‘Why did you come to the hospital?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘Answer the fucking question!’ Dad shouts. ‘Tell me you knew!’
There is a silence, and then Mum speaks, and her voice is hard and quiet. ‘Yes, I knew. I still think in the end it will be for the best. He’s only sixteen. He has so much going for him. There is no right in this situation,’ she whimpers. ‘I realise, Steve, that maybe Max won’t forgive me for a long time, but he will forgive me. And I knew you’d probably never forgive me. And of course I didn’t want that, because I love you, Steve, but . . .’
She trails off and there is silence for maybe half a minute. I peer through the keyhole. Mum stands with her hands leaning on the kitchen table on one side of it and Dad is opposite her, around the other side, sat down, arms folded, both of their faces dark and still.
‘I’m just going to say what all parents know and never say. I love you, Steve, but I love Max more. And I did this for him. And I’m not sorry I did it.’
Then there is an even longer silence. Mum’s face is ashen, tired and eerily dead. But she looks strong. Strong and used to bearing something.
My secrets, I think. My secrets are pulling this family apart. I slump down onto the floor by the door and thumb my lip.
‘Well,’ Dad’s voice murmurs. ‘Then there’s nothing left to say, is there?’
‘I’m going to go,’ says Mum.
‘To Leah’s?’ Dad asks.
‘No. Leah and Edward have their hands full with Hunter. He’s getting detention after detention at moment, cutting classes. I meant . . . maybe I should go somewhere . . . for a while.’
Then Mum whispers something that catches in her throat. I comprehend, ‘I should stay at my sister’s’, at the end of her sentence.
I look back up through the keyhole. After her last word, she moves quickly, her head down, slipping carefully past Dad, scooping her keys off the counter into her handbag. She stands with her body facing him, not looking up from behind her hair. She’s wearing her jeans, a green jumper and a tan leather jacket. Her lips look really pink and wet, and so do her cheeks. Her hair is all messy and looks dark blonde from the rain. She actually looks really pretty.
‘I agree,’ says Dad.
Mum raises her head, and her eyes are cold. ‘Daniel’s still at Leah’s,’ she says. ‘I’ll pick him up.’
‘No,’ says Dad. ‘I’ll do it.’
Mum looks as if she’s about to say something. Then she shakes her head wearily and lets herself out. The back door shuts gently.
There is silence for a bit, then Dad puts his two massive hands over his face and lets out a big sob, carefully, trying to hold back, hold it in. He gets up slowly and stands very still. His hands go to his hips and he takes a few deep breaths. His stomach and big chest move in and out as he gasps. I’ve never, ever seen my dad cry.
I remember once, on Mum’s birthday years ago, before Daniel was born, he got her this beautiful necklace. It was a heart, a gold heart, and she’s worn it ever since. And she cried when she took it out the box and he said, ‘For the love of my life.’ I remember all the occasions when Dad seemed at all soft and they are all images of him and Mum. Him hugging her, him dancing clumsily with her, their wedding photos where he was looking at her like she was the most amazing thing in the world. Now he’s thrown her out because of me. He picks up a tea towel and wipes his cheeks. Then he moves towards the door and I sit back from the keyhole and freeze.
Steve
I open the door to see where Max is. It’s at times like these you need your kids most, to hold them in your arms.
I open the door, planning on heading for the stairs, but on the floor right in front of me is Max.
One look at him sets me off again. The same mop of yellow hair he’s had since he was a baby. Little green eyes poking out from under it, wondering if I’m going to yell at him or whether he’s going to get away with snooping. Little bugger.
He’s not broad and bulky like me, but he’s not thin either. I notice for the first time how much he’s grown. I was right. It all goes by so fast. You always think of your kids as ‘the kids’. I still imagine him small and wet from the bath and listening to a bedtime story in his pyjamas, even though he’s sixteen and nearing a good five-foot-ten now. It doesn’t matter to me.
I look at his little body, the one that Karen and I created, and I hunch over him, put my arms under his shoulders, kneel down in front of him and pull him up into a hug. I feel his hands on my back, and remember when they were little paws.
Max
I basically sleep for the entire weekend, go back to school on Monday, and throw up at school on Tuesday. I know I’m going to do it about five minutes before I do. It’s a build-up of thoughts inside me that somehow creeps from my brain into my stomach. It’s in a break between classes, and I’m walking towards the Geography block. Then I make a sudden right out of the main corridor and down the dead end where the loos are. I walk in and no one is there, so I go into a cubicle, put my bag down, lift the seat up and heave into the bowl. I puke up my breakfast and then I dry heave twice, but nothing else comes out. The remnants of a bagel float half-digested in the loo water. I wait a minute until I’m sure it has all gone and then I flush, walk to the sinks, wash my face, then go to Geography.
The entire time I’m thinking how I went to the hospital with something inside me and I came out alone, with nothing, as if nothing happened, with no choice or thought required from me. I’m a passive observer to the pain around me. I’m the fuse of the bomb. I don’t even light myself. I don’t choose when I go out. I don’t explode. I just am.
After Geography, I go to the common room. When I walk in the door, Olivia and Marc are snogging. I make a sick noise and go over to the lockers to dump my books. Kerry is there. She’s new.
‘Hi,’ she says, and smiles at me.
‘Hi,’ I say half-heartedly.
At first break, Marc and I went into town and got vodka and mixed it with orange, because it’s going to be our last day of term soon, and it’s nearly Christmas, so we thought, why not?
Now he thrusts it at me and we drink it all, going back and forth between us. I get drunk quicker because my stomach is empty. Carl refuses to join in because we have an exam later, even though it doesn’t even count.
Then Marc suggests we play spin the bottle, winking at Olivia like, ‘I can’t wait to see you lezz up’.
I say no at first, but then I see Sylvie. She walks in the door right next to us. I turn away from her quickly.
‘Hey, Sylvie,’ Marc says. ‘Do you want to play spin the bottle?’
My eyes flit over to her and I watch her from beneath my hair.
‘No thanks,’ she says to Marc, looking at me.
Marc shrugs and moves away to Olivia, leaving only Sylvie and me by the door.
Hey,’ she says. ‘Um, how are you?’
‘Great,’ I say. I’m embarrassed, trying to make a joke, but I lose faith halfway through and it comes out sulky.
She hesitates.
‘I meant, do you know what you’re gonna do?’
She looks slightly uncomfortable, and I think about how she reacted, how it was this big deal for her to have such a disgusting boyfriend.
‘I had an operation on Friday,’ I murmur in a low growl, then add sarcastically, ‘So you don’t have to worry about me anymore.’
She nods. ‘I wondered . . . when you weren’t in school. I’m so sorry, Max.’
I start walking away.
‘Wait.’ Sylvie catches my arm and I shrug her off. She looks flustered. ‘Wait, Max! Are you OK?’
‘I said I’m great.’
‘Let’s go somewhere we can talk,’ she says, reasonably, moving towards the door. She clearly expects me to follow, like the little sheep I am.
‘Forget it. It’s over,’ I say, meaning everything. That everything is over. ‘So you can just go
back to normal and I’ll go back to whatever the fuck I am.’
‘Shit. I didn’t mean that “normal” thing I said on Thursday. I was just having a panic attack. I get them sometimes.’
‘I feel so sorry for you,’ I say coldly, and she stops talking abruptly. I look her in the eye, aiming at a defiant glare. ‘Have you told anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure? Not even your mum?’
‘No!’
My throat catches and I feel my face curling up miserably. ‘Swear you won’t.’
Sylvie frowns, watching me closely. ‘Are you drunk?’
‘Get lost,’ I reply lamely. I walk over to the game dizzily.
Marc looks up at me and beckons me over. ‘Come on, you twat.’ When I sit down next to him, he says more quietly, ‘What’s up with Sylvie?’
I shake my head. ‘Not going out anymore.’
I knew she couldn’t cope, I think, taking the drink bottle from Marc. I knew it.
The real problem is me, anyway. Not her. I’m just tired of being in people’s lives. I make everyone hate everyone else. Everyone thinks I’m disgusting. I am disgusting. I’m a catalyst for hate and confusion. I just show up and fuck up everything. Look at Mum and Dad. I’m weak and cowardly and I don’t stand up for myself, just like Dad said. I’m weak.
I get paired up with the new girl, Kerry, in spin the bottle. We have to kiss in front of everyone. She grins afterwards.
‘You’re an incredible kisser,’ she says.
Marc laughs. ‘Practically every girl in our year knows that!’
Olivia looks over at me. It occurs to me that Marc might be jealous.
Good, I think bitterly.
‘Max, it’s you again,’ Olivia says.
I look up. Kerry is giggling. The bottle has landed on me again, and we get off again.
The whole time Sylvie is watching and I feel bad, bad, bad. But at the same time I hate her. I hate everything that makes me remember.
Anyway. She’s better off not liking me.
‘Kerry’s kind of . . . um . . . a player, Max,’ says Maria, at the end of lunch, as we’re walking to our lockers. ‘I mean, seriously, she cheated on her last boyfriend at her old school loads. My brother told me. He’s friends with a guy who goes there.’
‘So?’ I say.
‘So, what about Sylvie? I thought you really liked her?’
I yank my bag out my locker really hard, so the whole row shakes. ‘What about Sylvie?’
‘You’re totally drunk,’ says Maria.
‘So?’ I ask, and laugh.
‘You’re an idiot,’ Maria says, affectionately but firmly, giving me a sisterly hug. ‘I dunno what’s going on with you, but I’m here if you need to talk, OK?’
I rub my eyes and nod.
‘OK, Max?’
‘OK.’ Maria shakes her head sadly at me and walks away. I hear her feet tap out of the common room and the door creaks shut. I don’t look up as she leaves.
Then I feel pissed at myself because I’m being so horrible to everybody, but I feel like I can’t stop, so I punch my locker really hard and hurt my hand. I look down and there’s blood on my knuckles, and a dent in the locker door, so I get out of there before someones comes to see what the noise was.
Everything seems to be carrying on. Except Mum is staying with her sister, Auntie Cheryl, and her husband, Uncle Charlie. I think she thinks I hate her. It’s half true.
She came back yesterday, on Sunday, to get some of her stuff. My aunt came with her. She clearly knew about everything that has been going on with me. I opened my bedroom door to see what was going on in Mum and Dad’s room, because I could hear whispering and things being moved, and Cheryl was stood at the door to their room. She turned towards me, and her face fell into lines of sympathy.
‘Oh, Max,’ she said. It’s an interesting thing about Mum, that she feels that, because I’m her kid, because I ‘belong’ to her, that she can make very personal decisions about my life, like who to tell my secrets to; when to come in my room without my permission and ‘tidy up’, i.e. mess with my stuff; whether to let surgeons operate on me when I’ve made it clear I don’t want the operation.
I know exactly what I would have done if she had stopped the operation, and she would have got her way in the end. I would have ummed and ahhed about it, like I always do about any decision, tried to talk to her and Dad a bit more about it, then panicked and had it anyway. So it would have been exactly the same as before. I wouldn’t have had the baby. I’d have been too scared and pathetic about how I felt, about wanting it a bit, about feeling so torn, worried about what everybody would think, and I would have freaked out and done what everyone wanted me to do. My body freaks me out, and hence . . . Hence, what? Hence I’m paralysed. I feel like nothing is ever going to change.
A bit later, Mum, again without my permission, pushed open the door to my room. When I saw her head peeking through, it took all my strength not to just jump off the bed and scream at her, shake her, hit her. She took away any control I have over my life. She took away my choice. Just like Hunter took away my control, my choices. Really, which one is worse? Just add her to the list of people who think they know what’s best for me. It’s almost full, with Hunter and all the doctors, but there’s just room for her too.
‘I don’t want to see you,’ I said immediately.
‘Max,’ she said. ‘I’m your mother.’
‘You’re not me.’
‘What?’
‘Are you me?’
‘Max,’ she said, placatively.
‘Fuck off saying my name like that! No! The answer is no! You’re not me! So you don’t know what it’s like. You shouldn’t choose for me, and you shouldn’t come in my fucking room without knocking!’ I shouted, barrelling towards the door. I shoved her out, and slammed it shut, narrowly missing her fingers.
‘Max, please!’ I heard her in tears on the other side of the door. ‘Please come out.’
Her voice sounded lower to the ground. I heard her weeping, and then Cheryl’s voice said softly, ‘Come on, Kaz. He just needs some time, you said so yourself. Come on, love.’
Then I heard the sound of floorboards – my mother getting up – and they shuffled away on the carpet, into Mum and Dad’s room, and shut the door.
I sat down against the wall next to the door and scratched my head back and forth until it hurt. Then I bit my knuckles until they hurt. You don’t know why you’re doing these things when you’re doing them. It just feels like you’re going crazy, that you have no control over what happens in your life or how you feel, and you have to do something to get the energy out, to get back in control. I took deep breaths, huffing them away. I sat on the floor and tightly held my knees with my palms, until I was calm again.
Sometimes when I need to let off steam, when I’m angry or upset or something, I play football. I’ve never been really good at letting out emotion. I’ve been thinking recently that Dad was right, that I don’t like to rock the boat.
I remember Mum leaving when I was little, but I didn’t know it was for two months. I guess the way I remembered it, it seemed like a few days to me. I was terrified she wasn’t going to come back, and afterwards I used to get scared a lot when she left the house, even if she was just driving down to Hemingway to get the shopping. I would sit, totally still, in the window, imagining horrible things, imagining that she would die and never get home or know how much I loved her. I would whisper, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy’, over and over again, like a little prayer. If I could just prove myself by being a good boy, by waiting for her, by not crying, by sitting quietly and whispersaying her name, then she would come back. I realise now that maybe this fear started after she left that time.
But Dad was wrong about one thing, because Mum is not really to blame, not alone. Really, I know I’ve always been scared of rocking the boat, because I always thought that being intersex was the thing that was difficult to cope with, and that if I piled anythin
g else on top of that, everyone would stop loving me. Maybe my parents didn’t talk to me about being intersex because they didn’t want it to be an issue, just in the same way Hunter’s parents were trying to do the right thing when they told him I was intersex when he was young. Maybe they thought by introducing him to it at a young age, he’d grow up OK with it. But you can start out with all the good intentions you like and still everything can go wrong. Hunter and I, we both got confused.
I wish I could let all this out by running onto a muddy field and kicking a ball about, but I’m not playing football until January. Doctor’s orders. Marc and Carl think I had my appendix out. The teachers must know, though, mustn’t they? It feels like my secrets are leaking out as the circle of people who know widens. Mum got a note from Archie and gave it to the school office. I watched it being handed over, one of the last things I did with Mum. It was white and folded and slipped into an envelope, twirling through the air, as Mum presented it to the head teacher. The head teacher looked at it, then back at me, shocked. Her face said, Oh, that’s why.
Maybe I was just imagining it. I never asked Mum what the note said. I didn’t say a word to her.
It was going to be my last day on Friday for the Christmas holidays anyway, but after getting drunk yesterday, I get up on Wednesday morning and I get dressed into my uniform, then I sit on the floor in my room with my bag, feeling like nothing, like crap, exhausted. I’m supposed to leave for the bus at ten past eight but I can’t stand up. I physically can’t. I feel so tired.
I think back to what Sylvie said, about only leaving, only letting go when you’re done. I feel so done.
Dad comes in at half past eight. He says it’s OK. That I don’t have to go in if I don’t want to.
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