The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone (38 page)

‘It’s all right, dear,’ she said stoically, though for several seconds she’d been doing a fair imitation of a goldfish. ‘I’m not going to have a heart attack.’

‘Please don’t,’ I begged her. ‘Not right under Nelson’s Column, which Kate tells me is really a giant phallus and symbol of the filthy patriarchy.’ My voice sounded quite feminine now; I’d found that pitch overlap after hours of practice, and the new inflections and intonations were coming more easily. It made all the difference to people’s reactions.

Mum stepped back to look at me. ‘I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a strange moment. But I will say this—I’m impressed.’ There was incredulity in her voice. ‘Classy, not brassy.’

We went to the play, which was hilarious; and then out to dinner in a nearby restaurant.

‘People stare,’ whispered Mum, her eyes flicking around at the other diners.

I shrugged. ‘Some do. Not all. Most don’t even notice nowadays.’

‘You’re amazing,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Just amazing.’

I didn’t ask her what she meant. She tucked into her steak, and we talked about golf for the rest of the evening.

That had been a turning point. I now had my mother’s approval, as well as my daughter’s, and Lucia blossomed. Each evening, a conventional man in a suit carried his briefcase into the flat in Thurso Lane. An hour later a woman emerged, holding her head high. I rarely saw my neighbours—mostly Somali refugees, with problems of their own—and I honestly don’t think they noticed anything unusual. I travelled on buses,
went ice-skating with Kate and Chloe (they skated, I was the admiring audience), and had lunch in a bistro with some of the Jenny Marsden group. My friend the Che Guevara man would always remember if Luke had bought
The Big Issue
, and not ask Lucia.

People who become fluent in a second language tell me they actually think in that language; they aren’t translating. It was like that with me. I began to think in Lucia’s voice, with her words. She was the reality now. Luke was a fancy-dress costume I donned for work. It was a strange double life; it took me an hour or so to change from one person to the other—not physically, but mentally. Sometimes I accidentally used the wrong voice or body language. It was a strain, but I wasn’t sinking.

As I took a shower on that glorious February morning, wincing at the increasing soreness across my chest, I noticed something new. It was very slight indeed, but nevertheless it was there. My body had begun to change. Fat and muscle were redistributing themselves. Even my face seemed different, when I looked in the shaving mirror.

I dressed in a white blouse, cardigan and flowing skirt and did several hours’ work. At about ten I made a sortie to the newsagent’s for more milk. On my way back, I picked up a magazine from Che Guevara man. He too was feeling chirpy, he said, because spring was on its way and soon it wouldn’t be so effing cold. I stopped to chat for a while. He told me he used to sell sound systems and had a home and family. Then he’d fallen into gambling, become a total arsehole (his words) and lost everything.

I had appointments in the office that afternoon, and was reluctantly changing into a suit and tie when Chloe phoned. I told her about my euphoria.

‘I feel so calm,’ I said. ‘Everything’s lovely today.’

I could hear the smile in her voice. ‘You know what that is? The hormones. For the first time in your life, your body isn’t fighting your mind.’

‘You could be right.’

‘I
am
right! That’s how cis people feel all the time.’

She meant cisgender people—those whose bodies matched their identities. I was pretty sure Mr Che Guevara didn’t feel calm and happy all the time; quite often he felt cold and lonely. Still, I didn’t argue.

‘Will it last?’ I asked.

‘No.’ She laughed. She was always laughing; I knew it was to cover up the pain. ‘Hang on tight, Luce, you’ve boarded a roller-coaster—up, down, up. But when things get tough, remember how you’re feeling today. Hold on to that and don’t let go.’

‘And where are you?’ I asked her. ‘Where on the roller-coaster?’

The laughter carried a flutter of panic. ‘Not so good today.’

Poor Chloe. She’d tried to phone her mother the previous evening, and it hadn’t gone well. Her mother insisted on calling her Callum (‘Why does she do that? I haven’t been Callum since I was fourteen years old!’) and gleefully announced that her grandparents had changed their will to cut Chloe out.
They don’t even want to hear your name, Callum.
Chloe had hung up on her. I suspected she’d then spent the night in tears and this was the real reason she’d phoned me.

‘I wish there was a pill,’ she said, in one of those rare, bleak, not-laughing moments, ‘to make them feel what we feel. Just for a day. Just for an hour. Then they’d stop hating us.’

I told her I’d a good mind to take the first train up to Manchester and have words with the old bat. Chloe said her mum wasn’t old, she was forty-six, but she was a bat.

‘Thanks,’ I said, as we ended the call.

‘What for?’

‘Well, you know . . . putting up with a fuddy-duddy like me.’

I could hear her laughter as I hung up.

I was still floating several feet above the ground when Judi turned up in my office. She was wearing some kind of trouser suit in dark crimson. Apparently, she’d had it made while on holiday in India.

‘That’s enough about my outfit,’ she said. ‘You’ve been on the
hormones for a while now. You should come out before questions are asked.’

‘They can’t have had any noticeable effect,’ I protested. ‘It’s like adolescence. It takes months. Years.’

She looked me up and down with a sceptical half-smile. ‘You’re changing fast, Luke,’ she said. ‘And you know it. It’s not just a visual thing. Maybe it’s some kind of sixth sense, I don’t know, but my radar tells me you’re changing. I don’t even think of you as male anymore, to be honest. Not sure I ever did, but I certainly don’t now. I see you as kind of . . . hinterland. You just don’t . . . I don’t know . . . you don’t
smell
male. You don’t talk male, or walk male. Your skin’s not male. Lucia is taking over. People will notice. Then they’ll talk.’

I knew she was right. It terrified me. It delighted me.

‘Let’s have a timetable for this rollout. May I?’ she said, opening my desk diary with her manicured fingers. ‘You must be the last person in this firm to use a real diary as well as a virtual one. Christmas present, was it?’

‘Good guess. From my mother.’

‘What else do you need to do?’

I scribbled a list on a memo pad. More voice training, deportment coaching, finish the electrolysis, allow time for the hormones to take effect; time for our divorce to be finalised, which I hoped would make things easier for Eilish, give her time to distance herself from me.

Judi was leafing through my diary. ‘Weren’t you meant to be taking a three-month sabbatical this year?’

‘We were going to Italy. We cancelled it.’

‘Okay. Well, let’s aim for July. You’ll have been separated from Eilish a year by then. In mid June, we brief the management committee and give them time for feedback. On July eleventh, you disappear for two weeks. While you’re gone we send out a memo to everyone, and change your name on the website and stationery. You get a working woman’s wardrobe together—I’ll help with that. Have your hair done, get another
laser zap on your face. What else? Leg wax, eyelash tint. Ear piercing.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Man up! And, for God’s sake, have those eyebrows sorted out by someone who knows what they’re doing.’

‘Femininity is so complicated and painful.’

She sighed. ‘Darling, try being in labour for thirty hours with an eleven-pounder. After that, everything’s a cinch. Anyway, you return to work on the twenty-eighth of July as . . . drum roll, please . . . Ms Lucia Livingstone.’

I glanced anxiously at the diary. ‘That’s only five months away.’

‘Probably too long. If you leave it any later than that, you’re going to be outed before you’re ready. Disastrous.’

‘True.’

‘Shall we make it a fixture?’ Her pen was poised.

‘Wait . . . wait.’ I was spluttering. ‘Think about it, Judi! This is it. This is no going back; goodbye, Luke.’

‘I thought you’d already made that decision.’

‘Yes, but . . . I’ll have to walk in here with a new name, new clothes, a new gender. You won’t be able to move for people laughing. Clients will take their work elsewhere. I’ll bring Bannermans into disrepute.’

Judi had rested her chin on the back of her hand, and was nodding as though I were giving her a shopping list. ‘Yep . . . yep . . . yep. All of that.’

‘I’m seriously thinking about early retirement. I could move away, somewhere nobody knows me, then quietly transition. That’d be easier for Eilish. Much less public.’

Judi let me finish, and then she tapped the desk. ‘Listen. Are you listening? This is a really, really big thing for you. I know that. But it isn’t a really big thing for this firm. There are over five hundred people in our London office alone, and every one of them has their hang-ups. Over the past ten years I’ve seen ’em come and I’ve seen ’em go. We’ve had partners caught having sex
in the lift. We’ve had someone become a reality TV star. We’ve had someone arrested for shoplifting. We’ve had three people die, in various ways. Those are just the things I can remember off the top of my head. The thing is, Livingstone—and I mean this nicely—you aren’t such a big deal. There will be tranny jokes for a few weeks, but after that you’ll be old news. You’ll just be Lucia, who’s as competent and decent as Luke ever was. Only better dressed.’

‘I think you underestimate how disturbing this is for people.’

‘I think you underestimate their tolerance.’

I still got a kick out of my job; at the moment, it was all I had. I needed the income, too. Divorce is very expensive and I hadn’t planned for it. I couldn’t afford to retire.

‘You win,’ I said. ‘July it is.’

Judi couldn’t suppress a victorious chuckle. I watched the words appear, flowing from her pen and onto the page of my diary. Magical, dangerous, exhilarating words. I had dreamed of them. I never thought to see them.

Lucia’s birthday.

I began to have doubts as soon as Judi left my office. They started as a niggle, but by the end of the afternoon I was in a cold sweat. It was almost March now . . . how could I be ready by July? I was staring at the words she’d written in my diary when my desk phone rang. It was Izzy, at reception.

‘I’ve got Penelope O’Neil on the line for you,’ she said.

I was pleased, if a little surprised. Penny O’Neil, headmistress of St Matthew’s school. We got on well. I liked her earthy sense of humour and straight talking.

‘Penny!’ I cried expansively, when she’d been put through. ‘What a pleasure.’

There was no warmth in her voice. ‘I think it won’t be a pleasure,’ she said. ‘Luke, we’ve got a problem.’

Forty

Eilish

‘You need to get rid of all this,’ said Stella, emerging from the downstairs cloakroom with an armful of Luke’s jackets and coats.

‘I will,’ I promised, taking them from her. ‘I’ll send them on to him. I just haven’t got around to it yet.’

‘Darling, it doesn’t get easier! I should know. Why don’t you let me sort everything out? He’s not going to come home and wear them.’

She was helping me with the spring issue of the parish newsletter. I’d first offered to edit the publication a decade ago, and still hadn’t found another mug to take it on. Luke thought this hilarious; he reckoned I did it in a desperate attempt to put credit in the heavenly account. The newsletter came out once a month, but in early March we pushed our bumper issue through every letterbox in the parish.

It had been a heart-lifting day, tinged with the first softness of spring. I’d picked a bunch of daffodils and they were in a vase on the kitchen table. I was writing the editor’s letter while Stella organised the layout—she’s a whizz at that kind of thing. The sun went down as we worked, Turkish-delight colours flaming through the copse.

‘You should announce it in here,’ Stella said, as she typed and clicked.

‘What?’

‘Luke. In your editor’s letter.
It’s been a busy and exciting year for East Yalton and Cottingwith parish. We have a dishy new vicar, the Reverend . . .
’ Stella’s brow furrowed. ‘Damn. Can’t remember the Rev’s name.’

‘Somebody Vallance.’

‘That’s it.
Somebody Vallance, who looks about eighteen and is adored by all the flower-pot hats. St Matthew’s Church of England Primary School is proud to announce that they have a new IT suite, at vast expense, and also that its chair of governors is to be known henceforward as Miss Lucia Livingstone.
’

‘There’d be fireworks,’ I said. ‘Luke’s been such a pillar of the community, and for so long.’

‘Mm. And the higher your pedestal, the more satisfying a crash you make when you fall. I discovered that after Steve got arrested.’

Once we were on the home straight, we opened the bottle of wine Stella had brought with her. I was just beginning to think about supper—I had a stew in the crockpot—when I noticed her peering out of the window.