NOVEL WEB 8. Midday on Mercury
8. Midday on Mercury
2019 October 16
Wednesday
I did it. I came out to Christine. And to her friend, Abby, actually. Abby, who knows Melissa! Which is really weird and circular. But, I guess, thinking about it, there are only eight of us down here, and if there are similar numbers in previous years and they all stay in touch then the chances of interacting with someone new doesn’t—
Stefan irritably hits delete and starts again.
I want to be a girl. I’ve never written that down before. Barely even thought it. And I know I should be thinking more like, I AM a girl, but I don’t know how I can know that unless I’ve actually tried it. That’s not how I’ve seen trans women — OTHER trans women — describe their experiences, but maybe there’s different ways to be trans, or I’m just less trans, or—
Delete.
I don’t know what to think of Christine. On the one hand, she’s been understanding with me, and didn’t freak out when I told her I’m trans (okay she did freak out but it was a concerned-for-my-safety freakout, not a bigoted one), and she’s the reason I’m actually finally going to transition, and do it right. I mean, I’ve seen her, Pippa, Maria and about half a dozen other girls now, and even knowing what I know… it’s hard to see. It’s also completely fucking RIDICULOUS that, supposedly, none of them are/were trans. (Are they even trans now? Christine says she’s not, but do they wake up each morning and feel about their bodies the way I do about mine right now? Again, Christine says no. Which makes NO SENSE. Maybe I should ask Abby about it. Get a second opinion. “Hi, Abby, Stef here, I want to ask you some really personal questions about your gender! What’s that, you say? ‘Fuck off’? Okay!”)
But that’s just me looking back to what this place apparently DOES. Because on the OTHER hand, Christine’s first response to someone knowing about Dorley (even if I was wrong, or right in a really really wrong way) was to fucking kidnap them and bring them here to the place where men are basically tortured, and she’s wrapped up so tight in this place you can almost see it on her. The way she talks about how all these guys are going to be ‘helped’ creeps me out… Even if sometimes I do kind of think they deserve it. I mean, they’re all really bad guys! God, ‘bad guys’, that’s an infantile way to talk about them. They’re misogynists, woman-beaters, and drunk drivers with fatalities to their name. So taking these guys out of society, at least until they can be reformed? A good thing, unequivocally. (I guess? I don’t know. What even ARE ethics?) But THIS? I guess I can see that if you want to reform a misogynist then ONE way to do it is make him truly understand and empathise with — become, in this case! — the subject of his contempt, but it can’t be THE ONLY way. Is it???? If Christine and Abby have both been telling the truth, maybe it is?? God, I’ve been down here half a week and already I’m starting to be all, maybe the kidnappers have a good point? I don’t know, it just rankles because it feels like it cheapens the thing I need to survive to see it used to control people. And what ABOUT Christine, anyway—
Getting really off-topic, here. And it feels wrong, somehow unfair, speculating about Christine like this, when they’ve had only one actual conversation, if you don’t count the night when they met, when they kissed, when Stefan was pretending to be something he’s not. He blushes at the memory, clears the screen, and tries again.
Today is the first day of the rest of my—
Fuck it.
The phone bounces as it hits the mattress, and Stefan winces when it slaps into the wall, but on retrieval and inspection there are no scratches. Funny; when he dropped his own phone less than half a metre out of a chair, the front glass spiderwebbed into near-illegibility, and the back plastic dented so hard it never closed again properly. The phones here are obviously just better.
Like the mattresses. He hasn’t slept so well in years.
He’s still staring at the phone screen, trying to come up with something to say, some note to leave to his future self to help him make sense of how he’s feeling right now, when the thin red light strip on the edge of the ceiling, right above the bed, increases in intensity slightly. To indicate morning? He squints at the phone screen and watches the clock tick over from 0759 to 0800.
The alarm on the phone immediately starts going off, playing some pop song he doesn’t recognise. He quiets it and waits for whatever’s going to happen next to happen, but nothing does. He half-expected the rest of the lights in the room — the bedside lamp, the desk lamp by the computer and the four small lights embedded in the ceiling — to come on all at once, on maximum brightness; he imagined Pippa in some control room, cackling as she turned a dial from pitch black all the way up to midday on Mercury. Nothing. Apparently, it’s up to him to decide what to do with himself next.
Not something he has a great deal of experience with.
He lies in the near-dark for a few more minutes, illuminated only by the soft red glow of the light strip and the dull green LEDs on the locks for the door and the little dumbwaiter next to it. He taps through the quiescent phone and makes sure all traces of his attempts at a diary entry are gone; anything he saves to the thing will almost certainly be readable to Pippa and God only knows who else. The last thing he wants to do, when he and Christine have gone to so much trouble to obscure his origin, is actually be himself anywhere it might be seen.
So, how the hell is he going to track his transition?
The best he can do, he decides after a little more thought, is to take a daily photograph in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door and use the timestamps to track his physical changes; if Pippa confronts him about them, he can pretend to be concerned about the effects of the Goserelin implant on his beloved male body. As for the emotional effects, he’ll just have to do his best to remember them. Far from ideal, but the best he can do, under the circumstances.
He doesn’t look at the picture when he takes it; instead he throws the phone back onto the mattress and concentrates very hard on getting dressed. It takes a few minutes, and requires that he steady himself on the side of the wardrobe several times: just a glimpse of his near-naked body in the mirror brought bile to his throat and the old itch to his forearms. He wants to tear at his skin until he bleeds. Christine doesn’t look like this; Pippa doesn’t look like this. Why does he have to? And why do other people have to see him like this?
He settles on pinching himself. Upper arms. A couple each side. It’s far from enough, but a little control is better than none at all, and the red welts are easy to explain away should they be discovered. Stefan’s probably allergic to Dorley’s detergent, or something.
He glares at the marks as they form on his skin. The dysphoria has never been quite this bad.
He busies himself hunting around for something to keep his hair out of his eyes. There’s no product in the dresser; eventually he slicks moisturiser through his fringe, which works well enough, and the task is sufficiently distracting that by the time he’s done, the worst of the revulsion has faded.
“Took you twenty-one years to call it dysphoria, didn’t it?” he mutters to himself, with enough presence of mind to face away from where Abby said the cameras are. “Idiot.”
One more pinch. To be sure.
* * *
Dorley has a lot of rules. Fewer as you move through the programme, although even graduates are still restricted in certain ways: no contact with family or friends from before Dorley; no contact with the new boys until they become new girls, unless you have explicit permission from their sponsor or Aunt Bea; no deviating from your agreed NPH, or New Personal History. It’s up to the individual whether they want to present themselves as a trans or cis woman, once they leave, but it’s a decision that can be made only once.
Early in their second year, when they were all of them still fresh in their new names and identities and only Vicky seemed truly to have a handle on things, Paige wrote The first rule of forced-fem club is you do not talk about forced-fem club on the recipe board in the kitchen. Aunt Bea, quite unexpectedly, loved it; for a while, she talked about getting it printed on a novelty mug, but either she relented, or she keeps it locked away in her office. If it’s bad opsec to list your crimes on a coffee mug, it’s worse to be caught drinking out of it.
Christine has a list of unofficial rules to go alongside, drawn up from observing the times the other girls got in trouble, and from her own multitude of mistakes. The one in force this morning: If you think you might be under suspicion of backsliding, put on a nice dress and stay in your room with the door open, so you look like you have nothing to hide. So, Christine, who declined last night to go out against not only all encouragement from her peers and her sponsor but also Aunt Bea’s explicit permission — and thus her implicit instruction — has been up since oh-seven-thirty, with another of Paige’s dresses on and the door and window open, watching the late summer breeze play with the pages of her textbooks, and practising her eyeliner.
She’s only poked herself in the eye three times so far; an improvement on last time. She’s wiping off her latest failure when Vicky pokes her head around the open door.
“Hey, Vick,” Christine says, and holds up her pencil. “Come to see me suck at makeup?”
“I just came by to see how you are,” she says, and then drops a gym bag off her shoulder with a guilty grin. “And to pick up a few things.”
“Is there anything even left in your room that’s actually yours?”
“The essentials,” Vicky says. “And, uh, a pile of dirty plates. Don’t tell anyone.”
Christine zippers her lips.
Officially, Vicky Robinson still lives in the dorms, two doors down from Christine; really, she lives in a nice place off-campus with her girlfriend and their friends, and returns only to visit, steal food and clothes, and to sneak out estradiol valerate for Lorna. With Vicky’s room mostly empty, Paige got permission from Aunt Bea to get her thumb added to Vicky’s lock, and uses the room as a walk-in wardrobe that just happens to have a bed and a desk in it; handy also for Vicky and Lorna, who are both only a couple of centimetres apart from Paige in height and thus haven’t had to go clothes shopping for months.
What Aunt Bea thinks of the arrangement she hasn’t said, but she wouldn’t have let Vicky graduate early if she didn’t think that Dorley’s rules, besides the obvious ones around disclosure, had become completely unnecessary for her.
One of many things about Vicky to be jealous of.
“Are you okay?” Vicky says, stepping over her gym bag and perching next to Christine on the bed.
“Yeah, Vick, I’m pretty okay.”
“Only pretty okay?”
Christine makes herself look away, because the shape Vicky’s lips form when she says pretty is not something she can witness and remain a hundred percent on-task afterwards. “Dira and Paige had a mini-intervention last night. Aunt Bea has been making comments about my continued feminine development.”
“Oh,” Vicky says. “Oh crap, Tina.”
“It’s okay, kind of. I mean, we’re not at drastic steps yet. But I’m behind everyone else. Not just you and Paige; everyone. Even bloody Jodie’s My Immortal-ass fashion sense is more developed than mine. I’ve been officially noticed.”
“Is that why you’re dressed up this morning?”
Christine nods, and leans back on the bed, inviting inspection and trying to stop her heart from fluttering. Vicky fucking Robinson is looking at her… “What do you think?” she asks.
Vicky laughs. “I think when you bite your lip like that, you could have anyone you want.”
Christine swallows. Can almost feel the Adam’s apple she once had bobbing in her throat. “I mean, um, about the dress.” She billows out the fabric around her thighs and kicks her legs lightly; it’s a shortish dress and Christine’s quietly proud of her legs. Comfort isn’t the only reason she habitually wears shorts.
“It looks lovely on you,” Vicky says.
Vicky and Christine have never kissed, never touched each other except platonically, and as far as Christine knows, Vicky’s never done anything with anyone from their intake, choosing instead to wait until she could go out and meet someone healthy and normal from the outside world. It probably had something to do with how quickly she took to the programme; by the time Christine and Paige were indulging in faltering experiments in horny and strangely adolescent denial — “I’m a straight guy,” Paige had said, although that wasn’t yet her name, “and so are you, but if we let ourselves forget what we know about each other for just a few minutes…” — Vicky had already booked her facial surgery, persuaded her sponsor to let her name herself, and had been allowed up to the kitchen to meet the second- and third-years at least a dozen times.
Difficult not to dwell on possibilities, though, when a beautiful woman says you look lovely.
“Um,” Christine says, and marvels briefly at her own eloquence before regaining full control of her mouth and continuing, “thank you. Paige picked it, but I, um, put it on. I mean, she brought a bunch of clothes around—” she flails an arm at the pile, “—but it was me who decided, hey, I like green today.” She touches the back of a hand to a hot cheek and looks away. “Sorry. I’m an idiot. And now I’m embarrassed.”
Vicky puts a hand on Christine’s knee. “Don’t be. You’re beautiful. You should be confident, too.”
Christine picks up the eyeliner pencil again and twirls it between her fingers. “Working on that.”
“You want some help?”
“It’s tempting, but I can’t.” Christine drops it back on the bed and blows a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I got help all through second year, and that’s why I still suck. I never learned.”
“Well, if you need to borrow anything, my door is always open.” Vicky scowls. “Literally. Paige never locks it.”
“You know, I might take you up on that.”
“Can I give you some advice?” Vicky says, removing her hand and lowering Christine’s heartbeat out of the danger zone. “Aunt Bea likes effort. Results are best, obviously, but trying and getting halfway there? Almost as good. All she’ll need to see, at least for now, is more variety in your clothes, and a spot of makeup. A bit of eyeshadow, maybe. You don’t need to worry about eyeliner that could kill a man just yet.” She grins and pokes Christine in the hip. “And dresses like this? Good choice.”
Christine sighs. “I’m going to miss my shorts.”
Vicky laughs and hugs her. “I won’t.”
Fending her off, Christine says, “Just eyeshadow?”
“For now. Maybe add a bit of lip gloss. But practise everything. Every day. Do a full face every morning. You don’t have to keep it on through the day if you do it before your shower. And it doesn’t matter if you look like an idiot if you wash it straight off.”
“And here I thought I was almost getting away with just eyeshadow.”
“It’s what I did, and it worked out for me. I think it will for you, too; better than Paige’s approach.” Which was to become an expert on every makeup type and tool individually, with hours of YouTube tutorials and written guides and whole evenings dedicated to, say, lip liner. “You never saw how silly I looked every morning, those first few months of our second year. Every week, I’d pick a look out of a magazine, or off Instagram, or anywhere, just something I liked, and I’d spend an hour each morning, trying to replicate it. By the end of each week, I’d have it, or I’d be close enough.”
Christine is saved from having to point out the flaw in Vicky’s idea — that she is Vicky and Christine is, regrettably, merely Christine — by an interruption.
“It’s good advice,” Aunt Bea says, from the door.
“Aunt Bea!” Christine says, feeling like she’s talking too loud but unable to hear herself properly over the rushing in her ears. “Hi!”
“Good morning, Christine, Victoria.”
“Hey,” Vicky says with a smile. “I’ll leave you two alone, shall I?” She stands, squeezes Christine’s shoulder, and retrieves her bag from the floor. “Oh,” she adds, “Lorna and I are going to the protest this afternoon. Want to come? She missed you and she’s giving a speech, so you can make up for last night and support her at the same time!”
“Oh,” Christine says, “uh, sure. I’m done with classes after lunch. Who or what are we protesting?”
“Professor Frost,” Vicky says. “If that’s okay, Aunt Bea?”
Vicky’s not in the programme any more and doesn’t need permission to do anything, but Christine is and does, and Aunt Bea grants it with a nod. All programme members, once they are judged to look different enough from their old selves that no-one who knew them before would recognise them, are cleared for social media — Paige was pleased to get clearance before anyone else still in the programme, months before Christine, seeing it both as proof that her old self was so buried that not even her own mother could find him, and as tacit approval to begin spamming Instagram and accumulating industry contacts — and Christine is no exception, but protests, where one might be filmed saying or doing something particularly notable, are a special case.
So is Professor Frost.
“Feel free to ruin her day,” Aunt Bea says, smiling.
Aunt Bea reserves a particular hatred for Professor Katherine “Oh, do call me Kat” Frost, author of Gender Dysphoria: the Psychological and Physiological Mutilation of Our Children, and Christine’s never quite decided if it comes from allyship, personal affront, or the fact that the quality of Professor Frost’s published writing is considerably more mediocre than her ascendant media stardom might imply. Months ago, when Professor Frost’s book — “Her supposed book!” Aunt Bea had howled. “It contains many of the attributes of a book, in that it has front and back covers, paper between, binding, and even endorsements from academics who should know better, but it lacks the quintessential feature that separates books from bricks: insight!” — first landed on shop shelves, Christine set up a search alert for the words ‘Professor Frost’ and ‘disappeared’, hoping to get out in front of any difficulties Dorley might experience if Aunt Bea ever followed through on her invective and found the spotlight-hungry History professor a new home in their basement.
“Thanks, Aunt Bea,” Vicky says, and throws a quick wave to Christine. “Three o’clock, Tina!” she shouts from the hallway. “Outside the Anthill!”
Aunt Bea shuts the door behind her, enclosing them both in a space that only ever feels small to Christine when she’s alone in it with the woman who is still, technically, her captor. Bea settles on the little sofa, on the far side of the room from the bed and farthest from the door; is it reading too much into it to think of that as a deliberate decision, to put Christine at her ease, to encourage her to feel like she can leave if she really needs to?
“How are you feeling, Christine?” Aunt Bea says.
Easy questions first, then. “Good. I finally got some sleep.”
“So I see,” Aunt Bea says with a smile. “You’re getting along with your studies?” To Christine’s confused frown, she adds, “Yes, yes, I know we talked about that the other day. But that was routine. An inspection. This, I assure you, is off the record. I just want to talk.”
“I’m enjoying Linguistics,” Christine says, nodding, still confused. “It’s more interesting than I expected. I can see myself finding a career in the field, I think.”
“Once you have graduated from our programme,” Aunt Bea says, “I think we may permit you to indulge your computing interests, if you would like. Some elective modules, perhaps?”
“Oh. Um. Thank you, Aunt Bea. But I’m not sure I would choose to. I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“I see. You believe you might find yourself open to temptation once more?”
“No!” Christine says quickly. That she might even think about hurting people that way ever again… The very idea is an insult to everything she’s become. She grips the bed to keep herself from shaking. Feels the pressure of her whole body in her knuckles.
“I apologise,” Aunt Bea says. “A necessary question.”
“I’m not him any more, Aunt Bea,” Christine says, losing control of her voice. “Not just because I don’t look or sound like him,” she continues, pausing for breath every few words, “but because he’s gone. And I don’t want him back. And he’s not in danger of coming back. Returning to that place… It would bring up bad memories, that’s all.” She pushes against the bed frame and empties her lungs, slowly, carefully. “When I’ve graduated. From Saints, not from the programme. I might look into it elsewhere. But. Not here. Sorry.”
“You’ve done no wrong, Christine,” Aunt Bea says. “I apologise again. I should not have asked. In fact…” She shifts her weight on the sofa, leans forward. “When Indira came to see me last night, to ask me to grant you some time to work on yourself at your own pace — a request I am minded to honour, especially in light of your conversation with Victoria — I took the opportunity to ruminate.” Oh no, Christine has time to think, before Aunt Bea continues, “And I realised, we haven’t really touched base, have we, you and I? You were, in every sense, a typical product of our programme: you were angry and bitter in all the ways I expect, rebellious in all the ways I expect, and ultimately compliant in all the ways I expect. And thus unmemorable to someone like me, who has seen many dozens of young women bloom. Even for your intake, you were apparently unremarkable: Paige fought me harder; Victoria flowered considerably earlier; Yasmin acquiesced more quietly but prefers to have as little to do with the rest of you as she can.” She holds up a finger, to forestall whatever objections Christine might have over her characterisation of her; Christine, for her part, is struggling for words. “We have engaged with each other formally, at inspections, and during your reviews, but Christine, I don’t know you. And that is entirely my failing.”
“Aunt Bea, no—” Christine says, following her instincts, all of which are screaming at her to contradict any self-deprecation the woman attempts in her presence.
“I want to know you,” Aunt Bea presses on. “And I want to know how you feel. About all of this: the programme; me. You. And I want you to be honest. Absolutely honest, with no regard for my feelings.”
Ah, Christine thinks, my strongest suit: honesty. “I don’t know where to start.”
“You dislike your former self,” Bea says, “with more vehemence than most of your cohort. Perhaps, start there?”
“‘Dislike’ is too weak a word,” Christine says, deciding to let Aunt Bea have all the honesty she wants, on this subject, at least. “I hate him. He… hurt people.”
“Try talking about yourself in the first person,” Aunt Bea suggests, quietly.
“I hurt people!” Christine says, trying hard not to grit her teeth. “And I know Dira says it’s because I wasn’t loved, because my father hated me, because he hurt my mother and because she still chose him over me, even after I— even after everything. And that’s all true, but it’s all just… reasons. I was always in control. I knew what I was doing. I just told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself I was getting something back from the world. What I was owed. I—” Christine jabs her finger into the mattress with each word, “—did those things. And I didn’t care who I hurt.”
“Indira would also say—”
“—that I was trapped and lonely. Also true. God, Aunt Bea, I was so lonely. I made my first real friends here, you know? And my first real family. I almost had to learn how to talk to people from scratch! But, again, those are excuses. I was angry, and I was hurting, and I made it everyone else’s problem.”
“You’re not angry any more?”
Christine smiles. “I’m a little angry at you,” she says. “And a little angry at Dira. For doing all those things to me.”
“If you were given the chance, would you go back? Instruct your former self to stay away from this campus, or even to refrain from your… activities for a time, so you wouldn’t be taken?”
“No,” Christine says quickly. “Absolutely not.” She meets Aunt Bea’s eyes for the first time since they started talking; she’s still leaning forward on the sofa, chin resting lightly on her hand. Looking for all the world like she gives a shit. “I was hurting people. And I was only going to escalate. I’ve seen what happens when people like that, people like me, don’t get corrected. Sooner or later, I was going to hurt someone in a way they couldn’t come back from. God, I still worry that I already did.” Defiant, and because she worries she hasn’t been quite clear enough, she adds, “I needed taking out of the world. Erasing.”
“You’re wrong about that. You needed help.”
“You say potato…”
“We’ve covered your past,” Aunt Bea says briskly. “How do you feel about yourself now?”
“Not bad,” Christine says, ignoring the twinge of guilt where Stef is concerned. He wants to be here! Be kind to yourself, Christine! “I’m… someone I can be, now. If you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“I mean that I like who I am,” Christine says, before Aunt Bea can move on. “I’m proud of myself. I’m sorry, it’s just, ‘I’m someone I can be,’ sounded so much like, ‘Oh, well, if I must,’ and that’s not it. I’m glad to be me.”
“Glad to be a woman?”
“Yes.”
“Proud to be a woman?”
“Yes. God, Aunt Bea… This life, this second chance, it’s a gift. It’s a future.”
“Do you mourn the man you might have grown to become? Absent your difficulties, of course.”
“No. He’s a fiction. A fantasy. Hmm. Give me a moment?” Christine raises a finger, and Aunt Bea nods. When Christine continues, she takes her time, chews over every word. “I can imagine a version of myself, taken out of my life when I was a child and placed elsewhere. I can imagine him growing up, going to university, getting a job, getting married. I can even imagine, if I were taken out of myself and placed into him, inhabiting him without complaint or inhibition. Living his life, quite content. But there’s no path from here to there, you know? There’s no way for me, as I am now, to become him, without becoming someone I no longer recognise as me. And if you were to tell me you have impossible magic that can make it happen, I think I would refuse. Because I don’t know him. I know me. And, when I let myself forget all my bullshit, all my guilt… I like me. I hope that all makes sense.”
“It does,” Aunt Bea says, smiling. “And yet, you are still angry at me.”
Christine snorts, and grins. “Well, you did cut my balls off. Without permission.”
“Would you have granted it?”
“I definitely would not have.”
The orchiectomy — the castration, the mutilation, as Christine thought of it at the time — had been a turning point. A whole swathe of possibilities for her life going forward felt like they had been cut away. There was suddenly no going back, and the changes she’d seen in her body would only accelerate. She lost whole days to a depression that threatened entirely to consume her. But she recovered — with help from Vicky, who’d been waiting with obvious and increasing impatience for them to get around to giving her the orchi, and Paige, who dealt with the loss of her testes with the same methodical thoroughness she applied to every other aspect of their imprisonment — and eventually allowed herself to consider the options that remained. A roadmap, which eventually she followed, seemed to sketch itself out in front of her.
A common inflection point, she learned later. And not entirely a coherent one: testosterone injections could have given back most of what had been taken from her. But no-one thinks about that in the immediate aftermath; it’s too visceral, too much of a shock. It’s not that the programme hinges on it — there are other ways to part a man from his masculinity — but it’s very convenient for your sponsor if you turn out to be susceptible.
Christine remembers chastising Indira for robbing her of the opportunity to have children; remembers Dira smiling and reminding her of the comprehensive ‘health tests’ they all had during the first few weeks underground. Christine can still have children, one day, if she chooses. And that moment, that realisation that there were paths that had in fact deliberately been left open for her, that it was not just about punishment but about building a new, different, better future, was when Dira began to reach her, when the new woman started to emerge from the burned-out husk inside her. And when a newly receptive Christine understood on an emotional level not just how much pain she had already caused but how much damage she had been on course to inflict, she would have done anything suggested to her. Her masculinity, not even a small price to pay; an irrelevance, weighed against the opportunity to throw away her old life, with all its mistakes and cruelties, and start again.
Masculinity had never been much help to her, anyway.
Aunt Bea looks thoughtful. “When Indira and I talked, we spoke about your daily presentation. And, as you know, I overheard your conversation with Victoria. At the risk of putting words in your mouth, I don’t believe your reluctance to dress in a feminine manner comes from, shall we say, a masculine reticence to indulge in femininity.”
“Absolutely not,” Christine says.
“When someone else helps you dress nicely, someone you trust, like Indira or Abigail, how does it make you feel? Take your time.”
“I like it. I really like it, actually. Aunt Bea, it feels like… It’s so different. Not just to how I was before, but to how I am the rest of the time. It’s not all good — I don’t like attention from men; most men, anyway — but it’s quite… liberating? I think? I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, though, given the choice; sometimes I feel more like I want to wear shorts and a top, and that’s not a laziness thing, that’s a… I don’t know, that’s a me that day thing? Sometimes I want to look how I always look, but sometimes I don’t, and…”
“And you’re frustrated that you have the skills to fulfil only the former desire, and not the latter?” Aunt Bea finishes, surprising Christine, who wasn’t entirely sure how much of that she’d said aloud.
“Yeah,” Christine says, and adds with venom, “I look like a fucking panto dame when I try it myself. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” Aunt Bea says with a smile. “Informal, remember? Just try to stay away from the c-word.”
The confirmation that Aunt Bea even knows about the c-word is enough of a shock to coalesce some of Christine’s scattered thoughts into something approaching legibility. “I hate feeling reliant on the other girls,” she says, “so I don’t ask their help any more. And when they offer, I usually refuse. And then I feel like a fake girl surrounded by real ones.”
“Understandable, but not insurmountable. It will take some hard work on your part,” Aunt Bea says, “but I believe you will overcome this obstacle. I trust you to pursue this, in your own time and in your own way, although I recommend the approach Victoria suggested. Don’t be afraid to ask for advice, and call on me should ever you need to.”
“I will, Aunt Bea.”
She nods, and adopts a grave expression. “There is one more thing. This morning, before leaving my office, I looked over your file. Start to finish. And I believe there is something you should know. Normally, this is information we withhold until graduation, but I believe it would be beneficial to air it now.”
“Okay?”
“The women you contacted, before you arrived here, the women whose testimony ultimately brought you to us, are none the worse for wear. They were reimbursed, which I think you know — mostly from what remained of your funds — and all of them are aware that your former identity is… gone from the world, as you said. Two of them, in fact, expressed sorrow that your former self could not be helped before it was too late, so, I believe, they would be satisfied with your current status.” She smiles, stands from the sofa, and crouches in front of Christine, putting herself on the same level. “You are not, and never will be blameless, and the harms you inflicted were real, but they were not lasting. The women have healed and moved on. You should, too.”
Oh, God.
She remembers their faces. How could she not?
“They’re all okay?” she asks, through a throat suddenly dry.
“They’re all okay. I would suggest, in fact, that if they were offered the opportunity, most or all of them would forgive you. Especially in light of your reformation.”
Oh, God. Christine loses track of the world for a while.
When she returns, she almost jumps at the realisation that Aunt Bea is sitting next to her on the bed, exactly where Vicky sat, and has an arm around her shoulder. Christine herself is leaning her head on Aunt Bea’s arm, and the fabric of her suit jacket is wet with Christine’s tears.
She pulls away, and Aunt Bea passes her a tissue.
“God, I’m sorry,” Christine says, blowing her nose and wiping her eyes.
“It’s quite all right,” Aunt Bea says. “I thought it important that you know.”
“Thank you,” Christine manages to say. “Yes. It’s good. I should know. Shit. God. I’ve been dreaming about them, you know? Not every night, not any more, but for years. God, that’s…”
“A weight off your mind?”
“I hope so. Too early to tell, I guess.”
“Indeed.”
“I’m not…” Christine starts, but can’t finish, because she wants to say, I’m not bad, not any more, but can’t summon the conviction. Perhaps it will come some other day.
They sit in silence for a minute or so, while Christine dries her face and collects herself, and Aunt Bea graciously spares her from active attention, busying herself with emails on her phone. Eventually, when Christine has more or less recovered, Aunt Bea stands, and beckons Christine to stand, too. Momentarily scared that another hug is approaching, Christine is relieved when Bea takes her hand and holds it between them both, almost like she’s about to kiss it.
“I’m very proud of you, Christine,” Aunt Bea says. “I’m proud of all my girls, of course, but you… You are quite something. There is a thoughtfulness in you that I, to my shame, never before noticed.”
“Thank you, Aunt Bea,” Christine says automatically. Something inside her makes her curtsey. Embarrassing.
“But there is something I wish you would try to internalise,” Aunt Bea continues. “Sometimes you think too much. I can see you blushing, and yet your curtsey was both appropriate and well-performed. The only person who is embarrassed by it… is you. I submit that this applies to more in your life than your curtsey.”
“I… Thank you, Aunt Bea,” Christine says again, injecting more warmth into her voice.
Aunt Bea releases her hand. In the doorway she pauses, looks back, and with a smile, says, “Smoking while on hormone replacement therapy is very bad for you.”
“Really?” Christine says innocently, and suppresses a sudden urge to cough. “Is it?”
“One of our girls, years ago now, started her habit again when she moved to the second floor. For three months she smoked nearly twenty a day, and only quit when, very early one morning, she woke screaming from a pain in her calf muscle so excruciating she could barely communicate her needs. Unable to speak properly, she rolled aside the duvet to reveal to us a raised area of flesh that she later described as being ‘the size and shape of a Cumberland sausage’. We took her to hospital immediately. Just something to think about.”
Can Aunt Bea smell the smoke, lingering on last night’s dress, hanging up by the window? Or does she just know? “The girl, was she okay?”
“Yes. Monica was lucky. We all were. Good morning, Christine.”
* * *
“Hey! New boy! You up?”
It’s a male voice, shouting through the door, disturbing Stefan in his amateurish search through the computer for some hidden place he could keep a diary.
“Yeah,” he says, deliberately not shouting; he can’t stand the abrasive edge his voice takes on when it gets loud. Christine said she trained hers, so maybe she can give him some tips. Not on actually developing a new voice, not yet, not while he’s down here, playing at being the bad little cis boy, but perhaps there’s some prep work he can do. Some exercises to expand his range. Anything to reduce the amount of time he has to spend listening to himself sound like this.
Anything for a crumb of progress.
Whoever it is raps on the door. “Come out and get your healthy breakfast!” Another knock. “It’s part of a complete, balanced diet!”
Stefan checks himself over quickly, with the sideways, fleeting glances in the mirror that are necessary on days like this. He hasn’t done anything daft like tuck his trousers into his socks, and his hoodie doesn’t look too obviously stretched from pulling the sleeves down over his hands.
It’s fine. He’s fine.
He fetches the phone from the bedside table and tries to open the door. It doesn’t cooperate.
“Uh,” he says, through the door, “how does this work?”
“It’s a door,” the voice says. “Just pull on it and watch the magic happen.”
“Yeah, okay, not working.”
“Did you unlock it?”
“The light’s green.”
“Your new best friend didn’t explain how it works?”
“No? It’s a door. I think she assumed I’ve seen them before.”
The voice mutters something too quiet for Stefan to hear, then continues in a lecturing tone, “You see the little black square under the green light? That is a fin-ger-print rea-der. Put your fin-ger or thumb on the rea-der and the door will o-pen.”
Stefan scans his thumb. The door makes the now-familiar ear-assaulting buzzing sound, and clicks open a couple of centimetres. Pulling it the rest of the way reveals the too-bright ceiling lights of the residential corridor, and Aaron, dressed similarly to Stefan except without the hoodie and affecting an expression of rapturous joy. “You see what can happen if you just believe?” he says, imitating an American preacher.
The urge to tell the little shit to fuck off is reasonably strong, but Abby’s right: Stefan needs to make a friend and, handily, the one she advised him to get close to is waiting for him right outside his door.
“Thanks,” Stefan says. “How do they know my fingerprints?”
“Well, I’m guessing — and this is just a guess, you understand — they took them during that time you were unconscious, when they brought you in.”
Stefan probably deserves the sarcasm; it was a stupid question. He smiles, to show he’s taken it in good grace, and asks, “So, what does the green light mean, if it doesn’t mean the door’s already open?”
“It means you can open it but, just for example, I can’t. You’re only actually locked in if it’s red; that’s when only your special assigned girlfriend can let you out. Red light means it’s piss-in-a-bottle time.”
“They really expect you — us — to pee in a bottle when they lock us in?”
Aaron shrugs. “Who knows? Half the fun of this place is figuring out the rules as you go along, and getting tased or at least very heavily bitched at when you guess wrong. We’ve only had lockdown once so far, when Declan went digging for Nazi gold in his nasty little Nazi stomach.”
“Wait. Declan’s a Nazi?”
“I dunno. Maybe. He seems like the type. Long, goose-stepping legs; tendency towards sudden and irrational acts of violence. Does it matter?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“Don’t talk to him, then,” Aaron says. “I don’t, if I can avoid it. He’s a fucking weirdo, anyway. But! My point: he does the whole belly-button fandango, they take him away to get patched up. They probably bang him around a little, too. I mean, I would.” He mimes slapping the air in front of him, and says, “‘Stop! Being! A weird! Little! Dick!’” in time with the slaps. “They took him away so quick, I didn’t even get to see the wound. Anyway, we were only in lockdown for an hour or so, and the only one who actually did piss in a bottle was Adam, and he probably does it all the time, anyway, to cleanse himself in the eyes of the Lord. Oh,” he adds, pointing at Stefan’s phone, “put that in your pocket, and leave it in your room next time, or they’ll take it away. Common room’s all about socialising.”
“Okay,” Stefan says, pocketing it. “Why?”
“Why do they want us to socialise?” Aaron says, pushing on the double doors to the dining room and guiding them both to seats near the entrance. On the table, there’s a box of Weetabix, some oat milk, and a pile of plastic spoons. “Haven’t you been paying attention? They’re trying to rehabilitate us! Get us all together in one room and have us waggle our dicks at each other for a couple of weeks until we’re good boys. Just like boarding school.”
“You went to boarding school?” Stefan asks, frowning.
“You’re thinking, ‘he doesn’t sound like a posh lad,’ aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Stefan admits, Weetabixing one of the plastic bowls.
“Dad got his business bought. Suddenly we’re rolling in money. Suddenly he’s too busy for me and Mum. Suddenly we’re moving from a two-up two-down to a big new house in a big new town and I’m being sent off to a big new school where all the Hooray Henries and Chinless Charlies go to learn how to tie their shoes and spell their names without smiley faces in the Os and run the country. And don’t they have a fun new target? That was a glorious four years. Believe it or not, I think this place is actually better: it’s warmer than the coal shed the posh boys liked to lock me in, and there are hot women to look at, even if they do all have tasers and hate me.”
“I’m sorry,” Stefan says. “That sounds awful.”
“Aww. Did I tug at your heartstrings? Did you hear a little violin playing? If I want your pity, I’ll ask for it.”
“It’s empathy, not pity.”
“That’s just ‘pity’ with more letters and a fucking viral TikTok channel,” Aaron says, stabbing his breakfast with a plastic spoon and not making a dent. “Inspiring videos of girls with too much money breaking down crying when they think about three-legged cats and the coming climate apocalypse.”
“Is he whining again?” Will says, from the other end of the table. He and Adam are the only others in the room, carrying on the same variety of murmured argument Stefan saw yesterday. Possibly it’s the same argument.
Stefan needs to make his decision. If he’s going to befriend someone — and he has to befriend someone, or he might end up like Declan’s belly — then it has to be one of the three men in this room. The other ones, based on his limited observation and Aaron’s narration, are each some combination of unpredictable, violent, or apathetic, none of which seem useful to Stefan right now. And of the ones who remain, Adam seems to believe in some strange stuff, and Stefan’s spent under two hours total in Will’s presence and has already been called a homo. Better the devil you could fold up and put under your arm…
“What do you care?” he says to Will, affecting a sneer, which comes easily enough. “I’m talking to him, not you.”
Not the most ringing endorsement of his conversation with Aaron. Baby steps.
“I don’t care,” Will says, matching Stefan’s contempt and returning to whatever he’s talking about with Adam. Demons, or being a massive homophobe and how cool that is, or something.
“Idiot,” Stefan mutters, and catches Aaron looking at him strangely for a moment, before the boy returns to his stubborn breakfast.
“So,” Aaron says, around a mouthful of dry Weetabix, “are you ready to tell me your crimes, yet?”
“Are you?”
“I feel like you’ll judge me. Will you judge me?”
“Yeah, probably,” Stefan admits.
“Hah! You really are like Raph. He judges me a lot, too, but I’m, like, seventy-to-eighty percent certain he’s knocked a bunch of women around, which is way more extreme than my thing. Except getting him to admit it is like pulling Goslafin implants out of Declan’s stomach.”
“It’s Goserelin, you fucking imbecile!” Will shouts, from the other end of the table.
“You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?” Stefan whispers.
Aaron replies, with a finger to his lips, “Ssshhh. Watch.”
Stefan looks back over. Adam’s put a hand on Will’s wrist, to quiet him, and Will waits a second before shaking it off. Adam looks put out for a moment, but rests his hand on the table next to Will’s, just centimetres apart. Their conversation resumes.
“What do you think?” Aaron says quietly. “Closet cases? Or just really, really repressed? Adam’s from this freaky Christian sect, the New Church of Something-or-Other, and William is a truly massive wanker.”
“The idea that all homophobes are closeted gay people is just a myth,” Stefan says. “A couple of big-name arseholes getting exposed doesn’t make it a pattern.”
“Whatever. I think they want to touch dicks.” He slaps his hands against each other a few times.
“That’s not how gay men have sex, Aaron.”
“Sounds fun, though, right?” Aaron says, grinning, and then adds, “Boarding school,” by way of explanation, and shovels more dry Weetabix into his mouth.
“Why haven’t you put milk on? Wouldn’t it make it easier to eat?”
“It’s oat milk. And this is Weetabix. I won’t pour oats onto oats. It’s perverse!”
“Weetabix is made of wheat, Aaron. It’s in the name. There’s even an oat version. Called Oatibix.”
“Oh. Never mind, then. Don’t tell Will I said that.”
“I heard, idiot,” Will says. “I wasn’t going to dignify it with a correction. Some things are just too stupid to bother with.”
Aaron shows Will his middle finger and turns back to Stefan. “So! How was your first evening at Hotel Feminazi?”
“Relaxing,” Stefan says, to be annoying.
“Well, good, because you’re going to be here a while.”
“What can I expect from this place? You know, day to day?”
Aaron adds milk to his bowl as he talks. “Boredom. If you’re down on your masturbation quota for the decade, this is a good chance to, you know—” he rubs a near-closed fist up and down the handle of his plastic spoon, “—catch up. It’s a shame Maria took away my FitBit or I could make my steps at the same time. They get judgy about sticky sheets, though, so you may want to nominate a sock to be your new bedtime pal.”
“What, they just leave you alone all day?”
“Mostly. I know, I was hoping for more, too, because Maria’s opening speech to me was highly enjoyable as far as failed attempts to make me feel guilty go, but there’s been nothing since. Maybe they’re hoping we all resort to cannibalism just for something to do. It’d make a change from Weetabix.”
“So? What do I do?”
“You don’t listen, do you?” Aaron says, mouth full. “You wank, you watch some TV, you wank some more. Sooner or later you get big angry sores on your dick so you give the wanking a rest for, I don’t know, the full length of a movie.” He pushes his bowl aside. “Oat milk on Weetabix is fucking disgusting. Come on, let’s go watch some TV, and then we can turn away from each other and be very quiet and respectful of each other’s privacy for, say, five minutes.”
* * *
The Anthill: a late-90s lecture theatre complex built as part of the campus expansion into its then-newly acquired lakeside land, the heart of Saints’ new campus-within-a-campus, an architectural marvel of interlocking brown domes and circular green skylights that has, since shortly after opening to the student population, been known as the Arthur Nathan Turner Halls on paper only.
Arthur Nathan Turner himself reportedly was not happy with the nickname, but expired before he could remove the Royal College from his will. Presumably he would have much to say about Saints’ quarterly cultural newsletter, which since 2004 has been titled News From the Anthill.
Christine’s seen the Anthill from above, via drone camera, and she thinks, as nicknames go, it could have been worse.
“Teenie!”
Poking out above a sea of student faces is an arm wearing a beaded bracelet that matches Christine’s, so she heads for it, and gets engulfed by Indira and her sign. It reads Protect Trans Kids! and is almost as big as she is.
“Hey, Dira!” Christine says, accepting her embrace. “I didn’t bring a sign. Is that okay?”
“You can yell, right?” Vicky says, joining in the hug from another angle. Christine, in the scrum, manages to nod. “Then that’s fine!”
“I’m so glad you could make it!” Indira says, squeezing hard. “You’re feeling okay? You got some sleep?”
“I’m good. Aunt Bea came to see me.”
“Vicky said. How did it go?”
“Pretty good, actually,” Christine says, as the three of them disentangle themselves. “She put my mind at rest about a few things, and endorsed Vicky’s suggestion on how to proceed with—” Christine hurriedly edits what she’s about to say, remembering just in time that she’s in mixed company, i.e. people who came about their current gender in one of the more usual fashions, “—you know, my thing I need to get better at.”
Indira squeals and kisses Christine on the cheek. “Proud of you,” she says, as she steps back.
“Thanks, sis,” Christine says, and they trail their hands against each other’s for a moment.
“Hi again, Christine,” Lorna says, and Christine looks round to see her standing next to Vicky, nervously playing with a much smaller sign. She’s changed a lot: where once she was all angles, she’s now filled out, and she doesn’t look as lost as she used to in clothes that, yes, have definitely been stolen from Paige’s second wardrobe. She’s becoming strikingly beautiful; a good match for Vicky.
“Hi,” Christine says, stepping closer so she doesn’t have to shout. “I wanted to ask you something, actually.”
“Maybe later?” Lorna says, and points at a picnic table a couple of people are carrying over. “I’m doing a speech soon and I’m kind of nervous? But I’ll be back down after, and then we’re going to the SU when the protest winds down?”
“Perfect,” Christine says. “Good luck with your speech! You’ll be amazing.” She turns back to Indira and asks, “When does the professor get here?”
“In about five minutes, supposedly. But people are saying she might not show.”
That might be preferable. Professor Frost’s public appearances are generally heralded by a flock of middle-aged busybodies whose favourite trick is to point their phone cameras at the trousers and skirts of all the women in a crowd of protesters and look for folds in the fabric they can draw red circles around and claim on social media are totally, definitely, one hundred percent positively erect penises, and that’s not something Christine wants associated with her own personal crotch. Self-consciously she swings her shoulder bag around from the side to the front, just in case.
Her trepidation can’t last long. The energy of the crowd is undeniable, and Christine finds herself buoyed up by it. She joins in a couple of chants, links elbows with Indira and Lorna, and excitedly greets Ren and Naila, who notice her from across the way and unwisely get within range of Indira’s hugging arm. They introduce each other around, and they all get caught up in the loud cheers for Lorna, who clambers up onto the picnic table in front of the crowd and accepts a microphone from someone with rainbow fingernails.
“Thank you, everyone!” Lorna says, and winces as the microphone feeds back. “I’m so happy to see you all here today! And we all know why we’re here: Professor Katherine Frost!” She pauses for boos, then opens up her script on her phone and starts her speech: “There was a time when Saints University used to stand up for the truth…”
“Isn’t she fantastic?” Vicky stage-whispers in Christine’s ear.
“She’s amazing!”
“I’m going to marry her, you know.”
“Really?”
“She doesn’t know it yet, but I do. I know it. She’s just… she’s perfect, Tina. I can’t imagine ever wanting anyone else.”
Christine lets her heart squeeze, just a little, before she replies. “I’m really happy for you,” she says, with all the warmth she genuinely feels. It’s not that she’s jealous of Lorna or Vicky, personally, for all that they are both breathtaking, but she longs to have that kind of connection with someone.
Vicky bumps shoulders with her, to say thanks. “Oh,” she adds, “if you’re still serious about coming out next week, we have something planned.”
“I am.”
“Good. She’s got a date for FFS and we’re celebrating.”
“Oh! That’s fantastic!”
“I don’t think she needs it, but I’ve, uh, stopped telling her that. She got kind of upset with me.”
Christine thinks of Stef, in the basement, asking why he should put up with anything less than what Christine was given. “Yes,” she says, “I think I get why.”
* * *
* * *