28. Old Soldiers

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 Baker, 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?”