The New Woman (46 page)

It was a happy evening, despite the anxiety of it all. Simon and Nico went to collect a takeaway pizza, and the family ate together around the breakfast bar. Rosa seemed delighted to be home, banging her cup and crowing with laughter when her dad—who was folding the washing—put a sock on top of his head. At bedtime, Simon read to Nico while Carmela pottered about downstairs. The house phone rang while he was reading, and he heard Carmela’s voice. She was having a very long conversation with someone.

He found her in the kitchen, checking her emails.

‘Tea,’ she said, pushing a mug in his direction.

‘Did I hear the phone earlier?’

‘You did. It was Eilish.’

He leaned over her with his arms linked around her neck. Mum was probably still worrying about that silly little dog of Kate’s. No need to call her back tonight. He didn’t want to think about his parents. He wanted to forget them, just for a while.

‘Your father’s had a terrible thing happen,’ said Carmela. ‘Terrible.’

He felt a lurch of fear. ‘He’s been attacked? Shit, I’ve been expecting this. How bad?’

‘No, no. He’s not hurt. This thing happened to a good friend of his. D’you want to know about it?’

Simon straightened up. He really didn’t want to know.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Carmela.

He really
did
want to know. ‘Tell me. What’s happened?’

‘You promise not to interrupt?’

‘Okay.’

‘Right. Sit down.’ She patted the stool next to her. ‘It’s a horrible story. Your father had a friend called Chloe. A good friend. She was a great support to him.’

‘A friend? Was she a—’

‘Yes, she was also a transgender woman. Now, shush!’ Carmela pouted, touching her finger to his lips. ‘You promised not to interrupt.’

She seemed to know all sorts of details about this Chloe, who—Simon had to admit—sounded like a nice person. He kept his promise and listened to the story without a word, until she came to the ghastly part at the end.

‘Stabbed to death?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘
Stabbed
? In her own bedsit?’

‘It was even worse! He continued after she was gone. He cut her private parts. He mutilated her.’

Simon remembered the smashing of a bottle, in the car park of the White Hart.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘That’s . . . What a screwball.’

‘Yes, a screwball. Apparently, Chloe was so happy about her date. She thought somebody valued her for herself, at last. Isn’t it sad?’

Jessica was standing in the botanical gardens, clutching his hands, smiling and crying.
You mean it? You really mean it?

I surrender
, thought Simon. He felt the relief, the freedom of it.
I’m coming out. My hands are up.

‘Poor Dad,’ he said. ‘Must be gutted. Is he all right?’

The words were a white flag, and they both knew it. For a moment—just a moment—he saw a smile of triumph on Carmela’s lips. She got to her feet.

‘Shall we have another cup of tea in the sitting room? I’ve put the heater on in there. I have to name all Nico’s school clothes. Can you believe it? We had a bossy email from the school while I was away. Rules, rules, rules. All so that they can turn him into a totally up-himself middle-class Englishman. Over-privileged and smug. A yawn a minute.’

‘Like his father,’ said Simon. He heard her laughing as she walked away.

He made more tea, and found some chocolate in a drawer. When he joined Carmela, she had Elgar playing on the stereo. The Enigma Variations. She’d arranged herself gracefully, cross-legged on the floor. Nico’s school uniform lay folded in a pile beside her, and she was wielding a marker pen.

‘We must label our son,’ she said, shaking her head in disgust. ‘He must know who he is!’

‘Can I help?’

‘With
your
handwriting? When Nico loses his gym shorts they will be given to somebody called Joe Bloggs. But you could just rub my shoulder, here. Can you feel it? I’ve strained something. Nico kept climbing into my bed in the night, and jamming me into one tiny corner. Every day I woke up with a crick in my neck.’

She began to label one garment after another:
Nico Livingstone
.
Nico Livingstone.
Simon sat behind her, on the edge of the armchair, digging his thumbs into the muscles of her upper back. She wriggled and said, ‘Down a bit . . . left a bit . . . there; ooh, that’s lovely.’ Neither of them mentioned the fact that she’d almost left him.

Elgar’s melody was immaculate. For some reason, it was bringing tears to Simon’s eyes.

‘Why
Enigma
?’ he whispered. ‘Puzzle, paradox . . . What did Elgar have in mind?’

Carmela chuckled. ‘I don’t know.’ She picked up a grey school jersey, looking for somewhere to write Nico’s name. ‘Some puzzles aren’t meant to be solved,’ she said. ‘They are a work of art in themselves.’

A work of art.

‘I knew a transsexual once,’ he said. ‘When I was nineteen. She was . . . a work of art. I fell in love with her.’

He saw the marker pen stop moving, halfway through the word
Livingstone
. Carmela swivelled around to stare at him in astonishment. ‘I have known you more than six years, and you’ve never mentioned this before.’

‘Even up-themselves, over-privileged, smug English males have skeletons in their closets.’

‘Tell me.’

He told her. He talked about the nightclub, and the river, and the botanical gardens. He only faltered when it came to describing
what happened outside the White Hart, in the darkness and rain. That part sounded barbaric, especially after the news of Chloe’s murder.

‘I don’t feel good about it,’ he said. ‘I discovered a vicious side to myself. I didn’t even know it was in me.’

Carmela had put aside Nico’s clothes as he spoke, and was resting her elbow on Simon’s thigh. ‘You were touchy about your sexuality. I’ve got four brothers, remember? I know how they think. You were afraid of the feelings you had for her. Did you wonder if it meant you were gay?’

Simon nodded.

‘And, after all,’ reasoned Carmela, ‘you didn’t actually hurt this Jessica.’

‘Not physically.’

‘Have you ever seen her again?’

‘Nope. Never again. After that one text, I blocked her number. A couple of years later I heard a rumour that she’d gone for surgery. Might be true, might not. You never know with student gossip.’

‘You must have wondered.’

He shrugged.

‘Simon!’ she said, slapping his knee. ‘Of course you wondered.’

‘I just wanted to forget it. I wanted to forget that I was the one who fell for a lady boy. That whole event buggered up university life for me. I’ve never made friends easily, Carmela. I’m not like you. I didn’t trust anyone after that, didn’t even trust myself. I didn’t really like myself again until . . . well, until I met you.’

She was resting her chin on his knee, smiling at him. Her hair had come loose from its clip, and her eyes seemed very dark.

‘You didn’t like yourself?’

He felt her fingers untying the laces of his shoes and pulling them off, one by one. It was just a light touch, but it was glorious. The next moment she’d kneeled up in front of him and was deftly unbuttoning his shirt.

‘I like you,’ she said. ‘Shall I prove it to you?’

Forty-nine

Lucia

I’d done all I could for Chloe. Her mother never got in touch. I called the police again, and this time was put through to the family liaison officer assigned to the case. I asked for the family’s permission for myself and some of Chloe’s other friends to attend her funeral. The liaison chap was more helpful than D.I. Dave, and agreed to ask them.

My hopes weren’t high. He came back to me with a curt message, which he’d written down and read out verbatim:

Please respect our grief. We have no wish to know about Callum’s other life. Leave us in peace with memories of our son and brother.

They were cremating her on Wednesday. The service began at twelve.

It was one of those calm, almost-sunny March days. Sparrows and swallows were nesting under the eaves of the house, flitting in and out, diving across the lawn with straw in their beaks. Eilish had a full day at the school; I had a vast backlog of work, so I got up at six, tackled the most urgent tasks and made several phone calls.

Just before midday, I pulled on my gumboots (Eilish had fetched them from the loft, where she’d thrown them) and took Baffy for a walk across Gareth’s fields. At the footbridge I stopped and played solitary Pooh sticks for a while. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The sticks floated sedately beneath the bridge before bobbing out the other side, around the corner and away on their journeys. Chloe, too, was going on a journey.
Safe travels
, I murmured as I watched the sticks disappear.
There will be a place for you, on the other side.

At twelve-thirty, I said goodbye and thank you.

By one o’clock I knew it would all be over.

I dropped Baffy back at the house but I didn’t want to go in. Instead, I crossed the lawn and let myself into the shed. As soon as I stepped through the door, I was overpowered by the scent of wood shavings. Eilish kept her gardening equipment in here, but my things were all exactly as I’d left them: the power tools, the circular saw, the router and an old lathe. They were my heritage.

My father’s woodworking shed was legendary. As soon as I was tall enough to reach the bench, he showed me how to use all his tools—even the circular saw, which looked so fearsome. I grew up with the resinous scents of wood and linseed oil in my nostrils. By the time I was ten, I could identify a timber by its smell, which came into the house on Dad’s clothes. His socks reeked of resin as they dried on the Aga; when he shook out his jerseys, sawdust rose in a cloud. Dad and wood resin went together. He made me my first ever blocks, and my first ride-on truck. One wonderful day, he and I worked together and a little biplane emerged from the timber. That was why I’d made one with Simon, years later. I’d promised to do the same for Nico.

When Dad died, they made his coffin out of timber from his farm. It was newly milled. I breathed in the living scent of pine as I carried him out of the church.

Now I stood in the shed, inhaling that familiar smell and thinking about my father. He gave me most of his tools. Even
when he knew he was dying, he and I would come in here and make things. It used to calm him, and me too.

I pictured him climbing a ladder to rescue me from a tree. I heard him calling to me from his tractor, inviting me to ride beside him in the cab. I sat under the table while he played poker with his friends, and felt his calloused hand ruffling my hair. I saw him sitting beside me in the car park at East Yalton hill, a blanket over his knees, shrunken and ready to meet death. Then I looked down at myself. I was wearing a pleated skirt and a mauve cowl-necked sweater. My hair grew in heavy waves. I had a definite bust now, even if it was only a size AA. My pierced earlobes ached slightly under their gold studs.

‘Hello, Dad,’ I said. ‘Are you here? This is who I am nowadays. I hope you don’t mind.’

He didn’t speak, but I thought perhaps the scent of resin had grown a little stronger.

My last project was lying on the workbench. It had been there since last July: a wooden shower mat, designed out of crisscrossed pieces of elm. The fun part was that it involved so many joints. There were the next pieces, waiting to be attached. I turned on the compressor and blew away eight months worth of cobwebs.

Several hours later, Eilish came home to find me working away. She brought me coffee and cake, kissed my cheek and left again. Later still, I heard a car in the drive. I thought it might be Stella.

I’d finished the coffee and was gluing an especially tricky joint—very tricky indeed—when the door opened again.

‘Just a minute, darling,’ I called. ‘I can’t move. Bit of a critical moment.’

When she didn’t reply, I looked around. It wasn’t Eilish; it was Simon. He was half in, half out of the doorway, as though not sure of his welcome. I turned back to my handiwork.

‘I’ve got glue on here,’ I said. ‘I can’t clamp it, the angle’s impossible.’

He took a quick look, and immediately saw the problem. I’d taught him well.

‘Is this the next bit?’ he asked, holding up a piece of timber. ‘Okay. I’ll sand it.’

Have you ever watched two small boys playing Lego? They talk nonsense, especially if they’re good friends who know one another well. They’re concentrating on the job at hand, and words just bubble out of them. Eilish calls it ‘Lego talk’. Simon and I were like that. We worked side by side, and we talked nonsense. It saved us from having to talk sense, which was far more risky. There was a moment when he began to apologise for what happened in the flat that day, but I stopped him in mid-sentence.

‘How about a clean slate?’ I suggested. ‘On both sides.’

He didn’t look up from his sanding, but I saw him nod. ‘I can live with that.’

We were gluing the final piece when he said, ‘I heard about your friend. Sorry.’

‘Her funeral was today. They wouldn’t let me go.’

‘Well, she was . . .’ Simon hesitated. I steeled myself, expecting him to say something insulting about Chloe. ‘She was their child. They’ve lost their child.’

We laid our wooden creation flat on the bench. I was wondering how to make sure it stayed flat while the glue finished drying. Simon suggested we cover it with a board and then put weights on it; so we did that. It worked very well.

‘Must be supper time,’ I said.

As we were leaving, he stopped and looked around the shed. ‘We’ve spent a few hours in here, over the years.’

‘We certainly have.’

‘Nico was hoping you’d make one of those little biplanes with him. You know, like mine. Would you do that next weekend, Dad?’

‘I’d be honoured. And when Rosa is older, she must come in here and make one too. I won’t have Kate accusing me of gender stereotyping.’

Simon smiled, and turned out the light.