Flesh & Blood

by A. E. Dooland

  I took my phone out. “Hey,” I texted him, “I got a steady job, but I’m only getting paid for Friday this week, so if you could use that extra $200 you took on Tuesday, you can take the $120 remaining out from my account after 8pm this Monday. After this week it should be fine for the rest of the loan, there’s no need for anyone to visit.”

  “Where are you working?”

  I read over that a couple of times. Didn’t he believe me? Oh well, I conceded, thinking that it wasn’t really that strange of him to ask. Mainstream credit providers always wanted work details. “Radic Automotive.”

  I waited a few minutes for a reply, but I didn’t get one. Feeling uneasy, I put my silent, dark phone back in my pocket, and completed the rest of the forms. The only thing that was missing was my ID, and I could photocopy my driver’s licence on Monday.

  Bree slept on the couch over the weekend. I didn’t sleep as a result; first of all because I was worried about her, and secondly because I had this niggling fear in my head that she might dump me, and I might be in financial ruin over someone who didn’t even want to stay with me. The idea of her leaving me was a really distressing thought in itself— because what the fuck would I do without her?—and so I lay awake in my cold, empty bed with my chest aching for her, trying to imagine how my life would look without my Bree.

  On Monday, Bree did at least say goodbye to me before she left, which gave me some fleeting hope she’d forgive me for giving up on my dreams or whatever. She didn’t go as far as letting me drive her, though, so I made the trip across the harbour by myself.

  The first thing I did when I got to work was photocopy my driver’s and hand all my completed paperwork to Lilly, who said she’d put it through immediately.

  Mrs Dejanovic was a few minutes late, and when she came rushing in, it was with some of that cheap concealer on under her eyes again, and mumbling something about neighbours being too loud.

  Neighbours, I thought, sure.

  “You really need to move house, Vera,” Lilly said over the partition. “Just sell up and leave. Councils are useless these days.”

  Mrs Dejanovic glanced at me to gauge my reaction, but she didn’t say anything about what she saw and just tried to get quickly stuck into her work.

  When we were all sipping away at our coffees, working solidly, Lilly made a concerned noise from over the partition. I didn’t like the sound of it. “Min?” she came around the desk and put the photocopy of my driver’s licence on the table. “I hate to be a pain, but I can’t use this.”

  “Do you need the back, too?” I wondered, and leant sideways to get my wallet out of my pocket.

  She stopped me. “No, I can’t use a driver’s licence, I mean. The auditors tore through us a couple of years ago about insufficient ID—it’s a workplace insurance thing, you see. We need to be able to prove everyone is a citizen. Don’t worry, though! I don’t want you to think we’re trying to get out of paying you. I’ll do a very special pay run just for you tomorrow when you bring it.” She winked a crinkled eye at me.

  The blood began to drain from my face. No pay today? “I’m definitely a citizen, so what do you need exactly?”

  “A birth certificate,” she said, and then sat back down at her desk, humming to herself.

  THIRTY

  It was lucky my new job required minimal brainpower, because I couldn’t think about anything else: my birth certificate was standing between me and getting paid. The second I handed it over to Lilly, that was it, I’d have to face another scandal. All the whispering, the staring, and all of those awkward questions. Everything I’d had at Frost, but with the bonus addition of my girlfriend’s parents suddenly finding out that their daughter’s boyfriend wasn’t actually a boy.

  Well then, Einstein, you’d better figure out a way to deal with this, I told myself, staring at my frowning reflection in the computer screen. Because If you don’t, Seung’s not getting paid and you’ll get to meet his hired goons.

  After I raced home from work, the first thing I did was turn my whole fucking room over to actually find the certificate. I don’t think I’d used it for years, and as a result, I had no idea which document folder it was in and I had to go through all of them.

  I found my passport first—which was also proof of my citizenship—but when I opened it to consider if I could use that instead, I came face-to-face with a photo of the old me, the one with long hair, false eyelashes and pink lipstick. I made a disgusted noise and put it aside. It might have had a very small and innocuous ‘F’ beside ‘Sex:’, but that photo said way too much.

  While I was leafing page-by-page through an old sketchbook to see if I’d tucked my birth certificate in there, it occurred to me that if it had a small ‘F’, too, perhaps this wasn’t a lost cause after all. It was a full page of information, and Lilly was only looking for my citizenship, wasn’t she? Bree had made a pretty good point about people generally seeing what they expected to. Maybe I could just casually hand it to Lilly and she’d glance at it, photocopy it, and tuck it away in a folder to never be looked at again.

  That seemed like my best bet so far, so when I finally found my stupid certificate in with my tax stuff from five years ago, I breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn’t have to use my passport, and sat back on the bed to unfold it.

  The certificate itself was pink and green—which to someone with five years of graphic design experience was a very painful combination—and printed on thick, almost cardstock-like paper with an embossed security pattern that I could feel when I ran my fingers over the surface. Min Lee, it read and, instead of ‘F’ like I’d expected, the word ‘FEMALE’ was printed in bolded capitals right under my name. You couldn’t miss it. There was absolutely no chance in hell Lilly would.

  “Fuck!” I said aloud, and let my hands flop into my lap.

  There was no way around it, was there? I had two choices: either I wasn’t going to get paid and I could look forward to being terrorised by debt collectors, or I was going to have to tell someone at the factory that Briana Dejanovic’s boyfriend was female.

  Who the fuck was I going to tell, though? Lilly was friendly, but if she thought the idea of Bree getting a nose piercing was radical, how was she going to feel about me being female? She was related to the Dejanovics too—and Bree always said her parents were terrified of people whispering about them. Everyone in the factory knew everyone; it wouldn’t take long for a scandal like this to spread like wildfire.

  But if I didn’t tell Lilly—the payroll clerk who’d be actually transferring my salary to me—how the hell was I going to pay Seung?

  Well, he wasn’t getting paid tonight like I’d said he would be, so I had to give him some reason why the money wasn’t there and hope to god that it wouldn’t result in a visit from his scary debt collectors. After agonising over what to say for 15 minutes, I settled on, “They couldn’t pay me today because they needed to sight my birth certificate, but it’s in my hand and you will definitely, 100% get the rest of the money tomorrow.” When he didn’t reply, I checked all the doors and windows were locked, feeling uneasy.

  I wanted to talk my options with Bree, but when I sent her a text to ask her when she was getting home, she sent a message back saying that she was staying at Courtney’s for the night. Maybe they’re working on homework together, I tried to reassure myself as I cleaned up my ransacked room, which included tucking my hard packer right down the bottom of my suitcase so that trespassing debt collectors wouldn’t find it. Or maybe she knows you’ve been hiding the fact you paid her fees, another voice said. I gulped.

  Rob didn’t come home, either, so for the whole night I had the pleasure of lying in bed alone in a big empty house, and imagining every tiny sound I heard was debt collectors coming to split my knee-caps, or kidnap me and hold me for ransom, or whatever it was that scary debt collectors did.

  When I headed to work the next morning—fuzzy-headed because there was no fucking caffeine in Sarah’s house—my petrol tank was n
early completely empty. The warning light was glowing on my dash for most of the trip. I’ll get paid today, I thought, touching the birth certificate in my breast pocket. It’s okay.

  For the last two days, I’d taken my blazer off and hung it on the back of my chair, but with the birth certificate in it, I didn’t want to leave it alone. I trialled folding the certificate again and putting it in my suit pants, too, but it felt like it was about to fall out all the time, and that was worse. Anyone could come across it on the floor, open it and see, ‘NAME: MIN LEE, SEX: FEMALE’ on it. So, I opted to leave my blazer on in the 20+ degree office while I was trying to work.

  “You don’t have to be so formal,” Mrs Dejanovic told me when she saw me struggling with it. “A shirt is enough, even with short sleeves. Dragi doesn’t even wear a singlet. It gets hot in the factory.”

  You’d see a lot more than you’d expect to if I took my ‘singlet’ off, I thought, but despite the layer of sweat that was probably clearly visible on my upper lip, I just said, “It’s fine, I’m actually a bit cold.”

  I spent the whole morning sitting uncomfortably at my desk stressing about who I was going to show the certificate to and how I was going to do it, and by lunchtime I was dying to take my jacket off. I went out to the car park and sat stewing in my car, trying to decide if I should just tell Lilly after all and beg her not to say anything to anyone else. I wasn’t sure I trusted her not to say anything, though, and I didn’t want to make another bad decision and screw everything up.

  Maybe I should wait until tomorrow so I can ask Bree what to do tonight, I thought. In the grand scheme of things, a single day wasn’t going to make that much difference to Seung, was it? But to me, it could be the difference between keeping my job and maintaining whatever tenuous relationship I had with my girlfriend’s parents, and losing everything.

  By half-past, I’d talked myself into that, and so I took my phone out and agonised over what to text him. “I know I said I’d get paid today,” I typed, “but there’s an issue with my ID. Tomorrow, for sure. I need the money as well.”

  I got an immediate reply. “Jesus Christ, Min!” It was a few seconds before the next one came through, and I stared intently at my phone and anxiously tapped the steering wheel, bracing for it. “This is bullshit. Whose pocket do you think the money comes out of to balance the till when you don’t pay? I can’t take another year of this crap, you’re stressing me out. It’s today or I get my dad’s people involved.”

  I read that a couple of times, feeling sick. I wondered who his people were and what they did. “Just one more day,” I texted him. “I mean it.”

  “You don’t know how often I hear that.”

  He didn’t reply after that, and after I’d sat there for a few minutes waiting, I realised he wasn’t going to. He wasn’t giving me any extra time. Well, then: that settled it. I was going to have to tell someone today, someone who could keep a secret. There were two people here who I knew for a fact were very good at keeping secrets, but only one of them probably wouldn’t shout at me. I needed to tell Mrs Dejanovic. But how? How should I frame it?

  I sent a text to Bree, “I need to come out to your mum because the office won’t pay me without a birth certificate, how should I do it? What should I say, should I keep it clinical?” and then I spent the rest of my lunch break sitting in my car and waiting for her to reply. By 1pm when I needed to go back inside, she still hadn’t. That was so unlike her, I could usually count on her to get back to me quickly. Just in case she was punishing me, I sent her another message. “Bree, I really need your help on this one. I know you’re disappointed with me about the master’s stuff, but please, I need your input on how to tell your mum.” She didn’t reply again, but I couldn’t sit and worry about it because I really needed to head back up to the office.

  When I sat down at the desk beside Mrs Dejanovic again, my heart was hammering in my chest as I unlocked my computer. Giving me a sideways glance, she mutely placed a stack of filled purchase orders on my desk for me to enter. I started on them, checking my phone every five minutes to see if Bree had replied with instructions on what to do. By four she still hadn’t—why hadn’t she?—and it was getting to the point where I wasn’t going to get paid if I didn’t do something very soon.

  When my phone finally buzzed, I jumped on it, hoping Bree had some pearls of wisdom about how to handle her mother, but it wasn’t from Bree at all, it was another message from Seung. “Right this second is your last chance: am I getting paid today or not?”

  I exhaled, reading over it and then putting my phone aside.

  You need to just do it now, I told myself, staring at my screen. Come on, you’ve done much harder things: think of that pitch at Frost. You’d worked with those people for five years; you haven’t even known people here for three days. What’s the worst that could happen?

  I looked across at Mrs Dejanovic mechanically typing away at her numeric keypad. Bree said she was okay, and despite the cool reception she always gave me, she had gotten me a job.

  Shit. I took a deep breath, here goes nothing. “Um,” I began, “Can I speak with you for sec?” I paused. “In private?”

  She looked up from her keyboard, frowning at me. Over the partition, Lilly glanced up at us; it was clear she was listening. Mrs Dejanovic noticed, and I may have seen her do the faintest of eyerolls. “Okay,” she said, and then stood, leading me out of the office.

  She stopped as soon as we were out in the open hallway that led downstairs to the floor, turning back towards me. Her arms were crossed.

  I glanced nervously at the door beside us. It didn’t feel very private. “Can’t they hear us?”

  She shook her head. “The factory is too loud.” I hadn’t noticed until that point, but the sound of machines being operated was louder out here.

  I nodded, and then stood there for a second, licking my lips. Fuck.

  “I have enough secrets in my life,” Mrs Dejanovic prompted me. “Tell me what is all this sweating, and this dressing up, and looking at your phone every five minutes. Don’t add to my secrets.”

  I grimaced. “I think I’m about to,” I began apologetically, and then took a steadying breath. “Something’s happened and I really need money, but I can’t get paid until Lilly sees my birth certificate, and there’s something on it that I don’t want her to see.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she crossed her arms more tightly.

  God, how the hell did I say it? “It’s really personal, and I really, really don’t want anyone here to know. Bree and I were trying to figure out how I should tell you and your husband, and I know now isn’t a great time, but…” I made a face. “I kind of don’t have a choice. I need to get paid, so I need to tell you now.”

  She looked unmoved. “Tell us what?”

  I watched her for a moment, and then, with a shaking hand, reached into my breast pocket, retrieving the folded birth certificate and holding it out to her.

  Squinting at me, she accepted it. I watched her eyes run over the text, bracing myself for impact. She was frowning. “It says ‘Melbourne’,” she said, “and you are a citizen, so I don’t—”

  The wait was agonising, and I couldn’t stand it. I wanted it over and done with. “Here.” I pointed to the bold text below my name.

  It took her a moment. She held the certificate closer to her face to check she’d read it right. Her eyes jumped back up to my name, and then up to my face. She looked aghast. “Is this a fake?”

  Swallowing, I shook my head.

  She glanced up and down my body, pausing on my chest and my crotch. “No,” she said easily. “No, it’s a fake.”

  I opened my mouth a moment before I spoke. “It’s not fake,” I told her with gravity.

  “No,” she repeated, and for a moment she had a look of complete and utter disbelief. Then, something occurred to her and recognition dawned on her face. “Andrej wasn’t lying,” she said, taking a shallow breath. “My god, you are a girl!”


  “Not exactly,” I managed to say. “I’m female, it’s not the same as—”

  “How is it not the same?” she asked, sounding measurably distressed. “Are we not the same?” She gestured at her own body.

  I winced. “At the moment,” I told her, and she inhaled in a gasp and put a hand on her forehead, taking a step away from me. “But I’m transgender,” I tried to explain. “It’s a medical condition where someone isn’t the right—”

  She wasn’t ready to hear any of that, and she interrupted me. “Briana knows this?” she asked, sounding very upset. “She likes this?”

  Oh god. I didn’t want to out Bree, but I also didn’t want to lie to her mother. My silence was answer enough.

  Mrs Dejanovic put her other hand to her chest—the birth certificate clutched in it—and muttered something in Serbian. This time after she’d looked me up and down again, her tone was more combative. “Did you make her that way? Did you trick her and lie to her the way you lied to us? To our faces?”

  What on—? “I’m not tricking you or Bree! This isn’t—”

  “Yes!” she said over me. “This is a trick! You are a girl, and you want us to think you are a boy, it’s a trick!”

  “It’s not a trick!” I told her, gesturing down my body. “This is how I feel comfortable. This is how I am, it’s not a costume. I’m not lying to you about any of—”

  “—is that the truth?” she said, pointing at my full crotch. “Is that real?” She knew the answer.

  I flushed bright red. “Believe me, I’m just as uncomfortable with my female body as you are. Bree is the only one of all of us who isn’t.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said, her hand slipping from her forehead to her mouth while she stared at me, wide-eyed. I went to say something else, but she put a hand up to silence me and took a step away. “No more, please, no more. I knew there was something, I knew it. I didn’t know it was this. God, and I got you a job here! Dragi is going to kill you if anyone finds out. He will kill me, too.”