29. The People We Once Were

2019 November 13
Wednesday

It’s his third year on this assignment, and it’s not so bad. It’s easy money and light work and it keeps him and his partner on call and thus in the country and off the active roster; the only thing better than being paid to be a soldier in a secretive private military company known for its discernment and care in choosing its contracts and spending the lives of its people, is being paid to be a largely indolent one.

Boredom’s a problem, though. The other guys from training are posted all around the world now, sunning themselves and sleeping around and posting photos to the intranet, and only one of them’s dead. His partner, Perry, insists the boredom’s a gift, for the same reason. Sunny climes give you wrinkles and attract bullets, he says; here in the UK there’s no sun to speak of and no-one worth shooting, or at least no-one worth shooting who can’t also afford to hire a PMC of their own to protect them. There are supposedly several high-placed individuals whom Perry has described as being like the king or queen in a game of chess that’s yet to begin, and so far no-one’s sacrificed the first pawn.

“That’s why you want the Dorley job, Trevor my lad,” Perry said, a few months into the first year. “Never once had to fire my gun.”

It’s still boring, though. At least it’s given him the chance to get his degree from the Open University, and now he’s studying Japanese. Perry thinks it’s because he wants to watch anime without the subtitles on, which is a lie he’s pleased to have had believed; there’s a Japanese grad student working the bar at Legend in Almsworth, and they’ve shared glances a few times and spoken with each other twice, and he wants desperately to impress him, and that’s exactly the kind of thing he’ll never tell anyone else at Peckinville Associates PMC, lest they tease him even more than they already do.

The day Perry happened upon his unlocked phone and realised he’s gay was the day his nicknames at the PMC changed for the worse. He was the kid, the shortarse, the pretty boy, the guy whose surname is ‘Darling’; now he’s the fruit. But one time when they were all out together and a local called him the f-word, his squad beat seven shades of shit out of the bloke, and that was sort of sweet.

It’s benevolent homophobia, he tells himself. Nobody’s allowed to call him a poofter but the squad.

No Perry today, though. Rung in with food poisoning. A lie: they were out last night and well into the morning, him and Perry and some of the others, and while Perry didn’t seem to drink more than he usually does it wouldn’t be a surprise if he’d kept going on his own and splattered his wits all over the carpet. So at half past ten at night Trevor’s sat in the driver’s seat of the special van, drumming his fingers on the wheel, parked in the woods out back of the Royal College of Saint Almsworth with a guy called Jake, just back from a bodyguarding gig in Portugal and sporting a tan and a cocky grin and a whole lot of stories about Portuguese women, stories Trevor wishes he’d tell with a few decibels less gusto, lest the ringing in his ears overpower him completely.

He matched Perry almost drink for drink last night, and he’s only a little more than half the old man’s size. The hangover finally hit mid-afternoon and has yet to quite fade.

“Sorry, mate,” Jake says, interrupting himself to grin at Trevor’s aching skull, now resting fully on the wheel. “Too much fun or not enough?”

It’s the first question the man’s asked since they got in the van together back in Watford. Trevor doesn’t mind; he likes to keep information about his personal life to a small, select circle of burly and objectively quite unpleasant men. “I wouldn’t call it fun. Perry’s separated from his wife again. It was vitally important that we drink about it.”

“So that’s why it’s me here and not him?”

Trevor shrugs, a manoeuvre which causes an alarming constriction at the base of his throat; he decides not to do it again. “Probably,” he says. “The old man called in sick before I did which means I have to run around pretending I didn’t get blackout drunk while on call.”

Jake nods. One man off with ‘food poisoning’ is an inconvenience; two in the same unit is an investigation.

“So, you done this job before, then?” he asks.

“Yeah.” It’d be lovely if storytime could wait until after Trevor got hold of some more painkillers and maybe an antiemetic but clearly none of his wishes are being granted today. “The last three years.” He holds up the appropriate number of fingers. “The job’s always the same: show up, pick someone up, transport them. The exact day varies but it’s usually only once or twice a year and usually late in the year, like now. Perry’s been doing it longer; he says one year he had to pick up three.”

“You don’t do anything else?”

In lieu of shrugging again, Trevor waves a flattened hand. “Odd jobs. A bit of bodyguarding when one of the VIPs is in the area. Deliveries. Et cetera.”

“Pair of lucky bastards.”

And there it is. The other guys always think he and Perry pulled the cushiest job around, and they did, it’s true, but it’s not a total doss. On the other hand, protesting would just extend the conversation.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“I bet it is, mate,” Jake says, and falls blessedly silent for a while.

It’s nice out here. He parked the van up in the usual spot, in the scrubland at the terminus of a barely there dirt track through the woods, and if Trevor ignores the bulk of a brick university building in the middle distance and doesn’t look in his rear-view then there’s nothing around them but trees. It’s cold out but not unbearable, and with a glance at Jake he winds down the window and transfers his weight from the steering wheel to the door, leaning out a little and looking around. So what if Jake thinks this is a weird thing for him to do? He’s not even from his unit; they might never see each other again after today.

“Birdwatcher, are you?” Jake says, amused.

“Maybe,” Trevor mutters, “when I’m done learning Japanese.”

If Jake has an opinion on that, he doesn’t share it.

It’s a while longer before the job phone on the dash buzzes, but when it does, it’s time to stop lazing around. Trevor shoves his headache and his exhaustion firmly to the back of his mind and drops down out of the van. Jake’s in place on the other side, weapon ready, and together they open up the back of the van. They parked up in front of a pair of bunker-style doors set into a concrete riser, and when they open Trevor tries, as he does every time, to glean a little more information about the other side of this assignment; all he sees is more concrete, again.

Perry always told him not to crane his neck. Don’t go beyond assignment parameters. Don’t be a nosy little fruit.

Same as always, there’s two more guys from Peckinville — two guys he’s never seen before, because they always pick people from opposite ends of the country for this stuff, so no-one can share information — and they’re carrying a third, younger, dressed in plain clothes, lolling as if he’s been sedated. This one’s a big bloke, and Trevor doesn’t waste any time wondering what he did to deserve his ultimate fate; it’s obvious. He’s seen guys like him in every pub, on every street, and he makes it his business to avoid them entirely when he’s out of uniform. Guys like him enjoy controlling people, and if they can’t do it with idiot words they’ll as happily use violence.

In the back of the van there’s hand and leg cuffs, and the sedated man makes no trouble as they get him locked in and tie the gag; and that’s a damn good thing, because in Trevor’s current condition, if the big lad had started anything Trevor doesn’t know if he’d punch the guy in the face or throw up on him. And then the doors are slammed shut and Trevor’s staggering a little on his way back round to the driver’s seat.

Jake puts a hand on his wrist before he can climb in.

“You’re fucking knackered, mate,” Jake says. “Why don’t you let me drive?” They’re not supposed to swap assignments. The senior soldier watches the prisoner; the junior drives. Reading his mind, Jake adds, “That one’s doped up to the nines. He’s going nowhere. It’s fine. Besides, Trev, if you fall asleep at the wheel you might actually kill us.”

“Yeah,” Trevor says, nodding, accepting the insistent push Jake’s giving him to walk around the bonnet to the passenger door, “yeah, fine. Thanks, Jake.”

“Pay me back sometime,” Jake says, climbing up and settling into the seat. “On my next job, in Barbados or wherever, you can come mix me a pina colada or something.”

“Deal,” Trevor says, leaning back on the headrest. He flicks on the dash monitors so he can keep an eye on the shackled guy in the back of the van, but the man’s eyes are closed like he’s sleeping, and it’s not long before Trevor succumbs as well, letting his headache be soothed by sleep and the sounds of the van being driven off the dirt track and onto the B-road that leads to the A-road that leads to the dual carriageway that leads, eventually, to the facility where they always take these guys.

He’ll sleep for just a little while.

 

* * *

 

The room in which he wakes is pure white and it blinds him. He comes around like a pistol shot, all sudden violence and ear-rending noise, but it’s just panic providing the sensations because when he calms, when he can focus his eyes again, when he can orientate himself sufficiently to look away from the bright light in the ceiling and towards something else instead, like the plastic ferns or the cheap-looking table or the cuffs around his wrists, everything dulls and coheres, and the rushing sounds that have blocked out all else resolve into the background hum of a decent-sized facility and the figures in the corner of his vision resolve into Jake, standing ready with his weapon slung over his shoulder, and an old woman, gazing at him with what he’d call, if it made any sense in this context at all, hunger.

“Sorry, mate,” Jake says. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

 

2019 December 16
Monday

It’s not like Valérie hasn’t had the opportunity to drink. She served old Smyth-Farrow’s table for years, usually while dressed in something demeaning, and he liked to keep her around while he ate. The first time she snatched his wine glass from him and drained it, daring him to retaliate, he laughed his awful braying laugh and fetched another glass; the second time he smirked at her. Before she could transgress a third time he instructed her irritably to just get another bloody glass and another bloody bottle and to stop making him make multiple trips to the bloody wine cellar every bloody night. She thinks she remembers spitting the wine at him for that, but that might have been another night. It was a very long time ago.

But she’s always been careful to maintain her faculties around her tormentors, and not just because she has more freedom when they are insensate and she is merely buzzed; there’s always been the chance that one of them, whether Smyth-Farrow or Dorothy or Karen or Frankie or the soldiers, might slip up while in their cups and leave open a vital door, or be persuaded to relate the codes for the locks.

Valérie levers herself up off her pillow with a disgusted grunt. A wasted hope, assuming Frankie’s been telling the truth: Dorothy’s the only one with the codes and always has been. Both their lives — and the rapist Declan’s — are tethered to the heartbeat of the increasingly frail and desperately cruel lady of the manor. Just like old times.

Truth be told, she hasn’t been wasting much of herself on hope, lately. There hasn’t seemed like much point in it. Too many people to watch her now, and all of them, Declan aside, allied against her. If she’d still had hope she would have been playing the game last night, encouraging Dorothy’s indulgences in the hope of provoking a mistake. But she was out of hope and at the end of her will, and so she drank, and when she returned to her room she drank more, and Frances, a feature frequently of her nightmares and some of her most brutal memories, fell asleep alongside her.

She remembers something her mother used to say, back when she was Vincent and she had a family and did family things, like enjoy long, lazy dinners together: ‘White can be experienced alone; red prefers company.’ Or, to be more precise and contextually useful: don’t drink several bottles of red wine on a stomach lined with only the barest minimum of food, or the hangover you acquire will be ungodly.

At least, at some point during the night, Frankie fell out. She’s curled up in her voluminous skirt on the carpet, snoring hideously and drooling on the wrist propping her head.

The curtains glow with the dim morning sun, and it’s enough to see by without turning on any lamps or anything else which might hurt her eyes. She can certainly see well enough to step out of bed and over Frankie and into the bathroom, and she leaves the door open to its fullest extent, to take advantage of the natural light.

And she realises she’s still wearing that awful fucking servant uniform! She swears under her breath. It was ugly and uncomfortable last night, and the creases from sleep and the smell of stale wine haven’t improved it any. She sets to tearing it off, takes out her irritation on the thing, feels stitches rip and fabric tear, and when she’s done it’ll likely never be wearable again. The awful pantyhose join it in an ugly pile on the bathroom floor and so does the cami she had on underneath it all. Maybe she’ll dump the whole ripped and wine-soaked abomination in the middle of the dining table just so Dorothy can appreciate the depth of her contempt. Because she’ll never wear it again, or anything else like it. The bitch can kill her if she wishes, and try to mould Declan or even Frankie in her personal servant in Val’s place, but she’s done with not caring and she’s done with not hoping; she’s done with living only for the rare moments of dim satisfaction; she’s done with all this shit.

Because Dee’s alive.

Not Dee. Béatrice. A name like the rising opening note in the best song Val’s ever heard, a name which Dee took and made her own after she escaped — after Frankie apparently helped her escape — and now she’s running the place that started all this and Val wants nothing more than to get away from the manor and go back to Dorley Hall and find out just what the actual fuck is going on.

She needs to look Béatrice in the eye and understand. Because she’s responsible for Declan, the human wreckage just one wall away from her, the wounded boy she’s been able to get maybe two dozen words out of. Yes, Frankie said that all Bea’s people actually did to him was a month or so of testosterone suppression, that when they found out he was a repeated and unrepentant rapist they kicked him out and sent him off to this Elle woman’s mysterious ‘project’ before they could do any of the things they usually do, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s still doing it to other boys.

Years and years of other boys.

Who, Frankie says, are allowed to go free but often stick around to help with the next lot. Out of the kindness of their hearts.

Which makes no sense. So Valérie needs to understand, and she can’t do that from in here, no matter how much information Frankie thinks she has. Because it’s all screwed up and the two factions, the one controlled by this Elle woman, for whom (with whom?) Béatrice is working, and Dorothy’s, are taking the kind of potshots at each other that generally lead to war.

Frankie laid it out: they had an urgent need for a staff nurse; they took Karen, on agreement that she fucking behave herself; Karen, obviously, could not. So then Elle and Bea’s faction had her disappeared and probably killed, and Dorothy retaliated by taking Declan from Elle, transforming him for her amusement and stashing him here. But to what end? A lot of effort and risk to go to just to give Elle and Bea a bloody nose, isn’t it?

All she knows is she wants as little to do with him as she can get away with. She feels dirty every time she touches him; the thought of treating someone who has done what he has done the same way she treated the girls who came before him is unbearable.

But maybe he can be a distraction.

And then her head throbs again and the red wine squirms in her stomach and she realises she’s been standing in the middle of the bathroom staring at the floor.

It’s too early to think about all this. And she still has a full bladder.

As she has for the last three decades, she tucks her little dick back to pee. After a little while, she closes her eyes.

“Jesus Christ, Val.”

Val moves her head a little too quickly and reality takes a moment to catch up, but when it does, Frankie’s there, leaning on the jamb, peering down at her through crusted eyelids.

“What?”

Frankie gestures, but only briefly; she needs both hands to guide herself, and as she wobbles back into position on the doorframe, Val looks down at herself and realises she’s wearing nothing but her underwear.

Oh well. Frankie’s one of those who’s seen it all before.

“Naked looks good on you, Val,” Frankie says. “The hangover doesn’t.”

Valérie scowls. “We drank an awful lot last night.”

“Yeah, we fucking did,” Frankie says. “Too much to hope you’ll be done on the bog any time soon, I take it?” Val nods. “Fine.” Without ceremony, Frankie drops her skirt onto the floor of the bathroom next to the remains of Val’s uniform, steps into Val’s shower, squats, and pisses.

“You English are all so disgusting,” Valérie mutters.

Frankie blows her a kiss.

 

2019 December 5
Thursday

He’s been counting the days and he knows he missed a few at the start but it’s definitely been more than two weeks and probably at least three. They won’t give him a phone or a tablet and they keep the TV over his bed set on a feed of movies that is either completely random or has been designed by a total maniac because Citizen Kane (1941) was preceded by Critters 2 (1988) and immediately followed by The Decagon Conspiracy (????), which judging by the production values was made for a niche cable TV channel in the early days of the twenty-first century, so while he’s been getting a comprehensive cultural education what he hasn’t had is access to anything that will tell him what day it is.

But he’s pretty sure it’s been three weeks.

Jake’s not been around much. No-one has, but it doesn’t matter because he’s been cuffed to the bed by his wrists and ankles, so even when the nurses come around to change out his catheter or the attendants bring him food there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s studied over a dozen ways to escape a facility, but all of them involve the freeing of his hands and feet. A shame; an escape attempt would really relieve the monotony, and save him from any more terrible made-for-TV movies.

And then the door opens and today’s different: the old woman is back, the one who was there the first time he woke up here. She walks briskly over to his bed with more assurance than he would expect from someone her age, and leans over him. At least the lights aren’t blinding him any more, so they don’t halo her the way they did on that first day, a grotesque angelic parody; his welcome to whatever new life they have planned for him. Because that was the only thing she said to him that first day: “Welcome to your new life.”

He hadn’t been able to answer her at the time. His throat had hurt too much.

Today she says, “Very nice.”

She steps away, steps aside for a medical functionary he hadn’t even noticed, and with a mechanical whirr his bed starts to elevate, lifting his head and upper body out of the horizontal position he’s been kept in for far too long. His head is still relatively immobilised, but from this position he can see much more of the room, get a better idea of where he is, and it’s roughly what he thought; he can see nothing to contradict his initial impression that this is an ordinary enough hospital room, probably in the medical wing of a secure facility.

The nurse (or doctor or whoever) frowns at him over a clipboard, makes a couple of notes and snaps a picture with her phone. She gives him a quick, professional smile and then leaves, offering Trevor a precious moment to glimpse through the closing door the environment outside his room: more institutional white walls. More important is that the door itself is thick, with a secure locking mechanism; if he is indeed in a medical facility, then he’s being kept in a room intended for prisoners.

And he’s almost definitely not at a Peckinville facility. The medical uniforms here are different.

“Trevor Darling.” It’s the old woman again. He can see her more clearly now that he’s sitting upright and she’s just standing there, leaning casually on a cane he’ll bet is an affectation: she’s in her seventies at the very least, and she’s gaunt in that way you get when you’ve lived well for a very long time, and she’s smirking at him. “Twenty-four years old,” she continues. “History degree from the OU; impressive. And learning Japanese on your phone! Very impressive. I never could get the hang of learning from an app. Too damned fiddly. And you signed up with Peckinville three months after finishing your A-levels. Interesting timing.”

Not that interesting. He missed the grades for his chosen universities, and by the time clearing came around he’d been outed to his family and his friends and found himself alone and bitter and decided, in a fit of nihilism, that he’d rather blow up the world than participate in it, and started looking into how you join the army. PAPMC contacted him, told him he had potential and offered him better money than the British government and slightly less chance of getting shot, and he jumped at the chance. He’s not going to tell her any of that, though. He’s going to grunt at her instead. That that’s all his sore and dry throat can manage is an unrelated issue.

“Trevor… Darling,” she says again, smiling at his surname. “You can call me ‘Grandmother’.”

He wants to laugh at that. How ridiculous. She’s old enough for it, but in his experience Grandmothers don’t sit comfortably in front of prisoners in private medical facilities; they bake cookies and disown you for being gay.

“I won’t,” he manages to say. He sounds awful.

“Suit yourself.” Something about her manner makes him want to tear himself bloody from his handcuffs and strangle her; something more than just her deeply suspicious presence here, in this place. She comes closer again, and the feeling intensifies. “You’re a pretty boy, Trevor,” she says, running a brittle finger down the side of his face and over the bandages that wrap his forehead and his jaw. “Very pretty. And you know what that makes you? Lucky, Trevor Darling. Very, very lucky.” She leans her elbows on the edge of the bed and props her chin on her hands. “We were going to kill you. Spoof your location to Peckinville for a while and then dump you in a river or something. Soldiers are not good raw material, you see, generally speaking. Too bulky, too scarred and beaten; too old, mostly, by the time they become accessible to us. But you… When I saw you, I personally countermanded the order to have you disposed of, and brought you here. Rather a risk to me, I might add. But I had an inkling my backer would see your potential, once you were brought to his attention, and he did. He agreed to fund your transition, as long as I oversee your retraining.”

“My what?” It’s a croak.

‘Grandmother’ doesn’t answer straight away. She just looks at him, that same expression on her face from the first time she saw him.

“It all worked out,” she says, cryptic. “Instead of just taking one thing away from Elle, I take two.” Elle? Does she mean Ms Lambert? Rumours say she practically runs Peckinville, or at the very least directs its goals. “We feed her a little false information, pretend that you and Declan are both precisely where you’re supposed to be, and you, Trevor my boy, you get to live, and you get to be beautiful.” She leans closer again, touches his face again, and he would crawl away from her if he wasn’t shackled to the bed.

“What do you mean,” he rasps, “my ‘transition’?”

“Oh, Trevor,” she says, “there’s a very important man out there, and you’re going to be his girl.”

 

2019 December 18
Wednesday

A soft, insistent sound draws Steph out of sleep, intruding on her dream in the manner of a phone ringing or a fire alarm sounding or the need urgently to urinate; characters in the narrative begin crying, the hotel in which various dream people have been murdered starts filling up with water, and Steph is yanked out of her role as the omniscient witness and suddenly, jarringly embodied, to cry uncontrollable tears of her own and stumble into wakefulness with stinging eyes and a dry throat.

For a moment she’s confused, wondering what could possibly have spilled out of her dream to make her so sad, and then she realises: in her arms, his legs curled up to his chest and his whole body shaking and his hands grasping hers so tight it almost hurts, Aaron weeps.

She draws him closer, though he’s already close enough she imagines he can feel her heart beating against his back, and whispers, “Hey.” She doesn’t know if he’s dreaming or if this is all real to him. “Hey, Aaron.”

“Don’t call me that!” It comes out raw and wet and bleeding and it pierces her, strikes deep, makes her want to respond with reassurance and love and searching questions about what might have made him say such a thing; but she suspects she knows, so she stays silent.

She remembers rasping almost those exact words, months ago, in her room. Abby, beautiful Abby, had come down to see her, made up and dressed up and absolutely radiant, and Steph had been just Stefan, ugly and trapped and taut like a wire under tension. She’d wanted to scream at Abby, wanted to release the poison inside her, wanted to spill blood and disgust and toxic vapour from inside her body, but instead she’d shut down, curled up on her bed, and Abby had waited for her.

It’s hard to think back to those days. Harder still to know Aaron might be living through them right now, and that his release may be longer and more painful in the making than hers had been. The woman she is now was always waiting inside her; Aaron has to construct his almost from scratch from the remaining pieces of himself.

It must be terrifying.

He’s still shaking. He feels so fragile. Steph blinks away the tears in her eyes, swallows the thickness out of her throat, and squeezes him tight, kisses the back of his neck where his shaggy, unkempt hair plays messily over skin beading with sweat. He begins eventually to calm, and she waits for him, nothing more or less than a warm and loving presence that doesn’t require anything of him that he might not be able to give.

Just live, she wills, pressing her lips to his neck. Just live.

 

* * *

 

She’s started treating him like a girl.

It’s not all the time. It’s not even most of the time. And it’s natural, too! Or understandable, at the very least. Down here all of them are changing, and while in some of them you still have to look for it to see it, in Steph it’s been obvious and encouraged and, God fucking help him, he’s been following her. Because of the role models available to him in this awful bloody basement, Adam’s a space case and Martin’s a blank slate and Will’s a nightmare and Ollie and Raph aren’t even out of the cells yet and all the rest are girls, and at least Steph is a girl who kisses him and touches him.

Even if she is a girl who kisses him and touches him like he’s a girl.

He’d expected the dynamic to change when Will came back, but even after he stopped keeping himself entirely to himself things have remained largely the same. It’s like the guy’s trying to fit in, trying not to take up as much space as he used to, and what’s either alarming or encouraging is that when he pointed out to Will’s face that this has become literally true, that his formerly impressive stature is starting seriously to fade, Will didn’t snap at him, didn’t argue, didn’t call him a fucking idiot or an incel or any of his other preferred insults.

Will just shrugged.

He doesn’t know how to deal with a Will who just shrugs at stuff like that.

Harmony, Ollie’s sponsor, said both of them, he and Will, are starting to drop their masculine interpretation layers. She said it because she’s been taking the cleaning rotas recently while Ollie’s still locked up, and she surprised him with a feather duster and made him shriek at a pitch he instinctively cringed from; he doesn’t have to care about that kind of thing any more, she told him. No-one gives a flying monkey’s if he gets startled or if he cries or if he does something else he’s always been told is tellingly feminine, like grow tits. The requirement to police his behaviour for appropriate levels of masculinity is gone, she said, and all he has left of it is the habit.

Easy enough for her to say, he told her. With no structure to his interpersonal relationships he feels like someone dropped into a foreign culture with no phrasebook and no Google Translate.

“I know,” she said, and he got annoyed with her for being smug about it. He told her she was behaving like someone who climbed the world’s biggest mountain five years ago, and now she’s sat at its base wearing merch she bought at the summit and drinking from a World’s Best Mountain Climber mug, making snide remarks to the poor chumps strapping on their snowshoes and oxy tanks and who are just now understanding what it is they’ve signed up for. Nine years ago, she corrected him, and that’s not what it says on her mug, but she left him alone; not before ruffling his hair, though.

They all do that now.

So interpreting behaviour’s recently got a lot harder for him but he’s pretty sure he’s got a good handle on Stephanie, on the way she thinks and more specifically the way she thinks about him, and he’s come to the conclusion that, while she takes care to treat him neutrally, she’s having to make an effort to do so; she’s started thinking of him, in some way, as a girl. As a girl in potentia, if not yet in fact.

But when her guard is down, when she’s tired or annoyed or, most pertinently, when she’s aroused, she can’t control herself to quite such an extent.

They had sex, and she treated him like a girl.

It’s fair enough, really. He’s going to be one; he’s already developing in subtle but noticeable ways. He feels it in his hips when he walks, in his squishier arse when he sits down, in his sensitive chest when he dresses, in his softer skin when he shaves. And Steph’s kind to him and she’s generous with her time and her emotions and she kisses him and puts hands on him the way no-one ever has, but she does it like she’s a girl making love to a girl.

He’s going to be a girl. He decided! He fucking accepted it! So why is he doing this to himself?

He could almost laugh: he’s finally, at twenty-one, having someone touch him like he’s someone who fucking matters, and he’s agonising about it because she’s touching him in ways that don’t validate a masculinity he doesn’t even care about any more. Maria and Harmony and all the others would say that this is the crux of it, that this is the fulcrum, that his need to satisfy the demands of masculinity has him fighting against something that feels good; that he’s being ridiculous.

He is being ridiculous. Knowing it makes it, somehow, worse. He almost misses his ignorance.

Men don’t behave that way is the entire bottom row of the house of cards that is/was his personality, and he knows there’s nothing beneath it, that the man he was/is was always a construction, always just inventions on top of justifications on top of suppositions, and he feels even more foolish for having finally agreed to sweep away all the cards, to expose the fragility of it all, and yet still waste his most vulnerable moments searching for the damn things, trying to build them up again, because the house of cards is all he’s ever known.

It’s just how he was trained.

They had sex and she treated him like a girl, and why should he care about that, again?

He wonders if this is all part of it, in that intentional/accidental way the sponsors find levers, weapons and coercion in everything: accept your pleasure, accept your love, and with it accept that you’ve become less like a man.

He sometimes thinks he should name the voice that screams at him from the back of his mind at times like these. The thing that tells him that a man would push Steph away, that a man would walk out of her room, that a man would slam his door and punch the wall. That a man wouldn’t sacrifice his identity for mere pleasure. That a man would be miserable and unloved and alone and better for it.

Better, but not better off. Because satisfying the voice, the creature, the thing is the whole of it. The virtue in and of itself.

He can almost see Maria’s soft smile, her spread hands. You see? she’s saying. You see what you would have to give up? And for what?

Like Harmony said, there’s no-one left to care, no-one left to be impressed by what’s always passed for his manhood. And he’s looked at it, he’s pinned it up against the wall and really examined it and realised he doesn’t need it. It’s something that was forced on him — or presented to him as something with no alternative; same difference — by people who never even gave a shit. He’s never been rewarded for his performance of masculinity, merely punished whenever it was deemed insufficient.

Punishment without reward, because the reward is supposed to be that you are empowered to take what you deserve. (But when he took, he just made things worse, for himself but more importantly for a lot of other people.)

Men don’t behave that way, but it’s stupid. It’s pointless. It doesn’t fucking matter. And so, for three nights now, he hasn’t fought it, he’s leaned into her embrace, he’s kissed her and touched her and allowed himself to be touched by her, and with almost every part of himself he’s adored it, adored her, and felt at peace for the first time in his life.

And then later, in the night and in the early mornings, the unnamed voice shrieks at him.

He can’t even talk to her about this. She’d understand. She’d listen and she’d comfort him and she’d be so wonderfully herself that he whimpers just thinking about it, but then their nights together would change, and there’s nothing in the world he wants less than that.

She whispers to him and tightens her embrace and he realises he’s shaking and he’s crying snot and salt and he’s gone and fucking woken her up and maybe even made her cry, too, and in his guilt and his shame and his misery he demands not to be called that awful fucking name, that dreadful sound, that pair of vowels begging for a proper anchor, the thing that’s always represented the void he tears in the world wherever he goes.

The thing he’s supposed to be getting away from.

She kisses him on the back of the neck and the contradiction of it kills him. She’s so gentle and he’s throwing it all back at her and she doesn’t even know.

At least now he knows the name of the voice that nags at him, that sees him trying to escape, that reaches for him with claws and teeth and with blood on its breath and tries with all its might to drag him back into the dark.

 

2019 December 16
Monday

He hates Stenordale Manor more than he hated the medical wing at the Silver River facility. That was where they kept him. Jake told him right at the end, the day before they moved him. Silver River Solutions, another PMC; not one Trevor’s ever interacted with. It’s small and lightweight, Jake said; agile. Like a tiger.

Jake made tiger claws with his fingers when he said it. The fucker thinks it’s all so funny. What they’ve done to him. What they’re still doing to him. Worse, Jake doesn’t just find it funny, not since they took him here and gave him normal clothes again; Trevor’s seen the man tenting his fucking trousers when he brings him his food, and looking over his altered body, and it makes him nervous. He’s still trapped, still cuffed — only by a single ankle this time, and on a long cable, but still cuffed, still confined to a handful of rooms — and he has no way to escape if the older man decides to try something.

He hates Stenordale Manor because he ought to be able to see the forest from out of his single window, but the place rises like a wart on the grounds, dominates the view, renders ugly and artificial the few remaining artefacts of nature he can see.

He hates Stenordale Manor because he spends even more of his time by himself than he did on the ward at Silver River, and even though he’s counted at least four people in the manor itself and perhaps as many as six, he’s only been visited here by Jake. Not even the old woman, Dorothy, has been by; ‘Grandmother’ as he still refuses to call her.

He hates Stenordale Manor because at least in the medical wing he could request drugs and sleep, and when he woke he was mostly attended to by people who didn’t take obvious joy in his plight.

Finally, he hates Stenordale Manor because there are mirrors in all the rooms here, and he can see exactly what’s been done to him.

“We call it the quickie,” Dorothy told him, back in the medical wing. “We do the bones in the face and the nose, we do the chest, we do the balls; all the things we don’t need and two things we very much do. In the outside world it’s not really the done thing, to do the surgeries before hormone therapy has had a chance to get going, but we’re old hands at this, and besides, there are some obvious ways the male skull can be improved; we don’t need two years of estrogen to know that your brow ridge needed to go, or that your nose needed to be properly tipped, or that your jawline needed to be smoothed out. It’s as much art as science, you know. Sometimes we guess wrong, but not often and not, I think, in your case. You’re already quite beautiful, Trevor Darling.”

The mirrors here, in the bedroom and bathroom of the little bungalow on the grounds of the Smyth-Farrow estate, show someone who looks half-and-half. His face, while still recognisably his face, has been altered, rounded off, smoothed out, and while he can see and feel the residual bruising from the operations they performed, it would still, he thinks, look more like a woman’s face than a man’s if he deigned to shave it. His chest sports two breasts that jut out jarringly from his slim frame. They’re not all that large, when considered in proportion with the rest of his body, but they feel god damned enormous. They also feel tight in a way he’s sure things inside your body shouldn’t feel, tight enough that he hasn’t felt brave enough to rebel against the requirement to keep the support garment on at all times. The old woman promised him that in a matter of months they’ll look perfectly natural, as if he’d grown them at puberty like most breast-havers; he finds that difficult to believe. And they took his fucking balls, of course, so he’d be reliant on the hormones they provide.

But he’s still built more or less like he used to be; like a man. They’ve been restricting his diet, because they want him to be petite as well as short, but he still has no hips and relatively broad shoulders. That’ll change, though. “Details,” Dorothy had said, when he told her what an ugly, shapeless woman he would make, back on the ward. “Mere details. Hips, thighs, waist… You’ll develop. You’ll be quite shapely. I have experience, Darling.”

That was the last he saw of her.

But not the last he saw of Jake. The man keeps coming round. Every day. He could just leave the food but he likes to come in, he likes to talk, he likes to leer. He’s started calling him ‘Theresa’ and touching his leg when he sits next to him.

Trevor’s thinking about trying to overpower him. Not to escape; he’s under no illusions about that. It’s not just that he’s shackled to the wall: all the windows are barred, and there’s a fenced-off dog run connecting the bungalow to the manor, which no doubt contains more of Dorothy’s people. The whole place is probably an adjunct to a Silver River facility. No, Trevor wants to overpower him just to prove he fucking can.

 

2019 December 18
Wednesday

It’s a cold morning, and Christine’s breath makes patterns on the car window, fogging the scenery as it zips past, as Indira drives them south, towards the M25, taking the big loop around London and the bridge at Dartford and grazing the northernmost edge of Kent until they wind up in Brighton, on the coast, where Christine grew up, and she’ll get to see the sea again. She’ll get to see her school and the shops and the pier and her old house again and maybe, from a distance, if Indira judges it safe, her mother.

She’s in the back seat, happy to be travelling but nervous about the destination and she would rather have sat up front, but she can’t drive, and Paige gets carsick on journeys this long and needs to be able to watch the road, and Indira’s a bad passenger, so Christine’s in the back seat by default, headphones in, eyes on the outside world, studiedly ignoring her sister and her girlfriend as they talk and occasionally glance at her.

They’re worried. They shouldn’t be. This is everything she’s wanted for a long time.

Indira booked out one of the Hall’s largest cars, one of its most comfortable, a BMW 7-Series, and it’s spacious and plush and is full of little sockets to plug your phone in and generally gets used to ferry around people who are important enough to be driven but not quite important enough to have their own fleet of vehicles. In its luxury, though, it unavoidably makes Christine think of her father’s car, and she would have mentioned it but decided, at the last moment, that it might help her get into the spirit.

Not necessarily a bad move, but an intense one.

She’s back in that liminal period between finishing your A levels and starting university, where the other boys she’s aware of are making the most of an idle summer to see their friends and their girlfriends and to pretend they’ll all stay in touch once they’re scattered around the country. She’s feeling superior because, having no-one, or almost no-one, means there’s no-one for her to miss once she leaves, once she gets the fuck away from Brighton and all its memories and all the things she’s done to pass the time and get out of her own head. She’s going to the Royal College of Saint Almsworth, and her father’s proud of her because it’s not the easiest uni to get into, but she did it entirely by accident. Put a pin in a list of prestigious colleges and turned out to have the predicted grades. She’s got accommodation lined up and she’s wondering what her dormmates will be like, and if she’ll be able to keep making money in the manner she’s lately been perfecting; money she doesn’t need, money she doesn’t even particularly want, but it’s a way of keeping score. Christine vs the world. So far, she’s winning.

(That’s not her name, though.)

She’s thinking about all this because it’s easier than thinking about where she’s going, where her father’s driving her. She’s leaving for uni in a few days, and her mother likely won’t be out of care when she goes, so she’s saying goodbye.

“It’s not a hospital,” her father says abruptly.

“I know,” she says, in the tenor voice she used to have, the one which she now knows she could have trained into a wonderful singing voice, had she ever had the inclination or encouragement. “It’s a facility.”

“It’s called—”

She doesn’t remember what he says it’s called. Meadow Gardens or Shady Oaks or whatever, something pastoral and reassuring. They do rehab there, and they do other things. Her mother’s there for the other things. Principally, getting her away from Dad.

He talks for a while and she ignores him for a while, preferring to watch the landmarks big and small as they crawl by in the distance, but eventually he says, “I’m proud of you.”

It’s such a ridiculous thing for him to say that she has to pay attention to him. “For what?”

“For stopping me. For knowing how.”

He means, when she put herself between him and her mother. When he apologised and her mother took his side and he hit her again a while later anyway, and they never spoke of it again. Until now.

“Didn’t do much good, did it?” she says. She doesn’t mean to; she’d prefer to keep quiet, but bitterness has a pressure of its own.

“Watch it, son. All I’m saying is, you knew what to do. I’m proud of you. And I’m… glad you won’t grow up to be like me.”

“You mean, big man in a big house with piles of cash and a beautiful, bruised trophy wife?”

“I said, watch it,” he says, before retreating from his rage. “You should call your mother when you get to uni. Face To Face or whatever it’s called. I got her a new phone, one that can do it.”

She knows. She already went through the suitcase in the boot while Dad was upstairs. She doesn’t correct him on the name of the video chat service; what would be the point? She doesn’t say anything at all, not until he clears his throat to prompt her and she snaps, “I’ll fucking call her, okay?”

“You know how it works? I can get Miss Begum from the office to show you.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she says, “I know how to use a phone.”

There’s a tapping on the window, incongruous with the memory, and Christine blinks and there’s Paige, rapping on the glass and smiling at her. Christine refocuses, shakes herself, and looks past Paige to see Indira walking in circles, stretching.

“We’re there?” she says.

“No.” Paige is almost inaudible through the window, so Christine unbelts and opens the door and climbs out, stretching like Indira. “This is the services at Thurrock,” Paige says. “I need a wee and Dira needs breakfast. Fancy some American-style pancakes?”

Christine hugs her, reminds herself that her dad, his BMW — not even the same model as this one, now that she comes to look at it again — and her mother and that awful hospice in Surrey are all in the past.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’d love some pancakes.”

 

* * *

 

Pippa’s father used to say that ‘hurry up and wait’ was the method by which hell could most effectively torture its captured sinners, that being made to hope for something, to put one’s life on hold in anticipation of it, was a pain more exquisite than losing a finger. He liked to brandish his right hand at her when he said that, with its missing ring finger, and wiggle the stump at her.

No, she remembers, pausing outside the entrance to the security room and rolling her bracelet in idle rings around her wrist, he used to say that to him. To his son. Her father liked to make his terrible but still moderately pious jokes to someone who is no longer real, who perhaps was never real, was merely a construction of convenience, a paper person burned away. If she walked up to him today her father would not recognise her, and nor would anyone who was once precious to her.

She leans against the wall, digs her shoulder blades into it, tries to carve chunks from the concrete with them, and reminds herself sternly that there are people to whom she is precious now. That it took until many months after her graduation from the care of her sponsor for her properly to become close to some of them is as much an indictment of the isolation she imposed upon herself as it is the processes of the programme, and, for goodness’ sake, she didn’t even meet Stephanie until she’d been elevated to the status of sponsor herself.

Pippa snorts in amusement. Arguably, she didn’t meet Stephanie for real until a month into her sponsorship.

There. Embrace that levity. Use it. Melancholy doesn’t get you anything except more melancholy. Remember what you have now; remember who you have now. And remind yourself that, one day, you might have your old family again. The consensus on that seems to be ever-changing, after all; if Indira’s careful, process-led pathway for reintegrating with her former family showed that the wall erected between the old life and the new didn’t have to be a permanent one, Shahida’s arrival and abrupt inclusion in the Sisterhood suggests the viability of an alternative, more radical approach: just effing do it.

And perhaps she will one day.

In the meantime, she has responsibilities. Hurry up and wait, indeed.

She shrugs off the memory, waves at Jane, who’s running the security room today and discussing something over Consensus with what looks like about five other people — probably, Pippa realises with a stab of concern, the imminent release of Raph and Ollie back into the basement population; she makes a mental note to check that Steph’s been keeping her pocket taser charged — and continues down the stairs, buzzing herself in to basement two and giving herself a moment out of the sight of any cameras to breathe in, to steel herself, to become Pippa, the sponsor, and not Pippa, the girl who misses her family.

She still rather hates it down here. But at least she has company; others who have no choice but to spend their days, weeks and months anticipating something that will come to them only eventually. Stephanie, now revealed to Aaron as well as everyone upstairs for who she really is, no longer in hiding but still forced to watch her body change agonisingly slowly; Aaron himself, struggling through the early stages of acceptance and spotted on surveillance this morning crying ugly and loud in Steph’s arms; Will, who seems to have decided that he can, in fact, become someone who isn’t either dangerous or deeply irritating to be around but has yet to understand the mechanism by which it might happen. There’s a tremendous urgency to the stated goals of Dorley Hall — to remove dangerous but pliable and ultimately redeemable boys away from the people they are hurting or whom they might hurt, and teach them another way to live — and simultaneously a depressing lack of alacrity to its methods.

You introduce the boys to estrogen, to new friends, and to enforced self-reflection, and you and the boys together all hurry up and effing well wait.

Maria would tell Pippa she’s being reductive. But what the heck; she never wanted to be a sponsor, anyway.

The first boy she sees is Adam, sitting with Edy at one end of the table in the lunch room and eating his breakfast with trembling eyes looking at everything in the room bar whoever is at the far end of the table from him; that turns out, as Pippa steps into the room to greet Edy and Adam, to be Will, quietly spooning porridge into his mouth and looking at nothing in particular. Edy offers Pippa a crinkle-fingered wave, which Pippa returns and which Adam, after a moment, imitates. Pippa decides that’s as good a cue as any and sits down a few chairs away from the boy, smiles, and leans nonthreateningly on her elbow.

Edy says Adam’s doing better lately, and that’s good. Pippa’s always felt she should have found more in common with him than she has, being that they’re both from religious families, but hers was simple Church of England with an occasional side of imported Evangelicalism (for the songs, mainly) whereas, from what she’s gleaned, Adam’s family squats at the head of a small and isolated sect of the sort that encourages its sons to hold signs outside women’s health clinics.

Pippa, uncomfortably, suspects she has more in common with Will than anyone else down here this year, despite his loudly and repeatedly professed atheism.

“Hi, Adam,” she says. “How are you doing?”

He glances at Edy for reassurance. She provides it with a nod, so he says in a small and polite voice, “I’m okay. Thank you for asking, Pippa. How are you?”

I’m stuck in a loop of mournful nostalgia and wistful hope, she thinks, through her smile. “I’m good,” she says out loud. “Steph’s doing well, and I’ll be going over there in a moment. I know you haven’t spent much time together lately; do you have a message for her—” Damn; almost the wrong pronoun. “—I mean, for Steph?” Wonderful save. Flawless. Sponsor of the year.

Edy’s eyes sparkle with amusement at the mistake. Pippa feels she isn’t granting the situation the respect she deserves, and aims a light kick at her under the table. She misses.

“Um,” Adam says, thinking hard, “just to say hi. And thank you for listening, those times.”

“Consider it passed on.” Pippa reaches out to touch his fingers, just for a moment, and he doesn’t take his hand away and doesn’t react poorly. He smiles at her instead, which feels good, especially for this stage of the programme. She’s pretty sure she was still barely holding herself back from attacking her sponsor at this point.

So much like Will.

She feels herself react to the thought, in her gut and in the way her back stiffens and her free hand momentarily clenches, but she’s pretty sure none of it reaches her face. Edy sees it anyway — of course she does — and she raises an eyebrow, asking silently if Pippa’s okay. Pippa answers by standing and walking the other way around the head of the table, briefly grasping Edy’s shoulder and squeezing: Yes, I’m okay, and thank you for asking. As she lets go, as she passes, Edy’s eyes meet hers with compassion and grace.

It’s good to feel known like that, to feel understood, to feel cared for and approved of. Pippa gives in for a moment to the need for a mother, for someone who can fill that position, and though Edith doesn’t have quite enough years on her to make that possible, she’s close enough and kind enough and altogether Edith enough that Pippa finds herself buoyed, once more feeling like someone who graduated from this place and not like someone who still needs it.

And she giggles quietly at her word choice: buoyed. Not any more, mate.

Embrace the levity, always, or you’ll go bloody mad down here.

“Hey, Will,” she says, on her way out. “You okay?”

“What do you care?” he says, and it’s so unlike something she would have said at the time — more adolescent insolence than the aggrieved aggression she was given to — that she smiles, grasps his shoulder, too, and just shrugs when his head whips around, full of questions.

“I just do,” she says.

At Stephanie’s door she knocks in the pattern she always uses, and Steph calls out that it’s okay to come in. Inside, Aaron’s still there, still in Stephanie’s arms and they’re still lying down together, though they’ve made themselves more comfortable, arranging pillows and cushions, and they’ve had some TV show on. Aaron’s the one to pause it — Pippa hides her smile at the incredibly poor opsec involved in allowing an ordinary programme inductee to use Steph’s fully enabled phone, but all the procedures have been thrown out of the window for these two — and Pippa crouches down by the bed, near to him but not too near and putting herself below him. Hopefully it’ll help him feel safe.

“Hi,” she says warmly, reaching for the tone of voice her mum always used to use when she was a child and had a nightmare. “Rough night?”

He looks at her and a moment later his expression mangles, like he’s suddenly realised there’s a sponsor in the room and he looks like absolute shit! And then he looks guiltily around at Stephanie, realising, if Pippa had to guess, that she’s spent the last couple of hours comforting someone who is rather more mucus than human, and Steph gives him a kiss.

He turns back to her, a little more relaxed, and Pippa smiles. They’re so good for each other. Unexpected, but wonderful.

“Rough night,” Aaron agrees, sniffing. He recoils at the disgusting sound his nose makes. “Just bad stuff, you know?”

“I know,” she says.

She and Aaron haven’t talked much, overall. They’ve had conversations, especially after he and Stephanie started to grow close, but they’ve always been about ordinary, everyday stuff; she’s been striving to help the both of them feel as normal as possible while they’re down here, and she likes to think she’s done as good a job with that as can be expected, but the flip side is that she doesn’t really know him. She’s read his intake file, sure, but he’s different enough from when he came to Dorley Hall that she no longer considers it a particularly accurate read on his personality.

Maria said she’s going to schedule a meeting, soon, for just the two of them, so they can touch base. The semester ends today, so they’ll finally have the time.

Aaron asks, “How did you do it?” It’s quick and sharp, like he wanted to get it out before he changed his mind, and the frown that creases his forehead suggests he regrets the question almost immediately. Pippa smiles gently for him, trying to reassure him that it’s not a bad question to ask, and she makes sure to show on her face that she’s thinking seriously about how to answer him.

“With a lot of fuss and a lot of friction,” she says eventually, more honestly than she’d planned. “Steph knows what happened to me before I came here; you can ask her if you like, and it’s fine, Steph, if she wants to know.” Pippa hadn’t meant to use the pronoun — habit from Steph, probably — but Aaron doesn’t flinch at it. Should she tell Maria about that? Part of her feels like it would be a betrayal; not everything the boy does ought to be analysed to hell and back. “Actually, if I’m going to be frank, I— What?”

She doesn’t smile, doesn’t telegraph her intentions in any way, but she put a subtle emphasis on the word and he picks up on it, laughing like she hoped he would. Yes, the liquid snorts that shift around his small frame the phlegm of a morning spent crying sound really gross, but it’s what she wanted.

“You can’t be Frank,” Aaron wheezes. “You’ve been here too long.”

Steph strokes his hair, pulls damp strands out of his face and pats them down. She’s smiling at the joke, too.

‘To be Frank’; a stupid joke, but it can both break the ice and serve to reinforce the notion that, down here, ceasing to be a man is ordinary, natural, and expected. Rather underhanded, really, but Ellie, her sponsor, used it on her to much the same effect.

You really do have to laugh.

“Seriously, though,” she says, “you’re doing better than I was at this point.”

“Maybe I’ve just given up,” Aaron says, and despite the levity still present in his voice she knows he’s half-serious. He’s asking for permission, or an endorsement. She provides both.

“You’re doing great,” she says, touching his hand the way she touched Adam’s. “Maria’s proud of you. She says you’ve exceeded her expectations, and you know she doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean. I don’t know exactly what upset you this morning—” although she can guess, “—but I want you to know that doubts are normal. Bad thoughts are normal. No-one changes overnight.”

“I still feel…” Aaron can’t finish the thought, just frowns again and splays his fingers out against the edge of the mattress.

“Lost?” Pippa asks, and he nods. “Also normal. Which, yes, I know, doesn’t make it any less difficult to deal with.”

He shrugs, and Steph squeezes him again, kisses him on the back of the head. He pushes against the mattress and sits up, Steph moving with him, arranging herself around him, moving herself entirely in reference to him (and Pippa suddenly misses Rani, wishes they had a deeper relationship; the sex is nice, but Pippa thinks she likes Rani more than Rani likes her, and, worse, she’s gone back home to Liverpool for the holidays).

Aaron’s nose, responding to gravity, drips. “Oh, God,” he says, “I’m disgusting.”

“You’re not disgusting,” Steph insists, nuzzling him, loyal to the end.

“Stephanie,” he says with a whine, and Pippa has to hide her delight that he uses her full, unambiguously feminine name, “I’m all sticky. I’ve spent, what, half the night crying—” he hesitates only a little over the word; well done, kiddo, “—and now I’m absolutely covered in snot and I don’t even want to know what I look like, so get your paws off me and let me go shower and we can continue my epic breakdown when I’m in clean, dry clothes, okay?”

Steph, incorrigible, kisses him again. “Okay,” she says, and opens her arms so he can stand up without her dragging on him. He succumbs for a second to the playfulness that’s always seemed to Pippa to infuse him from head to toe whenever he relaxes enough to be himself, and kisses Steph on the forehead, dodges away from her before he can be grabbed, and nips out of the door without another word.

He’s not wearing a top; Pippa notes that he’s definitely started to develop in the chest.

“Seriously,” she says, turning back to Stephanie, “is he okay?”

Steph nods, but she doesn’t look all that confident in her assessment. “Yeah…”

“Steph? Are you okay?”

The question seems to startle her, but she puts herself back together and answers with renewed confidence, “Yes, Pippa. I’m okay. I’m happy, actually. The more he comes to terms with… uh, with what’s happening to him, the more I do. I don’t have nightmares about finding him dead any more.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Pippa says automatically, and stands up to draw Steph into her arms. “You’re taking such good care of him. I’m so proud of you.” She says all the things she wanted to hear her sponsor say when she was down here; or all the things she wants to hear again from her mother and father. Then she pulls back so she can look Steph in the eye. “Just make sure you take care of yourself, too.”

“Isn’t that your job?” Steph asks, grinning.

“Yes, and you know what a terrible sponsor I am.”

“True,” Steph says, and drops back onto the mattress. “I wish there was more I could do for him.”

Pippa sits next to her, makes a space for Steph to lean on her, which she does, fitting her head into the crook of Pippa’s shoulder.

“There might be something we can do,” Pippa says thoughtfully. “He asked how I did it, and, sure, I can tell him. I can tell him in detail if he really wants, but at the end of the day… we’re quite different people. The thing is, though — and I know you love him, Steph, so don’t take too much offence at this — he’s not that original. We’ve probably got half a dozen girls knocking around upstairs who were just like him once. I can ask Maria for suggestions. See if someone can come talk to him.”

It’s something they do a lot, just not usually this soon. Edy says that early in the programme, once the first waves had graduated and some had consented to stick around, they tried to match sponsor to subject, like for like, and that turned out to be a huge mistake. But it is helpful for the boys to have access to someone who can think the way they do, who can empathise directly, from experience.

It had been Abby, for her. Strange that it still took them a while afterwards to become friends.

“Would you?” Steph says. “You’re amazing, Pippa.”

“I’m doing my best.”

Pippa closes one arm around Steph, and rolls her other arm on her thigh, nudging the bracelet up enough so she can play with it with her two longest fingers. She likes giving comfort, being the one people can turn to, but she can’t deny the growing hole in her life where once there had been people who took care of her; her sponsor had done, all things considered, a good job, and more importantly had been the right person to do it, to draw Pippa out of herself, but Ellie hadn’t exactly been a hugger.

Maybe she’ll call Ellie later, though. It’s been a while.

Goodness, she envies Indira. And today, particularly, she envies Christine, who’s taken Indira and Paige on a trip down to Brighton, to visit and perhaps exorcise some of the ghosts of her past, and maybe even to see her family, if only at an extreme distance. She can’t wait to hear how that goes, even if she thinks that if she were in Christine’s position, if she were to see her mother once more, they’d have to enlist all the sponsors in Dorley Hall to hold her down, because she would run to her without a second thought.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t wanna.”

“Yes, well, I never wanted to, either, and yet here I am.”

“But it’s…”

“It’s what, Declan?”

“It’s fucking gay.”

Valérie has decades of experience controlling herself, of analysing her first reaction and deciding whether it would be prudent, safe or helpful to allow it through, and she decides that, yes, her instincts in this moment are both entirely correct and likely to prove incredibly satisfying. She slaps the boy, hard, on the cheek.

She’s been expecting him to get his voice back, to reassert himself — he’s by no means the first new girl she’s been expected to guide through his response to such extreme and sudden surgical alterations — and he has. He’s used it mostly to object to his new life. Val finds such objections entirely understandable, of course, and ordinarily she might have chosen to empathise with them, but the boy is a piece of shit and she has other things to think about.

Dee is alive…

Clasping an outraged hand to his reddening cheek, Declan tries to stand up, to confront her, to outmass her, which even after the starvation diet and the month or so of estrogen therapy he is still perfectly capable of doing, but Frankie’s hands on his shoulders press him down.

“Sit, rapist,” she says.

“I didn’t fucking do anything!”

“Yes you fucking did, and you know how I know this?” Still pushing down on him, Frankie leans over to make herself louder to him. “I called around, didn’t I? Your girl, the one who kept coming back to you, well, she finally talked to someone, didn’t she? Yeah, she reported you missing months ago, but after a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks without you, she saw her GP. Got a referral for a therapist. And you know what I think she’s getting therapy for? It’s not because you left. It’s because of what you did, you little shit.”

She told Val about this last night: Béatrice’s bizarre reinvention of Dorley Hall sends people out to befriend some of the victims of the boys it takes in for reform, encourages them to seek therapy, helps them monetarily. Frankie doesn’t know if this is what happened in this particular case — she obviously doesn’t have access to Dorley’s records any more — but it seems likely, and she’s been able to confirm Declan’s ex-girlfriend’s medical appointments through Dorothy and Silver River. Easy to justify: if the man you’re trying to break knows the world is moving on without him, it’s harder for him to fight back.

If the man is fucking weak, that is. Valérie fought back for years.

“She fucking asked for it,” Declan insists with a sneer.

Valérie slaps him again. “Just like you asked for that?”

He pushes up against Frankie’s hands, but she’s putting all her weight on him and he, for all his size, is not at all as strong as he once was.

“Stay where you are,” Frankie hisses, “unless you want us to have a problem.”

“You should listen to her,” Valérie says. She’s sitting back now, folding her arms, watching him struggle against Frankie and allowing her amusement to show. “She once stabbed a man in the penis.”

“It’s true,” Frankie says. “And since you still have yours — for now — you should be careful around me, and not tell lies, and not act like you’re going to attack my friends, okay?”

Declan’s sullen and bitter and humiliated and scared and belligerent and all of it shows on his face, but he’s not brave and doesn’t seem like he ever was, and all that remains of his former bulk is his height; he seems finally to be realising that he really is in the shit, and that together the women around him aren’t intimidated by him and aren’t inclined to offer him the benefit of the doubt.

Val wonders what was going through his head when he was almost catatonic. Was anything?

She’s probably being unfair, she knows; but she doesn’t think it’s possible to be unfair to someone like Declan, to someone who’s done what he’s done. Or, if it is, she doesn’t care in the slightest.

She does want him functional, though, even if it’s only so he can have the run of the place without her constant supervision.

“Look,” she says, “you came from Dorley Hall, right? And they kicked you out because they found out you’re a rapist piece of shit, yes?” Frankie knows a reasonable amount about Dorley’s new operating procedures under Béatrice; Val’s spent as much as she can of the last two days quizzing her about it. It still seems strange, turning boys into girls for their benefit, but as Frankie pointed out more than once, Val acclimated to being a woman, and if she can do it, maybe any man can.

Declan grunts in response, and Valérie amends: maybe some men can.

“So this is the last chance saloon, yes?” she says, clenching a fist and steeling herself for what she has to say next, for the spirits she’s about to invoke. “There’s nothing after this place. And I mean that literally. All the other girls who came here are dead. Some of them I buried myself. So if, Declan, you want to die, go ahead and fight us. Insist until the fucking cows come home that you’re a man, that you don’t want to do anything gay—” she leans on the word, mocking him, “—and wait for the old bitch upstairs to get tired of you and instruct her soldier boys to kill you. If you want to live, learn how to behave yourself.”

Declan’s eyes intensify and his mouth tightens, and Val reads this as his fear jacking itself up another notch. Good. Fear will control him, and the last thing she wants right now is the little bastard making a problem out of himself.

“You know what?” Frankie says, pushing down on him again. “This is a learning opportunity right here.” She releases him and points at the collection of creams and powders on the vanity. “Do your own makeup.”

“That,” Val says, before Declan can react, “is an excellent idea.” She stands up. “Make yourself beautiful, Declan.”

“I don’t know how,” he says, and that’s better than the outright refusal Val expected.

“You saw that girl you assaulted up close, didn’t you?” Frankie says. “Got a good look at how she prettied herself, I bet?”

“You have everything you need right there,” Val says. “Just do what she did and make yourself beautiful. And choose a dress; there are several in your closet.”

“Don’t come out until you’re done,” Frankie says.

They leave him sitting in front of his vanity with his collection of cosmetics and a dumbfounded expression.

As soon as they close the door to his room, Val recoils from Frankie, marching several steps away from her. Mere proximity feels repulsive.

“When you called me one of your friends,” she says, leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor, “I had to clench my stomach so I wouldn’t throw up.”

“Sorry,” Frankie says, putting on that expression Val’s had to start reading as at least moderately apologetic.

“Christ alive,” Val says, and she closes her eyes and gives in for a moment to the other thing that’s been threatening her equilibrium, the surging cold, the grasp of the dead, because she used the lives of the girls she knew and cared for as a threat, as a tool to keep a rapist in line, and now she sees them all, every cold face, every matted black clump of dirt she used to cover them.

“Val?” Frankie comes closer and Valérie doesn’t have anything with which to stop her.

“Jesus fucking Christ and his angels,” she mutters, and she knows she’s shaking but she can’t stop. She was supposed to be past this, she was supposed to be nothing but a mass of scar tissue, all her wounds healed over and stronger for it, but now here she is, soft and weak and trembling. Frankie stands there, within arms’ reach but doing nothing; helpless but clearly wanting to help. “It is an obscenity to even think about them in front of you,” she adds, trying to find venom to spit at Frankie but coming up only with desperate, aching, biting cold.

“The girls?” Frankie says, gently and hesitantly, and that makes it even more obscene, because she was fucking part of it, and who cares if she was under the control of another monster? If someone hands you a gun and tells you to point it at someone else or at yourself and you oblige them by choosing, you’ve missed the very obvious third person you could have pointed it at.

But Frankie’s the only one within fifty miles who gives even the slightest portion of a shit about her. Sometimes you have to walk with monsters or you don’t walk at all.

“Yes,” Val says. “It’s the girls.”

They spoke of them two days ago. It’s not friendship, whatever it is that’s developing between them, but they’re both prisoners here, both trapped in Dorothy Marsden’s lifelong game, and that means they need each other. It also required Frankie, if Val was going to spend actual time with her, to properly understand.

So she took her to the courtyard and showed her the flagstones that come up if you pull on them and told her again how many girls she’s buried.

Valérie’s never considered herself especially religious, except in the lapsed Catholic sense — communion is hard to come by when you can’t leave your prison to go to church — but when she stands over their graves she can feel the spirits of the girls under her, and when she examines the tiny stone markers she left to commemorate each of them she can feel their eyes upon her.

And it felt like Frankie finally got it, finally took in all of what she’d done, what she’d been party to. “I really should have drowned myself in the fucking lake,” she’d muttered, and she’d turned to Valérie for comfort and Val, unable to believe what she was doing, provided it.

“I hate this fucking prison,” Val mutters. “It was bad enough when it was just me. And then there were the girls, and now it’s that piece of shit back there and— and you…”

“There’s someone else, Val,” Frankie says quietly. “I checked on it yesterday. There’s a gate at the end of the Run. And there’s an outbuilding behind it. I saw movement in there, and I know you and Dotty and Callum and that bastard Jake were all still in here.”

Val shakes her head, forces her ghosts to depart. “You really think there’s someone else here?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“Who the fuck knows, Valerie darling? Could be another guard. Could be another prisoner. Could be Declan’s long-lost twin-brother-turned-sister. Whoever it is, they might present an opportunity.”

“An ally, you’re thinking?”

You are reading story The Sisters of Dorley at novel35.com

“Only one way to find out,” Frankie says.

 

* * *

 

Steph’s waiting with him in the lunch room. He’s taken the chair farthest from the door, on the short end of the table, so he can see whoever it is as soon as she looms in the glass and thus have the maximum amount of time possible to prepare his reaction, and still he’s nervous because Steph said that Pippa said they both think he should talk to someone, someone other than Steph (who is a trans woman and, though she may love him, cannot necessarily relate to how he feels about his gender and especially not about his inexplicable lingering attachment to maleness) or Pippa (who claims she is/was nothing like him when she came here, that she was some completely other flavour of awful, and damn right he’s going to ask Steph for her story once the day is done with and he’s safely back in his or her room because that sounds fucking fascinating) or Maria (who to hear her tell it was never a bad person at all and who discarded her maleness so long ago she can, she says, barely remember what it was like to be seen as or behave as a boy).

So he’s waiting, antsy and trying not to be irritable, because he knows they’re trying to help, but he thinks probably the most helpful thing Pippa did was to tell him that it takes time, that he doesn’t have to have everything sorted out immediately just because he wants to or he feels like he should; and then she had to go spoil it all by heading upstairs and looking for someone to whom he will, supposedly, be able to relate and who, crucially, will understand him, too.

He hears her first, tap-tapping high heels in the corridor, and Steph kisses him on the top of his head before disappearing quietly out of the other door, leaving him entirely alone and unable to formulate a helpful response to the woman who enters, looking around with an expression of distaste but smiling warmly when she sees him.

It can’t be the case that all the women here were once men like him, right? He’s just about gotten used to it with Maria and Pippa and Edy and the others, and when he attempts momentarily to consider her objectively the woman tapping her way past the row of chairs towards him is no more or less attractive than, say, Maria, but she’s an attractive he hasn’t had the chance to acclimate to and he’s pretty sure that if he tries to say anything right now it will come out as an embarrassing collection of insensible vowels.

Her near-black hair is tied up in an elegant twist at the back of her head, and a few items of hair jewellery that Aaron is certain probably have special names are positioned near her temples. Her copper skin is radiant even in the harsh overhead lights of the lunch room, and her subtle makeup enhances what he’s willing to guess is a pretty considerable natural beauty to something approaching knockout status. She’s wearing a business suit, of all things, with a reddish-purple skirt to the knee and matching jacket, which she removes and places carefully over the back of a chair, revealing a white, short-sleeved blouse and softly muscled upper arms. Around her neck she wears a chain with a small locket, and he wonders if it’s the sort that has a photo in, and who it might be, if so.

She sits, pulling out the chair on the corner, positioning herself close enough to talk normally but not so close that they might accidentally touch.

“Aaron, right?” she asks in an accent Aaron places on the east coast somewhere; Norfolk, maybe.

He nods, and then, feeling tongue-tied, impresses himself by managing to say, “Yes. Hi?”

She laughs. It’s a sweet laugh, and Aaron outright refuses to believe her throat ever produced a voice like his. “Hello,” she says, and leans her elbows on the table. She’s set down two mugs, and he smells coffee. “I’m Yasmin. Pippa and Maria asked me to come down for a chat.” She eyes the mugs and pushes one toward him. “The coffee was my idea. Pippa asked Stephanie how you like it.”

He grabs it and inhales deeply. “Incredible idea,” he says, and sips carefully at it; too hot, unless he wants to scald his tongue.

“Excuse the outfit,” she says, as if such an ensemble has any need to be excused or explained. Aaron thinks he could stand to see a lot more women dressed similarly, preferably on a regular basis. “My idiot boss decided he wanted to see us all for a one-hour in-person meeting on a random Wednesday morning in mid-December. Normally I’m not so dressy for work.”

“You look good, though. Really good.”

Yasmin smiles broadly. “Pippa was right about you; you’re sweet.”

She lifts her mug with slender fingers tipped with a pale pink short-nailed manicure, and blows on her coffee before taking a delicate sip. She closes her eyes to savour the taste and inhale the vapour, and it gives Aaron the opportunity to read the slogan on the side of the mug. It says, Pain is just testicles leaving the body.

That’s… inappropriate. He looks down at his, too, and finds a simplistic image of a pile of bricks and what looks like a small scalpel, superimposed with the text, For the love of God, Montresor! Those were my balls!

So, a theme, then.

“Oh,” Yasmin says, frowning. “Sorry about the mugs. I wanted plain ones, but the second years have been making mug brownies or something and they’re all absolutely caked in muck. I swear, sometimes it’s like living on the set of Blue Peter around here, what with all the random projects they have the second years do to keep them busy and socialise them.” She snorts. “Like the Blue Peter set only much, much hornier.”

“You don’t think these are in bad taste?” he says, holding his mug up so she can read it. “Are we all just one big joke to the girls upstairs, is that it?” He doesn’t want to get angry — he hasn’t really done so in a short while, not at anyone or anything other than himself, and the sensation is surprisingly unfamiliar and unwelcome — but he can’t stop himself. “This is actually kind of—”

“It’s not at your expense,” Yasmin says quickly, putting a hand on his wrist and slowly lowering him and his mug back to the table. “These jokes — and they are very stupid jokes, I think we can both agree — aren’t about you; they’re about me. And Julia. And Christine and Paige and Maria and everyone else. All of us were down here. All of us were once… you. Or someone like you. Maria, perhaps, aside,” she adds, tilting her head. “The mugs and the memes and Maria’s silly poster, they’re like getting someone to sign the cast on your broken arm. Except we all have the broken arm, and we’re all signing each other’s cast, and that’s a terrible metaphor; sorry.”

“Still seems a bit… gross?”

“It’s acclimation,” she says firmly. “It’s affirmation. It’s, ‘I survived!’ And it’s bonding, actually. You never made a joke about something awful that happened to you?”

Aaron shrugs. He can see her point.

“I hated them for the longest time,” she continues. “I hated all the cutesy, twee, memey shit that grew around the trauma we all carry. And I kind of hated the other women here; or, at least, I wanted nothing to do with them. I transitioned with a girl called Julia, and we became very special to each other, to the point where we decided we didn’t need anyone else. And, because we became quite self-sufficient, just the two of us, the sponsors left us to it. They’ve told me since that they made a mistake, that they should have taken more care with us.” She sips her coffee. “I can’t say I disagree. But I’m trying to fix it. To engage more. To understand more about how my— my Sisters think. And I’m trying to show Julia that talking to the people we came up with isn’t necessarily a bad thing, not any more, not since everyone… chilled the fuck out. And that—” she grins at him, “—is why I was sitting at the kitchen table like a chump, drinking from a novelty mug and watching the second years make brownies when Pippa came in looking for someone to talk to a little wayward boy down in the basement.” She laughs. “She said she would have asked Christine — everyone always seems to ask her for everything — but, good for her, she’s not even in town today. I volunteered before I could be guilted into volunteering. And besides,” she adds, “you and I have a lot in common.”

Aaron takes her in again, and shakes his head. “That’s… hard to believe.”

She doesn’t say right away what she means. Instead she says, “You know what’s coming for you, don’t you?”

“The Estradiol Express? The orchi? Yeah, I know it. We’re all going to be you.”

“And Maria said you’ve been… coming to terms with it?”

“That’s the thing,” Aaron says, deciding to go follow this conversation wherever it leads; better to talk about it all with a stranger than with Steph, whose feelings he might hurt, or with someone who might, meaning well, tell Steph everything he says. “It’s yes and no. I feel so fucking weak, you know? I decided that, yeah, I’m going along with this, I mean, not that I have a choice but I’m definitely going along with this, because it didn’t take fucking long for Maria and Steph and all the others to make me realise that I was a grade-A bastard before I came here, and Maria and Monica both said that if I go back out there with a freshly raised consciousness but nothing else different about me that the entire world will conspire to turn me back into that guy, and they said it enough that I believe them. No; fuck it; that’s glib. They said it a lot but I decided they’re right, because I know I’m not strong enough to go against that kind of thing, you know? And I don’t have a solution, but they do, even if it’s fucking weird. So I’m going to do the girl thing if that’s what they think will work, and I realised that when I really look inside myself I’m not actually all that attached to being a guy, anyway, I mean, it’s never actually brought me happiness, just a load of misery and bullshit. But then, suddenly, I’m doing stuff—” he looks around furtively, “—and I mean, sexual stuff, with Steph and like a whole half my fucking brain starts screaming at me that this is wrong, that it’s not supposed to feel good, and I thought I was done with that shit, you know? But I can’t seem to shut it off.”

Yasmin’s been nodding as he speaks, and when he takes a break to collect his thoughts she inserts, “Growth isn’t a straight line, Aaron. It’s wiggly. It’s filled with potholes and detours and you go back and sideways as well as forward. And you’ll get lost and you’ll think it’s all hopeless and that the sponsors are all idiots and what they’re trying to get you to do is impossible, even if the day before you thought the exact opposite. You just have to stick with it.”

“Easy to say. Not so easy to do,”

“I mean,” Yasmin says, “you don’t have much choice down here. That’s the beauty of it. Maria will drag you to girlhood kicking and screaming if she has to. She would just, I suspect, prefer the alternative.”

“What about you, then? Were you dragged kicking and screaming?” Aaron tilts his head, takes her in again. “I mean, Jesus Christ, I can barely believe you’re not a model, let alone that you were once a— a—”

“Man? Relax yourself, Aaron; I was never a man. I never made it quite that far.” She leans back in her chair and holds her coffee with both hands, warming herself on it even though it’s not cold down here. Aaron recognises the body language of someone getting ready to settle in for a long conversation, so before she can say anything else he suggests they move somewhere more comfortable.

 

* * *

 

The BMW’s parked up in an open space near the beach — or near what Brighton calls a beach; in Indira’s mind, a beach shouldn’t have quite such a powerful smell — and now they’re walking the promenade, with Christine indulging her memories and Paige and Indira trailing along in her wake, Indira tightening her long coat against the wind. And it is bitterly cold, the sort of cold that makes Indira long for the kitchen back at Dorley Hall, for the AGA that makes it too warm in the summer unless you turn on the AC or open the barred windows, but which in the winter makes pushing open the double doors and returning home into a feeling she savours all season.

“Teenie,” Indira says, as Christine slowly approaches another apparent landmark, “I want you to know that I love you, and that Memory Lane is extremely cold.”

“I used to come here,” Christine says, slowly and without inflection, as if she’s in a trance, “after school sometimes. Most days I’d go straight home because a lot of the other guys walked back along this way but sometimes I stayed late, and by the time I got here they were long gone. There was a sausage guy just there.” She points and Indira looks at a patch of concrete that currently hosts a stand selling novelty rock candy, keyrings and phone cases. “Those were the days I’d skip dinner and I’d just have a sausage in a bun and a Sprite and I’d sit on the railing and watch the sea. Pretend I was someone else.”

Paige laughs, so quietly Indira thinks Christine didn’t hear it, and then approaches her from behind, looping her arms around Christine’s waist and waking the girl from her memory. “It’s a lovely view,” Paige says, in defiance of all good sense, because whatever virtues the seafront at Brighton may have, Indira would have to stretch the definition of the word intolerably to call it ‘lovely’.

‘Pestilent’, perhaps.

She joins Paige and Christine at the railing, listens to Christine relate ever more gloriously irrelevant details about her school life — rather, what she did when she was escaping school and home both; what she did when she was walking around town on her own, a teenager unmoored and restless and with nowhere safe to go, inside her head or without — and she lets herself smile. She looks away so Christine doesn’t see, but hearing the girl tell stories from her teenage years, stories which crack her voice on the telling, is even more wonderful than she expected.

Christine’s needed to heal for a long time, but it’s only recently that she’s been ready, and now she’s here, and she’s able to view the things that happened to her and the things she made happen to other people as part of her, part of her history, part of herself, and not as the ghastly acts of a life she wants to escape, or as the half-remembered thrashings of a monster she killed in order to rebuild herself from its grisly entrails.

Her beloved sister is healing at last, and it’s a good thing the salt wind is affecting all of them equally, or Indira might have a hard time hiding the tears she no longer wants even to try to keep back.

 

* * *

 

Yeah. The boy’s changes are definitely becoming apparent. He walks like she remembers Julia walking, early on, when the weight redistribution was starting to kick in. They’ll have switched him and the other boys — and the girl, Stephanie — from the low-calorie diet they always start them on to a higher-calorie one now, to give the hormones something to work with, and it shows on him primarily in the way he’s had to start moving his hips. He also pays conspicuous attention to his bedroom door, and Yasmin bites her lip in amusement; he’s barely a centimetre or two thicker around the bust than he probably used to be, but it’ll be enough to throw off years of muscle memory, enough that he probably grazes his sensitive chest every time he tries to nip through a small gap, like, say, between a closing door and its frame.

Goodness, she remembers that. She remembers collapsing on her bed after the umpteenth time, clutching herself and giggling madly, Julia looking on in shock; she couldn’t believe she was finding humour in any of it. Neither could Yasmin, really, but it had all just been too much.

Oh, Julia. Yasmin almost wishes she was down here with her, because without the fear of the imminent unknown, without the almost insurmountable anxiety over leaving her old self behind, it’s just an ugly basement with too-bright spotlights in the ceiling and, here in the bedroom corridor, nasty laminate covering the concrete walls. It’s just a place and nothing more. But Julia rejected even the idea of using the downstairs kitchen.

She’ll get there. Yasmin’s come around to the notion that they need to socialise with their Sisters, largely because so many of them are so despicably sweet and kind. Godsdamned delightful shower of girls; even Christine, whom both of them disliked for so long for reasons that were, probably, in the cold light of day or even in the harsh overhead lights of the basement bedroom corridor, rather petty.

Aaron returns from his room with a pair of jogging bottoms for her. She asked him, when he suggested they move their conversation to the common room, to find her something more comfortable to wear, and to his credit and her surprise he hesitated only a moment before agreeing. But then she overheard Pippa giggling that Aaron and Stephanie have been sharing clothes for a while; he’s used to it. He hands them over with a sheepish smile, and she’s pleased to find a pair of woolly socks folded in with them.

In the common room he preemptively turns around so she can change, but she just kicks off her heels and yanks the trousers up under her unzipped skirt, stepping out of it as soon as she’s decent.

So much better, even if Aaron Holt’s jogging bottoms don’t reach her ankles.

The common room’s as etched into her memory as any other down here, but for her the couches hadn’t usually been in this configuration, positioned next to each other, in front of the TV. During her first year and after Craig washed out, her cohort divided into, depending on how you counted it, either two or two-and-a-half cliques: Yasmin and Julia and their sponsors; Christine and Paige and Victoria and their sponsors, although mostly it had been Indira who spent social time with them; and Jodie and her sponsor, Donna, who were partially attached to Christine’s group but who increasingly spent their time alone together. They had the sofas up against opposite walls, with a cluster of cushions, books, discarded mugs and other detritus surrounding each one, each their own separate social area. If you wanted to watch TV, you went and sat at one of the tables. It hadn’t really been out of enmity, since that sort of ebbed and flowed as the year went on; the two groups had just been too different, too unable to understand each other.

Nowadays she wonders if they were, in fact, too similar. If she was too much like Christine; if Julie was too much like Paige. There’s a reason she’s second choice after Christine to talk to Aaron. Too damn alike.

She gets comfortable on one of the couches and stretches out her legs and Aaron does likewise, only he also pulls up a bean bag so he can elevate his feet, and she stifles a laugh; her basement wasn’t anywhere near as bean-bag-centric as this one appears to be.

“I read your file,” she says, and he flinches.

“We don’t need to go over that stuff,” he says.

“And we won’t. But you should know that I read it, and I know everything… and that I get it.” Hidden in her lap, she clenches a fist. From nostalgia to self-disgust in ten seconds flat. “And I hate that I get it, because I don’t enjoy thinking about what I did to end up here. But it’s almost definitely helpful for you to talk to someone who was in more or less your exact position relatively recently, and that’s me, so here I am. You could ask Maria to set you up with Christine when she gets back, if you like, since she’s like the shorter, more nervous, whiter version of me.” She laughs. “I was going to add ‘less neurotic’ to that list, but I honestly think that one would go to the judges.”

The boy rolls his hands around themselves. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

Adorable. “You’re sweet, like I said. But you need to hear this, because it’ll help you get to one of the harder truths we all have to deal with, sooner or later: we’re not unique. Growing up the way we did, as a boy who is fucking bad at it, who acts out for approval and for self-esteem, but who never actually gets either so acts out all the harder, is rather mundane. Dorley Hall could take in a hundred guys like us every year—” she points from him to her and back again, “—and still have spares, and then it’d be even more clear: we’re all fucked up, and we’re all fucked up in rather the same way.”

He looks even more uncomfortable. “Weird to hear you call yourself a guy.”

“Don’t get used to it. The point is, reading your file was like reading my file with the names changed.”

“What did you do?”

She gives him her professional smile, the one she uses when her boss stands too close to her. “Made life difficult for a lot of women. More than that, I’m not going to tell you. Not because I don’t want to — though I really do not — but because it’s not all that important. What’s important is what came before.” She shuffles her shoulders, gets comfortable in the couch cushions. “I grew up in a village near Thelingford. Close to Vicky, actually, though we never met before Dorley. It was a tiny village, and I was the only Iranian girl—” She stops herself, guards her laugh with her hand, and shrugs at his scrutiny. “Not a girl back then, obviously,” she says. “Consider that a little preview; in less than a year, talking about your past is going to be really confusing.”

“I’ve been talking with Steph about her school days; I’m used to it.” He smiles. “She kept calling herself he and Stefan like it was a fucking Hail Mary, you know? Like she was admitting to some great sin, like growing up as a boy — or faking being a boy — was something she had to make sure I never forgot she did, and I got a bit fucked up about it, actually. Had to kiss her until she stopped talking and then make her promise to stop bloody doing it.”

Yasmin bites her lip. Too much like what Julia used to do for her, once they moved up to the second year and had truly begun to embrace and explore their new selves; each other. Julia said she wanted her, wanted Yasmin, not the litany of confessions attached to a name and a body that didn’t even matter any more.

“Well done,” she says vaguely.

He shrugs. “I don’t like it when she hates herself,” he says.

Has it really been only two months since the two of them met? Remarkable. “Where was I?” she asks rhetorically, wanting to move on. Aaron lets her. “Right. Yes. My tiny village, and my family being the only Iranian family around. And in that situation, as a teenager — as a teenage boy — you’re under pressure, and pressure to fit in. But you can’t ‘fit in’ when you’re different and everyone knows it. You have to do more than that. You have to be—” she grimaces, “—cool. Do you know, Aaron, how tragic it is when a dorky teenage boy tries to be cool?” His expression matches hers. “Ah. Of course you do.”

She used to feel like the village of Medsham, the whole village and everyone in it who mattered even a little, revolved around the pool club. It was the most important place there; everything else was just an accessory to it. A famous retired guy from some punk band played there occasionally, that’s how important it was. Of course, viewed with Yasmin’s eyes it was actually nothing more than a squat, dingy building with a handful of pool tables and a bar that was okay selling to underage drinkers, but the boy she’d been was enamoured with it. The pool club was everything, and what the guys at the pool club thought of him was the most important thing of all.

He’d been underage when he started going there. The club was on a direct line between the school in Thelingford and his house in Medsham, and every time he walked past it he became more curious about it, especially when the guys hanging out on the bench out front, smoking and drinking, would yell out at him. He flinched away from them at first, because it was too much like when some of the boys at school had targeted him, but after a while he learned they didn’t mean anything by it, that they hassled everyone the same way.

That was what they said, anyway.

One time, one of them jokily suggested he join them, and in the spirit of inquiry — and even more in the spirit of not wanting to go home yet — he did, and that was that. He became a fixture there after school. They taught him to play pool, and though they found it funny when he missed his shots, they let him keep trying until he became first good, then really good. They gave him his first taste of beer — real beer, they said; locally brewed ale, not any of that imported German shit — and of gin, whisky and whiskey, cider, snakebite and black, and anything else he showed an interest in. They gave him his first cigarettes. They even provided a place to go when things at home became difficult; and again, when things at home ended. They let him be one of them.

“The condition,” she says, pointing at Aaron with her near-empty coffee mug, “was that to be one of them I had to be more like one of them than any of them were. I couldn’t be the first one to pass out drunk, I couldn’t be the first one knocked out at pool; you know what I mean. And you can keep that up for a while, especially when it helps you deal with the bullshit elsewhere. It was easier to deal with school because I felt above it all. I had other friends. Cooler friends. Older friends. Everyone else was just a kid.” She sniffs and shrugs. “Of course, actual friends wouldn’t have got me to do the things they got me to do. I’m glad I’ll never have to see any of those fuckers ever again.” She looks down at her cleavage. “Mind you, if they ever saw me again, I’d be one of their marks, I expect.”

“You’re really not going to tell me what you did, are you?”

She looks at him sharply enough that whatever further comments he’s been preparing fizzle out. “You’ve always done what’s easy,” she says. “I know, because I see a lot of myself in you, and that’s exactly what I did, too. That’s something I had to learn here: how to do the hard things. How to do the things that require effort every day, effort which might not pay off for months. Like you, I decided that I wanted to change — although I was nothing like as early as you — but then I got disheartened because it didn’t happen. I was still me, still the person who got sucked into all that stupid shit. But I’m down here now to tell you—” and she steps up from the couch and over to him, crouches down in front of him, takes his hand, “—from one easily led complete fuckup to another, it’ll happen. Don’t panic. Work on it but don’t force it. Don’t try to copy Steph’s progress right away, because she’s always going to be ten steps ahead of you because of who she is. Just be you.”

“That’s the problem,” he says, trying to snatch his hand away. “I don’t want to be me.”

“Actually,” she says, releasing his hand, “you do. I think you want to be you more than anything. You want to be the person you could have been without all the bullshit, yes?” He’s frowning but he’s receptive. “That’s what I wanted, too. And that’s what I eventually became. But it takes time, and it takes work — even the ‘drag them into girlhood kicking and screaming’ method requires something of you eventually — and more than anything else it takes understanding yourself. Picking out the parts of yourself that are real and not just more of the bullshit. Think of this as another shot at adolescence. It actually is, in many ways, since the basement can be a lot like a very small residential school and your body really is going through a whole lot of changes. Your first adolescence wasn’t quick, was it? And was it easy? No. You’re growing up all over again, as someone kinda new and kinda not, and you can’t rush these things.”

Aaron pushes himself up on the sofa cushions, sits up a bit more straight, and crosses his legs under him. He looks like he’s thinking so she doesn’t say anything else, just waits for him to finish getting comfortable and sits next to him on his couch.

“It’s Yasmin, yes?” he says eventually.

“Yes.”

“…How did you pick it?”

She laughs. “You’re thinking about names already?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Well,” she says, smiling conspiratorially at him, “I tell everyone it was a great-grandmother’s name — and it was — but I actually got it out of a movie.”

“Which movie?” he asks quickly.

“Sorry, Aaron,” she says, “but I’m taking that secret to the grave.”

He laughs with her, and she’s glad his mood’s come along for the ride. He’d been invested in her story, and she could tell, though he downplayed his reaction, how close to home some aspects of her old life hit for him. She hopes he’ll think about it, draw more comparisons between the two of them and maybe see himself in her a little. He’s going to be a girl or he’s going to wash out, and Yasmin might be biased but she thinks being a girl is by far the better option, and the sooner he starts actively imagining a future for himself, the less likely he is to catastrophically fail.

Besides, the little weasel is cute. She can see why Stephanie likes him. She squints at him, pictures him with a full year’s hormone therapy and maybe a little facial surgery, and suppresses her smile: she’s going to be so pretty.

Pippa comes by after a while with more coffee, interrupting their conversation, and for Aaron it seems like it signals the end, because he starts looking around himself. Probably wondering where Steph is, or Maria; wanting to get away from the intimidatingly pretty lady with the horrifyingly relatable stories.

He drinks his second cup of coffee quickly, but when he’s almost done he asks, “Yasmin, are you happy?”

A serious question deserves a serious answer. “Happiness… is not a function of transition at Dorley Hall. Most of us are happy, for sure, and all of us are happy we’re not the people we used to be.” She sips at her coffee, pretends to think it over; she’s talked this over with Julia many times and her thoughts on it are almost pat. “Happiness is something you have to find for yourself. For Dorley girls and cis girls. For trans girls. Even men. It can’t be given to you; you know this already. But what I learned here, what I gained, what I was given… was the capacity for happiness. For contentment. I was encouraged to become someone who understood herself.” She snorts, bitter. “Someone for whom the act of understanding herself was no longer deeply appalling. Someone with potential, replacing someone who had none.”

“Yes, but are you happy?”

She smiles for him one more time. “I’m working on it.”

 

* * *

 

It’s the same enormous house, and even from the car she can tell it’s mostly empty. It’s the same long driveway, lined with potted plants and braced on both sides by lawn. It’s the same street, where every plot is divided by a high brick wall and a cloud of tastefully varied foliage.

But the house looks even colder and less alive than she remembers, and the plant pots around the driveway are empty, and the lawn is unmowed and the trees and bushes are wild and unkempt.

The agreement was that she wait in the car while Paige and Indira go to the door. She can get out her phone and she can zoom all the way in with the camera and she can behave like a suspicious creep but she has to wait in the car. So, naturally, when she sees movement in the kitchen window, Christine leaps out of the rear door and runs to join Paige and Indira, too late for them to stop her, too late even for a reprimand from her former sponsor, because the front door is opening and, suddenly, here’s her mother.

She has pictures of her in the surveillance packets, pictures in which she looks frail and tired and old, and up close she can still see all that, but it’s modified by motion, by the smile that spreads across her mother’s face, by the hands that prop themselves on her mother’s hips, by her voice. She seems… okay. Not brilliant, not by any stretch, but she’s not the gaunt wreck Christine had been half-expecting. And she always did love to get visitors, if they were the right sort.

Christine almost catches her eye, and shuffles behind Paige a little more. She lets Indira do the talking, running quickly through the script they workshopped together: they are adopted sisters, checking out the neighbourhoods near where their parents are considering buying a house.

“Daddy’s so naive,” Indira’s saying, chattily. She can play the innocent and indulgent daughter to perfection; those acting classes paying off. And Aasha loves it when her daughter bamboozles people. “He thinks that just because a neighbourhood is rich, that means it’s safe! But—” and here she looks briefly around and then leans in, lowers her voice, brings Christine’s mother into her confidence, “—not everyone is the right kind of person, even if they do have money.” Dira sniffs disdainfully, as if mere money can be a reliable indicator of worth, and Christine’s mother nods.

That was one of the things they discussed: Christine’s father’s always been an arrogant prick, so convinced of his own value that if someone questioned him for any reason he’d likely as not laugh in their face. But her mother was always different. She worried about what people thought of her, of her house and the way she kept it — or paid to have it kept — and she was deeply concerned, always, about what people thought — Christine’s hand tightens around Paige’s — about her son. The son who did such terrible things, and then vanished.

She cared what people thought of her son. She never seemed interested in what her son thought about himself.

Careful, Christine. Be kind to yourself.

It’s a lever. Indira’s including Christine’s mother in her estimation of the right kind of person, and Christine’s mother is reflexively including Dira in return.

Christine’s mother starts her reply by evaluating her direct neighbours. She talks up their charitable contributions, the lovely meatballs they brought to the harvest festival four years ago, and how she hears they still attend neighbourhood watch meetings every week, but something’s not right, and it doesn’t take Christine long to spot it: everything’s past tense. Her mother’s not describing anything recent.

Nothing, she realises, from the last two or three years.

The conclusion that follows, moments later, is inescapable: Christine left, and her mother cut herself off from everything and everyone.

Just her and Dad.

In the big empty house.

With dust in the crannies of the skirting board and dead trees in the garden.

Mum’s alone.

She looks at her mother’s face again, and it’s the wrong move because Mum looks right back and as their eyes meet the image of Dad striking her, over and over for years, is almost overpowering, and yet there are no bruises anywhere she can see; even the broken red veins in her cheeks, the ones Christine had come to think were natural, something she might develop herself one day, are gone. Did she really always have red cheeks because Dad used to slap her there?

Mum asks, “Sweetheart, are you okay?”

Are you okay, Christine?

She wants nothing but to take her mother’s hand and drag her away, deposit her in the car, return and fill a suitcase and take her… somewhere. Anywhere. She can hear a faint hum in the background, almost drowned out by the distant sound of a television, and she’ll bet anything it’s from the machines around Dad’s bed, and it’s the perfect opportunity: leave! He can’t stop you! Leave! Why don’t you leave?

“She’s our newest sister,” Paige says, pulling on Christine’s hand, while Indira encloses Christine’s shoulders with a loving arm, “and it’s sometimes difficult for her. She—”

“My mum,” Christine says quickly. “She died.” There’s an inevitability to this; it’s like a car accident in motion, too late to stop. Later she’ll probably be thankful that her voice and mannerism training was so thorough and the changes from hormones and facial surgery significant enough that she really does seem like a completely new person (a completely new and completely perfect person, as Dira always says), but for now there’s only what needs to be said. “My Dad died, too, but he was the bad one. My whole family, gone in an instant.” Her Dad’s arm, crossing with hers, as she makes one final attempt to be a fucking man about it before the walls come crashing down. “I know you shouldn’t say that about a parent. That he was bad, I mean. People always said he tried his best. But he wasn’t trying. He just… did things, and he was so appallingly fortunate that they always seemed to work out for him. Until the end. But Mum… She took his side and I never wanted her to but she always did.” Mum’s in a bed in the hospital/in an armchair at the hospice/drinking tea in the conservatory and her son/daughter/whatever is trying to talk to her but she won’t listen, and now Christine’s thinking back she remembers something she never did before: fear. Fear in her mother’s eyes, in her demeanour. Fear burned into her soul. “I don’t think she even knew why she took his side, but she did, and I couldn’t bear it, so I left. And while I was away, she died. They both did. And I keep thinking, if I’d stayed, would I have changed anything? Could I have helped?”

She always expected, if ever she saw her mother again, to react with either uncontrollable rage or inconsolable sorrow. She should be screaming! She should be crying! What is this? Why can’t she stop just… talking?

“I love my new family,” she says, monotone and heartbroken, “and they love me, and I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. But when I look at— when I— Shit. Sorry.” She is crying now, and Paige wordlessly hands her a tissue. Christine dabs at her eyes with it. “When I remember what I used to have, when I remember my mummy, I feel selfish.” She laughs without humour, the spell breaking. “I’m sorry. You don’t need this.”

And Christine’s mother does something she never really did after Christine became a teenager, after she became the second man of the house: she steps over to where Indira and Paige are holding her and she cups Christine’s cheek with her hand and she says, “Why don’t you come inside and I’ll put on a pot of tea, and we’ll get you all fixed up?”

When her mother’s hand comes away it’s wet, and Christine understands suddenly where she is and what she said and who she said it to, and she can’t hold any of it back any more, and she’s helped into the house she grew up in, step by wounded step, by her sister, and her lover, and her mum.

 

* * *

 

“Theresa, my girl!”

He’s started saying that. Trevor doesn’t know if he thinks it’s funny or what, but Jake’s attitude towards him continues to deteriorate, from his original vaguely sympathetic but ultimately callous amusement to something much more dangerous, something that really genuinely scares him.

“Not my name,” he snaps.

“It should be,” Jake says, closing the front door of the bungalow behind him and throwing a rucksack on the floor. “Pretty little thing like you shouldn’t be called ‘Trevor’, right?”

Trevor laughs. Forces it, to try and annoy him, goad him into making a mistake. “‘Pretty’? I have mirrors, Jake. I look like a cross between me and my sister, and not the good bits of either of us.”

“Would you prefer ‘fuckable’?” Jake says. He opens the blinds to all the windows, lets the light in from all angles, makes it harder for Trevor to ignore his reflection in the bolted-to-the-wall mirror that’s not quite opposite the couch.

“I’d prefer Trevor,” he says. “Or Trev.”

“Well, ‘Trev’, you and I have got jobs to do today. You’re getting a visitor later on and that means you have to look presentable and so this—” Jakes been edging closer to Trevor the whole time he’s been talking, and he suddenly lunges at him, only to flick at the messy beard Trevor’s been growing, “—has got to go.”

They’re going to give him a razor blade? He can fucking use a razor blade. “Oh?” he says, innocently.

“‘Oh?’” Jake mimics in bad falsetto. “I know exactly what you’re thinking because I’d be thinking it, too, except I wouldn’t be fucking pansy enough to get myself stuck in your position. No, I’m going to shave you, and you’re going to sit still and let me.”

Trevor backs up. “Touch me, Jake, and I’ll kill you.”

“Darling, you couldn’t hurt me on your best day, and I think your best days are behind you, don’t you? So be a love and behave.” The arms of the couch are bare metal bars, and Trevor’s been wondering why. Jake provides the answer, taking from his rucksack a straight razor and accessories, a towel, and two pairs of handcuffs. “Spread ’em,” Jake says.

Reluctantly, Trevor holds his arms out to their fullest extension and allows Jake to cuff each wrist to the couch. Jake grins lopsidedly at him, then walks around behind the sofa and pushes it out into the room, creating a space for him to stand behind. Trevor tries to look around, to see what he’s doing, but Jake puts both hands on his forehead and pulls him back until he’s leaning into the cushion and looking up. Holding him still with one hand, Jake applies shaving cream with the other, and then readies the straight razor.

Trevor can’t take his eyes off it.

“Don’t worry, Theresa, I’m good at this; I used to do my dad.”

 

* * *

 

Christine clearly expects her mother to lead them through to the living room, because she starts walking in that direction, towards the open archway at the other end of the hall, and Indira has to tug on her hand to get her to switch directions. Christine’s still running on whatever it was that had taken her over on the porch, because it takes her a moment to get it, to wake up, and she corrects for her mistake with a frown.

Indira checks, but it doesn’t seem like Christine’s mother noticed.

The kitchen, when Christine’s mother opens the door and bustles them all inside, looks exactly like Indira expected. The house itself is one of those Edwardian jobs, all brick and bay windows, and she’s used to them being fitted out a certain way, with the kitchens taking pride of place, and Christine’s old house is no exception: lavish fittings, modern appliances, acres of prep surface, and a rack of pots and pans full to bursting. There’s a gas stove with a couple more pans discarded on top, and Christine’s mother clears them away as they enter.

“I’ve been teaching myself to cook,” she explains, with the same blush Indira’s seen a thousand times on her daughter. “I have a lot of time to myself these days, you see, and, can you believe it, I never knew how! Not really.” She shakes her head. “We used to get deliveries from a service, because… Well. Richard worked late and our son was never home and it was just easier to have someone else do it. How things change. Now, why don’t you—” she takes Christine’s hand, “—sit yourself down here, and I’ll put the kettle on.”

Christine allows herself to be sat, and as soon as her mother’s looking away Indira sits next to her, squeezing her hand under the table. Paige sits on her other side and, Indira would have bet a hundred pounds, already has Christine’s other hand in hers.

“Thank you,” Christine says, “Mrs…?” It was supposed to be Paige who asked for Christine’s mother’s name, should they happen to get invited inside, but they’ve been veering off script ever since Christine came running up behind them and Indira’s been reacting more slowly than she expected. It’s too easy for her to give Christine the benefit of the doubt, even when she gets herself invited into her own mother’s kitchen!

Christine’s mother’s shoulders tense, and she doesn’t turn around when she answers, just concentrates on filling the kettle from a large filter jug. “Please, call me Helen.”

Christine says, quietly, “Thank you, Helen,” and her hand stiffens in Indira’s.

Christine’s mother — Helen — leans on the counter while the kettle boils and looks at them, her gaze flicking from girl to girl, and Indira’s heart thumps so loudly she wonders if anyone else can hear it. Christine’s here and her mother’s looking right at her and is this going to be a problem?

Shit. Christine was one of the girls who really blossomed on estrogen, who had relatively subtle FFS, and Indira’s realising that, yes, Christine really does look just like the sister she never had; or, to put it another way, she looks an awful lot like her mother. Too much for them to claim coincidence.

This is why I wanted you to stay in the bloody car, Teenie!

Her fault, probably. Christine always did have a bit of a rash streak. Isn’t that how Stephanie ended up in the bloody basement in the first place? The trip down here was a good idea and she’s been able very nearly to watch her sister’s open wounds close up as she walks around, as she tells them stories about her past, as she places herself squarely and firmly back in her life. But this was too far, this was a mistake, and, worse, she’s pretty sure Christine knows it…

Hold on.

She’s having an idea.

Indira lets the conversation go on around her while she thinks.

“I’m so sorry about your family,” Helen’s saying to Christine as she fills the teapot. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

And Indira’s distracted from her thoughts for a second as her sister looks her mother in the eye and says, levelly and without a hint of the emotions that are starting to hurt Indira’s fingers, “Christine.”

“That’s a lovely name. And I know how you feel, Christine. I lost someone, too. Not quite as recently as you have, I think, but I’m still trying to get used to it. I’m afraid I became a bit of a recluse even before Richard’s turn for the worse.” She takes a quick, decisive breath, a sort of huff, a noise and action which when Indira’s mother makes it indicates she’s about to commence a displacement activity. Immediately she starts filling mismatched mugs with tea and placing them on the table, and Indira makes a note to visit home again very soon. With Christine. “I had a son,” Helen says, when she’s sat down. She’s still looking intently at Christine.

“What happened to him?” Christine asks.

“Killed himself, I’m sorry to say,” Helen says. “My fault.”

Paige says, quickly, to preempt Christine’s reaction, “I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“Oh, it was. I’m very sure. The police, they said he disappeared, but…” Helen smiles. “This is the part where, on the television, the good and dutiful mother says, ‘I know my son,’ but that is unfortunately the point. I never did. Oh, maybe when he was younger and so was I, but I allowed myself to become distracted. I got absorbed in my own problems and my boy just… drifted away.” She points at Christine, and then directs the finger at Indira and Paige in turn. “Be careful about the kind of man you end up with, girls, or you might become so wrapped up in him that you miss entirely what your son — or daughter — is going through.”

Indira, feeling that as the token straight woman she ought to say something, says, “My sisters and my friends have all vetted my boyfriend.”

“Good,” Helen says, with feeling. “Make sure they keep doing that. Joan — one of my friends; she lives up in Glasgow now — warned me about Richard, warned me about me. I didn’t listen.” She turns her attention to Christine again. “You know, my son was about your age… How old are you, sweetheart?”

“Eighteen,” Christine lies, and Indira lets herself breathe normally for a moment; did she remember she’s supposed to be recently adopted, and that she needs to be young enough for that to have happened? Or did she just get lucky? They both know you can’t adopt a legal adult in this country or Indira’s own mother would have done so with Christine.

“Just a couple of years older…” Helen muses. “You look a little like him, you know.”

“Oh,” Christine says.

Well, that came slightly earlier than Indira expected. She doesn’t have a complete plan yet, but when has she ever? Worst case, they can read her in and hope.

“It’s true,” Indira says. “She does.” Christine’s head whips around to stare at her; Paige, the better actress, remains neutral. “We lied about why we came here, Helen. Sorry. We are adoptive sisters, and Christine here is our newest, but our family isn’t thinking of moving here. It’s… This is difficult to say.” She makes a show of turning to Christine. “Would you like to tell her, or should I?”

Christine, wide-eyed, says slowly, “I think it might be better if you do it.”

Indira nods and returns her attention to Helen. “We’re quite a well-off family, and our legal advice is quite… particular about new additions. We want to make sure our new sisters don’t have anything in their past that could be used to hurt them, you see, or to hurt us, through them. Not so we could discard them, you understand; just so we can be prepared. So our lawyers conducted a thorough audit, went through every document. We adopted her before it was done — she would have turned eighteen before the process finished had we waited — so we’re only just finding out now.” She’s found that when you’re trying to convince someone of a lie, adding irrelevant little details helps a lot. If you just come out and say it, you’re less believable. “Christine’s birth father, it turns out, wasn’t her biological father. He was… um… How should I say this?”

“He was impotent,” says Paige, who’s guessed where Indira’s going with this.

“Paige!” Indira snaps, suppressing her grin. “Yes. My very rude sister is correct. Christine was conceived via donor. Her birth parents never told her, and when we found out, we started looking.”

“It was Hamish, wasn’t it?” Helen says. Whatever ideas she might have been entertaining, she seemed to discard them as Indira spoke, and now she’s leaning her elbows on the table and smiling. She doesn’t look puzzled any more; she looks wistful. “Bloody Hamish. Christine, sweetheart, was your family— your birth family, sorry, were they American?”

Christine jolts into life. “Half and half. Dad took a job there. Met mum. Moved back here when I was three.”

“My brother,” Helen explains, “Hamish. Older than I. Went to America to find himself. Said he was going to be famous. Used to send us all sorts of silly messages about what he was getting up to. Then he got hit by a car. Jaywalking, the American authorities called it.” She shrugs. “He never said he donated you know what—” she says it with a wrinkle in her nose that’s so quintessentially Christine that Indira has to stop herself from laughing, “—but it doesn’t surprise me. Dad refused to support him while he was out of the country so he was always struggling for money. Christine; we’re family, then?”

Christine nods slowly. “I think we are, yes.”

Indira does her best to not look surprised. She didn’t know about Hamish; she’d planned to imply but never state that Christine’s father had been the donor, and rely on the fact that the man is supposedly not terribly verbal and not expected ever to be so again to carry them through.

“We didn’t come here to get anything out of you,” Paige says. “We don’t need money or anything like that. She just wanted to see what you looked like.” She nudges Christine with her elbow. “She was supposed to wait in the car.”

“Oh, I didn’t think that for a second,” Helen says, reaching across the table.

Christine untangles her fingers from Indira and Paige so she can take her mother’s hand. “I just wanted to see,” she says.

A moment passes between them, and Indira feels that in that moment anything could happen, that Christine could confess it all, that Helen could throw them out, that bloody aliens could descend and take them all prisoner, and then it ends, and mother and daughter release each other and sit back.

“I’m glad you came,” Helen says. “It’s good to know there’s a piece of him out there.” She laughs. “Just remember to look both ways before you cross the road and you’ll do better than him.”

“I— I will.”

They manage small talk for a little while, and then Christine asks to use the toilet. Helen gives directions to the downstairs cloakroom, and Christine departs; to explore, presumably. When the kitchen door closes, Helen says, “She really does look a lot like him. A lot like me, too, I suppose. And an awful lot like… I’m sorry.” She dabs daintily at her eyes. “I shouldn’t burden you with this.”

“It’s okay,” Indira says. “If you need to talk about it…”

“She looks like my son,” Helen says flatly. “If he hadn’t taken his own life, if I’d been more attentive, if Richard had been a bit less, well, himself…” She sighs. “I made a dreadful mistake, girls, and my son paid the price. It’s been over two years and I’m still not even close to forgiving myself. But you don’t want to hear that,” she adds quickly, “and neither will she. Do you think she’d agree to visit again? I miss having someone her age around.” Before Indira can answer, Helen continues, “I’m thinking of fostering, actually. Richard’s sick, terribly sick, and there’s not long to go now.” She says it in the same matter-of-fact manner she used to discuss her son’s suicide. “Not long at all. And I’m going to need something to do, and I have this house and all this time and… well, I can’t say I really miss being a mother because I never really was one, but I’d like to do it right.” She smiles brightly. “I think I’d be good at it.”

“I think Christine would love to visit you again,” Indira says. “She misses her family, even though she wasn’t very happy while she lived with them. I think she longs for that kind of connection.”

“She gets lonely,” Paige says.

“Then I would love to help with that,” Helen says.

They make their excuses when Christine returns, exchanging phone numbers — Christine gives her the number to her real phone, Indira notes, and not the one attached to her secure, programme-monitored line — and promises to keep in touch, and Christine doesn’t breathe out, doesn’t relax her shoulders, until the BMW’s halfway out of Brighton and heading home.

“You okay?” Paige asks her.

“My room’s still there,” Christine says, staring out of the window. “Untouched. Even the Deep Space Nine poster with the rip in it. It’s all there. Like it’s waiting for me.” She shakes herself. “Sorry. Yes. I’m okay. I waited outside the door a bit while you were talking. I know what she said. I’m… glad she’s surviving. She looks better than she did in the surveillance pictures. I hope she gets to foster. And I hope she’s a better foster mother than she was mother to me.”

“We have some connections in the foster system,” Indira says. “We can keep an eye on things, if you’d like. I can ask Auntie Ashley about it.”

“Thanks,” Christine says absently.

“Do you think you’ll visit her, like she asked?” Paige says.

“Probably.”

“Teenie?” Indira asks. “You’re really okay?”

“Yes.” Christine nods, seeming to shake herself, to ground herself, to return fully to the present. “Yes, I am. Seeing her, seeing the old house, it was… intense. But I’m glad we did it.”

“We’ll have words about how we did it later, young lady,” Indira interjects. She’s careful to sound playful, so Christine knows she’s not in too much trouble.

“She’s not my mum any more,” Christine says, “and I don’t want her to be. But it’s good that she’s moving on. Or thinking about moving on. Or whatever. I’ll visit her, I’ll be her long-lost relative, and I’ll help check on her foster kids, if she goes through with it, and that’s all I’ll be.” She laughs. “Did you see her face whenever she mentioned Dad? I never thought I’d see her as ready for him to fucking croak as I always was.”

“Did you see him?” Paige asks. “When you were looking around?”

“Yeah,” Christine says. “I saw him all right. He looks dead as hell. That’s the other reason I’m glad we came: it gave me the chance, one last time, to give the old bastard the finger.”

Paige laughs, and Indira checks the road ahead to make sure she’s not going to need to shift gears any time soon, and reaches back with her left hand. Christine reaches forward and they touch for a few seconds. Not long enough for Indira — when they’re home she’s going to want to hug Christine for long enough to become very annoying — but enough for the reassurance she craves, that her sister is as she appears to be: healthy, happy, healing.

Atta girl.

 

* * *

 

“Val. You ready?”

“I still don’t see why I’m the one who has to do this.”

“Because Dorothy’s more likely to have me killed than she is you, isn’t she?”

“You really think so?”

“Of the two of us, who is nicer to look at?”

“Point taken.”

Jake, the older and even less pleasant soldier, came in through the side entrance ten minutes ago, the one that connects tangentially to the Run, the one he would use if he was trying to be subtle but not actively to be sneaky, and now he’s replacing Callum on watch upstairs; Dorothy’s taken to having at least one of them on guard any time she isn’t locked in her suite for the night, having presumably realised that Valérie and Declan could cause quite a problem for her if they decided to team up.

Not that that’s likely ever to happen. Declan with his faculties returned to him is far more annoying than Declan catatonic. In an ideal world, Valérie would walk out of here and leave the whole damn lot of them to enact their various pleasures and frustrations on each other; in a less ideal world, Frankie would come, too.

“Did you decide how you’re going to distract Callum yet?” Val asks.

“Yeah,” Frankie says. “I’m going to teach Declan to bake.”

Val laughs sharply. It’s not a bad diversion: they’re supposed to be teaching the boy how to perform Val’s duties, after all, and while Dorothy has directed Val and Val alone to the task, she’s unlikely even to comment on Frankie pitching in. She seems to hardly notice Frankie a lot of the time; Val’s envious.

Five minutes later, she’s leaving by the same door Jake used.

There are cameras all over the Run; Valérie hates being out here. She’s used to being watched, used to being constantly assessed and critiqued and drooled over, but it’s one thing to be on camera when you’re cooking dinner or performing on request and another to be caught where one ought not to be. Those were the times she was disciplined, and she doesn’t think she’d have the patience to humour it any more; if Dorothy comes in with the riding crop, like Smyth-Farrow used to, she thinks she might bite her.

Shouldn’t be a problem. Frankie promises she can delete the files later, and she also insists that no-one really looks at the footage. There’s only the six of them, and of that number only two are even officially guarding the place. No time to sit and scrub through surveillance, and no real impetus to, either; it’s not exactly a large operation.

Seven of them now, assuming this mysterious person Frankie swears exists is even real.

She tries to ignore the cameras and walks briskly by the fence. It’s mid-afternoon and the sun’s low enough that there’s not much light, but not so low that the spotlights have come on; she’s about as hidden as she can reasonably expect to be. If she wants to return to the house under the same favourable circumstances, she’d better be quick about this.

The door to the bungalow opens quietly, and Val takes in an ordinary residential property: one large main room, with kitchen towards the back and a living area in the middle; several doors leading off, most of them open to bedrooms and a bathroom; a mirror given pride of place in the main room next to the television; and a figure on a couch glaring up at her.

He’s wearing a dress — a curiously conservative one both for this house and for the woman he’s presumably wearing it for, but a dress nonetheless — and there’s a pair of high heels kicked off near his bare feet. He’s got the same residual swelling Declan has and his breasts look compressed under the dress, so he’s probably wearing one of the support bras new implant patients are supposed to wear; very likely he’s had the exact same procedures as Declan, and at the exact same time. She’s caught him in the act of daubing blush on himself; there’s a foldable mirror on the coffee table in front of him, the kind with lights set into the frame, and he’s surrounded by the mess of a first makeup attempt gone wrong.

“Jesus Christ,” Val says. “Not another one.”

“Ah,” the man says, “I was told to expect a visitor. Is that you? Come to have some fun?”

Valérie closes the door behind her. “If you knew what you were asking,” she says severely, “you wouldn’t have asked that.” He frowns at her, confused, so she says, “No!”

“Then who are you and why are you here?”

Now that she’s closer she can see he’s managed to get the eyeliner on okay, but the blush is way too extravagant and the lipstick’s lopsided and he’s not covered up his beard shadow. He’s done a better job than Declan did this morning, but that’s hardly a surprise. Valérie could probably train a dog to apply makeup better than Declan, and with less whining.

“Not bad,” she says absently. “But not good, either. You’ll need to learn. Quickly.”

“Who are you?” the man repeats.

“You’re the newcomer,” Val says. “Who are you?”

“Trevor Darling, Peckinville Associates.” He scowls. “Though not any more. I think I’ve been declared dead. That’s what that dick Jake says, anyway.”

Val thinks quickly. They took Declan from Béatrice — from Elle — and Frankie didn’t know exactly how except that there was subterfuge involved. Is she looking at another victim of the same scheme? Some soldier who was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be?

Promising.

“Well, Trevor,” Valérie says, “I think very much that you and I are in the same boat.”

He looks her up and down and his frown deepens. “Say what you mean.”

She waves a hand at him. “They did that to you a month ago, am I correct? Or thereabouts?” He nods. She says, “They did it to me more than thirty years ago. Topped and tailed and sanded down and made to look as they please.”

“No,” he says. “No. Bullshit.”

“Yes,” she says, crouching down by the couch and starting to tidy up his makeup supplies. “No bullshit. I was taken when I was still a teenager, and I have been their performing bear since the late nineteen-eighties.”

“You’re like me?”

“Actually, it’s you who are like me. And I can tell you your future. Not exactly what it will entail, but the shape of it, the feel of it, the—” she allows a sneer to cross her face, “—smell of it. It will not be pleasant.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking away, letting her take the blush brush out of his limp hand, “I guessed that when Jake the Dickhead shaved me and laid out a dress for me and told me I need to make myself look pretty or there’ll be consequences.”

Valérie nods. “Not a life you would have chosen for yourself, no?” She’ll give him some pointers. Get him up to speed as quickly as she dares. Tell him what Dorothy expects so he can learn when to play along with it and when to subvert it. And then…

“Doesn’t sound like much of a life at all.”

“It is not,” she says. “So, Trevor Darling, what shall we do about it?”

 

* * *

 

He waits a while in the common room after Yasmin leaves. She offered him a hug before she left, and he accepted, and he realised as she held him that he expected her to feel different from Steph and from Maria and the other women who’ve hugged him; expected her to feel artificial somehow. Fake. Unreal. Because she was right: he really can see a lot of himself in her, and he doesn’t have to try hard to do so at all, and that’s…

Aaron doesn’t know how to feel about it. Not yet. It’s too new and too raw. But he sees her running from her school and from her home to the pool club and he sees himself escaping the boarding school to Elizabeth’s shop and the images blend. Yes, Elizabeth was uncomplicatedly kind to him whereas the older men at the pool club definitely had a more transactional relationship with the younger Yasmin, but the things they both ultimately went on to do… She never did specify, but Aaron can guess. The things a clever young mind can achieve when it absolutely, positively, definitely does not value itself at all.

Stephanie is wonderful and Maria is becoming like the older sister he never had and Pippa is sweet and even the other sponsors have been treating him well lately but Yasmin’s like him and that’s…

Yeah. That’s something. What, he doesn’t know. Not yet.

But she’s got a job, and a girlfriend who loves her, and she has a life, and there’s nothing artificial or fake or unreal about her, and that’s something, too.

Eventually his arse starts to fall asleep, and rather than rearrange himself again he leaps off the couch and tidies his clothes and heads back to the bedroom corridor, where the sounds of muffled chatter are coming from Steph’s room. The lock rolls over before he can knock, and as it swings open there’s Maria standing behind it, putting her phone away and smiling.

What the hell. He hugs her. She feels just the same as Yasmin. Except shorter.

“Good talk?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Useful?”

“Don’t know yet. I think, maybe?”

She squeezes him and steps back. “Take your time,” she says. And then she finger-waves at Steph and together she and Pippa leave and he’s there alone again with her, and he silently walks forward into her arms, accepts her soft and quick kiss, and together they sit down on her bed.

“What were you talking about?” he asks.

“Christmas,” Steph says. “There’s a thing on Christmas Eve. They want me to come.” She wrinkles her face up. “Booze. Food. A big fire. Pippa said it’s like the annual get-together of Dorley wine mums; I said I’d rather spend Christmas Eve with you.”

“Where is it? Upstairs?”

She nods. “The dining hall.”

“Behind lock and key, then? Safe, and stuff? Private?”

“Yes. Why?”

It’s a new idea but it grows more solid the more he thinks about it. “What if we both go? Together. Like, as a couple, maybe. I can ask Maria. She can keep an eye on me. You can keep an eye on me.”

Steph pulls away from him for a second so she can look at him properly. “You really want to?”

“They might not let me, but if they do, I want to.” He leans into her. “And I think it could be good for me. Helpful, you know? For what’s to come.”

He still doesn’t know how to be a girl. Still instinctively feels it’s probably impossible for someone like him. But Yasmin’s like him, and she did it, she made it. She likes herself. It’s not just that the people around her tell her she matters, tell her she’s real, tell her she’s got a future; she knows it. Inside. He wants that so he can become someone good enough for Steph. He wants that so he can make Maria proud. He wants that for himself.

God, he wants that.

 

* * *

 

Finally, everything’s going her way again. The new boy, Declan, showed up in full makeup and a rose-coloured pinafore to kitchen duty, cheeks burning with disgust and forced quite effectively by Frankie, she has to admit, to keep his ruder comments in check. She had Callum record the whole sorry effort on his mobile phone, for the resolution; the surveillance feeds are just ghastly for quality. She’d have had them upgraded to the new whatsit, 4K, but the man from Silver River gave her a quote and it was bloody shocking and that was it for that idea. She doesn’t have infinite money.

Not yet, anyway.

They’ll see her worth soon enough. They always do. She’s proved it, hasn’t she, time and again? A shame to have to, especially at her age, but the men are the ones with the money and the power and with that comes paranoia. They need her. Men like them always have.

It’s the women who do the dirty work, the dangerous work, who stick their hands in deep and get filthy. The real women, the ones who bleed and birth and bloody well die for this world, not the jumped-up fakes like Vincent Barbier. Or like Beatrice whatshername, the little tart who administrates Dorley Hall these days. So much better when he was David, when he was controllable; now he’s running around like he owns the place, thanks to Elle Lambert.

Hah. Ms Lambert’s got such a nasty surprise coming. The money trail’s so well hidden even the men at Silver River promise they couldn’t find it if they didn’t know exactly where to look, and God if it wasn’t satisfying to give Lambert a smack in the mouth. She’ll still be worrying about how she did it. She’ll be going to her sources, wasting money, giving herself ulcers.

Lambert’s an idiot, of course. She should never have kept Dorley Hall running, let alone allowed David to release the boys after! Fifteen years of boy-girls charging around the country with their fake documents. The whole circus is becoming far too bloody visible. People are noticing.

The men at Silver River say they’re ready to step in, should Ms Lambert and Peckinville miss a trick.

Three discreet knocks on her bedroom door. That’ll be Jake. Good boy. Enthusiastic. Ugly as sin, which is a shame; leaves him only one possible end. But, for now, useful. She saw a fellow sadist as soon as she laid eyes on him. Much like Karen, really, only likely less inventive. But an acceptable substitute until she returns.

He escorts her through the manor and out into the Run and over to the bungalow where their latest acquisition lives. A pain in the arse; she would have put him in the servants’ quarters, but she was told to keep him apart and so here he is. It’s not the worst thing, since there are benefits to isolation when it comes to acclimating the new boys, but she’s also supposed to be training him! She asked exactly who it is who shall train him, and was rather brusquely informed that that was her problem. Her problem indeed! Her tools are limited: she has two idiot soldiers, her most disappointing assistant from the old days, the boy Declan, and Vincent bloody Barbier!

Hmm. Maybe Vincent could be useful here.

No. Vincent shouldn’t be allowed access to him; he’s been quite feisty the last few days. Might have to be disciplined. It’ll be Frances, may God forgive her many inadequacies.

Inside the bungalow the soldier, Trevor, waits for her. On his feet. Good boy. Defiant. Proud. He stands the way they all do at first, as if they can masculinise themselves and their garments and their pretty new faces with a wide stance and set shoulders and clenched fists. But his eyes… Good God, his eyes.

So afraid.

He’s had time enough to examine himself properly, to look himself head to toe in every mirror, to understand exactly what’s been taken from him. She told him, of course, in great detail and with greater pleasure, but there’s no substitute for witnessing one’s fate with one’s own eyes. He knows what’s happening to him. He knows there’s no escaping it. He knows permanent alterations have already been made.

And he knows it’s her doing it to him.

Delightful.

There’s slack in his ankle chain, so she doesn’t step inside his reach. Instead she nods at Jake, who walks up to the boy, binds his wrists together behind his back and forces him to his knees, and as it always does the fear in the boy’s eyes intensifies. If he could get his hands free, if he could escape the man holding him down, she knows he would tear her to pieces and then turn his rage on Jake and then on himself.

But he cannot. He is bound. Controlled. Trapped, in the most complete way it is possible to trap someone, in a body they desperately wish to escape, in a body that is changing day by inevitable day into something they cannot abide or comprehend.

A curse escapes through his clenched teeth.

Goodness, she’s missed this. To think! She might have died without bending another arrogant young man to her will, without being energised by their rage and their shame. If the prospect of revenge, revenge against Elle, against the new regime at Dorley, against everyone who took from her, was enough to bring her back from the dead, then this man, this boy, this cowering creature, is enough to make her feel young.

Dorothy places a finger under the boy’s chin, twists his face from side to side.

“Beautiful,” she says.

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