Golden Boy: A Novel

by Abigail Tarttelin

  ‘Alright then,’ he says. ‘Will you be home for tea?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What would you like?’

  I look at Daniel but he looks back at me and shrugs.

  ‘Um,’ I say. ‘Lasagne or something would be great, Dad.’

  ‘Done. Sounds good. I’ll have it ready around five.’ He nods and turns back to the house. Before he shuts the door he says, ‘I’ll be here if you need me, OK, Max?’

  I am embarrassed, but I smile gratefully. He knows what day it is.

  We wanted to go it alone today, just Sylvie, Daniel and me, so Daniel and I pumped up the tyres on our old bikes last night in preparation. Daniel doesn’t know why we’re going. He thinks it’s just a nice road trip.

  He found out about the baby, because he’s a lot smarter than anybody gives him credit for. I admitted everything he worked out for himself, and eventually, after he had asked again and again, I gave him a tempered version of events, about what happened between me and Hunter, and how the baby came to be. Obviously I omitted certain things.

  I don’t want him to know about today, or why we’re going where we’re going. He asked me to tell him everything, and as much as I can I have, but there are some things I just don’t have the words to explain. I figure if I’m not ready or able to understand them yet, then it’s not fair to heap the confused thoughts in my head onto my little brother. Growing up is overwhelming enough without doing it before you’re meant to.

  I woke up last night at one, four, and again at eight.

  At one I heard Dad in his bedroom, making notes into a dictaphone. He’s thinking of writing a book, and he makes notes late at night.

  Mum was still working until a few weeks ago. She’s actually a great barrister. Daniel and I have been to see her in court. Afterwards, she took us out for scones, which Daniel went crazy over. We’re kind of rebuilding a relationship slowly. That was last month, but she’s taking a long sabbatical from practising law over the summer. She has a little townhouse in Oxford and she’s reading a lot and just hanging out, really. She’s a lot more fun with Daniel than she used to be. With me she’s kind of less fun than she used to be, but more real. We’re working on it.

  Last night I listened to Dad speaking passionately into the dictaphone. I imagined him waving his arms around. Daniel and I thought Mum and Dad would get back together, but they haven’t. I don’t think either of them is seeing anyone else. I feel bad about that. That’s probably the last side effect of everything that happened in autumn that’s remained, hung around, leaving a bad taste in the air. I think sometimes of that note Dad gave Mum, ‘To the love of my life’, and I think about how they probably are the loves of each other’s lives, that they had something like Sylvie and I have, and that I’ve taken that away from them. Dad’s voice lowered to a murmur, then started up again, loud and righteous. Just another night. I put my iPod headphones in, turned over and shut my eyes.

  At four I sat up, startled, drenched in sweat, Gang Starr repeating ‘Take It Personal’ in my eardrums. I pulled the headphones out and took my T-shirt off. My chest hasn’t grown or feminised or whatever dumb term Dr Flint used. I guess if it hasn’t by now it never will, so there’s another theory debunked. Doctors know nothing. Well, that’s kind of unfair. Let’s just say the world is unpredictable. Science is unreliable. It can’t tell you who you are or what you’ll want or how you’ll feel. All these researchers are going crazy in their labs, trying to fit us into these little boxes so they can justify their jobs, or their government funding, or their life’s work. They can theorise and they can give you a mean, median and mode, but it’s all standardised guesswork, made official by arrogance. You have to be pretty into yourself to think you can play a part in defining the identity of a bunch of people you don’t know, of human beings with complicated shit going on in their bodies. They still don’t know what certain parts of our brains do, they still don’t know how to cure a common cold, and they claim to know about sexuality, about gender. Well, you’re not a man because you like football and you’re not a woman because you’re attracted to men, and you’re not not a chick because you like to be the one that gives, and you’re not not a dude because you like to receive or because sometimes you cry at dumb movies. Daniel cried all the way through Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

  I wiped the sweat off my chest with my T-shirt. Still no hairs, but my chest is actually pretty hard at the moment. Daniel wanted me to teach him to work out so we’ve been doing reps every morning before school. I mean, I guess I’ll never be a bodybuilder but compared to my friends, I’d say I’m keeping up.

  I sat like that for a while, my T-shirt crumpled in my hands, just staring blankly at my bed covers and feeling my shoulders lift and drop with every breath. It’s quiet in my head now. Just my voice, no one else’s.

  I’m alive. It’s a good thing. I’m glad about it. I’m intersex, and I’m coming to terms with that. One thing that does cross my mind from time to time, between all the talking about being intersex with my therapist, is the fact that I conceived a baby, and that I could again someday. I never thought before how life is so accidental, how it can so easily and quickly be made, and then gone again, in the space of minutes. It makes me appreciate everything more, but it also makes me think about how much of our fates are set by chance, and how many little accidents had to happen to make me what and who I am.

  I’m still hung up about what I had to do, what Mum had to do for me in the end. Nobody should have to go through a pregnancy when they don’t want to, and I’m glad that I didn’t. But even though it was an accident, and even though it was bad timing, and a bad situation, it was so hard for me to make that choice. I guess it’s always hard to make that choice and I don’t envy anybody that has to. But what’s even worse is that I didn’t. I just let it happen. I never fully came to terms with it before it was done, and perhaps I haven’t, even now. In any case, it’s a fucking heartbreaker of a thing to go through, and I don’t know when or how you’re supposed to get over it.

  I don’t know how you deal with it.

  But I do know that I’m so, so glad I didn’t have the other surgery in the end. I really don’t think I could have come back from that. I just wouldn’t have felt like me. It would have felt like not only do I not make my own choices, but this body isn’t mine either. My whole body would be a reminder, every day, that I wasn’t brave enough just to be myself.

  I throw the covers off my bed and feel my head. It’s hot and slick with sweat. I wait. I watch the room become more visible in the dark. I decide it isn’t Sunday yet. I decide it’s still Saturday night. I know I’m lying to myself. I sink back into the pillow, turn on my side and fall asleep.

  At eight. At eight . . . At eight I wake up and this time it’s Sunday morning.

  We take our bikes away from the houses and into the narrow roads through the fields. The sun lights up Sylvie’s caramel hair and Daniel’s red hair in front of me.

  ‘Come on, Max!’ Daniel shrieks excitedly, and I speed up ahead of them. We go up and over the hill, then fast down the side of it. The petrol station is on the edge of the road, standing alone.

  ‘Why are we stopping?’ calls Daniel.

  ‘Just wait here,’ I say.

  Sylvie and I lean our bikes against the building, not worrying to lock them up, while Daniel waits impatiently on the tarmac. This is the Oxfordshire countryside. No one would steal bikes here.

  ‘Hello,’ says Sylvie. ‘Some of your best flowers please.’

  Sylvie leans on the counter, her arms brown and her wrists small and delicate. She wears a watch and a friendship bracelet I gave her. I wrap my arms around her soft waist and kiss the nape of her neck, slipping the money for the flowers onto the counter.

  When Sylvie and I were biking around at the beginning of the summer, we found this cute little church up on a hill. It’s in a tiny village, but all the houses are spread out beneath it in the valley. The church was sweet enough, but non
e of us are religious, so I said I didn’t want to come to the church when we did this. But then Sylvie said wouldn’t it be lonely all by itself in a field somewhere?

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘Come on!’ yells Daniel ahead of us, pedalling furiously up the hill with the church on it, finding it easier going with his four or five stone, however heavy he is.

  ‘Careful of cars,’ I caution, pumping my legs to catch up to him.

  The three of us track our bikes around the graveyard wall. The wall is low and stone, and built a very long time ago. The church itself has grey-green stone, and moss all over it. Flowers fill the yard: nice, bright hollyhocks and vines and sweet williams. We park our bikes in the shrubs at the back of the church and then we climb around the back, up a very narrow path with a series of wooden arches over it, all with honeysuckle growing up their sides, creating a sweet-smelling corridor up to a spot that overlooks the valley beneath the hill. Cute little red-brick cottages are below, along with fallow fields filled with wildflowers and poppies and buttercups and daisies.

  There is a bench here that is dedicated to a child who died six weeks after she was born. Her name is Matilda.

  I look at it, unsure. Daniel sits down.

  ‘This is a lovely place,’ he says cheerfully.

  ‘Hey,’ a soft voice says from behind me.

  ‘Hi, you,’ I say, not turning around as she puts her arms around my shoulders and kisses the back of my neck. Then she takes my hand and I squeeze it gratefully.

  ‘Now what?’ I murmur.

  Sylvie’s bare shoulder brushes against mine as she comes to stand beside me. She looks out over the vista. ‘I don’t know.’

  We listen to the crickets whispering, and watch the heads of the poppies nod in the breeze, down below us.

  ‘I’m gonna take Danny down the hill to play,’ says Sylvie.

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ she replies softly. She moves forward and tickles Daniel, taking his hand and running a little way down the valley in front of me.

  It’s a smooth but steep slope, and I sit down on the bench and watch them playing in the wildflowers, in a great expanse of speckled green.

  I brought the picture from the ultrasound to the bench over the valley. Perhaps it’s stupid or sentimental, but I wanted to come here to say goodbye, if only to an idea of a person that helped me to realise that I might not be so broken, that I do have a future, that maybe one day I will have a family, and that maybe I won’t be afraid.

  I think I had romantic notions of me being over it at last, in a timely, Hollywood fashion, conveniently on the day the baby was supposed to be born, and setting myself free from past mistakes by leaving the picture on the bench in the graveyard, propped against it. But I can’t do it. It’s in my pocket the whole time I sit there, just looking at the grass.

  Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realise that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.

  ‘Nice spot,’ Sylvie murmurs, coming back to me and sitting beside me.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ I say, putting my arm around her, feeling her warmth. I stroke her soft skin with my fingers, and we both look out over the valley. ‘I know it’s weird.’

  Sylvie leans her head on my shoulder. ‘No, it’s not.’

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, thank you for reading. I have been very lucky in my life, and my particular brand of luck has been to be surrounded by clever, warm, passionate people. Of those people, there are a specific few I would like to thank here for being supporters on the road to telling Max’s story. These are:

  The Authors’ Foundation and K Blundell Trust for awarding me a grant to write this book, and the Brocklesby Trust for several grants over the years. It can’t be underestimated what a difference financial support makes to someone trying to find their feet, or in this case, voice.

  My wonderful editor and publisher, Arzu Tahsin, who stepped up to the plate to make an unknown, part-time writer into a novelist. This did nothing less than change my life, and I’m eternally grateful. Thanks also to everyone at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Orion for doing such a beautiful job with the edit and cover of Golden Boy, particularly Sophie Buchan for all her hard work and clever thoughts, and also Mark Streatfeild and Jennifer Kerslake. I’m so looking forward to working with you all over the years, and books, to come.

  Everyone at my lovely literary home, Conville & Walsh. Jo Unwin, my brilliant agent, saved my first manuscript from the submissions pile. Jo, thanks for being my support and teammate, always having faith and for all the fun we had with Golden Boy at LBF 2012. It’s been, and I know will continue to be, a great pleasure. A big thank you also to Carrie Plitt, Jake Smith-Bosanquet, Alexandra McNicoll, Henna Silvennoinen, Alex Christofi, Patrick Walsh and the rest of the team.

  As always, I would like to thank my amazing family and friends for being the absolute best. In the world. Ever. I credit your example, encouragement and love with making me who I am today. Particularly I’d like to thank:

  Andy Squires, for being enthusiastic about Golden Boy (and all my stupid ideas) from the beginning; Rosie Cannon, for suggesting I write something along the lines of Golden Boy; for their love and generosity, Karina Cornell, Coralie Colmez, Becky Preston, Melissa Hollis, Coco Quinn, Carla Evans, Sarah Mosses, Liv & Tim, Rhys & Sarah, Richie B, Tom & Tam, David & Kit, Joyce Walker, Kate, Brian, John, DJ, Bridge, Neil, Billy, Lucy, Luke, Geri, Georgie, Ben, Lottie, Spesh, Andrew Walker, Kate Squires, O and Stan, Nan D; the inspiring Michael Reeve; graphic artist genius Cassie Leedham; Phoenix editor and friend Hannah Kane; and my English teacher, Garrath Ellershaw. Very, very importantly, I’d like to thank the lovely Chris Goldberg, without whose support, belief, unwavering faith and very clever notes, this book would not exist in its current form.

  Finally, I would like to thank my parents, to whom this book is dedicated, for being really, really cool.

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  Copyright

  A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

  First published in Great Britain in 2013

  by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  This ebook first published in 2013

  by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  Copyright © 2013 Abigail Tarttelin

  The right of Abigail Tarttelin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 0 297 86899 6

  The Orion
Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk