‘Of course!’ I hold aloft his file, with the date on it. ‘Sixteen?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sweet sixteen. That’ll be fun.’
He turns towards the door. ‘Yeah. I’m a grown up!’ He gives a little, forced laugh.
‘Are you going to be alright?’
Max nods. ‘Thank you very much . . . for the pill and everything.’
‘Remember not to exceed the dosage of the painkillers. Apply the anaesthetic three times a day. Come back if it keeps hurting, or if you change your mind about going to the police. I’ve got all the evidence here.’ I gesture to the vials on my table.
Max shakes his head. ‘I don’t want to.’ He hesitates. ‘Please don’t tell them. ’Cause of Dad. Please don’t tell my mum.’
I frown. ‘I understand why you don’t want me to go to your dad’s office, Max. But I really should. I have a duty of care.’
‘No! Look, if it happens again, then that’s different. I just . . . It was just a one-time thing.’
I think. ‘Do you swear you’ll come to me if this happens again?’
‘I swear,’ he says earnestly.
‘OK.’ I nod, still unsure. ‘OK.’
‘’Kay. Thanks . . . thank you.’ He smiles determinedly and then hurries out. I close the door behind him, and then it’s just me, and the labelled vials of blood and DNA on my desk.
Karen
The house is cold and quiet when we get home, around three-thirty. We have a two-storey-high main hallway, and the heat often rises to the first floor from the ground. I switch the central heating on, setting the timer to go off after an hour.
‘Can we have a fire?’ Danny asks.
‘No.’
‘What is the point of the stupid woodburner if we never use it?’
‘Honey, we’ll roast if I start a fire. It’s not cold enough.’
‘Well, why get it put in in September?’
‘I don’t know,’ I sigh, leaning heavily on the kitchen table. ‘You have to go to your room now, OK?’
‘Am I grounded? That’s not fair. You said you believed me that I didn’t hit her!’
‘Daniel . . .’ I begin. It’s my fault. I phrased it as a question. I’m not a good disciplinarian. It either comes out imploring or aggressive.
‘You’d believe Max,’ he says darkly.
‘That’s not true, darling.’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t treat you and Max any differently.’
Daniel appears about to scream at me in frustration when the back door opens, surprising us both into silence.
Max’s head comes through the gap and he looks at me nervously. He looks exhausted, and dumps his schoolbag onto the floor by the coat rack. Before I say anything about cleaning up, I note the contents of my own handbag sprawled over the kitchen table.
‘What are you doing home this early?’ I frown.
His mop of hair shakes. ‘No one showed up for Geography, so they let us go. I feel sick.’
‘Do you believe him?’ cries Daniel. ‘You do!’
‘What’s happening?’ Max asks. We sit down together at the table and he leans his head on his hands. I knit my fingers through his hair and stroke the baby softness.
‘Daniel’s grounded,’ I murmur.
‘I don’t want to be bloody grounded!’
‘Don’t swear at Mum!’ Max says softly, just as I take my hand out of his hair and say,
‘You’ll be grounded for longer if your dad hears what you just said, young man.’
‘I’m going to get some water,’ Max mumbles, standing up. He leans against the kitchen counter next to the kettle and rubs his eyes.
‘Aren’t you feeling well, honey?’ I say, watching him. There is a loud crash and I turn around to see Daniel climbing onto the kitchen surface to get at the treat jar. ‘Daniel!’
‘I want a KitKat,’ he says, grabbing at the cupboard handle.
‘You are absolutely not allowed a treat today!’ I stand up and pull him off the counter. ‘Get to your room.’
‘Fine,’ Daniel growls, like the grumpy adolescent Max never became. ‘I’ll just play Xbox.’
‘No, you won’t, I’m confiscating it.’
‘What? No!’
‘Upstairs now!’ I plant my hand on his back and guide him firmly towards the kitchen door.
‘He was sent home today for hitting a teacher,’ I say to Max, as the door swings shut and Daniel’s steps recede.
‘I didn’t hit her,’ Daniel yells, running back to the kitchen and poking his head through the door. ‘I touched her!’
‘Daniel, go upstairs,’ I say, looking at Max.
Daniel bangs the door closed. I hear him thudding up the stairs dramatically. Max stares faintly at my waist from beneath the tips of his hair, his head slightly lowered.
‘What’s wrong, sweetie? You look terrible.’
‘I dunno.’
I touch his forehead. His face is white. ‘Are you coming down with something? You’re not hot.’
‘I dunno, Mum.’
Screeching rap music and gun blasts sound out from upstairs.
‘Daniel! I can hear that Xbox! Turn it off!’
‘No!’
I open the kitchen door and shout up the stairs. ‘Turn it off now!’
The music stops.
I look around again at Max worriedly, and he catches my eye, whips around to face the sink, leans over, and is sick.
I rush over to him, holding his hair back from his face. His body buckles and retches. He moans, his jaw straining, the veins showing through the skin of his neck. We wait a minute to make sure it’s over. He reaches for a kitchen towel and wipes his mouth with it.
A yellow liquid pools around the remains of food and three pills.
‘Did you take some painkillers, honey?’
Max nods. ‘Ibuprofen.’
‘You’re only supposed to take two. Don’t take too much, OK?’
‘Huh?’
I reach out, and touch Max’s warm back and my hand moves up to his golden neck. I notice the veins, the lines, the older skin on my hand. Max’s young skin smells like cinnamon.
‘Mum,’ he groans, shocked by being sick.
‘OK,’ I say, pulling him to me. ‘Go lie down in the living room, darling. I’ll be through in a minute. I’ll just clear up.’
Max nods, wipes tears from his eyes and pads out the door. I start the hot tap and the waste disposal and the pills and thick, viscous liquid swirl down the drain. I look through the window, at my own reflection and beyond it, to the low fence at the back of the property. We have to get hedges planted before the campaign too, if Steve runs. There’s so much to think about.
I nudge the laptop nearby. It wakes, and I tune in to the local radio station’s live streamed programme. Bart Garrett’s resignation was announced today, so the post is now officially open.
Paparazzi stalked Bart, twenty-four hours a day. They were savage. They were young reporters, looking to make a big splash, looking to unbuckle him. They went after his children first, and then uncovered some secrets, money he had slipped to people, not illegal, but inadvisable in his position. He voted to the right of the way Steve and I vote, but he wasn’t a bad person, and they made him out to be. Tax-dodging allegations, accusations of affairs, his son drinking, his daughter made a racist joke.
If Steve runs, Daniel can’t get sent home again, and Max has to go to Hemingway St Catherine’s, the private sixth form where they keep a better eye on the kids. Leah and Edward sent Hunter there this year. Max is already booked in to take the entrance exam, but I haven’t had a chance yet to call Leah and discuss the school. I promise myself I’ll do it tonight.
Sometimes I see kids from Max’s school smoking in town at lunchtime. I make a point of not looking for him, because I trust him. I know my son, and what is going on in his life. He’ll have a better chance of getting into Oxford University if he goes to a private sixth form, instead of a state school in Abingdon or Oxford, and
he deserves to go. He works so hard.
Steve was the same, but with a more directed ambition. Stephen Walker for Member of Parliament, Oxford West, Hemingway and Abingdon. Like so many things, I might have to get used to it.
Archie
It is ten at night, the end of my shift, by the time I am able to deal with the vials in my office. I shut up the clinic as fast as I can, and drive the specimens I took from Max out to a friend who works in a research lab at Oxford University. She works all our criminal cases, and usually I’d wait for the surgery to ship the samples over, but this time I can’t.
‘You want to come in?’ Mia asks as soon as she opens the door. ‘You look like you need a drink. Or three. I definitely do.’
‘Sorry, I’m in again at eight,’ I say, thrusting the samples at her. ‘I have to get back. Are you sure you’re OK to do this for me?’
Mia looks disappointed, but she nods. ‘I’ll call you with the results tomorrow. Anything I should know about this?’
I shake my head. ‘It’s a rape case but . . . other than that, I want you to find out what you find out and let me know. I also want chromosomal analysis on the blood sample, particularly the full vial. That’s the victim. And if there are two kinds of DNA on the swabs, could you get both?’
Mia rolls her eyes. ‘I knew there would be something more. You ask a lot, Archie. Karyotyping to get the chromosomal analysis will take a week.’
‘I’m very grateful. Keep it quiet. It’s for a young patient.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘Mm,’ I murmur. ‘Speak to you tomorrow?’
Mia smiles and goes to close the door. ‘Drive safe.’
The roads are quiet on the way home, through the suburbs of Oxford, out onto the short stretch of connecting road, through the darkness of trees and fields and a cloudy night, and back into the human world, in the residential lanes of Hemingway.
I find myself thinking, in spite of my belief in leaving work at the office, about Max.
Max is sixteen. So much changes when you are a teenager. You become aware of sex and love. You rush things, because you think your friends are experiencing more than you are. That’s one reason I see so many young kids coming in to talk to me about unprotected sex, about drugs, about alcohol. They all want to explore these new feelings. All the adolescents in Max’s school are pairing off or experimenting, as far as I can tell from how many come in to the drop-in sessions for contraception. Max must be waking up to it, revisiting his feelings about his condition as he understands what a difference it will make to his ability to form relationships. I wonder if I should recommend a counsellor.
Does Max feel intersex, or more like a boy? He seems to identify as a boy. He certainly wears the suit well. Little heartbreaker.
I requested karyotyping from Mia because it will tell me what type of intersex Max is and whether it’s in his chromosomes, written in his genetic make-up. This code dictates much of who Max will be, his health, how he functions, and his gender. Max’s file is over-full and confusing, and with diagnoses of these gender variations in such flux, I want to make sure he has been properly diagnosed. Karyotyping is a test often done with blood, which evaluates whether Max is XX (a girl), XY (a boy), or a combination. It might be that he is not truly intersex at all, that he presents that way physically, but is chromosomally a boy, or even a girl. If he is a boy, it could offer some real comfort to Max.
Max’s notes were all over the place, in all different types of handwriting. Not a lot was known about intersex conditions, even fifteen years ago, and I could not find his exact diagnosis in my quick scanning. I decide to read up on him, perhaps in my old textbooks, when I get time this week, while I wait for the karyotype.
One common type of intersexuality is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, where babies are genetically boys, but the body doesn’t react to androgens, including testosterone, in the womb, so they present as baby girls. The only reason I remember this type is because I saw it on a documentary. I search my memory, but I cannot recall any specific types I learnt about in my training. I wonder what secrets Max’s body is keeping.
Daniel
‘Shouldn’t you be in bed? It’s eleven,’ Max says, coming into my room. ‘You upset Mum today.’
‘Mum’s always upset with me.’ I shrug.
‘She’s never upset with you,’ says Max, and I raise my eyebrows at him, because for an older person, he sure doesn’t notice much.
‘Me and her fight all the time now,’ I tell him. He sits down next to me. ‘Oh. Do you?’
I kill three zombies and glance at him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
He picks bits out of my carpet. ‘Nothing. Why?’
‘Don’t do that,’ I say.
‘Sorry.’
‘I thought Mum said you were sick. Aren’t you supposed to be lying down somewhere?’
‘No. I’m fine. I just . . . had a shock today. I told her I was fine. Didn’t want to make her worry.’
‘Suck up,’ I say, teasing him like he teases me sometimes. Max just looks at me and his eyes roll around in his head like he’s thinking. Not right back or anything, just from side to side.
‘I’m only joking,’ I say.
‘I’m not a suck up,’ he says.
I pause the game and put the controller down. ‘What shock?’
Max shrugs. ‘Nothing. I’m over it now,’ he says, picking up the controller and turning the loud music back on. He instantly kills a Gnomobear, which is sixty-five points. That’s triple the points you get for wiping out a zombie. He gives me a big, blank smile, like a line stretching across his face and showing one sliver of tooth. He giggles, promptly killing another Gnomobear, watching the frustration on my face because I have yet to kill any of them the whole game.
‘Nothing,’ he says again.
Sylvie
It beats and it beats and it beats,
This beast . . .
That’s all I have. It just came to me this morning, while I was doing my homework on the computer in the IT room. It repeats in my head, along a rhythm, but no other words come. I love writing poetry, but it comes slow sometimes. I often write a bit while I do my homework in the IT room in the morning, or at lunchtime. I’ve noticed it’s the place where all the kids without friends go.
Let’s face it: I do not have friends. It’s not by choice. I don’t know why. I used to have one in primary school. We were tight, we used to make up all sorts of stories together and play imaginary games all the time. We had imaginary dogs and cats. Mine was a kitten called Tabby and she had a puppy called Max. I don’t like to be arrogant, but I was a good friend. We used to swap presents we made for each other all the time. I always made a big deal out of birthdays. But then when we were twelve I moved away, here, to Hemingway. We lived in Islington in North London. Then my mum and dad moved jobs to ones in Oxford and we moved here.
I never see my old friend now. It’s OK. It’s been four years. I never really met anyone at this school who was like me. There were a few near hits, and a lot of misses. I don’t mind it being just me now. I’m used to it, I guess, but I do miss knowing there’s someone out there who can stand me, who maybe thinks I’m funny, and is funny back. I miss having someone to be ridiculous and piss myself for ages with; I miss having someone who makes me feel like I’m not weird, or maybe that, no matter how weird I am, there’s someone out there who is just as weird as me. Sometimes I panic about that, but then that’s crazy. I’m only sixteen. I’ll meet someone cool.
After I’ve done my homework, I go to the common room. I sit alone as usual. Emma, Laura and Fay are nearby. They are halfway girls. Halfway pretty, halfway popular, halfway mean and halfway nice. Sometimes I hang out with them when I’m bored.
‘OMG,’ says Emma. ‘Did he really? He’s so hot.’
‘Oh my god, yeah, totally.’ Laura nods.
‘But his girlfriend is such a slaaaaag,’ Fay chimes in.
‘Right, Sylvie?’ says Emma, looking at me.
‘Right.’ I nod. I don’t know who they’re talking about. I don’t know why they talk to me. My guess is that I make a good audience. Everyone here bitches about each other and talks about boys all day. I don’t get it. I thought they were joking when I first came here, because who bitches so much about their friends behind their backs? And who would make boys like the ones at Hemingway the centre of their universe? Blah people. Small town blah people. So I don’t say anything. I just listen.
Not that the boys are so bad, but . . . they’re just people. In fact, the only people I’ve had fun hanging out with here have been boys. But here it is weird for boys to hang out with girls. In Hemingway, the boys hang out with the boys (‘boy’ = footballer who plays video games, drinks beer, wears blue, listens to rock music, likes tits, and will likely one day become a politician/work in finance and have a mild coke habit) and the girls hang out with the girls (‘girl’ = would-be accountant/footballer’s wife/housewife who dyes her hair blonde, drinks wine, wears pink clothes and orange make-up, dances to light RnB, likes pretty-boys and will likely one day have a mild coke habit).
So mostly I just hang out by myself, and sometimes Emma Best will come over with Laura, Fay and a few other people and talk to me. She blatantly digs for dirt all the time. On anyone. I can only take so much of them. I’m just not built for it. It’s not like I’m not incredibly observant and witty (and cocky); it’s just I’m not interested in bitching about or to people. But for some reason, Emma, Fay and Laura always come up to and sit right next to me. This morning I stuck my headphones in as soon as they arrived, to indicate I was busy.
If I’m not in the IT room, I usually like to hang out in the library to avoid them, but it’s only open at lunchtime, so I have to come to the common room. Not many people from my year hang out there, and none of the boys come in the IT room or library, of course (the boys say: ‘work = gay’). Max Walker doesn’t come into the library either.
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