Golden Boy (49 page)

Max shakes his head.

‘It would kill my mum and dad,’ Max mumbles. ‘Mum’s not living with us at the moment. They’d have to see it go through the courts. I don’t want people to know. Besides, I’m scared of Hunter. I do anything he says, pretty much. I’m a pushover.’

‘You’re not a pushover.’

‘Yes I am. I let everyone tell me what to do and I don’t stand up for myself or ever take responsibility. The only reason I took those . . .’

‘The pills?’

‘Yeah. The only reason was because I just wanted to take back control. I wanted to make a decision, even if it was just for things to stop.’

‘You’re not a pushover,’ I whisper sadly. ‘Do you . . . do you still want things to stop?’

Max looks at me. ‘I was just drunk, Sylvie. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.’

I nod. ‘Why are you so scared of Hunter?’

‘He’s just . . . I don’t know. The way he acts, like he’s in charge, like he owns me. He’s always acted that way and I’ve always just done what he says. I just think . . .’

‘What?’

‘If you can fuck people and overpower them and there’s no chance you’ll end up hurt, then you’re feared, and if you can’t, you’re vulnerable and you have to fear people.’

‘That’s . . . pessimistic. Doing stuff out of fear is always pessimistic.’

‘I dunno. I’ve had a lot of time to think.’

‘You missed the mocks.’

He shakes his head. ‘I had to take them the same day you guys did, but on my own, later.’

‘How did you do?’

‘Pretty shit. Dad’s not happy.’

‘I guess you’ve never done shit at anything before, right?’

‘Yep, I’m lowering all their expectations.’

We both look at the ripples on the water and watch a coot fight with a moorhen for some of Max’s crust.

‘So,’ I say. ‘If you can both do people and be done, what do you do?’

‘I don’t know.’ He thinks. ‘Accept that you’re a bit of both, I guess. Or that you’re neither.’

‘Or just be you. What does it matter?’

‘I guess. The bit beneath your heart,’ he mutters, with a wry grin.

‘Huh?’

‘Something my wise little brother said.’ Max hands me a bit of bread and gives me the first real look of the day. His eyes flit from my hair to my eyes, to my chin and he looks away shyly. We both pull off bread and try and feed it to a little duck who isn’t getting any because the bigger ones are faster and meaner.

‘You should go to the police,’ I say quietly. ‘What Hunter did was wrong.’

‘I just can’t.’

‘OK,’ I murmur.

‘Can we talk about something else, Sylvie?’ Max looks up at me. ‘Just, like . . . all everybody talks to me about at the moment is this stuff. Not specifically this stuff but . . . you know.’

‘Yeah, OK.’ I nod. ‘Sooo . . . you know there’s this half-guy I like?’

I see a tweak of a smile appear on Max’s face. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah, he’s like a suicidal wackjob, but blond and pretty with a nice arse, so you can kind of get past the screwed-up-ness.’

Max laughs, a giggle of hilarity. It’s good to hear. His face lights up, just for a moment, but it’s there – that familiar blast of sunshine. He pulls the last bit of crust apart and chucks both pieces into the water. Then he puts his hands in his pockets and murmurs, ‘Kook.’

T
here have been many things that have gone through my mind since Max came in to see me in September last year, about being intersex, gender, my own ideology, and the ideology of my profession towards gender and intersexuality. We thought we understood gender – the idea of men and women as finite concepts with boundaries between each other, but lately I have come to understand that we are only just beginning to comprehend what ‘gender’ is, what it means to be allocated a certain gender, how much that informs the person a child becomes, and what happens when we don’t talk about gender as a malleable thing, when we shy away from discussing gender with children and teenagers and even adults. Dealing with trans individuals in the clinic did not prepare me for dealing with Max, because being one gender and wanting to be another is a completely different thing, perhaps even the opposite, of feeling, as perhaps Max does, OK as you are, but forced to choose. As a doctor, most of the health issues we work with involve a clear-cut right or wrong way to be. It is not OK to be obese, it is not OK to have cancer, it is not OK to eat sugar all the time. Many moral issues are the same: it is wrong to be racist, it is wrong to pay men more than women for the same job, it is wrong to murder. Perhaps this is why intersexuality is so controversial. The ‘norm’ is to have two separate genders, and when someone presents as different from the norm, we think they are ‘wrong’, we call their condition a ‘disorder’. But how detrimental is intersexuality, really, to a person’s life? It’s a conversation I wish, in a way, I could have with Max, but that is not to be. Distance prevents me from doing so, and also protects me from the emotion that must make this issue more difficult for Max and his family to discuss than for me. As much as I now know about Max, about this rare condition, I sense I can only begin to imagine what it must be like for a parent of an intersex child, understanding that physically your child is happy and healthy, perfect even, but that, due to societal pressure to be normal and the fear of differences, being intersex may just ruin their life. It’s not the fault of the condition, but one can understand how ‘fixing’ the condition might seem to make the problem go away.

I found out about Karen leaving when Max and Steve Walker came to see me at the surgery to talk about the overdose. An ambulance had taken them to the nearest hospital in the middle of the night. Max used the painkillers I gave him and some of Karen’s sleeping pills, but he was also inebriated. We don’t know how much Max really meant to do any harm to himself, and I suspect Max himself does not entirely know what he meant to erase. They pumped his stomach at the hospital, kept him overnight and sent him home.

Steve wanted to do more for him, so they made an appointment and came in to see me just before New Year. Max said he took the pills because he couldn’t sleep, but he also said he was depressed. He was confused and seemed disorientated. I arranged for a psychiatrist to meet with him once a week for an hour. We put him on a mild anti-depressant for two months. He comes off it at the end of February. Steve didn’t want to put him on any medication at all, so he was insistent that it was mild and short-term. The psychiatrist tells me Max is doing quite well, and slowly coming to terms with everything. He didn’t talk for the first few weeks, then one day he began, tentatively, to speak about his feelings.

I drove to the Walkers’ house the other day. They live in a rather grand and sparsely populated area of countryside on the edge of Hemingway, called Oakland Drive. You have to squint at the house names on the gates as you pass. All the houses are set back from the road, beyond long drives.

Max lives at ‘The Gables’. It’s a large, white building set back from the road, and looks to be over a century old. It has a tall, wooden gate in front of it and a hedgerow around it, with a couple of tall trees in the back. It looks a nice place to bring up kids. I went because Steve asked me to come to talk to him, without Max, about the future.

I advised they continue with counselling, and talk as a family. I said that I could see Max adjusting well in time. I didn’t stay for coffee, as Steve suggested. It’s a natural impulse to become involved with patients’ lives when you have been through something this important with them, but it’s equally as important to stay objective. That’s what they need me for. I don’t suppose I’ll see Max again for a while. In fact, I hope not. That will mean he’s doing well.

With this in mind, when I see Karen Walker in the clothing boutique on The Promenade, my first thought is to subtly slip out of the store. First I have to remove the shoes I’m trying on. I pull them off, apologising softly to the shop assistant, but before I can dash out, I feel a tap on my shoulder.

‘Hello, Archie,’ says Karen, in her smooth but strangely cold voice. ‘It’s so nice to see you.’

I smile politely. ‘How are you, Karen?’

‘Good!’ She nods, realising how she sounds: determined; a little crazed. She laughs. ‘I’ve been thinking about drinking in the morning. It’s something I’ve never done that I’ve always wanted to try.’ She pauses, as if waiting for me to say something.

I take my cue. ‘I’m sorry for calling your husband about the clinic in London—’

‘Are you?’ Karen cuts in, rather sharply. She drops her head. ‘Sorry,’ she mutters. ‘It’s . . . been a bad year.’

I slip my handbag over my shoulder. ‘I really am sorry, Karen. I was concerned when I came in that morning. I didn’t know the clinic. I thought Max might have gone on his own.’

‘No,’ Karen speaks over me again, but this time softly. ‘No, you didn’t. But that’s OK. Maybe I was a little . . . bad with Max. I hope I’ll get another chance but . . . how can I know?’

For a moment she looks like she might cry.

‘Karen?’

She dips her long neck and her golden hair covers it as she brushes her cheek with a finger. Her head bobs up again and she beams at me, just like Max used to do.

‘Is everything going OK with Max? With his therapy?’ she asks.

‘Things aren’t so bad.’ I hesitate, wondering how much she knows. ‘I hear he’s doing well. Obviously Dr Evans and I don’t share notes, but she tells me he’s . . . on the mend.’

She nods again, earnestly. ‘Mm, I think so. I don’t know . . . Daniel tells me he is.’

‘He is,’ I say, and I reach out and touch her arm gently.

‘I just wish he would talk to me,’ she murmurs, looking off towards a rack of dresses. ‘We used to talk a lot.’

‘It’ll happen.’

Karen shrugs. ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t been telling me the truth for a long while, even before we stopped talking.’

It seems to me like she wants to talk. Perhaps she doesn’t have many people she can turn to.

Then she sighs, and says something that makes me want to set her straight, despite my need to stay professional and distanced.

‘He wouldn’t even admit that he was attracted to boys at all. What am I supposed to think? I used to think he was so open and brave.’

‘Isn’t he going out with Sylvie Clark now?’ I ask, trying to deflect this last comment.

‘Sylvie? I thought they broke up?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I say pointlessly, because Steve had told me the day before that they are seeing each other again. ‘I don’t know. I just presumed.’

‘Well, he’s probably bi, but he won’t talk to me about it.’

‘Karen, really, Max isn’t.’

‘How would you know?’ Karen says, almost disdainfully.

‘Well, it wouldn’t be a problem anyway, but I know he isn’t.’

‘I suppose he talks to you more than he talks to me now.’

‘I haven’t seen him in a long time, Karen.’

I turn to go but she grabs my arm. ‘Wait!’ she exclaims. ‘How do you know?’

‘I . . .’ I’ve said too much. I see suspicion in her eyes and I turn away. ‘Just take my word for it,’ I say, heading for the door.

‘I mean, if he isn’t . . .’ Karen’s voice has become firm, and yet desperate, like her throat has constricted. She grasps my arm with both hands and looks me in the eye.

‘Archie?’ she whispers. The boutique owner stares at us, and together we step outside into the light.

I look around at passers-by. When we’re alone, I say, ‘I can’t. Confidentiality.’

‘Archie.’ Karen pulls me to her. She looks stricken with grief. ‘What is it?’

I open my mouth but I can’t speak. Suddenly, Karen Walker doesn’t need me to speak.

‘Oh my god.’ She drops my arms and steps away, her eyes wide in horror. She puts her hands to her mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, not knowing what to say or do.

‘Oh my god.’ A deep, hollow sound comes from her throat. ‘Max.’

S
ylvie and I are making out in my room.

‘I love you to the nth degree,’ I mumble through her lips.

‘I love you . . . with every fibre of my being,’ she says back. It’s a game we play.

‘I love you . . . more than I love football.’