Then I found a communal laundry room in the apartment block. People would run a dryer cycle overnight and pick up their clothes in the morning. When my mum was out at night, I went down there and opened the dryer and stole anything that was small and looked nice. I took them back and put them on. Then I coloured my lips with red crayon and used an old watercolour set for eyeshadow. I played for a couple of hours, then I would hide the clothes in a garbage bag and wash my face.
I felt ashamed, because I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. It was addictive. I started looking forward to my mum going out and leaving me by myself. When I dressed up, I felt relaxed and happy. It was like unclenching my fist. I didn’t have to be Sam anymore. I liked looking at this new person in the mirror.
The more I enjoyed it, the worse I felt afterwards. I thought I was the only person in the world who did it. When I stuffed the clothes back in the garbage bag, I always told myself it was the last time, but the next chance I got, I dressed up again.
Then everything got really hard.
We had been living in an apartment block in Midland for about six months. A week after my eleventh birthday, I got home from school and my mum was stuffing all her clothes into suitcases and black plastic bags. She told me to hurry up and do the same, because our landlord was coming back with the police to evict us. I only had a few minutes. We threw all our clothes and anything valuable into my mum’s Hyundai and drove away just as the police came around the corner. I was really upset that we had to leave all my kitchen utensils behind. Then I remembered that I left the shoebox full of tissue kisses under the bed. Then I remembered the most precious thing of all.
‘Did you bring the honeybee?’ I asked.
‘What? No, I don’t think so. Be quiet, I have to think.’
I begged her to go back, but she wouldn’t. I was devastated. The honeybee was gone. I tried to cry as silently as I could.
We didn’t have any money or anywhere to go. All her credit cards had been cancelled. We couldn’t find a place to rent because we had been blacklisted. She was too proud to stay with her friends or at a refuge, so we lived in the car.
She told me we were on a camping trip, a real one this time. In the evenings we went to the beach and used the showers in the change rooms. Then we drove to the closest supermarket and crept around the back to go on a treasure hunt, which meant looking through the skip bins for food. A lot of it was still in plastic packaging and okay to eat.
Late at night we parked in quiet neighbourhoods near ovals or parks and locked the doors. We slept on the back seat and kept each other warm. My mum hummed songs and I pretended to fall asleep. I felt safe with her. We got caught a few times by security guards and had to move. It was cosy and fun at first, but I missed having a kitchen, and I really missed dressing up.
After a few days my mum started going to pubs at night. She left me in the car and told me she would be back in an hour. I would sit there until the pub closed and she came out.
Some nights she took me in with her. I sat on my own and watched horseracing on the television or rolled balls on the pool table. Sometimes someone who worked behind the bar would bring me a basket of chips or a side salad or a glass of Coke. At one pub I found a ten-dollar note under a table. I gave it to my mum at the bar. She was talking to a man in a pink collared shirt. When he saw me, he said he had to make a call and left. My mum put the ten-dollar note on the beer mat, and later I saw the barman take it. The man in the pink shirt never came back, but she was already talking to somebody else.
My mum was really beautiful. She had long blonde hair and a nice figure and high cheekbones. Wherever we went men looked at her. Sometimes they called out rude things, or they walked up and flirted. She was always gossiping or complaining about men on the phone with her friends, but she never introduced me to any of them.
We had been living in the car for almost three months and we both knew we couldn’t do it for much longer. Then my mum met Steve, and everything changed really quickly.
I met Steve on the day we moved into his house in Scarborough. He had a square jaw and a big chest and a round gut and he was tall. He had faded tattoos down his left arm. He was ten years older than my mum.
My mum told me he was her friend, but I knew they were together. He grabbed her waist a lot, and he liked to put his arm around her shoulder and pull her close. She would smile and lean into him. They had only known each other for a few days.
Steve’s house had two storeys and it was close to the beach. We had never lived anywhere like it. There was a boat on a trailer in the driveway. In the garage he had a late-model ute and a four-wheel drive and a jetski and a dirt bike. The lounge room had a huge couch and a big television. Upstairs, there was a whole room filled with electric guitars and amplifiers, and another room had an exercise bike and a set of dumbbells with dust on them.
Steve led me to a room with a new bed that hadn’t been assembled yet and an empty wardrobe. It was my first ever bedroom. Steve asked what I thought, and I couldn’t say anything because I was so shy and overwhelmed. Later, my mum pulled me aside and told me to be more grateful because Steve was saving us. When I thanked him, he said loudly that it was his pleasure. I think he liked that he was helping us out of a rough place. He talked about it all the time.
I heard them having sex a lot. The first time it happened I ran down the hall when I heard my mum crying out. I thought Steve was attacking her. I charged into their room and I saw my mum on her knees and Steve behind her. I ran up and pushed him and told him to stop. He shoved me away really hard, and I hit my head on the nightstand.
My mum picked me up and took me to my room. She calmed me down and told me Steve wasn’t hurting her, and I should never enter their room without knocking again. I crept back down the hall after she left, and I heard her apologising to him.
My mum fell in love with him really quickly, and she wanted me to feel the same way. I told her I didn’t like Steve and that I wanted to go back to how things were. She slapped my face, which she had never done before, and told me I didn’t know how lucky I was. I had never had a father figure, and now there was somebody who was prepared to help raise me. She wanted us to be a family.
Later, she told Steve what I had said about him, and that hurt more than the slap.
Steve tried to win me over. He bought me a computer. He picked me up from school and asked how my day was. He took me to the park and tried to teach me how to kick a football and play cricket, but I was bad at all of it. If my mum was there he would be patient and encouraging, but if it was just the two of us he was hard on me. He told me I was too soft because I had been spoiled my whole life and he was going to make a man out of me. He told me I needed to cut my hair and stand straight and toughen up. He made me try sit-ups and push-ups on the playground equipment.
One day at the park he asked me if I liked boys or girls. I didn’t know what he meant, so I shrugged and said I didn’t really like anyone. He pointed at a woman jogging past in tight-fitting activewear. She was really pretty. He asked me if I liked her body and I said yes. He smiled and told me I was a good boy.
He took us fishing on his boat. I hooked a skipjack one time and Steve crowded me and shouted and I panicked and lost the fish.
‘Why did you stop reeling? I told you, pull up and reel down! It’s easy!’
‘I’m sorry.’
My mum was wearing a straw hat and drinking prosecco. She was nice about it.
‘It’s okay. You’ll get the next one, Honeybee.’
Steve lost his temper.
‘Stop treating him like a baby.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Stop coddling him. He messed up. He needs to learn.’
‘Don’t tell me how to raise my son.’
Steve snatched the fishing rod out of my hand.
‘My parents didn’t raise a son, they raised a man. Calling him fucking Honeybee and protecting his feelings isn’t going to help him grow up.’
�
�Well I’ve been doing this longer than you.’
‘Fine. Keep wrapping him in cotton wool. I don’t give a shit.’
Steve started the boat and took us back to shore and didn’t speak to either of us for the rest of the day.
After that, she never called me Honeybee again.
I wanted to show Steve what I was good at, so I cooked dinner a few times. He never seemed impressed, and sometimes didn’t finish what I had made. He didn’t have much interest in nice food or spices. I only ever saw him eat burgers and pizza and pies and Chinese takeaway.
My mum stopped going out at night. She almost never left the house. She sat on the balcony and drank wine and smoked cigarettes and tanned her legs and read magazines and sketched pretty dresses in a notepad. She had hundreds of designs. She could draw really well, and she was really stylish and creative. I wished that I could talk to her about clothes and tell her my secret.
She didn’t see her friends anymore. Steve didn’t like them. He told her she needed a fresh start and better guidance. He should be her inspiration, he said. He had come from nothing. His family were poor and lazy. His brother was in jail and he had cousins who were patched members of motorcycle gangs. His old friends were addicts and criminals and dealers and losers. He could have been trapped in that world, but he learned a trade and worked hard and now he was rich and successful. He had to leave his family and friends behind, because he knew they would drag him back down.
Steve was a boilermaker. He worked on location up in the mines. He would fly out for two weeks and then come home for one. I was always relieved when I saw him packing his bags. When he came home he was tired and moody for a couple of days. He sat on the couch and played Call of Duty and my mum would bring him beer and potato chips and crawl up beside him like a pet cat. She was a different person when Steve was home. She treated him like a king. It made me jealous. She cleaned all the time and did his laundry and agreed with everything he said.
Once I brought one of Steve’s Gibson guitars downstairs so she could play and sing. She got embarrassed and said Steve was much better than her, which wasn’t true. When she took the guitar back upstairs, Steve grabbed my arm hard and told me never to touch his things without his permission. He let me go when she came back down. One night I heard her crying. I got out of bed and watched from the stairs. She was sitting at the table with Steve, holding a piece of paper. The police had come to the house and given her a court summons for default payments and unpaid fines. They warned her if she didn’t attend she would be sent to jail. I almost ran to her when I heard her say that, but I knew I would be in trouble for listening.
Steve wanted to know about her debts. My mum was ashamed and she cried for a long time. Finally she admitted to all her unpaid rent and her credit card debts and her court fees and her fines for driving an unregistered car without a licence. She owed tens of thousands of dollars. She said she had ignored it because it was too stressful, and the problem had got worse.
Steve was annoyed that she hadn’t told him. My mum said she was scared he would leave her. Steve put his hands on her shoulders. He was really calm. He told her he was an expert at personal finances, and he did all his own taxes. He knew all the tricks, and he would help her get through it. He offered to pay her outstanding fines, and after that she would have to apply for bankruptcy. He said the agency collectors would still chase her, but they were easy to ignore, and after three years all her debts would be erased. She wouldn’t owe anything, except to him, but he would never hold it over her.
We had never needed help from anyone before. We had always found a way together. I wanted her to refuse, but she gave in. She cried and Steve put his arms around her. He was the most important person in her life now. I knew that she would never leave him.
I felt so alone. I watched Julia Child videos on my new computer and it made my chest settle down a bit. I pretended she was talking directly to me.
‘One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll try.’
I wanted to dress up. I missed it so much that I ached. It was like being really hungry or really cold: it was all I could think about. But I had left all my clothes behind at the apartment, and I couldn’t risk it anyway. Instead, I looked at pictures of pretty dresses online and imagined I was wearing them. It wasn’t the same.
I started at Ocean View High School. I mostly kept to myself. I ate lunch with some Sudanese kids who didn’t mind me sitting with them. The first term wasn’t so bad, but then some boys from the year above started coming for me.
I had never met them, but they all seemed to know my name. They teased me in the halls between classes. They started rumours about me. They punched me hard in the thighs and pushed me to the ground and spat on me and told me faggots belonged on their knees. One recess they pushed me into the toilets and pinned me down and kicked me and ripped my shorts off and threw them outside. They turned everyone against me. The Sudanese kids said I couldn’t sit with them anymore.
I tried to ignore them, but that made it worse. I started hiding before and after school, and I stayed close to the teachers on lunchtime duty, but they always got to me. They would sneak up behind me and elbow me in the back of the head or pull my hair so hard I fell backwards. I started flinching a lot.
By the start of the second term they were branding me. They did it by heating the end of a cigarette lighter and pressing it against my arm or my leg or my neck. The skin would blister and scar.
I was really unhappy. I started dressing up again, late at night. I took my mum’s skirts and dresses and stockings from the dirty clothes basket, then I locked my bedroom door and put Steve’s dumbbells behind for extra security. I got dressed up and brushed my hair out and looked at myself in the mirror, and it was me who looked back. I would wear my mum’s clothes for an hour or so before I got changed and put them back. I always felt guilty and disgusted with myself, but it was the only thing I had to look forward to.
Once I started again, I couldn’t stop. I skipped school and went into the city to steal clothes. I hit cheap department stores and op shops. I was careful and patient. Most stores had undercover detectives and the staff knew what to look out for. I never took my bag with me, I never looked nervous, I never scouted the cameras, and I never got caught.
I was good at it. I had a few tricks that worked. Sometimes I would wait until a middle-aged lady approached the store, then I entered with her so the staff thought I was her son. If I was lucky she went to the women’s clothing section and I would quickly look around, take something off the rack and stuff it under my hoodie. Then I walked out of the store with her.
Make-up was easy to lift because no one expected me to steal it. I would go into a chemist and say I wanted to buy my mum some lipstick for her birthday. The person behind the counter would show me where they kept the cosmetics. Sometimes they tried to help, but mostly they left me alone to look. Then I would drop something and stuff a bunch of samples in my pockets as I bent down to pick it up. When I left, I would thank the sales assistant and tell them I would be back when I got my pocket money.
I dressed up every night, and I did it for longer and longer. I didn’t sleep much. I felt dazed during the day, then at home I came alive. I was two separate people. I walked around my room in a slip dress or a maxi or a playsuit and pretended I was a person that everybody liked. I whispered imaginary conversations. I moved and spoke differently and I wasn’t afraid.
I still thought I was the only person in the world who behaved this way, but one night I got curious. I googled do other boys dress up like girls? and there were over a billion results. I thought it must be a mistake, so I clicked on a few of the sites that had come up. That’s how I discovered drag.
It was like finding out there was a whole new nation of people who were just like me. I looked at thousands of photos. I dressed up and watched videos of lip syncs and dance pe
rformances at clubs. I watched every episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It was all so big and loud and elegant and colourful. The queens were so beautiful and confident and funny. It wasn’t anyone’s secret.
I was relieved there were other people like me, but watching from my room in my stolen clothes and my messy make-up made me feel really far away and even more lonely.
I found an old documentary called Paris is Burning about the underground drag balls in New York City. One performer was called Venus Xtravaganza. She was small and pretty and softly spoken. She started dressing up when she was thirteen years old and she hid it from her family too. When they caught her, she ran away.
Watching her, my chest got tight and my throat swelled up so much I couldn’t swallow. Then she said something that made me start shaking.
‘I don’t feel like there’s anything mannish about me, except maybe what I might have between me down there, which is why I want my sex change, to make myself complete.’
I went back and listened to her say it again and again. I felt queasy and I couldn’t breathe. In my head I didn’t know what any of it meant, but in my heart I understood.
I typed: can a girl be born as a boy?
Everything made sense and nothing made sense at the same time. I read lots of articles and I filled out questionnaires and I was confused and I was certain. I didn’t feel relieved to know. I felt scared. And I felt revolting. I didn’t want to be this way. I didn’t want to be mixed up. I just wanted to be normal. But I wasn’t. I was all wrong, and I didn’t know how to be right. Now I knew that you could change your body, like Venus had wanted, but I didn’t know how or who to speak to.
I stopped reading about it. I ignored everything. I told myself that it wasn’t true. I stopped dressing up. I threw out the clothes I had stolen. I stopped eating, and I didn’t want to cook anymore. I stopped watching Julia Child.
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