LIGHTNOVELONLINE 32. Endless Ascent
32. Endless Ascent
2019 December 25
Wednesday
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
He’s leaning against the wall at the top of the stairs, just out of sight of the exit to the dining hall, his chest rising and falling a hundred times a minute under his dishevelled tuxedo, his hands twisting around inside each other. Steph takes his hands in hers, steadies them, stills them.
“I’ve got you,” she says, quietly and insistently, keeping her voice calming and steady, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.” She feels his hands clench under hers, and she squeezes them, reinforces the hold she has on him, and it’s that which slows him down for a second. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Oh my God. ‘I’ve been Aaron’? Oh my God. Why did I say that? It’s like a promise, probably legally binding in this twisted fucking place, and tomorrow when everyone’s sober, Maria’s going to come to me and ask me who I am in place of ‘Aaron’—” in her hands, she can feel him trying to do the bunny-ear scare quotes, and it’s so absurd she wants to kiss him, “—and I’m just going to fucking look at her like an idiot; Jesus, Steph, you have to promise me that from now on you’ll psychically detect when I’m about to say something stupid and kick me really, really hard before I have the chance. Just give me the whole surprise orchi; I bet that’d be really distracting.”
“Was it a stupid thing to say?”
“Yes. No. Yes. Fuck.” He shakes ever so slightly, as if containing a shiver in his spine, and chews on his lip for a moment. Then he frees his hands from hers just long enough to offer them to her to hold more normally, and they stand there for a moment together, made mutually small by the tall concrete stairwell. “It’s true that I’m not him any more. Or I don’t think I am. Or I don’t want to be. But wanting’s the same as needing’s the same as being, isn’t it? It is here, anyway. Shit.” He rests his head against the wall. “I’m glad I said it. I believe it. Or I want to believe it— and I’m repeating myself. I just wish I hadn’t said it in front of so many people. That’s a lot of expectations to live up to, especially when I’ve rolled a fucking one and the next square on the Monopoly board is the great big question mark.”
“There’s no question mark on the Monopoly—”
“Yes, there is, Steph! It’s Chance! Jesus, have you never played Monopoly?”
“Not willingly.”
“It’s Chance. And you don’t know what you’re going to get with those. Especially if it’s one of those themed boards, like the one we had at school that was all personalised for a bunch of the worst families in the country.” He shudders again, but this time, judging by the curl of his lip, it’s from disgust.
“We’re getting off topic,” Steph says, and frowns, because she thinks it might have been her fault. The weight of alcohol and food is affecting her judgement: don’t offer Aaron a tangent because he will grasp it with both hands and do dreadful things to it.
“Everyone’s going to expect me to do the next thing,” he says. “To choose a name. Maybe even pronouns. But I don’t know, Steph! I jumped off the cliff and now all I can hear are whooshing sounds and when I hit the ground I’m going to have— Uh, fuck. Not sure about that metaphor,” he adds, with the first hint of a smile Steph’s seen since they left the dining hall.
“No-one’s going to expect you to have a name right away.”
“Yes! Yes, Steph, they are. Did you miss how many stunningly attractive people came up to me tonight to tell me how proud they all are of me? Because I think it was at least thirty. They even got me in the lavs. Couldn’t even piss without some gorgeous woman reaching under the door to give me a thumbs up.”
Steph cocks her head. “Really?”
“I mean, not exactly really. But kinda really. They ambushed me while I was washing my hands. Had to keep washing because it was either that or just stand there and revel in the awkwardness. Steph, I’ve never been so clean.”
“You still don’t have to do it,” Steph says. “Not tonight. Not ever, if you don’t want to.” Is she going to suggest it? Should she? “You can still be Aa—”
“No.”
Steph nods. “Okay.”
“What’s up with giving me a way out? I thought you were on board with Team Feminisation?”
“I don’t know,” she’s forced to admit. “I like it for me. But I think I’ve developed that Dorley thing where I start to instinctively assume it’ll be good for everyone, and I’m trying to push against that, because I know how horrified I was when I really understood what it meant they were going to do to you, and, yeah, the others, but mainly you, and—”
He shuts her up with a kiss. It’s wet and it’s tired and he’s still unsteady on his feet, but it works. She releases his hands so she can loop hers around his back, and for a while all they do is kiss.
“I like that you think about me,” he whispers. He’s smiling, she can tell by the tone of his voice, and—
Wait. Shit. Should she be thinking of him as a he any more? He’s not Aaron; he’s made that clear twice now, even if the prospect of following through is making him nervous. Is now a good time to ask his pronouns? No; she shouldn’t rush him. He’s got to have something here that isn’t coerced.
She’ll just make sure not to refer to him out loud in the third person for the moment, which oughtn’t be hard; unlike him, she’s not in the habit of narrating.
Not out loud, anyway.
“I think about you a lot,” she says, stroking the small of his back. “It came as a bit of a shock, actually, when I realised just how much. Never had someone take up that much space in my head before except Melissa.”
He giggles, and with his cheek pressed against hers she feels it as much as hears it.
“Hey, kids!” someone calls, and when they pull themselves apart it turns out to be Jane, leaning far enough out of the security room that Steph can just about see her around the curve in the stairwell; presumably she’s hanging onto the jamb for dear life. “Are you two going to stand there being adorable all night, or are you going to come keep me company for a bit?”
“We’re really tired,” Steph says.
“I’m lonely,” Jane says, leaning hard on the word and pouting.
“Sure,” Aaron says, and Steph would protest, but she’s in the mood right now to give him whatever he asks for. He holds out his hand for her and she takes it, and a few moments later they’re sitting down at the table in the security room, on which Jane has scattered a pair of laptops, three bottles of wine, and a small pile of tupperware containers, each containing one of the various choices of dessert.
One of the bottles of wine is almost empty.
Jane spots Steph looking, and wordlessly shifts over on the couch; a clinking noise suggests she’s trying inexpertly to hide more bottles. Steph, to be polite, pretends to cough to cover her smile.
“You want some?” Jane asks, and Steph’s still debating whether or not it would be a good idea to say yes when Jane hands her and Aaron a mug each, and then tops hers up with the open bottle, from which she shakes the last drops with the exaggerated care of the reasonably drunk. Perhaps realising she shouldn’t attempt to operate delicate machinery when there are more sober people present, she passes the next bottle of wine to Steph, along with a complicated-looking plastic thing that turns out to be a higher class of bottle opener than Steph’s ever seen before. “You put the thingy on the bottle,” Jane says, miming to demonstrate, “and then turn the other thingy. S’easy.”
Steph, with a little help from Aaron, successfully mates thingy and bottle, turns the other thingy, and pours herself and Aaron half a mug of wine each. They both meet Jane’s expectant toast in the middle of the table.
“Cheers,” she says.
“To arbitrary pagan festivals,” Jane says, and burps.
“Happy Christmas,” Aaron says, and drinks from his mug. On the side it says, next to a 1950s-style illustration of a housewife, Don’t get complacent, lock your man in the basement! Steph’s, meanwhile, says, Eight out of ten doctors recommend FEMINISATION! and adds, in smaller text underneath, The other two are currently unavailable for comment.
“Do you ever feel like the mugs are a hindrance to your mission here?” she asks.
Jane shrugs. “They’ve grown on me.” She turns hers around so Steph can read the slogan, written in cursive: Dorley Hall Spa and Wellness Centre: Feel your troubles float away! “Except,” Jane says, pointing to a faded revision to the text, “instead of ‘troubles’, it says—”
“I got it,” Steph says. “Thanks.”
“Philistine,” Jane says. She drains her mug, fills it again from the bottle Steph opened, and directs a slightly wobbly gaze her way.
“Hey, Jane, are you okay to watch the monitors when you’re…”
“Pissed?” she asks cheerfully when Steph hesitates. “Yeah. It’s fine. The boys are all asleep except for Adam, and Edy’s in with him. And I get relieved in—” she peers at one of the laptops to check the time, “—like forty minutes, so, yeah, it’s all fine.” She frowns under Steph’s scrutiny. “Seriously! It’s fine. They’ve had a big meal and a hot cocoa; they’ll be out until morning. Besides, with even Raph having succumbed to an understandable—” she stumbles over the word, “—distaste for being tased, the boys are practically feminising themselves. No offence, Aaron.”
Clearly Jane’s not been watching the cameras in the dining hall, then. Aaron says, carefully, “I’m not using that name any more.”
Jane’s delighted. She slams her mug down on the table and leans towards him. “Really? Really? That’s— that’s— that fucking rules, kid. You know how long it took me to get there? To see the bleeding obvious? Too long.” She falls abruptly back into the couch cushion, looking away. “Too fucking long.” It takes a moment before she energises herself again. “Hey, you got a new name yet?”
He tenses. “Haven’t got that far.”
Jane snorts. “There’s no rush. If you like we can do what Shahida and Melissa do with each other: call you by your initial. Aren’t they cute, by the way?”
“You want to call me ‘A’?” Aaron asks. “Like, ‘Ayyy’? That sounds…”
“Like you’re the Fonz,” Jane supplies, nodding. “Good point.”
“What’s ‘the Fonz’?” Steph says.
“Christ,” Jane says. “You’re both so young.”
“Sorry.”
“Not your fault. And hey, the-inmate-formerly-known-as-Aaron—” she salutes him with her mug, “—congrats on getting here so fast. I’m going to be waiting on Raph for at least another three months. Probably a lot longer.” Silent for a second, she drinks deeply before continuing. “Don’t suppose you could persuade him of the benefits of being a girl, could you? The joy of sex change? I know he’ll get there in the end — I did — but he’s going to take a long time about it, and it’ll only make him miserable. Sorry,” she adds, before anyone can reply. “Not a serious question. He’s me and I’m him and I was a stubborn, stupid little boy. Too attached to a manhood that was all promises and no… no kindness.”
“Jane—”
“I heard you, Steph,” she continues. “Before. On the stairs. Talking about the programme. You said you were all conflicted and shit. And I get it. God, I get it. But I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to be alone like I was. And that doesn’t mean we—” she points from herself to Aaron, “—have exclusive rights to feeling isolated or anything.” She shakes her head, too emphatically; Steph eyeballs her mug and realises she’s had almost half a bottle of wine since they arrived just a few minutes ago. “But there’s a black hole of loneliness that’s being a bad man. That’s failing at being a man. You’re fucking flailing, hurting everyone around you, hurting yourself, and it’s self-sustaining… You’ll just keep going, keep swallowing air until your chest hurts. Your dad’s a man and the guys at school, they’re men, and you want to be like them so much, but nothing you do is enough. And—” she slams her mug down on the table, spilling a little wine, “—there’s a way out! This!” She tugs at her dress, pulls it away from her chest, exposes cleavage and lacy bra. “But you would never think of it on your own and no-one ever tells you about it and everyone you ever knew would say you’re weak for even considering it, but… Fuck, Steph. It’s strength. To choose womanhood, to decide to be different, to accept it and embrace it even when you weren’t destined for it, when it wasn’t meant for you, to rip yourself apart from the inside out because you don’t want to hurt people any more… It’s strength. And it’s worth it. And if we wouldn’t all get arrested for breathing a single word of this outside these walls, I’d be shouting about it with a megaphone.” And she giggles, exhales bubbles into her wine. “Sorry. That was kind of a rant.”
Steph reaches for her. “It’s okay,” she says quietly. “It was a good rant. And I think I needed to hear it. I’ve spent so much time down there, watching everyone be miserable. Watching them get tased and— and beaten, and—”
“Hey,” Aaron says, laying a hand on Steph’s arm, and the contact helps; she’s not sure that without it she could have pushed the image of Declan, bruised and swollen and still fighting, from her mind.
“I know we seem extreme, Steph,” Jane says. “But we deal in extremes. We have only a few years to push back against lifetimes of shit. It’s all compressed, all concentrated. We go hard at them, fast, because we have to. Because it’s the only way.” She drinks again, drains her mug. Doesn’t refill it. Stares into it instead. “Boys are nailed into place as they grow,” she continues. “It’s violent and it’s relentless and it feels like it’ll never end.” She mimes hitting the table with a hammer. “Tik. Tik. Tik. Over and over. You can’t get away from it. You can’t move. And a person like that, something that’s been made so hard, so rigid, so perfectly shaped to exist in one place and one place alone… you gotta fucking whack it a bit to get it out again.” She laughs emptily. “I remember when I first came here, when I woke up in that cell and saw all these women looking at me from the other side of a locked door, I was enraged that I’d allowed myself to be caught and tied down by girls. Because I thought strength was in how hard you swing your fist. Because that’s what I’d been shown my whole life up to that point.” She looks at Aaron, still holding Steph by the arm, and smiles. “Like I said, it took me a long time to get to where you are right now. You should be proud. I know I’m proud of you. And—” she shakes a drunken finger at Aaron, her coordination and diction worsening as her mood lifts, “—don’t think of accepting it as giving in. Because I did that, too. It’s not giving in. It’s… It’s joyful. It’s stepping willingly into the cocoon, even though you understand you might not immediately recognise the woman who emerges.” She snorts and tries to drink from her mug again, discovers it to be empty, and dumps it back on the table.
Steph frowns at her. “Are you okay, Jane?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks for asking. It’s just… I don’t know. I said to Auntie Ashley that Raph’d be my last, at least for a while, and I’m feeling better and better about that decision. Just because I believe in this place, doesn’t make it any more fun to get through this first year. I don’t know; maybe I’ll change my mind when young Raphael becomes more like you two.” And then she slaps the table with an open palm, suddenly enough to make Steph jump. “Three months! Incredible.”
“It’s not that incredible,” Aaron says.
“It is.” Jane nods to herself. “More wine? More wine.”
“Is that wise?” Steph can’t help asking.
“I’m getting mood-swingy,” Jane replies, pouring herself a full mug, “and I’m pouring my heart out to two bloody basement dwellers. Unique circumstances or no, you’re still under my care and I need to be the responsible adult here.”
“And that means drinking more?” Aaron asks.
“I need to get back to happy-drunk. That way I’ll stop thinking of myself as a failure because Maria and Steph got you to stage… three? four? Stage whateverthefuck in three months while I’ve only just got Raph out of the cells.”
“You’re not a failure,” Steph says.
“And,” Aaron says, gesturing with his mug, “I don’t even know how I got to whatever stage I’m at. I didn’t think I was going fast. But everyone says I got here quick, so I guess I have to think about it.” Like Jane, he drinks to give himself time. “Three months ago, if you’d asked me if I’d ever thought about being a girl, I’d have been terrified I was being set up for something. I’d have looked for the hidden cameras. And— Yes,” he adds, in response to Jane jerking a thumb towards the cornice, “I can see the cameras here, Jane. That’s not the point.”
He rests his mug long enough on the table for Jane to fill it up. “What’s the point, then?” she asks.
He thinks for a moment, and then looks around, from Steph to Jane and then to the laptops, which are displaying the camera feeds from various rooms in the lower basement. “That,” he says, pointing to them.
Jane cranes her neck to see the screen, wondering what he’s pointing at. “What?”
“That!” He jabs at the screen with slightly too much exuberance and tips the laptop over. He rights it. “Sorry. I mean, look at the feeds. This is weird, by the way; getting to see behind the curtain.”
“Welcome to my world,” Steph mutters, but quietly, because she doesn’t want to interrupt his flow.
“Actually, the cells have curtains now,” Jane observes, clearly on her way back to happy-drunk.
“Nice,” Aaron says. “No, my point is, that’s been my world. Everything you see on those cameras.” He drinks another half-mug of wine. “And ’normal’, it’s locally defined, right? Well, who do I spend all my time with? Can’t fucking stand most of the boys, and conveniently enough they mostly hate me, too, so it was just me and Steph. Except when it was, uh, just me. But after I stopped wanting to, you know, die, it was me and Steph. And then—” he starts counting on his fingers, “—it was me and Steph and Maria and Pippa, and then Edy and Yasmin and you and Harm and Monica and Pam. All of us in that tiny space. My whole world. And then, finally, I get to leave it, to go strut my stuff somewhere else, and it’s more girls and nonbinary people and… Shit, Jane; everyone I know now is like you! And you all came through here and you’re all telling me how much better it is on the other side, and you’re all living it, too, and that’s the fucking thing: around here, being a girl, becoming a girl, it’s normal. It’d be stupid not to try it.” Jane tops up his mug again. “And if it doesn’t work out for me,” he continues, swilling the contents around, “then what have I lost? Yes, okay, my balls, fine, but you don’t need them to be a man, and besides, it’s not like I haven’t got my money’s worth out of them. Probably emptied them out so often the insides look like dehydrated grapefruits.”
Steph hugs him. She couldn’t not, after that. “You think you might want to be a man again?” she asks. Jane glares at her, like it’s the wrong question to ask in Dorley.
“I don’t know,” he says, leaning into Steph’s embrace. “It’s not like I ever wanted to be one before. It was just what I was. Never wanted to be a woman, either,” he adds quickly. “But I was shit at masculinity, so I can see the logic in giving femininity a try.”
“And what’s happening to you… It doesn’t bother you any more?”
“Oh, it still bothers me. Everything bothers me. Always has. But I meant what I said upstairs.” He kisses her and returns to his drink. “Like, it’s complicated as hell, but I meant it.”
Jane sits up from her slouch. “What are you two talking about?”
“She asked me if I want to be a girl,” Aaron says. “I said yes. Kind of. I said I want to want to be a girl. Like, I don’t want it the way she does. The way she is. I just… I want a future. I want a second chance. Or, to be honest, a twentieth chance, but I want to actually do something with this one. And I realised I’m not afraid of womanhood, intrinsically. Yeah, I’m scared of, you know, fucking it up, of trying to be a woman and doing it badly, but the idea of changing myself… The more I think about it, the more comfortable with it I am. And that’s new, I think. Yeah. It’s new. I always used to be scared of being associated with womanhood, you know, like any guy. Especially like any small guy. Because that’s one of the ways they get you, isn’t it?” He’s retreating into himself as he speaks, so Steph rubs his spine gently. Reminds him of her presence and her affection. “Like you said, Jane, it’s all part of hammering in the nail. You tell a small guy he’s like a girl and that’s horrifying, because that’s something guys aren’t supposed to be. But, in the end, it’s just another excuse for them to hurt you. And that’s another part of it.” He shakes his head, smiles, leans into Steph again. “I see women like you, Jane. Especially Maria, because she’s, you know, special, but you and the others. Being around you and knowing you did the thing guys aren’t supposed to do, and you’re happy, and no-one around you is using it as an excuse to hurt you… Like I said: normal is locally defined. I get recalibrated just from being here, from seeing the things I’ve seen.”
“That’s the idea.” It’s Edy, leaning against the door, looking tired but still beautifully dressed in her fitted skirt and blouse. She’s got the matching jacket hung by one finger over her shoulder and she’s smiling at the three of them. “That’s how it works.”
“S’true,” Jane says, shuffling up on the couch so Edy can sit down. “I got peer-pressured into being a girl.” Steph fails to hide her laugh at Jane’s glib description of her involuntary reassignment. “I did!” Jane insists. “Edy said it was cool.”
“And I was right. How are you doing, dear?” Edy directs this to Aaron. “I know they can be a bit much,” she says, pointing upwards, “all of them at once, but they mean well.”
Aaron smiles at her. “M’fine,” he says. He’s got that exhausted aura he sometimes gets when he’s talked for a long time, when he’s emptied out the cache of words that’s been building up inside his brain, and combined with the wine it’s clearly making him even more sleepy than he already was. “Need to pick a name,” he adds, after a pause.
“There’s a file on the network if you need ideas.”
He shakes his head. “I’ve got ideas.” He has? That’s… interesting. How long has he been thinking about names?
Edy pats his hand. “Take your time. It’s a big decision.”
“You don’t have to stick with the first name you think of,” Jane says.
“And you don’t need to pick one that’s almost the same as your old one, either.”
“Hey!” Steph says, and she’s only half-joking.
“You’re a special case, dear,” Edy says. “Most of us wanted more of a clean break from our old selves.”
“Too fucking true,” Jane mutters.
Edy slaps both hands on her thighs and stands up again. “Well, I’ve got a Maria to return to. Jane, will you be able to stay awake until Charlie comes to relieve you?”
“Oh God, Charlie,” Jane says. “She’s going to bring Nadine and there’s going to be kissing… I saw them go upstairs together earlier and that can only mean they’ve finally gotten over themselves, and—”
“Jane?”
“Oh. Sorry. Yes.”
“Good. Happy Holidays, everyone.”
“Hey, Edy,” Aaron says, standing up and walking unsteadily over to her. “Can you tell Maria, Merry Christmas? From, uh, me?”
Edy gathers Aaron into her arms and kisses him lightly on the forehead. “Of course, sweetie,” she says.
* * *
She’s only barely aware of the crackle of the fire and the murmur of voices because she feels as safe and as warm as ever she has; comfortable enough that when someone taps her on the side of the head and whispers, “Bedtime, sleepyhead,” Melissa very nearly swats at the person who disturbed her before she opens her eyes and discovers Shahida, sat next to her and leaning in, just inches from her face.
“What time is it?” Melissa asks, because it’s the simplest and safest question she can think of, all the others being variants on why are you so close to me right now?
“Late,” Shahida says.
“Like one o’clock,” Nell says.
Ah, yes; Nell. For a moment, Melissa remembers Nell as she used to be: perpetually angry, unconsciously intimidating and, when she wanted to be, actively threatening. Now, sitting with her friend group and so close to the fire that the soft red light outlines her bare shoulders and arms, glows through her fingers and glitters in her artfully arranged hair, she’s smaller and more approachable, in a way that has nothing to do with her size. Nell’s no longer imposing herself on the world, no longer seeking to push her way through it, in the manner that came most naturally to her and which, to hear the other girls tell, she hadn’t entirely abandoned in her new life. She and Melissa spoke at length a few hours ago — small talk about their lives after the programme, mostly — and Melissa was pleased to find her at peace.
A recent development, Nell had said, and one that came at great cost to her pride. Something to do with losing her temper with the second-year girl she’d been sponsoring.
“Thanks, Nell,” Melissa says.
“Late,” Shahida repeats, standing up from the couch and extending her hand. Melissa takes it but doesn’t use her friend for leverage. Instead she pushes up from the couch with her other hand, maintaining her balance with coordination hard-won from years spent acclimating to heels.
She must have slept through the majority of people leaving for bed; Bea and her associates are nowhere to be seen, and the lights in the kitchen are too low for them to be just out of sight; Monica and her group have mostly vanished, too. Maria finger-waves from her armchair; she’s probably waiting for Edy to return from whatever it was she was going to do with her charge… Adam or Eddie or something. For now, anyway. There hasn’t seemed much point in learning any boy names, so she hasn’t bothered; Aaron’s denouncement of their name tonight was nicely vindicating.
“Em,” Shahida says insistently, and Melissa realises she’s been standing there, looking roughly in Maria’s direction, for a little too long.
“Sorry,” she says, smiling apologetically at Maria. “Tired.”
“No shit,” Shahida says, giggling.
“Hey, Liss,” Nell says, half-standing, “can I grab you for a sec?”
“Oh,” Melissa says, “sure.”
“I’ll give you some space,” Shy whispers, and with a hand in the small of Melissa’s back gives her a little push towards Nell’s group, who are standing to meet her.
“Hey again,” Autumn says, leaning in for a cheek kiss. Tash, standing farther back, just waves.
“I wanted to thank you,” Nell says. “Not just for letting me apologise.”
“Again,” Tash interjects, nudging Nell with their elbow.
“Yes, thank you, Tash. It’s been pointed out,” Nell continues with a weary smile, “that I’ve swapped ‘rage-outs’ for apologies. Even if that’s true—” and she glares at Tash, “—I still think it’s healthier.”
“Just be you, Nell.”
“Easier said than done.” Nell turns back to Melissa. “But that’s why I wanted to thank you. I realised I never moved on from here. From there, actually.” She points downwards. “I’ve been carrying a lot of guilt.”
“And a lot of drink,” Tash whispers.
“Tonight, yes. But getting to talk to you, Liss, about boring, normal stuff, about work and shoes and shit… I know it’s nothing deep or anything, and nothing I don’t talk about with my other friends… But I hurt you, Liss. And you could have just accepted my apology and walked away, and that would have been your right. But you talked to me. Made me feel good about myself.”
Melissa smiles. “You’re fun to talk to, Nell,” she says. “And you don’t seem much like you used to, to me. Do you, uh, want to add me on Consensus?”
“Really? Is that okay?”
“I want to keep up with you. All of you,” Melissa adds, looking from Tash to Autumn, before meeting Nell’s eyes again. “You’re not the only one who never actually moved on.”
They share hugs and best wishes and when Melissa leaves the group and heads for the staircase, where Shahida’s waiting for her in the doorway, talking with Edy, she hears Tash whisper, “Proud of you,” to Nell, and the sounds of the three of them sharing another hug, and she’s glad she could help, in whatever small way she did.
She never would have expected it, but she’s happy she came home to Dorley Hall.
* * *
“Stairs,” Steph says, looking down at them.
“Stairs?” Aaron asks, looking at Steph.
“Lots of them,” Steph clarifies.
“Shoes,” Aaron suggests.
“What?”
“Shoes!”
“I don’t— What?”
“Take them off?”
“Oh,” Steph says. “Right. Steady me?”
They finished off the wine between them, and while, yes, there had been three of them, there had also been three bottles of wine on the table and one more, half-full and stoppered, between the couch cushions, and Jane’s contributions had slowed down significantly, leaving Steph and Aaron to pick up the slack. Which, Steph now wishes, looking down at a flight of concrete stairs that has never seemed so steep or to curve at such a sharp angle, she had not done.
Aaron — she’s not going to call him A in her head, nor any variation on it, especially not now, when she has trouble thinking clearly — moves so he’s standing behind her, and then he grabs her around the middle with both arms. She’s not convinced she’s actually any safer that way, and in fact she’s pretty certain that if she tips over with him holding her like this they’ll both go crashing down, but expressing an idea as complex as perhaps just hold my hand, dumbass, is beyond her, so she puts her trust in a God who wouldn’t let her survive three months in an underground concrete feminisation hole just to die on the stairs, and hooks her boots off her feet as quickly as she can. Aaron releases her, and she hands him one of the boots for safe keeping.
He cradles it like a baby for some reason, and she laughs at him, doubling over undignified and unsteady, and he has to grab at her to stop her from toppling over, the way she feared she would.
“Shit,” she comments.
“Right?” he agrees.
They link arms — Aaron still protectively carrying the boot — and take the stairs one step at a time.
“Waaaaaaaaait,” Aaron says, before she presses her thumb against the lock at the bottom of the stairs. “Wait.”
Steph looks patiently at him.
“Wait,” Aaron says again.
She waits.
“Do you…?” he starts, and frowns, leans against the wall. His shirt is almost completely unbuttoned now, and the V of smooth skin Steph can see is distracting enough to completely derail her attempt to guess what he’s trying to say. So she looks, and waits for his thoughts to cohere. “The doors,” he says eventually.
“The doors?”
“Cellar door,” he says, forming his lips around the words like he’s at the dentist and he’s just been given anaesthetic.
Steph frowns at him. “Not a cellar,” she says. “Basement. Cellars are smaller.” A memory returns to her; a school field trip. “Cellars have fruit. Apples. And sometimes Catholics.” She laughs. “‘Priest hole’. Gross.”
“Cellar door,” Aaron repeats. “It’s euphonic.”
“Me-phonic?”
“Yes.” Aaron nods seriously. “No. I had a thought.”
“About cellars?”
“About doors. Doors… Oh! Yes. Can you lock them?”
“S’already locked.”
“Not this one.” He waves at the door in front of them, but he’s too enthusiastic about it, and he catches a knuckle on the concrete wall. “Ow. I meab ’uh ’edroob ’oorz.”
“Take your thumb out of your mouth,” Steph says, taking care over every syllable, “and try again.”
“Sorry.” Aaron removes his bruised thumb, shakes it as if that might help somehow, and tries again. “I mean, the bedroom doors.”
“What about them?”
“Can you lock them? On your phone?
“Oh. Yes.” Steph pats at her side for the second or two it takes her to recall something important. “I don’t have my phone.”
Before Aaron can do anything more to reply than knot his eyebrows, a speaker somewhere overhead clicks on, and Jane says, in the unsubtle whisper of someone who’s had far too much wine, “I know what she means, Steph. I’ve locked the doors and I’ll keep them locked until you two are safely hidden away again.”
Aaron looks up at the ceiling. “Thank you!”
“I’m confused,” Steph admits. She manages to hit the thumb pad for the lock on her third try, and the two of them proceed slowly into the main corridor.
“Look at us! You’re in a dress. A fancy dress.” The tricky sibilants have reduced him to hissing. “You want someone to see you in it?”
“Oh. Oh! Right.” Steph’s heart feels light for just a moment, and then she imagines Raph emerging from his room at exactly the wrong moment and seeing them, dressed like James Bond’s hotter sister and the Bond girl she stole from him, swanning down the corridor.
She laughs again, and Aaron has to hold her up again.
It’s probably a minute later — or perhaps five; whenever Steph closes her eyes to blink it feels like an arbitrary amount of time passes — when she feels sensible enough to feel her way along towards the bedroom corridor, although she’s past Aaron’s ability to hold her up and is relying almost entirely on the wall for support. Thankfully there’s only one more set of main doors to navigate, and she bounces off the far wall as she staggers towards the door lock, finding purchase on the concrete on her second bounce and resting there for a grateful moment.
On her right, the double doors into the bedroom corridor, currently closed.
Ahead of her, the main corridor, leading to the common room, the lunch room, and the stairs they’d just come down. It’s currently swaying slightly.
On her left, the double doors into the bathroom, currently closed. In the glass inset, Adam looks out at both of them, wide-eyed, confused. He’s pushing on a door which ought, according to precedent, open easily for him.
“Shit,” Aaron says.
Steph can’t find a more suitable word than that, so she nods her agreement and lets the sudden surge of adrenaline push through the alcoholic haze. She covers the biometric sensor with her body, so Adam won’t see her use it, reasoning that while all three of them can normally open these doors with their thumbprints, she doesn’t want Adam wondering why she can operate them right now and he can’t. It takes a second, because she’s trying not to look like she’s doing what she’s actually doing, but she gets the doors open and she and Aaron walk through quickly, more sure on their feet than they have been in a while. Into Steph’s bedroom they tumble, with Steph deciding that whatever Adam gets told about her dress and Aaron’s tux is for Edy to decide, that it is fundamentally not her responsibility and thus nothing she has to worry about, and she’s happily removed and hung her dress and thrown her boots into the corner before the speaker over her bed clicks on and Jane says, “Whoops.”
“This place is a shitshow,” Steph says, and falls awkwardly onto the bed. She’s asleep before she’s finished properly arranging the pillows.
* * *
He knows he’s not quite as drunk as Steph. Or perhaps he is but he’s better at handling it. Or perhaps he’s burned more of it off, as his mood has pingponged from clarity to extreme anxiety and back again. Whichever; he’s not quite so inclined to immediately pass out.
He has to agree with her final words of the night, though: this place really is a shitshow. Jane should have checked the boys were all in their rooms before locking the doors; before letting them go downstairs in the first place! And she probably would have, had she not put away fuck knows how much wine. But then, it is the holiday, and they don’t usually have guests from below at the Christmas Eve dinner, so there’s no plan in place. There probably would have been more sponsors in the security room, or someone would have had a laptop up at their dinner table, or something. A gap in protocol, then.
A giggle escapes before he can stop it, because he’s wondering how he would sound right now if he tried to say ‘lapse’. His mind’s working quite a lot better than his mouth. For once, he can imagine Maria saying.
And then he wonders when he started making excuses for the poor security of his kidnappers, and he has to try not to laugh all over again.
It’s still tricky to move around, though, and so he undresses carefully and quietly, hanging the remains of his tuxedo up next to Steph’s dress. With the wardrobe door open and the full-length mirror unavoidably exposed, he catches a glimpse of himself as he steps away.
Sports bra. Underpants that aren’t exactly boxers — there’s no fly — but aren’t anything he’d describe as knickers, either. Maybe Maria had them made special. Maybe they have loads of them in stock, waiting for some tipping point to switch out everyone’s underwear; it’ll happen at the same time as the sports bras get a bit racier and the t-shirts get a little more low-cut and the jogging trousers they’ve all been lounging around in for the last three months get a little more… yoga pants-ish. Slowly but surely acclimating the lot of them to clothes that are more and more like ordinary women’s clothes, like boiling frogs, if the frogs were being boiled in a big vat of estrogen and the scientists were taking them out one by one to put them in little green frog dresses and make them learn how to do frog makeup and ribbit in a higher pitch—
Shut up and look at yourself.
Sports bra. Loose underpants. And the definite suggestion of hips. No different to how he looked this morning, if you don’t count the tired eyes and the knee that’s wobbling from the effort of standing so still for so long under the influence of so much wine and so much turkey and half a fork of gateaux.
No different, except he’s not Aaron any more.
So who is he?
Well, maybe he’s the person he can see.
“This is me,” he whispers, refusing to look away from the androgynous figure in the mirror. “This is me. This is who I am. This is me. I am…”
He can’t say it, not out loud, but yet, but in the quietest part of his mind, he thinks the name he’s been toying with.
* * *
The first she sees of Val she’s peeling potatoes in a dark green pinafore with her hair up and Jesus H Christ on a fucking unicycle, how does the bloody woman always look so immaculate? Because Frankie looks like shit warmed up, left out to cool and then reheated and served with a side order of piss, and she knows she does because she had to look at her saggy skin and under-eye shadow in the mirror while she brushed out her hair this morning. It annoys and amuses her in equal measure that she has so much to learn about femininity, womanhood and grace under pressure from someone whose life makes Frankie’s look like a carefree gallop through a field of fucking daisies.
“Good morning, Frances,” Val says, delicately peeling another potato in one continuous swipe, and flicking the peel away with her little finger such that it lands dead centre in a pile of similar detritus with an accuracy that would, in a just world, qualify her for the Olympics. “You look dreadful.”
“Thank you, m’dear,” Frances says, leaning on the doorjamb, safely out of reach. Not that Val’s going to lunge at her with a potato peeler or anything — probably not, at least not until they’re safely out of this place and Val has other people to turn to, people who were never even slightly complicit in her torture and imprisonment — but around here you have to act like you’re being watched until you know for certain you aren’t, and Frances and the Silver River guys are under instruction not to be too relaxed around Valérie Barbier.
“Having fun without me?” Val asks, flicking away another peel.
“Never you mind.”
Val doesn’t know it, not yet, but Frankie was up half the night with Trevor as he came down from a serious assault on his sanity, helping him deal with the twin gutshots of dysphoria and despair, all the while trying not to fuck him up even further than he already is, and God fucking damn if it wasn’t a tricky balancing act to pull off. She’s not sure she managed it, not at all, but Val’s right, they need him, because without him they’re a fifty-three-year-old maid and an even older woman who most recently worked in dog rescue; without him they have no combat skills whatsoever, and if they were up against just Dorothy that wouldn’t be a problem but it’s a foregone fucking conclusion that their usual blend of bitterness, pent-up rage and kitchen implements would land like a wet sponge on the Silver River soldiers. They need someone who can fight.
Just have to hope, then. Hope that his psyche doesn’t completely collapse until they can get him somewhere that can help him. Hope that his giant tits don’t get in the way of whatever weapon he might eventually bring to bear on Dorothy, Callum and Jake.
The thought of Dorothy with a bullet in her brain is one she likes to entertain, from time to time.
“You need something?” Val says, curling her upper lip and propping a hand on her hip and behaving very much as if she can’t stand the sight of Frankie, and the exciting thing is, Frankie has no idea how much of that is pretend. Of course, Frankie has power over Valérie here, same as she always did, but Val knows she won’t use it and is thus free to express herself as she wishes around her.
Frankie’s pretty sure Val knows, anyway. She should check later. For now, though, there’s business to attend to.
“Came to tell you we have two more guests for Christmas dinner. Plus security detail, but you don’t need to worry about them; they’ll have got their mums to pack them a nice turkey sandwich each.”
Curiosity burns in Val’s face. “In that case, we will need more potatoes,” she says. “Come to the pantry with me.”
“You’re the boss,” Frankie says, and follows her down the short, dark corridor to the pantry. It always smells a little of the rat poison Val puts down in the corners of the skirting board, but it’s quiet and it’s remote and, crucially, neither it nor the stretch of hallway just outside is wired for sound or video. “You okay, Val?” she asks, when she’s sure they’re out of range of the microphones in the kitchen.
“I am tired,” Val says, leaning against one of the shelves. “But not, I think, as tired as you.”
“Trev kept me up. Lad’s having a crisis. Did my best.”
“I do not remember Dee—” Val knots her eyebrows, gently thumps the shelf, and tries again. “I do not remember Béatrice having many complimentary things to say about your counselling technique.”
“Helped her escape though, didn’t I?” Frankie says. It doesn’t hurt to remind Val of this every so often. “Look, I’ve seen as many girls come and go as you have; you know it’s possible to put someone together long enough to get a bit of fight out of them. And if he falls apart after—”
“—which he will—”
“—we can give him to Bea’s girls, or to Elle Lambert, or back to Peckinville. He can have room and board and all the testosterone he can inject. Might even be able to get him some nice prosthetic bollocks. Everything restored but his fertility. And his old nose.”
Val frowns at this. She reacts much the same way every time Frankie reminds her that among their goals is to salvage Trevor’s manhood; Val doesn’t like being reminded that the same option would be open to her, too. A younger Frankie might have been surprised at one of their forcibly reassigned men deigning not to leap at the chance to go back, but as she’s aged she’s learned that continuity has its own comfort. Val probably could become a guy again, if she really worked at it, but she’s more Val than she is Vincent by a factor of about fifty.
Besides, the more time Frankie’s spent with her, the more Valérie has seemed like, well, Valérie. She’s a trapped, lonely, frustrated and bitter woman, but she’s a fucking woman. More so, probably, than Frankie.
Funny thing, gender. People’re so wedded to the idea that there are only two, but even if you accept that premise, the closer you look, the more anomalies you find, beautiful and strange and infinite in variety. If Frankie could go back she’d have so much to tell her younger self, even if the only practical benefit would have been to make her a kinder monster.
“We have to get him out, first,” Val says.
“We will,” Frankie says firmly. “I told him as much. We’ll all get out, I said, with all our bits and pieces intact. Well, with my bits and pieces, perhaps, but not—”
Val interrupts her with a laugh. “My ‘pieces’ are long gone and my ‘bit’ is barely worthy of the name.”
Frankie slaps her thigh. “I knew you’d appreciate that line! Trev got mad at me for it.”
“Trevor,” Val says, “is too new to this life to appreciate how much more comfortable underwear is to wear when you do not have to account for a pair of balls.”
“So, in a way,” Frankie says, “we did you a favour.”
Valérie brandishes the potato peeler. “I’m still armed, Frances.”
“Yeah, but I bet your wrist is still sore from peeling all those potatoes.”
“Hmm.” Shrugging, Val returns the peeler to the pocket of her pinny. “What of these new guests?”
“Alistair and Henrietta Smyth-Farrow. Yeah, the old man’s kids.”
Val’s frown deepens. “I thought he cut them out of his will. And spent almost all the money that remained.”
“Yeah,” Frankie says, nodding, “me too. Dunno where they’re getting the funding, but Dotty says they’re trying to shove their squeaky clean fingers in a lot of their daddy’s old pies, not just what’s left of the old fanny farm.”
“Are they coming back for good? Are they reclaiming the manor?”
“Dotty says no. Based in the States, usually, she says. Reading between the lines, they’re connected to the fundies somehow, so maybe that’s where the money’s coming from.”
“‘Fundies’?”
“Fundamentalist Christians. You know: evangelicals. Happy-clappy bible-thumpers who’re only truly happy when they’re diddling kids.”
“And they would be involved with Silver River and Dorothy, why, exactly?”
“Beats me. Could be they want in. Could be they spotted some line of cash they want to exploit or withdraw. Could just be a coincidence they’re coming here, now, when you and I and Trev and Declan are all here.”
“Frances,” Val says urgently, “when I was a teenager, visiting England with my parents, and saw the same man on two different street corners on two different nights, I dismissed it as a coincidence, too. And then my family was murdered and I was mutilated. I don’t like coincidences. Coincidences kill.”
Frankie nods. She wants to comfort her; she doesn’t dare. “I’ll find out what I can,” she says.
* * *
Edy wakes them in the morning with a knock on the door and a tray with two bottles of water, two plates of hot toaster pastries and a packet of cocodamol, and of all of it Steph’s most pleased to see the painkillers because just the act of sitting up in bed is enough to make the room spin. Edy places the tray quietly on the bedside table, waits for confirmation that Aaron — or whoever he is now — is awake, too, and then says, “As far as Adam knows, you had a drink with Maria and Pippa in the lunch room late last night, and you dressed up a bit for fun, in clothes we provided. It helps that he was tired and the lights were dimmed for the night, so he didn’t see you very clearly. And he already knows Steph’s embraced womanhood; he says he doesn’t think it’s too weird that you’re in a dress already, and we’re working on his… antipathy towards trans people.”
Aaron sits up, and Steph feels his arm encircle her from behind. “He has an ‘antipathy’? Edy, is he safe? Is it safe for Steph to be around him?”
“He’s safe. You both know something of his history, I think.” Steph nods, and Edy continues, “He never wanted to hurt anyone. Not truly. But he trusted people he shouldn’t have. Ultimately, he just… did what he was told.”
“Why’s he here?” Aaron asks. “If he’s not bad, why’s he here?”
Edy shrugs. “Who else do I know with the resources to pull someone out of a violent and oppressive environment, to give them a new identity, to keep them safe from their tormentors? Besides…” Steph feels a pressure on her back and realises that Edy’s taken Aaron’s hand. “He was bad. That stuff, those people, the things they claim to believe, it all gets into your head. You say things, do things. It doesn’t matter that you feel bad about wielding the knife if you still use it.” She lets Aaron go and stands up, shaking her limbs as she does so, as if purging the conversation from her body. “So that’s your story, okay? You had a drink, you dressed up, your sponsors were there.”
“Okay,” they both say.
“Okay.” Edy closes her eyes for a moment. “Sorry to wake you so early, but Adam was up early and so I was up early and then I needed to come up with a story on the fly and… Ugh. Don’t think I’ve been up this early on Christmas morning since I was a kid.”
“Presents under the tree?” Steph asks.
“No,” Edy says emphatically. “Look, I’m going back to bed. We’re running a small staff right now, but numbers’ll start picking up after ten. Ping the girls in the security room if you need anything.”
“Who’s on duty?”
“Nell just took over. Rabia’s with her. Try not to bother them unless you really need them, though. They both look like I feel.”
Steph nods. “Okay. Sleep well, Edy. Again.”
Edy smiles lightly. “You’d better bloody well believe I will.”
She closes the door just as gently on her way out, but while Aaron settles back down in the bed, Steph stays propped up, listening to what sound like muffled voices in the corridor. She’s not, therefore, surprised when there’s another knock on her door.
It’d be nice to pretend she’s not in, but where else would she be?
And then Adam announces himself with another knock, says, “It’s Adam,” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, like his reserved attitude prevents him even from raising his voice, and Steph would laugh but she remembers, again, how he was when she first arrived: argumentative and combative. Seemed to believe the weirdest things. Is all that still there, still motivating him, or was it merely a defence mechanism he was grateful to drop?
Either way, she has to get up to let him in. And, she realises, as she throws the covers off of her and a grumbling Aaron entirely, they should probably get dressed.
“Can’t we just say we’re not home?” Aaron mumbles.
Steph kisses him. “Where would we be?”
“I’d like to see Alaska.”
“One day. Get dressed?” In the direction of the door, Steph says, “Two minutes, Adam.”
“Okay,” comes the quiet reply.
She selects joggers and t-shirts for them both. It’s a shame to put the drab basement clothes back on, but she doesn’t want to challenge Adam too much this morning, not if he has questions, not if he might still, in some way Edy hasn’t predicted, be volatile. She said he comes from ‘a violent and oppressive environment’; suddenly Steph wonders if, back in November, Adam reacted with such revulsion to seeing Maria hurt because he’d seen such things before.
Or because he’d been made to do such things before.
She ties a hoodie around her waist and billows out the t-shirt a bit, though, because she doesn’t want to have no figure, and she smiles when she sees Aaron copying her. His answer from last night comes back to her, and she wants to hug him, to kiss him, to take him back to bed and show him just how good being a girl can be, but the two of them have responsibilities to the other occupants of the basement under Dorley Hall, even if she’d rather they didn’t.
She settles for kissing him again.
“Who do you want to be, to him?” she asks quietly.
“Um,” he says, “rain check?”
When she opens the door, Adam’s waiting for them, standing alone in the middle of the hallway and contriving somehow to look smaller than he ought; a feat, considering that of the three of them he’s tallest by several centimetres. The diet and the testosterone suppression have had a dramatic effect on him, though: he’s probably slimmer than Steph, if she’s reading his figure right through the bulky, baggy clothes he’s chosen.
“Hey, Adam,” she says.
“Hi, Steph,” he says. “Hi, Aaron.”
Steph holds her breath. Aaron says, “Hi, Adam,” and she releases it. Already she resents hearing Aaron’s old name in someone else’s mouth. It’s bad enough having to use it inside her head.
God, how is he even going to broach the subject of his name with the boys? Is he even going to? And why can’t they get five minutes alone, sober and awake to bloody talk about it?
Shitty timing.
“May I come in?” Adam asks.
“Let’s go to the common room,” Aaron suggests. He’s holding Edy’s breakfast tray — though he’s pocketed the painkillers — and he’s nudging Steph from behind.
“Yeah,” Steph says. “Let’s.”
At least Adam doesn’t comment on the fact that they obviously slept together. Yes, he knows they’re a couple and he’s seen them enter and leave each other’s rooms a lot, but the messy sheets on the bed and the lack of any matching bedding on the floor comprise an answer to a question Adam has so far preferred not to ask. In the common room they arrange themselves on the couches. Aaron passes Adam a water bottle and a toaster pastry. Steph’s not sure, but she thinks she hears Adam whisper grace over his Pop Tart.
There’s an extended silence as they eat, dividing breakfast between them. Aaron half-empties the water bottle he kept hold of, and gives it to Steph to finish.
God, she could just fall asleep right here…
“Thank you for the food,” Adam says.
“Y’welcome,” Steph mumbles.
“Merry Christmas,” Aaron says.
Another silence, during which Steph struggles to stay awake. She manages it solely because Aaron, done with his breakfast, is idly running a finger around on her knee, sketching out nothing in particular, and she knows that if she falls asleep she’ll regret missing any of this new, more touchy Aaron.
…or whoever he will be from now on!
“You weren’t in the lunch room last night,” Adam says.
Steph half misses it. “Hmm?”
“We were,” Aaron says.
“You weren’t,” Adam insists. “Edy told me you were, but she was tired from the party and… You were up there, weren’t you? With her and Maria and the others?”
Aaron looks significantly at Steph, and shrugs when she meets his eyes.
“I won’t be angry with her,” Adam says. “If Edy lied, I won’t be angry. I know she has to… to tell me stories to help me get through this. I know there are things I can’t know yet, because I’m not ready.” He’s hugging his knees, but he’s not curled himself up on the couch, like he does when he’s protecting himself. He seems open. “I have her promise, and that’s all I need.”
“Her promise?” Aaron asks.
“She promised to take care of me. To protect me. To help me become a better person. A new person.” He leans forward and whispers, “Like the girls upstairs. The ones who make the food.”
By her side, Aaron stiffens, so Steph decides it’s her turn to respond now. “You know about the girls upstairs,” she says.
“Edy told me. And I think Pippa told you. To show us there’s a way forward. I know they lied when they told us we were the first, and that’s okay.” He’s speaking straightforwardly now, like he’s listing the specifications of a car he’s interested in buying. “You need to learn the truth in stages, and sometimes new truths reveal old lies.”
“Did she say that?” Aaron asks.
“You were upstairs, weren’t you?” Adam repeats.
“Yes,” Steph says.
“A reward for good behaviour,” Aaron says after a moment’s hesitation.
Adam smiles, releases his knees from his grip, straightens his legs out. Relaxes. Runs a hand through his lengthening hair.
“Did she have a nice time at the party?” he asks.
* * *
“This is so fucked up, Ess.”
“It’s fine. She’ll be fine! And Edward barely even knew you before.”
“I don’t mean your mum and stepdad. I mean… this.”
“Define ‘this’.”
“This bloody car!” Melissa slaps the steering wheel of the BMW 7-Series, currently idling in a free parking space near the turnoff to Shahida’s street. The thing is massive, almost twice the length of anything she’s ever driven before, and just being present inside it feels like she’s making a statement she doesn’t at all want to make. Even before she first unlocked it, before she fumbled around in the glove compartment for an ice scraper and had to be directed to the heated windscreen controls by an amused Shahida, it had seemed to loom in the parking lot. But it was the only Dorley car not already booked out, so she took it.
And now she wishes it had fucking swallowed her.
“What about this bloody car?” Shahida asks.
“It’s…” The words to describe how it feels don’t come easily, but she can feel the shape of her objection, even if she can’t perfectly understand it. “It’s showy,” she says, after struggling with it for several seconds.
Shahida giggles. “Em, you do remember where my family lives, right?” She taps on the passenger-side window. “Look around! This is probably one of the least fancy cars on the whole street. Kids around here get four-by-fours for their learner cars.”
“I know, but…”
“But…?”
“I don’t know. It’s not me.”
“What is you?”
“Little cars? Runabouts with four wheels and a horn and a place to put your shopping? Fuck, Shy, I don’t know.” She taps the ignition again and the engine quietly growls to attention. “I just feel weird about it.”
“We can stop here,” Shahida says, her hand on the handbrake, preventing Melissa from releasing it. “We can just talk about it.”
“I think I’m just…” She can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t like being observed, is probably it. Now she’s had the chance to sit with it for a minute, it feels remarkably like when she has to go to other departments at work, or the occasional times she goes to the gym or the little café where she met that girl that one time… She doesn’t want judgements formed about her. She wants to move through the world silently, unnoticed. A problem for someone who looks, as many people have recently observed, rather pretty.
She also knows it’s something Abby tried to help her get over. It was something they were still talking about when Melissa cut off all contact. An open wound; a reminder of her past, still interfering with her present.
Being back at Saints had felt so safe she’d forgotten what it’s like to be unsettled by the gazes of others.
She can make herself get used to it again. Unsettled doesn’t mean unable.
“I’m okay,” she says, and Shahida pats her hand, allows her to release the brake. A minute or so later she’s pulling up outside the Mohsin-Carpenter house and looking at the front door she remembers so clearly — repainted a brighter shade of red — and the bay window of Shahida’s room on the first floor, with the cushioned seat just inside. She expects to be overwhelmed by the memories but they come slowly, like the tide, and she follows them out of the car, barely conscious of the need to lock it, because all she can do is watch that red front door.
And then it opens and Rupa Mohsin-Carpenter comes scurrying out in slippers and Santa hat to meet her daughter, who is likewise rushing towards her, arms outstretched, and allowing herself to be engulfed. Edward, Shahida’s stepdad, waits in the doorway. He’s also wearing a Santa hat. Melissa wonders whose idea the hats were.
“Mum!” Shahida exclaims. “You look so… festive!”
“Well, you know,” Rupa says, pulling away from Shahida and still smiling broadly, “after Ed’s sister moved down to Colchester we started doing alternating Boxing Days and, well, it’s fun, isn’t it?”
Shahida puts on a serious face. “I won’t tell Rachel you said that.”
“So,” Rupa says, releasing her, “who’s your mystery friend? We’ve been trying to guess, Ed and I, ever since you told us you wouldn’t be coming alone, but…”
She trails off because she’s looking at Melissa, really looking, searching her face, and suddenly Melissa’s caught in a tight embrace, with Rupa almost squeezing the life out of her and very nearly lifting her off the ground.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Rupa says. “It’s been a long time.”
“Hi, Mrs Moh— Sorry.” Melissa corrects herself, remembering just in time. “Hi, Rupa.”
“What’s your name, dear?”
“Melissa.”
“What a beautiful name.” Rupa gives her a final squeeze and then lets her go, calling back to Edward, “It’s Melissa!” as if the name should mean something to him, and then turning back to Melissa to say, “It’s wonderful to see you again. Why don’t you come inside and you can tell me all about it?”
She holds out both her hands, and Melissa and Shahida take one each and follow her indoors, past the little brick wall around the front garden and the potted plants and all the other things Melissa used to see whenever she came here, and into the same hallway she remembers. She kicks off her shoes and places them carefully on the battered old rack under the narrow window before she consciously realises that muscle memory from before she was even Melissa is now guiding her, and as Shahida closes the bright red door, Melissa’s memories finally overwhelm her.
* * *
* * *
Melissa’s momentary distress is barely visible from the outside and only really expresses itself as a quiet gasp and a small stumble, but Shahida’s been her friend for long enough that she can read her body language in the dark and detect her whispers in a gale, and she’s next to her and holding out a supportive hand before Melissa can do more than trip on the rug.
Behind her, her mother says something brisk about putting on the kettle and drags Edward into the kitchen with her, presumably to fill him in on this girl his wife and stepdaughter both seem to know.
“Sorry,” Melissa says.
“You okay?”
“It’s a bit weirder than I thought it would be. Being back.”
“Weird bad?”
“No. Definitely not.” Melissa, now steadied, starts taking off her coat. “It was when I kicked off my shoes,” she says. “And I had this incredible sense of déjà vu. Stronger than I’ve felt in years. I was him here. And—” she breaks into a broad smile, “—I just worked out why it felt so sudden.”
“Oh?” Shahida says, hanging up their coats.
“I spent barely any time at uni before I, um—” Melissa glances at the kitchen door, “—transitioned, and no time at all in the main floors of the Hall until I was a year in; this, right here, is the first time I’ve ever come back to somewhere he used to know well.”
“So, weird intense,” Shahida says, following Melissa into the living room, “rather than weird bad.”
“Right.”
Shahida drops into the corner seat on the biggest couch, but Melissa doesn’t follow her. Instead she walks around the living room, runs her fingers along the mantelpiece, refamiliarises herself with a place she hasn’t seen since she was seventeen.
Now that Melissa’s shucked off her winter coat, the clothes she picked out this morning are finally on display and Shahida indulges for a moment. It’s not as if Melissa dressed deliberately to show off her body, and in fact the light pink sweater and stretch jeans are among the least ostentatious things Shahida’s seen her wear since she came back to Dorley Hall, but the shape of her is nonetheless discernible if one is given to look, and Shahida is very much given.
She’s fucking incredible in every way. So much so that Shahida still finds it hard to believe. Of all the girls she dated in America, none of them held her gaze the way Melissa does, and she does it in denim and a baggy sweater!
It’s something about the way she moves, Shahida decides. Mark had always been awkward, had held his limbs in close and took small steps, as if he feared he might accidentally take up too much space, and there are echoes of those habits in Melissa, but it’s in their abandonment, in the moments that she forgets she was ever ashamed of herself and her physicality, that her true, expressive self becomes clear, and Shahida treasures those glimpses.
Treasures even more that they’ve become more common and more consistent over the last few weeks. After the car, and especially after Melissa’s brief, unsettled moment when she first entered the house, Shahida feared a setback, something that would be harder to come back from than usual, but now she’s here, she’s unwinding again, walking the living room and inspecting photos and trinkets with the lithe, easy motions of someone truly comfortable with herself and her body.
And what a body…
“You still have it,” Melissa says quietly, and Shahida stops looking at, shamefully, her friend’s bottom, and stands up to join her and see what she’s found.
She’s holding a framed picture. Shahida and her mother, and Melissa and her mother, all in swimsuits — Melissa in shorts and a baggy t-shirt, with trunks probably under there somewhere — poolside at Peri Park.
“Em…”
“I remember you wanted to ride the rapids again. We’d had lunch and you set a timer on your phone for when it was safe to swim and you were desperate to go as soon as possible, and…”
Melissa coughs and hiccups and Shahida’s concerned for a moment, before she realises that it’s only that Melissa’s crying; and then she seizes up completely for what feels like an age, because Melissa’s crying! Shit! It’s the bloody pictures; she should have called ahead, had Mum take down any with Mark in them, she should have known—
“And I made the two of you stay for a photo,” her mother says. Shahida hadn’t heard her enter, but there she is, ahead of Edward, who’s been roped into carrying the mugs. Her mum approaches Melissa and Shahida, wraps her arm around Melissa’s shoulder, and continues. “Shahida was complaining like mad, telling me about queue times and how long it would take the two of you to walk all the way around the pool complex to get there, and Laura, your mother, she was trying to hide it but she was laughing like nobody’s business. I’m sorry, darling,” she adds, turning to Shahida, “but you were a terribly pompous thirteen-year-old.”
“Hey!” Shahida says, but she’s grateful for her mother’s intervention. She joins her in the hug, sliding her arm around Melissa’s waist, and the three of them look at the photo.
“Laura wanted the picture,” Mum says. “Melissa’s father was being grumpy as per usual, so Laura got Ed to take it, with the good camera. She somehow managed to get Shahida to stand still for almost a whole minute while Ed got it all ready. Amazing woman.”
“She looks beautiful here,” Melissa says. She’s not exactly crying now, but her eyes are red and her cheeks are soaked. She doesn’t seem to care. “I have pictures of Mum, but not this one. I think our copy was in one of Dad’s boxes. She looks so beautiful, don’t you think? So beautiful and so happy.”
Shahida’s not looking at the photo when she says, “Yes. So beautiful.” And then she catches her mother smiling at her, and adds, “Um, sorry we have pictures of the old you. Do you want us to…?” She leaves the question hanging.
“No,” Melissa says. “Leave them up. Especially this one.” She turns to Shahida’s mother and asks, “Can I have a copy?”
“I have scans, dear,” Mum says. “Shahida can give me your email address or your WhatsApp and I can send anything you want. Except,” she adds, nudging Shahida with her elbow, “the contents of my daughter’s mysterious password-protected folder.”
“Mum!” Shahida gasps, but her mother’s playing innocent and Melissa’s laughing and there’s nothing, really, to be even slightly irritated about. She’s proud of her mum, actually; not that she ever really seriously imagined she’d make a fuss about Melissa’s transition and sudden reappearance, but it’s good to know that the people you love are, in fact, who you believe them to be. She takes the photo, looks it over. Her childhood self has that expression of injured determination that to this day everyone seems to find so amusing.
“We should take a new one. No, two; one with all of us, and one with just you two. Today.”
“I’d love to,” Melissa says. Then she shakes her head and digs in her bag. “But I should probably wash my face first; I’m a mess,” she explains, while rooting around, and she has a point. Before she can find her tissues, though, Shahida’s mum’s returned with a handful, and Melissa accepts them and starts wiping down her face. She inspects the first tissue: it’s stained with mascara. “I have ruined my makeup.”
“You don’t need it, dear.”
“You really don’t,” Shahida says, refusing to be beaten in a bolster-Melissa’s-confidence competition.
“Thank you,” Melissa says and, surprising Shahida, kisses both her and her mother on the cheek before disengaging and going to the bathroom to wash her face.
Shahida’s mother waits for the click of the bathroom door closing before she says, “She seems delicate.”
Shahida shrugs. “She always was.”
“Should I worry about her?”
“No. A few years ago, sure; it was very hard for her for a very long time. But things are changing for her now. I think she’s happy.”
“Good. I see how you look at her.”
Blushing and choosing to look back at the photo rather than at her mother, Shahida says, “So does everyone. Except her.”
“No,” her mother says, “she does, I think. She stands close to you, instinctively. Tell me… Who knows? Her family?”
“No-one knows except you and Edward and me and Rachel. Her father, especially, does not know, and we need to keep it that way. She’s got a life, and he’s one of the people who could really ruin it.”
Her mother nods. “I notice Amy wasn’t on that list,” she says carefully. “Is there a reason for that?”
“No. Just… We’re being careful.”
“Wise. If you decide to tell her, I happen to know her family are celebrating at home this year. You’ll find her there, if you want to visit. And,” she adds with a smile, “we’re not eating until late.”
Shahida can take a hint, especially one so glaringly obvious: her mother insists she not keep Amy in the dark. Fine; she’ll suggest it to Melissa. If she wants to say no, she’ll say no.
And then Melissa returns, fresh-faced and with her blonde hair tied up out of her face. Despite their assurances, she’s put on a little powder and redone her eyes, and while she really doesn’t need it, she still looks spectacular.
Just like she always does.
* * *
“What are you doing?”
A lifetime of working with volatile and occasionally violent people has given Frankie exceptional control over her reflexes, and she’s pretty fucking glad everything’s still in working order despite her advancing age and failing joints, because if she’d allowed herself to be startled when Callum appeared abruptly in the kitchen, the way her body wanted, she would absolutely have done her knee in on the cabinet. Instead she gives herself a quarter-second to think and then shuts off the tap, whacks the colander on the side of the sink a few times to shake off the excess water, and sets it down on the draining board. She can almost hear his frown, but screw him; he can wait.
He clears his throat impatiently, and she doesn’t bother hiding her grin when she finally turns to face him.
“I’m washing vegetables, Callum,” she says. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Where’s Vincent? He’s supposed to be the cook, not you.”
“Val? She went to get garlic for the roasties.”
“You’re not supposed to let him out of your sight!”
Frankie snorts. He hesitated for a fraction of a second on the pronoun; he’s trying his hardest to misgender Val, like a good little bastard, but he’s having trouble overriding his eyes and his instincts. He’s so bad at being bad, it’d be adorable if it wasn’t pathetic. “You think she’s up to something, do you?” she says. “Callum, you prat, she’s lived here half your miserable little life and she still hasn’t escaped; unless you left the door open, I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’re fucking cooking instead of him!”
“Hark at the mouth on you,” Frankie says. “We’re expecting two more for dinner, and that means more work. Food doesn’t just magically appear on the table, you know. Oh, look,” she adds, as Val emerges from the pantry corridor, “there she is. You get the garlic, Val?”
Val hefts a small cloth bag. “Yes.”
“Did you escape?”
“Plainly not.”
“Fashion any deadly weapons out of root vegetables?”
“Alas, no. Was I supposed to?”
Frankie turns back to Callum and spreads her hands. “Well then!”
“Why are you here, Callum?” Val asks, pouring garlic bulbs out onto a cutting board and proceeding to segment, peel and crush them. She asks it idly, not even looking at him; Frankie is tremendously amused. If anyone thought they were getting a simpering little maid out of Val Barbier, they ought by now to have had several more thinks come and smack them in the teeth and then call them a dickhead in a French accent.
“For Frankie,” he says. “Ms Marsden wants you. Rec room. I’m to watch him.”
Yeah. Inevitable that it was something like that; Dotty’s gotten antsy recently, likes to touch base more. Frankie’s not fond of that, and not just because she doesn’t enjoy spending time around ‘Grandmother’; the more often Dotty checks in, the more likely she is to spot Val and Frankie’s quiet little conspiracy, and even though it hasn’t amounted to much yet, they both have hope.
“Fine,” she says.
“Can you chop vegetables?” Val asks him. “Because if you can’t, you’re even more useless than you look.”
“I can bloody well shoot you, is what I can do,” Callum says.
“And then you won’t get a proper dinner. Just stay out of my way.”
Frankie finger-waves as she leaves the kitchen. “Have fun with him, Val,” she calls.
“Drop dead!” Val yells back.
Out to the main hall, have a quick look-without-looking at the big barred lock on the front door — still closed as tight as ever — and then it’s down the corridor on the other side towards the suite of rooms that contains the rec room, the snooker room, and one of the bars; Stenordale Manor’s nerve centre, if it can be said to have one. Inside, Dorothy’s messing with the surveillance equipment and Jake’s smoking, tipped back on a wooden chair that’s conservatively five times older than he is, leaning out of a window.
“What took you so long?” Dorothy snaps. Ah, she’s in one of these moods, is she? Wonderful.
“Callum’s a chatty lad,” Frankie says, and pulls up an antique chair. “What’s so important I needed to leave Val alone with the dinner prep?”
“Why are you helping her, anyway?” Jake asks, before Dorothy can say anything.
Frankie glances at Dotty. “Is every man in this fucking place going to ask the same stupid question? Cooking takes work, and now we’ve got the Smyth-Farrow kids coming, it’s more work than Val can manage on her own, and I don’t want to wait until Boxing Day for my turkey.”
“That’s why you’re here, Frances,” Dorothy says, ignoring Jake’s irritated reaction. “The Smyth-Farrows want to see Trevor.”
Shit. “They want to take him?”
“I’ve informed them he’s not ready, but they want to see the merchandise.”
“They want to know if he’s worth sinking any more cash into,” Jake says. “I think they want him to get the big snip-snip.”
Double shit. Frankie doesn’t know the Smyth-Farrow kids, but they are, in a sense, clients, and clients are always unpredictable. In the past she’s had to field requests from clients who wanted body modifications to their boy-girls that ranged from unfeasible to literal torture, and while her reputation as someone who could reliably deliver living human toys was built off the back of knowing when to indulge these requests, when to suggest alternatives and when to outright deny them, there was always the chance that Mister or Missus Aristocratic Weirdo would take their frustration with her interventions out on her. She had some close fucking calls, back in the day.
So many girls. And she got to save so few of them. Better them than her, of course, and in her more generous moments she likes to imagine that their sacrifices ultimately put her in the position she’s in now, to inflict harm on the woman who ordered it all or die trying, but it’s nothing but vanity. They wouldn’t thank her for her actions if they had a million years in which to forgive her.
The road to Frankie’s own personal hell is paved with the gravestones of unfortunate young men.
Point is, if they like what they see, they could yank Trev out of here this very evening, and she and Val would lose their soldier.
She affects nonchalance. “Why’re you telling me?”
“Get him ready,” Dorothy says. “Dress him up and paint him and make very clear to him that these people are the money, and if he messes up then what happens to him will be out of your hands. Out of mine, too.”
“And tell your little friend to lay another place for dinner,” Jake says.
“Oh?” Frankie asks. “Who for?”
“For Trevor,” Dorothy says. “They want him at dinner. I know, I know, we planned to keep him and Vincent separate, but—”
“Yeah. What the money wants, the money gets.” She’s going to have to warn Val about all of this. She jerks a thumb at the door. “So, I s’pose I’ll go finish helping Val with the dinner, then make Trev all pretty.”
“In a minute. First, we have to talk about the time you’ve been spending with Vincent.”
“What time?”
Dorothy starts counting on her fingers. “You’re not just helping him cook most days, you’re on camera sitting at the kitchen table, chatting with him. Ah-ah-ah!” She holds up a finger, stopping Frankie’s reply in her rapidly drying throat. “It seems every time you have a free moment, you’re with Vincent. You even go to his room sometimes, at night. Where we can’t see you.”
“Yeah,” Frankie says, “we watch movies.” They should have been more fucking careful. Boredom’s a dangerous thing, and even with the amount of cleaning she has to do, Val has almost as much free time as Frankie does; most of the rooms are still shut tight, furniture covered in dust sheets. Anyone can get careless with infinite time to spend.
“You’re socialising with him.”
Well. There’s a way through this, at least. Whether old Dotty will buy it is another matter. “Of course! Who the fuck else am I going to talk to around here? That idiot Callum?”
“He’s a servant,” Jake says. “And a prisoner.”
“Look,” Frankie says, “you know me, Dotty; if this was Dorley Hall I’d be having the time of my life breaking in new boys all the time. But it’s not. There’s just Trev, who’s still in the kid-gloves stage, and there’s Declan, who isn’t mine. Val doesn’t count because she’s fifty-fucking-three and if you try to humiliate her she just laughs at you. Besides, we used to do this shit from time to time, back at the Hall. Watch TV together or whatever. It’s good for the bond, makes them emotionally reliant on you; Stockholm syndrome and all that. It works.”
“It goes both ways,” Jake says, like he’s telling a toddler not to touch the hob. “She’ll play on your sympathy; prisoners always do. They try to make you feel guilty, get you to empathise with them.”
Frankie laughs and hopes it sounds genuine. “Dotty, have you ever known me to feel a single spot of guilt?” No, she bloody hasn’t, or she’d have spotted the handful of girls Frankie helped escape over the years.
“Hah!” Dorothy’s laugh sounds like a cheese grater’s been taken to her lungs. “True. Okay, fine, do what you want.”
Once again, Frankie thanks decades of emotional control for not instinctively sighing with relief. “Can I go now? I said I’d do the pigs in blankets.”
Dorothy waves her off. “Yes. Go. Oh, and tell Vincent he’ll be responsible for preparing Declan for the meal, as well.”
“And tell her I’ll be watching,” Jake says.
“Won’t that be fun for her?” Frankie says with a sneer, and then she gets the hell out of the rec room before anyone can ask her any more questions she doesn’t want to answer.
* * *
It turns out that one of the big drawbacks to avoiding cleanup duty on Christmas day is that if Monica catches you hanging out on the fifth floor, drinking coffee and nursing your hangover, she’ll scold you and send you to the basement, to keep an eye on Steph, Aaron and the boys until the rest of the sponsors get their shit together. Christine told Monica she’d complain to Indira; Monica just laughed at her.
So now here she is, back in sunny basement two, rounding the corner to the common room to find Steph and Aaron lounging on one of the couches, dressed conservatively, talking quietly.
“Hey Steph!” she says, plonking herself down on the other couch and pocketing her taser. “Hey… you.”
“Hi Christine,” Steph says. “You, uh, might not want to put that away.” And she gestures with her eyes to the corner by the storeroom, where Will’s sat on a bean bag chair, reading a book.
It’s a shock every time she sees him; it’s like the man’s being reduced in more ways than just testosterone deprivation and diet ought to provoke. She turns back to Steph and Aaron, gives them the most serious nod her incipient headache will allow, and pulls the little taser back out, thumbing it to the ready position and resting it on her lap.
“How’s he been?” she asks quietly, leaning forward so Will won’t overhear.
Aaron leans forward, matching her posture and volume. “Mostly like that. Reading his books, not saying a word, just sitting there in the corner. He’s our replacement Martin, except I haven’t been able to make him cry yet.”
“You think he’s still dangerous?”
“I wouldn’t turn my back on him,” Steph says.
“A watched Will never boils,” Aaron observes.
There’s the sound of throat clearing from Will’s corner, and when Christine checks on him, he’s glaring at the three of them.
“Whatever you girls are whispering about,” he says, “you’re being rude.”
“How’ve you been, Will?” Christine asks.
“I’m sorry; who are you?”
“I work here.”
“Fine. I’ll answer your question with a question: what does it matter? It’s not like I’m here for the long term.”
Christine turns bodily to face him, twisting fully around on the couch and using the movement to hide her other action: dipping into her pocket and thumbing her alert button. Nell and Rabia, on duty in the security room, should hear the alert and, if they’re not already, listen in on the conversation. Perhaps alert Tabby, if they think it appropriate.
“What do you mean, Will?” Christine asks in her most reasonable voice.
Will laughs, sharp and grating. “I’ve had Goserelin implants for three months now, and hormone injections for two. My body’s changing but my mind’s stayed the same. Got worse, maybe; I’m on more of a hair trigger than I ever was. Having to sit on my fucking hands half the time just to stay calm. But I couldn’t see it for the longest time, didn’t understand what was happening. What’s going to happen to the ones like me.
“And then I saw Raph, and he’s just the same as he was, too. And I told him off, sure, but I couldn’t get him out of my head. I kept thinking, why? Why is he no different? Why am I no different? And Ollie? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that, for us, the changes are just physical. Nothing’s happening up here.” He taps his temple. “I’ve been waiting to feel like a girl, the way you lot want, but it hasn’t happened. I’m just this… altered thing. A man walking around in a body that feels more alien every day. But that’s the big experiment, isn’t it? Obviously some men take to it, like Aaron — I can see you hiding behind your girlfriend, by the way — and others were practically waiting for it, like Steph. And then there’s men like me: we take the drugs and we change physically, but nothing else happens. So that means one of two things for me: either I wash out, and whatever happened to Declan happens to me, or I lose my fucking mind and… someone else emerges on the other side of insanity. Either way, I’m not going to be around. So,” he finishes, laying his book on the floor and standing from the bean bag chair, “that’s why it doesn’t matter how I am. I’m just temporary. Someone else gets the body after me. Someone else gets to walk out of here.”
“Will,” Steph says, “you need to give it—”
“More time?” Will snaps. He doesn’t advance, just stands there in the corner, but Christine grips the taser more tightly anyway. “More time? Is that what you were going to say? I’ve given it three months, Stefan! Three months. And I was willing to wait it out, because I thought something really was happening, until I realised how badly I was fooling myself. I realised how much I wanted—” he slaps his hand into his open palm, “—it to be real. And maybe it is. For you. For Aaron. Maybe for Martin and even Adam. But not for me or Raph and definitely not fucking Ollie. Christ, you know what the worst part is?”
“Will,” Christine says, as a prelude to asking him to calm down. His face is reddening, but to his minor credit he still hasn’t moved. She’s watched the video of Steph’s conversation with him when he was in the cell, and she’s pretty sure she can see just how hard he’s working to keep those little sparks of his from going off, from lighting his fuse.
“I had hope!” he shouts, and looks directly at Christine. “I thought I was like Steph and Steph was like me and that meant something! I thought you useless fucks were going to fix me!”
The door from the corridor opens and Tabby comes walking carefully in, followed by Monica and Nell. If the situation hadn’t become so suddenly tense, Christine would be amused that Tabby’s the only one who doesn’t look dreadful; the benefits of a relatively early night, she supposes.
“Hey Will,” Tabby says, in the controlled, authoritative voice that a small part of Christine still wants instinctively to obey. “You okay there?”
“Yep,” Will says, nodding to himself, or to some imaginary audience which doesn’t include anyone currently present, “yep, yep, here we go, the big, violent man’s being scary again, time to shut him down, time to—”
“Will! I’m not here to shut you down. I’m here to talk. Can I come over?”
Will looks alarmed at the prospect and instantly loops his arms behind his back, grasping at each elbow with the other hand. If Tabby isn’t going to control him, it seems he’ll control himself.
“Yes,” he says, seeming to shrink back into himself, to become more like the Will Christine’s seen on the cameras lately, quiet and unassuming. “Yes. No. Maybe we should go—”
“We’re not going to your room, William,” Tabby says. “Nor are we going to the cells. We’re not going anywhere. Look, see?” She takes another step closer. She’s within arm’s reach of him now. “I’m safe, aren’t I?”
He doesn’t say anything, and she steps closer again. Reaches behind him and brings both his hands back out in front. Holds them carefully. Will inhales sharply, but otherwise doesn’t react.
“I’m safe,” Tabby repeats, “aren’t I?”
“Hey,” Nell whispers, “you wanna take those two out of here?”
“Those two?” Christine asks, almost too scared for Tabby to remember Steph and Aaron behind her. And then she shakes herself, turns back to them, and finds Aaron in Steph’s arms. He’s not shaking; he doesn’t seem to be reacting at all, and that’s a little alarming.
“Take them for coffee or something,” Nell says, and looks up with her eyes only.
Christine nods, reaches out for Steph and Aaron, and silently leads them out of the common room. They don’t get as far as the stairs, though, because as soon as they’re out of the door and out of sight, Aaron leans against the wall and exhales all his tension.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he wheezes. “For a minute there I thought he was going to do to you what he did to Maria, only worse because it was just us three, and Steph might have a mean fucking right hook on her and you might have a taser but I’m negligible, honestly, and it could so easily have gone bad, and Maria still sometimes winces when the lights are too bright, and—”
Steph shushes him, engulfs him in a hug, pulls him away from the wall and pets him gently on the back, and Christine looks away. They should have as much privacy as is practically possible, down here in a corridor with no fewer than five camera emplacements and a dozen microphone points. Maybe she’ll delete the footage later.
Is it really okay if she takes them both upstairs again? She’s pretty sure that’s what Nell was suggesting, but while Steph has the run of the place — and could, at her discretion, even leave if she was very, very careful about it and had a good reason — Aaron’s dispensation to visit the main Hall was a one-night thing, granted specifically by Maria. There’d been more sponsors in the dining hall than were ever simultaneously present downstairs, after all, and with the graduates and miscellaneous hangers-on there’d been no shortage of people to keep an eye on him.
But then, he was asked if he wanted to leave, wasn’t he? And he said no. Teri, who’d outright offered to take him home with her, raised his reply with Bea, asked her if she’d upgraded to fancy mind-control drugs or something, because she couldn’t believe someone who’d never shown any prior signs of transness could refuse the offer to leave after just three months.
So he wants to stay. Whether it’s because of Steph or because of his desire to rehabilitate or even just because he thinks he’ll look good in a dress, he wants to stay. So it’s probably fine to take him upstairs again.
Fuck it; Bea or Maria can bollock her about it later if they want.
Aaron’s loosened up again, and that suggests it’s time for them all to move.
“You two want some coffee?” she says.
* * *
Melissa feels as if there are two versions of her, walking the familiar pavements from Shahida’s family’s house on Six Oaks Estate to Amy’s on Almsworth Row, and she leans into Shahida as they walk, gloved hand in gloved hand. When she was a teenager she didn’t spend nearly as much time in this suburb as she wanted to — she denied herself so much, for reasons she now finds difficult properly to imagine; sometimes looking into her past is like looking at a photograph of a stranger and trying to guess their thoughts — but she walked this route enough that the sense of it is stronger than the memory. It’s like Mark is walking with her, holding her other hand, and she flexes her free fingers, willing him to let go, to fade away, but he doesn’t.
He’s with her.
Shahida’s talking and she’s half-listening, replying automatically, because she’s replaying the first time she came to Amy’s like a movie, watching herself — watching Mark — nervously dragged along in his ugly clothes and with his hair tied back, uncomfortable in his body and never knowing why.
She tied her hair up when she redid her makeup. Absently she reaches up and pulls it loose, shakes out her hair, runs her hand through it; frees herself from him.
And then Shahida coughs and splutters, breaking the spell, and Melissa turns to her, rubs her back as she works her throat clear. Mark’s gone, and that’s fine, because he survived long enough — just about — to become her, and if he’s going to resurface occasionally when she revisits the places he used to feel at home, then perhaps that’s just part of the process.
She’s reclaiming herself.
“Sorry,” Shahida says, smiling and rubbing her neck, embarrassed. “I, uh, inhaled a bit of saliva. Hey, what are you so happy about?”
“Hmm?”
“You’re smiling, Em. You’re smiling like a maniac.”
“I’m just… it’s good to be home, Shy.”
Because that’s what it is. Home was never the house she shared with her father and brother, not since her mother died there, and home was Dorley Hall only for as long as it had to be, with the place only recently starting to feel genuinely like somewhere she can be safe. But this triangle of streets, the part of the city where she got to visit Shahida, Rachel and Amy, where she escaped from herself, is home, too.
Even if it ended badly.
“What is it?” Shahida asks, and Melissa wishes, just for a moment, that Shy didn’t have an apparent link directly to her psyche, didn’t know instantly when her mood turned.
She shrugs, forcing out the memory of her final night with the girls. It hadn’t even been at Amy’s, anyway! “There are bad memories as well as good,” she says.
Shahida nods. “You need some time?”
“I’m good.” And she laughs. “It’s cold, anyway. Let’s go surprise Amy.”
The Woodleys’ house is as imposing as Melissa remembers, and the scattering of cars suggests that they have enough visitors to overwhelm their considerable garage. Shahida isn’t deterred, though, and marches right up to the front door.
The doorbell tune is still horribly tacky.
“I’ll get it!” someone yells from inside, and Melissa’s heart jumps, because it’s a girl’s voice, and that means—
The front door bursts open. Behind it is Amy Woodley, wearing a baggy Rudolph sweater and tinsel on her head.
“Shy!” she exclaims, launching herself forward for a hug. “I’m so mad at you!”
“Then why are we hugging?” Shahida asks, giggling.
“Because I’ve still missed you, you idiot.”
Amy bounces away from Shahida and turns to assess Melissa, which gives Melissa ample opportunity to watch her face fall.
“Shit,” Amy says. She looks from Melissa to the door and back again. “Shit. Shy: go home. Now.”
“What?” Shahida says, but Amy’s already backing away, and the door slams before they can ask any more questions.
* * *
“Just watch this, Val; you’re going to love it.”
It wasn’t enough that Jake had to drag her away from the kitchen, leaving Callum — Callum! — watching the roast, and it likewise wasn’t enough that he kept up an inane monologue as they walked through the manor; now he’s being deliberately mysterious, as if there can possibly be behind any door in this heavenforsaken place anything Valérie would want to look at. She’d assumed, when he officially relieved her of kitchen duty for the time being, that they’d be going to see Declan, to get him ready for the dinner tonight, but Jake led her up the stairs and down a side corridor, to an area of the manor she hasn’t visited for a long time, a brace of rooms that were always, even in the old man’s days, nothing more than dust-sheeted furniture and spiders.
“Watch what?” she asks, looking around for surprises and finding nothing but a cracked-open door a little farther down, with several pairs of sturdy looking shoes and boots outside. Callum or Jake’s room, she assumes. She hasn’t been asked to clean up here, and so she hasn’t, which would account for the smell. Valérie wrinkles her nose: bachelor pong. Was she so disgusting when she was a boy?
Jake’s posing in front of a closed door. “Wait for it,” he says, and knocks twice.
The door opens after a short while and Val’s shocked to see Declan. He doesn’t look like the Declan she remembers, though; neither the borderline-comatose boy-girl who arrived here with Dorothy, nor the rude and sneering man she’d had the displeasure of interacting with. This Declan’s dressed already, and in an outfit Val wouldn’t willingly choose in this kind of environment: a white blouse in a material so thin she’d be able to see his red, lacy bra even if it wasn’t buttoned only halfway up, a skirt so short and so tight that he has to have tucked or she’d be able to see the bulge, and — she fights the urge to roll her eyes — a pair of black, thigh-high boots. No prizes for guessing who picked Declan’s outfit; it’s the slutty secretary look, as interpreted by someone whose sexuality was formed around the pages of lads’ mags. His hair, still relatively short, has even been brushed, though if she’s going to make it presentable she has a bit of work ahead of her.
“Good afternoon, Mr Henshall,” Declan says, in a breathy voice. Still quite deep but he’s unavoidably putting effort into sounding different. Valérie counts the days since she last saw him. What’s happened?
“Meet Dina,” Jake says, and he holds out a hand, palm open. Val can only watch as Declan steps meekly forward and rests his cheek against Jake’s hand, though she thinks she sees something in the boy’s eyes. A mixture of shame and fury.
The boy’s still in there, then.
“Dina,” she says flatly.
“Dina Shaw. She’s my project.”
Valérie can’t resist poking a little bit. “Declan?” she says.
Declan hesitates, but when he sees Jake watching him expectantly, he says, “Dina. That’s my name for now.”
“Good girl,” Jake says. “This is still early days,” he adds chattily, turning to Val as Declan leads them both into what is clearly his new room. “We only came to this agreement last night, didn’t we, love?”
“Yes,” Declan says.
“Yes who?”
“Yes, Mr Henshall.”
And then Jake starts directing them, having Declan sit in front of a much nicer vanity than the one Val has, showing Val to the makeup and the wig he wants her to put on him, and sitting himself in an armchair on the other side of the room, to watch and comment as she works. She ignores him, mostly, except to occasionally conform her makeup job on Declan to his preferences — bright red lipstick, naturally — because she’s too busy dwelling on two things: Declan said that Dina’s his name ‘for now’, and Jake said they came to their agreement last night.
She can see it all too clearly: Jake’s made promises to Declan, promises about restoring him if only he plays his given role for the moment, and perhaps has impressed upon him the severity of the penalties available if he refuses. Trevor, after all, is promised to someone else, and Valérie, for all her attitude, largely does the jobs that are required of her. Declan’s no-one’s, and that makes his position here precarious. Jake will have promised him the world and threatened a living hell.
Damn it. If Declan’s loyalty has been purchased — with lies, most likely, not that it makes much difference — then that could pose a problem; she and Frankie have been making their plans on the assumption that Declan would be a non-participant, perhaps someone they could free if they had the chance, but nothing they particularly needed or wanted to account for. If it comes to a fight, if things get complicated, and Declan sides with Jake, that gives them a numerical advantage against Valérie, Frankie and Trevor, and that’s before considering the relative balance of physical strength, military training, and access to weaponry.
Perhaps she should have been more pleasant to Declan when she had the opportunity.
No. He’s still a rapist, and siding with Frances has filled Val’s moral compromise quota for the entire decade. He’s a rapist and he’s unrepentant, no matter what manner of creature he might choose to become out of a desire to survive.
Fuck him. If it comes to it, and if it’s possible, she’ll happily kill him, too.
* * *
He reaches instinctively for Steph’s hand as they ascend. It’s not terra incognita up here any more, not since last night, but that’s part of the problem: last night, not only was he putting on something of a performance, with the suit and the hair and everything, but he made certain promises…
‘I’ve been Aaron.’ Yes, fine, super, but that was last night, so who are you now?
He’s being stupid again. What does everyone keep telling him? That he’s made more progress more quickly than anyone except Steph — and possibly Vicky — and Steph doesn’t count and Vicky’s almost definitely a special case, and special in a way that doesn’t apply to him.
Probably doesn’t apply to him. His past is getting murkier the more he avoids thinking about it, and after associating so closely with Steph it’s hard not to wonder if there were moments, as a kid, when he wanted to be someone else.
Except he’s pretty sure that in those moments he mostly wanted to be anyone else; girl hadn’t been on the menu.
Steph doesn’t ask him if he’s okay, and he’s glad of that because it seems like every third sentence out of the mouths of the people he’s currently surrounded with is some variation on that general theme, but she looks at him with kind eyes, anyway, and doubtless interprets his brave smile as an answer in the affirmative and, fuck, it’s not like he can resent someone caring about him. Especially not when that someone is Steph.
How does she look so much like a girl right now? Their clothes are almost identical, her hair has barely been touched, and she’s wearing no makeup. Sure, if he looks for it he can see the face of the Stefan who showed up one random day in October, but doing so makes him feel disloyal, so he stops.
Maybe it’s something about her mannerisms.
Maybe she can teach him.
Rabia waves at them from the security room as they pass. Entirely unsure whether or not he should be so presumptuous, he waves back. She grins at him.
He’s been thinking about the methods of indoctrination in use here; the mechanisms by which they transform, with a reasonable success rate, appalling but otherwise ordinary men into women who aren’t just accepting of their new gender but, from what he’s seen, apt to embrace it (or to transcend it, becoming something else entirely, something also not connected to their original identity). A shame he never happened to read up on cult initiation tactics, back when he had access to the internet, but as of last night he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t care even if he could follow his progress on a chart in some textbook somewhere. He’s being offered a new start, a clean slate, and a chance at real happiness, and just because that offer comes with a weapon aimed at his body and the threat of an uncertain fate should he refuse doesn’t make it a bad outcome; doesn’t make it something he hasn’t, on almost every level, decided to want.
Or, he remembers, smiling at the thought of Steph, in her dress, in the room with the view of the forest, touching him the way he finally asked to be touched, something he wants to want.
Lingering doubts don’t count, right? It’s like a wedding; just because the bride’s getting nervous in the room out back, doesn’t mean she’s going to call it off. And the discomfort he experienced in his stupid fucking tux, surrounded by so many beautiful women, was absolutely real, no matter its source.
God, this is too much thinking to attempt while he still has a hangover. Fortunately, Christine has the solution for that: she dumps a mug in front of him, filled to the brim and smelling caffeinated, and he realises they must have guided him to a seat at the kitchen table while he was off in his own little world.
The big thoughts can wait, honestly. Whoever he is, whoever he will become, he’ll still be someone who, right now, wants his fucking coffee.
It says Eat, Sleep, Feminise, Repeat on the mug. God help him, he’s starting to find the damn things sort of charming.
“She’s back with us,” Christine says, nudging Steph and smiling at him. It takes him a moment to register the pronoun, but it seems less jarring today.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“We could tell.”
“It was when we got to the dining hall and all the second years said hi and you didn’t react at all,” Steph says, “that’s when we knew.”
“Everything piling up in your head?” Christine asks.
“‘Everything’ isn’t a big enough word,” he says.
“I remember that. Happened a lot later for me, of course. Took me a couple of days to get through it.”
“A couple?” Paige says, walking in through the main doors. Vicky and Lorna are with her, all of them looking considerably more put together than he is. But then, they all have access to private shower facilities. “Try seven.”
Christine looks up, smiling, and receives her girlfriend, who leans down behind her and kisses her on the back of the neck.
“A couple is nearly seven,” Christine protests, but weakly, because Paige is still kissing her and Christine’s starting to squirm.
“When did it happen for you?” he asks.
2018 March 16
Friday
It’s been a week since they took him to the floor upstairs, to the basement above his own, so close to the surface and the outside world that he could see from the stairwell for the briefest moment what looked like a dining room, wood-panelled and rich. In that brief glimpse he yearned for it, ached to explore it, if only to see something beyond these concrete walls, but in the time since, in which he has had nothing to do but think, he’s started to wonder if that sliver of freedom was another deception, another sick joke. Maybe the dining room is as entirely enclosed as everything else here. Maybe the true ground level is hundreds of metres up. Maybe he’s going fucking crazy.
Sometimes he imagines that this place goes on forever, that if he somehow got unfettered access to the door locks he could climb those concrete stairs for weeks and still never reach the surface. In his dreams he’s starved to death in that stairwell, forgotten, abandoned, deliberately erased; a fitting end for one such as him.
On that day they took him past multiple anonymous doors and into another concrete box, and there they put him on an operating table and asked him very seriously if he needed to be restrained.
He said no. Indira was there, and despite what was about to happen to him, she was then, and is now, the sweetest and kindest woman he’s ever met, and the idea of hurting her was more abhorrent and more destructive to his sense of self than anything he might lose on that table. So he lay back, found for her a brave smile, and the other girl, the one he’d never seen before that day, prepped him.
Indira held his hand. Brushed the tears from his cheeks.
And then the other girl castrated him.
That was the end of the man he’d been. They moved him to a bed in the room next door and let him sleep, and when he woke up, he was something else.
What, though?
It was inevitable. From the moment of disclosure, even though they never said exactly what was involved in their eventual transformation, it wasn’t exactly hard to guess, especially not with the self-proclaimed Vicky talking in not-so-subtle tones with her sponsor about accelerating her treatment.
Fucking Vicky. He tried so hard to resent her, but she made it almost impossible. The fact that she responded to the orchiectomy with undisguised joy was a little hard to swallow, though. And he tried to want it, he really did, but right there, on the table, he would have given anything to be anywhere else.
Almost anything. Indira had been there, not just holding his hand and comforting him but also presenting herself as an obstacle, because she knew as well as he did that if there’d been a route for him out of Dorley Hall, unchanged and unharmed, but if he’d have had to go through Indira Chetry to reach it, he would refuse.
He loved her early and he loves her still, with an intensity that, when he steps out of himself to think about it, shocks him. He loves her despite everything she’s doing to him. And she seems genuinely to love him back, despite everything he’s done.
But such a mutilation isn’t the kind of thing you can just get over. Not the kind of violation you can wave away.
And the requirement to keep the area clean, to pat it dry after a shower, doesn’t bloody help. He does so anyway, and wraps the towel around himself — at chest height, the way Vicky does — and then the robe. He leaves his hair wet, even though it’s starting to get long, because he doesn’t want to deal with any of that shit right now. He just wants to sleep. He’ll wrap it in a spare t-shirt, or something.
He’s been sleeping a lot. It’s better than thinking.
But there’s someone waiting for him in his room. It’s the other boy — and God knows they’ve all become boys in here, stripped of any pretence of adulthood, of masculinity — the one who asked him a week ago to stop calling him by his name. Like all of them, he’s changed; like Vicky, he’s started to hold himself differently. He might, actually, be copying her.
The boy’s looking at the floor, but when the hinges squeak he looks up, his face blooming into a smile.
“Hi,” the boy says. “Indira let me in.”
Of course she did. “Do I have better movies than you, or something?”
“No. I wanted to talk.”
There’s space on the bed, so he sits. “About anything in particular?”
“About you,” the boy says. “Are you okay?”
“I’m two bollocks lighter. Can’t seem to get used to it.”
“Strange, isn’t it?”
“I have other words.”
The boy smiles again, his front teeth resting for a moment on his lower lip, biting softly at the flesh. It’s always been an appealing habit.
“I’ve been talking to Vicky,” the boy says. “She has some ideas about how we can adjust.”
“We’re not her,” he says. “She’s… Fuck, I don’t even know what she is. But we’re not her.”
“And? Why not choose to be? Why not do our best to emulate her, and see how we fare?”
“Why not grow wings and fly out of here?”
This is the longest conversation he’s had since the day of the operation. He wants to tell the boy to leave, to shove him out of the door, but he can’t. It wouldn’t be right. Indira wouldn’t approve.
He wouldn’t approve. And he doesn’t want to do shit that makes him feel guilty and disgusted with himself any more.
“I’ve been considering names,” the boy says.
Inevitable, after Vicky made such a show of choosing hers. “Any you’re ready to share?”
“Not yet. I’m still… trying them out in my head. You’ll be the first to know, though.” The boy shifts nervously on the bed. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Am I attractive?”
“What, you mean, like, objectively? Sort of. You’re kind of interesting to look at, I guess.” He sighs. “Indira says there’ll be facial surgery next. I think I should be more scared of that than I am, especially after this—” he looks down, draws his robe more tightly closed, “—but I don’t think I have it in me any more. I’m just kind of numb about it all.”
“Vicky says she knows what she wants done on her face.”
“Of course she does.”
“She’s got some suggestions for me.”
“Are you considering them?”
The boy shrugs. “Why wouldn’t I? If I’m going to be a girl, or if I’m going to look like a girl—” he glances to the side, towards the mirror in the door of the open wardrobe, “—then I think I’d prefer to be attractive. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about names?” the boy asks. “Have you thought about them yet?”
“No. I’ve thought about closing my eyes and never waking up. Kinda hoping for that, actually.”
It’s enough to startle the boy, and he reaches out, quicker than he’s ever moved. Joins their hands. Grasps him roughly, too hard, like he’s never done anything like this before and doesn’t know what level of pressure is appropriate.
“Don’t,” the boy says.
Fingers interlocking. So much heat between their palms. Hard to think about anything else.
“I want to try something,” the boy says. “It might be weird for you, and I know it’ll be weird for me, but I want to do it anyway.”
“Okay.” Forcing the word is almost impossible, and the sound is choked. Thick.
“I want you to kiss me,” the boy says.
2019 December 25
Wednesday
The girls from upstairs spent the time Christine told her story slicing loaves, buttering bread, and assembling sandwiches from yesterday’s leftovers and other food for those who simply can’t face any more turkey, so by the time Christine gets done, Steph’s halfway through her sandwich and Aaron’s finishing off a bowl of Weetabix.
“And that was sort of that,” Christine says, and laughs at herself. She’s been staring at the table, mostly, as she talks, with Paige sitting by her side, gently rubbing her upper arm and occasionally kissing her. Steph spotted the frown when she talked about her orchi, and speculates once again on the strength of character it must have taken to come out of that sort of thing better than you went into it, when it wasn’t something you ever wanted for yourself. “Of course,” Christine continues, “by the time I was a sophisticated-enough thinker to understand that losing my balls didn’t utterly revoke my manhood, I wasn’t a man any more, anyway.”
“Many such cases,” Vicky says, smirking.
“Proud of you,” Paige whispers, and Steph knows it wasn’t the kind of whisper she was intended to overhear by the way Christine sinks into her girlfriend for a moment and accepts her quiet and insistent reassurance.
She concentrates hard on Aaron instead, still sitting opposite from her, now idly twirling his spoon around an empty bowl. He’s frowning, too, and Steph wonders if, when it comes to it, he’ll accept the orchi like Christine did, fight it like some of the other girls did, or ask why the hell they didn’t get around to it sooner, the way Steph might if she wasn’t afraid of seeming ungrateful. He catches her looking at him and smiles lopsidedly, props his chin on one arm and rolls his eyes.
Steph’d give a million quid to see inside his head right now.
Next to her, Christine and Paige withdraw from each other.
“Paige found me,” Christine says. “So did Dira and so did Vicky. But that was the moment for me. Not at the point where all my other options got cut off—”
“Literally,” Paige says.
“—but in the weeks after, when I realised that I was still there, still changing bit by bit, and I could either go along with it or I could follow Craig.”
“Craig?” Aaron asks.
“Our Declan, kinda,” Vicky says. “Don’t ask what he did.” Lorna, currently fiddling with the coffee machine, visibly shudders, and Steph makes a mental note never to ask what Craig did.
And then there’s a ping sound, one Steph’s not heard here before, and she puzzles over it for a few moments before the main doors open again and the woman called Ashley enters backwards, holding them open for Teri in her wheelchair, and Steph realises the noise must have been from the seldom-used elevator. Pippa told her once that it’s slow and cramped and way too warm even in winter, ‘like the worst dumbwaiter in the world, but for people’. Beatrice follows them through, then Maria, then Edy, and suddenly the kitchen is full of people and Aaron’s looking uncomfortable.
It doesn’t help that he looks up at Bea at the exact moment she spots him.
“Relocate?” Steph says to him, and he nods. They exchange hurried greetings with the newcomers and leave them to talk to Christine and the others, trotting instead through to the dining hall, where a handful of girls — mostly second years — are sitting in a circle on the floor in the middle of the room. Their demeanour suggests they’ve been busy and are taking a break, and Steph spots a pile of cleaning products and a hoover in one corner.
They wave as they pass, and Aaron sits heavily on one of the couches by the fireplace, now unlit. Steph drops onto the cushion next to him and they find each other’s hands and sit for a while in silence.
“I know how she felt,” he says, after a few minutes. “Christine. I know how she felt. I mean, yes, I haven’t had my testicles obliterated yet but that feeling, that okay, what now? feeling, I get it. Like, what I said last night in front of all those people, that was like my spiritual orchiectomy, you know? I could’ve hacked them off with a turkey knife and it would’ve been— Is there such a thing as a turkey knife? Or is it just a meat knife?” Steph shrugs; knives come in three shapes, as far as she knows: serrated, non-serrated, and blunt. “Whatever. Point is, I’m there.” He makes chopping motions with his hand. “I’m unmanned. And now I’m sort of… I don’t know, floating around in a big pool of estrogen, wondering what happens next.”
“You said—”
“—that I want to want to be a girl, yes, and I do, I do, and now I’m just wondering, how exactly does that happen? I know it kind of has to, because, I mean, look at all the women we met last night. And look at Christine.”
“And Paige,” Steph says, counting on her fingers, “and Pippa, and Maria, and… everyone.”
He nods. “Everyone. And they’re already treating me like one of the girls. You’ve seen it, right? I’m not imagining it?”
“You’re not. Does that bother you?”
“You’d think it would, wouldn’t you? But it… it does and it doesn’t. It’s like there are expectations attached to being one of them. One of you. And, God, I think I’m repeating myself. Tell me the truth: how tedious am I being right now?”
“Not at all.”
“I am a little, aren’t I?”
“No.”
“Not even a— Oh, hey.” He interrupts himself to greet Mia, once again in a hoodie-and-long-socks combo instead of last night’s dress, and looking rather more comfortable than she had yesterday. Steph had watched as she emerged from the corridor that leads to the restroom, waved to her intake, and then spotted her and Aaron and diverted towards them.
“Hey,” she says to Aaron, “I’m Mia.” There’s a footstool a metre or so away from the couch, and she sits on it, pulling her legs up under her and revealing herself also to be wearing — thank God — modesty shorts. Steph exchanges finger-waves with her, and she turns back to Aaron. “Saw you last night. Thought you looked good.”
“I looked stupid,” Aaron mutters, looking away.
“No, no!” Mia says, leaning forward to touch his knee. “You were going for butch girl, right?”
“I was going for guy,” Aaron says. Steph has to cover her mouth.
“Oh. Sorry.” Mia shrugs. “Well, you rocked it, anyway.”
“It’s okay,” Aaron says, as Mia sits back, wobbling a little as she gets her balance on the footstool again. “Not like I want to be a guy any more, anyway. Not that guy, anyway.”
“I remember that.”
“Do you? Do you really? Christ, everyone keeps saying that. Can’t I have some originality in my journey of self-discovery?”
“Sorry, no,” Mia says. “We’re all the same kinda flavour of fucked-up here.”
“Yeah?” Aaron says. “Did you ask your sponsor to help you die, too, then?”
Mia nods. “Before the orchi.” She sniffs. “Mine was later than the others. Not my fault. Illness. They had to get someone else in to do it. So I had a week sitting around watching everyone else fall apart. In the end I couldn’t stand it any more; I went to Nadine and I said, the point’s to get rid of me, right? So let’s do it.”
“What did she say?” Aaron asks. The bitterness is gone from his voice.
Mia screws up her face, remembering. “She said, ‘You don’t know how happy I’ll be when I’m finally rid of you’ — and she said my old name here, in full, you know, like, ‘firstname middlename lastname’, like you do when you’re super annoyed with someone — ‘but on that day you will be a happy and winsome young lady. Are you happy?’ And I had to say no. ‘Are you winsome?’ And I had to ask what that meant, and then I said no. And I’ll always remember this, because she sat down next to me on my bed and pulled my head down into her lap, cradled me like a baby, and said, ‘Then I am not ready to be rid of you.’ Fuck. I love her so much.”
“And that was it?” He’s leaning forward, reaching for her the way she reached for him. “You were just… fine after that?”
“Well, I leapt in with both feet,” Mia says, her voice lower and more thoughtful than Steph’s used to. “I didn’t have a choice, right? From the beginning, none of us have a choice. Someone says to you, someone who has the keys to the lock on your door, she says, you have to become a girl because you’re too dangerous to leave running around as a boy, and you say, fuck off, and she says, fine, the exit’s this way, and the exit is, like, a pit of burning spikes, well, you become a girl, don’t you? Everything before accepting that is just fucking around. Especially when you’ve come to trust the person who told you that, even come to love her, and you understand that she really genuinely believes you can be a better person, and it doesn’t take long for you to want to be a better person, right? And I wasn’t anything before Nadine. If she wasn’t going to let me go, and she wasn’t going to let me die—”
“Or let you walk out into the flaming spike pit,” Aaron says. There’s a laugh from behind them, and Steph realises the other second years have gathered behind the couch, listening. She sees Faye nodding; Mia’s already talked about this with the rest of them, then.
“Right.” Mia nods to herself, frowning. She draws herself in, tightens her legs under her, rams her hands into her lap. “I wasn’t fine, though. I mean, I don’t know what exactly you meant when you asked that, but I wasn’t… comfortable. I’m still not comfortable a lot of the time. It’s within reach, though. I can see it. I’ve known for a long time who I’m going to be. That’s a lot of what I did after talking to Nadine that one time: I worked out who ‘Mia’ is. Kind of—” she releases a hand long enough to mime a person walking along her thigh, “—stepped into her. Lots of ‘What would Mia do?’ and ‘What would Mia say?’ Not about the little things, obviously; Mia hates Weetabix just the same as— as the boy did. After a while she started to feel authentic. Not all the time. But enough that I knew it was possible. I saw Ai and Bex and the others all becoming more like themselves and I worried that it wasn’t happening for me outside those little flashes of her so I just kept at it. Kept being Mia. I’m still doing it, and she feels realer all the time. One day she’ll be all me and I’ll be all her, and until then…” A grin appears suddenly, like the power’s been switched back on for the ‘Mia’ persona and the other thing, the unnamed, unwanted passenger, has been put back in its box. “Fake it till you make it, right? It’s a cliché for a reason.”
“I don’t think this is the reason, Mi,” Aisha says.
“It might be,” Mia retorts. “You don’t know.”
Aaron persists. “So… do you want this or not?”
“Doing what I wanted got me bloody knuckles and a criminal record. And it’s not the first time I’ve had to learn to want what I have. Don’t worry about me. Worry about those big fucking bruisers in the basement; Ollie scares the piss out of me, if I’m honest.”
Aisha’s standing behind Mia now, and the other second years have drawn closer, taking seats on the couch or on the floor. Aisha kisses Mia on the top of her head. “Harmony’s scarier than Ollie,” she says. “She’ll keep him under control.”
“True,” Mia says, and shuffles over slightly on the footstool to make room for Aisha, who loops an arm around Mia’s waist and sits down. Steph’s not quite sure how both of them are managing to stay on the tiny seat.
“So,” Aisha says, wriggling as she settles in and causing Mia to giggle softly, “Steph; you and her, then?”
Steph reaches for Aaron’s hand and takes it. Raises them both together. “Yep.”
“We’ve officially gone public,” Aaron says.
“And you!” Aisha turns to Aaron. “Speaking of public, that was one hell of a thing you did last night. You have a replacement name yet? Or are we all supposed to call you ‘Hey You’?”
“I have ideas,” Aaron says quietly.
“Oh my god tell us!” Mia says, quickly enough and at such a pitch it takes Steph a moment to decipher.
“Uh, I’m still, um…”
“You should be Ethel. You look like an Ethel.”
“They do not,” Faye says, and adds to Aaron, quietly, “Sorry, I don’t know what your pronouns are right now.”
He shrugs.
“Petunia,” Rebecca says. “What? I like plant names!”
“Why don’t you have one, then?” Mia asks.
“Because I didn’t like plant names back then. And I wanted to seem unremarkable, so nobody in the outside world could possibly guess about the whole… basement thing.” She turns to Aaron, who seems to be sinking into the sofa. “I’m going to be an accountant,” she tells him.
Lost for words, he gives her a thumbs-up.
“Well,” Aisha says, “what about Daisy? That’s a plant name.”
“We’ve had a Daisy,” Faye says thoughtfully.
“Rose. Lily. Violet?”
“That’s a colour,” Mia says.
“And a flower.”
Aaron’s grip on Steph’s hand tightens, and she turns to him, kisses him on the nose, strokes the back of his hand with her thumb. Around them, the second years’ voices start to merge together.
“Jasmine. Primrose. Olive.”
“Also not a plant.”
“Trees are plants.”
“Trees are trees.”
“Heather?”
Aaron whispers to Steph, “I thought about Heather.”
“Really?” Steph whispers back.
“I like the movie, with the three of them, and the guy with the bombs. Didn’t stick, though.”
“The bombs?”
“The name.”
“Can we get off plant names?” someone says.
“Helga,” someone else suggests. “Prudence.”
“Rapunzel.”
“If we’re doing Disney, what about Merida?”
“Steph’s the ginger, though.”
“True.”
“Snow White?”
“The Beauty from Beauty and the Beast.”
“Her name’s Belle. And we’ve got a Bella already.”
“No, her name’s Beauty. It’s in the title, dork.”
One of them starts saying ‘Cinderella’ but they’re cut off when another one smothers them with a cushion, and that would have been Steph’s cue to rescue Aaron, to pull him up with her and drag him away from the couch, but the good-natured bickering around them suddenly cuts out, and the two of them look up to see Maria and Edy standing by the empty fireplace.
“You’re keeping your sponsors waiting,” Edy says.
“You were due upstairs five minutes ago,” Maria adds.
“Oh shit,” Faye says, and starts organising the rest of her intake. One by one they wish Steph and Aaron Happy Holidays, pick up their assigned cleaning gear from the pile in the corner and disappear up the stairs. Faye, the last to go, turns back to wave at all of them, and then follows the rest of her intake up to the first floor.
“Worse than herding cats,” Edy mutters.
“Do we get presents?” Steph asks.
“There was going to be a mini-dinner downstairs,” Maria says. “But they’re still talking with Will in the common room, and—”
“Still?”
Maria exhales heavily. “Yes. Still. He’s… Well. You know what he’s like. Apparently he’s been building up this idea that our purpose here is to, essentially, replace him in his own head, so now Tabitha’s got to demolish this—” she waves a hand dismissively, “—tower of bullshit he’s constructed around himself. He’ll be fine. Speaking of…” She sits next to Aaron, takes his other hand, and smiles when his eyes meet hers. “How are you doing?”
And Aaron sits up, frees his hands from both of them, digs himself out of the gap between the sofa cushions he’d been practically burrowing into, and turns to Steph. Kisses her on the cheek, as gently as Steph’s ever been kissed.
“Mind if I talk to Maria alone for a bit?” he asks.
* * *
They don’t talk about it on the way back to Shahida’s. Amy slamming the door on them wasn’t something Melissa expected and, judging by the look on her face, neither did Shahida. They link hands instead, walking more slowly to stay together, sharing their warmth amid the lingering frost, and it’s because of that that the running footsteps catch up to them sooner than they otherwise might have.
“Jesus, guys!” Amy says, panting between words. “You couldn’t have waited?”
“For what?” Shahida says. “You sent us away!”
“Yes, and then—” Amy slows her voice to lecture speed, “—I texted you to say, wait around the corner.”
“You—? Oh. Shit.” Shahida pulls her phone out of her bag and checks it. “I left it on silent.”
“Idiot,” Amy says, reaching up and pulling down Shahida’s bobble hat, covering her eyes. She holds it there and says to Melissa, “Hi. Where the hell have you been?”
“Manchester,” Melissa says, because she can’t think of anything else.
“Is it nice there?”
“It’s all right.”
Shahida grabs at Amy’s arm until she lets go, and pulls her hat back up. “Amy, you little—”
“When were you going to tell me she’s back?” Amy interrupts, poking Melissa in the shoulder. “When were you going to tell me she’s a she?”
“Um,” Melissa says. “Now?” She points back up the road, in the general direction of Amy’s house.
“You know what I mean. Look at you! You’re gorgeous. So either you have a very talented makeup artist in your pocket, or you’ve been transitioning for years.”
“Um.”
“We only found out recently,” Shahida says quickly. “A couple of weeks ago. Less.”
Amy narrows her eyes. “Define ‘we’.”
Shahida’s cheeks concave for a moment, and Melissa smiles. She does that when she has to think fast: swallows too hard, bites at the insides of her cheeks. Melissa decides to rescue her. “Shy found me, and then Rach found me and Shy.”
“She ‘found’ you.”
“Yeah.” Melissa looks away. Now that she’s back, now that she’s meeting up with everyone again, she feels stupid for ever running, and not just from Shahida; from the Hall, too. Of course, running from Shahida’s in the rules…
Shit. Tabby sanctioned bringing Shahida’s parents in, on the tacit understanding that Melissa’s reconnections would be done with care, and Melissa went along with Shahida’s idea to see Amy without really thinking about it. She’s getting too comfortable with all this, making decisions too quickly. Again.
She has a cis NPH. She’s not supposed to be out to anyone not from or associated with Dorley. This is starting to feel reckless.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she says urgently.
“What?”
“You really can’t,” Shahida says. “Mum and Ed know, and Rachel knows, but that’s it.”
“Big secret,” Melissa confirms.
“What about your little study buddy?” Amy asks. “Your surrogate little brother? Steve, or something.”
Shahida closes her eyes. Melissa says, “Long story.”
“Why don’t you come home with us?” Shahida says. “It’s too cold to stand around in the street like this.”
“Sure,” Amy says, “but I have another bone to pick with you first, Shy: you booted me from the group chat!”
“That was Rach, actually. She was trying to protect our little secret here.”
“Seems unnecessary; today was the first time I checked it in years.”
“Ah,” Shahida says, pointing a finger, “but you still checked it! That means—”
Amy quiets her by pulling down her hat again. She grins at Melissa while Shahida yanks blindly on her arm. “You should remember this trick,” she says. “Very useful.”
“You’re a cow, Amy,” Shahida says.
“And you’ve picked up a bit of an American accent.”
“I have not!”
“Yep. Have.”
“Amy.”
“Say ‘mirror’. Say ‘squirrel’. Say—”
“God, I hate you so much.”
* * *
The only thing more fascinating than watching Melissa — and isn’t that a great name for her? — is watching Shy watch Melissa, and Amy delights in flitting between the two preoccupations as they make their way back to Shy’s place. She would have expected Melissa to be more, ah-ha, shy, but she’s keeping up her end of the conversation with no problems, making jokes, pushing back when she’s pushed against; being, quite honestly, the person Amy always thought Mark should have been.
Oh, she didn’t see this coming, not a bloody chance, but she ought to have. Melissa’s so natural as a girl Amy has to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t one the last time they saw each other.
Except she might have been. That’s the thing, isn’t it? She hasn’t met more than a couple of trans people in what her mother dotingly calls her ‘professional’ life, and only one personally — until now — but after Auntie went off the deep end without a life preserver she felt obligated to read up, and that’s something a lot of them say: that they were always… such-and-such a gender. But then others of them say they weren’t, and it’s a whole complicated thing that doesn’t seem, to Amy, all that important in the great scheme of things. She, Amy, was once a baby and now she isn’t, was once (briefly) into Busted and now (thank God) she isn’t, was once a university student but wasn’t even that for very long, and if she can reinvent herself that many times, both unavoidably and by choice, then if someone says they’re actually a girl or a guy or something else then who the hell is she to argue?
She said that, more or less, at the table two Christmases ago and caused an incident, and now she and Auntie Miranda are no longer friendly with each other. And now it keeps coming out, every time they can’t avoid each other — like, for example, this Christmas — and every time Auntie Miranda has somehow amassed even more grievances.
Oh fuck! She hasn’t told them yet about Auntie Miranda!
Inside the Mohsin-Carpenter house she yells a greeting to Eddie and exchanges hugs with Rupa, nods respectfully towards the now-empty upstairs flat, and leaps for the most comfortable spot in Shahida’s room, amused that it looks exactly the same as the last time she was here, which was…
Wow. Might have been five years ago!
Shy and Liss follow her up, Shy carrying a tray of teas and Liss carrying a plate of homemade sugar cookies, which she puts down on the floor near the massive cushion Amy’s claimed, the one positioned such that you can use the padded window bench as a headrest.
And Shy and Liss sit down next to each other. Uh-huh.
Shy hands the teas around, and for some reason Liss takes a second to inspect her mug all the way round, as if it might be dirty, before smiling to herself and taking a sip. Weird.
“Okay, so,” Amy says, rapping on the bay window for attention, “I am dying to know everything there is to know, obviously, but I have to tell you something first. You remember my Auntie Miranda?”
Liss shrugs and Shy says, “Vaguely. Tall, really thin, looks like the villain in a children’s movie?”
“That’s her.”
“Have you read the opinion columns in The Times lately?”
“No— Wait, what?”
Amy slurps on her tea. “So, you ever got bored, sitting around the house, waiting for your husband to stop boning his assistant and come home to pretend to pay attention to you? Because that’s why my lovely Auntie Miranda’s assaulting the whole country with her opinions every Saturday. The way she tells it, she was just talking to Bunny, and—”
“Who’s Bunny?” Shy asks. “Is it a person or a, well, a bunny?”
“‘Bunny’ is the manner in which the Viscountess of Whereverthefuck prefers to be addressed. She and my auntie went to school together. And Bunny, she’s got an in with editorial at the paper, because, like, half the staff there are related to her, or something. So that’s how Auntie Miranda got the new gig. And her hobby horse is—”
“Trans women,” Liss finishes. “Miranda Woodley-Stone? She’s your aunt?”
Amy sighs deeply. “Unfortunately.”
“I’m out of the loop,” Shahida says.
“Miranda Woodley-Stone,” Liss says. “Makes a living gravely informing Times readers that people like me are coming for them in the M&S changing rooms.”
Amy growls. “It’s not a living. It’s worse; it’s a hobby.”
“Jesus.”
“Anyway, she’s here again this Christmas, which is why we had to get the hell away from my house! She’s done multiple ‘exposés’ about private citizens who had the temerity to take a piss while trans and she’s got contacts all over the fucking place and she’s seen you, Liss. Old you. I have pictures of you in my room and there’s one of you at Rach’s brother’s party in the living room. The chances of her seeing you now and working it out are, well, they’re slim—”
“But not none,” Liss finishes. “Thanks, Ames.”
Amy beams at her. Shy rubs Liss’s knee, and Amy rolls her lips closed to keep from laughing at the way Shy’s hand looks just so ready to move up Liss’s thigh. Amy fucks up, though, and snorts, immediately covers her mouth with the back of her hand, and then, when both of them look at her, just bloody well gives up and rolls back on her pillow, letting the laughter out and easing the strain on her lungs.
“Holy shit,” she stammers as she gets her breath back.
“You okay, Amy?” Liss asks.
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, it’s fine, I shouldn’t say it. Really I shouldn’t.”
“Say what?” Liss says, at the same time that Shy says, “Em—”
“You two,” Amy says, still wheezing. “You’re so into each other it’s untrue. I mean, with Shy it’s super obvious, because she’s always been just, like, completely incapable of subterfuge, but Liss, you’re feeling it too, I can see it. She puts her hand on your knee and you lean into her like she’s the only girl in the world. God.” She reaches for a sugar cookie and waggles it at them both. “I always thought you were made for each other. Turns out you were. You just had this whole gender thing to get over.”
“Ames—”
“What happened with that, anyway? You owe me a story.”
“Amy!” Shy says. “You can’t just… drop that into the room and move on.”
“Why not? It’s so obvious.”
She can see it: the hope in both their eyes. There’ll be bullshit reasons for holding back, because there always are, and they’re both girls inclined to trip over themselves from thinking so hard they’ve tied their legs in knots.
Amy checks her tea is safely out of the way and then hops up off the cushion. She sits down in front of them and, before either of them have time to react — they’ll both be doing that thing where the brain presents an empty whiteboard and they have to rehearse their response on it in bloody triplicate before they can move a muscle — she takes Shy’s hand and Liss’s hand and clamps them together.
Their fingers interlock instantly, instinctively.
“Em, I haven’t wanted to—”
“I’m sorry, it’s just, I’ve felt like—”
“No, you don’t have to apologise, it’s me that—”
“Shy, seriously, I’m—
Amy clears her throat. “Do I have to push your heads together?” she says.
Shy glares at her, looks like she’s about to say something deeply, unforgivably rude, but Liss, whose face had been going brighter and brighter shades of pink over all this, suddenly smiles and reaches for Shy’s face with her free hand. “No, you don’t,” she says, and cups Shy’s cheek. “May I?”
Shy can’t speak. She just nods, and Amy’s heart just might bloody well explode from the sweetness of it.
* * *
Maria cleared everyone out for him, sent Steph away to talk to the others in the kitchen. Created for them both a little space, quiet, safe, private. And he needs that.
It’s not that he wants to be away from Steph. Not at all. But since he officially renounced his prior identity it feels like all the things that go with it are falling away, and while she wants the absolute best for him, he needs a chance to clarify his thinking without her there to overhear. And while Maria loves him, too, she has a lot more experience being objective about this kind of thing.
Maria asked him if he was okay and he assured her that he was and she gave him the space to think, to formulate his thoughts, and now he’s ready. Even more ready than he was last night, and for maybe an even more momentous purpose.
“I’ve been thinking about names,” he says. “And other stuff. But the name is important. I can’t be someone unless I have a name for her to be, you know?”
“I know,” Maria says softly.
“I talked to Jane. Talked to Christine and to that second year, Mia. And I think it was Christine and Mia that finally, you know, did it for me. Crystallised it.” He taps his thumb restlessly on his chin, and Maria reaches for his hand, calms it, interlaces their fingers, the way she did that night, the first time everything came crashing down.
“Take your time,” she says.
“Last night was hard. The tux was a mistake. Saying goodbye to Aaron was, like, I think I already had? But I’d been dwelling on this big, public gesture for so long that I couldn’t not do it, you know? Two raised middle fingers to the piece of shit I used to be. And then that was it: no more Aaron. And I started to kind of miss him, you know, just a little. Not who he was — not who I was — but who he could have been. The lost potential. And I know this whole place is about lost potential, there’s probably a mug about it in a cupboard somewhere and it probably finds a way to make it somehow also about testicles, but I mean, like, the first time I hurt someone, or the first time I was hurt, what if that never happened? And the fact that I can’t imagine that, that there’s no way for that little boy to exist even in my own fucking head, it breaks my heart, Maria. It kills me. So I want to remember him.” He laughs, deliberately, because he’s getting tense and that’s not what he intended.
“You don’t have to do this now,” Maria says.
He shakes his head; he’s fucking well going to do this now. “I want to remember him,” he continues, “but I’m not going to do a Steph, just change the spelling and call it a day, even though that would be so convenient, like, I wouldn’t even have to tell Will and Raph, I could just pretend they’re calling me the right name. And I don’t like it enough that I want it up in front, anyway. Plus, you know, opsec. A guy called Aaron goes missing and then a couple of years later a girl called Erin pops up? Even the worst private detective in the world would spot that, and then you’d have to have him killed by, I don’t know, Christine or someone.”
“I’ll tell Christine you thought of her.”
“She had a relationship with Paige, didn’t she? Before now, I mean. They were together when they were still… transitioning, and then they weren’t.”
“Yes. They didn’t get together again until recently.”
“You think that’ll happen to me and Steph? Just stop being together one day?”
“No. Christine and Paige, while they were developing, needed very different things from each other than you and Steph do. And they were both in flux, as personalities. I hope you don’t find this offensive, but in your relationship, one of you has a relatively stable sense of self.”
“And it’s not me,” he says, squeezing her hand. “Not offended. That’s kind of my point, actually. Kind of the reason for the name I’m thinking about. And why I want your opinion on whether it, you know, actually sucks.”
“I’m sure it won’t.”
“You haven’t heard my reason yet. Mia, she talked about herself like she designed a fucking D&D character and then decided to become it, and I thought that was weird for, like, literally three seconds, and then I realised that she’s probably got something there, like, I could decide on the person I think I should be, I can name her and I can describe the way she is and everything, and then all I have to do is be her, and keep being her until I am her. Right? I told Steph that I don’t want to be a girl, but I want to want to be a girl, and I do. Yesterday I saw so many people I’d swap places with in a heartbeat, if that would mean I’d also get their confidence in themselves and their guaranteed okayness with being, you know, a girl. So I make a girl of my own, and then I work on becoming her. Does that… make sense?”
“It does.”
“It’s not colossally fucking stupid?”
Maria lets go of his hand so she can shift position on the couch, lifting herself up and carefully crossing her legs. When she’s done she gestures towards herself, from head to toe, and says, “How do you think I became okay with being Maria? Our circumstances were quite different, but part of how I did it was deciding on who Maria would be. I imagined a whole life for her. I even picked a new surname; my mum’s favourite singer from back in Hong Kong.” She sniffs, looks away for a second, and he takes her hand, returns to her a little of the comfort she offered him. “I found out after the takeover that she’d died, though. The singer, I mean. Didn’t feel right to take her name after that.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“You’re sweet.” She smiles again, broad and happy. “I’m glad you’re my little sister.”
That’s a little startling to hear. But not bad, not really. More like Maria’s describing someone else, someone he doesn’t deserve to be.
And that’s the point.
“So I was thinking about role models,” he says, recovering and moving on, but not missing the playful smirk that now rests on Maria’s lips, “and there are a lot of them here, but the problem with that is that they’re all here. I can’t be you and I can’t be Steph — or I guess I could but it’d be really fucking weird — and I don’t know that I can really invent someone out of nothing like you did, or like Mia did. And, yes, I know, it’s just a template, or a bloody stencil, I guess, and when you do the thing with the spray paint it doesn’t always go on exactly the way you cut it, and that’s okay, because all I want’s a starting point. And I think I have that. I think I know who I’m going to be.”
She leans forward, arms out, and he accepts the hug, uses it to whisper the name so quietly that even if there’s surveillance on them right now she’ll still probably be the only one to hear it, and when she does, when she knows what she’s going to be calling him, from now until the end of his days, she repeats it back to him, delighted, and hugs him all the harder.
* * *
When Melissa withdraws she has to sit back heavily on her ankles, because her heart’s beating paradoxically too hard to properly support her head or her limbs or anything else of use, it’s beating so hard she can hear it, can feel her own pulse pound in her fingertips and in her lips, still wet, still trembling, still aching for her.
And it’s not enough for Shahida either, because she gets only a moment’s rest before it’s Shahida’s turn, and she doesn’t even wait for Melissa to recover, she crawls forward, rises just enough to grasp Melissa’s hands with her own, and pins her, kisses her, presses whole-body against her, and if Melissa could have just one prayer answered in her whole life it would be to share every sensation with Shahida, every nerve ending, every quivering limb, all of it because of her, all of it owed to her.
Eventually, Shahida relents and rolls off her, to land on her back on the floor by Melissa’s side, breathing heavily.
“I just remembered we’re in Mum’s house,” she says breathlessly. “And I can’t decide if she’d yell at us or take a seat and encourage us to continue.”
“And I’m here, also,” Amy says, observing them over the rim of her mug. It makes Melissa jump, because she had forgotten about Amy, forgotten about Rupa and Edward, forgotten about Dorley Hall and all the heavy shit she has to think about. She smiles sheepishly at Amy, who giggles in response. “And you know your mum would just bring you tea and snacks and tell you to pace yourselves.”
“Shit,” Melissa says.
“Yeah,” Shahida says.
“Yeah,” Melissa says.
“Yeah,” Shahida says, and then she props herself up on her elbows, examines Melissa with a narrowed eye for a moment, and asks, “Are you happy with this?”
“Very.”
“Would you like to be together?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” Shahida says, frowning, “I hate to deflate the mood, but we have to talk to Abby.”
“Abby?” Melissa says. “But she’s gone, she’s fucked off, she’s not coming back, and… Yeah. You’re right. I’m making excuses. We should talk to Abby.” She’d known it; she just wanted, for a little while, to pretend she didn’t. Abby’s got as large a space reserved in her heart as Shahida, but since Melissa returned, Abby’s made herself deliberately scarce. Melissa’s time away from everyone she ever loved was hard and lonely and she will not be the cause of such a thing in one of her best friends.
“Who’s Abby?” Amy asks.
“It’s a long story,” Melissa says.
“You said that about Steven.”
“Stefan,” Shahida says.
“I’m full of long stories,” Melissa says.
“So tell me!” Amy says, and then she holds up a finger and adds, “No, wait. First, we take a group selfie and I send it to Rach with the smuggest emoji I can find. Then you tell me.”
* * *
It’s been hard waiting for Aaron and Maria to finish talking about whatever they’re talking about, but, bless them, the girls have been doing their best to keep Steph occupied, catching her up on Hall gossip, recommending some new shows that have just been put on the network, and even bringing out some baby pictures: a graduate and her wife just had twins, and in anticipation of their planned New Year visit she’s sent along photos that have multiple girls around the table cooing, including Steph, to her immense surprise. By the time Maria comes to find her she’s borrowed a laptop from one of the girls and is alternating between drafting a new letter to Petra — filled, unfortunately, with the usual lies; at least she can make them happy ones — and showing them pictures of her on Facebook; she’s joined the new school band, and looks right at home there.
She closes the laptop as soon as Maria shows, though, and is out of her chair almost as quickly.
“Everything’s okay,” Maria says, and Steph swallows the lump that’s been growing in her throat for the last half-hour.
“Really?”
“Really.” Maria points back into the dining hall with her thumb. “Come through?”
Steph looks around quickly at the other girls, suddenly afraid again, suddenly aware that everything might be about to change, and though it’s change she wants, change she’s been waiting for, she still fears that Aaron might not make it through, that there might be a way for him to pass every test the programme sets for him but the very last, and end up separated from her, or washed out, or reduced, or otherwise taken away.
Another look at Maria, and Steph remembers: she’d never let that happen.
“Steph,” Christine says, tapping on the laptop lid, “I’ll save out your work and log out of Facebook and stuff.”
“Thanks, Tina,” Steph says. She likes that nickname for her, partly because it causes Christine to roll her eyes and Paige to giggle.
On the way, Maria takes Steph’s hand. Has she ever done that before? Steph’s not sure — the days do rather roll together, under Dorley — but something’s changed in Maria’s demeanour. She’s not as different as she was after the attack, when she came back to work and adopted a gentler approach with Aaron, but towards Steph she feels more… sisterly?
Everything changes. At least she’s changing now, too.
Aaron’s on the couch by the fireplace where she left him, and Edy’s there, throwing on fresh logs and getting ready to light it. She does so as they walk up, and they both recoil slightly from the sudden blanket of warm air.
“Hi,” Aaron says. He’s sitting cross-legged, facing across the couch, so Steph sits the same way, tucking her ankles under, facing him. He looks happy. Nervous, but happy. And, in the firelight, so fucking beautiful.
“We’ll be back in a bit,” Maria says, “for presents and the like, and a bit of a meal. It’s opt-in, so it should be a small crowd. You’re welcome to stay for it, if you’d like. Both of you. Steph, I know Pippa would be delighted not to have to give you your gift down in the basement.”
Steph nods distractedly, and pays little attention to Maria and Edy as they leave, because now it’s just her and Aaron in the circle of heat and light from the fire, and whatever he has to say, she will accept, she will love.
“Okay,” he says, and then shakes his head, smiles absently. “This is really it, isn’t it? This is really fucking it. Okay! Steph. Stephanie. Steph.”
“Hey,” she says.
“Right. I’ve been talking with— God. No. Christ! Why is this so hard?”
“You’re scaring me a little bit?”
“Sorry. It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s just— I have a name. A new one. Two of them, actually. Should probably pick a surname, but— Fuck. No. Off-topic.”
“Slow down,” Steph says. “One thought at a time.”
He laughs. “Is that even possible?”
“For you? No.”
“This is my moment!” he says. “You can’t be mean to me in my moment!”
“Sorry.”
But it worked, because he’s less jittery, no longer sitting on his hands, instead holding them gently in his lap.
“I was going to tell you the whole story behind them,” he says. “I told Maria. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you first, but I wanted to validate my thinking. I wanted to know from someone who’s been where I am, who was chosen for womanhood, who didn’t choose it for herself. I wanted to know from…”
“From your big sister?” Steph suggests, and Aaron creases into a smile.
“Yes. I wanted my big sister’s approval. I asked her if it suited me, because ever since I picked it I’ve been worrying it didn’t, that it doesn’t fit, that it was too, I don’t know, ordinary, and she told me she has full faith that any name I choose will be cursed by at least one sponsor inside a week. I don’t know why that made me feel better, but it did. She also, um, suggested I sit here and say it to myself. A lot. So it sounds normal to me. It doesn’t yet.”
“Are you going to keep me in suspense until New Year?”
“I’m— God. Steph, it seems weird to say out loud.”
And she can see in him a mixture of nervousness and pride; he’s named his destiny, his future self, and he’s anxious to become her, but even Maria’s approval isn’t enough for him to properly claim it. He needs hers.
Well. She can make it easier for him.
She unlinks her ankles and shuffles up on the couch, leans in. “Whisper them to me, then,” she says. “Both names.”
He does.
Steph doesn’t know what she imagined in this moment. Dramatic music, perhaps, or a passionate kiss. Instead she feels nothing but the most profound peace, a peace that seems to suffuse her whole being, a peace that promises a life for them both, within this Hall and beyond; a peace she wants to share with her partner. So she plants simple, soft kisses on cheek, chin and lips, and she says, “Hi, Bethany.”
And that’s it.
They sit back together, hands held, her head on Steph’s shoulder, with nothing but themselves and the light and heat from the fire, and Bethany Erin Holt says, “Hi.”
* * *
She can tell Frankie’s started early because when she wheels the serving trolley into the kitchen, she says, “Choo choo!” and pumps her forearm like she’s a child playing trains. And the fact that she’s wearing flats and still managed to almost fall over her own feet is another, slightly more subtle clue. Valérie gives her a tight smile, teeth clenched over the urge to laugh, and starts loading up the trolley.
“How much have you had?” she asks.
“You know how there’s a wine cellar?”
“I do.”
Frankie whispers, “There’s also a whisky cellar.”
“Oh, for God’s sake; are you trying to get us both killed?”
“Well, more a whisky cupboard.”
Val sets down the turkey and folds her arms. “Seriously, Frances.”
Frankie straightens up. “No, Valérie, I am not going to get us both killed. I’m leaning into it, aren’t I? We’re both about to walk into what is bound to be one of the more stressful dinners of our lives, so I’m having a little fun.”
Val, shaking her head, resumes loading the trolley. “It will be nothing new for me. I have eaten dinner with people who have the power of death over me many times before. With you, for example, back at Dorley Hall.”
“Val, love, you greatly overestimate the influence I had there.” Frankie thumps her chest.
“From the point of view of the ant, everyone’s boots are the same size.”
“More French philosophy?”
“Perhaps. I wouldn’t know. My education was never prioritised by the people who stole my life and my genitals from me.”
Frankie leans closer. “When we get out,” she whispers, “I’ll show you how to use Wikipedia.”
“Sshh!” Valérie hisses it as quietly and insistently as she dares. She does not share Frankie’s confidence in her ability to keep it together tonight. At least the woman had the foresight to brief her before disappearing into the depths of Stenordale Manor in search of alcohol; Trevor’s going to be at dinner, and Val’s had all afternoon to rehearse her reaction to him.
And that’s a good thing, because Trevor’s already sat at the table, bracketed by Callum and Jake, and his eyes bug out when he sees her. Declan’s there, also — or ‘Dina’; whichever — and sat on Jake’s other side, and the overall impression is of two grizzled and unattractive millionaires showing off their latest trophy wives, an impression only slightly spoiled by Trevor’s obvious terror and Declan’s sullen disinterest.
“Ah,” Val says, stopping momentarily with the trolley, “you’ll be why I was asked to cook for nine today. New acquisition, I take it?” she adds, addressing Jake.
“None of your business,” he says.
“But she does eat, yes?”
“Yeah. He does.”
“Ah,” Valérie says delicately, and smiles placidly at Trevor. “Welcome to my side of the family. Do you have a name?”
“Trevor,” he says.
“Theresa,” Jake says at the same time.
“A choice,” Val says. “How wonderful. Frances, lay the table, would you? I couldn’t fit the gravy or the other batch of potatoes on the trolley; I must fetch them.”
“Sure,” Frankie says, her deliberate, grudging obedience rather enhanced by her inebriation.
Val waits until she’s out in the corridor and out of the view of any cameras before she allows herself to smile. Frankie told her that, in her opinion, Trevor’s a terrible actor, so it’s perhaps best for all of them that his terror is so overwhelming tonight, and has so clear a cause; it gets him off the hook from having to pretend he doesn’t know Val, isn’t part of a very quiet and only slightly hopeless conspiracy. Frankie or Jake or someone will have told him: the Smyth-Farrows are here for a number of reasons, but high among them is to get a good look at him.
She wishes, momentarily, that she had not told him horror stories of her early days under their bastard father. Oh well.
When she returns to the dining room with the second, smaller cart and the missing potatoes, Dorothy’s taken her seat, and the distant rhythmic thump of helicopter blades has started to penetrate the walls of the manor.
“They’re here,” Dorothy says with a grunt, and that’s when Valérie knows she’s distracted: not a single barb or insult by way of greeting. She feels quite invisible.
Callum half-stands out of his chair. “Should I go greet them?”
“Sit. They don’t trust my people; that’s why they brought their own.”
“And your people are normally so trustworthy,” Val says in her smoothest voice, as she takes up the position of server and servant.
“Can it, Vincent.”
“What will you cut off if I don’t, Dorothy?”
“Seriously, Val,” Frankie says, sounding more sober. She’s sat next to Trevor, possibly to help keep him calm, though Valérie’s doubtful her dubious charms are powerful enough for that. “These are serious people. Don’t try and push their buttons.”
She gets the message: play-acting over. Val nods, offers Dorothy a final smirk just to shit her up a bit, and then settles her face into the careful neutrality of one who is only to be spoken to.
Alistair and Henrietta Smyth-Farrow turn out to be exceptionally well-groomed individuals of about her age — though they look older, she muses, and bites down on her pleasure at that — and they come braced with bodyguards, superior expressions and, when they speak, accents that could lacerate glass.
“Ms Marsden!” Alistair exclaims, almost before their little party is even visible through the opening double doors. “How charming to see you again.”
“And what a fabulous little estate,” Henrietta observes. Privately, Valérie imagines her slaughtering puppies for a fur coat. “Very English.”
“Yes, very,” Alistair says, looking expectantly at Valérie, who remembers just in time the duties of a domestic who isn’t bound to either a doddering old man or a motley collection of idiots with no interest in decorum, and receives his coat and Henrietta’s as he speaks. “I’m afraid that in our time with the colonials we’ve become used to grander things. There’s no weight of history there, of course, but there’s a certain level of service that one comes to take for granted.”
Val chooses to receive this observation as a personal insult, and wonders if, in the fullness of time, she’ll have the opportunity to disembowel the man.
“Yes, well,” Dorothy says, standing to greet them, “we have to make do with what we have, I’m afraid. It’s good to see you, Alistair; Henrietta.”
Niceties carry them through the Smyth-Farrows taking their places around the table — Val can sense them struggling not to call it ‘quaint’, even though it could fit the entire assembled party twice over — and an initial serving of wine, pre-approved by Alistair Smyth-Farrow; “Father always did have good taste,” he says as she pours for him, “in some things, at least.”
She decides to take that as a personal insult, too.
The unnamed bodyguards stand rigidly on either side of the main doors, and the evening begins.
The gatherings back at Dorley Hall were always rather more debauched, and old Crispin Smyth-Farrow rarely entertained; and on the few occasions he did, he was more prone to the authentically aristocratic raucous bacchanal of wine and song than his children, who are, Val decides, used to moving in circles which built their formalities around a shared cultural embarrassment at not being as aristocratic as the bastards back home. But there have been formal occasions in Valérie’s life; she simply was not Valérie when she experienced them. She finds herself overflowing with mournful nostalgia, and she struggles to keep a lid on it as she serves the appetisers.
Fortunately, the company here tonight is actively detrimental to such musings. Focusing on them, their attitudes, their appalling intentions, helps refocus her.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us to your people, then, Ms Marsden?” Henrietta asks.
“Of course,” Dorothy says, in deferential tones Val finds strangely unsettling. “These here are our contracted soldiers, Jacob and Callum. This is Declan, the reject from Dorley Hall we captured and… repurposed.”
“We’re calling her Dina now,” Jake says, and though Val’s behind her she could swear she saw Henrietta’s eyebrow minutely twitch.
“Over there is Frances, one of my long-time associates and quite the expert in moulding young men.”
“Hi,” Frankie says, with her fork paused halfway to her mouth.
“And next to her is Trevor.”
“Ah, yes,” Henrietta says, “the young man who is to be ours.”
Val watches what remains of Trevor’s Adam’s apple bob nervously in his throat.
“We picked Theresa for her,” Jake adds.
“Ugh,” Henrietta says, lightly coughing. “Ghastly name. And so, I’m afraid to say, is ‘Dina’.”
“Just my soldier amusing himself,” Dorothy says quickly, earning herself a glare from Jake that he quickly suppresses.
“Indeed.”
“Well,” Alistair says, “now that we’re all acquainted, I propose we move on to the main course. Domestic,” he adds, not even bothering to look at Val, whom nobody attempted to introduce, “more wine, if you please.”
For Valérie, the meal goes surprisingly quickly. At Frankie’s slurred insistence she joins them to eat, and when questioned the bloody woman claims to be responding to ‘old sponsoring instincts’; “I just hate to see them standing around, yeah? Could be up to something. Indulge me.” Val hates feeling grateful towards Frankie, and wishes the woman would stop being so aggravatingly helpful. She still has to serve the inbred monsters, and to suffer the veiled insults from Alistair Smyth-Farrow without comment, but she’s sure that the one time she accidentally caught the eye of one of the bodyguards, he gave her the smallest, most barely perceptible smile of solidarity, and she supposes that at least she has to put up with them for only one night.
Over dessert, Callum appears to have one of his periodic bouts of conscience, and asks the Smyth-Farrows their plans for Trevor.
“Well, I’m glad someone asked!” Henrietta exclaims. Her accent’s been slipping farther across the Atlantic with every glass of wine, and now holds little resemblance to the authentically, indisputably English accent of her father, a man so refined he was sometimes difficult to understand. “He’s key, actually; and I meant to thank you, Ms Marsden, for taking the initiative and retaining him. Saved us ever so much bother, ‘auditioning’ candidates.”
“And then we’d have to cover up the disappearance, yadda yadda yadda,” Alistair says, twirling a finger in a circle and sounding bored.
“Precisely. To our intentions: they are twofold. We do need a domestic, like yours, Ms Marsden; one who is entirely under our control and who does not, legally, exist. Such a creation is very useful. But young Trevor’s main task will be to function as a sort of travelling exhibit. We’ll be touring England, the States, and a handful of other countries, and he’ll be a vital part of our presentation. Investors are so much happier when they can experience things for themselves. Imagine, if you will, trying to acquire the necessary funding to construct, oh, I don’t know, say, a rollercoaster, in a world where rollercoasters do not yet exist. You’d be looking at a lot of blank faces! A lot of people asking what on earth the point is of an elevated train that simply travels in very small circles. So, that’s where he comes in: this is what can be achieved! Show us the sons of your political or ideological enemies or your corporate rivals, and we will swiftly provide you with a plaything you will find ever so satisfying to behold.”
“You can’t—” Trevor says, his gut convulsing.
“Oh, my dear,” Henrietta says, “we can and we will. We are even planning some further modifications to your body, for the second round of investor meetings; they’ll be ever so bored if they have to see the exact same girl twice.”
Callum’s trying to silence him, to calm him down, but Trevor pushes him away, practically falls out of his chair and staggers on his heels. He collides with the wall and, his self-control a distant memory, vomits his dinner into a plant pot.
“Oh dear,” Alistair Smyth-Farrow says.
“Ms Marsden,” Henrietta says, as Val and Frankie rush to Trevor’s side to help him up, “I was given to understand your training was… well, adequate.” She taps her fingers on the table for a few moments, and Val, holding Trevor’s right arm and keeping him steady, has to stop herself reaching for the gravy boat and throwing it at her. “Yes,” she says decisively, “he cannot remain here. We shall take him with us. Complete his training ourselves. Clyde, Howard, collect our property.”
The bodyguards leave their posts by the door and advance on Trevor, Frankie and Val, and while Frankie steps aside, Val refuses, and not just because if they take Trevor, their chances of escape drop dramatically; she sees in the amused eyes of Henrietta and the disgusted growl of Alistair the memory of Crispin Smyth-Farrow and the delight he took in murdering the girls she tried to help. She’s had decades to regret her failures, and she knows that if Trevor leaves with them, she’ll struggle to live with the knowledge of the suffering that will be inflicted upon him.
She exchanges a brief, apologetic glance with Frankie, and then stands in front of Trevor.
“Domestic!” Alistair Smyth-Farrow barks. “Remove yourself!”
Val plants her feet and glares at him. “I will not,” she says, and summons every ounce of authority she can access. “If you try to train this man with amateur methods you will fail. Look at him! He is barely functional. Because you are correct: Dorothy Marsden’s training is inadequate. And that is because she has never trained someone for the role you plan. What she did, and what she still does—” she jerks her head at Declan, “—is break people. She does not have a plan for putting them back together again because she never cared to. She preferred them that way. Now, I am sure you are familiar with your father’s preferences, and how they differed from Dorothy’s, yes?” To the silence, she repeats herself: “Yes?”
When Henrietta speaks, her Americanised accent has all but reasserted itself, and she’s looking at Val with an interested gaze that makes her want to spit.
“I am aware of our father’s preferences, yes,” Henrietta says.
“The girls he put to work here? I trained them. I put them back together after Dorothy Marsden tore them apart. Out of the shells of men I built functional women, capable of—” she tries not to grit her teeth, “—useful service. Me. Not her.”
“Interesting.”
“Henny—” Alistair says.
“Shush. I sense a proposition.”
Val pretends to think it over for a few seconds. “Six months,” she says directly to Henrietta, ignoring Alistair, who seems suddenly subordinate. “Give me six months and you’ll have your obedient, functional servant.”
Henrietta narrows her eyes, and Val wonders if she’s pretending to think, too, to give the moment more weight, to increase her perceived control over the situation. “Three,” she says eventually.
And now Valérie really does think: is three months enough time to get Trevor back to a state where he can actually assist in an escape attempt, while simultaneously pretending to train him to function as a servant slash display piece for these ghastly people?
It’ll have to be.
“Three,” she says.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake on it,” Henrietta says drily, standing and beckoning Alistair out of his chair, “since the man you are protecting has made quite the mess of himself.”
“Yes, Henny,” Alistair says, “please don’t.”
“What is your name?” Henrietta says to Val. “I don’t believe I caught it.”
Frankie relieves Val of Trevor, allowing her to step forward and announce herself with dignity. “Valérie Barbier. Daughter of Laurent and Celine Barbier. They were once rivals of your father.”
“Barbier… Barbier…” Alistair mutters.
“I remember,” Henrietta says. “The unhinged old coot had quite the temper on him. A dreadful thing for you to get caught up in, Valérie Barbier.”
“Yes,” Val says, “it was.” Grudging marks for pronouncing her name properly, at least.
“Aren’t you an interesting woman?”
“I have my moments.”
“Indeed. Thank you, Ms Marsden; we have indulged ourselves on your hospitality quite long enough. Three months, Ms Barbier.”
Alistair and Henrietta Smyth-Farrow retrieve their coats without assistance, and within minutes are gone, leaving a fuming Dorothy in their wake.
“I should put you across my knee, Trevor, boy!” she shouts, thumping an arthritic fist on the table.
“Ah-ah, Dorothy,” Val says. She’s helping Frankie keep him steady again; Trevor seems about ready to pass out from shock, fear or both. “The Smyth-Farrows would prefer their toy unharmed, don’t you think?”
“Fine. Take him. Clean him up. He’s yours, Vincent. Get him ready or I’ll give you to the blasted Smyth-Farrows as a consolation prize.”
Frankie’s room is the closest, has a full ensuite bathroom, and is conveniently unmonitored, and Val’s already formulating excuses to come back here, to spend time with Trevor and Frankie in the parts of the manor that will keep their secrets. But first they need to clean him up, calm him down and put him to bed, and those are daunting enough tasks in their own right. She and Frankie talk quietly and constantly to him, reassuring him that they won’t let the Smyth-Farrows take him, that they’re all going to get out or bloody well die trying. Val makes him a sincere promise, and Frankie surprises her by doing likewise, and when eventually he falls into restless sleep in Frankie’s unmade bed, the two of them tiptoe back into her bathroom and collapse in twin exhausted piles, Frankie sitting heavily on the toilet lid and Valérie sliding down the door.
“Well, Val, love,” Frankie says. “Looks like we have ourselves a deadline.”
