‘I don’t know. Like I said, they usually talk to Mum and Dad. I did have some hormone injections and pills and stuff a few years ago.’
‘OK. Well, if it makes you this upset, maybe . . . we should talk to your parents about it? Do you want me to call them?’
‘NO!’
‘OK, OK, sorry.’
‘You won’t, will you?’
‘I’ll only call them if you ask me.’
‘OK. Well, no.’
‘Sorry,’ I say reassuringly, patting his arm. I open the Levonelle packet and take out a piece of paper. ‘If you can just read this for me. It lists the possible side effects of the pill, and I just need you to sign here to say you understand. Did the unprotected sex occur in the last seventy-two hours?’
Max nods and reads the paper, holding his hands in his lap, occasionally lifting one up to wipe a stray line of moisture away from a cheek.
‘Can I just have the pill now?’ he mumbles. He’s so wretched, it’s upsetting even for an old-timer like me.
He’s oddly despondent, actually. I study him carefully. Something just doesn’t quite fit in this scene: an uncaring mood, a lack of eye contact, a blankness. As I watch him avoid my eyes, shuffling in his chair uncomfortably and worriedly chewing a nail, I remember seeing him before.
It was last summer, and I had recently read about his mother winning a landmark case in the paper. The article said that Karen Walker, if I recall her name correctly, was a barrister. The newspaper focused on Karen’s career, rather than the case, and there was a picture of her family, including Max, at a black tie affair.
Later that day I had been at the cinema, and I recognised Max. He was holding hands with Olivia Wasikowski, another patient of mine who had come into the clinic to have an implant fitted a few weeks before. As I noticed them both, Max put his hands on Olivia’s cheeks, leaned in and kissed her.
Looking at him now, remembering this, a thought rolls into my cerebral cortex like it belongs there, like a broken shoulder snapped back into place, and I feel so incredibly stupid I close my eyes and shake my head at myself.
I clear my throat. ‘Max. I’m sorry to ask this so forwardly. Are you attracted to boys?’
Max’s mouth opens. Then his hand reaches up to it and suppresses any words that were forming. He shakes his head.
‘What I’m asking is, did you consent to sexual intercourse?’
Max’s hair shakes again from side to side.
‘That’s why you’re asking for the emergency contraceptive pill?’
His hair gives a tiny nod. He looks up nervously.
‘Are you in any pain?’
A tear falls down his cheek and he wipes it away and sniffs.
‘OK. Do you want to get up on the bed and let me have a look at you?’
Max sighs, as if he has seen this coming. A thought flickers through my mind: he must be used to having doctors looking at his genitals. An intersex diagnosis is not only something that must be studied for prognosis; to many doctors it’s interesting. We see so few cases. My own curiosity is piqued, but I don’t let on. Max’s eyes slip to the side and dilate, becoming distant. He nods.
As a doctor, I’ve discovered the answers are always between the lines, somewhere in the landscape of the body. Physical evidence speaks louder than words. Evidence is all over Max’s face. His bottom lip presses nervously against his top one. I nod, resolved.
‘I’ll just give you a minute to get undressed for me. Pop this sheet over yourself and sit up on the bed with your head back here, OK?’
I pat the bed and hand him the sheet. He nods again, almost wearily, and I step outside.
Daniel
It’s my brother’s birthday tomorrow so I want to make him a card, but the teacher, Miss Jameson, is saying that we have to pack up now, because it’s story time.
Why should we have to pack up now? That is my question. It’s completely ridiculous having to stick to a schedule like we’re babies that need napping and feeding and our bottoms cleaned. It’s stupid. I’m going to take these scissors and sit in the corner of the class, and I can listen to the stupid story while I do the card for Max. I’m doing one of those stupid cards where you fold a piece of A4 white paper into four and then you cut a boy shape in it so that you get four boys and they’re all holding hands. Then I’m going to colour them in and I’ll make them me, Mum, Dad and Max, although actually the Mum one will still look like a boy. Oh well, I’ll just draw her in pink trousers and then I can stick some hair on from another bit of paper later. Anyway, this card is actually going to be awesome though, because here’s the special bit: they’re all going to be robots, and I’m giving them all a gun I’ve specially designed for them.
Hmm. Miss Jameson is waddling over to me, like a duck. Mum told me off for calling Miss Jameson a duck. We’re not to say Miss Jameson is a duck. Anymore.
‘Daniel, it’s story time now.’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘Everybody’s waiting. You don’t want to ruin their story time, do you?’
‘No. I’m not making my card in front of them.’
‘Yes, but we can’t do story time without everyone sitting in a circle, can we?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘Yes, you can.’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘Look, Miss Jameson, if anyone is ruining story time, it’s you, because you can do it and you won’t.’
‘Well.’ Miss Jameson puts her hands on her hips. ‘I’m not going to because you’re being a naughty boy. Now, you put down that card or I’ll throw it in the bin!’
I frown and mutter very quietly, ‘Duck.’
‘Daniel Walker, put that card down! Do you want to keep it? I’ll throw it away if you don’t put it down now!’
She takes my hand and I shake it off.
‘I’M JUST MAKING A CARD,’ I say, really loudly so she’ll understand and leave me alone. ‘GET YOUR STUPID HANDS OFF ME.’
‘Don’t you dare yell at me, Daniel! Stop being a naughty boy! Look, everyone.’ Miss Jameson turns to the class. ‘Daniel is being naughty and so we can’t have story time until he acts like a good boy and sits down with us all.’
All the other boys and girls look at me sympathetically. It’s so unfair. It’s Miss Jameson’s fault that her stupid rules mean that for some stupid reason I can’t make a card for my brother AND listen to a story at the same time.
I sit there in silence and I hold onto my card and I don’t look at her until Miss Jameson says, ‘Right!’ She leans down and grabs my wrist really hard and I push her off with my right hand and she starts screaming just like me, but louder and hootier, as if she is both an owl and the victim of a shooting.
Max
I lie back on the bed. It’s spongy and slender. I wait to feel her hands. I look at her nametag: Dr Archie Verma. When did they start putting first names on doctors’ badges? I don’t remember that from all the specialists. I never knew their first names. They always spoke over me, to Mum or Dad or to other doctors. They rarely asked me stuff, even when I could have just told them the answer. Dad said we had to be careful how much we told them, so I kept my mouth shut, while they pried around me, poking me with their stubby, plastic-gloved fingers. I was an interesting case study for them, an experiment. I’ve never thought about it before in great detail. But as I wait for Dr Verma to poke at me, I remember what it felt like on the cold, steel tables in the clinic in London. The eyes, the shaking heads. I just used to get a lollipop from Mum and look away.
When is Archie Verma going to touch me? I hold my breath, waiting for it.
She puts the sheet back over me.
‘OK, Max, you’ve definitely had a tear down there, but I can’t tell without cleaning where it is or if I need to put in any stitches. I’m going to take a few samples, and then I’m going to clean you up with some saline solution, OK? And then we’ll find out where the bleeding is coming from.’
I nod compliantly and she goes a
way and comes back with a bottle of liquid and some other stuff, which makes a clank when she puts it down on the table.
Then I feel a pulling. ‘Ow.’
‘I’m sorry. This will hurt but it’s important, OK?’
‘’Kay.’
I shut my eyes and try to think about football, running, the outdoors, fresh autumn air, leaves that crunch, girls’ lips, bonfire night, and then the uncomfortable feeling stops and Dr Verma says, ‘It’s over.’
Then she uses a cloth to dab hesitantly at me. I watch, not saying anything still. She’s much more gentle than the specialists. She looks up and crooks her mouth at me apologetically.
‘Nearly done,’ she says quietly. She takes the cloth away. ‘I’m just going to press in a few places, and you tell me if it hurts, OK?’
I nod and she presses around me. ‘No . . . no . . . no . . . YES . . . yes . . . no.’
‘OK, I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to put in one stitch. You’re being very brave.’
She gets up, takes off her gloves and fetches a clean pair.
‘Actually, Max,’ she goes over to her desk and brings me a pill and then a glass of water from the tap, ‘can you take this?’
I nod and swallow it.
‘I’m going to prescribe you some strong painkillers as well, but you have to promise me you won’t exceed the dose.’
‘’Kay.’
‘This is a local anaesthetic.’ She rubs a liquid on me and turns away for a minute, screwing tops onto some vials with sticks in them. She writes labels in tiny handwriting and sticks them on the vials. Then she turns back to me and asks me to close my eyes.
I feel a tugging and then she says it’s done. I put my clothes back on behind the curtain, and she tells me what medicines she’s going to give me. Before she lets me off the bed, she rolls up my sleeve and takes a blood sample in a needle from my arm.
She talks to me while she’s doing it, giving me more instructions, but my head swims, and she gives me a look and says she’ll write everything down so I don’t forget.
‘Max,’ she says, business-like, rolling down my sleeve. ‘I want to ask you something.’
I try to focus, as Dr Verma looks serious.
‘Do you think it’s going to happen again?’
‘No.’
She stares at me, like she’s trying to assess whether I’m telling the truth. ‘Are you sure?’
I nod.
‘Max, I have an obligation if I think you’re likely to be assaulted again to go to the police.’
‘No!’ I shout, suddenly terrified.
‘But I’m not going to,’ she says. ‘Not without your permission, because you’ve told me it’s not going to happen again and I believe you. But . . . do you want me to contact the police?’
‘Do I . . . ?’ I’m surprised, weirdly I guess. I hadn’t thought about it. ‘No.’
‘I could go with you.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t want anyone to know.’
She sort of nibbles her lip.
‘Your parents don’t have to find out,’ she says.
‘My dad’s the Crown Prosecutor.’
She takes a breath in and holds it for a second, then nods, letting it out. ‘Yes. I see.’
My dad prosecutes all the criminals that the police pick up. He’s in charge. He oversees every case that’s tried in our area.
‘I don’t want even . . . I don’t want anybody to know.’
Dr Verma nods, and says quietly, ‘I took some samples. So I have his DNA.’
‘You do?’ I look over to the vials as she collects them and puts them on her desk.
‘Definitely.’
I grimace, and don’t ask her how she knows for sure.
‘I can store them, and I can also get the samples analysed, so that if you wanted to go to the police, all the evidence would be here.’
She must see that I look uncomfortable, because she says, ‘It can just be between us, unless you tell me otherwise.’
I nod.
‘So? Do you want me to call someone from the local station? They could come see us here. We don’t even have to leave the office. We could ask them not to tell your dad.’
She looks at me really nicely, but I’m just a blank. I’m just tired. I just want it to be over.
‘I don’t want anyone to know,’ I say again.
Karen
The first thing out of my mouth when I arrive at Daniel’s school to take him home is straight from the Book of Bad Parenting, ‘What is wrong with you?’
Damn it, I think.
‘What’s wrong with you, Karen?’ he asks immediately, and I resist an urge, a truly terrible urge, to slap him right across the mouth.
I am a terrible parent, I think. I am not cut out for parenting.
I try to gather myself together. The heat of the case I had been arguing, the indignation, the adrenaline from the win (fifteen years in prison), the frustration of having to leave to pick up Daniel, to pick up Daniel for something so callous, so beneath him, so disgusting, something that I will have to pay for in appearing to be calm and in control and fawning at parent–teacher conferences; everything is coursing through me, becoming forward momentum, and I have to remind myself to take everything a step at a time, not to look at the big picture, to breathe slowly, calm down and stop myself from reaching out, leaning forward and shaking him.
My mother grew up in Ireland before she moved to Yorkshire and met my father, and I am unhappy to say I sometimes fall back on her old Irish Catholic parental tactics when I am frustrated. It happens today, and I choose to inflict guilt upon Daniel in an attempt to make him sorry for hitting his teacher in the face with scissors.
‘You know better than that, Daniel,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘I’m so, so disappointed in you.’
‘I didn’t hit her.
I touched her.’
I grab at his arm, attempting to pull him up, to get him out of the school before someone sees us, and he pushes me away.
I often feel out of my depth with Daniel. It is possible that I would have felt exactly the same way had Max been normal, I suppose. But he wasn’t. He was easy, if you didn’t think about his problem. He was perfect and reasonable and sweet to a fault, and sometimes I wish Daniel could be like Max: cuddly, obedient, always close by.
Everything is a fight with Daniel, everything is a trial and it all makes me think I’m such a bad parent, such a bad mother. It reminds me of the conviction I had when we first found out Max was different from other babies – that I had failed as a mother, that I wasn’t cut out for the job, – and I feel heartbroken again, like I’m back in the hospital sixteen years ago.
Steve says it’s because I care so deeply about Daniel that I get so frustrated with him. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t feel so irritated.
I sit next to Daniel, exhausted.
‘I didn’t hit her,’ he says miserably.
I study the mural of staff photographs on the wall. When Max went to primary school there were four teachers in total: three class teachers and a headmaster. Now I count twenty-four teachers and ‘support staff’. Have children become exponentially worse in the six years between Max and Daniel? I imagine the support staff in a milieu of screaming, shrieking, hitting little terrors.
‘Do you believe me?’ Daniel asks.
I turn to him. I think about this for a minute.
‘Yes.’
Daniel turns sadly towards the mural. ‘Thanks,’ he says.
‘We should go home,’ I say suggestively, as if putting it on the table. It’s just an option, my tone says. We can sit here for the next five hours if you want.
‘OK,’ he says.
Suddenly the irritation turns a corner and I feel a rush of empathy for Daniel. He’s not easy, but it’s not easy being him. He is awkward with everyone; he grew up too fast having a much older brother; he talks like a mini-politician because of his father; and he is quick to temper, which he gets from me. Max inher
ited all our best attributes, and Daniel all our worst. He’s bright, but he doesn’t have Max’s concentration in class. He’s a B+ student. He’s obsessive-compulsive. Physically he is small, inheriting his height perhaps from my mother’s side, yet he is bony. He has my proliferation of childhood freckles and childhood scrapes, an inherited tendency towards being bitten by mosquitoes, tripping, accidents. He once shot himself in the eye with a friend’s BB gun, resulting in a nightmare trip to the hospital for him and Steve, while Max and I waited anxiously at home for them.
My funny little man, I think, looking at Danny’s curly strawberry-blond hair.
I put my arm out spontaneously. The bottom length of it touches his shoulders, just fractionally, just the start of a hug, gently. My right arm goes around his front. I lean in to kiss his hair.
‘Get off!’ Daniel shakes his head aggressively, hitting my teeth with his skull, lurching away from me.
I cry out, my hand flying to my mouth.
‘Come on then,’ Daniel says, sliding off the chair. He walks over towards the secure door.
I take a breath. I tell myself it’s going to be OK. We’re going to go home and I’ll make dinner and he’ll calm down.
I pick up my coat and walk over, touching the door release button, high up the wall above Daniel’s head. The doors are released, we step through and head for my car in silence.
Archie
I sit back down at my desk as Max readies himself to leave, folding the information page from the Levonelle pack into his blazer pocket. I now feel a little helpless, although I know I’ve done all I can.
‘Shall I write you a sick note for tomorrow?’ I suggest. ‘Or for the rest of the week?’
‘Um . . . no.’ He slips his rucksack onto his shoulders. ‘Just today is fine.’
‘It’s no trouble, Max. Take a day off.’
‘Um, I want to be in tomorrow.’
He smiles, and I nod and speak more lightly, following his lead to try to change the tone.
‘Something exciting happening at school? Football match?’ He shakes his head and speaks shyly. ‘It’s my birthday.’
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