’s his turn to shrug. “I don’t think I’m there yet, you know?”
“Farah!” the other person calls from inside the stall. “Leave the poor kid alone!”
“Sod off, Am,” Farah says. For his benefit, she mimes throwing her balled-up paper towels over the door at the room’s third occupant.
“I can hear you doing shit out there, Farah.”
Farah giggles. “I’m innocent!”
The toilet flushes and, shortly after, a striking person dressed a little like him exits the stall and gives him a wave before washing their hands — and he confirms, checking the pin on their lapel, that they are they/them.
“Hi, Aaron,” they say. “I’m Amethyst, and — as you probably gathered — this giggling idiot is Farah, the weight around my neck.”
“You love it,” Farah says, air-kissing them.
“Sorry my Sisters have been staring at you all night. If you need a break — and, don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like you do — then may I suggest the back rooms? There are dozens of them. Just turn left out of here instead of right. Get lost for a little bit.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I’ll, um, think about it.”
“Happy hols, kiddo,” Amethyst says. Behind them, Farah’s already opening the door to the corridor, and she turns and waves over her partner’s head. “Oh, and don’t forget: if you don’t like what they want you to be, it doesn’t have to be forever. Sharp tux, by the way.”
He gives them a full minute before he follows. He uses the time to breathe deeply, to clear his head, to once again become used to his reflection, and to very carefully not wonder what it is that makes Amethyst look so good in their suit, while he…
Shit. Irritably he kicks open the door and almost falls over someone even shorter than him; a novelty even in mixed company, and a practical impossibility here.
“Sorry,” he says, backing up, and realises that she’s not short, she’s using a wheelchair.
“Aaron, yes?”
Why does everyone keep asking him that? Wait; he knows this woman. Knows her name, anyway; Pippa was talking about her in awed tones. He should have paid more attention. “Teri, right?”
“Right.” Teri looks behind her, and then beckons him closer. “You want to get out of here, Aaron?”
“You mean, like, to another room? Because I’m—”
“No. I mean, to London. Or to Scotland. Or to bloody space. Somewhere not here.”
“Oh. Um. Not really?”
“How long have you been here, Aaron?”
“I don’t know.” He knows; he’s not sure why he instinctively dissembled. “Three months. A bit less.”
“They brainwashed you in three months?”
“Hey!” He’s not brainwashed! And neither’s Steph, nor Adam, nor… Okay, Martin might be, but Martin could probably contrive to have his mind rearranged by a particularly intimidating geometric shape. And Maria’s never so much as hinted that that’s what she wants from him! If anything, he’s brainwashed her! Edy says she never laughed so hard at so many filthy things before he came along.
“Aaron.” She says it sharply, like she’s trying to dislodge something from his brain, and he realises he zoned out.
“Sorry. But no. I’m not brainwashed. I’m just… Wait; sorry; who are you?”
“I’m Teri.”
“Yeah, gathered, but that doesn’t help. You’re not a sponsor, are you?”
“Hah!” Teri whacks him on the elbow. “Don’t make me laugh. No, I’m the woman who took your ‘Aunt Bea’ in off the streets many, many years ago. Gave her a bed and hot meals and all the hormones she could swallow. So this whole thing is my fault, in a way.” She looks around again, and mutters, “This whole bloody self-perpetuating nightmare…”
“You don’t approve.”
“I don’t know.” She glares at him. “I didn’t used to. But that was fifteen years ago, and I’ve met too many people who would once have begged me to offer them what I just offered you, and who are now so convinced of the value of their vaunted programme that they turn around and run a whole new generation of kids through it. It’s… baffling.”
“Can’t argue with the results, I suppose,” he says, wondering why he’s trying to reassure her. If he even is; he can’t get a handle on her. But she’s older than him, a lot older, and don’t they have funny ideas sometimes?
He laughs to himself. Funny ideas like kidnapping is bad. Fuck, maybe he is brainwashed.
“Kid, I’ve argued with the results until I’m blue in the face,” Teri says, “and the results just smile at me and ask if I want another bloody cup of tea in another bloody funny mug. You really don’t want to leave?”
He leans against the wall. Slides down it until he’s on his haunches, a little below Teri’s eyeline. “I met Steph here,” he says. “You know her?”
Teri nods. “One of Dorley Hall’s ’new consciences’.”
“Hah. Yeah. Maybe. She told Aunt Bea off in front of the whole room earlier, so maybe.”
“Yes. I caught some of that.”
“Not the first time she’s done something like that. Not the first time she’s done it for me.” He thumps his head against the wall, just hard enough to serve as emphasis. “And you know what I’ve done to deserve someone like that? Absolutely fucking nothing. I’m a piece of shit, Teri; but you know that. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
She regards him kindly. “That doesn’t mean you have to let them make you into a woman. Seriously; we can leave. You can live with me. I know what they say, that when you’re back out in the world you’ll backslide. They always say it, but it doesn’t have to be true. Not with work. I’ll help you. You can stay you.”
“That’s kind, but I’m okay. Or I will be, or something.” He shivers. He’s not exactly okay. Hopefully she didn’t notice.
“Are you transgender, Aaron?”
“No. But I know a good deal when I see one, even if Maria and Steph and all the others had to spend months pulling the fucking cataracts out of my eyes first. Bea asked me if I consent. I said yes. Those people out there? I want everything they have, Teri; everything. I want the family, I want the home, I want to be wanted, to be needed, to have something to offer people that isn’t just, you know, waggling my fucking dick at them. Sorry.”
“Darling, I’ve seen enough dicks not to be offended just at the thought of them. Though, perhaps, don’t bring yours up again.”
“Deal.” He stands up. “I’m staying, Teri.” He looks behind him, at the maze of the back rooms, the places where Amethyst said he might find a few moments of peace and quiet. He looks ahead, out towards the end of the corridor, where he can see a little way into the dining hall. He can almost see Steph.
He knows where he’d rather be.
“Oh, well,” Teri says. “I tried.”
“I’m grateful,” he says. “You wanna go back in? I think we’re having dessert soon.”
* * *
It’s not the second years who clear off the tables, but a random assortment of graduates. Christine doesn’t know how they were chosen or whether they volunteered; she’s just glad she doesn’t have to get involved. She doesn’t want to move just yet. One too many roast potatoes, probably. At least she requested the sorbet for dessert. Paige asked for the chocolate cake. God only knows where she plans to put it.
Maria stands up from her table and calls for silence the same way Bea did, by tapping a spoon on a wine glass. The room is considerably less receptive to her request, though — or, possibly, everyone is simply more drunk — and it takes a while and much throat clearing from Bea before Maria can speak and be heard. Christine uses the time to admire her dress.
“You all know me,” she says, projecting her voice in a way that Christine, who is justifiably proud of her own voice, finds impressive. “And so you know I tend to get a little maudlin this time of year. Well, I’ve had a good meal and a pretty decent amount of wine—”
“Lush!” Indira shouts.
“—so I’m sure you’ll be happy to discover that this year is no exception. I want to tell you…” She pauses, looks down at Edy, looks over at Bea, and smiles. “I want to tell you about my parents.
“My parents were very serious about Christmas. Very serious. We’d throw open the door, we’d put out a spread of finger food, and we’d welcome the neighbours in, to view our tree, to sing carols, to take an individually wrapped present. The presents weren’t much — mostly little cakes Mum would bake or small toys Dad would make — but they were important. My parents came to this country as adults, and when they arrived they had no support network, no community; no friends. They did the work. They built their own community.” She looks down at the table. “When I was eight, Dad lost his job. Took almost three months to find a new one. And in that time, the friends they’d made, the community they’d built, they were there for us. Food parcels. Spare clothes, because I was growing fast and my school trousers were halfway up my shins. Very little money — no-one really had any at all — but a lot of love.” Edy, looking up at Maria, takes her hand. Maria smiles, and continues, “That’s gone. All of it. And there will always be a part of me that lives forever back then, that can’t and will never move on. But the rest of me, she sees a lot of that old community here, now. Because what we have here is built on love. On the belief that the start one has in life does not have to decide one’s future. On the certain knowledge that people can change, if they are offered the opportunity. And on the drive to find new family, new friends, and to forge connections that will last a lifetime.
“Beatrice already said it, but I’m stealing her bit. You are my family, all of you. You’re my place in the world. You’re why I get up in the morning and you’re how I sleep so well at night. I treasure you. Those who were there from the very start—” she raises her glass towards Bea, “—those I’ve found along the way, and those who are new. Aaron, that means you.”
Aaron raises his wine glass towards Maria, then turns back around to face their table and sinks into his chair. Steph hugs him and Christine, feeling a swell of affection for the little shit, takes the hand he’s left on the table. He’s surprised, but when he meets her eyes she smiles, and sheepishly he returns it. She squeezes his fingers and releases him.
“All of us,” Maria says, “have holes in our lives. People we were taken from; people who were taken from us. And sometimes it’s easy to focus on that, on what we’ve lost, on who we’ve lost, and lose sight of the tremendous gifts we’ve been provided with. But it’s also important not to forget. To live in all the moments, good and bad, that make us and sustain us. So, with that in mind, I would like to propose a toast: to the people we’ve lost.” She raises her glass to the air.
“To the people we’ve found!” Edy shouts, standing to join her and raising her own glass.
“To family,” Bea says, standing and joining the toast.
“To family,” most of the women around Christine mutter, and so she quickly joins in, draining her own glass and trying not to think of her mother, alone with her bastard dad on Christmas Eve. Except she’s not, is she? Maybe she’s still at the food bank. Maybe she’s gone to someone else’s house? Maybe while she’s out there’ll be a fire, and Dad will burn…
“To family,” Paige whispers in her ear, drawing Christine out of her thoughts and into her girlfriend’s arms. “I love you so much, Christine.”
Around the table, the other couples are sharing similar sentiments, and Melissa and Shahida are shuffling nervously around the thing everyone else has been able to see for weeks, and Pippa’s being included in the hug Steph and Aaron are sharing, so Christine feels able to just stop bloody caring about anyone and anything else, her parents included, and focus on the one thing that’s most important to her.
She leans into Paige’s embrace, presses her head against Paige’s chest, and replies, “I love you, too.”
* * *
“Hey. Liss.”
“Oh. Um. Hi. Rabia, right?”
“Right. Listen, um, I’ve got something to ask you, and it’s awkward, so I’m just going to come right out and say it. You wanna come say hi to Nell and Autumn and Tash? And also Bella, I suppose, but you don’t have any reason to hate her, so—”
“I don’t hate Nell.”
“But you do hate Autumn and Tash?”
“No! But I thought I’d better be specific about— You’re being cheeky, aren’t you?”
“Never. But you should know that Autumn is very much against this. Me coming over here to get you. Not because she doesn’t want to see you, you understand; she’s just embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?”
“Apparently there was a bit of a clique?”
“And I wasn’t in it. That’s true enough.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“No, I want to. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I kind of want to talk to them again. Can I finish my sorbet first?”
“If that’s sor berry important to you, yes.”
“If I do come over, will you keep being like this?”
“Very likely.”
“…I’ll still come over.”
“You’re a saint, Melissa.”
* * *
“Did you ever track down the rubber Santa and the fairy lights?”
“Yes. Someone made a shrine in one of the back rooms. Santa shibari’d with fairy lights on a cardboard altar. Fake mistletoe and candles all around it.”
“A shrine to Santa? Have we started getting intakes that develop weird little religions down there?”
“No, the second years are just annoying. They keep trying to jump-scare me with the weird shit they leave lying around.”
“A good thing you found it before Maria did.”
“Yes.”
“Too much like—”
“Yes.”
“You want me to have a word with them? Suggest some… boundaries for her extracurricular activities?”
“Please. After Christmas, though.”
* * *
“I’m getting too old for this, Ash.”
“Didn’t you bollock me less than an hour ago for saying exactly that? Because of what it would say about you?”
“Yes, but there’s a difference.”
“Explain.”
“No.”
“Fine. For what, exactly, are you getting too old, Beatrice?”
“This authoritarian act. Inserting myself into the therapeutic process. Sometimes I feel I’m more a hindrance than a help, honestly. I should trust the sponsors. I don’t know what I was thinking, manhandling the Holt boy.”
“The Holt boy? Oh, Aaron. He seems sweet. A bit quiet, though— Hey! What’s so funny?”
“I’m sorry, Ashley, but you should see him at almost any other time. He talks so much and so fast it’s a wonder he remembers to breathe between sentences. Maria had a compilation made of his greatest hits and, well… Hmm. I wonder if it’s a bad sign that he’s so quiet tonight.”
“He’s probably just intimidated. He’s up here in his cute little tuxedo, surrounded by sophisticated women—”
“—and your good self—”
“Yes, thank you, sophisticated women and me. No wonder he’s subdued.”
“Or it’s because an interfering old bat grabbed his face like a prize race horse the second he had the temerity to show it above ground level.”
“You’re not as scary as you think, Bea, sweetheart.”
“Hah! I’ll have you know I very nearly made one of the lads in the basement widdle himself today.”
“Oh?”
“The usual story. Macho man, thoroughly homophobic and utterly repulsive. Would have made life miserable for the others if he’d been allowed to continue mingling. Gave him a dressing-down over the speakers and sent him back to the cells.”
“Did you do the Elle voice?”
“Naturally.”
* * *
It takes a while for Charlie to lead Nadine up to her room on the top floor, what with Nadine’s expansive dress and Charlie’s inebriation, but it’s worth the struggle, worth begging Indira to let them sneak off for half an hour, because when they finally close themselves inside Charlie’s room, she drops her trousers and waits to enjoy the look on Nadine’s face when she realises what she’s been wearing under her pant suit.
“Charlene! Are those… boxer shorts?”
“Why, yes, Nadine, they are.”
“When did you buy boxer shorts?”
“Remember the year before graduation, when I kind of, uh…”
“Ah. Your ‘freakout’.”
“Right. I ran away. Bought a whole outfit. Dressed up as a guy. Went to London, walked around. Felt wrong. Felt weird. It was obscurely like I was in drag, except as a dude.”
“There are such things as drag kings, Charlie.”
“You know what I mean. At least it cemented that I did the right thing.”
“By being kidnapped?”
“By consenting. You know, like the kid, Aaron, did tonight.”
“Hmm.”
“Anyway, I found the boxers in the back of my drawer the other day. Felt like being a little naughty for Christmas. Getting a lump of coal in my stocking and stuff. And what’s naughtier, Nadine, my dearest darling, than wearing men’s underwear under Aunt Bea’s roof?”
Nadine, eyes wide, playing along with the sheer scandal of such impudent effrontery, steps closer, takes Charlie by the waist and dips her.
“Harlot,” she whispers.
* * *
“Is that her?”
“Who?”
“Stephanie! The, you know, the trans girl.”
“Loads of us are trans girls, Jenna.”
“No, you doofus, I mean the one who was trans before she got here. The one who sought us out.”
“Oh, shit! That’s her?”
“I don’t know, Daisy! That’s why I’m asking you!”
“Well, ask someone else!”
“You’re just mad because we missed turkey.”
“No, I’m happy we made it in time for profiteroles. Look her up! She’ll be in the directory.”
“Isn’t it rude to get out my phone at the dinner table? I don’t want to be rebasemented.”
“Do you think that’s likely? I’ll do it. Look. Yes. Stephanie. Likes to be called ‘Steph’. Aww. She’s come so far since she got here.”
“Who’s that with her? The cutie in the tux?”
“Don’t know.”
“She’s hot.”
“She’s— Oh. Jenna, she’s Aaron Holt.”
“Really? That’s Aaron Holt?”
“I mean, we were told to expect a guy.”
“Yes, but I was expecting, y’know, a guy, not a hot butch chick.”
“Jenna—”
“You know, she really is cute…”
“Jenna, you tart, are you leaving me for a jailbait first year?”
“She’s not jailbait; says here she’s almost twenty-two!”
“I can’t take you anywhere, can I?”
“Yes, you— Oh, shit, Daze, do you think she heard us?”
* * *
The two latecomers at the next table, who just returned to their dessert, giggling and whispering to each other, aren’t the only ones to have she’d him tonight. Over and over, when they think he can’t hear them, the Sisters have been coercively gendering him more consistently and insistently than Maria’s ever tried to. He’s pretty sure it’s not a conspiracy or anything like that; he saw himself in the mirror in the toilets, saw himself anew, and he’s had to acknowledge that without the inertia of recognition, he looks pretty fucking girlish already. Throw in a Sisterhood who are naturally inclined to look for the womanhood in everyone they meet, and, well… It’s an easy error to make.
Is it an error, though?
It’s not supposed to be, right?
He agreed to all this. Aunt Bea asked and he fucking consented. So why, when some well-meaning graduate applies to him the obvious pronoun, does he feel so fucking ashamed?
He’s at war with himself. Just like usual. Just like when Steph touched him intimately and he recoiled as much as he leaned into it. Just like when they first told him what they do here, what they really do, and a small part of him, so small he almost couldn’t hear it at the time, called his objection habitual.
This was a mistake.
He looks down at himself again; the fucking tuxedo.
This was a mistake.
He hasn’t touched his gateaux.
A touch on the side of his head startles him, but it’s just Maria, smoothing a lock of hair back behind his ear, crouching down beside him, her long black dress flowing out around her feet.
“You okay?” she says. “You’ve been a little quiet.”
He glances to the other side; Edy and Tabby are talking with Steph and Pippa, distracting them so Maria can have this conversation privately.
This isn’t right, though. It’s Christmas Eve! She shouldn’t be worrying about him right now. She has her own life, and he wants her to be able to live it.
Shit. He’s not been as careful as he wanted to be, probably been broadcasting to everyone with eyes to see that he’s having deep misgivings about coming up out of the basement at all.
“You’ve been watching me?” he asks.
“I’m your sponsor.”
“Not tonight, you aren’t.”
“Well then, I’m your Sister.” She brushes against his cheek with the back of her thumb. “And that’s something I’ll be long after I stop being anything else.”
Oh yeah. The family thing. It’s important to her. It’d be nice if it could be important to him, too. He wants it to be. God, he wants it to be. “I’m fine. I ate a lot. Made me sleepy. Sleepier. Trouble sleeping last night, you know?”
“Again?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t mention it earlier.” Does she sound genuinely reproachful? Or is she just teasing? It’s the latter more than the former, lately; at least, he’s pretty sure.
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Oh, Aaron,” she says, and touches his cheek again. “Perhaps we should start you on the progesterone. We weren’t thinking of introducing it until late January, but it’s good for sleep.”
Always half an eye on his endocrine system, huh. “So,” he says, checking again to make sure no-one else is listening, “uh, I’d kick myself if I didn’t ask… What else will that do?”
“Aside from help you sleep?” Maria asks. He nods. “Well, it’s good for mood regulation… general health… it’ll help balance your system, since you have essentially zero testosterone any more…”
Edy leans down, filling the space between him and Steph. “And it’ll give you nice, round breasts,” she whispers.
“Ah,” he says. He stammers for a moment, enough time for Edy to smirk at him and return to her conversation with Pippa, Steph and Tabby.
“Sorry,” Maria says, smiling in the direction of her retreating girlfriend and miming too much to drink. “But, yes, it’ll help with breast growth, too. Probably. It does in most people.”
“That’d be just my luck, to be the only girl in the intake with a flat chest.”
“Would that bother you?”
No. Yes. Maybe. Fuck. “Uh, what’s it like? Having breasts?”
Maria laughs. “It’s like having a couple of sacks of pleasingly shaped fat hanging off your chest, tipped by sensitive bits. I’m not the woman to ask about that; I’ve had them half my life and I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not have them. Ask one of the third years.”
“Yes, but they scare the hell out of me.”
“You’re really okay, Aaron? This is a lot, I know. No-one will think badly of you if you don’t want to stick around.”
“I’m fine,” he says. “I promise. I really am.”
“Proud of you,” she says, and rises to join the conversation going on behind her.
He’s not fine. He’s a world away from fine. But to admit it would be to disappoint her, and that’s the last thing he wants in the world.
* * *
It’s obvious Maria wants some privacy with Aaron — as much as that is possible in a room full of busybodies — and while there’s probably no harm in Stephanie overhearing whatever she has to say, Pippa decides to create the space anyway. It’s easy with Edy and Tabby around, anyway, since even when at least one of them is slightly the worse for wear for alcohol, their sponsor instincts are so old as to be undefeatable. The two of them create a body barrier between Steph and Aaron; Pippa provides the topic of conversation.
“So, Tab,” she says, wondering if she’ll pay for this later, “what’s it like, dating a man who can’t possibly decide he’s a girl one day?”
Tabby sighs dramatically, with one hand clutched to her breast. “It’s incredible, Pippa,” she says. “Such a relief. Do you know, the other day he started talking about obscure indie bands and absolutely none of them were unlistenable industrial noisecore? I still didn’t care, obviously. But I enjoyed the novelty.”
“I don’t get it,” Stephanie says.
“Me neither,” Pippa whispers to her, over her half-finished gateaux.
“You two really do put the ‘baby’ in ‘baby trans’,” Edy says.
“It’s just a stereotype,” Tabby says. “A trans girl stereotype.”
Stephanie frowns. “But I don’t listen to— What was it again?”
“Steph,” Tabby says, “I love you, but you are the least online trans woman ever to have existed. Even less than Pip.”
Edy comes up from whatever it was she just whispered to Aaron to say, “There’s a qualitative difference—” she struggles with both words, “—between the terrible music taste of men—” with her hand she unsteadily delineates two categories, “—and eggs.”
“Gotcha,” Stephanie says.
“So,” Pippa says, “what’s he actually like? Aside from not a girl?”
Tabby grins broadly. “He’s really sweet. He’s into city-builder video games and classic lit and he was talking recently about how he’s become one of those beard guys. Said he never expected to, but now he has the straight razor and the strop and the weird cream stuff and everything.”
“He does have a very neat beard,” Edy says.
Christine leans across the table. “Tabby finally encountering a non-denial beard for the first time in her life.”
“Hey, I had a beard before I got dragged here,” Tabby says. “That wasn’t a denial beard.”
Maria rises from where she’s been crouched next to Aaron, and walks around him to help support the unsteady Edy. “Tabitha,” she says, “that was kind of a denial beard.”
“It wasn’t!”
“Oh, sweetie.”
“Just because I retroactively consider myself as having been trans all along does not mean that at the time it was a denial beard. I could have been a regular, normal guy with a beard.”
“Were you, though?”
Tabby sighs. “Ugh. Fuck all you bitches. I’m going to go text my boyfriend.”
* * *
“I can’t believe you had half my sorbet. I don’t know where the food goes on you.”
“I’m tall,” Paige says, hooking her little finger around Christine’s and reminding Christine that she plans, at the earliest possible polite time, to escape to her room with her girlfriend. Charlie and Nadine did exactly that, and ever since then Christine’s been keenly aware that she could be forcing down ever-smaller spoonsful of dessert or she could be tearing off a dress that’s become rather uncomfortable and, generously, doing the same for Paige.
“You’re not half a sorbet and an entire slice of cake taller than me, Paige.”
“I’m tall and I jog,” Paige corrects, and Christine has to admit that that’s probably what makes the difference. She really should start taking care of herself again. Maybe in the two weeks off Beatrice promised her…
At least she’s not the only one feeling overfed. Melissa appears to be almost asleep at the table, allowing the conversation Shahida’s having with Vicky and Lorna — about, apparently, what Shahida’s masc name would be if she happened to get swept up in some bizarre ‘opposite Dorley’ — without contributing. She’s minimally aware, though, and catches Christine looking. They exchange sleepy smiles.
Shahida spots their silent communication, grins at Christine and starts rubbing Melissa’s back, at which Melissa makes near-silent moans of what could be pleasure or nausea. With her other hand Shahida beckons at Steph, who still seems annoyingly perky — presumably she didn’t make as many inadvisable roast potato consumption decisions as Christine — and walks around the table to join them.
She’s getting good on those heels.
Pippa shifts her chair up so she’s closer to Vicky, and that leaves Christine and Aaron.
Aaron is… quiet. He picked the gateaux for dessert, but he’s hardly touched it.
“We’re going to have leftovers for a month,” she tells him, leaning back in her chair to give her belly the room it needs.
“Can’t wait,” he says.
“Oh, Yasmin says hi. No idea where she and Julia are tonight, so she can’t say hi herself, but…” Christine shrugs, feeling awkward. “She says hi.”
Aaron nods, and then smiles as a thought strikes him. “Tell her I think she’s cool,” he says.
“Will do.”
“Hey,” he says suddenly, sitting up, activating like someone put in his batteries, “I never said. Happy Christmas.”
God. He’s so sweet. Nothing at all like the guy in the intake files any more. “Thanks. Happy Christmas.”
“And, uh, thank you. For not asking if I’m okay.”
She shrugs. “I have an idea what it’s like. My first big event here was intimidating and confusing and I didn’t even properly know if I was really a girl yet, or if I was just faking it because Dira wanted me to be a girl bad enough for both of us.”
“Were you faking it?”
“No,” Christine says, shaking her head. “Not in the end. Not ever, really. It was just doubts. And residual shame. And a million other things. You’re starting to get an idea of what that’s like, I think.”
He grimaces. “Am I fucking ever.”
“Hey,” Shahida calls, and Christine looks back to find her leaning over Melissa, looking at Aaron, “did you pick a name yet?”
“Who,” Aaron says, “me?”
“Yes. We’re talking guy names. I’m forsaking the obvious and picking ‘Geoff’ for mine; I think I could pull it off. Do you have a girl name yet?”
For a second Christine thinks he’s going to tell her off, or go quiet, or do anything other than reply, quietly and steadily and with most of his usual self to the forefront, “I’m not going to consciously choose a name, actually. I’m going to wait for one to pop into existence nearby, like a Higgs Boson, and claim it.”
Melissa snorts. “Who told the funny little guy about the Higgs Boson?”
“Hey, Christine,” Aaron says quietly, when Shahida’s turned back to the others, “I’m going to step out for a while. Get some quiet, you know?”
“Sure,” she says. “If you go where the bathroom is and keep going, you’ll get to—”
“The back rooms?”
“Yeah.”
“Stall anyone who comes looking for me?”
“Promise,” Christine says.
He frowns for a second, and then smiles, blows her a kiss, and takes his leave.
* * *
Val’s back in the house, getting all the final prep done for Christmas dinner — everything that can be done the day before, anyway — and no doubt bristling under Callum’s odious fucking gaze, and that bastard Jake’s off giving Declan his injection and no doubt preparing him for another enthralling evening of providing amusement for Dotty, and Dotty herself is doing God only knows what to prepare, and that leaves Frankie, in charge of yet another captured young man.
Dotty gave her the official notification, and thank fuck she finally did because erasing the records of Val’s occasional visits to the bungalow’s almost gotten her caught every time, and in one way it’s a shame because it means Val doesn’t get to see daylight again but it also means no more sneaking around for any of them for the moment.
It’s simple again: Val’s the maid; Declan’s the toy; Callum’s the guard; Jake’s the big dick; Dotty’s in charge. And Frankie, sinful old Frankie, gets the dirty job once again.
She laughs to herself as she imagines the mess the old woman’s digestive system likely makes of the bogs around here, and corrects: she gets the second-most dirty job. Whipping some bitter young lad into shape is still preferable to cleaning the toilets after old Dotty’s had a big meal.
Poor Val.
Truth be told, she’s almost looking forward to it. It’s morally simple this time: this one’s not going to get shipped off for some horny old cunt to play with, not if she and Val have anything to say about it, nor is he going to remain in menial servitude for the rest of his life. She just has to teach him to play the game well enough for them all to win.
Because the soldiers have guns, and that means Frankie, Val and this Trevor kid, well, they only have to win once, don’t they? They just have to get a gun off of one of them and then it’s game bloody over.
The bullet in Dotty’s head has been decades coming, and though she knows Val has a better claim on it, Frankie’s fingers are itching at the thought of it being her who gets to pull the trigger.
Val never had the tools to get out of here when it was just her and the corpse of the old pervert Smyth-Farrow. Starved almost to death trying to escape. But there’s a whole operations centre here now, and there are guns and all sorts of shit. The codes don’t matter; all they need is the freedom to explore their options. And the pantry’s stocked and all the freezers are full to bursting; when they control Stenordale Manor, they won’t even have to rush.
When she pushes open the door to the bungalow and finds the lad Trevor curled up on the couch, arms around his head and so far past crying he’s just making the occasional moaning sound, she’s not surprised. Seen it all before, hasn’t she?
She shuts the front door, turns off the overhead so the room is suddenly lit only by the table lamp — low light creates a better, more trusting atmosphere — and raps twice on the coffee table to get his attention.
No response.
Fine. Nothing new under the sun.
She looks around: quite the setup. He’s chained by the ankle to what looks to be a retaining wall in the dead-centre of the bungalow, with enough give to make it to the bed, the kitchen — it’ll have been cleared of all utensils more deadly than plastic teaspoons if Jake and company aren’t completely stupid — and the couch, but he’s also got a telly and a Sky box and a pretty hefty pair of speakers. She turns it all on, finds the music app, and starts In the Air Tonight playing.
A favourite.
The music will bring him back eventually. She sits in the armchair, gives him the time. A luxury, compared to how Val had to rush every meeting with him, but that’s Dotty all over, isn’t it? Handing her the keys to the shiny new prisoner like it’s the fucking 1980s again, letting her have all the time she needs with him.
Dotty thinks Val’s too cowed to rebel with more than harsh words and the odd bit of gob in her salad; she thinks Frankie’s always been loyal. False assumptions both, and convenient spaces in which to manoeuvre. So Val’s practically got the run of the manor with only that idiot Callum to watch her, and Frankie’s got unrestricted access to a former soldier.
So he’s chained to the wall and he’s so paralysed by fear and shame and self-loathing that he doesn’t even look up to see which new tormentor has entered his cage? So what? She’s worked with worse. She’s done worse, and still put out viable product in the end.
And Dotty still doesn’t know it was she who helped Beatrice escape.
The lad’s still curled up, so she kicks the arm of the couch.
Nothing.
“Okay, lad,” she says, “I haven’t got all night. Wake the fuck up. I’m not here to hurt you.”
Still nothing.
She looks around. There’s a stray shard of mirror glass on the mantelpiece, next to the new mirror, and she knows instantly what that means. So, reluctantly, because she’s not getting any fucking younger, she pushes up out of the generous armchair, walks carefully through to the bedroom, strips the top sheet off the bed, and drapes it over the mirror.
“Lad,” she says, choosing this time to sit on the couch next to him and scooting his feet up a little so she can fit, “I need to talk to you.”
It’s a gamble, sitting so close, especially since even in his current reduced state he could more easily overpower her than she could an ant, but it’s one she’s confident about. He might have been a soldier for hire, but he took an easy job, and she’ll bet her life he’s never tried to kill anyone before. Taking a life the first time is hard, even for a broken old bitch like her. This lad? No way he could keep his anger up long enough to strangle her.
The song ends, and the algorithm picks Edge of Seventeen. Fine. It’s a great song. Makes her think of Val. Makes her think of all the incarnations of Val. Karen used to say she looked a lot like Stevie Nicks.
Well then suddenly there was no-one
Left standing in the hall, yeah, yeah
In a flood of tears
That no one really ever heard fall at all
Well I went searching for an answer
Up the stairs and down the hall
Not to find an answer
Just to hear the call
Of a nightbird singing
Come away, come away
Trevor still hasn’t responded. Whatever. She’ll just talk, then.
“My name’s Frankie,” she says, settling back on the sofa and crossing her legs at the ankles, which is the farthest up she can comfortably cross them these days, unless she contorts herself into positions probably no-one wants to see on an out-of-shape woman in her sixties. “And I know who you are, of course. Trevor Darling — commiserations on the name, by the way — ex of the Peckinville private military gadabouts, most recently under the care of Dotty Marsden and her associates at Silver River. But that’s all I know about you, so until you open that pretty little mouth of yours, I’m going to talk about me.
“I’m a monster, Trev. A living, fire-breathing monster from the dawn of fucking time, or the dawn of this whole wretched project, anyway. I got my start by stabbing a man in the dick because he hurt my sister, and that was good and righteous and true, except it’s been twenty years since she even spoke to me, hasn’t it? And you know what? I think that’s funny. I think that’s really fucking funny. I kicked off my whole career because of a woman who won’t even reply to my Facebook messages.”
“What career?” It’s a whisper, but it’s audible, and Frankie’s seen enough men in such depths of despair that she’s almost impressed he’s listening.
“My career of making girls like you, babe,” she says. It’s another thing she’s learned: if they’re unresponsive, make absolutely clear just how much you don’t give a shit about them. How unremarkable you think their plight is. How wretched they are, and how little that impacts your day. Belittle the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. Whatever your real beliefs, whatever the sight of a ruined man clinging to the end of his life actually does to you, bottle it all up; it won’t help him and it won’t help you. “Taking tender lads off the street and plucking and filleting and dressing them until they’re sweet, simpering little ladies.”
She doesn’t wince at that, but that’s the other thing: you must outwardly maintain the belief that femininity is the pinnacle of human expression, unless one happens to have been — what’s the modern term? — assigned male, and then it becomes the most degrading state imaginable. ‘Little lady’ is, depending on context, the highest praise or the direst insult. A funny position to take, since Frankie has herself never been the most feminine of women, but hey-ho; you read from the script you’re given.
“A ‘simpering little lady’?” Trevor hisses. “Is that what I’m going to be?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it, mate. But it’s like my pal Val told you: you have to learn to play the part if you’re ever going to get out of here.”
“You’re working with her? But you said—”
“Yeah, Trevor, lad. I was one of the people who made her. And now we’re friends! Isn’t life grand?”
* * *
There’s a glass room at the back of the building, terminating the rats’ maze of hallways and extra bathrooms and mini-gyms and storerooms and rooms that look like they ought to be fumigated with a flamethrower. Steph told him about this room, said Melissa took her here, but he’s fucked if he can remember what it’s called. It’s kind of nice, though; he always knew there were woods behind the university, a finger of forest reaching out to connect it to the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty one of his first-year dormmates was always enthusing about, but he never went looking. Just shut himself in his room between classes, unless he was out doing, uh—
Yeah. Well done. Memory Lane is a stupid place to visit.
The big windows are nice. That’s what he was getting at. And Saints is close enough to the edge of what passes locally for civilisation that through the sloping glass roof he can see stars. Always was a little too much light even on the other side of campus for that.
Not such a bad place to make your home, with views like this. And it’s not all that’s nice to look at around here.
“Hey.”
It’s a girl’s voice, relatively deep but similar to the way Steph sounds when she gets it just right, when she catches the lightning in a bottle and gets that look on her face he wants to—
“Aaron, right?” the girl says, and he pinches the skin on his forearm to force himself to focus. When he gets like this his thoughts run away from him and he always chases them, always ends up—
Shit. Focus.
“Hi,” he says, turning away from the window and frowning when the girl turns out to be someone he doesn’t recognise. She’s pretty, a little stocky in the way some of the Dorley girls are, and she’s dressed up for tonight, in a dress that in the dark looks so black that it swallows all shadows but which, when she turns on the overhead light — ow! his fucking eyes! — turns out to have intricate jewelled butterfly patterns sewn into it. “I like your dress.” And he really does; it hugs her curves, exaggerates her relatively impressive bust, and feathers out at the wrists with a sheer, sparkling fabric that makes him think of insect wings.
“I like your tux,” she says, stepping closer.
“I don’t.” He says it before thinking about it, but he doesn’t, he really doesn’t. It’s uncomfortable, it feels weird around his hips, and of the handful of women and nonbinary people he’s encountered tonight wearing similar clothes it undoubtedly looks the shittest on him.
The girl smiles. Playful. “Would you rather’ve worn a dress, d’you think?”
He can only think of Steph, in black, with a ponytail he’s certain she didn’t have this morning, and that leads to wondering what it will be like to go back downstairs with her tonight, back to their bedrooms, and peel it off, pull off her boots, and—
But then she’ll have to undress him, won’t she? That’s the way these things are done. He can’t just be a disembodied pair of hands or whatever, he has to participate, which means she has to touch him, has to—
“Aaron?”
“Sorry.” He looks around for somewhere to sit, finds only white sheets covering things that’ll probably fall apart if he so much as touches them, and settles for the floor. Cross-legged. One advantage of the tux. Steph couldn’t do this right now. Steph would sit on her butt and she’d have to smooth out the tight skirt of her dress so as not to expose too much thigh, and she’d stretch her legs out in front of her. God, and the cute little Christmas tree pattern on her tights would catch the light like— Focus. He looks up at the girl and forces a smile. “I’m all over the place tonight.”
She hitches up her skirts and sits down in front of him, facing him, and when she does she has to rearrange her bust, which she accomplishes with a frown of concentration and a chewed lip. “Still getting used to these things,” she says, and then snaps her fingers. “Shit,” she adds, “you do know the big secret, don’t you?”
“Unless Maria has another surprise waiting for me next week, then, yeah. I know our intake isn’t exactly unique.”
“Good. Wow. That would have been embarrassing. I would have had to improvise something about, oh, I don’t know, I had a really late puberty, or I’m actually fourteen years old and just precocious, or… I don’t know.” She grins at him. “Happy I don’t have to. My boobs are new. I keep whacking them on things.”
Oh yeah. She’s new, then. One of the second years, probably. Maria suggested he ask someone like her what it’s like to have breasts, but maybe she meant for him to ask what it’s like to be a girl, to become one in adulthood, to choose it, and he would but he doesn’t even know how to start, and probably Maria just meant exactly what she said and he’s just overthinking shit again, and—
Fuck. Maybe he should whack his head against something a few times, see if he can find his reset button. All he knows is that this girl, he envies her, the same way he has everyone else he’s met tonight, and he can’t decide if it’s because they’re done, because they’ve moved on from their old selves and they’re either getting ready to start their new lives or they’re here to visit the old alma mater and indulge in a little nostalgia about the time they finally were allowed to lay down their burdens (and grow two additional burdens as compensation, a little farther up), or for… some other reason he can’t put his finger on, can’t identify, something that feels like it’s been lurking on the periphery of his consciousness ever since he decided he was going to accept everything Dorley has to offer. And the more he thinks about it, the more his head hurts.
He’s envious. That’s all he needs to know. He looks at those girls out there — and this girl, right here — and then he looks at himself, in his stupid tuxedo, and he wants to hide away forever. But that would disappoint Maria, and it would worry Steph, so here he is, sitting on the floor in a— in a— in a whatever this room is called, getting dust on his borrowed suit.
“I’m Faye,” the girl says. When he doesn’t reciprocate with a name — why bother? he has only one, and she knows it already — she continues, “I became a girl here, actually.”
It’s so absurd that he laughs. “Doesn’t everyone?”
She opens her mouth to correct him, and then realises. Laughs with him. “Not at Dorley. I mean, here. In this room. It started here, anyway.”
And she tells him the story: the girl, so new she wasn’t even sure she was a girl yet, bound up by fear of her own temper and obligations to her friends and to the girl she loves; and Christine, a year ahead of her and like her in so many ways, taking her by the hand, introducing her to the people in her life, showing her that, sure, for some people, girl is something you are, but for others, it can simply be something you do.
“And someone you do, too,” she finishes with a giggle. “But, seriously, I was caught up in my head. Like you are, I think. Scared to take the next step. No—” she raises a finger to forestall any objections he might have found, had his head been operating correctly, “—not scared. Intimidated. It all felt so large. But it’s just a lot of little things. Being a girl — being a woman, which is preferable — is only one of them.”
Easy for her to say. Being a girl — a woman — is just one part of her glorious, multifaceted personality? Cool. Great! What if your personality is clinging for its life over a bottomless pit, and the prospect of being a girl or a woman or a fucking platypus is the only thing keeping you from losing your grip, and—
Why is he arguing with her about this? In his head, sure, but isn’t that her whole damn point? That he can simply incorporate womanhood into his idea of himself?
What fucking idea of himself?
“Aaron?”
“Sorry. I’m doing it again.”
She takes his hand. “Yeah. I did, too. Don’t let it swallow you. My advice: stop thinking. Let yourself feel, and don’t worry about what those feelings mean. Allow yourself to have some fun with it. Live a little.” She giggles. “Dance, maybe.”
“Dance?”
“Yeah. Can’t you hear the music?”
No, actually. He gets all stoppered up when he falls too far into himself. Sensory information ceases being important, or something. He swallows to pop his ears and allows the sensation to open him back up.
She’s right: there’s something playing. It’s faint, because it’s had to travel all the way back here, but it’s just about audible.
Of course it’s Taylor Swift.
* * *
Shahida and Vicky claimed their spots on one of the couches while Melissa and Lorna relieved themselves, and then they swapped over, which gives Melissa the opportunity to watch Shy as she walks purposefully back to her across the dining hall.
The slit in Shy’s dress flicks open with every step. It’s difficult not to be entranced.
Melissa’s not stupid, much as she occasionally insists to herself that she is; she knows Shahida likes her. And Melissa likes her back. So much. Enough that it’s a little painful to be around her when she’s dressed and made up and looking her best, because despite what Melissa sees in the mirror and despite the men who constantly — constantly — hit on her, there’s always been a part of her living forever in Rachel’s room, seventeen years old, awkward and unsure. When the person who would become Melissa first started to appear, and then Shahida put her hands on her and Mark recoiled, knowing in every part of himself that he wasn’t good enough, that he didn’t belong there, that this was a space for women and he was invading it, that his body was wrong and broken and so twisted up it was barely alive. When Rachel and Amy looked at him like he was any other man; untrustworthy and potentially violent.
She’s still not worked out how to live without the fear that, without warning, everything — everything, even her body — could be taken away from her in an instant. It’s the fear that bites at every happy moment, that threatens every friendship, that undermines every thought she’s ever had.
Sometimes she thinks the other Dorley girls have it easier, that to have become a woman here, completely and totally, is better than to have been stumbling towards it your entire life. But she knows that’s unfair; as much as she’s probably the graduate who’s spoken the least with the others here — hell, Steph knows more people here than Melissa, and she’s been here less than three months! — she’s overheard enough conversations to know that at least a few of them lived lives before Dorley that seem, to Melissa, strikingly familiar.
She laughs at herself. Wouldn’t that make it easy? If everyone here was a secret trans girl all along? How… bloodless.
And then Shahida sits down, folds herself into the space created by Melissa’s outstretched arm, sinks into the sofa cushion with a grumble of contentment, and though her presence prompts echoes of Mark’s fear and uncertainty, it’s nothing Melissa can’t handle by taking the inside of her cheek between her teeth and biting.
Shy’s back in her life now. For good, if they both get their way. And that means Melissa has to face up to her shit.
Not tonight, though. It’s easy to let the good food and the alcohol, the murmur of conversation, the warmth of the fire and of Shy’s body, and the persistent girl-pop soundtrack relax her, and if her anxiety is to persist, these are the best conditions in which to smother it.
“Merry Christmas,” Shahida says to her, rubbing her bare shoulders into the cushion and the back of her neck against Melissa’s forearm.
“Happy holidays,” Melissa replies.
“Oh my God,” Tabby says, from where she’s perched cross-legged on a hassock chair with her back to the fire, “get a room, you two.”
Shahida sticks her tongue out at her, and Melissa says, “I’m sorry you don’t get to spend the holidays with Levi.”
“He must be hot if you miss him already,” Shahida says.
“No,” Tabby says, tapping her lower lip with a finger, faking contemplation, “it’s just nice to get away from all this estrogen for a while.”
Shahida snorts, and holds in laughter that otherwise might consume her. “Tab,” she says, pressing herself more against Melissa, “most of this estrogen—” she waves a hand behind her at the room, where most attendees are still sat at the tables, “—is your fault.”
“What’s Tabitha’s fault?” Paige asks, as she and Christine walk over, hand in hand, looking for a spot on one of the couches to slot into. Lorna shuffles up, and Paige drops into the space Lorna’s created. Christine perches on the padded arm of the couch.
“Girls,” Vicky says.
“Bad Tabby,” Christine giggles, wagging a censorious finger.
Tabby shakes her head. “I get no respect around here.”
“Actually,” Melissa says, “I wanted to ask you something, Tabby.”
“Oh?”
“I’m thinking of moving,” she says quickly, before the rising fear can stop her. Shy squeezes her forearm. They’ve talked about this — she wouldn’t be planning to reintroduce herself to Shahida’s parents if they hadn’t! — but it’s still nerve-wracking to raise the subject around other people, to make it real. “Moving back down here, that is. To Almsworth. Or somewhere close by.”
“That’s wonderful!” Tabby says, and by the way she smiles and leans forward to take Melissa’s hand, she seems genuine. Melissa bites the inside of her cheek again: of course she’s genuine! People actually like having you around, idiot!
“There are… logistical challenges, though. My family still live and work around here.”
Tabby nods. “Shouldn’t be a problem if you live on or near the grounds. And, honestly, you don’t look that much like you used to, not if someone’s not looking for it. You were, what, three minutes into your transition when Steph recognised you, yes? And it still took her a good few minutes and a fuckup on your part.”
“Yes, but Shahida—”
“Shahida is a terrifying monster who sat in the SU Bar scrutinising every blonde who walked past and comparing them with a half-dozen photos that she’d edited to make you look like a girl. No-one else is that psychotic.”
“Thanks, Tab,” Shahida says.
“You can keep the room you have here for as long as you need it,” Tabby continues, frowning slightly as she thinks, “or there are a few places we own in the city, close enough for convenience but far enough away from your old stomping grounds and your father and brother’s habitual haunts—”
“You know those by heart?”
“I have, as I believe has been noted, sort of adopted you two, and your friend, Rachel. Or, possibly, been adopted by you. It’s a complex, multifaceted relationship. And it’s my job to know this stuff. And Will has been pretty docile lately, and in a stage of his development where prodding him too much would be counterproductive, so—” she shrugs, “—I’ve got the time.”
“Oh,” Melissa says, “I wasn’t asking for a free house, or anything…”
“Liss,” Tabby says, “it’s staff we’re short on, not money or property. On that subject, if you’d consider sponsoring—”
“No.”
“Not even one boy?”
“No, Tabitha.”
Tabby holds up her thumb and forefinger, less than a centimetre apart. “One little guy?”
“Shy, save me.”
“Tabby,” Shahida says, very seriously, “make your own girls.”
* * *
He’s concentrating so hard on his farm game that he doesn’t notice her knocking, and it’s only when she sits down on the mattress behind him and the springs creak that Adam turns around, spinning in the computer chair with his legs crossed and seeming so much like the carefree young man he might have become without the influence of his family and his church that Edy’s heart strains against her chest, creates aches in her ribs and forces the air out of her lungs.
If she’d only gotten to him five years ago, none of this might be necessary.
“Hi, Adam,” she says.
His eyes widen as he takes her in, and she bites her lip, shy under his scrutiny, unused to inspiring the awe she sees in him. She’s far from the most glamorous graduate, and rarely goes all out; for tonight she wore a cute little jacket-and-skirt combo, belted tight under her breasts, and while Maria told her in sensuous whisper that she looks ‘tempting as fuck’, Edy knows that next to her — or Tabitha, Paige or Indira, or any of dozens more — she looks less like a hot chick and more like a mildly gussied-up primary school teacher. But she’s dressier than Adam’s ever seen her, and she supposes she is showing quite a lot of leg.
“Hi, Edy,” he says, and swallows. “How was the party?”
She lets him see her satisfied smile. “It was nice to see old friends again. I took some pictures, if you’d like to see?” He nods, so she pulls them up on her phone. The first is a selfie she took with Maria, in front of the Christmas tree.
“Maria looks so pretty…”
She can’t help but agree.
She runs him through the photos she selected before she came down. Stephanie and Aaron are not visible in any of them; they’re limited to just the sponsors he knows, Beatrice, and the second years. His eyes widen again as she points to each of them, names them, and gives him a moment to absorb them.
“They were really boys?” he asks, almost all the breath gone from his voice.
“Yes.”
“They look… like they’re having fun.”
“They are. They’re very sweet, Adam. I think you’ll like them.”
There’s a near-silent gasp from him, and his hand, clasped firmly in hers, stiffens. “I’ll get to meet them?”
“Yes.”
“They won’t hate me?”
That’s enough to get her to drop the phone on the mattress and pull him over to her, onto the bed beside her, into her arms, the better to draw him into her, to whisper to him, to show him once again that her love, unlike any he’s known before, is genuine, and as close to unconditional as it can get in this place.
“They won’t hate you,” she says, rubbing his upper arm. “They’ll understand.”
“But I’ve done awful things.”
“They’ll understand,” she repeats. And they will: Edy did worse than Adam, for far less approval, and yet Beatrice and Ashley and Maria love her no less for it. “I promise they’ll understand.”
* * *
Steph finds him sitting on the floor of the conservatory at the back of the building, mouthing along to the Taylor Swift track that’s playing in the dining hall, his eyes closed, his hands cupped in his lap and his legs crossed, one foot tapping in time with the music. His hair, which started the evening slicked back and which has been determined ever since to return to its usual slightly shaggy mess, is playing around his cheekbones, and she’s surprised he hasn’t brushed it away like usual. The light from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling is stark, and under different circumstances might have been unflattering, but here, now, he looks…
…so pretty.
The song ends and the playlist moves on and he opens his eyes, smiles up at her. He doesn’t seem embarrassed to have been caught singing along.
“Hey,” he says.
She doesn’t reply. Decides instead to sit down in front of him, though she quickly discovers that her dress is too tight to mimic the way he’s sitting, which earns a smirk from him. Instead she arranges herself with her legs stretched out next to him and her hands on the floor to support her torso.
His eyes are a little damp.
“I like your tights,” he says, and lays a hand on her knee, runs a thumb over the material. “I wanted to say all evening. They look really good on you. They feel nice, too.”
He’s touching her so casually and yet so intimately and they’re alone and there’s nothing stopping her from taking his hand in hers and moving it up her leg, under her dress… But he’s been crying, if only a little, and he came out here for a reason. She needs to know why, so she can help him. But his hand is on her leg and every nerve in her body is crying out for—
“Stockings,” she says, abruptly, interrupting herself. “They’re stockings, not tights.” He smiles at her again. “Easier to pee in, Paige said. And, yes, I like them. Listen, Aaron—”
“Don’t,” he says. He’s not upset, not about this, anyway, but he is firm. “Please.”
“Don’t what?”
“Not that name. Not tonight. I’d like to be someone else, if that’s okay?”
“Someone else? Aar— Sorry. Are you all right?”
He taps his fingers on her inner thigh for a moment while he thinks. It’s quite distracting. “That’s a hard question to answer,” he says.
They’re alone. Alone in the conservatory with no-one coming to get them and only one door between them and the outside world…
Steph asks, “Do you want to get out of here?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to go to bed yet.”
“No,” she says. “Do you want to get out of here? Leave. Out the door. Into the woods. Never to come back.”
“You’re not the first person to ask me that tonight.” He squeezes her leg, then retracts his hand, starts intertwining his fingers in his lap, a nervous habit she’s very familiar with. “No, thank you. Getting out of here, that’s what he wanted. Him. The guy. That’s what he’d do. And I don’t want to be him any more. I told you that, or I think I did. That’s sort of what’s been eating at me all night, actually. Like, I kicked him out of my head but I haven’t replaced him yet, haven’t had the slightest fucking idea who to replace him with, and he keeps trying to get back in. Keeps banging at my fucking windows. And he has all these… habits. Survival shit from the old days, when worrying about the way people saw me was second nature. When worrying about how much of a man I was being was important to me. And it still is, you know? Kind of?” He moves closer to her, so they’re both facing the opposite direction from each other but their hips are almost touching.
“Give me one of those,” Steph says, before he can say anything else.
“One of what?”
“You’re going to wear your hands down to nubs if you keep doing that.” She holds out a hand. “Give me one.”
He holds out his closest hand and she takes it, clasps it in both of hers, holds it in her lap. Just minutes ago, this would have been exciting for her; now, it feels necessary.
She smiles at him, and he continues. “I’ve been like a body without a person. Ever since… you know. I look at myself and sometimes it feels like I’m empty. Just skin and bones and nothing else. Other times, it feels like he’s still there, and he’s telling me all this useless shit, shit I don’t want, shit that shouldn’t be important any more. And—” he looks away, and she grips his hand more tightly, “—sometimes, when you touch me, he’s there, too, telling me I shouldn’t let you, telling me a man wouldn’t let himself be treated the way you do.” He looks right back at her, eyes shining. “And that’s bullshit, Steph. I know it is. I don’t want you to stop anything about what you’ve been doing. But I can’t not tell you about this, you know?”
“I know. You’ve been crying some nights. I thought it was about something like this.”
He nods. “It was. Faye said— You know her?”
“I do. She told me you were back here, actually.”
“Right. She said that when she was like me, she was intimidated. That what it took to get past it was understanding that womanhood could be — should be — just a part of who she is, a facet of her personality. And that was really scary, because I’ve been thinking for longer than I want to admit, since long before Dorley, that I don’t actually have a personality, that I’m nothing more than my shitty habits and my bullshit stress responses and my unstoppable and irresponsible libido.”
“You know that’s wrong, right?” Steph says gently. “You’re— Aaron— Shit, sorry. Look. I love you. I actually, genuinely do. I can’t imagine life without you. And not the ‘old’ you, the one you sent away, the one who keeps banging on your windows—”
“Demanding I crank out a quick wank whenever a pretty girl or an unexpectedly erotic shadow crosses my path,” he interjects with a smile, and she squeezes his hand again.
“You see? That’s you. The shitty jokes, that little grin you do, the way you’re instinctively sweet. Fuck. Remember the mice?”
“The mice?”
“You told me. When you were a kid. You caught mice in a bucket. You took them miles down the road to release them because you didn’t want them to die from the poison the pub put out.”
“I forgot I told you about that,” he whispers.
“That’s all you. And it’s not something I think you should get rid of. I think the guy, this creature you hate so much, he needs to be cared for, not thrown out.” She feels him wince at the pronoun. “You’ve always been this sweet, loving person. You’ve just also been all the other stuff, the stuff you hate.” She raises her knees up, traps his hand in the space between her belly and her thighs. Warms it. “I can’t claim to completely relate,” she says, “but before I got here, before I truly accepted that transition was something I could actually do, that living as a woman was something that was actually possible for me, I was someone I hated, too. I built this person, this boy called Stefan, to face the world for me.” She snorts. “Truth be told, he wasn’t very good at it. He didn’t have many friends, and by the end he didn’t have any, and he was about to drop out of his degree and get fired from work, and he was bad at dealing with complex emotional shit because, well, he had no subtlety.” She winces, remembering. “Hard to be a real person when you can barely even feel anything. I hated my body and I hated myself and I hated my voice and I hated the way people looked at me and nothing else was strong enough to break through all that. In the end I walked into the arms of this… secretive and, if we’re honest, kind of deeply weird feminisation reform dormitory and chose to stay here, knowing it would cut me off from my family, from my sister, and I did it because I didn’t have enough of me left not to do it. I think if I’d walked out when Christine offered, I’d be lucky to be alive right now. She said she could get me hormones, and I believed her — still do — but it’s not just the hormones that have put me back together. It’s Pippa and Christine and Indira and Maria… and you.” She’s still looking into his eyes, a connection at least as important as the hand she holds in her lap. “I was an empty shell. Nothing left inside me. Everything burned away by the need to survive. At least, that’s what I thought. But she was always inside me. The real me. And she was hard to find and even harder to listen to when she started making herself known and it was, actually, Maria who got me to see her in the first place, but just because she was small, and quiet, and inexperienced, doesn’t mean she wasn’t there.”
“I don’t have—”
“You do. The real you is in there. You’ll find them. I know you will.”
He smiles again, breaks eye contact, and wiggles his fingers to suggest that he wants his hand back. She complies.
“That’s the other thing Faye said. She said I should try just feeling for a while. So I have been. Then, before you came, and now.” With one hand on the floor he stands, rises slowly, holds out the other so she can rise with him, and when they’re both on their feet he loops an arm around her waist, stands slightly on his toes so he can rest his chin on her shoulder. The music’s still playing and they don’t dance, not really, but they sway in time with it. “I want all the things I’ve been denying myself,” he says. “I want to feel what it’s like. And when I close my eyes and I concentrate on just feeling…” He coughs, leans back to look at her, a sheepish smile on his face, then quickly kisses her on the cheek and returns to his place on her shoulder. “The funny thing is, people keep coming up to me tonight and offering to help me escape, or telling me I don’t have to be what Maria wants me to be, but… Fuck, Steph. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t have the words. I don’t even have the language for it. It’s like I’m trying to find something in the dark and I’m feeling around for it and I have no way to see it but I know I’ll know it when I lay my hands on it.” He closes his eyes. “There’s accepting what I’ve been offered. There’s actively choosing it. I’ve done both of those. I told Maria and I told you and I even told the scary lady who runs the place. I’ve made the choice.” Finally, so quietly she almost can’t hear him, he finishes, “And then… then there’s wanting it.”
Steph holds her breath. Rolls the thought over and over in her head. Wonders if she should ask the question that seems so obvious and yet so dangerous.
Until she breathes again, even the dust in the old conservatory stays still.
Steph whispers, “Do you want to be a girl?”
* * *
There’s a tree in the AirBnB. Not some grand, lavishly decorated confection like they have every year at Dorley Hall, but a plastic job from Argos with exactly five baubles that don’t shine satisfactorily no matter how vigorously her dad polishes them with his shirt sleeve. But it’s surrounded by presents, and those are home to all the festive cheer missing from the tree, with large looped golden bows tying up neat piles of packages. Her mum’s work, for sure.
Dad’s got an action movie on, but he’s got the sound low and the subtitles on because Mum’s asleep on Abby’s shoulder and it wouldn’t do to wake her. He winks at her when he catches her looking, but even his long-lost daughter can’t keep his attention when on the telly there’s a flaming tyre rolling in slow-motion out of the burning wreck of a truck.
Her phone buzzes. Another text. She ignores it. It’s hard to wrench herself away from the Hall, and especially from her friends there, but sometimes it takes your comfortable rut being ripped out from under you to make you realise that it was never all that comfortable to begin with. Melissa left her to try to live her life, and that was the right decision, and now Melissa’s life is bringing her back to the Hall at the exact same time Abby’s reconnecting with her family. Serendipitous.
And it’s better for both of them that they remain apart, no matter how many times Melissa texts. And Shahida seems lovely, living up entirely to the person Melissa described to her over and over again in those early months in the basement, and Abby’s glad. And no matter how many times Shahida tries to call her, Abby will never pick up.
Indira will arrange for her hormones and things to be sent on. And then Abby will go home with her family and Melissa will have Shahida and the Hall and everyone can get on with their lives.
“Hey, Abs!” her dad whispers. “Look at this bit! I love this bit!”
On the screen, a robot made of silver liquid struggles with a gun that’s got stuck in a barred door, and Abby laughs as quietly as she can, because Dad’s grinning, and his joy, his happiness, is a well she could return to over and over.
They watch the rest of the movie together.
* * *
“Do I have lipstick on my face?”
“It’s Dorley Hall; everyone has lipstick on their face.”
“Yes, but I didn’t, not when I left the room, and I don’t want to go back in there and have everyone know we’ve been… you know…”
“Kissing?”
“Not just kissing.”
“No,” Steph says. “Not just kissing.” At his request she touched his chest, touched him in the ways she’d been trying to remember not to, and his response had been extraordinary, enough so that she wanted to skip out on the rest of the evening to go straight downstairs and see what other sounds she could get out of him; but he wanted to say goodnight to Maria first, and truthfully she doesn’t want to vanish without seeing Melissa and Christine again, so they redressed him in the elements of his tuxedo that seemed important at the time — “Not the cummerbund. Fuck the cummerbund. Whoever invented it deserves to wear nothing but cummerbunds for the rest of his miserable life. Maybe even eat them.” — and headed back to the dining hall.
And then a pair of second years exiting the loos giggled at the both of them, and now he’s paranoid.
She turns to him, inspects him with exaggerated care, rubs at the side of his mouth with her thumb, and confirms, “There. No lipstick.”
“Good. Thank you. That’s all I wanted.”
Steph’s not sure how long they’ve been gone, but the couches by the fire that had been sparsely populated when she left are now full to bursting, and various stragglers have dragged over dining chairs or deposited large cushions on the floor or otherwise made themselves comfortable. Beatrice is just about visible in the kitchen with the friends she invited, and everyone else has either dispersed, is in the process of dispersing — the two second years from before give her a wave before joining the others of their cohort in the stairwell — or has settled down around the fire.
Maria waves them over. When they get there, Rabia and Bella stand up from one of the couches and offer them their seats.
“We were going to bed, anyway,” Rabia insists when Steph makes no please we couldn’t possibly hand gestures.
“Woo!” Shahida shouts. “Yeah, you were!”
Tabby’s sitting farthest away from where Steph’s standing but it sounds like she mutters, “Why is the crudest person here a bloody cis woman?”
“We’re going to bed to sleep, Mohsin,” Rabia says, showing her the v sign, which prompts more giggles from Shahida that Melissa has to help smother.
“What have you been putting in your hot chocolate, Shahida?” Lorna asks.
Melissa answers for her: “Rum.”
“There’s hot chocolate?” Aaron asks, sitting down and dragging on Steph until she sits down with him. She’s got the end space, which puts Aaron between her and Vicky, but neither of them seem uncomfortable with this state of affairs. Vicky, in fact, nudges him gently with her shoulder in greeting; he nudges her back, grinning.
Maria cups her hands to her mouth and shouts, “Hey, hot chocolate wench! Two more!” and a few moments later, Monica enters the dining hall from the kitchen, carrying a tray.
“I told you,” she says as she approaches, “if you call me that one more time, you’ll be wearing your next mug.”
“As long as it’s alcoholic,” Maria says, “I don’t care.”
Monica crouches, setting down the tray on a small coffee table. “Kids,” she says to Steph and Aaron, with a thumb pointed at Maria, “they get so excited on Christmas Eve. Need a little ‘help’ to go to sleep.”
“You’re not too old to put over my knee, Monica,” Maria says.
“Why is everyone so horny tonight?” Tabby moans.
“Tabitha’s missing her boyfriend,” Maria stage-whispers to Aaron, who plays along, nodding emphatically.
“Shahida?” Tabby says. “Pass the rum.”
“Ignore them all,” Monica says, passing a mug to Steph and another to Aaron. “It’s ten to midnight on Christmas Eve, so they’re obviously all drunk out of their tiny little skulls. You made the right decision hiding out; coming back might have been the mistake.”
Steph turns her mug around and rolls her eyes at what she finds. The mug is printed, in elaborate handwriting-style text, with, You’re practically perfect in (almost) every way! The ‘almost’ has been added after the fact, and the silhouette of Mary Poppins has had her traditional umbrella altered to look like a pair of garden shears. “Is there alcohol in this?”
“A little,” Monica says. “Not enough to turn you into one of them, though.”
“The horror,” Aaron says, and Steph realises he’s a little more nervous around Monica. A sponsor he hasn’t had much opportunity to get to know properly. But she grins at him and he responds in kind, relieved.
“Have you had a good night?” she asks.
Aaron considers the question. “It’s been… Yeah. I have.” He sips from his mug, and then holds it out so he can read it. Smirking, he turns it around to show Steph the caption: You can’t spell ’emasculate’ without C U T E.
“You people are all incorrigible,” Steph says, unable to keep a giddy smile off her face.
“Us?” Monica replies, an innocent hand held to her chest. “I promise you, we are the perfect picture of innocence.”
* * *
She took pity on the lad in the end. Let him cover himself in a dressing gown and slippers and brought a blanket in from the bedroom. Made them both a cup of tea and put the telly on. There’s nothing worth watching, but it’s distracting, and that’s better than letting Trevor dwell on his situation.
Frankie showed him the knives and other things she brought over from the main house. Showed him where she’s hiding them. He laughed at her, hysterically and with a despair she once, a long time ago, found almost titillating, and said there was no way he could get through the chain around his ankle with a kitchen knife, and she had to slap him to get him to be quiet long enough to tell him that that’s not what the knives are for.
“We’re going to fill this fucking place with weapons, Trevor, lad,” she said. “Weapons and tools and anything else me and Val can find, so that when the time comes, there’s something to hand.”
His hand to his cheek where she hit him, he’d replied quietly, “What time will that be?”
“When we fucking say so, Trev.”
So now they’re watching TV and talking quietly, and he’s coping about as well as she expected him to.
“This has to be a one-time thing, Trevor, lad,” she says, when the commercial break starts. “Because it’s Christmas Eve, and because I think you’re finally realising just how far up shit creek you are. You get one night. We’ll watch shit telly together and I’ll keep the tea coming and we can talk about whatever you want. But you have to know: after tonight, it’s time to get your shit together.”
“What do you mean?” His voice is sullen and shaking but he’s coherent and he’s listening and that’s good enough.
“I mean I know what it’s like, Trev. When you don’t want what’s been done to you. When you think you’ll never adapt. When you’re convinced you can’t adapt. I know because I’ve seen every possible response to forced transition under the sun. And, yeah, sure, you’re in a more extreme position than most. But I need you to remember something: when we get out of here — and if you do your part then we’ll have a fighting fucking chance — I know people who can rip those melons off your chest and give you all the testosterone you could wish for. Elle’s people are good, Trevor. They can give you back your whole life. Or almost all of it. Except you’ll be better off, won’t you, because Elle Lambert will pay you serious money for the look inside Silver River you got, and because I bet she wants soldiers she can seriously trust. She’ll have a use for you, and that means cash.”
“We can’t get out of here,” he says flatly. “We can’t. We can’t cut this chain and we can’t get the codes or the keys because this is a military operation. And what are we? An old maid, an even older woman and a… a fucking castrated soldier.”
“No-one cares about your balls, Trev,” Frankie says. “Jesus, you men and your fucking testicles. And you’re wrong: we can and we will get out of here. Because it’s not Silver River in charge here, it’s old Dotty, and she is many things and most of them are bad for you but she’s also arrogant and inflexible. See, I’m in her trust. It’s a stroke of luck, her assigning me to you. That means I get leeway and it means I get access, and those are things I can exploit.”
“How do you know she trusts you?”
“Four decades of silence, Trev. Four. Fucking. Decades. That’s how long I’ve been keeping her secrets and following her rules. She trusts me. Oh, yeah, absolutely, she’ll have me shot without a second thought if she thinks I’ve betrayed her, no fucking doubt, but there’s a way around that: we don’t let her think that.” She sips noisily from her tea. “Four decades, Trev. We only need to last a few more months on top of that. So don’t fuck it up, and we’ll have a chance of getting out of here alive with all our bits and pieces intact. Well, hah, not in your case. Or Val’s either. But who’s counting, eh?” She nudges him with an elbow.
“That’s not funny.”
“Val’d laugh.”
And that’s the miracle of it, isn’t it? Val would laugh, and all. After all her years trapped by the will of the rich and powerful, Val would fucking laugh. And that, more than anything else, is what makes Frankie believe anything’s possible.
“Oh, cheer up,” she says. “It’s almost Christmas.”
* * *
He remembers how Maria and Bea got the attention of the room, so when he feels Steph starting to fall asleep next to him, he nudges her awake, kisses her quickly, stands them both up, and carries his mug over to one of the tables to look for a spoon. The conversation around the fire isn’t loud enough really to warrant it, but he’s never done it before, and it looked fun, so he takes spoon, mug and Steph to the middle of the room and taps repeatedly on the mug.
The inhabitants of the couches, chairs and cushions arranged around the fireplace all turn to look, and when he’s sure he has their attention, he puts down the mug on a nearby table and runs a hand through his hair.
“There’s something I want to say,” he says, uncomfortably loud in the now-silent room. “A few things, actually. Fuck, I wish I’d written something down.”
“Take your time,” Maria says.
“Okay. Thank you. Okay.” He coughs. “Okay. First of all, you’re all terrible people, you know that? Just awful.” A few people laugh. “No, I mean it! You took me away from everything I knew, everything I was, my whole future, and never once considered that I might have wanted to keep being a miserable piece of shit. You didn’t ask me if I would prefer to live a life of cruelty and drudgery, no, you had to kidnap me and bring me to this awful, awful place.” He smiles. “You’re all terrible. Especially you, Maria,” he adds. Maria blows him a kiss; he pretends to catch it and put it in his pocket. “Now, I’m aware that when I talk, I tend to, uh, go on a bit.”
“A bit?” Maria yells.
“Yes, thank you, my benevolent and loving sponsor. You know—” he turns slightly, to address everyone else, “—she once accused me of trying to filibuster lunch. Can you believe her cruelty? So. I talk. With that in mind, and because I’m getting very sleepy, and because me and my girlfriend, I think you know her, the lovely Stephanie—” Steph waves, and a handful of cheers and whistles come from the women on the couches, “—have our concrete underground bedrooms to return to… I’m going to make this quick. Thank you, Maria. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for never giving up on me. And thank you for the opportunity to start again. Fuck you for making me do it in heels; I’ve been watching Steph all night and that shit looks hard.”
Someone shouts, “You get used to them!”
“But thank you, Maria. If I have to have a sister, I’m glad it’s you.”
“Love you, too,” Maria shouts.
He bows, as deeply as he can, and when he rises he leans into Steph, to steady himself, to keep himself balanced for the final thing he wants to say. And he has to say it, because he needs it to be real, to be known by everyone.
“I’ve had a wonderful night tonight,” he says. “And the only reason I’m sad is because it has to end. The food’s been great, the company’s been wonderful, and all sorts of lovely people have given me their time and their help. It’s impossible for me not to feel good, after all that. So. Ladies and others, Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas. For the last time ever, I’ve been Aaron.”
Notes:
The Sisters of Dorley now has a Discord!
Chapter 32: Endless Ascent
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 December 25
Wednesday
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
He’s leaning against the wall at the top of the stairs, just out of sight of the exit to the dining hall, his chest rising and falling a hundred times a minute under his dishevelled tuxedo, his hands twisting around inside each other. Steph takes his hands in hers, steadies them, stills them.
“I’ve got you,” she says, quietly and insistently, keeping her voice calming and steady, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.” She feels his hands clench under hers, and she squeezes them, reinforces the hold she has on him, and it’s that which slows him down for a second. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Oh my God. ‘I’ve been Aaron’? Oh my God. Why did I say that? It’s like a promise, probably legally binding in this twisted fucking place, and tomorrow when everyone’s sober, Maria’s going to come to me and ask me who I am in place of ‘Aaron’—” in her hands, she can feel him trying to do the bunny-ear scare quotes, and it’s so absurd she wants to kiss him, “—and I’m just going to fucking look at her like an idiot; Jesus, Steph, you have to promise me that from now on you’ll psychically detect when I’m about to say something stupid and kick me really, really hard before I have the chance. Just give me the whole surprise orchi; I bet that’d be really distracting.”
“Was it a stupid thing to say?”
“Yes. No. Yes. Fuck.” He shakes ever so slightly, as if containing a shiver in his spine, and chews on his lip for a moment. Then he frees his hands from hers just long enough to offer them to her to hold more normally, and they stand there for a moment together, made mutually small by the tall concrete stairwell. “It’s true that I’m not him any more. Or I don’t think I am. Or I don’t want to be. But wanting’s the same as needing’s the same as being, isn’t it? It is here, anyway. Shit.” He rests his head against the wall. “I’m glad I said it. I believe it. Or I want to believe it— and I’m repeating myself. I just wish I hadn’t said it in front of so many people. That’s a lot of expectations to live up to, especially when I’ve rolled a fucking one and the next square on the Monopoly board is the great big question mark.”
“There’s no question mark on the Monopoly—”
“Yes, there is, Steph! It’s Chance! Jesus, have you never played Monopoly?”
“Not willingly.”
“It’s Chance. And you don’t know what you’re going to get with those. Especially if it’s one of those themed boards, like the one we had at school that was all personalised for a bunch of the worst families in the country.” He shudders again, but this time, judging by the curl of his lip, it’s from disgust.
“We’re getting off topic,” Steph says, and frowns, because she thinks it might have been her fault. The weight of alcohol and food is affecting her judgement: don’t offer Aaron a tangent because he will grasp it with both hands and do dreadful things to it.
“Everyone’s going to expect me to do the next thing,” he says. “To choose a name. Maybe even pronouns. But I don’t know, Steph! I jumped off the cliff and now all I can hear are whooshing sounds and when I hit the ground I’m going to have— Uh, fuck. Not sure about that metaphor,” he adds, with the first hint of a smile Steph’s seen since they left the dining hall.
“No-one’s going to expect you to have a name right away.”
“Yes! Yes, Steph, they are. Did you miss how many stunningly attractive people came up to me tonight to tell me how proud they all are of me? Because I think it was at least thirty. They even got me in the lavs. Couldn’t even piss without some gorgeous woman reaching under the door to give me a thumbs up.”
Steph cocks her head. “Really?”
“I mean, not exactly really. But kinda really. They ambushed me while I was washing my hands. Had to keep washing because it was either that or just stand there and revel in the awkwardness. Steph, I’ve never been so clean.”
“You still don’t have to do it,” Steph says. “Not tonight. Not ever, if you don’t want to.” Is she going to suggest it? Should she? “You can still be Aa—”
“No.”
Steph nods. “Okay.”
“What’s up with giving me a way out? I thought you were on board with Team Feminisation?”
“I don’t know,” she’s forced to admit. “I like it for me. But I think I’ve developed that Dorley thing where I start to instinctively assume it’ll be good for everyone, and I’m trying to push against that, because I know how horrified I was when I really understood what it meant they were going to do to you, and, yeah, the others, but mainly you, and—”
He shuts her up with a kiss. It’s wet and it’s tired and he’s still unsteady on his feet, but it works. She releases his hands so she can loop hers around his back, and for a while all they do is kiss.
“I like that you think about me,” he whispers. He’s smiling, she can tell by the tone of his voice, and—
Wait. Shit. Should she be thinking of him as a he any more? He’s not Aaron; he’s made that clear twice now, even if the prospect of following through is making him nervous. Is now a good time to ask his pronouns? No; she shouldn’t rush him. He’s got to have something here that isn’t coerced.
She’ll just make sure not to refer to him out loud in the third person for the moment, which oughtn’t be hard; unlike him, she’s not in the habit of narrating.
Not out loud, anyway.
“I think about you a lot,” she says, stroking the small of his back. “It came as a bit of a shock, actually, when I realised just how much. Never had someone take up that much space in my head before except Melissa.”
He giggles, and with his cheek pressed against hers she feels it as much as hears it.
“Hey, kids!” someone calls, and when they pull themselves apart it turns out to be Jane, leaning far enough out of the security room that Steph can just about see her around the curve in the stairwell; presumably she’s hanging onto the jamb for dear life. “Are you two going to stand there being adorable all night, or are you going to come keep me company for a bit?”
“We’re really tired,” Steph says.
“I’m lonely,” Jane says, leaning hard on the word and pouting.
“Sure,” Aaron says, and Steph would protest, but she’s in the mood right now to give him whatever he asks for. He holds out his hand for her and she takes it, and a few moments later they’re sitting down at the table in the security room, on which Jane has scattered a pair of laptops, three bottles of wine, and a small pile of tupperware containers, each containing one of the various choices of dessert.
One of the bottles of wine is almost empty.
Jane spots Steph looking, and wordlessly shifts over on the couch; a clinking noise suggests she’s trying inexpertly to hide more bottles. Steph, to be polite, pretends to cough to cover her smile.
“You want some?” Jane asks, and Steph’s still debating whether or not it would be a good idea to say yes when Jane hands her and Aaron a mug each, and then tops hers up with the open bottle, from which she shakes the last drops with the exaggerated care of the reasonably drunk. Perhaps realising she shouldn’t attempt to operate delicate machinery when there are more sober people present, she passes the next bottle of wine to Steph, along with a complicated-looking plastic thing that turns out to be a higher class of bottle opener than Steph’s ever seen before. “You put the thingy on the bottle,” Jane says, miming to demonstrate, “and then turn the other thingy. S’easy.”
Steph, with a little help from Aaron, successfully mates thingy and bottle, turns the other thingy, and pours herself and Aaron half a mug of wine each. They both meet Jane’s expectant toast in the middle of the table.
“Cheers,” she says.
“To arbitrary pagan festivals,” Jane says, and burps.
“Happy Christmas,” Aaron says, and drinks from his mug. On the side it says, next to a 1950s-style illustration of a housewife, Don’t get complacent, lock your man in the basement! Steph’s, meanwhile, says, Eight out of ten doctors recommend FEMINISATION! and adds, in smaller text underneath, The other two are currently unavailable for comment.
“Do you ever feel like the mugs are a hindrance to your mission here?” she asks.
Jane shrugs. “They’ve grown on me.” She turns hers around so Steph can read the slogan, written in cursive: Dorley Hall Spa and Wellness Centre: Feel your troubles float away! “Except,” Jane says, pointing to a faded revision to the text, “instead of ‘troubles’, it says—”
“I got it,” Steph says. “Thanks.”
“Philistine,” Jane says. She drains her mug, fills it again from the bottle Steph opened, and directs a slightly wobbly gaze her way.
“Hey, Jane, are you okay to watch the monitors when you’re…”
“Pissed?” she asks cheerfully when Steph hesitates. “Yeah. It’s fine. The boys are all asleep except for Adam, and Edy’s in with him. And I get relieved in—” she peers at one of the laptops to check the time, “—like forty minutes, so, yeah, it’s all fine.” She frowns under Steph’s scrutiny. “Seriously! It’s fine. They’ve had a big meal and a hot cocoa; they’ll be out until morning. Besides, with even Raph having succumbed to an understandable—” she stumbles over the word, “—distaste for being tased, the boys are practically feminising themselves. No offence, Aaron.”
Clearly Jane’s not been watching the cameras in the dining hall, then. Aaron says, carefully, “I’m not using that name any more.”
Jane’s delighted. She slams her mug down on the table and leans towards him. “Really? Really? That’s— that’s— that fucking rules, kid. You know how long it took me to get there? To see the bleeding obvious? Too long.” She falls abruptly back into the couch cushion, looking away. “Too fucking long.” It takes a moment before she energises herself again. “Hey, you got a new name yet?”
He tenses. “Haven’t got that far.”
Jane snorts. “There’s no rush. If you like we can do what Shahida and Melissa do with each other: call you by your initial. Aren’t they cute, by the way?”
“You want to call me ‘A’?” Aaron asks. “Like, ‘Ayyy’? That sounds…”
“Like you’re the Fonz,” Jane supplies, nodding. “Good point.”
“What’s ‘the Fonz’?” Steph says.
“Christ,” Jane says. “You’re both so young.”
“Sorry.”
“Not your fault. And hey, the-inmate-formerly-known-as-Aaron—” she salutes him with her mug, “—congrats on getting here so fast. I’m going to be waiting on Raph for at least another three months. Probably a lot longer.” Silent for a second, she drinks deeply before continuing. “Don’t suppose you could persuade him of the benefits of being a girl, could you? The joy of sex change? I know he’ll get there in the end — I did — but he’s going to take a long time about it, and it’ll only make him miserable. Sorry,” she adds, before anyone can reply. “Not a serious question. He’s me and I’m him and I was a stubborn, stupid little boy. Too attached to a manhood that was all promises and no… no kindness.”
“Jane—”
“I heard you, Steph,” she continues. “Before. On the stairs. Talking about the programme. You said you were all conflicted and shit. And I get it. God, I get it. But I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to be alone like I was. And that doesn’t mean we—” she points from herself to Aaron, “—have exclusive rights to feeling isolated or anything.” She shakes her head, too emphatically; Steph eyeballs her mug and realises she’s had almost half a bottle of wine since they arrived just a few minutes ago. “But there’s a black hole of loneliness that’s being a bad man. That’s failing at being a man. You’re fucking flailing, hurting everyone around you, hurting yourself, and it’s self-sustaining… You’ll just keep going, keep swallowing air until your chest hurts. Your dad’s a man and the guys at school, they’re men, and you want to be like them so much, but nothing you do is enough. And—” she slams her mug down on the table, spilling a little wine, “—there’s a way out! This!” She tugs at her dress, pulls it away from her chest, exposes cleavage and lacy bra. “But you would never think of it on your own and no-one ever tells you about it and everyone you ever knew would say you’re weak for even considering it, but… Fuck, Steph. It’s strength. To choose womanhood, to decide to be different, to accept it and embrace it even when you weren’t destined for it, when it wasn’t meant for you, to rip yourself apart from the inside out because you don’t want to hurt people any more… It’s strength. And it’s worth it. And if we wouldn’t all get arrested for breathing a single word of this outside these walls, I’d be shouting about it with a megaphone.” And she giggles, exhales bubbles into her wine. “Sorry. That was kind of a rant.”
Steph reaches for her. “It’s okay,” she says quietly. “It was a good rant. And I think I needed to hear it. I’ve spent so much time down there, watching everyone be miserable. Watching them get tased and— and beaten, and—”
“Hey,” Aaron says, laying a hand on Steph’s arm, and the contact helps; she’s not sure that without it she could have pushed the image of Declan, bruised and swollen and still fighting, from her mind.
“I know we seem extreme, Steph,” Jane says. “But we deal in extremes. We have only a few years to push back against lifetimes of shit. It’s all compressed, all concentrated. We go hard at them, fast, because we have to. Because it’s the only way.” She drinks again, drains her mug. Doesn’t refill it. Stares into it instead. “Boys are nailed into place as they grow,” she continues. “It’s violent and it’s relentless and it feels like it’ll never end.” She mimes hitting the table with a hammer. “Tik. Tik. Tik. Over and over. You can’t get away from it. You can’t move. And a person like that, something that’s been made so hard, so rigid, so perfectly shaped to exist in one place and one place alone… you gotta fucking whack it a bit to get it out again.” She laughs emptily. “I remember when I first came here, when I woke up in that cell and saw all these women looking at me from the other side of a locked door, I was enraged that I’d allowed myself to be caught and tied down by girls. Because I thought strength was in how hard you swing your fist. Because that’s what I’d been shown my whole life up to that point.” She looks at Aaron, still holding Steph by the arm, and smiles. “Like I said, it took me a long time to get to where you are right now. You should be proud. I know I’m proud of you. And—” she shakes a drunken finger at Aaron, her coordination and diction worsening as her mood lifts, “—don’t think of accepting it as giving in. Because I did that, too. It’s not giving in. It’s… It’s joyful. It’s stepping willingly into the cocoon, even though you understand you might not immediately recognise the woman who emerges.” She snorts and tries to drink from her mug again, discovers it to be empty, and dumps it back on the table.
Steph frowns at her. “Are you okay, Jane?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks for asking. It’s just… I don’t know. I said to Auntie Ashley that Raph’d be my last, at least for a while, and I’m feeling better and better about that decision. Just because I believe in this place, doesn’t make it any more fun to get through this first year. I don’t know; maybe I’ll change my mind when young Raphael becomes more like you two.” And then she slaps the table with an open palm, suddenly enough to make Steph jump. “Three months! Incredible.”
“It’s not that incredible,” Aaron says.
“It is.” Jane nods to herself. “More wine? More wine.”
“Is that wise?” Steph can’t help asking.
“I’m getting mood-swingy,” Jane replies, pouring herself a full mug, “and I’m pouring my heart out to two bloody basement dwellers. Unique circumstances or no, you’re still under my care and I need to be the responsible adult here.”
“And that means drinking more?” Aaron asks.
“I need to get back to happy-drunk. That way I’ll stop thinking of myself as a failure because Maria and Steph got you to stage… three? four? Stage whateverthefuck in three months while I’ve only just got Raph out of the cells.”
“You’re not a failure,” Steph says.
“And,” Aaron says, gesturing with his mug, “I don’t even know how I got to whatever stage I’m at. I didn’t think I was going fast. But everyone says I got here quick, so I guess I have to think about it.” Like Jane, he drinks to give himself time. “Three months ago, if you’d asked me if I’d ever thought about being a girl, I’d have been terrified I was being set up for something. I’d have looked for the hidden cameras. And— Yes,” he adds, in response to Jane jerking a thumb towards the cornice, “I can see the cameras here, Jane. That’s not the point.”
He rests his mug long enough on the table for Jane to fill it up. “What’s the point, then?” she asks.
He thinks for a moment, and then looks around, from Steph to Jane and then to the laptops, which are displaying the camera feeds from various rooms in the lower basement. “That,” he says, pointing to them.
Jane cranes her neck to see the screen, wondering what he’s pointing at. “What?”
“That!” He jabs at the screen with slightly too much exuberance and tips the laptop over. He rights it. “Sorry. I mean, look at the feeds. This is weird, by the way; getting to see behind the curtain.”
“Welcome to my world,” Steph mutters, but quietly, because she doesn’t want to interrupt his flow.
“Actually, the cells have curtains now,” Jane observes, clearly on her way back to happy-drunk.
“Nice,” Aaron says. “No, my point is, that’s been my world. Everything you see on those cameras.” He drinks another half-mug of wine. “And ’normal’, it’s locally defined, right? Well, who do I spend all my time with? Can’t fucking stand most of the boys, and conveniently enough they mostly hate me, too, so it was just me and Steph. Except when it was, uh, just me. But after I stopped wanting to, you know, die, it was me and Steph. And then—” he starts counting on his fingers, “—it was me and Steph and Maria and Pippa, and then Edy and Yasmin and you and Harm and Monica and Pam. All of us in that tiny space. My whole world. And then, finally, I get to leave it, to go strut my stuff somewhere else, and it’s more girls and nonbinary people and… Shit, Jane; everyone I know now is like you! And you all came through here and you’re all telling me how much better it is on the other side, and you’re all living it, too, and that’s the fucking thing: around here, being a girl, becoming a girl, it’s normal. It’d be stupid not to try it.” Jane tops up his mug again. “And if it doesn’t work out for me,” he continues, swilling the contents around, “then what have I lost? Yes, okay, my balls, fine, but you don’t need them to be a man, and besides, it’s not like I haven’t got my money’s worth out of them. Probably emptied them out so often the insides look like dehydrated grapefruits.”
Steph hugs him. She couldn’t not, after that. “You think you might want to be a man again?” she asks. Jane glares at her, like it’s the wrong question to ask in Dorley.
“I don’t know,” he says, leaning into Steph’s embrace. “It’s not like I ever wanted to be one before. It was just what I was. Never wanted to be a woman, either,” he adds quickly. “But I was shit at masculinity, so I can see the logic in giving femininity a try.”
“And what’s happening to you… It doesn’t bother you any more?”
“Oh, it still bothers me. Everything bothers me. Always has. But I meant what I said upstairs.” He kisses her and returns to his drink. “Like, it’s complicated as hell, but I meant it.”
Jane sits up from her slouch. “What are you two talking about?”
“She asked me if I want to be a girl,” Aaron says. “I said yes. Kind of. I said I want to want to be a girl. Like, I don’t want it the way she does. The way she is. I just… I want a future. I want a second chance. Or, to be honest, a twentieth chance, but I want to actually do something with this one. And I realised I’m not afraid of womanhood, intrinsically. Yeah, I’m scared of, you know, fucking it up, of trying to be a woman and doing it badly, but the idea of changing myself… The more I think about it, the more comfortable with it I am. And that’s new, I think. Yeah. It’s new. I always used to be scared of being associated with womanhood, you know, like any guy. Especially like any small guy. Because that’s one of the ways they get you, isn’t it?” He’s retreating into himself as he speaks, so Steph rubs his spine gently. Reminds him of her presence and her affection. “Like you said, Jane, it’s all part of hammering in the nail. You tell a small guy he’s like a girl and that’s horrifying, because that’s something guys aren’t supposed to be. But, in the end, it’s just another excuse for them to hurt you. And that’s another part of it.” He shakes his head, smiles, leans into Steph again. “I see women like you, Jane. Especially Maria, because she’s, you know, special, but you and the others. Being around you and knowing you did the thing guys aren’t supposed to do, and you’re happy, and no-one around you is using it as an excuse to hurt you… Like I said: normal is locally defined. I get recalibrated just from being here, from seeing the things I’ve seen.”
“That’s the idea.” It’s Edy, leaning against the door, looking tired but still beautifully dressed in her fitted skirt and blouse. She’s got the matching jacket hung by one finger over her shoulder and she’s smiling at the three of them. “That’s how it works.”
“S’true,” Jane says, shuffling up on the couch so Edy can sit down. “I got peer-pressured into being a girl.” Steph fails to hide her laugh at Jane’s glib description of her involuntary reassignment. “I did!” Jane insists. “Edy said it was cool.”
“And I was right. How are you doing, dear?” Edy directs this to Aaron. “I know they can be a bit much,” she says, pointing upwards, “all of them at once, but they mean well.”
Aaron smiles at her. “M’fine,” he says. He’s got that exhausted aura he sometimes gets when he’s talked for a long time, when he’s emptied out the cache of words that’s been building up inside his brain, and combined with the wine it’s clearly making him even more sleepy than he already was. “Need to pick a name,” he adds, after a pause.
“There’s a file on the network if you need ideas.”
He shakes his head. “I’ve got ideas.” He has? That’s… interesting. How long has he been thinking about names?
Edy pats his hand. “Take your time. It’s a big decision.”
“You don’t have to stick with the first name you think of,” Jane says.
“And you don’t need to pick one that’s almost the same as your old one, either.”
“Hey!” Steph says, and she’s only half-joking.
“You’re a special case, dear,” Edy says. “Most of us wanted more of a clean break from our old selves.”
“Too fucking true,” Jane mutters.
Edy slaps both hands on her thighs and stands up again. “Well, I’ve got a Maria to return to. Jane, will you be able to stay awake until Charlie comes to relieve you?”
“Oh God, Charlie,” Jane says. “She’s going to bring Nadine and there’s going to be kissing… I saw them go upstairs together earlier and that can only mean they’ve finally gotten over themselves, and—”
“Jane?”
“Oh. Sorry. Yes.”
“Good. Happy Holidays, everyone.”
“Hey, Edy,” Aaron says, standing up and walking unsteadily over to her. “Can you tell Maria, Merry Christmas? From, uh, me?”
Edy gathers Aaron into her arms and kisses him lightly on the forehead. “Of course, sweetie,” she says.
* * *
She’s only barely aware of the crackle of the fire and the murmur of voices because she feels as safe and as warm as ever she has; comfortable enough that when someone taps her on the side of the head and whispers, “Bedtime, sleepyhead,” Melissa very nearly swats at the person who disturbed her before she opens her eyes and discovers Shahida, sat next to her and leaning in, just inches from her face.
“What time is it?” Melissa asks, because it’s the simplest and safest question she can think of, all the others being variants on why are you so close to me right now?
“Late,” Shahida says.
“Like one o’clock,” Nell says.
Ah, yes; Nell. For a moment, Melissa remembers Nell as she used to be: perpetually angry, unconsciously intimidating and, when she wanted to be, actively threatening. Now, sitting with her friend group and so close to the fire that the soft red light outlines her bare shoulders and arms, glows through her fingers and glitters in her artfully arranged hair, she’s smaller and more approachable, in a way that has nothing to do with her size. Nell’s no longer imposing herself on the world, no longer seeking to push her way through it, in the manner that came most naturally to her and which, to hear the other girls tell, she hadn’t entirely abandoned in her new life. She and Melissa spoke at length a few hours ago — small talk about their lives after the programme, mostly — and Melissa was pleased to find her at peace.
A recent development, Nell had said, and one that came at great cost to her pride. Something to do with losing her temper with the second-year girl she’d been sponsoring.
“Thanks, Nell,” Melissa says.
“Late,” Shahida repeats, standing up from the couch and extending her hand. Melissa takes it but doesn’t use her friend for leverage. Instead she pushes up from the couch with her other hand, maintaining her balance with coordination hard-won from years spent acclimating to heels.
She must have slept through the majority of people leaving for bed; Bea and her associates are nowhere to be seen, and the lights in the kitchen are too low for them to be just out of sight; Monica and her group have mostly vanished, too. Maria finger-waves from her armchair; she’s probably waiting for Edy to return from whatever it was she was going to do with her charge… Adam or Eddie or something. For now, anyway. There hasn’t seemed much point in learning any boy names, so she hasn’t bothered; Aaron’s denouncement of their name tonight was nicely vindicating.
“Em,” Shahida says insistently, and Melissa realises she’s been standing there, looking roughly in Maria’s direction, for a little too long.
“Sorry,” she says, smiling apologetically at Maria. “Tired.”
“No shit,” Shahida says, giggling.
“Hey, Liss,” Nell says, half-standing, “can I grab you for a sec?”
“Oh,” Melissa says, “sure.”
“I’ll give you some space,” Shy whispers, and with a hand in the small of Melissa’s back gives her a little push towards Nell’s group, who are standing to meet her.
“Hey again,” Autumn says, leaning in for a cheek kiss. Tash, standing farther back, just waves.
“I wanted to thank you,” Nell says. “Not just for letting me apologise.”
“Again,” Tash interjects, nudging Nell with their elbow.
“Yes, thank you, Tash. It’s been pointed out,” Nell continues with a weary smile, “that I’ve swapped ‘rage-outs’ for apologies. Even if that’s true—” and she glares at Tash, “—I still think it’s healthier.”
“Just be you, Nell.”
“Easier said than done.” Nell turns back to Melissa. “But that’s why I wanted to thank you. I realised I never moved on from here. From there, actually.” She points downwards. “I’ve been carrying a lot of guilt.”
“And a lot of drink,” Tash whispers.
“Tonight, yes. But getting to talk to you, Liss, about boring, normal stuff, about work and shoes and shit… I know it’s nothing deep or anything, and nothing I don’t talk about with my other friends… But I hurt you, Liss. And you could have just accepted my apology and walked away, and that would have been your right. But you talked to me. Made me feel good about myself.”
Melissa smiles. “You’re fun to talk to, Nell,” she says. “And you don’t seem much like you used to, to me. Do you, uh, want to add me on Consensus?”
“Really? Is that okay?”
“I want to keep up with you. All of you,” Melissa adds, looking from Tash to Autumn, before meeting Nell’s eyes again. “You’re not the only one who never actually moved on.”
They share hugs and best wishes and when Melissa leaves the group and heads for the staircase, where Shahida’s waiting for her in the doorway, talking with Edy, she hears Tash whisper, “Proud of you,” to Nell, and the sounds of the three of them sharing another hug, and she’s glad she could help, in whatever small way she did.
She never would have expected it, but she’s happy she came home to Dorley Hall.
* * *
“Stairs,” Steph says, looking down at them.
“Stairs?” Aaron asks, looking at Steph.
“Lots of them,” Steph clarifies.
“Shoes,” Aaron suggests.
“What?”
“Shoes!”
“I don’t— What?”
“Take them off?”
“Oh,” Steph says. “Right. Steady me?”
They finished off the wine between them, and while, yes, there had been three of them, there had also been three bottles of wine on the table and one more, half-full and stoppered, between the couch cushions, and Jane’s contributions had slowed down significantly, leaving Steph and Aaron to pick up the slack. Which, Steph now wishes, looking down at a flight of concrete stairs that has never seemed so steep or to curve at such a sharp angle, she had not done.
Aaron — she’s not going to call him A in her head, nor any variation on it, especially not now, when she has trouble thinking clearly — moves so he’s standing behind her, and then he grabs her around the middle with both arms. She’s not convinced she’s actually any safer that way, and in fact she’s pretty certain that if she tips over with him holding her like this they’ll both go crashing down, but expressing an idea as complex as perhaps just hold my hand, dumbass, is beyond her, so she puts her trust in a God who wouldn’t let her survive three months in an underground concrete feminisation hole just to die on the stairs, and hooks her boots off her feet as quickly as she can. Aaron releases her, and she hands him one of the boots for safe keeping.
He cradles it like a baby for some reason, and she laughs at him, doubling over undignified and unsteady, and he has to grab at her to stop her from toppling over, the way she feared she would.
“Shit,” she comments.
“Right?” he agrees.
They link arms — Aaron still protectively carrying the boot — and take the stairs one step at a time.
“Waaaaaaaaait,” Aaron says, before she presses her thumb against the lock at the bottom of the stairs. “Wait.”
Steph looks patiently at him.
“Wait,” Aaron says again.
She waits.
“Do you…?” he starts, and frowns, leans against the wall. His shirt is almost completely unbuttoned now, and the V of smooth skin Steph can see is distracting enough to completely derail her attempt to guess what he’s trying to say. So she looks, and waits for his thoughts to cohere. “The doors,” he says eventually.
“The doors?”
“Cellar door,” he says, forming his lips around the words like he’s at the dentist and he’s just been given anaesthetic.
Steph frowns at him. “Not a cellar,” she says. “Basement. Cellars are smaller.” A memory returns to her; a school field trip. “Cellars have fruit. Apples. And sometimes Catholics.” She laughs. “‘Priest hole’. Gross.”
“Cellar door,” Aaron repeats. “It’s euphonic.”
“Me-phonic?”
“Yes.” Aaron nods seriously. “No. I had a thought.”
“About cellars?”
“About doors. Doors… Oh! Yes. Can you lock them?”
“S’already locked.”
“Not this one.” He waves at the door in front of them, but he’s too enthusiastic about it, and he catches a knuckle on the concrete wall. “Ow. I meab ’uh ’edroob ’oorz.”
“Take your thumb out of your mouth,” Steph says, taking care over every syllable, “and try again.”
“Sorry.” Aaron removes his bruised thumb, shakes it as if that might help somehow, and tries again. “I mean, the bedroom doors.”
“What about them?”
“Can you lock them? On your phone?
“Oh. Yes.” Steph pats at her side for the second or two it takes her to recall something important. “I don’t have my phone.”
Before Aaron can do anything more to reply than knot his eyebrows, a speaker somewhere overhead clicks on, and Jane says, in the unsubtle whisper of someone who’s had far too much wine, “I know what she means, Steph. I’ve locked the doors and I’ll keep them locked until you two are safely hidden away again.”
Aaron looks up at the ceiling. “Thank you!”
“I’m confused,” Steph admits. She manages to hit the thumb pad for the lock on her third try, and the two of them proceed slowly into the main corridor.
“Look at us! You’re in a dress. A fancy dress.” The tricky sibilants have reduced him to hissing. “You want someone to see you in it?”
“Oh. Oh! Right.” Steph’s heart feels light for just a moment, and then she imagines Raph emerging from his room at exactly the wrong moment and seeing them, dressed like James Bond’s hotter sister and the Bond girl she stole from him, swanning down the corridor.
She laughs again, and Aaron has to hold her up again.
It’s probably a minute later — or perhaps five; whenever Steph closes her eyes to blink it feels like an arbitrary amount of time passes — when she feels sensible enough to feel her way along towards the bedroom corridor, although she’s past Aaron’s ability to hold her up and is relying almost entirely on the wall for support. Thankfully there’s only one more set of main doors to navigate, and she bounces off the far wall as she staggers towards the door lock, finding purchase on the concrete on her second bounce and resting there for a grateful moment.
On her right, the double doors into the bedroom corridor, currently closed.
Ahead of her, the main corridor, leading to the common room, the lunch room, and the stairs they’d just come down. It’s currently swaying slightly.
On her left, the double doors into the bathroom, currently closed. In the glass inset, Adam looks out at both of them, wide-eyed, confused. He’s pushing on a door which ought, according to precedent, open easily for him.
“Shit,” Aaron says.
Steph can’t find a more suitable word than that, so she nods her agreement and lets the sudden surge of adrenaline push through the alcoholic haze. She covers the biometric sensor with her body, so Adam won’t see her use it, reasoning that while all three of them can normally open these doors with their thumbprints, she doesn’t want Adam wondering why she can operate them right now and he can’t. It takes a second, because she’s trying not to look like she’s doing what she’s actually doing, but she gets the doors open and she and Aaron walk through quickly, more sure on their feet than they have been in a while. Into Steph’s bedroom they tumble, with Steph deciding that whatever Adam gets told about her dress and Aaron’s tux is for Edy to decide, that it is fundamentally not her responsibility and thus nothing she has to worry about, and she’s happily removed and hung her dress and thrown her boots into the corner before the speaker over her bed clicks on and Jane says, “Whoops.”
“This place is a shitshow,” Steph says, and falls awkwardly onto the bed. She’s asleep before she’s finished properly arranging the pillows.
* * *
He knows he’s not quite as drunk as Steph. Or perhaps he is but he’s better at handling it. Or perhaps he’s burned more of it off, as his mood has pingponged from clarity to extreme anxiety and back again. Whichever; he’s not quite so inclined to immediately pass out.
He has to agree with her final words of the night, though: this place really is a shitshow. Jane should have checked the boys were all in their rooms before locking the doors; before letting them go downstairs in the first place! And she probably would have, had she not put away fuck knows how much wine. But then, it is the holiday, and they don’t usually have guests from below at the Christmas Eve dinner, so there’s no plan in place. There probably would have been more sponsors in the security room, or someone would have had a laptop up at their dinner table, or something. A gap in protocol, then.
A giggle escapes before he can stop it, because he’s wondering how he would sound right now if he tried to say ‘lapse’. His mind’s working quite a lot better than his mouth. For once, he can imagine Maria saying.
And then he wonders when he started making excuses for the poor security of his kidnappers, and he has to try not to laugh all over again.
It’s still tricky to move around, though, and so he undresses carefully and quietly, hanging the remains of his tuxedo up next to Steph’s dress. With the wardrobe door open and the full-length mirror unavoidably exposed, he catches a glimpse of himself as he steps away.
Sports bra. Underpants that aren’t exactly boxers — there’s no fly — but aren’t anything he’d describe as knickers, either. Maybe Maria had them made special. Maybe they have loads of them in stock, waiting for some tipping point to switch out everyone’s underwear; it’ll happen at the same time as the sports bras get a bit racier and the t-shirts get a little more low-cut and the jogging trousers they’ve all been lounging around in for the last three months get a little more… yoga pants-ish. Slowly but surely acclimating the lot of them to clothes that are more and more like ordinary women’s clothes, like boiling frogs, if the frogs were being boiled in a big vat of estrogen and the scientists were taking them out one by one to put them in little green frog dresses and make them learn how to do frog makeup and ribbit in a higher pitch—
Shut up and look at yourself.
Sports bra. Loose underpants. And the definite suggestion of hips. No different to how he looked this morning, if you don’t count the tired eyes and the knee that’s wobbling from the effort of standing so still for so long under the influence of so much wine and so much turkey and half a fork of gateaux.
No different, except he’s not Aaron any more.
So who is he?
Well, maybe he’s the person he can see.
“This is me,” he whispers, refusing to look away from the androgynous figure in the mirror. “This is me. This is who I am. This is me. I am…”
He can’t say it, not out loud, not yet, but in the quietest part of his mind, he thinks the name he’s been toying with.
* * *
The first she sees of Val she’s peeling potatoes in a dark green pinafore with her hair up and Jesus H Christ on a fucking unicycle, how does the bloody woman always look so immaculate? Because Frankie looks like shit warmed up, left out to cool and then reheated and served with a side order of piss, and she knows she does because she had to look at her saggy skin and under-eye shadow in the mirror while she brushed out her hair this morning. It annoys and amuses her in equal measure that she has so much to learn about femininity, womanhood and grace under pressure from someone whose life makes Frankie’s look like a carefree gallop through a field of fucking daisies.
“Good morning, Frances,” Val says, delicately peeling another potato in one continuous swipe, and flicking the peel away with her little finger such that it lands dead centre in a pile of similar detritus with an accuracy that would, in a just world, qualify her for the Olympics. “You look dreadful.”
“Thank you, m’dear,” Frances says, leaning on the doorjamb, safely out of reach. Not that Val’s going to lunge at her with a potato peeler or anything — probably not, at least not until they’re safely out of this place and Val has other people to turn to, people who were never even slightly complicit in her torture and imprisonment — but around here you have to act like you’re being watched until you know for certain you aren’t, and Frances and the Silver River guys are under instruction not to be too relaxed around Valérie Barbier.
“Having fun without me?” Val asks, flicking away another peel.
“Never you mind.”
Val doesn’t know it, not yet, but Frankie was up half the night with Trevor as he came down from a serious assault on his sanity, helping him deal with the twin gutshots of dysphoria and despair, all the while trying not to fuck him up even further than he already is, and God fucking damn if it wasn’t a tricky balancing act to pull off. She’s not sure she managed it, not at all, but Val’s right, they need him, because without him they’re a fifty-three-year-old maid and an even older woman who most recently worked in dog rescue; without him they have no combat skills whatsoever, and if they were up against just Dorothy that wouldn’t be a problem but it’s a foregone fucking conclusion that their usual blend of bitterness, pent-up rage and kitchen implements would land like a wet sponge on the Silver River soldiers. They need someone who can fight.
Just have to hope, then. Hope that his psyche doesn’t completely collapse until they can get him somewhere that can help him. Hope that his giant tits don’t get in the way of whatever weapon he might eventually bring to bear on Dorothy, Callum and Jake.
The thought of Dorothy with a bullet in her brain is one she likes to entertain, from time to time.
“You need something?” Val says, curling her upper lip and propping a hand on her hip and behaving very much as if she can’t stand the sight of Frankie, and the exciting thing is, Frankie has no idea how much of that is pretend. Of course, Frankie has power over Valérie here, same as she always did, but Val knows she won’t use it and is thus free to express herself as she wishes around her.
Frankie’s pretty sure Val knows, anyway. She should check later. For now, though, there’s business to attend to.
“Came to tell you we have two more guests for Christmas dinner. Plus security detail, but you don’t need to worry about them; they’ll have got their mums to pack them a nice turkey sandwich each.”
Curiosity burns in Val’s face. “In that case, we will need more potatoes,” she says. “Come to the pantry with me.”
“You’re the boss,” Frankie says, and follows her down the short, dark corridor to the pantry. It always smells a little of the rat poison Val puts down in the corners of the skirting board, but it’s quiet and it’s remote and, crucially, neither it nor the stretch of hallway just outside is wired for sound or video. “You okay, Val?” she asks, when she’s sure they’re out of range of the microphones in the kitchen.
“I am tired,” Val says, leaning against one of the shelves. “But not, I think, as tired as you.”
“Trev kept me up. Lad’s having a crisis. Did my best.”
“I do not remember Dee—” Val knots her eyebrows, gently thumps the shelf, and tries again. “I do not remember Béatrice having many complimentary things to say about your counselling technique.”
“Helped her escape though, didn’t I?” Frankie says. It doesn’t hurt to remind Val of this every so often. “Look, I’ve seen as many girls come and go as you have; you know it’s possible to put someone together long enough to get a bit of fight out of them. And if he falls apart after—”
“—which he will—”
“—we can give him to Bea’s girls, or to Elle Lambert, or back to Peckinville. He can have room and board and all the testosterone he can inject. Might even be able to get him some nice prosthetic bollocks. Everything restored but his fertility. And his old nose.”
Val frowns at this. She reacts much the same way every time Frankie reminds her that among their goals is to salvage Trevor’s manhood; Val doesn’t like being reminded that the same option would be open to her, too. A younger Frankie might have been surprised at one of their forcibly reassigned men deigning not to leap at the chance to go back, but as she’s aged she’s learned that continuity has its own comfort. Val probably could become a guy again, if she really worked at it, but she’s more Val than she is Vincent by a factor of about fifty.
Besides, the more time Frankie’s spent with her, the more Valérie has seemed like, well, Valérie. She’s a trapped, lonely, frustrated and bitter woman, but she’s a fucking woman. More so, probably, than Frankie.
Funny thing, gender. People’re so wedded to the idea that there are only two, but even if you accept that premise, the closer you look, the more anomalies you find, beautiful and strange and infinite in variety. If Frankie could go back she’d have so much to tell her younger self, even if the only practical benefit would have been to make her a kinder monster.
“We have to get him out, first,” Val says.
“We will,” Frankie says firmly. “I told him as much. We’ll all get out, I said, with all our bits and pieces intact. Well, with my bits and pieces, perhaps, but not—”
Val interrupts her with a laugh. “My ‘pieces’ are long gone and my ‘bit’ is barely worthy of the name.”
Frankie slaps her thigh. “I knew you’d appreciate that line! Trev got mad at me for it.”
“Trevor,” Val says, “is too new to this life to appreciate how much more comfortable underwear is to wear when you do not have to account for a pair of balls.”
“So, in a way,” Frankie says, “we did you a favour.”
Valérie brandishes the potato peeler. “I’m still armed, Frances.”
“Yeah, but I bet your wrist is still sore from peeling all those potatoes.”
“Hmm.” Shrugging, Val returns the peeler to the pocket of her pinny. “What of these new guests?”
“Alistair and Henrietta Smyth-Farrow. Yeah, the old man’s kids.”
Val’s frown deepens. “I thought he cut them out of his will. And spent almost all the money that remained.”
“Yeah,” Frankie says, nodding, “me too. Dunno where they’re getting the funding, but Dotty says they’re trying to shove their squeaky clean fingers in a lot of their daddy’s old pies, not just what’s left of the old fanny farm.”
“Are they coming back for good? Are they reclaiming the manor?”
“Dotty says no. Based in the States, usually, she says. Reading between the lines, they’re connected to the fundies somehow, so maybe that’s where the money’s coming from.”
“‘Fundies’?”
“Fundamentalist Christians. You know: evangelicals. Happy-clappy bible-thumpers who’re only truly happy when they’re diddling kids.”
“And they would be involved with Silver River and Dorothy, why, exactly?”
“Beats me. Could be they want in. Could be they spotted some line of cash they want to exploit or withdraw. Could just be a coincidence they’re coming here, now, when you and I and Trev and Declan are all here.”
“Frances,” Val says urgently, “when I was a teenager, visiting England with my parents, and saw the same man on two different street corners on two different nights, I dismissed it as a coincidence, too. And then my family was murdered and I was mutilated. I don’t like coincidences. Coincidences kill.”
Frankie nods. She wants to comfort her; she doesn’t dare. “I’ll find out what I can,” she says.
* * *
Edy wakes them in the morning with a knock on the door and a tray with two bottles of water, two plates of hot toaster pastries and a packet of cocodamol, and of all of it Steph’s most pleased to see the painkillers because just the act of sitting up in bed is enough to make the room spin. Edy places the tray quietly on the bedside table, waits for confirmation that Aaron — or whoever he is now — is awake, too, and then says, “As far as Adam knows, you had a drink with Maria and Pippa in the lunch room late last night, and you dressed up a bit for fun, in clothes we provided. It helps that he was tired and the lights were dimmed for the night, so he didn’t see you very clearly. And he already knows Steph’s embraced womanhood; he says he doesn’t think it’s too weird that you’re in a dress already, and we’re working on his… antipathy towards trans people.”
Aaron sits up, and Steph feels his arm encircle her from behind. “He has an ‘antipathy’? Edy, is he safe? Is it safe for Steph to be around him?”
“He’s safe. You both know something of his history, I think.” Steph nods, and Edy continues, “He never wanted to hurt anyone. Not truly. But he trusted people he shouldn’t have. Ultimately, he just… did what he was told.”
“Why’s he here?” Aaron asks. “If he’s not bad, why’s he here?”
Edy shrugs. “Who else do I know with the resources to pull someone out of a violent and oppressive environment, to give them a new identity, to keep them safe from their tormentors? Besides…” Steph feels a pressure on her back and realises that Edy’s taken Aaron’s hand. “He was bad. That stuff, those people, the things they claim to believe, it all gets into your head. You say things, do things. It doesn’t matter that you feel bad about wielding the knife if you still use it.” She lets Aaron go and stands up, shaking her limbs as she does so, as if purging the conversation from her body. “So that’s your story, okay? You had a drink, you dressed up, your sponsors were there.”
“Okay,” they both say.
“Okay.” Edy closes her eyes for a moment. “Sorry to wake you so early, but Adam was up early and so I was up early and then I needed to come up with a story on the fly and… Ugh. Don’t think I’ve been up this early on Christmas morning since I was a kid.”
“Presents under the tree?” Steph asks.
“No,” Edy says emphatically. “Look, I’m going back to bed. We’re running a small staff right now, but numbers’ll start picking up after ten. Ping the girls in the security room if you need anything.”
“Who’s on duty?”
“Nell just took over. Rabia’s with her. Try not to bother them unless you really need them, though. They both look like I feel.”
Steph nods. “Okay. Sleep well, Edy. Again.”
Edy smiles lightly. “You’d better bloody well believe I will.”
She closes the door just as gently on her way out, but while Aaron settles back down in the bed, Steph stays propped up, listening to what sound like muffled voices in the corridor. She’s not, therefore, surprised when there’s another knock on her door.
It’d be nice to pretend she’s not in, but where else would she be?
And then Adam announces himself with another knock, says, “It’s Adam,” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, like his reserved attitude prevents him even from raising his voice, and Steph would laugh but she remembers, again, how he was when she first arrived: argumentative and combative. Seemed to believe the weirdest things. Is all that still there, still motivating him, or was it merely a defence mechanism he was grateful to drop?
Either way, she has to get up to let him in. And, she realises, as she throws the covers off of her and a grumbling Aaron entirely, they should probably get dressed.
“Can’t we just say we’re not home?” Aaron mumbles.
Steph kisses him. “Where would we be?”
“I’d like to see Alaska.”
“One day. Get dressed?” In the direction of the door, Steph says, “Two minutes, Adam.”
“Okay,” comes the quiet reply.
She selects joggers and t-shirts for them both. It’s a shame to put the drab basement clothes back on, but she doesn’t want to challenge Adam too much this morning, not if he has questions, not if he might still, in some way Edy hasn’t predicted, be volatile. She said he comes from ‘a violent and oppressive environment’; suddenly Steph wonders if, back in November, Adam reacted with such revulsion to seeing Maria hurt because he’d seen such things before.
Or because he’d been made to do such things before.
She ties a hoodie around her waist and billows out the t-shirt a bit, though, because she doesn’t want to have no figure, and she smiles when she sees Aaron copying her. His answer from last night comes back to her, and she wants to hug him, to kiss him, to take him back to bed and show him just how good being a girl can be, but the two of them have responsibilities to the other occupants of the basement under Dorley Hall, even if she’d rather they didn’t.
She settles for kissing him again.
“Who do you want to be, to him?” she asks quietly.
“Um,” he says, “rain check?”
When she opens the door, Adam’s waiting for them, standing alone in the middle of the hallway and contriving somehow to look smaller than he ought; a feat, considering that of the three of them he’s tallest by several centimetres. The diet and the testosterone suppression have had a dramatic effect on him, though: he’s probably slimmer than Steph, if she’s reading his figure right through the bulky, baggy clothes he’s chosen.
“Hey, Adam,” she says.
“Hi, Steph,” he says. “Hi, Aaron.”
Steph holds her breath. Aaron says, “Hi, Adam,” and she releases it. Already she resents hearing Aaron’s old name in someone else’s mouth. It’s bad enough having to use it inside her head.
God, how is he even going to broach the subject of his name with the boys? Is he even going to? And why can’t they get five minutes alone, sober and awake to bloody talk about it?
Shitty timing.
“May I come in?” Adam asks.
“Let’s go to the common room,” Aaron suggests. He’s holding Edy’s breakfast tray — though he’s pocketed the painkillers — and he’s nudging Steph from behind.
“Yeah,” Steph says. “Let’s.”
At least Adam doesn’t comment on the fact that they obviously slept together. Yes, he knows they’re a couple and he’s seen them enter and leave each other’s rooms a lot, but the messy sheets on the bed and the lack of any matching bedding on the floor comprise an answer to a question Adam has so far preferred not to ask. In the common room they arrange themselves on the couches. Aaron passes Adam a water bottle and a toaster pastry. Steph’s not sure, but she thinks she hears Adam whisper grace over his Pop Tart.
There’s an extended silence as they eat, dividing breakfast between them. Aaron half-empties the water bottle he kept hold of, and gives it to Steph to finish.
God, she could just fall asleep right here…
“Thank you for the food,” Adam says.
“Y’welcome,” Steph mumbles.
“Merry Christmas,” Aaron says.
Another silence, during which Steph struggles to stay awake. She manages it solely because Aaron, done with his breakfast, is idly running a finger around on her knee, sketching out nothing in particular, and she knows that if she falls asleep she’ll regret missing any of this new, more touchy Aaron.
…or whoever he will be from now on!
“You weren’t in the lunch room last night,” Adam says.
Steph half misses it. “Hmm?”
“We were,” Aaron says.
“You weren’t,” Adam insists. “Edy told me you were, but she was tired from the party and… You were up there, weren’t you? With her and Maria and the others?”
Aaron looks significantly at Steph, and shrugs when she meets his eyes.
“I won’t be angry with her,” Adam says. “If Edy lied, I won’t be angry. I know she has to… to tell me stories to help me get through this. I know there are things I can’t know yet, because I’m not ready.” He’s hugging his knees, but he’s not curled himself up on the couch, like he does when he’s protecting himself. He seems open. “I have her promise, and that’s all I need.”
“Her promise?” Aaron asks.
“She promised to take care of me. To protect me. To help me become a better person. A new person.” He leans forward and whispers, “Like the girls upstairs. The ones who make the food.”
By her side, Aaron stiffens, so Steph decides it’s her turn to respond now. “You know about the girls upstairs,” she says.
“Edy told me. And I think Pippa told you. To show us there’s a way forward. I know they lied when they told us we were the first, and that’s okay.” He’s speaking straightforwardly now, like he’s listing the specifications of a car he’s interested in buying. “You need to learn the truth in stages, and sometimes new truths reveal old lies.”
“Did she say that?” Aaron asks.
“You were upstairs, weren’t you?” Adam repeats.
“Yes,” Steph says.
“A reward for good behaviour,” Aaron says after a moment’s hesitation.
Adam smiles, releases his knees from his grip, straightens his legs out. Relaxes. Runs a hand through his lengthening hair.
“Did she have a nice time at the party?” he asks.
* * *
“This is so fucked up, Ess.”
“It’s fine. She’ll be fine! And Edward barely even knew you before.”
“I don’t mean your mum and stepdad. I mean… this.”
“Define ‘this’.”
“This bloody car!” Melissa slaps the steering wheel of the BMW 7-Series, currently idling in a free parking space near the turnoff to Shahida’s street. The thing is massive, almost twice the length of anything she’s ever driven before, and just being present inside it feels like she’s making a statement she doesn’t at all want to make. Even before she first unlocked it, before she fumbled around in the glove compartment for an ice scraper and had to be directed to the heated windscreen controls by an amused Shahida, it had seemed to loom in the parking lot. But it was the only Dorley car not already booked out, so she took it.
And now she wishes it had fucking swallowed her.
“What about this bloody car?” Shahida asks.
“It’s…” The words to describe how it feels don’t come easily, but she can feel the shape of her objection, even if she can’t perfectly understand it. “It’s showy,” she says, after struggling with it for several seconds.
Shahida giggles. “Em, you do remember where my family lives, right?” She taps on the passenger-side window. “Look around! This is probably one of the least fancy cars on the whole street. Kids around here get four-by-fours for their learner cars.”
“I know, but…”
“But…?”
“I don’t know. It’s not me.”
“What is you?”
“Little cars? Runabouts with four wheels and a horn and a place to put your shopping? Fuck, Shy, I don’t know.” She taps the ignition again and the engine quietly growls to attention. “I just feel weird about it.”
“We can stop here,” Shahida says, her hand on the handbrake, preventing Melissa from releasing it. “We can just talk about it.”
“I think I’m just…” She can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t like being observed, is probably it. Now she’s had the chance to sit with it for a minute, it feels remarkably like when she has to go to other departments at work, or the occasional times she goes to the gym or the little café where she met that girl that one time… She doesn’t want judgements formed about her. She wants to move through the world silently, unnoticed. A problem for someone who looks, as many people have recently observed, rather pretty.
She also knows it’s something Abby tried to help her get over. It was something they were still talking about when Melissa cut off all contact. An open wound; a reminder of her past, still interfering with her present.
Being back at Saints had felt so safe she’d forgotten what it’s like to be unsettled by the gazes of others.
She can make herself get used to it again. Unsettled doesn’t mean unable.
“I’m okay,” she says, and Shahida pats her hand, allows her to release the brake. A minute or so later she’s pulling up outside the Mohsin-Carpenter house and looking at the front door she remembers so clearly — repainted a brighter shade of red — and the bay window of Shahida’s room on the first floor, with the cushioned seat just inside. She expects to be overwhelmed by the memories but they come slowly, like the tide, and she follows them out of the car, barely conscious of the need to lock it, because all she can do is watch that red front door.
And then it opens and Rupa Mohsin-Carpenter comes scurrying out in slippers and Santa hat to meet her daughter, who is likewise rushing towards her, arms outstretched, and allowing herself to be engulfed. Edward, Shahida’s stepdad, waits in the doorway. He’s also wearing a Santa hat. Melissa wonders whose idea the hats were.
“Mum!” Shahida exclaims. “You look so… festive!”
“Well, you know,” Rupa says, pulling away from Shahida and still smiling broadly, “after Ed’s sister moved down to Colchester we started doing alternating Boxing Days and, well, it’s fun, isn’t it?”
Shahida puts on a serious face. “I won’t tell Rachel you said that.”
“So,” Rupa says, releasing her, “who’s your mystery friend? We’ve been trying to guess, Ed and I, ever since you told us you wouldn’t be coming alone, but…”
She trails off because she’s looking at Melissa, really looking, searching her face, and suddenly Melissa’s caught in a tight embrace, with Rupa almost squeezing the life out of her and very nearly lifting her off the ground.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Rupa says. “It’s been a long time.”
“Hi, Mrs Moh— Sorry.” Melissa corrects herself, remembering just in time. “Hi, Rupa.”
“What’s your name, dear?”
“Melissa.”
“What a beautiful name.” Rupa gives her a final squeeze and then lets her go, calling back to Edward, “It’s Melissa!” as if the name should mean something to him, and then turning back to Melissa to say, “It’s wonderful to see you again. Why don’t you come inside and you can tell me all about it?”
She holds out both her hands, and Melissa and Shahida take one each and follow her indoors, past the little brick wall around the front garden and the potted plants and all the other things Melissa used to see whenever she came here, and into the same hallway she remembers. She kicks off her shoes and places them carefully on the battered old rack under the narrow window before she consciously realises that muscle memory from before she was even Melissa is now guiding her, and as Shahida closes the bright red door, Melissa’s memories finally overwhelm her.
* * *
* * *
Melissa’s momentary distress is barely visible from the outside and only really expresses itself as a quiet gasp and a small stumble, but Shahida’s been her friend for long enough that she can read her body language in the dark and detect her whispers in a gale, and she’s next to her and holding out a supportive hand before Melissa can do more than trip on the rug.
Behind her, her mother says something brisk about putting on the kettle and drags Edward into the kitchen with her, presumably to fill him in on this girl his wife and stepdaughter both seem to know.
“Sorry,” Melissa says.
“You okay?”
“It’s a bit weirder than I thought it would be. Being back.”
“Weird bad?”
“No. Definitely not.” Melissa, now steadied, starts taking off her coat. “It was when I kicked off my shoes,” she says. “And I had this incredible sense of déjà vu. Stronger than I’ve felt in years. I was him here. And—” she breaks into a broad smile, “—I just worked out why it felt so sudden.”
“Oh?” Shahida says, hanging up their coats.
“I spent barely any time at uni before I, um—” Melissa glances at the kitchen door, “—transitioned, and no time at all in the main floors of the Hall until I was a year in; this, right here, is the first time I’ve ever come back to somewhere he used to know well.”
“So, weird intense,” Shahida says, following Melissa into the living room, “rather than weird bad.”
“Right.”
Shahida drops into the corner seat on the biggest couch, but Melissa doesn’t follow her. Instead she walks around the living room, runs her fingers along the mantelpiece, refamiliarises herself with a place she hasn’t seen since she was seventeen.
Now that Melissa’s shucked off her winter coat, the clothes she picked out this morning are finally on display and Shahida indulges for a moment. It’s not as if Melissa dressed deliberately to show off her body, and in fact the light pink sweater and stretch jeans are among the least ostentatious things Shahida’s seen her wear since she came back to Dorley Hall, but the shape of her is nonetheless discernible if one is given to look, and Shahida is very much given.
She’s fucking incredible in every way. So much so that Shahida still finds it hard to believe. Of all the girls she dated in America, none of them held her gaze the way Melissa does, and she does it in denim and a baggy sweater!
It’s something about the way she moves, Shahida decides. Mark had always been awkward, had held his limbs in close and took small steps, as if he feared he might accidentally take up too much space, and there are echoes of those habits in Melissa, but it’s in their abandonment, in the moments that she forgets she was ever ashamed of herself and her physicality, that her true, expressive self becomes clear, and Shahida treasures those glimpses.
Treasures even more that they’ve become more common and more consistent over the last few weeks. After the car, and especially after Melissa’s brief, unsettled moment when she first entered the house, Shahida feared a setback, something that would be harder to come back from than usual, but now she’s here, she’s unwinding again, walking the living room and inspecting photos and trinkets with the lithe, easy motions of someone truly comfortable with herself and her body.
And what a body…
“You still have it,” Melissa says quietly, and Shahida stops looking at, shamefully, her friend’s bottom, and stands up to join her and see what she’s found.
She’s holding a framed picture. Shahida and her mother, and Melissa and her mother, all in swimsuits — Melissa in shorts and a baggy t-shirt, with trunks probably under there somewhere — poolside at Peri Park.
“Em…”
“I remember you wanted to ride the rapids again. We’d had lunch and you set a timer on your phone for when it was safe to swim and you were desperate to go as soon as possible, and…”
Melissa coughs and hiccups and Shahida’s concerned for a moment, before she realises that it’s only that Melissa’s crying; and then she seizes up completely for what feels like an age, because Melissa’s crying! Shit! It’s the bloody pictures; she should have called ahead, had Mum take down any with Mark in them, she should have known—
“And I made the two of you stay for a photo,” her mother says. Shahida hadn’t heard her enter, but there she is, ahead of Edward, who’s been roped into carrying the mugs. Her mum approaches Melissa and Shahida, wraps her arm around Melissa’s shoulder, and continues. “Shahida was complaining like mad, telling me about queue times and how long it would take the two of you to walk all the way around the pool complex to get there, and Laura, your mother, she was trying to hide it but she was laughing like nobody’s business. I’m sorry, darling,” she adds, turning to Shahida, “but you were a terribly pompous thirteen-year-old.”
“Hey!” Shahida says, but she’s grateful for her mother’s intervention. She joins her in the hug, sliding her arm around Melissa’s waist, and the three of them look at the photo.
“Laura wanted the picture,” Mum says. “Melissa’s father was being grumpy as per usual, so Laura got Ed to take it, with the good camera. She somehow managed to get Shahida to stand still for almost a whole minute while Ed got it all ready. Amazing woman.”
“She looks beautiful here,” Melissa says. She’s not exactly crying now, but her eyes are red and her cheeks are soaked. She doesn’t seem to care. “I have pictures of Mum, but not this one. I think our copy was in one of Dad’s boxes. She looks so beautiful, don’t you think? So beautiful and so happy.”
Shahida’s not looking at the photo when she says, “Yes. So beautiful.” And then she catches her mother smiling at her, and adds, “Um, sorry we have pictures of the old you. Do you want us to…?” She leaves the question hanging.
“No,” Melissa says. “Leave them up. Especially this one.” She turns to Shahida’s mother and asks, “Can I have a copy?”
“I have scans, dear,” Mum says. “Shahida can give me your email address or your WhatsApp and I can send anything you want. Except,” she adds, nudging Shahida with her elbow, “the contents of my daughter’s mysterious password-protected folder.”
“Mum!” Shahida gasps, but her mother’s playing innocent and Melissa’s laughing and there’s nothing, really, to be even slightly irritated about. She’s proud of her mum, actually; not that she ever really seriously imagined she’d make a fuss about Melissa’s transition and sudden reappearance, but it’s good to know that the people you love are, in fact, who you believe them to be. She takes the photo, looks it over. Her childhood self has that expression of injured determination that to this day everyone seems to find so amusing.
“We should take a new one. No, two; one with all of us, and one with just you two. Today.”
“I’d love to,” Melissa says. Then she shakes her head and digs in her bag. “But I should probably wash my face first; I’m a mess,” she explains, while rooting around, and she has a point. Before she can find her tissues, though, Shahida’s mum’s returned with a handful, and Melissa accepts them and starts wiping down her face. She inspects the first tissue: it’s stained with mascara. “I have ruined my makeup.”
“You don’t need it, dear.”
“You really don’t,” Shahida says, refusing to be beaten in a bolster-Melissa’s-confidence competition.
“Thank you,” Melissa says and, surprising Shahida, kisses both her and her mother on the cheek before disengaging and going to the bathroom to wash her face.
Shahida’s mother waits for the click of the bathroom door closing before she says, “She seems delicate.”
Shahida shrugs. “She always was.”
“Should I worry about her?”
“No. A few years ago, sure; it was very hard for her for a very long time. But things are changing for her now. I think she’s happy.”
“Good. I see how you look at her.”
Blushing and choosing to look back at the photo rather than at her mother, Shahida says, “So does everyone. Except her.”
“No,” her mother says, “she does, I think. She stands close to you, instinctively. Tell me… Who knows? Her family?”
“No-one knows except you and Edward and me and Rachel. Her father, especially, does not know, and we need to keep it that way. She’s got a life, and he’s one of the people who could really ruin it.”
Her mother nods. “I notice Amy wasn’t on that list,” she says carefully. “Is there a reason for that?”
“No. Just… We’re being careful.”
“Wise. If you decide to tell her, I happen to know her family are celebrating at home this year. You’ll find her there, if you want to visit. And,” she adds with a smile, “we’re not eating until late.”
Shahida can take a hint, especially one so glaringly obvious: her mother insists she not keep Amy in the dark. Fine; she’ll suggest it to Melissa. If she wants to say no, she’ll say no.
And then Melissa returns, fresh-faced and with her blonde hair tied up out of her face. Despite their assurances, she’s put on a little powder and redone her eyes, and while she really doesn’t need it, she still looks spectacular.
Just like she always does.
* * *
“What are you doing?”
A lifetime of working with volatile and occasionally violent people has given Frankie exceptional control over her reflexes, and she’s pretty fucking glad everything’s still in working order despite her advancing age and failing joints, because if she’d allowed herself to be startled when Callum appeared abruptly in the kitchen, the way her body wanted, she would absolutely have done her knee in on the cabinet. Instead she gives herself a quarter-second to think and then shuts off the tap, whacks the colander on the side of the sink a few times to shake off the excess water, and sets it down on the draining board. She can almost hear his frown, but screw him; he can wait.
He clears his throat impatiently, and she doesn’t bother hiding her grin when she finally turns to face him.
“I’m washing vegetables, Callum,” she says. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Where’s Vincent? He’s supposed to be the cook, not you.”
“Val? She went to get garlic for the roasties.”
“You’re not supposed to let him out of your sight!”
Frankie snorts. He hesitated for a fraction of a second on the pronoun; he’s trying his hardest to misgender Val, like a good little bastard, but he’s having trouble overriding his eyes and his instincts. He’s so bad at being bad, it’d be adorable if it wasn’t pathetic. “You think she’s up to something, do you?” she says. “Callum, you prat, she’s lived here half your miserable little life and she still hasn’t escaped; unless you left the door open, I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’re fucking cooking instead of him!”
“Hark at the mouth on you,” Frankie says. “We’re expecting two more for dinner, and that means more work. Food doesn’t just magically appear on the table, you know. Oh, look,” she adds, as Val emerges from the pantry corridor, “there she is. You get the garlic, Val?”
Val hefts a small cloth bag. “Yes.”
“Did you escape?”
“Plainly not.”
“Fashion any deadly weapons out of root vegetables?”
“Alas, no. Was I supposed to?”
Frankie turns back to Callum and spreads her hands. “Well then!”
“Why are you here, Callum?” Val asks, pouring garlic bulbs out onto a cutting board and proceeding to segment, peel and crush them. She asks it idly, not even looking at him; Frankie is tremendously amused. If anyone thought they were getting a simpering little maid out of Val Barbier, they ought by now to have had several more thinks come and smack them in the teeth and then call them a dickhead in a French accent.
“For Frankie,” he says. “Ms Marsden wants you. Rec room. I’m to watch him.”
Yeah. Inevitable that it was something like that; Dotty’s gotten antsy recently, likes to touch base more. Frankie’s not fond of that, and not just because she doesn’t enjoy spending time around ‘Grandmother’; the more often Dotty checks in, the more likely she is to spot Val and Frankie’s quiet little conspiracy, and even though it hasn’t amounted to much yet, they both have hope.
“Fine,” she says.
“Can you chop vegetables?” Val asks him. “Because if you can’t, you’re even more useless than you look.”
“I can bloody well shoot you, is what I can do,” Callum says.
“And then you won’t get a proper dinner. Just stay out of my way.”
Frankie finger-waves as she leaves the kitchen. “Have fun with him, Val,” she calls.
“Drop dead!” Val yells back.
Out to the main hall, have a quick look-without-looking at the big barred lock on the front door — still closed as tight as ever — and then it’s down the corridor on the other side towards the suite of rooms that contains the rec room, the snooker room, and one of the bars; Stenordale Manor’s nerve centre, if it can be said to have one. Inside, Dorothy’s messing with the surveillance equipment and Jake’s smoking, tipped back on a wooden chair that’s conservatively five times older than he is, leaning out of a window.
“What took you so long?” Dorothy snaps. Ah, she’s in one of these moods, is she? Wonderful.
“Callum’s a chatty lad,” Frankie says, and pulls up an antique chair. “What’s so important I needed to leave Val alone with the dinner prep?”
“Why are you helping her, anyway?” Jake asks, before Dorothy can say anything.
Frankie glances at Dotty. “Is every man in this fucking place going to ask the same stupid question? Cooking takes work, and now we’ve got the Smyth-Farrow kids coming, it’s more work than Val can manage on her own, and I don’t want to wait until Boxing Day for my turkey.”
“That’s why you’re here, Frances,” Dorothy says, ignoring Jake’s irritated reaction. “The Smyth-Farrows want to see Trevor.”
Shit. “They want to take him?”
“I’ve informed them he’s not ready, but they want to see the merchandise.”
“They want to know if he’s worth sinking any more cash into,” Jake says. “I think they want him to get the big snip-snip.”
Double shit. Frankie doesn’t know the Smyth-Farrow kids, but they are, in a sense, clients, and clients are always unpredictable. In the past she’s had to field requests from clients who wanted body modifications to their boy-girls that ranged from unfeasible to literal torture, and while her reputation as someone who could reliably deliver living human toys was built off the back of knowing when to indulge these requests, when to suggest alternatives and when to outright deny them, there was always the chance that Mister or Missus Aristocratic Weirdo would take their frustration with her interventions out on her. She had some close fucking calls, back in the day.
So many girls. And she got to save so few of them. Better them than her, of course, and in her more generous moments she likes to imagine that their sacrifices ultimately put her in the position she’s in now, to inflict harm on the woman who ordered it all or die trying, but it’s nothing but vanity. They wouldn’t thank her for her actions if they had a million years in which to forgive her.
The road to Frankie’s own personal hell is paved with the gravestones of unfortunate young men.
Point is, if they like what they see, they could yank Trev out of here this very evening, and she and Val would lose their soldier.
She affects nonchalance. “Why’re you telling me?”
“Get him ready,” Dorothy says. “Dress him up and paint him and make very clear to him that these people are the money, and if he messes up then what happens to him will be out of your hands. Out of mine, too.”
“And tell your little friend to lay another place for dinner,” Jake says.
“Oh?” Frankie asks. “Who for?”
“For Trevor,” Dorothy says. “They want him at dinner. I know, I know, we planned to keep him and Vincent separate, but—”
“Yeah. What the money wants, the money gets.” She’s going to have to warn Val about all of this. She jerks a thumb at the door. “So, I s’pose I’ll go finish helping Val with the dinner, then make Trev all pretty.”
“In a minute. First, we have to talk about the time you’ve been spending with Vincent.”
“What time?”
Dorothy starts counting on her fingers. “You’re not just helping him cook most days, you’re on camera sitting at the kitchen table, chatting with him. Ah-ah-ah!” She holds up a finger, stopping Frankie’s reply in her rapidly drying throat. “It seems every time you have a free moment, you’re with Vincent. You even go to his room sometimes, at night. Where we can’t see you.”
“Yeah,” Frankie says, “we watch movies.” They should have been more fucking careful. Boredom’s a dangerous thing, and even with the amount of cleaning she has to do, Val has almost as much free time as Frankie does; most of the rooms are still shut tight, furniture covered in dust sheets. Anyone can get careless with infinite time to spend.
“You’re socialising with him.”
Well. There’s a way through this, at least. Whether old Dotty will buy it is another matter. “Of course! Who the fuck else am I going to talk to around here? That idiot Callum?”
“He’s a servant,” Jake says. “And a prisoner.”
“Look,” Frankie says, “you know me, Dotty; if this was Dorley Hall I’d be having the time of my life breaking in new boys all the time. But it’s not. There’s just Trev, who’s still in the kid-gloves stage, and there’s Declan, who isn’t mine. Val doesn’t count because she’s fifty-fucking-three and if you try to humiliate her she just laughs at you. Besides, we used to do this shit from time to time, back at the Hall. Watch TV together or whatever. It’s good for the bond, makes them emotionally reliant on you; Stockholm syndrome and all that. It works.”
“It goes both ways,” Jake says, like he’s telling a toddler not to touch the hob. “She’ll play on your sympathy; prisoners always do. They try to make you feel guilty, get you to empathise with them.”
Frankie laughs and hopes it sounds genuine. “Dotty, have you ever known me to feel a single spot of guilt?” No, she bloody hasn’t, or she’d have spotted the handful of girls Frankie helped escape over the years.
“Hah!” Dorothy’s laugh sounds like a cheese grater’s been taken to her lungs. “True. Okay, fine, do what you want.”
Once again, Frankie thanks decades of emotional control for not instinctively sighing with relief. “Can I go now? I said I’d do the pigs in blankets.”
Dorothy waves her off. “Yes. Go. Oh, and tell Vincent he’ll be responsible for preparing Declan for the meal, as well.”
“And tell her I’ll be watching,” Jake says.
“Won’t that be fun for her?” Frankie says with a sneer, and then she gets the hell out of the rec room before anyone can ask her any more questions she doesn’t want to answer.
* * *
It turns out that one of the big drawbacks to avoiding cleanup duty on Christmas day is that if Monica catches you hanging out on the fifth floor, drinking coffee and nursing your hangover, she’ll scold you and send you to the basement, to keep an eye on Steph, Aaron and the boys until the rest of the sponsors get their shit together. Christine told Monica she’d complain to Indira; Monica just laughed at her.
So now here she is, back in sunny basement two, rounding the corner to the common room to find Steph and Aaron lounging on one of the couches, dressed conservatively, talking quietly.
“Hey Steph!” she says, plonking herself down on the other couch and pocketing her taser. “Hey… you.”
“Hi Christine,” Steph says. “You, uh, might not want to put that away.” And she gestures with her eyes to the corner by the storeroom, where Will’s sat on a bean bag chair, reading a book.
It’s a shock every time she sees him; it’s like the man’s being reduced in more ways than just testosterone deprivation and diet ought to provoke. She turns back to Steph and Aaron, gives them the most serious nod her incipient headache will allow, and pulls the little taser back out, thumbing it to the ready position and resting it on her lap.
“How’s he been?” she asks quietly, leaning forward so Will won’t overhear.
Aaron leans forward, matching her posture and volume. “Mostly like that. Reading his books, not saying a word, just sitting there in the corner. He’s our replacement Martin, except I haven’t been able to make him cry yet.”
“You think he’s still dangerous?”
“I wouldn’t turn my back on him,” Steph says.
“A watched Will never boils,” Aaron observes.
There’s the sound of throat clearing from Will’s corner, and when Christine checks on him, he’s glaring at the three of them.
“Whatever you girls are whispering about,” he says, “you’re being rude.”
“How’ve you been, Will?” Christine asks.
“I’m sorry; who are you?”
“I work here.”
“Fine. I’ll answer your question with a question: what does it matter? It’s not like I’m here for the long term.”
Christine turns bodily to face him, twisting fully around on the couch and using the movement to hide her other action: dipping into her pocket and thumbing her alert button. Nell and Rabia, on duty in the security room, should hear the alert and, if they’re not already, listen in on the conversation. Perhaps alert Tabby, if they think it appropriate.
“What do you mean, Will?” Christine asks in her most reasonable voice.
Will laughs, sharp and grating. “I’ve had Goserelin implants for three months now, and hormone injections for two. My body’s changing but my mind’s stayed the same. Got worse, maybe; I’m on more of a hair trigger than I ever was. Having to sit on my fucking hands half the time just to stay calm. But I couldn’t see it for the longest time, didn’t understand what was happening. What’s going to happen to the ones like me.
“And then I saw Raph, and he’s just the same as he was, too. And I told him off, sure, but I couldn’t get him out of my head. I kept thinking, why? Why is he no different? Why am I no different? And Ollie? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that, for us, the changes are just physical. Nothing’s happening up here.” He taps his temple. “I’ve been waiting to feel like a girl, the way you lot want, but it hasn’t happened. I’m just this… altered thing. A man walking around in a body that feels more alien every day. But that’s the big experiment, isn’t it? Obviously some men take to it, like Aaron — I can see you hiding behind your girlfriend, by the way — and others were practically waiting for it, like Steph. And then there’s men like me: we take the drugs and we change physically, but nothing else happens. So that means one of two things for me: either I wash out, and whatever happened to Declan happens to me, or I lose my fucking mind and… someone else emerges on the other side of insanity. Either way, I’m not going to be around. So,” he finishes, laying his book on the floor and standing from the bean bag chair, “that’s why it doesn’t matter how I am. I’m just temporary. Someone else gets the body after me. Someone else gets to walk out of here.”
“Will,” Steph says, “you need to give it—”
“More time?” Will snaps. He doesn’t advance, just stands there in the corner, but Christine grips the taser more tightly anyway. “More time? Is that what you were going to say? I’ve given it three months, Stefan! Three months. And I was willing to wait it out, because I thought something really was happening, until I realised how badly I was fooling myself. I realised how much I wanted—” he slaps his hand into his open palm, “—it to be real. And maybe it is. For you. For Aaron. Maybe for Martin and even Adam. But not for me or Raph and definitely not fucking Ollie. Christ, you know what the worst part is?”
“Will,” Christine says, as a prelude to asking him to calm down. His face is reddening, but to his minor credit he still hasn’t moved. She’s watched the video of Steph’s conversation with him when he was in the cell, and she’s pretty sure she can see just how hard he’s working to keep those little sparks of his from going off, from lighting his fuse.
“I had hope!” he shouts, and looks directly at Christine. “I thought I was like Steph and Steph was like me and that meant something! I thought you useless fucks were going to fix me!”
The door from the corridor opens and Tabby comes walking carefully in, followed by Monica and Nell. If the situation hadn’t become so suddenly tense, Christine would be amused that Tabby’s the only one who doesn’t look dreadful; the benefits of a relatively early night, she supposes.
“Hey Will,” Tabby says, in the controlled, authoritative voice that a small part of Christine still wants instinctively to obey. “You okay there?”
“Yep,” Will says, nodding to himself, or to some imaginary audience which doesn’t include anyone currently present, “yep, yep, here we go, the big, violent man’s being scary again, time to shut him down, time to—”
“Will! I’m not here to shut you down. I’m here to talk. Can I come over?”
Will looks alarmed at the prospect and instantly loops his arms behind his back, grasping at each elbow with the other hand. If Tabby isn’t going to control him, it seems he’ll control himself.
“Yes,” he says, seeming to shrink back into himself, to become more like the Will Christine’s seen on the cameras lately, quiet and unassuming. “Yes. No. Maybe we should go—”
“We’re not going to your room, William,” Tabby says. “Nor are we going to the cells. We’re not going anywhere. Look, see?” She takes another step closer. She’s within arm’s reach of him now. “I’m safe, aren’t I?”
He doesn’t say anything, and she steps closer again. Reaches behind him and brings both his hands back out in front. Holds them carefully. Will inhales sharply, but otherwise doesn’t react.
“I’m safe,” Tabby repeats, “aren’t I?”
“Hey,” Nell whispers, “you wanna take those two out of here?”
“Those two?” Christine asks, almost too scared for Tabby to remember Steph and Aaron behind her. And then she shakes herself, turns back to them, and finds Aaron in Steph’s arms. He’s not shaking; he doesn’t seem to be reacting at all, and that’s a little alarming.
“Take them for coffee or something,” Nell says, and looks up with her eyes only.
Christine nods, reaches out for Steph and Aaron, and silently leads them out of the common room. They don’t get as far as the stairs, though, because as soon as they’re out of the door and out of sight, Aaron leans against the wall and exhales all his tension.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he wheezes. “For a minute there I thought he was going to do to you what he did to Maria, only worse because it was just us three, and Steph might have a mean fucking right hook on her and you might have a taser but I’m negligible, honestly, and it could so easily have gone bad, and Maria still sometimes winces when the lights are too bright, and—”
Steph shushes him, engulfs him in a hug, pulls him away from the wall and pets him gently on the back, and Christine looks away. They should have as much privacy as is practically possible, down here in a corridor with no fewer than five camera emplacements and a dozen microphone points. Maybe she’ll delete the footage later.
Is it really okay if she takes them both upstairs again? She’s pretty sure that’s what Nell was suggesting, but while Steph has the run of the place — and could, at her discretion, even leave if she was very, very careful about it and had a good reason — Aaron’s dispensation to visit the main Hall was a one-night thing, granted specifically by Maria. There’d been more sponsors in the dining hall than were ever simultaneously present downstairs, after all, and with the graduates and miscellaneous hangers-on there’d been no shortage of people to keep an eye on him.
But then, he was asked if he wanted to leave, wasn’t he? And he said no. Teri, who’d outright offered to take him home with her, raised his reply with Bea, asked her if she’d upgraded to fancy mind-control drugs or something, because she couldn’t believe someone who’d never shown any prior signs of transness could refuse the offer to leave after just three months.
So he wants to stay. Whether it’s because of Steph or because of his desire to rehabilitate or even just because he thinks he’ll look good in a dress, he wants to stay. So it’s probably fine to take him upstairs again.
Fuck it; Bea or Maria can bollock her about it later if they want.
Aaron’s loosened up again, and that suggests it’s time for them all to move.
“You two want some coffee?” she says.
* * *
Melissa feels as if there are two versions of her, walking the familiar pavements from Shahida’s family’s house on Six Oaks Estate to Amy’s on Almsworth Row, and she leans into Shahida as they walk, gloved hand in gloved hand. When she was a teenager she didn’t spend nearly as much time in this suburb as she wanted to — she denied herself so much, for reasons she now finds difficult properly to imagine; sometimes looking into her past is like looking at a photograph of a stranger and trying to guess their thoughts — but she walked this route enough that the sense of it is stronger than the memory. It’s like Mark is walking with her, holding her other hand, and she flexes her free fingers, willing him to let go, to fade away, but he doesn’t.
He’s with her.
Shahida’s talking and she’s half-listening, replying automatically, because she’s replaying the first time she came to Amy’s like a movie, watching herself — watching Mark — nervously dragged along in his ugly clothes and with his hair tied back, uncomfortable in his body and never knowing why.
She tied her hair up when she redid her makeup. Absently she reaches up and pulls it loose, shakes out her hair, runs her hand through it; frees herself from him.
And then Shahida coughs and splutters, breaking the spell, and Melissa turns to her, rubs her back as she works her throat clear. Mark’s gone, and that’s fine, because he survived long enough — just about — to become her, and if he’s going to resurface occasionally when she revisits the places he used to feel at home, then perhaps that’s just part of the process.
She’s reclaiming herself.
“Sorry,” Shahida says, smiling and rubbing her neck, embarrassed. “I, uh, inhaled a bit of saliva. Hey, what are you so happy about?”
“Hmm?”
“You’re smiling, Em. You’re smiling like a maniac.”
“I’m just… it’s good to be home, Shy.”
Because that’s what it is. Home was never the house she shared with her father and brother, not since her mother died there, and home was Dorley Hall only for as long as it had to be, with the place only recently starting to feel genuinely like somewhere she can be safe. But this triangle of streets, the part of the city where she got to visit Shahida, Rachel and Amy, where she escaped from herself, is home, too.
Even if it ended badly.
“What is it?” Shahida asks, and Melissa wishes, just for a moment, that Shy didn’t have an apparent link directly to her psyche, didn’t know instantly when her mood turned.
She shrugs, forcing out the memory of her final night with the girls. It hadn’t even been at Amy’s, anyway! “There are bad memories as well as good,” she says.
Shahida nods. “You need some time?”
“I’m good.” And she laughs. “It’s cold, anyway. Let’s go surprise Amy.”
The Woodleys’ house is as imposing as Melissa remembers, and the scattering of cars suggests that they have enough visitors to overwhelm their considerable garage. Shahida isn’t deterred, though, and marches right up to the front door.
The doorbell tune is still horribly tacky.
“I’ll get it!” someone yells from inside, and Melissa’s heart jumps, because it’s a girl’s voice, and that means—
The front door bursts open. Behind it is Amy Woodley, wearing a baggy Rudolph sweater and tinsel on her head.
“Shy!” she exclaims, launching herself forward for a hug. “I’m so mad at you!”
“Then why are we hugging?” Shahida asks, giggling.
“Because I’ve still missed you, you idiot.”
Amy bounces away from Shahida and turns to assess Melissa, which gives Melissa ample opportunity to watch her face fall.
“Shit,” Amy says. She looks from Melissa to the door and back again. “Shit. Shy: go home. Now.”
“What?” Shahida says, but Amy’s already backing away, and the door slams before they can ask any more questions.
* * *
“Just watch this, Val; you’re going to love it.”
It wasn’t enough that Jake had to drag her away from the kitchen, leaving Callum — Callum! — watching the roast, and it likewise wasn’t enough that he kept up an inane monologue as they walked through the manor; now he’s being deliberately mysterious, as if there can possibly be behind any door in this heavenforsaken place anything Valérie would want to look at. She’d assumed, when he officially relieved her of kitchen duty for the time being, that they’d be going to see Declan, to get him ready for the dinner tonight, but Jake led her up the stairs and down a side corridor, to an area of the manor she hasn’t visited for a long time, a brace of rooms that were always, even in the old man’s days, nothing more than dust-sheeted furniture and spiders.
“Watch what?” she asks, looking around for surprises and finding nothing but a cracked-open door a little farther down, with several pairs of sturdy looking shoes and boots outside. Callum or Jake’s room, she assumes. She hasn’t been asked to clean up here, and so she hasn’t, which would account for the smell. Valérie wrinkles her nose: bachelor pong. Was she so disgusting when she was a boy?
Jake’s posing in front of a closed door. “Wait for it,” he says, and knocks twice.
The door opens after a short while and Val’s shocked to see Declan. He doesn’t look like the Declan she remembers, though; neither the borderline-comatose boy-girl who arrived here with Dorothy, nor the rude and sneering man she’d had the displeasure of interacting with. This Declan’s dressed already, and in an outfit Val wouldn’t willingly choose in this kind of environment: a white blouse in a material so thin she’d be able to see his red, lacy bra even if it wasn’t buttoned only halfway up, a skirt so short and so tight that he has to have tucked or she’d be able to see the bulge, and — she fights the urge to roll her eyes — a pair of black, thigh-high boots. No prizes for guessing who picked Declan’s outfit; it’s the slutty secretary look, as interpreted by someone whose sexuality was formed around the pages of lads’ mags. His hair, still relatively short, has even been brushed, though if she’s going to make it presentable she has a bit of work ahead of her.
“Good afternoon, Mr Henshall,” Declan says, in a breathy voice. Still quite deep but he’s unavoidably putting effort into sounding different. Valérie counts the days since she last saw him. What’s happened?
“Meet Dina,” Jake says, and he holds out a hand, palm open. Val can only watch as Declan steps meekly forward and rests his cheek against Jake’s hand, though she thinks she sees something in the boy’s eyes. A mixture of shame and fury.
The boy’s still in there, then.
“Dina,” she says flatly.
“Dina Shaw. She’s my project.”
Valérie can’t resist poking a little bit. “Declan?” she says.
Declan hesitates, but when he sees Jake watching him expectantly, he says, “Dina. That’s my name for now.”
“Good girl,” Jake says. “This is still early days,” he adds chattily, turning to Val as Declan leads them both into what is clearly his new room. “We only came to this agreement last night, didn’t we, love?”
“Yes,” Declan says.
“Yes who?”
“Yes, Mr Henshall.”
And then Jake starts directing them, having Declan sit in front of a much nicer vanity than the one Val has, showing Val to the makeup and the wig he wants her to put on him, and sitting himself in an armchair on the other side of the room, to watch and comment as she works. She ignores him, mostly, except to occasionally conform her makeup job on Declan to his preferences — bright red lipstick, naturally — because she’s too busy dwelling on two things: Declan said that Dina’s his name ‘for now’, and Jake said they came to their agreement last night.
She can see it all too clearly: Jake’s made promises to Declan, promises about restoring him if only he plays his given role for the moment, and perhaps has impressed upon him the severity of the penalties available if he refuses. Trevor, after all, is promised to someone else, and Valérie, for all her attitude, largely does the jobs that are required of her. Declan’s no-one’s, and that makes his position here precarious. Jake will have promised him the world and threatened a living hell.
Damn it. If Declan’s loyalty has been purchased — with lies, most likely, not that it makes much difference — then that could pose a problem; she and Frankie have been making their plans on the assumption that Declan would be a non-participant, perhaps someone they could free if they had the chance, but nothing they particularly needed or wanted to account for. If it comes to a fight, if things get complicated, and Declan sides with Jake, that gives them a numerical advantage against Valérie, Frankie and Trevor, and that’s before considering the relative balance of physical strength, military training, and access to weaponry.
Perhaps she should have been more pleasant to Declan when she had the opportunity.
No. He’s still a rapist, and siding with Frances has filled Val’s moral compromise quota for the entire decade. He’s a rapist and he’s unrepentant, no matter what manner of creature he might choose to become out of a desire to survive.
Fuck him. If it comes to it, and if it’s possible, she’ll happily kill him, too.
* * *
He reaches instinctively for Steph’s hand as they ascend. It’s not terra incognita up here any more, not since last night, but that’s part of the problem: last night, not only was he putting on something of a performance, with the suit and the hair and everything, but he made certain promises…
‘I’ve been Aaron.’ Yes, fine, super, but that was last night, so who are you now?
He’s being stupid again. What does everyone keep telling him? That he’s made more progress more quickly than anyone except Steph — and possibly Vicky — and Steph doesn’t count and Vicky’s almost definitely a special case, and special in a way that doesn’t apply to him.
Probably doesn’t apply to him. His past is getting murkier the more he avoids thinking about it, and after associating so closely with Steph it’s hard not to wonder if there were moments, as a kid, when he wanted to be someone else.
Except he’s pretty sure that in those moments he mostly wanted to be anyone else; girl hadn’t been on the menu.
Steph doesn’t ask him if he’s okay, and he’s glad of that because it seems like every third sentence out of the mouths of the people he’s currently surrounded with is some variation on that general theme, but she looks at him with kind eyes, anyway, and doubtless interprets his brave smile as an answer in the affirmative and, fuck, it’s not like he can resent someone caring about him. Especially not when that someone is Steph.
How does she look so much like a girl right now? Their clothes are almost identical, her hair has barely been touched, and she’s wearing no makeup. Sure, if he looks for it he can see the face of the Stefan who showed up one random day in October, but doing so makes him feel disloyal, so he stops.
Maybe it’s something about her mannerisms.
Maybe she can teach him.
Rabia waves at them from the security room as they pass. Entirely unsure whether or not he should be so presumptuous, he waves back. She grins at him.
He’s been thinking about the methods of indoctrination in use here; the mechanisms by which they transform, with a reasonable success rate, appalling but otherwise ordinary men into women who aren’t just accepting of their new gender but, from what he’s seen, apt to embrace it (or to transcend it, becoming something else entirely, something also not connected to their original identity). A shame he never happened to read up on cult initiation tactics, back when he had access to the internet, but as of last night he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t care even if he could follow his progress on a chart in some textbook somewhere. He’s being offered a new start, a clean slate, and a chance at real happiness, and just because that offer comes with a weapon aimed at his body and the threat of an uncertain fate should he refuse doesn’t make it a bad outcome; doesn’t make it something he hasn’t, on almost every level, decided to want.
Or, he remembers, smiling at the thought of Steph, in her dress, in the room with the view of the forest, touching him the way he finally asked to be touched, something he wants to want.
Lingering doubts don’t count, right? It’s like a wedding; just because the bride’s getting nervous in the room out back, doesn’t mean she’s going to call it off. And the discomfort he experienced in his stupid fucking tux, surrounded by so many beautiful women, was absolutely real, no matter its source.
God, this is too much thinking to attempt while he still has a hangover. Fortunately, Christine has the solution for that: she dumps a mug in front of him, filled to the brim and smelling caffeinated, and he realises they must have guided him to a seat at the kitchen table while he was off in his own little world.
The big thoughts can wait, honestly. Whoever he is, whoever he will become, he’ll still be someone who, right now, wants his fucking coffee.
It says Eat, Sleep, Feminise, Repeat on the mug. God help him, he’s starting to find the damn things sort of charming.
“She’s back with us,” Christine says, nudging Steph and smiling at him. It takes him a moment to register the pronoun, but it seems less jarring today.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“We could tell.”
“It was when we got to the dining hall and all the second years said hi and you didn’t react at all,” Steph says, “that’s when we knew.”
“Everything piling up in your head?” Christine asks.
“‘Everything’ isn’t a big enough word,” he says.
“I remember that. Happened a lot later for me, of course. Took me a couple of days to get through it.”
“A couple?” Paige says, walking in through the main doors. Vicky and Lorna are with her, all of them looking considerably more put together than he is. But then, they all have access to private shower facilities. “Try seven.”
Christine looks up, smiling, and receives her girlfriend, who leans down behind her and kisses her on the back of the neck.
“A couple is nearly seven,” Christine protests, but weakly, because Paige is still kissing her and Christine’s starting to squirm.
“When did it happen for you?” he asks.
2018 March 16
Friday
It’s been a week since they took him to the floor upstairs, to the basement above his own, so close to the surface and the outside world that he could see from the stairwell for the briefest moment what looked like a dining room, wood-panelled and rich. In that brief glimpse he yearned for it, ached to explore it, if only to see something beyond these concrete walls, but in the time since, in which he has had nothing to do but think, he’s started to wonder if that sliver of freedom was another deception, another sick joke. Maybe the dining room is as entirely enclosed as everything else here. Maybe the true ground level is hundreds of metres up. Maybe he’s going fucking crazy.
Sometimes he imagines that this place goes on forever, that if he somehow got unfettered access to the door locks he could climb those concrete stairs for weeks and still never reach the surface. In his dreams he’s starved to death in that stairwell, forgotten, abandoned, deliberately erased; a fitting end for one such as him.
On that day they took him past multiple anonymous doors and into another concrete box, and there they put him on an operating table and asked him very seriously if he needed to be restrained.
He said no. Indira was there, and despite what was about to happen to him, she was then, and is now, the sweetest and kindest woman he’s ever met, and the idea of hurting her was more abhorrent and more destructive to his sense of self than anything he might lose on that table. So he lay back, found for her a brave smile, and the other girl, the one he’d never seen before that day, prepped him.
Indira held his hand. Brushed the tears from his cheeks.
And then the other girl castrated him.
That was the end of the man he’d been. They moved him to a bed in the room next door and let him sleep, and when he woke up, he was something else.
What, though?
It was inevitable. From the moment of disclosure, even though they never said exactly what was involved in their eventual transformation, it wasn’t exactly hard to guess, especially not with the self-proclaimed Vicky talking in not-so-subtle tones with her sponsor about accelerating her treatment.
Fucking Vicky. He tried so hard to resent her, but she made it almost impossible. The fact that she responded to the orchiectomy with undisguised joy was a little hard to swallow, though. And he tried to want it, he really did, but right there, on the table, he would have given anything to be anywhere else.
Almost anything. Indira had been there, not just holding his hand and comforting him but also presenting herself as an obstacle, because she knew as well as he did that if there’d been a route for him out of Dorley Hall, unchanged and unharmed, but if he’d have had to go through Indira Chetry to reach it, he would refuse.
He loved her early and he loves her still, with an intensity that, when he steps out of himself to think about it, shocks him. He loves her despite everything she’s doing to him. And she seems genuinely to love him back, despite everything he’s done.
But such a mutilation isn’t the kind of thing you can just get over. Not the kind of violation you can wave away.
And the requirement to keep the area clean, to pat it dry after a shower, doesn’t bloody help. He does so anyway, and wraps the towel around himself — at chest height, the way Vicky does — and then the robe. He leaves his hair wet, even though it’s starting to get long, because he doesn’t want to deal with any of that shit right now. He just wants to sleep. He’ll wrap it in a spare t-shirt, or something.
He’s been sleeping a lot. It’s better than thinking.
But there’s someone waiting for him in his room. It’s the other boy — and God knows they’ve all become boys in here, stripped of any pretence of adulthood, of masculinity — the one who asked him a week ago to stop calling him by his name. Like all of them, he’s changed; like Vicky, he’s started to hold himself differently. He might, actually, be copying her.
The boy’s looking at the floor, but when the hinges squeak he looks up, his face blooming into a smile.
“Hi,” the boy says. “Indira let me in.”
Of course she did. “Do I have better movies than you, or something?”
“No. I wanted to talk.”
There’s space on the bed, so he sits. “About anything in particular?”
“About you,” the boy says. “Are you okay?”
“I’m two bollocks lighter. Can’t seem to get used to it.”
“Strange, isn’t it?”
“I have other words.”
The boy smiles again, his front teeth resting for a moment on his lower lip, biting softly at the flesh. It’s always been an appealing habit.
“I’ve been talking to Vicky,” the boy says. “She has some ideas about how we can adjust.”
“We’re not her,” he says. “She’s… Fuck, I don’t even know what she is. But we’re not her.”
“And? Why not choose to be? Why not do our best to emulate her, and see how we fare?”
“Why not grow wings and fly out of here?”
This is the longest conversation he’s had since the day of the operation. He wants to tell the boy to leave, to shove him out of the door, but he can’t. It wouldn’t be right. Indira wouldn’t approve.
He wouldn’t approve. And he doesn’t want to do shit that makes him feel guilty and disgusted with himself any more.
“I’ve been considering names,” the boy says.
Inevitable, after Vicky made such a show of choosing hers. “Any you’re ready to share?”
“Not yet. I’m still… trying them out in my head. You’ll be the first to know, though.” The boy shifts nervously on the bed. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Am I attractive?”
“What, you mean, like, objectively? Sort of. You’re kind of interesting to look at, I guess.” He sighs. “Indira says there’ll be facial surgery next. I think I should be more scared of that than I am, especially after this—” he looks down, draws his robe more tightly closed, “—but I don’t think I have it in me any more. I’m just kind of numb about it all.”
“Vicky says she knows what she wants done on her face.”
“Of course she does.”
“She’s got some suggestions for me.”
“Are you considering them?”
The boy shrugs. “Why wouldn’t I? If I’m going to be a girl, or if I’m going to look like a girl—” he glances to the side, towards the mirror in the door of the open wardrobe, “—then I think I’d prefer to be attractive. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about names?” the boy asks. “Have you thought about them yet?”
“No. I’ve thought about closing my eyes and never waking up. Kinda hoping for that, actually.”
It’s enough to startle the boy, and he reaches out, quicker than he’s ever moved. Joins their hands. Grasps him roughly, too hard, like he’s never done anything like this before and doesn’t know what level of pressure is appropriate.
“Don’t,” the boy says.
Fingers interlocking. So much heat between their palms. Hard to think about anything else.
“I want to try something,” the boy says. “It might be weird for you, and I know it’ll be weird for me, but I want to do it anyway.”
“Okay.” Forcing the word is almost impossible, and the sound is choked. Thick.
“I want you to kiss me,” the boy says.
2019 December 25
Wednesday
The girls from upstairs spent the time Christine told her story slicing loaves, buttering bread, and assembling sandwiches from yesterday’s leftovers and other food for those who simply can’t face any more turkey, so by the time Christine gets done, Steph’s halfway through her sandwich and Aaron’s finishing off a bowl of Weetabix.
“And that was sort of that,” Christine says, and laughs at herself. She’s been staring at the table, mostly, as she talks, with Paige sitting by her side, gently rubbing her upper arm and occasionally kissing her. Steph spotted the frown when she talked about her orchi, and speculates once again on the strength of character it must have taken to come out of that sort of thing better than you went into it, when it wasn’t something you ever wanted for yourself. “Of course,” Christine continues, “by the time I was a sophisticated-enough thinker to understand that losing my balls didn’t utterly revoke my manhood, I wasn’t a man any more, anyway.”
“Many such cases,” Vicky says, smirking.
“Proud of you,” Paige whispers, and Steph knows it wasn’t the kind of whisper she was intended to overhear by the way Christine sinks into her girlfriend for a moment and accepts her quiet and insistent reassurance.
She concentrates hard on Aaron instead, still sitting opposite from her, now idly twirling his spoon around an empty bowl. He’s frowning, too, and Steph wonders if, when it comes to it, he’ll accept the orchi like Christine did, fight it like some of the other girls did, or ask why the hell they didn’t get around to it sooner, the way Steph might if she wasn’t afraid of seeming ungrateful. He catches her looking at him and smiles lopsidedly, props his chin on one arm and rolls his eyes.
Steph’d give a million quid to see inside his head right now.
Next to her, Christine and Paige withdraw from each other.
“Paige found me,” Christine says. “So did Dira and so did Vicky. But that was the moment for me. Not at the point where all my other options got cut off—”
“Literally,” Paige says.
“—but in the weeks after, when I realised that I was still there, still changing bit by bit, and I could either go along with it or I could follow Craig.”
“Craig?” Aaron asks.
“Our Declan, kinda,” Vicky says. “Don’t ask what he did.” Lorna, currently fiddling with the coffee machine, visibly shudders, and Steph makes a mental note never to ask what Craig did.
And then there’s a ping sound, one Steph’s not heard here before, and she puzzles over it for a few moments before the main doors open again and the woman called Ashley enters backwards, holding them open for Teri in her wheelchair, and Steph realises the noise must have been from the seldom-used elevator. Pippa told her once that it’s slow and cramped and way too warm even in winter, ‘like the worst dumbwaiter in the world, but for people’. Beatrice follows them through, then Maria, then Edy, and suddenly the kitchen is full of people and Aaron’s looking uncomfortable.
It doesn’t help that he looks up at Bea at the exact moment she spots him.
“Relocate?” Steph says to him, and he nods. They exchange hurried greetings with the newcomers and leave them to talk to Christine and the others, trotting instead through to the dining hall, where a handful of girls — mostly second years — are sitting in a circle on the floor in the middle of the room. Their demeanour suggests they’ve been busy and are taking a break, and Steph spots a pile of cleaning products and a hoover in one corner.
They wave as they pass, and Aaron sits heavily on one of the couches by the fireplace, now unlit. Steph drops onto the cushion next to him and they find each other’s hands and sit for a while in silence.
“I know how she felt,” he says, after a few minutes. “Christine. I know how she felt. I mean, yes, I haven’t had my testicles obliterated yet but that feeling, that okay, what now? feeling, I get it. Like, what I said last night in front of all those people, that was like my spiritual orchiectomy, you know? I could’ve hacked them off with a turkey knife and it would’ve been— Is there such a thing as a turkey knife? Or is it just a meat knife?” Steph shrugs; knives come in three shapes, as far as she knows: serrated, non-serrated, and blunt. “Whatever. Point is, I’m there.” He makes chopping motions with his hand. “I’m unmanned. And now I’m sort of… I don’t know, floating around in a big pool of estrogen, wondering what happens next.”
“You said—”
“—that I want to want to be a girl, yes, and I do, I do, and now I’m just wondering, how exactly does that happen? I know it kind of has to, because, I mean, look at all the women we met last night. And look at Christine.”
“And Paige,” Steph says, counting on her fingers, “and Pippa, and Maria, and… everyone.”
He nods. “Everyone. And they’re already treating me like one of the girls. You’ve seen it, right? I’m not imagining it?”
“You’re not. Does that bother you?”
“You’d think it would, wouldn’t you? But it… it does and it doesn’t. It’s like there are expectations attached to being one of them. One of you. And, God, I think I’m repeating myself. Tell me the truth: how tedious am I being right now?”
“Not at all.”
“I am a little, aren’t I?”
“No.”
“Not even a— Oh, hey.” He interrupts himself to greet Mia, once again in a hoodie-and-long-socks combo instead of last night’s dress, and looking rather more comfortable than she had yesterday. Steph had watched as she emerged from the corridor that leads to the restroom, waved to her intake, and then spotted her and Aaron and diverted towards them.
“Hey,” she says to Aaron, “I’m Mia.” There’s a footstool a metre or so away from the couch, and she sits on it, pulling her legs up under her and revealing herself also to be wearing — thank God — modesty shorts. Steph exchanges finger-waves with her, and she turns back to Aaron. “Saw you last night. Thought you looked good.”
“I looked stupid,” Aaron mutters, looking away.
“No, no!” Mia says, leaning forward to touch his knee. “You were going for butch girl, right?”
“I was going for guy,” Aaron says. Steph has to cover her mouth.
“Oh. Sorry.” Mia shrugs. “Well, you rocked it, anyway.”
“It’s okay,” Aaron says, as Mia sits back, wobbling a little as she gets her balance on the footstool again. “Not like I want to be a guy any more, anyway. Not that guy, anyway.”
“I remember that.”
“Do you? Do you really? Christ, everyone keeps saying that. Can’t I have some originality in my journey of self-discovery?”
“Sorry, no,” Mia says. “We’re all the same kinda flavour of fucked-up here.”
“Yeah?” Aaron says. “Did you ask your sponsor to help you die, too, then?”
Mia nods. “Before the orchi.” She sniffs. “Mine was later than the others. Not my fault. Illness. They had to get someone else in to do it. So I had a week sitting around watching everyone else fall apart. In the end I couldn’t stand it any more; I went to Nadine and I said, the point’s to get rid of me, right? So let’s do it.”
“What did she say?” Aaron asks. The bitterness is gone from his voice.
Mia screws up her face, remembering. “She said, ‘You don’t know how happy I’ll be when I’m finally rid of you’ — and she said my old name here, in full, you know, like, ‘firstname middlename lastname’, like you do when you’re super annoyed with someone — ‘but on that day you will be a happy and winsome young lady. Are you happy?’ And I had to say no. ‘Are you winsome?’ And I had to ask what that meant, and then I said no. And I’ll always remember this, because she sat down next to me on my bed and pulled my head down into her lap, cradled me like a baby, and said, ‘Then I am not ready to be rid of you.’ Fuck. I love her so much.”
“And that was it?” He’s leaning forward, reaching for her the way she reached for him. “You were just… fine after that?”
“Well, I leapt in with both feet,” Mia says, her voice lower and more thoughtful than Steph’s used to. “I didn’t have a choice, right? From the beginning, none of us have a choice. Someone says to you, someone who has the keys to the lock on your door, she says, you have to become a girl because you’re too dangerous to leave running around as a boy, and you say, fuck off, and she says, fine, the exit’s this way, and the exit is, like, a pit of burning spikes, well, you become a girl, don’t you? Everything before accepting that is just fucking around. Especially when you’ve come to trust the person who told you that, even come to love her, and you understand that she really genuinely believes you can be a better person, and it doesn’t take long for you to want to be a better person, right? And I wasn’t anything before Nadine. If she wasn’t going to let me go, and she wasn’t going to let me die—”
“Or let you walk out into the flaming spike pit,” Aaron says. There’s a laugh from behind them, and Steph realises the other second years have gathered behind the couch, listening. She sees Faye nodding; Mia’s already talked about this with the rest of them, then.
“Right.” Mia nods to herself, frowning. She draws herself in, tightens her legs under her, rams her hands into her lap. “I wasn’t fine, though. I mean, I don’t know what exactly you meant when you asked that, but I wasn’t… comfortable. I’m still not comfortable a lot of the time. It’s within reach, though. I can see it. I’ve known for a long time who I’m going to be. That’s a lot of what I did after talking to Nadine that one time: I worked out who ‘Mia’ is. Kind of—” she releases a hand long enough to mime a person walking along her thigh, “—stepped into her. Lots of ‘What would Mia do?’ and ‘What would Mia say?’ Not about the little things, obviously; Mia hates Weetabix just the same as— as the boy did. After a while she started to feel authentic. Not all the time. But enough that I knew it was possible. I saw Ai and Bex and the others all becoming more like themselves and I worried that it wasn’t happening for me outside those little flashes of her so I just kept at it. Kept being Mia. I’m still doing it, and she feels realer all the time. One day she’ll be all me and I’ll be all her, and until then…” A grin appears suddenly, like the power’s been switched back on for the ‘Mia’ persona and the other thing, the unnamed, unwanted passenger, has been put back in its box. “Fake it till you make it, right? It’s a cliché for a reason.”
“I don’t think this is the reason, Mi,” Aisha says.
“It might be,” Mia retorts. “You don’t know.”
Aaron persists. “So… do you want this or not?”
“Doing what I wanted got me bloody knuckles and a criminal record. And it’s not the first time I’ve had to learn to want what I have. Don’t worry about me. Worry about those big fucking bruisers in the basement; Ollie scares the piss out of me, if I’m honest.”
Aisha’s standing behind Mia now, and the other second years have drawn closer, taking seats on the couch or on the floor. Aisha kisses Mia on the top of her head. “Harmony’s scarier than Ollie,” she says. “She’ll keep him under control.”
“True,” Mia says, and shuffles over slightly on the footstool to make room for Aisha, who loops an arm around Mia’s waist and sits down. Steph’s not quite sure how both of them are managing to stay on the tiny seat.
“So,” Aisha says, wriggling as she settles in and causing Mia to giggle softly, “Steph; you and her, then?”
Steph reaches for Aaron’s hand and takes it. Raises them both together. “Yep.”
“We’ve officially gone public,” Aaron says.
“And you!” Aisha turns to Aaron. “Speaking of public, that was one hell of a thing you did last night. You have a replacement name yet? Or are we all supposed to call you ‘Hey You’?”
“I have ideas,” Aaron says quietly.
“Oh my god tell us!” Mia says, quickly enough and at such a pitch it takes Steph a moment to decipher.
“Uh, I’m still, um…”
“You should be Ethel. You look like an Ethel.”
“They do not,” Faye says, and adds to Aaron, quietly, “Sorry, I don’t know what your pronouns are right now.”
He shrugs.
“Petunia,” Rebecca says. “What? I like plant names!”
“Why don’t you have one, then?” Mia asks.
“Because I didn’t like plant names back then. And I wanted to seem unremarkable, so nobody in the outside world could possibly guess about the whole… basement thing.” She turns to Aaron, who seems to be sinking into the sofa. “I’m going to be an accountant,” she tells him.
Lost for words, he gives her a thumbs-up.
“Well,” Aisha says, “what about Daisy? That’s a plant name.”
“We’ve had a Daisy,” Faye says thoughtfully.
“Rose. Lily. Violet?”
“That’s a colour,” Mia says.
“And a flower.”
Aaron’s grip on Steph’s hand tightens, and she turns to him, kisses him on the nose, strokes the back of his hand with her thumb. Around them, the second years’ voices start to merge together.
“Jasmine. Primrose. Olive.”
“Also not a plant.”
“Trees are plants.”
“Trees are trees.”
“Heather?”
Aaron whispers to Steph, “I thought about Heather.”
“Really?” Steph whispers back.
“I like the movie, with the three of them, and the guy with the bombs. Didn’t stick, though.”
“The bombs?”
“The name.”
“Can we get off plant names?” someone says.
“Helga,” someone else suggests. “Prudence.”
“Rapunzel.”
“If we’re doing Disney, what about Merida?”
“Steph’s the ginger, though.”
“True.”
“Snow White?”
“The Beauty from Beauty and the Beast.”
“Her name’s Belle. And we’ve got a Bella already.”
“No, her name’s Beauty. It’s in the title, dork.”
One of them starts saying ‘Cinderella’ but they’re cut off when another one smothers them with a cushion, and that would have been Steph’s cue to rescue Aaron, to pull him up with her and drag him away from the couch, but the good-natured bickering around them suddenly cuts out, and the two of them look up to see Maria and Edy standing by the empty fireplace.
“You’re keeping your sponsors waiting,” Edy says.
“You were due upstairs five minutes ago,” Maria adds.
“Oh shit,” Faye says, and starts organising the rest of her intake. One by one they wish Steph and Aaron Happy Holidays, pick up their assigned cleaning gear from the pile in the corner and disappear up the stairs. Faye, the last to go, turns back to wave at all of them, and then follows the rest of her intake up to the first floor.
“Worse than herding cats,” Edy mutters.
“Do we get presents?” Steph asks.
“There was going to be a mini-dinner downstairs,” Maria says. “But they’re still talking with Will in the common room, and—”
“Still?”
Maria exhales heavily. “Yes. Still. He’s… Well. You know what he’s like. Apparently he’s been building up this idea that our purpose here is to, essentially, replace him in his own head, so now Tabitha’s got to demolish this—” she waves a hand dismissively, “—tower of bullshit he’s constructed around himself. He’ll be fine. Speaking of…” She sits next to Aaron, takes his other hand, and smiles when his eyes meet hers. “How are you doing?”
And Aaron sits up, frees his hands from both of them, digs himself out of the gap between the sofa cushions he’d been practically burrowing into, and turns to Steph. Kisses her on the cheek, as gently as Steph’s ever been kissed.
“Mind if I talk to Maria alone for a bit?” he asks.
* * *
They don’t talk about it on the way back to Shahida’s. Amy slamming the door on them wasn’t something Melissa expected and, judging by the look on her face, neither did Shahida. They link hands instead, walking more slowly to stay together, sharing their warmth amid the lingering frost, and it’s because of that that the running footsteps catch up to them sooner than they otherwise might have.
“Jesus, guys!” Amy says, panting between words. “You couldn’t have waited?”
“For what?” Shahida says. “You sent us away!”
“Yes, and then—” Amy slows her voice to lecture speed, “—I texted you to say, wait around the corner.”
“You—? Oh. Shit.” Shahida pulls her phone out of her bag and checks it. “I left it on silent.”
“Idiot,” Amy says, reaching up and pulling down Shahida’s bobble hat, covering her eyes. She holds it there and says to Melissa, “Hi. Where the hell have you been?”
“Manchester,” Melissa says, because she can’t think of anything else.
“Is it nice there?”
“It’s all right.”
Shahida grabs at Amy’s arm until she lets go, and pulls her hat back up. “Amy, you little—”
“When were you going to tell me she’s back?” Amy interrupts, poking Melissa in the shoulder. “When were you going to tell me she’s a she?”
“Um,” Melissa says. “Now?” She points back up the road, in the general direction of Amy’s house.
“You know what I mean. Look at you! You’re gorgeous. So either you have a very talented makeup artist in your pocket, or you’ve been transitioning for years.”
“Um.”
“We only found out recently,” Shahida says quickly. “A couple of weeks ago. Less.”
Amy narrows her eyes. “Define ‘we’.”
Shahida’s cheeks concave for a moment, and Melissa smiles. She does that when she has to think fast: swallows too hard, bites at the insides of her cheeks. Melissa decides to rescue her. “Shy found me, and then Rach found me and Shy.”
“She ‘found’ you.”
“Yeah.” Melissa looks away. Now that she’s back, now that she’s meeting up with everyone again, she feels stupid for ever running, and not just from Shahida; from the Hall, too. Of course, running from Shahida’s in the rules…
Shit. Tabby sanctioned bringing Shahida’s parents in, on the tacit understanding that Melissa’s reconnections would be done with care, and Melissa went along with Shahida’s idea to see Amy without really thinking about it. She’s getting too comfortable with all this, making decisions too quickly. Again.
She has a cis NPH. She’s not supposed to be out to anyone not from or associated with Dorley. This is starting to feel reckless.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she says urgently.
“What?”
“You really can’t,” Shahida says. “Mum and Ed know, and Rachel knows, but that’s it.”
“Big secret,” Melissa confirms.
“What about your little study buddy?” Amy asks. “Your surrogate little brother? Steve, or something.”
Shahida closes her eyes. Melissa says, “Long story.”
“Why don’t you come home with us?” Shahida says. “It’s too cold to stand around in the street like this.”
“Sure,” Amy says, “but I have another bone to pick with you first, Shy: you booted me from the group chat!”
“That was Rach, actually. She was trying to protect our little secret here.”
“Seems unnecessary; today was the first time I checked it in years.”
“Ah,” Shahida says, pointing a finger, “but you still checked it! That means—”
Amy quiets her by pulling down her hat again. She grins at Melissa while Shahida yanks blindly on her arm. “You should remember this trick,” she says. “Very useful.”
“You’re a cow, Amy,” Shahida says.
“And you’ve picked up a bit of an American accent.”
“I have not!”
“Yep. Have.”
“Amy.”
“Say ‘mirror’. Say ‘squirrel’. Say—”
“God, I hate you so much.”
* * *
The only thing more fascinating than watching Melissa — and isn’t that a great name for her? — is watching Shy watch Melissa, and Amy delights in flitting between the two preoccupations as they make their way back to Shy’s place. She would have expected Melissa to be more, ah-ha, shy, but she’s keeping up her end of the conversation with no problems, making jokes, pushing back when she’s pushed against; being, quite honestly, the person Amy always thought Mark should have been.
Oh, she didn’t see this coming, not a bloody chance, but she ought to have. Melissa’s so natural as a girl Amy has to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t one the last time they saw each other.
Except she might have been. That’s the thing, isn’t it? She hasn’t met more than a couple of trans people in what her mother dotingly calls her ‘professional’ life, and only one personally — until now — but after Auntie went off the deep end without a life preserver she felt obligated to read up, and that’s something a lot of them say: that they were always… such-and-such a gender. But then others of them say they weren’t, and it’s a whole complicated thing that doesn’t seem, to Amy, all that important in the great scheme of things. She, Amy, was once a baby and now she isn’t, was once (briefly) into Busted and now (thank God) she isn’t, was once a university student but wasn’t even that for very long, and if she can reinvent herself that many times, both unavoidably and by choice, then if someone says they’re actually a girl or a guy or something else then who the hell is she to argue?
She said that, more or less, at the table two Christmases ago and caused an incident, and now she and Auntie Miranda are no longer friendly with each other. And now it keeps coming out, every time they can’t avoid each other — like, for example, this Christmas — and every time Auntie Miranda has somehow amassed even more grievances.
Oh fuck! She hasn’t told them yet about Auntie Miranda!
Inside the Mohsin-Carpenter house she yells a greeting to Eddie and exchanges hugs with Rupa, nods respectfully towards the now-empty upstairs flat, and leaps for the most comfortable spot in Shahida’s room, amused that it looks exactly the same as the last time she was here, which was…
Wow. Might have been five years ago!
Shy and Liss follow her up, Shy carrying a tray of teas and Liss carrying a plate of homemade sugar cookies, which she puts down on the floor near the massive cushion Amy’s claimed, the one positioned such that you can use the padded window bench as a headrest.
And Shy and Liss sit down next to each other. Uh-huh.
Shy hands the teas around, and for some reason Liss takes a second to inspect her mug all the way round, as if it might be dirty, before smiling to herself and taking a sip. Weird.
“Okay, so,” Amy says, rapping on the bay window for attention, “I am dying to know everything there is to know, obviously, but I have to tell you something first. You remember my Auntie Miranda?”
Liss shrugs and Shy says, “Vaguely. Tall, really thin, looks like the villain in a children’s movie?”
“That’s her.”
“Have you read the opinion columns in The Times lately?”
“No— Wait, what?”
Amy slurps on her tea. “So, you ever got bored, sitting around the house, waiting for your husband to stop boning his assistant and come home to pretend to pay attention to you? Because that’s why my lovely Auntie Miranda’s assaulting the whole country with her opinions every Saturday. The way she tells it, she was just talking to Bunny, and—”
“Who’s Bunny?” Shy asks. “Is it a person or a, well, a bunny?”
“‘Bunny’ is the manner in which the Viscountess of Whereverthefuck prefers to be addressed. She and my auntie went to school together. And Bunny, she’s got an in with editorial at the paper, because, like, half the staff there are related to her, or something. So that’s how Auntie Miranda got the new gig. And her hobby horse is—”
“Trans women,” Liss finishes. “Miranda Woodley-Stone? She’s your aunt?”
Amy sighs deeply. “Unfortunately.”
“I’m out of the loop,” Shahida says.
“Miranda Woodley-Stone,” Liss says. “Makes a living gravely informing Times readers that people like me are coming for them in the M&S changing rooms.”
Amy growls. “It’s not a living. It’s worse; it’s a hobby.”
“Jesus.”
“Anyway, she’s here again this Christmas, which is why we had to get the hell away from my house! She’s done multiple ‘exposés’ about private citizens who had the temerity to take a piss while trans and she’s got contacts all over the fucking place and she’s seen you, Liss. Old you. I have pictures of you in my room and there’s one of you at Rach’s brother’s party in the living room. The chances of her seeing you now and working it out are, well, they’re slim—”
“But not none,” Liss finishes. “Thanks, Ames.”
Amy beams at her. Shy rubs Liss’s knee, and Amy rolls her lips closed to keep from laughing at the way Shy’s hand looks just so ready to move up Liss’s thigh. Amy fucks up, though, and snorts, immediately covers her mouth with the back of her hand, and then, when both of them look at her, just bloody well gives up and rolls back on her pillow, letting the laughter out and easing the strain on her lungs.
“Holy shit,” she stammers as she gets her breath back.
“You okay, Amy?” Liss asks.
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, it’s fine, I shouldn’t say it. Really I shouldn’t.”
“Say what?” Liss says, at the same time that Shy says, “Em—”
“You two,” Amy says, still wheezing. “You’re so into each other it’s untrue. I mean, with Shy it’s super obvious, because she’s always been just, like, completely incapable of subterfuge, but Liss, you’re feeling it too, I can see it. She puts her hand on your knee and you lean into her like she’s the only girl in the world. God.” She reaches for a sugar cookie and waggles it at them both. “I always thought you were made for each other. Turns out you were. You just had this whole gender thing to get over.”
“Ames—”
“What happened with that, anyway? You owe me a story.”
“Amy!” Shy says. “You can’t just… drop that into the room and move on.”
“Why not? It’s so obvious.”
She can see it: the hope in both their eyes. There’ll be bullshit reasons for holding back, because there always are, and they’re both girls inclined to trip over themselves from thinking so hard they’ve tied their legs in knots.
Amy checks her tea is safely out of the way and then hops up off the cushion. She sits down in front of them and, before either of them have time to react — they’ll both be doing that thing where the brain presents an empty whiteboard and they have to rehearse their response on it in bloody triplicate before they can move a muscle — she takes Shy’s hand and Liss’s hand and clamps them together.
Their fingers interlock instantly, instinctively.
“Em, I haven’t wanted to—”
“I’m sorry, it’s just, I’ve felt like—”
“No, you don’t have to apologise, it’s me that—”
“Shy, seriously, I’m—
Amy clears her throat. “Do I have to push your heads together?” she says.
Shy glares at her, looks like she’s about to say something deeply, unforgivably rude, but Liss, whose face had been going brighter and brighter shades of pink over all this, suddenly smiles and reaches for Shy’s face with her free hand. “No, you don’t,” she says, and cups Shy’s cheek. “May I?”
Shy can’t speak. She just nods, and Amy’s heart just might bloody well explode from the sweetness of it.
* * *
Maria cleared everyone out for him, sent Steph away to talk to the others in the kitchen. Created for them both a little space, quiet, safe, private. And he needs that.
It’s not that he wants to be away from Steph. Not at all. But since he officially renounced his prior identity it feels like all the things that go with it are falling away, and while she wants the absolute best for him, he needs a chance to clarify his thinking without her there to overhear. And while Maria loves him, too, she has a lot more experience being objective about this kind of thing.
Maria asked him if he was okay and he assured her that he was and she gave him the space to think, to formulate his thoughts, and now he’s ready. Even more ready than he was last night, and for maybe an even more momentous purpose.
“I’ve been thinking about names,” he says. “And other stuff. But the name is important. I can’t be someone unless I have a name for her to be, you know?”
“I know,” Maria says softly.
“I talked to Jane. Talked to Christine and to that second year, Mia. And I think it was Christine and Mia that finally, you know, did it for me. Crystallised it.” He taps his thumb restlessly on his chin, and Maria reaches for his hand, calms it, interlaces their fingers, the way she did that night, the first time everything came crashing down.
“Take your time,” she says.
“Last night was hard. The tux was a mistake. Saying goodbye to Aaron was, like, I think I already had? But I’d been dwelling on this big, public gesture for so long that I couldn’t not do it, you know? Two raised middle fingers to the piece of shit I used to be. And then that was it: no more Aaron. And I started to kind of miss him, you know, just a little. Not who he was — not who I was — but who he could have been. The lost potential. And I know this whole place is about lost potential, there’s probably a mug about it in a cupboard somewhere and it probably finds a way to make it somehow also about testicles, but I mean, like, the first time I hurt someone, or the first time I was hurt, what if that never happened? And the fact that I can’t imagine that, that there’s no way for that little boy to exist even in my own fucking head, it breaks my heart, Maria. It kills me. So I want to remember him.” He laughs, deliberately, because he’s getting tense and that’s not what he intended.
“You don’t have to do this now,” Maria says.
He shakes his head; he’s fucking well going to do this now. “I want to remember him,” he continues, “but I’m not going to do a Steph, just change the spelling and call it a day, even though that would be so convenient, like, I wouldn’t even have to tell Will and Raph, I could just pretend they’re calling me the right name. And I don’t like it enough that I want it up in front, anyway. Plus, you know, opsec. A guy called Aaron goes missing and then a couple of years later a girl called Erin pops up? Even the worst private detective in the world would spot that, and then you’d have to have him killed by, I don’t know, Christine or someone.”
“I’ll tell Christine you thought of her.”
“She had a relationship with Paige, didn’t she? Before now, I mean. They were together when they were still… transitioning, and then they weren’t.”
“Yes. They didn’t get together again until recently.”
“You think that’ll happen to me and Steph? Just stop being together one day?”
“No. Christine and Paige, while they were developing, needed very different things from each other than you and Steph do. And they were both in flux, as personalities. I hope you don’t find this offensive, but in your relationship, one of you has a relatively stable sense of self.”
“And it’s not me,” he says, squeezing her hand. “Not offended. That’s kind of my point, actually. Kind of the reason for the name I’m thinking about. And why I want your opinion on whether it, you know, actually sucks.”
“I’m sure it won’t.”
“You haven’t heard my reason yet. Mia, she talked about herself like she designed a fucking D&D character and then decided to become it, and I thought that was weird for, like, literally three seconds, and then I realised that she’s probably got something there, like, I could decide on the person I think I should be, I can name her and I can describe the way she is and everything, and then all I have to do is be her, and keep being her until I am her. Right? I told Steph that I don’t want to be a girl, but I want to want to be a girl, and I do. Yesterday I saw so many people I’d swap places with in a heartbeat, if that would mean I’d also get their confidence in themselves and their guaranteed okayness with being, you know, a girl. So I make a girl of my own, and then I work on becoming her. Does that… make sense?”
“It does.”
“It’s not colossally fucking stupid?”
Maria lets go of his hand so she can shift position on the couch, lifting herself up and carefully crossing her legs. When she’s done she gestures towards herself, from head to toe, and says, “How do you think I became okay with being Maria? Our circumstances were quite different, but part of how I did it was deciding on who Maria would be. I imagined a whole life for her. I even picked a new surname; my mum’s favourite singer from back in Hong Kong.” She sniffs, looks away for a second, and he takes her hand, returns to her a little of the comfort she offered him. “I found out after the takeover that she’d died, though. The singer, I mean. Didn’t feel right to take her name after that.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“You’re sweet.” She smiles again, broad and happy. “I’m glad you’re my little sister.”
That’s a little startling to hear. But not bad, not really. More like Maria’s describing someone else, someone he doesn’t deserve to be.
And that’s the point.
“So I was thinking about role models,” he says, recovering and moving on, but not missing the playful smirk that now rests on Maria’s lips, “and there are a lot of them here, but the problem with that is that they’re all here. I can’t be you and I can’t be Steph — or I guess I could but it’d be really fucking weird — and I don’t know that I can really invent someone out of nothing like you did, or like Mia did. And, yes, I know, it’s just a template, or a bloody stencil, I guess, and when you do the thing with the spray paint it doesn’t always go on exactly the way you cut it, and that’s okay, because all I want’s a starting point. And I think I have that. I think I know who I’m going to be.”
She leans forward, arms out, and he accepts the hug, uses it to whisper the name so quietly that even if there’s surveillance on them right now she’ll still probably be the only one to hear it, and when she does, when she knows what she’s going to be calling him, from now until the end of his days, she repeats it back to him, delighted, and hugs him all the harder.
* * *
When Melissa withdraws she has to sit back heavily on her ankles, because her heart’s beating paradoxically too hard to properly support her head or her limbs or anything else of use, it’s beating so hard she can hear it, can feel her own pulse pound in her fingertips and in her lips, still wet, still trembling, still aching for her.
And it’s not enough for Shahida either, because she gets only a moment’s rest before it’s Shahida’s turn, and she doesn’t even wait for Melissa to recover, she crawls forward, rises just enough to grasp Melissa’s hands with her own, and pins her, kisses her, presses whole-body against her, and if Melissa could have just one prayer answered in her whole life it would be to share every sensation with Shahida, every nerve ending, every quivering limb, all of it because of her, all of it owed to her.
Eventually, Shahida relents and rolls off her, to land on her back on the floor by Melissa’s side, breathing heavily.
“I just remembered we’re in Mum’s house,” she says breathlessly. “And I can’t decide if she’d yell at us or take a seat and encourage us to continue.”
“And I’m here, also,” Amy says, observing them over the rim of her mug. It makes Melissa jump, because she had forgotten about Amy, forgotten about Rupa and Edward, forgotten about Dorley Hall and all the heavy shit she has to think about. She smiles sheepishly at Amy, who giggles in response. “And you know your mum would just bring you tea and snacks and tell you to pace yourselves.”
“Shit,” Melissa says.
“Yeah,” Shahida says.
“Yeah,” Melissa says.
“Yeah,” Shahida says, and then she props herself up on her elbows, examines Melissa with a narrowed eye for a moment, and asks, “Are you happy with this?”
“Very.”
“Would you like to be together?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” Shahida says, frowning, “I hate to deflate the mood, but we have to talk to Abby.”
“Abby?” Melissa says. “But she’s gone, she’s fucked off, she’s not coming back, and… Yeah. You’re right. I’m making excuses. We should talk to Abby.” She’d known it; she just wanted, for a little while, to pretend she didn’t. Abby’s got as large a space reserved in her heart as Shahida, but since Melissa returned, Abby’s made herself deliberately scarce. Melissa’s time away from everyone she ever loved was hard and lonely and she will not be the cause of such a thing in one of her best friends.
“Who’s Abby?” Amy asks.
“It’s a long story,” Melissa says.
“You said that about Steven.”
“Stefan,” Shahida says.
“I’m full of long stories,” Melissa says.
“So tell me!” Amy says, and then she holds up a finger and adds, “No, wait. First, we take a group selfie and I send it to Rach with the smuggest emoji I can find. Then you tell me.”
* * *
It’s been hard waiting for Aaron and Maria to finish talking about whatever they’re talking about, but, bless them, the girls have been doing their best to keep Steph occupied, catching her up on Hall gossip, recommending some new shows that have just been put on the network, and even bringing out some baby pictures: a graduate and her wife just had twins, and in anticipation of their planned New Year visit she’s sent along photos that have multiple girls around the table cooing, including Steph, to her immense surprise. By the time Maria comes to find her she’s borrowed a laptop from one of the girls and is alternating between drafting a new letter to Petra — filled, unfortunately, with the usual lies; at least she can make them happy ones — and showing them pictures of her on Facebook; she’s joined the new school band, and looks right at home there.
She closes the laptop as soon as Maria shows, though, and is out of her chair almost as quickly.
“Everything’s okay,” Maria says, and Steph swallows the lump that’s been growing in her throat for the last half-hour.
“Really?”
“Really.” Maria points back into the dining hall with her thumb. “Come through?”
Steph looks around quickly at the other girls, suddenly afraid again, suddenly aware that everything might be about to change, and though it’s change she wants, change she’s been waiting for, she still fears that Aaron might not make it through, that there might be a way for him to pass every test the programme sets for him but the very last, and end up separated from her, or washed out, or reduced, or otherwise taken away.
Another look at Maria, and Steph remembers: she’d never let that happen.
“Steph,” Christine says, tapping on the laptop lid, “I’ll save out your work and log out of Facebook and stuff.”
“Thanks, Tina,” Steph says. She likes that nickname for her, partly because it causes Christine to roll her eyes and Paige to giggle.
On the way, Maria takes Steph’s hand. Has she ever done that before? Steph’s not sure — the days do rather roll together, under Dorley — but something’s changed in Maria’s demeanour. She’s not as different as she was after the attack, when she came back to work and adopted a gentler approach with Aaron, but towards Steph she feels more… sisterly?
Everything changes. At least she’s changing now, too.
Aaron’s on the couch by the fireplace where she left him, and Edy’s there, throwing on fresh logs and getting ready to light it. She does so as they walk up, and they both recoil slightly from the sudden blanket of warm air.
“Hi,” Aaron says. He’s sitting cross-legged, facing across the couch, so Steph sits the same way, tucking her ankles under, facing him. He looks happy. Nervous, but happy. And, in the firelight, so fucking beautiful.
“We’ll be back in a bit,” Maria says, “for presents and the like, and a bit of a meal. It’s opt-in, so it should be a small crowd. You’re welcome to stay for it, if you’d like. Both of you. Steph, I know Pippa would be delighted not to have to give you your gift down in the basement.”
Steph nods distractedly, and pays little attention to Maria and Edy as they leave, because now it’s just her and Aaron in the circle of heat and light from the fire, and whatever he has to say, she will accept, she will love.
“Okay,” he says, and then shakes his head, smiles absently. “This is really it, isn’t it? This is really fucking it. Okay! Steph. Stephanie. Steph.”
“Hey,” she says.
“Right. I’ve been talking with— God. No. Christ! Why is this so hard?”
“You’re scaring me a little bit?”
“Sorry. It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s just— I have a name. A new one. Two of them, actually. Should probably pick a surname, but— Fuck. No. Off-topic.”
“Slow down,” Steph says. “One thought at a time.”
He laughs. “Is that even possible?”
“For you? No.”
“This is my moment!” he says. “You can’t be mean to me in my moment!”
“Sorry.”
But it worked, because he’s less jittery, no longer sitting on his hands, instead holding them gently in his lap.
“I was going to tell you the whole story behind them,” he says. “I told Maria. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you first, but I wanted to validate my thinking. I wanted to know from someone who’s been where I am, who was chosen for womanhood, who didn’t choose it for herself. I wanted to know from…”
“From your big sister?” Steph suggests, and Aaron creases into a smile.
“Yes. I wanted my big sister’s approval. I asked her if it suited me, because ever since I picked it I’ve been worrying it didn’t, that it doesn’t fit, that it was too, I don’t know, ordinary, and she told me she has full faith that any name I choose will be cursed by at least one sponsor inside a week. I don’t know why that made me feel better, but it did. She also, um, suggested I sit here and say it to myself. A lot. So it sounds normal to me. It doesn’t yet.”
“Are you going to keep me in suspense until New Year?”
“I’m— God. Steph, it seems weird to say out loud.”
And she can see in him a mixture of nervousness and pride; he’s named his destiny, his future self, and he’s anxious to become her, but even Maria’s approval isn’t enough for him to properly claim it. He needs hers.
Well. She can make it easier for him.
She unlinks her ankles and shuffles up on the couch, leans in. “Whisper them to me, then,” she says. “Both names.”
He does.
Steph doesn’t know what she imagined in this moment. Dramatic music, perhaps, or a passionate kiss. Instead she feels nothing but the most profound peace, a peace that seems to suffuse her whole being, a peace that promises a life for them both, within this Hall and beyond; a peace she wants to share with her partner. So she plants simple, soft kisses on cheek, chin and lips, and she says, “Hi, Bethany.”
And that’s it.
They sit back together, hands held, her head on Steph’s shoulder, with nothing but themselves and the light and heat from the fire, and Bethany Erin Holt says, “Hi.”
* * *
She can tell Frankie’s started early because when she wheels the serving trolley into the kitchen, she says, “Choo choo!” and pumps her forearm like she’s a child playing trains. And the fact that she’s wearing flats and still managed to almost fall over her own feet is another, slightly more subtle clue. Valérie gives her a tight smile, teeth clenched over the urge to laugh, and starts loading up the trolley.
“How much have you had?” she asks.
“You know how there’s a wine cellar?”
“I do.”
Frankie whispers, “There’s also a whisky cellar.”
“Oh, for God’s sake; are you trying to get us both killed?”
“Well, more a whisky cupboard.”
Val sets down the turkey and folds her arms. “Seriously, Frances.”
Frankie straightens up. “No, Valérie, I am not going to get us both killed. I’m leaning into it, aren’t I? We’re both about to walk into what is bound to be one of the more stressful dinners of our lives, so I’m having a little fun.”
Val, shaking her head, resumes loading the trolley. “It will be nothing new for me. I have eaten dinner with people who have the power of death over me many times before. With you, for example, back at Dorley Hall.”
“Val, love, you greatly overestimate the influence I had there.” Frankie thumps her chest.
“From the point of view of the ant, everyone’s boots are the same size.”
“More French philosophy?”
“Perhaps. I wouldn’t know. My education was never prioritised by the people who stole my life and my genitals from me.”
Frankie leans closer. “When we get out,” she whispers, “I’ll show you how to use Wikipedia.”
“Sshh!” Valérie hisses it as quietly and insistently as she dares. She does not share Frankie’s confidence in her ability to keep it together tonight. At least the woman had the foresight to brief her before disappearing into the depths of Stenordale Manor in search of alcohol; Trevor’s going to be at dinner, and Val’s had all afternoon to rehearse her reaction to him.
And that’s a good thing, because Trevor’s already sat at the table, bracketed by Callum and Jake, and his eyes bug out when he sees her. Declan’s there, also — or ‘Dina’; whichever — and sat on Jake’s other side, and the overall impression is of two grizzled and unattractive millionaires showing off their latest trophy wives, an impression only slightly spoiled by Trevor’s obvious terror and Declan’s sullen disinterest.
“Ah,” Val says, stopping momentarily with the trolley, “you’ll be why I was asked to cook for nine today. New acquisition, I take it?” she adds, addressing Jake.
“None of your business,” he says.
“But she does eat, yes?”
“Yeah. He does.”
“Ah,” Valérie says delicately, and smiles placidly at Trevor. “Welcome to my side of the family. Do you have a name?”
“Trevor,” he says.
“Theresa,” Jake says at the same time.
“A choice,” Val says. “How wonderful. Frances, lay the table, would you? I couldn’t fit the gravy or the other batch of potatoes on the trolley; I must fetch them.”
“Sure,” Frankie says, her deliberate, grudging obedience rather enhanced by her inebriation.
Val waits until she’s out in the corridor and out of the view of any cameras before she allows herself to smile. Frankie told her that, in her opinion, Trevor’s a terrible actor, so it’s perhaps best for all of them that his terror is so overwhelming tonight, and has so clear a cause; it gets him off the hook from having to pretend he doesn’t know Val, isn’t part of a very quiet and only slightly hopeless conspiracy. Frankie or Jake or someone will have told him: the Smyth-Farrows are here for a number of reasons, but high among them is to get a good look at him.
She wishes, momentarily, that she had not told him horror stories of her early days under their bastard father. Oh well.
When she returns to the dining room with the second, smaller cart and the missing potatoes, Dorothy’s taken her seat, and the distant rhythmic thump of helicopter blades has started to penetrate the walls of the manor.
“They’re here,” Dorothy says with a grunt, and that’s when Valérie knows she’s distracted: not a single barb or insult by way of greeting. She feels quite invisible.
Callum half-stands out of his chair. “Should I go greet them?”
“Sit. They don’t trust my people; that’s why they brought their own.”
“And your people are normally so trustworthy,” Val says in her smoothest voice, as she takes up the position of server and servant.
“Can it, Vincent.”
“What will you cut off if I don’t, Dorothy?”
“Seriously, Val,” Frankie says, sounding more sober. She’s sat next to Trevor, possibly to help keep him calm, though Valérie’s doubtful her dubious charms are powerful enough for that. “These are serious people. Don’t try and push their buttons.”
She gets the message: play-acting over. Val nods, offers Dorothy a final smirk just to shit her up a bit, and then settles her face into the careful neutrality of one who is only to be spoken to.
Alistair and Henrietta Smyth-Farrow turn out to be exceptionally well-groomed individuals of about her age — though they look older, she muses, and bites down on her pleasure at that — and they come braced with bodyguards, superior expressions and, when they speak, accents that could lacerate glass.
“Ms Marsden!” Alistair exclaims, almost before their little party is even visible through the opening double doors. “How charming to see you again.”
“And what a fabulous little estate,” Henrietta observes. Privately, Valérie imagines her slaughtering puppies for a fur coat. “Very English.”
“Yes, very,” Alistair says, looking expectantly at Valérie, who remembers just in time the duties of a domestic who isn’t bound to either a doddering old man or a motley collection of idiots with no interest in decorum, and receives his coat and Henrietta’s as he speaks. “I’m afraid that in our time with the colonials we’ve become used to grander things. There’s no weight of history there, of course, but there’s a certain level of service that one comes to take for granted.”
Val chooses to receive this observation as a personal insult, and wonders if, in the fullness of time, she’ll have the opportunity to disembowel the man.
“Yes, well,” Dorothy says, standing to greet them, “we have to make do with what we have, I’m afraid. It’s good to see you, Alistair; Henrietta.”
Niceties carry them through the Smyth-Farrows taking their places around the table — Val can sense them struggling not to call it ‘quaint’, even though it could fit the entire assembled party twice over — and an initial serving of wine, pre-approved by Alistair Smyth-Farrow; “Father always did have good taste,” he says as she pours for him, “in some things, at least.”
She decides to take that as a personal insult, too.
The unnamed bodyguards stand rigidly on either side of the main doors, and the evening begins.
The gatherings back at Dorley Hall were always rather more debauched, and old Crispin Smyth-Farrow rarely entertained; and on the few occasions he did, he was more prone to the authentically aristocratic raucous bacchanal of wine and song than his children, who are, Val decides, used to moving in circles which built their formalities around a shared cultural embarrassment at not being as aristocratic as the bastards back home. But there have been formal occasions in Valérie’s life; she simply was not Valérie when she experienced them. She finds herself overflowing with mournful nostalgia, and she struggles to keep a lid on it as she serves the appetisers.
Fortunately, the company here tonight is actively detrimental to such musings. Focusing on them, their attitudes, their appalling intentions, helps refocus her.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us to your people, then, Ms Marsden?” Henrietta asks.
“Of course,” Dorothy says, in deferential tones Val finds strangely unsettling. “These here are our contracted soldiers, Jacob and Callum. This is Declan, the reject from Dorley Hall we captured and… repurposed.”
“We’re calling her Dina now,” Jake says, and though Val’s behind her she could swear she saw Henrietta’s eyebrow minutely twitch.
“Over there is Frances, one of my long-time associates and quite the expert in moulding young men.”
“Hi,” Frankie says, with her fork paused halfway to her mouth.
“And next to her is Trevor.”
“Ah, yes,” Henrietta says, “the young man who is to be ours.”
Val watches what remains of Trevor’s Adam’s apple bob nervously in his throat.
“We picked Theresa for her,” Jake adds.
“Ugh,” Henrietta says, lightly coughing. “Ghastly name. And so, I’m afraid to say, is ‘Dina’.”
“Just my soldier amusing himself,” Dorothy says quickly, earning herself a glare from Jake that he quickly suppresses.
“Indeed.”
“Well,” Alistair says, “now that we’re all acquainted, I propose we move on to the main course. Domestic,” he adds, not even bothering to look at Val, whom nobody attempted to introduce, “more wine, if you please.”
For Valérie, the meal goes surprisingly quickly. At Frankie’s slurred insistence she joins them to eat, and when questioned the bloody woman claims to be responding to ‘old sponsoring instincts’; “I just hate to see them standing around, yeah? Could be up to something. Indulge me.” Val hates feeling grateful towards Frankie, and wishes the woman would stop being so aggravatingly helpful. She still has to serve the inbred monsters, and to suffer the veiled insults from Alistair Smyth-Farrow without comment, but she’s sure that the one time she accidentally caught the eye of one of the bodyguards, he gave her the smallest, most barely perceptible smile of solidarity, and she supposes that at least she has to put up with them for only one night.
Over dessert, Callum appears to have one of his periodic bouts of conscience, and asks the Smyth-Farrows their plans for Trevor.
“Well, I’m glad someone asked!” Henrietta exclaims. Her accent’s been slipping farther across the Atlantic with every glass of wine, and now holds little resemblance to the authentically, indisputably English accent of her father, a man so refined he was sometimes difficult to understand. “He’s key, actually; and I meant to thank you, Ms Marsden, for taking the initiative and retaining him. Saved us ever so much bother, ‘auditioning’ candidates.”
“And then we’d have to cover up the disappearance, yadda yadda yadda,” Alistair says, twirling a finger in a circle and sounding bored.
“Precisely. To our intentions: they are twofold. We do need a domestic, like yours, Ms Marsden; one who is entirely under our control and who does not, legally, exist. Such a creation is very useful. But young Trevor’s main task will be to function as a sort of travelling exhibit. We’ll be touring England, the States, and a handful of other countries, and he’ll be a vital part of our presentation. Investors are so much happier when they can experience things for themselves. Imagine, if you will, trying to acquire the necessary funding to construct, oh, I don’t know, say, a rollercoaster, in a world where rollercoasters do not yet exist. You’d be looking at a lot of blank faces! A lot of people asking what on earth the point is of an elevated train that simply travels in very small circles. So, that’s where he comes in: this is what can be achieved! Show us the sons of your political or ideological enemies or your corporate rivals, and we will swiftly provide you with a plaything you will find ever so satisfying to behold.”
“You can’t—” Trevor says, his gut convulsing.
“Oh, my dear,” Henrietta says, “we can and we will. We are even planning some further modifications to your body, for the second round of investor meetings; they’ll be ever so bored if they have to see the exact same girl twice.”
Callum’s trying to silence him, to calm him down, but Trevor pushes him away, practically falls out of his chair and staggers on his heels. He collides with the wall and, his self-control a distant memory, vomits his dinner into a plant pot.
“Oh dear,” Alistair Smyth-Farrow says.
“Ms Marsden,” Henrietta says, as Val and Frankie rush to Trevor’s side to help him up, “I was given to understand your training was… well, adequate.” She taps her fingers on the table for a few moments, and Val, holding Trevor’s right arm and keeping him steady, has to stop herself reaching for the gravy boat and throwing it at her. “Yes,” she says decisively, “he cannot remain here. We shall take him with us. Complete his training ourselves. Clyde, Howard, collect our property.”
The bodyguards leave their posts by the door and advance on Trevor, Frankie and Val, and while Frankie steps aside, Val refuses, and not just because if they take Trevor, their chances of escape drop dramatically; she sees in the amused eyes of Henrietta and the disgusted growl of Alistair the memory of Crispin Smyth-Farrow and the delight he took in murdering the girls she tried to help. She’s had decades to regret her failures, and she knows that if Trevor leaves with them, she’ll struggle to live with the knowledge of the suffering that will be inflicted upon him.
She exchanges a brief, apologetic glance with Frankie, and then stands in front of Trevor.
“Domestic!” Alistair Smyth-Farrow barks. “Remove yourself!”
Val plants her feet and glares at him. “I will not,” she says, and summons every ounce of authority she can access. “If you try to train this man with amateur methods you will fail. Look at him! He is barely functional. Because you are correct: Dorothy Marsden’s training is inadequate. And that is because she has never trained someone for the role you plan. What she did, and what she still does—” she jerks her head at Declan, “—is break people. She does not have a plan for putting them back together again because she never cared to. She preferred them that way. Now, I am sure you are familiar with your father’s preferences, and how they differed from Dorothy’s, yes?” To the silence, she repeats herself: “Yes?”
When Henrietta speaks, her Americanised accent has all but reasserted itself, and she’s looking at Val with an interested gaze that makes her want to spit.
“I am aware of our father’s preferences, yes,” Henrietta says.
“The girls he put to work here? I trained them. I put them back together after Dorothy Marsden tore them apart. Out of the shells of men I built functional women, capable of—” she tries not to grit her teeth, “—useful service. Me. Not her.”
“Interesting.”
“Henny—” Alistair says.
“Shush. I sense a proposition.”
Val pretends to think it over for a few seconds. “Six months,” she says directly to Henrietta, ignoring Alistair, who seems suddenly subordinate. “Give me six months and you’ll have your obedient, functional servant.”
Henrietta narrows her eyes, and Val wonders if she’s pretending to think, too, to give the moment more weight, to increase her perceived control over the situation. “Three,” she says eventually.
And now Valérie really does think: is three months enough time to get Trevor back to a state where he can actually assist in an escape attempt, while simultaneously pretending to train him to function as a servant slash display piece for these ghastly people?
It’ll have to be.
“Three,” she says.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake on it,” Henrietta says drily, standing and beckoning Alistair out of his chair, “since the man you are protecting has made quite the mess of himself.”
“Yes, Henny,” Alistair says, “please don’t.”
“What is your name?” Henrietta says to Val. “I don’t believe I caught it.”
Frankie relieves Val of Trevor, allowing her to step forward and announce herself with dignity. “Valérie Barbier. Daughter of Laurent and Celine Barbier. They were once rivals of your father.”
“Barbier… Barbier…” Alistair mutters.
“I remember,” Henrietta says. “The unhinged old coot had quite the temper on him. A dreadful thing for you to get caught up in, Valérie Barbier.”
“Yes,” Val says, “it was.” Grudging marks for pronouncing her name properly, at least.
“Aren’t you an interesting woman?”
“I have my moments.”
“Indeed. Thank you, Ms Marsden; we have indulged ourselves on your hospitality quite long enough. Three months, Ms Barbier.”
Alistair and Henrietta Smyth-Farrow retrieve their coats without assistance, and within minutes are gone, leaving a fuming Dorothy in their wake.
“I should put you across my knee, Trevor, boy!” she shouts, thumping an arthritic fist on the table.
“Ah-ah, Dorothy,” Val says. She’s helping Frankie keep him steady again; Trevor seems about ready to pass out from shock, fear or both. “The Smyth-Farrows would prefer their toy unharmed, don’t you think?”
“Fine. Take him. Clean him up. He’s yours, Vincent. Get him ready or I’ll give you to the blasted Smyth-Farrows as a consolation prize.”
Frankie’s room is the closest, has a full ensuite bathroom, and is conveniently unmonitored, and Val’s already formulating excuses to come back here, to spend time with Trevor and Frankie in the parts of the manor that will keep their secrets. But first they need to clean him up, calm him down and put him to bed, and those are daunting enough tasks in their own right. She and Frankie talk quietly and constantly to him, reassuring him that they won’t let the Smyth-Farrows take him, that they’re all going to get out or bloody well die trying. Val makes him a sincere promise, and Frankie surprises her by doing likewise, and when eventually he falls into restless sleep in Frankie’s unmade bed, the two of them tiptoe back into her bathroom and collapse in twin exhausted piles, Frankie sitting heavily on the toilet lid and Valérie sliding down the door.
“Well, Val, love,” Frankie says. “Looks like we have ourselves a deadline.”
Notes:
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Chapter 33: Until You Make It
Notes:
CONTENT WARNINGS: violence, abuse, manipulation, humiliation, deadnaming, use of homophobic and transphobic slurs
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
2019 December 26
Thursday
She’s trying out her new pronouns. Not her new name, which settled into her subconscious almost as soon as she decided on it — her old name, her old everything, had become so mired in bad memories, so draped in the scorn of the people who abused him, so stained with the viscera of those he abused, that when it finally became clear to him how easy it would be to drop it and how proudly those now close to him would celebrate such an act, she did so immediately and with satisfaction. New pronouns are trickier, though; harder to internalise.
And she could well have lingered on the old set, would have had plenty of excuses to do so, but she tried being Bethany and remaining a he for all of twenty seconds before it became unbearably stupid.
Is that a weakness? Is she too binary in her thinking? Too attached to the clear line between man and woman to imagine something as simple and as ordinary and as boring as a woman’s name with masculine pronouns attached? Fuck it; probably. But that might be a strength down here, in the place where they want you to transition in a year or two from man to woman and refine the details later. Better to overshoot and have to back up a bit than flail forever at the dividing line.
Still an imperfect thought. That Aaron Holt, he was such a binarist. Thank God he’s dead.
Maria warned him once of the dangers of trying to enlighten himself too quickly, of setting his standards too high too early and becoming disheartened by his inability to live up to them, and she was, like always, right.
In the end, he was driven away from his old name by an antipathy and disgust that seemed to deepen by the day; she’s been drawn to her new pronouns by the love of people she’s come to admire.
Steph helped. For the last few hours of Christmas Day she relentlessly gendered her. Took her to the kitchen where Maria and Edy and Christine and various other sponsors and Sisters and — dare she say it? dare she even think it? — friends were hanging out. Reintroduced her with a joy that made her heart swell, made her throat stick. All the while holding her hand, lending her strength. And the Sisters responded with nothing but pride.
Is it really so simple? Once he was a man who did terrible things; now she’s the new girl, ushered into a family that grows by a half-dozen or so every year, offered forgiveness and love and sisterhood. Can she really leave it all behind so easily?
She laughs at herself; nothing about this was ever simple. They’re going to cut off her fucking balls!
And yet.
There’d been a moment, late on Christmas night, when the alcohol had come back out, when Monica and Tabby were showing off what horrible crimes they could commit with nothing more than a cocktail shaker and what turned out to be an extremely large spirits cabinet hidden behind a door she’d thought purely decorative, when she’d lost her nerve, and though she didn’t say anything, she was seen.
Christine had detached herself from her intimidatingly beautiful girlfriend, taken her by the arm out into the hallway, sat her on a bench by the front doors, and let her have some time to herself. They sat companionably together, looking out at the grassy front lawn and the narrow path from the Hall to the university, the darkness interrupted every so often by bright points of light. She imagined walking that path, going back to class, and as soon as she did so she shuddered:
She was looking out at the place where she hurt people.
She was truly fucking glad to be locked up.
And then Christine took her hands and told her a story. Told her about a boy mired in misery and loneliness, a boy who was too bloody clever by half and essentially unsupervised, a boy with access to too much money and too many toys and too much time, a boy who allowed himself to become poisoned. Told her of the women he hurt. Told her of the brief, insolent sparks of pleasure such pain brought.
“You know what Bea told me?” Christine said, holding her hands, looking out into the darkness with her. “She told me the women I hurt know I’m gone. That they know I’m dead. And that some of them, she said, were sorry I couldn’t be helped before it was too late.” Christine released her hands, brought her into a hug instead, an embrace inside which she felt small but protected. “She said — and I’m paraphrasing here, but you’ve met Beatrice and you know how she likes to express herself when she’s really leaning into the persona — ‘In light of your reformation, I would suggest that most or all of those women would likely forgive you.’”
“What did you say to that?”
And Christine laughed. “Bethany, I cried my fucking heart out.”
They talked a while longer. She took the point: that it isn’t enough that she grow, that she change, that she become someone worthy of forgiveness, someone capable of comprehending it; she must also understand that without him the world still turns. That when she leaves this place, it won’t be to the same world.
Everything’s new. Not just her.
Back in the kitchen, Steph kissed her and hugged her and found her a new chair because Pippa had nicked the old one, and she relaxed back into the conversation, only realising after several minutes that she and Christine had been outside Dorley Hall’s locks the whole time.
She could have run!
But why would she?
So they all called her Bethany and she and her and gradually it became quite ordinary. By the end of the night, Bethany Erin Holt — or Bethany Erin Someone, since Maria said she’ll need to a pick a new surname, and, no, she can’t have Maria’s, not even if she asks nicely — was the outline of a girl, an etching, a suggestion of wants and needs and new friendships and a preference for a cocktail Tabitha made with raspberry liqueur, and that’s more than she was before.
Still weird, though. To be new. To be her. To hop out of bed and stop to quickly kiss Steph on the forehead, feeling that the kiss is given by a girl, or by someone who isn’t going to stop striving until she becomes a girl. To narrowly avoid sweeping the stuffed frog and elephant off the bedside table — Pippa’s Christmas gift to Steph — as she regains her footing, because her centre of gravity seems to be changing every day and she can never quite get used to it. To make the two silent steps required to reach the wardrobe and to open the door.
Because there, in the mirror, she is.
Two days ago, this face and this body belonged to a man: Aaron Holt. No middle name. Oh, sure, he’d been aggressively dismantling himself piece by piece — he’d asked to die! he’d asked to die and someone who loved him took him by the hand and showed him how to live! — but Aaron he’d been.
Yesterday, Christmas Day, they belonged to someone in flux, someone whose prior self had been renounced before God, country and a gaggle of drunken women. Not just women; she breathes a silent apology to Amethyst, and not just for grouping them with the rest of the Sisters. She still feels a little guilty for not seriously considering their reminder that she could, in the fullness of time, look elsewhere for her gender than between the binary couch cushions.
‘The binary couch cushions’? Jesus, Bethany, you need coffee. And quite possibly a kick in the head; or another one of Tabby’s raspberry cocktails, which would have much the same effect.
Focus.
Wait, what the fuck was she even doing again?
Her reflection squints back at her, and she can tell just by looking that the poor girl has a bit of a hangover.
Right. She was reorientating herself. If Bethany’s to be real, if she’s to fulfil the potential the other girls all seem to think she has, then she needs to believe in herself.
This face. This body. This girl. These slight hips and this belly that for the first time has a subtle roundness to it, a hint of shape, a softly convex curve she already loves to run her hands across— Correction: she loves it when Steph runs her hands across it, loves the things she whispers as she does so, loves the new sensitivity, loves the promises such contact makes with every caressing finger. And Maria’s told her it’s only the start, that after a couple of months she’s only just begun to sensitise. She’ll get softer, rounder, more apt to shiver and bend with every touch, and the part of her that still complains about this, the part of her that clings unreasonably to her old name, the part of her that finds all of this to be emasculating and objectionable, can be silenced more easily every time Maria hugs her or Christine takes her into her confidence or Stephanie Fucking Riley kisses her, and also because that’s the point, isn’t it? Her masculinity hurt people. And it didn’t even protect her in return; the money did. And even that’s not accurate: the money protected the reputation, the freedom, the name of Aaron Holt. It cared nothing for his soul. And now his reputation is ruined, his freedom has been taken violently from him, his name has been discarded and even his bodily integrity has been violated, and she feels her soul finally begin to shed its tarnish.
She’ll tell Maria all this. She wants to please her, wants her to be proud of her. She’ll probably leave off the bit about the violated bodily integrity, though; Maria might be put out, because while it’s true, it’s not the sort of lesson Maria wants her to internalise going forward. Protect yourself, Bethany, as long as it’s Bethany you’re protecting. We’re the only ones allowed to cut bits out of you.
Mere months ago, she would have laughed at such a trade. Would have imagined herself a simpering, feminised wreck, performing obligate womanhood for a contemptuous audience; a creature of nothing, writhing in its own entrails, eking out a shadow of a life within the new, narrow borders allowed it. Now she thinks this trade is her salvation. Now she clings to it.
Even if she can’t cling to the fucking point to save her life.
This face, this body—
Fuck it.
She needs coffee.
She wheels around and kisses Steph again, for longer and with the intention to wake her, and when her eyes flutter prettily open and her face relaxes into a welcoming smile, Bethany says, “Yeah, okay, so the feminised and simpering little creature they made from the corpse of Aaron Holt is absolutely fucking dying from a headache and from a critical lack of coffee, and it’s almost ten, Steph, I lay beside you for fucking ages while you were making these cute snoring noises but it’s been an hour and my mindfulness exercises were a disaster. Come with me for a piss and a coffee.”
“You have mindfulness exercises?”
“Yeah. I made them up.”
“You have a mind?”
“That’s what the exercises are for. You coming?”
* * *
The mood around the table in the lunch room is sombre. Steph’s not the only one to have a hangover; not only did Bethany speak of little else as they got dressed, but Maria and Pippa are glaring at their coffees with a viciousness they might normally reserve for someone like Ollie. It helps Steph feel like less of a lightweight: ordinarily the sponsors would have their shit together by the time they got down here, but today, they’re all feeling dreadful together.
She’s pretty sure Pippa cursed Tabby’s name a couple of times.
Bethany’s the most cheerful of all of them, and when she’s finished slurping chocolate milk from the end of her bowl of Coco Pops, she asks, “Where is everyone this morning?” and Steph’s the only one who doesn’t seem annoyed with her for introducing the concept of a conversation to a table that would much rather enjoy its caffeine and misery in silence.
It was late last night when Steph and Bethany excused themselves; how much more could the sponsors have possibly drunk?
It’s Maria who answers. “Edy’s with Adam,” she says, counting off on her fingers, “because he’s still taking his breakfast in his room—”
“And his lunch and most dinners,” Pippa mutters.
“—Martin’s with Pamela in the common room—”
“Does he even count as a someone?” Bethany asks quietly.
“—Will’s probably sulking because Tabby has yet to appear to give his ego a good pat-down—”
“Can’t believe she gets to sleep in,” Pippa says. “She’s the one who did this to us.”
“To be fair,” Maria notes, “it takes two to drain a shot glass.”
“But only one to fill it with enticingly purple liqueur.”
Steph asks, “Why are we blaming Tabby? Monica was involved, too.” And that had been a squandered opportunity; of all the sponsors assigned to their intake, she’s the one Steph knows least well, but every attempt to make conversation ended with another drink, except for the last one, which ended with Monica asking Steph if she wanted to arm-wrestle. Steph had demurred; Monica had already beaten everyone else except Tabby, who declined on behalf of her drinks-mixing arm. All Steph found out about Monica that she didn’t know before was that she spent six months bartending in Australia before she was taken by Dorley and another six months after graduation; she said the contrast was endlessly fascinating.
“Monica isn’t here to blame,” Pippa says, refilling her coffee from the cafetiere. “Whereas Tabitha effing Forbes will surely be along momentarily, whereupon—” she pulls something from the pocket of her hoodie, “—I will throw this at her.”
“Is that a croissant?” Bethany says.
“Yes. I don’t know exactly how old it is, but I found it behind the microwave in the kitchen on the second floor. I expect it to bounce.”
“No throwing pastries at your fellow sponsors,” Maria chastises, but her heart isn’t in it, and when Pippa proffers the cafetiere she just nods, allowing Pippa to refill her coffee and place the weaponised croissant in the middle of the table without further comment.
“Where’s Raph?” Bethany asks.
“Hmm?”
“You ran down everyone else, but we never got to him.”
“Oh. In his room, probably. This might be the hangover talking—” Maria taps at her skull and winces, and it’s enough for Bethany to gasp and reach across the table towards her, “—but I wouldn’t especially mind if he never left it again.”
“He’s not been out since Christmas Eve, I think,” Pippa says.
“Good.”
Maria reaches for Bethany’s waiting hand and squeezes it. Steph averts her eyes, finds Pippa doing the same, and shares a smile with her. She’s reminded of her first week at the Hall, when Pippa kept turning up at her cell in a different dress each time, always perfectly made up and perfectly pissed off with her — with the person Pippa had thought Steph was — and she remembers wondering if Pippa had naturally perfect skin or if she was simply very skilled at makeup.
Skilled at makeup had turned out to be the answer; Pippa has some redness around her jawline, from when she had a zit problem as a teen, and this is only the third time Steph can recall seeing it. Combined with the hoodie and the joggers — Pippa’s dressed basically the same as the full-time basement occupants this morning — and Steph has a picture of a woman who would much, much rather be in bed.
“You don’t have to stay down here, Pip,” she says. “Not for my sake.”
Pippa snorts, and knuckles Steph on the shoulder. “Steph, I love you, but if it was just for you I’d still be in bed. We’ve got a staff meeting later; I thought I’d better make a start on having a functional brain beforehand. Checking in with my sister—” another playful poke, “—is a bonus, but not one I’d’ve forsaken sleep for.”
“What she means,” Maria says, looking up from the silent conversation she’s been having across the table with Bethany, “is that I knocked very loudly on her door half an hour ago and suggested she get her little blonde butt out of bed or there would be consequences.”
Pippa stops kneading Steph’s shoulder long enough to make a sarcastic heart symbol with her thumbs and forefingers.
* * *
Tabby’s been making the effort to look good lately. Not just for Levi — it would be pointless to do so now, with him so tragically far away — but for Will. The little bastard is at one of the critical moments, one of those times when he could leap forward, make the kind of progress Bethany has, or he could regress, like… well, no-one in the basement has meaningfully done that, not yet; there hasn’t been time. Raph is taking tiny, shuffling baby steps forward, Ollie remains stubbornly immobile and Adam and Martin are their own little enigmas, understood by their sponsors and bafflingly opaque to Tabitha. But Will… She’s got to be careful with him.
And that starts with taking care of herself.
When the cases were assigned she argued for and got Will, argued that she should have him rather than Monica, and she’s never regretted that decision. Sure, Monica’s probably the only one of them who could stand up to him if it ever came to it — and, she remembers with a grimace, it fucking did come to it, and it was tasers and Stephanie bloody Riley that saved Maria’s life, not physical strength — but Tabby’s never relied on her body in such an overt way.
So when she knocks on his door, she’s dressed with care. She likes to style her hair to emphasise its natural curl, which is a lot of work on its own, but today it’s tied back, gathered into a loose bun. She wants her face clear; she wants Will to have no excuse not to look at her, not to see in her face the love she has for him — and, yes, she loves him, because someone has to, because it feels like perhaps no-one ever has. Liking him, enjoying the time she spends with him, those are things that will come with time, but the idiot boy needs love.
She’s wearing light makeup, just enough to emphasise her eyes, and the faded green denim shorts and loose white drawstring t-shirt are meant to make her seem approachable. Tabby wants to look like the girl next door, as sweet as can be, so that when the time comes for her to tell William that she was once very much like him, the impact will be all the greater.
“Go away!” Will shouts in response to her knock.
Rolling her eyes, she opens the door to his bedroom, steps inside and pushes it closed with her heel. When it’s shut again, when it’s just the two of them in his space, she says with amusement, “No.”
He’s already backing away, positioning himself as far from her as possible. His eyes flick downwards; he’s thinking about using the handcuffs under the bed.
“No,” she says again. “And don’t you tell me you’re dangerous. Remember what we talked about.”
He nods. She has a fair idea what he’s thinking: not only has he opened up to her on, depending on how you count it, three or four occasions, he also talks in his sleep. He’s terrified of himself; terrified of what he could do to her.
“Tell me who you are, William,” she says, seating herself on his chair, just outside his reach.
“I’m who I decide to be,” he whispers, and she’s almost surprised. Yesterday he accepted the mantra easily enough, but she’s had enough experience with him that she’s come to expect resistance. Mostly she’s tried to lead him as she might a frightened animal: allowing him to make his own moves and come to his own conclusions. Her role is to prepare the route such that the only conclusions that can possibly be reached are those she prefers. It’s helpful for his progress for him to believe that it comes from within, because, for a person who claims to value the empirical, he sure does persist in his belief, against all evidence, that everyone around him is fucking stupid.
But sometimes he needs a push. Sometimes, very much like a frightened animal, he needs to be picked up and bloody well moved, regardless of how much he might thrash against it.
He wants to be fixed. He knows the ruin he’s made of himself. He knows, despite the arguments he can sometimes marshal to defend any word or deed, the difference between right and wrong, and he knows on which side of that line he’s placed himself. He needs, above all else, to escape the nightmares he’s inflicted on himself, the memories of unearned and disproportionate violence.
Will Schroeder has been in pain for a long time.
“You’re who you decide to be,” she agrees. “How are you feeling?”
She’s had to really work to make him understand that when she asks this kind of question in this kind of context, she’s not being nice; she really does want to know. She wants him to make progress; she also needs to know she’s safe. So he nods and swallows and takes the time to think about it, and she smiles, because that’s another thing she’s been trying to drill into him: you don’t need to have the correct answer right away.
“Okay,” he says.
“Do you want to talk about yesterday?”
He starts to reply and then stops himself, remembering. No quick answers. And no artifice: Tabby is uninterested in his masculine posturing, and she’s made clear to him that she believes it prevents him from properly understanding himself.
Because he doesn’t snap. She told him this. She told him this because she understands, because she was once similar, though she hasn’t yet told him how similar. He told her and he told Steph that he felt like the moments of violence came from nowhere, that they were the unpredictable instances when everything that had been placed inside him ignited. And she told him that they are instead the inevitable consequence of his own behaviour, his contempt for himself, his fear of himself. She told him she believes they started getting worse — culminating in an attack on his brother — because the layers of rationalisation were getting corroded by guilt, that his facade was disintegrating, that something else, something less stable, was building up in its place.
“You’re like a star,” she told him, “riding the last of its lighter elements. You’re going to burn through them until there’s nothing left but the core. Nothing left but what’s real.”
“That’s an imperfect metaphor,” he replied. “The core is no more or less real than the rest of the star.”
And she laughed and told him to remember that.
He’s still thinking. “I don’t know,” he says eventually, and Tabby revels in the honesty. “I still don’t think I believe you.”
She sits down next to him, takes his hand the way she did yesterday, closes her fingers over his so he can’t rip them away from her, and says, “I don’t want to replace you, Will. What I want you to realise is that none of the things you hate about yourself are necessary, and that the things you don’t understand about yourself have explanations you haven’t yet considered. When Steph came to see you in that cell, you said you thought you and she were a lot alike, and then yesterday you said you were wrong about that. You said you were more like Oliver and Raphael.” She squeezes his hands, balled into fists as they are under her grip. “I would like you to consider that you might have been wrong both times.”
He’s quiet for a very long time.
“You said you were like me,” he says eventually.
“I said we were once similar,” she corrects.
“Semantics.” It comes out quickly and with a hint of his old arrogance. “Sorry,” he adds, softening his tone. “I wanted to ask what exactly you meant by that.”
“You can ask,” she says, and rises again, dragging on his hands. “Come on. I want you to see something. But—” and she wrinkles her nose, “—I would also like you to shower.”
* * *
They’d pulled the mattress off her childhood bed and made up for the missing width with an inflatable out of the camping kit in the garage. They covered their makeshift three-person bed with sheets and pillows and shored it up with university textbooks out of the bottom of Shahida’s wardrobe. And when they fell asleep last night it was still as friends, not as a twosome and a third wheel, because Shahida was serious: before anything can happen between Melissa and her, they have to talk to Abby. Christine’s stayed in touch, and it seems more and more as if Abby’s about to disconnect from the Hall and all her Sisters.
One look at Melissa tells Shahida that’s not a solution. Abigail Meyer might have a family — something Melissa still lacks — but when you can’t be the whole of yourself with the people you love, it takes a toll. And Abby wouldn’t be who she is today without the terrible, wonderful secret of Dorley Hall.
A secret they’re having to keep from Amy. They played for time when she asked what she’d missed, changed the subject, exaggerated their sleepiness from dinner, and Amy was only a little upset when Melissa told her she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. The remedy, Amy had claimed, was for Melissa to make it up to her another way.
And so Melissa sat very gamely still while Amy brushed and tied and twisted and plaited and otherwise played with her hair.
She did protest: hadn’t Amy had years to play with Shahida’s hair? And Rachel’s? But Amy responded that, true, Shahida’s hair was like spun silk and wonderful to style, but Melissa’s was like a blanket of woven gold; charms all of its own.
And Rachel, even Shahida had to acknowledge, had over the years of their friendship gotten very good at fending Amy off.
Shahida had wondered, as they fell asleep together, intertwined and content, if the Sisters ever slept this way; if Christine or Vicky or Pippa ever found themselves sharing between three or more girls a space made only for one or two.
She surfaces through the memories, experiences once again the brief sorrow that Melissa had to spend so much time apart from her and their other friends, that her teenage years and her young adult life had been so cruelly limited — by ignorance as much as anything else — and when she opens her eyes she rolls over to face her friends.
Only Amy is there, and she’s still sleeping.
It doesn’t take her long to find Melissa, though the moment of panic keeps her heart beating in her throat for several minutes after. Melissa’s sitting on the padded window seat with the window open a crack. She’s hugging her shins and resting her chin on her knees and she is messily, silently crying.
Shahida doesn’t say anything. Just sits down behind her, drapes herself across Melissa’s back, takes the hand she can reach in hers, and kisses her gently on the back of the neck where she’s tied up her hair and left herself accessible.
“Hey, Em,” she whispers. She loves that she can still use that name, and every time she does it feels like a victory: the broken, dying thing she saw in Melissa’s home, the last time she saw her before she disappeared, revoked Shahida’s right to that name, and Melissa — the real Melissa, the girl inside who for the longest time had never even had a name, nor known who or what she was — kept the name safe for her for all those years, eventually to hand it back.
“Hey, Ess.”
“Been up long?”
“Don’t know. An hour? Maybe a bit less.”
“You want to talk about it?”
Melissa relaxes her grip on her shins, allows herself to lean back into Shahida’s steady embrace.
“It’s Mum. I can’t stop thinking about her.”
“Oh, Melissa…” Shahida tightens her grip on Melissa’s hand. She still has the iPod Melissa’s mother left her, the iPod Melissa destroyed on what she thought would be her last day. She could have had it fixed; she hasn’t. And she hasn’t yet told Melissa because she doesn’t know what to do with it. Doesn’t know whether to hand it back to her whole but altered or unchanged but broken. Or whether she should give it back at all. Maybe it’ll just be an awful reminder.
“I avoided coming out this far for so long,” Melissa says. She’s staring out of the window as she speaks, through the crack she’s opened, and the cold air whistling through mingles with her soft alto voice. “I went into the city centre with Abby and with you. I even went to the bloody Tesco, and you know how that turned out. But I never came out here. Never came back to my childhood. I think I was scared.”
“Amy’s promised to be quiet.”
“Not scared of any person. At least, no-one who’s still alive. It’s Mum, like I said. We moved here when she was still alive. She lived barely a couple of miles from here. She died in that house. And it’s so close, Shy. It’s so fucking close.”
“Em…”
“She never knew me. I was her little boy. I think she told me to be strong because she knew Dad would, and she didn’t want all that shit coming from him. She wanted me to grow up to be… I don’t know what. I wasn’t old enough to have that kind of conversation with her. And then she was gone. While I was Mark.” She sniffs. Shakes her head and looks at a different patch of ground outside. “I like to think she would approve of me,” she continues, quieter than before. “I like to think she’d love me. But Dad changed. He changed so fucking much, Shy. Just got worse and worse and fucking worse. What if that would have been her? What if she’d’ve hated me?”
Shahida shushes her, insistently and persistently, until Melissa stops mumbling nonsense and consents to be comforted. “Your mother,” Shahida says, having drawn Melissa back so her head rests in her lap, having wiped Melissa’s eyes and nose with a tissue, “was one of the kindest and most gentle people I’ve ever met. She would have loved you, Liss. She would have been delighted to see the beautiful woman you’ve grown to be.”
“I hope so.” Melissa sounds different, her voice constrained by her new position, but still in that lovely, lilting pitch Shahida’s grown to adore. “I really do hope so. I think she loved another woman, Shy. She loved my dad, too, at least to begin with, but there was another woman, the one I used to babysit for. They did everything together as kids, as teenagers. Listened to all the same music. There’s photos somewhere, a whole album. They’re wearing the most ridiculous clothes and they’re covered in, like, spraypaint and glitter…” She smiles wistfully. “Jenny Yau. A connection to Mum. Still alive. And so fucking close I feel like I can almost touch her.”
“We could—”
“We can’t,” Melissa says flatly. “We’ve pushed things way too far already. I’ve had to accept that there are things I want that just—” she sighs, and her chest rubs against Shahida’s forearm, “—aren’t possible.”
For want of anything to say, Shahida starts stroking Melissa’s cheek with the knuckle of her forefinger. She traces the light dusting of freckles across the cheekbone, tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, brushes her nails along Melissa’s jaw. She loves what a girl Melissa’s become, all soft skin and smooth cheeks and long, dazzling hair. She wonders if Melissa loves it as much as she does.
A gust of wind causes the whole bay window to creak, and Melissa winces.
“God,” she says, “I can smell it, Shy. It comes and goes; it’s the wrong time of year for it, but we’re close enough to the woods here… It’s the same smell. It’s what I always remember about the day at the railway tracks.”
Shahida had been about to ask the significance of the smell, so when Melissa preempted her question, her mouth was already hanging open, and an, “Oh,” dropped out of it.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about that day, Shy. You and me and the railway tracks. And your red and white picnic blanket. You know, in that first year, when I wasn’t allowed out, when I couldn’t even see the sky, I thought about the railway tracks a lot. Dreamed about them. Not because I wanted to… end things, no, as soon as I knew what they were doing to me, I knew I wanted to live, no matter how much it cost me. But I think it was the freedom. You feel so free when you think you’re about to die. So released. So I’d think about being back there, with nothing but green all around me, except for the railway tracks cutting through like a knife. And the smell would keep coming back to me. Damp grass. Moss. And the wind.”
“Liss…” Amy says, startling them. Shahida’s sure they both thought she was still asleep. “What the hell happened to you? What didn’t you want to tell me last night?”
Melissa laughs. “The only thing that could possibly happen. The only thing left.”
“You were… locked in a room?”
With that, something in Melissa changes. Something in her wakes up, and she sits, smiles her thanks to Shahida, and leans forward on her knees.
“Please, Amy,” she says, “forget I said anything.”
“I don’t think I can,” Amy says, frowning.
“It’s really important,” Shahida says.
Amy cocks her head. “Really? How important?”
And that’s when Shahida knows Amy’s about to extort her for a free breakfast.
* * *
Back to the cells again. The drapes are still hung in front of the doors and the furniture’s still there, but when he was last here they’d kept the area directly in front of his cell door relatively clear, so he could converse with Tabby free of distractions. Now that it’s just Ollie in here — someone who, when he is charitable to himself, he thinks the sponsors genuinely might not prefer to him — the couch and the chairs and the little tables have assumed a more chaotic configuration, and when Harmony rises from one of the chairs to greet them, she has to kick a pizza box out of the way.
“Hey, Tab. Will.”
“Happy Boxing Day, Harm,” Tabby says.
Not knowing how else to respond to her, he nods, and he could swear her eyes narrow as she acknowledges him. An understandable response: he sees Maria in all their faces, and he expects they see what he did to her when they look at him. He’ll never be forgiven, and that is correct, because he never should be forgiven, and if he can’t be fixed he should be allowed to rot.
A long time in that cell with no-one but himself. A long time to remember every moment of violence. He doesn’t know how Tabby can stand to be in the same room as him. She doesn’t fear him — not as much as she ought, anyway — but she should be repulsed by him.
William — never Will, not in his own head; nicknames are familiarities, and William’s never felt like he knows himself — also doesn’t know why Tabby’s brought him back to the cells, but if it’s to put him back inside, he won’t argue.
The lock behind him buzzes again, and he steps against the wall, hands clasped behind his back, to allow Jane past. She greets everyone present — him included — withdraws her taser from her pocket, and nods at Harmony.
Tabby leans against the wall next to him. “From now on,” she whispers, “you and I are not here. You are to make no noise and give no indication of your presence, okay? And remember, Jane, Harmony and I are all armed, and if you fuck this up, we’ll tase you until you shit yourself.”
“No noise,” he says.
“Good lad.”
Tabby gives Harmony the nod and Harmony steps forward, sweeps aside the drapes that cover the cell door from floor to ceiling, and raps twice on the glass. A quick click from above suggests to William that the intercom has been switched on.
“Fuck off,” Ollie says. A strong opening statement. William can’t see him but he can imagine how he looks as he says it, the contemptuous bite of his jaw, the stance designed to accentuate his size even as the diet and the hormones shrink him.
A shudder: he associated with this man and he didn’t even have the good grace to hate himself for it until after they put a woman in the hospital together.
“Good morning, Oliver!” Harmony says brightly. “And how are we feeling today?”
“Fuck off.”
William closes his eyes. Why is he here? Is he supposed to learn something from this? If he’s to grant that the purpose of this place is twisted benevolence, if he’s to believe that the desired outcome is not that he be effectively erased, that there be another personality crafted to replace him, then why is he here? What can listening to Ollie grunt and posture his way through another conversation possibly teach him?
He knows what Ollie would say to such thoughts. He’d say William is a pussy. Giving in. But what else is there to do? The only routes out of here are those provided by the sponsors.
And he’s not giving in. Giving in would be to do the other thing. The thing he did to his brother and to Maria and to so many other people. He won’t ever give in again.
A fist slams into glass and William jumps, opens his eyes, looks quickly around, but it’s just Ollie, thumping his hands against the door to his cell, the sound magnified by the microphones. It’s not until Tabby takes his hand again that he understands what he must have looked like, suddenly wide-eyed, looking around for an exit.
Ollie’s yelling at Harmony. “I want—” he bangs his fists on the glass again, “—to see—” bang, “—the fucking—” bang, “—sun!” Gunshots all. Each one impacts William’s heart, causes it to skip and thump against his chest.
“You’re safe,” whispers Tabby, and he nods, unsure why he needs the reassurance but grateful for it.
Harmony seems unmoved by Ollie’s outburst. “Tell me why you want to see it.”
“What?” Ollie yells. Footsteps: he’s walking around in his cell, bouncing back and forth in the tiny space afforded him, the way he did when the three of them were in the cells together.
“Tell me why—”
“Fuck off!”
Harmony taps on the glass again, and it sounds like he immediately lunges at her. He collides with it, and the violence of it is almost too much.
“I’m here,” Tabby whispers.
“You’re going to have to do better than that, Oliver,” Harmony says.
Ollie grunts his response. “Why?”
“Because I need to know that under that thick skull is a brain that can think, that can feel, that has any tools available to it other than… this.”
“I’m not a fag.”
“Interesting!” Harmony says, and with her inflection and the stance she takes William could almost believe she does find his response interesting, and not tedious, ridiculous and utterly pointless. Fascinating is the one thing Ollie isn’t, and has never been. “Do you believe only gay men can express emotion?”
“Fuck off.”
“You have to answer me, Oliver. I had a big breakfast; I can do this for hours. You can’t fight me and you can’t run from me and you can’t shut me out. So unless you want to keep repeating yourself, over and over and over again—” she twirls her finger in the air with a momentum that suggests inevitability, “—you have to answer me. Why do you want to see the sun?”
“Be! Cause!”
“Try again.”
He hits the glass. “Because I fucking miss it, okay?”
“Tell me why you miss it,” Harmony says. He hesitates, so she continues, “You want a burger for lunch? A proper burger with chips on the side? You can have one if you tell me exactly why you miss the sun. Take your time.”
To William’s surprise, it’s the burger that does it. But it makes sense: if Ollie’s still on the same diet as before, he’ll have had no variety and he’ll have rarely been full. Something in William adds, it’s also the kind of desire allowed to men. Food, fighting and fucking; the joys and limitations of life.
“With Sonia,” Ollie says eventually. “We used to sit out together. It was our first place. Shitty little house but she liked the garden. She did it up and she was proud of it but she got me to do the deck. Said we’d sit out every morning in the summer, watch the sunrise. We only did it a few times.”
“Must have been nice,” Harmony muses. “The rush of warmth from the sun, your wife by your side, the house you owned, the garden that was yours. Must have been nice.”
“Yeah.” Another pause. “I miss it.”
“And then you hit your wife,” Harmony says, businesslike. There’s an outraged splutter from inside the cell, but she continues, “You hit your wife — sorry, your ex-wife — and you beat up her new boyfriend and though they chose not to press charges through some level of sympathy for you I can’t personally imagine, they probably should have done. Because it was less than two months later that you hit another woman. And you’re a big man, Oliver — or you were. Are you proud of those actions?”
“Fuck you.”
“Do you think men who hit women deserve to see the sun, Oliver? Do men who break other men’s legs deserve to see the sun? You’re entirely in my power, Oliver; maybe if you tell me why you deserve to see the sun, maybe if you convince me, I’ll open the doors and I’ll let you out to see it.”
“Fuck. You.”
“You know the funny thing?” Harmony says. She’s walking up and down the corridor now, probably in and out of Ollie’s sight, and William suspects she’s doing it to show him the freedom he’s denied. “We’re not here to teach you right from wrong. We know you know it already. You knew it was wrong to hit her and yet you still did it, because you could. What I want to know—” and her voice is shaking a little here; William wonders if Ollie can tell, if he’s even capable of such subtle discernment, “—is why you did it.”
“She fucking left me.”
“And you wanted to punish her for it, is that right?”
“No! She— She—” He slams against the glass again. “Fuck you.”
“Your burger is on the line here, Oliver.”
“I don’t care!”
“Well, I do— Ah.” Harmony interrupts herself and steps away from the cell, and it takes William a moment to understand why. All that’s different is there’s some extra background static on the speakers.
“Your wife took your power from you, Oliver,” says a voice over the speakers. ‘Aunt Bea’, the woman who addressed Raph and Ollie in the common room. The mistress of this place. “She took your power from you and you wanted it back. But after you hit her you were exactly as powerless as before, weren’t you?”
“Fuck you!” Ollie yells.
“Ah. Originality,” Aunt Bea says. Harmony exchanges a look with Jane and the two of them walk away, gathering Tabby and William as they go and exiting into the main corridor. As the door to the cells slowly closes, Aunt Bea continues, “I will deprive you of food, Oliver. I will make you hungry and I will make you thirsty and, now that I know you miss the sun, I’m going to turn out your light. Oh, and you’ll find I’ve switched your tablet off. No more movies. Goodbye for now, Oliver.”
The intercom clicks off at almost the same moment that the door to the cell corridor finally closes, the safety hinges having slowed it to a crawl for the last handful of centimetres. The lock engages with a shockingly loud whine, and Harmony leans against the far wall.
“Jesus Christ,” she says. “I’m really going to enjoy cutting off that man’s balls.”
“Easy, girl,” Jane says, offering an arm for support.
“I don’t want to wash him out. I don’t. There’s a human somewhere under there and I’m going to dig him out.”
“It’s still early. He’ll make it.”
“I hope so,” Harmony says. And then she looks at William directly, and in her eyes he sees none of the hatred he expects. That he hopes for. “How about you, Will? You okay?”
He nods slowly. Hands still behind his back. “I think so. That was hard to listen to. And I still don’t understand why I had to listen to it.”
“Take a moment,” Tabby says.
William takes a moment to think. “You want me to see him… from your perspective?”
“And to try to see yourself that way, too.”
“That’s who you see when you look at me?”
Almost immediately he wants to take it back — it’s the kind of outburst he’s been trying to keep down lately — but his anger is defused when Tabby shakes her head, puts her hand on his shoulder.
“It’s who I used to see,” she says.
* * *
Shahida’s idea. Rachel doesn’t get it, personally, but then, she wasn’t there. Shy messaged her with everything that had happened that morning, with a summary of everything Melissa said, and attached a photo of her and Amy eating breakfast together. There’s no denying that, compared to how she was the last time Rachel saw her, Melissa looks tired. Withdrawn. A little too much like Mark.
Haunted, perhaps.
She remembers too well what it was like for Mark. She also remembers what it was like for Shahida, after Mark ‘died’, and there’s no way she’s going to watch that play out again. So she’s coming on this little field trip, even if she did have to lie to her family about why, exactly, because if there’s something she can do, she’ll do it.
And so she piled into the back of an unexpectedly massive car, greeted Amy with a grin and a roll of her eyes at the self-denying lovebirds in the front seats, and let Melissa drive them out to the nature reserve, and now they’re marching double-time along the trail in Shahida’s determined wake, headed for the train tracks and the bridge.
At least Melissa and Shahida are holding hands now.
“That’s as far as they’re going,” Amy confides, when Melissa and Shahida are far enough ahead to be out of earshot. “Shy wants to talk to some girl called Abby.”
Abby… Abby… Did Rachel meet an Abby? She thinks back to the Hall, home of all Melissa’s secrets and seemingly about a hundred giggling women, most of whom went carefully quiet when she looked at them. One of them was called Abby, she’s certain. “I think I met her at the Hall,” Rachel concludes with a shrug. “Don’t know her, though.”
“What hall?”
“It’s this dorm on the uni campus. Part of this whole mysterious backstory Melissa’s got going on. Something about a secret transition fund they need to keep quiet from the press? Or the NHS? Shy seems to know everything but when I pushed, she just asked me to trust her. So I decided to trust her. I don’t like it — I don’t want her to get hurt again — but I’m trusting her.”
“You think Shy’s going to get hurt?”
“I think Melissa still isn’t quite over all her shit, and she has a tendency to drag people into it.”
Amy frowns. “That’s not quite fair, Rach. If you remember, it was Shy who did most of the dragging. Liss just came along for the ride. God,” she adds suddenly, brightening up, “remember at that party? When we started calling her Emma?”
“Emily,” Rachel says. “And yes, I remember. I also remember how it ended. Shahida was a mess for months.”
“And that was something Shy dragged her to. Is that what you’re so worried about? Mark pulling another disappearing act and leaving Shy in shambles? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Rach, but Mark isn’t here any more.”
“And yet Melissa’s still following Shahida wherever she wants to go.”
Amy tugs on Rachel’s sleeve. “And we’re lagging behind,” she says. “Come on.”
“You’re really not worried that they won’t tell us everything?” Rachel says, staggering for a moment as Amy catches her off-step.
Amy looks back at her. “No. I don’t care. If Melissa’s happy and whole, she’s happy and whole. And look at her, Rach! She’s fucking gorgeous!”
With that, Amy lets go of her and stamps off after Melissa and Shahida, leaving Rachel wondering why she’s so worried. It’s not all for Shy’s sake, is it? Because Amy’s right: Melissa’s prior motivation for running off is no longer valid, and basically all her teenage behaviour is suddenly explicable. Besides, Shahida’s older now, has had multiple relationships, and is more emotionally resilient.
Although practically the first thing she did on coming back to England was to cover the uni where Melissa went missing with flyers…
Saint Almsworth. It all comes back to that bloody place. The Royal College and Dorley Hall and a mass of curious, guarded faces.
At least Shy brought a bunch of spare pairs of wellies. The winter sludge would have ruined her shoes.
* * *
It took two bowls of cereal from the little variety boxes, three cups of coffee and a couple of co-codamol courtesy of Maria, but Steph finally feels ready to face the day. And, as she insisted to Bethany when they went back for a shower together, it still counts even if the day has gone well past noon before she feels willing and able to open her eyes beyond a crack.
At least it’s looking like a normal, boring afternoon in the Dorley Hall basement. They’ve got the couches set up so everyone can see the TV, they’ve got some reality show on where impossibly fashionable women sell impossibly priced houses to impossibly short men, and she’s got Bethany in her arms again.
Bethany. They talked a bit more about her name while they were showering; Bethany said she likes the ‘Erin’ in the middle, feels that it represents the crumb of her old self that’s coming along for the ride. And, she added, with Erin in the middle, her other two names can keep an eye on it.
Steph loves it. Loves the name, loves that Bethany chose it for herself, loves that Bethany felt able to choose it after so little time. Pippa said it’s proof there was a remarkable level of maturity hidden inside that head of hers; Maria just smiled smugly.
“You’ll never sell that place for nine mil,” Bethany’s saying. “Look at those windows, like, yes, sure, floor-to-ceiling windows may look nice, but you’re in Los Angeles; why do you want to let more sun in? Not to mention that everyone can see in, all the time, unless you close the blinds, and then what’s the point of having floor-to-ceiling windows? ‘Oh hi, Joanne, do you like my new house? Yes, it cost nine million dollars, but that’s because it has floor-to-ceiling windows. No, you can’t see them, I have to keep the blinds closed because otherwise the guy next door wolf whistles when I go to the toilet.’ Imagine living in a place like that. You’d have to have a secret second house just to get changed in, because fuck me if I’d want to use that kitchen without looking immaculate first. You couldn’t just wander around in your PJs throwing Weetabix in a bowl; what if the paparazzi saw you? I like the infinity pool, though.”
“They all have infinity pools,” Martin says, and Steph quickly looks over to see if the pattern she’s observed repeats itself and, sure enough, Pamela gives Martin a friendly nudge. She’s been doing that every time he talks lately, and Steph hasn’t decided whether it’s some kind of Pavlovian positive reinforcement technique or if Ella really is just super psyched whenever Martin has something to contribute.
She gave him a bracelet for Christmas. Handmade. To celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, she told him, barely maintaining a straight face — neither of them is Christian, as far as Steph knows — and also, she added more seriously, to celebrate three months sober, or thereabouts. They’d both cried; Martin said he wanted to make sure he never had a reason to take it off.
Dorley’s big on bracelets; maybe someone upstairs likes arts and crafts.
“Yes, but that’s a particularly nice infinity pool,” Bethany insists. “The forced perspective makes it properly terrifying. I’d never use it.”
“It’s ornamental,” Pamela suggests.
“Exactly!”
After their shower, Steph asked if Bethany wanted to wear something a bit more feminine than her usual fitnesswear, and she struggled with the question for several seconds before wilting and admitting that, no, she doesn’t feel ready. She’s got the name and the pronouns and the shot-glass boobs; isn’t that enough for now? She wanted to try girl clothes but the moment she opened Steph’s wardrobe and looked at something other than herself she had a couple of minor heart attacks, she said.
She agreed to one of Steph’s tank tops over her sports bra, and no hoodie. Baby steps, Steph said. Microdosing girl clothes, Bethany said.
Steph didn’t point out that it’s a unisex tank top. It would defeat the point.
“I think it’s nice,” Martin says. “You could swim up to the edge and look out on the valley.”
She thinks she could almost like this new Martin. He’s certainly better than the guilt-ridden man she first met, and a lot less creepy than the motile shell he became for a while. There’s still flashes of his old self, moments where he retreats into one or the other of his previous guises, but three months of continuous attention from Pamela seem to have gone a long way towards healing him.
It’s like they’re always telling her: ultimately, this place is about love.
A shame Will seems to have taken Martin’s place. Tabby dropped him off in the common room a few minutes before the start of the latest episode, and so far he’s been quiet. He’s not even reading one of his many books — Tabby got him even more for Christmas — he’s just… sitting there in his customary bean bag chair at the other end of the room. Steph might have thought he was asleep if his eyes weren’t open.
“Why would you even want to look at the valley?” Bethany says, waving at the television the arm that’s not holding Steph’s in place around her belly. “The trees look half-dead, the grass looks completely dead, and I’m pretty sure I just saw a bird spontaneously combust when it flew out of the shade.”
“I’d live there,” Maria says. She’s sitting with Pippa at one of the tables, and she’s supposedly been working away at her laptop but she’s been just as drawn in by the reality show as the rest of them. “It looks warm,” she adds wistfully. “I’ve had enough of cold weather.”
Bethany snorts. “Please point to the people in this room who have recently had the opportunity to experience cold weather.”
“No.”
Bethany sits up out of Steph’s embrace so she can look at Maria. “You have to,” she says. “You have to indulge me! I changed my name and everything. That means I get favours.”
“You had two bowls of cereal at breakfast,” Pippa says.
“If I change my name again, do I get a third bowl?”
“No.”
“Aaron,” Will says, and the use of Bethany’s old name is like a slap; everyone else falls instantly silent. “What do you mean, you changed your name?”
“I mean,” Bethany says, “that I changed my name.”
“Why?” Will demands, his voice so flat and devoid of emotion it barely sounds like a question.
“Mate, you were literally just telling Ollie what this place does the other day. Did you forget?”
“Of course I didn’t forget, but how are you—? What are you—? For fuck’s sake, Aaron!”
“It’s Bethany,” Bethany says.
“When?”
“Yesterday,” Steph says.
“While you were sulking,” Bethany adds.
“I don’t fucking believe you, man.”
“Not a man any more. Not even on a technicality, soon.” She makes snip-snip motions with her first two fingers.
“What—? Fuck, Aaron—”
“Bethany.”
“I don’t believe this,” Will mutters, and then repeats himself, louder and with considerably more force. “I don’t fucking believe this. This isn’t— Aaron, you’re not like her. You’re not like Stefan or Steph or whatever. You shouldn’t be… You shouldn’t be doing this yet.”
“Her name is Bethany,” Maria says quietly, “and if you’re not going to respect that, you know where you can go.”
“‘Her’?” Will says, standing up. “Jesus Christ, no, I’m not going to respect this coercive shit. Tabby keeps telling me it’s all for the better and it’s going to work and I’m not going to be some fucking Twilight Zone zombie afterwards and I’m stupid enough to want to believe her but look at this!” Pippa, Maria and Pamela all subtly reach for their tasers. Not subtly enough, evidently, because Will notices. “Oh, here we go,” he continues, “Will’s angry and scary and suddenly we’re all pissing ourselves, time to—”
“William Schroeder!” Maria shouts, standing up and slamming her closed fist into the table in one movement. “You will respect her and you will call her by her name or I won’t bother to tase you and I won’t bother to consult with Tabitha; I will pick you up by the scruff of your greasy little neck and I will wash you out. Do you hear me, William?”
“I don’t— Fuck—”
It seems finally to have gotten through to him that he’s talking back to the woman he put in the hospital, and his legs collapse under him. He shrinks back into his bean bag chair, his eyes never leaving her, and while his mouth opens again, he doesn’t — can’t? — say anything.
“Do you hear me, William?” Maria demands. “You will call her the name she gives you and you will never deviate from it or I will make you wish you hadn’t.” She punches the table again. “Say you understand and agree.”
He can’t say anything. He just stammers, nailed to the spot by Maria’s anger. Steph can imagine what’s playing through his mind, and a vicious, vengeful part of her hopes he never gets over it.
Tabby rushes in from the corridor, bangs her shin on the door in her rush to get to Will, and kneels protectively by him. She must have been watching from the security room, or someone there must have messaged her. “Will?” she says. “William?”
He refocuses on her. Gives her all his attention. But he still can’t talk.
“Make him acknowledge me, Tabitha,” Maria says.
Tabby snaps back, “Take a break, Maria.”
Steph’s so caught up watching Will, she almost doesn’t notice when Bethany breaks from her grip entirely. She hops over the back of the couch and stands by Maria, reaches for her hand, suggests she stand up with her. Maria nods, accepts Bethany’s hand, and together they walk towards the exit to the corridor.
As they pass, Maria stops and says in a calmer voice, “No more deadnaming, Will. No more misgendering. You will respect Bethany and you will respect Steph, or I will bring Beatrice down on your head.”
He doesn’t look at her, but says, “I understand and agree,” in a voice that cracks and breaks, and Steph realises that this is probably the first time one of his victims has not only held power over him, but exercised that power.
And then Maria and Bethany are gone, and Steph is left alone on the couch.
* * *
The rain didn’t start in earnest until they were almost at the railway bridge, and it provides an excuse for Shahida to link arms with Melissa so they can share one umbrella. Granted, it’s not automatically an intimate act — Rachel and Amy, trudging along a few metres behind, are also sharing an umbrella — and neither is holding hands, but Shahida has yet to become jaded to the sheer joy of getting to do it with Melissa. And that’s without even considering the fact that Melissa kissed her back last night. She wants her. She always did. And though teen Shahida made some counterproductive decisions, she allows herself to feel vindicated.
Melissa’s quiet, though, and Shahida doesn’t have to guess why. And she knows Rachel and Amy have been talking, and she’s got a fair idea what they’ve been talking about, but so long as they don’t ask questions — or are willing to accept partial answers — there should be no problem. Rach has been to the Hall, she’s even overheard the second years joking about being kidnapped, and she still hasn’t put it together.
No-one would. Refuge in audacity.
The bridge has a covered section, an iron plate that covers the middle, and they rush up the stairs together, borrowed wellies splashing mud against the metal, any suggestion that they might be there for sombre reflection abandoned for the need to seek shelter. When they reach it and Shahida almost skids to a halt, she looks around for Melissa, worried that she’ll be upset by their attitude, or just from being in this place. It takes her a moment to find her, and when she does, she’s leaning over the edge of the bridge, looking down on the rails.
Terror takes her voice from her, pushes her down, and she can’t reach for Melissa, she can’t shout for her, and the seconds before Melissa moves again pass like hours.
And then Melissa turns, and she’s smiling, open-mouthed and manic. She meets Shahida’s eyes and she yells out with what Shahida would call, if she dared hope, joy.
“Holy shit!” Melissa says, bouncing on the spot in her wellies. She’s outside the shelter of the metal bridge cover and the rain’s plastering her hair to her face and she doesn’t care. “This is so perfect, Shy! I’ve been seeing this place in my dreams for, fuck, years, and it’s just… It’s just this! It’s just a bloody bridge!”
“You’re going to freeze to death!” Rachel calls.
Something about that makes Melissa almost double over with mirth, but she joins them anyway, squeezing water out of her hair and shaking out the droplets.
“You okay, Em?” Shahida asks, unpacking the blanket from her backpack and laying it out. She didn’t choose the red and white one this time, the one Melissa seems to find so funny; this was supposed to be a serious occasion.
“Better than okay,” Melissa says, sitting down and waiting for the others to join her before she continues. “Abby always used to talk about how when you have a bad memory, you should create a good one to counteract it. And this place… I’m here with you again, but I’m me now, and—” she smiles at Amy and Rachel, “—you two are here, too—”
“Thanks for noticing,” Rachel says, but she’s grinning so Shahida doesn’t kick her.
“—and it’s just a… a place now.” She looks around. “A muddy, rainy, cold, windy place.”
“Very cold,” Amy says, through chattering teeth.
Shahida swings her backpack around to her side and starts rummaging through it. It’s a camping rucksack, and though it’s on the smaller side it can fit everything her friends would probably never have thought to bring on such an excursion. She unrolls a padded raincoat and passes it wordlessly to Amy, who smiles her thanks and starts putting it on.
“Who wants hot tea?” she says.
“You brought tea?” Melissa asks, pausing in the act of smoothing out her sopping hair to boggle at her.
“I brought lunch, Em,” Shahida says, and starts unpacking thermoses and bagged sandwiches from her bag.
“When did you have time to make this?”
“While you were showering. Mum helped.” She shrugs. “It’s mostly leftovers inside bread.”
“You’re both just ridiculously wonderful, you know that?”
“She was so pleased you stayed for dinner. I know she didn’t want to crowd you, but she wanted me to ask if we could maybe make it a regular thing?”
“I’d love that,” Melissa says, taking her hand. Shahida tries not to let her immense satisfaction at the repeated contact show.
As they eat, and as Melissa helps Shahida pour the tea, Shahida briefly regrets that she didn’t think to bring some kind of portable heater. Hot baths all round when they get back to her place, she decides.
“Thank you, Shy,” Melissa says, after a while. “I’m glad we came here. And I’m glad I saw your place again, and not just because I got to see Rupa. The last memories I had from here, from your house, and from yours, Amy… they’re very bad.”
“What happened to you?” Amy asks quietly, pausing with her sandwich halfway to her mouth. “I mean, I know roughly what happened, that you ran away, that you transitioned, but… That’s all I have. You don’t have to tell me,” she adds quickly. “Just, if you want to, ever, I’m here to listen.”
Shahida glances at Rachel, who’s been carefully looking away. Rach has been needling Amy, for sure, the same way she’s been needling Shahida: over texts and private messages, away from Melissa’s eyes. So far she’s been content to accept Shahida’s dissembling, but she’s definitely looking out for contradictory information.
“I didn’t run away,” Melissa says. She’s leaning against the iron wall, head against the metal. “I think the only time I actually tried to run away was when I came here, to this bridge. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do until I got here, and Shy’ll tell you I’d been standing here just watching the trains when she found me. But the night I disappeared, I knew what I wanted. I wasn’t running away.
“I was always trans. Always a girl, a woman, whatever. But I didn’t know. I had all this shit crowding my head that I couldn’t interpret, and I could never get away from it to think about it clearly. The closest I got was when I was with all of you. Sometimes you could all make me feel… almost normal. But I never got it. Because you can’t get clear air to think about your problems when they’re contained entirely within you, right? Especially when you don’t even have a name for them. So I just spiralled. And the things I felt — the shame, the fear, the way I hated being touched or spoken to or even seen — just made me feel more like I was dangerous. Toxic. Like I would corrupt people just by being around them. Even though it was all just the way anyone could feel, being a teenage girl trying and failing to live the life of a teenage boy.” She shrugs. “I didn’t know.”
“So what happened?” Rachel asks. “When you disappeared?”
“I knew a girl called Abby. We met by chance originally; she was doing interviews for a part-time thing she had with the university paper. But she noticed me. Saw I was doing badly in ways she recognised. And then she heard about a— a situation I got into, which was nothing, really, I bumped against someone and I just got really, really in my head about it, and she worried I might do something drastic.” She laughs. “She was right. I went out one night intending not to come home. I left my mum’s iPod at the bus station and I went and tried to get drunk and I planned to just walk out into the cold air and see what I could do to myself. But she found me. Took me home. Helped me see who I really am. Who I always was.” She looks up suddenly, smiles for Amy, and Shahida’s certain it’s a genuine smile, that this hasn’t been a traumatic retelling or anything, not for the most part, that Melissa genuinely just wants Amy to know. “And that’s it,” she finishes. “I let everyone think I was dead because, well, see above; I thought I was toxic and dangerous. It took her a while to help me get rid of that. And by the time I had, it was years later. And I was Melissa, and Shahida was out of the country, and everything was different. I thought it was best to… remain a memory.”
Shahida grasps Melissa’s hand firmly. “I’m so glad you were wrong,” she says.
“I’m so glad you found me.”
“God, yes,” Amy says, energised again, “so how did that go down?”
Melissa shares a glance with Shahida and nods, which Shahida takes as her cue to take over. Melissa sips from her tea as Shahida tells an improvised embellishment of the day they were reunited, and from the look on her face, maybe even Rachel is mollified.
* * *
She’s not mad at Maria. Rather, she shouldn’t be. The woman basically runs the Hall, sponsors full time and has a civilian job, and on top of that the bastard she yelled at was the guy who attacked her, so she can and should be forgiven for losing her temper. And it might not be counterproductive yet; Will hasn’t exactly ever faced such direct consequences for an individual act of violence.
It’ll also be good for him to learn to respect other people’s identities.
Yes, this incident isn’t too far off the curve of her planned interventions. And if what she suspects about him is even close to true, it might be exactly what he needs. She hasn’t been confident enough of her assessment yet to force the issue herself, but…
The little shit’s still shivering, so she perches on the edge of the bean bag chair he’s claimed, shifting his balance and causing him to fall against her. He doesn’t react, which is a shame — she’d have liked to have the opportunity to confirm to him that it’s okay for them to touch each other so casually — but he also doesn’t flinch away.
Tabby’ll take it.
Oh, Will. You poor fucker. Everyone took a turn at screwing you up, didn’t they? And when they were done, you kept at it yourself. Built a rock-hard shell of physical and intellectual superiority, filled — as you said to Steph — with gunpowder. And you’re so scared I’m going to erase you, you can barely let me in. Do you even know what it looks like when someone tries to help you?
She knows his reply: help doesn’t normally begin with a kidnapping.
This is why she doesn’t say such things out loud; it’ll convince him of his righteousness all over again, and while she does want him to remain exactly as didactic and persistent as he always was, she needs time to crowbar his head a bit first.
He’s still unmoving, so she slips an arm around him. It might be too early for such intimacy, but if she’s not careful he’ll vanish the way Martin did, and that would be so much extra work for her.
She checks the room. Steph’s sitting on one of the couches with Pippa, and talking quietly; she seems perhaps a little concerned — about Bethany? about Maria? — but they have each other, so Tabby needn’t get involved. And Martin and Pamela are on the other couch, engrossed in the latest episode of that dumb reality show. Edy and Adam? Probably together in Adam’s room, as is their habit, as will probably remain their habit until she successfully prays him a new heart, or whatever the hell they’re doing in there. Poor kid never really recovered after Will attacked Maria. At least he looks cute in the matching necklace Edy got him for Christmas. And Raph’s probably locked in his room, considering Jane wants to keep an eye on him and she’s still upstairs with Harmony, calming her down after her momentary loss of composure. Tabby smiles; Harmony’s a great sponsor, but she could really stand to stop compartmentalising so much. Although, if she’s honest, Tabby can’t see Ollie making it.
She’s not going to say they bit off more than they can chew this year — Tabby herself has been involved with more difficult boys — but this lot remains an ordeal after the previous two intakes. Maybe next time she’ll try to pick out a Steph or a Bethany.
And then the doors from the corridor swing open and in steps—
What. The. Fuck.
Tabby can’t imagine Maria did all this. She acceded to the late, lamented Aaron’s request for a tux to wear to the Christmas Eve party, even found one in his size, but where did she even get the wig?
Ah. Paige. She’s standing with Maria in the corridor, watching Bethany sashay into the room with an amusement Tabby would be very annoyed with if she wasn’t, herself, trying not to laugh.
“Bethany?” Steph says.
“Hey, babe,” Bethany says, interrupting her chewing to finger-wave at Steph and blow a huge pink bubble. When she’s sure all eyes in the room are on her — Will’s included; his head’s following her like she’s magnetic — she struts across the room to her girlfriend and leans over the back of the couch, grabbing Steph by the chin and positioning her so they can kiss. They remain that way for several seconds, during which Will’s breathing becomes laboured, and then Bethany straightens up again, directs her grin squarely at Will, and resumes chewing her bubblegum.
“Hmm,” Steph says. “Strawberry.”
“Oh,” Bethany says, “hey, Will. Didn’t see you there! You like the look?” She poses, and blows and pops another bubble. “Think it’ll help you remember my name?”
Will swallows. “Uh—” he says.
“Oh, come on, Will.” Bethany walks closer, drops into a crouch just a metre away. She keeps her knees together, but when Will’s eyes flick downward she cracks them open just a little. “Like what you see?”
Bethany’s wearing what Tabby can only think to call a slutty catholic schoolgirl uniform, right out of a Halloween costume catalogue. Her white blouse is buttoned dangerously low, and sheer enough to show off the lacy bra she has on underneath. She’s wearing a checked school tie loosely around her neck, tied in a delinquent knot, with a pattern that matches her skirt.
Her very, very short skirt. She must have tucked under there, because she’s still crouched in front of them teasing Will, and Tabby can see, very clearly, her underwear: not the modest and practically unisex boyshorts any more. Black stockings — and an honest-to-God garter belt — complete the look, and they were probably a necessity because Tabby happens to know Bethany isn’t shaving her legs yet.
Probably only a matter of time, though, at this rate.
Bethany giggles, and it’s a very practised and girly giggle that Tabby hadn’t expected to hear from her for a long time, based on what Maria’s been saying about her progress. To pick a new name by Christmas is, yes, practically unprecedented, but Bethany may just have set a record for— for fucking something. For whatever this is.
“Fuck you, Aaron,” Will whispers, and Bethany responds with another blown bubble. She rolls her eyes at him, stands easily, flicks disdainfully at the hair of her long, chestnut-brown wig, offers Will a final flourish of her skirt, and joins Steph on the couch, dropping onto the cushion and crossing her legs at the knee.
“There’s just no helping some people,” she says in her most creditable attempt at head voice yet.
For Will it’s the last straw. He pulls his way out of Tabby’s grip and charges out of the room without a backward glance, and Tabby knows that the last thing he hears before the doors close behind him is another impish giggle.
“Did you really have to do that, Beth?” Tabby says, pushing up off the bean bag chair and frowning at Maria.
“Yes,” she says. And then she’s up off the couch again and reaching out a hand, and Tabby looks around to find Maria walking forward with a hoodie and a pair of jogging trousers. Bethany quickly pulls them on, zips the hoodie closed with a sigh of relief, and sits again, accepting Steph’s hug and leaning into Maria’s when she joins them. “Jesus,” she mutters, visibly shaking, “that was nerve-wracking. How do girls do that every day?”
“Practice,” Pamela says. “And it’s ‘the other girls’ now, remember? You joined Team Pink.”
“Yaaaay.”
“You’re keeping the outfit, though, right?” Steph says.
Tabby leaves them to it.
In the corridor, she checks the camera. She doesn’t think he’ll respond violently if she enters, but it’s best to be sure. And Will’s put the cuffs on again, his wrists locked into the restraints and the wire looped around his arms, to further restrict his movements. Even on the tiny screen, she can see the fear in his eyes.
Fear that he’ll hurt someone? Or fear of something else?
Only one way to find out.
She opens the door as quietly as she knows how. On the other side, Will hasn’t moved.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to— I wanted to fucking get him. It was all I could think about. I’m sorry. You should wash me out, Tab. You should fucking kill me or ship me off to Antarctica or whatever it is you do.” His voice quietens to barely a breath. “I wanted to hurt him so bad.”
Tabby sits on the bed next to him. He shuffles further into the corner.
“Bethany’s a she, Will.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
He’s breathing heavily but he speaks in whispers and punctuates with wheezes. He wasn’t like this after he attacked Maria; he wasn’t even like this when they brought him in. She thinks again of the frightened animal.
Sometimes they need to be guided. Sometimes they need to be moved.
“Will—” she starts.
He interrupts her. “What do you see, Tabitha?”
“What do you want me to see?”
“I don’t want you to see someone like Ollie.”
“I told you,” she says. “That’s not you any more. You walked away from this, remember?”
“I don’t want you to see…”
“What?”
He covers his face with his hands, and the wire tying his wrists to the bolt on the floor under the bed is so taut she worries it might be cutting into his forearm, but she doesn’t try to pull his hands away. Only the most gentle, careful contact for now.
“It was when you saw her, wasn’t it?” she says. “I saw it in you when it was Steph, but she’s more of a natural, isn’t she? Easier to deal with.” He says nothing. “But now Bethany, not just with her new name, but with her… playful attitude… It was too much, wasn’t it?” Still nothing. “You weren’t attracted to her, I know that much. I know that look, Will. I know it. It’s not lust; it’s envy.” That gets a reaction from him, just barely, and she takes him into her arms.
“I’m not—”
“You saw Steph. Now you’ve seen Bethany. And I’ve seen the way you look at them, Will.” She strokes his upper arm with her nails, softly drawing lines in the skin. “How long have you wanted to be a girl, Will?”
His reply is almost buried by his tears and suffocated by his hands but she’s close enough to hear it, close enough to grip him tightly, close enough to reassure him that she’s not going anywhere. She’s glad she has comforting hands around him and she’s glad to be his Sister, because what he whispers sounds an awful lot like, “Forever.”
2019 December 28
Saturday
In an ordinary job, in an ordinary place, the persistent stench of stale smoke that surrounds Jake Henshall would without a doubt be the worst thing about him. The stuff clings to him for hours after, and he wraps himself in it, relishes it with the same satisfied smirk he retains for all his sins. He knows it bothers Frankie, too, in the way heavy smokers can spot ex-smokers by how their fingers twitch when someone lights up; she could swear he smokes double when he knows she’s going to have to spend time around him. And it’s not simply that the smell teases the decades-old craving that still lurks in her throat, it’s that it reminds her unavoidably of her tenure at Dorley Hall, of stepping out into the woods on cold, wet nights and grinding one sodden, lipstick-stained filter after another into the dirt, trying to regain her equilibrium after a night spent debasing some doomed boy-girl.
Because that’s the fucking thing, isn’t it? This isn’t an ordinary job and this isn’t an ordinary place. This is the manor at Stenordale, whose empty halls could swallow Dorley thrice over, whose grounds were rotten with death even before Crispin Smyth-Farrow began burying girls in the central quad, and the job Frankie’s taken up is the same one she walked gratefully away from fifteen years ago. If she could, she would snatch the cigarette from Jake’s mouth and with it start a fire to consume them all.
She wishes sometimes that her nerve had never failed, that her rage had never subsided, that the impelling flame that carried her through those early years at the Hall hadn’t faltered in the face of Val and Beatrice’s affection for each other. Because that had been a simple world: every man was the man who hurt her sister; every newly born girl was her naivete personified, stumbling around on new legs and despicably vulnerable. And other times she wishes that she’d given it up completely, that she hadn’t retained enough residual self-satisfied sadism to continue the work until Beatrice returned and kicked them all out, that she’d exposed her moral weakness to old Dotty somehow, because then the dozens of boys and girls whose transformations she oversaw might never have been taken.
But she became broken. Not comprehensively, not in a manner that would be useful to anyone else, or even so noticeably that she even realised it at first, but enough that the fractures crept through every aspect of her until she was utterly and completely and forever altered.
Funny that it had been Val who did it. Valérie and the boy who would become Beatrice Quinn. When Frankie had run up behind Beatrice, protected her as best she could from the wrath of Smyth-Farrow’s hired thugs, risked everything to give the two girls five more minutes together, she’d imagined her actions had been simple expediency. And perhaps they were.
They did not remain so.
Even then, however, she kept her silence. Sure, she granted invisible kindnesses, ignored the things Beatrice hid imperfectly, directed her colleagues to look the other way, but until the night Beatrice finally escaped, until Frankie had the opportunity to lose her and ensure she remained lost, she did nothing that would show up in anyone’s memory but her own. Because how do you tell the girl you’re torturing that you daren’t stop, daren’t even significantly ease up, lest you be removed, to be replaced by someone with no such reservations? She’d be right not to care; she’d be right to spit your words back in your face, there to stain you. And it would have been a lie, anyway: she and her sister sponsors were, in all practical terms, irreplaceable. For the work they performed you needed a very particular kind of madwoman.
If she’d had the courage of her convictions, if she’d walked away or resisted Dorothy unto death, the capacity of Dorley Hall would have been permanently reduced, and twenty or so men would be alive today. Lately she sees their faces, pretty and painted and afraid, a lot more than she used to.
Val says she sees the faces of the dead, too, but she has the luxury of not being a willing component of the machine that murdered them. Oh, she says she is, claims in careless moments that she should have tried harder with them, helped them better to survive the predilections and perversions and ultimately the boredom of Crispin Smyth-Farrow, but she’s not and never has been anything like Frankie. Val is a victim; at worst, a weapon wielded against her will, at herself as much as at the other girls who came from Dorley.
No-one would call Frankie a victim.
In her years away from the Hall, Frankie would occasionally pull her secret second phone out of its hiding place and check the search alerts for Beatrice Quinn and a handful of other names. She’d spend a night reading and rereading the sparse information she’d collected, reminding herself that, despite her, they thrive. She’d comfort herself and, every time, consider releasing the lock on the living room window of her sixth-floor flat and just stepping out.
Beatrice and her girls are the salve on Frankie’s conscience, wretched and wounded thing that it is. If Frankie hadn’t taken a chance, none of them would be who they are today.
Every time old Dotty rants about Elle Lambert, about Peckinville, about the constraints she’s had to live under and the indignities she’s had to suffer and the theft of her rightful property — by which she means both Dorley Hall and the men she tortured in its depths — Frankie feels a flicker of satisfaction in the depths of what she might call her soul, if she were inclined to believe she had one any more. Because it was Beatrice who did that, who was a key instrument in the dismantling of Dorothy’s support and financial network; Lambert could never have accomplished it all on her own, not without a passionate and motivated woman who did not, until mere weeks before the coup, officially exist. Too many eyes in the employ of too many important people.
A familiar grunt of satisfaction draws her out of her introspection and reminds her what prompted her mind to wander in the first place: Jake, contriving to take up an entire two-person sofa by himself, signalling his appreciation for the person who has just presented himself for inspection.
“Good morning, Mr Henshall,” Declan says. This morning he doesn’t need prompting to curtsey, does it as he speaks, and Frankie wants to throw up. It’s the sort of shit Karen liked to see from her boys; overt and exaggerated displays of femininity calculated to extract maximum humiliation from the man inside the altered, abused body.
Frankie always preferred her girls a little more punk rock. Oh, she broke them, and broke them good and proper, because that was the work she was paid for, the work she was kept at by the knife at her throat. But Dotty gave her the jobs for clients who wanted marginally more functional humans at the end of it all. Still toys, but toys less apt immediately to break. Few of her girls ever ended up here, buried in the quad at Stenordale.
She almost laughs: a prize for the cunt with a tiny speck of gold buried somewhere inside her heart. Fat lot of good it did most of her girls. Beatrice is likely the only one of hers, bar those rescued in the coup, who still lives.
Fucking Declan. Subservient and scared and all painted up; with the generic bone shave done to feminise his face, it all contrives to make him look like every girl the Hall ever sent off to die.
The faces of the dead, everywhere she fucking looks.
“Morning, Dina,” Jake says, and his leer speaks of the same mix of lust and contempt Frankie used to see on her fellow ‘sponsors’ back at the Hall. A shame for Jake that Karen, the worst of them, is almost definitely dead; they would have got along like a stately home on fire.
Declan’s wardrobe has been doubling in size daily — Christ only knows what the Silver River guys who make the deliveries think about the boxes of borderline fetishwear they’ve been shuttling in — and Frankie’s had to see the lad in every wank-mag outfit Jake’s sordid little mind can dream up. Worse, she knows Dotty’s having a wonderful time with it, too; with Trev largely off-limits, Jake’s got the old woman’s approval to humiliate Declan any way he sees fit. Today he’s in a maid costume that hails from the darkest days of Val’s duties under the dearly departed Crispin Smyth-Farrow, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to: Declan won’t be able to pass a single mirror without having to see his new body in all its glory.
Frankie snorts. Jake and Dotty’ve told the idiot he’s going to be put back to normal if he just cooperates, and if Declan knew anything about anything he’d realise how impossible that is. She’s not sure she’s ever seen such a comprehensive package of alterations made in such a short time, not even at Dorley, when Dorothy was at her most maliciously creative. They’ve done everything to him but shorten the tendons in his ankles. Dotty said she read about it on some website and wanted to try it, but this was a mere year before the coup and, fortunately for the people under her power, she ran out of time. Frankie still can’t imagine what the point would be except to make it painful to walk, and Dorothy isn’t usually into pain for pain’s sake; she prefers it as a motivator.
“Something to add, Frankie?” Jake says.
“I was just admiring your choice of outfit for young Dina here,” she says, unable to resist twisting the knife a little; Declan very clearly hates it when people use the name Jake gave him, and Frankie’s only human.
There’s a laugh from the other side of the room, where Val and Trev are walking back and forth together across a small patch of uncarpeted floor. Trev’s been trying to match her steps all morning, marching along with a hardback book on his head in a series of taller and taller heels, and he’s fallen on his arse several times. Frankie left them alone after a while because his attitude and incompetence were making her dangerously nostalgic.
“Sarcasm is unbecoming, Frances,” Val says, pausing in her strut to look Declan up and down. She transfers her contemptuous gaze to Jake and adds, “As is that ensemble. Declan, you look like a tart.”
Frankie hides her smile as best she can. Val despises Declan. The lad has zero allies.
“Dina,” Jake says, reaching out to pat Declan on the behind. Declan jumps. “What do you have to say to Vincent over there?”
“Um…” The lad looks lost.
“Why don’t you tell him that — oh, let me think — he’s a bitter, ageing old tranny who should have been put down years ago?”
Val laughs again. “Declan,” she says, “why don’t you tell your sugar daddy there how sad it is that he has to make a girl to drool over.”
Jake’s smirk drops from his face. “Dina—” he starts.
But Declan’s had enough. Again, something all too familiar to Frankie: people can only progress so fast, especially if you want them to remain somewhat functional at the end of it all, and Jake is an amateur hand, driven by his pugnacious desires and his erotic fascination with Declan’s transformation and humiliation. He’s pushing too hard, and no matter the bullshit promises he and Dotty might have made, sometimes the girls push back.
It starts formless, a scream of frustration and agony and sheer hatred. It’s ragged and it’ll give the lad a sore throat later, because that’s how it works when you’ve been bottling your emotions for days upon days; eventually you just can’t fucking do it any more. Especially if, like Declan, you were never particularly emotionally sophisticated to begin with. The scream becomes a yell and eventually, in the face of Jake’s disgusted snarl, a barely controlled rasp.
“I don’t want this!”
“Dina,” Jake says firmly, as if he can resolve this outburst with a stern voice. Fucking amateur.
“My name is Dec—”
He doesn’t get to finish. Jake’s up and in his face almost faster than Frankie can follow — and that’s concerning; his middle-age spread hadn’t slowed him down as much as she’s been hoping — and the slap practically spins the lad around, causing him to stumble on his ridiculous heels and fall sideways to the floor. He’s on the carpeted side of the room, so it’s not as bad as it could have been, but Frankie still winces; that has to have hurt.
“Your name is Dina,” Jake says, leaning over Declan and failing to control his fury. And, God, he really is furious; Frankie’s reminded of something Karen used to say, back when Dorothy was trying to recruit. Men shouldn’t do this job, she said, over and over at the kitchen table, because they don’t know when to control themselves and when to let loose. They’re so used to getting what they want, when they want it, that they’d lose it the first time a boy talked back, and that would be that. Men will lose them money, she told Dorothy; they might even get them shut down.
“It’s—”
Jake doesn’t hit him again, just lashes out as if he’s going to, his flat palm inches from Declan’s face. Declan’s flinch takes his whole body, causes him to pull his knees up to his chest. The stupid maid costume rips, exposing his underwear.
“What is your name?” Jake says.
“I don’t—”
“What is your name?”
There’s a long silence. Declan’s facing away from her, but Frankie can imagine him perfectly: reddening eyes, cheeks flushed with fury and shame, limbs shaking and heart pumping with the need to fight or flee. But he can do neither; all he can do is appease.
“Dina,” Declan whispers.
“Again.”
“Dina.”
Jake holds out his hand. Declan flinches again, but Jake merely beckons irritably with his fingers, and slowly Declan unfolds, takes the hand that’s been offered him, and stands, unsteady and unwilling. Jake pulls on his hand, causing him to lose his balance again, but this time Declan falls into Jake’s arms.
The contrast between them, despite the situation, is almost amusing. They’re of a height, but Jake is entirely the stocky man Declan once was. Declan, it is clear, is coming to a similar conclusion.
Finally, perhaps, understanding the level of shit he’s in.
“Tell me your name,” Jake says gently.
“Dina.”
“Claim it.”
“Dina.”
“Claim it.”
Declan swallows. Jake’s face is inches from his, and the fear of what Jake might do next looks like it threatens to overwhelm him. From what Frankie knows, Jake and Dotty have focused on humiliation and feminisation, reserving the threat of taking things further for, well, times like this. It offers a powerful level of control. It’s possible Dorothy has even brought in one of her oldest motivations: behave or we go after your family. That she might no longer have that reach is irrelevant; it’s beyond effective.
Frankie, again, feels as if she could throw up. One thing to regret her past life, to seek some undeserved and absurd atonement or, more likely and perhaps preferably, death; another to see her actions replayed in front of her.
She did this shit for years. And she was good at it.
“My name is Dina Shaw,” Declan says, and Frankie has to turn away.
* * *
The moment she hears the lock cycle, Bethany knows she should have pulled the pillow over her head, the way her instincts suggested. Because the cameras and because the constant surveillance and because no-one, least of all her, can be allowed to have an unobserved emotional moment.
Because with every two steps forward she takes several steps back, the exact quantity of which seems to be tied to a random number generator strapped to the back of her fucking head, where she can’t get at it.
Because Steph’s trans and that’s fine and aspirational and all that shit but now Will’s trans and, seriously, what the actual fuck? Bethany got the briefing from Maria yesterday, about how the bulky bastard spent his whole life repressing or some shit, how he successfully logic’d his way into a belief system that allowed no basis for human growth or whatever, and when Bethany asked Maria if perhaps such a level of gross stupidity was a basis for washing out or at the very least some good hard tasering she gave her this look that wasn’t exactly disappointed but did successfully communicate that if Bethany’s going to say that shit again she should maybe work on her inflection so it’s more clear that it’s a joke.
How the fuck is Will trans? How is he trans and yet actively fighting this place? How do you tie yourself in so many knots that you do this to yourself?
What a fucking idiot.
Bethany slept badly last night. Again.
Steph looks at her like she’s a girl. Steph touches her like she’s a girl. Steph says her name like she’s a girl. And for, like, five minutes, that had been fine.
Because now Will’s trans, too, and she’s starting to wonder, what if everyone is, what if she’s been scooped up by mistake, one lonely rock in a basket full of eggs, what if that’s how it’s always worked, and Maria and Steph and everyone else — Bethany herself absolutely included — have been operating on the assumption that if they just dig deep enough into the depths of the thing that is/was Aaron Holt they’ll discover she was a geode all along.
She can’t even bring this to Steph, because she knows what she’ll say. Steph’s talked of her conversations with countless sponsors, dissecting the gender theories this place generates as a practical outcome of its operations, like potato skins when you’re making mash, and she’ll have a hundred answers to Bethany’s doubts, not least of which will be, why are you allowing Will, of all people, to shake you so?
She also can’t bring it to Steph because she’s fucking gone. Upstairs with Pippa, to Steph’s room. They asked her if she wanted to come with, and Bethany had felt so ashamed of and yet so consumed by the need to turn their invitation down that she’d raced back from the common room and dove immediately back into her bed, the bed she’s barely occupied lately, the bed that smells a bit like it needs to have its sheets changed, because even her smell’s changed lately, and the covers smell a little too much like she used to, a little too much like Aaron.
“Please come,” Pippa had said, and Steph had nodded and then put that concerned look on her face Bethany’s grown to dread, because it usually means she’s worried her in some way, and that’s something that shouldn’t happen.
People shouldn’t worry about her; people should forget about her.
“I can’t,” she’d said, and by the constriction of her throat she knew instantly that she’d said the wrong thing, that I can’t in that desperate tone of voice is indicative of internal strife or serious physical impairment and there was nothing she could do to walk it back. She tried, though. She was tired, she said, entirely at odds with the three cups of coffee she’d knocked back and the long conversation she’d had with Steph about Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues, in which she expressed some opinions she had difficulty supporting about the coverage provided by the cheerleader outfits.
Pippa, obviously trying to salvage the situation, had made some jokey remark about what it was that could possibly have tired Bethany out, and had nudged Steph with her elbow at the same time, and that was when Bethany snapped, “It’s not because of her.”
Telling the truth; fucking fatal down here.
“Beth—” Steph had said.
She’d cut her off: “A bunch of maniacs are turning me into a girl, Steph. Gives me weird dreams.”
There was no way after that to continue the conversation without getting into shit Bethany absolutely did not want to get into, so she did the only valiant thing: she fucking legged it.
She just wanted a few minutes or hours or years to herself to figure out why she’s balking so hard at everything. Again. But here’s Maria, poking her head around the half-open door with a pair of steaming mugs and, yes, that concerned look on her face.
“Bethany?” she says, entering and closing the door behind her.
She should have hidden under the pillow; if you can’t see your sponsor, she can’t see you. She settles for, “Hi.”
“How’re you doing?”
She rolls over so she’s facing the wall, which is ugly but which at least won’t make concerned faces at him. “I know you talked to Pippa,” she says. “Or watched the video. Or both.”
“Steph, actually.” The mattress depresses and Bethany rolls a little; Maria’s sat down next to her. “And she said I should leave you alone.”
God fucking bless her, as always. “And so you decided to ignore her suggestion and immediately come see what’s up with the angsty basement boy.”
“You’re not a boy, Bethany.”
“Well, I’m not fucking trans, am I? Put Steph or, Christ, even Will in a doctor’s office and they’ll take one look at them and go, ah yes—” she pushes an imaginary pair of glasses up her nose, “—a classic case of gender dysphoria. What would they say to me? ‘Holy shit, this idiot’s let himself get gaslit into girlhood’?”
Maria’s hand closes around Bethany’s ankle. “First of all,” she says, “you have a charmingly generous understanding of how trans people are treated by doctors.”
“Postulated,” Bethany says, to sound like Will and thus be annoying.
Maria ignores that she probably used the word wrong. “And, second, you know how many of us were like you once.”
She rolls over. The wall isn’t helping, and even if Maria’s going to make faces at her, at least she’s pretty. “Tell that to my brain.”
“I’m trying.”
“Well, maybe yell.”
“Is this about Will?”
“No. Yes.”
“Tell me?”
“What am I going to do,” Bethany says, “when sponsor shenanigans manoeuvre Martin fucking Moody into a position where he admits that he got really into drinking his body weight and playing real-life GTA because he was in denial about his gender dysphoria? When Raph reveals he kicks things because he hates how big his feet are and he’s trying to starve his toes of blood? When—”
“You don’t need to go on,” Maria says.
“I had more.”
“I know.”
She wants to keep at it, wants to say the words that are on the tip of her tongue, but she feels Aaron holding her back, warning her of the consequences of revealing herself, reminding her what happens to boys who show weakness.
Maria lies down next to her. Shoves her a bit to move her over, so they have space to lie together on the narrow bed. She pulls her phone out of her bag, runs through the familiar process of turning off the cameras embedded in the ceiling, and drops it all behind her.
“Tell me,” Maria says again.
“I feel so fucking alone,” Bethany whispers. Maria doesn’t reply, instead taking Bethany’s hand in hers. She locks their fingers together, like she did the day she came clean. The day she told Bethany everything. “I don’t know why.”
“We’ve been pushing you. Not the same way we usually do, and definitely not on the same timeframe. But we’ve been pushing you, nonetheless.” Maria smiles gently. “Remember Christine?”
“Yeah. I like her.”
Maria snorts. “Everyone likes her. It’s why she keeps getting more and more work. Indira was her sponsor, you know, and—”
“Indira was her sponsor? And she’s not, like, dead?”
“Indira did nothing with you I wouldn’t have done,” Maria says sternly. “You were proceeding along one of our predicted tracks, she was following our established best practices, and— God. Listen to me. The thing is, this whole intake has gone a little off the rails. It’s been a long time since one of us was hospitalised by someone down here, and—”
Maria’s interrupted by Bethany snatching her hand away so she can wrap it around Maria’s waist. The suddenness of the hug pulls a little hiccup from her.
“Oh,” Bethany says, pulling back. “Sorry.”
Maria cranes her neck so she can kiss Bethany on the forehead. “You’ve illustrated my point. First we had Steph, and though she kept herself a secret for a while — and we kept the secret from you even longer — she had a… distorting effect. Like Vicky, two years ago, only way more intense; like Melissa might have done, if she hadn’t been so isolated.” She’s frowning as she remembers. She shakes her head, to the extent that she can, lying sideways on this cramped bed. “Steph. My attack. Your temporary entanglement with Indira. You and Steph developing a relationship. All of it. It all pushed you forward far earlier than we would expect from someone with your history. If you don’t mind me dropping into slightly more institutional language—”
“Sure.”
“—you were someone who always felt deeply. We have transcripts from your school; dressings down from your housemaster, mostly. After-action stuff from the few assaults you reported. Some boys, Bethany, are outraged when they are attacked and demand restitution; some are resigned, because it happens all the time; others are… I could go on. You, however, acted as if you deserved it. Not just that it was an inevitability, given your size and your social position compared to the other boys… You thought it was—”
“Karma.”
“Sorry,” Maria says. “I don’t want to rehash it all. My point is, all your life, you’ve been punished for weakness and rewarded for strength, but what was defined as strength was out of reach—”
“Literally,” Bethany mutters.
“—and what was called weakness was… you. And in that,” she adds briskly, “you were not and are not alone. You should see our stats, Beth. Seriously. Boys don’t normally become girls anything like this soon. Usually they haven’t even begun to consider it! They, and you, have an emotional response mechanism that needs to be completely retuned, rebuilt, whatever. Except now you’re here: you’ve accepted yourself as a woman, you’re trying to move forward with everything involved with that, you’re in a developing relationship with Steph, and you are — if you’ll pardon the presumption — quite attached to your sponsor. Which is great, but the thing about going fast is that, sometimes, parts of you need to catch up.”
Bethany wriggles, tries to get comfortable again. Realises that may be a doomed endeavour: the bed is tiny and Maria’s dissected her on it.
“What does that mean?” she asks, when it becomes clear Maria’s run out of things to say.
“It means,” Maria says, rolling herself into a seated position, “that I want to give you some time.” She pulls at Bethany, tries to yank her up. Bethany, feeling stubborn, stays put. “There’s a favour I want to ask of you, but that can wait. Come on; I brought hot chocolate.”
Bethany laughs. It’s always hot chocolate. She sits up, feeling unnaturally stiff and putting it down to the stress. Maria hands her a mug.
“Don’t worry,” Maria says. “It’s low calorie.”
Pointing to the bag of marshmallows, Bethany says, “Don’t they defeat the point of buying low-calorie hot chocolate?”
“No! Low cal means we have room for marshmallows. These are the things you have to learn, now you’re a girl, Bethany. Cheers.”
Maria clinks their mugs together.
“Isn’t that a little reductive?” Bethany says, and sips from her mug. It’s very good: she wouldn’t have guessed it was low calorie.
“Who taught you that word?”
Bethany sticks out a chocolatey tongue. “Monica.”
They drink in silence for a few moments. Bethany has a chance to check her mug for the dreaded ‘joke’, and finds it: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. ‘Hope’ is crossed out, but whatever replaced it seems to have faded to illegibility.
“It’s the dishwasher,” Maria says. “Some of these older ones have become so battered they’re almost tasteful again.” She holds hers up so Bethany can read it: I might look like I’m working, but in my head I’m dancing wondering what you would look like as a girl.
“That one’s not so bad,” Bethany says. She drops a marshmallow into her mug and, trying to appear casual about it, asks, “What sort of favour?”
“Hmm?”
“You said you have a favour to ask?”
“Oh. Right.” Maria sips deeply from her mug, watching Bethany. “It’s Will,” she says after a while. “I think you broke him.”
Bethany almost chokes on her marshmallow. “Really?”
It’s the best thing she’s heard all day.
* * *
Trev makes it three times in a row from one end of the room to the other, across two levels of uneven floor and three hardwood-to-carpet-and-back-again transitions, in three-inch heels and a long but relatively restrictive skirt, and doesn’t even come close to losing the book off the top of his head. Frankie can’t help herself: she claps.
“Well done, Trev!”
And it seems almost as if he’s having fun. He executes a little spin at the terminus of his route and poses for a moment, before nodding his head, dropping the book — an eighties copy of the British National Formulary — into his waiting hands.
“Ta-da,” he says.
“Good work, Trevor,” Val says. She’s been sitting cross-legged at a dining table on one side of the room, leaning with one arm on the wood and the other curled delicately in her lap with an elegance Frankie still, after all this time, admires. Val stopped walking with Trev after his first successful traversal of the room, and instead found a vantage point from which she could critique his form and drink coffee.
“Yes,” calls a harsher voice from the other end of the room, an unwelcome reminder that Jake has continued to inflict his presence on them. “Well fucking done, Theresa. I was starting to think you’d be at that shit all day.”
Trev’s fingers twitch, and if he didn’t have a heavy book in his hands he’d be giving Jake the finger, Frankie’s certain; if Jake were closer, he’d have hurled it at him. She catches Trev’s eye, minutely shakes her head, and he turns away, places the book carefully on the dining table, and sits down near Val, copying her posture and, remarkably, only wincing a little when he crosses his legs the same way she does.
Makes sense; his dick’s had a lot less time to shrink than hers. Val’s is probably—
She coughs. She’s not supposed to be thinking about that.
Val and Trev bend closer, begin a whispered conversation, and Frankie swallows, forces herself to concentrate. She has a role to play: keep Jake away from them, at least for the moment.
She can have a little fun while doing it, too.
“Bet your girl can’t do that,” she says to Jake.
“Why would I want her to?”
Frankie leans forward on the battered armchair she’s colonised. She knows the effect she has on men like Jake; they hate the idea of a woman who doesn’t care what they think, who is beyond being even slightly interested in them as an object of arousal, and she’s not above using it to her advantage. He resents her, resents having to answer to her — at least in some aspects of the day-to-day — because as an older woman she ought to have quietly put herself out of his life. Checked into a home or something. And fuck that: Frankie will die on her feet.
Quite soon, probably.
“Are you a fucking idiot, Jacob?” she asks. “Ms Marsden turned Dina’s care over to you, and so far she’s let you do what you like. But Val there isn’t going to last forever and Trev’s getting packed off to the poshos, and then it’s going to be you and Dorothy and that idiot Callum and this… broken bird of yours.” She flaps a hand in Declan’s direction; the lad is currently sitting curled up in another half-dead old armchair, staring at nothing. Frankie’d bet money he’s dissociating. “Can she cook? Can she clean? Can she cross the room in heels without tripping? Fuck, mate; can she express herself in complete sentences? No, no, no and no. You’re fucking it, Jake, lad. Old Dotty likes results. And you plainly don’t know how to get them because you can’t stop thinking with your dick.”
She could go on, but she doesn’t. She wants him irritated, she wants him taken down a peg in the eyes of people he considers below him: subjugated men like Trevor and Declan; women like Val and herself. But she doesn’t want him mad, not yet. She sneaks a glance at Val, still observing the situation from her straight-backed chair, and smiles to herself.
Jake doesn’t reply, and when she looks back at him, he’s glaring. She smiles for him, her broadest, ugliest grin — she used to be pretty proud of her teeth, but time and coffee and neglect have yellowed them, and who the fuck can afford the dentist, anyway? Not on her salary.
“Dina,” Jake grunts. He has to repeat himself a couple of times before the lad uncurls and stands.
“Yes, Mr Henshaw,” Declan mumbles, sounding for all the world like a teen boy trying to ingratiate himself with the father of his date.
“You were watching Theresa? You have an idea what to do?”
“Yes, Mr Henshaw.”
“Then get over there and fucking well do it.”
The next several minutes provide a spectacle so embarrassing Frankie almost feels sorry for the lad, and she has to keep reminding herself that of all the girls and boys she’s seen receive this treatment, he is perhaps the closest to actually deserving it. Though she wonders, as he drops his book, fumbles his step and trips over the edge of the carpet for the sixth time, what he would do if returned to his life as-is; have his experiences chastened him or merely ruined him? Or would he, given appropriate bodily restitution, return enthusiastically to the behaviour that minded Beatrice Quinn to remove him from the world in the first place? She’s always wondered how much of the new programme at Dorley Hall is dependent on the physical modifications versus the… Christ, she doesn’t even know what to call it. Brainwashing? Gaslighting? She’s seen one of their documents — for internal circulation only, nabbed by Silver River earlier in the year, shortly before the holes in the Hall’s security all closed up — written by a sponsor called Tabitha, and she was vehement that none of her girls have ever been brainwashed or mind-wiped or otherwise fucked with. They all have a choice, she insisted at the end of the memo; a coerced choice, for sure, but a choice. The ones who choose otherwise — or who are like Declan — go to Elle Lambert. What she does with them, Frankie doesn’t know, but it’s probably not what Dorothy’s allowing Jake to do to Declan.
After Declan’s seventh fall, upon which Jake yells at him, Val stands with an audible cluck of her tongue and marches over to where the stricken boy lies. He’s crying — he’s humiliated and full of hormones so it’s no fucking surprise — and she yanks him up from the floor with one arm and with the other holds out a handkerchief.
“Clean yourself,” she says shortly.
“He’s to do it on his own,” Jake says, his voice still the loudest in the room, and Frankie doesn’t miss the slight sneer of amusement that twists Val’s lips: in his irritation, Jake forgot what gender he’s supposed to be forcing on Declan.
“Clearly, he cannot.”
With that Val turns her back to him, returns her attention to Declan. He’s still trying to hold the torn skirt of his hideous dress tight enough to his thighs that his crotch remains hidden, so she wipes his face for him, dabs at his eyes. She produces a second handkerchief, licks it, and pats at the smudges on Declan’s cheeks. It’d be quite motherly, if she wasn’t very obviously pressing harder than she needs to.
“Now,” she says, “let’s try again. Without the book, for the moment. You’ll walk behind me and try to match my steps. Notice our heels are almost the same height? If I can do it, anyone can.”
“I don’t want to,” Declan whispers.
“Oh, Dina,” Val says, cupping his cheek with her hand, “then you should not have raped that girl, should you?”
* * *
Some are born women.
Some become women.
Some have womanhood thrust upon them; most of the women here, apparently.
Bethany’s becoming a woman out of spite.
They watched one of Maria’s favourite old movies together. If she loved Heathers, Maria said, then how about Pump Up the Volume? It’s like the last gasp of the eighties, she said. It’s ridiculous, she said. So they watched it, with Maria ignoring Bethany’s reaction when the schoolkids onscreen start passing around a cassette tape of someone playing loud music and talking about his dick — “I thought you disapproved of that kind of behaviour!” — and afterwards she asked if she could call home and play the song Hello Dad… I’m in Jail! from the end of the movie down the phone. Maria said no. She’d do it anonymously! Maria said no. It’d be so funny. Maria laughed and agreed and said no.
And the whole time she thought about Will. She sat there on the bed and leaned against Maria and thought about Will, about why she felt so reduced by the revelation of his transness. Or his supposed transness. His probable transness. By the end of it she couldn’t claim to be closer to a conclusion, but she was considerably more irritated with the fuckwit, and she decided that was reason enough to get up off the bed and go aggressively be a girl at him.
Because fuck him for knocking her confidence around.
Because fuck her for allowing herself to be so thrown.
Because fake it till you make it, right? Just because it’s trite doesn’t mean it can’t be a way of life. And it’s what Maria did, anyway.
So now she’s on her way back from the shower, towel-drying her hair and feeling very scrubbed. Maria got her a cleanser and an exfoliator and told her Steph was right about haircare, so she rubbed in the conditioner with her good hand and left it to soak in while she subjected her face to a cleansing process which left it looking pink.
Maria’s waiting outside her room with a couple of wheelie suitcases, and together they unlock it and head inside. While Bethany swaps her robe for underwear — including the push-up bra she borrowed the other day for the schoolgirl costume — Maria starts stocking the wardrobe with the contents of the suitcases.
The very tightly packed suitcases.
“That’s too much,” Bethany says.
Maria turns to her with an expression of angelic innocence. “Too much what?”
“Too much clothes.” Shit. Very grammatical; she’s going to have to watch that in front of Will, lest he lecture her on the proper and orderly use of English grammar. Again. Although that one time it’d almost been worth it when Steph — still Stefan back then — came suddenly out of her shell and made fun of Will for not knowing what a gerund was.
“Beth,” Maria says, “do you know how many boxes of this stuff we have upstairs? I’ll answer for you—” she spins around in her crouch and continues unpacking, “—because you don’t. You saw one room. You got hassled by Paige one time. We have whole rooms full of clothes, enough to fit every possible body type, and Paige’s enthusiasm is unstoppable.”
“Postulated,” Bethany says again, because it’s fun to say, and that’s something to concentrate on that isn’t, for example, the burgundy skirt Maria just unrolled. Why is it so short?
“You’ve got to stop saying that.”
Bethany sits heavily on the bed, wincing as her tucked-under penis compresses against her crotch. “Look, Maria, this is scary, okay? This is…” She can’t finish it. She doesn’t have to: the magic of her relationship with Maria is that she doesn’t have to vocalise every thought that dances across her brain; she merely has to be stunningly insecure and terrified and Maria will, magically, pick up on it.
Maria picks up on it. She puts away the shoes in her hands — black ankle boots with, thank fuck, a tiny heel — and joins Bethany on the bed, holding out an arm and, as ever, accepting her into her embrace as if the two of them were born to fit together. As if they’d been doing this all their lives.
“Talk to me, Beth,” she says.
“It’s nothing new.”
“Moving too fast?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think so.” Maria knocks the side of her head against Bethany’s, gently enough that it probably doesn’t hurt even Maria’s still-sensitive skull but hard enough that it makes a sound, extracting a giggle from Bethany. A dirty tactic: just because Bethany’s amused by funny noises — among many other things — doesn’t mean Maria gets to use them against her. “I wasn’t quite honest,” she continues, “about my ulterior motive. Or I wasn’t comprehensive, I suppose. I don’t want you to talk to Will because I think you’ll help him. Tabby actually wanted Steph to do it, but I pulled rank. I don’t want to keep giving her all this work to do for us, especially not for Will’s sake. Frankly — though I wouldn’t say it outside these walls — I don’t much care for him.”
“You hide it well.”
“Thank you. I want you to talk to Will, Bethany, because I think you need to. For you. Because I know what’s going on in that head—” she pokes it, “—beyond just what you’ve told me. So I know it’s not enough for you to know that I survived as a woman despite my background, same as you will, same as Jane and Harmony and Pippa did.”
“Not Tabby?”
Maria smiles. “Tabitha was, with hindsight, more like Melissa than, say, me. More like Will, even, though without his… randomly directed aggressive tendencies.” She winces as she says this, and Bethany bumps shoulders with her. “You’ve had a knock to your confidence. You need to shore it up. You need to talk to him. You need to see for yourself that his progress — or otherwise — has no influence on yours.”
Bethany nods slowly. “So,” she says, thinking it through, “that’s why you went to get clothes.”
“You’re an actress, Beth. You sink into roles so deeply that after a while you don’t even know yourself any more. And I think you know that about yourself: remember ‘Aaron’?” She articulates his name with some of the most expressive scare quotes Bethany’s ever seen. “You still need to feel out how to be Bethany. You can’t do that just hanging around Steph and me all the time. And, before you say it, I don’t want her to be an act forever — because we’re going to keep checking in like this, all the time, until you’re comfortable in her, comfortable in yourself — but in the short term you can exploit your… acting abilities.”
“Fake it till you make it.”
“Exactly. I did it; Pippa did it—”
“Mia did it,” Bethany says. To Maria’s surprised expression, she adds, “We spoke. While I was still thinking about names. She said that’s how she gets along.”
“She’s sensible,” Maria says, “as long as you ignore the cat-ear hoodies. And she’s closer than she thinks.”
Bethany nods. Why is she so nervous about the clothes, anyway? They don’t mean anything. She was all geared up to go yell at Will and be obnoxious about her name and pronouns until Maria started unpacking, and why is that?
There are rumblings from Aaron, deep inside her, but they’re not what she expects. Thinking too much and remembering too little, lately. Feeling too much, perhaps. Because it’s not that he’s scared of the clothes, and it’s not that he’s even scared of what the clothes mean; he’s scared of what they mean to other people. He’s scared of making a choice, of being seen to have made it, and living with the consequences. He’s scared of being seen to care about something.
Jesus Christ, he’s an idiot.
Yeah. He was.
“Okay,” she says. “I’m ready.”
She’s not. Not at all. But she will be someday, and until then? She knows what she can do.
* * *
“This isn’t working.”
Val says it through her teeth, like she’s an auto mechanic examining an engine that persists, despite her efforts, in leaping out of the bonnet and scattering itself across the pavement. She helps Declan up again and walks him carefully to the dining table, sits him down next to Trevor. Frankie braces for what is inevitably to come; what they hoped would/wouldn’t come.
“No!” Jake barks from the other end of the room, on cue. “You don’t stop.”
“She stops,” Val says sharply.
Jake ignores her. “Get back to it, Dina.”
Jake’s getting antsy. Has he realised how alone he is here? How outnumbered? There he is, sinking into his armchair at the far end of the room, like a decrepit dad decomposing in front of the football while his family live their lives around him. With Declan now sitting next to Trevor and trying to copy the way he’s sitting — knees together, ankles crossed — and Val leaning against the back of a chair close by, all the men-become-women are clustered as far away from Jake as they possibly can be. Frankie’s closer, occupying a neutral space in the centre, keeping him from them.
“She cannot ‘get back to it’,” Val says, her arms stiffening on the back of the chair. She’s readied for action; what kind, none of them can predict. But she’s spent her entire life around bastards with hair-trigger tempers and no depths to their depravities, so she’s probably best equipped of all of them to spot a problem coming.
Or provoke one.
“What do you mean?” Jake snaps. Frankie’s got her eye on his feet. She’s still trying to learn his tics and tells, the better to predict his moods and movements. He was damn fast earlier when he struck Declan, and Frankie’s rattled.
Val pushes away from the chair and crosses the floor, her carefully chosen heels striking sharply against the hardwood. Straight-backed and steady of shoulder, she’s everything she’s been trying to drill into Trevor since Boxing Day. If she wasn’t in her fifties, she might belong on the catwalk.
Fuck it, Frankie decides; she would own the catwalk, age be damned. Amid the sin that curdles inside the manor at Stenordale, Valérie Barbier is the only thing worth looking at, the only thing worth retaining.
Val stops just short of Frankie’s chair. The furniture is scattered such that she almost completely bars entry to the other side of the room; if Jake wants to get at Declan, he’ll have to go through her or through Frankie.
Not a happy thought.
“She cannot learn to walk,” Val says, glaring down at Jake, “while she is forced to use both hands to retain her dignity.”
“Her— What dignity?”
“He’s been trying to cover his dick, Jake,” Frankie says. “You haven’t seen how he keeps stopping to pull down that stupid plastic skirt you made him wear?”
“He—”
“Trevor,” Val says, interrupting Jake’s nascent response and turning away from him, “go to my room and fetch something knee-length, please. There should be some modest dresses in my wardrobe. And bear in mind the height disparity; if in doubt, go long.”
“Wait,” Jake says, rising from his chair, “you can’t just—”
“Do you want her trained?” Val snaps, turning back to him and taking another step towards him. “Or do you wish simply to ogle her?”
Frankie doesn’t laugh at the way ‘ogle’ sounds in Val’s accent; she always sounds more French when she’s angry. “You should listen to her,” she says. “Val’s the expert.”
“She’s—” Jake says, and then restarts with a sneer. “He’s nothing but a toy.”
“Careful, Mr Henshaw,” Val says in a voice that could butter crumpets. “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
Jake covers some of the ground between them. “You forget your place. And you’re not sending your little friend out there alone.”
Val sighs theatrically. “Jake, I’ve been here thirty years. If there was an escape route, I would have found it.”
“The old man was sloppy. This is protocol.”
“Fine. Frances, you want to take him?”
“You’re the boss,” Frankie says, dropping a subtle emphasis on the final word. She makes a show of pushing up out of her chair, stopping halfway with her hand theatrically pressed against her back. “Trev, hun, would you help me up?”
Trevor taps his way across the hardwood, exhibiting more skill on his heels than Frankie’s ever managed, and cocks his hip as he stops in front of her, causing the tasteful outfit Val chose for him to flare ever so slightly. Frankie takes his hand and allows herself to be pulled up, and together they leave out of the door at the far end. The last thing she hears is Jake ordering Val to resume ‘Dina’s’ training, and Val refusing.
Christ, she hopes Val doesn’t push him too hard.
She checks for cameras in the corridor. She knows there aren’t any, not until they hit the foyer, because she’s memorised the security system, but Val said she should always remain alert, and Val’s the expert at surviving in such a hostile environment, so alert Frankie remains, to the best of her ability.
“Christ, I want to throw up,” Trevor mutters, letting her go and releasing all his stored tension. Frankie’d hoped he could be encouraged to be more like Val or Bea or any of the other girls who’d grown accustomed to and even embraced their femininity and their womanhood — it’d certainly make his day-to-day easier if he wasn’t battling his own bile every time he passed a mirror — but some men are just wired to be men, and Trev, the poor kid, seems to be one of them.
Exactly the way old Dotty likes them. What a find he would be, if she were allowed to keep him.
“Later, lad,” Frankie says, straightening up and quickening her step. “It’s quite a way to Val’s room, so we’ve got to fucking hustle, and that wasn’t entirely for show in there; my back isn’t what it used to be.”
“We couldn’t have left something closer?”
“Do you want us to look like we planned this?” Frankie whispers. “Besides, we didn’t know this was how it’d go. We’re winging it, Trev; it’s all improvisation. Val seized on the dress thing and now here we are. So come on.”
* * *
Truthfully, the outfit isn’t as bad as the schoolgirl costume. Maria, failing to hide her smirk as they discussed Bethany’s needs, helped her select from the minimal options in her wardrobe a light, easy-to-wear dress in dark grey. It billows out a little above the knee — to flatter hips she doesn’t yet have — and is generously proportioned around the chest, leaving ample space for the bra; another padded one. She’s wearing leggings so she doesn’t have to feel self-conscious about her legs, her leg hair or her underwear, and she’s satisfied that there’s little enough on show up top that she’s not going to have to worry about flashing the fucker with the extremely limited chest she’s managed to grow. And with the subtle makeup she got Maria to do for her, she looks…
Oh, Christ.
She looks like a girl.
The costume had been one thing. One over-the-top and very obviously silly thing, a teen boy’s fantasy, and that had helped when it came to putting it on and it helped even more when it came to rationalising it after. In Steph’s arms, bundled up in hoodie and jogging trousers, she quickly came to see it all as a performance, as a bit of fun.
Bethany looks at herself and sees no performance. No costume. And her knees start to wobble and she feels like she might fall but Maria’s there, holding her by the shoulders, guiding her back to the bed, sitting her down and saying something about how she doesn’t have to do this today, she doesn’t have to do this ever, they can just sit here and watch movies together, they can get more hot chocolate in even less pleasant mugs, and Maria will help her take it all off right now, and—
“No,” Bethany whispers.
She reaches up, takes a few of Maria’s fingers clumsily in hers and squeezes, and then stands and returns to the mirror.
This face, made up and tense.
This body, clothed and pretty and hugging itself.
This girl.
Well, she had to start being her sooner or later. Or, at the very least, faking it.
She forces a smile, and when Maria comes back to join her, embraces her again, kisses her lightly on the temple, emphasises with her presence their growing similarity, Bethany’s smile broadens, becomes genuine, and she returns her sister’s embrace with everything she has.
And then she turns back to herself.
Well, now she knows something new about Bethany Erin: she looks cute in a dress. She loves Steph and she’s Maria’s sister and she looks really fucking cute in a dress.
Only one more question to ask now: “So, do I get to tell him? Please can I tell him?”
Maria knows what she’s asking. “Beth, you don’t know how much I would love to say yes. But you can’t. Will doesn’t get to find out about the rest of us until Tabby says so. It’s her prerogative.”
“Fine. Fine. I get it. I do.” She pauses, experiments in the mirror with a pose: one hand on her hip, the other playing with her bottom lip. “Can I hint at it?”
“No.” Maria nudges her. “Absolutely not.”
“Spoilsport.”
And then Maria’s hand loops around her waist again. “Bethany,” she says quietly, resting her chin on Bethany’s shoulder, “it’s check-in time. You okay?”
The girl in the mirror grins at both of them. “Yeah,” she says. “It’s… I won’t pretend it’s not really fucking weird, Maria. Like, I look at her — I look at me — and there’s a part of me that just won’t stop screaming, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with what I’m wearing.” She leans her head against Maria’s. “I read up on dysphoria, you know. After Steph. After you showed me the video from her intake. And, I mean, I knew kind of what it was already, I think everyone who’s ever been on the internet does, but I saw things in her that I never want to experience. And you know what’s weird?” She’s watching her lips as she talks, and the light colour Maria applied makes the shapes they form all the more pleasing. “I get it. And not the way I expected to.”
Maria squeezes her. “What do you mean?”
“I expected to hate this,” Bethany says, nodding at her reflection. “And when I put on the— the thing the other day, got all dressed up, I kind of did. But I didn’t feel like that about it. Scared and overwhelmed and super fucking stupid, sure, like I’d just jumped off a cliff without a rope or a parachute or one of those cartoon trampolines at the bottom, like I’d gone way too far way too quickly, but you know that, we talked about that, that’s just, like, baseline. But I never felt the way Steph did when Pippa was saying all that to her. And in the shower, too, that one time when she got burned. Looking back, I think she was trying to ruin herself, and I just don’t feel that when I look at myself. You know when I do? When I think about him. About Aaron. And it’s not about bodies or being a man or whatever, it’s about what he represents, who he is or was or whatever. I think about him and it makes my feet itch, makes me want to batter down these doors and run and keep running until he’s just a memory, until everyone’s forgotten his name and in his place there’s just… me.”
Maria nods, her hair mingling with Bethany’s as she does so. “You remind me of Christine,” she says. “And Yasmin and Faye and so many other girls here. It’s a stage a lot of them go through.”
“Not you?”
“No.” Another squeeze, but this time Maria’s looking away as she speaks. “I missed him. I still do. But he was killed and I survived in his place. It’s not really the same dynamic. As a boy, I was loved. Shown kindness. I’m not sure you ever were.”
Bethany snorts. “I didn’t deserve kindness.”
“You weren’t always the man we picked up, Bethany. You were innocent, once. As innocent as I ever was.”
It’s a lovely idea. Untrue, obviously; Aaron’s first reprimand for bad behaviour came early in junior school, and she winces when she remembers his disbelief that he’d been caught, his anger at being denied. Where did he learn such things? How can she be sure she won’t learn them again? Or that she can ever fully discard them?
It pulls at her, though. “Do you think I could ever be that innocent again?” she asks, quickly and shamefully.
Maria’s embrace tightens once more. “No,” she says. “But I’m not innocent any more, either. You’re just like the rest of us now.”
* * *
Frankie hasn’t been in Val’s room without her before. It’s uncomfortable despite Trevor’s presence; this is Val’s private place, the only part of her life that has, for uncountable years, been hers and hers alone. Without her, it’s an invasion.
Since Frankie got here, she’s twice had to talk Dotty out of fucking with it. Dorothy would love to play with Val, but she also, as Frankie pointed out, likes eating meals and living in a clean home, and it’s not like Silver River’s going to provide them with a maid, especially if they break the one they’ve already got.
It’s a cosy space. Strangely timeless. Most of Val’s belongings, aside from her clothes, are decades old, with pride of place given to a smallish TV/VCR combo and a wall of books and video tapes. Of course, thanks largely to Frankie, Val now knows about Blu-ray discs and mobile phones and the internet and 9/11, but nothing of that has been able to infect her room.
Frankie could probably stay here forever.
“You think this’ll look good on Dina?” Trev says, and Frankie blinks, remembering why they’re here.
“I really don’t care,” she says. “The question is, is it long enough?”
“Yeah,” he says, holding the dark blue dress up against himself. “Should be.” He flaps idly at the loose skirt. The gesture is feminine enough that Frankie schools her reaction to it; ordinarily she might laugh — and tell herself afterwards that she ought to hate herself for it — but that would be downright counterproductive right now. The lad’s got enough to deal with, and she and Val need him functional.
“Good,” she says. “Let’s go, then.”
As they close in on the training room, Frankie can hear yelling. Fuck only knows if that’s a good sign or a bad one, but she hurries herself anyway, and as a result doesn’t have to fake the limp that almost trips her a dozen times.
Trev barges through the door first, momentarily but understandably forgetting his role in all this, and rushes over to help Val while Frankie just leans against the door frame and tries hard not to vomit from the exertion. Inconvenient, at such a time, to be so fucking old.
“What the fuck is going on here, Jacob?” she wheezes.
The tableau which greeted them as they arrived: Declan on the floor at the edge of the carpet, having fallen again; Val parked on her arse in the middle of the carpet, hand clasped to a cheek Frankie would bet money is red and swelling; Jake standing between them with one hand raised.
Someone who didn’t know the man might assume he would be pleased at this point, having reasserted his authority, but he looks angrier than ever. His chest is pumping with the short, sharp breaths he’s taking, and his fist — fortunately not the one he used to slap Val — is clenched. Frankie’s contempt near doubles; he was even easier to provoke than she thought.
Declan’s crying, and Frankie knows why because she’s seen that look before on the face of too many girls over too many years: the absolute and inescapable despair of someone who’s been remade and trained and pumped so full of hormones they barely recognise their own emotions any more. Declan just watched Val, one of the people he might once have hoped would stand up for him, take a punishment meant for him. He just watched it floor her.
And Frankie would have difficulty tearing her eyes from him, if it weren’t for Val, who takes advantage of Trev’s outstretched arm and levers herself back to her feet. She steps away from him, towards Jake, and Frankie tries not to bite the inside of her mouth as Trev stiffens.
Control yourself, lad.
“You do not touch me,” Val says, low and steady, glaring at Jake. “Do you hear me, you contemptible rat of a man? You do not touch me.”
Jake is twice her size and he knows it. With a sneer he matches her step forward and says, “I will do what I fucking like with you. You’re a toy, Vincent. A piece of meat. Past your best and overcooked but a piece of meat all the same. And I can do what the fuck I—”
Valérie’s slap takes him by surprise. She puts her whole arm into it, and the noise from the impact is shockingly loud.
It stops him for no more than a second. And then he laughs, the humourless laugh of a man about to mete out just and delectable punishment, and kicks her full in the stomach. Val sees the kick coming, enough to bend with the blow, but still she staggers, and only saves herself from falling by grasping blindly at the back of a dust-sheeted couch. She loses a shoe and might have twisted her ankle and she’s in no shape to respond to whatever he does next.
He doesn’t get to do it. Trevor shoulder-barges him, pushes him back, knocks the wind out of him, almost trips him, and he follows through, stepping around him and hooking a foot around Jake’s lower leg.
Jake goes down, his head striking the carpet, and for a heart-freezing moment Frankie’s convinced they’ve put it all into motion too early, because he’s not got his gun with him; if they kill him now, they’ve no leverage, they’ve achieved nothing, and Silver River will triple their guard and all hope will be lost.
That’s not the plan.
Frankie holds her breath.
And then Jake kicks out, unbalances Trevor with a kick to his ankle, and he’s up, pulling Trevor into his reach with one hand and closing the other into a fist. There’s the look of triumph she’s been waiting for; there’s his victory.
There’s his first punch.
Before Jake can do it again, before he has the opportunity seriously to hurt poor Trevor, Frankie puts all her years of authority into her voice and yells, “Don’t hit the fucking merchandise, you idiot!”
* * *
It’s only a few steps from Bethany’s room to Will’s, but Tabby’s there by his door, her eyes narrowing when she sees how Bethany’s dressed, and the voice of Aaron resurfaces briefly to remind her that these judgements haven’t gone away, will never go away, because there will always be people who knew her as Aaron, who knew what he did, who will see him when they ought to see her, and—
Bethany shuts him up by knocking her head briefly against the wall. The horrible wood-effect laminate wallpaper cushions the impact, but it has the desired effect.
The world moves on without you, Christine said, and the girls here all make the effort to move with it. If you want him to, Aaron Holt can fade away.
God, she wants him to.
“Uh,” Tabby says, “Beth?”
“Yes?” Bethany says brightly.
“Never mind. You want to talk to Will?”
“‘Want’ is a strong word, but yeah.”
“Is he okay?” Maria asks.
Tabby shakes her head. “Far from it.”
“How come?” Bethany asks. “I mean, he admitted it, didn’t he? His dark little secret?”
“It’s not that simple,” Tabby says, shrugging her shoulders against the wall. “It’s never that simple. He’s trans, but he’s not trans like Steph is. She held off on transition because she had some damn stupid ideas about how she was too weak or too masculine or whatever—”
“And some very reasonable notions about the NHS,” Maria adds.
“Yeah, sure. Will… Yes, he’s known all his life. But he buried it. Why exactly, I don’t know — although look out the fucking window and take your pick; this country isn’t exactly short on reasons to stay closeted — but since he did so, it’ll have found its way out in other ways. Ways that are easier for him to deny, to pathologise. Fetishes and secret desires and fleeting moments of revelation. He’ll have crushed them all. Put them right back where he thinks they belong. No, Beth, I think he’s got a long way to go before he can accept himself.”
“He told you all this?” Bethany says.
“No. We’ve barely talked since. That’s why I wanted Steph; he opened up to her before.”
“Yes,” Maria says, “but he closed right up again after. In fact, that might have been where he started thinking we were basically going to Stepford Wife him.”
“If he didn’t tell you all that,” Bethany persists, “then how do you know it?”
Tabby shrugs again. “Experience. Personal and otherwise. Opening his file for the first time was a bit like looking in a really pasty mirror.” She sighs. “There are ways in which it’s simpler, dealing with someone down here with a head start on transness: there are women like Will in every community of trans women. Makes him a little more predictable, now we know his deal. But there are ways in which it’s much, much harder: we’re not just dismantling his false ideas about masculinity, manhood, womanhood, and so on; we have to teach him a whole new way to think about being trans, too.”
Maria brings Bethany into a quick shoulder hug. “Told you I got the best one,” she says.
“Beth,” Tabby says, “could you perhaps backslide a bit, please? Get sent to the cells, or something? Maria’s become so annoying.”
“Sorry,” Bethany says, and does her best to keep a straight face. “I’m a good girl now.”
“Now that I’ll believe when I see it.”
“Oh, Tab,” Maria says, interrupting Tabby as she reaches for the door lock, “Bea wants you to contact Shahida. She wants to see her and Melissa together. Soon.”
“Oh?” Tabby frowns. “She can’t do that herself?”
“She wants to speak to you, too.”
“Oh. Joy. Go on, then.” She thumbs the biometric reader and pushes Will’s door open with her foot. “Don’t break him again.”
* * *
Jake clears out. He reminds them all that the camera in the corner will have seen everything and that they shouldn’t test his authority and then he clears the fuck out, because if he harms the Smyth-Farrows’ brand new prize he’ll be bloody well segmented, like Karen. Frankie breathes her first clear breath since last night, when she and Val first talked it all through, when they came up with their bare-bones plan. But then her throat closes up again, because Val’s still on the floor, on her knees now, looking at nothing, her fingers twitching, and Frankie has to wonder how hard she was hurt.
“What’s up with her?” Declan says. Sullen little fuck. He watched it all go down with a hungry look in his eyes, which died the moment he realised Trevor was no match for Jake. That none of them are.
“Shut up, Declan,” Frankie mutters. “Go to your room.”
“But I—”
She resummons the remains of her authority and practically screams at him. “Go to your room!”
He leaves. He’ll probably take the long way round, stay as far away from the soldiers as he can. Frankie doesn’t care. He can go claw at the windows and get tased by Callum if he wants. He’s not part of this.
“Don’t yell at me,” Trevor says quietly, crouching down next to Val, “but is she okay?”
She wants to tell him off just for the hell of it, but she’s replaying the fight, trying to understand what’s happening, and when she reaches the end of it she goes cold, and curses herself for her rank, careless stupidity. The training room starts to take on the aspect of the old kitchen at Dorley Hall, with another girl in Val’s place, knocked bloody nosed to the tile.
Beatrice, come to catch her friend before she leaves.
Valérie, struggling against her captors, about to be taken from her forever.
And Frankie, who bought them five minutes to comfort each other, to say their goodbyes.
Don’t hit the merchandise.
“Bad memories, lad,” Frankie says absently. “Don’t worry about it.”
* * *
He’s sleeping when she enters, and he’s got the covers off and very little clothing on. It’s a banal observation — she and Steph have discussed it several times — but the Will who currently lurks in his room bears little resemblance to the man they met back at the start of all this. Where he was once muscled he’s now spare, where he was once energetic he’s now enervated, and where he was once arrogant to the point of aggravation, well, he’s now a twitching fucking wreck of a man, a man who can’t keep himself still unless he has something in his hands, something in front of his eyes, something to keep his attention off the people around him, containing his fear in his book or his phone or in the knuckleprints he leaves in the bean bag chairs.
There’s a stress ball on his bedside table. It says Greetings from Wookey Hole! around the equator, and Bethany frowns; if that’s a joke, like on the mugs, it’s an obscure one.
She wonders if she should leave. Not because she doesn’t want to disturb him, but because the mere sight of him has reminded her exactly what she thinks of him, and because, she has to admit to herself, that while it was fun to tease the fucker a few days ago, she doesn’t necessarily want to be seen as a girl by him. Not yet.
No, actually.
No, no and bollocks to him. She doesn’t care what he thinks. In fact, she invites his contempt! If he sneers at her for embracing the womanhood he’s been running from his entire life, all that proves is that he’s a shithead, and that he knows about a hundredth of what he thinks he knows. And there is no fucking way Bethany Erin Something-or-Other is turning down the chance to lord it over Will Schroeder.
Lady it over him. Whatever.
She sits carefully and quietly in the wheelie chair, crosses her legs at the knees — and then reconsiders and crosses them at the ankle, trying for the benefit of the overhead cameras not to wince. There must be a special, secret way to tuck that makes the other way less painful.
Maybe that secret is the orchiectomy.
Someone — one of the girls watching on their phone screens just outside the door — turns on the lights and activates the alarm on Will’s phone. Look What You Made Me Do.
Maria warned her about Dorley Hall’s Taylor Swift problem. In the bed, Will stirs and reaches out a hand for his phone.
“Hey, Will,” Bethany says quietly.
He reacts like she just hooked him up to the mains via his spine, sitting up straight and pulling the covers around his chest in the same instant. He winces and Bethany smirks. Sensitive nipples. Join the club.
“How did you get in here?” he says. Christ. He talks like he just learned how, with an unsteady rhythm and in a whisper so broken it could be a death rattle. Unsettling.
You are so not feeling sorry for Will, Bethany.
“Tabby let me in,” she says, pushing indifference into her voice. “She’s worried about you.”
Will frowns and gathers the sheets tighter around himself. “Why did she let you in?”
Bethany leans forward. “Because you’re a broken doll, Will. And I’m the one who broke you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. And just what the fuck are you wearing?”
Ah; the opportunity she’s been waiting for. She silences her inhibitions, even though she still feels them numbing her limbs and biting at her belly, and leans back again, pushes on the chair latch so she can keep going until she’s practically horizontal, the better to show off her dress. Will’s expression freezes.
Yeah. She’s got him. She lets the recoil on the seat push her back into a normal sitting position and then uncrosses her ankles, smooths down her dress and shuffles in the seat. In his face she sees a lot of what she saw two days ago: a confused mixture of fear, desire and shame. She expected that.
What she didn’t expect: it feels good. Better than good, it feels powerful; she feels powerful. She’s always sought to control the attention she receives, the better to direct the reactions she may or may not inspire in the people around her, but to be the site of such— such—
Fuck. She can only call it awe.
She should have gone shorter on the dress. Bolder on the makeup. Maybe worn the wig again. She wants this feeling and she wants it more than practically anything she’s ever experienced, because this is actual fucking control, real influence, not the petty crap she habitually extracts from those willing to listen.
Aaron screams at her but she doesn’t care; no-one ever looked at him like this.
“Do you like it?” she says, in the sweetest, most winsome voice she can manage. She should have voice trained harder; it would have been more effective. “I think it’s cute, don’t you?”
“No,” Will says, his customary venom creeping back into his manner. “You should take all that shit off.”
One last protest from Aaron before she shuts him the fuck up: you shouldn’t be looked at like that, men shouldn’t see you this way, you shouldn’t be doing this! What a whiner.
“You want me to undress?” she asks. “But that would be so… inappropriate.”
“Shut up.”
“Trying to get a girl naked on a first date…”
“You’re not a girl, Aaron,” Will says.
Bethany sniffs. Drops the act. But remembers how it felt; maybe she’ll try it out on Steph. “Interesting!” she says, in something closer to her everyday voice. “Because I hear you are a girl, Will, so why am I so much better at this than you?”
It’s like she’s knifed him. And that’s probably a reasonable reaction; he will have assumed that it was privileged information, that Tabby would keep it a secret as long as he needed her to, but sponsors talk, and one sponsor in particular fucking hates you, buddy…
Besides, Will’s misery is affecting Tabby, and she quite likes Tabby. He needs some sense knocked into him.
Will looks like he wants to run. His eyes are darting around the room, from the door to the end of the bed to the wardrobe and back again. But he’s got to know he’s trapped: he’s in his room and in his bed with the sheets pulled practically over his head; he’s retreated as far as he can already.
She’s briefly concerned that he might attack, but she discussed it with Maria while she was getting changed. She and Tabby will be right outside, waiting on either side of the doorway, tasers ready, lock set to quick release. They’ve drilled it: by the time Will finishes untangling himself from his bedsheets, he’ll already be stuck with taser darts.
Bethany asked, what if he’s just getting up to pee, or something?
Maria said, I’d find a way to live with the guilt.
“I’m not a girl…” Will says. Unconvincing.
“Maria told me,” Bethany says conversationally, “and I’ve got to admit, Will, I’m confused. You’ve wanted to be a girl all your life, and now these girls are literally forcing estrogen into your system, so why the long face? I mean, yes, sure, it’s genetic, and you don’t know how sorry I am for you about that, but—”
“Aaron—”
“Deadnaming me is not nice, Will.”
“Then stop calling me that!”
She rolls her eyes. “What the fuck else am I supposed to call you? Do you even have a name, buried deep down inside your fortress of logic and reason and sudden violent episodes? Or have you wound yourself up so tight you can’t even imagine it? Jesus Christ, I knew you were pathetic, Will, but this is… Is there a word that’s, like, pathetic but worse? You’re like pathetic got all folded in on itself and collapsed under its own mass. You’re pathetic with an event horizon.”
“You don’t know anything.”
She leans forward again. “That surprises me, Will, that you would say that, and I’ll tell you why: because you gave a lecture recently about the purpose of this place that was very neat and sensible and put it all into perspective. About the inevitability of it all and the stupidity of resistance. You know, the one you gave to Ollie about his sad little rebellion? I mean, sure, it was basically everything Steph’s ever said but reworded to be slightly more annoying — sorry, my bad: far more annoying — but all I can think, looking at you now, is why doesn’t this bitch take her own advice?”
He freezes. “Don’t…”
“You’re a girl, Will. Tabby asked how long you’ve wanted to be a girl, and you said, ‘Always,’ or something. So what gives?”
He can’t look at her and she thrills with it. Is this what it’s like to be a sponsor? To find the vulnerable spot in some macho piece of shit and just keep pressing on it until it collapses? Until it reveals itself to be supported by nothing but arrogance and supposition and superstition and really, really bad gender politics?
Will mumbles something, his face almost buried in the matted bedsheets.
“Louder, William,” Bethany says.
“It’s not the same!” Will shouts. Loud despite the muffling from his sheets. And then he looks back up at Bethany, right at her, his eyes red and his hands shaking. “It’s not the same! I’m not the same.”
He’s taking a breath to say something else stupid, so Bethany gets there first. “What does it matter, Will?”
Clearly, he finds the question absurd enough that his imminent tantrum is redirected. He gasps for a few moments, like a fish out of its element, and then says, “It fucking matters, okay? Of course it matters.”
“So explain it to me.” She props her elbow on her knee and cups her jaw in her hand. Imagines she looks like an interested primary school teacher, in her grey dress and sensible makeup. He remains silent, so she decides to give him a push. “Look, mate, you know I fucking hate you, right? You’re pompous and annoying and you’re like if Wikipedia was made up of only its worst editors. And I’m pretty sure you hate me right back.” He grunts his agreement, frowning, wondering where she’s headed with this. “So look at me! Right here! Right now! It’s that guy you hate, only he’s dressed up as a girl and he’s calling himself Bethany. I couldn’t have made myself more vulnerable in front of you if I tried. So what does it matter what you say to me? What dark secrets you spill? How can I, someone already way farther down the rabbit hole than you, possibly leverage it against you?”
He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t tense up, either. He stays still, his gaze having slipped away from hers, now locked somewhere around her chin. Thinking. Or so she hopes.
“You talked to Steph,” she says. “When you were in the cells, she came to see you. I was against it, by the way. I found out after and I made Maria promise that she’d never be put in that kind of position again, because, and I don’t know if you remember this, you’re a violent piece of shit. A violent piece of shit who hurt my sister—” She bites off the escalation before it can get going. “But you talked. And she thought you’d had a breakthrough. Of sorts.”
He nods slowly. “I remember.”
“So? What happened?”
His lip curls into a sneer. “Nothing. Nothing happened. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it? I talked to Steph and she listened and that made me feel good about myself for the first time in years. Maybe ever. And I did nothing with it. I got out of the cell and went back to my room and read the books Tab got me and kept to myself and did nothing. Because I didn’t know what to do! So I just waited around for something to happen to me. Oh, I kept my promise, I didn’t stir shit any more and I definitely didn’t attack anyone else, but those aren’t good things, Aaron. That’s just… the absence of bad things. I’ve never been so passive in my life. And do you know how hard it was? How much work? Keeping him at bay?”
“‘Him’?”
“Who do you fucking think?”
She taps her fingers on her cheek. Watches him. He’s moving carefully again, without the jitters brought on by panic or by fear of himself. “I’m early, you know,” she says. “According to Maria. I’m early. Steph’s influence, maybe. Or because I bonded so well with Maria. Or because I got just enough of a break from being Aaron—” with her free hand she measures a tiny space between her thumb and forefinger, “—to realise just how much shit he used to talk. All the time. All the excuses and all the justifications and all that bullshit. I realised I really fucking hated him.” She nods to herself. “I mean, you get that, right? Of all people, you should understand what a little bastard I was.”
“‘Was’?” he says with something almost like a smile.
Got him again. “I like to think I’ve improved,” she says, stretching, showing herself off again before returning to a neutral, interested position. “So,” she continues, “if I can do it, why can’t you?”
The faint hint of humour vanishes. “Because it doesn’t work like that.”
“Haven’t you been reading Tabby’s books? You can just choose to be a girl, Will. It’s fine. It’s normal. Christ, going by the numbers, being a girl’s actually more normal than being a boy. By, like, almost a whole percent, globally.”
“But you can’t just be a girl.”
Okay. This is getting annoying now. “Yes, you can. You know this. At least, I assume you do; you have heard of trans women, yes?” Nothing from him again. What does she do? Back off? Push him harder? And what if she breaks him?
She laughs to herself; not only does she not particularly care if she does, he probably can’t get any more broken.
“Give me something, Will. Give me a name, maybe. Names are easy; I picked one. What would your parents have called you if you were—?”
“Nothing!” He hits both fists against the mattress as he says it, like a child having a tantrum, only scary as shit; even in his reduced state, he has five inches on her at least.
Behind her, she hears the soft whirr-click of the lock engaging. The slow rollover; almost silent. A recent innovation, apparently, and a comforting one. Maria’s that much closer.
Will doesn’t appear to hear it.
“What do you mean, ’nothing’?” she asks.
It takes him a while to come out with it, and she decides she’s pushed hard enough, that if anything’s going to happen, it’ll have to happen without her encouragement. When he speaks, he’s quiet but steady, practically toneless.
“I asked Mum once. What she would’ve called me. If I’d been born a girl. I was six or something. Maybe five. She said she never chose another name. Said she knew from the start I’d be a boy. She just knew. So she and Dad never came up with another name. Just William. Just Will.” The closed fists buried in the mattress start to wind themselves into the sheets. “I think that might be my earliest memory.”
Well.
Shit.
“Will?” Bethany says carefully.
“Don’t. Just fucking don’t.” He unwinds, loosens his grip on the sheets, presses his head back into the wall, stares up at the ceiling. Bethany wonders if he’s looking at one of the cameras or if he’s just looking at nothing. “You want secrets?” he says. “You want my fucking secrets? When I was fourteen I tried on my mum’s clothes and I was already tall and filling out and I looked like shit, but it didn’t stop me wanking one out on her bed. And after I felt like the worst fucking person imaginable, do you know what I did? The next day I went the fuck off on the first guy at school who pissed me off, and the next night I put on my mum’s dress and did it all over again. And I kept doing it. For a year. Until my dad almost caught me. Sweaty and naked in their bedroom. I stuffed her dress back in the wardrobe and when he found me he demanded to know what I was doing so I… I showed him his porn mags. The ones he kept under the box with his dress shoes in the back of the wardrobe. And he was proud. He’d been working out with me and teaching me to fight and then he caught me masturbating to his dirty mags and… and I was a man in his eyes now. Fifteen and a fucking man. I didn’t go in my parents’ room again. I sure did hit a lot more people, though.”
“Will…”
“There’s words for what I am,” he says. “Pervert. Transvestite. Fucking autogynephile, except that one doesn’t work for me because I don’t— Shit. No.” He closes his eyes. “I’m all those things and I’m a bully, too. Unpredictable. Violent. Male.”
He’s got his eyes closed now so she takes advantage, quietly rolls her chair a little farther away from him. Because, yeah: unpredictable; violent. Male might be up for debate, but suddenly Maria and her taser seem dangerously distant.
“Will—”
“Oh, fuck off, Aaron,” he says, and, yeah, okay. Fine. Maria’s outside with the taser? Let’s take off the fucking gloves, then.
“You almost had me sympathising with you there,” she says. “Almost. But you can’t stop yourself, can you?”
“What are you on about?”
He sounds tired. She doesn’t care.
“My name, Will. It’s Bethany. Not Aaron. You haven’t got it right once.”
“So? Why is it so important to you, anyway? You’re not trans, not like Steph. You’re just—”
“No, William, I’m not ‘just’ anything. And who gives a shit if I’m not trans? Does it even matter?”
“I’m not talking about if it matters or not — why don’t you listen? — I’m saying it makes no sense for you to be so sensitive about this name they forced on you when you’re not actually… You know. You’re not real.”
His leg’s dangling over the edge of the bed, so she kicks it. And she’s wearing shoes, so it probably hurt. He looks at her again for the first time in a while, and some of the life returns to his eyes.
He speaks first. “You piece of—”
“Oh my God,” she says. “Will. William. First, no-one forced a name on me; I picked it. All by myself. It’s mine. Second, why do you even care what’s real? Why do you think it matters? Do you think maybe that God, or whatever abstract creature of pure logic you built to replace God, gives even the slightest lump of drippy shit that Will Schroeder’s been torturing himself his entire life because he had a few risky wanks as a kid and now he thinks that defines him for life? Are you earning little logic prizes for your self-denial? Because holy fucking shit, Will, before I came to Dorley I was wound up like a fucking Duracell Bunny and I’m still approximately one-millionth as fucked up as you.”
She pauses for breath, is momentarily surprised that she needs to, but as she spoke she started to tense, to cling to her chair, and she forces herself to relax. Yelling won’t fix the stupid bastard.
What would Steph do? Probably empathise and gently draw out from him a lifetime of salted wounds, just like she did with some dumb Geology student she no longer cares to name. A shame she’s not Steph, then.
Will glares at her. “You don’t wind the Duracell Bunny,” he says. “It’s got batteries.”
“You suck, you know that?” Bethany says, standing and kicking the chair away. “That’s all you have to say? That’s what you thought was important right now? Priorities, Will. We’re here to talk about your neuroses, and while your pathological need to correct people might be among them it’s hardly the most interesting, is it? Remember the whole ‘putting on your mother’s dress’ thing? That sounds just awful, Will. And I’ve got a fair idea now of what it’s like, growing up as a girl while having to fake being a guy. Steph’s talked about it. It sounds like the worst thing I can imagine, and you know what? I fucking resent that I have to look at you and understand that you and she share something I can’t. Yeah, something painful and traumatic but still, it’s something I have to imagine. But you know the difference between you two? I mean, aside from the obvious ones, like she’s kind and pretty and funny and you’re a violent, pedantic arsewipe. The big difference is, when she got here, she did something about it. She connected with her sponsor. She asked the right questions. And then she reached out and started helping me. Not just me, actually; you talked to Adam lately? Well, she has. And Martin, too, for some reason. And you already know she’s tried helping you.”
“Aaron—”
“Bethany, Will. It’s Bethany. Say it or I’ll scream and get Maria in here to tase you until your hair turns white.”
“Bethany. Fine.”
Frustrated, she kicks the chair again. “Just fucking do something, Will!” she says, throwing her arms up. “You’re in the one place on the entire planet that’ll give you free hormones and free surgeries and free clothes and a free best friend for life — and it’s doing so in spite of the shit you’ve done, including hurting my sister — and what are you doing? You’re lying here in the fucking dark, moping about your tragic history with masturbation and your, I don’t know, your broad shoulders? Girls with broad shoulders are hot, Will, so if that’s what’s stopping you—”
“It’s not.”
“Then I don’t get it. Who cares if you think you’re a transvestite or whatever the fuck? You seriously thought that was worth all this? The God of Logic doesn’t care if you’re a boy or a girl or a crossdresser or a fucking dinosaur, mate. The only people whose opinions matter are the people you choose. That’s what I did; I didn’t just choose to be a girl, I chose whose opinions I give a shit about. And I decided I care about Steph’s opinion. I decided I care about my sister’s opinion. And they both happen to think I can be a woman. I bet Tabby thinks you can be a woman, too, and yeah, that’s basically the only flaw in an otherwise remarkable human being, but whatever. She believes in you.”
“You keep calling Maria your sister. She’s just your sponsor, Aa— Bethany.”
“And you keep changing the subject. And you like that ‘just’ word, don’t you? I’m just a boy they’re turning into a girl. Maria’s just my sponsor. You’re just an autogroinophile.”
“That’s not— Never mind.”
“This is your problem, Will. You keep reducing beautiful and strange and weird and wonderful things! You keep fucking compacting them to fit into your rigid little brain. It’s stupid. It’s wasteful. Because you know what? Maria is my sister. Aaron was an only child, but Bethany’s got a sister. Yes, she’s, like, eighteen years older than me and her parents were from Hong Kong, not Barnet, and she’s different from Aaron in every way I can think of, but she picked me, and she told me something very important: I get to leave Aaron behind if I want to. And I do, because he didn’t deserve someone like Maria as his sister.”
“And ‘Bethany’ does?”
“She’s fucking working on it, Will. Give her a break, she’s been around less than a week.”
* * *
“Do you think he was right?”
Frankie, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Val, inches away from her and wondering if she ought to try a physical form of comfort, wondering if that wouldn’t just make it worse, flinches in irritation as Trevor breaks her concentration. But she doesn’t yell at him, for Val’s sake if not his; her eyes are wet and she’s chewing on her lip, but she’s not absent, not like Declan was. She’s just, if Frankie has to guess, fucking tired of it all. Taking a break.
“About what, lad?” she says quietly.
“Jake. When he left. He said I wasn’t a soldier any more. Said I never was.”
She quickly looks around, checks her memory of the camera layout in here: just one, near the back of the room. Mic’d up and, unfortunately, facing her.
“I mean, yeah,” she says, hoping he’ll understand that she can’t speak her mind here, and neither should he. “You’re one of us now. Just another girl under the aegis of Dorothy Marsden and Silver River Solutions. Try to enjoy it.”
He doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t especially enjoy coddling him, so she returns her attention to Val. She’s looking right at her, it turns out; Frankie almost jumps in surprise, and feels the strain of the cancelled motion in her creaking knees.
“Think of it as an upgrade, Trevor,” Val says, releasing Frankie from her gaze. She speaks more carefully than normal and sounds comparatively deep, at the bottom end of alto. Frankie never did ask how Val trained her voice, although she got the impression it was largely by trial and error, down in Dorley Hall’s concrete dungeon. “You will never again be ordered to kill. The downside is—” and an unsettling smile crinkles her lips, “—you might still die.”
He still doesn’t say anything, and Val turns her eyes back to Frankie.
“You feeling okay, Val?” Frankie asks.
“Are you asking after my belly, my face or my feelings?”
Frankie shrugs. “Take your pick.”
“I am sore.”
“Want me to walk you to your room?”
“I can manage that all by myself, Frances,” Val says.
“Yeah? Well, I want to eat lunch tomorrow, Val, and that means I’m taking you back to your room, one way or another. Right now, I don’t trust you to wash your face without drowning in the sink.”
Val’s expression sharpens, her eyebrows pinching slightly. “I am not suicidal, Frances.”
“No, but you’re a mess. Trev, lad, give me a— Oh.” She looks around and discovers that the absence she’s been feeling behind her is indeed because Trevor took off. Barefoot; he’s left his heels behind. “Shit. I’ll have to discipline him for that.”
“Good at that, aren’t you?”
Frankie rolls her eyes. “Give me a break, Val. We’ve all got our jobs to do.” She pushes her legs out, stretches the knees painfully, massages her thighs. “Come on,” she says, “let’s get you back to your room.”
Better in theory than in practise; she’s stuck. Her legs are simply unwilling to push her up, and she knows that if she tries to get her arms involved she’ll probably dislocate a shoulder or something.
Val’s face pinches with momentary amusement, and then in one lithe motion she’s standing, unfolding from the crouch she’s been maintaining with little appearance of effort. Something to be said for staying active.
“Get up,” Val says, holding out a hand for her. “I don’t have all night.”
* * *
Bethany leans on the outside of Will’s door for a moment after she closes it behind her, more for the theatricality of it than for any support it might offer her, because holy fucking shit, that boy is more wound up than a fleet of advertising mascot rabbits. Christ, if her shit is undergraduate level — and she’s perfectly willing to admit that Maria and Steph between them accomplished quite the feat in exhuming it all and dumping it in front of her, gross slimy wiggly creatures and all — Will’s tangled horror of neuroses and repression could probably survive multiple graduate research projects without giving up all its secrets.
“Rough day?” Maria asks. She’s squatting against the wall on the other side of the corridor, and she rubs at her back as she stands. Tabby’s gone, presumably to contact Shahida and/or gird her loins for an encounter with Beatrice in her role as boss, chief feminiser, mug inspector, whatever.
“Do we have, like, a decontamination chamber or something?” Bethany says, mimicking Maria and massaging the small of her back. Those shitty chairs really aren’t comfortable after a while, and it absolutely had taken a while to talk Will around to admitting that, maybe, just maybe, Tabby had a fucking point when she said you can just be a girl, dumbass. “One of those rooms from the sexy prison dramas where you strip off and get hit with the hoses and then the big lady inmate comes up and whispers—”
“No. Sorry.”
“Shit. I’m going to catch the worms that live in his brain.” When Maria rolls her eyes, Bethany, seized by the need to make Maria suffer just a little for putting her through all that, grabs at Maria’s arm and pulls on it, affecting extreme distress. “Maria,” she whines, “I don’t want to catch his worms! I only just got rid of my own!”
“You did, did you?” Maria responds, pushing her away. “That’s funny, because I remember just recently you were panicking over a simple grey dress.”
“Oh, please. That was hours ago.”
It’s Maria’s turn to grab at Bethany, and she does, reeling her in and placing her in the middle of the corridor. Suddenly serious, she says, “Bethany, you know this confidence, this comfort, it can come and go. Especially with you.”
Bethany squirms under her grip. “I know, I know.”
“If you wake up in the morning and you want to wear neutral clothes again, that’s fine.”
“I know.”
“It’s not backsliding.”
“I know.”
“And we don’t have an infinite supply of repressed trans girls for you to retraumatise every time you need to push yourself.”
“I know.”
“I think we’re limited to just the one, actually.”
Bethany can’t keep it up; she laughs. “Christ, imagine if Ollie really did turn out to be trans all along. He’s really sorry, all that intimate partner violence was just his way of— Uh, whoops.” Maria’s frowning at her. “Bad taste?”
“Bad taste,” Maria says, smirking. “Now, you want to come upstairs? Edy and I are having a movie night. Steph and Pippa’ll be there. Probably a few others, too.”
“Is this a sponsor tactic?” Bethany asks. “Encouraging me to form bonds with the women who live here, to—”
“Yes,” Maria says, and pulls on her again, kisses her on the forehead, “but it’s also a big sister tactic. I want to keep an eye on you.”
“Fine.”
She can’t help thinking of Will, alone in his room. He’ll have dimmed the lights again, she’s sure of it — it’s what she did when she wanted to convince herself the best way forward was to dig a deep hole and pull the dirt back on top of her — and she doesn’t even make it to the first floor basement before she has to ask: “You think Will’s going to be okay?”
Maria looks around, presumably checking for Tabby, and says, “God, I don’t care.”
“Maria!” someone says from inside the security room.
“I’m off the clock, Nell,” Maria yells. “I don’t have to care.” She turns back to Bethany, reaches out for her. “What do you think?” she asks. “Is he going to be okay?”
Will in his room, in the dark, wrapped in his sweat-soaked sheets, replaying over and over in his head the pivotal memories from his childhood, the memories that after years and years of overthinking and repression he’s transformed into reasons to keep his real self undernourished and neglected. Did she help? Did she inject enough doubt into his iron-thick self-hatred and self-disgust? Did she, in the end, reinforce Tabby’s point, or did she contradict it?
Anyone can be a fucking girl, Will. Even you.
“Yes,” Bethany says. “Probably. I mean, his head’s so far up his arse he’s eating yesterday’s dinner, but… yes. Probably.”
“Proud of you, Beth.”
“Yeah. I’m kind of proud of me, too.”
* * *
Frankie doesn’t immediately offer to carry Val back to her room — not with the state of her joints — but Val’s insistence that she can, in fact, make it entirely under her own power is rendered moot when she nearly falls twice in just the first corridor. So Frankie ducks under Val’s shoulder, ignores the shooting pains in her hip, and together they walk slowly and almost drunkenly through the maze that is Stenordale Manor.
“It is not supposed to make you feel weak, I thought,” Val’s saying, practically muttering, almost inaudible and more heavily accented than ever. “The fight or flight. I am supposed to be energised, to be ready to run or to fight, and goodness, I wanted to fight, Frances. I wanted to take my heel and ram it right through his eye socket. The only thing stopping me was that I knew I wouldn’t get away with it. Because he will have trained for it, won’t he? Soldier classes. Advanced shoe-blocking for imperialist bastards. What to do if a maddened transsexual comes at you with an improvised weapon. Why do I feel so weak, Frances?”
“Shush, love,” Frankie says, providing the majority of the impelling force to get them around the last corner into the servants’ quarters.
“I am going to have a bruise,” Val says, steadying them both against the awful wallpaper, “right in the middle of my belly, the exact shape of that bastard’s foot.”
“No bikinis for you for a while.”
“No. No bikinis.”
“Can you—? Shit. Sorry. Val, can you get the door?”
“Hmm? Oh. Yes.”
She had grand plans about making them both a cup of tea in Val’s kitchenette, about putting her to bed and sitting herself down in the rocking chair and watching her until she falls asleep, but getting the both of them back here’s cost Frankie almost as much as facing down Jake cost Val, just without the bruises. So when they both collapse onto Val’s bed she’s pleased she had the presence of mind to kick the door closed, because she doesn’t think either of them are getting up again for a while.
Frankie lies there and she wheezes.
“Thank you,” Val says quietly. Frankie almost doesn’t hear her over her own breath. “For Béatrice.”
Frankie manages to gasp something out. “You don’t—have—to—”
“I don’t have to,” Val says with a trace of irritation, “but I prefer to. I didn’t believe you at first,” she continues, regaining enough energy to pile up some pillows and cushions behind her head, “with all your talk about helping Béatrice, helping some of the other girls. I thought you were… selectively remembering events to your benefit. But what you said today…”
“I’m really fucking sorry about that,” Frankie says quickly.
“Don’t be,” Val snaps. “Jacob and Trevor needed the reminder.”
“Val—”
“And so did I, I think. That night, that morning — whenever it was — the memory of it carried me through some difficult times. I think it probably saved my life.”
Frankie takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I still don’t deserve thanks,” she says, and pushes herself more upright as she does so, accepting a pillow from Val and shoving it behind her head. “No more than a kid who crushes insects for fun deserves thanks from the ones he decides to spare. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, Val, and even then I spent most of it focused on a… particular perspective: mine. It’s taken meeting you again for me to get beyond the guilt I’ve been carrying, to realise how fucking self-serving it is and always has been. I should’ve walked away, Val. I could’ve. Yeah, I probably would’ve got killed, but better me than… than my girls.”
Val’s quiet for a long time. Frankie can feel her eyes on her. Can’t meet them.
“They would have found someone else to do the work,” Val says.
“Nah. Not necessarily. We were flukes, our lot. New blood to replace the old, the ones who wouldn’t get with the new programme. We were just angry enough and stupid enough to fall under her spell, and old Dorothy wasn’t getting any more charming with age, I’ll tell you that. And you can look and look for someone like Karen, someone who’ll do it just because it’s fun, but there’s never a guarantee you’d find one. Dotty was trying to recruit for the whole nineties. Found one new sponsor in all that time. One. S’why we’re all so fucking old together.”
Val nods. “Will you make it?” she asks. “You’re having trouble with your knees, your back. Your hip, I think. When the time comes, will you make it? Will you be able to go all the way?”
“Val, I’ll do my part. If it kills me. And Jake, well, he thinks we’re all pushovers now. Even Trev. He won’t have his guard up quite so much in future.” Including, crucially, those times when he is properly armed.
Rubbing her reddened cheek, Val says, “An expensive lesson.”
“Yeah. You want to talk next steps?”
Val laughs and reaches under the bed. Returns with two bottles of wine and a bottle opener. “No,” she says. “I think I want to get drunk, Frances.”
“Fair enough,” Frankie says, and laughs with her. “You want me to get glasses or something?”
Val pops the cork on one of the bottles and takes a swig before passing the other and the opener to Frankie. “No,” she says.
Frankie struggles with the opener as Val roots around for the remote for the TV and starts whatever tape is currently in the machine. A trailer flickers onto the screen for the VHS release of Batman Returns. Wow; a really old tape, then.
She manages, finally, to get the cork out of her bottle, and throws it in the rough direction of the bin. A clanging sound suggests she hit the target, and she raises her bottle to Val: a toast.
“To getting the fuck out of here,” Frankie says.
“To miracles,” Val replies, and they clink the necks of their bottles together.
“So,” Frankie says, and takes a swig, “what are we watching?”
Val laughs again. Almost carefree. She matches Frankie, taking another swig and wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
“I have no idea,” she says.
Notes:
Sorry for the wait on this one! The last couple of months have been a nightmare.
Chapter 34: Your Sisters in the Dark
Notes:
Content warnings: slurs, height dysphoria, general dysphoria
Chapter Text
2002 August 2
Friday
Why is it that she is so nervous? Why does she play with the silver chain around her neck, the matching loops around each wrist? Why do her shoes seem suddenly uncomfortable, her clothes too revealing? Why does she fidget so in her seat? This is not her; this is not the person she’s been training herself to become. This is not a woman who wins wars; this is a woman who is consumed by them.
Her mother would be disgusted with her. Fortunate that she will never again have the opportunity.
She checks the time. Still twenty minutes to go, if Beatrice is punctual. And, whether because of her profession or as an expression of her will, Beatrice is always punctual. One cannot be late when one works exclusively in the cracks between the floorboards of high society, just as one’s deportment cannot be clumsy, one’s appearance sloppy; one’s reputation is rent. For someone like Beatrice Quinn, it is quite possible it is also her life; the world is not kind to escorts, sex workers, street walkers or whores, and triply so when they are transsexual, when they are uniquely vulnerable to annihilation, both material and social.
Indelicate to think upon the advantages she has over her, and yet she takes care always to bear them in mind: in money, title, power, even in the legal recognition of her personhood and gender, Elle Lambert is positioned so far above Beatrice Quinn that the worlds in which they walk would never ordinarily intersect. In the normal course of things, the life of idle luxury to which Elle was born would proceed unaware of and unimpeded by someone such as Beatrice.
Elle, then, owes this meeting, this opportunity, to the brief lives of two people: Valérie Barbier, née Vincent Barbier, the woman whose likely death impelled Beatrice eventually to escape; Kelly, a woman of no surname that Elle’s people have been able to discover, an innocent, whose caress and confession and ultimate demise impelled an investigation which justly took the lives of those whom Elle Lambert had once called family. And now, soaked with blood, Elle finds herself with no-one above her, no-one to control her, no-one to tell her that her plans for Beatrice Quinn are dangerous, disquieting and damn near impossible.
She unhooks her thumb from the silver bracelet and lets it fall to her wrist. Stands and once again inspects herself. Checks the fit and fabric of her dress for the hundredth time. And meets her own gaze, instructs herself in the voice of her mother that she is Elladine Agnes Lambert. Doubts are beneath her, should be placed appropriately with the hordes of untitled filth who swarm the streets of the city below.
And she shakes her head. She longs for her mother’s strength of will, not her beliefs. The woman taught her many things before she was killed, and Elle has discarded almost all of them. Because she might well intend to look down on Beatrice Quinn today, but only to reach out, to offer her a hand up, to share with her the power she has been so unrighteously granted.
Getting ahead of yourself, Elle. She’s agreed to nothing yet.
Fifteen minutes. Almost time.
At the culmination of the silver chain she wears around her neck is a locket, fingernail-small and latched shut. She holds it for a moment in her palm, steadies herself, and flicks it open with a thumbnail to look once again upon the girl she grieves.
Elle never knew Kelly’s former name. She never asked, and foolishly believed that they had many days, months, perhaps years for the girl eventually to tell her. She imagines sometimes a tryst that will never come, a moment of vulnerability between the two of them, a moment of trust. She imagines Kelly leaning close to her and whispering her sole remaining secret. She imagines Kelly’s breath upon the short, wispy hairs on the back of her neck.
Kelly. Proud of her womanhood, no matter that it had been forced upon her. Possessed of a charming disregard for authority. Terribly skilled with her fingers and her tongue. Murdered by Elle’s grandfather. Not by his hand, not the way she eventually understood him to have dispatched Kelly’s predecessors, but by his people. Killed the way one of her lineage might have shot a fox that strayed too close to the henhouse: casually, indifferently, and with no regard for suffering or inclination to mourn.
Two photographs in the locket, rendered in miniature. The first: a beautiful woman, auburn-haired and confident, beautiful and with a mischievous smile she kept only for Elle. She’s resting against a tree in the middle of the gardens, her sundress caught billowing gently in the wind. The second: the two of them, close-up and poor quality, taken with disposable film cameras. Kelly’s smiling again and Elle’s kissing her cheek and standing on the tips of her toes to do so.
She remembers that day. Their last. She promised to get her out, to smuggle her somehow or to create a distraction. Perhaps just to smash a window and scale the walls, two Rapunzels with no need for a knight. In that airy summer garden, Elle told her to stay in her room. She told her to lock the door. She told her she was working on it. She told her to trust her. She told her it would be any day now.
Carefully she closes the locket and returns it to her chest, because such things cannot be remembered calmly, and Elle wants to make fists, to rip the room apart, to tear down the city and the country and the world.
She should have told her to run.
She found nothing in Kelly’s room but her grandfather. There were cameras she didn’t know about; every tryst, every whispered promise had been witnessed. He demanded to know what she’d been told, and though at that moment he appeared as frail as ever he had, she knew that his power had never been in his physical potential. She saw her death in the old man’s eyes, as clearly as she saw the death of Kelly and all her predecessors, so she swallowed her rage, her guilt and her grief. She drew upon her mother’s voice, a voice that could silence a room with a whisper, and she lied.
Kelly confessed, she said. The girl confessed, and Elle found it titillating. She found her stories exciting, and plied her with promises until she told them all. And in that she understood that Kelly had crossed a line and had to be dealt with, but could she, perhaps, have a say in their next procurement.
The old man smiled and said, if you are good.
What happened to her? she asked. So that she may dissemble and deflect, should any questions be asked. And the old man laughed. No questions, he said. Where she came from, no questions ever followed. And now she’s gone. Buried so deep and dark, her body will never be found.
Good, she said, and bit her cheek until it bled.
2019 December 30
Monday
His new room’s better than the bungalow, at least. No more restraints, not even at night, not after his and Valérie’s failed attack on Jake — a ruse that had turned out disconcertingly close to genuine, for there had been a moment where Trevor had applied his full remaining strength and achieved almost nothing. But they’ve bought themselves increased freedom and decreased supervision, and as long as he takes care to look like a broken man, or something like it, whenever the eyes of the cameras are on him, they’re likely to keep it.
And his new room has a view, of a sort.
Frankie said the plan’s coming together. It’ll be risky, but what isn’t? He asked her if she was scared, if she lies awake at night as he does, imagining the barrel of a gun turned on him, imagining the helicopter coming to take him away, imagining his end in every grisly form it might someday take. And she told him no: she thinks of the deaths she should have had, of the people whose lives paid for hers.
Val left instructions on what to wear. He’s to keep himself to a certain standard of feminine comportment and deportment. Makeup and clothes; mannerisms and speaking voice. And he’s not to complain: she’ll help him but she can’t abide whiners. He’s to maintain his appearance or it will be maintained for him, and he’ll be lucky if it’s her who does it.
Frankie laughed and asked if she was sponsoring him and Valérie kicked her in the shin.
He’s become passably skilled, not least because he’s finally found a way to look at himself. When he dresses, when he paints his face, when he tries on his shoes and checks his outfit, he imagines that the woman in the mirror is his sister. She’s just his sister, and he’s helping her get ready. In return, she’s helping him survive. And when she’s done, when she’s gone, then he’ll be able to look at himself again. It’s enough to keep going, even if he feels himself slipping a little more each day, even if he can hardly bear even to look down, because his shape, especially in the clothes provided to him, is undeniable.
Hard not to wonder what it was like to live under Dorothy when she had more staff, more funding, a whole facility with which to do as she wished. Val’s told him bits and pieces, mostly to fill the silence and to give him something else to concentrate on while she taught him how to apply his makeup. She’s told him of the dark rooms underground, of ugly, threadbare furniture and the same battered books over and over again. Of the things done to them to make them compliant. Of never knowing when a new boy would arrive, angry and afraid and spitting and fighting. Of never knowing when a friend would be taken from them, cowed and resigned and ready for the end. And then there’s him, she added, slapping him slightly too hard on the cheek when his attention was waning, when he could no longer control his shakes: reshaped, yes, but not left without hope. If you have such an active imagination, she told him, then imagine what it is like to live with only one possible end ahead of you.
He sees them in his nightmares, Val and her sisters. He wakes and wants once again to rip his flesh from his bones. And there she is again in the morning, impeccably attired, waiting for him.
How the hell does she do it?
Except Frankie said it, didn’t she? Val’s a woman now. Has been for decades. He asked if she was always trans and Frankie said, no, probably not, but if there’s one thing she’s learned, it’s that you don’t necessarily have to be. Made her a bit thoughtful when she realised, she said. Some people can just adapt.
The flip side of that is that some can’t. Trevor can’t even imagine a world where he can look at himself with clear eyes and not want to tear himself asunder, and yet Valérie wanders around the place with such self-assurance he still finds himself doubting she was ever a man.
“You’ve got a strong male gender identity, lad,” Frankie’d said. “It won’t be budged. Unlucky for you.”
“And Valérie?”
She’d shrugged. “Val’s just Val. I thought I understood her thirty-odd years ago and I didn’t; all I have to offer you now is speculation.” And she’d leaned in and whispered with a dirty grin, “Tell you the truth, I don’t think she knows, either.”
And that was it, because Valérie returned from the pantry and shouted at them both for sitting around chatting at the kitchen table like a pair of old men when there was chopping to be done.
That was it. Val’s just Val.
* * *
Shahida’s room’s barely changed since they were teenagers. Melissa knows why: after Mark’s disappearance, Shy started counting down the days until she could leave, until she didn’t have to exist in the places he’d been. She fancies she can see exactly when Shahida stopped living here, when she started waiting out the time: the photowall that stops after the party, save for a single group shot from graduation; the pot of coloured pens with several colours missing and never replaced; the empty spaces on the walls where posters have been taken down but nothing put up in their place.
She won’t say anything about it. Shahida’s sensitive about that time; still convinced that everything that went wrong was her fault, that if only she’d known, if only she’d worked it out, if only she hadn’t been so impatient to have Mark for herself, then the two of them could have worked it out together. Melissa’s had to tell her that no, they couldn’t. How could they have? By the end of it, Mark wasn’t even an empty shell, he’d been smashed open, brought close to death multiple times, and still he didn’t work it out until Abby took him back to Dorley Hall!
Shit. Abby. Another problem. Another worry, on top of the thing with Bea that Tabitha called about. Shahida’s serious about tracking her down and talking to her before things between them progress too much, and if Melissa’s honest, so is she. Abby’s prone to spiralling — like Sister, like Sister, Melissa admits to herself with a snort that causes Shahida to mumble in her sleep — and though Christine’s assured them both multiple times that Abby is fine, that she’s just busy, Melissa can spot a lie when she sees one.
Shahida mumbles again and rolls over, as if in protest, and Melissa laughs at herself, because in truth, she didn’t spot the lie; Shahida did.
“I’m an acute student of human behaviour, Em,” she said, when they talked about it again the other night. “Also, she was looking at the floor when she said it.”
First things first, though. They’ve been called in to meet with Bea. For what purpose, Melissa’s been trying not to wonder, because even a few minutes spent thinking about it produced a list of possible reasons far longer than she was comfortable with, which raised the additional, awful possibility that perhaps they were getting called in over all of them. But here, in the quiet of the morning, there’s nothing else to do but brood over past mistakes.
She’s still worrying when she hears the rustle of sheets and feels a chin prop itself on her shoulder. She reaches back and Shahida finds her hand, intertwines their fingers and squeezes.
“Morning, Em,” she says.
“Hi,” Melissa says.
“What time is it?”
“Not sure. I’ve been up since about seven.”
Shahida knocks her head against Melissa’s. “And you’ve just been sitting here like a weirdo, for…” There’s a pause as Shahida reaches for her phone. “For forty minutes?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“Worrying?”
“Well, yeah.”
Shahida lets go of her and bounces across the mattress, around Melissa’s body. Melissa has to try very hard not to laugh, despite her mood, because Shy keeps colliding with her and then nearly falling backwards when she overcorrects. Eventually, when she’s finally manoeuvred herself into position by Melissa’s side, she takes her hand again, composes her face, and looks very seriously into her eyes. “Don’t,” she says. “Seriously, Liss.”
Melissa offers her tension to Shahida, leans against her, breathes slowly out and gradually curls into her embrace.
“I wish it were that easy,” she says.
“What can Bea even do?”
“Have us killed?” It’s not that she thinks it’s likely, it’s that she’s fairly sure the possibility space of Bea’s response to any given situation involves ‘summon my benefactors and have someone killed,’ even if it’s at the most extreme end. It’s an act until it’s not, she remembers telling Steph, when they were talking about Aunt Bea’s imposing reputation.
Shahida laughs. “She won’t do that.”
“You heard about Karen?”
Shahida nods. “But she wasn’t one of us.”
Melissa has to smile at that. Karen wasn’t one of us. She was one of the bad kidnappers.
Shahida including herself in us is new, though.
“Nevertheless—”
“No,” Shahida interrupts, “not ‘nevertheless’.” She pulls away from Melissa to look at her again. “Remember Christmas Eve? At the party? You didn’t talk to Bea much, did you?”
“Not really.”
“I did. And the woman I spoke to could no more have you or I killed than she could… I don’t know. Chop off her own foot. Sprout wings and fly. Drink from a mug without a tasteless joke on it.”
“I thought she hated the mugs,” Melissa says with a frown.
“Please. It’s all part of the act. I think sometimes she forgets to take it off, either out of habit, or for her own private amusement. But she adores those things.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can! I asked her. And she said, with the most delicate little pinch in her eyebrows, that she didn’t know where the bloody things kept coming from.”
“That’s hardly conclusive.”
“You had to be there. She thinks they’re so funny.” Shahida shakes her head. “I was saying something. Right: Bea’s not going to do anything drastic to either of us. The woman I saw, Em, she loves you. She’s working on loving me, because I come as a package with you now. She loves all her girls and enbies. She— Okay. You know who she reminds me of? My gran.”
“Really?”
Shahida moves her hands around, describing a shape in the air, like she’s trying to make her thoughts physical. “It’s hard to put into words. When my gran was still around, she loved spending time with us, but what she loved most was when we all got together. Me and mum and Ed and my aunts, usually, but sometimes we had family over from Pakistan, too, and that made her even happier. There’d always be a time when we’d be sitting around the table together, almost thirty of us when everyone was here, and she’d be sitting at the head of the table, my mum on one side and Auntie Mona on her other side, and she’d look…” She sniffs, and Melissa suddenly realises Shahida’s hands, now resting in her lap, are shaking. She reaches for them, gathers Shahida’s fingers into hers, clasps them tight. “She’d do this, you know,” Shahida adds, her voice thick. “Exactly this.”
“What do you mean?”
Shy raises their joined hands. “This. We’d all hold hands. One big circle. She wanted to make sure we appreciated the time we had together. Make our connections physical. And, Em, she was so proud. She was so proud of us. And so—” another sniff, deeper this time, and more liquid, “—so loving. I miss her, Em, I miss her so much. Her and Dad.”
Melissa lifts their hands, separates them, and draws Shahida into a hug. Holds her and runs gentle fingers the length of her spine until Shahida’s cried it out, until her head rises once again, bright-cheeked and red-eyed.
Shahida smiles, suddenly new, and kisses her on the lips.
“I do miss her,” she says. “But she had a long life. She saw it all. And I’m happy we were able to keep her here with us at the end. And that’s the thing,” she adds with another sniff, “I saw that in Bea, too. The pride. The love. I look at her and I see a woman who’s set out to find or to—” she laughs, “—to bloody well make the biggest family she can. The worst she’s going to do to either of us is yell at us, maybe tell us we can’t do this or that, but she wants us to have a life, Em.” She pokes Melissa’s collarbone. “She wants you to have a life. She wants you to be whole. You’re part of her family. Just as much as you’re part of mine.”
“I’m… part of yours?”
Shahida gives her a scalding look. “Melissa, please. You could show up here at three in the morning, any day of the year, and ask for a bed and something to eat, and my mother would provide both without complaint and would only bollock you for waking her up after you’d had a full night’s sleep, so, yes, you’re part of my family.” She smiles, and strokes Melissa’s cheek. “She always did want to claim you, anyway, since the day we all met. But especially after, you know…”
Melissa finishes the sentence for her. “After my mum died.”
“Yeah.”
They’re still close, Shahida not having fully extracted herself from the hug, so Melissa leans her forehead against Shahida’s. “Does it ever get easier to lose people?” she asks.
“No,” Shahida says. And then she kisses her again. “But sometimes they come back.”
* * *
The smell of fresh coffee and croissants wakes Christine up just seconds before a stuffie hits her in the face. She bats at it, knocks it out of her line of sight, and sits up in bed to glare at Paige, who by the looks of her has recently finished showering.
“There’s coffee,” Paige says, pointing to the tray on the table, “and I heated up a couple of frozen pastries.” Of course she did. Paige probably put the coffee on, started the microwave, then went to shower and wash her hair before returning in a robe to fetch everything. Impossible not to be impressed with her; she even overachieves at breakfast. “Sorry, by the way,” Paige adds. “I didn’t want to wake you at all, but I need to dry my hair and I can’t untangle the plug from everything else without risking tipping over the lamp and, Christine, when are you going to sort these out?”
“I already did,” Christine says vaguely. “They’re like headphone cords. They just get tangled again.”
“Well,” Paige says, “I didn’t want to wake you with this.” She briefly guns the hair dryer. “Awful way to wake up.”
“And braining me with a plush pink penguin is a good way to wake me up?”
“Hmm. I was aiming for your belly.”
Christine laughs. “Your aim is terrible. It’s a good thing you’re beautiful.”
“I know,” Paige says, so smugly that Christine has to throw the penguin back at her. “Hey! Be nicer to your favourite stuffie!”
“It’s not my favourite,” Christine protests as Paige picks it up, sets it down on the end of the bed and pats it carefully on the head. “I don’t have a favourite. It’s just the one I say is my favourite. For compliance purposes.”
Paige smirks at her. “It’s grown on you.”
Christine sighs; the woman misses nothing. “Yes, it has.”
“What’s its name?”
“Pingu.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s trademarked, Christine.”
“Yes, well, the police can do me for infringement while they’re also arresting me for all my other crimes. Besides, TV Pingu isn’t pink.”
“Ah. So he’s been feminised. How appropriate.”
“Give her back to me,” Christine says, “so I can throw her at you again. Beak first.”
Paige protectively scoops up the penguin and sticks her tongue out at Christine, so Christine pointedly fetches coffee and croissant and gets to work on them. With Paige drying her hair and Christine slurping her coffee and checking her messages, they don’t talk again until Christine opens the email from Beatrice, cc’d to Paige and Tabby and probably bcc’d to Indira, Maria, and whichever other busybodies are knocking around the place this week.
“Paige?” she says slowly. “Did you check your messages?”
Paige switches off the hair dryer and shakes out her hair, and Christine’s momentarily distracted by how shampoo-ad perfect her pose is. If she didn’t know Paige spent months in her second year practising exactly this sort of thing, she’d be intimidated; as it is, Christine is merely very, very happy she gets to share a bed with her. Paige, the girl who carefully considered every single brick when she remade herself.
“Yes,” Paige says. “Beatrice wants us to team up with Tabitha. Something to do with Melissa and her little gang.” She shrugs. “She’s been running around telling everyone and their cat that she’s returned from the dead; it’s likely about that.”
Christine nods. “Sure. But why us?”
Paige points with the hair dryer. “Why you is the important question. Read it; I’m to support you.”
Christine scans it again; she’s right. “Yeah,” she mutters. “Why me indeed?”
Paige sits down next to her on the bed, quickly reaching over to steady the plate with the half-finished croissant before it overbalances. “You have a rapport,” she says.
“With whom?”
“People in general.”
Christine snorts, remembering what it was that got her caught by Dorley Hall in the first place. “That’s ironic,” she says.
Paige frowns delicately at her, pinching her eyebrows just slightly. “One of these days you’ll see yourself clearly,” she says, and leans in, kisses her and leans away again, smiling broadly and picking a flake of croissant from Christine’s cheek. She’s outlined against the morning light, her hair shimmering in rainbow colours in the dewy air and rippling gently in the slight breeze from the cracked-open window. And then, wrinkling her beautiful, perfect nose, Paige says, “Christine, you really should clean your teeth.”
* * *
“Steph?”
“Yes?”
“Why did I agree to this?”
“You don’t have a choice. I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but there was this whole kidnapping incident and now a bunch of older women control your life.”
“When you put it like that, it sounds really hot.”
“I think Pippa would attack me with my elephant if I even implied anything like that in her presence.”
“That also sounds really—”
“Beth.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Can I open my eyes yet?”
“Fuck no.”
“I’m going to need them sooner or later. You’re not the only one who needs to get dressed.”
“Yes, but, Steph, the crucial part of it is, of the two of us, only one of us is an actual girl, and that’s you, and then there’s me, and I’m one-day-at-a-timing this whole new gender thing, and while I think I’m doing pretty good at it there are moments, small moments, mind you, teeny-tiny infinitesimal moments, moments so brief you could hardly be blamed for missing them entirely, when I completely lose my shit and want nothing more than to crawl into something small and horrible, like Martin, and never come out.”
“You wouldn’t fit.”
“Bet?”
“You’re going to have to be nice to Martin today, you know.”
“I know. That’s why I’m getting it all out now. How long do we have?”
“Not long enough. Not if you want to get it all out.”
“He’s gotten even more weird.”
“And we haven’t?”
“Yes, but we’re pretty, Steph. You are, anyway. I’m sort of a creature. Like something you find under a rock.”
“Beth. Bethany. Beth.”
“Yes?”
“I really want to open my eyes, because I want to be able to reassure you that you look fine and not have it be based on complete guesswork.”
“And that’s why I’m withholding permission. This is a trust exercise. Like when you close your eyes and the other boys are supposed to catch you, only they pretend to accidentally drop you and you hit your head really fucking hard on the flagstones. Or when the church comes to school and you go along to the service because it’s often a quiet place to hide but it turns out to be one of those fucking weird ones where there’s electric guitar music and a guy up front who taps people on the forehead and they, like, die, or something—”
“I’m not sure that’s how church works.”
“Those people were crazy, Steph.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I do! I don’t trust myself. My fashion sense. My ability to dress myself. Right now I’m looking in the mirror and there’s, like, a grey fuzzy blob in there where I should be, and for all I know I have socks on my hands and my dress on upside down, and—”
“You’re wearing a dress?”
“Yes. No. It’s— Fuck, Steph, I don’t know the names for things. It’s like a dress with shorts.”
“Okay. Explain how you could have it on upside down?”
“You never went to an all-boy boarding school. You don’t know how creative it’s possible to get with an item of clothing and the way it intersects with the human body. No, what I’m saying is, right now I’m like the cat. I’m in the box — or in the mirror — and I could look fine or I could look like a fucking pillock, and when you open your eyes to take me out of the box and reveal me to be dressed really, really badly. Schroeder’s Cat.”
“Schrodinger’s Cat.”
“What did I say?”
“Schroeder. That’s Will’s surname.”
“Yeah. I know. I know. I know. Fuck. God, Steph, I still can’t believe it about him.”
“I can.”
“Really?”
“I get it.”
“Don’t say that, Steph.”
“I do! Pippa said he’s convinced himself that he’s AGP, a fetishist, a transvestite, or something.”
“Will’s too gloomy to be a transvestite. I bet they’re loads of fun.”
“Shush. I get it because I can see a version of me that fell for the same bullshit he did. No, she did. Fuck it; he did. I’ll change pronouns when I’m asked to. Anyway. I’d go online sometimes, and although I mostly avoided trans stuff because it was way too easy to see shit that made it hard to want to carry on… You know, like, pretty girls posting like, ‘Do I pass?’ and you look and they’re basically a runway model and you have to avoid reflective surfaces for a week. But I also saw that stuff. Will’s stuff. The edges of it, anyway. Subreddits, other places. Girls talking about transition in a way that was negative even for me.”
“Explain.”
“It’d be easier with my eyes open.”
“No.”
“Fine. You know why I didn’t transition. Partly because I was looking for this place, mainly because I’d made myself believe I couldn’t pass or be happy or be properly transitioned or whatever because of the shape of my face, the way it’s all, like, I’ve got the bumps on my forehead and my eyes are beady and my jaw… my jaw is fucking— Hey!”
“No complaining.”
“No kissing me when my eyes are closed.”
“Then don’t talk shit about your face, Steph. Your face is lovely.”
“Says you.”
“Says everyone. Anyway, don’t stop; you were shit-talking Will.”
“I was saying I understand him, Beth. Because I had reasons for delaying my transition that were at least partly based in reality — no, don’t interrupt, I can hear you opening your mouth — but these girls, they had a whole taxonomy, a whole clinical-seeming language to describe all the reasons they shouldn’t transition. Because it’s a fetish, because it’s a challenge you’re supposed to overcome, because if you can’t look instantly like a cis girl you’re a complete failure, because you’re six months older than this arbitrary cutoff age, because you’re too tall… And I see Will. And he’s tall and broad and he’s got a fairly masculine face, and he’s very… intellectual?”
“Uh—”
“You know what I mean. He’s very impressed with his own intelligence. And I think that can make people gullible. Enough that I can see him falling into all those traps. He starts convincing himself it’s just a fetish, and then every bit of information he finds reinforces it. I can see it because I could see it happening to me, too. It’s why I always closed the tab. Walked away. I didn’t want to be a part of any community that would make me think like that.”
“Tabby does always say you’re the least online trans woman she’s ever met.”
“By design.”
“But, okay, so, question: Will told me he put on women’s clothes when he was a kid. A teenager. He put them on and popped such a massive boner he had to deal with it right there and then. Doesn’t that point to, you know, a bit of a fetish? Because— Steph?”
“Um. Well. That is. Um.”
“You okay?”
“Um. Yeah. I, um, did that. I put on one of my mum’s skirts, once. And it happened to me, too. I didn’t wank, though, because I hated doing it, even back then, but I had the same thought after, so I read about it and, like, fetishes are often subconscious ways of fulfilling unmet needs, and— mmph!”
“I knew it! I knew you were a perv like me!”
“I’m not a perv!”
“You are! You are! You’re my pervert!”
“And no kissing me when my eyes are closed!
“Fine. Open them. Because I’m going to kiss you again.”
“Thank fuck, because— Shit. Bethany! You look beautiful!”
“Oh, um, you really think so?”
“God. Yes. I could eat you up, Beth.”
“Shit, fuck, thank you, because I really didn’t know, and I feel like I’ve completely lost the ability to evaluate the way I look, you know, like I wasn’t kidding when I said I just see a grey smudge in the mirror, and, okay, that’s not exactly true, I just see me, but I’m still working out who that is and what she should look like, and… and… You’re looking at me.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you looking at me, Steph?”
“Because you’re beautiful, Bethany.”
“I— Um— Shit.”
“Yeah. That too.”
“Hey, um, Steph? You think… You think it’ll be okay? Going out like this? I mean, I know it’s only the common room and it’s just going to be the four of us and Pippa and Pamela but I don’t want to look, you know, stupid.”
“You won’t. You don’t. You look so nice, in fact, that I want you to pick something out for me.”
“Steph, you shouldn’t trust me with that.”
“Bethany, at this point, I’d trust you with my life. But first… First I want to kiss you with my eyes open.”
2002 August 2
Friday
Photographs don’t do her justice. Surveillance footage doesn’t do her justice. Elle’s people even managed to intercept some footage from a movie shoot that has her in the background for seventeen frames, and none of those frames do her justice either.
Elle very carefully does not spill her drink.
Beatrice Quinn in the flesh is everything she dreamed of. Her dress is a heartstopper, black and cut to the thigh and rippling with gemstones that catch the low light of the hotel bar, reflecting enough of it to emphasise a tasteful décolletage and lightly tanned limbs. Her hair is a lustrous black and held out of her face in a high bun that Elle just knows will unravel with one quick tug. And her face…
From the moment she learned about the Hall, the moment dear Kelly confessed that she was not, in fact, everything she seemed, Elle’s wanted to know: can it be reformed? Turned to a better path? Because the world needs these ethereal creatures, these beings of pure strength, vibrant femininity and exceptional beauty. The masculine reshaped, filtered, refined into the feminine; the women born from fire, their womanhood crafted by their own hands. The survivors of the dark and torturous dungeon under Dorley Hall.
Just the thought of it is intoxicating.
But the waste required to create these women is unconscionable. The blood spilled in service of old men’s fetishes, despicable. Too many young lives destroyed, too many women abused by men who could never properly appreciate their beauty, and discarded. If Elle had her way, she would today stride into the Hall and remove them all; tour the country and extract the survivors from the places they’d been sent.
Unfortunate that she must live in the real world, and so must they. She’s managed to save just one so far, snatched from the jaws of death moments before the bite — fake car accidents are ever so easy to arrange when one has a controlling interest in a smallish military concern. Thus far, sadly, she is so traumatised she has to be under constant watch. She still believes her reprieve to be a deception, and when left alone she attempts to mark herself, to ‘deface the merchandise’. Elle has a therapist working with her, attempting to untwist the knot of her gender, her self-perception, and her future, but it’s not looking good. If they have to, they’ll remove her implants and restore as much of her manhood as they can, terrible waste though it would be, but first she must be returned to functionality.
The girl doesn’t especially interest her, anyway. Oh, she’ll ensure she has a job and a place to live when she leaves, suitable for whatever shape she chooses, but Kelly, her Kelly, found a way to make her short life extraordinary. This unfortunate girl hasn’t even named herself.
And then there’s Beatrice Quinn. Elle knows all about her.
She was brought in on a petty crime pretext like most of Dorley’s acquisitions, and is likewise similar to the rest of them in every respect. Almost every respect: Frances, her ‘sponsor’ — how monstrous to appropriate such a term! — wrote of a disaffection, a disconnection that she found unusual enough to note. Beatrice didn’t, seemingly, identify as a girl while under the dubious care of Dorley Hall, but now, here she is, in her late thirties and still a woman. By choice, Elle has to imagine.
And a creature of such beauty it’s difficult to believe she was born in violence.
She’s looked far enough into Beatrice’s past to have a fair guess at what her life might have become, had she not been stolen from it by Dorothy Marsden and her brutal little angels: her schooling had been next to worthless and over at 16, and with little work available in her hometown and no positive role models, she would likely have continued on the path of the petty criminal. Thatcher began the starvation of her home, Major completed it, and thus far Blair has shown little genuine interest in such places. Eventually she would have joined her mother, long since dead of one of the many diseases of poverty. A dreadful waste of a life.
But there was something there. Something inside her that let her adapt— no, flourish. Something that created Beatrice Quinn almost from scratch. Some quality, as special as it is rare. Because Elle’s fairly sure that were she to scoop up fifty young boys in superficially similar situations and subject them to Dorley’s process, she would end up with nobody like Beatrice.
And here she is, leaning against the bar, evaluating Elle in return, sizing her up, deciding what sort of client she’s likely to be. Elle, who prides herself on her ability to hide from her peers in plain sight, feels stripped naked.
Revels in that feeling. Embraces it like a promise.
Up close, she’s even more incredible. Perfect makeup, and though she’s offering a professional smile there’s not a line on her face. Hard to believe she’s fifteen years Elle’s senior.
“Aren’t you a young one?” Beatrice Quinn asks, her voice like silk, like sex, like bottled fire, and Elle realises that for all her research, she knows nothing at all about this woman. Nothing real. Nothing that matters. But she wants to find out. She wants that exquisite, red-lipped mouth to bite her; she wants those French-tipped fingers to dig furrows in her back; she wants her.
And she wants to give her the world.
2019 December 30
Monday
“Thank you, Christine,” Tabby says, tapping the side of the coffee mug with her nail. “This is exactly the energy I need this morning.”
Christine slumps into a chair on the other side of the kitchen table, looking rather like Tabby feels, and she wonders for a moment if she needs to don her sponsor persona a few minutes early and advise her to go back upstairs and brush her hair — or at least properly dry it, because, sweetheart, don’t just put it in a pony when it’s still wet! — but Paige catches her eye and nods, and Tabby smiles at her. Paige has got her. Paige will doubtless steer her around the Hall until her hair is perfectly styled and her makeup is exquisite.
“The coffee?” Christine asks, frowning at her own mug and reaching for the jug of milk on the table. Tabby watches her become visibly tempted by the shaker of chocolate powder. “It was just in the machine.”
“No,” Tabby says, turning her mug to face her. “This.”
Christine snorts. “Oh. Right. I didn’t pay any attention; it was just on the drying rack.”
“She’s still waking up,” Paige explains.
“I’m not ‘waking up’,” Christine complains, “I’m surfacing from a deep and highly necessary slumber, which was rudely interrupted.”
“She’s still waking up,” Paige repeats.
“Evidently,” Tabby says with a smirk, and turns her mug back around so she can fill herself with caffeine. The mug’s not a new one on her, but it’s a fun one nonetheless; she’s pretty sure it’s one of Indira’s, from that time she got really into them and kept coming into the kitchen with a new one every day, trying to get a reaction (and usually getting one). It says, on four lines and with certain words in flowing script, DANCE like nobody’s watching / LOVE like you’ve never been hurt / KIDNAP like nobody’s listening / and force him into a SKIRT.
You have to love this place, or it’ll drive you mad. And there’s a mug for that, too.
She needs the encouraging sentiment for sure, but the caffeine is pretty beneficial, too: she has far too much on her plate for one day. She’s got Shahida and Melissa to wrangle for Aunt Bea, and then Maria’s bringing in Rachel and Amy and she might have to help out with that, and she’s also got Will to deal with.
Poor Will. Like Bethany, he’s getting carried along ahead of himself by the accelerated schedule half the basement seems to be running on this year; unlike Bethany, he’s not been so ready to jump in with both feet. But then, Bethany’s shame is all tied to her own self, the thing she abandoned. Will’s is still very much present.
And it’s been decided, somewhat over her head, that Will needs to be one of the participants in the intake’s first official group, the first mutual bitching session for those who are in the know and who may need to blow off steam about it or who might need the help of the rest of the intake to become more comfortable in their new identities. So he needs to be brought up to speed.
She asked if it could wait, if they could maybe survive this thing with Melissa and Aunt Bea and then get through what little remains of 2019 and then try again, but Pamela’s impatient and Steph, the sainted fucking trans girl whose opinion they are all obliged to listen to, thinks it’ll be good for Will, anyway.
So she’s doing final disclosure and then she’s being recalled upstairs, because she’s also intimately involved in the whole Melissa/Shahida/Rachel/Amy clusterfuck, and the reckoning over that is imminent.
The timing on everything sucks.
And, yes, fine, Will did, technically, very nearly kill Maria, so maybe Maria’s being a little more harsh with him than she might be with someone else, but she claims genuinely to believe in him, and Tabby’s certain that if Maria thought this might go badly, she’d recommend against it.
She’s pretty sure, anyway.
Maria still rubs her temple sometimes, and closes her eyes when the lights are bright.
Damn you, William. Why did you have to attack her? Why can’t you be all mouth, like Raphael?
* * *
He’s hit the mirror a dozen times this morning and still it remains intact. He’s hit the wall, he’s hit the door, and he almost hit the computer screen before stopping himself, remembering that if he doesn’t have TV to numb his mind he’ll go insane before he gets an A cup. He’s made his knuckles bleed and what has he accomplished? Fucking nothing.
Yeah. Pithy. A judgement on his whole life. His whole stupid, arrogant, fuck-you-and-fuck-me-too life.
He turns away from the mirror again. Why did he have to get so big?
It made people afraid of him. It made his father proud of him. It gave him the ability to push past anyone in his way. A success, then? Fuck no. All his life it’s accosted him every time he has to look at himself, every time he gets somewhere quiet and has nothing else to do but experience himself, his body, the sensations it returns to him even in careful repose. And, combined with his temper, it landed him here, where the thing he’s been afraid of his whole life got ripped out of him by some pissant little tranny in a short skirt and now it’s just fucking there, in front of everyone.
And he’s been.
So.
Fucking.
Stupid.
He knows about the conspiratorial worldview, that an outlandish fact, once adopted, will defend itself against all attempts to disprove it. That a simple idea expressed in attractive language is a natural defence against a truth that has no other option than to be expressed in complex language. And that attempts at education are often actively counterproductive: the believer has been taught — or has taught themselves — to disregard any approaches that do not validate the underlying lie. Hold fast, believers.
He knows all this and still he walked right the fuck into it. Because he looked in the wrong places first, driven by shame and revulsion, and taught himself the lies.
AGP. Autogynephilia. The notion — the ‘theory’; the ‘diagnosis’ — that a man can become so fetishistically attracted to the image of himself as a woman that he is compelled to transform himself into one. It’s supposed to encompass transvestism, crossdressing, transitioning trans women and, for all he fucking knows, femboys; a conveniently wide and ill-defined term that does nothing to advance understanding of such people and everything to encourage pathologisation of them. And, obviously, to push them into the closet and keep them there.
Tabitha didn’t even have a book for him about it; she said they exist, but for his purposes, they are unnecessary. She sent him a single essay. Under three thousand words. Completely demolished the concept.
He’s been so fucking deceived. Not just by the shit he read online, pushed out by others in his position and by those who want to exploit them, but by the world, by the pathologisation of female sexuality, by the misogyny that suggests that for a woman to enjoy herself as a woman, for her own sake, is something inherently unclean.
And thinking that feels like slamming his head into a wall over and over. Because: is he a woman? And, worse, if he is, why did it take Aaron Holt, of all people, to show him? Twice over?
“Bethany,” he says to himself.
What was it she said? She called him stupid; correct. Wasteful; also correct. Reductive; that might be the most correct of all. Because he’s supposed to be smart, isn’t he? He’s quick and he knows it and that means his first conclusion, if it is not immediately supplanted by something obviously better, must be the correct one.
He put on his mother’s skirt and found a new way to hate himself, and then he found other people who hated themselves just as much, and there he found his religion. One he defended from all threats to its veracity.
Hell, his religion even had an original sin.
So fucking stupid.
Well. It’s out there now. And you know what would be stupid, William? To behave as if it isn’t. To raise his fists like always and be William, as if anyone could possibly be taken in by his shit any more.
They know.
They know, William, that you’re a—
Fuck.
Can’t say it. Can’t think it. Every time it’s like it’s Aaron who’s spitting it at him, and that’s the other fucking problem, that Aaron, that little shit, got there first, got to revel in it, got to be pretty and carefree and he didn’t even want it.
Not like William did, back when he allowed himself to want anything at all.
It’s not fair.
“Bethany,” he says to himself again.
Too stubborn. Too fucking stubborn to say the name someone asked him to. And why? What for? To raise another fist? To light another gunpowder spark? To impose himself on the people who stand up to him?
He knows why. If he acknowledges her then it’s all true. And if it’s all true, if Bethany gets to choose to be a girl, then why doesn’t he?
Because then he’s a girl who’s too tall and too broad and too old and too violent and too—
He has another fucking go at the mirror.
* * *
He doesn’t see her when she enters. Doesn’t register when she calls his name. It takes her grabbing him by both wrists and shoving him brutally up against the wardrobe for him to notice her, and when he finally does, it’s with none of his usual bravado. He mutters something incoherent; Tabby doesn’t think it would make any sense even if he had breath left in him to sound it out.
“Will!” she says, glaring at him and squeezing his wrists. She has to look up at him just a little, and that’s annoying; she’s seized temporary physical authority over him, largely because she caught him by surprise, but she could always use more. She’s under no illusions: Will is still very capable of placing her in physical danger. Tabby’s no slouch, but Will was working out until practically the moment he was brought here, and despite the testosterone deprivation, he’s still potent. Potent enough to worry her, anyway; for all the sparring she’s done with Monica, she’s not been in a real fight since before the Hall, and she’s rusty as hell.
But he’s just looking at her. Knuckles bruised and bleeding. Red marks across his face and his bare chest, where he’s gotten blood on himself. Hair matted with sweat. Just looking at her.
This is an inflection point. He’s going to lash out or he’s going to break. She feels him flinch under her grip, like he’s testing her strength, so she presses into him, forces her knee against his, just under the joint — one advantage of being slightly shorter — and squeezes harder on his wrists. The message is clear: either you stop this, or we are going to have a fucking problem.
She checked on him with her phone as soon as she felt sufficiently caffeinated, and there he’d been, going at the mirror. It took a second for it to worry her; he’s been at it before, taken little swipes at his reflection, but it quickly became clear that this time, he was thrashing himself against it, more violent than she’s ever seen him, worse than he was even with Maria. She ran out on her conversation and charged down the stairs as quickly as she could, cursing the poor angles on the cameras. Flipping between the two, neither showed his face, and that would have been vital information to have before she opened his door.
What exactly does he think he was doing? Does he even know? Is this simple rage or something more complex; the latter’s potentially more advantageous to her — and him, in the long run — but trickier to handle.
So now here she is, looking up at him, holding him with all her strength against the wardrobe, the blood on his hands now spreading to hers, and she’s still guessing what approach will work to calm him down.
“Will,” she says again. “Stop this.”
He tests her grip again. She holds him back with a sneer. Braces herself against the floor with the leg that isn’t pressed against him.
“Will,” she whispers. “Stop.”
He says nothing. So she makes the decision: she snaps her hands loose of his wrists, takes her knee away, stands back. Hands up; still prepared.
“I will hurt you,” he whispers.
“You won’t,” she says.
“I will.”
“Go on, then,” she says, lowering her hands. “Hurt me.”
Yeah. That works. That gets through. There’s no visible reaction from him, which is a sign in itself, and his stillness lasts several seconds.
Then he practically collapses. She’s on him, holding him again, guiding him to the bed, sitting him roughly down — because he’s still fucking heavy and her angle of intercept just now was shit — and making sure he doesn’t bash his head.
He wasn’t threatening her; he was warning her. Which means he’s still him. Still the new him, the self he turned to after he attacked Maria, when he couldn’t run from his violence, when he was made to face it, made to take the first steps toward understanding it. Steps which led him to confess to her a secret he’d held since he was young.
With, she has to admit, some help from Maria and Bethany.
“I’m safe,” she says, “aren’t I?”
His arms twitch, and she knows he wants to put them behind his back, to make himself safe. She rests a hand on them. Lightly enough that he can bat her aside without hurting her if that’s what he wants. But she’d prefer him to stay exactly as he is, and make himself safe anyway.
“Aren’t I?” she repeats.
“Yes,” he whispers, closing his eyes and resting. His fingers twitch as his hands uncurl from fists.
“Let’s just sit here for a minute, okay? I have to send a couple of quick messages, and then I’ll be with you a hundred percent. Is that all right?”
He nods.
“Done,” she says and, now that these obligations have been discharged, allows herself a deep breath. Checks on the quiescent Will. She’d been unsure for a moment if she was going to have to try to block a punch from him, and equally unsure that she would even be able to. Indira likes to say that feminising boys is more art than science, but they’ve both found that the crucial moments are when you simply make yourself terrifyingly vulnerable, and trust that they’ve learned enough, changed enough, not to take advantage. To join you in your vulnerability instead.
“Sorry,” he says, and she rubs on his arm.
“Don’t worry about it. Just try to lay off the mirror, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You don’t have to do the group thing today,” she says, and he looks up sharply. Bingo: it probably is too early to throw him to the wolves like that. Not again, anyway. Bethany’s intervention, like Steph’s, worked out — even if Tabby had to have a good yell at Maria before she could make herself admit it — but he’s in a delicate spot right now, and Tabby knows what he needs. Better than anyone else, she knows. Who cares if group is supposed to be as much for Bethany’s benefit as Will’s? Let Maria handle her own little tearaway.
He surprises her, though.
“No,” he says. “I’ll go.” He’s rubbing his ankles together.
“You don’t have to. You can stay here.”
“I’m not weak.” In other times he might have shouted it. Right now, he sounds tired. Tired of himself.
“Will,” she says, “you can be weak. Being weak can be good. Being weak is often better than being strong.”
“Is that what you want to do to me? To make me weak?”
She laughs. Gently, so he knows she’s not mocking him. “No. It’s not binary like that. Few things are. You can be weak sometimes, strong other times. That’s how it should be. But sometimes people are made to be weak all the time, and that’s when they can’t take care of themselves. And sometimes people are forced to be strong all the time, and that’s when they break. Because that’s not how to be a complete person; that’s how to be a… Fuck.” She laughs again. “Sorry. I don’t have a whole prepared speech.”
He snorts. “How unprofessional.”
“Do I look like Maria? She’s the one doing this for a career. I’m just here until… Shit. I don’t know how long I’m here.” She rests her chin on her hand. “I do seem accidentally to have become quite senior.”
Will nods like he’s sympathising with her, then frowns and closes up again. Tabby fights the urge to sigh; there’s going to be a lot of this. People like Will — like the boy Tabby was, once upon a time — open up in stages, fighting themselves every time, because they’re not so much complete and integrated personalities as they are a single lonely authentic voice, drowned out by an entire chorus of obligation, heteronormativity and masculinity. At least he knows something of who he is. Tabby had no such anchor, and when the girls here stripped her down to her very essence she had to create something to hold on to.
“I’m so stupid,” Will hisses.
“You’re not.”
“Yeah, Tab. Yeah, I fucking am. And the worst part is, I know I’m smart. I know it. There’s not much I can’t pick up—” he snaps his fingers, “—like that. But my whole life… My whole life…”
She leans against him. “I can’t claim to know what it’s like to be trans like you, but—”
“I’m not—”
“Yeah, Will. Yeah, you fucking are. And you can see it, can’t you?” She taps him on the forearm to get him to look at her. “You can see the shape of it. How you were lied to. How you were deceived. There’s so many good reasons to believe you’re not trans. To think it’s a fetish or a bit of adolescent confusion you just haven’t grown out of yet. And you’re not stupid for falling for any of it, Will, because, yeah, you’re smart, but a whole lot of equally smart people have spent much longer lives than you’ve had denying their transness, and they’ve put all their justifications and all their explanations out on the web for anyone to find. And don’t forget the PhDs with a grudge against trans people who’ve written whole books about how transness isn’t real, who’ve got their lies and their suppositions into medical journals and the press. You’re not stupid for believing what you were told. You were just… outnumbered.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Finally, he mirrors her, leans into her, allows her to take his weight. “Well,” he says, “I feel stupid.”
She butts heads with him. “Don’t we all.” His hand is resting on his knee, so she reaches for it, takes it in hers. He doesn’t fight her off. “I’m serious about this, Will,” she says. “I’m in this for the long haul. You’re trans, yes, but I know that you know that accepting it is only the beginning. You have a long way to go. My promise is you’ll never have to do any of this alone. I’m your Sister, Will. I’ll teach you what I know about being a woman, about doing it out there in the world. And I’ll teach you what I know about being a woman in here—” with her free hand, she taps at her heart, “—and that’s something on which I’m an expert.”
“What do you mean?”
She lets out a long breath before she continues. “You’ve worked out that you’re not the first year we’ve done this to, right?” He nods. “Will,” she says, “this is what we’ve always done. All we’ve ever done. We find boys whose lives are either about to go off the rails or are already a wreck, boys who are a danger to themselves as much as to other people, and we rehabilitate them. We’ve been doing it since 2004.” She tucks a finger under his chin to raise his eyes back up to hers. “And the new girls, the ones we’ve helped, some of them stick around to help the next lot.” She smiles, gives him a moment to make the next logical step.
“Are you telling me…?”
“Yes,” she says.
“You’re…?”
“I’m like you,” she says, and then rolls her eyes. “Well, not entirely like you. You’re trans already. You’ve got a head start. I was more like… Maybe Raph?”
His expression sours. “Don’t compare yourself to him,” he says quickly.
“Thanks, sweetie.” She resists the urge to grin. Defending her: an excellent sign!
“You were really a…?” He can’t say it.
She butts foreheads with him again. “Yeah, I was a man. A boy, really, when I was brought here. And I got in trouble a lot. I didn’t get out of it as easily as some,” she adds sourly. “White boys get disciplined; Black boys get the book thrown at them. And they’re fucking lucky if it’s just the book.”
“Yeah.” Will looks away. “Sorry.”
“So,” she says briskly, “like I said, I’m here all the way. I’m going to teach you all the things my Sister taught me, and a few other tricks I’ve picked up along the way. And all the others in your intake, their Sisters will be doing the same, and when you leave here — and you will get to leave here — it’ll be as the woman you always ought to have been. I’m the chance you were never given. The choice you were never offered.”
“You really think I can do it?”
She laughs. “I did, and I didn’t want it even a tiny little bit. Not until way later than this. You’ll be fine.”
He sighs. Quietly and gently, and when she looks at him, he’s closed his eyes. His breathing is even, his hands are at rest, and he’s still leaning against her.
They sit together for a while. Until Tabby’s phone buzzes with the message she’s been waiting for. She pushes against him, brings him out of whatever thoughts he’s been working on.
“Okay,” she says, standing up from the bed and holding out an expectant hand. “Come with me. Not to group; you’re excused. I have something much more fun in mind.”
* * *
Shahida’s never been intimidated by the Hall before. Not really. Even on that first day, when Tabitha locked the doors behind her, she could see the outside world. Furthermore, she could feel the nervous energy of the place, see it in the women buzzing around her; there was only so much Tabby could do to intimidate, especially when it became clear how little her heart was in it. And since then, Dorley’s felt homely. Comforting. Oh, she knows what goes on under its antique floorboards, and she’s aware that every year they wash someone out, a still-unspecified excommunicative punishment that is spoken of only in the most dire tones even by the more flippant of the Dorley Girls. But this year it was a rapist who washed out, and if the sum total of the Hall’s weight on the world is to yearly transform a handful of self-destructive boys into happy girls, and to (possibly) kill one rapist, then she can’t bring herself to be too distracted from the obvious benefits.
Namely, Melissa. And various other women whom she’s coming to consider friends.
Besides, she’d be a dreadful lesbian if she thought that introducing more girls to the world was somehow a bad thing.
But today… Today it looms. Today she can sort of see Lorna’s point, when she spoke of the Hall as an edifice, an artefact of cruelty, an aristocratic relic that has shed so much blood over the years that one could easily imagine its inhabitants barely noticing the spilling of a little more.
Shahida shakes her head. Too little sleep. Not enough coffee. And Melissa’s anxiety’s affecting her somewhat.
“Did we have to be early?” Melissa asks, her fingers trembling in Shahida’s grip.
“We’re making a good impression,” Shahida says decisively. “Whatever Beatrice wants from us, we’re here to engage with it without hesitation.”
Shahida can sense Melissa looking up at the building. Can imagine what she’s thinking. The early morning mist doesn’t help.
“It’s just a dorm like any other,” Melissa whispers to herself. She starts, as if realising anew that Shahida is right next to her, and shrugs. “I kinda feel like I did when I came charging in for Steph,” she adds sheepishly.
“Let’s stop standing around, then. The sooner we get inside, the sooner we can have coffee in upsetting mugs and remember how twee and homespun Dorley Hall really is.”
There’s no Tabitha waiting for them, though. Shahida thumbs them both through into an empty kitchen and frowns at her phone, checking her messages. They’re not that early…
Someone comes rushing out of one of the kitchen side doors, giving Shahida a brief glimpse of a storeroom packed floor to ceiling with canned and dry goods, and gives them a once-over.
“Oh,” says the girl. Shahida knows her only by face, not by name. “Shahida, right?” Shahida nods. “Um, can you sit down? Tabby’s got an unexpected thing with Will and we’re sort of scrambling to work around that. Um. Coffee?”
“Fran?” Melissa says, stepping out from behind Shahida and causing her to realise she’d stood instinctively in front. Protective streak or controlling streak? Shahida’ll have to remember to get a therapist and ask.
“Melissa!” says Fran. “Hi!”
“Hi. Is everything okay?”
The girl blinks at her for a second, clearly reorganising her thoughts, and then her flustered expression collapses into a brittle smile and she waves them towards the kitchen table.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s fine. It’s just— Okay, so I just recently got done sponsoring? She was released from me at the start of the year and, um, we don’t get on. My fault. And I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, I mean, just, we don’t get on by design. I pushed her the ways I thought she needed pushing and, well, she’s remarkable, but there’s a reason I don’t hang around much here any more. I’m, well, I’m not needed, you see? Not any more. And my presence is… inhibiting to her. Which is a shame, because she’s a wonderful girl and I miss her ever so, but what can I do but make myself scarce? And then, this morning, right slap-bang at the end of the holidays, we’re suddenly in a bit of an all-available-hands situation. Which wouldn’t be so bad if so many of the hands weren’t off elsewhere.”
“Fran,” Melissa says, inserting herself in the closest thing to a pause. She’s still standing, and now she takes Fran’s hand and starts leading her towards the doors out to the dining hall. “You don’t need to worry about us. We can fix our own coffee, and we don’t need supervision to wait for Tabby. If you don’t want to run into Paige, you don’t have to stay.”
Fran sags with relief. “Are you sure?” she says. “I don’t want to shirk, but it’s not good for Paige to see me. She’s so happy these days, and—”
“I’m sure,” Melissa says, patting her on the back and impelling her into the dining hall in one motion. “Go do whatever you need to do.” Fran exits with profuse thanks, and Melissa leans against the doorjamb. “Well, that cured my nerves, I think. She’s got enough of them for all of us.”
“She’s Paige’s sponsor?” Shahida says. “I thought she was a huge hardarse! That’s what Christine told me.”
Melissa sets to filling the kettle and arranging coffee equipment. “I don’t know her that well,” she says, “but I think she’s a bit method. Nell says she’s totally butter-wouldn’t-melt in reality.”
Shahida nods, wondering anew what sort of toll it takes on a sponsor to get a boy through those early months, wondering why Fran — Francesca, she remembers; Christine got talking about sponsors at the Christmas Eve dinner — felt she had to adopt the approach she did. “I’m glad you’re still talking to Nell,” she says absently.
“We have a group chat. All of us. The whole class of 2015. It’s… nice.” She fills the cafetiere and then gestures like a show girl at the cupboards behind her. “What kind of mug do you want? Sinister or plain?”
* * *
His world’s been so small for months: the cell; the bedroom; the common room and the lunch room and the bathroom; the cell again. It’s come to feel almost natural, like he’s found his appropriate place in the world. So it’s got to be expected that he hesitates when Tabitha leads him towards the door at the end of the corridor, right? She has to have anticipated his reluctance to leave the minuscule space he’s been confined to.
This isn’t, surely, a unique weakness.
“It’s okay, Will,” Tabby says quietly. One hand on his back. She’s been touching him more lately. The last couple of days. And his response to it is just more of the same, isn’t it? The way he flinched the first few times she reached for him — more than just the first few, if he’s honest — has its mirror in the way he wants to reach for the concrete walls, to dig in with his nails. To keep hiding.
“Yeah?” he says. It seems like a lot of effort to say.
“I remember when I first walked back up these stairs,” she says.
God, it’s good to hear her talk about Dorley Hall like she was a victim of it, too, not just a prison guard. She’s from here. She was like him, once. Forget all the shit she talked about being more like Raph — that, he can’t see. But like him? He can kind of see himself in the shape of her, in her shoulders, in her stance. Yeah, everything’s a bit smaller on her, but he’s shrinking already, isn’t he? He’s noticed. Only a little bit, but a little bit in all directions adds up.
It had been anticlimactic for her finally to say it, to confirm that, yes, she really was once a man — for whatever value of man he finds believable. It’s not that he suspected it, not in the slightest, but it’s always been clear she’s been holding something back, and not just because she told him so, days before.
She dropped her guard, properly, for the first time, and now he sees her.
“I’d been down here longer than you,” she continues, reaching for his hand again. “And my sponsor, she’d been a little too good at persuading me that my old self was irredeemable. I didn’t think I deserved to go upstairs.”
He shakes his head. “Not sure I do, either.”
“Well, we’re not going all the way up,” she says. “Just one flight. Can you give me one flight of stairs?”
He stops resisting. She humours him; they take the stairs slowly.
There’s not much to see. Tabby says, as they ascend, that she had them lock down the stairwell, so while ordinarily there’d be a security room on his right and more stairs directly in front, here there’s only closed doors and the corridor to the left, with a lot of anonymous rooms leading off and another door at the far end. It’s similar enough to ‘his’ basement that it’s almost a relief, and he tells himself not to feel weak because of that.
Maybe he is weak. Maybe weakness is fine. Some of the time.
Tabitha prods at the biometric reader by one of the doors near the end of the corridor, and then turns around and performs a similar, longer action at another door. “Toilets,” she explains, pointing to the second door. “Fully unlocked. So I don’t have to let you in and out.”
He nods.
And then she’s taking him into the room. The prep room, she said it was called. Prep for what, he’d asked; never you mind, she said. It’s empty, but she keeps going, through one of three other doors, into a smaller, cooler room. He raises his fingers and confirms that, yes, the ever-present air current that flows across all the ceilings in the basement is slightly stronger in here.
“This was going to be a storage space,” a voice says.
He spins around to find Monica leaning against the wall by the door. Great; not someone he’s particularly familiar with, not since Declan disappeared. She’ll have other jobs now, probably, one of them apparently being to set up—
“Punching bags?” he says.
Christ. For a moment he can almost see his dad, leaning against the back wall of the cleared-out garage, geometrically in near the exact same position as Monica, but the sensation passes quickly. Monica’s displaying none of the twisted pride his dad always found for him, and she doesn’t dress like him either. The thought makes him laugh, and it’s that that prompts Tabby to hug him.
“Hey!” He fends her off, laughing again, and freezes, feeling suddenly too carefree, too untethered. And it shouldn’t be that simple, should it? Show him something from his past, something he misses, something he’s ashamed to miss, and recontextualise it, and suddenly he feels light on his feet?
He’s a very simple machine if so.
Fuck, though, it’s not like they’re even the same kind of punching bag. Dad got a cheap one that hung from the ceiling, and it got threadbare after a few weeks. These look well-used but cared for, and they’re free-standing. Bases probably filled with sand or water or something. Pretty different, really.
Tabby pokes him in the chest. Dead centre, carefully avoiding his sensitive spots. “You need to blow off steam.” She jabs a thumb into her own chest. “I need to blow off steam. And, eventually, Monica’ll need someone to spar with that she doesn’t almost instantly knock down.”
“Isn’t this…?” He waves his hand at the punching bags, not sure what he’s trying to say.
“Unfeminine?” Monica suggests.
“Like I said,” Tabby says, “it’s okay to be weak some of the time.” She’s turned away from him now, and she pulls off her top too quickly for him to look away. “But other times, you just have to fucking hit something, y’know?”
He finds himself nodding. She pulls on another top, smaller and tighter than her old one, and then steps out of her skirt, switching to a pair of loose shorts. Then she half-turns, catches his eye and beckons him to come closer.
“One requirement,” she whispers, and points to a pile of similar clothes. “You don’t have to change your underwear,” she adds, “but you need the sports bra. Trust me.”
“Yeah, but—” he starts, and then something about Monica’s presence in the room catches up to him. “She knows?” he whispers, matching Tabby’s volume.
“About you? Yes.”
“Fuck. Does she have to be here?”
“Yes. I’d get bollocked to hell and back if I gave you a punching bag and then let myself be the only other girl in the room. It’s not personal.”
“Wise,” he says, almost automatically, and she giggles at him. Why, he can’t imagine.
“Just don’t think about it. Or, if you have to, remember: she’s like me and I’m like you. All the shit we’re ever going to judge you for is in your past — as long as you leave it there — and being trans? No matter what you think about it, it’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“What about being autogy—?”
“Shut up. Seriously. You don’t even believe in that. Not any more. Not really. So don’t go running back to it at the first spot of friction.”
He nods, feeling — once again — stupid. And oddly childish, suddenly. Tabby’s in her early thirties, he knows, mature and experienced, and Monica’s probably a similar age, and here he is, worrying about… stupid shit. Besides, Tabby’s like him. So’s Monica.
He glances from one to the other. It doesn’t change how he feels about them, he realises. It’s just… something he knows about them.
“Fuck it,” he says to himself, and reaches for the clothes.
The sports bra is easy enough to put on, though he has to stretch it out a bit to get it over his chest without brushing the fabric against his sore parts. And the shorts are just shorts. Something else familiar, recontextualised.
He turns around and Monica’s grinning at them both. She throws a knotted pair of small gloves to Tabby. He catches the second pair, and he’s about to put them on when Tabby taps him on the shoulder.
“Stretch first.”
“Dad never used to— Ah. Yeah.”
“Yeah. Your dad didn’t make you stretch because your dad was an idiot.”
He can’t argue with that. He never did know why it seemed so important to please him, except that he feared what might happen if he didn’t.
But nothing ever happened to Topher, he remembers. Sure, he wasn’t the favourite, but nothing happened to him until, well, him.
He stretches, copies Tabby, and feels tension in muscles he hasn’t used in what feels like forever. She’s stretching with languid, easy movements, and he follows her. It’s surprisingly pleasurable. He’s startled, though, when a beat starts out of nowhere, and he looks up at Monica in time to see her putting her phone down on top of a Bluetooth speaker.
“Beyoncé?” he asks, when the singing starts.
“Don’t whine,” Monica says, smirking at him. She points at the punching bags. “Hit it!”
Tabby walks past him, bouncing on the soles of her feet, gathering her energy. She holds up the fourth finger of her left hand as she passes. “And put a ring on it!” she says.
Fine. If she’s going to be cheeky…
William tests the gloves for fit, bounces a few times while grinning at her, and then turns and swings for the nearest punching bag as hard as he can.
* * *
Melissa drops a second mug of coffee in front of Shahida, who smiles and squeezes her forearm in gratitude before returning to her game. Melissa shakes her head in amusement and goes back to pour another cup for herself.
Shahida’s playing on her battered old 3DS while they wait for whoever’s going to take them up to Bea. It’s stress displacement, Melissa’s well aware, and as she sits back down she decides she’ll do her bit to distract her by asking about the game, because she doesn’t recognise it.
“Oh, this?” Shahida says, gesturing with the 3DS. “It’s Vampire Queens: Devil Sisters. It’s pretty obscure, actually. When the DS came out, they had this idea that the mainline games were going to stay on the home consoles, but they still wanted a presence on handheld, so they put this out. It’s a Metroidvania.”
Melissa cups her hands around her coffee. “A what?”
“An exploration game. See, I played all the Vampire Queens games I could get my hands on after I finished Seven Great Houses, but Devil Sisters never came out in Europe. It did badly in the US, I think. Anyway, I picked it up while I was over there. You actually play as the great aunt of one of the main characters from SGH! It’s… um, it’s pretty good.”
“How many times have you finished it?”
Shahida looks away. “I mean. Not many times. I haven’t played it much. Only had it a few years.”
“How many times?”
She frowns. “Five, I think. It’s short, though. Only nine maps and two bonus areas.”
Melissa giggles. “I love you, Shy.”
Her frown deepens and she almost drops the 3DS. “What? What did I do? What’s so funny?”
Melissa’s about to say something when she realises someone’s leaning on the doorjamb, watching them and smiling indulgently. “Oh,” she says, “uh, hi, Indira.”
“Hey, you two,” Indira says, and jerks her thumb behind herself. “Come on up. It’s time.”
* * *
Steph’s pretty pleased with the outfits Bethany picked out for them both. Beth went back and forth on the dress-with-shorts, anxiously fixating on the need to wear leggings with them or to shave her legs. Then she had a short period of absolute, unshakeable confidence, and asked for Steph’s help assembling an outfit that could, if possible, kill Will just with its presence, and Steph had to argue her down from that, and then Bethany’s nerves reasserted themselves, and she went back to the dress-with-shorts and the leggings. Steph, tucking a stray bit of fringe behind Bethany’s ear, told her she looked beautiful.
And then she wouldn’t accept any input on Steph’s outfit, and Steph wondered briefly if she was going to have to overrule her, if she was going to be put in something as provocative as the schoolgirl outfit from a few days ago, but Beth dressed her in a long, pleated skirt and loose blouse combo.
It’s cute.
And then she let Steph do eyeliner for both of them, which was good; she needs the practise.
It was almost disappointing to arrive at the common room to the news that Will isn’t going to be joining them.
“But why?” Bethany asks, dropping into the couch cushions with a passable impression of a sulk.
“I think you traumatised him,” Pamela says.
“Please. At worst, I retraumatised him.”
Steph sits next to her and raises her arm. Bethany burrows into it.
She doesn’t really know what to expect from this. The first of many regular get-togethers with every basementee who’s had the veil lifted in its entirety, which apparently means her, Bethany, Will and Martin — though God only knows when exactly Martin learned the truth. With Will absent, that leaves her and Beth and Martin. What will they even talk about? Is this therapy? Pippa claims not to know; she said it’s new. First tried with the current second years, she said, and it must work great, because they’re all—
Pippa didn’t finish her sentence, but she did blush a lot.
Steph got it, anyway. She’s seen what the second years are like around each other. From what she can work out there are three main couples and a lot of mingling. And Faye, who is definitely dating Bex, told her that kissing Mia is like kissing a combine harvester, though that’s mostly the braces; Mia came to the basement with, she said herself, pretty fucked-up teeth.
Martin’s already here, sitting cross-legged on the floor again, with Pamela sat on the couch just behind him. Pippa’s next to her, and wiggles her fingers in greeting when Steph looks up.
“Is this… it?” she asks.
“This is it,” Pippa says. “We would have had Will, too, and probably another sponsor, as per the regs, but…” She twirls a finger absently.
Bethany wriggles a little as she gets more comfortable. She crosses her legs at the thigh, then winces and recrosses them at the ankles. Steph manages not to giggle; Bethany’s more and more been imitating Maria’s body language, consciously or not, but she keeps forgetting to account for the presence of certain things between her thighs that Maria no longer possesses.
The temporary presence, anyway, Steph remembers, and this time she can’t stop herself laughing. Bethany’s chosen this path, so it’s okay to laugh about it. Fucking finally.
“What’s so funny?” Beth whispers.
Steph just shrugs, and gets a poke in the arm for her insouciance.
“So…” Steph says, when she’s finished fending off Bethany. “What do we do?”
“We would have been waiting for Indira,” Pamela says sourly, “since she’s actually officiated one of these before and therefore knows what the hell to do, but she’s covering for Tabitha with Bea, so I suppose we just… talk?”
Bethany says, “About…?”
“Don’t know,” Pamela says. Beside her, Pippa buries her head in her hands.
* * *
“Congratulations, Trevor Darling!”
The exercise gear almost hits him in the face as he rounds the corner into the kitchen. He ducks, and what looks horribly like a hot pink sports bra and shorts go sailing over his head. At the table, nursing a mug of coffee, Frankie snorts.
Valérie, who threw the clothes at him, is standing in the middle of the kitchen, dressed in much more muted sportswear — with, he can’t help but note, a warm-looking hoodie draped over her shoulders — and her expression, though more dignified, is no less amused than Frankie’s.
“Congratulations on what?” he asks, aware that he’s failed even to try to pitch his voice into the range Val uses.
“Today,” she says, “you and I get to go for a run.”
“A run? Where?”
“In the Run. A run in the Run. It’s very logical and quite linguistically satisfying.”
“Okay. Why?” Officially sanctioned exercise is new; they’ve been very clear that if he is discovered doing, say, chin-ups, or anything else too ‘masculine’, there will be trouble.
“Because estradiol makes the weight pile on,” Val says, tapping at his belly with a wooden spoon, “and your new friends, the Smyth-Farrows, I am told they prefer a slender girl. So, from now on, you get to join me for cardio.”
Frankie slurps noisily from her mug. She’s smirking at him when she swallows and says, “And I’m sure it has nothing to do with your, ahem, truly pathetic showing against our Jacob the other day. Nobody’s worried about your… martial capabilities.”
“True,” Valérie says with a nod. “Not so much the soldier any more, are you?”
It’s for the cameras. He knows this. It still hurts to hear.
He gets changed in the storeroom, surrounded by potatoes. The sports bra and shorts are no less hideous on him than they were when they were in a heap in the corridor, but at least they help control two of the more unpleasant aspects of his recent fate. A few experimental jumps confirm that, unfortunately, no power on earth could keep them entirely still.
He slips on the socks and the running shoes. They are also pink. He feels like an overgrown doll, and for a moment pictures himself taken by the Smyth-Farrows and grotesquely handed off to some child to play with, some little girl who would paint his nails and brush his hair.
He rejects the thought before he starts fantasising about tearing his flesh from his bones again.
Val meets him at the side door, waves goodbye to Frankie, and sets the pace. The ground is cold enough that it’s not muddy despite the damp air, and the horrible pink shoes offer reasonable grip. He opens up, finds the same delight in movement he sometimes used to, back when he was in training at Peckinville, and passes her easily.
She catches him when his stitch settles in.
“You should not go so fast on your first time,” she says, matching his now much more dismal speed.
“Thanks—for—the—reminder,” he pants.
Together they jog at barely more than a fast walk, and Val goes over their tasks for the day. More training. More cleaning. And then dinner.
“The man, Jacob,” Val says, “he wants roast beef. Again! If we are lucky he will eat so much beef he will turn into a cow, and then we will more easily slaughter him.”
“Do we even have the stuff for it?”
“We are running low on many things. Not out yet, but it is to our advantage. If they keep guzzling through our supplies as quickly as they have been, they will have to request a resupply. And that is our chance.”
They hit the end of the Run and, though Trevor would love to stop and take a breather, Valérie simply turns on her heel and carries on. Feeling like his lungs are about to erupt out of his throat, he does his best to follow.
“Is it okay to talk about that?” he asks when he catches her.
“We cannot be overheard here. This is perhaps the most secure place on the grounds that is accessible to us. So you may talk, and I will listen. And not just about our plans. How are you doing, Trevor?”
“I want to tear off my skin,” he says, panting again. And it’s true, but hard to vocalise most of the time. Somehow, out here, it’s easier to say. Perhaps because most of him — rather uncomfortably too much of him — is occupied with the run.
“Ah,” Val says, unbothered by the pace she’s setting, “dysphoria. I have heard of it.”
“And you don’t get it yourself?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not especially. I never knew about it. And then, when I learned about it, I felt strange for never really having experienced it.”
“You mean, you were just fine with being—?”
“No! Goodness, fuck no, Trevor. I hated it. I was taken from everything I knew, my family was murdered in front of me, and I was forcibly reshaped for the pleasure of others. To look at myself was to understand that my life was no longer my own.”
“Then how are you still going?”
Valérie pauses before she answers. Perhaps to think through her answer, perhaps just to get her breath back. Trevor hopes for the latter; a fifty-three-year-old is absolutely trouncing a former professional soldier!
“Because my womanhood is my proudest scar,” she says. “Because I am stubborn. Because if I am not a woman then I am a mutilated toy.” She takes another few breaths. Trevor starts to feel himself fall behind. “But, also,” she continues, “I’ve been talking this over with Frances. She thinks… Well, I think she got this off the ‘world web’, but she thinks gender is just a great big mess, that there are points that most people cluster around that we call ‘male’ and ‘female’, and that some people cluster much closer than others. And that there are other points, other things one can be. She told me about the, uh, the nonbinary people.”
“You’re nonbinary?”
“Perhaps. There is another possibility. It might simply not matter to me what I am. My maleness, such as it was, may have been something like a comfortable jacket. I had no reason to change it, and I certainly missed it when it was taken away, but, in the end, most jackets are largely the same. Another theory Frances has advanced. She reads too much for a woman of her age.”
“So, what do you think you are?”
“I think, Trevor Darling, that I am Valérie Barbier, and that I have fucking survived, and that that is all I need to know for now. Perhaps, when I have the luxury of time, I will reconsider.”
She quickens the pace again, and this time, he realises, there’s no way he can follow her.
* * *
Shahida’s been to the first floor before, many times. Her first night at the Hall, she and Melissa stayed in the room allocated to Steph, and on her regular visits here she sometimes pops in to the basic little common room to see the second years. Other times she comes here purely to get out of the second-floor kitchen, when Julia’s in one of her moods; Shahida feels her status as an outsider most strongly around her, for all that Yasmin’s explained that it’s nothing personal.
She’s known since her first visit that the first floor is where Aunt Bea sleeps, too, and she’s always felt a little intimidated by that. But she’s never seen inside Beatrice’s room, and for a long time now she’s been wondering how a woman of her age and stature can stand to live in the glorified dorm rooms that are typical of the above-ground floors at Dorley Hall.
The answer, it turns out, is that she doesn’t.
Indira called it a flat, and at first glance that doesn’t seem accurate. The room she and Melissa are quietly ushered into is brightly sunlit, but it’s more utilitarian than she expected: a sofa, a couple of armchairs, a stack of smaller chairs, and various bookshelves and filing cabinets surround a large central desk, at which Beatrice sits, smiling patiently, waiting for them. But as they move to sit in the padded stackable chairs that have been prepared for them on the near side of Beatrice’s desk, Shahida spots two doors leading off; one is half-open into a kitchen space, the other is closed and, she surmises, almost definitely leads to the more homely areas.
And then she starts spotting the knickknacks. There’s a drinks cabinet with a few emptied and clean bottles set up at the back, presiding over the in-use bottles like the mementos they clearly are. The main bookshelf is stuffed so full that some of the shelves have a second row of books, and Shahida curses that her vision isn’t quite good enough to make out most of the spines. And every spare surface, away from the pristine central desk, seems covered in small items. It’s the home office of someone who has kept the same home for a very long time.
As she and Melissa get comfortable, Indira shuts the door and flops into one of the armchairs.
“Thank you, Indira,” Beatrice says, “Tabitha is managing, I take it?”
“She’s fine,” Indira says. “She’s got Will beating the shit out of a punching bag. It seems to be helping.”
“Ah. Percussive therapy.”
“That boy just really needed to hit something that wouldn’t hit him back. Or give him a crisis. Or repeatedly tase him. I suggest we don’t involve Maria in this stage of his therapy, though.”
“Happily, she is running errands today.” Beatrice smiles at Indira and then turns to Melissa. “Now, to the two of you.” After spearing Melissa with a look for a moment, she turns to Shahida, though she breaks off quite quickly, shaking her head and sighing. She stares into her mug for a moment, turns it around and around in her hands, giving Shahida the opportunity to read: Behind every great man is a woman. Underneath those words, in a bolder, red script, is the addition, With tranquilisers. “I do wish we could have had Tabitha here for this. Yes, Indira, I know; William’s rehabilitation will always take precedence. It’s just that she’s been—” she sighs again, looks back at Shahida, “—rather permissive with the two of you.”
“Permissive?” Melissa says.
Beatrice glares at Melissa and pinches the bridge of her nose. “I acknowledge that the involvement of Ms Mohsin here was unavoidable — and I do commend your detective work, by the way,” she adds to Shahida.
“Oh,” Shahida says, nonplussed. “Thank you?”
“Just don’t do it again.”
“Sorry.”
“Involving Ms Gray-Wallace, though,” Beatrice says, “that was pushing it.”
“My fault,” Shahida says quickly. “I was incautious with my preparations, and—”
“I’m aware. Your little spy-movie voicemail idea. Not ideal. But Ms Gray-Wallace has remained discreet, despite, I am told, voicing some understandable reservations; had you left it with her, I would have had minimal complaint. I would likely have muttered something dire into my tea, but not, you understand, when I could be overheard. But Shahida, you and Melissa visited family. Not Melissa’s, no — though I suspect Ms Mohsin would dispute that assessment — but, still, a near-inexcusable breach of operational security. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that the mere notion that Melissa could be alive was enough to galvanise two people into detective work around campus?”
“Two?”
“Steph,” Melissa says quietly.
“Oh.”
“Young Miss Riley, thankfully, has proved an asset to the programme,” Beatrice says with a wry smile, “and she is quite a personable girl in her own right. And Ms Mohsin is obviously of impeccable character. So don’t lay on the self-recriminations too thickly, Melissa.”
Melissa nods, very obviously laying them on, anyway. Shahida wonders just how many memories this interaction is unearthing. It’s an act until it’s not.
“My family will stay quiet,” Shahida says.
“I’m sure,” Beatrice replies, “but that is our assessment to make. And such meetings ought to occur under controlled conditions. But, Shahida— may I call you Shahida?”
“I’m sure you have already.”
Beatrice sniffs. “This is a rather more formal occasion.”
“Shahida’s fine.”
“The issue is not entirely your family. You met with your friend, Ms Woodley. Amy. And her family is an ongoing concern to this house. Do you understand? They are very dangerous.”
“Amy’s family?” Shahida says, shaking her head. “Dangerous?”
“Oh, shit,” Melissa whispers.
“Quite,” Beatrice says.
“It’s her aunt, Shy.”
Oh. Yes. Quite.
“Miranda Woodley-Stone,” Beatrice says, speaking as if she is reading a list of crimes off a ledger, “lately of The Times, previously of The Guardian, The Spectator, and New Musical Express. A singularly vile woman who is as likely to trip over a trans woman and cry assault as she is to publish a column on ‘compelled speech’ because she was served coffee by a barista with a pronoun pin. A rumourmonger; a hobbyist of hate; an indolent upper-class moraliser with a particular bee in her undoubtedly ridiculous Ascot bonnet about trans people. And that is before she discovers what we do here. Before she finds out that Amy’s vanished friend has popped back up, years later, as a woman, under not entirely self-directed circumstances. Do you understand what she could do?”
“She doesn’t know,” Shahida says. “Amy got us away before—”
Beatrice slams her fist into the table. “You placed a graduate of this house within thirty feet of one of the most dedicated enemies of trans life this godforsaken country has to offer! She is personal friends with Katherine Frost! This is why we have procedures!”
“Bea,” Indira says urgently.
Melissa, once again silent, is pressing herself down in her chair. As if she can make herself disappear if she just cowers hard enough. Shahida reaches for her, takes her hand, and Beatrice stands up from the desk, staring at the connection between them, removing herself from the vicinity.
“I apologise,” Bea says. “My goodness, I apologise. Dear Melissa, I really do. I am…” She runs a hand through her hair, seeming very young, despite her fifty-five years. “I am having a bad year. Or a very difficult few months, at least. I should not have taken it out on you. Either of you.”
“It’s… fine,” Melissa says.
“It is not.” Bea fetches her mug from the desk, drains it, and looks around the room. “I think I need another cup. Melissa, Shahida, would you like anything?”
“Um, tea?” Shahida says, mostly to grant Beatrice the excuse she’s angling for.
“Same,” Melissa says quietly.
“I’d like one, too,” Indira adds pointedly.
“Then you can join me in the kitchen,” Bea says.
And then the two of them are alone in Beatrice’s office, Melissa’s hand still folded into Shahida’s. In the silence, Melissa breathes carefully, in and out, and Shahida squeezes her fingers in time.
* * *
Their attempts at structured group therapy have failed miserably. Steph doesn’t know if it’s because Beth refuses to take the process seriously, or if it’s because not even Martin seems particularly troubled any more. It makes sense: this was probably supposed to be for Will, either to help him specifically — like both she and Bethany have done recently — or to help him reintegrate. Pippa’s told her privately that they’re trying, now that Will’s had a breakthrough of sorts and even Raph’s been reduced to quiet, trouble-free moping, to recreate whatever trick they pulled off with the current second years. It won’t work: Ollie, his light and some of his entertainment restored, still hasn’t consented to the simple behavioural agreements Harmony keeps putting to him, and Raph… Steph can’t see him ever doing what Bethany’s doing. He just doesn’t seem to have the temperament.
The sponsors seem confident, though, and she’s prepared to concede that the people who’ve been doing this for a decade-and-a-half might know more about this than she does, her much-vaunted ‘really trans’ status aside.
In the absence of any serious conflict, Pippa’s gone to get them all bottles of water, so it’s just the three of them and Pamela, who’s still sitting behind Martin, her thumb gently massaging the side of his neck.
“You really don’t know how it’s done?” Bethany’s asking. She’s been hassling Martin for the past minute or so, on the basis that he, surely, with his strong, drunken pedigree, ought to have a few tips on how group therapy should go.
“I don’t,” Martin says, a little more sharply than before, an echo of the irritation Steph remembers from his early days, back at the table in the lunch room, when he first told Steph his real name — emphatically not ‘Moody’ — and when Steph, to her disappointment, discovered she outright loathed him.
She’s been working on that. But she hasn’t spent much time around him, and definitely hasn’t spent much time talking to him.
“Fine,” Beth says, taking Martin’s petulance and doubling it. She’s put a slight American spin on the word, stretching and abusing the vowel, and Steph wonders if Bethany should perhaps stop rewatching that cheerleader show she likes so much if she’s going to copy the bitchier girls from it. But when she talks next she not only reverts to her usual accent, she digs her fingers into Steph’s thigh, seeking reassurance, and Steph hurriedly takes her hand. If Bethany needs reassurance, Bethany gets reassurance, especially if it stops her from bruising Steph’s leg. “I’m sorry, okay?” she continues. “I’m not used to this all-new Martin. He talks! He laughs! He sings! Do you sing?”
“In the shower,” Pamela says.
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss the guy who looked like he was trying to open up a portal to hell when the rest of us were trying to have breakfast; he was proper depressing, he found a way to make daily life in this sunless underground shoebox somehow even worse with just his presence, but at least I understood him, you know?”
“You used to throw Weetabix at me,” Martin says, in his quiet, steady way.
“You barely ate.”
“You’re saying that was benevolent?”
“Well, no, but… Right now you seem so happy-go-lucky about everything. It’s weird.”
Martin snorts. “Happy-go-lucky?”
“Well, not miserable, then,” Beth says, shrugging. Hidden under the folds of Steph’s skirt, she squeezes Steph’s hand. Being around other people, even people as inoffensive as Pamela and the newly chatty Martin, is costing her, as is maintaining her detached persona. Steph used to wish she’d drop it, but she’s done so, multiple times, made herself vulnerable, made herself new, so Steph’s not going to think ill of her for returning to it when she needs it. As long as she’s herself, through and through, when the lights go out. When she and Bethany are together, in the dark, as no-one but themselves.
“That’s more like it,” Martin says. Steph gives Beth’s hand a warning pinch, just in case she feels like saying something, because Martin’s looking at the floor, frowning, thinking, and whatever he’s thinking about, Steph wants to hear it. Bethany glances up at her, grinning, and Steph takes advantage: kisses her right on the nose.
Beth’s eyes go wide.
“We’ve been talking about this, haven’t we, Martin?” Pamela says. She’s leaning over him, still massaging his neck, and before Beth can get Steph back for the surprise attack, both Pam and Martin are looking up again, something having passed between them. Steph returns Bethany’s grin and pointedly gives Martin her full attention, which she maintains even when Bethany starts poking her in the thigh again.
“I had rather a lot of realisations all drop on me at once,” Martin says. “And the most relevant one is that it’s all happened. All the consequences. I was always scared of them — always wanted them — and now they’ve all hit. It’s a profound relief. A relief I’m still feeling, to be honest. I think I’ll be feeling it for a while. There was a vicar who used to visit. We never went to church except at Christmas and Easter, but it was good for the parish books to have our family be seen to be involved, so the vicar used to visit. Father would push him off on the children, so he’d come talk to us about whatever he wanted to talk about. Sometimes he’d just watch telly with us; sometimes he’d talk about Jesus.”
“Oh, the life of the rich,” Pamela says quietly, fondly. “Hot and cold running clergy…”
“Absent fathers,” Martin adds, and she laughs. “What I mean is, the vicar used to talk about rebirth. Being born again. And the way I feel right now is basically the way I used to imagine what being reborn feels like. Everything’s new.”
Steph can’t resist it. “The Christian rebirth is also about forgiveness,” she says, and she’s about to kick the nasty part of her that wanted to say that when Bethany does it for her, intensifying her hidden attack on Steph’s thigh. Beth’s probably pro-nastiness when it comes to Martin, though.
“Forgiveness doesn’t matter,” Martin says quickly. “It’s not mine to ask for, anyway. I’m never going to get it; waiting for it, hoping for it, like I did for a while, is a good way to waste a life. Another life.” He looks up at Pamela, who nods. “Early on,” he continues, looking back at Steph, holding her gaze, “all I could think about was the accident. I think it was, perhaps, the first time I ever thought about it clearly at all. And I thought of this place, of whatever it was going to do to me — to all of us — as something I deserved. As a punishment. I mostly expected never to leave here, and I thought that was fine. And then I realised what was happening, and I… blew some diodes. I couldn’t square the circle: I deserved punishment; I didn’t want to be a girl. But the punishment was more important, so I thought, maybe I could just fade away here. The ghost of Moody Martin Holloway. Do you understand how stupid that is? I was ready to die, but I wasn’t ready to start ticking a different gender marker.”
“Preaching to the choir, Moody,” Bethany mutters.
“What changed?” Steph asks.
He looks down at his wrist and fiddles with his bracelet for a moment before replying. “I already trusted Pamela. I already said I’d put my life wholly in her hands. And that helped, it really did. But it was still an escape. I was still detached. You know how easy it is to say you’re a murderer? It’s like self-harm; it makes you giddy. No, what it really took was for me to know everything. And now I do.”
“So when did you disclose to Martin, Ella?” Pippa asks, re-entering from the corridor and throwing bottles of water at people. Steph catches hers; Bethany fails to extract her hand in time, but the bottle falls harmlessly onto the cushion next to her. “I’ve been meaning to ask, but I haven’t had the chance.”
Pamela shrugs. “I didn’t. He asked. So I told him. And I told him why, too. And why me.”
“You just asked?” Steph says.
“I’d been thinking about it,” Martin says, leaning his head back against the sofa cushion again. “All the way through, I thought about it. And I didn’t stop thinking, even when I wasn’t really doing much of anything else.”
“I remember at disclosure, you said you guessed it.”
“Yes. And I asked the occasional question, I kept my eyes open, especially at you, Stephanie—”
“Me?”
“You’re very, very bad at pretending not to be a girl.”
“He’s got you there,” Pippa says.
“None of the sponsors thought you were weird,” Martin says. “And they kept giving you these looks. Like you were in on it. Which, I realised, you probably were.”
“She’s very bad at pretending in general,” Bethany says.
“Shut up, you,” Steph says, and kisses her on the temple. Bethany wriggles closer.
“So I asked,” Martin says. “A few days ago. And she came clean. Even filled in the last few details about my first week or so. Stuff I hadn’t been able to work out. I didn’t come straight here. I was at another place first.”
“What place?”
“Look, you know I had a problem, right? Alcohol. Since before I was old enough for it. And it was bad. So I needed to dry out, and for that, an environment like this is downright dangerous. Too much concrete to get through if someone has a problem. Everyone too close together.” Pamela nods her agreement and continues to massage his neck as he talks. “So, they had me in another place first. Bigger room than here, and not concrete, either. But I used to hear all sorts of shit outside the door; at least,” he adds, frowning, “I thought I did. Probably imagined a lot of it. At the time, I thought it was another rehab, a better one, one with more strongarm tactics for keeping you there. I thought my dad put me there.”
“It was a Peckinville facility, though,” Pamela says. “Not a big one, but it’s got staff. More than we have. It can do a proper, multi-person twenty-four-hour watch, without any of the compromises we have to make.”
“Peckinville?” Bethany whispers, looking up at Steph.
“Private army,” Steph says.
“Remember those guys who came for Will, Ollie and Raph after they attacked Maria?” Pippa says. “They were Peckinville. There’s two onsite at all times.”
“Different guys now,” Pamela says. “A shame; I thought Tyler was cute.”
Martin’s leaning back even more, smiling up at her, and Steph’s forced to wonder once again at the nature of their relationship. They seem to have settled into the sisterhood — or Sisterhood; or siblinghood, really, since Martin is still, well, Martin — that she and Pippa share, and that rankles, just a little. Because Pippa’s special, and so is Maria for Bethany, and while there’s nothing wrong with Pamela that she knows of, Martin killed someone—
Someone Pamela knew.
He says forgiveness is impossible, but he seems to have hers. So maybe Steph should stop fucking judging.
Bethany squeezes her thigh again, and when Steph looks down at her, she’s looking back up, wide-eyed and concerned. All trace of the persona gone; just Bethany. It’s a check: Are you okay? And Steph nods, because she’s just being stupid. It really is none of her business.
“I didn’t notice the days go by,” Martin’s saying. “It was just me and the four off-white walls. Didn’t even know how long I was there. I had a bunch of water bottles and a guy who’d come in three times a day with food and painkillers. So I suppose I could have marked time by him, except sometimes I was asleep. And sometimes I don’t think I was actually aware of him. And a few times I thought he was something else, like a hallucination or something, and I’d throw things at him. Yeah, it’s as fucked as it sounds. And the painkillers didn’t work, anyway. Then, one day, just when I was starting to get a handle on things, I woke up and I was here. In a cell. And that’s when I met Pammy.”
“God, Martin,” Pamela says, ceasing to massage him and clipping him lightly around the ear instead. “Pamela. Or Pam. Or Ella if you must. Not Pammy.”
“Give him a break, Pam,” Pippa says. “You’ve had so many names.”
“They’re all the same name!”
“I like Pammy,” Bethany says, finally turning away from Steph. “I think it suits you.”
“Not an endorsement,” Pamela mutters.
“That’s when I met Pam,” Martin says. “And I know now just how carefully timed it all was. I was supposed to come here and meet her at the exact right moment, so I’d associate her with feeling better. I was, uh, still kind of jittery, though.”
“Were you?” Bethany says. “If I remember correctly, you just kind of sat there. For the whole first week. You just sat there.” She points. “In the corner.”
“Sitting on my hands, Bethany.”
“Oh. Fine. Well done. Carry on.”
“But yes. It worked. I really did think of her as my guardian angel. Even if she hated me.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Pamela says. “At least, not part of his plan. Kind of part of the plan for me, though.”
“You don’t hate him any more?” Steph asks.
“No. I won’t say it’s been easy, because it hasn’t. And, before you say it, it wasn’t my idea to be his sponsor. Wanted nothing to do with him. Wanted to get him in and wash him straight out. Bea’s idea, to put us together.”
“Seems a little risky.”
Pamela shrugs. “There’s lots of girls down here with tasers. Nothing to stop them from dropping me if I lost my shit. And Martin… I’d read his file, obviously. But when he went quiet, when I thought I’d pushed him too hard, when I thought I really had fucked it, I realised I didn’t want him to wash out any more. So I went back and read his file again. Found all the little things I’d made myself ignore the first time around. All the bullshit in his past. A lot like my bullshit, really. Except he had an addiction on top of it all, and he never got the right help. He was never going to get the right help.” She leans back on the couch, looks at the ceiling. “I wish my friend’s husband hadn’t had to die, but I eventually realised more people than just Martin are responsible for that. A whole edifice of bastards; he just happened to be at the sharp end. And he’s different now, too.”
Bethany says, “He’ll be even more different when she’s Martina.”
“Ew,” Pamela says. “No.”
“Agreed,” Martin says.
And then the door from the corridor’s banging open again, and this time it’s not Pippa with her arms full of water bottles, it’s Will, and he’s wearing a sports bra. He’s dripping with sweat and he’s smiling and he’s wearing a sports bra and loose shorts and fingerless gloves, and there are faint red circles around his wrists which makes Steph wonder momentarily if he’s insisted on shackling himself again, but he looks… almost high.
Pippa throws him a spare water bottle, and he catches it out of the air, cracks the seal and downs half.
“Hi, girls,” he says, leaning one-handed on the end of the couch. “Hi, Martin. Sorry I missed the communal bitching session. I promise I’ll make the next one.”
“Are you okay?” Steph asks.
“Am I okay? Am I okay?” He pushes away from the couch again, spins around, starts walking in uneven circles around the common room. “Am. I. Okay. Stephanie, I just spent half an hour beating the absolute shit out of a punching bag. And it was good. Tab was there, and so was Monica, and we talked things over a bit, but mainly I just—” he jabs twice in the air, a boxer’s one-two. With his forearm he wipes a river of sweat from around his mouth, and he sits down at one of the metal tables, facing outward. “You know what? Yes. I’m okay. I’m so fucking okay. I hit that punching bag like I was hitting my dad. And for a while I pretended I was hitting my brother, because Monica made me admit that I do kind of hate him, just a little bit! And then, after that, I really needed to hit myself, and that was the best thing of all.” He laughs. “That bastard really had it coming.”
“That sounds… cathartic?”
Will leaps up from the table and lunges for the couch again. Steph manages not to react, though she feels Bethany shrink just a little beside her. Will, surprisingly, notices, and steps away again.
“Oh,” he says, his mood only a little deflated, “sorry, Bethany. And sorry for all the deadnaming before. And for being a massive fucking dick, I suppose. Hey,” he adds, “Martin, did you know I’ve had trans thoughts since I was a fucking kid?”
“Um,” Martin says, “no?”
“And do you know how hard I was working to repress them?” Will spins, his arms wide, indicating the whole building. “In this place? Like a fucking idiot?”
Steph briefly meets Martin’s eyes and smiles.
“I didn’t,” Martin says.
“It was going to get to you eventually,” Will says, still breathing hard from the exertion, “and this way, I’m in control. God, I have so much thinking to do. You know? I’ve got to work on myself. I always thought that was such a stupid thing to say. You are who you are, I thought, and if you want to be different, you just decide to be different. I was so fucking dumb.”
“Yeah?” Bethany says.
“Yeah. So fucking dumb. I’m going to work on that, too.” He looks around again, his nose wrinkling, and then he sniffs his armpit. “Oh. That’s me. New smell; not used to it yet.” He brushes his hands together. “Bethany, you look lovely. Steph, you too. Hi again, Martin. I need a shower!”
They’re all silent as they watch Will almost skip out of the room, and after a few moments, Steph can just about hear one of the showers come on.
Bethany breaks the silence. “Well,” she says, “she’s no fun any more.”
* * *
“I apologise again,” Beatrice says, laying out cups of tea in front of Shahida and Melissa. Shahida takes hers with a nod, warming her hands on it — it’s a little cold in Bea’s office — and she notices that, after a second to check her mug for amusing slogans (none), Melissa does the same.
“It’s quite all right,” Shahida says, unintentionally falling into a similar tone to Bea.
“What are you going to do about Amy’s aunt?” Melissa asks.
“Well,” Bea says, sitting down, “there’s nothing you can do with such people. They have too much invested in their crusades.”
“You’re not going to have her killed, are you?”
Beatrice almost spills her tea. “What? No! Where do you girls get the impression that I go around bumping people off? Indira, stop laughing.”
“Well,” Melissa says, “I heard about Karen…”
Sighing, Bea fixes Melissa with a look, and says carefully, “Karen was complicated. Karen was a piece in a game I hadn’t fully grasped we were still obliged to play.” She takes a sip of tea, frowns at the heat, and continues. “Karen was responsible for at least thirty deaths that I can put names and faces to. Karen was a monster in the truest sense of the word. As repulsive as Miranda Woodley-Stone may be, I don’t believe she’s committed any murders. Not directly, at any rate. For the moment, Melissa, I would ask simply that you not visit home any more.” She taps a finger on the wood. “Anyone’s home. You will both, obviously, be allowed to stay here as often and as long as you like. Or return to Manchester and your job up there, if you wish. And, Melissa, since you already have a line of communication open with Rupa Mohsin-Carpenter, you may continue texting her, calling her, WhatsApping her, and so on.”
“Mum’s gotten to see her again,” Shahida says. “That’ll be enough. Though… am I allowed to go home?”
Bea rolls her eyes. “Of course. Just be sure to impress upon your family that Melissa’s privacy is paramount.”
“They know. But I will, anyway.”
“As for your friends, Ms Gray-Wallace and Ms Woodley, we will take another approach. One which will not involve murder, Melissa, nor grievous bodily harm, nor kidnapping, nor whatever other grisly acts you might believe me capable of.”
“It was just the murder, Aunt Bea,” Melissa says. She says it with such a straight face that Shahida almost believes she’s being serious, but then Bea laughs and Melissa laughs and Shahida, feeling the remaining tension finally dissolve, laughs with them.
“To recap—” Beatrice says, and then pauses as the door to her office opens and Tabitha steps carefully inside. She’s wearing exercise clothes with a loose t-shirt over the top, and her skin has a shine to it, like she’s been, well, exercising. “Ah! Tabitha. How was your session with William?”
“Productive, I think,” Tabby says. “We’re recontextualising; first, his old hobbies; later, his gender. Sorry I’m late.” Indira stands up to greet her, but Tabby waves her away. “Don’t, Dira; I stink.”
Indira sniffs to confirm, and then sits back down again, theatrically pinching her nose.
Beatrice shakes her head minutely and returns her attention to Shahida and Melissa. “To recap, then: you are welcome to stay here, both of you; you are permitted to remain in contact with Ms Mohsin’s family, provided you retain your distance; your other friends—”
“Actually,” Melissa interrupts, and she’s gripping the edge of her chair with both hands, “I did have a request.”
“Go on.”
“I understand that I need to be more careful. But there’s someone I need to see. There’s a woman. She still lives in Almsworth, I think. Jenny Yau. She’s… She’s all that’s left of my mother. They were best friends. I mean, I love Jenny for Jenny, of course, but I need to see her for her and for Mum. I can tell her I’m hiding from my father so she won’t tell anyone — she hates him; she’ll believe it. Aunt Bea, she protected me when I was growing up, helped me survive, well, everything, and I can’t stand that she thinks I’m dead. I’ll do anything. It’s just—”
“Yes,” Bea says.
“Yes?”
“Yes.” Beatrice raises her mug again, holds it in front of her mouth, obscuring her expression. Shahida tries to look around it but catches Indira’s eye. Indira shakes her head, so Shahida tries very hard to look like she was just rearranging herself in her chair. “We’ll work it out,” Bea says. “You’ll have a chaperone; you’ll meet somewhere private. But of course you can see her. Consider it… a demonstration of my trust in you, Melissa. My belief in you. Tabitha will work out the details.”
“Oh, I will, will I?” Tabby says. “I have my hands full downstairs.”
“Tabitha Forbes,” Beatrice says, lowering the mug to glare at her, “you know full well that I have one rule when it comes to operational security: you broke it, you bought it.”
* * *
Maria almost runs into Indira as she jogs up the stairs to the first floor. They sidestep at the same time — in the same direction — and after a moment, Indira holds up her hands in surrender and backs up against the side of the stairwell. Maria shares a smile with her, and she’s about to go past when Indira says, “Oh, FYI, I just left Melissa and Shahida with Christine and Paige.”
Maria pauses, leans against the handrail. “You did? I thought Tabitha was handling them today?”
“She had a thing with Will.”
“Fair enough. Where did you leave them? Christine’s room?”
“No, the first-floor common room.”
Maria snorts. “That’s what we’re calling it, is it?”
“Until someone comes up with something better,” Indira says, shrugging.
The empty rooms on the first and second floor have been a contentious issue amongst the sponsors for a while. More so than the rooms on the ground floor, since at least there’s things kept in most of those, even though, really, much of it ought to be auctioned off or stored offsite. It’s been a problem for a while that the second years haven’t had anywhere to themselves except their own rooms, but it came to a head when Indira took over for Nell, accidentally adopted that entire intake, and got fed up with leading them down to the dining hall or to one of the teaching spaces just to talk to them all in one place. And with Steph having had a room opened up for her on the first floor, and more people coming and going than ever, it just made sense to start making better use of the available space.
The new common room is messily decorated, with mismatched couches and tables and chairs pulled from various storerooms. There’s a TV old enough to be, if not anyone’s mother, then at least a first-generation sponsor, a tower PC someone found — and which Christine dutifully upgraded — that has the appropriate cables to feed the TV a signal, and a pile of games consoles. Laptops and tablets are scattered around and used communally, and there’s a kettle and a toaster and a microwave. There’s also a big water dispenser, since the room lacks plumbing, something Auntie’s said she’ll get around to signing off on a fix for ‘whenever Elle has a senior moment and unexpectedly triples our budget’.
“What about the other girls?” Indira asks. “They’re here?”
“Just got back with them,” Maria says. “I left them in the kitchen with Pippa.”
“I thought Pippa was handling the group thing, downstairs?”
“They got done, and she found herself at a sudden loose end because, and I quote, ‘heartfelt confessionals make Bethany horny,’ and she didn’t want to be a third wheel in Steph’s very small bedroom.”
Indira laughs. “There must be something in the water today. I had to shut Mia’s door on my way past, because she was loudly complaining to Aisha that her penis looks like ‘a sad little cashew nut’.”
Maria pinches the bridge of her nose. “Is this something I need to know, Indira?”
“Maybe. I mean, she has made all sorts of claims about her huge hog that she definitely can’t live up to.”
Maria swipes at her; Indira steps down a stair, neatly dodging her.
“Why did we promote you again?”
“Because I’m literally the best at this,” Indira says.
Maria reluctantly concedes the point.
Bea’s in her flat, and Maria catches her in the act of pouring a small measure of gin.
“Hard meeting?” she asks, closing the door behind her.
“No,” Bea says. “They were fine. I was an ogre.”
“I can’t picture that.”
“You’re sweet.” Beatrice takes the gin in a single hit. “I shouted at them. Slammed my fist on the table.” She rubs the side of her hand, wincing. “And that was in front of Melissa, you understand. With her history.”
Maria nods. She re-familiarised herself with Melissa’s file after she inserted herself back into daily life at the Hall, and she dug out some of the stuff Abby redacted. Her father had a temper; the reminder was likely unpleasant.
“She’s with Christine and Paige now,” she says. It would be pointless to try to absolve Auntie of the act; she knows what she did.
“I know. And she didn’t seem angry with me, not after she got over her initial reaction. I, ah, may have said we’ll allow her to see another significant person from her childhood.”
“Oh?” Maria asks, holding down a laugh. One moment, the tyrannical custodian of a secretive forced feminisation programme, the next, a worried, motherly woman handing out favours.
“The woman she used to babysit for. The—”
“Ah,” Maria says. “Yes. Her mother’s first love.”
“Probable first love,” Beatrice corrects her. “And that’s reading heavily between the lines.”
Maria shrugs. It had stood out pretty clearly to her.
“On that subject,” Bea continues, “I need you to start the process of bringing Abby in.”
“Really? Already?”
Beatrice leans forward at her desk. She looks, more than anything else, tired. “It’s this Peckinville thing,” she says. “The missing soldiers. Elle’s looking into it, but it’s got me nervous. I don’t like loose ends flapping around out there. If she’s going to do… what she’s been doing, I’d like her doing it on our terms. Or at least with our supervision.”
Maria nods. It wasn’t entirely a surprise when Elle let them know that, in the course of her investigation into Peckinville, she’d chased up every possible lead, and one of them had led to the discovery that one of their own had conducted an unauthorised reunion with her family. Christine was involved, because of course.
“You’re going to let it go on?” Maria asks.
“I’m prepared to grant my official approval, yes. But she needs to come in. We need to have a meeting about it. Ground rules, put her cover story on file, et cetera. And, bluntly, she needs to talk to Melissa and Shahida as much as they want to speak to her. Honestly, these girls! I’d have thought she’d be ecstatic to have Melissa back, but—” Beatrice mimes someone running away with the shot glass, “—off she goes, being self-sacrificing. Maria, how are they still having teen drama? They’re all in their mid-twenties at least!”
“Do you remember what your mid-twenties were like?”
“Vividly,” Beatrice says, and slumps forward again. “Damn it. I should be happy all they’re doing is creating relationship drama for themselves. And that,” she adds in a sing-song voice, “is the point, isn’t it, Beatrice? That none of these girls should have to go through what I did. Ugh. Fine. Your score.”
Maria licks her index finger and draws in the air, incrementing an imaginary number on an imaginary scoreboard.
“Now, stop being smug,” Bea says, “and bring in the next lot.”
Maria nods, pulls out her phone and shoots off a quick text to Pippa, asking her to bring up Rachel and Amy.
* * *
“Oi,” says a voice, and Frankie doesn’t have to turn to know it’s Jake. She also doesn’t have to turn to know he’s leaning against the wall by the kitchen door, because since Val and Trev spectacularly failed to make a dent in him, he’s been even more disagreeably fucking casual than he was already. She turns anyway, and there he is, smirking at her. The only surprise is that Callum’s with him, waiting in the doorway and standing with something approaching military dignity, wet fish edition.
She’s glad she decided to load the main dishwasher and start on cleaning the sides. She can ball her hands into fists at his presence, at the way he surprised her, and look merely as if she is squeezing out her sponge over the sink.
“Jake!” she says, with as much good cheer as she can fake. “Come to punch the moneymaker in the face again?”
“That’s Callum’s job, isn’t it?” Jake says, nodding behind him. Callum, still hovering nervously, nods, and then seems immediately to regret it.
“I’m not going to hit Trevor,” he says.
“Theresa,” Jake says flatly.
“I’m not going to hit anyone!”
“Maybe not hit,” Jake says, twisting around to face him. “Maybe hit on. I keep telling you, Cal, you should have a go at Valerie.” This he accompanies with a lurid gesture, which neither Callum nor Frankie can look away from.
Frankie strangles the sponge, far beyond its water-retaining capacity. Callum says, “I’ll just watch them, I think.”
“Fairy,” Jake says, and pushes off from the wall. “Come on, Frances. We got a job for you.”
His leer is both unbecoming and seriously fucking unsettling — the man is already far too comfortable with old Dotty’s stock in trade — so she does her best to ignore it. It helps that she’s never pretended to like the lecherous bastard, so she doesn’t have to simper for him now.
“Do tell,” she says.
“I’ll do better. I’ll show.”
She throws the dripping sponge at Callum on her way out, yelling at him to make himself useful, and she’s gratified that the last thing she sees before the kitchen disappears from sight is Callum glumly dropping the sponge in the sink and jumping away from the splash.
Jake leads her up to the corridor where he, Callum and Declan have their rooms, and when she sees Declan curled in a ball of misery on his bed, naked and red-eyed, she turns to Jake and asks, “Why am I here?”
“Visitors,” Jake says. “Posh ones.”
“The Smyth-Farrows again?”
“No. The old woman’ll tell you all about it. You’re to make Dina look good.”
“Me? Val would be better at—”
Dorothy’s sharp, tired voice comes from the corridor. “Vincent can’t be trusted. And my hands shake.”
“Been a while, Dot,” Frankie says. Because I’ve been avoiding you, she adds silently, while trying very hard to seem like I’m not.
“Make him look classy,” Dorothy says. “Remember the galas?”
Frankie stills her body as quickly as she can. Because of course she remembers the galas. Another bloodless term for something horrific they used to do to the girls and boys at old Dorley. Another in-joke among torturers.
“We’re throwing one today?”
Dorothy chuckles grimly, and then — having terrified Frankie to the depths of her soul — says, “No, more’s the pity. But do it like you’re preparing him for one.” She flicks an irritated hand at Jake to get him to move out of her way, and leans against the jamb. Frankie, pretending to make herself more comfortable, pulls over a stool and sits, coincidentally blocking the view of Declan’s naked, shivering body.
“So?” Frankie says. “What are we doing?”
“I’ve been going through my rolodex. Been having a hard time with it, too, because most of our old patrons have either shuffled off or were quite a way downstream from Smyth-Farrow senior.” Meaning they were misled as to the exact nature of the programme at Dorley Hall. Most of the active participants were smaller fry, single-contract interests or dilettantes. Curious wankers and pervs prepared to empty their savings account for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Though there were a few big families who retained an arms-length interest, with full knowledge as to what was going on. “But my very careful line of inquiry has found me a young couple, newly moneyed and with interests in the right areas. I’m having them round this evening. But I can’t show them Trevor; if the nouveau Yanks found out, they’d have my head. And our funding. But Declan’s mine.”
Frankie can’t help checking Jake’s reaction to that. He’s displeased. He likes to think of Declan as his. She lets through a snort of amusement about it; Dotty always did approve of rivalries between her underlings.
“So why risk bringing them here?” Frankie asks.
“Man cannot live on bread alone, Franks,” Dorothy says. “Especially not American bread. Have you ever tried it? It’s solid sugar. Anyway, I don’t trust the Smyth-Farrow kids. Too many new ideas.”
“And you think this new couple can be sold on, what? The same old boy-girls we used to turn out?”
“Hope so, Frankie. Hope so. None of this gets out, you understand? Not to the Yanks, not to Silver River.”
Frankie nods. “Yeah. I understand.” It’s not like she has the Silver River Services number on her speed dial, anyway.
“Good. Now, we’re ordering in tonight, so Callum’s giving Vincent the good news: he only has to cook for himself, Trevor and you. All I need from you, after you’ve done up Declan like a nice little tart, is to keep the other two out of the loop and out of the way.”
“Right. We’ll have a movie night or something.”
Dorothy laughs. “Yes. Yes. You do that. Just—” she waves a hand at Declan, “—make the boy look nice, first.”
Everyone clears out. It’s fortunate: she was prepared to yell at them. Because she hasn’t seen Declan or Dina or whoever he thinks he is right now since the staged and rather messy confrontation with Jake, and two days with no-one but Dotty and the Silver River dickheads would be rough even for Frankie; Declan, new to being a girl, new to being knowingly and deliberately made vulnerable, has none of the self-possession required to shrug off their lewd comments and demeaning barbs. Not to mention, she’s as weak as a kitten and absolutely fucking terrified.
The girls back at Dorley, old Dorley, her Dorley, as repulsive as it is for her to claim it… they’d get like this sometimes. This is Declan when he first came here, but worse, because she’s pretty sure that back then it was just humiliation and fear and the total, systematic dismantling of his identity; this Declan has all that, and absolutely no hope.
She stands up from her little stool and locks the door. Loudly, leaving no doubt as to what she’s doing. To ram the point home, she fetches a wooden chair from the other side of the room and shoves it under the door handle.
“Hey,” she says, sitting back down next to her, “sweetheart. It’s just us here now.”
She doesn’t respond. She lays a hand on her bare shoulder and she doesn’t even flinch and that is, pardon her French, a bad fucking sign.
French. Hah. Maybe I should channel a spot of Val.
She takes another look at her, and she’s about to say something when she stops short. Why is she gendering her this way? Why is she more apt to think of Declan as a girl when she’s at her most vulnerable? She— He wouldn’t thank her for it, for sure, not unless he’s trying to go deep immersion, the way she’s pretty sure Beatrice did after Val was taken away. But Declan doesn’t have the strength of will to do what Beatrice did. Beatrice constructed a new, female self, built not just her identity but her very survival into it, then turned around and taught dozens upon dozens of girls to do the same. Declan is…
He’s just a man. Despite his appearance, despite the name Jake gave him, he’s a fucking man. He’s emphatically not, as the girls at new Dorley would say, her sister.
Except perhaps he ought to be. This new life that’s been chosen for him is inescapable and, most likely, short. Frankie looks at him and can’t help remembering what Val said about all the girls buried here, all the lives sacrificed on the altars of lust and cruelty. Perhaps, before all this ends in darkness, he deserves someone on his side. Despite his past, despite the pain he’s inflicted.
Val’d say she’s an idiot for even thinking it. Val’d probably be right.
Fuck. There’s a ripe blue bruise across his cheek. Jake playing rough or exacting discipline. She’s going to have to cover it. She reaches out again, this time with the back of her thumb, and strokes his cheek as gently as she can, and this time he responds, releasing his grip on his legs, sitting up just a little.
Frankie smiles. Fuck, she really is pretty. Despite the cartoon tits and despite the bruises — bruises plural, she now realises; she’s going to have to dress her in something that covers her whole left side — there’s no denying she’s been made beautiful.
And Declan wouldn’t thank you for thinking that, either, Frankie. But what is a woman, if not someone who is forced into the subservient gendered position by—
Christ, shut up, Frankie. Shut up and do what you came here to do. You’re too old to think about shit like that, especially when you can’t remember if the essay you read which used that phrase was arguing for or against it. You’ll have to ask the author, assuming you live long enough to see the inside of Dorley Hall again.
Shite. Where was I?
Yeah. Channelling Val.
“Declan — and I’m going to call you that until you ask me otherwise, okay? — I need you to sit up with me. I need you to cooperate. I need you to sit still for me while I do your face and your hair, and then I need you to dress for me. In return I will give you all that I can give you right now, which is an hour or two without Jake or Callum or Dorothy. But I do need you to cooperate. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she says.
* * *
Rachel Gray-Wallace and Amy Woodley. More of Melissa’s friends. Pippa’s seen Rachel around, though not nearly as much as Shahida; Amy is completely new to her. Maria dropped them off in the kitchen, spied Pippa escaping the basement, and got her to watch them, so now she’s keeping an eye on them, sitting comfortably and somewhat sleepily at one end of the kitchen table while Rachel and Amy sit together at the other, drinking the tea she made them and looking a little confused.
“I know I’m not supposed to ask questions,” Rachel says, “but—”
“You’re not supposed to ask questions?” Amy interrupts, switching rapidly between frowning at Rachel and staring at Pippa. “Why isn’t she allowed to ask questions?” she asks Pippa.
Pippa shrugs. “Because the answers are super weird,” she says.
She doesn’t actually know why they’re here, but given that they’ve been yanked straight from their family homes by Maria — and on the day before New Year’s Eve, at that — and given that she asked Pippa specifically to make sure they didn’t go anywhere or look too hard at anything, ‘for now’, disclosure’s a safe bet. Another opsec eff-up, no doubt. They’re becoming a regular thing; Steph, Lorna, Shahida, and now these two.
At least Lorna wasn’t Melissa’s fault. Pippa wonders if the woman ever feels guilty about how much harder she keeps making everyone’s lives here, and then cancels the thought: if Melissa hadn’t dropped her debit card — ‘accidentally’, no doubt — in front of a young Steph, Pippa’s world would look quite different right now.
The hope Melissa represented might actually have been what kept Steph going. Without that…
A sobering thought.
Pippa’s going to buy Melissa something nice, she decides. And then someone can yell at her about security, if Aunt Bea hasn’t already.
“That’s a super weird answer in and of itself,” Amy says.
Pippa smiles and spreads her hands. She earns a scowl from Rachel and an amused grin from Amy.
It’s going to be nice when the new semester starts up and people can’t grab Pippa and give her random jobs any more. Though taking the shift to watch group had been satisfying. Bethany’s progress: nothing short of miraculous at this point. I mean, yes, sure, Pippa can tell when her nerve fails, when reticence overcomes her, because she burrows into Steph’s side. Practically tries to hide her whole head in Steph’s armpit. And the way they were holding hands under Steph’s skirt, probably thinking no-one could see! Downright adorable.
She could see the stress building up, though. Ninety minutes of that ‘failed’ group — convened though it was specifically so that Bethany could be Bethany, in voice, in dress and in attitude, in front of Martin and Pam — got to be too much, and she let them all go back to their rooms shortly after Will’s short-lived return.
It’s nostalgic, in a way. Pippa can see a lot of herself in Bethany. Yes, they are and were very different people, and Bethany seems to be taking a lot more of her old self into her new self than even she seems to be aware of, but those moments of hesitation, of discomfort, of fear, when you catch up to yourself and realise that you’re dressed as a girl, you’re being seen as a girl, you’re relating to others as a girl… You have to force a realignment. You have to remind yourself that none of the old rules matter, and that the reason they don’t is because you, in conjunction with your sponsor and the other ‘boys’ in the basement, decided they don’t. Even though they can still contrive to feel very real; oppressively so, at times. The stress of the dissonance, the war between the created and the rejected self, needs to be blown off somehow, some way.
Pippa used to sing. Her dad always said she had the perfect shower voice, and she brought it with her to her new life, retraining her voice and belting out her music — and the occasional fondly remembered church song — into the mirror. Hairbrush for a microphone. Security cameras for an audience. Something she’d always been too self-conscious to do, as a teen, as a boy; another thing she unlearned.
Okay, yes, fine, she didn’t unlearn it completely, but she was promised that no-one would see the recordings.
Bethany’s been blowing off steam, as well. Unlike Pippa, she does so with an audience, with someone who will hold her hands and shut out the rest of the world for her, and though Pippa doesn’t know exactly what they do, since they keep Steph’s cameras off, she can hazard a guess.
A few minutes and a handful more dodged questions later, Pippa’s phone chimes, and she leads Rachel and Amy up to the first floor, to Aunt Bea’s flat. Maria’s in there, sitting cross-legged at an office chair pulled up to the central desk, so Pippa takes the couch, figuring that if what she thinks is about to happen goes wrong in any way, they might need an extra pair of hands, or, failing that, an extra taser.
“Ms Gray-Wallace,” Aunt Bea says. “Ms Woodley. My name is Beatrice.” She leans harder than usual on the first syllable of her name. Pippa can’t guess at all what that means. “I am responsible for the programme we operate here, and I am responsible for the wellbeing of your friend, Melissa Haverford.”
“What?” It’s Rachel, leaning forward and pointing at Aunt Bea. “Where did ‘Haverford’ come from? Her name’s Vogel.”
“Um,” Amy says, “Rach?”
“Melissa took a new name on completion of our programme,” Bea says. “An entirely new name. I take it she has not yet discussed this aspect of her new life with you.”
“Why?” Rachel demands. She seems annoyed. Because she was dragged away from her family during the holidays? Maybe. Pippa checks the taser in her pocket, makes sure it’s not snagged on anything. She checked the charge this morning, thank goodness.
“Think about it, Rach,” Amy says. “What if her dad found out?”
Rachel turns to her friend “Yeah, Amy? And what if Russell found out? What then? The man’s got a sister he knows nothing about.”
“Russ is okay. I check on him, and—”
“You check on him? You?”
Amy lays a hand on Rachel’s forearm. “Yes. Mum knows his office manager. He’s got a good job, he’s got friends. It’s all a bit new, but he’s much less isolated than he used to be. Last I heard, he might finally have a boyfriend. I don’t think he needs to have his life tipped over, not just yet.”
“What do you mean? Why would it—?”
“Look at Shy,” Amy says. “She wasn’t back home for five minutes before she started covering the country in wanted posters, and now she’s actually found her, do you think she’s going to start interviewing for jobs here like she planned? Shahida and Melissa need to sort out what they’re going to do, where they’re going to live, all that shit. When they have stability, they’re less likely to turn Russ’ life into a huge mess by accident because they’ll have the time to do it right.”
“No, Amy, that’s ridiculous. Russ has a right to know.”
“I agree. I also think, not now.”
“Since when have you been checking on him, anyway?”
“Since always. And I didn’t tell you because you always get weird when I do stuff.”
“Because you always go too far!”
Amy sits back in her chair. “I go exactly far enough, Rach.”
Aunt Bea’s been watching the conversation with interest, and as it peters out, she pushes two tablets across the desk, one for each of them. Disclosure agreements.
“I know you have questions,” she says. “I have answers. But protecting our operation here is my top priority. So I must ask that you read these documents thoroughly. You can sign your agreement at the bottom.”
“What if we don’t sign?” Rachel asks.
“Then you can leave,” Bea says. “And I will trust that you keep what you think you know about us to yourself, for the good of your friends, and for the good of all the people for whom I am responsible.”
“And what if—?”
“Rach,” Amy snaps. “Sign it.” She flicks her fingers quickly down the screen of the tablet she’s been given, and hits the bottom of the document at such speed that the bounce animation is visible from the couch. She thumbs the biometric reader, signs her name with the stylus Bea silently hands her, and pushes the tablet back across the table.
“You’re not going to read that?”
Amy shrugs. “I wanna know. Melissa knows everything. Shy knows everything! The way they talk when they think we’re not listening… They’ve both obviously signed this already, or something like it, and that’s enough for me.”
The tension cracks on Rachel’s face and she laughs. It’s a shallow laugh, but it’s a reprieve. She’s been making Pippa nervous.
“That’s very rash of you,” Rachel says, wagging a finger. “Your boss would disapprove.”
Amy says, “My boss doesn’t desperately want to know everything about… Shit, Rach! This is a whole thing here! They’ve got the building and they’ve got staff and they’ve got an AGA and that girl Pippa makes a lovely cup of tea—”
“—thank you—”
“—and I want to know. So sign!”
“Thanks, Amy,” Rachel says, “but I’m going to read all the same.”
Amy catches Pippa’s gaze and rolls her eyes. Pippa smiles in return, and both of them dig in their bags for their phones, the better to occupy themselves while Rachel reads the fine print. A few minutes in, Maria leans over to whisper something in Bea’s ear, and then disappears into Bea’s kitchen, returning with enough tea for everyone. In, Pippa notes, what Christine calls the ‘opsec mugs’.
“I’m not comfortable with this,” Rachel says. Her mug is still full while everyone else’s is empty, and Amy’s been sitting on the couch next to Pippa, talking musical taste and recent TV and Pippa’s classes, while throwing the occasional impatient glance at Rachel.
“Oh my God, Rach,” Amy says, rolling her eyes at Pippa again, patting her on the knee and standing up. “Can you just not be so…?”
“I’m not in the habit of signing my rights away. Look!” She holds up the tablet, points with the stylus to various clauses. “We’re agreeing to waive our right to talk about Dorley Hall or anything that goes on here without approval from and consultation with a representative of the capital-P Programme!”
“Yeah?” Amy says, leaning on the desk next to Rachel and tapping at the edge of the tablet. “Who were you going to talk about it with, anyway?”
“I don’t know— The police?”
“ACAB, Rach.”
“How are you so chill about this?” Rachel drops the tablet on the desk. “This isn’t just an NDA; this is sweeping. This is an NDA with teeth. It might even be an NDA with guns!”
Aunt Bea wheels her chair back over to the desk. Maria returns from the kitchen, pocketing her phone, and takes up the same seat she used before. Pippa pays attention: this could be crunch time.
“Ms Gray-Wallace—” Aunt Bea starts.
“For fuck’s sake,” Rachel says, “call me Rachel.”
“Amy,” Amy supplies, nodding to Aunt Bea and sitting down again.
“Rachel,” Aunt Bea continues, “I’m going to be honest with you. That is an NDA with teeth. And it’s more than that. It is the legal pretext under which we will use any means necessary to protect ourselves, and we require it to be ‘sweeping’, as you say, because the graduates of our programme are, in many ways, among the most vulnerable women and nonbinary individuals in the country.” Bea’s leaning forward on the desk, staring Rachel down, and Pippa doesn’t think she’s imagining that Rachel’s starting to push her chair away from the desk, centimetre by centimetre. “Take what you know about your friend Melissa. Not just her status as a transgender woman; her family situation. The delicacy of her identity. The process by which she came about it. The trials she underwent beforehand. Now imagine almost a hundred more like her. Imagine the… hostility that might await them, were they to be exposed. They are whom I am protecting.” She points to Rachel’s tablet. “They are whom that protects.”
Rachel’s face is blank. “There’s got to be more to it than that.”
“There is. But that is all you can know. Unless you sign.”
They watch each other for a moment. Pippa wants to place herself in front of Aunt Bea, taser in hand, because it looks very much as if Rachel might throw the tablet at her. Instead she checks her taser again and chews on her cheek.
“Fine,” Rachel says eventually, thumbing and signing in the appropriate places with rough fervour. “It’s done. Tell me.”
2004 August 8
Sunday
What a blasted eyesore, inside and out. From the brickwork to the windows to the kitchen to the exposed concrete stairway that leads down from the dining hall, Dorley Hall is a building with an identity crisis. It’s like a stately home refurbished by enthusiastic amateurs; like a period hospital restored to working order during a National Trust budget crisis.
Elle permits herself a smirk. Rather appropriate, really. But who on earth thought an AGA was appropriate? The main kitchen in a place like this needs restaurant-grade equipment if it’s going to feed as many mouths as its room count implies. She’ll suggest to Beatrice that they have the whole kitchen ripped out and redone.
With Dorothy Marsden having scuttled off, tail between her legs and with her minions behind her, the Hall is curiously empty, and that’s not right, either. A building such as this ought to be a hive of activity!
Still, if her plans pan out, it will be.
One of the girls — one of the survivors — enters the dining hall from the concrete stairwell. She’s carrying a bundle of clothes, and when she catches Elle’s eye she jumps, so Elle turns away, leaves through the kitchen and exits to the rough path out front, so she can’t make the poor thing any more uncomfortable.
So she can’t make herself any more uncomfortable. Because she need only look upon these women to see their past, to see their origin, and though most of them lack Beatrice’s grace and refinement they are, to a woman, absolutely beautiful and exquisitely, painfully arousing.
Elle returns to her car, checks that none of the students from the encroaching university has decided to go for a walk nearby, and relieves her tension.
She won’t survive a whole evening around these women, not unless she can regularly shut herself in one of the side rooms. Or unless one of them consents to—
No.
She looks around again, for what she is about to do is perhaps more revealing of her inner turmoil than anything else she might do on this campus. When she’s satisfied that she is truly, absolutely alone, she carefully removes the ring from her finger and slaps herself as hard as she can across the face. Once, twice, thrice.
“Control yourself, Elladine!”
Or, if she cannot control herself, at the very least she can do the responsible thing, and masturbate in a car with partly blacked-out windows.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Mother’s memory is good for something, at least.
Satisfied, she touches up her cheeks with a little powder — such redness has always, in her experience, been taken for rouge, but best be careful — and taps out a quick text message. Five minutes later and the trucks are already rolling in, and Elle emerges from her car in time to lead the first group of Peckinville workmen into the Hall.
She may not have been able to rid the girls entirely of Dorothy Marsden — the odious Crispin Smyth-Farrow has guaranteed her flat for the next two years, and she’s bound to return to it at some point — but she can damn well upgrade the locks enough to keep the old bitch confined to the narrowest possible slice of the Hall for as long as Beatrice pleases.
And, hell, if she does come back, she can bear witness to the extent that the girls, with the assistance of Elle’s men, have stripped the memory of her from the brickwork, from the woodwork, from their very bodies.
2019 December 30
Monday
It was Pippa’s turn to make the next round of drinks, and she returns from Aunt Bea’s little kitchen with several mugs on a tray to find Amy slapping her thigh in delight.
“So that’s what Melissa meant!” Amy says, and then grimaces as she realises she almost dislodged Pippa’s tray. Pippa smiles at her, to tell her not to worry about it, and Amy returns the smile and retrieves two mugs, one for her and one for Rachel, who isn’t taking the many revelations with Amy’s equanimity.
“What?” Rachel says urgently, ignoring the mug Amy’s placed in front of her and tugging at her sleeve instead. “What, Amy? What did she say?”
Pippa hands mugs to Bea and Maria, both of them still sitting uncomfortably close to the visibly upset Rachel, and then retreats to her couch.
“Just… Actually, Rachel, you know what? I probably shouldn’t tell you.”
“Amy…”
Maria, leaning on the desk and seeming convincingly bored, says, “You might as well tell her, Amy. We’ve got a lot to get through.”
Amy delays by a few more seconds, testing the temperature of her tea. “She just said she was ‘locked in’,” she says, and then frowns. “No, wait; that was how I characterised it.” She looks over at Pippa and explains, “I overheard her and Shy talking. That was the gist, though.”
Rachel’s hands are both fists, and at this her knuckles whiten. “You locked her in!”
“It’s procedure,” Maria says. “We were all locked in at one point.”
“That’s barbaric. That’s criminal. Shit, Amy, how are you not— not—?”
“Because of Liss,” Amy says, cupping her mug.
“Haven’t you been listening?”
Amy glares at Rachel, sips from her tea, and replaces the mug carefully on the table. “Haven’t you?” she says. “Rach, if what they’re saying is true, then everyone here’s been through it. Not just Liss. You’ve spent more time around them than I have; do they strike you as traumatised by their experiences here?”
“Quiet, Pippa,” Maria mutters, as Pippa quickly shoves her hand to her mouth and turns her laugh into a snort.
“What?” Rachel shouts, turning to Pippa. “What is so fucking funny?”
Oh, drat. “Sorry,” Pippa says quickly. “It’s just that that’s kind of an old joke around here.”
“A joke.”
“Well, yes! Like Amy said, we’ve all been through it. And it hurts at the time, yes—” Rachel is narrowing her eyes but Pippa presses on, remembering Martin, “—but it’s rehab, sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘rehab’?”
“Well, it’s—”
“No,” Rachel says, cutting her off. Amy lays a hand on her forearm but she irritably dislodges her. “Fucking no. Because if what you’re about to say is premised on a belief that Melissa was ever like— like you, then shut your fucking mouth forever. Because I knew Mark. I knew him. And he was such a sweet boy.” Her grip loosens on her anger for a second. “Such a hurt boy.” She’s silent for a short while, and Pippa wants to speak up, wants to correct her, to comfort her, to understand her if she can. But when Rachel looks up again, it’s with a curl to her lip that looks too familiar. “And you people dragged him here and you locked him up in the fucking dark and brutalised him until he became someone else.”
Pippa’s throat seizes. That’s not how it works!
“And now she’s Melissa,” Rachel continues. “And now I don’t know if that was ever going to be something that happened without you. I don’t know if she’s real or not.”
“She’s real, Rach,” Amy says.
Rachel turns on her. “And what do you know, Amy? You’ve spent, what, one afternoon with her? Two? You haven’t seen the— the cracks that I have. You’re just happy the boy you had a secret little crush on for years is still alive.”
“Rach—”
“She’s been lying, Amy.” Rachel turns to Bea. “For you. For all of you.” And she includes Pippa in her scathing assessment of the room. “And she’s scared of you! It’s obvious whenever she so much as alludes to you. And she’s got Shahida lying for you, too. Lying on behalf of a mob. And Shy, she asked me to trust her! And, fuck me, I fucking did. I trusted her. For this. For— I can’t put it into words! This is monstrous. It’s disgusting. It’s conversion therapy!”
“No,” Maria says, slapping her open palm on the table and attracting Rachel’s attention. “The fact that you can even suggest that means you have heard nothing that we’ve said. We would never take a gay person and try to make them straight, or a trans person and try to make them cis. Aside from the ethical considerations, it can’t be bloody well done!”
“You take men and you mutilate them. Make them look like women.”
“Hey,” Pippa interjects, finding her voice croaky and quiet, “I am a—”
“We do not,” Maria says. “We are very careful to take only those who can adapt. Who can be helped by our programme.”
“Oh, yes, right, I got that part, sure! Men who can be ‘helped’. Oh, yes, I fucking got that part. Wife-beaters and abusers and— Do you take rapists, too?” She turns to Pippa again. “What about you, ‘Pippa’? Should I be scared of you? Are you a rapist?”
The room is suddenly cold.
It’s like she can’t breathe any more. Like she’s been struck and the air’s been forced out of her. And she wants to breathe, she needs to, because the dizziness is back, that feeling she used to get early on, when she understood what was going to happen to her, when she understood why it was going to happen to her, when she looked back at her life and found nothing there worth saving and no-one to miss her who hadn’t already been taken from her, by the violence of the state, by the violence of men, and she needs to breathe, but there’s no oxygen in here, no resistance to the air at all, and she stumbles through it, ignoring the people calling her name, because she has to, because if she turns back to the people who want to comfort her she will pass out.
The last thing she hears from anyone back there is Maria saying emphatically, “Pippa Green is not—” and then she’s leaning against the wall around the corner, wheezing painfully, filling her lungs one agonising gasp at a time. There’s the sound of footsteps, and she doesn’t want to know, can’t know, can’t be looked at right now, can’t be witnessed, so she runs for the stairs. Takes them two, three at a time.
She’s got to get away.
She’s got to be alone.
She’s thumbing her way through door after door, staggering when she loses her footing, still dizzy and uncoordinated. At the top floor she pauses to retrieve her headphones from her bag and jam them into her ears, a manoeuvre so practised it might as well be instinctive. She taps play. She doesn’t remember the last playlist she was listening to — doesn’t care — but it feels only too appropriate, as she kicks open the roof door and steps out into the bright and brittle December afternoon, that something from one of her old playlists comes on.
The first thing she did when they gave her a real phone was to reassemble, as best as she could remember, all the playlists she used to listen to as a kid, all the music she found online, curled up in her teenage bedroom, headphones almost deafening her, looking for something or someone to latch onto, to describe her.
Spanish Moss by Against Me! starts playing, and Pippa leans against the brick and looks out across the university, her lips mouthing the lyrics, her arms clasped tight around her belly.
2004 August 8
Sunday
Before she arrived at Dorley Hall, before she took great pleasure in entering on Beatrice’s cue — to be at the beck of another, especially one such as Beatrice, is quite the thrill! — and shattering Dorothy Marsden’s world, she weighed carefully the benefits of immediately calling in the Peckinville workmen versus waiting, giving the girls time to come to terms with their new reality. And she’s certain she made the right decision, bringing them in right away, given that almost the first thing she saw after the dirty work was said and done were various girls moving their precious items out of that awful basement and throwing out anything they could find that belonged to Marsden or one of her ‘sponsors’.
Her men are handling it all now. With direction, of course. Maria, Beatrice’s contact, that beautiful East Asian girl with the slender fingers and the scars on her forearms, is speaking with two of the men, so Elle hangs back. To insert herself would be to interrupt, to co-opt Maria’s authority, and that’s the last thing she wants. She might have plans for the Hall — a humane repurposing must be possible! just look at these women! — but central to them is the need for its current inhabitants to heal and to take control over their lives.
It’s an opportunity to watch her, too. To examine her movements, to imagine her life up to this point. For she is graceful and careful and a little reserved, and so unlike Dorothy or her coterie that Elle wonders where she learned such femininity. From memories of her mother, perhaps?
Her mother whose death was requested by Dorothy and carried out by Smyth-Farrow’s people. Oh, she can’t prove it, not to the point where a court would accept her evidence, but it’s obvious. The power plays of the English aristocracy — and those who serve and emulate them — have always been, in effect and intent, deeply racist; no wonder the immigrant family from Hong Kong was chosen to have an example made of them.
But she can see none of that on Maria’s face. The woman has so much to grieve, has borne so much injury, and yet she stands as straight-backed and proud as anyone Elle’s ever seen. There’s something there that reminds her of Beatrice, too; a survivor’s instinct, perhaps.
And then the men nod to her and take their leave, one of them heading towards the ugly concrete stairs down — and aren’t the sliding bookcases that hide it stupid? she can see the scrapes in the blasted wood! — and the other back out through the kitchen. He nods at Elle as he passes, seeming surprised to find her lurking behind the doorway, but she ignores him, far more concerned that she might have been spotted by Maria.
No. Worse. Maria’s acting like she can’t be seen by anyone. At least, not by one such as Elle.
Maria’s watching the one headed for the basement, a smile still plastered on her face. He turns around to smile at her before he starts down, and she waves at him. And then she almost loses her footing. Her hands fly out to steady her and one of them finds a stack of dining chairs, but they’re not enough to arrest her fall. And then another girl, one Elle hadn’t even noticed because she’d been sitting so still, leaps up from the floor to catch her. They stumble around together for a bit — Elle roots herself; she’s too far away meaningfully to help, anyway — and then find their feet. The other girl, Barbara or something, hoists Maria’s arm over her shoulder and leads her out into the corridor at the back of the building.
When Elle sneaks closer, she hears sobbing from behind a closed door.
She grasps at nothing for a moment, her fingers closing on air, and then she does the obvious thing: she puts the kettle on. It’s not difficult to find everything in the kitchen, though she does send one of the men out to the catering truck they ought to have set up around the back by now, for fresh tea bags and new mugs and a packet of biscuits. She disdains even the kitchen’s resident teapot — hard to know what around here might have bad memories associated with it — and brews the tea directly in the mugs.
The crying has ceased when she arrives again at the back room, and she briefly worries that they’ve gone somewhere else, that she’ll be left with a tray of tea and milk and bourbon creams, and then she hears whispers, so she knocks twice. Gently; again, hoping not to trigger any unpleasant recollections.
“Yes?” a tremulous voice says from inside.
“It’s Elle Lambert,” she says, feeling foolish. It is her instinct in such situations to lean into her accent, to establish her authority and breeding from the very start of the interaction — though the former is merely a tool and the latter a source of much self-directed contempt. But it doesn’t seem appropriate, so she moderates her tone; the result, unfortunately, sounds rather like a RADA-trained actor on the BBC trying to appear salt of the earth.
“Mrs… Lambert?” another voice asks.
“Miss,” she says, trying to convey her smile in her voice. “May I come in?”
“Um,” says the first voice — Maria, most likely. “I’m not exactly at my best.”
“I am aware. I, aha, I have tea. And biscuits.”
There’s a pause. Then laughter, and the door opens to Maria, looking very much as if she has been crying for her life in there. The other girl — and, yes, it’s definitely Barbara — bobs in a strange little curtsey, and holds out her hands for the tray.
“I can serve,” Barbara says.
“Nonsense,” Elle says quickly, refusing to hand it off. Instead she steps inside and places it down on what might, under the dust sheet, be a billiard table. “Do you take milk?”
Both girls say yes, so she adds milk and distributes mugs, before taking a seat on a mucky stool, a sensible distance from the girls. Best not to crowd them.
“It’s just ordinary tea,” she says before either of them can sample it. “I didn’t want to use anything from the kitchen, and the men chose the stock for the catering truck themselves. None of them, inexplicably, enjoys Darjeeling. At least, not enough to add it to the menu on the intranet. So: ordinary tea. My mother used to call it builder’s tea. Which seems a little rude, now that I come to think about it.”
“Miss Lambert—”
“Elle.”
“Thank you, Elle,” Maria says. She drinks deeply from her mug, inhales the steam. Closes her eyes.
Elle ventures, “Would you like a bourbon cream?”
When Maria opens her eyes they’re shining again, and the girl has to deposit her mug quickly back on the tray before the floodgates open once more, and she’s sobbing into Barbara’s arms. Elle, feeling rather superfluous, reaches for her, uncertain as to whether she can even be useful, and Maria grabs at her outstretched hand.
Elle is drawn into the hug. She’s struck instantly by how thin they both are, and not in the manner of one who diets for fashion or for health. They’ve been starved.
After a while they lean back from each other, remaining connected but not so tightly that they can’t see each other’s faces.
“I’m so sorry for intruding,” Elle says.
“Oh, it’s not that,” Maria says, smiling, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. “You made us tea. You brought us biscuits.” She sniffs. “That, apparently, is all it takes. Someone to… to do something for me. And I was— I was supposed to be in charge. But here I am, hiding out in this windowless room because it’s too bloody bright out there.”
“Maria…” Barbara whispers.
“Brightness means we’re— It doesn’t mean anything good. I’m fighting with myself. I want to go back down. Back down there. Back where I used to know what’s going to happen next.”
“What’s going to happen next,” Elle says gently, “is that you are going to get some rest, Maria. You can involve yourself in the renovation of the Hall as much or as little as you like.” She pulls out of the hug, returns to her stool, takes up her tea. She needs the prop. “You can have a room upstairs. Or we can put you up in a hotel, or find you an apartment.”
“I should help,” Maria says. “I want to help.”
“For now, perhaps you should just rest. You’ve had to be strong for so long.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just, I don’t want to be so fragile. I don’t mean to be.”
“Rest, Maria,” Elle says.
Not fragile. Brittle, perhaps. Strong but easily shattered. All of them. Sisters imperfectly forged together, down there in the dark.
2019 December 30
Monday
The Hall operates on a different, lazier schedule this time of year, so when Melissa and Shahida showed up this morning there were few enough people about that they could be nervous in relative peace. Now, though, as Melissa picks her way downstairs, she has to pause every ten seconds to greet someone. The second years are out in force, finally showered and dressed and foraging, their attached sponsors only nominally keeping an eye on them and concentrating far harder on their respective sources of caffeine. And various other Dorley inhabitants are wandering around between the main kitchen, the dining hall, and coming up from the basement facilities.
And all of them are happy to see her.
Melissa’s still getting used to it. For so long she was the aloof and untouchable Melissa Haverford, who deigned to visit among the rest of them only in the company of Abby Meyer, but now — ever since her stunt with the taser and Steph — she’s Melissa, she’s Liss, she’s that girl who’s just as messy as the rest of us. She’s gotten more compliments on her hair, makeup and choices of outfit in the last few weeks than she did from anyone other than Abby in her entire earlier tenure at Dorley Hall.
It’s nice.
She and Shahida talked with Christine and Paige for a little while, but then Christine suggested she go surprise Steph. Said that as long as she knocks first — very loudly — on Steph’s door, she can just go in. And Melissa jumped at the chance.
One problem: she has to go down those fucking concrete stairs. And if she thought they looked unpleasant from all the way over on the other side of the room, during the Christmas Eve dinner, from here they look downright—
“Hey,” someone says, and Melissa tears her eyes away from the arch over the stairs and the ridiculous elevated bookcases and turns around to see a pretty girl, dressed in an oversized sleepshirt with the logo of… isn’t that a tabletop game company? Something to do with vampires and werewolves?
“Hi?” Melissa says.
“Melissa, right?” The girl points to herself. “Jodie. We met. Kinda. I was a bit more dressed up then. Um, Donna’s sister? You know Donna, right?”
Melissa nods. “Yes. I know Donna. And I remember you, too. You were giving Lorna Fielding that video game.”
Jodie grins. Melissa finds herself expecting to see fangs. “That’s me! I just came over because, well, you’ve been standing at the entrance to the basement for ages and there’s such a draft coming up from there that— There! I see it! You have goosebumps. And now I do, too.” She proffers a bare leg — aside from the sleepshirt, she’s wearing only socks and, presumably, underwear of some kind — to show off her dimpled skin. “Goosebumps! Anyway, what I mean is, you should either go down or you should come have a really, really late breakfast with me and Donna, but whatever you do, you should stop standing here, because this is the coldest spot in the entire Hall, if you don’t count that weird freezing spot on the fourth floor by the trash chute. Veronica said it’s like a metaphor made real, like you stand on the last free patch of floor in the Hall and you get the chills, but between you and me, she was a massive drama queen, and it’s just the air conditioning.”
Melissa doesn’t think she knows who Veronica is. It’s probably wisest not to say so.
“I’m okay,” she says instead. “Thanks, though. I’m going to see Steph, and I don’t want to be late, so—”
“Steph! Oh my God! Tell her hi. From everyone. I’ve talked to her, like, a ninetieth as much as I want to, but I never have the time. Oh, you know that guy she’s been together with? Girl now.”
“Yes, I caught that—”
“And called Bethany. That’s the cutest name, right? Makes me want to run down those stairs and scoop her up and take loads of little bites. Anyway. Anyway. I won’t keep you. Go say hi.”
“I will,” Melissa says. “Thanks, Jodie.” And she’s genuine: those last few steps off ‘the last free patch of floor’ really have been difficult to contemplate, but Jodie’s energy is infectious. “Say hi to Donna in return?”
“You can do that yourself,” Jodie says, twisting and pointing. Donna’s sitting with a couple of other people she recognises, and when she spots Melissa looking, she smiles and spins a finger around by her temple for a moment. “Love her,” Jodie adds, and when Melissa looks back, she’s beaming at her. They exchange waves.
Melissa takes the stairs down at a light jog and nips into the security room to check on where everyone is. A sponsor she doesn’t recognise quickly talks her through it: Steph, Bethany, Martin and Will are back in the common area, and all of them have had full disclosure; the others are in their rooms. Rather than lock any of them in, the sponsor says she’ll put a temporary limit on access to the common room. “If you run into any of the other guys in the corridor, pretend to be a sponsor,” she says, and throws a half-finished bag of Penguin bars at her: a peace offering. Will, apparently, is potentially a little antsy.
The first thing that strikes her as she starts down the last flight of stairs is that they’ve redecorated: the first basement main corridor has been recarpeted, the lights set into the ceiling aren’t quite the same eye-searingly pure white, and the handrail’s been replaced with something in a more realistic fake wood. The little details, the little differences, are enough; that plus the way everyone’s been so nice to her. She can’t be isolated, lonely Melissa here, not any more. No-one will let her.
She can’t resist a look into the cell corridor when she reaches the bottom, but the door lock won’t admit her, which means either that she hasn’t been given full permissions, or someone’s still in there. Ominous. She’s pretty sure some of her intake were still in and out of the cells at this point, especially Nell, but hasn’t Steph’s presence been stated to have sort of… accelerated everyone? She laughs to herself: maybe slotting an actual trans girl into an intake and letting her get on with it isn’t a magic bullet, after all.
Melissa trails her fingers along the concrete as she goes. The lunch room’s empty, but she lingers outside, anyway, looking in through the window, remembering those times when she felt most unsafe, when she would only leave her room in Abby’s company. She’s been expecting the memories to overcome her, but there they sit, available for her to access but quite manageable.
It seems much bigger down here than it did back then.
She can see through the window that they’re watching TV in the common room, and she’d love to slip in quietly, to observe them without being seen, to see first-hand what it’s like to be a sponsor, to be among them but apart from them, and then she rolls her eyes at herself: she always was among them but set apart, and if she really wanted to spy on them she could have stayed in the security room. No, she’s here for Steph, and so she’s gratified that when she opens the door and the terribly unsubtle lock mechanism gives her entrance away, it’s Steph who leaps up from the couch and practically runs for her.
“Liss!” she breathes as she and Melissa collide with each other, and then she apologises as her hair, still wet from a recent shower and getting quite long, sprays Melissa with water.
“It’s fine,” Melissa giggles. “I’m due a shower, anyway.”
“What are you doing down here?” Steph asks, stepping back from her and taking her hand, leading her over to the loose assemblage of couches, cushions and bean bag chairs. “Is everything okay?”
Melissa waves to Bethany, who gives her a nervous grin. “Everything’s fine!” she says, sitting down at the other end of the couch.
Steph sits down next to her. “Good.”
“Hi, Melissa,” Bethany says, shuffling up to be close to Steph again.
“Hey,” Melissa says, and then looks at the other two — Martin, quietly sat on the other couch and wearing a neutral expression; Will, sitting on a bean bag chair by the wall and closing the book he’s been reading — and adds, “I’m Melissa.”
“Hi,” Martin says.
“I would like to know what’s going on,” Will says. He’s put down his book, he’s looped his hands behind his back and now he’s pressing them against the wall, which in any other circumstance would strike Melissa as strange behaviour but which down here is probably pretty ordinary.
Bethany points. “Melissa,” she says.
“Yes,” Will says testily, “I caught that, but— Wait. That Melissa?”
“Um. Yes?”
“No. Fuck you. That’s— That’s stupid. That can’t be right.”
“Will?” Steph says, and Will, still holding his hands behind his back, looks at her and jerks his head towards Melissa.
“Is that her? The one you were on about before everything went to— before everything went even more to shit?”
Steph and Melissa exchange glances. Melissa shrugs, and Steph says, “Yes.”
“You are fucking kidding me.”
“Sorry.”
“She’s a sponsor?”
“No,” Melissa says quickly. “I just—” and she has to very quickly control a smirk, because what she’s about to say seems hilariously mundane, given the context. “I just went here for a while.”
Every head in the room turns to Will, who looks back at them all with an unreadable expression, and then seems to come undone all at once, his grip on his arms loosening, his posture reverting to a slouch. He laughs, loud and genuine. Not the sort of laugh she expected from him, given the little she knows about him — Beth called him all sorts of names whenever conversation at the Christmas Eve dinner table turned to the current occupants of the basement.
“Christ,” he splutters, between heaving breaths, “my fucking side. I’m getting— Shit!” He jams a hand over his mouth and stiffens his body, taking a few seconds to regain control. “I have a stitch,” he says to no-one in particular.
“Sorry,” Steph says again.
“You went here?” he asks Melissa. “Same as us?”
“Yep.”
He turns to Steph. “So that’s why— Shit. You knew?”
“Sort of,” Steph says. “I was wrong about it. I saw her by accident, realised my childhood friend was alive after all, and got—” she laughs gently, “—entirely the wrong end of the stick.”
“You thought this was, what? A secret gender clinic?” Will snorts. “Instead, it’s…” He trails off, unable to find the words.
“Masculinity rehab,” Melissa says.
Another laugh ripples through Will, and he covers his mouth again.
“Are you okay?” Steph asks. “You seem a little hysterical.”
“I’m good,” he says, through his hand. “I’m fine. Just. Wow. Incredible. Wow. Fuck.”
“Someone hit him,” Bethany says. “He’s got stuck.”
“No,” Will says. “No, no, I’m good. I’m— Fuck. Shit! I think… I think it helps? I think it’s good. Hey, uh, Melissa, you don’t work here or anything, do you?”
“No,” Melissa says. “I live in Manchester.”
Will nods. Keeps looking at her, keeps nodding, like he’s trying to dislodge something in his mind. “How’s life?” he says eventually. “After all this, after graduating skirt school. How’s life?”
Melissa shrugs. “Complicated. I’m doing okay, though.”
“Good enough,” Will says, sinking back into his bean bag chair and retrieving his book, flicking through it — he’s wearing fingerless gloves; weird — until he finds his place. “Good enough.”
* * *
It’s not Beatrice Quinn who eventually drags them out of the office, though there were moments it seemed like she wanted to. It’s the younger woman, Maria, the one who’d managed to remain placidly in control of herself even after Rach basically accused them all of being rapists, who limited her contributions to the conversation after that to terse statements of fact — many of them in defence of Pippa, the girl who quite rightly didn’t want to listen to any more of Rach’s shit — and who kept meeting Amy’s eyes and exchanging with her little micro-expressions, all of which Amy chose at the time to interpret as, Don’t worry, we deal with this all the time, and not as, Why did you bring this complete bitch into our house? With the benefit of hindsight, though, and considering the look on Maria’s face when she shuts the office door behind them, Amy’s beginning to think it might be option number two. Certainly Beatrice had seemed right on the verge of losing her shit.
“Sorry to cut this short,” Maria says, addressing Amy. “We didn’t plan to drop all this on you and then get rid of you so soon after, but something’s come up.” She frowns. “Something else.”
“Yeah,” Rachel says, “I bet.”
“Rach!” Amy says, rounding on her. Rachel’s been uncharacteristically combative today, which, okay, fine, some of it Amy kind of gets, since the real story of what happened to Melissa — and what happened sort of around her — in her time away turned out to be a lot weirder and darker than either of them thought, but you don’t just look at some poor girl who’s younger than you and clearly feeling the tension in the room, you don’t just look her in the eye and ask if she’s a rapist. You just don’t. Especially given what Beatrice said about the traumatic histories of most of the — what did she call them? — the graduates. She’s starting to get the feeling that all of them really were, just as Beatrice said, as much victims as victimisers. The way a lot of people are, in various quantities.
“Convenient,” Rachel says, “isn’t it?”
“Not really,” Maria says. “But we don’t intend to just chuck you out on the street like this, so… Can you come with me, please?”
“Where?”
“Yes,” Amy says, grabbing Rach’s wrist and pulling on it, “we can. Rach?”
Rachel glares at her but doesn’t resist, and they follow Maria down the corridor, past a lot of doors with nameplates on them — Amy reads Mia on one and Faye on another as they hurry along; she likes the stars and hearts on Faye’s, and the blocky figure with a wig on drawn on Mia’s — and around a couple of bends, until they come to a larger room, open to the corridor and packed full of mismatched couches. There’re more girls inside, and they all look up when the three of them come into view. The one closest to Amy is—
“Shy!” Amy yells, dropping Rach’s forearm and almost leaping at her. Yes, it’s not been long since they last saw each other, but Shahida spent almost as long out of Amy’s life as Melissa did; that neither of them sent her postcards — from America; from a basement — is something for which she’s already yelled at them. Water under the bridge.
“Hey, Amy,” Shahida says, opening her arms but not standing up, so Amy gets to fall into her embrace and also onto the last remaining open cushion on the couch. “Welcome to Dorley Hall.”
“This place is so weird,” she says, muffling herself against Shahida’s shoulder.
“I know,” Shahida says with a giggle, and then pulls back, frowning at something behind Amy. Oh. Yeah. Rach. “Is, um, is she okay?”
“No,” Rachel says, “I’m not.”
“Hey, Maria,” says one of the girls Amy doesn’t recognise, “are we doing this again?”
“I’m sorry,” Maria says. “We were handling it, but that one—” she nods at Rach, “—upset Pippa enough that I need to go get her back off the roof, and—”
“Pippa’s on the roof?” says the other girl, standing up. Amy echoes her alarm, but Maria’s quick to correct them both.
“Yes, but not like that. She’s just… She was upset. She’s got her headphones in and she’s getting in some alone time. I thought I’d give her another ten minutes and then go up to see her, bring her back down and fill her with hot chocolate or something. It’s cold out.”
Amy nods. It had been cold enough in Ms Quinn’s office. On the roof? She can’t imagine. Probably catches all the wind from the near-pancake-flat campus.
The other girl sits again and links hands with the taller girl, the one with the long blonde hair and the looks, the one Amy can’t decide whether to envy or rub herself against.
“Can I suggest something?” the other girl asks. “Send Steph up for her.”
“Isn’t she with Melissa?” Shahida asks.
The girl shrugs. “Send her up, too. She has a calming influence.”
“Melissa’s here?” Rachel says. “Now? She approves of this place?”
Shahida laughs sharply. “Yes,” she says, “she’s here. We came together. You’ve been told everything, then?”
“Yeah,” Rachel says.
“Enough that we get it,” Amy adds, hurriedly. “Or I do, anyway.”
“Amy, what is your problem?” Rachel’s bloody well yelling, and that’s bloody well enough. Amy stands up again, puts herself between the girls and Rachel, and grabs her by both shoulders.
“Rach,” she says. “Breathe. You hear me? You’re going to blow a gasket or something, and you’re being a bad guest.”
She knows it’s the wrong thing to say as soon as she says it. Stupid reflexive responses; Mum’d have a fit if Amy behaved like Rachel among strangers, no matter what they may or may not have done. But Rachel isn’t wired that way.
“I’m not their guest,” Rachel says darkly, but she keeps the decibels down, so it’s not as bad as it could be.
“Well,” Amy says. “I am.” Then she turns her head, still keeping hold of Rachel, so she can just barely see the two girls she doesn’t know. “I’m Amy, by the way. Old friend of Melissa’s.”
“Christine,” the shorter one says.
“Paige,” says the stunner.
“Shahida,” says Shahida.
“Yes, Shy,” Amy says. “Thank you for the reminder. You’re not funny.”
“Em thinks I’m funny.”
“Melissa thinks the sun and moon shine out of your arsehole, Shahida.”
Rachel twists out of Amy’s grip. “Will you stop that! Stop joking! Stop acting like everything is normal! I’m the only one freaking out here and I don’t get it! Shahida, they kidnapped Melissa! They kidnapped dozens of other boys—”
“Lowballing it,” Christine mutters.
“—and you’re just sitting there! Drinking their tea!”
“This is coffee,” Shahida says.
The observation serves to knock the wind out of Rachel, and she just glares at all of them for a few moments while breathing heavily.
“May I hazard a guess as to how disclosure went?” Paige asks.
“Badly,” Amy says. “But go on, guess.”
“She’s hung up on the non-consensual aspects of the operation here?”
“Worse.”
Rachel’s got at least some of her breath back. She steps away from Amy, takes up a seat on the far end of the room, out of reach and with a few throwable objects — mostly video game boxes and controllers — within reach. So Amy rejoins Shahida, Christine and Paige on the couch, making her allegiance known.
Why is Rachel being like this? Like, yes, okay, strong sense of justice, history of victim advocacy, pedantic streak a mile wide, trust issues after one friend vanished and another one almost did, yes, fine, but Shahida’s been here for weeks now, and Shy’s not exactly one to just sit by while awful things happen. Why can’t Rachel just trust her?
Like, yes, okay, trust issues, but still.
“Rach,” she says, an overture to diplomacy.
“Shut up, Amy,” Rachel says. “Shy, what’s going on?”
“It sounds like you know what’s going on,” Shahida says coldly. “And it sounds like your first reaction, upon finding out that the women in this building are all trans, is to start yelling at them.”
“They’re not trans, Shy,” Rachel snaps.
It’s Christine’s turn to try. “Excuse me—”
“No. Shut the fuck up. Please, everyone, shut the fuck up! Shy, they’re not trans, trans people, they have, like—” Rachel gestures wildly at the air, “—medical diagnoses and stuff.” Out of the corner of her eye, Amy sees Christine cover her mouth. “They don’t get dragged into a dungeon by a mad old woman, and—”
“Beatrice is not old,” Shahida interrupts.
“What?”
“She’s not.”
“How is that relevant?”
Shahida shrugs. “It’s not. But I like her, so I don’t like hearing you say that about her.” She drums her fingers on her knee. “Look, Rachel. Do we have a problem here?”
“You and me?”
“You and me and my friends.”
“These people are your friends?” Rachel says. “These… violent men?”
“Rach!” Amy snaps.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rachel says in a pantomime voice. “These formerly violent former men.”
“They’re as much men as Melissa is, Rachel,” Shahida says.
“Yeah, well, now I’ve seen this place, I’m starting to wonder about—”
“Don’t.”
Rachel seems taken aback by Shahida’s certainty. “Well, what am I supposed to think?” she splutters.
“That’s the problem, Rach,” Amy says, spotting her moment. “You’re supposed to think.”
“You’ve been reacting, not thinking,” Shahida agrees. “You need to think and you need to listen.”
“Oh?” Rachel says with a sneer. “Like you?”
“Yes!” Shahida says. “Exactly like me! I came here looking for Liss. And she came here looking for someone else, but that’s a whole other story. I came here, and a wonderful woman met me at the door. Tabitha. Yes, Rach, another one of them. And she made me a hot drink and she sat me down and she explained the whole deal and you know what I did? I listened. I didn’t start screaming about violent men or questioning her gender. I asked questions and she answered. She did, too, actually,” she adds, nodding at Paige.
“There were coloured pens involved,” Paige says.
Shahida smiles, turns back to her. “Right? I’m so pleased you had them on you. It helps me think.”
Paige returns her smile. “I had my book bag, and I always have coloured pens in my—”
Rachel mutters something under her breath, effectively silencing the others and puncturing the momentarily elevated atmosphere. When she sees all eyes are on her again, she snaps, “How can you be so flippant? How are you just talking, Shy, when he could be… He could be anyone?”
Shahida’s about to answer, but Paige catches her eye and a quick and silent exchange of information takes place. Shahida nods, and Paige untangles her fingers from Christine’s and sits forward.
“I know how this goes,” she says, in quiet but steady tones. “You push and you push and you push until one of us—” she points briefly from herself to Christine and back, “—breaks and starts the big confessional. We tell you about our tragic past, or how traumatic the process of coming to terms with it was, and in doing so we finally unlock the empathy that lurks somewhere inside you. Well, we’re not doing it. I’m not doing it and Christine’s definitely not doing it. And it would be pointless anyway, wouldn’t it? You’ve already made up your mind about us. We’re ‘violent men’. Forget that you know nothing about our history. Nothing about our lives. Beatrice gave you the spiel and then, apparently, didn’t get to finish it, because you had to have a tantrum right there and then, and—”
“That’s not—” Rachel starts.
“I’m talking,” Paige says.
“I don’t—”
“I am talking!” Paige yells, and it’s the loudest sound in the bloody universe. Amy thinks her heart might have stopped. “You’ve come to our house,” Paige continues, “and made judgements, and now you think you have something to say? Well, you don’t. Shahida’s right. You are here to learn how to support your friends Melissa and Shahida—”
“And Amy,” Amy whispers.
Paige nods at her. “You are here to learn how to support your friends. You are here to learn why it matters that you keep the secrets you have been entrusted with. And even if you have no respect for me or Christine or Melissa or Pippa or any of the rest of my friends, I suspect you will want to learn how to listen, lest Amy and Shahida cease being yours.”
Rachel’s mouth works for a moment before she manages to find words to put in it. “They’re still my friends. No matter what you say.”
“Rachel,” Shahida says, “if you hurt Melissa, if you hurt any of these women, I will never forgive you. If you call them men one more time, if you imply that they are anything other than the women I know them to be, if you go telling their secrets to other people, I will cut off contact. Do you hear me? Hurting these women isn’t something I will get over. We won’t be laughing about it in five years’ time. It won’t even be the delicate topic we never raise. You will be out of my life. That’s a promise, Rachel. Melissa is mine and I’m hers.”
“A-fucking-men,” Amy whispers.
Rachel’s quiet, watching Shahida, seemingly with no answer ready, so after a few seconds, Shahida continues. “Rach, I get it. This place is a lot. And I won’t lie and say I became instantly comfortable with it. But I have friends here. And even if Melissa wasn’t in the picture, I wouldn’t — I couldn’t — let you carry on like this.”
Amy can’t take her eyes off Rachel. Every twitch of a muscle, every micro-movement on her face, and Amy’s convinced she’s about to pop off again. Instead, after a while, the only thing Rachel says is a whispered, “Shy…”
“This is my life now, too,” Shahida says.
“I just…” Rachel says in the same whisper. “I just don’t get it.”
“No-one’s asking you to,” Christine says. Amy glances over and sees her wiping under her eyes with the back of her hand. She makes plans to take her aside and apologise on Rachel’s behalf, maybe get to know her.
“I have a suggestion,” Paige says. “Spend the rest of the evening here. We’re going to have dinner in the main hall later, because none of us wants to cook, especially after this. You can join us. You can see what we’re like. All of us. And you’re going to understand that whatever you’ve convinced yourself to think of us, we are simply a community of women and nonbinary people, as different from each other as any extended family. We cannot be judged as a whole. We must be understood individually. And—” she raises a pointing finger, “—you will keep your mouth shut unless you have something nice to say.”
Rachel says nothing, so it’s Amy’s job to unblock her. “Rach?”
“Fine,” Rachel says.
“You won’t make a fuss?” Paige prompts.
“No,” Rachel says after a pause.
“Good,” Paige says. “And, if it occurs to you to think anything stupid about me, anything poorly observed, perhaps that my behaviour just now seemed very masculine to you, then I invite you to consider two things: first, that degendering is a common response to a feminist who asserts herself; second, that it is here that I learned to stand up for myself. It is here that I learned I have value.”
Rachel nods silently. She’s frowning but she’s not immediately yelling, so she’s thinking.
The back and forth goes on for a few more minutes, during which Amy admits to herself that, yes, she does have her second ever crush on another girl. Second if you count the thing she had for Mark (but never acted on, because Shahida was in so deep you could barely see her). Paige splits her time evenly between talking sternly to Rachel — but never again raising her voice — and paying attention to Christine, and it would be so easy to think that perhaps men aren’t worth bothering with at all, because not a bloody one of them has ever treated her with such tenderness.
And then she laughs, remembering the central tenet of the argument that Rachel’s only just dropped: that these women are, or were, men. She’d forgotten.
She looks back at Christine and Paige. Christine’s kissing Paige back, laughing sweetly into her cheek, and Amy wonders if Shahida and Melissa will be like that, once they’ve talked to this Abby girl and done whatever else they feel they need to do before they can properly get on with things.
So, so easy to feel envious.
Melissa and Shahida even have a room together in the Hall, apparently! Amy learns this when Rachel and Shahida suddenly stand up and she starts paying attention to the conversation again. Shahida wants to take Rachel upstairs, to her and Melissa’s room, to get washed up before dinner, since she’s worked herself up a bit and she could use a shower and a change of clothes, but Christine’s telling her that Rachel doesn’t have permission to leave the first floor, except to return to the main dining hall.
“There are showers here,” Shahida says. “On first.”
“I don’t have a change of clothes, Shy,” Rachel says. She’s still wary, still keeping her distance, both metaphorically — through her closed-off body language — and physically.
“I’ll nip up and get something,” Shahida says. “I’ve got two whole drawers here, and half the wardrobe.”
“You’ve moved in?”
“Little bit, yes.”
They disappear around the corner and Amy lets out a long, unsteady breath. She didn’t expect anything like this tense to happen to her when she woke up this morning.
Nothing so exciting, either.
“Are you two okay?” she asks, leaning back on the couch and stretching her limbs all at once and probably looking quite amusing.
“Yeah,” Christine says. Paige nods.
“You said this has happened before?”
Paige counts on her fingers. “Lorna. Shahida. And now Rachel. So only three times, really.”
“We did kind of have to do Lorna twice,” Christine says.
“Lorna?” Amy asks.
“She’ll be at dinner tonight. You’ll like her.” Christine presses herself further into Paige, and then frowns and says, “How about you, Amy?”
“Hmm? Me?”
“You had all the Dorley crap dumped in your lap, what, less than two hours ago, and then Rachel immediately started up. You probably haven’t had a moment to think about it all.”
Amy nods. It’s true. “I do have one question,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Do you take referrals?”
* * *
“I’ve been thinking. I’m going to write to Petra again.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah! We’ve just had Christmas and New Year’s coming up, and I want to tell her I had the time of my life.”
“And? Did you?”
“I don’t know; let me check. Kiss me.”
“Okay.”
From next to them comes a snort of repressed laughter, and Steph and Bethany both look over to see Melissa with her fist practically jammed into her mouth. She’s shaking, too, and that’s harder to hide from Steph because the three of them are on the same sofa, and with Beth on Steph’s lap and Melissa right next to them, they’re practically sharing the same cushion.
“I’m so sorry,” Melissa says, unconvincingly blanking her face. “Please carry on.”
“Why am I so funny to you?” Beth asks, rolling off of Steph and onto the cushion next to her. Steph finds herself already missing her weight, her warmth, and quickly seeks out her hand to hold.
“Because you’re sweet,” Melissa says, and she’s clearly noticed them holding hands again because she fails to not smile even harder, “both of you. And because you, Bethany, look way better in that romper than you did in that tux.”
“Don’t remind me about the fucking tux…”
“It’s called a romper?” Steph asks. Stupid name.
Melissa nods. “Or a playsuit. But I always think that sounds kind of too horny.”
Bethany says, “Heaven forfend,” and Steph doesn’t need to see her face to know she’s putting on her best ‘innocent’ expression.
“As I was saying,” Steph says as Melissa rolls her eyes at Beth, “I’m going to write to Petra.” It’s family, is what it is. Melissa and Bethany together on the same couch. It’s different to the Christmas Eve dinner, when they were surrounded by people. Here it’s just the three of them, with Will having long since gotten sick of their giggling and Martin having been collected by Pamela for some private purpose back in his room. So she’s here with her family, in a soft, warm space, and she wants in some way to include Petra. The missing sister, the one she never gets to see any more. “And I wanted to ask a favour. Of both of you.”
Melissa and Bethany both say, “Oh?” at the same time, and Steph wonders, briefly, if she made a mistake by letting them talk to each other so much. After a spot of understandable shyness on Beth’s part, they’ve been getting on incredibly well. Melissa plays innocent better than Steph does, which makes her a better foil for Bethany’s ruder observations.
“Well,” she says, “I’m going to start working in details of my life. We pitched the backpacking idea to Aunt Bea — well, Christine did — so I could walk back into my life when I’m done here, as me, rather than as… you know. So I was wondering, Beth, if I could say you’re a fellow backpacker, that we met doing temp work together, and, um, I was wondering if I could tell her you’re a trans girl.”
“Uh,” Bethany says, “me? Why not her?”
“I can’t say Melissa’s in Romania. She’s got a job. You can call the university and ask for Melissa Haverford and they’ll put you through.”
“I mean,” Melissa says, looking at a pretend watch, “not right now.”
“Oh,” Bethany says. “Right. Okay. Makes sense. So, why am I a trans girl?”
“Because I want to start telling the story. Laying the groundwork. And if I meet this super-hot girl in Romania who’s from the UK, too, and just happens to be trans…”
“Wait,” Beth says. “Waitwaitwaitwaitwait. I think I’m picking up the absolutely ridiculous thing you’re putting down. You’re going to cast me as the one who cracked your egg?”
“Yep.”
“Um. I don’t know how to crack eggs, though. What do I even do in your story? Walk up to you with my tits out and say, ‘Hey, little man, did you ever think about giving womanhood a try?’”
“Why did you put on a deep voice to say that?”
“Dunno.”
“Look, Beth, you don’t have to do anything. Letter-you doesn’t, I mean. Just proximity to you will be enough to make me… realise things about myself.”
“Really? Is that how it works? Steph, that’s so dumb.”
“It’s how it works,” Melissa says, “for a lot of people.”
Steph spreads her hands Melissa-wards. “See?”
“I still think it’s dumb,” Bethany says, shaking her head.
“Can I do it, though?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess. So I’m going to teach you how to do girl stuff?”
“Yep.”
“Cool. I bet I’m really good at it.”
Steph’s preparing something deeply cutting to say, something that will wound Bethany to her core, something along the lines of, Yeah, I bet you are, followed by more kissing — and probably more of Melissa calling them sweet — when the message chime she’s set for Maria’s contact starts playing. So she starts digging around in the cushions, looking for her phone, and eventually discovers Bethany’s been sitting on it.
“Aw, shit,” she mutters, reading through Maria’s lengthy message.
“Steph?” Beth asks. “Everything okay?”
Steph quickly summarises. Maria wants Steph and Melissa both to go up to the roof and fetch Pippa back down. Rachel’s here — Melissa’s eyebrows go all the way up at that — and she said something that really upset Pippa. For the sake of not saying it out loud, not wanting to group any of them into Rachel’s careless mischaracterisation — they are all Dorley girls, after all — Steph doesn’t say exactly what it was that upset Pippa so. Only that, when they’ve fetched her, Melissa might want to touch base with her friends.
“Of course I’ll come,” Melissa says. “Beth, will you be joining us?”
Oh. Yeah. Melissa still hasn’t quite internalised that Bethany hasn’t quite the freedom Steph has. Beth saves her from having to explain, though.
“Me? No. Sorry. Can’t. Love Pippa. But I can’t. She’s on the roof, is she? Well, I’m scared to death of heights. Can’t deal with them. And birds. Also confrontation, the cold, the dark, the outside world, birds—”
“Beth,” Steph says, “don’t worry about it.” Melissa’s already helped her up from the couch, and she leans down and kisses Bethany on the forehead.
“Sorry.”
“Text Maria. Get her to come down and see you when she’s free. I’ll probably be with Pip, but I’ll text you, too, okay?”
“Okay.”
Steph kisses her again, and once more just because she wants to, and whispers, “Love you,” before she straightens up.
“Love you, too,” Bethany whispers, and then Steph’s following Melissa out of the common room and up the stairs.
“You really are sweet together,” Melissa says as they emerge into the dining hall and, on unspoken agreement, both head for the lift at the front of the building. Five flights of stairs after taking two so quickly? No thanks.
“I’m so lucky,” Steph says. “Like, I don’t even get it sometimes. First you, then here, then Pippa and Christine and Paige and Maria and Indira and Abby and everyone, and then Bethany.” She stabs at the call button. “But I’m also lucky because Beth’s going to make it. And when I think about that, I think about the people who didn’t.”
“The washouts.”
“Yeah.”
“I know what you mean,” Melissa says, as they step inside and start the elevator on its rattly upward journey. “I always hated the Hall. But I can’t any more, not now I’m back. But yeah. There’s always that.”
“Our washout was a multiple rapist,” Steph says. “And he attacked me and Beth. I shouldn’t care about what happened to him. I don’t want to. I try not to.”
“But you do, anyway.”
“You know, when I first came here, I used to tell Christine I wanted all the boys to wash out. I was kind of vicious about it.”
“Fear and stress,” Melissa says as they exit onto fifth. “It can make you say horrible things. Think horrible things. That’s not you.”
Steph shrugs. “I’d like to believe that.”
Melissa pushes open the door to the roof and the cold, which has been building ever since they stepped into the stairwell, hits them like a hammer. Steph almost buckles; the wind is harsh, and they didn’t stop to pick up jackets on their way up. Melissa takes her hand, smiles, and together they approach the huddled figure on the other side of the roof.
Pippa’s mouthing something to herself, and part of Steph wants to wait and try to lip-read, to see if she’s singing along to something on her earbuds or if she’s talking to herself. But Melissa urges her on, and they walk a wide circle around in front of Pippa, so they won’t startle her too badly when she sees them.
Pippa jumps a little anyway, and guiltily rips her headphones out and stuffs them into her bag.
“Steph!” she says, stammering in the cold. “I’m sorry, I— Did I miss something?”
“Nothing,” Steph says, putting more force than normal into her words so she doesn’t succumb to the cold herself. She doesn’t want to seem nervous or agitated; she wants Pippa to see how genuine she is. “We came up to see if you’re okay. We heard about what Rachel said.”
“I’m so sorry,” Melissa says. “I didn’t know they were bringing her in. She’s, um…”
“She’s just standing up for you,” Pippa says. “And she should. You’re about the only graduate who hasn’t been tainted by this place.”
“Pip—”
“I keep thinking it over,” she says. “Am I any better than I used to be? At least back then it was just me. Now I’m part of this machine that keeps hurting people. Now I’m—”
“Hey, Pip,” Steph says, “I want to talk about this, and I know you do, too, but I’m really cold, so I bet you’re freezing. Come down with us?” She reaches for Pippa’s hand. It’s curled into a fist, so Steph just takes the whole thing in both of hers. Pippa offers no resistance, and lets Steph breathe warm air onto knuckles made white by tension and temperature. “We can go to my room, the one on first, and I’ll make you a hot drink, okay? We can talk or we can watch movies. Or whatever you want to do.”
“And we don’t hurt people here,” Melissa says. Steph wonders what that we really means to her now. “We save them. They saved me. They saved Steph. And Bethany, she’s actually kind of incredible.”
“But Declan—”
“—was a rapist,” Steph finishes. “We may not have saved him, but we saved people from him. You know this. You’ve just been… knocked for six.”
Pippa nods, unconvinced. But she’s had a crisis of faith before. Granted, it was because Steph had been nothing like the antisocial boy she’d been pretending to be, but it means she has a path back from this. This will pass.
In Pippa’s loosening fist, Steph finds more hope, so she nods to Melissa, has her take Pippa’s other hand, and together they walk her slowly back to the stairwell.
They don’t make it all the way to Steph’s room without incident. They’re almost there when the door from the shower room opens and Shahida and Rachel emerge, robed and with hair wrapped in towels.
Shahida’s first to notice them, and she very nearly succeeds at turning Rachel back around.
“Shit,” Rachel says, “Pippa, I— Shit!” Now she’s gaping at Steph. “You’re— You’re Stef! You’re that Stef! I saw you on Liss’ old phone, and— Fuck, hi, Liss.”
“Hi, Rachel,” Melissa says. She places herself between Pippa and Rachel.
“Yes,” Steph says, taking another step with Pippa towards her room, “I’m that Steph. And Pippa is my sister, so—” and she has to bite down hard on the anger that almost consumes her, because what gives her the right to come into their home and say such things? “—so you don’t get to say another thing, okay? Unless it’s an apology.”
Rachel, startled, backs up a bit and collides lightly with Shahida. “Um, I’m—”
“And not now,” Steph finishes. “When she’s ready. Not when you are. Come on, Pip.”
She doesn’t give Rachel another look. She turns and unlocks her door and ushers Pippa inside, closing it behind them and shutting out everyone else.
It’s just going to be her and her sister for a while. Her family.
2004 August 8
Sunday
Since Dorothy will be retaining — for now — the main residence on the first floor, Beatrice has claimed a flat on third, a bedsit-type affair that seems in recent years to have been used by Dorothy Marsden and her people for insalubrious affairs. There’s a pile of furniture and oddments in the corridor outside, and another door open on the other side of the corridor to a room in which Beatrice has stashed even more rejected detritus. Elle picks her way carefully over the wreckage, feeling a little shaken after her encounter with Maria and looking forward to sitting down somewhere she can close a door behind her.
She remembers fantasising about these girls. The thought makes her ill.
“Ah, Elle,” Beatrice says, standing up from where she’s slotting strips of cardboard under one foot of a rather beaten-up desk, “did you have to fill the Hall with men and surround it with trucks? We’ve only had it five minutes.”
“Oh,” Elle says absently. “Sorry.”
“Do you like it?” Bea says, standing back and gesturing at the desk. Looks like mahogany, or what mahogany becomes when an unpleasant old woman fails to properly care for it for several decades. “It’s the only one I could find that doesn’t smell vaguely of Dorothy.”
“I can get you a better one,” Elle mutters.
“No,” Bea says thoughtfully, “I think I prefer to have a desk I’ve reclaimed. It’s symbolic, I suspect.”
“Ah,” Elle says, spotting an opportunity to occupy herself, “you have a kitchen!” Tiny by her standards, but adequate to cook for one person. Or for a couple. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Beatrice frowns at her, and Elle’s heart sinks. Is that really her only response to uncomfortable situations? To offer to make the tea? She feels suddenly like a parody of an aristocrat, unable to connect with ordinary people except on the most trivial level.
But Bea asks the question Elle wasn’t expecting.
“Are you okay?”
Elle, still on autopilot, says, “Yes, I’m fine, I’m just looking for the kettle—”
“Sit down,” Bea says. “I don’t, as it happens, have a kettle here yet, nor do I have tea bags, but I can ask one of the girls—”
“Don’t.”
“Hmm?”
They’re caught looking at each other. Bea: puzzled. Elle: absolutely unsure of herself. She breaks it off first and sits heavily in an armchair near Beatrice’s reclaimed desk.
“Don’t disturb the girls,” she says. “Maria was… She was crying, Beatrice. Crying, and all I could offer was bloody tea.”
“I’m sure she appreciated it,” Bea says, sitting opposite.
Elle shifts her weight around, tries to sit the way her mother taught her; back straight, legs crossed at the ankles. But the chair is too well padded, and she simply sinks into it. “I’m worried about them, Beatrice,” she says, giving up on decorum and elegance. “I’m worried about forcing them to carry on in this place, about making them face again and again what happened to them, about—”
“You don’t plan to offer them alternative accommodations?”
“No, no, I do. Of course I do. But those who stay… I’m worried about them.”
Beatrice is quiet for a moment. She’s steepled her fingers and momentarily hides her expression behind them. But then she lowers them, spreads them out on the desk in a manner that, to Elle, suggests openness and compassion, and Christ on a bloody bike, how is this woman so effortless at the very things Elle’s had to work at all her life?
“You know what I used to do for a living,” Beatrice said. Elle nods. “And you know that I was far from the only one in… that line of work. Well, we all looked out for each other. Those of us who worked on the street, and others in allied trades.” Elle has to smile, just a little, at Beatrice’s sanitising language. For her benefit, no doubt. “Sometimes, girls would disappear. Oh, mostly we knew about it, we expected it, and they stayed at least nominally in touch. They’d found alternative work, or they were getting too old, or they were moving in with someone else, or they were just fed up to the back teeth with the whole thing. But sometimes there’d be a girl who didn’t know her limits. Or she did, but she had no alternatives. And, together, we’d watch her ever so carefully. We couldn’t always help, but when we could, we did.”
“What are you saying, Beatrice?”
“I know when life is getting to be too much for someone, Elle,” Bea says. “I won’t let any of these girls fall apart. I won’t let any of them reach their limit. And with the budget you have so generously granted us…” She trails off, watching Elle expectantly, and Elle nods. Even after two years, Bea still sometimes acts as if Elle is about to take everything away. “We can afford time off. Alternative work. Alternative accommodation. I’ll take care of them, Elle. Don’t worry about that.”
“What happened to the other girls?” Elle asks. “Back then. The ones you couldn’t help.”
Bea breathes deeply. “Sometimes girls vanished. And sometimes, when that happened, they’d come back after a few days or weeks. And if they didn’t, well, we’d ask around, and if no-one had heard anything, we’d pick flowers and we’d make cards and we’d find somewhere to leave them, somewhere that mattered to her. I always thought that if the girl came back, if she found them, she’d know that she was loved. That she was missed. But, always, the flowers were cleared away and the cards destroyed and the girl would never come back. But it helped. It let us move on.”
Elle wants to hold her hand. Wants to grab her and embrace her. Wants to apologise for every damned thing the world has dumped on her head. Including Elle and her demands and her idiotic plans, plans they are now both trapped in.
“I’m going to have one of your men bring us up some tea,” Bea says briskly. “And perhaps something stronger.”
“Beatrice, I’m—”
“Don’t say you’re sorry, Elladine. I can’t bear it when the rich apologise to me.”
Elle nods and stays silent, and Beatrice calls up one of the Peckinville men and orders him — in tones Elle was trained in as a child and has since studiously attempted to erase — to bring up a pot of tea, a bottle of anything suitably alcoholic, and something to bloody well eat.
“And some glasses,” Elle adds. The kitchen here really is bare.
“And some glasses,” Bea finishes, and hangs up without so much as a thank you. She catches Elle’s frown and says, “What? I assume they are paid well enough that a slightly curt transsexual isn’t going to upset them.”
Elle shakes her head. She hates it when Bea uses that word, and she suspects it’s why Bea insists on using it. They’ve had debates, over dinner, after sex, about whether the newer term, trans woman, even applies to Bea. She’s said many times that she prefers the old one: her sex, she says, was indeed trans’d. It seems to her like it describes a process, which is something she can more comfortably identify with than a term which seems to Beatrice like it makes a statement about her inner life.
Beatrice knows everything about herself, and Elle is, as ever, consumed with envy, for she has only guesses, or things she suspects are true and things she wishes weren’t.
“How long are your men going to be hanging around?” Bea asks.
“As long as it takes.”
“To refurbish the Hall?”
“As long as it takes for me to be certain you’re safe,” Elle says.
“You think Dorothy might return with a howitzer?” Bea replies, raising an eyebrow, and Elle sighs. It’s an argument they’ve had more than once.
“I think someone else might return in her stead. I know, I know, you think they won’t try anything just because the university’s practically swallowed the Dorley grounds and there are people everywhere nowadays. But they’re not scared of me. Not yet.”
“But Elle, you are terrifying,” Bea says drily.
“Maybe one day. I have the name, the money, the connections, but, Beatrice, right now I’m bloody vulnerable. All those old men, even the ones who are right now feeling hoodwinked by Smyth-Farrow and Marsden, they’ve been in their seats of power for decades. And so has Smyth-Farrow. They might not trust him any more, but they have no reason to trust me, either, and, for now, his name is bigger than mine.”
“I thought Lambert was one of the biggest names in the country.”
“It is. I’m not.”
“Hence the takeover,” Bea says tiredly. They’ve talked about this part before, as well. Over and over. “Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she adds, gesturing idly, “I’m sold. I think your rehabilitation idea is… well, it’s worth a shot, anyway. And goodness knows I’m living proof that there’s life after castration. I’m just annoyed we have to continue humouring Dorothy.”
“It’s a transfer of power,” Elle says. “Very smooth and businesslike. Oh, old Smyth-Farrow thinks he’s outmanoeuvred us, and that’s what he’ll tell everyone, but I’ll be spinning my own stories. And no-one ever liked Marsden all that much, so it’s my word against his. And I control the Hall,” she adds with satisfaction. “That buys me a greater in than my surname does, believe me, Beatrice. People who don’t currently trust me will let me into their lives, and I promise you that when I enter, I’ll be holding a fucking knife.”
“How will they trust you?” Beatrice asks. “You won’t be supplying them with girls any more.”
“Well, I wanted to talk to you about that—” Elle starts, but she’s interrupted by a knock on the door. Beatrice shouts for whomever it is to enter, and he does: it’s one of the Peckinville men, carrying what looks like one of the trays from the canteen back at the facility. He nods to both of them, sets it down on the table and starts putting out plates of sandwiches and a pair of mugs. There’s also, Elle realises with a sigh of relief, a bottle of brandy that doesn’t look like it came from the local Tesco, and some glass tumblers.
“Ah, no,” Bea says, holding a hand over the mug the Peckinville man was about to pour for her. “Just a second.” She stands and strides across the room to her luggage, rummages around for a second and produces a chipped white mug, which she quickly rinses. With some ceremony, she places it on the table, pushes the other mug aside, and nods to the man, who fills it, adds milk, and then serves Elle before silently exiting.
“Our crockery not good enough for you?” Elle asks with a smile. Bea says nothing, merely turns the mug around so the nonsense words printed on the front are now facing away from her. “‘A Round Tuit’?” Elle reads. “Very nice. What does it mean?”
Bea turns the mug around again, takes a long sip from it, and then replaces it with satisfaction in the middle of her purloined desk.
“It means,” Beatrice says, “that I’m here to stay.”
2019 December 30
Monday
What a day. At least the potential disasters that have thus far unfolded have had, seemingly, reasonably positive conclusions. William Schroeder’s little boxing session with Tabitha and Monica went well, Bethany handled group better than any of them expected — with the possible and probable exception of Steph and Maria herself, who will likely be very smug about it later on — and one of Melissa Haverford’s two remaining friends is proving receptive enough to the benefits of the programme that between her and the rest of them, they ought to be able to peer-pressure Ms Gray-Wallace into keeping the secret. And Ms Gray-Wallace herself has already shown remorse for her outburst at young Pippa, so even that has yielded something.
Bea sighs and contemplates her liquor cabinet. It won’t surprise her if one of her charges decides she invited Pippa up to her office in the hope of just such an outcome. They seem so ready to believe the worst of her sometimes. She’d be more disappointed in them if she wasn’t painfully aware that there have been times when she’s deserved such scepticism. Especially in the early years, when she and Elle were still working to appease people Beatrice would sooner have sliced open than exchanged pleasantries with.
Elle. A woman with perfect timing, always picking her crises to interrupt other crises. Still, if she’s coming here, at least Bea will have someone to drink with who won’t make her drink a glass of water for every two shots, nor force her to eat an energy bar or a bowl of Weetabix at the end of the night.
At least she has a moment to herself. A moment to prepare. She doesn’t bother to check her reflection — this is not one of those visits; Elle’s coming to her — and instead she puts an old favourite on the Bluetooth speaker. She closes her eyes, and Toni Braxton’s voice animates her lips.
I shall never breathe again.
She doesn’t quite reach the end of the song before Elle knocks. Easy to tell it’s her: for someone of such bearing and such breeding, the woman knocks as if she’s afraid to be heard.
She rises from her chair, silencing the music and calling, “Enter,” as she stands. And there’s Elle, still young-looking despite her forty years but wearing them a little harder than usual. She’s tried to cover how tired she is, but it’s just possible there’s not enough concealer in the world.
“Beatrice,” she says, sounding as exhausted as she looks. She shuts the door behind her with a kick and meets Bea with two steps, sinking briefly into her arms before stiffening, straightening, and smiling. It’s a false smile, and they both know it.
“Elle,” Bea says. “Would you like something to—”
“I’ll get straight to the point,” Elle says, sitting in one of the chairs laid out for Rachel and Amy and gesturing for Bea to sit, also. “We have a big fucking problem, Bea. Remember our lost soldiers? And our lost… prize?” Bea nods: Declan never made it out of the halfway house, and neither did his escorts. “Well, for a while we were working on the theory that one of the soldiers was a traitor. Sold secrets, got everyone involved killed.”
“That’s not so?” Bea asks.
“Goodness fucking gracious, I wish it were so. No, he wasn’t a traitor; he was an infiltrator. He joined up with Peckinville straight from another outfit. Silver River, Beatrice. Silver fucking River.”
Shit. “What does this mean?”
Elle pushes herself up from her chair, and rummages through Bea’s liquor cabinet. After inspecting the necks of several bottles, she selects two, and returns to her seat, placing one on the desk for Bea and roughly uncapping the other.
“It means,” she says, “that our little cold war’s heating up. I want to bring the trucks in, Bea. Tomorrow. We’re going to set up in the woods, out by the basement two exit.”
“Trucks?”
“By the fifth of January I want to have a proper installation out in the woods, Bea. Portacabins for Peckinville men. What you might call a small barracks. But I won’t force this on you; I know how delicate things can be here.”
Indeed she does; she had to be almost forced to stay away after those difficult first few years.
“Silver River being actively involved is a bad sign, Beatrice. They’re connected to the Smyth-Farrows. The kids, if you can still call them that. Middle-aged and looking for a legacy, no doubt. They’ve got church money. American church money. And it’d be bad enough if it was just them, but they’ve made a friend, and you’ll bloody love who it is. Dorothy Marsden. Dorothy bloody Marsden’s gotten herself installed at Stenordale, she’s got a Silver River protection detail, she’s having meetings with the Smyth-Farrows, and, Beatrice—” Elle leans forward over the desk, “—she’s got Declan.”
Impossible to know what to say to that. Impossible to know what to think. Grandmother’s got Declan. She’s got military contacts. She’s living in Smyth-Farrow’s old manor house.
“All of it,” Elle continues, “the missing soldiers, losing Declan, the rumours I’ve been hearing… It’s all her. Her and the bloody blasted Smyth-fucking-Farrows.”
Jesus Christ.
“Well, Bea?” Elle asks. “Do I have your permission? To bring in my men? To protect the Hall? To protect you?”
Bea’s throat is dry, too dry to speak, so with stiff hands she uncaps the bottle of gin Elle left for her and takes a swig, feeling the burn as it goes down. She swallows, trying to find her voice, but she still can’t find it in her to speak, feels as if her throat might catch fire if she tries.
So she nods, and Elle makes the call.
Chapter 35: Wilderness
Notes:
Content warnings: sexual assault, height dysphora, slurs
Chapter Text
2020 January 2
Thursday
Christine could watch Paige for hours. It barely matters where they are or what they’re doing; Paige could be brushing her teeth or writing an essay or preparing breakfast — she cracks eggs with the practised skill she brings to every endeavour; Christine once tried to replicate her method and ended up with shell in her hair — and Christine will happily lose herself in the sight. And lose herself in memories, too: Paige dressing, delicately buttoning a blouse, lacing a boot can so easily become Paige rising, flushed and spent, presenting slick fingers to Christine’s mouth.
This morning, Paige is addressing the assembled second years, all crammed into the second-floor kitchen, and Christine’s sat with Donna and Jodie, sipping tea and indulging herself. Paige meets her eye, catches her watching her, and as the blush warms Christine’s cheeks, Donna leans over and whispers, “You are so smitten.”
“I know,” Christine replies, sighing.
Paige winks at her.
Ordinarily it’d be far too early in the day to be organising so many people — too early in the year, probably — but today’s trip out has been Paige’s passion project for almost a month, and her enthusiasm has spread to almost everyone she’s invited along. Christine’s still not sure how Paige got Aunt Bea to agree to a roller-skating outing so readily, but she’s grateful that, so far, everything seems to be going according to plan. All the second years are coming, and Donna’s providing a sponsor presence, and thus Jodie’s coming along, too. And, God, Christine’s glad of that: she hasn’t spent nearly enough time with Jodie, and she’s all too aware that it’s not too long before they all start moving on to the next stage of their lives. She wanted Julia and Yasmin to come as well, but Yasmin’s on call today and Julia’s at the office, which information Julia supplied yesterday with, Paige said, what appeared to be genuine regret.
Christine’s talked them both into a night on the town next week to make up for it. Julia consented to come more readily than Christine expected, but it’s possible Yasmin’s been working on her, extolling the virtues of leaving one’s room every so often. Which is presumably why Yasmin’s not whiling away her on-call hours in her room; she’s here instead, leaning against the far wall and backing up Paige’s assertions to the second years with the odd supportive or explanatory remark.
Yes, fine, Yasmin’s also here because Christine knocked on her door before and promised coffee and toast if she came and hung out with the second years for a bit.
Does Christine want everyone to get along? To love each other? To miss each other when eventually they have to part ways? Damn fucking right she does! Indira might call it ‘sponsor behaviour’ and Paige might gently point out that she’s attempting the same kind of social engineering that brought her out of her shell mere months ago, but Christine’s just brazening through it, celebrating her successes wherever she finds them. Call her soppy, she doesn’t care.
Paige does call her soppy, but she kisses her before and after, so it’s fine.
“You’re adorable, you know,” Donna says. “Both of you.”
“One of us more than the other, I think,” Christine says, still watching Paige.
Jodie, sitting on the other side of Donna and industriously putting away a full set of egg and soldiers, giggles. “Things like that just make you more adorable,” she says.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Donna says absently.
Jodie swallows, apologetically covering her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. Christine’s still adorable, though.”
“And don’t get egg on your goth gloves,” Donna adds, reaching over and tugging at them.
Christine feels the heat of another gaze and looks up to meet Yasmin’s eyes; the girl is smirking at her. “Are you going to call me adorable, too?” Christine asks, scowling, and Yasmin reaches up with her free hand and zippers her lips.
On second thought, maybe Christine should move out right now and live alone forever.
The lecture’s winding up. Paige, impressively, managed to keep it mostly on topic — rules for outings for non-graduates — despite the girls pestering her for makeup advice and passing tips. She’s promised to cover all that at a later date, against her better judgement; Paige is being dragged into the daily workings of Dorley just the way Christine did, except that Paige volunteered to take the second years out, promising to keep an eye on them and ensure their conformity to the Hall’s standards for those who have not yet graduated. Christine’s involvement, as with everything else, was assumed.
Paige directs the second years’ attention to the clothing rack that’s been lurking against the far wall of the kitchen all morning.
In theory, the second years have access to all the clothes they could possibly want. But because they’re still not even halfway through the intended length of the programme, and since the only ones among them to have actually been outside are Bex — whose private nickname appears to have spread to the entire Hall; Paige has joked: only to those with whom she has been intimate, i.e. the entire Hall — and Faye, and since that was strictly by order and a one-time deal, no-one’s thought to buy any of them suitable winter coats. Ordinarily they’d get some out of storage, but there’s been an unusually high number of graduates visiting recently, and the winter coat rack, like the Hall’s supplies of umbrellas and progesterone, has been extensively predated upon.
So Paige is providing outerwear from her own supply.
“I’m never taking this off,” Aisha says, posing in the morning light. She’s found a black trench coat with red accents, and Christine’s got to admit that it looks amazing on her. “I’m sorry, Paige. This is mine now.”
“Go ahead,” Paige says, “keep it. It’s just a knockoff.”
“Um,” Anne asks, “of what?”
“Of whom,” Fiona corrects, in her soft, husky voice. “It’ll be designer. A specific designer.”
That’s another thing to add to this morning’s small list of successes, then: Anne and Fiona, the two quietest second years, rarely speak up around others. Christine knows little about them except that they’re shy, and a couple. She finds herself wondering how they kiss: Anne’s one of the shortest Dorley girls Christine’s ever seen, shorter even than Abby, and Fiona’s over six feet. Perhaps there’s a stepladder involved.
“Alexander McQueen,” Paige says absently. “There should be a belt for it somewhere.”
Someone inside the coat rack shouts, “I’ve got it!” and after a moment, Mia emerges, still wearing the hoodie Paige has been trying all morning to get her to swap for something nice, and holding out the belt. She and Aisha exchange kisses.
“If you want adorable,” Christine says to Donna, elbowing her gently for emphasis and flicking her pointing finger between the three second-year couples, “there you are.”
Donna pretends to consider it. “Nope,” she says. “You’re still the most adorable.”
“Damn.”
“You love it.”
Christine shrugs, affecting indifference. She sometimes wonders what her old self would have made of interactions like this, but over the years has concluded that, as much as he might have balked at the specifics, he’d probably be most distracted by the realisation that anyone was talking to him with any affection at all. Forget the skirts; people like him?
The thought makes her smile.
“I knew it,” Donna says. “You love it.”
“Guilty.”
“Okay,” Donna says, standing to address the whole room. “You lot finish picking out your coats and get your shoes on. Jodie and I will bring the minibus round to the car park by the lake.”
“You can drive a minibus?” Mia asks.
“Mia, sweetheart,” Donna says as she leaves, “I contain multitudes. I can drive many things.”
“She’s not forklift certified,” Jodie adds, following her.
From out in the corridor, Donna yells, “Not yet!”
With the meeting broken up, there’s one of those moments of indecision Christine’s come to think of as institutional — do we make small talk? do we just… leave? someone show us what to do! — and then Paige claps her hands and starts gathering up second years, making sure each one has a coat and a specially issued phone, and leads them out into the corridor. As she goes, she reiterates the penalties for running off in a rote, resigned sort of way; no-one seriously believes any of the second years is going to try anything.
And then it’s just Christine and Yasmin, and a few seconds of silence that feel like they’re about to become awkward. Christine tries to think of something to say, but Yasmin beats her to it.
“I’m going to miss this place,” she says, pushing away from the wall and walking over to rinse her coffee mug in the sink. She drops it onto the drying rack, text facing outwards, and Christine recognises it as one of Edy’s (very few) contributions to the collection:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
I just wish she’d set me free
“Oh?” Christine says. It’s not something she ever expected Yasmin to say, even after she softened on the rest of them.
Yasmin turns to face her again and leans on the edge of the kitchen counter, supporting herself with her hands in a posture so incredibly Paige-like that Christine momentarily overproduces saliva.
“Yeah,” she says. “There’s a sort of—” she quirks her lips as she thinks, “—a girl scouts misbehaving vibe these days. Second years running around, making little private jokes to each other. It’s sweet.” She frowns. “Strange that they seem so young, when…”
“When they’re basically our age?” Christine finishes when Yasmin doesn’t seem to be able to. Yasmin nods. “I know. I wonder if we were the same. I mean,” she adds quickly, “not like they are, not exactly, but I bet Pippa’s lot thought we were a bunch of moody adolescents.”
“And we think our follow-up year’s a bunch of giggly schoolchildren,” Yasmin says, nodding. She taps her nails on the underside of the countertop. “Must be something about going through puberty again. It gets weird the second time around.”
“You’re coming next week, right?” Christine says. She doesn’t want to be so blunt, but she’s got to be in the minibus in about a minute, and something about the look on Yasmin’s face has her doubting everything.
“I’m coming,” Yasmin says. “What’s up? Why so nervous?”
“I— I don’t know.”
Yasmin walks quickly over, lays a hand on Christine’s. “I do,” she says. “You’re going to miss this place, too.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to get to leave,” Christine says gloomily. “Every time I turn around I get another job, or there’s another crisis that isn’t being properly handled. Did you hear about bloody Rachel Gray-Wallace?”
“I heard. I’m not worried. She’s too tied to Shahida and Melissa to make a public fuss. But I didn’t mean you’ll miss the Hall, not really. I mean you’ll miss how it is now, with all of us here. You’re a natural mother hen, Christine. You want to gather everyone you love in one place and keep them all safe.”
“I’m not—”
“It’s true,” Yasmin says. “You are. It’s part of why everyone loves you back. You know that, right?” Christine stares up at her, and Yasmin leans down, kisses her hair where it parts. “Don’t worry. We’ll all stay in touch. Even Julia.”
“You really mean it?” It comes out with all the yearning Christine can’t suppress.
Yasmin taps her lightly on the head, right where she kissed her. “I mean it,” she says.
* * *
Wouldn’t it be clean if he were fixed? Wouldn’t it be convenient? If Tabitha had reached inside him and found the frayed edge of string that unravelled the knot that tied closed the door that kept trapped the girl he’d always dreamed of being? Wouldn’t that be fucking lovely?
Slam. The punching bag recoils from him, swings in an arc, comes back to him. He steps away from it, keeps on his toes, reaches out to steady it, prepares it for another strike.
He remembers the fantasy of it, clear as day. Because how could he not? It’s the dream that was the death of him — the death of her — and it plagued him for weeks, hollowed him, made him rattle with empty horror at the desires it uncovered. The impossible, dreadful dream.
Slam. This time he hits it twice, once with each hand, and the dull thud of his gloves on the canvas is a memory, too, one more acceptable to someone of his size, of his shape, of his history.
Their house always had thin walls, and it was the laughter from the bedroom of the place next door that did it. He sat there on his parents’ bed, in his mother’s dress, in the wreckage of himself, his dick in his hand, and everything he could have been died at that moment. And they didn’t even know about him. Couldn’t know. Probably were just watching the telly or something.
He died anyway. Because he’d already seen himself, had thoroughly and dreadfully witnessed himself, and he knew that if he ever did this again, if he ever went further, if he ever gave in, then laughter would be the most generous reaction he could expect to inspire.
Fucking laughter saved him. That’s the worst part. He was already half out of his mother’s dress when he heard his dad’s car. Gave him time to cover his tracks. The laughter saved him and ended him, all at once.
Almost caught. Maybe if there’d been consequences, things would be different.
Yeah.
No.
Maybe they’d be exactly the fucking same.
Slam. Kill this fucking punching bag, honestly. Slam. Rip it to shreds. Slam. Take it apart, spill the sand from its base, tear off the canvas cover. Slam. Because we’re all reducible to our parts, aren’t we? And we know what yours are, don’t we, Will? Six foot three of broad bone and a face not even a mother could love, not after the shit you did. Ingredients for a violent, worthless, man.
Slam.
What did Tab say? Months ago? That Topher sighed with relief when he found out his brother was missing. And of course he did. No need to worry any more that William fucking Schroeder might burst through the door and batter him again.
This body.
This mind.
This man.
Good for nothing but violence.
Slam.
“Will!”
He hadn’t realised how numb he’d become, how unaware, how absent, until hot hands grab him, hold him, resist his pushback, and now Tabitha’s here, keeping him in place, and for a brief, coherent second he worries that he hit her, that he hurt her, that he did it again, but there’s nothing but concern in her eyes, and that’s enough to rip away the last of his energy. He stumbles and she takes his weight, and as his head rests against her bare shoulder he realises that at some point back there, somewhere inside the memories and the chill that has him from head to toe, he started crying.
* * *
Okay, so, yeah: roller-skating’s easy. You push out with your feet, you let the friction guide you, you keep yourself steady, and if you’re feeling especially flash, you go up on one foot to impress the girls.
The other girls.
Faye laughs to herself. She’s not slipping up so much on that any more, not since she saw a pretty girl in a pretty dress in the mirror and realised that her first thoughts were no longer about whether she could possibly see herself in that girl, but whether Bex could see herself inside that girl.
She laughs again. The other girls tell her she has a filthy mind. That’s fine.
She attempts a pirouette, a spin, a glide. When she hears clapping from one of the tables at the edge of the rink, she bows.
“Bravo!” Christine yells.
“Stupendous!” Jodie adds.
Vicky just wolf whistles.
“Very flash!” says the last girl. A new one, not from Dorley, but Faye’s seen her around, exchanged the odd word with her. Still has trouble remembering her name. Lorna? Lorna. Dating Vicky, who landed on her butt twenty minutes ago and decamped to join her girlfriend and the other third years at their table for a sympathetic kiss and a Pepsi Max.
Normally Faye would find it difficult to be around an outsider, but Lorna’s different. And she sort of hates to admit it, but Lorna’s different because she’s trans. And that shouldn’t matter — she still remembers Marshall, the trans boy at her school, whenever she wants to feel especially guilty — but it does, and it feels unworthy of her to group Lorna apart for that reason alone. It’s the sort of thing Bex would gently scold her about, midway through their first year, when Faye was trying desperately to unlearn all the things she hadn’t even realised she’d been taught: trans women are women, idiot.
But it makes her feel safe around her. The idea that someone who doesn’t share her history — the history which, in broad strokes, she shares with everyone in the Hall — nevertheless still can relate to it, understand it, empathise with it… It’s exciting. It’s comforting. Who better to understand such a metamorphosis?
The cis girls, though. None of them are here today, thankfully, but they’ve been showing up a lot lately. And when it was just Shahida, well, that was okay. Shahida’s kind, and curious in a gentle kind of way.
Rachel, though, she’s scary. She tried to grill Bex the other night. Had to be led away by Shahida and Melissa.
Bex had nightmares.
Faye shakes her head. She can think about that shit any time; she shouldn’t be wasting her time on it here, now. Not when she could be doing this!
There’s more applause when she slows to a stop. She decides to go bask in it.
“Hey, sporty girl,” Christine says, as Faye rolls up to the table. They’re not technically supposed to go above a certain speed outside the rink, but they’ve booked the whole place out, so no-one’s in danger of accidentally rolling over someone’s five-year-old.
“Hey, lazy girl,” Faye replies, and worries instantly that she’s being too familiar. Christine’s a third year! And more than that, she’s—
“Rude,” Christine comments, and her grin is as reassuring as the rude gesture that accompanies it.
Faye giggles. And wow, Christine looks great today. Obviously she’ll claim that Paige dressed her, that all accolades should go to the tall, fashionable one, but with her blue and white skater dress and her hair up she looks almost as beautiful as she did that first day, when they first got to know each other, when Christine and Paige wore their butterfly dresses and outshined every other woman in the building.
Every woman other than Bex, obviously.
And Christine’s not the only beautiful woman at the table. Jodie’s made herself up pale and dramatic in a manner that wouldn’t suit Faye but which she kind of wants to see on Mia, especially with those fishnet gloves; Vicky’s classically beautiful even in the jeans and loose shirt combo she has on; and Lorna, rolling back from the concessions stand, is gorgeous, too, in a way Faye knows she’s insecure about, but which reminds her of how Bex looked towards the end of the first year. To say nothing of Donna and Paige herself, both indulging themselves on the rink behind her.
Suddenly very aware of herself, Faye pulls at the hem of her skirt, grateful that Paige made all the girls wear lycra shorts underneath; protecting the second years’ modesty is, Paige said, a matter of decency and operational security. How can she just stand here in front of such incredible women!
She reminds herself, as she still sometimes has to, that none of her elders intend to judge her, and tries to remember what she was going to say, before she got sidetracked by beauty and insecurity.
“You’re not skating,” she says.
“I put on the boots,” Christine says, poking a leg out from under the table and wiggling a skate at Faye, “and had a sudden crisis of stability. And then she—” she points at Vicky, “—bruised her arse, and that doubled my desire to stay still and watch the rest of you.” Her gaze flickers away from them for a second. “Well, mainly watch Paige.”
“You’ve got to try it,” Faye says. It’s a bit of a whine, but she’s been working on her voice and she’s pleased with the registers she can reach; this one has a touch of the offended teenage girl about it, and it’s fun to play with.
Christine pouts at her. “No.”
“Tinaaaa,” she says, borrowing Vicky’s nickname for her.
“No.”
“You won’t fall. I’ll keep you steady.”
“I’ll fall,” Christine says, as Bex rolls up and hooks an arm around Faye’s waist. “I’ll find a way.”
“What’s up?” Bex asks.
“Your bloody girlfriend’s trying to embarrass me,” Christine says.
“Bex,” Faye whines, “she won’t skate.”
With a giggle, Bex says, “Oh, I think we can solve that.”
It takes the two of them, and the tacit approval of everyone else nearby — Paige rolling up to observe but cruelly, in Christine’s very loudly expressed view, remaining neutral — but she and Bex manage eventually to get Christine up on her skates and rolling slowly towards the rink.
“No,” Christine says again, and there’s less amusement there now.
“It’s okay,” Faye says. “Just concentrate on keeping yourself steady. Bex and I will steer.”
“You’re in good hands,” Bex echoes.
“No?” Christine whispers, but she doesn’t struggle.
Together, the three of them lace a gentle figure of eight around the rink. Faye and Bex take the weight of the curves, allowing Christine to lean on them. The other second years skate around them and past them, occasionally expressing how impressed they are with Christine’s progress, which Christine takes, every time, as a great personal insult. After four complete circuits they let her go, and it’s with a resigned laugh that Faye and Bex watch Christine wobble gracelessly to the edge of the rink, to be rescued by Paige and escorted back to the table, where what looks like a bowl of ice cream awaits her, along with much comforting.
She and Bex return to their figure-of-eight pattern, and trace a faster and more tightly curved path around the rink together than they did with Christine.
Hand in hand.
God, this feels good.
They’ve been talking a lot amongst themselves about their futures, about their lives. It was some of the first advice Faye got from Christine, and she’s spread it around. And Christine was right: most of them were, that night and in the weeks after, still struggling in one way or another, and looking to the future was a great help. Faye asked for, and Indira provided, a list of Dorley girls who’d gone on to have careers away from the Hall, and though it was heavily redacted it was sufficient. Dozens of women — and not-women, and kinda-women — living their lives, returning to Dorley Hall only for the occasional indulgent banquet, to see old friends, and to steal coats, umbrellas and progesterone.
There’s life as a girl, should you have the courage to reach for it.
But she and Bex were still the only two of their intake to leave the Hall, and just taking their first steps past the threshold had been nerve-wracking and exhausting. Not exactly a knock to her confidence, since they weren’t exposed — not as Dorley girls, not as trans girls — but not a salve for it, either.
This, however.
She’s still holding Bex’s hand, so she raises it above their heads and twirls, lets her skirt billow out, and shrieks with the sheer joy of it. She’s out in the world. She’s free. And Bex and their friends and their sometime lovers are all with her.
“Ew,” Bex says, holding her hand to her mouth in mock disgust and momentarily bursting Faye’s bubble. But Bex just nods, indicating something behind them, and with a hand on her hips, turns Faye around.
They’ve booked out the rink but not the whole entertainment complex, and there’s a walkway on the other side of the glass. People have been going back and forth along there all morning, from the cinema to the bowling alley and the food court, and right now there’s a group of boys, maybe Faye’s age, maybe a bit younger, pressed up against the glass, watching them skate. Leering.
One of them catches Faye’s eye and makes the wanking-off gesture with his hand, and for a moment Faye’s caught up in the strangest feeling of relief: that awful little shit could have been her. That awful little shit once was her. Staring at girls but walled off from them, able to exercise power only through his implied position, as a man, as the one who ought to have the power, but who is insecure enough in its possession to have to show it off.
Pathetic. Sort of tragic, really. He and his friends will never know how it feels to be free.
Bex still has a hand on her hip, so Faye takes it, spins her, holds her, dips her, and exchanges with her a long and luxurious kiss. With her free hand, she gives the watching boys the finger, and she’s delighted to see that Bex does, too, and they skate away, giggling, forgetting for now that there were ever boys in their lives, that they ever walked among them.
Faye’s never felt more complete.
* * *
“Tell me about it,” she said, so he did. And she kept her hands on him throughout, brushed his sweaty hair out of his face, unlaced his gloves and massaged his sore knuckles, and for his part he did his best not to yank his hands out of hers, for as much as he wanted to lock them behind his back, as much as he needed to turn away from her, he knew she wanted him to stay with her, to stay present. To stop hiding, in all the forms he’s found in which to hide.
He doesn’t worry he’ll hurt her. Not so much, not any more, not outside brief moments of fear. But it’s a matter of whether he deserves to be touched so gently, to be cared for, to be made into someone who matters with deft fingers and careful words. Because if there’s one thing that’s been coming for him in the middle of the night, over and over, wearing him out, staining his sheets with sweat and tears, bruising his flesh, it’s that if his brother could see Tabitha Forbes fussing over him, he’d pull her away, warn her, protect her.
“I feel stupid,” he mutters, because it’s better than admitting that when he looks into her eyes all he wants to do is tell her to run from him. “I get lost in it. And I should be better at this.”
“Who says?” she whispers. Touches his cheek with the back of a finger. “I don’t.”
A girl, dressed up, provoking him; that same girl accusing him, challenging him.
“Bethany’s better at this,” he says.
“Bethany is a little shit,” she says, sincere. It forces a half-smile out of him. She’s still holding him, pinching his palm. “And you know there are ways she has it easier.”
He nods. They’ve covered this. Endlessly. Because obvious truths just won’t fix themselves in his head, but lies need to be uttered only once to take up permanent residence.
So stupid.
She says it anyway. “You’ve spent your whole life thinking about this. Or finding ways to not think about it. For her, it’s an escape; for you, it’s a site of trauma. And, come on, look at her: being a strong, masculine man was never a viable shield for her. For you…”
He nods again. He almost made it work; whole months without succumbing to the desperate, gnawing need.
“I get it,” she continues. “I was as tall as you are now, and just as bulky. Being a certain way… it was just there. In front of me. A weapon, lying there, waiting for me to pick it up.”
“Not quite the same,” he says.
“Not quite, no,” she says, leaning against the wall and transferring her touch to his knee. “But it’s similar enough.”
Since he learned the truth, since he learned everything that Tabitha Forbes is and was, he’s wondered how she fared. She had his temper, she says, and his build, and even a close enough family life. But she’s Black and he’s white, and the weapon she describes has and will always carry harsher penalties for someone like her than someone like him.
He doesn’t bring it up with her any more, though. The one time he did, he spiralled, and she pulled him out of it, gently and with fond amusement. She doesn’t need him guilty, she said; she needs him better.
“Sorry,” he says anyway, and she pokes him.
“Stop that.”
The wall here’s warm. A few more degrees above ambient than Will expects from painted concrete. Tabby didn’t know why when he asked her; Monica said she thinks there’s a generator behind there, or the servers for the security room, or something. It doesn’t matter. They’ve moved their equipment out of the prep room — still, no-one will tell him what ‘prep’ means in this instance, though he has a few guesses — and into one of the rooms farther down the corridor. It’s smaller and has even more of the feel of an underground bunker to it, but it has the virtue of being semi-permanent. Monica and Tabby moved in a couple of benches, a couple of lockers, and put up a Hang in There, Baby! poster.
He asked about the poster, which seemed out of character, and was drily informed that, like everything else here, it’s another in-joke.
“I mean it,” she says after a little while. “Don’t compare yourself to Bethany. Or Steph, or Martin, or Raph, or anyone. Everyone’s different. Everyone has their own path.” She taps herself on the chest. “For example, I wouldn’t be hanging around in here with Ollie.”
He snorts. The man’s finally out of the cell again, but he’s locked in his room unless he’s being actively supervised, so the difference is moot. Harmony said they only moved him because the cell needed fumigating.
That’s another thing. He remembers his confused jealousy at the way the sponsors used to talk to Steph, how they made room for her, shared amused glances with her, treated her a little bit like one of them, even when she was still ostensibly hiding herself from everyone. And when he discovered Steph’s secret, the jealousy intensified: of course they relate to her and not him! Because she’s really a girl.
Tabby pulled it out of him one tearful night. People are mirrors, she told him after, and while they are both girls, Steph merely suppressed her true self, and did so quite poorly. He, on the other hand, had a good fucking go at killing his.
Go find yourself, go heal yourself, go love yourself, and see how the other women relate to you.
He frowns, suddenly curious. “What would you do with Ollie?” he asks.
She leans away from the wall for a moment, the better to look askance at him, and then settles back down with an amused hiss.
“I think there’s a point with every boy — or, at least, every boy who ends up here — where they decide on what they have to do, who they think they have to be to get along. I think, if he were mine, I’d look to finding who he was before that, before he made himself hard and stupid. Find the boy inside the man. Of course,” she adds, “that’s not Harmony’s approach. She’s trying to get the little fucker to stop justifying his bullshit first. I don’t know; maybe that’s the better way. For him.”
“What about me? And my bullshit?”
She laughs. “Yours is way twistier. But you’ve made a good start. I wouldn’t be sitting like this with October’s Will.”
“You’re not looking for the little boy in me?” he asks, unable to stop himself from pressing on it. The idea is distasteful.
“No, stupid. I’m looking for the little girl. The one you kept telling yourself wasn’t real. And—” she leans away from the wall again, this time to smile gently at him and squeeze his hand, “—she’s closer to the surface than you think. Sometimes I can almost see her.”
And that’s too much. He sits there in his stupid little shorts and his stupid sports bra and with his lengthening hair held back by a stupid fucking hair band that he looked at five times in the mirror when he put it on because he couldn’t believe how it looked, nestling in his hair, framing his face, and he fucking cries all over again. And she holds him and she comforts him and above all, she loves him, because she is, as she keeps insisting, his Sister.
* * *
Rachel should not have come into the office today. It’s the boredom that’s the worst. The endless hours. The second of January: not traditionally the day on which anything gets done. Not traditionally the day on which anyone of note comes in at all. And if it were last year — hell, if it were last month — she would have appreciated the quiet, been glad that she didn’t have to stick in her earbuds and blast rain sounds to drown out Davina’s endless chatter in the next cubicle, but Davina’s not here, and Rachel is, so here she sits in silence, staring at her phone.
Almost better to be here than at home, anyway. Things have been tense. She can’t tell Belinda why she’s angry, beyond that it has something to do with her old friends, because then she’ll want to do something about it, and that kind of catalyst Rachel could do without, especially since she’s struggling not to do something about it herself.
That fucking place. Dorley Hall. Where they take young men — boys, really — who have supposedly done terrible things, and… torture them. Confine them underground and control their diets and inject them with hormones and surgically modify them! And she’s tried to be generous, to accept the framing pressed on her by Melissa and Shahida and that boy-girl Paige, that they ultimately benefit from it, that they learn to appreciate the second chance, that they come to hate their former selves, but how can she?
There are fucking channels! Someone’s an unrepentant wife-beater, you report them! Someone’s got a pattern of sexual harassment, you report them! It’s the way things are done!
Oh yeah? she asks herself. And how often does that pan out, here in the real world?
She could call the police. Have them storm the place. Have them free the boys down there, the ones in what everyone insists euphemistically on calling ‘the basement’. And then…
And then what? They go free? She heard the other day about how some regional police department recently disposed of hundreds of rape kits that had never been tested. Hundreds of rapes, ignored. Hundreds of victims who retraumatised themselves for the police, for nothing. And she knows full well that ‘lesser’ crimes, mere beatings and assaults and other forms of violence against women, fare no better.
The solution to that is not torture!
Maybe it ought to be.
“Fuck,” she mutters to herself. That’s the worst thing about Dorley Hall: if she thinks too long about what the victims have allegedly done, she finds herself wondering if the ‘sponsors’ might have a fucking point.
She concentrates on what she knows: kidnapping, torture, mutilation. All crimes. All wrong. All despicable. And that’s not even considering the psychological manipulation! That woman Indira explained to her how it works, how a ‘sponsor’ forms a personal connection with a victim and gains their trust, manipulates them until they no longer think like a man, no longer act like a man, no longer want to be a man. Those aren’t Indira’s words, no; she couched it in what Rachel might have called ‘therapy-speak’, if said therapy was from another fucking world.
She spat it all back at her, of course. Pushed every button she could think of. And Indira, who maintained her calm the whole time, who seemed so bloody amused by the whole thing, had an answer: “We don’t gaslight them, dear. We do not aim to persuade them that the metaphorical light has or has not been dimmed or brightened. Quite the opposite: we encourage them to look clearly at the light for the first time in their lives.”
Glib. But Rachel had no response. Even now, days and a handful of hangovers later, she still doesn’t have one, except to go find a paper dictionary and look up words like abuse and manipulation and march back in there, pointing at the page and screaming until someone there pays attention.
She’d stewed for a bit and then switched topics, asked how she could possibly expect women to feel safe in a house packed with violent criminals, even rapists, and Indira had replied in her calm and steady fashion that none of her girls are rapists, and added sweetly that if Rachel ever implied such a thing again then she, Indira, would be rather put out.
In the silence that had followed, a woman at a nearby table sucked air through her teeth.
She stares at her phone.
Fucking Dorley Hall.
She can’t think of it without thinking about Melissa. About the way Shahida looked at her when she implied — no, be honest, Rachel; outright fucking stated — that if Melissa came from the Hall then maybe she isn’t the girl they all thought she was. And the way Shahida said that she wouldn’t tell Melissa what she said.
It’d break her heart.
She loves you.
And she thought better of you.
Hah! Thought better of her! There’s no way Melissa could possibly have thought that Rachel might react some other way to the revelation that Melissa’s womanhood had brutally been carved into her in the underground torture chambers of a multi-decade kidnapping operation! Make it make sense!
Fucking Amy had a go at her as well. Babbled some nonsense about how there are so many things she can’t know, so many things she doesn’t have the right to know, that all she can do is ask the girls what they think about themselves and accept the answer. And so Rachel did, and every girl’s answer was a variation on the same theme: “I needed help, and although this wasn’t the help I expected, it worked out just fine.” As if every boy-girl ‘graduate’ sat down and rehearsed their own unique cult-initiation vows, just in case some pushy outsider comes along and demands to hear them.
Amy didn’t come to Belinda’s New Year’s party. First one she’s missed in a long time. Rachel’s never seen her so angry.
She stares at her phone.
She can’t call the police. She can’t do that to—
To whom? To Melissa? Does she even know her? Does Melissa even exist, or is she a construct, a creation of her ‘sponsor’? Did they replace the sweet boy Rachel knew? Did they, effectively, kill him?
So what about Shahida, then? You want to throw her into the arms of the police?
Fuck.
She needs to talk to someone. And she needs to go back to Dorley Hall. To understand. To see if there’s anything there to understand.
Because right now it looks like a hundred counts of kidnapping, torture, and many other things besides. And that’s something she’s honour-bound to see destroyed.
* * *
There’s a rhythm to life at Stenordale Manor, and Trevor has, to his reluctance, settled into it. He wakes, he washes, he dresses. He does his makeup. He fucking disappears while he pretties himself up — dissociation, that’s what Frankie called it; Valérie hit her and told her to stop reading books — but he gets through it. And then all that’s left is to complete the day’s work. Cooking, cleaning, organising. Not so different from his busier days at Peckinville, really, though at the PMC he mostly didn’t want to rip himself apart.
Val said today that he’s lucky, that if this were the Stenordale of thirty years ago he’d be required to perform more intimate services. Trevor contested that luck, yelled at her that the Smyth-Farrow siblings still lurk in his future, and she slapped him. Told him she did him the favour of euphemising things she was forced vividly to experience. Told him to go whine to the unmarked graves of her sisters about a future that has yet to arrive.
He’s still not sure if that was a performance for the cameras or if she really was that pissed off with him, but they haven’t spoken since, and he carried out the remainder of his duties alongside her — cleaning up after dinner — in silence, before retiring to his room.
His room. Just a place where he goes to hide his head under the fucking pillow. It was Declan’s before it was his, though there’s no trace of the man’s personality. It makes sense: from what Frankie’s told him, Declan was practically catatonic through the early days of his tenure here, which strikes Trevor as probably the most sensible possible response to getting chopped up the way they both did, but which isn’t a state conducive to home decorating.
Fucking Declan. He’s lost, absolutely and completely. He’s sunk further into the Dina role every time Trevor sees him; at dinner tonight he was actually smiling when Jake addressed him, though Trevor also saw the flinches, the wariness, and the occasional flash of pure dread. Sometimes he wants to reach out and shake him, to demand to know why he’s given in, but he knows why: if he had to suffer the attention of Jake, all day every day, he’d probably have given in by now. Why not become what they want, if it hurts less?
Absurd to think, despite the drastic modifications to his body, that he’s gotten off easy, whether he compares himself to Declan, to Valérie, or to the many others who have passed through this place on their way to an early death.
He can see into the quad from the window here. All the rooms on this corridor can. Housing Val here was probably old Smyth-Farrow senior’s idea of a cruel joke. Sometimes when she’s left her door open a crack, he can see her leaning on the windowsill, looking out. He hasn’t dared ask her about it.
Fuck. She really was mad at him, wasn’t she?
He needs to apologise.
But he looks like crap. He’s been working all day and he hasn’t refreshed his makeup. And while he loathes the new face he’s been given, Valérie is noticeably pleased when he makes the effort, so he stretches and reaches for the wipes on his bedside table.
He doesn’t get the opportunity to finish. He’s half done cleaning his face when the door slams open. He doesn’t see it happening, is lost in thought about what he wants to say to Valérie, so it’s the noise of it that alerts him, startles him, pushes his heart into his mouth, and when he looks up he drops the hand mirror and plunges his hands into the mattress and plants his feet harder against the floor.
Jake’s drunk. It’s obvious from the start. He stands like a drunk man, legs splayed, hands lacking purchase. His mouth is locked in the sneer of the inebriated, his bloodshot eyes take in the room unsteadily and his rough cheeks are repulsively reddened.
“Theresa,” he says, struggling with it.
There’s a window of time in which Trevor could, feasibly, dart around him, get out, run away down the corridor, hide from him in the recesses of the manor, but while the man is drunk, he’s also big enough to fill most of the doorway, and trying to escape might make what’s coming next all the worse.
Because Trevor knows what’s coming next. There’s no other reason to be here. A stray, violent thought escapes: Isn’t that what Declan is for?
“It’s after hours,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady, trying to keep his whole fucking self steady. He thinks he might rip the sheets from how hard he’s pulling on them, anchoring himself with his grip.
“Yeah,” Jake grunts. “Yeah, I s’pose it is.”
“So go to bed,” Trevor says, raising his voice. If he has to face this, maybe he doesn’t have to do so alone. Maybe Valérie can help. Or get help. Or—
Jake scolds him with a raised finger. “Ah-ah-ah! I’ve locked her in. Your little friend, Vincent. She can’t help you. And Frankie? That soft-touch cunt? She can’t help you either. She’s sleeping half a building away. Too old for this work. Too old and too soft.”
The man’s still slovenly propped up by the doorjamb, and for a moment Trevor hopes against motherfucking hope that he stays there, that he’s just come to scare him, that he knows he can’t do anything to mark the Smyth-Farrows’ precious prize, but it’s clear Jake’s too drunk to care, too drunk to consider it, and as if reading his mind, Jake steps forward, steps backward, practically falls through the door, recovers grotesquely, and drops himself onto the mattress.
He’s too fucking close.
“The-re-sa,” Jake sings, and then he laughs. “Got that from Dina, didn’t I? She likes to do that with names. I think she likes the sound of it. And me? I think it’s cute. I’ve been encouraging it. What do you think, The-re-sa?”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh,” Jake says, like a disappointed teacher, “but you have to care, Theresa. It’s your job to care. If I say it is.”
Trevor asks the inevitable question. “Why are you here, Jacob?”
Jake slumps, leans back on the bed, tucks an arm behind his head. He bounces a little, ungainly and uncareful, until he’s facing Trevor again. “It’s Dina,” he says. “She’s lovely and she’s cute and all but she’s given the fuck up. I go in of a morning and she’s already doing her pretty little face and putting on her pretty little dress and, oh, Trevor my son, it’s arousing, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no resistance there any more. No—” he grinds his hips against the air, “—friction. Puts me right off my game, I don’t mind saying. But you…” The man pushes himself up, scattering pillows and cushions, and breathes whisky vapour in Trevor’s face. “You never gave up, did you? Oh, sure, you do your makeup and you wear what we tell you, but you’re still pushing against us. You even had a go, didn’t you? You even came at me.” He snorts. “It was pathetic. But, even then, you didn’t give up.” Jake leans closer still. “I bet you’re still thinking of trying to escape, aren’t you?”
“Jacob—”
He abruptly leans back again, staccato motion around quivering, unnerving stillness. “You are, aren’t you! You’re still thinking about escaping! You and Val-uh-rie. God.” He looks around, as if checking for cameras. “I should give her a go and all. What do you think? Man to man? Should I have a go? I mean, she’s hot, isn’t she? The old bat says Val’s in her fifties but I’d buy ten years younger. And I bet her arse is younger still. Know what I mean?” He nods to himself. “I’m going to give her a go. Callum wants to, the prick. He lusts after her. Watches her on the tapes when he thinks I can’t see. It’s disgusting, though, isn’t it? She’s old enough to be his mother. Well,” he adds, leaning forward again and flooding Trevor’s throat with another wave of stagnant air, “okay, maybe not his mother. Not unless she had him at fourteen, or something. And her dick’s a problem for that, I s’pose.” He snorts, flecks of phlegm coating his upper lip, and wiggles his pinkie finger. “Teeny tiny little problem, though, right?”
He should say something. He should fucking say something. There must be something he can say to end this!
But there isn’t, is there? He knows what this is leading to, he’s seen it, seen it at school, seen it outside clubs, helped stop it once, felt like a fucking hero, and now here he is, facing it down, facing him down, and he can’t move, can’t think, can barely speak. Jake’s blurring in his vision because he’s crying, because he’s too scared to do anything else.
A memory: Perry, his old partner, laughing, pontificating on the difference between real rape, and rape if she’s asking for it. “If she isn’t moving…” he used to say, and let silence finish for him.
Trevor should have fucking killed him for that.
“Oh, Theresa,” Jake says, grabbing suddenly at Trevor’s face, pawing at his cheek, running calloused fingers down his jaw, and the fear that’s paralysed Trevor intensifies. It’s been since morning that he shaved, and though he doesn’t grow much hair on his face, especially not since the castration and the injections, there’s still enough that by the evening it’s there to the touch if not to the eye, and Jake’s fingers are all over him.
The man’s flipping back and forth between calling him Trevor and Theresa, and what does that mean to him? How does Jake see him now?
And then the smile that crawls across Jake’s mouth confirms it: Jake expects this; Jake wants this; Jake needs to know that the person in front of him is neither man nor woman but captured plaything, and Trevor’s fulfilling every aspect of that awful desire for him.
He’s a toy.
Just like Valérie.
Just like the dead girls.
One hand on his face. The other plunging for his crotch.
Trevor hasn’t taken off his day clothes yet, so he’s still in the outfit he put on this morning. The one Valérie helped him with, because he followed a strange urge to look half-decent and wanted her advice on matching a knee-length skirt with a blouse, and now Jake’s pulling at it all, ripping at the buttons on the blouse, yanking at the skirt until the stitches pop, and Trevor comes the fuck alive, pushing back suddenly, hands on Jake’s shoulders, pushing and pushing and fucking pushing and hoping against hope that if the man loses his grip he’ll topple backwards and knock himself out on the wooden bedframe.
“Yes!” Jake spits, laughing, sneering. “This is more fucking like it! Come on, Theresa, my little girl, my fucking beauty, show me what you can do.”
Theresa can go for the fucking eyes, Trevor decides. And he’s almost fast enough. He gets a thumb against Jake’s cheek and the other even closer but then his wrists are bound, held in a sweaty, unbreakable grip. Jake’s laughing again, and now he pulls them both up off the bed, makes them stand unsteady. Walks them to the middle of the room and slowly forces Trevor’s hands behind his back. Holds them there, both wrists in one of Jake’s hands, and how is it possible that Trevor can’t break his hold? The bastard’s flat-out drunk!
Drunk, but still larger even than Trevor used to be, before he was brought here. Jake pushes on him again, forces him back until he slams painfully into the far wall. He feels himself press against it, feels his hands crushed against it as Jake’s full body weight traps him, and there’s nothing he can do but close his eyes and maybe try to bite Jake’s nose off if he gets the opportunity.
Jake’s hand slips under his skirt.
Best to not be here, if he can. Best to fade out.
And then there’s another slam, the door crashing into the wall hard enough to wake the dead, and Jake’s pulled violently away from him, thrown rough and sprawling to the floor.
“Trevor,” Callum says, standing in a ready stance equidistant between the two of them, breathing hard, “go to Val. I’ve unlocked her door. You don’t want to be alone after something like this. Go. Now.”
Trevor can’t move. He’s still trapped, still pressed against the wall, still waiting for the violation, still waiting for it to end. He’s looking and he’s looking and he’s looking but not seeing and all he can understand is that maybe Callum isn’t there after all, maybe he just hopes he is, maybe he needs to believe this isn’t happening so bad that—
“Trevor!” Callum yells. “Val’s room. Now. And don’t fucking look at me like that.”
Like what?
Like—?
Shit.
Fucking shit.
Trevor’s got it now. He’s got it and he moves like he wishes he had before, takes the wide path around Jake because the man’s stirring on the ground and glaring at the taser Callum’s got levelled at him, wondering what he can do, who he can hurt, and Trevor wants nothing more but to be away, to be locked behind another door, to be safe, but safety is a lie in this place, in this fucking charnel house, this abattoir, and why would he lie to himself like that? He’s trapped again, trapped in the moment, because when it ends oh god when it ends there’s going to be nothing left of him that he understands.
“Trevor!” Callum barks once more. “Seriously! Fuck off!”
Right.
Yeah.
Shit.
He falls back on protocol and snaps off a stupid little salute like he’s still in Peckinville, like he’s still the man he used to be, like he’s still got discipline worth shit, so it’s something when Callum, after a moment, returns it, before levelling his weapon once more at the man on the floor.
And that’s it. Trevor backs away, rounds the door frame, and when Valérie catches him in her arms he tries to push her away and almost succeeds before he realises.
It’s her.
It’s just her.
It’s just Val.
“I’ve got you,” she says. “Come stay with me. I’ve got you.”
She keeps her eyes on him as she locks the door behind them. Keeps her eyes on him as she props a chair under the handle. Keeps her eyes on him as she guides him to a place to sit, makes them both cups of something hot, adds a spot of liquor to each mug, bids him drink deeply.
He does so, and he remembers he has something to say to her. An apology. An apology she richly deserves because she’s put up with so much from him, helped him in every way she knows how.
But nothing comes out, no matter how hard he tries. Nothing but what feels like the last breath he’ll ever take.
2020 January 3
Friday
Beatrice dumps the morning coffee in front of her in a mug that says, FEE FI FO FEM (I’ll replace your blood with est-ro-gen), and Elle’s slow enough to wake that it takes her several seconds to get the joke. There are a lot of these bloody mugs around here, all of them with some kind of in-joke or reference cheaply printed on the side, and she’s already had to have some of the more obscure ones explained to her. Embarrassing but inevitable; she’s kept her distance from the Hall as a matter of habit and necessity, though more the former than the latter, these days, and she can hardly be faulted for failing to keep up with the local culture.
A nasty reminder, though, that for all she’s the reason Dorley Hall exists in its current form, she’ll never truly be a part of it. Difficult not to be envious when she sees the younger women running around in twos and threes, sharing easy camaraderie, while she is restricted to a spare flat on the second floor or, as with last night, a space in Beatrice’s bed, purchased with gin and compliments.
Her mother surfaces in her thoughts, as she often does, to scold her for not taking her due, by force when not freely given, and Elle irritably tries to forget her. She once told Beatrice that she feels haunted by the ghosts of her predecessors, that she feels torn between spitting their legacy back in their faces and apologising for failing to live up to it; that Beatrice did not immediately respond with something from the extensive list of genuine hardships that have characterised her life is, again, tribute to the strength of character one of them possesses and the other is always striving for.
She sits up in bed. It’s nice here. Even through the soundproofing in Beatrice’s flat, Dorley Hall has the same background hum of activity one might find in a hotel, but aimed in rather a more altruistic direction (if one stretches the definition of altruism just a tad). It pleases her to close her eyes and listen, and as she does so, two pairs of feet scamper past in the corridor; second years heading to the showers. Going there together, she notes, which suggests they woke up together. Whether as Sisters or as something more.
Elle has no siblings and no close friends save for those she retains, like Beatrice (even if the nature of her employment has shifted dramatically since their first meeting). Something else to envy.
She slurps at her coffee while Beatrice showers, and at the end of the cup her morning melancholy has largely been chased away. Company, family, in-jokes; daft things to regret the lack of, really, especially for one such as her: rich, titled and only just the wrong side of forty. Let the kids have their fun. They’ve more than earned it.
She swaps places with Bea, availing herself of her shower — it’s really quite good, but then it ought to be; it bloody well cost enough! — and slips her nightgown back on, unwilling to start the day quite yet. She returns to the bedroom with a towel around her head to find Beatrice frowning at a laptop and noisily drinking a coffee of her own. When she catches Elle trying to read the inscription, she holds it up:
Dorley’s Ironmongers
~Since 2004~
“We put the ‘fe’ in ‘male’!”
Yeah, that one’s obvious enough.
Elle lingers. The view from the window reminds of her home. Her real home, the place she hasn’t visited since she became both orphan and grand-orphan. Endless trees, frost-brittle and veiled in morning fog. If this were home, there’d be a secret place, somewhere only she knows about, a precious and quiet little grove she would find whenever she needed solitude. Whenever she needed somewhere to be someone other than Elle Lambert, daughter of immense privilege, heir to magnificent responsibility. A place that was spoiled, like everything else, by her adult discovery that it was where her grandfather preferred to bury the bones of his discarded acquisitions. She had them exhumed and discreetly sorted, but could not discover which remains, if any, belonged to Kelly.
Here at the Hall, the woods hide the two emergency exits from the lower floors; one relatively close by that leads to the first basement, and one deep in the woods that leads to the second. And the angle’s not perfect, but if she leans on the sill and squints, she can just about see the roof of one of the portacabins her people have been setting up around the nearer exit. She’s due a visit today; she’ll have to scold them for not having put up the camouflage netting yet.
Damn. If she’s going out there, she’ll have to borrow a pair of boots from one of the girls. Embarrassing. But she came here in a rush, a fire lit under her by the intelligence report, and operational practicalities and panicked phone calls were more urgent priorities than inventorying and shipping a suitable selection of travel- and footwear.
“How many more?” Beatrice asks, and Elle turns back to her, finds her looking up, her frown still very much in place. “How many more soldiers?”
“No more soldiers,” Elle says quickly, and laughs at herself. Almost twenty years on and still she hates to antagonise Beatrice, despite their respective positions. “I don’t want to drop a platoon on your heads, and I don’t believe I need to. A handful more staff still to come: medical, administrative. Two more installations. That’s all.”
“Two?”
Elle repeats herself. “Medical. Administrative.”
“Ah.”
“Are you annoyed with me, Beatrice?” she asks, and dislikes the pleading edge to her voice even as she is amused by it.
“I’m—” Bea starts, and then catches herself. Closes her laptop and smiles. It’s a rough smile, but it’s the effort that matters. “No. I’m annoyed with the situation. With Dorothy. And with the armed men setting up shop in my back garden. Not with you. I understand the need.”
“Armed women, actually,” Elle says, sitting on the other end of the bed from Bea. “Mostly, anyway. Our contingent had to be fully briefed, and it was the judgement of Jan and myself that the women in our ranks would respond more… positively to an explication of the programme here. Don’t worry, Beatrice, they are all bound by contract.” She shrugs. “Most of them found it quite interesting.”
It had helped that Jan, one of Elle’s most trusted assistants, had been the one to brief the soldiers, because she was able to draw on her own experiences at the Hall. Poor Jan fielded hours of questions, described the programme for them in detail, demonstrated for them the benefits and discussed with them the ethics of it all. The personal touch; an underrated component of the private military chain of command.
“It was still rather a messy afternoon,” Elle continues. “Exhausting.”
“Poor little rich girl,” Bea says, her smile broadening.
“Poor Jan,” Elle corrects, and then stretches, works the kinks out of her back and shoulders, and adds, “Poor me, too, though.”
“How is she?”
“Jan? Happy, as far as I can tell. Husband. They’re planning for children.”
“And you’re not…?”
Beatrice leaves the question hanging, so Elle answers in the firmest voice she can summon. “Absolutely not. One, she’s married. Two, she works for me. Give me some credit for growing up, Beatrice.”
She leaves it there, though she wants to go further, wants to confront and refute the idea from every possible angle, because she is emphatically not the woman she used to be, the woman Beatrice had to ask, with fear and determination in her voice, to leave the Hall, to cease her nights of leisure here. Oh, she never forced consent, but with hindsight and a good deal more wisdom, she’s certain there was a time one of the girls said yes solely because of who she was. It took her a long time to meet her own eyes in the mirror after she realised that.
Stupid girl: vowed to change the world; wound up becoming her grandfather. Doubly stupid because she really did have good intentions for the Hall, and there were enough tearaway lads on paths to become truly bad people to make it worth a shot. But she let her libido get in the way. Again and again.
When she left, she decided to emulate the girls. They come here to overcome their past selves, to face their souls in every sharp and violent aspect, to emerge changed, reborn; so should she. Sometimes she’s sure she succeeded.
Other times, such as now, faced with Beatrice in her bed, looking over at her with those bright, intelligent, sensual eyes, she wonders why she even bothered to try.
Christ.
Keep yourself in check, girl, for pity’s sake! Yes, she allowed you into her bed for one night, but this is her bloody home. Have some respect.
“Elladine?” Beatrice says. “Are you okay?”
Elle shrugs, both glad and irritated to have been noticed. No-one can read her like Beatrice can. “The usual,” she says. “Frustrated. Lonely. Desperately horny.”
She’s looked away to say this, preferring to study the intricacies of the wallpaper than personally witness being so intimately observed, and so it’s a surprise when the mattress shifts under her and Beatrice, laptop put away and coffee mug disposed of, lays a hand on Elle’s thigh.
“I thought once was enough,” Elle whispers.
Beatrice answers by flicking at the thin strap of Elle’s nightgown and pulling on the material, exposing her breasts and her back. Fingernails carve lightly into Elle’s spine and she follows them, turns on the bed and allows herself to enter Beatrice’s embrace. For her part, she slips her fingers under Bea’s camisole.
They kiss, and Elle lingers.
“Ugh,” Beatrice says, pulling away and wrinkling her nose, “you taste like coffee.”
“So do you,” Elle says, and kisses her again.
Beatrice leans back, and with a hand on Elle’s shoulder, guides her down. “Not everywhere,” she says.
* * *
* * *
They’re both woken by a loud thumping on Valérie’s door, and she’s closest — being that Trevor chose to sleep on what could be called her sofa only if one were feeling particularly charitable — so she kicks off the sheets and pulls on a robe and yanks at the door to find Callum, staring at the floor and with a nasty looking dark bruise on one side of his mouth. He doesn’t look up when she clears her throat, so she snaps her fingers a few times and, eventually, resorts simply to raising his head with her thumb under his chin.
He looks like shit.
“Callum,” she says shortly, “good morning. Lose any teeth?”
“Please,” he says. “I can take a punch.”
She heard Callum and Jacob going at it in the corridor last night. Jake was all mouth, called Callum all the worst names he could think of, and from the sound of it Callum put him down quite handily. But Callum’s bruised face suggests it wasn’t quite as easy as Valérie assumed. Drunk out of his mind or not, Jake presents a problem none of them seem to be able to solve.
“Good for you,” she says.
The curtains are still drawn and the only light in the room is from the front panel of her VCR, which makes the yellow sunlight flooding in from the corridor quite unpleasant. She looks back, checking on Trevor, and finds that he’s squinting towards the two of them at the door, so she smiles for Callum, places her palm on his chest, and walks him out into the corridor, shutting the door behind her.
“He’s not working today,” she says. “Dorothy can take it out of my hide if she wants, but he’s not—” she lowers her voice, “—as resilient as I am. No scar tissue,” she adds, as if Callum could possibly understand what she means.
“It’ll mean more work for you,” Callum replies, frowning.
Val shrugs. “Frances can help. Tell you what: why don’t we placate the very special boy upstairs, since I bet he’s still upset at you? We’ll make him a nice roast dinner, Frances and I. It’ll make him happy and put him to sleep. Should make everyone’s lives easier.”
“Jake’s not on duty today.”
“Oh?”
“The asset’s off-limits,” Callum says, and has the good grace to look a little guilty about it. Val’s glad she shut the door; Trevor does not need to hear himself described that way.
“Look, Callum,” she says. “I have not got into the habit of thanking people for things. I haven’t had the opportunity. But I don’t want to force darling Trevor to do it, so…” She leans up and kisses him on his other cheek, the one that isn’t bruised. “There’s your thanks.”
Callum, idiot that he is, puts a hand to his face and looks at her like she just ravished him.
“I’m, um…” He’s stammering a little, and it’s almost sweet, almost enough to make her forget that he works for the people who hold the key to her prison. “I’m glad you didn’t make Trevor do that.”
“Our secret,” she says.
When he’s gone — most likely to report to Dorothy on his successful mollification of the volatile French bitch — she flicks on a lamp and crouches down next to Trevor. He’s still lying on the sofa, still cocooned in borrowed sheets, and she rests the back of her hand carefully on his forehead. He smiles weakly, and she once again catches herself thinking how pretty he is.
He’ll never see it. Or, if he does, he’ll be disgusted by it.
“Trevor Darling,” she says, “how are you feeling?”
He blinks at her. “I’m not sure I know how to answer that.”
“Then don’t,” she replies briskly, and stands up from her crouch. “You have a choice: appalling instant coffee here, or quite good coffee in the kitchen. You don’t have to work today, but I imagine you’d prefer to have company.”
“Yeah,” he says, sitting up, “I’d like to be near you, if possible.”
“Then come,” she says, beckoning him, “and I will dress you. And don’t give me that look; there are some things that are not optional.”
“Val?” he says, catching her turning away. “Thank you.”
“I merely gave you a place to sleep and a locked door. Thank Callum. Except don’t; I already thanked him on your behalf.” And she mimes the kiss she gave him.
“Oh,” Trevor says. “Uh. Thanks. That must have been… Thanks.”
“See?” Val says. “I told you my job was worse than yours.”
* * *
“Do you miss my little soldier?”
Elle’s wrapping a light scarf around her neck while gazing idly out of the window in Beatrice’s office, and she wonders for a moment if she misheard, but looking around she finds Bea leaning against the frame of the door that connects office to living room and smiling broadly, apparently still in a playful mood.
So she finishes with her scarf and strides quickly across the office to take Beatrice’s hands in hers, and says in the most sultry voice she can conjure, “How could I, when its replacement is even more inviting?” It’s the truth, too. She’s well aware that Dorley’s traditional customers valued what they saw as the marks of manhood left on the girls they procured, the better to humiliate and fetishise them, but Elle’s never been drawn to one set of genitals over another. What’s enticing is the woman’s relationship to her body, to her history, not the exact configuration of her sex.
Beatrice’s smile deepens, and then she leans in, kisses Elle quickly on the lips, and pulls away. “Flirt,” she says.
“What brought this on?” Elle asks, as Beatrice starts throwing things — phone, tablet, pens — into a shoulder bag, still smiling, still acting as if she might at any moment reach out and resume their intimacy. And it’s not like her to linger on the moments they share together.
Bea nods her head at the window. “Them,” she says, meaning, no doubt, the Peckinville people who’ve been setting up shop in the woods. “It’s been a long time since we had more than two of your lads—”
“—mostly women, this time, remember—”
“—on the grounds, and it brings back memories. I’m nostalgic. And, perhaps, regressing a little, to a time when pleasure came more easily.” Bea stops, slings the bag over her shoulder, and frowns at Elle, her mood suddenly flattening. “I never did work out what you see in us.”
They’ve spoken of it hundreds of times. It’s almost a game; Beatrice always trying to catch her out, to uncover the physicality at the base of Elle’s altruism. Elle’s never hidden her preferences, but she’s always tried to emphasise that they are far from the entirety of her motivation.
“Rebirth,” she says. “Resilience. And,” she adds, smiling, “I must confess, just a touch of unsavoury interest.”
Beatrice laughs. “Unsavoury? You? I never would have guessed.” She seems momentarily so buoyant that Elle wants to reach for her again, but then Beatrice’s shoulders slump and her melancholy returns.
“Bea?” Elle says gently. “Beatrice? What is it, really?”
There’s a silence that drags on for far too long, and then Beatrice dumps her bag on the desk, leans on its edge, and says, “Declan. My fault. I washed him out, which is bad enough, and then—” she claps her hands together, “—bang, suddenly fucking Dorothy Marsden has him. Dorothy! Of all people!”
Bea turns a glare on Elle, who doesn’t even try to deflect it. Almost twenty years they’ve been working on turning Dorley Hall from a house of horrors to a functional — if highly specialised — rehabilitation centre, and she knows Bea is sometimes of the opinion that they haven’t gone far enough. The washouts weigh heavily on her.
“It was bad enough when I thought it was just you getting your claws into him, but Dorothy? How is he? Did your people get a look at him?”
Elle nods. “He was the show-room exhibit. Topped and tailed, they said. Dorothy was most precise in her retelling. They left quite nauseous.”
“Shit.” She prods herself in the chest with a thumb. “My fault.”
Elle sits on the desk next to her, dangling her legs over the edge and hesitatingly taking Bea’s hand. She doesn’t resist. “My people, remember,” she says. “I’m the one who lost him.”
“Fat lot of good it does him, either way. And yet…”
“Yeah,” Elle says. She knows what Bea’s not saying, because she knows what Declan did. They’ve both seen the file. Probably read it cover to cover multiple times, salving their conscience. None of them have much room in their hearts for rapists, but there’s a difference between justice and a life even more cruel and unusual than the one she had planned for him.
At least the girl’s okay. The girl he abused, made his own, the girl who seemed unable to tear herself from him, for reasons Elle finds unfathomable. The girl. Take her away from him, ply her with friends and community, and she’s a new woman. Hardly even talks about him any more, Elle understands. They’re waving a higher education bursary at her and encouraging her to take a foundation year and getting her counselling and she’s doing okay.
“We can’t leave him with her,” Bea says.
“You’re right. But we have to. For now.”
“Elle—”
“I’m sorry, Beatrice, but it’s just not practical. It’s not safe. I burned a major asset just confirming the rumours about Stenordale, and I don’t have anything else even remotely on that level ready for another shot. Especially since another nibble at her unseemly little fishing hook would probably raise suspicions. Doubly so when the last lot don’t come up with the funds they promised her. She’ll vet any interested parties all the harder.”
“You know what she’s doing to him.”
Elle squeezes Bea’s hand. “I know,” she says. Beatrice makes an unhappy noise, so Elle shrugs, and adds, “Tell you what. I have some people in the area. I can have a couple of them swing by in a few days. Not to knock on the door or anything, but just to hang around for a while. Try to get an idea of force strength. They can pose as ramblers or something.” She’s trying to make the idea sound improvised; in truth, it’s a plan that’s been sitting ready until someone judges it either sufficiently safe or sufficiently necessary. “But all they can do is look, Bea. From afar. You know how big Stenordale is; you could house fifty people there and still have empty rooms.”
“I know,” Bea says.
“He’s not there forever.”
“I know. But it’s the manner in which he eventually leaves that concerns me.” Beatrice takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “No matter. What about your missing man; you think he’s there?”
“He could be,” Elle says. “Then again, he could be in any one of a number of Silver River facilities.”
“Or,” Bea says, “Dorothy could have had him topped and tailed, too.”
“Don’t,” Elle says. Trevor Darling’s file hasn’t left her list of open documents since he went missing, and she’s looked long and hard at his pictures. It’s long since occurred to her that someone like Dorothy, always on the lookout for new amusement, would see his potential; she’s just been hoping Beatrice wouldn’t think of it. The woman wears her guilt so extravagantly.
“It’s a possibility,” Bea says quietly. “You know it is.”
“Well,” Elle says, “if it’s happened, we’ll get him straightened out. See if your Mrs Prentice can do something for him.”
“He’ll never be the same. That’s the whole point.”
Elle closes her eyes. “None of us are, Bea,” she says.
* * *
They arrive at Dorley Hall and Amy deliberately doesn’t let them in, doesn’t let Rachel know she’s been judged trustworthy and put on the security system, because that’s exactly the kind of thing that might set her off, and she spent the whole bloody car ride over simmering, pushing down her anger, being Rachel, and while it made Amy smile when she first saw it because it reminded her so much of how they used to be — Amy the inquisitive one, Shahida the intuitive one and Rachel the too bloody clever by half one — it also put her on edge, too. She spent a lot of time managing Rachel’s moods after Melissa disappeared and Shahida mostly followed her, and while it’s more or less instinctive at this point, it’s not exactly pleasant, not when Rachel gets a bee in her bonnet. Worse, when Rachel gets a tirade going and Amy finds herself lost for words, unable to counter it.
Charlie, Nadine and Indira are all in the kitchen, supervising the second years in something culinary — probably the early stages of the not-exactly-formal lunch Amy’s been invited to — but it’s Tabitha who spots them first, jogging down the main stairs and almost colliding with them in her haste. They exchange greetings and, minus Rachel, a quick hug — Tabitha’s in exercise clothes that, quite incidentally, show a lot of skin, and Amy feels her pulse quicken on contact — and then Tabitha lets them all in, grabs a handful of cereal bars and vanishes in the direction of what Amy understands is the stairway to the basement.
“Hi, Amy,” Nadine says, and Charlie, Indira and several second years echo her a moment later.
Amy waves. “Hi!”
“How many of them do you know?” Rachel whispers to her.
“I don’t know! It was a big party and I didn’t count. And don’t be so bloody rude.” Amy raises her voice and addresses the rest of the kitchen, most of whom have stopped what they’re doing to look at them both. “Sorry about my friend,” she says. “I’m just going to deliver her to a nice, comfy chair in the dining hall and then I’ll be back for some coffee or something for both of us.”
“I’ll bring you some,” Faye says. “And some breakfast, if you want anything.”
“What do you think, Rach?” Amy asks. “Can you stand to eat something prepared here?”
“Fuck off, Amy,” Rachel says, and starts off for the dining hall without her.
“Whatever’s handy’d be lovely,” Amy says to Faye, and follows Rachel out, catching up with her and steering her towards a handful of armchairs set up around a coffee table in one corner. “What is wrong with you?” she hisses.
“Absolutely nothing,” Rachel snaps back.
They sit in silence.
How can she get through to Rachel? Indira made it clear to Amy that her friend is skating on very thin ice indeed, that if she does anything that even looks suspicious, the Hall is likely to respond with lawyers first, and escalate from there. And Amy said, isn’t that a bit harsh, and Indira replied, not if you have almost a hundred vulnerable and highly minoritised people to protect. And Amy said, yah, point.
But Rachel isn’t going to be persuaded with threats. The allusions that were made on the day they both found everything out were almost enough to set her off, and it had probably been due only to the literally everything else that got dropped on them that had distracted her, caused her instead to start laying into Pippa rather than responding with legal threats of her own. Because Rachel isn’t without resources and she’s not without courage, and while as a whole the Hall undoubtedly has her outgunned by an order or two of magnitude and a decent helping of ruthlessness, Amy’s certain they wouldn’t be able to shut her down before she comprehensively wrecked at least some of their shit.
She’ll be an incredible ally, she told Indira, if she can be persuaded. And so they’re all holding back, playing nice, pretending like she didn’t say the awful things she did, so Amy can try to manage her without seeming like she’s managing her.
If only Shy hadn’t sent that email or left that voicemail message. Amy knows the whole story now, knows how the entire mess went down, and she can’t help but think the Hall and everyone in it would be a bit more secure if Shahida had been just a little less… Shahida. Yes, Amy wouldn’t know, and that would be a tragedy for a hundred reasons, but maybe Melissa could have brought her onside quietly.
“What am I doing here, Amy?” Rachel asks.
“You tell me. You’re the one who called this morning.”
“That’s because I’m losing my mind over this, Amy! And, believe me, if there were anyone else I could talk to about this, I would.” Rachel folds her arms, sits back in the voluminous armchair. “But there isn’t. I can’t even talk to Belinda because she’d immediately call the police. I’m still not sure why I haven’t yet.”
“Because—”
“Yes, I know, because Shy’d get in trouble.”
“Melissa, too,” Amy points out.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Anyway,” Amy says, “we’re here because I was already meeting some friends and I didn’t want to fart around with you one place and them another. And we’re here—” she indicates their little corner of the room, “—so we can talk out your shit without anyone who is likely to be affected overhearing, while at the same time showing you just how bloody ordinary these people are. Look!” She points discreetly. At a table in the rough centre of the dining hall, Maria and Edy are chatting and eating breakfast over a laptop and a sheaf of papers. “Just normal people, eating normal cereal. Normally.”
Maria spots them and waves. Amy waves back.
“Amy,” Rachel says, “you’re not going to get me to hug a prison guard by showing me he pets his dog.”
Amy nods. She doesn’t note that Rachel chose to gender her hypothetical prison guard male, just as she doesn’t say out loud that Rachel passed through the kitchen practically cringing away from the bodies of the second-year girls milling about. There’s something to unpick there, and Amy’s starting to wonder if it has anything to do with Rachel’s reticence even to talk about Melissa lately.
Didn’t Shahida say Rachel was suspicious of Liss from day one? Picking holes in her story from the start? And, okay, it’s not like her story wasn’t bollocks, but she and Shy told it earnestly and it was, from what Amy understands, more sort of spiritually true. And who does that? Who looks such a beautiful, blonde gift horse right in the bloody mouth?
She’s roused from her thoughts by Faye, tapping over on her fashionable little one-inch heels and setting down a tray on the coffee table. Catching Amy looking at her shoes, Faye says, “You like them?”
“Faye,” Amy says, projecting as much seriousness as she can manage, “I covet them. You might have to lock your door tonight.”
“You know they lock us in,” Faye replies, matching Amy’s tone.
“Where did you get them?” Amy asks, ignoring Rachel’s sharp intake of breath.
“Paige,” Faye says. “I don’t normally wear heels, not since… you know.” Amy nods; she talked fashion with some of the second years her first evening here, after Shahida took Rachel away for everyone’s own good. Faye told her about her old sponsor, and how the blow-up that led to her coming under Indira’s expansive wing happened, at least in part, because of a pair of inappropriate shoes. “But Paige is just so persuasive. And she has a large collection of shoes in my size.”
“Are you happy?” Rachel asks suddenly, interrupting the half-formed thought Amy was about to express and leaving her floundering.
Faye’s voice hardens. “What?”
“Are you happy?” Rachel repeats. “You say they lock you in. Do you think that helps?”
“Who are you, again?” Faye says.
“Rachel Gray-Wallace.”
“Oh. Shahida’s other friend.” Faye nods. “You’re the one who called Pippa a rapist.”
“I didn’t—”
“‘Are you happy?’ What kind of a question is that?”
Rachel scowls. “The kind of question you ask someone who was kidnapped and mutilated.”
“Uh—” Amy says.
“What is wrong with you?” Faye says, twisting on her heel and storming off.
“Everyone keeps asking me that,” Rachel mutters.
“Yeah,” Amy says, having successfully unglued her brain, “that’s because you keep saying incredibly awful things. Jesus, Rach! Why are you so determined to see monsters here?”
“Why are you so determined not to?”
“Because I talked to them!” Amy yells, losing her self-control. Her voice rasps and she starts coughing, feeling like something’s lodged in her throat. Probably Rachel’s stubborn insistence on adhering to conventional morality. As if conventional morality ever made space for women like the ones she’s met here!
Rachel glares at her, not replying, so Amy glares right back. She’s got no way forward here, no ideas, no plan ever since look how normal they are, isn’t it neat got thrown back in her face, and no more patience. She’s tempted to storm out, to follow Faye — to check on Faye, too, for all that she left for a kitchen full of her Sisters — and she’s wondering what would happen if she did just that, if she left Rachel to bloody well stew, when a hand closes over her shoulder.
Amy doesn’t jump, but Rachel does, and Amy wonders for a moment if Rach was tunnel-visioning on her so hard that she didn’t see anyone approach, or if she’s just reacting to being in the presence of another Dorley girl.
“Everything okay?” Jane asks.
Amy leans her head back, jams it into the cushion, looks at Jane from underneath. “I have no bloody idea,” she says. “Probably not, on balance.”
“Who’s this?” Rachel says.
“God, Rach! You’re so rude.”
“This,” Jane says, squeezing Amy’s shoulder for a moment, “is Jane.” She doesn’t extend a hand, which is funny to Amy because it was the first thing she did when they met on New Year’s, and instead nudges Amy with her hip. Amy gets the message after a moment and shifts over, and Jane squeezes herself into the armchair.
Rachel stares at them, frowning.
“This isn’t going well,” Amy says.
“She means,” Rachel says, “that she’s failed to persuade me that your little operation here isn’t… horrific.”
“Yeah, well,” Jane says, “it kind of is. Ames, is this in danger of becoming a thing?”
Amy nods gloomily. “A whole bloody thing.”
“Maria showed me the video from disclosure. And Faye just told the whole kitchen about what she said just now. So there’s probably a debate going on about what to do next.” Jane tilts her head towards Maria and Edy’s table, which has acquired a couple of other sponsors, all talking in whispers. “I thought I’d come have a go. See if I can get through to her.”
“A good start,” Rachel says, “would be to stop talking about me as if I’m not here.”
“Would it?” Jane says brightly. “Would it, indeed? I’m sorry, have I been impolite?”
“Frankly—”
“As impolite as you were just now to Faye, do you think?”
“I wasn’t—”
“You treated her more like the subject of a scientific experiment than a person. She told us all about it. ‘Do you think that helps?’” Jane’s impression of Rachel isn’t bad; Amy gives it a seven. “That’s not a question you ask in good faith, Rachel. That’s a question you ask when you’re preparing to refute whatever the answer is. Come on; you’re a smart woman. You know how you’re coming across.”
“How I’m coming across?” Rachel sputters. “I was dragged into this fucking place on the second to last day of the year to be told that a friend I thought was dead and then thought had a slightly weird gender transition was, in fact, forcibly reassigned in an underground prison, and that my other friend is happily going along with it! I’ve been pulled into your insane nightmare and you think I’m coming across poorly?”
“Well, yeah,” Jane says. “You know why you were brought in: Melissa and Shahida weren’t careful. They involved you. And so we stepped in, because you needed to know how important it is that Melissa’s new identity remains, broadly, a secret. And so did Amy, but the difference between the two of you, it seems to me, is that Amy listened.”
“Amy’s always been prone to—”
“Careful, Rach,” Amy says, in part because she suddenly very much does not want to hear what Rachel thinks of her. What she might have thought of her all along.
“Amy, they’re— they’re— Fuck!”
Rachel gives up, unable to articulate herself in the face of Amy’s increasingly obvious upset and Jane’s deliberately focused interest. She flops back instead, and stares at her untouched breakfast.
Amy, reminded, fetches her coffee and takes a sip. Something nice and solid to hold on to.
“Hey, Amy,” Jane says quietly, “remember the story I told you? About the thing? On the tube?”
Amy nods, frowning, slurping distractedly, feeling suddenly cold and exposed, because she doesn’t want Jane to share it, doesn’t want Jane to feel like she has to. Doesn’t want to sully it with Rachel’s disapproval. She thinks back to her first night at the Hall, when Paige refused to pander to Rachel’s indignation, and how at the time Amy thought her precisely correct.
But perhaps, sometimes, it’s the right approach. Perhaps, when you have nothing else, you really do need to expose your weakest self, and hope empathy carries the day, hope you haven’t handed someone a weapon to use against you.
But she still doesn’t want Jane to share the story, because it’s special to her in a way she’s not sure she’ll ever tell Rach at this rate. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Amy and Liss and Shy and most of the first-year sponsors decamped to the third-floor common room, and the Dorley contingent graciously answered every drunken question Amy could think of. They told her their secrets. They let her in. And then the quiet corner she’d claimed with Jane became quieter still until it was just the two of them, and Jane kissed her again and told her the story, and the girl who had simply been there at the stroke of midnight, who’d shared with her a friendly kiss to mark the new year, became the girl who opened herself up for Amy, because she was interested, because she promised not to judge, and maybe a little because Amy kissed her back.
She’d never kissed a girl before.
Jane tells the story, deftly intercepting Rachel’s hostility as she goes, and Amy leans against her and thinks of everything else from that night, everything Rachel doesn’t get to see.
When Jane was a boy, the story goes, she was thin like a reed and wore cheap glasses that always needed repairing and lifted cans of beans duct-taped together because she wanted dumbbells but couldn’t afford them. She ran with a group of boys from her school, boys who played football and rugby and revelled in their boyhood, in the ugly things that were implicitly permitted, in the taboo things they coveted and sometimes stole for themselves. She’d grown up around them, had known little but their company.
“The pressure is overwhelming,” she’d said, as Amy locked arms around her waist and softly nibbled at her neck, up there in the third-floor common room. “If you don’t conform, if you don’t do the things they do, then you’re not one of them, you’re the other thing, the thing everyone’s supposed to despise. And if you’re not strong, if you’re not confident, if you’re most of the way to not being like them already, then you have to go further, just to show them. Just so they won’t turn on you.”
The story, for all the buildup Jane gives it — now, telling Rachel, and upstairs, whispering it between wet breaths — could be thought of as anticlimactic. The boy Jane used to be stepping away from his friend group and pinching a woman’s bottom. Calling her a slut. Trapping her, taking advantage of the enclosed space of the train carriage. Grinning down at her and doing his best to be intimidating while the lads behind him laugh and egg him on, support him, elevate him.
“It’s so ordinary, isn’t it?” she’d said. “A woman getting her arse pinched on the tube or the bus or somewhere. Just another one of those little intrusions. Sexual assaults so mundane that sometimes you don’t even tell anyone about them. It’s happened to me. Most girls I know, too. But it wasn’t the moment that stuck with me, Amy. It was when I saw her on the platform after. She moved off down the carriage from us, obviously, but she got off at the same stop as me, and only a couple of the other boys did, too, so we weren’t such a crowd any more, and I saw her, and she saw me, and I knew it wasn’t worth it. I knew I’d balanced my scales by taking from hers. It was a single, perfect, awful moment of clarity.”
“What did you do after that?” Amy’d asked, expecting something redemptive. And that was when Jane began properly to cry.
“I blamed her. I fucking blamed her, Amy. I felt miserable and guilty and stupid and cruel, and I let it poison me. Because that’s what it was like. When you’re a teenage boy, when you’re the kind of teenage boy I was, in the environment I was in, with my friends and my dad and my brothers, you can’t stop to think, because thinking… it’s so fucking dangerous, Amy. So I took all my guilt and I put it on her and I hated her. It was so easy to do. So easy. She was that bitch. I got so angry. For such a long time.”
In the early hours of New Year’s Day they’d kissed some more, without passion but with fondness and with care, and as she fell asleep on the other side of Jane’s bed that morning Amy tried to remember a single time any of the men she’d dated had been so vulnerable in front of her, so trusting.
Rachel listens. She’s stopped asking questions. But she’s leaning forward again, and seems more open, and Amy hopes it’s enough, because she can feel through her shoulder that Jane’s shaking just a little.
“The Hall saved me from all that,” Jane says. “I didn’t assault any other women, but eventually I came here to study and they saw me glowering in the corridors and saying awful things and they looked into what I was like online and that was it. If misogyny is a river then I was swimming in it. If it’s an ocean, I couldn’t see land. And they just came and scooped me up and made me so, so angry, and also a little bit relieved, because I didn’t have to prove myself any more. Didn’t have to be a man any more. Didn’t have to be horribly, constantly aware of how fucking bad at it I was. Because that’s kind of the thing, Rachel: people won’t shut up about what victims boys are. Boys are being outperformed at school; boys are deprived of healthy role models; boys are losing their place in modern society. And so on. But no-one talks about the actual problem with boys: that we make them into boys. Boys are told that emotions are weakness, that strength is everything, that any hint of homosexuality or womanhood is a death sentence, and then we send them out into the world, as children, to violently police each other. To police themselves. And it’s not enough to tell them otherwise, because the entire world wants to contradict you. You have to pull them out of it.” She sits back, runs a hand through her hair. “So that’s what I do now. I look for boys who are the way I was, who are hurting themselves and hurting other people, and I pull them out. Make them see what I saw. And once you’re free of it, it’s easy to see the lies and contradictions for yourself. The concrete shell around the house of cards just—” she flicks a finger in mid-air, “—falls away, and the cards follow, one by one.”
Jane’s voice has been growing more hoarse as she talks, so Amy passes over her half-finished coffee and Jane drinks, smiles in thanks, and together they wait for Rachel’s response.
It’s a long time coming.
“Okay,” Rachel says, standing up from her chair. “Okay. Right. Okay.” She’s gathering her things, all the while looking everywhere but at Jane and Amy. “I’m going to do you the courtesy of not reacting right now. I’m going to find somewhere quiet, somewhere else, and think about what you said.” She nods at Jane, meeting her eyes at last. “Thank you.”
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” Amy says as Rachel passes. “You’ll keep quiet?”
“I’ll keep quiet,” Rachel says.
Amy persists. “It’s important. It’s for Melissa, for Steph, for Shahida, for—”
“I’ll keep it to myself. Won’t even tell Belinda. I promise. Have a nice lunch, Amy. Jane.”
Neither of them exhales until Rachel’s out of the room, and then Jane’s leaning full-body against Amy, spent, more affected than Amy thought. It’s one thing, she supposes, to tell everything to someone like Amy, on an intimate night, loosened by alcohol and the company of friends; quite another to tell a hostile stranger over a coffee while you wait for her to throw it in your face.
Feeling like maybe she shouldn’t, that perhaps it was just a New Year’s thing, but wanting to comfort her anyway, Amy kisses Jane on the cheek, and Jane freezes for a moment and then nuzzles against her, still shaking but smiling again and returning Amy’s affection with a kiss to the end of her nose.
“Thanks,” Jane says.
“Thank you,” Amy says. “She’s my problem.”
“She’s all of our problem. You think she won’t tell anyone?”
“She won’t,” Amy says, and with all her heart, wills herself to believe it.
* * *
The dark-haired girl with the attitude and the adorable little car pulls out of the car park by the lake at such speed that Elle worries for a moment that the Beetle will tip over on the corner, but she makes it to the main road without incident. Elle would follow her halfway home just in case, since she still seems to be driving somewhat erratically, but she doesn’t have access to any cameras outside the university — not from here, anyway — so she’ll just have to hope she makes it home okay. Even if, for security reasons, it might be better for them all if she didn’t.
An unworthy thought; one of many, lately. Why can’t people just leave her girls alone? And why go to such depths of moral opprobrium for men?
She’ll never understand these younger Millennials.
“Shall I put someone on her?” she asks, passing the tablet back to Beatrice. “Just in case?”
“Goodness, no,” Bea says. “We’re trying to persuade her we’re not evil.”
“Ah. Well. Good luck to us, then.” People can be so tiresomely didactic.
A second breakfast of sorts — pastries, mostly — and yet more coffee had given Elle and Beatrice an ideal vantage point from which to observe another of the Hall’s little dramas playing out, while keeping them mostly hidden behind a larger cluster of sponsors and hangers-on in the centre of the dining hall. A good thing, too: had that girl, Rachel, come charging over with the intent of handing over a piece of her mind, Elle would have been extremely tempted to refuse it, and press onto her a piece of her mind as a considerably more helpful replacement. And Beatrice does so hate it when Elle yells.
Beatrice nudges her, and Elle looks over to see the outsider girl, Amy, and the sponsor, Jane, standing up and heading for the stairs together. Elle wants nothing more than to borrow the tablet right back and follow them up the stairs, but they’re late for their meeting with Jan and, anyway, Elle can’t disguise that desire even to herself as coming from anything other than prurience. It’s the kind of habit she’s supposed to have left in her twenties.
She does hope they work something out, though. It’s wonderful when the girls find love.
Hmm. Living vicariously through the recipients of her professional largesse. Again. Not especially healthy, Elladine.
She makes a mental note to ensure Jane is compensated adequately enough that, should she and Amy Woodley wish to step out together, they will not be financially restricted, and allows herself to be guided to her feet by Beatrice. She smiles at Maria and the other girls currently brunching with her, and follows Bea through the corridors at the back of the Hall and out through the glass doors of the conservatory. There’s little paving out here, and civilisation gives way to the wilds remarkably quickly, but she is at least well-equipped; Maria had several options in a comfortable size seven, and thus Elle stomps out across the frost-hardened ground in a satisfyingly sturdy pair of Doc Martens in cherry red.
It’s only a little more than three minutes across the uneven and treacherous ground, but by the time they find the exit from basement two, the carefully salted dirt road out and the smattering of portacabins, it feels as if Dorley Hall and the university could be a mile away. Jan, her girl here, dressed for the weather and the job but still unable completely to hide her charm, trips as she rushes out of the main office cabin to greet them. Elle’s briefly confused, since Jan is usually so poised, until she remembers that the girl retains a habitual deference to Beatrice that she never quite developed for Elle.
“Ms Lambert!” Jan squeaks, several registers higher than usual. “Aunt Bea!”
“Good morning, Jan!” Elle replies, stepping forward to shake her hand and, incidentally, to offer moral and physical support. Jan’s knees appear to be knocking.
“Jan,” Beatrice says warmly, standing back and smiling. “Wonderful to see you.”
“Aunt Bea,” Jan repeats.
“Please call me Beatrice. Or Bea. Or Ms Quinn, if you really must.”
Jan nods vigorously. Her other arm, the one not cradled in Elle’s hands, is ramrod-straight at her side. Those early intakes were a tad rough. Jan’s been so down-to-earth in her endeavours for Elle, and even during the (brief) planning of this operation; remarkable to watch the decade-plus between her intake and now fall away, to see her become wary again, terrified to cause offence.
Bea sees it, doesn’t she? Elle glances back, and Bea meets her eyes. Yes. Of course she sees it.
“Jan,” Bea says, “if you’d like to speak to Ms Lambert in your… office, there, I will inspect the site.”
“Yes, of course,” Jan says, with barely a gap between words.
Inside the office, which is larger than Elle expects — these portable installations always are — Jan relaxes, leans against a filing cabinet and tries to look like nothing just happened.
“Jan,” Elle says quietly, “are we alone?” Jan nods. “You don’t need to worry about Beatrice. She’s not here to judge you, and she no longer has authority over you. In fact, outside the walls of the Hall, you outrank her.”
Jan wheezes for another second or two before answering. “I know. I do. I don’t know why I’m so antsy around her. I didn’t expect to be.”
“It was a difficult time for you. Let’s not dwell, shan’t we? How’s Robert?”
Breaking out into a broad smile that only at its edges betrays the nerves that still cause her occasionally to shudder, Jan says, “Oh, he’s fine. A friend of his is having top surgery soon, so he’s taking the opportunity. Flying out with him, et cetera.”
Elle nods. She knew of this; Robert bought the ticket on Jan’s company laptop. She’s already planned a concomitant increase to Jan’s bonus, so she won’t be out of pocket. She keeps up the small talk as Jan takes her through the operational developments of the last two days: nothing unexpected. The medical staff arrive this afternoon with the last of the installations, and the last administrator, tomorrow morning. They have taps into the Hall’s power and enough water for showers of a length that qualifies, she says, as decadent. Elle prompts her about the missing camouflage netting; this evening, Jan says.
“We’ll be an invisible little hamlet by nineteen-hundred.”
“Well done,” Elle says, and makes a show of inspecting the office space. “You’re happy in the trailer?”
Jan shrugs, smiling. “It’s fine. And it’s only for a month, after all.”
One month is the time they’ve allowed themselves properly to assess the situation at Stenordale Manor, to decide if the Hall is under threat, to verify the locations of Dorothy Marsden and Declan Shaw, to probe further for sightings of Trevor Darling, and to thus decide if the installation in the woods needs to become something more permanent or if it can be quietly dismantled.
“You’re quite welcome to stay at the Hall,” Beatrice says, entering the office.
“Oh,” Jan says, “ah, um, no, thank you, Aunt Bea.”
“Well. The offer’s open. Ms Lambert, I believe we should be on our way? I’m happy enough with the disposition of the trailers and the portacabins and such.” She waves a disinterested hand. “And you said something about hiding them so they can’t be seen from above…?”
“Tonight,” Elle says. “We’ll do some drone flybys and send you the footage. Nobody’ll know we’re here.”
“Unless they decide to go rambling,” Bea says pointedly, presumably reminding Elle of her earlier promise.
“Quite. Well, Jan, we’ll leave you to it.”
“Um,” Jan says, “actually, there was one thing…”
“Hmm?” Bea says, and then laughs softly when Jan tries to reply and instead half-swallows some saliva. “Oh, relax, child,” she adds over Jan’s frantic coughing. “I’m not half the harridan I pretend to be. Ask your question.”
Jan nods, massaging her chest and breathing carefully. “I just wanted to ask,” she says, hoarse but a little more confident, “if Tabitha still works here.” Her words are coming out quickly again. “It’s been a long time and we haven’t kept in touch, but I’ve been thinking of her lately and I wanted to see if, maybe, she wanted to meet for coffee or something, and—”
“Tabitha’s still here,” Beatrice says kindly, cutting her off before she runs out of oxygen. “I’ll let her know you asked after her. You might well find her showing up at your door sooner rather than later.”
The pleasantries required to extricate themselves from her presence go more smoothly than their introduction, and Jan waves at them from the office door as they leave, stepping carefully off the temporary paving and back onto the dirt.
“Thank Maria for these boots, won’t you, Beatrice?” Elle says once they’re finished waving. “I’ll have them cleaned and returned to her.”
“You can thank her yourself.”
“Ah, no. I should get out of your hair.”
“Yes,” Beatrice says, “but perhaps I enjoy having you in my hair.”
Elle snorts. “Likewise, but I have responsibilities that cannot be fulfilled from the Hall.”
“Maybe you should set up an office here.”
“You know the story. I can’t be seen here too much.”
“I know,” Beatrice says, frowning. “It’s just that I’ve become rather used to the company. Everyone else is so… young.”
“Why, thank you,” Elle says drily.
“You know what I mean. And there’s Maria, of course, but she’s busy, and she has Edith now. I don’t like to intrude.” Bea sighs, stops walking, looks up at the morning sky, the greying clouds, the promise of rain. “I’m becoming old, Elle. Old and alone. I don’t like it. And with the soldiers, with Dorothy— I keep thinking of her.”
“Oh, Beatrice.”
“I know. I’m being foolish.”
“Valérie might still be out there, Beatrice. We might yet find her.”
Bea shakes her head. “At this point,” she says, “I’d almost rather we didn’t. The thought of her trapped somewhere. Trapped for decades… It’s the stuff of nightmares.”
2020 January 4
Saturday
It’s the dichotomy of her that gets to him. The way she walks into the security room as if she owns the place, as if everyone in it — him included — is beneath her; and yet she’s controlled, directed, her path in life confined more than anyone else he’s ever known, ever met, ever heard of. She can’t leave the manor. Can’t even take a sick day.
And, yes, there’s the other dichotomy of her. Because she’s technically a man, and still is, somewhere under that skirt. But you wouldn’t know it to look at her or talk to her, and if she thought she could get away with it she’d hurt you for so much as suggesting it.
Still she walks like she’s daring him to give her an order. It’s hypnotic.
His cheek tingles where she kissed him.
Jake would say he’s spent too much time cooped up at Stenordale Manor, which is true — a week’d be too much time in this stuffy old shithole — and that he’s forgotten what a real woman looks like. Mind, he’d say that while preening over his abused and altered toy, his gift from Ms Marsden, and he’d also say something like, any hole’s a goal. Because he’s a piece of shit.
A piece of shit who took a good swing at Callum. A reward for saving him from Ms Marsden’s wrath. Because that’s why he did it: so no-one broke the rules, so Ms Marsden doesn’t call in more people from Silver River, so the two of them don’t get replaced on the most plum assignment he’s ever had. They agreed, come the morning, not to put it in the log, so Jake doesn’t have to face another bloody enquiry and Callum doesn’t get sent off somewhere else, somewhere he might get shot at.
When he puts it like that, he can almost believe it.
The bastard Jake is right: he’s too soft for this job. Like Trevor. But what’s the point of it? Even Val said it: his conscience, whatever form it might take, is useless to her.
“Thanks,” he mutters when Val drops a cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of him. Breakfast in the security office at Stenordale: the lap of luxury. He wonders, suddenly, what she’s going to eat, or whether she already has. Wonders what she does when she’s not on the clock, or when she’s not watching movies after hours in her small room in the servants’ quarters. He could follow her with the cameras the way Jake and Ms Marsden do sometimes, but they’ve complained she knows where to go to get away from them.
Val rolls her eyes at his thanks, dumps the rest of her cargo, and leaves without a word.
Ms Marsden’s still chatting away in the other corner of the room, subjecting Frankie to a stream of appalling nostalgia. The more Callum’s learned about Ms Marsden’s life, the less he likes her, and Frankie’s doing no better, judging by the hesitation with which she replies. The old woman doesn’t seem to have noticed, though, and just keeps going.
“We’re still scouting for a good pairing, Franks. Oh, we wanted to keep Declan and Trevor in-house, but for some reason Silver River doesn’t have an experienced facial feminisation surgeon on hand, so we had to pay through the nose. Hah! Through the nose! Anyway, it was money for the surgery—” she’s counting off on her fingers now, “—money for recovery, and money to keep them bloody quiet, and that was the biggest bill, I don’t mind telling you. We can’t afford to keep doing that, not even if that new couple come through; they’re old money, sure, but they’re new to it and the country pile isn’t as big as it was. No, if we’re spinning up again, we need our own people. Not bloody soldiers.”
“What people?” Callum asks.
“Haven’t you been listening? Doctors, Callum. Bloody doctors. Remember Laurel and Hardy, Franks?”
“Hah,” Frankie remarks, with that same hesitation, the one she’s been showing all morning. It’s always been there, there’s always been a distance between the two women, but Callum’s tended to put it down to Frankie’s oft-repeated insistence that until Ms Marsden came calling again, she was happy with her dogs. “Yeah. They were a pair.”
“Laurel and Hardy?” Callum says.
“Not their real names, of course,” Ms Marsden says. “But Karen especially had trouble remembering their actual names.” She frowns. “Or she couldn’t pronounce them. Don’t remember. Either way, the resemblance was uncanny, so they were Laurel and Hardy. And their work… It was outstanding.”
“And they’re not still available?”
“Oh, Lord, no. They were doddering even back then. And then cancer took one and that bastard Persimmon did for the other. Botched his granddaughter’s nose, or so he claimed. If you ask me, if he didn’t want to have children with faces out of a horror movie, he should have adopted. Remember the Persimmons, Franks? Incestuous lot. Probably a hundred new diseases lurking in that bloodline. And now the great-grandkids are starting to appear, the poor little fuckers. I tell you, it’s going to be spectacular watching those genetic bombs go off. Absolutely bloody spectacular.”
Callum decides to go back to ignoring her. He flips through the camera feeds instead, looking for Val, and finds her sitting with Trevor at the little table in the rec room in the servants’ quarters; rather, he finds Trevor and he finds Val’s forearms, the rest of her being out of shot. He nudges the trackball, shifts the camera mounted above the door, trying to get her in frame, and clearly she hears the motors in the camera mount, because when she swings into view, she’s got two fingers raised at the screen.
* * *
Christine’s making the breakfast today, and though she’s once again experimentally confirmed that she can’t hope to replicate Paige’s skill with cracking eggs one-handed, she’s damn good at the subsequent omelettes even if she has to break the shells with the back of a table knife. They’re in the main kitchen this time, partly because they don’t have the second years to herd or an outing to keep on schedule — the girls were effusive with their thanks, about which Paige has been adorably smug — and partly because Julia and Yasmin are both working from home today, and have set up a miniature office in the second-floor kitchen, the better to keep themselves supplied with coffee.
It’s early enough that there are few others around, and those who are — first-year sponsors, mostly, shuffling down the stairs in ones and twos to fetch coffee — have gathered in the dining hall, the better to leave Christine and Paige to themselves. It’s hard to find intimate moments when you live in a building that, even outside term-time, houses over sixty people, especially when most of them are naturally inclined — or, at least, deliberately re-engineered — to be well-meaning and extremely nosy. Maria, however, can do much with a glare and a raised eyebrow, and so they are left alone.
Christine’s left her phone on the table, quietly humming away at an ambient playlist, and the cold air streaming in through the high windows mingles with the low simmer of perpetual heat from the AGA in a manner that makes her nostalgic for winter holidays at home, before everything. A little piece of innocence.
She turns with a satisfied whirl, slides her omelette out onto her plate, and sits opposite Paige, who is just finishing hers. She knows Paige has been watching her the whole time; she’s got that sort of smile on. Christine returns it, and under the table hooks her ankle around Paige’s, finding a point of contact to maintain while she eats her breakfast.
These days could last forever.
So, naturally, someone shows up to ruin the mood. At least she’s done with her omelette when the tentative, almost embarrassed knock on the door out to the entrance hall jerks her attention away from Paige. And standing there, looking windswept and nervous, is Rachel Gray-Wallace.
Again?
Rachel says something, made inaudible by the glass, and Christine taps meaningfully at her wrist. It’s not even nine in the morning on a Saturday!
Can I come in? Rachel mouths, over-enunciating to make herself clear.
Christine glances at Paige, who shrugs. Fuck it. Why not? They can lock the door behind her, anyway. As she lets her in, she notices Paige covering her coffee mug with her palm. Probably wise; it’s the one with the anime girl and the caption Lo-T Beats to Feminise To.
Rachel’s moving with none of her former confidence, none of the anger that animated her the last time Christine saw her. Instead she steps carefully, hangs her bag on the hook by the door, extracts her phone and lays it face down on the table, and sits in the chair closest to the door. After a moment, she tucks in her legs and drags the chair forward, sitting at the kitchen table with her arms loosely crossed on the wood like a sullen child anticipating richly deserved punishment.
Christine doesn’t join her yet. Defaulting to hostess, she puts the kettle on again. To be annoying, she selects one of the funny mugs for Rachel. She never gets to put the boot in, and just this once…
No. Stupid. Supremely counter-productive. She puts the Morning Has Broken mug on the countertop, decorated side turned away, and takes out a plain one.
“Hello again, Rachel,” says Paige, placid.
“Hello,” Rachel says hesitantly.
“Are you going to behave yourself today?”
Christine snaps her fingers, pulling Rachel’s attention away from Paige — which seems like a good thing, since the question has her stumped — and towards the box of tea she’s holding up. After a confused second, Rachel nods, and Christine starts assigning teabags to mugs and adding water.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel says. “I feel like I’ve behaved appallingly—” Paige snorts in response to this, an uncharacteristically ugly sound from her, “—and I owe you an apology. Both of you. And a lot of other people, too. I’m… sort of debate-minded. And I forget other people aren’t. I forget it a lot.”
“Up on the first floor, the other day,” Paige says, “you thought that was a debate?”
“Oh. No. That was an outburst.” Rachel smiles, accepting the mug of tea from Christine, but it’s a smile that dissolves quickly, and she returns to Paige. “I’ve had time to think. A lot of time. Belinda made me sleep in the spare room, said I was keeping her up with all my thinking, and if I wasn’t going to tell her what was up, I should just— Oh. Sorry.” Paige’s deepening frown causes Rachel to pause, to pull herself together. “I’m here to apologise. Not to fight. Not to debate. I might have my problems with… what you do here, but—”
“I don’t do anything here,” Paige says pointedly. “Except write essays. I’m a student.”
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“You assumed.”
“Yes,” Rachel says, and exhales loudly through her nose. “Yes, I really did.”
“Who else are you here to apologise to?” Christine asks.
Rachel starts counting on her fingers. “Pippa,” she says, closing her thumb decisively, like Pippa’s the most important; she probably is, Christine decides. “Both of you. Jane. Maria. Beatrice, perhaps, if she’ll see me. Stephanie.”
“I don’t think you need to do the rounds,” Paige says. “I think a generalised apology is probably fine. Don’t bother Pippa.”
“I was horrible to her.”
“Yes. A tip: don’t walk into a house full of traumatised women and start accusing them of being rapists.”
“Oh, shit. Is she a survivor?”
“Not our place to say,” Christine says quickly, throwing a significant look at Paige. “And not your place to ask. And she’s… okay. She’s been spending a lot of time with Steph. Who, no, I suggest you also don’t ask to see.”
“Steph… He— She, sorry, I know everything about her, and that was— Shit. I’m bad at this. But she said Pippa’s her sister.”
“She is.” Christine leans forward over her tea. “We form close relationships here. Familial relationships. A lot of us don’t have anyone else, you understand? No-one but our family here.”
“I— Yeah. Yes. I get it. I mean, I don’t get it, I can’t imagine being— Yes. Sorry.”
“Slow down,” Paige suggests.
Rachel laughs weakly. “I’m trying. Look, I at least want to apologise to Maria, Beatrice and Jane. And then maybe you can… pass on my apologies to Steph and Pippa?”
“I’m impressed you remembered everyone’s names,” Paige says. “The list of people you offended is very long.”
“I have a good memory,” Rachel mutters, and then her expression turns awkward. “And, well, Shy and Liss called last night. Finished the yelling at me Amy started. Filled me in on Steph’s whole story, on a lot of other things. And they were able, once I promised I wasn’t going to do anything stupid — anything else stupid — to confirm names for me.” She looks down at the table. “I don’t exactly have a script I’m following, but…”
“You had your arse kicked,” Christine says.
“I did.”
“Well, why not drink your tea and then we can see about— Oh. Hi.”
Christine sees them before Rachel does, and braces herself for what might come next, but Rachel’s reaction to Amy and Jane padding sleepily into the kitchen from the dining hall in the exact same exhausted manner as all the other sponsors is surprisingly muted. Amy’s wearing one of Jane’s sleepshirts — Christine’s seen Jane wear it over jogging trousers sometimes, usually when she’s showing up late to a morning briefing — and they’re walking with their pinkies linked. It’s sweet.
“Morning, Amy,” Rachel says, sounding worn out.
“Rach?” Amy blurts out, leaving Jane in the doorway and running forward, and then stopping, indecisive, in the middle of the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”
“Embarrassing myself.”
“Wasn’t that yesterday?” Paige says. Christine frowns; Paige smirks back at her.
“And today, and tomorrow…”
“Okay,” Amy says. “What else are you doing here?”
“I came to—” Rachel starts, and blinks. “You stayed the night, didn’t you?”
Amy shrugs. “Duh.”
“With her?”
“Hello, Rachel,” Jane says, from the doorway. Briefly she meets Christine’s eyes; Christine can only shrug in response.
“Look, Jane,” Rachel says, “I’m really sorry. I was rude, I made assumptions and… I’m sorry.”
“Good,” Jane says, pushing up off the doorjamb and heading for the coffee machine. She swipes a mug off the side, fills it, and sits heavily down on the exact opposite side of the kitchen table from Rachel. Behind her, the doorway starts filling up with sponsors.
“We need to talk, Rach,” Amy says.
“That’s my line,” Rachel says. “But, yes, okay, sure.”
“Not here,” Edy says. She’s standing with Maria, an arm around her waist, a defiant show of affection. Everyone’s heard what Rachel said by now, or they’ve at least read the transcripts. “The second years’ll be down soon, probably, and the last thing they need is more of—” she waves a hand towards Rachel, “—that.”
“Jane,” Amy says, “is there somewhere we can go? Somewhere quiet?”
Jane slurps from her mug. Christine can’t help noticing it’s the Morning Has Broken mug she set aside earlier, and hopes Rachel doesn’t happen to focus on it.
“Anywhere in the first basement,” Jane says. “Can someone else take them? I’ve got to get my shit together and then go see Raph.”
No-one else volunteers, so Christine raises a hand.
“Who’s Raph?” Rachel asks.
“My special friend,” Jane says, unhelpfully.
“What—? Ah. Right.”
“Don’t make a scene, Rach,” Amy warns.
“Wouldn’t fucking dream of it,” Rachel murmurs, frowning again and standing from her seat. She looks like she might be winding herself up again, having been reminded that, yes, there are boys under the house, so Christine stands, too, to take them both downstairs with alacrity, and the action prompts a gasp and a guilty glance down from Rachel. “I let my tea get cold,” she says to Christine, who finds herself relieved that an abandoned mug of tea is apparently sufficient to derail Rachel’s train of thought, at least temporarily. “Sorry.”
“There’s a microwave downstairs,” Maria says. “And Jane, hide that bloody mug from her, would you? It’s too early for drama and I’m already at my limit.”
“Why would—?” Rachel says, as she collects her tea, her phone and her bag. “No. Never mind. I’m beginning to suspect I don’t want to know.”
As she leads Rachel and Amy out of the kitchen and towards the stairs down to the basement, Christine hears Paige ask which mug Jane picked, which means Jane will be showing Paige the lovely watercolour-effect artwork and the handwritten script which reads:
Michael has broken, calls herself Morgan
Bradley has spoken, a lovely new sound
Praise for the new girls, minus some organs
Praise for them springing out from underground
“I don’t get the reference,” Paige says.
Christine just about overhears Edy saying, “There’s no love for the classics any more,” and then they’re out of earshot and into the concrete stairwell. She knows it can be intimidating, so she checks behind her: Rachel is looking carefully at the floor, watching her step; Amy, though, meets her eyes and smirks, so Christine smiles back.
Another hectic bloody morning.
* * *
“Are we really ready for this?”
“Honestly, Val, no. But I don’t see how we have a choice.”
Frankie leans against the sturdiest-looking shelf in the pantry and shoves her hands in her pockets. Val’s uncharacteristically nervous, which Frankie might have expected on a day like today if she hadn’t seemed positively bloodthirsty last night. But then, it might not be the prospect of dying in the escape attempt that scares her; it might be the prospect of surviving. It’s not escaped Frankie’s notice that Val, for all her arrogance and her bluster, hasn’t seen the outside world in thirty years, and a portion of her plans for the day have concerned what to do if Val just freezes.
She’s talked about it with Trev; they’ll pick her up if they have to.
“We can’t wait? Only another month until the next delivery.”
“No,” Frankie says, tensing her fists in her pockets. “The old woman’s getting ambitious again. That new family she saw recently? She’s talking about sending out more feelers. Getting more people involved. She hates being beholden to the Yanks; she wants British money, easy access. And more money means more Silver River bastards. No; this is our last shot before we become hopelessly outnumbered. Unless you want to try plan B.”
Plan B is setting fire to the manor and letting the chips and wooden beams fall where they may. It’s possible something structurally important will collapse before they all succumb to smoke inhalation.
“They’re not American,” Val says quietly.
“Hmm?”
“The Smyth-Farrow children.”
“Might as well be,” Frankie says. “And their cash is, anyway. They’ve got their hands across the aisle, remember?”
“I’ve been locked up for a long time, Frances,” Val says acidly, frowning at her. “You can’t just make these references and expect me to get them.”
Frankie nods apologetically. “Tax-free American church money. Fuck only knows what the church wants with Trev, or with any other of the poor lads they plan to manufacture.”
Val smiles. “That, I do know about. There is none so immoral as a priest most pious.”
In the kitchen, Trev rattles a plate in the sink: someone’s coming.
“Twenty minutes,” Frankie says quickly. “Give or take. They’ll probably be late; military precision is dead. Shit, Val, what did we come in here for again?”
Val steps to one side, revealing one of the last crates left in the pantry. “Very old potatoes,” she says. “Mostly eyes and shoots. I was planning to throw them out whatever happens today.” She doesn’t miss the look Frankie aims at her. “What? Always plan for failure, Frances.”
“That’s gloomy.”
“It’s been the only constant in my life.”
* * *
It’s Amy’s first trip downstairs, and if Rachel weren’t here she’d put on her most ingratiating and annoying voice and try to get Christine to take her on a tour of the basement — she really wants to meet one of the boys in their ‘before’ state, and she’s given to understand that time is running out on that already — but she has to content herself with a quick glance down the next flight of stairs, which frustratingly reveals nothing of interest. Just more concrete.
They really need to get a decorator down here.
It’s neat to see into the security room, though, and she waves at the girls on duty, only one of whom she knows by name, and then Christine’s directing them into an office space that reminds Amy of those little consulting rooms you spend a lot of time in when you’re shopping for a nose job. There’s even a pile of pamphlets which Christine sweeps out of the way and into a drawer before Rachel sees them.
“I’ll leave the door open,” Christine says, as the two of them get comfortable. “Bathroom’s down the hall and clearly labelled. Kitchen’s across from here and I’ll leave that door open, too. Everything else is locked, so don’t try it.”
Amy crosses her heart.
“What would we even try?” Rachel asks, eyeing walls of solid concrete.
Christine shrugs. “Often I can’t guess until someone tries it. Just don’t, okay? I’m trying to have a nice day.”
“Sorry.”
Christine glares at Rachel for a moment, and then smiles quickly for Amy and leaves the two of them alone, closing the heavy door to and, a second later, kicking a small wedge under it.
“If it bangs closed anyway,” she shouts through the door, “just wave your arms around and someone in the security room will see and come let you out. Don’t worry, you won’t suffocate.”
“Thanks, Christine,” Amy yells back, hands around her mouth. “Isn’t she nice?” she says, turning back to Rachel, who’s taken an office chair and tucked her legs under, and is slowly swinging herself from left to right, with one hand on the desk to guide her.
“I’m not reassured that she felt she had to mention suffocation,” Rachel says. Amy just points upwards at the vents. “Oh. Fine.”
Amy rests her chin on her wrist and regards her friend for a while. She’s displaced, unmoored. Which is understandable: she’s always been both moral and thorough and now here she is, one floor underground in a place which confounds her morals and would prefer she not poke around too much.
A thought occurs: “Does Belinda know?” She didn’t know before, Amy’s pretty sure, but Rachel left the Hall at speed yesterday, and had all day to seethe on it.
Rachel blinks at her. “What? No! What would I tell her? How would I tell her?”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell her something if you’re going to keep coming round here.”
“Why would I—?” Rachel pauses, stares at her. “Oh.”
“Not just me,” Amy says. “Shy spends half her waking hours here, too. She’s already talking about looking for work locally. Melissa’s going back to Manchester soon, but probably just to resign and empty out her flat, so it’s going to be the three of us in and out of here all the time.”
“I have other friends.”
Amy laughs. “So go. Leave the rest of us be.”
Rachel recoils as if Amy just slapped her. “You’re not serious, are you? Amy, you’re—!”
“Yes, I’m bloody serious!” Amy says, raising her voice. She’s putting on the performance she discussed with Jane, and she’s perhaps over-egging it a touch, but she’s also deadly serious about this. “Rach, you’re my oldest friend. I love you. But even if it doesn’t work out with Jane, I’m still going to keep coming here for Shy and Liss. So either you need to sort your shit out or you need to make room in your life for three new best friends.”
“That’s…” Rachel slumps in her chair. “Shit.”
“Thought you were just gonna come here, apologise and sod off, didn’t you?” Amy says with a smile.
“Yeah.”
“Come on.” Amy jumps up out of her chair. “Your tea’s cold. Forget microwaving it; let’s make a new cuppa and have that talk.”
* * *
It’s a larger delivery than the last one, and that means all hands on deck, even if some of those hands belong to people no-one under this roof officially trusts. But what can Trevor and Valérie even do? Callum’s run through all the escape scenarios he can think of, and in the best case, they both get caught or killed before they’re halfway down the driveway. He’s armed; Jake’s armed, and still in a royally shit mood with everyone; the two delivery men from Silver River’ll be armed, too. And Frankie’s got her taser. It’d take outside action to give the girls — or whatever they are — a chance. Outside action or, perhaps, a betrayal.
So he’s got his eye on Frankie.
They’re unloading into the main hall. Callum likes to imagine some older Smyth-Farrow, maybe one of the component parts of the stupid double-barrelled name, having a fit at the gouges the crates always leave in the tile, but when Silver River eventually inherits the manor from Ms Marsden it’ll see a lot worse. It’s an interesting question, actually: what would be more distasteful to the aristocratic ancestors of Stenordale Manor, the scuffed flooring or the corpses in the quad?
He knows his answer. Because, fuck, they made Valérie bury them. That shook him. Shook him hard.
Eyes on him. He turns to find Jake staring at him from his position by the door, and then he remembers: he’s in the wrong place. They’re supposed to be standing either side of the entrance, so when the men from Silver River are unloading, they’re covered from both sides. Not just in case Val or Trev try anything, which is a laughable prospect; in case one of the delivery men turns traitor, which is unlikely but something Jake insisted on planning for. After all, that was how young Trevor got here in the first place.
Everyone’s on edge.
Everyone except the delivery guys, apparently, because one of them’s whistling when he wheels in the first crate and the other greets them all with a smile. Callum suddenly envies them; they get to go home after this, or back to a Silver River facility, or down the pub, or somewhere else that isn’t this dusty fucking manor. He tries not to let it show in his face, and returns the man’s greeting in the spirit with which it was offered.
Trev and Val load the first crate onto the trolley and wheel it off down the corridor towards the kitchens, and Jake very obviously lets himself relax, which is permission for Callum to follow suit, and together they watch the others do their jobs.
It happens after the Silver River men dump the third crate in the entrance hall and are halfway back to the van. The first Callum knows something’s happening is when Jake leaps suddenly backwards, yelling his name, yelling for him to draw, and he whips around to see the twin silver darts of Frankie’s taser embedded in the wooden beam by the entrance.
She shot for Jake and she missed.
He takes an agonising moment, probably less than a second but perceptibly considerably longer, to clear his head, to suppress his instinctive response and to take stock, and it’s too long, because before he can properly assess the situation, Val’s collided with his stomach, rocking him, causing him to lose his footing temporarily, and then there’s an explosion of pain in the small of his back and his knees lock up. He tries to swear and nothing comes out and he realises Valérie must have Frankie’s backup, the crappy little stun gun Jake made fun of, and she’s got it rammed into him.
She’s not practised with it, though, or Frankie’s instructed her wrong, because she’s not keeping up the pressure, and it’s easy enough to turn away from her, put himself out of her reach, knock her away. He goes down on one knee because he’s shaking like fucking mad but he’s still upright, still capable, and that’s enough to take back the initiative from someone like Valérie.
She’s sensible, not coming back for him immediately but clearly weighing her options. She’s still got the stun gun, and now they’re facing each other there’s the chance she could get it in his face; if there’s enough charge left, she could seriously fuck him up if she gets lucky. So, hand on his gun, releasing the grip straps and carefully unholstering it — still fucking shaking — he takes another step away from her and, finally, gets hold of the situation.
The delivery guys aren’t back yet, but they probably heard him or Jake yelling, so it can’t be long. Jake himself is on the floor, with Trevor on top of him, flailing like a schoolgirl in her first playground catfight, and Frankie’s pointing another taser at them both — God only knows where she got it; she’s only supposed to have the one — tracking the melee, clearly afraid to fire in case she hits the wrong person.
Jake’s got his gun drawn but Trevor’s got his foot on Jake’s wrist, and that’s the only thing keeping the whole situation from resolution already. It’s easy to see how it plays out from here: Jake keeps Trevor at bay and Callum, now free of Val, can keep the women under gunpoint until the men from Silver River come back and end it all.
It’s fucking pathetic, it really is. They’ve thrown everything at this, all their meagre chances, even brought Frankie into it, and as soon as the delivery guys come back, it’s over. A twenty-second rebellion. And then nothing. Trevor and Val return to their assigned fates, likely after Ms Marsden lets Jake have a bit of fun, lets him have a spot of revenge. Death for Frankie, probably.
Trevor’s still got Jake’s gun hand under control, and Val’s deep-breathing, preparing to come at him again, and Frankie’s realising Callum’s free; only moments until she re-evaluates and tries to use her remaining taser on him.
He can take control of the situation so easily.
Callum feels calm as he points his pistol at Frankie. Calm and cold. Aware of himself.
“Stop,” he says, and Frankie’s taser hand lowers.
“Cal!” Jake yells, out of breath, apparently having more trouble with Trevor than either of them expected. “Get—this—fucking—tranny—off me!”
Calm.
Cold.
Aware of himself.
“Cal!”
When the men from Silver River come rushing in, guns ready, Callum shoots the first one in the thigh. The man instantly loses his footing, tumbles, and hits his head on the tile, and if that’s not it for him then he’s probably not getting up for a while. The other looks for the source of the bullet, his hearing deafened into uselessness by the proximity of the gunshot, and Callum aims for him.
“Disarm,” he orders. “Now!”
“Callum—!” Jake grunts. Out of the corner of his eye, Callum can see the struggle between Jake and Trevor has renewed.
“I said, disarm!” he repeats, and the Silver River man still standing leans down, places his gun on the floor, kicks it into the middle of the room. Val’s closest, and she starts for it. “Frankie,” Callum says, “go for the van. Start it. We’ll follow. I’ll drive. I can get you out of—”
Another deafening crack, another gunshot, and for an instant and forever, Callum’s colder still.
* * *
“So,” Rachel says, and Amy eyes her hard because she knows what she’s going to say, has been able to see it bubbling under ever since she walked into the kitchen. “You and Jane.”
“Me and Jane.”
“You and a— her.”
Amy spends a while looking into her tea before answering. Wondering what Jane would say. Wondering how she would say it. Wondering how she can keep her best friend. And when it comes out, it’s bitter and sharp and she has to wipe the spittle from her chin. “You’re going to say something gross about her, aren’t you?” she says. “Because I don’t care what you say and I don’t care what you think, but she’s—”
“Hey!” Rachel says, reaching out for her. Amy recoils. “Amy! I don’t know what you think I’m going to say, but it’s not what you think!”
“Oh, really?” Amy snaps back. “I know what you think when you look at these women, Rachel.”
“Fuck! Amy! Where is this coming from?”
“It’s—” she starts, and then pulls it back. “Isn’t it obvious?” she asks, forcing herself to be more calm. “You’re not the only one who’s been thinking, Rach. Ever since you walked back in here this morning, I’ve been wondering about your ulterior motive.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Bullshit.”
Rachel slaps the table, open-palmed. “I don’t! I really did just come here to apologise. And because you’re right: I don’t want to lose my friends. And you’re wrong, also. I don’t know what I think when I look at them.” She shakes her head. “I know what I see.”
“So go with that,” Amy says. “Go with what you see. Let them be bloody women, Rach. Because, yes: me and Jane.”
“I wasn’t going to call her a man or anything. I promise.”
“It’s what Liss thinks you think of her now.”
“What? That’s not— She didn’t say anything to me.”
Amy clasps her mug. The air con’s running a little hard; she’s chilly. “Why would she? We’re all just trying to keep you from doing anything that’ll hurt people.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you! Or did you forget why you came here today in the first place?”
Rachel glares at her, seems ready to snap at her, and then closes her eyes. Reaches for and drinks her tea.
“I hate this,” she says. “I hate feeling so tense around my best friend.”
“Yeah,” Amy says, “me too.” It’s an easy admission. Amy used to tell her everything, often to a level of detail Rachel found annoying. Losing that, even if only for a few days, has been an open wound.
“I’m not here to have a go at you,” Rachel says slowly. “And I’m not here with ulterior motives. I’m not going to do anything. I just want things how they were.”
Impossible not to smile at that. Amy yanks at the collar of Jane’s sleepshirt. “Not going to happen.”
“Right. You and Jane.”
“Me and Jane.”
“It’s… strange to see you with another woman,” Rachel says, with an emphasis on ‘another’ that Amy chooses to take as an olive branch. “You were always so boy-crazy.”
“I was,” Amy says carefully, watching Rachel. “But they always disappointed me.” A stray thought leaks out before she can stop it: “Maybe that’s why I understood this place so quick.”
Rachel doesn’t take offence, or if she does, she doesn’t show it. “They were that bad?”
“Oh, no. Not really. Well, Charlie bloody Carstairs was. But they just…” She leans forward again, blows on her tea. More for something to do than to cool it down. “You’ve never dated men. You don’t know what they’re like when they’re alone with you.”
“Tell me.”
They’ve talked about everything. Everything but this. Everything but the empty feeling that always chases her after being in a relationship for a few months. The deep and distracting dissatisfaction she’s found in every boyfriend. Because Amy always wondered if she was broken, if she was the missing piece in every relationship, and she didn’t want her best friend to be the one to confirm it.
“They just don’t give a shit, Rach,” she says. “And you expect more, because of course you do. So you go from man to man, looking for someone who cares.” She sips at her tea. “After a couple of months I’d always get to the point where I’d be up at night, obsessing over them. Over whether they were worth it. I used to wonder if something happened to me, if they’d stick around. If I got breast cancer, like Gran, so I had to have a mastectomy. Or a car accident. Or an illness. I’d wonder if I’d wake up and find them gone.”
“And?”
“Never found a man I could convincingly tell myself yes.”
“So,” Rachel says. “You and Jane.” Amy nods. “Do you like girls?”
“I never thought so. But growing up, it was just you and Shy and the girls at school. You were my friends and you know what the girls at school were like. And there was Mark, of course, and he was cute, and if it’d been him then I wouldn’t’ve had to wonder. But I never even really thought seriously about it, because he came as a package with Shahida, and he was also really obviously broken. And we all know how that turned out. She never even was a guy.”
Rachel nods slowly, running a hand over her chin. “I really need to apologise to Liss. I said such awful things.”
“Yes,” Amy says, “you really did.”
“Never said them to her, though.”
“No, but you said them. And you know what it’s like when someone’s a homophobe, don’t you? It doesn’t take much to tell.”
Rach smiles weakly. “Throw that back in my face, why don’t you.”
“I think your face kinda deserves it.”
“Yeah,” Rachel says. “True. She told me, actually, last night — Melissa, I mean — she told me to look at the women here the same way I do anyone who comes out. She said I wouldn’t tell a girl who just realised she likes girls—” and she directs another smile at Amy, “—that she’s still really straight, that she’s still straight inside. She said all that matters is the now.”
“It’s good advice.”
“I know. I’m just… I’m scared for you, Ames.”
“Because I like girls?” Amy says, sitting upright. “You like girls, Rach.”
“No. I mean… I mean, because of Jane.”
And they’re right back here again. “What now?”
“I’m not casting aspersions,” Rachel says quickly, waving a hand. “I’m not, I promise. I’m doing what Liss said. Or trying to. She’s a woman. But, Ames—”
“Don’t ‘Ames’ me if you’re going to be insulting.”
“What if she changes herself again?”
Okay. Yeah. This is the point where she walks away. Where she gets up and leaves Rachel to find her own way out of this concrete maze, because this is stupid—
“Amy!” Rachel says, louder and more insistent. “I’m serious! She wasn’t Jane ten years ago! If you go through with this, if you stay with her, how do you know she’ll still be Jane five, ten years from now?”
Half out of her chair, Amy lowers herself again. Because this really is stupid. “She’s not going to stop being Jane, Rach.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I— You know what? I can’t. But I can’t know that about anyone, can I? I can’t even know that about me! I could change my pronouns. I could change my name! I could do anything. Does that make me dangerous, Rachel?”
“No,” Rachel says, “I suppose not. But you’re not going to do any of that, are you?”
Amy hesitates. Shrugs. “Dunno,” she says. “But being around a bunch of trans girls— and don’t say a thing because what else am I going to call them? Being around a bunch of trans girls, it makes you think. Like, on the one hand, they’re so bloody happy to be women, Rach. They celebrate it! I can see it in all the little things, and you would, too, if you could pull your head out of your arse. Jane is… she’s so happy to be her. It’s the kind of thing that makes you appreciate what you have. But, at the same time, like I said, it makes you think. Makes you think, maybe you don’t have to be a girl all the time. Maybe you can try something else. Makes you think, maybe you’ve got options you never thought about.”
“This is… unreal, Amy.”
She seems unsure again. Rachel’s wobbled back and forth between confrontational and conciliatory, and this is perhaps the best chance to nail her down on the side Amy prefers. “I met some new people, Rach,” she says. “I expanded my horizons. I had a wicked handful of orgasms, too.” Into Rachel’s sudden blush, Amy continues, “Look, you don’t have to like the programme or the girls or even the bloody building. You don’t have to approve. Just… ease up, would you?”
“I’d love to. And if I stop thinking about it, I like the girls I’ve met here just fine, I do. But I can’t get it out of my head, Amy. They torture people here! I don’t understand how you’re so… unbothered.”
“I have doubts, too. I get it. The difference is, I talked about those doubts without blowing the fuck up.”
“And they talked you out of them,” Rachel says.
“Nope,” Amy says triumphantly. “Jane’s got doubts, too. Most people here do, she said. She got in a few of her friends and we talked about it and everyone’s kind of uneasy. Everyone’s a little unsure.”
“So why not stop? Why keep doing it, year after year?”
“Name another way of taking a dangerous man, a man who is genuinely becoming a threat to women, a man who needs help to change but who’ll never get it, because the system loves men like him.” A direct quote, but Amy can’t think of a better way to phrase it, especially not now, with her heart beating so fast she can feel it in her wrists.
“So you… kidnap him?”
“It’s more like, you throw him a life preserver. You see a guy in the masculinity doom spiral — Monica’s words — and you pull him out. If you can. And if you think he can hack it as a she. Not everyone can, and doing the whole programme to someone who can’t? That would be cruel.”
“So what about the others?” Rachel presses.
“They report them, if there’s evidence. But sometimes there’s just nothing they can do.”
“What? They just leave them there? We’re talking about men who’ve hurt women here, right?”
Amy leans forward. “So,” she says, smiling the kind of smile she puts on when she’s been made to play Monopoly with her family and she just got the first hotel, “you agree something has to be done? What do you suggest?”
“Fuck off,” Rachel says, but she does so lightly, with humour, the way she always used to, and Amy decides, yeah, this is it. This is the start of the breakthrough.
“Persuasive.”
“You know I don’t have the answers,” Rachel says. “No-one does.”
Amy’s smile broadens. “They do. Look,” she continues, when Rachel rolls her eyes at her, “we could go around in circles on this forever, and I really don’t want to and I think you’re sick of it, too.”
Rachel leans forward on her hands. “I didn’t come here to argue in the first place. I just want things to be normal again.”
“So let’s do something normal,” Amy suggests. “You try to stop yourself from thinking too much about stuff, and come back upstairs with me to say any apologies you feel you need to, and then… have lunch with me and my new friends. The lunch you should have had with us yesterday.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Forgiven,” Amy says lightly.
“About Jane,” Rachel says, and she sounds genuine, so Amy waits through her significant pause, allows her the time to gather her thoughts. “She’s nice, yes?”
“Yah,” Amy replies, aware that she sounds a little dreamy, the way she once did about Rachel’s older brother, “she is.”
“You think she could be, you know… it? I mean, I know it’s early, but like, do you think?”
“Yeah,” Amy says, trying not to sound triumphant, because if she’s interested, if she’s invested, then Amy’s got her, and it’s only a matter of time before Rachel forgets her objections, or decides they don’t really matter. “Yeah, she really could be.”
Rachel relaxes her shoulders, winds the tension out of her upper arms, and smiles for Amy. “I’m happy for you,” she says. “I am. And I’m not going to do anything, I promise. I’m worried, but I’m… working on it. Sorting it out in my head.”
“No more yelling?”
“No more yelling. Maybe some polite discussions. With a chaperone.”
“Oh?”
“I’d like to talk to Steph,” Rachel says. “I saw her just that one time, and she was… very annoyed with me. I want to try again. I want to listen. Because she’s trans and so I would have assumed she’d be against this place, but she called Pippa her sister and… I don’t know what to think. But I want to.”
“We can ask Maria. Or Pippa, but—” Amy catches Rachel’s wince. “Yeah. We’ll ask Maria.”
Rachel reaches for her, takes her hand, and this feels old again, like when they would sit up late in each other’s rooms. When they spent all the time they could together. When they were almost like sisters, too.
“Thanks, Ames.”
“You’re really happy for me?” Amy asks, squeezing at Rachel’s fingers but still needing the reassurance. “You’re not just saying that?”
“Haven’t I always told you, women are better?” Rachel laughs. “I just never expected you to take it to such an extreme.”
* * *
A momentous crash of thunder.
The zip of burned and tortured air.
A red stain under Callum’s eye, and he falls.
He falls quickly, fades faster still. Tendons loose; strings cut. Nothing left of him before he’s even halfway to the floor, and Valérie feels abstractly sorry for him. If he were another man, if he’d lived another life, then this moment would be a tragedy.
In this life, in her life, it’s an obstacle.
Instinctively she dropped when she saw Jake finally throw off his assailant and take aim, and now she’s flat on the tile, useless, unarmed and unable to move, pinned down by a rapacious bastard with a handgun aimed directly at her.
“You fucking bitches,” Jake’s muttering as he climbs to his feet, wiping blood from his cheek with one hand while keeping a steady aim on Valérie with the other. “You stupid fucking bitches. Put something in his head, didn’t you? He was a good lad. Soft. A bit thick. And now he’s dead.”
He shouldn’t be aiming at her. She’s unarmed. Helpless. Harmless. Is he just that sadistic?
And then she understands: there are guns all around her. Trevor’s against the far wall, bleeding from what looks like a shallow but unpleasant wound to the side of his neck, and Frankie’s still dithering, still keeping her second taser in hand, ready, and thus potentially a problem, but behind Val there’s Callum’s gun, centimetres from his fingers and most definitely loaded and ready to fire. And there’s the gun the unharmed delivery man kicked into the middle of the floor, and the still-holstered weapon belonging to the unconscious — dead? that was a hard fall, head-first — man that Callum shot.
What will she have to do to get hold of one?
“Ah-ah-ah!” Jake says, wobbling the tip of the gun minutely and without breaking his aim. “Stay still, Vincent.”
Shit. He knows exactly what she knows. He’s identified every weapon, seen every route she could take to get to one. And of course he has: of the two of them, one’s a trained, professional soldier, the other’s spent the last thirty years cooking roast beef dinners for revolting English pigs. An unarmed civilian under his gun, less than a metre away from a gun of her own? He’s probably killed a dozen of her.
So what will he expect her to do?
And then she’s out of time to think, because there’s a sudden crash of smashed crockery, and the vase Trevor’s thrown at Jake causes him to stumble, to raise his arms to protect his face, so while Trevor misses with the second vase and collapses back, grasping once again at the wound on his neck, Valérie gives in to her instincts and rises from the floor, both hands pushing off. She lifts herself as quickly as she can, feels something pop in her left thigh and something else in her right calf, but she’s on him, on Jake, faster than he can react, and either she’s faster or stronger than she thought, or Trevor managed actually to do some damage, because he overbalances and falls with her and she crashes to the ground for the second time in thirty seconds, this time with a monster of a man underneath her.
Her hand’s around his wrist more quickly than he can get it away from her, and he might be strong but she’s been a working woman for thirty years and she keeps hold of him, presses that hand to the ground. She doesn’t try knocking it against the tile the way Trevor did, knowing she has no chance of breaking his grip, and she thinks she has probably less than a second before Jake can begin to respond, so she twists, gets a foot onto his other wrist, crouches over him like a predatory insect, like a wounded and terrified creature desperate for blood, and with her free hand, hits him in the face as hard as she can.
Again.
Again.
Again.
He’s Crispin Smyth-Farrow, pressing himself upon her, forcing her to prepare her sisters for slaughter.
He’s Dorothy Marsden, leering at her from the other side of a cell door, extracting every possible pleasure from her imprisonment.
He’s the men, the endless fucking men, the ones who looked at her, the ones who touched her, the ones who were content simply to know her, her history, her unwanted physiology. One of Dorothy’s little toys, one of her attractions.
He’s Callum, lying dead, come to his conscience too late and spotted dark and ugly red on his face, too much in death like her parents, a memory raw.
He’s Jake.
She hits him again.
Less than ten seconds she has, ten seconds to make him suffer, ten seconds for her parents, for Vincent, for Valérie, for Béatrice, for all the girls she couldn’t save, even for Callum, and then he’s pushing against her again, moving himself the way she did, getting his legs into place, kicking at her. The first time he misses but the second time he drives his foot into her belly.
She holds on.
He kicks her again and that’s it. She overbalances, falls sideways, grasps again at his hand as she does so and finally, fucking finally, yanks the gun from his grip.
She can’t hold it. Slick with sweat and shaking from exertion she loses it, and it clatters and slides and scrapes against the tile, out of reach.
Out of his reach, too.
Their eyes meet. At least his face is a fucking wreck.
For a long second, they both take stock. Trevor’s moved, still bleeding but now halfway around the room from where he was; still nowhere especially useful, unless he’s going to try to throw another vase. Frankie’s connected to the second delivery man by the wires of her second taser, but she got him in the act of diving for his gun, and he’s probably not going to stay down for long; he’s already shakily climbing back up onto his elbows. And Jake and Valérie are both as far away from a weapon as each other.
It’s Callum who saves her. Jake dives for his gun but exhaustion and adrenaline cause him to fall early and he hits the floor, grunting in pain and landing far short of his target. Valérie, however, dives at the same time and lands on Callum, on the man’s cooling middle-aged spread, and she finds his gun before Jake finds his.
She can also stand more quickly, more ably than him. She and Trevor did a lot of work on him between them.
“Stop,” she commands. She’s pleased to find her voice calm, her hand steady. Finger inside the trigger guard, other hand steadying the stock, Valérie tries to remember everything she’s ever seen in movies about handguns. Aim for the centre mass; no trick shots, no head shots.
“Don’t be stupid, Vincent,” Jake says. He pushes himself up, faces her. “Our man’s up in a few seconds—” he nods at the delivery man, now struggling against Frankie, who looks destined to lose, and lose quickly, “—and that’s your only weapon. Shoot me, and he’ll drop you right after.”
“Jacob,” Valérie says, “I’ve been waiting to die for thirty years.”
She fires.
The recoil feels like it’s going to take her arm from her. Her shoulder bucks, feels like it dislocates, and the white-hot flash and the noise, the deafening fucking noise, are overwhelming. She’s forced backwards, ankles catching on Callum’s body, and this time she falls hard, topples over on him, and that’s what Jake needs.
Because she fucking missed.
Oh, okay, she thinks, as he charges at her, perhaps she got him in the side, a little. Grazed him. Gave him a nasty burn he’ll still be thinking about in a month’s time, when she’s long since been buried with her sisters. She’s stupid, like he said. Of the three of them who remain, she was the last one who should have got the gun. It should have been Trevor, who’s trained in the damn things. It could even have been Frankie. But it was her, the once-promising boy, the lifelong maid, the prisoner, the failure.
The fool. For believing, even for a moment, that this could work.
And then there’s another crash of sound, loud enough again that she thinks she might not hear properly for the rest of her life, and Jake, inches from her, is thrown sideways. She backs up, stands up, looks around, finds Trevor, still clasping at his neck with one hand — he’s absorbing the blood with a stack of doilies, of all things — but with the other he holds what must be Jake’s gun, and his first shot knocked Jake down.
Got him in the leg, it looks like. It’s probably smart, looking at the angles: immobilisation was probably easier, for Trevor, than a kill.
Trevor steps smartly forward and shoots the delivery man, moments before he can get to his gun. Two in the head. Swings back around to aim at Jake, but Jake’s ready for him.
But not the way Valérie expects. Because Jake runs. He throws himself at Trevor’s feet, knocks him down but doesn’t disarm him, and while Trevor’s righting himself, Jake scrambles back up and runs for the end of the corridor, colliding with a table and making it around the corner just as Trevor, wobbling under the weight of the gun and his injury, plants a bullet in the wall.
“Come on,” Trevor says, and there’s blood in his voice, “we have to go. He can disable the gate mechanism if he gets to the security room. Valérie! Frankie! We have to go!”
Valérie’s the first of the two of them to come to her senses, to stop watching the end of the corridor, waiting for Jake to come back out, freshly armed, and finish them. She’s moving before she has a chance to register where she’s going, and she drags on Frankie’s arm as she passes. Frankie’s grabbed the gun off the floor, the one belonging to the second delivery man to die, but she drops it as Valérie pulls on her, and Valérie decides, fuck it, leave it; none of them except Trevor can shoot, anyway.
Within seconds they’re moving quickly, or as quickly as they can. Frankie’s the only one not to have been hurt, and while Valérie, in theory, is used to pain, it’s been a long time since she’s been so knocked around, so Frankie’s first to the van. She stands there by the open back doors, beckoning, and Valérie looks behind to see Trevor struggling.
Together they fetch him, all the while with an eye to the gates, waiting for a red light or a loud click or some kind of sign that Jake’s beaten them to it, that he’s turned them off, that the van, when eventually they’re loaded up, won’t be able to open them, will trap them as efficiently as the manor always has.
She gets in the back with Trevor, sits him down on a crate, checks on him quickly — he still has enough strength to keep holding his wad of doilies to his throat — and climbs through the gap in the front seats. She drops painfully into the passenger seat and starts looking for the gate control switch.
She finds it and stabs at it, and the second or two before the gates start to respond and slide apart, their near-three-metre height slowly grinding along the cobblestones, is the longest Valérie’s ever had to wait for anything.
Frankie climbs into the driver’s seat. The engine’s still running, to keep the heater going on such a cold day, although Valérie doesn’t see any keys anywhere, and the whole dashboard in fact looks like one of those modern phones Frankie has, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because Frankie jams her foot to the floor and the van grinds on the stones for a moment and leaps forward.
“Val!” Frankie says, tapping on her shoulder. “Check on Trev, will you?”
The gate passes them, the walls pass them, and they’re away, onto a barely paved, narrow and winding road closed in on both sides by dormant winter trees.
“Val!”
It doesn’t take long, though, with Frankie pushing the van up to forty, fifty, sixty, for the tree cover to start to fade, for them to crest the rise, and in front of them is suddenly a sun-bright and brittle landscape, their road widening, their destination ahead of them at the base of the hill, a village, a town, a fucking city, Valérie doesn’t know which, can’t know, would have no way to know anything except that it’s something new, something real, something free.
“Val! I don’t know how much blood he’s lost! Check on Trevor, Val!”
The world goes on forever.
* * *
She’s Dina and he’s Declan and he doesn’t know any more from day to day, from hour to hour, which name he should claim, which life he should lead. He’s taken and she’s used and he’s beaten and she’s caressed and he’s mutilated and she’s dressed in pretty things. He would once have believed himself unchangeable, and for a while the girls at Dorley Hall, the girl Monica, proved him right, handed him a victory, but now he’s here and she’s here too and they are, both of them, shattered and gathered and rebuilt into someone he doesn’t want to recognise.
Monica. Val. The older woman, Frankie. All of them. She shouldn’t have pushed. Shouldn’t have fought. Shouldn’t shouldn’t shouldn’t but did anyway. Because he was proud. And pride brought him here. Left him with Jacob. The first one of them to rename her. The first one of them to remake her. The first one of them to—
The door. That’s not right! It stays locked. Stays locked and shut unless it’s one of those nights, and she was told no, not tonight, because Jake’s on guard duty, real guard duty, and he’ll be tired, the sort of tired she can’t help with. He’s getting old, see, Dina, love, and he puts up a good front, but some nights, all he’s good for is sleep. Maybe a little telly.
The door.
Jake.
Please! Not tonight!
But here he is, anyway, chasing away for now the last hints of Declan, the man who couldn’t survive him, but something’s wrong, everything’s wrong. He’s been beaten, he’s been bruised. Swollen jaw, cheek, eye. Cuts and contusions all over. Limping badly. And, Jesus, with his shirt half-open she can see the bandage wrapped triple around his belly. Blood seeping through.
Bottle of beer in one hand. Almost empty.
“Oh, Dina,” he says, sitting down next to her, where she’s sat, knees together like he taught her, on the little bed they allow her. “Oh, Dina.”
She says nothing. What would she say?
“It’s been a fucking day, Dina. A fucking day. Callum betrayed us. Sided with Vincent. Frankie did, too, but I’m not so surprised by that. Callum, though, he was a good lad. I knew his uncle, you know. Wasn’t in Silver River. Knew him from the army. Heard he died. Don’t know how. Better man than Callum, in the end. Had to put him down myself. One shot. Was a good shot.”
He finishes his bottle, throws it. It clatters into the corner by the vanity.
“So now it’s just us, Dina. Just you and me and the old woman. We’re going to have to build back from scratch, aren’t we? But we will. We’ve got the money. We’ve got the people. And we’re going to find Vincent and we’re going to fucking kill him. Slowly. For Callum, right? For the man he should have been.”
Val and Frankie are gone? And the other one, the quiet one, the one who’s always watching her; gone, too? Gone and left her behind, alone with Jake?
Beer on his breath. Blood on his face. Sinking into her arms, he feels slow and weak, brought down by injury and pain and alcohol.
“I need you, baby. I need you. Just let me hold you, just let me rest. We’re going to get them, baby. We’re going to do it, starting tomorrow. But for now, I just need to rest.”
He’s disgusting. He’s old and he’s losing his shape to this job and he’s starting to look the way Declan’s dad used to, starting to sound like him, too, that guttural growl, that alcoholic murmur. She’s always been revolted by him, always wanted to push him away. But they took her strength from her, enough that she’s been unable before to push him off even when he’s unconscious.
But the others are gone. Gone without her. Gone with what little hope she had left. Leaving her and Jake and Grandmother. So what can she do? What should she do? What is left to do?
“Kiss me, baby,” he says. “Kiss me.”
“No,” she says.
Dina goes for the fucking eyes.
Chapter 36: In From the Cold
Notes:
Content warnings: sexual assault, domestic abuse
Chapter Text
2020 January 4
Saturday
They’ve taken everything from her. Everything. Piece by miserable piece, torn from her over and over. And now here she stands, in the wreckage of the life she’s built.
Blood on her shoes. Again.
The carnage left for her in the hall of Stenordale Manor might as well be the scene she discovered in the old makeshift basement at Dorley Hall, long before they had anyone else, when it was just her, her fellow survivors, and the work. When she believed in the precision, the purity, the honour of their cause. When all it took was a little bloodshed for her allies to lose their collective nerve.
The end of everything.
It might even be the kitchen at Dorley Hall, renovated and made into a home, made into a fortress for the new work, the work that was begun when she realised that her place in the world was far from guaranteed. The work that was messy and satisfying. The work that fed her and her companions, body and soul, and thus had an honour of its own. The kitchen when that bitch Elle and her lapdog David strolled in as if the both of them were not beneath her. When not even Crispin Smyth-Farrow would help her take it back, when he told her to make her peace with it, when he laughed at her rage. Laughed as if at some private joke.
Always and forever, the end of everything.
Dead men at Dorothy’s feet.
While Jake was getting minimally cleaned up — and drunk — before running off to pleasure himself with his toy, Dorothy watched the footage from the front hall. The cameras are placed poorly and thus much of the footage is unclear, but from what she can see, Vincent was responsible for much of it. The worthless cunt got hold of a gun at some point, fired it at least once, and now… this. The last laugh of Crispin Smith-Farrow’s little joke.
Frankie and Callum turned on Jake and the Silver River delivery men. Hard to tell whether it happened during the fight or was premeditated, but that hardly means anything. And Callum she can understand; a wetter and more useless soldier Dorothy has never encountered, more so even than Trevor, and she had Trevor’s balls cut off. But Frankie? Frankie was… Frankie was like a daughter to her. Always so vicious. So meticulous. So beautifully and deliberately cruel to the boys in her care. She rose above her roots and found in the work a satisfaction Dorothy always saw as an echo of her own.
And now, here she is, on the bloody tape, betraying a woman she’s known longer than her own mother.
Why?
Stupid. It’s obvious. Why else would Frankie defect?
You’re going to lose, Dorothy.
You’re going to die, Dorothy.
For a moment she feels her age, pulling at her from the soles of her aching feet. Eighty-one years like gravity, like a promise, like a chain, wrapped around her neck and keeping her in this place. And then she pulls herself the fuck together. What does she gain, feeling sorry for herself? Absolutely nothing.
Frankie learned something. That must be it. She learned something that made her act in self-preservation. Something to do with the Smyth-Farrow kids; the Yanks. They have full control of Silver River now. They’ll have decided to cut them all out. To recall Callum and Jake and, most likely, murder Dorothy and Frankie. NDAs for the soldiers; ashes for the women. Business as per fucking usual.
Obviously, whatever it is hasn’t come through yet, but when Jake gets himself together enough to report, it’ll happen. He’ll execute the order and Silver River will get Stenordale and that will be the final end of everything.
Fuck that.
She’s not dead yet. She can make them bleed for it. Frankie, the Smyth-Farrows, Elle and Vincent and Trevor and David. Rage is her most precious possession, and always has been.
But she needs to get to Jake first.
* * *
Wet fingers. Familiar. Slick with him. Every night, always slick with him. Struggling out from under him. Rinsing him away. Coming back to find him asking for more. Demanding more. Taking more. And more. And more.
Not just taking but altering, too. Chipping away. Every night a new wound. Carefully made where not even the mirror can show it. And when he leaves there is nothing and no-one left behind. Just filthy hair. Sore muscles. Bruised shoulders.
Wet fingers.
A muscle twitches. Something falls messy to the floor, out of a weakened hand, and the sound of it, the disgusting damp thump of it, it’s a memory: of being hit, not like Monica used to, not even like Dad used to, because the target is wrong, because it’s h—
A hand striking a wound. A hand bruising a face. A hand probing and pulling and tearing off clothes and controlling, a raised finger that says do not disobey and another hand plunged deep and grasping, and it all flickers in and out and in the small room there is nowhere to go and no-one to cry out to, except to Mum, except to Monica, except sometimes even to Val.
Valerie.
Valerie.
Get it right. Have some respect. He never did.
Val-é-rie.
No; still too much emphasis on the first sound. Try again. Bring up the base of the tongue for the second sound. No, not sound, that’s not right, that’s not the word. There used to be words for this, there used to be a way to describe it, but school was too long ago and memory is failing, and anyway the teachers never bothered to call on h—
Enough. Fix it later. Focus on the second part of the word. Flatten it. Roll it a little. Not like the forgotten half-sound at the end of butter, of sister. It’s more lyrical than that.
Valérie.
Do it better!
Val-é-rie. That’s right. That’s it. Like a song.
Valérie.
She was kind. She was so kind. Kind until she found out.
Because of what was done.
Because of what h—
She looked for something. Spent days searching for it. Only silence in return but she kept looking. Wanted desperately to see it. But in the end, like everyone, like how it always goes, all she found was h—
Was him.
Was Declan.
Dec-lan. Ugly. Blunt. Never liked it. No song to it.
Valérie found him. Like Monica. Like Aunt Bea. Should have hidden it. Didn’t know better.
Face it.
It’s all over now.
What else is there to do?
What else must be done?
Face it. Face her.
It’s been there all this time. What he did to her. What he revelled in doing to her. Except now in memory it’s doubled, split, superimposed, an old film spliced with a new one, him and him, her and her, one and then the other. Old and new.
He didn’t think about it at the time. What he did. What he did to Tracy.
Not much.
Barely at all.
Hyped it after because that’s the done thing, isn’t it? That’s what you do, that’s how you get what’s really important, what really matters, isn’t it? You’ve got to be the one people respect, the one they listen to, don’t you? Or what else are you?
Found that out too late.
It would have been better if he’d wanted it from her. From Tracy. If he’d cared about her at all. If it had been about more than control, power, and the need, the endless, vicious, victorious need.
But she was there, even though it was all about him. She was there. Tracy. He played with her.
And then it all repeats. Backwards. Flipped. Shattered and broken and chipped away at.
Sometimes he fought, when there was anything left of him to fight.
But other times he didn’t, because he wasn’t looking out any more.
There’s a man and there’s a girl, and there’s always a man and there’s always a girl, and the man has power and the girl doesn’t, and he takes control of her and he uses her and he hurts her. And the man gets what he wants.
And the girl?
What does it matter what she wants? She can’t break free.
Him. Jake and— and him. Superimposed. Hands moving symmetrical. Faces a blur. Bodies inescapable. Pressing and trapping and keeping you down, keeping you from running, keeping you from screaming, keeping you, keeping you, keeping you.
Hand over your mouth / hand over your crotch / hand over your innocence.
They come apart. Her and him and everyone. Because innocence is a fucking joke. Because you never allowed it. Because you never wanted it, except for the pleasure of ruining it. And yet you venerated it anyway, because you ought.
Like Dad said.
You can only pluck a flower once, kid.
Like Dad always said.
It’s all running together now. Dad and Declan and Jake. Mum and Tracy and— and you.
You and Declan.
Wet fingers. Slick with him. And you know what he likes, don’t you? You know what he wants to see. You know what he needs you to do. What lights him up in drunken delight, because he knows he’s got you, he made you, he owns you. Lick it up, baby. Lick it up, darling. Lick it up, bitch. Always tastes like salt and yeast. And the demands are so comical but the laughter never comes because why would it? How can you laugh when he is all around you?
Wet fingers; lick it up, baby.
Tastes like copper.
Tastes like him.
Tastes like—
Someone’s coming. Someone’s here. Someone’s talking.
Down the corridor. The old woman. Dorothy. Grandmother. Probably a hundred other names besides. Another one of the same: Dad, Dorothy, Declan and Jake.
Yield. Control. Now. Get your shit together. Not for much longer but now.
Get it the fuck together.
And he’s standing there, the pieces of him that are left, barely enough to speak, to think, to move. He’s standing there with his tattered dress and his blood-smeared arms and the knife he hid under his bed, last gift of a dying man, cradled lovingly in his other hand.
Wet fucking fingers pressed into his eyes.
You can only pluck a flower once, kid.
Control, Declan.
The old woman’s armed. Should scare her. Show of strength.
Come and fucking try it.
He kicks the body. Kicks him. And it should feel good, he knows it should, but maybe Jake took that part of him already. Took it like he took the rest of him. Maybe it’s on the floor. Maybe it died with him.
He lowers his fingers and feels them smear on his chin and the old woman speaks to him from behind her shotgun and the barrel wobbles and she’s so far away down the corridor he thinks that even if she fires maybe one in a hundred pellets might actually hit him, he saw a programme once, one of his dad’s DVDs, late nights up with him, late nights up alone.
The memory fractures but it doesn’t matter because she’s talking and he has to find something in him that can pay attention.
She says,
What have you done.
You’ve killed him.
He could make it to her. She could fire once and he could make it to her before her second try. Just have to make sure the first shot goes wide, but even if it doesn’t, it’s one in a hundred.
She says,
Maybe you can still be useful.
She’s hard to hear. Muffled. Not just from distance. Not just from shock. He’s not sure if she’s saying anything. She might just be standing there, shotgun raised, ready for him. She might not even be there. He might be looking at nothing.
She says,
You’re a rapist, Declan Shaw.
It’s in all your files, Declan Shaw.
They’ll find you, Declan Shaw.
You’ll be thrown away, Declan Shaw.
She says,
And you’ll deserve it.
You’ll deserve it, Declan Shaw.
She points the gun at him still but it’s shaking even more than before and he could definitely get to her unharmed and then what? And then she turns and walks away and he could follow her, he could stop her, and he should because what she knows about him could lock him up forever. He should get to her and he should stop her.
But what would be the point?
You’re a rapist, Declan Shaw.
* * *
Realistically, it’s all going to land on her head, whatever happens. Whether she’s right about the Smyth-Farrows or not, this whole clusterfuck ends with her. Probably it ends on her corpse. She put all her eggs in Silver River’s basket, in the hands of the Smyth-Farrow kids and their backers, and now she has nothing. Everything taken from local storage to a Silver River facility. Data security, they told her.
Fuck, she’s an idiot. All she has now is what’s in her hand-written notes, and everything she can remember. Not enough to go after Elle Lambert and the Smyth-Farrows and everyone else. Not with her remaining resources, and especially not with Silver River, looking to take a head for this fucking debacle.
Okay, if she’s been stupid, it’s time to play smart. She knows Lambert’s been pissing herself at the thought that she might go scorched earth on them, that she might gamble her dwindling years on a last-ditch attempt to expose everyone, to persuade someone in authority whose pockets haven’t been lined by Lambert or by some other interested party that the basement below Dorley Hall is worth a quick look. And it’s tempting. God, it’s tempting.
But her mother lived to a hundred and two, she heard. Why die early in prison when she could live another two decades? When she still has a shot at personally ruining Elle Lambert’s deviant little heart?
And why die now, at the hands of Silver River and the fucking nouveau Yanks, when she could just disappear? When she could buy herself some time?
Christ. The boy Declan. Standing over the corpse with bloody fingers in his mouth and a knife in his hand, disgusting with gore. Didn’t seem to be able to understand her, though. Just stared at her. Nothing left of him. Nothing left of Jake, either, but fuck him; if he couldn’t defend himself against someone Dorothy’s been assiduously making helpless then he deserved the knife in his stomach, he deserved the horrible death his wretched plaything delivered.
You can’t trust a man in this job, anyway. They get attached. They don’t know when to cut their losses.
The boy Declan can stay. He’ll be useful, if he survives; he knows next to nothing about her, but quite a lot about Dorley Hall. Because if he survives, if he’s found, he’ll be a murderer as well as a rapist, and he’ll tell them anything in his desperation.
Maybe they’ll even believe him. Maybe that’ll be a little bit of heat for Lambert to deal with. Keep her occupied for a while.
Or maybe he’ll die.
Hey ho.
Whistling, she starts pouring out the contents of every bottle she can find. Soaks the curtains, covers the floor tiles, liberally douses antique wooden furniture and hyper-modern racks of computers alike.
This place will go up like a pile of dry tinder.
* * *
It hasn’t been more than a couple of days, but it feels like forever out in these woods, rationing the washing water and sleeping in shifts in the stupid campervan’s three beds. But this is where the boss put them, so this is where they will stay until told otherwise. They’re due to make a pass by the manor early tomorrow morning, and they’re ready for it. They’ve checked over their rambler disguises and their padded backpacks with the hidden compartments. They’re ready for anything.
The lieutenant wanted to go last night, but orders are orders and intel is intel, and in this case both things align: the Silver River pricks were due a delivery today, and the day after is likely to be the day they are most lax. Sure enough, the delivery van came and went, just as expected, and now there’s nothing to do but watch.
He kind of wants to take the telescope for a spin, see if he can make out Jupiter’s rings through the cloud cover, but orders are orders, and he’s to keep it focused on Stenordale Manor. Not that you can see much past the high walls, even from this altitude, but it’s enough to—
Shit.
Wait.
Is that—?
Thirty seconds later he’s waking the lieutenant. Ten minutes later they’re packed up and on their way, rambler costumes in place, tramping the planned route through the woods that runs close by the outer wall of the manor at Stenordale. Fifteen minutes later and they hear sirens and the lieutenant has ordered them to a jog, and then to a flat-out run, and he’s the first one there.
It immediately becomes clear that the two fire engines already on the scene will not be anything like enough to tackle the blaze that is consuming Stenordale Manor.
2020 January 5
Sunday
“You really think this is working?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what was the point of this, then?”
“Because it should work, and it’s better than any of our other options!”
“We could’ve kept driving, Trev.”
“Not the way you drive. Did you have to take all those side roads?”
“Like I’ve been to this bloody town before!”
“Well, then.”
“So how are we supposed to know if it’s working or not?”
“No idea, Frankie. But as Silver River have continued to not jump out at us from the darkness, I’d say we’re doing okay.”
“Aren’t you supposed to have military training, and all that? Aren’t you supposed to know things?”
He winces, resisting once again the urge to tear off the duct tape wrapped twice around his neck and scratch at his wound. The thing itches like crazy, even worse since they got Val to stop staring out the windscreen and tape him up. It’s a good thing Jake only nicked him, or Val’d never’ve got her shit together in time and he’d be a strangely pretty corpse in the back of a stolen Silver River Solutions delivery van.
“Private military training, Frankie,” he says. “You’d be amazed the stuff we didn’t cover. Did you find anything back there?”
“Oh, sure,” Frankie says, vaulting out of the back of the van with unexpected energy and joining him on the concrete floor of the multi-storey. “I have tinned potatoes. You want a potato, Trev? We don’t have a can opener, mind.”
“They don’t even have energy bars or something? We used to live on those in Peckinville. Three of them’s lunch.”
Frankie hands him a tin. “Just potatoes.”
Once Trevor was strapped up and no longer bleeding — except under the tape, which feels horribly oozy — he took control of the radio, but the order to find them never came. Which meant either that Jake had inexplicably not called it in, or that Silver River isolated the van’s communications equipment immediately and didn’t, for example, give them a convenient heads up.
Either way, they’d needed to ditch the van, and Stenordale’s a small enough town that for a while, Trevor considered just abandoning it on the side of the road and running the three of them out into the woods. But without supplies, maps, GPS, it would have been pointless.
And then he spotted the shopping centre and practically screamed at Frankie until she drove them there, and they found what he hoped for: a concrete car park. Better yet, an underground car park. He’d said to Frankie, ever tried to get bars on your phone underground? And she’d said, obviously she has, and made him explain his point.
He’s far from certain that a few floors of concrete ceilings and a few more floors of Apple Stores and defunct Mothercares will dampen whatever signalling equipment Silver River equipped the van with, but it’s by far their best option.
He’d hoped to find a car they could switch to, as well, but the car park is empty aside from them and a couple of vehicles he assumes belong to the night security people.
So they’ve been taking a breather; quite literally, in his case.
He scratches at the outside of the duct tape.
“You’re sure we can’t just nick that one?” Frankie asks him again, pointing at one of the other cars.
“We can’t. Look, it’s parked right under a security camera; we’d be a police report in minutes. And it’s too modern. We need to get out of here and find something without computers and special locks and tracking devices of its own. Everything’s got bloody Find My Car or whatever these days. We need a car that can meaningfully go dark or we won’t make it halfway to Dorley Hall before Silver River knocks us off the road. Also, one that’s straightforward to hotwire would be nice.”
“So we need a car old enough that even Val can recognise it,” Frankie says.
“It’s not too late to accidentally kill you, Frances,” Val says, making herself known. “It can have happened during the escape. A stray bullet — zwip!”
“Bad taste, Val,” Trevor mutters.
“You okay?” Frankie asks, nodding at the dark corner from which Valérie emerged. “How did it go?”
“I hate urinating standing up,” she says.
“Really?” Trev says. “Isn’t it more convenient?”
“It’s not ladylike.”
“Okay,” Trev says, standing. “Fine. Come on, ladies. We have to go. We can’t be on the streets without a vehicle for very long, and dressed the way I am, we can’t be on the streets when the sun comes up, or Neighbourhood Watch will turn me in.”
She doesn’t want to tell him it’s just a sundress. Inappropriate for the time of year, yes, but hardly likely to get him picked up for soliciting.
“We have everything we need from the van?” Val asks.
“Yeah,” Frankie says. “I found some potatoes.”
“Ah. Good. What now?”
“We find a really old car to steal,” Trev says. “And maybe swipe me a set of clothes off any clotheslines we happen to see.”
“Are we likely to see any clotheslines?”
“No.”
“Can we not just smash a shop window and steal some clothes?” Val says as they exit onto the street. It’s uncomfortably brightly lit here in the town centre, and Trev immediately leads them towards the nearest side street.
“No,” Frankie says.
“Too many cameras,” Trev adds. “Also, clothes shops don’t really exist any more outside the big cities. Probably only a handful in the mall here. Most places have just closed.”
“What?” Val asks. “Why?”
“Amazon.”
“The rainforest?”
* * *
“She really just—?”
“Yeah. Right onto the concrete floor. She was in hospital for a while. Still has a slight mark on her temple. Don’t look for it.”
Rachel waves her hands in the most conciliatory manner she knows. “I won’t,” she says. The girl, Bethany, flippant to a fault the rest of the time, becomes unsettlingly earnest when the topic of Maria comes up, as it has a few times over the course of their very long… conversation? Movie session? Girls’ night?
That she is a girl was the first thing Rachel confirmed. Less than three months to claim her womanhood and her name; a basement record, if one discounts Steph. It’s not brainwashing, Bethany told her, gesticulating with her hot chocolate in a mug etched with the phrase, Nothing is impossible with the right attitude and a scalpel; it’s just the presentation of another option, and the promise that the man you’ve been doesn’t have to define you forever.
“I think she’s fully healed over,” Pippa says. She came down towards the end of the night, quietly informed Rachel that she does not need to apologise, and settled in on the far side of the bed, next to Steph, hands intertwined.
“It’s faint,” Bethany says. “You have to be close to see it. Can we change topic, please?”
Steph, her head currently barely propped up by a scattering of pillows and Pippa’s shoulder, her mug — which bears the line I never question my sister’s choices (she already kidnapped me once) — abandoned on the bedside table, opens her eyes for long enough to say, “Can we maybe go to sleep?”
“What time is it?” Rachel asks.
Bethany digs around in the bed for her phone, finds it and swears. “Um. It’s half one.”
“Whoops,” Rachel mutters. She starts assembling her things, and Bethany hops up to help her, fetching the mug Rachel’s been using — with a cartoon of a girl talking to a police officer and the caption I swear, officer, she was like that when I found him! — and sweeping the mess of paper pastry wrappings into a plastic bag.
“Don’t worry, Beth,” Pippa says, still intertwined with Steph. “It’s got to be me who takes her up, anyway.”
“I just want a quick chat with her,” Bethany says. “You stay with Steph for a sec, okay?”
Pippa shrugs, slightly dislodging Steph. “Okay.”
It takes a few moments for them to finish collecting everything together, and then Rachel and Bethany are out in the corridor, the door to Steph’s room closing quietly behind her.
“You’re safe, aren’t you?” Bethany says, as soon as the door is completely shut. “You won’t hurt Maria and the others, will you?”
Rachel doesn’t know how many times she’s going to have to promise that, but she’ll probably have to keep doing it until enough time has passed that they start feeling they can trust her. She’s still far from convinced about the place, but Bethany took her aside earlier, when she asked a pointed question about the supposed necessity of snatching a handful of tender lads off the streets.
“You’re not getting the urgency of it,” Bethany had said quietly. “You’re thinking of it like a thought experiment. I can tell because I’m cursed to know someone who treats everything like that. But you need to think of it like— Okay, look. Adam, right? They told you about him? I thought he was just another god-bothering weirdo, and then when I strained to listen hard enough, I realised he was actually a dangerous fucking headcase inside a quiet man’s body, whispering about demons and possession and how secular society will drain the earth of the mana required for the Rapture, and—”
Rachel had interrupted her, recognising already the signs that Bethany was about to veer off onto a complicated and lengthy tangent. “He really said that?”
“What? Yes. No. Sort of. Okay, so I tuned him out a lot and I’m filling in from a video game I played. But my point is, he was raised to be an extremist, right? You know, ‘One day my son, you shall nail bomb a gay bar.’ An extremist. And if you know that’s going to happen, and if you know there’s no way the police or social services can possibly step in because blah blah legal adult, blah blah no probable cause, blah blah no-one goes to gay bars any more, and crucially if you know how tied up all the horseshit he’s been fed is with—” she idly clicked her finger and thumb together, searching for the right words, “—masculine supremacy… Well, what would you do? Fuck it; what should you do? Step in?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel had replied.
Bethany had laughed at her. “You’re saying that because you don’t want to say yes. But you mean yes. You’re thinking about the things he would definitely have gone on to do, and you’re thinking yes. And if you’d been here at the start, if you’d seen us all at our most unfiltered, you wouldn’t even try to hide it, because you’d’ve seen us for what we are. Were. Steph did. Saw right through me. Saw right through all of us. Adam might have been the most literal time bomb, but we all had it in us. We were all going to hurt someone in a way they couldn’t recover from. And don’t tell me we weren’t, because, Rachel, I looked into my future and I hated the fucker I saw there so much I wanted to die to escape him. It’s entirely thanks to Maria that I didn’t have to do that; I became a girl instead.”
She hadn’t given her a chance to reply. Just returned to the bed and the movie. Steph had asked Bethany a question with her eyebrows, and Bethany had answered with a shake of her head.
Hours later, it’s that moment that’s stuck with her the most. The bond between the two of them. Formed in just three months, alongside Bethany’s new identity. It’s hard to deny the reality of it all, even if the efficacy is still questionable— Is it, Rachel? Is it? Please point to one girl upstairs who seems on the verge of recidivism! They’re less likely to commit an act of violence than they are to make you another bloody hot chocolate!
Damn it. Damn all of them and their stupid doe eyes and hot chocolates.
“I won’t hurt Maria,” she promises.
“Good,” Bethany says, nodding seriously for a moment and then breaking out in the mischievous smile she’s seen far too often tonight. “So, are you going to hug me, then? It’s how friendships are traditionally celebrated here. It gets a little stifling, but you can learn to sort of lean away with your sensitive spots so no-one inadvertently causes an accident.”
“We’re friends now?” Rachel asks, accepting the hug. It’s brief but tight.
“If you can’t beat them,” Bethany says, stepping back, “join them.”
“Right.”
Pippa emerges from Steph’s room, probably having sensed that the moment in the corridor has passed, and beckons to Rachel to follow. It’s an uncomfortable reminder that she can’t get out of this dungeon — or back in again — without the help of one of the sponsors, but then, she supposes, neither can Bethany. And she seems… kind of okay, overall.
“Thank you, Bethany,” Rachel says, as they turn to leave. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“Oh, shit. I am helping, aren’t I? Fuck! I’m helping. I’ve become a helper. This is the last straw. Where’s Maria? I need to tell her she’s warped my personality to an unacceptable degree.”
* * *
You can leave it all behind, Declan. Mum said it, back when he was moving up from primary school to secondary school. The stupid four-eyes fucker who made his life miserable was going on to grammar school and Declan was going on to the same place his mum and dad went, the place they met, and she told him he didn’t need to be afraid any more. Everyone’s new there, she said. Lots of people from all over. Everyone’s starting over. You can, too.
You can leave it all behind.
It was a woman firefighter who found him. She had to drag him out because he could barely walk and didn’t answer with a name when asked, so she led him to a pull-out shelter attached to one of the smaller vehicles and left him with another woman and he’s here now, with Dorothy’s words ringing in his ears.
You’re a rapist, Declan Shaw.
You’ll be thrown away.
But that’s not his only name. And does he want to be him in front of this woman, anyway? This kind woman, who handed him a fresh set of clothes and showed him how to pull down a cover on the shelter, does he want to be Declan with her?
If he ever sees Monica again, does he want to be Declan with her, too?
There was a time he wouldn’t even have thought to ask that question. Now, it’s… practical.
He pulls back the cover, and there’s the woman again. Not a firefighter, she said. An auxiliary worker. Call her Noor, she said. She said it when she gave him the clothes, when she eyed the remains of his dress, when she raised an eyebrow at the kind of dress it once had been.
“Feeling better?” she asks, and he nods. She points to a chair and he sits. “So, ready to tell me your name, love?”
You can leave it all behind.
You don’t have to be thrown away.
“Di—” Except no. No he fucking can’t. Not Dina. Not with Jake all over that name, all over that name the way Tracy’s all over Declan’s name. And worse: it’s not just Jake with his hands on him; it’s Jake with his eyes bloody and gone, Jake slipping and falling, Jake’s last liquid shudder.
“Diana,” he whispers, and then he repeats it, louder, enjoying for a moment the individual sounds of it, enjoying how it’s not either of the other names.
Noor smiles and she’s pretty, even with the bright night lights of the emergency vehicles on one side of her face and the dull glow of the fading fire on the other. She’s pretty like an older woman. Declan always hated that, hated the lines on their faces, hated the way they were around him, hated the things they said to him, when it was him and Dad.
“Like the princess?” Noor asks.
He hadn’t made the connection. But there it is, waiting for him. Mum used to like her. The princess. Had pictures up, a little corner of the living room. Taken from us too early, Mum always said. Too early. Met her on her nursing rounds. AIDS patients. The princess cared. Dad would laugh at that and Mum would shout at him, and Declan would laugh too, and Mum would just look at him, and sometimes she wouldn’t come home again until the day after.
Pictures in the living room. Mum’s candle every year. A memory to cling to. Taken too early.
Mum says you can leave it all behind.
“Yeah,” Diana says quietly. “Like the princess.”
* * *
“Thank you,” Pippa says as soon as they’ve cleared the lowest basement floor.
“Thank me?” Rachel says, looking back at Pippa and almost tripping. “For what?”
“For reassuring Bethany. I know she seems… how she seems, but she’s vulnerable. She’s still—” she waves her hands vaguely, “—coalescing.”
“Still becoming Bethany?” Rachel suggests.
“Exactly.”
“I still want to apologise to—”
“Don’t,” Pippa says, and brings Rachel to a stop with a gentle hand on her forearm. They’re halfway up the last flight of stairs now, with the dining hall almost in sight. “We have a habit here of dropping the world’s craziest bomb on people and… expecting them to field it like an effing baseball. I know you don’t actually think I’m dangerous, or you wouldn’t be here like this with me.”
Rachel can’t stop herself from frowning, but Pippa’s right, and Rachel just hadn’t realised it. She spent the whole evening with Steph and Bethany and a lot of it with Pippa, in a tiny room and with no way out and at no point did she feel threatened. Confused and maybe a little annoyed? Sure.
And now, here she is, in a cramped concrete stairwell, with Pippa. And she’s just… Pippa. To be wary of her seems absurd.
“I’m still sorry,” she says.
“Forgiven,” Pippa says instantly, and she makes to start walking again, but Rachel stops her.
“I meant to ask,” she says, “about Steph. Is she… okay? She’s not reconsidering any of this, is she?”
“No,” Pippa says, frowning.
“But she’s growing out her—”
Pippa interrupts her. “Oh! Oh. No. No, Rachel, it’s not that.” She’s holding back a laugh, and for a moment Rachel really is annoyed with her, because none of this is funny. “Electrolysis,” Pippa says. “She has to grow out her— her stubble so she can have it removed. She’s got a session tomorrow. Well, today, really.”
“She’s getting it… removed?”
“Yes.”
“Her… facial hair?”
“Yes?”
“I thought that just happened. Hormones, and all.”
“Afraid not. Getting rid of it all is super painful and takes ages.”
“Oh. Whoops.”
Pippa leans against the wall, looking as tired as Rachel suddenly feels.
“She’s doing so well,” Pippa says quietly. “She’s been helping out with the boys, she’s been there for Bethany, she’s been there for me… She’s a miracle, Rachel. And I didn’t even realise. For over a month, at the start.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t know she was trans. I don’t know what you know about how she came to be here, but she found out about what we do here, sort of, and she faked being one of us so we’d help her transition. And she was—” a giggle momentarily breaks out, “—so bad at it. I was trying so hard to see bad things in her, bad things I had to help her break out of, and they just… weren’t there. And, Rachel, I hated what I was doing to her. I had nightmares. I was a mess. I bit my lip to shreds, I’d be half out of my room and realise I hadn’t done my hair or my face or even gotten out of my pyjamas. I lost count of all the times I wanted to just open all the locks and let her go.”
“So why didn’t you?”
Pippa smiles. “Because I had nothing when I came here. And I knew she had nothing, too. Nothing and no-one except me. And I knew that, in the end, it’s worth it. Being me? Being this?” She holds out an arm, flexes her fingers like a piano player. “It’s worth it.” Then she tugs on Rachel’s arm. “Why don’t you come with me up to the kitchen and I’ll make you a cup of tea and we can talk a little more, okay? Just you and me.”
“It’s late,” Rachel says.
“You want to go home?”
And wake Belinda? When she’s already in a foul fucking mood? “No. No, not really.” She’ll text her. Not that she’ll even read it until morning. Maybe not even then; Rachel’s had her phone out the whole time she’s been here, at least until she disappeared into the depths of the basement and lost all her bars, and Belinda’s replied to none of her texts. The one time her phone vibrated it was an email from Amazon, who are still apparently under the impression that she and Belinda are the kind of couple who need a new kettle every few weeks.
“Tea it is, then,” Pippa says, and they resume their climb, emerging quickly into the dining hall. Rachel’s surprised to note that they’re not the only people still up; there’s a huddle of girls by the fireplace, and Pippa crosses the floor to check in. Rachel follows at a distance.
“We got some news,” Maria says, her eyes flicking to Rachel and then back to Pippa, who shakes her head.
“Pretty big news,” says another woman, sat practically in Maria’s lap.
“Anything we need to worry about?” Pippa asks.
“No. I think, maybe, we can all be a bit relieved? Someone’ll tell you later, I’m sure.”
“Trust the rumour mill,” says the woman in Maria’s lap. “It knows all.”
“Um,” Rachel says, “what are you talking about?”
“Torture stuff,” Indira says. “Don’t worry about it.”
To her horror, Rachel laughs.
* * *
Noor gets beckoned away, so Diana sits there with her paper cup of tea and the jogging trousers and hoodie and basic tennis shoes she’s been given and thinks:
Is it okay for her to be Diana? Is it okay to think she might be allowed to survive this?
A strong memory: Monica, when she found out. Because he had to brag. Because he thought it was funny. Because he didn’t understand.
No. Diana can be honest. He didn’t bother to understand. He didn’t think it was important. He didn’t think Tracy was important. She was just his, and how dare she walk away?
The thought makes her quiver.
She shakes her head, looks back at the burning manor. Better to see it destroyed than to think about what happened inside. But it’s impossible not to.
Valérie, who helped her, until she knew. Just like Monica.
And Frankie, who helped her as well, a few times.
And Trevor, who seemed kind. Who rejected the name they tried to give him.
And Jake.
Jake—
She stuck her fingers in his eyes.
And they were her fingers. Declan wouldn’t have done that. Declan would have gone straight for the knife, and he would have lost.
“Hey, hey, sugar,” Noor says, running over, crouching down next to her. She must have made another noise or something, because Noor’s concerned again. But then the other woman’s there, and it’s the firefighter who pulled her out, and it’s something else to worry about. “You okay?”
Diana nods.
“We have to ask you a few things, okay?” the firefighter woman says. “First, though, I’m Judy. Pleased to meet you.”
“Di-a-na,” she says, sounding it out again. Pleasing.
“Are you ready to answer a few questions, sugar?” Noor asks.
Diana nods again.
“Are you transgender?” Judy asks.
Diana freezes. Of course they’d know. Why wouldn’t they know? He never learned how to be anything but Jake’s pliable toy, he never tried, he never thought, he never—
“We didn’t know immediately,” Noor says quickly. “But it’s your voice, sweetheart. It’s a little deep. And when you coughed, earlier—”
“I’m sorry,” Diana says, fighting the resurgence of that other identity, that fucking horror show. It’s too easy to be him because she knows how, because even now, even after Jake, sometimes he feels like he’s just a thought away. Other times he feels like he’s been dead for months.
Can’t be him. He’ll be thrown away. He’ll deserve it.
“We just needed to know,” Judy says. “Because, well, when I found you, the way you were dressed…”
“The man who was with you,” Noor says. “The one Judy found… next to you. You did that?”
Diana nods.
“Did he deserve it?”
Diana nods.
“What did he do to you?”
You don’t want to be him in front of these women? You want to survive? You want to be Diana? You want to be someone who won’t be thrown away? Then you need to say the word. You need to tell them. Because he wouldn’t.
Diana says, quietly and with a constricted throat, “He raped me.”
“Oh, honey,” Noor says, taking her hand.
“It happened a lot,” Diana continues. “And the clothes, and the— the—”
“We can see your bruises, Diana,” Judy says.
Diana nods.
“He’s not the only body,” Judy says. “We found more downstairs. Not too badly burned up yet. And bodies means police. Police means an investigation. And the fire was obviously set…”
Diana frowns. “Set?”
“Multiple ignition points. Clear as day. Was that you?”
“No.”
“Okay, sugar,” Noor says, still holding Diana’s hand, “Judy and I have talked it over, and you have a choice. Right now you’re a civilian. Rescued from a burning building. But when the police come… then you’re a suspect. So, you can stay here until the police come, and leave with them, or we can give you our emergency cash, everything we’ve got, and you can… go.”
“Go?”
“Go,” Judy confirms. “All we have on you is a first name, and we didn’t even write it down. There are guns with the other bodies, and without you in the picture, the conclusion will be different. Men shooting men. I wouldn’t go home, though. Not yet.”
Diana shakes her head. “Can’t, anyway.”
Noor squeezes her hand. “You don’t want to go with the police, Diana,” she says.
“You think I’ll go to jail?”
“I think you shouldn’t go to jail. Not if he deserved it. But you know what it’s like. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re… too new? Women who kill men who were hurting them, it doesn’t always end well for them, Diana dear. And since you’re trans, that makes it worse for you. They won’t be sympathetic. They won’t understand. You should run. Right now. Before the police come. Before more of us come.”
“Go to town, take a taxi somewhere else,” Judy says. “Find a B&B, maybe. Get a burner phone— That is, get a cheap phone from a corner shop, one that takes credit. Call someone you trust. But not immediately. Leave it a couple of days.”
Noor lets go of Diana’s hand and stands. She pulls a small rucksack out of a side compartment in the vehicle, and then transfers a few things from her bag into it. She reaches back in, pulls out another bag and holds it up for Judy’s approval — she nods — and pulls out a purse, from which she empties the cash compartment.
“It’s a decent amount,” Judy says, handing it to Diana. “It’ll be enough. If you’re careful.”
“Run, Diana,” Noor says, smiling softly.
Diana runs.
* * *
The suburbs of the town of Stenordale aren’t anything to write home about, but at least they’re dark: rural enough to have few streetlights and plenty of foliage to jump into, should a suspiciously military-spec vehicle appear suddenly in their line of sight.
As predicted, they didn’t find any convenient clotheslines or shops with easily smashed windows, but they did pause behind a bush for a while, at Val’s suggestion, to swap garments. Young Trev’s much more confident in Frankie’s loose trousers and comfy cardie, even if he does still look more like a woman than a man, and if Val’s feeling the cold in Trev’s floaty summer dress and leggings, she’s not showing it. Frankie, meanwhile, is wearing Val’s ugliest maid uniform, one of the ones she somehow talked old Smyth-Farrow into getting for her, years ago, perhaps when he came to realise that if he ran into her in the hallway and all the blood rushed to his dick, he’d faint. It doesn’t even look like a maid uniform without the prim little apron, so Frankie’s pretty comfortable, despite how tight the skirt is even with the button left undone.
There’s blood on all the clothes, of course, but that’s part of why they waited until well after midnight to set out from the multi-storey, so no-one’d see them wandering around like fucking psychos out of a horror movie. And it’s not so bad now they’ve had a chance to clean themselves with wet wipes out of Frankie’s bag. Val even insisted on having a go at the clothes with the wipes, and got pretty good results, especially with certain items turned inside out and labels quickly cut off with Frankie’s nail scissors.
Frankie and Val’d both been antsy about waiting, but Trev said the Silver River lot were more likely to assume they’d disabled or removed any trackers in the van than to guess the truth: that none of them, not even the trained soldier, had the first fucking clue what to look for. They’d been as safe in the underground car park as they were anywhere, and at least they had the guns out of the lockbox from the van, which popped open when they rolled a tyre over it.
Frankie’s got one of them now, and the weight of it feels absurd in the main pocket of Val’s ugly maid uniform. Val’s carrying hers, her finger resting on the outside of the trigger guard, the way Trev showed her, and as Frankie glances over, Val twitches again, looks around them, looks behind them, and then realises she’s being watched.
Val shrugs and Frankie feels like even more of a cunt than she already did.
Valérie Barbier, perhaps the most genuinely strong person Frankie’s ever met, freezing up in the front of the van. Like just the sight of freedom, of the open countryside, had been too much for her. Val, reduced to nothing. Frankie, watching her, horrifyingly aware of just how small her world had been made, deliberately and with cruel intent. For decades upon decades.
And Frankie was there right at the start. She knew Vincent before she knew Valérie. She was there. She made this.
“What?” Val says, frowning under Frankie’s continued attention, and Frankie shakes her head. Firmly looks in front of her.
“Sorry, Val,” she says.
“Do I have blood on my face? I thought I got it all off, but—”
“No blood. You’re fine, Val.”
“I am clearly not if you are going to stare at me like that.”
Frankie stops, motions to Val for her to stop, too, and waits a moment for Trev to walk out of earshot. “Are you okay with all this, Val?”
“Are you asking me if I am going to freeze again?”
Frankie shrugs. “Yeah.”
“I will not. That is a promise.” And with that she starts walking again, more briskly than before, catching up with Trevor before Frankie can say anything else.
Probably a good thing, overall. She’d just put her foot in her mouth again. Ahead of her, Val guides Trevor under one of the few streetlights in this part of town and has him stop for her so she can fuss over his duct tape again. Frankie doesn’t know why, since all they can do for him if it comes off is tape him up better next time, but—
Oh yeah. Val doesn’t like being cared for. Doesn’t trust it. Prefers to care for others.
She’s making sense of the world again, in little bits.
Frankie catches up, and by the time she reaches them they’ve set off again, searching for a car old enough for Trevor’s purposes.
* * *
This’ll be something to tell Amy in the morning. ‘Hey, Ames, I stayed the night in a Dorley girl’s room and you were right: no-one molested anyone. High five?’ Perhaps not with that precise wording, though.
Pippa offered her the bed when she realised Rachel was here for the night, and it took some persuading from Rachel for Pippa to agree to share it; Pippa had wanted to freeze to death on the couch! And then Pippa said, obviously she’ll go into the bathroom to change into her PJs, and Rachel had to insist that if she wants to, it shouldn’t be on Rachel’s account. They’re both girls here, after all.
Overcompensating? Probably. Better than the alternative. And she gets to see a pretty girl in her underwear, so.
Pippa’s rustling around in her wardrobe looking for spare pyjamas, which gives Rachel the opportunity to look around, to see how a graduate of the vaunted Dorley Hall programme lives. Her conclusion is that Pippa’s room is, along with most other above-ground aspects of the Hall, boringly ordinary. The bed is home to a handful of stuffed animals, and the bedside tables have all the expected bedside table things: lamps, an e-reader, a laptop, and a handful of charging cables poking up from behind. There’s also a strange little metal stand with nothing on it, which Rachel puzzled over for several seconds. The room itself is larger than the one assigned to Melissa and Shahida, with walls painted cream and dotted with reproduction paintings; some are famous enough for Rachel to recognise, but most are too obscure for her. Several of them are of cats, painted in various styles.
“Um,” Pippa says, turning around from the wardrobe with a bundle of pyjamas in each hand, “I have choices.”
“Hit me.”
Pippa hefts the clothes in her left hand. “Bees,” she says, and switches to her right, “or rabbits.”
Rachel hides her laugh behind her hand. Pyjamas with cartoon animals on them! It’s either an incredibly consistent performance of innocence or it’s just… innocence.
“Hmm?” Pippa says, having spotted the laugh anyway.
“Oh,” Rachel says, and in the interest of honesty, owns up. “I was thinking that if I wanted to persuade a suspicious stranger of the inherent harmlessness of Dorley graduates, I’d put her in a room with one, and offer her cute PJs. Maybe watch movies all night with a trans girl and her nascent girlfriend.”
Pippa rolls her eyes. “I wish we were so organised. You fell in my lap. Happens a lot around here.”
“Well,” Rachel says, “if you ever do get sneaky enough, it should definitely be you. With your cat paintings and your animal PJs. You’re just…” She frowns, takes a moment to arrange her thoughts properly. “You’re just so innocent.”
“Me?” Pippa exclaims, and Rachel has the impression that if her arms weren’t full of pyjamas, she’d be raising one astonished hand to press against her chest. “Innocent? Oh, no, Rachel, no.” She drops the pyjamas in a single pile on the seat in front of her dresser and sits on the end of the bed, far from Rachel. “No, definitely not.”
Shit. Pippa’s mood’s collapsed. Triggery word? Or triggery assumption? “Sorry,” Rachel says quickly. “If I, um, poked something, I didn’t mean to.”
Pippa waves a hand in her direction but doesn’t look at her. “No, it’s okay. It’s just… Ugh. I’m not innocent.”
“What do you mean?”
Now Pippa looks at her. Her chest is fluttering; short breaths, quickly and shallowly taken. She hiccups quietly, and places a hand over her chest. Straightens up a little, so her airway isn’t twisted. Doesn’t speak for a little while; just breathes.
“I mean,” Pippa says eventually, “that if I tell you what I’m thinking, you’ll think I’m manipulating you. You’ll think I was chosen to talk to you. You’ll think I was instructed to mimic this stupid anxiety attack to guilt you into being sorry or whatever. But I wasn’t. We don’t think that far ahead. I don’t think we’ve ever had so many outsiders know about us. I don’t think there are procedures for this.” She smiles, though it doesn’t last long. “Steph likes to call our operation the ess-show. And she’s right.”
‘Ess-show’? Rachel doesn’t get it. But it doesn’t seem important. “Pippa,” she says quietly, “I didn’t mean to upset you. I definitely didn’t mean to trigger an anxiety attack.”
“I know.”
“You want to talk about it?”
Pippa swings her feet up onto the bed. “You know how Melissa can seem… sort of fragile?” she says. Rachel nods. Yeah, she’s noticed. “Abby thinks it’s because she didn’t open up while she was here, and I’m pretty sure Shahida thinks so, too, now she’s gotten more familiar with Melissa’s intake. But some of us are just like that, Rachel. Some of us are one wrong move away from collapsing. And I’m always afraid of what will come out of me if that ever happens.”
Rachel moves closer. “What will come out of you?” she asks.
“Not something innocent, that’s for sure.”
And Pippa tells Rachel a story. A story of a boy and his cousin. She tells Rachel of how angry the boy was, all the time. How lonely and how wrapped up in himself. And she tells Rachel how his cousin could pull him out of it. Humanise him. Make him like other people, while they were together.
She tells Rachel how much the boy loved his cousin. How much he wanted to protect her. How much he felt protected by her.
Then she tells Rachel what happened to the boy’s cousin, and it’s a familiar-enough story that Rachel can almost recite it with her. The manipulative boyfriend. The sexual assault. The girl clinging to him, siding with him. And the revenge from the young boy’s father, who — and Pippa never says it, but it seems obvious just from the way she talks about him — the young boy feared he was already too much like. Kind; proud; prone to intense rage.
The cousin and the boyfriend left together. The father went to prison. And the boy… never really grew up. Remained stranded in that time.
“I was boiling over,” Pippa says. “Without her to keep me safe, without Dad to help me be more… productive about it, I just kept losing it. I wasn’t safe.” She rolls her head on her knees, where she’s had it propped the last ten minutes. “And then I was brought here. Given to Eleanor Payton, my sponsor. And she made me understand… eventually… where my path was leading.”
“And now you’re… you,” Rachel says. “You’re Pippa.”
“Yes.”
“And you like it.” It’s obvious. Notwithstanding Pippa’s earlier exuberance about herself, it didn’t take Rachel five minutes in her company to make it abundantly clear.
Pippa smiles, her first since she started talking about it, and it shines. “I love it, Rachel,” she says. “I’m free.”
“So,” Rachel says, and she dares to poke Pippa in the knee, “what are you so scared of?”
She shrugs. “Of it all coming out again. It happens in little ways, you know. All the time. I get so ashamed.” She closes her eyes. “I get angry and I kick at the wall or I slap my hand on a table or something. Or I have to pace to burn off the energy. Or—”
“Pippa,” Rachel says sharply, to get her attention. When she has it, when the girl with the once-again fluttering chest is looking right at her, she asks, “Is that all?”
“Wh— What?”
“Pippa, when I get mad, I throw things. My wife and I had a dispute over some stupid bill last year and I threw a bloody vase out the back window. It went all the way across the garden and smashed on the shed. I had to go out there in the dark and pick it all up because Belinda was worried about the neighbour’s cats hurting their paws on it. There’s a perfect indentation of my knuckles in the plastic door cover in my car. And I yell. My goodness, do I yell.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, you sound about as dangerous as I am,” Rachel says. “Which is, I suppose, mostly to car doors, vases, tables and walls. It’s normal, Pippa. Everyone has to let it out.”
“I’m not everyone.”
“You could be. Look,” Rachel adds, shuffling closer, “can I hug you? Because I really feel like you need to be hugged, and then when I tell you not to be so bloody stupid, you’ll still feel good about me from the hug, and— Oh, shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” Suddenly cold to her spine, Rachel backs away from Pippa, withdraws her hands. “Pippa, I’m so sorry; I must have hurt you so bad. After everything that happened with your cousin, I accused you of being—”
“Rachel, no.” Pippa reaches for Rachel’s hands, manages to find one of them, and holds it with both of hers. “I don’t need an apology. I meant what I said before. You were on the spot. And you’re right; it hurt. But my— my friends helped me and I dealt with it.”
“But still—”
“And it’s what I meant when I said you’d think this is a deliberate thing, like we’re trying to guilt trip you. But it’s not. We’re not. At least, I’m not. But there’s one thing I think you need to understand about us.” Pippa moves closer again. “Most of us are like this in some way or another. Like me. When we were boys, we were violent — or socially violent, like Bethany was — but we also have bad stuff in our past. Neglect or abuse or violence. Reasons, not excuses. But still reasons. Stuff we never let go, stuff we should have learned from, but didn’t. We made all the mistakes healthier boys don’t make, we missed every road sign that said STOP BEING YOUR WORST POSSIBLE SELF, EXIT HALF A MILE, but we, um, we weren’t put on that road ourselves.” She smiles and rubs at the back of her neck with her free hand. “Terrible metaphor. Sorry. I think I picked those up from Steph, too. But what I mean is—”
“Circumstances,” Rachel says. “You all had circumstances.”
“Yeah. Pretty much. Some of us never had the right people. Some of us—” Pippa takes a quick breath at this point, and some of the flutter returns to her chest, “—had the right people, only to have them taken away. We were all— And believe me, it’s taken an inordinate number of discussions about this with the other girls for me to feel even vaguely okay about saying this about myself, but we were all failed. And we were picked because we’d been failed, and because, with some help, we could get better.”
Rachel’s nodding. “I still think there are other ways, though,” she says, after a moment.
She expects disagreement, but Pippa says, “Maybe. Probably. But we seem to be working, so far. In the end, we’re a mad experiment by a bunch of mad people. Maybe someone else might have found me and helped me, but they didn’t. So I don’t really think about it that much.” She chews on her lip for a second. “I’m very glad I didn’t end up having to do to Steph what was done to me, though. The methods can be… uncomfortable.” Then she looks up. “Hey, I never got that hug.”
“Right,” Rachel says. “Um. Bring it in?”
When they’re done, when Rachel’s expressed through a judicious squeeze all the apologies she hasn’t been permitted to say out loud, when they’ve sat back with mutually embarrassed reddened cheeks, Pippa says, “Now it’s my turn to apologise. Preemptively, I mean.”
“Oh?”
“I know Beth already asked you, but I’m a sponsor, so I need the truth from you, on the record: are we safe? When you go home in the morning, are we safe?”
Rachel smiles. “What would you do if you weren’t?”
“Me? Nothing. The woman in charge might be displeased, though.”
Sitting back on the bed, leaning into Pippa’s pillows and displacing a stuffie, Rachel says, “It’d be so easy to read that as a threat. I know it’s not, though. It’s just a fact, right? I’d be offered bribes and incentives and then maybe something else. But we can skip all of that: you’re safe. I’ll keep the secret. No extortion required.”
Pippa whistles through her teeth. Still looking at the floor, she says, “Sorry about that. I hate that I have to do things like that. I only said I’d be a stupid sponsor because… I don’t know. Pay it forward?”
Rachel laughs. “‘Pay it forward’? I get it, I do, because you all seem to see what you do as this big favour — and if I really tilt my head, I suppose I can, too — but you have to admit, it is funny.” She waves a hand in the air and remembers something one of the younger girls said once, something she lacked the context for at the time. “Pay it forward — with castration!”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Pippa says, holding back a giggle. “That should be a mug.”
“Oh yeah. What’s with those? Steph gave me one earlier, and they seem to be everywhere.”
Pippa shrugs. “They’re humanising, I think. For us, I mean. They remind us that we’re just dumb little people, trying to do our best. Personally, I think they’re a bit tacky.” Sheepishly, she looks away again. “I’m probably not the best person to explain our weird habits.”
“No,” Rachel insists, “you are. Better than Bethany, anyway. And don’t think I didn’t notice that I was paired up with the only boy — ex-boy, sorry — to have got with the programme already, by the way.” She pinches her fingers in the air. “That was a tiny bit manipulative.”
“I thought that was your idea?”
“I wanted to talk to Steph.”
“Ah,” Pippa says, “well, they’re sort of a package deal, these days. Now, if you want to talk to one of the boys who are still boys, you could try Will, but he’s just sort of depressing. And at a delicate point right now,” she adds with a scowl.
“Oh?”
“Long story.”
“Not a happy one, it looks like.”
“It was him who hurt Maria,” Pippa says, and chews briefly at her lip again. “And we all understand why,” she continues in a sing-song voice, “and we all know it won’t happen again and we all know she’s fine, but… It’s a process. For all of us. And I think I’m discovering I’m not entirely all the way through it.”
“Understandable.”
“The rest of them,” Pippa says, “well, they’re mostly still working through it. If you really want, I’m sure Maria can get you in with one of the less abrasive ones. Like Martin. I mean, his story is kind of awful as well, but—”
“It’s fine,” Rachel says. “I get enough human misery at my day job. I’m trying to quit seeking it out on my own time.”
Pippa nods soberly, and then her smile returns. “So,” she says, pointing at the bundled-up pyjamas, “bees or rabbits?”
* * *
It was raining the day Frankie first saw Valérie Barbier again. She remembers it clearly, first because Dorothy, the cheap old sow, wouldn’t shell out for a car service, and the train station café was closed, so Frankie had to wait around in the deluge for a local taxi to come pick her up; second because when she showed up at the front door of Stenordale Manor with her wheelie suitcase rattling along behind her and her work-branded sports bag slung uncomfortably over her shoulder, Val had taken one look at her and said, “Oh. It’s you.”
And then she’d kicked dismissively at the sad little wheelie suitcase, knocking it on its side, and said to Dorothy, “I’m not carrying that,” and left for the kitchen.
Their first interaction after decades. It had been all Frankie could do not to stare.
Frankie’d known she’d be there. Not from the start; though she knew that Dorothy and Karen had taken over old Smyth-Farrow’s place more or less right after it happened, both of them kept Val’s survival from her. She’s never known why, though she has her suspicions, most of them rooted in old Dotty’s well-exercised class prejudice, her patronising insistence on reminding Frankie how well she’s done, ‘considering’, but keeping her out of the inner circle, anyway. But when Dorothy called her in, shortly after Karen’s death, she told her there’d be an ‘old friend’ waiting for her at the manor. The cantankerous old nightmare had wanted to keep it a secret, to spring the surprise on her when she arrived, but Frankie insisted and Dorothy relented.
Valérie fucking Barbier.
It was bad enough when she thought Valérie’d been murdered by Smyth-Farrow. To find out from Dorothy that not only had she been alive the whole time, but that she’d been in service? Frankie had ended the call as quickly as possible so she could go throw up in her kitchen sink.
And then, three days later, she told the shelter she needed some time away. She packed up everything she could, and stepped out of her Newcastle flat for what she didn’t yet realise would likely be the last time.
Shit. She should call the shelter and apologise.
Soaking wet, shabby and shell-shocked, Frankie had watched Valérie tip-tap her way away. Realised she would remember that moment for the rest of her life. That effortlessly beautiful face, that perfect hair, that contemptuous curled lip. More than three decades held against her will and she moved like she owned the place, like Dorothy Marsden was some illegitimate squatter, like Frankie was just some new inconvenience to add to the list; barely worth thinking about.
Frankie had felt like a peasant brought before a queen.
She hadn’t realised how much comfort she’d drawn from that. It made it a lot easier to play beta bitch to Dorothy, that’s for fucking certain; if Val’d been a wreck, Frankie might’ve tried to shank Dorothy there and then. Or just gone straight for her own jugular.
No. No, she wouldn’t have. She has to be honest with herself: she was, for the longest time, a fucking coward. Content to piss about rescuing dogs and trying to forget the part she played in Grandmother’s Dorley.
Until Val. Val’s strength was Frankie’s strength. Val kept both of them on the path long enough to get all of them out. All of them minus Declan, anyway, but now that everyone anybody officially gives a shit about is out of the manor, maybe the Lambert woman can send some people in. Get the kid back. Do to him… whatever the hell they were going to do before Silver River intervened.
So yeah. Val’s strength was her strength. And now Val’s faltering, showing the weight of the decades of misery piled upon her, and Frankie feels sick again.
Trev’s left them to it, taking Val’s gun off her when she didn’t seem to have the energy even to hold it any more, and marching ahead of them in his borrowed clothes, checking side streets, signalling his failure to Frankie with a shake of his head. And that’s fine: he’s young; he can do all the running around. Especially because Val’s bent over, she’s hugging herself, and she’s not even looking where she’s going. Twice Frankie’s had to tug gently on her arm to pull her away from upcoming obstacles.
If a Silver River van showed up right now to take them back to Stenordale Manor, Val’d probably get in without a second thought.
But Frankie doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t want to push too far again. Eventually, while Trev halts them so he can investigate a promising car, and while Val’s leaning against a fence under a dim and flickering streetlight, one cigarette away from looking like a doomed femme fatale, Frankie decides to give her a break.
“I’m just going to talk with young Trev, okay?” she says.
Val nods. Not a word.
The car Trev’s found doesn’t look like a total shitbox, but it’s pretty banged up and probably about as old as Trevor himself. He enthusiastically but quietly identifies it to her as some model of car she instantly forgets, and asks for her shoelace.
“What?”
“Your shoelace, Frankie,” he repeats.
She doesn’t bother asking why. She just unloops one of them and hands it over. He spends a minute or so in deep concentration, his tongue sticking out slightly — she’d tell him how adorably feminine he looks right now but she doesn’t want to get strangled with a shoelace so close to freedom — and then triumphantly produces a shoelace with a single loop knotted into it, two-thirds of the way along its length.
“Very nice,” she says.
He directs at her a withering look, and slides the shoelace into the gap between the dented and warped passenger-side door and the frame of the car. She can’t see exactly what he’s trying to do, but judging by the swearing, he’s not successful the first five times he tries.
She looks back at Val. Still just standing there.
“Why not smash a window?” she asks. “Quicker.”
He doesn’t stop working to reply to her. “You want to be even colder?” he asks, and he’s got a point: the only one of them who isn’t obviously feeling the cold is Val, and where Frankie originally thought she was regally ignoring it, she’s now inclined to believe she’s just… numb.
“Yeah, no,” she says, not looking at him. “Cold enough already, thanks.”
“Plus, an open window on a knackered old car on a cold day screams stolen. Whereas, doing it this way, I can— Fuck!”
“You can what?”
“Never mind. Just know that if it works, it’ll get us in with no noise and no broken anything.” He drops the shoelace back into the void between the door and the frame. “What’s up with Val?”
“What do you think?” Frankie snaps.
“I— Oh. Yeah.”
“Just open the fucking door, Trev.”
She leaves him to it. Ambles slowly back to Val, still standing under her flickering streetlight, and leans against the fence next to her.
“Trevor Darling nicked my shoelace,” she says.
Val says nothing.
“I don’t know what he’s doing with it,” Frankie continues. “Just constantly dropping it behind the— Oh. Yeah. I get it. He’s—” She hesitates in the face of Val’s silence. “Uh. You don’t care.”
“He’s trying to hook the loop around the door lock,” Val says, “so he can pull it up. One of the many reasons he wanted to find an old car.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going back to Dorley Hall,” Val says. “My life is one big stupid circle.”
“You don’t want to see Beatrice again?” Frankie asks.
If Val were in a movie, she’d be stubbing her cigarette out with a heeled foot right now. As it is, she just fidgets.
“Who is she, Frances?” she says. “More to the point, who am I? Assuming you haven’t been lying all this time—”
“—promise I haven’t—”
“—then she has spent the last three decades living life, meeting people, building a family. Whereas I… Shit, Frances. Shit. I don’t want this.”
“You could, um…”
“Do not waste my time with unfeasible suggestions. There is no other place. I know this. So I’m going. But… Frances, I am a child. I am a fifty-three-year-old child.”
And she walks away from Frankie again. Doesn’t look back. Just returns to the car, snatches the shoelace from Trevor, and gets the door open on her second try.
* * *
“I thought about changing it. Kicking out the hyphen and all that. Respelling ‘Smyth’ without the archaic Y. Hated it when I was a girl, you know. Hated my father and hated his name. But it’s an advantage here. The Americans call me ‘Lady Smyth-Farrow’. Sometimes ‘Dame Smyth-Farrow’; they do get confused. I think, to a certain, more traditionally minded American, the presence of someone so… baldly aristocratic is reassuring. We represent authority, lineage, a history of exploitation no-one especially likes to talk about, et cetera. They look at us and feel that if their families hadn’t made the crossing, they would have been equally elevated. It’s a fantasy, but it does comfort them. Especially when we appear to share their beliefs. And for my part, I do so enjoy the weather here. Look at that! Midnight and it’s still ten degrees out. Sorry; fifty or so in Fahrenheit, I believe. Sometimes I forget you’re one of them. Oh, yes, I know, the humidity, well, I do suppose it’s rather a bear, but one can get used to anything with enough air conditioning and a morning and evening shower. And they build for the heat here; they don’t sit around in four-hundred-year-old brick boxes and melt in the summer and freeze in the winter.
“Rather a shame about the old pile, actually, while we’re on the subject. Alistair’s in shock; he was always rather more fond of it than I, though he pretended not to be. Men! Personally, if I’d thought of it, I might have lit the match myself. I certainly won’t say no to the insurance. Sadly, it does invite certain complications.
“It was all so inevitable, really. I mean, think about it: that Marsden woman was always too proud for her own good, always insisted on doing everything her own way, told us we wouldn’t be able to break people without her expert knowledge, and Alistair, well, he thought she had a jolly good point. And one has to indulge one’s siblings, doesn’t one? Still, we have the video files from her. You know, I showed you! Her two little pets, looking all terrified, and that marvellous specimen who served us our wine. More than enough. We tell them they used to be men, that we can produce this to spec, using whatever raw material they care to provide, and voilà! Investors are so easy to string along. Especially Americans.
“Hmm. Where was I? Ah. Yes. The manor at Stenordale. I gather it’s a burned-out shell, about which I’m rather pleased; I also gather it is positively packed to the brim with smoking corpses. All ours, too; all Silver River. Dorothy’s deputy, that wonderful maid and the two little fillies are all unaccounted for. As is Dorothy Marsden. Tremendous fuck-up, really, on her part. Unfortunately, there is also a considerable cache of bones under the central quad. Yes, yes, it was my father, of course, but he’s dead, God rest his rotten old soul, and the maid, the domestic — Valérie — can’t feasibly take the blame because even if they find her, all she has to do is lift up her skirt and tell the police my father had her mutilated on contract and Elle Lambert will back her to the hilt, probably through discreet side channels. The jig will be, as they say, up. No, whatever happens, the police will lay the blame at my father’s dead feet and the Smyth-Farrow name will be mud and a good dozen or so geriatric missing persons cases will be suddenly and unexpectedly closed. The good news is, Alistair and I can fairly claim to have been completely out of the loop; it’s not exactly news that we didn’t get on with Daddy. If we stay out of the country we needn’t even get involved, except at lawyers’-arms’ length.
“Oh, don’t worry about it! We’ll get someone in to scrub the servers, just in case any data survived. And we’ll have a good old look for Ms Marsden, while we’re at it; someone has to. You know what? I’ll bet you right now that if we do recover any data, it’ll show that one or both of the Silver River men turned on her and that she, in response, ran like a cowardly child. Five K? Absolutely. Honestly, I can’t believe you’re taking this one. Silver River doesn’t exactly have access to the cream of the bloody crop, you know, and I would assert that if you were to show your average red-blooded Englishman a quivering captive girl on one side and a foul old pensioner on the other, you’d have to pay them a bloody lot more money than we do to stay firmly on our side forever. Yes, I know, those quivering captive girls have penises, the lot of them, but our men were stuck in the English countryside! In Stenordale, of all places! If I were a young man in Stenordale, I’d call myself lucky if the thing I was shagging didn’t have a woolly coat and a bloody tag on its ear.
“Anyway, we do, at least, still have everything we need. So we don’t need her any more, nor the manor, nor her little playthings. We have the old client books; we have the old records. We even, despite her bleating to the contrary, have much of her methodology. And we have the idea, obviously. Oh, shush, I know you have objections, but I still think it’s delicious. You want to hunt a man like a fox? If you know the right people, you can do it. It’s not even especially complicated to arrange. But you want to break a man in precisely the correct way that he becomes your girly little servant forever? I’ve seen what it’s like when amateurs play this game; either the handlers end up dead, or the subjects do, or both. Only Dorothy Marsden has the decades of experience to make it work.
“And now, so do we.
“Ugh. Yes. The complication. Elle Lambert and her quaint little operation. Florence Nightingale-ing troublesome men into pretty, quiescent women. All very laudable, all very dull, dull, dull. But not to be underestimated; one of her people has already conducted a quiet little murder over here, I’m sure. Someone I was quite interested to meet. No, I don’t know it was her, not for certain. But her fingerprints are obvious.
“Yes. Elle Lambert is going to be a bloody problem.
“Oh? So soon? But it’s only nine o’clock there! Ah, well. Delightful to talk to you as always. Love to your daddy and step-mummy. Oh, do remind them about the church social next week, won’t you? I’m going to help feed the poor! Yes, I know; me! But we have to show we’re willing to get our hands truly dirty, or we’ll lose their trust.
“Hah! Don’t say that in front of the Reverend. What? No, any Reverend! They’re interchangeable, and some of them might try to wash your mouth out with soap, you know. They’re into old remedies over here. Herbs and spiritual healing, and so on and so forth, From God’s brain to Instagram to the hands of American evangelists.
“Okay. Bye bye. God bless, and all that.”
* * *
“We’re in luck,” Trev says, as he pulls the stolen hatchback out onto what passes for a main road in Stenordale and finally judges it time to turn on the headlights. “We’ve a bit more than half a tank, if the display is accurate. And it’d better be, since no-one thought to bring any cash—”
“Who carries cash any more?” Frankie says, from her position sprawled across the back seat. It’s probably not a particularly safe way to ride in the back of a car, but she discovered when she climbed in that there aren’t any seat belts in the back and, well, if anyone’s going to go through the windscreen, better her than Val or Trev. “Do you have any on you?”
“No. I was kidnapped, if you remember.”
“Yeah? I’ve been living off of debit cards for years.”
“Fine,” Trev says, taking the next left.
“Uh, Trev,” Frankie says, turning around to look behind them, “you just turned back off the main road.”
“We’re going to Almsworth, yes?” he says, and Frankie steals a look at Val — looking out of the passenger-side front window, unmoving — before nodding. “Then we need to go roughly south.” He jerks a thumb behind them. “That’s north. Actually, Valérie,” he adds, and he’s squinting at the road ahead when he does so, and thus hopefully misses the way Val goes momentarily somehow even more still than before, “can you check in the glove? See if there’s a road map or something?”
Credit to her, she doesn’t hesitate. “‘In the glove’? Oh. La boîte à gants.” She laughs drily. “Of course.” For a few seconds she fumbles at the dashboard, frowning, unable to find the opening mechanism for the glove compartment. “Sorry,” she says, sounding distant, “I am… unused to being in the front of vehicles.”
“Just push the—”
“Yes, yes,” Valérie mutters, “I’m not completely stupid. Ah. See?” She reaches inside. “Hmm. No map. Not much of anything, unless you want — let’s see — an extremely old Wine Gum.”
“Fine,” Trev says. “Fine. I’ll eyeball it.”
“You can eyeball south?” Frankie says.
“The sky’s lightening over that way—” he inclines his head, “—which makes that east and that north. It also makes it probably not that long until the roads start to fill up, so—”
“How is your neck?” Val asks, interrupting him. He’s been picking at it again, every time his left hand isn’t on the gear stick. And Val’s noticed, same as Frankie; that’s good, right? She’s as observant as ever; that’s a good thing, isn’t it?
Frankie wants to kick herself for her optimism. Better: she wants Val to kick her.
“My neck is horrible,” Trev says. “Don’t ask again.”
“Now that we have some time, I can take a proper look at it.”
“Val—”
Val’s reaching for him now. “I could perhaps sew it up, if we could find somewhere to buy a needle and—”
“Valérie,” Trevor says. “One, we need to keep moving. Two, we don’t have any money. Three, please, for the love of God, leave me alone. I’ll just— Look. Sorry. Okay, Val? I’m sorry. But I’ll keep the tape on now.” He laughs mirthlessly. “Maybe I’ll keep it forever. Kind of offsets the tits, don’t you think?”
“Careful, Trev,” Frankie mutters to herself.
“Trevor,” Val says, “if you are not okay—”
“I’m okay,” he says. “I am. But leave me to drive, please. I want something to concentrate on. Something to do. Never thought we’d get out of that fucking place,” he continues, shaking his head lightly as Val settles back in her seat and finally snaps her belt closed. “Thought we’d die trying. Now we’re out… Fuck.”
“I understand,” Val says, and Frankie’s thinking, yes, she understands a hell of a lot better than you, lad. She knows full well what would have happened to the both of you, and unless Jake had truly lost it, it wasn’t going to be die trying.
“Val,” Trevor says. “You don’t understand. You can’t. You’re— Fuck, Val, look at me! I look like a fucking woman! It was one thing when it was just the Silver River bastards and Dorothy who could see me like this, but now it’s fucking everyone, and you don’t understand because you’re good at this.”
“I was not always.”
Frankie doesn’t call that a lie, though it is. Frankie was there, and through the hissing, constricting guilt, she remembers Valérie as she was, before she became the woman she created for herself. Vincent Barbier, the defiant and beautiful boy, who faked half his torment to cover for the other half, who stabbed Karen Turner before it was fashionable. A boy she sometimes imagined standing over himself, his own shadow, his own ghost, waiting for someone new to inhabit.
And Valérie. New. Even more beautiful than Vincent had been; even more defiant. She’d stolen Beatrice out from under them before any of them worked out what she was doing. Created two women, not just one, in the slaughterhouse under Dorley Hall.
Trevor doesn’t have what Vincent had. He definitely doesn’t have it in him to become what Valérie did. And even now, timid and touchy and reduced in a way perhaps only Frankie can truly see, Trevor Darling doesn’t have a fraction of Valérie Barbier’s strength. The man can’t stand to look at himself in the mirror; Val prefers not to piss standing up because it’s not ladylike.
“Frances says they can fix you,” Val’s saying to him as he grips the wheel. “And although she has lied about much in her life, this is the truth. It may take a while—” and it fucking will; it won’t be safe to operate on him for quite some time, though Beatrice or Elle Lambert or whoever might get him on testosterone jabs sooner than that, if their pet endocrinologist agrees it won’t make his tits explode or something, “—but you will be fixed. And, before you say it, no, it is unfortunate, but you won’t be the way you once were. None of us ever will be.”
“She’s right,” Frankie says, daring to speak, hoping she’s picked her moment, and Val, at least, doesn’t glare at her. “I’ve looked into it. What it takes, I mean. To turn someone back. It’s a process. And it’s not a perfect one. But it’s better than nothing.”
Val nods. “And in the meantime,” she says, “if you would like to appear as a woman, for safety, for comfort, I can continue to teach you.”
“I’d like to drive, thank you,” Trevor says.
“Then we will leave you to drive,” Val says. “Frances, I think perhaps we should think about getting some sleep. In case we need to relieve him at the wheel.”
“Yeah,” Frankie says. “Yeah. You’re right.”
Fanciful, though. Frankie’s been wired since before the escape. She hasn’t felt as much of a bite of fatigue since they all climbed in the van together. But Val should sleep. Maybe on the other side of some rest, she won’t feel so… agoraphobic? Is that even the right word for someone who’s spent three decades under the complete control of a sadist?
A sadist Frankie basically fucking handed her to. Because it all keeps returning to that moment, doesn’t it? David/Dee/Beatrice on the kitchen floor, bloody nosed and wretched. Valérie in the grip of armed men, helpless. And Frankie could have put it all on the line, could have changed everything. She’d been armed, hadn’t she? Fuck, she could even have called the fucking police! She could at the very least have created enough confusion that Val might’ve been able to slip away.
Thirty years of hell. Her fault.
She wakes to a tap on the window, right at the point where she’s laid her head, and the unexpectedness is such that she jerks upright too fast and bruises something delicate. She looks around, gets her bearings as quickly as she can, and as her guilty, violent dreams fade she realises that it’s light out, that they’re parked… somewhere, and that Val is frowning at her through the window.
“Get out of the car,” Val says through the window, “and have a disgusting sausage.”
“What?”
Val taps on the window again with a knuckle, and in her hand she’s holding a hot dog in a paper wrapper. “Sausage,” she repeats.
A minute or so later and Frankie’s out of the car and on her feet and stretching away the cramps and sore muscles and trying to forget her dreams. She accepts her hot dog from Val and leans against the car next to her. Trevor, apparently done with his, squats by the boot, hands in pockets.
“How?” Frankie asks.
“We found a twenty in the ashtray,” Trevor whispers. “Can we get a move on? I don’t like being here?”
“Worried about Silver River?”
“He’s worried about being seen,” Valérie says. Whether or not she slept, she looks better than she did earlier. More like her usual self, in fact: unfairly, staggeringly gorgeous for a woman her age, despite the lack of makeup, hair brushes, and changes of clothes. “Not by Silver River, though.”
“There was a man,” Trevor says, “in the café. He kept looking at me. He probably still is.”
“Being looked at is easy,” Val says, and takes another delicate bite of sausage. Frankie follows her eyeline, and there is, indeed, a man watching them from inside a squat little café. Frankie wonders to what extent Valérie is performing for him. “And it is preferable to the alternative.”
“Not for me,” Trevor mutters.
“Where are we, anyway?” Frankie asks, because there are no clues that make any sense to her, beyond that they’re at a small service station, one of those non-chain ones that’s basically a car park and a petrol station and a place to buy bad sausages.
“We found the A1,” Val says. “Eventually.”
“How eventually?”
“I got us lost,” Trevor says. “We’re still several hours from Almsworth.”
“Trevor Darling, you took us in roughly the right direction with no map or compass and not even any sun after the clouds rolled in,” Val scolds him. “I would have dropped us into the sea, I’m sure.”
Trevor shrugs.
“You didn’t get us caught, Trev,” Frankie says, “and that’s all that matters. Will the petrol hold out?”
“Yeah,” Trevor says. “That’s why we have hot dogs. Cheapest item on the menu. The rest went into the tank.”
“Tell her about the discount,” Val says.
“You got a discount?” Frankie asks.
“Yeah,” Trevor says, though he doesn’t look happy about it, “and a free paper map.”
“It’s as I’ve been trying to tell him,” Val says. “Being looked at is easy.”
At that, Trevor just shrugs again. Frankie has to give him a few points: his first time out after being force feminised and he apparently managed to score petrol, a map, and sausages. Admittedly, he probably let Val do the actual flirting, since she’s more experienced, and she doesn’t have duct tape wrapped around her neck.
And Val’s doing better, too, despite her continued wariness. She’s almost never been less animated during a conversation, but Val’s still going; willpower could raise the Titanic.
Frankie finishes her hot dog, screws up the paper wrapping, collects Val and Trevor’s wrapping for good measure, and sets off across the car park to find a bin to dump it all in and a toilet to piss in. When she’s halfway to the ugly little café, Val calls across the lot that Frankie should use her feminine wiles to get them free Cokes, and the laugh Frankie has to suppress has more to do with her glee that Val’s feeling comfortable enough to do such a thing than anything particularly funny about the suggestion. And anyway, Frankie could have done it, back in the day. Yeah, she wasn’t the looker Val was — still is — but she wasn’t half bad, and men, honestly, are fucking suckers for a bit of attention. That, she learned from her sister.
Bless her soul.
She doesn’t try for the Cokes, but on her way back she wiggles her hips a little, for Val, and gets a laugh. Good enough.
By unspoken consensus they both take the front seats, so Trevor has no choice but to take the back. He doesn’t complain; he can barely sit up. Val’s nominated herself as the map reader, and at Trevor’s suggestion they’re not going to take the A1 any farther. They’re going to avoid motorways and dual carriageways altogether, and follow a longer, slower, but theoretically safer route, marked out while Frankie was still asleep. Dorley Hall’s the obvious choice, he said, and they’ll expect them to be heading there. By the time they get to Almsworth they won’t be able to obfuscate their route, but there’ll be people everywhere, and they’ll be safe enough even if they do pick up a Silver River tail. After all, no-one’s tried anything at Dorley Hall yet, to the best of everyone’s knowledge.
The car has a bit of a slippery first gear and no power steering, but Frankie gets the hang of it quickly enough. There’s a decent amount of traffic, and she checks the clock on the dash before she realises she has no reason to believe it’s set to the correct time, and none of them have a phone they want to risk switching on.
“Any idea what time it is?” she asks.
“A little after nine,” Trevor says, getting caught in a yawn before he can finish.
“Three or four hours since we set off,” Val says. She’s kicked off her shoes and is stretching her toes out in the footwell. “We asked in the café.”
“How long to Almsworth?”
“No idea,” Trevor says. “Just drive.”
And she does.
Half a mile down the road, Val starts unsuccessfully fiddling with the radio cassette, and makes a distracting enough meal of it that Frankie slaps her hand away to give it a try herself, to no avail. Val sits back and lets her play with it, though, returning to watching the B-road they’ve been motoring along at a sedate fifty.
“Why are there so many giant vehicles?” she asks.
“Hmm? What do you mean?”
“The cars! Every one of them. Or almost every one of them. They’re massive!”
Trevor briefly leans up from his sprawl and squints out of the rear window. “What are you talking about?” he says.
“No, wait,” Frankie says. “I know what she’s talking about. Uh, yeah, Val. Cars got big.”
“But people stayed the same size?” Val says.
“Mostly.”
“The twenty-first century is stupid. Here, let me try again.” She flaps at Frankie’s hand until she returns it to the wheel, and then raises her foot and jams her heel into the radio cassette. Absurdly, static starts crackling over the speakers. “Ah-ha!”
“Magic,” Trevor says, and shuffles around on the back seat, lying himself down. “Just keep the volume down, okay?”
“Yes, yes,” Val says, reverentially turning the dial, “I know you need your beauty sleep.”
“’uck you,” Trevor mumbles.
The radio passes through several songs Frankie vaguely recognises, a few talking voices, and a lot of static. Val keeps turning the dial, searching.
“Don’t worry about me, Frances,” she says quietly. “I think I’m looking forward to it. To seeing her again.”
“Yeah?”
“Overall, yes. I’ve been looking at it all wrong, Frances. Whoever she is, whoever she’s become… I lived. I lived, and I want to see what she’s built.”
“Good,” Frankie says. “And I know it’s worth nothing, but I’m sorry.”
“I know,” Valérie says.
Finally she alights on a song she knows, a track from one of the cassettes she was allowed in her little room in the servants’ quarters, and it’s one Frankie knows so well that even the opening chords send shivers up her spine, rip memories from her she’d rather keep buried, and inspire others, more recent, that she can never stop thinking about.
As Trevor sleeps and Frankie drives south, Val closes her eyes and quietly sings.
Life is a mystery
Everyone must stand alone
I hear you call my name
And it feels like home
* * *
She’s been debating where to go. It’s not like she has a lot of options. If only Karen hadn’t been killed! If only Dorothy knew exactly what happened to her!
Though it’s not hard to guess. Karen was supposed to embed. To prove herself. David’s former nurse, Richard — ‘Barbara’ — had finally been enticed out of the country by her pervert husband and Karen had been right there, ready and willing to take her old job back, to become one of the team. To get Dorothy her access back. The phone call where they discussed it, this boon that had appeared out of nowhere, had been the first time Dorothy felt hope in years.
And then Elle Lambert had Karen killed. There’s no denying it. And while it’s possible that Lambert did so on a whim, it’s not bloody likely; any action on either of their part risks mutually assured destruction. So what’s more likely is that Karen couldn’t fucking help herself. Made herself a problem.
She always did like to torture the boys. Perhaps the most out of all of them.
Stupid. And such a waste.
It’s been an indulgence to believe her missing, to imagine that she could one day saunter back through the front door of Stenordale Manor and return to work. But now the manor’s gone, at Dorothy’s hand, and Karen’s gone; at her own hand, ultimately.
So:
Karen’s dead, probably. Definitely.
Frankie’s turned. She’s probably delivering Vincent into Elle Lambert’s adoring arms right now.
Esther’s out of the country, as far as Dorothy knows, and anyway, the last time she called her, she got an earful.
Ruth?
Hmm. Ruth. Will anyone be watching her? Does anyone else even know where she is? Perhaps not; no-one’s been quite as assiduous at dropping off the grid as Ruth.
The highlands it is, then.
Dorothy checks her credentials again. For the next few days, weeks or months — however long it takes — she’s Constance Westerman, a woman of roughly Dorothy’s age, who keeps a small flat in Aberdeen and lives frugally off a dwindling nestegg. The state doesn’t know she died back in the sixties, killed at the Hall by one of her own subjects.
She thought about hiring a car, but Silver River, if they are looking for her, will be keeping an eye out for things like that. But they can’t watch every local bus service, nor can they follow up on every train ticket purchased within a thirty-mile radius of the manor. And the name on her debit card means nothing to anyone.
She’ll go north. She’ll empty Constance Westerman’s accounts. Sell her jewellery. She’ll reconnect with Ruth and hope she isn’t still holding too much of a grudge. And then, well… There are some people out there who remember how much damage Elle Lambert did. Probably some more who are suspicious of the rise of Silver River.
Dorothy can rebuild. She’s done it before; it’s practically the story of her life.
* * *
Noor and the firefighter woman, whose name she can’t remember or perhaps never learned, which is beyond frustrating because it feels like her name is there, just out of reach, and it’s like that’s happening with everything, like he remembers Jake and she remembers killing Jake and there’s a flicker of the old woman, of Dorothy/Grandmother/whoever, and then she’s outside with Noor and the jogging clothes she gave him, clothes which reminded him so much of his brief life at Dorley Hall she’d had to smother her laughter, and then couldn’t any more, and he’d hacked up poison from his smoke-blocked lungs, and then she was out there on the road on the other side of the woods, and
and
blanks
blanks and stuttered sensation
like a CD skipping
like a CD skipping on a broken portable player
cheap Argos shit
the other boys had iPods
fuck them
wait
go back
Shit.
Where is it all? Where did it all fucking go?
It’s there. It’s all there. It has to be. Think.
It’s all there. She just has to find it. She just has to know wh—
“Are you okay, sweetheart?”
“Yes,” she says, finding a scrap of herself with which to answer, “I’m okay.”
That was it! The thought she’s been picking at: Noor and the firefighter woman, whose name she wants to shout because she fucking remembers and it was Judy, they spotted her as a man because of her voice, and she thought about it as she walked, as she hiked through the forest, as she looked up at what stars were visible through the clouds, and she’d done a little practising. Because Val had said so, hadn’t she? Before she— Before she found out, when he had been so frozen by what had been taken from him, before he found out just how bad it could get…
Val said it’s possible to change your voice. Didn’t say how. Said she did it, though.
So she— So Diana—
So she practised.
It’s mostly a whisper. It sounds hoarse. It scratches at her throat and makes her cough. But that might be the smoke.
And it sounds nothing like him. Nothing like Declan.
Like
Fuck!
He keeps
keeps shattering her
he was so important
he was so right always and in every way
he was so strong
he
he fucking was
She closes her eyes from the effort of remembering, but she finds him in the place he was most proud, in the form room at school, when it was easy to be liked, when he wasn’t big like Jake or like Dad but just tall and built and she can see him there so clearly and she feels suddenly so sad for him
and who the fuck does she think she is, anyway? he knew what he liked, he knew what he wanted, and he fucking made sure he got it, didn’t matter if it was at school or at the club or with—
tracy
Diana doesn’t feel sad for him any more. She wants to rub him out. And what is this, anyway?
Val would call it context.
Val-é-rie. Musical, especially in her accent. Diana knows better than to try to imitate it. But maybe she’ll practise that, too. Maybe she’ll see her again somehow. Show her everything she’s learned. Everything she’s going to learn.
She feels unstable. Afloat on blackened memories. Like at the end of Tracy’s favourite movie, with the girl on the raft and the guy sinking into the sea. And that’s a stupid image. It’s — fuck, what’s the word? — clichéd.
Except Diana can start again, can’t she? That’s what she’s doing, isn’t it? He thought he was so strong, so much better than everyone else, and what did it get him? It was Diana who saved him, who put her fingers into the eyes of a man whose violence was so much a reflection of his own that she hated him all the more. So who gives a fuck what he thinks about anything?
Everything’s a fucking reflection. The blood she wiped away. The bruises on her face.
Everything’s a reflection, but it’s not a mirror, it’s not glass. It’s the sea, still and calm for now but with roiling potential, and there she is, clinging to the last shred of wood, clinging to life.
But still doing better than him.
“Diana, dear, would you like some tea? We could stop for a few minutes, if you’d like. We have a kettle in the caravan.”
She smiles. “No, thank you,” she says.
“Well,” says Mrs Carlisle, “let us know if you change your mind.”
“Not far to go now, anyway,” Mr Carlisle says. He doesn’t look away from the road for more than a moment, but when he catches her eye in the rear-view mirror, he smiles at her, that same reassuring smile he had when they stopped for her at the side of the road, topped by a thick grey moustache.
Diana would call it fatherly if the thought didn’t still her.
“I’m so sorry we can’t take you beyond Cherston, dear,” Mrs Carlisle says, “but you wouldn’t want to wait around until our son and his family shows up. They’ll be hours.”
“If we’re lucky,” Mr Carlisle says.
“Cherston’s absolutely fine,” Diana says. “Thank you again.”
They saw her bruises when they picked her up. She saw them looking. But they didn’t ask questions. Just asked if she was okay and if she needed a lift and Mrs Carlisle mentioned only the once that they have medical supplies in the caravan if she needs them.
And Diana said not to worry.
Cherston’s a good place to start again. On the east coast, apparently. Diana’s never heard of it before, and that means Declan’s a completely unknown face. And she has the cash from Noor and Judy, and Noor’s emergency number on a scrap of operations manual paper if she ever really needs it. And she has a new name and a new face. Everything she needs, at least for a while.
She’s going to start again.
* * *
A barrage of alto not-swearing wakes her, and Rachel slowly opens her eyes and rolls over in bed just in time to see Pippa leap out of it, throw her phone down onto her pillow, and get through a frustrated half-circle on the carpet. When she realises Rachel’s awake, she freezes, stock-still.
“It’s okay, Pippa,” Rachel says. “If you need to kick something, kick something.”
“I’d like to kick myself,” Pippa says. “I’m late! And I’m a terrible hostess, as well.”
“Late for what?”
Pippa gestures at her phone. The screen’s lit up with three reminders, in increasingly angry colours.
“A briefing!”
“Oh,” Rachel says, “like a torture briefing?”
“Yes,” Pippa says, slowing her panic enough to extract maximum sarcasm from her words, “like a torture briefing. Crap, and I don’t know if I should call or get dressed or— Sorry. Decision failure. I mess up; I lock up. And immediately after, I go a bit mental.” She breathes out and massages her wrist, which for now, Rachel realises, is free of its ever-present bracelet. She looks: it’s hanging on the little stand on Pippa’s bedside table.
“Hey,” Rachel says, “when I mess up, I make it everyone’s problem. Why not try that?”
“There are a lot of people in Dorley Hall,” Pippa mutters, “it would take a while. Hey, could you pass my phone? I won’t throw it again, I promise.”
Rachel lets herself into the bathroom so Pippa can make her anxious little phone call in peace. By the time she steps out, showered and wrapped in the towel Pippa showed her last night, Pippa’s looking more calm. She probably kicked something; Rachel looks discreetly around for dented furniture.
“It’s fine,” Pippa says. “It’s all fine. I’ve got time. We’re doing an early afternoon briefing instead. Exceptional circumstances.”
“Oh?” Rachel asks, patting herself dry and draping the towel over the back of the chair.
“You,” Pippa says, and when Rachel jerks her head around, Pippa’s smirking. “You can borrow something, if you like,” she adds, “rather than wear dirty stuff. We’re about the same size.”
As Rachel selects something from Pippa’s wardrobe — the girl has a lot of nice casual dresses, and Rachel borrows one in pastel-blue coral, adding leggings and a cardie — Pippa fills her in: Melissa, Shahida and Amy are all here and all downstairs, waiting for her. Pippa’s told Maria that she doesn’t think Rachel represents any kind of a risk to the Hall — “Don’t make a liar out of me,” she says, and Rachel zippers her lips and mimes throwing the key out of the window — and that in her opinion she should be added to the official guest list, with the usual thumbprint access privileges, and so on. Finally, Aunt Bea would like a word.
“With me?”
“That’s what I assumed,” Pippa says, disrobing. “She can talk to me any time she wants,” she adds, closing the bathroom door behind her.
Cheeky.
* * *
Two taps on the forehead means it’s time for Steph to pull out her earbuds, and as she does so, Tanya switches off the ring light and starts to massage aloe into Steph’s face.
“Ow,” Steph says, and Tanya grins at her.
“Sorry.”
“No, no. Good ow.”
Very good; for one thing, the stubble she’s been growing out for the last three days has all been violently electrocuted and then yanked out; for another, she doesn’t have to have this done again for weeks. And that’s the best part: today’s her first full-face clear, her first time lying on the table for as long as it takes, dosed up on painkillers and covered in numbing cream, and she’s not eager to repeat the experience any time soon. If she thought just one hour of it was bad…
“I hope you didn’t get bored,” Steph says, hopping off the table and stretching.
“Nope,” Tanya replies, massaging her fingers. “You have your audiobook, I have mine. I get a bit cramped, though.”
“Thanks for doing this.”
Laughing, Tanya says, “Don’t thank me. I remember when I had it done. Being ginger sucks. First, the other boys at school say you don’t have a soul, and then electrolysis.”
“Yeah,” Steph says, “those are definitely the two defining events of my life.”
“How are things, anyway?” Tanya asks, dumping her gloves in the bin and washing up at the little station in the corner. “I heard your girlfriend became, well, your girlfriend.”
“You weren’t at the Christmas Eve party?”
“Nope. Family. Not original family,” she adds quickly. “Current family.”
“Did you have a tree?”
Tanya fetches her jacket from the chair and holds open the door for Steph, and then follows her out into the basement one corridor. “We had a forest,” she says. “Gary never had proper Christmases as a kid, and he does like to spoil the kids. And now they’re getting old enough to know what’s going on?” She mimes an explosion with her hands, and does the sound effect to match. “Pchoo! Like those prank videos where they fill someone’s house with ball pit balls, only it’s our living room and it’s presents.”
“That’s cute,” Steph says.
“Speaking of cute…” Tanya prompts. “And you… And your girlfriend…”
Steph points down the stairs. “I was just going to go get her, actually. Atiena did her laser while you were doing me, and I think she’s probably just as sore as I am.”
“I thought I heard screaming.”
“We’re going to raid the sweets cupboard and see if we can steal any chocolate bars. And maybe see if Beth can look pathetic enough that one of the sponsors makes us a nicer lunch than whatever they had planned.”
“Devious,” Tanya says. “I’ll see you upstairs?”
Steph nods and they part ways. She practically skips down the stairs to the second basement and lets herself through into the main corridor with a wave through the window of the cell corridor door at Harmony; apparently Ollie did something requiring a time out while Steph was upstairs.
She pokes her head into the common room.
“Hey, Steph,” Raph says, looking up from his tablet. He’s sat at the metal table closest to the TV, clearly not paying the cooking show very much attention. Steph can’t see what’s on his tablet in any detail, except that it’s entirely text; a book?
“Hey,” Steph says cautiously. Raph’s been muted recently, but still very definitely not happy to be here.
“Your girl went to bed,” he says. “She said they shouldn’t be allowed to employ deceptively gorgeous women if they’re just going to let them hurt him. Sorry; her. She said she’s not coming out for a million years, and asked for you to bring her a biscuit.”
“Thanks, Raph,” Steph says, leaning against the door, propping it open. “You okay?”
He shrugs. “Jane told me the whole story this morning. I don’t think she meant to,” he adds, frowning, “but she was so excited.”
“Excited about Amy?”
“If there’s an Amy, you know more than I do. But, yeah, after she slipped up, Jane gave me her life’s story.”
“You don’t seem… agitated about it?”
Raph sighs and leans forward on his elbows. “I had my suspicions. I think we all did, except maybe Ollie.”
“Is that why Ollie’s in the cell again?”
“He threw a bread roll at Harmony. Didn’t even hit her. Pathetic, really. And no, he doesn’t know the secret. He’ll be the last. Or Adam will, if he ever comes out of his room. I dunno.”
“How do you… feel about it?” Steph asks.
“Are you sponsoring me, Riley?”
“Just curious.”
Raph closes his eyes. “I think…” he says. “I think… Oh, fuck it; I think it doesn’t change anything. They’re going to do to me what they’re going to do to me. To all of us.” He shrugs. “It’s reassuring to know Jane already did it. Feels a bit less stupidly fucking impossible than before. And…” His cheeks flush, but he doesn’t try to hide it. “And, I dunno. I feel less alone in this than before. You get it?”
“I do.”
“Sorry,” Raph says. “This is still weird.”
“You know, you could start laser. Since you’re going to have to have it done anyway. Get a head start?”
“Don’t push it.”
“Okay,” Steph says, straightening up. “I’ll bring you a biscuit as well.”
And then she rushes off to Beth’s room to drag her out of bed and up the stairs.
* * *
Mr and Mrs Carlisle drove her the scenic route into Cherston-on-Sea, along the river, and dropped her in the town centre. Mrs Carlisle hugged her, told her to be safe and to be careful around men, checked with her again that she has enough money to stay somewhere warm and dry, and eventually consented to be driven away by her husband.
Diana would tell herself she can’t remember the last time she was treated with such kindness, except she can. Things are clearer now, though not entirely unjumbled, and she can say for certain that Noor and Judy were just like that, and so was her mother, and so were the older women who buzzed around her mother at social functions, disapproved of her father and many of her older siblings, and eventually disapproved of her, too.
Strange to view memories this way. Same person. And not the same person. At once. And when she tries to square it, when she tries to place him, the boy and the man she still might be, back in those memories, the sudden violence of it threatens to shatter the stability she’s found. So she’s stopped trying.
There might be a man called Declan, and he might be part of her, and he might be her, and she might be fucking mad if she thinks she isn’t him, but he had a shape and he had an attitude and he had, more than anything else, an end, and she can’t push past that any more. She can’t get to him any more. Because she has to go through the thing that ended him.
And because she might not want to.
She dreamed of him. In the back seat of the Carlisles’ car, she dreamed of him. He took Jake’s place, holding her down. And sometimes she was him, and the girl below her was Tracy. And sometimes he took Jake’s place, and she killed him. And sometimes she was him, and she killed herself.
If she could cut him out.
If she could bury him.
Diana picks a sheltered spot out of the salt wind coming in from the sea, and she looks around to make sure the Carlisles are out of sight and no-one else has come round the corner, and she crouches down behind the bus stop, makes herself as small as she can, and she fucking cries. Thumps a fist against the dirty metal and cries. Buries her head in her knees and cries.
Monica was right. Aunt Bea was right. Val, she was right, too. And her Mum, if she knew, she’d agree with them all. She’d belt her around the fucking ear, and—
No. Honesty. Right now.
Mum wouldn’t belt her. Not for what he did. Not for how he revelled in it. Not for the way he protested that they just exaggerate it, don’t they? It’s just sex. It’s not like he cut her or anything, or even hit her that badly. She liked it, really. And she came back, didn’t she? So it was all just making a big deal out of nothing.
Mum wouldn’t belt him for that. She’d probably call the fucking police.
Stupid.
She’s stupid and she knows it. And he made himself stupid and that felt good, and that was a way to control people, and because he was tall and built and kind of good-looking, they expected it of him. And it felt good because he knew that if he tried, if he pushed himself, if he really fucking worked at it, he’d still be stupid. So why bother?
And then he left school and he got shit jobs and he lost his shape and Tracy would still come back but sometimes only after seeing other men and sometimes he knew and took it out on her and sometimes he pretended he didn’t because he knew she had a fucking point and because he was in many ways a fucking coward. And he never knew for sure whether she did or not, anyway.
He was stupid.
And she knows she’s stupid now.
But she knows she’s not a coward any more. She took on Jake and she won. Declan didn’t. Declan couldn’t. Declan was too busy fucking drowning. And Diana, or whoever she was then, remained.
And because she’s not a coward, she doesn’t have to be stupid any more. All towns have a library, right? She can learn. And maybe she won’t be Stephen Hawking, but she won’t be Declan Shaw, either.
She stands. Rubs her eyes and nose with the sleeves of her hoodie. Sniffs away the last of the snot, the stuff that didn’t come all the way out.
Declan Shaw was stupid.
Declan Shaw was a coward.
Declan Shaw was a rapist.
That last one she fucking spits.
And because she’s already less stupid than him, she knows she has no innocence to carry forward. She knows his actions stain her as clearly as the bruises on her skin. But she can be someone new, can be someone who would never again do the things Declan Shaw did, never do the things that were done to him. Eventually, Declan Shaw will be forgotten.
She walks the promenade for a while. She thinks that’s what it’s called; she’s been squinting for signs but hasn’t seen anything to say that it is— and she’s also realised over the last few months that she can’t do without glasses any more, not comfortably. She knows it’s called Sharrow’s Way, but that’s all she has to go on.
It’s pretty. It’s cold and there’s a haze over the water and the air smells sharp, but it’s not Stenordale Manor and it’s not a concrete basement and there’s no-one here who knows that a man named Declan Shaw ever existed. And he’d never let her call anything pretty, so she does so again, looking out over the water. Again and again and again.
Along the way and down a couple of side streets she finds a bed and breakfast, advertising vacancies. It’s a tall terraced house, five storeys at least, and it reminds her of home: lace curtains on the ground floor, steps down to a basement, and small balconies on the upper floors, not enough to stand on but fine to lean out of. Mum used to use them to dry clothes.
She counted the money she got from Noor and Judy. Even though they said it was for emergencies, for times like this, she still felt bad to take it, and worse when she pulled it out of the bag and flipped through it by faded starlight and found almost three hundred quid.
Enough for more than a week at the price on the door.
Inside, she rings the little bell.
She can’t pretend to herself that the reaction she gets is unexpected, particularly since the woman who bustles into the foyer is old enough to be her grandmother. She’s seen herself clearly in dozens of shop windows since the Carlisles dropped her off, and though most things about her appearance don’t have the power to shock her any more, the bruises do. Mostly Jake kept to the less visible parts of her, but in his final struggle, he used everything he had.
She knows what she looks like: a woman who has been severely battered by a man. And it shames her to deceive people, if that’s even what she’s doing any more, but it doesn’t shame her to be seen as a woman any more. Hasn’t for a little while. At least a woman has the power to make choices. At least a woman can name herself.
At least a woman can kill the man who tortures her.
“Oh, you look exhausted!” the old lady says. She’s Dorothy’s age or thereabouts but couldn’t be more different: she’s plump, she’s Black, she’s wearing a head covering Diana doesn’t (yet) know the name of, and her long dress billows out around her shape in a way that makes Diana think of breezy summer days. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“Thank you,” Diana says, in her hoarse whisper, “but I’m okay.” On impulse, she adds, “I’ve sat down a lot today. Hitchhiking. Still stretching my legs.”
The woman nods. “What’s your name, dear?”
“Diana.”
“I’m Chiamaka.”
“Chia-ma-ka,” Diana repeats, frowning in concentration. Important to get it right. She never did with Valérie. Not until after.
Chiamaka beams at her. “That’s right! Now, I’m not going to pry, and I’m not going to ask you about your bruises, but I’m guessing you’re here for a room?” Diana nods, and Chiamaka continues, “Then I do have to ask you, is he going to come looking for you? Will he come here? The man who did those?”
“No,” Diana says, as definitively as she can.
“I’ll trust you on that. So, Diana, do you have luggage? Is the person you hitched from waiting for you?”
“No. No luggage.” Diana spreads her arms, and can’t control a wince as she does so; Jake got her really bad in the ribs, several times, and she keeps forgetting. “J— Just me.”
“Hmm. Well, it’s thirty-two a night, and I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but we’ve got to compete with the Premier Inn down the road. I think our service is better and our beds are softer, but people do like a name brand. It’s another fiver for breakfast, though, and another fiver on top of that for wifi.” She smiles. “That’s where we get them.”
Diana nods. “I don’t need wifi. I need breakfast, though.”
Chiamaka stares at her. “And dinner? And supper?”
“Breakfast’s fine,” Diana says, shrugging.
“Hmm,” Chiamaka says. “No luggage. No ride waiting for you outside. And no phone?” Diana shakes her head. “You’re stretching what money you have, so that’s why you want only breakfast, yes?” Diana nods. “You have ID? A number I can call? Do you want me to get someone here for you?”
“No!” Diana says, too loud, and her voice cracks, and she sounds wrong, and this is the thing she’s scared of being seen as. This is the thing that can still hurt her.
Chiamaka narrows her eyes. “I see. You have a surname, Diana?”
Something inside her, shrinking under Chiamaka’s gaze, says, “No.”
“Well, then!” the older woman says, clapping her hands together, stunning Diana with the sudden noise. “You need a place to stay, and I need help. Oh, my granddaughters, they come around sometimes and pitch in, and my daughter helps out on weekends, but I’m not getting any younger and the breakfasts don’t make themselves, so this is what I propose, Diana: keep your money. We’ve got a small room on the attic floor we don’t rent out because it’s so pokey, and my granddaughters will be annoyed they can’t use it while you’re here, but they’ll have to live with it because that’s where you’ll stay. You’ll have your own sink and toilet, but you’ll have to come down a flight to bathe. You’ll be up at five every morning to help me with breakfast and you’ll run the desk and answer the phone when I’m busy, and while I’m sure you want to keep working on your voice, if anyone gives you grief for it in the meantime, they’ll answer to me. You’ll help me with the cleaning and with turning the beds. It’s not the best deal in the world, but it’s the best you’ll get in this town. You want it?”
Diana has to bite her lip to keep from crying again, but it doesn’t work, and when she says, “Yes,” she’s so overwhelmed she can barely see. She almost jumps when a hand closes over her shoulder.
“You really are a tall girl, aren’t you?” Chiamaka says softly, and tugs gently on her, leading her towards a set of stairs at the back of the hall. With her free arm she turns around a sign on the desk that says Back In Ten Minutes! You Are Being WATCHED! “No matter. My granddaughters might have left something you can wear, if you don’t mind showing a bit of ankle.”
“Thank you,” Diana whispers, regaining some control.
“Thank me,” Chiamaka says, “by setting the alarm in your room to four-thirty and by being in the kitchen at five on the dot.”
They find her a few things. Simple and mostly a bit short on her, but Chiamaka says she can catch a bus to the big shopping centre in a few days when she’s got her bearings. There’s an outlet shop where a little money goes a long way, and maybe one of her granddaughters can go with her, if she’s never shopped for herself before. And here’s the toilet and sink, and here’s the bed and there’s the telly, and here’s a little desk and chair and an old computer the granddaughters use, and she can borrow it for a while. She won’t even have to put in the wifi password; it’s already saved.
And now Diana’s left alone, with a small pile of clothes and her own computer and a window out onto a windswept street. The walls here aren’t the thickest, and she can hear someone playing a flute and some kids kicking a ball about in the garden next door and several TVs, and she thinks she can hear the start of rain, coming in off the sea.
Later she’ll go down and have a shower and try on some of these clothes and maybe offer to help out a bit today, because she wants to show willing, but for now she’ll lie here and listen to absolutely nothing.
There’s one thing she knows: Chiamaka would never have done this for Declan. She would have turned him away. Maybe turned him in.
And she would have been right to do so.
* * *
Apologising to Rachel Gray-Wallace was easier than she thought. Yes, the woman’s been bouncing around the Hall for the last couple of days, and yes, Pippa and Stephanie were the mollifying influence she’d hoped they’d be, but Rachel had been mortified when Beatrice started winding up her apology, enough that Beatrice was, truthfully, a little put out.
It was all Beatrice’s fault. She’s been rather distracted for an awfully long time, what with Peckinville’s missing man and Dorothy’s mysterious plans and Elladine’s concerns and Stephanie putting the cat among the pigeons. Not to mention a dozen other little crises, all of them piling up and each of them contributing in their own special way to her perpetual stress headache. And she’d wanted to be there for Amy Woodley and Rachel Gray-Wallace. She’d wanted to provide the personal touch. She’d wanted to be involved, and not just hand the problem off to Maria and her stress headache.
Fat lot of good that did. She mishandled it horribly. Rather the same as with Stephanie’s revelation, come to think of it.
So she cleared out the kitchen and sat Rachel down and made them a cup of coffee each. A proper one, out of the cafetiere. Rachel expressed a desire for one of their speciality mugs, claiming she wanted to torture Pippa with it later, so Bea selected the most esoteric one she could find, one with a cartoon image of William Shakespeare on the side and the caption, in faux-vintage text, To quote Henry V, Act I, Scene 2, Line 408: “Balls, my liege.”
Rachel took it in stride.
Beatrice chose her favourite, Linda’s A Round Tuit, which of the two was the mug Rachel seemed to find the more baffling. At least, as Beatrice observed to Rachel, it has the benefit of not being in any way about testicles.
And then Rachel turned down her apology. Offered one of her own. Told her she’ll always have reservations, that she’ll be visiting often to check in, that she’ll be keeping an eye on them. But that she understands. That she sees in the programme at Dorley Hall something offered to few people who deserve it, fewer still who need it.
“Just don’t be cruel,” she said as she finished her coffee and stood up.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Beatrice said, slightly stunned.
Beatrice had to make another coffee after that. With a spot of brandy. And now she leans on the counter by the microwave and the odd little kitchen device Monica thought would be handy and Indira’s slow cooker and the sandwich toaster no-one ever uses, and very carefully does not drink her alcoholic coffee in one gulp.
“I take it that went well?” Maria says, walking in from the dining hall with Edy. She doesn’t sit down, nudges Beatrice aside instead, and flicks on the tea urn mounted on the wall; standard practice when one is making hot drinks for more than, say, a dozen people at once.
Beatrice, displaced and having to find herself a new place to stand, says, “Swimmingly,” and takes what she feels is an appropriately sarcastic and loudly slurpy sip from her Round Tuit.
“Rachel’s okay, then?” says another voice, and it’s Stephanie, dressed disappointingly in a standard basement outfit rather than in any of the nicer and more colourful items in her upstairs room. She’s also wearing a face mask, one from the boxes Beatrice has insisted always be kept in stock and fresh, ever since SARS, and after a moment, the reason for it becomes obvious: what’s visible of her cheeks and neck are covered in tiny red dots.
Beatrice winces in sympathy. Probably explains the frumpy clothes, too; no-one feels their best after that.
“She’s in some sort of awful five-way hug in the dining hall,” says Bethany, also masked and dully dressed and following Steph to the dry goods cupboards.
“Rachel is fine,” Beatrice says, and seriously regrets the amount of brandy she poured into her coffee; three to four times more would have been more appropriate. “I’m sorry, Bethany, but have we given you the run of the place?”
“No,” Maria says, frowning at her.
“Steph has the run of the place,” Bethany says, pointing. “I just nip through after her, before the doors close.”
The tea urn starts making the usual gurgling noises, and more people start wandering into the kitchen, possibly to get away from whatever’s happening with Rachel in the dining hall. Maria and Edy take drinks orders and fill mugs and Pippa surreptitiously hands Stephanie and Bethany a large chocolate bar each, and when Steph whispers for a packet of biscuits, too, for Raphael, Beatrice finishes most of the rest of her coffee and concentrates very hard on the floor and pretends not to have noticed.
It used to be so simple. A handful of sponsors, a basementful of rowdy boys, and a couple of years of decreasingly meek new girls to fill out the ranks. Now the boys are turning out to have been girls all along, or really rather into it despite having no prior inclination, and they’re popping up from the basement for chocolate bars and having sleepovers and guests from the outside world. And families are getting involved! Indira’s was carefully vetted, and Beatrice has known ever since Stephanie’s revelation that they’ll have to concoct airtight evidence for her when the time comes, but now Abigail’s reunited with her family in a completely unauthorised fashion and, wonderfully for young Abigail but tragically for Beatrice’s conscience, it seems to be going swimmingly.
Has she been doing everything wrong?
At least the girls are happy. At least none of them seem to be especially bitter about her, personally, or no more than usual, at any rate. At least something works. She accepts a refill — decaffeinated this time, and with milk but no added alcohol — and sips quietly on it, contributing nothing to the conversation but content to listen. Whatever else she’s done, whatever she’s done wrong, she can at least take responsibility for this little family, right here in this kitchen.
And then the conversation suddenly stills. Someone gasps and someone else whispers, “Maria, no!” and when Beatrice opens her eyes the tableau that greets her is of a dozen frozen bodies, of Edy holding Maria by the waist, and of Maria’s face, contorted with a hatred Beatrice hasn’t seen in over a decade.
And in the hallway, looking in through the large windows in the kitchen doors, are three women,
One she doesn’t recognise.
One is Frankie, of all people.
And the third…
The third is—
Beatrice drops her mug.
Chapter 37: Snuff
Notes:
Content warnings: references to suicide, rape, injury, abuse
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
1962 May 18
Friday
Her breath is the first thing she becomes aware of. Her throat, raw with the effort of taking in air again. Her chest, heaving as she fills her lungs over and over in desperate gasps. It hurts, too, a peculiar empty pain that came on gradually as she ran out of air, and escalated, started to bite at her every limb as she struggled to rip his hands from her throat. Is it possible to bleed inside your windpipe, inside your lungs? She doesn’t know. She has no way to find out.
A concern for later.
“Dots? Are you okay? Are you okay, Dots?”
Yes. Yes, she’s okay, because the boy is dead. She made sure of it before she stepped away. No need to be thorough about it; the blade was inside his throat. Justice for the hands around her neck. No-one can live through that.
Stupid boy used his hands when there were weapons around.
Her senses start to bleed in. She can hear Esther pestering her. She can see colour again, see the stained walls and the wooden benches and the discarded kitchen knife; she can see the boy’s unmoving body, grotesquely discarded on top of his victim. She can feel her fingers ache, feel his viscera up to her elbows.
She should have done this sooner. As soon as they made the first film. Long before he got his hands on any of them. What further use could he have been, anyway? Stupid. This is what happens when you give in, when you start to indulge yourself.
You can’t change the world so fundamentally for very long. Sooner or later, the natural order will reassert itself.
Hands around her neck.
The first violence in Dorothy’s life was at the hands of men. First from her uncle, though it was opportunistic and furtive, restricted to lonely moments and quiet corners, and when she told her mother she suggested she get away, get a job. Told her to go to the rich family out in the sticks; they’re looking for a new girl, she heard, and they don’t check for age. Go, make me proud, and send back some money.
And then there were the men of the manor. They took her for granted, not just in the way all men do, but in the way rich men treat women in their employ. A slap; a fondle; a drunken grope in the laundry room. She didn’t know to call it violence, not then. It was the way things were; the way they had always been.
Men taking their due.
Ten years of it. More, most likely; she struggles to remember the exact year she came to the manor. She didn’t write things down back then. Didn’t start doing so until a couple of years in, when a new girl started sharing her room and showed her the diary she kept. The girl didn’t last but the habits she instilled in Dorothy did, and she remembered every day in her little book, stuffed inside the unused fireplace in the shared room, hidden from the masters of the manor.
Men taking their due.
The oldest girl said to stop worrying about it, to stop talking about it, to stop riling up the other girls. Said she was lucky to have a job at all. Said if she wanted to guard her body so much, she could go back where she came from. Said that when your labour is purchased, your consent is, too. Said you’re probably leading them on, anyway.
So Dorothy put rat poison in the gravy.
It was a big event. Centre of the local social scene. Lots of families from the surrounding counties. Shame she got only a couple of the wives, one of the teens, and an elderly man whose heart was probably mere years from giving out. The boy, the one she wanted, the means by which she sought to really hurt that bastard Hugo Mount, he lived. Unconscious but breathing.
So she improvised, and in the chaos of recriminations and paranoia and some rather over-performed weeping, she took him. Constance and Esther helped her get one of his cousins, too, and before anyone stopped blaming their political enemies and thought to look for the scullery girls and the kitchen maid, they’d stolen the boys away. Esther knew how to drive and Constance kept the boys under with ether and Dorothy had the map. The route to a remote and dilapidated building, closest to the city of Almsworth and a small associated college but not actually all that close to anywhere in particular and, crucially, unused since the turn of the century. Property of some related but uninterested family. ‘Extensive weathering’, the report on its condition said, alongside an estimate for its renovation that represented more money than even Hugo Mount could likely stump up. For an unmoneyed relative, it was probably not worth the cost of demolition.
Perfect for their needs.
Dorley Hall. Dorothy’s stolen report said it used to be an asylum, and between them they knew enough to understand exactly what that meant, so they weren’t surprised to discover holding cells in the basement. They stashed the boys in the only two cells that still closed, and as Mount’s boy woke up and started thrashing at the chains around his wrists, screaming threats and entreaties, and kicking at walls which had once imprisoned particularly recalcitrant women, Dorothy had to appreciate the irony of it.
Girls were sent here to be made docile.
Constance operated the 8mm movie camera and Dorothy kept him ethered and Esther, who grew up on a farm, took Wallace Mount’s testicles from him.
And now Constance is dead by Wallace’s delicate hand. Just as he is dead by Dorothy’s.
She accepts Esther’s support, massages her neck where the boy had his hands around her, and slowly makes her way out of the basement, to wash up, to change clothes, and to make a start on cleaning up this whole bloody mess.
2020 January 5
Sunday
Christine needs to stop volunteering for things. If she’d just learn to keep her mouth shut, she and Paige could’ve spent this chilly Sunday morning in bed. But no, they have to be up and about on their last Sunday morning before classes kick off again, and even though it’s not long until eleven, it still feels obscenely early to be sat at the table in the second-floor kitchen, surrounded by almost her entire intake, throwing coffee down her throat.
Time is relative, she supposes. As is the chore list.
Not that fetching Abby back to the Hall is a chore. More of a calling. A pilgrimage. Or, most accurately, just another task she can’t let fall into someone else’s hands because she knows she can do it better.
If Abigail Meyer has to be brought back, it has to be Christine who does it.
“We’re going to have a September wedding,” Yasmin’s saying, over her cup of coffee and slice of buttered toast. With the new year, and with the end of the programme approaching, talk has turned to the future. “Or October, maybe. When the summer’s over and the weather’s just starting to turn.”
“She thinks autumn is romantic.”
Julia’s leaning against the wall by the window, inhaling her third cup of tea since Christine and Paige came in, and she’s doing her best. Christine’s been seeing more of her recently, in fits and starts, and it’d be more heartening if Julia weren’t often so obviously waiting to leave whichever room or situation she finds herself in. But she’s here now, hanging out with the rest of them — including an extremely sleep-deprived and possibly hungover Jodie, who is face-down on the table and who has not touched her coffee — and she’s making the effort she promised to make.
At least they’re both still committed to the night out Christine’s got hazily pencilled in for Friday or Saturday night. Christine wants to see Julia dance.
“Autumn is romantic,” Paige says, flicking idly at a strand of hair. She looks wonderful, as usual, despite having rolled out of the very same bed as Christine. They both took five minutes to wash and moisturise and run brushes through their hair; Paige is thus fresh and shining, and Christine left a blob of moisturiser on her nose. Yasmin, uncharacteristically playful, wiped it off with her little finger as soon as they both sat down.
Christine’s also getting a zit.
“Yeah,” Yasmin says. “The leaves turning. The rainy sunsets. The wind.”
“She insists it’s all very lovely,” Julia says. “All the dead trees and such.”
Yasmin covers her mouth to laugh. Julia’s from London, and claims never to have left until she was scooped up by Dorley. She likes to play up her total ignorance of life in the countryside, despite various of her intake, Yasmin included, repeatedly pointing to the woods outside the back windows.
“So,” Paige says, “this autumn, then?”
“Next year,” Yasmin says. “We move out, get a mortgage, make sure we can function independently in the outside world—” Julia snorts, “—and then we get married. We need to be engaged first, anyway.”
“That’s cute,” Jodie says, into the table.
“You’re invited to our engagement party, when it happens. Vicky, too, if she wants to come.”
“Yas,” Christine says, “when Vicky gets the invitation, cover your ears.” Next to her, Paige deadpan mimes someone caught in a thrall of exaggeratedly girly excitement.
Yasmin points at Christine with her coffee mug. Whether she chose it for the joke or for the cute cartoon illustrations or just because it was already on the draining rack from the other night is anyone’s guess. On the side, it says, Home is where THE HEART IS. The medical waste bin is where THE TESTICLES ARE.
“What about you two?” Yasmin asks, holding out a hand, fingers splayed, ring finger extended. “Any plans?”
“You mean, are we going to get married?” Christine says. “Well, yes.”
“Any thoughts on where? Jools and I, we’re—”
“We’re getting married in the sun,” Paige says. “On a hill. Somewhere nice. There’ll be an arch with flowers, white seats for the guests, and a pair of golden retrievers to bring us the rings. Unless any of you want to come. Then you can have the dogs’ jobs.”
“Done,” Jodie says. “I could absolutely do a dog’s job.”
“Right now?” Julia says, patting Jodie on her prone shoulder. “Are you sure?”
“Christine, is that what you want, too?” Yasmin asks. “Or are you being bridezilla’d?”
“No, I’m in,” Christine says. “We may have spent a few nights talking about it,” she adds, leaning her head on Paige’s shoulder.
“No church wedding, then?” Julia says. “If you’re on a hill, and all.”
“No. We’re doing mixed traditions. For Paige, we’ll do the horah. With chairs.” Paige mimes again. Christine kisses her and continues. “For me… We’re still working on it. Not sure how you can work ‘just being sort of wet and ineffectual’ into nuptials.”
“C of E?” Julia asks.
“Yes, but mainly for the holidays. School was sort of nominally Christian, too.”
“You’re all so cute,” Jodie moans.
“You okay, Jode?” Christine asks.
“I want to die.”
“It’s a nice day for it,” Paige says.
“Hey, Jodie,” Julia says, “you want some breakfast? I’m feeling antsy. I need something to do with my hands.”
Without raising her head, Jodie says, “Eggs?”
“We don’t have eggs,” Yasmin says, “but—”
Julia waves her into silence. “It’s okay. I can get eggs. Five minutes, Jodie.”
While Julia nips down to the main kitchen for a carton of eggs, the rest of them talk; quietly, for Jodie’s sake. Yasmin makes another round of drinks, and cheekily replaces Christine’s nice, plain mug with one from what she’s starting to think of as The Terrible Opsec Collection. Christine wants to warn Yasmin that appreciating the funny mugs is step one on the Dorley radicalisation journey, and that if she doesn’t firmly draw back, before she knows what’s happening she’ll be lecturing some poor boy and staying up until six in the morning in the security room, watching eight malcontents try with various degrees of success to hide the fact that they’re masturbating under the duvet.
At least Yasmin and Julia have a solid plan to leave, which is more than Christine does right now. Yasmin might well be destined to become a mug aficionado, but she’ll probably be storing her collection at the other end of the country while Christine’s still stuck here.
She surreptitiously checks the one Yasmin gave her. The illustration is of a woman standing in the foreground, looking into the distance at a pair of snowy and slightly rounded mountains. The caption reads, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Predictably, the word step has been crossed out and replaced by snip. Faced with Yasmin’s obvious amusement, Christine simply refuses to acknowledge it.
“Oh, come on, Christine,” Yasmin says. “It’s funny!”
Christine pastes her most innocent look over her face. “What’s funny?”
They’re still playing chicken over it — though Christine is the only one; even Paige responds to her new mug, which bears the slogan Get ready to be fit! Get ready to be strong! Get ready to be amazing! (Get ready to be slightly more aerodynamic!), with a snort — when Julia returns, bearing eggs and a fresh loaf of bread.
“What are you giggling about?” she says, dropping off her cargo by the sink. Yasmin shrugs, and Julia leans down over her head and kisses her, upside-down. Then she appears to remember that they’re not the only ones in the room, and quickly straightens up, embarrassed.
“You’re still cute,” Jodie says. She’s levered herself upright at this point, the better to absorb coffee, and she smiles sleepily for Julia. “Seriously. I love to see it.” She reaches out a hand for Julia, who takes it, sheepishly hesitant. “And I love to see you around the place again. Makes me happy. Where did this Julia go?”
“Don’t know, really,” Julia says, then squeezes Jodie’s hand and removes herself, returning to the sideboard with a more businesslike air. “Except for the obvious: downstairs for eggs. You want soldiers, Jodie?”
“God. Please.”
Julia turns her back, hides herself from the room. Probably only Christine has the right angle to see her cheeks are bright red. “The Rachel circus has reconvened downstairs, by the way,” she says.
“Oh?” Yasmin says, sharing a smile with Christine. “I wonder how that went.”
“She spent the night with Pippa,” Jodie says, and then has to add, hurriedly, “Not like that! She just… She didn’t want to go home. She’s not exactly fighting with her wife, but she’s got to get up early for work and it was already late and there’ve been tensions over all the secrecy about Dorley, and… What? Donna sends me the updates from the sponsor Consensus channel. Anything juicy, you know?”
Yasmin pats her hand. “Thanks, Jode.”
“Well, now she’s downstairs,” Julia says, racking the toaster, “with Pippa and Shahida and the rest of them. And Aunt Bea’s in the kitchen, wringing her hands. I think there’s going to be a confrontation.”
“Bea’s going to apologise,” Jodie says. She still sounds exhausted, but coffee and conversation has perked her up a little. “She thinks she fumbled the intro.”
“She did,” Paige says. “And then she dropped a very angry woman with incomplete information and a powerful sense of right and wrong into our laps.”
Julia sets down a plate of buttered toast strips in front of Jodie and returns a moment later with two boiled eggs, both in cups. “Maybe Aunt Bea should apologise to you, Paige.”
“Not holding my breath.”
“So,” Jodie says, dipping her toast in an egg, “I know why I’m up today, and I know why Christine and Paige are, so—”
“How do you know that?” Christine asks.
Jodie shrugs. “Donna told me.”
“Of course she did.”
Donna’s not supposed to be in the loop on this, but the sponsors are the biggest gossips around, probably because once you’ve been trusted with the big secrets — basements; boys; castrations; mugs — the smaller ones are fair game.
“That doesn’t help me,” Yasmin says. “Why are you up and about today?”
Fuck it. “We’re off to see Abby,” Christine says. That’s fairly nonspecific, and besides, assuming Abby comes with them, she’ll be there for everyone to see by the end of the day. Hardly a secret.
“Oh, yeah. The thing with her family.”
“Jesus Christ,” Christine groans. “I kept it a secret for over a month!” She nods her head sideways at Paige. “We both did! Donna told her, obviously—” another nod, this time at Jodie, “—but how do you know about Abby’s family?”
Yasmin winces. “Sally.”
Her sponsor. Of course. As far as Christine knows, they haven’t been seeing each other very often, but given how behind everything she seems suddenly to be, it won’t surprise her if it turns out Yasmin and Sally have been having dinner together every evening. Fuck, she’s going to get up on Monday morning and see the two of them in a single get-along shirt, isn’t she?
“I give up,” she says.
“There, there.”
“I still can’t believe Abby did it,” Jodie says, finishing off her coffee between eggs. Her mug bears the strikingly inoffensive slogan, When the going gets tough, the tough get gothic. “Just ran off to find her family.”
Julia nods, frowning, and Yasmin says, “Good for her. Never want to see my lot again, personally, not after everything, but… Good for her.”
“I can’t believe she dragged Christine into it,” Julia says, and Christine offers a smile as thanks for the consideration.
“Oh, I can,” Paige says. “I’ve been trying to call a moratorium on anyone giving her any more jobs, but she keeps finding them, anyway.” She elbows Christine gently. “This is supposed to be your fortnight off, isn’t it?”
“I’ve been negotiating that with Aunt Bea,” Christine says. “Technically, it starts tomorrow. Nothing but classes for two weeks. Today, I’m still on the clock.”
“Maybe…” Julia says, finally sitting down and clutching a fresh mug of tea. “Maybe we can step up a bit. I mean, Yas and me, we don’t really do anything around here, and that’s supposed to be sort of a rejection of the whole thing, in concept, anyway, but… I kind of feel like shit about it all.”
“I told her how much work you’ve been doing,” Yasmin says. “And I agree: we can pitch in more. I don’t mean sponsor, or anything, and I’m not taking on any of your network security jobs — I get enough of that at work — but random crap? Yeah. We can help. I mean, I talked to Bethany. Before she was Bethany, I mean. And that went fine. She was actually sort of sweet. So if you get press-ganged into basement work again—” and Christine has, every so often; Raph knows her name now, “—send me a message. Sally says the boys downstairs are out of the rowdy phase, anyway, that it’s starting to be time to show them…” Yasmin pauses, and takes Julia’s hand before she continues. “It’s time to show them how much better life is on the other side of the fence.”
Julia dabs at her mouth with a tissue, and then kisses Yasmin. Then she hefts her mug — a blank one — and says, “There’s a mug joke in that, I think. ‘Grass is greener’, that kind of thing.”
“‘The bush is fluffier on the other side of the fence,’” Jodie suggests.
“Please stop,” Christine says. “Thank you, though. Both of you. You don’t have to offer, though. Really. I can just—”
“What you can do,” Julia says, smiling through her teeth, “is shut up and take the olive branch.”
“Don’t make her mad,” Yasmin warns.
Christine holds up her hands. “Fine. I give up. Olive branch grasped. You can help. You too, Jodie, if you want.”
Jodie slumps again. “No,” she says, stretching out the vowel, “I super don’t want to. I’m so busy,” she adds, sighing theatrically.
Julia reaches out and massages Jodie gently between the shoulder blades. Jodie presses against Julia’s hands, rolls her shoulders under the contact, and moans happily.
“Come on,” Paige says, standing and collecting the empty mugs from the table to rinse. “We should fetch Maria.”
“Oh,” Julia says as Christine stands and stretches, “we’re coming, too. Not to Abby’s. Just downstairs.”
“We’ve been invited out tonight,” Yasmin says. “A few people from work have organised a charity pool tournament. We want to practise.”
“Hence downstairs,” Julia says.
“We have a pool table?” Christine asks, quickly tallying up all the closed doors she’s never opened. There are a lot.
“What do you think we were doing the entire second year?”
Paige finishes washing the mugs and turns around. “Then why do you need to practise?”
“Uh,” Yasmin says, looking away, “we weren’t playing pool on the pool table. Mostly.”
“It’s quiet and out of the way,” Julia says.
“And sturdy.”
“Huh,” Christine says, to fill the silence. It’s difficult not to picture it.
It’s still uncomfortably cold outside, and when it gets windy — which is, on the mostly flat Saints campus, especially with the buffer of the woods behind the Hall, often — the stairway at the front of the building gets the brunt of it. It’s in the oldest part of the building and is least-well served by radiators, and when the temperature’s low enough, it’s not uncommon to see residents of the third floor and up, who don’t have access to the inner stairwells, rushing up and down in full coats and gloves and earmuffs.
Dorley girls, at least, have other options. They take the central stairs down and emerge straight into the dining hall, where a few groups of people are already congregating. Yasmin and Julia say their goodbyes and slip away into the corridors at the back of the building, presumably to find the pool room and actually use it for its intended purpose for once. Shahida catches Christine’s eye and waves, and—
The crash of crockery from the kitchen isn’t so unusual, but the complete lack of follow-up noise is, especially when it drags on, when no-one is audibly picking up bits of plate or berating whoever was clumsy enough to drop it. Christine rushes to the kitchen and finds it bereft of activity but full of people, all of them completely ignoring the broken mug at Beatrice’s feet and instead staring silently at the three women waiting in the entrance hall, looking in through the windows in the doors.
Christine thinks back to her illicit delves into the network, to the documents she was never supposed to see, and tries to remember if she ought to know who the hell these women are.
* * *
It takes Edy a moment to put it all together, and it’s a moment longer than Maria, because before she’s even done assembling her thoughts, she’s having to wrap her arms around her lover’s waist and hold her back from doing—
Doing what? It’s a good bet Maria herself doesn’t even know. Running on instinct, probably, and memory, and hatred.
Edy was one of the first to graduate from Bea and Elle’s shiny new programme, and there was a lot more communal sponsoring back then, and a lot less information security, at least as far as the sponsor/sponsee relationship was concerned. She was there while they relived horror stories from only slightly before her time, and she was there to comfort them when the pressure of enacting a sanitised version of — and Edy has to be blunt — their own torture on someone else, someone who was, in Edy’s case, still technically an innocent, became too much. Empathising with her captors, understanding them, coming to terms with living with them as confidante and equal, it was all part of Edy’s process, part of what drew her away from her old identity, her old beliefs. What was done to her new friends, to her new Sisters, was horrific, and the people who did it to them were unequivocally monsters.
And she’s read the files. She keeps up with the surveillance Peckinville sends over. She’s cognisant of all the threats against their little operation, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly ludicrous. To that end, she knows the faces of all the old sponsors, of all Grandmother’s collaborators, and of several otherwise innocuous people known to be linked in some way to Silver River Solutions.
All of which is why Frankie Barton was the last person Edy expected ever to show her face here again.
She came back once before. Few years back. No-one spotted it at the time, not until the routine scrub-through of the video logs, but there she was, big as life, walking up to the kitchen doors, getting buzzed in by Indira, and looking around like she expected apparitions to reach up from the floor and out from the walls and drag her away. Maria made them all watch it, over and over, made them commit that face to memory, so if she ever tried anything again, they’d be ready.
And Frankie has to know that, doesn’t she? She has to know she got clocked for exactly who she is. She has to know that after she walks through those doors, that’s it for her. She’ll never leave.
So why is she here?
When they watched the footage, over and over, one of the other sponsors suggested that, judging by the look on her face, Frankie perhaps felt remorse for her actions. Maria had thrown a plate at the wall.
In Edy’s arms, her love stands limp, no longer struggling. The force which impelled her, pushed her forward, has departed her; without it, she can barely stand. Edy wants to swear, wants to be like Maria was, wants to throw things, because if that old bag has provoked a relapse, if Maria’s recovery is set back by this…
Maria’s been fine for ages. And now look at her!
“I’ve got you, Maria,” Edy whispers.
Around her, no-one moves. Bea’s dropped her mug but remains oblivious to the shards at her feet and the liquid stain on her ankles; Christine and Paige stand behind Steph and Bethany in the doorway, and as she looks, another group of girls — second years — shuffles up behind them; the other sponsors are waiting for someone senior to tell them what to do, and Edy wonders if that ought to be her.
Ah. Correction: almost no-one moves. Tabby’s deftly stepping over the smashed mug and the spilled coffee and heading for the door.
“Tabitha Hazel Forbes,” Maria says, startling Edy such that she almost drops her, “if you let that woman into this room, I won’t be responsible for what I do.”
Tabby pauses long enough to turn around, to take in the sight of her immediate superior in Edy’s arms. She says, “Yes, you will,” and she presses her thumb against the lock.
* * *
She’s here! The bitch is here!
When Karen Turner returned to Dorley Hall, she came under a contract foolishly offered by one of the other sponsors and automatically secured by Peckinville, and that meant that all the things Maria wanted to do to her, all the wounds she wanted to inflict, every little piece of vengeance Maria wanted to cut out of her… All of it was impossible. The contract forced her to smile through snide remarks and pretend-accidental deadnaming and the outright abuse of the people in Maria’s care. And Karen knew, and she loved knowing, and Maria could almost see right into her mind, see her pleasure, see the joy she took in everything she did to her.
Karen’s dead, and Maria never got her chance. But this is Frankie, and she’s not here under contract and Dorothy’s power base is in disarray and can’t strike back at her and Maria doesn’t have to play nice and doesn’t have to be servile and she’ll never have another opportunity like this and the game is fucking on.
Her temple throbs, directs a shaft of pain directly into her eyes, forcing her to close them, just for a moment, but it’s a helpful, motivating reminder of the pain she tried to forget, of the beatings and the cigarette burns and the razors around her wrist. Edy’s got her arms around her and obviously thinks she’s holding her back and that’s probably for the best, because with the pain comes the dizziness, and with the dizziness comes the focused and building headache, and Maria has only a few minutes of verticality left in her, so if Edy wants to hold her up, fine. Maybe she can get her a knife while she’s at it.
Tabitha’s gone to let in Frankie and her friends, whoever they are. Maria orders her not to, but it doesn’t make a difference; Maria’s not in charge in this room and Beatrice is as still as Maria is seething. Maybe it’s good that Tabitha’s let them in, anyway, because as soon as those doors open they can drag the three of them through and shut them in the Hall forever.
And who are the other two, anyway? At least with the doors open she can see them more clearly, without the daylight on the window panes obscuring their faces. They’re all rather the worse for wear, with sloppily cleaned and still-bloodstained clothing, bruising in almost all the parts she can see, and the skinny one, the young one, has duct tape around her neck and a black eye and a series of shallow cuts on her face, and—
Oh.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Edy’s hold on her increases and Maria feels her weight seem to double. She doesn’t fight it. She allows herself to be supported, but no longer because she expects to carry out some impractical revenge fantasy — Be serious, Maria, for one minute — but because the headache is really pressing on her now, and she needs to think before her faculties entirely depart her.
That’s Trevor Darling, isn’t it? The Peckinville soldier who went missing. The one with the unfortunate name. He’s clearly been worked on, tragically for him, and his obvious discomfort suggests he hasn’t adjusted well. Miracle if he had, really, considering it hasn’t been all that long since he disappeared. And the timing — and the presence of Frankie fucking Barton — suggests he was with Dorothy. He was almost definitely at Stenordale Manor, with Declan, which raises further questions. Was it them who burned it down? (Probably.) And where is Declan, anyway? Did he burn, too? (Probably.)
Frankie; Trevor. Two down. Head swimming, the weight of Edy’s body now almost as oppressive as her own, Maria turns her attention to the third woman.
And feels like an idiot.
It wasn’t Frankie’s arrival that shocked Bea. It wasn’t fucking Frankie who caused her to drop her mug, to freeze in place, to become helpless and confused and so little like the adoptive mother Maria has known for approaching half her life, and she feels stupid for assuming it.
Because the third woman is older, beautiful, and proud in the way only the truly wounded can be.
Valerie Barbier.
Well.
Isn’t that something?
And then Maria has to close her eyes again. It’s all too much; the lights are too bright; there are too many people and all of them are suddenly too loud. Everything is happening all at once, and Maria needs to rest.
* * *
It’s Val who makes the first move. The first move after the girl up front, anyway, the pretty one — that’s not very specific, Frankie; they’re all pretty — the one who opened the door for them, the one who’s now standing there waiting for them to do whatever the hell they’re going to do with the arch interest of one who really wants to see how this turns out but who has also realised how much paperwork has just been generated for her. But of the three of them, it was always going to be Val.
Fucking Val. The last time she saw this kitchen she was being dragged out of it, bodily yanked away from her only friend and thrown in the back of a van, and yet here she is, taking it all in, calmly, without affect.
Besides, there’s a woman who needs help. A woman in the arms of someone who doesn’t seem entirely up to the task of holding her up. And who would Valérie Barbier be if she wasn’t so fucking practical all the time?
Val rushes forward, past the Black girl who let them in, and helps the dusty blonde one with her cargo, and Frankie suddenly realises with a shock that practically welds her to the floor that the woman in Blondie’s arms is Maria.
Maria Lam!
Karen’s final boy!
Frankie remembers liking him, because he pushed back at Karen. Gave as good as he got, no matter the punishment. Even after Dorothy had his family killed, the boy didn’t back down, didn’t submit the way Dorothy and Karen expected him to. No, he bared his teeth in old Dotty’s face and dared her to kill him right there. And she found and claimed her new identity with a proud disdain Frankie’d last seen on, well, Val.
Christ. She was the one who leaked information to Beatrice Quinn! The one who can fairly take as much credit for the fall of Dorothy’s Dorley as anyone in this room. She certainly risked more than any of them, having to live day after day with Dorothy and Karen, having to absorb their cruelty, having to play along.
She definitely lost more than any of them.
Christ. Fucking Maria. Frankie should have expected to see her right up front; she’s read the files, knows Maria Lam’s been Beatrice’s number two since the start. But she didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to know how she’d feel if she ever saw that face again.
It’s like seeing Val again after thirty years. Worse, maybe.
The last thing Maria did before closing her eyes and succumbing to… to whatever has taken her over right now, was to glare at Frankie, right fucking at her, and who, really, can blame her? If Frankie was in her position, she might have smashed a glass and leapt at her the moment the doors opened.
And then there’s Val. Val, standing there in the fucking sundress she took off of Trev, with her arm linked with Blondie and with Maria carried between them. Val, commanding the attention of practically everyone, including a short, butch girl who ran over to Maria shortly after Val did and who is now hovering uselessly nearby. Val, who less than a day ago was repeatedly punching a professional soldier in the face, who is now collecting herself, deciding what to do next.
If she’s finding this at all taxing, it doesn’t show.
It dawns on Frankie that practically no-one’s said anything. The girl currently giving her the stinkeye said something to the room and Maria snapped something back at her, but since the doors opened, it’s as if the silence is a delicate thing nobody wants to break.
A thought, half-amusing, half-guilty, breaks through into Frankie’s mind: of everyone here, she has the most experience at breaking delicate things.
She’s about to greet everyone, introduce herself and kick off whatever madness follows, when Valérie — naturally — beats her to it, smiling at Beatrice and saying, “Frances said you took the name I suggested.”
“Um,” Beatrice says. “Yes. Yes, I did.”
“I’m glad,” Val says. “It suited you then and it suits you now.”
Beatrice bites her lip.
Stinkeye girl takes it as her cue to get things rolling. She looks past Frankie and Trev into the entryway, presumably to check no-one else is about to roll up and ruin their day even more, and then points at Val.
“Valerie Barbier, right?”
“Valérie,” Val says, correcting her pronunciation without animosity.
Stinkeye nods. “Valérie,” she says, in a perfect imitation. “Got it. I’m Tabitha Forbes.” She turns back to the door. “Frankie Barton and Trevor Darling, yes?”
“Y—yes,” Frankie says.
“Down from Stenordale?” Stinkeye girl — Tabitha Forbes — asks in a conversational tone, as if they’re on their holidays.
“Yeah.”
“Rough trip?”
“You could say that.”
“Is there anything you need? A hot meal? Clean clothes? A shower? Trevor, you have tape wrapped around your neck. I assume you’re going to need that seen to.”
Trev doesn’t answer — he doesn’t even look up — so Frankie replies for him. “Yeah, Trev here got a bit cut up while we were escaping.” She chooses her words carefully, to remind all present and especially those glaring at her that she, Frankie, is as much on the run as Val and Trev. “It didn’t get an artery or anything, but it’s pretty nasty. And Val can sew but we didn’t have anything to sew with, and—” Fuck. She’s rambling. Nerves. “Hence the tape. You got someone for that? A nurse, or someone?”
“We do,” Tabitha says. She takes another step closer, but slowly, with care. Yeah, she’s got to be a sponsor; she’s dealt often enough with the skittish and afraid that she has a whole process for it. “Trevor? Are you okay to come with me?”
Frankie’s honestly impressed the girl recognised Trev so quickly, but then, he was nicked off of Peckinville, wasn’t he? Elle’s lot will have been looking for him for a while.
And just how involved are the Dorley staff with their patron PMC, anyway? Do they get the same kind of packets old Dotty got from Silver River? If they do, they’re probably less shambolic; Frankie doesn’t know loads about the small but unpleasant network of innocently named British and (theoretically) allied security services, but she’s pretty sure Peckinville could swallow Silver River without so much as a burp.
“Yeah,” Trev says quietly, meeting the girl’s eye — meeting anyone’s eye — for the first time, “I can come with you. Um, you said something about clothes? I, uh, I need new clothes. Do you have a tracksuit I could borrow? Or something? Anything, really. And maybe…” He looks down at himself and seems about to say something else, but then shakes his head; Frankie’d bet money he was about to ask for a sports bra, but bottled it. Too many people around for that kind of vulnerability. He’s already doing that breathy whisper he put on back at the service station; he doesn’t know whether to play it as woman or man. Back then, it was about safety. Here, he can’t decide which option will bring him less shame.
Yeah. Frankie’s seen that shit before. When you are brought before someone you used to know, and you have been irrevocably changed, is it better to resist it and appear ludicrous, or accept it and appear weak?
“I think we can manage a tracksuit,” Tabitha says. “Can I touch you, Trevor?”
Hesitantly, Trev nods, and Tabitha takes his hand. Frankie has to step fully inside the kitchen so he can get past, and as he does, she pats him on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Trev,” she says, doing her best to sound reassuring.
The girls gathered in the doorway to the dining hall — even more of them than before — part like the Red Sea parted for Moses, and then close in again, trapping Frankie, the sinner, inside. And behind her, there’s a click. The doors to the outside, closing and locking behind her.
She kind of wants to swear really, really loud.
Instead she says, for anyone who will listen, “He’s not a girl. I know how he looks, but he’s not a girl.” All eyes on her. “It was done to him. Treat him like a man. And go easy on him; he’s had a rough couple of months.”
“And you know that,” says Blondie, still holding up Maria but now aided by Val, “because you were there, weren’t you.” There’s acid in her voice, and it corrodes her pretty face.
“She was not there by choice,” Val says, and Frankie can’t conceal her surprise. They’re not friends, not really; they’re veterans of the same abusive death cult, and here, with other people who are more like her, Val has no need for Frankie. And yet. “I cannot say she was as much a prisoner as I was, but I cannot in good conscience say she was there of her own free will. Dorothy was controlling her movements.”
“She was here by choice, though,” Blondie says, not letting it go. “She took the job here.”
“That is as may be. But young Trevor Darling and I would not have escaped without her. Now.” Val hefts, ever so slightly, the woman she and Blondie are supporting together. “There must be somewhere we can take her, yes? Somewhere close. With comfortable chairs.” She flicks her eyes dismissively at the wooden chairs around the kitchen table. “We cannot hold her in our arms forever,” she adds, in defiance of her apparent lack of expended effort.
Everyone looks at Beatrice, who doesn’t seem to know how to answer. She doesn’t seem to know how to do anything. Easy to guess why: she’s been looking for Val for thirty years, that much Frankie knows, and meanwhile, Val has been in one fucking place. Bea’ll be replaying those lost decades, wondering what she could have done differently, wondering if she could have saved her. The guilt must be eating her up. Frankie could make her crack with just one word—
Jesus, Frankie. Stop.
It’s being back here, that’s what it is. Despite the situation, despite the near certainty that she’s never leaving this place again, there’s something about the kitchen at Dorley Hall that changes her. Just the approach to the Hall had them stirring in her, those old, controlling instincts. The persona she built here, when her rage was long gone, when she still had a job to do. Sometimes she thinks she got worse when she was faking it, more focused on looking for angles on the people around her. And she’s doing it now, analysing Bea, finding a way to manipulate her.
She won’t do it.
In the end, a younger girl steps forward and answers for Beatrice. Probably to break the awkward silence.
Jesus; a much younger girl.
“There’s sofas and stuff in the dining hall,” she says. “On the far wall. By the fireplace.” Good God, she might be the youngest one here. A slim little ginger thing, not actually short — she’s taller, for example, than the butch girl who now, in the absence of anything else helpful to do, holds Maria’s limp hand — but she’s at most mid-height compared to the taller-than-average girls still waiting around. More strangely, she seems very underdeveloped. If Frankie’s an expert, and she bloody well is, then the girl’s been on hormones a few months at most. She’s had no facial surgery and the injections have barely even begun to soften her features. Oh, she’s pretty, and with the surgical mask pulled down so she can speak, it’s clear she’s going to have a face to die for when she graduates — and a lot of nasty little whiteheads much sooner than that, assuming all those little red marks are from an electrolysis session; ouch — but no-one’d mistake her for a real girl.
Whoops, Frances; a cis girl.
What’s Ginger doing up here, anyway? From what Frankie understands about the new programme, they stay in the basement for a whole year, so they can feminise gradually, so they can’t escape. They’re not allowed even to socialise outside their circle. One of the purloined essays Frankie read — which she now realises was written by the girl who left with Trev, Tabitha Forbes — described it as ‘concentric positive and negative feedback loops’, and that fairly strongly implies keeping them all in one fucking place. There’s no way Ginger should be up here, running around just a single locked door away from freedom. If she’s had a year of hormone therapy, then Frankie is a bloody donkey.
And Christ, the butch girl, the one who was with Ginger until Maria’s little episode, she’s not butch after all, not necessarily. She’s the same as Ginger: two or three months on hormones at most. Still got her boyish haircut. Still got most of her boyish figure. And yet, somehow, like Ginger, she’s upstairs, socialising with the older girls, in defiance of everything Frankie knows about the new programme.
Unless something’s changed.
“Perfect,” Val says to Ginger. “We will make use of the ‘sofas and stuff’. Young lady—”
“Steph,” the girl says, and then adds, in a more formal tone, “Stephanie.” Frankie, watching her, could swear her lips form briefly the shape of an M, and feels a kinship with Stephanie; she, too, sometimes wants to call Valérie Barbier ‘ma’am’.
“Stephanie, then. Please pick up the pieces of Béatrice’s mug. Put on dishwashing gloves first, and watch for sharp edges. Save them in a bowl or tray; there’s no reason to throw away something that can be repaired.”
“Yes,” Steph says. “Um, ma’am,” comes a moment later, and Frankie has to cover her mouth.
“We don’t have any food-safe adhesive,” says Blondie. “We ran out.”
Val shrugs. “Any glue will be fine. We will mend it with whatever we have.” She turns a smile on Beatrice. “Are you coming, Béatrice?”
Beatrice nods. Steps delicately over the smashed crockery. The girls in the doorway part again to let through Beatrice, Val, Blondie, Maria and the short girl — or boy, or girl-boy, or however it works here now — and most of them break off to follow them into the dining hall.
The ones who remain are uncomfortably focused on Frankie. The last loose end. The least of them all. Frankie, though, can’t take her eyes off the exit to the dining hall. It’s almost empty now, with just one girl — older, perhaps, than Stephanie and her butch little boy-girl friend, but otherwise difficult to place — leaning against the jamb. The girl’s frowning at her, the way everyone has been, but Frankie’s looking past her, into a dining hall rendered near-dark from this angle, the way it always used to. At this time of year the kitchen always did capture through its high-up, barred windows a kind of diffuse, lazy sunlight that rendered the rooms beyond almost invisible until you walked through.
Frankie shudders; it’s too much like being home. She doesn’t want Dorley Hall to be home.
“Excuse me,” a voice says, and steps back to find a begloved Stephanie coming up to her with a Pyrex dish full of broken crockery. She makes a shooing motion, and adds, “There’s a bit just behind you.” With the bright yellow rubber glove on, with the glass dish and the look of concern, the whole scene is so domestic, so out of place, so at odds with Trev’s worsening social anxiety, Val’s brittle insistence on helping everyone but herself, and Frankie’s constant spiral into unhelpful memory, that Frankie can’t stop herself from laughing, just a bit. It doesn’t help the looks she’s getting from the older girls.
She takes that step back, though, and gives Stephanie the space she needs.
“Thanks,” Stephanie says, “but it’s— No, it’s still behind you. To the left? No, my left, sorry. Just— Come forward a bit? No, okay, stay still. No, no, just stay right there. I’ll just nip in and grab it.” She straightens up and places her prize carefully in the dish. “Thanks.”
“Y’welcome,” Frankie murmurs.
One of the other girls claps her hands together, and then spreads them to encompass the entire room. “Well!” she says. “Now that the most awkward part is out of the way, let me introduce the team who’ll be keeping an eye on you.” She jerks a thumb into her chest. “I’m Indira. That’s Monica, and that’s—”
“Monica?” Frankie asks. She doesn’t even realise she’s said it out loud until the schoolteacherish one, Indira, grinds to a halt and looks at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Do we know each other?” says one of the others. This one’s tall, pale, and quite built for a Dorley girl. She’s leaning against the sideboard near the sink, and though it’s not fully visible from where Frankie’s standing, her black hair hangs with a weight that suggests it reaches the small of her back.
Monica. Fucking Monica!
It was the last time she saw Declan properly, when Dorothy insisted she pretty him up, get him ready to be paraded in front of some new funding prospect, some new pair of pervs who have, now that she comes to think about it, been suspiciously silent ever since.
So she got Declan ready. And he was a wreck. An exquisite physical specimen, obviously — old Dotty would have it no other way, and Jake had clearly taken pains to keep most of the bruises he inflicted hidden under Declan’s clothes — but a broken one, quiet almost to the point of catatonia. She couldn’t even get from him a confirmation of which name he preferred; she’d used Declan, and the boy didn’t contradict her.
But he wasn’t completely silent.
“Monica,” Frankie says, “you’re Declan’s sponsor, right?”
Monica flinches. Balls her hands into fists. Says quietly, “Yes.”
Indira tries to say something but Monica waves her into silence. Steps forward and sits at the table, with enough uncertainty in her step that Frankie knows she’s truly rattled. Frankie feels like she ought to sit down with her, ought to show a bit of human fucking compassion, but instead she stands there. Stands there and spools out from her memory like a machine.
“He always liked your name. He told me that. I was getting him ready and he sounded out my name a bit and then he did yours. Said he liked it. The right kind of syllables. He didn’t know the word for it, but that’s what he meant. He did that a lot. With names. Sounded them out. Almost sang them, sometimes.”
“I remember,” Monica whispers.
“You were getting him ready?” asks the third girl at the table. Frankie doesn’t know her name and doesn’t remember her picture from the files. She’s darker skinned than Monica, and her black hair’s almost as long. She’s holding Monica’s hand. Comforting her.
Frankie glances around. Now that Stephanie’s gone — Frankie didn’t see her leave, but she probably took the dish full of mug bits into the dining hall to go watch the Val show with everyone else — there’s only the four of them left. Frankie, and three fully actualised Dorley girls.
Two of them are holding hands.
Dorothy would despise this place.
“Yeah,” she says. “I was getting him ready. Hair, makeup. You know the drill.”
“Ready for what?” Monica asks, her voice hoarse.
Frankie shrugs. “Some stupid sales pitch. You probably already know this, since I guess you lot have been watching Dorothy as much as she’s had people watching you, but she’s been trying to rebuild the farm. On her own. Stupid. And I would’ve told her that if she’d asked me, told her she got out with all her skin still attached and considering the size of the wallets of the people she got tangled up with, she ought to consider herself lucky. But she didn’t ask, and I didn’t know what she was doing until it was too late, until she threw Karen at you — or not; I still don’t have all the details on how that happened — and yanked me back in to replace her. And I got there and found bloody Val there! I don’t have to tell you how fucked up that is—”
“Chop chop, Frankie,” Indira says.
“Right. Sorry. Anyway, she got herself in hock to Silver River, and that came with stipulations. Brakes on her behaviour and stuff. Meant even after she had Trev mutilated—” she doesn’t quite choke in shock that she used that word, but the way Trev’s been acting lately, there’s no other way she can see him; Indira, at least, reacts, though only with a repeat of her raised eyebrow, “—she couldn’t use him. Earmarked, y’see. For the Americans. So when she wanted to—”
“The Americans?” the third girl says.
“Whoever they are,” Monica says quickly, “they’re Bea’s problem. Or Elle’s. Or— Or fucking someone’s. I don’t care. Just continue, Frankie. Please? I need to know.”
Frankie nods. Stretches her fingers a little; tries to be a bit more human for the girls. It’s difficult.
“This isn’t going to be nice to hear,” she says.
“Say it. Please.”
“Dorothy wants alternative funding. Outside of Silver River and the Yanks. To get it she needed to show… the product.”
“Declan,” Monica murmurs.
“Yeah. And it fell to me to get him ready, because even in a prison where she had all the keys to all the locks, she didn’t trust Val or Trev. And Trev doesn’t know shit about makeup and clothes, and Val found out— Uh, Val found out what Declan did. To end up here.” She points downward. Monica nods softly. “She wouldn’t’ve worked on him even if old Dotty had threatened her. So, yeah. My job. I was to make him look like… Fuck. You know the score, yeah? Dorothy’s Dorley. The way it was here, back then?” She waves an irritated hand. “I needed to show off the product.”
“We understand,” Indira says quietly. The third girl gestures her agreement, and Monica just stares.
“While I was getting him ready, I tried to give him, you know, a bit of quiet space. Away from Jake and Dotty and all that. He always had to be on, is the thing. Always ready for it. Some of the girls, they can’t take it. They never could. It got to be too much, too fast.” Her voice is shaking. She knows this. She cannot stop it. What’s the point of self-control, anyway? She’ll never leave this place. They can think what they want of her. She might not even be here any more, in the kitchen. Or not in this version of the kitchen, anyway. She could swear the light’s close to blinding her, just the way it used to, when she stood right here. “Some of them might’ve. If they’d been given the chance. The time. But they never got it. Never alone because they were always being watched. Always a fault to find. Always a weakness to exploit. Always a—”
“Frankie,” Monica says, and Frankie halts herself.
Shit. Where was she? Where is she?
“Right,” she says. “Yeah. Okay. Declan and me. We talked a little. I tried to keep it light. It was mostly me talking, but he talked about you. And your name, like I said.”
“Mo-ni-ca.”
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t come with you, did he?”
“No.”
“Where is he? Is he okay?”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Mon,” the third girl says.
Monica pulls her hand away. “Oh, fuck off, Lisa! You’ve never even had a washout.”
“Monica,” Indira says, with a warning to her voice.
“You can fuck off, too,” Monica says, but she quietens, leans back in her chair. Looks back at Frankie. “Is he okay?” she repeats.
“Honestly?” Frankie says. “No. You have to understand, life at Stenordale was… Fuck. In some ways it was worse than it used to be here. Trev got the least of it, because the Americans wanted him, and Val, she’s been living this longer than half your girls have been alive. She knew how to deal with it; fuck, she crushed a Silver River guy’s balls just for trying to sympathise with her. It was brilliant. But Declan, he got it all. Dorothy wanted to recreate this place, how it used to be, and that all fell on Declan.”
“And doing those things to him, that was your job?” asks the third girl; Lisa.
“What? No. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on Trev. Which, hah, look how that turned out—”
Monica slaps her hand on the table. “Who was it?”
“It was Jake.” She’d spit his name if she could. “Silver River soldier. We had two there at all times. At the manor. To keep an eye on us, make sure we didn’t try anything. Well, they were mainly there for Val and Trev.” Jarring, to remember she’s not a part of any ‘us’. Never was. “Declan wasn’t a problem. Was quiet most of the time. Mostly from being so bloody shell-shocked. But yeah, Jake. He was in charge of her. And he was… Christ, he picked it up so quick. I think Dorothy was coaching him? Or maybe he’s just a fucking sadist. He used to beat her. And worse. Much worse. I won’t say what. I think you know. I didn’t stop it. I couldn’t risk it. Not with the plan to get Trev and Val out. What he did to her… I don’t know if I could have stopped it, but I didn’t. I’m…” Don’t say you’re sorry, Frankie. Don’t you fucking do it.
Monica’s covering her mouth with her hand and Indira’s got her arm around Monica’s shaking shoulders and Lisa’s leaning up against her, and just as Frankie thinks the girl’s about to go completely nonverbal, Monica sniffs, fixes Frankie with another glare, and says, “‘Her’?”
“What?”
“You said ‘her’. About Declan.”
“Oh. Yeah. I do that sometimes. Look, she had this way about her. She made herself— Okay, so it was the surgeries, I s’pose? The way they made her look. The clothes. The makeup. The… expectations. It all got to her. And I saw her like that. A lot. I remember she did, too. You’d see her looking at herself, and this was when she was barely speaking at all, but… I don’t know. I think she couldn’t process it. But yeah, if I try, I can think of Declan, I can picture him how he was when I first saw him, still bruised. Still unfinished. Barely out of recovery from all the surgery. Because old Dotty, she did it all at once. Recovery from that is nasty. Took him a long time to get his voice back, even after— after Jake… But she did. In little bits. She was working him out, y’see. Finding a way to survive, I think. She made herself small. To protect herself. And Jake liked it, so—”
“Stop,” Monica says, through her hand. “Please.”
“All right.”
“Just tell me one thing. After you escaped, where did she— he— whatever; where did he go?”
Frankie’s turn to frown. “She didn’t go anywhere. There was no way to get at him most of the time. ’Specially not for the escape. He was always kept separate. Upstairs. He was Jake’s toy.” Unwise choice of words; Monica looks like she’s about to hyperventilate. Fuck it. Plough on. “Point is, he didn’t get out with us. He’s still there, best of my knowledge.”
“He’s not,” Indira says quietly. “Or if he is, he’s—”
“Don’t,” Monica whispers.
“What’s going on?” Frankie asks.
“You don’t know?” Indira says.
“Know what?”
“Stenordale Manor. It burned down.”
Oh.
Oh Christ.
1962 June 10
Sunday
There’s an air of death to the place. A feeling of everything coming to an end. The wind that whips through the hallways even on the warmest day has a bite to it, and for the first time since they got here, Dorothy wants to leave.
So she can’t blame the others for being vocal about it.
Esther, who was down there in the basement when it happened, she’s already packing, and Gladys, their one independent find, she’s coming down to make food for herself and for the other boy, but is otherwise remaining in the second-floor room she fixed up for herself.
None of them signed up for death; not one of theirs, and not one of them.
At least Gladys, who reads detective novels, helped out in one key respect. On her advice, they wrapped the Mount boy in sheets and an old tarpaulin before burying him, to keep him contained. And they didn’t use the obvious clearing in the woods, but rather picked an arbitrary and awkward spot and dug below the tree roots. The roots will pick him up, Gladys said, and carry him to the surface; but if he’s deep enough and if they’re careful, they’ll plough the soil above him and bury him even deeper.
Dorothy enjoys the imagery. Wallace Mount, slowly and inevitably unravelling, undiscovered, deep beneath the surface.
And she sent the bloody film. The first one, anyway. The one with their faces hidden. As it is, it’s a story without a denouement, but if it’s all over, why not go out on a high before she goes into hiding?
“Knock knock,” says a voice, a voice that reminds Dorothy of Mount, of the others at his functions, of hundreds upon hundreds of years of unwarranted and hateful dominance. It’s accompanied by a light rapping at the door that leads from the kitchen to the darkened outer hallway. The door makes its customary hollow rattle; probably only weeks of useful life left in it.
Hah; just like the other boy.
And then she understands, coldly, that her designs for Chester, the survivor, unavoidably must end here and now, for the man waiting for her in the dilapidated doorway is none other than Crispin Smyth-Farrow. A relative of Albert’s, a (presumed) friend of Hugo Mount, and likely the coming architect of her own messy end. She wonders if she’ll end up next to Wallace under those trees.
“Who are you?” she demands. She refuses to be deferential any longer.
“My word,” he says cheerfully, leaning against the door. Under his weight, it cracks. “Dorothy Marsden! As I live and breathe.” She glares at him. Unaffected, he continues, “Crispin Smyth-Farrow, at your service. We’ve met, you know. Repeatedly. You gave such delightful dinner service. I believe you served me a succulent roast duck one enchanting evening; another, rat poison.”
“How was it?” Dorothy asks. She wonders if there’s a way she can signal Gladys and Esther to run without tipping him off.
“The rat poison? My dear, it was a delight. Especially when it finished off the Admiral’s wife. She was very—” He interrupts himself with a hand around his throat and some uncannily accurate choking noises. “She’d been teetering on the edge for a while, you know, so you could almost call it a mercy.”
“Not my intention.”
“And that,” Smyth-Farrow says, stepping forward, stabbing a finger into a palm with each word, “is the core of it. Wonderful work, Dorothy Marsden, simply wonderful.”
Dorothy can’t stand the curiosity any more. “How did you find me?”
There are a handful of rickety chairs in the kitchen, around a central table, and Smyth-Farrow scoops one up, sits on it with a terrible insouciance, and leans on the table. “You really shouldn’t have made your little film in the basement, Dorothy, dear; it’s terribly distinctive.”
“Distinctive enough to find me? From scratch? Hard to believe, Smyth-Farrow.”
“Oh, you’re a firecracker, aren’t you? Fine; I admit to an ounce of cheating. I’ve visited this dump before. It has rather a lot of potential and a positively disgusting history, but I was unable to convince that awful Lambert fellow to give up the lease, so unfortunately it lies fallow. Until your good self, that is. I love what you’ve done with the place.”
This act is becoming unbearable. “What I’ve done with the place,” Dorothy says, leaning forward and, in the process, tipping the wobbly kitchen table back towards her, “is trap one aristocratic boy and kill another.”
That gets a reaction: a raised eyebrow. “Which boy did you kill?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters!” snaps Smyth-Farrow.
“Wallace Mount. He attacked us. Killed Constance.”
“Well,” Smyth-Farrow says, leaning back, his avuncular attitude already restored, “you did remove his testicles. And he seemed rather vexed about the dress and the makeup, too. But to be clear, young Charles Mount-Farrow is alive?”
“Not his name, but yes.”
“Good. I promised his father I’d return the boy. Oh, and don’t worry about Wallace. Not even his mother cares for him. I imagine they’ll commission someone to find you, pay for a bit of half-hearted gumshoeing, but they won’t dig too deeply. No, revenge failed, I believe.” He leans toward her again. “That is why you’re doing this, isn’t it? For revenge? I can’t imagine the slight, but I also can’t imagine another reason for you to dress up these boys of privilege as pretty girls. A lot of work for such meagre reward”
“Not when you’ve been used the way I have,” Dorothy says. She’s tired of this, and before she dies it would be nice for someone from the upper classes to understand how hard the world works to keep them afloat.
“Hmm. Yes.” Smyth-Farrow nods. “You are referring to the… little privileges, are you not?”
Through gritted teeth, Dorothy says, “Yes.”
“Always thought it a frightfully boring way of entertaining oneself, if I’m honest. A dismal exercise of some of the pettiest power imaginable. But I see your point. So the death of the Mount boy, that was an accident, I take it?”
“As I said: he attacked one of mine. Killed her. Attacked me. So I stopped him.”
“And as for his current whereabouts?”
“Buried.”
“I see.”
“Come on, then,” Dorothy says loudly, and hopefully loudly enough that at least one of the other girls will hear her and fetch the other, thereafter to depart, “do what you came here to do.”
“And what is that?”
She shrugs. “Arrest me. Kill me. Pick one.”
“I choose neither, Miss Marsden,” says Smyth-Farrow, smiling his infuriating smile again. “I came here for the boy, Albert. Oh, I planned to deliver young Mount back to his father, but his death is not especially vexing; the Mounts are a waning influence.”
“And the Mount-Farrows are not?” Dorothy asks.
Smyth-Farrow laughs. It comes out of him accompanied by spittle, and he apologetically wipes his lips with a handkerchief. “Oh, they are small fry indeed,” he says, “but no more nor less than they have been, historically. No, as you have surely guessed, young Chauncey is a relative of mine. Distant. And from a foolish branch of the family.” He lowers his voice, whispers conspiratorially. “They never should have hyphenated the way they did. ‘Mount-Farrow’? Sounds like something one ought to climb, doesn’t it?” He laughs again; this one is a bark, the undignified snort of an aristocrat who enjoys their position a little too much. “Though, I must admit, I did climb Mount-Farrow’s wife on occasion. Back in my younger days, you must understand; she’s a right old horror show now. Face’d be more at home on the prow of a decommissioned ship, or a chocolate ha’penny.”
“Ah,” Dorothy says.
“I’ll swear him to secrecy and deliver him back to his mother. There’ll be monetary incentive. Did you, perchance, geld him yet?”
“No. Didn’t know what to do with him, really.”
“Wonderful! That will considerably lessen the outlay required to keep him quiet. The Mount-Farrow line will live on. May a thousand more mediocre boys clog up the class lists of Eton—” he mimes a toast, “—until the sun sets on the Commonwealth of Nations.”
Dorothy frowns. “Five years ago, you were toasting to the glory of the British Empire.”
“Ah! You do remember me, after all! And I’m a realist, Dorothy Marsden. And that ties into my real reason for coming here in person.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, yes.” A ruthless smile. “If all I’d wanted was the boy, I would have sent someone and had them return with your head. No, I have a proposition for you, Miss Marsden. But first, a hunch requires resolution.”
He’s waiting for her, his sense of theatricality clearly requiring a prompt from her. She provides it: “Go on.”
“Kidnapping those boys, trapping them, keeping them under your control, taking their manhood from them, forcing them to do your bidding… You can’t tell me you don’t find it all just an eensy bit exciting, can you, Dorothy?”
2020 January 5
Sunday
You only have to look at Trevor Darling to understand why Grandmother decided to have some fun with him rather than simply have him killed, which Tabby assumes would have been the outcome if he’d looked more like your average male PMC soldier. But Trevor’s small and he’s pretty and his manner is careful and a little delicate in a way that makes her think of Will, when he drops all his shit, when he forgets for a moment to pretend to be a macho man. That’s not to say that Trevor Darling is trans — he almost definitely isn’t — but he lacks the swagger Tabby’s come to expect from soldiers. If Tabby had been in Grandmother’s position, and possessed her flexible ethical outlook, she might have done the same thing.
And it’s better than death, right?
Hah; tell him that. Since the kitchen doors opened, Trevor’s seemed like every second he’s had to spend around people has been akin to a thousand daggers digging into his skin, and while Tabby’s familiar with the look of it from many years working in the basement, there’s an intensity to Trevor’s reaction that’s new to her. As if he really can’t survive this. As if there is some critical level of exposure that lies somewhere in his future, and every person who looks at him takes him a little closer.
Reminds her of Steph. Or, more specifically, of Stefan.
Trevor insisted to her on the way up the stairs that he wants nothing more than to have what was done to him reversed, and considering how much he relaxed when it was just the two of them — and allowing for the fact that he’s done nothing specifically basementable, as far as she knows — she’s motivated to respect his wishes until someone tells her otherwise.
She looks back at him; he really is making himself small, isn’t he? Wow.
The thick-sided and centrally holed rectangle that is Dorley Hall has all of its active second- and third-year accommodation biased to one side, nearest the two main stairwells, and what that means for today is that Tabby has to lead Trevor on a relatively long walk. As they pass the second years’ rooms, she wonders what he makes of the colourfully decorated nameplates, and of the odd door left open, leading to adolescent messes. It’s almost a shame none of the girls are around to reassure him, to lend their voices to hers, to tell him that here, at Dorley Hall, no-one cares if his biology and his internality don’t match up. That whatever he thinks everyone is thinking of him when they look at him is simply untrue. It might not help with the dysphoria, but it’d probably stop him treating every new blind corner like it might harbour some new and even more awful gender, just waiting to violently apply itself to him.
They continue around the corner, away from the in-use bedrooms and the large bathrooms, and pass the still-lightly equipped second-year common room. The closed doors to empty bedrooms are always a little depressing; Tabby can easily imagine a version of the programme that has the resources to handle bigger intakes, but with the basement capping out at ten people and the staff an even more serious limiting factor, the rooms along here — and their counterparts on the second floor — will probably remain empty for years to come. Excepting the occasional visitors from recently burned-down competing forced-fem operations, obviously, but that doesn’t seem like something that’ll come up all that often.
Trevor continues to fidget.
Another corner, and the first floor becomes even more bare bones. There are two more bathrooms here, which usually go unused unless all the second years decide to have a shower at once, and a lot of empty and unpurposed rooms that once upon a time might have housed patients but now are home to nothing more than dust. There’s also a large room on the corner, matching the room on the other side of the building that was turned into a common area; here, it’s storage. Clothes, shoes, coats and jackets, all carefully mothballed and boxed away. Much of it is out of style, but Beatrice works on the assumption that everything comes back around again, sooner or later.
“Ta-da,” she says to Trevor, wiggling her hands and failing to extract from him more than a confused frown. “Clothes,” she explains, kicking at the door and opening it all the way, exposing the inside of the room. “For all occasions. Categorised by function and style and, within that, roughly by size.”
“Aren’t these all going to be… women’s clothes, though?”
Tabby does not roll her eyes. “Women’s clothes are only women’s clothes when it’s women who are wearing them. Besides, we have tracksuits and shit. Very neutral. Have a look! Pick out some unisex stuff. We can do you an order online when you’ve picked a room and gotten settled in, but this’ll do for now.”
“I’m… staying?” he asks, still waiting at the threshold even as Tabby walks around, pointing at things.
“Well, yeah. As long as you need. We have rooms to spare, Trevor, and plenty of food, and—”
“Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”
“Tracksuits,” Tabby repeats, pointing again. “Unisex. Get yourself three or four changes, okay? Just to tide you over until we can get you something specially for you. Maybe…” She eyes him again; he’s rather chesty. “Maybe a sports bra. Same section.”
He nods tremulously, breathes deeply, seems for a moment like he’s going to hug himself, and then shakes his head and starts sorting through sportswear. At least he isn’t in denial; he picks out four sports bras immediately. He looks around, wondering where to put them, and Tabby throws over a mesh bag. He thanks her silently, loads it up, and goes back to the racks and boxes of clothes.
“Tabitha,” he says after a while, pausing in the act of dropping some oversized hoodies into the bag, “do you think they can actually fix me? Frankie said you could, but—”
“Yeah,” Tabby says, trying not to sneer at the mention of Frankie’s name. She knows all about her — after the news broke about Trevor and Declan going missing, all the sponsors had to read up on Grandmother’s accomplices — and if she had her way, Frankie’d be following her pal Karen into the ocean. But it was obvious, even from a brief look at the three of them together, that Valérie, Trevor and Frankie are at least a little bit codependent, and ripping out a part of that dynamic before the more innocent parties have had a chance to stabilise would be… Well, it’d be the kind of cruelty Frankie fucking specialises in, wouldn’t it?
And Tabby’s not about to judge someone for how they survive the sort of forced feminisation that isn’t supposed to help you. Without the care the sponsors provide, without direction, without a clear end goal — without love — it’s just fucking torture.
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s just detransition, really. There’ll be a bit of time before anyone can take those implants out, so I can’t say what your immediate medical care is going to look like, but when that’s done, it’s just a matter of testosterone injections, like any trans man.”
Trevor’s staring at her. Going so white the natural red of his cheeks starts to look like a bloodstain. And just as she’s wondering what she could possibly have said to provoke such a reaction, he whispers, in a voice without breath, “You know about that? About my—” He glances down.
Oh.
“Yeah,” she says. “We know about the… standard practice. We do it here, but we’re, uh, nicer about it.”
Very convincing, Tab.
Trevor hugs the clothes he’s holding to his ample chest, and he wobbles.
Fuck.
Intervention time.
She hates doing this on the fly. She knows so little about him; she’s going to have to make this work purely on generalised knowledge about men. Which is a problem, because even though she technically was one for quite a while, the memories are a little fuzzy. And she always overcompensated, anyway; she has no first-hand memories of being a man who isn’t kind of shit at it.
A quick stride forward and she’s put the clothes he was holding away in the bag and put the bag on a bench, and then she’s guiding him, hand in hand, down onto a pair of comfortable chairs by the door. There’ll be no-one around to hear them, but she kicks the door shut, anyway.
“Sit for a bit, yeah?” she says.
Trevor nods. “Yeah.”
Even in that single syllable she can hear it: the stress of keeping going. She thinks back, trying to remember exactly when Grandmother took him; earlyish in November, she thinks. So, granted, he’s spent a little less than two months forced into this new appearance, and probably much of that was spent in post-surgical recovery. But he’s still packed as much physical alteration as a modern ISO standard Dorley girl gets in about a year — sometimes a few months more, depending on when they have facial surgery — into a staggeringly short time. And with none of the careful psychological grounding the girls here get, to boot.
The man needs to know he’s not alone in this. He needs to know he has a way forward.
He needs a good fucking cry. So, how to prompt one?
“Can I tell you about myself?” she asks. He nods again. “I’m Tabitha. You know that. People mostly call me Tab or Tabby, unless they’re annoyed with me. Or if they’re Aunt Bea, though I guess that might be tautological. But it’s not the name my mother gave me.”
“I— I know,” he says, fumbling the words.
“Nah. You don’t.”
“I do. You all have new—”
“You know it,” Tabby says, pointing at her head, “but you keep forgetting, don’t you? It’s hard to remember, isn’t it? We’re like cis women to you, aren’t we? Through and through, until you get confronted with it. People expect us to be all fucked up, but we’re too normal, at least until you get to know us. Trust me; I know. Every newbie goes through it.”
“I’m not a newbie,” he mutters.
“Right. Sure. Okay. What about Valérie? Tell me, what was she like as a man, Trevor?”
“What?”
“Picture it. What was he like?” She leans on the pronoun just a little.
“Hey, that’s— No!” He sounds more certain than he has about anything he’s said since he walked through the front doors. “Tabitha, that’s gross. It’s rude.”
“Yeah,” she says, “it is. But she’s like me, Trevor. And I’m like her. And so’s practically everyone else around here. Although,” she adds darkly, “the cis quotient has been rising, lately.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Shit. He probably doesn’t need to know about the cats Melissa dragged in. Shahida’s fine and probably on course to ask shyly about sponsoring in a year or two, assuming she gets a real job again at some point. Amy’s integrating with terrifying speed, and even Rachel seems to have relaxed somewhat.
Okay, so they’re fine, but Trevor doesn’t need to feel any more on view, does he? He’s already so fucked up that he prioritised getting into unisex clothes over having the wound on his neck seen to, an insane decision if ever Tabby’s witnessed one.
“Nothing,” she says. “People come and go. What I mean, Trevor, is that what happened to you? Happened to all of us. Yeah, granted, not as quickly, but practically none of us wanted it at the time. We—”
“I’m not— Shit. I’m not going to adjust,” he interrupts. But without confidence. He’s tripping over his words. Too many thoughts? Or is he too fragmented? “I can’t. I won’t! I’m just fucking— I’m not. Val tried, but she’s— Fuck.”
“Slow down, Trevor. Take your time.”
“Val tried to help me,” he says quietly. “Talked to me about her life. Not much. But enough for me to know I’m not her. I’m not you, either, I think.”
“You don’t have to be. Like I said, we’ll get you fixed up. Proper medical supervision and everything. But until then, and I want you to remember this, Trevor, because it’s important: we understand. We don’t want you to be a woman. We don’t want you to be Val. We don’t want you to be me. And we don’t want you to behave any which way around us. Just… do what’s natural. Whatever you need to do, whatever you need to be to get through the next little while, we’ll all respect it. No-one’ll make you act like a woman. No-one’ll make you act like a man. You can just chill.”
He laughs. It’s a wheeze, a smokestack laugh of the sort Tabby’s used to hearing from lifelong smokers, and she makes a mental note to get him fed and watered as soon as the medic’s done with him.
“Can’t act like a man, anyway,” he says. “Not any more. Not a real man.”
Tabby pretends interest, though she knows where this is going. “Oh?”
He doesn’t say anything, just looks at her and makes a snipping motion with his fingers.
“Ah,” Tabby says. “You think you need balls to be a man?” He shrugs. Looks down. Embarrassed by what must have felt so simple to him just moments ago. God; cis people! They come to the most simplistic and stupid conclusions! “Trevor, that’s bullshit.”
“It’s not. You wouldn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t?”
That gets him to meet her eyes. Only briefly. “You’re supposed to be a girl.”
“Maybe,” Tabby allows, “but that’s not what I mean. Okay. Let me tell you about my boyfriend.”
“What? Why?”
“Bear with me.” She adjusts herself until she’s sitting more comfortably. “His name’s Levi, and we haven’t been dating all that long, but this one feels like it’ll go the distance, yeah? And he’s sweet and he’s funny and he’s kind. He paints little plastic figures and he loses games with them because he’s terrible at the rules. And he’s hot, Trevor.” She gives herself a second, eyes closed, to remember their first night together. “He’s really fucking hot.” She shakes herself and looks Trevor in the eye. “And he’s all man.”
“What’s your point?”
“He also doesn’t have balls. Only difference is, he never did. Never did and doesn’t need them. Trevor, there are so many guys out there who are guys, and who’re just getting on with it despite not having been born with the balls you miss so much. And I get missing them, sure, that’s understandable, and maybe if the sacs haven’t completely withered then someone can put little silicone thingies in them so they feel right again. But they don’t matter. They’re not you. And they’re certainly not the site of your manhood. They’re just flesh. Not even very useful flesh.”
“Your boyfriend… he’s trans?”
Tabby sighs. “Yes, Trevor. He’s trans. And you’ve got a leg up on him, because unless Grandmother’s changed her habits in the last thirty years, your balls are all you lost, right?” She makes a wiggling gesture with a little finger; he nods. “Well then. You’ve got nothing to worry about; get some testosterone in you and you’ll be right as rain.”
He turns away from her. Leans back in his chair. “How can you be so blasé about all this?”
Tabby counts on her fingers. “Because I’ve seen it all, Trevor. Because I change people’s genders therapeutically for a living, and I’m good at it. Because I— Shit, Trevor. Because I can’t have kids. I can’t have kids and I really want to, and if I’m flippant, if I’m a bit abrasive about all this… I mean, you kind of have to be, right?”
Trevor nods. “No, I actually get that,” he says, perking up. “Val’s the same way. Talks about everything that’s happened to her like she’s reeling off a shopping list. I think, if I wanted to know what she really thinks about herself, I’d have to cut through about fifty layers of coping mechanisms. Wait, no; she told me once that womanhood is her proudest scar. That was about as real as she ever got.”
“Yeah,” Tabby says. “Yeah.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he adds, leaning forward again, “she’s actually kind of wonderful. She always wants to help, you know? Just, she keeps a lot in.”
“Understandable.”
“You, um, you really want a baby?”
“I mean, yeah. I haven’t talked about it with Levi yet. It’s too early. But I don’t know if I will. Adoption’d be a problem because we’re both trans. And if we wanted to carry, he’d have to do it, and that’s a huge ask. So, surrogacy, maybe. It’s possible. I could be a mum, Trevor. But I can’t ever carry a child. And it’s not something I knew I wanted before. You know what that’s like? To hit thirty and suddenly feel like something vital is just missing? There’s a part of me that was just… never there.”
“Shit. I’m sorry, Tab.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she says, and she’s about to wave off the hand that’s hesitantly reaching out to her before she remembers why she’s here, in this room, talking to him. So she takes it in both of hers. Squeezes gently.
“Hey,” he says, making no move to pull his hand away, “actually, while we’re here, I mean, before we go back down, there’s something I need to say. Something Val might not. But it’s important.” He frowns, uncomfortable. “Don’t throw the book at Frankie. Please? I know what she did. Maybe not the specifics, but I know she was basically the Jake to Beatrice’s Declan. Except maybe without the, uh, the—”
“Yeah, I know what you’re getting at,” Tabby says. “You don’t have to say it.”
“She’s done awful things. I know. And I don’t think she’s going to apologise for them. But it’s not because she doesn’t want to, Tab; it’s because she doesn’t feel she deserves to. She expected to die in our escape attempt. She didn’t say it. Not out loud. But I have some training. And I’ve met a lot of vets. The escape, she threw everything into it. She didn’t plan to leave with us.”
“Suicide isn’t redemption, Trevor.”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s just… She’ll be useful. Not just for what she knows. But for who she is now. Tab, she fucked off to work at a dog shelter for fifteen years. She was out. She never wanted to come back. But Dorothy had her over a barrel. And… And back then, she helped Beatrice escape. Back in the eighties or nineties or whenever it was. She helped her get away.”
No.
Fuck that.
She did what?
It’s bullshit. Has to be.
No.
Because that would mean—
Tabby snatches her hands away, wants instinctively to recoil even more bodily away from him, away from the suggestion that Bea’s escape and her subsequent return, that the foundation of everything they’ve built here… is because of fucking Frankie.
“S—sorry,” Trevor says, sounding small again, retreating in his own way.
“Are you sure?” Tabby hisses.
“I mean, it’s what she said. I asked about this place, about how Dorothy lost it, how Beatrice took it from her. And she told me about letting Beatrice pickpocket the keys, about standing in the doors, pretending not to see her. Said she knew Beatrice ran to some homeless shelter. They got a tip. Frankie went, told Dorothy she was going to get her, but she barely went inside. Just stomped around, made a lot of noise, made sure Beatrice knew she was there, and left again.”
Tabby’s silent, taking all this in, cross-referencing it with the very little she knows about Bea’s life before Elle. She said something about a shelter once, about tracking down a man who helped her and finding him in a home and getting Elle to move him somewhere better. He lived in luxury until the end.
Shit. This might be real.
“Tab?” he says carefully.
“What?” she snaps. “Oh. Sorry. Yeah. I’m, uh, I’m going to have to talk to someone about this. Not Bea; she’ll be with Valérie. Maria, maybe. Shit.”
“You’ll go easy on her?”
“Not my decision, Trevor. Few things here are, and I like it that way. Come on; let’s get you dressed, and then we’ll get all this—” she swipes a hand back and forth across her neck, “—fixed up.”
* * *
It doesn’t feel real. Valerie— No. Beatrice corrects herself, vows never to ruin her name again: Valérie, the woman who saved her in every way that mattered, who showed her how to survive, showed her how to scrape together a life, to find joy in any situation. Alive. Here. Staggeringly beautiful, just the way she remembers. And fussing over Maria while Bea herself sits uselessly in the armchair she was guided to.
“Edith,” Val’s saying, with a gentle hand under Maria’s neck, lowering her onto the sofa cushions, “are there any special care considerations?”
Edith’s bustling up with more cushions and a blanket. In her busyness, in her competence, a miniature of Valérie. Funny. Bea never really noticed that before. “Post-concussion care,” she says. “Are you familiar?”
Maria murmurs something that could be, “I’m fine. You don’t need to fuss.” Edith quietly scolds her, then turns her attention back to Valérie.
“Not intimately,” Valérie says, frowning thoughtfully. “I watched an instructional VHS. Several times. But I have no hands-on experience. Not with a concussion.”
Bea missed her voice so much.
“It’s not recent,” Edith says. “She’s out of the recovery period and hasn’t even had a dizzy spell for a while. But she went back to work too soon.” This last remark isn’t directed specifically at Beatrice, but it might as well be; she’s been having thoughts along those lines since Maria took up her sponsoring duties again.
Bea bites the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood. She has to pull herself together! What has she done since Valérie walked through her front door? Stared uselessly at her, allowed her senior sponsors to take charge in lieu, and watched her more-or-less adoptive daughter very nearly faint right in front of her!
“How is she?” she asks Edith.
Maria says, “’m fine.”
“She'll be okay, Aunt Bea,” Edith says. “She just needs to rest.” She punctuates this with a light press of a forefinger to Maria’s upper chest, compressing her into the sofa cushions and putting an end to her incipient squirming. “She’s described the dizzy spells to me before. They’re disorientating, and, worse, she says afterwards that, looking back, her judgement is impaired. She’ll do things—” finger to the chest again, “—that she ends up regretting. Like standing up. And telling everyone she’s fine. She also needs fluids.”
“Fluids?” Valérie says. “Allow me.”
Bea places a hand on her arm. “No,” she says, “it’s okay.” She nods in the direction of the pack of second-year girls — and Bethany — who followed them into the dining hall. Bethany steps forward, along with Faye and Rebecca.
“Yes, Aunt Bea?” Faye says.
“What can we do?” Bethany asks.
“They call you Aunt Bea,” Valérie whispers with a smile, and Bea realises she’s still touching her. The sundress she is inexplicably wearing has short sleeves, and Beatrice is touching Valérie’s arm.
Don’t get distracted.
“Bring us tea, please,” Beatrice says. “And plain biscuits. Digestives, perhaps. Not the chocolate ones I saw Stephanie sneaking, earlier.”
“And a bottle of water,” Edy adds.
“And Bethany: sensible mugs, please.”
As Bethany raises an innocent hand to her breast, Valérie asks, “You have mugs that are silly?”
“We are plagued by them,” Edy says. She pinches her eyebrows together; were she not preoccupied with Maria she would likely have performed a more emphatic gesture.
“In what way are they silly? Are they shaped oddly, or are they silly in some other fashion?”
“They have jokes on them,” Beatrice says, weighed down by inevitability.
Valérie considers this for a moment. “I think I would like to see some silly mugs.”
Bea directs her attention back at Bethany, Faye and Rebecca. Bethany especially. “Okay, girls. Tasteful mugs, please. And I would remind you,” she calls, as they turn away, “that it takes only one girl to carry a tray.”
In response to Valérie’s confusion, Edith says quietly, “Sometimes they try to be clever. That’s usually when messes are made.”
Bethany rushes off, with Faye and Rebecca in tow and, as if loosely and elastically connected, the other second years hesitantly follow them. On their way out, they absorb Stephanie, who is exiting the kitchen with a glass dish for some reason, and after a whispered conversation, the whole group turns around and heads for the stairs.
“Do they always move in a pack?” Valérie asks.
“I think of it as more of a herd,” Edy says.
“Why does one of them have cat ears on her hood?”
“Because it’s twenty-nineteen,” Beatrice mutters.
Edy says, “It’s twenty-twenty now, Auntie,” and if Beatrice were a little less discombobulated — and if Maria were okay — then Edy might be on the receiving end of a faceful of cushion right about now. The cheek!
Stephanie, left behind by the group, deposits her dish on a table near the fireplace and sits, pulling her feet up under herself.
“I suggested they use another kitchen,” she says. “There’s a bit of a discussion happening in there.”
“Is anyone throwing anything?” Edith asks.
“No, but when I left, they were talking about Declan,” Stephanie says. Beatrice feels herself tighten, and she notes Valérie’s sharp intake of breath. “I know he washed out, but they were talking about him like something else happened to him. Something after he washed out?”
It’s a question no-one wants to answer. Well, not so much a question as a bomb lobbed at Beatrice personally, via an impudently implicating rising intonation, but someone’s going to have to catch it.
“You shouldn’t be talking about this, Steph,” Edith says, though she doesn’t look up from Maria.
“And yet she is,” Beatrice says. “Stephanie, when someone is washed out, they are… delivered elsewhere. Declan was intercepted. By, it turns out, a private military associated with Dorothy Marsden. Remember ‘Grandmother’?” Stephanie nods, and as Bea takes a second to decide what she’s going to say next, Valérie slides her wrist out of her grasp, takes her hand, laces their fingers together, and continues on her behalf.
Unfair. Just because her voice was shaking.
“Declan was delivered to us,” Valérie says, “straight out of recovery from his surgeries.” Stephanie pales, and Valérie nods, gently. “Yes. Those kinds of surgeries. You saw young Trevor Darling? They had essentially the same work done. Face, breasts, and a quick snip down below. They even were given the same retroussé nose. Although Declan was larger up front, to account for his bigger frame.”
“How did he take it?” Stephanie asks, and Valérie leads her — and Beatrice, by extension — through a summary of Declan’s time at Stenordale Manor, of his near-catatonia, of Valérie finding out about his past and effectively rejecting him, handing him off to Frankie. She alludes to Declan’s later role, and Beatrice hopes against hope that Stephanie’s minimal knowledge of Dorothy Marsden’s proclivities will prevent her from reading too closely between the lines.
Declan was a toy for a brutal man and has now most likely perished in the fire that consumed Stenordale Manor, and Beatrice thinks, perhaps, that she will never forgive herself.
When Bethany and the second years return, distributing mugs and delighting Valérie with one that spells out in bold pink letters the word FIERCE (and alleges that it stands for Feminine! Independent! Elegant! Radiant! Castrated! Empowered!), and ensuring Maria has access to water and digestives, when Faye and Rebecca sit down on the sofa near Maria and ask if there’s anything else they can do, when Bethany and Stephanie share a kiss and an embrace and look upon the situation with concern in their eyes, Beatrice decides there are enough people to watch over Maria and to keep Valérie company and temporarily removes herself, striding quickly from the dining hall and up the stairs to find another room, any room, in which to sequester herself.
It would not do for the sponsors to see her cry. Nor the second years.
Nor Valérie.
* * *
“Honestly, I feel good about removing ourselves from that situation. I mean, yes, high drama, totally fascinating and everything, but realistically, it was only a matter of time before someone gave me a job.”
“Or,” Paige says, “until you volunteered for one.” She reaches for the gearshift again and fumes — again. Christine’s been subjected to Paige’s complaints about automatic transmissions before; she feels as if her left hand has nothing to do, and no amount of tactfully placing it on Christine’s thigh will prevent it eventually wandering back to the gearshift, there to find itself useless.
“True. Think we’ll get in trouble for this?”
Paige quirks her head, shaking it the way she does when she’s driving and needs to keep her eyes on the road: very slightly and very carefully. “I’d be astonished if anyone notices we’re gone.”
“So, what, we just show up again this afternoon with Abby and act like we were there the whole time?”
Paige laughs. “Yes. Let’s do that. Let’s see if anyone has the brass nerve to call us out for it, after our chaperone practically passed out and your sponsor—”
“—ex-sponsor—”
“—elected herself chief of the Torturer Handler group. If they wanted us supervised, they should have supervised us better.”
“Yeah. True.”
“Hey!” Pippa says, from the back seat. “I’m technically a sponsor, you know.”
Paige snorts, then frowns at herself. “Sorry. Rude.”
“I mean, it’s a little reassuring, actually.” Pippa sits back, and after a moment’s struggle, pops the seat belt back into place in the centre of her chest. “I’d rather the thought of me sponsoring be amusing than anything else.”
“Feeling the weight of responsibility?” Christine asks.
“Hardly. Last I saw, Steph was being ordered around by a French woman. I don’t do that any more. Just movie nights, stuff like that.”
“Where’s Rachel, anyway? She spent the night with you, didn’t she?”
Pippa rolls her eyes. “Don’t you start, too. Jane called me a homewrecker earlier. I know she didn’t mean it, like it was a joke, but all the same—”
“I know, Pip,” Christine says quickly. “I just meant, who’s chaperoning her right now?”
“Jane,” Pippa says, shrugging. “And Melissa, Shahida and Amy, I suppose. Who were those people? I thought I recognised one of them, but I couldn’t place her.”
Christine talks her through it — to the best of her knowledge; she didn’t exactly memorise Trevor Darling’s file when she skimmed recent senior sponsor updates — while Paige negotiates with a complicated intersection and deposits them onto the M11.
“So,” Pippa says, when the M11 has shed its hard shoulder and become the A11, “what’s the plan?”
“Bring Abby back,” Christine says, and adds with a shrug, “That’s about as complex as it got.”
“We appeal to Abby’s affection for Melissa,” Paige says. “And, if that doesn’t work, we tell her Beatrice needs to talk to her.”
“Is that true?” Pippa asks.
Christine says, “Unfortunately, yes.”
* * *
He holds Tabitha’s hand on the way back down the stairs. He’s not proud of it — and she reminded him, quite pointedly, that she has a boyfriend already, which caused him to inform her that he is gay, thank you very bloody much — but he can’t pretend that he isn’t rattled by this place. And, contrary to what Tabitha said, it’s not because of the way people look at him.
Okay, it’s not entirely because of the way people look at him. But as soon as he first looked in through the windows in the kitchen doors, he realised that if what Frankie told him about Dorley Hall was true, then every single one of the women looking back at him had a history just like his.
Taken. Transformed.
And they adapted. They became the women they appeared to be. And not just the ones who went through the relatively cushy programme under Beatrice; both Maria and Bea herself survived the same brutal regime as Val, were both reshaped for someone else’s pleasure.
On some level, he knows this is nothing new. Because Val’s Val, right? Like he said to Tabitha, she claims her womanhood, despite its origin. But it was always possible for a small part of him to believe that she was lying to herself, that she was a woman because she had no other choice.
Well, here’s a whole building full of women who had the choice. They all made it.
So why can’t he?
Why does even the thought of it fill him with creeping horror? Why does the idea make his skin crawl and his teeth clench? Why, when he thinks about spending another year — fuck, another month — like this, does he want to dive for the nearest knife and take the easier exit?
Is he really that weak?
He’s not ashamed because the women of Dorley Hall look at him and see a woman, or a man, or a man who was forcibly made into a woman; he’s ashamed because they see someone who fucking failed.
And he’s being stupid. He knows it. Tabitha said it: they don’t care. And Frankie said something ages ago about the selection criteria for the new programme being carefully tailored to weed out men just like him, men who can’t make the switch — though how that actually works, he has no idea. Do they have statistics? Do they send someone to sit by them in a bar and see if they have the right vibes? Are they just extraordinarily lucky?
Whatever. He can as easily make himself believe that the men like him, the ones they weed out, aren’t merely unsuitable; they’re the weak ones. The ones who aren’t strong enough to be women.
Christ. He needs a therapist. Or a gun.
“Trevor?” Tabitha says, squeezing his fingers to get him to let her go. “We’re here.”
“Hm? Oh. Sorry.”
She shakes her hand a bit, flexes the knuckles, and he resists the urge to apologise again. He probably held on a bit too tight towards the end, largely because he can’t believe he’s about to introduce himself to even more people.
Only two, though. Tabitha called ahead; the soldiers will be kept out of their hair. “They’re not interested,” she said. “They’ve seen a million girls who used to be boys already.”
It took a little badgering to get her to confirm that they haven’t been told about his specific situation; they probably would be eager to get a look at a former colleague.
The door to one of the portacabins — mid-sized, and of a configuration he doesn’t recognise — opens as they approach, and a pretty, dark-skinned woman leans out and waves at them. She’s not dressed in fatigues as he expected, but instead wears a sweater, a calf-length skirt and long boots. She’s got her hair pulled tight against her head and tied up at the back, though it spills out quite spectacularly, even more so than Tabitha’s. The two of them clearly know each other: they embrace, and then the new woman turns to Trevor and introduces herself.
“Hi, Trevor. I’m Jan Golding. I represent Elle Lambert’s interests.” She holds out a hand, and when Trevor accepts it and shakes, she giggles. “Now that the pompous part is out of the way: welcome to our little village.”
She waves them inside, and Trevor finds a small but not cramped infirmary, with a staff, apparently, of one. The one beckons him over, and he sheds the coat he pulled on for the walk and goes over to meet her.
Behind him, Tabitha and Jan are talking quietly:
“You’re sure I can’t persuade you to stay in the Hall? Girls’ night?”
“Sorry, Tab. One encounter with Aunt Bea was enough.”
“Her bark is so much worse than her bite.”
“Perhaps. It’s still no, though.”
“Fair enough.”
“Trevor!” the medic says, pulling him in to shake his hand. “I’m Fatima. I hear you need some fixing?”
He shrugs and smiles. “Little bit,” he admits. Before he can get into it, Tabitha calls to him from the door.
“I have to go talk to Bea,” she says. “You’re serious about Frankie? About what you said?”
“Yeah.”
Tabitha sighs. “Then I have to go talk to Bea,” she repeats. “Jan’ll walk you back to the Hall when you’re ready.”
“Just as far as the door,” Jan says.
“Okay,” Trevor says. “Thanks, Tab.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” she says, and ducks out of the door, closing it behind her.
“Shall we get this off, then?” Fatima says brightly, poking at the edge of the tape that’s been holding him closed. He nods, and Fatima makes sympathetic noises as she yanks away at the tape, followed by a low whistle when she finally exposes the wound.
“Yeah,” he says, “it wasn’t pleasant to look at when we put the tape on.”
“I suspect it’s probably worse now,” Fatima says. “But nothing we can’t handle. Just sit back and we’ll get you nicely numbed up…”
* * *
Frances talked more than once about the time she saw them, talked endlessly about the Indian girl who was so friendly and so pretty, talked about the way she moved, her voice, her hair, and when she was drunk she spoke of her frustration that when she worked at the Hall all they were doing was producing throwaway toys, how they could have been making beautiful, vibrant people, and that was usually the point where Valérie kicked her until she shut up. Val assumed she was exaggerating — not lying; the old woman doesn’t have any lies left — and that the girls at Dorley Hall would be more like the better-adjusted girls Valérie used to find in her (brief) care at Stenordale, the ones who had found a way to live with themselves until, despite Val’s efforts, they were killed.
She assumed they would be something like Val fears herself to be: patchwork creations, facsimiles of women. Survivors, above all else.
They are emphatically not. There’s joy here. There’s love.
It’s humbling. And it makes Valérie so fucking angry. She sees in them everything the girls she cared for could have had. Everything she could have had. Because while Valérie can’t imagine what her life might have been like as a man, she’s always been curious what it would have been like if she hadn’t been kept prisoner.
And now she can see it.
She can see it, and her chest burns. She’s dragged down, memories a gravitic tug on her heart, a binding and inescapable force.
The graves she was made to dig.
The girls she was made to bury.
The life she was made to live, within sight of the stone markers she left to commemorate those even less fortunate than her.
“Are you okay, Valérie?” the dusty blonde one asks. Edith. Edy. Sweet girl; doting on the other one, Maria, the one who lost all control at the sight of Frankie. The only one here, Béatrice aside, who stands the slightest chance of understanding her.
Maria had looked ready to murder, and in that, Valérie understands her right back. She wanted to do the same to Frankie, the first time she saw her again. Unfortunate that the cantankerous old bitch grows on you.
“Mademoiselle Barbier?” Edith asks again, and this time, Valérie registers it properly. Perhaps it’s Edith’s suddenly flawless French accent. She stifles a laugh; Frankie would call Edith a swot.
“Oh,” she says. “Yes. I’m fine.”
“You must have a lot to think about.”
Val shrugs. She says, “How is Maria?”
“I’m fine,” Maria insists.
“She’s doing better,” Edith corrects.
Maria’s sitting up now, and drinking carefully from her second bottle of water. Edith has the plate of digestive biscuits on her lap, and occasionally hands one to Maria, accompanied by a meaningful look. She does this now, and as Maria rolls her eyes, shares a brief, slightly embarrassed look with Valérie, and eats her biscuit, Val has to look away.
She’s like her. Like her and her girls. Maria, Béatrice, Valérie, and a handful of other girls who were lucky enough to still be at the Hall when Béatrice and Elle came storming in. Oh, Frankie says there were one or two others, from before Béatrice’s tenure, snuck away and sworn to secrecy lest they invite death upon themselves and their former captors, but she’s presented no proof, and it’s still nothing against the sheer number of dead.
Valérie can feel them when she breathes.
It’s all so unfair.
It’d be easier not to think about all this if Valérie had something to do. But Béatrice has run off, and Val knows better than to go chasing straight after someone in such a state. And Béatrice tried so hard to hide her tears. She is respected here, she is loved, she is…
To be frank, some of the younger girls seem to regard her with a mixture of awe and naked fear. Not the youngest, though, not Stephanie, which is curious. She has a rather more pragmatic view of Béatrice, from what Valérie’s seen.
Val got the rundown from Stephanie. An earnest little thing, ginger-haired and terribly pale and apparently some variety of feral trans woman, a kitten who ran in off the street and then refused to leave. Another step further away from Valérie’s own life, and thus a little easier to talk to. She got a potted history of the Hall — rather simplified, Valérie is sure — and Stephanie introduced her to everyone nearby, obliging Val to learn several new names and faces very quickly.
She picked the most visually distinctive one as an anchor for her memory: Mia. The one with the pretend ears on her outfit and the long socks and the improperly washed-off remnants of eyeliner whiskers on her cheeks. Chalk-white and excitable, she seems almost permanently attached to Aisha, darker-skinned and more conventionally attired but no less energetic. Their next-most-rowdy friends are Faye and Rebecca, and the two quiet ones are Anne and Fiona. Together, the six of them comprise the 2018 intake, and they are each of them at most six-ish months into their identification as women.
Remarkable, really.
Stephanie described the second years collectively as a polycule. She then had to describe for Valérie what a ‘polycule’ is, and then had to emphasise that she was only joking. She seemed unsure about it, though, so Val let her off the hook and asked her instead to introduce the only one who remained unnamed: the darker-haired one, no less pale than Stephanie, but smaller in every dimension. And so Val met Bethany, an event which prompted in everyone around her, including the semi-aware Maria, an anticipatory gasp, but which proved to be anticlimactic.
Bethany is a quiet, sombre girl, content to hide behind her surgical mask, to smother herself in Stephanie’s embrace, and to drink deeply from her mug of tea. She’s very concerned with Maria’s wellbeing, and the few words she’s spoken have reflected that. She did seem proud of having broken some sort of record — “Two, actually,” she said, when queried; “one, first girl in the basement who wasn’t a girl when she arrived; second, first basementee to give another basementee a bona fide nervous breakdown.” — and became briefly quite animated, but sobered immediately when Maria asked her to pass over a new bottle of water.
“Valérie?” Maria asks. She’s so quiet, and given the pained expressions on both Edith and Bethany’s faces, considerably more so than usual.
“Yes?”
“Do you plan to stay?”
Ah. One of the difficult questions, then. “I don’t know.”
“Stay,” Maria says. It’s almost a hiss. “Please. For a little while. For Bea.”
Valérie nods. “Of course.” Where else would she go? Who else would she be? Concepts made alien by time.
“Thank you.” And Maria leans back. Closes her eyes again. Still conscious; just resting. Edith and Bethany fuss over her some more, and Valérie crosses her legs, rearranges her arms, sips at her cooling black tea, and considers Béatrice.
So different now. She remembers her: the scared child, still learning defiance, still learning survival, still learning womanhood, still afraid to claim it, to spit it in the face of their captors. Béatrice when she was Dee, when she was unnamed, unclaimed, running towards her in the midnight kitchen, being knocked back and rising again, bleeding, ready for anything, for Val’s sake.
Valérie has possessed that memory for a long time. She’s coveted it. Nurtured it. For a long time she thought it was all there would ever be of the girl: a moment of rebellion, buying five minutes for the two of them to say goodbye. Dee and Valérie, aborted women for whom nothing awaited but their humiliation, their abuse and their deaths.
And then, miraculously, they survived. Val knows Frankie helped Dee escape, knows she got out of the Hall and then away from Almsworth, but she knows nothing of the years between. More than a decade, in which Dee became Béatrice, became someone who could return with powerful allies and strip her abusers of their power and their home.
In that same time, Valérie became something else. Her wounds scarred and her fears dulled, and even her hate faded somewhat. She became a corpse, animated by memory.
Still; they survived. And now Béatrice runs from her and Valérie must chase her.
She ought to clean up first, though.
Fending off protests from some of the girls — though they acquiesce quickly without their Aunt Bea around to tell them otherwise — she fetches up the crumb-covered plate from Edith’s lap and every empty mug she can find, and delivers them all to the kitchen, remembering only after she enters that everything on her tray originated in another kitchen upstairs, because Frankie’s been having some kind of standoff in this one. She still is: Frankie’s sat at the table facing three of Béatrice’s girls, and the atmosphere between them is tense.
Oh, well. She fills the sink with soapy water, anyway.
“Having a nice time, Frances?” she asks the silent room.
One of the girls snorts, and Frankie says, “I think I’m about to be locked in a dark closet for the rest of my life.”
Val locates a washcloth. “How nice,” she says. “I’ll have to visit.”
“Val,” Frankie says. “The manor. It burned down.”
She’s glad she already tipped her crockery into the sink, because just the thought of it makes her fists clench. Her mind’s eye fills quickly with imagery: the graves, burning; her awful little suite in the servants’ quarters, her home for decades, burning. And, oh no—
“Declan?” she says, turning around. “Is there news of him?”
“Thought you hated him.”
“Yes, Frances, I do, but my preferred fate for rapists is not necessarily that they burn to death.”
“S’not like there’s much of Declan left to burn, anyway,” Frankie mutters.
“Please shut up,” one of the other girls says.
“We don’t know anything,” says the girl who laughed before. She seems to be in charge. She glances briefly at Frankie before adding, “But we have people on the ground there. And… other ways of acquiring information. Elle’s people sent over an update a few minutes ago: the fire brigade found four corpses. Three in the entrance hall.”
“Callum,” Valérie says, as Frankie nods, “and the two delivery men from Silver River. They were in the entrance hall. Who was the fourth?”
“A man.”
“That rules out Declan, then. He wouldn’t pass for a man. Not even a dead one. Frances, do you know what that means? Jake is dead!”
“Told them all this already, Val,” Frankie says.
“For some reason,” says the girl who told Frankie to shut up, “we don’t trust you.”
“How did he die?”
“We don’t know,” says the first girl.
“He might’ve bled out,” Frankie says. “We did get him. A bit. Mostly Trev.”
“I hit him very hard in the face,” Valérie reminds her. Her knuckles are still sore.
“It doesn’t matter,” says the first girl. “It just means that Dorothy Marsden left with Declan. Probably started the fire herself.”
“You don’t know that, Dira,” says the girl who told Frankie to shut up. “They might not have found his body yet.”
“Why assume the worst?” Dira says.
“Why would Dorothy start the fire?” Val asks, returning to the washing up, if only to give her stiffening fingers something to do. The graves, burning…
“Because she fucked it, Val,” Frankie says. “Trev was the Smyth-Farrows’ golden girl, and we nabbed him right from under her. Her head’s going to roll. You remember what the Smyth-Farrows were like, don’t you? They liked you more than they liked her.”
Valérie nods. “The only point on which to recommend them.”
“Right. Fucking horrible people. ’Specially the girl. Hortense, or whatever her name is.”
“Henrietta,” Valérie suggests.
“Like father like daughter,” Frankie finishes.
Val rinses the last mug and sets it on the draining rack. “Can we finish later? I have to talk to Béatrice.”
“By all means,” Dira says. “We need to finish, ah, debriefing Frankie here.”
“Enjoy yourselves. But do remember: she saved my life. She saved Trev’s life. She even had a go at helping Declan. Don’t break her in any way that can’t be mended.”
“You’re a doll, Val,” Frankie says.
Valérie blows her a kiss on the way out, to the bemusement of Béatrice’s girls, and sweeps through the dining hall, picking up on her way the dish with the broken cup. Some helpful soul — Stephanie, perhaps — has added a tube of glue. She smiles at the gathered groups of girls in the dining hall, and notes that Stephanie and Bethany have both gone, along with a handful of others, and she contemplates staying, to keep an eye on Maria, but decides against; Edith is speaking quietly with her, and Val doesn’t want to intrude.
Besides, she has somewhere to be and things to do.
She’s dredged up from the depths of her memory a rough map of the lower floors of Dorley Hall, and she’s pretty sure she knows where Béatrice will have gone. The stairs she ran to lead directly to the first floor, and to Dorothy Marsden’s old flat; it’s the biggest single space Valérie knows of, so the odds are decent that Béatrice lives there now. It’ll be on the first floor, assuming she isn’t wildly wrong.
If she is, well, the Hall seems to possess an infinite supply of intriguing and helpful young women; one of them will be able to direct her.
Dorothy’s flat turns out to be right where she remembers, though there’s one of those hefty thumb scanners on the door now, so she knocks. Does her best to blank her memory as she waits. With luck, Béatrice will have rearranged the furniture, because if it looks inside the way it always used to…
Dorothy and her guests sometimes preferred to keep their entertainment private.
And then the door opens, and there’s Béatrice.
* * *
Diana wakes with a jerk and finds the sheets twisted into knots around her, tying her limbs into place, and she can’t stop another spasm of fear from ripping through her body, because she’s immobilised, her dream made physical. It was Jake! He was—
Shut up, Diana.
The thought pulls her to a stop. Drags at her. Wakes her more completely and helps her to reassert reality. And as she carefully untangles herself from the sheets, as she wipes her sweaty face with a tissue, as she stretches, she reflects on it.
Has she called herself Diana before? So directly? In the silence of her head?
She doesn’t think so.
That feels permanent.
Yeah, and is that bad? Why would she want to be anyone else, anyway? She’s been Diana less than a day; she doesn’t know anything about her yet. Except that people are kind to her. And is that bad? That she shows off the way she was remade, speaks in a certain voice, pretends to be Diana, and people are inspired to help her?
“Manipulative,” the memory of Aunt Bea says, loud enough to be in the room with her. “You’re manipulative, Declan. You’re more than clever enough to lie and to charm when you need to, and that poor girl kept coming back to you, even after you—”
Shut up, Diana!
Where did that nice, reassuring reality go…?
She’s half out of bed and she almost falls. It takes her a second to collect herself, and she slumps against the edge of the bed. Butt to the floor. Hands by her side. Fingers curling into fists but with nothing and no-one to hit.
“What’s your plan, mate?” the memory of Stefan asks her, because she’s back in the shower room, executing some idiot plan to get Stefan by the throat and use him to force the sponsors to get free. “What’s your plan?”
Stupid.
So what if the sponsors had been protecting Stefan? So what if he was on their side? It wouldn’t have changed the fact that Declan Shaw is a fucking rapist.
Hands into fists. She wants to pull him out of herself, enact upon him everything that was done to him, times a thousand, times a fucking million, she wants to choose it, she wants to own it, she wants it to be her fists, her fingernails, she wants to fucking violate him—
Shut up, Diana.
No-one is violating anyone.
She should have that shower. She’s still filthy under everything, and her hair smells of smoke. But she’ll have to disrobe to do so. It’s the final hurdle.
No. Don’t be stupid. It’s just the next hurdle. But Diana hasn’t seen herself naked since before she escaped the manor, and she doesn’t know how well her hastily constructed identity will stand up to the sight. It’s one thing being Dina or Declan or whoever and having to be a woman because she was made to be that way, because her choices had all been taken from her, because punishment awaited her if she didn’t keep herself to Jake’s standards, because she was his doll—
Jesus Christ, Diana. Shut up!
Declan would have hated her. She knows it. Coldly. With certainty. And with a little satisfaction, also. He would have thought her weak, would have disdained, among other things, her new habit of disappearing into her own head, into memories, of thinking too much.
Except it’s not new, is it? Did she just forget?
Fists into hands again. Pushing up from the floor. Making her way over to the long mirror in the corner. It’s not full-length, but it captures her from the knees up. It’s enough.
She starts pulling off her clothes, so fast she rips a seam on the joggers Noor gave her, and she throws them aside, wrinkling her nose as the smell of smoke escapes from their depths and folds.
There she is. There’s Diana. And her head swims, just for a second, because if she’s truly honest with herself, she doesn’t know if she’s okay with this, if outside the control of Jake and Grandmother and the punishments promised to her, she can live with this body, this shape. And she doesn’t know anything about it, really. She shaved it, and she knows how to do that, obviously, but the lotions and things she was made to put on, even the types of makeup she was made to wear; she learned it all rote and used what was given to her. Out here, she’ll have to start from scratch.
And does she want to?
Diana’s tall, and that’s obvious even in the mirror, without anyone else to compare herself against. And though she lost a lot of weight, at Dorley Hall but particularly at Stenordale Manor — and she thinks there might have been some fat redistribution or some other surgery done when they did everything else — she’s still broad: her ribs are as wide as her hips, and her shoulders slightly wider. But Grandmother’s surgeons knew what to do about that, and she’s balanced out in front by large breasts. They were uncomfortable when she first got them, and they got in the way and they made her back hurt, but in the time since, she’s gotten used to them. They sag a little more than they used to, as well, the way breasts are supposed to, and she experimentally tucks a finger into the fold of skin under each one.
With every passing week, they seem more a part of her.
Hmm. One thing she hasn’t looked at. She avoided it as much as she could at Stenordale. Cleaned it, dried it, even used it for sex when she was made to, but never really looked at it. Jake taunted her about it quite a lot, but she got good at blanking him out.
Just do it, Diana.
She forces herself to look at it, and it’s… fine. Not at all as bad as she expected. It’s not shocking. It’s not ugly. It’s just a penis. It doesn’t even look out of place on her.
She reaches down. Tucks it under a little. It’s easy, considering they took away everything else down there. She crosses her thighs and it disappears.
She feels lighter, suddenly. The feeling comes from nowhere, and she doesn’t even know how to interrogate it, except perhaps that it’s another step away from him.
Taking a step back — while being careful to keep her penis tucked away — she looks at herself. Top to toe; well, top to just below the knee.
God. She thought she’d look off. Wrong. That she could pull off the girl thing with clothes but that naked, she’d be misproportioned and ugly.
Couldn’t be further from the truth.
Diana strikes a pose. She can’t help it. She raises her fists, not to punch, but as a show of strength. It’s a pose she remembers from a cartoon that was always being rerun at the weekends, a show one of her older brothers used to watch obsessively, before he moved out. She ended up watching it herself, to remember him, and got quite into it, too.
Superheroes. She can picture them all. And with her build, with her broad ribs and the chest they gave her, with her fists raised, she looks like—
Oh my God.
The girl in the mirror smiles at herself, and the smile becomes a laugh and the laugh infects all of her, and she has to support herself on her knees, because it’s just so stupid, it’s just so perfect, it’s just so absolutely ridiculous.
She feels like Wonder Woman.
Oh my God, Diana!
She giggles again.
Diana.
Not so much of a scary thought. Not any more.
And Declan would hate this. Declan would hate her. Would loathe looking at himself and finding this creature looking back.
And that’s reason enough to love her.
* * *
Beatrice is well aware that her eyes are probably red. That her hair is a mess. Her clothes, rumpled. Her boots, discarded. When she shut the door behind her, she threw off the persona she normally inhabits, and with it her inhibitions and a whole layer of clothing. She’s downed three measures of gin and is considering a fourth when the knock comes.
She considers ignoring it. Here she is, a regression, a version of Beatrice whose responsibilities have been left downstairs. Along, most likely, with her dignity. And there are few people she could stand to let see her like this.
Best roll the dice on it being one of them, then.
And behind the door, Valérie.
Beatrice Quinn is gone, and someone else, someone younger, is here. Valérie’s presence causes what remains of her to flee, and she can’t help but smile back, giddy and foolish and a little bit childish.
Stuff it. It’s better this way. Let her be Dee, and let Valérie be Val, and let them be young again.
Beatrice feels twenty years old.
Val’s standing in the doorway, holding the fragments of the Round Tuit in a Pyrex dish, so Bea takes it from her, twists quickly around and deposits it on the drinks table next to her open bottle of gin, and returns to Val. Still standing there. Still smiling, though slightly quizzically now.
So much better this way. Just the two of them.
“Won’t you come in?” she says.
“Thank you,” Val says. “And I apologise.”
With a frown, Bea says, “What for?”
“The tale I told. Of Declan. I could see it getting to you. And yet I continued. Because to tell the tale…” Val hesitates. Stands there, still. “It heals me, I think.” She looks directly at Bea. “I could have helped him. I chose not to.”
Declan. The years come rushing back, with momentum. Beatrice sees him again, a large man, rendered small by the cell, by the glass protecting her from him. She remembers what she told him.
All of it.
She asks the question before she can decide not to. “Why didn’t you help him?”
Why didn’t she?
“He was a rapist.”
“Yes. I spoke with him about it. In his cell. Before I— Before I sent him away. He is a rapist. I… have to remind myself of that.”
“He was a rapist,” Val says carefully, taking another few steps, leaving Bea behind at the bar. She sits down on the couch by the window, looks around. “But I do not think he will be again. I’m glad you changed the furniture, by the way.”
“Couldn’t stand looking at it,” Bea mutters. “What do you mean?”
“Frances spoke of him. And she didn’t say it, not exactly, but I think he is changing. Profoundly. In the manner of your girls, perhaps. Though under a catalyst I think you and I would recognise, more than your girls. But I still… resisted spending time with him. I think because I didn’t want to see it. I wanted him to remain a rapist. Because then I could despise him properly.”
Beatrice’s hands find the table and she leans heavily on it, rocking but not tipping the bottles on display. She wants to grip something, wants to take one of the bottles in front of her and tighten her hands around it until it breaks, until it cuts her, until she ruins herself on it.
Instead, she says, “I understand.”
There’s a creak, the tap of shoes on floorboards, and then arms close around her waist. Another time, she might exult in the sensation, but for now, she seeks and finds comfort.
“We both failed him,” Valérie says, “and neither of us did. If he is different, different the way your girls are, well, that may be better for him.”
“I remember I said to Stephanie,” Beatrice whispers, “that we don’t waste people. But we did, didn’t we? I did. I threw him away. Tossed him to the wolves. Into the arms of Dorothy fucking Marsden. And, Jesus Christ, Valérie—” she twists around, but Valérie maintains her grip, “—I left you with her! For decades!”
“Shush,” Valérie says sharply. Her breath washes over Beatrice, who concludes absently that she’s been drinking black tea. “Did you know I was there?”
“No. No! Of course not!”
“Did you keep looking for me?”
“Yes!”
“Even after people, I suspect, told you I was almost definitely dead?”
“Well, yes.”
Valérie leans closer, leaves a kiss on Beatrice’s cheek. “Then you did not abandon me. You did not throw me away. And—” Valérie steps away, takes back her embrace, “—you did not throw Declan away, either. You offered him a chance and he rejected it, no?”
“I—”
“Pour me a drink, Béatrice. Something alcoholic. Cognac, for preference.”
Beatrice nods, and for the next minute or so, occupies herself. When she has the drinks ready, she finds Val has pulled out one of the small stacking tables and placed it in front of the couch, offset from her slightly. An invitation for Beatrice to join her, to abandon any silly ideas she might have gotten, while staring intently at the bottles, about pulling up an office chair or otherwise keeping her distance.
She sits.
“You can come closer, Béatrice.”
Can she? That feels presumptuous. And then Val points out her idiocy:
“Béatrice, I just kissed you. Whatever space there is between us exists only in your head. I do not know what kind of relationship we have, but I do know that it is not one where you sit—” she waves a hand, “—all the way over there. Come, Béatrice.”
Fine. Bea shuffles up to where Valérie is patting an empty sofa cushion.
“You know,” Valérie says, “it is reassuring that you are so bad at this. Thirty years without going outside, and I thought I would be the awkward one.”
It’s a horrific reminder, but delivered with such a sly grin, and with such a laugh in her voice, that Bea can’t stop herself from snorting, and the undignified noise — and the way Val’s eyes light up when Bea belatedly covers both her mouth and her embarrassment — is enough to break her.
Bea laughs, and Val laughs, too.
“Goodness,” Beatrice says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I promise you, I’m usually considerably more on top of things.”
“I believe you. I’ve seen how your girls look at you.”
Bea addresses her glass. “Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t. I feel like I turned around and suddenly became forty, and the shock of that is so hideous that it takes another few minutes for me to remember that I’m actually fifty-five.”
Valérie salutes Bea with her cognac. “You wear it well.”
Bea clinks with her. “As do you.”
“Well, someone has to ask the awkward question, and I’m going to do it first: what happened to you, Béatrice? What happened after I left the Hall?”
“That’s not fair. I wanted to ask that.”
Valérie shrugs. “I spent thirty years wearing stupid outfits — ranging from practical to pornographic — and cooking roast beef for disgusting Englishmen and women. That’s it. Your turn.”
“There’s more to you than that.”
“No, Béatrice. There is not. Can I be honest? Everyone here wants to ask me about my past. I can see it on their faces, and I know I’m going to have to address it sooner or later. Thank you, by the way, for having the audacity to be the first. My problem is, I don’t want to talk about it. Because every time I talk about it, every time I think about it, I am forced to realise everything I have missed. All the things I don’t know, that I never learned. And I remember that I am a woman because I am no longer a man, because my manhood was taken from me and I embraced the alternative out of hatred. But inside me there is little to be found, Béatrice. I exist in opposition to the world, always knowing that if the world were ever to stop pushing back, I would fall. And now, quite suddenly, it has. I have been free for a day, Béatrice, and already I fear it. I am falling, and when I hit the ground, I will shatter.”
“Val… I’m so sorry.”
“Fuck your pity,” Valérie says, swilling the remains of her cognac around in its glass, and then necking it, “and fuck your guilt. They are unnecessary and unwelcome. All I want is time, Béatrice. Time, and somewhere to spend it.”
“You can have it. You can have a room here. Come and go as you please. But, Valérie, please, if you fall, if it’s bad, you have to let me catch you.”
“Béatrice, I will allow you to try. Now.” She stands, picks up the shot glasses and takes them over to the bar. When she returns, she’s carrying the glasses pinched between her fingers, each filled again, and in her other hand, the Pyrex dish. “I am done talking about myself for a while.” She places the glasses on the little table, and pulls out another of the stacking tables for the dish with the smashed mug in it. “I have superglue,” she says.
“Is it going to be safe to drink from?”
“I do not know,” Valérie says. “But I do not think it matters. We will repair it, and — if you will allow me to be pompous; I have listened to a lot of Englishmen and I am now quite good at it — though it may no longer be useful, it will still have value. I think I like that metaphor.”
“I think I do, too.”
“Let’s get on with it, then. We will glue this mug back together, and you will tell me about your life.”
* * *
Steph’s getting used to the way Bethany’s fingers stiffen as they walk down the stairs to the lowest level of the basement, and she wonders again if it was cruel to let her back up above ground every so often without actually granting her as much freedom as Steph. The last time this happened, they’d only gone as far as the first basement level, and still Bethany’s grip on Steph’s hand tightened on the way back down; Steph had led her quietly to her room and held her tight until she reacclimated, until she once again became the version of her who exists down here: a little more wary, a little less bright; a little less. But more prone to talk a lot.
She can’t do that today. They have a job to do.
But she can at least hug her, and that’s what she does, pulling on her to get her to move more quickly and then rounding the corner to the bedrooms quickly enough that the women following them are left far behind. They duck into Steph’s room, shut the door, and Bethany collapses into her arms.
Steph surrounds her.
“We can’t—” Steph says.
“I know,” Bethany says.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know that, too.” And then Bethany shakes herself, kisses Steph on the cheek, and steps away. “How do we get ourselves into these situations?”
Steph’s already at the wardrobe, pulling out fresh clothes for the both of them; basement-issue joggers and hoodies, one set from her side of the wardrobe and one from Bethany’s. “Don’t ask that question around Indira. She probably has an itemised list ready to go.”
Bethany holds up her first finger and attempts Indira’s South London accent. “‘January first, two thousand and one: hit another boy with a Transformers toy in playgroup.’” She adds another finger. “‘January second, same year: came at the boy again; bigger Transformers toy; more sensitive strike area.’”
“Clean clothes,” Steph says, throwing one of the sets of clothes at her. “Wear them.”
“Fine,” Bethany replies in a mock-whine, but she obliges, stripping off her dirties.
It started out as such an ordinary day: get horribly tortured in the morning (via small needle probes for Steph and a hair-obliterating laser for Bethany) and then spend the entire afternoon feeling sorry for themselves. Possibly scamming the sponsors out of some convalescent chocolate. And while the chocolate had gone fine — and, shit, she still has Raph’s biscuits in the pocket of the hoodie she just took off — everything else went to shit.
She and Bethany had ended up in a huddle with Melissa, Shahida, Rachel, Amy and Jane, watching everything go down from a discreet distance. Steph had had a bit of trouble getting Bethany away from Maria, but Edy clearly wanted some privacy, and she wasn’t in any actual danger, so Steph tactfully suggested Bethany come over and spend some time with Melissa. She is, after all, practically Steph’s sister. It led to some whining about how Maria is Bethany’s sister with a capital S, and that surely that wins out, but Steph was always going to win; if nothing else, of the two of them, she’s slightly stronger, and can physically drag Bethany, if necessary. She might, she told her, even consider a leash.
Bethany said that was hot, which prompted Steph simply to leave, to walk back over to Melissa’s group on her own, secure in the knowledge that Bethany would probably follow, if only so she could ask questions like, what if I pulled on the leash, what if I pulled hard, what would you do?
She did. Steph was a little proud.
So they got together with the others, but the conversation quickly faltered. Rachel left first, saying she needed to apologise to her wife, with flowers and her favourite takeaway and other, less specifically described things. Melissa and Shahida tried to exit shortly after, but were intercepted.
“Steph?” Indira says, via the speaker over the bed. “Beth? Now I’ve got you alone, I need to ask you to keep an eye on Amy. Just to make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid. And Shahida, when she comes back down.”
“Isn’t that Jane’s job?” Steph asks.
“And it’s yours, too.”
“Question,” Bethany says, “are you going to pay me?”
“Yes,” Indira says, so quickly and so straightforwardly that Bethany drops the sock she’s about to put on. “Standard junior sponsor rate. For however long this takes.”
“Okay. Well. Shit. There goes almost my entire objection.” Then she smirks and looks up at the ceiling, towards one of the cameras. “Say, warden,” she says, performing an accent so terribly it takes Steph a moment to guess that it’s probably supposed to be Texan, “are you gonna give us more library time, too? Maybe a football to throw about in the yard? While you’re feelin’ awful generous.”
“Bethany,” Indira says, “I remind you that I do have that list, and I can read to you from it whenever you like.”
Upstairs, Indira explained that not only did practically every sponsor already have her hands full — with Frankie; with Trevor; with Maria’s problem — but the sponsors on duty in the security room and the basement were still on duty and had been since early in the morning. And with it being the weekend, and the last one before the proper start of the semester, most of the off-duty sponsors were offsite and difficult to bring back at short notice. Tabby is going to be pulling double duty: taking care of Trevor when he gets back from being sewn up, and watching Frankie, which is why Frankie, for now, is locked in one of the rooms out back.
Steph asked about the third-year sponsors — she never seems to see them around; surely they can help — and was told that the third year of sponsorship is generally the most loose, and much latitude is allowed for time away. If, by her third year, one’s girl-in-training can’t function on her own most of the time, she’s probably not going to graduate that year, anyway. In short, they’re mostly off campus.
Bethany swears at the speaker in the ceiling and Indira passes on her love, and then it’s time for them to join the others in the common room. Lisa, the only other third-year sponsor onsite today, is in the main kitchen, hurrying through preparing a basic dinner, with Shahida’s help, and with everyone else either busy, exhausted or away, that leaves the job of monitoring the boys in the basement to Jane, Steph, Bethany… and Melissa and Amy.
Melissa had been reluctant to take the job, but she agreed to help out. Amy then invited herself along.
“You’re not a graduate,” Tabby pointed out.
“I can fake it,” Amy said. “Check me out—” and she held up an imaginary mug, “—I just got this back from Funny Mugs Dot Com: Hurt People Hurt People, and, see, I added a bit by hand that says, Intentionally.” She did a little curtsey. “What do you think?”
Tabby responded by slapping Jane lightly on her upper arm. “You’re not allowed to kiss any more outsider girls, Jane,” she said.
Officially, and as far as the other inhabitants of the basement are supposed to be concerned, neither Steph nor Bethany has any role other than reluctant girl-in-training, so it’s Jane who’s going to relieve the sponsors currently camped out in the common room. Which is why she’s waiting for them in the corridor, with crossed arms and a surfeit of irritation, and Melissa and Amy hovering behind her.
“What took you so long?” she whispers.
Steph gestures at the two of them. “We had to get changed. We were gross. Do you know how uncomfortably sweaty you can get after two hours of electrolysis?”
Jane’s expression softens. “Well, yeah. Come on, then.”
In the common room, Pamela practically collapses with relief when she sees Jane in the doorway, and then she frowns, as the faces that follow her are less encouraging. She looks around to make sure her lips can’t be seen, and then she mouths, Amy? at Jane. Jane just shrugs.
Harmony joins them at the door, and they have a quick, whispered conversation, with everyone bar Jane still hidden in the corridor.
“How’re things upstairs?” Pamela says. “Because down here they’ve been tense as hell. Ollie’s out of his cell, and, oh yeah, Ollie’s out of his cell, and that wasn’t my idea and apparently it wasn’t Harmony’s, either.”
“Maria said, since we’re bare bones today, he should be in gen pop,” Harmony says. “And he’s not been a problem, Ella; he’s just been sitting there. I’m a bit worried about him, actually.”
“Him ‘just sitting there’ might be the problem, Harmony! Will’s pretty different from how he was and even Raphael’s been borderline pleasant, but Ollie’s the same guy who hung out with Declan! He’s the same guy who helped Will attack Maria! He scares me.”
“Yeah,” Jane says, “I know. He kind of scares me, too. Look, Pam, just go rest, okay? We’ve got this.”
“Do you actually?” Pamela says. “Because the only sponsor I see here is you, Jane.”
“We’ve been drafted,” Steph says. Beth nods and Melissa shrugs.
“I volunteered,” Amy says.
“Oh? And what will you do if Ollie comes running at you?” Pamela snaps.
Amy pats her pocket. “Zap him.”
“Will you, now?”
“I was pretty good at laser tag as a kid.”
“Reassuring.”
“Pam,” Jane says, “get some sleep.” She glances at Harmony with raised eyebrows, and Harmony nods, takes Pamela by the shoulder and starts to lead her out. “All right,” Jane continues, when it’s just the five of them, “Steph, Bethany, you know the drill. Hang out, chat, be normal. Bethany, today would be a bad day to push people’s buttons.”
“But what if I really feel like backsliding?”
“Save it for Maria. Melissa, you know what to do?”
“Not really,” Melissa says, “but I remember what it was like to be them. Kinda. I can be aloof and mildly threatening, I think.”
“Good. You’ve got my utmost confidence. Amy, you good?”
“Hang out, keep my distance, pretend not to know those two.” She nods at Steph. “And electro-murder anyone who comes at me.”
“Let’s go, then.”
* * *
The Grants’ house, positioned roughly centrally in a row of terraced houses, has no space available on the street in front of it, nor anywhere near it, and Christine hides a smile as Paige grumbles under her breath, looking for somewhere to park. Eventually, Paige gives up and announces that she’ll stay in the car and keep it idling. She’ll do a lap if any other cars come up behind her.
“Be quick,” she says as Christine and Pippa hop out.
“Wish us luck,” Christine replies, and they exchange blown kisses. By the time they’re halfway up the moss-dotted path to the front door, Paige is already gunning the engine and starting her first lap, so a supermarket delivery van can get past.
The front door is bright orange and looks recently painted. There’s a bell, but it doesn’t play a tune. Christine presses it twice, anyway; the dong-dong sound is pretty satisfying.
“Coming!” Mrs Grant yells from inside, and when she opens the door, she still has oven gloves on. “Christine!” she exclaims, pulling them off, depositing them on the key table just inside, and grasping Christine by both hands, the better to drag her inside. “How wonderful to see you again! And… who is this handsome young woman?”
“Pippa,” Pippa says, as the front door closes behind her. “Hi. I’m a friend.” She follows Christine’s lead and kicks off her boots, places them in the clearly marked ‘guest’ spot on the shoe rack.
“Are you—” and here Mrs Grant lowers her voice, “—‘part of the family’?” Christine can hear the quote marks lock into place, and wonders if Abby’s told her parents any more about her history, or if that’s just her mother’s way of referencing the trans community in general.
Pippa doesn’t hesitate for a moment. “Just a cis girl,” she says, sticking faithfully to her NPH. “Oh, ‘cis’ means—”
“Don’t worry!” booms another voice, and Abby’s father comes out into the hall. “Abigail’s given us all the information we need! We’re up on the terms now.”
“We joined a support group,” Mrs Grant says. “Lovely people. Do you know, the woman who runs it is famous! Been on the news!”
Christine wants nothing more at this point than to sink into a hole in the ground and see if there are any locally accessible basements who need an IT technician, or possibly just an emotional punching bag. Because, yes, while there are umpteen support groups for the parents of trans people, there’s only one she can think of that is regularly visited by — and technically administered by — a woman who’s been on the news. Multiple times.
“Oh? Who’s that?” Pippa asks, presumably because someone has to.
“Aasha’s her name,” Robert Grant says, ushering them through into what turns out to be the living room. It’s cosy, done up in warm, earthy colours with brighter green accents: cushions, bookshelves, and the cloth over the dining table at the far end. “Forget her surname,” he adds, frowning.
“Chetry,” Christine says. “Aasha Chetry.”
Mrs Grant claps her hands. “You know her!”
“I know her daughter.” Her daughter saved my life, Christine doesn’t say, and Aasha Chetry is one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met.
“Small world,” Mr Grant says, and then cups his hands to his mouth and leans back out of the living room door. “Abigail! Company!”
And a familiar voice yells out, “Coming, Dad!”
When Abby arrives in the doorway and sees Christine and Pippa, she doesn’t react the way Christine expects. Abby’s been distant for a while, emotionally and physically, and Christine’s slowly convinced herself — though this is a fear she hasn’t shared, even with Paige — that Abby’s decided she’s better off cutting everyone from the Hall out of her life altogether. That the breakdown of her faltering relationship with Melissa and the subsequent arrival of Shahida, a woman who can be for Melissa everything Abby can’t, was the last straw.
But Abby launches immediately into a hug, and even, after a moment, beckons in a bemused Pippa. Abby squeezes so hard, Christine thinks her ribs might crack.
“I’ve missed you, Chrissy,” she whispers.
“I’ve missed you, too,” Christine replies, and she wonders how she ever could have doubted her Sister.
* * *
Frankie remembers this room. She remembers most of them, especially the ones on the ground floor, the ones where the girls were brought to visit with guests. She remembers the first time she oversaw such a session, remembers the thrill it brought her, the gleeful, vengeful satisfaction.
The feeling didn’t last. It didn’t take all that long, really, to get it through her thick fucking head that these were just girls — or boys, or men, or whatever — who’d done nothing particularly wrong, usually; nothing beyond stealing for food or for fun, or the occasional spot of light GBH. And there, but for the grace of Dorothy, went Frankie.
No, they were just girls, because she never could stop doing that, never could stop seeing it in their vulnerability, their innocence, and, as she got older and the intakes did not, their youth. Such things have always been girlish to Frankie, and though she’s aware of it as a character defect — and a pretty fucking severe one, recently — she’s never sought to correct it. In the past, it nurtured her growing conscience as much as it buttressed her nightmares; now, she’s just too bloody old to change.
They were just girls, and she brought them to these rooms so that they could be humiliated. Held down. Hurt. Sometimes they never came out, and in those instances, it didn’t matter whose hand did the deed; it always felt like Frankie’s were the filthiest.
It occurs to her that, were she male and still young, the modern programme at Dorley Hall would take one look at her and wash her out, same as Declan.
Oh, well. She never claimed to have the moral high ground. And at least the room has a pool table in it, now, and briefly contained two more of the tall and pretty girls of Dorley, whom Tabitha brought quickly up to speed and who decided to go out for dinner rather than stick around.
Sensible.
Beatrice’ll be along to deal with her when she’s good and ready, she was told, so here she waits, next to the pool table, in a room stained with blood.
Frankie indulges herself in a little cry. Of frustration, mostly: she did what she set out to do, she got Val and Trev back to Dorley, back to safety, back to their people, and she even survived, which was unexpected. But, briefly, she hoped to be useful after that, to provide information on Dotty, on the layout of Stenordale, on the likely plans going forward. But Stenordale’s gone, and Dorothy’s fucked off, and if she’s fucked off with Declan, the way Beatrice’s girls think she has, Frankie’ll find a hat and eat it. Without someone to stand between them, Declan could knock Dorothy over with a feather.
Which leaves Declan dead or in the wind or recaptured by Silver River. It leaves Dorothy probably having gone to ground. And it leaves Silver River and the bastard Smyth-Farrows, heirs to their hated father’s legacy, fuck only knows where. It’d be lovely if she had the first clue what the Smyth-Farrows’ plans are, save that they want to start it all up again. They won’t have Dorothy’s expertise, but the old cow was overblowing it, anyway; if you don’t want functional girls, you can do what you want to any man and get something superficially girlish who will function for long enough to have a little fun, and if you do that for long enough, you’ll luck into another Val, another Beatrice, another Maria, another Barbara.
Another Rhia. Another Naomi. Another Kelly.
Another corpse.
It’s a good job there’s a metal bin in the corner of the room, because Frankie fills it. Not much in her stomach but acid, but up it all comes, anyway.
She’s useless. She’s useless and she’s stupid and she’s very, very guilty. No jury would take more than thirty seconds to convict her. Throw away the key.
Just get her out of here. Put her somewhere in this godforsaken building where she hasn’t overseen the debasement and ultimate destruction of so many people.
The lock turns. Frankie drops the bin. Turns around, expecting the girl Tabitha, who dropped her off here, or Indira, the one who was leading the ‘civil conversation’ in the kitchen.
No.
In the doorway, silhouetted against the darkening corridor, is Maria.
“Frankie,” she says.
“Shit, Maria,” Frankie babbles, “you shouldn’t be up and about, you were practically fainting a few minutes ago, let me get you a chair or something, let me call for—”
“If you raise your voice,” Maria says levelly, “I will tase you. And when you’re down, I will cut you.”
Frankie has nothing to say to that. With her sleeve she wipes at the corner of her mouth, where a spot of stomach acid irritates her lip.
Maria steps inside, and her gait is wobbly, uncertain. Her eyes, though, remain locked on Frankie’s, and Frankie would do anything to escape them. Anything except apologise; it wouldn’t matter how much she might mean it, to do so would be the worst insult imaginable.
“Would you like me to cut you?” Maria says. Her ankle threatens to give way, but she adjusts her balance. Stabilises. Barely. “Karen always liked to cut me. Do you remember? I think you remember. She always threatened the vein. Never quite slicing it. I think she wanted me to do that part. To give up. To give in. To open the cuts myself. To tear just that little bit more.” She’s holding a knife, Frankie realises. Serrated; did she take it with her from the kitchen, or has she just been wandering around, unsupervised despite her state, collecting weapons? “I almost did it, Frankie. I could have torn myself open. With my nails. With my fucking teeth. And she wanted that, didn’t she, Frankie? Did she talk about me with you? Up there in the kitchen? Did she tell you how she longed to find me one morning, bleeding out in my bedroom?”
Frankie, not entirely steady on her feet herself, her eyes blurred from tears, her gut emptied and sore, her joints failing her, wonders if she can catch Maria before she falls without getting a knife in her belly.
“Karen was a psychopath,” she says.
“And you weren’t?”
“No, I was.”
Maria rests her knife hand on the edge of the pool table, fingers splayed, the knife trapped under her palm, scraping against the polished wood as she advances. “You want me to think you’ve changed? You expect forgiveness, just because you show up after fifteen years with Valérie Barbier and some wounded stray?”
“No,” Frankie says, “I never expected forgiveness. I would never ask for it.”
The knife carves a groove in the wood.
“Do you know who I was? You don’t, do you? Not really. You don’t even know the name I had when I came here. You only know what Karen and Dorothy twisted it into. I bet they didn’t even write it down.” She stops, gathering her balance once again. Leans against the pool table, the tips of her slender fingers caressing the knife handle. “They wouldn’t have the first idea how. I think that was the worst thing, Frankie. Dorothy imprisoned me and Karen cut me and Dorothy had me castrated and they both made me do things but the worst thing, Frankie, the worst thing, was that after they murdered my family, they called me Nic. They found a sound from my name and they stripped it out and even then they couldn’t say it right and they branded me with it just as much as they scarred my skin. Call me Nic, Frankie. Go on. Like you used to.”
“No.”
Maria leans a hip against the pool table. Scoops up the knife. Points the blade at her. Barely a few feet away. Just one lunge would do it. Just one lunge would end it, even if Maria fell.
“Call me Nic.”
“I won’t.”
“Do you want me to cut you?”
She has left only honesty. “I don’t care.”
“You were there, Frankie!” Maria says, and it’s almost a wail this time, a sudden loosening of her throat, because if she can’t prise the things that were done to her out of Frankie’s skin then she will fucking scream them, she will spit blood at the sky, and Frankie understands her more in that moment than she ever did. Fifteen years ago, when she watched a kind boy be abused and altered. When she watched him survive. When she watched him evolve into someone who would ultimately help wrench Dorothy’s entire regime out from under her. Someone who kept her kindness, honed it, and with it built a home to support her sisters and Beatrice and generations of new girls. “You were there! She was cutting into me and you were in the next room! And when they pulled me out and they took me up here… Up here… Into this room. This room, Frankie! The other girls, they don’t know. I never come in here or any of a dozen others, but they don’t know. They put a fucking pool table in here. They put you in here. In this… this fucking room.”
Old soldiers, Frankie remembers. Val spoke of it. At the time, Frankie had been almost flattered.
“I know,” she says.
Maria gestures with the knife. “That corner. There was… Shit. It was a woman. They were mostly men, weren’t they? But, occasionally, there was a woman. And they didn’t like to touch. Not me, anyway. And this one… She watched. She made me—”
“Don’t say it,” Frankie says. Interrupting her is chancing it, it’s risking provoking her, but she has to stop this, or Maria will get herself caught in a loop. She’ll resurrect every horror, every crime that was wrought upon her body, every claw that was raked across her soul, and she will never be free of it.
Such is for the guilty, not the innocent.
“She made me—”
“Maria!” Frankie says. She pushes forward. Catches Maria’s wrist, knife still pointing wildly outwards. Ignores it. If it cuts her, it cuts her. “Stop this, Maria.” She speaks the way she did with Declan, with Dina, with whoever that was who lay wounded in her bed. “This isn’t you. This was never you. This is what was done to you. But it isn’t what made you.” It’s what she would say to Val, if Val ever showed weakness for more than a moment. It’s what she would say to Trev, if Trev ever would accept it from her. It’s what she would say to Dina, if Dina ever were to return. She barely knows this girl, knew only the child made subservient to Karen Turner more than fifteen years ago, but she’s here and they’re not and though she’s just as unlikely to accept help from her — more so — she might just be vulnerable enough to have no other choice. “You were just a child, Maria,” Frankie says, in the steadiest, kindest voice she can manage. “A prisoner. And we were monsters. Forget about what we did, if you can. Focus on who you are.”
“Fuck you,” Maria whispers. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you—”
She slips, and Frankie quickly grabs her other arm so she doesn’t fall. In Maria’s weakened grip, the knife falls from her hand and lands point-first on the pool table, where it sticks for a moment, before toppling.
“I’ve got you,” Frankie says.
“You’ve got me,” Maria sneers, “oh, yeah, you’ve got me. You going to fuck me, Frankie? You going to have some fun, Frankie?”
Frankie’s stuck. Holding her. Doesn’t know what to do with her. Can’t let go: she’d go for the knife; she’d fall and hurt herself; both. Maria’s got nothing in the tank but fumes now. Hate’s not enough to keep you upright when it’s all you have.
Maria’s probably going to spit in her face or something. Wouldn’t be Frankie’s first time.
“Maria—” she tries.
“Why are you here?” Maria croaks. “Why did you come back?” Frankie glances behind her, hooks her ankle around a chair, drags it over. “Why couldn’t you have died out there?” Maria’s saying, her voice a wet rattle in her throat. “Do you even know how many of us you killed? How many of my sisters?”
Sisters. It’s a funny thing, Frankie reflects, as she lowers Maria onto the chair. Val thinks this way, too: thinks of all the people who were abused by Dorothy’s Dorley as her sisters, even though most of them claimed their manhood right up to their end.
But it’s not all that different to Frankie, really. She can’t stop thinking of Declan as a girl. Can’t help but remember everyone who passed through her hands as girls, no matter what they claimed. An affectation of conscience, of regret, of guilt, of internalised misogyny, perhaps. Funny that the better side of her is still so repellent.
Or is this new? She likes to tell herself that she softened on her girls, but is that the guilt talking, too? She doesn’t know. Memories are unreliable enough in your sixties; more so, when you’d rather not confront them in all their grisly detail.
Frankie drops into another chair, a decent distance from Maria. At least the girl isn’t about to injure herself any more. Or injure Frankie.
“I kept count,” Frankie says. “So, yeah, I know.”
Maria mumbles something like, “Fucking bet you did,” and then nothing comes out of her for a while. She’s still conscious; she’s just unable.
They sit. Waiting.
In the end, neither of them makes the next move. The door, sat slightly ajar for their whole confrontation, opens slowly, and the dusty blonde one looks carefully inside. Takes in Maria, head down, breathing slowly and shallowly; Frankie, sprawled on a chair at the back of the room, undignified and unladylike. Frankie only realises she’s sat there with her legs apart and her head lolled when she’s looked at, when she’s forced to see herself as someone else would, and another memory crawls the length of her spine:
She used to do this on purpose. Karen and the others, they were all quite feminine, if a bit posh about it, and Dorothy, she had the dignity of age, and of someone who in childhood was probably whipped with a belt if she ever opened her legs in a skirt. But Frankie always liked to lounge, to cut her hair short, to emphasise to the poor boys they were making look and dress and preen like pretty young things that she was exempt from all that, that she got to choose.
Amazing how she found cruelty in everything. What a skillset.
“Edith…” Maria whispers. “’m sorry.”
“If you need help with her,” Frankie says, “you’d better get someone else to do it.” With her eyes, she gestures at the pool table, where the knife is somewhere in the green.
“I’ve got her,” Edith says, and crouches in front of Maria. Lays a hand on each of her thighs. “Maria? You don’t need to apologise. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you, not even for a minute. Tab needed to talk, and— Never mind.”
“What’s up with Tabitha?” Maria murmurs. There’s a bit more strength behind her voice, though; she’s coming back to herself.
Edith glances at Frankie. “Tell you later.” And back at Maria, smiling gently for her, waiting for her. “I’ll take you home, Maria. You need to rest.”
Maria finally raises her head, meets Edith’s eyes, and the rage and the years fall away, and Frankie understands with absolute clarity the depth and sincerity of their love for each other. Understands that it blossomed here, in the places that made Frankie filthy.
She wants to vomit again.
“Will you stay with me?” Maria says.
“Of course I will, sweetheart,” Edith replies.
Edith takes Maria’s weight. Not all of it, for Maria is coming back to herself, wants to support herself. She doesn’t hang in Edith’s arms any more, not like in the kitchen.
At the door, Edith turns around, says to Frankie, “You don’t have to stay here. You shouldn’t have to, I mean. I can have someone watch you. I can—”
“No,” Frankie says, “it’s fine. I’ll stay.”
Edith nods, and the door closes and locks behind them.
She’ll stay. With her memories, with her guilt, with the knowledge that she made every possible mistake. Maria’s knife, the hatred in her eyes; Frankie deserves it a thousand times over.
She’ll stay. In the place where she made the girls under her dubious care do awful things, suffer every indignity. Where she forced them to unmake themselves. Where, every time, she chose herself and her own survival instead of theirs.
She’ll stay.
Someone has to.
* * *
They don’t, as an amateur sponsor group, make the best first impression, and Amy’s willing to let most of that lie on her head. She lets Jane go in first, heroically resisting the temptation to hold her hand and establish her claim on her, just so the boys don’t get the wrong idea. Amy follows her in at a chaste distance, but stops short straight away, and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t successfully hide her surprise: this place is bloody depressing.
It’s a concrete box. Oh, there are sofas and a half-million bean bag chairs and plenty of places to sit and read, though they are made of metal and bolted to the floor and don’t look all that comfortable; one of the boys, Martin, is sat at one of the metal tables, and as he looks up from his book and frowns at them, he wriggles his back against the rigid seat. There’s a TV on the wall and cabinets running along nearby, and an instinct Amy buried after her last ever week at summer camp instructs her to avoid them, because they probably contain board games.
Melissa and the others sort of pile up behind her, but she’s not done looking around. There’s Raphael, Jane’s boy, to whom Jane accidentally let everything slip, early this morning. She said she wasn’t sure how he took it, but right now he’s pretty relaxed, with his legs up on the arm of the sofa nearest the telly and head resting lightly on his folded arms. Amy cocks her head at him, unconsciously, and tries to see how the estrogen’s changed him already. He’ll be a tall girl, that’s for sure, but that’s hardly unusual around here.
There’s Martin, of course, propping his chin on his hand and putting his book down, watching them with polite interest. And there’s Ollie. He’s not actually in the common area; he’s sitting at the lunch table in the adjoining room. The door through’s been left open, so he’s not cut off from everyone, but he’s separated. And he either hasn’t noticed their entry or he doesn’t care. Jane said he was bounced briefly into the cells again, and only let out a few hours ago just to reduce the number of people required to keep an eye on everyone, and to watch herself around him, though if Amy’s half the expert at body language she sometimes pretends to be, Ollie could go hours without even acknowledging the existence of anyone else right now.
Will, Tab’s one, he’s on another of the sofas near the TV. He looked up when they all came in — correction: when Amy came in and immediately announced her obvious unfamiliarity with everything by just standing there and bloody well staring — and now he’s craning his neck to look around her. Steph and Bethany are next into the room, and he nods at one or both of them. It’s such a masculine gesture, so much the thing she would expect to see self-conscious teen boys greeting each other with, that she smiles, and it unglues her, sets her in motion. She angles over to the metal tables, picks the one next to Martin’s table and sits, choosing a seat that gives her a view of everyone.
“Hi,” she says to the room.
“You’re new,” Martin says.
She shrugs. Three separate Dorley girls, Jane included, told her to pretend to be one of them. “I just don’t take shifts that often,” she says.
God, she’s glad she got Jane to give her the rundown on all the boys the other night, or she’d be totally lost. She’d probably be cosying up to Ollie, or something. Score one for morbid curiosity.
Wait; where’s Adam?
The others take up their positions. Steph and Bethany slouch onto the sofa next to Raph; Steph uses the packet of chocolate digestives she brought him as a lure, directing him like a fisherwoman reeling in her biggest catch of the day, to get him to move his legs. Liss takes one of the sofas by the door, trying to conceal her obvious discomfort with a too-casual flop into the cushions. She immediately rests her taser in her lap, covering it with both hands. It is still incredibly obvious.
Jane joins Amy, picking the seat next to hers, and rests her weapon much more casually on the table. “Dinner soon,” she announces to the room, and when she receives a handful of nods and grunts, she turns her attention to her taser, balancing it on the metal table with her thumb on one end, and twisting it idly around.
Amy takes the opportunity to ask the question on her mind. “Where’s Adam?” she whispers.
Jane snatches up her taser and leans in close to reply. “In his room, as usual. Don’t expect him to show up for dinner, either; someone’ll send something down in the dumbwaiter, or Edy’ll go see him later. I haven’t seen his face in… Shit, I don’t know how long.”
“Jay, that seems kinda scary! Isn’t complete social isolation sort of…?” She mimes stabbing someone, and does the noises from Psycho.
“I mean, everyone who’s down here is here for being a bit scary. Except Steph.”
“Adam’s really okay, all alone like that?”
“Pretty much. Sometimes they need a lot of alone time to get used to it. Granted, his is going on kinda long, but he’s Edy’s problem, not mine, and if she says she’s handling it, she’s handling it.”
“Is she?”
“She’s more senior’n me,” Jane says. “So, probably?” She leans back, raises her voice. “Hey, Raph! Don’t eat too many of those; you’ll ruin your dinner!”
Raph, now sitting more or less upright, having made room for Steph and Bethany, turns around to face her with a chocolate digestive sticking out of his mouth, and shows her two fingers.
“Very funny,” she says. “Now you owe me a biscuit.”
When he stands, Raph moves differently to how Amy expected, especially after Will’s amusing little head nod. She wanted him to move like a swaggering football player, like the boys she used to notice when she was a teenager, but he steps carefully instead, watching where he places his feet, keeping his hands inside his frame. He navigates around a few scattered bean bag chairs and sits at Jane and Amy’s table, on the far side. And, seeing him upright, he’s taller than her and Jane, but not as tall as she thought; maybe five eleven, five ten.
He sets down the packet of digestive biscuits vertically on the table, and then pushes them across the metal surface, like he’s a barman in a Western.
Jane catches them. “Thanks, Raph,” she says.
“Don’t ruin your dinner,” he says. “Hi, Amy.”
“Oh,” Amy says, “hi.”
Jane pauses, a biscuit halfway to her mouth. “I didn’t tell you her name, did I?”
Raphael smirks. “Got my sources, made a guess,” he says. After a slightly uncomfortable moment, he adds, “Hey, listen, is, uh, is everything okay? Upstairs? Pamela and Harmony were all stressed out, and even that other one, Nell, even she seemed…”
“Also stressed out?” Jane suggests.
“Yeah.”
“God.” Jane slumps a little. Gesticulates with half a digestive as she talks. “It’s just another crazy day in a crazy house. But crazier than usual. Sorry, Raph; the shifts are all messed up today.”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter to us. Been as boring as ever down here. Steph did her disappearing act again, and took Beth with her, but I’m used to that now. And I got biscuits out of it. And fuck knows about Adam. But, Jane, why’d you let Ollie out? He was barely in the cell five minutes.”
“More like five hours,” Jane says, “but, yeah. Wasn’t my decision.”
“Look,” he says, “I know she’s probably knackered, but maybe you should get Harmony back down here soon. He needs someone whose job it is to keep an eye on him. Since he got back he’s just been… sitting there.”
“Is that bad?” Amy asks.
“Normally he does things. Like, he’ll poke at his arm with a plastic fork or some shit, or he’ll say something really fucking stupid and one of us won’t be able to let it lie, and there’ll be a huge argument, or—”
“It’s usually you who can’t let it lie, Raph,” Jane interrupts.
“Yeah, it is. That’s how I noticed. He’s been doing nothing, Jane. Just fucking staring at the table. For hours.”
“Maybe we should get him a big plate of mashed potato,” Bethany calls, from the sofa, “and see if he sculpts anything psychologically revealing.”
Raph hides his smile and shows Bethany his middle finger. Amy catches his eye and he shakes his head minutely at her, sharing with her… something? She’s sure she’s supposed to be reading something from that look he just gave her, but she’s bloody well fucked if she knows what. He doesn’t seem right.
She quickly does the maths in her head: he’s been here since, what, early October? And Jane said they restricted their testosterone right away and started estrogen a few weeks later. So that’s… somewhere around thirteen or fourteen weeks to turn someone like Raph, who by all accounts was controlling and self-important and not particularly pleasant to be around, especially if you were his girlfriend, into someone who gives you cryptic looks and shares his biscuits with the woman who controls his life.
“Anyway,” Raph says, “that’s what I wanted to say.”
“Thank you, Raphael.”
“Yeah. Can I have my biscuits back?”
“Oh, sure,” Jane says, and swipes two before sweeping the packet back across the table towards him.
“Thanks,” he says. He doesn’t get up, though; he seems distracted.
“Raph?” Jane prompts.
“Can we talk? Sometime? Not tonight. I know.” He frowns in Amy’s direction. “You’ll be busy. But I just… I have to know more. About all of it. I’m thinking about it. A lot. But it’s big. Too big. I need to know about other people. Other people who were like me.”
“Sure,” Jane says warmly. “Of course. And don’t worry, Raph. You’ll be fine.”
“Easy for you to say,” he says, but he still has the faintest hint of a smile, and when he stands, he nods at Amy, and while it’s just like Will’s, it’s not as funny this time. His politeness, his superficial kindness, masks something deeper. Fear, maybe.
Well, yeah, fear obviously. Fear of exactly what, Amy’s still trying to guess.
Her hand finds Jane’s, and Jane squeezes hers.
“I know,” Jane whispers.
“How do you deal with it?”
Jane bumps shoulders with her. “I look in the mirror every morning, and I remember being him. Seeing a face like that looking back at me. It’s a journey, Ames. He’s just starting out. But he’ll be okay.”
“And Ollie?” Amy asks, glancing into the lunch room at the near-motionless man. “Adam?”
“Not my job,” Jane says.
* * *
Abby spends the journey back catching up with Christine and Paige and chatting with Pippa, who she never knew as well as she wanted to, and then they’re there, at the Hall, and she feels more than a little silly for assuming she could turn her back on the place for even a month. But Aunt Bea needs to talk to her, in person— Correction: Aunt Bea ‘would like’ to talk to her, according to Christine, and Abby knows better than to wait for a request from Beatrice to become an order.
Christine also promised that it wasn’t her who leaked it, but apparently the whole sponsor body and most of the live-in girls now know where Abby’s been. She’s been thinking about that all the way back, and still doesn’t know how to feel about it. She was always jealous of Indira, so she should probably prepare herself for some mild hostility of the sort she experienced when first she reconnected with her family…
Then again, apparently the rolling disaster at Dorley Hall has expanded over the last twenty-four hours to include more or less the entire distributed British forced feminisation network — or the parts any of them know about, anyway — so even the girls who miss their families probably won’t have time to be mad at her for ignoring all the rules they’ve forced themselves to live by.
Mind you, that’s a group that includes Pippa, and she’s been nothing but sweetness and light.
That’ll be it, though, won’t it? They won’t be jealous; or they won’t be just jealous. They’ll be hopeful. Abby broke the rules. Combined with Indira’s successful but carefully monitored reunion, that’s two Dorley girls who’ve returned to their families. It doesn’t matter that Abby didn’t have permission; now the secret’s out, it makes it that much more likely that someone else will be emboldened to have a go. And just because Abby was careful, doesn’t mean the next person to try it will be.
And she wasn’t all that careful, now she comes to analyse her actions, now she’s walking in through the front door, trying to anticipate every angle of attack from Aunt Bea. She met them in Almsworth, for Christ’s sake! That’s just down the road! Hell, she took Christine along!
No, she wasn’t careful. She was reckless.
Oh, well. If she has to be made an example of, at least she got to see her family again. At least they know she’s alive. They know her name. They know a version of her they can be proud of, a version she can be proud of, whether that’s Abigail Meyer or Abigail Grant.
Huh. The place is… kind of empty.
“Chrissy,” she says, her voice echoing in the late afternoon kitchen in a way it really ought not, “where is everyone?”
“No idea,” Christine says. “When we left, it felt like everyone in the building was trying to squeeze through these doors.” She taps on the frame as they pass through into the dining hall; also empty.
“Um,” Pippa says, trying not to sound panicked, “no-one’s updating the— Oh.” She taps at her phone a bit more. “Indira’s in the security room. She’ll know what’s going on.”
“I don’t know what’s so confusing,” Paige says, following them in and walking past them, striding towards the stairs. When they don’t follow, she stops, turning around with her hands on her hips and a delicate, frustrated pinch between her eyebrows, as if she can’t believe what idiots they all are. “It’s obvious what’s happened. The youngest woman, she was injured, so she’ll be out back, with a chaperone, getting that seen to; the oldest woman, she was one of Grandmother’s, so she’ll be somewhere else with another chaperone; and the other one was Valérie, the woman Beatrice’s been mourning for decades, so they’ll be together, too. Maria was in a bad way when we left, so that’s Edy accounted for. And the shift downstairs was getting long in the tooth when we left, so they’ll have to have been relieved. And there just weren’t that many sponsors around today; we’re still running light after the holiday.”
Christine nods. “So the second years’ll all be upstairs, with one sponsor—”
“And everyone else will be in the basement,” Paige finishes. “Except for Indira, apparently.”
“You really do know everything. You should run this place.”
“No.”
“She’s in the security room,” Pippa says again, proffering her phone. “I’ll, um, go check in with her. I mean, you’re right, Paige, I’m sure, but—”
Paige laughs and languidly waves her off. “Go. I’m not offended. I need a shower, anyway. But,” she adds, “I can check on the second years first, if that’ll make you feel better.”
“Just put something in the group chat?”
“I will.”
Paige reaches out, beckoning Christine toward her, and they share a kiss — quite a long one, with Christine leaning in and up, her back arched — before Paige smiles at Abby and heads off up the stairs. To her other side, Pippa shrugs, waves to both of them, and jogs toward the ugly concrete basement entrance.
“Where to?” Christine asks, turning to Abby. She’s a bit flushed, and—
“Chrissy, you have so much lipstick on your face.”
“Occupational hazard.”
Abby hands her a wipe as Christine digs in her bag for the little folding mirror Paige made her start carrying around, and she quickly cleans herself off and applies a bit of gloss.
“You’re not going to, uh…?” Abby mimes applying some pressed powder.
“Abs,” Christine says, “Aunt Bea’s lost love, or sister, or whoever, she came back today. I don’t think Beatrice’ll even notice if I’m a bit shiny.”
“Oh, I think she will.”
Christine shrugs her indifference, and starts walking away towards the stairs, until she realises Abby’s tugging on her sleeve, holding her back. She turns, puzzled, and that’s Abby’s opportunity to sweep in and hug her, to hold her even more tightly than she did back home.
She has no idea how this little thing of a girl — yes, okay, Christine’s taller than her, but so’re most people; Christine’s shortness is metaphorical — became so important to her in such a relatively short time, but she did, and time away from her has ached more and more the longer it’s gone on.
“Um, Abs?” Christine says. “Didn’t we do this already?”
“Yes,” Abby says, “but now it’s just us.”
“Oh. Okay.”
And Christine hugs her back, just as hard, resting her chin on Abby’s shoulder and nuzzling against her head.
In some ways, some very specific ways that have nothing to do with her growing anxiety about Beatrice or her concern over what she’ll even say to Melissa, and, shit, what about Shahida, what’s she even going to do about her? This is all—
Christine squeezes her. “Missed you,” she whispers.
“Missed you, too,” Abby says.
In some ways, it really is good to be back.
* * *
“I can’t put it in the office,” Béatrice says.
“Oh?”
“It wouldn’t feel right.” She pauses awkwardly, a long cream skirt in her hands. She fluffs it at Valérie. “What about this?”
“No, thank you.”
Béatrice re-racks the skirt and goes back to sifting through her wardrobe.
They fixed the mug together, and Val decided that, while the glue set — which it ought to have had more than enough time to do by now, but caution is its own reward — she would shower and wash her sweaty hair and finally change out of Trevor’s pretty but bloodstained sundress. She asked if Béatrice had anything she could borrow and now she’s here, wrapped in a sinfully luxurious robe, damp hair hanging limply around her face, looking through Béatrice’s clothes.
They’re all very middle-aged.
“Why would it not feel right?” she asks, after shaking her head to turn down another terrible skirt.
“It was Linda’s mug,” Béatrice says, sounding strangely young. “She gave it to me. It’s not a part of—” she waves a hand downwards, “—all this. When I met her, my life was… precarious. I was barely a girl, didn’t even know how to get my own hormones, couldn’t talk like this… She was like another mother. Her and Teri. For more than ten years, she supported me, encouraged me, helped me out with what little cash she had if I needed it. Loved me. And if she knew what I do here, what I’ve been doing… She wouldn’t approve, Valérie.”
Val leans against the wall. Despite her height, Béatrice looks very small here, holding her ugly skirt in both hands, kneading the hideous elasticated waistband with her fingers.
“And you think about that a lot,” Valérie says.
Béatrice shrugs like a disaffected teen. “I feel like I can hear her,” she says, “with every new intake. Every year. Asking me what the heck I think I’m doing to these boys. Telling me, in no uncertain terms, that there are real-life transsexuals out there who need saving. Asking me, kindly but firmly, if there is no other pursuit to which my life could be directed.”
“What do you say to her?”
Béatrice blinks at Val. Seems almost ready to drop the skirt. “What?” she asks eventually.
“When she asks you these questions, what do you say to her?”
“I… don’t. I don’t say anything.”
“Well,” Valérie says, “maybe you should. What would you say to me, if I asked you the same questions?”
That gets through to her. Béatrice laughs, a gentle little trickle of amusement, and returns the skirt to its place. “Truth be told, I half-expected you to slap me when you found out what I do.”
“I have had a while to get used to the idea. Frankie told me.”
“Of course she did.”
“And, no, I’m not going to slap you,” Val says. “Why would I?” Béatrice, by way of reply, simply gestures downwards again. Val rolls her eyes. “Would I have done it in your position? Probably not. Is it my problem? Absolutely not. Do I think you’re doing a bad thing? Well, your girls seem very nice. Even that tiny one who seems to have been on hormones for less than ten minutes. So, who can say?”
“You really aren’t bothered?”
Valérie leans closer. “No, Béatrice. You’ll notice that, unlike young Trevor, I am not shivering with fear at being seen by others? I am comfortable in my womanhood.” She prods gently at Béatrice’s arm. “You are comfortable in your womanhood. And I knew many girls who were, also. Or would have become so, had they lived.”
“Val—”
“Do not want to talk about them. Shouldn’t have raised the subject.” Shaking her head, flexing her fingers, Valérie clears her mind. She’s out. Out of Stenordale. And while Dorothy lives, there remains a chance she can find justice for the memories of the girls she buried. Maybe there’s even a chance Elle Lambert’s horrible military machine can be aimed at the odious Smyth-Farrow children, too. “Béatrice,” she says, leaning in again and picking at the hem of the skirt Béatrice is still holding, “what is this stuff? I never pictured you quite so… Oh, God, what is the word? Frankie used it constantly. To describe herself. Ah! Yes: frumpy. I never pictured you this frumpy, Béatrice.”
“‘Frumpy’?” Béatrice exclaims, contriving to sound both relieved and moderately offended.
Val flicks through the hangers. “You have barely any casual clothes, and you have hardly anything nice. Do you even have jeans?”
Throwing the skirt messily onto the bed, Béatrice says, “I have jeans.”
“Oh?” Valérie steps closer, challenging her. “Show me.”
Béatrice pushes her aside and starts sorting through the drawers set into the wardrobe. “I have jeans,” she repeats. “Just… not here, apparently.” She looks around, frowning. And then she lunges for her mobile telephone, one of those slablike colourful things, the things Valérie’s still trying forcibly to decouple from her earliest impression of them — that they are like the Guide from Hitchhiker’s Guide, a book series her father encouraged her to read to help with her English — because outside of the manor they seem to be everywhere. The association, if she lets it, bites deep at the back of her throat.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Look.” Béatrice activates the device and navigates through the interface at baffling speed until she alights upon a photograph of herself, wearing a canary-yellow top and, yes, blue jeans. She points at the screen. “Jeans,” she says. “I have jeans.”
“Very nice,” Valérie comments. It must be a recent picture, since she looks more or less identical, though she’s had her roots done in the time since.
“I stopped wearing them around the Hall so much. I have an image to maintain.”
Valérie makes bunny-ear quote marks with her fingers. “That of ‘Aunt Bea’?”
“Precisely. And one of the girls called me a MILF a few years ago. I was wearing jeans at the time. Rather… clingy jeans.”
“Dare I ask what a MILF is?”
“You can ask, but I won’t tell you,” Béatrice says.
Val smirks at her. “I’m going to get one of those… telephones, I imagine? I saw Frankie use one, though she used a soft-tipped pencil thing and not her finger. But it seems easy enough; I can simply look it up. Actually, are they like Star Trek? Can I say, ‘Computer: define MILF’? Ah. Apparently not.”
They lock eyes for a moment, and Béatrice’s resistance — as temporary and as pantomimed as it is — evaporates. She steps closer until they’re standing side by side, and then takes Val’s left hand, manoeuvres it upright, and places the telephone in it.
“Fine,” she says. “Tap.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She demonstrates. “Tap the screen. There, where the little G is. That will bring up the search function.”
Following the instructions, Val taps her way through. “In what language does ‘G’ mean ‘search’?” she mutters as she does so, and though she is talking half to herself, Béatrice provides the answer anyway. The little keyboard that pops up is awful to use — she hasn’t used a computer since school, so her memory is hazy, but she swears the keys are laid out wrong here — and the device is both too small to comfortably type on and too large to hold, but eventually she works her way through to the page with the appropriate information.
“Hmm,” she says. “‘Mom I’d Like to Fuck’. One of your girls said that to you?”
Béatrice laughs, easily and sweetly. “She wasn’t a girl back then, but yes. I can point her out to you, if you’d like. Although she’s fairly distinctive; she dresses like a goth.”
Valérie pictures it, and decides she’d better employ the same techniques she used when she had not to express too much outward loathing for her erstwhile captors, because it wouldn’t be polite to burst out laughing at the sight of one of Béatrice’s girls, even if she is a mass of teased hair and bicycle chains.
“I can’t believe you still have goths,” she says.
“Two decades into the twenty-first century,” Béatrice says, “and no new trends have emerged. It’s just the old ones, on repeat, forever.”
“So, what you are saying is, I don’t have to learn a new way to style my hair?” Valérie says.
Béatrice snorts, a sound that, as much as Val’s been trying to avoid nostalgia, unavoidably yanks her back more than thirty years. But even though the briefly vivid image of Dee, of Béatrice as she once was, is saturated with fondness, it cannot survive, because the woman in front of her — once she abandoned her absurd and unnecessary guilt — could not be more of an improvement. Val can’t help it: she giggles.
“What?” Béatrice asks.
“Oh, nothing. Show me how to see the picture of you again.”
Béatrice guides her finger this time, showing her how to swipe up from the bottom of the device to go to what she calls the ‘home’ screen, how to open the gallery application, and how to swipe through photos. Béatrice doesn’t take all that many pictures, but she takes enough, and by the time Val reaches the jeans photo, she’s also seen Béatrice in a variety of other — boring — outfits.
“Wait,” Val says, zooming in with her fingers, the way Béatrice showed her. “What is that you’re holding? Is that another one of your funny mugs?”
“Not exactly,” Béatrice says. “It was made by one of the girls.”
Val zooms in and out, but enough of Béatrice’s fingers are covering the text that she can’t make out more than the first words. “What does it say?”
“My other sister is also a kidnapper,” Béatrice says, sighing.
“Ah! That’s cute.”
“It’s… flippant.”
“And yet there you are, holding it.”
“I like to encourage the girls,” Béatrice says.
Val laughs, full-throated this time, and wraps an arm around Béatrice’s shoulders. Despite her height, it’s easy, because Béatrice leans into it, and Val rests her head on her shoulder.
“You love it,” she says quietly. “You really do. You love all of it. Being called ‘Aunt Bea’. The girls running around all over the place. The questionably tasteful mugs. You love it. I can still read you, Béatrice Quinn.”
“Like a book,” Béatrice whispers.
“Remember our plan?”
“The restaurant thing? I never really learned to cook, I’m afraid.”
“Yes,” Valérie says, nudging her with her forehead, “but the plan was that I teach you. Because I did learn to cook. Yes, mostly disgusting English slop, but I can do great and terrible things with a kitchen knife.”
“I believe you,” Béatrice says, and then she recoils, laughing, pushing Valérie away. “Your hair!” she exclaims. “It’s still wet!”
Valérie throws the phone back onto the bed and spreads her arms wide. “So find me something to wear, Béatrice, and I will put it on and then I shall dry my hair. Not,” she adds, side-eyeing the wardrobe, “any of that, please.”
“How about I get us another drink,” Béatrice says, “and then I’ll find you some things I guarantee you’ll like.”
* * *
She tried to talk to Ollie, she really did. Yes, Steph knows what he’s like and what he thinks of her — of all of them, at this point, with the possible exception of Adam; even Raph has grudgingly accepted that he can’t stop what’s coming, even if he hasn’t embraced it — but his life has been as ripped apart as anyone’s down here, and he is without question the most alone. Again, with the possible exception of Adam, though as far as Steph knows, he has a good relationship with Edy. Ollie has no-one.
She knows Harmony’s frustrated: she envies the rapport most of the other sponsors have been building with their charges, and not just for her own sake; for anyone to make the leap, she told Steph once, they have to understand that they’re not alone.
Harmony hasn’t disclosed everything to him yet, though. Presumably she thinks it would be unhelpful at this point. She’s probably right. Ollie isn’t pulling out his own hair any more, as far as she can tell, and the bruises from when he used to throw himself at his cell wall have faded and have yet to be replaced by new ones, but she gets a hair-trigger feeling from him. He reminds her of Will, when he was so scared of his own unpredictability that he cuffed himself, only without the pacifistic intention.
But she tried to talk to him anyway, when Shahida and Lisa came down with dinner: sandwiches with premade fillings, a couple of variety multipacks of crisps, several bottles of diet fizzy drink and two packs of Mr Kipling snack cakes. Steph picked out a few half-sandwiches — tuna mayo, cheese and pickle, egg and cress — and a bag of prawn cocktail crisps and, feeling strangely like she was fifteen years old again and struggling through another church picnic, sat down opposite Ollie, who hadn’t moved when Shahida and Lisa came in and had yet even to acknowledge the food.
She got three words into her greeting before he left. He didn’t take any food with him and he didn’t look at her once.
“Um,” she says, as soon as the door to the corridor’s closed and there’s no chance of him overhearing her, “should we tell Harmony about that?”
“Yeah,” Jane says. She and Amy had to stand aside so that Ollie could leave without coming too close to comfort, and she looks as unsettled as Steph feels. “Yeah, I will.” She whips out her phone to compose a message while Amy squeezes her shoulder.
And that’s that, for the rest of dinner. Raph exchanges a look with her and Bethany jokes that Ollie didn’t take any sandwiches because they’re not yet hard enough to injure himself with, and he’ll be back for the leftovers in a day or two, but the joke doesn’t land.
“Harm says she’ll bring him something to eat in a couple of hours,” Jane says, reading from her phone.
“Good,” Steph says, feeling like she ought to have more to contribute but not knowing what. “I’m worried about him.”
“Yeah,” Raph says, with a mouth half full of egg and bacon sandwich, “but there’s nothing you can do, right? The last time he spoke to me it was mostly swearing, and we were… Okay, we weren’t friends, we were…”
“Colleagues?” Amy suggests.
“I’m sorry,” Will asks, from the other end of the table. He’s been talking, surprisingly, to Martin. “Who are you again?”
“Girl class of 2015,” she says smoothly. “Just visiting.”
“Fine.”
Raph smirks and turns back to Steph. “Point is: don’t try and help him. And don’t sic her on him, either.” He points at Bethany, currently eating from a bag of salt and vinegar and watching with polite interest; which means she’s tired as hell, and is faking being even remotely awake just to get through dinner. “He’s not Will. He’s not even me. I don’t know if he’d attack you, but I don’t know he wouldn’t, either.”
“Raphael,” Bethany says, and Steph doesn’t know if it’s her sleepiness or her habit of saying the most inadvisable thing at any given moment that causes her to hesitate a little on each syllable of Raph’s name, like an echo of Declan, “I didn’t know you cared.”
He shrugs. “I’m being rational. She got me a pack of chocolate digestives. If Ollie loses his fucking nut and attacks her, the chances of me getting any more chocolate digestives are a lot lower. QED.”
“When did you grow a brain?” Will asks.
“Always had one. You just never listened to me.”
“Oh? What does ‘QED’ mean, then?”
“‘Quite easily done’,” Raph says.
Will snorts. “Thank fuck for that,” he mutters. “Thought the world was going off-axis, for a minute.”
1984 December 3
Monday
There are excuses, and then there is the reason.
The Smyth-Farrows have never been an especially powerful family. A matter of location, apparently, and some bad luck, and some bad investments a handful of hundred years ago, and some downright stupid decisions made when every other noble family was absolutely coining it in. They survive by virtue of their assets, their savvy, and their bloody-mindedness.
But what if one had an ace up one’s sleeve? What if one were to be loaned a mundane investment property under which some truly diabolical actions could be taken? What if one crafted a meticulous plan to extract from certain families, families which have wronged the Smyth-Farrows, finances, assurances, allegiances, and promises, all secured with the bodies of their children? For there is proof, you see, of what is possible, of what can be done to a young man with enough violence, enough surgery, enough birth control pills. And you wouldn’t want it happening to your sons, now, would you?
And the Smyth-Farrow name rose.
But that was always merely the excuse. The reason was that Crispin Smyth-Farrow discovered he liked nothing more than to put over his knee a girl who was once a boy, who remained a boy in most vital respects — including and especially his mind — and extract his pleasure. The discovery, the thing that kept the Hall going beyond the first few years, the thing that arguably kept Dorothy alive, was that he’s turned out to be far from the only moneyed man in England to have developed such tastes. If such raw material can be procured from less refined stock, and such girls manufactured on a predictable basis, and especially if — for the more sensitive customer — some details of their origin can be tastefully elided, then Dorley Hall will never not be busy.
The money poured in, and extortion became a side job.
Dorothy would have left. After the first year, after her revenge was secured, she would gladly have handed it all over to Smyth-Farrow or to one of the other women he found. Because, although he was right about her — although it thrills her to the bone to break a man, to reverse his development, to reduce him to a shivering, terrified boy, and then diminish him even further — there’s barely been a day she hasn’t feared for her life.
As much as she has learned to ape them, as much as some of them treat her almost as one of them, Dorothy Marsden knows she exists solely on the sufferance of a small and particularly rapacious segment of the aristocracy. On her ability to produce these creatures for them.
So she would have left. If not for that letter. That damnable letter.
One of Smyth-Farrow’s men came to see her, shortly after they inked their initial agreement, and handed her an unmarked envelope before leaving wordlessly. Inside, a photograph, grainy enough to have been enlarged from a film still, depicting Dorothy with her knife inside Wallace Mount’s neck, and a single piece of paper, on which was printed one word: Behave.
The camera had been running, the day Wallace Mount killed Constance, the day Dorothy killed him in return. And she’d been a fool to keep the film. And an even greater fool not to hide it somewhere better.
But Crispin Smyth-Farrow had been right about her.
And now, here he is with another of his little requests. They come in from time to time and interrupt the smooth mechanisms of Dorley Hall. But she has to fulfil them, and she has to admit — once again — that there is a certain frisson to them, to kidnapping and altering the child of someone truly powerful, to bite one of the many hands that feed them. To take one of their own is always a risk; to break one is a unique reward.
This one is a little different, though. The Barbiers. Erstwhile business partners. Some venture in France, from the larger and legitimate side of Smyth-Farrow’s operation, now done with. But the Barbiers have become a little too curious about the English end of things, and not in the prurient and exploitable fashion of Crispin’s other associates. Dorothy’s met them before, and she agrees with him that there is little chance they can be persuaded of the virtue of the operation at Dorley Hall, should they discover it. Too… Catholic.
So it’s to be done: new business will be arranged. The Barbiers will be dealt with. And the boy, he’s supposed to be quite pretty, for a young man.
He’ll be Crispin’s prize. And Dorothy’s, too, for a time.
2020 January 5
Sunday
Val’s playing with Béatrice’s telephone when she returns, laden with shot glasses. Béatrice takes it from her, leaves it on the side, and then pulls on Valérie’s forefinger, drags her out of the bedroom and through the living room to another door, one which Valérie, on their way through, had assumed was merely a cupboard. Instead it opens into a whole extra room — Béatrice has six rooms! — which, unlike the others, has no clear purpose. It hosts a pair of armchairs, a handful of scatter cushions, a small window, and a side table, on which sits some kind of leather-bound device with its cover open. Shoved into a cramped corner is a large, antique-looking armoire.
“I like to read in here,” Béatrice says, still leading her. Val allows herself to be led, and Béatrice opens all the doors of the armoire and one of the drawers, out of which she extracts a pair of jeans. “Look! See?”
But Valérie is too interested in the things hanging from rails to care about Béatrice’s triumphant jeans. Where the wardrobe in the bedroom lacked colour, the armoire is bursting with it. And such fabrics! Valérie runs her hands through and finds silk, cotton, cashmere.
“Why do you have a secret second wardrobe, Béatrice?” she asks, delicately examining a daringly cut dress in deep red.
“It’s not secret,” Béatrice says. “It’s just separate. There’s… someone.”
Inevitable that there would be, after all this time. “Oh?”
“She bankrolls this whole place.”
“Ah,” Valérie says flatly. One of those kinds of relationships.
“We’re not exclusive,” Béatrice says quickly. “And we don’t have a relationship, not really. But, well, I’ve never found anyone, not anyone real, and she is, well, she’s very attractive, and it’s like a game we play, except—”
“Béatrice. I am happy you have someone. And I’m sorry it is not real.”
Béatrice breathes deeply. “Sorry,” she says. “I knew I’d have to tell you. And I knew it would be awkward. And I don’t even know why it’s awkward, but it was and it is, and I…” She twirls a limp hand. “I’m fifty-five and I’ve never had a real relationship.”
Val takes her hand. Gently. Carefully. Raises it between them. Smiles for her.
“Neither have I.”
“And now you see what I mean about being suddenly very old,” Béatrice says, taking her hand back. “There are ways in which I’m still like a teenager, I think. Looking around, blinking in the light, wondering how I got here. Now, don’t get me wrong,” she adds, frowning and pointing a finger at Valérie, “I have been quite fulfilled in many ways, and not just with Elle.” Valérie files that name away: Elle. The woman who bankrolls the place. Isn’t that the woman Frankie talks about occasionally? The one Dorothy despises? “But I still feel foolish about it sometimes. Like, especially, now.”
Valérie waves away the concerns, both hers and Béatrice’s. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. She turns her attention back to the contents of the armoire, and unhooks something silky which caught her attention before. “Did you wear this for Elle?”
It’s black and it’s so light that it billows in the heat from the radiator in the skirting board.
Béatrice blushes. “Not yet.”
And Valérie, wondering if this is a wise thing to say, wondering if this is too much, too soon, and unaware of whether she even wants what she’s implying, but exposed so very suddenly and totally to the atmosphere of permissiveness here at the Hall and deciding the hell with it, says, “Don’t.”
Something passes between them.
And then there’s a knock at the door. The farthest door, it sounds like, the one into the office from the corridor. Béatrice shakes herself, and then cups her hands to her mouth and yells, “Just a minute!” and the moment is well and truly gone.
“Gosh,” Valérie says, “I should get dressed.”
“You do that,” Béatrice says, looking hassled. “Anything you want. I’ll go see who that is?”
Val nods and Béatrice, granted permission, rushes off. Valérie permits herself a smile, and then returns to the armoire.
She doesn’t go mad in the end. Béatrice has some very racy things — and she’s kept herself in shape, so even the tightest ought to fit quite decently — but Val settles in the end for a flattering but sensible diaphanous black skirt. It becomes less sheer towards the waist, a concession to modesty, though Val decides to concede a little more, and pairs it with a slip and some opaque black stockings.
“It’s still practical,” she tells herself, kicking out a leg. The material folds silkily around her, draping away at the calf without becoming an impediment. “See? If an emergency occurs, I can still run. Hmm,” she adds, shaking her head, “I am talking to no-one.”
She adds a dappled charcoal-and-white top with a modest neckline and sleeves to her elbows, and throws a loose black jacket over top. She can’t, however, borrow any shoes from Béatrice, as Val’s feet are smaller, so for now she slips on a pair of woolly winter socks. She’ll have to ask to be escorted to wherever in the Hall they keep their shoes. She’d prefer a nice ankle boot, if possible.
There’s a mirror in this little room, and she examines herself quickly. Hair still damp, but acceptable, and she can doubtless borrow a brush from someone if it needs sorting out later. No makeup, but she has nothing but the battered lipstick she escaped with, and she’d prefer not to use someone else’s. Besides, she’s never needed it to look good, a fact she always liked to believe was secret torture for Dorothy, a woman whose lipstick occasionally looked as if it had been brutally scraped across the desiccated lips of a corpse.
In the office, Béatrice is standing, leaning against her desk and looking exasperated, as a pretty — and strikingly short, for this place — Black girl talks herself into an anxiety attack, and a brown-haired white girl — also pretty; not short — watches from the doorway.
“I know I was reckless, Aunt Bea,” the Black girl is saying, “and I know I should have sought permission, but the thing is, I asked permission, I put in the request and it just sat there, and all that time I knew where they were and I just couldn’t stand it any more, and I knew they’d be fine with it, fine with me, and I’m sorry, but—”
“Abigail.”
“—I’m happy now, I’ve seen my parents again, I’ve seen my family again, my dad knows who I am now, my mum, she knows I’m alive, and they’re over the moon with me, they love me, and that’s all I needed, it’s all I wanted, I can tell them anything you need me to tell them over the phone, and—”
“What on earth would I want you to tell them over the phone?”
“—if it’s for the good of the programme, if it’s so the others don’t try anything dangerous, I’ll—”
“Dear Lord, child!” Béatrice exclaims, and it has the desired effect; the girl — Abigail — momentarily halts the flow of words and stands there, hugging herself, looking up.
“Aunt Bea?” she says.
“Abigail, sit down, please. You are worrying unduly. And you are making me look like a tyrant in front of Ms Barbier!”
“Oh,” Valérie says, closing the door behind her and smiling at the new occupants, who have both finally noticed her, “I’m Ms Barbier, am I?”
“Valérie,” Béatrice says, “don’t be cheeky. Go on with Christine. She’ll find you somewhere to hang your hat— Oh, no, I’m terribly sorry, my hat for the evening—”
“Will I?” the white girl, Christine, says.
“Yes,” Béatrice says firmly.
“Oh. Fine.”
“We’ll sort you out somewhere more permanent tomorrow,” Béatrice says to Valérie, before returning her attention to Abigail, who has partially calmed herself and taken the seat that was in front of her. “Now, Abigail, before we begin, I want to assure you that I have no intention of keeping you prisoner in this house, like a— like—”
“Like me?” Valérie offers.
Béatrice points to the door. “You. Go. Now.”
“Hi,” Christine says, as they close the door behind them, “I’m Christine. I get all the jobs.”
Valérie assesses her. She was one of the ones in the kitchen when she first arrived. Bringing up the rear. Attached to that tall girl, if she remembers correctly. She carries herself well.
“Valérie Barbier,” she says. “I have had only one job.”
“I like your skirt.”
“It belongs to Béatrice, actually,” Valérie says, and takes great pleasure in the look of shock she receives. Béatrice really is presenting herself to these girls as some middle-aged old fuddy-duddy, isn’t she? Perhaps she believes it makes the girls feel safer around her?
“I have never seen her in something like that,” Christine says, turning around to look properly at Val. “I mean, she dresses up for parties, but… Fuck me. Never anything like that! Oh. Sorry. Pardon my, uh… Never mind.”
Valérie huffs, amused. “You may swear around me, Christine. You have my permission.”
“Oh. That’s good. So.” She rubs her hands together, suddenly all business; a clone of Béatrice. “I gather I’m supposed to find you somewhere to sleep? And then we should probably go downstairs. I haven’t eaten and I bet you haven’t, either, and the sponsors are throwing out the rule book and ordering in rather than cook anything, so if you want the good pizza slices or to snag a naan before they all go, we ought to hurry.”
“Actually,” Valérie says, “first, I could use some boots.”
Christine nods. “Right. Follow me.”
Christine leads her to a stuffed-to-bursting walk-in wardrobe and helps her select a few pairs of shoes and boots in her size, as well as sleepwear and a few casual items, and then takes her to a row of bedrooms. For tonight, Valérie will be borrowing Christine’s room, and Christine herself will stay with her girlfriend, Paige. Just two doors up, if Valérie needs her for anything.
As they go, Val satisfies a number of minor curiosities. It is ‘throwing out the rule book’ to order in food for as many people as are assembled this evening because they try to avoid drawing attention to their numbers on off days like this: a Sunday before the start of the semester. A rule they break with reasonable regularity, according to Christine, who mumbles something about ‘godawful opsec’.
Elle is indeed Elle Lambert, says Christine, and she’s only recently properly met her. It was when Béatrice returned from the search for Valérie somewhat wiped out, she adds, embarrassed, after some prompting. Christine describes her as nice enough, but that she ‘looks at you like a piece of meat, but one she wants to rub all over herself, if you know what I mean’. Valérie assures her that, yes, she knows the type.
Christine herself is in the third year of the programme here and, yes, she started out as a boy, just like all the others. Would she go back? Absolutely not, she says, and Valérie finds herself reassured by this. It is something to discover a womanhood inside yourself that you never otherwise would have found, to create and inhabit her to protect yourself, to embrace her as succour as much as revenge. And Valérie found echoes of herself in some of the girls who came to Stenordale after her. But a part of her always has wondered: is she still her? Is there truly continuity between Vincent and Valérie? Or was he broken down, disintegrated, used up, raw material for someone new? Chatting with Christine as Valérie tries on shoes, selects a bathrobe, and admires the accommodations is thus more of a relief than she expected: the girl has been here less than two-and-a-half years, and not only is she happy and well-adjusted and dating, she also speaks of her former self with a detached fondness, with a sort of familial irritation. He’s a part of her still, she says, and that’s something she’s recently come to terms with. She wanted to believe he died, that she killed him — and Valérie had to wince at the parallel — but she’s recently accepted that she is, and always has been, one person.
She just learned how to be better.
Was taught how to be better, she adds.
Christine can’t wait for Valérie to meet Indira.
And so, with Val’s new belongings stashed by the side of Christine’s bed, they descend the staircase at the front of the building. It’s dark out, but it’s quite clear, and the university buildings, much closer than they were in Valérie’s time, are lit up like earthbound stars.
“We’ll get you put on the access list,” Christine says, as she presses her thumb against one of the omnipresent readers and lets them into the kitchen. She frowns as the doors open, and for a moment Valérie’s not sure why, until she realises that there are a lot of people in the dining hall, but very little noise. “Um, come on,” Christine mutters, and speeds up, half-running into the dining hall.
Inside, someone is leading a group of girls holding pizza boxes to the back stairs, and a couple of others are making phone calls in various corners of the room. A central table, laden with food, remains virtually untouched.
Christine hurries across the room, and Valérie follows her, catching up in time for Christine to tug at the sleeve of a strikingly blonde girl.
“Pip,” she asks, “what’s going on?”
“It’s Ollie,” the girl says. “He’s tried to kill himself.”
Chapter 38: Daylight
Notes:
CONTENT WARNINGS: extensive scenes relating to a suicide attempt. references to sexual assault and domestic violence.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
2020 January 5
Sunday
“It’s January some time. The fourth or the fifth or the sixth. Don’t know. Think it’s a Monday. Or a Tuesday. Don’t care. Anyway. This is my diary.”
Bare mattress. Stained pillow. He doesn’t know where the bottom sheet’s gone. It doesn’t seem to matter. Not his problem. Easy to pull most of it back together. When it matters. If it ever does.
Dictaphone’s on the pillow. Harmony’s. When she said he had to have one, he expected a tape recorder. He doesn’t really know why. Seen them on TV, maybe. But this one’s more like one of those MP3 players a few kids still had at primary school. Just five buttons and a small screen. It rattles. It probably shouldn’t rattle.
He plays it back sometimes. Listens to his voice. It helps him sleep.
Sonia used to talk to him at night. When he was restless. Helped him sleep.
She left.
“Another day. Another day, another day, another day. Same as. No. Not the same. Got angry. At breakfast. Got a right to it. Kept here, told shit, fed shit. Hah. But still. Got angry. Threw something. Punished. Usual consequences. Should have thrown it at Martin. Like Aaron used to. Little shit. Fucking teacher’s pet. But yeah. In the cell, no food. Same threats, same punishments. I keep doing the same things. You keep doing the same things. Nothing changes. I behave; I get food, I get light. Don’t behave; no food, no light.
“You don’t even hurt me any more. Not really. Not like Dec. He could take it, couldn’t he? Fucker was covered in bruises. Took it smiling. Showed it off. Like he was proud of how much he got hurt. Thought it was stupid at the time. Didn’t say it because you don’t, do you? But I thought it was stupid. And a bit of a show he was putting on. Don’t know if the show was for us or for you. But yeah. Mainly stupid.
“And then you started locking me in the dark.”
They used to tase him. Not so much since Will went for Maria. And then he hurt himself. In the cells. Trying to show them. Trying to show her.
Didn’t work.
Stupid.
Since then, since the dark, it’s been the same.
All the same.
Except now he has to do this.
“Don’t behave; no food, no light. Now, no diary; no food, no light. Don’t know why you want to know what I’m thinking so much, Harmony. Isn’t the point to keep us here until we break? S’what Will said. But Will changed, too, didn’t he? Will and Raph. And Dec’s gone. So maybe they broke. Maybe Will was right. Or maybe they started behaving. Don’t know. Don’t care. Not gonna.”
They stopped hurting him, so he hurt himself. But he couldn’t keep it up. Pain feels different now.
Another thing Will said: people are machines. Machines are simple. And the girls have the manual. The right chemicals and everything changes. Just got to wait it out.
Machines are simple.
“What you want from me. It’s impossible. Maybe just for me. Will and Raph. Broken or… or something else. And the others, Stefan and that. I’m not as stupid as Raph thinks I am. I’ve been around. I know about trannies. Was one lived on the estate. It’s in the brain. And it’s always in there. Like with Stefan. Obvious. Should have seen it. Know what to look for. But people don’t change. Unless you break them.”
People don’t change. Sonia thought he would. He didn’t realise until close to the end. She said what she thought she saw in him wasn’t there.
Was never there.
Couldn’t be found.
So she left.
He went after her.
He was always that guy. The one who throws the first punch. The one who ups the ante. It was in Dec, too. But Dec tried too hard. Boasted too loud. Made everything into a show. Thought it was supposed to be fun.
You lose control. You lose everything. Not fun.
“I’m not Raph. Not Will. You can’t make me give in to this. Can’t break me. I’m not Stefan. Not Aaron. It was never in me in the first place. Don’t know about Martin. Or Adam. Shit. They might be the smartest ones here. Or even dumber than Dec. Don’t know. Don’t know much of anything. Don’t know how you think shutting me in the dark and pumping me full of chemicals is going to change who I am. But I know this.”
Yeah. He knows who he is. What he is. What he always was. Always will be.
He went after Sonia.
She moved on. Too quick. Like she planned it. Like he didn’t matter.
And he worked it out right there: he didn’t. Blood on his knuckles and he didn’t matter.
“You can take my food. You can take my light. You can take my body. You can even take my fucking balls, like you said. But I have something I can take from you, Harmony.”
He puts the bed back together. Pulls the duvet out from underneath. Pillowcase. Even finds the bottom sheet. He puts it all together and climbs in.
There’s a light on the dictaphone. Dim but enough. He doesn’t need to see much under the duvet. As long as he can’t be seen.
Electric shaver in the bedside drawer. Took it half apart already. Found what he needs. Not exactly easy to use. Not exactly sharp. But he’s a machine, isn’t he? Like all of them. Machines are simple. Cut the wires.
It’s going to hurt. But pain is different now.
* * *
Frankie throws down the triangle and racks the pool balls again. She’s three-two; Frankie’s won three games, and Frances, the slightly more respectable version of herself she likes to think Val sometimes sees, has won two. On the chalkboard on the wall, the one with the barely rubbed-off remnants of other people’s games still marked on it, Frankie’s been recording her scores in a cramped corner. Reflective of her intentions here: stay out of the way, minimise her presence, try not to change anything important. Leave a fixable trail.
What pretentious horseshit. And hopelessly naive.
She hits the cue ball too hard and with an unintended spin. It leaves the felt for a moment and cracks hard into the racked balls; Frankie almost pockets the black on her first shot of the game.
Pathetic. The girls back home would laugh. Nerves are shot, are they? Conscience playing up, is it? Too scared to shoot straight, are we? Poor old woman. Poor old woman who’s going to bloody well rot, if not here then in some other ignominious place, unloved and unwanted.
“Now that,” she mutters to herself, “is pretentious horseshit.”
Just a bad shot, that’s all.
She’s tidying up the game — another win for Frances, the sanctimonious bitch; three-three — when the door unlocks and the girl who first let her into the building stands there. Waits for her.
Tabitha. She looks harried, but who wouldn’t after a day like today?
“Maria didn’t kill you, then?” Tabitha says, contriving to sound only mildly interested in the answer.
“She’s not the first to have a go,” Frankie replies, and that’s true, though before yesterday it’d been decades since someone had a pop, and on balance, she prefers calm. She’s also not entirely sure why she’s playing it so casually arrogant with Tabitha, except that to show empathy for Maria would still feel like spitting on her undug grave.
Maria deserves better than Frankie’s understanding.
And then Tabitha laughs, and Frankie decides right there that she likes her. But she has to know:
“Is she okay? Maria?”
“She’s fine,” Tabitha says. “Sleeping it off. One of the boys attacked her, a bit over a month ago. She was in hospital with a concussion. We thought she’d recovered completely; obviously not.”
“That’s… a lot of information to just give me,” Frankie says, frowning.
“If you’re staying,” Tabitha says, “then you’ll hear it sooner or later. You’ll hear everything. Dunno what information security was like under your Dorothy, but this lot are terrible gossips, and they don’t always check who’s listening, first.”
Frankie almost asks how they’ve managed to keep the place quiet these last fifteen years, but she doesn’t waste Tabitha’s time with it; it’ll be the same old. Dorothy’s regime was the same: tight-lipped outside the building, but once you’re through the doors, you get read into everything almost by default.
When you have so few people and so many responsibilities, secrets are difficult to keep.
She asks instead: “So, I’m hanging around, then?”
“No idea,” Tabitha says, and beckons her. Frankie lays down the pool cue — she’d been grasping it to her chest like a defensive weapon, she now realises — and joins her in the doorway. “But you need to eat,” Tabitha continues, “and I’m not having my dinner in here with you. It’s depressing. And Yasmin and Julia used to fuck on that table. So come on.”
* * *
Frustrating to be stuck in here, watching the screens, listening to a mix of all the basement microphones — set to low, because there’s only so much of a headache Indira wants to go to bed with tonight — while upstairs a grand, practically operatic drama plays out. The cast of characters could certainly have been ripped from the pages of any of the plays or TV shows she’s auditioned for:
Valérie Barbier, the long-lost friend, back from the dead!
Trevor Darling, the missing soldier, recovered but grievously altered by his ordeal!
Frankie Barton, the enemy-turned-co-conspirator, key to their escape!
And they leave in their wake the bodies of their captors, a stolen car, and a burning English manor house!
Easy to picture the moment of the double-cross, when Frankie turned on Dorothy Marsden, when together they killed the soldiers and lit the fire — or knocked over a candle on their way out, or something — and took a vehicle, making their escape into the night. Frankie’d have a speech, maybe, or Valérie; something about crying havoc, and—
No, wait. She shouldn’t put Shakespeare in someone’s mouth. That’s hack stuff! And, gosh, wasn’t Christine offended that Indira complained when they had the guy in the Star Trek movie start spouting off. You don’t borrow from the bard when you’re riding around inside a great big bloody spaceship!
But Valérie would say something. Something deeply resonant. Something to get the blood boiling. And then she’d fire her gun and triumphantly execute her torturer. That’s the sort of thing you close an act on. Fade to black. Next scene.
Goodness. It’s an exciting time to be in the business of Ahem. And here Indira giggles to herself, because she and her fellow sponsors, when they talk outside the Hall, often mumble at this point, or fake a cough, or otherwise obscure the precise nature of the business they are in. What do you do for a living? Oh, I’m deeply involved in the rehabilitation of Cough. Ah, charitable work; most admirable.
But she’s not outside and she’s not even with her fellow sponsors. She’s stuck here, watching a bunch of barely moving girls and boys on a screen, narrativising her thoughts out of boredom.
‘Narrativising’? Is that a word? She should ask Christine. She won’t know, not right off the bat, but she likes solving things, and it’s been a while since they sat down and just talked, and it’s not like Indira needs an excuse, not really, since Teenie will make time for her, and Indira tries very hard not to exploit that, and the poor girl’s been so on the go lately that anything more than a hello and a quick hug feels like encroaching on what little time she has left to spend with Paige — and to sleep! But maybe a little interaction like that wouldn’t be so bad? An opportunity for Christine to look something up for her, to help her in a (really) small fashion, for them to connect as sisters… That seems adequate recompense for having to sit down here, watching the bloody screens while things are happening, like she’s on punishment duty or something, like she’s some foolish little thing like Nell who can’t control her temper.
Bored.
Bored.
Bored.
“O Romeo, Romeo,” she whispers, tapping her fingers idly on the security desk, “wherefore art thou, Romeo! Deny thy father and refuse thy name. Or, if thou wilt not, be— Oh!”
Something’s happening. Not much, but she’ll take it over literally nothing. Ollie, who’s been sleeping on a bare mattress whenever he’s out of the cell and back in his room, has reassembled his bed. Not super notable, but it’s a change in behaviour and thus must be noted and investigated and — yay! — it’s a chance to talk to someone!
Her phone’s out on the desk in front of her, and she snatches it up and calls Jane. It takes her a little while to pick up, and Indira watches on the screen as Jane picks her way out of the lunch room, where most of the boys and girls are still eating their ersatz picnic, and into the corridor. She brushes fingers with Amy on her way past, and isn’t that adorable?
“What’s up?” Jane asks.
“It’s Oliver,” Indira says, leaning down so she can speak quietly into the mic. “He’s remade his bed.”
“Okay. And?”
“And that’s unusual. And Harmony’s asleep, or she blimming well should be. Can you check on him?”
“Yeah. Sure. Can I bring backup?”
“Obviously. Take Lisa; I don’t want—”
“Yeah, got it,” Jane interrupts. “No newbies.”
She hangs up, and Indira quickly dials Tabby, who picks up considerably faster than Jane did.
“Yeah?” she says. She sounds like she’s eating.
“Jane and Lisa are looking into something downstairs. Can you supervise down here? Just for five minutes?”
“I’m already supervising,” Tabby replies, annoyed. “I’m on Frankie duty.”
“Bring her with you,” Indira says, “and leave her with me on your way down. I’m armed; I’ll drop her so hard if she tries anything.”
And if she doesn’t try anything, then she can answer a few more questions, can’t she?
* * *
Fucking Ollie. So he made his bed for once; who cares? Things were nice and settled in the lunch room, and the girls were even getting on with the boys — with Steph’s and Bethany’s help — and Jane had just been starting to relax, so of course something new has to happen! Ollie couldn’t’ve just slept face-down on his bare mattress like a fucking weirdo, like he always does?
Protocol, though. Changes in habits have to be checked up on. Maybe it’s a good sign. Maybe he’s starting to take care of himself and his space. Maybe he’s finally coming around. Maybe he doesn’t want to be left behind by Raph.
Raph, though. She’s actually quite proud: he’s doing well. He doesn’t like any of it — though he will, she’s sure; it’s just a matter of getting him to the point where he can admit it, and she’s slowly bleeding away his arrogance and his cocksure front, drop by drop — but he’s not fighting her any more, so this is the point where she gets to stop being his adversary and become something else. Whether it’s a friend or merely a more pleasant jailer is mostly up to him.
Ah, here’s her relief. Tab jogs down the last few remaining stairs, smiles at her on her way past, and takes up Lisa’s place in the lunch room. Immediately starts talking to Melissa. And that frees up Lisa, who joins Jane in the corridor.
Time to check on Ollie, then. Fortunate that the journey to his bedroom is so short, and that she’s been so occupied with her irritation, because Ollie’s still a big lad and she doesn’t like to think about how ugly it could get. She checks, and Lisa, like her, has her taser armed and ready.
She does the double-tap on the biometric reader that causes the door to open on its own, slowly and quietly.
It ought to creak, really, for the vibe.
There he is: a lump under his duvet. Nothing of him is visible; he could be asleep, or he could be waiting for them. With Ollie, either is equally possible.
She directs Lisa to stand ready with the taser, and she reaches out and pulls at the duvet.
It doesn’t come away cleanly. It sticks, and she has to yank on it, and when she does, when it falls away, it’s clear why it stuck, what it was that stuck it in place, and as Lisa gasps at the bloodstained sheets and at Ollie’s prone form, Jane looks straight up at the nearest camera and yells, “Get help!”
* * *
It shocks them both, and Frankie takes a moment to be reassured by that, because if Indira — who’s turned out to be far more disarmingly charming on her own than when she’s surrounded by her fellow sponsors and is putting on a professional façade — isn’t expecting the sudden display of bloody sheets on the security monitors, it means everything Frankie’s heard about Beatrice’s Dorley is more likely to be true, that they don’t go through people at the rate Dotty’s did…
And then she’s grabbing Indira by the shoulders.
“You’ve got to let me go down there,” she says, as firmly as she dares.
“Wh— What?” Indira stutters. “Why?”
“Look: he’s cut his wrists. I’ve seen that.” Frankie doesn’t shake her. “You know I’ve seen it more than you have. Let me down. I can help!”
Indira takes another moment, and then her expression clears and she nods. “Yes,” she says, shrugging Frankie’s grip off her shoulders and reaching for the security screen. A few taps later — and a quick press of her thumb to a reader, Frankie notes — she says, “There. All the doors between here and there are unlocked. Go.” And then it’s Frankie’s turn to hesitate. It lasts until Indira slaps her on the forearm. “Go!”
“Right.”
The layout’s the same. It’s got to be, right? Beatrice poured new cement into the cracks and rebuilt the doors and had the wiring redone and sorted out the shitty air-con but the layout’s exactly the same, and Frankie relies on this as she barrels down the stairs as fast as she can, all fatigue having fled. She feels like she’s facing down Jake with his gun again, like she’s tasing the soldiers again, like she’s defying Dorothy again, and that feels right, because this lad’s cut his wrists, and he’s cut them the dangerous way, and that means she doesn’t have long, that she’s fighting another inescapable fate. Same way she’s been fighting Trev’s and Val’s and her own.
Throwing herself into another problem feels good. She’s come to hate all this sitting around, waiting.
She makes the main corridor without falling, and doesn’t have the time or breath to laugh at herself. ‘Another inescapable fate’. Being pretentious again, are we? Maybe just embrace it. Like Indira said, while they were waiting for Jane and Lisa to sort themselves out, when they thought Ollie’d just changed his sleeping habits… Everything that’s happening; it’s all a bit operatic, innit?
Left turn into the residential corridor. She ignores the door that used to be Beatrice’s, though she briefly wonders what she thinks when she comes down here, when she faces the place her life was ripped from her; probably why she had the wood-effect laminate plastered over this whole corridor, so it looks less like a torture facility and more like the toilets at a dilapidated Little Chef.
Ollie’s room is right ahead, and Lisa and Jane are waiting with him. Still got the sheets in their hands!
“Out of my way!” she yells, and they both just bloody well look at her.
“Let her through,” Indira commands over the speakers, and they step aside immediately. They’re frowning and confused and possibly a little belligerent, but they’re out of the way, so it doesn’t matter.
Right.
She crouches down by the bed — Christ, her knees are going to kill her for this — and examines the scene before her. Quickly she finds the implement he used. Huh; smashed-up electric shaver, looks like. Not all that sharp. Must’ve hurt. Still, it works for her purposes. She locates the bloodiest and thus probably the sharpest part of the shaver, pulls up a section of undersheet from the bed, snaps it taut under her knee, and stabs through it, opening a hole large enough to get her fingers through. She tears at it, pulls away one ragged strip and then another, and then throws the shaver behind her.
“More strips,” she commands, but she doesn’t stop to make sure the girls are doing as they’re told. Instead she starts wrapping his cuts as tightly as she can.
The material immediately stains red, so she wraps it tighter.
She’s seen this before.
Again and again.
Sometimes she saves them.
Sometimes she doesn’t.
Sometimes—
No. And fuck you, Frances; this is going to be one of the ones you save.
* * *
Keeps. Hurting. Stupid thought. Why even. Think it?
Obvious.
Ragged cuts. Both wrists. Second. More ragged than first. Course they’d keep hurting.
Not fair. Dropped the blade. Curled up. No more pushing. No more fighting. No more taking. No more.
And still. They hurt.
Like nothing else.
Pulse has a feel.
And it’s.
Fucking.
Weakening.
This.
Is.
.
No.
Fuck this.
Think. Don’t be weak. Don’t be stupid.
Breathe deep.
Feels like. Like he could throw up. Fighting for air. Drowning in it.
This pain. It’s vital. It’s old. It’s got him.
Old pain. Oldest. When he was six. When his mum. When she hit him. Slipper shouldn’t hurt so much. But every strike. A lesson. Every strike. A humiliation. Every strike. A death.
Dad was disappointed. Take it like a man.
Mum hit him.
Sonia left.
Mum hit him.
Sonia left.
Mum hit him.
Sonia left.
Take it like a man.
He hit her.
Eyes open. Chest heaving. Arms burning. Sheets are pulled back. When did that happen? Is he still here? In the bedroom? Under that fucking dorm? What’s it called? Dor-something?
He shouldn’t forget things. But he can’t think.
When he was six. Cheek red where she hit him. No school for a week. No TV for a week. No computer for a week. No leaving his room. For a week.
Alone.
Inside.
In the dark.
Reliving the pain.
Reliving the end.
Reliving it all.
When he was fifteen. In a fight. At school. Easy win. Boys slamming both hands on the desks, calling his name.
When he was twenty-three. In a bar.
Pulse a rhythmic thump, weak and yet strong, fading and yet so loud in his ears he can hear nothing else. It’s the beat that’ll fucking kill him, and he can hear nothing else. It’s strongest in his ragged wrists, and it feels like he could raise them to his head and hear nothing else, make the beat his universe, the thump-thump-thump-thump of spending all that he is to hang on.
To hang on for one more minute.
The beat of music in a bar.
The beat of hands across his face, too weak to fight back.
The beat of hands on school desks, voices chanting his name.
The beat of music. When Sonia left. Music. In the bar. Where he hit her.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
But. There are. Other noises. Can’t hear. Can’t understand. Opens. His eyes again. Too much. Too bright. Too loud. Can’t think.
Pressure. Going numb. But the pressure. Around his wrists. That doesn’t. Make sense.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
It’s. Resolving. Not too bright. Any more. He can see if. He squints. If. He concentrates.
Old woman. Old. Who?
White. White hair. White skin. Frowning. Concentrating. Sticking her tongue out and up. Gran did that. When she was knitting. Before her fingers curled up.
The old woman. Yelling something. Can almost hear it.
“Oi! Indira! I’ve got his wrists bound, but it’s with bloody bedsheets! We’re tourniqueting below the elbow but you need to get your nurse or doctor or whoever the fuck down here right now! Whoever’s taking care of Trev! Fetch them! Now!”
Try to sit up. Need to. Look at her better. Even sounds like Gran. Angry. Right all the time. Would ask him. About Mum. About the slipper. Would say. You can stay with me. If you need. Until her fingers curled up. Until she went. Into the home. Until. She died there.
Try to sit up.
Try.
Nothing left.
“Who. The fuck. Are you?”
Everything he has. Into that. So fucking. Quiet.
“What did he say?”
That was one of. The younger girls. Jane. Raph’s girl. She’s frightened. Terrified. Why? No more Ollie. No more problem.
“Who cares?” The old woman. Again. “Where’s my tourniquet?”
“Oh. Shit. Right here.”
“Ollie?” She’s talking. To him now. He can’t look at her. Unclear. White hair. White skin. Like Gran. But not. She’s strong. “I’m going to raise your arms, okay? I’m going to raise them, and then Jane and Lisa are going to hold them there, okay? Fucksake, I said, and then Jane and Lisa are going to—”
“Crap. Right. Coming. Is this right?”
“Yes. Ollie, I’m going to wrap this tight, okay? One around each arm. It’s going to feel uncomfortable. And a bit strange.”
He nods. Like it matters.
And then. More people. Indian woman. Reminds him of a teacher. From primary school. Smiles like her. She’s crouching by. The old woman. They’re talking. Too fast. And too quiet. To hear.
“Right.” It’s the new one. “Ollie, we’ve got you. You’re going to be okay. Frankie, right? You’re my nurse. You’re with me. Everyone else, get out of the way and wait for instructions.”
The new one. And the old one. Like the teacher. Like Gran.
A little bit. Of safety.
At last.
* * *
“It’s Ollie,” Pippa says. “He’s tried to kill himself.”
And Christine’s first thought, which she immediately scrubs from her head, is: It’s only Ollie.
No-one is only anyone.
Her second thought is to reach out for Paige, instinctively, but her hand comes up short because she’s not here. She’s gone upstairs to check on the second years or to have a shower or something. Because that was the fear, the terror she had to live with early on: that one of the others in there with her was going to try it, was going to try what Ollie tried. And she feared the most for the boy who was to become Paige, because he’d been so closed off, so silenced, so hesitant to speak, Christine always thought she could see the shadow of her family, scolding her or hurting her or otherwise keeping her quiet.
Eventually, they connected. Eventually, Paige grew up and out from the silenced boy, stretching limbs that had never before been stretched, becoming a person who had never before been permitted, and Christine no longer feared for her. But right now, Christine sees Paige as she was, and her heart clenches like a fist.
She suddenly does not wish to mourn Ollie’s lost potential.
“How did he do it?” she asks, a question which seems urgent right up until the moment she asks it. Yeah, well done, Christine; not helpful.
Pippa just shrugs.
“Does this happen a lot?” Valérie Barbier asks, and, no, that might be the poster child for unhelpful questions.
“No,” Pippa says, “it does not.” A bit too loud, a bit too insistent, and Christine has to wonder, did she struggle with the temptation? Did someone else in her intake? The whole way this place works is supposed to be that the desire to survive, to see another day — whether it’s to fight those bitches who imprisoned you, or to further distance yourself from the monster you used to be — outweighs all else, and judging that, walking boys and girls along that threshold, is something they’ve supposedly gotten pretty good at, here at Dorley Hall.
Indira says that sometimes boys are closer to the edge before they’re picked up than after. She says those, once given refuge, are often the quickest to turn themselves around. The world isn’t battering at you constantly any more; it’s just this one irritating woman, and she keeps trying to feed you and make you into her Sister. That’s not so bad, really.
It worked on Christine.
“Should we… help?” Valérie says, and she starts forward, towards the stairs down.
Christine holds one hand out to block her, points with the other. “No,” she says. “Look.”
Two soldiers, both women and presumably straight from the hamlet of portacabins out back, are jogging through the dining hall. One of them’s holding a folded stretcher, and the other’s carrying a squared-off case. They ignore the collection of rapt, worried faces as they pass, heading for the basement.
“Did anyone call Harmony?” Pippa asks.
“Dunno,” Christine says, shrugging. “Maria’s got seniority this shift; is she feeling better yet?”
“No. Worse.”
“Never rains,” Christine mutters. She spots an unattended laptop on one of the nearby tables, one of the standard models they issue from the locker in the security room, and she beckons Pippa and Valérie to follow her. She can at least settle her most pressing concern without bothering anyone else.
She opens the laptop and logs in, and after it loads her standard desktop it takes only seconds to bring up the security console. A tap brings up the shift information. “Tabby’s on duty,” she says. “Dira, too.”
As the others absorb this, Christine pulls out a chair and almost falls into it, pathetically grateful that two of the people she trusts most to handle almost any situation are currently in the middle of handling it.
And that means she doesn’t have to get involved.
There’s a scrape to Christine’s left as Pippa pulls up a chair, and a delicate, almost inaudible noise as Valérie places another chair to her right. Pippa points at the corner of the screen, at the window with the camera view, currently slowly cycling through each feed from basements one and two.
“Can we see him?” she asks.
“You sure you want to?” Christine says.
“Yeah. Please? I just— I need to know. One way or the other.”
Honestly, so does Christine. It takes a second to find the right feed. She full-screens it. It’s hard to see what’s going on; she’s got the split feed up, which divides the two room cameras across the left and right sides of the screen, and both views are crowded. There’s not been so many people in one basement bedroom since… Shit, since Steph accidentally said Melissa’s name out loud and ended everyone’s quiet life.
Valérie leans in, taps at the screen, and inadvertently zooms the view so it’s focused entirely on one barely moving head. “Is that Frances?” she asks, as Christine fixes it.
What?
The figure she pointed to suddenly moves, steps up and away from the bed and backs out into the corridor to let in the just-arriving soldiers, so Christine quickly backs out to the camera list and adds a couple of corridor views. On one of them, clear as day, is Frankie Barton.
“Yes,” she says, bringing up the timeline view and scrubbing back. In one corner of the screen, the camera above Ollie’s bed flips back through the last several minutes, and they watch events play out in reverse. “What is she even doing down there?”
“Indira must have let her,” Pippa says.
“Yes, but why?”
“Maybe she didn’t want to give you another job.”
“Not funny,” Christine says, glaring at her.
“Sorry.”
“Look,” Valérie says, “he’s moving. Your boy.”
“Oliver,” Pippa says absently.
“If he’s alive now, and well enough to move, and the blood loss has been stemmed, he will probably live.”
“Seen a lot of this, have you?” Christine snaps, still trying to control her irritation at Pippa’s comment. She definitely needs her fortnight off. Will she even get it, with all this happening now?
“Yes,” Valérie says, and that’s enough to make Christine feel like shit all over again.
* * *
Frankie finds herself evacuated from Ollie’s room, watching the buzz of activity inside, with the two sponsors, Jane and Lisa, standing to her left and right, and she can’t decide if they’re bracketing her for security reasons or if they genuinely haven’t even processed that she’s here. Lisa, to Frankie’s left, reaches around Frankie to tap Jane on the forearm, and then silently points to the door at the end of the corridor, where another girl — not one Frankie’s met, nor one she recognises from Dorothy’s files — is waiting for her. From the way she flies down the hallway and into her arms, though, Frankie’s going to guess girlfriend.
That’s sweet.
Lisa obviously thinks so, too, because she leans against Frankie and sighs.
“You got someone waiting for you?” Frankie asks.
Lisa shakes her head. “No. Might see if Julia wants to say hi later, though, when she gets home.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No, I’m her—” Lisa starts, and then almost jumps, stands away from the wall, looks at Frankie for a moment as if Frankie is a wild animal, or an eldritch horror, or a TV licence inspector, and then moves to a ready pose. One hand on her weapon. “I’m her sponsor. You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
“Only what I’ve heard, love,” Frankie says, shuffling a little farther down the wall, giving Lisa her space. “We did it differently in my day.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Lisa folds her arms. “Why are you here? Really?”
“Nowhere else to go.”
“Why’d you help him?” She jerks her head back. Behind her, in Ollie’s room, the soldiers are preparing the stretcher, and the doctor, whose name Frankie also doesn’t know, is checking the dressings. The floor is covered with discarded, bloody strips of bedsheet.
“Believe it or not, I didn’t want him to die.”
In Ollie’s room, one of the soldiers — who replaced Frankie as nurse as soon as they arrived — says, “Fatima, he’s out again.”
“Shit,” the doctor mutters. “Alright. We’re moving him now. You lot in the corridor: out the way!”
“Our cue,” Frankie says, and Lisa thumbs open an empty bedroom and they both back into it to let the soldiers pass, with Ollie loaded up onto the stretcher. Frankie gets a good look, and they were right: the lad’s out cold. Not even a flutter on his eyelids.
For want of anything else to do, and because she doesn’t know where Tabitha’s gone, and she doesn’t know who, in her absence, is supposed to be keeping an eye on her, when the doctor leaves Ollie’s room, two-handing her medical kit and dangling a bag off one hand, Frankie reaches for the bag, relieves her of it, and follows her.
* * *
Christine doesn’t have time to comment on the way Frankie’s followed Doctor Rahman up and out of the basement, through the dining hall and out into the hallways at the back — following the soldiers, who went that way less than a minute ago, hauling an unconscious Ollie — and she barely has time to note Pippa’s reaction (confusion) and Valérie’s (a laugh she quickly covers with her hand) before Harmony comes charging down the main stairway into the dining hall, dressed for sleep and trailing Pamela.
“What’s going on?” she shrieks.
And then there are running feet behind Christine, and Monica rushes past her — Christine doesn’t see from where — and intercepts Harmony before she can go any farther. They have a whispered conversation, with occasional slightly louder interjections from Pamela, whom Monica keeps waving into quiet, and then Harmony yells, “He’s not conscious?”
She practically collapses into Monica’s arms, and Monica, with help from Pamela, leads her across the dining hall and into the kitchen.
“That went well,” Pippa mutters.
“I am confused,” Valérie says.
“Ollie’s sponsor. Only came off shift a little while ago. I thought she was asleep.”
“I assume,” Christine adds, “that she woke up and checked the sponsor channel on Consensus before anyone could break it to her more gently.” Awful way to find out. Presumably someone was going to go up and tell her in person, but got beaten to the punch by happenstance.
Par for the course.
“The usual ess-show,” Pippa says, as if reading Christine’s mind.
* * *
The smattering of portacabins out in the woods is much more extensive than Frankie expected, and she adds another zero to her assessment of how much money Peckinville has access to, and/or how much it allocates to the Dorley project. They’re laid out in three connected buildings, each one put together from multiple units; Frankie guesses there’s space to sleep fifteen or so people, in addition to the facilities to keep them clean, fed, and from going mad with boredom out here in the woods, since she can’t imagine Elle Lambert wants her soldiers spending time in the Hall and socialising with Dorley women. The medical building, a three-unit-wide slump at the edge of the hamlet, is sparsely appointed but clean, and as she follows Doctor Fatima through the door she spies Trev, sitting up in another bed and watching as the soldiers gently lower Ollie into the bed next to him.
“Hey, Trev,” she says, ambling over. “Got your head screwed back on all right?”
He shrugs gingerly with just one shoulder, the one that won’t interfere with his dressings if he moves it. “Can’t complain. What’s up with him?”
She sits on a chair next to his bed and leans in, covering her mouth. “Suicide attempt,” she whispers. “Unsuccessful one, so far.”
“Oh,” Trev says. “Good. That it was unsuccessful, I mean. What are you doing here? I thought you’d be under lock and key.”
“I helped.”
“With the suicide attempt?”
She laughs. “Nah. After. Bound his wrists, did a couple of tourniquets.”
He feigns surprise. “Ah, turning over a new leaf, then?”
“You little shit,” she says, laughing again. “I’ll have you know, I’m a very caring, compassionate—”
“If you two are going to keep talking,” Fatima says, turning away from Ollie for a moment, “you can get the hell out of my— my— my portacabin.”
“You okay to walk, Trev?”
“He’s fine,” Fatima says. “Just make sure he comes back later. I want him here overnight.” She’s waving an arm in their direction — universal sign language for piss off — but she’s not looking at them any more. All her concentration’s on Ollie.
Fair enough.
The two of them exit quietly, share a few observations about the setup out the back here — Trev points out the camo netting overtop all the buildings, which Frankie hadn’t noticed — and then find themselves stymied by the conservatory door out of which Frankie originally followed the doctor. In her absence, it has shut and locked itself. They knock on the glass for a bit, and wave at any security cameras that might be in the area, before giving up and circling the building.
“Nice location,” Trev says.
“I’ve always thought so.”
“Never seen it during the day.”
“Oh yeah. You were on the washout squad, weren’t you?”
“Just a delivery boy.”
“Very moral.”
“Weird to be back?” he asks.
“Trev,” Frankie says, and then they’ve rounded the corner and the lake is right there.
Christ.
What was she going to say?
Who knows.
The lake. She could walk to it in five minutes. Less. She’s brought them both to a stop and he’s looking at her but she’s just staring at those still waters and remembering a time she considered walking right into them, letting them close over her, letting the light slowly fade out.
It’s too much.
Having to be back here means having to be back here, and it’s not just the rooms that have bad memories and it’s not even the grounds; it’s her, it’s the woman she escaped when she left, it’s the woman she spent all that time at Stenordale trying not to become again, it’s the coward and the sadist and the woman who knew exactly what to do or to say to hurt someone.
Spent a long time telling herself she didn’t have a conscience. Calling it guilt or expedience or boredom or taking a bloody chance on something. And now it pulls at her, it sinks to the back of her mind like tar, suffocating every thought.
She’s leaning against the bare brick wall. Just looking out at the water. It’d be nice to think she’s clear of any cameras or microphones, but she’ll never be that lucky. Used up all her luck getting away from Dorothy a second time without getting a bullet to the brain or a knife in the back.
“Frankie?” Trev says.
“You know what I was,” she says, “when I was here?”
He settles against the wall next to her, as if they’re watching the sunset together and not preparing to count Frankie’s sins, nor admiring the font in which she almost baptised them. “You were young,” he says.
Frankie snorts. “Among other things. You shouldn’t associate with me, you know. Neither should Val. You got a whole building full of nice, normal women in there. Not a one of them ever did what I did.”
“Aren’t they similar, though? I mean, in methods, even if not—”
She slaps a hand against the bricks. It shuts him up before he says anything stupider.
“Only three girls I had a hand in made it out, Trev. One’s Beatrice. Another’s Val. And the third, I don’t know what happened to her. She never contacted me again. I just…” She mimes a plane taking off, though that wasn’t how they managed it. “…I just got her out.”
“When was that?”
She shrugs. “Nineties. Forget when.”
“She didn’t go to the police?”
“’Course not. Told her not to. When Beatrice got out, she wound up at a shelter in town. We found her immediately. She only got away because it was me who went after her; I forget, did I tell you this story?”
“About Beatrice, yeah. Not about the other girl.”
“Yeah, well. No police. I said, get away. I’d been withdrawing money for months and living on Tesco Value pot noodles. Gave her all of it. And off she went. Fuck, Trev, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have contacts. Didn’t have nothing. She could’ve died on the streets for all I know.”
“You still did a good thing.”
Still waters. Could walk it in minutes. This time of year, the cold might make it easier…
“I did not,” she says, closing her eyes. “I spent years and years saving my own skin. Opportunistically saving three people doesn’t make up for… Christ, Trev. I can’t even count them. And you know the worst thing? I could know. I could know how many, right now. They’ve probably got the info here. Beatrice’d tell me. Hell, she probably will anyway, when she decides to lock me up. And I’ll know exactly how many. I’ll know.”
Trev doesn’t say anything. Frankie doesn’t open her eyes. And the lake, not quite still, whispers to her.
* * *
When it became clear no-one was going to tell them what was going on, they all decamped to the common area, flicked on the TV, and ignored it. Well, Steph ignored it, and so did Bethany, and as for the others, Steph can’t really bring herself to care too much about them right now. Because something’s happened, and she hasn’t felt so out of the loop, so isolated, since before Pippa discovered her secret.
Something’s happened to Ollie. And though Jane and Lisa are back now, replacing Tabby, who vanished back upstairs without a word, no-one’s said a damn thing. They’re all huddled over at the far side of the room, talking amongst themselves.
“Steph?” Bethany whispers, and Steph immediately shakes herself out of it and rolls over, so she can face her. She’s pale, even more so than they all are, down here, away from the sun. “You think Ollie’s…?”
“No.”
“Awful certain of you,” Raph says. He must have overheard Bethany, and Steph recoils from that; whispers between them are for them, not him, recent convert to the team of not-making-trouble-any-more though he may be.
“You got anything useful to say?”
“Actually, yes. And it’s good news. Should lighten the mood.” He pushes up from the cushions he’s been slouching into, and swings himself around to address everyone. “Jane zeroed my student loans. I just realised.”
“What?”
“Well, I was thinking about if Ollie dies—”
“He won’t.”
“Steph,” Raph says, “they carried him out on a stretcher. We all saw.”
“We saw something,” Will corrects him, looking away from the TV. And it’s true: the windows set into the doors here are both thick and small; from a distance, it’s difficult to make out the face of someone you know well. All they know for certain is that two women went past, carrying something. Probably Ollie. Probably not Adam.
“Doesn’t matter,” Raph continues, blithely waving a hand. “Point is, Jane zeroed my student loan. Thanks, by the way,” he adds, calling across the room. She ignores him. “Look. I was thinking about if Ollie’s dead, and then I realised, I’m dead, right? Effectively. Or I’ve vanished or whatever. I’ve been put on a bus. My name’s in the end credits one last time, and then everyone forgets about me next season.”
Steph feels like she just crashed face-first into several conversational hurdles. “What?”
“It’s a TV Tropes reference,” Will says. “And he’s using it wrong.”
“Fuck you, Will,” Raph says.
“You’re using it wrong.”
“Fuck. You. Will.”
“You’re an idiot. Put on a Bus is when it’s left with a chance they might come back. What you’re talking about is Dropped a Bridge on Him.”
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Steph asks.
“It’s a website,” Bethany whispers, taking her hand, “It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m dead,” Raph says. “I don’t leave this place the same way I entered, right? None of us do. Different names. Different birthdays, probably. And you know what that means? Two years and one semester of student loans I never have to pay back.”
Bethany snorts. Will says, “And you think that’s worth losing your balls? You?”
“I’m just trying to look on the bright side. And it’s for all of us, isn’t it? All of us who got snatched out of the university grounds, anyway. Get out of debt free!”
“I didn’t get loans,” Bethany says quietly.
“And I’m not dying,” Steph says. “Not effectively. Not at all. I’m coming back as me.”
“Really?” Raph says, and Bethany taps Steph on the knee, a quiet rebuke.
Steph shrugs; it’s not as if it could stay a secret forever, and she’s long since forgotten who knows what. “I’m on a slightly different programme,” she says.
“Weird,” Raph says, seeming neither excited nor bothered by the revelation.
“Martin didn’t get loans, either,” Will says. “And Ollie and Adam, they didn’t get picked up from Saints. They weren’t students. Neither was Declan, actually. I think.”
“So it’s just us?” Raph says, and holds up a hand. “High five?”
“Shut up.”
“Please?”
Raph keeps his hand upheld until Will turns away, back to the TV, and pointedly ignores him. Bethany quietly laughs and buries her amusement in Steph’s shoulder.
“Raphael,” Jane calls across the room, “stop helping.”
“This is part of my process!” he shouts back.
“There are so many tasers in this room,” Amy says, just loud enough for Raph to hear, and he smiles at her, nods at her, and turns back to Steph and Bethany.
“You all right, Raph?” Steph asks, keeping her voice low, trying to suggest they keep the conversation, however it turns out, between the three of us.
“Just bored of moping,” he says. “I mean, they could have killed us, yeah? We could’ve been dead by now. And, fuck, they could have done to us what they did to Declan, whatever that was. They’ve had our lives in their hands for months, and we’re still here. Eating their food and wearing their clothes.”
“Taking their hormones,” Bethany adds.
“What are you saying, Raph?” Steph says. “That you’re grateful?”
“Fuck no. They still took us, didn’t they? But like I said, I’m finding bright sides. Fed up of sticking my head in the ground, waiting for Declan to do something stupid or Will to try and hurt someone or Ollie to— to do whatever it is he just did. And it’s actually kind of interesting, really, isn’t it? If they’re going to do this shit to us anyway, whatever we do — as long as we don’t push them too far — then why not sit back, let it happen, and see what we all end up like? I think I’ll be one of those nerdy librarian women.”
“You— You want that?”
“No. But women like that are hot. So, what I mean is: fuck it. Caring is out. Whatever happened to Declan is out. Whatever just happened with Ollie and whatever the fuck Adam’s doing to himself in his room; all out. Apathy is in. Sit back and smell the bean bag chairs.”
“Why couldn’t you’ve realised this months ago?” Jane says. She’s walking over, and she leans on the back of the sofa. “Would’ve saved me so much work.” Before Raph can retort, she adds, sounding as exhausted as she looks, “Come on, all. Turn off the telly and sit up at the tables. Tab’s coming back down, and she’s got an announcement to make.”
* * *
Tabby came up, handed out a few instructions to the assembled women in the dining hall — mostly to get them to disperse — grabbed Pippa, and went back downstairs, leaving Christine blissfully alone in an emptying room.
Almost alone: Valérie, the fifty-three-year-old serial abuse survivor, to whom Christine still does not know how to talk, and who seems quietly amused by everything going on around her, will be back from the bathroom in a minute. She considers messaging Paige, but decides she’d rather keep her out of this whole kerfuffle. Better for her to encounter it all later, when the excitement is over, when people have calmed down.
She tabs through the camera feeds one more time. Steph and the others are assembling in standard ‘disclosure’ formation in the common room, presumably so Tabby can brief them. Adam’s sleeping; she winds back a few hours and finds him variously reading, staring at the ceiling, listlessly playing a game, and sleeping again. Ollie is out of Christine’s range; she’ll have to check with Jan about whether they’re supposed to be meshing their security systems.
“Where did everyone go? Did I miss anything?”
Christine quickly closes the laptop. Valérie Barbier might be an old friend of Aunt Bea’s, but until Christine knows exactly what her clearance level is, she’s not showing her any damning video evidence of the underground torture facility they are not, legally, allowed to operate.
Well, she’s not showing her any more evidence. Dear lord, she’s so dumb.
“In my defence,” Christine says to herself, “it’s been a long year.”
“Hmm?”
“Oh. Nothing.”
“You are right, though,” Valérie says, settling against the edge of the table gently enough that Christine, whose hands are still resting on the laptop, barely feels it, “it has been an extremely long year.”
“Ah,” Christine says, recalling that, no matter how stressed out she’s been lately, no-one has yet pointed a gun at her. “Shit. Sorry. I should have—”
She’s interrupted by a playful poke to the shoulder. “Don’t worry!” Valérie says, and she shuffles up closer to Christine. “Don’t be so stiff around me, okay? I do not intend to spend the rest of my life reliving the atrocities of its first half every time someone is not sufficiently deferential to my pain and suffering. Okay?”
“Okay,” Christine says. She’s caught between parsing Valérie’s statement and being infuriated that Valérie is, like Paige, apparently another woman who can appear effortlessly elegant while lounging artlessly on the furniture, while Christine — for example — has anxiously hiked up her legs under her bottom, and would probably have curled up like a snail if she had a shell. “I get it, I think. Different degrees, but, you know…”
“Of course you do. We were both taken from our lives, Christine. For different reasons and for… different durations, but with similar outcomes, yes?”
Christine grins. “I think Paige would say you dress better than I do, but yes. Pretty similar.”
“This Paige; your… girlfriend? Ah. I see by your blush that she is. Good. I would like to meet her.”
“Really?”
Valérie stands. “Yes. You have so many extraordinary women here. I would like to get to know all of you. It is so much better to talk to new people than it is to be very, very tragic.” She nods in the direction of the kitchen. “Cup of tea? And then perhaps you can finish showing me around.”
Christine, nodding, accepts a hand up and out of her chair, which proves helpful when her partially numbed legs aren’t quite up to the task of holding her all the way up. So Valérie holds her firmly by the upper arm, and Christine follows her into the kitchen, feeling like, perhaps, the last of her awkwardness around her is finally dissipating.
And why not make some tea? Why not take her back upstairs and show her around the rest of the building? It’s not as if there’s much else incriminating above ground except for the bloody mugs.
In the kitchen, Monica’s sitting with Harmony. Pamela, who Christine’s pretty sure went in with them, isn’t around, so presumably she checked the same feeds Christine did, confirmed that Martin’s taking in events with his usual confusing equanimity, and then vanished up the front stairs and went back to bed. Probably a good thing. Harmony, meanwhile, has the look of someone who might, if she were being watched by anyone less intimidating than Monica, have to be handcuffed to the table to keep her in place.
“Valérie,” Monica says, “hello again.” And then she points from herself to Harmony. “I’m Monica, and the stressed-out one there—”
“—shut up—”
“—is Harmony. Don’t worry about remembering all our names on your first day.”
“I make a point of remembering names,” Valérie replies. “It was enforced.”
Monica frowns at that, and Harmony looks like she might cry again; Christine hides her smirk by rushing over to the sideboard and fetching mugs off the mug tree, though she’s interrupted by Valérie, who seems to think the job of making tea is hers. She grabs the kettle before Christine can.
“Would you girls like a cup of tea?” Valérie asks. They both nod, and as she turns back to the sideboard and fills the kettle all the way to the top, she says, “And don’t worry about the boy. Frances was with him, and she’s seen more of that kind of thing than even I have. He’ll be fine, I’m sure.”
“Frankie being present isn’t all that reassuring,” Monica says. “We all know what she used to do.”
“Well, obviously,” Val says, and Harmony whispers something that sounds like, Can’t believe fucking Frankie was there and I wasn’t. She’s fiddling with the thick-strapped watch she habitually wears; it looks odd on her slim wrist. “And now she’s here again, isn’t she? She’s very motivated to help out.”
“I suppose,” Monica says, nodding slowly.
“And she’s— Ah! Speak of the devil!”
Valérie says it just before someone knocks on the kitchen door, and through the windows, Christine can see Frankie. Shit; how did she get out there? At least she’s not alone; the other girl is with her. No, Christine reminds herself, the guy. The one who’s going to be detransitioned, or retransitioned, or whatever. Seems strange to do so without at least giving womanhood a proper try, but Christine’s long since accepted that just because she’s reasonably normal for Dorley doesn’t mean she’s representative of most people who were assigned male at birth.
She lets them in.
“Thank you!” Frankie says, theatrically rubbing her hands together and huffing her red cheeks. “It’s cold!”
“It’s not that bad,” Trevor says.
“Hark at him. He’s got proper clothes on and he says it’s not that cold. Meanwhile, I’m still in Val’s castoffs. Actually,” she adds, turning to him, “I didn’t notice, but you look less—” she gestures voluptuously above her chest, “—shapely than usual. Sports bra?”
“Uh. Yes. And the, uh—”
“Baggy clothes, right. You want a tea?”
Valérie points to the boiling kettle. “I’m handling the tea, Frances. Sit. We will warm you, and then we will get you some fresh clothes.” She glances at Christine. “If that is acceptable?”
Christine doesn’t get to answer, because Monica asks, very suddenly, the question on everyone’s mind: “How did you get out?”
Frankie doesn’t seem bothered by the interrogation. She pulls back a chair and slumps into it. “I was with the lad. Ollie. The one who hurt himself. Went with the doctor, in case there was anything else I could do. Turned out I was just in the way — story of my life — and Trev looked like he was getting bored in there, so I fetched him up and we headed back. Only the conservatory door was closed, so…”
“You came around the front,” Monica finishes. “You didn’t think about, say, running off?”
“In this weather? Besides, why would I show up one minute and run off the next? How’s that tea, Val?”
“I’m sorry,” Valérie says, leaning against the sideboard, “is your last name Smyth-Farrow? Or Marsden? Do you think you can snap your fingers and tea will appear?” She taps a teapot Christine didn’t know they had. “It is brewing, you ingrate. You’ll get it when it’s ready. Show of hands for milk.”
It takes everyone assembled — Frankie aside — a moment to realise she’s addressing all of them, and then everyone raises their hands. She repeats for sugar; only Frankie’s hand remains up.
“Yes, yes,” Valérie says to her, “I know what you like. Enough sugar to sink the Titanic. See how the rest of these young women take better care of their teeth?”
“Val,” Frankie says, “if my teeth haven’t fallen out by now, they’re never going to. I could eat rocks.”
“Disgusting,” Valérie comments. “Help me pass these out.”
Frankie stands up, fetches from Valérie the only mug with sugar in, and two others. Christine can’t help but notice that poor Trevor gets the mug labelled I got the surgery that makes you worse, and she hopes he doesn’t notice. And then she realises Valérie must have switched out the mugs Christine got out originally; she hadn’t thought novelty mugs would be entirely appropriate in the present atmosphere, but Valérie disagrees. Valérie hands her a mug of her own — it says An Englishman’s word is his bond; the rest is surplus to requirements — and they both quietly sit.
Monica seems about to say something, but she immediately quietens, and when Christine frowns at her, Monica nods to the seat next to her: Harmony’s quietly shivering.
Christine, carefully, reaches over and takes her hand, and Harmony grips it hard enough that it hurts a little.
“Frankie,” Harmony says, quiet and hesitant, “how did he seem?”
Frankie leans forward, her face blank. “He’s yours, isn’t he?” Harmony doesn’t nod, but the twitch that crosses her face seems like it’s enough for Frankie. “Well, he was conscious when I got there. I’ll not lie, he cut himself deep. Could have been really nasty. But your girl in the security room, Indira, she saw quickly how he wasn’t behaving like normal, she said how he never makes his bed like he did, so she sent in two of the others, and as soon as I saw on the screen what was up, I asked her to let me help. I’ve, uh, seen a lot of—”
“She knows, Frances,” Valérie says quietly.
“’Course she does. Well, okay, I’d say I got down there in a minute or so, and I got his wrists wrapped, good and tight. Got a tourniquet on each arm, too, just below the elbow. That’s to stop the blood flow. You gotta do it in two places, see? Gotta stop the bleeding and then you gotta—”
“Frances.”
“Right. He was still conscious for that. He was looking at us, looking at me. Knew we were talking. Tried to respond, but he was a bit out of it for that. Then the doctor was there. Forgot to get her name in all the commotion. Fatima Something, I think.”
“Rahman,” Monica says. “Doctor Fatima Rahman.”
“Thanks, love. So, Doctor Rahman, she got my makeshift wraps replaced with proper dressings, a proper barrier so he couldn’t bleed no more, and they improved on my tourniquets, too. He lost consciousness after that, but, Harmony, love, it wasn’t necessarily from blood loss. Could have been shock. Sometimes it’s enough. Or sometimes people go unresponsive, but they’re still conscious. I’ve seen it.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Mon, please…” Harmony whispers.
“Then they took him out to the medical cabin out back,” Frankie says. “Got him settled. Trev and I, we both saw.” Trevor, both hands around his mug — covering the lettering, fortunately — nods when Harmony looks over at him. “He didn’t have time to get in too much danger, and they’ve got blood supplies out back, I assume?” Frankie says this to Monica, who curtly bobs her head. “He’ll be fine. Nice little setup, by the way. Quite plush for a bunch of trailers.”
“Supposed to protect us from your lot,” Monica says. “Only you’re in our kitchen.”
Frankie shrugs. “I get everywhere, love.”
“I’ve done it all wrong with him,” Harmony says. She’s not looking at anyone now, and the hand Christine’s holding seems suddenly like her only human connection. “Should have been kinder. Should have given him a light when he asked for one. Should have anticipated this. But I thought I was so fucking clever. I thought I was… Fuck.” She bangs the hand Christine’s holding on the table, but it’s gentle enough that it doesn’t really hurt. “Shit,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Christine says.
“You’re doing your best, Harmony,” Monica says. “You are; don’t argue. Everyone knows it. And we all know how difficult this job can be. We know that sometimes they have to get close to losing everything — absolutely everything — before they understand what they have to gain.”
“True enough,” Valérie says.
“It never goes this far, though,” Harmony says.
“It does,” Monica insists. “You know it does. It hasn’t for a while, sure, but it happens. As much as we all try to make sure it doesn’t, it happens. And this time it feels bigger, Harmony, because he’s yours.”
“And because there’s everything else happening at the same time,” Christine puts in.
“I want to see him,” Harmony says, letting go of Christine and pushing back out of her chair, her mug of tea untouched.
“And you will,” Monica says, grabbing her forearm before she can scramble out of reach. “But you’re no good to him right now. You need to sleep, Harmony.”
“Sleep? How can I sleep?”
“I’ll get you something to take with your tea. And then you can get some sleep, and then you’ll take the first overnight rota.”
“Rota?”
Monica nods. “Two people are going to be with him at all times. Right now, it’s Doctor Rahman and Jan; later, it’ll be you and whomever you like. He won’t be alone, Harm. I promise.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
* * *
Jane had them all sit up at the metal tables, facing towards the TV, and maybe that’s why Bethany, as soon as she sits down, grabs hold of Steph’s hand under the table and doesn’t let go: it’s too much like disclosure day. Too much like the day that ultimately ended Aaron.
They haven’t talked about that day much. Haven’t talked much about Bethany’s old life at all, not really. It’s been a boundary Steph’s kept to, because as much as she desperately wants to talk with Bethany about the things that still hurt her, that ambush her when she’s awake and that come for her in the night, she knows that sometimes it just doesn’t help to talk about things. Sometimes, you just need to put as much distance between them and yourself as possible.
Pippa and Tabby enter as the others grudgingly take up their seats. Pippa waves to Steph — Bethany, head down, doesn’t see — and joins Jane and the others. Raph, oddly, has chosen to sit with Steph and Bethany, and he nods awkwardly to Steph as he sits down; Will and Martin take the next table over; and that’s it. These are their reduced numbers: no Ollie, no Declan, no—
“Hey,” Will says, “where’s Adam? Isn’t he even going to come out for this?”
Tabby’s leaning against the wall by the door, and she stands to her fullest extent before she starts to answer, and walks closer as she talks, rounding the metal tables and ending on the other side of the couches, near the TV.
“Edy will talk to Adam,” she says. “Later. Right now, he doesn’t know anything’s happened at all. It’s easier that way.”
“What’s going on with him, anyway? He won’t even talk to me any more.”
“And you’re surprised by that?” Raph says. “After what you did? What we did?”
Bethany flinches at the memory but says nothing.
“I’m not surprised,” Will says, “but he should talk to someone.”
“He’ll talk to Edy,” Tabby says. “Look, Will, I know you miss him—”
“Nah.”
“—but he’s got a lot on his mind, and Edy’s the only one who can really understand him.”
“What’s he got on his mind that the rest of us don’t?” Will asks. He’s tapping his fingers slowly and arrhythmically on the metal table. “Aside from Steph, I s’pose.”
“And you,” Bethany points out quietly.
“Look,” Will says suddenly, turning around in his seat, suddenly animated, “whatever you think you know, you—”
“William,” Tabby says. When she has him successfully diverted — and Steph has to be amused; the Will she knew when she first arrived would never allow himself to be controlled with a word — she continues, “There’s no shame in it.”
“Look, forget about me,” he says. “We’re talking about Adam. He’s completely checked out. Fuck it, Tab; where’s he gone?”
Tabby smiles at him. “Never lost a religion, have you?”
Will snorts. “Obviously not.”
“Just give him the time he needs, Will. Please. And that,” she adds, stepping away from his table and raising her voice, “goes for all of you. Adam’ll be back when he’s ready.”
“Fine,” Raph says. “Okay. What about Ollie?” Steph glances over; he’s more tense than he probably wants anyone to think he is. Strange. She thought he hated Ollie. She thought Ollie hated him.
Ollie hates everyone, though.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” Tabby says. “You’re big boys and girls. The fact is, he tried to kill himself. He took apart his electric razor and cut through his wrists with it.” The hand holding Steph’s suddenly freezes. Steph leans over, presses her shoulder into Bethany’s. “Fortunately, we got there in time. We have a doctor onsite. She’s with him now, and he’ll have round-the-clock supervision.”
“For how long?” Raph asks.
“Until the sponsors say otherwise.”
“When’s he coming back down here?”
“When the sponsors think he’s ready. He’s not getting a holiday,” Tabby adds, holding up a finger to address a complaint no-one seems about to raise. “He’ll be in restraints and under watch.”
“We’ll get him a TV, though,” Jane says. “Or a tablet. Something to watch things on.”
“Yeah.”
“So he’s going to be okay?” Steph asks, very aware that Bethany hasn’t moved except to take shallow, anxious breaths since they started talking about him.
“He is.”
“Then, um, can we go? I’m tired,” she improvises, painfully aware of how obvious she’s probably being. She forces a yawn. “I could really do with a nap or something.”
“Oh,” Tabby says, surprised. “Sure, I suppose. Knock yourself out.”
“Don’t take that literally,” Raph says, as Steph and Bethany climb out of the metal chairs and walk stiffly out of the room. Steph can hear Jane scolding Raph and Tabby talking to Will and Martin as they leave, but Bethany doesn’t say a word until the doors swing shut behind them and they’re alone in the corridor.
“Thanks, Steph,” she whispers.
* * *
Frankie’s quietly drinking her tea — from a mug labelled There once was a young man from Saints / Whose behaviour was quite the disgrace / So we faked that he drowned / And kept him below ground / In the end we gave her a new face — and listening to Val and Trev talk to Monica. Mostly boring stuff about the current intake, though Val is listening with every impression of fascination. Trev just looks tired. Understandable; Frankie doesn’t understand how any of them are still going. When did she last sleep? In the car? Why are they all still walking around?
Might just be that everything’s new again. Everything’s exciting. Hopeful.
For them, anyway. Trev’s going to be a man again, eventually, and the Smyth-Farrows aren’t going to be able to touch him. And Val, well, she’s a free woman for the first time since she was a teen; she’s soaking up every tiny detail. Doesn’t seem to bother her that this was the place she was first tortured, the place she was made into who she was. Woman’d give a whole team of psychiatrists the best day of their lives if she let them poke around inside her brain.
Frankie, though, still doesn’t know her fate. And the worst thing about a plan with a good chance of dying is that when you survive it, you have to live through all the bullshit you’d hoped to avoid, by virtue of being fucking dead.
The lake is still tempting. It’s certain.
“Heads up, Frances,” Val says, pulling Frankie’s attention away from the grain of the wood and back towards the people again. Val’s gesturing with her mug — which says If at first you don’t succeed, castrate him and try again — and in the doorway through to the dining hall are two people: a short — very short, for this place — Black girl with glasses and tightly tied-back hair, and…
Yeah. Beatrice Quinn.
It’s time, then.
“Hi, Beatrice,” Frankie says. “Properly, this time.”
Beatrice, to her credit, completely fucking ignores her and turns instead to the girl at her side. “Abigail,” she says, “you’re happy with our arrangement?”
The girl, Abigail, nods. “Yes, Aunt Bea.”
“Then go get something to eat. If you need to microwave any of it, please use one of the other kitchens. Oh, and Abigail,” Beatrice adds, before Abigail can quite vanish around the doorframe, “do tell Amy Woodley that I need to talk to her some time. It’s not urgent and she’s not in trouble, but we do need to speak about some people of… mutual concern.”
“Will do, Aunt Bea,” Abigail says, and waves to the room. “Hi and bye, all.”
“Hey, Abby!” Monica yells after her. “Tell Amy we’re going to start charging rent if she keeps hanging around here!”
“No!” Abigail yells back, and then it’s just Beatrice and the rest of them.
“Ladies,” Beatrice says, sitting down at the far end of the table from Frankie, “the room, please.”
“Come on, Valérie,” the one called Christine says, and Frankie has to be impressed; she’s got the pronunciation down pat in just a few hours. “I can finish giving you the tour and we can go find Paige. Trevor? Wanna come?”
Trev abandons his second cup of tea and follows them out, though he turns and winks at Frankie before saying quietly to Val that he thinks he’ll just find a quiet corner for now, and read.
And then Frankie and Beatrice are alone together.
“We need to catch up,” Beatrice says.
Her voice, now that Frankie has her alone and can concentrate on her, is not as Frankie remembers it from the day she took back the Hall. Nor is it how it was earlier today, when Frankie first saw her again. It is low, on the lowest end of alto, and delicately controlled, and it is quiet. It reminds Frankie of someone else, of one of the aristo women who visited Dotty’s Dorley occasionally, and who was so absolutely convinced of her own superiority that it seemed to rub off on everyone else. She would whisper and the room would quiet.
When Frankie knew Beatrice — when Beatrice was David or Dee — she was as coarse as Frankie herself; this mode of speech is learned.
Who from? Elle Lambert? Whatever; Frankie finds herself wanting to walk back the accent she’s adopted and talk like she used to, before decades of association with Dorothy, the social climber, softened her. She wants to rub it in: I remember where you come from.
It’s an unhelpful impulse. She squashes it. Who cares if Beatrice sounds different? Maybe it started when she met Lambert; maybe it’s from before, from the sketchy period of her life about which no-one seems to know. And so what if it’s an affectation; the voice is a tool, and Beatrice is using hers to tell Frankie that she is at her most formal and least tolerant.
Besides, you shouldn’t be a cunt to someone just because she reinvented herself, especially when it was you who did it to her in the first place.
“Tabitha spoke to me,” Beatrice says. “And Valérie and I talked of it a little. Much more in the future, I imagine. I understand that you claim you are responsible for my freedom?”
What to say to that? Frankie makes do with a shrug. Any more might ignite Beatrice.
“I am told you let me run,” Beatrice says, “and that when I hid at the homeless shelter, you followed me and pretended not to find me. And yet…” She leans forward on the table, chin resting on the back of a hand. “And yet I remember my earlier excursions. I’m sure you do, too. Do you recall threatening to pull down my skirt in public?”
“Yeah,” Frankie says. “I do.”
“Help me square this circle, Frances.”
Hah. No-one calls her Frances except Val. Those two must’ve got close, quick.
Doesn’t matter. Think! What should she say? How should she say it? Forget about the fucking lake. Forget about her stupid conscience. Suddenly she’s invested in her own survival for the first time in a long while, and she’s not exactly sure why; maybe she wants to live long enough to see Dorothy burn; maybe she just wants to see a nice, wholesome Dorley intake. Maybe she never had the death wish she thought she had. Maybe she was just — what did Trev say that one time, that therapy phrase? — processing her emotions.
Maybe she’s just a coward, same as usual.
Sod it. Just lay it out.
“There were too many of us around, Beatrice,” she said. “Karen and Tilly and Sharon and the rest. They always had someone on you. And we were all watching each other, too.”
“Why allow me out at all?”
“Boredom. Experimentation. The others, they wanted to see how you’d turn out if you got a taste of the good life before we shipped you off.”
“And you?” Beatrice asks carefully.
“Six of one,” Frankie says. “Felt sorry for you. Thought you needed an outlet. But also… Yeah, I was interested. Never liked turning out basket cases.”
“How altruistic.”
Frankie hardens her voice. “The ones who were stable… They lived longer.”
“Don’t talk to me about the others. Tell me what you did to get me out that I didn’t do myself.”
“All of it. Sorry, but it’s true. Oh, you wanted it, yes, and that was all well and good, but you needed the opportunity and it needed to be safe. Or not safe. You were still being thrown to the wolves. Just not our wolves. Anyway, on the night you got out, it was late. Really late. And there weren’t many of us about. And we were having work done on the premises, so there was more gaps in the net than usual. I mean, you were practically the only person in the building that night. Above or below ground.”
“And the keys?”
“Yeah. Meant you to have them. You’re not a good pickpocket.”
“You’ll understand if I find this hard to believe.”
Frankie’s turn to lean forward. “Yeah. Obviously. I know I have no credibility, and I know my history. Talk to Val about me. Talk to Trev. They’ll tell you: I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not. I’m a monster, Beatrice. I know it. Always covered my own hide first. A few opportunistic acts of kindness don’t change that. Hah; all the same,” she adds, “I was half expecting old Dotty to gut me when I came back empty-handed. But you weren’t Val, happy to say. She might have found you interesting for a little while, but there was never any money wrapped up in you. Caught to spec, you might say. Speculatively mutilated. She forgot about you easily enough after you were gone. Or made herself forget.” Frankie should probably stop talking at this point; she doesn’t know why she can’t. “I think if she’d punished me, it would’ve given the game away. She wouldn’t’ve been ‘Grandmother’ no more, just a woman, growing older, losing control.”
Beatrice stares at her for a moment, expressionless, and then nods.
“I don’t trust you, Frances,” she says. “And I will never trust you. There is nothing you can do, no life you can save, that will endear you to me. But you helped Valérie. You helped Trevor. You even helped Oliver. I know someone useful when I see her, and I am not in the business of throwing people away. I prefer not to be, anyway.” Silence again for a short while. Frankie lets it grow to fill the space. Eventually, Beatrice continues, “You can stay here. We’ll find you a room. You won’t be a prisoner, but I wouldn’t advise that you stray too far from this building.”
“Yeah, no,” Frankie says. “Doubt I could get a mile away from this place without being knifed by some Silver River bastard.”
“You’ll tell us everything you know, obviously.”
“Well, yeah.” Frankie taps a finger on the table. Creates a little time. “Can I make a request? No room on the ground floor, please. Or the first floor.”
“May I ask why?”
“I got as many bad memories here as you do, I think.”
* * *
Apparently Liss, Shahida and Amy are still being debriefed — and relieved of their temporary weaponry — so after a quick chat with Christine and Valérie, who subsequently vanish up the central stairs in search of Paige, Abby makes herself busy assembling a selection of takeaway food. There’s always a stack of miscellaneous and mismatched trays in the corner of the dining hall, and she’s borrowed two. Liss or someone can help her carry it all upstairs.
She’s not looking forward to facing Liss and Shahida. She ran and she knows it, and so do they, and while she has all kinds of good and reasonable arguments as to why she ran, she knows they’re all bullshit. And so do they.
Part of the arrangement: sort your shit out. Not the greater part of the arrangement — which mostly involves negotiating, writing and signing an updated NPH, so one or other of the elves back at head office can propagate little bits of proof throughout the country’s disorganised electronic infrastructure — but, Aunt Bea pressed on her, an important part. Don’t let people leave you, Bea said, and don’t leave people. Don’t waste chances, or you’ll wake up in your fifties and still be alone.
Unsettling to see Beatrice Quinn seem so vulnerable.
She’s looking around the place, refamiliarising herself with it all — it’s not long since she was here last, but things at the Hall change quickly as much as they stay resolutely the same, and if you don’t keep up, you feel out of the loop pretty quick — and thus has her back turned when the girls come pouring out of the stairwell to the basement. She hears them coming, but doesn’t have time to turn around before a pair of pale forearms lock around her waist and a chin props itself on the back of her head.
“Hi, Liss,” she says.
“Hi, Abs,” Melissa says.
Liss always likes to say she fits perfectly there, but it’s not quite true; there’s only ten centimetres between them, so she has to stand on her toes so she can properly wield her height advantage against Abby. It would be easy, therefore, for Abby to press back lightly with one foot, knock Melissa off balance and turn the tables on her, but they’re not there yet. They may not ever be again.
The thought is depressing enough that Abby leans into Liss’ embrace instead.
“I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“Shush,” Melissa says, releasing her and giving her a chance to turn around. Abby does so, and finds Shahida and Melissa’s other friend, Amy, waiting a respectful distance away. Amy waves, Shahida smiles. Melissa looks radiant. “Don’t say anything dumb, Abs. I’ve missed you.”
“I ran from you.”
Melissa frowns, mock-disappointed. “What did I just say about dumb things? Anyway, I ran first. I wasn’t fair to you. And,” she adds, before Abby can correct her horrendous mischaracterisation of their relationship, “I don’t want to talk about that now. Because, Abs, I’m so tired. So I have a suggestion.”
“My idea, actually,” Amy says. She’s investigating a mostly empty pizza box, and when she looks back at Abby it is to cheekily pop a slice of pepperoni into her mouth.
“Shut up, Amy,” Melissa says, without looking behind her. “Let’s go upstairs. The four of us. My room or yours. Because I want to reconnect, Abs, and I want to apologise, and I want to talk into the night, but right now all my body wants is to eat and sleep. So let’s pick a room and put on a movie and eat until it knocks us all out.”
“Yeah,” Abby says, nodding, “let’s do that.” Behind Melissa, Shahida seems to sigh in relief.
“Wanna steal some food?” Melissa says.
Abby taps the trays she’s been assembling. “Way ahead of you.”
* * *
Bethany’s way too warm. Her own stupid fault, sure. But now Steph’s leaning up against her and she looks and sounds really comfortable and if she’s going to remedy the situation before, e.g., her organs start boiling in her belly, she’s going to have to move her and spoil everything.
Back in the common room, Bethany couldn’t deal with it. Any of it. And Steph was so good. Didn’t ask questions. Just let her get the fuck out back to Steph’s room, and let her wrap herself in the duvet until she looked, per Steph, ‘like if ET had better skin’.
Bethany hasn’t seen ET, but she’s seen screenshots. Memes. References in TV shows. Little alien bastard looks like a Peperami; she hopes she looks better than a fucking Peperami. And then that’s a stupid thing to think of, because she used to get Peperami at the tuck shop at school, and that takes her right back to the thing she’s been trying to avoid ever since she heard about what Ollie tried to do to himself.
Fuck Peperami and fuck ET. Think about something else, Bethany.
Like how hot you are right now.
Shit. Comforting being cocooned; comforting having Steph on her lap. But she’s going to die of heat stroke, and the heat brings other things with it, so:
“Steph,” she says. A light snore answers her, so she bucks her thigh to nudge her, and says, “Stephanie.”
Steph makes this adorable little moaning noise, which is lovely to hear but not especially useful, so Bethany shifts around with greater and greater urgency until Steph finally, and with much groaning, wakes up, straightens up and stretches.
“Oof,” she says, reaching around to the small of her back and pressing on herself. “That sure was a sleeping position.”
Normally Bethany’d be in there with a stupid comment, but it’s getting difficult to think about that stuff. It’s getting difficult to think about anything else. So she shrugs off the duvet and stands up as soon as Steph’s completely out of her way, the better to walk off some of the energy that’s been building up.
“Beth?” Steph says. “What’s up?”
She shakes her head. Not ready. Not ready yet.
“Okay,” Steph says. “You don’t have to say anything.”
“No,” Bethany says, stopping for a moment. “No, I do. I just— Fuck.” She starts pacing again. “Okay. So here’s the thing. Here’s what’s been on my brain. And I shouldn’t even be thinking about it, you know? Because I made myself stop thinking about it years ago. Like a week after it happened, honestly. But now it’s just there, right in the way of everything, and I just— Fuck. Fuck.”
Steph reaches for her, and Bethany takes her hand, lets herself be pulled back in. She sits down on the edge of the mattress, between Steph’s knees, and leans back onto her. At least she’s not so boiling hot now.
“You really don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want,” Steph says.
“No, that’s just it. I don’t want to talk about it, but I have to, because I keep fucking regressing, you know? Fucking backsliding. Back into him. Back into Aaron.” Steph’s reaction to that is obvious, even though Bethany can’t see her face; neither of them have said that name for a while. Bethany ploughs on. “Because of fucking Ollie, right? Stupid fucker has a go at his wrists and doesn’t even have the good grace to go all the way and cut his fucking hands off or something, and now all I can think about is— is—”
“Bethany—”
“Is when I tried it.”
Steph’s hands freeze on her, just for a moment, and then she gathers her in, holds her tight. Steph’s cheek presses against Bethany’s, and she doesn’t even care that she’s still sore from laser; she presses right back.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she says. “I didn’t cut. No, I was clever. And stupid. But mostly clever.”
“What happened?” Steph whispers.
And Bethany tells her.
There’s a school. And a long, hot summer, one that’s come early, one that won’t break. And a boy.
Aaron.
He’s been at that stupid school for long enough, and with long enough ahead of him, that it feels inescapable. And that’s dumb, because it is, you know, quite literally escapable, in that he can leave the grounds if no-one spots him slipping out through the gap in the fence by the side gate, and he can go see Elizabeth, but there’ve been more people around lately, because of the hot weather, because of the genetic need these braying bastards have to gather on any vaguely flat spot of land and throw cricket balls around — mostly in service of impromptu games; occasionally at Aaron — so he’s been more trapped in here than ever before, trapped with the boys who never let up and who are in infinite fucking supply. And today he’s bruised and he’s probably broken a toe and he’s definitely been kicked in the balls because he refused to cooperate with some bullshit Henry Tarquin Roger Beefcake Landfucker the Third demanded of him, and it’s too hot in the halls and too hot in the dorms and too hot in the places he goes to hide and he just wants out.
Imagine being able to call your mum. Imagine calling her and having her express sympathy. Imagine having her pull you out of the school that assaults you and tries to make you suck the older boys’ dicks and doesn’t even teach you anything useful or important because she loves you and she wants the best for you. Imagine being anything other than a chess piece in training, getting made ready to be put on the board and advance its father’s desire to step forward from the back ranks and, shit, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t play chess, maybe castle something? Or rook something?
Who cares.
Laughter from the other end of the corridor. Hugo Fuckstick Manorshit the Ninety-First and his cadre of lesser aristocunts, probably. Or it could be any of the others; a parade of names Aaron’s aggressively refused to learn, a shapeless, undifferentiated mass of arrogance and sadism.
Yeah.
Move.
He does: he jumps up from the bench he’s been lolling on, here in this relatively untrafficked spot, and jogs off down an adjoining corridor. It’s possible Rowland Harry Peasantdefiler of Ipswich or whoever sees him leave, but it’s hot for everyone, not just Aaron, and he can be fucking fast when he needs to be, and the posh fucker probably doesn’t want to chase him just to end up only with the second most satisfying outcome, which is all he ever gives any of them these days. Better a swollen eyesocket or a week-long limp than the alternative.
He picks up the pace, anyway. Takes a couple of turns. He’s into the staff areas now, he’s pretty sure, so he slows up again, moves more carefully, but there’s no-one around.
He hasn’t been here before, and it takes him a few minutes to orientate himself. He does so, finally, by locating the dean’s office, which he knows well, because he’s been hauled in there time after time to have it explained to him that boys will be boys, that it’s just the rough and tumble of education, that if it was the dean’s day, then bigod he’d have Aaron over his knee with a strap just for wasting his time.
Fuck this place.
And fuck the dean, too.
He kicks at the door, and he’s surprised to find it swings open. Does the man not lock up when he’s not around? Is he so certain of his authority? Is he that arrogant?
It’s at this point that Bethany starts shaking, and she has to take a break. Steph holds her, strokes her cheeks and her hair and gifts loving, gentle kisses on every exposed part of her, reminds her that she is here now, that she’s safe, that she’s not even Aaron any more, and that none of the fuckers can get to her any more, that the doors here lock tight and that the only people who can open them are people she trusts. Maria’s upstairs and Steph’s here and the others, the ones Bethany’s come to know, like Edy and the other sponsors, like Christine and Paige and their friends, are all here and they have all chosen, despite everything, against all odds, to like her and to protect her.
Silence is comfort. But eventually, she has to carry on.
“The boys found me. Don’t even remember which ones. Just that it was three of them. And I couldn’t get away, not in a space like that. They, uh, they—”
“You don’t have to say it,” Steph murmurs, her face pressed against Bethany’s neck, her hands locked around Bethany’s belly.
“After. After. They left. And I was bleeding. Sweaty. Disgusting. Uniform ripped again. Wasn’t in the dean’s office any more. Was in some old room. Old classroom or something. Took me a while to get up again. Had to, though. It was getting late. And I wasn’t sleeping in the dorm. No fucking way.” She swallows, tries to lubricate her throat, because it’s as if the memory has crawled inside her, has scratched and ruined every open surface inside her body. “I took the wrong door out. Ended up in some other office. Some teacher’s. And on the side, there was a big bottle of gin. Almost full. So I took it. Took it and left.” Steph’s still got her tight, and Bethany reaches for a hand, peels it away from her stomach, takes it in both of hers. “Had a place. Old coal shed. Had a few bits there, made it okay to sleep there. Not exactly comfortable, but better than nothing. I didn’t use it much; one night away from the dorms and the shitheads didn’t care, but I couldn’t just disappear. Learned that the hard way. Another story, though. Just— Steph, promise me you won’t think less of me for this?”
“Never,” Steph says, and kisses her again. “Whatever it is, never.”
“I had pills. Took a bunch. A lot. Took them with the gin. And kept drinking. Kept going. Hoped I’d just… never wake up.” She’s captured by the memory now, and she has to follow where it leads, or she’ll never escape it. “It’s all I wanted. To close my eyes and never open them again. Wanted it peaceful, you know? But I was stupid. Drank too much. Threw it all back up. All of it. Remember it so clearly. Still hot, even at night, and it stank, and in the morning it stank even worse. And I was so disappointed, you know? I wanted it so badly. And I fucked it. No-one even found out. Didn’t get in trouble for stealing the gin. Didn’t get in trouble for being away from the dorm. Just went to classes the next day with a splitting fucking headache like nothing happened.” She slumps. “And that’s the story. That’s the worst thing I ever did. To myself, I mean. God knows I did—”
Steph silences her with another kiss. “Stop it,” she says.
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Why would I think less of you for that?”
A shrug. A need, suddenly, to become small, to hide, but Steph’s holding her, and the need passes before she can act on it, before she can get away. Probably better. “I don’t know. It just feels like something you should, I don’t know, judge me for.”
“Never,” Steph repeats.
“No,” Bethany insists, twisting but unable to break Steph’s grip, because it’s rising inside her again like bile, like her failure to end it before she could hurt anyone else, like the older boys’ hands on her, “you should. This should be it. You should think less of me!” She’s aware she’s raising her voice, but it’s irrelevant. Boys in boarding school uniforms wait for her at the edges of her vision. “You should hate me!” She pushes forward against Steph, trying to make her let go. “Not just for this! For everything!” It’s all indistinct now. The words in her mouth, the things she can see, the rising heat she can feel. A stultifying summer. Dead grass under cleats. Unmoving, bruised, used bodies. She’s still talking, still leaning into Steph, but the words are losing their shape and it’s all coming out, all of it, years and years and years of shit, enough that it will never end, that it will pour out of her forever, that she will never again be anything but a conduit for the misery and heat of the endless summer.
* * *
The third floor of Dorley Hall is a transitional space, one which marks a concession made by Aunt Bea and her backers when they had the building renovated: they couldn’t give over just the two top floors to ordinary students of the Royal College, whose genders had been coerced only the normal amount, but nor did they want to lose access to or demolish the more lavish flats that were already in place up there. The solution was to partition the third floor, such that somewhere between a third and a quarter of it is shut behind thick, soundproofed doors and accessible only via thumbprint, and the rest is given over to (mostly) women students from across the country.
An upshot of this is that though the third floor opens straight into one of its two common areas, just as the fourth and fifth floors do, this first common area is truncated, and as such, isn’t much used. Which is fortunate for Abby, as she and the others are going to need to get a large amount of takeaway food from the stairs to her room without getting it predated upon, a task which is considerably more difficult on the upper floors.
“Welcome,” she says, backing through the main double doors, “to the third floor. Keep your arms and legs inside the cockpit and, uh, place your bets now as to how dusty my room’s going to be.”
“Oh, it’ll be fine,” says Liss, following her through with the second tray. “They had a service do the rounds on, what, Thursday?” She turns around for confirmation, and Shahida nods. “Yes. Thursday. They did all the rooms on three, four and five. Pretty sure they’ll have done yours, too.”
“God,” Abby says, “I really hope I didn’t leave any knickers out.”
She has to admit, letting herself into her room, the place would be a strong incentive to stick around even without Christine and Melissa and the others. It’s large, recently renovated, and even manages to be quite quiet, despite sharing a floor with students, largely due to that near-deserted first common area, but also because the residents of the cis floors at Dorley Hall tend to be more studious than your average university student. A side-effect of the various hardship grants, Abby’s always assumed; Saints attracts a lot of the kind of people whose university attendance has been expected since birth, but the residents here, by and large, worked for it.
And, no, she didn’t leave any underwear hanging off the handlebars of her fold-up exercise bike.
“Wow,” Shahida says, taking Abby’s tray out of her hands and finding a clear space to put it down as pretext, apparently, to look around every inch of Abby’s room. “This is huge!”
“Dorley girls get preferential treatment,” Melissa says, setting her tray down on a side table, “and corner suites, if they ask for them.”
“Why didn’t you get a corner suite, Liss?” Amy asks.
“I’m just not important enough.”
“Layout’s different on first and second,” Abby says. “All the rooms down there are basically the same. Up here, it’s more like a trad dorm, but they still had to work with the original room dimensions. So!” Relieved of her tray, she does a little pirouette, ending with her hands spread. “I got the best corner suite on the floor, because I am important. Well, I was. I think Monica does most of what I used to do these days.”
“Christine does, actually,” Melissa says, and fends off a guilty look from Abby. “Sorry. She wasn’t complaining about it, she really wasn’t. It just came up. Monica’s been having a hard time lately, and you know what Christine’s like…”
“Yeah,” Abby says, “I do. I’ll, um, talk to her about that.”
“She’s probably got it all automated by now,” Amy says, flopping down on the shorter of Abby’s two couches. “Have you seen what she can do with a laptop?”
“Yeah, I have. You know the story of how Steph got basemented, yes? Christine brought me in on that. Day one. Or day two, maybe. She was talking to Steph in person while she was still in the cells. Just wandering around our most secure areas like the doors were made of paper. I think, if she wanted to, she could have played a tune on the biometric locks.” She roots around in a drawer and finds what she was hoping to find: a box of decaffeinated tea bags. “Anyone want a tea?"
“Yes,” Melissa says. Abby’s room doesn’t have a kitchen, but she’s got a microwave, kettle and hot plate all set up next to the TV, and Melissa’s been microwaving the food, one tupperware container at a time. She passes the first one to Shahida and starts work on the second.
“I don’t,” Amy says, her head lolling on the couch cushion. “I want to sleep.”
“Tough,” Shahida says, sitting down with her dinner. “I want to eat.”
“Nobody sit on the big couch yet,” Melissa says. “Abby can turn it into a bed.”
“That’s a point,” Amy says. “Who sleeps where? There’s four of us and only two beds.”
“I’ll take the little sofa,” Abby says.
“Abs,” Melissa protests, “it’s your room.”
“I’m shortest. And it’s fine; I’ve slept on it lots of times, remember?”
Melissa nods, smiling. “I do.”
“Liss takes the bed, then,” Shahida says, “and Amy and I’ll have the sofa bed.”
“Hey!” Melissa says, handing a tray to Amy. “Don’t exile me all the way around the corner. You and Amy take the sofa bed, Abby can take the sofa, and we can put some sheets down and I’ll take the floor between.”
“You don’t want to sleep on the floor, Liss,” Abby says.
She shrugs, pauses on her way back to the microwave. “It’ll be about as comfortable as the beds were in the basement,” she says, straight-faced. She leans forward and adds, “You know, the ones you condemned me to.”
Abby, holding two decaf teas in (plain) mugs, says, “I have my hands full; someone throw something at her, please?”
“Ow! Bitch!”
“Thanks, Amy.”
“No problem,” Amy says, and shifts her weight so she can dig around under her bottom. “I have more cushions, if she needs punishing again.”
“I hate you all,” Melissa says.
“I know,” Abby says, handing the mugs off to Shahida and Amy. “Mind giving me a hand with the sofa bed? Assuming you remember how it works.”
It’s not a difficult job, just a cumbersome one, and involves moving the coffee table. They get it done quickly, retrieve their food and their drinks and then the two of them flop down onto the sofa bed. Despite Shahida and Amy’s presence, it all feels very familiar to Abby. As if Melissa had never left; as if Abby had never left. As if neither of them made any of the mistakes that spoiled it all.
“Liss…” she says, about to bring it all up, despite herself. But Melissa can spot her a mile away.
“No,” Melissa says, with a forkful of food halfway to her face. “Whatever you’re about to say, bottle it. I’m serious!” she adds, when Abby tries to protest. “We are going to have a proper talk, all three of us. But it’s going to be tomorrow. Because tonight…” She doesn’t finish, just wriggles her shoulder places in the cushions.
“Yeah,” Abby says, nodding.
“Wait,” Amy says, as Shahida flicks through the streaming app, looking for something to watch, “what do you mean, ‘all three of us’?”
“You’ll be out of here and into Jane’s arms first thing in the morning, won’t you?” Shahida says without looking, still frowning at the screen.
“I wish. I have to go to work tomorrow.”
“Gasp,” Shahida says, deadpan.
“Get a job, Shy.”
“Uh,” Abby says. “Jane Jane? Our Jane? Jane Shearer?”
“Yes, yes and yes,” Melissa says with her mouth full.
“They’re adorable,” Shahida says.
“So adorable they stopped Rach turning us all in.”
“That was Pippa, wasn’t it?”
“Rachel and Pippa?” Abby says, feeling rather behind events.
“Yes,” Amy says, at the same time that Melissa says, “No.”
“Pippa just let her stay over,” Shahida says, “because Rachel didn’t want to disturb her wife by coming home late. They were having—” she screws up her nose, “—a bit of a fight.” Abby makes sympathetic noises, and Shahida adds, “Oh, no, it’s fine; they made up. I got a very graphic text from Belinda thanking me for taking Rachel away on an errand — thankfully an unspecified one — because she tried really, really hard to make up for it.”
“That’s good,” Amy murmurs, sliding a little farther down in the couch cushions, “I’d hate to think of Belinda’s pussy going unserviced.”
“I still have that pillow you threw at me, Amy,” Melissa says.
“Save it,” Shahida says, “give her a few minutes and she’ll say something even more gross, and you’ll be sad you wasted it.”
Amy says, “Fuck you, Shy,” and leans her head against Shahida’s shoulder.
“So,” Abby says, “you and Jane, then?”
“Yes. I mean, I think so. We’ve only known each other a few days, really, so I don’t know if we have a future, but… I think I’d like one.”
“Amy Woodley,” Shahida says, “liking girls. Not on my 2020 bingo card.”
“Yeah, well. Boys suck.”
“We know,” Abby and Melissa say at almost the same time.
Amy snorts, and has to wipe a little food off her lower lip. “I forget, you know,” she says, and points at Melissa. “Even with you, I forget.”
“She’s basically the same as she was,” Shahida says. “She’s just… not sad any more.”
“Call marketing,” Melissa says, nudging Abby with her shoulder. “We have a new slogan.”
“Oh!” Amy says suddenly, grabbing the remote from Shahida and scrolling back up. “Stop right there.”
“You want to watch Mean Girls?” Shahida asks. “Again?”
“Yes. C’mon, Shy, it’s not like we’re going to pay attention to it, anyway.”
“Why do you like it so much?”
“I just… I dunno. It’s funny.”
“It can’t still be funny after the twentieth time, can it?” Melissa says, leaning over Abby.
“Oh shit,” Shahida says, frowning. “You like Regina George, don’t you?” Amy says nothing, but her blush is visible even in the dim light. “Amy! You’ve been a dyke all along!”
“I just like her clothes,” Amy says quietly.
“Really?”
“And her hair.”
“Really?”
“Um. Can I get back to you on that?”
“Please do,” Melissa says.
“Fine,” Shahida says. “I’ll put on Mean Girls. But if you get horny, Amy, I’m switching seats.”
Abby doesn’t make it very far through the movie. It’s warm in her room, and she’s with friends again, and though it’s a different feeling to being around her family, it’s just as vital and just as comforting, and she drifts off to sleep wondering exactly what she can do to keep a foot in both her worlds.
When she wakes a short while later, needing desperately to pee, she realises Shahida and Amy have switched off the movie and taken the bed on the other side of the room, leaving her and Melissa alone, but she doesn’t have time to appreciate their thoughtfulness because she has to lever Melissa’s arm and leg off of her so she can get out of bed before her bladder explodes.
* * *
The boys — and Will, she supposes — are dispersing, going back to their rooms, and Pippa has a long night ahead of her. Foolishly, she volunteered to take over in the security room so Indira can get some sleep, and though she’s not going to be relieved until six in the morning, at least she won’t be alone; they’re going back to two people in the security room at all times. Turns out there was a reason for all those rules they used to have, and scaling them back to cope with staffing issues can, in fact, lead to disaster!
Pippa could have told them all so. Yes, she didn’t, but maybe next year, when she has a whole year of sponsoring under her belt, she can throw her weight around a little more.
A little normality will return tomorrow, since the sponsors who took the week after New Year off will be back, and taking extra shifts to make up for the time they missed, which means Pippa, like everyone else who’s been working overtime this week, can get some flipping sleep. And Aunt Bea’s going to be offering incentives to former sponsors who’ve since taken wing to give evenings and weekends, which will take even more of the pressure off.
And there can’t be any more surprises waiting, can there? It feels like all the shoes dropped at once, but with Grandmother in hiding — so says the Frankie woman — and the whereabouts of Valérie Barbier and the missing soldier both resolved, what’s even left?
She pokes Tab, who is having a whispered conversation with Will, and points towards the bedrooms, indicating her intent. Tabitha nods and Pippa exits, throwing a quick smile Will’s way. The boy — the girl? — returns it, which is a minor miracle. Whatever Tab and Monica are doing with him and that punching bag is good for him. His fingerless gloves are sort of cute, too,
Pippa’s already checked the cameras. She knows that Steph and Bethany are both in Steph’s room, and that Bethany was having trouble. Steph seemed to be handling it, though, so Pippa didn’t interrupt and didn’t listen in, merely tagged the footage to Maria’s account and left it at that. But she wants to pop in now, if only to say goodnight to the two of them.
She taps out her special knock, so Steph knows it’s her, and after a moment, a subdued voice calls out for her to enter. Inside, they’re both sprawled on Steph’s bed, covers curled up around their knees, with that cheerleader show Bethany likes playing on low volume on the computer screen.
“Hi,” Pippa says quietly. “Just catching up. You both all right?”
“Yeah,” Bethany says, after looking to the side and checking with Steph. “We’re just a bit worn out, you know? Thinking of taking a shower and then getting some sleep. Some real sleep. Not fucked up nightmare sleep.”
Pippa leans against the door jamb. “Ouch,” she says. “Sounds bad.”
“It wasn’t that bad. I just, you know, shrieked right in Steph’s face and then had weird dreams about it.”
“She had kicking dreams,” Steph says, pulling up the covers and stretching out a leg. On her shin, the beginnings of a bruise.
“And I already said you can kick me back.”
“Not going to.”
“You can take a run-up.”
“Not going to, Beth.”
“How long’s it been, anyway?” Bethany asks, pushing lightly at Steph and turning towards Pippa.
“What, since you left the common room?” Pippa says. “I don’t know; an hour? Two?”
“Seems like longer.”
“I was asleep for half of it,” Steph says.
“And then I had an episode,” Bethany continues, “and then I slept. And then we watched TV. Full evening. Hey, Pip, can I ask a favour? Like, make an official request?”
“Sure.”
“Can we have real food tomorrow?”
“What?” Pippa says, “you didn’t like the picnic?”
“Real food,” Bethany repeats.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
They don’t talk for much longer; they’re all tired, and while Pippa isn’t going to have the opportunity to sleep for a good long while, she’s still looking forward to the comfy chairs in the security room, and the opportunity to catch up on TV while watching a basementful of people do nothing more exciting than turn over in bed. Bethany insists she needs a shower — “I’m soaked in terror sweat.” — even more than she needs sleep, though, so Pippa steps aside and lets the two of them out of Steph’s room, clutching robes and shampoo and the cleanser Steph’s finally persuaded Bethany to start using.
They walk slowly, like people walking off a shared injury, and as she watches, Stephanie reaches out a hand. Bethany takes it, and then the bathroom door closes behind her and Pippa, more than anything else, more than she’s exhausted, more than she’s frustrated with how things have been going at the Hall lately, feels lonely, and misses the heck out of Rani.
Maybe she’s not busy this week. Maybe she’ll be up for getting together before the semester really gets going.
She’ll message her in the morning, and hope for the best.
* * *
“Sorry about the dust.”
“Are you, actually?”
Monica shrugs. “Dunno. Don’t know how I feel about you yet.”
“Yeah, well,” Frankie says, “that makes two of us. And also about—” she counts under her breath, “—seventy of you.”
“Dorley grads?” Monica guesses, kicking at the door when it won’t open and dislodging a pile of something on the other side.
“Yeah.”
“You’re under.”
Frankie’s impressed. “Fewer washouts than I thought, then.”
“We’re getting—” Monica grunts as she shoves bodily against the door; it gives way, and she almost falls into the room, “—better at it. Today’s clusterfuck notwithstanding.”
Frankie follows her through. The room isn’t as dusty as the corridor outside, somehow. Monica wordlessly hands her a mask; one of the same ones the two anomalously above-ground below-ground girls were wearing. Frankie slips it over one ear, for now.
“There’s a vacuum in the storage closet opposite,” Monica says. “It should be unlocked. And, actually, as far as locks go, you have thumb access to the stairs via that door—” she jerks in the rough direction of the end of the corridor, “—but you can’t get through the fire door to the other half of the floor. And you can’t leave the building.”
“Wouldn’t want to,” Frankie mutters. “And, yeah, sensible, cutting me off from the girls.”
The fire door cuts the second floor in half; Frankie’s on one side of it and everyone else is on the other. There’s a windy little corridor that leads to the main stairwell and the lift, and it seems that’s going to be her world for the time being.
Fine with her.
The dust is unpleasant, though. It’s not as thick in here, but it’s still thick, like it hasn’t been touched in years, and Frankie hopes there’s more than just a vacuum cleaner in the closet; she’s going to need cleaning fluid and rags and possibly a scrubbing brush.
Fuck it. She’ll probably clean the corridor as well. It needs doing, and it’s not like she’s going to have much else to occupy her.
“You’ve got your own shower, toilet, et cetera,” Monica says, waving her hand at another door set into a nearby wall. “They’re not so bad; all this stuff got renovated when Bea took over, it just hasn’t been touched since.”
“Still nicer’n what old Smyth-Farrow had,” Frankie says, and it is: for all that, before it burned down, Stenordale had been a genuine slice of English heritage in its truest form — a Frankensteinian amalgam of the least-vital elements of at least four distinct ages of English architecture, haphazardly stitched together and given life mostly via artistic trellis placement — it wasn’t exactly maintained internally to the highest standards.
“Oh?” Monica says, sounding interested despite herself.
“The old pervert spent the last of his money on girls,” Frankie says. “Nothing left for fittings and fixtures.”
Monica leans against a radiator, shaking her head. “Disgusting old man,” she says.
“What do you know about him?”
“Only what I’ve read in the files.”
“Horny bastard?” Frankie says. “Very specific tastes? You don’t know the half of it. The man was a pure sadist.”
“I can’t believe Valérie Barbier was stuck in there with him.”
“Yeah, well, if you get a chance to talk to her about it, don’t.” Frankie sits on the empty bedframe which, to the credit of the original refurbishment, doesn’t creak. “Just don’t. And it wasn’t him, anyway. Oh, he was awful; she told me all about it. But she always was able to compartmentalise that stuff. Even in my day, when she was here, she was confounding Karen’s every effort. No, the thing that fucked her up is all the girls we sent along after her.”
“Ah,” Monica says. It’s a very careful, diplomatic syllable, one which says, I haven’t yet been instructed to murder you.
Frankie barely registers it. This place comes and goes, seems to switch almost at random from being just another old building to being Dorley Hall, and its walls seem once again too tall, too inescapable, too disinterestedly cruel.
“She had to watch them all die. She had to watch him kill them. Girl after girl after girl… I always think I’ve seen some horrors, and then I think of what she’s seen.” She looks up, her vision clearing, the walls receding, and there’s Monica, refreshingly normal, refreshingly now, but glaring at her with the disgust she richly deserves. “I don’t know anything,” she finishes. “Not compared to Val. Look, treat her carefully, okay? Pass it on, but be discreet about it. She’s buried more bodies than even old Dorothy, and she didn’t have a choice in any of it. Give her space when she needs it, give her stuff to do, give her interesting stuff to read and movies to watch and weird people to talk to. Maybe get her involved in the next crisis somehow. But don’t talk to her about her past. Not unless she chooses to.” She inhales deeply, lets it out with a wheeze. She keeps thinking of Val freezing up the first time she saw the open countryside. And then, suddenly, she was back to work again, helping Trev, griping at Frankie, the same old Val. She closes and locks the door on every fear, every tragedy and humiliation, and it does her no good if people go around opening them again.
Monica looks at her for a long time. Then she pushes up off the radiator, looks around, and irritably brushes the dust off the back of her jeans.
“Someone’ll be around in a bit with a mattress for you,” she says. “Bedding’s in the cupboard across the corridor, same as the hoover. And here—” she upends the bag she’s been carrying over the dust-sheeted sofa, “—is your phone. You’re on second-year rules: read-only access to the internet, and you can’t call out. There’s an SOS app on the home screen; if you get in trouble, hit the app, scan your thumb, and someone’ll come running. Probably.”
“You mean it’s a Life Alert.”
“Everyone has it,” Monica says placidly. “Oh,” she adds, nodding at a plastic-covered TV that looks like it’s from the very early days of flatscreens, “there’s an HDMI stick in the pile. Plug it into the telly and you can stream movies and shit from your phone. You… do know what HDMI is, yes?”
“Please,” Frankie says, getting up from the bed and walking the short distance to the sofa. She snatches up the little streaming stick and waggles it at Monica. “I set the tellies up at Stenordale for Dotty. It’s easier’n LEGO.”
“Right then.” Monica looks around the room as if there’s something she’s forgotten. Apparently nothing comes to mind, because she claps her hands together and says, “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Sure,” Frankie says absently, and then, because she’s still thinking about old Dorley, and she wants to remind herself and everyone listening — because if they’re at all sensible they’ll be taping this whole encounter — where she stands, “Hey, Monica, listen. If what I heard your lot did to Karen is true?” She gives her two thumbs up and an exaggerated grin. “Always hated her. Well done.”
Monica acknowledges her with rolled eyes, and heads for the door. Then she stops suddenly, halfway out. Doesn’t look round.
“The others — some of them — they think Declan’s with Dorothy. What do you think?”
Ah. Declan again. “Four corpses, right?” Frankie says. “Trev, Val and me, we got two of them. Jake killed one; that was Callum, God rest his stupid fucking soul. And the fourth was a man, so that’s got to be Jake. We didn’t get him bad enough to kill him, and old Dotty couldn’t’ve managed it even with that bloody shotgun she had in her room. She always was a terrible shot, and she hasn’t got any better with age. So that means Dina killed him.”
Monica still doesn’t turn around. “Dina?”
“New name. Jake chose it. And by the end, Declan was Dina more than she was anything else. Survival, right? People become who they need to become.” She makes a show of looking around. “This whole place is built on it.”
“Not like that.”
“No. But Val and Beatrice and Maria, it’s what they built this place off of, isn’t it? Dina’s more like them than she is you. Phoenix rising from the ashes, and all that. Hah; be even more appropriate if it was her who started the fire. And I don’t see the woman who killed Jake leaving with Dorothy. Do you?”
“Guess not.”
“She’s out there,” Frankie says. “She’ll get scooped up by the police or she’ll try to get into a shelter or something, same as Bea did, and you’ll find her again.”
“You really think?”
“Yeah. ’Course.”
There’s a long silence before Monica finally says, “Thanks, Frankie,” and heaves herself upright. She kicks the door shut behind her, leaving Frankie alone in the bare, dusty room.
* * *
Maria was awake long enough to give her input on where to keep Frankie — “Far enough away from me that I never have to see her.” — and then she fell asleep again, and that’s good enough for Edy. She’s closed the curtains and she’s kept only one lamp on, and she’s content to stay exactly where she is, in a chair by the bed, for as long as it takes. She has four new novels on her Kindle; she can stay here all night and all day if she has to.
So, of course, duty intervenes, in the form of Tabitha messaging her, asking Edy to meet her out in the corridor. Edy does so, and gets the update: regular shifts are back; all the temporary sponsors are back out of the basement and are in fact all in Abby’s room, asleep in piles; Monica’s depositing Frankie in one of the unused rooms on the second floor; Christine’s still escorting Valérie Barbier around the place, still randomly picking up extra work.
“Christine’s got that two weeks off, doesn’t she?” Edy asks, and Tabitha nods.
“Starting tomorrow.”
“She gets it. No more jobs. And if we have another clustersuck, and she tries to pick up some responsibilities? Sic Paige on her.”
Tabitha laughs. “I think she’s way ahead of us there.”
“Good. How’s Adam?”
“Still in his room. He doesn’t know anything of what’s happened today yet, and someone needs to tell him.” Tabitha pauses. “I could do it, but—”
“No,” Edy says. “No. I’ll do it. Will you sit with Maria?”
“Of course, Ede. As long as you need.”
A lot of the lights are off as she makes her way down; most of the Hall has gone to bed uncharacteristically early, or been called to various duty shifts. Some dear soul has cleared away the remains of the vast array of takeaway meals, and Edy can’t resist checking up on how much is left. Sure enough, the massive freezer in the utility room has been stocked with enough curry to keep foragers happy for weeks, and the fridge next to it has seven full pizza boxes stacked up inside; tomorrow’s unhealthy breakfast.
It’s quiet in the dining hall as she slips back through, her socks making the polished floor slippery, and she decides to nip into the security room on the way past, both to say hi to Pippa and Lisa and to appropriate a pair of slippers.
The night lights are on in the basement corridors, colouring everything a baleful red but lending an odd, glittering beauty to the two pairs of wet footsteps that lead from the bathroom to Steph’s bedroom. Edy avoids them, and quietens a laugh as she remembers Maria’s notorious Footsteps print.
And then, two doors down, is Adam’s.
She unlocks the door and lets it swing slightly open. Once, she would have knocked, but Adam has been variably responsive recently, and waiting for an answer could have had Tabitha watching Maria all night. So she pushes it open, carefully and quietly, and finds Adam exactly where the security feed showed him a few minutes ago: sitting on the floor, his back against the bed, his knees grasped in his looped arms. There’s light music on; some lo-fi mix. There’s a book discarded by his feet; a mystery novel Edy hasn’t read. And he’s been crying again.
Edy shuts the door, kicks off her slippers, and settles down next to him.
“Hi, Adam,” she says.
He doesn’t answer, but he does move up a little closer, closing the gap, accepting the implicit invitation. She does the same, so they’re touching, just barely
“What did you do today?” she asks.
He shrugs. She knows very well what he did today, and it’s the same thing he’s been doing for a while now: almost nothing.
Adam is lost.
Without the Lord’s approval, without His grace, without His presence, without the certain knowledge that one’s father, and one’s father’s father, and his father before him were all chosen to be the Voice of the Lord in the heathen lands, without the structure and strictures of the New Church to guide you, why place one foot in front of the other? Why give voice to thoughts you now suspect to be nothing more than the echoes of your father’s cruelty? Why take in each breath and why expel it?
Edy would have loved to spare him this. To have put him through the same programme as everyone else, to have continued to indulge his beliefs all the way through, as one might indulge a childish insistence that an imaginary friend lurks in the next room. But, as Maria discovered during Edy’s difficult transition, the beliefs of the New Church are quite simply incompatible with a normal life.
Can’t build a house on lies, and Edy and Adam’s families lied to them about a great many things.
It’s harder for Adam. Edy had been a minor cousin, her family at the periphery of the church, without power or influence. Edy had been relatively free to roam, to discover for herself that things were not always as they were made to seem, and her mother had even sometimes had the opportunity to whisper to her, to share kinder interpretations of the Church’s teachings. Adam, though, was more controlled. He was the heir. The new Voice. His whole life, that was all he’d known.
It hurt her to take it from him. To tell him where she came from. That she knew his father and mother. That she knew the cruelties upon which their community had been built and maintained. That the true foundations of the New Church were rape, incest, subjugation, and a systematised cruelty that many of the women eventually found themselves participating in, too old or too scared or too trapped to leave.
That there is no Voice.
And now he barely speaks.
She has yet to tell him what she suspects. But he’s the spitting image of Edy when she was his age, when she was his gender, when she was just starting this faltering, meandering path to redemption, to forgiveness and atonement. His cheeks have started to fill out just the way hers did; his eyes have begun to brighten, and already match Edy’s in colour and shape; his nose has always been a match for hers.
But she may never tell him. She may never need to. They’ll be Sisters, and that’s all that matters.
She strokes his hand. He whimpers, almost inaudibly.
“Adam,” she says, “something happened today. With Ollie.”
* * *
“We’re out of ready-made guestrooms, I’m afraid,” Christine says, as Valérie registers her thumbprint on the reader by her new bedroom door, which swings open to reveal walls in faded pastel pink, “so this is the best we could do at short notice. We’ll be putting Trevor in the room next to you—”
“He gets the one with the blue walls,” Paige says.
“Appropriate,” Valérie says, with a smile in her voice.
“—and Paige and I, and the others — Jodie, Julia, Yasmin, and Vicky when she’s around — are just around the corner. You can ask us for anything. We’ve also got a little kitchen, so you don’t need to go all the way downstairs if you need a snack. And, um…”
“That’s everything,” Paige says, squeezing Christine’s hand.
They don’t follow her in. It wouldn’t seem right; Valérie’s lived decades with essentially zero privacy, and something inside Christine itches horribly at the thought of just blithely walking into her new space. Everything’s already set up, anyway: the bed’s made, there’s a laptop and a phone and a TV and everything, and someone even tested the bathroom fixtures, made sure the shower has good pressure and the toilet flushes properly.
“You’re very kind,” Valérie says.
“Thank the second years,” Paige says. “I put them to work.”
“She’s a cruel taskmaster,” Christine says.
“Yes.”
“Then please pass on my thanks,” Valérie says. “And now, girls…”
“You’re tired,” Christine says. “Us, too. It was, um, lovely to meet you, Valérie.”
“I’m looking forward to spending more time with you,” Paige says in a more formal tone than Christine’s used to from her. The three of them haven’t had a lot of time to talk, but Paige has already mentioned her vast stash of clothing and her Instagram channel, and Valérie visibly started getting ideas. Christine had at the time wondered if she ought to move the conversation on before Valérie commandeered a phone and set up an account right there, but fortunately one of the second years found another highly inappropriate question about the eighties to ask — “Did you really have phones this big?” — and Christine was saved from having to live with two Instagram obsessives for at least another day.
Their own rooms are, as promised, just around the corner, and they choose Paige’s room for the night, closing the door behind them and falling in each other’s arms right into her bed, a manoeuvre Paige immediately comments would be impossible in Christine’s room because the mattress is still covered in laptops.
“Two,” Christine says sleepily. “Two laptops.”
“Come on,” Paige says, hooking a hand under Christine’s head and taking her weight, “we still need to shower.”
“We do?” Christine’s back hurts from the tension; her legs hurt from walking around so much; her head hurts from second-hand stress. It’s possible even her fingers hurt, but she hasn’t gotten round to interrogating those yet. “I want to sleep.”
Planting a kiss on Christine’s lips and quickly leaning away when Christine tries to respond, Paige whispers, “You smell, darling.”
“Hey!” Just for that, Christine gives up on trying to kiss her back.
“Mostly of pizza,” Paige allows. “But you do have sweat stains under your armpits.”
“Oh, God,” Christine says, sinking back into the mattress. “I got sweaty in front of the nice French lady.”
“I’m sure she didn’t notice.”
“Oh, God,” Christine says again. “She definitely noticed. You’re just being kind.” Paige kisses her again. “You’re not defeating the ‘being kind’ accusation.”
“Up,” Paige says, slapping the mattress. “I’ll shower with you. I’ll hold you up. I’ll even wash your hair.”
“Fine,” Christine says, “but only if it doesn’t get sexy. I’m too sleepy to reciprocate.”
Paige kisses her one more time. “No promises,” she whispers.
* * *
It would have been nice to find Valérie a suitable room on the first floor, near Beatrice, but no-one felt good about bombarding her with second years. The third-floor flats would have been perfect, but there are none spare; they still haven’t moved Edith out, and she’s dug in like a tick, anyway, what with her library and her… Well, mostly her library, but given that it’s spilled over onto a fifth bookcase now, it almost deserves mentioning twice. Religious histories, at least fifty editions and translations of the Christian bible — or of books that are very nearly the Christian bible — and novels upon novels upon novels. Even if she does mostly read on that awful little plastic thing these days.
So Beatrice had Paige and the second years get a room ready on second for her, and that feels, now that she comes to think about it, like an appropriate amount of space between them. Quickly surmountable, should Valérie decide to visit, but not so close that they will constantly be running into each other in the corridor.
Beatrice doesn’t know how much space to give her, nor how much space she might want or need. So Valérie will be the one to define it, and Bea will go along with whatever she chooses. But she ought to go see her tonight. To make sure she’s settling in okay. To see if there’s anything she needs. To see if she’s just as baffled by the onslaught of under-thirties women as Beatrice often is.
She finds herself outside Valérie’s door almost without thinking of it, and it’s open. Waiting for her.
“Béatrice!” Valérie calls from inside. “Come in!”
“Oh,” Bea says, hesitating, “I just wanted to see how you were, uh—”
“Come in and help me. I need your help with something and I don’t want your building to burn down the way Stenordale did when some rascal took a torch to it.”
Bea nods, steps inside, and Valérie turns half around, smiles, and beckons her forward. She’s shifted the television off its glass table-stand, which she’s moved underneath the open window. It’s not all that cold out, but a light breeze is circulating around the room, and Beatrice shivers.
“Shut the door, please,” Valérie says, and Beatrice does so. As soon as the door closes, Valérie looks different, and it’s not just the change in the light. “Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t want to do this alone, but I didn’t want to bother any of your young people, and much as Frankie has grown on me, I think doing this with her would be… profane.”
She kneels on a cushion in front of the TV table, and pulls over a rucksack she must have appropriated from somewhere.
It’s full of candles.
“I found them in the pantry,” Valérie says, “and a box of matches, and— Oh, can you pass me the dinner tray? I stole it from downstairs but I left it on the bed.”
“Of course,” Bea says, retrieving it and passing it to Valérie, who places it carefully on the glass table. Bea fetches another cushion and kneels down next to her.
Valérie begins placing candles on the tray. Some of them are scented candles in pretty glass dishes; some are emergency candles in undecorated holders. She counts under her breath as she sets them out, and then pauses, frowning, and adds one more.
“Hold these, would you?” she asks, tapping the box of matches. Bea obliges, and Valérie lights a match. She moves slowly from candle to candle, refreshing her match several times, and with each lit candle she whispers a name.
A name, and something she remembers about them.
“Molly, who loved to sing. Carol, who showed me the good way to cook roast beef. Paul, who held my hand. Neve, who arranged flowers.” On and on she goes, lighting them, pausing after each one, until finally she reaches the last candle she set out, a stubby little thing, already half spent. “Callum,” she whispers, “who was a god-damned fool.”
Valérie’s hand finds Beatrice’s, and together they sit, embraced by a silence disturbed by nothing but the whistling wind through the open window and the crackle of the candles as they burn.
The flames spit. They gutter. And, one by one, they go out.
* * *
He lost his escort somewhere amid all the commotion, and that’s absolutely fine by him. This is the first quiet Trev’s had in a long time, and he’s going to extend it for as long as he possibly can; preferably until just before they dispatch someone to look for him and drag him back to the medical portacabin. Though it’s probable that at least one of the girls knows where he is; he’s been given a phone — his to keep for as long as he needs it — and they’re idiots if they don’t track every device they hand out.
He’s not entirely convinced they’re not idiots, given today’s display, but he has to admit, he didn’t make much of a first impression, either. Trained, professional soldier, going to pieces in front of a bunch of ordinary civilian women. A thirty-year prisoner and an old woman spoke for him, while he mostly hid.
Is it worse that he knows they understand? Perhaps not the disgust he feels every time he sees himself in a reflective surface, every time he’s looked at by someone new, knowing that he is what he’s been made to be, but they get it. Everyone here’s been through the wringer, one way or another.
Or, in Frankie’s case, operated it.
Still. Good to be alone. Good to get a phone he can trust so he can catch up on things. The usual political nonsense; too much to hope that Boris Johnson had been somehow deposed while Trevor was otherwise engaged. There’s some nasty virus popping up in China, and he makes a mental note to suggest to Beatrice Quinn that they refresh their emergency supplies, on the off-chance it goes global. Perhaps commit to making the installation out back a bit more permanent. Dig it into the dirt, perhaps? Shit, he doesn’t know; logistics and support were never his thing, and he doesn’t know why he’s worrying about a virus that will probably never be his problem. Captivity made him paranoid, probably.
He’s pretty sure the Peckinville online library’s got a couple of documents about pandemic preparedness, but they weren’t required reading, so he left them unopened. Maybe he’ll seek them out, if he can get his clearance back.
Should he get his clearance back? Should he let the outfit know he’s alive? Or do they already know? The installation out back is a Peckinville effort, but given how ring-fenced the Dorley operation is, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether they’ve chucked his name up the chain. They keep quiet about this place; he didn’t know what Dorley did until one of the skeletons in its closet reached out and took him.
Sod it. It’s coming up on ten now, and that means he needs to show his face before they come looking for him. Before the doctor goes off shift. Because while his ad hoc duct tape bandage might have been replaced by something actually appropriate, and while his wound may never have been all that bad in the first place — a bleeder, not a killer, as old Perry used to say — he still has a fucking gash in his neck. Understandable that the doctor wants to check up on it.
He closes up his phone in its cute little leather case, pockets it, and presses his thumb against the reader on the door out of the conservatory. It takes a moment to register him, and he worries briefly that when that Christine girl told him to record his fingerprint that he somehow did it wrong, and then the lock rolls over and the door clicks noisily open, creaking on its hinges and scraping on the gravel outside. He makes a note: not a stealthy option. In case it ever comes up.
It’s not paranoia! There are soldiers on the premises! Someone here is preparing for something!
It doesn’t take long to find the Peckinville village, and the door to the medical cabin is unlocked, so he lets himself in. It’s almost homely; so much like every other field medical installation he’s ever seen or been briefed on, its temporary nature obvious in every aspect, from its shape — plainly three trailer-sized portacabins assembled into a single small building — to its decor. It had occurred to him to be worried about flashbacks to the medical wing he woke up in after he was kidnapped, but it couldn’t be more different, really.
Doctor Rahman greets him, has him sit down, changes his dressing, and then he’s free to take up one of the beds. The man, Ollie, is in another of them, and though he’s cuffed to the bed by the leg, his arms haven’t been restrained; probably because that’s where his injuries are.
He’s also awake.
“Hi,” Trevor says, feeling a little stupid. He’s no good at talking to the actualised girls here; he doesn’t know at all what to say to one who is, in a sense, still cooking.
The lad shrugs at him, and then sits up, putting aside his tablet and pulling out his earphones. “What’d you do to yourself, then?”
“Me?” he says, and then his hand goes to the new dressing on his neck. Oh yeah. How much should he tell this guy? “I, uh, got in a fight.”
“Right,” Ollie says, nodding. “What’s with your voice?”
“What?”
Ollie leans over a little, over-enunciates his words, as if Trev is stupid. “You look like a bird,” he says, “but you have a deep voice.”
Shit. “Long story.”
“Oh. Right. You’re one of those tran guys then.”
“I’m sorry; ‘tran guys’?”
“Yeah. Heard about it. You take testosterone, your voice lowers, you start looking like a bloke. Grow a beard, and that.”
Trev takes refuge in the mistake. Hell, it’s not all that far off the truth; they’re going to put him on testosterone at some point. Sooner rather than later, if he has anything to say about it. “Still waiting on the beard,” he says, stroking his chin.
“Don’t suppose you’ll call the police on this lot for me, will you?” Ollie says. “They’re trying to do that to me, only in reverse.”
“Oh. Sorry. No.”
The man shrugs. “Didn’t think so. Everyone’s in on it. Nothing I can do about it.” He laughs suddenly, sharply, and raises a wrapped wrist. “Not even this.”
“Might as well enjoy the ride, then?” Trev finds himself saying. Stupid! He woke up with tits and his testicles taken away and he didn’t stop hating it even for a second! Why would this man be any different?
But that’s the question, isn’t it? Why are the Dorley women different? Will Ollie eventually become like them? Or will they wash him out, like Declan?
He wants to laugh at himself. He feels terribly unoriginal. Apparently the Hall has had an influx of outsiders lately; he should compare notes with them. There’s probably something like the five stages of grief for encountering a rehabilitative forced feminisation facility, and they probably all step through them in the exact same order.
“Dunno about enjoy it,” Ollie says, with less rancour than Trev thinks appropriate. “Going to make them fight for it, though. That could be fun. And if I’m a bird in five years, I’ll know I tried.”
“Good man,” Trev says. Probably the least productive thing he could say, under the circumstances, but Ollie’s recovering from an injury, isn’t he? He should be kept calm. He should not have his coping mechanisms critiqued.
Probably not, anyway. Fuck, Trev doesn’t know; he’s an ex-soldier, and, being honest, not a great one. He couldn’t even subdue Jake. Fucking Val did better against him than he did!
“You all right, mate?” Ollie asks, and Trev doesn’t know how to feel about the way he says it. He seems to have slipped into viewing Trev as a man more easily than he would have expected, and Trev doesn’t know if that’s him being prejudiced against the kind of man who used to call him a queer at school, or if something else is going on.
He tries to play it for laughs. “Got a great big gash in my neck, haven’t I?”
“Good fight?”
“I lost.”
“Next time.”
“Yeah.” He shouldn’t say the man who did it is probably dead. Seems like the kind of thing you shouldn’t tell someone who’s here to become less violent.
There’s movement in the next room, and the sound of people talking. More than two people; the doctor and Jan’s shift replacements, presumably. Ollie lies back down in his bed and gathers his headphones back up, but before he can put them in, someone comes rushing into their shared room and stops short in the middle, as if she’s afraid to get any closer to Ollie’s bed.
“Harmony,” Ollie says.
“How are you feeling, Ollie?” she says. She’s quiet. Small. It looks like her hands are shaking.
“Well, I didn’t manage it, so I don’t know. How do you think I am?”
“I’m sorry, Oliver.”
“You going to let me go?”
“No.”
“Then that doesn’t matter, does it?”
Harmony nods. “I suppose not.” She balls her hands behind her back. “Look, I’m, uh, going to be watching you tonight. You too, um, Trevor. Nell and me. We’ll be in the next room. Okay?”
“Sure.”
She nods again. “Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. “Okay.” She’s turning to leave when she hesitates, crosses the room to the window by Ollie’s bed, and opens the curtains. Trev, craning his neck, can see nothing but the clearing, the edges of the camouflage tarp, and the woods.
“What are you doing?” Ollie asks.
“It’s, um— This window faces east. Mostly. Enough. Anyway, it’s supposed to be clear tomorrow morning. Clear enough. You’ll get the sunrise. I, um…” She pauses, frowns at herself. “Goodnight, Ollie.”
She nods at him one last time, and then leaves, taking small, nervous steps. Trev can easily imagine her sitting down in the doctor’s office in the room next door, other people’s hands quick to comfort her.
Ollie, though, is smiling. It’s gone quickly, but he sits up a bit in bed again, nodding to himself.
“Saw it,” he says. “Knew it. She always has that big watch on. Thick leather strap. It’s so ugly. But I saw it when she opened the curtains. Under the strap.” He leans back again, settles himself into the pillow. “She’s got a scar,” he says. “She’s like me.”
2020 January 11
Saturday
The last few days’ve been difficult, but today’s the worst yet. And it’s not as if she isn’t trying, because she is, she’s trying harder than she’s ever tried at anything, but when she goes for falsetto she sounds like a cartoon character and when she uses her whisper-voice, she can’t make herself heard over the traffic outside. So when another older couple make the same face to her that all of them make when she speaks up, and they realise exactly what she is, Diana has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from crying.
It should have gotten easier. Chiamaka’s granddaughters helped her get some basic clothes, and she borrowed a few things from each of them, too, so she has things that fit now, things she looks nice in. And nice in a way that she likes, not in a way that makes Jake do that horrible little grin that says she’s debased herself in exactly the right way. And she’s got better with her hair, and she’s gotten hold of a little makeup and impressed Chiamaka with how she’s actually pretty okay with it. And she looks in the mirror every morning and she feels good about herself, which is something she doesn’t think she’s done ever in her life before.
But she can’t get the voice right, and none of the videos she watched online make sense to her, and she’s been getting snappy recently.
It’s not good to be snappy to the customers. Chiamaka was disappointed in her yesterday, and Diana can’t let her down. After the clothes and the underwear and a couple of other little things, she doesn’t have enough cash left even to go to the next town over. She can’t be kicked out.
She smiles through the old couple’s dismayed realisation, and fortunately these ones aren’t so insulted that they don’t take the room. She books them in and gives them their key and swallows her anger and her humiliation, because the way they look at her is too similar to the way Dorothy would look at her, and the last thing she needs when she’s trying to help people, when she’s trying to get along and be normal, when she’s trying to be Diana, is to remember Stenordale. And, for fuck’s sake, she just doesn’t get what they’re so grossed out by! She’s just a—
Except she does, doesn’t she? That was one of the things Declan understood so well: men shouldn’t be women and women shouldn’t be men. Just because Diana’s learned to think otherwise, doesn’t mean the rest of the world suddenly agrees.
She stretches, and the pain in her back dissipates a little. The wooden chair’s too small for her, but the last few days it’s been especially bad. She aches all over and, worse, she keeps getting these intense hot feelings that start in her chest and spread throughout her body. She hates them; it’s like if a bruise is inside you, and itches.
She told Chiamaka all this yesterday, after she snapped at the elderly tourists, and Chiamaka’s irritation had dissipated immediately. She said Diana was too young for the menopause, and laughed.
And then she came back last night, just before Diana got ready for bed, and said that she looked up a few things. Asked when the last time Diana had her hormone pills.
Diana’s never taken any hormone pills.
When was the last injection, then?
And that was when Diana went cold. Because, yes, she got the injections weekly, back at Stenordale, and it was almost time for a new one when everything went down. And now it’s longer still, and she doesn’t have any pills or any injections and she doesn’t have the first idea how to go about getting them.
There’s a solution to her problem, but it scares the living daylights out of her. It came to her last night, as she fell asleep, and it dominated her dreams. Probably why she’s been so irritable. That, and irritability is on the list of menopause symptoms Chiamaka read out to her. Irritability (yes), dry skin (yes, and the little tube of moisturiser Chiamaka gave her is almost empty), headaches and migraines (yes and no, not yet), hot flushes (lots) and many more she doesn’t want to experience, especially because she doesn’t know what else will happen if she keeps going without the injections. Will she revert? Can that even happen, now she’s been castrated?
Or will she just get sicker and sicker?
Chiamaka said, with compassion, that she needs to find a way to fix it. She can drive her anywhere she needs to go, she said, and get her granddaughters to look after the B&B for a day. But she can’t get spendy; none of them can. And she’s not importing any grey market nonsense to her respectable bed and breakfast.
Diana’s been turning her cheap new phone over and over in her hands. She knows what she has to do. She looked up the number this morning on the computer. Not hard to find, really. The university has a directory of grad students and Dorley Hall has a directory of residents, so all she had to do was cross-reference. Easy.
Amazing how she doesn’t feel so stupid all the time any more. Just — she winces — achy and irritable.
“Chia!” she calls, once again feeling conspicuous from how deep her voice sounds. “I need a few minutes to make a call!”
“Wait!” Chiamaka calls back, from the kitchen. “I’m making a cuppa! You want one?”
“Um. Sure! Thank you!”
A giggle breaks through the anxiety building in her chest — along with another of those awful hot flushes — because Declan didn’t thank people. And that’s because Declan’s dad didn’t thank people; he accepted what he was given, and at most he would nod, or say, “Yeah,” or some other single-syllable word that might as well have been a grunt.
Declan didn’t do a lot of things that Diana does. Like read Wikipedia at night, with the dictionary open in another tab. Like go to sleep listening to YouTube videos on any subject that sounds interesting. Like show any curiosity about anything.
Diana is all curiosity.
Chiamaka comes through with the tea, sets hers down on the desk and then amusedly bats at Diana’s arm until she gets the hell out of the way. So Diana thanks her again and takes her tea through to the breakfast room, which at a quarter past eleven is finally empty.
She takes a sip, lets it warm her stomach, and then calls the number she has, hoping it’s the right one.
It answers on the third ring.
“Hello? Hello? Who is this? I don’t recognise this number.”
“H— Hello,” Diana manages to say. Stupid to be so nervous! She used to hate this woman! She used to fantasise about what she would do to her if she could get her fucking taser off her! She used to—
No. Declan used to think those thoughts. Diana refuses to.
“Who is this?” Monica asks, on the other end of the line.
In her best voice, Diana says, “My name’s Diana. You knew me as Declan. I need your help.”
Notes:
Up-to-date Dorley Discord link.
Chapter 39: Where He Cannot Follow
Notes:
Content warnings: eating disorders, mentions of what Ollie did a couple of chapters ago.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
12. Breath
He controls me
Knees pinning
Belly crushing
Fingers at my throat
With little effort he controls me
For if I move
if I resist
if I scream
if I am too much myself
he will take my breath from me
and I will wake again in darkness
2020 January 11
Saturday
Christine’s awake earlier than Paige and, judging by the emptiness of the second-floor kitchen, earlier than everyone else on her floor. Valérie included, which is a surprise; though Paige did say, as she and Christine folded gratefully into bed last night, that she hadn’t seen Val all evening, and that no-one had seen Aunt Bea, either, and that maybe…
No! She rejects the thought. Because no matter what Paige might say, or what Jodie might insinuate, largely with mime, she doesn’t want to think of Aunt Bea that way. She still remembers when Beatrice was a figure of fear for her, an unknowable presence who loomed over her life, controlling every aspect of it via locks, sponsors, and the loving care and attention of Indira, and while Christine’s accepted that this was largely a fiction, created to keep the new girls in line and to give their sponsors an unimpeachable authority figure on whom to blame all the most grating aspects of their training as women, she’s still not ready to imagine her so human, so normal, so sweatily real.
Christine rebels by breaking open locks — and she still takes pride in that, even knowing she fell entirely to Indira’s much more subtle manipulation — not by picturing her boss and the ultimate architect of her womanhood fucking.
Jodie says she’s naive. Surely Christine’s heard the rumours about what Beatrice did before she returned to Dorley? How she made a living without an official existence? Donna says that’s how she met Elle Lambert in the first place, and—
That’s usually the point where Christine walks out of the room or sticks her fingers in her ears. Aunt Bea should be Aunt Bea. And, sure, Valérie reportedly hasn’t been back to her room three nights in a row, but that doesn’t mean anything! Not if Christine has anything to say about it.
So why’s she thinking about it non-stop this morning?
Because she’s up early and alone, that’s why. And she can’t go back to bed because she’s far too antsy to stay still, and then she’d wake Paige, and while that has the potential to be adorable, they were up late last night. She should let her sleep.
She takes to the stairs instead, running two at a time for most of their length, and emerges into a disappointingly empty dining hall. She’s about to move on, maybe to go for a walk into campus and try to find someone to talk to in Café One or the library, when she realises the dining hall’s not actually empty, that one of the armchairs by the fireplace is occupied.
It’s not until she’s closer that she realises it’s occupied by Steph. And a surprisingly nondescript Steph, at that: she’s dressed in the standard basement outfit of joggers, t-shirt and hoodie, and though she’s clearly wearing a bra under it, she’s otherwise androgynous. Not the sort of thing she usually wears on her excursions upstairs unless she’s having electrolysis or something.
Strange.
“Hey!” Christine says, injecting all the energy she can into the greeting, hopping over the back of the sofa nearest the armchair and realising immediately that she’s misjudged the mood. Steph’s sitting there, leaning forward, hands clasped, clearly unready for human contact.
“Hey,” Steph says, raising her head long enough to say the word and dropping it back down.
Yeah. She wants to be left alone. Trouble is, people who want to be left alone rarely benefit from it, in Christine’s experience. “What’s up? And I mean that in a friendly way, not a sponsorly way; I’m on holiday.”
“I heard.”
“Also, I’m not a sponsor.”
“I know.”
“I just do the technical stuff. Steph, what’s wrong?”
Steph takes a disconcertingly long moment to respond, and when she does, she leans back in her arm chair, hugs herself. “Nothing, really. Little things.” Another pause, while she stares into the empty fireplace. “It’s Bethany. I’m worried about her. Ever since Ollie, ever since that night…”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Don’t know. I came up here for a change of scenery. And for the quiet.”
“Well,” Christine says, checking the time, “this is a bad place to be if you want to be alone, and not just because of me.” She holds her phone up, showing Steph the lock screen, with its forest of notifications and alerts. “Shift change soon.”
She nods, morose. She’s still hugging herself, and Christine recognises that exact behaviour: it’s to stop herself from fidgeting, it’s to protect herself, it’s to keep inside everything that threatens to come out. And whether it’s just that she’s worried about Bethany, or there’s other bullshit going on in her life as well, the fact remains that the poor girl has spent the bulk of the last three months in windowless rooms, surrounded by people who have only recently become halfway bearable. She needs to get out. It seemed to do wonders for Ollie.
“Hey, Steph,” Christine says, “you wanna build a fire?”
The question’s unexpected enough that Steph has to force herself to think about it, to interrupt whatever unhelpful shit is going on in that head of hers to consider new information, and when she manages something that is almost a smile, Christine grins back at her, hops up from the sofa and holds out a hand. Steph takes it, and together they head off into the back corridors.
“We’re going outside?” Steph asks as they close in on the conservatory.
“That is where the wood is.”
“But I’m wearing socks.”
Christine’s prepared for that: there’s a supply closet just before the last door, and inside is everything she expects, including several pairs of green wellies. She pulls out a few and squints at the soles.
“What size do you wear?” she asks.
“Oh,” Steph says, shifting uncomfortably in the doorway, “uh, ten. I can get into a nine if I need to, but, uh… Yeah. Ten. Unless you have nine-and-a-half.”
Christine nods and hands her a pair of tens. “We’ve got you covered,” she says, and when Steph takes them, Christine gestures vaguely upstairs. “Most of us have feet that are kind of on the big side.”
Steph doesn’t seem all that mollified, but she slips them on and stamps a couple of times. “Oh. They’re actually loose.”
“You’re probably already shrinking,” Christine says, dumping her Keds on the shelf and pulling on a pair of eights.
“Shrinking?”
“Well, yeah.” Christine stands up. She’s a little taller than Steph, and she decides to emphasise it by standing closer to her, looking down on her just a little. “You’ll lose height on the hormones—”
“I knew that,” Steph interrupts, sagging.
“And you’ll probably drop at least half a shoe size. More, maybe. Nines were tight on me when I came here.” She sticks out a wellie’d foot. “Now I have room in eights.”
Steph boggles at her. “Our feet shrink?”
“Usually, yeah. Might hurt a bit every so often. Like everywhere else.”
“Oh, yeah,” Steph says, arching her back. “I’ve had a bit of that already.”
Christine can’t help smiling, remembering. For a while it had been a new ache and a new pain every day. Something else to make living down in the basement extra-special.
“Come on,” she says, tugging on Steph’s sleeve, “let’s go stock up.”
There’s a wicker basket on wheels in the storeroom, and together they drag it out and into the conservatory. They leave it by the door — “For tactical reasons,” Christine says, when Steph asks — and Christine makes a bit of a show out of opening the door to the outside, spoiled only slightly by the way the door sticks in the frame.
Is she imagining it, or did Steph breathe in extra-deep as soon as she stepped outside?
Neither of them say anything, though, so Christine leads them off the concrete lip and onto a barely gravelled path, perpendicular to the woods and, thankfully, wending nowhere at all near Peckinville’s little installation.
The woodshed is a smallish construction, a higgledy-piggledy mess of stone and long-dried mud cement. Several trees have grown around it, their roots and branches enmeshed into its structure, and without them it would probably have collapsed decades ago; maybe centuries. Christine doesn’t know how old it is, just that it has the otherworldly feel of a building that might, if it did not rupture all sense, credibly claim to predate the woods that surround it and the land that hosts it.
“Spooky,” Steph says.
“Less so when you see the van from the Got Wood? people parked outside. What, you think we chop our own wood?” She shows off her nails to Steph, reflecting that her point would be made better if she were Paige, with her perfect manicure. Or Jodie, or Yasmin, or any of the girls who don’t chew on themselves when they’re anxious.
The out-of-place modern door opens into an interior lined with waterproof material and stacked high with precisely chopped logs, each perfectly sized to fit in those nicely aesthetic cast-iron firewood containers Paige keeps pointing out to her on lifestyle Instagrams. The Hall has a rather less pleasing little cupboard set into the wall, by the fireplace, rarely stocked with wood but filled with firelighters and matches and cleaning fluid and other less fashionable fireplace accessories.
Christine fetches the wheelbarrow from its place, dumps it in the doorway, and beckons Steph to help her. Careful not to get dust or wood chips on their clothes or in their hair, they start loading it.
Eventually, Steph speaks.
“Beth’s been quiet,” she says. “Sad. And it’s not like before, when she… when Aaron was falling apart. It’s new.”
“Did you talk to her about it?”
“I’m afraid to. I’m always scared to, with this kind of thing. Best I can do is drop hints and wait for her to pick them up.” Steph drops her logs into the barrow and steps back. “I know she’s not trans the way I am. I know there’s a whole process to get from where she was to where she needs to be. And I know she’s not there yet. So it scares me every time it seems like she’s stopped making progress. Every time it feels like she’s going backwards instead. Every time she hesitates to put on a bra or doesn’t look at me when I talk, or makes a face when she looks at herself in the mirror, or…” Trailing off, she squats, rests her hands inside her silhouette. Another defensive posture.
“Steph?”
“I’m scared of breaking her, Christine,” Steph says. “Sometimes I feel like if I touch her the wrong way it’ll be like pulling on a thread and she’ll just come apart. And that’s the other thing. I know she’s not trans the way I am, but she knows it, too. And she thinks about it a lot. I know she feels inferior.”
“She’s told you this?”
“Once or twice. Not in quite those words. But sometimes…” Steph leans against the doorway. “Sometimes I think she’s only going forwards because she hates who she used to be so much.”
Christine sets down her last log and walks over to Steph. She squats down next to her, reaches in and takes both her hands. “You could be describing me,” she says softly. “I’m not trans the way you are, either. And you might be surprised at how recently I decided I was trans at all. It’s a weird mental hurdle to get over. Remember,” she continues, when Steph looks like she’s going to protest, “I’m like Bethany; I had to be dragged into this. And there were weeks when I felt like doing nothing but shutting myself away, hiding even from the people I loved — and, yes, even back then, I loved Paige and I loved Dira, even if I didn’t know it yet. Progress isn’t a straight line, Steph. It’s wiggly. It turns back on itself. There are valleys to cross and hills to climb and the map, well, the map sucks.”
Steph smiles weakly. “That’s a Maria line, isn’t it?”
“Broadly,” Christine says. “She’s a smart woman. Has she, uh, been down to see Bethany lately?”
Shaking her head, Steph says, “Edy has. She says Maria’s recovering.”
“She wants her as rested as possible. I think she’s being overprotective; Maria’s bored. I had to go see her earlier in the week, just to get some stuff signed, and she kept me there almost an hour, just chatting.”
“Oh? What kind of stuff?”
“We’re going out tonight. All the second years. And Lorna, and Pippa, and—”
“Oh, yeah,” Steph says, nodding. “Pippa mentioned it. You have to get paperwork signed for that?”
“Normally? No. But none of us has actually graduated, apart from Vicky, and since we’re going out as a group it’s technically a programme activity. To be honest,” Christine adds, hefting the bars of the wheelbarrow and stepping aside so Steph can open the door for her, “we’re in by-the-book mode now.”
Steph slips the latch back on and together they head back towards the hall, the dirty wheelbarrow held between them, so they can share the load. When they arrive at the conservatory, they’ll transfer the firewood to the indoor-safe wicker cart, so no-one will have reason to yell at Christine and Steph for scratching the wooden floors.
“You know,” Christine says, “I have a thought. Why not take Beth up to see Maria? I bet she misses her, and—”
“Shit,” Steph says, stopping short and causing the wheelbarrow to rock. “That’s a great idea, Christine!”
Trying not to be smug, Christine says, “Yes. Yes, it is.”
* * *
At least she gets to rest today. Bit of a hell week, all things considered.
Work’s been tense. Back at Dorley it had been easy to think of her life up here as not especially real, as some fugue state she’d slipped into, but then Zach texted asking where the hell she was and icily informing that her absence was starting to cause problems, and as much as Melissa doesn’t need a reference to get a job down in Almsworth — the new girls’ network strikes again — the thought of leaving Zach short-handed was unpleasant enough that she dropped everything and jumped on a train back to Manchester.
Back to a remnant of a life she was crazy even to attempt.
So, yeah. Returning to work only to immediately quit wasn’t exactly the kindest thing she could have done, but Zach was gracious enough about it. Considering how much of his goodwill she’s burned through, Melissa’s grateful to have gotten off with just a few harsh words and an awkward atmosphere while she works her notice.
She won’t pretend she hasn’t slipped a bit, though. Her meal replacement shakes are still in the office fridge. And they would be, wouldn’t they? They’re practically immortal, which doesn’t say amazing things about the contents, and fuck her if on her first day back — and every day since — she didn’t just pick one out for lunch instead of eating something.
She has more at home, and as much as Shahida and the girls back at the Hall made sure she ate, now she’s back here, now it’s all laid out for her, now that there’s no food in the flat that hasn’t expired, it’s been impossible not to revert to old habits. She hasn’t yet weighed herself on the worn and unloved scale under the sink, but she looks at it every time she uses the bathroom; it’s only a matter of time. Because when she started boxing up her stuff, she found a blouse she hasn’t worn since she first moved up here, and when she tried it on, the buttons wouldn’t do up. And no amount of facing herself in the mirror and reminding herself that she’s a healthy weight now and recalling Shahida’s appreciative hands on her and Abby’s reserved and questioning kisses can defeat a button that won’t close.
On her first night she threw all her old clothes into boxes and taped them all shut and decided to wear only what she brought with her. The things she bought and borrowed, the things that caress her instead of binding her. She wears her new clothes and she tries to forget. Which is hard to do when one of the girls at work keeps telling her she looks ‘healthier’ now, and Melissa’s been a woman long enough to know what that’s code for. They’ve never gotten along, and the bitch knew exactly where to skewer her: in the rolls and rolls of fat on her—
“Oh, shut up,” Melissa mutters to herself.
Next week will be better. Zach was more like his old self yesterday, and she even got to tell him she’s going to miss him when she’s gone. He started talking about networking; if she’s going to be working at her alma mater, well, the Royal College is a prestigious institution, and maybe she can drop his name a few times. The thought makes her giggle. Zach at Saints? Popping into Dorley to say hi? He’s had some choice things to say about toxic masculinity over the years; maybe she can persuade him to help out. Maybe she can lead him by the hand into the monstrosity that made her and show him the ropes, introduce him around.
“It’s just networking, Zach,” she whispers, laughing again.
There. Much better. Now she can get out of bed and not have to worry so much about the face she’ll see in the mirror.
She sucks her cheeks in all the same. Best not to push it.
In the shower, she pokes at her belly. She complained to Shahida the other week that she was getting pudgy, and Shy made her prove it and then very tactfully did not make fun of Melissa’s nonexistent belly bulge. Melissa can feel it, but if no-one can see it, is it really there?
She soaps it up and doesn’t linger on it. Thinking of Shahida, her hand drops, but before she can indulge herself too much, the memory of their awkward Monday morning presents itself, and she focuses instead on washing and conditioning and shaving and scrubbing.
Two kisses. One from each of them. First from Shy, in her room. Not so unexpected. But the second was out in the corridor, from Abby, their first proper kiss in a long time. And Abby stepped away, eyes wide, smiling, truly happy, and something boiled inside Melissa.
It boils still, it writhes inside her, a creature of passion and guilt and memory and lust, and it wants them both, the woman she grew up with and the woman who saved her. And that’s just Melissa being unfair again, failing to choose, failing for the longest time to recognise that there is a choice even to make.
Zach’s text, then, was convenient. It gave her a pretext to get the hell away and think about things. And Shahida couldn’t follow because her money is far from infinite and she needs to find a job, and Abby has work and her family to think of, and no-one else knew she was going until she’d already run back up the country to Manchester, to her empty flat and her meal-replacement shakes and her mirror that tells her over and over the she needs to weigh herself again and write down the number in the little book under her bed.
And she hasn’t come to a decision yet. She’s been too scared to think about it.
Zach texted, and away she ran, because hurting people with her absence is the thing Melissa is best at.
* * *
“I still can’t believe our feet shrink.”
“Believe it.”
“I lost a whole size,” someone says.
“I lost almost two,” someone else adds.
“Bitch!”
“Hey! I had bigger feet to start with. More to lose. Look at you; if you’d lost any more, you’d be like a— a— a woman with really small feet.”
“How does that even work, anyway?”
“I don’t know. The tendons tighten, or something? Monica, you’re a biologist; how does it happen?”
“Science.”
“That’s… not helpful.”
“Hormones.”
“Still not helpful.”
“It’s early; leave me alone.”
“Mon, it’s almost eleven.”
“That counts as early on a Saturday.”
“Says you. I just got off shift.”
“Nell, you got off shift five hours ago.”
“Shit, really? What time is it?”
“Almost eleven.”
“Christ.”
“You’re a mess, Nell.”
“Hey! It’s not my fault Bella left her Switch down here. I’m getting really good at Mario.”
Christine meets Steph’s eyes, and they share a smile.
Starting a fire on such a relatively cold morning had the effect of gathering together every sponsor coming off the night shift, every resident out blearily searching for a cup of coffee, a handful of older graduates who’ve recently been roped in to fill out the ranks at the weekends, and even the odd hungover girl returning home in the same clothes she went out in the night before. Paige brought out a few drip coffee makers from storage, and Faye and a handful of other second years set up a cereal station on a nearby table, and everyone’s just hanging out. It reminds Christine of some of the lazy mornings she had earlier in her third year, before everything went crazy, only now she knows everyone’s name, more or less.
It’s good to see Steph smiling into her Weetabix. They kept talking as they got the fire going, conspiring to lift Bethany’s mood, and in the process, Steph started to feel better, too. So now, as long as Bethany is asleep down there — and she is; Christine set her phone to vibrate if Bethany so much as rolls over in bed — Steph can stay up here, and drink her coffee and eat her cereal and speak with her peers.
She does feel the need to check on her every so often, though.
“You’re sure she’s still asleep?” Steph whispers again, leaning close enough to Christine that no-one — save Paige — will overhear.
Christine nods, waking her phone and bringing up the feed. There she is, lying on her back, the covers slowly rising and falling. “Out cold,” Christine says.
“She never sleeps in this long.”
“You sleep together most nights, don’t you?” Paige asks, and Steph nods. “It’s the beds. They’re narrow. Christine and I had the same problem: she likes to spread out and thrash around—”
“—I don’t like to; it just happens—”
“—and so does Bethany.”
“Well,” Christine says, nudging Paige with an elbow, “hopefully she’ll feel better by tonight.”
Steph sighs. “I hope so. I’m just— I’m worried about her.”
Paige, reaching over Christine, puts a hand on Steph’s knee. “I know. This will help her. I’m sure of it.”
Steph half-smiles and leans away, rejoining the larger conversation, which has somehow circled back to feet.
“I still have to buy wide, though,” Nell’s saying. “Sucks to lose two sizes but still have trouble buying cute shoes because you have to find them in an eight wide.”
“It’s crazy that they shrink at all,” Steph says.
“I can’t believe you didn’t know that,” Monica says. She’s sitting on a dining chair in the centre of the loose semi-circle of couches and armchairs, with her back to the fire. She dragged it over when she joined the group, because every other seat was full, and the effect has been to nominate her as the de facto adjudicator of whatever conversation has the most participants, since she’s elevated above everyone else even more than normal. “It’s one of the first things baby transes usually find out.”
“I didn’t.”
“She doesn’t know a lot of the things baby transes know,” Paige points out.
“She doesn’t like to Google things,” Christine says.
“That’s only partly true,” Steph says.
“So,” Monica says, “ask us! I know we drip-feed information down there—” she jerks a thumb basementwards, “—but you’re exempt from that. Unless you think you’re likely to panic about your feet shrinking or your hips rotating, or—”
“My hips are going to rotate?”
One of the other girls giggles as Monica shrugs. “Doesn’t happen to everyone. But, mostly? Yes.”
It’s good to see Monica doing better, too. The news about Declan — and then, in its wake, the continued absence of further news about Declan — shook her, but she’s gradually been getting back to normal. She’s taken more shifts, and she’s teamed up with Pippa to spend time with Ollie in what they’ve come to call the infirmary, so Harmony can take breaks.
“It’s an age thing,” Nell says. “It might not happen for Ollie, since he’s older, but I bet most of your lot’ll start feeling it soon, if you haven’t already.”
“I have been a bit sore,” Steph says.
“There you go.”
“When you say ‘rotate’…”
With Steph in someone else’s hands for a while, Christine allows herself to zone out. She leans against Paige, indulges in her warmth and in the hand that quickly covers hers, and sips her coffee. Her first week ‘off’ — she still has to attend lectures — has gone well, and it’s been incredibly reassuring to see more faces around the hall, more sponsors, more graduates; more people to respond if some emergency presents itself. If, say, a survivor of a third and heretofore unknown clandestine forced feminisation operation shows up, begging for help holding up her cartoonishly large boobs, they won’t be Christine’s problem. Not for another week, at least.
Sure, okay, she inserted herself into Steph’s situation a bit this morning, did a little of what Indira would probably — with a nudge and a wink — call sponsoring, but the girl really does need to have her context kicked occasionally. She spends too much time in the basement, and almost all of it with Bethany, and while Bethany’s lovely in her own way, Steph needs reminding occasionally that most trans women don’t actually glare at their bras as if they are about to leap up and bite them.
She’s come a long way. Easy to remember when Steph didn’t like to use appropriate pronouns or compare herself to other trans women; now, here she is, naturally and easily including herself with only the gentlest of nudges.
Christine smiles to herself. It’s not been so long since she didn’t like to call herself a trans woman at all, and now here she is, seriously considering ticking the box for it on her NPH.
Paige nuzzles her, so Christine leans up to kiss her and folds her awareness back into the hubbub again. The second years are arguing over who among them gets Trevor Darling’s tits when they finally take them out of him, and as Monica tries to tell them that it doesn’t work like that, Mia insists that it’s going to be her that gets them, that she’s going to be magnificent, and that she’s going to be visible from space.
Laughing, Christine snuggles up against Paige even more. Feels like family, being here among so many, though the thought reminds her she ought to check up on her mum, see how she’s doing. She probably won’t ever go see her again — the ruse that carried her through their last meeting is unsustainable — but it’s been healing to know for sure that not everything Christine left behind is forever ruined.
A ringtone disturbs the conversation for a moment, one of the ones they all have on their personal phones that’s set to a special ring — the classic ‘telephone’ ring, rather than a tune — to indicate that a call’s being forwarded from their personal landline extension. Christine sees Monica picking up, and relaxes; it’s almost definitely someone from her (very) part-time job outside Dorley. Not Christine’s concern, especially because the recording will be instantly accessible to whomever is in the security room.
She grins as she realises she doesn’t even know who’s on shift down there right now, and she doesn’t have to care!
She’s rolling over to kiss Paige again when Monica stands up from her dining chair, covers the mic on her phone, and yells, “Everybody shut the fuck up!” Then, in the silence, she says into her phone, “I’m sorry; Diana, was it? Would you please repeat that?”
* * *
One of these weekends she should probably take a last look around the city. It’s an odd impulse; it’s not like she’ll never have the opportunity to come back. But these last few weeks here are the last Melissa will ever have working for Zach, they’ll be the last in her little apartment; they’ll be the last of this era of her life. When she next comes back to Manchester, whenever that is, she’ll be someone else again.
Hopefully someone a little less neurotic. Someone who eats more.
But she should do it. Walk around the Northern Quarter. Have a coffee in the café atop Afflecks. Have a drink on Canal Street.
Yeah. Go see every place she’s had a failed date with a cis girl. Amazing plan, Melissa.
Still. What better way to draw a line under her old life? One of her old lives, anyway. She’s amassed several: unhappy and confused child; desperate and suicidal teen; subdued but stable(ish) girl-in-progress; Abby’s girlfriend; Abby’s ex. And then Steph happened, and suddenly everything that came before seemed unimportant. Rushing back down to Almsworth, filled with the certainty that she could finally do some good, that she was finally needed, was extraordinary, even as it was terrifying. And it worked out better than expected; sort of a first, in Melissa’s experience. And Melissa’s so, so proud of Steph.
Except now Melissa’s back here again. In the same old flat. With the same old meal replacement shakes.
She’s getting stuck in circular thinking. Only one way to fix that, and that’s by doing something. Maybe she will do the tour of Manchester. See all the old places. Bum herself out remembering when Veronica said she met another girl at Vanilla, one who’s just fun, who doesn’t seem sad all the time, and—
Yeah, Liss. Let’s get the hell out of here.
She fridges the rest of her shake — she’ll finish it later — and rushes through the process of getting ready. Nothing fancy: she detangles her hair and throws it in a high pony, pulls on a pair of jeggings and a loose sweater, steps into her comfiest pair of long boots, and chucks a favourite dark brown coat over the top, because the condensation’s only just receded from the windows. It’s colder up here in Manchester; she always forgets.
It’s reassuringly familiar. She’s riding the lift down from the fifth floor, checking herself over in its green-tinted mirrors. She’s wishing, as she steps out into the lobby, that she’d brought a hat, but since she’ll undoubtedly end up shopping for clothes, she can just pick one up if her ears get too cold.
It’s like any other Saturday up here in Manchester. Like the whole excursion to Almsworth was just a dream, and this is her real life.
There are two figures visible through the frosted glass of the front double doors, buzzing someone and having no luck, so that’ll be her good deed for the day: letting a couple of people in so they don’t have to wait for their friend outside. She taps her fob against the reader, opens the door, and prepares a smile.
“Liss! We were just buzzing you!” Abby says.
“I know we should have called,” Shahida says, “but we wanted to surprise you, and—”
“Why are you dressed like a pumpkin spice latte girl?”
* * *
The daylight’s blinding in the breakfast room and the red-and-white-squared tablecloths are starting to blend together and it takes a moment for Diana to realise how unsteady she is on her feet, how every noise and every light and everything she can touch has unified against her in a cacophony of sensation, and as she thinks to herself that she should write down ‘a cacophony of sensation’ somewhere, she almost falls. She’s only saved from braining herself on one of the rickety wooden chairs because Chiamaka’s there, positioning herself under one arm and steadying her.
“Diana?” the reedy voice on the phone says. “Are you there?”
She doesn’t feel like she can answer. That would take everything she is currently using to fail to stand.
Chiamaka takes the phone out of her hand and answers for her. “Whoever this is, please give Diana a moment.” Then she lays it on the table and pulls out a chair. “Diana, sweetheart, please sit down. You are very heavy.”
Yeah. She probably is, isn’t she?
Diana drops into the chair. It wobbles a bit on the uneven floor — or is it because the chair itself is uneven? — and she overcorrects, grabbing Chiamaka’s arm.
“Okay, sweetheart,” Chiamaka says, “you can let me go now.”
“Oh, sorry.” Diana releases her. “I’m— I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just finish your conversation.”
Numbly nodding, Diana retrieves her phone and says, “Hello. Sorry about that.” She doesn’t use her new voice, because it hurts to use it too much, and she doesn’t want to have a coughing fit on top of everything else. It sounds terrible anyway.
“Decl— Diana, what happened?” Monica asks. Through the speaker, Diana could swear she can almost hear the hush of people, and she wonders where Monica was when she took the call. Doubtless somewhere Declan never visited, unless he was unconscious at the time.
“I got dizzy,” she says. And she remembers the other thing she decided: to be honest with Monica, or as honest as she can be without giving up her location. She doesn’t know how much she can trust her, doesn’t even know if there’s any reason to trust her at all, but everything she knows about the ultimate goals of the Hall came from Frankie and Grandmother and him, and none of them had reason to be honest. Maybe Frankie did. Impossible to know. Anyway, Monica’s got to be the most trustworthy person she knows who is actually in a position to help her with this. “It’s been happening a lot the last few days,” she adds, “when I get worried or stressed.”
“And talking to me… worries you?”
“Yes,” Diana says. Chiamaka, satisfied that Diana is unlikely to fall from her chair, squeezes her shoulder and returns to the reception room, making good on her promise not to eavesdrop.
“I’m sorry, Diana,” Monica says. “If I’d been kinder to you—”
Diana interrupts her before another dizzy spell overtakes her. “Please. I don’t want to talk about then. I just need to know some things.”
“Okay.”
“Is there something I can take that will stop me getting dizzy?”
“You’re… getting dizzy?”
“Not just dizzy. I’m having a lot of problems.”
“What problems, Diana?”
Diana lists every symptom she can think of. As she goes, she hears Monica ferociously shush someone on the other end, someone asking her a question, though she can’t make out what’s asked.
“There’s something you can take, yes,” Monica says, when Diana’s finished. “It’ll alleviate your symptoms and it’ll keep you healthy. And we can get it for you, but you need to come home. You need to come back, Diana.”
And that was it. That was the thing Monica said to her earlier, the thing that nearly put Diana on the floor. Back to Dorley Hall.
“I can’t,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“You need our help, Diana,” Monica says.
The dizziness comes again. Diana leans both elbows on the table and struggles to keep the phone raised to her ear. “I can’t be locked up again, Monica,” she whispers, and she feels his hand around her throat as she does so. He liked to hold her there, keep her in place, the threat of cutting off her air never stated but always implicit. He only had to go through with it once; after a while, even a light touch around her neck was enough.
That was the end of him, though. He should have held her tighter.
“I can’t be locked up again,” she repeats, almost inaudible even to herself. Her breathing slows and shallows, and she stills as much as she can. “I can’t.”
“I will not lock you up, Diana,” Monica says on the other end of the line. She sounds the way she did when she gave Declan one of her ultimatums, all of which he spat back at her.
“I can’t,” is all Diana can say, and then there are hands around her throat. Memories of him, but also of Declan’s defiance, his stupid, idiot defiance.
Moments later, the phone is taken out of her grip, and as she struggles to breathe, Chiamaka speaks for her again.
“Whatever you are saying to Diana is hurting her.” There’s a commotion on the speaker, too far away for Diana to hear. “No. No. You will be quiet! Good. Now, listen. I don’t know who you are, but if you know her, then either you know she’s a very delicate girl, or you ought to. So this is me telling you: lay off. Can you do that for me? Okay. I’m going to give you back to her now, and I’ll give her back her privacy.” She sets the phone on the table and addresses Diana directly. “Whatever you need from her, I’m sure there’s another way to get it.”
“I don’t think so,” Diana says. She’s aware she sounds hoarse and nothing at all like a girl, but Chiamaka doesn’t seem to care. Instead she smiles grimly, nods at the phone on the table, and mouths, Be careful, before walking out again.
A faint voice from the phone is repeating her name, so Diana picks it up.
“Monica,” she says.
“I’m not going to pressure you to come back to the Hall,” Monica says. “I can meet you somewhere, bring you what you need, show you how to use it. We can meet somewhere neutral and open. Where lots of people can see us, so you know I won’t be able to do anything to you. How easy is it for you to get to, say, Chelmsford?”
The relief that floods Diana is hard to contain — she’s not going to be made to go back! she’s not going to be imprisoned again! — until she realises the problem: “I can’t go anywhere. I don’t have any money.”
“Shit, of course, you don’t have an identity,” Monica says. “Okay. I’m thinking.” Diana wonders if she’s tapping the side of her nose, the way she used to. The thought makes her smile. “You obviously have a phone; do you have internet access?”
“Yes.”
“Right. I’m going to text an email address and a link to an app to this number, is that okay?”
“Yes.”
“Download the app to your phone. It’s a payment app, and you don’t need a bank account or anything to use it, just a phone. Set it up and send a cash request to the email address. I will then send you some money. Enough for you to buy a train ticket or a taxi or whatever. Come to Chelmsford and— Do you want to do this today? I imagine you want to do this today, if you’re having dizzy spells.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. Maybe get a taxi or an Uber or something if you’re that dizzy. Safer than the train. I’ll make sure to send you enough. Meet me in the café in the John Lewis in Chelmsford. Is that okay, Diana?”
“Y— Yes.”
Monica slows down. “Look. I’m sorry. I’m bombarding you, I know. But I need to know: if I leave for Chelmsford now, will you meet me there? I promise you will be safe, and that you’ll be free to leave on your own at any time.”
Diana hesitates. But in the absence of trust, desperation wins out.
“I’ll be there,” she says.
* * *
It feels to Christine like the entire dining hall’s been holding its breath as Monica talks to someone she keeps calling Diana but twice she has almost called Declan, and when eventually she hangs up and stands there, drained, her phone clutched tightly in both hands, everyone starts to talk at once.
“Shut up!” she yells, after a few seconds of madness. And then she starts muttering to herself, counting off on her fingers. “I need to call a cab, I need injection supplies, I need— Christine! You need to authorise me for a thousand pounds out of the emergency fund!”
“I need Aunt Bea’s permission to—”
“No, you fucking don’t!” Monica says, leaning down towards her, wielding her height against her. “Authorise the money, Christine, please. I promise no-one’ll yell at you for it.”
One of the other sponsors passes Christine a laptop, and she takes it with a shrug. It’s the work of a few seconds to authorise the transfer to Monica’s sponsorship account. She closes up the computer and as she leans forward to place it on the coffee table, several sponsors nod at her or give her a thumbs up or otherwise validate her; they’ll have her back if Monica fucks up.
“Monica,” Nell asks, “what’s going on?”
“I’m going to Chelmsford,” Monica says. “Nobody tell Aunt Bea until I’ve left. I’ll ask for forgiveness, not permission.”
“Why Chelmsford?”
“Ask me that when I get back!” she yells, sounding manic. And then she’s gone, disappearing into the back rooms; presumably going straight for one of the secure medicine lockers for injection supplies.
There’s silence for a moment, and then Nadine, the most senior sponsor present, stands regally from her armchair at the end of the row, walks up to Christine and hands her back the laptop.
“Please play the recording,” she says.
Everyone assembled seem to huddle closer as Christine hops into the security system and pulls up the records for Monica’s outside line. She hits play on the latest entry.
“Hello?” Monica’s voice says. “Hello? Who is this? I don’t recognise this number.”
“H— Hello,” someone says, their voice a whisper that Christine can’t yet gender.
“Who is this?”
“My name’s Diana,” the voice says. “You knew me as Declan. I need your help.”
The whole room erupts.
* * *
9. The Shell
Lost myself
Found something else
He reaches for me still
But I have gone where he cannot follow
All that is left
is a life I don’t understand
and a cracked and broken shell
I hope I paint it well
* * *
Bethany dreams of corridors. Of boys made comically large by fear. Of a summer that never ends, of teachers’ offices that offer no protection, of a bed that could be taken from her at any moment. And in her waking hours, she sees a boy who survived all that and turned it outward, who decided that being hurt was reason enough to hurt others, whose impunity became armour.
She sees him because she makes herself see him. Because a week of nightmares about boys chasing her, catching her, hurting her, forcing her, that’s not why she’s here. That’s not what she did. That’s just… bullshit backstory. And the more she returns to it, the more times she escapes from it upon waking, the more self-serving it feels, the more indulgent.
Steph’s been trying. Bless her, she’s been trying so hard. Distractions and kisses and careful, wary questions. But it hasn’t been enough.
It’s like that other girl, Mia, said: fake it til you make it. Bethany’s been trying to fake it for what feels like forever and yet she knows has been mere weeks, and she’s exhausted and she’s run ragged in her dreams and when she wakes the people who surround her are progressing and she’s constantly dragged back to the endless corridors of the school in summer. Dragged back to where she started.
And the fear of it is that, in her haste to protect her, Steph will be pulled along with her. And that cannot happen.
Fake it til you make it: Bethany the character, the ideal, the goal, is further away than ever. She can’t see her in the mirror any more. Can’t drum up her voice to guide her. The girl who put on cute clothes to taunt Will, the girl who renounced her old identity in front of dozens of people, the girl who allowed Steph to kiss her and touch her and treat her delicately; where did she go?
It’s not even as if Aaron’s come back in her place. She’s tried reaching for him, experimentally, and found nothing.
So who is she?
And how can she even discover that when her world is so reduced? Fuck, even Ollie gets to go outside more than she does! Stupid bastard has an accident shaving his copious wrist hair and gets a week in the fresh air! Oh, she could ask Steph to take her upstairs, and Steph’d jump at it, but then she’d be admitting she’s having difficulties, that she’s not as far along as she hoped to be.
Steph shouldn’t be weighed down by her. She’s better than that.
She’s better than Bethany. In every sense.
* * *
They take the stairs back up to Melissa’s apartment, partly because Abby drove all the way here and she needs to stretch her legs and partly because the patterns on the stairwell walls — concentric rings of terracotta-brown tile embedded in green — are absolutely beautiful to Shahida, and she wants to follow them all the way up to the fifth floor. As Melissa speaks, Shahida runs her fingers along them, tracing the bumps and imperfections and barely noticing the effort of the climb.
“When did you set off?” Melissa asks, taking refuge in the most banal opening question possible.
“About six,” Abby says, huffing with effort. “Maybe a little before? Stopped for breakfast around ten to let the car juice up.”
“We took one of the electric cars,” Shahida says, still focusing on the tiles. “Abby said she’d never driven one before.”
“Well, I hadn’t. And it’s weird.”
“What did this building used to be, Liss?” Shahida asks.
Melissa stops, leans against the third-floor lobby wall. “What?” she says.
“It’s not a new build. These tiles are old.”
“Oh, um. A warehouse, I think? Or offices attached to a warehouse? I don’t know, actually. It’s pretty old. That’s all I know.”
“Very early twentieth century, at a guess,” Shahida says. She spent a little time in Boston, in America, and she remembers buildings there that looked like this, outside and in. Fascinating; but for the ocean between them, they could have been built by the same people.
“She’s tired,” Abby says, as they resume. “Job searching all week.”
“I did say,” Shahida says. “I posted in our channel.”
“Sorry,” Melissa says, not turning around this time. “I’ve just been trying to get through the week. Zach’s been in a mood with me, and the bitch on the other team is still the bitch on the other team. She didn’t get visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, or anything, though if anyone deserves it, it’s her. ‘This is what your life would be like if you weren’t passive aggressive towards women who are just trying to be nice to you.’ Bitch.”
“You have an office enemy?” Abby says.
“She does like to let me know when I’ve put on weight.”
“Okay. Now I have an enemy, too.”
“You couldn’t take her, Abby.”
“I bet I could. And about what she said—”
“Here we are,” Melissa interrupts, glancing quickly at Shahida and then looking away when she realises Shahida is examining her up and down just as much as Abby is. “Fifth floor.”
“You’re not overweight, Liss,” Shahida says.
Melissa taps her fob and holds open the door for them.
“She’s right, you know,” Abby says.
Melissa continues to hold open the door.
“You are eating, aren’t you?”
“Can we just keep going, please?” Melissa says. “You can sponsor me when we’re behind closed doors.”
“Right,” Abby says, meeting Shahida’s eyes. “Sorry.”
Shahida frowns meaningfully at her. They shouldn’t press her on this. Goodness knows it never went well when she tried it, back when they were teenagers. But then, Shahida was never her sponsor, was she? And Abby was. It was Abby who woke Melissa every morning, turned those sweet brown eyes on her, and meticulously brought her back from the brink, inch by inch. It was Abby who showed her the world deserved to have her in it.
Damn it. Every time she feels like she’s getting closer to Abby, something like this comes up and reminds her that Abby got to understand Melissa on a level deeper than Shahida’s ever accessed. And she does feel close to Abby! So she shouldn’t be jealous! Abby’s sweet, if a little defensive, and enthusiastic, if sometimes somewhat guarded, and sometimes Shahida feels like she could watch the way Abby speaks with her hands for hours.
But she is jealous. So she just has to deal with that.
She follows Melissa and Abby out of the stairwell and into a beautifully open atrium. The tiled motif continues only as far as the outer wall of the stairwell; beyond that the style is much more modern, with metal and glass guardrails around a central space that extends all the way down to the ground floor and all the way up to a glass-covered roof. It’s a little like Dorley Hall could be, if the central area had been properly cared for and not mostly sealed off save for some skylights that are so grubby they might as well not be there. Shahida wonders if Melissa’s ever noticed the similarity; most of the girls at Dorley don’t even know how the place is put together. Hard to imagine being so incurious about the place you’ve been living for years!
Melissa’s flat is right in the middle, with the front door and the misted windows either side of it facing out into the atrium. As Melissa opens up, Abby catches Shahida’s eye and winks at her, and Shahida, lost for any other response, winks back.
At least she seems to be doing okay.
Inside, Melissa shows them a high-ceilinged apartment, well-maintained but with characterless furniture and almost none of Melissa’s bubbly personality stamped on the place. That Liss has been living here for years seems impossible.
Abby clearly knows her way around: she goes straight for what turns out to be the kitchen and starts clattering about, finding cups and tea bags and putting on the kettle. Shahida excuses herself to the bathroom. Ostensibly to pee; in reality, all she wants is to be alone for a minute, so she doesn’t have to see yet more evidence that Abby knows Melissa, knows the woman she’s been for years, with a depth Shahida can’t hope to match.
She has to concentrate. They’re here for a reason. All she has to do for now is play her part. Abby’ll make the tea and sell Liss on going out for a walk together, all three of them, maybe going shopping, and then, at some point, they’ll find the time to talk about the thing.
The thing that really needs talking about.
* * *
She loads up the thermoses, the covered plates, the packet of bourbons and the plain mugs, and gives the ancient tea trolley the usual shove to get it moving. Frankie had to laugh when she found the old thing in one of the storage rooms. It still has the busted caster on one side so it still veers to the left unless you compensate by pushing it with your left hip as well as your hands. Frankie doesn’t know exactly how old it is, but she’s pretty sure it predates both Val and Bea’s introduction to the hall.
One time in the early nineties — probably? or late eighties? Christ, she’s getting old — a girl she was having serve herself and one of her more disagreeable colleagues ‘accidentally’ drove the trolley right into Frankie’s leg, and the tremblingly defiant look on the poor thing’s face survived Tilly’s temper tantrum but faded as soon as Frankie stopped being able to keep herself from laughing. She and the girl — still calling herself Jim or John or something else horribly unsuitable — had practically chased Tilly from the room with their disrespect, and the levity lasted a good thirty seconds before the girl asked her, with all sincerity but with no actual hope, to let her go.
“Can’t, love,” Frankie said to her, and she remembers her heart breaking all over again, as it did every time she faced up to the reality of what she was doing. “It’d be my head.”
And the girl, bless her, had said something like, well, we can still have a nice cup of tea, can’t we? Frankie had laughed again, and they’d had tea together, with biscuits. A rare treat.
The girl was gone within six months. Her body could be anywhere by now; not all the bastard toffs buried them on their grounds. Drop someone off in the middle of the North Sea and no-one’s ever going to find their remains. Frankie likes to think it was quick, anyway. And at least the toff in question followed her into the dark. The old bastard had the misfortune to be related to Elle Lambert.
A sharp jolt and the clatter of crockery brings Frankie back; she’s run the trolley into a wall. Stupid old woman.
She wipes her eyes with her sleeves, rights the trolley, and continues on down the corridor. There’s a commotion going on behind her in the dining hall but, crucially, it’s behind her, and probably not something she’ll be welcome in, anyway. Most people here look at her like they just scraped her off the sole of their shoe, and she tries not to indulge that, because it really does make it difficult to get up in the morning.
Val said she should stop dwelling on it all. Least of all on her. Her hatred, Val said, is more usefully directed at the men and women who funded Dorothy, who were her customers.
“They were the architects of the machine, Frances,” Val said. “You were just the grease between its wheels.”
There’s no coming back from who she became. But perhaps, in her survival, she can contribute to the ends of everyone who benefited from her grisly work.
It’s a way to keep going. And in the mean time, there’s tea that needs delivering.
The shitty old trolley is even more unreliable on the gravel out back. It’d be impossible to manoeuvre through the dirt, but thankfully, in deference to the increased foot traffic between the hall and ‘Peckinville Village’, the soldiers put down boards and a mud-covered tarp. As long as Frankie keeps the trolley clear of the edges, where dirt mounds cover the metal pegs that hold it all in place, she has a relatively easy journey.
Jan, Elle’s girl, helps her get the trolley up the ramp and into the infirmary. She’s got her majestic hair tied back today, and she’s wearing fatigues the way the women soldiers here do, but yesterday she was wearing exercise clothes and testily explained to Frankie that she just didn’t want to go inside the hall to do laundry, so presumably the same thing applies today. Frankie leaves her a thermos and one of the sandwich plates, and wheels on through to the tiny ‘ward’, where Doctor Rahman and the Dorley nurse, Rabia Qureshi, are fussing over Trev.
She parks the trolley in the middle and waves to Ollie, who is sat up on his bed, wrists still thoroughly wrapped and leg still chained to the metal, reading something on a tablet. He nods to her, as usual, and as usual Frankie tries not to laugh: Ollie, though he’s still quite big in all directions, is visibly a lot less masculine than he used to be — she’s seen the intake photos — and the brusque gesture is starting to look out of place on him.
Trev, from behind the doctor and the nurse, says, “Hi, Frankie.”
“Alright, Trev,” she says, half-sitting on one of the institutional chairs. “Still got pretty girls pawing at you, then?”
“Yeah,” he says, deadpan, leaning around Rabia to address her. “I’m in heaven.”
“How’s the fatal neck wound?”
He stretches his head to the side to show her: it’s a raw red line that cuts diagonally from just under his ear to his collarbone, varying in intensity. But it’s not bleeding any more, which is a plus.
“The doctor says I’m going to live,” Trev says. “Might be close, though.”
“He’ll live, yes,” Doctor Rahman says, turning to address Frankie, “but unfortunately he will continue to suffer crippling bouts of sarcasm.”
“Want a cuppa, doc?” Frankie says. She’s playing up her accent a bit, but she always feels nervous around educated people. “Nurse?” she adds, as Rabia subjects her to a glare.
“No,” Rabia says sharply. She adds, a moment later, a belated, “Thank you,” and then says to the doctor, “I’m going inside. Call me if you need anything, yeah?”
Doctor Rahman nods, and the three of them watch Rabia leave in silence. “Sorry about that,” the doctor says.
Frankie waves her off. “Wasn’t asking her to be nice to me. Just if she wanted a cup of tea. So!” She shoves positivity into her voice. “How about it?”
Frankie serves all of them, pouring tea and milk into the boringly plain mugs she brought from the kitchen — Ollie’s still, somehow, in the dark about certain aspects of the operation here, so the mug Frankie saw that said, Transvestigate This! (with an illustration of a red-nailed hand giving the finger to the reader) had to remain on the draining rack — and passing out sandwiches. Val’s already made fun of her for doing ‘maid work’ every day this week, but the simple domesticity of it is satisfying, it keeps her busy, and gives her the opportunity to talk to Trev, who otherwise has been keeping himself mostly to himself. The surgeon, Mrs Prentice, dropped by to see him and told him he ought to give it at least three months until he gets his tits taken out, and that he probably should stay on the estradiol until then and, well, it was a blow. Unlike Val, he hasn’t really made any friends here, apart from Tabitha.
Frankie, however, has made a friend. The boy, Ollie, he likes it when she comes round. He doesn’t show it all that much — he’s still got the tediously masculine reticence to let his emotions out — but he said she reminds him of someone he used to know. She told him that might be the first time anyone’s ever said that to her and meant it as a good thing.
He reminds her of someone, too. She told him that on her second day here. Naturally, he asked about him.
“Oh, he’s dead,” she had to say. “Died when he was, what, twenty-four?”
Ollie, visibly startled, asked what happened to him, and she told him the story as she heard it: tough young lad, thought with his fists rather than his head, did odd jobs for whoever could pay, drank most of the money he made; one day he pushed someone too far, and they pushed back.
“They found him in the canal,” she said. “No real external wounds or nothing. Sometimes you take a bad hit and you just don’t get up.”
He was quiet for most of the rest of their time together that day.
She doesn’t get to sit with him today, though, because as she’s biting into her sandwich, Monica, Dina’s sponsor, crashes through the door.
“Shit—” she says, panting and holding her belly. She’s a fit girl, so that puts Frankie’s estimate of how long she’s been running around at easily over ten minutes. “Fuck! Shit.” She points with an unsteady hand. “You! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
Frankie says, “Me?”
“Yeah. The fuck you doing in here?”
“Bringing lunch for the lads.”
Shoulders still heaving, but with her breath returning to her, Monica says, “Get your coat. You’re coming with me.”
“What for?”
Monica looks briefly at Ollie and then back to her. “Can’t say. Not here. Outside. Now, Barton!”
Probably a good idea to go with her; Frankie is here on sufferance, after all. So she packs up her sandwiches, raises an eyebrow at Trev, who nods — he’ll take the trolley back when he goes inside — and snatches a half-empty thermos. All of it goes inside the pockets of the voluminous winter coat she’s been borrowing, and she follows Monica out. They don’t go straight back to the hall via the conservatory, instead taking the route around the side.
Frankie takes care to look straight ahead.
“What’s up?” she asks.
“Declan,” Monica says. “Only she’s calling herself Diana, now, and she—”
“Hah! Like the Avenger. Good choice.”
“Like the— What?”
“Diana Rigg,” Frankie explains.
“Somehow,” Monica says, “I don’t think that’s who she had in mind when she picked it. Anyway, she’s reappeared, and I’m going to meet her, but I’m pretty fucking sure she doesn’t trust me, so I went and asked Valérie who out of the three of you connected best with her, back at Stenordale.”
“And she said me?”
“Yeah.”
Frankie considers it. “She’s probably right.”
“That’s why I need you. United front. Two faces she knows. Makes her less likely to bolt.”
“Makes sense.”
They’re going for the car park. Not unexpected, really, and better than walking through campus, which is not something Frankie wants to try, even with company, lest some arsehole from Silver River’s hanging around. Granted, Val said she asked Beatrice if there’s been any chatter about Frankie, vis a vis Dorothy and her Silver River frenemies wanting her dead, and Beatrice apparently said no, but Frankie’s not going to consider herself safe until she lives to ninety-nine without any more major stab wounds. A car journey’s less of a concern, though. They’d have to be really dedicated to get into a car chase, and she’s under no illusions as to the magnitude of her worth to anyone.
“So,” Frankie says. “Diana. Where’s she been hiding?”
“You’re not surprised about her at all, are you?” Monica says, unlocking a nondescript hatchback and opening the driver side door.
Frankie climbs into the passenger seat and buckles up. “Not really. Never thought Dotty had her.”
“I mean, about her. About Diana being Diana. Staying a woman.”
“Oh.” Frankie shrugs. “Just makes sense. Basic safety, isn’t it? You haven’t seen her, so you don’t know, but she’s really going to have trouble passing as a man. As a— What do you call it? As a cis man, anyway. Picture Trev, but with bigger tits and better at it.”
Monica pulls the car out. “Better at it?”
“Well, yeah. Trev had me’n Val looking after him, and we were always planning to get out, so teaching him the feminine arts wasn’t exactly high on our list. Especially since he was quite upset about it all. Diana, well, she had Jake, and not to be indelicate but he was very clear about what he wanted her to be. And about what he wanted her to let him do to her. So she learned. Quick.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah. I was there for some of it. The aftermath, anyway. She spent a while nonverbal. Dealing with it all. Hey, mind if I finish my lunch?”
Monica twitches. “In the car? Sure. Whatever. Go ahead.”
“S’not the only reason I’m not surprised, though,” Frankie says, opening the glove box so she has somewhere to put the plastic cup off the top of the thermos, and pouring out a serving. “Want me to save you some tea? It’s hot.”
“No.”
She unwraps her half-finished ham and mustard sandwich and takes a large bite. “Seen it before,” she says as she chews. “Back in the day. It happened with a lot of them. Put someone through enough trauma and the old personality kind of… breaks down. The new self is tailored to survival. To hear Val tell it, everything you used to believe, all your old habits, even the way you thought about yourself, it all becomes alien. Like remembering stuff that happened to someone else.”
“It was that bad for Valérie? As bad as it sounds like it was for Diana?”
“Worse, maybe. Way back when, they had each other, you know? Almost none of them were going through it alone. It’s how Val and Beatrice got so close. It’s probably how Beatrice got the idea to do whole intakes at once, all of them together. Diana… It was just her.” It’s not hard to remember Diana as she was most of the time: dead-eyed and alone. What’s hard is remembering her any other way. “It was always just her.”
“Valérie said you helped her.”
Frankie shrugs. “Could’ve done a lot more. I knew what she did, is the thing, and I know what you all think of me, but what she did is horrific and I know it. It’s what kept Val away. But that’s the point.” She takes another bite. Chases it with a mouthful of tea. Monica gives her a disgusted look, but it’s easier to think about this stuff when it’s not all she’s concentrating on. “By the end, there wasn’t any Declan left. It’s about becoming a shape that fits. It’s brutal, but there it is.”
Monica nods. Doesn’t say anything for a while. Just drives. Frankie’s more than happy to polish off the rest of her lunch in silence as Monica takes them east out of Almsworth. Familiar suburbs give way to long stretches of open countryside, and Frankie looks away, because they summon images of Val’s unsettling breakdown, the first time she saw the world outside Stenordale Manor.
“Actually,” she says eventually, “I never asked: why’d she get in touch with you? I’d’ve thought she’d be in the wind. I know I would’ve been.”
“She needs hormones.”
“Ah,” Frankie says, nodding. “Biology’s a bitch, innit?”
* * *
She’s being a fucking child. She knows what Steph would say if she could hear what she was thinking. She’d cradle her in her arms and whisper to her that, yes, she is good enough for her and yes, she is worth the effort. She’d tell her she loves her, and reassure her that everything’s going to be okay.
And that’s why Bethany doesn’t go looking for her. Because, sooner or later, she has to work this shit out for her fucking self.
She’s out of bed now, and she’s moved all the crap off her floor — mostly hoodies and joggers and loose tees; clothing in which to be thoroughly morose — and shoved the chair out of the way, all so she can theatrically throw open the doors on her wardrobe and examine herself in the full-length mirror.
It doesn’t work: a bunch of clothes fall out of the wardrobe and scatter themselves at her feet, ruining her moment. At this minor setback she resists the urge simply to drop back into bed and scream into a pillow, and instead collects it all up, folds the clean things and makes a pile of dirties, and puts everything away where it should be.
Back to the mirror.
In just over a week it’ll be three months since the estradiol injections started. In the beginning, she counted each one, dreading the changes they would bring without exactly being able to articulate why. Aaron feared womanhood, or despised it, or didn’t understand it, or didn’t understand what was so different about it; all of those things. He had a boy’s understanding of half of the human race: stunted, malformed, ignorant and deliberately useless.
Bethany spent a while trying to convince herself to be excited about what’s coming. Another ignorant position, she thinks, as she looks at herself and squeezes the nascent, flowering bud of a breast. There might be some of them — Steph, definitely; Will, probably — who look upon their changing bodies with excitement and anticipation, but Bethany’s body is just her body and nothing more, a tool, a vessel, a—
“Or maybe,” she says, butting her forehead softly into the mirror, “you’ve been fucking depressed, idiot.”
That is the simpler explanation. Anyone’s body becomes nothing but a tool when all they need it to do is keep breathing.
Where’s the girl who put on sexy clothes and danced in front of Will just because it would be funny? She had a bit of a panic attack after, okay, but Bethany’s been slipping in and out of panic attacks all week and she has nothing to show for it; no sexy outfits, no traumatised Williams, and Steph’s eyes, when they’ve alighted on her, have been alight with love and concern, not love and—
It’s like running into a brick wall. Or butting her head against the stupid fucking mirror. To even think the word is to lob a grenade into her thought process, to construct a wall in the path of her train of thought.
Lust.
It hasn’t just been Ollie. He just lit the fuse. Really, she’s been constructing this fear ever since their first kiss. Since Steph first touched her. It’s been building, quietly consuming her thoughts, a tumour at the back of her mind.
And then Ollie.
And she couldn’t ignore it any more.
Boys chasing her through the endless corridors.
Stephanie’s fingers in her hair—
People don’t touch her because they want her. They touch her because they want to humiliate her.
Not Steph. Not Steph. Even from the start, when Bethany was Aaron, when she was a ball of nerves and defensive humour, Steph saw in her something worth touching for her own sake. Not because she was getting anything out it.
In the mirror, the other her, perhaps the real her, she’s crying, she’s red-faced and messy haired and she’s a total disaster and Bethany has the most absurd impulse, one which she follows instantly and without question, because the alternative is to sink back into her bed and be, once again, the person the boys used to hunt.
“I’m sorry,” she says to herself. “I’m so sorry. You’re not him. Not any more. And these?” A hand around her developing breast. “You know what they are. They’re fucking magnificent.”
Christ. That’s a weight off. That’s a weight thrown off, discarded. Useless.
Once she might have berated herself for being stupid enough to be so affected by someone else’s fate, to have been thrown so far back into her own past, to feel upon her skin the hands of her first and worst torturers, just because an idiot like Ollie tried to kill himself. But that’s the flip side of masculine pride, no different from Ollie’s obsession with strength. A true man stands alone; his strength/intellect is all he needs.
So fucking stupid. A whole gender archetype built on a delusion.
She runs a hand through her hair, pulling it up out of her face, trying not to grimace at how greasy it feels, and she takes inventory again, noting every way she differs from Aaron, every way she’s left him behind. And she does love this body, this brand-new and still mostly unknown body, because it’s hers, and it’s what she chooses.
Bethany smiles, wet and disgusting and not free, not yet, but not him, and that’s close enough.
* * *
“Oh my goodness! I love this!”
“Really? I never took you for a goth, Shy.”
“You never saw me in America. You can dress weirder there and no-one cares. They might shoot you, but they don’t care.”
“You can dress weird here!”
“Sure, yes, here, but when’s the last time you saw a scene kid running around Almsworth, Abs?”
“They don’t have scene kids any more.”
“No?”
“No, Shy, Jesus, that was, like, 2010.”
“Due for a comeback, then. Liss, what do you think of this?”
Shahida’s voice jerks Melissa out of her contemplative state, and she refocuses to find Shahida holding up against her body an ankle-length black tube dress with a wide neckline and lace detailing everywhere. For a moment, Shahida isn’t almost twenty-six; she’s fifteen again, grinning wildly at her, and Melissa would follow her in the memory but she really shouldn’t, so she settles instead for denying her adult self the opportunity to ask but when would you wear it? and instead says, “Buy it.”
Abby boggles at her, and Shahida giggles. “I knew you’d like it,” she says.
“When will you wear it?” Abby asks.
“Dinner at the hall. I’ll make it an occasion. Valérie’s been showing everyone up this week, and—”
“She has?” Melissa says.
“She has! Paige has competition for once. Anyway, I think I could beat her. With this.” Shahida billows out the skirt against her legs.
“You could beat her in audacity, I suppose,” Abby says.
Shahida sticks her tongue out at her.
It’s strange watching them interact this way. When Melissa left, running both back towards her old job and away from two very confusing kisses, they barely knew each other, had spent just hours in each other’s company. Now they seem as close as any two women she could pick from Dorley’s roster, and closer than many. There’s a pull to their closeness; Melissa wants to orbit silently around them, watching them, listening.
She’s no stranger to jealousy. Every hour she spent with Shahida when they were growing up, she was jealous of her. Not that she understood why at the time; not that she could reliably put a name to the feeling. And at the hall, she was jealous of the closeness of others in her intake, drawing strength only from the bond she developed with Abby.
A bond she pushed too far, and then, ultimately, ran from.
Melissa grounds herself. Counts doors — seven just in this section, in the rabbit warren of shops and stalls on this floor of Afflecks — and tables and people. In her brief month or so back at Dorley, with Shahida and Steph and the others, she realised just how little control she’d gained over her emotions, how much leaving for Manchester had been an abdication of responsibility toward her personal development. Up here she’d worked and she’d dated and she’d lived, in her way, but her one close connection had been made against her will, and it was with her boss, anyway; hardly something she can take with her into the outside world. She locked herself away, from Abby, from the hall, from everyone, and effectively paused her life.
And now she knows for sure that she has almost the same dire emotional regulation that she had when Abby took her up the hill to Almsworth Cathedral, and saved her life.
What was the realisation she came to back then? In the basement and after? Never to trust her first reaction to something.
So she ought not be jealous of Abby and Shahida. She should instead be—
Someone raps her lightly on the forehead.
“Hey, Liss,” Shahida says, smiling as Melissa meets her eyes. “You’re doing the thing again.”
Melissa flushes with guilt. “I’m not!”
“You so are,” Abby says. “You’re zoning out.”
“I— You—” Melissa holds up a finger, hoping to buy for herself a reprieve, so she can reboot her stupid fucking brain. “I’m just a bit overwhelmed,” she admits.
Shahida hugs her. Grabs onto her and holds her tight, and Melissa has just enough time to register the thing bouncing off her thigh as being a shopping bag, meaning Shy probably did buy the goth dress in the end, and then Shahida’s releasing her and Abby’s taking over.
“Sorry,” she says as Abby steps away.
Abby pokes her. “We’re not asking for an apology. We’re asking if you’re okay.”
“I wasn’t expecting this. You two. Up here. And it’s wonderful, I mean, it’s amazing, but I’ve been on my own all week and I think I’m still spinning up, you know?” Melissa has more deflections — far more — but they’re interrupted by her stomach, which growls loudly enough that a few other patrons look their way.
“You’re really not eating, are you?” Abby says.
“How technical do you want my answer to get?”
“You’re not eating. I saw those awful shakes in your fridge, Liss.”
“We’re going upstairs,” Shahida decides, “and we’re putting some food in you. They’re advertising ‘everything-free muffins’ at the café here. I want to know what their definition of ‘everything’ is.”
“And I want a muffin,” Abby says.
Shahida brings her flattened palms together. “See? Our goals align.”
* * *
Bethany looks thin. She hasn’t been eating much lately, pushing away her plates half-finished and skipping most breakfasts, but it’s still a shock to see her this way.
It’s also a shock when the girl who’s been withdrawn and quiet this whole week lets Steph into her room and then without a word shucks off her robe and walks towards her, unclothed and unashamed. Bethany’s been bundling up lately, keeping herself covered, but here she is, naked but for her underwear and a pair of socks, embracing Steph and reaching up for a kiss.
Impossible not to oblige. Steph doesn’t mention that Bethany’s breath sort of smells.
“Sorry about this week,” Bethany says, returning to her feet. “Huge mess up here—” she taps a finger on her temple, “—and I did not deal well with it. I got into a rut. Kind of a cocoon? And I know you asked me about it and I kinda deflected but you didn’t push, and I’m grateful, because I think if you’d pushed it wouldn’t have gone well for me, I would have just started ugly crying all over the place and that would have made me even worse. Which makes no sense, I know, unless you’ve been in my head the last few days. Huge mess. Like I said. And— You’re smiling at me. Why are you smiling at me?”
Steph sweeps her up in a hug. “Because you’re talking again!”
“Well, yeah, I always— Oh. Yeah. I see what you mean.”
“Motormouth,” Steph says, and kisses her again.
“Put me down?”
Steph consents, adding another kiss as she does so. “It’s sort of a shame,” she says, going over and sitting on the edge of Bethany’s bed, which also smells a bit. “I had a whole plan to make you feel better. It was really good. Multiple parts.”
“Tell me!” Bethany says, bouncing.
“We were going to go see Maria, and—”
“Steph!” Bethany rushes over and grasps both of Steph’s hands. “That’s a great plan! We should do it anyway. I’ve been worried about her since that Frankie woman showed up but I haven’t wanted to pester her so I haven’t actually asked how she is, and— Shit, Steph! Do you think she thinks I’ve forgotten about her?”
“No.”
“Good. Good. Because I think that would really break me, you know? I’d backslide all the way. I’d be worse than when I got here. I’d be— Actually, no, I don’t think I’m going to go there.”
“Solid plan.”
“Shit. I need to shower. I haven’t showered in four, five days? I think I smell. Do I smell, Steph?”
“Uh—”
“Sniff me, Steph. Sniff me!”
Extracting both her hands from Bethany’s grip, Steph backs up farther onto the bed. “I don’t need to.”
“Oh, God. Is it that bad? I really need to shower. Can you come with me?”
“Sure. I could do with a shower.”
“Cool. Good. Excellent. I want to borrow some clothes, too. I want to look nice for her, I want to make an effort and— What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You have your phone out.”
“Nothing!”
“Steeeeeeeph!”
“Fine. I’m leaving a message for whoever’s on duty in the security room. I’m asking them to come take your sheets away to wash them, and to turn up the air con in your room.”
“It’s really that bad?”
“I’m suggesting they wear a clothes peg on their nose.”
“God. God. I can’t believe I got so gross. Come on! The quicker we shower the quicker we can—”
“Hey, Bethany, come back. Please? Quickly?”
“What? Why?”
“You, uh, might want to put a robe on before you leave the room.”
“Oh. Right.”
* * *
Diana’s pen crawls slowly across the lined paper, and once again she looks around. It’s not that she never learned to write quickly, it’s that she never cultivated the skill of doing so legibly — or he didn’t — and so now when she’s writing for keeps and not just making a show of it in class, she writes carefully, with large, rounded letters and long stems.
She keeps perfectly to the lines.
She also crosses an awful lot of it out.
19.
Who They See
What I Am
In Public
She works on it for a while, but she can’t make anything that sounds right. The temptation is to screw up the paper completely, the way she does in the little room atop the B&B, filling the wicker wastebasket and dumping the worst ones under the bed. But there’s something there that’s worth saving, the core of a good idea, and she’s not at home, anyway. Cherston-on-Sea is a long way behind her, and here in the café in John Lewis, even in the most remote corner she can find, she is watched, and there is nowhere she can throw her discarded work that someone will not find it.
There’s no clear line as to when her attempts at diary entries became poems. One day, earlier this week, she found herself ending lines early, building in rhythm and repetition, choosing words for their sound and not just their meaning. Immediately she found herself inadequate, and that led her to Chiamaka’s thesaurus and a world of delightful new sounds. After a while, she started numbering them, giving them titles, making them special. And now, when she writes about her preoccupations, she finds herself pulling them apart and putting them back together in an order she finds pleasing.
Her preoccupation right now is the little girl she met briefly in the entrance to John Lewis. She called Diana ‘very tall and very pretty’, and Diana was pleased enough that she forgot herself, and squatted down to thank the little girl, remembering too late about her voice. The speed with which the girl’s mother led her away will stay with Diana for a while, but so will the expression of awe on the girl’s face as she looked back at the tall, pretty woman.
Was she ever that innocent? She must have been. There has to have been a time that she was, before Declan really existed, before she was taught to be first a boy, then a man, then a monster.
She screws up the paper. Tears it out of the pad and balls it and shoves it in her cheap shoulder bag. Because she’s making excuses for herself again, and she’s not about to start writing them down and exonerating herself. She was made a monster? She participated in that process. The only constant was her. And it wasn’t as if she was just like the other men, as if she was helplessly carried along in a tide of masculine inculturation; other men don’t do what she did.
But she was too stupid, too wilfully ignorant, to understand. Even when it was all taken from her, when she was imprisoned, it wasn’t enough. Only at Stenordale, faced with Valérie’s contempt and Dorothy’s taunting and his appetites did she finally understand.
Other men would not have needed such profound violence to change themselves.
No excuses.
Pen returns quickly to paper, and she has time to write 20. No Excuses before the sound of new customers distracts her. It’s a sound she’s aligned to after her week working for Chiamaka, and she’s been looking up from her pad every time the café door’s creaked open. Seen a procession of ordinary, forgettable people.
This time, though, it’s really her. Monica. The woman whose faith she abused. The woman she still doesn’t really trust.
And—
What?
What’s the old woman from Stenordale doing here?
* * *
“Jesus,” Tabitha pants, taking one last swing at her punching bag before collapsing into the padded wall and letting herself slide down onto the mat. “Tell me you’re knackered, too.”
It takes him a moment to find the breath to answer, and when he speaks, he still has to draw breath for every word. “I—am—way—more—knackered—than—you!”
“Good. Then I don’t have to kill you.”
He didn’t know a body could need so much air, but he’s been fucking gasping for it. He asked her, midway through today’s session, if the air conditioning system is delivering enough oxygen, and she somehow managed to give him a filthy look without breaking the swing she had in progress.
Hands in the small of his back. Stretch. But he doesn’t get up. Not yet. The mat is his friend. The mat is soft and doesn’t require of him anything that currently seems impossible, like the use of his legs.
“So what’s going on with Declan?” he asks, his breath coming back to him. Tabitha promised an explanation, but only after they got in their daily exercise together. She’s come to rely on it, she said; she needs the endorphins, and it’s more interesting than watching boys sit around in a concrete box.
“She phoned Monica,” Tabitha says, levering herself up off the mat. “Turns out she did escape, like Frankie thought she had. Which means Grandmother’s even more in the wind than we thought, but that’s a problem for another day.”
“‘She’,” he quotes, carefully and without emotion. He’s not surprised Dorothy Marsden’s run off without a trace; from what Tab’s told him over the last few days, the old woman has more lives than a cat. But Declan…? “You mean, after everything that happened up there…?”
Tabitha starts her warm-down, which reminds him he really ought to do his, too, no matter how much he doesn’t want to get back up.
“Some of the girls are calling it a personality break,” Tabitha says, contorting and grunting with effort mid-sentence. “I don’t buy it. I’ve never bought it. In all my time here, I’ve nev-er—” she pulls the word apart, emphasises it, like Declan used to, “—seen someone come out the other side as someone else, someone without continuity. Then again, some of the others are calling it simple survival.”
“What do you think?”
She fixes him with one of her analytical glares. “I’m reserving judgement.”
He nods and returns to stretching his triceps. “All in all,” he says, “I think I’m happy I didn’t wash out.”
“Me too. Then we wouldn’t be able to have this nice conversation.”
It’s painful to get back down on the mat, but he has to, because he has butterfly stretches to do. He doesn’t groan the way he wants to, because Tabitha giggles at him when he makes a big deal of how much dancing around a punching bag makes him ache, and because he’s preoccupied with thoughts of Declan. He knows something of what happened to him up at that manor — not enough to provide anyone else with a play-by-play but more than enough to give him nightmares — and he can’t imagine the Declan he knew surviving it.
“So he phoned Monica,” he says, and then winces; he knows what’s coming.
“She phoned Monica,” Tabitha corrects him, and slaps him lightly with her glove. She’s been very clear on the topic of pronouns, and brushed aside his half-hearted and half-remembered objections by asking him if he thought whether he/him would be appropriate for her. He’d violently rejected the idea.
“She phoned Monica,” he says.
“…And told her she’s having hot flushes,” Tabitha continues. “So she needs—”
“Injections. Got it.” Another stretch. He pushes it a little far, stresses his hamstrings a bit too much, but better that than think about Declan, and what happened to him in that place. Some things are too awful even for awful people. “Wait,” he says, “she’s going by she, right? That means she’s living as a woman.”
“Yes,” Tabitha says warily.
“What’s her name?”
“Leigh—”
“What’s her name, Tab?”
“Diana.”
He unfolds from his pose. Lies back on the mat. Face up. “Shit,” he says.
Tabitha’s down with him a moment later, lying next to him, taking one of his hands and clasping it in hers, bringing it slowly over her belly and holding it there. “Don’t compare yourself to her.”
“Steph, Bethany, sure. Raph making jokes about being a sexy librarian? Okay. But now he— she— Diana is ahead of me? Jesus Christ. I’m supposed to be—”
“Leigh,” Tabitha interrupts. “It’s not a race.”
Leigh. The name represents a truce of a sort. He finds the connotations of all forms of his given name unpleasant. Tabitha wants him to pick a new name; not, she made sure he understood, because he’s on any kind of timetable, but because while she respects his distaste for all forms of William, she can’t go calling him ‘hey, you’. He doesn’t want to, though. Not yet. Not while he’s still like this.
So they pulled his name apart, like Declan— like Diana might. Will is no good, obviously. Liam is another man’s name, and though he doesn’t think he’s ever been called it in his life, he recoils from it just the same. And just the initial, W, is out of the question, because it’s cumbersome and, he feels, a bit silly. Also, there’s the matter of the ex-president of the United States, Tabitha had said. He barely remembers him, he replied. He pronounces it ‘nuke-u-ler’, she said.
Horrified, he swore off it entirely. Not even as a backup.
They kept pulling William apart. Will-i-am. Will-li-yam. And he spotted it, and suggested Lee, and she pointed out that Leigh can be a name for a girl or a boy, and that was that.
It’s good enough for now.
“Maybe you should castrate me tomorrow,” he says, and Tabitha squeezes his hand. “Then I’d be ahead at something.” He shakes his head and mutters, mostly to himself, “Please, God, castrate me.”
“We don’t use that word, Leigh. Except sometimes on mugs.”
He snorts. He saw his first example of the infamous Dorley mugs a couple of days ago, when Tabitha wordlessly handed him his pre-workout drink in a mug that said, You can’t have HOT GIRL SUMMER without UNSUSPECTING BOY WINTER. Bad taste, he told her, and she giggled at him while swigging from hers, which read, When Aunt Bea saw the breadth of her domain, she wept, for there were no more boys to kidnap.
She advised him that the sooner he got used to the institutional sense of humour, the easier a ride he’d have going forward.
“Look,” she says, “when I said it’s not a race, I meant it. No-one’s sitting in the security room comparing you against the others, or the others against you. And especially no-one is ever going to compare you to Diana. There’s a reason we take the approach to rehabilitation we do; who knows how stable she’s going to be long-term after what she’s been through?”
“Yeah,” he says, still unable to control his imagination. “God, when I think about it—”
“Don’t,” Tabitha says. “I’m trying not to.”
“Having any luck with that?”
“I find keeping busy helps.”
“Does it, though?”
She shrugs, letting go of his hand and propping herself up on her elbow. “Not really. Oh, and don’t repeat what we just talked about. I think if I even so much as questioned Diana’s continued sanity in front of Monica she might physically attack me. Do you want to keep sulking, by the way? Because I need a shower and so do you.”
They collect up their stuff, still sore and still stretching every so often, and Leigh watches Tabitha out of the corner of his eye. She’d been neglecting herself before they started doing this together, and now every contented huff of exhaustion she makes brings him a little spark of pleasure. He wants her to be happy. He wants her to be healthy. And he wants her to enjoy spending time with him. He’s aware there’s an element of manipulation here, making Tabitha such an essential part of his life and his future, but it’s ceased to matter as much as it once did.
She’s in his corner. She wants to be like the big sister he never had, and all he has to do is let her.
It feels good not to fight it any more.
* * *
She’s almost unrecognisable, and considering Frankie last saw her less than two weeks ago, that says something in itself. But what’s different about her isn’t really anything physical, though the bruises have faded and the cuts have healed. And it’s not that she’s dressed and made up reasonably competently, because that’s a given: she’s been living out in the world for about a week, and she’s clearly found someone to help her.
Either that, or she stole that fetching midi dress and those boots and that camel coat.
No, the difference is in the way she carries herself. She stands up as they approach, clearly surprised by Frankie’s presence and maybe a bit intimidated by Monica’s, but she’s ready for them, and for a moment, she’s as confident and proud a woman as any Frankie’s met at Dorley Hall.
Then the girl looks away, looks down at the table, and there’s the wound.
She closes a lined writing pad and fiddles with her pen as Monica quietly greets her and starts shucking off her bag and coat, hanging them on the back of one of the chairs on the other side of the table from Diana. Frankie dumps her coat, too, taking the same side as Monica so as to give Diana space, but she doesn’t sit down.
“Drinks?” she says with a jolly tone. “Sandwiches?” She quickly looks over at the menu board. “Honey crumpets?”
“Tea,” Monica says, without looking at her. She’s sitting down, and has yet to take her eyes off Diana.
“I’d like another tea,” Diana says in a soft voice. Frankie doesn’t wince for her, but she wants to: navigating the world looking the way she does but sounding the way she does has got to have been a challenge. At least that’s something the girls can help with, if she’ll let them. “And, um, I’d like a honey crumpet, too.”
“Gotcha, love,” Frankie says. A smile bites at her lips, and she turns away before her expression betrays her. This isn’t the brash Declan she’s read about in the files Dotty purloined, and nor is it the submissive and terrified Dina, who emerged at Stenordale because Declan wasn’t up to the task. This is someone else.
This is like being there when Val first actualised, or Beatrice. Christ, she feels privileged to see it.
And then, now, profoundly sick at herself, for feeling that way. Too much akin to old Dotty’s sick satisfaction when one of the more stubborn boys finally broke.
“Get it together, Frances,” she mutters to herself. The man ahead of her in the queue glances back at her; she ignores him. Prick. She ought to franchise the hall and set up a basement for bald, red-faced men in their fifties who look at her funny in posh department stores. She wouldn’t make women out of them; she’d just let off a spot of steam.
She gets a plate of honey crumpets for the table, in case Monica wants one, too, and declines the server’s offer to take it over for her. When she gets back with the tray, the tea and the crumpets, Monica and Diana are staring at each other in silence, so Frankie does her best to disrupt it by being extra noisy as she sets everything out.
“Thank you,” Diana says.
Up close, Frankie realises as she sits down, you can see the joins. The gaps where Diana’s new life doesn’t fit together properly. She had some laser while she was being worked on, Frankie’s pretty sure, but now she’s shaving again, and she hasn’t quite covered the dark hair on her upper lip as thoroughly as she’s hidden it everywhere else. And the dress should be far longer on her and the arms on her coat expose more of her wrists than she thinks Diana can possibly be comfortable with. The boots, probably the only thing she’s wearing that she bought for herself, are the cheap kind that’s basically a fake-leather tube sewn onto a pair of flats. It’s testament to the work Dotty’s people did that Diana’s appearance has held up as well as it has, considering the rush, her limited time on hormones, and Diana’s lack of expertise.
The girl’s in dire need of a few hours in Dorley’s closets, access to Dorley’s hair removal people, and — obviously — a voice coach.
So they need to persuade her to come back so they can give it all to her, don’t they?
“How’ve you been, Diana?” Frankie says, since the ice remains unbroken.
“I’ve been, um, working.” There’s that quiet voice again. Up close, when she can drop it almost to a whisper, it nearly works. Probably how she got by. That and those humongous tits.
“Listen, I’m sorry we didn’t grab you when we ran, but—”
“I didn’t even hear the gunfire,” she says. “You couldn’t have come for me. It was too far, and there was— there was him. I understand. And Valérie, she hates me.”
“She does not.”
Diana looks fiercely into Frankie’s eyes. “She’s right to.”
“Declan—” Monica says, and then stops herself, covers her mouth with her hands, but it’s too late, because the name’s like a slap, and Diana recoils. “Sorry,” Monica whispers.
“I was stupid,” Diana says. “And I did something awful. I was stupid on purpose. I celebrated my stupidity.” Her lip curls in contempt, but it shakes, too, and Diana obviously feels it, because she bites her upper lip awkwardly, tries to control it.
“You weren’t stupid, Diana.”
“Nah, she was,” Frankie says, “weren’t you? I knew guys like you were, back when I was young. See them around, still. Told Ollie he’s a bit like it, too, and he is. Sometimes it ends bad for them, or for someone around them. Mostly they’re fine. Stupid white men in this country can do pretty well. Even when they do awful things.”
Diana’s nodding, a small frown pinching her eyebrows, and Frankie’s impressed: Declan, by all accounts, would have been belligerent by now, and as for Dina, most things seemed to go in one of her ears and come right out the other.
“The others,” Diana says, “Valérie and Trevor, are they okay?”
“Yeah,” Frankie says.
“They’re staying with us,” Monica says. “At the hall. Above ground.”
Diana nods and puts down her tea. She tears one of the crumpets into quarters and chews in silence for a little while. Her eyes flicker from Frankie to Monica and back.
“You called me sweetheart,” she says suddenly to Frankie, and then she smiles, does a sweet little laugh — Christ, she’s going to be a heartbreaker when she gets her shit together — and adds, “Sorry. The connection makes sense in my head, I promise. But you called me sweetheart.”
“You did?” Monica asks.
Frankie shrugs. “I s’pose.”
“It was before that stupid dinner,” Diana says, still talking quietly but with an added intensity, as if she has to get the words out, as if this is more than just conversational for her. Makes sense; this is probably the first time she’s talked about any of this stuff. “Not the one with the Americans. That was awful.”
“Yeah,” Frankie says. “Hated them.”
“They were rude to Valérie.”
“They were.” Not hard to notice that Diana pronounces Val’s name basically perfectly, even if she has to slow down slightly to do so. Better at it than Frankie.
“And they were horrible about Trevor. Talking about him like they owned him.”
“That’s who these people are, love,” Frankie says. “That’s what the people with the money are always like.”
Diana whispers, “I hated how they looked at me, too,” and she looks down again to do so.
Frankie reaches over the table, takes Diana’s hand. “You’re allowed to hate them for that,” she says.
“No. Not important. Not compared to Trevor and Valérie.”
Monica’s about to say something, but Frankie nudges her into silence. Diana has more to say; she just needs time to find it.
“Under the table,” Diana says eventually, almost inaudibly. “He had his hand on me.”
“Jake?”
Diana shudders. “Yes. J— Jake.”
Frankie’s still got Diana’s hand held, so she squeezes it and she says, “What happened to him? The reports say he’s dead.”
The reply is viper-fast. “I killed him.”
“Attagirl.”
Letting go of Diana’s hand and leaning back, Frankie smiles at her, signalling as hard as she can that she doesn’t have to talk about the difficult things any more. She hopes Monica gets the message, and she seems to, because she redirects the conversation.
Unfortunately, she picks a direction for it that is uncomfortable for Frankie.
“You said Frankie here called you a sweetheart. And I’m… intrigued.”
“Oh,” Diana says, covering her mouth to laugh lightly, “yeah. She did my makeup. Took care of me. Before the other dinner. You know—” she turns back to Frankie, “—the one with the other couple. And I know you think you didn’t do much, but you gave me what you said you would: time without Dorothy and without J— without him. And I never thanked you.”
Frankie’s turn to look away. The girl’s so damn earnest. Makes her want to throw it all back in her face, claim she was only doing it to get herself a bit of peace and quiet, or something. But it would have been a lie, and everyone at the table would know it as a lie.
Or they probably would, anyway. Always a chance Diana’d believe her. And why would she risk hurting this sweet new girl’s feelings? Forget what she did, who she used to be; she’s obviously already reckoning with that, and if there’s more to come, harder truths to face, then she can do so when she’s ready, when she won’t be undone by it, returned to the state she was in at the manor. For now, what matters is Diana, not Frankie’s bullshit or any idea of redemption.
Redemption’s a pointless concept, anyway. You keep moving forward. You keep working. There’s no scale balancing out the good you do against the bad. Hurts that can heal, do; hurts that can’t, kill. All that’s left is to try not to hurt people again.
“You’re welcome, Diana,” she says. She doesn’t add on anything self-pitying, like how she could have done more. It’d be as useless as pressing Diana on her past right now.
Monica leans forward, both her arms out on the table. Frankie, to make sure she doesn’t feel the urge to interrupt what looks like a prepared speech, grabs one of the honey crumpets while it’s still warm and gets to work on it.
“Diana,” Monica says, “I want you to consider coming back to the hall with us. Not to stay, not to live there, not if you don’t want to.”
“Can’t go back down there,” Diana whispers, sounding suddenly reduced, more like Frankie remembers. She supports her head for a moment, as if she’s dizzy. “Can’t go back in a cage.”
“We wouldn’t. I told you that on the phone and I’m serious. And if you insist on leaving today, on going back wherever you came from, I’ll give you the bag—” she tilts her head at the rucksack she laid against the wall, “—and you can go. It’s got everything you need for three months. But Diana, you need more than just medication, you need help. And that’s what we’re here for. That’s everything we do. If you agree to come, we’ll get you a room on the first or second floor, with the other free girls, and you’ll be able to come and go as you wish.”
“I like where I am.”
“Then visit. Please. We— I want to help you.”
“Maybe tell her how you can help her,” Frankie suggests.
“Voice training,” Monica says. “I can teach you to speak like me. Or— Or someone else can, if you’re not comfortable around me.” Oh, that was difficult for her to say, wasn’t it? Frankie knew Monica’d gotten attached to Diana — or to the idea of her — since she washed out, but this is more intense than she thought. “We can help you with clothes and money and we can get you an identity. A real identity. Diana can be you. Forever. If that’s what you want.”
That got Diana’s attention. She’s stopped fiddling with the remains of her crumpet and she’s staring, rapt and intense, right at Monica. The rest of the café might as well not exist.
“I want that,” Diana says. “How does it work?”
“Can’t really talk about that here,” Monica says, and Frankie rolls her eyes. Operational security. They’ve been skirting it this whole time, really, and if the café weren’t mostly empty and their corner deserted apart from them, Frankie would have shut things down already. Monica would have, too, probably, assuming her head’s still in the game. They’re fucked if someone’s got one of those laser microphones, the ones Dotty couldn’t persuade Silver River to shell out for, but there’s little reason to worry about that. They’re two attractive young women and an old bat having crumpets in a John Lewis café; the only people inclined to spy on them who might also have access to that kind of equipment already know who they are.
“But you can do it?”
“They did it for me,” Monica says, and she’s watching Diana’s face carefully, checking to see if she understands the implications behind that statement. “And for Tabitha, Pippa, Maria… All of us. You’ll have a passport. I might even be able to persuade Aunt Bea—” and Diana jumps a little at the name, “—to put you on a stipend.”
“A stipend?”
“Money,” Frankie says. “Free money for keeping your mouth shut.”
“For rent,” Monica says. “And food, clothes; whatever. And the other thing, Diana, and this is really important…” She switches to a whisper, and Diana and Frankie both lean in to hear it. “You need to be debriefed. Dorothy Marsden is still out there somewhere, as are her American partners and their security company. We need to know everything you know, and you need to know how to protect yourself from them.”
Eyes wide, Diana asks, “You think Dorothy would come back for me?”
“Di,” Frankie says, “the thing you have to understand about Dotty is, she holds grudges. She’s inconstant in her affections and sometimes she’s not too picky about where the grudge is actually aimed, but she’s persistent. She could have retired when she lost the hall. Could have lived the rest of her days in peace and quiet, but the cantankerous old bitch couldn’t leave well alone, could she? Only plus side is she saved Val’s life,” she adds, mostly to herself. It’s not a pleasant thought. “She would’ve died in that place if Dorothy hadn’t shown up. Anyway. Point is, no, it wouldn’t be sensible to come after you. But she might. And her lot—” she nods sideways at Monica, “—have the resources to protect you. S’why I’m staying with them.”
Diana’s nodding. Frowning again. Thinking. “I’ll come,” she says after a while. “But just for a few days. Then I have to go home.”
“That’s enough, Diana,” Monica says. “That’s more than enough.”
* * *
Tabitha’s added his thumbprint to the locks that take him from their workout room down to the lower basement, and while it’s only one-way access and he definitely can’t roam the way Steph does — and the way Bethany seems to by proxy, though she hasn’t been taking much advantage of it recently — the relative freedom is still quite thrilling. Which he might have thought was sad, once, but he knows better now. Tab said she might have given him full two-way access, at least up to the exercise room, so he doesn’t need to call on her if he needs to get away from some of the more irritating people downstairs, but she knew Maria would veto it, so she didn’t ask.
And that’s fine. He’s someone who needs limits on his freedom. For the moment, at least.
She called him the name again, over and over, and it’s enough for him to think about it again. He repeats it under his breath as he unlocks every door between him and his bedroom, being careful to move his lips as little as possible so Raph, who is sitting at the lunch table with Martin and their sponsors, playing cards, and who is positioned to see him through the window as he walks by, doesn’t think he’s gone insane.
Leigh.
He still doesn’t think it’ll be the name he walks out of here with. Tab insists that she’ll get him over all his bullshit eventually, that there will come a day when he can look at himself in a mirror, dressed and made up, and call himself by an unambiguously feminine name without needing to cringe, needing to tear the mirror off its hinges, needing to hurt himself or, preferably, someone else, but—
He thumps his hand against the wall as he rounds the corner to the bedroom corridor. Doesn’t need to be thinking about that shit. And that’s not avoidant behaviour; or maybe it is, but Tabitha’s signed off on it. He’s not Steph and he’s not Bethany. He needs tangible, physical progress before he can actualise — Tab’s word — and there’s no use pretending otherwise.
She’s promised to get them a pair of matching mugs when he’s finally ready for it, and when he told her that would delay his actualisation by at least another month, she laughed and hugged him.
“Leigh,” he says to himself, briefly in the safety of his bedroom.
“Leigh,” he says, as he fetches a robe from a hook inside the wardrobe door and his shower kit from the bottom drawer.
“Leigh,” he says, his foot catching on the chains he stuffed back under the bed weeks ago and hasn’t felt the need to get out since.
“Fuck it,” he says, as he opens the door again and heads down the corridor to the bathroom. “Why not?”
There’s noise coming from the shower room — obviously there is; Leigh never gets to shower in peace — and he listens in for a moment, just to confirm who it is.
“No! I’m telling you, no gendery feelings in my life. And I watched a lot of those cartoons, you know, the ones with Bugs Bunny, where he dresses up like a girl and catfishes the shotgun guy? Those weren’t the only ones I watched, Steph, I know what it sounds like I said, but that’s not what I meant, so stop making that face at me. Stop it! You can’t retroactively diagnose me with girl. Did I fancy Bugs when he was all sexy? Yeah, obviously, but literally everyone did, right? A rabbit in a sundress with a big floppy hat on? Who doesn’t feel oddly drawn to that? But did I want to be him? Maybe kinda-sorta, but only to get out of the house.”
“I never fancied Girl Bugs.”
“You did! You did, Steph. Everyone did. Girl Bugs is universal. Anyway, what I’m saying is, I had ample exposure growing up to all the stuff that’s supposed to crack eggs, and nothing. Nada. Zip. Not until I came here. And then I didn’t crack, because I wasn’t an egg, but I was sort of thrown at the wall. And yes, I know, Pippa has egg theories about me, but you can tell her— Oh, hey. Come in, lurker.”
He must have strayed too close. Oh well; not like he has anything to fear from Steph and Bethany, aside, perhaps, from being talked to death.
“Hi,” he says, rounding the corner fully and hanging up his robe.
“Hey, Will,” Steph says, and he knows he doesn’t control his reaction as completely as he ought, and he knows she saw. “How’s Tabby?” she continues, obviously deciding — to Leigh’s relief — not to draw attention to it.
“Still fitter than I am,” he says, dropping his exercise gear onto the wooden changing rack.
He doesn’t exactly like getting naked around these two, but better Steph and Bethany than basically anyone else. And at least it’s just them now; no more supervision when they wash. He’s absolutely certain both of them are examining him as he picks a shower at the other side of the annexe, but he’s doing the same to them, so fair’s fair, and they’re all about the same, really. Leigh’s not as slim as them, but he had more mass to lose to begin with, and he’s actively trying to retain some of it, in certain areas. But all three of them are budding in the chest, and there’s a slight curve to Steph’s back in particular that Leigh’s sure he’ll see replicated in his, when he gets back to his room and checks. All of them changing, bit by bit.
Would have horrified him once. Still does a little, but he’s learned enough to know the difference between a rational fear and a habitual one.
“Be fair,” Bethany says, “Tabby’s fitter than most people.” And she sticks out her tongue and lolls it, pretending to drool.
“Physically fit, you— Ugh. Fuck.” He rolls his eyes as Bethany grins at him. He’s got to stop chasing her bait. Somehow he thought becoming a girl might have mellowed her; instead, it seems to have made her… Well, okay, not worse, because Aaron wouldn’t have stopped at calling Tab fit, and William would have had to suppress the urge to go and slap some sense into him, but Bethany has a confidence Aaron lacked, even if it seems to come and go.
And unlike William, Leigh doesn’t hit people.
“Hey,” Steph says, “uh… Hey.” Yeah; she definitely spotted his discomfort around his old name. “We’re not going to be around tonight. And not that you’ll need us, or anything, but if you do, just send me a message, okay?”
There she goes again. If the sponsors want to be everyone’s older sister, Stephanie wants to be everyone’s mother. Worse, she’s not actually that bad at it.
“Yeah,” he says, with his back half-turned, “but unless it’s an Adam thing, I probably won’t.”
She’s closer now, and he can see her hand twitch, like she wants to touch his shoulder or something. But she keeps her distance, and smiles at him instead.
“You want me to ask Edy about him?” she says.
He mostly tries not to think about Adam. Which means there’s a hole in his mind in Adam’s exact size and shape.
“Would you?” he says.
“Of course.” Now she reaches out for him, but it’s just a tap on his upper arm, and then she’s stepping away again, slipping into her robe.
Bethany, waiting for her in the entrance, is already robed up, and just before the two of them leave, she blows him a kiss. Thinking quickly, Leigh smirks at her and blows her a kiss back, and the irritated noise she makes will probably keep him happy for hours.
* * *
Harmony’s going to be here soon. He should thank her. He’s going to thank her. Not something he expected to be doing. Not something he’s sure he should be doing at all. But he had it all wrong. What’s going on here. What’s being done. He was wrong.
Mostly wrong, anyway.
What she’s doing to him? He still doesn’t want it. He’ll still push back against it, even if it’s pointless. Because what man wouldn’t?
Funny, though. Tries to kill himself, tries to hurt the bitch who’s hurting him, trapping him, and everyone suddenly gets real. Old woman he’s never even seen before shows up out of nowhere. Saves his life. Then this doctor. There’ve even been soldiers. Women in fatigues. Dropping in to see the doctor every so often. A couple of them said hi.
And there’s Trev. Guy trapped inside a girl. You’ve got to laugh. Nice guy. Told him soldier stories. He’s hiding something, but so’s everyone.
And they’re all so fucking nice to him.
Harmony cried over him two nights in a row. In this hospital bed. Or infirmary bed. That’s what they call it, right? But she cried over him. And thanked him for surviving. And apologised for what she did. Said she was going to keep doing it, still. But she was different. She was cruel before. Felt good pushing back against someone like that. Felt good cutting into himself, every slice a weapon.
Now? She’s a girl who cried over him. And when he thinks of trying to hurt her again, he can’t summon up the old glee.
It’s got to feel righteous or it’s bullshit.
The old woman, though. She said that was a trap. She said anything can feel righteous if you think you need it enough. She said look at what you think you need. She said do you actually need it? Or do you just want it?
Made him think of Sonia again.
Talk to me, she always said. Tell me what you’re feeling. Never knew how.
Something else the old woman said, this time with Trev backing her up. You already know how to talk about your feelings, she said. Think about when you get drunk. Think about when your barriers are down. You were talking about your feelings when you attacked Sonia’s new boyfriend, she said. When you attacked her.
No-one in that pub was in doubt about what you felt, is what she said.
And then she made him tell her what it felt like to know that.
Fucking awful, he said.
You want to know how to never do that again? she said, and he nodded, and she pointed at Harmony. Do what she says.
The things he needs. The things he wants. The things he feels.
Thinking about it makes his head ache.
It’s a start, Harmony said, and she held his hand, and she talked about how their hands aren’t all that different, how she’s always had hands that are kind of big, and he was confused at first, didn’t know why she would even say that, until she went off to talk to the doctor for a minute and the old woman whispered to him, she’s telling you a secret. She’s giving you something that can hurt her. She’s trusting you not to use it.
So when she came back, he told her a secret, too. About the last time he saw Gran. In the home. He held her hand, too. But she couldn’t hold back. Couldn’t make a fist. Fingers already curled. Stuck. So he put his hand in hers. And she told him.
Leave, she told him. Leave home. As soon as you can.
He did. With Sonia. But that was years later. And he fucked it up.
She’s coming back soon. Harmony. And he’s going to thank her. It’s another secret. Something he needs. Not just wants. She could guess it, probably. But he wants her to know it. So he’s going to thank her. For showing him the sun again.
* * *
She started shaking a little when it came time to get dressed, but it was her who insisted she wanted to borrow some clothes; logically it has to be her who puts them on.
Bethany’s not even sure where all this shit’s coming from. She doesn’t know why her hands tremble when she holds up the bra with the padding in the cups, or when Steph hands her the leggings to cover her hairy legs, but the only way out is through, right? Fake it til you make it, something something. And if, in the process of faking it, you identify what it is that makes you so afraid, well, maybe that’s part of the point of it.
Steph thinks it’s just because she isn’t used to it yet. She’s pointed out before — gently and without pushing, in her very Steph kind of way — that Bethany got used to the name and the pronouns and everything else pretty quickly. And if she’s honest with herself, pulling up the calf-length skirt and slipping on the top feels a lot like putting on the tux she wore at Christmas.
Two options, then: either she’s weird about this because clothing is artifice and she’s above it (unlikely), or she’s weird about this because clothing is making an effort, is saying something about herself to anyone who can see her. And being read that way, being understood, is still intimidating.
Or a secret third thing. Who the fuck knows?
Arms loop around her waist and, in the mirror, Steph’s head rests on her shoulder.
“You look good,” she says.
“Is it too late to become a nun?”
Steph kisses her on the cheek. “You’ll have to ask Maria.”
Frowning, Bethany says, “Wouldn’t it be Edy who’s in charge of nunnery transfers?”
“Hmm. Point.”
Fake it til you make it. Again and again and again. No-one ever said you’d make it quickly.
So at least you can fake it well.
Bethany forces a smile onto her face, and twirls around in Steph’s arms, kisses her full on the mouth, messy and wet, until Steph has to push her away, giggling.
“Oh my God,” Steph bursts out, landing butt-first on the bed and bouncing, “you’re so gross! I just did my makeup!”
“You can do it again in a minute,” Bethany says, advancing on her. “I’m much more important.”
This she doesn’t have to fake.
* * *
“Come on, people!” Christine shouts, loud enough for her voice to carry the length of the third-year corridor and through every closed door. “Move it, move it, move it!” She claps her hands in time with her words.
“Front and centre!” Paige adds, matching her volume and reaching around her to clap her hands in unison. Paige’s perfume temporarily overwhelms Christine, and for a moment she wants to sack off the whole night and go right back to bed, but she needs to be out of the building and dancing her arse off and she needs to be setting off soon.
“All right!” Yasmin says, emerging from Julia’s room with her hands placed comically over her ears. “No need to yell!”
“Yeah,” Jodie says, appearing from the kitchen, “what’s the rush?”
“The rush,” Paige says before Christine can, “is that Ollie’s being moved back to the basement soon and Monica’s gone to see a semi-possibly-maybe-reformed Declan and she’s going to try and drag him back here and someone—” she slaps Christine on both shoulders, “—doesn’t want to be here when the action happens.”
“Ah,” Yasmin says, nodding. “She’ll get jobs.”
“She’ll volunteer for jobs,” Julia says, following Yasmin out of her room. “She can’t help herself.”
“It’s true,” Christine says, shrugging.
“Well, we’re all here, aren’t we?” Julia looks from face to face and makes shooing gestures. “So let’s go!”
“Where’s Vicky?” Jodie asks, as they thunder down the middle stairwell.
“Meeting us there,” Christine says. She starts counting off on her fingers. “Pippa and Donna are meeting us downstairs. Vicky and Lorna are probably already in Almsworth by now. Dira had to cancel, in case anything does go down tonight.”
“I don’t know how anyone can work here,” Julia says as they breach the doors to the dining hall in one energetic huddle. “Imagine having to drop everything because some dumb boy— Oh!” She stops, and then waves to someone on the far side of the room. “Hey, Lisa!” she shouts.
Lisa, similarly dressed up, bounces on her toes and waves back. “Hi!”
“I invited her,” Yasmin says quietly to Christine. “They were close for a while, and then they weren’t. It was a whole thing.”
“I remember,” Christine murmurs. Julia and Lisa are hugging in the middle of the room.
“Well, they’ve been talking again. And it just seemed like time. Is— Is that okay?”
Christine feels like she ought to perform a cartoon double take. “Of course it’s okay! I’m not the boss of this night out, Yas.”
“And yet who organised it all?” Paige whispers in her ear.
“Shush.”
It takes them just a few minutes to absorb Pippa, Donna and Lisa, during which time a nicely dressed Steph and Bethany slip through the dining hall, almost managing to make it to the stairwell before Yasmin intercepts and hugs Bethany, but thankfully the two basement girls have somewhere to be, too, and the rest of them are underway before anything disastrous happens that Christine will have to fix.
It’s good to have time off, but as Paige has pointed out to her many, many times, sometimes you need to actively curate it.
* * *
Bethany bumps up against her as they take the stairs, waiting, Steph’s sure, until they are almost but not completely out of sight of the girls in the dining hall to express physical affection. Steph hears someone faintly whooping in the background, and then they’re on their own.
“Thanks for this,” Bethany says quietly, speaking for the first time at the first-floor landing. “I wanted to ask about leaving the basement, but…”
“You were feeling weird about it?”
“So weird.”
Steph nods and bumps her back, and they climb a few more steps.
“Nice to see Yasmin again,” Bethany says.
“Yeah. She’s lovely.”
“I mean, yes, sure, that.” She’s slightly ahead on the stairs, but Steph’s certain from the tone of her voice that she’s smiling that I’m-about-to-say-something-terrible smile of hers. “But that’s not the important thing. She’s hot, Steph, and, ahem, an underrated but extremely important aspect of the rehabilitative programme is to expose the subjects to an endless—” A giggle breaks through the academic tone she’s trying to strike, but she contains herself and restores her pomposity. “Apologies. Exposing the subjects to an endless parade of unbelievably attractive women, and informing them under laboratory conditions that if they behave themselves and eat all their Weetabix and pretend to laugh very hard at the mugs that they will one day get to hang out with women like this, and it’ll be no big deal, and they’ll go clubbing with them and shower with them and maybe there’ll be a moment where they and the aforementioned hot women are, for example, both bending down to retrieve the same pencil. And oh yeah, sorry, you’re going to have to be a woman in order for this to happen, but that doesn’t matter because did you see how hot your friends are going to be?”
“I’m not sure that’s how the sponsors see it.”
“I think it’s how Raph sees it.”
“True,” Steph says. “He has been more receptive to Jane ever since he saw her and Amy together.”
“You see? Thank you!” Bethany claps her hands together. “I’m writing a paper on it.”
“Peer review might be tricky.”
Snorting, Bethany says, “Peer reviewers don’t read long paragraphs. If there’s nothing incriminating in the abstract I bet I could get it in one of the smaller journals.”
An unpleasant image suddenly lodges itself in Steph’s mind, and she immediately unsticks it. “You think I’ll be as pretty as her, don’t you?” she says, pausing in her ascent. “As Yasmin?”
Hands immediately find her and drag her into a tight and only slightly precarious embrace. “Steph,” Bethany whispers, “of course you will. You’re going to be beautiful.” She kisses her gently. “You’ll be the ginger temptress of Dorley Hall.”
Steph giggles. “You should say that kind of stuff a lot more,” she says, and rubs her cheek against Bethany’s.
“I mean, it’s just facts,” Bethany says, pulling away from her and starting up the stairs again. She keeps a hand in Steph’s and tugs her along with her. “You’ve seen the other third years, right? This place doesn’t miss.”
They reach the landing on the third floor with the two exits, and Steph jabs her thumb into the reader for the Dorley side. It’s much more discreet than the readers on second and first, and she wonders for a moment if it’s because it’s of a higher quality, or if they only had so much money and they decided to put the senior staff behind the best locks.
It rejects her.
“Oh,” she says.
“Problem?”
“Maybe?”
She touches the reader again, but nothing happens. Frowning, she inspects it, as if she might suddenly have gained the technical skills to diagnose a faulty biometric reader by sight alone, and then a speaker embedded somewhere in the ceiling pipes up.
“Sorry, Steph.” Edy’s voice. “Try it again.”
It works this time, and the door opens into the L-shaped corridor she remembers: the senior sponsors’ flats. The door to Maria’s swings open as they approach, revealing Edy, smiling and waiting for them.
“Sorry,” she says. “Normally, no-one has access except us. How are you both doing? You okay? There’s nothing… happening, is there? Nothing I should know about?”
“Nothing,” Bethany says quickly.
“We just wanted to see Maria,” Steph says.
Bethany nods vigorously.
Edy says, “Oh, well, she’s quite—”
“Let them in, Edith!” Maria yells from somewhere inside.
Edy steps aside. “I’ve been overruled,” she mutters, waving them through and closing the door behind them.
Maria’s flat is exactly as Steph remembers, down to Maria herself. Steph tries not to wince; she last came up here before she embraced her true self, and Maria’s lying in the same bed, for the same reason. She’s been recovering from what Will did for a long time.
Like she can read Steph’s mind, Maria says, “I’m fine, Steph. I’ve been given the week off, is all.” The tone in which she says ‘given’ implies something rather different, something more coercive, but when Edy approaches the bed, Maria receives her with a loving arm and a quick kiss on the cheek. “I would have preferred not to spend the entire week in bed, but darling Edith here got Fatima and Mrs Prentice to educate me on the importance of rest and, well, when the next crisis occurs, I’d prefer it if my response wasn’t immediately to almost faint. Makes me a bit useless.”
“I’m just glad someone caught you,” Bethany says, gingerly walking to her bedside. Maria immediately holds out her free hand, and Bethany takes it. She sits in a chair on the other side of the bed, still holding Maria’s hand and showing no intention of letting go, so rather than force Maria to remain oddly spreadeagled, Edy stands and inclines her head towards Steph.
“Let’s make the tea, yes?” she says quietly, as Maria and Bethany start to talk between themselves.
Edy leads Steph through the living room and under the arch into the kitchen, and fills the kettle from a filter jug while Steph looks for mugs. She has the uncanny feeling of being on the other end of the conversation she had in the woodshed with Christine; of being in a small area with someone who needs to talk.
“How’s she doing?” she asks.
Edy shakes her head, and in a moment of frustration sets the kettle into its cradle a bit too hard. Then she laughs at herself and touches Steph quickly on the hand. “She’s okay,” she says, “but she’s impossible to get to rest. I tried to call a moratorium on all work activities, but she wouldn’t have it, and I tried to get Aunt Bea’s backing but she told me, in no uncertain terms, that Maria would go completely mad with nothing to do.” She smiles weakly. “And she was right, of course. So I keep it to a minimum. How does Bethany take hers, again?”
“With milk. She says that before Dorley, she used to take it with five sugars, but being underground for so long has forced her to appreciate bland, bitter things.”
Edy drops a tea bag into a mug with a cartoon image of Freddie Mercury on it, alongside the slogan, WE WILL FROCK YOU. “She gets the supermarket own-brand tea, then.”
Steph gets the white and gold mug with halo motifs and the filigreed text, The Divine (Forced) Feminine. Unsportingly, Edy picks plain mugs for herself and Maria, and together they wait for the kettle to boil.
“How are you doing?” Steph asks.
Edy blinks at her. “How am I doing?” she quotes, in the incredulous tones of someone who momentarily can’t believe that someone else is concerned for her. Then she leans against the cabinet, transfers her weight to it, and says, “I’m tired, Stephanie. I’m worried all the time, and some of it’s the same things everyone else is worried about, so that’s not so bad. You know: Diana, Frankie, Dorothy, Silver River; the whole rogues gallery of people of either unknown loyalty or who are actively hostile. But I’m worried about Adam. And I know,” she adds, touching Steph’s hand again, “you’re about to say you can help, and that’s lovely of you, but you’ve spent the whole week taking care of Bethany. I’ve been around enough to see that. I’m not adding to your workload. You shouldn’t even have a workload!”
Steph smiles. “Let me earn my keep, Edy. I do still remember all that stuff Aunt Bea said to me.”
“Hey,” Edy says sternly, “she walked all that back.”
“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. It is useful to have me around. Or—” and Steph frowns, remembering conversations she’s had with Pippa and some of the other sponsors, “—it’s been catalytic, anyway. I still wonder sometimes if Will wouldn’t have attacked Maria if I hadn’t been here, stirring things up.”
“Oh, don’t you dare. Unpredictable things happen every year. What happened with Will happened because we got careless, just like Ollie happened because we were run ragged. We’re working to fix both those things, but, Steph, they’re our problems. Not yours.”
“Let me help with Adam.”
Edy looks at her for a moment, frowning, chewing her lower lip. “You were raised religious, weren’t you?”
“Not cult religious, but yes. C of E. Church every Sunday and I wasn’t allowed to swear.”
“Okay,” Edy says. “Okay. When Maria’s back to work, next week some time, you and me, we’ll have a meeting. And I’ll tell you everything you need to know. About Adam and about me.” At Steph’s confused expression, she explains, “Adam and I are linked, Steph. Really linked.” She sighs; Steph’s not getting it. “Officially, he’s my second cousin. But I’m pretty sure he’s my half-brother.”
The world swims around Steph for a second. “Your brother?” she whispers.
“’Fraid so,” Edy replies. “That’s what it was like up there.” While Steph’s still stuck to the spot, reconsidering and recontextualising everything she knows and everything she’s guessed about Adam’s childhood, Edy pours hot water into mugs, squidges tea bags, and adds milk. She nudges Steph when she’s done, unlocking her. “Come on,” she says. “Tea time.”
“Yeah,” Steph says, still dazed. “Tea time.”
* * *
He’s got an escort out of the infirmary. They haven’t cuffed him, though. Ollie could run. The women soldiers might have guns and they might have tasers, but the woods are thick. He might make it.
Yeah, and then what? Out there, he ruined everything. Here, even down there, he might not. Harmony says he won’t. The old lady says he won’t. Even Trev says he won’t.
That’s it. That’s the thing. Trev. Guy trapped inside a girl. And the pain is obvious. Just talking to the guy. He looks away all the time. He folds his arms. Hides his chest. Second day here, he got one of the soldiers to bring him an electric razor. Kind of like the one Ollie used. Trev buzzed his head with it. Military number two. Soldier girls wolf-whistled. He asked to be introduced to any hot boy soldiers they know.
Point is. Trev. He hates his body. Hates that he looks so much like a woman.
Ollie can’t imagine caring so much. Only ever been important because of other people. Because of what it got him. Dad. Mum. Sonia. He ruined it all. Ended up here.
He fought with Raph about it. Seems stupid now.
Everyone else here. They’ve all been right. He’s always been wrong.
So he follows Harmony. And the soldier women follow him. And he returns to the hall.
There’s another reason to go, too.
Harmony’s going to tell him everything, she said.
* * *
Goodness bloody gracious bloody shit! That was so embarrassing! Helpful, too, for definite, but Shahida’s body still feels hot from it, even after traipsing all the way back to Melissa’s place in the January wind.
They got something to eat at the café in Afflecks. Near the top, with a nice view, and a perfect little table by the window with just enough flat for the three of them, their everything-free muffins and their drinks. And they talked, in the shy and awkwardly flirtatious way they’ve been talking all day, all of them aware they’re talking around themselves when they should be talking about themselves, none of them quite able to push through and broach the topic.
And then this girl, this scene-looking girl, almost an anachronism with how early 2010s she looked, but she made it work and she was, well, hot, she came over, all long black hair and silver bangles and impudent smile, and she looked right at Shahida and asked if she was doing anything later, and Shahida bloody well panicked! As if this day hasn’t been confusing enough! This week! Worse, Abby caught Shahida’s eye and mouthed you were right about the comeback at her, and Shahida was far too lost to even begin to decipher that.
Melissa rescued her. Took her hand. Told the sexy scene girl that, sorry, she’s taken. And the scene girl graciously moved on — right onto Abby!
And bloody Abby was far smoother than Shahida was. She didn’t lock up and stare into the woman’s eyes like she was a pair of oncoming headlights and Abby was an injured fawn, oh no, she took Melissa’s other hand and smoothly said she was taken, too! And Melissa backed her up, and the girl shrugged and told the three of them they were all very lucky, and said she had to try, and when she returned to her friends on the other side of the café, Abby released Melissa’s hand and told her that, yeah, this was what they need to talk to her about. The two of them, and her.
Shahida hasn’t said more than five words since, because Abby’s stupid smile and the way she took Melissa’s hand have been burning in her brain, and she’s been trying to get along with her all day, all week, and she’s been doing really well even though it’s been so confusing, even though they both know there’s two of them and only one Melissa and ugh!
She excused herself and went to hang out in the living room while Melissa and Abby got changed, and she doesn’t want to know what they’re doing in the bedroom, and if they’re kissing then— then— then she bloody well hopes they are, because that would be just perfect, wouldn’t it?
Is this how they resolve it? Shahida goes for a sulk in the living room and Abby and Melissa talk it out in the bedroom like adults? That would not have been her bet as to how it would go, but she’s only been getting more and more het up in Abby’s presence, and whether it’s the jealousy, or it’s the way Abby keeps looking at her—
Oh, bloody hell.
Shahida’s been rhythmically tapping her hands against her thighs since she got here, and now she stops, shakes them out, shakes them hard, lets go of the tension and allows in a little of the euphoria of released energy, because she’s been so stupid and she can’t believe how simple it all could have been. On loop in her head are all the times today and this week that Abby’s shared a look or a laugh with her, or touched her in some way, or otherwise displayed nothing but comfort in her presence.
Idiot. Idiot. Idiot!
She shakes the last of the energy out of her hands. The action coincides with Abby appearing, pushing aside the living room door quietly and padding through, her shoes discarded, her adorable Snoopy socks on show.
“Liss is just taking a shower,” Abby says, jerking a thumb backwards. “Would you like a drink, or…?” And she trails off, because Shahida’s just standing there like a weirdo.
At least she’s finally a self-aware weirdo.
Well.
No time like the present.
“Abigail,” Shahida says. “I want to try something. Because I’ve been going mad all day. All week. And it’s like something just popped in my head and now if I don’t try it, it feels like everything else is going to go pop, too. You can say no or push me away at any time, okay? And I won’t be weird about it. But I have to try this. And I have to try it now. Before I see Liss again. Before you see Liss again. I have to know.”
Abby, entranced, nods, and Shahida walks slowly towards her, loops a hand around her waist, and leans down, hesitating, giving her the chance to refuse her. Abby doesn’t take it, and instead inclines her head. Invites her.
Shahida kisses her. Pushes her back until they both bounce gently against the wall. Lifts her a little with the arm around her waist. Indulges in her heat, in her life, in her.
And Abby kisses her back.
There never was any reason to be jealous. Shahida is just very, very stupid.
After an age, after everything in her life has changed for the better, Shahida leans away, warm again and unable to control her smile. Abby leans up and kisses her quickly, closed lips to closed lips.
“What about Liss?” Abby asks. “You going to give her the speech, too?”
Shahida shakes her head. “She’s heard it already.”
* * *
It’s like six degrees out, and Bethany ought to be cold, and she supposes, physically, she kind of is, but metaphysically, she’s toasty as hell, because the light wind whistling through the window in Steph’s first-floor room has a taste to it. It has a smell! She’s been breathing the air-conditioned breeze in the basement for so long, she’d almost forgotten what real fresh air is like.
Besides, if it’s cold in here, it means she can wrap herself and Steph in blankets and not overheat, and she needs that. After this week, after delving deep into memories she’s been doing her best for years to suppress, she fucking needs that. A bit of animal comfort, a bit of shared warmth; a bit of love.
And she is loved, and not just by Steph. Talking to Maria again was the perfect reminder, and it also — as Maria wryly pointed out — served as a barometer for how far Bethany’s come: the last time Maria was out of her life, the boy Aaron wanted her back mainly because Indira kept threatening to feed him through a tube.
All right, that’s not entirely accurate; being a bit too ungenerous towards Aaron, there. Little fucker’s earned it, though.
Still. Maria’s okay. They’re just being cautious. And she’s thinking of moving on from her academic work, too; the time she’s had off sick recently has given her the opportunity to reassess it, and she’s realised, she said, that in her adult life she’s never been so happy to be alive. She doesn’t need to fill empty hours any more.
Bethany cried a little in her arms while Maria gently stroked her hair, and everything was fine. And then Edy got rid of her, promised to have Maria back on duty by Tuesday, and very firmly closed the door after them both.
She stretches out on the bed. God, she loves this thing. The beds in the basement are barely wide enough for two, whereas you could fit three in this one, easily, and five if you packed them in like sardines (or basement dwellers). And the pillows up here are fluffier, the duvets more enveloping, and even the mattresses seem firmer and more springy.
Maybe when Maria comes back on duty, she can sweet-talk her into giving her the same access Steph has. Or close to it, anyway. She’d ask if they could both move out, move into Steph’s room up here permanently, but she’s pretty sure they’d have to say no. Steph’s spoken a few times about the peer-pressure nature of transition for most people at Dorley, and it probably won’t work if your peers have moved on while you’re still refusing to wear a bra. So she’ll stay downstairs for the sake of the others — she guesses — but she definitely wants at least a little more control over her own movements.
As if to underline the point, that’s when Steph comes back, buzzing the lock and entering the room backwards, holding a tray of Pop Tarts and Pot Noodles.
“A feast,” she says, putting down the tray on the table in front of the TV.
“Why are you covered in lipstick kisses?” Bethany asks, reaching a finger towards Steph’s almost entirely red cheek.
“The second years ambushed me. They thought it would be funny.”
Sitting down next to her, Steph leans in so Bethany can clean her cheek with a tissue, a task she punctuates with occasional kisses and mild scolding, and which segues naturally into them sliding down off the bed and onto cushions by the table, where they eat their Pot Noodles and Pop Tarts.
Later, as the night closes in and Bethany feels tired for the first time in a week — tired, not exhausted or depressed or simply unable to leave her bed; just tired — she is almost carried into the little ensuite and propped in front of the sink, there to wash her face and clean her teeth. Steph rubs moisturiser on when Bethany doesn’t quite have the coordination to do it herself, and then takes her to bed.
To that clean, huge, firm, wonderful bed.
Bethany rolls over and wraps her arms around her girlfriend, thinks to herself that before she falls entirely asleep, she should lean in and kiss Steph on the back of the neck. But she never makes it, and she dreams about everything but the corridors at her old school.
* * *
“Chia, it’s okay. I’m going to a place where people can help me. Yes, I trust them. But I’ll be back. If that’s okay? If you want me? Okay. Okay! I’ll be back. And I might be able to start paying rent. I’ll be back in a few days. I’ll call every night. Yes, at seven, right before— Of course! No. I’d never interrupt it.”
Impossible for Monica not to watch Diana as she speaks. How is this the same person? Declan was dull like a blunt object, like a much-used weapon, but Diana has a flow to her, an expressiveness. It’s almost hypnotic.
“Night, Chia,” she says into her cheap, plasticky phone. “Sorry for waking you. I just wanted to— Okay! Sorry for apologising. Goodnight.” The call ends, and she fusses with her phone for a moment before slipping it back into her bag — the woman who was once Declan has a bloody handbag! — and smiling. “That’s the woman who took me in. She’s very, um… She’s nice.”
“She sounds it.”
The texture of the ride smooths out, an indicator that Frankie’s pulled them off the rough-asphalted main road and onto the university’s network. Not long now to Dorley.
“Are you ready for this?” she asks.
Diana emphatically shakes her head. “No. But I’ve got no choice, I think.”
“I won’t let you down.”
“If she does, Di,” Frankie says from the front seat, “I think Trev still has a gun.”
“Frankie!” Monica exclaims.
“I won’t need it,” Diana says. “But I’m looking forward to seeing him again. He was nice to me. Valérie… I’m not so sure about her. She might not want to see me, I think.”
“Val’ll be happy to see you again,” Frankie says, pulling the car into its spot and killing the engine. “And she’ll want the story about how you killed Jake. All the gory details. She loves it when you get graphic.”
It’s a short walk from the car to the hall, and Monica spends much of it returning to her mental rehearsal of how she’s going to introduce Diana to the others. At least it’s something that can mostly wait until morning; they spent long enough in the café that they decided to wait out the rush hour traffic, which combined with westbound roadworks meant that the dashboard clock hit ten just before the turn-off for Almsworth. Monica called ahead, and there’s going to be a room ready for her up on the second floor, around the corner from the third years. A bit bare, probably, but better than nothing and the best her grudgingly cooperative co-sponsors could arrange on short notice. It’s also best for her to have the opportunity to control who she sees: she’ll have her own bathroom, the second-floor kitchen is reasonably stocked, and for the most part the only sponsors who visit the floor are there for the third years.
Diana, her new boots clicking softly on the concrete path, slows as they approach. She looks up at the bulk of Dorley Hall and takes a deep, slow breath.
“There’s one more thing,” she says, not looking away from the hall. “It doesn’t have to be tonight, but if you can arrange it, I want to see Steph.” She swallows and rolls her shoulders, stretching out the kinks from the journey.
“Shouldn’t be hard,” Monica says, and frowns, remembering their history. Declan, as he was, attacking Steph and Bethany in the shower annexe. Steph punching him out and setting in motion Declan’s washing out. Warily, she adds, “What do you want to see her for?”
“I need to apologise,” Diana says, and without looking back, she starts to stride towards the entrance, leaving Monica and Frankie in her wake.
* * *
1. I Am Diana
I am Diana
It’s a choice
and a privilege
and a challenge I always seem to fail
But I am Diana
And it’s not a choice
cause the alternative
is to be
is to be
is to be
him
[found by Chiamaka under Diana’s bed, torn into pieces]
Notes:
Up-to-date Dorley Discord link.
Chapter 40: The Wicked Unaware
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2004 August 3
Tuesday
Eighteen tomorrow, which means one thing and one thing only, and Seth McMillan could not be more excited. Eighteen tomorrow means leaving the farm, means going north to Edinburgh or south to Newcastle — Father Adam hasn’t yet said which. Eighteen tomorrow means it’s time for his first true battle, the one which will define the rest of his life.
It’s time to walk among the unbelievers. The wicked unaware. The ignorant unsaved. Or, as Mum says, the British.
Dad mumbles along with Father Adam when he speaks of the nation, but Mum doesn’t, and whispers to him instead that to call a farm — and not even a particularly large farm, at that — a nation is to reach for a form of vainglory as yet unattainable to the human soul, “but you know the Father; he reaches.” And then Dad usually snaps at her to be quiet, to pay attention, to not disrupt the service, but they are seated too far back to be truly disruptive. In the back pews, they are not actively disfavoured — that would place them elsewhere — but they flirt with it persistently.
So Mum says.
Seth doesn’t yet know what vainglory means. One of the tasks he has assigned himself, in the two or so hours he expects to have free tomorrow, is to explore, to walk among the unbelievers cloaked as one of their own, and to find whatever they have for a library, so he can look up the many words his mother uses that cannot be found in the small but spiritually complete library at home.
The farm; the nation; his world.
It seems wrong to yearn to leave it, but his mother is not native to the nation, and he wants desperately to see where she came from.
The television weather said it would be warm all week, but it’s always wrong for here. Mum says it’s because they built all their houses on the hill, and thus created an accidental wind tunnel through which the bitter salt wind from the sea whistles day-in, day-out, an accompaniment to Seth’s dreams since before he can remember. Dad says it’s because the British lie, and that the broadcasts they receive on the single television in the library here are targeted specifically to them, to deceive and confuse. It’s probably why the television is kept locked behind metal mesh these days, and why Seth is not authorised to choose the channel.
No, Mum says, it’s because, years ago, Noah sneaked in one night and reconnected the aerial and saw things he wasn’t supposed to, things which contradict the teaching of the church. Seth, confused, had asked how Noah, who even now is only seven years old, could possibly have managed such a thing; his mother had turned away at that point. Another Noah, she said. She should not have said anything, she said. Forget about him, she said. And she put him to bed early that night, and assigned him extra prayers.
Your grace is your most precious gift. Please, Lord, make me worthy of it.
But the television weather said it would be warm all week, and tomorrow is the day Seth walks among the ignorant unsaved, and he’s excited to discover the truth of it, away from the farm, away from the nation, away from Father Adam.
2020 January 11
Saturday
Confidence doesn’t last here. She should have remembered. And she does, sort of, when she forces herself to think about it: Declan might be dead, but he’s not gone, and she remembers what it was like when he first understood he would not be leaving this place. His cocksure certainty that everything would turn out alright for him, the way it always had — for certain values of ‘alright’, Diana muses — faded away, to be replaced by what preceded it: a childish tendency to push and push and never stop, to always be rattling someone’s nerves, to always be asserting his wants, his needs, his physical superiority.
The overcompensation of the youngest and smallest, mutated by adolescence into the masculinity of his father.
She remembers, staring up at the entrance to the hall — its name carved into stone and mounted right there in the brick, a branding inflicted — the way her father acted when Declan grew taller than him. To begin with, it was as if he expected retribution for the way he had treated his youngest child, but at seventeen, Declan had already moved on; his father’s cruelties no longer mattered, were barely even remembered, except inasmuch as he could pass them on to others, smaller, slower, more kind.
Confidence dies here, and whatever you choose to replace it, Diana is sure, says every possible thing about your character that the sponsors could ever want to know. That for her — for him, for Declan — it was cruelty, yet more of it, cruelty unfettered, directed at people just as vulnerable as he was, just as trapped, is another in a long list of memories that will never leave her, that will remain as grit and dirt in her gut for as long as she lives.
She is the lone bright spot in the life of Declan Shaw. She is the survivor of everything he was, everything he did, and everything that was done to him. And she will not go back. Not ever. It is her guiding light, her mantra, and she has with some amusement started to say to herself, WWDD: What Wouldn’t Declan Do?
So what does such a resolution require her to become, now that she’s here?
A hand closes around hers.
“Diana?” Monica says softly. “Are you coming inside?”
What is it that returns to her now, as the remnants of her confidence slip away?
Only she can decide that. If Diana is still being built, brick by brick, then only Diana can decide the shape of her. Who does she become, when she is so scared she can hardly move?
“Di?” Frankie says from her other side.
“Yeah,” Diana says, her voice rough. “I’m okay. I can… I think I can feel him. I can… see what he would do, what he would say.”
And she can: Declan, not so dead after all, roused by fear. He is once again the cage into which she once willingly stepped.
But she will not. Never again.
“Fuck him,” Monica whispers, and gives her hand a squeeze.
“Fuck him,” Diana agrees, and together they walk right up to the entryway and push their way inside.
The doors feel heavier than they should.
Someone jumps up from the kitchen table at their approach and rushes to the kitchen doors, unlocking them and pulling them aside. Diana knows her: Raph’s sponsor. Did Declan ever bother to learn her name? She doesn’t think so. Maybe it doesn’t sound good.
Maybe Declan was just a self-centred little prick.
“Half the hall wanted to see you,” Raph’s sponsor says, smiling warmly and returning to the table, “but Bea said a gaggle of, quote, ‘clucking hens waiting to devour a speck of chicken feed’, unquote, would be overwhelming for Diana here.”
“Boy, does Aunt Bea ever have our number,” Monica murmurs.
“So it’s just me here. Waiting for you. Hi, Diana. Welcome back.”
Bea. Aunt Bea. Declan’s memory presents an image of an older woman, in her forties or fifties but ageing well, waiting for him outside Declan’s cell. Laying down the law. Condemning him. Declan screamed at her for that. Diana, however, can discern a degree of nuance: Aunt Bea had been determined to see the end of Declan, yes, but she mourned him, too. Declan was a bundle of missed opportunities, of wasted potential, the living embodiment of always making the wrong choice.
Aunt Bea blends with Monica, with the other sponsors, with the beatings Declan endured, with the indignities he suffered with pride and which Diana recalls with shame. Almost funny, really: the girls here attacked Declan on the surface, where his wounds had long since scarred into armour, and it had been nothing more than the rattle of batons against a cage.
At Stenordale, they got to him on the inside, where he was weak, and they ended him.
Too.
Many.
Memories.
And all of them all at once.
She wants to laugh. She wants to fucking screech. Because she’s back, she’s here in the place where Declan made himself almost stronger than he’d ever been, where he confirmed for himself his long-held suspicion that all he had to do was keep pushing back and the world would arrange itself around him. He should have died here; instead, he died at Stenordale, with blood on his hands and smoke in his lungs.
She wants to scream, but she settles for hugging herself.
It’s ridiculous, really, that she’s having this reaction here, because Declan never saw the kitchen, because this could be any old house. She could half-close her eyes and it could almost be Stenordale.
But she knows where she is. That the decor is unfamiliar doesn’t seem to matter. Two floors down is where she was kept, and she can almost feel the humming of the air conditioning down there.
She wants to ask Monica: Do the graduate girls fear the place where they were held captive, too? And if so, why? Is it because they remember the things that were done to them? Or is it as she suspects, that it is because they remember who they once were? Who they might, with what feels like the slightest nudge, become again?
Cornered as she is, she knows what Declan would do: he would fight. He’d drive an elbow into Monica’s neck; he’d stamp hard on Frankie’s shin; and if the other one, Raph’s sponsor, if she tried to get in the way, well, there are fucking chairs, aren’t there? She might not be as strong as she was and she might not have the mass any more, but she’s still bigger than everyone here; she could do it.
“Diana?” Monica asks again, the same soft concern in her voice, and then her hand touches Diana’s cheeks, left then right, gentle and careful. Wiping away her tears.
Declan is here. His blood and defiance soaked into the floor here, just as it did at Stenordale, and now he fucking haunts the place, haunts her.
“I’m scared, Monica,” she says. Another thing she’s learning: not to pretend like her emotions don’t exist. Yes, they’re a weakness, but a weakness isn’t a bad thing; a weakness is a need, and needs are provided by other people. Needs are how you let people in. Needs are how you love.
“Outside,” Monica says quietly, “you said you could feel him.”
Nodding, Diana whispers, “Yes. It’s… It’s pretty fucking overwhelming. He wants to fight.” She laughs bitterly. “No. He doesn’t. Either he’s not real, or he’s just me. I want to fight. It would be so easy.”
“It’s okay. You won’t hurt me.”
“I won’t,” Diana says quickly. Say it like you fucking mean it, Di-an-a. “I won’t,” she repeats. An instruction. A fucking injunction.
“No, you won’t. I know it, Diana. And don’t forget—” Monica applies a little pressure to Diana’s elbow, turns her around to face the double doors, “—you’re not trapped. You can leave. You have that choice.”
Diana glances at her, then goes back to staring out of the kitchen doors. It feels like thoughts have left her, like she’s a dumb mass of impulses, and she doesn’t know which to obey. But she’s not Declan, who was made instinctively to lash out in insecurity, in fear, in desperation, in pride. She’s Diana, so she waits, and ignores the thrashing of memory.
He fades.
Not completely, but enough.
She can leave.
It shouldn’t be so easy.
It feels insulting that it is.
But she can leave.
So if she stays, if she walks through the kitchen and farther into this vast, dark building, so like Stenordale in so many ways, it is because she chooses to.
“Diana?” a small voice says, turning Diana around. Raph’s sponsor is there, beside her, shorter — in comparison, not compared to the average woman — and slimmer, vulnerable to Diana, should she choose to take advantage of it.
Fuck, she wishes she could switch that part of her mind all the way off.
“Diana,” Raph’s sponsor says again, “look at me.” Diana’s hands are still wrapped around her waist; Raph’s sponsor takes one, almost peels it away from Diana’s body, and holds it. “You remember me, right?” Diana nods. “I knew you before. When you were here. I saw everything. Look into my eyes, Diana: am I afraid of you?”
Diana looks. What she finds there, she doesn’t know, couldn’t even begin to guess, and before she can, Raph’s sponsor hugs her.
Disarming her.
And so Diana rests her head on the woman’s shoulder, and carefully wraps her arms around her, aware as she does so that her lower lip is trembling and her lungs are heating with the pain of keeping herself from crying, from really wailing the way her body wants to. She daren’t relax her self-control, not now, not yet. She doesn’t feel finished; whoever Diana is, whoever she is here, is as yet not entirely decided.
She needs new instincts. She longs for them. She’s desperate to be natural again, to be unguarded. Another question to ask Monica: is that even possible? Or will she be watching herself, her every action, her every thought, for the rest of her life?
“I’m sorry,” she says, and the act of speaking loosens her self-control enough that a few tears escape her, “but I can’t remember your name.”
“I’m Jane,” Jane whispers, with a touch of mirth to her voice, and that, combined with the broad smile on her face when she pulls away, is worth saving. Worth remembering. Diana builds a little of that into her new self: Jane is Raph’s sponsor, she is kind and generous, and Diana can make her smile.
“Thank you,” Diana says.
“Have a good night, Diana,” Jane says, stepping back and retrieving her mug from the kitchen table. She holds it oddly, with her palm completely covering the side, and she sips from it as she looks at the three of them, still all standing there less than a metre from the doors. “Hello again, Frances. And Monica, you owe me £200.”
“I do not!” Monica exclaims.
“You’re going to make Diana pay it, then?”
Next to Diana, Monica sags. “I owe you £200.”
“What did she mean by that?” Diana says, when Jane’s gone, when the faint sound of her grippy socks squeaking on the wooden floor has been swallowed by the vast space just beyond the inner doors.
Frankie snorts, and Monica says, “We, uh, we have a bet on. Each year. It’s in bad taste, really. On who, um… On who—”
“You evil bitches!” Frankie exclaims, cackling loudly and slapping Monica on the back. “I knew you had it in you!”
“She bet on me?” Diana asks.
“No!” Monica says quickly. “No. She bet on just one washout. I think she thought it would be Ollie, actually.”
Another pulse of memory. Ollie’s perpetual belligerence almost rivalling her own.
Should she see Ollie? She feels like both Ollie and Raph deserve apologies; if the purpose of Dorley Hall really is rehabilitation — and being back here and seeing Jane again, with the knowledge that she, too, was once just like Ollie and Raph, if not like Declan, makes that seem all the more plausible — then she was an anchor around their waists, a negative influence.
Yeah, she fucked everything up for everyone she met.
“Can I get some sleep?” she asks.
“Sure,” Monica says, and unlocks the outer doors again. “I’ll show you to your room. Frankie? You can get to yours okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Frankie says, waving her off. She doesn’t follow the two of them back out into the corridor; she follows the route Jane did. In the doorway, she pauses and adds, “Hey, Di, if you need me, ask one of the sponsors to get me. Whatever you need.”
“Thanks, Frankie,” Diana says.
“G’night.”
Frankie vanishes into the dark, and Diana and Monica head out into the outer hallway, pulling their jackets tight again.
Funny layout to this place. The big double entryway with the noticeboard and the pretty tiles leading almost directly into a locked kitchen, and you have to take a hard right to get to the main staircase? Who designed it? Stenordale at least had made internal sense, even if everything had always seemed too far apart.
She adds it to the list of questions to ask someday, if she can keep her shit together long enough to ask.
“Oh, Diana,” Monica says, as they climb, “did you want to do the injection now, or—?”
“Will it help me sleep?”
Monica shrugs. “You might be a bit sore.”
“In the morning is fine.”
“I can leave you the kit,” Monica says. “You can do it yourself, and—”
Diana stops. “You want to leave me with needles? Here?”
Frowning, Monica says, “Yes?”
“Sharp needles? Needles plural?”
“Yes?”
“You’re really not scared of me, are you?”
“No.”
“Monica, I’m scared of me.”
“Uh-huh. That’s why I’m not, Diana.”
2004 August 4
Wednesday
There’s so little sky here.
Because today is a special day, they did not go north to Edinburgh or south to Newcastle; they went all the way south, to the centre of unbelief, to the greatest clamour of unclaimed souls for a thousand miles: London. Almost five hours on the train, surrounded by the unsaved, trying his best to close his ears to their babble, to their blasphemous ignorance.
Today is a special day, but not because it is Seth’s birthday. No-one outside his immediate family had even known about it. Father Adam was surprised when Dad pointed it out, and had ruffled Seth’s hair with the appearance of fondness. “You’ll make me proud,” Father Adam had said, “I know it.”
But there’s another side to that. Make me proud is the inverse of don’t shame me, and when Seth finally persuaded his mum to tell him what happened to the other Noah, he understood that a great shame indeed had been laid directly at Father’s feet, one that ought never be repeated.
Especially not on such a special day.
And today is special because yesterday was little Adam’s first ululation, the first time his voice was commandeered by the Voice; the first time the Words were spoken by him and not Father. It was the sign Father Adam has been waiting for, the sign the Father before him told him to watch for. Confirmation that the bloodline remains unbroken and undiluted, that the Voice is safe.
Four years old. Seth didn’t speak in tongues until he was almost ten, and part of him still wonders if he was copying the older children. Did the Voice really reach him that day? Has it ever?
It doesn’t matter; Seth is not the future of the nation. Little Adam carries that burden. And to celebrate his first witness, the family has travelled to London, selected one of its greatest monuments to wickedness, and begun to witness, just as little Adam did, to the ignorant unsaved.
Seth has not been selected to sing; he does not have the voice for it. Instead, he is required to hold a placard, to obstruct the men and women — especially the women — who try to enter the hospital, to minister to them, and to provide them with hand-printed leaflets.
If they are rude or dismissive or otherwise unreceptive, he has been instructed to repeat himself, to block their path, to ensure that they have no choice but to heed the Word. And Seth must be careful, for this is where Noah failed. A woman lost her footing in front of him, Mum said; a woman who on her way in had shouted defiance had fallen on her way out, blinded by her sorrow, and Noah had caught her and led her to somewhere comfortable where she could sit. He did not attempt to minister to her again.
He comforted her, not with the Word, but with meaningless platitudes.
Seth’s mother followed him, rushed over to bring him back to the fold, to return him to the embrace of the nation, but she, too, was deceived by the young woman’s sorrow, and she did not attempt to minister to her.
This morning, Mum took him aside and whispered, “Beware compassion, dearest Seth, for they will answer it with cruelty.”
And now Seth stands there with his sign, and a young woman approaches, furtive and afraid, and he must not be led astray like Noah, and he must not be weak like Mum. For on that day, almost a year before Seth was born, Noah was sent away, never to return, never to be heard from again, and Mum was confined to the nation. Because she could still be useful, she said, and she articulated the word useful with the same venom Father reserves for his sermons on the unbelievers, on the devils they carry with them, on the corruption that flows in their veins and causes them to sin.
2020 January 12
Sunday
Some of the girls are up early, even earlier than Steph. She can tell, because the sound of giggling reaches her almost as soon as she creeps out of her bedroom. Down the corridor and around the corner, in the first-floor common room, Steph finds Mia frowning at the disgusting gloop someone — almost certainly Mia herself — left glued to the bottom of the cafetiere.
Aisha’s there, too, and she spots Steph before Mia does, finger-waving from her reclined position. When Mia spots her and greets her with an inappropriate level of enthusiasm for nine o’clock on a Sunday, Aisha rolls her eyes and smiles fondly.
“Steph!” Mia squeals, bouncing over to her, the ears on her colourful onesie flopping up and down, out of time with her exuberance. “You’ve got to help us! We need coffee!”
“Feel free to decline,” Aisha says in her deeper, softer voice. “The last thing she needs is caffeine. Actually, on an unrelated note, do you have access to sedatives?”
Steph doesn’t get a chance to respond, because by this point, Mia’s got her by the shoulders and is looking very soberly into her eyes. “We need you to steal the third years’ cafetiere,” Mia says, “right out from under their noses.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be reformed?” Steph asks.
“Only from, like, getting in fights and stuff. Not from petty theft.”
“If I borrow it on your behalf,” Steph says, leaning on the word, “will you clean it when you’re done with it and leave it in here for someone to collect?”
“Yes!” Mia releases Steph long enough to lull her into a false sense of a security sufficient to overwhelm her with a sudden, bone-cracking hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She’s stuck on Steph like a limpet for several seconds, until Aisha, who got up from the couch with extreme reluctance, starts peeling her off, limb by limb.
“I’ll make sure she cleans it,” Aisha whispers.
“Thank you,” Steph whispers back.
Aisha walks Mia to the couch and firmly sits her down, pulling back her cat-ear hood and smoothing down her hair, and Steph leaves them to it. The last thing she hears from either of them as she heads for the nearest stairwell is Aisha suggesting to Mia that she perhaps dial down the shtick a little until after everyone in the vicinity has had a cup of coffee.
Steph takes the outside stairs; it’s a nice bright day, and she likes to look out over the campus. She’d like even more to go out there, but she’s not sure her newfound and extremely fragile confidence — buoyed up by her bee-sting breast buds; battered by the limited changes everywhere else — could survive contact with your average tactless cis student. What was it Melissa said to her up on the roof, when Steph insisted to her that she still looked male? Melissa told her she’s beautiful. ‘Obviously still transitioning’ does not equal ‘not beautiful’, even if cis people tend to see it that way.
So yeah. She’ll stay inside, and confine her excursions for fresh air to the roof, to the secluded area behind the hall, and to leaning out of all the windows that don’t have bars on them.
She’s supposed to be backpacking, anyway.
That’s a point; in the alternate reality she and Pippa have been constructing for her family, where would Steph be by now? She should go online later, decide on a rough location, and start picking out details to describe for Petra. Steph’s always wanted to see Italy; maybe she ought to be in Venice.
She’s musing on this as she exits the stairs into the second-floor main corridor. Seven closed doors suggest that the girls — and Paige’s clothing collection — are all still sleeping off their night out, so she tiptoes her way to the kitchen. She can probably steal the cafetiere, make coffee for the entire first floor, make Mia clean it, and put it back before anyone up here even notices.
Ah. There’s someone in the kitchen already. A woman — obviously! This is the second floor of Dorley Hall; if there are any unattached men here, they’ve probably been tagged for catch and eventual release, like a feral cat. Whoever she is, she’s very tall and quite big in basically all directions, especially, judging by a long and busty shadow that blocks Steph’s view out of the kitchen window, in the forward direction. She’s idly tapping out a rhythm on a box of Weetabix and swaying her hips in time with the beat while she waits for the microwave.
Probably a friend of Christine’s, or of someone else on this floor. Maybe an older graduate.
“Good morning,” Steph says quietly, so she doesn’t startle the girl.
Mission failed: the girl freezes for a moment, comes to a complete stop. As Steph watches, the girl’s shoulders stiffen, and for the second time in ten seconds Steph thinks of a cat, though this time it is one that has been cornered, one that no longer feels safe.
Shit. Did she just fuck something up somehow?
And then the microwave pings, which makes them both jump.
“Sorry,” Steph says. “I, uh, didn’t mean to, um… I just came to borrow the cafetiere. I’m Steph. From…” Shit, what are the chances this girl knows about the basement? High, but not maxed out. “From downstairs,” she finishes, wincing at her inability to get through a greeting without making an idiot out of herself.
The girl turns around, slowly, and yeah, if she grew that chest all by herself, then Steph needs to borrow her genes for a while. Worse, she’s pretty, too, in a striking sort of way, with full lips and a sharp jawline. She also has a faded red line running the length of her hairline, and Steph’s been around the second years long enough to know what that means: this girl, whoever she is, had facial surgery fairly recently. Which (probably) explains the height, and (definitely) explains how she, like most people in this place, can without even meaning to make Steph feel ugly and—
Wait.
Hold the fuck on.
“Hi, Steph,” the girl says.
Her voice is soft. Deliberately so. It’s also deep and a little scratchy, with a quality that the part of Steph’s mind that’s been running in fucking circles ever since it recognised the girl’s eyes and the little horizontal scar on her left cheek picks up on it, imagines what that voice would sound like if it were shouting, if it were yelling, if it were attacking her in the bathroom annexe of the basement at Dorley Hall.
Steph is curiously aware of her heart.
This girl.
This woman.
She has a new name. Steph heard it. She heard a lot of other things, too, about rehabilitation, about what a hard time she had away from the hall, but she also heard the name, so why can’t she think of it? Bad manners, Steph. Bad fucking manners, to look up at the face of someone who tried to attack you, twice, and forget their new name.
She remembers the old one, though.
He was in that fucking shower room, down in the basement.
He was in the common room, boasting about the awful things he’d done.
And now he’s here, and Steph absolutely, definitely cannot stay.
The girl, whatever her name is, says something else, but Steph doesn’t stick around to hear whatever else she might say, because not only is the girl the boy who Steph hit in the face, months ago, but Stef is suddenly once again the boy who hit him.
* * *
Three bangs on her door are all the warning Frankie has. Someone’s going at her door all closed-fist, and that means, tediously, that something else is happening in this bloody place, and Frankie’s about to find out what the situation is and why anyone could possibly be deluded enough to think it could be improved by yanking her out of her little fingerprint-controlled, limited-access and very barely gilded cage.
It also means she has only a couple of seconds’ warning to pull the duvet around herself, because the selection of nighties they have at Dorley Hall, like most everything else here, is curated with an eye to the young and the attractive, and she’s been forced to go to sleep every evening in one of two nightgowns, both of which have cute animal patterns on, are cut low on the chest, and terminate at the mid-thigh. As a woman in her sixties, whose figure hasn’t so much faded as solidified, she’s been wondering if she can get them classed as a hate crime.
“I’m coming in,” Monica says from behind the opening door, and when she emerges, she’s got her hand over her eyes. “If I look, am I going to see anything wrinkly?”
“If you did,” Frankie says, “it’d do you good. What’s going on? Correction,” she adds as Monica takes a breath, “what’s going on that you need me for?”
“It’s Diana. She’s upset. Like, upset upset. I’m going right to her, but I stopped to get you because she needs friendly faces, and we’re the closest things she has around here. She’s in the kitchen on this floor; I’ll leave the locks open for you.” She removes her hand — slightly hesitantly — from her eyes and then, with an almost imperceptible sigh of relief, claps loudly and repeatedly, like she’s rousing a summer camp of eager teens and not, for example, a woman who could use another hour. “Up up up up up!”
“I’m up, I’m up. Jesus fucking Christ, what do they put in the coffee here?”
“Progesterone,” Monica says, and ducks back out.
They’ve all got to have a clever answer for everything, don’t they?
Still, she makes sure to move quickly, because Diana doesn’t deserve to have her first day here marred by whatever the hell is going on; or maybe she does, because she’s guilty, guilty like Frankie is, though with perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude less area of effect, but—
“Blah, blah, blah,” Frankie mutters to herself. She’ll give herself a bloody headache if she thinks too bloody hard this bloody early in the bloody morning. Morality is for idiots, anyway.
She throws off the duvet, arthritically climbs out of the cutesy nightie, and starts assembling a borderline-dignified outfit. Some of the things in her meagre closet are new, ordered online with the minimal stipend she’s been grudgingly granted, but most of it comes straight from the Dorley Hall dress-up box.
Frankie hates getting dressed in a hurry: it makes her elbows ache. Maybe she should have some of Monica’s progesterone coffee; actually, come to think of it, maybe she genuinely ought to inquire about tapping the hall’s HRT supply. Isn’t estrogen supposed to be good for your joints or something? She’ll ask Monica; for better or worse, the tall, energetic, neurotic girl has become Frankie’s in with the Dorley people.
She doesn’t bother with shoes, instead slipping her feet into a pair of adorable pink bunny slippers she hasn’t yet worn outside her room for fear of inspiring the kind of hysterical meltdown in one of the sponsors that might cause Frankie’s heart to stop from sheer irritated resentment. But fuck it; they’re comfortable, and the corridors here can get cold in January.
They always did. Some things never fucking change.
She lurches off down the corridor, through the door that normally bars her from accessing the third years and doing God knows what to them — terrifying them with the ravages of age, presumably — and around the corner. She sees Diana through the doorway as she approaches the kitchen: the girl has somehow made her impressive height seem insignificant as she gathers herself minuscule on one of the chairs around the table. She’s got her thighs together and her feet tucked under her — You’re welcome, Frankie thinks; it’s a lot more difficult to sit comfortably like that when the girl still has her balls — and she’s desultorily spooning cereal from a bowl.
“Mornin’, Di,” she says, entering the kitchen.
Diana, her face streaked with tears but still surgically perfect, even without makeup, smiles weakly at her and gives her a little wave, and Frankie once again feels a stab of regret that she never got to meet Declan; the real Declan, the one that was brought to Dorley Hall and subsequently rejected. She’s only ever known Diana as a near-mute, then as a quiet, forlorn creature, and very recently as a vibrant but badly wounded young woman, and there’s no amount of missing context that reading someone’s file can properly supply.
She can’t imagine the girl hurting a fly. Even though she knows what Declan did; even though she knows what Diana did, eventually, to Jake.
“I’ll put the kettle on, then, shall I?” Frankie says.
Monica’s sitting next to Diana, a hand on her shoulder, and that’s not a role Frankie needs to usurp, so she makes herself useful instead, brewing coffee and buttering toast. When she’s done and she’s settled herself at the table opposite Diana, the girl’s cheeks are almost dry.
“Tell me what happened,” Frankie says.
It’s funny listening to her talk. The Declan/Dina Frankie knew, when she spoke at all, used simple words and short sentences, and seemed always ready to retract them, but Diana converses like a bloody adult, with only the occasional incorrectly pronounced word to clue the listener in that this articulate young woman learned most everything she knows out of a book or off a screen.
Diana lays it all out, that Steph made her feel like him again, and worse, that Diana wants desperately to resent her for it, and Frankie gets it, she gets it all too bloody well, and when Monica offers to give Diana a bit of space, some time to think, Frankie seizes on the opportunity to kick shut the kitchen door and get some alone time with the poor young thing.
“Got something to say, Di,” Frankie says. “One pariah to another. You know what I did, don’t you? What I used to do? It’s all right, you don’t need the details. Long as you know roughly. Well it weighs on me, Di. Weighs on me like a ten-tonne bloody anvil. Love to pretend it doesn’t, but who am I fucking kidding, right?
“I came back here once before. Few years ago now. And I thought about killing myself. Just walking into that lake. For a few reasons. One, because I saw the girls here, the new girls, and it was like a bloody chasm opened up in front of me, a pit of all the corpses I’d helped create, all the girls I made who came to nothing, and I knew right then that even though I’ve known soldiers and killers, I had the bloodiest hands of anyone I’d ever met; me. Bloodier than anyone’s, bar Dorothy. Two, because I felt the pull of this place, like I feel it now. I didn’t just bury bodies here, Di — I actually didn’t bury them here at all, mostly, but you know what I mean — I buried habits, I left parts of me here I never wanted to see again, and all it took was to step onto the grounds and I could feel them all coming back. Same as I do now. And three, it would have been so easy. So fucking easy, Di. Like clicking off on the remote. A burst of static on the telly screen and then nothing. I craved it.” She sighs. “I really could have done it, Di, I really could.”
Frankie takes a long drink from her coffee, giving Diana time to absorb everything she’s said. The girl doesn’t move, but Frankie’s pretty sure she can see that fast-developing brain of hers working away behind those strikingly sharp eyes.
“You want to know why it’s good that I didn’t?” Frankie says eventually.
Diana nods.
“Because I’m here now,” Frankie says. “And that means I can help you. I can share information with Beatrice and the girls. Shit, I think I made a pal for life in Ollie. Or a grandson.” She snorts. “Granddaughter. Whatever. You know how it is with him, I expect. Kid needs an old lady to hold his hand now and then. I can do that. I might be able to do that better than anyone else here.
“Thing is, Di, I know I can’t unbury those bodies and make it right. I can’t undo any of the things I did. But I can hold someone’s hand when they’re hurting. That’s what I can do. You attacked Steph, yes?”
“Twice,” Diana whispers.
“Right. You should know, Di, that that’s never going away. Ever. Nor’s anything else. What I did, what you did. It’s all done. And some of the things we did, they’re permanent.
“Not all of them, though. You know, I was here when Val came through. After Dorothy murdered her parents, when she brought this scared little boy here. And I didn’t do jack to help her, Di. Fucking nothing. Not until she was being dragged off to Stenordale, and I had a sudden attack of conscience. Got her five minutes to say goodbye to her friend. You know what that was worth?” Frankie raps a knuckle on the table. “Fucking piss. Fucking nothing in the great scheme of things. But it was a little thing that was worth doing.
“And look at Val and me now! Twenty years ago, if you’d told me Val Barbier was alive and that I’d one day be in the same room as her again, I’d’ve wondered just how many times she was going to bloody well stab me. Fast-forward to today, though, and we’re— Well, okay, we’re maybe not friends, but we understand each other. We can help each other. And I know what you’re going to say, that we’ve barely seen each other this last week — or you would say that if you’d been here to see it — but that’s not my point. My point is, we didn’t get stuck as bitter enemies. We moved on. Mainly through mutual hatred and a lot of wine, but we did. And you’ll get there with Steph. Probably a lot sooner, and with a better outcome, because all you did was try to hit her a couple of times.”
“You don’t get it,” Diana says. “She saw me like— like I was Declan. Like I was still him. It scares me, because I know how easily I could be him. And it makes me feel like people can still see him.”
Frankie leans on the table. “No, I do get it,” she says. “Honest. You remember Maria?”
“Aaron’s sponsor. Shit! Bethany’s sponsor.” She corrects herself with a little pinched frown, frustrated that she’s not instantly perfect at the new names and faces that are par for the course around here. “That’s what I meant.”
“Yeah, and doesn’t she seem nice? Soft spoken, kind, and she’s done wonders with someone who was, I have it on good authority, a little shit when she got here. And worse.” Diana nods, reluctantly agreeing with the assessment. Frankie gives it a beat or two. Sips her coffee. She wants her point to make an impact. “First day we got here, Maria attacked me. With a knife.”
Diana’s eyes go wide. “With a knife?”
“Yeah. Proper kitchen knife. Because she was here in the old times, just like Val. And Maria had it rough. She was too difficult to break, even after Dorothy killed her family, just like she killed Val’s. But they kept trying to break her, and it got worse and worse. And all the time, I was there, too. Working for Dorothy. Maria wasn’t mine, but I was there. I was part of it. When she got hurt, when she got cut, when she got tied up and put in the dark, yeah, I was often there.” She shakes her head. “That girl,” she mutters, “the things she’s survived… You know some of it, Di, but she… she survived years of it.
“So,” Frankie continues, forcing herself out of the distant past, “she came for me, as was her right, and I would have let her cut me. I would have let her do it. I think I would, anyway.” She shakes her head. “I would have let her carve me up. People need closure, Di. If they’re going to be around you, if you’re going to be in their lives, even a little bit, they need to shut the book on what you did to them. So the girl, Steph, she needs to confront you, and whether she’s going to hit you in the face or forgive you, she needs to choose it for herself.”
“She needs to… hit me?”
“Whatever she needs to do. Like I said: you can’t unbury a body — except literally, I suppose — but a harsh word? A fight? You can get past those. Steph gets to decide how, though, and to do that, she needs to be able to confront you in an environment where she feels safe. Not here—” Frankie makes a show of looking around, “—in a cramped kitchen, alone with you.”
“Because she’s scared of me,” Diana says flatly.
“Yes. But she’ll get over it. Question is, are you scared of her?”
“No. Not really. I’m scared of what she thinks of me, but—”
“She can think about you anywhere, Di,” Frankie says. “But she can’t resolve her feelings without you in the room. So let her get it out of her system. Whatever she needs. Okay?”
Diana hesitates, and then nods. “Okay.”
“Good.” Tapping on Diana’s empty bowl, Frankie adds, “I didn’t think of you as a Weetabix girl.”
“We have it at home,” Diana says, shrugging. “It’s nice with brown sugar and hot milk.”
* * *
Hmm. No Steph.
Steph’s warm!
Miss Steph.
Need Steph.
Find Steph?
Bethany reaches sleepily for her phone, which she habitually leaves on the bedside table — always in the same place, whether it’s her room or Steph’s — and when her hand doesn’t slap immediately into concrete she concludes, okay, fine, this is her room, not Steph’s, but then her hand doesn’t come down on the bedside table, just on…
…more bed.
She feels around with her hand some more, and finds only bed. Acres and fucking acres of it.
What the fuck?
Bethany sits up, momentarily panicked, and quickly looks around, trying to get her bearings: the walls are too damn far away, they’re not concrete, and they aren’t marked by stains she tries not to think about; the bed is a large double, the size of her parents’ bed and possibly the largest thing she’s ever slept in; and the window—
The window exists.
Fucksake.
She’s upstairs. In Steph’s other bedroom. The nice one, the one Steph got for being the best, first and only trans girl in the basement; Will — possibly — aside.
She flops back down onto the pillow, exhausted by her sudden burst of energy. Feeling dumb about it, too, she guesses, but how was her subconscious supposed to remember she finally spent a night above ground? It’s having enough trouble remembering she’s supposed to be a girl now, and that’s something she does every single day.
Finding her phone, much farther away than usual, she flicks away at the screen, checking the time, checking to see if she has any messages. Steph hasn’t left a note in their private channel, so she probably plans this to be a short outing. She’ll be back. Possibly with coffee.
Good. It’s weird being up here without her.
Bethany groans at herself. How is she so pathetically dependent? Steph leaves the room for ten minutes and all she can do is whine at the door, waiting for it to open?
Oh well. If she’s dependent, she’s dependent. She can work on self-reliance at the same time she works on the girl stuff. And maybe a bit of dependence is good, actually?
Bethany discards her phone, rolls out of bed, and immediately starts shivering. She’s only wearing a tank top and a pair of shorts. Weird for it to be colder up here than it is in the concrete basement, though.
Ah: window’s open a crack. Cold air’s streaming in, mingling with the warmth from the radiator. Bethany goes to close the window, and stops.
Hand on the sill. Feels important. Strangely new. Except it is, isn’t it? Something so mundane, and this is the first time Bethany has ever done it.
Feels almost sacred.
The sounds of life from outside the building, of voices somewhere down there. And Bethany’s breath, faint in the infiltrating cold, misting around her face.
She doesn’t shut the window. Instead she leans on the sill and looks down, finds the girls who are talking. Walking on grass, heading for the lake, dressed for warmth. She watches them until they disappear out of sight, the murmur of their voices long gone.
Bethany doesn’t know them. She doesn’t need to know them to be happy for them.
Closing the window, she’s surprised to find herself crying, but it makes sense, it makes perfect sense on this perfect Sunday morning.
Aaron never had a place in the world. He was like a misshapen jigsaw piece, moved around by his family, by the school, and even by himself, always an imperfect match. He wasn’t the son anyone wanted; he wasn’t like the other boys at school; and here, at the university, he bucked and shifted and never found comfort. Just new ways to hurt people. New ways to make himself alone.
Bethany… She fits. She fits almost too well; struggles to function on her own. The opposite of how she once was.
And that leads unavoidably to thoughts of Steph. Steph, who also seemed never to fit, not until she came here and slotted so perfectly into the machinery of Dorley Hall that some sponsors even defer to her opinion. Bethany still remembers when she first saw it, when she first started to understand who Steph was, who she could be, who she will be: it was the day after she — after Aaron — finally emerged from his room after days and days of desperate self-pity, only to find this radiant creature reaching out for him. And giggling at him, fetching him a clean toothbrush.
Steph fits; Bethany fits.
Though she’s not altogether certain what the girl, Bethany, does when she wakes alone in a plain yet comfortable room, with her girlfriend away.
Maybe she washes her face. That’ll do for a start.
* * *
She’s making new memories. Monica’s initially reluctant to perform the estradiol injection, suggesting that Diana do it herself, but Diana insists. She doesn’t tell Monica why. But when Monica has her sit on the bed and roll sideways, Diana twists so she can watch, and as Monica works, Diana wallpapers over Declan’s bullshit fear of needles and the idiot bravado with which he approached every prior injection administered by Monica.
This is a good thing. This is something she needs. This is something she wants. Not everything is a battle. Sometimes a needle is just a fucking needle.
She still doesn’t want to take her progesterone, though.
“You can leave the progesterone until tonight,” Monica says as she makes the needle safe, “but you have to do it every night. Sorry. I’ll leave you a box of gloves and some lube so it’s easy.”
“Monica,” Diana says, “I have never willingly put anything up my own arse.”
“Yeah, well, you never wore a skirt before, either.”
Monica’s sharp intake of breath suggests that she’s wondering if she just crossed a line, if drawing attention to Diana’s recent gender history in such a lighthearted fashion is inappropriate, so Diana laughs to let her off the hook. She’s not sure she’s quite there yet, but she envies the ease with which the women here joke about their lives. While she was making breakfast, she found a mug on the draining rack with a tacky picture of a woman printed on the side, along with the text, She was a dancing queen, young and sweet and an abductee. She looked at it for a very long time, with Declan beating against the walls of her mind, her every instinct insisting on her outrage, her disgust. So she made herself laugh at it.
And then Steph.
After that, after she cried herself dry, Frankie and Monica took her to a storage room and let her play for a while. It was the right decision: if there’s one thing about being Diana that she’s learned she loves without equivalence or hesitation, it’s the clothes. She can choose colours! She can choose soft fabrics! She can sheath her legs in cotton and wrap her chest in silk! And though her eventual choices for an outfit today were more conservative than some of the things she found, she earned a pair of raised eyebrows from Frankie and a delighted little clap from Monica.
Injection complete — and with the requirement to shove progesterone up her backside relegated thankfully to bedtime — Diana pulls her skirt back up and belts it tight, taking a moment to fuss over the wine-coloured sweater so it doesn’t crease up under the belt. With Chiamaka’s advice for dressing herself firmly forward in her mind — dress for your shape and dress for the impression you want to make — Diana picked out the sweater along with a navy blue pencil skirt and a pair of beautiful boots she wasn’t sure she would have been able to say no to even if she wanted to. She’ll never be a petite girl — nor even average-size, like Stephanie — but neither is Chia, and a week in her company, paying attention to how she dresses and carries herself, has given Diana a good idea of how to dress to emphasise her assets.
Hence the clinging sweater; hence the pencil skirt and the belt. Like Chiamaka said, her chest is proportioned such that it makes her waist look dainty by sheer force of perspective.
“So,” Monica says, “Diana.” She’s picking at her lower lip with a finger, strangely nervous. “Aunt Bea would like to see you. She took pains to remind me that Valérie will be present, and suggested you bring both myself and Frankie to advocate for you. If you’d like to go right now, that’s fine, we can do that, but…”
Diana, now perched on the end of the bed with her legs crossed at the ankles, can see where this is going, mostly because she saw it on one of Chiamaka’s granddaughters just a few days ago. “Yes?”
“You can tell me to shut up if you want, but I brought some things from my room, stuff I haven’t used yet, so it’s clean, and, um, well…” Monica’s looking every which way but at Diana. “Would you like me to do your makeup?”
“Yes,” Diana says without hesitation. “I would love that.”
More new memories.
* * *
She loves a new room. A new bed. New pillows. New sheets. New sensations; especially when they crinkle just so. Shahida’s revelling in this, in waking in a new place, and that’s before she even starts thinking about who she’s sandwiched between.
Abby on her left and Melissa on her right.
Melissa’s bedroom is nothing like her room back at the hall. The rooms there are nice, and the room Shahida and Melissa have been sharing, have gradually made their own, is like a little apartment unto itself: a bed and a wardrobe and a TV and couches and even a bathroom, all slotted neatly into place. But Melissa’s bedroom here is nothing but a bedroom, which feels palatial but strangely empty. She has a freestanding wardrobe and a freestanding mirror—and no art or photos on the walls, because this place is a rental—and floor-to-ceiling windows shuttered with thin vertical blinds that barely restrict the daylight at all. It could be wonderful; Shahida wants to buy this place, wants to redesign it, build cubbyholes into its corners, build an elevated reading nook into the vast amounts of empty vertical space. It screams ‘wasted potential’. High ceilings for the sake of it.
Abby and Melissa are both coming round, too. It’s not a surprise: Melissa’s bedroom is so full of morning sunlight it’s like a natural alarm clock. One she can’t ever turn off.
“Morning,” Abby murmurs, rolling over and kissing Shahida shyly on her shoulder. Shahida smiles at her, raising a delighted eyebrow, revelling in the newness of this, the simple joy of it.
She gets to have them both. And they both get to have her, but then, Shahida’s always had herself, and the dumb bitch has made some bad decisions over the years, so that’s the part of the equation she’s naturally less excited about.
“Oh my God,” Melissa says, hiking the duvet up to her throat. “Did we…?”
Shahida shrugs. “We sort of did,” she says.
“It was a bit messy,” Abby says.
“Sorry,” Melissa says. “I’m, um, out of practice, so—”
She’s interrupted by Abby: “Messy’s good. Do you want to be perfect at threesome stuff first time? Where’s the fun in that?”
Nodding seriously, Shahida adds, “I’m looking forward to iterating on our first experimental findings.”
“Oh my God,” Melissa says again. “If I hide all the way under the duvet, do you promise not to look for me?”
“No,” Shahida says. “Hey, who wants coffee?”
“The crucial question,” Abby says, her eye on Melissa, who is still cowering mostly under the sheets, “is which one of us gets up and makes the coffee?”
Shahida taps herself on her chest. “Not it. Hey, Em, are you still under there? Do you want coffee? You don’t need to be so shy.”
“I don’t think so many people have simultaneously seen me naked since I was in the basement,” Melissa says.
“They don’t get you naked for surgery?” Shahida asks, frowning.
“There are gowns,” Abby says. “Have you never had surgery before?”
“Nope. I’m incredibly structurally sound, generally.”
“Neither of you,” Melissa says, “is taking my mortification seriously.”
“Kiss it better?” Abby suggests.
“Steph is going to scream,” Shahida says, “you know that, right? She’s going to be so happy for us.”
Abby laughs. “I just realised,” she says, “we just settled probably a dozen bets back at Dorley Hall.”
Sitting up, the duvet still gathered almost up to her eyes, Melissa says, “I can never show my face there ever again.” She’s only a little bit muffled.
“You’re planning on taking the duvet with you, then?” Shahida says, leaning over, pulling down a section, and kissing Melissa on her barely exposed shoulder, the way Abby did to her.
“None of this,” Abby says, “is getting me my coffee.”
“It’s still not going to be me who makes it.”
“Okay, hear me out: we order coffee, and maybe muffins, too, and then only one of us has to get out of bed, and only for long enough to bring it all back in here.”
“You’re a genius,” Shahida says. “Incredible work.”
“These are the organisational skills I bring to the polycule,” Abby says.
“We’re a polycule? Huh. I suppose we are.”
“Um,” Melissa says, “what’s a polycule?”
“You really don’t know?” Abby asks. “This isn’t a bit?”
“I’ve heard the word. I just… I don’t know. Never asked.”
“Abby,” Shahida says, “what are you teaching girls in that programme of yours?”
Abby counts on her fingers. “Fashion, lying, novelty mug design, and nothing else.”
* * *
Diana always thought the interior of Dorley Hall would be more orderly, more gridlike: with the layout of the basement being such a clearly designed thing, she expected the rest of the building to be just as modern, just as intentional.
But it’s a maze.
She murmurs as much to Frankie as they wind through the hallways to what Monica calls the back stairs — apparently so they can avoid rubbernecking second years on their way to Aunt Bea’s flat — and Frankie just shrugs.
“Old buildings, innit,” she says, as if that means anything. Stenordale was laid out almost like an office building internally, and while there were a lot of rooms, they were positioned quite mundanely. Diana’s one other opportunity to look inside a grand old building of similar apparent vintage to Dorley Hall was at school, and Dad wouldn’t sign the permission slip, and Declan was on a run of detentions and restricted lunches anyway, so he didn’t get to go. From what she remembers overhearing the next day, the overriding impression of the National Trust stately home was that it was ‘old’.
Ugh. Her various genders are, at this point, just getting confusing. Especially here, where Declan feels more present in her memories than ever.
The back stairs connect via another winding hallway to a door that spits the three of them out in the middle of… somewhere else. How does Monica keep the layout of this place straight in her head? It seems so random! From somewhere down the hall, Diana can hear talking, interspersed with laughter, from voices that are feminine if not always entirely female-sounding; second years? She listens closer, interested: there’s one of them who sounds high-pitched but strained, and whose voice seems to descend into her chest when she laughs; there’s another whose voice is more measured and consistent, remaining at a pitch similar to Chiamaka’s usual tone, but with less variation, almost as if the speaker has yet to regain all her former expressiveness with her new voice.
They both have a quality to their voices that reminds Diana of the music teacher at school, the one who often segued directly from spoken word to song; there’s something about the way they’re speaking that positions their voices right in the middle of that transition away from normal speech.
Is voice training like learning to sing?
God, she hopes it is. Declan always wanted to learn to sing. Another secret he held so close to the hot, terrified centre of himself that it fucking curdled.
Declan, Diana decides for approximately the thousandth time, was a fucking idiot.
“We’re here,” Monica says quietly, and glances at Diana for— What? Approval? Permission? Diana nods, hoping that’s the right response in this situation, and Monica opens the door to Aunt Bea’s office.
It’s her flat as well, Diana knows. Monica told her: business gets conducted in the first room; the rest is solely for Beatrice.
(Be-a-trice; it’s a good name, a name with rhythm. Diana’s decided she won’t be ‘Aunt Bea’; too blunt.)
Inside, Diana finds a room drenched in sunlight, so much so that after the gloom of the hallway she has to shield her eyes and blink away the afterglow, and the effect is such that when finally she can see well enough again to make out Beatrice, sitting at her ominously large desk, hands clasped and resting on its surface, the details of her come in gradually, piece by piece, like a painting in progress.
Long fingers, tipped with clear-coated nails, delicately shaped but worn short, like Chia’s granddaughters do. Hair that seems almost silver in the light, but which reveals itself to be blonde, and dyed that way, judging by the roots. And a sharp nose, strong jaw and pale white skin, all of which she remembers as Declan did: facing him down on almost his final night here, judging him, condemning him. Pitying him.
Today, though, she wears soft makeup, a casual and sunflower-yellow t-shirt, and a smile.
It’s Valérie who speaks first, startling Diana, for she hadn’t even noticed her, standing as she is in stark shadow, out of the blinding light.
“Diana,” she says, wielding her name the way Declan might have, but with more compassion, more interest. “It is good to see you.”
“Alright, Val?” Frankie says from behind Diana.
“Diana,” Beatrice says, and the way she says it is different too, more like Diana imagines a doctor might preface bad news: with care and regret. “Won’t you please sit?”
Moving stiffly, inhibited by the presence of so many people, so many who know her, who can see her whole self, her history, the things she has said and done which cause her to retch, Diana sits.
Under Beatrice’s gaze, she waits.
Again, Valérie is the first to speak. This time she approaches Beatrice’s desk, enters the light, and places her hands on the wood. She leans down, almost like she’s bowing in supplication. “I am sorry, Diana,” she says. “I should have helped you. I saw in you something that was no longer there, and I punished you for it.”
In her eyes, sincerity. But she should be like Maria with Frankie; she knows everything. She should have a knife.
Diana might submit.
“Don’t say sorry,” Diana says. Her voice is guttural. It scrapes heavily across her tongue. “Don’t. I wasn’t… someone who deserved help.”
“Everyone deserves help,” Monica says. Diana doesn’t look round, but she sounds like she’s standing with Frankie, right behind Diana. Like an honour guard. Or just like a guard.
“I didn’t. Maybe I still don’t. I’m grateful for it,” she adds quickly, “but it’s—” And she has to cough, to cover her mouth, because she’s staining this fucking room with her presence, with her voice, and the effort of holding herself stiff is deepening her voice further, robbing her of the soft affect she’s tried so hard to cultivate. And she’s big, too fucking big, comically so, it suddenly seems, around these kind, feminine—
There’s a scraping sound, immediate and too loud, and it forces all of them to look, Diana included. She expects it to be Frankie, dragging a chair over and obliterating the whole world with her studied insouciance and measured vulgarity as usual, but it’s Monica, and when she deposits it heavily right next to Diana and sits, Diana is still too consumed by herself to have even a chance of preventing what comes next.
Monica holds her hand. Takes it between both of hers, raises it onto the desk where Beatrice’s hands lie clasped and Valérie still rests on hers.
Declan always felt he had huge hands. Powerful, abrupt, just another part of him turned toward violence by nature and nurture both; wielded gleefully. And Diana’s have slimmed a little, yes, and have been decorated with colours at the tips and jewellery at the wrist, but she’s been hiding them as much as she can. At home, at Chiamaka’s, at the front desk, when Diana’s voice gives her away, people always look down at her hands.
Her hand in Monica’s. Almost the same size. Almost the same shape. And Monica’s are unadorned today, but in Declan’s memories there are times when she wore her nails in pinks and oranges and reds, and did Declan ever properly look at Monica’s hands? Did Declan ever find them revolting, the way Diana does hers?
Did Declan ever really think about them at all?
“It’s okay, Diana,” Monica’s saying, quiet and insistent.
Eyes flickering across the desk to Beatrice’s hands. Not all that different either.
Monster, Declan reminds her.
Fuck off, Diana suggests.
“Valérie,” Diana says, and she delights in the minutely raised eyebrow that is Valérie’s only reaction to her name being pronounced — as far as Diana knows — precisely correctly, “you don’t need to apologise.” It’s easier to speak now, easier to find her softer voice, her compromise between ambition and ability. “I know what happened to you. I would not ask you to treat someone who has done the things I’ve done with generosity.”
There she goes again, talking like a newspaper. Chiamaka ribs her about it sometimes, and every time it’s a victory: Chiamaka never heard how Declan spoke.
“Nevertheless,” Valérie says, “I would like to start again with you.”
“And with that,” Beatrice says, inserting herself before Diana can reply with anything more than a smile, “Valérie has summarised the aim of this session. Diana, I regret sending you away. Not only because of what was done to you, and not only because of what would have been done to you absent Dorothy Marsden’s interference.”
Diana winces. Yeah, she doesn’t really know the details of that, only that the woman, the backer for this place, has a use for the men who are too repulsive for rehabilitation. ‘To be irredeemable is a tool in itself,’ she remembers Aunt Bea telling her, in icy tones out of a throat held tight. ‘You will learn to make yourself useful.’
“I regret it,” Beatrice continues, “because I should have looked deeper. I made… an emotional decision.”
“Aunt Bea—” Monica protests.
“A decision based on the established tenets of the programme, yes, absolutely,” Beatrice says, nodding curtly toward Monica, “but we have bent and broken our own rules before. We re-evaluate them all the time. I’m starting to feel that every time we do not, we have failed someone.”
“Aunt Bea,” Diana says, spitting her name ugly because that’s what’s needed right now. “I’m guilty. I did what I did. To Tracy. I know it. I knew it was wrong as I did it. I knew I was taking from her. Hurting her. I drew strength from it. I… built her pain into the… the myth of me. I’m guilty, Aunt Bea.”
“Diana…”
“I didn’t need to be taught right from wrong. I didn’t need to be shown the error of my ways. I needed to understand how pointless it all was. How irrelevant. With respect, Beatrice, I do not think you would have taught me that here. I don’t think you could have.”
“You did not deserve what happened to you.”
Diana shrugs. “I’m trying not to think about it like that any more. If I think about what I deserve… then I might never take another breath. What I think is…” She closes her eyes, assembles her thoughts. “I was a lost cause. I needed to be dealt with.”
“That is very carceral thinking, Diana,” Beatrice says. To Diana’s frown — and ignoring Monica’s surprised snort — she explains, “Justifying imprisonment as punishment and not rehabilitation. Imprisonment for its own sake, as its own end.”
“I don’t mean…” Fuck. What does she mean? Why is it so hard to think about this? Why is it so difficult to find a way through? Beatrice and Valérie, they seem intent on absolving her, absolving Declan, and she won’t have that; she can’t.
So how does she justify herself at all?
Why is she even here? Why didn’t she take the hormones and run?
What was it Frankie said?
Right.
She opens her eyes. Meets Beatrice’s gaze directly. Wonders if she might wither in it. For there is knowledge there, and where there is knowledge, there is judgement. Beatrice is surely running up against her instincts, and Diana would lay bets her instincts say rapists should be disposed of.
Diana agrees.
“I should have died,” she says softly. “But I didn’t. I was brutalised and I was raped and I knew there would be no end to it. And it was like death. And that’s what I would like to believe. Because it would be comforting. Declan died; Diana lives. But I don’t get to die. Maybe I don’t deserve it. Maybe dying would be easy. Dying would mean that I don’t see Jake in my dreams. It would mean I don’t see Tracy in them. It would mean I would stop remembering what I did to her.”
“We have few innocents here, Diana,” Beatrice says. “Very few. We cannot create them.”
“Yes,” Diana says. She takes the moment they all allow her to organise her thoughts again, so they can spill out, one by one, to be counted. “It’s not about innocence,” she continues. “It’s about not doing it again. But it’s more than that.” Again, they wait for her. “Fuck, this is hard to say,” she mutters, her spoken persona — one-third Chiamaka, two-thirds simply the woman she wants to be, someone admirable and articulate — failing her. “It’s about stopping it,” she says. “That’s what I want to do. I don’t just want to be good or whatever the fuck, I don’t want to walk away, I don’t want to hide from it, I want— Shit.” She can’t say it. It’s too difficult, too big. Too presumptuous. “All the shit I did? All the shit I would have gone on to do? I want— I need to push back against it. I need to do everything I can to stop it, to save people from it.” She glares at Beatrice. “I never want to stop hating myself. Hating Declan. I never want to forgive myself. The guilt is mine. I want to… I want to use it.”
“Are you saying,” Beatrice says, “that you would like to… help?”
Diana collects herself. She’s Diana, she’s the woman she made out of nothing; she’s the end of Declan, not just his opposite. Why did she come here? Truly? Why did she stay?
Because there’s got to be a point to all this.
“Yes,” she says.
2004 October 31
Sunday
Difficult to resent Little Adam when he’s on your knee.
It’s Halloween, and most of the others are out, down in Newcastle, picketing. Seth wanted to go, but there’s a rota: someone who is trusted and who is of age must stay behind to supervise the children. And, spoken only in whispers, to supervise those who are not trusted. So Seth is here in the living room of the farmhouse, the place where Father Adam lives, watching over the children.
Watching over little Adam. And though he is undoubtedly the future of the church, of the nation, he is also enthralled with his picture book, and with the childish stories Seth’s reading him.
Mum’s here, too. One of those who are no longer trusted. Making herself useful: preparing a meal for the others, who will be tired and hungry when they return. But it’s all in the oven now, so she says, and she’s leaning against the doorjamb, smiling at Seth.
At Seth and at the future of the church.
Seth reads and Adam recites the parts he knows, and sometimes Adam sucks on his own finger and sometimes he sucks on Seth’s. At Mum’s direction, he bounces Adam gently on his knee, and when Adam starts to tire, Seth carries him to the blankets in the corner and wraps him up.
“They’re so sweet at that age,” Mum says. “Just a couple of years younger and they’re despicable little bastards, and a couple of years older and they’re starting to think they know it all already, but— Oh, sorry, Seth,” she adds, noticing his frown. “They never did quite get me to stop swearing.”
Seth shrugs it off. He follows her back into the kitchen, making sure he can still see Adam’s corner from where he stands.
“Was I like that when I was four?” he asks.
“No,” his mother says, leaning over to check on the pots on the stove, “you were sweeter. Like butter wouldn’t melt.” She looks up, smiling sadly. “You still can be sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, wincing as he remembers the last time he shouted at her; just two days ago, after she was censured — again. “But Mum—”
“I know, I know.” She waves a hand at him, dismissing his apology. “You are what they made you. I know.” And then she looks past him, through the door. “Still, I suppose you’re lucky, in a way. Better off than him. It’s not fair, what’s going to happen to him.”
Seth looks around. There’s no-one else there, so she must mean little Adam, but what could possibly be unfair in Adam’s future? He’ll inherit the nation; the world. “What do you mean?” he asks, turning back to see his mother leaning against the counter, worrying at her lip. “What’s going to happen to Adam?”
“He’ll be the Voice of God.”
2020 January 12
Sunday
“Stupid. Stupid! I’m so fucking stupid. ‘Oh, hey, what’s up, new girl? Oh, you’re Diana, the traumatised girl who spent months being actually tortured while I was complaining about the Weetabix? Oh, how about I act like you’re the devil himself and run the fuck away?’ Stupid boy. Stupid idiot fuckwit boy!”
She kicks a cardboard box. It doesn’t go flying across the room in a satisfying arc; it comes apart and sags limply to the floor, defeated by wind resistance, by physics, and by the fact that Steph can’t kick for shit.
“Where do I think I fucking am? Would she even be here, wandering around, microwaving her cereal, if she wasn’t fucking safe? What’s wrong with me?”
She tries kicking another one and misses entirely. So she gives up on the whole catharsis-by-cardboard-violence thing and sits heavily on the bare mattress.
She’s unlocked a random second-floor room, one of the ones on the other corridor, one of the ones that are all empty and serve variously as storerooms, emergency bedrooms for unexpected guests, and repositories for all the hall’s empty boxes. And she’s been ranting at its bare walls for what seems like hours.
So fucking stupid. Why wasn’t she more careful? More thoughtful? Diana’s at a delicate point in her development; she might be regressing right now! Because of Steph! So what if she used to be Declan? Bethany used to be someone else, too, and Steph rarely sleeps alone any more.
“Idiot,” she mutters, and kicks at nothing.
“Knock knock,” someone says, accompanying their words with quick taps on the half-open door. Steph looks up from where she’s been contemplating her latest failed attempt to exact proxy revenge on wilted cardboard to find Edy smiling at her, leaning cautiously around the doorjamb like someone checking in on an excitable zoo animal.
Consciously unhunching her shoulders, Steph says, “Hi.”
“You need to talk?”
“Not really.”
“Well,” Edy says, rounding the door and sitting herself on the mattress, “tough. You’re going to.”
“Ah,” Steph says, “this must be some of that patented Dorley Hall torture.”
Edy wraps her in a hug. “Yes,” she says. “Do not resist.”
* * *
Tabitha said he might see Diana today. And, unfortunately, he knows exactly what that means: the prodigal bastard son’s come back as a reportedly beautiful woman, and so Leigh must pay close attention to his appearance for the first time since his abortive excursions into his mother’s closet, and that fucking hurts. Because, as he examines himself in his wardrobe mirror, he knows he’s not ready.
He can’t be Diana’s distorted mirror; he just can’t. But he also can’t escape it.
Too tall — almost as tall as Declan.
Features too squared-off — almost like Declan’s.
Still too thick around the stomach, too firm in the places he should be soft — almost like fucking Declan.
Diana got away from it all, and here he is embodying it. And not just physically.
Fuck.
He shouldn’t envy her. Not according to Tabitha. It wasn’t a shortcut she took; it was a descent into deprivation and depravity, and it’s a miracle she’s come out of it alive, let alone functional. Though Leigh would dispute, if Diana is as articulate and kind as Tabitha said she’s been told he is, that anything of Declan came out of it at all. It sounds like the kind of experience that would murder someone, that would inspire someone else to rise up in an empty mind.
He hasn’t said that, though. He used to say that about the programme; he doesn’t want to be a broken record. And what does he know about that shit, anyway?
Turning in the mirror, examining his profile, he wonders what he will look like when this is all done with, when he’s had done all the things Diana’s had done. It’s something he’s been allowing himself to toy with just recently: the hope, however far-fetched, that he can seem normal, that he can perhaps even be attractive, when he graduates. And though Tab provides a lot of justification for that hope — she’s not exactly super built but she is fit and tall and beautiful and she has a boyfriend — Leigh never met her while she was… whoever she was before. He doesn’t know what she used to look like, how she used to carry herself. But Diana? Leigh remembers Declan very clearly. If Diana can make it, maybe he can, too.
Hope, nurtured long enough, becomes belief. And it would be so nice to believe in something, every once in a while.
Eventually decides: fuck it. He’d feel worse trying to dress up and inevitably failing at it than otherwise, so he’ll dress the way he usually does when he visits the first basement, and he’ll throw a hoodie over it all like always. Yes, the sports bras Tabitha has him wearing have a tendency to show off what he has up top, which is essentially nothing right now, but they’re sports bras; they’re supposed to flatten you out. He feels less uncomfortable wearing one than he does going without, these days.
He won’t be meeting Tab until later, but he’s hungry, so he might as well get out of his room; at least he can get some late breakfast.
Adam’s room is silent as he passes, the way it always is. Edy said she wanted to talk to him about Adam, him and Steph, though what she expects either of them to do, Leigh doesn’t know. Whatever; Leigh puts Adam out of his mind, quickly relieves himself and washes his face in the annexe, and then enters the common room straight from the bathroom, where the remaining confirmed-still-boys and their sponsors have already congregated: Raph’s there, eating a bowl of cereal at one of the metal tables with Jane; Martin and Pamela are talking quietly on the couch by the door; Ollie and Harmony are positioned on the other couches, the ones by the TV, and Ollie is holding court.
“Maria,” he’s saying, “the little shit’s sponsor. She can’t be—”
“Yep,” Raph says.
“Fuck off. No way!”
“He’s right,” Jane says. “She is.”
“What about the God girl, the one with the cross? She can’t be.”
“She is,” Harmony says. “I told you—”
“What’s going on?” Leigh asks, helping himself to the impromptu breakfast bar someone set up on one of the tables. Huh; they rate metal cutlery again.
“Full disclosure,” Jane says, nodding her head in Ollie’s direction.
Leigh sits down at Raph and Jane’s table with his cornflakes. “How’s he taking it?”
Jane just points.
“Even Aunt Bea?” Ollie says, and Jane has to cover her mouth. “She was never a man, was she?”
“Yeah,” Leigh calls, “even her.” He has to admit, that realisation, when he came to it, made his head spin. But only for a few moments, after which everything about this place suddenly made perfect sense.
“Fucksake. Okay,” Ollie adds, rearranging himself on the couch to better project to the entire room, “so who didn’t used to be a man? What about Frankie?”
“Frankie,” Jane says, “was always a woman. Tragic L for womanhood, really.”
“Oh.” Ollie sinks back into the couch cushions again, frowning. “But everyone else?”
“Yeah,” Raph says. “Everyone else. That’s how they know it works. Trust the process, man.”
“Oh, fuck off, man,” Ollie says, showing Raph his middle finger.
Raph meets Leigh’s eyes and they share a smile, and shit, that’s new. The ground seems to shift under Leigh’s feet; since when was Raph, of all people, so… normal?
And how exactly is Leigh defining normal right now?
But then Raph whispers something to Jane, and she laughs, and Leigh gets it. Yeah. Of course. Sisters already. Looking around the room, Leigh takes them all in: Jane with Raph; Harmony with Ollie; Pamela with Martin. And Leigh with Tabitha; Bethany with Maria. Edy, the God girl, with Adam, the God guy. Almost like they were matched with the woman most likely to reach them, to find common ground with them, to get them through this.
Almost like they planned it all from the start.
Steph with Pippa feels like the odd one out, but Steph was always the odd one out anyway. Leigh wonders what it says about Monica that it was she who had Declan.
Hell, what does it say about Tabitha that she got stuck with him?
* * *
Edy set her up with some proper coffee from the machine downstairs and some pastries, and Steph’s now taking it all back to her room on a wooden tray Edy kindly provided. Edy’s also promised to bring the second years a spare cafetiere from downstairs and supervise the cleanup, which leaves Steph no other task but to return to her room, over an hour late, with an apology and some coffee in the usual horrifyingly inappropriate mugs.
When she opens the door, though, she can’t find Bethany. She’s not in bed, and it doesn’t sound like she’s in the bathroom. Putting the tray down on the bedside table, she looks around the room and eventually finds Bethany crouched half-in and half-out of Steph’s large wardrobe, wearing only her underwear and guiltily holding one of Steph’s lacier bras, looking for all the world like Gollum, caught trying to steal the One Ring.
“Uh,” Bethany says, holding the bra up over her chest, “it’s not what it looks like.”
* * *
Melissa’s flat came with a glass dining table that she’s basically never used. Normally she keeps it shoved against the wall in the main room, covered in random crap — mail, books, various devices when they’re not in use and need somewhere stable to charge — but someone has pulled it out from the wall, tidied up all the rubbish that was on top, and set it with table mats she didn’t even know she had. Worse, she doesn’t know whether to suspect Shahida or Abby, because they’re both, in slightly different ways, equally likely to do such a thing.
“Ta-da,” Shahida says as Melissa stands unsteadily in the doorway. “Lunch!”
“Late lunch,” Abby clarifies.
Squinting, Melissa tries to focus on the contents of the plates they’ve laid out. “Where did you even find food?” she asks, accepting the hand Abby offers and trying to stiffen her arm so it’s not obvious that she’s shaking a little.
And then she stops trying to hide it and takes the damn help, allowing Abby to keep her steady as she wobbles her way across the room and into a seat. Both of them have known her long enough to know that she sometimes gets the shakes in the morning, especially when she hasn’t eaten anything yet that day and little the day before; double especially when she’s been stressed.
Although she can’t exactly say the last day or so have been stressful. Exciting, perhaps. Unexpected, definitely.
“Well,” Abby says, sitting down next to her and releasing her hand, “there’s nothing in your fridge, as you well know, so—”
“We stole your keys,” Shahida says, taking the seat on Abby’s other side, “after you fell back to sleep. And went shopping!”
“I do like to finish sentences sometimes, Shahida,” Abby says. She turns back to Melissa and adds, “Oh, and we stocked your freezer and threw out all your shakes.”
Shahida spears some broccoli with her fork. “Don’t worry; it’s all ready-to-cook stuff. Just throw it in the oven and eat.”
“You’re not going to have to learn, like, recipes, or anything,” Abby says.
“I’d stay,” Shahida says, “and make sure you eat, but Abs and I agreed that since she has to go back down south for work, we should wait to re-consummate our new relationship until we can all be together again.” She shrugs. “And I’m still job-hunting; it’s probably better if I’m not surrounded by gorgeous women who distract me.”
“And Liss?” Abby says. “We’ll be checking in each night to make sure you’ve picked out a meal and eaten it.”
Melissa slumps over her shepherd’s pie. “Is this what being in a relationship with the both of you is going to be like? The two of you ganging up on me all the time?”
“Yes,” Shahida says.
“Sorry,” Abby says.
“Fair enough,” Melissa says with a shrug, and starts eating. It’s not like she isn’t the happiest she’s ever been, shaking hands aside. “Hey,” she adds, when she’s finished her first mouthful of pretty good shepherd’s pie, “what am I going to get to gang up on you about?”
“Deadlines,” Abby says.
“Nothing,” Shahida says. Both of them look at her, and she grins at them. “What? I don’t have any flaws.”
* * *
It sucks that Steph is so understanding. It sucks that she is so nice. It sucks that she is sort of okay at makeup. Because now Bethany is wearing women’s clothes again — actual, for real women’s clothes, not just the plausibly deniable oh-no-my-nipples-hurt sports bras she slobs around in downstairs — and she can’t stop fucking fidgeting in her skirt long enough to comfortably eat her weird raisin pastry thing, which is too damn flaky and sticky and threatens with every bite to ruin the makeup Steph spent a whole twenty minutes on.
But none of it matters, because by sitting still, by allowing Steph to pick out clothes for her, by allowing her to paint her up, and by accepting from her a pastry that’s practically falling apart and a mug of coffee with Disqualified from the battle of the sexes for doping on the side, she got to help Steph through a difficult moment.
Diana’s back, and Steph’s managed to convince herself that by not reacting perfectly to a surprise appearance in a random kitchen of the girl who was the guy who tried twice to knock her to the floor, she is somehow a terrible person and responsible for unravelling the Dorley project as they all know it.
She’s so dumb. Sweet, but terribly dumb.
“Next time you need a little cry,” Bethany says, after carefully manoeuvring another bite of pastry into her mouth, “come cry on me. It’s what I’m for.”
Steph, whose eyes are still a little red, laughs and says, “Maria might dispute that.”
“I ought to be very offended that you picked Edy to cry on over me.”
“I didn’t!” Steph protests, waving the remains of her pastry for emphasis. “She just sort of showed up. Oh, actually, can you keep a secret?”
“Um—”
“She told me what she’s getting for Maria for her birthday. And she wanted me to check with you that it’s okay. She wants your permission.”
“Sure,” Bethany says. “Why?”
“Because she got her a mug that says, The wages of sin is Beth.”
Bethany just stares at Steph for a moment. “Oh,” she says eventually.
“There’s sort of a cartoon picture of you on it.”
“O…kay?”
“Is that… all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bethany?”
“Let me get this straight,” Bethany says. “Edy, who is Maria’s girlfriend, thinks that an appropriate gift for Maria’s birthday — and this is a woman she loves deeply, you understand — is something that references… me?”
“That’s the gist of it, yes.”
“But… why?”
Steph smiles lopsidedly at her. “You are kind of special, you know.”
“Oh, I’m so not.” Bethany turns the idea around in her mind. Imagines Maria opening a wrapped present and extracting the mug. Tries to picture her reaction; fails. “It’s a mug,” she says. “About me.”
“Yes.”
“About me.”
“Yes.”
“Is this the only present she’s getting her?”
“I think so,” Steph says. “I mean, what do you get for the woman who has everything? Apart from, I guess, more people to torture.”
Bethany doesn’t even notice the joke, nor Steph’s subsequent musing that maybe she’ll get it put on a mug herself. Because the idea is consuming her. In her mind, Maria unwraps the present. Over and over. But her imagination cuts out immediately after. “But,” she says again, “why?”
“I think it’s just— Oh, hey, Bethany,” Steph says, interrupting herself. She puts down her Your rights end where my syringe of ketamine begins mug and shuffles over on the bed towards Bethany, taking her in her arm, and Bethany’s initially confused until she realises that her cheeks are wet and she’s shaking, and as soon as she’s gotten rid of her crumb-riddled plate, she buries herself in Steph.
It makes no sense. None of it: why Edy would get that mug; why Bethany is having this reaction. It’s overwhelming. It’s ridiculous. But it’s happening, so she’s got to roll with it.
Like with everything in this place.
* * *
They picked somewhere Steph would feel safe: that cavernous dining hall on the ground floor, cleared out of random observers. They cut down on Diana’s support team, so it’s just Monica with her, someone Steph trusts. And, though Diana was loath to, she’s taken off her boots; they were just too severe.
She’s keeping them, though. Monica promised. She’s going to show up back home with a whole new wardrobe and maybe even with a half-trained voice and blow them all away.
And now she’s waiting for Steph.
She doesn’t have to do this. Monica said so; Bea said so. Frankie argued for it, though, and that was the tie-breaker, because Valérie said, in her snappish, soft-hearted way, that everyone needs closure. She looked at Frankie when she said that.
Diana hears Steph approach before she sees her; she’s talking to someone else, another girl from here. It doesn’t take much to recognise her, though whether the biggest clue was her barely altered voice or the fact that she seems like an unstoppable fount of nonsense.
“I can’t believe our feet shrink. That seems like propaganda, like a way to get youth with big feet who have trouble shopping for them to take estrogen. It’s bullshit, Steph.”
“It’s so not. Christine says I can wear size nines now.”
“Really? Shit.”
“What’s so bad about our feet shrinking?”
“Nothing, really, I guess, it’s just… Well, how will I wear my collection of antique loafers? I’ll have to get inserts, I suppose, but it’s just not the same. No, Steph, don’t laugh, you don’t understand; they’re priceless, and if I don’t wear them constantly, I can’t justify keeping them around. They’ll have to go to someone who doesn’t appreciate antique loafers the way I do.”
“Please, Beth, show me to your collection of antique loafers.”
“I can’t. They’re on loan right now. And— Oh. Hey. Shit. There she is.”
Yeah. There she is. Diana waves at the two of them as they emerge from the echoey central stairwell, feeling like she ought to get off on the right (non-booted) foot. After a little hesitation, Steph waves back. Bethany just boggles at her with raised brows and widened eyes.
Bethany… doesn’t look how Diana expected. Oh, Diana knows she’s the only one of them to have had facial surgery, that none of the ones who stayed behind will have anything so invasive done until their second year, when the hormones have had time to work — Monica’s already insinuated that there’s room in the funding for some touch-up work if Diana isn’t happy with how her face fills out after another year or two on hormones — but she’s already seen that Steph’s face shows signs of subtle changes that she almost envies; where Diana has had carved a strong yet feminine jaw, has had her nose softened and her forehead shaved down and her hairline adjusted, Steph looks like herself, only more so. Like she’s becoming the person she always had it in her to be. Frankie called hormone therapy ‘a second, worse puberty’, but Steph’s appearance reminds Diana of someone in what one of Chiamaka’s books called the first blush of womanhood. She has everything ahead of her.
And Bethany is similar. Aaron is still there, but it is as if the exaggeration of his best features has already begun, and Bethany’s final face — for all that, yes, she’s probably going to have similar forehead work to Diana one of these days — is visible in potentia.
What a luxury, to be able to adjust to the changes a millimetre at a time, and not simply wake up one day to stare a stranger in the face.
She doesn’t let her jealousy show, and she wonders what they think of her. Certainly Bethany’s eyes spend several seconds resting on Diana’s chest.
“Hi,” she says as they approach.
Steph crawls to a stop, too far away for a hug or to shake hands. She stands frozen at the edge of the little circle of couches, armchairs and tables by the fire, and seems momentarily lost for words.
Eventually she finds one: “Sorry,” Steph says.
Diana smiles the gentlest smile in her repertoire, the one she’s practised in the mirror, the one that makes her seem the least threatening, that most successfully downplays her size and her mass.
“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” she says.
* * *
She forgot how tall Declan was. How big, too, though in Diana that attribute appears to have been more generously distributed than before, concentrated as it was in Declan’s beer belly and thick forearms. Bethany remembers distinctly those arms reaching for her in the shower annexe downstairs. Remembers getting hurt by them.
So, all in all, it’s downright weird how unintimidated she is by Diana. Steph and Diana are playing apology chicken right now — sorry for charging at you in the shower; sorry for punching you in the face; sorry for trying to hit you back; and so on, as if any of it is important. If Bethany started apologising for all the awful shit she’s done, she’d never stop, and it suddenly hits her just how much that’s part of the programme here: you don’t get to apologise, not ever, because the people you really hurt, the ones whose injuries, physical or mental, got you dragged under the dormitory at Dorley Hall, will never see or hear from you again. Maybe the lack of closure is part of the programme; maybe you’re supposed to always be trying to make up for things you can never take back.
And in all this, Diana’s just… another girl. She’s big, yes, in every possible direction, but Monica’s pretty big, and Tabby’s only a little less so, and Bethany’s well used to both of them by now. If anything, bloody Paige is more intimidating than Diana, because she might actually offer nuanced and devastating critique on your choice of clothes, whereas on current evidence, Diana will just apologise to you.
“I can’t believe you’re the same person,” Steph’s saying to her, while Bethany just sits cross-legged on the end of the couch, sipping tea, listening.
“I wish I weren’t,” Diana says, in that soft voice of hers, that’s like if Declan decided to do an impression of a woman in an advert for upscale perfume. “I’m still the guy who tried to attack you. Twice. I’m just… trying not to be.” She stares into her delicate little teacup — decorated with swirls of flowers; tasteful — and shakes her head. “I have to live with who I was. Who I am. But I also…” She looks up suddenly. “I don’t want you to be afraid of me, Steph. And that’s not on you; you can be afraid if you need to be. What I mean is, I don’t want to be the kind of person people are afraid of. I want to be the kind of person people come to for help. And that’s so far from what I’ve been all my life… It’s like starting again.”
Steph’s hand is twitching, but whether it’s because she wants to reach for Diana or wants to punch her, Bethany doesn’t know. The former, probably?
“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Steph says, “just tell me.”
“I will,” Diana says. “I just want to be someone Mum would be proud of, you know? She was a nurse. She hated who I was, but she tried not to show it. I think… I think one day I want to find her and show her I’m someone she can be proud of.”
Bethany burrows into the couch a little more. Must be nice, to have someone in your family you want to impress; she was never enough of a little Lord Fauntleroy for her mum, never managed somehow to overcome the deficiency of a normal upbringing to ingratiate herself with the aristocrat thugs they insisted on surrounding her with. If her mum could see her now…
She squirms. If her mum could see her now, with her hair growing out, with her mouth plump with lipstick — twice over; Steph repaired her makeup job after she had a little cry — with her legs stuffed into glossy brown tights, with her proto-tits like squishy marbles lurking inside a push-up bra, she’d be fucking horrified. She’d probably call the police on this place, and that’s about all that’s stopped Bethany from taking advantage of her relative freedom and running out the door, flagging down a taxi and presenting herself at her parents’ doorstep, tits out. Sorry about all the cash you wasted on tuition, Mum and Dad, but I’m a lesbian now.
Impossible to imagine being wanted, even now, but she can at least revel in the certain fact that her parents would disown her so fast they’d break the sound barrier.
She is wanted now. By Steph. By Maria, inexplicably. She needs to keep that at the forefront of her mind, because it’s too easy to forget. She shakes her head and tunes back in.
“Steph,” Diana’s saying, “this is important, okay? Remember when you punched me?”
Looking uncomfortable, Steph says, “Yeah. I’m still sorry about that.”
“You didn’t do it right,” Diana says.
“What? Oh. Yeah. Pippa told me. Said I shouldn’t have put my thumb inside my fist. Which, yeah, I sort of worked out on my own.”
“It was your first punch, then?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to—? I could show you how to—”
“Oh! No. No, it’s okay. I don’t think the sponsors want us teaching each other how to punch.”
Diana laughs. “Always was kind of funny that you had a sponsor. I just never realised why.”
“Pippa… She’s more like a sister, I think. I’ve only known her since October but already… I couldn’t imagine life without her.”
“But she didn’t show you how to punch,” Diana says.
“Um. No. She just said—”
“Okay. Steph. You need to know this, because it’s not just about where you put your— Okay? Can I…? Is this okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine.”
“Okay, so stand up, just like— Woah! Yeah, okay. Good. Now put your leg back just a little bit. You need a solid base before you can— What?”
“Sorry. I just never thought you, of all people, would be showing me how to defend myself.”
“Steph, it might be one of the only useful things I learned before I came here.”
It doesn’t surprise Bethany when it all ends in hugs. There’s a lot more talking first, obviously — Steph loves a project, and even though Diana’s not going to be around much, they promise to keep in touch via whatever mechanism the hall allows — but then they’re hugging, and Bethany’s watching still, wondering if she should get involved.
She makes the decision when Diana looks at her, eyebrows raised.
“I, uh, think I’ll sit that one out,” Bethany says. “Nice tits, though.”
“Thank you,” Diana says.
“Hey, Steph, when do you think I’ll get tits like that?”
It’s Monica who replies, breaking her supervisory silence of the last half-hour or so. “When Maria agrees to it.”
“Oh shit,” Bethany says. “I’m going to have to be so good, aren’t I?”
Diana giggles, Steph rolls her eyes, and Monica says, “I’m afraid so.”
* * *
Shahida hates to be leaving so early, but Abby wants to see her family before she decamps somewhere local for work tomorrow, and Shahida herself really ought to get some face time with her mum and maybe go see Rachel, so they’re saying their first tearful goodbyes as a throuple. As a polycule.
She snorts. She can’t believe Melissa had to have ‘polycule’ explained to her! Was she even paying attention, all those years she lived at the hall? From what Jane was telling her, the current crop of second years are hardly the first to have emerged from the basement basically inseparable. But it tracks with Melissa; she always did have a tendency to isolate herself, to prepare for herself the smallest world possible and inhabit it alone. She remembers talking to Em about that once, and Em just breaking down, managing to say through floods of tears only that she was happy Steph worked out who she was when she did.
The memory causes her to hug Melissa extra hard, causes her to trail hands with her all the way out to the ludicrously expensive weekend parking Abby found. Causes her to have to force herself to let go and go with Abby to the car.
This is going to be a difficult week.
“Wow,” Abby says, pulling the car out onto the main road. “That was harder than I expected it to be.”
Shahida twists back around in her seat from waving to Liss and clips her seat belt. “It really was,” she says. She’s fairly sure she’s going to spend the whole next week reliving the memory of Melissa standing on the pavement, waving them off, and especially the last second or so, of Melissa turning around, ramming her hands into her hoodie and starting the walk back to her flat. Alone. Already closing herself in. “We’ll be on Consensus,” she adds, mostly to herself. “Every night.”
“We could still stay,” Abby says.
Shahida’s already fiddling with her phone, looking for a playlist. She needs some noise. “I’m not sure I could,” she says. “I need a job, Abs. And if I’m around Melissa — or you, for that matter — I think I would be too distracted to look for one.”
Grinning and adjusting her driving sunglasses, Abby says, “You think I’m distracting, do you?”
“I’m not falling for your bait, missy,” Shahida says, placing her hands deliberately between her thighs and squeezing them there, so she doesn’t do anything foolish, like reach out and touch her new girlfriend while she’s driving.
“I’ll have you know, Shahida Mohsin, that I’ve never baited anyone in my life. I’m just naturally beautiful; all I have to do is sit very still and quiet, and the gorgeous women flock to me.”
“Oh, really?”
“I mean…” Abby says, and sweeps her left hand around the car, coincidentally encompassing the entire seat that holds Shahida.
Shahida checks the mirrors, checks ahead and behind, makes sure they’re on a clear stretch of road with no cars coming, no pedestrians waiting to cross, no blind spots and no turnings ahead, and then she pulls her hand out from her lap and reaches over to poke Abby in the shoulder.
“Ow!” Abby says, pretending agonising pain, switching hands on the wheel to rub her shoulder.
“Serves you right.”
* * *
When Diana left the hall, she did so via the back entrance, and was so heavily sedated she didn’t really know what was happening. And when she originally arrived, she just woke up in her cell with Monica sitting in an out-of-place office chair, waiting for her. So descending the concrete steps to the first basement is not the terrifying experience she expected it to be. Oddly, it’s more like going down to the games room at her old local, where the landlord had turned an old shelter under the pub into a cold and damp but secluded place in which to play darts and to continue drinking after-hours.
She already said she didn’t want to go all the way down, though; the first basement is as far as she wants to go, and it’s unfamiliar enough, despite the dull concrete walls, that she doesn’t feel Declan’s instincts stir inside her. Just a minor ache of claustrophobia, which is eased by Monica’s presence.
She’s meeting Will. And just like with Steph, she’s meeting him somewhere he feels comfortable.
For some reason, that place turns out to be a mini-gym. It’s the last thing she expected to be under the hall, but here it is, sparsely equipped with a pair of free-standing sand-ballast punching bags, a stand with some light free weights, a bike, and a bench. And there, sitting against a wall on a mat, wearing standard basement-issue sweats but with a sports bra clearly visible under his hoodie, is Will.
He’s no more different-looking than Steph or Bethany — less, probably — but it’s more jarring with him. Like Diana, Will’s lost a lot of muscle mass; like Diana, he probably hopes to lose more. He’s broad like she is, tall like she is, and his hair has hardly grown out at all, and yet…
And yet he looks like a completely different person. She can’t explain it.
He looks up as she enters — and how could he not, with the noise of her heels? He probably heard her coming before she even started down the stairs. He looks up and he smiles, and though it’s a wavering, unsure kind of smile, it’s new; it lacks the edge she expects from him, the sneer that says she’s just said something stupid as hell and he’s about to correct her. And that’s probably fortunate, because if there’s anyone who’s ever been able to make Diana feel stupid, it’s Will.
But he’s changed, hasn’t he? The way they all have. So she shouldn’t worry.
“Hi,” she says, wishing as ever she knew how to modulate her fucking voice. Next time she visits — and it startles her to realise that there will be a next time, that she wants to see Monica and Frankie again, that she wants to see Steph again, that she wants to get to know this place and understand it and maybe become a part of it…
Concentrate, Diana!
Next time she visits, she’ll sound as good as she looks.
“Diana, right?” Will says. Tabitha, his sponsor, is leaning against the wall nearby, and before Diana can approach, Tabitha reaches down for Will and helps him up. They exchange a brief hug, and then she’s gone, along with Monica, leaving them alone.
Will gestures to one of the benches, and sits down on the other one. Diana, taking it as an invitation, sits on the one he pointed to, and crosses her legs. Double-down on the femininity; finding her comfort zone.
Hah; she kind of wants to go back in time six months and taunt Declan with that.
“It’s good to see you again, Will,” she says, and then she frowns, shaking her head. “No, actually. Total lie.” She stretches her arms out in front of her, fingers interlocked, and relaxes. Drops once again out of the persona she’s been adopting while she’s here; it seems too aspirational for Will.
If she’s honest with herself, it’s too aspirational for her. But if you aim high and miss, you still got pretty far.
“What I should have said,” she says, “is that it’s fucking weird and uncomfortable seeing you again, Will. I hated you. And I’m pretty sure you hated me.”
“True,” Will says, and the admission seems to get him to relax, too.
Diana looks around the room again. “Appropriate venue for a fight.”
“I think I could take you. Always thought I could. I mean, if Steph could put you on the ground—”
Diana snorts. “I can’t believe I got sucker-punched by Stephanie fucking Riley. Did I look ridiculous when I went down?”
“Like a complete idiot,” Will says, laughing.
“I showed her how to punch,” Diana says. “Just now. Up there. I thought, if she’s going to go around hitting people, she needs to know how.”
“You’re her sponsor now, then?”
“Not hers, no.”
There’s silence between them for a bit. Diana can feel Will’s eyes on her, on the outfit she chose to feel confident in front of Beatrice and fashionable in front of Valérie and which now feels overly showy. But that’s her self-consciousness whispering to her, her fear of seeming stupid in front of Will, so she steps on it as hard as she can.
“What’s it like?” Will says suddenly. “I don’t mean all that shit that happened to you, I mean—”
“They told you about that?”
“Some. Enough to know I don’t want to know more. And, uh, Diana, I’m sorry about it.”
“I killed the guy who did it to me,” Diana says, shrugging. “I’m not saying I don’t carry it with me, because I do, but… Well, he’s dead.”
“And what was that like?” Will asks, leaning forward.
“It was like killing Declan,” she says flatly.
Narrowing his eyes, Will says, “And is Declan dead?”
“I fucking wish,” Diana whispers. “I worry about him, Will. All the time. I worry about being him again. About doing what he would do. And I like to think I’ve got pretty good at not being him, but the truth is…” She balls her hands into fists. “The truth is, I was thrown in at the deep end and I’m having to work all of this out while I try not to drown. And it’s like he’s the mud at the bottom of the lake, he’s the thing I’ll sink back into if I don’t keep trying.”
Will doesn’t say anything, and Diana’s looking away, looking at the floor, keeping herself still and safe, but he still doesn’t say anything, so she forces herself to look up and she finds him staring at her, frozen almost the same way she is.
“Will?” she says.
“Don’t—” he says instantly, but he shuts himself down just as quickly.
She wants to go to him, but she doesn’t know him well. Not this version of him, the Will who is uncertain, who seems like he’s fighting himself just to sit in the same room as her.
“I get it,” he says. He sounds hollow. Cold. There’s a tremolo to his words; he’s shaking. “I really fucking get it, Diana.” He laughs. “And it’s the ultimate fucking kick in the teeth that I do.” He’s still looking at her. “I’m a lot like Steph. In a lot of ways. And I’ve been hanging onto that. But I’m also a lot like you. And I’ve been holding onto that, too. Holding onto it like a grenade without a pin. And now—” he laughs again, a grating laugh that seems like it bleeds his lungs on its way out, “—here you are, looking like that, walking around free, and now I’m thinking that maybe I was just like me all along. That the difference between us is that you’re strong and I’m weak.”
“No,” Diana says firmly, because she’s not having this bullshit. “Absolutely not. I’m not strong, Will! I never was. I’m fucking— I’m malleable.”
Another laugh. “Funny to hear you say a word like that.”
“I know. And it’s a good word, isn’t it? Mall-e-able. Did you know that the redundant vowel sound present in many English words is called a schwa? I never did. Not until this week. But it’s the second ‘a’ in ‘malleable’. It’s the ‘er’ in ‘caterpillar’. I’ve been reading a lot. I almost don’t do anything else. Because if I’m not occupied, I’m scared I’ll just… become him again. By default.”
“Yeah,” Will whispers.
“When I was Declan, I became the person I was treated as. You know? I was handed a shape and fucking hell if it wasn’t easy to fit into it. It was the easiest thing in the world, being Declan. Being an abusive, violent rapist.” She’s spitting the words now. “It was easy and it was just habit. And it wasn’t like other people didn’t try to teach me different. But by the time they even noticed who I was, it was too late. I had life on easy mode: the big stupid fucking guy who treats people like shit.
“And then I came here, and it was even easier. Monica and the others, they saw a violent thug, and they were right. And they tried to hurt me, tried to push it out of me, but it was all I was. All I knew. Fuck, they put bruises on me and all it did was remind me who I was. Made me feel alive. Made me feel like I mattered, just when I was starting to think that I didn’t.
“And then Stenordale. Then Dorothy and Jake. They showed me what it was to be on the other side of it. And everything they did to me… I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed that that is what it took for me to understand who I was. What I was doing. What I’d done to people, truly. To understand that weakness isn’t contemptible, it’s just… Fuck.”
“Diana?”
“I hate who I was, Will,” she says, looking back at him the same way he looked at her. “And I hate that it’s all still inside me. All the instincts, all the bullshit. It’s difficult to get through a day without looking at a knife and wondering what it would be like to make it all go away. Can you understand what it’s like to look back at your whole life and not just see a monster, not just see someone who deserves to die but who got spared because he pulled out a little bit more violence at exactly the right time, but to see someone so stupid, so deliberately fucking thick they barely counted as conscious? Because that’s what I see, Will. When I look in the mirror and I don’t make myself see Diana, the woman I’m trying my hardest to become… That’s what I see.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I can. And it’s…”
His vulnerability, the suddenness of it, the insanity of seeing it on someone like Will, pulls her up. Drags her up from the bottom of the lake and deposits her gasping on its shore. Because he’s got his hands together like it’s the only way he can control them and he’s made his lip bleed with his teeth and he’s still looking at her, but not, she doesn’t think, like someone who is judging her.
Like someone who understands.
“Will?” she says.
And then he snarls, “Fuck this,” and stands. Shakes out his hands. She wonders for a moment if he’s going to fight her, if this is something she’s going to have to defend herself against — and if she ought to — but then he rolls his shoulders and shakes out his hands again and she realises he’s loosening his limbs, like you might before warming up.
This is his space. The punching bags, the funny little pink free weights; they’re his.
Right.
“My name,” he says. “It’s not— Fuck. It’s Leigh. Tab and me. We talked about it. And it’s Leigh. It’s not permanent. Or it might be.”
“Leigh,” Diana says. “I like it.”
“I know about looking back, Diana,” Leigh says. “I know about seeing nothing but endless stupidity. I know about wanting to go back and throttle yourself for how fucking stupid you used to be. And I know about looking in the mirror and seeing that same bastard looking back at you. I’m trying to break away from him, Diana.”
She waits for Leigh to look at her again, and she smiles. “Hard to think of you as stupid,” she says,
“Yeah?” Leigh says, and shadowboxes for a moment. “Yeah? Knowing shit isn’t wisdom, Diana. It’s not being smart, it’s not being clever. Sometimes knowing things is self-harm. You find the wrong information and you— you wrap yourself in it because it’s comforting. Because it says all the faults you find in yourself aren’t your fault. You were just built that way. You were just… just AGP, just a perverted man, and the things you wanted were just… fuckin’ paraphilias. Something to be resisted. Repressed. Cured. And I’m not much better than you, Diana. I hurt people. A lot. Put my own little brother in hospital because I found out he was gay and I couldn’t fucking deal with it. I saw something of myself in him and I fucking lost it because if it was okay for him to just be himself, then what did that say about me?
“Weak,” Leigh says. “It says I’m weak. And stupid. And you know what? At least when you were a cunt, you had fun with it. That was always obvious. Declan, he was a bastard but he was a jolly bastard, right? I couldn’t even be that. I hurt people and I hated myself for it and I kept doing it because I’d compressed myself into this tight little bag of gunpowder, and every so often there was a spark, and I’d go off. Like a natural fucking disaster.” Shadow boxing again.
“You know why I like to know things?” Leigh says. “Because knowing shit isn’t doing. It isn’t being. And it’s definitely not thinking. It’s an excuse not to think. Oh, some fuckwit, decades ago, decides that the trans women who don’t want to fuck him are just straight men, stroking themselves off to pictures of women’s underwear? I read that and I thought, yeah, that’s me. And that makes me stupid, so fucking stupid; more stupid than even the other trans women who took that shit from him and rolled in it because they were afraid of who they might be if they stopped convincing themselves it was just a fetish. No, I’m stupid because I diagnosed myself with pervert straight man disease and I don’t even fucking like girls!”
Leigh throws a punch hard enough to rock the punching bag on its base, and then suddenly, as if afraid of herself, she pulls herself back in, cradles her hand against her chest, steps away from Diana, towards the wall.
“Shit,” she says. “Shit. Shit. Sorry.”
“Leigh?” Diana says, standing.
“Stay away,” she says, shaking her head, holding herself tight and small.
“You won’t hurt me,” Diana says.
“I will,” Leigh says.
Diana doesn’t say anything else. Just walks closer, step by slow and careful step, until she’s almost on top of Leigh. Leigh responds by turning away, so Diana reaches in for her hand, the one she thinks is so fucking scary. She pulls it out from her chest, holds it between them, and when Leigh finally looks up at her again from the almost-crouched and contorted, protective position she’s adopted, Diana says, “You won’t.”
Leigh cries. She unfolds into Diana’s arms and she cries.
2004 December 29
Wednesday
Seth stands three purges strong. Three expeditions among the wicked unaware and three successful purges of the sin and the doubt and the hatred that accumulates among the unbelievers. Father looked upon him with pride, and even Dad seemed pleased, though when he recounted his acts for the table at the celebratory dinner, his mum looked away, and did not eat.
Not even the jail cells of the unbelievers can hold him. That the woman declined to press charges, Father declared, implies that Seth’s witness has taken root in her soul, that she might one day be saved, that she might find her way to belief, and that even though she may never come to reside in the nation, she will hear the Voice and she will do His bidding.
Little Adam seemed resentful that night, and Seth struggled with his pride and his pleasure; he ought not to have revelled in the child’s temporary demotion from the centre of attention, but it felt good to be the first to wash his hands and his mouth, the one invited to take the first bite, the one to initiate the final prayer of the day.
Your grace is your most precious gift. Please, Lord, make me worthy of it.
He is trusted now. And while he is not in charge of this expedition, this opportunistic knife thrust into the heart of the devil’s operation in London, this holy witness against the grand cathedral of sin, he is its key component; he is its soul. And though he is buffeted by the cold wind through his thin coat, though he has been spat on and shoved and shouted at, he will continue his work, for the hospital outside which they have assembled their outreach is the wicked place in which they treat the unworthy, the homo sexuals, the trans sexuals, the hyper sexuals, and the women who murder their unborn infants. Seth does not know what any of these things are, save the last, but he is compelled to agree that they must be wicked, for the Voice has spoken, and Seth has listened.
And as the night crawls in and the clouded sky provides no moonlit respite from the garish decorations strung around the square, Seth makes himself a conduit of the Voice, an extension of His will, and in the armour of the Lord he will witness!
2020 January 12
Sunday
She’s staying one more night. When she came back up to the dining hall she texted Chiamaka to let her know she’d be back on Monday some time, and then she accepted Monica’s offer of a late lunch all the way upstairs, in the tiny little kitchen they have on the third floor. And just now Chiamaka’s texted her back to say she’s looking forward to having her back, that the B&B just isn’t the same without her, and Diana has to blink back a few tears of her own.
This is the first little glimmer of a real place for her. Something she can do; someone she can be. She can help Chia at the B&B. She can come back here and talk to Monica and Frankie and Valérie, and stay in touch with Leigh and Steph and maybe even Bethany. This could be Diana’s life for the next little while.
And the thought of coming back here often is much more exciting than she ever thought it would be. Not just because she wants and needs their help — with her voice, with hormones, with money — but because she wants to get to know her intake. Properly. As Diana. She wants to see who they will all become. She wants to say hi to Raph again. She wants to know what the hell is going on with Martin. And she wants to help, if she can.
It’s the weirdest thing.
* * *
“So,” Steph says, closing her door behind them and shutting out the rest of the hall; at least until Pippa shows up in a couple of hours, with pizza, like she promised. “Diana.”
“Diana,” Bethany agrees, kicking off her shoes and flopping backwards onto the bed. “Hey, Steph?” she says. “Did you, um, did you, uh, that is…?”
“Beth?”
“Did you think she was hot?”
Steph giggles. “Yeah,” she says. “She was so hot.” The sun’s getting low, and she doesn’t want to get back up from the bed to close the curtains, so she does so now before joining Bethany on the bed.
“Right?” Bethany says. “Tall, pretty, huge tits… She’s going to be unstoppable. She could have any girl she wants.”
Steph’s already lying back, so she reaches for Bethany’s shoulder and pulls, dumping her onto her back and yanking a laugh out of her.
“Not any girl,” she says, rolling over to face her.
“Oh?” Bethany says.
“I mean, I’ve got a girl,” Steph says. “And I happen to think she’s prettier—” she leans over and quickly kisses Bethany on the lips, “—and more my size.”
“Smaller tits, though.”
“For now.”
“Yeah,” Bethany says, returning Steph’s kiss. “For now.”
* * *
Tabitha brings her a wet cloth and a dry towel, and Leigh cleans herself up, then she shucks off her hoodie and goes a few rounds with the punching bag. She’s still worn out from the conversation with Diana, though, so it’s less than twenty minutes later that she’s hugging Tab goodbye and heading back downstairs. It’ll be time for dinner soon, and she’s got something she wants to get off her chest before they all congregate.
Raph’s the only one there, though, sitting on the couch with Jane, talking. His hair’s at that awkward stage where he’s stopped shaving it off — a habit which didn’t last that long down here — and now it’s long enough to be giving him all sorts of unaccustomed sensations, so he keeps running a hand through it and twisting the odd strand around in his fingers. They both see her enter, so they share a wave and Leigh thinks, what the fuck, right?
“Hey,” she says, and Raph and Jane both adopt comically near-identical attentive expressions, “I just, um. Shit. Uh. I saw Diana.”
“Oh,” Raph says. “Huh. How is Declan two point oh? Upgraded in all the right places?”
“Very different,” Leigh says, as Jane taps Raph on the shoulder and both mouths and mimes huge tits at him. “Anyway, we were talking and I told her some stuff and now I need to tell you some stuff, and if I don’t do it now I might never do it and I’ll fucking hate myself and… Oh, Christ.”
“What’s going on, Will?”
Fast. Clean. Like bad news. Like a slap in the face. “Leigh. Call me Leigh.”
“Oh my God!” Jane exclaims, and claps twice in involuntary excitement.
“Leigh?” Raph says, nodding, considering it. “Okay. Sure.”
“I love it,” Jane says, doing a very good impression of not having even heard the name Leigh before. “Leigh.”
“Raph,” Leigh says, “you’re not… I mean, is that it? Just ‘sure’?”
“It’s going to keep happening, isn’t it? Why not roll with it?”
“I guess.”
“So… is that it?”
“Yeah,” Leigh says. “Uh. That was it.”
She’s about to leave, to go shower maybe, or go grab a book in bed or something, but then Raph waves at her again and says, “Hey, Leigh, we were thinking we’d have a late dinner, and we’d have kind of a movie night. In here. With pizza and popcorn and shit. Steph and Beth aren’t in, they’re off doing their own thing, but Martin’s up for it. Probably Ollie.” He makes a face. “But he’s been behaving himself, so fuck it, it’s probably fine. And Harmony will tase him and throw him back in the cells if it’s not. Which would also be fun. You wanna join? We were going to do the Star Wars prequels.”
Will would have told him to fuck off, would have gone read a book. Would have been miserable. But Leigh doesn’t need to share his habits. She can cultivate new ones. And though Raph wouldn’t be her first choice for a friend, he’s here and he’s making the effort and, well, she’s stuck with him for the next three years.
“Why not?” she says.
* * *
Sometimes, Adam hears the others. Through the thick concrete walls. Crying or shouting or screaming. Less so now, though; Edy says the others are adjusting, getting used to things. The first month is always the most distressing, she says.
She says a lot.
She says too much.
She knows about the church, about the nation. She knows about the Voice. She even knows it’s gone silent. She knows everything.
As much as it frustrates him, it’s good that she does. Because he knows nothing any more. He has no guide, he has no wisdom, he has no insight save that which she gives to him. And she gives freely, shares with him all that she knows.
Almost all that she knows. How does she know about the farm? He told her a story from his childhood, about the time when he was six that he walked unsupervised all the way out back to the old playground, and she gasped, eyes wide and hands over her mouth, like she already knew how dangerous it was there. Like she’d seen the eroded cliffside and the fence that spills down into the ocean. Like she’d felt the spray in the air, just as he had.
He thinks of that often. Especially now, in his empty room, when even the crying from the others has gone silent. He wants to ask her again, certain that this time she might tell him, she might admit to having visited them once, having seen him when he was younger.
He wants her to admit their connection, whatever it is.
But she can’t, because he made her promise.
He’s bitten his nails to stubs and he’s scratched his arms until they bleed and he’s worn his lower lip into a ragged mess, and still he is no closer. And he wishes he could talk to her, about this, about anything, but he made her promise to stay away until he asks her to come back, and he cannot ask until he has made peace with the silence in his head.
2004 December 31
Friday
For a moment, it’s just like home. At home, Seth sleeps on a thin mattress and he wakes to plain white walls. But at home, he’s always too cold, because the wind from the sea never stops, and that’s his first clue that he is not where he ought to be, not where he expects.
The second is that he does not remember wrapping up the witness, returning to the safe house in Barnet, the one owned by the sad little convert woman who feeds them meat from tin cans and sleeps them six to a room. And he does not remember catching the train the next morning.
Above him, a light switches on. It’s embedded in the ceiling — nothing at home nor at the safe house is like this — and it is bright. Too bright. Bright enough that he is forced to cover his eyes and roll onto his front, and as he does so, there’s a tight pinch of pain from his stomach.
That’s new.
He rolls over again and sits up. Shields his eyes from the light with one hand and with the other frantically feels around his belly, searching for the source of the pain.
There’s a bump. Almost like a zit, but deeper, and it itches. It’s difficult to see; it’s so bright that all colour has been bleached from his vision, and he sees only in blinding highlights and invisible shadows. And then, as suddenly as the light switched on, it halves in brightness, and halves again, until it is bearable, until he can uncover his eyes and look around properly.
He sits on a cot. It is bolted to the wall. Against the wall behind him is a metal toilet and a basin. And the wall in front of him—
Is not a wall. It is barred.
Did he get arrested again? He didn’t strike anyone this time.
As his eyes finish adjusting to the lower light, he sees a woman on the other side of the bars. She sits cross-legged on the floor, her chin propped on her hand, her elbow propped on her knee. She wears her black hair long and chooses modest clothes and, unlike most of the young unbeliever women he has encountered, she doesn’t wear obvious makeup. When she speaks, she sounds like the Londoners he’s spent the last few days picketing against.
“Seth,” she says softly. “My name is Maria.”
Chapter 41: Come up for Air, My Darlings
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2020 January 13
Monday
The hall has a large supply of post-surgical support bras — because of course it does — and Trevor keeps pulling at his, trying to reposition it, trying to make himself comfortable, and consistently failing. It’s like a cross between a sports bra and that kind of bra women wear under t-shirts when they don’t want the lines of their underwear to show, and whether it’s the size of his implants — he doesn’t like thinking of them as ‘breasts’, especially not after spending so much time around girls who actually appreciate theirs — or his choice of not-exactly-complementary clothing, he just can’t get the fucking thing to sit right.
Val pulls his hand away and holds it stiffly to his side.
“If you keep fiddling with it,” she says, “it will never settle.”
The worst thing about hanging around with women like Val and, increasingly, Beatrice, is that all the retorts that might be effective on, say, Frankie, are useless: he can’t protest that he never asked for this, or that they can’t know what it’s like, because Beatrice will say something wry and Val will just look at him, and then he’ll feel doubly stupid.
And, honestly, he can’t say that shit to Frankie, either. She’d just laugh at him. Tell him there are far worse mutilated men to be, and that he should consider himself lucky that he got out with his heart still beating and with at least part of his dignity — the bit in the middle, the long bit — intact.
Christ. Trevor needs male friends. People who can be relied upon to react with appropriate horror to the revelation that he was kidnapped and castrated, and not merely ask in a mild, interested voice what flavours of hospital jelly he got to try after.
“I told him he should’ve worn a nice dress,” Frankie says. She’s sitting on the kerbside, a little farther away from Trevor, Val and Beatrice. “He needs to let the girls breathe.”
“Frances,” Val says, “has it really been so long since you last psychologically wounded someone that you need to practise on Trevor?”
Frankie shrugs. “I’m only saying. I’d be sweating buckets in his get-up, and I’m not still technically in a surgery recovery period.”
“I’m fine,” Trevor says.
And he’s not — he’s hot as hell, even in the January chill — but he’d rather wear bulky, oversized gym clothes than ‘let the girls breathe’. He’s already baulking at Mrs Prentice’s belief that he should keep them in for months longer, but unless he has a go himself, he needs someone with surgical expertise to get them out, and it doesn’t do to antagonise your surgeon.
Beatrice’s words. When he complained to her, and when one of the sponsors did so too, on his behalf. Mrs Prentice does not need to work for the hall, and she has by far the least to lose if they get into any kind of stalemate or legal battle, so keeping her happy is high on Beatrice’s priority list. Keeping Trevor happy is, presumably, not.
“Car’s here,” Beatrice says, and sure enough, a blacked-out Range Rover’s gliding easily into the car park. It stops perfectly in front of Beatrice, who nods at the invisible driver and climbs serenely into the passenger seat. Val takes the seat directly behind Beatrice, and Trevor’s about to sit next to her when Frankie barges him out of the way.
“Move, Trev,” she mutters. “I’ll take the middle seat. Penance, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Val says. “A few hours of discomfort more than makes up for your decades of brutality.”
“Knew I could count on you, Valérie.”
When they’re all belted in, the driver confirms with them that their phones, watches and other devices are all switched off — Trevor didn’t even bring one — and then she pulls them out of the car park and gets them underway.
Elle Lambert moves around a lot, rarely spending time in any of the stately homes and magnificent apartments that are in her name, but as of late, she has been eschewing her usual five-star hotels for more utilitarian accommodation, swapping security by obscurity for security by virtue of a shitload of guns.
The strikingly beautiful driver is taking them to a Peckinville facility.
Trevor’s going home.
* * *
Everything changes so fast. It’s not even halfway through January 2020, and she’s Diana, looking out from a window in her borrowed room at Dorley Hall, dressed for the cold weather in a sweater, jeggings and boots, cradling her chest in her arms and wondering idly if she should borrow or steal a nicer coat from the hall’s seemingly infinite dress-up box; and yet less than four months ago she was Declan, unrepentant and deliberately ignorant.
She frowns and counts backwards on her fingers. Four months? That doesn’t sound right. She smiles as she does so: Monica did her nails in a soft pink last night, and she’s looking forward to showing them off to Chiamaka. Perhaps just as helpfully, Monica also gave her a USB stick to take back home, containing everything Monica could scrape up that might help lend Diana’s life — still so new the finger-paint’s only just not tacky, she reflects with a smile — a little stability: login details for her new bank account; personal details of a handful of the women here, and emergency contact details for the hall as a whole; and a whole strata of folders on voice training, including a link to an app she’s supposed to install on her phone.
New identity documents are coming soon, as are the finer details of her history; she’ll be meeting up with Monica again next week, to work out what she called an NPH. But her new passport and birth certificate are already in the works.
She had to choose a new surname for the bank account and for her ID documents, and they spent almost twenty minutes last night going through alternatives before Monica happened to mention that some girls choose the same name as their sponsors, and Diana immediately asked permission. So she’s Diana Rosamond, sister to Monica Rosamond, from this morning to the end of her life.
Four months ago — is that right? feels like two lifetimes ago — she was Declan Shaw, last son to a retired nurse and her bastard husband. And now she’s Diana Rosamond, younger sister to Monica, with a mother and father who are a (deceased) legal fiction, and an extended family that has unexpectedly embraced her.
Despite everything she’s done.
Everything changes so fast. And now she’s this whole new person, someone for whom she still hasn’t quite established a personality. She liked who she was with Leigh yesterday, with some of the smoother edges of her too-careful persona roughed up, and since she was able to be like that with her, maybe she can bring some of that person with her.
There’s a knock on her door, and she calls out that it’s open without checking who it is. Because it’s going to be Monica, come to drive her home. All the way back to Cherston, to Chia’s. Because she wants Chiamaka to meet her sister.
But first…
“Hey, Lady Di,” Monica says with a smile in her voice. Diana’s still facing away from her, looking out at the world, so the first of Monica that Diana sees is a hand looping around her belly. “Sleep well?”
“Yeah,” Diana says, turning to embrace her. “Listen,” she adds, “before we go…”
“You want to say goodbye?” Monica guesses.
“I do.”
“Well, Steph and Bethany are still up here, so that’s easy enough, but it’s early; if you want to see Leigh, too, we’ll have to drag Tabitha out of bed and, well, rather you than me.” She wrinkles her nose. “She likes her beauty sleep. I mean, I could totally take her, don’t worry about that, but—”
“I was thinking…” Diana says. She’s still weighing this, still wondering if she can take it, but the smile on Monica’s face makes her mind up. She survived Stenordale; she can survive anything. “I was thinking I’d go down to see her.”
“All the way down?”
“Yeah. All the way down.”
* * *
Christine bumps off Lorna and rebounds into a hug with Vicky and, God, it’s good to see them again. It’s even better to see them away from the hall, because its loving, chaotic embrace has been sort of overpowering lately. She’s been on sabbatical, and she’s still spent way too much time there.
Vicky suggested Café One but Christine wanted to get off campus, so they’re getting an early breakfast at Egg Nation before the four of them split off for lectures and workshops.
“Hey,” Vicky says into Christine’s hair.
“Oh my God,” Christine says, pulling back and dropping onto the worn fake-leather seat of the booth. “I am so hungry! Where’s my egg bitch?”
Lorna points. “Dazzling the poor boy behind the counter.”
Turning, Christine discovers that, yes, Paige is talking sweetly to an adolescent lad who is doing his best to fulfil her order for the table without stumbling over anything in his quest to look at her as much as humanly possible. When, a minute or so later, Paige arrives at the table, it’s with a slight exaggeration to her normal level of hip sway, which causes Christine to have to bury her giggle in her hand.
“You’re mean,” Vicky says.
“I can’t help it,” Paige says, sitting down.
Looking back over at the boy, Christine pretends to assess him properly. “Hmm,” she says. “Not bad. Think we should take him home with us? Vick, how do you think she’d turn out after three years of estrogen therapy?”
Lorna frowns, but Vicky says, “His skin would probably clear up. We’d be doing her a favour.”
“I thought you dragged us here to get away from the horror show you call home,” Lorna says pointedly.
“I’m not assessing him in my professional capacity,” Christine protests. “This would be more of a hobby.”
“It’s important to keep busy,” Paige says, nodding.
* * *
The thing about thinking ahead and stealing the cafetiere from the second years’ common room is that a) it can be washed in Steph’s ensuite with the washing-up liquid and dish sponge that Steph also stole and b) when it comes time to seek forgiveness rather than permission she can make the quite reasonable point that she’s saved it from Mia’s tender ministrations; when she returns it, it will be as pristine as the day it was manufactured, and there will be no mould, growths or rodents living inside it.
She frowns as she presses down on the plunger, thinking about Mia. Of all of them outside the second year, it’s Bethany who’s gotten closest to her. Which isn’t to say that Bethany knows her well, but she’s validated Steph’s impression of Mia: that she has formed a shell of a person, designed a whole new personality, and she’s growing into it, bit by bit. That the personality she picked is kind of over-the-top, larger-than-life, stereotypical, etc. seems to be part of the plan; the more she relaxes into it, the more she’ll find the natural limits of her comfort with it, and those… spikier edges ought to be smoothed off. Nadine’s frustrated with her pretty much constantly, which seems mostly to come down to an extreme personality clash; sponsors are matched to intake members on either a complementary or oppositional basis — with a few exceptions, like Pippa, who was simply available when Steph showed up and who, Pippa has admitted, had a few issues with the programme she needed to work out — but Steph doesn’t know Nadine well enough to guess what she might have been like before Dorley, and thus what insights she brings to Mia’s so-called rehabilitation.
Laughing at herself, Steph pours coffee into two mugs, both refugees from the main kitchen. Mia’s ‘so-called’ rehabilitation! Steph’s still half-heartedly performing outrage at a programme she’s long-since stopped butting up against. Bit silly, really; for whose benefit, at this point, is she performing? Bethany might have had a rushed actualisation — Maria’s very proud — but the things that wake her up at night are not connected to her new self; they are fears imported from her past, traumas inflicted on her before she was brought here, before she was protected. And while Bethany’s still on a Mia-like path, talking quietly some nights about how she’s still working out who Bethany ought to be, who she wants her to be, and how she can grow to become her, she’s brought with her everything Steph found sweet and endearing about Aaron.
Cut away the bad stuff, and the masculinity falls away with it? It’s not exactly the thesis statement of Dorley Hall — doesn’t apply to, say, Diana, who seems to have been not so much carefully amended as utterly shredded by a man at Stenordale who, Steph was happy to be told, was subsequently brutally murdered for his trouble — but for Bethany, and perhaps Mia, it’s true enough.
She adds whitener — it objectively sucks compared to milk, but she doesn’t yet have the mini-fridge she’s been begging Pippa for — and pauses with the mugs in her hands, looking at Bethany, still lightly snoring, lying sideways on the bed with a forearm protecting her chest. Her hair is splayed around her head, messed up and matted slightly with sweat, and Steph wonders what dreams disturbed her this time.
Aaron again? She whispers his name occasionally, but in a curious manner, as if the dream that is surfacing aloud is not from her/his perspective, but has taken the point of view of an onlooker. One who thinks of Bethany’s former self with considerable contempt.
Steph hopes one day that Bethany can learn to hate who she was a little less. To separate the things she did from the person she was. And maybe that would be counterproductive, maybe it would be detrimental to her progress. And maybe she can’t ever do so, because her disgust for Aaron is part of what drives her development. But Steph still can’t quite bring herself to believe that stripping someone’s identity from them so completely, on the physical level as well as the psychological, is either the only or the best way to help someone trapped by the expectations of masculinity.
She’s pretty sure the sponsors would remind her that she was never a man in the first place, that she by definition cannot understand the allure of a power structure which turns its teeth both outward and inward. She knows Aunt Bea would.
Eh.
Fuck it.
They’re all along for the ride at this point. The orchis aren’t that far off; if it turns out there’s a better way, that’s for future generations who still possess testicles to discover.
She sets down Bethany’s coffee on her bedside table. She picked out the mugs at random from downstairs, and now she’s regretting it, because she’s about to serve Bethany her morning coffee in a mug that declares in scrappy print, NO GODS, NO MISTERS, and has printed underneath something which Steph originally thought was just a graffiti of the anarchy ‘circled-A’ symbol but which turns out to be the head of a penis, crudely drawn and with a line slashed through it. She picks up the mug again, substitutes the other one — which says, slightly more innocently and in bold, sans-serif text, ASMR You Are The Kidnap Victim [12:36], with an appropriate illustration — and kisses Bethany gently on the forehead.
She stirs and mumbles, but doesn’t wake up.
So gentle.
Steph kisses her again, smooths out an errant lock of hair, and retrieves the cup. She’ll make her another when she rises, and in the meantime, she’ll go drink hers somewhere else. Fortunately, it’s early enough that no-one else is likely to be around.
Her theory is proved wrong a moment later, when someone knocks quietly on her door. She rushes to open it, almost spilling her coffee, and finds Diana on the other side, hand still raised.
Steph lifts a finger to her lips and flicks her eyes sideways, and Diana nods.
“Hey,” Steph whispers, hefting her mug, “I just made coffee and I have spare. You want one?”
* * *
“You want to know the best thing about these eggs?” Christine says, scooping up the last of her breakfast on a fork. “They were made by normal, free-range people. People whose worst secret is that they cheated on their boyfriend or their girlfriend, or they stole a tenner from a friend once, or something. You know what I’d give to have that kind of secret?”
Paige bumps up against her, pulls her into a one-armed hug. “You’d dress worse, though,” she says. “If you were like them, you’d only ever wear shorts and t-shirts.”
“I like shorts and t-shirts.” Christine wriggles her shoulder under Paige’s embrace.
“I hate them.”
“I know.”
“You look like a children’s TV presenter when you wear them.”
“I know.”
“I keep looking for the funny puppet.”
Christine laughs. “You mean Mia? I left her at home.”
“Dress nice, Christine,” Paige says.
“Fine,” Christine says, with exaggerated grumpiness. “All I’m saying is, a little normality would be nice.”
Paige kisses her. “All told, and with my objections to our enforced participation on file, if normality comes with shorts, I think I prefer insanity.”
“How are you doing, Tina?” Vicky asks. “Surely they’re going to let you—” and she lowers her voice, “—graduate soon?”
Christine wants to say that that’s part of her frustration, that innocent words like ‘graduate’ have such overtones of meaning that even someone like Vicky, who’s been free for months and months now, still whispers them like she’s confessing to a murder, but, in all honesty, it’s not, not really. She can’t imagine life without the hall, not even if she bypasses the slightly itchy thought of being that guy again and instead tries to build a life in which she is merely an ordinary girl, trans or cis. And that is the problem: that she has become so used to the structure provided by the hall, so used to being part of the machine, that her fortnight off had to be enforced, and still she’s found herself picking up little bits of work here and there.
She doesn’t want to be a part of the feminising machine when she’s thirty. Let alone forty! So what does a life outside the hall even look like?
“I think they’ve forgotten about me,” she says. “Now that I’m on staff—” Vicky winces when she doesn’t whisper that, but it’s a perfectly normal thing to say, “—I’ve just gotten folded into the workflow, you know? Hell, some of the junior sponsors have started reporting to me.”
“Ew,” Vicky says.
Lorna laughs. “Responsibility! Get out. Get out while you can.”
“That’s sort of the question,” Christine says. “Get out and do what? I haven’t even graduated yet. The other kind of graduated, I mean. The one where you get a qualification and not a mildly psychotic Sisterhood.”
“Be a dropout,” Vicky suggests. “Develop the next killer internet app. Retire on your millions in ten years.”
“That’s a no-hoper. My instincts suck; I thought crypto would die on the vine. Doesn’t speak well of my chances to develop the next big thing. All I know is that it’ll be something equally dumb and wasteful.”
“Maybe you should graduate anyway,” Paige says. “Soon. I’m going to. I’ve got a meeting scheduled with Francesca in early March. I’ll stick around until I’ve finished my degree, but that’s all.”
“I’m still technically on watch for my feminine presentation skills,” Christine says.
“You’re so good at that now!” Vicky exclaims.
Shrugging, Christine’s got to admit that, yeah, she kind of is. Most of her wardrobe’s still borrowed, but she’s decent enough at makeup and, crucially, she doesn’t get scared about going outside in skirts any more. Time was that even her tomboy outfits would have her terrified that every Tom, Dick and Harry would see right through her to the ‘boy’ inside; this morning, she casually threw together an outfit last year’s Christine would have been terrified even to try at home, and didn’t think about it until— Well, until just now. And, she wants to remind Paige, she didn’t pick shorts!
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s kinda nice to just fly under the radar, you know?”
“You already did, darling,” Paige whispers, nuzzling her.
“But I didn’t know it.”
“Hey,” Vicky says, and Christine looks back from Paige, but Vicky’s not talking to her. She’s taken Lorna’s hand and she’s stroking the knuckles.
“I’m fine,” Lorna says quietly, in a voice devoid of her usual animation.
“Lorna?” Christine says.
“Old shit. Don’t worry about it.”
“Try us,” Paige suggests.
“You, especially,” Lorna snaps, “should not worry about it.” She’s stiff, shoulders forward, like a challenge, but she can’t hold it, and she falls back into the booth, Vicky still holding her hand. “Sorry,” she says. “Paige, you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Recently,” Paige says, in such a dry voice it extracts a near-smile from Lorna.
“My point exactly. I feel like shit complaining about my crap in front of you. You included, Vick,” she adds, covering Vicky’s hand. “You went through hell to get where you are, I merely went through—”
“A different kind of hell,” Vicky says, interrupting her. “A much, much worse one.”
“Debatable,” Lorna mutters.
Vicky’s not having that, and she gathers Lorna up in her arms, kisses her on the forehead, over and over. Christine reaches over the table and carefully moves the coffee cups and empty plates out of their way.
“We always had each other,” Vicky says. “You were alone. And when you weren’t alone, it was your mum, it was your awful ex-girlfriend. So don’t downplay your shit, okay?” Lorna nods into Vicky’s armpit. “So what’s up?”
“The usual,” Lorna says, shrugging, keeping herself well inside Vicky’s hug. “I love you, Vicky, obviously, and I really like both of you—” she waves her free hand vaguely in Christine’s direction, “—but you’re all so perfect and sometimes I hate you for it.”
Something in Christine, the remnant of the thing who hated his captivity, wants to speak up, but she squashes it, because Lorna’s talked about her past, about her ex-girlfriend who was staggeringly cruel to her, about her mother who was worse, and unlike Christine, Lorna did nothing to deserve any of it.
“Seem to be getting clocked more lately,” Lorna’s saying. “Kids. Other students. A girl shouted at me in the toilets in the Anthill last week. I don’t know what’s different.”
“Maybe nothing’s different about you,” Paige says. “Maybe it’s just the way everything is these days.”
“Maybe. I went on that forum Kathryn Frost posts on—”
“Oh, Lorna, no,” Vicky whispers.
“—and there wasn’t anything new on my page there. Nothing since the protest last year.” Lorna smiles weakly. “I’m deliberately boring. Sorry, Vick,” she adds. “I know I shouldn’t go there.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Anyway,” Lorna says, sitting forward again, “I have my surgery in six weeks. Ish. Maybe that’ll be enough to stop people giving me the look.”
Yeah. Christine’s glad she stomped on her worst instincts. She’s gotten clocked only a couple of times, most notably on her early outing from Dorley to visit Indira’s family, and she still thinks about them. For that to be Lorna’s daily life, for her to experience, over and over, the thing Christine merely fears…
Dorley Hall doesn’t just keep the girls mostly inside until their third year so they don’t expose the programme. When all you want is to blend in, having people repeatedly single you out is beyond traumatic.
And as for that forum, well, there’s a reason Maria’s organising a committee later in the year to look at the NPHs, and especially the trans-origin ones, to see if they need to be adjusted.
The conversation moves on, mostly to a discussion of how Lorna is going to fit her uni work around her operation — Lorna’s resigned to going to lectures with healing bruises and visible swelling, because it’s not like she can put her transness back in the bag while she’s at Saints — but Christine makes only token comments. She’s thinking again about the basement, about the solidarity she found there, about the family she found there — multiple members of whom are at this table — and about Lorna, alone, surrounded only by people who refuse to understand her.
Maybe Christine’ll nip down to the basement in a day or two. Maybe she’ll take a supervising shift. See how everyone is down there. Catch up.
It’s good to stay involved.
* * *
Once again, it’s difficult not to feel envious of how natural Steph looks. She handed Diana a mug of freshly made and delicious-smelling coffee — in a mug with a joke on that Diana doesn’t really get; another thing to Google when she gets home — and closed the door to her room long enough to throw an oversized shirt on over her sleeping clothes, but now here she is, sitting on one of the couches in the first-floor common room in just a pair of shorts, a silk-looking strappy top of some kind, and a large red-and-black-checked lumberjack shirt, sipping from a mug of her own and smiling politely at Diana. And it’s something that’s changed in her, for in her own way she’s changed almost as much as Diana has: when Declan knew her, when she was outwardly Stefan, she was awkward and shy. She would look away when people met her eyes. Not always; sometimes she seemed so confident, so self-assured, that Declan wondered if she really was down there for the same reason as the rest of them. In his belligerence, he decided she was grassing on them to the sponsors, and tried to exploit that.
She winces at the memory.
“Thank you for the coffee,” she says in her faltering voice, the thing about her that is still mostly Declan, no matter the words she picks or the sentiments she tries to convey.
Steph grins. “Thank you for the retroactive justification for my stealing the second years’ cafetiere.”
And at that, Diana giggles. It’s difficult to be too sad around Steph, now that they’re past yesterday’s awkwardness. She’s too kind, too much a person who enjoys putting others at ease, and it works on Diana just as much as she saw it working on Aaron, Adam and even Will, long before any of them chose their new names. It’s also clear how much her earlier flashes of confidence — Stefan’s — were a front, a shield; something she became used to holding in front of her true self, to hide it, to protect it. When Stephanie is confident now, she is more comfortable with it, more laid-back.
In that, Diana thinks she can understand her. She does not often contrive to feel natural in her new body, in her new persona, but when she does, it might be the most wonderful thing she’s ever experienced.
Still, she feels overdressed. Not so much because of the warm travelling clothes, but because of her overly large chest. Her breasts feel, compared to Steph’s — which essentially do not exist — too obvious. As if Steph is a woman because of her manner, because of her smile, because of the way she carries herself, and Diana is a woman because light bends around her mammaries.
She makes a mental note: talk to Monica about it.
Thank fuck for Monica, honestly. Not something Declan would ever have thought!
They make small talk for a little while as they drink their coffee. Steph talks about her plans for the day: she and Leigh are going to talk to Adam, and though that probably won’t happen today, the meeting about it sure will. Diana reveals that she’s been thinking about coming back to the hall every weekend, or every other weekend, or something like that, to touch base, and Steph seems genuinely happy about that, something which Diana grasps with both hands until Steph squeals and mentions that she’s spilling her coffee and also can’t, when she’s trapped between two voluminous breasts, actually breathe very well.
Diana doesn’t mention what she talked about with Aunt Bea, that she left her office with a loose conviction that she will, one day, return to this place on a permanent basis, to help others like her, because… Well, too many reasons. Mainly, though, Diana doesn’t yet feel like someone who can claim to be of use to anyone.
Second years are starting to mill sleepily about — the one Diana thinks is called Faye waves to Steph on her way to the bathroom — which is Diana’s cue to get a move on, because she has more to say and do before Monica takes her home. So she stands again, hugs Steph again — from the side this time — and offers to wash her mug.
“I’ll do it,” Steph says, taking it from her and looking sideways at another of the girls who is hovering at the edge of the room. “I’m teaching by example.” The girl rolls her eyes and follows Faye to the bathroom, and Steph looks back at Diana, grinning. “I know,” she says, “I’m the ‘mum friend’. People keep telling me that like it’s new information.”
“It looks good on you,” Diana says. “It always has. I saw it too, you know. Before.” She feels suddenly awkward, and with good reason. The person who looks out from behind Diana’s eyes is the same who looked out from Declan’s, in most respects, but acknowledging this in front of someone she tried very seriously to hurt is more than uncomfortable. “From the day you got here, you’ve been helping people.”
Steph’s turn to feel awkward. She looks away, looks carefully at one of the threadbare couches. “Oh,” she says, “well, um… You know, I just don’t, uh…”
“It’s a wonderful thing. Makes me want to be like you when I grow up.”
Laughing, covering her mouth, Steph briefly meets Diana’s eyes, then looks away again. “Thank you,” she says.
“Oh,” Diana says, “and before I go, I want you to know: I’m called Diana Rosamond now. No more Shaw, same as no more Declan. Clean break.”
Now Steph smiles up at her, genuine and delighted. “It suits you,” she says. “It really suits you.”
* * *
Honestly, Raph might be the smartest one here. Because the thing is, you have to try, don’t you? When a bunch of mad women kidnap you and stash you underground and then a month or so later reveal that, oh, hey, we’re planning to turn you into girls, fighting back is the obvious solution, isn’t it? And you can fight back with actual fighting, like Declan and Will did, but that doesn’t get you anywhere, not when the women in charge are, well, in charge. And Declan’s Diana now, and Will’s Leigh, so an argument could be made that charging in and trying to nut the problem is the worst approach. Ollie tried hurting himself and then tried killing himself, and yet he’s still here and on the same path as the rest of them.
But Declan was a mess, wasn’t he? Always trying to prove himself, always trying to make himself King Shit of whatever hill he found himself on top of. Will? He buried his true self under a mountain of logic and left someone self-satisfied but deeply unhappy in charge. And Ollie, he’s just too fucking stupid to navigate the world without a role model, and his selection criteria are stupider than he is.
Who else have we got? Martin? Drank to cope with the trauma of being a useless failson. Adam’s a mystery, but it’s obvious enough that most of his shit is bundled up with the obscure religion he was raised into, so he was made stupid. Ignorant by design. And there’s Bethany, who was victimised her entire life and made it every woman’s problem.
There’s also Steph, but she doesn’t count. She wanted to be a girl, right? So where better than here? She’s the only other one of them to have made mostly sensible decisions from the start.
Raph, on the other hand, pushed back exactly as much as was wise, didn’t he? Someone wants to make him into a woman? Fuck that; he knows women have it worse, that resisting these lunatics and remaining a man is his best option for an easy ride through life. And he also knows exactly nothing about being a woman, and not just the technical stuff like makeup and periods and that; a woman walks into a boardroom filled with men, right? How is she supposed to navigate that? Raph doesn’t know. It’s supposed to suck, he knows that. What he doesn’t know is how a woman is supposed to turn that around.
So of course he pushed back. He was difficult. He actively resisted assimilation, attaching himself — in a backseat capacity, of course — to anyone who had a plan to resist. That’s the clever thing: you don’t throw the punch, but you talk up the guy who’s going to, so if the punch works out then you reap the benefits, and if it doesn’t, you don’t get punished quite as hard.
All that time in the cells did suck, though. And not just because of Ollie. Powerful motivation to go along with things. He’s always been a chameleon, is the thing. An observer of the status quo. And, sure, okay, he was also kind of attached to being a man, and that was only a little bit because it was and is the most rational choice for one who wants to have a quiet life, who wants to coast, effort-free, into a mediocre existence. But he is a man, isn’t he? It’s only natural to be protective of that. Hell, even Leigh, who spent his whole life wanting to be a woman, was defensive of his manhood.
Yeah. Only natural.
But he’s over that now. Because he didn’t have all the information before. Jane and the rest of them used to be just like him? And now they’re all doing fine? Better, they’re set for life, with stipends and support from some crazy rich lady? And a job here if they want one?
That changes things.
And that’s not all. Because the ones among them who got with the programme early, like Bethany and maybe Martin and, yes, Steph, kind of, they’re the ones doing best. They’ve got the easiest lives: they get bugged less by their sponsors, they get to just chill more and spend less time reading boring books about feminism; Steph and Bethany even get to go upstairs!
That’s the information he needed. First, that making the switch is not just possible, it’s actively beneficial in the long term. Second, that even in the short term, cooperation is just better.
So Raph’s going to cooperate.
And when he made that decision, a little while ago now, it was as if a huge weight had lifted. Not only did he no longer have to care about protecting his future from a gang of mad women, but all the things he did to be a proper man, all the behaviours and habits and shit, he doesn’t need to think about them any more, either.
And, funny thing, but when masculinity no longer matters, when it’s not important, then its fear of ambiguity, its veneration of brute strength and blunt rudeness, its outright rejection of homosexuality and femininity, its need for power and control, all of it starts to seem… childish.
Big man hit rock with sledgehammer. Big man hit woman with fist. Big man. Who fucking cares?
He’d be ashamed that it took him so many months to see this, to realise that his embrace of manhood was just another habit, another way he was supporting the status quo as it had been presented to him all his life and not the natural, normal way of things, but that’d be a bit stupid, really; he always had the impression that the behaviour that was drilled into him was as natural as his chromosomes — hell, that it flowed directly from them — and you don’t drop a belief immediately if it’s one you've been indoctrinated into your whole life. What did he say about the sponsors before? That they think all men are evil or something? Well, maybe men aren’t evil, but they’re also not the only option. That much is obvious now.
So no, he’s not ashamed of how he was before. With one exception: Angelina. The way he tried to control her. Maybe he should look her up when he gets out. Maybe there’s a way he can contribute to supporting her and the kid. That’s his big flub, actually: man got scared that a woman was asserting herself and her rights over him, so he asserted himself right back. Childish.
Hmm. Yeah. He should think about that more. Maybe Jane has some time free this afternoon? He can ask her what the orchi is going to be like while he’s at it.
“Hey,” someone says, “Raph? Are you there?”
He looks up. He’s been staring at this one bowl of Weetabix for fuck only knows how long — except that it’s become a bowl of gross-looking wheaty soup, which is a major clue — and now someone’s after him. A girl, by the sound of it.
He laughs; and just how long will voice be an accurate determiner of gender down here?
It’s Monica trying to get his attention, which is unusual. She hasn’t been down much since Declan was thrown out on his cauliflower ear. Internally shrugging, Raph shoves his unwanted Weetabix aside and stands, joining her at the door to the corridor, which she’s holding open with a foot while she beckons him.
Sometimes he’s glad she doesn’t hang out much; she’s built like a boxer — a lady boxer — and she’s the only one of all the sponsors Raph finds physically intimidating. Oh, Will tried to make a case for his girl, Tabitha, once or twice, but she’s just tall. Monica’s strong.
Shit. Leigh. And she. He should get better at that. It’s basically going to be his future, after all.
He stops a sensible, nonthreatening distance away from Monica and says, “What’s up?”
“You were enjoying your Weetabix that much, you couldn’t hear me?” she says, smirking.
“I was contemplating it.”
“Well, contemplate this: how mentally sturdy are you feeling right now?”
He can feel himself frowning. The question’s caught him off guard. And aren’t they supposed to be off-balance? Isn’t that the whole point of this place? “Uh,” he says, “one to ten? Maybe a six. Seven. Why?”
“Diana wants to see you,” Monica says.
* * *
Jane’s out in the hallway with Diana, watching the exchange, and she can’t stop herself from grinning when Raph responds to this the exact way no-one but her expected.
“Holy shit!” he exclaims. “Really?”
“Y—yes,” Monica stutters, but she recovers. “She’s waiting out there. Just didn’t want to—”
“I’m fine,” Raph says, flapping a hand. “I’m fine. Send her in!” In his exuberance, he finally notices Jane, hanging back, and he waves at her. “Morning!”
“Morning, Raph,” she says. To Diana, behind her, she says, “Ready?”
“Ready,” Diana says in that soft, rumbling voice of hers. It’s sweet that she’s trying to moderate the way she speaks even without training, though it does make her sound kinda like a boxing announcer took a shift narrating Swan Lake.
But yeah. Of course Raph was going to be excited. He’s been changing rapidly, and no-one else has really seen it. Well, okay, maybe some of the other girls down here have, but after he got out of the cells, after he encountered the new Steph and, shortly after, the new Bethany, he’s been fixing his attitude, and something like genuine curiosity has opened up in him. It surprised Jane at the time — not because she wasn’t expecting it, because she was, just not for another few months at least — but she’s used to it now, and she enjoys watching him befuddle everyone else.
Still, he’s a bit too light-hearted about it all now. She doesn’t want him pushing too far, too fast, and blowing up. But the collapse of basically every other masculine role model in the basement — Declan’s abrupt departure, Ollie’s descent into self-harm, Will’s very sudden realisation that everyone could see what a massive tool he was — has had the effect on Raph that Jane hoped.
He’s a chronic follower. A near-passive sponge for peer pressure. He just… has a bit of lag time, is all. With an understandable attachment to his testicles.
* * *
Diana remembers Raph — who she has to continually curb the temptation to call Raphael, because the confluence of syllables is just too wonderful — as the kind of guy you don’t really remember. Not tall, not short, and not bulky, either; he was fourth most buff guy in the basement more or less by default, since Steph, Bethany, Adam and Martin were all out of the running. Hair buzzed to his temples; Diana doesn’t even remember the colour. Scratchy stubble of the sort that shows but doesn’t ever amount to anything; even before the Goserelin, Raphael was never going to be a guy who could grow an impressive beard.
Seeing him now, then, is a shock. And not the same shock she had when she first saw Steph again, or even Leigh, because Raph is supposed to be more like her, or more like she used to be: a regular guy caught by Dorley. Monica’s talked about him with her, called him a ‘manipulator’, and so Diana probably ought to brace herself for a barrage of bullshit or whatever, but she finds herself unable to think about much else, because…
Well.
Were Raphael’s eyes always so pretty?
They’re nothing special, really. Brown, like Diana’s. But Raph’s a shade or so darker than her, even after all this time underground, and something about the complementary colours just makes his eyes stand out, makes them seem to shine.
“Holy fucking shit!” Raph says as Monica steps aside and Diana walks through the door into the common room. “Look at you!”
Yeah. Look at her. Look at her all slack-jawed and staring. She tries her best to get something out. “Hi,” she says, and she becomes aware she’s tilting her head at him. It doesn’t help that she’s taller, and has to look down on him. “You, uh… You look different.”
Very articulate, Diana. Declan would be proud.
Except Raph does look different! His hair’s longer, of course, being maybe three inches long, but the main thing is his cheeks. They seem rounder, and they fill out his face in a way that feels like they were always meant to, like Raph was just too bony before. They make his smile sweeter, his eyes crinklier, and— Diana runs out of coherent thoughts. He just looks good.
“Yeah, well,” Raph says, “it’s the injections, innit? And talk about me… Shit, man. You’re all—” He doesn’t finish the sentence, and instead mimes Diana’s most obvious, stand-out feature around his chest. He uses both arms to do so, at their fullest extension.
“Please, Raph,” she says, “not ‘man’. I’m trying to leave all that behind.”
She worries suddenly that he’ll judge her for that, but this Raph is not the one she was expecting. “Oh,” he says, “yeah, sure, sure. I mean, wow.” He looks her up and down. “I mean, Leigh said she saw you yesterday, but she didn’t go into detail… I suppose it would have taken up all of movie night.”
“You have movie nights now?”
“Yeah. You wanna stay? We could do another one. Maybe watch that cheerleader show Bethany’s obsessed with, if we can get her and Steph to come back downstairs.”
“Goodness gracious,” Diana mutters, and then she shakes her head and smiles at Raph. “Shit. Sorry. Trying too hard.”
“‘Goodness gracious’?”
They’re walking slowly across the concrete floor now, and Diana sits at one of the metal tables. Declan sat here. Declan had this view…
“I’m trying not to be Declan,” she says as Raph sits opposite her. “And sometimes I try too hard.”
Shrugging, Raph replies, “Declan would never have said ‘goodness gracious’. Not unless he could do that weird half-singing thing he used to do.” And then he catches Diana’s eye. “Oh. Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. And I still do that. I always loved how words sound. I was just ashamed of it. You’re not supposed to, as a bloke.”
“Yeah, well,” Raph says, “you know what I realised?” He nods at Monica and Jane. “Around here, blokes don’t win. So you might as well do all the things you always wanted to.”
“Oh? What are you doing?”
Raph looks uncomfortable. “Uh, TBA. I haven’t got that far yet. Still working on it, right? I’m not Steph. I’m not even Bethany. And I’m definitely not you.”
Taking a risk, Diana reaches over and pats Raph on the back of his hand. “Neither was I,” she says. And then she laughs, withdrawing her hand and leaning on it. “Everything changes, doesn’t it?”
“Martin hasn’t,” Raph says. He didn’t react to her touching his hand, and now she’s burning to know: did he control his reaction, or does he just not care? “Well, actually, since you were here, he’s changed, I guess. Like, he’s not all depressing any more. Hmm. Oh! Ollie. He’s still Ollie.” He frowns. “Uh, maybe don’t go see him.”
“Yeah. I heard about what happened.”
“Still wondering if he’s going to wash out, like you did. Him or— Shit, that’s right! You know who hasn’t changed? Adam. I assume. He doesn’t really leave his room.”
“Oh.”
“When he does, he’s usually mumbling. What happens when you wash out, anyway? I think Beth thought you got turned into hamburgers, but clearly you didn’t, so spill.”
“I never got that far,” Diana says. “To the burger stage, I mean. I was kidnapped. Again. But if I’d made it, I got the feeling I’d be working for Peckinville, but in what capacity, I have no idea.”
“Fair, fair,” Raph says, and snorts with amusement. “I don’t know what’s weirder, seeing you all hot like Wonder Woman or hearing you say things like ‘in what capacity’.”
Diana can’t help it. “You really think— Like Wonder Woman?” She’s smiling like an idiot.
Raph, thankfully, smiles back at her, his plump cheeks pinking. “Yeah, I mean… Yeah. The one from the cartoons, not the movies. The better one. Hey.” He leans forward. “Do you like looking like that?”
And there, Diana’s smile collapses. “That’s complicated,” she says. “I’m learning to. I wish I didn’t sound like this, though. I feel conspicuous enough, and then I open my fucking mouth.”
“You make it work,” Raph insists.
“You’re sweet.”
Raph blinks at her, and then smiles more broadly. “Shit, I am, aren’t I? Fuck. Cool.”
Diana takes this opportunity to redirect the conversation. “How are you doing, Raph? Last time we spoke, I was… Well. You know what I was talking about. And then Steph hit me. Which I deserved.”
Raph looks down. Starts playing with the spoon in what looks like it was once a bowl of Weetabix. “Yeah. Shit. Yeah. Not a good memory, that. And I don’t mean your pratfall,” he adds, waving a hand. “Jane replayed the conversation to me. A lot. Made me look her in the eye while I listened to myself laugh. That fucks you up, you know? Because I never really thought about it before. Like, you’re just joking around with the lads, aren’t you? Present company excepted, et cetera. But that’s it, isn’t it? It’s just what you do. Hot girl with big tits walks past, you all holler. Your mate’s talking about the slag he banged last night, you go, ‘Way ayyy,’ and you ask if he did her up the jacksie. And a guy’s joking about… about that, and you laugh. And you don’t even laugh because it’s funny. You laugh because the lads are all laughing. You laugh because it’s what you do. And I never thought about it before then. Not really.” He twirls the spoon around, takes it out, puts it in his mouth, licks it clean of milk. Diana’s torn between thinking about what he said and watching the spoon as it slides back out from between his lips. “That’s a lie,” he continues. “O’course I thought about it. I imagine we all did. Because you know it’s wrong, don’t you? You don’t joke about that when a bird might hear you. Like, a bird you know, like your mum or your cousin or a girl you want to pull. You know, but you laugh anyway.”
“Because it’s what you do,” Diana says.
Raph puts the spoon down. “Yeah. Shit.” He shakes his head. “When you think about it, men are bastards, aren’t we? Oh. Present company.”
“No, no,” Diana says, “we are.” She breathes out, long and slow, thinking of two men in particular: the one she’s running from, and the one who broke her. “We really fucking are.”
She must be showing her emotions on her face again, because Raph leans forward. “Diana,” he says, “what happened to you?”
She should hold it together. She shouldn’t speak. But here’s Raph, with his pretty eyes and his genuine concern, and she can see all the little ways the estrogen’s worked on him so far, same as with Steph, and now that she’s met God only knows how many Dorley girls she can see how it’s going to keep working on him, how he’s slowly going to become more like Monica. More like Jane.
Slowly, and not all at once.
“Fuck,” she says quietly. “Sorry, Raphael. Really. But you’re so fucking lucky. I want you to know that. You’re so fucking lucky. You get to be here. You get to take your time about this. You can ask all the difficult fucking questions of yourself that you need to. You— Shit. Sorry. I can’t do this.”
Diana makes to stand, but Raph’s holding her wrist. Not firmly. Just enough to say stay.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Raph says quickly.
Another deep breath. “I think I do,” she says. “You know, I was scared to come back down here? Scared it would bring Declan back. That I’d look around this place and he’d— Stupid. Because I look at this place, I look at you, and I’m just jealous. I wish I’d got my shit together while I was still down here. I wish I was you, Raph. I wish I’d had time. But I had to make a… a hard break. A quick one. And it was really fucking messy.” She laughs without humour. “There’s all these old bits of me all around. Old instincts, old habits, old thoughts. I have to be careful all the time. Jake might have killed Declan, but I have to kill him again, a bit at a time, every day.”
“Jake?”
“He raped me.” Too blunt. But she can’t not be. Not about this. Not if she’s going to talk about it. “More than that. He controlled me. He was one of the military guys, the men the old woman had watching over us. And he couldn’t have Trevor, but he was allowed to have me. Like I was a toy. Shit.” She’s been trying not to cry, but it’s still all so present, so recent, and less and less buried every time she thinks about it. And the injections don’t help. Too many damn emotions, all the time. “Sorry.”
With that, Raph’s out of his chair. He walks up to her, holds out his arms. “I’m not very good at this,” he says, “but if you want…”
Yeah. She wants. She stands into his arms, and they hug. Gingerly, like either of them could break the other. Like neither of them knows precisely what the code is in this situation.
“You could stay,” Raph says as they hug. “If you wanna go slow, you could stay. Get your old room back. Or live upstairs, I guess.”
“I can’t,” she says. “I’ve had a clean break, like I said. And even if there are bits of Declan everywhere, I’m not who I was when I came here. I can’t stay locked up.” She leans away from him and smiles. She must look stupid. Makeup everywhere. “I’m still working out who Diana is. And who she isn’t. And to do that, I need to spend time around people. Lots of people. And I need… I need Chia.”
“Who is—?”
“She took me in. And, um, no-one else knows about her? So—”
“Secret,” Raph says. “Got it.”
“So,” Diana says, sniffing, “I can’t stay. But I will come back.” She smiles again, feeling clearer. Feeling emptier, and freer of Declan than ever. Look directly at the devil and he flees. “Maybe I’ll come back for movie night.”
“Bring something sexy. They won’t let us watch anything too sexy.”
“No promises,” Diana says.
“Take care, Diana,” Raph says.
They embrace once more, and then Diana makes her excuses. She was going to say goodbye to Leigh, too, but she thinks she’ll just leave a message with Tabitha. And she’ll go fix her face and she’ll get a ride home with Monica.
But first she’ll walk slowly and unsteadily out of the basement, away from the boy with the pretty eyes.
* * *
As a child, Beatrice didn’t travel with her mother. They didn’t have the money for a car, and Bea’s mum was perpetually flipped between working all the hours God sent for barely enough money to put food on the table and, more often, saving every last penny from the dole and going without to make sure Beatrice herself — or her mother’s son, at any rate; a vastly different person — got something to eat. So she doesn’t have a reference for what awkward family outings are like, beyond what she’s seen on the television.
This, she thinks, undoubtedly counts.
She would be driving, if she were allowed, but Elladine’s paranoia has been escalating lately, and Bea would have had to use the GPS to get them to this facility — an unacceptable security risk, apparently; something to do with needing to be online to use it in every car Beatrice has access to — so instead the woman from Elle’s personal retinue drives, with the air of a put-upon father who has only not turned the car around and taken them home because those tickets to Disneyland were expensive. Beatrice sits in the passenger seat, frowning, wondering whether to turn on the radio to break the uncomfortable silence, but ultimately concluding that she is unwilling to risk annoying the driver further by putting any of her theories on how to operate the complicated-looking touchscreen interface to the test.
In the back, Trevor and Valérie glare out of their respective windows, and Frankie sits in the middle, belted only around her lap, grinning at Beatrice whenever she catches her eye in the pull-down vanity mirror, and reminding Bea of nothing so much as a naughty child, struggling against the confines of their booster seat, remaining quiet only until the moment they have judged to be the most optimally irritating at which to ask to stop for a wee.
Valérie hadn’t wanted to come. That’s the crux of it. Her time at Stenordale is over, she said, and she has no wish to revisit it. She made the point, quite reasonably, Bea thought, that Trevor and Frankie had just as much knowledge of Dorothy’s recent movements as she, and that the only information she possessed that they didn’t was related to aspects of upkeep for a manor house that has since burned to ashes. But Elle needs Valérie, and so Beatrice was bound to insist.
And then Valérie wanted to stay at the hall. Again, quite reasonable. And she raised again her objections when their blacked-out Range Rover left the county and started north, taking Valérie far away from what passes these days for her comfort zone. And so Bea was forced to explain that Elle has become concerned that her movements are being watched by elements of Silver River. For now, she prefers to keep her location secret, and surround herself with people she trusts. To which Valérie had said that she had been kept in one place for decades by people allied to Silver River and somehow is still alive, and that Ms Lambert should perhaps toughen the fuck up.
Trevor said something about operational security, and that Elle was clearly making sensible moves, to which Valérie only swore. And then Frankie had come in with, “Don’t shit-talk the money,” and an argument began. An argument which petered out some five minutes later — five minutes which felt to Beatrice like five hours — in a stalemate, with no-one’s grievances adequately addressed.
They’ve been living with this for too long. For Bea, having Valérie back is a miracle, but Valérie herself has been more reserved, more pragmatic. And well she might be, after so many decades of entrapment. They have argued about it more than once, about Val’s inability to settle down, to dedicate herself emotionally to a new life, and the last time Bea broached the subject, Val spat out, “J’attends constamment l’inévitable catastrophe, Béatrice!” and left for the roof, to bum a smoke off of one of the cis girls who habitually lurk there.
Lord only knows what excuse Valérie gave them for her presence. After such an argument, Beatrice was loath to ask.
Mostly it’s been wonderful having her back. But a part of Valérie still resides in the ruins of Stenordale, just as for the longest time, a part of Beatrice was still trapped below the hall. It’s been Bea’s hope that this upcoming debriefing might help Valérie reclaim that part of her, might allow her to purge Dorothy’s hold over her psyche. Might allow her finally to move on from surviving to living.
But Val has been against it. And Beatrice hasn’t wanted to ask the inevitable question, the one which crowds her thoughts whenever they discuss the matter, for fear of enraging her.
Who are you, Valérie Barbier, without your pain?
Fifteen miles of silence later, Valérie speaks again.
“I will speak with her, Béatrice,” she says. “I will tell your Ms Lambert everything she wants to know. I will relive it all. Every grisly moment of it. For if it brings me one inch closer to Dorothy, if it allows me eventually to grip her with my hands and choke the life from her, it will be worth it. So I will talk to her. I will be debriefed. And then, I think, Béatrice, I should like to go home.”
Bea nods. By ‘home’, she doesn’t mean the hall. She can mean only one place.
“I’ll take you,” Bea says. “Whenever you want to go.”
“Immediately, I think.”
“Immediately, then.”
In her head, she’s already running through the logistics of it — they’ll need to get her a passport, for one thing — and they are complex enough that she almost misses Valérie’s smile. It’s gone almost immediately, and she returns to gazing out of her window, but the tension is gone from her.
“You kids are adorable,” Frankie says, and she mimes grasping someone by the throat and shaking them, then sticks her tongue out, lolling her head as if dead.
“Shut up, Frankie,” Valérie says, without looking around.
Frankie nods and sits in silence for a moment. Frowning. Thinking. Planning, possibly, to apologise. Eventually, she crosses her arms and with great ceremony says, “Is it a bad time to ask to pull over somewhere? I need a wee.”
* * *
Several of the others have come and gone. Martin’s showed up, read his book for a while, been intercepted by Pamela, and vanished back to his room to do whatever it is they do in there when no-one else is around. Remonstrate about his vehicular murder, maybe. Competitive sulking?
Steph and Bethany both showed their faces. Steph pretended like they hadn’t been upstairs in the lap of luxury, and when Raph very clearly didn’t believe her, she gave him two croissants and some butter, which basically made up for it. Leigh was out of his room just long enough to fetch a bowl of cereal and say hi. And Ollie passed by on his way to the shower; they’re greeting each other by name again now, without swearing, which is progress. Progress on Ollie’s part, anyway. He might still be a complete fuckwit, but he’s showing it less.
And Raph’s sat here, chewing on his buttered croissants, drinking from the mug of tea Jane brought him — in a mug decorated with a silhouette of a woman, posing mid-song and holding a small device where she might otherwise be holding a microphone, and captioned, TASER SWIFT. Thinking it through.
Really thinking it through.
Because when he puts aside everything else, when he stops congratulating himself on his own insight and intelligence, and even when he stops returning continually to Angelina, to the letter he got from her, to the shock of recognition he got even back then when he read it, a shock which he had to put away immediately lest it consume him, control him, change him…
Shit. He’s getting off-topic.
The thing is.
Declan’s hot now.
He’s hot.
Declan, the most belligerent of all of them, the stupidest, the one who attacked his own fucking belly with a spoon, was dragged away, subjected to a kind of torture Raph finds it difficult to think about, and returned as Diana. And Diana’s striking, because she’s beautiful, with massive tits and—
And that’s not what actually struck Raph. Which, good thing, because if one of those hit him in the face—
Jesus Christ. Is he actually fucking allergic to thinking about anything seriously? Smartest one here? Raph might actually be the stupidest. Bar Ollie, obviously, because even in the momentary depths of self-criticism, Raph’s never going to put himself that low.
No.
What struck Raph was that Diana’s happy. She’s confident. Oh, sure, her happiness is brittle and her confidence is at least half fake and she’s very clearly haunted by everything that happened to her, but she’s doing it, isn’t she? She’s out there every day, making the best of her bizarre accelerated transition, talking to people in a voice that still sounds like Declan’s while looking like that. And she went back out there to continue doing all that shit.
She’s not just happy and confident. She’s almost inconceivably brave.
Shit.
He admires her.
He really, truly admires her.
Declan Shaw. Imagine that.
No, Diana Rosamond now, isn’t it? That’s what Jane said.
Fuck. Is he going to have to come up with a new name, too? Yeah. Yeah, he’s going to have to, isn’t he? He’s going to be a new person. A new woman. The itchy spots on his chest will eventually become breasts. His face, already subtly different, will continue to change. And he’ll grow his hair out, because he likes girls with long hair. And he’ll wear nice clothes, because he likes girls who dress nice.
And he’ll find Angelina and apologise. She’s a nurse now, apparently. She might not kill him, especially if he shows her his tits first.
Shit. Fucking shit. It’s all real. It’s not a joke, it’s not a hypothetical, and it’s not going to go away. It’s real, and it walked out of here with size WTF breasts and a smile he can’t stop thinking about.
One thing to accept that he cannot change his future. To stop inserting pointless friction into his life. To take the easy road. To make jokes and laugh along with it all. To become something like friends with Jane, because she’s nice and she seems worth it.
Another to know that it’s not going to be easy. To see in Diana the pain this has caused her, the grief. To see her smile anyway, despite how much she still has to do.
She’s out there.
She’s happy.
Or she’s working on it.
“Fucking hell,” he whispers.
This is going to be so much fucking work.
* * *
Jane’s relaxing on the common room couch by the door, going through the minutes from a recent meeting she had to miss, when Raph suddenly stands up from the metal table he’s been sitting at. He’s whispering something and frowning, and it feels like he’s looking at something only he can see, something which occupies him so much that when Jane locks her tablet, dumps it on the couch and goes over to him, he doesn’t notice her until she taps his elbow.
“Oh,” he says, briefly stiffening. “Hi.”
Huh. He seems guarded. Not like him. Or not like him lately. She’s been waiting for this: the cascade moment, when everything becomes too much, when he can no longer sustain the air of frivolity that replaced his prior self, the one that fought back. The one that hated her.
“Raph?” she says. She keeps it gentle, inquisitive. The last thing she wants is to—
And then he laughs. “Wow,” he says, looking properly at her, grinning broadly. “Shit,” he says, and now he’s looking skyward, as if consulting God, or perhaps Beatrice. “Christ,” he says, looking back to her.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was just— Wow. That was a conversation, wasn’t it?”
“With Diana?”
He nods emphatically. “She’s got it all figured out, hasn’t she? Off she goes one day, back she comes the next, with— Hey, was that a wig, do you know? Or did she get hair extensions?”
“Um.” Jane’s caught off guard. “I doubt it was a wig. Grandmother always liked to do things that weren’t easily undone.”
“Grandmother. Huh. Yeah. God. You’ve got to tell me all about that, okay?”
“It’s… Well, it’s pretty fucked up, Raph.”
He takes her arm and starts walking them towards the door to the corridor. And Jane could do a number of things in this situation — the handbook would permit her to zap him with her stun gun, tase him while he’s on the floor and throw him back into the cells just for touching her without permission — but she chooses to go with him. Raph’s thinking, it seems.
“I wanna know,” he says. “I don’t care how fucked up it is. If it happened to Dec, I wanna know. How he became her. And you, too.”
“Grandmother didn’t—”
“Oh. Shit. No.” He takes them down the corridor, back towards the bedrooms. “Sorry. Fuck. I just mean, how did you do it? What made it work for you?”
“‘It’?” she asks. She can guess, but it’s a fairly major rule that you don’t let them get away with implying things; when they’re actualising, they’re supposed to say so.
“This!” he exclaims, placing his thumb on the reader outside his room. “You! The whole girl thing.”
“Where are you going with this, Raph?”
He takes them into his room but he doesn’t shut the door. She does, toeing it closed, preferring privacy — his and hers — but she taps the alert button she carries in her pocket, so the women on duty upstairs will make sure to pay attention to the cameras in here until she taps it again.
“Look.” He drops onto his bed, pulls his legs up under him to sit cross-legged, and leans back on his arms. “Diana proves it, doesn’t she? Becoming a woman is objectively a viable option. Not just the only option, but actually doable. Because if Dec can manage it, then so can I, right? Fuck,” he adds, looking down, “I should tell Ollie. Either he’ll listen to me or he’ll get really upset. Honestly, either’s a win.”
He seems a little manic. Thoughts running away from him. Possibilities suddenly crowding his mind.
Good.
“I mean,” she says, “you’re right. Becoming a woman is a viable option. I did it. Diana’s doing it. So can you.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. But I mean mechanically, what’s next?” He tilts his head, thinking. “What’s the orchi like?”
“Um. Well, it’s— They numb you and they go in with a scalpel and cut out the…” Jane twirls a hand in the air; she always forgets the technical words for these things. “The ball bits,” she finishes.
“Do they leave the sacks?”
“Yes. But they sort of shrivel.”
“Huh. Huh. Weird. Weird. Okay.” He nods to himself a few times. “What about bras?”
“Bras.”
“What about them?”
“What,” Jane says, “like, in general, or…?”
“When do we start wearing them? When did you start wearing them? How do you do that thing where you leave your top on but you take off your bra? I still remember the first time I saw a bird do that; I was well impressed. Like a magic trick. Can you show me?”
“Raph! I’m not showing you my bra!”
“I don’t mean show me on you,” he says. “I mean…” And for the first time since he stood up at the metal table, he slows down. He leans forward and takes her hand; once again, she does not tase him. “I want to know how to put one on.”
She frowns. “You just kind of—”
“No, I mean, I want to know how to put on one well. And take it off again. And how to do the thing with the top. I saw Steph struggling with hers once in the shower room, and I don’t want to be bad at wearing a bra. You get that, right?”
“Yeah,” she says, “I do.” She sits next to him on the bed. “I once practised putting on and taking off a bra for a whole afternoon. Didn’t want to look like an idiot.”
“Right,” he says. “Right. You get me. Show me?”
“Sure, Raph,” Jane says. “I’ll show you how to put on a bra.”
“Show me everything,” Raph says. “Hey, I don’t quite have twenty-twenty; could I get glasses?”
She’s half up from the bed again, and when she looks back at him she sees nothing but innocence on his face.
“You’re not still fixated on being a hot librarian, are you?” she says.
“You don't think that sounds fun? Standing up from behind the desk at the library with a short skirt on, adjusting your glasses with your little finger, pulling a pencil out of your bun and having your hair slowly bounce down around your shoulders? Bending over to stack books, climbing ladders to reach the high shelves. And all the men can do is watch and not touch… Or so they think.”
“Raph? Do you like men?”
There’s a slight crease to his eyebrows as he appears genuinely to consider the question. “Dunno. Never tried.”
* * *
Monica pulls the Kia into an empty spot on the street Diana’s directed her to. She’s been directing her since they left Almsworth, and Monica’s had to restrain her disbelief that Diana, the woman who grew out of the monster who was Declan, has settled in Cherston-on-Sea, of all places. It’s the kind of town Tabitha calls ‘a tourist trap with a busted mechanism’; a run-down echo of fifties seaside family fun. There’ll be a shop somewhere on the promenade that sells rock candy and postcards of apple-cheeked white families all wearing red-and-white-striped swimwear.
With the car locked up, Diana leads her across the road, to one of a dozen terraced houses, done up smartly and recently repainted. It is, Monica notes, bemused, a bed and breakfast. Has she been staying here? With what money?
“Wait here, please,” Diana says. She’s returned to her clipped, breathy and slightly formal voice, the one she was using when Monica and Frankie first met her to bring her back. Is this where she learned to speak like that?
Monica loiters while Diana pushes open the front door. It’s the kind of front door that just has to make a sad little jingle sound when it opens, and it does, exactly as Monica expects. She controls a little laugh.
What she doesn’t expect is the woman who meets Diana practically at a run, and who would sweep her up in her arms if Diana wasn’t so much taller than her.
“Diana!” she exclaims, hugging her. “It’s good to see you back. Now, I’m sorry, but— Oh! And who is this?”
Diana, extracting herself from the woman’s grip, steps aside. “Chiamaka, this is Monica. She’s—”
“I’m from an agency,” Monica says quickly. “We specialise in these kinds of cases.”
“Well, I’ll be,” the woman named Chiamaka says, grinning broadly. “Well, come on up, then.”
Feeling strangely adolescent, Monica stuffs her hands in her jeans pockets and walks up the steps to where Chiamaka and Diana are waiting for her. Diana, damn her, is grinning like a maniac. Ball’s on the other foot.
Hmm. Pick another pithy phrase, Monica.
“Hi,” she says, presenting herself.
“Monica,” Chiamaka says. “From an agency.”
“Yes.”
“…Called?”
“Oh,” Monica says. “New Beginnings.” One of Elle’s people picked that name years ago, because any given English-speaking country in the world contains at least fifty agencies, organisations, clubs, companies, etc. named some variation on New Beginnings. It is, unless you are stupid enough to be cornered into giving more information, very difficult successfully to Google. “We’re going to make sure Diana’s taken care of.”
“I’m the one who takes care of her, Monica. But I would welcome your help.” She leans forward and whispers, “She’s been through it.”
“I know.”
“Good!” Chiamaka rubs her hands together. “Then you’ll be happy to mind the desk while I’m out, yes?”
“What?” Monica says, trying not to sound as stupid as she feels. It doesn’t help that Diana’s still grinning at her.
“The desk. I was just about to run some errands, since I didn’t expect Diana here back until later. And I’d rather not leave her to mind the place on her own after spending a few days away, so… do you mind?”
Vigorously shaking her head, Monica says, “No, no, I don’t mind.”
“Excellent!” Chiamaka says, and she reaches out for Diana, draws her in for another hug. “I won’t be long, sweetheart. Watch her, now, won’t you?”
“I will, Chia,” Diana says.
And with that, the woman’s gone, shutting the door with its tacky little jingling sound, leaving Diana and Monica alone in the lobby. Diana’s already moving towards the desk, opening a ledger and running her finger down handwritten notes.
“Good,” she says. “No-one’s leaving until later. Would you like a cup of tea, Monica?”
“Um,” Monica says. Diana’s indicating a chair at the desk, one which will place Monica right in the line of fire of any holidaymakers who might come through the front door, holidaymakers who inexplicably haven’t gotten the message about Cherston-on-Sea yet. “Would I?”
“I think you would.”
“Diana?” Monica says, sitting down. “Does— Does she normally just recruit people like this?”
“Yes,” Diana says, “she does.”
And then she’s gone, to the kitchen, presumably, and Monica’s sat there on her own, unaccountably nervous, watching the front door carefully, in case it jingles again.
* * *
Father used to talk about addicts. About how you could see the mercy of the Lord in their shakes, in their pallid skin, in the darkness of their eyes as they recovered. They’d host them on the farm sometimes, having placed adverts in the local paper. Tough love for your teen.
Adam always hated it when they ran an addiction camp. The temptation to speak with the newcomers was difficult to suppress, and they told him things he didn’t understand, acted as if he ought to be familiar with the world they inhabited. When they were lucid, when they were able to help with the chores, they spoke of the godless life like it was an ordinary thing.
He used to pity them. Used to imagine they turned to the drugs that had such a hold on them because they had a void to fill, that a life without the Voice, without the Lord, was as empty as Father always claimed. And it was an easy thing to believe. See how they moan! See how they beg for release!
Now, as he shakes, as he shudders with hunger and fear and confusion, he wonders if they were allowed onto the farm solely to show Adam and his brothers the peril of straying from the path, of abandoning the Lord, of denying the Voice. He was manipulated, Edy said, his entire life. Handed truths accepted by no-one outside their little church and made to believe them with everything he had. Made to press those beliefs on others.
The point was never to help other people, Edy said. The point was to control him. And everything was part of it.
She knows too much.
She knows everything.
And he knows nothing. Which, suddenly, feels disgusting.
Adam, drenched with sweat, barely able to move without his weak limbs betraying him, but determined nonetheless to leave this damned room, makes it onto his feet.
He needs to talk to her.
He needs to get out of this room.
* * *
It’s nowhere Trevor’s been before. It’s not Peckinville headquarters, which is relatively grand, and it’s not the barracks where he was last stationed, which was a place that could possibly have provided the dictionary illustration for the word ‘squalid’. The driver dropped them off outside what looks for all the world like an ordinary office park, and as another Peckinville staffer — a man, this time — leads them through a rabbit warren of nondescript buildings and prefab additions, Trevor struggles to spot anything that says, to his somewhat experienced eye, that this is a military facility.
And then, he realises, that’s probably because it isn’t. The Peckinville group of companies is more than just its private military arm; these are probably the offices of a firm that imports laser printers or sells insurance or something.
The staffer takes them finally to a subsidiary building, just three storeys tall, which like the rest of the complex shows no sign of being anything other than what it appears to be. Not until they are two doors deep, and the staffer switches from a swipe card to a combination of thumbprint and code to get through suddenly much heavier doors and down a short flight of stairs, to a secondary check-in area, staffed with the kinds of people Trevor’s been expecting to see all along.
He should have worn a uniform. He feels even more out of place here, in his baggy sportswear, than he does back at the hall.
Is everyone staring at him?
Everyone will definitely be staring.
Except, he realises, no, they aren’t. The woman at the desk is conducting a quiet conversation with Beatrice, and Val and Frankie are standing about awkwardly. No-one’s paying him any attention, except to nod in his direction when Bea confirms his name.
The woman at the desk hands him a visitor lanyard, and another woman, their third escort of the day, takes them to an elevator at the far end of the lobby.
He expects it to take them down, into some kind of basement war room, but instead it takes them up two floors. Makes sense, when he thinks about it: the dead centre of the building. Probably reinforced.
Trevor’s still a little disappointed that there isn’t a basement war room, though. There could have been wall-spanning screens covered in maps.
Out of the elevator, it’s a short walk to a conference room, and there, sitting at the table, waiting for them, is Elle Lambert.
He feels strangely like he ought to salute. Instead he follows their escort inside, takes the seat that is offered him, and accepts a cup of tea from the attendant. He half-expects it to come in a mug with a military-themed joke on it — Don’t ask to see my privates, they’re small and disappointing — and decides he’s been spending way too much time at Dorley Hall.
He sips anyway. It’s terrible, and there, with scalding-hot tea that tastes as if the bag has been used at least once before, he feels comfortable for the first time. They used to live on this stuff.
“Beatrice,” Ms Lambert says. “Welcome.” She’s not smiling, though she’s not unfriendly. “And Ms Barbier, I’m glad you were able to join us.”
Val’s sat down opposite Trevor, and she meets his eyes before she replies. “Let’s just get this over with,” she says.
“Very well.” Ms Lambert’s got a clicker in one hand, and she raises it. Before she does anything, though, she says loudly, “The room, please.”
Every member of staff files out, leaving Ms Lambert, Bea, Trevor, Val and Frankie in the massive conference room, made small and insignificant by its emptiness. With a flourish, Elle taps the clicker, and the lights go out. A screen against the far wall — almost as large as the war-room screens Trevor imagined — lights up. Blank white, for now.
“Elle,” Beatrice says, “what’s going on? I thought we were just here for you to debrief Valérie and the others.”
“That can come later,” Ms Lambert says. She wears a locket on a gold chain around her neck, a tiny thing the size of a thumbnail, and she hasn’t stopped playing with it since they arrived. She rolls it between the fingers and thumb of her free hand. “First, I have news. News I dared not share even over secure channels.”
She taps the clicker again, and an image flicks up on the screen. It’s a drone shot, washed-out in the way photographs taken from high altitude with rugged cameras usually are, and what it shows is initially, to Trevor, unintelligible.
Valérie recognises it immediately. “That is the manor at Stenordale,” she says levelly.
“Yes,” Ms Lambert says. “Excavation of the ruins has been ongoing, and we have largely been able to control the proceedings. Less so than we hoped, but more than we expected. Silver River made a bid, but they are a military organisation only, whereas we are multifaceted.” She ought to sound triumphant at this, but instead she sounds tired. She’s still rolling her little locket in her fingers. “Unfortunately, we have not been able to keep the police entirely at bay, and though we were able to remove much that is… incriminating, there has been a rather unfortunate revelation.”
The clicker again. The image zooms in on the ruins of the central quad, partially excavated. Across from Trevor, Valérie gasps and covers her mouth.
“No…” she whispers.
Finger bones just visible in the dirt. A skull, smashed, probably to make identification more difficult. But a body still, partially exhumed. And another. And another.
“I’m afraid so,” Ms Lambert says. “The ruins of Stenordale Manor are now the site of a murder investigation.”
Chapter 42: Finger Bones
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2020 January 13
Monday
They’ve not been back in Steph’s room — her room underground; her real room, the one she’s supposed to spend most of her time in — for five minutes, and Bethany’s already antsy. Steph can’t blame her, not really, not when they spent one of the best nights of Steph’s life up there, up where the air isn’t blown in via AC and the windows open and there are windows at all and the worst they can expect of their neighbours is that they might not clean the cafetiere. Down here, they have to be on their guard, because even with Raph starting to sort his shit out, Martin’s continued state of sanguine acceptance and Adam’s… whatever the hell is going on there, there’s still Ollie.
Steph hadn’t understood how privileged she’d been to be among people she absolutely trusted, until she wasn’t any more. Every time that dividing door closes, the one that cuts off the basement from the stairwell, it’s like it’s heavier, like it shuts with more volume and force. Like it’s more final.
Ugh. She’s being dumb. January’s basement is not October’s basement. No-one’s coming after her, and even the people who are miserable are just quietly getting on with it. And on the remote chance that Ollie does try his luck — something which seems even more unlikely than it ever did with, say, Leigh, because Ollie’s aggression has been focused mainly inwards — then he’s the only one who will. He’ll be twitching on the ground before he takes two steps. Hell, Raph would probably help sit on him.
Still. Sucks to be back here, where everything is uncertain.
Bethany’s problem, however, seems simpler:
“Fuck,” she says, “right back in the concrete shoebox.”
“You okay, Beth?” Steph asks her. Bethany’s pacing in circles in the tiny space, covering the distance between the small bed they always seem to almost fall out of and the door so massive it has to have a powerfully sprung hinge so that in its last few inches it doesn’t inadvertently take off someone’s fingers.
A theme here: discomfort and heavy fucking doors. An environment designed to be unwelcoming and yet still keep you in.
“Yeah,” Beth says. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.” She stops, folds her hands over her chest, winces, and then wraps them around her belly. “I don’t want to be down here again, Steph. It’s fucking oppressive, man. I can feel the concrete. Can you feel concrete? Is that insane? Did I spend one night in a nice bed with the window open and go insane? Does that happen?”
“You’re not insane,” Steph says. “I’m feeling it too, a bit.”
“You think maybe we could have another night? You think that would be fine? You can just let us up, right? You can do it? Because, Jesus, Steph, suddenly I’m looking at these walls and they look just like my walls, and all I can think of is—”
“Got it,” Steph says, reaching out and taking one of Bethany’s hands, prising her fingers away from her side and pulling her closer, into a hug. “Let’s go.”
“I was going to say, ‘and all I can think of is all the jizz on my walls,’” Bethany mumbles.
Liar, Steph thinks, but she thinks it with a kiss to Bethany’s forehead. She can lie about that all she wants. Why does Beth spend so much time in Steph’s room down here? Because hers is home to some truly shitty memories.
Still, it feels more intense this time. Much more. For both of them. Maybe when you spend time away, you change, and on returning to a place that you used to fit into, however grudgingly, you might find that you stick out a little more, that its blunted edges dig in a little more painfully.
It would seem an extreme reaction to develop over the course of a single day, if the contrast between life above ground and below were not so great, and if Bethany in particular had not become adept at rapid personal development.
So, fuck it: they’re going back upstairs. She can ask for forgiveness later, possibly while delivering a nice, calming hot chocolate to Maria.
* * *
Stupid Steph. Knows her too well. Sees through her lies immediately, quickly enough that she doesn’t even get to finish lying. Which objectively sucks, because her lies are good, and when they’re not good, they’re entertaining, and that’s at least as important.
Still, she probably should ask Maria for some cleaning shit and a big sponge, and give her bedroom walls the soaping of a lifetime. Though, knowing her, she’d probably accidentally make mustard gas or something, and take herself out in the dumbest of all possible fashions. Just sitting there in her room with a mixing bowl and a random sampling of science’s craziest chemicals, trying to make Fairy Liquid and coming up with something that dissolves skin, but slapping it on the walls anyway because yeah, the ghosts of wanks past are kind of bothering her.
Bethany’s spinning out. She knows it. Can feel it like it’s physical, like her brain’s a fucking dynamo and coming back down here pulled the cord and started it going, and now the only way to stop it is to remove herself again, or she’ll keep spinning until she comes off her axle and—
Shit.
Hits the wall?
Explodes?
Where is she going with this?
Nowhere except round in fucking circles, that’s where.
“Hoodie,” she says to herself. It’s the sole reason she came back to her room: she got buttery croissant on her top and now she needs a clean one. Or something to wear over it to hide the stain.
Huh. Very allegorical. She should write poetry.
No. No, she should never write poetry. You need way bigger tits to pull it off.
“Hoodie,” she insists to herself.
Stupid concrete walls. She said to Steph that she can feel the concrete, and yeah, she can, but she can also feel the dirt, the cold, wet dirt that surrounds them on all sides. Thicker and more foreboding than the man-made intrusion into the ground that is the basement, it feels as if at any moment it could choose to reject them all, could fold over with an earthen sigh and trap her even more completely than the doors and the walls and the locks that currently keep her at the mercy of the Sisters.
And she loves the Sisters! Well, she loves Maria. Loves her with a frightening intensity. Claims her as a sister closer than any of her blood relatives. But she’s still holding the keys to Bethany’s cage, and it seems that no amount of good and promising behaviour is enough to dismantle the lock.
Not yet.
Even the light is a privilege down here.
Shit.
It’s too easy to imagine the lights shutting off and incapacitating them all, and it doesn’t matter that Maria’s reassured her that there are independent circuits and backup generators and batteries that can run the emergency lights for more than long enough to effect an evacuation; Bethany can sense the possibility of absolute darkness at the edge of her vision, like an encroaching concussion.
She’s hidden in too many small places. Now they’re coming back for her.
“Fucking hoodie,” she mutters through her teeth. She slaps herself around the cheek, strides over to the wardrobe, pulls out the first clean hoodie she can find, adds a set of clean underwear, a pair of joggers and a tank top to the pile, and exits her room before it can drag her down, before she becomes so afraid of the dark that she goes looking for it again.
* * *
Steph’s about to go fetch her when Bethany finally emerges, clutching a pile of clothing to her belly with both hands as if it is a life preserver. Steph’s got her own little bundle, but she also has a bag, so she holds it out and stands there for a few moments until Bethany, who seems locked in her own world, gets the idea and drops her stuff inside.
They’re out of the bedroom corridor and about to turn off towards the stairs when Steph hears people talking in the common room, and though normally she’d dismiss that, especially now, she stops short when she realises that one of them is Adam.
Adam! When did he last leave his room except to wash and relieve himself? And where’s Edy? If Adam’s out, and if she still wants Steph and Leigh’s help with him, she’d be down here already, right? Checking her pocket for her phone, Steph cuts through the bathroom into the common room, with Bethany following behind her, silent, probably wondering why they aren’t getting the hell out like Steph promised.
In the common room, Martin’s sitting up against the cabinets on the far side, resting on a bean bag chair, with a small pile of books next to him. As they enter, he shoots Steph an alarmed look, which discombobulates her almost as much as Adam’s presence: Martin has been almost eerily calm for so long now that Steph almost forgets how he arrived here, as a strung-out, moody, barely recovered addict with a severe self-hatred problem.
“What happens next?” Adam’s asking him. Adam’s standing there, arms folded, unthreatening except perhaps in that he is an unknown quantity. When he hears Steph and Bethany walk up, he turns to look at them, his expression more quizzical than anything else. “I want to leave,” he says to Steph as she carefully drops off her clothes bag on the couch. He says it all simple, but one look tells Steph there’s nothing simple about him right now.
“Why don’t I get Edy for you?” Steph says, keeping her tone calm and neutral.
“I just want to know,” Adam says, and Steph realises that he’s not just got his arms folded, he’s holding them steady, because he’s shaking, he’s shaking like a cornered animal. “I want to know what comes next, and I want to leave. I don’t care how. I… don’t think I even care who I leave as. Hah!” He exclaims suddenly, making Martin jump and prompting Bethany nervously to manoeuvre herself in front of Steph. “Serve him right, wouldn’t it? But— Yes. Yes. I need to talk to my father.”
Heedless of whether she should be showing Adam the depth of her access, because he’s kind of fucking scaring her right now, Steph pulls out her phone and says, “I’m going to call Edy. Why don’t you sit down, Adam?”
“Yes,” Martin says, “why don’t you sit down?” But he doesn’t bloody well do anything about it, so when Adam turns away again, when he starts looking around the room like he might find the solution to his problem under the metal tables or stuffed into the couch cushions, Steph makes irritable gestures with her free hand. Martin, finally, stands and gingerly taps Adam on the elbow and suggests, “Sit down?” in a voice which suggests he, too, is shaking.
“I need to go,” Adam says.
“And Steph’s going to call and ask about that,” Martin says. “Until she— Until that’s done, you should sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down. I need to get out of here. I need to talk to Father. I need to find my mum. I need to get her away from him.”
“You won’t do her any good making a nuisance of yourself now,” Martin snaps, his accent briefly elevating itself a couple of social classes from the position, Steph realises, at which he has been mostly slumming it. “So sit down, and let Steph call Edy, and maybe Beth— maybe someone can get you some water.”
Martin’s making significant eyes at Bethany as he guides Adam to the couch, and Steph’s glad that Bethany doesn’t fight him. She trots off, and returns from the lunch room a moment later with a plastic cup of water from the dispenser, handing it to Martin rather than Adam.
With the situation — with Adam — under something approaching control, Steph returns her attention to her phone.
It’s rung through to voicemail twice now.
On the third time, she’s about to give up when Edy finally answers with a wary, “Yes? Steph, listen, I—”
“Adam’s out of his room,” Steph says quickly before Edy can finish. “He’s here in the common room.”
“Of all the…” Edy mutters, sounding distant, as if she’s covered the mic. “Look, just keep an eye on him for a minute, okay?”
“I really need to—”
“Just for one minute, okay, Steph? Remember what you agreed to.”
“I agreed to talk to him,” Steph says. “Not to sponsor him. He’s asking to leave, says he needs to see his parents.”
“Does he seem unstable?” There’s an edge to Edy’s voice.
“How should I know? I don’t even know what he’s been thinking for the last, what, million years?”
“Hold fire, will you? Two minutes.” Twenty seconds ago it was ‘one minute’. Steph doesn’t say so, though; Edy seems stressed. “Okay?” Edy adds impatiently.
“Two minutes, Edy. No more.”
“You don’t give the orders around here, Steph.”
“What?” Steph snaps, astonishment sharpening her voice. That’s… not like Edy at all.
There’s a pause, during which Steph can almost hear the tension on the other end of the line, and then Edy says, “Sorry,” and hangs up.
What the fuck was that?
* * *
It’s been more than the two minutes Steph said Edy promised, and there are more people here now. Raph’s back, looking different in a way Bethany can’t identify except that he keeps fiddling with his chest — join the fucking club, mate — and he’s brought Jane with him, and that means there’s some fucking supervision at last, that means the girl scout camp counsellors are here to make sure none of the nascent girls burns any of the others with her s’more, so it’s time to be off. Bethany doesn’t want to spend another minute down here, not with Adam restless and sponsors snapping at Steph on the phone; if there’s weird shit going down, Bethany wants to be somewhere she can see the sky, somewhere the people are a fuck of a lot closer to normal, and not down here, not in the place where Declan came at her and Steph in the shower annexe, in the place where she locked herself in the dark for days and failed very hard at not wanting to die.
So she’s picking at Steph’s sleeve, unable quite to vocalise her desire to get the fuck out. Steph’s still holding her phone in one hand, checking the screen constantly, waiting for Edy to call back or text or send one of her happy little update messages on Consensus or something, but she gives up on it after another couple of minutes.
“Fuck it,” Steph says. “Jane?” Jane, sitting at one of the metal tables with Raph, looks up. “Keep an eye on Adam, would you? Edy will be down in a moment, but Bethany and I…” She doesn’t say aloud that they’re going upstairs. Opsec, as Christine would say, for all that that seems to matter down here any more; Bethany’s lost track of who knows what and who is supposed to know what.
“Uh,” Jane says, but Steph and Bethany don’t stick around for the resolution, because they’re gone. Out the door. Obligation discharged. It’s like Steph said to Edy, they’re not sponsors. Bethany’s a programme member and Steph’s, like, a goat, or something.
Bethany’s already got the clothes bag over her shoulder, but Steph checks it anyway, offering up an apologetic smile when she confirms that everything’s still in there, and then she walks confidently up to the door to the stairs and places her thumb against the reader.
Red light.
“What?” she mutters, and tries again.
Red light.
It should make a loud buzzing noise, like the wrong answer in a game show. It should flash up a screen with ACCESS DENIED on it. It should do something, anything.
What it’s doing is: fucking nothing.
One more try.
Red light.
Steph’s still got her phone in her hand, and this time she calls Pippa.
Voicemail.
She tries Edy again.
Voicemail.
Maria.
Voicemail.
She tries Christine, but the call fails, and Steph understands why before Bethany does, swearing at the screen and wondering aloud what the fuck is going on. It takes Bethany way too much time, time her roiling belly is making good use of by churning itself into a whirlpool of anxiety, to spot on the screen that the wifi has been cut off.
No more network calls. No more network.
Bethany’s got her own phone in her pocket, and though she doesn’t usually have the same access as Steph, she does now: the network’s been disconnected.
Their only access to the outside world now comes in the form of waving at the security cameras, which is what Steph’s doing, and more fucking power to her, because Bethany’s dropped her phone and the clothes bag and is sliding down the stupid ugly concrete wall, hugging herself and trying to convince herself that her trust hasn’t been betrayed, that everything up to now wasn’t an elaborate bait and switch, that this isn’t part of a new form of captivity, where they punish you extra hard by giving you a taste of the outside world and then taking it away.
Shit.
They’re not done with her, are they?
* * *
They’re all in the common room now. All the boys and girls of the basement, plus Jane. No-one but Martin wants to share the couches by the TV with Adam, who seems under control only because Martin is continually and softly talking to him, so Steph’s taken a quivering Bethany to the couch by the door, the one she vividly remembers the sponsors clustering around on her first day in the common room, months ago.
She’s promised Bethany that this is not a new torture, that it’s not a new tactic, following up the bad food and the zero sunlight and the solitary confinement and the presence of Martin and all the fucking tasers with isolation, with the steady removal of their privileges. Though the longer it goes on, the less sure she is. She wants to get up and quietly ask Jane what’s going on, but Jane’s just sitting there with Raph, tense, tapping her nails on the metal table, and when Steph catches her eye again, she just shakes her head.
And then, finally, there’s the loud, ugly noise of the main lock turning over, and moments later, Pippa, Edy, Pamela, Harmony and Tabitha all show up together. Pippa immediately joins Steph and Bethany on the couch, Edy and Pamela go straight to Adam and Martin, and Harmony finds Ollie, who’s colonised the bean bag chair by the supply closet, leaving Tabitha to nod at Leigh and take up station by the door.
“We’re on lockdown,” Tabitha announces. “That means all network access has been terminated, all doors have been double-locked, and the basements have been isolated from the hall and from each other. For now, that’s all it means, but—”
“What’s going on, Tab?” Leigh asks before Steph can.
“We don’t know yet. As soon as we know, you’ll know. I promise you that.” Tabitha smiles without humour, and her stance softens. “This isn’t a bit, I promise. It’s not a ruse. It affects us as well as you.”
“We got the lockdown code flashed to our phones,” Pippa whispers to Steph. “Straight from Aunt Bea’s account.”
“What happens next?” Steph whispers back.
“I have no idea. It’s my first lockdown. And the code was just that: a code. More information to follow, or so I’m told.”
Steph just nods. She’s unmoored; if Pippa doesn’t know what’s going on, and Steph’s network access has been cut just like everyone else’s, then there’s no way to orientate herself. At least, she amends, if Pippa doesn’t know what’s going on, then that really does mean it isn’t targeted, that it’s exactly what it appears to be.
Pippa wouldn’t lie to her.
Next to her, Pippa’s sitting cross-legged on the couch, her shoes kicked off, her feet tucked under herself. She’s got her phone sitting on her thigh, and she can’t take her eyes off it. Not the behaviour of someone trying to deceive her; Pippa is legitimately nervous about this.
Steph leans against her, shoulder to shoulder, and Pippa, after a moment, presses back, and reaches out a hand. Steph’s got one hand busy holding Bethany, but the other’s free for Pippa, and when Pippa takes it and grips it tight, Steph’s suddenly not sure which of them needs reassurance the most.
* * *
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It’s a genuine emergency. Everyone looks freaked and Tab gave a little speech and Steph’s been whispering to her again that this is just a temporary thing, that it really is a genuine emergency, that it’s not intended to break down Bethany’s resistance — like she even has any left! — and Bethany’s clinging to all that as hard as she’s clinging to Steph’s arm. What’s weird is that Pippa, in her silence, contributes as much to convincing Bethany as Steph; Bethany’s seen Pippa amused, she’s seen her angry, but she’s never seen her scared. Not like this, anyway.
Unnerving. But if something is happening, then they’re under all that dirt and concrete, right? With generators and batteries and all that shit, yeah? They’re safe, aren’t they?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Over by the telly, Edy’s talking with Adam, holding his hand, and as Bethany looks around, she notes with something almost like amusement that every sponsor is holding their subject’s hand. Even Ollie, the biggest and strongest guy left — strong everywhere but the skin on his wrists, aha; shut up, Bethany — has consented to be comforted by Harmony. They’re all just sitting there, waiting to find out what the hell is going on. Did the university get a bomb threat? Did all those army women out the back decide to stage a coup? Did Frankie get bored playing nice and start performing genital topiary on the second years?
Shit. They’re going to be here all day.
Funny how quickly panic collapses into boredom. The sponsors all seeming genuinely spooked really helped push down Bethany’s fear, and though it’s not gone — can she even remember a time she wasn’t scared? even BB, Before Basement? — now she’s just waiting with the rest of them. Hell, she might be more calm right now than Pippa.
It could be anything, just as long as it isn’t a new torture tactic. Just as long as it’s not her fault.
No. Maria would be here, if so, and gently telling her off, showing her how to be better. That she’s not here is yet more evidence that something actually is going down; she runs the place, basically, doesn’t she?
Still. She misses her.
She’s got Steph on one side and Steph’s got Pippa on the other, and Bethany would quite like her own sister with her, too. There’s room on the couch and everything.
She would quite like her here.
But she’s not, because whatever’s going on is more important than Bethany, because Maria’s in charge, and Bethany’s just got to be okay with that.
Okay?
Okay.
Yeah.
She forms her spare hand into a fist, earthing what nervous energy remains.
Lays it out flat again.
Into a fist.
Flat.
Into a fist.
Flat.
Into a fist so tight her fingernails cut into her palm.
* * *
Edy’s whispering to Adam that he can’t leave, that he’s not ready, just like she wasn’t ready, and that he needs to trust her, and that she’s sorry this happened on the day he wants to talk, that this isn’t his fault, that it isn’t targeted at him, that they’ll talk about his mum just as soon as they can, and the rest of the room is practically silent as everyone listens, because no-one’s ever been sure what to expect of Adam when he loses his religion. Or when he has it taken from him, deliberately, by Edy and by the hall, because it is a destructive, manipulative thing that he is best off without. Because he can only become a new person when the framework of lies on which his old self was constructed, and by which it was constricted, is properly examined, understood and discarded.
And they’re all aware that becoming a new person, especially down here, can be violent. Witness Diana, Leigh, Ollie. Adam needs a careful hand.
What he’s getting, apparently, is a lockdown, and a roomful of anxious sponsors.
Bad timing, like Edy said.
And then a half-dozen phones all vibrate at once, astonishingly sudden and loud in the near-silence, and most of the room jumps. The sponsors all fumble for their phones, and Steph tries to look at Pippa’s, but she’s angling it away, scrolling through, obviously trying to understand and process what’s going on before she presents it to Steph and Bethany.
Slowly, though, Pippa comes to a halt. She stops scrolling, despite there being more on the screen to see, Steph’s pretty sure.
Pippa just ceases, her hand slack.
The common room is genuinely silent now. All the sponsors, Edy included, are reading from their phones, and—
Except they’re not. Steph looks around, and Tabitha’s holding her phone limply in one hand, staring right through it. Jane’s gripping hers tight, and Raph’s got his hands on her upper arms, gently massaging them. And Pippa…
Pippa’s crying.
Quietly. Softly. Steph wouldn’t even have noticed if it weren’t so quiet in here, if she wasn’t still touching her, if she couldn’t feel her shoulders shaking. Gently, she reaches out and turns over the phone in Pippa’s hand.
Pippa doesn’t resist.
Steph scrolls to the top. LOCKDOWN NOTICE, the first line reads, and Steph intends to skim-read so she can quickly become to Bethany what Pippa was clearly planning to be for her, a buffer against whatever the hell is going on, but it soon becomes clear that this is not the kind of shit you skim.
This is the kind of shit you can’t look away from.
The police have found bodies at Stenordale. New bodies, buried in the central quad. Four so far, but the excavation is ongoing. Beatrice notes that insider intelligence suggests they should expect at least nineteen.
Nineteen bodies. All originally from Dorley Hall. From here. From home. All of them victims of Grandmother and of the old man Smyth-Farrow, the one who kept Valérie Barbier imprisoned. The one whose tastes ran to the truly depraved.
Nineteen bodies. Boys and young men, stolen from their lives, mutilated, murdered, buried.
Nineteen bodies. Any one of whom could lead the police here, to the hall, to the place where they were first imprisoned.
Nineteen bodies. Separated from Maria and Pippa and even Bethany only by an accident of time. She could have known them. She could have loved them.
There are pictures. Delicate finger bones. A ribcage, worn and broken. Something that was once a skull.
Nineteen bodies buried in the soil, in the dark, and now coming back, one by one.
Next to Steph, Pippa collapses, and all Steph can do is pull her into an embrace, quickly scrolling the phone away from the most macabre of the photographs, because Pippa doesn’t need to see any more of the women who might have been her Sisters, filthy and dismantled like broken toys.
* * *
Sometimes Christine feels as if she’s playing a huge trick on the world, on everyone around her. This girl sitting right here, half-paying attention in her seminar, used to be a boy; used to be a terrible boy! If only the girl sitting directly in front of her, the girl who smiled so sweetly at her when she came in late and sat down quickly, knew who Christine used to be! Christine’s a woman now, and the things she could do with the access her new body grants her…
All rather ruined, of course, by the immediate subsequent sense of nausea. She knows now what she did, how comprehensively she hurt people. She knows now that the excuses she provided herself — in complexity and abundance — were not just invalid but actually rather pathetic: a cry for help from someone who would, if only he would stop hurting himself and the people around him, have access to all the help he needed.
It’s not that her value system is entirely different these days, though it has evolved, obviously; it’s that she learned just how poorly she was categorising people. And now she’s left with a need to help, to place herself into people’s lives in a constructive fashion, to be someone who can face herself in the mirror every morning and confront those old memories with everything she’s done since. She’s become someone who can be trusted. Perhaps more vitally, she’s become someone who trusts.
But if she wanted to…
Yeah. If she wanted to, she could.
Ugh.
Indira let her know early on that there will be times when temptations rise again, when old habits make themselves known. When this happens, recognise them for what they are: something akin to intrusive thoughts of the soul; self-harm born of lingering guilt.
It is not, Indira told her repeatedly, possession of a weapon that makes you dangerous. It is choosing to use it, it is becoming someone who will use it, who will again and again put themselves on the other side of the moral calculus that says, yes, this weapon is worth using, and the suffering of its victims is worthwhile. Or, at the very least, excusable. And the thing about Christine, like Indira before her and like so many of their Sisters, is that she very quickly decided never again to be that someone.
The weapon has atrophied in her hand.
But if she wanted to.
Fuck this. Quietly she packs up her shit, stands from her seat — grateful that she picked one exposed to the aisle — throws her backpack over her shoulder, and quietly leaves the lecture. As she leaves, Professor Dawson catches her eye, and Christine shakes her head sharply. They both know what that means: Christine has to get the fuck out for unspecified personal reasons, and Prof Dawson will be emailing her later to make sure she’s okay.
Sucks to have a professor who cares, because sometimes you have to explain yourself.
Christine’s been a woman for a while now, and a happy one for almost as long, but there are still bad days, and it seems like this will be one of them. The last thing she wants to do is explain; she would prefer, instead, to bury herself.
* * *
Vick’s phone buzzes three times and, yeah, there’s that sinking feeling. Vicky’s got her phone set to silent almost all the time, but she had Christine mess with it such that official updates from Dorley always set off the vibration, so she doesn’t miss them. Lorna’s tempted to go into Vick’s phone and erase whatever incoming bullshit the hall’s trying to spring on her, but a) it’s probably important, because it always is, because that fucking place attracts crises like shit attracts flies, and b) Vicky’s been in the bathroom like four minutes already, so she’ll probably be back before Lorna gets done.
It’s been such a nice morning! A brisk run at the crack of dawn because they’re both trying to get into shape; coffee from the little place near their house to perk her up; breakfast with Paige and Christine. And yeah, it’s downright strange to count them among her closest friends after what went down between them, but the last time they talked about it, Christine waved it off as being a result of the ‘Dorley Hall Reality Distortion Field’, which Lorna’s completely prepared to accept is a real thing that is most likely powered by human suffering or leftover Weetabix. When Lorna looks at her friend, very rarely does she remember the awful things she said to her; nor does she often remember the things Indira said in return.
So. A good day, including a breezy — if basic — lunch here at Café One. A good day up until precisely this moment. She glares at Vicky’s little Android phone, lying deceptively innocently on the table beside her empty sandwich packet. Hmm. Vick’s still not back. Maybe she could…
No. They both need to know what’s gone wrong, if only so they can formulate the perfect excuse to avoid it. She’d try to find a way to get Paige and Christine out of it, too, but Christine’s folded in, like she said, and Paige goes wherever she does, so… Sucks to be them, really.
“Hey, sweetie,” Vicky says, supplementing her greeting with a kiss to Lorna’s soon-to-be-reduced forehead. “You wanna get going?”
“In a minute,” Lorna says, taking Vicky’s hand and guiding her back to her seat. With her other hand, she taps the table by the phone, and Vicky’s gaze alights on the notification waiting for her.
“Oh. Crap.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Settling quickly back into her chair, Vicky unlocks her phone, frowns at it for a moment, and then throws it irritably into her bag. “Double crap,” she says.
“What’s going on?”
“It doesn’t say. I’m just supposed to come in for a briefing. But I’m also not to rush; I’m to act as if I’m a normal student. No skipping classes, no running across campus screaming that the world’s about to end.”
“It really says that?”
“Nah. Code phrases. Cloak and dagger stuff; you know the drill.”
“Yeah,” Lorna sighs, “I really do. And hey,” she adds, frowning her disapproval, “you are a normal student.”
Vicky kisses her hand and then starts gathering up her trash to throw away. “I’m really not,” she says. “Normal students don’t have their foundation year in a windowless basement.”
“That’s because Saints is high up the league tables. It gets the good funding.”
* * *
Christine’s phone’s been buzzing; she’s been ignoring it. She’s too busy alternating between enjoying the view and slightly freezing to death. Sucks that the bench atop the highest hill — if you can call it that — on campus also naturally attracts all the wind in the local area. Christine dressed for January this morning, yes, but she didn’t dress for this kind of windchill.
Still worth it.
She comes here when she’s afraid, when she’s angry, when she’s contemplative, and when she’s too annoyed with the hall to do this on the roof. Why did they have to go and have a fucking point? It was so easy being him, being miserable, hurting people, and now she’s got to carry all this guilt and shame around and also she’s got to endure leers from male students and, stupid girl, she dressed nice today, that’s why they’re all looking at her, and if they only knew…
“Oh, God, shut up, Christine,” she whispers.
She could murder a cigarette right now.
“Bad thoughts?”
“Shit!” Christine jumps half a fucking mile in the air and almost falls off the stupid nameless bench. “Give me a fucking heart attack, why don’t you?”
Paige loops her arms around Christine from behind and kisses her on her hair parting. “Sorry. But I’ve been texting. And you didn’t answer. So I came looking.”
Leaning into Paige’s arms, bending her head back to look up at her, Christine says, “Yeah. Pretty bad thoughts. Nothing new.”
Paige keeps one hand on Christine as she walks around the back of the bench to sit next to her. Christine immediately rests her head on Paige’s shoulder, and Paige cradles it, rocking her ever so slightly. “You want to talk about it?” she asks. “Or do you want to talk about literally anything else?”
“Just came out of nowhere,” Christine says quietly. “The panic. The fear. The thought that I could become him again so, so easily.”
“Not quite so easily,” Paige says, nudging Christine’s breast.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. And I also know that you’ll never be him again. You’ll never be like him again. You know how I know that?”
“Tell me,” Christine whispers.
“Because you’re my Christine. And she doesn’t do things like that. Because she’s the kindest, most thoughtful woman I’ve ever known.”
It’s even less than a whisper this time. “Thank you.”
Paige holds her for a long time, long enough that Christine warms in the shared body heat. Long enough for the fear to fade, for him to fade, for Christine Hale to reassert herself: the woman she created. The woman she loves.
Maybe it’s because half the first years have started to actualise. It’s bringing everything back.
“Paige,” she says, “I think I want to see Mum again.”
She can feel Paige nodding. “You should talk to Indira about it,” Paige says. “Though, perhaps, after the current crisis.”
Christine jerks out of Paige’s embrace. “There’s a crisis? Again?”
“Apparently.”
All the air lets out of her in one long, exaggerated wheeze.
“Fuck,” Christine says.
* * *
Lambert had to go. Had to debrief her liaison with the pigs. Possibly her plant or her double agent or something. She was cagey about it, and well she might be, with Frankie in the room, doing her best impression of a good girl, in case Elle Lambert suddenly remembers what Frankie used to do for a living and decides either to honour her or bury her with Crispin Smyth-Farrow’s discarded toys.
Even without her, it’s tense. Trev’s spooked, which Frankie was briefly a little confused by — the girls aren’t his first dead bodies. But it makes sense, really; one thing to listen to Valérie talk about the girls she buried, another to see them unearthed. Frankie’s got to turn her sudden laugh into a cough, because it’s just occurred to her that maybe old Dotty did Trev a favour, pulling him out of that van and slapping a pair of tits on him; if the lad can’t take a few rotten skeletons, he would have made a shit soldier. Probably would have got himself killed in his first real firefight.
He didn’t do badly during the escape, though.
Maybe Frankie’s just letting her thoughts latch onto anything that occurs, however stupid, so she doesn’t have to look at the pictures. Because all those corpses? They’re her doing as much as Smyth-Farrow’s. As much as Dorothy’s. Frankie probably knew the names of every single one, even the ones who were assigned to one of the others. She starts thinking back, trying to remember which of the ones she sponsored ended up at Smyth-Farrow’s.
Too many.
Pleading hands reaching out from the dirt, stripped of flesh, stripped of identity. Just bones, anonymous, picked clean, and really fucking dead.
Not that her other girls fared better. If there’s a single girl from her time at Dorley who still lives, who wasn’t pulled out by Bea and Elle and Maria, Frankie’d be bloody astonished.
It’s a good thing she’s decided she’s not interested in chasing redemption, because there’s no chance redemption’s interested in her.
“You had to tell them,” Val’s saying. “You couldn’t have let my girls rest?”
Bea pinches the bridge of her nose. “The police won’t. And if they pick up a lead, however tenuous, that points to the hall…”
“Yes, yes.” Valérie’s talking into the table, her chin resting on her folded arms. “I know. I just…” She closes a fist and smacks it into the wood. “Fucking piss and shit.”
Beatrice sent out an all-sponsor alert to supplement the lockdown command she posted the second she first saw the bodies. Threw in basically all the information they’ve got. Frankie tried to tell her that maybe she should edit, reduce the impact of it all — or at least take out some of the gore — and Bea shrieked at her, so Frankie bloody well dropped it like it was hot.
The girls back at the hall got the whole info drop. Frankie wonders how they’re taking it.
She catches Trev’s eye, raises an eyebrow. He shrugs at her. He asked Lambert if he could talk to her about a delicate matter, and she outright asked him, in front of the rest of them, if he wanted her to find someone who could whip his tits out for him. He had to say yes. So he’s staying a while, just a few days, long enough for Elle to bus in a surgeon she knows, someone who might be willing to go beyond Mrs Prentice and ignore best practice — which was hardly established with a case like Trev’s in mind — and make him flat-chested again, with a course of testosterone on the side.
Of course, he’ll always be prettier than he used to be, unless he persuades Lambert to shell out for some facial masculinising surgery, but that’s so far outside her wheelhouse she might genuinely explode at the thought of it. Except she did it for that one girl, didn’t she? The escapee who couldn’t hack it; word is he’s a quiet, reserved guy with a wife, a couple of adopted kids, and a job for life somewhere in the labyrinthine Peckinville Group of Companies. Nice work, if you can get it. All it costs is your balls.
Bit of a shame, though, isn’t it? About Trev. Bit of a waste. Frankie’s no Elladine Agnes Tranter Lambert — thank all the bloody mercies; she wouldn’t be able to sign her own name without pissing herself laughing — but she’s still inclined to think of woman as, well, sort of the natural state of humanity. Men are the weird carve-outs, the guys with the stunted chromosome and the awful habits. What did Valerie Solanas say? ‘The male is aborted at the gene stage,’ or something. Boy, did she have some ideas.
Bloody hell, what is she thinking? Trev’s Trev. He’s no more a woman and no more a candidate for becoming one than Frankie’s a bloody wildebeest. Just because she can’t imagine why anyone would want to be a man doesn’t make it not a valid state of affairs.
Even if she feels sort of itchy about it.
Going to be weird to see him looking like a bloke again. Dotty didn’t have him long enough for a complete course of hair removal, so maybe he’ll grow the world’s saddest beard.
Shit. Maybe Frankie’ll buy him a prop one for Christmas this year. Maybe she’ll get him some nice rubber bollocks and stick-on chest hair, and all.
She’s drifted off from what’s happening again. Defence mechanism, probably. That’s her life’s work up on the screen. As if she were a serial killer, and those poor dead girls are her trophies.
Christ alive. Shut up, Frankie. What can you do? You can make sure this never happens again. You can slip the knife to old Dotty and maybe you can stick around long enough to help do in the Smyth-Farrow kids. And then you can get Monica or someone to drive you out somewhere scenic, like the Lake District, and never come back.
“No,” Bea’s saying, “you’re getting the scale wrong. One murdered trans woman, the cops don’t give a shit about. Nineteen? All in one place? They’re probably making jokes about it down the station, but they’re going to follow it up. If only because when the papers get hold of it — and they will, believe me — they don’t want to be seen to be slacking. What if a nice cis woman slipped in among the monster corpses?”
Beatrice’s accent’s creeping back in. The old one, the one she had when Dotty brought her in to replace a batch of boy-girls who’d just got shipped out. When she was David, a just-off-the-street boy from a council flat. Frankie’s always wondered if it takes constant effort to keep up the Elladine impression; apparently, it does.
She wishes Beatrice’d drop it more often. Though maybe not, if it takes circumstances like this.
“Béatrice…” Val says quietly, reaching out from her slump to take Bea by the arm, but Beatrice stands, walks away from her, starts pacing by the wall.
“Sorry, Valérie,” Bea says. “I know they’re… they’re your girls, but I’ve got ghosts of my own. And… Shit. Sorry.”
Val joins her, lets Beatrice walk into her embrace, and after a moment, Frankie’s pretty sure Val whispers something like, “Tell me about your girls sometime.”
They hug for a long bloody time, and Trev sits there and watches them. Frankie just sits there, and thinks of the Lake District, and how wide and deep a body of water must be before you might never be found.
* * *
Quaint. That’s what this place is: quaint. It reminds Monica powerfully of certain older parts of Almsworth, of the little shops on backstreets that sell bric-a-brac and overly sweet cups of tea. But it’s also a working B&B and, judging by the ledger, a reasonably popular one, considering the area.
That’s the thing about B&Bs, though, isn’t it? The Travelodge out by the A-road is for people just passing through, and the smattering of AirBnBs that doubtless infest the suburbs are for people who post pictures of their accommodation to Instagram, but if you’re a small family or an older couple and you’re looking for the authentic British seaside experience, you’ll choose a town like Cherston-on-Sea, and you’ll choose a B&B just like this one.
The tablecloths in the dining room will have the classic red-and-white-check pattern, she’s absolutely sure of it. And there’ll be little pots of jam and marmalade on every table at breakfast. And—
Shit, is she getting nostalgic?
Monica doesn’t think about her childhood much. To do so, she must get through her teen years, which lurk in her memory, ready to capture her if she ventures too far into the past. But right now, she has a clear image of herself, seven or eight years old and come with her family to stay in a seaside town very much like Cherston, in a B&B very much like Chiamaka’s. She remembers a top-floor room with bookshelves full of ancient children’s books — books that shared a vintage with Narnia, but which did not endure the way C.S. Lewis’ work did. She remembers clutching one of them in her hand, a novel about two boys who ventured to far-away lands to rescue animals from poachers and return them to zoos, which she chose because of the pencil annotations inside the front cover from previous kids, kids whose scepticism had been overcome by the story. She remembers taking it with her down the stairs, looking wide-eyed up at unpleasantly vivid landscape paintings mounted to the slanted ceiling of the stairway, and reading all the way through breakfast.
Breakfast on a red-and-white tablecloth, with little pots of jam and marmalade.
There’s a clink as Diana places another cup of tea in front of her, the spoon rattling in the saucer. And then Diana’s there with her, pulling up one of the wooden chairs and offering her an arm. Which Monica takes without embarrassment because, fuck it, if she didn’t want Diana to see her crying, she should have hopped right the hell off of memory lane before it took her all the way back.
Diana doesn’t say anything. Perhaps she doesn’t know what to say. Perhaps she’s intuitive enough to realise that there’s nothing she can say. Monica, who ought in this situation to be the responsible one, and who definitely should not be crying off her minimal makeup before an unaffiliated civilian returns, has fallen apart, and needs time to put herself back together.
“Memories,” she says eventually, “of who I was before. Of the boy I had to wreck to become the woman I am.”
Diana nods. “Was he… Were you… nice?”
“I was a kid,” Monica says with a shrug. “Just a kid. I had it all ahead of me and I screwed it up.” She sniffs wetly. “This is a lesson, Diana. Sometimes, and you’ll never know when, it’ll all just fucking come for you.”
Nodding again, Diana says, “I know.”
A giggle pushes through Monica’s constricted throat, though it doesn’t exactly sound pleasant. She needs to wash her face and blow her nose, soon. “You’re so wise, Diana. How is this you? After everything, how is this you?”
“Because it wouldn’t be him,” Diana says simply.
“You’re so wise,” Monica says again. And then she pushes her chair back and stands, looking around for a bathroom or cloakroom or something. Diana points the way with a gentle smile, and Monica grabs her bag and leaves to make herself presentable again.
Her phone’s vibrating, somewhere under all the crap she carries around, but it’s been going for about half an hour now, and she has more important shit to think about. Dorley Hall can cope without her for one day.
* * *
Vick’s hand tenses in Lorna’s as they return to what still, to Lorna, sometimes feels like the scene of a crime. Of all the crimes. She came here once, righteous fear trembling in her chest, to confront the whole fucking place, to demand knowledge, and she’s wondered since if she’s truly happier for the possession of it. It’s an idle thought: she’s closer to Vicky than she’s ever been, and she sees more of Paige and Christine and the others now that they don’t have to keep secrets from her, so it’s all to the good; but sometimes the secrets are a problem. Keeping the big damn secret has meant she’s been spending less time with their housemates and their other friends and more time with the girls who are, as Christine says, in on the joke.
Place is a fucking black hole; once you’re in its orbit, you’re never getting free.
At least they have nice food, usually.
As they cross the threshold, Vicky gets another message. This one’s come in over the hall’s main Consensus instance, and it tells her — and ‘guest’ — to head up to the second floor, so, still gripping hands, they take the stairs up from the dining hall.
Lorna can’t help noticing on her way past that the doors to the basement are gone. In their place is an unassuming set of shelves, stocked with vintage books, the exact mirror of the bookshelves in the other corners of the room. Christine once told her it’s done with an arcing mechanism that lifts the two-piece shelves up and lowers them into place; she also said the idiots who ran Dorley before used a sliding mechanism that left grooves in the wood.
They’re being directed to a room on the second floor Lorna’s never seen before, and it turns out to be for a good reason: most third-year socialising happens in their rooms, in their kitchen, in other parts of the hall, or — increasingly — out of the hall altogether. Paige, Christine and the others aren’t like the second years, curfewed in their own little slice of Dorley Hall. So the little lounge area goes unused, and — judging by all the boxes that have been turfed out into the corridor — is usually just used as a storeroom.
Paige catches Lorna’s eye as they enter, and nudges Christine, who shakes herself back to awareness and smiles at Lorna and Vicky. They join them, Vicky tutting at the thin layer of dust that covers the back of their chosen couch. Around the room, Lorna recognises Jodie, who waves enthusiastically at her, and Julia and Yasmin, who smile and nod respectively. Another handful of faces, most of whom Lorna can put a name to, even if she doesn’t know them especially well, represent the contingent of graduates who still live somewhere in the hall, but who aren’t, to the best of Lorna’s knowledge, involved in the programme any more.
There aren’t any second years about.
Up front, Indira’s sitting on a stool, legs crossed, arms folded, fiddling in one hand with a pencil, seeming for all the world like a substitute teacher waiting for her first class of the day to file in, so she can judge how hard a time they’re going to give her.
And she knows it, too, because the first thing she says, after checking her phone and presumably deciding that everyone who is going to be here is here, is, “Good afternoon, class.”
A handful of girls laugh.
Christine says, “Good morning, Miss.”
Julia says, “What the hell’s going on, Indira? I took a half-day for this.”
“First,” Indira says, leaning forward on her stool, all traces of amusement wiped from her face, “I must emphasise that everyone is okay. No current residents or graduates of the hall have been harmed. But a situation has come up that may — again, I must emphasise, may — affect the security of the hall. And that means you all need to know about it, in case your lives are disrupted, and in the very unlikely event that police or security services have questions for you.”
“Security services?” one of the girls from upstairs says. “What the fuck, Dira?”
And so Indira launches into it. She gives them the potted history of the woman known as Grandmother. They get a summary of the Smyth-Farrow family tree, including the two middle-aged siblings who control a small PMC but whose main job appears to be to act as a funnel for American right-wing money and influence in the UK. And Indira briefly covers Valérie Barbier’s awful life story — which makes at least two of the girls cry — and Trevor Darling’s involvement.
It’s all an appetiser. The main course is the burning down of Stenordale Manor, the killing of several employees of Silver River Services, the Smyth-Farrows’ PMC, the escape of Dorothy Marsden, and the discovery of at least nineteen bodies on manor grounds. More are expected, Indira says; the grounds are quite extensive, and Crispin Smyth-Farrow was known for his playfulness.
These are the people Beatrice overthrew. These are the people whose infinite capacity for violence has gone unsatisfied in recent years precisely because the hall was taken from them and repurposed. These are the people who have been floundering for almost two decades, robbed of their purpose, and whose recent regroup has been, Indira assures them, extremely limited.
Lorna still wants to throw up. And she’s not the only one. A handful of unused bedrooms across the hallway have been opened up, and some of the girls Lorna doesn’t really know — and Yasmin — have rushed out. As they file back in, wet-faced and still very obviously shaken, Indira continues in a softer voice.
“I’m sorry that you have to know all this. There are pictures for those who want to see them, but none of you are involved with the programme, so they are strictly optional. I would advise against it. Yes, Christine, I know,” Indira adds quietly, “but you still don’t have to see them.”
“Thanks,” Christine whispers, while Paige leans into her.
“We do not expect your lives to change at all,” Indira says to the room. “The victims mostly predate electronic record-keeping, and back in the day, men like Crispin Smyth-Farrow had people who intercepted paper records. We are not even convinced that the authorities will be able to identify them as trans women — or, yes, as men changed against their will; yes, Selena, we all know what Dorothy used to do here. I didn’t think I needed to go into detail about it.”
“Sorry,” mutters the woman standing at the edge of the room, who’d got almost four words into a counterargument before Indira stopped her.
“Stenordale Manor sits on soft, damp soil, and even the most recent burial was approaching twenty years ago; the old man slowed down considerably in his old age, from what Ms Barbier says. There are bones, yes, but they are in an advanced state of decay. It may be enough, I am told, to obscure the surgical alterations that were performed on many of Marsden and Smyth-Farrow’s victims.”
“So, what,” Julia says, “we’re just hoping no-one puts two and two together?”
“They would have to put a lot more together than that, Julia,” Indira says gently. “Every one of those bodies is connected to the hall, yes, but the connection is tenuous in the extreme. They were never officially here, you understand.”
“Why get us all together, then? Why yank Yas and me out of work just to tell us how fucking terrible this place was before Aunt Bea’s benevolent new regime?”
“Because we have enemies. And while we operate largely from a position of mutually assured destruction, it is not impossible that someone could slip the police an anonymous tip. That they could ‘find’ a stack of lost records placing some of the victims here, or connecting them to Beatrice or even to Ms Lambert. So, for the foreseeable, we will be airtight. Your lives, as third years and graduates, will be largely unaffected, but you should be aware that the outer locks to the kitchen, dining hall, and other areas connected to the programme will be sealed at certain times of day. We will lock down entirely for twenty minutes every eight hours so the doors to the facility can be opened and sponsors can go on and off shift. So if any of you have a burning desire to see Steph or anyone else, you are welcome to, but you’ll be down there for the whole shift. Also,” she adds with a wry smile, “the Peckinville installation in the back garden is being redressed as a fake recruitment station, as quid pro quo for the funding we receive from the Peckinville Group, so if any of you feel a burning desire to work as a mercenary, you should think about visiting; it would really help with the façade.”
“Not funny, Indira,” someone says.
Indira shrugs. “We’re not locking down to outsiders, not for the moment, but we are restricting access to those who are in the know, as much as we can, anyway. Most of you here know Lorna Fielding.” She points in Lorna’s direction; Lorna tries not to cringe under Indira’s attention. “She’s approved. Shahida Mohsin, Amy Woodley and Rachel Gray-Wallace are also expected over the next week or so, so don’t feel like you need to deputise yourselves into throwing them out, or anything.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Julia mutters.
“Hey, Dira,” Christine says before Indira can say anything else. “Afternoon shift change is at four, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Put me down for a couple of afternoon shifts this week. There’s going to be pressure on the sponsors and, well, I want to go see Steph. And the others, obviously. Bethany. But yeah. I want to see Steph.”
“I’ll come, too,” Paige says. “Same shifts.”
“Are you sure?” Indira says. “You’re on sabbatical, remember? And you—” she points her pencil at Paige, “—are not on staff.”
“Dira, this is actually an emergency,” Christine says.
“More of a flap.”
“Dira.”
“Fine,” Indira admits with a frown, “it’s a bloody disaster. I’ll put you on the rota. Is your class schedule up to date?”
“Yeah.”
“Good girl.” She’s tapping on her lip with her pencil, still looking at Christine. “You’re really sure? Afternoon shift lasts until midnight. That’s a long time in the basement.”
Christine’s standing and pulling Paige up with her, and they step gingerly over Lorna and Vicky as they make their way out of the crowded little room. “So send down something nice to eat,” Christine says as they leave.
“You’ll get packet sandwiches,” Indira calls after them, “and you’ll like it!”
“Cow!” Christine calls back from somewhere out of sight. It has the benefit of restoring a little levity to the room, and the girls start talking amongst themselves. Next to Lorna, Vicky leans into her, and Lorna decides that they’re going to blow the week’s food budget on a really nice takeaway to make up for all this. Maybe make it a romantic night in. Maybe reconnect with their flatmates, people she can rely on to never call her in for a macabre briefing like this one.
“Right!” Indira says, clapping her hands, as the chatter starts to die away. “Any questions?”
* * *
Edy’s upset. That’s the thing that’s overridden everything else. Adam came roaring out of his room, desperate to leave, to do something, to run home and start breaking apart with his hands every lie that was told to him his whole life, and he is still so full of that energy he can almost feel it waiting in his limbs, waiting to carry him through solid concrete. Waiting to take him home. Waiting to tear it to pieces. Waiting to take Mum from that place.
But now that he’s out here, now that he’s been speaking with Edy, he feels stupid.
He’s been hollowing out. His certainty revealed as the lie it always was; the rock on which he has his whole life stood, torn away like paper. He believed. He took the things that he was told, and he built a universe with them, a pantheon of one man and one god and a slew of earthly angels.
All stupid. He read the books she gave him. Didn’t understand most of them. But they showed him how little he knows, how restricted his perspective has been kept. There is always a Father, and it was to be him one day; what did he need to know but how to prepare the Father to come after him, and how to punish and preach to the world of the wicked unaware?
So out of his room he came, and no farther, because he has no power here. No power, no knowledge. Nothing. Idiot boy’s ready to destroy the world he was given; can’t even get there. Can’t get past a single locked door.
Mum’s still up there. And he was so cruel to her.
But Edy’s upset. She’s been the only consistently and reliably kind person he’s ever known, apart from his mum, and she’s upset.
The farm will still be there tomorrow. It’ll still be there next year. The way Father likes to talk, it will still be there in a thousand years.
He will go there. And he will not reveal the truth to the family, because he does not yet know it. But he can lay bare the lies. Perhaps, if Edy comes, she can do the rest.
She’s shuddering quietly in his arms, and he will be to her as Mum was to him: the only source of kindness amid lies.
* * *
“Hey,” Tabitha says softly, addressing the room but not wanting to break up any of the small groups that have formed, little islands of love and comfort. “Shift change is coming up.”
“I’m staying,” Pippa says, speaking up first. She’s sitting with Steph and Bethany, and ever since she cried herself dry, she’s been helping keep Bethany calm, which, yeah, sterling service; Tabitha’s read Bethany’s file, and being trapped in a place like this, when tensions are high, and she has recently tasted something approaching freedom? It’s got to fucking suck. Ought to be helpful in the long run, though; there’s no bully coming to hurt her, no headmaster coming to dismiss the attacks on her, the persistent, deliberate trauma, as mere ‘boys will be boys, especially the rich ones’. Just Maria, coming down with the next shift, probably to take her somewhere private and talk with her. To be her sister.
“Same,” Jane says.
“You sure?” Tabitha checks. “You’ve been awake a long time.”
“I’ll nap in Raph’s room if I need to.”
Nodding, Tabitha returns her attention to the rest of the room. Not a single sponsor wants to go, which is a bit fucking annoying, because she wanted to get out, but she can send Levi an apologetic text through the relay. And it’s not as if she was going to leave Leigh, anyway.
“I’ll tell the girls upstairs to make extra for dinner,” she says.
* * *
She doesn’t know exactly why Monica’s upset, only that she becomes fragile again when she takes dinner in the dining room, but that’s okay, because it’s sausages and mash; Diana can hold Monica’s hand and still leave them one free each to wield a fork. Even if it does earn them a raised eyebrow from Chiamaka. But they get a smile, too, and Diana’s learned to treasure smiles of a certain sort: smiles that say that she’s welcome, that she’s loved, that she’s safe. They’re so different to the smiles Declan used to cultivate in women, the leers from the girls who like a big, strong lad; the brittle, tight, closed smiles when he let his rage off the hook.
It was all a performance. Men get angry. Raph had it right: it’s a dance you’re all doing, and the audience is other men. Women are there to get thrown around or trampled on.
“Diana?” Monica asks quietly, her fork halfway to her mouth.
“Oh. Sorry.”
She almost lets go of Monica’s hand, and only doesn’t because Monica’s holding onto her pretty tight. Nothing like as tight as Diana was just holding her, obviously. With luck, she didn’t hurt her, but she probably did, because Diana has such large, strong—
Huh. Oh yeah. Monica’s hands aren’t much smaller. So easy to forget.
“Everything okay?”
“It’s like you said,” Diana says. “Sometimes it just—” she glances over at Chia, who’s finished her small plate already and is sipping tea and scrolling her phone, “—effing comes for you.”
Monica snorts. “Well, hello, Pippa,” she says. And then, when Diana frowns in confusion, she adds, “Pippa. She, um, doesn’t swear? Like, ever. Churchy habit, I think. Or it might be an anger management thing.”
“I don’t think I ever noticed.” Diana lets her frown deepen. “I let so much slip past me before. One of the many things I’m angry with him about.”
As they finish their potatoes, a handful of guests come and go, and are served potatoes in their turn by Chia’s granddaughter — who throws a wink at Diana when she sees that she and Monica are holding hands; goodness knows what information she thinks she’s gathered, but Diana’s probably going to have to find her and quietly explain that she and Monica are definitely not dating, and even more definitely never will, because…
Well.
She’s Monica. She’s the woman who beat the living daylights out of Declan; she’s the woman who came back for Diana as soon as she learned there was someone to come back for. Diana’s gathered that most of the girls at Dorley settle into a sisterly relationship with their sponsors; if she and Monica are going to be like that to each other, then it’s a little disappointing to be such a cliché — Diana’s discovering within herself a desire to be unique — but what other word is there for a woman who beats the shit out of you and then stands between you and the world?
“I should check in,” Monica mutters to herself, and starts rummaging in her bag. Diana wants to tell her not to, wants to ask her to stay, but she knows there’s no point. So she sits there and tries not to feel let down that her — say it — sister is going to be going away tonight. And then Monica says, “Uh,” and covers her mouth, and Diana’s on alert again.
“What’s going on?” she whispers.
Monica looks around. “Not here. Is there somewhere private we can go?”
“Um. Yes.” Diana raises her voice. “Chia,” she says, and across the dining room, Chia puts down her phone and smiles attentively, “we’re going up to my room. For just a minute. If that’s okay?”
“It is okay,” Chiamaka says, nodding. Behind her, her granddaughter just grins.
Diana’s going to have to straighten that out.
The route to her attic room takes them up several narrow flights of stairs, all of which Monica climbs in silence. She’s holding her phone in a closed fist, and the screen keeps coming on and trying to respond to the fingerprint reader, which is confused about the palm currently pressed down on it. Diana finds it hard to look away; it’s the source of a mild but growing fear that something might have happened, and as astonishing as it feels, Diana has people in her life now that she worries about.
She’d thought them all safe until she saw Monica’s expression. Nothing could get through all that concrete, surely?
Monica doesn’t even look around when Diana closes the door to her room behind her, and that’s probably for the best, since it’s still quite bare. It’s larger than her room at Dorley Hall, though; larger, too, than her prison at Stenordale Manor. Over both her previous accommodations it benefits from having its lock on the inside, and Diana tests it daily, just to be sure.
She doesn’t lock them in now. She doesn’t want Monica to feel trapped.
“Um, Diana,” Monica asks, “do you have a computer?”
“Yes,” Diana says, pointing, and Monica gratefully settles into the little chair and boots up the ageing PC Diana’s been using.
“The hall’s in lockdown,” Monica explains as she waits for the screen to populate itself with icons. “But because I’m off the grounds, I won’t know why until I log in on the secure server.”
“Is it safe to do so from here?”
“Apparently. Something about tunnelling and an imaginary— no, a virtual machine. Don’t ask me for details. I’m going to run an EXE on your computer, if that’s okay?”
“What’s that?”
“Just a program. An app.”
“Oh. Sure.”
Monica plugs her phone into the PC with a short cable, and after a few moments, a complicated-looking window pops up on the screen, with scrolling text like something out of a movie. Then it disappears, to be replaced with something that looks mostly like an ordinary browser window, into which Monica quick-types a series of credentials, which she backs up with more typing on her phone.
“Just imagine I’m not doing this in front of you,” Monica says when the screen fills with DORLEY HALL SECURE SERVER. She clicks around until she opens up something labelled LOCKDOWN BRIEFING, and as soon as she opens it, she stands out of the chair, tries to hide the screen with her body.
“Monica,” Diana says.
“Diana. You don’t want to see this. It’s— It’s about Stenordale. I don’t know more. I haven’t read it yet. But it’s— You don’t want to see it, I’m sure.”
Memories — of a room with the lock on the outside; of being brutalised; of Jake — rush into Diana, and she steps back, steps away. “Stenordale burned,” she whispers.
“I know. I don’t know what this is.”
“I want to know.” Diana moves closer, and Monica makes no move to stop her. “I think I need to know.”
For a long while, Monica looks at her, frowning slightly, studying her face. And then she smiles just a little, reaches up to tuck a lock of Diana’s hair behind her ear, and turns to sit back down. “Okay,” she says.
Diana pulls up the other chair, the one with no back that she sits on to do her makeup, and they hold hands again before they read.
* * *
Another one of Elle’s people drives them back to the hall. Frankie sits very quietly, tries not to be noticed, and misses Trev already, because Val isn’t saying anything, and Beatrice is muttering angrily under her breath. Frankie hasn’t caught most of it, and what she has heard is sort of worrying. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say the grand old matriarch of Dorley Hall is only barely holding off a full-blown panic attack.
Is she overreacting? Fuck only knows, honestly. Lambert had one of her analysts come in and talk about bone decomposition and damp soil and how at some point Smyth-Farrow had someone surface the most recent bodies and bash in their poor skulls and— Yeah, okay, bloody hell; Frankie might be on the verge of a panic attack, too.
Those were her girls…
She takes shallow breaths, grips the door handle, and forces herself to think logically.
The problem’s not the bodies, not really, not directly. The chances of them being traced back to Dorley Hall are remote, and even Dorothy’s in the clear, save a really dedicated and lucky forensics team; from what the analyst said, the chances of them identifying any given body as belonging to a trans woman — or, you know, whatever — aren’t exactly high, and it’s only the presence of so many bodies in one place that will suggest to a halfway intelligent investigator that where one or two of them are trans — whatever — then there’s a high likelihood the rest of them are.
The real problem is threefold:
One: the Smyth-Farrow kids. They’re the wild card. Frankie knows only enough about them to have decided she bloody well hates them, possibly more than she despised their father, because they grew up with front-row seats to his cruelty — if not his depravity, though it’s hard to believe he kept himself in check entirely around them — and seem to have decided that their main problem with it was that they weren’t included. How they will respond to the unearthing of a bastard’s dozen bodies at Stenordale, the smoking ruins of which are still Silver River’s property and thus controlled by them — or fifty-one percent controlled by them — is anyone’s guess. Given their chosen allegiances, Frankie can imagine practically any outcome, from a bland press conference to a scorched-earth campaign against anyone and everyone who has recently pissed them off.
Two: Dorothy. But she’s always a problem, she’s the oldest problem they all have, and has been since Crispin died, and so far, she’s been content to bide her time. The old bitch seems to be immortal, so unless she catches Bird Flu 2 or whatever it is that’s currently menacing China, they’re stuck with her. Which isn’t so bad, because she can’t screw them over without equally screwing herself, and at least in that instance Beatrice can trot out a hundred-odd happy women to testify that, yes, actually, they volunteered for womanhood, and the year underground was like an ascetic retreat, and all the Ready Brek they had to eat was properly fortified with vitamins and iron, your honour. No, Dorothy’s not likely to try anything, especially not if she’s hiding from the Smyth-Farrows; their investment burned down on her watch, after all.
But it doesn’t mean she won’t try to slip some information in through private channels. That’s what Frankie doesn’t know: how many of old Dotty’s contacts remain, and how many of them are still willing to put themselves out there for her. That’s what Frankie’s chewing on.
Finally, three: the trans nature of it all. Yeah, like the analyst said, the chances are low they’ll spot the poorly documented signs of vintage nineties facial feminisation on the more intact skulls, but low isn’t zero, and if it gets out that almost twenty presumed trans women were buried in the back garden of one of Britain’s glorious aristocratic families? Frankie’s got no clue whatsoever what that will do to this country’s lurid fascination with trans women, but it’s got to be an accelerant, right? Some mad columnist or twitter fanatic will spin an insane theory that makes the dead look like they earned their graves, the Mail will pick it up and spend a few salacious days working over the corpses with their best scandal hunters, and then the bloody Guardian will bring in one of their heads to nod very seriously about how this, tragically, means trans women should be extra-special super-duper stopped from going to the toilet, lest a serial killer accidentally open the jugular of a real woman on his way past. The one thing it’s guaranteed not to do is inspire sympathy in the press; dead trans women get the same treatment as dead sex workers or dead immigrants. Even someone like Frankie, who purposefully disconnected herself from the world as much as possible, who spent years rescuing dogs and doing little else, hasn’t been able to avoid building an awareness of the omnidirectional malice of the British papers; they used to use The Times to line the kennels.
So, to sum up: shit. No wonder Beatrice is muttering to herself.
Frankie risks another glance at Val. Last time she did that, Val caught her looking and glared at her, but this time, Valérie seems beyond noticing anything at all. She’s staring out the window, watching the scenery glide by, and Frankie suddenly wonders what she thinks of the car. Weird thought, but a better one than everything else occupying Frankie’s head right now. She remembers Val commenting during their escape that cars seem to have grown since the eighties. Did they even have chunky four-by-fours like this back then? They had Land Rovers and Range Rovers, but they were for farmers and landowners, respectively, and none of them had a ride like this. Elle Lambert’s fleet of jet-black Range Rovers glide along as though the road is coated in Teflon, and the inside trim is more like you’d expect in a limo. A far cry from the van they stole, or the car they also stole, or anything Val’s parents buzzed around Paris in when she was a kid. Crappy little Citroëns, or something.
Val should ask Lambert for a car. Val should get the hell away from the hall, from all of this. She’s seen enough, done enough, more than anyone except Beatrice, Maria, and the other survivors of Dorothy’s regime. She shouldn’t be dealing with disasters; she should piss off to the Côte d’Azur in a luxury car and never come back. Reconnect with her countrypeople and drink a lot of tacky fruit drinks.
And Frankie’s got to admit, the idea of Valérie Barbier strutting around the beach in a bikini is an arresting one. She’d be on the front cover of some fashion mag within a month. Showing the real girls how it’s done.
Christ alive, Franks, where is your head going? She needs to get her mind out of the gutter and concentrate on the important things, like—
Wait. It’s not Ready Brek everyone in the basement always complains about, is it? It’s Weetabix.
It is Weetabix, right?
Jesus. She’s losing it.
* * *
Monica wonders if a small attic room with tilted ceilings and small windows has ever felt so open, so free. Because Diana’s standing there by one of the windows, as close as she can get without having to duck, looking out on the cold early evening and thinking… what?
They’ve been talking about Stenordale. About what it was like to wake every morning in her room there and to have to wait to discover what violations were going to be administered that day; she might get off light, helping Valérie Barbier with dinner — though Valérie disdained Diana’s help after she found out why she was ejected from Dorley Hall in the first place, so those duties became sparse after a while — or she might have to shadow the Silver River man around the premises, or she might have to prepare herself for a more private encounter. Diana said that very quickly, she stopped feeling trapped, because she stopped feeling anything much at all; her surgeries and the limited time she was allocated to recover from them had already left her shell-shocked, and after that, it seemed like every new blow to her equilibrium came while she was still adjusting to the last one. Declan ran from the experience, and Diana was yet to be born. Sometimes there was Dina; sometimes there was something like Declan, but so shattered by his treatment that he was more memory and instinct than anything else; more often, there was no-one.
“I think they were the same as me,” she’s saying, still looking out of the window, speaking in the gentle, husky whisper Monica’s come to think of, quite naturally, as Diana’s voice, not anything connected to Declan. “I think maybe they woke up as nothing, too. I hope… I hope they were nothing when they were killed.” Now she turns, her eyes shining and red for the first time. “It was easier to be nothing.” Monica stands, walks slowly over. “It was better.” Monica wraps her arms around Diana’s belly, allows Diana to lean into her. “Nothing can’t be hurt. Nothing can’t be made to do things. Nothing can’t be violated.”
“You’re safe, Diana,” Monica says.
“And I feel selfish for it. Lucky. But selfish.” She sighs, her wide ribcage taking Monica’s head with it as it rises. “At every turn, I’ve been given more than I deserved. Chia’s been more generous than I could possibly have expected. And you, you tried to help me, and I pushed you away. And now you’re helping me again. Money. Clothes. A real identity.”
“It’s coming. You’ll be Diana Rosamond.”
“I know,” Diana whispers. “And I couldn’t be happier. But it was only in that place that I came close to getting what I deserved.”
“Diana,” Monica says, leaning away so she can look her in the eye, “you did not deserve to die there.”
“Maybe not. But neither did those girls.”
Neither of them says anything else for a while. They look out the window together, at the unwinding evening, at the sea-blown rain, at the wide, darkening world. Diana cries gently, and Monica just tries her very hardest to be her sister.
* * *
It got around. Of course it did. The basement’s not exactly large, and once Steph read it on Pippa’s phone and gave the gist to Bethany, and Jane told Raph, and Tabitha reluctantly gave in to Leigh’s pestering, it was inevitable that most of the rest of them would find out. If only because Ollie really, really wanted to know why Raph, the fucking collaborator, is hugging his sponsor now, and also why Harmony had to excuse herself to go sit alone in the bathroom for half an hour.
So it got around, but quietly, because still no-one seems to know exactly how much Adam knows, and nobody, not even Ollie, wants to ask him outright.
Tabitha got the TV in the common room to play quiet music, so they don’t have to sit in silence, and Martin suggested they play a board game or something, but it was only when Raph asked Jane to open the storeroom and came back with a bunch of spare mattresses that the mood even slightly changed. They shoved the couches to the edges of the room, pulled them apart for cushions, and supplemented their makeshift beds with bean bag chairs, and now they’re all sitting in little clumps, more connected than before, still talking quietly, still sombre, but no longer just randomly weeping in the corner.
Almost all of them: Adam’s gone back to his room, and Edy’s gone with him. She told him she didn’t want to be alone, and that there are things they need to talk about. She made significant eyes at the rest of the room when she said that, which Steph took to mean that they can probably — finally — talk completely freely down here from, say, tomorrow morning onwards.
Deeply weird to see Adam and Edy together now, considering what Steph knows — look at their eyes! they’re the same! — but it’s kinda cool that someone here gets to have an actual blood relative for a Sister.
Briefly she thinks of Petra. Not a helpful thought. She misses her. Or she thinks she does; she was so screwed up from basically the moment puberty started that she sort of big-brothered on autopilot. Did she ever really know her little sister?
She shakes herself. Now is hardly the time to berate herself, and when Pippa leans around and throws a questioning look her way, Steph smiles to let her know that nothing’s wrong.
Because nothing is wrong. Petra’s getting the letters. She knows she’s loved.
Yeah, by a big brother who hasn’t even existed for months; who never really existed at all. Who sends bullshitty letters and discarded his phone, who barely even bothered to visit while he was still at uni for real. Who spent years entirely checked out, and then quietly dwindled away.
She must be the luckiest girl in Britain.
“Insane to think all that shit used to happen here,” Raph’s saying, and Steph frowns, forcing herself to concentrate on what’s being said and not the stupid bullshit inside her head. “All the sex stuff.”
“Yeah,” Leigh says sarcastically, from where she and Tabitha are sitting together on the only couch that hasn’t been disintegrated, “now they just do the kidnapping and coercive identity realignment thing. Just parts one and two of the three-part plan.”
“They didn’t do that,” Harmony says quietly.
“What?”
“The identity thing. That’s us. That’s the important difference. They didn’t do it. What they used to do was—”
“Harmony,” Maria says. “Don’t.” She’s with Steph, Pippa and Bethany, close to the centre of the huddle of mattresses and cushions, and she’s letting Beth idly play with her hair, twisting it into knots that she’ll probably have to tease out in the shower later.
“Right. Sorry.”
“We don’t need to go into detail.”
“I know.”
Soft music plays. Pippa leans against Steph; Steph leans against Pippa. Maria’s stopped Bethany from playing with her hair so she can hold her hand, or have her hand held. Everyone’s so quiet and everyone’s so fucked up.
Nineteen bodies. Steph finds it hard enough to contemplate one; that a man could be so twisted as to commission the transformation of nineteen men — twenty, she corrects herself; Valérie — only to murder them…
And every single one of them began their journey here, inside these walls.
Yeah. She gets why Bethany feels so claustrophobic now.
“What’s going to happen?” Ollie asks. He hasn’t said much until now, apart from to sneer at Raph. He’s just been sitting awkwardly with Harmony on the edge of the cluster of mattresses. “Is Frankie going to be okay?”
“Frankie?” Pippa says.
“Yeah,” Ollie says, without elaborating.
“Frankie is with Aunt Bea and Ms Barbier,” Maria says, leaning into her ‘official’ voice. “She’s safe, Oliver.”
He nods and says nothing else. It’s weird; he’s the only one down here not connected to someone else somehow. Everyone’s holding hands or leaning on each other or outright sitting in each other’s laps, and there’s Ollie, who tried three sitting positions when he first came over and rejected every one, only to end up with both legs spread out in front of him. He’s having to hold himself up, his arms splayed out behind him, and it doesn’t look comfortable. Is he feeling how different he is now? How much everyone else has moved away from what probably still feels natural to him?
“Hey,” Bethany says, “so, uh, when are we going to get to go upstairs again?”
“I don’t know, Bethany,” Maria says. “We’ll know more in the morning; we need to wait for Aunt Bea to brief us properly.”
Tabitha says sharply, “All we’ve got to go on right now is what you saw on our phones. So we’ve locked down hard. And don’t have a choice in this; we’ll relax it when we know it’s safe to do so. We’ve been over this, Bethany.”
“Sorry,” Bethany says quickly.
“No,” Tabitha says before Maria can interject, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t… Yeah. I shouldn’t. Sorry.”
“What’s so great about going upstairs, anyway?” Raph says. Ollie’s laugh is sharp and humourless; Raph ignores it. “You still can’t leave, right? A lock for every door and a bar for every window?”
“Better bed, better food,” Bethany says, and eyes Raph. “Better company.”
“You’re such a little shit,” Raph says, but he’s smiling, and Beth doesn’t seem to mind.
“And the windows do open,” Bethany continues. “You can smell the fresh air, and… Fuck.” She leans against Maria, who pulls her in closer, into a hug. “Not much point, anyway. I don’t know who I am up there, same as I don’t down here.”
“Bethany—” Steph starts.
“No, I’m serious,” she snaps, leaning forward, straining against Maria’s embrace, “I fucking don’t. I looked at those fucking bodies and I kept thinking, I kept thinking, like… Shit. Fucking self-indulgent bullshit. Sorry.”
No-one says anything for a moment, and then Maria, in her kindest voice, says, “What were you thinking, Bethany?”
“That they died knowing who they are.”
Steph wants to protest, because Bethany’s seemed so solid lately, comparatively speaking, but Pippa and Maria have both warned her about pushing Beth too hard, about not giving her the space she needs to develop as her own woman.
Bethany looks around the room. Winces as she seems to realise how everyone’s looking back at her. Mostly sympathetically, or so Steph thinks.
“I’m an accessory to Steph,” Bethany says eventually. “You all see it, don’t you? You’re all thinking it, right? I don’t sleep in my own room; I sleep in Steph’s. I borrow her clothes. I go upstairs when she does, and when I talk to people, it’s like I’m Steph’s. I’m Stephanie Riley’s Bethany. Practically her fucking pet.”
“Hey,” Steph says, but Bethany cuts her off.
“You know it’s true. It’s like I can’t function without you or Maria. And that’s not a person, is it? That’s a— a growth on your arse that you can’t get rid of.”
“No, Bethany,” Maria gently chides.
“I keep telling myself that I’m faking it until I make it,” Bethany continues. “Like Mia said. And I’ve got good at that. Or I thought I did. But I look into the future, and where I used to see this sad fucking life for Aaron, a butt-slapping piece of shit working a crap suit job he doesn’t care about, you know what I see for Bethany? I see Steph. I see Maria. Fuck me, I even see some of you. But I don’t see me.” She’s getting louder now, and when she pauses, she’s chewing on her lower lip, really wrecking the skin there. “I’m supposed to be a person, aren’t I? A real girl? Not just Steph’s girlfriend.” She hesitates only slightly before the word, and Steph would consider that progress if not for the surrounding context. “Not just Maria’s Sister. Not just the idiot who pined so hard for a girl he didn’t even know that well that he borrowed half her fucking name. Jesus Christ, I walk into a room with no-one in it and I feel like I ought to switch myself off until someone shows up! Until I have to perform Bethany! And I like her more than Aaron, and she doesn’t get the shit beaten out of her as much, but I’m— I’m fucking empty. And I don’t want to be.” She slows and quiets, leans back into Maria, stops pulling away from her. “I feel like I’m flickering between two states: Steph’s girlfriend, and just a blank piece of paper. And I hate that. I don’t want to be that any more. I don’t want to be this shitty little thing that does nothing but pine for Steph when she’s not around. I should be more. And I feel like I’m betraying Bethany by not being more! But I’m here, and I’m still here, and the walls are fucking closing in, and when they finally snap shut— Fuck. I don’t know what I’m saying. Might be going a little cuckoo in here, you know?”
Steph shuffles forward and reaches for Bethany’s hand. She has to extract it from somewhere in the depths of her, but she does so. She does so and she fucking well holds it.
“You’re more than just my girlfriend,” Steph says. “And when all this shit isn’t going on, I think you know it.”
“I tried to dress up for you,” Bethany says, with a half-smile. “I tried to dress up for you. Wanted to look nice for you. Shit, Steph; I want to do things for me. But right now it’s like I’m, I don’t know, survival needs only. I have a concrete hole to live in and I have food and stuff, but I don’t have… me.”
“You will.”
“You’ll learn to,” Maria adds. “This is just a step. An important step. One you’re going to get through.”
“I just…” Bethany mumbles. “I never know what to do. It’s like— You ever make decision trees at school? I don’t know, probably not; seems like make-work for aristo boys with underutilised brains. But we did. And unless I’m with Steph or Maria, it feels like I’m always… missing the top of the decision tree. You know? Like, I know what’s in the last box, the box where I’m like a happy, smiling girl having fun with her friends, but I don’t know how to get there. Just a blank piece of paper with an impossible goal on it.”
Raph, who is sitting with Jane amid a pile of bean bag chairs, struggles to sit forward. “That’s because everything that used to be simple is complicated now,” he says.
“Got that right,” Leigh murmurs.
“No, I mean it,” Raph says. “You used to be a man, Bethany, like— uh, like me, I guess.” Ollie laughs again. “Shut up, Ollie. This’ll be you in a month. Look.” He’s addressing Bethany directly, but he occasionally turns his head to include the rest of the room. “I’ve been thinking about this. Beth’s been talking and I’ve been thinking, and— Okay, so, being a man is simple, right? There’s one rule: don’t be a poof. We all know that, yeah? Steph most of all, probably, because she had to fake it, but that’s just how it works. And it’s easy, because everyone knows what a poof is, don’t we? A fairy. A fag. A—”
“Stop saying slurs and make your point, Raph,” Jane says, nudging him.
“Oh. Yeah. Soz. Getting a bit too into it. But look, we all know what a— a gay guy is like, yeah? And I don’t mean the kind of gay guy we might know; I mean the gay guy we all trained ourselves not to be. We know how he walks, how he talks, how he sits. We know the kinds of things he likes. And we know that he’s not really a guy, not the way we are. Were. Whatever. He’s like a girl. Or worse, because girls have, you know, redeeming qualities, and the guy we’re so afraid of? He’s got none. No good for anything. And we hate him, because he could be a guy, right? If he was strong, like us, he could be a guy.”
“Where are you going with this?” Leigh asks.
“Sorry,” Raph says, glaring at him, “is this Phoenix Wright? Are you yelling ‘Objection!’? I’m just talking! Jesus. Look,” he continues, and he’s staring at his hands now, following them as he gesticulates, supporting his points, “we’ve got this guy we’re all trying not to be. And we think he’s weak and stupid and womanly and gay, but not in a gay way, in a poofter way — sorry, Jane, but it’s true. So everything we do is evaluated against that guy. It’s the one rule: don’t be him. And because we all know how that guy behaves, it’s easy.” He drops his hands into his lap, squeezes them between his legs. “But we’re here now. We’ve gotten rid of the rule. Took some of us a while—” he looks from Ollie to Leigh, “—but we got there, or we’re getting there, or we’re working on it, or some shit; I don’t know. I hung onto it for too fucking long, I know that much. It’s an easy stick to beat other men with. Point is: the rule’s gone. The guidebook on how to be? It’s torn up. And now you—” he nods at Bethany, “—have got to figure out the new rules. Only you’re working from first principles. All we really know is that women aren’t like us, aren’t like we used to be; they don’t have that guy they’re always trying not to be. At least, I don’t think so. So it’s complicated.”
“Uh,” Bethany says, “sure? I suppose?”
“Okay, example, right? What about, like, when someone’s crying? For guys, it’s easy: if it’s a girl, you can be like, ‘How can I fix this?’ or you just ignore her, because it’s girl stuff and you don’t need to get involved; if it’s another guy, you say, ‘What a bitch; you don’t need her.’ Right? What does a girl do?”
“I think you’ll find,” Jane says, smiling at him, “that we do whatever feels right.”
“But how do you figure that out? How do you know what feels right?” It’s Raph asking the question, but Bethany’s listening out for the answer, too.
“You’ll know.”
“You’ve got a voice,” Pippa says, very suddenly, speaking up for the first time in a while, and speaking too loud. Too loud even for her, because she looks around like she’s embarrassed, and continues more quietly, “You’ve always had a voice inside you. And you drowned it out. Like Raph said. It was more important to be the right kind of man. And especially for someone like you, Bethany.”
“Me?” Bethany says warily.
“Small. Not physically strong. Didn’t fit in.”
“Yeah, okay, thanks—”
“You’ve got two choices, there. You either get tough anyway, and you push it way too hard, and you hand out a few bloody noses because you’re fed up of being the boy everyone picks on, or you find another way out. You make people laugh. You learn to run, or you find places to hide. But Raph’s right: you make sure you never become that guy, or the people who hurt you will definitely hurt you more. You were probably drowning out your real voice even more than the tough guys.”
“What ‘real voice’?” Bethany says.
“You,” Pippa says. “You know what you want. You know who you are. You do, I promise. You’ve just become so used to blocking it out, to making yourself someone else, that you’ve forgotten it’s there. It’s why you’re stuck at the top of your decision tree, I suppose; step one is, ‘What feels right to do right now?’ and you’ve made sure never to ask yourself that, ever.” She’s blushing now, looking down. “It took me a long time to learn to listen to myself. Sometimes I think I’m still not there. Still evaluating my every movement against this… invisible eye that will punish me if I do things wrong. I’m still teaching myself to stop worrying about all that stuff.” She looks up again. “You’ve got a reflex that stops you before you do anything. It makes you question what you’re about to do or to say. You built that reflex because it helped you survive. And now you know you don’t need it, but it’s still there.”
“It’ll fade,” Jane says. “It will. None of us—” she nods at Pippa, but seems to mean all the sponsors present, “—ever found being a man came all that naturally. And moving past it was, eventually, a relief. You stop constantly asking yourself, ‘Wait, if I give a shit, is that gay?’ And this really was all of us. All my intake, anyway; it’s the kind of shit you talk about in your third year, when you’re getting ready to graduate and you’re letting it all out.”
“Also,” Harmony says, “when you’re really stoned.”
“Exactly,” Jane says, pointing at her. “We got blazed out of our brains and spilled all the bullshit we’d been thinking about for three years, and we ended up laughing so fucking hard… We were all so similar. We were all terrified, all the time, of being the wrong kind of guy, and we worked too hard at it, and we policed the other guys… We were the toxic masculinity recruitment and enforcement squad. Because that’s the thing: there are guys who don’t seem to have to try, and they’re the ones we were all trying to be like; and then there are the guys you’re not supposed to be, and they were the ones we were always afraid we’d be seen as if we said the wrong thing.”
“S’what I said,” Raph says.
“And you’re right. One time, at school, I had a massive zit on my chin. Ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. My girlfriend — short-lived — put concealer on it at lunch, but by fifth period, I’d rubbed it off on my shirt, and I was still scared some other boy would see it and pound me into the ground over it. And, probably, some of the boys there would have.”
“Well, yeah. It’s what I would have done. It’s in the rules.”
“And now you need to forget the rules. And the trick isn’t to learn new ones, to spend the rest of your life in the same anxious puddle of bullshit as your first couple of decades; the trick is to realise that the rules are crap. And, like Pippa said, to learn to listen to what you want, not what you’ve trained yourself to think you need.”
“But there are still girl rules, right?” Ollie says.
“Oh, tonnes. But they’re… very different. And you can break them if you want.”
“We’ll teach you,” Harmony says. “Not this year, but we’ll teach you. It’s advanced class stuff. Gotta pull all the crap outta your brains first before we put the good stuff in.” Ollie frowns at her. “Ask your beloved Frankie! She’s seen how this works. And it really works. Even back then, under Dorothy, it worked sometimes, without them even—”
“Harmony,” Maria warns.
“Shit. Sorry.”
“Of course,” Jane says, “that’s only half the story. The other thing is just as important, and it’s a realisation we all come to, eventually.”
“Oh?” Raph asks. “What other thing?”
“Men are fucking stupid.”
Raph laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, we are.”
“Uh-uh,” Jane says, wagging a finger in his face. “I don’t want you to be self-deprecating about this. This is something else. This is about putting words to something you already know, and it’s about embracing it, reinforcing it. ‘Men are fucking stupid,’ sure, but try saying it like you’re not one of them any more. Try saying it like you’re better than them. Like you’re not so thick as to get caught out by the bullshit they let themselves do to each other.”
“Men are fucking stupid?” Raph tries.
“Again. Remember: men are stupid. But you know better now. You’re not going to be that thick again. There’s a battle of the sexes, and you just joined the winning team. And now you see them for what they are, these scared little children, with children’s worries and a child’s understanding of the world. ‘Oh no!’” she adds in a comically deep voice. “‘Someone might think I’m not enough of a man!’ Men are fucking stupid. Say it again.”
“Men,” Raph says, and he does so with a sneer, but also with pinking cheeks, “are so fucking stupid. I mean, why do they even care if some other guy thinks they’re gay? Is he going to try anything? Fuck no. Because men are fucking cowards, too. And the ones that aren’t, they’ll go for you for something you never even thought of, they’ll decide the way you hold a pint is gay, or the way you— the way you fucking parallel park. So, no, I don’t give a shit what they think, and I don’t give a shit about them, either. Because men are fucking stupid.”
“Attagirl,” Jane says, which makes Raph flinch. “No, seriously. Hold onto that thought. Keep it with you. Maybe write a diary entry about it. I want you to feel superior to them. I want you to feel contemptuous of them. Raph, I want you to be a smug fucking bitch. You know why?”
“Because men are fucking stupid.”
“And you’re not stupid any more.”
* * *
He’s desperate to help her. Ever since the news came in, the update that no-one will tell him about, the other sponsors have seemed delicate, have cried, have needed help to get through the day — and Adam’s been pleased to see the others providing that help, because that’s the way the world ought to work; share the load — but Edy’s been different. Edy’s had difficulty standing upright; Edy’s not been able to stop crying for more than a few minutes at a time; Edy was barely able to get through the snacks they sent down. It was as if, once her initial burst of crisis-management energy dissipated, she had nothing left except raw nerves.
Adam’s so, so worried about her. And now, in his room, with the heavy door closed and red-light locked, with no-one else around to inhibit him or to make her leave him, he can finally, properly help her.
She’s sitting on the end of his tidy bed, her feet flat on the floor, her knees together and her hands clasped between her thighs. She isn’t moving, and though she isn’t crying, her cheeks are still wet, her eyes are still red, and Adam thinks that if she moves even the slightest bit, she will lose control and begin once again to weep.
And he’s been sitting on the chair with the castors, but he cannot help from there, so, under the pretext of collecting from the dumbwaiter and bringing to her the bottled water someone sent down almost half an hour ago, Adam sits next to her. Thighs touching. Sinfully close, were it not for the things he is certain he knows about her. And Adam, of late, is certain about little.
He was almost offended when he first understood how Dorley Hall works. Bad men get made into women, and they get their evil cured in the process. It seemed simplistic, even to him, and whatever he’s done, whatever he’s said, whichever of Father’s words he has let spill out of him in service of the Voice — whatever lies he has been made to tell — he has never considered himself to be a bad man. But as he understood the nuance of it, as Edy told him about the second years, about their paths to secular salvation in the eyes of Aunt Bea, he realised he had it wrong.
Bad men? Yes and no.
Destructive men? Most definitely. And Adam has been forced to understand that his path was a most destructive one. He was to succeed Father — guaranteed by his early mastery of the Tongue, his early channelling of The Voice — and in that role he would surely have performed as Father himself has. All fruits of the farm — of the nation — would find their way to him; the disfavoured cousins would go hungry; and the Word would continue to be spread among the unenlightened. Before he left, there was talk of more radical action, talk of a search among their ranks for a martyr, talk of fire and brimstone and the kind of education only the blood of the cross can provide. Before he left, he dismissed his mum’s concerns about it; Father knows all.
But Father knows nothing, and in his ignorance, he wages war upon the innocent.
All that was to be his. Adam was to be the new Father. And when he finally realised, here in his small, concrete room, that the fate that Edy and the programme here at Dorley Hall has in store for him will render that role inaccessible to him, he found his first peace in a long time.
Peace which gave way, quite quickly, to rage. And rage which dissipated, equally quickly, when he understood just how profoundly Edy needs him.
Mum used to say she wanted to save just one person. She wanted it to be Adam, but Adam resisted.
He’ll be like her. He’ll save someone, and she’ll be proud of him when she sees him again. When he saves her, too.
“Adam…” Edy whispers. “I’m so sorry.” Her voice sounds as if she is forcing it through sandpaper.
He unscrews the water bottle and holds it to her mouth. After a moment — and a glance at him — she parts her lips, tips back her head, and accepts a small sip of water. It feels strangely like a baptism.
“You don’t need to be sorry,” he says.
“Oh, Adam,” she says. She takes the bottle from him, swigs hard from it, and then recaps it and throws it on the bed. Then she wraps an arm around his shoulders and holds him, delicately but firmly.
He’s always thought of her that way. She’s very beautiful. Very strong. Very fragile. And always very familiar. As if she was always there, throughout his life, but stepped out of the shadows only recently. Like a guardian angel.
“You don’t need to be sorry,” he repeats.
“I do,” she says softly. Her voice has its fondness back now, the lilt with which she has always addressed him. “I have kept things from you, and I have told myself that it is for your benefit that I have done so. But I’ve been scared. Goodness, Adam, I was going to have Steph and Leigh talk to you on my behalf; isn’t that cowardly?”
“Leigh?”
“Never mind. Adam, you deserve to know why I’m so upset.” She shifts on the mattress, crosses her legs at the ankles, leans into him. Adam, for his part, leans back. Whatever it is she needs to tell him, he wants to know. Nothing could hurt him more than the dissolution of his faith, and the understanding that his beloved Father is, and always has been, a charlatan, or a fool at best. “The programme at Dorley Hall,” she says. “You know what it does. You’re a part of it. But you don’t know everything.” She takes a deep breath. Smooths down her clothes, frowning, paying attention to them. “It’s existed for roughly fifteen years, and I was one of its first subjects. My name was… I’ll get to what my name was, Adam. Before Aunt Bea, before Maria, Dorley Hall was run by a different group of people. A woman who called herself ‘Grandmother’ was in charge, and she did not share our beliefs. When she made a woman from a man, she did so for the basest of reasons, and when that woman was complete, Grandmother would sell her. Sell her into the most foul depravity imaginable. She was cruel, Adam, and she delighted in it.”
She invites Adam into a world of horrors. Tells him everything, though she keeps the details light, for which he is grateful. She tells him about Declan and Diana, about Vincent and Valérie. And she tells him about the girls who were delivered to Stenordale Manor who never returned.
He can’t help thinking of Father. Adam was never kidnapped, and neither were the other boys he knew there, but there was, similarly, no escape. Their very minds were shaped by someone who had a use for them.
Is that love? Of a sort?
“I told you, Adam,” Edy says. “I was there at the start. When I saw Maria through those bars… Goodness. I was her first. And the others, the other girls who were trying their best, muddling through with that first intake, they were all survivors of Grandmother. And they were so wounded, Adam.” She sniffs again. He passes her a tissue. “The old woman and her wicked associates tried their best to break them, and praise God, they were not broken, but, Adam, my sweet, brave Adam… they were so hurt. And when I saw those bodies, those bones, all I could think of was that that was almost Maria. It was almost Barbara. It was almost Trish and— and Beatrice, too. It was almost her. And I remember Maria looking at me through those bars, and I remember her face… and I can’t stop thinking about how close she came to never being there at all. To never being mine at all. I’m stuck wandering, stuck convincing myself that I’m doing the right thing, and she’s… gone.”
That’s all Edy can manage for now. She bends over, pulling her arm away from Adam so she can cover her face, and all he can do is hold her.
* * *
They had packet sandwiches off paper plates with cans of fizzy drink and bags of prawn cocktail crisps. A little picnic in the common room, because none of them want to go back to their rooms. And now Steph’s lying back, covered in one of the light duvets someone fetched from somewhere, with Bethany in her arm and Pippa lying next to them. Maria’s sitting on a somewhat reconstituted couch, tapping away on her phone but keeping close enough to Bethany that she doesn’t get restless.
That was some confession Bethany made earlier, and Steph wants to discuss it, if only so she can provide whatever reassurances the anxious hamster wheel that is Bethany’s brain will require — there is a bright, vibrant woman inside that head of hers, and the sponsors were right: she needs only to learn to listen to her — but Bethany was one of the first to fall asleep, so it’ll have to wait until morning.
Most of the others are asleep now, too. Every time they got away from talking about the bodies, from talking about the grotesque practices of the old man who lived at the manor, from talking about what that meant for Valérie and Diana, they circled back to it all with an inevitability that bordered on fatalistic, and that’s a tiring emotional high to keep going for so many hours. They were all exhausted.
Steph, for her part, can’t stay focused, and she doesn’t think she’ll be sleeping for a while, either. Because ever since she thought about Petra, she can’t get her out of her head.
Petra doesn’t know she has a sister. She’s been getting these artful fictions in the mail, these stories that Steph dreams up with Pippa, and while maybe it’s nice that she gets to imagine her brother having slightly unrealistically perfect adventures in far-off countries — Steph and Pippa are careful never to mention how ‘Stefan’ is paying for his excursion — it’s all building up to something that Steph will never live up to. Stefan’s never coming back from his trip abroad, and Stephanie, the girl who’s replaced him, is not only a liar, she’s a stranger.
If only she hadn’t come to Dorley Hall. If only she hadn’t made herself custodian of the secrets of almost a hundred people. If only she hadn’t made herself a liar for life.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Pippa says.
Rolling over just in time to spot Pippa closing the lockdown notice on her phone, Steph says, “So’re you.”
“Yeah,” Pippa sighs quietly. “Guilty.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“I think I’m the same as everyone else. So many dead, you know?”
“Yeah,” Steph says warily.
“Something else on your mind?”
Propping herself up on her elbow so she can see Pippa properly in the lowered lights, Steph says, “I don’t know how I’m going to face my family. That’s… That’s everything on my mind right now. Which is selfish and stupid and—”
Pippa lays a hand on Steph’s forearm. “Normal,” she says.
“I should be grieving,” Steph says, frowning.
“You never knew those girls,” Pippa says. “And neither did I, so it’s all kind of abstract for me. Once I got over the shock, it was like my brain just started looking for other stuff to connect them to. So I ended up thinking about my family, too.”
“See? That’s why I’m selfish. I’m going to see mine again, and you’re…” Steph stops herself from finishing a profoundly impolitic sentence by virtue of biting herself on the inside of her cheek.
“Not,” Pippa finishes. “I’m not. You don’t need to not say it, Steph. It’s something I’ve been dealing with for a long time. Something I’m going to keep dealing with for a while longer, I think. But it’s not raw, not like it used to be. They just… come back sometimes. And speak to me. At times like these, when everything’s topsy-turvy. At least, in my head, I get to tell my dad how much I miss him. And Sarah…” Smiling, Pippa holds up her wrist, the one with the bracelet that she always wears, and tugs on it with her little finger. “I get to tell her off. I get to find the magic words that will make her leave that— that bastard, make her listen to me.” She shrugs, a movement which, given her position, takes her whole upper body with it. “But the problem with that, Steph, is that it changes my life. Completely. If Sarah leaves Pete, then my Dad doesn’t go to jail, then I stand a better chance of sorting my life out, then Eleanor doesn’t pick me up and I don’t become Pippa and I don’t meet you.”
“You don’t think that would be better?” Steph says. “Because I keep thinking about what if I hadn’t been such a coward, what if I’d come out to my family and transitioned on my own, what if—”
“And then,” Pippa interrupts, “you wouldn’t have met Bethany. You wouldn’t have met Christine. You wouldn’t have been reunited with Melissa. And we wouldn’t have met, and I don’t know about you, but I, for one, can’t imagine my life without you in it. Not any more.” She reaches out for Steph’s hand, and Steph lifts herself off her elbow and lies back down on her side so she can take it.
“I can’t be worth it, can I? I’m just… I don’t know. I don’t think I’m that great. I don’t think it would be so bad if I was… elsewhere. Somewhere I could be actually helpful.”
“You’re helpful here, Steph. Look, neither of us can know what our lives would be if we’d done the ‘right’ thing. All we can know is what we have right now, and what we’d lose if we could somehow turn back the clock. And, personally, I know that. So, mostly, I don’t think about it. I only indulge—” she makes a show of glancing around the common room, “—at times of great stress. The rest of the time, I’ve decided to be content. And I’m working on happy.”
Steph nods. She wouldn’t have met Bethany. She wouldn’t have met Pippa or Christine or Indira or any of the others. She wouldn’t have seen Melissa again, probably ever! She’d have had that sad little encounter at the big Tesco, and for the rest of her life, she would have wondered.
Lying to Petra is still such a high price for all that, though. And it’s miserable to have so many people be so important to her, and to have to hide them from her only blood sister.
Her little Petra.
Shit.
Pippa’s right. You can’t go back. And if you could, you’d lose everything.
Make that a part of your thinking, Steph.
Easy to look back and critique her own rash decisions. But if she hadn’t gone looking for the hall, or if she hadn’t stopped Christine from getting her out, would she even be alive today? Things have been too comfortable for too long; she’s forgotten how close to the edge she was.
And that makes her laugh. Because she’s on a makeshift mattress in a concrete basement, surrounded by people who were kidnapped for, largely, crimes of misogyny. ‘Comfortable’ is relative. But, yes, it’s still better than her shitty student room and her shitty supermarket job and her shitty empty bank account. And the way, oh yeah, she’d made no progress whatsoever on her transition back then, and she was probably never going to.
Fuck, she was still telling herself she might not even be a girl.
Don’t ever go back, Steph. There are demons there.
“I’m really stupid, Pip,” she says.
“Yeah,” Pippa says. “I could practically see that thought as it passed through you.” She lets go of Steph’s hand and places a finger on Steph’s heart, mostly avoiding the sensitive breast buds, though Steph winces anyway. “It started here, and it moved very slowly—” she runs her finger the length of Steph’s chest and neck, “—all the way up here.” She taps Steph on the temple.
“I’m really stupid, and you’re actually pretty wise.”
Another tap. “I’m supposed to be wise. I’m your sponsor. We’re specially taught and everything. I am absolutely not winging it.”
Because Steph bloody well wants to, she grabs Pippa’s hand, where it’s still idling by Steph’s head, and brings it around to her mouth. She kisses it, smiles, and returns Pippa’s hand to her, feeling suddenly and inappropriately content.
She’ll explain it to Petra. Somehow. She’ll find a way.
“Thanks, Pip.”
“Now go to sleep,” Pippa whispers. “Big day tomorrow.”
“Oh?” Steph says, getting comfortable again, laying her head in the crook of her elbow to push up her pillow a little. “What happens tomorrow?”
“Aunt Bea tells us how long we have to be in lockdown for. We get follow-ups on the police investigation, the sponsors get… constant briefings, probably. And then we come back down here and give you the CliffsNotes. You know, work stuff. Disaster management. Someone will probably debut a terrible new mug to relieve the tension. I was, um, thinking about making some myself, actually.”
“Really? I thought you hated the mugs.”
Pippa shrugs. “Like everything here, they sort of grow on you. These will be my first; I plan to sneak them into the rotation and wait for someone to notice. I’m still working on my ideas, though.”
“Oh? Tell me!”
“I was thinking… This Machine Pills Sapphics, or maybe No Feminisation Without Representation.”
“Does that first one even make sense?”
“Kinda? Like I said, I’m working on it.”
* * *
There’s an innocence to Adam that’s always been there. Even back when they brought him in, when he was still — only slightly awkwardly — declaiming the will of the Voice, of his father, of the whole damn stupid thing, there was an innocence to him. Edy thinks he could probably have kept going until the exact point Father made him do something truly awful, and then there would have been two paths available to him: he could have given in and become Father, imitated him in spirit as well as in word and deed, become inhabited by him; or he would have been broken by it.
Edy will never not be glad she found a third path for him — even if she had to rather force him onto it — though she will also never not be a little sorry that the best parts of him cannot be preserved as-is. But they just don’t have a mechanism for that, and Edy has neither the funding nor the facilities to operate what Maria has occasionally wryly termed a ‘gender-secular’ deprogramming facility. No, she’s got to be evangelical about womanhood as the solution to the unfortunate state of manhood.
Adam doesn’t seem to mind, though. He minds it less than she did, back in the day. Most of the other boys have pushed back far harder.
Well, they are related. It makes sense, sort of.
And it’s time he knew it.
“Adam,” she says, pulling his attention back to her. They’ve been lying lengthways on his bed together, gently snoozing, ever since she cried herself out; ever since he poured two whole bottles of water into her, and they shared a little treat together: Edy got one of the girls upstairs to promise to keep her mouth shut, and to send down some chocolate ice cream. An emergency, she’d said. Add it to the pile, the girl upstairs said, though she sent the ice cream anyway.
“Yes?” Adam replies sleepily.
Edy shuffles up in bed, pushes up the pillows a little. “I need to tell you something. I think you’ve probably guessed that I lived on the farm. That I come from there. From… where you come from.”
He nods slowly. “You know everything about it. Everything about me.”
“Do you remember… Seth?”
Now he sits up with her, pulling himself up until their faces are close enough that she can taste the chocolate on his breath. “Seth?” he says, frowning.
“You would have been young,” Edy says. “Four, five, I think? Four. And I was just one of many. But I bounced you on my knee, Adam. I was getting ready to go out into the world, and there you were, young and innocent and playing with your toys, and…” She sniffs, unwilling to start crying again, because this time, if she loses control, she will never stop. “You were just a baby. Just a little boy. You had these tiny little hands…”
“I’m sorry,” Adam says earnestly, “but I don’t think I remember a Seth.”
“You would have had no reason to. I was just… one of them. One of Father’s boys. There were… a few of us.” Edy shuffles into the corner, where the bed meets the wall, feeling unaccountably awkward. She’s long known that her dad isn’t her dad, and that all the adults on the farm were well aware of that fact. She hasn’t even been back to the damn place since she left it fifteen years ago, but the shame of it still bites sometimes. “Adam,” she says, “I have to tell you something… about Father.”
And what is left of Adam’s world, the last of him, falls cleanly and inevitably away.
* * *
Frankie’s been dispatched to her room, and she went without comment, doubtless noting Béatrice’s dark mood and Valérie’s disconnection. Perhaps Valérie ought to feel bad about that, and perhaps she will, when she one day regains the ability properly to feel sympathetic towards the old hag, but for right now, she is glad to see the back of her. Valérie could never see her again and be happy.
Her girls. The ones she tried to help and the ones she tried to distance herself from. None of it mattered in the end. All of them ended up in the ground. And now, here they all are, all of them being extracted, piece by piece, bone by bone, to be laid out on cold tables in a fluorescent-lit room somewhere. To be examined, pored over, to have their lives picked apart as filthily as their bodies.
The best case is that they’ll find nothing. That they’ll connect a handful of her girls to the men they were when they went missing, and they’ll conclude that the monster Crispin Smyth-Farrow was some kind of gay serial killer, and that will be the story that is ultimately released to the press. Béatrice remarked that she thinks the newspapers and the police would prefer a gay serial killer to a stalker and murderer of trans women; there are more thinkpieces in it, more ways to drum up sympathy for the kind of queer person the British public, in their indolent, repulsive, arrogant ignorance, can bring itself almost to tolerate.
Awful to think that the deaths of her girls and the way they are presented to the world could spin on something as random as a medical examiner identifying a surviving facial surgery bone carving, or on some quirk of evidence no-one has yet thought to look for or to hide, or on whichever story can be spun most conveniently to match the mood of the day.
Valérie needs to get out of this feculent country.
A shame that she cannot.
Now that she’s back at the hall, she’s not to leave. She’s housebound, just like Frankie and the second years, and restricted from accessing the ground floor, lest the fucking flics show their faces unexpectedly and start asking the nice young ladies for their identification. Someone at Peckinville is probably running up emergency identities for the lot of them, right now.
She hopes they hurry. Because she needs to get out of the hall. Get away from all these beautiful young women whose futures have not been confiscated. She needs to fucking leave.
She told Béatrice she didn’t want to sleep with her in the flat tonight. That she’ll instead take her own room on the second floor, amid the least raucous of the hall’s population. And Béatrice took the news with a nod and shut her door without a word, a move which both insulted Valérie and inflamed her temper, because, God damn it all, she wanted to do it. So she hit Béatrice’s door with her full fist and forearm, and stamped her way up the stairs to her little room on second.
Cold. Lonely. And empty but for a little-used bed, a half-empty wardrobe, and her little tray with the stubs of the candles, a memorial that sits by the window, forever in the light.
Twenty candles. Nineteen for her girls; one for Callum.
Growling, wanting suddenly to take a match to them all and see them once again ablaze, wanting to return to Stenordale with rags and alcohol and set alight the ruins, wanting to run from England as fast as she can and look back from the ferry to watch this whole evil, pathetic little country burn behind her, Val kicks at the tray, knocking it from its perch, scattering the dead candles across the floor and covering the carpet with brittle shards of melted white wax, like so many finger bones reaching uselessly up from the dirt.
Chapter 43: Wrecking Ball
Notes:
A shorter chapter this time. Longer ones are returning — I'm changing how I switch between projects so I won't have to rush things in future :)
Chapter Text
2019 November 8
Friday
Two minutes of silence.
Jenny would light candles, and she used to, before she started doing this with him, when it was only one, but when she became pregnant with Ada, when suddenly her life meant something, when suddenly her safety was important, she made the switch. She bought the candle, she told him, and she set it down in the middle of the dining table that she never uses, and all she could think about was how flammable everything was. How the boxes and files of papers that she had yet to deal with — had yet to angrily shred — and the curtains and the cushions and even the stupid ugly tablecloth could all go up. And then the little life inside her would be lost before it had taken so much as its first breath.
When Laura died, life became precious to her, but in such an abstract way that it seemed almost to devalue her own. People were important; Jenny wasn’t. And then Ada came along, and there was someone who meant more to her even than Laura did. Someone worth living for.
Mark always got that, she said once. And then she frowned. Because he can’t have got it, not properly, or he wouldn’t have done what he did. He wouldn’t have forced her to remember him every year on this date.
You get it, though, don’t you? She asked that over and over.
The sole remaining Vogel boy, all that remains of Laura. He must live. He must thrive.
And he must join her in these precious moments of silence.
So Russell does, kneeling beside her on the little mat she was given by a friend at the outreach centre, the one with the beautiful and intricate patterning, and he holds her hand, and while Jenny looks up at the night sky through the obsessively clean glass patio door, Russell closes his eyes and tries to think thoughts worthy of such a moment.
Laura Vogel; his mum.
Mark Vogel; his big brother.
They mourn them together, the two who lived remembering the two who weren’t so lucky. And Russell is absolutely the fuck not bitter about it.
All his life, Russell’s been the second priority. To everyone, it’s always seemed. He was the younger son, less important than Mark, or at least taking up less of everyone’s time, because while Russell kept his head down and just got on with it, everything Mark did was huge and dramatic. Mum was always so worried about him, paid him so much attention. Left little for Russell.
And then Mum died, and Russell was somehow second to a memory in his brother’s priorities. The same went for Dad, too, though where Mark wallowed in Mum’s absence, Dad tried to act as if it hadn’t happened, as if her memory was something to be assiduously and constantly cleaned away, like a recurring mould stain. Neither preoccupation left room for Russell, who had to get through the death of his mum mostly alone.
At least he’d had Stef. Though, again, kind of not. Would he and Stef have even been friends if it weren’t for Mark? He was always well aware that Stef got excited when Mark came home, more than he ever did for Russell. Which, fucking unfair. Stef didn’t even cheat off of Russell’s science homework! He got Mark to help him with it instead! Even before Russell had understood exactly why he’d felt so drawn to Stef, that had hurt.
Finally, Mark’s big disappearing act. Wedging himself permanently into the hearts of everyone who knew him. Carving out a wound that would never fully heal. The narcissism of suicide. Fucking prick. If Russell could go back to that day, he’d show him pictures of all the people he hurt, of Jenny, of Stef. He’d show him the hole he was about to leave in their lives. Christ, this time of year he always wants to take the memory of his older brother by the lapels and shake him until he gets it, until he understands that you move through the world together, as a family, as friends, and that if you pull away, if you destroy yourself, you don’t just leave pain in your wake, you leave a familial unit struggling to replace you, struggling to find a way to continue.
Russell’s family, reduced as it was to just him and Dad, didn’t. And so Russell put his head down — again — and worked hard and moved out at the first opportunity. Got himself a job. Paid his own way.
You can’t rely on people. Stef pulled away after Mark’s disappearance the same way Mark did after Mum’s death. It was like Stef’s whole life became about Russell’s stupid dead stupid brother. Nothing left for Russell.
Jenny’s the only one left in Russell’s life from before. Jenny and Ada, now all grown up and barely needing babysitting at all, though Russell’s still happy to give Jenny the odd night for free here and there. Sometimes she doesn’t even go out, just has him over for the company, and it’s nice. They’ve grown close. She was the first person he told that he was even thinking about his sexuality, and when he finally worked himself out, she was again the first to know. She was delighted. You’re just like your mother, she said, and kissed him on his forehead.
You’re just like your mother, and don’t ever tell your father.
Ada never knew Mark. It’s one of the many things Russell likes about her. She was too young when Mark sat for her, and when Mark withdrew and then ultimately disappeared, Ada still needed sitting, Jenny still needed help, and Russell needed money and something to distract him.
Ada never knew Mark. It’s why she’ll never see this: Russell and Jenny kneeling together in silence, remembering someone who died before Ada was born, and someone who killed himself before she could form sentences.
Shit. He’s unworthy of this. He loved Mark, he really did. And he feels his absence every day. But, Christ, he was a fucking wrecking ball. Is there anyone he didn’t hurt? Even Shahida, that girl he used to date — or whatever that was — and her friends! He hasn’t seen Shahida in years, but he runs into Amy every so often. Nice girl. Bit posh.
And then Jenny breathes out, turns to him, smiles, and bumps against him, and that means it’s been two minutes, and he can consign his complicated, beloved, difficult brother back to memory where he belongs.
“Come on,” Jenny says. “Ada’ll be back from school soon. You staying? I’m making garlic chicken.”
She always asks. She doesn’t like to impose or assume. And it’s nice of her, because Russell doesn’t like to feel unwelcome.
“Yeah,” he says, pushing up off his knees, “I’m staying.”
“Good. You can help chop things.”
2020 January 13
Monday
Good news and bad news.
The good news: Elle’s police liaison has informed her that only two surviving breast implants have been recovered from the gravesite at Stenordale, and she estimates that no more are likely to be found, at least not at the primary site. God only knows what old Smyth-Farrow did with them, whether he recovered them from the soil or — and Elle cleaves to this option, simply because it is more grisly and thus more in keeping with what she understands about the perverted little fuck — carved them from the bodies postmortem, but however they were obtained, they’re gone.
It would be nice to imagine that questing tree roots unearthed them and gently bore them to the surface, but women of the kind that Smyth-Farrow preferred don’t get that kind of luck. No, there was a violation involved; of that, Elle is certain.
Still, only two breast implants among nineteen fragmented and heavily decomposed bodies. Not only does it further confuse the issue regarding the sex of the dead, it will very probably point the police in the wrong direction. In Elle’s experience, the average cis mind does not assume transfemininity when any other option is available; they will be searching the records for missing cis women. Tragically, there is an abundant supply.
So. That’s the good news.
The bad news: it is possible that serial numbers might be recoverable from the implants. Elle’s liaison is not yet in place to check, though she plans to try, but if the implants can be identified, then that’s a problem. Oh, she doesn’t expect them to be traceable to Dorley Hall’s old surgeons, not unless Dorothy Marsden surrounded herself with complete idiots — and she did not — but an identifiable serial number provides a timeframe and at least part of a supply chain. Elle thinks of Dorley Hall, as it is now, existing at the end of a very long and heavily knotted rope, where each knot represents a bundle of evidence, and every knot that is found, examined and untied leads the police closer to the hall, closer to Beatrice; closer to Elle herself. Just because the rope is long and the knots many, doesn’t mean there isn’t enough evidence, buried across the country, eventually to reach the top.
Old men, Elle muses. Old men and their appetites, with social-climbing gender traitors like Dorothy and her girls only too happy to sacrifice others to feed them, to keep their own bodies to themselves. She could kill a hundred of them, kill a thousand, kill a thousand bloody thousand, and it wouldn’t be enough.
All this from just one of the macabre memorials to their victims. How many other bodies are there? Elle has a fair idea, and it’s a number she doesn’t like to contemplate, especially because she knows how many of them she is personally responsible for: three times, when she got too close, her targets had their victims quietly murdered, and though she learned quickly to stay her hand, to strike only when the advantage was utterly and undeniably hers, those three bodies are her responsibility and hers alone.
Shit.
Shit bloody shit.
The day a British aristocrat does something virtuous with their money will be the day the Earth is swallowed by the sun, but could Smyth-Farrow and his odious little club not have taken up even a mildly less repulsive hobby?
Elladine needs to do something. She can feel the energy boiling under her skin, and every moment, every hour, every day she waits at this facility, hiding behind her personal military, makes her want to scream, want to stab the code into the safe under desk and bloody well arm up, want to walk out of here with every weapon she can get her hands on and fucking gut something. Her hands are shaking, her teeth are jammed so violently together that her breath comes out as a hiss, and before she knows what she’s doing she’s ripped her office phone out of its desk mount, torn the cord from its base, and thrown it overarm at the wall.
It leaves, as she hoped it would, a bloody great dent. She always was picked first for rounders.
As she stands there, her chest heaving, her mind clearing, as the plastic base of the phone that stuck momentarily into the wall is dislodged by its own weight and crashes to the ground, Elladine Lambert feels something close to complete, something close to righteous, something close to necessary for the first time in a long while.
In the doorway, the girl waiting for her attention — who jumped a mile high when Elle threw the phone — whimpers a little.
“Yes?” Elle demands.
“Um, Ms Lambert?” The girl’s voice is quavering, like she’s afraid of her or something, which is ridiculous: Elle might on occasion do violence to office equipment and to the very specific targets of her ire, but inside the walls of Peckinville, the only staff she has ever exercised her temper on have been the bloody washouts from Beatrice’s sainted little institution, and even with them, it’s been mostly part of the act. And this girl, unless Elle is very much mistaken, has not washed out of anywhere. Why she’s fawning — bloody well biting her lip, crossing her ankles, gripping her hands tight — is therefore a damned mystery.
If there’s one thing Elle has little patience for, it’s unnecessary obsequience.
“What is it?”
“There’s a visitor at reception. A lawyer.” Elle twirls a finger in the air: get on with it. “Right,” the girl says. “Um, she’s a lawyer for Ms Smyth-Farrow. Ms Smyth-Farrow’s lawyer. Or so she says.”
Wait. The Smyth-Farrow whelps have sent someone over? Interesting! “Send her up,” Elle says, and then barks out, “Wait. Pick that up—” she points at the wreckage by the wall, “—and get rid of it. Then send her up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
At least the bloody girl doesn’t comment on the smashed phone, merely picking it up and cradling it in her arms. Elle watches her trot back out into the hall, heels clattering staccato on the hard floors. A transfer, presumably; she can’t see why anyone else would be so nervous. Jackie or Jan or someone will have vetted her, so she’s got to be competent and trustworthy. Rather offputting to have her be so damned skittish.
So. Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s sticking her oar in, is she? Is this lawyer a trusted confidante or merely someone on staff who happened to be local? Either way, Elle can expect her to report back as soon as she is out of surveillance range. Which, obviously; Elle’s people have the same standing instructions.
Faced with an underling from a rival, and a dangerous one at that, a lesser woman might straighten her clothing, check her hair and makeup, and so on, but Elle can’t be bothered with all that fuss. The woman coming up here will bloody well know who Elle is: she’s the kind of aristocrat who didn’t let her vicious, bloodthirsty parents survive for long enough to waste the family money on pleasure, and she certainly didn’t allow the prior holders of the family name to write her out of their wills. She is someone who has been winning the game that Crispin Smyth-Farrow ultimately lost for two decades now, and no Jane-come-lately like Henrietta Smyth-Farrow — or, heaven forfend, her idiot brother — can touch her.
There’s always the possibility, though, that the lawyer doesn’t know who she is, doesn’t understand the vipers’ nest into which she’s been thrown, and Elle might almost prefer that; it is ever so much fun grabbing some unsuspecting underling by their wrinkly parts and shaking them up and down.
Either way, that Elle Lambert currently looks, charitably, like someone who was dragged backwards through several thorny hedges is of no concern. It’s the Smyth-Farrows, for pity’s sake! For all their new Evangelical money and their attempts to throw their weight around via association with Dorothy Marsden, they are still small fish. And Elle isn’t even a bloody shark; she’s on the shore with a barbed spear, and sooner or later, one or both of Crispin Smyth-Farrow’s children will wind up stuck with her weapon, to be hauled to the shore, exposed, wounded, and suffocating on air.
The woman, when she appears, wears the uniform of the moneyed and married middle class: a trouser suit, likely off the rack and subsequently altered to fit; low heels, because to the circles she moves in, high heels are too feminine and flats mean that you are not a serious woman; light makeup; swept-back, sensible hair. She probably looks the bomb when she bestrides the offices of the law firm she is presumably partnered in.
A tad pathetic, really.
Still, Elle stands and crosses the floor to shake her hand, because she is nothing if not polite. And because she rather wants to give this professional ladder-climber a view of how a woman can dress when she actually matters: old jeans, a chunky sweater, and a pair of walking boots that belonged to her mother. What was Henrietta wearing the last time Elle encountered her? A dreadful block-coloured dress, if memory serves. And blonde-dyed hair sculpted into an unflattering church porch over her spotted forehead. As if she had decided that the way to butter up the Americans was to play dress-up in the wardrobe department of Fox News. Christ, woman; have some dignity.
“Elle Lambert,” she says, focusing intently on Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s envoy and twisting a corner of her mouth into something approximating a smile.
“Rosa Carr,” the woman says, revealing an American accent. Ah, so she’s completely out of her depth, then. But probably quite close to Henrietta. Elle gestures at the chairs arrayed on the visitor side of her desk, and returns to hers. Ms Carr, however, declines to sit. “I’ll be brief. This is a courtesy visit. Silver River Services will brook no further interference with the police investigation into the bodies at Stenordale Manor.”
“‘No further interference’?”
“Yes. The police must be allowed to conduct their investigation unobstructed.”
Elle sits on the edge of her desk, affecting nonchalance. And the truth is, she really doesn’t care about this conversation. “Is old Henny going to let the constabulary into her knicker drawers, too?”
“Ms Smyth-Farrow has not been a part of this decision chain,” says Ms Carr.
“I’m sure.” Dreadful liar, this Carr woman. “So what does make Henrietta Smyth-Farrow think we have any interest in the bodies her father buried under the rose bushes?”
“We are aware of the extent of your operations within this country.” Rosa Carr says, emphasising the final two words with a rehearsed sneer, as if to imply that Peckinville, with its British, European and North African interests, is somehow the more parochial outfit, and further suggesting that Silver River’s marginal presence in the United States represents a serious international concern and not, for example, a convenient hole into which various moneyed psychopaths can shovel their swindled money, secreting it and their noxious private interests in the shallow grave of a laxly monitored security company.
“Are you, indeed?” Elle says brightly, broadening her smile.
“You have also taken possession of some of Ms Smyth-Farrow’s personal property.”
This pulls a small frown out of Elle, one she’s irritated she’s slightly too tired properly to suppress. She needs a proper fucking, is what she needs; a fuck and a nightcap and a good night’s sleep. And, sadly, she suspects that even if Beatrice were still amenable after the return of Valérie Barbier to her breast, she would not be receptive to a call, for example, this evening.
She’ll have to make other arrangements. One of her second choices is most likely available, fortunately.
“Spill it,” she snaps, bored of this ridiculous meeting. “What do we have that is so precious?”
“You are aware,” the Carr woman says.
“I’m quite certain I am not.”
Rosa Carr rolls her eyes. “This resource is of a… personal nature.”
She pushed on the ‘person’ in ‘personal’. So. Trevor Darling. Well, he’s Elladine’s now, and he will be getting the best possible care. Ordinarily, Elle would try to persuade a failed feminisation of the merits of womanhood, but Trevor? She would quite like it if Trevor became the most masculine man there ever has been, just to spite Henrietta Smyth-Bloody-Farrow. Perhaps he might be interested in becoming a mixed-martial-arts competitor? Or a professional wrestler?
“I’m terribly sorry,” she says, smiling once more, “but do not know to whom you are referring.” She says it that way, ‘accidentally’ slipping in a ‘whom’ rather than a ‘what’, because this American lawyer seems a tad dim, and would benefit from having the obvious shoved in her sculpted face. “In the interests of… international cooperation, though, might we offer old Henny a gift basket? There’s a shop in the village that does them. Local cheeses. Quite wonderful. The muffins, I’m afraid, are merely adequate.”
The lawyer stares at her for a moment, and then says, without alteration to her facial expression, “The message has been delivered. Further communication will take place over official channels. Thank you for your time, Ms Lambert.”
“Pleasure,” Elle says, immediately turning away from her, dismissing her, so that Rosa Carr, if she would like the last word, will have to utter it to Elle’s disinterested back. She picks up her mobile from the desk and checks off a few notifications, busying herself until Rosa Carr is gone from her office, and then she drops her phone onto the desk — with rather more care than she showed her office line; mobiles are not expensive but it is rather cumbersome to transfer one’s credentials to a new device — and walks over to the false window, wishing that she could, at times like this, look out upon rolling fields, or a vast and vibrant city, resenting that she is stuck underneath and behind concrete, and will be for the duration of this crisis, if that is what this is.
Bloody Henrietta. That she is trying to throw her weight around would be charmingly naive, if she weren’t attempting to throw it in Elladine’s direction.
Shit, though. For all that Silver River is a bug compared to the hungry housecat that is Peckinville, bugs can be damned irritating, and sometimes small can also mean quick. She’ll task more operatives, she’ll get more eyes on the investigation, and she’ll obsess over it all some more, no doubt. What’s most irritating is that there is no way to know whether the Smyth-Farrows want to keep her out because there is something more to be found on the premises, because there is something going on with the investigating police, or simply because they want to get their own spin on the situation without interruption or preemption.
Double shit. It could have all been so simple. If the fire hadn’t been set, if Peckinville had found their way in a day or two earlier, if Valérie and Trevor and even Diana and that odious little street creature Frankie had been safely and quietly delivered into Elle’s care, they could have resolved all of this without fuss or further incident. Dorothy Marsden would be dead, the Silver River soldiers would be promptly debriefed and returned, and Elle could have made a wonderfully satisfying show of handing Stenordale Manor and its environs back over to Henrietta Smyth-Farrow, picked clean of information and as bare and useless as the day it was constructed.
At least they got a handful of hard drives, though. Replaced them with data-scrambled and artfully burnt dummies, as per usual. Elle’s technical people are poring over them now, but as she has been informed repeatedly, encryption takes time to break. And sometimes does not yield at all.
Bloody Stenordale. Aggravating that it was off their radar for so long, that Dorothy Marsden was able to indulge herself for so long after her ousting from Dorley Hall — and at the expense of just one woman! Elle had found it difficult to look Valérie Barbier in the eye during their meeting, and in her presence, it was all Elladine could do to keep herself from picturing the horrors of her life, the decades of servitude, of sexual enslavement, of depravity unending.
She’d had to cross her legs to keep from squirming. The only thing that had tempered her arousal was, contradictorily, the presence of Valérie herself; the strength of the woman is beyond admirable, but the glimpses she offered Elle — unwillingly, no doubt — into her true depth of her feelings were enough to throw cold water onto the fires of a raging libido.
If it had been Elladine who had found her all those years ago… If it had been Elle who nursed her back to health, Elle who took her from that awful place, Elle who showed her the delights of the then-nascent twenty-first century… She shivers to think about it.
It is in moments like this that she wonders if there is anything that separates her from Dorothy Marsden beyond a vast gulf in upbringing and what would to an outside observer look like identical private proclivities. And then she must scold herself, because she would never do even to the guilty what Dorothy did to the innocent, and the abuses that she bankrolls, observes and — yes — exploits are not lifelong. Her charges, even those who fail Beatrice Quinn’s purity test, do not suffer as even Dorothy’s favourites once did.
And there is one key thing that sets them apart: their rage, and how they have curated it. Dorothy allowed her rage to be misdirected, transmuted, and even dissolved, choosing instead to work with the kinds of people who mistreated her for the promise of an easy, titillating life. Dorothy looked the horrors of the world in the face, allowed herself to be bargained with, and became an enthusiastic participant.
Elle, though, has never ceased to be angry. Sometimes she thinks she was born when she met Kelly, and born again when Kelly was murdered. Born again into a pure and mournful rage, a rage she refined into a weapon, turned first on Kelly’s killers and then on the greater organisation. She cannot truly arrest the tendency towards depravity among her peers, the so-called betters of Britain, but she can and will strike at it, bloody it, weaken it, raise its cost to the near-insurmountable.
On the side, Dorley Hall, a little engine of resistance against the same tendencies made manifest in the rest of them, in the vast swathe of vicious and thoughtless violence that is contemporary British masculinity. She would, if she could, burn all of it; she must be content merely with coring it from a handful of select beneficiaries per year, allowing them to transcend the brutality that raised them.
And she has a use for those who are beyond even that.
Everyone in their place. No-one ever wasted. Not if Elladine Lambert has anything to say about it.
Shit, though. The bodies. Proof that she and Beatrice did the right thing, that even absent loftier goals, their aim was true. But it’s hard to concentrate on that when the lost potential of those poor, murdered girls clamps itself around Elle’s chest. A reborn horror, a spirit of the old world, a remnant of the monsters buried too deep to return themselves.
They could have been beautiful, each of them. They could have been amazing.
Well. In their names — all of their names, chosen, claimed and rejected all — she will ensure that Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s desire to reacquire her lost toy will remain frustrated, that her attempt to rekindle her father’s obsession on a new continent will fail, and that Henrietta herself will fucking choke.
Put her in the ground and spit into the hole.
Leaning back in her chair, Elle crosses her hands behind her head and stares upwards. The ceiling, like the rest of her office, has been dressed to not appear to be plain concrete — they’ve tiled it like any other office, and covered the floor with wood panelling; there are even fake windows, with screens behind glass showing the view from the HD cameras positioned roughly where the windows would be, if the elevator to her office — which rather cleverly masks its precise movement by reversing the indicator lights and moving slowly enough that few people notice — took you up as it claims, instead of down. And that’s rather depressing, isn’t it? Hmm. Trapped under concrete and resenting it; rather like Beatrice’s boys. Poor things; at least she can leave whenever she wishes.
Elle’s ping-ponging from identifying too hard with Dorothy Marsden to empathising with Bea’s wayward boys. It’s been a long, long day, clearly. And should she even think of them as boys any more? Young, precocious Stephanie obviously excepted — and Diana excluded — it’s possible that some of them might have made the switch, made the only possible sensible decision. She ought to check in, see how things are going. Beatrice ought to have candids to show her.
She wishes she could just bloody well go home. But she can’t, can she? The family pit is too large and crumbly properly to secure — similar to Stenordale, actually — and her apartments in London, Cairo and Hong Kong are known. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t consider that so important, but with the Smyth-Farrow embryos trying to establish themselves, she’d prefer to leave the risk-taking to the people she pays for just that. Unfortunately, that leaves her various Peckinville facilities, and the bolthole suites she has in each one are little more than adequate.
Home. A concept she long ago abandoned, anyway. Attempting to clean the blood off the family name does rather leave one exposed and alone, and while her more distant — and surviving — relatives are cordial, that is all they are. They are not family. In a way, Beatrice is her family. Maria Lam and Edith and the others. And, with the sole and likely waning exception of Beatrice, they merely tolerate her.
Bloody hell. Bloody buggering fucking hell. She’s getting all too introspective. She should return to her suite, pour herself something strong and colourful, and deaden herself to the world for a while.
First, though, there is an itch she must scratch. Picking up her mobile, she taps through to the entry for Gerry Fields — though she finds it, as usual, through the name that comes first in her contacts list: Bianca.
She calls his work line first. It’s after six, but it’s just possible that—
“Hello?” says a voice, deep and full, and yes, that’s ‘Gerry’. She owes him a bonus for staying so late at the office.
“Gerry!” she exclaims, too loud and too enthusiastic, but she can’t help it: it’s too good to hear his voice. She had him placed in Peckinville Insurance, perhaps the least exciting company in the Peckinville group, after Bianca looked up at her with tears in her eyes and pleaded for nothing more than a normal life. “Elladine Lambert here. Just checking in.”
“Ah! Ms Lambert. Good afternoon.”
“Good evening, more like,” Elle replies, aware that she’s coming on hard with the cheer. But then, she does have some unpleasant news to impart; perhaps a positive attitude will limit its impact. “And do call me Elladine. Or Elle. Call me Elle.”
“O…kay, Elle.”
“How have you been?” She’s leaning on one elbow now, and smiling like an idiot.
“Can’t complain. The girls are doing well.”
“Good,” Elle says. “Good.” The girls, Gerry’s adopted daughters, are of secondary school age now. And they know only who their father is, not who he was briefly and forcibly made into by Dorothy Marsden.
Their father’s on a pub quiz team. It’s all terribly mundane, but he seems to enjoy it, and for a brief, horrible moment, Elle is jealous.
“Gerry,” she continues, “I have some news, I’m afraid. Nothing that will directly affect you or your family, but something for which you should prepare yourself.”
“I’m ready,” Gerry says, sounding more like she remembers him after they finished putting him back together: determined and proud. A good man.
She gives him the overview: bodies at Stenordale, Ms Marsden’s involvement, and so forth. No grisly details, but enough information that when and if it makes its way out to the mainstream media — which seems rather an inevitability, given the number of bodies and the potential for scandal — he won’t be unduly surprised by it. He takes it all in soberly, and with only a few moments where he clearly had to cover the receiver in order to conceal his reaction.
Bianca was never destined for Stenordale. But there’s no reason to believe that the old bastard to whom she was supposed to be shipped would have treated her any better than Crispin Smyth-Farrow, and then Gerry wouldn’t be here today, to attend his pub quizzes and pick up his girls from football.
“Thank you, Ms Lambert,” he says when she’s done, his composure shot.
“We’ll get them, Gerry,” she says. “I promise.”
“That is… good to know.”
“If you would like someone to drive you home…”
“No,” Gerry says. “No, I’ll be fine. Catherine and I are meeting friends tonight. She’s picking me up in about twenty minutes. Enough time to… Well.”
Though he can’t see her, Elle nods anyway. Yes. Enough time for him to wash his face and pretend that everything is fine. Catherine, his wife, knows only what she needs to know, and what she needs to know is not much.
“Be safe, Gerry,” Elle says. And then, on impulse, she adds, “Your bonus this year just tripled.”
“Thank you, Ms Lambert.”
“Elle, please.”
“Thank you, Elle.”
“Any time, day or night,” she says, her finger ready to hang up the call. “If you need anything…”
“I will contact you.”
“Good evening, Gerry. Have a pleasant evening.”
And then Elle carefully lays her mobile phone back on the desk, looks up at her fake little ceiling again, and stops holding it all in. The security staff, if they know what’s bloody good for them, will erase the footage of her crying.
2020 January 14
Tuesday
“Are you sitting down? Thought you just went for a slash.”
Well, shit, that’s an unwelcome question at three in the morning. At least there are a hundred answers, most of which stand a decent chance of maintaining the unsteady and unpredictable rapport Raph and the others have developed with Ollie tonight. The guy asked about the girl rules, for fuck’s sake! Maybe when he cut his wrists open, he severed some kind of idiot bullshit line, some bile duct that directed the stuff he should have kept stored in his lower intestine right up and out through his mouth.
Raph could say he was too tired to stand to piss, and that’s true. He could say the way his dick’s been feeling subtly different lately has been freaking him out, so he doesn’t want to have to touch it just to have a slash, and that’s also true.
But he’s getting the feeling that part of the point of the basement is to cut through the lies, to find them wherever they are — mostly inside all their heads — and expose them, ridicule them, end them. Fucking knock them all down like a rotten building, all decaying bricks and shit.
He likes that imagery.
“Yeah, I’m sitting down,” he says through the cubicle door. “So what? And why are you looking, anyway?”
He can just about see one of Ollie’s feet, and that’s all; a relief, because he really didn’t want to look down and see Ollie’s face staring up at him from under the door.
“What are you doing?” Ollie asks. “Trying out how girls piss?” He doesn’t sound belligerent, as Raph might have expected; he’s just confused. Understandable: Harmony and Frankie seem to have teamed up in order to shove as many revolutionary ideas as they can through Ollie’s ears and into his head, and they’re probably running up against the problem that the brain inside is only slightly larger than the ear canal, and absorbs new concepts slowly, with occasional violence.
Raph, very suddenly, wants to go back the fuck to sleep. He was having such a nice night on the mattresses in the common room. He wasn’t lonely for once. Unfortunately, he seems to have woken up his least favourite person in the building when he got up to pee.
“What is there to try out?” he says slowly, so Ollie has more time to digest each single-syllable word. “It’s like shitting, in that you still sit down, but it’s subtly different: you don’t shit. You just do the other thing.”
From out in the bathroom, there’s an exasperated pause, and then Ollie says, “Fuck off, Raph.”
Raph laughs to himself and starts cleaning up, thoughtfully rolling the end of his penis between two fingers as he wipes it. And, yeah, it does feel different — softer, maybe — but right now, with Ollie out there, Raph doesn’t feel so weird about it any more. Because Ollie, when and if he notices the same thing, is going to hate it so fucking much, and that makes Raph kinda like it.
By the time he’s out and washing his hands, Ollie’s in another cubicle. Standing, judging by the sound of the piss stream. Raph declines to comment. He’s almost out of the door before Ollie reappears, and Raph realises that he has a task of utmost importance to accomplish.
“Jesus, Ollie,” he says, pointing at the sinks. “Wash your fucking hands.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ollie mutters, changing course. “It’s not like I touched anything.”
“Tell me you always wash your hands.”
“…Yeah.”
“Shit,” Raph says, leaning against the locked storage cabinet by the door. “Shit. You’ve been getting your greasy dick juice all over everything for months, haven’t you?”
“Fuck off, Raph. I wash my hands. It’s just…”
Frowning, Raph pushes off from the wall and walks back across the bathroom to Ollie, who is now just standing there, his (unwashed) hands on the sink emplacement. He’s leaning his whole weight on them, and even Raph, who is versed in Ollie’s body language mostly as it pertains to his belligerence, can tell that the weight of the world is suddenly weighing down those chunky — but thinning — shoulders.
Raph doesn’t say anything. Just waits by the sinks. If Ollie’s got anything to say beyond more swearing, it’ll come.
“Frankie,” Ollie says after a while.
“You’re worried about her?” Raph asks. Not exactly news that he likes her; she saved his life, probably, from what Jane says, and the guy visibly perks up when she’s so much as mentioned. A contrast to the grimace that usually crosses Maria’s face at the same time.
“Yeah. No.” With a flourish, Ollie shoves himself away from the sinks and starts walking away from him, towards the far wall. He’s not exactly moving quickly — he’s tired; everyone’s fucking tired! — but it still takes him until he’s passing the door to the shower annexe before he says anything else. “She worked there. At that place.”
“Stenordale?” Raph knows as much as anyone about it now, and he didn’t even have to read it off his sponsor’s phone like Steph. Jane’s just sharing shit now, like they’re friends. “Yeah,” he says. “She was there. And here, too. Before the current lot.”
Ollie’s hit the end and turned around by now, so Raph gets to see his eyebrows briefly move, like some of that is new information to him. But he doesn’t comment. Just says, “Yeah.”
Ollie’s halfway back over to him, and if Raph doesn’t say anything, there’s every chance Ollie will continue right past him and back out into the common room, and the window of opportunity to get something coherent out of him will have been missed. So Raph guesses: “You’re afraid of her, then?”
Raph would be. He thinks he kind of is, actually. She worked here. Here. In the butcher days. Jane said it was ten percent revenge cases or other power play shit, and ninety percent the grim fetishisation of… of something or other. Shit. Raph might listen more than he used to, but sometimes Jane makes him feel like he needs a gender studies degree to participate in the conversation beyond just nodding and going, ‘Yuh-huh.’
“Not afraid,” Ollie says, coming to a stop. “Not scared.”
Something in that pisses Raph the fuck off. “Oh, right, I forgot: Oliver Bradley doesn’t get scared. Why are your wrists still bandaged, Ollie?”
Sneering, Ollie says, “Wasn’t scared. Won’t do it again, though.”
“Oh? How come?”
“Promised Harm. Promised Frankie.”
Of the two of them, Raph gets the feeling that the promise to Frankie is the more important to Ollie, the more vital. He’s getting along with Harmony now, though of all of them, he’s by far the least close with his sponsor, but he’s got something weird going on with that old woman.
Raph gives up. “What’s on your mind, then?”
Ollie’s really close now. And he’s still kind of a scary guy. When it was the three of them, whether it was Ollie, Raph and Declan or Ollie, Raph and Will, Ollie was always the middle guy, the one who was bigger than Raph but not exactly the active threat, the one Raph was careful to laugh along with. But now it’s just the two of them, the followers, and while Raph’s picked a new direction, Ollie’s just kind of fucking wandering, and that makes him dangerous. A man who cuts into himself — out of something other than fear, supposedly — and who throws himself against a concrete wall just to get a rise out of his enemy — which is what he claimed — needs direction or he can be dangerous in his unpredictability.
And, huh: both of them and Declan; both of them and Will. Funny how the biggest ones, each time, are further along than him. Will’s Leigh now, and probably a hair’s breadth from asking them to switch pronouns the way Steph and Bethany did, and Declan’s… hot.
Raph puts thought of Diana aside for tomorrow night, when he’ll be alone in his room again and can feasibly get a hand under the duvet without anyone asking sarky questions about what he plans to do with it, and pays attention to Ollie.
“Worried about her,” Ollie says. “About Frankie.”
“Worried about—?”
“She was there, right? They’re going to want to question her. And if they question her, they could arrest her. And if they arrest her… She could go away for life. She could die in jail.” Ollie’s way too close, and way too intense. But Raph doesn’t push him away; this constitutes maybe the longest thing he’s ever heard Ollie say all at once. “She’s got this laugh. Like my gran.” Ollie smiles suddenly. It’s unsettling. “Fucking dirty laugh, wasn’t it? Proper dirty laugh. Dad always said you couldn’t take her to panto. She’d throw things. Get thrown out. Gran was… good to me. Better’n Mum and Dad.” The smile vanishes, and Ollie turns away, starts pacing again. “Didn’t get it before. Couldn’t… Couldn’t see. But Mum was a cunt and Dad was a bastard. Hope I never see them again. Hope they die.”
Raph blinks, astonished. Back in October, Ollie used to talk about his dad. Not often, but enough that Raph got the impression he idolised him. So where’s this coming from?
“Gran was strong,” Ollie says, stopping quite a distance away by the last toilet cubicle on the row. Far enough that Raph has to strain to hear him. “And she used to protect me. And then she couldn’t.” He’s got his arms folded around himself now. “She went in the home and then it was just me and Mum and Dad. And Frankie… She’s strong. But if they take her, it won’t last.”
“You think you’ll never see her again,” Raph says quietly.
“Like with Gran. One day she was walking around. Talking shit. One day she was my Gran. Suddenly she was sleeping all the time. Forgot who I was sometimes. Went off to a home.”
“Yeah, and how old is Frankie?” Raph asks.
“Sixty-three.”
Raph shrugs. “My gran’s older than that, and she’s still out there fucking shit up. And Frankie seems pretty healthy, Ollie.”
Ollie won’t be persuaded. “So did Gran.”
“Look,” Raph says, risking a step closer, “you’re still a teenager, and—”
“I’m twenty-four,” Ollie says, sullen.
Huh. He doesn’t act like it. “You’re young,” Raph corrects himself, “and the first time you lose someone, it hits hard. Hard enough you don’t get over it for years. But you gotta learn to just enjoy people, Ollie.” Raph doesn’t grimace as he says this, doesn’t call attention to the fact that this is a lesson he fully assimilated only, like, last week. Can’t control everything; can’t control everyone. “Let them be, love them for it, and make the most of the time you’ve got.”
“Queer.”
At this, Raph does not laugh. Nor does he get mad. Nor does he choose to view his equanimous reaction as a measure of how much he’s grown since, yeah, also like a week ago. “Probably. Who really cares, though?”
“Dunno. Think I get it, though.”
“Good. You’re going to lose people. It’s natural. So be a good boy and become a girl like Harmony wants you to, and you can spend all the time with Frankie you want, and anyone else who takes your fancy.”
“Fuck off, Raph.”
“Aw,” Raph says, and extends his arms out. “Bring it in.”
“Fuck off,” Ollie says, having decided that the moment they were enjoying between them is absolutely a hundred percent over. He strides past Raph, ignoring his outstretched arms.
“You’re going to have to learn to hug eventually,” Raph says to Ollie’s retreating back.
“Fuck all the way off.”
2020 January 15
Wednesday
Paige links up with Christine as she passes the Student Union Bar, pressing her hand into Christine’s with the kind of finality Christine mostly associates with Indira taking her meekly along to her laser hair removal sessions, way back when. And that’s unexpected, because Paige has a tutorial starting soon, and shouldn’t be on her way back to Dorley at all, but—
“Before you say it,” Paige whispers, “I’m coming with. And that’s final.”
Oh, right. The afternoon shift thing. “No argument here,” Christine replies.
She’d lose, anyway.
The last couple of days at the hall have been tense. Beatrice, Valérie and Frankie returned from Peckinville sans Trevor Darling, and Aunt Bea gave strict instructions that not one resident in the basement be allowed to know where he is or what he’s doing, or they’ll all want to be men again. And when Tabitha opened her mouth to suggest that Beatrice might actually be wrong about that, she got yelled at.
It’s been a theme lately. People questioning Bea; Bea yelling at them. No-one wants to go up to see her any more; it’s been up to Maria and Edy to run interference. Which hasn’t exactly improved their tempers.
Shit. When the new year first began, things really seemed like they were looking up. And now their collective past is literally haunting them, and guys are having their breasts taken out and, shit, maybe Christine should just ask to graduate. Maybe she should graduate herself; the way things are right now, she could probably get away with it.
They don’t dawdle in the kitchen like they might usually; instead they go straight down to the security room. They’re almost the last there, so they quickly drop into a pair of vacant seats at the central tables, with Paige drawing only a couple of raised eyebrows before the pre-meeting chatter resumes. A few moments later, Edy pours them a cup of coffee each, correctly intuiting that if they’re going to be in the basement from 4pm to midnight, they’re going to fucking need it.
Christine immediately takes a long draught from her mug. Finishes half of it before it even occurs to her to check it for incriminating (and bad) jokes. Unfortunately for her, Edy hasn’t been picking the mugs out of the plain cupboard. Christine’s says, in bold, black capital letters, GENERIC FORCED FEMINISATION JOKE MUG, which, okay, whatever. She turns it around just to check; on the back it says FUNNY BALLS REFERENCE.
And to think, she could have come home from her lecture and gone straight to bed and missed this.
Pamela comes rushing in at that point, all apologies and wet hair, the last to arrive. She plants herself next to Christine, shrugs at her, and gratefully accepts a mug from Edy that she groans at before shrugging and sucking down her coffee in ugly gulps. Christine leans around her to check; her mug says I had my testicles removed like any other girl: one at a time. Pamela meets Christine’s eyes and shakes her head in solidarity.
And then Maria’s tapping a teaspoon on the side of her mug — which says One Aunt to rule them all, one Aunt to find them, one Aunt to bring them all, and in the darkness, feminise them, and yeah, that’s Christine’s fill of ‘humour’ for the day; for the entire year, perhaps — to call for attention, and the briefing starts. It’s rough on them downstairs, she says, as the main screen shows an overhead view of the common room. If the sponsors are stressed, she says, then the girls and boys of the basement pick up on it, and that’s not fair. So leave your shit upstairs and put on a happy face.
“Not too happy, though,” Paige whispers to Christine. “I think that would creep them out.”
* * *
She’s been trying to not touch Steph too much. She’s been trying to rely on Maria less. She’s been trying to be her own person. And yeah, both Steph and Maria have been telling her that it’s still very early for someone in her position to be trying to develop that kind of independence regarding her identity, her personhood, and all that shit, but, fuck it, she was early to choosing new pronouns and a new name, too — as far as she knows, she’s got everyone but the actual trans girls beat — and she’s fucked if Diana is going to keep outstripping her in everything but chest size, and she’s double fucked if Leigh or Raph or, heaven for-fucking-fend, Martin catch up to her.
Has she stood in front of the mirror for what feels like hours every day this week, looking herself in the eyes, working out who Bethany is from first principles? Hell yes she has, and no, it’s not weird. Weird would be letting Maria and Steph continue to do so much of the heavy lifting regarding her personality formulation. Weird would be hesitating at this moment she finds herself in, stalling, going this far and no farther. Weird would be failing to become a woman, and remaining a basement-dwelling creature that subsists by parasitising more complete, enlightened and upstairs personalities.
She tried faking it til she made it; she didn’t make it. If it’s working for Mia, good for her. And it is working for her; Steph says Mia’s been pitching mug ideas, which means that as far as Dorley Hall is concerned, she’s perfectly assimilated and probably counts as a hundred percent ready for the real world, assuming the real world doesn’t mind drinking its tea out of mugs that say on the side, Noblesse Oblige: With Great Fortune Comes the Responsibility to Give Up Your Nob, which was apparently Mia’s latest suggestion.
No, Bethany can’t fake it. But she can find more people to admire, more women from whom to borrow aspects to incorporate into herself. And that’s why when Christine and Paige are among the sponsors who emerge from the corridor at shift change, Bethany sits up straight and smiles right at her.
Paige’s smile is more muted, but at least she comes over.
“Hi, Bethany,” she says.
Shuffling up on the couch, Bethany makes space for her, and Paige sits, throwing a smile at Christine, who’s made a beeline for Steph’s table on the other side of the room.
“Paige!” Bethany says as she finishes rearranging herself, tucking her legs under. “Been a while.” She points towards the ceiling. “How’s life on the outside?”
“Tense,” Paige says, copying Bethany’s pose but looking far better as she does it. She’s not exactly dressed glam; Bethany gets the impression that she’s come straight from lectures, so the jeans and top combo is practical but still, on Paige, hot as hell. “Thankfully, I’m not a sponsor.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Bethany hums, nodding. Shit, she’s being too enthusiastic and coming off strange. “Um,” she continues, fiddling with the material of her jogging trousers, “shit.”
“‘Shit’?” Paige echoes, tilting her head slightly in a manner that Bethany will absolutely be practising tonight in the mirror.
Radical honesty, that’s her best bet. “I don’t know what to say. I think I’m bad at talking to people.”
“I thought you were a chatterbox,” Paige says with a smile. “Though you were quite quiet at the Christmas party.”
“That’s just it! I’m trying to be appropriate and not fall back on, you know, what I always fall back on, but being appropriate is a lot of work. I keep turning to my brain and asking like, hey, give me five potential topics to talk about, but my brain is like, dude, it’s taking everything I’ve got to stop you from just bringing up your— Um. Yeah.”
Paige nods. “Your penis, yes.” She smiles again, this time with the very tip of her tongue poking out between her teeth just for a moment, and, shit, that’s another one for the personality bank. It’s adorable, and does funny things to the thing Bethany’s trying not to allude to.
“Um—”
“I used to have one,” Paige says conversationally. “And I, too, remember it as being quite difficult to not talk about. It was always there. Made it quite difficult to wear certain skirts and trousers while retaining my status as a cis girl.”
“Um…”
“I can show you how to tuck with tape, if you’d like. It presents a flatter profile.”
Bethany tries something: the little head tilt Paige did. “Are you teasing me?” she asks.
Covering her mouth, Paige laughs. “I am,” she says after a moment.
“That’s rude, you know.”
“I’m not a sponsor. I’m allowed to be mean.”
“Um—”
“So, how are you doing, Bethany?” Paige says, leaning away, settling back into the couch cushion.
“No fucking clue,” Bethany replies. Honesty again; it seems to be working so far. The key is to remember that, bar Steph and maybe Leigh and probably Melissa and definitely Maria, every tall, beautiful girl who comes up to Bethany has been where she is right now. Has sat in this same couch, been plagued by the same doubts, has had to construct herself a new personality from scratch, just like Bethany. Many of them have probably also sat in their rooms and watched the same ten or twenty seconds of the episode of Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues with the locker room cheerleader slapfight until every part of their developing body that responds pleasurably to persistent rubbing has become too sore to touch, just like Bethany. “Can I ask you a question?” she says suddenly, racing ahead of her thoughts but not wanting to trip herself up by thinking too much, which has been, in the main, one of her biggest problems, alongside talking too much.
“Shoot.”
“How did you get into clothes?”
Paige blinks at her. “Good question,” she says after a moment’s consideration. “I decided I wanted to be.”
“You… decided?”
A shrug. “The women who get what they want tend to be pretty and to dress well. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. The reality is more complex. But by the time I realised that, I was good at makeup and becoming great, and I’d already got permission to set up an Instagram. And it was — is — fun. I enjoy looking nice for its own sake, and I love to bring out the inner beauty in other girls. That was how it started, though: I wanted to be the kind of girl who could be successful and popular.” She leans out from the cushion and whispers, “And I wanted to be the kind of girl Christine would like.”
Bethany can feel her eyes widening, and the thought that her emotions, her desires, are so readable makes her cheeks flush — which only makes it worse — but, again, she doesn’t want to care about that, and she feels stupid for even thinking about it: she likes Steph; so what? Paige likes Christine.
“Even back then?” she asks quietly.
“Even back then. I saw who she was becoming, and I fell in love. It took her a while to love me back — or to realise that she loved me back, anyway. I’m a good match for her, don’t you think?”
Bethany, who has on a few shameful occasions imagined the two of them together, wearing the dresses they wore at the Christmas party, whenever she couldn’t be bothered to load the right episode of Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues, nods.
“A very good match,” she says.
* * *
“It’s been fine, I suppose, and better since I haven’t technically been working, just going to lectures and tutorials and all that shit, but, God, Steph, it would be so nice if we could have just one calm month. Just one. When we’re out of the new intake period and the sponsors aren’t too stressed out because their subjects are all cooperating and all the rest of us have to do is study, eat, practise our makeup, and actualise. Like my second year! That was nice. Very calm. Half the time the first-year sponsors were practically fucking Zen, like they were walking on clouds, they couldn’t believe they had such a wonderful intake. Hah. Except for Nell, I guess. Butting heads with Faye from the start. Hmm. No. I’m being unfair. I bet it was a lot less serene than I thought it was.” Christine looks up from her coffee to frown at Steph. “But it seemed pretty fucking serene. Now, this year, the year I’m supposed to be graduating, we’ve got supposedly dead women showing up at our door, we’ve got one of the original torturers living upstairs, and we’ve got a police investigation that might at any moment barge into the kitchen and start asking awkward questions about the mugs. Shit, Steph; I just want to learn about Linguistics.”
She’s still holding Steph’s hand, there on the metal table, between Steph’s phone and the romance book she’s been reading — giving Bethany a little extra space, the way they agreed; not because Bethany wants to be apart from her but because she needs to learn to function without always deferring to someone else — so Steph squeezes it.
“Would they let you move out?” she suggests.
Christine laughs bitterly. “No. No, they— Shit. Maybe? I mean… I don’t know. I could do my job remotely, I suppose?” She sighs. “I’d miss my room. I’d miss Jodie and Julia and Yas. I’d miss the second years.” She looks at Steph again. “I’d miss you.”
“You would?”
“Sure.”
“Really?”
“Steph, are you doing the thing again?”
“The thing?”
“You know,” Christine says, “the thing where you assume that your value rests in what you can do for people, how you can look after them? The thing where you think you’ll only be worth loving as a woman when you pass better, when you’ve had FFS and more time on hormones? The thing where you assume that you, as you are now, are inherently flawed?”
Swallowing, Steph removes her hand. Massages it as she frowns at Christine. “I don’t think so.”
“Sorry. They, uh, updated the psych profiles on all of you today. We went over them upstairs. Pippa refused to write yours, so Maria did it. Is it… not accurate?”
In the relative silence that follows, Steph wants to shout that, fuck no, it’s not accurate, that she knows her value, that it is intrinsic to her, that it has nothing to do with how she chose to stay here in the basement for Bethany’s sake and for Adam’s and the others’. But she can’t. Because, well.
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s accurate. Fuck.” She rests her chin on her hand, leans heavily on it. Glares. “I thought I was above all that, not like the rest of them,” she whines, only half joking. “Do I really have to work on myself, too?”
“Yeah. Afraid so.”
“Fucksake.”
“It happens to the best of us.”
* * *
Dinner’s got to be served in stages, which is a pain in the arse, but they have no choice: the dumbwaiter at the back of the lunch room was deliberately made too small for even someone Bethany- or Abby-sized to crawl up it to freedom, and the downside of that is that only two plates can fit side by side. Under normal circumstances, the sponsors use the ’waiter only for very hot and very spillable items, and bring the rest down from the kitchen themselves, but they are very much not under normal circumstances, and the big door in the dining hall won’t open again for another six hours, no matter what. It’s not even visible right now, hidden behind bookcases.
They’ve been under lockdown for only a handful of days, and already being closed off from the kitchen is becoming restrictive. Christine, in her head, starts sketching out plans for how one of the small store rooms attached to the fire exit could be retrofitted into a kitchen. Privately, she considers the whole lockdown they’re under to be total overkill, but Beatrice has been running this place since the early 2000s and has yet to get arrested; she must be doing something right.
Even if that something is, currently, mostly sulking and yelling at people.
Leigh, Martin, Tabitha and Pamela have eaten already, so now Steph and Bethany are led into the lunch room by Paige, while Christine waits by the dumbwaiter, waiting to find out what Indira’s going to have sent down to them.
It turns out to be vegetarian cottage pie. Christine remembers the second years cooking up a huge batch of the stuff earlier in the week, presumably for exactly this reason: with dinners split like this until lockdown ends, it’s easier to reheat four portions at a time than it is to continually run, say, a stew, and dole out bowls of it every half an hour until everyone’s been fed.
“Did you pick a movie yet?” Bethany asks.
Christine sets down two plates on one side of the table, and returns to the ’waiter for the next two. “There was an argument about whether The Matrix is too on the nose,” she says. “But Martin hasn’t seen it, so that’s probably going to sway opinion somewhat.”
Bethany leans back in her chair to give Christine room to put down her plate. “Martin? He… expressed a preference?”
Christine shrugs. “He wants to see The Matrix. So we might make a whole thing of it. Keep going with Matrix movies until we run out of movies, we run out of snacks, or the night shift relieves Paige and me. Whichever comes first.”
“Wow.” Bethany’s shaking her head. “This is a revelation. Martin cares about something. Shit. Now I’ve really got to sort my shit out.”
“I mean, we don’t have to watch The Matrix,” Christine says. “We could—”
“Oh, I don’t care what we watch,” Bethany says, waving a hand, and with the other, picking up a fork and starting on her cottage pie. “I just want an excuse to eat popcorn and have Paige braid my hair.”
Next to Christine, Steph lays down her fork. “Um,” she says. “What?”
“Paige is going to braid my hair.”
“She’s going to be very pretty,” Paige says.
“Is there enough to braid?” Christine says.
“Just about. If we weren’t on lockdown I’d fetch a wig.”
Bethany shrugs. “It wouldn’t be my hair. Less fun.”
“Maybe you should ask Maria for extensions.”
“Shit,” Bethany says. “Yeah. You know what? I might.”
“Beth,” Steph says, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“Yeah, but I’m sick of this.” She taps herself on the chest. “I’m choosing to work on myself again, and you know why? I want to be a better person. I want to keep up with you. I want to make Maria happy. But, you know, mainly… Remember when I put on that slutty skirt and danced around in front of Leigh and almost made her head explode? I promise you, Steph, that when I next put on a slutty skirt, it will be because I choose to, and it will be, like, ninety percent to fuck with Leigh. It’s my main route to actualisation.”
Christine mutters, “I’m going to add that to the sponsor handbook.”
“Sorry, Steph,” Bethany says, “but you’re not my main catalyst any more. Leigh’s the new goat, and I’m going to milk her for all she’s worth.”
“Sometimes, Beth, I think you should end everything you say like one sentence earlier.”
“Just one?”
2020 January 16
Thursday
Today’s the day that Monica officially told the hall that she won’t be coming home until lockdown is over, until the investigation is wrapped up — or at least confirmed to be pointing very far away from Dorley. Until Diana is safe. She sent the email at eight this morning from her phone, and by three minutes past she was dealing with Indira, deputised by Maria to yell at her.
“Just pretend I’m super mad at you,” Indira said, and then made obnoxiously audible slurping sounds, presumably so Monica would know for certain that Indira is partaking of the excellent coffee available to her at the hall, while Monica is stuck with, for example, supermarket-brand instant granules.
Still, Monica got what she wanted: proper authorisation for the cash Christine transferred to her — and for considerably more besides — and an agreement that she can stay out in Cherston for as long as it takes. She’s still a sponsor, after all, and Diana, no matter how unconventional her journey, and no matter that she already washed out, is still Monica’s responsibility.
She also got a craving for good coffee, which is why, when Indira told her she needs to be briefed by one of Elle’s people, Monica insisted on meeting Isla, the soldier, in one of those coffee shops that draws the little flower in your foam. She’s waiting there now, sipping at something goddamn fucking amazing with caramel in, and browsing online stores for inspiration for when she goes clothes shopping with Diana tomorrow.
Isla, when she shows up almost twenty minutes late, turns out to be dark-skinned, dark-haired, wickedly pretty, and not even all that short compared to Monica. She’s used to cis girls coming up to her shoulders, but Isla, if she stood up on her toes, could probably just about look down on her. And that’s far too hot a concept for Monica to deal with so early on a Thursday morning, especially when they have business to discuss, so Monica settles for a smile and a handshake. Isla orders a coffee, Monica orders another, and they get down to it.
“Everything’s in the bag,” Isla says, nodding at the backpack she slung under the table when she arrived. “Two clean laptops — one for you, one for her — and one clean phone. All her ID, but she can’t leave the country on that passport until next year; it’ll take us that long to get her cleanly inserted into the system. There’s a video message from Ms Lambert saved to the desktop on Diana’s laptop, so make sure she watches it.”
“A video message?”
“Ms Lambert would like to debrief her, personally.”
Monica leans across the table and hisses, “If that chaser bitch thinks she can—”
“No,” Isla says, holding up a hand. “No. It’s nothing like that. Girl scout’s honour.”
“Yeah, well,” Monica says, a little mollified but still horrified at the thought of letting Elle Lambert anywhere near Diana, “some of us weren’t allowed into the girl scouts. Just promise me that if she goes — if — Diana will be unharmed, untouched, and allowed to leave afterwards.”
Isla frowns. “Why would she not be allowed to leave?”
“She was washed out. Marsden took her out of Lambert’s hands, not ours.”
“Ms Lambert has no use for her. I’ve been assured. Besides, that project is being wound down?”
“Oh?” Monica scowls. “The ethical issues finally got to her, then?”
“Maybe,” Isla says, and what bursts Monica’s mood and makes her laugh is that the soldier is very obviously trying not to smile.
“God. Funny business we’re in, isn’t it?”
Isla reaches for her coffee and blows gently on the patterned foam. “Speak for yourself. Until last year I was protecting a CFO. I got drafted into this.”
Monica takes a sip from her own coffee. “Yeah?” she says. “Me too.”
2020 January 17
Friday
“Come in!” Maria shouts through the door, and Frankie, failing to disguise her nerves, almost trips as she enters.
Nice in here, though. It would be bad form to note that Maria’s flat used to belong to one of the sponsors from Frankie’s time, so she doesn’t, but Maria’s made far better use of it than Tilly, turning it into a proper studio apartment. She’s got bookshelves, she’s got a lovely set of matching rugs, and she’s done up the kitchen proper. She’s also got herself a large desk, and it’s behind this that she sits, waiting for Frankie.
“Frances,” she says, her voice neutral.
“Sorry in advance for this being weird,” Frankie says, taking the seat that Maria’s girl, Edy, is holding out for her.
“Weird?” Maria says as Edy leaves for the kitchen and starts a kettle boiling. “I wouldn’t call it weird. I might call you stupid for walking into a lockable room with me, but not weird.”
Frankie shrugs. “I’m not here to be best mates, or anything. I just… It’s the lad. Ollie. Oliver. He’s been worrying about me. I want— I need to reassure him.”
“And how will you do that?”
“Dunno. All I know is, he wants to see me, and Harmony said I need to go to you or Beatrice about it. And since Bea’s all… incommunicado, she said it should be you.”
“Remind me to thank her for this opportunity, then,” Maria says. Edy places a mug of tea in front of her. The mug says, I’m not a woman, I’m a hundred coping mechanisms in a tight skirt. “No.”
“No?”
“No.”
Edy sets Frankie’s tea in a blue-and-white mug that says on the side, The Guardian view on mugs: the gender distressed should not be forced to experience ‘jokes’. She’s not sure she gets that one.
“Maria—” Edy starts.
“No,” Maria repeats. “I’m keeping her away from that boy. From everyone I can.” She turns back to Frankie. “The only reason you’re not locked up right now is that Beatrice overruled me. And I’m fairly sure the only reason she did that is because Valérie has this absurd soft spot for you. Which I can’t do anything about, because I can make the clear-headed decision to keep you the fuck away from Oliver Bradley.”
“She did save his life.”
“S’not the point, actually,” Frankie says. “Maria, you’re never going to not hate me. Not asking you to change that. But I’m useful. I’m a tool. So either I can sit around in my room watching telly and eventually die of boredom, or you can put me to use and I’ll die of, I don’t know, a stress-induced heart attack.”
“Don’t try to make me laugh, Frances,” Maria says.
“I can help Ollie, is the point. I get him. And Harmony’ll be with me, right? Ready to zap me if I need zapping?”
“He’s been asking for her, Maria,” Edy says gently, with a hand on Maria’s shoulder. “And he’s still in a delicate—”
“All right!” Maria snaps, ducking out from under Edy’s hand. She stays like that for a moment, contorted and uncomfortable, and then straightens out, sits back in her chair. Pinches the bridge of her nose. “All right, okay?” Without looking at Frankie, she continues, “You can see him. I’ll get it set up. And I’ll make sure Harmony gets authorisation to take you down whenever she sees fit. But remember, you go down there, you’re going down for eight hours. A whole shift.”
“S’fine,” Frankie says readily.
“And if you fuck around,” Maria says, finally looking at her, pointing a finger across the desk, “I’ll kill you. And I’ll bury you a fuck of a lot deeper than Crispin Smyth-Farrow buried all his secrets.”
* * *
Harmony said he should read, so he’s reading. She said he should try to see himself in the main character, so he’s trying. And he’s doing his best to ignore that he shouldn’t be doing any of this, that he should still be fighting. The voice that’s fucking screaming at him. Don’t listen to the people trying to control you. Fight back.
The others felt like that. For definite. Declan. He attacked Steph in the shower. Will. He attacked Maria right here in the common room. Raph. He was there for all of it, he backed them up.
Look at them all now.
It’s so fucking exhausting. Last one standing. And late at night, he’s started to think that maybe he’s going to fall, too.
Shit. Not even late at night any more. All the time. If there’s a part of him that thinks he’s a pussy for no longer trying to escape, there’s another part that’s just waiting. Waiting for what?
For it to happen.
Fuck, he almost wants it at this point. Feels like in a movie. The bloke walking up the stairs. Haunted attic or some shit. And you’re watching and waiting. Because he’s fucked and he doesn’t know it yet.
That’s the thing, though. Ollie knows it. He’s beyond fucked.
He puts down the book. Can’t see himself in the main character anyway. Doesn’t give a shit about baking.
Not many people around right now. No Bethany, no Steph. Martin’s here somewhere. And Leigh. Still getting used to that new name. And he asked everyone to call him a girl from now on. Another thing to get used to.
Leigh tried to lecture him. Told him about people who don’t care about gender or whatever. Okay. So? Say he’s right, say Ollie’s as flexible as Harmony and Leigh and all the others think he must be. Doesn’t change a thing. Still got no choice in this.
Still letting shit be done to him.
“Hey, Ollie!”
It’s Harmony.
What now?
What’s he not doing that he’s supposed to be doing?
Or is he doing something, but doing it wrong?
“Someone to see you, Ollie,” Harmony says. She’s waiting at the door to the corridor. Better go see what she wants, then.
He dogs the ear of his book, even though he isn’t enjoying it and doesn’t care about losing his place, because that’s just what you do, it seems, or it’s what Steph does anyway, and half the guys in this fucking basement seem to be watching her for their cues on how to behave, even more so than girls like Harmony, which okay, yeah, he understands that they are basically the same, just with more time as girls behind them, and he even gets now that Steph is different in her own way, being transgender from birth or whatever, because he had that shit drummed into him for hours by Harmony and then Raph shouted at him and Leigh called him a prick.
Fucking overthinking everything. Shit.
He drops his book and pushes up, feeling sluggish and slow from the hormones, and drags himself across the room. He doesn’t have the energy for this shit, especially if he’s going to be lectured again, if his visitor is going to be the woman in charge or one of her deputies and they’re going to tell him how it is again, and he knows how it is, that’s the fucking problem.
“Ollie?” Harmony says. She’s waiting for him halfway down the corridor and he’s just standing there in the doorway now.
“Sorry,” he mutters. Follows her.
He doesn’t know if he’s slowing down, if he’s getting stupider, if his body really is getting harder to move around, or if he’s getting faster, quicker, brighter, and his body feels like it’s holding him back. How would he know? Who could he ask, anyway? None of the girls here have stories that sound like his.
Down the corridor. Door. Door. And there’s the cell corridor again. Makes his heart sink. What did he even do? They can’t put him back in here without telling him what he did!
But then—
Ah.
Right then.
“Frankie,” he says quietly.
* * *
Broken dogs, the sponsors would call them, back in Frankie’s day. Boys who’d look twice around every corner, who’d flinch when you came in the room, who’d eat their food like they were less afraid of choking on it than having it taken away. Boys who’d been made into nothing, who had nowhere to go but up.
Failures, to Dotty’s mind. Her slimy aristo customers didn’t like it when the boys broke too easily; they preferred to do that themselves on their grand old estates in the middle of nowhere, places where the screams could echo for a dozen rooms without being heard by a single other soul. When you break a man such that the mere sight of your raised hand is enough to bring him to heel, when you take someone who was once like you — dignified, male — and you reduce him, layer by layer, take his manhood and his masculinity… it is a unique pleasure. Or that’s what old Dotty used to say anyway. Frankie could never get into it. Probably why she wasn’t as good at riding the line as the rest of them.
Ollie’s not there yet, but he reminds her of Karen’s boys. The ones who walked closest to that line, who provided the clients of Dorothy’s Dorley with more satisfaction than challenge. He’s walking like he doesn’t fit into his body, like it hangs poorly off a mind that doesn’t know who or what it is. And when he sits next to her on the couch set up at the end of the corridor, he tries out three ways to sit before he hits on one that seems comfortable.
And then he just sits there, staring at his lap.
Harmony might lose him. She’s talked to the girl about him at length, and she’s backed way off from how she was before, treating him with kindness, letting the others — Leigh and Raph, mainly — provide behavioural corrections, but she’s worried. And she’s right to be.
The problem with most of the younger sponsors here is that they’re just that: young. Even the older ones have got, what, two or three transitions under their belt? And the senior sponsors might have overseen more than that, but Frankie…
Frankie’s seen hundreds be reborn only to die, to be used and discarded. Her past is painted with death, her road to hell obscured by the bodies that litter it, and maybe she can actually fucking use that for once. Like she did with Diana, briefly; like she should have done with Diana from the start.
She can help him.
But she needs to set the scene first.
“Hey, Harmony,” she calls to the girl fidgeting with her phone and her taser halfway back up the corridor, “you couldn’t get us a cuppa, could you, love?”
“I shouldn’t—”
“You fancy a tea, don’t you, Oliver?” Frankie says to Ollie, cutting Harmony off. He doesn’t say anything, but nods slowly. “Milk and sugar?” she says to Harmony.
“I need to watch the two of you,” Harmony says.
Frankie forces a laugh. “He’s not going to attack me,” she says. “Are you, Oliver?” Ollie silently shakes his head. “There you go.”
“Maria said—”
“Maria’s not here, is she?”
Harmony stares at her for a moment, chewing on her lip. Go on, Frankie silently urges her, take the bloody hint. Give the lad a break from you and from the boys and girls he’s obliged to spend all his time with.
“Milk and sugar,” Harmony says, to which Frankie grins. “Fine.” And she turns on her heel and marches off. Frankie doesn’t know if she’s genuinely annoyed, or if she’s playing it up for Ollie, trying to make him feel like he — or someone acting on his behalf — has got one over on her. She thinks it’s probably the latter.
“Much better,” Frankie says, settling back with her hands folded behind her head. There’s a little table in front of the sofa, and she puts her feet up on it, crossed at the ankle. Not only is it a comfortable position, something she can keep up for hours, it’s also open. Ollie can see her, see that she’s not armed, see that she’s relaxed around him. Like the old days, playing good cop to Karen or Tilly’s bad cop. Only even back then, she meant it. “How’ve you been, Oliver?”
He shrugs. She waits. Eventually, in the absence of anything else to break the silence, he says, “Bored.”
“No good books in the basement?”
That makes him laugh. “Nah. Reading this one about baking. And lesbians.”
“Right,” Frankie says. “Boring. You got anything you’d rather read?”
“Dunno,” Ollie says. He slips back into silence, so Frankie waits for him again. She’s seen the footage of him laughing to Raph in the bathroom; she knows he’s capable of speaking his mind when he wants to. But he’s been so moulded by the lifelong dominance game of masculinity that stepping outside it seems to confuse him.
No, that’s wrong. He’s not confused. He’s just not Ollie. He’s Oliver, maybe. He’s whoever he was when he was with his gran.
“I used to read sci-fi and fantasy,” Frankie says. “The classics. Library had a whole section on ’em, and when I was a girl, I’d start at one end and work my way along. And some of it— Hell, a lot of it was crap. But the good ones really opened my mind.”
“Who did you like?” he asks.
The question surprises her. So she segues from her lie — about reading anything at all — to a truth, one she finds easily, but in an uncomfortable place. “Le Guin,” she says, pulling a name out of her memory. They had a lad down here once. Loved Le Guin. She got him some. He was so grateful, he actually fucking hugged her. Dead now. “Ursula K Le Guin, that was her name. She was good. You want me to get you some Le Guin books?”
He shrugs again, so she takes that as a yes. She’s about to move on, to think up something else with which to engage him, when he says, very suddenly, “I’ve been worrying. About you.”
Oh, she remembers this. It was on the video. But she asks him about it anyway because he mustn’t think she’s been spying on him, and he spools out with staccato lucidity all the nonsense he’s worried about: that Frankie’s old, that she’ll get caught, that she’ll die in jail. She thought Raph dealt with it fine, but if Ollie’s still worrying, then clearly another approach is required. Outright rejection, maybe.
“Bugger that, Oliver,” she says. “Nobody’s catching me. And if I think they’re going to, I’ll be at my throat with the nearest bit of cutlery before you can say boo. No, I’m dying on my feet, me. I’d prefer a long time in the future, but if it comes earlier, it comes earlier. Done too much with these hands to let anyone else take that away from me.”
“You’d…?” Ollie, his eyes wide, can’t say it.
“Yep,” Frankie says, popping the P. She unclasps her hands from behind her head and slices a finger across her throat, cackling.
Dirty laugh, Ollie said to Raph, days ago. Dirty laugh, like his gran. Well, she’s not above using that, is she?
“You wouldn’t let them take you?”
“Like you,” Frankie says. It’s a risk, but she’s going somewhere with this, and if he can’t follow, there’s basically no point; they might as well wash him out tomorrow. “Except the difference is, prison’d be the end for me. But this? It’s not the end for you, Oliver.”
He shrugs again. Good. Time was, someone like Ollie would have lunged for her at even the thought of it. But there’s enough between them — or borrowed from his gran — and he’s made enough slow, grudging progress, that he just sits there. Doesn’t even glare. Just looks empty.
Oliver Bradley doesn’t know what he’s going to do with himself.
“You were here,” he says, and it’s sudden again, the way half his thoughts seem to come out. Like if he didn’t spit them at the moment of ideation, he might claw them back, keep them to himself. “Before Aunt Bea. You were here.”
“Yeah,” she says simply. “Seen a lot of people come and go.”
“What was it like?”
Well, shit. That’s a hell of a question. “It wasn’t good, Ollie. It was violent and coercive and— Hah, yeah, stop nodding, because I don’t mean that it was violent like Monica hitting Declan with a nightstick, or like Will going for Maria, or—”
“Diana,” Ollie says. “And Leigh.” Says the names like bloody tombstones. With finality.
“Diana,” Frankie agrees. “And Leigh.”
“Harmony said to be careful about it.”
“Good. Good. She should have. And so should you.”
Ollie asks, “So why didn’t you?”
“Because…” Okay, yeah, he’s got her with this one. But she can turn it around. “Because that’s how I think, Oliver. Because that’s what this place made me. Me and the other sponsors of my life, we came in two groups. There were those like Karen, the nurse. Sadistic. Killed for it, in the end. Missed by no-one. And then there was me. You know what I got good at, Ollie? Drawing lines. Lines between someone’s past and their future. Lines between the things I wanted to do and the things I let myself do, because if I stepped over that line, I would’ve been killed. So that’s how I think: Diana, when Monica had to hit her, she was Declan then; and Leigh didn’t go for Maria, that was Will. That was before they crossed that line. The line that’s still in your future, Oliver.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Now, I won’t say I never crossed that line myself. For the boys. Had to, for discipline. To remind them I was in control. But sometimes… Sometimes, even I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“With Aunt Bea?” Ollie asks.
Who told him she used to sponsor Beatrice? Interesting. Anyway. “No,” she says. “Not with Bea. With someone else. Someone who almost got out.”
And she gets it. In the way he’s sitting forward all of a sudden, invested, listening like an eager student. In the questions he’s suddenly asking. Ollie needs a route out of here. He’s worked out that he’s not leaving here as Oliver Bradley, whether or not he’s okay with that, but he needs to know how to leave. He needs a map. And none of the girls here can give it to him. Not even Maria.
So she tells him the story of a girl who came from violence, who hurt people in her former life, who flowered right here under Dorley. Who helped the other girls with their makeup and coached them on how to behave just right so the visitors wouldn’t punish them so readily. Who asked Frankie for books and read them cover to cover, because they were the books she read when she was a child, before she grew up, before she grew violent. Who found in herself something complex, something new, something real, and very different from her life before.
And then she was taken from this place as they all were.
“What happened to her?” Ollie asks.
“She’s… Shit.” Frankie’s got to wipe her face on her sleeve. She’s not faking these tears. Nor is she faking the tense, dry feeling in her throat. When Harmony eventually decides they’ve talked enough and shows up with the tea, she’s going to drink it right away, no matter how hot it is. The hotter the better, actually. Let her scald herself. “She’s why we’re here, Oliver. She’s why we are all here, why the hall no longer belongs to Dorothy. She’s why I got to get away from this place. She’s why Valérie is free and why Beatrice has the luxury of locking herself in that nice office upstairs. She was a right bastard kid, Ollie, but in here, in this fucking place, she became a perfect, innocent, beautiful flower. She picked her name, Kelly, because it would have been her sister’s. She told me that. Weeks before she was taken away, she told me that. Shit, I wasn’t even her sponsor. I just took a liking to her. But it was after Beatrice, you see, and we were locked up good and tight. No chance of a nice girl like her getting out.” She wipes her nose again. Sniffs noisily. Feels the sting of everything she’s done in her eyes, in her chest. “She was taken away, and Elladine Lambert fell in love with her. For that crime, for being someone who could be loved, she was murdered, and Lambert, she rose up against this place. This new Dorley? If there is a grave on which it is built, Ollie, it is hers.”
2020 January 18
Saturday
Amazing how little she owns, really. Melissa’s little computer and her laptop are both boxed up and ready to be dragged to the lift. Most of her clothes have gone to the charity shop in batches, day after day this week. And what else is there? Her pots and pans aren't coming with her, since she won’t need them while she’s staying at the hall, and when they finally do the thing they’ve been talking about and find a place in town for the three of them, they’re going to want to get all new stuff. So her kitchenware is in a box in the post room on the ground floor with a note attached that says for people to take as they need. It’s probably empty already.
Most other things came with the flat. At least it’s not much to lug down with her, though of course Mr Bakhash from the corner apartment helps her with the computer box as soon as he sees her stagger out of her door with it. They’re going to miss her here, he says, and when she says that she didn’t really do much while she was here, he says that’s the point! Some tenants have music on at all hours, put their trash out at the wrong time, are in and out with crashing doors, but Melissa? She respected the building.
“It’s nice to be missed,” she says with a smile, waiting for the elevator doors to close.
“Safe drive, Miss Haverford,” he says, and gives her a little wave.
It kind of is nice to be missed. She’s told him about her little box of kitchen stuff; she hopes he picks out something useful for himself.
Melissa’s going home. She’s got a job lined up at Saints, and she’s going to live at the hall for a bit. She’s going to visit Steph a lot and she’s going to finish reconnecting with Nell and the others from her intake. She’s going to put back together the life she should have started building when she first graduated.
No more running, no more hiding.
And if she’s putting her family back together, well there’s someone else very important to her she needs to see. Aunt Bea said she could contact Jenny, right? Tabitha was working on that, so the first thing Melissa’s going to do when she gets back — when she gets home — is talk to Tabitha and get the ball rolling.
The best time to fix her life passed by years ago, but the second-best time is right now.
Chapter 44: One, Two, Three
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2020 January 18
Saturday
They’ve pushed all the tables to the side and stacked the chairs out of the way, and the effect, with the colourful tablecloths and the curtains swept aside on the four bay windows, is close enough to a ballroom — or what she thinks of when she imagines a ballroom, never having attended any function fancy enough to stop watering down its beer, let alone insist on a dress code — that Diana feels almost giddy. Her mind’s eye expands the little dining room into something ten times larger, ten times grander, with tall ceilings and chandeliers. On the side with the tables, rows of tuxedoed men; on the side with the windows, rows of women in elaborate dresses, bathed in light.
And here, in the middle, stands Diana, her hands held out, nervously controlling her breathing, waiting for Chiamaka to step into her grip.
Diana saw her before, dancing in the kitchen, eyes closed, murmuring under her breath, killing time waiting for the kettle to boil, so she asked about it, and Chiamaka, once she recovered from the shock of being discovered — Diana, who has come to know her quite well, could tell from the momentary immobilisation of her expression and by the way her chin raised ever so slightly, that Chiamaka’s heart had jumped almost into her throat — agreed to teach her.
She wanted to know why:
Diana’s just interested.
And that wasn’t enough:
No, really, she’s curious, that’s all.
She has come to know Diana at least as well as Diana has come to know her, and she knows a half-truth when she hears one, young lady.
Thus Diana was forced, with reddening cheeks and fingers clasping each other uselessly, to admit that she wishes to dance entirely because she saw Chiamaka dancing. Chiamaka specifically. Because Diana is making someone new of herself, someone she thinks can do good in the world, someone around whom people can feel safe — will be safe, will be protected — and the only way she can think of to do so is to emulate the people she admires.
“You admire me?” Chiamaka had asked.
“Very much,” Diana had replied, still not entirely looking at her, and that was the point at which Chiamaka hugged her, and promised that, starting tomorrow, Diana would learn to dance. And now tomorrow is here, and the overnight patrons have stuffed themselves with bacon and sausages and eggs and taken their leave, and Diana waits with her hands ready, fighting against the instinct to close her eyes, to ride the moment forever.
Declan would never stand here. Declan would never make himself so vulnerable as to want something. Declan would simply take, and there is nothing here that can be taken.
“First,” Chiamaka says, gently grasping Diana’s hands in each of hers — Diana once again feeling delighted that their hands really aren’t so different; time has thinned hers a little, and they were never quite as big as they always felt, anyway — and firming her grip, “I will lead and you will follow. That means that when I step, you step with me. Try to anticipate my moves but do not try to control where the dance takes us. For now, that is my job. After, you can watch your YouTube videos and learn all the particular terms and styles and such, and I will expect you to know the basics for next time, okay?”
“Right,” Diana says, nodding.
Chiamaka leans away from Diana, and for a moment that new fear kicks in, the new fear that is really an old fear, resurfaced from childhood, from before Declan became all that he was, of a parental figure disapproving, expressing disappointment that will turn inevitably to rage; but Chiamaka is only attempting to guard Diana’s ears as she shouts for her daughter. “Obi! In here, please!”
It’s still loud. And Diana takes note of how Chiamaka articulates the shout, of where in her mouth she forms the words, because along with everything else, she’s been poring over the voice training manuals on Monica’s USB drive. Learning to speak the way Monica does, the way Beatrice does, the way Chiamaka does. At the front of the mouth, bright and hard, she notes.
“Coming!” Adaobi shouts from the front desk. She’s covering today, so as to give her mother and Diana a break, for which they have both been grateful. She told Diana that she’s only agreed to do so because she gets to be out of here again by late afternoon, when the real busyness starts, when the out-of-towners on their spontaneous budget weekend breaks discover that the Travelodge down the road is full up and that the various AirBnBs scattered around Cherston-on-Sea are too expensive, too far out of the way, or just too ‘effing try-hard’ to deal with. A moment later and she’s walking lightly into the dining room, almost the spit of her mother: taller, thinner, but no less kind.
‘My pride,’ Chiamaka says of her, and from the moment she met her, Diana has admired her almost as much as she does her mother. Envied her, too. Chiamaka has told stories of Adaobi’s early years, of the adversity they faced together, for she was the first of Chiamaka’s whole extended family to be born in the UK, and there were times when she was, says Chia, ‘the only light in my life’. To have that kind of connection with someone is something Diana can only dream of.
“The tape, please,” Chiamaka says, and she flexes her grip on Diana’s hands as she does so.
There’s a vintage tape player waiting on the counter that separates the kitchen and the dining room, cued up and waiting, and Adaobi almost skips over to it, moving lightly. “Have fun, you two,” she says. “Mum? Reminder? I’m out of here at four. No later. I have a thing.”
Chiamaka nods seriously. “I remember about your thing.”
Adaobi depresses one of the chunky buttons on the tape player and stands for a moment, waiting for the staticky noise to be supplanted by classical music — violins and such; another area in which Diana regrets her ignorance! — upon which she grins at the both of them, waiting expectantly for the entertainment to begin.
“Off with you, sweetheart,” Chiamaka says, and Adaobi laughs and leaves them to it. The music is on three beats, which Diana instantly connects to Chiamaka counting silently to herself in the kitchen, and she gets it confirmed when Chiamaka nods at her and begins reciting: “One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. And, we go.”
And then, joining Chiamaka in counting on the beat, Diana is swept in precise, rhythmic circles around the dining room. One step after another, each one on the beat. Chiamaka takes her on a tour of the room, which requires little help any more from Diana’s mind’s eye to feel grand, to feel exciting, to feel new.
* * *
It’s past bloody ten and Elle should not feel like such a handcrafted gift basket of crap, but she does, and that’s the end of it. Time was, she would have been up all night indulging in mild debauchery at the very least, and up with the dawn the next day, but here she is, close to forty-one and feeling it in her spine. This has been the week from hell, and she is bloody well ready for it to be over.
She could have slept until midday. Cally, the other occupant of her bed, is still asleep, and in this, as in many other things, she confounds Elle. The girl is precisely as young as Elle once was, but somehow she has only ever beaten Elle to the sunrise because she has not yet been to bed; on such occasions she likes to wake Elle rudely and with a sex toy, and while Elle can’t bring herself to be annoyed with such behaviour, it probably shouldn’t be encouraged. She’s got a group of companies to run, an obnoxious nouveau-American making not-so-veiled threats and accusations via lawyer, and an antsy ex-lover on the other end of a phone line every day, demanding information from Elle regarding the bodies at Stenordale that she does not yet possess.
Beatrice is probably an ex-lover, anyway. There have been no more overtures in either direction since Valérie Barbier came back into the picture, and Beatrice knows well that Elladine has other outlets for her needs and has done for a long time. If Elle had known that their dalliance late last year would be their last, she would have booked a more expensive hotel room, would have laid herself out for Beatrice more completely. Would have opened her soul to her as well as her legs.
Hmm. Perhaps it is better that it was what it was. Just another fun little fuck. A shame, though, that no other girl has ever made Elle feel quite as Beatrice has.
Cally rolls over in her sleep, tucking her knees up towards her chest and snorting sweetly into the pillow, reminding Elle once again that it is possible that no other woman has made her feel as Beatrice did because Elle has never given them the chance. Has always thought of them as temporary.
Elle looks on some more. Goodness, the girl really is adorable.
And she rolls her eyes at herself. ‘Adorable’; a problematic word to use for a younger woman when you’re in your forties. Makes you sound as if you are lusting unsubtly over the office secretary and thinking very hard about giving her arse a tap on your way to the water cooler. Not a vision of herself she wishes to indulge in. Elle’s always seen herself as a predator who muzzles herself around the innocent as best she can, but she never gave much thought as to how such an attitude might age with her. Her current habits bring much pleasure, but no future.
It might be settling-down time before too long. She can start thinking about an heir, perhaps. She’s still viable, she knows that much, and God only knows she has unquestioned access to more stored sperm than perhaps any other individual on this planet. A shame Beatrice couldn’t have had hers frozen the way the younger Dorley girls do. Elle asked her once if she regretted that she was never given the opportunity; Beatrice told her that she considers her own survival to be statistically anomalous at best, and that she does not wish to look a gift horse in the mouth. She also said, much later and after a considerable amount of alcohol, that she has enough bloody kids running around already, making a mess and driving her mad, and she can’t imagine how much worse it could be with that mentality transposed onto someone who can’t clean themselves after using the toilet.
Cally’s had sperm frozen, as is usual for a Dorley graduate of her vintage. But Cally’s not the one. At least, she’s not the one yet; it’s been barely seven months since they first met and not quite two weeks since they encountered each other again, since Cally salved Elle’s selfishly wounded and just barely romantic soul. Their relationship up to this point has been entirely about sex.
And Cally is—
Well, she’s very energetic when the moment is right.
Elle could use some of that right now.
Maybe she ought to—
Christ! No. “Calm yourself, Elladine,” she mutters to herself, and turns away from the bed, planning to prepare some coffee and a round of toast and perhaps one of those bolt guns they use to stun cattle; maybe if she thumps herself hard enough in the head, she will become someone with fewer brain cells, simpler problems, less annoying enemies, better control over her libido, and a greater tolerance for being woken too early on a Saturday.
She shouldn’t have taken the call. To have ignored it would have sent a message — a message beyond ‘piss off’, which she would also quite like to have sent — but by the time she came to her senses, she’d already picked up the receiver and carried it halfway to the next room. At least she didn’t humiliate herself before Henny Smyth-Farrow’s conniving lawyer. Aristocratic autopilot can carry one through entire conversations; entire social encounters, sometimes, if there is enough bubbly.
That bloody lawyer! Asking for Trevor Darling again! In even less coded language than before! And making insinuations about the girl Diana Rosamond! Speaking about people as if they are property! Repulsive. She’s inclined to call Henny bloody Smyth-bloody-Farrow personally and inform her in no uncertain terms that every time her attack dog lawyer snaps at Elladine’s heels and whines for the soldier boy, she will have her people masculinise him further. Steroids. Pectoral implants, perhaps. Is it possible surgically to craft someone into a facsimile of that man with the impossibly chiselled jaw, the man in the memes Cally persists in finding so amusing? Elladine will have him transformed into a mountain of a man, a veritable colossus, and then fly him to America and drop him on Henny’s doorstep with a note attached that reads FEMINISE THIS.
No.
Appalling even to think about. She would never subject poor Trevor Darling to Henrietta Smyth-Farrow. The woman’s got a voice like a wounded elephant giving birth.
It is an amusing image, though, and Elle considers it as she brews coffee, butters toast and spreads marmalade: Trevor Darling with the body of a professional wrestler. The operations on his face have left Mr Darling with a feminine appeal that she suspects will persist even once the testosterone injections regain their grip on his endocrine system. The surgeon she contacted — who will, more’s the pity, be flattening Mr Darling’s chest as he requested — refused to consider amending his facial surgery on such an accelerated schedule, suggesting that he try to get used to it. The ladies love a pretty boy, he said.
Elle had struggled not to laugh when Trevor quietly noted that he prefers, exclusively, men, a subject on which her surgeon did not attempt to claim expertise. Still, the fact remains that he is going to have to spend at least the next year or two cultivating a beard sufficient to make him appear both adequately masculine and old enough to shop at the off-licence, and thanking all the gods of good fortune that Dorothy Marsden did not have enough time to perform significant hair removal on him.
At the thought of it, Mr Darling scowled. Beards itch, apparently. They are awkward and require specialised cleaning, especially when they grow beyond a certain length. Elle refrained from recommending a brand of dog shampoo and instead suggested that there are likely other ways to offset — or live with — his feminine features, at least until such time passes as her surgeon feels comfortable chiselling the man back up.
She spoke of Trevor Darling with Beatrice during their last — slightly fraught — phone conversation. Beatrice knows someone, a genderqueer individual from long in her past with whom she still keeps in touch, who might help Mr Darling adjust to the complexities of a life lived necessarily out of the bounds of the binary. Elle’s met em, a long time ago now; only for long enough for em to collect Beatrice and drive her home, but ey made an impression. So Elle plans to ship Trevor Darling back to Dorley Hall when he’s done, and this Sammy person, ey of the colourful career and the studied mien of a lapsed sex worker, can fix him up. Show him some episodes of Drag Race, or something. Elle is sure that she prefers not to know, ultimately, the affairs of non-women.
It is as much a mystery to Elle as it is to almost everyone she knows why someone would choose something other than womanhood when it has been offered to them, no matter how gruesome the platter, but it takes all sorts to make a world, doesn’t it? She caught the eye of the woman Frances Barton when she was last here, and thought when Mr Darling spoke of his desire to remasculinise that they shared a moment of instinctive confusion over the matter. Even among cis women, she’s not alone.
Ah, speaking of not being alone. In the bed they have been sharing, Cally is stirring, complaining about the drool on the pillow and fetching cushions from the shelf above the headboard to prop herself upright. So Elle finishes her second slice of toast and pours two cups of coffee, carrying them on a tray back to bed, where Cally pulls aside the covers for her and settles against Elle’s body with every appearance of enjoying being exactly where she is.
“Morning,” Cally says, her South London accent still showing through despite recent attempts to modify it, in case she ever needs to accompany Elle to some official function. Elle’s been telling her not to bother, that on the subject of her voice, she owes no apologies, but Cally will have none of it. And this is perhaps why this nascent relationship feels inevitably temporary to Elle: Cally is already making plans for the functions they will attend together; where heads a social climber when the local summit has been attained?
And attained… and attained… and attained, she adds to herself with a smirk. Four times last night alone.
She does rather hope that she’s being uncharitable. Certainly, Cally showed no interest in high society until she and Elle first met and flirted right under Beatrice’s judgemental frown. And she mentioned it only as an afterthought, in the comedown after some quite vigorous afternoon exercise. Cally wants to prove her worth, she said; she also would enjoy the opportunity to show off the rather magnificent decolletage that Elle — indirectly — purchased for her.
“Good morning,” Elle says, brushing her hair out of her face and drinking deeply from her coffee.
“Doesn’t look that good,” Cally says, taking the other cup and removing the tray from Elle’s lap, dropping it to the floor by the bed. “You’re cranky.”
“Work.” It’s impossible to keep the disgust from her voice. Touching Henny Smyth-Farrow, even at such a remove, even through her beastly little lawyer, feels like ramming a fork into an electrical socket and then licking it, becoming connected in an instant to the electrical grid of an entire country and then, precisely one more instant later, suffering the inevitable consequences. The excitement she feels is twinned with her revulsion, intertwined with it, and has been made so deliberately. The work of decades at this point. Separating herself from her fantasies.
Because Elladine could be Henrietta so, so easily. Callous and cruel, abusing human beings as playthings and discarding them just as easily. God knows they both have access to more money, power and influence than any one person should.
Except she couldn’t be her, could she? Because Henrietta is a bloody outsider, a newcomer! She chose this! Yes, her blasted father was elbow-deep in the trafficking of young criminal boys around the British Isles, but she and her brother were deliberately kept innocent of it. Warehoused in another wing of Stenordale as they grew, shipped off to boarding schools and to university and to the army, in Alistair’s case. Elle, meanwhile, was offhandedly gifted a front-row seat to her family’s perversions, to the exploitation of Kelly, to her murder. And it broke her, broke her and remade her as surely and as completely as any girl who has emerged from the prison under Dorley Hall. Since Elle’s first kiss, since her first death, it’s been a part of her. How can someone untainted by this, someone whose life has not been shaped by its proximity, willingly embrace it?
Elle should take those live wires she’s so scared of and ram them down Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s throat. Then, perhaps, she should recall the operatives who remain. They’ve done their bit for queen and country; they should receive the lives they have been promised. Freedom of a sort, at the end of a short but gilded chain.
“That,” Cally says, prodding Elle’s face, where the frown is, “is not ‘work’. That is Elladine Lambert taking the weight of the world on her pretty little shoulders again.”
“It’s already there,” Elle says vaguely, and blows on her coffee. “I put it there when I had the chance to end all this, and I refused. I kept it alive, Cally, do you understand? All of it.” She’s barely speaking, finding the effort of it exhausting and exasperating, as if she ought to be stronger than this. As if she ought to be the woman she pretends to be, because someone must. “I never thought about what could happen if nobody does this. If we just let the idea die. Because I was thinking years ahead, not decades. I was thinking about revenge, about justice that would never be served.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“I helped Beatrice Quinn take down Dorothy Marsden’s Dorley Hall. And that could have been it. But I built it up again, with a new—” Elle’s voice takes on a sneer, “—noble purpose.”
Cally nods, smiling. “Because you like girls with—”
“No,” Elle snaps, raising her voice for the first time. “Sorry, but no. Except…” She leans her head against the back of the bed, rolls it along the hard edge of the wood. “Shit. Yes. Far from the only reason, but yes. I’m sorry, Cally; I’ve lost track of which excuses were for what.”
“Well,” Cally says, “I, for one, am glad you did it. The hall was good to me. In the end.”
“You didn’t wash out.”
Cally pauses. Seems for a moment to lose the capacity for breath. And then, just as quickly, she returns to normal, though it is somewhat forced. At least she has the coffee cup for a prop, for something to do with her hands.
As does Elle.
“No,” Cally says. “No, I didn’t. And we had a few, our year. I always wondered what happened to them. Aunt Bea won’t say.”
“And yet,” Elle says gently, trying her best to appear reassuring, “you’ve never asked me about them.”
“Come on; we’ve been doing this, what, eleven days? Ten? Elladine, I’m your stress relief. I’m basically a fucktoy. I don’t get to ask questions like that.”
“You are not.”
Cally laughs. “Am I something more, then? I thought you and Aunt Bea…”
“Not any more.”
“Oh. Um. Sorry?”
“I could have loved her,” Elle says. “But she could never have loved me. And that’s better, I think. I hope she and Valérie Barbier make something good together.”
“No, you don’t. I can see it in your eyes.”
A smile that feels like it has been dredged from the depths of Elle’s inhospitable heart. Goodness, it takes effort to maintain. “Then I would like to hope for that. I really would. Bloody hell, Cally, I’m trying.”
“Hey, hey,” Cally says, “no judgement. If there’s anyone who knows what it’s like to try constantly to be better…”
Damn it. Yes. Elle’s getting all wound up in herself again. She sips from her coffee, places it carefully on a coaster on her bedside table, and leans over, steadying Cally’s cup with her left hand and caressing her hair with her right.
They kiss for a while. It’s not passionate, but it fills a need for both of them, a need which Elle keeps forgetting Cally shares with her. To regret one’s past; to strive.
“So is that what’s got you all fucked up?” Cally asks when they’re sitting normally again, coffee cups back in their hands. “Aunt Bea and Val B and—” she bunny-ears with her fingers; Elle’s convinced that one of the early sponsors must have passed that habit to the graduates, because so many of them seem to do it, “—your ‘business’. Which was, I’m guessing, that very tense phone call.”
“Ah. You overheard, then?”
“I heard you talking. Not any of the words, though. And I’m pretty sure I just fell right back to sleep and incorporated it into my dream, anyway.”
“Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s lawyer again,” Elle says. “Being bloody cheeky as per. She thinks she’s got me at the business end of a long barrel—” she raises her hands, cupped, one in front of the other, miming sniper, “—and she’s having fun throwing out her little threats, hoping to control me, to make me do her work for her.”
“Yeah,” Cally says, “that’d piss me off.”
“No, it’s not that. I know what she’s trying to do and I’m not going to let her. It’s… Bloody hell, Cally, it’s that I loathe everything about her, but to an outsider, I’m willing to bet you couldn’t slide a credit card between us. We’re exactly the same flavour of monster, and I’m just deluding myself.” She sets what remains of her coffee aside for good. It’s gone cold, anyway. “She wants Trevor Darling and Diana Rosamond and probably even Valérie Barbier so she can shop them to any Silicon Valley psychopath who thinks himself an evolutionary step above the average man, and every Evangelical who’s become bored of kiddy diddling and needs a new innocence to prey upon before the Rapture comes and takes them all away. She wants the playbook, the instruction manual, and she didn’t get it from Marsden so she wants it from us. In return, she gets more money than God and a brand-new Barbie playset in which to turn unfortunate American boys into toys. She makes my bloody skin crawl, Cally, but I’m no different. Not really.”
“May I remind you again that I am grateful for Dorley Hall?”
Elle looks away. “And may I remind you — again — that you didn’t wash out?”
“Elle,” Cally says without hesitation, “look, you can’t beat yourself up about that. The washouts… They’re irredeemable. That’s the whole point. Boys go in—” she holds up two hands with most of the digits raised, and then lowers three, “—and girls come out, and the difference is a bucket of balls and a couple of bastards.” Elle raises an eyebrow at the phrasing. “Sorry. We used to talk about it a lot. Usually I try to be less flippant. But that’s the thing: the washouts… they washed out. They were…” She flutters her fingers, searching for the right word, then gives up. “They were bad.”
“And yet Diana Rosamond is pottering about in a sleepy Essex seaside town, learning to be the world’s tallest, nicest girl — or so says her sponsor — and here I am thinking about all the people I used. All the people who could have been like her, if only we’d done better. Known better.”
Cally reaches for her, takes her hands. “Tell me about them, then,” she says. “And not because I want to know, although I do. Like, fucking rabidly. But tell me for you. Tell me because you need to tell someone.”
“Few people know all of it,” Elle says, surprising herself. Classified information ought not to spill from her so easily, but she’s tired and, God damn it, Cally’s right: she does need to tell someone. Beatrice’s steadfast disapproval has been weighing on her for fifteen years. “The washouts are bombs, essentially. Not all of them and not so much any more — they have other uses — but at the beginning, in those first few years when we were still setting up the new programme, when bloody Dorothy Marsden was still able to exert her influence, when even Crispin Smyth-Farrow had yet to gather the good grace to fucking die… It was a different time, Cally. I was not as established as I am now, and there were whole networks of people who had grown accustomed to ordering in an amusing little thing to play with now and then. The programme had its obligations. And of course we were never going to fulfil them legitimately! But we had to be seen to. Because then it was our word against Crispin Smyth-Farrow’s, and if we supplied the girls, well, we had the product; he had nothing but sour grapes. Victim of a hostile takeover. We could get on with things without interruption. At the time, it all seemed so simple and logical. The right thing to do with the resources we had. Beatrice disagreed, but it didn’t take long for her to lose the will to fight me on it. She had her new girls, the rescuees, and she had people she had promised to house and employ through me…”
“Auntie Ashley. Met her once.”
“Sweet girl. And Teri, her surrogate mum. Beatrice’s too, I suppose. I should have done something for her and Linda while there was still time…”
“Elladine?” Cally prompts. “The washouts?”
“Yes. Look, the way of it was that these old-money men, they got their girls. Or their girl-boys or their toys or whatever they liked to call them, these broken creatures who could still just barely talk back to them. And then, quietly, deniably, and on a staggered timetable, they were killed by their girls. Accidents were arranged, medicine was substituted, that kind of thing. It didn’t always work, and we couldn’t always extract the girls after, but… Cally, I like to tell myself that, like Beatrice, I don’t waste people, but now, looking back? Second-guessing a lifetime of arrogant assumptions? That was all me. I did it because I wanted to, because I wanted these men dead and I wanted it to happen at the hands of the people they planned to hurt. I wanted the gasping throat under the choking hand to be their end, Cally. I wanted the weakened, painted hands they found so fetching to come for them with a knife. But I could have just bribed a bloody scullery maid. Yes, fine, that’s riskier, but the risk would all have been on me. If that scullery maid refuses to knife the lady of the house or cut the brakes of the lord of the manor’s Rolls Royce and instead goes straight to her employer and outs me or my network, I’m the one who takes the fall.”
It’s an image she’s always struggled to shake: one of the girls, the ones who had to be treated alternately with tenderness and brutality or they would not become the things they needed to become, being whisked innocently to her new employ, walking inside, closing the door behind her. Those doors were once all the doors to her childhood estate, the place where Kelly was murdered and Elle as she is now was born; lately, though, in her nightmares, they’ve been mixed with the doors to Stenordale Manor, where Valérie Barbier, Trevor Darling and Diana Rosamond were horrifically, intolerably abused.
They need to go. Dorothy, Henrietta; all of them. Forget mutually assured destruction. Time for the gloves to bloody well come off.
“Shit,” she murmurs. “I’m the worst of all of them. Not even toys but tools. The girls… My girls… I’m the one who made them that way and I’m the one who sent them out there to live or die, as luck wills it.” Contempt withdraws almost all breath from her. “Cowardly not to do it myself.”
“No, fuck that,” Cally says, “you’re wrong. It’s not important who takes on the risk; it’s only important that someone does. It’s only important that it gets done.”
“Cally—”
“Quiet. I’m talking now. And, Elle, I’ve heard stories. About the old place. I think most of us have, though I think how accurate they are… varies.” She gives Elle a wry smile, her canine resting briefly on her lower lip. “If you pester your sponsor enough, they’ll tell you what they’ve heard, especially if you’re in your third year and you’re basically done, you know, and they trust you and you trust them. I know something of what those people used to do. And, fuck, Elladine, the bodies? Under Stenordale? If the other men were anything like that man—”
“They were,” Elle says quietly. “Some of them were a lot worse. Fewer girls; even more violent appetites.”
“Then they were fucking evil. You were right not to trust their death to some employee or whatever. And you were right not to risk yourself.”
“That’s… convenient.”
“Nah,” Cally says. “If you’d died, who would have been left to take down the next bastard?”
Elle shrugs. “I still don’t want to… absolve myself. I want to carry this. I need to own it.”
“So own it. But don’t wallow in it. This might just be me regurgitating lectures from my sponsor here but, fuck, Elle, I think you need a good sponsoring. So you did what you did. And yeah, I know you’re going to say I’m being too casual about it or something — I can literally see it on your face — but the thing is, Elle… it’s done. If you don’t want to do it in future, then don’t. You let your future actions be influenced by the things you did, informed by them. You use those memories, that regret, to be a better person. And,” Cally adds, pointing a finger in Elle’s face, “that assumes that you’re even right, that you were a net weight on the world. I’m not convinced. I look at those dead girls in that fucking manor and I think about you, years ago, killing men who did shit like that, no matter how you did it? You’re going to have to try harder to make me condemn you for it.”
“Cally…” Elle says, her mouth dry. “You’re so young…” Too young. Too young to bloody well get it.
“And you’ve been carrying this too long,” Cally says, undaunted. “You’ve lost perspective.”
Not much to do but nod and shut the bloody hell up, not unless she wants to keep pushing this, and she doesn’t. Elle thinks suddenly of Frankie, who after returning to Dorley Hall after a fifteen-year absence simply went right back to work, on the side of the angels this time — or on whoever’s side they are actually on. Saved a boy’s life, though which one, she forgets; until they’re girls, they’re boys, and as such are interesting to her largely only as raw material.
As a source of inspiration, as a role model, Frankie leaves much to be desired, but Elladine has hardly attained sufficiently high moral ground to go searching elsewhere.
The thought suddenly makes her want to laugh. Frankie was a sponsor too, of sorts, and now Cally’s using sponsor-speak on her. Dorley Hall — its methods, its philosophy — is in her veins.
She should make like the girls. Start telling people that, no, she’s not part of a cult, she’s a cult deprogrammer. That was the logic, wasn’t it? Shocking young boys abused by the cult of masculinity out of adherence to the power structure, by any means necessary. Though one of the girls — Indira, maybe — used to say with an appealingly cheeky smile that, no, of course they’re not a cult, they’re a pyramid scheme.
“So how does it work?” Cally asks, jolting Elle out of her thoughts.
“Hmm?”
“This is my curiosity speaking, but the washouts, right? They were down there with the rest of us, but they couldn’t hack it. I remember what they were like towards the end. How do you turn that into a convincing little toy-maid-assassin or whatever?”
“Not the complicated part,” Elle says, happy to be talking process rather than culpability. “The psyche can take a lot, Cally, and for people such as you, it can weather everything the sponsors can throw at it and emerge thoughtful and improved—” Cally laughs, which seems inappropriate, “—but there are things it cannot withstand. Experiences beyond which nothing survives but the body. And then, upon that… empty plot of land, you build something new. Something that seeks to please you. Something that will, on the promise of eventual freedom, perform terrible violence. Righteous, deserved violence, but violence nonetheless. Most of them wash out not because they cannot change, but because Beatrice cannot redeem them. Cannot reform them. But my people…” Shit. She’s gone and bloody spilled it all, hasn’t she? She’d better hope Cally’s worth the trust Elle has inadvertently placed in her. “I don’t pretend this is a noble thing I’ve done, Cally. It is despicable. But the men those girls used to be… Well, you know. We took people who, generally, did terrible things — or we removed them from the world with the knife already in their hand, as it were — and we made better, more effective weapons out of them.”
Cally’s nodding thoughtfully. She isn’t running from the room, nor does she seem about to denounce Elle as the embodiment of all evil in the world.
“Like boot camp,” she says.
“Hmm?”
“I saw a documentary,” Cally says. “And there were these ex-soldiers talking about how the whole point of boot camp was to acculturate you to a system of permitted, regimented violence. Those were his words, I think.”
“Our way is, perhaps, a little more extreme. I accept the comparison, though.”
“So… what about my washouts? Were they bombs? Are they alive?”
“Not bombs,” Elle says. “We haven’t done that for a long time. And, yes, all alive.”
“But they’re still… doing stuff like that?”
“Actively? No.”
“But they’re trained for it?”
“Only one is, actually. The other two are under watch. My trainers did not consider them suitable for the process, so they are slow-walking something analogous to the current programme at the hall.”
“Oh. Is it working?”
“Too early to tell. They are well cared for, don’t worry.”
“What about the other one?” Cally asks.
“She was unsuitable for… entirely different reasons. She is still in training. And will hopefully never be necessary.”
“Necessary for what?”
Elle smiles darkly. “Necessary for whatever becomes necessary.”
“Woah.” Cally’s nodding again, but without real purpose. “Shit. Which one was she? Which washout?”
“I’m sorry, but I never remember their former identities. If you’d like, I could—”
“No,” Cally says, waving a hand. “Overall, I think I might be better off not knowing.” She stares into the middle distance for a few moments. “Fucking hell,” she mutters eventually. “That’s fucking mad.”
“If you’d prefer never to associate with me again,” Elle says, “I can have you in a car to the city of your choice within the hour. You will have an apartment, a—”
“Elle.” Glaring at her, Cally takes the hands she’s still holding and pries them apart, as if in the empty air between them they contain all Elle’s sins, all the things that will condemn her rightfully to hell. “Shut the fuck up.”
“But—”
“You know,” Cally continues as if Elle had never reopened her mouth, “I’d never even heard of you until after I graduated. And then it was in all hushed tones, right, like, she’s the money, she’s the scary woman with the private army and control of a hundred thousand companies, like the personal insurance company and the subsidiary that makes fucking diggers or something.”
“We don’t make diggers.”
“And then I learned your name, and you seemed a little more human; and then I met you, and you seemed actually sort of nice and only a little bit creepy, and—”
“Creepy?”
“Elladine,” Cally says, “you spent that whole fundraiser with your eyes glued to my tits. And yes, I know, they’re very nice and you paid for them, but you’re not subtle.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine, because then I met you again, and you were having an attack of the sads, and because I’m a sucker for hopeless cases — myself included — I ended up sleeping with you and finding you weirdly charming.”
“Thank you?”
“And now here we are, and I still find you charming and weird and incredibly energetic for your age. But if you have a flaw, Elle, it’s that you don’t know when to shut the fuck up.”
Nodding slowly, Elle is forced to admit that Cally might have a point.
Cally shuffles around in the bed again. Looks directly at Elle. “If I agree to agree that you’ve done some incredibly fucked-up shit, will you agree to stop worrying that I’m going to start screaming at the sight of you?”
“I… suppose.”
“And I have a further suggestion,” Cally says. “You need to keep talking about this. It’s been boiling up inside you. I can tell; my mum was a therapist. It’s why I turned out such a fucking mess. So what say we call one of your people, get them to make us a stupidly lavish lunch for, I don’t know, one-o’clock-ish? And then we can go make more coffee, maybe have showers, put clothes on like normal, civilised people, and get to work hashing out all your moral quandaries.”
"I can’t just… smother you with all this.” Elle frowns. “I feel like I’m using you.”
Cally looks down and hefts one of her breasts with her hand. “Yeah, well, I used you first.”
* * *
It’s the weekend, so it’s substitute sponsor day in the basement! And Bethany found herself rolling out of bed this morning feeling strangely excited about it. The regular girls all get (some of) the day off, and a handful of mildly coerced volunteers have been bussed in from around the country to watch over the wayward inhabitants of the basement at Dorley Hall. A week ago, it might have been a more intimidating thought — Bethany’s been going back and forth on how comfortable she is even appearing to make an effort — but she’s putting all that dumb shit behind her and concentrating on living life to the fullest extent that it is possible to live it when you are trapped in a concrete rats’ nest with several other extremely maladjusted people and Steph. The girl who is to be Bethany is still in many respects a void, but she’s a void with intentions, a thing that will be manifested, a person who will be all of her best aspects distilled and improved, and then lightly salted with some of her worst.
She needs to keep Steph and Maria around, though, if only so they can help her work out which is which. And these new sponsors? She gets to calibrate herself against them. She gets to dress nice and put on some extra lip balm to make her mouth appealingly shiny, and she gets to see which of them does a double take when Bethany Erin Question Mark walks into the room.
Woolly tights, because she’s been getting cold lately. Ankle socks, because her feet have been getting even colder. A pair of shorts, because Christine was down here before and Bethany thought her outfit looked cute. And a grey pullover with inexplicable cutouts at the shoulders, because Pippa helped move a bunch of clothes down for them to try on, and she stole a lot of it from Paige’s stash. Experimental fashion, probably. Or it’s a jumper for runners, and the holes are to let the sweat out, or maybe to cut down on wind resistance.
Whatever. She looks nice.
At least…
Shit. Does she look nice?
No. Fuck. She looks like an idiot, she looks like a guy who just raided his sister’s winter closet and put on the first three things he found. She looks like the worst kind of loser, the world’s greatest mistake.
The lock in her door rolls noisily over, and if she could, she would jam something in it, crowbar it to keep it shut, lock herself in here forever with her recently washed walls and her fresh duvet and her stupid fucking outfit. But she can’t, because Steph’s the one they trusted with access to all the doors, and the only way to keep her out is to unbolt the bed from the floor and rip the wardrobe from the wall and drag them both into a makeshift barricade. And that would take too long, because now the door’s opening and Steph is here and—
“Oh, hey,” Steph says, smiling. “You look nice!”
Bethany stops. Looks up warily. “I do?”
“Very cute.”
“Well, it’s just something I put tog—”
She doesn’t get to finish because immediately Steph’s kissing her, Steph’s holding her, Steph’s proving that the jumper with the holes in was an incredible decision because it’s got enough give to it that she can get her hands up inside it and press them against the bare skin of Bethany’s back without exposing her to the elements. Or to the one element, anyway; to the air conditioning.
Pulling away, stepping back, because she needs to reciprocate, Bethany takes in Steph’s outfit. She looks great, like she always does, like she has done ever since she properly accepted herself, since she stopped keeping erect the walls she put up to survive as long as she did. And the hormones, several months of them now, well, they help, don’t they? It’s easy to see who she’s going to be; it’s who she already is, but with tits.
“Shit, Steph,” Bethany says, “you’re fucking hot.”
Frowning and laughing, Steph says, “I am?”
She’s wearing a pair of jeans — that are so form-fitting that they’re almost jeggings — under a loose sort of button-up cardigan thing in greyish blue — or blueish grey? — with a hint of a lacy white cami underneath, and okay, fine, that’s nothing actually special or exciting, but it’s Steph that makes it so, especially when she looks at Bethany like that, all freckles and tilted smile and a little bit of shine on her cheeks that makes Bethany feel guilty for not doing makeup this morning.
Like she’s read her mind, Steph keeps one arm around Bethany’s waist, under her pullover, and with the other she reaches for the lip balm on the computer desk. She lets go of Bethany, which sucks initially, but then, after uncapping the lip balm with a look of concentration that makes Bethany want to kiss her again, she takes Bethany’s chin in her thumb and forefinger, pulls down Bethany’s lower lip with her middle finger, and coats her upper lip with cherry flavour. It’s such an intimate, delicate act that Bethany feels suddenly frozen by it, confused as to what she should do, as to whether she should reciprocate, and that gives Steph time to let go of Bethany’s lower lip and coat that, too.
“I kissed it off,” Steph says with a soft, loving smile, recapping the little tube of lip balm and slipping it into one of the barely there pockets in her jeans. “For later,” she adds.
Bethany feels like she’s floating. There’s something warm in her belly, something electric in her fingertips, something intense everywhere, something that makes her want to pull Steph close to her again and rip off those fucking almost-jeggings and—
What the fuck? All Steph did was kiss her and reapply her lip balm, so how in the living hell has such a simple thing made Bethany so fucking horny?
It’s the estrogen. It’s got to be the estrogen. Because, yeah, it used to be that Aaron could look at a freeze-frame from a show about hot cheerleaders or a suggestive statue or, at worst, a cloud shaped like a boob, and feel the urge to have a quick tug, but this is something else. This has an urgency to it that Bethany finds difficult to control. It’s like it’s coming from all of her at once.
“You want some breakfast?” Steph asks.
Bethany coughs, swallows, and says, “Yes.”
She’s still getting on top of it as they wind their way through the corridor to the lunch room, which the sponsors have set out as a breakfast bar, with the usual cereal variety packs and plates of croissants. Probably yesterday’s croissants; fresh baked goods are for girls who can do their own eyeliner without injuring themselves. Maria’s here, and Edy, watching over most of the intake. Missing are Martin and Ollie, but that doesn’t mean much. Lockdown’s gotten boring and routine, like every other week in the basement, and all their crises are either in the past or wrapped properly in neuroses and any spare neurons that might be lying around and buried in the back of the brain. Everyone’s talking quietly, pouring milk, drinking tea or coffee or whatever; starting the day, drama-free.
They might be trapped in an underground basement for fear of police discovery, but breakfast is breakfast. And, most importantly for Bethany, breakfast is extremely non-sexual. Famously so.
“Morning,” Maria says, breaking off from her conversation with Edy to round the table and briefly grasp Bethany’s shoulder. “Sleep well?”
A hundred stupid jokes float to the top of Bethany’s head, but all she says is, “Yeah, thanks.” She’s still buzzing, from the reaction she had to it, from the way her penis is struggling against both her boy-shorts and her shorts-shorts, and if she tries to be her usual self, she’s a hundred percent certain that within two sentences she’ll be espousing the benefits and softness of Steph’s lips, breasts — such that they are; little buds just like Bethany’s, good for funny feelings and grazing against doors and licking — and arse.
Maria taps a box of Coco Pops. “The usual?”
“Nah,” Bethany says, shaking her head and feeling weirdly like she doesn’t want to be predictable today. Or maybe any more in general. “Granola, if we have any. Or something else healthy. Aggressively healthy, if possible. I want to go in kind of a Weetabix direction.”
“Playing the classics, I see,” Maria says, shuffling through the cereal boxes until she finds a couple that are decked out in earthy colours and which have pictures of raisins and sheaves of wheat on the front instead of the hyper-saturated sugar-rush blues and yellows and cartoon mascots of Bethany’s regular choices. She can almost feel herself becoming healthier, a better person; more regular. She sets them down in front of Bethany. “Are you sure you don’t want the Coco Pops?”
Picking a box of granola, Bethany insists, “You gotta try everything once.”
“YOLO,” Maria agrees, nodding.
She pours for her, having decided apparently to wait on Bethany hand and foot this morning, probably because they’re not going to see each other for the rest of the day; she gets big-sistery when she knows they’re going to be apart for a while, which is one of the things that makes Bethany, if she thinks about it too much in the shower, start to ugly cry. Which is a much less productive use of her shower time than the other thing she does in there when she’s alone.
As Maria sets out the bowl and starts administering the oat milk, Adam speaks up from behind his equally healthy but much less exciting bowl of Weetabix. “What’s ‘yollow’?”
“It’s ‘you only live once’,” Leigh says. She’s got toast, Christ only knows from where. Tabitha favouritism, no doubt. Rushing it down the stairs while it’s still hot. Or there could always be a toaster in the dumbwaiter.
“YOLO,” Adam says, nodding thoughtfully.
“Forget it, Adam,” Raph says. “Don’t let the Millennial cuspers get you using dead memes.”
“What’s a ‘cusper’?”
“Friendly ghost,” Bethany says, catching up with the conversation.
Next to her, Maria rolls up an imaginary newspaper and whaps Bethany around the head with it. And Adam still looks confused, and Leigh looks exasperated, and Raph’s just smirking at everyone, and Maria’s here, and so’s Edy, and Steph is right next to her, and Bethany wonders what was ever so terrifying about being trapped down here in the first place.
* * *
One step through that fucking door, and she’s accepting it all back into her life again. This time, she’s not just visiting, rushing back to get Steph out. And this time, she’s not staying because her friends, her chosen family, suddenly all came back to her at once, and she had to stick around for as long as she could because how, in such a circumstance, could she possibly leave?
No, this time, Melissa is choosing to return to the hall. To live here for the foreseeable future. She’s actively deciding to slot herself back into this environment, to absorb all of its stresses, its ongoing crises, its dubious morals and artfully debated ethics. She’s got her whole life in suitcases in the back of her rented car, and when she wheels it all up the little ramp and clatters it into the kitchen, when those fucking thumbprint-locked doors shut behind her, she’ll have said to everyone she knows, everyone who is left who matters, that this, this place, this life, this philosophy, this is her.
She’s still in the car park, staring through the windscreen at the looming bulk of Dorley Hall in the middle distance, and she’s debating gunning the engine again and just reversing the fuck away from Dorley, from Saints, from Almsworth.
She won’t. Obviously. Apart from anything else, she doesn’t have anywhere else lined up to live, and the hall — via Tabitha, her semi-official liaison with the power structure here — has a new, nicer room set up for her, away from the action on the third floor, up with all the normal people. Another corner suite like Abby’s. They’re practically laying out the red carpet for her, and asking nothing in return bar her silence.
Yeah, she’s good at that. She never even once let slip around Zach that her wide-eyed curiosity around trans issues was as fake as her enthusiasm for those little boxes of flapjacks that got passed around when someone was leaving. She’s a really fucking good liar.
But they’re giving her a room for free forever, or at least until she and Abby and Shahida have ascertained that they are stable as a throuple and can start looking into pooling their incomes and getting a house together or something, and that means that she’s got to live here for real. She can’t just drift away like she did after graduation and she can’t just hang only with her friends and loved ones. No, she’s got to live at the hall and work a job like a normal person and walk around the university grounds where once she planned to kill herself with a smile on her face, or at least without bursting into tears in the shadow of Café One.
Shit. When they found her the job, maybe she should have thought longer about it before saying yes.
Except she can’t escape this place, can she? Abby’s all tied up here, still, because Christine’s here, and so are many of her other friends, and one of Melissa’s best friends is dating a sponsor, and Shahida’s settled into the place like she was born there, and, fuck, Steph is there, and watching her grow into the woman she always should have been, the woman she always has been, has the potential to be the greatest privilege of Melissa’s life, so perhaps she ought to just suck it the fuck up?
Yeah, perhaps. And it’s not like it’s going to be hard for her, anyway. Oh no, she’s got to lie, she’s got to put on a brave face; a lifetime of practice has prepared her for this. And Dorley Hall has no plans that she knows of deliberately to hurt her again.
Shit. Make a rash decision, cross the country for it, then sit in a rental car for twenty minutes, five minutes’ walk from the front door, and whine to herself. It’s becoming a pattern.
Snarling at herself, at her impulsiveness as much as her self-disgust, Melissa cracks open the car door, hauls herself out, and starts yanking suitcases out of the boot. Another girl passes by, presumably a student, and offers to help, but Melissa demurs, because that would be asking too much of a random stranger, and that’s something Melissa only does recklessly, and on purpose.
“For fuck’s sake,” she whispers to herself when she judges herself alone again.
She’s here. At the hall. To stay. For a hundred reasons, most of them very good and very logical and very sensible.
And there’s one other thing. One other thing that she needs the hall for, needs their resources. Something she needs Tabitha for.
She’s going to make it so Melissa can see Jenny again. So Melissa can get back that tiny little piece of her mum.
* * *
Good to have a reason to pull herself out of interview prep. Mum’s been telling her she doesn’t need to try so hard, that Edward knows the recruiter, that everything will be and can only be fine, but it’s not like Shahida’s ever not going to study for an interview! It’s how she got her job over in the States and it’s how she’ll get her new job here: by working at it, by being the best candidate, and by presenting herself as a properly motivated and precisely attired potential new employee. That the recruiter is a friend of the family means only, to Shahida, that she does not for once need to emphasise her white stepfather’s part of her double-barrelled surname.
She’s having Pop-Tarts while Mum frowns at her. She offered to whip something up, and she was halfway to retrieving a ball of dough from the fridge before Shahida insisted that, sorry, she’s meeting someone, and she’s really got to go, like, soon. The fact that it’s Melissa she’s meeting today did a lot to reduce Mum’s objections from anything verbal to a facial expression that Shahida has had a lot of time to grow accustomed to filtering out. And at least the Pop-Tarts mean that she isn’t going to have to spend her first day with Melissa in a week fielding anxious WhatsApp messages idly wondering if Shahida has had, perchance, something to eat yet.
What she still hasn’t worked out: how to tell Mum that she’s dating Melissa; how to tell her that both of them are also dating Abby; how to ask if Mum and Edward would like to meet Abby.
That’s quite the list! Nothing she needs to deal with right now, fortunately. Right now she can wash her plate and kiss her mum and hug Edward and escape into the mild cold without having to deal with any of the more complex concepts that have entered her life since she started papering Saints with pictures of Melissa’s old self, all those weeks ago.
* * *
Raph’s made a discovery: he doesn’t like sports bras. Or, possibly, he doesn’t like this sports bra; it pinches under his armpits and presses down on his sore chest and, okay, it’s nice that it means that the most sore parts of his chest don’t, for example, rub on his loose t-shirt, but it doesn’t mean he has to enjoy the sensation. He can instead heroically make the best of a bad situation.
“Stretch,” Leigh says. The moment they got up here, she beat a tactical retreat to the other side of the little gym room, to a wooden bench that made Raph laugh when he first saw it because it looks just like the ones they used to have at his old primary school, and started shedding clothes: hoodie, t-shirt, jogging trousers. Now she’s standing there, doing something complicated-looking with her hand and her thigh, wearing a vest over a sports bra and a pair of loose shorts over whatever underwear she presumably has on.
Wow. Those shorts aren’t all that loose, actually.
Suddenly, the question of whether or not Leigh tucks becomes the most important thing on Raph’s mind. Jane told him about tucking, and made amusing faces about how much she used to hate doing it, and Raph astonished himself by laughing. Because that’s not the kind of thing he ought to find funny, right? When he was in sixth form, one of the other lads was trying to gross people out by showing them image search results for ‘gross genital surgery’, and Raph came very close to losing his crap cafeteria lunch; a comprehensible reaction, surely. Now, though, somehow the thought that someone could find such a thing not only desirable, but a relief… Well, he laughed. He laughed to show her that he understood her, that he supported her, and she laughed with him.
She’s probably relieved that he can joke about it. Orchis are coming up soon, and thanks to his recent curiosity, he knows exactly how they work and he finds them a lot less intimidating than he would have before. He’s considering, when the time comes for his, sticking his finger in his mouth and making a popping sound when each of them comes out.
“Raph! Stretch!”
“What?”
Leigh’s not doing that thigh thing any more; she’s sitting on the floor with her legs stretched out in front of her and she’s grabbing at her knees. Shrugging, Raph starts stretching, starting with trying and failing to touch his toes, overbalancing, and almost falling over.
“Shit,” he comments.
“You should help him,” Bethany says to Leigh. She’s sitting in another corner, defiantly refusing to wear exercise clothes, which is another thing that Raph finds funny, because exercise clothes are all anyone wore down here for months. “Go over to him, Leigh. Show him how to stretch. Go on, put a hand on his back and another on his thigh and… guide him.”
“Piss off, Bethany,” Leigh says with a sigh in her voice.
“No, no, you should. If it helps, I can get Pippa to play some sexy music to get you both in the mood. It’ll be like a montage thing.”
Pippa, who along with Steph has been getting changed in the even smaller room attached to the little gym, swings lazily around the door frame and says, “I’m not putting on any sexy music, Beth.”
Shit. Pippa’s hot today.
Like, okay, she’s always hot, with her funky little pixie cut and her perpetual eyeliner and those dresses she likes to wear, but somehow, in her exercise gear, she’s hotter. Raph finds his gaze twitching downwards, and feels instantly guilty about it — hey, another new thing! — but he does get to confirm to himself that either Pippa tucks like she could give a TED talk on it, or she’s had the big snip, just like Jane.
Do they get together and compare notes? Do they get competitive about depth? Is there something in one of the rooms upstairs that’s like the height charts you always see in kids’ rooms on American TV shows, except it terminates in different colours at five inches, seven inches, nine inches?
There should be. Maybe he’ll suggest it.
Wait. He’s lost track of the situation. “What’s a stretch I can do without looking like a fucking idiot?” he asks.
“I’ll show you,” Steph says, walking over, “without it getting sexy.”
With a shrug, Raph says, “It can get sexy if you want.”
“I can still set Leigh on you, Raph,” Bethany says.
They’re here for yoga. Raph’s here because Steph was talking about how she uses yoga to relax and Raph, remembering Diana’s thing about learning shit, about trying new things, stuck his hand in the air like he was back in school — and like it was one of the times Dean wasn’t trying to show him something gross, either on the computer or cupped in the palm of his hand — and asked to be taught. Leigh’s here because she wanted to box today, to smack around those punching bags again, but Tabitha’s busy upstairs with that high-maintenance blonde girl, and it’s no fun hitting stuff without her, apparently. Pippa’s here both because she’s the designated sponsor keeping an eye on them all and also because, she said, ever since Steph’s first day here, when Pippa went to her cell to give her the lecture and found her upside down, she’s been interested in trying yoga, too.
(And that sounded hilarious, so Raph made Steph and Pippa tell the story, and laughed even harder when they both looked put out by his amusement. It’s not exactly a fun memory for them, or something.)
Meanwhile, Bethany’s here because… Well, actually, he doesn’t know why. Probably she doesn’t want to hang out with Martin downstairs, which makes no sense, because Martin’s actually sort of funny now. For a couple of days, Raph thought that Martin was like him, had made the logical choice at the logical time to go along with it all — though he goes back and forth on whether that was actually a choice he made or merely the result of being slowly worn down by the dimples Jane gets when she smiles — but Jane says no. Says Pamela’s been talking about him like he’s proceeding through the stages she expects of him at roughly the right pace, and that right now he’s experiencing the ‘euphoria of nothingness’. Jane curled her fingers and her lip when she said it, but Raph’s not sure he shares her cynicism about it. In fact, he thinks he kind of gets it: if he’d killed someone out of drunken recklessness, he’d want to stop existing, too. The fact that Raph forced an abortion is bad enough, and it’s something he’s going to have to fucking deal with inside his own head, sooner or later, but to have potato-mashed someone with a car? Fucked up. And Martin wallowed for the longest time, absorbed a tonne of abuse from the rest of them for it.
Anyway, Jane says that Pamela says that Martin’s moving beyond it at last, that he has found a kind of joy in the understanding that Martin Holloway will never return to the world, will never again have excuses made for him, will never again be unjustly elevated above other people. If he ever fucks up again, they’ll throw the fucking book at him, and Martin, or whoever he is by then, will probably try to angle himself so it hits him right in the face.
The upshot is that Martin’s talking now, and that’s cool, because he’s an interesting guy. Raph’s never known anyone who went to public school before, and now he knows two, and Martin, unlike Bethany, has been willing to talk about it. Mortifying to understand that soggy biscuit is a real thing. Considerably worse than learning about orchiectomies. Maybe that’s why Bethany’s reluctant to hang with Martin 2.0 — Martin 0.0? — because then she’ll have to relive all those traumatic evenings playing Everybody Wank on the Waitrose Cookie.
Steph leads Raph and Pippa through some simple stretches and then pronounces them ready to begin. As Raph, Leigh and Pippa stand, as instructed, before their mats, Steph turns around and says to Bethany, “You sure you don’t want to try it?”
“Yeah, Bethany,” Raph says, “come get Zen with us.”
Bethany frowns at the four of them. “My inner turmoil is the only thing keeping me upright,” she says, and snaps open the charging case for the headphones. “If I ever achieve inner peace, my heart will stop beating and I will fucking die.” With that, she jams the earbuds into her ears and hits play on whatever it is she’s got cued up. Probably that cheerleader show she’s obsessed with.
That solves it, at least, Raph muses as he forms his body into the first pose and does his best to hold it. Bethany’s not joining in because she’s being a fucking whiner.
Some things never change.
* * *
She’s over it. She’s totally over it. She’s completely, totally and utterly—
“Hey! Blonde girl! In or out?”
Right. Yeah, she probably shouldn’t just be standing outside the doors to the kitchen, dithering about pressing her thumb against the reader, should she? What did that girl Christine call it? Opsec. It’s probably not good opsec to behave as if the act of entering a normal kitchen is something you’ve got to psych yourself up for.
“In,” Melissa says through the glass, pleased to have settled for the sensible option in the pinch, and not the one that involves turning tail and running back to the rental car with her suitcases as fast as her legs can carry her. Besides, turning and running is almost clichéd for her at this point. The fresh, new Melissa faces her problems, eventually.
“So…?”
The woman waiting on the other side of the glass is clearly waiting for Melissa to do something. She’s not one of the girls she knows, looking older than the others; early thirties, maybe. Sponsor age, Melissa automatically thinks of it, though there are twenty-two-year-old sponsors now! God, she’s out of date.
“So?” Melissa says, echoing the woman.
Another woman of similar age joins the first one at the door. “Hey, pumpkin spice,” she says, which causes Melissa reflexively to look down at her outfit, “this is a dormitory for, uh—” she glances at her friend, who just giggles, “—people with certain special qualifications. If you’re allowed to be here, press your thumb on the reader.”
Oh. Of course that’s what they’re waiting for. Melissa’s too rattled by this. Almost as if quitting her job in Manchester and ending her tenancy has entirely erased the fragile and limited non-Dorley safety net she’s built up.
“Right,” she says, shaking her head and smiling, because she doesn’t like being under the gaze of these strangers and sort of wants to reassure them, in case they think she’s a crazy person or something. It takes her a moment to release her grip on one of her suitcases — she hadn’t even realised she’s been grasping the handles so tightly that she’s made her hands sore — and then she presses her thumb against the reader and the door locks make their familiar and overly loud whirring, clunking sound.
“Are you okay?” says the first woman as Melissa starts shepherding her two suitcases through the door. If Melissa were to guess, she’s slightly the older of the two, and something about her demeanour says mum. She’s wearing almost no makeup, but her dark skin looks healthier than Melissa’s, so she probably doesn’t need to. She almost definitely hasn’t spent the last several nights losing sleep and becoming more and more haggard, like Melissa.
“Yeah,” Melissa says.
“Angela,” the woman says, taking one of the suitcases out of Melissa’s hands. She nods at the white woman next to her, who follows her cue and takes the other one. “That’s Gillian.”
“Would you like a drink?” Gillian asks, wheeling her suitcase to the doorway that leads to the dining room — which is, against all expectation, closed. She leans it against the wall by the door, and holds out a hand for the handle to the suitcase Angela’s been dragging after her.
“Um,” Melissa says, unsure. “I’m sorry, but am I supposed to know you?”
Angela laughs. “No, so don’t worry about it. I’m sure we—” she points to Gillian and back to herself, “—are supposed to know who you are, but I didn’t have time to read the info packet. Thea’s been sick, and we think she’s over it now. Doesn’t stop us from— I’m sorry.” She laughs again, more gently. “I’m talking as if you know who the hell we are.”
“Class of 2011,” Gillian says. “We’re pitching in.”
“You’ve heard about the lockdown?”
“Vaguely,” Melissa says. Abby’s mentioned it, but only circumspectly, since they were chatting via text. She could have looked it up, but getting past the surface-level graduate site requires passwords Melissa’s long since forgotten; she only remembers the graduate one because it’s Ada Yau’s birthday.
“Well, the sponsors have been run ragged,” Angela says, “so they’re mostly taking the weekends off, and they’re bringing in grads—”
“Like us,” Gillian puts in.
“—to watch the boys while they catch up on sleep. It’s going to be nostalgic to see the ol’ basement again.”
“Nostalgic?” Melissa says.
“So nostalgic.”
“I’m making,” Gillian says. She’s poised by the kettle, her finger on the switch. “Do you want?”
“Um. No. Thank you.”
“You sure?”
“We’ll make sure you get the best mug,” Angela says.
“Mug?” Melissa echoes, aware that she sounds a little stupid. She ought to be used to Dorley grads being aggressively normal at her by now — too normal, sometimes; occasionally it all feels like one grand act being put on to keep her, Melissa, who has never quite contrived to feel completely normal even now that she lives in a body she can comfortably call her own, perpetually on the back foot — but, clearly, she is not.
“I never thought I’d miss them,” Gillian says. “But it’s like coming home, in a way. Drinking tea out of a mug with a stupid joke on it.”
“And they have way more now,” Angela says. “I barely recognise any of them. Check this one out.” She grabs her mostly empty mug off the table and holds it up for Melissa to read. It says, in classic motivational poster style, Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. ‘Wise’ has been crossed out and replaced, in typewriter-style text, with vulnerable to an organised kidnapping operation on dark and deserted early morning streets.
“Wow,” Melissa says, feeling that some kind of response is required.
“Mine’s better,” Gillian says. She’s futzing with the kettle now, so she just nods at her mug, which is on the sideboard, and which is printed with the logo of a famous breakfast cereal — though, for copyright reasons, as if that is something Dorley Hall could feasibly get done on, it merely says BREAKFAST CEREAL inside the logo. Underneath, in the kind of fake handwriting font that curses cereal boxes everywhere, it says, Fortified with vitamins, minerals, and absolutely nothing else, we promise! “Last chance for me to make you a tea.”
Before, Melissa felt anxious, intimidated, like she’d just got to the end part of making the latest mistake in a long series of them; now, she mostly feels exasperated. The hall is clearly operating as normal, and Melissa — as normal — is blundering around like she just walked onstage on opening night but doesn’t know any of her lines.
“No,” she says. “Thanks. I, um, should go see Tabitha Forbes. Do you know where she is?”
“Dining hall,” Angela says. “But before you go… You got our names, but we never got yours.”
“Right. Sorry. It’s Melissa. Melissa Haverford.”
“Oh!” Angela says.
“Oh,” Gillian says.
“Right,” Angela says.
Gillian giggles.
Melissa doesn’t know whose response she least prefers, so she takes her luggage by the handles, says, “Dining hall? Got it. Thanks for the help,” and gets out of the kitchen as quickly as she can.
“Any time!” Gillian calls after her.
Just what Melissa needs: more Dorley women who are older than her, more together than her, who have kids — because Angela mentioned a kid, didn’t she? or did Melissa just think she looked like the quintessential mum and filled one in herself? shit, she’s tired — and who can therefore make her feel like she’s trapped in an extended adolescence, like someone who grew older but didn’t grow up, someone who without the intervention of the hall — again — might have spent the next decade in her low-level administrative job because she was too consumed with the processes of being an adult to actually be an adult.
She shakes her head, almost swears under her breath. No, she’s better at this now! She’s in a real relationship! And, yeah, okay, it was Dorley’s contacts who got her this job at Saints, and it’s undoubtedly Dorley’s contacts who are going to ensure that she rises through the ranks at a plausibly steady pace — they need people inside local infrastructure — but, fuck it, it’s going to be her that shows up every day, and she can do better at this job than at her last one. Hell, maybe she’ll use her own newly acquired influence to get Zach that better job he was hinting at, and impress the hell out of him with her competence when he arrives.
Melissa’s getting a new new start; she doesn’t have to keep wallowing in the bullshit she dragged along behind her when she got her last new start.
She spies Tabitha on one of the far tables, sitting with a sandwich and a laptop, and she walks over to her, her suitcases rattling on the slightly uneven floor. As she goes, she senses multiple eyes turn to her, and she does her best not to be self-conscious about it. She looks like shit, she’s aware, but anyone who knows who she is ought to know how long a drive she just got done with; she’s allowed to look terrible.
Tabitha looks up as she approaches. “Hey, Melissa,” she says. “Welcome home. We’ve got your new room ready up on third. You know the pretext, right? University employee, disadvantaged background, former student, blah blah blah.”
Melissa nods. You can usually guess Dorley backstories; they all hinge on emotive but nonspecific sob stories. “Yeah, I’ve got it. Listen, I wanted to talk to you about the Jenny thing. It’s—”
“The Jenny thing?”
“Aunt Bea said you were going to arrange a meeting with Jenny Yau? She’s someone from my past, and—”
“Yeah. Yeah. Got it.” Tabitha sighs, and glares at Melissa’s luggage. “You couldn’t even unpack before you started trying to bend the entire hall to your will again?” But before Melissa can say anything else, Tabitha’s shoulders relax from a position Melissa hadn’t even noticed was tense, and she says, “Shit. Sorry. Crappy week. Overworked. Shouldn’t take it out on you.”
“I heard,” Melissa says. “The lockdown, right?”
“The lockdown, the bodies, the soldiers breathing down our necks…” Tabitha covers her eyes with her hand for a moment.
When Melissa gets up to her new room, and when she’s settled in, she’s going to read all those briefing packets Abby’s been leaving in the secure folder for her. So what if she has to embarrass herself by asking someone to authenticate new login details for her? She’s clearly behind. Bodies? Either Abby didn’t say anything about that in her texts, or—
Wait. Shit. The Stenordale thing. She knows about that. It was on the news. And it’s horrible.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t around to help,” she says, feeling entirely genuine about it.
“What could you have done?” Tabitha asks. Her tone isn’t accusatory, just exhausted, so Melissa doesn’t take offence. Even though, she realises, if this lockdown thing continues, she’s probably going to join the other graduates in filling in for the sponsors, now that she’s a resident here again.
If the other sponsors are as knackered as Tab seems, she’ll do so gladly. So long as she can get some good sleep for herself first.
“Well,” Melissa says, smiling, “if you need someone around to make things worse…?”
She gets a laugh out of Tabitha. Good.
“It’s good to have you back, Melissa,” Tabitha says, still smiling. She leans back in her chair and stretches, making little appreciative noises as she does so. “God, I’m going to be glad to be done with this.” She flicks at the laptop, making the screen wobble. “You’d think a clandestine forced feminisation operation wouldn’t generate so much paperwork. I’m giving it an hour, and then I’m going to nick an Ambien or two from the medicine cabinet and if Maria or Edy or Beatrice ask for me, I’m going to do the biggest, most satisfying snore.”
“It’s really been that bad?”
“Oh, Melissa. It’s sucked.”
They chat about nothing for a few minutes, with Melissa feeling like she can’t really move on without being insulting, even though both of them are very obviously getting more and more tired as the conversation progresses. Lucky, then, that she is saved by the sound of high heels clicking rapidly as someone rushes across the room towards them, and by an arm that spins her around almost too quickly for her to track.
Shahida, by way of saying hi, gives her a kiss.
“I’m so lucky,” she says when they pull apart. “Abby’s not going to be here until later, which means I get to help you unpack!”
“You want to help her?” Tabitha asks.
“Duh,” Shahida says. “And hi, Tab.”
Tabitha snorts. “Takes all sorts.”
“Where’s the rest of your stuff?” Shahida says, turning back to Melissa.
“Um,” Melissa says. “This is it.”
“Just these two suitcases?”
“Yes?”
“Em. They are… Well, they’re not big, are they?”
“I took a bunch of stuff to the charity shop, I told you. What’s left is mostly clothes. And my laptop.” Melissa shrugs. “Didn’t think I needed to bring my crappy pots and pans back down south, honestly.”
“Wait,” Tabitha says, leaning forward, “you’re telling me that you just moved cities, and those two fucking Primark suitcases contain your entire life?”
“Yes?”
“Christ. Abby really was a shit sponsor, wasn’t she?” Melissa would respond to defend her, but Tabby’s already getting up from her chair. She takes Melissa by the shoulder. “Look, Melissa,” she says, “I’ll try to make the Jenny Yau thing happen sooner rather than later. I will. But these things take time. They require people. We need to look into her afresh, check out her job, her family, her friends. We have to know her schedule, her social life. I know you and Abby both have a rep for just up and doing shit and having it all work out okay, but that’s not actually how we run things here.”
Someone, passing by, says, “It’s not?”
“Can it, Chetry,” Tabitha says. Indira Chetry sticks out her tongue at Tabitha, smiles at Melissa and Shahida, then picks up Tabitha’s empty plate and leaves for the kitchen, gathering up other dirties from other tables as she goes.
“Why all the prep?” Melissa says. “She’s Jenny. She’s going to be overjoyed to see me. Like Shahida’s mum was. Like Amy and Rachel.”
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Tabitha says, “Please don’t cite Rachel as an example of a stress-free onboarding. She made Pippa Green cry.”
“Sorry. But she’s fine now. And the others—”
“Will Jenny Yau be fine? Do you know that for certain? Do you have absolutely zero doubt? Because if there’s any chance she’ll take it badly, we could all be finished. You know this.”
“She’s… She’s Jenny.”
“You haven’t seen her for years,” Tabitha says. She starts counting on her fingers. “She could have got religion; she could have joined up with those gender critical maniacs Professor Frost keeps riling up; she might just be a common-or-garden bigot, and it never came up when you knew her before. And no, before you say it, comfort with other forms of queerness or other forms of gender variance is not a reliable indicator that someone will not be fucking weird about trans women. Again, you know this. Hell,” Tabitha adds, sitting on the table, “she might be fine about it, but you might fuck it up. You could go in unprepared, say the wrong thing, she gets the wrong end of the stick, and before you know it, we’re fending off the cops. It almost happened with Rachel, remember? So. Melissa. Are you certain?”
“Shit,” Melissa says. “No.” Shahida’s rubbing her arm, comforting her.
“There you go. So we do it our way. It will happen, that’s a promise. It’s just…”
“I know. These things take time.”
* * *
When the news about Stenordale broke, Valérie returned to her room, and Beatrice barely saw her in the time after. They passed in the halls, they met and spoke sometimes in various kitchens, in Bea’s office, or down in the dining hall, but Valérie came no farther into Bea’s flat than the first room. It was as if she was afraid, suddenly, to be intimate, to be herself; or, perhaps, that she was too angry to be.
She spoke once of her fear that without an enemy, she might cease to function. She worried that there was nothing more to her than stubbornness, bitterness, and rage.
Last night, when she finally returned to Beatrice’s bedroom, Valérie discovered the rest of herself. Or began to.
It is a fine thing, Beatrice knows, to reclaim yourself as a sexual being when your experiences to that point have been entirely abusive, have been coerced, have been with a knife held to your throat. And more so, when the body that is being abused is not the one you would have chosen. You were transformed into something else, and you were punished for it, your shape both appealing and nauseating in your eyes and in the eye of every beholder. When you have escaped, when you have taken back life and body and concluded that there is little recourse but to embrace what was forced upon you, you must learn anew how to perform intimacy. How to be intimate. How to appreciate your body, love it, exult in it.
You can feed a body, you can exercise it and paint it and dress it up, and these are things you can do and do well while still finding your inner self an expression of ambivalence, but pleasure cannot be imposed from without. You cannot force it.
You must not.
Last night, Valérie let herself into Bea’s flat and walked silently over to the desk. Closed the laptop, put aside the glass of gin, and untied the cord holding her robe closed. She told Beatrice that she had discovered within herself a need, a need that she tried for days to deny, to push down into the dark place which imprisons the things that have been done to her, but she could not. In her lingerie, in her makeup, Valérie politely and firmly asked Beatrice for a fuck.
The lust was practically dripping from her voice.
But, Valérie apologised, the thing that she once used for such a purpose is no longer suitable, not even, she suspects, with the assistance of miraculous modern medicine, and she is not ready to be penetrated for pleasure.
Beatrice stood, took her hands, lightly and delightedly kissed her, and led her into the bedroom, where she spent a moment getting it ready, getting herself ready, providing a little more alcohol and a little music and laying out in front of Valérie some of the more approachable toys from her collection. Valérie disdained the straps and the vibrators and almost all the other things, and that was fine, for Beatrice sold access to her body and her expertise for many, many years, and she does not need more than her fingers and her tongue to inspire someone to find pleasure in herself.
Last night, Valérie began to reclaim her body. Began to make it hers, as much as she has made the life that was forced onto her into a proud refutation of those who abused her. In Beatrice’s arms, as they lay in the afterglow, Valérie said, very softly and with much amusement, “Fucking shit. I suppose I really am a woman, after all.”
They kissed, and before long, were asleep.
Now, this morning, with the messages queuing up on her phone and three knocks on the outer door, all of which they have ignored, Beatrice is finally admitting to herself that she and Valérie should probably get out of bed, if only to shower, to find something to eat, and to make coffee. Perhaps finding and putting on clothes should be part of this endeavour, too.
She feels revitalised. New again, which is a strange thing to feel at— Jesus, she’s going to be fifty-six this year! She’s too old to be having revelatory experiences, to have her perspective shift and her world rocked, and yet fucking Valérie Barbier did indeed qualify. More than their early, abortive fumblings, when Valérie first returned to her; more than anything Beatrice ever did with Elle or anybody else. And Val’s feeling it too, stretching and smiling and chatting happily and seeming as if the preceding decades were a bad dream, seeming like someone who at one point in her life woke up as a woman and walked into it as naturally and easily as if it were her heart’s desire.
“Work,” Bea says, articulating with one syllable and a sigh all the thoughts that are necessary. She kicks off the covers, accidentally also kicks the bottle of lube that must have found its way somewhere towards the bottom of the bed overnight, and can’t even see where it went. At least it’s water-based; as long as it isn’t dribbling into a socket, it’s probably fine.
“Saturday,” Val replies, but she follows Beatrice out of bed and, while Bea is distracted looking for the lube — because it might have gone somewhere untoward and might not have ended up exactly where she finds it, rolled under the dresser, offending no-one and certainly not dribbling on anything — she slips into the shower first, laughing as she closes the door to the bathroom most of the way, inviting Bea to follow her, if she wishes.
She does.
It’s gone midday by the time they are dressed and presentable, and the giggles have mostly left them, which is all to the good, because Beatrice has a hall to run, and she’s been neglecting it recently, she’s well aware. Oh, she’s had her reasons, and she’s been worried about Valérie and stressed about Stenordale and the Smyth-Farrows — who have inconveniently decided to establish themselves as players in the niche and extremely distressing field of to-order unwilling transformation — and she and everyone else knows that the hall is in good hands when those hands are Maria’s, but still. She has emphatically not been present. She ordered the lockdown, and what has come from it? Last she checked, a basementful of miserable boys and girls, and a whole lot of stress. And where are the police? Elle’s source inside the investigation describes total bafflement, frustration with the degree of degradation thanks to the damp, porous soil, and a single pair of breast implants that have proven impossible to trace to their origin and are, anyway, being treated as anomalous. The working theory is that Crispin Smyth-Farrow liked to acquire young men — a supposition based, Beatrice understands, largely on the implied heights of the recovered bodies, which fall more towards the assigned-male end of the spectrum — and that however he went about this, whether he hired rent boys and would not let them leave, or whether he straight-up kidnapped people, a woman must have been swept along by mistake. Wrong place, wrong time.
All very grisly, but none of it points to the hall. Still, the police are due to make a public statement on Monday, she’s been told; any information they do not have access to, if there is any, will doubtless surface then.
She and Valérie are still milling about in Beatrice’s office, ready to face the world but feeling, in Bea’s case, almost a little shy about it, about how little doubt there can be as to what they got up to last night — if that Jodie girl makes another MILF joke, she really will basement her again, just for the day; she and the others were bad enough when Valérie first came back, when their nights together, such as they were, were largely chaste — when there’s another knock at the outer door, and this time, she responds, opening the door to find a red-faced Edy, who frowns at her, glances at Valérie, and then marches right over to Beatrice’s desk. She opens Beatrice’s laptop, futzes with it for a few moments, and then turns it to face Bea and Valérie.
“Sorry,” she says, “but you need to see this. It went up about an hour ago.”
On the screen is a still image of a woman, and Bea feels Valérie stiffen as she recognises her more quickly than Bea does.
“It’s her,” Valérie says. “The Smyth-Farrow woman. Henrietta.”
“Sorry,” Edy says again, and reaches down to tap the spacebar, starting the video. “It gets worse.”
Henrietta Smyth-Farrow is making a public statement about the fire at the family manor and the discoveries on its grounds. She and her brother Alistair are saddened, of course, and deeply moved, and their first priority is restitution for the families of the victims. If and when those families come forward, she says, she and her brother can offer financial compensation, and though she understands that this pales in comparison to the loss of a loved one, it is her hope that monetary aid will at least begin to heal the old wounds that have been reopened by this incident.
Their father, she says, was a depraved man. Given to flights of ungodly desire, driven to hide his shame within the walls of her childhood home. They were aware of the men he visited, she claims, but as for everything else, she and Alistair were shipped off to boarding school at the first opportunity, there to remain until their departure for Cambridge. They never did return home, and escaped their father to the United States of America, there to seek comfort in the worship of God, and fellowship in the families of His children.
She wishes there was more she could do to help, but the reclamation of Stenordale Manor through their holding company was in its earliest stages when the place burned to the ground. She believes that prior to their legal repurchase, it was effectively squatted in by parties unknown. None of this, however, should distract from what she believes to be the final act of this investigation: locating her father’s accomplices.
There are two that she knows of, she says. Two who were there, if not from the start, then regularly enough even for her and her brother to encounter them. Find them, and there may be a chance at justice.
Find Frances Barton. Find Vincent Barbier.
The video falls silent; the screen goes black. And for fully five seconds, no-one says a word.
Then, as if suddenly reactivated, Valérie steps forward, closes the laptop, and turns back to face Bea. “Béatrice,” she says, “we are going to have this woman killed, yes? Horribly, painfully, buried at sea?”
It takes Bea a moment to push herself to reply. “I imagine so,” she says. Her voice sounds hollow, and she knows she ought to be thinking all this through, strategising, but she simply cannot.
“Then let us make our coffee and forget about her.”
“But…” Bea’s floundering, confused. And Valérie’s there with her hands on her hips, waiting for her to come up with something useful. Or with something, at any rate. So Beatrice tries. “But she named you! She named you in an active murder investigation!”
“She named a dead man, a man whose trail went cold in 1985. Vincent Barbier died before some of the investigating officers were even born, Béatrice. He certainly died before anyone digitised their records. And his parents? They died in London; no-one will look for me here, and absolutely no-one will look for me in the body of the woman who stands before you now.”
“This is provocation—”
“But not for us, I think.” Val’s frowning, thinking. She glances at Edy. “Henrietta Smyth-Farrow has been threatening Elladine Lambert lately, has she not?”
“Um, yes,” Edy says. “By lawyer. Making demands about Trevor Darling. And, um, there was something else in the report just this morning, but I haven’t read it yet. Maria has.”
“There you go,” Val says. She catches Bea staring at her, probably open-mouthed, for Beatrice feels as if her whole body has ceased to function, and she definitely couldn’t hazard a guess as to what her face is doing at the moment. “Don’t give me that look, Béatrice. Just because I barely left my room, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t reading the reports. I keep up to date with Stenordale like it is a new mole on my buttock. And this? This is not for me. Nor is it for Frances, I think. Crispin’s daughter has been threatening Elladine; this is for her. She probably thinks Frances and I are at a Peckinville facility; no way in the world she thinks we’re here. This is using the internet and the police department to send the world’s most elaborate message of ‘I know where you live and I’m coming for you and all of your things.’”
“Why wouldn’t you be here?” Edy asks, and Bea’s grateful, because it’s the question she might have asked if she were capable, even though she thinks she already half-knows the answer.
“Why would we? Frances was part of Dorothy’s regime; as far as Henrietta’s intelligence goes, if she came back here, you’d have killed her already, just as you did with the nurse, Karen whatever-her-name-was. But she’s still a valuable intelligence asset, so she’s most likely locked in a cell somewhere on Peckinville property. As for me, well, why would I return to the place that tortured me? What possible motivation would I have to come back here? No, they think I’m safely at Peckinville, too. Especially if they have intelligence that Trevor has been wandering the grounds at that facility we visited; his presence probably places all of us there. Frances in a cell, me in rehabilitative custody, and Trevor… wandering. Wandering and complaining about his chest.”
“What about… us?” Beatrice asks.
“They don’t know,” Valérie says with a shrug. “Or they know that we were close when we were here, decades ago, and they don’t think it’s important. Frances said that Dorothy never took friendships or relationships between the girls terribly seriously.”
“So why not name the hall?” Edy asks. “If she’s threatening Ms Lambert, I mean.”
“She wants it. You haven’t met her, Edith. Neither of you have. She is fascinated by women like us. I saw it in her the moment I stood up for myself at that ridiculous dinner. And I outright told her that you can’t just break a man and have him become your girlish servant, that it takes care and training to do it properly. I don’t think she would risk exposing the hall before she has had a chance to claim it for herself, or at least to remove some of its most delectable prizes from its ranks.”
“I don’t understand how you’re so calm…” Bea mutters.
Valérie takes her hand, takes it by the tips of her fingers. The gentlest, most delicate connection. A connection that Bea will lose if she doesn’t work to keep it up, and so she does.
“Because I have seen these people,” Valérie says. “Not just Henrietta and her idiot brother; all of them. They are controlled by their hunger, defined by it, and they will chase it as a cat will chase a mouse. They think themselves untouchable. They are playing a grand game with the world, Béatrice, and it is not just people like us who are the pieces; it is whole nations. And even those without such lofty power, like Henrietta Smyth-Farrow, they aspire to it. They consider themselves worthy of it. Your Elladine Lambert is the same. Now. Come. We should go downstairs. I suspect many of your girls are panicking.”
“You’re not wrong,” Edy says.
Beatrice is still staring at Valérie, still trying to understand her, to process all this. But it’s like she said before: without an enemy against which to define herself, Valérie was falling. And while Bea helped her gain some of herself back, it is still early days, and the greater part of Valérie Barbier needs a fight, no matter how big or how small.
She functions best in the fire.
2020 January 19
Sunday
It would have been so easy to turn away from all this, to return to her room, to continue to brood over the swept-up fragments of her candles, to nurse her memories and her grudges. When she saw that statement on Béatrice’s computer screen, when that uppity Anglo-Amerloque invoked her former name for the world to hear, she could have retreated.
But she didn’t. In the wake of the discovery of the bodies, Valérie was childish. She acted like someone who does not know how to cope with misfortune, who does not understand why the world punishes them in ways that it does not punish others. She became… pathetic.
In the aftermath of Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s statement, with young Edith staring at her in disbelief and Béatrice utterly failing to mask her horror, Valérie was satisfied. Vindicated. That her assessment of the woman had been proven correct; that Valérie herself is still at the centre of events, being pawed over by dreadful people as if she is some kind of valuable pet or intriguing trinket. And she has always found power in such a position, for when people reach for you, that is your chance to bite.
And in her belly, the same boiling fury. In her spine, the same coiling rage. In her head, the same thumping, furious hatred. Old friends all.
Crispin Smyth-Farrow died and Dorothy Marsden disappeared and Frances turned out over the years to have constructed something that functions almost like a conscience out of the scraps of latent malevolence and spiteful, gleeful violence that drove her younger self, and Valérie was left without a lightning rod for her spite. When the news came out about her girls, she felt useless, and in that, she became useless, unable to function, unable to process it all.
Now? In front of the whole world, some rich bitch just invoked the name of her dead self, and Valérie feels alive again. Feels the way she did when she got to hurt Crispin just right, the way she did when the visitors to old Dorley were incautious with their sharp implements, the way she did when Callum, the stupid boy, let her get too close, thinking his weapon could protect him from the purity of her hatred. And she’s better than all that now, because she is free, free to move, free to act, and she intends to dance on Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s grave and then move directly onto Dorothy Marsden.
The latest avatar for Valérie’s abuse at the hands of the powerful tried to use her as a weapon against another aristocrat, tried to make her into a game piece, and she has been revitalised by it.
And the fact that she had, for the first time in many, many decades, a proper good fuck just the night before, that helps, too.
Today, then, is the first of many small steps towards the new future, the future in which they are rid of the powerful entirely — with the sole and apparently enduring exception of the one who bankrolls this place, the one whose guilt and whose rage might, perhaps, rival Valérie’s. Elladine Lambert is coming to Dorley Hall, along with some number of her retinue, and the girls have been clearing out a room on the first basement to receive her, because there is going to be a briefing. Béatrice must be there, and Valérie needs to be there, so she is escorting her.
And, occasionally, stopping in the corners of stairwells, to kiss her, to promise her that she is okay, that she is not about to retreat again to her room, there to be weak, there to be useless.
Valérie is a bomb, and her fuse has been lit.
* * *
The village of portacabins out back of Dorley Hall has given itself a makeover. It still sports the camouflage netting over top, the often-rowdy cabin at the back where the women spend their off hours, and the infirmary — currently home, thankfully, to no patients but the soldier who got a stinging nettle rash and needed ointment — but now, also, there are signs up suggesting to visiting students that they consider a lucrative career in private enforcement. There’s a banner proclaiming the Peckinville Group’s proud financial support of disadvantaged women students, which surely, if these were less serious times, would by now have been vandalised by one of the reprobates from the hall. There are even leaflets.
Camouflage can take many forms.
Elle, flanked by four of her security people — but not Cally, who wanted to come and who was not pleased by Elle’s insistence that she remain at home at the facility, where she can be safe — takes the shorter of the two sloping fire escapes. She’s headed directly to the first basement, the one which is still, after all these years, tragically underutilised. As she often does, Elle finds herself looking around with the eye she sees employed by the TV people who strip old houses to the brick and bone and build them back considerably gaudier. Everywhere, there is potential; everywhere, there are empty rooms, dozens upon dozens of them, all wired for power, piped for heat and water, and connected to the AC ducts that thread through both underground floors. There are plans to build out a proper surgical suite, yes, and a makeshift gymnasium has apparently been taking shape, but the first basement still sits mostly empty.
Perhaps, when all this is done with, she will invest.
Jan asked her not to do this in person. Said that she was equally suited to give the briefing. Did everything but outright order Elle to stay on Peckinville property, to respect her own safety the way she seems dedicated to respecting Cally’s. Henrietta Smyth-Farrow might not stop at lawyers, she suggested. But Elle’s been getting itchy feet, especially when it comes to seeing the hall again. Dorley is her baby — as Cally has repeatedly recently reminded her — and the girls deserve her full attention.
Two of her security people remain with her in the hallway while the others inspect the room that has been prepared. A moment later, they give her the nod, and form a guard outside the door, two on each side. It is officious enough that Elle feels almost embarrassed when she enters, finding a smattering of sponsors inside, and she clings to that sensation. It is only right and proper for her to be humble here, for her to understand the disparity between her immense wealth and status and the more reduced circumstances of every girl at the hall, who are neither rich nor influential, whose very identities, legal and social, have been conjured from nothing.
“Hi,” says the girl Edith, waving lazily from where she is sitting on the front row. Next to her is Maria, posed a little more formally, who smiles. Various others, including Indira, Nadine, and Charlene, the butch one, greet her, and Elle feels yet more self-conscious as she glides to the front of the room.
All eyes on her. This ought to be a situation in which she thrives, and yet she contrives to feel, in front of these women, inferior. Trapped in a state of arrested development, where women who a decade ago slept with her have now moved on, found themselves proper relationships, while Elladine remains stagnant. Remains the woman she was made.
Bloody hell, she’s really going round the bend recently, isn’t she? Shut up, Elladine. Or Cally will tell her off again.
From the side of the room, Beatrice catches her eye and winks at her. Damned woman always could read her mind. She’s with Valérie Barbier, and something about the way they stand together confirms it: they’re together. They’re together, and Beatrice is someone else’s now.
Just as it always was meant to be.
It helps, actually. She pushes through the briefing quickly, professionally, passing on everything she has, everything that has been passed to her. She keeps it simple, straightforward, because at this point, there is little involvement that will be required from the women of Dorley Hall:
The police investigation, frankly, is swamped. They’ve assigned several of their number to follow ‘leads’ that have come in from the public, but since almost every single one has been from some unfortunate soul who had a son or a brother or a friend go missing sometime in the last several decades… Well. They’ve been inundated. Genius move by Henny, as much as Elle dislikes admitting it: offer compensation, and suddenly every missing persons case in the country reopens, every bereaved family calls in, hopeful. In such a flood of data, a pattern is impossible to discover, especially given that even the idea of resexing has not crossed the investigation’s collective mind, and that Dorley, old and new, has historically selected targets such that the local area’s missing persons statistics are not significantly higher than the national average. Especially with London right there and Stenordale Manor being a significant distance away.
One of the girls — one of the younger ones, a girl with bleached-blonde hair cut short — asks how, exactly, they have managed such a statistical feat. Fully half this year’s intake was taken on or near university grounds.
“Outreach,” Elle says. “Because of the programme’s nontraditional approach, it is able to provide more comprehensive assistance to those whose malfeasance or, in many cases, ideation can be alleviated without recourse to the full programme.” She coughs, and switches out of her sales-pitch register. “Bluntly, therapy is not necessarily helpful to a young man who is staring down the weight of the world and facing it alone. But a little subtle manoeuvring, some new friends, maybe an income stream, a glimpse of real hope… It can be enough to prevent them from walking out into the cold and never returning.” Feeling a mischievous urge, one that often comes upon her when she gets to deliver genuinely good news, she strikes a pose, palms out, and does a little curtsey. “And thus we keep the numbers down!”
“Are you saying,” the girl says, “that we perform charitable outreach and save lives… as a smokescreen?”
“I take it you are not familiar with the wider charitable sector.”
“It’s true, Pip,” Edy says, turning to address the girl who, yes, is called Pippa. Pippa Green. Pretty, and with a nice, deep alto voice. She’d be prettier if she grew out her hair, though; perhaps also if she lightened her eyeliner a spot. “When you look at the big leagues, charity’s mostly sinecures, tax write-offs, and support for photogenic animals. At least we get concrete results, inside the hall and out.”
Pippa mulls this, going silent.
The briefing goes on. They speak of the theory — Valérie’s, apparently — that Henny Smyth-Farrow is targeting Elle and Peckinville with the release of Valérie and Frances’ names, and Elle says that she and Jan and her analysts agree. There’s little to lead the investigation toward the hall, from what any of them can tell, and even those in the local constabulary who assisted Dorothy’s Dorley Hall are unlikely to come forward; the thing about dirty cops who take bribes is that they don’t tend to speak up. The investigation will continue to be an extant threat for quite some time, in absolute terms — even an under-resourced and mostly rural police department will not quickly consign remains enough to build almost two dozen bodies to the cold case pile, no matter how impossible those remains are to identify — and Elle will have her people keeping an eye on it for months to come, most likely, but the immediate danger, if it ever existed at all, has passed.
She’s minded to recommend relaxing the lockdown at Dorley Hall, she says, and when she does, the joy in the air is palpable.
At the end, when she is helping herself to a cup of tea and a biscuit from the wicker baskets that some helpful soul has laid out, Valérie Barbier quite unexpectedly approaches her. Takes her aside.
“I have a request,” Valérie says.
* * *
The substitute sponsors are pretty nice, all told. They were certainly impressed when they first walked into the common room yesterday to find Steph and Bethany both dressed reasonably nicely, and Raph — unexpectedly — wearing eyeliner. Steph’s been hoping that Leigh would get over herself and do more than just wear a sports bra under her layers, but no luck so far; she’s got this thing about not wanting even to try to look better until she can do so seamlessly. She doesn’t want to look at herself in the mirror and scare herself back into being Will, she told Steph a few nights back.
As if Tabitha would let her.
But Steph gets it. Christ, she gets it. Some days it’s hard to look at herself; some days it’s hard to believe she will ever look like anything but this sort of inbetweeny thing — and on her worst days, she tells herself that she’s not even that, that she’s a man with microtits and a soft belly. She finds herself looking to Pippa, to Maria, to Edy and the others, forcing herself to remember that all that separates her from them, and their obvious womanhood, is time.
The spare sponsors are helpful in that regard, too. Angela’s been talking about her one-year-old like it’s the most normal thing in the world for a woman who was raised here, inside these walls, to have a wife and a baby, and Steph’s been working on seeing herself in her, too.
A shame there’s no way for her to see the baby, even though she’s just upstairs, Angela says.
“Wait,” Bethany says, “you’re telling us that you just left your baby with one of those lunatics upstairs?”
“Several of them, actually, but yes,” Angela says.
“And I would remind you,” Gillian says, “that we are ‘those lunatics upstairs’ as well. We’ve just been away a while.” Angela nods, then sticks her tongue sideways out of her mouth and rolls her eyes to the ceiling. Gillian jerks a thumb at her. “See?”
“Can’t believe you found someone up there to watch a kid,” Ollie says, speaking up for the first time in a while.
“Finding someone to mind a baby?” Angela says. “In this place? Not hard, I promise you.”
“Hey,” Gillian says, “not all of us are baby crazy, thank you.”
Gillian’s another one of them, pale white where Angela is dark, and ginger-haired. In theory, that ought to make Gillian the easier of the two for Steph to identify with — neither of them can go out in the daytime without SPF50 and a prayer to whichever god might be lurking nearby, begging for cloud cover; though that is not, currently, a problem for Steph — but there’s something in the way that Angela speaks about her daughter and her wife that’s been filling Steph with a very particular kind of yearning. She wonders if her mother ever spoke of her so fondly.
They’ve gotten their backstories, or the short versions, anyway. Angela and Gillian left the hall as inseparable friends, and now that they both are married — Angela to a wife, Gillian to a husband — they are still in each other’s lives. Angela has a cis NPH, she told Steph with a whisper and a wink, but her wife knows she’s trans. Which, thank goodness, because she would have felt terrible pretending to be infertile.
For lunch, they share sandwiches in the common room. There’s a briefing of some kind happening upstairs, and that means the main meal of the day is going to be in the evening, which suits Steph fine; she and Bethany can eat their fill and retire to Steph’s room, put on a movie, and cuddle until they fall into a food coma. She’s looking forward to it.
* * *
Yeah so it turns out that even the graduates who leave and start having babies are hot. Angela waited until today to drop the baby bombshell on them, and since then, Bethany’s been trying not to stare, trying to keep her focus on something other than, like, breasts and stuff; trying to resist the urge to ask Angela if she breastfed the baby, and if so, how did it feel, and if it felt good, then could the sensation be replicated with things easily found around the house or, say, the basement? She keeps catching Steph’s eye about this and making complicated expressions with her face, which she hopes Steph is interpreting as something along the lines of ‘when we graduate we need to become MILFs immediately’ and not anything, like, gross.
Shit, she’s on kind of a high with this. And she gets why, because she worked it out with Steph last night, after their first session with the substitutes, during which they were rather more reserved and mostly buffered from the intake by the presence of various other full-time sponsors; easing them in, as if Bethany and her fellow basementees are a bath of scalding water, into which you must sink one toe at a time, lest you become all pink and sore, and shriek a lot. They talked about it and Bethany said, shit, it’s nice to see some normal people around here, some people who switched to what is starting to seem to Bethany like objectively the preferable sex for all sorts of reasons — up to and including but not limited to being able to keep a small child alive with just your nipple leavings — and then up and fucking left, and no, Melissa doesn’t count, because yeah, she’s definitely nice and shit, but it only takes, like, three seconds interacting with her to see that she’s got issues, man.
Angela and Gillian? They are the normal life beyond Dorley. And, yeah, definitely Maria is that, too, and Bethany will defend her to the ends of the earth, but Maria’s whole life is tied to this place; Bethany would prefer, she thinks, only to visit sometimes.
It’s cool also, because the subs are chill. Chill in a way that Maria isn’t, and that someone like Pippa definitely isn’t. They’re not intense, is the thing. As if popping over to watch the torture basement of a weekend is a fun little holiday, which, yeah, it probably is.
Eventually, the real sponsors return. Some of them, at least, with Maria and Edy leading the charge and Harmony following up, and they’ve got an announcement to make.
Lockdown’s over.
Mostly.
“We’re under airlock protocol now,” Maria says, leaning casually against one of the metal tables. It’s a far cry from how they used to make announcements, all huddled by the door with their tasers out.
“Airlock protocol?” Steph repeats, laughing. “Portentous.”
“My fault,” Edy says. “I spent a lot of my time down here reading after Maria knocked some sense into me, and when I moved upstairs and sort of halfway joined the team — for a while, anyway — I kept it up. I was on a sci-fi kick when we wrote those regs.”
What it means is that there must always be at least one biometrically sealed outer door and one lockable inner door between the outside world and anyone whose presence here is controversial. In practice, all it really means is that both sets of kitchen doors stay closed, and the back corridors on the ground floor get locked up.
“Does that mean I can go upstairs again?” Bethany asks. “For real?” It seems too good to be true.
“Yeah,” Maria says, smiling, “go hang. Steph’s access has been reinstated. You can stay in Steph’s upstairs room tonight, if you want.”
“Shit yeah.”
“Don’t get too used to it, though. You’re not done yet; this—” she nods at the floor, “—is still your home until we say otherwise.”
“Yeah, yeah, got it,” Bethany says. “I need my recommended daily dose of concrete misery. Are we allowed to have something interesting for breakfast on Monday morning before we trudge back down here? Do we get fresh baked goods?”
“Sure.”
She doesn’t even stop to look back, not least because Ollie’s been making sufficiently annoyed noises — presumably because Bethany and Steph get to leave and he and his ragged wrists do not — that Harmony’s gone over to him. She just grabs Steph’s hand, pulls her up off the couch, and drags her over to the door out to the corridor. Thumb-first, Bethany propels Steph along until they hit the door out to the stairs together, and they actually hit it, because Bethany’s a little giggly and Steph’s outright laughing, has been since she worked out what Bethany’s trying to do. They collide with each other as much as with the door, and it takes them long enough to sort themselves out that they still haven’t collectively manoeuvred Steph’s thumb onto the reader before the substitute sponsors show up behind them.
“Adorable,” Angela says.
“Thanks,” Bethany replies, and gets Steph’s thumb, finally, onto the biometric scanner. The lock heaves, the door clicks open, and Bethany’s dragging Steph again, up the stairs, around the various corners, still laughing and catching the attention of everyone they pass, from the girls in the security room to a rather stern-looking dark-haired and pale-skinned woman, dressed to the nines (officewear version), who looks upon the commotion staggering past her as if she is a pioneering astronaut teetering on the edge of a dangerous orbit around a supermassive black hole and has just spied on her telescope a pair of aliens casually exiting the event horizon because one of them forgot to get milk.
She’s fucking giddy with it. She gets to go back upstairs! She got used to the basement all over again — the basement that cannot be escaped is, it turns out, a different prospect to the basement that really and truly cannot be escaped, though Bethany’s not sure she could explain the logic behind the distinction, if pressed — but now she gets to see the sky and feel a non-air-conditioned breeze on her face and watch telly on a reasonably sized screen without Ollie complaining that Bethany put on the hot cheerleader show again.
At the last moment, she has a sudden fear that they haven’t lifted the stupid bookcases out, and that she and Steph are going to pile straight into them with a comical thud and — seen from the other side — a slight shifting in the position of the books on the shelves, followed by a pair of loud groans, but it’s fine. They round the last turn, climb the last handful of stairs, and they’re out, they’re fucking out of the basement and in the dining hall, which is exactly as Bethany remembers: a bit like if they let you turn the biggest room on a National Trust tour into a pretentious café, and also full of women staring at her.
“Shit,” she mutters under her breath, her feet suddenly anchored to the ground, “that’s a lot of fucking people.”
And then Angela and Gillian, rushing up the stairs behind them and encountering Steph and Bethany stood stock still just half a metre out of the stairwell, struggle to stop in time.
* * *
“Full lockdown all week,” Steph says, rubbing the plaster on her forehead, “and as soon as it lifts, I get injured. There’s a lesson in that.”
“That’s not an injury, Steph,” Angela says, slapping her hand away from the wound, “that’s a boo-boo.”
Beth laughs. “A boo-boo?”
“Sorry. Occupational hazard of being a mum. Just be glad I didn’t try to blow raspberries on your belly.”
Steph, now sitting on her hands so she can’t fiddle with her plaster, grimaces. “I think that would be the worst torture yet.”
“Yes,” Bethany says unconvincingly. “That would be so awful.”
“Speaking of babies,” Gillian says, “maybe you should go get yours?” She nods towards the other side of the dining hall, where a circle of sponsors, women and hangers-on surround Tabitha, who has swaddled in her arms an adorable little blob that is presumably Angela’s baby, Thea.
She looks happier than Steph’s ever seen her.
The four of them go over, with Bethany suggesting to Steph in a whisper that if she wants to really milk her incredibly serious injury and walk with a limp to garner more sympathy, she’ll back her up. Steph declines, and finds Christine and Paige sitting just off to the side of the main group with a couple of sponsors, Charlie and Nadine, who sponsor — Steph racks her brain for a moment — Aisha and Mia respectively. Nadine doesn’t look quite as put upon as usual, which suggests to Steph that Mia has been unusually quiet lately. As they approach, Christine spots them and smiles, beckoning for them to come sit down, so they do, splitting off from Angela and Gillian.
“Hey,” Steph says as she’s intercepted by Christine, who half-stands out of her chair and gives her a one-armed hug. “How are things up here in the real world?”
“Not bad,” Christine says.
“Elle’s briefing relieved a lot of tension,” Paige says.
“She could have waited one more week,” Nadine says, frowning. “Lifting the lockdown means we’re probably not going to get relief sponsors next week. Charlie and I will be back on the rotation.”
“If we promise to feminise ourselves really hard,” Bethany says, “maybe you can get a break.”
“Don’t think it works like that any more,” Charlie says, sipping coffee from a mug that smells to Steph as if it doesn’t just have coffee in. It’s not a mug she’s seen before, bearing a silhouette of a woman in a short dress holding a microphone in the air. Printed next to the woman are the lyrics to the first verse of Wannabe by the Spice Girls, though the last line reads, I really really really want your balls in a jar. “I think we’re going to be at least a little bit on alert for a long time, honestly.”
Bethany slumps across the table. “Shit.”
“Relax. Won’t affect you. It’ll just be us—” Charlie sighs theatrically, “—working ourselves to the bone.”
“As usual,” Nadine says. She’s holding a mug which proclaims, rather more dramatically than Charlie’s Spice Girls mug, in newspaper-style serif font, The basement is empty, and all the devils are here.
“Woah,” Steph says, frowning at it. “That mug’s kind of a mood change.”
“Hmm? Oh. This. Yes.” Nadine turns it around in her hands to examine the text herself. “This was Leanne’s, wasn’t it?”
Charlie laughs. “Yeah. Her only mug. Christine, Paige, you remember Leanne? I think you might have met her, like, twice.”
“Sorry,” Christine says, while Paige shakes her head.
“She’s a bitch.”
“She misses her,” Nadine says.
“Completely fucking peaced on us,” Charlie says. “Graduated one day, gone the next.”
“She’s okay,” Nadine adds quickly. “She still replies to my emails.”
“Yeah. Just… Ethical problems, you know? The whole kidnapping thing. She’s promised not to rat us out, but Nadine’s the only one she’ll even talk to any more.”
“And yet she felt the need to design a mug,” Paige says.
Charlie shrugs. “We had a competition. Back in the… was it early third year? Must have been. I remember it was cold, anyway. We were trying to while away those long autumn nights, and one of the sponsors suggested a mug competition. So we were all trying to do Shakespeare.”
“Mine won,” Nadine says. “To she, or not to she, that is the question.”
“I like Leanne’s more,” Christine says. And then she blinks, and adds, “Sorry.”
“Quite all right.”
A table away, Angela has retrieved her child from Tabitha and placed her back in her pram, though Tab is still with her, crouched down and holding little Thea’s hand, seemingly entranced by her tiny fingers.
“There’s a time limit on this, you know,” someone says to Angela. “You’re not going to get to keep bringing her here.”
“I know,” Angela says, standing up from the pram and stretching. “But what she can’t remember, can’t hurt her.”
“Doesn’t it fuck you up?” Tabitha says, still with eyes for no-one but the baby.
“Hmm?”
“Having to lie to your child, I mean. When she’s old enough to understand things, you’re going to have to start lying to her. I’ve seen your NPH, Angela.”
“Of course you have,” Gillian says.
“Down, Gilly,” Angela says. She squats by Tabitha, puts herself in the same space as her and the baby. And when she talks, she’s gentle, quiet. Which might have as much to do with Thea being sleepy as it does with the conflicted, stiff expression on Tabitha’s face. “And no, to answer your question, it doesn’t eff me up. I lived, Tabitha. Thanks to this place, I made it long enough to fix my life, meet an amazing woman, and mother this wonderful little girl. I get to give her a life, and I get to make it a better life than the one I started out with.” Her voice quietens even more. “But that’s not all of it. Gillian and I…” She glances up at Gillian, who nods. “We have a friend. A trans woman. But, unlike us, she can’t hide it. Trail of documents going back her whole life, and they all say—” she wags a finger in the air in time with the words, “—male, male, male. She wants to have kids, she really does, but she’s with another trans woman, so neither of them can gestate, and it’s too late for… natural impregnation, anyway. They tried to adopt, but…”
“Yeah,” Tabitha says heavily. “I get it. Trans women don’t get approved for adoption.”
“She tries to tell us she’s happy,” Gillian says, sitting on the table nearby, looking down at the two of them and the baby, “and I believe her. She is. In that way, she’s like us.”
“I got so angry on her behalf,” Angela says. “One night, we were over at their place, and I just started ranting, and it was at least as much about girls I know from here who picked the wrong NPH as it was about her. I was spitting about all the opportunities she doesn’t get to have, all the things she doesn’t get to do, all because she did everything the right way, and so the state knows everything it needs to know about her to keep her out of everything she wants. Hell, she had, what, sixty interviews? And still didn’t get a job? I had to call up Elle Lambert’s office and beg her for help. So now she works for Peckinville Insurance and I feel like shit about it, because she doesn’t know I helped her get that job, and…” She laughs bitterly. “Turns out I’m still angry about it. She tells me not to be, tells me how grateful she is, but the thing is… They let her live. They let her live and that’s it. This country graciously does not actively try to kill her. But it refuses everything else. Treats her like a transmissible disease. And it absolutely will not allow her to have children if it can do anything about it. So yeah. I will lie to my daughter with a smile on my face until she is old enough…” Angela breathes out heavily. Briefly closes her eyes. “Until she is old enough to understand that some truths are prisons.”
In the quiet, little Thea makes a bubbling noise so sweet that Steph almost wants to rush over and disturb the sombre tableaux so she can pick up the baby and hug it inadvisably hard.
“You gave that speech before, huh?” Tabitha says after a few moments. She’s smiling, but it looks difficult.
“To her wife,” Gillian says.
“She’s not supposed to know about me,” Angela says. “But she does. Don’t tell Bea.”
“I won’t,” Tabitha says softly. And then she adds, “Can I hold her again?”
“All you like.”
* * *
It’s been a long time since Monica had a burger. Like, a really crappy fast food burger, the kind where the picture on the menu above the counter looks as if it was shat out by the god of cheeseburgers, all plump lettuce, perfectly melted cheese and fat, glistening patty, but the thing you pull out of the paper wrapping seems to have been, on its way from the warming tray to your hands, sat on. Possibly used as some kind of weapon.
“Oh my fucking god,” Isla murmurs. She got the meal, the whole shebang, with the soggy fries and the coke, and she’s already half-done with her burger, having started savaging it while Monica was still unwrapping hers and inspecting the meat for signs of, well, meat. “It’s been so long. Sometimes you just crave the worst burgers in the world, you know?”
“I dunno,” Monica says, shrugging and taking an experimental bite. It’s not bad exactly. It’s possible it might not be anything. “Kind of reminds me of the burgers at school. We always thought they made them out of PE shoes.”
“That,” Isla says, pausing with her mouth full to talk messily straight to Monica’s face, “is exactly the point. Nobody wants a good burger. Not really. You get that artisanal bullshit with the five kinds of cheese and the aioli and all the other crap and it has to be held together with a toothpick and it comes apart in your hands.”
Monica throws caution to the wind and takes another bite. “You get that a lot, do you?”
“Plagued by it back at the ranch.” ‘The ranch’: Isla’s term for the large Peckinville facility up the coast. Supposedly it’s the one where Elle Lambert’s been hiding out, the one where Aunt Bea went for her big briefing. Monica hates the term; ‘ranch’ is one of those words that just doesn’t suit most English accents. It should be said with an American drawl or not at all. “I think it’s because Ms Lambert doesn’t know what a burger is supposed to look like. Being rich and all. So when she got that chef guy in to design the menu and he presented her with the closest approximation of a five-star restaurant bullshit burger that can be mass-cooked for five hundred people at once, she signed off on it thinking she was doing us all a big bloody favour.” Closing her eyes, Isla takes another bite and moans under her breath. “You can’t even pick them up without losing all the chopped onion. But this… this is fucking perfection.”
“Would you like to be alone with the burger?” Monica asks.
“Yes,” Isla says, “but we’ve got work to do.”
“If you’ve come to tell me about the investigation and the relaxed lockdown protocol—”
“Not that. Remember how I said Ms Lambert wants to debrief your Diana?”
“Shit. Yes.”
“That’s still a thing.”
“Of course it is.” Sighing, Monica pulls out her phone. “Gimme a date.”
“Tuesday,” Isla says, “if that’s quite all right with you and your Lady Di.”
Monica wags a finger, though her heart’s not really in it. The crappy burger must have sapped all her energy. “Don’t call her that. You’re not allowed to make fun of her.”
“I won’t. Girl scout’s honour.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
They spend another few minutes going over arrangements for Tuesday — with occasional pauses for Isla to ingest terrible fries and wax poetic about how much better they are than the proper thick-cut steak fries they insist on serving at the ranch — and a few other items of paramilitary frippery, and Monica’s hugging Isla goodbye for the day, because apparently that’s also a thing they do now, they eat shitty cheeseburgers together and they hug, and then she’s headed back to the bed and breakfast to break the news to Diana. She’s got to go face down yet another rich arsewipe who thinks she controls her. Once more unto the bitch, dear friends.
Isla gives Monica a little wave as she climbs into her not-at-all-subtle Range Rover, and honks her horn once as she passes, leaving Monica to trudge slowly and reluctantly home to Chiamaka’s, to the little rental room that Peckinville is definitely overpaying for.
At least it’s a nice day, or what passes for a nice day in Cherston-on-Sea in January. Flecks of salt on the air and a light breeze whisking the chill across Monica’s nose; she’s probably red as hell there, actually, and she’ll have to rub lip balm on it when she gets back, because she still hasn’t got around to doing a proper toiletries run. She takes the scenic route, wending back and forth from the promenade to the parallel street that contains all the real local shops, the places that sell meat and clothing and stuff and not just rock candy and pictures of the pier taken on a sunny day in 1973. Picks up a couple of things: a bag of this morning’s croissants, marked down to sell before closing time, because of all the things about Dorley Hall she didn’t expect to miss, the greatest one is the pastry obsession. She doesn’t know when the tradition of getting the second years to make finicky French pastries began, but it teaches patience and calm reasonably well. Aisha, the second year, is probably going to graduate and then immediately become a world-class pastry chef or something.
There’s little else Monica misses about the hall. The sisterhood, sure, and the sense that if she had a personal disaster of some kind, there would always be someone around who thought highly enough of her to help her out or lend an ear, even at 3am, but it’s good to be away from the basement. Immersing herself in that environment every day, every week, every fucking year… it wasn’t exactly warping her perspective, but it necessarily limited it. She still wakes up some mornings from nightmares about what she did to Declan. That it is often Diana who wakes her with a smile and a coffee, well, it helps, but usually it just prompts the other bad dreams the next night, the ones about Diana at Stenordale.
Shit. She needs to get out of this racket.
At least she’s out of the hall. Chiamaka’s is much nicer; she doesn’t even have a basement.
The front door to the bed and breakfast comprises mostly a large, misted glass panel, and through it Monica can see movement. While she initially dismisses it — someone booking in, no doubt — when she opens the inside door she is so surprised that she just stands there silently, watching.
Diana’s there in the foyer, eyes on the floor — on her feet, actually — holding one hand close to her ample chest and another out, almost horizontal. She’s stepping through what seems almost like a dance sequence, and then Monica gets it: she is dancing. Diana is dancing! She’s dancing a waltz in the entrance foyer, and she’s singing, “One, two, three,” to herself, over and over. And she sounds pretty good, too! Clearer than before, with less of the resonance that used to colour everything she said. Now that Monica comes to think about it, ‘One, two, three’ is actually okay for training the vowels, and probably constitutes a nice break from all the heat from fire shit.
She’s still dancing, still watching her feet, and Monica should make herself known, should stop silently watching her like an arsehole, but she misses her chance, because Diana straightens up, catches Monica looking, and stops right there in the middle of the patterned foyer carpet. Her face falls, the genuine joy that was there seeping away and taking all the colour with it, and Monica doesn’t need to think for more than half a second about what she needs to do.
Dropping the bag of croissants on the little wooden chair by the door, Monica steps forward, takes each of Diana’s still-raised hands in hers, looks ever so slightly up into Diana’s eyes — she’s still taller than her, even with Monica in light heels today — and starts to count.
“One, two, three.”
A thing about Declan, Monica remembers, is that he didn’t have a true smile. He had a sneer, something that would come readily to his face when he was taking advantage of someone — or, with opportunities to do so in the basement being limited, describing a time he did so — and he had something like a smirk, which came to him when he felt he was pushing back, asserting himself, being a man. It found its way onto his face a lot when Monica, trying anything to get him to cooperate, hit him. It’s the smirk that comes to her in her dreams, a reminder of her wheezing, wounded conscience.
Diana, though, smiles. She likes to wear lipstick, and she applies it well, overdrawing just a little with pencil, and the effect, when she smiles broadly enough to show her teeth, is dazzling. Diana has a smile someone could fall easily in love with, and Monica desperately hopes that Diana gets the chance one day for that to happen, that she forgives herself enough that she will allow herself to be loved. Because it’s not only Monica who wakes, sweating, surrounded by the memories of the things she has done.
It’s that smile that Monica gets to see right now, with her hands entwined, stepping through the dance, counting it out.
She could have been long gone. Lost to Monica, lost to them all. Swallowed up by Stenordale, taken by the Smyth-Farrows, or washed out right into Elle Lambert’s hands, there to effectively vanish. Diana’s very presence — and her smile, her beautiful, heart-breaking smile — feels like the final knot in a very long, thin, fragile string of fate. The last terrible, brutal mistake in a series of them, with God or the universe or what-the-fuck-ever allowing, finally, for something good to happen, something wonderful. Something that doesn’t erase the things that either of them have done, but which offers the hope that, from now on, better things are possible. Better people can be found, or made, spun up from terror and circumstance and something like love.
She smiles, and she counts, and Diana and Monica dance the waltz together.
* * *
She can’t get what Tabitha said out of her head. It keeps coming back to her, haunting her thoughts, colouring even her memories.
What if Jenny doesn’t accept her?
What if Jenny hates her?
When Tabitha first brought it up, it seemed to Melissa to be absurd, something so outside the bounds of possibility that it wasn’t even worth worrying about, that Tabitha was just doing her due diligence because that’s her job, but the more she thinks about it, the more horribly plausible it seems.
People change, don’t they? People Jenny’s age definitely do, like, shit, Jenny’s going to be forty-six this year, isn’t she? Or forty-seven? That’s right around the point on the graph in every political analysis essay Melissa’s ever seen where people shift rightwards, start voting Tory, start planning for a prosperity that relies on the ascent of the cruel and the punishing of the poor. And Jenny’s doing okay for herself now, she knows; she’s got a nice place on the other side of Almsworth, somewhere she was able to move to eventually get Ada into a better school than the one Melissa went to, and that fits, doesn’t it? Demographically, it fits.
Shit. She’s insane. Jenny’s Jenny. She spent her teen years covered in eyeliner and spraypaint and she was probably in love with Mum and you don’t just lose all that, do you? That seems… fucked up beyond belief.
But Melissa doesn’t know how normal people work, not really. Oh, she can fake it — she’s encountered enough of them since leaving the hall — but as someone whose continuity from teenager to adult has a big fucking basement jammed in the middle of it, she doesn’t really understand how people who were raised normally even function. Certainly there were times when her coworkers would talk fondly of shit they remembered from school and Melissa had to make something up if she wanted to join in, because there are whole years from that time that she barely remembers, and what she does still have is mostly unpleasant. All the bits where she wasn’t with Mum or Shahida, really. Drawing a straight line from that to now… Maybe you do shift like that. Maybe, if you never had to reevaluate how you understood the world, how you understood yourself, you just… drift rightward. You start believing that the world ought to be yours, that it ought to revolve around you.
“Ugh,” she says to herself, and kicks a leg in the air before rolling over on her plush new bed to stare at the wall instead. Tabitha said something similar to that, didn’t she? That Melissa always acts as if Dorley Hall ought to be at her beck and call, or something. She took it back immediately, but still.
God damn it.
And Tabitha’s right that Melissa got lucky. The list of people from her life who have found her, or whose house she walked right the fuck up to, is long enough that it probably makes Aunt Bea twitch: Steph, Shahida, Rachel, Amy. And Amy’s aunt is a known bad actor and Rachel… is tied to the hall and its secrets solely because she’s Melissa’s friend. And Pippa’s friend now, and she’s getting to know Jane, but— Shit, the point is that Rachel has three reasons maximum to keep quiet about what she knows, and they are all flimsy as hell. People drift apart, and if in five years, Rachel decides that she doesn’t care all that much about Melissa any more, she could crack Dorley Hall open like an egg.
Or she could get killed by Aunt Bea’s people the moment she tried.
Yeah. Melissa understands. She, like every other graduate, has everything to lose from turning over Aunt Bea and the sponsors to the police or to the press, but every newcomer they add to the fold weakens the hall, threatens to expose it. And Melissa’s been crashing about the place, opening holes in Dorley’s security left and right. No wonder Tabitha’s exasperated with her. Probably everyone is.
She shouldn’t have quit her job. She should have stayed up in Manchester. She’s not wanted here.
Another thing she should have done? Gone with Shahida. Rupa wanted them both home today, and Melissa insisted that Shy should go but that she should stay, because she only just got back and she needs to get acclimatised before she starts her new job and, shit, because even this morning she was thinking about just what a thoughtless piece of shit she’s been, and she kept having images of saying the wrong thing to Rupa and Edward, of suggesting to them through a misplaced sense of familial safety that her transition was not a normal one, and—
“Christ.”
She turns over again, stares at the ceiling. She’s spiralling. Round and fucking round she goes, a manoeuvre as classically Melissa as running away from her problems; the one, in fact, often leads to the other.
Helps no-one, least of all her, to stay up here on the third floor and go insane. And she has at least developed one helpful new habit: when she starts to lose control, and she’s alone, then she needs to go somewhere with people. And just hope that the whole thing about everyone hating her is just her paranoia talking.
There’ll be people in the second-floor kitchen, most likely. Or if not, then the second years will be hanging out on first. She’ll go down, she’ll eat something — because, shit, she needs to do that, too — and she’ll get her head to stop spinning and taking her with it.
2020 January 20
Monday
It’s not over for the bodies. What’s left of Valérie’s girls are going to be held for a long time, bagged and frozen and stored and pulled out to be examined with every new missing persons case, most likely. But it’s over for their memories, for the souls that clung to them.
The police statement this morning was so anticlimactic after Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s little speech that many of the news programmes didn’t even bother leading with it, especially given how much hay they got to make out of the police switchboard becoming jammed with calls from long-bereaved families across the UK. What more is there to say now? Many of them preferred instead to report on the virus, the one that’s left China and which is now spreading to Japan, Thailand and South Korea. Moreover, Elladine’s insider has confirmed that attempts to identify the bodies have unofficially begun a gradual wind-down, with officers being moved to other cases. What had seemed when it came in like the case of the century has quickly turned out to be ‘bone soup’, in the words of the lead forensic investigator.
Frances Barton and Vincent Barbier are still being sought to assist the police with their enquiries, of course, but they are both, as far as the authorities are concerned, in the wind, with Vincent rather more in the wind than Frankie. Another factor in their favour is that Dorothy Marsden and her handful of surviving accomplices are among Frankie’s known associates, which ought to keep her quiet for a while longer.
So it’s time.
Valérie is leading a memorial service.
She keeps it short. Nobody here, not even Beatrice, knew any of her girls; nobody except Frankie, who sits in the front row of the room Valérie appropriated for this purpose, her gaze locked steadily on the picture wall, her jaw set, her hands buried in her lap. She learned what Valérie was planning and helped acquire the photos, went looking through old paper files purloined from the old regime at the time of the takeover — or assembled by Beatrice, Maria and Elladine during their time in opposition — and digital records painstakingly put together in the years since. She insisted on doing it alone, and when she was done, she handed the sheaf of printed pictures to Valérie and returned to her room without saying a word.
That she is here now is, perhaps, a little miraculous.
They don’t have pictures for all Valérie’s girls, but they have enough. They even have a picture of Callum, taken from Silver River’s servers as a byproduct of some gallant act of digital espionage as the two oppositional private militaries conduct something of a cold war. There he will stay alongside his spiritual sisters, the boys and girls and men and women who died at Stenordale Manor in service to the insatiable appetites of their betters.
Valérie sits on a chair, facing the others, speaking aloud her memories, incomplete and inadequate as they are. Portraits of lives Valérie knew sometimes for as little as three months. Fragments of fragments of people. And she does not shy away from her own cruelties: she speaks of the time she spent making herself numb, making herself tyrannical, in a perhaps foolish attempt to extend the lives of those vouchsafed implicitly to her care.
She cries easily and openly, feeling the tears wet her cheeks, her blouse, the skirt she took from Béatrice’s wardrobe this morning.
The girls attending — most every off-duty sponsor, and some others, like Christine, Paige, and the others from their year — sit in silence, listening, some of them crying, all of them enraptured by the pictures, the faces of the beautiful dead. Imagining, perhaps, who these girls might have been if they had never been taken, or if they had ever been freed. Seeing themselves on that wall, there but for the grace of God.
Valérie tells complete stories if she can. The girls who fought her; the girls who hated her; the one who attacked her with a carving knife and found herself disarmed and confused on the floor of the kitchen at Stenordale. The girls who embraced their new selves and the girls who did not, would not, could not. The girls who were still, in their attitudes and prejudices and in the words they spat, the young men they once were; the girls who tried to touch Valérie against her will.
“The dead,” she says, reading from the last of her tear-stained little white cards, “are rarely convenient. They may have thought things that have become unfashionable; they may have been bigots or fools or bastards. They are vulnerable to reinterpretation, to softening, to having their identities stolen from them in death as surely as they were in life. But they have one thing that unites them, and one thing we must not and cannot ever forget: they are gone. Killed before their time, before they could repent their misdeeds or reinvent themselves. Murdered by the same forces that assail us today. I know that it is hard to hear of their sins, of their struggles, but we do them a disservice if we do not remember them as they were. They might have died ugly or they might have died angelic, but what remains is that they died, and they were my girls, and I will remember them for as long as I live.” Her voice unsteady, her self-control long departed, Valérie reads the final words on her card. “You have the opportunities that were stolen from them. You are their legacy. So, please, I ask you: live. As loud and as long and as proud as you can. For them. For my girls.”
And that is all. That is everything that Valérie has left in her for today. As Béatrice comes for her, steadies her on her arm, helps her out of her seat and away from the girls, who are at once now standing, reaching for the photographs on the memorial wall, touching them, establishing connections, and holding each other, comforting each other, Valérie has eyes for no-one but Frances, who without once looking at anyone else, stands from her chair and quietly leaves the room.
* * *
The others go left, headed towards the dining hall, the stairs up or the stairs down, or the kitchen; off to go deal with their job, their bed or their rumbling stomachs. Tabitha, though, turns right, the other way down the corridor out of their makeshift chapel — or whatever the hell they’re choosing to call that morbid fucking room with all the pictures of dead girls. Shit. She can’t deal with this.
Or she doesn’t want to. Same diff.
She had a fight with Levi last night. It was the worst kind of fight, the kind you have over fucking FaceTime, so she couldn’t even go up to him after and take his hand in hers and apologise, and he couldn’t do the same. Stuck instead waiting for one of them to break and call the other, and Tabitha couldn’t be the one to do it.
Out to the end of the corridor. Thumb on the now-locked door to the conservatory — Edith’s stupid ‘airlock protocol’ — and again on the reader for the doors to the outside world, and then she’s fucking free, she’s away from it all, all the dead girls and her fellow sponsors and Val’s crying and Aunt Bea’s stubborn propriety and bloody Frankie comporting herself with more dignity than Tabitha’s ever seen from her. Away from the hall, away from the baby she got to hold for so little time yesterday.
Angela’s baby. She won’t pretend to herself that she didn’t entertain for a second or two the notion of just snatching the kid and running away with her, claiming her for her own. The kid was just that beautiful, just that sweet. A thing that fit so perfectly in her arms, that felt so natural there.
Shit.
The dew left the ground damp and sticky, and it’s sucking at her shoes, which are just trainers. She was going to spar with Leigh today; she didn’t expect to be out here, stamping around in the fucking mud.
She and Levi talked babies. And she didn’t even bring up the possibility that he might want to carry! He did! All she said was that she’s got sperm stored. No, it was Levi who brought it up. Said he wanted to raise the subject before she got a chance to, so he could shoot it down. Not ruining his body just to have a baby, he said. Take your frozen sperm to some other guy, he said.
Tabitha wasn’t going to ask him. She was just venting. And she understood, the moment she ended the call and threw her phone at the couch: probably a bit of a sensitive topic for him, huh. Probably as sensitive as it is for her. She should have been more careful. Should have found someone else to vent to.
He’s back in town in a few days. They’ll make up then, if they haven’t already. And Tabitha will quietly shelve it, the way she has done ever since the desire, the need, snuck up on her, years ago.
Maybe Phil had the right idea. Christ, what an arsehole! And the poshest boy she’s ever met, before or since. Took them less than a week for her gaggle of disaffected boys to identify the odd one out, but Prince Philip never let that stop him. It’s possible that it made him worse, made him into someone who truly did not give a shit. Even after disclosure, when Tabitha and the rest of them were stunned into silence out of sheer disbelief, he kept pushing. And he never stopped, not until it was time to get rid of him.
None of them cared. Prince Philip was gone, and the rest of them could get on with the job of just surviving the fucking basement.
Yeah, he was a nightmare. Maria called him a ‘gold-star washout’ when they talked briefly about him after Tabitha’s graduation. The kind of guy they’ve tried to avoid picking up since; a truly unbendable, unbreakable bastard. And a perfect candidate for whatever the hell comes after they wash someone out.
But someone had a plan for him. Someone — no-one at Dorley itself, but someone — looked at that walking sneer and decided that he had a use. Tabitha, right now, is lost. Doesn’t have a fucking use beyond shepherding the next generation of idiot boys into their new futures. Maybe she should have been more like him. Washed out like him, and then she’d be wherever he is now, whether that’s dead or jailed or on ice for organ donation or working as a fetish maid in Elle Lambert’s rubber dungeon or acting as a bullet shield for some bigwig, her every movement controlled. She’s never decided which of her outlandish theories about the ultimate state of the washouts is the most plausible, but if she was one of them, if she washed out, she wouldn’t be here right now, muddying her trainers and making a good fucking start on freezing to death out here in the woods behind Dorley Hall, miserable after a fight with her boyfriend and feeling more alone than she has in years.
She should have been a proper bastard. Then they would have taken care of her, taken her away from here and done God knows what to her, instead of dumping her back into her life with a new body and a new attitude, there to know and to see exactly what it is that she cannot have, over and over again.
* * *
Raph’s wearing eyeliner again. And it’s better. It’s good. It’s the first thing Steph notices when she and Beth return from their lazy morning — and early afternoon — upstairs, feeling fat and sleepy because Aisha roped the rest of the second years in to help her make pastries for the mourners and Steph and Bethany crashed the party. Steph herself ate two bear claws, two croissants, a cinnamon twist, and a truly massive pain au chocolat. Mia also gave them both a share of the messy, doughy failures that the second years had been gorging on all morning, because Steph is kind of like their mascot, she said.
Steph decided not to ask about that.
And now, down here, too groggy to manage much else but just to collapse into one of the open couches and sort of doze on top of each other, Steph has to deal with the fact that Raph is wearing really, really good eyeliner.
Shit. She isn’t even wearing bad eyeliner! Every time Bethany’s worried about one of the others accelerating ahead of her after her initial burst of enthusiasm — aimed, admittedly, at fucking with Leigh — Steph and Maria and all the others have reminded her that they are not in competition with each other, that it is in fact vital that they each go at their own pace, but now Steph’s sneaking glances at Raph’s eyes and feeling like absolute crap that she didn’t put anything on her face when she woke up this morning, that she didn’t even make an effort with her clothes. She just threw on a pair of leggings, a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and called herself done, and Bethany did similarly and, fuck, is Steph holding Beth up now? Is she being a bad example?
The couch moves under her, and she looks up to find Pippa sitting heavily down next to her, perching on the front of the couch frame and waiting pointedly for— Oh, right. Steph scoots her feet out of the way, and Pippa smiles gratefully and sits back.
Her eyeliner looks amazing, too.
“Thanks, Steph,” Pippa says, closing her eyes briefly. “That was… something.”
“The memorial? I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“No, no.” Pippa shakes her head. “You’ve got enough to think about. Better you just had a nice morning, honestly.” Steph reaches for her hand, and Pippa grasps it. “Thanks. That was really bad. Kind of… Kind of ‘go see your loved ones while you still can’ bad.”
“Shit,” Steph says. Behind her, curled into the couch cushion, Bethany snores lightly, and Steph reaches back with her free hand. Rests it on Bethany’s knee. Because, yeah, time with your loved ones.
“Exactly,” Pippa says. “I had to go redo my whole face. Along with half the girls there, actually. We were all rushing upstairs at the same time. Streaky eyes, red cheeks, the works.” She frowns. “Objectively stupid to do my eye makeup before a memorial, I guess.”
Steph just nods. Just nods and feels like an exceptionally shitty person, because Pippa’s talking about things that actually matter, and Steph… Steph is staring at her eyes, at her perfect eyeliner.
“Steph?” Pippa says.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Sorry,” Steph says, shaking her head and leaning forward, letting go of Bethany and giving her other hand to Pippa, too. “Distracted. You okay, Pip?”
“I think so. It’s just all very… Well, like Valérie said, there but for the grace of God go we. Me and you and Bethany and all the rest of us. Our kidnappers were benevolent.”
“Not if you ask Leanne.”
“Who?”
“Oh. Sorry. Charlie and Nadine were talking about her. She’s—”
“No, yeah.” Pippa smiles and shifts position, moving herself closer to Steph. “One of our conscientious objectors. Half the time I envy the girls like her.”
“And the other half?”
Pippa shrugs. “I think they’re selfish. But what do I know? Leanne’s older than I am, and even though my intake was kind of an ess-show, the further back you go, the rougher things get. She probably has a good reason to hate her sponsor and to never want to come back.” She blinks a few times, though Steph can’t tell if she’s blinking back tears left over from the memorial or if she’s trying to make herself more alert. Either way, Pippa smiles again, and says, “Tell me about your morning.”
“It was nice to wake up to the sunlight again,” Steph says. “Even if it’s not exactly sunny at the moment. Oh, and Bethany caught up with Maria before the memorial and made her promise to let her sleep upstairs once a week. And then we stole a bunch of pastries.”
“Cool,” Pippa says, nodding. “Very cool.”
“Pip…”
“Hmm?”
Shit. “No. Nothing.”
“Steph,” Pippa says fondly, sounding suddenly as if she’s holding back a giggle, “you’re allowed to ask me for stuff. I’m your sponsor, not just a random blonde chick who shows up now and then.”
“Um. Can you… teach me eyeliner?”
“But weren’t you already—?”
“Yes,” Steph interrupts, “but I’m crap. Your eyeliner is always amazing. It’s even amazing today, after you had to go reapply it. Seriously. You look great.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“Thanks.”
“How about this evening? In your room?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.”
“Cool,” Pippa says again, and stretches out on the couch, winding up with her head resting against Steph’s shoulders, while Steph ends up leaning a little more on Bethany’s still-sleeping form. There are a few scattered cushions on the floor, and when Pippa leans briefly forward to fetch a couple, Steph follows her lead, picking up all that she can reach. Together they arrange them, some to support their heads, some to warm their bellies. “Yeah,” Pippa says when they’re done. “This? This is good. Gonna rest here a while.”
Steph nods, to the extent that she can with her head so captured by cushions. “Yeah. Same.”
The TV’s still on, but it’s quiet like it has been since Steph got down here, showing some gardening show that only Adam and Martin seem really to be watching, and the soft murmuring from the speakers, combined with the warmth from both Pippa and Beth — and the bellyful of warm pastries — sends Steph quickly to sleep. She wakes only a couple of times, once when Ollie gets up to leave, carrying his latest novel with him, and again when Tabitha returns, barefoot and with streaks of mud around the cuffs of her trousers. She walks right up to Leigh, who stands and wordlessly embraces her.
“Holy shit,” Raph says, “check it out: sponsor feet.”
“Shut the fuck up, Raph,” Leigh says, still holding her.
“Yeah, bad taste,” Martin says, in the soft, almost uncaring voice he’s been using recently.
“Bethany’s asleep,” Raph argues. “Someone had to say it.”
Tabitha says nothing to defend — or explain — her bare feet. Instead, still arm in arm, she and Leigh leave the room together and turn left towards the stairs, going up to the first basement. Probably to their little gym, but probably not to spar or use the punching bags.
Must have been a rough memorial.
Pippa’s right, Steph muses. At times like this, you go to your loved ones. And hers, with the exception of Petra, who she feels like she misses more and more every day, are right here.
* * *
Mum’s delighted to have her kitchen be so busy again. And even though she doesn’t get to feed Rachel and Amy, she does get to make them tea and fuss over them and ask about their relationships and call them pretty, and she gets to nod attentively and smile generously when Amy talks about everything that’s been going on with her.
“It’s called ‘high femme’,” Amy says, stretching out a leg away from the barstool to show Shahida’s mum her bright pink tights and expensive-looking ankle boots. They go with the rest of Amy’s outfit, and with her makeup, which has been done in pinks and whites and looks more effortful than Shahida’s ever seen on her. “It’s all about being sort of confrontationally feminine, you know? Or it might be ‘hard femme’. Or a combination of both? Whichever; I was doing some reading and I just thought, hey, I’m into that. And since I’m dating girls now…”
Mum’s eyebrows raise, and she smiles even more broadly than before. “You’re dating girls now?”
“Well, just one.” And Amy launches into an animated spiel about Jane, about how sweet and pretty she is, and about how unexpected it was that she basically fell randomly into Amy’s life. “I’m done with men,” Amy finishes.
“Well,” Mum says, “much as I do think that some of them have their plus points—” and she glances down the hall, in the direction of the living room, where Edward is currently lurking, “—I can’t blame any woman for preferring the company of other women.”
“Um,” Shahida says, “Mum, you’re not trying to tell me something, are you?”
“Oh, no, absolutely not. But they are exasperating at the best of times!”
Okay. Good. Shahida’s not sure she has the mental bandwidth right now to deal with Mum: Lesbian Arc, though it would make it simpler for her to break the news that, yeah, Mum, you know how she dates girls, too? Well, now she’s dating girls: two.
She giggles.
“I suppose there’s a reason the three of us flocked together when we were kids,” Rachel says. She hasn’t been all that vocal so far tonight; Shahida hopes she’s just saving up all her good conversation for dinner. She’s dressed as she normally does for nights out, in dark colours, low heels and subtle makeup, which positions Shahida very much in the middle, with her off-white dress and the new lipstick she went out for and bought special today.
“The four of you, surely?” Mum says. Before Rachel can react to the correction, Mum says to Shahida, “How is Melissa?”
“She’s good!” Shahida says, hoping that she doesn’t sound too strangled. “We’re meeting her tonight. Her and Jane and… and Abby.”
“Abby…” Drumming her fingers on her chin, Mum theatrically searches her memories. “I don’t think I know an Abby.”
“You will,” Rachel says, smirking. Shahida swats at her.
Twenty or so minutes later, it’s time, and they bid their goodbyes, exchange hugs, and all pile into Amy’s mum’s car, today borrowed by Amy because it can fit all three of them without all the cramped squashing up of Shahida’s car. Amy, nattering on the whole time, drives them into the city and halfway out the other side, eventually to park up at the out-of-town outlet mall, just five minutes’ walk from the restaurant.
And Shahida’s excited. She hasn’t been out with Rachel and Amy for a while, and that’s part of it, but it’s also her first outing as part of her new relationship, and she gets to spend the night feeling out how that works in public, how the three of them are going to relate to each other when it’s not just them and a bed and four walls for privacy. Will they kiss? Will they do the tandem kissing thing that they discovered last night, to much giggling?
When they arrive at the intimate little restaurant — barely more than a hole in the wall to look at, but intimate and cosy inside, in a wood-panelled sort of way — Abby, Melissa and Jane are already there, having taken over a booth right at the back of the restaurant. Jane’s the first to hop up, rushing over to greet and kiss Amy as if she hasn’t seen her for weeks; true to their largely more circumspect group makeup — Shahida possibly excluded — Abby and Melissa wait for Shahida to join them before standing, and they embrace.
Shahida could sink into this. Could do nothing but stand there in their arms for the rest of her life. Could definitely forget about the meal they’re supposed to eat and how at least part of the aim for tonight was to keep Rachel sweet and keep her on-side, just in case. So it’s probably good that it’s not her who breaks them up but Jane, making to pry them apart as if with an imaginary crowbar, and she does it because their waiter is arriving, and because it would be better for their overall decorum to appear as something other than a bunch of horny teenagers.
Correction: a bunch of horny teenagers and Rachel, who has been standing a little farther back, looking on with an unreadable expression on her face. Sucks awfully that Belinda’s busy tonight, but Rachel’s been a third — sixth — wheel before, and she usually seems to enjoy making hay out of it.
They sit, with Shahida, Abby and Melissa taking one side of the booth, and start picking drinks and accepting menus. When the waiter’s gone, Amy’s the first to speak up.
“I have a little announcement to make,” she says.
“Just a little one?” Rachel asks, frowning.
“Yes,” Amy says, pinching the air. “It’s wee.”
“Ah,” Jane says, “is this about—?”
“Yep! Friends, Romans, countrywomen…” Amy looks about the table, her hands spread out across it. “I have new pronouns. They’re optional for now, like, I’m going to keep using them alongside my regular ones, largely because I don’t want to have to correct baristas or whatever, but… I’m trying out zie/hir/hirs.”
“Oh that’s so cool, Ames,” Melissa says, reacting first and reaching across the table to take one of Amy’s hands.
“What prompted this?” Rachel asks.
“Well,” Amy says, leaning on the liquid L sound, “I’ve been hanging around the girls a lot, as you know, and, like, you just kinda start thinking about this kinda stuff after a while. And I was looking in the pronoun book—”
“There’s a pronoun book?” Shahida says.
“It’s more of a pamphlet,” Jane says. “You know, understanding nonbinary identities and all that. It’s mostly for the second and third years, so they have a single source of information on it before they venture out into the world.”
“How does it work? Are there pictures?”
“Yes, actually. Someone put it together about five years ago — I think — and found some, like, exemplar people. You know, ‘this is Brent, Brent uses he/him pronouns, Brent is boring, don’t be like Brent,’ except, you know, worded better. Rumour has it that Sammy, the model for Spivak pronouns, is a mysterious figure from Aunt Bea’s past.”
That last line is delivered in such a hushed, conspiratorial whisper that Shahida can’t help but lean forward, intrigued. Beatrice Quinn’s past is something she’s thought about a lot, and every tantalising glimpse she gets into it, every rumour, every guess, seems more fascinating than the last.
“Please,” Abby says, giggling, “Aunt Bea’s past is ninety percent mysterious figures by volume. And then you meet them and they turn out to be either shockingly normal or shockingly rich.”
“Amy,” Rachel says, interrupting Melissa, who was about to say something, “the pronouns?”
“Oh,” Amy says, “right. Well, they just called to me. They sound sharp, you know? Like they could cut a bitch.” Zie flips hir hair and makes a kissy face with hir bold, outlined lips.
“So what are you? Not a woman any more? I thought you were going all high femme.”
“I’m a lesbian. I think that’s the important thing right now? Not whether or not I’m a girl; whether or not I’m a huge fucking gay.”
Shahida nods because, yes, that makes sense, actually. Rachel, across the table from her, looks exasperated but interested, and Abby just laughs. Melissa, though, hasn’t said anything since she congratulated Amy, and Shahida looks around Abby to find her looking intently at the table, at her own hand, chewing on her lip. Catching her eye, Shahida raises an eyebrow to ask if she’s okay, and Melissa looks startled for a moment, and then nods, smiles, and rejoins the conversation — which is, currently, Rachel asking Amy which of hir two pronoun sets zie would prefer to be called in public and, for example, in front of their server — as if everything is perfectly okay.
2020 January 21
Tuesday
Monica half-expects to be blindfolded, but Isla’s delivering her and Diana to Peckinville with absolutely no drama, showing up early to pick them up in the same Range Rover she charges about Cherston in, and chatting happily all the while. Monica appreciates the effort to make it all seem so normal, so mundane, when they are driving Diana to a debriefing with a woman who could make her disappear — could make her someone other than Diana — with a snap of her fingers.
“When I first got the security clearance,” Isla’s saying, “I thought I’d won the lottery. Plum job, right? I’d been at Peckinville five years, I’d done my bit, and I was thinking, hey, this is my reward. And then I got read in. I thought I was going insane.”
“Been there,” Monica says, “done that.”
“It sounds like a plum assignment, doesn’t it? All UK-based, no farting around with foreign dignitaries or escorting high-value targets through enemy strongholds, like Belgium. Come work directly for the director on her personal project, on the thing you’ve been hearing rumours about since you joined the company. Come gain favour with the eccentric madwoman who pays your wages! Gravy train, I thought. Plum assignment.”
“Whereas, when you think about it, it’s more of a two-plum assignment, actually.”
Isla stares ahead at the road for a moment, and then laughs. “God,” she says, “breaks my brain that you girls can joke about it. I mean, after everything—”
“Careful,” Monica says quietly, and when Isla looks over, Monica flicks her eyes towards the back seat, where Diana is looking out of the window, paying no apparent attention to the conversation.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Diana says.
“Really? You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Diana’s using what Monica’s come to think of as her voice for when company calls: it’s as if Aunt Bea and Chiamaka got together to voice-train a daughter, and left in her only the barest hint of her original accent. When Diana speaks this way, she sounds as considered and thoughtful as anyone Monica’s ever met, and sometimes she thinks that she’s the only one who sees what an effort it always is.
Eventually, Diana will be able to relax, won’t need to be so vigilant. Declan will be gone forever, and though the things he did will always remain, there will be no chance of him returning in any meaningful form. His instincts, habits, neuroses: all gone, forgotten. She remembers well what it was like, and she’s going to stand by Diana every step of the way.
She already failed her once; never again.
“We’ve talked about it,” Isla says. “The girls on Squad Misandry, I mean. That’s what we call ourselves. And we are mostly girls. Entirely, I think, except for the odd driver, and I don’t think they’re even fully briefed. Ms Lambert likes to pick those of us who’ve got… sympathetic inclinations, that’s what we think. Not a one of us hasn’t been fucked over royally by a father, a brother, a boyfriend, whatever. Makes us less inclined to get all weepy about the bodily autonomy of violent men.” She blinks, and then adds, “Uh, sorry again, Di. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s the right attitude,” Diana says.
“Maybe. But I don’t want you to think that I think you deserved what happened to you.”
“If anybody did,” Diana says, “then I did.”
“Diana,” Monica says, “we’ve talked about this.”
Diana says nothing. Just nods, then picks a book out of her bag and settles down in the back seat to read, very obviously signalling that she’s done talking about this for now. So Monica, shrugging, turns on some quiet music up front, and she and Isla chat for the rest of the journey. Isla tells her what it’s like to stay in what might be the world’s poshest hotel for three months, waiting for someone to take a pop at her guy (“Boring. Like, really boring. But tense at the same time.”) and Monica fills Isla in on what it’s like to sponsor (“The same, really.”)
When they arrive at the facility, it’s almost half an hour later, Diana’s asleep with her book on her lap, and Monica’s on the verge of it, having to be nudged by Isla so she can wake herself up first. As for the facility, Monica’s expectations have been confounded again: it looks like an office complex, one of those soul-sucking places you find on the edges of towns, an ugly blotch of buildings that absorb hundreds of people every morning and spit them out every evening, enervated and pale. Isla leads them into the largest building, which sits off-centre in a manner that seems designed to appear maximally asymmetrical and ugly from every possible angle, and through various corridors to a lift. Up they go, a couple of floors, following Isla to a conference room.
It’s all very ordinary. All of it, that is, except for Elle Lambert, who waits for them in the room, sitting cross-legged in a chair at the head of the table, hands clasped in her lap, the picture of composure, seeming to loom over the room despite how small she is compared to all three of the women who just walked in. Monica is about to greet her when she notices the other person, balled up in his seat at the other end of the table, wearing the baggiest combat fatigues that probably anybody has ever worn.
“Hi, Di,” Trevor says, waving sheepishly. “Long time no see.”
Diana, leaving Monica with confounded expectations again, abandons all decorum to rush over to him, and practically lifts him out of his seat to hug him. “I’m sorry,” she says, quiet enough that Monica almost can’t hear, “I should have been more use.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Trevor says. “We should have got you out.”
Into the slightly awkward silence that follows, with Diana still hugging Trevor as if he is a rag doll that she’s found in the street and has decided to take home, Isla says, “I take it you two know each other?”
Laughing awkwardly, Diana says, “Not really.”
* * *
She should feel more strange around him, she’s sure. He’s going to be a man again! He’s doing the one thing that Declan would have fought for, would have begged for in the end. She ought to be jealous.
But she can’t be. Because if Diana were to follow him down that road, she would find Declan again, waiting for her like the monster out of a fairy tale; Trevor, however, was supposedly a pretty inoffensive guy before Grandmother got her hands on him. Yes, he signed away his right to choose to not shoot people in exchange for a paycheque, but as far as Diana knows, the first and only time he ever shot anyone was during the escape from Stenordale, and from what she’s heard, it didn’t go that well.
“Monica said you were having those out,” she says, glancing down at the chest that his voluminous clothes can’t quite conceal.
“Yes,” Trevor says as they disengage from each other, “but not yet.” He sits, and Diana chooses to sit next to him. At Stenordale, they were aware of each other — to the extent that Declan was aware of much at all, much of the time — but they contrived to almost entirely miss each other while Diana was at Dorley Hall, and she wants to explore the connection she feels. She could be him, and she never will, and she’s okay with that.
“Not yet?” she asks.
“Two more weeks. Can’t fucking wait.”
“Why two weeks?” Isla says. She and Monica are pulling out chairs on the other side of the table from Diana and Trevor, but they’re still at the other end of the room from Ms Lambert, and so have subtly indicated their allegiance. Perhaps, anyway; maybe those were just the closest chairs. “Sorry,” Isla adds, smiling and leaning over the table, her hand out. “Isla Michaels, Peckinville. I’ve been watching over these two.”
“Hi,” Trevor says, shaking and releasing her hand and then turning back to Diana, apparently a little put out that this new person has just inserted herself into the conversation. “Mrs Prentice wasn’t wrong when she said it was too early to take them out. Ms Lambert’s surgeon tells me that two weeks from now is still pushing it, and he warned me about scars, but I said, if I get my flat chest, I don’t care about scars. I can just get tats. Guys dig tats.”
“They do?” Diana asks. She hasn’t thought much about what guys might want from her yet, except to decide that if any of them want her the way he did, she will very quickly run the other way, lest she exercise the only option she has found to be effective against men like that.
“I mean, I assume. I’m the world’s least social gay, Diana. Was even before… everything.”
Diana smiles. “I don’t get out much, either.”
“How are you doing?” Trevor asks. “With the everything I mentioned before.”
Glancing at Ms Lambert before she replies, because she can see her leaning forward out of interest, Diana says, “Some days are hard. But mostly, when they’re hard, it’s because other people make them hard. People commenting on my voice or my height. I was walking on the promenade the other day and I heard some teenagers talking about me, wondering whether I’m a man or a woman.”
“Shit. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Diana says lightly. “I know that I’m still… early. And that I’m coming at it all in a strange order.” She can feel her voice formalising, the way it does when she discusses difficult topics. As a habit, she doesn’t hate it, not least because it’s new. “The surgeries that were performed on me — on you, as well — are not usually performed before any hormone therapy. So I have a woman’s face, but I still have a lot of Declan’s old build, even if I don’t have his beer gut any more.” She allows herself a disgusted sneer at that. Even Declan hadn’t loved it, but hadn’t felt motivated to do anything about it. And he’d enjoyed the feeling of power being so massy gave him. “Monica says my shoulders and upper arms will continue to shrink, that I’ll get, um, more of a bottom.” She giggles, and she loves that she does. Loves even more that it just slipped out without her even thinking about it. “As for the kids… I know what Declan would have done to them. So I walked past, walked home, helped Chiamaka with the evening rush, and then I had a bath.”
Monica’s looking over at her, smiling gently, and Diana wonders if the stinging in her eyes is visible, if she has the beginnings of tears, or if she’s still in control. She cried that night in her hot bath, and then she told Chiamaka about it, about the kids who made her feel like a freak, and Chiamaka told her very seriously that there is nothing freakish about her, that there is only wonder.
Diana sometimes thinks that if Declan had had that kind of thing consistently growing up, and not one-sidedly from his mum, to be instantly countermanded and reinforced against by his dad, he might have turned out different. And she always hates herself for thinking that, because it’s too close to making excuses for him, and Declan deserves no excuses. Not now, not ever.
The room’s gone silent in the wake of her little speech, and Diana’s cheeks start to heat up. All eyes on her again. So she’s grateful when Ms Lambert stands and starts to pace back and forth, picking up from the table a little remote control on her third sweep past it, and clicking on the screen set into the wall.
“Stenordale Manor,” Ms Lambert says. She clicks again, and the image of the proud, ancient, shambolic building is replaced by a pit of scorched earth, surrounded by excavation equipment, and with what looks like a tarpaulin over the central section. “And as it is now. You will, I hope, be aware that the police investigation has moved on, yes?”
“We’ve been briefed,” Monica says, glancing back at Diana for a moment. “We don’t need to go into it.”
“Good.” Ms Lambert clicks again, and the screen switches to a photograph of an old woman. Thin, white in that faded, pinked-and-yellowed way that people become as they age, like a page from a book left out in the elements. Close-cropped grey hair tops her head; reading glasses perch on her nose; and her thin mouth has been painted bright red.
Grandmother. The lipstick was reliably the only makeup she wore. Diana’s not sure she ever saw her without it. Sometimes it was on her teeth.
She is aware, suddenly, of her breath. Of it massing in her chest, swelling it, tightening it, binding her to her seat. It is immediately difficult to exhale, and Diana has to look away, because when she sees Dorothy Marsden, she sees him standing with her, looking on curiously as he did at the beginning, or up close, his face twisted into a triumphant, lustful snarl, as he was at the end.
Diana’s thumbs twitch.
“Uh, Elle?” Monica says. “Next slide.”
“Right,” Ms Lambert says, clicking again. She says nothing else for a few moments, which allows Diana to vacate her lungs, to wheeze painfully, as if a bruise is making its way out of her with her breath. “My apologies, Miss Rosamond. Diana, I mean.”
Yeah. Yeah. That’s her name. That’s her name. She took that name because it means something. Because it means she has a sister, she has someone who will walk with her to the ends of the earth.
And it’s her name because she made a promise, to herself and her sister, never again to be Declan Shaw, and never again to be anything like him.
“I’m okay,” she says, and she hates how she sounds, scratchy and deep, but her limited voice practice has been completely overwhelmed by what still feels like a chest cavity that has filled entirely with brackish, salty water, as if she had gone to the edge of the promenade at home in Cherston-on-Sea and made the whole ocean a part of her. “Shit,” she adds, and when Trevor puts a hand on her shoulder, she leans into it, accepting the comfort.
“Take your time,” Ms Lambert says.
“Shit,” Diana whispers again.
* * *
They took a break. Monica suggested it as forcefully as she dared, still stinging with disbelief that Elle Lambert would jumpscare poor Diana with a picture of Dorothy Marsden like that. Isla, bless her, backed her up, and so Elle called for a refreshment cart and left the conference room for a while. Monica assumes she’s off for a good hard wank in her office; whenever Diana and Trevor would refer obliquely to ‘everything’, Elle would visibly shift in her seat.
She just hopes Diana didn’t notice.
Now, Monica’s sitting on the conference table eating a tuna sandwich and Isla, having chatted for a bit with the woman who brought the cart — a member of Squad Misandry, apparently, who supposedly does not resent being made to wheel a sandwich trolley because it gets her out of the barracks — has come over to join Monica again. She hops up on the table next to her, closer than Monica expected and once again igniting in her the suspicion that the tour of Cherston fast food joints they’ve been going on together has been, in some small way, a series of get-to-know-you dates. And Monica wouldn’t mind — Isla is pretty as hell, and today she’s accented her aquiline nose with painted-on freckles, which stand out against her dark skin in a way that would make Monica herself shift in her seat if she didn’t possess the self-control that years in the Dorley Hall basement instilled in her — but she’s got a job to concentrate on right now. Her priority has to be Diana.
Fun to imagine, though. So she leans over Isla to fetch another sandwich, and she lingers a moment longer than is strictly necessary.
And then, awkwardly, Elle Lambert is back, striding briskly into the room as if she’d only gone for a wee, and activating the screen with her remote before she reaches the table. It’s everyone’s cue to rearrange themselves, to sit back in their chairs and appear attentive, because however much Elle might just have fucked up, she’s still the one with a) all the money and b) all the guns.
“Diana,” Elle says, standing in front of the screen, which shows once again a drone shot of Stenordale Manor, looking as it did before it burned to the ground, “I would like to apologise. Not only for just now, which was insensitive of me, but for your whole interaction with our enterprise.”
“Do not worry about it,” Diana says, and Monica has to quickly cover her mouth, because Diana’s accent has shifted even further into the upper echelons it sometimes borrows from Beatrice’s Aunt Bea persona, and is now scraping the ceiling, matching Elle Lambert’s arch vowels and tight, clipped consonants. The girl is a natural mimic. Not for the first time, Monica wishes she could take a recording of her into the past, to play for Declan. To play for herself, as well; listen to what this guy becomes! Just don’t ask how he gets there.
“You were to be one of my washouts,” Elle continues. “So, yes, I feel I do need to apologise. If you had been successfully handed over to me, you would not be living anywhere so mundane as a bed and breakfast by the seaside. You would also, I imagine, be having a considerably more fraught time of it. So, Diana Rosamond, I apologise. My intentions for you were not generous.”
Nodding tightly, Diana just says, “Thank you.” Her delicate jaw is flexing, and Monica wishes she’d sat with her on the other side of the table, so she could discreetly hold her hand or something.
Ms Lambert moves on, grilling Diana — lightly, thank God — about Dorothy’s motives, her motivations, and for any information that the others might have missed. And Diana, because she spent a lot of time with the woman, has a few nuggets of information to pass on, things that, judging by Elle’s reaction, not even Frankie knew. It was easy, Diana says, for Dorothy to feel as if she was alone in the room when Declan was there, particularly in the early days, when Declan was essentially nonverbal and Dorothy spent less time with the soldier, Jake. And the old woman would talk to herself. It seemed as if she didn’t know she was doing it some of the time, Diana says. Most notably, she spoke of a place up in Scotland somewhere, a place belonging to one of the old ones, the ones from before Frankie’s time.
It’s a lead, Elle says. They don’t know of any of the older sponsors still living up there, but people who are not used to living with scrutiny can be uncareful, and leave pieces of themselves, evidence to find, scattered about.
Time wears on. And on. Lambert goes over and over Diana’s time at Stenordale, grills Trevor for supporting information. Important not to miss a single detail, she insists. And Diana, bless her, keeps going through all of it, never complaining, controlling her reactions. Controlling her breathing, too, from what Monica can see. There’s probably another long, hot bubble bath in her future. Eventually, Elle decides that they’re done for the day, and everyone sits back in their chairs.
“Shit,” Isla comments. “That place was a lot more fucked up than I thought. Diana, how are you still functional?”
“If it helps,” Diana says, stretching, “I’m not always sure that I am.”
“She’s been very brave,” Elle says.
“Not brave. Never brave. Just… I’m not sure it’s possible for any of you to understand how much you can hate yourself.”
Monica glances to her right, because she’s pretty sure she just heard Elle Lambert whisper, “I might,” to herself. And isn’t that interesting?
“Miss Rosamond,” Elle says out loud, and it’s clear from the way she’s facing that she’s talking to Diana. “I have a proposal for you.” She pauses for Diana’s response, but none is forthcoming. “I would like you to live here. At this facility.”
Diana nods. “Why?” she asks.
“You are not safe. Henrietta Smyth-Farrow is… probing our operation.”
“Right,” Monica says. “The lawyer.”
Elle shakes her head. “The lawyer is just the face of it. She’s having people nibble at our network, and at least one agent of hers, an operative of Silver River, has been spotted in the vicinity. It would be foolish in the extreme to assume that what we have witnessed is the extent of her operations. And she wants you, Miss Rosamond. Diana. She wants you. From what Valérie Barbier said, you were considered to be quite the prize.”
“Yeah,” Diana says, shuddering. At this, Monica gets up and walks around to her, pulls out a chair and sits, looping her arm around Diana’s shoulders.
“She is after Mr Darling, as well,” Elle continues, nodding at Trevor, “but he is well protected here. I’m not comfortable with you being stuck out at the edge of nowhere, alone.”
“Sorry. I’d prefer not to.”
“If not here, then why not stay at Dorley Hall? We have soldiers there, and there is strength in numbers — not to mention the location is inherently secure against the showier forms of violence. Nobody wants to start a fight on a university campus.” Elle frowns. “Nobody except, perhaps, the university administration.”
“Ms Lambert,” Diana starts, and then she frowns. Looks at table for a moment, and when she continues, she’s dropped all the affect she usually brings with her, and speaks in something closer to the accent Monica remembers from when Declan was at the hall. “Elle. No-one knows where I am, right? It’s just the people in this room.”
“And most people at the hall by now, I imagine,” Elle says.
“No, actually,” Monica says. “People know she’s back, but we haven’t been specific about where.”
“Oh,” Diana says, “actually, I told Raph about Chiamaka.”
“Raph’s not exactly smuggling information out of the basement, is he?” Trevor says.
“Last I heard, he was practising his eyeliner,” Monica says.
Elle laughs. It’s a short bark of a laugh. Very aristocratic; Monica instantly hates it. “He’s practising his eyeliner? Are you taking in nothing but trans girls down there now? Is it fully a charitable operation?”
“Nah. Boys are just suggestible. It’s kind of the operating principle behind the whole thing.”
“True,” Elle says, and returns her attention to Diana. “I ask you one last time, Diana, to consider moving to somewhere we can protect you.”
“I won’t leave Chiamaka,” Diana says.
“Fine.” Elle turns in her seat. “Isla, are you enjoying the sea air?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Isla says. “Getting good at mini-golf, too.”
“Fine. You are hereby assigned to the protection of Diana Rosamond on a permanent basis. You will have access to all relevant intel, and we’ll get you out of that AirBnB and into a nice flat. All the comforts.”
* * *
Before they leave, Diana hugs Trevor again. She gives him her email address — the one she registered recently, which contains proudly her new surname, her new family allegiance — and makes him promise to send her his, which then leads to Isla taking her quietly aside and telling her about her other email address, the one on the domain used by all the sponsors for their professional communications, or for anything else that must remain discreet. Use it and only it to talk about Dorley-related matters, and use it only through this app. It still contains her new name in full, so it’s fine, and she finds Trevor in the Peckinville directory immediately, sending a smile and a hug emoji as her first official communication.
She loves doing that kind of stuff, and not just because Declan would never; being Diana and choosing to do the things that feel good, that feel right for her, is developing into a genuine pleasure. Even if sometimes she still looks in the mirror and feels as if she might float away, because that’s still a fuck of a lot better than seeing a rapist looking back at her.
Isla drives them home. Diana really wanted to spend the journey conversing this time, but talking about Stenordale and Dorothy and him — even thinking about them — always takes it out of her, and today, going over and over looking for any missing detail, anything Ms Lambert and her people could use to root out Grandmother or to trace lines of communication back to the Smyth-Farrows or anything, was exhausting. When she closes her eyes just for a moment, she’s not especially surprised to open them again in Cherston, just a few minutes away from the bed and breakfast.
Monica helps her out of the car, waves to Isla for both of them, and walks her into the foyer, where Chiamaka is behind the desk, typing away on her ancient laptop. And Diana smiles, because Chiamaka loves that laptop, loves its crappy keys and its number pad, loves it enough that when Adaobi said she could probably get something at least five years newer when the school liquidates its old supply, Chia refused. Just looking at that laptop, with its faded Lenovo logo and the carefully applied electrical tape over the webcam, makes Diana feel at home.
“Diana!” Chiamaka says as they enter. She closes the lid of her computer and rushes around the desk to where Diana is feeling weak but wired, where she holds out both arms, palms up.
Diana takes them, and they stand there for a moment, with Monica disengaging to take off her coat.
“Nothing like this ever again, okay?” Chiamaka says when Monica’s finished fussing with her clothes. “She is exhausted. So whatever this was, never again.”
“If you want to put that in writing,” Monica says, “I’ll post it straight to the bitch who forced it to happen today.”
“Excuse me, young lady?”
Monica shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I’m tired. And I tried to get Diana out of this, I really did, but we both have obligations.”
“Very well,” Chia says, nodding. “I’m afraid you’ve missed the kitchen.”
“I’m ordering pizza,” Monica says. “Just as soon as I’ve had a nap. Was up all last night worrying about how this would go today, whether she’d pull a fast one…” She shudders, and then glances from Diana to Chiamaka and back again. “Nap. Then, Diana, if it’s okay, I’ll order, and we can eat pizza in your room?”
“You will eat in the dining room,” Chiamaka says with a smile. “I don’t care if it is midnight when you wake, you will eat in the dining room. And I will have a slice of your pizza.”
“Fair.”
Monica returns to Diana’s side and ducks under her arm again, pushes Diana’s elbow back behind her head, takes the weight, and Diana would protest that she can absolutely make the stairs on her own, but she doesn’t want to. Not because it isn’t true, but because she has decided never to turn down help. More Diana stuff: accept it where it is offered, and offer it where she can.
Diana Rosamond is a calling as much as she is a woman.
Up in her room, Diana carefully removes her outdoor clothes and puts them away in their allotted places. She fishes her phone out of her bag and hangs that up, too, then places her phone carefully on the little bedside table, starting a waltz playing as she does so. And then, moving around the room in threes and counting all the while, she pulls off her tunic, steps out of her skirt, and climbs into bed.
“One,” she murmurs to herself.
“Two.” Out of time with the music already. It’s getting hard to think. Probably a poem in that. Something about family. Something about being loved and being free.
She doesn’t get to three. Diana instead falls deeply asleep, and dreams of dancing.
* * *
House arrest. Genuinely, this time. Not like before, when it was mostly voluntary, when she could have gone walking the grounds of the university and been reasonably sure she could make it as far as one of the outer car parks without getting ethered and whisked away by some Silver River arsehole. No, now that her name — and Val’s — are out there, are being actively sought by the pigs, she’s to stay inside. No communications — not that she has anyone she wants to talk to — and no more of her wistful little walks to the edge of the lake. Someone’s going to check in with the people at her old dog sanctuary, with the landlord of her empty flat — which has probably already been scoured by Lambert’s people or Smyth-Farrow’s people or both — and with everyone else from the crappy little life she made for herself after leaving the hall, and if she’s really lucky and kisses enough arse, she might even get told what they find out.
She can’t say she didn’t deserve this, being the public face of a human trafficking investigation. Her mug’s been on the telly, though less often than she expected. In fact, the whole fucking investigation’s been less luridly gone into than she thought it would be. Class solidarity, probably. Every paper’s owned by a toff, and every news channel is either run by one or reports directly. Parliament’s all toffs and former-middle-class social climbers. And the Lords? Yeah, guess. And in Frankie’s considerable experience, there isn’t an aristocrat in the land who doesn’t have a pocketful of dirty secrets. Henrietta Smyth-Farrow gave them the out they needed, and they took it.
Doesn’t stop Frankie being wanted to help with their enquiries, though. Shit situation to be in.
Still. Inevitable, wasn’t it? And it’s probably fine; it’s not like she has any ambitions left any more beyond surviving long enough that she and Val can each ram a knife into Dorothy Marsden’s windpipe. Until then, she’s got the boy Ollie, his mousy sponsor Harmony, and the occasional chats she gets to have with Val to keep her going.
Ollie, though. He’s a funny one. She’s got permission to go down to see him semi-regularly, and every time, he asks for another story about one of her girls. He seems to relate to them more than any of the others in his intake. Harmony gets him somewhat — they both have in common that they stared despair in the face and blinked; Frankie’s seen what Harmony keeps hidden under her watch — but maybe she was never quite the same kind of guy he is.
Or was. Because he’s changing, too. Slower than the others; except for Martin, who is doing that whole other thing Frankie’s familiar with, that thing where you hollow yourself out completely, where you discard every prior aspect of yourself, where you spend so much of your time in a dissociative state that you become almost mechanical. And Martin sets her teeth on edge, because in her experience, men like that usually fade away, stop eating, stop drinking, stop caring at all; Pamela’d better know what she’s doing, and she’d better be ready with the intravenous feeding kit. No, Ollie’s more traditional. More like most of the girls Frankie used to care for, who weren’t chosen after months of deliberation and careful evaluation of their responses to the hegemony of masculinity. He’s more like a guy you just grab off the street, and that means she’s got high hopes for him, because she knows that despite what they all say, when you hold a knife to a man’s throat and another to his balls and ask him to choose, most men choose the balls.
Life’s funny that way.
2020 January 22
Wednesday
It’s a game. It’s a game they’ve been playing for a while, but a game that Bethany only just worked out. It’s called Who Is More Of A Girl, and it’s her and Steph against Raph and, god fucking damn it, right now, he’s winning. Which is such bullshit, because who was the first one here to properly woman up and put on a skirt? Bethany, that’s who. Granted, it was to piss off Will, who is now Leigh, and who doesn’t get even half as entertainingly annoyed as she used to get, because apparently a side-effect of becoming a healthier person and also a girl is that you become less baitable. And if that’s the secret, Bethany just needs to identify another—
Shit.
No. No, she doesn’t. This is exactly the trap and exactly the habit she got stuck in last time, when she pushed it too hard for the sake of a joke and then found herself having fucking nightmares about it after. Because you can’t become a girl out of spite, actually. You can’t do it to piss someone off, you can’t do it to upstage anyone, and you definitely can’t do it just because some other idiot is better at eye makeup than you.
“Beth?” Steph says.
“Hmm?”
“You’ve been staring at me for like a minute. You okay?”
“Shit,” Bethany says. She checks over the plaster on Steph’s forehead again, leans in to give it a soft kiss, and then sits back on her haunches. They’re on the floor in the middle of Bethany’s room, recently dry from the shower and naked but for their underwear, and it’s a testament to how much more comfortable Bethany’s become with herself that she can be like this, just fucking be, all vulnerable in her boyshorts and sports bra and shit, with another girl her age. Just a couple of years ago it would have been another boy her age, and Aaron would have been preemptively looking for a pencil to bite.
“Beth?”
“Yeah, I’m good. Just kicking the dumb out of my head, you know?”
Steph copies her, sitting back and resting her palms on the floor, and Bethany is filled instantly with a terribly clear and horrifyingly overpowering sense of her own stupidity. She’s got a girl. Right here, she’s got a girl, and the girl loves her and supports her and wants the best for her, and once the girl got over worrying about how Bethany is, technically, still being forced to be this way — it’s on the paperwork and everything; Bethany Erin [cough], flight risk — she has been nothing but ready with a hand to help her up and another hand to pull outfits out of their increasingly shared wardrobe. She’s got a girl and she even thinks about what Raph is doing? Fucking Raph? The idiot who was right at the back of the pack with Ollie (and possibly Martin) just weeks ago? He’ll be headed for a crash, a big stupid realisation about how he’s been moving forwards for all the wrong reasons, and Bethany doesn’t need to tailgate him enough that she crashes with him.
She can just be here. With Steph.
And she can dress comfortable, and she can talk to Maria today and ask her how things are, and she’s going to keep building a new self, piece by piece.
* * *
It’s a game, and the game is called Fuck It Let’s Go. And Raph’s only playing against himself, but he’s winning all the same, since Steph — who ought to be fucking disqualified anyway for her unfair advantage in being a girl instinctively — and Beth have both stepped out of the running, and none of the others have ever shown any interest in wanting to play. It’s a game, and Raph’s awarding himself points for everything he does, everything he learns, that makes him more like Jane and the other girls, and Jane, giggling, agreed to tally his score at the end of every week.
Crucially, she also agreed to get him a bunch of stuff, and now his room down here is way different than how it used to be.
That nice girl with the brown hair, Christine, she was talking to Steph the other day, and said she was still doing a thing where she applies a whole makeup look for practise in the morning and then washes it off, which sounded like a hell of a lot of work, but Raph was ready to try it anyway until Paige, her girlfriend, gently chastised her. She did it that way because she didn’t put in the work in her second year, she said. In her second year, Paige learned by picking something, whether it was eyeliner or putting her hair in a messy bun or learning how to walk in stilettos, and she practised nothing but that one thing until she was perfect, and then she moved on.
And, shit, Paige? Raph immediately wanted to emulate her. Because she’s stunning, and because people who like girls like girls who look like that, and if Raph’s going to be a girl, he’s going to be the kind of girl that people like. Boy people or girl people? Both? And more besides? He hasn’t got that far yet, except for a strange sensation in his belly when he thinks about Diana, who is also someone he kind of wants to emulate; also someone he thinks about late at night.
So Raph is officially Doing A Paige. Only he’s doing it better, because he’s started now, here, in the basement, and he’s scoring himself and keeping track of his progress. Job one was getting good at eyeliner. Now accomplished. Job two? He’s thinking lip liner. He’s going to conquer all the liners, and then go back for the more subtle stuff, the stuff that makes you look pink where you’re too pale and the stuff that makes you look darker where you’re not dark enough. Next time he sees her, he’s also going to ask that girl Indira, the one who was in charge of torturing Bethany for a while, how she does the gradient thing with her eyeshadow, because she was down here once with an amazing-looking bright pink and purple job that stood out incredibly against her dark skin and really highlighted her eyes, and Raph thinks he can make it work sort of inverted: a mid-purple fading to black, slowly joining with the dark, bold eyeliner, which of course is already perfect on him.
And he’s going to keep at the yoga. Steph’s a decent teacher, and it’s fun to hang out with the girls and to get to see what that kind of interaction is like. He’s also started doing squats, because someone said they can make your arse bigger.
Jane’s showing him lip liner in his mirror, and she’s been talking, and Raph’s been only half-listening. Melissa, that girl Steph came here looking for, the girl who came down here once and seemed nice but sort of distant, she was at the dinner Jane went to the other night, and from what Jane’s saying, she was nice but sort of distant, so Raph’s not sure why Jane thinks it’s worthy of comment. What is interesting, though, is that Amy isn’t Jane’s girlfriend any more, she’s her ‘partner’, and Raph has just got to know more about that.
“Oh, zie’s trying new pronouns,” Jane says, smiling. “Zie’s keeping the old set, too, but — shit, actually, Raph, this is a lesson, so pay attention, I’m sponsoring you right now — when someone starts using new pronouns, you make the effort to use them. Especially when zie is someone precious to you.”
“Holy shit,” Raph says. “That’s cool.” And yeah, it is cool, getting to hear about people reinventing themselves without the intervention of tasers. “Why did she— I mean, shit, sorry, why did zie pick those? And what goes with zie?”
“It’s zie/hir/hirs. And zie picked them because they sound sharper, is what zie said. Like, more lesbian. Rachel was muttering some stuff about recent converts, but she came around, and honestly—” and here Jane presses a hand to her chest and starts speaking with a wide-eyed sincerity, “—I happen to think that newcomers to an identity have quite a bit to teach old-timers.” She giggles. “Unbiased opinion, of course.”
“Yeah,” Raph says, picking up on it, “and you’ve been a woman for how long now?”
“Long enough that I’m always excited to meet new ones,” Jane says, and reaches over to squeeze the hand that isn’t holding lip liner. Shit, that feels nice. Getting girls was always easy before — the guy he used to be was tall enough and decently built, with large, innocent eyes and an easy smile; Cerys called him ‘a bastard with the face of an angel’ — but none of the girls he slept with or even formed relationships with ever touched him so simply, so gently. He’s no stranger to nails dug into his shoulders, to having his name screamed with passion or with hatred, but this, somehow, feels more intimate than any of that.
He might actually love this.
“So,” he asks, genuinely interested, “is zie still a girl, or…?”
“Zie has deemphasised womanhood, zie would say. It’s all about being a lesbian now. Lesbian as a gender, I think.”
“Huh. That’s neat.”
“You think?” Jane peers at him. “You really think?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “I really think.”
Zie/hir/hirs. New pronouns. Should he try that?
No. He hasn’t tried out she yet. Hasn’t thought of a name. Can’t go farting around with pronouns when he doesn’t even know what to call himself.
So maybe that is something he ought to think about right now.
They return to their lip liner practice, and between applying it, wiping it off, trying again, wiping it off and so on, Raph thinks through every woman he’s ever known, every girl he’s ever slept with, every teacher he’s ever had. Making a blacklist. Cerys is out, obviously, and so are Jane and Amy and Melissa and Steph and all, and so’s, like, Frankie, that old woman who comprises a good half of the conversations Ollie starts down here.
He’ll think of something. There are a million good names, after all.
* * *
It’s good to get out of his room. Adam’s spending a lot of time in the common area now, and whether it’s Edy he’s talking to or Leigh or Martin or even Ollie, he treasures every moment. Because this is all new, and this is all real, and in his time down here under Dorley Hall he may be, he thinks, experiencing the most sustained period of real, genuine sincerity of his life. Certainly since Mum was prevented from spending as much time with him as before. Yes, they want something from him here — Edy, specifically, wants something from him — but they wanted more back home, and they wanted it to consume him, wanted him to become more of an idea than a person, a vessel for his father’s twisted, broken vision for humanity. His vision of God. Edy just wants him to be a girl.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Edy wanted to get him out, and she did that, and for everything since, Adam gets the impression, now that he can look back with clear eyes, that she’s been winging it, as they say down here. She even told him as such, just once: it’s not that she wants him to be exactly like her, but she has no other options available to her. He thinks that maybe if he were to ask, she might try to get him out, might allow him to continue to be Adam, and he toys with that idea sometimes. Other times, though, it’s the most repulsive thing he can think of: anything that brings him closer to his father’s wishes for him makes his skin crawl.
They watched a movie before. One of the occasional movie nights they’ve started having. And someone in the movie brought up the concept of desecration, of making something unholy, and though Edy tried hurriedly to shield him from it, from the notion that someone could find joy in desecration, he told her that it was fine, that he was learning to not be made upset by such things any more. And it’s true that he hasn’t been; in fact, in the nights since, he has become almost obsessed with the concept.
Making something unholy.
Making himself unholy.
Desecrating Adam, the Voice of God. Rendering him an abomination.
It’s exciting.
But there is also more to his life now than the Voice, whether it is in training to be its vessel or in denying it. He’s been showing Martin how to play Stardew Valley, and in doing so, has been able to talk to him more. He feels like they could be close, that they should be close, that they have things in their past that the others don’t quite know how to relate to, and if there is one thing that Adam has been taught, it is how to proselytise. It’s all in the persistence, and Martin is showing every sign of enjoying their evenings together.
Bethany, when she heard they were playing the game together, said something rude about farming, about farmers, and about the things they do to their sheep under cover of darkness, which Adam at first and to his subsequent mild embarrassment took completely seriously; now that he knows the truth about his father and the people he surrounded himself with, there is no low that Adam would not believe of him. Edy had to tell him that it was just a tacky, hacky, low-effort joke, which caused Bethany to stop for a moment and then leave the room, muttering about needing to get better material.
Anyway, Stardew Valley is for later. Right now, it’s dinner with Leigh and Martin and Ollie and all their sponsors. And Leigh’s sitting close, which is nice. She doesn’t look at him the way she used to, though, which makes Adam a touch sad, and he’s been wondering if there’s anything he can do to further close the gap which opened up between them. Because Leigh’s a different person now than she was when she hurt Maria — literally! — and Adam is too. Now that he understands, he finds it easier to forgive Leigh for the actions of Will; they seem like the last thrashing of someone who was already on the way out. Certainly, Adam shudders to think of the things he might have done, the things that would have seemed normal to him, even desirable, had Edy never rescued him. He was what they made him, Mum said. And they made him into their Voice.
Adam’s just thinking of trying to start a conversation with Leigh, something about the vegetarian burgers or about the way Tabitha’s done her hair today, when Raph comes in with Jane, and he’s wearing a skirt and a blouse and his lips look somehow bigger and redder than they did this morning, and Leigh whispers, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” to herself, and immediately pushes back her chair and leaves.
“You lot have got to stop fucking with her,” Tabitha says, pointing at Jane but glaring at Raph, and then she follows Leigh out into the corridor. Adam can hear them talking, and he listens as their voices fade, as they return to Leigh’s room.
“We weren’t fucking with anyone,” Jane says to the room as she goes over to the dumbwaiter in the corner and retrieves a couple of plates.
“I might have been fucking with her a little bit,” Raph says, smiling a broad smile that seems all the more intense for the contrast between his white teeth and his painted red lips.
Jane rushes to set down Raph’s plate and her own, but she’s too late, and everyone gets to see the grin that she tries to hide.
2020 January 23
Thursday
Fucking Henny Smyth-Farrow. Her idiots have been probing the network again, nibbling at Peckinville’s security. And someone tried to get into the facility yesterday! Elle’s terrified of what could happen to Diana, out there with no-one to protect her but Isla and Monica and some bed and breakfast proprietress that Elle’s people haven’t even had time to assemble a proper file on. No strength in numbers, as at Dorley Hall; no strength in strength, as Elle has here.
She checks her itinerary. Too much to do today, far too much. She misses Cally already, but she’s in the secure wing, in Elle’s suite, living the life of luxury — and boredom, most likely — while Elle’s stuck out here. She misses her. Hell, Elle misses Beatrice still! A tragedy that she is most likely closed to her forever now. She still remembers their introduction in that hotel; Beatrice in that dress. A decade-and-a-half older than her but no less energetic. No less alive.
More so, in fact. Rather a consistent thing, that.
Bloody well fuck it. She’s wallowing in the past again, and when she’s not, she’s wallowing in the present. Neither is productive, and certainly neither gets her any closer to discovering an exploitable weakness in Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s operation. It’s the American money that’s the problem: Silver River may lack bodies and it may lack facilities, but when you have an unquenchable money spigot held open by the selfish prayers of prosperity gospel maniacs, you can do whatever you want. There comes a point where Elladine’s status ceases to be sufficient, where money talks louder. And she has money, too, to be sure, but it is a given that the religious nuts have more. Probably squirrelled away in darker, nastier hiding places, too.
Her car’s waiting for her out on the lot. She gets the go-ahead, so she barges through the doors into the courtyard and immediately has to shield her eyes from the glare. God, she hates January: the sun spends half its time lurking right in your eyeline, and you look like a bloody pillock wearing sunglasses and a parka at the same time. Thank heaven it’s only a short walk to the car.
All the same, after a few steps, she stops, reaches down for her satchel and starts rummaging around for her Ray-Bans, struggling to find them in the voluminous bag she’s been carrying around the facility.
And then someone in her retinue calls out, “Down!”
It’s instinct. She’s drilled it enough, so much so that by the time she registers the hard, dull thump of the bullet hitting the dirt next to her, and well before she hears the hard crack of the shot being fired in the first place, she’s already halfway to the ground, her body working through practised motions and landing her on her elbows, facing sideways, her heels already kicked off. Working methodically through her training, she rolls, and another bullet strikes the dirt where she was just a moment before.
She doesn’t roll again. Instead, she slams her knuckles into the grass as hard as she can, pushes up to her knees — to a runner’s start, almost — and starts moving. Her bare foot bites the ground, shoves her forwards, and she runs, weaving and bobbing and moving erratically, just as she has been trained. Another bullet zips past her, missing her by what could be feet or inches, she doesn’t know, and then the bodies arrive, jogging, blocking her from all angles. Her people, armoured and armed, as ready for this moment as she has been.
Another shot fires, this one loud enough to crack the fucking sky open, but it doesn’t land anywhere close by, and then Elle is back inside again, being lifted by both shoulders as the adrenaline drains and her legs start to wobble, and carried through the anteroom to safety. Around her, her people are talking over comms, checking in, but beyond gleaning that a shooter has been located and neutralised, Elle finds it difficult to concentrate.
Being shot at is supposed to make you feel more alive. Every movie, every TV show, every book seems to insist on it. But Elladine Lambert finds herself wishing, with a sincerity that scares the hell out of her, that the bullet had hit home.
She’d be dead. She’d be done. She’d be with Kelly now. And all of this would be somebody else’s problem.
* * *
What the fuck? Why are there wet paint signs up where the entrance hall turns to meet the kitchen? Before she goes any farther, Christine checks her phone for any messages, for anything that might explain this, but finds nothing, so she keeps going, buzzing herself into an empty kitchen — par for the course these days, what with the airlock protocol and all; people have been socialising more in the dining hall, and there’s a kitchenette in one of the back rooms that’s been cleared out and sees use these days as somewhere to hang out, gossip, and make tea in tasteless mugs.
When Christine pushes through the doors to the dining hall, though, she’s met with something she doesn’t expect: one of the Peckinville soldiers from out back. Standing right in her fucking way. She’s about to get righteous, channel her inner bitch — which she has been working on, with encouragement from Paige — when something in the soldier girl’s expression changes her mind. So when the soldier holds out a hand for Christine’s bag, she hands it over without comment.
“What’s going on?” Christine asks as the soldier searches through her things.
“Elle Lambert has been shot at,” the soldier says.
Well. Nothing Christine can say to that, especially not the sarcastic comments that are suddenly queuing up in her throat. Because, yeah, she is surprised it’s taken this long for someone to have a pop at her, but if she says that out loud, the very serious-minded soldier woman might actually hit her.
A moment later, the woman’s letting her go, and Christine hustles over to one of the tables, where Paige and Abby are sitting, whispering to each other. Christine accepts hugs from both of them, and a kiss from Paige, and then gets right down to business.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Someone shot Elle,” Paige says.
“No, I got that. I mean, why?”
“Who the fuck knows?” Abby says, leaning on her wrists. “Probably in a turf war with that bloody Smyth-Farrow woman. Look, have you seen Melissa?”
“Melissa?” Christine says, frowning. “No. Been out all day. Uni stuff.”
“Shit. I don’t know where she is; no-one does. We were supposed to meet up, but she’s not here, and she’s not in her room, and Shy doesn’t know where she is, and now people are being shot at and Melissa’s out there somewhere!”
Paige, sitting next to Abby, moves immediately to comfort Abby, while Christine fetches her laptop from her bag and opens it. “I can check her sign-ins,” she says. “When she left, which door, etc. Whether she was seen on a uni camera, and all that.”
“Christine,” Abby says, “thank you.”
“S’all right,” Christine says, already absorbed by the task. “And relax, Abs. No-one’s shooting at Melissa. She’s just another Dorley girl, right? Apart from us, no-one even knows who she is.”
* * *
There it is. Jenny Yau’s house. Her new place. Semi-detached, and that means something. In Almsworth especially, that means a hell of mortgage and a reliable, sizeable income. That means Jenny’s doing really well for herself. Even if she ultimately rejects Melissa, that’s something to celebrate, right?
Christ, she’s a fuckup. She goes out on a date with her girlfriends and her friends and the whole time she’s thinking about Jenny. She hangs with Nell and tries to make nice, normal conversation, and the whole time she’s thinking about Jenny. She tries to watch TV, read, even play a simple game on her laptop, and she loses track of what she’s doing because she’s thinking about Jenny.
And not just Jenny. She reread the old files on Russ, on her supposed brother, the boy she ran out on. The boy she neglected because she was too busy with her own shit. They don’t update the files on him any more, not since Melissa graduated, but after she got taken? After she spent three self-indulgent years at Dorley Hall? Russ got fucked up. And at dinner, when she asked Amy about him again, all she’d say was that he’s ‘doing okay’.
Doing okay. That’s not what you say when someone’s living the dream. That’s what you say when they’re barely surviving their mother dying and their brother abandoning them, leaving them with no family but their abusive father. ‘Doing okay’ is what you say when someone is barely hanging on.
But she can’t see Russ again. She knows that. Reconnecting with family is number one on the big list of Dorley Don’ts, because family will chase down your lies to the ends of the Earth, and they will expose you and the hall and everyone who has ever come from there. She also knows that Aunt Bea would never have even considered letting Melissa reconnect with Jenny if she hadn’t already broken protocol over and over again and exposed more than half of her former life’s connections to her new self.
Because she’s a fucking problem. Because she makes everything about herself. Because she’s a never-ending nightmare that everyone else has to deal with, accommodate, make space for. Hell, Shahida’s reorientating her whole life around Melissa and Abby now, and while that’s good, while that’s fucking amazing, it’s hard not to wonder if, by doing so, she’s locking herself off from something better. Shahida’s one of the most amazing people Melissa’s ever known, and she deserves better than to be tied down in such a way. And Abby! She was getting away from the hall until Melissa came back and pulled her in again.
Jenny’s going to hate her.
But Melissa’s got to know. And she can’t make Tabitha and all the others at the hall do it all for her. She can’t make them put in the work and the effort and the money only for it all to prove useless, for Jenny to throw her out, to decry her.
At least this way, Melissa’s not making anyone else face this with her. She’s not making anyone else responsible for it. She’s not making her problems anyone else’s, not any more.
She’s being stupid. She’s being so stupid. But she couldn’t get it out of her head. All morning. Thought of nothing else. Even bummed a joint off someone else on the third floor in the hopes that it would mellow her; nope. All she could think about was Jenny shouting at her, Jenny calling her disgusting.
Melissa’s got her lies ready. She never faked her own death. She just walked away. Hitch-hiked all the way to Edinburgh. Decided that she didn’t want to be found, so she cut herself off from her old life as much as she could. Worked cash-only for the money to buy hormones. Yeah, it doesn’t explain how she could afford facial surgery, but cis people seem to think that either everything is surgery or that nothing is; she can just allude to the effects of HRT. It’s not like her FFS was especially extensive or anything, not compared to some of the other girls from her intake.
Dorley Hall? What’s that?
She’s not going to say she lives down here. She’s visiting. Feeling guilty about leaving her old life behind. Wanting to check in before she goes home.
It has the virtue of almost being true.
And it’s not going to change a fucking thing. Because Jenny Yau is going to hate her.
She knocks. For a moment, there’s nothing. And then a voice that is so, so familiar calls out, “Just a minute!”
Melissa could run. She could run right now. Because this whole thing is stupid, so stupid, and Jenny’s going to hate her, and—
The door opens, and Melissa can’t stop herself from smiling, because it’s Jenny, and she looks almost like she used to.
“Laura?” Jenny says, frowning. “That’s—? No. No, no…”
And from the back room, another voice, just as familiar, a voice that Melissa remembers breaking, deepening, remembers becoming this, a voice she remembers with a fondness that staggers her and a fear that almost breaks her, shouts, “Who is it?”
* * *
“One, two, three!”
Three strikes, one to the wrist to disarm, one to the solar plexus to stagger, one to the throat to disable.
“One, two, three!”
And again, with precisely the same force. If her opponent were anything but a practice dummy, he would be fucked right now. He would be about to lose his footing, upon which Cora would step forward, hook her boot inside his stride, and push him to the floor. Her gun is still ready for her on the bench, but for a close-quarters encounter such as this, the next step, obviously, is to draw her knife, and—
“Cora!”
She can barely hear it over her ear protection she’s still wearing, and for a moment she considers pretending that she heard nothing at all and just carrying on, returning to the task she ought to be carrying out — cleaning and prepping her equipment — but that way lies getting told off and lectured and sometimes getting strapped down and having to have her meals fed to her through a tube, and Cora’s not interested in any of that right now. She’s been having a good time lately, and she doesn’t want it to end.
She hates that the way to control her is to show her what life can be, take it away for some mild infraction, and then release her again with a warning that the punishments she’s tasted can be made permanent, that her life can once again become what it used to be, what she spent years enduring. She hates how eager to please this makes her.
She hates how, sometimes, she longs for it.
“Yah?” she says, sliding the ear defenders down around her neck. They’re ugly, chunky things, painted with an absurd camouflage effect, like a lot of the things you can buy in gun stores here are. She loves them because Haley hates them, almost as much as she hates it when Cora calls her ‘Handler Haley’ and not ‘ma’am’ or ‘Miss Godfrey’.
Haley’s marching in from the far door, dressed up to the fucking nines as per usual, and even in the way she says Cora’s name, it’s obvious she’s having trouble dropping the fake American accent and regaining her natural voice. Not a problem Cora ever has, though to call this her natural voice would be a stretch.
“Cora,” Haley says, coming to a stop at the edge of Cora’s staging area. “Attend.”
“Jawohl.”
“Shut up. And where were you last night?”
Cora shrugs. “Out,” she says, sheathing her knife in her thigh holster.
“Out?”
“Went clubbing. Scored.”
“Cora,” Haley says, picking up Cora’s pistol from the bench and checking it over, “I’ve been lax with you, since we are both in a strange country, but you really must be more careful.” She replaces the gun with a frown, having found nothing to complain about. She should have known she wouldn’t; Cora always makes her guns safe.
“It’s fine. She was nice.” Cora smiles her dirtiest smile. “She held me down like you used to.”
Haley just sighs and pulls out her little notebook. “Fine. Where did you find this girl?”
“I told you. At a club.”
“I’m obligated to check on her. You know that, don’t you?”
“Got her socials on my phone,” Cora says, nodding at it. Haley immediately picks it up and starts swiping through. “You can follow up all you want. But she’s fine. Shitposting away quite happily. She hurt me, anyway.”
Suddenly concerned, Haley puts down the phone and takes another step towards Cora. Places a hand on her shoulder in a manner so gentle it makes Cora’s skin tingle. “Cora,” she says, “are you okay?”
“She hurt me consensually.” The memory of it makes her tingle even more.
“Oh.”
“I’m not a danger to her, Handler Haley.”
The hand quickly retracts and finds a home on Haley’s hip instead. “You used to be.”
“I used to be a lot of things, Hale,” Cora says, suddenly tired of this conversation. Suddenly vulnerable in a fashion she does not appreciate. “Look, what do you need?”
Haley’s voice is all soft again. “Things are about to change for you, Cora,” she says. “Again.”
“Well, if there’s anything I’m used to…” Turning away, Cora looks for something to do with her hands. Finds the pistol Haley put down and picks it up, turns it over. To look at it is to remember: drills, training. More hours of it than she can count.
“The principal has survived a shooting,” Haley says, and that gets Cora’s attention. Someone tried to assassinate Elle Lambert? What’s happening back home? “We have been activated.”
“Immediate action?”
“Standby.”
“But action,” Cora says, “sooner or later, right?”
“Sooner or later. Briefing tonight.” Haley looks around at the scattered equipment. “Do you need help with this?”
“Nah. I’ve got it.”
Haley nods, pats at where her pockets would be if she was wearing suitable clothes, and then shrugs awkwardly. “One hour,” she says.
“Gotcha,” Cora says, and Haley turns away. Leaves as briskly as she entered.
Well, then. Action at last. And not, judging by how flustered Haley is, anything flash-in-the-pan like all their assignments up to now. No, this is big. Elle Lambert, the woman in whose palm Cora ultimately resides, survived an assassination attempt, and now Haley’s telling Cora that things are about to change?
Hell yes.
One day, Cora woke up in a cell. A cell with a cot and a glass door and a stainless steel toilet, and a girl on the other side of the glass, telling her about the terrible things she had done.
Another day, Cora woke up in that same cell. Another woman talking to her this time, an older woman, telling her that her behaviour made her unsuitable for the programme, that she was an ‘unamendably violent individual’. She’ll remember that phrasing as long as she lives. She still doesn’t consider it entirely fair.
On yet another day, Cora woke up in a hospital bed. She’d been made suitable, she was told. She would have a purpose. And when she asked what had been done to her and heard her new voice, still scratchy and hoarse but different in a way there was no coming back from, she was suddenly excited. Her old world, boring and predictable, had been long ago taken from her, and now here was a new one, filled with promise.
And now, things are changing again.
One hour to tidy up, and then she gets to learn exactly how much they’ve changed. She gets to learn who she will be this time, what her cover will be. There might be training, as there was when she was to act as a stewardess; there might be long, tedious briefings, as there were for that security job in Washington. Whatever; it’ll be new, it’ll be different.
And Haley will be there. Might even give her cause to strap her down again. For old times’ sake.
Cora starts closing cases, folding away clothes, and then she feels against her neck the weight of the ear protection. She almost forgot what she was in the middle of when Haley interrupted her, and it comes back to her like an itch that requires scratching. It’s one of the things they trained into her: never leave something half-done, even when it is just a limbering-up exercise, even when she’s just checking and cleaning and testing her gear.
Pulling the ear defenders back up, she returns to first position. Strikes the dummy once, twice, three times, counting as she goes. Again. Again. Hooks in her ankle, topples the dummy to the floor. Pulls her knife. Blade to the throat. Slides it across, dispatching the begging, pleading man she imagines under her.
And then the pistol. A thought, and it’s in her hand. She retrieves and slaps home the clip — “One.” — racks it — “Two.” — and clicks off the safety. “Three.”
Turning downrange, she sights on the target and pulls the trigger. The buck of the weapon against her hand, her elbow, her shoulder, is as familiar as it is delightful, and the target’s left shoulder, shredded away from the rest of the wood and paper figure, detaches, taking the torso with it and leaving the target ragged and Cora with the thrill she’s come to crave, the lightning of quick and decisive violence, the exultation of the weapon wielded perfectly.
“Four.”
Notes:
Chapter 45: Kingfisher
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2008 January 1
Tuesday
You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? The high-and-mighties showed their cards the day before Christmas Eve, because Morris’ brain ticked over one quiet night and he guessed enough of it, told the others, brought chaos to the basement. And that might have been fun, except that Maria and the two older women, the so-called Aunties, put an immediate stop to the incipient riot with a PowerPoint presentation that somehow contrived to render the forced transformation of seven men into women boring.
Boring to Philip, anyway. He already worked it out weeks before, and bore the confirmation with immense, suffocating ennui. Couldn’t even lift his spirits by admiring the shocked and disgusted faces of the other soon-to-be-ex-boys, not this time; in the absence of prior confirmation or denial, Philip had very nearly convinced himself that all of this — the slight but noticeable changes to his body and some milquetoast lectures on feminism that seemed to be aimed at people who had encountered the concept of women have feelings too only the previous afternoon, and who were still doubtful about it — was merely a prelude to something greater, something more fucking real.
They told him they were going to bloody well fix him. And if this is it, if this is really their big play…
Hence: bored. And with nothing in the immediate future likely to alleviate that boredom, especially since his fellow captives were too morose — still! a week after disclosure! — to ring in the new year with a mass rebellion like he wanted. Probably not worth trying to rile any of them up for at least another fortnight.
Not that it would be worth Philip’s time to bother.
He’s fought almost everyone down here now. Morris was the closest to actually being fun, the most able to go a few rounds. Morris is a big man; well, big-ish. Big compared to Philip, though that doesn’t take much. A big man with a pretty face, which he offsets with his height and bulk. A good trick if you can pull it off: the girls love a kind pair of eyes and a gentle smile, but you need the body to go with it or the boys will call you queer, and then they’ll fucking batter you, as Morris put it during one of their rare heart-to-hearts.
That’s what Philip did. Two weeks in, just after breakfast. Fucking battered him. Oh, to begin with, Morris gave almost as good as he got, lacking the tactical deficiency of a lot of taller, bulkier men, who rely on their strength and their reach, assuming that all they have to do is get hold of the other guy, and the fight is over. Men like that have no answer to someone like Philip, who is hard to grab and even harder to keep hold of. Not Morris, though; Morris was ready for the feints and the jabs and even for Philip’s fancy footwork, but still pulled his punches. At the time, Philip had thought it was because Morris decided that such a little man couldn’t take the hit, because that’s what Philip’s schoolchums thought, that a boy of such an effete nature — and whose upper arms could take a belt several times before the first notch — couldn’t possibly be a threat. And he’d thought less of the man because of it. But then they talked, weeks later, when Philip was let out of the cells and approached Morris in the common room, hands raised in surrender, and Morris explained, after much prompting, that it was just habit.
When you’re big, he said, and you’re Black, and you have a certain rep, deserved or no, you mustn’t win fights too hard, especially when your opponent is some plummy-voiced little white twerp who can make your life a living hell by squealing to the right people. So Morris, a habitual mollifier, pulled his punches, and Philip, thinking him weak because of it, didn’t. But then, he was never going to. Morris isn’t the only one with habits: Philip doesn’t stop until the blood on his knuckles joins itself with sticky strands to the unfortunate he is straddling.
Sometimes, not even then.
Mum always said there’s something wrong with him, something missing from his brain that normal people have. And Philip’s always considered that a stupid thing to say. Stupid and insulting, as if he isn’t capable of making his own decisions. As if he cannot, when he throws his fist, understand the likely consequences.
He just doesn’t care.
He fought two Scottish boys just last year. Down here for their education and letting loose for the night. They were big men, like Morris, but drunk and lairy and far less capable. Philip put one of them in the hospital. Watch out for the vicious wee cunt, his friend said — too late — and Philip will always remember that. That man understood him.
Morris does, too. Which is why, when Philip approached him that day, Morris shook his hand. Good game.
Philip could have taken him again. Right there. Because Morris was better than the others — and more fun — but he still moves too slowly, too carefully, too much like a man who doesn’t want to assert himself; who cannot, perhaps, for fear of what will be done to him if he does. And it would have been fun to try, to goad him past his imposed limits, to really see what he could do, even after a few months of estrogen therapy, testosterone suppression and a total lack of anything to do down here aside from watch TV, eat appalling breakfast cereals, and lose fights.
Terrible to imagine existing within such limits, but exciting, too. Philip has always been protected in a hundred ways, all of them inaccessible to a working-class Black man. He can strike with impunity, and when he does, it is with the quickness of a kingfisher, the violence of a wasp, and the assurance of a prince.
Arrest him? Mumsy’ll have him out in two shakes, and she’ll have the copper’s bloody badge. Sue him? The lawyers’ll eat well for a year. Nothing short of killing him can put him down.
Well, almost nothing. Locking him in a basement — Philip tried to get everyone to call it the whine cellar, but couldn’t get it to stick — for almost four months with a bedraggled selection of tedious ne’er-do-wells with unappealing sob stories has controlled him fairly effectively. And you’ve got to laugh, or else you’ll cry. You’ll become as despondent as the rest of them. As boring.
When Philip was brought here, the older ones, Auntie Ashley and Aunt Bea, tag-teamed him in the cell in which they first stashed him and told him very firmly, in accents that would have been flawless if not for Ashley’s occasional flattened vowels, that they had brought him here to fix him, to make him right, he was relieved. And he was relieved until exactly the point that he understood how they intended to fix him, and then it all bloody well fell apart.
Because maybe there is something missing in his brain. Something that other people have that forces them to give a toss about the world around them, about where the dominoes fall, about how the cookie crumbles, all that nonsense. He hates his mother for saying it of him, but not for saying it; for making him this way and providing him with no solution. Fencing lessons, infinite largesse, a million second chances, a deaf ear to his actual problems, and no solution.
He thinks sometimes, though, that she looks at him with pride. That perhaps the thing that is missing from him has always been missing from her, too, and that she found herself frustrated, restricted by the expectations of her sex, her class. And that makes him hate her all the more. Because she should despise their shared state. She should want to cut it out of herself, and she should bloody well drown herself for the crime of bringing someone else so broken into the world.
Sometimes he’ll look at some man or woman, be they a peer or — aha — a Peer, and he will envy them with a ferocity that chokes the bloody life out of him, that thrusts him into a darkness from which he can barely crawl. He or she or they or whoever, be they mediocrity or superstar, they have, all of them, something he lacks. Something that allows them to be content with their lot, to exist within it, to look at the boundaries that have been drawn around them, or which they have themselves drawn, and find comfort in them.
Philip looks at the world sometimes and wants to scream so loud that he shatters it. Wants to take it by the throat and claw at it until it bleeds and gasps and shakes.
When he was first let out into the common area to meet his fellow inmates, he thought for a moment that he had found his true peers. But they turned out to have been collected by the amusingly named sponsors of Dorley Hall for, mostly, mundane crimes of misogyny, petty little violences; dirt with which Philip would not sully his hands. And, ultimately, despite their aggression, despite their ignorant, spitting malice, they turned out to be as anaesthetised as everyone else. All except Morris, who is one step closer to Philip than the rest of them, who sees some of the things they don’t, who is almost comprehensible. Probably not a good sign for Morris, really.
But you’ve got to laugh. Or you’ll do something drastic.
In the mirror he twists, checking himself, confirming that the t-shirt around his waist is tied tight, that the tank-top he mutilated sits properly, that the inch-long pigtails he’s formed with torn fabric are appropriately cheeky.
Does he look like a naughty schoolgirl, with her skirt shortened, her top cropped, her belly exposed, her hair carefully styled? Does he look the picture of innocence, ready to be soiled, stained and possessed? Not really. But he looks more like that than he did twenty minutes ago, and definitely more like it than any of the others they’ve got stuck down here, and that’s enough.
Auntie Ashley wants him to be a girl because she thinks it will, on its own, be enough somehow to fix him. It won’t, more’s the pity. But maybe it will be fun. And maybe one of the men out there in the common room will consent to have a little fun, too.
Licking his lips, adjusting the socks stuffed into his improvised bra, and practising a hip wiggle one last time in the mirror, Philip sets out from his room, to see if anyone wants to get their dick sucked. Because he’s never done it before. Because it will annoy the piss out of the sponsors. And because Morris, maybe, will let him.
And if he won’t, maybe Auntie Ashley will.
2020 January 23
Thursday
“Laura? That’s—? No. No, no…”
It takes Melissa a moment to process it, a moment to get it, because who calls their mum by their first name? She didn’t know that mums even had first names until she first saw Mum and Jenny together, giggling like schoolgirls in the dining room, behaving with an intimacy that Mark didn’t understand but somehow still longed for, and which Melissa, years later, understands only too well.
You get trapped. You can get trapped in the wrong sex, you can get trapped in the wrong city or town or village, you can get trapped in the wrong marriage. And when you are trapped, there will be people on the outside who see you, who reach in, who see that you are bound, that you are broken, that you need help. Shahida was that to Mark. Mark was that to Stefan. Jenny was that to Mum. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.
Jenny sees Mum in her, enough to call her by her name. Melissa never really did. Maybe because she still sees too much of Mark, even after the surgery and the years of hormones. But she’s still got her pictures, and sometimes, when she’s brought them out and cried over the plastic that protects them, she’s seen flashes of herself in her mother’s face. In her hands, in her smile, in the way she used to hold herself.
So she knows what Jenny sees. And the thought of it, of Jenny’s best friend, of Jenny’s probable former lover, living on in this idiot girl who just showed the fuck up one day, back from the dead and still haunted… it might be breaking Melissa.
She hadn’t thought there was any part of her left that had not already been broken.
It’s getting hard to hear, hard to think. The world feels heavy, and Melissa feels close to being pulled under, being swept away. She almost doesn’t notice the other voice, the male voice, coming from inside somewhere, asking who’s at the door.
But she knows it. Of course she does. And she understands immediately what a terrible, stupid mistake she has made.
Covering her face with one hand, she turns away, shields herself, just in time for Russ, her brother, to round the corner, to emerge from what might be a kitchen or a living room into the long hallway that ends in the front door. Through the cracks in her fingers, she can see him: older, taller, his dusty brown hair grown messy but not long, the way that hair that curls often does. Easy to imagine pulling on it, gently teasing him, being a real sister to him.
His face, once soft like hers, now hardened with maturity.
He’s a man now. All grown up.
Melissa wants to cry.
Melissa wants to puke.
Melissa wants, desperately, to take back the last hour of her life. But she can do the next best thing. With Jenny Yau, the best and almost the last connection to her mother that exists and the woman who was so kind to her, still torn between recognition and confusion, Melissa has a chance to get away, so turns all the way around, starts walking away, each step ripped from the dirt like a root, like a vein, messy and bloody and awful. She can take this back. She can go, right fucking now, and be a mystery, be a fucking ghost, be a question without an answer.
But she’s not even capable of running away properly, not any more, not since she started finally to understand that without connections, without people, she is empty. So she goes slow, she allows her longing and her hesitation to pull at her, and Jenny gets her hand in hers.
“Wait,” says Jenny Yau.
“I’m sorry,” Melissa whispers, tugging on her hand, but Jenny won’t let go.
Shit. It’s like a fucking echo, faint and faded and distorted but always with her, and sometimes so loud that it deafens her. Melissa’s life: always trying to leave, always trying to get away, to start again, or to finish things properly; always a woman, desperate to help her, to know her, holding on as hard as she can.
“You’re… Mark, aren’t you?” Jenny says.
“No,” says another voice, before Melissa can say anything. “No.” Russ. Little Russell, her baby brother. “No, no, fucking no. I don’t fucking believe it!”
She should turn back around. Face Jenny. Face him. But the same force that stopped her from running keeps her here now, frozen, unmoving, as trapped as she ever was. And it’s all the same, anyway, because Russ is marching out into the cold, grabbing her by both arms, glaring down at her — when did he get so tall? — and then, without another word, he is gone, throwing his bag into the back of a car parked in the road, slamming the door, and hitting the gas so hard that, for a moment, the front wheels spin noisily and uselessly against the tarmac.
* * *
If you had asked Christine a week or two ago, amidst the drama of the lockdown, the bodies surfacing at Stenordale, and the sudden conversion of Elle Lambert’s precautionary security detail out back from an occasional irritation and an ease on Rabia Qureshi’s responsibilities, to an active and unavoidable — if, at times, perplexingly peppy — presence, what it would be like at Dorley Hall after someone took a genuine pop at the boss’ boss, at the woman whose group of companies funds the whole damn thing out of a series of deniable line items, Christine would not, she thinks, have picked ‘everyone sitting down for a nice cup of tea’ as her top choice. It probably wouldn’t have made the top ten. And yet there they all are, corralled into the dining hall, sitting, standing, sprawling — she’s glad she wore shorts today, and yes, she noticed Aunt Bea noticing them and pointedly declining to comment — and accepting the thick plastic cups of steaming hot tea that the soldiers are passing out, shuttling it from the resurrected tea urn and following up with little packets of sugar for those who ask, throwing them into waiting hands and laps and onto tables with the unnerving accuracy of people who have, Christine is reminded, been trained to kill.
They make pretty good tea, also.
The PMC quotient is holding court at the other end of the dining hall, with some of the sponsors arranged in a half-circle, eating sandwiches off little paper plates and being addressed by Jan, Elle Lambert’s voice here at the hall. Her voice in matters pertaining to Peckinville’s fun little private war crimes division, anyway; though Christine’s looked into them as far as she was able and determined that what they do overseas these days is limited largely to lucrative personal security contracts and does not involve waging the kinds of wars that Christine’s imagination rather luridly illustrated for her in her dreams, the night after she first met Jan. It’s possible that under Elle, it’s Peckinville’s insurance division that has become the most cleanly, definitively evil, unless the diggers that the group of companies might or might not manufacture are prone to exploding and taking out farmhands, villagers and sheep.
Christine could go over and listen to the briefing, but it’s fine. She’s better off not getting involved; whatever information she can’t get away with not knowing will come to her second- or third-hand.
Everything is surprisingly calm. It helps that the shooter failed, or so Abby says. Ms Lambert stopped, dropped and rolled like she should have, they got the sniper, and now Peckinville is performing a comprehensive leak hunt, with Elle Lambert buried in some vault somewhere, deeper even than Steph and company, safe as concrete houses, waiting for the all-clear. Hopefully she’s got a deck of cards or something, because, wow, that sounds dull. When Christine mentioned that to Abby, though, she covered her mouth and had to look away for a moment, before whispering that there are other things that Elle Lambert is likely to do if she is stuck on her own for a while with nothing to hand but whatever she happens to have saved to her laptop.
Gross.
Christine didn’t get much else out of Abby. She’s understandably preoccupied. They followed Melissa through the security logs as far as possible, to the point where she caught a bus off campus, and while Abby said she doesn’t know for sure where she’s gone, she can guess. Of everyone who’s ever ended up under Dorley, no-one but Melissa has had such a zeal for reconnecting with their old life, whether accidentally or on purpose, save perhaps Indira, and Abby herself.
She’ll have gone to Jenny’s. Right there, straight as an anxious arrow. Even though Tabitha told her to wait.
Why? Christine can guess. She can see it perfectly. It’s like when Christine went to Brighton. Checking on her mum. Supposed to wait in the car, which, for fuck’s sake, of course she didn’t. Christine took the reckless option because she wasn’t thinking because she couldn’t think, because behind that door was her mum, and now… Now, Christine’s officially some girl who just happened to visit, and that’s okay. They’re on WhatsApp together.
She gets the impulse to go back every now and then. But it’s a trip: Brighton’s a run around the M25 away, or a train ride that cuts through London. Neither option is a spur of the moment thing; Christine’d be reconsidering it before she got out of Almsworth. And so she gets to stay in touch with her mum, and she gets to avoid making a mildly complicated situation worth more than a clucked tongue and an official note of disapproval from Aunt Bea, which is roughly equivalent to the punishment she tends to receive these days for wearing shorts too many days in a row.
For Melissa, though, Jenny is close. Not quite as close as she would be if she’d stayed in her old place, but close enough that you can easily get there from here before common sense breaks through your skull, especially if you are in the midst of the kind of shame spiral that Melissa, apparently, is prone to.
To that, also, Christine relates. Though she’s better at it now. She hasn’t felt bad about being a fake trans woman for the longest time — thanks, Lorna, for finally kicking that shit out of her head forever — and as for her past? Shit, this might be the first time she’s even thought about it this whole week. She gets how Indira can be the way she is, how Abby can be, how all the other girls she’s been holding to her heart as role models, as family, can walk out of here and into the world and feel the equal of anyone they encounter.
Well, okay, they can’t walk out right now. There are soldiers in the way. But theoretically…
Shit. It’s weird to be looking at someone older than her, a graduate, and understanding her from a perspective that is, at least in part, further along the same line of messy coping mechanisms, unfortunate but temporary backslides, and that bit where they all grew tits and got vaginas. Melissa’s the poster girl for why you shouldn’t leave before you’re ready.
As they sit here, drinking top-ups of tea and munching on military-issue finger food, Christine’s filling the gaps in her knowledge of Melissa by browsing through her file. Not the juicy bits — they’ve been moved off of accessible digital storage just as with all graduates — but the relationship map is giving her all the context she feels she needs. And it’s crazy how intertwined she is with some of the people that Christine loves; crazy especially that she still doesn’t know her that well, despite that.
She was an older brother figure to Steph, growing up, and that’s something Steph’s talked about at length. How, looking back, they were clearly not boys to each other, even though Melissa didn’t understand that about herself and Steph tried to hide it. And Abby’s insisted that Melissa’s as trans as Steph or Lorna, which lends a nightmarish quality to thoughts of what her first year at Dorley must have been like.
Shit. Abby. Christine’s closest friend here at the hall, outside Indira and her intake. The girl who was there when Christine first exited the basement, new name and freshly kitbashed face ready to go, who was kind to her, who treated her as the fresh, new person she was only just working out how to be. Melissa’s wound so tightly into Abby’s life that even if their new relationship breaks apart like their first one did, they’ll always be connected.
But those are just the first two people on the relationship map, and neither of them are likely to cause problems. Steph’s opsec-violating days are over, and Abby has her whole family believing something close to the standard-issue break-glass-in-case-of-emergency story they’re all supposed to memorise in case they run into a great aunt down at the big Tesco. No, the people that Christine needs to know about are Jenny Yau and Russell Vogel.
Jenny’s straightforward. Technical writing job of some kind, works mainly from home. One child, Ada, for whom Melissa used to babysit — and about whom Melissa still talks. Despite Tabitha’s concerns that Jenny could have gone the way of a disconcerting number of British women as they enter middle age — deeply invested in the private lives and parts of people they just learned existed last week — Christine doesn’t get that impression from the dossier.
Russell, though. He’s complicated. Used to be friends with Steph, until their friendship fell apart because Steph unaccountably believed that Russ’ dearly departed — into the fucking night — brother was still alive. And Melissa was never exactly close with him; she was the tormented and emotionally absent older brother, the favourite of their mother but also the focus of their father’s intermittent anger. Remove her from the picture, and then Steph a few years later, and you have a growing boy facing the world alone, without his mother, his brother or his best friend, and with a father who no longer has the effeminate older one on whom to take out his increasingly drunken and variably religious anger. And he had to survive his dad for years. Years before he got his A-levels. Years before he got away. Years that he had to spend with his alcoholic, doubly bereaved, physically violent father.
He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t resent Melissa for that.
* * *
“Did you drive here?”
Melissa’s lost. Completely and totally fucking lost. Russ left, ran right the fuck past her, jumped in his car and sped off like he was being fucking chased, leaving Melissa standing there in Jenny’s driveway, staring at the bend in the road, at the place she last saw his car. It’s as if she can see herself from outside, standing at the terminus of a trail of destruction, of stupid mistakes and rash decisions, and all the way along lie the people she’s hurt, the people she’s left behind.
Anyone else but Melissa might be upset. Russ’ long-lost sister is back! And she’s alive! And he didn’t want to say two words to her! But she knows what she did to him, because it’s the same thing she did to Shahida and to Abby.
She left.
She once told Shahida that there is no such thing as a clean death. But she proceeded to inflict that upon her anyway, and on Russ and on Steph. And wasn’t running away from Abby much the same? For perhaps the first time ever, she wasn’t leaving with the intent to kill herself, but she was still ripping herself away from the only person who cared about her.
Not the only person. The sponsors cared about her, in their way. All of them, and more girls at the hall besides. They just never know what to do with her. Because she didn’t tell them.
“Mark—? Damn. I don’t know what to call you. Not Mark, I assume! But you should come inside, okay?”
Abby used to tell her that she’d become part of something. And she meant both the friendship they shared — and what it became — and the greater entity of the hall, a community composed of the people it had spent the years collecting, affecting. And Melissa always halfway dismissed it, despite Abby’s clear sincerity, because it sounded like something straight out of Dorley Hall’s big book of psychological manipulation, and it was back when everything about that fucking place seemed designed to dig at her, to hurt her, to isolate her.
Which, again, if she’d just fucking told them… She’d thought it would be the end of her, whether from violence or from shame, but look at Steph! She’s happier than Melissa’s ever known her to be. Melissa could have had that, if only she’d told them what she understood about herself as soon as she understood it. But she buttoned herself up good and tight, like always, and as soon as she had the chance, she ran. Like always.
“Mark?”
God fucking damn it. Jenny’s still out here, saying her name — her old name, but maybe she deserves to have that thrown in her face for what she just did — and Melissa’s just… what? Standing there, hugging herself, berating herself for her personality flaws because it’s easier than contemplating the other thing she just did?
Yeah.
Russ knows she’s alive. And he’s not contained, as Tabitha might say. Melissa has an obligation, right fucking now, to get on the phone to someone at Dorley Hall and confess. And the stupid flare of fear that lights the back of her throat on fire when she thinks about it is just something she’s going to have to deal with, because as much as she convinced herself over and over that Aunt Bea was and is capable of all kinds of awful things, as much as she bought the act, she needs to make herself understand that ‘containing’ Russ likely means nothing more than just fucking talking to him like a human being. Something she singularly failed to do.
And she’s still just standing here.
“Sorry,” she says, shaking her head as if it might fling all her bullshit right out, might paint the driveway with it. “Sorry. Yeah. I’ll come inside. I just— I need to make a call. But, uh, inside, I think.”
Jenny takes her hand and leads her gently into the house, shutting the door behind them quietly, as if Melissa is a feral cat that might startle easily; not far from the truth.
“Did you drive here?” Jenny asks again, now that they’re alone, now that the minimal noise from the residential street has been shut out. “I looked for a car, but—”
“I got the bus,” Melissa says. There’s something else she was going to say, but a more urgent question suddenly presents itself, and she stops and looks around, as if the answer might appear unprompted. “Where’s Ada? Is she okay?”
“Playdate.” Jenny’s still holding Melissa’s hand, and she tugs gently on it to get her moving again. “Nicola takes her after school on Thursdays so Russ and I can have our little evening together. Catch up. Some other days, too,” she adds, frowning, “but every Thursday.”
“Oh. Right. Yes. Nicola?”
“Another mum.”
She nods. Looks back and forth again, still thinking about Ada. She was such a beautiful baby, and it had always seemed like she came into the world complete, a bouncy little package, all grasping fingers and bubble-blowing mouth and huge, wet eyes that were amazed by everything. She was the most perfect thing Melissa might ever have seen. And now she’s all grown. Older, school-age. Going on playdates.
Melissa missed it.
She shouldn’t have come here. She shouldn’t have come, should have listened to Tabitha, should have listened to Abby when she tried to explain that Tabitha was just being cautious, should have should have should have—
It’s a list and it’s the length of her whole life and it unspools in her head, every mistake, every stupid decision, every reckless moment. Every time she ran away. It winds around her. Binds her.
She shouldn’t have come here. She’s missed too much. You can’t just walk back into people’s lives, especially when they’ve grieved for you. When they’ve moved on. You’re a piece of the past. You should stay there.
And then there’s Russ.
Oh, God.
“Jenny,” she says, “I—”
“I’m sorry about Russ,” Jenny says quickly, leading her into the kitchen. “I know it’s probably not what you hoped for with him, but things have been… difficult.”
“He shouldn’t have seen me,” Melissa says, accepting a pull-out wooden chair and sitting at the cramped little bar. And— Oh, God, should she have even said that in front of Jenny? Isn’t that too revealing?
Revealing of what exactly?
She doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing.
She really shouldn’t have come here. She should have prepared. Should have let Tabitha do the work. Should have waited. Should have had patience, had faith.
“What do you mean?” Jenny asks. She’s crouching down, messing with something in one of the cupboards, and she comes back with a bottle of wine, which she places on the bar in front of Melissa. “You can have a drink before you tell me, if it helps. Since you’re not driving and all. Oh! Unless you can’t—”
“I can drink,” Melissa says. “And, um, it’s complicated.” And why is it complicated, Melissa? “Shit. I should make that call.”
“So call. Then drink. And talk to me.”
Right. Yeah. A woman with nothing to hide would be happy to make a call in front of her mum’s best friend. But she’s put the idea out there now that she needs to, twice now, so the best she can do is make it quick and make it as innocent-sounding as she possibly can.
* * *
The long and the short of it is that Elle Lambert has indeed been moved to an undisclosed secure location, just like Abby said. She’s given instructions for the disposition of Peckinville staff that are being carried out at this very minute, and her injuries are negligible, consistent with those that might be sustained by a woman in her early forties, who does not spend as much time on the treadmill as she ought, suffering both a fairly severe shock and a high-speed collision with the ground. Christine thought Bea looked relieved at that.
Right now, they’re into the Q&A, which has largely been spent establishing that the hall’s mid-tier security measures will continue as-is, and that the only disruption residents and sponsors should experience is a greater-than-before presence of Peckinville staff onsite, which will manifest mainly in there being more washing-up. Trevor Darling made a joke about PMC novelty mugs the last time he was swapping updates on the secure server — apparently he misses the atmosphere at the hall, but not as much as he misses having a flat chest — and now Christine’s mind’s eye keeps showing her an image of the drying rack in the kitchen, with new mugs that say things like Manoeuvres? I barely knew ’ers! and You Can’t Spell Peckinville Group Private Military Company Without P R I C K.
Got to be better than the one she had her coffee out of first thing. It was styled like one of those American wartime posters, with Rosie the Riveter pointing out at the beholder above the all-caps legend, A MORALLY QUESTIONABLE SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT NEEDS YOU!
One day, this place is going to wreck her last remaining brain cell. And probably replace it with a novelty mug.
Jan, the woman from Peckinville, has been looking harried and exhausted this whole time — though she still looks immaculate, in grey fatigues that fit her so well they might actually be tailored, and with her hair pulled under a soft purple wrap — but with every touch of her hand to her ear, accompanied by a raised finger requesting quiet from whomever she is with, she has become more relaxed. Most recently, she’s been relaying the news that the shooter’s been identified, and he was the usual: a contract guy with no surface connection to Silver River, the Smyth-Farrows or their benefactors, paid in a likely untraceable fashion — Christine briefly considers trying to put a dent in that ‘likely’ before deciding that, no, she would prefer not to be a personal target of the Smyth-Farrows — and now extremely dead. A contract guy is good, because he suggests deniability and a reluctance to escalate too far; had he been from Silver River itself, they might already be in open war territory. Which, fuck, scary.
But it’s fine, Jan’s telling them. The hall’s presence on campus, the very thing that can make opsec here such a massive pain in Christine’s personal arse, also provides them an immense amount of protection. She’s just telling them, to general sponsor groaning, that a member of Peckinville staff will be on duty in the security room at all times, when she’s interrupted by someone’s phone.
The ringtone is the chorus from I Knew You Were Trouble.
“Shit,” Abby says, standing up too fast and kicking her chair wildly to the side. “Sorry. Sec.”
“Abigail—” Bea starts.
“It’s important. Sorry. It really is.”
“Melissa,” Christine guesses, to scattered groans. Nodding, frowning, Abby rushes away to the other side of the dining hall and half-bends over her phone, as if she can somehow contrive to have a private conversation while in the same room as two dozen Dorley sponsors, several Peckinville soldiers and, conservatively, about thirty surveillance devices.
Most of the cameras and shit aren’t usually switched on, which is how Christine has managed to have lunch in here so many times without having five simultaneous panic attacks, but it’s not exactly a normal month they’re having. Dorley Hall has over the last decade-and-a-bit become a major centre of electromagnetic monitoring, enough that if you were inclined to plot these kinds of things on a map of the UK, it would be less deeply shaded than, say, GCHQ, but not by even a single order of magnitude.
Granted, GCHQ probably keep theirs turned on more of the time.
Everyone assembled remains quiet as Abby hisses into her phone. Christine briefly considers piping the audio from the call through to Jan’s earpiece, but decides against; if Jan wants to listen in, she probably already is. All Christine would do is give her a headache. And whoever Peckinville has on staff to handle that stuff would probably easily keep Christine out, anyway; it’s one thing to be a talented amateur in an environment that relies on annual visits from an expert to keep its secrets from leaking, and quite another to be a trained professional at a private military operation. Yasmin once asked her if she could hack into Peckinville and have a look around and Christine had to say that if she even thinks too hard about doing such a thing, they could probably make her laptop explode.
After less than a minute, Abby hangs up and starts walking back towards the group. Before she can get halfway, Tabitha says, “She did it, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Abby says, picking up her chair from where it bounced.
“And?”
“Russ.”
“Is he still there?”
“No.”
Sighing, Tabitha stands and stretches. “Dira,” she says when she’s done, “did you finish the—?”
“Yes,” Indira says, waving a tablet with a keyboard cover in the air. “There are still some details to fill in, but it’s basically done.”
“Right. Abby, Melissa’s still at Jenny’s?”
“Yes,” Abby says.
“Good. Don’t wait up, ladies. Dira, pull the trigger, would you? And can I borrow someone’s jacket? I didn’t bring one.”
* * *
Jenny’s a caretaker, is the thing. When Melissa was Mark, and when she was trying to starve herself, it was Jenny who made her eat, who made her promise to make herself as safe as possible when Jenny wasn’t around to look after her. And she’s been doing the same for Russ? Okay, so he’s probably not bulimic — she fucking hopes — but a standing weekly meal, with the strong hint that he comes around at other times, too… that’s stepping up. Stepping up in a way that Melissa’s never done, not for Russ. Perhaps not for anyone. No, she’s had to be bullied into every good thing she’s ever done, and—
Fuck. She can’t keep a lid on it.
“Bad thoughts, huh?” Jenny asks, because obviously she’s noticed. She always did see way too much, and neither age nor the glass-and-a-half of white wine they’ve each had has slowed her down.
“Happens a lot,” Melissa says, finding a sheepish smile.
“Was that your sponsor you were calling?”
“Uh…” is all Melissa can say before she gets a fucking hold of herself, because there’s absolutely no way that Jenny is implying what it sounds to Melissa like she’s implying, and it’s only because Melissa’s context is absolutely fucked up that she would even think that. So what should she say? Who else has sponsors? Racing drivers? “W— What?” she stutters.
Well done, idiot girl. Very coherent!
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Jenny says, looking down into her glass and swirling the remaining wine around. “I just assumed. While you were away… I did some volunteering. Met a lot of people out of rehab. S’why I asked about the wine. Sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
Rehab. Of course. And she’s even sort of on target. Not for Melissa, but for all the girls who were there with her, yeah. Rehab from violent masculinity. The twelve steps for being an arsehole, only the greater power isn’t God, it’s Aunt Bea, who might be scarier.
Except neither Abby nor Steph are afraid of Beatrice, are they? It’s just Melissa who is, still, when she forgets herself, and it’s another sign of how disconnected she’s been that she’s yet to shed the instinctive fear she and the others developed of their seldom-seen custodian over their first and second years. Melissa, as a graduate, is supposed to understand that the persona is just that, and that Beatrice, as a woman, is mostly quite nice.
She really is fucking terrible at being a Dorley girl, isn’t she?
“I mean,” she says, thinking of Abby, thinking of Steph, of Bea, and of Nell and the others from her intake, “yeah, it’s kind of like that?”
“You do have a sponsor?”
Melissa shrugs. “I do.”
“I didn’t eff up?”
“No. No, you didn’t.”
“Good.”
Melissa bites at her lip for a second, feeling suddenly shy, suddenly innocent, suddenly young. She hasn’t been around Jenny since she was Mark, and there are times — few and far between — that she misses that life. Misses the simplicity of it. Yes, it was hell, mostly, but she didn’t have all these fucking secrets. Just the one, and she couldn’t even put words to it.
And Jenny’s still adorable. Melissa used to think that when they spent time together, Jenny became once more the teen girl who went to gigs with Melissa’s mum, who spray-painted slogans on her oversized t-shirts, and less like the sensible adult with a kid and a house and a job. Age has not lessened that effect. She makes Melissa want to be open with her.
Makes her laugh, too. “‘Eff up’?” Melissa says, smirking.
“Yes,” Jenny says. “Ada grew up, and I had to teach myself to stop swearing before she got old enough to understand me. No-one wants to be the mum in the school car park with the potty-mouth kid. Listen,” she adds, leaning forward on her elbows, “I have a very important question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“What’s your name?”
Melissa almost chokes on her wine. It’s been too long since she had to introduce herself like this. At the hall, in her slim time there, she’s run into so many people who already know her, because they were among the group who oversaw her forced regendering, or knew of her, because they’ve read the briefing packet on her or they’ve been exposed to Dorley gossip about the prissy blonde chick with the opsec problem. And then there was Shy, then Amy and Rachel, but none of how that was conducted was normal. Closest was Amy, and even then, Melissa was better prepared.
She wasn’t completely unprepared today, for all that she rushed into this. But she saw Russ and it spun her so hard she forgot to introduce herself.
“Melissa,” she says, and a genuine smile rises within her. She loves that name, she really does. At the hall, they discourage keeping the same initial —and they officially disapprove of modifications to your deadname, because it doesn’t look good for Dave to go missing and for Davina to pop up three years later; hey, look, another programme rule that Steph gets to skip — but Shy always used to call her Em, and she wanted to keep that. Abby wasn’t exactly hard to persuade.
“Melissa,” Jenny says, smiling irresistibly as she does so. “Melissa. I love it! Do people call you Mel? Or—?”
“Liss. Usually. Shahida calls me Em sometimes, and—”
Jenny’s practically sprawled on the little bar surface now, her head propped on one arm such that she’s looking up at Melissa and seeming like she can’t stop. “Shahida! You’re still in touch?”
Cheeks heating, Melissa is forced to admit that, yes, they are, and that they’re dating. “And Abby, too. We’re both dating a girl called Abby. Or she’s dating us? Anyway, you don’t know her.”
“You’re polyamorous?”
“You know about that kind of stuff?” Melissa says, successfully avoiding choking on her wine this time. She barely knows anything about it, and she’s in a poly relationship.
Jenny straightens and picks up her wine glass again. “I’ll have you know that the mum circle at the junior school is very progressive. We’ve got two-dad families, two-mum families, pathetic singlets like me—”
“—hey—”
“—and one family that’s like, three families smushed together. I met a new one just last week. Oh, not new to the relationship, but new to me, you understand? They were like, ‘Hi, I’m Marcy, I’m the hinge,’ and I have to admit, I looked at them like they’d just told me they were from Alpha Centauri.”
“What’s a hinge?”
“Ten bob, same as in town,” Jenny says, and the way she smirks at Melissa after is so familiar that it’s like the shell of the present day cracks around her, breaks open, reveals itself as nothing more substantial than a snow globe, artificial and over-bright. Speckles clouding her eyes. Jenny’s kitchen becomes Jenny’s old kitchen, smaller and cosier but plainer, too, and marked all over with scuffs and scratches and places where the trim has come off the cabinets. Jenny loses ten years and, hell, maybe Melissa does, too, becomes fifteen again, but fifteen as herself, as she might have been had anyone had known what to do with her, what to say to her. Had she known herself.
When she laughs, it’s like the last ten years never happened. And she keeps going, laughs until her belly hurts, until she’s wiping her sparse makeup off onto a tissue and she’s having to reach for the wipes in her bag to take it all off, because she’s an idiot and wore mascara today.
“Shit,” she says, and then giggles again. “Whoops. Sorry. Um, shirt?”
“No-one says ‘shirt’ when they want to swear, Liss,” Jenny says. “They say… Um…”
“Shoot?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“There’s a girl I know who says ‘ess-show’ when she means to say ‘shitshow’.”
“She sounds very sensible,” Jenny says. “Does she have grounds to say it a lot?”
“Constantly.”
And then Jenny’s up on her feet and dragging Melissa up, too, to give her the hug she’s no doubt been waiting for since Melissa showed up at her door. It’s a tight squeeze, and it goes on long enough that Melissa starts to find herself a little short of breath, but she doesn’t stop it, wouldn’t even think to do so, because Jenny carries a little piece of Mum inside her. Because Jenny is the family that could have been. The life Melissa might have had, had she known herself, had Mum lived, had everything not broken down, piece by piece. This is an embrace that Melissa’s been dreaming of since she left home, since she first walked off into the dark to die, only to be found by Abby and whisked away to a new life, better than the first, immeasurably so, but, in a fundamental way, kind of empty.
Empty of Jenny, of Ada. Shit, even of Russ. It’s a future, which is more than she ever expected to have — more than she suspects she deserves — and it’s full of people she loves, but it’s missing all of its past.
And here that past is. Holding her. Holding her like mum would.
“Love you,” Melissa whispers. At that, Jenny’s embrace tightens, shudders. And then she lets her go, stands back. “Oh. Shit. Here.”
Jenny accepts the tissue Melissa offers her and dabs delicately at her eyes, before apparently deciding that she, too, should just give up on her makeup. She takes the wipe Melissa hands her right after, and it’s a minute or so before they’re sitting again, both of them leaning on the bar with both elbows, exhausted from the near-decade that just passed between them. Bare-faced and smiling.
“Love you too, Liss,” Jenny says, and seems like she almost bursts into tears again. “I dreamed about this, you know,” she continues. “I heard about what happened. How they found Laura’s iPod at the bus stop. I knew… I knew that girl Shahida got it in the end, and I was glad of that. I got more years with Laura than Shahida did with you. But I dreamed about you coming back. Walking up one morning like it had never happened. Like it was all a big misunderstanding. I never expected… Do you know how much you look like Laura? Like your mum?”
She does now. “I never thought about it, I suppose. Sometimes I still see the old me, and that’s… uh, that’s not good. Maybe it gets in the way.”
“Well, ignore that ‘old you’ nonsense.” Jenny pokes a finger into Melissa’s forehead. “You look like your mother.” She laughs again. “You’re the spit. I can almost see you in a spray-painted t-shirt.”
“I remember those pictures. God. The two of you.” And there they are, right in Melissa’s memory, clear as day. Vivid as a wound. It helps that they were some of the last things she talked about with Mum, but she can make herself focus on the good, not the bad. Photographs of Mum and Jenny; precious moments with Mum. Try not to dwell on how they were some of the last. “You looked amazing. You both did.”
“Yeah,” Jenny says dreamily, “we really did.” Sticking the tip of her tongue out of her mouth for a second and smiling at Melissa again, and it’s crazy that she seems no different, that she’s a slice of Melissa’s childhood brought right here into the present. Yes, she’s wearing her jet-black hair long these days — Ada’s presumably not trying to grab it at every possible opportunity any more — and she’s got little lines around her eyes and mouth when she smiles, but none of that matters. “You look great, too,” she continues, and then she frowns. “Although… Liss, you’re too thin, you know. Still.”
“I know.”
“That’s not good, Liss.”
Always the caretaker. Melissa’s missed this so much. “Shy and Abby have me eating,” she says, and leans back on the wobbly chair to pat her belly, tries not to think about how it feels like there’s too much there when there’s anything at all. “And I’m not, you know, throwing up any more. When I eat stuff, it stays eaten. Mostly. There’s more of me than there used to be, anyway.”
“You mean,” Jenny says, glancing down at Melissa’s chest, “in places other than the obvious?”
“Oh, God,” Melissa murmurs, laughing, “my mum’s best friend is checking out my tits…”
Jenny just pokes her again.
A little while later — and after a snack, because Jenny’s motherly instincts were fully activated and she insisted on making them both a sandwich; dinner, she said, tends to float a bit on the afternoons that Russ comes around and Ada has her playdates — they’re sitting in the living room with one of Jenny’s albums on, drinking something non-alcoholic and feeling, in Melissa’s case, sort of silly that she ever worried about this.
And then she remembers the other reason she’s got to worry.
“Shit,” she says, leaning forward on her knees, “I really messed up today. Not with you,” she adds quickly, “but with Russ. He wasn’t supposed to know that I’m…”
“Alive?” Jenny finishes.
“Yeah. That.”
“How come?”
“It’s a long story,” Melissa says. “And I’m— Shit, I’m sorry, Jenny, but it’s supposed to be a secret that I’m, you know, me.”
“But Shahida knows,” Jenny says, frowning. “And didn’t you say that you’re in touch with Rachel and Amy, too?”
It would be nice, at this point, if she could bury herself in the couch cushions. “Rachel and Amy were… sort of my fault. Where I lived for the longest time, it wasn’t exactly… legal?”
“Like a squat?”
“Like a halfway house, maybe. But off the grid, you know? Shit. I don’t think I’m making much sense.” What sense is there to make of this? Sometimes, Melissa can barely believe her own life story.
“A halfway house. A squat. And also rehab?”
Melissa finds a way to be very interested in her own fingers, as if they might contain within them the perfect reply, if only she can interlock them in the proper order.
“Um,” she says.
“Maybe I don’t need to know,” Jenny says, and she twists around on the couch to take both of Melissa’s hands. “Just promise me that you’re not in trouble.”
“I’m not in trouble,” Melissa says as sincerely as she can. Truth is, she’s probably in a lot of trouble, but not the kind Jenny’s thinking of. The worst Dorley can do to her is lock her in a room and subject her to the funny mugs again. “I’m safe, Jenny. But the whole secret thing is important, so…”
Nodding, Jenny says, “I’m going to need the whole story one day. But for now…” She mimes zipping her mouth shut. “I’m just so glad to have you back.”
* * *
Nice place. Jenny Yau’s wrangled herself a newbuild semi on one of those roads that sprouts like a tendril from any suburban Almsworth street with any spare space around it at all, and the car in the driveway is less than ten years old. Maybe Tabitha should get out of the feminising business and learn a trade; it’s not too late.
She’d get bored, though. She knows herself well enough to be certain that if she lived this kind of life — largely solitary but for the kid, the other mums, and some random twenty-one-year-old who shows up once or twice a week for dinner — she’d go nuts within a year. She needs direction, and she’s not the best at providing it for herself. At least, if things do work out with Levi, he’s amenable to staying in the area, so she won’t ever have to lose her sizeable and infuriating found family.
Speaking of, Melissa’s in the front room with Jenny, chatting happily, so at least that went okay. That girl is the luckiest bitch in the history of the hall, maybe. Lucky enough to light a fire of envy inside Tabitha, and not for the first time. She’s trying really hard to not want to grab her by the earlobe and drag her back to Dorley Hall, and it’s just a shame they need to stop by her little brother’s place on the way; ruins the momentum.
Yeah. The little brother. Right pissed off, or so says Abby. Melissa’s luck running out at last.
Crappy timing for it.
She’s hesitating out front. Should go knock, get this over with, but Melissa and Jenny look so happy, and there’s no harm in letting them talk for a little longer. Maria would call her soft and Indira would make fun of her, but there’s absolutely no way that either of them could walk up and end this reunion right away. Whole damn sponsor corps; big softies, all of them. They only manage to remain at all intimidating in the basement because they get to turn it off the moment they go up the stairs, and even then, it’s got a shelf life.
They need a henchwoman, that’s what they need. Someone who spends most of her time at leisure, waiting for the call, only to step into action when heads need to roll, when people need a good fucking clip around the ear.
And then Tabitha’s missed her chance to make the big, authoritative entrance, because Jenny’s turned around and spotted through the window the woman lurking on her driveway, and Melissa’s waved at her sort of sheepishly, and they’ve both got up, so it’s time to do the fucking thing, to be the avatar of the hall’s official disapproval of this bullshit. When the front door opens, though, Tabitha finds herself smiling, looking down on both of them, and wondering if there’s any chance she could get away with just visiting a few choice people from her past like this.
Admittedly, in her case, it would be to tell them to fuck off all over again, but it would be so satisfying.
“Hi, Tab,” Melissa says. She’s got the good grace to look ashamed.
“Hello, Melissa,” Tabitha says. She doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or to scream; how dare this go so well? Russ aside, obviously.
“Hi,” Jenny says, stepping forward — to put herself between Tabitha and Melissa — and holding out a hand. “Are you her sponsor?”
“Her—? Melissa, what did you tell her?”
“No rehab secrets,” Jenny says. “Promise.”
Rehab? Huh. Not bad. And thank fuck for that. There’s at least a small amount of brain left inside Melissa’s head, after all. Maybe it’s lonely in there.
“I’m not her sponsor.”
“But you’re her friend.”
“Yes,” Tabitha says, and she briefly locks her teeth together to stop herself from laughing at the way Melissa looks startled by that. “Look,” she continues, “Melissa, we should go.”
“Yeah,” Melissa says, looking up at her. “Yeah.”
“You’ll be back?” Jenny says.
Melissa doesn’t answer her. Just keeps looking at Tabitha.
“Oh, for—” Tabitha says. “Give her your bloody WhatsApp or something, Melissa. Add her on Consensus. Whatever you need to do.”
Turning away, giving them some space, Tabitha waits for the two of them to exchange details and hugs, and then she waits for the sniffing to stop before she turns back, smiles in her most businesslike fashion at Jenny Yau — who smiles bravely back, her face stained with tears — and leads Melissa to the car. Once inside, and after she has wordlessly handed Melissa a tissue, Tabitha guns the engine, pulls them away, and starts the lecture.
“I’d say that was the most reckless thing you’ve ever done,” she says, “but you originally returned to Dorley with a stolen taser to steal one of our girls from us. So I’m just going to call myself an idiot for not locking you in your room and letting you run around without supervision.” Glancing sideways, she can see that Melissa’s watching her attentively, taking her bollocking like a woman. “You put us all in danger, and that includes Abby, Steph, everyone else you love. You understand?”
“Yes,” Melissa says, and she says it plainly, clearly. That’s good; Tabitha had been expecting a shame spiral, or some lame attempt at justification.
“Good. So you get that we need to fix this?”
“Yes.”
“You have a new NPH,” Tabitha says. “You can’t be linked to Dorley, and you’ve exposed yourself to practically everybody from your past, so we’re making you you again. That’s how we’re fixing this. Oh, and don’t worry, you’re still Melissa Haverford. She’s just a trans girl now. As far as everyone you ever met as her is concerned, you were in really deep stealth.”
“Okay,” Melissa says softly. She’s looking down at her knees now. Shaken or just surprised?
“We’ll give you a copy of your new NPH when we get back to the hall. Memorise it before you see Jenny again. We’ll make sure Amy’s briefed, but you might want to get Shahida to handle Rachel.”
“Okay.”
“This doesn’t mean you have to go see your dad. You don’t have to acknowledge him in any way. Not unless Russell goes to him, or he finds out in some other way, and then you might need to—”
“He won’t. Russ won’t, I mean.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“As sure as I was that Jenny wouldn’t reject me,” Melissa says. There’s ice in her voice now.
“I’m sorry about that,” Tabitha says, hitting the indicator stalk a little too hard as she takes the turn off the roundabout. “But procedures exist for a reason.”
“You don’t— Shit. No, Tabitha. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Well. Just pick your moment better next time, okay?”
“There won’t be a next time.”
Tabitha laughs. “Melissa, there’d better fucking not be. We had to use our contacts to make this work, and that means risk. Editing existing records is quite something else than just adding new ones.”
The next exit off the ring road takes them to another suburb, this one shabbier, older, more familiar to Tabitha. Ex-council estates, probably: victims of the eighties buy-up, the semis and terraces now the centrepiece of nineties-era builds, flats in blocks five or six storeys tall. Ugly petals on a rose.
And, shit. Flats. That could pose a problem. Russ lives in one of those places, but what are they going to do if he picks up the intercom and just doesn’t let them in? Tabitha might be, in this instance, the representative of Dorley Hall, but that doesn’t mean she can crack security like Christine or pick locks like Monica. Mostly, what she brings to the table is that she’s kind of tall, and people say she has a pretty smile and kind eyes.
Well, Steph and Leigh both say that. But Steph’s hardly an objective observer — she calls everyone pretty and even appears to mean it — and Leigh… Leigh is being extra-sweet right now. Struggling with the progress the others are making, yes, but she’s taking that anger and she’s discharging it healthily, with Tabitha, not storing it up like she used to.
Hah. Pretty smile; kind eyes. Wasn’t just Steph and Leigh who said that.
Neither will get her into Russell’s flat, though. Fortunately, they don’t have to: as they’re waiting on the curb, Russ’ car pulls up and slots in only a couple of spaces away from the car Tabitha borrowed from the hall. He doesn’t see them as he climbs out, which is all to the good, because it gives Tabitha time to ambush him.
Ambush him with a pretty smile. And kind eyes.
“Hey!” she calls, jogging over. “Are you Russell Vogel?”
It pulls Russ to a halt, but then he looks right past her, to where Melissa’s lurking. “No,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” Tabitha says, “but I know you are. I’m Melissa’s sponsor—” because, yes, fuck it, let’s embrace Melissa’s rehab thing; she’ll get Indira to add that little detail to the NPH, “—and I’m here to talk to you on her behalf.”
“Melissa, huh?” Russ says. “That’s his name now?”
Tabitha ratchets her accent up a social class or two, borrowing from Bea. “You know better than that, I’m sure.”
It doesn’t seem to do much. “I’m sure,” Russ replies, sneering.
“I know she hurt you. But she—”
“He did more than hurt me,” Russ says, stepping closer, jabbing a finger in Tabitha’s direction. He’s not at all intimidating; not only is she slightly taller than him, but he looks like his only muscle definition comes from the stuff that testosterone — Tabitha remembers with slight wistfulness — gives you for free. “Do you know what he did?”
“Russ,” Melissa says, coming up alongside Tabitha at last, “I’m sorry.”
“Whatever,” he says.
“Just please don’t tell Dad, okay? Don’t tell anyone?”
Crossing his arms, Russ says, “Did you commit some big crime or something? Is the mafia after you?”
“Well—”
“Don’t care. And don’t worry. I won’t tell a soul. Not like I want anyone to know my brother’s back.”
“Russ…”
But, true to his word, seeming not to care in the slightest, Russell turns away and walks briskly for the door to his block. Doesn’t look back once. And, yeah, Tabitha could stop him, easily. Hell, she could probably pick him and his sister up by the scruffs of their necks and hold them up facing each other until they agreed to have one (1) civilised conversation, but she’s not here to browbeat him. She’s here to assess him, and to give Melissa the opportunity to reconnect. Whether she’s fucked it, or whether it was always pointless, she doesn’t know. But for now, she lets him go, and Melissa doesn’t say a word.
Nor does she speak on the way back to the hall. Just cries almost silently, her hands over her face, her mouth occasionally opening so wide that Tabitha can see through the fingers her reddened skin, the streaks of salt water and snot that cover her. If Tabitha weren’t around, Melissa would be screaming.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’s beyond that.
Tabitha parks up. Gives Melissa some time to calm herself down. Offers the girl a hug, leaning against the side of the car, and Melissa takes her up on it, grasping her tight and shivering against her borrowed jacket.
After a while, Abby comes to fetch her, to take her upstairs, and Tabitha goes around the back, to make her calls in private. An official action request to Peckinville: bug Russell Vogel’s flat. Bug his phone. Bug his car. Bug the fucking veterinarian’s office where he works. And assign someone to listen to all of it; if the Peckinville people are going to have someone in the security office at all times, then they can bloody well make themselves useful, and keep half an ear out for Melissa Haverford’s stubborn little brother.
2008 January 28
Monday
“Please state your full name for the record.”
“Haley Annabel Godfrey.”
“What is your professional opinion of Subject Four?”
“Well, [pause, laugh] I can see why they washed him out. He tried to, what, molest Ashley Spratt?”
“Not quite. On his last day in general population, he, um. [pause, sound of rustling paper] Let’s see. He offered to suck her dick. When she told him she didn’t have one any more, and that even if she did, she wouldn’t trust him not to try to bite it off, he said, quote, [clears throat] I’d never bite off something so beautiful, baby. She then [sound of page turning] tased him.”
“And the next day, when they let him out of the cells again, he picked a fight with… Who was it? This guy Morris?”
“No. Not a fight.”
“What, then? [sound of rustling paper] Oh. [sigh, whistle through teeth] Yeah, that sounds like him.”
“Your professional opinion, Miss Godfrey.”
“He’s a fucking menace, is what he is.”
“May I remind you—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Look, he’s not violent, not really. Yes, he’s picked a lot of fights, but that’s not the same thing, is it? He doesn’t hang around pubs looking for someone to glass, not like some of the pieces of [inaudible] they’ve taken in at that place. He loves attention. He, uh, he bores easily. He’s a dangerous combination of callous and [pause] and interested. He wouldn’t pull the wings off a butterfly just to see what happens, because that’s been done already. He could look it up. By the same token, he gravitates towards people who, uh, interest him. Or who amuse him. Same thing, I think.”
“We will be placing him under your supervision. Under your care, Miss Godfrey.”
“We’re really doing this, then?”
“Yes.”
“All of it? Again?”
“He’ll be retained, retrained, resexed. Yes, Miss Godfrey, all of it. Though, the extent to which that will make him controllable is—”
“Subject Four. Philip. He doesn’t need controlling. He needs [pause] accommodating. Listening to. Instructing. Training, yes. He’ll need to understand the curbs on his behaviour, of course. As do we all.”
“Have you chosen a name for him?”
“Cora.”
“I assume that has some esoteric meaning?”
“What good is a classical education if you don’t use it?”
“Quite. It’s a pretty enough name, I suppose.”
“Yes. I suspect he’ll think so, too.”
2020 January 24
Friday
Zie didn’t want to do this on hir own. Actually, like, fuck, zie didn’t want to do this at all, but zie’s got an obligation to the bloody place now, through Jane, through Melissa, and even through Shahida, who seems to have tied herself even more thoroughly to it than Amy has. And the fact of the matter is, Russ came to hir, and saw right through hir crappy dissembling, going home almost as pissed off with hir as he was with Melissa.
It probably wasn’t the right time to ask him to use hir new pronouns, but like, shit, zie’s learned from the girls and the others at Dorley Hall that if you don’t get firm with people, they just won’t bother. And zie’s never going to get consistent at using them inside hir own head if zie’s constantly having to listen to people — hir parents included — saying the wrong damn thing.
At least zie isn’t scheduled for work until this afternoon. Would have been a tough one to call in for. Reason for absence: Um, well, you see, my friend’s brother just found out that she came back from the dead as a girl, and— Yeah. In any normal job, zie’d get fired for that, or sent to the company counsellor or whatever.
Do companies have counsellors? Shit, zie really does know nothing about what Rachel constantly and obnoxiously calls the real world. And as much as zie can insist until zie’s blue in the face that senior financial administrator for a mid-sized charity is just as much of a real job as Rachel’s — or the job that Shahida’s due to start next week — the uncomfortable fact remains that if zie wants to take a morning off, or a week off, zie pretty much can. Jane relayed to hir Elle Lambert’s derogatory remarks about the charitable sector from the briefing the other day, and Amy would love to contradict her, but most of the time zie feels like the people there who actually care are the ones volunteering their time and getting nothing but satisfaction in return; those above Amy, the ones who get paid the (relatively) big bucks, well, zie gets the impression most of them view it as more of a hobby. Something with which to soak up the endless hours offered to them by privilege.
“Hey!” Jane says, jogging up to the car and causing Amy to near-double-take as zie stops obsessing over the thing that’s been bugging hir lately — one of the many things, but it’s sort of the most pressing right now, given that even Melissa, who took time out of her busy life to chill in a basement for a year and came back as a completely different person, has a job that feels more valid than hirs — and greets her with a kiss to her cheek, from which Jane recoils, squealing, “You’re so cold!”
“Sorry,” Amy says, pushing up off the bonnet of hir car. Zie hadn’t really noticed the temperature, but Jane feels the cold more than Amy, for some reason, so zie resolves to take charge immediately as they enter the hall and make hir girlfriend a mug of hot tea, which is absolutely not a delaying tactic.
It’s not like zie has a precise time for when zie’s meeting Aunt Bea. Zie’s supposed to just show up. She’s just going to be working in a room off the dining hall, one of the many that have been cleared out of all their crap and transformed in— well, mostly into empty spaces right now, Jane said. But they’ve got a couple made up as temp offices already, and most of the rest they’ve given over to Peckinville, to be converted into sleeping spaces and the like. Too much time spent in a handful of Portakabins will make anyone go crazy.
They left alone that one room with the pool table that two of the third-year girls infamously fucked on, though. It’s like a monument or something.
“So,” Jane says, linking arms with Amy as they walk together out of the car park and towards the front entrance to the hall, “nervous?”
The one problem with Jane — aside from how, when Amy introduced her to hir mum, and Mum asked where she went to school, neither of them remembered what they were supposed to say — is that she can reliably read Amy like zie’s a large-print children’s colouring book. Zie’s asked her if maybe she picked up that skill in a basement somewhere, and got kissed for hir trouble.
And they now both know where Jane is supposed to have gone to school; they looked it up together. Conveniently, it’s one of the handful of places that have suffered serious fire damage between the time of Jane’s supposed graduation and now. Amy hasn’t yet asked if someone from Peckinville set those fires on purpose, because zie likes to imagine Elle doing it herself, creeping around in the early hours with a can of petrol and a Zippo, and zie doesn’t want to be disabused. Especially because hir imagination has furnished Elle Lambert with a bad spy costume of the kind you might find in the cheapest fancy dress shop.
“Nervous as hell,” Amy confirms, and pushes closer to Jane, enough that they avoid the steps on the way in and take the ramp at the side so they’re less likely to fall over. And then Amy almost topples them anyway, because there’s someone waiting just around the corner for them, right where zie expects to see nothing more interrogatory than the corkboard, which is usually passive aggressive at worst.
“Halt and be recognised!” says Jodie Hicks. She’s sitting by the double doors to the kitchen on a cushioned chair, with a bucket on the floor next to her marked with Please Give Generously. Camouflage, presumably, in case any of the normies stray this way.
“Sod off, Jo,” Jane says, grinning at her.
“What are we supposed to be giving?” Amy asks, pointing at the bucket.
“Testicles, knowing this place.”
“Whatever you can part with,” Jodie says piously, as Amy giggles.
“Yeah,” Jane says, thumbing the lock. “Definitely testicles.”
“Isn’t that Shahida’s 3DS?” Amy says.
“It is!” Jodie says, leaning forward and gesturing with it. “She got me into Vampire Queens. Hey, did you know—?”
“Yes. Whatever you’re about to say, if it’s a fact about The Seven Great Houses, I already know it.”
“Oh? Which ending’s your favourite?”
“Never played it,” Amy says, and quickly follows Jane through into the kitchen, grateful that Shahida has someone else to share her obsession with that game series with, but nervous at the prospect that eventually the entire hall might get into it, and that zie might not be able to stay over with Jane any more without, in the mornings, having to vault over a half-dozen vampirically evangelical women trying to share facts about romance paths when all zie wants is to steal leftovers from the communal fridge.
Jane’s happy to let Amy waste time in the kitchen, so zie sets to fiddling with the kettle, warming hir hands on its sides — zie doesn’t get as cold as Jane, but zie does get cold — and fetching mugs. Zie’s aware that there’s a tea urn out in the dining hall, and that feeding and watering a small platoon has rapidly had to become part of Dorley’s new normal, but tea urns always give hir church vibes, and make hir crave the bourbon creams they used to have the kids hand out after in grubby little baskets.
Throwing a tea bag into each mug, Amy leans back against the countertop and gives hirself a moment. Jane’s talking quietly with a couple of sponsors who are sitting at the kitchen table looking distinctly hungover, and, God, it’s hard not to enjoy the sight. Melissa’s blonde hair might be more striking, and her blue eyes more classic, but Amy thinks of Jane as a more subtle beauty, with her sandy hair, her green eyes, her tidy little mouth, and her wonderfully pert ski-jump nose — that Jane claims to have asked Mrs Prentice for specifically. They make a nice contrast together, with Amy’s darker hair, hir sharper features, hir collection of moles, and what one of hir teachers once referred to as hir ‘expressive’ front teeth. It sort of makes hir want to do a couple’s costume this Halloween. With a bit of effort, they could absolutely be the most obnoxious couple at the party.
The boiling kettle prompts hir to turn away from the arresting sight of hir girlfriend annoying the hungover sponsors. Dumping boiling water into each mug, zie pokes idly at the tea bags as they steep. For hirself, zie’s picked out a mug with the amusingly childish slogan, Today’s the day the teddy bears get their dicks snipped; Jane gets the one with the strangely specific text, In retrospect, it was foolish to take the night bus at 1:31am on Sunday the 28th of September 2014.
Tea bags out. Milk in. Jane waved over and kissed. Kissed again. And now Amy’s out of excuses to procrastinate short of full-on making breakfast in here, which zie’s not going to do — mostly because if you’re not just reheating leftovers, it’s quite difficult to cook for yourself and yourself alone in the main kitchen at Dorley Hall — so zie nods resignedly to Jane and together they head out through the dining hall, towards the office room Aunt Bea’s been using.
Shit. The door’s open. Amy had been half-entertaining fantasies about just pegging it out the back. Escaping hir old life. Eloping with Jane; she could probably just, like, sponsor Raph over Skype, right?
Catching Amy’s nervous eye, Bea beckons them both in, and her smile doesn’t do much to reassure hir. It feels weird to be so discombobulated around her, because Amy’s found Beatrice to be a fairly chill presence overall, but the thing about that is that zie’s never had cause to annoy or disappoint her before. The cautionary tale of Karen wafts to the front of hir mind, and okay, sure, zie’s not going to be dismembered and scattered to the four winds just for kind of fucking it up when Russ came to see hir, but zie’ll probably get yelled at.
* * *
There were times, when Melissa was young and Russ was even younger, when she would hide inside her room and he would hide inside his. When Dad would rage at one of the many injustices in his life — his dead wife, his shitty job, his debts; the kids he got saddled with. He would become unpredictable, and though he never raised his hand to Russ while Melissa was there, the threat of it seemed to coat the air in the house, made it tangible. Impossible to move through, difficult to breathe. So they would hide from him, barricading themselves as best they could, protecting themselves, body and soul, from their father’s wrath.
From his despair.
On those nights, Melissa rarely slept. She spent them instead consumed with regret, with guilt, as if she, as a child, could have spotted her mother’s cancer before it began viciously to consume her, as if she could have pushed the drinks from her father’s hand before he became dependent on them. She would become obsessed with the idea that it was the move from Cherston that infected her mother and broke her father, and that if she had been more careful at her old school, more boyish, more like the thing she spent her whole life barely even understanding that she was failing at being, things might have been okay.
Better doctors near the old place, maybe. Better air by the sea. More of Dad’s friends, to keep him steady.
Her fault.
On the worst of those nights, when he would batter at her door, shout the name that she hated, and drag himself to bed with clattering thumps, heavy footsteps on the old floorboards, with the kind of moaning, keening, desperate sounds that used to make her think of banshees, of ghosts, of the hateful, vengeful dead, she would sit on the chest of drawers to hold her door closed and she would wail in time with him, silently, openly, breathlessly. She worried that she understood him too well, that the thing that had found its way inside him and made him bitter and disgusting had got inside her, too, that with the death of her mother she had become poisoned, that it was why she looked at herself with hate and with shame, that it was why she starved herself until her ribs near broke through.
She worried that she was like her father, that that was why she wanted to die. That she was him, but weaker, because he made it this far and she, barely grown, was already failing. And she worried that if she didn’t die, if she somehow survived to adulthood, then it would be her stalking the halls of some rental place, her children cowering, hiding from her, piling furniture against their doors and praying that she does not strike them.
Even after she understood why she was the way that she was, she could not quite dig out the pitted, rotten fruit that her father buried inside her. She could change her life over and over, she could find new friends, new lovers, new jobs, new cities, but the decayed seed planted in the core of her, rooted into her heart and bleeding discoloured sap into every vein, would still be there.
And when she hurts people, when she gives in to the thoughts that torture and mock her, she can feel it, can sense its withered, insistent, buried hatred with every beat of her heart. A corpse without a headstone. An unloved thing. Her father, waiting for her outside every door.
Last night, he was there. He was there, and she wanted to walk out of the fucking window.
Abby kept her safe. Abby kept her stable. Brought her dinner, a thermos of tea, a carrier bag of water bottles and a handful of healthy snacks. Tabitha’s orders: no going anywhere until you talk to Aunt Bea in the morning.
Abby locked them in.
In the room on first. Which means that they didn’t trust Melissa enough to let her use her room, the one up with the normal, never-basemented students.
It was fine. They watched TV, they talked, they ate calorie-controlled cereal bars and most of their portions of vegetarian shepherd’s pie, and Abby got Melissa the fuck under control. Got her stable enough to go to bed and get some sleep. But Abby couldn’t do anything about the dreams, and she didn’t wake when Melissa did, sweating and shivering at three in the morning, suffocated by her father, by her own guilt, and by the absolute certainty that, this time, she’s broken things so thoroughly that they cannot be mended.
Russ.
She could die right now, and it would be justice for what she did to him by leaving.
* * *
Beatrice dispatched Amy Woodley swiftly, accepting the news zie brought about Russell Vogel with a total lack of surprise that she hoped she covered for adequately, and moving hir along, because there’s a lot of business to cover today, and Beatrice doesn’t intend to spend her entire morning running around after Melissa Haverford, cleaning up her latest opsec SNAFU.
Running around figuratively, that is. She’s commandeered an office on the ground floor for the time being, and though it is bare and a little cold and the desk here is hardly the commanding oak monstrosity she has in the office attached to her flat, she’s grown rather sick of people traipsing in and out of the place as if they own it, informing her of this or that emergency. Better to conduct business somewhere far from the place where she sleeps, at least until business returns to its usual background hum from its current screaming roar.
As Mz Woodley leaves — and Beatrice has taken some pleasure in addressing hir as such, leaning hard on the Z and receiving an appreciative smile in return each time — to rejoin Jane Shearer in the hallway, and as they instinctively go for each other’s hands and then recoil, aware that the matriarch of the hall has her eye on them and that perhaps they should not be so blindingly obvious about the nature of their relationship, they almost collide with Beatrice’s next appointment, leaning nervously against the far wall, having eschewed the motley row of plastic chairs as probably more comfort than she deserves right now. Oh yes, Beatrice is well aware of the nature of Melissa’s anxiety, of the forms it can take and the expressions it can adopt. The girl is hardly unique; just, unfortunately, less anchored to this place by the mechanisms of the programme than the others who share her inclinations. It had been assumed for a while that it was simply an inevitable consequence of having a genuine trans girl, one who would have found herself without assistance had she lived long enough to do so, endure the ministrations of the basement and the sponsors, but recent experience with Victoria Robinson and, of course, Stephanie Riley has forced the senior sponsors to reassess.
And of course they are aware that Melissa Haverford is trans! As much as she has remained silent on it, told no-one but Abigail, and her only recently, they would have to have been complete idiots not to have worked it out. Admittedly, they could have worked it out while she was still down there, while she was still under their care at all, and mitigated the damage somewhat, but she and Abigail were an unofficial conspiracy of two, managing her development between them with more or less no input from the other sponsors. At the time, they had been relieved that at least somebody wasn’t being a pain in the arse.
Mistakes. Many of them.
Melissa, still dithering in the corridor after engaging in a brief, quiet conversation with Amy and Jane, catches Beatrice’s eye, and responds to the smile and the beckoning finger with a visible swallow that brings old cartoons to mind: the absurd lump in the throat, catching as it falls into the belly, there to weigh down the body like a ten tonne weight.
Hmm. Fanciful this morning, isn’t she?
“Melissa,” Beatrice says, warmly. Standing, she indicates a chair on the other side of the table, and waits for the girl to seat herself before returning to her own. “Good morning.”
“Um,” Melissa says. “Aunt Bea, I’m sorry that—”
Beatrice raises a hand for silence. She’s still smiling, so with luck, the girl won’t see it as a threat, but she has no time for apologies. They seem, in this era of corpses rising from the dirt to panic them all, grossly unnecessary. Why, when someone is clearly racked with guilt, should she shame them further by demanding an apology?
“There is no need to litigate mistakes, Melissa,” Beatrice says. “And if there were, then judging solely by quantity, I would need to go first, and we would perhaps have to think about getting lunch in.”
“Oh. Um.”
“We’ll talk next steps in a few minutes, when Maria gets here. Until then… How are you, Melissa? Forget yesterday’s flap. Aside from that, are you happy?”
The girl seems taken aback by the question. Possibly by the very idea of being asked such a thing by the fearsome Aunt Bea. “Am I happy?” she asks, as if Beatrice has asked her to do a handstand. “I… don’t know.” That’s her instinctive answer; Beatrice gives her time to come up with the real one. “Yes. I think so? I mean, I have Abby and Shy… You know about them?” Beatrice nods. Of course she does; even if she hadn’t been officially informed, the gossip around here is of the considered opinion that their little throuple is adorable. And it’s something they’re relying on, going forward. “It’s new. And I don’t know much about being poly — even Jenny knows more than I do! — so I keep worrying that I’m going to screw it up, or that Shy and Abby will decide they work better as a couple without me, or…” She looks over at Beatrice again, sees her soft smile and tolerant frown — deliberate actions both — and halts before she talks herself into another spiral. “But when I forget all that, then yes, I’m happy. Happier than I thought was ever possible.”
Beatrice reaches across the table. Lays her hand out flat, palm up. Melissa, after a moment’s hesitation, takes it, and Beatrice immediately squeezes her hand tight. “Good,” she says. “I don’t get anything like as much chance to check in with our graduates as I would like, and especially with someone in your position, I often worry that we have inflicted, shall we say, more than the necessary amount of trauma.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Melissa says breezily, “I was broken before I even got here.” And then her brain catches up with her mouth, and her hand stills in Beatrice’s grip. “I mean— Shit.” She laughs, her mood changing again, but this time in the direction that Beatrice prefers, that she has been trying to prompt for the last minute. “God, I’m still so intimidated by you. And it’s so stupid. I know it’s an act! Abby keeps reminding me.”
“Does she now?”
“‘Someone in my position’?” Melissa prompts, quoting Beatrice.
“You have… intense ties to the life you had before,” Beatrice says, releasing her grip on Melissa’s hand so they can both sit back. “Stephanie, obviously, and Miss Mohsin. But also your brother, your friends. Most of our graduates are pleased to be released from the lives they once led. Or they are, at the very least, conflicted.”
“Abby’s not conflicted.”
“Quite so. And neither is Indira, for example. We had previously been five-year-trialling a reconnection profile, with Indira as our exemplar, but at this point, I’m minded to… reduce the observation period.” Beatrice leans forward again, rests her chin on her hand. “The appetite is clearly there.”
Whatever Melissa is about to say in response is cut short by a brisk knock, and then Maria enters, smiling professionally for Melissa’s benefit. In the closing door, Pippa Green is just about visible in the corridor; Beatrice’s next appointment. There are so many today, vaguely organised but precisely minuted — or they should be, assuming Beatrice hasn’t somehow broken the voice recording app on her phone. Much to plan, much to rethink.
“Hi,” Maria says, taking the seat next to Melissa rather than joining Beatrice on the officious side of the temporary desk. “I’m sure you don’t want to dwell on it, and we’re all very busy, so here’s a quick postmortem: your brother went to see Amy Woodley, and zie was unprepared for the confrontation. He shouted, zie defended hirself, and in doing so, zie inadvertently revealed that zie knew of your survival, your return, and your transition. And that so did Shahida and Rachel. Fortunately, zie stopped hirself short of mentioning Steph, or it could have been worse. Anyway. Russell, understandably, was upset. That is the state in which you and Tab encountered him outside his flat.”
“Yeah,” Melissa says, nodding.
“We have had his flat bugged. Don’t worry,” Maria quickly adds with a reassuring wave of her hand, “the feed is accessible to one person at a time, and they’re not even a sponsor; we’re having one of the soldiers handle it. Thus far, all he has done is complain to his boyfriend about you. I’ll spare you the details.”
“He’s been talking to his boyfriend?” Melissa demands, alarmed. “That’s— Shit! That’s a problem, isn’t it? Like, if he talks?”
“Yes and no,” Beatrice says.
“It’s a problem if we don’t deal with it,” Maria says. “These things have ways of breaking containment. You know, long-lost relative back from the dead, and first it’s just the immediate family talking about it, but then it’s friends, and then it’s friends of friends — at dinner parties, at pubs, whatever — and before you know it, some journalist with an ear for muck comes knocking.”
“But you can deal with it, can’t you?”
“You mean,” Beatrice says, “we can have the journalist killed? Believe me, Melissa, if offing unpleasant journalists was a practical option for us, this country would be a very different place. But the logistical challenges prevent such an option.”
“It’d be rather unethical, too,” Maria says.
“Ah. Of course. Ethics. Our watchword.” Beatrice permits herself a cynical laugh, and then, noticing that Melissa is flicking her gaze back and forth from herself to Maria, covers her mouth, coughs, and continues, “No, we can’t stop any journalist who may pick up your story. Nor can we hide you, unless you would like to start from scratch again.”
“No, thank you,” Melissa says quickly.
“Tab told you about your new NPH, didn’t she?” Maria asks. Melissa nods. “You’ll be an ordinary trans girl who ran away. Transitioned in some far-flung city — she and Indira were still working out the details the last time I checked — and re-emerging a few years ago in Manchester. We’ve already created records for your FFS and GRS with Mrs Prentice’s above-ground practice. Her secretary thought it was all terribly funny.”
“Is she… one of us?”
“No. But she’s reliable. We’re also…” Maria dips into her bag for her phone, unlocks it, and scrolls through a document, pinching her eyebrows as she does so. “We have a house for you. A rental, outwardly, though obviously we’re covering that. It’s on Clover Drive. You know? That newbuild road that butts up against campus? Maybe you don’t know. It’s a short walk, anyway.”
Melissa hugs herself. “You’re moving me out of the hall?”
“Yes,” Beatrice says. “Non-negotiable, I’m afraid. First, because the people who are re-entering your life are emphatically not people we plan to read in; second, because it plain doesn’t make sense for you to live here, not according to your new NPH. You were never here, never stayed here while you returned to — and abandoned — your education. We’ve already erased your records from Saints’ files, though someone’ll have to nip in and pull the paper copies. Melissa’s records, that is; Mark’s records end with your disappearance.”
“You need a life that makes sense,” Maria says plainly. “And you need to live it somewhere else, in case things do blow up, so they find you there, not here. So we’ve got you a house. And it’s a pretty nice one, I think. Hardly huge, but you’ll have three bedrooms, a bathroom, a shower room. Much more space than you have here. And Abby will be joining you.”
“She will?” Melissa says, and then frowns at herself, presumably looking back through her contributions to this conversation and finding them somewhat wanting. “No,” she continues, more relaxed — though clearly forcing it — and more considered, “yeah, I get it.”
“She’s no longer a sponsor. Of you or anyone. She’s barely involved on the admin side any more. And she needs, bluntly, to be anchored here if your relationship is to have any chance at all. If her family can offer her a house but all we can give her is a dorm room…”
“She wouldn’t leave me for that.”
“No. But she might drift away.”
“That’s my speciality,” Melissa says, with the slightest of smiles. “What about Shahida?”
“If she wants to join you, she is more than welcome to,” Beatrice says. “Your choice of housemates — as with your choice of partners — is entirely up to you. We’ll be paying for the place, covering the utilities, council tax, et cetera, but it is your house.”
“Has been since January first, actually,” Maria says. “We backdated. Though you can’t move in until Sunday at the earliest; we have people there now, getting it ready.”
“Ready how?”
Maria smiles and leans towards Melissa, touches her gently on the forearm. “Tabitha told me how you came here from Manchester with what she described as ‘barely enough suitcases for a weekend in Benidorm.’ And Abby isn’t exactly a hoarder. So we’re setting you up: beds, wardrobes, sofas, pots and pans, and so on. A TV in every bedroom; not state-of-the-art, though. None of it will be.”
Nodding, Melissa says, “You don’t want any of it to seem too new.”
“Exactly. Jenny, at the very least, will very likely want to visit you, spend time with your girlfriends, and so on, and we’re hopeful that your brother will, too, eventually. It’s better for your NPH, for your story — for you, to be honest — if you appear to be exactly what you are: a young trans woman moving back to the city of her youth, and bringing with her all her accumulated baggage.”
“Thanks,” Melissa says drily.
“Sorry,” Maria says, giggling. “Couldn’t resist.”
“Bethany,” Beatrice says, raising a conspiratorial eyebrow at Melissa, “is a bad influence on her.”
“No,” Maria mutters, “if she said it, it would be much ruder.”
“I’ll still be able to visit, won’t I?” Melissa asks, a spot of urgency returning to her voice.
“Yes, that won’t be a problem,” Maria says. “You’re dating Abby and you know Tabitha, and through them you’ve come to know several other girls here.”
“It’s all terribly plausible,” Beatrice says.
It’s going well. Melissa Haverford is a girl who needs to be controlled more carefully and more completely than they have been, though little of that is the girl’s fault — strictly speaking — and none of it is Tabitha Forbes’ fault, either, who has been handling what she referred to once in the security room as her ‘Haverford headache’ with as much equanimity as Beatrice could expect. No, as usual, the fault is Beatrice’s. She ought to have paid more attention to Melissa while she was under their constant care; she did not. Again and again, she is finding that those who make little trouble, who are unremarkable, can conceal hidden depths. With Christine Hale, those depths provided cover for a remarkably talented young woman, a woman who cannot see a problem without trying to fix it, whether that problem is a malfunctioning computer or a distressed friend.
Melissa Haverford’s depths, it seems, mostly contained anxiety.
It is understandable. Her life before Dorley was not easy. Beatrice knows from long late-night conversations with Ashley and Sue — and the many other girls that she met before she came to earn her living in the respectable fashion that she does now — that to grow up trans is to be subject to a degree of abuse that, yes, she can imagine, but only because she was put through what one might term the express version under Dorothy Marsden. A young psyche cannot withstand the daily pressures of a gender that does not fit without being harmed in some way, and Beatrice is both grateful that so many women she has known and loved have lived to speak about it — usually with the assistance of alcohol and with the kind of grim humour that, these days, Beatrice tends to find mostly on mugs — and frequently reduced to melancholy at the thought of those who never become adults. Whenever she wavers in her resolve here, whenever she wonders whether the roles they have chosen are more abuser than saviour, it takes nothing more than a glance through the sealed records to mollify her bruised conscience. To be cis, to have been granted the gift of a gender that fits, only to abuse the power that has been given you, to spend its currency on acts of violence, and to be celebrated for it, uplifted, rescued from the consequences of your actions, positioned with love and affection to repeat them again and again and again, tarnishing the souls and marking the bodies of the girls and women unfortunate enough to intersect with you…
Well. She feels quite justified in taking away that gift. And then, when the individuals in question are ready, when they understand what they have done, when they see the new life that awaits them, she has quite another gift to offer in return.
For someone such as Melissa, though, the process lacks the… therapeutic element that makes it work so well on most of the boys they acquire. Someone like her, or Stephanie, or Victoria. None of them should have been allowed to endure a corrective process that was designed for the kinds of people who, in their previous lives, abused them. Victoria, fortunately, has fallen into an apparently healthy relationship with a girl who loves her very much. With luck, Melissa’s new arrangement with Abigail and Shahida will prove similarly stabilising.
And Steph’s situation, meanwhile, is… evolving. Creating precedents left, right and centre.
“Oh,” she adds, interrupting Maria in the middle of something or other and earning a scowl from her number two that she will make amends for later, “there is one thing, Melissa. Keep a bed free. At your new house, I mean. You can set up one of the bedrooms as a guest room or, if you and Abigail and Shahida would prefer to keep your own bedrooms, I believe we ordered a sofabed for the living room?”
She phrases it as a question, requiring Maria to stop comedically grimacing at her for interrupting, and answer. “One three-seater that converts into a bed,” Maria says, scrolling and tapping on her phone screen, “one two-seater that does not. And, yes, there will be fresh sheets in the airing cupboard.”
“I have an airing cupboard?” Melissa says, sounding very much as if Maria has confirmed that she will have gold-plated taps or a live-in chef.
“That’s good, I take it?” Beatrice says.
Melissa shrugs, though she’s still smiling. “Childhood friend had one. Back in Cherston. She had a really big house, so I always sort of thought of them as a rich-person thing.” She’s looking down now, at — or through — the ugly, temporary desk. “We used to sit in there on cold days. Take our juice boxes in. Duck under the shelves. God,” she adds, shaking her head, “I haven’t thought about her in years.”
“Well. Perhaps you can look her up.”
“I can?”
“Miss Haverford, your identities have been unified. You are, once again, one person. You can talk to whomever you like. Just don’t bring anyone else here, if that’s okay.”
* * *
Valérie appreciates a woman who is properly put together. Who has decided on a look for herself, and maintains it. It’s one of the things she’s come to love about this new Béatrice, this incredible woman who replaced the quivering, determined girl she once knew: she knows the impression that she wants to give, and she damn well gives it. Severe mistress of the house to the new girls, who need an authority figure to fear and resent; mother to the gaggle of older sponsors, the lifers for whom Dorley Hall is their family and their social group, who need to look toward someone older than them and understand that there is still life to come, and that it is good, that it is filled with love. And there is the third version of her, the woman whom only her lovers and — in her old life — her clients have seen; the one only Valérie sees now. This version of Béatrice is delectable.
There is strength in controlling your appearance. In crafting it. Not just in creating the desired impression in the people that surround you, but in the process itself. This, Valérie knows most deeply: in the depths of Stenordale Manor, choosing her own image was about the only power she had over her life. She’d like to think some of that rubbed off on Trevor, that it is a lesson he will take forward.
A damn shame none of it rubbed off on Frances. Unless, and this is a horrifying thought, it did.
Hmm.
Jan, the woman in Elle’s employ who has come to Val’s room bearing coffee, is clearly a woman who understands how to present herself. In the time Valérie has spent at the hall, she’s seen her dressed up in her uniform, dressed down for a casual breakfast in the dining hall — she was initially reticent to spend much time in the hall itself, but that seems to have changed of late, out of necessity — and even dressed as a student to go out on campus on some errand or other. Each time, she has fulfilled the role so perfectly that Valérie became certain that she was looking at another woman like her, another woman who soothes her nerves and fortifies her spirit with clothes, with makeup, with the manner in which she holds herself.
She’s done it again today. Sitting on the one spare chair in Valérie’s extremely spare bedroom, Jan is wearing all beige: her blazer and her calf-length skirt are light, bordering on yellow, and her low-cut top, concealed almost entirely by the blazer, is almost brown. Her boots, loose-fit and knee-length, are glossy black. Her outfit reminds Valérie most strongly of Elladine Lambert, and of others of aristocratic stock that she has encountered over the years. The boots are reminiscent of riding boots; the skirt, absently pleated, is of a kind that if it were rendered in gaudy twill, you might expect to see on a woman who likes to work the garden with her own hands, and who likes her peers to know this; the blazer, were it black, blue or some godawful, lacklustre brown, could be from the uniform of a private girls’ school. Were it not for the tailoring, for the matched colours, for the deliberate nature of it all, it could be an outfit thrown together by some society girl, home for the weekend and touring the local villages.
On Jan, it is a statement. She belongs. In the place that she is going today, that they are both going, she belongs. This, again, Valérie understands.
Finally, to her face. Jan is almost bare today, leaving her deep, dark skin unaugmented — a wise choice; it does not need cosmetic assistance — and wearing only gloss on her lips and a touch of shadow above her eyes. She wears her hair pulled back tight, as she often does, tied high on the back of her head and bursting out from there, a flower of tight curls, shined and buoyant.
“It’s not a long drive,” Jan’s saying. “But once you are there, I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to leave as and when you wish. Security’s tight at the moment.”
“Of course.”
“Just as long as you know that you might be sitting around eating packet sandwiches all afternoon.”
“I am prepared.”
Val has chosen to send the opposite message with her presentation today. Borrowed from Béatrice, she wears a skirt suit and blouse, office-simple and in blacks and whites. Her hair she has blown out to its full length, with a light application of mousse to her long fringe, to ensure that it perfectly frames a full face of makeup, done as expertly as she knows how. She chose neutral shades for all but her lips, which are striking; when Béatrice saw them this morning before the start of her workday, Valérie could swear that she moaned quietly and involuntarily. The intended message: that she is serious about the request that she has presented.
Also, that she makes all you cis bitches look frumpy and dull.
Valérie learned the word ‘cis’ quite recently; she enjoys it.
They take the central stairs to the ground floor, and make quite a spectacle of themselves as they tap-tap-tap through the dining hall, Jan’s boots and Valérie’s heels in near-perfect time. In a room filled with girls who are mostly still waking up, they provoke no small amount of comment. Val saves her laugh until they are outside, and she is pleased to find that Jan is equally amused.
One of Elladine’s luxurious black off-roaders takes the two of them out of Almsworth and quite a way up the country. They fill the time with silence, Jan working on her laptop and Valérie browsing on her phone, a device with which she has become reasonably expert. She’s still catching up on the twenty-first century, and though at first she continues with that task, it doesn’t take long for boredom to find her. She scrolls her Instagram feed instead, occasionally showing Jan this or that outfit that might suit her, and then switches to the video app. Paige and Christine have her watching a TV show called The OA, and though they immediately took back their recommendation, belatedly realising that she might find some of its content as triggering as Paige initially did, she dismissed their concerns and, true to her assertions, remained unperturbed when the pretty blonde girl was locked in a glass cage.
She got to watch Crispin Smyth-Farrow wither and die through glass. It is, now that she is free of him, of his house, of the curse of his breath upon her, one of her most treasured memories.
As they approach their destination, Jan is gripped suddenly with a similar — and similarly belated — anxiety, and Valérie has to reassure her that just because Elladine Lambert is holed up in a country house, it will not take her back to Stenordale.
Nothing ever will. Stenordale is a husk. She had pictures of the rubble printed out, to remember her girls and to never forget the charred corpse the place has become. Whatever grand name this estate claims for itself, it is not Stenordale. It is not even built in the same style. It is more like a cottage that grew beyond its means, and as their driver takes them through a distressed stone archway into a central lot, it becomes clear that this is literally true: stone and tile give way to modern materials, to shapeless outbuildings, to an office block, to a windowless bunker. Behind them, construction machinery, a half-dug foundation that makes Valérie think only fleetingly of the exhumed central quad at Stenordale, and a lot more of those temporary buildings that sprung up in the woods behind Dorley Hall, though the people she can see walking out of one of them are dressed smartly, not in fatigues.
Jan does not take her to the bunker as she expects. Instead, she leads her toward the office building, a four-storey insult to architecture, and walks briskly ahead of her, so as to activate the automatic doors first. Valérie passes through behind her, and when she sees the look on Jan’s face, she raises a questioning eyebrow.
“Sorry,” Jan says. “It, uh, just occurred to me that you might never have encountered an automatic door before.” She shrugs sheepishly. “And then it didn’t seem to faze you, so I felt like an idiot.”
“Dear girl,” Val says, “from the moment I left Stenordale I have encountered so many new things that if I reacted to each and every one of them, I would be left entirely without dignity. I barely even notice your enormous modern cars any more. Besides,” she adds, walking forward, setting the pace, “we had those doors in the 1980s. It was hardly the Stone Age.”
And it is true: she has developed a habit of clenching her stomach muscles whenever she encounters something new, so as to control her response to it. And though, yes, of course she has seen automatic doors before, the principle holds. Something her father once said: never show the English your belly; without a doubt, they will cut it. Besides, she loathes being predictable.
Jan takes her up two flights into a warren of small offices. Most of them do not have windows, and for those that do, Valérie notes, not only is the glass extremely thick, but so are the containing walls.
Built for purpose, then.
At the end of the corridor, Jan leaves her at another windowless room, in which Val finds a small table, a coffee machine, and Elladine Lambert. She looks composed; entirely unlike someone who was recently shot at. If you ignore that she currently resides in a building where the glass is thicker than Valérie’s hand.
The woman is dressed to hide her elbows and knees, which presumably took the brunt of her fall and her subsequent escape. Her knuckles, though, are a mess of scabs, and a dressing on her left wrist barely escapes a long sleeve.
“Ms Barbier,” Elle says, rising to shake her hand. Valérie complies, smooths down her skirt, and sits in the chair that is presented to her.
“Ms Lambert,” she says, leaning into her accent a little more than usual. Elle might be in her element, here in her country-house-adjacent, bulletproof office block, but she is likely the only genuine aristocrat in the area. They are, both of them, women who belong, and women who are alone.
“I’ve been thinking about your request,” Elle says, pouring a cup of coffee for both of them and sitting back in her seat. “Bluntly, I’m minded to refuse it. But I know what you are likely to do if I do so.”
“Henrietta Smyth-Farrow needs to be dealt with,” Val says, sipping her coffee. “And Dorothy Marsden needs a knife in her gut. Oh, and it would be nice to do something about Henrietta’s brother, too.”
“On the Smyth-Farrows, we are gathering intel. Dorothy, too, though she remains elusive. But, Valérie, I want you to know that if and when we find them, I would still prefer not to hang you out like bait on a line.”
“Elladine—”
“I didn’t say I can’t use you,” Elle says quickly. “I can and I will. But I won’t waste you, Ms Barbier. You are a valuable individual in your own right, not to mention a precious commodity.”
“I’m a commodity?”
“To people like the Smyth-Farrows. Henny in particular.”
“Henrietta,” Valérie says, “is the only one of the two of them who seemed particular.”
“You said she was… intrigued by you?”
“Yes.”
“I think she sees you as a showroom piece. The son of her late father’s business rival, captured and mutilated and yet still alive. Who would still be serving if it were not for— You know the rest.”
“I was there, yes.”
“Sorry. You also told her that you could do what Dorothy does, yes? Create more like you. Create people who are — and please excuse me — humiliated and controlled, but stable. That’s important to her. They are developing a client base of wealthy perverts who have many enemies. Local journalists, environmental inspectors. College roommates. And we happen to know—” Elle coughs delicately, “—that they have tried. And failed.”
“Suicides?”
“Yes,” Elle says. “She wants you. She needs you. She bloody well named you in her little press release stunt, but she didn’t use your current name. A message, or so she thinks in that peanut brain of hers. Oh, she wants Dorothy, too. And she wants me, she wants Frankie and she probably wants Beatrice — anyone who can elevate the process beyond mere torture. She also wants Trevor Darling, though I don’t think she is under any illusions that he can help her beyond looking pretty. You, though, are the most tempting prize. Exhibition and employee, all at once.”
Val finds that she must pry her jaw apart to say her piece. “It is a role I’m used to.”
“Well, you shan’t be returning to it. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“So you won’t use me, then.”
Elle waves a hand. “I didn’t say that.” She pauses. Sips from her coffee again. “You are aware that I was shot at, yes?” Val nods. “If we are to use you, that is the kind of thing you may have to face. That is the kind of thing you may have to survive. So, Valérie Barbier, if you are truly serious about becoming a part of this task force—”
“I am.”
“—then you are going to need to be trained.”
“Trained?”
2008 June 4
Wednesday
He’s been waking up in this bloody bed every morning for two months now.
Waking up and feeling numb, wanting to demand to know why he can’t feel his face and discovering that he can’t feel his bloody throat, either, that he can’t even bloody talk;
Waking up and itching all over and repeatedly hitting the button next to his head until a nurse comes to move the button out of his reach and, after much irritated signing on his part, also to give him a bed bath;
Waking up and needing desperately to cough or to sneeze or sometimes just to bloody well scream, and having to remind himself that he is unable to do so because he might lose his voice forever if he does — and because they told him that they will sedate him until he’s healed, and take their chances with the brain damage, if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut until they tell him otherwise;
Waking up and throbbing with pain because they’ve reduced his morphine and the bloody button’s been moved out of reach and he’s been bloody well cut into, all over.
Back at Dorley Hall, when they threw him in the cell for the final time and ‘Aunt’ Bea came for him to inform him that they were washing him out, that he was and is and forever shall be irreparably broken, he was gleeful. He told her he was bored out of his bloody mind, that he’s had Latin classes that were more emotionally stimulating than the post-disclosure basement, that he was aching for a change of scenery. This wasn’t what he had in mind.
At least he finally managed to annoy the piss out of one of the nurses sufficient to get them to tell him how long it’s been. When they threw him in his nice new room in what he now knows is a facility run by that upstart Lambert woman’s quaint little private military concern, he had no way to count the hours or the days, and when he fell asleep there and awoke here, he was even more marooned in time. So he was comforted to learn that he was in the cell barely two months, which means that they took his bollocks at roughly the same time that they would have been gelding Morris and the other lads back at the hall. Synchronicity!
Bloody annoying to have missed it. He had a bet with himself that Morris would take it okay and talk the others round, and Philip had planned to interfere with that process. Or possibly to try to accelerate it; when he was taken from there, washed out as a new year’s gift for Ashley and the other sponsors, he hadn’t yet decided.
Hah. ‘Upstart Lambert woman’, his mother’s assessment, overheard at some tedious gathering or other, and redolent of the contempt she and her peers had for this gadabout young’un who lucked into the keys to the family car. He decided at the time to put no stock in it, as with everything his mother liked to say, but now that the upstart has him trapped, has had him bloody operated on, he thinks he’s allowed a little snobbery.
It’s the uncertainty of it all that’s pissing him off! They took the bandages off his face and consented eventually to uncuff his right hand, now that he can’t mess up the healing by poking at himself. They let him watch movies and TV shows and even gave him a controller to hold awkwardly between his cuffed and uncuffed hands so he could play some basic games, but they won’t tell him what they’ve done to him or why he’s here. Though what they’ve done to him is obvious: he’s known for two whole months that he’s been operated on, and given both the general trajectory of things back at beloved mother Dorley and the distinctly empty feeling where his nads used to be — not to mention the miniature and amusingly conical breasts that started budding during his last month at Dorley and have continued to grow in the time since — it’s obvious that they’ve made a woman out of him, though why they had to drag him kicking and screaming out to God knows where to do so when Morris and the others get to stay in sunny Almsworth and become women in a charming collegiate setting, he’s got no bloody clue.
But they won’t give him a mirror, and the laptop has a matte screen and a hole in the casing where the camera should be. Even when they have someone take him out for his little walks around the block, they’ve contrived to put him somewhere with all concrete walls! No glass! Not even a bloody puddle!
He hasn’t been able to see himself. It’s been driving him up the wall. Is he hot? The nurses won’t say.
Seriously, is he hot? He has no way to know and no-one to tell him. Next to that, the why of it feels rather secondary. If they want him to be a woman — though as God and Ashley both know, it won’t fix him — then he’ll give it a go and see what he thinks of it, but not if he has to be an ugly one. Mother’s had a face like the back end of a Rolls Royce her whole life, enough that when they put her in the society pages, they tend to shoot her from a distance, and it made her deeply unpleasant to be around. Oh, there were probably other factors — a horrible boarding school, perhaps, or some terrible matter involving a male relative that the family refers to only as ‘the incident’; Philip would guess both, because dear old Mumsy’s never been forthcoming with anything but criticism, and because she reacted unhelpfully to Philip’s own smattering of ‘incidents’ — but her bottle-opening chin can’t have helped.
Two months. Two months of boredom, two months of near-immobility — a once-daily walk through a concrete warren doesn’t count — and two months of not knowing what he even looks like. Absently, he pulls at the cuff on his left wrist, tests again the metal bedframe it’s connected to. Nothing. Not unless he wants to chew off his own hand. He’s exactly as secure as he was yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. He’s here at her majesty’s pleasure until Ms Lambert, or her local representative, decides he can leave.
If they ever do.
Halfway through a TV show that he refuses on principle to pay attention to, the door to his cosy little suite opens, but instead of the uniformed nurse he’s expecting, the woman who enters wears a trouser suit and carries in one hand a clipboard and in the other a stun gun. She smiles briefly at him, and the low lights glisten on her lip colouring.
“Good morning,” she says. “My name is Haley Godfrey. Yours is Cora.”
Is it now? That’s fascinating! Has Morris received his new name yet? Have the others? Or do they get to choose, and this is the special treatment for the one declared most difficult to handle, least likely to reform?
“Oh,” Haley adds, “you can talk, by the way.”
It’s so unexpected that he blinks at her for a dumb moment before he tries to say anything. “Thank you,” he says, in a voice which sounds, to his inaccurate ears, as would a hypothetical sister of his might while recovering from the most severe flu the world has ever known. He’ll have to try the trick later of holding up a book on either side of his face so he can hear himself properly, assuming he can get a nurse or this Haley woman to assist him.
Also, he thanked her? Hah! Very conciliatory! And a bit of a surprise, though that’s not exactly new; sometimes he doesn’t know which way he’ll jump in a given situation until he’s already over the cliff.
“Actually,” Haley continues, “it’s been safe for you to talk for a while now, but I thought a week or two’s additional enforced silence would be instructive.”
“I see,” he says. It’s no easier to speak than it was the last time, which does rather limit his ability to yell at her about this. Though if he could, what exactly would he yell? ‘How dare you prove the extent of your power over me’? He’d do similarly in her position. Actually, he’d probably make the poor sucker in the bed stick it out for another fortnight.
Shame the poor sucker in the bed is him.
“Sorry,” she says, walking towards him and stopping by his cuffed left hand, which she proceeds to unlock. “Bad joke. Should have seen your face, though.”
“I haven’t seen my face,” he whispers, still hoarse. “And when do I get to speak normally again? Do I ever?”
“Not sure, exactly.” She slips the cuff off of him, and steps back as he flexes his hand. “About a month, I think.”
He frowns at her. She’s not afraid of him. She stepped back, yes, but he’s fairly certain that that was to give him room to stand. And it would make sense to be afraid of him, since she surely has read the file that Ashley had on him, plus the embellishments from his time at Dorley Hall. So the fact that she isn’t is… suggestive.
Since she came in, he’s been watching her. And it’s true that she moves with a confidence that he’s unused to from women her age — late twenties or early thirties at the oldest — and with a heavy step that seems incongruous, considering her nice suit. It’s also true that he’s the weakest he’s been since he was a child, and that if she’s read his file, she’s prepared for him, and half of his strategy in any kind of fight is to rely on the other guy not knowing how to deal with him, not being ready for the shortarse with the skinny arms to be so tenacious. Someone once described seeing him fight as being like watching a small dog sink its teeth into someone’s leg and hang on as they thrash around, trying to get it off. Most people don’t have a strategy for that.
Maybe she does.
Plus, what would he even do? He’s already been given the tour of his immediate environs, and the Peckinville PMC isn’t exactly short of burly men and women, all of whom have presumably had training. Philip hasn’t had training; just an attitude problem. Winning every random fight he’s ever picked is not, actually, a guarantee that against someone who knows what she’s doing, he won’t get — and he smiles, remembering Morris — fucking battered.
So he doesn’t try to lunge at her. And, he’s absolutely sure, she notices him having this conversation with himself. The way she’s smirking certainly suggests as much.
Damn. Now he wants to fight her anyway, just to see how quickly she puts him down.
“I’m due my supervised walk about now,” he says. “Is that why you’re here? Did the other woman retire? You’ll have to tell her I’ll miss our little talks. I loved hearing all about ‘turn left here’ and ‘stop now’ and ‘go back to bed’.” The sarcasm is satisfying, but its delivery is emphatically not enhanced by the way his voice fades out at the end, like he doesn’t have enough breath for a complex sentence.
Haley rolls her eyes at him. “Come on,” she says, and nods at the chair by the door. There are clothes on there; he hadn’t noticed. Did she bring them with her, or were they there since last night? He’s getting slow and unobservant. Maybe it’s the estrogen.
Or maybe it’s that he’s barely moved for four months. Two months in a cell and two months in a bed, with minimal exercise and barely enough food to keep his stomach quiet. It would tame an MMA fighter, probably.
He hops stiffly out of the bed, takes a moment to stretch — she steps back farther, gives him room — and walks right over to the chair, shedding his gown as he goes, daring her to look at his naked form, his penis, his ball scars, his tiny, conical breasts, all of it.
She regards him entirely dispassionately. Okay then; what worked on Ashley’s not going to work on Haley.
He dresses. Simple trousers, shirt and shoes. Similar to the uniforms he’s seen the cleaners wearing, only without logos or nametags. He’d been dreading that it would be something girlish or kinky, and he’s about to make a smart comment to that effect when he remembers that speaking is bloody exhausting right now, and he has, apparently, somewhere to be. So when he’s done, he stands there, hands limply by his side, ready to be taken from here.
At once, he hates being so easily directed, and rather revels in it, too.
Haley Godfrey leads him out of his room and into the corridor, and as he follows her, he notes that the quantity of armed men and women has not noticeably diminished.
Around the loop they go, until they get to a brushed metal door that Philip has never seen the other side of, so when it opens to reveal a lift, it’s with genuine interest that he steps inside. It’s the first confirmation that, yes, he’s actually getting out of this bloody place, and even if it’s ultimately only for a few minutes, he’ll take it. He keeps glancing at Haley, waiting for her to betray any kind of nervousness around him, any kind of uncertainty about what a documented psycho might try to do to her, but she takes them up from the basement floor to third without so much as a twitch, and when the doors open again, she walks right out.
He follows her.
Up here, on the third floor of wherever the hell they are, he’d expected to see hospital decor: white walls, lots of signage, coloured lines on the floor to direct those who are forgetful. But it’s more like… Actually, he doesn’t know what it’s like. They pass blank walls painted in soft grey, with doors inset every so often. The doors themselves are marked with numbers, but nothing that gives him anything he can work with. There aren’t even any soldiers here that he can see, but he has no doubt that they are present, ready to jump on him if he seems like he might be about to make himself a danger to Haley.
And he’s had time to think about it. Whatever she’s brought him here to do to him, it’s gotten him out of that dull little room and out of the second concrete basement he’s found himself in recently. She’s an agent of change in his life, and she’s overdue. He’s excited for what comes next.
What comes next turns out to be inside room 315, which she unlocks with a key from a small ring. When he follows her in, he finds what seems to be a whole residential suite. 315 has doors inside leading off into other rooms, and most are open; he can see a bedroom, a bathroom, what looks like an office, another room with a single metal table that reminds him most of police interrogation rooms, and another with exercise equipment. He’s grateful to note that several of the rooms, including the bedroom, appear to have windows: daylight, eye-searingly bright to someone who has spent months upon months underground, streams in.
“Welcome home, Cora,” Haley says, turning around to face him and waiting for his response with her hands on her hips. She’s dropped the clipboard off on an end table, but she’s still, Philip notices, holding the stun gun.
“What’s home?” he asks. He hates that his voice is still so quiet, so husky, so difficult. “Why am I here?”
Haley nods at one of the chairs. “Sit,” she says, and Philip does. “You remember what Beatrice told you, the night you left the care of Dorley Hall?”
“Yes. She told me that there are uses for someone of my nature. Someone who wouldn’t be missed.” He’s a little bitter about that. He’d like to think that Morris, at least, would miss him.
“There are.”
“What uses are those? You’ve continued the work she started, but you’ve taken me away anyway; are you going to pimp me out?”
Grimacing, Haley shakes her head. “Not quite. We’ve had you altered, it’s true. And there will be further alterations to come, when you’re ready. But we’re not interested in Beatrice Quinn’s little mission. Deprogramming for the terminally masculine.” She says it the way that Philip’s mother would describe providing meals for starving orphans. “We have something more vital in mind for you.”
“You’re not going to fix me, are you?” Philip asks. He doesn’t entirely mean to say it, but it’s been on his mind: that if Ashley and Bea and the others couldn’t make him someone normal, someone that people could look at with neither disgust nor contemptuous amusement, then maybe these people could.
A vain hope.
“That’s not the plan. You’ve been designed for a purpose, Cora.”
“‘Designed’? What do you mean? What have you done to me?”
“Oh, the usual,” Haley says. “You have the pretty face already. The voice will come. And as your body develops, we will train it. Train you. And further enhance your appearance as and when it seems necessary. Including,” she adds after a pause, during which she looks at Philip as though she would like to have a pair of glasses perched on her stern nose, “I’m afraid to say, probably SRS, eventually.”
“You’re giving me a full sex change?” he says. The idea’s not unbelievable, and it’s not even unwelcome or unexpected. He’s been prepared for it ever since he worked out what they were doing to the boys under Dorley Hall, and he’s been singularly uninterested; he expects he will have as little attachment to the vagina they craft for him as he has currently for his penis. But a sex change means paying a doctor, it means allocating resources for his recovery… That they are committed to that is telling. Of what, he still can’t say.
“Of course. Your job may well take you to America, and you’ll need to get through TSA.”
He almost laughs. “You’re giving me a sex change so I can fly internationally?”
“Most likely. Who knows? You might get lucky. We might need you to stay in the UK.”
“Why not leave me as a man? Fully intact men travel by aeroplane to the USA all the time. I’ve heard about it.”
“Men make poor assassins, Cora,” Haley says flatly. “They draw attention to themselves. They are flamboyant. They are less often underestimated. We will require you to walk in places where you will not be considered a threat, where you will be an object of desire, not of fear. You will not be seen as a danger or as a rival; you will be seen as a good fuck.”
“You want me to kill people?”
“Does that bother you?”
He shrugs. “Rather depends which people, don’t you think?”
She doesn’t reply. Instead, she picks up the clipboard from the end table and detaches an A4 envelope, which she opens with a pen and throws over to him. Catching it, he upends it into his lap.
Truth be told, he feels lucky. Morris and the others are going to be women, same as him, but they’re going to walk out into the world and get boring jobs. Become accountants or teachers or women plumbers. And Philip had always wondered if, had they possessed the ability to fix him, he could have recognised the person he’d become, the woman who would be content with such a lot. Cora, however, is offering him something new, something different.
It really is exciting.
“He will be one of your targets,” Haley says. “Not your first, but perhaps your most important. And don’t worry; we’re not going to send you after anyone right away. We will train you. Condition you. Educate you. It will take time. And hard work.”
“I don’t mind hard work,” Philip says, though truth be told, it will be another novelty among many. He’s staring at the picture on the top sheet, his mouth dry; drier than it was already, after waking without water, after whatever they did to his voice. “Why me, though?” he asks. “Why not just use a normal woman for this? Someone like you?”
“Beyond the fact that many of our targets would not render themselves vulnerable to ‘normal’ women, as you call us? These are high-risk assignments, Cora, and Ms Lambert prefers not to waste people. If there is to be waste, however…”
“Of course.” It’s what Ashley said all those months ago. He was a weight on the world. A violent, uncontrollable thing. Men and women hospitalised in his wake. Families paid off or threatened into silence. And surely, eventually, he would cross that final line, and still escape justice. Because the family name requires it.
And there’s the other thing she said. Men who would not render themselves vulnerable to normal women? What did Haley say when he asked if she was going to pimp him out? ‘Not really.’
That’s not the emphatic denial he might wish for. Though it colours the role somewhat differently if he is to make himself submissive to some man, only to immediately end him.
“I’m glad you understand,” Haley says.
“Uh-huh.” Philip’s still staring at the picture. It’s a man, doughy, ageing, grey all over, from hair to skin to suit. Pictured at Ascot, though Philip has known him in more other contexts than he can count.
Alexander Twill-Barrington. Oh, there’s a smattering of middle names in there, too. Philip is similarly afflicted; something to do with the aristocratic tendency to broadcast with the naming of your children simultaneously your status (elevated), your ancestry (varied) and your education in the classics (insufferable). Philip tries to ignore his.
Alexander Twill-Barrington. One of his mother’s associates. Possibly her lover, though that is something Philip has never wanted to investigate, not even to satisfy his conviction that anyone brave enough to have sex with his mother — his father included — must necessarily be highly inebriated, financially motivated, or adept at receiving pleasure with their eyes closed.
Alexander Twill-Barrington. Philip can recall countless occasions on which the man has cloistered himself in some private room with Mum — and with Dad, barely conscious though he usually was — and a handful of their other associates. Murmurs and clinking glasses; nothing a child with his ear to a locked door could do anything with.
Alexander fucking Twill-fucking-Barrington. Not above putting his hands on a child. And apparently so important, so vital in Mother’s circle that bringing this to her attention resulted in nothing more useful than a scolding, and the stern instruction to take it like a man. He’s untouchable, or so Mother says; it is not a privilege that he extends to anyone else.
Philip’s wondered occasionally if it was this man who broke him. But he doesn’t think so. Those times he was trapped alone with him? He’d been fighting with the other children for years already. Looking up the girls’ skirts, pulling down the boys’ trousers. For a reaction, mostly. It was childish.
It was childish, and he was scolded for it. But not ruined, and not by this man. No, he did that himself.
Doesn’t mean he doesn’t still think about it. Doesn’t mean Alexander Twill-Barrington didn’t show him who people really are. Doesn’t mean that, in the night, he doesn’t remember him.
Does Haley know? Does Elle Lambert? Are they aware that they have served up to him on a platter perhaps the one person besides his own mother who has hurt him badly enough to leave scars beyond the physical?
Or is he just really, really bloody lucky?
“What has he done?” he asks. He almost says ‘else’.
“Worse than you,” Haley says.
Philip nods again. It’s a novel idea. Not killing someone, no, that’s always been a possibility. But killing someone who deserves it? Humiliating him? Unmaking him? That’s interesting. And maybe, as part of it, Philip will be, as Haley said, wasted.
“I’ll do it,” he says.
2020 January 26
Sunday
There’s a small queue outside Aunt Bea’s flat when Christine gets there, and that’s unusual enough so early on a Sunday morning that she pulls out her earbuds and whispers a question to Jane, who is ahead of her in line, behind Bella and Charlie.
“Don’t know,” Jane replies, leaning back so they can talk quietly. “I’ve been here fifteen minutes, at least.”
“Is she in with someone?”
“Don’t think so. Maria went in about five minutes ago. Hey, why are we whispering?”
Christine laughs, suddenly embarrassed. “No idea,” she says. “Felt, I don’t know, disrespectful? What are you here to talk about, anyway? Is Raph okay?”
“He’s fine. He’s better than fine; he’s annoying.”
“Oh?”
“He wants to try on more clothes. He’s really getting into it?”
“Why’s that annoying?”
Jane shrugs. “It’s the way he said it. Bugged me. He didn’t mean anything by it, but he was talking about the way Paige dresses. And Jodie and Pippa and, shit, even you. And I said, what about how I dress, and he gave me this look, and that’s when I realised what the four of you all have in common. You’re all skinny bitches.”
“Sorry. But you’re not—”
“I’m size sixteen, Christine.”
“That’s still not—”
“It’s not a ten or whatever you are. And don’t tell me I can start lifting or whatever. Amy already did.”
“Well?”
Shrugging again, Jane says, “We’re going jogging tomorrow morning. Laps around the campus. I’m going into town later to buy—” she makes a face, scrunching up her nose as if she’s just stepped in something horrible, “—exercise gear.”
“Sorry you’re sponsoring a body fascist, I guess,” Christine says.
“Oh, I’ll yell at him if he says anything. Don’t you worry. I’ve been practising a whole big speech. In the shower.”
Charlie, two spaces ahead of Jane in the queue, turns around and says, “You know, sixteen’s the average size for women in the UK.”
“Bella?” Jane says. “Kick her for me, would you?”
Without looking up from her phone, Bella says in a distracted voice, “If I kicked Charlene every time she said something insensitive, I wouldn’t have time to sponsor.”
“It’s true!” Charlie protests. “Just tell him it’s completely normal, and—”
“I’m sorry,” Jane says, “would you like to sponsor Raph? Shall we swap? I can have Aisha.”
“No way. She wants to open a bakery after she graduates. I’m set for life, Jane. Free breakfasts until I can’t walk any more.”
Christine’s watching Jane wind up to a retort and failing to find one — not her fault; it’s early and none of them are at their best — when the door to Aunt Bea’s flat opens and Maria steps quietly out. Charlie starts to speak, but Maria holds up a hand, requesting silence, and then beckons them away down the hallway. They follow her all the way to the first-floor common room, blessedly empty of second years, who are all presumably still in their beds — or possibly all still in one bed, stacked like Jenga pieces.
“Normally, I’d want to keep this quiet,” Maria says softly, “but people are on edge lately and the rumour mill is running at full speed. So here’s the official story of why Beatrice will not be attending the meetings scheduled for today: she and Val had a fight. If anyone asks, that’s it and that’s all. Okay?”
“I understand and agree,” Charlie says. Bella rolls her eyes at her.
“What’s the real story?” Jane asks.
“The same as that one, with embellishments. Valérie wants to be part of the eventual solution to the Smyth-Farrow problem. And the Marsden problem. To that end, she is undergoing… training. At a Peckinville facility. She will stay there a few days a week, most likely. Starting now; I don’t expect to see her here until Tuesday at the earliest.”
“Training?” Christine says. “Like—?” And she mimes a few karate moves, or what she thinks are probably karate moves. Karate-ish. Karate-adjacent. They make her hands look good, anyway.
Maria shakes her head. “Emergency procedures. Elle Lambert was shot at, and she knew how to drop, how to roll, how to run, because she’s been trained. That kind of thing.”
“So no cool Matrix moves from the hot French lady?” Charlie clarifies.
“No.”
“Darn.”
“Anyway,” Maria says, “Bea is understandably… upset that Val is choosing to put herself in harm’s way. She plans to visit them both in person and try to argue them around.”
“When?” Bella asks.
“No idea. Tomorrow, maybe? As for the rest of us…” Maria taps her wrist. “Briefing in the security room. Ten minutes. Spread the word.” She smiles. “I advise coffee; it’s going to be a long one.”
* * *
It’s strange how quickly everyone got used to seeing Raph wearing makeup. Ollie was convinced he was just doing it to fuck with everyone, and that he’d stop after a while, but that was obviously stupid, so when he walks in this morning with a pretty decently done eyeshadow gradient and black lipstick — going for the goth look after Jodie took a random cover shift — Steph doesn’t even comment on it. She waves instead, and Raph smiles and waves back.
He looks happy. And he’s said as much. Oh, sure, he’s also said that he would never have chosen this, that being a woman seems like a hassle — they are, most of them, apparently contractually obliged to say stuff like that every so often, lest Steph get the idea that they are doing this of their own accord; it’ll pass, Pippa says — but now that the uncertainty and the fear have slipped away, now that he has apparently discovered the same ripening cherry-tits that they are all very slowly growing and found that he doesn’t hate them, he claims to be enjoying the new outlook on life.
Insane how the basement has become downright relaxed recently. Enough that Pippa has joked that she’s going to miss it when she’s a second year, when suddenly there are expectations of them that go beyond ‘grudgingly accept what we’re doing to you’ and ‘don’t riot after the orchi’. In the early second year, when most of them will be recovering from FFS and just wanting to spend all their time watching movies and trying not to sniff, is when the feminine training starts to ramp up, when Aunt Bea’s directive that her girls will know everything there is to know about womanhood, whether they want to or not, really kicks in.
“I hated it,” Pippa said the other night. “And I told Eleanor that as soon as I graduated, I wasn’t going to do any of it. I was just going to wear hoodies and jeans and I insisted that girls don’t have to know any of that stuff to get along in the world. And she would just smile at me and remind me that most girls don’t have to worry about people clocking them, that it can be like armour, and that I might even come to appreciate the aesthetic merits of makeup and nice clothes and acting like I give a you-know-what about myself.” Then she tapped her temple, next to her left eye, still painted and pretty. “She was right.”
To that end — so she doesn’t have to work quite as hard in her second year, and also because, yeah, she actually wants to — Steph has been doing her makeup with Pippa, following her directions, and though Pippa wasn’t around this morning to help, Steph thinks she’s done a good job.
Raph, though, doesn’t seem to notice. Self-absorbed ass. Or maybe he’s just not awake yet.
“Jane been down?” he asks as he passes the couch where Steph is slouched and where Bethany, having crawled out of Steph’s bed this morning with extreme reluctance, is asleep.
“Not yet,” Steph says.
“There’s a meeting,” Nell says. She’s one of two who’s been watching them on the cameras overnight, and she came down early because of something going on with Martin. Neither of them will say what it was, with Martin reading a book in the corner, waiting for breakfast, characteristically quiet. Steph’s been giving him hard looks whenever he’s had his head down and can’t see her staring at him, and she’s pretty sure his eyes are red. Crying? Or just poor sleep?
“About us?” Raph says, grinning at her and dropping into a bean bag chair.
“Pretty sure they’re all about us,” Steph says.
“True.”
“It’s about everything,” Nell says, sounding bored. “You lot, definitely. Sponsoring in general. Me, probably. The soldier girls and how they keep using up all the Pop-Tarts. A lot of it’s gossip and hey-did-you-see type stuff, too. TV shows, stuff off the news, all of it.”
“Riveting,” Raph says.
“Why do you think I took this shift?”
“Sensible. Oh, hey.” Raph’s leaning forward now, squinting at Steph. “Nice eyes. Do that yourself?”
“Uh. Yeah.” Steph swallows. The endless, stupid war between wanting to be seen and unseen. Having her effort recognised, having someone acknowledge her need to be understood as who she is, even through something as frivolous as makeup… It makes her uncomfortable. Bethany, too. They’ve been talking about it. Lives spent trying to seem like people who don’t try. Something to which Raph is apparently immune, the lucky bastard. “Yours look good, too,” she says, punting the attention back to where it might be more uncomplicatedly appreciated.
“Thanks!” Raph rubs his hands together. “When’s breakfast?”
“After the meeting, probably,” Nell says. “And hold your horses; Leigh and Adam aren’t up yet, anyway.”
“Did they spend the night together again?”
“No.”
“It was one time, Raph,” Steph says. “And they just talked.”
“Boring,” Raph says.
“Agree,” Bethany mumbles. Steph pokes her, and she says something inaudible in response. Rolling over, she repositions her hands under her head, and she’s quickly asleep again, or doing a very convincing impression of it.
Her rest doesn’t last long, though. A few minutes later, the door from the corridor opens, but it’s not Pippa and the others; it’s Christine and Charlie. Charlie waves at everyone present and then goes straight to the lunch room to unlock the cupboard with the cereal and fetch milk from the dumbwaiter. Christine doesn’t go with her, instead walking over to the rough circle of couches and bean bag chairs. She sits on the arm of Steph’s couch, and leans against her for a moment.
It’s uncharacteristic enough that Steph says quietly, “You okay?”
“Hmm?” Christine says. “Oh. Yeah. Just… I dunno. Might not see you for a while.”
“Me in particular?”
Christine shrugs. “It’s just… Um. I’m going to be busy.”
“Too busy to visit?”
She just shrugs again. Then she leans forward, away from Steph, and says, “Hey, Nell, they’re going to be a while up there. Like, a while. Can you cover a bit longer?”
“Sure,” Nell says. “Not like I had anything else going on.”
“Life’s hard,” Martin says. Aside from his denial that he or Nell spoke about anything relevant or interesting this morning, it’s the first thing he’s said since he walked in.
“Too right. I feel like I haven’t seen the outside world in— Oh.” Nell rolls her eyes, leans her head back against the cabinet she’s leaning on, and gently bashes it against the metal. “Insensitive. Sorry.”
“Okay!” Charlie calls from the door to the lunch room. “Breakfast is ready! Eat now or forever hold your peace.”
Steph helps a grumbling Bethany to her feet, and they’re both about to go when Christine tugs at Steph’s sleeve, holds her back.
“Hey,” she says, “listen. I’m going to go wake Adam and Leigh, but before I do… Oh, fuck it.” And she pulls Steph into a hug, wrapping herself all the way around before Steph can even respond.
“Um,” Steph says, and when Christine pulls back a moment, Steph just gestures downwards with her eyes, indicating her arms, trapped at her side, inside Christine’s grip.
“Sorry.”
They reconfigure, and as they hug, as Christine squeezes Steph with what feels like it might be all her strength, Steph’s reminded of her first few nights here, those lonely nights in the cell, which were confusing and intimidating and would have been some of the worst of her life if she hadn’t had so many that were worse, alone in her crappy little room in her crappy little student house. And then Christine came down, walked right into her cell, told her everything, and changed Steph’s life forever.
Steph hugs her harder.
“Gonna miss you,” Christine says.
“You’ll be on Consensus, though, right?” Steph says. “Whatever you’re doing, you’ll have a computer? Or a phone, or something?”
“Oh. Yeah. Totally. You can send me all the ASCII middle fingers you like.”
Steph laughs, and they start to pull away from each other. “I forgot about that,” she says.
“You said it was the only useful thing you learned at junior school.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“Come on,” Christine says, “let’s go eat.”
As they walk into the lunch room, Charlie’s telling Raph to say something nice to Jane, to call her pretty or compliment her dress. He agrees, and then she asks him what he’s going to do when he leaves here.
“Still stuck on sexy librarian, I think,” Raph says, grinning and stabbing his spoon into his bowl.
“Huh,” Charlie says. “Free books for life, I guess. Could be worse.”
Well, that’s two social interactions in the last two minutes that Steph doesn’t know what to do with. But she’s hungry, and still sleepy, so she puts them out of her mind, sits down next to Bethany, and opts for some nice, reassuringly predictable Weetabix. Bethany’s still on her healthy kick — and still boycotting Weetabix — so she’s having Bran Flakes with chopped banana in, which is honestly quite impressive, and as they settle down to eat, she starts talking, taking care not to spray bits of fruit all over the table. Supposedly she’s convinced Charlie already that no-one down here is any combination of suicidal or homicidal any more, and therefore they should be allowed a microwave. Nobody should be reliant on the kindness of sponsors to have access to hot porridge on a cold winter’s morning, she says. Convincing Charlie is half the battle, she says. Steph points out that Charlie is just one of many sponsors, that she doesn’t even sponsor their intake normally, and that no abuse of mathematics is sufficient to suggest that one is half of, what, two or three dozen? Including duty sponsors like Nell?
“A microwave,” Bethany insists. “And maybe a mini-fridge.”
Steph kisses her on the cheek.
2012 July 27
Friday
She wanted to know all the nasty things he’d done. Tonight’s target, the one she’s been working here for over two months to get close to. The one she baited out to the balcony and quietly pushed over the edge. The one who made such an extraordinary mess on the pavement, eleven storeys down. And it wasn’t like she needed to justify her coming actions — they drilled into her, over and over, that they are not in the business of random assassinations, that they don’t take contracts and they don’t kill for petty reasons; everyone she will be required to kill, assuming she survives this first engagement, will be among the most despicable people in the country. But she was curious.
Double-barrelled uncle to some differently double-barrelled newspaper columnist. Father to the kind of spoiled brats even Philip would have raised an eyebrow at. And, of course, as with all of them, a customer of Dorothy Marsden’s Dorley Hall.
She wanted to know. Told Haley she was tired of being kept in the dark. Told her she was ready for all of it. Truth be told, she was rather looking for a spot of titillation. What she got was anything but.
This man. Oh, he’s no Alexander Twill-Barrington, but he differs mostly in that he has fallen somewhat from grace, his estate having been divided up between his children and the National Trust — presumably after a bit of covert exhumation — and in that he never wronged Cora personally. But Haley took her at her word, and gave her all the details.
The rooms at Dorley Hall. The rooms Cora wasn’t there long enough to see, the rooms that now host pool tables and tea urns and, per Haley, a lot of old furniture. The rooms with the locks and the soundproofing, where you could take one of the boys who had been pulled off the street, topped and tailed and painted and dressed, and do whatever you pleased to him. The ones where, mostly, one man walked out, and one boy — or girl or whatever they might have called themselves — had to be helped out after, cleaned up by his sponsor, and put to bed with a promise that it will all happen again tomorrow. Sometimes, only the man walked out.
This man, this Fuller-Jennings bastard, he was one of those who walked out alone. Who left behind him a wrecked body, every inch of it used. Dorothy Marsden’s Dorley Hall might have made those boys into girls, or something like them, but men like Fuller-Jennings made them into objects. Toys.
Haley played her a tape. An actual tape: VHS, from the nineties. Faded and fringed but clearly showing this man, in the prime of his life, walking out of one of those rooms. All used up, he said. And then he went into another room and closed the door, and shortly thereafter, another boy-girl was given to him.
He ruined himself, Haley said. Spent everything on his Dorley girls. Eventually had to be turned away by Dorothy herself, and dissuaded from returning. But not because he was too violent to the girls; because he could no longer pay.
“And he was far from the worst one,” Haley said. Her voice, monotone and robotic the whole bloody time. With Cora — and with Philip, as he was before — Haley always allowed her exasperation through, her amusement, her delight and her disappointment. Last night was the first time Cora ever saw her like that, saw her take absolute control of herself. “He didn’t care where his toys came from, who they used to be. He liked that they still had their penises, that they still talked like men. He was a failure of a man, heir to a fortune that he wasted through bad investments and carelessness, but when he had a girl in front of him? On her knees, unable to escape? Then he was the man. Then he was in charge. And you know what men are like when they feel small. When they— Shit. Excuse me.”
Haley had gone to the toilet to throw up, leaving Cora alone in the perfunctory little flat they’ve been renting for the duration of the assignment.
Shaking.
She rewound the tape a couple of times. At first, she wanted to look him in the eyes, to try to see through to him, to the dirty thing inside that motivated him.
But she found herself watching the second girl. The one who came up after. Who joined him in the second room. Who survived him, Haley said, though eventually she was shipped out. Presumed dead by Elle’s organisation. Another victim.
She watched the girl. And she realised as she did so that she had slid perfectly and quickly from seeing these people as boys or men or as something in between, to seeing them as girls, as women, as people like her. In that straight-backed pride, in that refusal to be ashamed, Cora saw strength. Determination. Spirit. Whatever; something she can’t quite define, but something she didn’t see in Fuller-Jennings. Something she wasn’t sure she’s seen in any man. Something she never saw in Philip.
When they talked about it later than night, Haley said that that’s not an uncommon reaction. You see the men, she said, and you see the despicable things that they are capable of, and then you look around at the world outside, and you see those same acts inflicted in miniature, in little pieces at a time, every day. By men who are celebrated. And you think that those girls don’t deserve to share a gender with them. You decide that they deserve more, that they deserve better.
“And,” Haley said, “girls like you, you remember what you used to be like. And you think about what you are now. And you start to think that maybe you deserve better, too.” And she tucked a lock of Cora’s hair behind her ear and sent her to bed. Cora went, obedient, still trembling, still wondering if she really did see her old self in that man. She never did anything like that.
Only had a bit of fun.
Boys and girls in the hospital.
Sometimes, the mirror is a man, a decaying old bastard with useless violence in his bones; sometimes, the mirror looks back at you.
She did her best to sleep. Double shift the next day; Olympic opening ceremony day.
The next day’s come and almost gone, and so has Fuller-Jennings, over the bloody balcony. Never to hurt another living soul. And perhaps to provide absolution to the dozen or so dead he leaves behind.
At the start of this assignment — her first; her training wheels assignment — Haley made it very clear to her that Cora cannot stray, that she must leave her shift at the hotel on time and return immediately to the flat, there to be debriefed, fed, watered and put to bed. If she tries to run, Haley said, they will find her, and she will understand that there are worse things than living life on the end of a lead.
To begin with, Cora was tempted. Only curiosity kept her coming back, returned her on time to the flat every day. Because she had never killed before. And because she wanted to know what it would be like to follow the plan, to show him how she is different from the other girls, to excite him.
After last night, though. After what she learned. And after this. After showing him and finding herself revolted by him. After seeing in him more echoes than she wants to count. After putting her hands on the man and ending him.
Cora will always come back.
Because there was always something inside her that didn’t fit. That made comfort grate, that made good intentions stain. And now it’s gone. Gone with the man Fuller-Jennings. As if, through him, it bleeds out of her, blackens the pavement, seeps into the earth.
Maybe it will be back. Maybe this is all temporary. But when she sent him over those railings, she thought for a moment that she could see all those girls looking up. Waiting for him.
And she felt light.
Empty.
Quiet.
Killing him has fixed her.
Haley, who brought her this opportunity, this gift, who has taken care of her, who watched over her, has fixed her.
And Cora might, actually, love her.
2020 January 27
Monday
Her first day at a new job, and she survived! Which, fine, in terms of perilous things she’s done recently, up to and including surrendering herself to Aunt Bea’s judgement after monumentally fucking up, taking her seat in the admin office isn’t exactly close to the top, but Melissa’s still not good at meeting new people. Still feels like they can see through her, unless she controls herself perfectly, unless she reveals nothing of herself. She expected today to be no different.
But it was. Oh, for the first ten or twenty minutes, she was awkward, she was quiet, but then something broke for her, got her laughing with the girl whose desk sits on the other side of the divider like they were old friends.
Because she realised:
She doesn’t have to do any of that old bullshit any more. She doesn’t have to lie, doesn’t have to watch herself. Tabitha and Indira sat down with her and went through her new history, her new self, showed her how it connects to the Melissa who worked in Manchester and the Mark who (very briefly) attended Saints. Showed her the unbroken continuity; showed her a life without a hole in. She is, for the first time, a woman without secrets.
Which, sure, is not precisely accurate. But the requirement to pretend to be cis, to have this whole other history, to be a stranger to herself, is gone. And it doesn’t mean that she immediately brought everyone in the office up to speed on her intimate particulars, but she got to talk to people, to relay stories from her childhood without having to worry that she might accidentally reveal too much. If someone connects the girl sitting at the desk with a boy who once went to school close by, all it means is that she has to come out, and three people in just this one office wear rainbow pins.
She’s free. It makes everything new. And as she waves goodbye to her new immediate boss, to the boss above her, and to the handful of people still chained to their desks, as she skips down the steps of the Saints admin building, she doesn’t even bother to contain her amusement that she’s walking home, right now, to a place she’s never been before.
If anyone sees her laughing to herself at that, well, she’s probably happy because her first day at work went well, right? And if they don’t buy that, well, fuck you, Melissa’s a trans girl now, and there are no dirty secrets to be found, nothing she can say that will trip her up — provided she stays away from the whole topic of basements. But that shit literally never comes up organically.
As a last hurrah for the concept of opsec as a part of her daily life, she’s already traced the route to the new place in Google Street View a half-dozen times, and she’s got the maps app reading directions into her ears, all so she will not appear to be a complete stranger to her new neighbourhood. No looking around, squinting at house numbers and guessing at landmarks; no, she’s walking along with her hands in the pockets of her light beige jacket, stepping around the odd puddle so she doesn’t splash her slightly impractical but cute as hell brown knee-highs, earbuds in, oblivious to the world. Yes, she’s walked this route a hundred times. Yes, she’s definitely been to this fully furnished house before.
It’s an absolutely absurd level of attention to detail as far as opsec goes, but she’s been so fucking bad at it lately, and she’s trying to turn over a new leaf in all aspects of her life. She’s the new Melissa (again): better habits, healthier thinking, fewer destructive episodes.
And, now that she’s free, it seems more fun.
Trotting up to the front door of number 37, and deciding that unless someone’s recording the feed from the doorbell camera — someone other than Dorley or Peckinville — she’s completely free from observation, she indulges in a quick look around, under cover of rooting for her keys in her handbag. It’s nice, as newbuild roads go. Makes her think a little of Rectory Street, of what it might have looked like years before they moved there.
She can go back there now, actually. She doesn’t want to — only her father lives there now, in a house he’s probably stripped of the memories it once contained, thrown out like the boxes of Mum’s things — but she could. She’s Melissa Haverford and Mark Vogel. She can do anything!
She might even be able to fix things with Russ. But she’s going to take her time with that. They told her to steer clear, that he’s under observation, that they have another solution they’re working on. So she’s complying. But still, she wants him in her life. Wants to get to know him. She’ll have to talk to Steph about that; it’s occurred to her that she doesn’t really know much about him at all. When he was growing up, she was… distracted.
Closing the front door to her new place behind her, she shrugs off her cardigan and steps out of her boots, smoothing down her jeggings and wiggling her toes. Already the house feels comfortable, and all she’s seen of it is an open-plan living and dining area with, true to Maria’s promises, several couches and a big TV. To amuse herself, she calls out, “Honey, I’m home!” at the top of her voice, waiting for the empty house to echo it back to her.
“Hi!” Abby says, marching in from the kitchen with an oven glove over each hand and making Melissa jump a mile or two into the air. “How was work?”
“Jesus Christ, Ab!” Melissa says. She lays a hand on her chest and waits for her heart to stop attacking her throat.
“Sorry.” Smiling to accent her apology, Abby slides off one of her oven mitts and clasps it in her other hand. She quickly crosses the room, kisses Melissa gently on the lips, then steps back to look around. “Nice, isn’t it?” she says.
“Yeah. I mean, the living room is nice. What’s with the oven gloves?”
“I’m baking.”
“Need a hand?”
Abby giggles. “Can you bake?”
“Um. Probably not.”
“Go look around!” Abby waves the empty oven glove at the stairs, then slips it back onto her hand. “I need to mind the oven, anyway. We’re both moved in on the top floor, and there’s room for Shy’s stuff when she gets here later tonight. Big closets.”
“Cool.”
Melissa takes the tour. The house is on three storeys, with the top one given over to the main bedroom and its bathroom — and, yes, Melissa’s clothes and her laptop are already here. She takes a moment to check the mattress for bounciness — it’s good! — and then makes her way back down again, properly investigating the first floor and finding two smaller bedrooms, another bathroom, and the fabled airing cupboard. The ground floor, she’s mostly already seen, so she does little more than spin happily in the living room on her way through, revelling in the fact that she has her own home, that she gets to live here with the two women she loves most, and that she should probably decide not to learn any life lessons from how she got it.
New Melissa. No more fucking up.
She joins Abby in the kitchen. Puts the kettle on. And she’s delighted to find, when she opens the cupboard over the toaster and finds the mugs, that absolutely none of them are even remotely funny.
* * *
Since Haley brought her the mission, Cora’s been studying. Thinking about how best to go about it. Because Haley’s always got ideas, plans, interminable briefing packets and, sometimes, a cute little uniform ready to go, but in Cora’s experience, there is little that is brought to her that cannot be re-thought and improved. Except, perhaps, the cute little uniforms.
She doesn’t get one this time. Which is why she’s been online and skipped through dozens of records of televised and streamed megachurch services, paying particular attention to the wives, the girlfriends, and the hopeful women milling about closest to the camera. She’s also been mainlining the most toxic cable news she can find, all to get herself in both the right mindset and the right wardrobe. Blowing out her blonde hair in just the right fashion was a bloody bitch, though. She doesn’t know how these women put up with it every day.
“What do you think?” she says, stepping out of the back room and modelling for Haley, presenting a shapely and almost entirely bare thigh.
“I think your skirt is too short,” Haley says, with barely a flicker of recognition for Cora’s hard work. She’s leaning against the dresser and tapping at her phone, and she is dressed, in Cora’s humble opinion, too much like an English woman. Insane that Cora, who is of something approaching noble lineage, can cast off her Englishness like a damp and unloved coat, while Haley cannot.
Perhaps it helps that Cora was taken from her old life and serially operated on, while Haley has always been, for better or worse, Haley.
“It’s perfect, o handler of mine,” Cora says, pulling at the hem. It doesn’t pull very far; there’s not a lot of spare material. “The skirt and the hair and the makeup, it’s all perfect.”
“If you say so. When they catch you and kill you, it’s your loss, not mine.”
Affecting a pout, Cora takes a couple of steps forward. “You don’t like it?” she whines, pitching right into her Floridian accent. It’s another thing she’s been working on; she’s added a little Austin, too, trying to give the impression that her character, a wide-eyed, naive, late twentysomething, all-American Christian sweetheart, recently left the liberal big city and her dalliance with being a Democrat to rediscover her evangelical roots. “You don’t think I’m just the sweetest girl you ever saw?”
“Well, now,” Haley says, putting down her phone and attempting to match Cora’s accent, “let me see. You pushed a man out of a window.”
“He deserved it.”
“You poisoned two men on a plane.”
“That was bad beef, not me.”
“You shoved a pipe into a man’s neck.”
A sore point. They held up the killing of Alexander Twill-Barrington for years, requiring Cora to wait and wait and wait until some precious item of intelligence had been gathered — and gathered by someone other than her. When finally they let her at him, they threw her in at the deep end, battering her and presenting her to him as Elle Lambert’s latest discarded toy, and one that might be of interest to the old man. It took quite some prompting for his withered brain to latch onto the fact that the girl sitting bruised and ashamed in front of him, cringing from his view, was none other than Philip, son of a former lover, with whom there was now considerable mutual animus. Yes, how truly entertaining it is to imagine him as the captive of Elle Lambert! All this time!
This toy is yours. A gesture of good faith. Do as you will with him.
Cora was supposed to stick it out for six weeks. Suck the place dry of all remaining useful information, and pump the man, too, in case anything else could be dislodged from his fading mind. When, on the second day, she slid a shard of broken radiator pipe into his throat and left him spluttering and gasping on the landing, when she turned him over, whispered to him, “Good men don’t touch little boys,” and kissed him as he died, when she walked out of there spattered and stained with his gore, that was a demerit. Got her put on bloody probation.
It could have been an accident, she protested. The radiator was ancient, nonfunctional, practically falling apart, and he was an oafish old man. A tumble down the stairs. An unfortunately placed piece of common household debris. It could happen to any fumbling aristocrat.
They had to remove her presence from the premises, they told her. Had to check the scene for her hair and fingerprints, had to erase her from the security tapes. They barely had a team in place yet! She was supposed to hold off on killing him for six weeks! And, in case Cora had forgotten, they reminded her that Philip’s fingerprints and DNA are on file with a dozen police departments around the country — and several abroad. They don’t erase that stuff just because Mumsy got him off scot-free every time.
Haley fought for her. Said that it was cruel to expect her charge to submit to the ministrations of a man who abused her in her childhood. Said that when she signed on for this, she expected Cora to be put into a support role — a driver, a nurse, a contract cleaner. The mission parameters had changed, she was told, and this she relayed. Useful intelligence was expected, and none was delivered. Alexander Twill-Barrington had been a threat to no-one but Cora, not any more, but he still knew where many of the bodies were buried, figuratively and literally. The knowledge died with him.
She would have quit, Haley said, if she could have brought Cora with her. But she couldn’t, so she didn’t, and they’ve been stuck with each other ever since, running crap assignments. No more honeypot stuff for ageing perverts. With no more use for Cora’s penis, they gave her the long-promised sex change so she could reliably get in and out of America without alarming the TSA, and that was it: monitoring jobs, bodyguard shit.
Cora needs to be making a difference. But she paid her dues, and as long as Haley — the girl who saved her, who stood up for her, who made her this hot in the first bloody place; she picked out Cora’s nose, she told her once, from several options — paid them with her, it was bearable.
This, though. This is her ticket back. This is Henrietta Smyth-Farrow! And Cora knows everything the mother organisation knows now, all the sordid histories, all the gory details; the Smyth-Farrow family is the beating bloody heart of it all. There is perhaps no greater prize but Dorothy Marsden herself, freshly returned to the target list after some unexpected nip and tuck on an unsuspecting washout. So now, Cora, in the right place at the right time, is going to do this exactly right. Starting with a picture-perfect infiltration.
“I killed my own mother, too,” she says, leaning into the accent, attempting to stay in the game. And she did. At least that was deniable; old ladies choke on their afternoon tea all the time, she’s heard. It’s the crumpets. Deadly little things. Ought to be banned.
Haley’s smiling, which gives Cora a little thrill. They used to play like this all the time; that they haven’t for the last few years has been an indicator of the doldrums in which they’ve been languishing; that Haley is responding again suggests that she, like Cora, believes that they might once again be on the rise. No more practicing with guns she never gets to fire, knives she never gets to wet.
“None of those,” Haley says, “are the actions of a sweet girl.”
It’s the perfect prompt. Swinging her hips and aligning the tips of her toes perfectly with her ankles as she goes, Cora walks across the room, slowly, seductively. She’s wearing a two-piece outfit, a crisp white halter top married to a short black skirt. Minimal jewellery, overdone makeup, serious tan. She’s trying to evoke Tomi Lahren, but with a helping of girlish innocence.
She’s sexy and she knows it, even if it’s the kind of sexy that makes her want to have ten showers at once when she snaps out of character at the end of the day. It was easier playing at being a cleaner; she doesn’t regard cleaners with seething contempt.
They don’t get the cute outfits, though.
“I’m sweet,” she insists, lowering her voice. “I’m the sweetest girl there is.”
Haley, holding her gaze, says, “You’ve killed more people than I have.”
“Well,” Cora says, reaching around to run a manicured nail under Haley’s top and up her spine, “you know what they say.” She leans closer still, and whispers, “Sugar’s bad for you.”
Eyes going wide, Haley snorts, loses her composure, and pushes Cora away enough that she can hide her laugh behind her hand. “Okay,” she says. “You lost it.”
“Step too far?” Cora’s brushing herself down now, sweeping imaginary spots of lint off her virginal white top.
“Little bit.”
“You know,” Cora says, resting a nail on her lower lip, “we could do something when I get back.”
“No.”
“I’ve got the Fox News hair. Highlights and everything. I could be the anchorwoman and you could be my producer. You’d give me some story about immigrants or something, and—”
“No.”
“All lives matter, Haley.”
“I can have you killed, you know. Oh,” she adds, picking up her phone again, terminating what’s left of the game and returning to business, “and no going out on the town. Not even after the job is done.”
Cora blows a lock of hair out of her face. “Wasn’t going to. Everyone here’s got Republican cooties. Or Florida cooties; worms in their brains with Mickey Mouse ears.”
“Fine. You ready to go?”
“Got everything I need,” Cora says, patting her little bag.
“Excellent.”
The infiltration goes as smoothly as it always does; Cora is very nearly bored. Silver River’s been granted space in a complex that belongs to one of the megachurches around here, and it’s not exactly a challenge to get in, leave the first thumb drive in the back of the dustiest computer she can find, run the second thumb drive off the front until it’s full, and get out again. She runs into a few of the regular staffers, and she charms them all; an eager young thing with a pretty face fits in just right, and if she’s required to return, to blend in with these people, that’s the angle she’ll continue to work. The sweet girl with the doe eyes and the tendency to look a little too long at the oh-so-tempting older men who inevitably surround her? Cora could play it in her sleep.
But she hopes for something better. The thumb drive nestled at the bottom of her bag contains everything that could be extracted from their local network, and if she is at all lucky, it will give them an insight into Silver River’s logistics, maybe even the planned movements of Henrietta Smyth-Farrow. It’s only natural that they are the ones to follow up on that, right? Haley can make the case for them both, keep them on her, and if that happens to involve a trip back to England? Cora can look up Morris. She’s always wondered how he turned out.
And killing Henrietta Smyth-Farrow? Given everything she’s trying to do? Given that her father got to die unpunished?
Gosh. It would be so fun.
2020 January 28
Tuesday
Three knocks. A pause. Two knocks. Another pause. Another two knocks. And then a voice, whispering over the speaker in the ceiling: “Steph. It’s Pippa. I’m outside.”
In Steph’s arms, Bethany mumbles, “Tell her we don’t want room service,” and then she grasps at Steph as she tries to extricate herself, holding her down, keeping her in bed. “Nooooo,” she insists. “Stay. If they’ve found someone else they need your help feminising, you can do it later.”
“Get off me,” Steph says, smiling uncontrollably and prying Beth’s fingers from her forearm one by one, only to have them latch on again farther down, “I should see what she wants.”
She’s adorable when she’s sleepy.
Bethany’s still not letting go. “But it’s first thing on a Sunday morning,” she whines.
“Bethany, it’s Tuesday.”
“What happened to Monday?”
“Don’t you remember?” Steph says, successfully unlatching herself from Bethany’s grasp and moving her arm out of reach before it can be snagged again. “Raph came in with blush on the tip of his nose. You called him an e-girl poser. Said he—”
“—looked like the gamer girl bathwater girl. Yeah. I remember. I think I made him horny. Wasn’t that yesterday?”
“Yes?”
“But yesterday was Saturday.”
“Bethany—” Steph starts, and then she decides to give up on this nonstarter of a conversation. She kisses her instead — on the end of the nose, where Raph put the makeup. He said he got it from pictures Jane gave him, that it’s just a way to look young. The fact that he’s already young — younger than Steph! — didn’t seem to matter. You can always look younger, Steph. Barely eighteen is the new responsible adult.
She didn’t tell him the blush made him look like he had a bad cold. Stifling his creative spirit would have been counter to their whole deal down here.
Or possibly it wouldn’t have been? Jane’s been going along with Raph’s recent makeup obsession — and she’s also got him a bunch of bras, though that makes him no different from Steph, Bethany and Leigh, and probably the others by now, too — but what does Aunt Bea think of it? Is he approaching it in a programme-approved manner? Or is he just putting stuff in his head that they’re going to have to knock back out later?
Whatever. She doesn’t have to worry about it. Officially relieved from her position as Judas goat. Raph’s better at that, too.
“Go back to sleep,” she tells Bethany, who glares up at her in a manner that requires further kisses to placate. And then she’s out of bed, running a quick brush through her hair — it’s exactly long enough to be fucking annoying — and pulling on the nearest clean clothes. Joggers, a sports bra, a hoodie; basement casual. Too tired to wear anything nice; they were up late last night. Briefly she lingers, swinging the wardrobe door back and forth, wondering if she ought to make the effort after all.
Fuck it. If they want her looking pretty, then it’ll have to be on a day when she hasn’t been woken at the crack of—
“Bethany,” she says. “Get off my arm, please.”
Sulkily holding on to the sleeve of Steph’s hoodie, Bethany says, “Bring me a bagel.”
“Fine.”
* * *
There’s a clipboard on the kitchen table, and suddenly Christine wishes she’d had more coffee this morning. She wishes she’d eaten breakfast or lunch. Possibly she wishes that she’d been teleported into a different building during the night and thus would not have to face this.
She knew it was coming. She’s been excited for it! And yet she was content to let Indira work on it behind the scenes, as it were, tapping her for only the barest bits of required information.
Because here’s the thing:
She had the orchi because they made her get it. She got the face surgery because Mrs Prentice drew a pretty enough picture on her computer that she’d thought that even if she never learned to like looking at that face, someone probably would. They told her to start voice training, they told her to dress herself properly, they told her to learn makeup.
And the other thing is, once she’s had the kick up the arse, she’s put her all into it every time. Okay, so post-orchi it was mostly just a matter of getting over what remained of her manly pride — hilarious, looking back — but she took good care of the new face that Mrs Prentice crafted for her, was soft with its bruising, got herself a skincare routine, and she did, in the end, learn to love it; in particular, she loves the way her smile is ever-so-slightly lop-sided, the way it used to be before everything, but it’s fuller now, more genuine, more real. And, obviously, when Aunt Bea instructed her that she still had some work to do on the whole ‘wear dresses sometimes’ and ‘learn to do anything but bad eyeshadow’ problems, she got on with it. She grumbled, but she found pleasure in it, made it a habit, made it something she can slip into. Yes, she’s still no Paige or Jodie, but she can hold her own when she wants to.
It’s the same with her NPH. All she told Indira was that she was finally ready, and that she wanted as little to do with the process as possible. Give it to her to sign, she said, and after, when it’s done, that’s when she’ll make her life her own.
Well.
Here it is.
And.
Shit.
Indira’s sitting across from her, leaning on her hand, waiting. She’ll wait all day if she needs to; she wouldn’t miss this for the world. Of that, Christine is absolutely sure. She might not be Christine’s official sponsor any more, but she’s her sister; she’s her family. Would be pretty much all her family, too, if it weren’t for Indira’s mother and the rest of the Chetrys.
It’s just a piece of paper. Okay, so it’s like two dozen pieces of paper, but she only has to sign the top one.
It’s a formality.
It’s a foregone fucking conclusion; Christine’s been trans to too many people, and though she’s been cis to others, the only one who actually matters is Lorna, and she knows everything already. Knows far too much, or so says Lorna. And being cis is something you can take back: you were closeted, you were stealth. What’s that charming word Aunt Bea used once? Christine was woodworking.
“Would you like another coffee, Teenie?” Indira says.
“Might make my hands shake.”
“Tea, then?”
“Yeah,” Christine says, nodding. “Thanks, Dira.”
“Take your time with that,” Indira says, rising. And the noise of the tea ritual is a nice distraction for a few minutes. It gives Christine time to clear her mind, to ask herself what’s stopping her, to remind herself that after this, she is truly her own person, now and forever.
Maybe that’s what’s so scary. Training wheels off.
And that’s nonsense, too. Dira’ll still be here. And so will Paige and Jodie and Steph and Abby and everyone, all the girls who taught her how to be a person, then how to be a woman, and who gave her the space to work out how to be Christine.
End of an era? Maybe. But she’s not even moving out for months.
She’s startled by a kiss on the top of her head, but it’s just Indira grabbing her attention before she sets the mug down. And the mug’s another distraction, so Christine immediately takes it up, wraps her hands around it to savour the warmth and inspects it for bad jokes.
Fortunately, it has one. In the style of the logo from the sitcom Friends, it says SISTERS in bold letters. Underneath, in cursive, it says,
I’ll be there for you — I followed you home unseen
I’ll be there for you — with a dose of ketamine
I’ll be there for you — when you finally come to.
Under the lyrics there is a graphic of a steaming cup of coffee, which seems strangely redundant.
“Thank you, Dira,” Christine says.
And that’s probably what does it. Her sister, her beloved sister, doing something as dumb and simple as making her a cuppa. The stupid gag on the side of the mug. Everything. All this might be coming to an end — one of the current first years will get her room; this kitchen will no longer be her first port of call in the morning; she’ll have, for the first time in years, a functioning birth certificate, for all that birth certificates actually do anything in this country — but it’s also continuing. There’ll be another intake, there’ll be more daft mugs, and Indira will be here, watching over it all.
Before Dira can step away, Christine reaches for her, takes her hand. Holds it for just a second. Then, with a squeeze, Christine lets her go, grabs the pen, and signs her name.
Christine Hale. Trans woman.
* * *
Steph quietly closes the door to her room — Bethany’s back to sleep already — and turns around to find Pippa waiting for her, leaning against the other wall, one leg propped, anxious. Chewing on her lip, ruining her lipstick.
“Sorry for the intercom thing,” Pippa says, before Steph can give her shit about chapping her lips. “But Aunt Bea needs to see you, and it’s getting late, and—”
“It is?” Steph falls into step alongside her, and as they walk, she can hear one of the showers going in the bathroom, and then they’re passing the common room, where everyone else is already sitting around. “Shit. What time is it?”
“After two.”
“After two?”
They reach the stairs, and Pippa hangs back, gestures for Steph to go first. “You’ve been sleeping in a lot. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m— Well, Beth has bad dreams sometimes, but also— Um, we are, um…”
“Ah. Is that why you look so terrible all the time lately?”
“Thanks, Pip. And, yeah, I suppose.”
As they pass the security room, Pippa stops her for a moment and leans closer to whisper, “I’ll teach you how to cover dark circles, okay?”
Up in the dining hall, there’s at least two dozen people having lunch and a handful more wandering around, and Steph takes a moment to be embarrassed for sleeping in so late and for wearing nothing but joggers and a hoodie. But then, there’s a soldier in uniform, which is basically just the same kind of thing as joggers, and there are Charlie and Nadine, and while Nadine’s dressed impeccably as usual — impeccably for some other, more vintage decade — Charlie’s just in jeans and a shirt. Shit, and there’s someone who looks like she just got out of bed, too. So that’s okay, then.
Every time Steph convinces herself that everyone at Dorley Hall is a perfectly put together paragon of femininity, some girl wanders by in a sport shirt full of holes.
Pippa stops them both outside Aunt Bea’s temporary new office, and lingers. “Hey, Steph,” she says. “Before we go in…” And then Pippa grabs her, loops her arms around her waist, and presses herself tightly against her, so tightly that her chest pushes rather painfully into Steph’s sensitive nipples. But it wouldn’t be right to complain about that, because this, Steph senses, is important. “I love you, Steph. And I’m sorry for all the weird shit I did to you at the beginning of all this.”
“Love you too, Pip,” Steph says, and then she’s got to pull away, because, shit, that hurts. “So this is bad, then?” She points a thumb at the office door. “Like, I-love-you-hug bad?”
“You’re not in trouble,” Pippa says, and then she knocks once on the door, and opens it when Aunt Bea calls out. When Steph walks in, Pippa doesn’t follow her.
Ah. So it’s just going to be her and Bea alone, then, is it? Fun!
Aunt Bea doesn’t look angry, though. Just… neutral.
“Stephanie,” she says. “Sit. Please.”
“What’s going on?” Steph asks as she sits. She doesn’t want to mess around with niceties; she just wants to know. Now.
“I won’t sugar-coat it,” Beatrice says. “The situation has changed. Your fake backpacking jaunt is over. You need to come back to England. And you can’t—” Bea’s careful demeanour cracks, and she leans forward, eyes shining, like she’s apologising, like she’s pleading with Steph. “I’m sorry, Stephanie, but you can’t stay here any more.”
Notes:
Find me on BlueSky!
Chapter 46: Home
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
2020 January 28
Tuesday
This isn’t Aunt Bea’s usual office. It’s all Steph can think about. Pippa’s described it to her, and so’s Christine, so she knows all about the massive, intimidating lump of an oak desk, about the bookshelves, about the not terribly well-hidden liquor cabinet. About the closed doors that lead to Aunt Bea’s real life, to the places where she can be Beatrice, the places where it has been much rumoured that she and Elle Lambert have entertained each other; the places in which far more well-evidenced rumour suggests that she and Valérie Barbier have become intimate.
The office to which Steph has been guided is very much not that place. Yes, she obviously knew that going in, because it’s down on the ground floor, just one of the many anonymous doors leading off the winding corridor down which Steph was once pulled by Melissa, but it seems suddenly urgent and important that she is in the wrong place for this conversation. Aunt Bea has just changed the immediate course of Steph’s life — again — and she’s done so in a cold, narrow room, from behind a desk that would be more at home in the classrooms of Steph’s old secondary school than in the office of someone who commands both fear and respect.
Old boxes are stacked up at the back of the room, all of them with their cardboard lids taped firmly on at all corners, as if the information they contain ought not to be allowed to escape, or to be seen by unprepared eyes. Which, given the apparent age of the dust that coats the blades of the box fan that sits on top of them, might well be true; Steph’s getting the impression that until it was hastily converted to a temporary office, this room was one of the ones that was summarily locked and left locked after Aunt Bea took over the hall. Probably everything here that wasn’t recently purchased from Ikea dates from before then, from when Dorley used to torture boys with less conviction but significantly more glee.
Steph finds herself unable to look away from that clunky old fan, unable to keep herself from picturing the mess it would make were it to be switched on: ancient papers blown everywhere; oddments scattered; Steph and Aunt Bea choking on decades-old dust.
Everything here bears the weight of decades, it seems.
She remembers when she first came here. Not when Christine brought her here, but before, when she was still looking for Melissa, when she followed a crazy theory that birthed an even crazier one. When she saw the place for the first time, trudging past the Student Union Bar and down the path through the scrubby green space. She’d wondered at the time why, on a campus that had at the time been busy tearing down its old Psychology building to put up new dorms, there was so much empty space around the hall. And she’d wondered why she’d never so much as thought about it earlier.
Obvious, though, in retrospect. Stefan Riley came from a family that was, though it would never say it, proud that it wasn’t poor. Never mind that they were always scrabbling for money, and never mind that they almost lost the house when Dad was out of work; they were middle class, they were making do, and would be very upset if anyone suggested otherwise. And Dorley Hall? Dorley Hall was known across campus as the dorm building for poor girls — because the snobbery baked into the bricks of a university like Saints is so thick that it seems sometimes to ooze from the walls.
The dorm for poor girls. So Stefan was disqualified for two reasons.
And then he had reason to seek it out. And it told him, very firmly, that the girl he was looking for was not here, and it sent him away. And when he left, he could feel the bulk of the place rising up behind him, proud and violent, and so he never stopped thinking about it.
Then: everything. Meeting Christine, waking here, facing Pippa, meeting his fellow basement dwellers, conspiring with Christine and Abby. All of it leading Steph to this moment, to this unpleasant, dusty little room in which Aunt Bea sits with a plastic cup of tea and a discarded plate that looks to have once had a sandwich on it, and has just told her that she’s got to go.
* * *
Ordinarily, Beatrice would be inclined to hurry this along, but she scheduled Stephanie as her only appointment this afternoon for precisely this reason. The girl’s life is to undergo yet another wrenching change; Beatrice will not rush this.
Appalling to look back at the decisions that led them to this place. Well, just the one decision, really. Yes, you can point to Christine taking young Stefan in right at the start, and you can certainly circle in accusatory red ink her decision to lie to Beatrice’s face about the newest supposed boy in the hall’s custody, but from there you might as well draw a line to Abigail’s decision to send Melissa out of the hall on that particular day, at that particular time, for her fateful encounter with her erstwhile neighbour, and from there to the sponsors’ group decision, made with Beatrice’s blessing, to allow Abigail a degree of latitude with her soft-spoken charge. Decisions become fractal the moment you examine them, each one a product of a hundred others; some are mistakes, others are not, but all are inescapable.
There is one decision in particular that brought Stephanie to this place, that froze her in her seat, fingers resting on the cheap, ugly desk, paused in motion along with the rest of her:
Beatrice said yes. Christine came to her with the plan that she and Steph had been cooking up, the plan to keep her from having to sever her ties with her past, the plan to pretend to have ‘Stefan Riley’ go abroad to find himself, to backpack around Europe, to maybe go further afield if need be. The plan to keep Stefan’s young sister from losing a brother. And Beatrice, for a hundred very good reasons, said yes.
They’d already filled their quota of local disappearances. That’s the primary reason, the easy one, the one she most often lays out on the handful of times the logistics of Stephanie’s removal from society has come up. Through Peckinville, they have people embedded in key positions, but they still have to be careful to keep the greater Almsworth area’s vanishings down to the level of intriguing local quirk, the kind of thing most people will happily ignore. Like buying a house on a flood plain, most people planning to visit or move to Almsworth will consider the slightly elevated rate of disappearances the way they might consider the chance of running into the Beast of Bodmin while on a night out in Cornwall. But there is a level above which it will become properly noticeable, will become national news, and that level is unpredictable. Best to play it safe.
More immediately, Stefan was out of season. Christine brought him to the hall during a rather busy time for the sponsors: Maria and the others were all hands on deck monitoring their new charges, subtly guiding them as they formed relationships with the others in the basement, making their first deft prods at the structures of masculinity that had been holding them back. Quite simply, they lacked the available personnel to spin up and execute on a plausible story from scratch to cover Stefan’s sudden absence. Fabricating evidence, liaising with local authorities, monitoring the family… None of it is easy, cheap or quick. It’s also rather an emotional drain. Whereas accommodating Christine and Stephanie’s request was merely a matter of handing the girl’s passport to the next bright young Peckinville lad set to ship out for the continent, and she’d happened to know there was one due to leave within days. There wasn’t even much of a need to make it look good! They had the flight records, and the passport had provably travelled from the UK to France; beyond that, all they had to do was clear out Stefan’s belongings and let the family and acquaintances fill in the rest of the story themselves. As long as the letters keep showing up — and they have done — then the family has no reason to be suspicious.
But the real reason Beatrice agreed is that she’s a bloody softie. Elladine’s always telling her so. She’s long been growing tired of the necessities of the hall, and though she will not cease to see that they continue for as long as they are required, in this instance, for this one wayward youngster, she saw a way out and she bloody well took it.
And there was Petra, too. The hall creates enough only children, both in the siblings it leaves behind and the new girls that it births. The chance to leave that connection intact was too tempting to ignore.
So now they’re paying for it. Stephanie, specifically, is paying for it. The only comfort is that ‘killing’ Stefan Riley would probably still have been worse. Monitoring funerals is a miserable task.
“I’m sorry, Stephanie,” Beatrice says, because Steph’s been silent for a long time now, and because it’s not been an easy silence: the girl’s lips have been moving, and she’s taken several short breaths, as if she has multiple times prepared something to say and then abandoned it, or as if she has simply lost conscious control of herself. Beatrice says it softly, and with as much care and love as she can pour into it. She’s quite fond of the little ginger thing, really.
* * *
In mid-October last year, a young man in the employ of Peckinville Associates boarded a flight to France. He did not travel under his own name, but under the passport of Stefan Riley, though presumably once he reached his destination, he put it in a drawer somewhere and carried on his clandestine duties under his original identity.
Steph’s only assuming his duties were clandestine; Aunt Bea hasn’t said which part of Peckinville the guy works for, only that he has Steph’s passport. And, sure, while it’s likely that he’s employed under the legal murder arm of Elle Lambert’s operation — given that he willingly left the country under a false identity — it’s possible he’s just selling tractors or something.
Anyway. Doesn’t matter. Steph’s passport and her phone have been with the guy this whole time, following him from country to country in a back pocket or a briefcase or whatever. And then, a few days ago, Steph’s phone got a message from Russ, an all-caps scream about how ‘Mark’ is alive. Further messages followed:
“We cloned your SIM,” Bea says, as Steph reads Russ’ texts off possibly the cheapest-looking Android phone she’s ever seen.
“Okay,” Steph says, “so Russ knows Melissa’s alive?”
“Not by anyone’s choice,” Aunt Bea replies. “Melissa took it upon herself to visit Jenny Yau. You know of her?” Steph nods. “Russ was there. The two of them have been keeping in touch and, apparently, share a meal at least once a week. Bad timing. Miss Haverford’s speciality, as I have come to understand it.”
“Shit. Wait.” And here Steph leans across the desk, energised suddenly, mind racing. “Is that why you’re kicking me out? Because of a few texts?”
“Heavens, no!” Aunt Bea exclaims, rocking back in her chair a little as if blown away by the sheer absurdity of Steph’s assumption. “If that were all, we would have texted him back and called it a day. Easy enough to have you say something to mollify him. No, it’s the virus.”
“The virus? What virus?”
She shouldn’t have asked. Because Aunt Bea has all the information, and she delivers it with an urgency that suggests she’s been sitting on it all morning, piling up the justifications in her head for what she’s about to do to Steph, salving her guilt, bathing her wounds. And it impacts Steph like a kick in the head, a reminder that there is a world outside Dorley Hall that she hasn’t been so much neglecting as wilfully ignoring.
Yeah, there’s a virus. So far, it’s been relatively confined to China but, Aunt Bea tells her, it’s starting to spread. And it’s deadly and it’s brutal and some expert just told the Chinese government — and, by extension, the world — that it’s more transmissible than anyone thought. Beatrice pulls a laptop from a bag by the desk and shows Steph pictures from Wuhan, a city in China about as populous as London, entirely locked down. And now it’s been seen in France, Germany and the USA, and supposedly Peckinville has received worrying information about Italy and India. Only one or two cases have been confirmed so far in each country, but with the virus being as transmissible as it is, all it takes is for a handful of people to have come into contact with those cases for things to spiral out of control. Which means more cities locking down, worldwide, and it means, most pertinently for Steph, that there are likely to be restrictions on international travel.
“This is our problem, Stephanie,” Bea says, and she’s leaning forward on the desk now, the laptop still open next to her, showing an image of an empty Wuhan street. She sounds tired. “Right now, ‘Stefan Riley’ is in Europe. He has limited funds, and he has been drifting from hostel to hostel, staying only in the cheapest places. He can afford exactly one large expense: the plane ticket home.”
“Pretty sure ‘Stefan Riley’ is me,” Steph says, “and I know I had less than twenty quid in my account when I came here. If I’m still out there, I’m not buying any plane tickets. I’m not even buying sandwiches.” Oh hey, another thing to file under shit she should have thought about before.
“You sold your laptop.”
“Oh.”
“Rather, we sold your laptop. And more or less everything else. To ourselves, naturally, and arguably for more than it was worth, but there’s a paper record that provides you with just enough money for everything you are thus far supposed to have accomplished. It is also possible that you might have been working for cash here and there. Though not,” she adds, “at anything that would create paperwork.”
Steph’s nodding slowly. “Uh,” she says, “sorry for making all that work for you, I suppose. With the backpacking idea and everything.”
“Nonsense,” Aunt Bea says with a smile. “It would have been so much more trouble to kill you.”
“Huh.”
“May I continue?”
“Sorry. Yeah.”
“Peckinville says that the chance of a genuine global pandemic is high enough that they are recalling everyone who can be recalled. And they’re doing it now, before it becomes prohibitively expensive to travel. Before it becomes prohibited entirely.”
“Is that really likely?”
“India is about to start screening all travellers from China,” Bea says. “Their government has seen the same information that Peckinville has. And more besides, I would suspect. It’s bad, Stephanie. It could shut down the world. And the one thing we cannot afford is for ‘Stefan Riley’—” she places the audible scare quotes around Steph’s old name again, which Steph appreciates, “—to be stranded on the continent when and if travel shuts down. So, while you’ve been backpacking, you’ve been keeping an eye on the news, and you’ve come to the decision to—”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” Steph interrupts, frowning. It’s a little galling to have to listen to Aunt Bea outline all the sensible things their fake version of Stefan would do, and realise that she, Steph, would do none of them. “I mean, if the goal is to be believable, then I don’t think I’d leave yet. I don’t think I’d know any of this stuff. I’m not very plugged in.” She looks away. “It’s, uh, been a point of discussion, how little attention I pay to everything. So, yeah. This big, scary virus? I wouldn’t know about it yet.”
“Perhaps not. But from what we know of this virus, it moves fast. It was only in December that hospitals in Wuhan began to identify what they thought was a kind of pneumonia; now here we are in late January, and several nations are already advising against travel to and from China, and are poised to suspend it entirely. Cases are popping up all over the world, and those are only the ones that have been identified. When the hammer comes down, Stephanie, it tends to fall swiftly; when that time comes, it is entirely possible that we will be cut off from the continent faster than we can make arrangements.”
“Okay, but—”
“Your passport is physically in Europe. It was stamped in France and has not returned to the UK; a search of any suitably connected digital system will present this fact quickly and plainly. It is not something we can trick. Oh, we can mess about with records here in the UK to an extent, but that is because we have people embedded in strategic positions and because Britain, to be frank, is somewhat shambolic. Worldwide? We must be considerably more careful. And before you ask, no, we cannot simply leave Stefan in Europe, because if we are faced with a global pandemic, if this virus breaks containment the way Peckinville and other actors fear it might, then you — rather, your fictional male counterpart — will be stranded. No money, no options. And can you say with absolute certainty that in such an instance, your mother and father will not be on the phone to the British embassy in every country they can think of, looking for you? Checking up on you? Perhaps emptying their savings account to send you some money, so you don’t have to rely on crowded hostels while there is an incredibly infectious virus on the loose?”
Fuck.
She has a point.
And Steph had thought herself so clever for coming up with the backpacking thing.
Stupid, stupid girl.
Except maybe not. Maybe she’s being too hard on herself here. She’s reminded of a movie she watched with Russ one time, where two American survivalists had stocked a basement — hah! — with guns, water and food, protected against every threat they could imagine, only to be ambushed by underground alien monsters.
You can’t predict everything.
But she can predict her parents.
“Yeah,” she says heavily. “They’d call. And they wouldn’t find me, so…” Steph lets the sentence hang; it’s depressing to think about what her parents might do when faced with the loss of their only son, because they already lost him. And, sure, they haven’t exactly been close with each other these last few years, but it’s one thing to be on the outs for a bit, and quite another to worry that your oldest child might be at risk of actually dying.
Mum’s always been waiting for Steph to become someone. Through Steph’s carefully bland secondary school years, Mum was patient and loving and made sure that her son had all the things he needed — food, shelter, a second-hand laptop for homework — and she made sure that he didn’t swear overmuch or take the Lord’s name in vain, but it’s always seemed to Steph as if they were each of them speaking to someone who did not yet exist; who might never. The son with a career, a life, a destination; the Mum who loves her older daughter.
Shit. She’s going to have to see them again, isn’t she? She’s going to have to see them and she’s not ready, she’s not done. It was bad enough seeing Melissa again, and Melissa was and is so inclined to grant Steph the benefit of the doubt — regarding her intentions, her clumsy assumptions, her even clumsier gender presentation — that if Steph suggested the sky is pink, Melissa might not even look up to check. But Mum and Dad…
Mum and Dad love Stefan. They were always awkward about showing it, or Steph was awkward about being on the receiving end, perhaps, but there’s a lot of love there. Love that she’s been avoiding thinking about for a few months now, because tearing it up and trying to bandage it back together into someone new — or failing — has been one of those things lurking in her future that she’s excused herself from dealing with, what with everything else. But now she has to, and it’s a problem from both directions.
Mum and Dad love Stefan — even if they don’t really understand him — and they might not love Stephanie.
Mum and Dad love Stefan, and if they can’t find him, they’ll never stop looking.
“They’ll be a problem,” she says, aware of the heavy silence that has sat on the desk between them the whole time she’s been pounding on the inside of her skull. “If they don’t know I’m back in the country, they’ll be a problem.”
“Precisely. Our subterfuge, Stephanie, consists of one man with your passport and a box of orange hair dye. If your family starts making trouble — and a single phone call could be enough — our subterfuge falls apart. In the face of that, I think we can stretch believability a tad and allow Stefan Riley a touch more savvy than he might normally display, yes?”
“Fine,” Steph says sourly. “I’m a news buff.”
“As we speak, our man is waiting in a hotel in Italy, keeping his hair and eyebrows dyed, waiting for the word. A word which Peckinville will give in its next communication. The ticket is bought; Stefan Riley returns home in three days.”
* * *
Beatrice has given Stephanie a short break. She’s had one of the PMC ladies fetch them fresh cups of tea, insisting that they have something not out of the tea urn they’ve been using to mass-hydrate their little platoon — Beatrice could swear she can taste the patina — which has had the unfortunate upshot that the soldier just delivered their refreshments in mugs from the kitchen cupboard, rather than the plastic cups they’ve been distributing en masse in the dining hall. So, when the woman from Peckinville takes her leave, Beatrice has to watch Stephanie, right slap bang in the middle of one of her less pleasant recent days, understand that she’s just been given a mug decorated with pictures of balloons and birthday cake and printed with the legend:
Dear [boy’s name],
I’m sorry for:
—hogging the shower every morning
—always using the last of the good cereal
—telling on you to [parent or guardian]
—[nonconsensual surgical intervention]
But I'm not sorry for being your sister.
Love, [sister’s name]
She doesn’t comment on it, to her credit. She just cups it, warming her hands in this chilly office, and slurps experimentally at her tea, discovering immediately that it is too hot. This presents a problem: without their drinks to distract them, Beatrice and Stephanie must awkwardly occupy themselves some other way, lest they dive straight back into their rather fraught conversation.
Beatrice, therefore, makes her second mistake of the last few minutes — perhaps her millionth overall — and examines her own mug. It is baffling: next to a drawing of a stereotypical-looking woman — gingham dress, fifties-style hair, ruby-red lips — is a crude, messily lined sketch of a face with its eyeline connected directly to the girl via a dotted line. A speech bubble above the face reads, “Wow!! Cool gender!!” There is a pink line drawn from the girl that arcs over the top of the ugly, staring face and lands somewhere behind it, which is interrupted at its apex with the caption OW MY BALLS. Beatrice holds it up to the light, frowning, as if elevation and illumination might make sense of it.
“You probably shouldn’t worry about it,” Stephanie says.
“It’s terribly difficult not to,” Beatrice replies. “They get more confusing every year.”
Stephanie laughs. “I bet you say that to all the girls,” she says. And she sits back, still holding her mug. “Shit. I’m going to miss this place.”
“You can still visit. And you can live here officially again, come autumn, whether you decide to return to your degree or not.”
“I know. That’s not really what I mean.”
Beatrice nods. Yes. She knows, too.
Stephanie coughs.
Beatrice taps her fingers on the desk.
Their tea, eventually, cools enough to drink.
* * *
Christine’s still in sort of a daze when Indira leads her carefully down the main stairs into the dining hall, because there are more people who want to offer their congratulations than can easily fit into the second-floor kitchen, and she’s still in a daze when Jodie captures her in her rose-scented embrace, whispering excitedly into Christine’s ear about how cool it is that she’s trans officially now, that she’s not just trans accidentally the way she has been. Donna passes on her best wishes, too; remotely, first via text to Jodie and then via an extra squeeze from her girl. Christine’s joined the winning team, apparently.
Looking at the girls who surround her, Christine’s got to admit that, yeah, that’s probably true.
A few more hugs later, someone hands her a cup of tea and leads her out of the scrum, and Christine’s wits are still so lagging behind the rest of her that she registers that the girl who rescued her is Pippa a good few seconds after she takes in the tasteless joke on her mug — a captionless cartoon of a tennis ball pitching machine that has been loaded with something other than tennis balls. Allowing herself to be sat down at the edge of the dining hall, near the corridor out to the back, Christine takes a moment to massage her shoulders before smiling at Pippa in genuine thanks. She loves her Sisters, she really does, but they can be rather a lot sometimes.
“Brave choice,” Pippa says. She’s clasping her own mug in both hands and obscuring whatever might or might not be printed on it.
“Signing a trans NPH or coming downstairs right after?” Christine asks, shaking her head lightly as she realises she’s trying to work out what the joke is on Pippa’s mug via the fragments she can see between Pippa’s fingers. This place has beyond infected her.
“Both?”
“Didn’t really have a choice,” Christine says. “On either front. Outside the hall, who am I even cis to?”
Frowning, but then instantly losing it to a smirk, Pippa pretends to think. “Um…?”
“Exactly my point. It was a formality. A scary one, but still. A formality. Hey,” Christine adds, when the amusement departs Pippa’s face as quickly as it showed up, “do you need me for anything? You really incredibly look like you need me for something, and I could actually do with being needed for something right now.”
Pippa shrugs. “Ideas? Aunt Bea’s got Steph in with her now, and—”
“Oh, for the thing?”
“Yes. For the thing. The thing where we throw her out because I made a stupid decision.”
“We’re not throwing her out,” Christine says quickly. “She’s not even leaving today, is she? Dira said that Edy said that Maria talked Bea into a stay of a few days.”
“She did. But that’s not— She needs us, Christine. She needs me. And where she’s going, I can’t help her.”
Christine quickly runs through what she knows of the plan: Steph’s coming home from her sojourn abroad, and because she’s no longer a student here at Saints — not until the autumn semester — she’ll be staying with Abby, Melissa and Shahida at their house around the corner. It’s not like she’ll be incommunicado, and she’ll be able to visit all the time. Yes, it sucks to rip her away from Bethany, but Christine’s been persuaded over the last day or so by Indira’s position on this: that Steph has sunk into such a holding pattern that Raph, of all people, has suddenly started to outstrip her on at least some aspects of the whole becoming a girl thing. A change of scenery might do her good.
Sure, if such a change of scenery had happened to Christine at this stage of her reeducation, it would have been fucking disastrous, but Christine is trans the long way round; Steph arrived at this place a mere hop, skip and a jump from where most of them are when they graduate. In, again, some aspects.
What was it Indira said to Christine when she took her home for the first time? ‘Sometimes, you’ve just got to be a girl where people can see you.’
“I can help her.”
Christine says it without really thinking about it. But it’s the obvious thing, isn’t it? Christine’s the connection, the catalyst for Steph’s transition. Steph was convinced she ran into Melissa all those years ago, but she didn’t do anything about it until Christine. Until Christine, she was stuck in her deepening pit of self-loathing and doubt. So yeah, they met at the party, the one in that half-finished dorm for rich kids out on the other edge of campus. They met, they got drunk together, they smoked a little weed, and then Steph… disappeared.
No, she corrects herself: Stefan disappeared. He went back to his crappy little houseshare and he packed up his shit, sold what he could, and ran off to find himself. And when he comes back to England in a few days, he’ll be Stephanie. He’ll be so clearly Stephanie to anyone who knows what they’re looking at, because yeah, he’s had only a few months of hormone therapy, but it’s been enough to shift the average person’s perception of his sex. At least, Christine’s pretty sure it has; she’s still not great at predicting how cis people work, which is very funny, since she used to be one.
But yeah. Steph is clearly a girl. Also clearly not a cis girl, because she hasn’t changed that much yet, and she wasn’t one of that handful of girls blessed with a face that needs only the mildest kiss of estradiol to start passing. Or that one in fifty who can pass with long hair, lipstick and a smile; bitches. She’s got a bit of a brow going on, and kind of a chin, and though both have softened in the months since she’s been here, she still looks like a trans girl, not a cis girl, and she will for a while yet.
Christine grimaces to herself; she can practically feel Vicky kicking her for thinking of Steph that way. And yet she thinks Lorna would agree: you’ve got to be practical about how people will see you, or you can’t be prepared. And Stephanie, when she walks out into the world, has a choice: she can be seen as a funny-looking man — not the choice Christine expects her to make — or she can be seen as a trans woman. Not by everyone, but by enough people. And she needs to be prepared for that.
Pippa never did that. Pippa stayed at the hall until she passed better than perfectly, until her voice and her face and her body and her bloody eyeliner were ready. She struggled with understanding herself as a woman, like all of them — with a handful of notable exceptions — and with understanding how people saw her, but to the best of Christine’s knowledge, Pippa has never had to face down a drunken man who knows, in his poisonous heart, that the creature trying to walk quickly away from him is a tranny.
Christine knows. At the time, when Indira took her out of the hall, took her all the way to London to meet the family, Christine had questioned the wisdom of it. She didn’t look completely like a cis girl, and as it turned out, the world could see that just fine. But she went anyway, because it was important that Indira got to see her family again, and she took the knock to her confidence as just another price to pay for the boy she had been, for the things she had done.
Now, though. Now, she’s got something almost no-one else here has. Everyone here was like Pippa: holed up and practising their eyeliner until they were able to walk the streets without getting hassled. Which, shit, means that Christine’s got kind of a responsibility here.
“What do you mean?” Pippa asks. “How can you help her?”
Christine chooses to not be offended by the astonishment in Pippa’s voice — Christine’s more than just tech support, or she could be; she ought to be — and just says, “Because I’ve lived it, Pip. Excuse me.”
And she drains her tea, pushes back on her chair, and sets off to interrupt Aunt Bea and Steph’s sad little meeting without ever getting to see the bad joke on Pippa’s mug.
* * *
Three days. Three more days here. Three days to sleep in her own bed — the one downstairs, for as much as the one on the first floor has been assigned to her and as much as its closet space has been hers, too, it’s never really felt like more than a hotel room, a temporary place; the bed in the basement, that nasty, too-narrow thing that she and Bethany are constantly falling out of, that’s hers. And, soon, it won’t be.
Oh, they’re not giving it away or anything. She can come back and bounce on its springs more or less whenever she likes. She’ll have very nearly sponsor-like access to the hall and all its environs, with only a last-level requirement to get permission from whomever is on-shift to enter or exit the basement on any given day, in the unlikely event that she regresses to the person she was last year and tries to, say, spring Bethany. She had to laugh when Beatrice said that, because maybe that’s a legitimate fear; maybe, when Steph is no longer bound to the hall, when she comes and goes as guest rather than resident, its reality distortion field will fail and she will wake up sweating one morning, to run from her bedroom screaming, “They’ve been kidnapped! They’re going to be castrated!” And then Melissa will have to restrain her with whatever is on hand; one of those full-of-holes sports t-shirts Abby favours, possibly.
That’s the thing: she’s going to be a visitor. Oh, she has been for a long time, in a way. Since she got caught, since not long after Aunt Bea visited her in her room and laid it all out for her, Steph’s had her run of the place, and the only reason she’s been discouraged from leaving at all is because she’s supposed to be in another country. But she stayed, and she lived through it all, and she became herself here, much like everyone seems to. And it was important that she stayed, and necessary, and—
Shit, though, was it? She’s been telling herself that Bethany wouldn’t have made it without her, but yeah, actually, she might well have. She’s got Maria looking out for her, and Leigh’s got Tabitha, and Raph’s got Jane; they’ve all got someone. Maybe that’s the scariest part, that if she leaves, and they get along fine, then Steph was just sort of fucking around the whole time, after all.
Or maybe that’s bullshit, and she’s just grasping for a handhold here.
“Take your time,” Aunt Bea says. They’re done with their tea now, and supposedly they’re due to carry on talking about all this big important crap, but maybe Steph’s tired of that. Maybe she’s done with it.
“Can we just… skip to the end?”
Frowning politely, Bea says, “How so?”
Steph shrugs. “Lay it all out for me. How the next few days are going to go.”
“All right. We can leave informing Bethany and the others up to you, or we can tell them ourselves. After that, you will have three days to spend as you like. Then we will move the belongings you have accumulated while here to the house that Abigail, Melissa and Shahida Mohsin-Carpenter are sharing, and—”
“You’re not going to do a whole thing with me getting dropped off by taxi from the airport?”
“Heavens, no. We only do that sort of thing when we know — or suspect — that someone is being watched. Though, if anyone asks…” Bea frowns again, and taps her fingers together a few times. Then she nods to herself, pulls her phone out of a bag that’s been sitting on the floor, and starts a sound recorder app. When she talks again, it is with the sing-song diction of someone who is dictating. “Tomorrow, having received Russell Vogel’s texts, Stephanie Riley will email Amy Woodley asking if zie knows anything. Amy will email back with confirmation, and they will converse. This ultimately will lead to Stephanie buying her ticket home, whereupon Mz Woodley or one of hir friends will pick her up from the airport and drive her home.” She taps at the phone screen again, stopping the recording, and smiles slightly at Steph. “Are we happy with that? An email chain is easy enough to create. And we don’t actually have to have anyone drive out to ‘get’ you; an evidence chain that shows you had no reason to catch a train will be sufficient, if it comes to it.”
“Yeah,” Steph says, “we’re happy with that.” It makes as much sense as anything else. But there’s one thing that hasn’t been addressed: her family. She’s been turning the thought over and over in her head, feeling more and more like a coward for considering trying to avoid them, for even briefly entertaining the thought that maybe Pippa or Maria or Aunt Bea herself could call them on her behalf and tell them that she’s back in the country but that, no, they can’t see her because she’s gone straight from a backpacking excursion into a no-contact medical trial, or she’s joined an obscure religious sect or something. Stefan or Stephanie, she’s facing this. “Hey,” she continues, hoping that her voice betrays none of her nervousness about this, “so when do I go see my family?”
Aunt Bea pauses a moment. “Your… family?”
“I mean, if I’m coming ‘home’ all so they won’t kick up a fuss, I assume I need to go see them, yeah?” She really hopes this sounds logical and not like she’s still half-trying to talk herself out of it.
“Well,” Bea says awkwardly, “it would be helpful, perhaps. But we weren’t going to force it. A phone call, maybe.”
“They’d want to visit me anyway,” Steph says firmly. Because that’s the other thing she’s been thinking about. “And… I don’t want them to.”
“Are you sure? Visiting them in London will be difficult for you, I would have thought. If they want to come here—”
“They will.”
“Okay. Surely, then, you would prefer to meet them where you have allies? Abigail, Melissa, Ms Mohsin—”
“I don’t want them here, Aunt Bea,” Steph says. “I want to compartmentalise. London is for them. Almsworth is for me.”
Aunt Bea smiles softly. “Rather a size disparity there, wouldn’t you say?”
“Petra’s a growing girl.” And she laughs at her own joke, just a little, despite herself, despite everything. Probably a good sign, right?
She takes a moment to gather herself — and Bea grants her that moment, as she has many times so far in this fraught conversation — but before she can continue, before she can finish assembling her battered thoughts into something whole, there’s a creak from the door behind her.
“Shit,” Christine says, as Steph and Bea look around and up at the same time to find her standing behind a slowly opening door, straightening up from the position in which she was, presumably, spying on them, leaning close enough to the door to listen in that she accidentally touched it and caused it to swing open.
“Christine?” Aunt Bea says pleasantly.
“Sorry. But someone left the door open and I was going to just knock but then I heard the two of you talking and—”
“Are we plagued by some new disaster? Is that why you are… lurking?”
“What? Oh. No, actually. No disaster, for once. Nothing new, anyway. But I had an idea.” And she pushes the door the rest of the way open, steps inside, and closes it behind her. “You’re going to see your family, Steph?”
“Um,” Steph says, “maybe.” As Christine pulls up a chair and sits down, Steph turns back around to Bea to make her case. “The thing is, if they come here, then they’re in my life. And I only just started building it, and I don’t know what I’m doing half the time, even less so if I’m going to have to actually go outside, and they could mess it all up. They could disapprove. They could wander around campus asking questions or something. Or they could just yell. Or…” She shifts uncomfortably. More and more scenarios keep presenting themselves, and she feels them like pricks in her skin, like a heat at the back of her neck. “They could get involved. They could ask to see my doctor, and I know we could probably produce one—”
“Several,” Aunt Bea mutters.
“—but if I take this into my own hands, if I go to London, if I’m not…” And yeah, here she’s got to spit it out. “If I’m not a fucking coward about it, then I get to control it, you know?”
“Steph,” Christine says, “you’re not a coward.”
“No?” She’s mocking herself now, and she’s aware of how unpleasant she sounds, but she’s in this, and the only way to discharge it is to hurl it from her body. To fucking vomit it up. “How did I get here? I was too scared to transition on my own. You remember that, right? You remember? I didn’t think I’d make it, so I just… didn’t. I sat in my shitty life and I got worse and worse and worse. I’m a coward.”
“Stephanie—” Aunt Bea starts, but Christine’s quicker.
“No, Steph,” she says, “you’re not being fair on yourself. You weren’t a coward; you were alone. You had no-one to support you, no-one to worry about you.” She smiles gently. “No-one to tell you how pretty you are.”
“I’m not pretty,” Steph says instantly, feeling as if she has turned back the clock by months and she’s staring into the distorted mirror of her phone screen, seeing nothing but her pronounced brow, her high hairline, her masculine jaw. “I know I don’t pass. I can’t.”
“Passing isn’t pretty,” Christine says. “And pretty isn’t passing.”
“Bullshit.”
Christine lays a hand on Steph’s; Steph jerks away. “Come on, Steph. I know Melissa talked to you about this.”
“Ask Lorna if pretty is passing,” Steph says, instantly regretting her bitter tone. “Shit. Fuck. Yeah, okay. Shouldn’t have said that.”
“She would tell you that passing is safety,” Christine says, “and that that’s why she’s getting FFS in, what two weeks, wasn’t it? And she would also tell you that Vick said she didn’t need FFS, that she was beautiful the way she was, and that they had a huge fight about it.”
Steph nods slowly. “Yeah. I get why Lorna would get mad about that.”
“You’re determined to go see your family? Because if you’re not ready—”
“I’m ready.”
“Are you sure?” Christine says. “Because we can find another way. We can keep them at arm’s length for as long as you need.” From the other side of the desk, Aunt Bea quietly but firmly clears her throat. Christine frowns at her. “We can,” she insists. “If it’s extra work I’ll do it my fucking self, because if she needs it—”
“I don’t,” Steph says. “I’m tired of constantly lying about who I am. I’m tired of writing these fucking letters to Petra, making her believe she still has a big brother and not… not whatever I’m going to get to be to her now. I’m tired of being a coward.” She raises a hand. “I know, I know, you can tell me I’m not a coward until you’re blue in the face, but if I don’t do this? If I give all of you a bunch of work covering for me with them again? I’ll think I’m a coward. And…” She leans back in her chair, hugging herself. “It’s not like I hate them or anything. I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want them to think their only son doesn’t want to see them.”
“So, um,” Christine says, “what I was thinking is… what if I go with you?”
* * *
“So? What do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“The USB!”
“What about it?”
“Did we get anything useful?”
“Cora, it’s— Oh, okay, bloody hell, it’s actually eleven, but still.”
“Yeah, it’s eleven in the morning and you’re still in bed. That’s lazy even for Florida.”
Haley frowns, propping herself up on her elbows, and the sight of it is so adorable that Cora is once again agitated that she can’t go out to blow off her vast quantities of sexual energy while they’re stuck here. It’s not fair! They got drunk together a few times and had sex and shattered the agent/handler dynamic and then Haley was just all, no, Cora, that was a mistake and it will not happen again.
Cora knows what mistakes feel like; her whole life has been a parade of them, one after the other, but getting to be fucked by Haley? Not a mistake. Not even close to one. Especially because Cora’d had her vagina long enough by that point that she was used to the feel of it, and she knew already that she could grip a dick — or something with the same function — firmly enough to make girls squeal.
“I looked through the files last night, Cora. After you went to bed.”
“And?”
Haley rolls her eyes. “Lots of stuff, okay? Flight logs, itineraries, employee records for a hundred-odd people. And also some password-protected stuff that I’ve sent home to be studied.”
“Nothing actionable right now?”
“Nothing actionable right now.”
“Shit,” Cora says.
“Bored?” Haley asks, smiling in the way that pocks her cheek just so and makes Cora want to kiss it.
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”
“You could make me a cuppa.”
“I killed the last person who wanted me to do maid stuff, o handler of mine.”
“No, you didn’t,” Haley says, laughing the way Cora hoped she would and sitting forward in bed to hug her shins, “because the last person to make you do maid stuff was—”
“That was consensual,” Cora says.
Releasing her legs and swinging them out over the side of the bed, Haley says, “Tell you what. I’ll make us both a cuppa, and then we can talk about your surveillance responsibilities for the next couple of days.”
Christ. Really? Surveillance? “That’s worse than making tea,” Cora whines as Haley stands and pushes her gently out of the way.
“There are outfits,” Haley sings in a temptingly lilting voice.
“Outfits?”
* * *
“She’s still asleep,” Christine says, tapping on the laptop screen and feeling Steph, sitting next to her, relax somewhat. Now that they’ve hammered out some — but not all, far from it — of the details regarding the next week or so of Steph’s life, and now that they’ve left Bea to whatever other responsibilities she has piled up for the rest of the afternoon, Steph has moved almost entirely to worrying about Bethany, about how she’s going to react when Steph tells her what’s going to happen, about how she’s going to deal with everything when Steph gets demoted from roommate to visitor.
“She could be faking,” Steph says, but she says it with a smile; it’s not a serious concern, clearly. “She does that sometimes, like if I come back into whichever room we’re staying in that night and she’s already asleep, so I start getting undressed for bed, and when I’m looking away and I’m half-naked, that’s when she, uh…” Cheeks red, Steph trails off, looking carefully at the table.
Unfortunately for Steph, Indira is sitting on the other side of the dining table, dawdling over a curry, getting ready to help cover the evening shift. Grinning and circling a finger in the air, Dira says, “And that’s when she…?”
Steph’s cheeks just get redder. And she’s ginger; there’s a lot of red to go around. “Um…” she says.
“Leave the poor girl alone, Chetry,” Tabitha says, sitting down next to Indira with a plate of her own. More curry; someone must have made a batch. “She doesn’t need you pestering her.”
“You do realise,” Dira says, through a mouthful of food, “that you just directly contradicted our mission statement?” She swallows; Tabitha rolls her eyes. “I don’t think your heart’s in it any more, Tab. No wonder Leigh’s getting lapped by Raph.”
“Oh yeah? So why’s your girl wearing shorts again? No offence, Christine.”
“’S’fine,” Christine says absently. She’s still watching Bethany on the screen, thinking back to when the chances of her actually fucking with the cameras were high. When she was Aaron, and every moment of her life was a performance, every movement something on which she could be evaluated. Though pretending to sleep wasn’t exactly high on her list of preferred activities for when she thought the sponsors might be watching. She’s calmed down a lot recently, thanks to Maria, thanks to Steph, thanks to just living with the reality of what’s happening, what’s coming — it’s been months since she deliberately flashed the girls on duty in the security room, via the cameras — and yeah, Christine can absolutely understand that Steph’s worried about removing one of those elements from the equation. Backsliding isn’t just bad because your Sister scolds you for it.
Losing that progress? Feeling like you failed, like you’re still that broken, twisted boy? Like maybe you’re destined for nothing more than what you became at your lowest point? Yeah. It’s not good.
But Bethany will be okay. Hopefully. It’s not like Steph’s going away forever, just for a few days, or however long she wants to stay with her parents; however long they are willing to have her. And then she’ll be back in Almsworth, living practically on campus. She can be here about as much as Shahida was over Christmas and New Year, i.e. all the time. She’s just got to show her face to the outside world. She’s got to be seen to be living in it, now that she’s coming home and that nobody, ostensibly, ever kidnapped her.
Are they going to make her get a job?
No. There’s a limit to the tortures that Dorley Hall is willing to inflict.
“Shorts are fashionable,” Dira says defensively. She lays down her cutlery and reaches across the table for Christine’s hand. Christine lets her take it, resigned to letting this conversation go wherever it’s going to go; toward her wardrobe, for now, apparently.
Tabitha points at Indira with a fork. “If you’re willing to perjure yourself on behalf of those shorts — again, no offence — then I think you’ve lost it more than I have.”
Indira just nods, like she’s not really paying attention any more, and it seems like she really isn’t, having become distracted by the way Steph is just kind of watching the laptop display, watching the duvet slowly rise and fall as Bethany sleeps. “Steph,” she says after a bit, “you have three days, yes?”
Blinking, finally looking away from the screen, Steph says, “Uh, yes.”
“And you’re, what, going from here to Abby’s—” Dira traces the route through the air with her fork, “—for one night, and then you’re going to London to see your parents again?” The fork moves again, towards the table.
“Yeah. I think so. I mean, that’s what I want.” Steph’s jaw flexes for a moment. “I want to see them. I want to see Petra.”
“Oh, no, completely, agreed,” Dira says. “Family’s important. I just want to check: you’re going as Stephanie, right?”
“That’s why I’m going with her,” Christine says quickly. “Strength in numbers, and all that. Emotional support. And I have the right story, and, well—”
Indira smiles. “And you already did it for me.”
“I know what it’s like to go out into the world before you’re ready.”
“Before you think you’re ready.”
“I’m going as me,” Steph says. “But… I won’t lie. I’m fucking scared about it. And I keep wanting to say, no, I’ll grow out my stubble and I’ll put on men’s clothes and I’ll be Stefan again, because I think somehow that’s easier?”
“But you’re not going to,” Tabitha says.
Steph nods tightly. “I’ve always done the easy thing. And it’s only ever made it harder in the long run.”
“And so we come to my point,” Indira says. “Steph, would it be fair to say that, up to now, you have had relatively little instruction on how to pass as a woman?”
“Dira—” Tabitha starts.
“Shush. Steph?”
“I suppose,” Steph says with a shrug. “I mean, I’ve been messing with eyeliner and stuff, and I’ve got clothes…”
“It’s been self-directed, mostly,” Tabitha says. “Leigh’s been talking about it. They’re peer-pressuring each other down there to practise makeup.”
“And you’re learning from Pippa,” Indira says. “And Jane and a few others, right?” Steph nods again. “All of them being girls who have had, and I say this with all the love in the world, a shitload of surgeries. And a lot of time for the hormones to do what they do.”
“Oh,” Christine says, “yeah.”
“When my Teenie first went out there, she was fresh off of her FFS and she was still developing, but she was, you know, mostly passing even without care taken over her makeup and her clothes. I’m sorry if this is hard to hear, Steph, but that’s not going to be you.”
Stiffly, Steph does a little half-shrug. “I know,” she says. “I spend a lot of time looking at this face. I know I don’t pass.”
Dira wags a finger. “Ah-ah,” she says. “That doesn’t have to be the case. Oh, I’m not saying we can make you pass perfectly, but we can teach you how to walk down the street and stay mostly unbothered.”
“Wow,” Steph says, deadpan. “That sounds miraculous.”
“It is, actually,” Tabitha says. “What are you thinking, Dira? Rope Nadine in?”
“Yes,” Dira says. “I want to bring a little of the second year into Steph’s first year. Teach her— Teach you, sorry,” she adds, turning away from Tabitha to face Steph again, “how to do more than just copy Pippa’s eyeliner.”
“What about her hair?” Tabitha says, frowning and poking at her half-finished curry. “We could pull in Francesca, too, for extensions?”
“Uh,” Christine says, “don’t forget, she’s supposed to have been backpacking. Around Europe? Maybe beyond? She hasn’t had the time or money to go to a salon.”
“True. But Francesca—”
“And no Francesca. I know you like her, but Paige is still— Look, things are just… not great between them, okay? Can we keep her at arm’s length until my girlfriend moves out?”
“Fine,” Indira says. “Nadine’s got hairdressing training, too. She can help Steph pick a style that works with what she’s got. Something… pixie-ish.”
“Oh my God,” Tabitha says, covering her smile with the back of her hand, “she’s going to be a slightly taller, ginger Pippa.”
“Right? She’s going to be adorable. Sec; I’ll call Nadine.”
“Woah,” Steph says, leaning forward, “I haven’t agreed to anything yet!”
But Indira’s already turned away, with one finger held up in the universal gesture for I’m on the phone. She talks quietly into her mobile while Steph leans back again, sighing heavily, and Christine tries not to laugh, and especially tries not to catch Tabitha’s eye, because she’s smirking, too, and they could easily set each other off. Christine forces herself to look around, to find anything else to lay her eyes on, and picks Indira’s mug, which has an illustration styled to look like a newspaper cartoon depicting Dorley Hall itself, with some kind of fluid bursting from all the open windows and a speech bubble emanating from one of them that says in comic-style text, …and just to warn you, the first five rows will get feminised.
Steph nudges Christine with her elbow. “I never really had a chance, did I?” she whispers, and Christine shakes her head, happy that Steph’s mood has bounced back somewhat.
Dira taps to end the call and turns back around in her chair, smiling broadly. “After dinner good for you?”
“Fine,” Steph says with a sigh. Then she nods at the laptop. “What about Bethany? If I’m going to eat and get tortured, she might wake up before I’m done.”
“This might come as a shock to you, Steph,” Tabitha says, “but I’ve seen that girl function for whole minutes without your assistance.” In the face of Steph’s glare, she adds, “Fine. I’ll ask the girls in the security room to send her a message when she wakes up. Let her know you’re fine, that you’re up here with us doing something conveniently unspecified. We can even Tupperware up some curry for her and send it down in the dumbwaiter. It’s not like we’re in danger of running out.”
“Better yet,” Dira says, “when you’re all pretty and stuff, you can bring her some curry yourself.”
“Okay,” Steph says. “Um, I need to bring her a bagel, too.”
“Hmm. Do we have bagels today?”
Christine leans back in her chair and yells kitchenward. Faye’s in there, she knows, along with a handful of other second years, mingling with soldiers and sponsors, continuing their socialisation and possibly responsible for all the curry. “Hey!” she calls. “Faye! We got any bagels!”
She catches Dira winking at her and rolls her eyes because, yes, if Faye yells back the way Christine did, it’ll show how her voice training is coming along, if she needs any additional instruction or if she’s just at the point where she needs to keep practising, and that wasn’t at the top of Christine’s mind when she shouted, but it wasn’t entirely absent, either.
If you’re training your voice properly, she remembers, then yelling comes as part of the package.
A few moments later, Faye leans around the door frame and shouts, “Nothing fresh! Probably got some bagged ones in the pantry, though!”
“That’ll be fine!” Christine yells back, giving her a thumbs up and ignoring Indira’s smirk. Faye sounds good. Still scratchy and a little unclear, but she’s coming along well; she could yell out at someone in the street and nobody would think anything of it, except possibly to perv on the pretty girl doing the yelling.
Ugh. Gross. And to think, in a few days, she’ll be going out there. She’ll be taking Steph out there.
As they stand, so she and Steph can collect themselves some curry from the warming tray at the edge of the dining hall, Indira catches Christine by the fabric of her top and says, “Nice sponsoring, Teenie.”
* * *
Haley Googled ‘Florida winter outfits’. Or that’s what she said she did, anyway; she tells little white lies all the time, lies like, ‘You don’t need to worry about that, Cora,’ and, ‘Sometimes, men have a use beyond as raw materials, Cora,’ and, ‘No, I’m not attracted to you, Cora.’ She seems to feel them to be necessary to maintain the correct emotional distance from her operative, a quirk that was annoying enough when they were in Blighty and were able, within the limits of operational security, to call upon others in the organisation, but which out here, in the billion sheriffs’ fiefdoms masquerading as a country called the United States of America, is actively frustrating. Cora needs an emotional connection, damn it! Or, at the very least, she needs a satisfying orgasm every once in a while.
The outfit that Haley thrust at her, whether she threw it together from out of the duty closet or pieced it together on Pinterest, is so perfect for the requirements of this tedious little assignment that Cora wanted even more than usual to kiss her for it. It combines many of the things that Cora finds either fun or hot in the clothes she chooses for herself — oversized sunglasses: fun; a skirt that clings to her hips and thighs and restricts her movement just a little: hot, though it would be hotter if she could barely walk, if she had to hobble her way down the Florida boulevards, struggling to—
Bloody hell. Down, girl. She really does need a good fucking, doesn’t she?
Start again.
Cora’s striding down Main Street in this provincial Florida town in her flowery pencil skirt, her flirty but sensible sandals, her figure-hugging top with sleeves just past the elbow, and her white-rimmed sunglasses, appearing to everyone who witnesses her to be just another American gal out on her break from work, or maybe even done for the day, perhaps employed in some mostly ceremonial position that allows her to take whole afternoons off to go to the salon. She’s playing younger than her age today, so she’s gone light on the makeup, with soft pink lip gloss and brown mascara instead of black, to open up her eyes and lighten her face. It’s playing her age that’s often more difficult, and Haley’s told her that sometimes she overdoes it, applying the foundation too thick to try to hide her youthful skin, and overplaying the cynicism, but she can’t help it! That level of world-weariness does not come easily to her these days. She really does love the world — when she is allowed outside to frolic in it. She loves to see everything it wants to show her, and loves to force it to show her the things it keeps hidden. Sometimes at knifepoint; sometimes with a kiss.
And this guy will tell her everything, one way or another. Because that’s the other thing. Haley buried the lede; Cora’s not just out on surveillance today. She has the option, should she deem it necessary, of seducing someone. And she read the packet on him: he’s exactly the kind of person she likes to seduce when she’s on the job! Ageing, losing his looks and his figure, but retaining his wealth and thus starting to resent his wife for ageing alongside him. He’ll be browsing for younger, sexier models, girls whose gaze willingly turns away from the piggy little eyes and the wrinkles and toward the smart clothes, the expensive watch, the expansive car. Girls like Cora.
Men like him will tell girls like her anything. It’s almost like how it was before, when chasing men was almost the entirety of what she did.
Almost; she differs from how she was back then in one crucial particular.
The only bitter thing about her Peckinville-mandated sex change is that she’s stuck with this kind of man, the kind who is only mundanely awful. The honeypots she used to execute against Elladine Lambert’s preferred targets are off-limits to her now. And that’s a crying shame, but what would she even do with them, anyway? She can’t exactly walk seductively up to them, slide her knickers down her thighs and say, in her surgically altered woman’s voice, “Hey, handsome. There was a cock here. It’s gone now.” They’d call her a LARPer, if any of them were attentive enough to know what a LARPer is. It’s probably all to the good that Lambert’s extensive target list has been so whittled down over the last twenty or so years that those who remain are keeping a low profile, removing themselves from anything that looks even slightly like human trafficking or forced transformation, because when Cora’s penis went the way of all medical waste, that was it for the Peckinville washout crew; of the others like her, who mostly came before her, some are dead, whether while discharging their duties or by their own hand, and those who aren’t have all chosen to lead ordinary lives of relatively obscene luxury, handsomely paid by Peckinville for their service and their silence.
Cora met one of them once. She was working in the bloody insurance division. They’d swapped stories, with Cora providing most of the enthusiasm for that part of the conversation, and then Cora had slunk away, feeling both disgusted and terribly jealous. She’d begged Haley to let her play with the other washouts, the ones who neither adapted nor exploded, but had been refused on the grounds that it’s not like throwing meat into the lion enclosure at the zoo; you actually have to stick around and do mental health support work afterwards. Booooooring.
At least Elladine herself is fun to tease, even if Haley has had to instruct her to ease back somewhat from time to time. But the woman is so obvious about her little fetish! Once, all Cora had to do was say to another operative at some function, while within earshot of Ms Lambert, “Can you believe they gave me a full sex change just so I wouldn’t set off the scanner at the airport?” and Elle had looked at her for a couple of seconds, excused herself from her own nearby conversation, and rushed from the room. It’s like when Cora was in school and they weren’t allowed to leave class to piss, and she knew that one boy had had a lot to drink at lunch, so she played water_droplets.mp3 on her phone at just above subliminal volume until he had to run out of the room with wet trousers. She set herself a challenge, at the last function she attended — some dreadfully tedious briefing on the disposition of the remaining targets — to get Elladine Lambert to have to leave the room to masturbate within ten minutes of their first encounter.
Good, clean fun.
She sometimes wonders if Elladine’s prepping a new version of Cora somewhere, some new washout with a similar mental outlook, or if it’s true that the woman’s lost the taste for it, if the guilt that flushes her cheeks as readily as the lust is truly dictating her decisions these days. Shame; Cora would quite like a sister.
Still, Cora’s a regular agent now, and a bloody good one, in possession of what Haley terms ‘a callous disinterest in traditional morality,’ which is handler-speak for ‘actually she knows full well that killing people is bad, which is why she only kills people who are truly terrible.’ And that’s good, because she still gets jobs and she doesn’t have to go work in insurance with the other washouts — and some normal people, presumably — but it’s also bad, because even when they’re not on probation, regular agents mostly get bodyguard work. Or intelligence gathering. She finds herself occasionally wishing that she had stuck it out for the full six weeks with Twill-Barrington. If she’d known it would be her last chance to really properly righteously murder a total and utter bastard, she might have relished it even more than she did. Maybe set up a few cameras.
Now, finally, there’s someone new, someone truly problematic, someone building up their own private security service with American money, someone who might not just coax all the survivors of Lambert’s two-decade proxy rampage out of their little wank cocoons and back into the business, but who has already inspired a bunch of copycats on these purple-mountained, painfully sincere and bloodily stolen shores… Now there’s a worthy kill, and Cora will be worthy of it. And she’ll do the bloody brother, too.
But first, she needs to writhe for some gullible loser of a guy. Fortunately, it’ll probably be pretty fun.
* * *
They leave the dining hall through the kitchen, because Christine wants to say hi to Julia, who is on call today and thus found herself dangerously available when Edy was looking for ‘volunteers’ for door duty. She’s not as grumpy about it as Christine expected, though, because she’s heard about this virus that’s doing the rounds, and she whispers to Christine that if it’s serious enough to pull Dorley’s darlingest child out of her fake trip to Europe, it’s probably good for a week or two off work entirely. There’s some sleep Julia plans to catch up on. Maybe some TV shows.
The little charade out in the front hall has been improved. They have a fake donation box instead of a bucket out of the cleaning closet, and they have posters up for the charities they are supposedly going to be supporting. Julia tells Christine that, actually, they’re supporting them for real, and that someone — probably Aunt Bea — browbeat Elle Lambert into committing herself to matching whatever donations they pull in from people who wander off the beaten track. It’s like when you come home from school, Julia says, and you hand your mum a sponsor sheet for the fun run, only it doesn’t end with you getting backhanded and bouncing off the sideboard.
Christine’s got to hug her for that. For providing, in the brief moment of her grimace, in the way she looked to the floor, in the memories that spilled clearly across her face, today’s reminder that most of them weren’t just rescued from the things that they did, but from the things that were done to them, too.
And then it’s up the main stairs, the three of them jogging alongside each other — Tabitha having stayed in the dining room to continue doing the kind of sponsor stuff Christine is delighted to know as little as she can about. Indira’s energy is as infectious as always, and it seems to be carrying Steph through her post-dinner sleepiness as well as her misgivings about this whole ‘going outside’ thing, though it also helps that Christine’s been checking on Bethany every so often and confirming that she’s still asleep.
And, shit, yeah, Bethany is still asleep! The girl must have run her batteries down to the absolute minimum. Christine’s starting to wonder if a little time away from Steph might actually do her some good, if only because she’s not spending all her time making sure she misses as little of Steph as possible. What did Maria say about her? That she’s become slightly more codependent than the programme generally wishes to encourage.
Everyone gets to grow a little! Though Steph, unfortunately, still has to go outside.
“Good evening,” Nadine says to them as they emerge onto the first floor. She’s waiting for them in the hallway, dressed to kill as per usual. Today, she wears an A-line dress that wouldn’t look out of place on the female lead in a 1960s romance movie. In sky blue. With little boots. Christine could never pull that off, though she also contrives to feel, in her comfortable shorts and loose t-shirt, maybe just a little stupid as she approaches Nadine, like she’s stepped out of the TARDIS and into the history books and she’s still wearing her twenty-first-century street clothes. Steph probably feels even more out of place, but they’re here to fix that, so.
Indira gets her hug from Nadine first, and then passes her around, sweeping past her into the salon room, opening curtains, turning on lights, checking for dust and tutting at the grey stain on her fingertip when she swipes it across one of the shelves at the back. This place probably hasn’t been used since the New Year’s party.
“I didn’t know this was here,” Steph says, following Indira in and leaving Christine still getting hugged by Nadine.
“Why would you?” Indira says. “We usually use it for second years, and they’re mostly in one-on-one now. You know, doing each other’s makeup, and then…”
“Doing each other,” Christine says, entering alongside Nadine, who coughs discreetly to suggest that that is not how she would have put it.
“We knocked two rooms together,” Indira continues, pointing up at the line in the ceiling where the paint doesn’t quite match. “Beatrice finally convinced Elle to release the funds about ten years ago, I think? Just before my time, anyway. They realised they were never going to do the double intake thing, and—”
“What was that?” Steph asks, settling down in the chair that Nadine is politely and silently pointing to, and assenting to have a cape draped around her shoulders.
“Every year, there are more abusive and troubled boys than we have bedrooms in the basement,” Nadine says, crouching down slightly in front of Steph and starting to finger-brush her hair around, pulling it out, checking its length and consistency. “We were considering running a second intake around March, moving the existing first years into secure rooms up here. You’ve seen the heavy door that bisects the first floor, yes?”
“Um, yeah.”
Nadine’s frowning with concentration, moving around Steph like a large, elegant insect, inspecting her from every angle. “Had we got the go-ahead, there would have been high- and low-security rooms up here. But that was around about the time the original sponsors started to succumb to burnout, and you know what Aunt Bea is like; there was no way she was going to try to keep them here against their will. Steph, are you okay with me trimming your hair here and there? Just to make it neat?”
Steph nods as Indira says, “Beatrice is a big softie. Always has been. So: staffing crisis, blah blah blah, recruitment drive among the graduates, blah blah blah, and by the time the institution comes up for air, there’s no real enthusiasm for taking on more work. So they knocked together a few rooms up here that would have been secure bedrooms and Bob’s your exclusive salon! At least, that’s what I was told.”
Nadine nods to herself, then swiftly turns around and opens a cupboard at the back of the room, a cupboard Christine remembers as being full of the most hideous objects of torture known to a feminising correctional facility: hair dryers, heated straighteners, eyelash curlers, brushes and sponges, and several dozen bags of makeup starter kits, designed so that new second years can experiment messily without having to share.
“Crying shame, really,” Nadine’s saying. “There are always more bad men getting away with it than there are people willing to step up to correct them. I think—”
“Hey, Dira,” Christine says, not really meaning to interrupt but so absorbed with memories from early in her second year that she can’t help but vocalise them, “remember when Jodie and Paige had a fight, the first week in here? Over a blush brush. It was insane.”
“I do,” Indira says.
“And, shit,” Christine continues, “there’s where Julia ripped out half her extensions, because she said they made her head itch. She threw them out the window. God, and there’s where the book slipped off my head and landed on my foot.” She’s aware, suddenly, of all eyes on her, so she chooses the least intimidating pair to meet, and clarifies to Steph, “It’s a posture thing. And a gait thing. You walk with a book on your head until you can go back and forth without it falling.”
“Does that help?” Steph asks, glancing around the room, probably in case there are any rogue encyclopaedias waiting to balance themselves on her head.
“No,” Dira says, “which is why I told Christine she didn’t have to do it.”
“And you don’t have to do it now,” Nadine adds, tying an apron around her waist.
“I had bad posture,” Christine says, shrugging. Smiling, too, because as much as she limped for a week, it’s a happy memory. Many of them are, once she got out of the basement, because as much as she was continually being made to do things she didn’t exactly want to do, few of them were actually particularly arduous, and Dira was there the whole time. And so was Paige. “Before I came here, when I wasn’t bunking off school or running off to smoke, I was bent double over a laptop. Never bothered me before, but here? By the beginning of the second year, Vick was basically a beautiful girl already and Paige was catching up at high speed. Meanwhile, I was still slouching. I got self-conscious about it.”
“So you put a book on your head,” Steph says.
“Don’t knock it. It worked.”
Steph’s hair is the subject of interest for the next several minutes, with Nadine talking mostly to Indira about what to do with it. Steph endures with only a slight grimace, and deals with being turned this way and that in her chair so that Nadine and Dira can poke and prod at her by zoning out, if Christine’s any judge. Christine herself spends the time on a laptop someone left in here at some point, logging into her secure drive and finding some coursework to focus on, because the thing about makeovers at Dorley is that if you’re not careful, you can get swept up in them. They’re practically infectious. Especially when multiple sponsors get involved; they start casting about for more people to feminise, like it’s reflexive or something, and when Jane shows up — first to relay a message from Maria, that she’ll be going down to wake Bethany in a bit and make sure she gets fed, and then to hang around and make supportive comments — Christine does her best to look extra absorbed in her linguistics notes, lest anyone get any ideas about the girl in the shorts and the t-shirt.
“Okay, so,” Nadine says. She’s leaning against the wall, fiddling with a tablet. “Charlize Theron. Famous for always being in the middle of growing out a short haircut. She’s like a one-woman Pinterest board. So she’s ideal for our purposes, since we can basically put a pin in a timeline of her last ten years and probably we’ll hit a style that will work for Steph.”
“Don’t put a pin in the iPad, Nadine,” Christine says without looking up.
“There,” Indira says, ignoring Christine. She’s standing next to Nadine, leaning up against her and peering at the screen in her hands. “That one. It’s perfect.”
“Ye-es,” Nadine says, lingering on the word as she considers it. “I think I agree. Jane?”
Christine starts paying attention just in time to see Nadine turn the tablet around so that Jane, still idling on the other side of the room, can see what is, yes, a photo of Charlize Theron growing out a pixie cut. There’s a slight curl to her hair, and she wears it pulled back from her forehead.
Yeah. She looks nice. And, most importantly, Steph’s hair is just about long enough for this now. It’s not exactly a classic princess ’do, but it is unambiguously a women’s style, and as Indira said to Christine over and over in those early days, trying to hide your womanhood can lead to more people questioning it than if you loudly and obviously embrace it.
Steph’s going to look pretty.
“I like it,” Jane says, nodding enthusiastically and crossing the room quickly. She takes the tablet out of Nadine’s hands, as if holding it herself will bring her spiritually closer to the hairstyle, or something. “Yeah, this is good. Assuming you’re up for a bit of work in the mornings, Steph?”
Steph just shrugs.
“She can mostly just scrunch it, anyway,” Dira says. “I think it’s the one.”
“We need the consent of the victim,” Nadine says. She takes back the tablet and hands it to Steph, who chews on her lip as she looks at the picture.
“You can make my hair do that?” she asks.
“Yes. And so can you.”
“With… scrunching?”
Nadine taps away from the picture and, with a few more taps, finds a YouTube video of a girl styling her short hair, scrunching product into it while it’s wet, shaking it out, and finger-combing it into her preferred style.
“That’s it?” Steph asks.
“That’s it.”
“Yeah,” Steph says, nodding. “Yeah. I love it. Fuck, Nadine, I actually love it.”
Even Christine can’t suppress a happy giggle at that. It’s part of the magic of Dorley Hall, part of the joy of it, when someone who was utterly miserable — or who was responsible for utter misery, or both — has that turn around, that moment when they look at themselves in the mirror, or when they understand the possibilities of who they are being encouraged to become. When they see freedom stretching out in front of them, a process and an experience that will last the rest of their life, and all they have to do in order to have it is to keep following in the footsteps of the girls who went before. That Steph isn’t like Christine or Paige or almost anyone else at the hall doesn’t really matter here; her misery was as deep as anyone’s, and while she’s found a level of fulfilment in aggressively mothering a basement of maladjusted losers — an appellation which Christine applies to her former self as well, so no-one can tell her she’s being unfair or anything — the moments in which she has seemed to truly understand the shape of the woman she’s going to be, the energy of her… Those have been few and far between. Steph has been, more acutely at this stage of the programme than perhaps any Dorley girl before her, all too aware of how she is read by those around her.
All too aware of her brow bone, of her jaw. She’s talked to Christine about it a few times, in person and over Consensus, and yeah, it’s something that is going to have to be minimised for now and, if Steph is going to be truly comfortable, probably something that Mrs Prentice and her little surgery elves will need to take a chisel to.
Christine’s brow was kind of like that, too. But she didn’t care about it at this stage the way Steph does. That’s got to do shit to you.
So it’s welcome enough to see Steph happy about herself for once that Christine starts to feel really good about this trip they’ve got planned. They’ll go together on the train. They’ll meet Steph’s family together. And then, whether that goes well or not, they’ll go see the Chetrys — Christine’s been planning it for a while, and Indira suggested over dinner that they make it a thing they do together — and Steph will get to see what a real family looks like. A family that loves and cares unconditionally.
“I kind of love watching this stuff,” Jane says. Nadine’s already washing Steph’s hair over the sink, and Indira’s unpacking the pots and paints for her makeup and the strips for her waxing, which will both come after. “You read all these stories about, you know, the first time in the salon chair and stuff, but seeing it is still better.”
“You’ve got to stop reading that stuff, Jane,” Dira says.
“What’s she reading?” Nadine asks.
“Forcefem,” Christine says with a roll of her eyes. She’s been brought up to speed on Jane’s extracurricular reading habits. Her delves into the depths of the internet, from which she returns with stories written by people from all walks of life who have but one thing in common: that they find what happened to Christine and basically everyone she knows to be intriguing, hot, and fictional. Christine got curious and looked some of them up, but the one story she tried to read made her want to track down its author, sit them down somewhere uncomfortable, and lecture them on what she suspects might happen to the underlying flesh if you glue an unrealistically lifelike rubber vagina over your penis and leave it there for a year.
“Jane,” Nadine says, “that can’t be healthy. Not after…” She doesn’t finish her sentence, just points up and out with her chin, indicating the whole building and everything that happens within and underneath it. “I can lend you some good books, if you want.”
“It’s fine,” Jane says. “I’m like those people who have a near-death experience, and then they seek out stories about it. Like that guy who lost an arm under a big rock.”
“You didn’t lose an arm, Jane,” Indira says.
“I lost something.”
* * *
The thing about a well-stocked villa placed just off to the side of a Peckinville installation this far out in the countryside is that, no matter how many snacks and spirits and wines and Blu-rays there are, no matter how bulging the wardrobes are, no matter that you can call for basically whatever food you want and have someone deliver it to you as quick as any city service, you’re still stuck out in the middle of the fucking countryside and you still can’t just up and go to a club or whatever if you’re bored.
And Cally is bored. Doubly so because she’s under strict instructions to keep to the grounds. And, like, she doesn’t want to break them — she’s well aware that anyone dumb, brave or well enough resourced to take a potshot at Elle would not think twice about snatching the girl who shares her bed — so it’s not like she’s constantly looking at the horizon and debating whether to make a run for it, but that might actually make it worse. Because she is, in a way, choosing to hang out here.
The sex sort of makes up for it. But sweet Elladine’s been busy lately, busy and bruised and constantly having to have the scrapes and cuts on her arms and legs treated in case they scar or get infected, so they only really get to squeeze it in — squeeze each other — after Elle’s evening shower, and then it’s an early night for the two of them right after.
It fucking blows, actually. As much as Elle continues to insist that Cally is more than just a fucktoy, that she is someone actually worth listening to and occasionally even confiding in — and kissing on the way out, as she goes to work in the main building here, like they’ve been married for ten years or something — the fact remains that Cally quite likes being a fucktoy, likes being the one who lies there on the bed in her lingerie and with her hair and face done, waiting for the powerful older woman to come home to her, to gasp at how sexy she is, to forget about her stress and her responsibilities and about everything except the strap-on, the lube, and the need to make her precious, beautiful little toy scream the fucking house down.
Sometimes she wonders if this is what it was like for Aunt Bea, when she and Elladine were together — and as much as it has always been officially pretended that they’ve had nothing but a professional relationship, they were blatantly doing it, or so Cally’s been told. Did Aunt Bea throw on a cute little slip and drape herself across some hotel bed? Or was Elle the more submissive one, because Bea was so much older? Older and — again, according to rumour — more experienced.
Though it’s not like Elle isn’t submissive at times now. Just… sometimes, she’s the woman in charge, the boss bitch with the serious money whose early forties have barely begun to show on her face, but sometimes she’s the wide-eyed, delicate little thing whose cheek Cally loves to cradle in one hand as she dives the other deep inside.
Hey, Mum, guess what I do with my time these days?
Shit. If she’s going to start thinking about Mum, then maybe she needs to get out of the house. She’s not allowed to leave the complex, but there are people out there to talk to, and sure, most of them are soldiers, and the ones that aren’t spend all their time with soldiers, and Cally actually has quite a limited tolerance for talking about the logistics of killing people with anyone other than Elle, but it’s got to be better than sitting here in her sexy underwear, waiting for an exhausted woman eventually to come home.
Rummaging quickly in the wardrobe, she finds and pulls on a skirt and a cami, and then throws one of Elle’s jackets over the top, because the cami doesn’t exactly disguise the nature of the lingerie she has on. The jackets and coats and shit that Elle has here are mostly farmer-type crap, huge warm things with fleece layers and those huge doohickies instead of buttons that Cally can never remember if they’re called toggles or boggles. Mostly ugly, but they cover her up, and so she fastens the big dumb button things all the way down, steps into one of the pairs of wellies that are lined up by the kitchen door, and trudges out into the cold.
Peckinville House isn’t just a house any more, more like a frontage for a complex that is given over, these days, almost entirely to the organisation that took its name. Cally’s been reminded over and over of trips her school took to National Trust properties where only a small part of the house and gardens were made available to a gaggle of inquisitive, sticky-fingered eight-year-olds, except the difference is that here, there are no velvet ropes, and Cally’s allowed on the other side of all the locked doors. Well, most of them.
The lady of the manor doesn’t even live in the old house these days. Cally hasn’t asked whether Elle had the villa built before or after she killed the remaining members of her family — it seems like it would be rude to do so — but she can easily imagine a younger Elladine marching out of there and refusing to return until there is a bed somewhere that doesn’t smell of death. Or, maybe, of old people.
Cally makes her way up the path to the main building, the office block where most of the action happens. Elladine will be upstairs in her office, stressing out about this or that thing, but Cally’s not going to bother her; Valérie Barbier is supposed to be somewhere around here, though, and through some discreet back and forth on their encrypted Consensus channels, Cally has learned enough about the French woman to have her dying of curiosity about the rest of it all day.
Asking around leads Cally to the elevator down, to the basement gym complex. She pushes through the glass door, passes by a handful of people she vaguely recognises — soldiers all — who are populating the machines, and a handful more who greet her with waves and smiles. No Valérie, though, and no Trevor, so she keeps going, past the juice bar and the vending machines to the private room at the back, from which she can just about hear a pounding, peppy bass beat of the sort Cally might expect to find on an eighties-movie training montage. There’s a smoked glass strip next to the door, and she can see inside enough to work out that she’s probably found her quarry, and also that she would be interrupting them if went in right now, so she returns to the juice bar and strikes up a conversation — not, thankfully, about killing people — with a couple of the soldiers there while she waits.
Eventually, the music stops. Cally slurps down the last of her drink, hops off her stool, and returns to the door to the private room. She opens it a crack at first, just enough to make sure that she’s not about to see anyone naked or anything, and then she pushes it open all the way, nipping inside and allowing the heavy door to close quickly behind her. She’s pleased to find that the voice she heard before, booming out over the eighties music, belonged to the person she thought it did.
“Cally!”
“Jess!” Cally calls. Wasting no time, she goes in for a hug, only for Jess to hold her back with one arm. Which, obviously, she can, because Jess is a fitness monster and the most exercise Cally’s gotten lately is on Elle.
“Sweaty,” Jess explains. And while still effortlessly holding Cally back, she lifts her shoulder slightly to expose the small patch of moisture at her underarm.
Cally wants to lick it.
Jesus. Being with Elle’s made her horny again. At least now, post-basement, she’s got it pointed in a healthy direction, and if anyone’s being manipulated and taken advantage of, it’s probably her. And, shit, it’s Jessica Bell. Jessica Bell! Cally used to have dreams about her…
“Oh,” Cally says. “Sorry.” And then, remembering that there are other people here, too, that she’s not just come down to stare deeply into Jess Bell’s hazel eyes and wonder what it’s like to be bench-pressed by her, Cally turns around to find Valérie Barbier and Trevor Darling practically passed out on a bench against the far wall. They’re both wearing gym gear, though Trevor’s is looser fitting everywhere but around his chest, and they are both absolutely soaked with sweat. Cally glances back again to confirm that, yeah, Jess has merely a light spotting.
“Meet my victims,” Jess says. “Trev and Val.”
“Delighted,” Val says, not sounding quite as exhausted as she looks, so twelve points to her.
“Hi,” Trev says, sounding like he might be about to die. Nil points to Trev, then. He waves at her awkwardly, because he’s using the elbow of his waving arm and the entirety of the other to try to keep his chest compressed. Shit. Yeah, he’s probably embarrassed about that around strangers, isn’t he.
Well. She can solve that.
“Caroline Baker,” she says, waving back at Trev and smiling at Val. “Call me Cally. I’m here with Elladine, but before that, I was at Dorley.”
Val blinks at her. “Oh,” she says flatly.
“Dorley Hall?” Trev says, already visibly relaxing.
“Yep,” Cally confirms. “The ol’ alma castrata.”
“Did you get that from a mug?” Val asks, frowning.
“No, but they should put it on one. But yeah, Trev,” Cally adds, taking a couple more steps towards him, “you can stop hiding your tits now. I’ve seen weirder. I’ve been weirder.”
“Not sure about that,” Trev says, but he releases himself anyway, and sits on his hands. His boobs, now constrained only by the heroic efforts of his sports bra, sort of flop under his t-shirt.
Cally comes to sit next to him on the bench, just far enough away that she can’t smell his sweat too bad. Because, wow, it’s penetrating; is he back on the T? “You got the express package, I heard,” she says. “Everything at once? Must suck for the shock value alone, but honestly? At least you got an explanation.” She taps herself in the boob; she still loves how they wobble when she does that. “Having it all grow in bit by bit was weirder, I’m betting. Especially when we didn’t even know what was happening for, like, months.”
“I agree with the new girl,” Val says.
Trev just nods awkwardly, and stays silent for a second or two. Then he speaks up, brightly and with a Jesus-Christ-change-the-subject forced smile that Cally wants to pinch. He’s weirdly cute. “So, how do you know Jess?” he asks.
Cally directs her broadening grin back at Jess. “She used to teach self-defence at Dorley, back when I was a second year. All of us had a crush on her. Like, huge.”
“You did?” Jess says in a tone of voice that suggests this is not even remotely a surprise.
“Look at her!” Cally gestures with both hands, indicating the tall, copper-skinned, sportswear-clad fitness goddess. When Cally’s mind goes instantly to eighties workout montages, it’s always been because Jessica Bell looks like the kind of woman who would star in one, close-ups on hot beads of sweat and everything. “Take her in.”
“You’re embarrassing me, Cally.”
“But you’re so hot.”
“She presents a reasonable case,” Val says.
“O’course,” Cally continues, “we all had crushes on the girl who taught makeup, too. And the dress girl. And Maria… Jesus Christ. We were just a bunch of horny girls who mostly used to be straight boys and we were, God, just constantly stimulated. Hot girl teaches you self-defence? Stimulated. Hot girl does your makeup? Stimulated. Hot girl shows you how to walk in heels and you all crane your heads to follow her legs around the room? Stimulated. And at nights, after, it was all response, response, response.”
“Vivid,” Val comments as Jess laughs.
“You were at the hall,” Trev says. “Do you know anyone I know?”
Cally shrugs. “Probably? I graduated with Siobhan Graham, Veronica Ratcliffe, Pippa Green—”
“Ah!” Val says. “Pippa. I know Pippa.”
“Which one’s Pippa?” Trev asks.
“Steph’s sponsor. Short hair. Blonde. Eyeliner, and lots of it.”
“Right. That Pippa.”
Cally laughs. “She’s still slathering it on, is she? God. Love that for her.” She should go back, actually. Next time Elle goes, she’ll go, too. Say hi to Pippa. Meet Pippa’s boy, if he’s still a boy by the time that happens. Steal some clothes. Funny how much you can miss a place that put you in solitary confinement, shit, how many times? “Hey,” she adds, feeling the spirit of nostalgia swell within her, “why don’t you come to dinner tonight and we can talk Dorley? You both lived there recently, right? You can give me the dirt the girls on Consensus think is too embarrassing to tell me about.”
“Tonight?” Trev says.
“I think,” Val says quickly, “that tomorrow might be better. For both of us.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Cally says. “Cool! I’ll bug the chef about menus in the morning.”
“To be clear, this is to have dinner… where exactly?”
“Elle’s villa. It’s not far, it’s just—”
“Elle? As in, Elladine Lambert?”
“Yeah!” Cally says, and then she adds, “Oh, right. I should have said.” She reaches around Trev, her hand held out towards Val, and introduces herself again. “Hi! I’m Caroline Baker. I’m fucking the boss.”
* * *
She’s not hiding that she’s a girl. That was the whole point of this. That she’s going to walk out of the hall in a few days’ time, and she’s not going to hide. Which is scary as fuck, because it’s not as if her forehead has got any less clocky — yeah, that’s a new word she learned today, from Jane — but as Christine repeatedly said to her, they’re going to be travelling through relatively cosmopolitan areas, they’re going to be doing so during the day, and they’re not going to use public toilets if they can avoid it.
Almsworth is a university city; the people at the train station see weirder than Steph every day. That’s what Christine said, and that’s, oddly, the thing she’s clinging to the most. Yes, she’s going to be clocky, and she’s going to keep being clocky until they bring back Mrs Prentice in five to seven months to address all Steph’s problem areas — ‘solution areas’, Mrs Prentice suggested she call them; Steph refuses — but she is also, ultimately, just another girl catching the train to London with her friend.
And she’s not hiding.
“Are you ready?” Nadine asks.
“Yeah,” Steph says. “Show me the damage.”
It’s been a long afternoon. Long enough that it’s bled into the evening; it’s coming up on nine, someone said, and that was at least half an hour ago. After hair, there was leg waxing, and after leg waxing, there was makeup, and after makeup, there was clothes. All of it done to her, not by her — though that’s only a today thing; tomorrow, the intensive classes begin. Someone else gets custody of Mia for the rest of the week, and Nadine’s going to teach Steph how to be a girl. Most of it’s going to be focused on makeup, because that’s probably the area in which she needs the most help, but they’re going to talk clothes and hair as well. All the stuff that Pippa’s been slow-rolling with her, letting her take her time with, letting her feel things out, decide on the kind of girl she’s going to be; well, no time for the touchy-feely approach any more.
Her outfit feels horribly daring. Which in one way is sort of stupid, because it’s just shorts and a couple of layered tops, but that’s not the point.
The point is not to hide. And so her shorts reveal her thighs in basically their entirety, and the grey tank top and the wine-coloured sweater she’s wearing over it plunge right down to her cleavage, leaving little to the imagination. Even the brown leather jacket seems to conform to her body, to the minuscule curves she has so far developed, more than any coat feels like it should. And Nadine painted and filed her nails and made her wear tights under the shorts and boots over the tights, and it’s all very…
It’s all very girl.
And now she’s standing in the middle of the salon room, waiting to see herself for the first time. Nadine believes in reveals, apparently. It’s the power of the total transformation, she said. It’s like how down in the basement you can watch your body change slowly, month by month, and not really register how different you are to when you were brought in, because you’ve been acclimatising, little by little, every morning. But Steph has only really got herself all dolled up for parties here, and the thing about a party dress, Nadine told her, is that it’s not the real world. It’s fancy dress, like going as a vampire for Halloween, or something; those fangs are as much from a different world as your petticoats and your nice shoes. Whereas this — and she indicated everything that Steph had just struggled into with a sweep of her elegant fingers — is the real world.
There’s a sheet over the mirror, and Nadine, smiling fit to burst, pulls it away with a flourish. And Steph gets to see herself for the first time in hours.
* * *
Christine’s come and gone throughout this whole process, but not because she hasn’t wanted to be there — it’s been surprisingly nice to just sit and see someone else get tortured with all Nadine’s tools of feminisation, and since Indira’s been there the whole time, it’s been quite nostalgic, too — but because she’s had to leave a couple of times to cover her actual job, the one they give her all that money to do. So she’s gotten to see Steph’s transformation in fits and starts, and each time it’s been a little more dramatic.
First it was the hair. Steph’s got this dramatically ginger-coloured hair, the kind of ginger you can’t get easily with dye because you’re likely to overshoot and end up with a nonhuman colour, like bright orange. It’s always been the most striking thing about her, and now that it’s longer, long enough to be teased and scrunched into textured waves that fall to her mid-cheek at their longest — a classic growing-out-a-pixie-cut look — it’s even more so. Nadine’s done Steph’s face in complementary colours, and though she’s had to use medium-coverage foundation and not the bare minimum that Steph would probably benefit from, because she still has zits and red skin from her last electrolysis appointment, the effect is close enough to fresh-faced that it really, really works for her.
As for the outfit? Well, Indira sort of tricked her there. It was very sneaky: she sat down next to Steph while she was still getting her hair done to browse on her iPad, and it just so happened that she was on Pinterest, scrolling through photos of girls with similar colouring to Steph. And when Steph noted, hey, she looks pretty, Indira smiled that sweet, disarming smile of hers, and started to pin picture after picture, assembling a style guide featuring nothing but photos of this one ginger-haired actress. “I think we do this look today,” she said, handing Nadine the tablet and causing Steph to very nearly faint on the spot.
It’s not what Christine would have done. Christine would have asked Steph what clothes she was comfortable trying out, and Steph would have said, jeans, or something, and they would have put together a nice, simple outfit that didn’t challenge her at all.
Christine’s approach wouldn’t have caused Steph almost to fall to her knees upon seeing her reflection. Because, yeah, Nadine and Indira did a good job. They’ve put her in an outfit that looks cute and comfortable, and which will leave no-one in any doubt that this girl right here? Is a girl.
They even managed to find some cleavage for her from somewhere. Christine doesn’t know where; she was out of the room for the underwear stage. Steph doesn’t have zero growth in her chest, just very little, so presumably there are some bra inserts doing a lot of work somewhere under that tank top.
“Holy shit,” Steph says.
“Head voice, Steph,” Indira says, shooting a meaningful glance at Christine. Because, yeah, that’s another thing: Steph’s getting the intensive girl course over the next few days, and voice lessons are part of it; voice lessons that Christine is going to give, because — as people keep telling her — she’s really good. Steph’s been muddling through with a soft voice that comes across sort of girly-androgynous; Christine’s been tasked with pulling that voice out of her throat, where it’s mostly come to reside. She probably can’t make her into a singer in just three days, but she’s reasonably confident she can make it so she won’t, say, get misgendered over the phone.
Like Steph’s going to be making lots of phone calls…
“Uh, yeah,” she says. “Head voice.”
“Sorry,” Steph says, not in head voice. “But like…”
“You look lovely,” Nadine says, standing off to one side, holding the sheet that had been covering the mirror and looking smug.
“And you look normal, right?” Indira says, stepping closer and cupping Steph’s elbow gently. “Not how you always thought you would look right now?”
Steph’s angling her head this way and that, trying to see her face from all angles. “I just…” she says, still having trouble finishing sentences. “Wow.”
“You look hot, Steph,” Christine says.
“I do not.”
Indira giggles and Christine says, “No, sorry, you do.”
“This isn’t me,” Steph says. “This… Shit. I feel… I don’t know.”
“Good?” Nadine suggests.
“Stupid. Like this could always have been me and I was just too dumb to know it.”
In this room, Christine’s the expert on feeling stupid, so she steps forward and bends an arm around Steph’s shoulders. Indira backs off, gives them the space.
“Remember when we met?” Christine says.
Steph’s lips twitch. “Yeah. We were just talking about it earlier.”
“If we hadn’t gone off on our own, if you hadn’t absolutely shit me up by saying you knew stuff about Dorley Hall, if you’d gone home alone that night instead, would you be wearing something like this right now?”
Baldly, Steph says, “I think I’d probably be dead.”
* * *
“Cody,” she’d said, leaning with her forearms flat against the bar and her chest pushed up, the better to curve her spine and present to her target her bottom and her breasts all at once. “That’s, like, such a coincidence! That’s my name!”
And the good Christian man, who works for a good Christian organisation, had frowned delightedly at her and said, “Cody’s a guy’s name.”
Cora had sighed and rolled her eyes with maximum theatricality. “My parents are liberals,” she told him. “They raised me… gender-neutral.”
It didn’t take much of that kind of nonsense to extract from him everything she needed. A few drinks — but only a couple, because he didn’t want to be drunk when he went home to his wife for dinner — and a few jokes, a few made-up anecdotes about her liberal family and the distance she’s travelled to get away from them, and a quick handjob in the restroom, and that was it. He gave it all up.
Not that there was much all to give, really. Like Haley said, they had a lot of the information already, and a number of possible locations. They just needed this logistics guy to confirm for them which one is currently active. Which he did, after the drinks and the jokes but before the handjob, which Cora only really gave him so she can be sure he’s going to be thinking of her when he sees his wife tonight.
It’s almost disappointing that she didn’t have to fuck the guy. And it’s definitely disappointing that she’s finished so early, because now she’s back where she was before, with most of an evening to kill in bloody Florida, where she’s not allowed to go out unless it’s undercover, unless she has a mission. But at least she’s got one thing.
“I beat the com-pu-ters,” she sings as she prances in through the safehouse door. “I got the lo-ca-tion.”
“For the record,” Haley says, “it’s people you beat. Not computers.”
“Well,” Cora says as she slips out of her jacket and kicks off her shoes, “I beat them. And I didn’t even have to fuck the bloke. Elladine Lambert forced a sex change on me for nothing.”
“Would you like to file another complaint?”
Cora blows Haley a kiss; Haley pointedly does not catch it. Instead, she makes the subtlest move to the left, as if dodging it entirely. Which says to Cora that the game is, in fact, if not in session, then not all that far away, so she clasps her hands together in front of her dress, pushes up her cleavage with her upper arms, and drops back into her Florida accent. “So?” she says, kicking her voice up another octave for good measure, the better to sound sweetly naive and temptingly available, “did I do good? Was I a good girl?”
“That depends,” Haley says, outwardly unmoved. “Which site?”
Cora doesn’t drop the accent. “Site three. The Smyth-Farrows are at site three.”
“Good. Well done. Now go to bed.”
Another step closer, and Cora bends down a little at the knees. She’s right in front of Haley now, and she can smell her conditioner. “Don’t I get a reward?”
There’s a pause as Haley turns all the way around in her chair, and for a glorious moment, Cora’s convinced that this is how it’s going to happen, that they’re going to be together tonight, but Haley just puts a finger on Cora’s hip and pushes. Cora instinctively locks her stance so she doesn’t rock back, which just means that Haley pushes herself away, rolling backwards on her office chair towards the desk.
“No,” Haley says, swinging back around and typing her password into the computer.
Damn it.
* * *
Her heels are too loud. She noticed, up in the salon room, and with every step they feel like they’ve been getting louder. They seemed to echo all the way down the main stairs, and then echoed some more as they passed Julia again — who told her, yeah, Steph, you look good. And now that they’ve entered the kitchen? Guess what! They’re bloody well still echoing! It’s like every room is her stage, and she’s got a pair of drums strapped to her feet that make everyone turn to look at her.
People would have spotted her, anyway, because she’s Steph the Real Trans Girl, and even though the sponsors and the hangers-on are used to her by now, to the soldier contingent, she’s still a novelty. And also a potential security threat, according to Nadine. She said it while she worked. Be careful around the soldiers, she said; you’re the only one of us bound to secrecy by nothing but gratitude.
Makes the whole place sort of unpleasant to think about, that. The thought that everyone else, graduate and sponsor alike, is considered ‘safe’ because they have everything to lose should it all come tumbling down. Their past misdeeds exposed, likely printed on every front page in the country. And Steph had asked — very carefully, because at that point Nadine was re-emphasising the freckles that were covered by foundation — why that matters, because she thought the entire reason most people were brought to Dorley was because their behaviour was not being corrected due to their social status, their manhood. Would anyone really care that much now?
And Nadine had smiled sadly. “Look at me, Steph,” she’d said. “I couldn’t go public even if I wanted to. The things I did are so much worse now.”
“Why?” Steph had asked. “Because times have changed?”
“No,” she’d said. “Because I have.”
Jane jumped in with a bit more context, but all Steph really gleaned from it is what she ought already to have known: women are treated more harshly, and trans women — or anyone who can be positioned to seem like a trans woman — are treated most harshly of all. A man can abuse and survive the court of public opinion; a woman can slap; a trans woman can’t even shout.
Again, it’s part of the logic of this place. Because it doesn’t just inhibit whistleblowers; the behaviour that brought you to Dorley’s attention likely isn’t even possible when one has been, per Indira, both womanised and transsexualised.
Anyway, that’s why the soldiers are so aware of her, it seems. Everyone else here is leashed in some way.
And the heels aren’t helping.
“Bagels,” Aisha says, handing her a bag. She’s been out in the pantry, checking stock for tomorrow’s sixty-head dinner — the AGA has been getting a workout recently — and she offered to fetch Steph some bagels when she rather lamely explained to the smattering of people still hanging out at this time of night that she needed one to take down to Bethany.
“Thanks,” Steph says, taking it from her and winding the plastic around her little finger, as if cutting off the blood supply to a minor part of her will assuage the anxiety she feels just fucking standing here. It’s the same problem as always, writ much, much larger: now that she’s making the effort, she can be judged on it. Also, she’s got used to being trusted here, and the stares of the two soldiers sat on stools near the sink are getting to her. “Can I help you?” she snaps at them, which is such completely out-there behaviour that she wants immediately to take it back, and perhaps to scrunch herself up into a small ball, but one of the two women shrugs and turns around straight away.
“Sorry,” the other one says. The first one, the one who turned away, nudges her, so she adds, “Ignore us.”
Steph’s starting to get the feeling that ‘security threat’ isn’t the only reason she’s so fascinating to some of these soldier women.
“You look wonderful, by the way,” Aisha says, seeming to sense Steph’s discomfort but picking the worst possible strategy to alleviate it.
“Oh, um, thank you,” Steph says, trying to smile and to seem grateful. That’s five people who’ve complimented her in the last few minutes, and she is getting, if anything, worse at thanking them for it. Some part of her insists that the attention, the praise, is all sarcastic or something, that they’re holding on to their laughter, waiting for her to leave.
There’s a hot, ugly itch developing at the back of her neck, and it’s got nothing to do with her new hair.
“Can I take a picture?” Aisha asks. “Just to show Mia and the others.”
“Only if I can die after.”
“Oh. Maybe not, then.”
The girl looks so deflated at that that Steph relents, and it takes her another few minutes to escape the kitchen, because getting pictures taken solo and with Nadine and Indira takes time. Christine, sensible as ever, already escaped to her room, saying she had some stuff to do but that she would see Steph bright and early tomorrow morning for her first intensive voice training session.
Yay.
At least that’s going to be one good thing about leaving the hall: fewer Sisters and soldiers to be constantly curious about her progress, or to be casually interested in her opinion as to the morality or otherwise of the programme as a sort-of-semi-nonparticipant and kind of objective observer. If the soldiers think she’s a security risk then, fine, she can go be a security risk at Abby and Melissa and Shahida’s place, or even at her parents’, in the unlikely event that things go so incredibly well down in London that she wants to stay.
She pictures, suddenly, telling that to her parents, asking them if she can stay, and having them react with the same disbelief that Christine did all those months ago, and the levity carries her out of the kitchen with her bag of bagels and through the dining hall. Yes, her heels are still echoing and yes, people are still looking, but she only has to hold her composure for long enough to reach the stairs to the basement and get herself around the first bend.
Jesus.
“The hyenas are coming for you, huh,” says Nell, which makes Steph jump a little. “Whoops,” Nell adds. “Sorry.”
“’S’okay,” Steph mutters. She takes the extra few steps down to the first basement floor, though, in case anybody else pokes their head out of some random side room and scares the bejesus out of her when she’s just trying to catch her breath.
Nell’s leaning against the security room door frame, one foot propped up, drinking something that looks Starbucks-ish; lots of gunk at the top, with a straw through a domed plastic lid. Craning her neck, Steph looks past Nell into the security room, and a few other women are sat inside. Two sponsors at the main desk — Sally spots her and waves — and someone Steph doesn’t recognise on the couch with her legs stretched out and a laptop perched on her thighs. Nell taps Steph on the back of her hand and leads her out into the first basement corridor, which is colder than usual, and a quick glance down its length tells Steph why: the back doors are open, and a gentle breeze is wafting in from the woods.
“Soldiers,” Nell says with a shrug. “They’re coming and going a lot recently. Getting stuff set up.”
“They’re really going to be here that long?”
“Yeah. No-one’s said so, but—” and here Nell leans closer, “—I’m thinking this is going to be a permanent thing. Or at least until everything with old Dorothy and the Smyth-Farrows is done with. We’ve already made up temporary accommodation for them, and I know some of them have been up on the second floor, clearing out and cleaning some of those unused rooms.”
“They can’t stay out back?”
“I suppose there’s only so long you can have a pretend recruitment station out there before someone starts asking questions.”
“This is going to be so weird.”
Nodding, Nell says, “At least you’re getting away for a while. I’m stuck with them.”
“You don’t like them?”
“It’s not that I don’t like them,” Nell says, leaning against the wall and grinding a shoulder against it for a moment, “it’s just that, well, I have a cis NPH, don’t I? So either I’m among my Sisters, or I’m around people who think I’m a cis girl. The soldiers are this whole third category. Right now I’m feeling all antsy and inbetweeny.” She shrugs again. “I’ll get used to it.”
“I think I get what you mean, though,” Steph says.
Frowning a moment, Nell suddenly nods and pulls Steph into a hug. One-armed, so she doesn’t mess up Steph’s outfit. “Listen,” she says when she drops back against the wall, “I know we don’t know each other that well, but if things get weird out there in the real world? Call. Call me or call any of us. We’ll come running.”
Yeah. Steph’s going to miss this place.
Well, parts of it.
The price for getting away from the first basement floor is to exchange greetings with the sponsors still in the security room, and then she’s heading down again, thumbing her way back into the basement proper, and trying not to feel too melancholy about it, trying not to imbue these ugly concrete walls with any more emotion than they deserve. A challenge that she utterly fails.
Shit. She’s all memories at the moment. They seem to rush through her, pulling her back to when Pippa took her out of her cell, took her to meet the others for the first time. Leigh called it ‘woke jail’. Adam spouted the kinds of religious conspiracy theories he would soon come to see were ridiculous. Raph swore, Ollie sulked, Diana said fuck you to basically everyone, Martin bared his soul.
And Bethany… She was the first one to greet her. The one to try to make her feel welcome. And though Steph was too disgusted by the lot of them to realise it at the time, she was the first one to hope for Steph to reach back, to make the effort few other people ever did.
Steph’s running her fingers across the concrete, drawing little patterns as she goes, as she taps her way slowly down the corridor, trying to stretch her time out here. The sooner she opens that door to the common room, the closer she is to leaving.
On the other hand, eventually someone’s going to walk past and spot her dawdling. And the girls up in the security room are probably already wondering if she’s broken a heel or if her batteries have run out and are even now preparing to jog down, pick her up by both shoulders and carry her into the common room, and that will be slightly worse than just walking in under her own power and having everyone there, everyone who first saw her as a nervous and self-righteous boy, get to see her trying to look like a girl.
It’s the barely audible noise of someone speaking that gets her moving, gets her opening that door and stepping inside, gets her interrupting Leigh as she’s lecturing Ollie on something or other. Gets everyone in the common room looking at her, the way everyone else in this bloody building already has. She stops dead, half-in, half-out, the back of her neck burning, fighting against the urge to fucking run.
Jesus, Steph wishes Pippa were here. But that was her decision, wasn’t it? Pippa’s got the early morning shift, so Steph said they shouldn’t tell her about the whole makeover thing, should let her sleep so she’s not a complete wreck tomorrow.
Steph makes a lot of really fucking stupid decisions.
“Huh,” Martin says, from the corner where he’s reading, and that just makes it worse.
And then Raph, crass to the end, wolf whistles, pulling an embarrassed giggle out of Steph, forcing her back into the girl she saw in the mirror in the salon room, the last time she properly saw herself, except for in the rippled and night-lit windows in the main stairs. The girl who looked, genuinely, like a girl. Not the most beautiful girl in the world, for sure, and visibly trans, for definite, but a girl nonetheless.
Laughing lightly, feeling almost weightless, almost above this whole moment, Steph looks up again, sticks out one of her booted feet for inspection, and scowls with amusement as Raph very obviously allows his eyes to examine her from her toes upwards, lingering on her legs.
“Oh my God,” she says, still laughing, “you’re actually a perv.”
“I am a healthy young person,” Raph says, “of currently indeterminate gender—” he dodges as Harmony, sitting on the other couch with Ollie, throws a biscuit at him, “—and I have conventional interests.”
“You’re a perv,” Steph says, and Raph nods. She’s about to say something else when Ollie unexpectedly and without a word pushes up from the couch and walks out of the room without looking at her. Looking entirely the other way, actually, as if she is a bright and blinding light.
“Huh,” Martin says again.
“You okay there, champ?” Raph says, turning back to look at him.
“Me?”
“Yeah.” Martin doesn’t answer, so Raph shrugs and turns back towards Steph. “Hey,” he says, “are those bagels for us?”
“No,” Steph says.
“Drat.”
Of all the people in the room, Leigh’s the only one not to have reacted yet, and while just sitting there and staring straight ahead is higher up on the healthy scale than leaving in silence, it’s not great, and Steph never wants to be the cause of any of them slipping back into their earlier selves. Or just hurting themselves somehow. So she steps around the end of the couch to where Leigh’s sitting on a couple of bean bags, legs crossed at the ankle.
“Hey, Leigh,” Steph says, crouching down, feeling the shorts tighten around her buttocks and becoming fairly certain that she knows where Raph is looking.
Leigh, expressionless, says, “You’re not going to lap-dance on me, are you?”
“No.”
“Then hi. You look nice.”
“Thanks. Did I do anything to piss you off?”
“Besides walking in here looking like a million dollars?” Leigh says. “No.”
“You know,” Steph says, “I bet Tab could—”
“Stop.”
“Okay.”
“What’s the occasion?” Leigh asks.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I like your hair,” Martin says as Steph stands back up.
“Thanks,” Steph says, swinging her bag of bagels back and forth. “Hey, is Bethany around?”
“In her room, I think,” Raph says.
“Okay,” Steph says. “Okay.” She plays a little more with the bagel bag. “Okay. Cool.”
* * *
* * *
She doesn’t hesitate this time. Doesn’t fuck around in the corridor, admiring the laminated walls, indulging in memories. Just pushes in the door to her room straight away, takes a deep breath, and enters.
Bethany’s not there.
Fuck. Wrong room.
The second time is harder, and keeps Steph out in the corridor for maybe a minute, working on her breathing and trying to keep her suddenly light head from tipping her over, so when she shoves the door open and when Bethany looks up from where she’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, watching some movie or other but apparently not really concentrating on it, since she’s also reading a book, Steph’s stumbling again. Awkward. But that’s okay, because she has an ice-breaker, and though she’s on the verge of seeing stars, she manages to get it out:
“I brought bagels,” she says, holding the bag out in front of her.
“Holy shit,” Bethany says, staring at her. She drops the book, leaps out of bed, and starts groping blindly behind her at the lamp on the table, refusing to break eye contact. It takes three failed attempts before she connects with the switch, which lights Steph up more completely and widens Bethany’s eyes a little more. “Steph…”
“It’s occurring to me, though,” Steph continues, still holding the bagels out, “that I didn’t bring any butter or cream cheese. Or a toaster? I just… They’re in a bag.” She hefts it again. “I, uh, brought a bag of uncut, untoasted bagels. And nothing to put on them.”
Bethany takes a step closer. “Jesus, Steph…” she mutters.
“We could send them up in the dumbwaiter thing. Get someone to toast them for us.”
“Steph,” Bethany says, “shut up?”
“Got it.”
Now Bethany’s right there, with a finger on the sleeve of the leather jacket Nadine put Steph in. Her hand runs reverentially up Steph’s arm, briefly caresses her shoulder, and moves towards Steph’s hair, though Bethany stops short of actually touching it.
“What did you do to your hair?” she asks.
“My— My hair?” Steph says, fumbling with the difficult words. “Oh, Nadine did it. It’s all about volume? It’s supposed to look like Charlize Theron in twenty-fourteen. Or twenty-sixteen? I don’t remember. They were looking over all these different styles, the three of them — it wasn’t just Nadine; Jane was there, too. And Indira. And Christine, but she was, um. Doing other stuff? Anyway, they picked out this one style Charlize Theron had when she was growing it out after having it cut back for a role or something, or maybe just because she wanted to? I’m not all that familiar with Charlize Theron, actually—”
“You don’t have to say her full name every time,” Bethany says, smiling indulgently, her hand still resting lightly on Steph’s neck.
“But it’s not quite like hers, I mean, Nadine said my hair’s probably quite a lot finer than hers, so it comes out less… wavy? I’m not sure. But it’s still thicker than usual, and it’s very nearly curly, and I like it, and I have a tube of the stuff that makes it do this.”
“There’s a tube?”
“Yeah. I don’t have it on me. But it’s cool, you don’t really even dry the hair, you just run this stuff through and scrunch it with your fingers and then just kind of flop your hair about? I’m not sure, but—”
“Steph.”
“Yes?”
“You look beautiful. And,” Bethany adds, her smile broadening, “you’re babbling.”
“Shit,” Steph says. “I am, aren’t I?”
Bethany nods, and Steph can feel her cheeks fucking lighting up. What world has she entered, where Beth’s the one waiting for her to shut the fuck up?
Bethany says, “Missed you today.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“’S’cool. Maria brought me dinner. Curry. And then we just, you know, talked. She wouldn’t say what you were doing.”
“Yeah, about that—”
Bethany surges forward, kisses Steph on the lips, interrupting her. “It can wait,” she whispers, pushing forward again, but Steph’s got her free hand on Bethany’s shoulder now, and she’s pushing back.
“Beth,” she says, “it can’t.”
“But—”
Holding Bethany by her upper arms and looking as steadily as she can down at her, Steph says, “It can’t wait.” And she clearly gets through, because Bethany steps back, nodding, and sits down on the edge of the bed.
“Tell me,” she says.
2020 January 29
Wednesday
She holds her like she’s never going to see her again. Moreover, she holds Bethany like Bethany will, in her absence, collapse back into the man she was before. As if Bethany could shed her outer layers of gentility and whatever aspects of femininity she’s been able to incorporate, returning to the hard iron core that remains Aaron, that always shall remain Aaron. And Bethany might be insulted by that, but she’s prepared to accept that she might be reading too much into a death-grip hug. Maybe Steph just doesn’t want to go outside.
It’s a fair point, actually. Maria’s talked recently about how one aspect of the second year of the programme is essentially counter-programming for the first year, transforming the intake from the institutionalised agoraphobes they have, in some cases at least, been trained to be, into healthy young women who can look at a door to the outside world without feeling their skin crawl and without worrying where the next box of Weetabix is going to come from. Bethany had joked that there will still probably be some part of her that will always feel a little bit reliant on Maria, and Maria had laughed and then straightened her face to say, as clearly as she could, that yes, that’s the point.
You learn to love being a woman — or at least to accept it — because you are showered with praise and affection when you pull it off, the same as you are showered with praise and affection when you display prosocial behaviours. It’s all about becoming the inverse of the man you were before, not just on the spectrum of sex, but in all aspects of yourself. Did Bethany think that Christine, for example, came to the basement as a young man who would consistently and reliably drop everything to solve everyone else’s problems for them? And Bethany had said, what, is that a thing she does? And Maria, who has in their little chats over the last month or so alternately praised Christine and despaired of her, depending on how severely her chronic over-helping is impacting her personal life, had stared open-mouthed at Bethany for several seconds before Bethany’s resolve cracked and she laughed.
Maria beat her with an empty plastic water bottle.
Aaron used to dream of getting out of here, though it was a perfunctory dream. Like everything else about him, it was at least partly a performance. But he would have been able to walk out of here without shame — or with only the usual amount of shame — and reintegrated into what segments of society would have him in full awareness of the role he had to play. And, yes, that role was one that he hadn’t allowed himself to understand how much he hated, it was one that would lead to the slow death of anything good that had remained inside him — she still shudders awake sometimes, having embodied the spectre she imagined, months ago, of the man in his thirties with the suit and the unfulfilling job and the addiction to belittling, harassing and generally being an impediment towards the women in his life — but it was a role he could fit into like a puzzle piece. Just don’t look at the picture.
Now, though. Now, she thinks she can understand any reticence Steph might have about leaving, conscious or otherwise. Neither of them has been at this whole woman thing very long, and though Steph has some natural advantages in that area — starting out trans at Dorley is, as Bethany’s heard the sponsors joke, cheating — they are both amateurs at leaving the safety of the hall. Unless Steph’s had any excursions that Bethany isn’t aware of, then about the only thing that counts is that one brief trip upstairs, where she played Nintendo with a couple of randos from the floors where they let you get an education and also leave if you want. And, wait, how does that fit into the claim that Steph’s been abroad this whole time? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe they’re just going to rely on the queer solidarity of silence; if those two, the girl and the nonbinary person, if Bethany remembers correctly, if they hear that the girl they beat at Episode I Racer, a girl who was clearly early in transition, was supposed to be out of the country at the time, are they going to say, actually, no, the vulnerable queer girl is lying? Bethany doesn’t exactly have much experience at being queer, but she has access to a lot of sponsors who do, and things have been almost casual down here lately, which has led to a lot of lazy, meandering late-night talks about what things will be like on the other side. Based in part on those conversations, Bethany’s expecting at some point to start developing very strong opinions about pockets.
All that aside, if Steph’s nerves are more attributable to a fear of leaving Dorley than to a fear of what Bethany might become-slash-return-to without her, Bethany understands. Probably more than she would have even a month ago. And, yeah, if Aaron were still there, if he clung to the core of her like the last layer of compressed neutrons, like the nanometre-thin atmosphere on a dead star, then having to spend time around normal people, people who haven’t spent the last several months extending to her a benefit of the doubt that she has proven time and again that she does not deserve, would probably bring him back again. But Bethany knows two things: one, that Aaron is gone, properly and completely gone, burned away in her incandescence, blown away into space, is probably a fucking nebula by now, and two, that she’s got to stop listening to space documentaries when she can’t sleep. Because she hasn’t slept, has stayed up most of the night, compressed in Steph’s arms, has been held and held back, has whispered reassuring nonsense whenever Steph has quickened or complained, and that’s been the extent of it.
She’s listened to astronomy videos, and she’s thought.
She’s had a lot to think about.
And she’s super fucked her sleep cycle. What time did she finally wake for good yesterday? Seven, or something? In the evening? God.
“Sorry,” Steph mumbles, trying and failing to roll over, because Bethany is in the way, half-sitting up, the better to keep her phone plugged in and charging while she listens to her space videos and idly browses some of the reading material on the network. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean…” And then she’s silent again, snuffing herself out with a snore and curling more tightly around Bethany. She’s hugging Bethany’s thigh right now like it’s a pillow, and it’s about the most reassuring thing she could possibly do right now, conscious or no.
The truth! Bethany is scared. Just because she’d be insulted if Steph assumed she’d backslide without her doesn’t mean that the fear isn’t there. Oh, she’s not afraid of becoming Aaron again, not after he slid forever into the muck at the bottom of her own personal bog — switching metaphors at last; her English teacher would be proud, right after he got done reporting her to the headmaster for being improperly dressed — but she’s afraid of ceasing to function, of discovering that she really does need Steph, or the presence of her, the promise of her, to get through a day. She’s afraid of becoming like Martin, of turning the fuck off for hours and hours at a time. Shit, she’s seen him stare at the same page for upwards of forty-five minutes, ostensibly reading and possibly thinking but most likely just deactivated, slipping back into his extremely justified self-loathing and fucking bathing in it. Diving into his own personal lake of self-hatred with the same kind of impaired insouciance with which he used to drive cars. Luxuriating in it. Blowing little bubbles.
That doesn’t sound so bad, actually. Even when Steph’s around, the hours tend to drag in this place. Not as much as they did at the beginning, when she was scared basically all the time and when she felt she needed to pull back out the instincts she’d honed at school and then gratefully discarded after leaving for Saints, but still. Skipping a few boring minutes here and there, at least until Steph gets to visit? Not bad.
Because she’s going to visit. She said as much. Her bed will be at this new place, the house that Abby, Shahida and Melissa just moved into, but that doesn’t mean she’s not going to be here basically all the time, once she gets back from London. And probably she’ll stay the night and stuff. So would it be so bad if Bethany just kind of threw her consciousness out there, had it skip like a stone on the surface of a lake, where each impact with the water is when Steph’s around, and the rest of the time…
She tries it. Pauses the space video. Closes her eyes. And tries to switch off.
Within thirty seconds she’s resurfacing, gasping for air, holding Steph with matching desperation.
Jesus Christ.
That sucked.
Turns out that when Bethany tries to empty her mind, that’s when it gets busy. That’s when it starts stepping back through everything she ever did wrong and everything wrong that’s ever been done to her; that’s when it starts looking at the careful corrections that she and Maria have been making — no, just because she was a little bastard at her old state school, her experiences after were not somehow deserved — and layering over them with the old shit that used to preoccupy her. And while she doesn’t think she can ever return to the person who thought that exposing herself, digitally or otherwise, was victimless, was amusing, was something that only an uptight bitch who thinks the world owes her men to fawn over her could possibly find offensive or upsetting, there’s something else from that period that isn’t as far away as she would like.
Aaron was worthless. He knew it. Always did. Probably couldn’t have done half the things he did if he thought anything of himself at all, if the bluster he pulled out like a chemical-soaked rag hadn’t been as artificial as his smile. One of the gifts of Dorley, something that’s come in bits and pieces from Steph and from Maria and sometimes from the others — even a little bit from Indira — is Bethany’s understanding that she has more worth than she has ever claimed before.
Bad son. Inattentive, excitable, attention-seeking, given to pushing other people’s buttons for a moment of their time.
Bad schoolboy. Wrong voice, wrong family, wrong attitude. No connections. A target.
Bad friend. Took comfort from Elizabeth and offered her little in return. Made her work for his friendship and still failed to understand her.
Bad man. This is the part that she finds either difficult to think about at all, or which she stares at unblinkingly, daring it to reassert itself. She remembers all of it with a clarity that seems only to intensify with time, like copying a picture into Photoshop and turning up the sharpness over and over until every edge becomes jagged and every fragment of detail becomes like a scrunched-up piece of paper. When she closes her eyes, when she tries to centre herself, this is what she finds: a view of Aaron’s desk in his old room, with a bottle of something expensive and alcoholic set out with a glass, because while his mother preferred to love some utterly distinct person who was not her son, who shared with him only his name and his shape, his father was even more disconnected, and provided only consumable affection. It’s his first-year room that she sees, and because it was in what was at that point the most expensive dorm on campus, the desk is set up below a large, openable window. Aaron always thought that was fucking stupid, that the rooms in the cheaper places were better, because even though they were smaller, with narrower beds, welded-shut windows, less closet space and paint so thin it seemed almost like whitewash, the desks in the cheaper rooms were set up against the wall. He always used to get a headache from trying to concentrate on the screen of his laptop against the afternoon light streaming in around it. It’s that same over-bright light that she sees now, refracted through the half-drunk bottle and in every drop of spilled liquid.
Aaron didn’t leave his room all that much. Didn’t really have any serious friends. There were the guys in his dorm, the ones with whom he shared a kitchen and a social area, but he avoided them as much as he could. Not their fault: they were perfectly nice, but it was a rich dorm at a relatively prestigious uni, and his accommodations attracted the kinds of accents that Aaron had spent the prior few years running from, hiding from, being held down by. So there he would be in his opulent little rented palace, half-blind from the winter sun and half-drunk on his father’s affection, with nowhere to go but inside his own mind, into his resentments and his fears and his bitterness.
Bethany doesn’t remember which of the girls he first sent a photo to, carefully framed to keep anything that could identify him out of the picture. He had the email addresses of everyone in all of his lectures, and even some of their phone numbers, thanks to that schedule leak in the first semester, and she remembers thinking fiercely of one of the girls in a post-lecture discussion group, a girl who looked at Aaron like he was lower than pond scum. Hitting that send button felt like a victory against his own despair. And after that, it was easier. Didn’t need alcohol, didn’t need excuses or reasons or even really to know her at all. After that, he was on almost a hair trigger. Some girl pissed him off in class? He’d go to the bogs, pull out his phone, snap a pic, log onto one of his burner email accounts, and maybe send it to her friend instead of her. Fucking curveball, bitch! Because, in the end, they were all the same, really.
All women who were better than him.
That first girl, she wishes she knew who it was. She wishes she remembered all of their names, but there were so many, enough that Aaron inevitably fucked up and got caught, got yanked before a disciplinary committee and just as quickly was rescued from it. And the sense of exquisite shame that Aaron experienced when his parents arrived, when his mother glared at him and his father roused himself from indifference long enough to actually fucking wink at him, it was like nothing else. A sensation seared through with both pride and disgust, with the understanding that he was, in a manner unavailable to him at that school, suddenly untouchable, that he could do more or less whatever he wanted. And with the understanding that he was, or would inevitably now become, his father.
She likes to think that if he’d known that the little pantomime of accountability would be the beginning of his end, he would have celebrated it, but it’s not likely. If he had been the kind of person to act on his doubts, to scrub the filth from his soul instead of covering it over with yet more unpleasant acts, then Maria and her people would never have come for him. There is, looking back, a pleasing inevitability to it.
Bad son, bad schoolboy, bad friend, bad man; all gone now, never to return.
Breathing heavily again.
Holding on to Steph.
Bethany surfaces like a drowning woman.
Because she closed her eyes and she let her mind wander and when it caught the scent of her past, she fucking chased it. Embraced it. Bound it to herself. Tucked it under this new skin she’s growing, a network of deep scars, the many wounds she has inflicted all turned back on her.
Remember.
She’s had so many new beginnings, so many new chances, and the only one she didn’t utterly fuck up was the one offered here, by Maria. And Steph leaving, well, that’s kind of a new beginning, too, right? Yes, she’ll be back — a lot, from what she insisted last night, over and over — but this is Bethany’s chance to be her own woman, not just Steph’s Bethany. She’s wanted this, hasn’t she?
She’s been wanting this for a while now. To become her own person, to stop defining herself by the people around her. By her relationship with Steph, specifically.
This is a good thing.
It’s a good thing.
And if she keeps telling herself that, and if she keeps revisiting her past, renewing her revulsion for her former self, then she might make it until morning without going fucking insane with fear.
She’s going to be alone…
Bethany closes her eyes again, and as she does so, she wonders if this is where Martin goes when he seems to be looking at nothing.
* * *
“Three days to voice train Steph.”
“Yes,” Christine says, nodding, still frowning at her laptop screen. She’s been pulling all the resources on voice training she thinks are relevant off the network, so she doesn’t have to deal with the sometimes-patchy wifi down in the basement.
“And then down to London the day after.”
“Uh-huh.”
“For… How long?”
“I don’t know, actually. I don’t expect Steph’s mum to be all, please come stay with us, total stranger who transed my beloved son, this son I love so much that I left him to fall apart on his own, to run down to seventeen quid in a windy flat in Almsworth—”
“You read Pippa’s report on that?”
“Yeah. Oh my God, Paige! The Rileys weren’t and aren’t rich, but they had enough money to send Steph twenty quid now and then. And they just didn’t. I don’t know why she wants to see them so badly.”
Paige smiles sadly. “Yes, you do.”
“Hey. No being insightful at me.”
“It’s my job.”
“I thought you were an influencer.”
“Christine,” Paige says severely, “how long are you going to be away?”
“I don’t have to go.”
“Yes, you do. First, because you already offered. And second… You just do. If you were capable of letting Steph do this on her own, you wouldn’t be the girl I fell in love with.” And Paige pauses to uncross her legs and recross them the other way, all the while tapping her stylus on her phone screen. She’s got one of those truly massive phones, on the basis that she has larger hands — incredibly graceful larger hands, as Christine is always saying; usually a good way to get a kiss out of Paige — and can actually use all that screen space, unlike Christine, who struggles to one-hand her own six-inch device. Paige’s phone came with all the bells and whistles, including a pop-out stylus, which Paige has been known to use as a conversational prop in much the same way Christine’s former self used to use cigarettes; in the same way Christine aches to use cigarettes now, every time things get awkward. Paige also got it because out of all the phones that Dorley can and will harden against intrusion, it has the best camera. The only influencer with a milspec firewall running on the thing she uses to snap outfits for Instagram, probably. “How long?” she asks again, still tapping away.
“I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t think I’ll be sleeping on Steph’s floor — assuming they let her stay the night — so I’ll hop on the tube to Harrow and go see the Chetrys. I’ve been planning to, anyway; this just moves it up a few days.”
Paige nods. “So, will you be packing your dilation kit?”
“I wasn’t going to,” Christine says, and when Paige sighs at her, entirely unsurprisingly, she pushes ahead. “I’m down to twice a week, Paige. Ish. And you know I can stretch that if I need to.”
“What happens if you need to stay longer?”
“I won’t.”
Paige taps the stylus on the phone screen again. “Take the dilators, Christine. Don’t worry about lube, since you can buy that if you need it, but take the dilators. Okay?” Christine’s opening her mouth to disagree, to complain about how much room the kit takes up — which isn’t much, really, but since she became a girl, and more particularly since she became, on pain of being tutted at, Indira and Bea’s kind of girl, adequate luggage space has mysteriously become far more valuable — but Paige holds up the stylus like a finger. “Aaht!” she says, as if Christine is an unruly child trying to steal fresh cookies from the cooling rack. “You need to take your dilators.”
“But—”
“Say you understand and agree.”
“Paige—”
“Don’t argue with me, darling. I’ll win.”
“You mean,” Christine says, setting the laptop aside and hopping off the bed, “you’ll just say you’ve won, and we’ll both take it as read.”
Paige leans forward, presenting her cheek for a kiss. “Exactly,” she says when she receives it. “This way, we save time and get right to the good bit.”
“Oh? What’s the good bit?”
“Tell me, Christine,” Paige says, “which skirts were you thinking of taking?”
* * *
Frankie’s receiving Harmony in her room, and all she can think of as the worried girl lays down the ingratiating tray of standard-Dorley-issue pastries and mugs of coffee is, bloody hell, something terrible has happened or is about to happen; also that she’s been watching too many terrible period dramas with her ample free time if she thinks of opening the door to Harmony as ‘receiving’. Indisputably, she needs to get out more, even if she makes it only as far as the ground floor.
She’s almost disappointed to learn, once Harmony calms down a little — largely through scalding her tongue with her too-hot coffee and near-burning her hands on the mug — that there is no immediate emergency, not unless you count Harmony’s obvious panic.
“I don’t know what to do with him!” Harmony’s saying as she sits on the floor, legs spread such that Frankie might have had a good view of something really tasty, were Harmony not wearing shorts under her skirt. She rests her mug on the carpet between her thighs and plays with the rim, constantly testing it for heat. “I thought he was coming to terms with it, you know? Becoming okay with it all. Or at least not constantly eyeing the nearest thing he could sharpen. Now, though… Steph’s wandering around completely dressed up and made over, and Ollie just leaves the fucking room. Like she’s toxic to even look at. So I went to see him in his room and he was just sitting there. Quieter than usual.” She slides her forefinger around the rim of her mug, back and forth. “Part of me wants to go all hardass on him, you know? Go back a few steps, treat him like he’s hostile, because, God, that’s easier. Zap him, drop him, yell at him. Make him understand that a girl has such power over him. Sometimes I miss it.” Her hands stop still, and Harmony looks like she wants to pick up her mug and throw it. But after staring at it fiercely for a moment, she returns to messing with it. It’s probably a little too hot right now for that to be comfortable, and Frankie remembers with a hint of unease that Harmony has a scar that matches Ollie.
Damn it. Frankie hates it when they cut themselves or burn themselves or start trying to make ropes. She’s going to have to tread carefully here. Her speciality.
“What are you asking, kid?” she says.
“I’m failing him. Every other bastard in the basement is actualising or, at the very least, is acting something like a normal person around the others. Ollie is… Look, Frankie, you’ve seen this kind of thing before, right?”
Frankie laughs in her chest. “You don’t want to know the things I’ve seen, Harmony.”
“You were telling Jane all about them.”
“Jane has a healthy interest. And she can distance herself. It probably helps that Raphael basically called her fat. ”
“Frankie,” Harmony says, and she’s fully cupping her mug now, and wincing at it, “Raph is part of the fucking problem. Ollie hates him, and seeing him going along with it…? Look, just fucking help me, okay?”
“Shouldn’t you be going to the other sponsors with this?”
“No. You understand him. He’s, well, he’s more like the guys you used to have, isn’t he?”
“Harmony, we didn’t have a type of guy. We scooped people up and that was that. We weren’t interested in who they were, just whether we could get away with taking them. As far as we were concerned, if he had a nice nose or a pretty little chin, that was it.”
Frowning, and starting to flush from the heat in her hands — or from the effort of keeping them there — Harmony says, “I thought you took criminals. Men who got arrested for fighting or whatever, like Ollie did.”
“Only because a criminal record helps you get rid of someone,” Frankie says. “We would have taken Jesus if we thought we could get away with it, and if old Dotty thought he’d look good in a skirt.”
Harmony just nods and stares down at her coffee again. She’s poured it black for herself this morning, which is probably why it’s still hot enough to make it painful to hold. Frankie’s gone the whole hog, with lashings of milk and sugar, and if Harmony’s going to be all quiet and tortured for a minute, it’s probably time for Frankie to have some coffee and a pastry, isn’t it? She fetches herself something with raisins in, not bothering with a plate or a napkin — because who the hell cares if she gets food on her dress at her age? — and chews noisily and happily, inspecting her mug as she does so, expecting to find some nonsense bit of Dorley humour and not being disappointed.
On her mug it says:
Is your friend secretly a kidnapper? What your ‘innocent’ friend’s text messages actually mean:
BRB = Balls Removal Bag
LOL = Let’s Orchi Lots (of boys)
TBH = Totally Basement Him
STFU = Sever That Fucking Undercarriage
SMH = Sisterhood of Man-Haters
TFW = This Fucking Washout
IDC = I Do Castrations
BTW = Boys To Women
YOLO = You Obviously Love Orchis
ROFL = Respect Only Female Life
OMG = Ow, My Genitals
Well, that could have been worse.
Strange feeling, to understand only two or three of those abbreviations. Oh, it’s not as if Frankie’s ever been on the pulse of modern society, but that decade-and-a-bit she spent at a nice, peaceful dog rescue has left her both catching up and feeling her age. Sometimes she feels a bit like Val, like she turned away and the modern world went and bloody well modernised without her. When Harmony leaves, Frankie’s going to keep hold of the mug and look up what all that nonsense actually means, and then maybe she won’t feel like quite such an old bat.
“I shouldn’t have bothered you with this,” Harmony says just as Frankie’s taking another bite of her breakfast. “I’m sorry.”
She’s already making to get up, hands on the floor and everything, so Frankie doesn’t wait to swallow. She says, “Harmony, wait,” and she’s pleased that she fires only a few flakes of pastry out onto her lap. Harmony, thankfully, stops in place, which means Frankie actually gets to finish her bite before she carries on. “Look, you think you failed him, right?”
Harmony puts her hands back on her mug, seems disappointed that it’s cooled enough now that it’s not actively hurting her, and drinks from it instead. “Yeah,” she says quietly, after a lengthy sip.
“Bullshit,” Frankie says.
“I’m a failure,” Harmony insists.
“Total bullshit.”
“I’ve got the only suicidal one, Frankie. The only one! And he wasn’t trying to kill himself when we brought him in. Ergo, I’m a failure.”
“He only tried the once,” Frankie points out, quite reasonably, she thinks.
“Jesus fucking—”
“Look,” Frankie says, interrupting her and causing Harmony, who’d started rising again, to sink back down to the floor. “I’ve seen the logs, Harmony. From before you lot tightened security. Had a lot of free time up in Stenordale, and I always hated Patience. Always got bored and started cheating. So I know things. And one thing I know is that this year is off the rails, isn’t it? You threw a genuine trans girl into the mix and she bounced around the basement like a bloody pinball, didn’t she? Bethany, Raphael, that prick Martin… Where d’you think they’d be if Steph hadn’t been down there with them?”
“But why hasn’t Ollie—?”
“Because he’s a normal bloke! He’s not a self-hating aristo with a drinking problem, he’s not a pretty-boy cuntlicker, he’s not a hyperactive little shit or a religious weirdo or— or— What’s the new name that sad-act picked, the one who’s under that bird Tabitha?”
“Leigh?”
“Huh. No wonder I forgot it. See, Ollie’s normal. A regular bloke. One of the future wife-beaters of England, right? A proper lad. He only got on your radar because he got in over his head with his ex-wife; she left him and he couldn’t cope. Brought the whole spousal abuse thing forward a decade, early enough that, I assume is your logic, he’s not quite ossified into it yet. You’re thinking he can be pushed out of it with a few good hard kicks in the head and a bit of a bollock-snip.”
“It’s… more complicated than that.”
“Oh, I know. I read the reports, remember? You’ve got more than a few Ollies still knocking around, paying back society for the crimes they committed when they were men. Castrating it forward, so to speak. He’s just not done yet, Harm. You have to kick him a few more times yet. Or whatever you’ve moved on to now that isn’t kicking.”
“But what about Diana?” Harmony says. She’s still playing with her mug, but it’s mostly empty now, and isn’t burning her. “She actualised already, and she was at least as much of a bloke as Ollie.”
Frankie clears her throat. “Diana’s only holding herself together out of spite. She’s either a miracle or a ticking time-bomb or, I think, probably both. Diana’s building herself a whole new person, and she’s having to do it out there. In the world. Bigger cruelty than anything you can think of doing to Oliver. And that’s before you even start thinking about what ol’ Dotty did to her. S’why it’s good that Monica’s around her twenty-four-seven. Gives her a chance. Ollie,” she finishes, glaring at Harmony, “has a better chance, because he’s got a whole support network and not just a handful of people, and he’s not having to put up with people constantly throwing it back in his face that he’s tall and broad and still has a deep voice. No, you’re doing fine, love.”
“Maybe. I still don’t see it.”
“No maybe about it. I’ve seen Ollies before, remember? And not just on your staff. Most of ours went fucking mad, more’s the pity, but that was the point, so. Just be his hope, yeah? Like Monica is Diana’s. Show him there’s a life.” Frankie shrugs and grins at Harmony. “Might help to tell him about a time you got laid recently. Tell him about some guy that made you squeal.”
“I like girls, Frankie,” Harmony says coldly.
“Even better. So does he.”
“Will you talk to him? He responds to you.”
Yeah, why not? It gets her out of her room. And she likes Ollie, in a way. He’s a bastard, sure, and not in the way she likes her bastards, but he’s already coming to terms with the idea that what he did was wrong and that the path he was on was only getting more fucked up, so, yeah, she likes him well enough, and she likes helping him, too. But she’s got to seem grudging about it; she has a reputation.
“Show me your mug and I’ll visit him again,” she says.
“What?”
“I’ve been trying to get a look at it but your hands have always been in the way. Come on, show me. I like the jokes.”
“Um,” Harmony says, “okay?”
She holds it up, and Frankie reads:
Oops, I did it again
Went out on the town, kidnapped more young men
Oh baby, baby
Oops, they were horrible lads
So I cut off their nads
It was magnificent
“Shit,” Frankie mutters, “that’s going to be stuck in my head all day.”
“It was a group effort,” Harmony says, reclaiming the mug. “We were really bored in the security room one day. Jane lobbied for the last line to be, ‘I’m ontologically innocent,’ but Maria told her it didn’t scan, and that was that.”
* * *
Christine’s morning is turning out to be very organised, which is what she ought to have expected when she accidentally got Paige involved with the jobs she’s taken on, but Christine’s still working on cauterising the part of her brain that convinces her nobody can or should want to help her, ever.
“You’re leaving in three days,” Paige said as she was sorting through Christine’s wardrobe and dressing her for her trip in clothes that would not, as she had already pointed out, make her look as if she were trained by a much less competent feminiser than Aunt Bea. “And I’m going to be fine while you’re away, before you say anything. Until you go, though, I’m going to get in as much Christine as I can.”
So now, bags packed — bags plural, for in addition to a roller suitcase of her own she has one for Steph, too, and backpacks for both of them, in addition to ‘whatever shoulder bag you care to throw your phone into’ — and checklists checked, Paige is rushing Christine through one of her quicker makeup routines, pooh-poohing the idea that Christine could just go down barefaced or with a touch of lippy or something.
“We should stop in the kitchen for coffee or tea,” Christine says while Paige is safely working around the eye area.
“Nope,” Paige says. “No hot drinks while voice training. No cold drinks, either. Strictly lukewarm, if you remember?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“There’s a box of caffeine-free energy drink sachets in the pantry; we’re going to stop off and grab enough for you, me, Steph, and anyone else who wants to join in.”
“Anyone else? You really think—?”
“Yes,” Paige says. “I was talking to Jane last night, and if Raph doesn’t immediately volunteer just to see what it’s like, I’ll…” She flounders, unable to think of something acceptable on which to acquiesce.
“You’ll let me take all the skirts out of my suitcase.”
Pausing with the mascara wand halfway out, Paige subjects Christine to one of those frowns of hers, the ones that crease the spot between her eyes. They’ve remained almost entirely the same through the whole time Christine’s known her, despite everything, despite the surgeries and the hormones and all the other ways Paige has changed, large and small, and Christine is so suddenly heartsick, so mad with herself for volunteering not just to go with Steph to London but to spend any time outside this room at all, that Paige doesn’t get to respond with whatever she was going to say. Her mouth is open to do so, though, and that’s perfect, because it means that Christine can lean forward to kiss her and get a little cheeky with it without having to wait for Paige to open up first; though Paige does have to quickly whip away the hand holding the mascara wand lest Christine wind up with any amusing and unsightly black lines on her cheek.
“The answer,” Paige says when Christine withdraws, “is no.”
Christine’s smiling too broadly, uncontrollably, enough that she can’t stop and wouldn’t want to. “I don’t care, anyway,” she whispers. “For this, I’ll wear all the skirts.”
“Really? Because I have some—”
“Do you want to dress me today, Paige?” Christine asks, still talking softly, still overcome with warmth, and wanting to give to her girlfriend anything that she can to make up for the time she’s going to be away.
Paige smiles in turn, and it’s a lighter smile, more contained than Christine’s — for Paige is always contained, in her way — though with a tickle at the corners of her mouth that suggests she is struggling to keep her composure, to keep playing her role in the game they’ve suddenly started playing. “I always want to dress you,” she says.
Christine kisses her again.
* * *
It’s so strange to be moving out of home. Shahida did it before, technically, multiple times, when she went to uni and when she moved to the USA, but it was always the case that she was based here. Home, as a concept, as an emotional state, has always been connected to the house at Six Oaks, to Mum and Edward, to the place where Gran lived in comfort and love right up to the end. And in that time, as Amy has repeatedly and acerbically observed, her room has changed less than the decor in some stately homes: she still has the photowall that was like the official documentary of her life up to graduation; she still has the My Little Pony pillow, threadbare from much childhood hugging and from the occasional dignified crying jag in adulthood; she even still has the little cubbyhole she made from stacked books next to the bed, where she used to keep her 3DS and a handful of games. It’s a place of safety, a place of comfort.
And they’re packing it all up, the two of them. Shahida and Amy. And Amy is, not too surprisingly, complaining that the job zie volunteered for is making hir break out in a light sweat.
“You’ve barely even packed anything yet,” Shahida points out when Amy slumps onto the bed and falls back onto the mattress, the thin sheaf of old Seventeen magazines slipping from hir grasp and scattering across the floor.
“I’m in hell,” zie moans. “Where’s Melissa, anyway? She’s your girlfriend. Or one of them. Or is there a different word when there are three of you? I don’t bloody know.” Zie’s had hir hands raised above hir head, tapping hir fingers together like zie’s counting on them, but the effort even of that seems like too much, and zie lets them fall to hir side. “Your whateverfriend should be helping you. Not just the random bitch who lives up the road and happens to be available.”
Shahida sighs and, so she can better glare at Amy, puts down the box she’s been packing. It’s desk ornaments, mostly, collected over the years and her constant companions through a decade of homework assignments: finger-trap monsters in all sorts of colours; those odd little fluffy things with the tail-labels they sell at National Trust shops; two slinkies, one in rainbow colours and one in plain silver; a prized Peri Park Polar Bear, and various one-off gifts from her mum and dad and, latterly, from her stepdad, which she used to keep lined up on the edge of the desk, secured with Blu Tack, and which will perform a similar watchful role in whatever desk she ends up claiming at the new place.
“Melissa has work,” she says. “And I asked Rachel; she has work, too. And I start work tomorrow, so I can’t exactly put this off unless I want to wait until the weekend. Which I don’t. I even asked Jane, but—”
“Let me guess,” Amy interrupts. “Work.” Zie pushes up onto hir elbows. “Poor excuse. I had work, too!”
“Yes, but their jobs are all real.”
“Please. Jane works for the hall and Liss got her job through the hall.”
Shahida nods, considering this and conceding. “Okay, yes. Still realer than your job, though.”
“Ugh,” Amy says, flopping back onto the mattress again. “Fine. Why do you have so much crap, anyway? Why couldn’t you have been an ascetic kid?”
“Amy, don’t forget that I’ve seen your room. And I’ve seen what you’re doing to Jane’s room. And—”
“Fine,” zie says again. And, suddenly possessed of fresh energy, Amy bounces up and off the bed, collects up the magazines zie dropped, and bends down to position them carefully in one of the boxes Shahida’s mum’s had prepared since the weekend — always helps to know someone who knows someone who’s big in local removals. “See?” Amy says, hefting another stack of old magazines off of one of Shahida’s shelves. “I’m helping. I’m good. I’m productive.”
“You are,” Shahida says with a smile, and returns to her work.
It doesn’t take long to pack the desk. Her PC will be staying here, since it’s years and years out of date, but she dutifully tidies it away anyway, positioning it sideways against the wall, so when Mum inevitably half-repurposes this space — she’ll never fully take over her child’s room, but Shahida can easily picture it filling slowly with hobbies and household overflow, all positioned such that it can be quickly and easily removed should her daughter decide suddenly to return home — she’ll have ample room on the desk. After a moment’s thought, Shahida fetches her old archive USB stick, returned to its drawer by Mum, and drops it into her handbag; after another moment’s thought, she unlatches the side panel of her PC, reaches around blindly on the shelf above the desk for the screwdriver, and removes the hard drive from the computer. No telling what could be on it; she’ll buy or borrow an adaptor and check its contents in the safety of her new place. The last thing she wants to leave in her mum’s exclusive possession is a hard drive full of what might be porn or, worse, what might be pining over Melissa.
Even worse: there might be Vampire Queens fanfiction on there.
Wow. Yeah. Her new place. A whole new house to inhabit; a whole new set of quirks to discover and to cherish — which floorboards creak in the night, which pipes make the loudest gurgling sound when someone else is showering. She’ll be unpacking most of her things mainly into the third bedroom, since the first will be their shared space and the second will be Steph’s for as long as she needs it, but when she spoke to Abs and Em about this last night, they both agreed that it would be mostly Shahida’s things that will be scattered around. Neither Abby nor Melissa have much stuff with which to fill a house: Abby’s been living in a room furnished for her by Dorley, and so is mainly bringing clothes, and Melissa… Well, all Mark’s stuff was thrown away by her sad excuse for a father, and when she became Melissa and left the hall, she admits herself that she didn’t really live so much as just work, sleep and (sometimes) eat; she complained that four separate Dorley girls gave her more or less the same bollocking Tabitha did about her having accumulated so little stuff that she could walk through the dining hall at Dorley, easily wheeling her entire life along behind her.
That’s something Shahida’s excited to get the chance to do: spoil Melissa. Pamper her. Show her what life can be when you stop running from it. She’s been conspiring with Abby about it, making plans to go clothes shopping, to go furniture shopping, to go to that weird shop in Almsworth with the cat paintings that Pippa was talking about. They’re going to fill Melissa’s life with wonderful things, interesting trinkets, and this one end table Abby saw on the Habitat website. It’s going to be nice for Abby, too, but Abby’s been living light for practical reasons; she’s like a gas, she’s said, in that she will expand to fill all available space, and it’s only circumstances and coincidence that have kept her spaces relatively small up to now.
Amy puts some music on, laying hir phone on the newly cleared desk and kicking them off with Halsey’s new album. As they work, the playlist takes them through Tegan and Sara, SOPHIE, Janelle Monáe, Hayley Kiyoko, and more or less every other queer artist Shahida would expect Amy to have been mainlining since zie started exploring hirself and stopped throwing hirself in front of — and here Shahida is being absurdly generous — perhaps the worst men in the south of England to have somehow avoided being snatched up by Dorley Hall. In fact, Shahida’s been having some thoughts about finding Charlie Carstairs’ current address and quietly suggesting to Indira or Tabitha that she maybe has a rich little scrote who quite possibly might benefit from a spot of active monitoring, a dash of kidnapping, and a soupçon of castration, assuming that he has not, in the time since he was a spectacular arsehole to Amy, cleaned up his act. Shahida doubts it.
“Would have been nice to have Liss here to help with this,” Amy says as they’re nearing the end of the job. “Not because this has been a huge burden or anything,” zie adds, “but just, like, I think this room was kind of important to her.”
“Yeah,” Shahida says, staring at a patch of empty floor. “I gave her a panic attack right there.”
“You know what I mean.” Amy shakes hir head. “Shit. I’m still so annoyed with myself for fucking up with Russ.”
“Don’t be. The way everyone tells it, he’s been a seething ball of mad since before Steph disappeared.”
Amy drops the half-full box zie’s holding on the bed. “Yes, but I should be better than that. After Auntie Miranda… Damn it. Did I tell you she’s been arguing with Mum?”
“No.”
“At least twice a week, they have these long phone calls. And I only hear half of it, but I think mostly it’s Miranda bitching at Mum about whatever’s got her grizzled old goat that day. I swear, I keep expecting Mum to show up in that bloody opinion column.”
“‘Sisters Aren’t What They Used To Be,’” Shahida suggests, and yeah, she can see the page layout clearly: there’ll be the usual smirking headshot of Miranda Woodley-Stone, there’ll be a papped picture of Amy’s mum holding a glass of wine and looking sozzled, and there’ll be four neatly spaced, scandalous and probably libellous columns of total and utter bullshit recapping their entire lives as sisters.
“It’s good,” Amy says, nodding, “but it needs a subheading. Maybe, ‘How the trans lobby drove a family apart.’”
Shahida barks a laugh, and then frowns, an expression Amy quickly matches. “Wow,” Shahida says. “Depressing.”
“I know. Especially since Auntie Miranda and that Bunny woman are always crashing out of society crap. No-one ever puts that in the paper. Except Private Eye, and fuck Private Eye.”
“Agreed. Come on, let’s go load up the car.”
They’re borrowing Amy’s mum’s Range Rover for this, because it has the most cargo space out of anything they have access to without spending money or calling in favours; even then, Shahida has enough stuff that they’re going to have to put the back seats down to get it all in. And it turns out that loading the car is harder work than clearing Shahida’s room, even with Mum available to help them down the stairs with the boxes, to help lift things over the back bumper, and to not let them go until they’ve had a drink and maybe something to eat. Abigail can wait another hour for them, Mum insists, locking up the Range Rover and bustling Shahida and Amy back inside. Unless they want to invite her over for a late breakfast…?
“No,” Shahida says, accepting her fate and her place at the dining table, “she’s working on the spare room today, I think. Making it nice for when a friend comes to stay in a few days.”
“Jane said Abby’ll just fill it with candles,” Amy says, smiling and nodding hir thanks to Mum, who’s just set a plate down in front of hir. “Apparently that’s what her old room was like, before graduation. Just candles, candles, candles.”
Well. Maybe Shahida can spare a few items from her collection for Steph’s room too, then. To fill in the space between the candles.
* * *
Christine knew what she was getting into. She knew that the second she allowed Paige to dress her, that she would be stepping out of her comfortable shorts and not even allowed anywhere near the kinds of sloppy but borderline-fashionable skirts — Paige’s words — she’s let seep into her wardrobe. She knew that Paige would go instantly to her boxes and her racks and maybe even down the hall to the third room she’s claimed for her stuff, now that Vicky has complained loudly enough about never getting to sleep over in the room that’s technically hers, that she would start scrolling through not just her public Instagram posts but her collages, her Pinterest pins, through every scrap of fashion she’s ever collected, to find the perfect outfit.
She also knew that Paige likes it when they coordinate.
So she does her best not to feel selfconscious when they exit Paige’s extra room in contrasting outfits that are far more outfitty than anything Christine would normally choose for herself. Paige has put Christine in shades of brown, to match her hair, with a long-sleeved, wide-necked top speckled with whites and with artfully distressed sections, tears in the fabric that were apparently deliberate, such that when the sleeves reach her hands they hang ragged over her fingers, and over the extra rings Paige insisted she try out, just for today. She’s wearing a skirt in a very similar shade over patterned brown tights and a pair of knee boots that don’t cling snugly to her calves, the way Christine’s always thought boots should, but which seem to be too big; that, Paige had to explain, is the point. Paige put Christine’s hair up in a messy bun, and teased out and lightly curled her bangs. And after declaring her earlier makeup effort unsuitable, she wiped Christine’s face down and redid it in shades of brown and burgundy. She looks amazing — she always does when Paige dresses her — and she also looks rather unlike the girl she’s accustomed to being.
Christine knew this would happen, and she’s almost glad of it. Because the more she’s thought of Steph and Bethany, of both of them being forced out of their comfort zones, of having their development renewed after a period of mild stagnation, the more she’s decided that, yeah, she’s prone to the same thing. Which isn’t news to her, not at all, but it’s a timely reminder that just because she can do a few good looks now and she has skirts in her closet that she slings on sometimes, she can always grow, always become different. It’s something she’s come to treasure after growing up again under Aunt Bea’s care: gaining not just the ability to adapt, but the incentive to.
If you’re always the same person, you’ll become terribly bored.
Paige has dressed herself to match, brown vs blonde, and as such has equipped herself in whites and light greys, with a top cut similarly to Christine’s but without the tears and the glimpses of exposed flesh. Instead of tights, she wears white knee socks that she’s allowed to fall around her ankles. Only the skirt — in the same shade of brown as Christine’s — strays from the white-and-grey colour scheme. She’s wearing her long blonde hair loose, with volume blown into the roots and a little oil scrunched into the ends to make them bounce, and she’s made her face up in light peach, with her eyeshadow, her lips and her blush all matching.
And she insisted on taking a bunch of photos before she let Christine out of the room, too. Christine dreads seeing herself on Instagram; she’s also resigned to it.
They catch some whistles and some admiring comments as they walk through the dining hall to the kitchen, Paige beaming with pride and Christine biting her lower lip and trying to maintain her composure. But, as ever, it’s not bad being seen this way, and she reminds herself as they enter the kitchen and encounter a couple of second years that, yes, this can be just how Christine Hale dresses sometimes. Mostly she’s kind of a tomboy, kind of a shorts-and-shoes-and-out-the-door girl, but sometimes she can be this, too, and it can be as much a part of her as all her crappy tank tops.
“Why are we in the kitchen again?” Christine says as Paige pauses on her tiptoes, palms slightly spread at her sides, thinking.
“No hot or cold drinks, remember?” Paige says, lightly frowning again.
The pinch between her brows… Christine stares at it for a moment before she remembers that she should probably answer. “Right,” she says.
Paige lowers from her tiptoes, says, “Pantry,” and turns in the appropriate direction, opening the door and disappearing inside. Christine doesn’t follow because there’s not all the world’s room in there, and she doesn’t want to trip over Paige and end up with potatoes all over her nice outfit.
“Hi,” she says sheepishly to the other occupants of the kitchen, raising a hand with fingers caught in the fabric of her sleeve and giving them a little wave.
“Oh my fucking God,” Faye says. “You look incredible.”
“Yeah,” Rebecca says.
“Paige’s clothes, not mine,” Christine says, her hand still raised. She shrugs lightly, like it’s no big deal. Because it isn’t, or it shouldn’t be.
“No shit,” Faye says.
“Effie!” Rebecca scolds her, before turning back to Christine. “What’s the occasion?”
And that is the thing that finally makes Christine blush with embarrassment. Not the outfit or the whistles or the comments, but the question, because she’s got to answer it with, “Um, I was kissing Paige and got carried away and asked her to dress me?”
Rebecca instantly goes starry-eyed. “That is so romantic!” She spins around on her dining chair. “Dress me, Effie.”
Faye nods and looks up at Christine. “How much denim do we have access to here? Do we have any overalls?”
“I have no idea,” Christine says. “Army uniforms, though. We have plenty of those, I think.”
“Ew,” Rebecca says, screwing up her nose.
“No army uniforms. Check.”
They each lean forward and start talking quietly, quietly enough that Christine can almost not make it out if she tries. She considers putting the kettle on just to make a little more noise, but before she can, Paige emerges from the pantry with a large cardboard box held in both arms and sweeps immediately past Christine, preventing her from looking inside. Christine waves to Faye and Rebecca again and rushes out of the kitchen, following Paige, who is now halfway to the stairs down to the basement, though she diverts herself as Christine catches up to a table in the middle of the dining hall which has been set up with plastic cups and water bottles. She scoops several of each into the box and continues.
“Don’t you need help carrying that?” Christine says.
Pausing briefly with her foot on the first step down, Paige smiles at Christine and says, “I’m so much stronger than you.”
Christine’s got to rush to keep up again. “We never tested that,” she says as she trots down the stairs after Paige.
“I’m taller.”
“True, but—” And then Christine’s got to stop, because she finally put together why Paige might know about a mysterious box of energy drink sachets, and why she might be trying to hide them from Christine until the last moment. “Paige, that’s not the bloody gamer juice, is it?”
“It’s called Pro Fuel,” Paige says, turning finally to talk to Christine and leaning delicately against the stairwell wall with one foot, “and it’s fine.”
It was one of the first promotional items Paige received after her Insta started getting big. Hopelessly mistargeted, of course, but it gave the girls something to muck around with for an afternoon before Paige boxed it all up and stored it somewhere. In the main pantry, apparently.
“It’s vile,” Christine protests.
“You only tried the spiced lime flavour. And I agree: that one was terrible. I threw all those away.”
“So,” Christine says, stepping close enough to look in the box and pulling out a random sachet, which she holds at arm’s length, “you’ll vouch for Epic Banana flavour?”
“Yes.”
“Paige, I don’t think we should be giving anyone in the basement anything called ‘Epic Banana’. It might give them unrealistic expectations. And isn’t this all way too much for just you, me and Steph, anyway?”
Paige laughs lightly, again igniting within Christine the kind of feeling that leads to getting dressed up. “Yeah, right,” she says, and then turns on her heel and starts off down the stairs again.
When they hit the bottom of the stairs and Christine opens the door to the main basement — because Paige’s hands are full — Christine’s heart sinks: they’re all in the common room. All of them. Well, almost all; Adam’s in his room with Edy, she’s pretty sure. And Ollie’s probably still asleep. But the rest of them are here. More than half of them. Which, shit. She’d hoped she could just nip along to Steph’s room, grab her, and take her somewhere upstairs, having to face maybe only Bethany while wearing all her Paige-induced finery. Steph’s sitting on the couch — upside-down, with her legs up in the air, which is for some reason such a comfortable way for her to sit that she regularly adopts it — and Bethany’s sitting next to her as usual. But while Christine’s become recently very used to seeing Bethany napping or at least behaving almost sedately, here, she’s the one talking, and all eyes are on her.
“I’m serious, it was literally the worst,” she’s saying as Christine pushes the main door open. Pippa and Maria are sitting together on the couch by the door, and Christine catches Pippa’s eye as they enter and as Pippa looks up from her book. Maria, though, has her eye on Bethany, and only half-acknowledges them. Fair enough: she’s probably going to be watching her charge carefully over the next few days, monitoring how she responds to Steph’s upcoming departure. “I was in there easily ten minutes. Ask me why. Leigh? Ask me why.”
“No,” Leigh says.
“Why?” Raph asks.
“Okay,” Bethany says, “so you know how sometimes you can have a poo that’s like, a load-bearing poo, like it’s this hard little bullet of shit that feels like it’s stuck in the way of the rest of it, and you just know that if you can squeeze it out, if you can work your arse muscles just right and fire it at the bowl, everything else is just going to flow like it should?”
“I just had breakfast, Beth,” Leigh says.
“As did I. Which is why, I think, I needed a dump. New food pushing out the old.”
“That’s not how— Fuck it. Never mind. Tell me, Bethany Erin Holt, about your poo.”
“Thank you, Leigh Middlename Schroeder—”
“Why is it that ‘Leigh’ out of your mouth sounds like ‘wanker’ out of anyone else’s?”
“Because you are a very uncharitable young lady,” Bethany says. “Can I finish my poo story?” Leigh, rolling her eyes and resting her head on the back of the couch, waves a hand to say: continue. “So I’ve got this rock-hard lump of shit,” Bethany carries on, while Leigh picks up a spare cushion and uses it to cover her own face, “like a diamond in the middle of a coal vein, you know, like the thing that clogs up the teeth on the big coal mining machines.” Christine could swear that Leigh whispers something to the effect of, that’s not how that works, either, but Bethany ignores her. “And I’m clenching and I’m pushing really hard and I’m really going for it, you know, and I’m making real progress and it’s going really well and then, right, there’s like this escape of arse air, like not even a fart, just like a valve goes pop and the air rushes out, and suddenly there’s no pressure, and the shit lump just retreats halfway up my colon and I have to start all over again. Don’t you just hate that? It’s like failing a quicktime event.”
Beside Christine, Maria snorts.
“Paige,” Christine whispers, “if she wants to come to voice training, I’m blaming you.”
“Bethany,” Leigh says from under her cushion, “why do you tell us these stories as if they’re relatable? What do you expect us to do with this information? Have a discussion about the times we spent ages on the bog, too? Are you hoping we’ll humour you with a debate on the mechanics of stopped-up arseholes?”
“It’s not very ladylike,” Martin says. “You’ve got to admit.”
“I totally relate,” someone says, and it takes Christine’s bewildered brain a moment to realise that it was Paige who just said that, and she’s stepping forward with her Instagram outfit and her big box of Pro Fuel sachets, right into the line of sight of the motley crew assembled on the couches around the TV. “Happened to me just last week.”
“See?” Bethany says after a moment’s stunned pause. “I knew Paige would support me.”
* * *
This morning, after very little sleep, some odd nightmares revolving mostly around failing to rescue Steph from being eaten by wolves with curled and moussed ginger hairdos, and an extremely good fresh bagel with cream cheese courtesy of Pippa, Bethany decided on her new course of action. Which is fairly similar to her previous course of action — become a girl, with supervision — but which comes with a brand-new attitude, and that attitude is: hot girl shit. When Steph comes back from her short time away, she will be astounded by the progress Bethany’s made. She will look at the girl she left in the basement and she will react the way Bethany did that one time when she came out of her room, saw Steph and fell on her toothbrush, only it’ll be better, because they’ll get to have sex about it instead of getting all identity crisis-y.
So when Christine and Paige rock up, Bethany plans to seize her chance.
And, wow, they look amazing, so that’s some inspiration right there. Both of them do, which is— Okay, so Paige always looks stunning. It’s the main thing people ever say about her, though in Bethany’s limited experience with her she’s also found her to be sweet and sort of quietly funny sometimes. She’s the rake-thin one, small up top but dressing like she’s absolutely fine with that, and with her height and her cheekbones and her general thinness she’s the Dorley girl Bethany’s seen who could most be a model. She’s supposedly had extensive work done on her face; Maria said once that of all of them, she’s one of the most immune to detection, because she looks absolutely nothing like her former self. And that’s actually sort of cool, right? To go under the knife and come out entirely different? Bethany might want that for herself, actually. It would help with the whole ‘new person, new woman’ thing she’s working on.
Christine, though. Christine’s a surprise. She’s a pretty girl in general. Not catwalk pretty, but she’s the girl you might cast in a made-for-streaming romantic comedy about a guy who spends the whole movie trying to date the head cheerleader and then, hey, at the last minute, it turns out that his frumpy childhood friend was his soulmate all along, and that if you just take off her glasses, style her hair and put her in a prom dress, she looks damn good. Christine’s that girl. Raph, maybe, is the lead guy, because Bethany’s honestly always thought he looks like the kind of guy who bursts into song on the Disney Channel; less so after a few months of estrogen, sure, but at the start? Yeah, pretty boy. Didn’t make him any less of a bastard, but Bethany, looking back, is better at seeing out of Aaron’s eyes than Aaron was.
Who’s the head cheerleader in this situation? Not Paige, she’s too much like a model. Harmony, maybe, if she were younger and if she dyed her hair blonde; she’s got the right kind of nervous energy. Or Pippa, if she grew her hair out.
What the fuck is Bethany even doing right now? Fantasy casting a teen movie? She really didn’t get much sleep. She focuses back on Christine, who right now is talking quietly with Steph, and it’s actually insane how good she looks today, how that skirt clings to her thighs in a way that inspires something within Bethany that might be lust or might, just might, be a twinge of jealousy, because suddenly she can imagine what it might be like to walk out of here looking like that. At least for today, she’s shed her whole girl-next-door thing, with the shorts and the camisoles that she usually bums around in, and she’s handling herself differently, too; normally, when she wears her stuff that is halfway between sportswear and sleepwear, she gives Bethany the impression that she might at any point have to excuse herself from the conversation to go finish painting the deck. (Bethany doesn’t actually know what a deck is, but season three of Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues has a subplot in which Brit’s older brother is made to paint a deck as parental punishment for getting caught with drugs, so what Bethany knows about decks is that they’re associated with the home and that you paint them.) Today, Christine’s like Steph was last night: new and different and recontextualised and stupid hot; all the hotter, actually, for it being a departure from her usual presentation.
Jesus. Maybe she should concentrate, because Steph and Christine are breaking up from their whispered conversation now and probably something is about to happen that Bethany should pay attention to.
“Hey,” Steph says, hopping up to sit on the edge of one of the metal tables like she’s a camp counsellor about to get really down with the kids. “Can I just talk to everyone? Two minutes.”
The room, which wasn’t exactly bustling, quietens down, with even the sponsors on the couch by the door turning politely to listen. And then, because Steph doesn’t immediately launch into the whole ‘I’m leaving’ confessional, Raph cups his hands around his mouth and yells, “Take ’em off!”
“Die horribly, Raph,” Bethany says, out of solidarity and general malice.
“Okay,” Steph says, “the thing is… I never actually came out and told all of you this, but I think you all picked up along the way that, uh, I’m, um, well—”
“We know you’re trans, Steph,” Leigh says. “We know about Melissa.”
“Do we?” Raph says.
“Yes. We do."
“She’s trans?” Bethany exclaims, putting her all into it.
“Shut up.”
“I genuinely didn’t know,” Raph says. And then he frowns. “At least, I don’t think I did.”
“Pay attention to what’s going on around you for once.”
“No.”
“Steph,” Leigh continues, “we—”
“Wait,” Raph interrupts, “yes, no, I knew. Jane told me.” He claps his hands together, satisfied, and winks at Bethany with the eye Leigh probably can’t see. “Go on, Leigh.”
Leigh sighs heavily, though she doesn’t put the cushion back on her face, which is a shame. “We know about Melissa,” she repeats, sounding like when the school janitor explained to the cheer squad in Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues that have to take down every banner that is supportive of Blake by 6pm on Friday and they have to get the keys back to her by 6:30pm so she can hand over to the night staff and not get fired. “We know you stumbled into this place and got kidnapped because you know too much. Incredibly stupid move, by the way; if you’d been a little more careful, you could have rescued all of us.”
“Oh?” Raph says, setting his phone aside and sitting forward. “Would you like to be rescued?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Hey,” Steph says, “uh, hi? Trying to say something here.”
Leigh waves a hand. “Yeah, go on.”
“Take ’em off?” Raph says.
Bethany quickly looks back from Steph to see if Martin’s going to say something — and to check that he’s even awake. He is, but he’s silent. He’s leaning on his knees with his book tented on the floor next to him, and he’s watching Steph avidly. This fucking guy; the only one of them to get weirder after all this time underground.
Steph continues. “You’re all dead, right? Or disappeared, or whatever, as far as the outside world is concerned. I’m… not.”
“We know this, too,” Leigh says, and when Raph frowns at her, she adds, “Seriously, don’t you listen?”
“I, um, may not have told everyone,” Steph says, at which Raph just shrugs. Bethany can’t stop herself from checking on Martin — it’s becoming a minor obsession; maybe understanding him can be her project for while Steph’s away, alongside all the girl shit — and he’s smirking, facing down into his lap to halfway hide it. “But yeah. I asked Pippa and she asked Aunt Bea and we agreed that my story is that I’m travelling. I was failing uni, is the thing. Or I wasn’t quite failing yet, but I was going to, and I was falling apart, so we agreed. That would be my story. I’d go abroad to find myself and I’d send letters home so my family wouldn’t worry.” Steph swallows. “So my little sister wouldn’t worry.” Raph mouths, She’s got a sister? to Leigh, who sticks two fingers up at him. “But the problem with that is… Okay, so now I’ve got to explain this whole other thing. This virus thing.”
“I can take that, Steph,” Maria says, “if you want.” She’s half-standing from the couch by the door, and when Steph considers it for a moment and then nervously nods, Maria pushes all the way up and walks out into the middle of the room, positioning herself just behind Bethany’s couch. She leans on the back of the couch with both hands, and Bethany decides to take advantage, covering one of Maria’s hands with hers. Maria looks down at her, smiles, and then launches into her explanation of this new SARS-type virus.
Raph, predictably, claims not to have heard of SARS, which causes Leigh to sigh even more theatrically than before and throw up her arms in frustration, appealing silently to Maria as if she’s the arbiter of consensus reality, as if she has the ability magically to force knowledge of recent events, the outside world, and the history of the twenty-first century straight into Raph’s brain. And if anyone could do that, Bethany decides, it’s Maria.
* * *
“You’re leaving?” Raph says, raising his voice so high that it clips into falsetto a little. Which, yeah, Christine’s going to have to address that if he does, like Paige insists, want to sit in on voice training. No falsetto!
Steph, still sitting awkwardly on the metal table, swings her legs a couple of times and says, quietly, “Yes.”
“Like, leaving leaving?”
Steph nods. hugging herself, and Christine — feeling that if there is any moment at which she can most usefully take over, it’s this one — steps up, taking up the space that Maria vacated when she finished her mini-lecture about SARS 2 or whatever they’re going to end up calling it. Shooting a soft smile at Steph, she goes over the whys and the whens. Three days including today, was the decision; Steph leaves the hall on Friday afternoon-ish after being (fictionally) driven back to Almsworth from the airport by one of the Shahida-associated girls; Christine forgets which one. Then, after dumping all her possessions at the house around the corner—
“And, really, it’s just around the corner,” Steph puts in. “It’s probably slightly closer than those new dorms on the other side of campus. I’ll be visiting all the time.”
“So why are you moving out, then?” Raph asks. He’s lost some of his former playful attitude and seems upset. Or thrown, at the very least.
“Because this place is a huge secret,” Martin says in his quiet, lilting voice. It feels like every time Christine hears him speak, he’s lost a little more of his accent, such that it’s now eerily like hearing herself from three years ago coming out of someone else’s mouth. Public school left Christine with an accent that trended aristocratic — more so than her parents’ — and when she started at Saints, she did her best to modulate her rich-boy voice towards something less home counties and more north London. Martin’s on the same path, and speedrunning it. “We’ve kidnapped somewhere around eight young men during a floating late August to early October timeframe every year since— When was it?” he asks, leaning up from his bean bag chair to look directly at Christine, who is the only sponsor-type person in his eyeline. “Two-thousand-five?”
“Uh,” Christine says, still processing both that she thinks this is the most words she’s heard out of him ever, including all the time she’s spent covering shifts in the security room, and that he said ‘we’ and not, for example, ‘they’ or ‘those bitches’. “About that, yeah.”
“It was shakier in the early years,” Maria says, sounding strange. When Christine turns around to find out why, she turns out to have retreated to the couch by the door and cracked open a yogurt; a plastic teaspoon is sticking out of her mouth, and she’s speaking around it. “We didn’t really get to a regular cadence until oh-seven. Or thereabouts.”
Christine takes the opportunity to lock eyes with Pippa, who seems just as baffled by this conversational turn. They share shrugs.
“Okay,” Martin says, and all heads turn back towards him, “oh-seven. But it’s not just about those disappearances. Pamela told me that Dorley Hall was run by someone else before Aunt Bea, and that they ran it with an eye to a more opportunistic and less altruistic purpose.” Leigh laughs sarcastically; Martin carries on. “So you have an unknown number of people who have been kept under here who just never came out again, and a reasonable estimate of the number of people who did since oh-seven. And each one of those people has a past connected to Dorley Hall. Secrets that cannot be revealed, because they are all connected.”
“What’s your point, Martin?” Raph says.
“My point is that the secrets are all connected to us now, too. When we leave this place, we’re not just going to have to pretend to be women, we’re going to have to pretend that we were never kidnapped at all. That Dorley Hall was, maybe, let’s see, a place where we visited friends sometimes, or the dorm we stayed in while we completed our degrees. And Steph, if she’s leaving, has to seem like she was never kidnapped. She has to seem like she really was backpacking around Europe. And girls who take a year out from their degree to go backpacking don’t come back to live in dorms again halfway through the academic year.”
“Is it really that important? She can’t just show her face and then come back here?”
“No, actually,” Maria says, standing again, her yogurt apparently done with. “Steph has a family and friends outside the hall. They’re going to be checking up on her. And I happen to know that one of your professors, Steph, wants to have a word with you when you’re back in the country.”
“Oh, shit,” Steph says, “really?”
“Just to check in. To make sure that when you come back to finish your degree, you give it your all. She might suggest some catch-up tutorials for the summer. Maybe some regular meetings.”
“So does that mean…?”
“Yes. You’ll be coming out to the university administration, too.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Steph mutters.
“Unless you don’t want to. If you want to boymode at uni for a while, we’ll support you. It’s not exactly out of the ordinary for a young trans girl to—”
“No. God, no.”
“It’s Professor Dawson, isn’t it?” Christine says.
“Yes,” Maria says.
“It’ll be fine. She’s really nice, Steph.”
“She might be nice to you,” Steph says, looking not quite at Christine. “You didn’t spend a year blowing off her every request to come see her.”
“And now you have a marvellous excuse for your delinquency,” Maria says. Steph looks blankly at her for a moment. “You were dysphoric,” Maria adds.
“Oh. Right. Yeah. I was, actually.”
“You see? It’s convenient and real.”
Bethany, leaning over the back of the couch, raises a hand. “Who here remembers what we were talking about?”
“I’m voice training Steph,” Christine says before anyone can say anything dubiously clever. “She’s got to live outside the hall for a while, and she’s going to be a girl while she does it, and all of this is happening for reasons you are welcome to discuss at length with your sponsors, so I’m going to give her some tips to help her be more confident. Okay?” She nods, smiling professionally. “Okay. Steph? You wanna come to the lunch room?”
“Hey,” says Raph as Steph hops down off the metal table and meets Pippa, who is walking towards her, “are these private lessons, or…?”
Christine doesn’t need to turn around to know that Paige is smirking at her. She can feel it. Tiredly, she says, “You wanna learn to speak like a girl, Raph?”
“Yeah. Duh. I mean, I’m going to have to learn eventually, right?”
“True. So! Steph, Raph, come to the— What, Bethany?”
Bethany’s raised her hand again. “Can I come, too?”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Christine mutters, looking down at the floor and pinching the bridge of her nose. “Okay! Anyone else?”
She does her best to not be surprised when Martin stands, shrugs at her, and starts making his way towards the lunch room, following Paige, who is presumably going to start preparing drinks for everyone. And then Raph and Bethany are both pulling on Leigh, who is the only one still sitting.
“C’mon,” Bethany says. “You know you want this, Leigh.”
“Fuck off,” Leigh mutters. She’s keeping her head down and she seems preoccupied with her hands.
“You really want me to get ahead of you on this? You want Raph to be better at this than you? Martin? Those fuckers don’t even have girl names yet.”
“Neither do I.”
Unexpectedly, it’s Raph who squats down in front of Leigh and looks very seriously up into her face. “Look,” he says, “we all know your deal, okay? And you know mine and you know hers and we all know Martin murdered the shit out of someone, so why are you acting like it’s embarrassing that you want this? Why do you give a shit what Bethany thinks? Or what I think?”
“I don’t,” Leigh growls.
“Oh, get up, Leigh,” Raph says. “You can hit a punching bag about this later. And I’ll be up there doing Steph’s yoga moves and you can hit me too about it if you want, but just stop fucking around, okay?”
“The man’s got a point, Leigh,” Maria says. “Christine’s got three days for this. Three days. Now, I’m sure Tabitha could teach you, but—”
“Okay!” Leigh snaps, and then recoils, which, yeah, Christine gets that, because her voice went really deep on that one. “I don’t know how you’re going to make someone who sounds like me sound like you,” she adds, suddenly looking up and glaring at Christine, “but if you think you can help me, fine.” She stands quickly, almost pushing Raph aside. “Knock yourself out.”
“That’s the spirit!” Bethany says, and then she dodges away when Leigh turns her glare around to face her. She rushes to join Steph and Pippa in the lunch room.
Leigh’s next, and as she passes her, Christine says, “You’re not the deepest voice I ever trained.” It’s not completely honest, because she didn’t actually train Julia, but she was there for it. She was around as Julia raged in her second-year room, throwing crap at the walls, trying over and over to get her vowels into the front of her mouth, sobbing in Yasmin’s arms. She was around when Julia finally cracked it, when she walked out of her room one day with Yasmin and greeted the rest of them in a voice that sounded reedy and raspy and a little sore, but that sounded nothing like her old voice.
“We’ll see then, won’t we?” Leigh says.
Raph’s the last to enter, having had to steady himself and brush himself off after Leigh almost collided with him. He smiles at her as he approaches, and says, “You look nice today.”
“Thanks,” Christine says, and stops herself from rolling her eyes. Instead she jerks her head sideways at the door to the lunch room. “I’ll be in there in a sec. Go get yourself a cup of gamer juice.”
* * *
“One, two, three!” Three strikes, one to the wrist to disarm, one to the solar plexus to stagger, one to the— “Fuck!”
She persuaded Haley to let her set up a few things in the back room of the safe house, the room with only one window, the room farthest from the front door — the room that it’s least likely any casual visitor, nosy neighbour or package delivery person will stumble into — because she got to hunt down one guy and they didn’t even fuck and now she has all this energy that she doesn’t know what to do with. She’s been up since five in the morning and she’s spent the last hour setting everything up, changing into her exercise gear — jogging stuff; plausibly deniable — and getting ready to just bloody well go for it.
But now she’s missed the throat on the practice dummy and hurt her wrist. Not badly, but it’s a temporarily disabling injury, the kind you seek to inflict on your attacker — or your victim — to ensure they can’t, for example, pick up a gun or a blade, to be sure that if they succeed in getting their hands around your throat, at least one of them will be weak. And she’s gone and done it to herself, because she’s distracted and she’s horny and she’s absolutely fed the fuck up with bloody Florida!
Most of America isn’t like this. There are vast swathes of it that consist of essentially nothing, land the settlers stole and then sort of shrugged at, because they didn’t understand how to keep bison herds, or— Shit, is that right? Were there Native nations who kept bison? She’s fairly sure there were — might still be, for that matter — but her schooling was inexplicably short on Native American history and long on the classics, on Latin, on cricket; though, okay, fair’s fair, a cricket bat swung at the right height will do in just about anyone you care to name. But no, most of the USA is fine for her purposes, packed with passably entertaining cities and men to use and women to be used by. Florida, though. The weather sucks and the TV news sucks even more, and a good eighty percent of the people here are gainfully employed by the enemies of Elle Lambert. Megachurches and Smyth-Farrows and petty little kingdoms, oh my. Bloody Florida.
She’s being unfair. There’s good nightlife out there, to be sure. But if she’s not allowed to so much as go sniffing for it, how can she know?
God. Sometimes Haley pisses her off so much. Don’t go out, Cora. Don’t have fun, Cora. Don’t kill that guy who looked at me funny just to impress me, Cora. The bitch has everything she could possibly want in the world — a pretty head on her shoulders, a razor-sharp mind to go with it, a right hook that could decapitate God, and a legal identity — and what does she do with her life? She’s chosen to bum around America with Cora and her purpose-built pussy when she could be doing anything. She got herself shackled to Cora’s poor impulse control, and now she’s being wasted. Just for that, Cora wants to kiss her and kill her in equal measure. Fortunately for Haley, Cora’s likely, in her special case, able only to manage the former. They’ve sparred: Cora’s win rate is not impressive. Because Cora’s an ambush predator, and Haley’s the kind of creature who could catch a snake by the neck mid-strike, and hold it there, paralysed and helpless, stare at it, ask it searching questions, tease it with the proud curl of her lip and the low thrum of her voice, and…
Bloody hell. Now Cora’s got to change out her underwear, too.
Slumping against the wall and letting herself slide down all the way to the floor — causing the damp spot in her knickers to spread uncomfortably, but fuck it, she doesn’t care about that — Cora lands with a bump, curls her legs in, hugs her shins, and lays her head down. Making of herself the smallest thing she can, so that when and if she wakes Haley with her bullshit, she might have a small chance of hiding that she’s crying.
She shouldn’t desire her so. She shouldn’t. It’s not how any of this is supposed to work. Did Haley work on her so hard and for so long to make this? This thing that can barely keep its shit together just from a little boredom?
At times like this, she feels as if she can see herself. And the girl huddled around herself in the corner of the little practice space at the back of the safe house is composed not just of the pathetic creature of the now, but of everyone she has been in her life: the difficult, undisciplined and fatally bored child; the violent little bastard who spends half his time being privately tutored because he can’t be left alone with the others; the ragged and desperate scrap of a thing, barely no longer a boy, being held down by a man he would eventually and delightedly murder; the lean, vicious man with the scars on his knuckles. And then, after him, there’s Dorley Hall, and there’s Peckinville, and there’s Haley and Elle and there’s hope…
She wants to go home. She wants to see England again. She wants to be useful again. She wants no longer to be the cause of Haley’s exile. She wants no longer to be the failure that Haley must watch with one finger on the kill switch. She wants to wrap her hands around the throat of every wastrel aristocrat and every belt-wielding schoolmaster who ever created boys like her, and squeeze until blood and salt water mingle in her hands. She wants to prove herself to Elladine Lambert, the upstart bitch with the right idea. And she wants to have one last chance at being normal. She wants to have a name and a passport of her own. She wants that boring life, that nine to five. And if it is death, then maybe she wants to die.
She wants, more than anything else, to be over this stupid little fit she’s having. She wants, when Haley wakes and comes to join her, to make a stupid joke and have her roll her eyes at her. She wants to smile and flirt and push it a little too far and be told in no uncertain terms that she’ll eat a bullet if she doesn’t shape up. She wants to be Cora again. Not this cluster of instincts, this miasma of all the effluence of the twin noble lines that made her.
Cora squeezes herself tighter, and tries as best she can to muffle the thing building in her throat that wants desperately to be a scream. In her efforts, she shakes and she wheezes and the wet patch between her legs continues to spread.
Probably a good thing, overall, that she doesn’t really exist. Else this would be really bloody embarrassing.
* * *
The kids are voice training in the lunch room and, Christ, it’s really sort of adorable, isn’t it? That Christine girl, dressed up like someone off the internet, showing them all how to say their vowels and all that in the right place, getting them to do the bit where you start out singing and then you turn it into a spoken sentence that, as if by magic, doesn’t sound like a bloke saying it. They have special phrases, too, with strategically chosen sounds.
One of the girls talked about that once. Said that the thing from My Fair Lady, that line the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, is actually really effective, because it’s all these strong a sounds, it’s a sentence you can’t be lazy about, that you can’t just mumble in your throat or whatever, not if you want any volume at all. You’re forced to project it, and it shows you how to say everything else. Worked it out from first principles, she said, just from seeing the film so many times. Her mum’s favourite, she said. Fucking hell, and she was a pretty one. Took to it like a baby bird takes to flying.
Smyth-Farrow killed her. Smyth-Farrow the elder, that is. Val will have known her. Probably remembers her name, too, which is more than Frankie can manage.
“Shit,” she mutters to herself, and leans her shoulder against the concrete.
“Frankie?”
Val’s going to help kill the Smyth-Farrows, she reminds herself. Val and Elle and the others, maybe some of these soldier women or the mythical Lambert assassins. Those nepo baby bastards are going to get their throats cut before any of this shit can get properly started up again, before anyone else can raise something beautiful specifically so they can watch it writhe, watch it beg, watch it die.
“I’m okay, Harmony,” Frankie says. She’s heavy breathing a bit, and feeling it all through her lungs and down her back, like she does when this shit comes to get her. Heavy breathing, but she’s in her sixties, isn’t she? Practically everything makes her chest hurt. Slicing the bloody bananas for her stupid healthy Dorley brunch makes her chest hurt. She’ll be fine. “Come on,” she adds, pushing away from the wall and marching on down the corridor again, “let’s go wake the little arsehole.”
“You really think this’ll help?” Harmony asks, trotting along behind her.
“Yeah. It’s genius. Trust me.”
What she’s going to do is, she’s going to teach Ollie to play chess. Zero chance anyone ever bothered before, right? And it’s good for teaching patience and analytical thinking and also you can do a bit of checkers after if you want a bit of fun. It gets the brain working, and Ollie’s been suffering from an acute lack in that area lately. He’s a bloke, and he’s been used to constant stimuli: beer and football and a bit of a fight, and all that. She’s going to tell Ollie the same thing she told Harmony, that she got her start with chess when she was here, that she played against one of the girls when she was down here and that it helped her keep her head in the game, helped her survive what was being done to her. Total shite, of course; she learned at the dog shelter up in Newcastle. After hours, mostly. Playing against the computer. It was boring and lonely but it was also engrossing, especially when she started getting good enough that she could beat even the high settings with decent regularity. Perfect for someone whose life had been, until six months before, an endless whirlwind of cruelty (hers) and terror (the girls’; also hers, a bit).
Helpful for Ollie to believe that she learned with a girl from here, though. The last story she told him, it seemed to really get to the heart of him, seemed to encourage him, almost. Like he could understand Kelly in a way he still doesn’t understand the others here.
Hence the chess story. And hence the chess story being a bloody lie, because when she dragged all that shit about Kelly out of the muck of her memory, that fucking hurt. Frankie’s not sure she can survive telling the truth again.
They’re outside Ollie’s room now, and Frankie wants to get the fuck on with it, so without waiting for Harmony to do any sponsor bollocks like remotely unlock the door or something, she bangs hard on it three times with her whole forearm.
“Get your arse up, Oliver, my lad!” she yells with gusto. “Hands off cocks and on with socks! Chop chop! We got shit to do today!”
* * *
“You do realise I’m technically traumatised, don’t you?”
“Shush.”
“I was shot at.”
“Oh, really? I hadn’t heard.”
“The company psychiatrist told me to take a month off.”
“And did you?”
“I mean, this is my childhood estate, Cally. I could make the argument that just by being here, I’m on sabbatical. And that therefore, by ambushing me with a dinner party, you are impeding—”
“Elladine Lambert, will you stop talking shit and set the table?”
It’s very funny to witness Elle being so cross with her, even if it is mostly performance, because her accent seems to deepen, becoming near-incomprehensible on certain words. Cally’s pretty certain, for example, that nobody outside the British aristocracy has ever pronounced it ‘tharefore’, with a first vowel sound so strangulated that she wants to step in with a knife and put it out of its misery. She doesn’t bother to hide her broad smile, and she chooses to keep it there a moment longer than she would otherwise, to be annoying, to make her ancestors proud, to redraw in her mind the thick and vital line between the upper-middle-class (Dad was and is a solicitor; funny that he never used his lawyer money to look for her, really) and those who ate their baby food from a spoon encrusted with stolen jewels.
“You win,” Elle says, exaggerating her shrug and, after a second, returning Cally’s smile. She likes to be put in her place sometimes — as with sex, so with life, as they say, or as someone says somewhere, probably — and Cally very much enjoys being the one to do so. And then Elle stops, frowns. “Hey,” she says, “Cally? Where do we keep the cutlery?”
“How can you not know?” Cally asks.
“Um, you look beautiful today?”
“Don’t avoid the question.”
“You have fantastic breasts.”
“Thank you.”
“No, really, I mean—”
“Elle.”
“You don’t have to get dressed, do you? It’s perfectly fine for you to receive guests while still in your underwear, I think.”
“Elladine Lambert, when is the last time you used your cutlery drawer?”
Rolling her eyes, giving up, Elle says, “It’s possible that I never have.”
Giggling, Cally marches past her into the kitchen and opens the deep drawer by the dishwasher, the one with all the mugs in. “Here,” she says.
“No,” Elle protests, “I looked in there, but—” Wordlessly, Cally pulls out the inner cutlery drawer, extracts a fork, and holds it up, posing with it as if she has just performed a magic trick. “Damn,” Elle says. “A drawer inside another drawer is stupid, Cally.”
Cally returns to the living room, handing Elle the fork as she passes. “How you poshos survive when it’s the servants’ day off, I don’t know.”
“Mostly we don’t.”
“Wait,” Cally says, pausing and turning around again, “you’ve made me coffee recently. And tea. And toast. Where do you—?”
Elle points. Cally takes a few steps back towards the kitchen and there, in the draining rack by the sink, is a single teaspoon, two forks, two knives, and two dessert spoons. They’re of a different design to the expensive ones in the drawer; Cally’s pretty sure they’re the ones they sell at the local Tesco. “I’ve just been washing them every time,” Elle says weakly.
It’s such a pathetic admission, such a sad and lovely little thing, that Cally has no choice but to march right back into that kitchen, to wrap her hand around Elle’s waist, to kiss her. And Elle, when they are done, pulls her back in, kisses her again, no longer playing but hungry. She stands taller, straightening her back, and Cally is suddenly very aware that Elle is fully dressed while she is still in her underwear.
The thought of it, of what they must look like together, causes her knees to weaken.
“How long do we have?” Elle whispers.
Cally blinks a spot of sense back into her head for just long enough to answer. “A bit over half an hour.”
Elle nods. Doesn’t say anything else. Just smiles wickedly and places her hands on Cally’s shoulders, pushing her down. Cally tries to push back, but Elle’s having none of it; she increases the pressure, and with Cally already feeling weak, she has no chance but to comply.
This is a dominant day, then. Fine. Cally can work with that. She lets herself fall only to a crouch, not to her knees, and then she steadies herself, reaches around behind Elle, and unzips her beautiful black silk skirt. It falls to the kitchen floor, exposing her matching underwear. Cally hooks a finger into the band of Elle’s knickers, one on each side, and slides them down her thighs, enjoying the slick and silken sound they make as they glide over her suspenders and the tops of her stockings. Exposed, Elladine is damp already, and Cally licks her lips in anticipation and in satisfaction; that she can inspire such a reaction from someone so powerful, so experienced, is profoundly exciting.
With a hand on each of Elle’s hips, Cally exerts a little upward force, enough for Elle to get the message and hop up onto the counter. And then Cally’s leaning in, taking in Elladine’s heat and her lust, and when her tongue first touches flesh, Elle reacts with a gasp and by clenching her thighs together, trapping Cally between her legs. Holding her there.
And so, low on breath but hardly unused to that, Cally gets to work.
“Oh my God,” Elle whispers, and Cally presses harder against her, breathing deeply and wetly. “Oh my God!” It’s a hoarse moan now, interrupted by the rhythmic gasps extracted from her by Cally’s efforts. “Caroline! Ca-ro-line!”
It doesn’t take long to bring Elle to release, and that would be perfectly fine, except now Cally’s too excited to stop, so while Elle, panting and quivering, manages barely to hold herself up with both palms flat on the counter, Cally rises, covering the distance between Elle’s pussy and her mouth with thickly wet kisses. Because now, in her orgasmic haze, the rich aristo bitch doesn’t have a tenth of the strength she would need to keep Cally at bay, and it’s Cally’s turn to claim her prize.
* * *
They keep reminding him that he’s not allowed to strap his tits down. That’s the worst of it. Everything else about living here is more or less fine. Better than anywhere else he’s been stationed. And he actually gets respect from the soldiers here, because he used to be one of them, for all that he’s been deliberately and punitively reduced — in most areas, anyway. By and large, they don’t look at him like a freak; even less so than at Dorley, because while there, yes, everyone’s used to gender fuckery, to being dragged into an institution one shape and staggering out quite another, they were all low-key confused as to why he wanted to change back.
Maybe ‘confused’ is the wrong word. It was a little like they were embarrassed for him, like they considered his inability to hack it as a woman to be a personal failing.
Or, actually, maybe that’s just him. Maybe that’s the same as the shame he’s always felt around Valérie, a woman who has suffered a thousand times what he has and who still refuses to consider the idea of becoming a man again. The other day, when they were taking lunch together in the canteen, one of the office workers here suggested that they could probably get testosterone for her if she wanted, and she laughed in their face.
If Trevor were that strong…
He doesn’t know what he would do if he were that strong. Because the thought of it is as laughable to him as the thought of taking testosterone is to Valérie.
So all that shit is the worst of it, actually. Not being allowed to strap down his voluminous tits to anything like the extent that he would like is merely extremely annoying. Since he got here, he’s felt trapped in exercise gear, in joggers and loose tops and hoodies, while Val’s been swanning around in outfits that she’s been getting from… somewhere? She didn’t bring much luggage when she came here, so either she’s been borrowing clothes from some of the women here, she’s been stealing them from Ms Lambert, or she can manifest fashionable clothing and flattering exercise gear out of the ether. And he’s well aware that, when she shows up to collect him for this baffling meal they agreed to, she will look like a million Euros — or, given when she last set foot in France, perhaps a hundred million francs — and he will look like a sack of potatoes with a disconcertingly girlish head sticking out the top.
It’s such an awful thought that he briefly considers asking her to dress him up as a woman again, like they did at Stenordale, but given that his immediate reaction to the idea is to vomit into his mouth a little, yeah, best not.
He wonders sometimes if his extreme revulsion is due to what was done to him while he was required to dress as a woman, but that, again, is a weakness. The girls from Dorley, the ones from before, Valérie and Beatrice’s contemporaries — and Maria’s — they all transitioned under conditions no less despicable, and to a woman they endured it far longer than he. He should be able to be a woman, shouldn’t he?
“Trevor,” he sighs as he once again checks himself out in the half-height mirror in his room, “you are a fucking idiot.”
If there is a limit to the number of times one can circle the drain of self-doubt and self-loathing, Trevor has yet to find it. And now here he is, circling back out once again, reminding himself that the girls at Dorley talked over their theories of gender with him — and there are more theories than there are people in that place — and that several of them have repeated to him over and over that some people’s identities cannot be budged, that it is both cruelty and insanity to try, and that if they don’t believe him, well, they’ve got the statistics. He, Trevor Darling, is merely a perfectly normal guy whose gender or internal sex identity or sense of self or whatever you want to call it — again, a hundred theories and a hundred names for things — is fixed at the ‘male’ setting, and that’s just the way it is.
Or something. He shouldn’t have to care about gender, anyway. And when he gets these tits out, he won’t.
Except—
A knock at the door interrupts his bullshit, and he twists gratefully away from the mirror, deciding as he does so that even though he’s wearing a slobby, oversized hoodie, it doesn’t matter. No-one will judge him for it.
And opening his door confirms it. Because Val looks so good that no-one will even bother glancing at him, anyway.
“Ready for an awkward dinner?” Valérie asks.
* * *
Site three is an unassuming McMansion in a street full of the things. It looks to Cora’s eye like someone took a barn, converted all the ground-floor space into garages, stapled it to the side of a townhouse, poured beige stucco over the whole assemblage, and then added the world’s ugliest porch up front. It looks as if the slightest gale-force breeze might dismantle it, scatter it to the wind, littering the pristine suburbs with half-eaten wall insulation and brittle IKEA-grade wood. It looks like the kind of place that would normally house a family with a shiny white and Pilates-skinny mother, a blisteringly pink father, and three kids of the type who try to pull down the trousers of other customers in restaurants.
It’s where — according to intelligence gathered from the USB drive Cora stole, the firewall hole created by the other USB drive that she left in a back-office PC, and that one guy she wanked off — the Smyth-Farrows are hiding out, and she hopes that it is as existentially painful to be stuck inside for someone of noble birth and extensive childhood access to time-tested architecture as it is to witness through a sniper scope.
Eyes on. That’s what she’s here for. Haley came to her after Cora cleaned herself up, made herself presentable, and put back in place the personality she’s been donning with mostly consistent success since they gave her this job, and handed over her next assignment, and before Cora could so much as gripe about it being yet more surveillance, she revealed whom it was that Cora would be surveilling.
Eyes on the Smyth-Farrows. Henrietta. Alistair. And when Cora has them both in her sights, and if she judges it safe and appropriate, she is to kill them. No mucking about, no threats, no mutually assured destruction. Henrietta Smyth-Farrow started a fight she can only lose, and Cora gets to be the finger on the trigger.
She would prefer to be the hand on the knife, but beggars can’t be choosers, and neither can assassins.
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