27. Everything a Body Needs

1988 September 5
Monday

She’s almost out of chances.

They fixed the lock on the door out of the conservatory. They replaced the loose pane in the front hallway. They caught her slipping out of the window in the rear stairs, and when they yanked her back inside and threw her roughly against the wood panelling she scraped her upper arm on the metal window frame and bruised her shoulder on the wall. The other routes she and Val and the others mapped out, the ones she had yet even to try, have all been closed off, too.

New boys are coming, Frankie said. It’s time to stop fucking around. Time to stop indulging any idiot dreams of a life outside the boundaries that have been drawn for her. They added new, larger locks to the doors up to the main hall and the fire exit at the end of the basement corridor, and Frankie delighted in showing her how sturdy they are now, how invulnerable to hairpins and a well-placed elbow. They were watching the whole time, following her around campus, letting her play at escape. After her little display when they took Val away, the nurse suggested that some carefully managed freedom might be good for her — read: might prevent her from losing her mind completely, and that got their attention, because a mad toy is a useless toy — so they allowed her a handful of little jaunts, a stolen kiss with a pretty girl; a few evenings of near-normality. It had been fun, Frankie said. And funny!

But new boys are coming, and the money’s getting more serious about securing the place, so additional funds have been provided to lock it all down, and not before time, too; Frankie showed her a rickety old lock, newly replaced, that they hadn’t even known about. Why, she could have slipped away entirely undetected and they wouldn’t have known how!

“Oh, well,” Frankie said, and ruffled her hair with that curious mix of sentimentality and contempt she’s lately been given to, “them’s the breaks, David. I’ll kind of miss you, you know. When you’re gone, and all that. So make the best of the time you have left, okay? Make hay while the sun shines,” she’d added, and then looked up at the concrete ceiling. “Metaphorically.”

That had been six nights ago. She’s still puzzling over it.

Frankie, whatever else she is, whatever else might be going on in that thing she calls a brain, is fortunately still an idiot, and wasn’t careful with all the replacement keys. The stolen set’s been a lump under the mattress for weeks now, ready for her to make her move. And her move has to come soon, because she really is almost out of chances.

Even before they started locking the place down, she knew she couldn’t keep playing at escape forever. Frankie and Karen and the others have been telling her she’s Grandmother’s favourite for as long as she cares to remember, but that favour can only last so long, especially now she’s in the same position Val was when she arrived, more than two years ago: the last one left. And that can mean only one thing: they want her to help a new group of battered boys adjust to the mutilation, humiliation and deprivation of Dorley Hall. And then, when she’s fulfilled her role, they’ll ship her out. She’ll go wherever Val went, and she’ll die.

At that point, she thinks, she’ll be ready for it.

So her reticence finally to commit to getting the hell out has to end, because even though she finds it almost impossible to imagine building from scratch a life in the outside world, a life as a woman, no less, it has to be better than what awaits her here.

There’s an upside to her hesitation, at least: Frankie said they were watching her. They watched her explore the university, watched her learn tentatively to talk to people, watched her dance with Annie at the party by the lake. They were waiting for her to try to run away. If she’d tried a week ago, they would have caught her.

Now? They might not.

Unless this is all a setup. Unless she was supposed to pickpocket the keys. Unless they’re waiting for her to try for real so they can laugh at her again, hurt her again.

Only one way to know for certain.

She’s never been allowed an alarm clock in her room, so she’s been lying on her bed with her hair brush under one thigh and the stolen keys under the other, trusting in the discomfort to keep her more or less awake. She doesn’t have an exact idea of how long she needs to wait; just long enough for the bulk of the upstairs residents to go to bed or go home or do whatever it is they do when they lock everything down. She’s been murmuring the whole time, narrating to herself in a whisper versions of the life she’ll lead when she gets out. All fantasies, as silly as the ones she used to share with Val, but they’ve kept her busy and, in concert with the sharp objects poking at her legs, very nearly alert.

She knows enough about the security system here at Dorley Hall to know that it’s far from sophisticated. She’s seen the monitor in the room by the stairs, and aside from the cameras in every bedroom and the handful in the main room, coverage is spotty. There are motion sensors — she overhead Frankie (who else?) talking about them a few days ago — and it’s probably those that let them know when she left the Hall before, when she took the long way up through the main building, when she took her time being quiet, greasing locks with hair conditioner, carefully easing open doors and windows. She made it so easy for them, and she didn’t even know.

Still. She knows about them now, and that means she can plan for them. She’s been deliberately triggering them most nights: getting up, stretching, walking in circles in her tiny bedroom, returning to bed; creating the impression that she’s become a restless sleeper. The assumption might only gain her a few extra seconds, but it all counts.

Okay.

Call it.

Time to go.

She’s planned her route as far as her knowledge will take her — which isn’t particularly far, but it gets her out of the building — and she executes it as quickly as she can. She slips her fingers into the keyring, finds the keys she needs and readies them, and then she throws off the covers, leaps for the bedroom door and unlocks it. She’s out in the corridor before ten seconds have passed. Whoever’s in the security room has by now probably put down their coffee and rubbed their eyes and squinted at the screen, presumably expecting to see the timid boy in bedroom four stretching or pissing in his bucket or something. There’s no alarm she can expect to hear, not down here, but whoever it is will either come running right for her — having to stop to deal with a brand new and very heavy lock on the way — or call frantically for help. Either way, the clock’s ticking.

She turns right, up towards the so-called emergency exit — she’s quite certain that in the event of a fire, Grandmother’s favourite or not, she’d be left to burn — and kicks open the door to the abandoned room; door three of nine, equally spaced on either side of the sloping corridor, picked at random a long time ago. She and Val and the few others who’ve been in here always walked carefully to avoid kicking up the dust and keep their intentions concealed, so it’s a novelty she doesn’t have time to appreciate simply to run in, yank the old cabinet away from the wall and pull out the supplies.

It’s a pair of pillowcases, nested inside each other for strength and containing shoes, money, Frankie’s passport, and a handful of other bits and pieces collected over the years. Each item represents an ungodly investment of effort and time. Pain, too; not all attempts at theft were successful, and punishments for those that failed were always severe. Each item also represents a girl who is no longer here, but there’s no time to think, there’s no time to mourn, because she’s got to fucking go.

The stolen keys get her out of the doors at the end of the tunnel in time for her to hear someone shouting from somewhere inside the basement, so she slams the fire door, relocks it, and leaves the keys. She considered, while formulating her plan, breaking them off in the lock at this point, but decided against trying it: relying on tactics you’ve seen in movies will get you caught.

She slips her feet into the running shoes, velcros them tight, and runs off into the woods, heading in what she’s certain is the right direction for the city of Almsworth, and the last thing she hears as she vanishes into the trees is Frankie, standing in the open fire exit, shouting back into the building that she can’t see where David went, and loudly damning the rain.

 

2019 December 16
Monday

A kiss draws Christine back to consciousness, out of a formless dream and into the gaze of her girlfriend, who smiles and kisses her again, on the lips, on the cheek, on the tip of her nose, and Christine luxuriates in the extended moment of mixed perception as the real world slowly imposes itself in the form of Paige, kissing her again and again and laughing at the faces she pulls and the grumbling noises she makes in her throat as she wakes, finally, and returns the affection with still-sleepy insistence and confused limbs.

Hmm. Morning breath.

“Hi, Christine,” Paige says, and nips her once more playfully on the chin before rolling over and landing back on her pillow with an enthusiasm that shakes the bedframe. She sighs. “Another day in paradise.”

The need to stretch takes Christine, and it’s a moment before she has control enough to push herself into an upright position. “What time is it?” she asks, leaning forward a little so Paige can arrange pillows behind her head.

Paige shrugs. “Sometime after seven,” she says. “And I have a thing at nine and you have a workshop at ten, so I thought: why not be on time for once?”

“Paige, you’re always on time.”

“And you never are,” Paige says. She tenses her upper body so she can fully stretch the kinks out of her legs, and the duvet falls away as she lifts them, exposing her from hip to toe. She grins at Christine and wiggles her toes.

“Seven o’clock?” Christine says, feeling light. She hasn’t even gone on her trip with Paige and Indira yet, to visit her old city of Brighton, to tour the places she grew up, the places she was hurt; the places she hurt people. But it’s as if the therapeutic effects have travelled back in time; she feels complete, for the first time in her life. Her old self isn’t the enemy, isn’t some monster who had to be killed, its corpse fuel for the growth of her new life; he was just a sad, injured, misunderstood boy. Reintegrating him always felt like it might reintroduce his fear, his loneliness, his flashes of blinding, misdirected malice, but here he is, in his entirety; part of her.

She has a few little scars, faded white, on her hip, remnants of the other ways the boy tried to control his mounting, devastating isolation, and she’s always thought them ugly. Now, though, she finds them beautiful, and she let Paige touch them for the first time last night.

She also downloaded a copy of the game he was obsessed with onto her laptop, and spent a few hours moving tiny 3D fantasy armies around a map, remembering who the boy was before everything went to shit. Because he’s in here as well, and he’s precious to her. Precious to Paige, too, who found her fighting an epic unicorns vs demons battle on the windswept ramparts of a ruined castle, and wrapped her in a hug so tight Christine thought she might never escape it.

“Seven o’clock,” Paige confirms.

Christine reaches over, takes her hand. “So we have a little while, then?”

Paige, an impish smile all over her face like she planned it this way — inevitably she did — nods and allows Christine to draw her in, and for the hundredth time Christine contemplates just how lucky she is.

It’s taken her a long, long time to understand she might actually deserve it.

It’s shortly before eight when they reluctantly split up for their showers, with Paige stopping in the door before returning to her room, grumbling good-naturedly about Christine’s academic responsibilities, about her other responsibilities, about how the English language isn’t going anywhere and surely doesn’t need to be picked apart for its secrets at quite so alacritous a pace, about how the boys in the basement ought to be expected, after so many weeks in captivity, to feminise themselves for a morning or two. Christine kisses her again, pushes up against her, stands on her toes to reach into Paige’s mouth with her tongue, and when Paige steps back into the corridor Christine ducks away and shuts the door.

“Cow,” Paige comments loudly, and it’s hard not to giggle.

She washes gingerly; she’s still sensitive down there.

After her shower Christine throws on a tank top and shorts, squeezes on a pair of tennis shoes made tight by her thick winter socks, and finger-combs her hair into something approximating a style. She would have washed it but she decided she didn’t have time to properly dry it and deal with the frizz, so she left it as-is and resolved to fix it later, after her workshop. It’s not as if standards haven’t been lax, lately, anyway; it’s been chaos.

Nice to properly meet Melissa at last, though, and not just as a nervous wreck still feeling her way through her first months as Christine. And Shahida’s sweet, and the girl Rachel, who she’s been assured knows some things but not enough to hurt herself or everyone else and who has promised not to ask, was very nice to her, even if Christine could tell she was being looked at a little too hard, up there in Café One.

She throws a lip gloss in her pocket, as much to protect against the cold weather as to look glamorous or as preventative against any unexpected Aunt Bea encounters, and heads out of her room and down the hall to the kitchen, where she knows she’ll have a good twenty minutes to kill before Paige gets done dealing with her hair extensions. She’s not halfway there when she hears a familiar voice:

“—so first up you’ve got to choose your clan, and that’s maybe the most important choice! Not only does each clan grant certain special traits, it’ll be the starting point for your roleplaying style! I mean, it’s not that your clan dictates what kind of vampire you’ll be, but there’s a certain range, you know, a particular flavour to the vamp-ness? Sure, you could be a lovable hugs-and-kisses Lasom—”

“I thought I just had to put points in dexterity and stuff,” says another voice, and Christine swallows to keep from reacting. Yasmin? She must have been ambushed.

“I mean, yes, you do, but that’s not until later! Look on the screen, have a read about the different clans, and— Hi, Christine!”

Busted. “Hey, Jodie,” Christine says. “Hiya, Yasmin.” She stops lurking in the doorway and steps inside, finding Jodie and Yasmin sat around the small kitchen table with empty mugs and scraps of breakfast. Jodie’s her morning self, with her red hair tied back and her fringe tucked under an Alice band. Yasmin’s wearing a suit, a nice one, with a pale yellow blouse and a black skirt to the knee. As usual, she looks very adult, very together, and Christine’s glad she got dressed before searching out coffee, or she’d feel even more childlike compared to her. She wishes she’d worn something a little more feminine than her old-habit shorts and tank, though.

“Oh crap,” Jodie says. “What time is it?”

“Eight fourteen,” Yasmin says, reading off the laptop screen.

“Crap! I have to get ready!”

Christine and Yasmin watch her buzz out of the kitchen and back to her room, and share a smile; a slightly strained one, in Christine’s case. She never knows how Yasmin will respond to her presence. She offers the best olive branch she knows: “Wanna tea?”

“Sure,” Yasmin says, and Christine’s grateful to have the mechanical process of tea-making to occupy herself. After she sets the kettle boiling she retrieves Yasmin’s mug, rinses it, and grabs two clean ones from the mug tree for her and Paige.

“Julia’s gone to work?” she asks, deciding it’s probably a safe enough topic.

Yasmin nods. “Um,” she says, and Christine notices she’s staring very carefully at the kettle and not at her, “Christine. Fuck. I’m so bad at this.”

“Bad at what?”

“Thank you,” Yasmin says, still deliberately not meeting her eyes. “Thank you for getting Indira involved. She spoke to Beatrice for us.”

“Oh?”

“Our timetable’s been moved up.” Yasmin shrugs. “March. You did that. Well. Indira did that. But you got her onside. Three months and we’ll be free to leave. We already signed the paperwork.”

“You’re really leaving?”

“Three months,” Yasmin repeats.

Concentrating on pouring hot water onto tea bags and squishing them against the sides of the mugs, Christine fights the sudden wave of vertigo. Sure, they never really got on, but Yasmin and Julia have been a part of her life for so long that she just assumed they always would be, even in the face of their repeated confirmation that they want nothing to do with Dorley Hall or its residents and would rather just leave. But now it’s real: they’re leaving. Three months!

Just once, Christine thinks, I would like things to stay the same for a while.

Quickly she shuttles three mugs to the table and sits down before her weak legs betray her, and a hand, closing on hers, startles her.

“You okay?” Yasmin says.

Christine stares at her hand. When was the last time Yasmin touched her? Was she even Yasmin then? “Um,” she says, “yeah. Just… things changing, you know?”

Self-consciously Yasmin removes her hand, smiles guiltily at Christine, and occupies herself with her mug, cupping it in both hands, blowing uselessly on it, sipping gingerly at the hot tea. “That’s just it, actually,” she says, after a little while. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. That’s why I was in here, waiting. For you.”

“And Jodie,” Christine says, to cover for her confusion. Waiting for her?

“She was just a bonus,” Yasmin says, one corner of her mouth curling fondly. “It’s been… nice catching up with her. But it’s you I wanted to see.”

“How come?” Christine asks neutrally.

Yasmin becomes even more awkward, which Christine hadn’t thought possible. “We talked. Me and Julia. After Indira told us we’re getting our strings cut, after we signed all the prelim stuff. Indira… She said some things. Stirred some stuff up.”

Christine nods. “Yeah. Indira does that.” She always did know how to climb into someone’s psyche and prod them in the right direction. A good thing she doesn’t use her powers for evil.

Mostly not for evil, anyway.

“Anyway, I realised…” Yasmin drinks deeply from her tea and winces; too hot. So she puts the mug back on the table and drums her fingers, accompanies her hesitant words with the percussive tap-tap-tap of carefully shaped nails on polished wood. “We have each other, Julia and me. And that’s the way it’s always been. Since the start. Julia and me, me and Julia. You and Paige and Vicky and Jodie, kinda. And Craig. And me and Julia. I mean, you practically shut us out—” The drumming fingers halt. “Sorry. Sorry. Fuck. Doing it again. Relitigating the past. Seeing it from only my point of view. Stupid. Habit.” She plays at her bottom lip with her teeth, and Christine grounds herself in the sight of it, reminds herself forcibly that Yasmin, the girl she’s walked on eggshells around for the longest time, is just a girl like her, finding her way. “I’m supposed to save this stuff for my therapist,” Yasmin adds suddenly, smiling.

Christine’s glad she’s not got a mouthful of tea, or she would have spat it out. “You have a therapist?”

“Yes. Just started. And don’t worry; I just say we were in a girls’ school together. Far from home. Dormmates. The sponsors are head girls, teachers, bullies, et cetera. Secret’s safe. It’s fine. But, look, that’s not the point. The point is, it’s always been just us. And I kind of… I don’t want it to be any more.” Another sip of tea, another pause. Christine gives her time to organise her thoughts. This feels important. “We don’t have families. Hers wouldn’t accept her, and mine… You know what happened with mine.”

Christine doesn’t, not exactly, but she knows there was a falling out, years before Dorley, and the boy who would become Yasmin ran away, stayed with friends, hid from them. And then, just when he wanted to try for reconciliation: tragedy of some kind. Yasmin’s eyes always darken when she alludes to it, and Christine’s never wanted to push.

“Yeah,” she says, to keep things moving, and risks covering Yasmin’s hand, currently resting on the table, with hers. Yasmin accepts it.

“We don’t have families, and we don’t really have friends apart from the people at work, and we spend so much time on call or working offsite that we hardly see them. And I think— we think we need a foundation. Something solid to build our lives on. So that’s what we’re going to do, before we leave. And I’d like your help with that, Christine. I’d ask Jodie, but…”

“Jodie’s friends are mostly from outside,” Christine finishes. She doesn’t know Jodie as well as she’d like, but the girl seems to hold zero grudges about what happened to her here; Christine expects her to keep showing up for birthdays and holidays and quick visits more or less indefinitely, so there’s time for them to grow their relationship beyond the superficial. And a lot of time for Christine to learn everything there is to know about vampires.

“I want to meet the new you,” Yasmin says. “I only really know the you who came here. And that sucks, actually! I want to get to know you. And Vicky. Even Paige.” Christine raises an eyebrow; Yasmin and Paige had been the first to fall out, downstairs. “Yes,” Yasmin adds with a grin, “even Paige. She’s a totally different person now! Even I can tell. And Julia’s out today, and I’m on call—” she gestures at her jacket, to explain why she’s dressed for work but still lounging around the second-floor kitchen, “—so I thought it was a good opportunity. To hang out. Start again. But I understand if you have classes, or whatever—”

“I have a workshop,” Christine says, “but I bet we can find you people who don’t. You can get to know more people than just me, Paige and Vick if you come downstairs, you know.” Not entirely sure she’s making a good decision, she stands, hefting her half-full mug with one hand and pulling on Yasmin with the other.

Yasmin doesn’t move. “People,” she says. “You mean, sponsors. I don’t— I can’t do any sponsors. Not yet.”

“They’re not the people you remember them as,” Christine insists, internally crossing her heart; it’s mostly true. “And I can tell them not to talk shop, if that helps.”

Nodding slowly, Yasmin rises from the table, not letting go of Christine’s hand. “Right,” she says. “Fuck it. Let’s go downstairs.”

“You okay with me fetching Paige on the way down?”

“Yeah,” Yasmin says with a smile. “Get your girlfriend. And then…” She sighs, squares her shoulders, and retrieves her hand from Christine so she can smooth down jacket and skirt. “Let’s go see the sponsors.”

“It won’t just be sponsors,” Christine says, leading Yasmin down the corridor to Paige’s door and knocking on it. “We’re like a hotel these days. Or a convention centre. We get all sorts.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, yeah.” Christine nods, grinning. “Sponsors, second years, random hangers-on. Indira’s boyfriend and the guy Tabby just started dating. Melissa, the girl who made all that fuss a few days ago, and her friend Shahida, who knows everything. Maybe even her friend Rachel, but be careful what you say around her. Oh, and Steph, probably, at some point. She’s basically unstoppable.”

 

* * *

 

“I’m just saying, my clothes are more comfortable. And just better in general. You’ll look great!”

“And I’m just saying, not on your life. Not yet. You’re confusing ‘acceptance’ with ‘enthusiasm’ again, and I, for one, am not ready for skirt go spinny. My centre of gravity is changing; I’d fall down.”

“You’ve barely changed, Aaron.”

“Tell that to my arse, Steph!”

“Okay.”

“Stop that!”

“You really want me to?”

“No. Ugh. Fuck. I can’t believe you sometimes.”

“Who? Little old me?”

“Yeah, right. I can’t believe I ever bought your innocent act. You’re a monster, a deviant, an incorrigible creature of— Ai! You pinched me!”

“No being mean.”

“Yeah, well, no doing that.”

“Fine.”

“Can I go get dressed now?”

“Just try on one skirt? Look at this one! It’s cute, right?”

“Steph, just because you’re a girl now—”

“—always was—”

“Fine, yes, sure, absolutely. You’ve always been a girl. Agreed. Can I say my thing, please? You’re not going to interrupt me again?”

“No, no, go right ahead. I shouldn’t have distracted you.”

“But just because—”

“Sorry.”

“But just because—”

“I just think it’s important to be accurate.”

“But just because—”

“I’m still sorry though.”

“You’re not funny.”

“Sorry. Genuinely! Please. Say your thing.”

“I feel stupid now.”

“Aaron, I want to hear it.”

“Okay. Look, I agree: it’s a lovely skirt, and I’m sure it will look very good on you. But not on me! How do you even walk in a skirt? And don’t say ‘one foot in front of the other’! I can see you thinking about it. It’s just— Look. I’m going to be serious for a second. Actually serious. I’m not ready for it. Any of it! Clothes and stuff. Not ready. One step at a time, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You’re right. One step at a time. Which is, incidentally, how you walk when you’re wearing— Ow!”

“I’m not sorry.”

“I am. I won’t push.”

“You can push. But I’m going to push back. You might be a girl, but I’m not yet, not up here, no matter how sensitive my nipples get or how many pairs of knickers Maria passive-aggressively stocks my wardrobe with. My huge, manly bollocks would appreciate a few more months to hang free and easy in tracksuits and boxers, thank you very much.”

“You’re taking orders from your testicles? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“I don’t know how you can say that with a straight face.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“I wonder how you’ll know.”

“Know what?”

“When you do feel like a girl. Up there.”

“Steph, I barely know what it’s like to feel like an Aaron up there. My personality—” and he dodges her grab because it’s obvious she’s guessed what he’s going to say next and she’s going to interrupt it if it’s the last thing she does, “—is stored—” he oversteps and trips, and the calculating look on her face turns to panic, “—in the balls.” She hooks an arm around his waist just in time, and it’s not enough to catch him but it is enough to push him onto the bed, where he lands, bounces once, and protects his head with his hands as he bumps against the wall.

He comes to rest with a smirk and she glares at him, clearly torn between the need to apologise for almost knocking him down and the need to attack him again for his terrible jokes.

“I thought you were being serious,” she says instead, crouching down in front of him and resting her forearms on his knees.

“I was!” he insists, and to break her attempt at a scowl he adds, “For a whole five or six seconds.”

She grins at him, rolling her eyes, and then steps away, stands up, looks at the floor. “Um,” she says, “your towel’s open.”

Whoops.

Steph’s had a towel wrapped around her chest since they got back from the shower and Aaron, choosing to take the enforced changes to his gender and his identity at a more leisurely pace, has his tied firmly around his waist, which he knows is fucking stupid because showing his nipples to the whole basement — or the whole basement as expressed as the contents of Steph’s locked bedroom — is probably more obscene than hiding them behind a towel, but if he’s going to be a girl, he’s going to do it on his terms, and that means holding off on the new clothes and the makeup and the hair and the towel position and stuff until he’s good and ready.

And he doesn’t think he could stand it if he tried any of it too early, and looked stupid.

She’s still looking away so he closes the towel and chews on his cheek for a moment, trying to stop himself from being embarrassed and failing. But it’s okay because so’s she, and she’s seen it all before, anyway, even touched some of it before in flailing little moments, and besides, as he insisted to her in the shower, they’re he/him titties.

For now.

Steph runs a hand through her hair and smiles at him, still flushed. She looks radiant, as she often does these days, with the residual heat from the shower still pink on her skin and her wet hair slicked back out of her face. Sure, she’s got all those markers of a testosterone puberty that she hates, that she’s complained about to him multiple times, but he can see past them, or through them, or they don’t matter, or something. They don’t detract from her. Stephanie’s a woman bursting with potential, and you’d have to be mad or stubborn to miss it.

He whispered as much to her last night, when in a vulnerable moment she shut the wardrobe door too hard, not wanting to see herself in the mirror, not wanting to experience herself, fighting with her need to throw him out so she could be miserable on her own. He told her she’s beautiful, she’s elegant, she takes his breath away. He told her about the day he saw her again after hiding away, how he could barely believe she was the same person as before. He told her how she shines.

And when she felt better she responded, she held him and she told him how she saw all he could be, and for the first time the idea was actually a little affecting. He’d blushed and, feeling exceptionally childish, briefly hid his face in a pillow. But that’s what Maria said, isn’t it? One of her many little nuggets of wisdom: you’re starting over, not quite from scratch but close to it, so it’s fine to be a little childish sometimes. It’s expected. It’s encouraged. Experiment. Play! Find the new you. It’s bound to be a bit silly sometimes.

He’s not up to playing, not yet. But Steph is, and he can help her, and encourage her, and fend off her enthusiasm for skirts, and maybe enough nights and mornings like this will be sufficient to encourage him to try something, someday.

He really should cover his tits, though.

She waves a bra at him, pointedly, letting him know she’s getting changed, and as he stands up to leave she turns her back to drop her towel, so he punishes her by leaning in and planting a kiss between her shoulder blades, making her squeal and jump and scold him. They’ve been doing that a lot lately, since they first kissed: little displays of affection. He doesn’t yet know exactly what they are to each other — they haven’t really talked about it — but he figures they can take whatever it is nice and slow. It’s not like they’re hurting for time.

He’s not even sure he’s over the thrill of being wanted. If every stage of a relationship or an intimate friendship or whatever this is can be so intense, he might not be able to handle moving more quickly.

She’s not going to wear any of the things she was teasing him with, anyway; Maria and Pippa got in touch shortly after they woke up and told them both — mainly Steph — to dress neutral, which is easy enough for him but will be a bit of an imposition for Steph, who’s got used to wearing nicer things. On Sunday, with his encouragement, she wore a dress and leggings out of her room. Wore it all day. Lunch and dinner and watching crap TV in the common room and everything. Martin almost cracked an emotion when he first saw her.

“Dress neutral,” he mutters to himself as he sorts through his wardrobe. The collection of bras on hangers is new, and divided half-and-half into sports and starter. He picks out a sports bra, same as usual, and is about to struggle into it when he remembers how hard the damn things are to get out of, especially without help, and how painful it can be when, halfway in or out of it, the elastic gets stuck dragging over his extraordinarily sensitive nipples. “Fuck it.” Starter bra it is.

Maria showed him the easy way to put them on: backwards, and turn it round when the clasp’s done up.

He looks in the mirror when he’s done, never quite sure what to expect any more. He doesn’t see the man in women’s underwear he feels instinctively he ought to see; instead there’s just him, Aaron, in a towel and a bra, curiously ungendered. Something in his belly twists, and he doesn’t know what to make of that either, or the lightheaded feeling that threatens to topple him.

He drops his towel. Doesn’t look away. And there’s the rest of him! He squints: is it smaller? No. Just his imagination. He’s barely been on the damn hormones long enough to grow more than the suggestion of tits — and for a golf-ball-sized lump of flesh behind each nipple to become approximately as sensitive to both pain and pleasure as the tip of his lately neglected dick — and from what Maria said, it takes a lot longer than that for the genitals actually to shrink. But then she also said, ‘Use it or lose it,’ and he hasn’t had the will for that lately, so maybe it is going to shrivel up like a prune.

“Idiot.”

The running commentary isn’t helping. Sternly he instructs himself to shut the hell up, and selects underwear (men’s, and not from the recently added selection of what Maria swears are called ‘boyshorts’, either), t-shirt, loose jogging trousers and a hoodie, throwing them over himself in a rush to be done.

But before he goes he runs fingers through his hair, musses it up like Steph does sometimes to add volume to its meagre length, and poses in the mirror. With his hoodie unzipped and open he reaches behind his back and pulls the t-shirt tight, exposing his shape. Something about the cotton, the way it conforms to his body, makes the subtle changes in his shape more obvious.

It’s a race made up of more than one hurdle, he knows, learning to see himself as a girl, and it’s going to take more than some buds on his chest and a minute amount of fat distribution to get him there but, God, if he tries he can almost see it.

It doesn’t even occur to him until he’s almost out of his door again that he flashed Steph, that his towel fell open when she was practically on top of him, that, accident or no, he did to her what he did to all those women. Her face ripples in his mind’s eye, replaced for a second with the other women, the ones whose lives he pushed himself into, and it’s enough to take his feet out from under him. He’s still there on the floor, minutes later, when Steph finds him, helps him up onto his bed, and strokes his hair while he cries.

Because that’s another thing Maria said: now he’s accepted responsibility for his actions, now he’s properly understood them, they’re going to come back to him when he least expects it, in bits and pieces and for a long time to come. He didn’t get to die because of what he did, so now he’s going to have to live with it, and that’s another thing entirely.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t want you to go.”

Christine writhes in Paige’s arms, presses her face into Paige’s shoulder, braces her hands behind Paige’s back; if she never lets go, Paige can’t leave the building, right?

“Christine,” Paige says, reaching behind and tickling Christine in the crook of her elbow, which causes her instantly to lose her grip, “I have a one-on-one. I can’t miss it.”

“What if I was really sexy?” Christine says, looking up and bouncing on her toes. “What if I ran upstairs and put some actually good clothes on? What if I did my makeup? Would you stay?”

Paige leans forward, kisses Christine on the top of her head. “You’re always sexy,” she whispers. “But,” she adds, extracting herself entirely from Christine’s grip, “you’re not always stylish. Look at these shorts; you’ll freeze!” She pinches Christine’s exposed thigh.

“It’s not that cold,” Christine insists. “It’ll just make me hustle.”

“Goodbye,” Paige says, kissing her on the cheek and pushing her gently away. “I’ll see you this evening.”

“I hate school,” Christine says as Paige opens the doors and takes the steps down onto the path at a light jog. “We should drop out!” she yells, propping open the closing door. Paige waves a backwards hand. “I love you!”

Paige turns, her whole face lit up, and blows a kiss. Christine blows one back, and Paige laughs and pretends to catch it, like they’re two lovebirds in a corny old movie.

“I’m glad you’re back together,” Yasmin says, from behind her.

Christine whirls, ashamed that she’d forgotten Yasmin was there, that she’d carried on like a lovesick teenager while professional, adult Yasmin was standing beside her. But she doesn’t seem all that put out that she had to stand there through what had probably been a solid three-to-four minutes of cuddling, kissing and unpleasantly sappy noises, most of which had been generated by Christine. Small mercies.

“Oh,” Christine says, “um, yeah. Me too.”

“Well, obviously.”

Yasmin’s a little strained and nervous, fiddling with the lapel of her jacket, and tapping her heel on the tile, but she’s trying. When was the last time she lingered on the ground floor, anyway? And now she’s agreed to join Christine in the main kitchen, to see who else is around? And potentially stay with them, when Christine goes down to the security room? It’s unprecedented.

Sort of the point. No shop talk, though. That’s vital.

Christine says it, when she lets them both through the doors into the kitchen, before she even registers who’s inside: “No shop talk, please.”

“When have you ever known me to talk shop?” Vicky says, waving a slice of omelette on her fork at Christine, and eating it. “Hi, Yasmin!” she adds, and talking with her mouth full helps her sound slightly less surprised. She swallows. “Everything okay?”

Yasmin stands up a little straighter, clenches jaw, and commits. She strides a little too quickly over to the nearest chair at the central table. “Yes,” she says as she sits. “I’m just… getting out of my comfort zone a little.”

“Good for you! This—” Vicky yanks a thumb in the direction of the AGA, where Lorna is fussing with a frying pan, “—is Lorna. Have you met? I forget. She’s not from here, if you know what I mean, but she knows about it.”

Yasmin shades her eyes. “We’ve met,” she says. In the silence that follows, Christine joins Lorna at the AGA, gives her shoulder a quick squeeze in greeting, and prods speculatively at the coffee maker.

“It’s fresh,” Lorna whispers.

“Thanks,” Christine whispers back, and fetches some mugs — plain, for the sake of Yasmin’s temper — and pours some for them both.

“I’m sorry, Lorna,” Yasmin says, stumbling over her words. “I’m really sorry.”

Lorna checks on the frying pan and then turns to look. “What for?”

“When you were being, um, read in to the programme. Julia and I, we were kind of flippant. Rude. You were being asked to accept something huge, and we… we were dicks about it.”

“Apology unnecessary,” Lorna says, throwing her a quick smile and returning to chase the half-cooked omelette around the pan. “I’m not going to judge how the victims of this place deal with the trauma of it. I tried that for a while,” she adds, with a sidelong glance at Christine, “and it sucks. Besides, I’ve made the same Faustian bargain as everyone else now. Maybe even a worse one, since I don’t have to be here.” She shrugs. “But I’m here, I’m all in, and I can hate myself for it when I’m old. Tina, if you’re hungry I can make you an omelette.”

Christine, who’s been rummaging in one of the cupboards, emerges with a cereal bar. “No thanks. I need something portable.”

“Got work?”

“Got work,” Christine confirms. “Getting some routine security monitoring crap out of the way. Then I’ve got a Linguistics workshop. Then a lecture. And then something else; I forget.”

“You’re a great student, Tina,” Vicky says, and Christine flashes her the most passive-aggressive (yet feminine) smile Indira taught her.

“Thank you!” she says falsely.

“Hey, Lorna?” Yasmin says suddenly, urgently. “I wasn’t a victim. You said I was a victim of this place? I wasn’t. I don’t like it that much, and I think the way things are done could use some… adjustment, but when I came here I needed it. I was a, um, a really fucking—”

“You don’t have to say it,” Lorna says.

“You don’t know what I was like.”

“Raise your hand if you have skeletons in your closet,” Christine says. “And she knows about mine, Yas, and they’re worse than yours.”

“No, Christine,” Yasmin says, frowning, “that’s not true. I was—”

“And,” Christine interrupts, “this counts as shop talk.”

“No comparing trauma at the breakfast table,” Vicky mutters, and Lorna covers her mouth, tries not to laugh. “What?”

“You really are a bunch of bloody trans women, aren’t you?” Lorna says, and snorts, undignified but unbothered about it, into her closed fist. “Straight from, ‘Hello!’ to, ‘A horrible thing happened to me on the way to the gender this morning.’”

“Guilty,” Vicky says.

“Yasmin here,” Christine says, before Yasmin can have a third go at describing her crimes, “wants to hang out today, and I have to work. Who’s sticking around?”

“I’m not,” Lorna says, decanting her omelette onto a plate. She sits down, leans over to kiss Vicky on the cheek, and starts cutting up her food. She points at her girlfriend with her fork. “But she is.”

“Lorna has lectures and things most of the day,” Vicky says, chasing the last of her omelette around her plate, “but I’m at a loose end until three. If you want to hang, we can hang.”

“Can we?” Yasmin says, immensely relieved and immediately self-conscious about it.

“We can,” Vicky says, standing to wash her plate. “And we can hang wherever you like: in the kitchen, the hall, out at uni somewhere, or upstairs. And would you like an omelette? I have free hands now and there’s, like, a billion eggs.”

“Please?”

“Okay,” Christine says, dumping her empty mug in the sink, “you kids have fun today. Some of us have to work for a living.”

Yasmin snorts, and Lorna says, “Have a good day in hell.”

“Just a half-hour or so,” Christine corrects. “Half an hour in hell. And then two hours in a Linguistics workshop, which might be worse.”

“Poor thing,” Vicky says, reaching out to grab Christine’s sleeve as she passes. “Oh, hey, Tina. Guess what Maria gave me this morning? For Lorna?” Without waiting for an answer she reaches into her bag and pulls out a paper bag, which she rattles: pills. Lots of them. The same ones she used to sneak out of the secure medicine locker. “We’ve gone legit!”

Christine laughs as she leaves. Maria’s just handing out free HRT now, unprompted? Dorley’s in danger of becoming entirely too nice.

 

* * *

 

Another day in paradise. Dorothy’s acquisition of the boy Declan’s got her in fine form, bustling about the manor with an energy Valérie hasn’t seen in her in years. She spends half her time talking on or tapping at her weird light-up portable telephone and the rest in discussion with one or both of the brick-thick men who brought Declan in, who’ve hung around to keep an eye on things. Odd that Dorothy’s taken little interest in the boy thus far; she threw him at Val and then apparently forgot about him. But then, she was like that when she had Dorley, too: with a handful of exceptions, the new ones seemed to bore her until they’d spent some time in her manicured care, and Declan’s an especially rough example of the art, with his surgeries still healing and his body barely yet altered by the hormones. Most likely she wants him to have progressed further in his feminisation before she deigns to delight herself on him.

Lucky boy gets a break.

She doesn’t know where Karen’s gone, though. The nurse — though God knows why she went into that profession, being one of the more vicious and self-satisfied of all Dorothy’s hangers-on — vanished a while back, which precipitated a dip in Dorothy’s mood severe enough that Val genuinely feared she might kill herself, leaving her alone and starving in this vast, near-empty house. Again. She’s almost glad Dorothy’s got a new lease on life; at least she’s not going to have to have another debate with herself over whether she can stomach eating partially decomposed human thigh meat.

With Declan came Frankie, whom Val hadn’t seen for decades. She doesn’t know if Frankie’s the new favoured daughter or simply subbing in for Karen, but either way she’s here, skulking around, making the odd arch comment but keeping mostly to herself. She hasn’t been meeting Val’s eyes on the few occasions they’ve interacted, but after Dorley, after Smyth-Farrow, after decades upon decades of this shit, Val prefers not to dwell on the motivations of her captors. Better to imagine them as forces of nature to be prepared for, endured, survived, and not as living, breathing people, people who decide to abuse you the ways that they do.

The two men look like soldiers, or ex-soldiers. Not that Val’s an expert. But she’s seen movies and TV shows — all from the eighties and nineties, admittedly — and she remembers what the guys from Smyth-Farrow’s PMC were like, and they move like she thinks soldiers should move, with economy and caution and with reference to one another. They also look at her with undisguised lust, which could become a problem.

“You’re half my age,” she snapped at one yesterday, when he stood too close while she prepared Sunday lunch. It was an exaggeration: that one, the mouthy one, looks mid-thirties at the very least, and his partner’s older. But she’s at least a decade their senior, no matter what.

“Just means you’ve got more experience,” he said to her, leering. She laughed in his face at that, which surprised him, and got on with the roast beef.

Fucking English. She’s cooked more roast beef in her life than she cares to remember, and with the guards around she can’t even spit in the gravy any more. At least today’s leftover day, which means beef sandwiches with all the trimmings; easy and quick. She has to bake the bread herself, but she’s done that enough times she barely has to watch what she’s doing.

The same goes for everything she does here. Sometimes she fancies she can see a groove worn in the tiled floors where her life has left its mark.

In the corner, in his stupid maid outfit — more revealing than hers; he has more to reveal, Dorothy’s taste in modification having taken a turn to the crass in the decades since she was made — Declan barely moves. Not since she put him there and started on the bread has he so much as spoken or raised a hand. And it’s been the same with him since he got here. Ten words she’s gotten out of him, and she’s had to control the urge to shake him, to hit him, to do something to pull him out of his stupor, but she knows that doesn’t work, because she’s seen this before. The violence of the sudden alteration, the absolute powerlessness; there are some men it simply kills.

Here, at least, she has a little more control than she had under Dorley. Here she has the run of the place. She can dress him in the mornings, undress him at night. She can guide him to the toilet every two hours so he doesn’t piss himself. She can feed him and she can wash him and she can make sure he lives, and maybe if she keeps it up for long enough, something of him might come back.

And he might know something that could help her get them both out.

She’s wrapping the sandwiches in cling film when the older, quieter guard approaches the kitchen from the direction of the main hall. He whispers something in the ear of the mouthy one, who jerks up from his near-sleep, leaning against the door frame, and gestures at Declan.

“Come on, love,” the loud one says. “Time to go see Ms Marsden.”

Val hides her smile. ‘Ms Marsden’; couldn’t get the hired help to call you Grandmother, then? Declan, unsurprisingly, doesn’t respond, not even when the loud one yanks him off his chair. His feet, in their tacky Mary Janes, don’t seem competent to support him, and when the loud one makes to let go Declan almost falls.

“Don’t be cruel,” Val says sharply, but the loud one ignores her as he half-drags Declan out of the kitchen, the boy’s feet eventually finding purchase and settling into an inelegant stumble, block heels tapping on the tile.

The quiet one takes up the loud one’s post, leaning against the jamb with the air of someone who could stand there all day. Not his first guard job.

“That one deserves it,” he says.

Val finishes putting the sandwiches away in the fridge before she deigns to respond. “What?”

“The lad. Declan. Rapist, isn’t he?”

She’s glad she’s got her back to him, because that’s not something she wants to know. She wants Declan to be an innocent, like her, like Dee, like every other girl taken and altered and ultimately killed by the aristocratic horrors who’ve controlled her life for three decades. If he’s cruel, if he’s like them, then caring for him’s a wasted effort, and investing hope in him is futile.

But it might just as easily be a lie.

She calms herself, closes the fridge, turns around and leans on it, feeling suddenly very exposed in Dorothy’s hideous uniform. Unlike Declan’s, it’s not cut to the crotch or the chest — she has to actually work in the damn thing after all — but it’s still revealing, and she still hates it.

She folds her arms around her waist. A measure of protection.

“Would you mind repeating that?” she asks, in her clearest and most feminine voice, the one that annoys Dorothy the most.

“He’s a rapist. This—” the man jerks a thumb in the direction of Dorothy’s suite, “—is his punishment.”

“This isn’t a punishment,” she spits. “This is a game. He’s just a piece in it. It doesn’t matter to her if he’s a rapist. Wouldn’t matter if he were a murderer or a saint. She just… does this to people.”

The quiet one has the residual decency to look uncomfortable. “She did this to you?”

She can’t tell if it’s a question or a confirmation. “What do you think?” she sneers. “I’m not here for my health.”

“Right,” he says. “Jake said… Shit. I didn’t believe him.”

“You know it for sure?” she says, busying herself with cleaning kitchen surfaces that don’t need to be cleaned, to keep her back to him. “That he’s a rapist?”

“Saw his file. He had a girlfriend. She kept coming back, he kept assaulting her. And it probably wasn’t just her. You know what they’re like, those types.”

“Not really.” She lifts the kettle and the toaster and wipes under each one, the cloth coming away clean.

“What did you do?” the quiet one asks suddenly.

“Does it matter?” she snaps, freezing in place.

“If he was a rapist—”

“I was dragged away from the corpses of my parents in nineteen-eighty-five,” she says, unmoving. “The bitch upstairs castrated me and kept me and now, thirty-four years later, here I still am. Powerless. Trapped in a role she created for me. One which, I might add, she delights in subverting solely because she gets off on it. So—” she throws the cloth down on the counter and turns around, pins him with her glare, “—I ask you again: does it matter?”

“So you’re a— a— fuck, I don’t know the right word. You’re a transgender?”

She shrugs. “Nineteen-eighty-five. That’s when I stopped learning anything she didn’t want me to. So if, in the meantime, someone’s coined a word for a person whose family was murdered and who was turned into a woman against her will and who has been trying and failing to escape for three decades while watching others even less fortunate than her be similarly tortured and then killed, assume I have not been apprised.” She leans into her accent, dredges it up from her memory. It sounds fake. Too much time around the fucking English. The quiet one looks away, and Val lets an irritated click slip her lips. “What’s your name? I can’t keep calling you ‘the quiet one’ in my head.”

That gets him looking at her again. “I’m ‘the quiet one’?”

Val holds up two hands, looks from one to the other. “The loud one and the quiet one. If you wanted to take up more space in my head you shouldn’t have taken the job of being my latest prison guard.”

“I’m not—”

“Do not even pretend to— Oh!” Val interrupts herself. “Did she lie to you? Or are you simply very ill-informed? I am the prisoner—” she taps a hand to her breast, “—and you are the guard. Or shall I make it simpler?”

“No,” he says quickly, quietly. “No.”

“Did she tell you all her boy-girls are like Declan?” Val says, approaching him, pressing her advantage. If by some chance the man does have a guilty conscience she wants to fucking spank it; it might not help, but goodness fucking gracious if it wouldn’t feel good to hurt one of these people for a change! “Evil men being justly punished?”

“She didn’t—”

She starts counting on her fingers. “Owen. He took a handbag off a wealthy-looking woman. Kieron shoplifted a Walkman. Imran. Pretty sure the police got him for something he didn’t even do. And Louis. She was sweet. She liked to be called Lou. She got in a fight and got booked on a drunk and disorderly, lost her job, lost her flat, had to steal to make ends meet. She loved to read the classics and she was obsessed with The Breakfast Club and she is buried in the fucking courtyard.” She’s struggling to keep her voice under control. “Oh, and Dee. She was the last one I saw before I was brought here. She was passionate and kind and we always said we’d escape together. It’s just possible I might have loved her, and she’s been dead for thirty years. And as for me? As for my crime? My parents’ business was in competition with the man who used to own this place. That’s it. For that they got murdered and I got thirty years in hell, so tell—me—your—name!” She’s right up in his face now, and she claps her hands in front of him, startles him out of his astonished silence.

“Vincent, I’m sorry, I—”

“Is that what she told you to call me?”

“What—”

“My name is Valérie and if you call me anything else I will shut your head in the fucking oven.”

He holds up his hands, seeming strangely threatened by someone he could probably fold up and tuck under one arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

Val turns away from him and marches back across the kitchen. “How could you know? After all, this is just a routine assignment, right? Live-in guard, room and board provided, plenty of hot water, help keep a couple of abuse victims captive. I bet your last five jobs were just like this, weren’t they?”

“I get briefed on the road,” he says. “I don’t get a chance to say yes or no. It’s not in my contract. And my name’s Callum.”

She laughs and holds out a dainty wrist, as if introducing herself at one of the society functions she dimly remembers. “Callum, Valérie. Valérie, Callum.” Then she turns from him again and starts noisily preparing a cup of tea, slamming drawers and cupboards and taking out her anger on things which are not paid to hit her back. When she reaches for the kettle she finds it already out of its charging socket; Callum’s filling it from the tap.

“Let me help,” he says.

“Put it down,” Valérie growls. He pauses, puzzled, and lets the kettle overflow. She slams a fist into the countertop. “Put it down,” she says as steadily as she can, “and go stand over by the door. You are the guard and I am the prisoner and unless you plan to change that relationship I suggest you do not try to get on my good side.”

“Okay,” he says, putting it down and backing away. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

She wants to shriek. She wants to scream. She wants to fucking batter him. A guard with a guilty conscience! She glares at him as she empties the kettle, fills it again from scratch, slams it down into its charger and flicks it on.

“You can keep me here against my will,” she whispers. “You can bar the windows and lock the doors and seal the gates. You can beat me with that baton, you can stun me with that taser, you can shoot me with that gun. You can mock me. You can leer at me. You can even fuck me. I can’t stop you.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“Just don’t try to be my friend, Callum.” She starts wiping dry the cutlery in the draining rack, starting with the bread knife. His eyes track it until she puts it away in the drawer, and Val extracts a little nugget of pleasure from the way his shoulders relax now she’s no longer armed. He opens his mouth to say something else irrelevant; she ignores him, turns her back, returns to her work, shuts him out. Just another fucking jailer.

“I liked you better when you were the quiet one,” she says.

 

* * *

 

He’s still feeling weak so she loops his arm around her shoulders, takes his weight. He thanks her, sheepish but not ashamed, because he knows he can cry around her, he knows he can tell her anything and she won’t respond with scorn. She smiles, kisses him on the cheek, and stands up from the bed.

Aaron holds onto her, and Stef near-carries him out of his room and down the corridor to the bathroom. He needs to wash his face; he got all snotty.

“You doing okay?” she asks, depositing Aaron by the sinks.

He nods, red-eyed, tired out. “Yeah. Yeah, Steph, I think so.” He sniffs again. “It just hit me. Too much like when I used to, uh… you know.”

“It’s different, though,” Stef says, covering his hand in hers. “You know that, right?”

He nods again. “I know. But it’s like veterans who jump when a car backfires. It doesn’t have to be the thing to remind you of the thing.”

Yeah. Yeah, she knows that. Intimately. She ducks in and hugs him again, kisses him on the forehead and brushes his hair back out of his face. “Getting long,” she says, grinning and tugging at a loose lock.

Aaron smiles, bats her hand away, and checks himself over in the mirror, takes in the mess he’s made of himself and starts washing, running wet fingers through his hair and rubbing at his sore eyes. Stef leans against the dividing wall, watches him.

She loves watching him, especially now he’s more like himself again. He doesn’t know the grace he’s capable of; he doesn’t know how much his personality comes out in his movements. He cups his hands under the tap, throws a last palmful of water at his face before shutting off the water, and looks at himself again, smiling this time, and then he catches her in the mirror, watching him, and she can’t stop herself from giggling, from launching herself forward and wrapping herself around him.

He wanted to die. And Maria wouldn’t let him. And now he’s here and he’s Aaron again, and it’s everything she wanted.

“Hey!” he says, laughing and trying to pull away. “You’re going to get wet!”

“Don’t care,” Stef says into his hair.

Eventually he succeeds in pushing her off, and they walk back to her room together to fetch towels and for her to change out of her damp top. She doesn’t turn away from him this time, doesn’t feel like being cheeky or teasing him, just wants him to know how comfortable she is in his presence. Before he can do the polite thing and leave her to get changed she’s already pulled off her top, maintaining eye contact the whole time.

He looks down at her chest for a second, and then back up.

“You like them?” she says, cupping a hand under a breast that’s rather more impressive than it ought to be, and bouncing it a few times. “Bra boosters. Pippa got them for me. They look like little chicken fillets.”

“Very effective,” Aaron says, sounding strange. “I thought we were supposed to dress neutral?”

“I am!” Stef protests, finding another t-shirt and throwing it over her head. “Look,” she adds, posing in the mirror, “you can barely see them. But they make me feel good, so.”

He nods. “They, um, look good, too.”

“Do they now?” she says, smiling, stepping close to him, reaching out for his cheek. He’s been letting her do things like this lately, letting her touch him, kiss him, and often he kisses her back. Sometimes he even initiates it! And every time it’s precious, and every time it’s over too soon, and—

There’s a knock at the door.

“C’mon, kids!” Tabby yells, without opening it. “It’s time!”

The two of them sigh in unison, and Stef permits herself a moment to run fingers down his jawline before releasing him and rolling her eyes.

“Another day in paradise,” Aaron says, and she laughs, steps around him, opens the door, and holds out her hand for him to take. “You sure?” he asks.

They’ve talked about whether to make their (tentative, slow-moving, exploratory) relationship public, running through all the possible ways it could go horribly wrong, but didn’t come to any conclusion about how to proceed. But Stef’s itching with the need for contact, to have him with her today, and she doesn’t think it’ll come as any surprise to anyone that their friendship has become something deeper. Aaron was worried about Will’s reaction, since they know he’s coming back, so Stef asked for and got a recording of the strange conversation she had with him, and decided after skipping back and forth through it a few times that he probably wouldn’t make trouble. He probably wouldn’t even think to.

The man was drowning in self-loathing.

She hasn’t seen him since. But even if she is a little worried about his reaction, she’s also sick of hiding, sick of lying. She’s done enough of that for a lifetime.

“I’m sure if you are,” she says.

Aaron takes her hand and pulls on her, bumping against her affectionately, and they leave the room together.

 

1988 September 24
Saturday

She sits up and stretches, shucking off the ugly brown coat Mr Choudry gave her and laying it out on her knees. It’s dewy, like her face, but she doesn’t have a towel or a dry piece of clothing to rub at it so she just rolls it up, carefully keeping most of the damp parts facing outward, and stuffs it into a plastic bag. It’s difficult to get a clear idea of what the weather’s going to be like from inside the copse she slept in, but the air’s muggy and tendrils of mist have been creeping in through the dense branches, so she surmises it’s going to be another miserable day in London, and considers herself lucky she didn’t get properly rained on overnight.

Sleeping in the park’s a risk and she’s been almost caught twice, but despite her exhaustion and pain she’s nimble and determined and rather good at climbing fences, and if it’s light enough to be this bright even through the haze, it’s late enough in the morning that the gates should be open. She can stroll out with the dog walkers, just like a normal Londoner. Not that anybody will be under any illusion as to what her situation is, but she feels insulated from the judgement of strangers: they see a girl sleeping rough, in dirty clothes, and that’s what she wants people to see.

She’s been wrestling with the question: can she even do this? Can she be a girl, be a woman, out here in the real world? And how can she be a girl? Who is there who will teach her?

Back at Dorley it was simple. There was Val, and Val knew everything, and Val was amazing, so the idea that her route to survival was to become more like Val was an easy one to grasp, even if it took a while for her truly to accept it. But Val’s gone, and she still needs help, but she doesn’t even know exactly what kind of help she needs, and even if she did she daren’t ask for it.

She wasn’t prepared for this.

But she wasn’t prepared for Dorley Hall, either, and she survived that.

She laughs at herself, shakes her head at her foolishness. She got this far, didn’t she? She can just keep going. Solve one problem at a time, until she’s who she needs to be.

It’d help if she could get something to eat, though. Hopefully the church is open this morning.

She stands, pushing herself up on the tree trunk and wincing as every part of her aches. She hasn’t hurt this bad since the worst nights back at Dorley, and at least then she knew the origin of her pain: some sadist with a belt or a cigarette or some other desire they needed to fulfil on her. Today, as with most days since she got here, she just fucking hurts.

Almost three weeks without the injections. Frankie used to say she’d need them for the rest of her life, and at the time she’d wondered if it was another lie, but here she is, aching and hot flushing and feeling like absolute shit. Another problem to solve, somehow.

She finishes securing her things, such as they are, in the pillowcases, wrapping them up so they don’t show and then shoving them into another plastic bag. Then she checks herself over, makes sure her hair extensions are still tied up and her jeans are still zipped shut and the rip in her t-shirt is still concealed under the large men’s shirt — another gift from Mr Choudry — and, satisfied, she vaults the small iron fence into the park proper and joins the sparse crowds of Londoners.

No-one gives her a second glance.

She’s getting used to London; this part of it, anyway. She’d planned to stay in Almsworth, but that hope was dashed on the second night of her escape, when she asked to use the phone in the hostel’s cramped reception. Mr Choudry overheard her conversation and, as soon as she was done, hustled her into his office and instructed her to wait right there, and to hide in the attached restroom if anyone came in without knocking four times on the door first. The cops, he said, often visit people who call from the hostel. An unfounded suspicion of the homeless, he said. An effin’ injustice, he said; pardon his French.

The cops didn’t visit, but someone else did. A white woman with long curly hair and an Essex accent, he said, but she worked it out even before he re-entered the office with four knocks and a cup of hot tea. She’d heard enough from her hiding spot and had won a battle with herself over her desire just to jump out of the second-floor window and take her chances with the pavement. The sound of that voice made her skin crawl, humiliated her anew.

Frankie.

She had enough money left in her meagre stash to buy an overnight bus ticket to London, so she got the hell out of Almsworth, but not before Mr Choudry insisted on gifting her the coat, the shirt, a bundle of socks, and a small pouch containing toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap and a pack of tampons. She thanked him, hugged him, leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, imagining for a moment her old self cringing at her, but dismissing his presence in her mind immediately; the only remnant of her boyhood was securely tucked back inside two pairs of knickers, and was about as relevant to her life now as every other part of him. She delighted in prompting an embarrassed chuckle from the man, and she laughed along with him, enjoying the sound of his deep voice in his chest, resonating all the way through her.

Her own voice cracked a few times while at the hostel and it terrified her every time, but if he noticed, he didn’t say. He asked her for a name a few times, and she demurred every time, as she did on her way out, for the last time; she simply did not have a name to give him, she said.

He understood, and wished her well.

In London she slept rough the first few nights. She got her bearings, asked around for information, begged bits and pieces of money from strangers, and ran from drunken groups of men when they clocked her voice. An older woman told her of a church where the parishioners and other volunteers cook meals, provide washing facilities, and sometimes even let you sleep there, if you’re lucky and arrive at the right time. And a few times she did, sleeping on one of a dozen cots in a damp, dark room, surrounded by strangers, speaking as little as possible.

She heads there now, her stomach cramping painfully.

She’s always thought of churches as great old stone monstrosities, populated by the kinds of people who pretend to righteousness but who shunned her and her mother when they needed help, but First Baptist is different: all brick, relatively modern and squat; about the size and shape of her old school’s gym building. She can’t help but smile as she approaches, because the doors are open and Mr Lewis is outside, lounging on a picnic bench, smoking. He’s been kind to her before. Not in the way Mr Choudry was, but still kind. He lets her eat, lets her get cleaned up. It’s more than she ever got at church before. She swallows, pre-breathes, and prepares to speak.

“Good morning,” she says. Scratchy, but tolerable. Probably passes muster.

Mr Lewis jerks his head towards the doors. “Breakfast in twenty,” he says. “Go get cleaned up.”

She nods enthusiastically, and a few minutes later she’s joining the queue of women outside the shower room at the back of the building, and avoiding the eyes of the men waiting their turn on a selection of mismatched chairs. Something in her wants to pull Mr Choudry’s coat out of its bag and put it on, the better to hide her shape from the men, but she has a feeling that acknowledging their interest at all could be unwise. So she bundles up her bags, crosses her arms under her breasts, and waits.

There’s only three showers and five sinks and a lot of people, so the queue moves slowly. She’s not going to use a shower — far too risky — so when it’s her turn she can be quick: she’ll strip off her top layers, wash her face, armpits, neck and under her breasts, and soap up her hair from temple to top; the ponytail can take care of itself. She washed her crotch yesterday in a building site portaloo so she’s good there for a while.

She wishes she could have a shower — she’s dreamed of it — but she’s not confident she can hide what’s between her legs.

“Stacked, aren’t you?”

It takes her a second to realise the woman in front of her in the queue has turned around, and is looking intently at her chest. Idiot! Hasn’t she learned to pay attention by now?

“Um, yes, I suppose,” she says, and winces; that didn’t sound good. As subtly as she can she pulls the shirt tighter, covering herself more.

“What are you doing here with a figure like that, love?”

She tries to lubricate her mouth before answering, but she’s not had anything to drink for a while and it feels like there’s nothing liquid left inside her. She tries anyway.

“What do you mean?” It comes out too deep. Way too fucking deep.

“Listen, darling—”

“Excuse me,” says a new voice, one she doesn’t recognise, and a tall, dark-skinned, dark-haired woman cuts in, places herself between the two of them. She’s wearing practical clothes and carries a huge sports bag. “Can I ask you some questions?” the woman asks, looking down at her. Six foot three, at a guess. “Linda will keep your spot.”

She doesn’t trust herself to speak, not any more, so she just nods and allows the tall woman to take her out of the queue while the other woman, Linda, takes her place. Linda’s shorter, white-skinned and wispy-haired and wearing a slightly incongruous baseball cap, and smiles widely at her.

The tall woman leads her around the corner into a small office, where she sits down and waits for whatever’s about to happen to happen. It’s not ideal to be here, in an enclosed space with a stranger who clearly wants something from her, but she knows better than to make a fuss in public, especially when she’s losing control of her voice.

“I’m Teri,” the woman says. “Teri with an i.” She dots the letter in the air with a finger. “And the other woman, Linda, is my partner. What’s your name, child?”

She swallows again, but her voice is long gone, and she doesn’t know how to get out of the situation without speaking. Starved for options, she shrugs.

Teri smiles, clicks the lock closed on the door, drops off her bag and pulls up a chair, delicately crossing her legs. “You’re a transsexual, sweetheart, aren’t you?”

Her heart freezes. She’s been found out! She should have worked harder on her voice, she should have listened to Val, she shouldn’t have come here for breakfast…

She knows bits and pieces about transsexuals. Val said they’re men who weren’t actually men, who were always women inside, who take medicine and undergo surgery to make the outside match the inside. Val hadn’t believed they were real, had thought they were just an invention of the television and the lurid magazines some of the boys at school passed around, the ones with the adverts in the back pages for colourfully described services from men, women and transsexuals who could, for a price, make you feel incredible things. The idea of turning a man into a woman sounded like something out of science fiction. But then she’d been brought to the Hall and been made to learn first-hand just what a few milligrams of sex hormones and a little surgery can do, and she dug deep into her memory for every scrap of information she’d ever encountered that might help her survive.

Val said the plan was to pretend to be an ordinary woman, and if that failed, only then to play the part of a transsexual. It’s riskier, she said, remembering a film she’d once seen on the television, that she’d originally believed to be fictional: people are cruel to transsexuals. People are cruel to genetic girls, too, but no-one likes to feel like they’ve been tricked, even if the trick is all in their heads.

“It’s okay,” Teri says gently.

Hard to believe. But she doesn’t move, because what could she do? The windows are all closed, and the door is locked. She stiffens, braces herself, waits for the first strike to land; it won’t be the first time she’s been hurt.

But instead Teri backs away from her, scrapes her chair across the floor until she reaches the cavernous sports bag she dropped by the door. She pulls out a thermos, unclips the two plastic cups from the top and pours two cups of tea. She drinks deeply from one and leans forward, passes the other over.

“Have something to drink,” Teri says, “and I’ll tell you what I think. Sweet girl, you are a transsexual. Relax; it’s not obvious to anyone else but me and Linda, but, sweetheart, you need to be more careful. I saw you here last week, washing with the other girls, and I don’t care that you have an impressive chest because unless you are somehow living on the streets at your age with a vagina already, you don’t want to risk taking off any clothes around genetic girls. They will tear you down if they figure you out. And that’s even before we get to your voice. You’re not safe, child.”

“I know I’m not safe.” It’s a whisper, but it doesn’t sound all that bad. The tea’s helping. “I’m being careful.”

“I know, sweetheart,” Teri says, cupping her hands around her tea, “I know. But I also know what it’s like to be in your position. These guys, these people, these ‘Christians’—” the word comes out from between bitterly curled lips, “—are not good people. They play at it. They claim it. They put it on their tax returns and they tell Jesus all about it, but it’s a lie. You have to be even more careful around them than around regular people because they are nosy and they are self-righteous and they are dangerous — and I mean ship-you-to-a-psych-ward dangerous — for transsexuals like us.”

She almost chokes on her tea, and in her scrabble to keep hold of the plastic cup she’s suddenly fumbling, she betrays exactly what she’s thinking.

“Yep.” Teri grins. “I’m like you. Linda, too.”

“Like me?”

Teri pokes herself in the chest with a thumb. “Transsexual through and through. Couldn’t tell, could you?”

Behind Teri, a silhouette appears in the frosted glass window set into the office door, and someone behind it says, “Teri? It’s me.” Teri unlocks the door without looking, and her friend — her partner, that’s what Teri said before — walks in, closing it as soon as she’s able.

“Hi,” Linda says. “Sorry. Lost your space in the queue. One woman got pretty argumentative.”

“That’s okay,” Teri says. “She can shower at our place, can’t she?”

“You were right?”

“Of course I was right!” Teri turns her attention away from Linda again. “What do you say, sweetheart? Want to come stay with a pair of disreputable transsexuals for a while? Get cleaned up, learn to speak like we do? We have frozen pizza.”

“Actually,” Linda says quietly, “I was going to make stew today.”

What should she say? How should she respond?

“What’s your name, child?” Teri says softly.

What is her name? She’s considered so many, recited them as she goes to sleep every night, tried to remember every girl she went to school with, every teacher, every random acquaintance, and every character on her mum’s soap operas, but in the end there’s only one possible choice, and now’s the time to choose it, to remember the girl who helped her survive the worst years of her life, who offered her a name precious to her, who taught her how to remain someone when her old identity, her old sex, her old life was stolen from her. Who hadn’t even been offended or upset when she hadn’t been strong enough to take the name when she was offered it.

Well?

Is she strong enough now?

Does it even matter? Can’t live without a name, and at some point she really does have to start living.

Sink or swim.

“Beatrice,” she says.

 

2019 December 16
Monday

He made a pattern with the bean bag chairs: a wide, flattened, lazy circle around a central pair, like an eye. He had to push the couches out to create the space he needed and he had to rope in Stephanie to help move everything, but he’s learned by now that when he has a perverse idea, when it presses on the inside of his head for days, he has to follow it through.

Once, of course, he’s thoroughly examined it for the sorts of motivations, complications and compulsions that characterised his old perverse ideas.

It was because of something Maria said as part of bringing him entirely into her confidence: that most intakes, year by year, end up roughly the same. And he wasn’t and still isn’t inclined to disbelieve her, not even in the interest of being contrary, because it’s not an observation he found original. Early on, someone else down here, he forgets who — although it was almost certainly Steph — said it felt like they were all stepping through expected points of rebellion and acceptance, and although theirs may have played out roughly uniquely, since probably in the whole country Declan is/was the only person stupid enough to try to dig out a Goserelin implant with a spoon that still had a little bit of Weetabix on it, the results tended to generalise. Someone acts out with the metal cutlery; it gets replaced with plastic. Someone attacks someone else in one of the communal areas; restrictions are imposed. Someone repeatedly refuses to calm the fuck down and play nice; they are put in a cell, beaten, and eventually washed out. Mice, running down the most obvious and direct routes in the maze, looking for food.

Aaron had rolled the idea around in his head all weekend and decided he felt like being different. Like making a statement. Like being unpredictable. So he pushed out the couches and rearranged the bean bags into something like a conversation pit and sat down with Steph in the middle, waiting for a reaction from the first sponsor to walk in. It had been Edy, and she’d just grinned at him. Disappointing.

Still, the task had filled the back half of a boring Sunday, and at least the place looks different now. He hasn’t had the courage to ask if it’s been done before, but even if it has, fuck whoever did it already and fuck their shitty conversation pit; his is better.

His has Steph.

The common room, once laid out as if on a grid, now has the couches that previously had braced the wall-mounted television pressed all the way up against the closest of the metal tables, and the circle of bean bags intersects them on its way past. One can choose to recline on a couch and lay one’s feet on a comfortable bean bag chair, or one can opt to laze on one of the many cushions strewn throughout the white of the ‘eye’, or, if one has access to a Stephanie, one can claim together the double-bean-bag centre seat, the pupil of the eye, and watch television in a decadent and slightly scrunchy haze.

Another thing that’s changed: they get breakfast TV. It’s on a short delay, Maria said, so someone up in the security room can blank the screen and mute the audio, so it’s only available on the days someone can be bothered to do that, but it’s appreciated, even if this morning’s news is dominated by the election and the Tories and Brexit and all sorts of other things that he never paid much attention to before but which has Steph and several of the sponsors rather agitated.

“Oh well,” Edy says to Maria, “this probably makes it easier for us. Regulatory bonfire equals all our loopholes get bigger.”

“Optimist,” Maria replies, and kisses her.

Like Steph and Aaron, Maria and Edy are no longer hiding their relationship, although there was likely never any need; the only people to whom it might have been a surprise are Adam and Martin, and even if either boy were mentally capable of being scandalised — or even understanding what it means when two girls have very special feelings for each other — the only people they could tell already know.

And it’s pretty sweet, really.

Maria and Edy are sitting together on one of the couches, shoes shucked off somewhere in the sea of cushions, and Maria’s kicking her feet idly in one of the bean bag chairs, apparently enjoying curling the material between her toes. So they’re close enough to Aaron to overhear, and seemingly comfortable enough with his presence to let him overhear.

Should he find that reassuring? They’re his captors.

But they’re being nice to him. Who the hell else has ever been nice to him?

Yes, but they’re being nice to him now. Because he acquiesced. Because he’s agreed to become who they want him to become.

No, because he agreed to change. Maria’s not dictating what kind of girl he eventually becomes — and a shiver runs through him as he thinks it, physical enough for Steph to grab his hand and squeeze — and she’s never going to. She’s simply provided a general direction of travel: he’s moving away from, not towards.

Yes, but—

“You’re thinking too hard,” Steph whispers, nudging him. “I can feel it.”

“I’m thinking just hard enough.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

“Same old.”

“Girls!” Maria says sharply, and when Aaron looks around to glare at her, she’s smirking at him. She’s been more light-hearted with him lately, even teasing him from time to time, and when he first called her on it she pretended great offence and insisted it was just part of the process. He had to think of her as his big sister, she said, and big sisters tease. He responded that big sisters don’t generally force feminise their younger brothers, which led her to question the quality of his upbringing. He’d been forced to admit that, if nothing else, at least Maria was taking an interest.

And he never had a big sister before.

When he burst into tears at that simple realisation she comforted him, and didn’t even make him tell her what upset him so much.

God fucking damn this place. Everything stupid becomes profound; everything profound becomes stupid. And in the middle there’s Aaron, unsure what to do with any of it.

“What?” he says, aware that Maria’s waiting for a more comprehensive response.

“Make yourselves respectable,” Maria says, rooting around in the cushions for her shoes. “We’re about to have company.”

 

* * *

 

They’re reintroducing Will today, decanting him from his cell and dumping him back into the common areas with Steph and the others, and that was all Christine needed to hear. Abby and Indira, breakfasting in the dining hall, told her so conversationally, like it was nothing she needs to worry about, but it’ll be a long time before she can think of the boy as anything other than potentially lethally dangerous. Yes, sure, Tabby’s his sponsor and yes, sure, she’s experienced and level-headed and a good shot with a taser and she would not let him loose on the others again if she were at all worried about him, but the sound of Maria’s head hitting the floor is one Christine never wants to hear again, so one extra warm body between Will and anyone he wants to hurt can only be a good idea, even if it does mean she has to stay the whole day, miss her Linguistics workshop and get in trouble with the professor again.

She takes the steps down to the basement slightly too fast. A thought strikes her halfway down and she redirects her stumbling feet, bounces off the wall opposite the security room and nips inside. Nell, surrounded by three empty chain-store paper coffee cups and looking very much like she needed them, intuits her need and has the drawer by the main security console unlocked and open by the time Christine skids to a stop. She grabs one of the duty tasers, smiles her thanks at Nell when she looks up to find she’s already pairing it to Christine’s identity, and takes the remaining stairs to basement two at a more sensible pace, feeling very prescient for being lazy enough to wear shorts. Although when she shoves the taser in the front pocket it deforms the fabric in such a way that she’s unavoidably reminded of the morning erections she’ll never have again, so she pulls it back out and throws it in her back pocket instead, lest she have an entirely inappropriate giggle attack when something serious is going down.

She arrives to see Steph and Aaron sitting at the far end of Aaron’s curious bean bag construction, backs to the wall and looking about as ready for action as they can while still sinking slowly into the chairs. Edy’s just entering from the bedrooms with a subdued-looking Adam, his hair still wet from the shower, and she guides him onto the couch closest to Steph and Aaron. Maria’s perched on the edge of one of the tables, taser in the palm of her hand.

Martin, less dishevelled than usual, as if he’s been persuaded to care about his appearance again, enters next, with Pamela walking behind him. She guides him to the other couch, sits down with him, holds his hand. Curious; didn’t she hate him before?

“Hi, Tina,” Steph says, waving, and Christine waves back, smiling at the nickname. Steph’s been talking to Lorna, and probably picked it up from her. Why no-one apart from Paige can just bloody well call her Christine, she doesn’t know.

“Don’t you have a lecture?” Edy says, and under her arm Adam flinches. She immediately moves to comfort him.

“I have an hour,” Christine says, taking up position on the table next to Maria’s. “And it’s a workshop. I can miss it.”

“It’s only Will,” Aaron says. He sounds unsure, and Steph hugs him, rubs his leg. “Steph thinks he won’t be any trouble.”

Huh. Has Aaron ever addressed her directly before? Have they ever even interacted? To be encouraging, she smiles for him and says, “I’m taking no chances, Aaron,” and gets a wink from Steph for her trouble. Maria catches her eye and, when she’s sure Aaron’s looking away, Christine quickly shrugs.

She doesn’t know if it’s a big deal for Aaron to volunteer information at this stage or not. She’s pretty certain she wouldn’t have, and aside from her own experience she has little to go on. She’s deliberately avoided reading any of the files on the psychology of basementing, because that would indicate a willingness to stick around, and Christine still plans to graduate from Saints and leave. With Paige. And Vicky and Lorna. And Pippa. And Abby, depending on how things shake out with her family. And Indira, if she can drag her away. She smiles to herself; the last time she talked about her plans, Paige commented drily that it sounded like she was intending to poach enough talent to set up a competing feminisation dungeon in another city, an observation which had earned her a particularly vicious punishment kiss.

And then the door from the corridor opens and Will enters, bracketed by Jane and Harmony and led by Tabby. They walk him in like a shackled prisoner, and though he’s free, as far as Christine can tell, he moves like a man in cuffs, with short steps and careful attention paid to the women escorting him.

No, she realises, as he lifts his head and looks around the room, as Adam burrows into Edy’s embrace, as Maria stiffens, as even Martin frowns and exchanges looks with Pamela… Not like a prisoner. Like a bomb. Like any sudden movement would be like cutting the wrong wire and unleashing hell. Will’s scared.

Scared of himself.

Jane and Harmony fan out, Jane moving to one of the as-yet-untouched-by-Aaron couches near the door and Harmony to the closest metal table, and Tabby leads him through the room. She has him wait in the clear area in the middle of the room while she fetches a chair. Tabby sits him down, retreats to the cabinet on the wall, taser in hand. Christine spots a lump in the thigh pocket of Tabby’s cargo pants; she probably has one of the smaller, close-range tasers in there, too. Christine looks around and realises that all the sponsors have today, entirely coincidentally, worn clothes with lots of pockets.

Yeah. Maybe she’s not necessary after all. Maybe she worried over nothing. Idiot; this is how people get recruited: they just start helping out and before they know it, bam, someone’s handing them a Martin.

Silence for almost a minute. Will in the chair, knees together, hands in his lap, palms up. Head down. Almost comically penitent. He’s smaller, and it’s not just in the way he carries himself. Christine imagined him emerging from his cell looking like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, all muscle and sinew, a greater and more powerful weapon than he’d been when he was first isolated. But it’s as if he’s barely moved in there, barely eaten, and has been thus reduced.

Will’s small.

He’s still at least as tall as Paige or Vicky, and he’s nowhere near as thin as either of them, and looked at with objective eyes he’s still a big guy, but it’s like he made a play for the record for quantity of mass lost in just under three weeks. He feels small. It’s shocking.

Welcome to the other intakes, I guess, she tells herself. Not all of them can be like hers, proceeding almost entirely without serious incident. Sometimes, some years, someone goes into a hole and comes out… different.

Will clears his throat.

“I’m not going to say I screwed up,” he says, his voice dull and heavy. “I’m not going to say I made a mistake. I’m not going to say I learned a lesson. I’m not going to excuse what I did.” There’s a long pause. Next to her, Christine can hear Maria’s careful breathing. “I’m sorry,” Will continues. “I’m sorry, Maria. What I did to you was wrong. Premeditated, cruel, pointless. Wrong. I don’t expect forgiveness, nor do I ask it. Tabitha tells me you’re on your way to a full recovery. I’m glad it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I’m glad I didn’t take you away from the people who care about you. I know why you’re doing what you’re doing to me now, even though I struggle to understand why anyone thinks I am worth the effort to salvage.” He’s looking up only briefly, eyes darting around the room, never quite alighting on any one person. The speech, such as it is, sounds rehearsed, and Christine imagines him sat in his restraints in the cell, repeating it over and over to the wall. “Adam,” Will says, “I’m sorry I proved unworthy of your trust. I would like a chance to regain it, but that gesture is yours to make, not mine to demand. Stefan, thank you for visiting me. I know you came only because you were asked, but you listened. That was important. That helped me.”

“You’re welcome,” Steph says, leaning forward. Aaron’s got a restraining hand on her knee, like he fears she might get up and go hug Will, but she’s not moving; she’s frowning at him, thinking.

“Thank you all for your time,” Will says, and then he stands up, nods at Tabby, and waits patiently for her to walk up behind him. Jane and Harmony join them, and together they walk towards the door out to the corridor, in the same formation in which they entered. Before they leave he holds up a hand to request they stop, turns around, and says in a wavering, cracking voice that finally betrays his emotional state, “I’m so sorry, Adam.”

Adam’s not able to see him; his couch is facing away from the door, and he’s plainly not willing to move from Edy’s embrace. “You hurt Maria,” he says. It’s quiet but it carries.

“I know.”

“She’s Edy’s friend.”

“I know.”

“She’s Edy’s girlfriend,” Adam says.

“I… didn’t know that.”

Whether it’s Will’s uncertainty prompting a change in Adam or whether he’s just been boiling over in his seat, Christine can’t guess, but the boy twists out of Edy’s grip and leans towards Will over the back of the couch. They’re on opposite sides of the room, far out of each other’s reach, but still Will flinches.

“I hate you!” Adam shouts. “I fl— I fu— I fucking hate you!”

“Adam!” Edy cries, opening her arms to him, not pulling him back but offering him a place to bury himself if he needs to, and he does, turning firmly away from Will with a finality Christine finds almost disturbing. “Ssshhh, sweetie,” Edy whispers, as Adam starts crying softly into her chest, as she rocks him gently, stroking his back and occasionally kissing the top of his head. “Ssshhh. I’ve got you. It’s okay. I’ve got you and you’re safe. You’re safe and you can release your anger. Release it. Release it. Grace is a precious gift.” She starts repeating the mantra, quieter and quieter: “Grace is a precious gift. Grace is a precious gift.”

Adam replies, through thick tears and liquid breaths, “And it’s ours, not God’s, to give.”

Will, having watched it all, turns away, leaves the room with his sponsor and their escorts, and Maria almost inaudibly sighs.

 

* * *

 

Well, she sure felt useless for that.

Christine unregisters the taser, throws it back in the drawer, and sticks around in the security room long enough to watch on the monitors as Tabby, Jane and Harmony deposit Will in his room. The sound’s off on the feed — with two sponsors in the room with him and one covering from the door, weapon at the ready, Nell apparently doesn’t believe she needs to listen in — but no-one seems to be saying much, and Will’s involvement’s restricted to nods and shakes of his head. A moment later and he’s alone again, and he lies back on his bed, closes his eyes, rests his hands by his side, palms up again, and appears very plausibly to fall asleep.

“Well,” Christine says, rolling her shoulders to release some of the tension, “that was anticlimactic.”

“I don’t know,” Nell says. “Adam going off was something, I thought.”

“Something good?”

Nell shrugs. “Maybe. Some girls— some boys need to let it out.” Her cheeks redden a little, and she smiles. “Others need to learn not to.”

Things have cooled between Christine and Nell since the night Christine got Faye removed from her supervision. After her month of night shifts, Nell’s been doing odd jobs around the Hall — mostly more security shifts, but during waking hours now, since Aunt Bea wants her kept separate from the second years for the time being — and she’s been bumping into Christine rather more than chance would suggest. At first, she wondered if Nell was up to something, but then she decided she’s probably just a bit lonely.

“That was most of us,” Christine says, returning Nell’s smile. “Hey, you know Melissa’s around again, right? Wasn’t she in your intake?”

“Yeah,” Nell says, crossing her arms over her chest, “and I was a bitch to her, too. I’ve been avoiding her. I mean,” she adds, looking inward, “I did apologise to her way back when, but so much has happened since then. I feel like it doesn’t count any more.”

“So find her and apologise again. You might have to do it early, though; she skips out at breakfast time to find Shahida most days.”

“Shahida? That girl she was in love with as a kid?”

“Wow,” Christine says, parking her butt on the edge of the security console, “you are out of the loop, aren’t you?”

“Deliberately,” Nell says. “I’m taking everything real slow, Christine. And that includes hanging out with people again. I realised even my friends here were getting kinda sick of my shit.” She’s loosened her arms again, and it’s put one of her hands within reach; Christine takes it, squeezes her fingers. After a moment, Nell squeezes back. “Thanks.”

“Don’t spend too much time alone,” Christine says. “It’ll make you strange.”

She laughs. “Don’t worry about that. Bella and Rabia are taking me out this weekend. Sort of a get-to-know-you-again thing. I’ll be fine. I’m just… being careful. I’ve got the time, after all.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not sponsoring again until next year, with the new intake. And I’ll be under Indira’s supervision. So… kind of humbling? Hopefully I won’t get someone who’s basically a tiny version of me, so I can’t fuck her up like I was fucked up.”

“Oh,” Christine says. “Well, um, good luck?”

Nell’s smile turns wistful. “Thanks. Don’t be a sponsor, Christine.”

“I really won’t,” Christine promises, and makes the most graceful exit she can. She checked the time on the security monitors and she has ages to go before she has to be at her workshop; she can finally experience the transcendental state of not being late for something that Paige has described to her! If she’s early, she might get a chance to talk to Caroline, the non-Dorley and very probably cis girl she’s almost made friends with; she’s twenty-one, unusual in a workshop otherwise filled with eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, which helps Christine feel a little less out of place. Now all she has to do is summon the courage to start a non-academic conversation…

Distracted, she almost walks into Aunt Bea on her way through the kitchen, and has to take a few extremely apologetic steps back. The older woman’s leaning against the cabinet next to the AGA, close enough to benefit from its heat but not so close as to be uncomfortable, and, apparently, until Christine interrupted her, talking with Yasmin. Vicky’s there, too, sitting next to Yasmin at the kitchen table, and she waves at her.

“Ah, Christine,” Bea says.

God, she looks so damn tired. She’s not as bad as she was when Elle and her assistant returned her, barely upright, to the Hall — Maria said she spent most of the weekend resting — but the Beatrice Christine knows and might ordinarily be rather intimidated by still seems absent, replaced by, of all things, an old woman.

Christine knows about the annual search for Valerie Barbier; just one of the many pieces of Dorley’s history she’s read up on since she got official access to the archives. So she knows about Grandmother and she knows something of what she was really like; she knows that the transfer of power she’d had described to her by Indira was a bloodless lie, that it had been more like a coup; and she knows bits and pieces of what it had been like, back in the eighties, to be forced through an unwanted and decidedly nontherapeutic transition under Grandmother’s coterie of sadists.

A bond forged under such circumstances probably could survive death. Three decades on, Beatrice still looks for her, and Christine understands; if Paige had been dragged from her arms like that, she’d never give up the search.

“Good morning, Aunt Bea,” Christine replies. “How are you feeling?” She wants to ask if there’s been an update on the Peckinville thing, but that’s probably a conversation best saved for Maria. Besides, if there are no notes on the server tagged for her, then there likely haven’t been any developments.

Two missing soldiers. Scary. She looked them up: not anyone she’s met.

“My age, Christine,” Beatrice says. “I’m feeling my age.”

“Can I get you anything?”

Bea waves a hand. “No, no. I’m quite capable of feeding and watering myself, still.”

“How did it go, downstairs?” Vicky asks.

“It was pretty uneventful,” Christine says, grateful for the diversion. She has time for a cup of tea before she goes, so she fills the kettle and waits for it to boil, leaning on the counter on the other side of the AGA from Bea. “They escorted him in, he gave a short speech, they escorted him out. Adam got angry, though,” she adds, frowning, “which is unusual.”

Yasmin runs a hand through her hair. “I’m so pleased I don’t know who any of those people are,” she says. “And, Vicky? That counts as shop talk, too.”

“So it does,” Vicky says.

“While we are on ‘shop talk’,” Beatrice says, “or something very much like it, it’s good to see you down here, Yasmin.”

Yasmin blinks. “Oh,” she says, “uh, yeah. It just… It felt like the right time, you know?”

“Indeed.” Bea nods to herself. “Yasmin… I would like to apologise. You and Julia were the subject of many heated debates among the sponsors and I, during your first year. We saw the way things were developing between the two of you and the others of your intake, and we chose not to intervene. It was my suggestion, in fact.” Beatrice smiles, as if her ‘suggestions’ are not gospel to most of the sponsor team. “Sometimes it’s best, with certain types of girls, when they develop a bond such as the one you and Julia share, to let them heal each other. Let them grow as women together, to the exclusion of all others. Inevitably, this can lead to a certain level of isolation from the rest of the group, depending on how the dynamics shake out.” She stops for a moment, takes a laboured breath.

Christine snatches a mug off the drying rack, drops in a tea bag, pours on the water and begins violently squishing the tea bag against the sides of the mug, so she doesn’t have to concentrate too hard on the uncomfortable atmosphere in the kitchen.

“What are you saying, Aunt Bea?” Yasmin says.

“Just Bea,” Bea says. “Or Beatrice. Please. Right now I feel old enough already.” She retrieves her drink from one of the AGA’s hot plates and brings it with her to the table, where she sits opposite Yasmin and takes a dainty sip. “And what I’m saying is sorry. We do what we can with what we have. What we had, back then, was you and Julia and a whole intake of other girls, and not enough staff. Same as always. You benefited from your close relationship with Julia — as did she — but you also grew apart from the others in your group. We could probably have done better by you, and for that, I am deeply sorry.”

“It’s… it’s okay, Aunt— Beatrice,” Yasmin says, drumming her nails on the table again. She talks slowly, thinking as she goes. “I won’t say it wasn’t hard. And I won’t say I haven’t carried a lot of anger over the way I was treated. But I’m working through it, and I’m— Fuck, it feels so hard to say this to you, but I’m better off. Me and Julia. We both are. We’re better as we are now. And we owe that to you.”

Bea, cupping her tea in both hands, nods. Holds the mug up just below her face, warming herself on it. “We’re releasing you, I know,” she said. “Indira asked for immediate release; I asked for three months. In the hope that you might consider… this.” She releases a few fingers, indicates the whole room, herself, Vicky, Christine. “Reconnecting.”

Yasmin stops tapping on the table, rests her chin on her hand instead. Seems deliberately to still herself. “Connecting, really,” she says, nodding at Christine. “We’re all different people now.”

“Thank God,” Christine says, finally comfortable enough to stop torturing her tea bag and sit down at the table to drink.

“I’m glad,” Bea says. “I don’t like to think of our girls going out into the world alone. That’s—”

She doesn’t finish her thought; Vicky, at the other end of the table, snorts, covers her mouth, and tries urgently to signal something to Christine, her eyes bobbing back and forth from Christine’s tea to Yasmin.

“What?” Christine says.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Yasmin says, but she’s amused rather than, as Vicky clearly feared, insulted. “I can’t believe we still have those.”

“Maybe don’t show that one to Julia,” Vicky says.

Christine turns the mug around, the one she picked at random and without care off the drying rack, and reads:

Great hair ✓
A winning smile ✓
Balls ✕
…Two out of three ain’t bad!

She turns her attention to Yasmin, meaning to apologise, but she’s staring, bemused, across the table at Bea, and when Christine looks she realises that the wheezing sound she’s been hearing for the last couple of seconds is Beatrice, leaning bodily on the table and laughing so hard she cries.

 

1988 September 24
Saturday

It’s a three-storey terraced place, like the houses at the end of the street where she used to live with her mum. They always seemed much grander than her mum’s flat, but when she visited inside one they turned out to be divided into flats even more cramped than her own, and just as in need of repair. The surrounding road is familiar, too, down to the council-clipped trees suffocating in tiny patches of grass; different city, same world. She feels like if she explored she’d find around the next corner the very same boys who used to hang around by the rec centre, or the older guys who colonised the car park by the doctor’s office.

Strange, in such a context, to have become something so entirely new. She knows how David would have walked this world, would have dealt with those boys, would have responded to Teri and Linda; how would she?

Her mum would warn her not to enter a stranger’s home. Would probably have a fit if she knew she was about to do so with a pair of transsexuals. But she’s not here and she never will be, and besides, for all her mother’s fear of queer people, it wasn’t Gay George from down the road who kidnapped and castrated her, and it wasn’t the woman her mother called The Dyke who thought putting cigarettes out on her back counted as foreplay, so maybe her mum never did know anything useful.

Fuck. She’s never going to see her again, is she? Frankie said her mum moved away, or was kicked out, or something, and without money, without an identity, she doesn’t know how she would even start looking for—

“Beatrice? Honey?”

Ah. Yeah. Beatrice. That’s her. Bea. The name she’s going to wear for the rest of her life; she should probably get used to it. She tastes it, rolls it around in her head, imagines introducing herself to new people with it. Imagines telling Val about it. Imagines the look on her face.

She should have embraced the name Val chose for her while they were still together. It could have been something special, not just a remembrance.

“Beatrice?”

“Oh,” she says, realising she’s been frozen in front of the house for maybe a minute. “Sorry.”

Teri’s standing on the step up to the front door and holding out a hand. Bea looks past her, looks at the front door. Yellow. Clean. Recently painted. Seems respectable. Mum would approve.

“We’re not going to bite, you know,” Teri says.

The thought of it is comical, and Bea wants to tell her she’s been bitten by people far larger and scarier, and then she’s laughing, releasing the tension she’s unjustifiably let build inside her.

Her fear is stupid. Teri and Linda are just a couple of friendly local women, volunteering their time and their home to help someone who needs them. They are exactly what they appear to be.

It’s almost as if being captured and castrated has given her trust issues!

“You okay there, honey?” Linda says.

“Yeah,” Bea says, patting herself on the chest and forcing a few coughs. All those nights in the cold and the damp have made raucous laughter rather painful, and she needs to redistribute some mucus. “Yeah. Just having dumb thoughts. That’s all.”

“We can try this later, if you like,” Teri says, lowering her hand. “Plenty of light left.”

Bea smiles, holds out her hand in return, waits for Teri to take it. “Don’t forget,” she says, when Teri’s fingers close around hers, “you promised not to bite.”

It’s nice inside. Bigger than it looked from the outside, and while none of the furniture looks especially new, it’s tidy and it’s been arranged to make maximal use of the space. There’s a kitchen through a door at the back of the room — probably an extension — and stairs up on the left.

“Our house is your house,” Linda says, smiling at her. They got rained on a little on the way back, which is probably why Linda’s taking off her cap and— Oh. She’s not got much hair under there; it only starts to thicken at her temples.

“Don’t stare, kid,” Teri says.

“Oh, it’s fine,” Linda says, flapping a hand in Bea’s direction. “Everybody looks the first time. Lost half my hair by twenty-four, figured out who I was at twenty-six. Very tragic. But—” she raises a finger, “—it’s not all bad. Be right back!” She starts up the stairs, cupping her hands and yelling as she climbs, “Ashley! We have company!”

Teri takes off her jacket, shakes off the excess water over the mat by the front door and hangs it on a hook, and encourages Bea to do the same with Mr Choudry’s coat. Teri then heads for the kitchen and Bea, not wanting to be alone in a strange place, follows her. Inside it is, once again, shockingly familiar: standalone oven and fridge, chest freezer in the corner, enough pots and pans and plates and bowls that the slim cupboards can’t fit them all. A row of windows looks out onto a small back garden, overlooked by the terrace behind and dimly grey in the late morning drizzle.

“Tea or coffee, Beatrice?” Teri asks. Clearly noticing something in Bea’s expression, she adds, “And do you prefer Beatrice, Bea, or something else?”

“Tea,” Bea says, and shrugs. “And either’s fine. Bea or Beatrice. I, um, haven’t had the name long.” An hour, perhaps. However long it took them to walk here from the church.

“Bea, then,” Teri says, and giggles. “Tea for Bea!”

It’s such a stupid thing to say that Bea laughs, too, and accepts the mug with both hands when it’s done. It’s not all that warm in the house, and it’s nice to hold something so hot, even if she has to cup her fingers out a little so she doesn’t get uncomfortable. Teri arranges the other three mugs on a tray and carries them back through into the main room, where Linda’s waiting. She’s changed out her top for something lower-cut and more flattering, and she’s changed out her hair.

“Like it?” she says, striking a pose, and Bea, her mood still lifting, nods enthusiastically. The wig’s styled perfectly to frame Linda’s face, and the red-brown waves that tumble to the small of her back are striking. She looks almost like a different person. “I have lots,” Linda continues, as Teri guides Bea to an armchair in the corner which accepts her with the voluminous embrace of well-loved but well-stuffed cushions, “so I have one for every occasion.”

“Every year she buys a new one,” Teri says.

“Why not wear one today, then?” Bea asks, and sips gingerly at her tea; still too hot. “Sorry if it’s rude to ask.”

“It’s your first night,” Linda says, hopping onto the couch next to Teri and tucking her feet up under her bottom, “so you have a free pass on rude questions. Get them all out. And I didn’t wear one today because, well, it can sometimes get a bit rowdy at the church. I have enough ‘real’ hair—” she finger-quotes with the hand that isn’t holding tea and rolls her eyes in time, “—that I look fine with a hat on, and then if someone yanks on me it doesn’t damage anything expensive. I don’t wear one to go to the corner shop, either,” she adds with a grin, “and I often don’t wear one when it’s just us, so get used to it.”

“I will,” Bea says, hoping she sounds as earnest as she feels. She’s seen boys in every stage of unwilling transformation; thinning hair isn’t ever going to phase her. Her voice cracks a little again, probably from pushing it too hard.

“You’ll need to work on that,” Teri says. “Your voice. You’re pretty as hell and you’re not even all that tall, so the voice is all you need, and then you’re set.”

“All I need for what?”

“Life!” Teri says, spreading her free hand out.

The conversation turns to small talk as they drink their tea and warm themselves from inside to out. It’s a strange experience: Bea’s struggling to remember the last time she just talked with someone, when it wasn’t hissed and frantic exchanges of information in a camera blind spot, or coming up with the most minimal possible response when one of Grandmother’s guests wanted something from her to titillate or amuse.

Not since Val, probably.

When the tea’s done with, Teri suggests she shower. They’ve got ample clean clothes spare so they’ll leave some out, and they’ll get hers washing when no-one needs the hot water any more. Following instructions she finds a towel and a bathrobe in the airing cupboard on the first floor, and on her way to the bathroom she meets the house’s final occupant.

Ashley’s white, blonde out of a bottle, attractive, and tall enough to turn heads. She endears herself instantly to Bea by not wrinkling or covering her nose when they almost collide with each other outside the bathroom door; Bea’s under no illusions as to how she smells at the moment.

She introduces herself and Bea gives the name she’s starting to get used to, and Ashley shoos her into the bathroom with a smile. “Wash up!” she says. “Get clean. And then we can chat. Oh,” she adds, louder, through the closing door, “and don’t use the green bottles; those are mine. Special for dyed hair.”

Bea hasn’t showered alone in years.

As she washes, a few long strands of hair threaten to block the plug. She pulls them out, wraps them in tissue paper and dumps them in the toilet. The extensions Grandmother had glued into her hair have been coming out in clumps for a week or so, and she’ll be glad when they’re all gone. Her natural hair is almost shoulder-length now, and that’s more than long enough.

Laid on a rickety wooden chair outside the bathroom door is a full set of clean clothes. She dresses, towel-dries her hair, finger-brushes it and throws a few more extensions into the toilet, leaves her old clothes in a pile in the corner of the bathroom as requested, and heads back downstairs to another cup of tea and three expectant faces waiting for her.

The whole walk back from the church Bea had been thinking about her story, about how she can explain her inconsistent transition to a trio of transsexuals, because she knows she doesn’t make a lot of sense: she’s had years of physiological changes and some rudimentary voice training, she’s decent at applying makeup and styling her hair, and she’s even been castrated — Teri informs her with a frown that it’s called an ‘orchiectomy’ — but she knows nothing about actually living as a woman, she’s completely ignorant of transsexual terminology, and she can’t even say for sure the names of the hormones she’s been taking.

She doesn’t get far into the story before she has to stop for a moment, to wait out the tightness in her chest. This was Valerie’s idea, and she remembers the night she laid it all out: they were in Val’s room, practising makeup the way they were supposed to, and throwing silly stories back and forth, the way they always did. The idea of her being dead, of someone taking her and using her and discarding her the way they did with all the others, is enough to stopper Bea’s throat. And she can’t even get justice! Call the police and fucking Frankie shows up! How can you fight people with such leverage when you barely even exist?

“Hey, hey,” Teri says, leaning over and placing a hand on Bea’s thigh, and not making a fuss when Bea jumps at the unexpected contact, “it’s okay. You don’t have to tell us.”

Swallowing, lubricating her throat with one of the endless mugs of tea, Bea pushes the memories away.

“I’m fine,” she says, and she’s disappointed to note that her voice has returned almost to how it was before she started Val’s lessons. “Fuck. Sorry. I’m— I sound wrong. I know.”

“We’ll help you with your voice,” Teri says.

“We can teach you,” Linda says.

Ashley says, an octave below her normal speaking voice, “They will, you know.” She grins at Bea’s startled expression, and returns to normal to add, “They’re very good.”

“Wow,” Bea says. “I hadn’t even… I’m stupid.”

“What do you mean?” Teri asks.

“It didn’t even occur to me that those aren’t your natural voices. You all sound so good.” Not even Val had been that good.

“Thank you!” Ashley says, pitching up a little bit into something more like a little girl’s voice and approximating a curtsey from her position on the other armchair.

“But you should know,” Teri says, “there’s nothing ‘unnatural’ about the voice I’m using now. I’m using the same vocal cords God gave me, just differently to how I used to. It’s only a matter of training. You wouldn’t say an opera singer’s voice is unnatural, right?”

Bea shakes her head and apologises again.

“For now just put a hand on your chest,” Linda says, “right between your breasts, and feel for resonance there. That’s like, vibrations. Feel for vibrations. Don’t try and ‘do’ anything; just get used to how it feels when you speak now.”

Bea nods, puts her hand in place, and tries to pay attention to it as she relays the story. “It was me and— me and Val. Valerie. We had someone. Someone who paid for stuff. Helped us out.”

“A sugar daddy?”

Bea shrugs. “Maybe?”

“But he wanted something in return,” Ashley says flatly.

It’s not a question, and Beatrice responds to it with all the vehemence the memory of Val’s last night conjures up in her. “Yeah,” she says. “He wanted something. From her, first. He— he came for her.” And her throat tightens again: Val had said they should obscure the gender of their captor, to make it harder for someone to check up on the story, and she’d said so while waving a blush brush around in the air, like she was conducting an orchestra. She could be so expressive, so alive.

And now she’s gone.

And so are all the others but Val most especially is gone.

Bea doesn’t notice she’s crying until the tears splash in her tea. Almost immediately someone takes the mug from her, comforting hands find hers, and Teri perches on the arm of the chair and whispers calming things.

Get used to it, Beatrice. This is just the way things are now.

Val’s gone.

She’d always expected to find Val waiting for her. It wasn’t a realistic dream, and on every rational level she knew she’d never see her again, but a shard of hope, which survived everything Grandmother could do to her, claimed every night as she fell asleep that Valerie is out there. When she ran out into the woods, that part of her expected to see her, running up to meet her with supplies and fresh clothes and whispering for Bea to come with her. When she found the hostel and met Mr Choudry, that part of her expected to turn the corner to the dormitory and see her sitting up on one of the cots, discarding a half-read book and leaping up to embrace her. Even when she came down here, to London, that part of her insisted Val had done the same, that she’d escaped to the big city, that if Bea just asked enough people and looked in enough places she’d find her, already established, with a place for her in their shared new lives together.

But Val’s not here, there, or anywhere. She’s just gone, and Bea has to do this alone.

The cold core of her heaves with loss, and in the overstuffed chair in the little terraced house, with the women who’ve taken her in holding her hands, Beatrice lets go of Valerie Barbier.

Maybe it’s not for good.

Maybe one day, when she’s back on her feet, she can look for her.

Maybe she’s still out there somewhere, waiting for her.

But maybe she’s not.

 

2019 December 16
Monday

She doesn’t know quite why she’s doing this, except that Will left the common room flinching under Adam’s disapproval, and she hates to think of anyone, even Will, having to be alone down here. Everyone needs at least one friend.

Tabby escorts her, raps twice on Will’s door and pushes it slowly open.

“You have a visitor,” she says.

“Wait, please,” Will says, and Stef can’t see what he’s doing but she can hear the clink of metal. After a few seconds he says, “Okay, I’m ready.”

“Shout when you want to leave,” Tabby says, and stands aside.

Will’s room is right next to Stef’s, so unlike Aaron’s it’s not mirrored from what she’s used to. It’s less messy, though; Stef’s clothing supply is starting to overflow out of her wardrobe, and both she and Aaron keep acquiring cushions from somewhere. And while, yes, Will just got back, she gets the impression his room was always like this, ordered and neat. His cell was like that, too, and she sees the same pile of paperbacks he’d had in there, stacked here by the foot of his bed. There are considerably more of them now.

“Anything you want to borrow, you can,” Will says.

“Uh. Sure.”

Will’s sat in the middle of his bed, cross-legged and with his hands once again palm-up in his lap, the way they were when he gave his speech in the common room. In here, though, they’re locked in the chained handcuff, the one attached to the underside of the bed in every room. Stef had completely forgotten about them.

“Don’t get any closer than the computer desk,” Will says, and demonstrates the give on the chain. There is, indeed, about enough that he could feasibly grab someone who came any closer.

“You don’t need to do that,” Stef says. She obeys his instructions, though, rolling the chair over from where it’s been parked by the vanity and sitting down a half metre or so into the room.

“I want you to be safe around me. More than that, I want you to feel safe.”

“I can take care of myself, Will.”

“Against Aaron, maybe. But against me?”

He has a point: even reduced — Tabby said he ate little and did zero exercise while in the cell — he’s still an intimidating presence. All the same… “I did punch Declan in the face, you know,” Stef says.

“Yes. And you nearly broke your thumb. Because you’ve been in exactly one fight, which was broken up by the sponsors, and I’m… That’s why I’m here. So I’ll keep the cuffs on, thank you.”

“Okay,” Stef says, shrugging. It doesn’t seem worth pushing it.

“Did you ever find out what happened to him?”

“Who, Declan? No. He’s just gone.”

Nodding, Will says, “Right. So. Why are you here?”

“I thought you might need a friend.”

“I hurt my friends, Stefan.”

“It’s Steph.”

“What? Who cares?”

“I do.”

“Why—? Fuck. Yeah. Of course you do.” Will mimes writing on an imaginary piece of paper. “And how do you spell that, Steph? With an f? With a ph? Is there a y in there?”

“Fuck off, Will. If you’re going to be a dick, I can leave you to it.”

“Stefan—”

Stef leans forward, brings the chair with her, gets closer to him, inside his reach. Will backs off, away to the head of the bed, into the corner. “I hoped you’d changed, Will,” she says. “I hoped all that time alone would have given you a chance to think. To decide to change. But if you’re the same mouthy piece of shit who came here, the same guy who beat his brother into the hospital—”

“Please move away.” It’s quiet but it’s insistent.

“Have you changed?”

“Move away, please.”

“Fine.” Stef kicks off from the end of the bed, rolls backwards on the chair. It bumps into the computer desk and she pushes it a little farther. Out of his reach. “Well?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You already said that part, out in the common room.”

“How do I know?” He’s still quiet, but his edge, his perpetual sneer, has gone. “How do I know if I’ve changed? I’ve thought I have before. And then I kick the shit out of someone and I’m just the same fucker I always was. How can I know?”

Stef remembers his monotone confession, back in the cell. He told her how he’d snap, lose control, and when he came back to himself there’d be blood; rarely his.

“You said you were in control,” she says. “When you attacked Maria. You said you chose it.”

“Did I?” He’s frowning. Probably the days start to flow together when you spend so much time alone, no matter how many books you read or TV shows you watch.

“You did. I watched the surveillance video.”

Will laughs. “Are you a sponsor now, Stefan?”

“Steph.”

“Sorry. Shit. Fucking— It’s habit. It’s habit and it’s stubbornness. You can’t just change the name you call someone.”

“I can,” Stef says. “It’s easy. You just do it. You recognise that it’s something important to them and you just… call them the new thing.”

“No, look,” Will says, leaning forward from the wall and raising his voice, “the neural pathways—”

She interrupts him with a laugh. It’s not entirely a genuine laugh, but the boy is so fucking ridiculous. “You can’t call me by my name because of your neural pathways?”

“It’s how it works.”

“It’s an excuse,” Stef snaps. “You know, maybe that’s why you don’t change. Even if you want to. You talked about everyone putting things in you: what they wanted from you, what they thought you could be. I think you do it, too. I think you’re always watching yourself. Always trying to be the cleverest one in the room. The quickest, the most well-read. I think, if you want to change, you should drop it.”

Stef has to give him credit; he doesn’t get angry. He sits back again. “I don’t know exactly what you mean,” he says.

She breathes out through her nose. Laughs again. “Will,” she says, “I think you need to fucking relax, man. You’ve called me ‘Stef’ before, you know. Yeah. It’s on the video. But you’re overthinking it. You’re getting weird about it. Consider: you just don’t have to get weird.”

“That,” Will says, and there’s the first hint of a smile, “is easy for you to say.”

Stef keeps having to redirect her expectations. Even after watching the video, reminding herself how completely devastated he’d been in the cell, she keeps forgetting. Back here, in his room, he’s more like he used to be. Except this is the same Will who apologised to Maria and Adam. Who seemed genuinely uncomfortable under the gaze of so many people in the common room. Who’s handcuffed himself to his bed, just in case.

Both of him are in there, the humbled boy and the arrogant piece of shit. And she remembers the other things he said, too.

“You’re going to be changing on the outside, too,” Stef says. “You know that. You said you were okay with it.” No; the wounds on his forearms, self-inflicted. “You said you were sometimes okay with it. Why not all the time?”

“Because it can’t work.” He looks up at the ceiling. In the cuffs, his fists clench, “It shouldn’t work. It’s fucking insane, Stef.” Ah; the correct name at last. His eyes flicker down and she smiles, to let him know she appreciates the effort. “It’s— Okay, yeah, so Tabby’s gone on at me enough about it that I understand the argument that it says it ought to work. In theory. But we’re not talking about perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum here—”

“—perfectly spherical boys in a basement—”

“—we’re talking about real life. And it’s impossible. But…” He waves his joined hands limply.

“But?”

“But what the fuck else am I going to do?” He rests, slumps against the wall. “I don’t want to do that shit any more. And I don’t know how to stop. This has no chance of working. Or maybe it does, but the person who comes out the end isn’t me any more. But that’s fine. Like I said — and I do remember telling you this — I’m fucking done being the guy who hurts people. Whatever it takes. Even if it kills me.”

She lets his words linger for a moment. She’s not entirely sure what to make of them — she’ll be requesting the video of this conversation, too, no doubt — but there’s something there, something more animated than the desolate creature she spoke to back in his cell. Something, perhaps, worth saving.

“You can’t keep those on forever, you know,” she says, nodding at his cuffs.

“Just for now.”

“Okay. You want to watch some TV?”

“What?”

Sighing, Stef wheels her chair around. Not close enough to alarm him. Just so she can see the computer screen. “Olive branch,” she says. “Friendship overture. You want to watch some TV?”

“Right,” he says. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.”

“Oh, and for the record,” she says, “it’s Steph with a ph. Short for Stephanie. I’ve been trying it out for a while. And I think I like it, actually.”

Is this really how she’s going to stop dancing around the name? In a conversation with Will, of all people? Is this really how she’s going to claim it for good?

Fuck it. Why not? She’s Stephanie now.

And the look on his face is hilarious.

 

1988 September 24
Saturday

Teri and Linda don’t make her talk any more. When she’s cried herself out they retreat back to the couch, promising her she can tell them anything, anytime, or nothing, never. All at her own pace. Ashley throws a teacloth at her so she can dry her face.

They tell her their own stories instead. Teri was lucky, she says; the luckiest transsexual she’s ever met. Her parents didn’t disown her. They didn’t even disapprove! They live close by, they’ve met Linda, and the next time they visit they’ll meet Ashley and, if she feels she’s ready for it, they’ll meet Beatrice, too. They even found another church for her, so she can attend with them once a month — or more often, if she can afford the bus fare — and worship in a place where no-one knows who she used to be.

Linda lived with her father in this house until the day he died, transitioning right under his nose. She used to keep her outfits and her wigs at Teri’s old flat; it was her staging area, she said, for many a raucous night out. And, yes, she did have to hide her figure from her father, but it wasn’t difficult: it’s amazing what you can do with a bit of breast binding, some loose clothes, and the ironclad denial of a man. When she inherited the house she changed her name, began living full-time as Linda, and told all her surviving relatives to fuck off.

Teri’s in her late twenties and Linda her late thirties but Ashley’s around Beatrice’s age, and she ran away from home around about the time Bea got kidnapped, a coincidence Bea’s surprised she can laugh at. While Linda gets dinner going in the slow cooker and Teri fusses with housework, so she can ‘leave you girls to it’, Ashley tells the story of how she ended up at Teri and Linda’s. They found her at the same church they found Bea, only she’d been living rough for much longer.

“I’m going to school,” Ashley says. “A-levels. Didn’t have the chance before. I thought it would be really weird because of my age, but I’m not the oldest one there by a long shot. And Teri and Lin say I can stay with them as long as I need to, so it’s not so bad. Better than anything else, right?”

Bea nods. “Teri said the people at the church are dangerous?”

“Don’t I know it. I’ll tell you the story sometime. Not today. But I look better now, more like a genetic girl, and I sound like one, too. I’ve changed my name and, even though I can’t change my birth certificate, I’ve got a bank card and a school ID in my real name, so it’s fine. It’s enough. Teri says that when I start work I just need to call Inland Revenue and tell them I’m a sex change and they’ll lock my records so even if someone from the Job Centre or whatever looks up my National Insurance number they won’t know.”

“That’s really all you need to do?”

“Yep.” Ashley grins, confident. “I have everything ready. Going to get my A-levels and get a job and live a quiet life. I’m going to woodwork. That means,” she adds, when she sees Bea frowning, “living so no-one knows you’re a transsexual. It’s all about norms. Like, yeah, being yourself is important, but so’s surviving, and people’ve heard about transsexuals now. So you need to not seem transsexual. And if you’re a bit tall like me, you’ve got to be more careful. I’m going to get a nice, low-profile job with good long-term prospects. Start as a bank teller or something, and move up. I find a big institution with lots of room for lateral movement as well as upward, and I dig in. Go on every on-the-job training course they offer me. Live a normal life.” She taps Bea on the knee. “I know you might not want to hear this, but dream small, Bea. Unless you want them to find you and kill you, dream small.”

“Okay, doombug,” Linda says, approaching from behind the couch and ruffling Ashley’s hair. “She’s got a good head on her, this one,” she adds, addressing Bea, “but she doesn’t half see the bad side in everything.”

“I’m being prudent,” Ashley says, pouting and swatting at Linda’s hand.

“Is Ashley being depressing again?” Teri calls down from somewhere upstairs.

“Yes!” Linda shouts.

“You’re terrible mums,” Ashley says, and returns her attention to Bea. “So. That’s what you should do. Oh! Shit. It’s nearly lunchtime, right?” She holds up a finger. “Hormone time.”

“Here,” Linda says, passing her a handbag. Ashley rummages around inside and comes out with a single white pill, which she swallows dry.

“Three times a day,” she says, “come rain or shine. Do you need to take yours?”

Shit. “Yeah, probably.”

Linda leans on the back of the couch. “Do you have any?”

“Not for almost three weeks. I used to get injections, from the, um—”

“Gotcha,” Linda interrupts, so she doesn’t have to say it. “Well, we can’t get you injections — I’ve never even heard of anyone who gets fancy hormone injections — but we’ll give you a spare box now and we’ll get you in to see the pharmacist as soon as we can.”

“The pharmacist?” Bea asks, as Linda throws her a small white box. It falls open when she catches it, and two trays of white pills, just like the one Ashley took, fall into her lap.

“We know a guy,” Teri says as she walks down the stairs.

“He’s a pharmacist,” Linda explains, grinning. Ashley swats at her again.

“He always ‘accidentally’ overstocks on birth control, and sells us the extra.” Teri points at the pills in Bea’s lap.

Beatrice wants suddenly to throw the pills across the room. “Birth control? I thought we—”

“Relax,” Linda says, as Teri flops down onto the couch. “It’s just hormones.”

Ashley reaches forward and picks up the pill box, turns it over so Bea can read the brand name: Ovran. “Birth control is, like she said, literally just hormones,” she says. “When genetic girls take these, their bodies are tricked into not getting pregnant. Shut up, Lin, I know it’s more complicated than that.”

“It’s not, really,” Linda whispers.

Teri takes the box from Ashley and waves it back and forth. “These’ve got everything a body needs, or modern science’s synthetic imitations thereof: estrogen, progesterone, sugar…”

“You have to supply your own spice,” Linda says, smirking. From the way Ashley reacts, Bea gets the impression it’s an old joke.

“You can have these for free,” Teri says, handing the box back to Bea, “but we’re not exactly rich, so at some point you’ll need to help us pay for more.”

“Don’t worry about paperwork. There are places around here that will pay cash.”

“Wait a few weeks, though. Practise that voice. The way you look, if you can crack the voice, you won’t have to worry about anyone finding you out.”

“Not unless she drops her knickers, Teri.”

“Yeah. Don’t do that.”

“Unless someone’s paying you to.”

They make a little ceremony out of her first birth control pill, with Linda insisting on making her another cup of tea to wash it down with and Teri insisting that they need new mugs, as the current batch is starting to turn unpleasantly brown. So Bea sits with Ashley, the pills waiting on her lap, and tries to plan her life, starting from now:

She can’t risk doing what Ashley did, or what she’s planning to do — go to school, get a job — because the implications of Dorley’s instant response to her 999 call are clear. If they have someone in the police, they could have someone in position to pass on information from any arbitrary government department. The moment Bea gets official work is the moment her National Insurance number gets attached to her updated name and current address and then the risk’s not just on her head, but on the heads of everyone around her.

But there’s cash work, Linda said, so that will do for now. She’ll fix her voice, she’ll learn from Ashley and Linda and Teri everything she needs to learn, and she’ll start bringing in money.

It’s not much of a plan; it takes her a few months from now, if that. But it’s more of a future than she’s had since Dorley took her, years ago, and it represents freedom.

Now that, Beatrice, is a heavy, joyful concept. Freedom. And she can thank Val that she survived long enough to experience it.

Her final gift.

She’s roused from her thoughts by Teri and Linda as they return from the kitchen with four cups of tea, and as promised all three of them make a great deal of fuss over her first hormone pill. She swallows it down, chases it with the tea, gives her audience a cheeky little curtsey, and sits back in the armchair. Odd to be taking the hormones willingly, but she hasn’t the first idea of how to go about becoming a man again, and she’s not sure that’s something she even knows how to be any more.

The other women steer the conversation back towards Ashley’s week at school, to take the pressure off Bea for a while, and she’s content to sit there, drink her tea, and enjoy the company. Until she reads the slogan on the mug she’s holding, and frowns; she can’t make sense of it.

“You okay, sweetheart?” Teri asks, leaning towards her again.

She turns the mug around so they can all read it. “I don’t get it,” she says.

Linda takes the mug from her and explains: “Well, okay, so you see how it says, ‘A Round Tuit’?” She underlines the slogan with her finger. “What that means is, you know how people say, ‘I’ll do such and such when I get around to it’, yes? Well, this mug is ‘A Round Tuit’, so now that you have it, you have no excuse for not doing whatever it is you said you were going to do!”

Linda holds up the half-full mug like it’s the prize on a game show, and waits for reactions.

“Lin,” Ashley says, “that joke gets less funny every time you tell it.”

But Bea can’t take her eyes off it. A Round Tuit. It’s so… so absolutely, completely and totally stupid. So innocent. So cheesy and fun and so unlike what her life has been for more years than she wants even to think about. She reaches out, takes the mug from Linda, places it carefully on the table by the side of her chair and stands up. Linda’s hands are still raised and Bea takes them, pulls the older woman up from the couch and into a hug.

“I love it,” she whispers. “It’s amazing.”

Teri snorts, Ashley shakes her head, and Linda, returning the hug, says, “See, Ashley? Someone appreciates my funny mugs.”