NOVEL NEXT 34. Your Sisters in the Dark
34. Your Sisters in the Dark
2002 August 2
Friday
Why is it that she is so nervous? Why does she play with the silver chain around her neck, the matching loops around each wrist? Why do her shoes seem suddenly uncomfortable, her clothes too revealing? Why does she fidget so in her seat? This is not her; this is not the person she’s been training herself to become. This is not a woman who wins wars; this is a woman who is consumed by them.
Her mother would be disgusted with her. Fortunate that she will never again have the opportunity.
She checks the time. Still twenty minutes to go, if Beatrice is punctual. And, whether because of her profession or as an expression of her will, Beatrice is always punctual. One cannot be late when one works exclusively in the cracks between the floorboards of high society, just as one’s deportment cannot be clumsy, one’s appearance sloppy; one’s reputation is rent. For someone like Beatrice Quinn, it is quite possible it is also her life; the world is not kind to escorts, sex workers, street walkers or whores, and triply so when they are transsexual, when they are uniquely vulnerable to annihilation, both material and social.
Indelicate to think upon the advantages she has over her, and yet she takes care always to bear them in mind: in money, title, power, even in the legal recognition of her personhood and gender, Elle Lambert is positioned so far above Beatrice Quinn that the worlds in which they walk would never ordinarily intersect. In the normal course of things, the life of idle luxury to which Elle was born would proceed unaware of and unimpeded by someone such as Beatrice.
Elle, then, owes this meeting, this opportunity, to the brief lives of two people: Valérie Barbier, née Vincent Barbier, the woman whose likely death impelled Beatrice eventually to escape; Kelly, a woman of no surname that Elle’s people have been able to discover, an innocent, whose caress and confession and ultimate demise impelled an investigation which justly took the lives of those whom Elle Lambert had once called family. And now, soaked with blood, Elle finds herself with no-one above her, no-one to control her, no-one to tell her that her plans for Beatrice Quinn are dangerous, disquieting and damn near impossible.
She unhooks her thumb from the silver bracelet and lets it fall to her wrist. Stands and once again inspects herself. Checks the fit and fabric of her dress for the hundredth time. And meets her own gaze, instructs herself in the voice of her mother that she is Elladine Agnes Lambert. Doubts are beneath her, should be placed appropriately with the hordes of untitled filth who swarm the streets of the city below.
And she shakes her head. She longs for her mother’s strength of will, not her beliefs. The woman taught her many things before she was killed, and Elle has discarded almost all of them. Because she might well intend to look down on Beatrice Quinn today, but only to reach out, to offer her a hand up, to share with her the power she has been so unrighteously granted.
Getting ahead of yourself, Elle. She’s agreed to nothing yet.
Fifteen minutes. Almost time.
At the culmination of the silver chain she wears around her neck is a locket, fingernail-small and latched shut. She holds it for a moment in her palm, steadies herself, and flicks it open with a thumbnail to look once again upon the girl she grieves.
Elle never knew Kelly’s former name. She never asked, and foolishly believed that they had many days, months, perhaps years for the girl eventually to tell her. She imagines sometimes a tryst that will never come, a moment of vulnerability between the two of them, a moment of trust. She imagines Kelly leaning close to her and whispering her sole remaining secret. She imagines Kelly’s breath upon the short, wispy hairs on the back of her neck.
Kelly. Proud of her womanhood, no matter that it had been forced upon her. Possessed of a charming disregard for authority. Terribly skilled with her fingers and her tongue. Murdered by Elle’s grandfather. Not by his hand, not the way she eventually understood him to have dispatched Kelly’s predecessors, but by his people. Killed the way one of her lineage might have shot a fox that strayed too close to the henhouse: casually, indifferently, and with no regard for suffering or inclination to mourn.
Two photographs in the locket, rendered in miniature. The first: a beautiful woman, auburn-haired and confident, beautiful and with a mischievous smile she kept only for Elle. She’s resting against a tree in the middle of the gardens, her sundress caught billowing gently in the wind. The second: the two of them, close-up and poor quality, taken with disposable film cameras. Kelly’s smiling again and Elle’s kissing her cheek and standing on the tips of her toes to do so.
She remembers that day. Their last. She promised to get her out, to smuggle her somehow or to create a distraction. Perhaps just to smash a window and scale the walls, two Rapunzels with no need for a knight. In that airy summer garden, Elle told her to stay in her room. She told her to lock the door. She told her she was working on it. She told her to trust her. She told her it would be any day now.
Carefully she closes the locket and returns it to her chest, because such things cannot be remembered calmly, and Elle wants to make fists, to rip the room apart, to tear down the city and the country and the world.
She should have told her to run.
She found nothing in Kelly’s room but her grandfather. There were cameras she didn’t know about; every tryst, every whispered promise had been witnessed. He demanded to know what she’d been told, and though at that moment he appeared as frail as ever he had, she knew that his power had never been in his physical potential. She saw her death in the old man’s eyes, as clearly as she saw the death of Kelly and all her predecessors, so she swallowed her rage, her guilt and her grief. She drew upon her mother’s voice, a voice that could silence a room with a whisper, and she lied.
Kelly confessed, she said. The girl confessed, and Elle found it titillating. She found her stories exciting, and plied her with promises until she told them all. And in that she understood that Kelly had crossed a line and had to be dealt with, but could she, perhaps, have a say in their next procurement.
The old man smiled and said, if you are good.
What happened to her? she asked. So that she may dissemble and deflect, should any questions be asked. And the old man laughed. No questions, he said. Where she came from, no questions ever followed. And now she’s gone. Buried so deep and dark, her body will never be found.
Good, she said, and bit her cheek until it bled.
2019 December 30
Monday
His new room’s better than the bungalow, at least. No more restraints, not even at night, not after his and Valérie’s failed attack on Jake — a ruse that had turned out disconcertingly close to genuine, for there had been a moment where Trevor had applied his full remaining strength and achieved almost nothing. But they’ve bought themselves increased freedom and decreased supervision, and as long as he takes care to look like a broken man, or something like it, whenever the eyes of the cameras are on him, they’re likely to keep it.
And his new room has a view, of a sort.
Frankie said the plan’s coming together. It’ll be risky, but what isn’t? He asked her if she was scared, if she lies awake at night as he does, imagining the barrel of a gun turned on him, imagining the helicopter coming to take him away, imagining his end in every grisly form it might someday take. And she told him no: she thinks of the deaths she should have had, of the people whose lives paid for hers.
Val left instructions on what to wear. He’s to keep himself to a certain standard of feminine comportment and deportment. Makeup and clothes; mannerisms and speaking voice. And he’s not to complain: she’ll help him but she can’t abide whiners. He’s to maintain his appearance or it will be maintained for him, and he’ll be lucky if it’s her who does it.
Frankie laughed and asked if she was sponsoring him and Valérie kicked her in the shin.
He’s become passably skilled, not least because he’s finally found a way to look at himself. When he dresses, when he paints his face, when he tries on his shoes and checks his outfit, he imagines that the woman in the mirror is his sister. She’s just his sister, and he’s helping her get ready. In return, she’s helping him survive. And when she’s done, when she’s gone, then he’ll be able to look at himself again. It’s enough to keep going, even if he feels himself slipping a little more each day, even if he can hardly bear even to look down, because his shape, especially in the clothes provided to him, is undeniable.
Hard not to wonder what it was like to live under Dorothy when she had more staff, more funding, a whole facility with which to do as she wished. Val’s told him bits and pieces, mostly to fill the silence and to give him something else to concentrate on while she taught him how to apply his makeup. She’s told him of the dark rooms underground, of ugly, threadbare furniture and the same battered books over and over again. Of the things done to them to make them compliant. Of never knowing when a new boy would arrive, angry and afraid and spitting and fighting. Of never knowing when a friend would be taken from them, cowed and resigned and ready for the end. And then there’s him, she added, slapping him slightly too hard on the cheek when his attention was waning, when he could no longer control his shakes: reshaped, yes, but not left without hope. If you have such an active imagination, she told him, then imagine what it is like to live with only one possible end ahead of you.
He sees them in his nightmares, Val and her sisters. He wakes and wants once again to rip his flesh from his bones. And there she is again in the morning, impeccably attired, waiting for him.
How the hell does she do it?
Except Frankie said it, didn’t she? Val’s a woman now. Has been for decades. He asked if she was always trans and Frankie said, no, probably not, but if there’s one thing she’s learned, it’s that you don’t necessarily have to be. Made her a bit thoughtful when she realised, she said. Some people can just adapt.
The flip side of that is that some can’t. Trevor can’t even imagine a world where he can look at himself with clear eyes and not want to tear himself asunder, and yet Valérie wanders around the place with such self-assurance he still finds himself doubting she was ever a man.
“You’ve got a strong male gender identity, lad,” Frankie’d said. “It won’t be budged. Unlucky for you.”
“And Valérie?”
She’d shrugged. “Val’s just Val. I thought I understood her thirty-odd years ago and I didn’t; all I have to offer you now is speculation.” And she’d leaned in and whispered with a dirty grin, “Tell you the truth, I don’t think she knows, either.”
And that was it, because Valérie returned from the pantry and shouted at them both for sitting around chatting at the kitchen table like a pair of old men when there was chopping to be done.
That was it. Val’s just Val.
* * *
Shahida’s room’s barely changed since they were teenagers. Melissa knows why: after Mark’s disappearance, Shy started counting down the days until she could leave, until she didn’t have to exist in the places he’d been. She fancies she can see exactly when Shahida stopped living here, when she started waiting out the time: the photowall that stops after the party, save for a single group shot from graduation; the pot of coloured pens with several colours missing and never replaced; the empty spaces on the walls where posters have been taken down but nothing put up in their place.
She won’t say anything about it. Shahida’s sensitive about that time; still convinced that everything that went wrong was her fault, that if only she’d known, if only she’d worked it out, if only she hadn’t been so impatient to have Mark for herself, then the two of them could have worked it out together. Melissa’s had to tell her that no, they couldn’t. How could they have? By the end of it, Mark wasn’t even an empty shell, he’d been smashed open, brought close to death multiple times, and still he didn’t work it out until Abby took him back to Dorley Hall!
Shit. Abby. Another problem. Another worry, on top of the thing with Bea that Tabitha called about. Shahida’s serious about tracking her down and talking to her before things between them progress too much, and if Melissa’s honest, so is she. Abby’s prone to spiralling — like Sister, like Sister, Melissa admits to herself with a snort that causes Shahida to mumble in her sleep — and though Christine’s assured them both multiple times that Abby is fine, that she’s just busy, Melissa can spot a lie when she sees one.
Shahida mumbles again and rolls over, as if in protest, and Melissa laughs at herself, because in truth, she didn’t spot the lie; Shahida did.
“I’m an acute student of human behaviour, Em,” she said, when they talked about it again the other night. “Also, she was looking at the floor when she said it.”
First things first, though. They’ve been called in to meet with Bea. For what purpose, Melissa’s been trying not to wonder, because even a few minutes spent thinking about it produced a list of possible reasons far longer than she was comfortable with, which raised the additional, awful possibility that perhaps they were getting called in over all of them. But here, in the quiet of the morning, there’s nothing else to do but brood over past mistakes.
She’s still worrying when she hears the rustle of sheets and feels a chin prop itself on her shoulder. She reaches back and Shahida finds her hand, intertwines their fingers and squeezes.
“Morning, Em,” she says.
“Hi,” Melissa says.
“What time is it?”
“Not sure. I’ve been up since about seven.”
Shahida knocks her head against Melissa’s. “And you’ve just been sitting here like a weirdo, for…” There’s a pause as Shahida reaches for her phone. “For forty minutes?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“Worrying?”
“Well, yeah.”
Shahida lets go of her and bounces across the mattress, around Melissa’s body. Melissa has to try very hard not to laugh, despite her mood, because Shy keeps colliding with her and then nearly falling backwards when she overcorrects. Eventually, when she’s finally manoeuvred herself into position by Melissa’s side, she takes her hand again, composes her face, and looks very seriously into her eyes. “Don’t,” she says. “Seriously, Liss.”
Melissa offers her tension to Shahida, leans against her, breathes slowly out and gradually curls into her embrace.
“I wish it were that easy,” she says.
“What can Bea even do?”
“Have us killed?” It’s not that she thinks it’s likely, it’s that she’s fairly sure the possibility space of Bea’s response to any given situation involves ‘summon my benefactors and have someone killed,’ even if it’s at the most extreme end. It’s an act until it’s not, she remembers telling Steph, when they were talking about Aunt Bea’s imposing reputation.
Shahida laughs. “She won’t do that.”
“You heard about Karen?”
Shahida nods. “But she wasn’t one of us.”
Melissa has to smile at that. Karen wasn’t one of us. She was one of the bad kidnappers.
Shahida including herself in us is new, though.
“Nevertheless—”
“No,” Shahida interrupts, “not ‘nevertheless’.” She pulls away from Melissa to look at her again. “Remember Christmas Eve? At the party? You didn’t talk to Bea much, did you?”
“Not really.”
“I did. And the woman I spoke to could no more have you or I killed than she could… I don’t know. Chop off her own foot. Sprout wings and fly. Drink from a mug without a tasteless joke on it.”
“I thought she hated the mugs,” Melissa says with a frown.
“Please. It’s all part of the act. I think sometimes she forgets to take it off, either out of habit, or for her own private amusement. But she adores those things.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can! I asked her. And she said, with the most delicate little pinch in her eyebrows, that she didn’t know where the bloody things kept coming from.”
“That’s hardly conclusive.”
“You had to be there. She thinks they’re so funny.” Shahida shakes her head. “I was saying something. Right: Bea’s not going to do anything drastic to either of us. The woman I saw, Em, she loves you. She’s working on loving me, because I come as a package with you now. She loves all her girls and enbies. She— Okay. You know who she reminds me of? My gran.”
“Really?”
Shahida moves her hands around, describing a shape in the air, like she’s trying to make her thoughts physical. “It’s hard to put into words. When my gran was still around, she loved spending time with us, but what she loved most was when we all got together. Me and mum and Ed and my aunts, usually, but sometimes we had family over from Pakistan, too, and that made her even happier. There’d always be a time when we’d be sitting around the table together, almost thirty of us when everyone was here, and she’d be sitting at the head of the table, my mum on one side and Auntie Mona on her other side, and she’d look…” She sniffs, and Melissa suddenly realises Shahida’s hands, now resting in her lap, are shaking. She reaches for them, gathers Shahida’s fingers into hers, clasps them tight. “She’d do this, you know,” Shahida adds, her voice thick. “Exactly this.”
“What do you mean?”
Shy raises their joined hands. “This. We’d all hold hands. One big circle. She wanted to make sure we appreciated the time we had together. Make our connections physical. And, Em, she was so proud. She was so proud of us. And so—” another sniff, deeper this time, and more liquid, “—so loving. I miss her, Em, I miss her so much. Her and Dad.”
Melissa lifts their hands, separates them, and draws Shahida into a hug. Holds her and runs gentle fingers the length of her spine until Shahida’s cried it out, until her head rises once again, bright-cheeked and red-eyed.
Shahida smiles, suddenly new, and kisses her on the lips.
“I do miss her,” she says. “But she had a long life. She saw it all. And I’m happy we were able to keep her here with us at the end. And that’s the thing,” she adds with another sniff, “I saw that in Bea, too. The pride. The love. I look at her and I see a woman who’s set out to find or to—” she laughs, “—to bloody well make the biggest family she can. The worst she’s going to do to either of us is yell at us, maybe tell us we can’t do this or that, but she wants us to have a life, Em.” She pokes Melissa’s collarbone. “She wants you to have a life. She wants you to be whole. You’re part of her family. Just as much as you’re part of mine.”
“I’m… part of yours?”
Shahida gives her a scalding look. “Melissa, please. You could show up here at three in the morning, any day of the year, and ask for a bed and something to eat, and my mother would provide both without complaint and would only bollock you for waking her up after you’d had a full night’s sleep, so, yes, you’re part of my family.” She smiles, and strokes Melissa’s cheek. “She always did want to claim you, anyway, since the day we all met. But especially after, you know…”
Melissa finishes the sentence for her. “After my mum died.”
“Yeah.”
They’re still close, Shahida not having fully extracted herself from the hug, so Melissa leans her forehead against Shahida’s. “Does it ever get easier to lose people?” she asks.
“No,” Shahida says. And then she kisses her again. “But sometimes they come back.”
* * *
The smell of fresh coffee and croissants wakes Christine up just seconds before a stuffie hits her in the face. She bats at it, knocks it out of her line of sight, and sits up in bed to glare at Paige, who by the looks of her has recently finished showering.
“There’s coffee,” Paige says, pointing to the tray on the table, “and I heated up a couple of frozen pastries.” Of course she did. Paige probably put the coffee on, started the microwave, then went to shower and wash her hair before returning in a robe to fetch everything. Impossible not to be impressed with her; she even overachieves at breakfast. “Sorry, by the way,” Paige adds. “I didn’t want to wake you at all, but I need to dry my hair and I can’t untangle the plug from everything else without risking tipping over the lamp and, Christine, when are you going to sort these out?”
“I already did,” Christine says vaguely. “They’re like headphone cords. They just get tangled again.”
“Well,” Paige says, “I didn’t want to wake you with this.” She briefly guns the hair dryer. “Awful way to wake up.”
“And braining me with a plush pink penguin is a good way to wake me up?”
“Hmm. I was aiming for your belly.”
Christine laughs. “Your aim is terrible. It’s a good thing you’re beautiful.”
“I know,” Paige says, so smugly that Christine has to throw the penguin back at her. “Hey! Be nicer to your favourite stuffie!”
“It’s not my favourite,” Christine protests as Paige picks it up, sets it down on the end of the bed and pats it carefully on the head. “I don’t have a favourite. It’s just the one I say is my favourite. For compliance purposes.”
Paige smirks at her. “It’s grown on you.”
Christine sighs; the woman misses nothing. “Yes, it has.”
“What’s its name?”
“Pingu.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s trademarked, Christine.”
“Yes, well, the police can do me for infringement while they’re also arresting me for all my other crimes. Besides, TV Pingu isn’t pink.”
“Ah. So he’s been feminised. How appropriate.”
“Give her back to me,” Christine says, “so I can throw her at you again. Beak first.”
Paige protectively scoops up the penguin and sticks her tongue out at Christine, so Christine pointedly fetches coffee and croissant and gets to work on them. With Paige drying her hair and Christine slurping her coffee and checking her messages, they don’t talk again until Christine opens the email from Beatrice, cc’d to Paige and Tabby and probably bcc’d to Indira, Maria, and whichever other busybodies are knocking around the place this week.
“Paige?” she says slowly. “Did you check your messages?”
Paige switches off the hair dryer and shakes out her hair, and Christine’s momentarily distracted by how shampoo-ad perfect her pose is. If she didn’t know Paige spent months in her second year practising exactly this sort of thing, she’d be intimidated; as it is, Christine is merely very, very happy she gets to share a bed with her. Paige, the girl who carefully considered every single brick when she remade herself.
“Yes,” Paige says. “Beatrice wants us to team up with Tabitha. Something to do with Melissa and her little gang.” She shrugs. “She’s been running around telling everyone and their cat that she’s returned from the dead; it’s likely about that.”
Christine nods. “Sure. But why us?”
Paige points with the hair dryer. “Why you is the important question. Read it; I’m to support you.”
Christine scans it again; she’s right. “Yeah,” she mutters. “Why me indeed?”
Paige sits down next to her on the bed, quickly reaching over to steady the plate with the half-finished croissant before it overbalances. “You have a rapport,” she says.
“With whom?”
“People in general.”
Christine snorts, remembering what it was that got her caught by Dorley Hall in the first place. “That’s ironic,” she says.
Paige frowns delicately at her, pinching her eyebrows just slightly. “One of these days you’ll see yourself clearly,” she says, and leans in, kisses her and leans away again, smiling broadly and picking a flake of croissant from Christine’s cheek. She’s outlined against the morning light, her hair shimmering in rainbow colours in the dewy air and rippling gently in the slight breeze from the cracked-open window. And then, wrinkling her beautiful, perfect nose, Paige says, “Christine, you really should clean your teeth.”
* * *
“Steph?”
“Yes?”
“Why did I agree to this?”
“You don’t have a choice. I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but there was this whole kidnapping incident and now a bunch of older women control your life.”
“When you put it like that, it sounds really hot.”
“I think Pippa would attack me with my elephant if I even implied anything like that in her presence.”
“That also sounds really—”
“Beth.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Can I open my eyes yet?”
“Fuck no.”
“I’m going to need them sooner or later. You’re not the only one who needs to get dressed.”
“Yes, but, Steph, the crucial part of it is, of the two of us, only one of us is an actual girl, and that’s you, and then there’s me, and I’m one-day-at-a-timing this whole new gender thing, and while I think I’m doing pretty good at it there are moments, small moments, mind you, teeny-tiny infinitesimal moments, moments so brief you could hardly be blamed for missing them entirely, when I completely lose my shit and want nothing more than to crawl into something small and horrible, like Martin, and never come out.”
“You wouldn’t fit.”
“Bet?”
“You’re going to have to be nice to Martin today, you know.”
“I know. That’s why I’m getting it all out now. How long do we have?”
“Not long enough. Not if you want to get it all out.”
“He’s gotten even more weird.”
“And we haven’t?”
“Yes, but we’re pretty, Steph. You are, anyway. I’m sort of a creature. Like something you find under a rock.”
“Beth. Bethany. Beth.”
“Yes?”
“I really want to open my eyes, because I want to be able to reassure you that you look fine and not have it be based on complete guesswork.”
“And that’s why I’m withholding permission. This is a trust exercise. Like when you close your eyes and the other boys are supposed to catch you, only they pretend to accidentally drop you and you hit your head really fucking hard on the flagstones. Or when the church comes to school and you go along to the service because it’s often a quiet place to hide but it turns out to be one of those fucking weird ones where there’s electric guitar music and a guy up front who taps people on the forehead and they, like, die, or something—”
“I’m not sure that’s how church works.”
“Those people were crazy, Steph.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I do! I don’t trust myself. My fashion sense. My ability to dress myself. Right now I’m looking in the mirror and there’s, like, a grey fuzzy blob in there where I should be, and for all I know I have socks on my hands and my dress on upside down, and—”
“You’re wearing a dress?”
“Yes. No. It’s— Fuck, Steph, I don’t know the names for things. It’s like a dress with shorts.”
“Okay. Explain how you could have it on upside down?”
“You never went to an all-boy boarding school. You don’t know how creative it’s possible to get with an item of clothing and the way it intersects with the human body. No, what I’m saying is, right now I’m like the cat. I’m in the box — or in the mirror — and I could look fine or I could look like a fucking pillock, and when you open your eyes to take me out of the box and reveal me to be dressed really, really badly. Schroeder’s Cat.”
“Schrodinger’s Cat.”
“What did I say?”
“Schroeder. That’s Will’s surname.”
“Yeah. I know. I know. I know. Fuck. God, Steph, I still can’t believe it about him.”
“I can.”
“Really?”
“I get it.”
“Don’t say that, Steph.”
“I do! Pippa said he’s convinced himself that he’s AGP, a fetishist, a transvestite, or something.”
“Will’s too gloomy to be a transvestite. I bet they’re loads of fun.”
“Shush. I get it because I can see a version of me that fell for the same bullshit he did. No, she did. Fuck it; he did. I’ll change pronouns when I’m asked to. Anyway. I’d go online sometimes, and although I mostly avoided trans stuff because it was way too easy to see shit that made it hard to want to carry on… You know, like, pretty girls posting like, ‘Do I pass?’ and you look and they’re basically a runway model and you have to avoid reflective surfaces for a week. But I also saw that stuff. Will’s stuff. The edges of it, anyway. Subreddits, other places. Girls talking about transition in a way that was negative even for me.”
“Explain.”
“It’d be easier with my eyes open.”
“No.”
“Fine. You know why I didn’t transition. Partly because I was looking for this place, mainly because I’d made myself believe I couldn’t pass or be happy or be properly transitioned or whatever because of the shape of my face, the way it’s all, like, I’ve got the bumps on my forehead and my eyes are beady and my jaw… my jaw is fucking— Hey!”
“No complaining.”
“No kissing me when my eyes are closed.”
“Then don’t talk shit about your face, Steph. Your face is lovely.”
“Says you.”
“Says everyone. Anyway, don’t stop; you were shit-talking Will.”
“I was saying I understand him, Beth. Because I had reasons for delaying my transition that were at least partly based in reality — no, don’t interrupt, I can hear you opening your mouth — but these girls, they had a whole taxonomy, a whole clinical-seeming language to describe all the reasons they shouldn’t transition. Because it’s a fetish, because it’s a challenge you’re supposed to overcome, because if you can’t look instantly like a cis girl you’re a complete failure, because you’re six months older than this arbitrary cutoff age, because you’re too tall… And I see Will. And he’s tall and broad and he’s got a fairly masculine face, and he’s very… intellectual?”
“Uh—”
“You know what I mean. He’s very impressed with his own intelligence. And I think that can make people gullible. Enough that I can see him falling into all those traps. He starts convincing himself it’s just a fetish, and then every bit of information he finds reinforces it. I can see it because I could see it happening to me, too. It’s why I always closed the tab. Walked away. I didn’t want to be a part of any community that would make me think like that.”
“Tabby does always say you’re the least online trans woman she’s ever met.”
“By design.”
“But, okay, so, question: Will told me he put on women’s clothes when he was a kid. A teenager. He put them on and popped such a massive boner he had to deal with it right there and then. Doesn’t that point to, you know, a bit of a fetish? Because— Steph?”
“Um. Well. That is. Um.”
“You okay?”
“Um. Yeah. I, um, did that. I put on one of my mum’s skirts, once. And it happened to me, too. I didn’t wank, though, because I hated doing it, even back then, but I had the same thought after, so I read about it and, like, fetishes are often subconscious ways of fulfilling unmet needs, and— mmph!”
“I knew it! I knew you were a perv like me!”
“I’m not a perv!”
“You are! You are! You’re my pervert!”
“And no kissing me when my eyes are closed!
“Fine. Open them. Because I’m going to kiss you again.”
“Thank fuck, because— Shit. Bethany! You look beautiful!”
“Oh, um, you really think so?”
“God. Yes. I could eat you up, Beth.”
“Shit, fuck, thank you, because I really didn’t know, and I feel like I’ve completely lost the ability to evaluate the way I look, you know, like I wasn’t kidding when I said I just see a grey smudge in the mirror, and, okay, that’s not exactly true, I just see me, but I’m still working out who that is and what she should look like, and… and… You’re looking at me.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you looking at me, Steph?”
“Because you’re beautiful, Bethany.”
“I— Um— Shit.”
“Yeah. That too.”
“Hey, um, Steph? You think… You think it’ll be okay? Going out like this? I mean, I know it’s only the common room and it’s just going to be the four of us and Pippa and Pamela but I don’t want to look, you know, stupid.”
“You won’t. You don’t. You look so nice, in fact, that I want you to pick something out for me.”
“Steph, you shouldn’t trust me with that.”
“Bethany, at this point, I’d trust you with my life. But first… First I want to kiss you with my eyes open.”
2002 August 2
Friday
Photographs don’t do her justice. Surveillance footage doesn’t do her justice. Elle’s people even managed to intercept some footage from a movie shoot that has her in the background for seventeen frames, and none of those frames do her justice either.
Elle very carefully does not spill her drink.
Beatrice Quinn in the flesh is everything she dreamed of. Her dress is a heartstopper, black and cut to the thigh and rippling with gemstones that catch the low light of the hotel bar, reflecting enough of it to emphasise a tasteful décolletage and lightly tanned limbs. Her hair is a lustrous black and held out of her face in a high bun that Elle just knows will unravel with one quick tug. And her face…
From the moment she learned about the Hall, the moment dear Kelly confessed that she was not, in fact, everything she seemed, Elle’s wanted to know: can it be reformed? Turned to a better path? Because the world needs these ethereal creatures, these beings of pure strength, vibrant femininity and exceptional beauty. The masculine reshaped, filtered, refined into the feminine; the women born from fire, their womanhood crafted by their own hands. The survivors of the dark and torturous dungeon under Dorley Hall.
Just the thought of it is intoxicating.
But the waste required to create these women is unconscionable. The blood spilled in service of old men’s fetishes, despicable. Too many young lives destroyed, too many women abused by men who could never properly appreciate their beauty, and discarded. If Elle had her way, she would today stride into the Hall and remove them all; tour the country and extract the survivors from the places they’d been sent.
Unfortunate that she must live in the real world, and so must they. She’s managed to save just one so far, snatched from the jaws of death moments before the bite — fake car accidents are ever so easy to arrange when one has a controlling interest in a smallish military concern. Thus far, sadly, she is so traumatised she has to be under constant watch. She still believes her reprieve to be a deception, and when left alone she attempts to mark herself, to ‘deface the merchandise’. Elle has a therapist working with her, attempting to untwist the knot of her gender, her self-perception, and her future, but it’s not looking good. If they have to, they’ll remove her implants and restore as much of her manhood as they can, terrible waste though it would be, but first she must be returned to functionality.
The girl doesn’t especially interest her, anyway. Oh, she’ll ensure she has a job and a place to live when she leaves, suitable for whatever shape she chooses, but Kelly, her Kelly, found a way to make her short life extraordinary. This unfortunate girl hasn’t even named herself.
And then there’s Beatrice Quinn. Elle knows all about her.
She was brought in on a petty crime pretext like most of Dorley’s acquisitions, and is likewise similar to the rest of them in every respect. Almost every respect: Frances, her ‘sponsor’ — how monstrous to appropriate such a term! — wrote of a disaffection, a disconnection that she found unusual enough to note. Beatrice didn’t, seemingly, identify as a girl while under the dubious care of Dorley Hall, but now, here she is, in her late thirties and still a woman. By choice, Elle has to imagine.
And a creature of such beauty it’s difficult to believe she was born in violence.
She’s looked far enough into Beatrice’s past to have a fair guess at what her life might have become, had she not been stolen from it by Dorothy Marsden and her brutal little angels: her schooling had been next to worthless and over at 16, and with little work available in her hometown and no positive role models, she would likely have continued on the path of the petty criminal. Thatcher began the starvation of her home, Major completed it, and thus far Blair has shown little genuine interest in such places. Eventually she would have joined her mother, long since dead of one of the many diseases of poverty. A dreadful waste of a life.
But there was something there. Something inside her that let her adapt— no, flourish. Something that created Beatrice Quinn almost from scratch. Some quality, as special as it is rare. Because Elle’s fairly sure that were she to scoop up fifty young boys in superficially similar situations and subject them to Dorley’s process, she would end up with nobody like Beatrice.
And here she is, leaning against the bar, evaluating Elle in return, sizing her up, deciding what sort of client she’s likely to be. Elle, who prides herself on her ability to hide from her peers in plain sight, feels stripped naked.
Revels in that feeling. Embraces it like a promise.
Up close, she’s even more incredible. Perfect makeup, and though she’s offering a professional smile there’s not a line on her face. Hard to believe she’s fifteen years Elle’s senior.
“Aren’t you a young one?” Beatrice Quinn asks, her voice like silk, like sex, like bottled fire, and Elle realises that for all her research, she knows nothing at all about this woman. Nothing real. Nothing that matters. But she wants to find out. She wants that exquisite, red-lipped mouth to bite her; she wants those French-tipped fingers to dig furrows in her back; she wants her.
And she wants to give her the world.
2019 December 30
Monday
“Thank you, Christine,” Tabby says, tapping the side of the coffee mug with her nail. “This is exactly the energy I need this morning.”
Christine slumps into a chair on the other side of the kitchen table, looking rather like Tabby feels, and she wonders for a moment if she needs to don her sponsor persona a few minutes early and advise her to go back upstairs and brush her hair — or at least properly dry it, because, sweetheart, don’t just put it in a pony when it’s still wet! — but Paige catches her eye and nods, and Tabby smiles at her. Paige has got her. Paige will doubtless steer her around the Hall until her hair is perfectly styled and her makeup is exquisite.
“The coffee?” Christine asks, frowning at her own mug and reaching for the jug of milk on the table. Tabby watches her become visibly tempted by the shaker of chocolate powder. “It was just in the machine.”
“No,” Tabby says, turning her mug to face her. “This.”
Christine snorts. “Oh. Right. I didn’t pay any attention; it was just on the drying rack.”
“She’s still waking up,” Paige explains.
“I’m not ‘waking up’,” Christine complains, “I’m surfacing from a deep and highly necessary slumber, which was rudely interrupted.”
“She’s still waking up,” Paige repeats.
“Evidently,” Tabby says with a smirk, and turns her mug back around so she can fill herself with caffeine. The mug’s not a new one on her, but it’s a fun one nonetheless; she’s pretty sure it’s one of Indira’s, from that time she got really into them and kept coming into the kitchen with a new one every day, trying to get a reaction (and usually getting one). It says, on four lines and with certain words in flowing script, DANCE like nobody’s watching / LOVE like you’ve never been hurt / KIDNAP like nobody’s listening / and force him into a SKIRT.
You have to love this place, or it’ll drive you mad. And there’s a mug for that, too.
She needs the encouraging sentiment for sure, but the caffeine is pretty beneficial, too: she has far too much on her plate for one day. She’s got Shahida and Melissa to wrangle for Aunt Bea, and then Maria’s bringing in Rachel and Amy and she might have to help out with that, and she’s also got Will to deal with.
Poor Will. Like Bethany, he’s getting carried along ahead of himself by the accelerated schedule half the basement seems to be running on this year; unlike Bethany, he’s not been so ready to jump in with both feet. But then, Bethany’s shame is all tied to her own self, the thing she abandoned. Will’s is still very much present.
And it’s been decided, somewhat over her head, that Will needs to be one of the participants in the intake’s first official group, the first mutual bitching session for those who are in the know and who may need to blow off steam about it or who might need the help of the rest of the intake to become more comfortable in their new identities. So he needs to be brought up to speed.
She asked if it could wait, if they could maybe survive this thing with Melissa and Aunt Bea and then get through what little remains of 2019 and then try again, but Pamela’s impatient and Steph, the sainted fucking trans girl whose opinion they are all obliged to listen to, thinks it’ll be good for Will, anyway.
So she’s doing final disclosure and then she’s being recalled upstairs, because she’s also intimately involved in the whole Melissa/Shahida/Rachel/Amy clusterfuck, and the reckoning over that is imminent.
The timing on everything sucks.
And, yes, fine, Will did, technically, very nearly kill Maria, so maybe Maria’s being a little more harsh with him than she might be with someone else, but she claims genuinely to believe in him, and Tabby’s certain that if Maria thought this might go badly, she’d recommend against it.
She’s pretty sure, anyway.
Maria still rubs her temple sometimes, and closes her eyes when the lights are bright.
Damn you, William. Why did you have to attack her? Why can’t you be all mouth, like Raphael?
* * *
He’s hit the mirror a dozen times this morning and still it remains intact. He’s hit the wall, he’s hit the door, and he almost hit the computer screen before stopping himself, remembering that if he doesn’t have TV to numb his mind he’ll go insane before he gets an A cup. He’s made his knuckles bleed and what has he accomplished? Fucking nothing.
Yeah. Pithy. A judgement on his whole life. His whole stupid, arrogant, fuck-you-and-fuck-me-too life.
He turns away from the mirror again. Why did he have to get so big?
It made people afraid of him. It made his father proud of him. It gave him the ability to push past anyone in his way. A success, then? Fuck no. All his life it’s accosted him every time he has to look at himself, every time he gets somewhere quiet and has nothing else to do but experience himself, his body, the sensations it returns to him even in careful repose. And, combined with his temper, it landed him here, where the thing he’s been afraid of his whole life got ripped out of him by some pissant little tranny in a short skirt and now it’s just fucking there, in front of everyone.
And he’s been.
So.
Fucking.
Stupid.
He knows about the conspiratorial worldview, that an outlandish fact, once adopted, will defend itself against all attempts to disprove it. That a simple idea expressed in attractive language is a natural defence against a truth that has no other option than to be expressed in complex language. And that attempts at education are often actively counterproductive: the believer has been taught — or has taught themselves — to disregard any approaches that do not validate the underlying lie. Hold fast, believers.
He knows all this and still he walked right the fuck into it. Because he looked in the wrong places first, driven by shame and revulsion, and taught himself the lies.
AGP. Autogynephilia. The notion — the ‘theory’; the ‘diagnosis’ — that a man can become so fetishistically attracted to the image of himself as a woman that he is compelled to transform himself into one. It’s supposed to encompass transvestism, crossdressing, transitioning trans women and, for all he fucking knows, femboys; a conveniently wide and ill-defined term that does nothing to advance understanding of such people and everything to encourage pathologisation of them. And, obviously, to push them into the closet and keep them there.
Tabitha didn’t even have a book for him about it; she said they exist, but for his purposes, they are unnecessary. She sent him a single essay. Under three thousand words. Completely demolished the concept.
He’s been so fucking deceived. Not just by the shit he read online, pushed out by others in his position and by those who want to exploit them, but by the world, by the pathologisation of female sexuality, by the misogyny that suggests that for a woman to enjoy herself as a woman, for her own sake, is something inherently unclean.
And thinking that feels like slamming his head into a wall over and over. Because: is he a woman? And, worse, if he is, why did it take Aaron Holt, of all people, to show him? Twice over?
“Bethany,” he says to himself.
What was it she said? She called him stupid; correct. Wasteful; also correct. Reductive; that might be the most correct of all. Because he’s supposed to be smart, isn’t he? He’s quick and he knows it and that means his first conclusion, if it is not immediately supplanted by something obviously better, must be the correct one.
He put on his mother’s skirt and found a new way to hate himself, and then he found other people who hated themselves just as much, and there he found his religion. One he defended from all threats to its veracity.
Hell, his religion even had an original sin.
So fucking stupid.
Well. It’s out there now. And you know what would be stupid, William? To behave as if it isn’t. To raise his fists like always and be William, as if anyone could possibly be taken in by his shit any more.
They know.
They know, William, that you’re a—
Fuck.
Can’t say it. Can’t think it. Every time it’s like it’s Aaron who’s spitting it at him, and that’s the other fucking problem, that Aaron, that little shit, got there first, got to revel in it, got to be pretty and carefree and he didn’t even want it.
Not like William did, back when he allowed himself to want anything at all.
It’s not fair.
“Bethany,” he says to himself again.
Too stubborn. Too fucking stubborn to say the name someone asked him to. And why? What for? To raise another fist? To light another gunpowder spark? To impose himself on the people who stand up to him?
He knows why. If he acknowledges her then it’s all true. And if it’s all true, if Bethany gets to choose to be a girl, then why doesn’t he?
Because then he’s a girl who’s too tall and too broad and too old and too violent and too—
He has another fucking go at the mirror.
* * *
He doesn’t see her when she enters. Doesn’t register when she calls his name. It takes her grabbing him by both wrists and shoving him brutally up against the wardrobe for him to notice her, and when he finally does, it’s with none of his usual bravado. He mutters something incoherent; Tabby doesn’t think it would make any sense even if he had breath left in him to sound it out.
“Will!” she says, glaring at him and squeezing his wrists. She has to look up at him just a little, and that’s annoying; she’s seized temporary physical authority over him, largely because she caught him by surprise, but she could always use more. She’s under no illusions: Will is still very capable of placing her in physical danger. Tabby’s no slouch, but Will was working out until practically the moment he was brought here, and despite the testosterone deprivation, he’s still potent. Potent enough to worry her, anyway; for all the sparring she’s done with Monica, she’s not been in a real fight since before the Hall, and she’s rusty as hell.
But he’s just looking at her. Knuckles bruised and bleeding. Red marks across his face and his bare chest, where he’s gotten blood on himself. Hair matted with sweat. Just looking at her.
This is an inflection point. He’s going to lash out or he’s going to break. She feels him flinch under her grip, like he’s testing her strength, so she presses into him, forces her knee against his, just under the joint — one advantage of being slightly shorter — and squeezes harder on his wrists. The message is clear: either you stop this, or we are going to have a fucking problem.
She checked on him with her phone as soon as she felt sufficiently caffeinated, and there he’d been, going at the mirror. It took a second for it to worry her; he’s been at it before, taken little swipes at his reflection, but it quickly became clear that this time, he was thrashing himself against it, more violent than she’s ever seen him, worse than he was even with Maria. She ran out on her conversation and charged down the stairs as quickly as she could, cursing the poor angles on the cameras. Flipping between the two, neither showed his face, and that would have been vital information to have before she opened his door.
What exactly does he think he was doing? Does he even know? Is this simple rage or something more complex; the latter’s potentially more advantageous to her — and him, in the long run — but trickier to handle.
So now here she is, looking up at him, holding him with all her strength against the wardrobe, the blood on his hands now spreading to hers, and she’s still guessing what approach will work to calm him down.
“Will,” she says again. “Stop this.”
He tests her grip again. She holds him back with a sneer. Braces herself against the floor with the leg that isn’t pressed against him.
“Will,” she whispers. “Stop.”
He says nothing. So she makes the decision: she snaps her hands loose of his wrists, takes her knee away, stands back. Hands up; still prepared.
“I will hurt you,” he whispers.
“You won’t,” she says.
“I will.”
“Go on, then,” she says, lowering her hands. “Hurt me.”
Yeah. That works. That gets through. There’s no visible reaction from him, which is a sign in itself, and his stillness lasts several seconds.
Then he practically collapses. She’s on him, holding him again, guiding him to the bed, sitting him roughly down — because he’s still fucking heavy and her angle of intercept just now was shit — and making sure he doesn’t bash his head.
He wasn’t threatening her; he was warning her. Which means he’s still him. Still the new him, the self he turned to after he attacked Maria, when he couldn’t run from his violence, when he was made to face it, made to take the first steps toward understanding it. Steps which led him to confess to her a secret he’d held since he was young.
With, she has to admit, some help from Maria and Bethany.
“I’m safe,” she says, “aren’t I?”
His arms twitch, and she knows he wants to put them behind his back, to make himself safe. She rests a hand on them. Lightly enough that he can bat her aside without hurting her if that’s what he wants. But she’d prefer him to stay exactly as he is, and make himself safe anyway.
“Aren’t I?” she repeats.
“Yes,” he whispers, closing his eyes and resting. His fingers twitch as his hands uncurl from fists.
“Let’s just sit here for a minute, okay? I have to send a couple of quick messages, and then I’ll be with you a hundred percent. Is that all right?”
He nods.
“Done,” she says and, now that these obligations have been discharged, allows herself a deep breath. Checks on the quiescent Will. She’d been unsure for a moment if she was going to have to try to block a punch from him, and equally unsure that she would even be able to. Indira likes to say that feminising boys is more art than science, but they’ve both found that the crucial moments are when you simply make yourself terrifyingly vulnerable, and trust that they’ve learned enough, changed enough, not to take advantage. To join you in your vulnerability instead.
“Sorry,” he says, and she rubs on his arm.
“Don’t worry about it. Just try to lay off the mirror, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You don’t have to do the group thing today,” she says, and he looks up sharply. Bingo: it probably is too early to throw him to the wolves like that. Not again, anyway. Bethany’s intervention, like Steph’s, worked out — even if Tabby had to have a good yell at Maria before she could make herself admit it — but he’s in a delicate spot right now, and Tabby knows what he needs. Better than anyone else, she knows. Who cares if group is supposed to be as much for Bethany’s benefit as Will’s? Let Maria handle her own little tearaway.
He surprises her, though.
“No,” he says. “I’ll go.” He’s rubbing his ankles together.
“You don’t have to. You can stay here.”
“I’m not weak.” In other times he might have shouted it. Right now, he sounds tired. Tired of himself.
“Will,” she says, “you can be weak. Being weak can be good. Being weak is often better than being strong.”
“Is that what you want to do to me? To make me weak?”
She laughs. Gently, so he knows she’s not mocking him. “No. It’s not binary like that. Few things are. You can be weak sometimes, strong other times. That’s how it should be. But sometimes people are made to be weak all the time, and that’s when they can’t take care of themselves. And sometimes people are forced to be strong all the time, and that’s when they break. Because that’s not how to be a complete person; that’s how to be a… Fuck.” She laughs again. “Sorry. I don’t have a whole prepared speech.”
He snorts. “How unprofessional.”
“Do I look like Maria? She’s the one doing this for a career. I’m just here until… Shit. I don’t know how long I’m here.” She rests her chin on her hand. “I do seem accidentally to have become quite senior.”
Will nods like he’s sympathising with her, then frowns and closes up again. Tabby fights the urge to sigh; there’s going to be a lot of this. People like Will — like the boy Tabby was, once upon a time — open up in stages, fighting themselves every time, because they’re not so much complete and integrated personalities as they are a single lonely authentic voice, drowned out by an entire chorus of obligation, heteronormativity and masculinity. At least he knows something of who he is. Tabby had no such anchor, and when the girls here stripped her down to her very essence she had to create something to hold on to.
“I’m so stupid,” Will hisses.
“You’re not.”
“Yeah, Tab. Yeah, I fucking am. And the worst part is, I know I’m smart. I know it. There’s not much I can’t pick up—” he snaps his fingers, “—like that. But my whole life… My whole life…”
She leans against him. “I can’t claim to know what it’s like to be trans like you, but—”
“I’m not—”
“Yeah, Will. Yeah, you fucking are. And you can see it, can’t you?” She taps him on the forearm to get him to look at her. “You can see the shape of it. How you were lied to. How you were deceived. There’s so many good reasons to believe you’re not trans. To think it’s a fetish or a bit of adolescent confusion you just haven’t grown out of yet. And you’re not stupid for falling for any of it, Will, because, yeah, you’re smart, but a whole lot of equally smart people have spent much longer lives than you’ve had denying their transness, and they’ve put all their justifications and all their explanations out on the web for anyone to find. And don’t forget the PhDs with a grudge against trans people who’ve written whole books about how transness isn’t real, who’ve got their lies and their suppositions into medical journals and the press. You’re not stupid for believing what you were told. You were just… outnumbered.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Finally, he mirrors her, leans into her, allows her to take his weight. “Well,” he says, “I feel stupid.”
She butts heads with him. “Don’t we all.” His hand is resting on his knee, so she reaches for it, takes it in hers. He doesn’t fight her off. “I’m serious about this, Will,” she says. “I’m in this for the long haul. You’re trans, yes, but I know that you know that accepting it is only the beginning. You have a long way to go. My promise is you’ll never have to do any of this alone. I’m your Sister, Will. I’ll teach you what I know about being a woman, about doing it out there in the world. And I’ll teach you what I know about being a woman in here—” with her free hand, she taps at her heart, “—and that’s something on which I’m an expert.”
“What do you mean?”
She lets out a long breath before she continues. “You’ve worked out that you’re not the first year we’ve done this to, right?” He nods. “Will,” she says, “this is what we’ve always done. All we’ve ever done. We find boys whose lives are either about to go off the rails or are already a wreck, boys who are a danger to themselves as much as to other people, and we rehabilitate them. We’ve been doing it since 2004.” She tucks a finger under his chin to raise his eyes back up to hers. “And the new girls, the ones we’ve helped, some of them stick around to help the next lot.” She smiles, gives him a moment to make the next logical step.
“Are you telling me…?”
“Yes,” she says.
“You’re…?”
“I’m like you,” she says, and then rolls her eyes. “Well, not entirely like you. You’re trans already. You’ve got a head start. I was more like… Maybe Raph?”
His expression sours. “Don’t compare yourself to him,” he says quickly.
“Thanks, sweetie.” She resists the urge to grin. Defending her: an excellent sign!
“You were really a…?” He can’t say it.
She butts foreheads with him again. “Yeah, I was a man. A boy, really, when I was brought here. And I got in trouble a lot. I didn’t get out of it as easily as some,” she adds sourly. “White boys get disciplined; Black boys get the book thrown at them. And they’re fucking lucky if it’s just the book.”
“Yeah.” Will looks away. “Sorry.”
“So,” she says briskly, “like I said, I’m here all the way. I’m going to teach you all the things my Sister taught me, and a few other tricks I’ve picked up along the way. And all the others in your intake, their Sisters will be doing the same, and when you leave here — and you will get to leave here — it’ll be as the woman you always ought to have been. I’m the chance you were never given. The choice you were never offered.”
“You really think I can do it?”
She laughs. “I did, and I didn’t want it even a tiny little bit. Not until way later than this. You’ll be fine.”
He sighs. Quietly and gently, and when she looks at him, he’s closed his eyes. His breathing is even, his hands are at rest, and he’s still leaning against her.
They sit together for a while. Until Tabby’s phone buzzes with the message she’s been waiting for. She pushes against him, brings him out of whatever thoughts he’s been working on.
“Okay,” she says, standing up from the bed and holding out an expectant hand. “Come with me. Not to group; you’re excused. I have something much more fun in mind.”
* * *
Shahida’s never been intimidated by the Hall before. Not really. Even on that first day, when Tabitha locked the doors behind her, she could see the outside world. Furthermore, she could feel the nervous energy of the place, see it in the women buzzing around her; there was only so much Tabby could do to intimidate, especially when it became clear how little her heart was in it. And since then, Dorley’s felt homely. Comforting. Oh, she knows what goes on under its antique floorboards, and she’s aware that every year they wash someone out, a still-unspecified excommunicative punishment that is spoken of only in the most dire tones even by the more flippant of the Dorley Girls. But this year it was a rapist who washed out, and if the sum total of the Hall’s weight on the world is to yearly transform a handful of self-destructive boys into happy girls, and to (possibly) kill one rapist, then she can’t bring herself to be too distracted from the obvious benefits.
Namely, Melissa. And various other women whom she’s coming to consider friends.
Besides, she’d be a dreadful lesbian if she thought that introducing more girls to the world was somehow a bad thing.
But today… Today it looms. Today she can sort of see Lorna’s point, when she spoke of the Hall as an edifice, an artefact of cruelty, an aristocratic relic that has shed so much blood over the years that one could easily imagine its inhabitants barely noticing the spilling of a little more.
Shahida shakes her head. Too little sleep. Not enough coffee. And Melissa’s anxiety’s affecting her somewhat.
“Did we have to be early?” Melissa asks, her fingers trembling in Shahida’s grip.
“We’re making a good impression,” Shahida says decisively. “Whatever Beatrice wants from us, we’re here to engage with it without hesitation.”
Shahida can sense Melissa looking up at the building. Can imagine what she’s thinking. The early morning mist doesn’t help.
“It’s just a dorm like any other,” Melissa whispers to herself. She starts, as if realising anew that Shahida is right next to her, and shrugs. “I kinda feel like I did when I came charging in for Steph,” she adds sheepishly.
“Let’s stop standing around, then. The sooner we get inside, the sooner we can have coffee in upsetting mugs and remember how twee and homespun Dorley Hall really is.”
There’s no Tabitha waiting for them, though. Shahida thumbs them both through into an empty kitchen and frowns at her phone, checking her messages. They’re not that early…
Someone comes rushing out of one of the kitchen side doors, giving Shahida a brief glimpse of a storeroom packed floor to ceiling with canned and dry goods, and gives them a once-over.
“Oh,” says the girl. Shahida knows her only by face, not by name. “Shahida, right?” Shahida nods. “Um, can you sit down? Tabby’s got an unexpected thing with Will and we’re sort of scrambling to work around that. Um. Coffee?”
“Fran?” Melissa says, stepping out from behind Shahida and causing her to realise she’d stood instinctively in front. Protective streak or controlling streak? Shahida’ll have to remember to get a therapist and ask.
“Melissa!” says Fran. “Hi!”
“Hi. Is everything okay?”
The girl blinks at her for a second, clearly reorganising her thoughts, and then her flustered expression collapses into a brittle smile and she waves them towards the kitchen table.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s fine. It’s just— Okay, so I just recently got done sponsoring? She was released from me at the start of the year and, um, we don’t get on. My fault. And I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, I mean, just, we don’t get on by design. I pushed her the ways I thought she needed pushing and, well, she’s remarkable, but there’s a reason I don’t hang around much here any more. I’m, well, I’m not needed, you see? Not any more. And my presence is… inhibiting to her. Which is a shame, because she’s a wonderful girl and I miss her ever so, but what can I do but make myself scarce? And then, this morning, right slap-bang at the end of the holidays, we’re suddenly in a bit of an all-available-hands situation. Which wouldn’t be so bad if so many of the hands weren’t off elsewhere.”
“Fran,” Melissa says, inserting herself in the closest thing to a pause. She’s still standing, and now she takes Fran’s hand and starts leading her towards the doors out to the dining hall. “You don’t need to worry about us. We can fix our own coffee, and we don’t need supervision to wait for Tabby. If you don’t want to run into Paige, you don’t have to stay.”
Fran sags with relief. “Are you sure?” she says. “I don’t want to shirk, but it’s not good for Paige to see me. She’s so happy these days, and—”
“I’m sure,” Melissa says, patting her on the back and impelling her into the dining hall in one motion. “Go do whatever you need to do.” Fran exits with profuse thanks, and Melissa leans against the doorjamb. “Well, that cured my nerves, I think. She’s got enough of them for all of us.”
“She’s Paige’s sponsor?” Shahida says. “I thought she was a huge hardarse! That’s what Christine told me.”
Melissa sets to filling the kettle and arranging coffee equipment. “I don’t know her that well,” she says, “but I think she’s a bit method. Nell says she’s totally butter-wouldn’t-melt in reality.”
Shahida nods, wondering anew what sort of toll it takes on a sponsor to get a boy through those early months, wondering why Fran — Francesca, she remembers; Christine got talking about sponsors at the Christmas Eve dinner — felt she had to adopt the approach she did. “I’m glad you’re still talking to Nell,” she says absently.
“We have a group chat. All of us. The whole class of 2015. It’s… nice.” She fills the cafetiere and then gestures like a show girl at the cupboards behind her. “What kind of mug do you want? Sinister or plain?”
* * *
His world’s been so small for months: the cell; the bedroom; the common room and the lunch room and the bathroom; the cell again. It’s come to feel almost natural, like he’s found his appropriate place in the world. So it’s got to be expected that he hesitates when Tabitha leads him towards the door at the end of the corridor, right? She has to have anticipated his reluctance to leave the minuscule space he’s been confined to.
This isn’t, surely, a unique weakness.
“It’s okay, Will,” Tabby says quietly. One hand on his back. She’s been touching him more lately. The last couple of days. And his response to it is just more of the same, isn’t it? The way he flinched the first few times she reached for him — more than just the first few, if he’s honest — has its mirror in the way he wants to reach for the concrete walls, to dig in with his nails. To keep hiding.
“Yeah?” he says. It seems like a lot of effort to say.
“I remember when I first walked back up these stairs,” she says.
God, it’s good to hear her talk about Dorley Hall like she was a victim of it, too, not just a prison guard. She’s from here. She was like him, once. Forget all the shit she talked about being more like Raph — that, he can’t see. But like him? He can kind of see himself in the shape of her, in her shoulders, in her stance. Yeah, everything’s a bit smaller on her, but he’s shrinking already, isn’t he? He’s noticed. Only a little bit, but a little bit in all directions adds up.
It had been anticlimactic for her finally to say it, to confirm that, yes, she really was once a man — for whatever value of man he finds believable. It’s not that he suspected it, not in the slightest, but it’s always been clear she’s been holding something back, and not just because she told him so, days before.
She dropped her guard, properly, for the first time, and now he sees her.
“I’d been down here longer than you,” she continues, reaching for his hand again. “And my sponsor, she’d been a little too good at persuading me that my old self was irredeemable. I didn’t think I deserved to go upstairs.”
He shakes his head. “Not sure I do, either.”
“Well, we’re not going all the way up,” she says. “Just one flight. Can you give me one flight of stairs?”
He stops resisting. She humours him; they take the stairs slowly.
There’s not much to see. Tabby says, as they ascend, that she had them lock down the stairwell, so while ordinarily there’d be a security room on his right and more stairs directly in front, here there’s only closed doors and the corridor to the left, with a lot of anonymous rooms leading off and another door at the far end. It’s similar enough to ‘his’ basement that it’s almost a relief, and he tells himself not to feel weak because of that.
Maybe he is weak. Maybe weakness is fine. Some of the time.
Tabitha prods at the biometric reader by one of the doors near the end of the corridor, and then turns around and performs a similar, longer action at another door. “Toilets,” she explains, pointing to the second door. “Fully unlocked. So I don’t have to let you in and out.”
He nods.
And then she’s taking him into the room. The prep room, she said it was called. Prep for what, he’d asked; never you mind, she said. It’s empty, but she keeps going, through one of three other doors, into a smaller, cooler room. He raises his fingers and confirms that, yes, the ever-present air current that flows across all the ceilings in the basement is slightly stronger in here.
“This was going to be a storage space,” a voice says.
He spins around to find Monica leaning against the wall by the door. Great; not someone he’s particularly familiar with, not since Declan disappeared. She’ll have other jobs now, probably, one of them apparently being to set up—
“Punching bags?” he says.
Christ. For a moment he can almost see his dad, leaning against the back wall of the cleared-out garage, geometrically in near the exact same position as Monica, but the sensation passes quickly. Monica’s displaying none of the twisted pride his dad always found for him, and she doesn’t dress like him either. The thought makes him laugh, and it’s that that prompts Tabby to hug him.
“Hey!” He fends her off, laughing again, and freezes, feeling suddenly too carefree, too untethered. And it shouldn’t be that simple, should it? Show him something from his past, something he misses, something he’s ashamed to miss, and recontextualise it, and suddenly he feels light on his feet?
He’s a very simple machine if so.
Fuck, though, it’s not like they’re even the same kind of punching bag. Dad got a cheap one that hung from the ceiling, and it got threadbare after a few weeks. These look well-used but cared for, and they’re free-standing. Bases probably filled with sand or water or something. Pretty different, really.
Tabby pokes him in the chest. Dead centre, carefully avoiding his sensitive spots. “You need to blow off steam.” She jabs a thumb into her own chest. “I need to blow off steam. And, eventually, Monica’ll need someone to spar with that she doesn’t almost instantly knock down.”
“Isn’t this…?” He waves his hand at the punching bags, not sure what he’s trying to say.
“Unfeminine?” Monica suggests.
“Like I said,” Tabby says, “it’s okay to be weak some of the time.” She’s turned away from him now, and she pulls off her top too quickly for him to look away. “But other times, you just have to fucking hit something, y’know?”
He finds himself nodding. She pulls on another top, smaller and tighter than her old one, and then steps out of her skirt, switching to a pair of loose shorts. Then she half-turns, catches his eye and beckons him to come closer.
“One requirement,” she whispers, and points to a pile of similar clothes. “You don’t have to change your underwear,” she adds, “but you need the sports bra. Trust me.”
“Yeah, but—” he starts, and then something about Monica’s presence in the room catches up to him. “She knows?” he whispers, matching Tabby’s volume.
“About you? Yes.”
“Fuck. Does she have to be here?”
“Yes. I’d get bollocked to hell and back if I gave you a punching bag and then let myself be the only other girl in the room. It’s not personal.”
“Wise,” he says, almost automatically, and she giggles at him. Why, he can’t imagine.
“Just don’t think about it. Or, if you have to, remember: she’s like me and I’m like you. All the shit we’re ever going to judge you for is in your past — as long as you leave it there — and being trans? No matter what you think about it, it’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“What about being autogy—?”
“Shut up. Seriously. You don’t even believe in that. Not any more. Not really. So don’t go running back to it at the first spot of friction.”
He nods, feeling — once again — stupid. And oddly childish, suddenly. Tabby’s in her early thirties, he knows, mature and experienced, and Monica’s probably a similar age, and here he is, worrying about… stupid shit. Besides, Tabby’s like him. So’s Monica.
He glances from one to the other. It doesn’t change how he feels about them, he realises. It’s just… something he knows about them.
“Fuck it,” he says to himself, and reaches for the clothes.
The sports bra is easy enough to put on, though he has to stretch it out a bit to get it over his chest without brushing the fabric against his sore parts. And the shorts are just shorts. Something else familiar, recontextualised.
He turns around and Monica’s grinning at them both. She throws a knotted pair of small gloves to Tabby. He catches the second pair, and he’s about to put them on when Tabby taps him on the shoulder.
“Stretch first.”
“Dad never used to— Ah. Yeah.”
“Yeah. Your dad didn’t make you stretch because your dad was an idiot.”
He can’t argue with that. He never did know why it seemed so important to please him, except that he feared what might happen if he didn’t.
But nothing ever happened to Topher, he remembers. Sure, he wasn’t the favourite, but nothing happened to him until, well, him.
He stretches, copies Tabby, and feels tension in muscles he hasn’t used in what feels like forever. She’s stretching with languid, easy movements, and he follows her. It’s surprisingly pleasurable. He’s startled, though, when a beat starts out of nowhere, and he looks up at Monica in time to see her putting her phone down on top of a Bluetooth speaker.
“Beyoncé?” he asks, when the singing starts.
“Don’t whine,” Monica says, smirking at him. She points at the punching bags. “Hit it!”
Tabby walks past him, bouncing on the soles of her feet, gathering her energy. She holds up the fourth finger of her left hand as she passes. “And put a ring on it!” she says.
Fine. If she’s going to be cheeky…
William tests the gloves for fit, bounces a few times while grinning at her, and then turns and swings for the nearest punching bag as hard as he can.
* * *
Melissa drops a second mug of coffee in front of Shahida, who smiles and squeezes her forearm in gratitude before returning to her game. Melissa shakes her head in amusement and goes back to pour another cup for herself.
Shahida’s playing on her battered old 3DS while they wait for whoever’s going to take them up to Bea. It’s stress displacement, Melissa’s well aware, and as she sits back down she decides she’ll do her bit to distract her by asking about the game, because she doesn’t recognise it.
“Oh, this?” Shahida says, gesturing with the 3DS. “It’s Vampire Queens: Devil Sisters. It’s pretty obscure, actually. When the DS came out, they had this idea that the mainline games were going to stay on the home consoles, but they still wanted a presence on handheld, so they put this out. It’s a Metroidvania.”
Melissa cups her hands around her coffee. “A what?”
“An exploration game. See, I played all the Vampire Queens games I could get my hands on after I finished Seven Great Houses, but Devil Sisters never came out in Europe. It did badly in the US, I think. Anyway, I picked it up while I was over there. You actually play as the great aunt of one of the main characters from SGH! It’s… um, it’s pretty good.”
“How many times have you finished it?”
Shahida looks away. “I mean. Not many times. I haven’t played it much. Only had it a few years.”
“How many times?”
She frowns. “Five, I think. It’s short, though. Only nine maps and two bonus areas.”
Melissa giggles. “I love you, Shy.”
Her frown deepens and she almost drops the 3DS. “What? What did I do? What’s so funny?”
Melissa’s about to say something when she realises someone’s leaning on the doorjamb, watching them and smiling indulgently. “Oh,” she says, “uh, hi, Indira.”
“Hey, you two,” Indira says, and jerks her thumb behind herself. “Come on up. It’s time.”
* * *
Steph’s pretty pleased with the outfits Bethany picked out for them both. Beth went back and forth on the dress-with-shorts, anxiously fixating on the need to wear leggings with them or to shave her legs. Then she had a short period of absolute, unshakeable confidence, and asked for Steph’s help assembling an outfit that could, if possible, kill Will just with its presence, and Steph had to argue her down from that, and then Bethany’s nerves reasserted themselves, and she went back to the dress-with-shorts and the leggings. Steph, tucking a stray bit of fringe behind Bethany’s ear, told her she looked beautiful.
And then she wouldn’t accept any input on Steph’s outfit, and Steph wondered briefly if she was going to have to overrule her, if she was going to be put in something as provocative as the schoolgirl outfit from a few days ago, but Beth dressed her in a long, pleated skirt and loose blouse combo.
It’s cute.
And then she let Steph do eyeliner for both of them, which was good; she needs the practise.
It was almost disappointing to arrive at the common room to the news that Will isn’t going to be joining them.
“But why?” Bethany asks, dropping into the couch cushions with a passable impression of a sulk.
“I think you traumatised him,” Pamela says.
“Please. At worst, I retraumatised him.”
Steph sits next to her and raises her arm. Bethany burrows into it.
She doesn’t really know what to expect from this. The first of many regular get-togethers with every basementee who’s had the veil lifted in its entirety, which apparently means her, Bethany, Will and Martin — though God only knows when exactly Martin learned the truth. With Will absent, that leaves her and Beth and Martin. What will they even talk about? Is this therapy? Pippa claims not to know; she said it’s new. First tried with the current second years, she said, and it must work great, because they’re all—
Pippa didn’t finish her sentence, but she did blush a lot.
Steph got it, anyway. She’s seen what the second years are like around each other. From what she can work out there are three main couples and a lot of mingling. And Faye, who is definitely dating Bex, told her that kissing Mia is like kissing a combine harvester, though that’s mostly the braces; Mia came to the basement with, she said herself, pretty fucked-up teeth.
Martin’s already here, sitting cross-legged on the floor again, with Pamela sat on the couch just behind him. Pippa’s next to her, and wiggles her fingers in greeting when Steph looks up.
“Is this… it?” she asks.
“This is it,” Pippa says. “We would have had Will, too, and probably another sponsor, as per the regs, but…” She twirls a finger absently.
Bethany wriggles a little as she gets more comfortable. She crosses her legs at the thigh, then winces and recrosses them at the ankles. Steph manages not to giggle; Bethany’s more and more been imitating Maria’s body language, consciously or not, but she keeps forgetting to account for the presence of certain things between her thighs that Maria no longer possesses.
The temporary presence, anyway, Steph remembers, and this time she can’t stop herself laughing. Bethany’s chosen this path, so it’s okay to laugh about it. Fucking finally.
“What’s so funny?” Beth whispers.
Steph just shrugs, and gets a poke in the arm for her insouciance.
“So…” Steph says, when she’s finished fending off Bethany. “What do we do?”
“We would have been waiting for Indira,” Pamela says sourly, “since she’s actually officiated one of these before and therefore knows what the hell to do, but she’s covering for Tabitha with Bea, so I suppose we just… talk?”
Bethany says, “About…?”
“Don’t know,” Pamela says. Beside her, Pippa buries her head in her hands.
* * *
“Congratulations, Trevor Darling!”
The exercise gear almost hits him in the face as he rounds the corner into the kitchen. He ducks, and what looks horribly like a hot pink sports bra and shorts go sailing over his head. At the table, nursing a mug of coffee, Frankie snorts.
Valérie, who threw the clothes at him, is standing in the middle of the kitchen, dressed in much more muted sportswear — with, he can’t help but note, a warm-looking hoodie draped over her shoulders — and her expression, though more dignified, is no less amused than Frankie’s.
“Congratulations on what?” he asks, aware that he’s failed even to try to pitch his voice into the range Val uses.
“Today,” she says, “you and I get to go for a run.”
“A run? Where?”
“In the Run. A run in the Run. It’s very logical and quite linguistically satisfying.”
“Okay. Why?” Officially sanctioned exercise is new; they’ve been very clear that if he is discovered doing, say, chin-ups, or anything else too ‘masculine’, there will be trouble.
“Because estradiol makes the weight pile on,” Val says, tapping at his belly with a wooden spoon, “and your new friends, the Smyth-Farrows, I am told they prefer a slender girl. So, from now on, you get to join me for cardio.”
Frankie slurps noisily from her mug. She’s smirking at him when she swallows and says, “And I’m sure it has nothing to do with your, ahem, truly pathetic showing against our Jacob the other day. Nobody’s worried about your… martial capabilities.”
“True,” Valérie says with a nod. “Not so much the soldier any more, are you?”
It’s for the cameras. He knows this. It still hurts to hear.
He gets changed in the storeroom, surrounded by potatoes. The sports bra and shorts are no less hideous on him than they were when they were in a heap in the corridor, but at least they help control two of the more unpleasant aspects of his recent fate. A few experimental jumps confirm that, unfortunately, no power on earth could keep them entirely still.
He slips on the socks and the running shoes. They are also pink. He feels like an overgrown doll, and for a moment pictures himself taken by the Smyth-Farrows and grotesquely handed off to some child to play with, some little girl who would paint his nails and brush his hair.
He rejects the thought before he starts fantasising about tearing his flesh from his bones again.
Val meets him at the side door, waves goodbye to Frankie, and sets the pace. The ground is cold enough that it’s not muddy despite the damp air, and the horrible pink shoes offer reasonable grip. He opens up, finds the same delight in movement he sometimes used to, back when he was in training at Peckinville, and passes her easily.
She catches him when his stitch settles in.
“You should not go so fast on your first time,” she says, matching his now much more dismal speed.
“Thanks—for—the—reminder,” he pants.
Together they jog at barely more than a fast walk, and Val goes over their tasks for the day. More training. More cleaning. And then dinner.
“The man, Jacob,” Val says, “he wants roast beef. Again! If we are lucky he will eat so much beef he will turn into a cow, and then we will more easily slaughter him.”
“Do we even have the stuff for it?”
“We are running low on many things. Not out yet, but it is to our advantage. If they keep guzzling through our supplies as quickly as they have been, they will have to request a resupply. And that is our chance.”
They hit the end of the Run and, though Trevor would love to stop and take a breather, Valérie simply turns on her heel and carries on. Feeling like his lungs are about to erupt out of his throat, he does his best to follow.
“Is it okay to talk about that?” he asks when he catches her.
“We cannot be overheard here. This is perhaps the most secure place on the grounds that is accessible to us. So you may talk, and I will listen. And not just about our plans. How are you doing, Trevor?”
“I want to tear off my skin,” he says, panting again. And it’s true, but hard to vocalise most of the time. Somehow, out here, it’s easier to say. Perhaps because most of him — rather uncomfortably too much of him — is occupied with the run.
“Ah,” Val says, unbothered by the pace she’s setting, “dysphoria. I have heard of it.”
“And you don’t get it yourself?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not especially. I never knew about it. And then, when I learned about it, I felt strange for never really having experienced it.”
“You mean, you were just fine with being—?”
“No! Goodness, fuck no, Trevor. I hated it. I was taken from everything I knew, my family was murdered in front of me, and I was forcibly reshaped for the pleasure of others. To look at myself was to understand that my life was no longer my own.”
“Then how are you still going?”
Valérie pauses before she answers. Perhaps to think through her answer, perhaps just to get her breath back. Trevor hopes for the latter; a fifty-three-year-old is absolutely trouncing a former professional soldier!
“Because my womanhood is my proudest scar,” she says. “Because I am stubborn. Because if I am not a woman then I am a mutilated toy.” She takes another few breaths. Trevor starts to feel himself fall behind. “But, also,” she continues, “I’ve been talking this over with Frances. She thinks… Well, I think she got this off the ‘world web’, but she thinks gender is just a great big mess, that there are points that most people cluster around that we call ‘male’ and ‘female’, and that some people cluster much closer than others. And that there are other points, other things one can be. She told me about the, uh, the nonbinary people.”
“You’re nonbinary?”
“Perhaps. There is another possibility. It might simply not matter to me what I am. My maleness, such as it was, may have been something like a comfortable jacket. I had no reason to change it, and I certainly missed it when it was taken away, but, in the end, most jackets are largely the same. Another theory Frances has advanced. She reads too much for a woman of her age.”
“So, what do you think you are?”
“I think, Trevor Darling, that I am Valérie Barbier, and that I have fucking survived, and that that is all I need to know for now. Perhaps, when I have the luxury of time, I will reconsider.”
She quickens the pace again, and this time, he realises, there’s no way he can follow her.
* * *
Shahida’s been to the first floor before, many times. Her first night at the Hall, she and Melissa stayed in the room allocated to Steph, and on her regular visits here she sometimes pops in to the basic little common room to see the second years. Other times she comes here purely to get out of the second-floor kitchen, when Julia’s in one of her moods; Shahida feels her status as an outsider most strongly around her, for all that Yasmin’s explained that it’s nothing personal.
She’s known since her first visit that the first floor is where Aunt Bea sleeps, too, and she’s always felt a little intimidated by that. But she’s never seen inside Beatrice’s room, and for a long time now she’s been wondering how a woman of her age and stature can stand to live in the glorified dorm rooms that are typical of the above-ground floors at Dorley Hall.
The answer, it turns out, is that she doesn’t.
Indira called it a flat, and at first glance that doesn’t seem accurate. The room she and Melissa are quietly ushered into is brightly sunlit, but it’s more utilitarian than she expected: a sofa, a couple of armchairs, a stack of smaller chairs, and various bookshelves and filing cabinets surround a large central desk, at which Beatrice sits, smiling patiently, waiting for them. But as they move to sit in the padded stackable chairs that have been prepared for them on the near side of Beatrice’s desk, Shahida spots two doors leading off; one is half-open into a kitchen space, the other is closed and, she surmises, almost definitely leads to the more homely areas.
And then she starts spotting the knickknacks. There’s a drinks cabinet with a few emptied and clean bottles set up at the back, presiding over the in-use bottles like the mementos they clearly are. The main bookshelf is stuffed so full that some of the shelves have a second row of books, and Shahida curses that her vision isn’t quite good enough to make out most of the spines. And every spare surface, away from the pristine central desk, seems covered in small items. It’s the home office of someone who has kept the same home for a very long time.
As she and Melissa get comfortable, Indira shuts the door and flops into one of the armchairs.
“Thank you, Indira,” Beatrice says, “Tabitha is managing, I take it?”
“She’s fine,” Indira says. “She’s got Will beating the shit out of a punching bag. It seems to be helping.”
“Ah. Percussive therapy.”
“That boy just really needed to hit something that wouldn’t hit him back. Or give him a crisis. Or repeatedly tase him. I suggest we don’t involve Maria in this stage of his therapy, though.”
“Happily, she is running errands today.” Beatrice smiles at Indira and then turns to Melissa. “Now, to the two of you.” After spearing Melissa with a look for a moment, she turns to Shahida, though she breaks off quite quickly, shaking her head and sighing. She stares into her mug for a moment, turns it around and around in her hands, giving Shahida the opportunity to read: Behind every great man is a woman. Underneath those words, in a bolder, red script, is the addition, With tranquilisers. “I do wish we could have had Tabitha here for this. Yes, Indira, I know; William’s rehabilitation will always take precedence. It’s just that she’s been—” she sighs again, looks back at Shahida, “—rather permissive with the two of you.”
“Permissive?” Melissa says.
Beatrice glares at Melissa and pinches the bridge of her nose. “I acknowledge that the involvement of Ms Mohsin here was unavoidable — and I do commend your detective work, by the way,” she adds to Shahida.
“Oh,” Shahida says, nonplussed. “Thank you?”
“Just don’t do it again.”
“Sorry.”
“Involving Ms Gray-Wallace, though,” Beatrice says, “that was pushing it.”
“My fault,” Shahida says quickly. “I was incautious with my preparations, and—”
“I’m aware. Your little spy-movie voicemail idea. Not ideal. But Ms Gray-Wallace has remained discreet, despite, I am told, voicing some understandable reservations; had you left it with her, I would have had minimal complaint. I would likely have muttered something dire into my tea, but not, you understand, when I could be overheard. But Shahida, you and Melissa visited family. Not Melissa’s, no — though I suspect Ms Mohsin would dispute that assessment — but, still, a near-inexcusable breach of operational security. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that the mere notion that Melissa could be alive was enough to galvanise two people into detective work around campus?”
“Two?”
“Steph,” Melissa says quietly.
“Oh.”
“Young Miss Riley, thankfully, has proved an asset to the programme,” Beatrice says with a wry smile, “and she is quite a personable girl in her own right. And Ms Mohsin is obviously of impeccable character. So don’t lay on the self-recriminations too thickly, Melissa.”
Melissa nods, very obviously laying them on, anyway. Shahida wonders just how many memories this interaction is unearthing. It’s an act until it’s not.
“My family will stay quiet,” Shahida says.
“I’m sure,” Beatrice replies, “but that is our assessment to make. And such meetings ought to occur under controlled conditions. But, Shahida— may I call you Shahida?”
“I’m sure you have already.”
Beatrice sniffs. “This is a rather more formal occasion.”
“Shahida’s fine.”
“The issue is not entirely your family. You met with your friend, Ms Woodley. Amy. And her family is an ongoing concern to this house. Do you understand? They are very dangerous.”
“Amy’s family?” Shahida says, shaking her head. “Dangerous?”
“Oh, shit,” Melissa whispers.
“Quite,” Beatrice says.
“It’s her aunt, Shy.”
Oh. Yes. Quite.
“Miranda Woodley-Stone,” Beatrice says, speaking as if she is reading a list of crimes off a ledger, “lately of The Times, previously of The Guardian, The Spectator, and New Musical Express. A singularly vile woman who is as likely to trip over a trans woman and cry assault as she is to publish a column on ‘compelled speech’ because she was served coffee by a barista with a pronoun pin. A rumourmonger; a hobbyist of hate; an indolent upper-class moraliser with a particular bee in her undoubtedly ridiculous Ascot bonnet about trans people. And that is before she discovers what we do here. Before she finds out that Amy’s vanished friend has popped back up, years later, as a woman, under not entirely self-directed circumstances. Do you understand what she could do?”
“She doesn’t know,” Shahida says. “Amy got us away before—”
Beatrice slams her fist into the table. “You placed a graduate of this house within thirty feet of one of the most dedicated enemies of trans life this godforsaken country has to offer! She is personal friends with Katherine Frost! This is why we have procedures!”
“Bea,” Indira says urgently.
Melissa, once again silent, is pressing herself down in her chair. As if she can make herself disappear if she just cowers hard enough. Shahida reaches for her, takes her hand, and Beatrice stands up from the desk, staring at the connection between them, removing herself from the vicinity.
“I apologise,” Bea says. “My goodness, I apologise. Dear Melissa, I really do. I am…” She runs a hand through her hair, seeming very young, despite her fifty-five years. “I am having a bad year. Or a very difficult few months, at least. I should not have taken it out on you. Either of you.”
“It’s… fine,” Melissa says.
“It is not.” Bea fetches her mug from the desk, drains it, and looks around the room. “I think I need another cup. Melissa, Shahida, would you like anything?”
“Um, tea?” Shahida says, mostly to grant Beatrice the excuse she’s angling for.
“Same,” Melissa says quietly.
“I’d like one, too,” Indira adds pointedly.
“Then you can join me in the kitchen,” Bea says.
And then the two of them are alone in Beatrice’s office, Melissa’s hand still folded into Shahida’s. In the silence, Melissa breathes carefully, in and out, and Shahida squeezes her fingers in time.
* * *
Their attempts at structured group therapy have failed miserably. Steph doesn’t know if it’s because Beth refuses to take the process seriously, or if it’s because not even Martin seems particularly troubled any more. It makes sense: this was probably supposed to be for Will, either to help him specifically — like both she and Bethany have done recently — or to help him reintegrate. Pippa’s told her privately that they’re trying, now that Will’s had a breakthrough of sorts and even Raph’s been reduced to quiet, trouble-free moping, to recreate whatever trick they pulled off with the current second years. It won’t work: Ollie, his light and some of his entertainment restored, still hasn’t consented to the simple behavioural agreements Harmony keeps putting to him, and Raph… Steph can’t see him ever doing what Bethany’s doing. He just doesn’t seem to have the temperament.
The sponsors seem confident, though, and she’s prepared to concede that the people who’ve been doing this for a decade-and-a-half might know more about this than she does, her much-vaunted ‘really trans’ status aside.
In the absence of any serious conflict, Pippa’s gone to get them all bottles of water, so it’s just the three of them and Pamela, who’s still sitting behind Martin, her thumb gently massaging the side of his neck.
“You really don’t know how it’s done?” Bethany’s asking. She’s been hassling Martin for the past minute or so, on the basis that he, surely, with his strong, drunken pedigree, ought to have a few tips on how group therapy should go.
“I don’t,” Martin says, a little more sharply than before, an echo of the irritation Steph remembers from his early days, back at the table in the lunch room, when he first told Steph his real name — emphatically not ‘Moody’ — and when Steph, to her disappointment, discovered she outright loathed him.
She’s been working on that. But she hasn’t spent much time around him, and definitely hasn’t spent much time talking to him.
“Fine,” Beth says, taking Martin’s petulance and doubling it. She’s put a slight American spin on the word, stretching and abusing the vowel, and Steph wonders if Bethany should perhaps stop rewatching that cheerleader show she likes so much if she’s going to copy the bitchier girls from it. But when she talks next she not only reverts to her usual accent, she digs her fingers into Steph’s thigh, seeking reassurance, and Steph hurriedly takes her hand. If Bethany needs reassurance, Bethany gets reassurance, especially if it stops her from bruising Steph’s leg. “I’m sorry, okay?” she continues. “I’m not used to this all-new Martin. He talks! He laughs! He sings! Do you sing?”
“In the shower,” Pamela says.
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss the guy who looked like he was trying to open up a portal to hell when the rest of us were trying to have breakfast; he was proper depressing, he found a way to make daily life in this sunless underground shoebox somehow even worse with just his presence, but at least I understood him, you know?”
“You used to throw Weetabix at me,” Martin says, in his quiet, steady way.
“You barely ate.”
“You’re saying that was benevolent?”
“Well, no, but… Right now you seem so happy-go-lucky about everything. It’s weird.”
Martin snorts. “Happy-go-lucky?”
“Well, not miserable, then,” Beth says, shrugging. Hidden under the folds of Steph’s skirt, she squeezes Steph’s hand. Being around other people, even people as inoffensive as Pamela and the newly chatty Martin, is costing her, as is maintaining her detached persona. Steph used to wish she’d drop it, but she’s done so, multiple times, made herself vulnerable, made herself new, so Steph’s not going to think ill of her for returning to it when she needs it. As long as she’s herself, through and through, when the lights go out. When she and Bethany are together, in the dark, as no-one but themselves.
“That’s more like it,” Martin says. Steph gives Beth’s hand a warning pinch, just in case she feels like saying something, because Martin’s looking at the floor, frowning, thinking, and whatever he’s thinking about, Steph wants to hear it. Bethany glances up at her, grinning, and Steph takes advantage: kisses her right on the nose.
Beth’s eyes go wide.
“We’ve been talking about this, haven’t we, Martin?” Pamela says. She’s leaning over him, still massaging his neck, and before Beth can get Steph back for the surprise attack, both Pam and Martin are looking up again, something having passed between them. Steph returns Bethany’s grin and pointedly gives Martin her full attention, which she maintains even when Bethany starts poking her in the thigh again.
“I had rather a lot of realisations all drop on me at once,” Martin says. “And the most relevant one is that it’s all happened. All the consequences. I was always scared of them — always wanted them — and now they’ve all hit. It’s a profound relief. A relief I’m still feeling, to be honest. I think I’ll be feeling it for a while. There was a vicar who used to visit. We never went to church except at Christmas and Easter, but it was good for the parish books to have our family be seen to be involved, so the vicar used to visit. Father would push him off on the children, so he’d come talk to us about whatever he wanted to talk about. Sometimes he’d just watch telly with us; sometimes he’d talk about Jesus.”
“Oh, the life of the rich,” Pamela says quietly, fondly. “Hot and cold running clergy…”
“Absent fathers,” Martin adds, and she laughs. “What I mean is, the vicar used to talk about rebirth. Being born again. And the way I feel right now is basically the way I used to imagine what being reborn feels like. Everything’s new.”
Steph can’t resist it. “The Christian rebirth is also about forgiveness,” she says, and she’s about to kick the nasty part of her that wanted to say that when Bethany does it for her, intensifying her hidden attack on Steph’s thigh. Beth’s probably pro-nastiness when it comes to Martin, though.
“Forgiveness doesn’t matter,” Martin says quickly. “It’s not mine to ask for, anyway. I’m never going to get it; waiting for it, hoping for it, like I did for a while, is a good way to waste a life. Another life.” He looks up at Pamela, who nods. “Early on,” he continues, looking back at Steph, holding her gaze, “all I could think about was the accident. I think it was, perhaps, the first time I ever thought about it clearly at all. And I thought of this place, of whatever it was going to do to me — to all of us — as something I deserved. As a punishment. I mostly expected never to leave here, and I thought that was fine. And then I realised what was happening, and I… blew some diodes. I couldn’t square the circle: I deserved punishment; I didn’t want to be a girl. But the punishment was more important, so I thought, maybe I could just fade away here. The ghost of Moody Martin Holloway. Do you understand how stupid that is? I was ready to die, but I wasn’t ready to start ticking a different gender marker.”
“Preaching to the choir, Moody,” Bethany mutters.
“What changed?” Steph asks.
He looks down at his wrist and fiddles with his bracelet for a moment before replying. “I already trusted Pamela. I already said I’d put my life wholly in her hands. And that helped, it really did. But it was still an escape. I was still detached. You know how easy it is to say you’re a murderer? It’s like self-harm; it makes you giddy. No, what it really took was for me to know everything. And now I do.”
“So when did you disclose to Martin, Ella?” Pippa asks, re-entering from the corridor and throwing bottles of water at people. Steph catches hers; Bethany fails to extract her hand in time, but the bottle falls harmlessly onto the cushion next to her. “I’ve been meaning to ask, but I haven’t had the chance.”
Pamela shrugs. “I didn’t. He asked. So I told him. And I told him why, too. And why me.”
“You just asked?” Steph says.
“I’d been thinking about it,” Martin says, leaning his head back against the sofa cushion again. “All the way through, I thought about it. And I didn’t stop thinking, even when I wasn’t really doing much of anything else.”
“I remember at disclosure, you said you guessed it.”
“Yes. And I asked the occasional question, I kept my eyes open, especially at you, Stephanie—”
“Me?”
“You’re very, very bad at pretending not to be a girl.”
“He’s got you there,” Pippa says.
“None of the sponsors thought you were weird,” Martin says. “And they kept giving you these looks. Like you were in on it. Which, I realised, you probably were.”
“She’s very bad at pretending in general,” Bethany says.
“Shut up, you,” Steph says, and kisses her on the temple. Bethany wriggles closer.
“So I asked,” Martin says. “A few days ago. And she came clean. Even filled in the last few details about my first week or so. Stuff I hadn’t been able to work out. I didn’t come straight here. I was at another place first.”
“What place?”
“Look, you know I had a problem, right? Alcohol. Since before I was old enough for it. And it was bad. So I needed to dry out, and for that, an environment like this is downright dangerous. Too much concrete to get through if someone has a problem. Everyone too close together.” Pamela nods her agreement and continues to massage his neck as he talks. “So, they had me in another place first. Bigger room than here, and not concrete, either. But I used to hear all sorts of shit outside the door; at least,” he adds, frowning, “I thought I did. Probably imagined a lot of it. At the time, I thought it was another rehab, a better one, one with more strongarm tactics for keeping you there. I thought my dad put me there.”
“It was a Peckinville facility, though,” Pamela says. “Not a big one, but it’s got staff. More than we have. It can do a proper, multi-person twenty-four-hour watch, without any of the compromises we have to make.”
“Peckinville?” Bethany whispers, looking up at Steph.
“Private army,” Steph says.
“Remember those guys who came for Will, Ollie and Raph after they attacked Maria?” Pippa says. “They were Peckinville. There’s two onsite at all times.”
“Different guys now,” Pamela says. “A shame; I thought Tyler was cute.”
Martin’s leaning back even more, smiling up at her, and Steph’s forced to wonder once again at the nature of their relationship. They seem to have settled into the sisterhood — or Sisterhood; or siblinghood, really, since Martin is still, well, Martin — that she and Pippa share, and that rankles, just a little. Because Pippa’s special, and so is Maria for Bethany, and while there’s nothing wrong with Pamela that she knows of, Martin killed someone—
Someone Pamela knew.
He says forgiveness is impossible, but he seems to have hers. So maybe Steph should stop fucking judging.
Bethany squeezes her thigh again, and when Steph looks down at her, she’s looking back up, wide-eyed and concerned. All trace of the persona gone; just Bethany. It’s a check: Are you okay? And Steph nods, because she’s just being stupid. It really is none of her business.
“I didn’t notice the days go by,” Martin’s saying. “It was just me and the four off-white walls. Didn’t even know how long I was there. I had a bunch of water bottles and a guy who’d come in three times a day with food and painkillers. So I suppose I could have marked time by him, except sometimes I was asleep. And sometimes I don’t think I was actually aware of him. And a few times I thought he was something else, like a hallucination or something, and I’d throw things at him. Yeah, it’s as fucked as it sounds. And the painkillers didn’t work, anyway. Then, one day, just when I was starting to get a handle on things, I woke up and I was here. In a cell. And that’s when I met Pammy.”
“God, Martin,” Pamela says, ceasing to massage him and clipping him lightly around the ear instead. “Pamela. Or Pam. Or Ella if you must. Not Pammy.”
“Give him a break, Pam,” Pippa says. “You’ve had so many names.”
“They’re all the same name!”
“I like Pammy,” Bethany says, finally turning away from Steph. “I think it suits you.”
“Not an endorsement,” Pamela mutters.
“That’s when I met Pam,” Martin says. “And I know now just how carefully timed it all was. I was supposed to come here and meet her at the exact right moment, so I’d associate her with feeling better. I was, uh, still kind of jittery, though.”
“Were you?” Bethany says. “If I remember correctly, you just kind of sat there. For the whole first week. You just sat there.” She points. “In the corner.”
“Sitting on my hands, Bethany.”
“Oh. Fine. Well done. Carry on.”
“But yes. It worked. I really did think of her as my guardian angel. Even if she hated me.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Pamela says. “At least, not part of his plan. Kind of part of the plan for me, though.”
“You don’t hate him any more?” Steph asks.
“No. I won’t say it’s been easy, because it hasn’t. And, before you say it, it wasn’t my idea to be his sponsor. Wanted nothing to do with him. Wanted to get him in and wash him straight out. Bea’s idea, to put us together.”
“Seems a little risky.”
Pamela shrugs. “There’s lots of girls down here with tasers. Nothing to stop them from dropping me if I lost my shit. And Martin… I’d read his file, obviously. But when he went quiet, when I thought I’d pushed him too hard, when I thought I really had fucked it, I realised I didn’t want him to wash out any more. So I went back and read his file again. Found all the little things I’d made myself ignore the first time around. All the bullshit in his past. A lot like my bullshit, really. Except he had an addiction on top of it all, and he never got the right help. He was never going to get the right help.” She leans back on the couch, looks at the ceiling. “I wish my friend’s husband hadn’t had to die, but I eventually realised more people than just Martin are responsible for that. A whole edifice of bastards; he just happened to be at the sharp end. And he’s different now, too.”
Bethany says, “He’ll be even more different when she’s Martina.”
“Ew,” Pamela says. “No.”
“Agreed,” Martin says.
And then the door from the corridor’s banging open again, and this time it’s not Pippa with her arms full of water bottles, it’s Will, and he’s wearing a sports bra. He’s dripping with sweat and he’s smiling and he’s wearing a sports bra and loose shorts and fingerless gloves, and there are faint red circles around his wrists which makes Steph wonder momentarily if he’s insisted on shackling himself again, but he looks… almost high.
Pippa throws him a spare water bottle, and he catches it out of the air, cracks the seal and downs half.
“Hi, girls,” he says, leaning one-handed on the end of the couch. “Hi, Martin. Sorry I missed the communal bitching session. I promise I’ll make the next one.”
“Are you okay?” Steph asks.
“Am I okay? Am I okay?” He pushes away from the couch again, spins around, starts walking in uneven circles around the common room. “Am. I. Okay. Stephanie, I just spent half an hour beating the absolute shit out of a punching bag. And it was good. Tab was there, and so was Monica, and we talked things over a bit, but mainly I just—” he jabs twice in the air, a boxer’s one-two. With his forearm he wipes a river of sweat from around his mouth, and he sits down at one of the metal tables, facing outward. “You know what? Yes. I’m okay. I’m so fucking okay. I hit that punching bag like I was hitting my dad. And for a while I pretended I was hitting my brother, because Monica made me admit that I do kind of hate him, just a little bit! And then, after that, I really needed to hit myself, and that was the best thing of all.” He laughs. “That bastard really had it coming.”
“That sounds… cathartic?”
Will leaps up from the table and lunges for the couch again. Steph manages not to react, though she feels Bethany shrink just a little beside her. Will, surprisingly, notices, and steps away again.
“Oh,” he says, his mood only a little deflated, “sorry, Bethany. And sorry for all the deadnaming before. And for being a massive fucking dick, I suppose. Hey,” he adds, “Martin, did you know I’ve had trans thoughts since I was a fucking kid?”
“Um,” Martin says, “no?”
“And do you know how hard I was working to repress them?” Will spins, his arms wide, indicating the whole building. “In this place? Like a fucking idiot?”
Steph briefly meets Martin’s eyes and smiles.
“I didn’t,” Martin says.
“It was going to get to you eventually,” Will says, still breathing hard from the exertion, “and this way, I’m in control. God, I have so much thinking to do. You know? I’ve got to work on myself. I always thought that was such a stupid thing to say. You are who you are, I thought, and if you want to be different, you just decide to be different. I was so fucking dumb.”
“Yeah?” Bethany says.
“Yeah. So fucking dumb. I’m going to work on that, too.” He looks around again, his nose wrinkling, and then he sniffs his armpit. “Oh. That’s me. New smell; not used to it yet.” He brushes his hands together. “Bethany, you look lovely. Steph, you too. Hi again, Martin. I need a shower!”
They’re all silent as they watch Will almost skip out of the room, and after a few moments, Steph can just about hear one of the showers come on.
Bethany breaks the silence. “Well,” she says, “she’s no fun any more.”
* * *
“I apologise again,” Beatrice says, laying out cups of tea in front of Shahida and Melissa. Shahida takes hers with a nod, warming her hands on it — it’s a little cold in Bea’s office — and she notices that, after a second to check her mug for amusing slogans (none), Melissa does the same.
“It’s quite all right,” Shahida says, unintentionally falling into a similar tone to Bea.
“What are you going to do about Amy’s aunt?” Melissa asks.
“Well,” Bea says, sitting down, “there’s nothing you can do with such people. They have too much invested in their crusades.”
“You’re not going to have her killed, are you?”
Beatrice almost spills her tea. “What? No! Where do you girls get the impression that I go around bumping people off? Indira, stop laughing.”
“Well,” Melissa says, “I heard about Karen…”
Sighing, Bea fixes Melissa with a look, and says carefully, “Karen was complicated. Karen was a piece in a game I hadn’t fully grasped we were still obliged to play.” She takes a sip of tea, frowns at the heat, and continues. “Karen was responsible for at least thirty deaths that I can put names and faces to. Karen was a monster in the truest sense of the word. As repulsive as Miranda Woodley-Stone may be, I don’t believe she’s committed any murders. Not directly, at any rate. For the moment, Melissa, I would ask simply that you not visit home any more.” She taps a finger on the wood. “Anyone’s home. You will both, obviously, be allowed to stay here as often and as long as you like. Or return to Manchester and your job up there, if you wish. And, Melissa, since you already have a line of communication open with Rupa Mohsin-Carpenter, you may continue texting her, calling her, WhatsApping her, and so on.”
“Mum’s gotten to see her again,” Shahida says. “That’ll be enough. Though… am I allowed to go home?”
Bea rolls her eyes. “Of course. Just be sure to impress upon your family that Melissa’s privacy is paramount.”
“They know. But I will, anyway.”
“As for your friends, Ms Gray-Wallace and Ms Woodley, we will take another approach. One which will not involve murder, Melissa, nor grievous bodily harm, nor kidnapping, nor whatever other grisly acts you might believe me capable of.”
“It was just the murder, Aunt Bea,” Melissa says. She says it with such a straight face that Shahida almost believes she’s being serious, but then Bea laughs and Melissa laughs and Shahida, feeling the remaining tension finally dissolve, laughs with them.
“To recap—” Beatrice says, and then pauses as the door to her office opens and Tabitha steps carefully inside. She’s wearing exercise clothes with a loose t-shirt over the top, and her skin has a shine to it, like she’s been, well, exercising. “Ah! Tabitha. How was your session with William?”
“Productive, I think,” Tabby says. “We’re recontextualising; first, his old hobbies; later, his gender. Sorry I’m late.” Indira stands up to greet her, but Tabby waves her away. “Don’t, Dira; I stink.”
Indira sniffs to confirm, and then sits back down again, theatrically pinching her nose.
Beatrice shakes her head minutely and returns her attention to Shahida and Melissa. “To recap, then: you are welcome to stay here, both of you; you are permitted to remain in contact with Ms Mohsin’s family, provided you retain your distance; your other friends—”
“Actually,” Melissa interrupts, and she’s gripping the edge of her chair with both hands, “I did have a request.”
“Go on.”
“I understand that I need to be more careful. But there’s someone I need to see. There’s a woman. She still lives in Almsworth, I think. Jenny Yau. She’s… She’s all that’s left of my mother. They were best friends. I mean, I love Jenny for Jenny, of course, but I need to see her for her and for Mum. I can tell her I’m hiding from my father so she won’t tell anyone — she hates him; she’ll believe it. Aunt Bea, she protected me when I was growing up, helped me survive, well, everything, and I can’t stand that she thinks I’m dead. I’ll do anything. It’s just—”
“Yes,” Bea says.
“Yes?”
“Yes.” Beatrice raises her mug again, holds it in front of her mouth, obscuring her expression. Shahida tries to look around it but catches Indira’s eye. Indira shakes her head, so Shahida tries very hard to look like she was just rearranging herself in her chair. “We’ll work it out,” Bea says. “You’ll have a chaperone; you’ll meet somewhere private. But of course you can see her. Consider it… a demonstration of my trust in you, Melissa. My belief in you. Tabitha will work out the details.”
“Oh, I will, will I?” Tabby says. “I have my hands full downstairs.”
“Tabitha Forbes,” Beatrice says, lowering the mug to glare at her, “you know full well that I have one rule when it comes to operational security: you broke it, you bought it.”
* * *
Maria almost runs into Indira as she jogs up the stairs to the first floor. They sidestep at the same time — in the same direction — and after a moment, Indira holds up her hands in surrender and backs up against the side of the stairwell. Maria shares a smile with her, and she’s about to go past when Indira says, “Oh, FYI, I just left Melissa and Shahida with Christine and Paige.”
Maria pauses, leans against the handrail. “You did? I thought Tabitha was handling them today?”
“She had a thing with Will.”
“Fair enough. Where did you leave them? Christine’s room?”
“No, the first-floor common room.”
Maria snorts. “That’s what we’re calling it, is it?”
“Until someone comes up with something better,” Indira says, shrugging.
The empty rooms on the first and second floor have been a contentious issue amongst the sponsors for a while. More so than the rooms on the ground floor, since at least there’s things kept in most of those, even though, really, much of it ought to be auctioned off or stored offsite. It’s been a problem for a while that the second years haven’t had anywhere to themselves except their own rooms, but it came to a head when Indira took over for Nell, accidentally adopted that entire intake, and got fed up with leading them down to the dining hall or to one of the teaching spaces just to talk to them all in one place. And with Steph having had a room opened up for her on the first floor, and more people coming and going than ever, it just made sense to start making better use of the available space.
The new common room is messily decorated, with mismatched couches and tables and chairs pulled from various storerooms. There’s a TV old enough to be, if not anyone’s mother, then at least a first-generation sponsor, a tower PC someone found — and which Christine dutifully upgraded — that has the appropriate cables to feed the TV a signal, and a pile of games consoles. Laptops and tablets are scattered around and used communally, and there’s a kettle and a toaster and a microwave. There’s also a big water dispenser, since the room lacks plumbing, something Auntie’s said she’ll get around to signing off on a fix for ‘whenever Elle has a senior moment and unexpectedly triples our budget’.
“What about the other girls?” Indira asks. “They’re here?”
“Just got back with them,” Maria says. “I left them in the kitchen with Pippa.”
“I thought Pippa was handling the group thing, downstairs?”
“They got done, and she found herself at a sudden loose end because, and I quote, ‘heartfelt confessionals make Bethany horny,’ and she didn’t want to be a third wheel in Steph’s very small bedroom.”
Indira laughs. “There must be something in the water today. I had to shut Mia’s door on my way past, because she was loudly complaining to Aisha that her penis looks like ‘a sad little cashew nut’.”
Maria pinches the bridge of her nose. “Is this something I need to know, Indira?”
“Maybe. I mean, she has made all sorts of claims about her huge hog that she definitely can’t live up to.”
Maria swipes at her; Indira steps down a stair, neatly dodging her.
“Why did we promote you again?”
“Because I’m literally the best at this,” Indira says.
Maria reluctantly concedes the point.
Bea’s in her flat, and Maria catches her in the act of pouring a small measure of gin.
“Hard meeting?” she asks, closing the door behind her.
“No,” Bea says. “They were fine. I was an ogre.”
“I can’t picture that.”
“You’re sweet.” Beatrice takes the gin in a single hit. “I shouted at them. Slammed my fist on the table.” She rubs the side of her hand, wincing. “And that was in front of Melissa, you understand. With her history.”
Maria nods. She re-familiarised herself with Melissa’s file after she inserted herself back into daily life at the Hall, and she dug out some of the stuff Abby redacted. Her father had a temper; the reminder was likely unpleasant.
“She’s with Christine and Paige now,” she says. It would be pointless to try to absolve Auntie of the act; she knows what she did.
“I know. And she didn’t seem angry with me, not after she got over her initial reaction. I, ah, may have said we’ll allow her to see another significant person from her childhood.”
“Oh?” Maria asks, holding down a laugh. One moment, the tyrannical custodian of a secretive forced feminisation programme, the next, a worried, motherly woman handing out favours.
“The woman she used to babysit for. The—”
“Ah,” Maria says. “Yes. Her mother’s first love.”
“Probable first love,” Beatrice corrects her. “And that’s reading heavily between the lines.”
Maria shrugs. It had stood out pretty clearly to her.
“On that subject,” Bea continues, “I need you to start the process of bringing Abby in.”
“Really? Already?”
Beatrice leans forward at her desk. She looks, more than anything else, tired. “It’s this Peckinville thing,” she says. “The missing soldiers. Elle’s looking into it, but it’s got me nervous. I don’t like loose ends flapping around out there. If she’s going to do… what she’s been doing, I’d like her doing it on our terms. Or at least with our supervision.”
Maria nods. It wasn’t entirely a surprise when Elle let them know that, in the course of her investigation into Peckinville, she’d chased up every possible lead, and one of them had led to the discovery that one of their own had conducted an unauthorised reunion with her family. Christine was involved, because of course.
“You’re going to let it go on?” Maria asks.
“I’m prepared to grant my official approval, yes. But she needs to come in. We need to have a meeting about it. Ground rules, put her cover story on file, et cetera. And, bluntly, she needs to talk to Melissa and Shahida as much as they want to speak to her. Honestly, these girls! I’d have thought she’d be ecstatic to have Melissa back, but—” Beatrice mimes someone running away with the shot glass, “—off she goes, being self-sacrificing. Maria, how are they still having teen drama? They’re all in their mid-twenties at least!”
“Do you remember what your mid-twenties were like?”
“Vividly,” Beatrice says, and slumps forward again. “Damn it. I should be happy all they’re doing is creating relationship drama for themselves. And that,” she adds in a sing-song voice, “is the point, isn’t it, Beatrice? That none of these girls should have to go through what I did. Ugh. Fine. Your score.”
Maria licks her index finger and draws in the air, incrementing an imaginary number on an imaginary scoreboard.
“Now, stop being smug,” Bea says, “and bring in the next lot.”
Maria nods, pulls out her phone and shoots off a quick text to Pippa, asking her to bring up Rachel and Amy.
* * *
“Oi,” says a voice, and Frankie doesn’t have to turn to know it’s Jake. She also doesn’t have to turn to know he’s leaning against the wall by the kitchen door, because since Val and Trev spectacularly failed to make a dent in him, he’s been even more disagreeably fucking casual than he was already. She turns anyway, and there he is, smirking at her. The only surprise is that Callum’s with him, waiting in the doorway and standing with something approaching military dignity, wet fish edition.
She’s glad she decided to load the main dishwasher and start on cleaning the sides. She can ball her hands into fists at his presence, at the way he surprised her, and look merely as if she is squeezing out her sponge over the sink.
“Jake!” she says, with as much good cheer as she can fake. “Come to punch the moneymaker in the face again?”
“That’s Callum’s job, isn’t it?” Jake says, nodding behind him. Callum, still hovering nervously, nods, and then seems immediately to regret it.
“I’m not going to hit Trevor,” he says.
“Theresa,” Jake says flatly.
“I’m not going to hit anyone!”
“Maybe not hit,” Jake says, twisting around to face him. “Maybe hit on. I keep telling you, Cal, you should have a go at Valerie.” This he accompanies with a lurid gesture, which neither Callum nor Frankie can look away from.
Frankie strangles the sponge, far beyond its water-retaining capacity. Callum says, “I’ll just watch them, I think.”
“Fairy,” Jake says, and pushes off from the wall. “Come on, Frances. We got a job for you.”
His leer is both unbecoming and seriously fucking unsettling — the man is already far too comfortable with old Dotty’s stock in trade — so she does her best to ignore it. It helps that she’s never pretended to like the lecherous bastard, so she doesn’t have to simper for him now.
“Do tell,” she says.
“I’ll do better. I’ll show.”
She throws the dripping sponge at Callum on her way out, yelling at him to make himself useful, and she’s gratified that the last thing she sees before the kitchen disappears from sight is Callum glumly dropping the sponge in the sink and jumping away from the splash.
Jake leads her up to the corridor where he, Callum and Declan have their rooms, and when she sees Declan curled in a ball of misery on his bed, naked and red-eyed, she turns to Jake and asks, “Why am I here?”
“Visitors,” Jake says. “Posh ones.”
“The Smyth-Farrows again?”
“No. The old woman’ll tell you all about it. You’re to make Dina look good.”
“Me? Val would be better at—”
Dorothy’s sharp, tired voice comes from the corridor. “Vincent can’t be trusted. And my hands shake.”
“Been a while, Dot,” Frankie says. Because I’ve been avoiding you, she adds silently, while trying very hard to seem like I’m not.
“Make him look classy,” Dorothy says. “Remember the galas?”
Frankie stills her body as quickly as she can. Because of course she remembers the galas. Another bloodless term for something horrific they used to do to the girls and boys at old Dorley. Another in-joke among torturers.
“We’re throwing one today?”
Dorothy chuckles grimly, and then — having terrified Frankie to the depths of her soul — says, “No, more’s the pity. But do it like you’re preparing him for one.” She flicks an irritated hand at Jake to get him to move out of her way, and leans against the jamb. Frankie, pretending to make herself more comfortable, pulls over a stool and sits, coincidentally blocking the view of Declan’s naked, shivering body.
“So?” Frankie says. “What are we doing?”
“I’ve been going through my rolodex. Been having a hard time with it, too, because most of our old patrons have either shuffled off or were quite a way downstream from Smyth-Farrow senior.” Meaning they were misled as to the exact nature of the programme at Dorley Hall. Most of the active participants were smaller fry, single-contract interests or dilettantes. Curious wankers and pervs prepared to empty their savings account for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Though there were a few big families who retained an arms-length interest, with full knowledge as to what was going on. “But my very careful line of inquiry has found me a young couple, newly moneyed and with interests in the right areas. I’m having them round this evening. But I can’t show them Trevor; if the nouveau Yanks found out, they’d have my head. And our funding. But Declan’s mine.”
Frankie can’t help checking Jake’s reaction to that. He’s displeased. He likes to think of Declan as his. She lets through a snort of amusement about it; Dotty always did approve of rivalries between her underlings.
“So why risk bringing them here?” Frankie asks.
“Man cannot live on bread alone, Franks,” Dorothy says. “Especially not American bread. Have you ever tried it? It’s solid sugar. Anyway, I don’t trust the Smyth-Farrow kids. Too many new ideas.”
“And you think this new couple can be sold on, what? The same old boy-girls we used to turn out?”
“Hope so, Frankie. Hope so. None of this gets out, you understand? Not to the Yanks, not to Silver River.”
Frankie nods. “Yeah. I understand.” It’s not like she has the Silver River Services number on her speed dial, anyway.
“Good. Now, we’re ordering in tonight, so Callum’s giving Vincent the good news: he only has to cook for himself, Trevor and you. All I need from you, after you’ve done up Declan like a nice little tart, is to keep the other two out of the loop and out of the way.”
“Right. We’ll have a movie night or something.”
Dorothy laughs. “Yes. Yes. You do that. Just—” she waves a hand at Declan, “—make the boy look nice, first.”
Everyone clears out. It’s fortunate: she was prepared to yell at them. Because she hasn’t seen Declan or Dina or whoever he thinks he is right now since the staged and rather messy confrontation with Jake, and two days with no-one but Dotty and the Silver River dickheads would be rough even for Frankie; Declan, new to being a girl, new to being knowingly and deliberately made vulnerable, has none of the self-possession required to shrug off their lewd comments and demeaning barbs. Not to mention, she’s as weak as a kitten and absolutely fucking terrified.
The girls back at Dorley, old Dorley, her Dorley, as repulsive as it is for her to claim it… they’d get like this sometimes. This is Declan when he first came here, but worse, because she’s pretty sure that back then it was just humiliation and fear and the total, systematic dismantling of his identity; this Declan has all that, and absolutely no hope.
She stands up from her little stool and locks the door. Loudly, leaving no doubt as to what she’s doing. To ram the point home, she fetches a wooden chair from the other side of the room and shoves it under the door handle.
“Hey,” she says, sitting back down next to her, “sweetheart. It’s just us here now.”
She doesn’t respond. She lays a hand on her bare shoulder and she doesn’t even flinch and that is, pardon her French, a bad fucking sign.
French. Hah. Maybe I should channel a spot of Val.
She takes another look at her, and she’s about to say something when she stops short. Why is she gendering her this way? Why is she more apt to think of Declan as a girl when she’s at her most vulnerable? She— He wouldn’t thank her for it, for sure, not unless he’s trying to go deep immersion, the way she’s pretty sure Beatrice did after Val was taken away. But Declan doesn’t have the strength of will to do what Beatrice did. Beatrice constructed a new, female self, built not just her identity but her very survival into it, then turned around and taught dozens upon dozens of girls to do the same. Declan is…
He’s just a man. Despite his appearance, despite the name Jake gave him, he’s a fucking man. He’s emphatically not, as the girls at new Dorley would say, her sister.
Except perhaps he ought to be. This new life that’s been chosen for him is inescapable and, most likely, short. Frankie looks at him and can’t help remembering what Val said about all the girls buried here, all the lives sacrificed on the altars of lust and cruelty. Perhaps, before all this ends in darkness, he deserves someone on his side. Despite his past, despite the pain he’s inflicted.
Val’d say she’s an idiot for even thinking it. Val’d probably be right.
Fuck. There’s a ripe blue bruise across his cheek. Jake playing rough or exacting discipline. She’s going to have to cover it. She reaches out again, this time with the back of her thumb, and strokes his cheek as gently as she can, and this time he responds, releasing his grip on his legs, sitting up just a little.
Frankie smiles. Fuck, she really is pretty. Despite the cartoon tits and despite the bruises — bruises plural, she now realises; she’s going to have to dress her in something that covers her whole left side — there’s no denying she’s been made beautiful.
And Declan wouldn’t thank you for thinking that, either, Frankie. But what is a woman, if not someone who is forced into the subservient gendered position by—
Christ, shut up, Frankie. Shut up and do what you came here to do. You’re too old to think about shit like that, especially when you can’t remember if the essay you read which used that phrase was arguing for or against it. You’ll have to ask the author, assuming you live long enough to see the inside of Dorley Hall again.
Shite. Where was I?
Yeah. Channelling Val.
“Declan — and I’m going to call you that until you ask me otherwise, okay? — I need you to sit up with me. I need you to cooperate. I need you to sit still for me while I do your face and your hair, and then I need you to dress for me. In return I will give you all that I can give you right now, which is an hour or two without Jake or Callum or Dorothy. But I do need you to cooperate. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she says.
* * *
Rachel Gray-Wallace and Amy Woodley. More of Melissa’s friends. Pippa’s seen Rachel around, though not nearly as much as Shahida; Amy is completely new to her. Maria dropped them off in the kitchen, spied Pippa escaping the basement, and got her to watch them, so now she’s keeping an eye on them, sitting comfortably and somewhat sleepily at one end of the kitchen table while Rachel and Amy sit together at the other, drinking the tea she made them and looking a little confused.
“I know I’m not supposed to ask questions,” Rachel says, “but—”
“You’re not supposed to ask questions?” Amy interrupts, switching rapidly between frowning at Rachel and staring at Pippa. “Why isn’t she allowed to ask questions?” she asks Pippa.
Pippa shrugs. “Because the answers are super weird,” she says.
She doesn’t actually know why they’re here, but given that they’ve been yanked straight from their family homes by Maria — and on the day before New Year’s Eve, at that — and given that she asked Pippa specifically to make sure they didn’t go anywhere or look too hard at anything, ‘for now’, disclosure’s a safe bet. Another opsec eff-up, no doubt. They’re becoming a regular thing; Steph, Lorna, Shahida, and now these two.
At least Lorna wasn’t Melissa’s fault. Pippa wonders if the woman ever feels guilty about how much harder she keeps making everyone’s lives here, and then cancels the thought: if Melissa hadn’t dropped her debit card — ‘accidentally’, no doubt — in front of a young Steph, Pippa’s world would look quite different right now.
The hope Melissa represented might actually have been what kept Steph going. Without that…
A sobering thought.
Pippa’s going to buy Melissa something nice, she decides. And then someone can yell at her about security, if Aunt Bea hasn’t already.
“That’s a super weird answer in and of itself,” Amy says.
Pippa smiles and spreads her hands. She earns a scowl from Rachel and an amused grin from Amy.
It’s going to be nice when the new semester starts up and people can’t grab Pippa and give her random jobs any more. Though taking the shift to watch group had been satisfying. Bethany’s progress: nothing short of miraculous at this point. I mean, yes, sure, Pippa can tell when her nerve fails, when reticence overcomes her, because she burrows into Steph’s side. Practically tries to hide her whole head in Steph’s armpit. And the way they were holding hands under Steph’s skirt, probably thinking no-one could see! Downright adorable.
She could see the stress building up, though. Ninety minutes of that ‘failed’ group — convened though it was specifically so that Bethany could be Bethany, in voice, in dress and in attitude, in front of Martin and Pam — got to be too much, and she let them all go back to their rooms shortly after Will’s short-lived return.
It’s nostalgic, in a way. Pippa can see a lot of herself in Bethany. Yes, they are and were very different people, and Bethany seems to be taking a lot more of her old self into her new self than even she seems to be aware of, but those moments of hesitation, of discomfort, of fear, when you catch up to yourself and realise that you’re dressed as a girl, you’re being seen as a girl, you’re relating to others as a girl… You have to force a realignment. You have to remind yourself that none of the old rules matter, and that the reason they don’t is because you, in conjunction with your sponsor and the other ‘boys’ in the basement, decided they don’t. Even though they can still contrive to feel very real; oppressively so, at times. The stress of the dissonance, the war between the created and the rejected self, needs to be blown off somehow, some way.
Pippa used to sing. Her dad always said she had the perfect shower voice, and she brought it with her to her new life, retraining her voice and belting out her music — and the occasional fondly remembered church song — into the mirror. Hairbrush for a microphone. Security cameras for an audience. Something she’d always been too self-conscious to do, as a teen, as a boy; another thing she unlearned.
Okay, yes, fine, she didn’t unlearn it completely, but she was promised that no-one would see the recordings.
Bethany’s been blowing off steam, as well. Unlike Pippa, she does so with an audience, with someone who will hold her hands and shut out the rest of the world for her, and though Pippa doesn’t know exactly what they do, since they keep Steph’s cameras off, she can hazard a guess.
A few minutes and a handful more dodged questions later, Pippa’s phone chimes, and she leads Rachel and Amy up to the first floor, to Aunt Bea’s flat. Maria’s in there, sitting cross-legged at an office chair pulled up to the central desk, so Pippa takes the couch, figuring that if what she thinks is about to happen goes wrong in any way, they might need an extra pair of hands, or, failing that, an extra taser.
“Ms Gray-Wallace,” Aunt Bea says. “Ms Woodley. My name is Beatrice.” She leans harder than usual on the first syllable of her name. Pippa can’t guess at all what that means. “I am responsible for the programme we operate here, and I am responsible for the wellbeing of your friend, Melissa Haverford.”
“What?” It’s Rachel, leaning forward and pointing at Aunt Bea. “Where did ‘Haverford’ come from? Her name’s Vogel.”
“Um,” Amy says, “Rach?”
“Melissa took a new name on completion of our programme,” Bea says. “An entirely new name. I take it she has not yet discussed this aspect of her new life with you.”
“Why?” Rachel demands. She seems annoyed. Because she was dragged away from her family during the holidays? Maybe. Pippa checks the taser in her pocket, makes sure it’s not snagged on anything. She checked the charge this morning, thank goodness.
“Think about it, Rach,” Amy says. “What if her dad found out?”
Rachel turns to her friend “Yeah, Amy? And what if Russell found out? What then? The man’s got a sister he knows nothing about.”
“Russ is okay. I check on him, and—”
“You check on him? You?”
Amy lays a hand on Rachel’s forearm. “Yes. Mum knows his office manager. He’s got a good job, he’s got friends. It’s all a bit new, but he’s much less isolated than he used to be. Last I heard, he might finally have a boyfriend. I don’t think he needs to have his life tipped over, not just yet.”
“What do you mean? Why would it—?”
“Look at Shy,” Amy says. “She wasn’t back home for five minutes before she started covering the country in wanted posters, and now she’s actually found her, do you think she’s going to start interviewing for jobs here like she planned? Shahida and Melissa need to sort out what they’re going to do, where they’re going to live, all that shit. When they have stability, they’re less likely to turn Russ’ life into a huge mess by accident because they’ll have the time to do it right.”
“No, Amy, that’s ridiculous. Russ has a right to know.”
“I agree. I also think, not now.”
“Since when have you been checking on him, anyway?”
“Since always. And I didn’t tell you because you always get weird when I do stuff.”
“Because you always go too far!”
Amy sits back in her chair. “I go exactly far enough, Rach.”
Aunt Bea’s been watching the conversation with interest, and as it peters out, she pushes two tablets across the desk, one for each of them. Disclosure agreements.
“I know you have questions,” she says. “I have answers. But protecting our operation here is my top priority. So I must ask that you read these documents thoroughly. You can sign your agreement at the bottom.”
“What if we don’t sign?” Rachel asks.
“Then you can leave,” Bea says. “And I will trust that you keep what you think you know about us to yourself, for the good of your friends, and for the good of all the people for whom I am responsible.”
“And what if—?”
“Rach,” Amy snaps. “Sign it.” She flicks her fingers quickly down the screen of the tablet she’s been given, and hits the bottom of the document at such speed that the bounce animation is visible from the couch. She thumbs the biometric reader, signs her name with the stylus Bea silently hands her, and pushes the tablet back across the table.
“You’re not going to read that?”
Amy shrugs. “I wanna know. Melissa knows everything. Shy knows everything! The way they talk when they think we’re not listening… They’ve both obviously signed this already, or something like it, and that’s enough for me.”
The tension cracks on Rachel’s face and she laughs. It’s a shallow laugh, but it’s a reprieve. She’s been making Pippa nervous.
“That’s very rash of you,” Rachel says, wagging a finger. “Your boss would disapprove.”
Amy says, “My boss doesn’t desperately want to know everything about… Shit, Rach! This is a whole thing here! They’ve got the building and they’ve got staff and they’ve got an AGA and that girl Pippa makes a lovely cup of tea—”
“—thank you—”
“—and I want to know. So sign!”
“Thanks, Amy,” Rachel says, “but I’m going to read all the same.”
Amy catches Pippa’s gaze and rolls her eyes. Pippa smiles in return, and both of them dig in their bags for their phones, the better to occupy themselves while Rachel reads the fine print. A few minutes in, Maria leans over to whisper something in Bea’s ear, and then disappears into Bea’s kitchen, returning with enough tea for everyone. In, Pippa notes, what Christine calls the ‘opsec mugs’.
“I’m not comfortable with this,” Rachel says. Her mug is still full while everyone else’s is empty, and Amy’s been sitting on the couch next to Pippa, talking musical taste and recent TV and Pippa’s classes, while throwing the occasional impatient glance at Rachel.
“Oh my God, Rach,” Amy says, rolling her eyes at Pippa again, patting her on the knee and standing up. “Can you just not be so…?”
“I’m not in the habit of signing my rights away. Look!” She holds up the tablet, points with the stylus to various clauses. “We’re agreeing to waive our right to talk about Dorley Hall or anything that goes on here without approval from and consultation with a representative of the capital-P Programme!”
“Yeah?” Amy says, leaning on the desk next to Rachel and tapping at the edge of the tablet. “Who were you going to talk about it with, anyway?”
“I don’t know— The police?”
“ACAB, Rach.”
“How are you so chill about this?” Rachel drops the tablet on the desk. “This isn’t just an NDA; this is sweeping. This is an NDA with teeth. It might even be an NDA with guns!”
Aunt Bea wheels her chair back over to the desk. Maria returns from the kitchen, pocketing her phone, and takes up the same seat she used before. Pippa pays attention: this could be crunch time.
“Ms Gray-Wallace—” Aunt Bea starts.
“For fuck’s sake,” Rachel says, “call me Rachel.”
“Amy,” Amy supplies, nodding to Aunt Bea and sitting down again.
“Rachel,” Aunt Bea continues, “I’m going to be honest with you. That is an NDA with teeth. And it’s more than that. It is the legal pretext under which we will use any means necessary to protect ourselves, and we require it to be ‘sweeping’, as you say, because the graduates of our programme are, in many ways, among the most vulnerable women and nonbinary individuals in the country.” Bea’s leaning forward on the desk, staring Rachel down, and Pippa doesn’t think she’s imagining that Rachel’s starting to push her chair away from the desk, centimetre by centimetre. “Take what you know about your friend Melissa. Not just her status as a transgender woman; her family situation. The delicacy of her identity. The process by which she came about it. The trials she underwent beforehand. Now imagine almost a hundred more like her. Imagine the… hostility that might await them, were they to be exposed. They are whom I am protecting.” She points to Rachel’s tablet. “They are whom that protects.”
Rachel’s face is blank. “There’s got to be more to it than that.”
“There is. But that is all you can know. Unless you sign.”
They watch each other for a moment. Pippa wants to place herself in front of Aunt Bea, taser in hand, because it looks very much as if Rachel might throw the tablet at her. Instead she checks her taser again and chews on her cheek.
“Fine,” Rachel says eventually, thumbing and signing in the appropriate places with rough fervour. “It’s done. Tell me.”
2004 August 8
Sunday
What a blasted eyesore, inside and out. From the brickwork to the windows to the kitchen to the exposed concrete stairway that leads down from the dining hall, Dorley Hall is a building with an identity crisis. It’s like a stately home refurbished by enthusiastic amateurs; like a period hospital restored to working order during a National Trust budget crisis.
Elle permits herself a smirk. Rather appropriate, really. But who on earth thought an AGA was appropriate? The main kitchen in a place like this needs restaurant-grade equipment if it’s going to feed as many mouths as its room count implies. She’ll suggest to Beatrice that they have the whole kitchen ripped out and redone.
With Dorothy Marsden having scuttled off, tail between her legs and with her minions behind her, the Hall is curiously empty, and that’s not right, either. A building such as this ought to be a hive of activity!
Still, if her plans pan out, it will be.
One of the girls — one of the survivors — enters the dining hall from the concrete stairwell. She’s carrying a bundle of clothes, and when she catches Elle’s eye she jumps, so Elle turns away, leaves through the kitchen and exits to the rough path out front, so she can’t make the poor thing any more uncomfortable.
So she can’t make herself any more uncomfortable. Because she need only look upon these women to see their past, to see their origin, and though most of them lack Beatrice’s grace and refinement they are, to a woman, absolutely beautiful and exquisitely, painfully arousing.
Elle returns to her car, checks that none of the students from the encroaching university has decided to go for a walk nearby, and relieves her tension.
She won’t survive a whole evening around these women, not unless she can regularly shut herself in one of the side rooms. Or unless one of them consents to—
No.
She looks around again, for what she is about to do is perhaps more revealing of her inner turmoil than anything else she might do on this campus. When she’s satisfied that she is truly, absolutely alone, she carefully removes the ring from her finger and slaps herself as hard as she can across the face. Once, twice, thrice.
“Control yourself, Elladine!”
Or, if she cannot control herself, at the very least she can do the responsible thing, and masturbate in a car with partly blacked-out windows.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Mother’s memory is good for something, at least.
Satisfied, she touches up her cheeks with a little powder — such redness has always, in her experience, been taken for rouge, but best be careful — and taps out a quick text message. Five minutes later and the trucks are already rolling in, and Elle emerges from her car in time to lead the first group of Peckinville workmen into the Hall.
She may not have been able to rid the girls entirely of Dorothy Marsden — the odious Crispin Smyth-Farrow has guaranteed her flat for the next two years, and she’s bound to return to it at some point — but she can damn well upgrade the locks enough to keep the old bitch confined to the narrowest possible slice of the Hall for as long as Beatrice pleases.
And, hell, if she does come back, she can bear witness to the extent that the girls, with the assistance of Elle’s men, have stripped the memory of her from the brickwork, from the woodwork, from their very bodies.
2019 December 30
Monday
It was Pippa’s turn to make the next round of drinks, and she returns from Aunt Bea’s little kitchen with several mugs on a tray to find Amy slapping her thigh in delight.
“So that’s what Melissa meant!” Amy says, and then grimaces as she realises she almost dislodged Pippa’s tray. Pippa smiles at her, to tell her not to worry about it, and Amy returns the smile and retrieves two mugs, one for her and one for Rachel, who isn’t taking the many revelations with Amy’s equanimity.
“What?” Rachel says urgently, ignoring the mug Amy’s placed in front of her and tugging at her sleeve instead. “What, Amy? What did she say?”
Pippa hands mugs to Bea and Maria, both of them still sitting uncomfortably close to the visibly upset Rachel, and then retreats to her couch.
“Just… Actually, Rachel, you know what? I probably shouldn’t tell you.”
“Amy…”
Maria, leaning on the desk and seeming convincingly bored, says, “You might as well tell her, Amy. We’ve got a lot to get through.”
Amy delays by a few more seconds, testing the temperature of her tea. “She just said she was ‘locked in’,” she says, and then frowns. “No, wait; that was how I
characterised it.” She looks over at Pippa and explains, “I overheard her and Shy talking. That was the gist, though.”Rachel’s hands are both fists, and at this her knuckles whiten. “You locked her in!”
“It’s procedure,” Maria says. “We were all locked in at one point.”
“That’s barbaric. That’s criminal. Shit, Amy, how are you not— not—?”
“Because of Liss,” Amy says, cupping her mug.
“Haven’t you been listening?”
Amy glares at Rachel, sips from her tea, and replaces the mug carefully on the table. “Haven’t you?” she says. “Rach, if what they’re saying is true, then everyone here’s been through it. Not just Liss. You’ve spent more time around them than I have; do they strike you as traumatised by their experiences here?”
“Quiet, Pippa,” Maria mutters, as Pippa quickly shoves her hand to her mouth and turns her laugh into a snort.
“What?” Rachel shouts, turning to Pippa. “What is so fucking funny?”
Oh, drat. “Sorry,” Pippa says quickly. “It’s just that that’s kind of an old joke around here.”
“A joke.”
“Well, yes! Like Amy said, we’ve all been through it. And it hurts at the time, yes—” Rachel is narrowing her eyes but Pippa presses on, remembering Martin, “—but it’s rehab, sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘rehab’?”
“Well, it’s—”
“No,” Rachel says, cutting her off. Amy lays a hand on her forearm but she irritably dislodges her. “Fucking no. Because if what you’re about to say is premised on a belief that Melissa was ever like— like you, then shut your fucking mouth forever. Because I knew Mark. I knew him. And he was such a sweet boy.” Her grip loosens on her anger for a second. “Such a hurt boy.” She’s silent for a short while, and Pippa wants to speak up, wants to correct her, to comfort her, to understand her if she can. But when Rachel looks up again, it’s with a curl to her lip that looks too familiar. “And you people dragged him here and you locked him up in the fucking dark and brutalised him until he became someone else.”
Pippa’s throat seizes. That’s not how it works!
“And now she’s Melissa,” Rachel continues. “And now I don’t know if that was ever going to be something that happened without you. I don’t know if she’s real or not.”
“She’s real, Rach,” Amy says.
Rachel turns on her. “And what do you know, Amy? You’ve spent, what, one afternoon with her? Two? You haven’t seen the— the cracks that I have. You’re just happy the boy you had a secret little crush on for years is still alive.”
“Rach—”
“She’s been lying, Amy.” Rachel turns to Bea. “For you. For all of you.” And she includes Pippa in her scathing assessment of the room. “And she’s scared of you! It’s obvious whenever she so much as alludes to you. And she’s got Shahida lying for you, too. Lying on behalf of a mob. And Shy, she asked me to trust her! And, fuck me, I fucking did. I trusted her. For this. For— I can’t put it into words! This is monstrous. It’s disgusting. It’s conversion therapy!”
“No,” Maria says, slapping her open palm on the table and attracting Rachel’s attention. “The fact that you can even suggest that means you have heard nothing that we’ve said. We would never take a gay person and try to make them straight, or a trans person and try to make them cis. Aside from the ethical considerations, it can’t be bloody well done!”
“You take men and you mutilate them. Make them look like women.”
“Hey,” Pippa interjects, finding her voice croaky and quiet, “I am a—”
“We do not,” Maria says. “We are very careful to take only those who can adapt. Who can be helped by our programme.”
“Oh, yes, right, I got that part, sure! Men who can be ‘helped’. Oh, yes, I fucking got that part. Wife-beaters and abusers and— Do you take rapists, too?” She turns to Pippa again. “What about you, ‘Pippa’? Should I be scared of you? Are you a rapist?”
The room is suddenly cold.
It’s like she can’t breathe any more. Like she’s been struck and the air’s been forced out of her. And she wants to breathe, she needs to, because the dizziness is back, that feeling she used to get early on, when she understood what was going to happen to her, when she understood why it was going to happen to her, when she looked back at her life and found nothing there worth saving and no-one to miss her who hadn’t already been taken from her, by the violence of the state, by the violence of men, and she needs to breathe, but there’s no oxygen in here, no resistance to the air at all, and she stumbles through it, ignoring the people calling her name, because she has to, because if she turns back to the people who want to comfort her she will pass out.
The last thing she hears from anyone back there is Maria saying emphatically, “Pippa Green is not—” and then she’s leaning against the wall around the corner, wheezing painfully, filling her lungs one agonising gasp at a time. There’s the sound of footsteps, and she doesn’t want to know, can’t know, can’t be looked at right now, can’t be witnessed, so she runs for the stairs. Takes them two, three at a time.
She’s got to get away.
She’s got to be alone.
She’s thumbing her way through door after door, staggering when she loses her footing, still dizzy and uncoordinated. At the top floor she pauses to retrieve her headphones from her bag and jam them into her ears, a manoeuvre so practised it might as well be instinctive. She taps play. She doesn’t remember the last playlist she was listening too — doesn’t care — but it feels only too appropriate, as she kicks open the roof door and steps out into the bright and brittle December afternoon, that something from one of her old playlists comes on.
The first thing she did when they gave her a real phone was to reassemble, as best as she could remember, all the playlists she used to listen to as a kid, all the music she found online, curled up in her teenage bedroom, headphones almost deafening her, looking for something or someone to latch onto, to describe her.
Spanish Moss by Against Me! starts playing, and Pippa leans against the brick and looks out across the university, her lips mouthing the lyrics, her arms clasped tight around her belly.
2004 August 8
Sunday
Before she arrived at Dorley Hall, before she took great pleasure in entering on Beatrice’s cue — to be at the beck of another, especially one such as Beatrice, is quite the thrill! — and shattering Dorothy Marsden’s world, she weighed carefully the benefits of immediately calling in the Peckinville workmen versus waiting, giving the girls time to come to terms with their new reality. And she’s certain she made the right decision, bringing them in right away, given that almost the first thing she saw after the dirty work was said and done were various girls moving their precious items out of that awful basement and throwing out anything they could find that belonged to Marsden or one of her ‘sponsors’.
Her men are handling it all now. With direction, of course. Maria, Beatrice’s contact, that beautiful East Asian girl with the slender fingers and the scars on her forearms, is speaking with two of the men, so Elle hangs back. To insert herself would be to interrupt, to co-opt Maria’s authority, and that’s the last thing she wants. She might have plans for the Hall — a humane repurposing must be possible! just look at these women! — but central to them is the need for its current inhabitants to heal and to take control over their lives.
It’s an opportunity to watch her, too. To examine her movements, to imagine her life up to this point. For she is graceful and careful and a little reserved, and so unlike Dorothy or her coterie that Elle wonders where she learned such femininity. From memories of her mother, perhaps?
Her mother whose death was requested by Dorothy and carried out by Smyth-Farrow’s people. Oh, she can’t prove it, not to the point where a court would accept her evidence, but it’s obvious. The power plays of the English aristocracy — and those who serve and emulate them — have always been, in effect and intent, deeply racist; no wonder the immigrant family from Hong Kong was chosen to have an example made of them.
But she can see none of that on Maria’s face. The woman has so much to grieve, has borne so much injury, and yet she stands as straight-backed and proud as anyone Elle’s ever seen. There’s something there that reminds her of Beatrice, too; a survivor’s instinct, perhaps.
And then the men nod to her and take their leave, one of them heading towards the ugly concrete stairs down — and aren’t the sliding bookcases that hide it stupid? she can see the scrapes in the blasted wood! — and the other back out through the kitchen. He nods at Elle as he passes, seeming surprised to find her lurking behind the doorway, but she ignores him, far more concerned that she might have been spotted by Maria.
No. Worse. Maria’s acting like she can’t be seen by anyone. At least, not by one such as Elle.
Maria’s watching the one headed for the basement, a smile still plastered on her face. He turns around to smile at her before he starts down, and she waves at him. And then she almost loses her footing. Her hands fly out to steady her and one of them finds a stack of dining chairs, but they’re not enough to arrest her fall. And then another girl, one Elle hadn’t even noticed because she’d been sitting so still, leaps up from the floor to catch her. They stumble around together for a bit — Elle roots herself; she’s too far away meaningfully to help, anyway — and then find their feet. The other girl, Barbara or something, hoists Maria’s arm over her shoulder and leads her out into the corridor at the back of the building.
When Elle sneaks closer, she hears sobbing from behind a closed door.
She grasps at nothing for a moment, her fingers closing on air, and then she does the obvious thing: she puts the kettle on. It’s not difficult to find everything in the kitchen, though she does send one of the men out to the catering truck they ought to have set up around the back by now, for fresh tea bags and new mugs and a packet of biscuits. She disdains even the kitchen’s resident teapot — hard to know what around here might have bad memories associated with it — and brews the tea directly in the mugs.
The crying has ceased when she arrives again at the back room, and she briefly worries that they’ve gone somewhere else, that she’ll be left with a tray of tea and milk and bourbon creams, and then she hears whispers, so she knocks twice. Gently; again, hoping not to trigger any unpleasant recollections.
“Yes?” a tremulous voice says from inside.
“It’s Elle Lambert,” she says, feeling foolish. It is her instinct in such situations to lean into her accent, to establish her authority and breeding from the very start of the interaction — though the former is merely a tool and the latter a source of much self-directed contempt. But it doesn’t seem appropriate, so she moderates her tone; the result, unfortunately, sounds rather like a RADA-trained actor on the BBC trying to appear salt of the earth.
“Mrs… Lambert?” another voice asks.
“Miss,” she says, trying to convey her smile in her voice. “May I come in?”
“Um,” says the first voice — Maria, most likely. “I’m not exactly at my best.”
“I am aware. I, aha, I have tea. And biscuits.”
There’s a pause. Then laughter, and the door opens to Maria, looking very much as if she has been crying for her life in there. The other girl — and, yes, it’s definitely Barbara — bobs in a strange little curtsey, and holds out her hands for the tray.
“I can serve,” Barbara says.
“Nonsense,” Elle says quickly, refusing to hand it off. Instead she steps inside and places it down on what might, under the dust sheet, be a billiard table. “Do you take milk?”
Both girls say yes, so she adds milk and distributes mugs, before taking a seat on a mucky stool, a sensible distance from the girls. Best not to crowd them.
“It’s just ordinary tea,” she says before either of them can sample it. “I didn’t want to use anything from the kitchen, and the men chose the stock for the catering truck themselves. None of them, inexplicably, enjoys Darjeeling. At least, not enough to add it to the menu on the intranet. So: ordinary tea. My mother used to call it builder’s tea. Which seems a little rude, now that I come to think about it.”
“Miss Lambert—”
“Elle.”
“Thank you, Elle,” Maria says. She drinks deeply from her mug, inhales the steam. Closes her eyes.
Elle ventures, “Would you like a bourbon cream?”
When Maria opens her eyes they’re shining again, and the girl has to deposit her mug quickly back on the tray before the floodgates open once more, and she’s sobbing into Barbara’s arms. Elle, feeling rather superfluous, reaches for her, uncertain as to whether she can even be useful, and Maria grabs at her outstretched hand.
Elle is drawn into the hug. She’s struck instantly by how thin they both are, and not in the manner of one who diets for fashion or for health. They’ve been starved.
After a while they lean back from each other, remaining connected but not so tightly that they can’t see each other’s faces.
“I’m so sorry for intruding,” Elle says.
“Oh, it’s not that,” Maria says, smiling, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. “You made us tea. You brought us biscuits.” She sniffs. “That, apparently, is all it takes. Someone to… to do something for me. And I was— I was supposed to be in charge. But here I am, hiding out in this windowless room because it’s too bloody bright out there.”
“Maria…” Barbara whispers.
“Brightness means we’re— It doesn’t mean anything good. I’m fighting with myself. I want to go back down. Back down there. Back where I used to know what’s going to happen next.”
“What’s going to happen next,” Elle says gently, “is that you are going to get some rest, Maria. You can involve yourself in the renovation of the Hall as much or as little as you like.” She pulls out of the hug, returns to her stool, takes up her tea. She needs the prop. “You can have a room upstairs. Or we can put you up in a hotel, or find you an apartment.”
“I should help,” Maria says. “I want to help.”
“For now, perhaps you should just rest. You’ve had to be strong for so long.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just, I don’t want to be so fragile. I don’t mean to be.”
“Rest, Maria,” Elle says.
Not fragile. Brittle, perhaps. Strong but easily shattered. All of them. Sisters imperfectly forged together, down there in the dark.
2019 December 30
Monday
The Hall operates on a different, lazier schedule this time of year, so when Melissa and Shahida showed up this morning there were few enough people about that they could be nervous in relative peace. Now, though, as Melissa picks her way downstairs, she has to pause every ten seconds to greet someone. The second years are out in force, finally showered and dressed and foraging, their attached sponsors only nominally keeping an eye on them and concentrating far harder on their respective sources of caffeine. And various other Dorley inhabitants are wandering around between the main kitchen, the dining hall, and coming up from the basement facilities.
And all of them are happy to see her.
Melissa’s still getting used to it. For so long she was the aloof and untouchable Melissa Haverford, who deigned to visit among the rest of them only in the company of Abby Meyer, but now — ever since her stunt with the taser and Steph — she’s Melissa, she’s Liss, she’s that girl who’s just as messy as the rest of us. She’s gotten more compliments on her hair, makeup and choices of outfit in the last few weeks than she did from anyone other than Abby in her entire earlier tenure at Dorley Hall.
It’s nice.
She and Shahida talked with Christine and Paige for a little while, but then Christine suggested she go surprise Steph. Said that as long as she knocks first — very loudly — on Steph’s door, she can just go in. And Melissa jumped at the chance.
One problem: she has to go down those fucking concrete stairs. And if she thought they looked unpleasant from all the way over on the other side of the room, during the Christmas Eve dinner, from here they look downright—
“Hey,” someone says, and Melissa tears her eyes away from the arch over the stairs and the ridiculous elevated bookcases and turns around to see a pretty girl, dressed in an oversized sleepshirt with the logo of… isn’t that a tabletop game company? Something to do with vampires and werewolves?
“Hi?” Melissa says.
“Melissa, right?” The girl points to herself. “Jodie. We met. Kinda. I was a bit more dressed up then. Um, Donna’s sister? You know Donna, right?”
Melissa nods. “Yes. I know Donna. And I remember you, too. You were giving Lorna Fielding that video game.”
Jodie grins. Melissa finds herself expecting to see fangs. “That’s me! I just came over because, well, you’ve been standing at the entrance to the basement for ages and there’s such a draft coming up from there that— There! I see it! You have goosebumps. And now I do, too.” She proffers a bare leg — aside from the sleepshirt, she’s wearing only socks and, presumably, underwear of some kind — to show off her dimpled skin. “Goosebumps! Anyway, what I mean is, you should either go down or you should come have a really, really late breakfast with me and Donna, but whatever you do, you should stop standing here, because this is the coldest spot in the entire Hall, if you don’t count that weird freezing spot on the fourth floor by the trash chute. Veronica said it’s like a metaphor made real, like you stand on the last free patch of floor in the Hall and you get the chills, but between you and me, she was a massive drama queen, and it’s just the air conditioning.”
Melissa doesn’t think she knows who Veronica is. It’s probably wisest not to say so.
“I’m okay,” she says instead. “Thanks, though. I’m going to see Steph, and I don’t want to be late, so—”
“Steph! Oh my God! Tell her hi. From everyone. I’ve talked to her, like, a ninetieth as much as I want to, but I never have the time. Oh, you know that guy she’s been together with? Girl now.”
“Yes, I caught that—”
“And called Bethany. That’s the cutest name, right? Makes me want to run down those stairs and scoop her up and take loads of little bites. Anyway. Anyway. I won’t keep you. Go say hi.”
“I will,” Melissa says. “Thanks, Jodie.” And she’s genuine: those last few steps off ‘the last free patch of floor’ really have been difficult to contemplate, but Jodie’s energy is infectious. “Say hi to Donna in return?”
“You can do that yourself,” Jodie says, twisting and pointing. Donna’s sitting with a couple of other people she recognises, and when she spots Melissa looking, she smiles and spins a finger around by her temple for a moment. “Love her,” Jodie adds, and when Melissa looks back, she’s beaming at her. They exchange waves.
Melissa takes the stairs down at a light jog and nips into the security room to check on where everyone is. A sponsor she doesn’t recognise quickly talks her through it: Steph, Bethany, Martin and Will are back in the common area, and all of them have had full disclosure; the others are in their rooms. Rather than lock any of them in, the sponsor says she’ll put a temporary limit on access to the common room. “If you run into any of the other guys in the corridor, pretend to be a sponsor,” she says, and throws a half-finished bag of Penguin bars at her: a peace offering. Will, apparently, is potentially a little antsy.
The first thing that strikes her as she starts down the last flight of stairs is that they’ve redecorated: the first basement main corridor has been recarpeted, the lights set into the ceiling aren’t quite the same eye-searingly pure white, and the handrail’s been replaced with something in a more realistic fake wood. The little details, the little differences, are enough; that plus the way everyone’s been so nice to her. She can’t be isolated, lonely Melissa here, not any more. No-one will let her.
She can’t resist a look into the cell corridor when she reaches the bottom, but the door lock won’t admit her, which means either that she hasn’t been given full permissions, or someone’s still in there. Ominous. She’s pretty sure some of her intake were still in and out of the cells at this point, especially Nell, but hasn’t Steph’s presence been stated to have sort of… accelerated everyone? She laughs to herself: maybe slotting an actual trans girl into an intake and letting her get on with it isn’t a magic bullet, after all.
Melissa trails her fingers along the concrete as she goes. The lunch room’s empty, but she lingers outside, anyway, looking in through the window, remembering those times when she felt most unsafe, when she would only leave her room in Abby’s company. She’s been expecting the memories to overcome her, but there they sit, available for her to access but quite manageable.
It seems much bigger down here than it did back then.
She can see through the window that they’re watching TV in the common room, and she’d love to slip in quietly, to observe them without being seen, to see first-hand what it’s like to be a sponsor, to be among them but apart from them, and then she rolls her eyes at herself: she always was among them but set apart, and if she really wanted to spy on them she could have stayed in the security room. No, she’s here for Steph, and so she’s gratified that when she opens the door and the terribly unsubtle lock mechanism gives her entrance away, it’s Steph who leaps up from the couch and practically runs for her.
“Liss!” she breathes as she and Melissa collide with each other, and then she apologises as her hair, still wet from a recent shower and getting quite long, sprays Melissa with water.
“It’s fine,” Melissa giggles. “I’m due a shower, anyway.”
“What are you doing down here?” Steph asks, stepping back from her and taking her hand, leading her over to the loose assemblage of couches, cushions and bean bag chairs. “Is everything okay?”
Melissa waves to Bethany, who gives her a nervous grin. “Everything’s fine!” she says, sitting down at the other end of the couch.
Steph sits down next to her. “Good.”
“Hi, Melissa,” Bethany says, shuffling up to be close to Steph again.
“Hey,” Melissa says, and then looks at the other two — Martin, quietly sat on the other couch and wearing a neutral expression; Will, sitting on a bean bag chair by the wall and closing the book he’s been reading — and adds, “I’m Melissa.”
“Hi,” Martin says.
“I would like to know what’s going on,” Will says. He’s put down his book, he’s looped his hands behind his back and now he’s pressing them against the wall, which in any other circumstance would strike Melissa as strange behaviour but which down here is probably pretty ordinary.
Bethany points. “Melissa,” she says.
“Yes,” Will says testily, “I caught that, but— Wait. That Melissa?”
“Um. Yes?”
“No. Fuck you. That’s— That’s stupid. That can’t be right.”
“Will?” Steph says, and Will, still holding his hands behind his back, looks at her and jerks his head towards Melissa.
“Is that her? The one you were on about before everything went to— before everything went even more to shit?”
Steph and Melissa exchange glances. Melissa shrugs, and Steph says, “Yes.”
“You are fucking kidding me.”
“Sorry.”
“She’s a sponsor?”
“No,” Melissa says quickly. “I just—” and she has to very quickly control a smirk, because what she’s about to say seems hilariously mundane, given the context. “I just went here for a while.”
Every head in the room turns to Will, who looks back at them all with an unreadable expression, and then seems to come undone all at once, his grip on his arms loosening, his posture reverting to a slouch. He laughs, loud and genuine. Not the sort of laugh she expected from him, given the little she knows about him — Beth called him all sorts of names whenever conversation at the Christmas Eve dinner table turned to the current occupants of the basement.
“Christ,” he splutters, between heaving breaths, “my fucking side. I’m getting— Shit!” He jams a hand over his mouth and stiffens his body, taking a few seconds to regain control. “I have a stitch,” he says to no-one in particular.
“Sorry,” Steph says again.
“You went here?” he asks Melissa. “Same as us?”
“Yep.”
He turns to Steph. “So that’s why— Shit. You knew?”
“Sort of,” Steph says. “I was wrong about it. I saw her by accident, realised my childhood friend was alive after all, and got—” she laughs gently, “—entirely the wrong end of the stick.”
“You thought this was, what? A secret gender clinic?” Will snorts. “Instead, it’s…” He trails off, unable to find the words.
“Masculinity rehab,” Melissa says.
Another laugh ripples through Will, and he covers his mouth again.
“Are you okay?” Steph asks. “You seem a little hysterical.”
“I’m good,” he says, through his hand. “I’m fine. Just. Wow. Incredible. Wow. Fuck.”
“Someone hit him,” Bethany says. “He’s got stuck.”
“No,” Will says. “No, no, I’m good. I’m— Fuck. Shit! I think… I think it helps? I think it’s good. Hey, uh, Melissa, you don’t work here or anything, do you?”
“No,” Melissa says. “I live in Manchester.”
Will nods. Keeps looking at her, keeps nodding, like he’s trying to dislodge something in his mind. “How’s life?” he says eventually. “After all this, after graduating skirt school. How’s life?”
Melissa shrugs. “Complicated. I’m doing okay, though.”
“Good enough,” Will says, sinking back into his bean bag chair and retrieving his book, flicking through it — he’s wearing fingerless gloves; weird — until he finds his place. “Good enough.”
* * *
It’s not Beatrice Quinn who eventually drags them out of the office, though there were moments it seemed like she wanted to. It’s the younger woman, Maria, the one who’d managed to remain placidly in control of herself even after Rach basically accused them all of being rapists, who limited her contributions to the conversation after that to terse statements of fact — many of them in defence of Pippa, the girl who quite rightly didn’t want to listen to any more of Rach’s shit — and who kept meeting Amy’s eyes and exchanging with her little micro-expressions, all of which Amy chose at the time to interpret as, Don’t worry, we deal with this all the time, and not as, Why did you bring this complete bitch into our house? With the benefit of hindsight, though, and considering the look on Maria’s face when she shuts the office door behind them, Amy’s beginning to think it might be option number two. Certainly Beatrice had seemed right on the verge of losing her shit.
“Sorry to cut this short,” Maria says, addressing Amy. “We didn’t plan to drop all this on you and then get rid of you so soon after, but something’s come up.” She frowns. “Something else.”
“Yeah,” Rachel says, “I bet.”
“Rach!” Amy says, rounding on her. Rachel’s been uncharacteristically combative today, which, okay, fine, some of it Amy kind of gets, since the real story of what happened to Melissa — and what happened sort of around her — in her time away turned out to be a lot weirder and darker than either of them thought, but you don’t just look at some poor girl who’s younger than you and clearly feeling the tension in the room, you don’t just look her in the eye and ask if she’s a rapist. You just don’t. Especially given what Beatrice said about the traumatic histories of most of the — what did she call them? — the graduates. She’s starting to get the feeling that all of them really were, just as Beatrice said, as much victims as victimisers. The way a lot of people are, in various quantities.
“Convenient,” Rachel says, “isn’t it?”
“Not really,” Maria says. “But we don’t intend to just chuck you out on the street like this, so… Can you come with me, please?”
“Where?”
“Yes,” Amy says, grabbing Rach’s wrist and pulling on it, “we can. Rach?”
Rachel glares at her but doesn’t resist, and they follow Maria down the corridor, past a lot of doors with nameplates on them — Amy reads Mia on one and Faye on another as they hurry along; she likes the stars and hearts on Faye’s, and the blocky figure with a wig on drawn on Mia’s — and around a couple of bends, until they come to a larger room, open to the corridor and packed full of mismatched couches. There’re more girls inside, and they all look up when the three of them come into view. The one closest to Amy is—
“Shy!” Amy yells, dropping Rach’s forearm and almost leaping at her. Yes, it’s not been long since they last saw each other, but Shahida spent almost as long out of Amy’s life as Melissa did; that neither of them sent her postcards — from America; from a basement — is something for which she’s already yelled at them. Water under the bridge.
“Hey, Amy,” Shahida says, opening her arms but not standing up, so Amy gets to fall into her embrace and also onto the last remaining open cushion on the couch. “Welcome to Dorley Hall.”
“This place is so weird,” she says, muffling herself against Shahida’s shoulder.
“I know,” Shahida says with a giggle, and then pulls back, frowning at something behind Amy. Oh. Yeah. Rach. “Is, um, is she okay?”
“No,” Rachel says, “I’m not.”
“Hey, Maria,” says one of the girls Amy doesn’t recognise, “are we doing this again?”
“I’m sorry,” Maria says. “We were handling it, but that one—” she nods at Rach, “—upset Pippa enough that I need to go get her back off the roof, and—”
“Pippa’s on the roof?” says the other girl, standing up. Amy echoes her alarm, but Maria’s quick to correct them both.
“Yes, but not like that. She’s just… She was upset. She’s got her headphones in and she’s getting in some alone time. I thought I’d give her another ten minutes and then go up to see her, bring her back down and fill her with hot chocolate or something. It’s cold out.”
Amy nods. It had been cold enough in Ms Quinn’s office. On the roof? She can’t imagine. Probably catches all the wind from the near-pancake-flat campus.
The other girl sits again and links hands with the taller girl, the one with the long blonde hair and the looks, the one Amy can’t decide whether to envy or rub herself against.
“Can I suggest something?” the other girl asks. “Send Steph up for her.”
“Isn’t she with Melissa?” Shahida asks.
The girl shrugs. “Send her up, too. She has a calming influence.”
“Melissa’s here?” Rachel says. “Now? She approves of this place?”
Shahida laughs sharply. “Yes,” she says, “she’s here. We came together. You’ve been told everything, then?”
“Yeah,” Rachel says.
“Enough that we get it,” Amy adds, hurriedly. “Or I do, anyway.”
“Amy, what is your problem?” Rachel’s bloody well yelling, and that’s bloody well enough. Amy stands up again, puts herself between the girls and Rachel, and grabs her by both shoulders.
“Rach,” she says. “Breathe. You hear me? You’re going to blow a gasket or something, and you’re being a bad guest.”
She knows it’s the wrong thing to say as soon as she says it. Stupid reflexive responses; Mum’d have a fit if Amy behaved like Rachel among strangers, no matter what they may or may not have done. But Rachel isn’t wired that way.
“I’m not their guest,” Rachel says darkly, but she keeps the decibels down, so it’s not as bad as it could be.
“Well,” Amy says. “I am.” Then she turns her head, still keeping hold of Rachel, so she can just barely see the two girls she doesn’t know. “I’m Amy, by the way. Old friend of Melissa’s.”
“Christine,” the shorter one says.
“Paige,” says the stunner.
“Shahida,” says Shahida.
“Yes, Shy,” Amy says. “Thank you for the reminder. You’re not funny.”
“Em thinks I’m funny.”
“Melissa thinks the sun and moon shine out of your arsehole, Shahida.”
Rachel twists out of Amy’s grip. “Will you stop that! Stop joking! Stop acting like everything is normal! I’m the only one freaking out here and I don’t get it! Shahida, they kidnapped Melissa! They kidnapped dozens of other boys—”
“Lowballing it,” Christine mutters.
“—and you’re just sitting there! Drinking their tea!”
“This is coffee,” Shahida says.
The observation serves to knock the wind out of Rachel, and she just glares at all of them for a few moments while breathing heavily.
“May I hazard a guess as to how disclosure went?” Paige asks.
“Badly,” Amy says. “But go on, guess.”
“She’s hung up on the non-consensual aspects of the operation here?”
“Worse.”
Rachel’s got at least some of her breath back. She steps away from Amy, takes up a seat on the far end of the room, out of reach and with a few throwable objects — mostly video game boxes and controllers — within reach. So Amy rejoins Shahida, Christine and Paige on the couch, making her allegiance known.
Why is Rachel being like this? Like, yes, okay, strong sense of justice, history of victim advocacy, pedantic streak a mile wide, trust issues after one friend vanished and another one almost did, yes, fine, but Shahida’s been here for weeks now, and Shy’s not exactly one to just sit by while awful things happen. Why can’t Rachel just trust her?
Like, yes, okay, trust issues, but still.
“Rach,” she says, an overture to diplomacy.
“Shut up, Amy,” Rachel says. “Shy, what’s going on?”
“It sounds like you know what’s going on,” Shahida says coldly. “And it sounds like your first reaction, upon finding out that the women in this building are all trans, is to start yelling at them.”
“They’re not trans, Shy,” Rachel snaps.
It’s Christine’s turn to try. “Excuse me—”
“No. Shut the fuck up. Please, everyone, shut the fuck up! Shy, they’re not trans, trans people, they have, like—” Rachel gestures wildly at the air, “—medical diagnoses and stuff.” Out of the corner of her eye, Amy sees Christine cover her mouth. “They don’t get dragged into a dungeon by a mad old woman, and—”
“Beatrice is not old,” Shahida interrupts.
“What?”
“She’s not.”
“How is that relevant?”
Shahida shrugs. “It’s not. But I like her, so I don’t like hearing you say that about her.” She drums her fingers on her knee. “Look, Rachel. Do we have a problem here?”
“You and me?”
“You and me and my friends.”
“These people are your friends?” Rachel says. “These… violent men?”
“Rach!” Amy snaps.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rachel says in a pantomime voice. “These formerly violent former men.”
“They’re as much men as Melissa is, Rachel,” Shahida says.
“Yeah, well, now I’ve seen this place, I’m starting to wonder about—”
“Don’t.”
Rachel seems taken aback by Shahida’s certainty. “Well, what am I supposed to think?” she splutters.
“That’s the problem, Rach,” Amy says, spotting her moment. “You’re supposed to think.”
“You’ve been reacting, not thinking,” Shahida agrees. “You need to think and you need to listen.”
“Oh?” Rachel says with a sneer. “Like you?”
“Yes!” Shahida says. “Exactly like me! I came here looking for Liss. And she came here looking for someone else, but that’s a whole other story. I came here, and a wonderful woman met me at the door. Tabitha. Yes, Rach, another one of them. And she made me a hot drink and she sat me down and she explained the whole deal and you know what I did? I listened. I didn’t start screaming about violent men or questioning her gender. I asked questions and she answered. She did, too, actually,” she adds, nodding at Paige.
“There were coloured pens involved,” Paige says.
Shahida smiles, turns back to her. “Right? I’m so pleased you had them on you. It helps me think.”
Paige returns her smile. “I had my book bag, and I always have coloured pens in my—”
Rachel mutters something under her breath, effectively silencing the others and puncturing the momentarily elevated atmosphere. When she sees all eyes are on her again, she snaps, “How can you be so flippant? How are you just talking, Shy, when he could be… He could be anyone?”
Shahida’s about to answer, but Paige catches her eye and a quick and silent exchange of information takes place. Shahida nods, and Paige untangles her fingers from Christine’s and sits forward.
“I know how this goes,” she says, in quiet but steady tones. “You push and you push and you push until one of us—” she points briefly from herself to Christine and back, “—breaks and starts the big confessional. We tell you about our tragic past, or how traumatic the process of coming to terms with it was, and in doing so we finally unlock the empathy that lurks somewhere inside you. Well, we’re not doing it. I’m not doing it and Christine’s definitely not doing it. And it would be pointless anyway, wouldn’t it? You’ve already made up your mind about us. We’re ‘violent men’. Forget that you know nothing about our history. Nothing about our lives. Beatrice gave you the spiel and then, apparently, didn’t get to finish it, because you had to have a tantrum right there and then, and—”
“That’s not—” Rachel starts.
“I’m talking,” Paige says.
“I don’t—”
“I am talking!” Paige yells, and it’s the loudest sound in the bloody universe. Amy thinks her heart might have stopped. “You’ve come to our house,” Paige continues, “and made judgements, and now you think you have something to say? Well, you don’t. Shahida’s right. You are here to learn how to support your friends Melissa and Shahida—”
“And Amy,” Amy whispers.
Paige nods at her. “You are here to learn how to support your friends. You are here to learn why it matters that you keep the secrets you have been entrusted with. And even if you have no respect for me or Christine or Melissa or Pippa or any of the rest of my friends, I suspect you will want to learn how to listen, lest Amy and Shahida cease being yours.”
Rachel’s mouth works for a moment before she manages to find words to put in it. “They’re still my friends. No matter what you say.”
“Rachel,” Shahida says, “if you hurt Melissa, if you hurt any of these women, I will never forgive you. If you call them men one more time, if you imply that they are anything other than the women I know them to be, if you go telling their secrets to other people, I will cut off contact. Do you hear me? Hurting these women isn’t something I will get over. We won’t be laughing about it in five years’ time. It won’t even be the delicate topic we never raise. You will be out of my life. That’s a promise, Rachel. Melissa is mine and I’m hers.”
“A-fucking-men,” Amy whispers.
Rachel’s quiet, watching Shahida, seemingly with no answer ready, so after a few seconds, Shahida continues. “Rach, I get it. This place is a lot. And I won’t lie and say I became instantly comfortable with it. But I have friends here. And even if Melissa wasn’t in the picture, I wouldn’t — I couldn’t — let you carry on like this.”
Amy can’t take her eyes off Rachel. Every twitch of a muscle, every micro-movement on her face, and Amy’s convinced she’s about to pop off again. Instead, after a while, the only thing Rachel says is a whispered, “Shy…”
“This is my life now, too,” Shahida says.
“I just…” Rachel says in the same whisper. “I just don’t get it.”
“No-one’s asking you to,” Christine says. Amy glances over and sees her wiping under her eyes with the back of her hand. She makes plans to take her aside and apologise on Rachel’s behalf, maybe get to know her.
“I have a suggestion,” Paige says. “Spend the rest of the evening here. We’re going to have dinner in the main hall later, because none of us wants to cook, especially after this. You can join us. You can see what we’re like. All of us. And you’re going to understand that whatever you’ve convinced yourself to think of us, we are simply a community of women and nonbinary people, as different from each other as any extended family. We cannot be judged as a whole. We must be understood individually. And—” she raises a pointing finger, “—you will keep your mouth shut unless you have something nice to say.”
Rachel says nothing, so it’s Amy’s job to unblock her. “Rach?”
“Fine,” Rachel says.
“You won’t make a fuss?” Paige prompts.
“No,” Rachel says after a pause.
“Good,” Paige says. “And, if it occurs to you to think anything stupid about me, anything poorly observed, perhaps that my behaviour just now seemed very masculine to you, then I invite you to consider two things: first, that degendering is a common response to a feminist who asserts herself; second, that it is here that I learned to stand up for myself. It is here that I learned I have value.”
Rachel nods silently. She’s frowning but she’s not immediately yelling, so she’s thinking.
The back and forth goes on for a few more minutes, during which Amy admits to herself that, yes, she does have her second ever crush on another girl. Second if you count the thing she had for Mark (but never acted on, because Shahida was in so deep you could barely see her). Paige splits her time evenly between talking sternly to Rachel — but never again raising her voice — and paying attention to Christine, and it would be so easy to think that perhaps men aren’t worth bothering with at all, because not a bloody one of them has ever treated her with such tenderness.
And then she laughs, remembering the central tenet of the argument that Rachel’s only just dropped: that these women are, or were, men. She’d forgotten.
She looks back at Christine and Paige. Christine’s kissing Paige back, laughing sweetly into her cheek, and Amy wonders if Shahida and Melissa will be like that, once they’ve talked to this Abby girl and done whatever else they feel they need to do before they can properly get on with things.
So, so easy to feel envious.
Melissa and Shahida even have a room together in the Hall, apparently! Amy learns this when Rachel and Shahida suddenly stand up and she starts paying attention to the conversation again. Shahida wants to take Rachel upstairs, to her and Melissa’s room, to get washed up before dinner, since she’s worked herself up a bit and she could use a shower and a change of clothes, but Christine’s telling her that Rachel doesn’t have permission to leave the first floor, except to return to the main dining hall.
“There are showers here,” Shahida says. “On first.”
“I don’t have a change of clothes, Shy,” Rachel says. She’s still wary, still keeping her distance, both metaphorically — through her closed-off body language — and physically.
“I’ll nip up and get something,” Shahida says. “I’ve got two whole drawers here, and half the wardrobe.”
“You’ve moved in?”
“Little bit, yes.”
They disappear around the corner and Amy lets out a long, unsteady breath. She didn’t expect anything like this tense to happen to her when she woke up this morning.
Nothing so exciting, either.
“Are you two okay?” she asks, leaning back on the couch and stretching her limbs all at once and probably looking quite amusing.
“Yeah,” Christine says. Paige nods.
“You said this has happened before?”
Paige counts on her fingers. “Lorna. Shahida. And now Rachel. So only three times, really.”
“We did kind of have to do Lorna twice,” Christine says.
“Lorna?” Amy asks.
“She’ll be at dinner tonight. You’ll like her.” Christine presses herself further into Paige, and then frowns and says, “How about you, Amy?”
“Hmm? Me?”
“You had all the Dorley crap dumped in your lap, what, less than two hours ago, and then Rachel immediately started up. You probably haven’t had a moment to think about it all.”
Amy nods. It’s true. “I do have one question,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Do you take referrals?”
* * *
“I’ve been thinking. I’m going to write to Petra again.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah! We’ve just had Christmas and New Year’s coming up, and I want to tell her I had the time of my life.”
“And? Did you?”
“I don’t know; let me check. Kiss me.”
“Okay.”
From next to them comes a snort of repressed laughter, and Steph and Bethany both look over to see Melissa with her fist practically jammed into her mouth. She’s shaking, too, and that’s harder to hide from Steph because the three of them are on the same sofa, and with Beth on Steph’s lap and Melissa right next to them, they’re practically sharing the same cushion.
“I’m so sorry,” Melissa says, unconvincingly blanking her face. “Please carry on.”
“Why am I so funny to you?” Beth asks, rolling off of Steph and onto the cushion next to her. Steph finds herself already missing her weight, her warmth, and quickly seeks out her hand to hold.
“Because you’re sweet,” Melissa says, and she’s clearly noticed them holding hands again because she fails to not smile even harder, “both of you. And because you, Bethany, look way better in that romper than you did in that tux.”
“Don’t remind me about the fucking tux…”
“It’s called a romper?” Steph asks. Stupid name.
Melissa nods. “Or a playsuit. But I always think that sounds kind of too horny.”
Bethany says, “Heaven forfend,” and Steph doesn’t need to see her face to know she’s putting on her best ‘innocent’ expression.
“As I was saying,” Steph says as Melissa rolls her eyes at Beth, “I’m going to write to Petra.” It’s family, is what it is. Melissa and Bethany together on the same couch. It’s different to the Christmas Eve dinner, when they were surrounded by people. Here it’s just the three of them, with Will having long since gotten sick of their giggling and Martin having been collected by Pamela for some private purpose back in his room. So she’s here with her family, in a soft, warm space, and she wants in some way to include Petra. The missing sister, the one she never gets to see any more. “And I wanted to ask a favour. Of both of you.”
Melissa and Bethany both say, “Oh?” at the same time, and Steph wonders, briefly, if she made a mistake by letting them talk to each other so much. After a spot of understandable shyness on Beth’s part, they’ve been getting on incredibly well. Melissa plays innocent better than Steph does, which makes her a better foil for Bethany’s ruder observations.
“Well,” she says, “I’m going to start working in details of my life. We pitched the backpacking idea to Aunt Bea — well, Christine did — so I could walk back into my life when I’m done here, as me, rather than as… you know. So I was wondering, Beth, if I could say you’re a fellow backpacker, that we met doing temp work together, and, um, I was wondering if I could tell her you’re a trans girl.”
“Uh,” Bethany says, “me? Why not her?”
“I can’t say Melissa’s in Romania. She’s got a job. You can call the university and ask for Melissa Haverford and they’ll put you through.”
“I mean,” Melissa says, looking at a pretend watch, “not right now.”
“Oh,” Bethany says. “Right. Okay. Makes sense. So, why am I a trans girl?”
“Because I want to start telling the story. Laying the groundwork. And if I meet this super-hot girl in Romania who’s from the UK, too, and just happens to be trans…”
“Wait,” Beth says. “Waitwaitwaitwaitwait. I think I’m picking up the absolutely ridiculous thing you’re putting down. You’re going to cast me as the one who cracked your egg?”
“Yep.”
“Um. I don’t know how to crack eggs, though. What do I even do in your story? Walk up to you with my tits out and say, ‘Hey, little man, did you ever think about giving womanhood a try?’”
“Why did you put on a deep voice to say that?”
“Dunno.”
“Look, Beth, you don’t have to do anything. Letter-you doesn’t, I mean. Just proximity to you will be enough to make me… realise things about myself.”
“Really? Is that how it works? Steph, that’s so dumb.”
“It’s how it works,” Melissa says, “for a lot of people.”
Steph spreads her hands Melissa-wards. “See?”
“I still think it’s dumb,” Bethany says, shaking her head.
“Can I do it, though?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess. So I’m going to teach you how to do girl stuff?”
“Yep.”
“Cool. I bet I’m really good at it.”
Steph’s preparing something deeply cutting to say, something that will wound Bethany to her core, something along the lines of, Yeah, I bet you are, followed by more kissing — and probably more of Melissa calling them sweet — when the message chime she’s set for Maria’s contact starts playing. So she starts digging around in the cushions, looking for her phone, and eventually discovers Bethany’s been sitting on it.
“Aw, shit,” she mutters, reading through Maria’s lengthy message.
“Steph?” Beth asks. “Everything okay?”
Steph quickly summarises. Maria wants Steph and Melissa both to go up to the roof and fetch Pippa back down. Rachel’s here — Melissa’s eyebrows go all the way up at that — and she said something that really upset Pippa. For the sake of not saying it out loud, not wanting to group any of them into Rachel’s careless mischaracterisation — they are all Dorley girls, after all — Steph doesn’t say exactly what it was that upset Pippa so. Only that, when they’ve fetched her, Melissa might want to touch base with her friends.
“Of course I’ll come,” Melissa says. “Beth, will you be joining us?”
Oh. Yeah. Melissa still hasn’t quite internalised that Bethany hasn’t quite the freedom Steph has. Beth saves her from having to explain, though.
“Me? No. Sorry. Can’t. Love Pippa. But I can’t. She’s on the roof, is she? Well, I’m scared to death of heights. Can’t deal with them. And birds. Also confrontation, the cold, the dark, the outside world, birds—”
“Beth,” Steph says, “don’t worry about it.” Melissa’s already helped her up from the couch, and she leans down and kisses Bethany on the forehead.
“Sorry.”
“Text Maria. Get her to come down and see you when she’s free. I’ll probably be with Pip, but I’ll text you, too, okay?”
“Okay.”
Steph kisses her again, and once more just because she wants to, and whispers, “Love you,” before she straightens up.
“Love you, too,” Bethany whispers, and then Steph’s following Melissa out of the common room and up the stairs.
“You really are sweet together,” Melissa says as they emerge into the dining hall and, on unspoken agreement, both head for the lift at the front of the building. Five flights of stairs after taking two so quickly? No thanks.
“I’m so lucky,” Steph says. “Like, I don’t even get it sometimes. First you, then here, then Pippa and Christine and Paige and Maria and Indira and Abby and everyone, and then Bethany.” She stabs at the call button. “But I’m also lucky because Beth’s going to make it. And when I think about that, I think about the people who didn’t.”
“The washouts.”
“Yeah.”
“I know what you mean,” Melissa says, as they step inside and start the elevator on its rattly upward journey. “I always hated the Hall. But I can’t any more, not now I’m back. But yeah. There’s always that.”
“Our washout was a multiple rapist,” Steph says. “And he attacked me and Beth. I shouldn’t care about what happened to him. I don’t want to. I try not to.”
“But you do, anyway.”
“You know, when I first came here, I used to tell Christine I wanted all the boys to wash out. I was kind of vicious about it.”
“Fear and stress,” Melissa says as they exit onto fifth. “It can make you say horrible things. Think horrible things. That’s not you.”
Steph shrugs. “I’d like to believe that.”
Melissa pushes open the door to the roof and the cold, which has been building ever since they stepped into the stairwell, hits them like a hammer. Steph almost buckles; the wind is harsh, and they didn’t stop to pick up jackets on their way up. Melissa takes her hand, smiles, and together they approach the huddled figure on the other side of the roof.
Pippa’s mouthing something to herself, and part of Steph wants to wait and try to lip-read, to see if she’s singing along to something on her earbuds or if she’s talking to herself. But Melissa urges her on, and they walk a wide circle around in front of Pippa, so they won’t startle her too badly when she sees them.
Pippa jumps a little anyway, and guiltily rips her headphones out and stuffs them into her bag.
“Steph!” she says, stammering in the cold. “I’m sorry, I— Did I miss something?”
“Nothing,” Steph says, putting more force than normal into her words so she doesn’t succumb to the cold herself. She doesn’t want to seem nervous or agitated; she wants Pippa to see how genuine she is. “We came up to see if you’re okay. We heard about what Rachel said.”
“I’m so sorry,” Melissa says. “I didn’t know they were bringing her in. She’s, um…”
“She’s just standing up for you,” Pippa says. “And she should. You’re about the only graduate who hasn’t been tainted by this place.”
“Pip—”
“I keep thinking it over,” she says. “Am I any better than I used to be? At least back then it was just me. Now I’m part of this machine that keeps hurting people. Now I’m—”
“Hey, Pip,” Steph says, “I want to talk about this, and I know you do, too, but I’m really cold, so I bet you’re freezing. Come down with us?” She reaches for Pippa’s hand. It’s curled into a fist, so Steph just takes the whole thing in both of hers. Pippa offers no resistance, and lets Steph breathe warm air onto knuckles made white by tension and temperature. “We can go to my room, the one on first, and I’ll make you a hot drink, okay? We can talk or we can watch movies. Or whatever you want to do.”
“And we don’t hurt people here,” Melissa says. Steph wonders what that we really means to her now. “We save them. They saved me. They saved Steph. And Bethany, she’s actually kind of incredible.”
“But Declan—”
“—was a rapist,” Steph finishes. “We may not have saved him, but we saved people from him. You know this. You’ve just been… knocked for six.”
Pippa nods, unconvinced. But she’s had a crisis of faith before. Granted, it was because Steph had been nothing like the antisocial boy she’d been pretending to be, but it means she has a path back from this. This will pass.
In Pippa’s loosening fist, Steph finds more hope, so she nods to Melissa, has her take Pippa’s other hand, and together they walk her slowly back to the stairwell.
They don’t make it all the way to Steph’s room without incident. They’re almost there when the door from the shower room opens and Shahida and Rachel emerge, robed and with hair wrapped in towels.
Shahida’s first to notice them, and she very nearly succeeds at turning Rachel back around.
“Shit,” Rachel says, “Pippa, I— Shit!” Now she’s gaping at Steph. “You’re— You’re Stef! You’re that Stef! I saw you on Liss’ old phone, and— Fuck, hi, Liss.”
“Hi, Rachel,” Melissa says. She places herself between Pippa and Rachel.
“Yes,” Steph says, taking another step with Pippa towards her room, “I’m that Steph. And Pippa is my sister, so—” and she has to bite down hard on the anger that almost consumes her, because what gives her the right to come into their home and say such things? “—so you don’t get to say another thing, okay? Unless it’s an apology.”
Rachel, startled, backs up a bit and collides lightly with Shahida. “Um, I’m—”
“And not now,” Steph finishes. “When she’s ready. Not when you are. Come on, Pip.”
She doesn’t give Rachel another look. She turns and unlocks her door and ushers Pippa inside, closing it behind them and shutting out everyone else.
It’s just going to be her and her sister for a while. Her family.
2004 August 8
Sunday
Since Dorothy will be retaining — for now — the main residence on the first floor, Beatrice has claimed a flat on third, a bedsit-type affair that seems in recent years to have been used by Dorothy Marsden and her people for insalubrious affairs. There’s a pile of furniture and oddments in the corridor outside, and another door open on the other side of the corridor to a room in which Beatrice has stashed even more rejected detritus. Elle picks her way carefully over the wreckage, feeling a little shaken after her encounter with Maria and looking forward to sitting down somewhere she can close a door behind her.
She remembers fantasising about these girls. The thought makes her ill.
“Ah, Elle,” Beatrice says, standing up from where she’s slotting strips of cardboard under one foot of a rather beaten-up desk, “did you have to fill the Hall with men and surround it with trucks? We’ve only had it five minutes.”
“Oh,” Elle says absently. “Sorry.”
“Do you like it?” Bea says, standing back and gesturing at the desk. Looks like mahogany, or what mahogany becomes when an unpleasant old woman fails to properly care for it for several decades. “It’s the only one I could find that doesn’t smell vaguely of Dorothy.”
“I can get you a better one,” Elle mutters.
“No,” Bea says thoughtfully, “I think I prefer to have a desk I’ve reclaimed. It’s symbolic, I suspect.”
“Ah,” Elle says, spotting an opportunity to occupy herself, “you have a kitchen!” Tiny by her standards, but adequate to cook for one person. Or for a couple. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Beatrice frowns at her, and Elle’s heart sinks. Is that really her only response to uncomfortable situations? To offer to make the tea? She feels suddenly like a parody of an aristocrat, unable to connect with ordinary people except on the most trivial level.
But Bea asks the question Elle wasn’t expecting.
“Are you okay?”
Elle, still on autopilot, says, “Yes, I’m fine, I’m just looking for the kettle—”
“Sit down,” Bea says. “I don’t, as it happens, have a kettle here yet, nor do I have tea bags, but I can ask one of the girls—”
“Don’t.”
“Hmm?”
They’re caught looking at each other. Bea: puzzled. Elle: absolutely unsure of herself. She breaks it off first and sits heavily in an armchair near Beatrice’s reclaimed desk.
“Don’t disturb the girls,” she says. “Maria was… She was crying, Beatrice. Crying, and all I could offer was bloody tea.”
“I’m sure she appreciated it,” Bea says, sitting opposite.
Elle shifts her weight around, tries to sit the way her mother taught her; back straight, legs crossed at the ankles. But the chair is too well padded, and she simply sinks into it. “I’m worried about them, Beatrice,” she says, giving up on decorum and elegance. “I’m worried about forcing them to carry on in this place, about making them face again and again what happened to them, about—”
“You don’t plan to offer them alternative accommodations?”
“No, no, I do. Of course I do. But those who stay… I’m worried about them.”
Beatrice is quiet for a moment. She’s steepled her fingers and momentarily hides her expression behind them. But then she lowers them, spreads them out on the desk in a manner that, to Elle, suggests openness and compassion, and Christ on a bloody bike, how is this woman so effortless at the very things Elle’s had to work at all her life?
“You know what I used to do for a living,” Beatrice said. Elle nods. “And you know that I was far from the only one in… that line of work. Well, we all looked out for each other. Those of us who worked on the street, and others in allied trades.” Elle has to smile, just a little, at Beatrice’s sanitising language. For her benefit, no doubt. “Sometimes, girls would disappear. Oh, mostly we knew about it, we expected it, and they stayed at least nominally in touch. They’d found alternative work, or they were getting too old, or they were moving in with someone else, or they were just fed up to the back teeth with the whole thing. But sometimes there’d be a girl who didn’t know her limits. Or she did, but she had no alternatives. And, together, we’d watch her ever so carefully. We couldn’t always help, but when we could, we did.”
“What are you saying, Beatrice?”
“I know when life is getting to be too much for someone, Elle,” Bea says. “I won’t let any of these girls fall apart. I won’t let any of them reach their limit. And with the budget you have so generously granted us…” She trails off, watching Elle expectantly, and Elle nods. Even after two years, Bea still sometimes acts as if Elle is about to take everything away. “We can afford time off. Alternative work. Alternative accommodation. I’ll take care of them, Elle. Don’t worry about that.”
“What happened to the other girls?” Elle asks. “Back then. The ones you couldn’t help.”
Bea breathes deeply. “Sometimes girls vanished. And sometimes, when that happened, they’d come back after a few days or weeks. And if they didn’t, well, we’d ask around, and if no-one had heard anything, we’d pick flowers and we’d make cards and we’d find somewhere to leave them, somewhere that mattered to her. I always thought that if the girl came back, if she found them, she’d know that she was loved. That she was missed. But, always, the flowers were cleared away and the cards destroyed and the girl would never come back. But it helped. It let us move on.”
Elle wants to hold her hand. Wants to grab her and embrace her. Wants to apologise for every damned thing the world has dumped on her head. Including Elle and her demands and her idiotic plans, plans they are now both trapped in.
“I’m going to have one of your men bring us up some tea,” Bea says briskly. “And perhaps something stronger.”
“Beatrice, I’m—”
“Don’t say you’re sorry, Elladine. I can’t bear it when the rich apologise to me.”
Elle nods and stays silent, and Beatrice calls up one of the Peckinville men and orders him — in tones Elle was trained in as a child and has since studiously attempted to erase — to bring up a pot of tea, a bottle of anything suitably alcoholic, and something to bloody well eat.
“And some glasses,” Elle adds. The kitchen here really is bare.
“And some glasses,” Bea finishes, and hangs up without so much as a thank you. She catches Elle’s frown and says, “What? I assume they are paid well enough that a slightly curt transsexual isn’t going to upset them.”
Elle shakes her head. She hates it when Bea uses that word, and she suspects it’s why Bea insists on using it. They’ve had debates, over dinner, after sex, about whether the newer term, trans woman, even applies to Bea. She’s said many times that she prefers the old one: her sex, she says, was indeed trans’d. It seems to her like it describes a process, which is something she can more comfortably identify with than a term which seems to Beatrice like it makes a statement about her inner life.
Beatrice knows everything about herself, and Elle is, as ever, consumed with envy, for she has only guesses, or things she suspects are true and things she wishes weren’t.
“How long are your men going to be hanging around?” Bea asks.
“As long as it takes.”
“To refurbish the Hall?”
“As long as it takes for me to be certain you’re safe,” Elle says.
“You think Dorothy might return with a howitzer?” Bea replies, raising an eyebrow, and Elle sighs. It’s an argument they’ve had more than once.
“I think someone else might return in her stead. I know, I know, you think they won’t try anything just because the university’s practically swallowed the Dorley grounds and there are people everywhere nowadays. But they’re not scared of me. Not yet.”
“But Elle, you are terrifying,” Bea says drily.
“Maybe one day. I have the name, the money, the connections, but, Beatrice, right now I’m bloody vulnerable. All those old men, even the ones who are right now feeling hoodwinked by Smyth-Farrow and Marsden, they’ve been in their seats of power for decades. And so has Smyth-Farrow. They might not trust him any more, but they have no reason to trust me, either, and, for now, his name is bigger than mine.”
“I thought Lambert was one of the biggest names in the country.”
“It is. I’m not.”
“Hence the takeover,” Bea says tiredly. They’ve talked about this part before, as well. Over and over. “Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she adds, gesturing idly, “I’m sold. I think your rehabilitation idea is… well, it’s worth a shot, anyway. And goodness knows I’m living proof that there’s life after castration. I’m just annoyed we have to continue humouring Dorothy.”
“It’s a transfer of power,” Elle says. “Very smooth and businesslike. Oh, old Smyth-Farrow thinks he’s outmanoeuvred us, and that’s what he’ll tell everyone, but I’ll be spinning my own stories. And no-one ever liked Marsden all that much, so it’s my word against his. And I control the Hall,” she adds with satisfaction. “That buys me a greater in than my surname does, believe me, Beatrice. People who don’t currently trust me will let me into their lives, and I promise you that when I enter, I’ll be holding a fucking knife.”
“How will they trust you?” Beatrice asks. “You won’t be supplying them with girls any more.”
“Well, I wanted to talk to you about that—” Elle starts, but she’s interrupted by a knock on the door. Beatrice shouts for whomever it is to enter, and he does: it’s one of the Peckinville men, carrying what looks like one of the trays from the canteen back at the facility. He nods to both of them, sets it down on the table and starts putting out plates of sandwiches and a pair of mugs. There’s also, Elle realises with a sigh of relief, a bottle of brandy that doesn’t look like it came from the local Tesco, and some glass tumblers.
“Ah, no,” Bea says, holding a hand over the mug the Peckinville man was about to pour for her. “Just a second.” She stands and strides across the room to her luggage, rummages around for a second and produces a chipped white mug, which she quickly rinses. With some ceremony, she places it on the table, pushes the other mug aside, and nods to the man, who fills it, adds milk, and then serves Elle before silently exiting.
“Our crockery not good enough for you?” Elle asks with a smile. Bea says nothing, merely turns the mug around so the nonsense words printed on the front are now facing away from her. “‘A Round Tuit’?” Elle reads. “Very nice. What does it mean?”
Bea turns the mug around again, takes a long sip from it, and then replaces it with satisfaction in the middle of her purloined desk.
“It means,” Beatrice says, “that I’m here to stay.”
2019 December 30
Monday
What a day. At least the potential disasters that have thus far unfolded have had, seemingly, reasonably positive conclusions. William Schroeder’s little boxing session with Tabitha and Monica went well, Bethany handled group better than any of them expected — with the possible and probable exception of Steph and Maria herself, who will likely be very smug about it later on — and one of Melissa Haverford’s two remaining friends is proving receptive enough to the benefits of the programme that between her and the rest of them, they ought to be able to peer-pressure Ms Gray-Wallace into keeping the secret. And Ms Gray-Wallace herself has already shown remorse for her outburst at young Pippa, so even that has yielded something.
Bea sighs and contemplates her liquor cabinet. It won’t surprise her if one of her charges decides she invited Pippa up to her office in the hope of just such an outcome. They seem so ready to believe the worst of her sometimes. She’d be more disappointed in them if she wasn’t painfully aware that there have been times when she’s deserved such scepticism. Especially in the early years, when she and Elle were still working to appease people Beatrice would sooner have sliced open than exchanged pleasantries with.
Elle. A woman with perfect timing, always picking her crises to interrupt other crises. Still, if she’s coming here, at least Bea will have someone to drink with who won’t make her drink a glass of water for every two shots, nor force her to eat an energy bar or a bowl of Weetabix at the end of the night.
At least she has a moment to herself. A moment to prepare. She doesn’t bother to check her reflection — this is not one of those visits; Elle’s coming to her — and instead she puts an old favourite on the Bluetooth speaker. She closes her eyes, and Toni Braxton’s voice animates her lips.
I shall never breathe again.
She doesn’t quite reach the end of the song before Elle knocks. Easy to tell it’s her: for someone of such bearing and such breeding, the woman knocks as if she’s afraid to be heard.
She rises from her chair, silencing the music and calling, “Enter,” as she stands. And there’s Elle, still young-looking despite her forty years but wearing them a little harder than usual. She’s tried to cover how tired she is, but it’s just possible there’s not enough concealer in the world.
“Beatrice,” she says, sounding as exhausted as she looks. She shuts the door behind her with a kick and meets Bea with two steps, sinking briefly into her arms before stiffening, straightening, and smiling. It’s a false smile, and they both know it.
“Elle,” Bea says. “Would you like something to—”
“I’ll get straight to the point,” Elle says, sitting in one of the chairs laid out for Rachel and Amy and gesturing for Bea to sit, also. “We have a big fucking problem, Bea. Remember our lost soldiers? And our lost… prize?” Bea nods: Declan never made it out of the halfway house, and neither did his escorts. “Well, for a while we were working on the theory that one of the soldiers was a traitor. Sold secrets, got everyone involved killed.”
“That’s not so?” Bea asks.
“Goodness fucking gracious, I wish it were so. No, he wasn’t a traitor; he was an infiltrator. He joined up with Peckinville straight from another outfit. Silver River, Beatrice. Silver fucking River.”
Shit. “What does this mean?”
Elle pushes herself up from her chair, and rummages through Bea’s liquor cabinet. After inspecting the necks of several bottles, she selects two, and returns to her seat, placing one on the desk for Bea and roughly uncapping the other.
“It means,” she says, “that our little cold war’s heating up. I want to bring the trucks in, Bea. Tomorrow. We’re going to set up in the woods, out by the basement two exit.”
“Trucks?”
“By the fifth of January I want to have a proper installation out in the woods, Bea. Portacabins for Peckinville men. What you might call a small barracks. But I won’t force this on you; I know how delicate things can be here.”
Indeed she does; she had to be almost forced to stay away after those difficult first few years.
“Silver River being actively involved is a bad sign, Beatrice. They’re connected to the Smyth-Farrows. The kids, if you can still call them that. Middle-aged and looking for a legacy, no doubt. They’ve got church money. American church money. And it’d be bad enough if it was just them, but they’ve made a friend, and you’ll bloody love who it is. Dorothy Marsden. Dorothy bloody Marsden’s gotten herself installed at Stenordale, she’s got a Silver River protection detail, she’s having meetings with the Smyth-Farrows, and, Beatrice—” Elle leans forward over the desk, “—she’s got Declan.”
Impossible to know what to say to that. Impossible to know what to think. Grandmother’s got Declan. She’s got military contacts. She’s living in Smyth-Farrow’s old manor house.
“All of it,” Elle continues, “the missing soldiers, losing Declan, the rumours I’ve been hearing… It’s all her. Her and the bloody blasted Smyth-fucking-Farrows.”
Jesus Christ.
“Well, Bea?” Elle asks. “Do I have your permission? To bring in my men? To protect the Hall? To protect you?”
Bea’s throat is dry, too dry to speak, so with stiff hands she uncaps the bottle of gin Elle left for her and takes a swig, feeling the burn as it goes down. She swallows, trying to find her voice, but she still can’t find it in her to speak, feels as if her throat might catch fire if she tries.
So she nods, and Elle makes the call.