by Harper Fox
“Kind of, even though they knew I could handle myself. They looked after me, when they could.”
“I bet you looked after them too. When you could.”
Jamie’s defensive mask shifted to new lines of pain. “Yeah, I did. But when I started my transition, those same guys... they couldn’t cope. My best mate Maz—he would’ve taken a bullet for me any day. But the next firefight we got into, he told me he didn’t have to. Not for another guy. So from then on, I was on my own.”
“Jesus. Were they all like that?”
“No. No, not at all. The army’s stance on transgender soldiers is fucking amazing, if you ask me, and they closed ranks round us even tighter after Trump had his tantrum last year. The officers were great. But my lads, the blokes I’d done front-line service with... They just didn’t get it. I changed but they didn’t. When you’ve been that close to someone in those circumstances...” He shook his head. “Anyway. I finished out my four years and I left. I don’t expect you to get it either. No civilian ever could.”
“You do have scars, though.”
“What?”
“You said you were glad you didn’t have to show Andrew Fenchurch your scars. Okay, you were never shot. But you do still have ’em.”
Jamie shuffled round on the bed to face him. He’d hung on to his T-shirt throughout their tumble. Now, slowly, he pulled it off over his head. He was neatly marked beneath each nipple with a red-brown stripe. “Here they are,” he said, so faintly that Silver could barely catch the words. “Here are my scars. I wish I could fuck you, Silver.”
Following him—listening, loving him, doing his job—was giving Silver whiplash. There were tears in the poor bastard’s eyes. “You can,” Silver told him, reaching out, glad when he didn’t flinch away. “Fingers are good. Hands. Fists.”
“I mean the way you fucked me.”
“Ah. In that case...” He grabbed his holdall from off the floor by the bed. “In that case, I’ve got just the thing you need.”
***
Wrong move. Somehow, after hundreds of seamless sessions with the trickiest of clients, Silver had stuck his big foot in it. The holdall he thought of as his box of tricks had failed him. If he’d had a wish to spend, a lantern and a genie instead of a leather bag, he’d have wished himself back playing chess in George’s hotel room. He sat up in bed, the beautiful strap-on dildo spread out across his lap, buckles gleaming. Jamie’s hunched back was turned to him. He’d buried his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” Silver said carefully. “That was crass of me. I didn’t mean to hurt.”
Slowly Jamie uncurled. “For fuck’s sake,” he rasped, and Silver got ready to jump, dodge or run, because George was the least transphobic guy in the world, and if he said watch your back, he’d have had good reason, and nothing to do with gender: Silver should’ve listened. “For fuck’s sake, man. I don’t want or need bottom surgery. I told you.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I didn’t do this—I didn’t make my transition—because I was lacking something. But here you are—my great white saviour, come to change my world with his magic dick.”
It wasn’t the time for a joke. Silver tried anyway. “You liked my magic dick well enough twenty minutes ago.”
“I did. It’s yours, on you. It’s fine.” He scrambled around, pounced suddenly to straddle Silver’s hips. “Christ, I get even get crap like this on my Facebook groups—from other trans men. If I don’t get a cock, I’m not legitimate. Don’t say you understand, because unless you’ve been through what I have, you can’t.”
His eyes were burning. Silver reached through veils of fear to brush the tears off his cheekbones. “I know,” he said. “I know I can’t. You can’t know what it was like growing up queer in Derby in the eighties, but I’m a cis man. My factory setting is gay, but I can and will fuck any consenting adult of my own species, so stick a label on that if you can. None of us can know. I am paid to listen, and if you want to talk more about all of this, go ahead.”
Silently Jamie shook his head. A hot tear landed on Silver’s belly. No.
“Okay. Then the only thing that matters to me here is... you’re a really attractive guy, and I’d like you to fuck me.” He held out the strap-on—heavy, long shapely dildo crafted for him by another grateful friend, supple leather harness swinging—and put it into Jamie’s hands. “So, for the purposes of our time together here, it’s not my dick at all, lover-boy. It’s yours.”
Chapter Seven
“What burns me most is when people say it doesn’t matter to them. Like, oh, I don’t see colour when they’re talking about race.”
The soldier had consented to lay his crew-cut head on Silver’s stomach. Silver would be friends with him yet, he thought, reaching down to scratch the velvety hair at the top of his skull, eliciting the kind of look kids give a tender, too-demonstrative dad: resentful, still wryly grateful that the old man cares. Friends before they left this room, at any rate. “People can be stupid,” he said. “They don’t mean to make it all about them—like, they’re so great and tolerant and you should be thrilled about that. They don’t mean to invalidate your whole life’s experience of prejudice from other people, even if that is the effect. Sometimes they just don’t know what to say.”
“Who’s asking them to say anything? You’re too tolerant, man. I’d settle for them shutting up and treating me the same as everyone else.”
Silver wanted to go home. Jamie had thrown a sweet fuck into him, amazingly tender for a maiden flight, but he was tired, and he hadn’t got turned on. One good thing about being done from the back: with a client too excited to reach around and check, he could fake a come and get things over with. “There are differences, though,” he said, folding an arm behind his head and staring up at the ceiling, where the colours of a city dusk were beginning to tarnish the sunlight. “Especially when it comes to treating women the same as men. A lot of it’s about biological males wanting to control who fathers their babies, I reckon. I met somebody recently...” He paused, surprised at himself, but there were so many somebodies that Jamie could hardly guess. “Someone I really liked. And if we’d got together, he’d have taken me with him to dinner parties, and if anyone asked, he’d have said, Silver used to be a sex-worker. He’s that kind of man. He’s shy, but I don’t think he’s scared of anyone, let alone their opinions. And people’s mouths would drop open, and they’d maybe be curious or a bit fazed. If he took a girlfriend along and said that about her...”
Jamie had turned his head to listen. His gaze was bright with the barbed pleasures of comprehension. “They’d pity him. They’d think he was a perv, or desperate. By the end of the night, somebody would’ve got drunk and tried to fuck the girl, like she was fair game. And that could happen to you too, but—”
“The dynamic’s completely different. If a woman comes at me, that’s one thing. It might be embarrassing, wrong, but I’m never gonna be afraid. If it’s a guy and I don’t like it, that simplifies things. I can punch him in the face.”
Trouble shadowed Jamie’s brow. “Not all the guys, Silver.”
“I’ve yet to come across one I couldn’t handle.” Sensing that this was the heart of the matter for Jamie, Silver let a few moments of traffic-whisper silence flow through the room. “How about you?”
Jamie ran a hand over his chest—the scars, the developing muscles. “I started T over two years ago. I was fit from the army anyway. I can handle most of ’em now.”
But not all. Silver hadn’t put the fingerprint bruises on the tops of his arms. “It’s good to be able to take care of yourself.”
“But that’s a side effect. I didn’t do any of this so I could... I dunno, get to a place where I could have male privileges, punch would-be rapists in the face, be thought of as just a bit of a lad instead of a slut if I like to sleep around.” He paused, surveying his new world so clearly that Silver could see it too. “Not so I could walk home on my own from the pub late at night, although that was a
bloody eye-opener. Or walk alone anywhere. I grew up in Brighton. Ask me how often I walked on the beach after dark, when I still had long hair and tits.”
Silver didn’t have to. He’d grown up with a sister, and seen for himself the division of that birthright freedom. You get house and garden, well-lit streets. I get those too—and everywhere else. He sat up. “Why did you do it?”
“You know, nobody ever asks me that? Like a train hit me or something, some fucking accident that they shouldn’t talk about in case it reminds me of the horror.”
“Tell me.”
Jamie sat up too. He crossed his legs, hitched close enough to Silver to look into his face. His lairiness dropped away, leaving the sweet-natured core of him wide open and revealed. “I wanted my body to match my brain, to look in the mirror and see someone I recognise. A body that tells the truth to the world about who’s inside. I... just wanted to be happy, I suppose.”
“Happy is good.”
“Yeah. So...” He rubbed his eyes fiercely, then suddenly raised his head. “So why the bloody hell am I still living with Lenny?”
“Lenny who bruises you. Who won’t let you go.”
“That’s right. You know what? Sod that.” Jamie sprang off the bed. He grabbed his T-shirt and the beautiful hand-crafted strap-on he’d put to such good use. “Thanks for the loan of your dick, man. That was fantastic. I might get one of my own one day—nothing permanent, though. I’m good the way I am.” He tossed the dildo onto the bed, set his hands on his hips. Bounced lightly on his heels, as if he could barely contain himself. “I am so... so fucking good. Bye, Silver. Take your time getting dressed. Post Jimmy’s keys back through the door when you leave.”
***
Despite the invitation, Silver didn’t hang around. You never spent more time than you needed on uncertain ground, unless by chance you’d run into a strange, diffident guy who made you feel at home anywhere: a hotel, a Mayfair street, a café with numbered days ticking out beneath urban shade. Of course there was always the chance that the guy himself felt like home—properly, for the first time in your adult life—but that was too sad, too desperate, and Silver pushed the idea out of his head as he dressed and packed up.
He hit the street a bare three minutes after Jamie, who was waiting at a bus stop outside the patisserie, jogging on the spot in impatience. A black cab appeared, and the young man checked his wallet, then took an athletic dive across traffic to flag it down. Silver wasn’t proud of helping end marriages in general, but this one was due for the chop. If Jamie could get it done on momentum, in a clean hard rush, so much the better.
Still, he was uneasy. He watched the cab out of sight, half-wondering if he ought to follow. Then he let the clatter and buzz of the street rise around him. Noisy reality, anchoring him in the wider world... If he started chasing after clients, doing the work of copper, counsellor, friend, he would be screwed.
And if following was bad, what price being followed? For God’s sake—there on the far pavement, framed by the outrageous claims of a Brexit billboard, was George Fenchurch. Drew must’ve given him the day off: he looked splendid, self-consciously casual in good jeans and a neat charcoal-grey summer jacket. Did he imagine the outfit was helping him blend in?
Maybe it would, to anyone but Silver. He forgot Jamie and his problems with instant totality. He allowed himself a second of pleasure, the moment before reality crashed in and told him there was no chance of coincidence, no way George had just happened to be here on the streets of Ladbroke Grove in time for Silver to get finished with a client. His heart sank like a rock. Why the fuck did such a bone-deep nice guy have to turn out to be a stalker?
He was rotten at it, too. He saw Silver, and his face gave a great helpless flash of recognition. Might as well have sent up a flare... Then he visibly remembered he was meant to be somewhere else—anywhere else but here—and he dodged behind a delivery van and disappeared.
Silver let him. He turned away, leaned on a lamppost and made a big show of checking his phone. He wanted a deep bath, a whisky and about ten hours’ sleep. More sharply, he wanted not to feel that he was reaching the end of things: his capacity to live the life he did, his faith in human nature. Waiting on his phone were three texts from the ambassador, each one more impatient than the last. Silver could meet him for their appointment that afternoon, or his valuable custom would go elsewhere, and Silver Fox Services would know why.
Annoyingly, the bastard was right. Silver had double-booked, or at least failed to spot an overlap. He was half an hour late already. In another unforgivable first, he’d allowed himself to think—just briefly over the last couple of nights, between the click of his bedside light and falling asleep—that if ever he did pack it all in, the man at the end of the line might be someone like George.
Chapter Eight
Silver took a week off. George’s effect on him turned out to be as dynamic as his own upon Jamie: he phoned Silver Fox and announced that he was done with the ambassador, who should probably be in jail for the way he treated his wife and kids, and definitely belonged on the agency’s list of abusers. His boss, who valued her golden eggs, chose not to argue with the goose, and so he picked up his car from the blindingly expensive visitor’s car park in the tower block and blazed out of the city in the sunset light.
He managed almost three days at home, in the smart, new-built, meaningless house he’d bought when his fortunes had improved. Hundreds of other precisely similar houses lined the streets around it, and that had suited Silver too. To be able to vanish from both sides of his world.
But there was nothing to do. He’d grown up in intimate, messy battles with the houses where he’d lived, learning—gender distinctions again!—to stand in for an absentee father with plumbing and electrical skills. He missed damp corners, peeling paint, the smell of other lives. He phoned Andrew Fenchurch, on the flimsy pretext of wanting some plans drawn up for an extension, and casually asked after Jamie. Drew, cheerfully indiscreet, had roared with laughter: Jamie was fine, and George too, no doubt thanks to Silver. If Drew had his time again, he’d train as a plumber, he would, or a vet, or... Silver listened, smiling, while he floundered around for a word. He sounded just like his brother when trying to dig himself out. Anyway, he said, Silver should pop into the office next time he was in town.
Silver promised to do so. While he was at his desk with the phone in his hand, he had a couple of other admin tasks to clear away. He unlocked a drawer, removed a leatherbound black book—not by any means little, not after this long on the game—and looked up a number or two at London Central Council.
He mowed his patch of lawn. Picked up a long-neglected guitar and several books, went out for dinner with a guy he’d been sporadically trying to romance. Ditched him before dessert hit the table, unable to think why he hadn’t done so before. On the third day he gave it up and packed a bag for Derby. He could stay with his sister, visit his nephews, who thought he was something hush-hush in the city and weren’t wrong.
Before he could leave, a phone beeped from across the room where he’d left it to charge. His second mobile, carried quietly in a hidden jacket pocket, disconnected entirely from his life as a silver fox. He hadn’t heard that two-tone summons in so long that he’d begun to wonder if his work in that other world was done. He took the phone off its cable and sank down onto the couch to read. The text was a series of code-words and numbers, meaningless to anyone but him.
He looked at his open bag. Not the magical leather one from whose depths intuition and specialised stockpiling so often allowed him to pull out the right toy for a client: just a plain carryall. The contents, minus presents for his sister, would do for a trip.
His kitchen had a drawer with reinforced sides and a sturdy lock. Silver took out of it what he needed, and locked up inside it the silver-fox phone. He changed out of the absurd Hawaiian shirt he wore to make his nephews laugh and groan at Uncle Sil. In front of the mirror, in jeans and a scuffed leather jacket, he ruffled
his hair out of its perfect cut, and then he turned away. He put the flash car into the garage, locked up the house and made his way down back streets to a parking lot by the railway line. The dusty, pollen-specked banger he drove out looked like a million others anywhere.
Silver disappeared.
***
Early afternoon, the sun high over roaring, buzzing London. Time for my daily brisk walk through the streets of Oak Vale. No designer tracksuit now, just the well-cut, comfortable clothes I’d gone out and bought for myself at last. I’d folded up my too-tight suits and the fancy, uncomfortable gear I’d worn for Melchior’s concert nights and the endless Hampstead parties, had it all dry-cleaned and bagged up for Oxfam. There was a big branch right here in the Vale: I’d walked away, head spinning slightly with relief, gleeful cries of the old ladies who staffed the place fading out behind me.
I’d taken my lunchtime walk here every day since my last meeting with Silver. Soon I’d have to find streets without an army of JCBs beginning to foregather in a vacant lot, without memories of an impossible lover in every shadow of the oaks.
As wallowing went, though, it beat the hell out of missing Melchior and staring at the inside of Drew’s office walls. In Oak Vale I could look at something beautiful before it was destroyed. And when I yearned for Silver, it was with a clean new pain, not a wash of my own inadequacies and mistakes.
Still, I knew I’d made a big one. I’d panicked when Sil had asked me out. The sense of freefall into a new life had overwhelmed me. Speaking about the loss of my baby boy—even those few words—had set off firecrackers of unprocessed grief; I’d gone home that night, locked myself up in the spare room, taken out my one remaining photo of Daniel and wept.
In the morning I’d phoned Jess, startling the daylights out of her, but once she got over her shock she talked to me gladly enough. Yes, she was well. Yes, she’d been happy: a houseful of kids, and grandkids too now, believe it or not. She’d never forgotten Daniel, never would. She asked me up to meet her family sometime, meaning it, and I said I’d love to, meaning that too.