The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone (42 page)

Yvonne began to shake Lucia’s hand, then changed her mind and air-kissed her instead—but carefully, as though she were afraid of creasing Lucia’s clothes. ‘You do look . . . well, marvellous, actually. Come and share a pew with us,’ she said. ‘We’ll be your bodyguards.’

When they reached the porch, Kate lingered a little behind the others. The organ was wheezing away gently; she could already smell dust, damp and furniture polish. She smiled at the sight of Hattie the ancient verger, with her hymnbooks, peering myopically out at them. Some things never changed. Hattie spoke to someone over her shoulder, and Kate glimpsed a figure in a surplice. The new vicar, presumably.

She watched as her parents paused, side by side, on the threshold. Their hands touched, then briefly entwined. She was proud of them. They were about to be divorced, but when the chips were down, they were a team.

‘Right,’ said Lucia, taking her wife’s arm. ‘Let’s face the music.’

As they stepped inside, Kate could just make out the vicar shaking their hands. Full marks, she thought grudgingly. He’d made sure he was there to meet them. He was waiting to greet Kate, too. It was gloomy in the old building, after the brightness of the day. Her eyes took time to adjust, and for several seconds he was a silhouette against the east window. When he came into focus, she saw that he was staring at her incredulously.

‘Kate,’ he said, and she felt a grip on her hand.

She began to laugh.

Forty-four

Simon

It had been another long day. He didn’t finish writing up his notes until after seven.

His dad had moved home now, and was living as a woman; called himself Lucia, apparently. So he was the village joke, like something off
Little Britain
. Simon was baffled. Mum, Kate, Granny, even Carmela, seemed able to perform some kind of mental gymnastics that he couldn’t understand. They were lucky, because they hadn’t lost the person they’d loved.

He found his colleague Sven in the clinic, injecting a diabetic cat with insulin.

‘Coming for a drink?’ Simon asked.

Sven was in his forties, and had teenage children. All the clients, both animal and human, loved him; his bedside manner was irresistible. Simon wished it were contagious.

Sven looked at his watch. ‘It’s a bit late.’

‘Never too late.’

‘Why don’t you go home, Simon?’ Sven lifted the cat back into its cage and stroked its head for a moment. ‘You have a family. What’s the point in all this hard work if you don’t go home to them?’

‘You think I’m drinking too much.’

‘I think you should go home. Straight home.’

To his own surprise, Simon took Sven’s advice. He’d try to make it right with Carmela. The troubles had gone on too long; he missed the old days, when they were happy. He was home by seven-thirty, dropping his keys on the table the hall. Carmela wasn’t around, and there were no sounds from upstairs. Nico was probably asleep. He got so tired now that he was a schoolboy.

Shrugging out of his jacket, Simon wandered into the kitchen. Carmela must have been having a spring clean, because the place looked pristine. He took a bottle of wine out of the fridge. Something steamed in the slow cooker, but he wasn’t hungry.

He walked back to the kitchen door, looking towards the stairs. He stood in his shirtsleeves, a glass in one hand and the bottle in the other.

And he listened.

The house was quiet. Very quiet. No footsteps, no murmur of the radio. No yells from Rosa, who loved to party at this time of the evening.

‘Carmela?’ he called.

To him his voice sounded uncouth, as though he’d shouted during a funeral. He hoped she would appear at the top of the stairs, with a finger to her lips and a sleeping baby in her arms. She didn’t.

Suddenly frightened, he shouted again before sprinting up the stairs to look in every room. It was like a horrible detective game. Their toothbrushes were gone from the bathroom. Nico’s duvet had been taken from his bed. The baby’s travel cot was no longer on top of the cupboard on the landing, and neither was Carmela’s big suitcase.

There was no text on his phone, no missed call. It took him a long time to find the note, though she’d left it where he should have seen it straight away. It lay on the table in the hall, right next to the keys he’d dropped so casually.

Dear Simon,

I feel that I have no other choices. I have taken the children away from what is happening to us. We’ll be staying in Suffolk, by the sea. You’ll be angry, you’ll probably think that I’m being manipulative, but I am not. Nico needs a holiday from the tension, and so do I. I have informed his school. As for the future, I don’t know.

I think it would be kind if you don’t tell your parents yet. They’re going through this terrible time, and they would only blame themselves. It’s not their fault. It is our fault.

I will turn my phone on from time to time, in case there are messages. I think this is a good thing for you as well as for me. You and I both need time to think, and time to decide what is best.

My love, take care of yourself.

Carmela

P.S. Soup in the slow cooker. Your dry-cleaning ticket is pinned to the noticeboard.

All the wine in the house couldn’t dull the pain.

He imagined them in a holiday cottage by the sea, happy and excited. He imagined Nico playing on a beach, running and shouting; he imagined Carmela with Rosa on her back, and saw her hair lifting in a breeze. He wished—fiercely, desperately—that he were with them.

It took him most of the night to write a simple text. He composed it first on the back of an envelope, since it was probably the most important message he’d ever send. The envelope was soon covered in his handwriting. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. He drafted long and convoluted messages; he drafted bitter messages, pleading messages, irrational messages. He paced around the garden in the dark, trying to get it right. What did he want to say?

He tried to be angry with her. That would be so much easier than being angry with himself. He tried to think her faithless, selfish, a total bitch; but the truth was that even as he’d feverishly searched the house for his family, he’d known they were gone, and he’d known why.

I drove them away, he thought, staring at his scribbles on the envelope. Why was I so destructive? Perhaps it was a form of self-harm, like cutting myself. I thought I’d grown out of that; haven’t done it since I left school.

By the time he lay down on his bed, he still hadn’t sent any message. According to the bedside clock it was three-eighteen. He felt light-headed with exhaustion, but he wasn’t at all sure he’d sleep. He’d been going to bed alone since New Year’s Day, and hated it. This was far worse. He slid under the covers and lay very still, listening to the emptiness. There was no life in the house. No Carmela, no Nico, no smiling Rosa; no hope that tomorrow would be different.

Finally, he knew what he wanted to say.

Five words.

Terrified. Please come home soon.

Forty-five

Luke

I was grateful to Ricky Tait, who’d invaded my privacy and shared my secret with the world. He was the super-cool teenager who’d pushed me off the edge of the cantilevered platform. I’d been hesitating, looking down into the abyss, until he gave me that final nudge. I dived into thin air, and so far I had survived. So had Eilish.

Of course the world gossiped about me. I’d have done the same, in the world’s shoes. I was too alien for some: those parents who called Penny O’Neil and demanded my resignation; Hugh Tolly, who never did quite meet my eye; the couple who walked out of the Bracton Arms that first day; the woman beside me at the altar rail who turned the chalice around as though afraid she might catch transgender-person germs. My sisters. My son.

Ah, but then there were the others—so many others, who looked beyond their fear and revulsion and accepted me. It came from the most unexpected quarters, and it carried both Eilish and me through those first days.

Two weeks after Ricky took his photographs, a tall fifty-something woman walked up to the main doors of Bannermans. It was eight o’clock in the morning. An expert had done her
hair; it was very dark, but with streaks of silver, and it bounced around her face in waves, softening the lines of her jaw and forehead. Another expert had chosen her understated clothes: a cream blouse and charcoal skirt suit, beautifully cut; she had pearls around her neck and in her ears. Her make-up was subtle, her shoes elegant. Her nails were polished and carefully shaped. She drew few second glances from passers-by. One or two stared just a little too long, as though puzzled, but she kept smiling. She felt intensely feminine, determined and nervous in equal measure.

She didn’t allow herself to hesitate. Up the steps. In through the revolving doors.

The two women at reception had been well primed.

‘Morning, Ms Livingstone,’ said Izzy, with a bright smile.

Ms Livingstone returned the greeting warmly, crossed the lobby—her heels tapping on the marble floor, feeling eyes on her back—and swiped her security card before calling the lift.

Behind her, she heard Izzy pick up a phone and whisper to someone:
He’s here. No, sorry; shit, I’ve done it already . . . God, this is going to be impossible . . . I mean,
she’s
here.

The lift doors opened. Empty, thank heavens. She stepped in. What a relief: for about half a minute she was alone, and could lower her guard.

She had a busy day ahead of her.

‘I’m afraid you’re straight in at the deep end,’ Judi had warned her. ‘Your secretary tells me they’ve had to schedule two client meetings for your first day back.’

‘Clients still want me to act for them?’

‘Livingstone, you’re more in demand than ever. Apparently they’ve been fighting ’em off. Don’t kid yourself, though—this popularity isn’t because of your incisive legal brain. They couldn’t give a toss about that. They just want to see how you’ve done your hair. Welcome to womanhood.’

I wish I were
, thought Lucia now.
I wish I were welcome to womanhood
.

The lift reached her floor. There were—as always—several people around. She was back on display, and she had to walk down the corridor. She thought of a small child in green shorts, sobbing on her first day at school. One or two colleagues said hello, how nice to have you back, and she smiled brilliantly at them. She guessed they’d all had the fear of God put into them: no staring, no smirks, no careless remarks that might be taken to an employment tribunal.

At last she reached her own office. The sliding door was open. Judi was waiting by the desk, holding an immense bunch of flowers.

‘You made it, then,’ she said.

‘I made it.’

For a moment they smiled at one another, taking pleasure in a hard-fought victory. Then Judi nodded towards the open door. ‘Did you notice something?’

Lucia stepped back outside to look. When she saw the new nameplate, her heart almost burst.

‘
Flowers?
’ echoed Kate. She sounded incredulous. ‘They gave you bloody flowers? Have they ever given you flowers before, in the decades you’ve worked there?’

‘Well, no.’

‘So what kind of naked stereotyping is that?’

I laughed. I could see where this was going. ‘The good kind.’

‘You know what the implications are, don’t you, Dad? Female equals soft and sweet-smelling and non-threatening. We’ll never smash through the glass ceiling with flowers in our hands.’

‘Never mind the flowers—what about my new nameplate?
Lucia Livingstone
.’

‘Yeah,’ conceded Kate. ‘That was cool.’

‘I had two meetings today, both with large teams of people, during which my advice was listened to, flowers or no flowers—though I did notice quite a few people staring at my boobs, obviously trying to work out if they’re real or not.’

‘
Are
they real?’

‘Not very. Not yet.’

‘Men look at women’s chests,’ said Kate. ‘It’s what they do. They can’t help themselves. They don’t even know they’re doing it.’

‘Not all men,’ I said mildly.

‘No. Well, I’m sure you never did. You weren’t that sort of man.’

We’d met for a drink at the station to celebrate my first day as a full-time woman. Kate had Guinness. I asked for a white wine spritzer and remembered to sit in the way I’d learned: knees together, ankles tucked to the side. The satin lining of my skirt felt luxurious. Still, I couldn’t relax in case I made a mistake; I hadn’t been able to relax all day. I was triumphant but dog-tired, and longing to get back to Smith’s Barn. I knew I’d have to learn to do without Eilish, but for now she was my refuge.

‘You know, Kate, I’m fighting a pretty big battle here. I think I can safely say that as a transgender woman—technically, a lesbian transgender woman—I’m a bit of a pariah. It seems to bring out a primal fear in some people. Like a snake does.’

‘Can’t deny that. A lawyer, too! Ouch. Triple whammy.’

‘I can’t fight on two fronts,’ I said. ‘I applaud your ideals. I do. I think you’re right, there is a glass ceiling, and having heard the way many men talk at the urinals, I know we’ve a long way to go before it’s shattered. But I can’t—and I won’t—feel angry when someone gives me flowers or holds open a door. I’ll just be grateful. If there’s a glass ceiling for me, it isn’t because I’m a woman. It’s because I was once a man. You do realise you’ve got foam on your nose?’