Golden Boy: A Novel

by Abigail Tarttelin

  ‘Karen, what’s that book?’

  ‘I just thought we could discuss his gender and whether he wants to, you know—’

  ‘Is this what Max is slamming the door over?’

  ‘Stop growling at me, both of you, you’re both doing it, I’m just trying to fucking help!’

  ‘You’re overreacting and it’s winding him up. Come on, it’s Max; he doesn’t have to choose gender or change gender because of this. He’s fine as he is, as long as you leave him alone!’ His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m tired.’

  ‘Well, I’m tired too,’ says Mum. ‘I’m tired of taking care of him and picking up after him and trying so hard to get everything right for sixteen years and then watching him fuck it all up!’

  ‘Shh!’ Dad says, mindful not of me, but of Lawrence and Debbie downstairs. He cautions Mum, ‘Calm down. This is the first and only thing he has ever done wrong.’

  Mum makes a snorting sound.

  ‘Karen, it’ll be over soon,’ Dad says. ‘We just have to ride out the storm. This isn’t going to change anything. He’s still Max. We’ll go into the hospital, get rid of it and everything’ll be back to normal. He’s not going to change sex just because of an accident. He’s still Max, OK?’

  Mum is crying. ‘He’s gay.’

  I suck in a breath and lower myself to the floor, leaning my head against the wall. I breathe out unsteadily. I hate Hunter. I hate him for everything he’s doing to my mum, and to me and to my family.

  ‘Who’s he been doing it with?’ she moans.

  ‘Come into the bedroom,’ I hear Dad murmur. ‘Stop making a stir in the corridor.’

  Then their door shuts and the voices stop.

  I feel a tear roll down my cheek. I wipe it away and concentrate on my breathing. My bedroom’s cold. I hear nothing but the rise and fall of my breath.

  Dad means well. But everything has changed. Or maybe nothing has changed, except that everything is different now we acknowledge it. It, being me.

  Daniel

  ‘Max, are you content wearing what you wear?’

  ‘What?’ says Max. He is watching the screen, not taking his eyes away from it. Tonight has been a very good night for me. Max seems a bit better, although he was sick at school today. He has played three hours solid of Deadland 2, though, and he doesn’t seem ill to me. He is playing better than ever, and concentrating very hard, which is good because sometimes I have to tell him off for being easily distracted by things around my room. He is inquisitive, that one. He likes to poke things.

  ‘You’re wearing a T-shirt that says “Occupy”, chinos and converse,’ I inform him.

  ‘I know what I’m wearing. I meant why are you asking?’ he says. ‘And don’t call them chinos. It sounds gay.’

  ‘Like homosexual?’

  ‘No.’ He shakes his head and moans. ‘Um.’ He pauses the game and puts his controller down and looks at me. ‘People say something’s gay when it’s stupid. But really I shouldn’t say it because it’s not nice. To gay people, I mean.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well . . . you’re comparing them to something lame. Like the word “chinos”.’

  ‘But what do you call them?’

  ‘I dunno.’ He shakes his head and presses the play button. ‘Trousers. Chinos is just a dumb word.’

  ‘Does that make me gay?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because I said something gay?’

  ‘No. It’s not gay, it’s just stupid. Forget it.’

  ‘What would make me gay, though?’

  ‘Liking boys would make you gay.’

  ‘Do you like boys?’

  ‘Oh my god,’ Max mutters, putting his hands in his hair and scratching. ‘Aaaaaargh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. No, I don’t like boys.’

  ‘OK.’ We pick up our controllers again and play the game but I keep staring at him in the screen and he notices and becomes slowly more agitated. I can tell because he is killing less zombies and getting shot more.

  ‘Why did you ask me that?’

  ‘If you liked boys?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because Mum was talking about stuff like that. Like, what it would be like if you were a girl and wore dresses, or if you were gay or something. I heard through their bedroom wall.’

  ‘She’s not serious!’ Max says loudly. ‘She – she was joking.’

  ‘Why would she joke about that?’

  ‘Because Mum’s insane, Daniel.’ He takes out a zombie leader. ‘She has serious psychological problems.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, worried.

  ‘No. I mean . . .’ He looks over at me. ‘She has psychological problems but . . . they’re not serious.’

  I kill a zombie midget and a zombie dog with a razor blade to its gut. I’m still confused, though. ‘Does she think you want to be a girl?’

  Max goes reddish and is quiet for a bit. ‘Kind of.’

  ‘You couldn’t be a girl.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re a boy.’

  ‘Well . . . yeah.’

  ‘That would be impossible,’ I say.

  ‘Well . . . urgh,’ says Max. He takes out a Pterodactyl.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why did you say urgh?’

  Max pauses the game.

  ‘Don’t freeze it!’ I cry in dismay. ‘I was just about to nuke the living dead HQ.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you something important or not?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I always want to hear important things.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Because they’re important.’

  Max groans. ‘Of course. Alright. So. Sometimes men dress as women, or women dress up as men.’ He looks at me to see if I’m following, which I find insulting because this is really simple so far.

  ‘OK. I am following,’ I say, which is the thing that Max asks me to say so he doesn’t spend half an hour explaining something then have to backtrack, like that time I asked him what was going on in outerspace, and then after he had explained for minutes about the Milky Way, I told him I meant Outerspace, in World of War, which is the fifth level of the game.

  ‘Because sometimes people feel that they have been born in the wrong body.’

  ‘Have they?’

  ‘Err, I don’t know. But anyway, um, they feel that way, and then they sometimes try to make themselves look that way, by wearing dresses and make-up, and sometimes having operations.’

  ‘Operations?’

  ‘Like, on their bits. Their male or female bits.’

  I take this in. ‘Eww.’

  ‘Er, yeah. Anyway—’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How the operations?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, like if a guy wanted to be a woman, he would have his thing, um, taken off, and they would make lady parts.’

  ‘EWW!’

  ‘It’s not ew—’

  ‘THAT’S SO UNBELIEVABLY DISGUSTING!’

  ‘Will you shut up? No it isn’t, it’s just sometimes people are born with something that’s not what they want and they decide to change it.’

  ‘But it’s gross!’

  ‘No, it’s like plastic surgery; like if someone wants a facelift, they get it.’

  ‘But that’s disgusting too!’

  ‘No it’s not! Shh! Mum and Dad will hear you yelling.’

  ‘But what about Sylvester Stallone?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘His face!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s disgusting! Is that what happens to your bits?’

  ‘Urgh. Don’t be so stupid. You don’t get a facelift on your crotch, do you?’ He puts his hands over his face and moans again. ‘Jesus! I came in here to get away from all this shit.’

  I pause. ‘You swore.’

  ‘I know,’ Max says, like he’s impatient with me. ‘But haven’t you been list
ening? I’m trying to tell you, some people are just born wrong and they . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They feel sad or wrong until they get put right. And bad things can happen when people have things that don’t fit them. So everything has to be removed, so that . . . so that people aren’t sad anymore.’ He sits with his hands over his face and we are quiet for a bit. ‘You wouldn’t want anyone to be sad, would you?’

  I think about this, because Max seems very serious.

  ‘No, Max,’ I say, after about thirty seconds. ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to be sad.’

  ‘OK,’ he says, hands still over his face, and he swallows as if he has a Haribo in his mouth, except he doesn’t have a Haribo, unless he has one without my knowledge, but I would be able to smell it. ‘Then sometimes there are situations where it’s not exactly that, but . . . it’s like that.’

  ‘Max?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I am not following you.’

  ‘Like . . . sometimes people have to choose whether they want to be a boy or a girl when they are kind of both.’

  ‘What, people who look half like a girl and half like a boy?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Wow. I’d love to see one of them. I wonder what they would look like.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Probably totally weird.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘So why do they have to choose?’

  ‘Whether to be a boy or a girl?’ he asks.

  I nod.

  ‘They just do,’ he says, taking one hand away from his face and looking at his shoe and scratching it with his fingernail. ‘That’s just the way things are.’

  ‘Like, how?’

  ‘Oh god, I don’t know.’ He drops his other hand from his face and reties his shoelaces on his converse. ‘Like how when you fill out a form it says male or female, or when there are changing rooms and they are male and female, or toilets, or clothes, or like on your driver’s licence and passport, or when they do school uniform, or when you play a game and it’s boys versus girls. Or when you get married and you have to be a boy or a girl because same-sex marriage is not recognised by some countries.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I ask, but Max doesn’t seem to hear me. He keeps talking to his shoes.

  ‘It’s just weird and people don’t know how to treat you if you’re halfway in-between. They think you’re going to fuck with their head and corrupt their children and . . . stuff like that . . .’

  ‘You said the “eff” word.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So, anyway, you’re a boy, and you don’t want to be a girl?’

  He picks up his controller, looks down to the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, even though there aren’t any zombies in it, and then back up to his viewfinder. ‘No. I don’t want to be a girl.’

  ‘You want to be a boy?’ I ask.

  Max stares very still at the screen and then frowns, as if he has remembered I’m there. ‘Um,’ he says, and unpauses the game and kills another zombie. Then he looks confused, as if he has lost one of the zombies, except I look to check, and he hasn’t, he has killed them all, five out of five.

  I pick up my controller and nuke the evil HQ. This game is brilliant because it’s the only one where I am nearly as good as Max. You can pick out of lots of characters too, and get them all through the levels. I usually pick Xylar, who is a small boy whose special weapon is fire coming out of his hands. Max usually plays Defender, who is a woman with big breasts and dark skin. I look over at my brother.

  I decide to try a different tack with asking him questions about what happened earlier, because Max says when you are torturing the truth out of people, this is a good way to go.

  ‘When we play this game,’ I say, ‘you always pick Defender, and she’s a girl, so do you want to be a girl like Defender?’

  Max sighs, like he is deeply, deeply irritated at me, and I realise I’ve been doing that thing where I ask questions all the time to him, which he has politely asked me not to do several times before, so I say, ‘Sorry.’

  He looks at me as if he has just noticed me and shakes his head and mumbles, ‘It’s OK.’ Then he sighs again and says, ‘No, I don’t want to be a girl like Defender.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘But why do you want to be Defender every time we play, then?’

  He looks at me, and then looks at the screen. ‘Err, because she’s hot.’

  ‘What does hot actually mean?’

  ‘Oh my god!’ Max throws his controller on the floor and leans back against the bed like he’s really tired and he whines and yells at the same time like I’m really annoying. ‘It means sexually attractive! Stop asking me questions!’

  I go quiet, which I do when people yell because I don’t like it. Now it is Max’s turn to apologise, but he doesn’t.

  ‘You yelled at me, Max,’ I say.

  ‘Well,’ he grumbles. ‘You ask stupid questions.’

  I throw my controller down on the floor because I’m angry. I hate Max for being so moody and whiny this week. He’s never moody and now he’s being it with me and I haven’t done ANYTHING and all I’ve done all week is worry about him being sick and now he’s being horrible to me and I can’t TAKE it anymore, so I shout, ‘Well, you give stupid answers!’ and I pick up the controller and throw it hard at Max’s face and it hits his eyebrow and then I turn around and get on the bed and tell him to get out my room and I keep screaming at him to get out.

  ‘Hey!’ Max gets up and comes over and grabs my shoulders. ‘Hey! Stop!’

  At first I think he is fighting me, so I kick him really hard, but then I realise he is trying to hold me still, so I kick him harder.

  ‘Ow! Daniel, calm down, I’m sorry! It’s OK, Daniel, it’s alright!’

  I scream at him, ‘I don’t want a sister, I want a brother!’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry!’ says Max, like he is distressed. He looks like he will cry.

  ‘I want a brother!’ I howl.

  ‘I’m sorry! I am your brother, I’m not going to be a sister. Ow, stop fucking kicking me, Daniel! OW!’

  Max lets go of me and goes over to the telly-wall. I turn around and pick up a book and throw it at him and it hits him in the forehead but he is holding his stomach.

  When the book hits his head he puts an arm over his head as well and crouches down. His eyebrow has a scratch on it that I made with the controller. There is a bit of blood but not a lot.

  ‘I told you my tummy was hurt,’ Max says quietly, with a scratchy voice, like he is catching his breath. ‘I told you the other day. Why did you kick me?’

  I stop screaming and even though my chest is heaving, I get really quiet, really quickly.

  ‘I can’t fucking handle you when you’re like this,’ Max says.

  ‘Yes you can,’ I say.

  ‘You really hurt me.’

  ‘Well . . .’ I frown. ‘You’re big.’

  ‘I’m not that big, Daniel.’

  ‘You’re as big as Mum and Dad.’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘I am almost, size-wise, but I’m way, way younger than them. You can’t yell at me like that and shove and kick me. It hurts, and I’m not old enough to deal with it,’ he says really quietly, like he is totally, completely tired. ‘I just don’t have the energy to fight you. And you can’t ask me to do that. I’m not your parent.’

  I shrug. ‘You’re old enough to be one.’

  ‘No!’ And then it’s Max’s turn to shout at me. ‘I’M NOT.’

  I’m still angry at him, but he seems to be very upset so I walk over to him and crouch down next to him and put my arm over his shoulder.

  ‘OK, Max, you’re not,’ I say to comfort him, but it does the opposite because he cries once, loudly, under his arm. Then he gets up and walks out of my room, and I have no one to play Deadland 2 with anymore.

  I sigh, very deeply, like Max did earlier, and notice how our sighs sound very much t
he same, and I think this is probably because we are brothers, and we are the closest people to each other genetically in the world, and so even our sighs sound the same, and I think this is a very profound realisation, so I write it down in my notebook.

  Archie

  ‘I want to know,’ I hear as I walk in my office on Friday morning, and I jump, realising Max is standing next to my examining table.

  ‘Max! You scared me.’ I heave my files carefully onto the desk. Max steps forward to help me balance the pile, picking up several that slip off the tabletop. ‘What are you doing here? We have an appointment next week.’

  ‘I want to know now,’ he says, almost petulantly.

  I sigh and glance at the clock on the wall. ‘Look, you have to schedule an appointment. I have so many patients to see today and they all need my help too. I know what’s going on in your life is overwhelming, but—’

  ‘Archie! Please! I want to know!’ Max can’t look me in the eye. He puts his hands over his face and speaks quickly. ‘Please, Archie. This is so embarrassing. I don’t know anything about myself, and I’ve never asked anyone, I’ve never made an issue out of it, I just want . . . I want to know. Please.’

  He takes his hands off his face, as if he needed them there just to speak.

  I think, and then feel ashamed of myself, embarrassed for being in such a rush. I shut my door and sit down at my desk. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want to know . . . whether I’m a boy or a girl.’

  He looks wrecked, as if he hasn’t slept in weeks. Somebody should have told him the truth, I think. I sigh and decide to address the issue simply. ‘You’re neither.’

  ‘No.’ Max shakes his head. ‘I Googled it. Being intersex means that you don’t look like one or the other to a doctor. It doesn’t mean you aren’t one.’

  ‘That’s . . .’ I rub my lips together, trying to find the right words. ‘Not always true. Sit down,’ I say, nodding to the chair opposite me. Max is standing rigidly, his arms crossed. He swallows, looks around and then moves to the patient’s chair.

  ‘Sorry for busting in,’ he mutters.

  ‘That’s alright,’ I reply. ‘How are things at home?’

  He looks up at me, like it’s a stupid question.

  ‘I see,’ I say, nodding. ‘Max, before we talk about this, I wanted to ask. The boy who assaulted you . . .’ I falter. ‘Has it happened again? Do you think it will?’