AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I wasn’t sure of what I was saying, not at all, but in that moment it was worth it to see her face relax with relief.
“Can you?” She grasped my hand. “Are you sure? I know I’ve not been attentive enough. I feel like you’ve been pulling away. But that’s probably a figment of my imagination. It’s not like I’ve exactly had the time to be paying much attention. Are you okay, though? Like… in yourself?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “If I have been pulling away, it’s to give you space to breathe without all this school shit piling on top of you. Nothing to worry about. Honest.”
“Yeah?” She looked directly at me, then pulled me into a hug. I couldn’t help my sigh of relief as I settled into her embrace. How long had it been since we’d hugged like this? Far too long. I closed my eyes and inhaled her scent. It filled my lungs, then my heart, then my veins, until I almost – almost – felt whole again.
Then her phone pinged. She’d been holding it on the way in, and had laid it face-up on the arm of the sofa next to her. From my position in our cuddle, I could see the screen as it flashed up.
S. McBride: 20 Monday? You all good?
Again, it could have been completely innocuous. And it would have been weird to text now if they’d been together all day. But Petra’s reaction screamed otherwise. The moment the message became visible, she practically threw me aside in a mad swipe at the phone. It fell to the floor in the gap between the sofa and the magazine rack, while I ended up at the other end of the two-seater, rubbing my elbow which had come into contact with the arm with some force.
Okay, perhaps they hadn’t seen each other today then. But there was something going on there. Definitely. Completely. One-hundred percent.
My blood ran cold, and the bubble burst.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
We still went to the car boot sale the next day. Petra had seemed so thrilled by the prospect of it, and I couldn’t bear to let her down, especially now she wasn’t getting much of a chance to have time away from work. All the same, it was hard to conjure up even the faintest veneer of enthusiasm as we got up together, ate breakfast and got ready for the day. It was only as I did so that I realised that we hadn’t actually gotten up and ready side-by-side for weeks, what with both of our work schedules. I’d missed it. If it hadn’t been for the pool of unease sitting in my gut, things would have been pretty perfect.
Everything should have been perfect. It was an idyllic early June day: a bright azure sky with the odd wispy cloud, a temperature that was warm without being sticky, the air faintly perfumed by the sea when the wind blew right. Petra and I folded ourselves into our little car and zipped through the winding lanes with the breeze blowing in our hair through the open windows. Once we got out of the village onto the main roads, Petra tuned in to Radio Miltree, where they were playing ‘Sunday Breakfast Bangers’ that she even sung along to.
I was surprised when the urge to join in found me, too. I hadn’t sung since karaoke night the week before, nor had I felt any need to. There had once been a time when singing – music in general – had been as natural to me as breathing. But that had been a long while ago. Today, of all days, felt unexpected to have the urge again. Then again, Petra’s voice had always had effects on me.
I’m still feeling something, I noted with relief. Our marriage can’t be quite dead in the water yet.
So I cleared my throat and sung. Eulalia Gray’s Always All My Love had been one of our songs, back in the early days. I’d turned it into a duet for our voices, in fact, creating our version of the power ballad that we’d intended to sing at our wedding before plans changed. Even though we’d never ended up singing it in public at all, our fondness for it had never abated, and now we slipped back into the same harmonies as if no time had passed whatsoever since we last did so.
Petra whooped as we finished on a euphoric note that clashed perfectly with Eulalia’s prerecorded vocals, and held out a hand to me for a high-five.
“Put it there, wifey!”
I did so, but the moniker was like the finest needle to the little balloon of happiness that had been growing in my chest. It didn’t burst it entirely, but it put a tiny air hole in it, and I could feel the happiness seeping out, allowing the familiar ache of unidentifiable negativity to take hold again. I closed my eyes and mentally duct-taped across the air hole. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Focus on today. You, here, buying knickknacks with Petra and soaking up the sun. Not your gender identity.
Despite this, the ache persisted. Walking around the rows of tables groaning with other people’s assorted… well, crap, I was afflicted with a sudden self-consciousness. I kept picturing what people saw: the dumpy, frumpy middle-aged woman. And I had established that what they saw was not me – I was getting more and more sure of that with every day that passed now. The problem lay in the fact that I wasn’t sure what actually was me. As Petra rifled through a table full of chipped ornaments and costume jewellery, I glazed over and – out of nowhere – pictured myself as a man. It was difficult, but when I managed it, I was struck by a wave of revulsion.
Nope, nope, nope. That doesn’t work at all. Absolutely not.
But then, it would feel unnatural at first, wouldn’t it? It would be like cutting my face out of a photograph and sticking it onto a generic male body from a magazine. I’d grown used to seeing this face on a female body – surely anybody would feel the same if they mentally transplanted their face onto a body of the opposite sex. Perhaps, if I were to metaphorically photoshop my face onto a male body as opposed to a stark cut-and-paste, it might feel more normal and then I might know if I was actually a man. It felt like the logical first step into discovering my true identity.
“Another little duck ornament to add to my collection,” Petra said, shoving the ornament in my face and pulling me out of the reverie.
“I think you’re quackers,” I said automatically, remembering to smile just in time to make it clear that I was joking. The joke landed well and Petra laughed with her once-abundant, recently-absent gaiety.
“Oh, I’ve missed your sense of humour,” Petra said after she’d finished laughing, and took my hand for the first time in God knows how long. “Come on. Let’s see what else we can find.”
I let her lead, and tried to ignore the foul smell of burning tobacco that was creeping around the whole area.
I’d forgotten about this part of boot sale life. Somehow, they seemed to attract the majority of Cornwall’s tobacco-smoking population. The scent was once as familiar to me as my own long-since-abandoned perfume – after all, it had followed my sister around like an invisible cloak for nearly three quarters of her life, and eventually it had just become… her. After she’d died, and my mental health went down the tubes, the merest hint of cigarette smoke had been triggering for me, but that had faded as my heart started to rebuild itself. I hadn’t actually noticed it on Petra on our first date. It was only when I’d gone to her flat on the second that I’d picked it up, seen the cigarette packet and lighter on her bedside table, and walked straight back out again.
Thus had ensued a tearful exchange – tearful on my part, at least – as Petra had chased me down the road. Hiding down an alleyway so nobody else would see my tears, I’d poured out everything, from Lyndsey’s chain smoking to her lung cancer and the way it had almost destroyed my family and I. “I had such high hopes for you and I, but this would kill it completely,” I’d sobbed, at which point she’d hugged me so tightly I couldn’t help but hug her back.
“I’ll quit,” she’d said into my shoulder. “I don’t care what it takes. If it means that we can make a go of it, I’ll quit.”
A rather extreme course of action in hindsight, given that we’d only been on one official date and a couple of choir rehearsals, but I’d gone back to hers and she’d put the cigarettes in the bin there and then. Her face had grown pale, but the set of her jaw had been resolute, and from that day on I’d never detected a hint of cigarette smoke on her.
Guess we’ll both be stinking of it after today, I thought ruefully, glancing at one young lad with a cigarette dangling from his fingers. My thoughts now addressed him. How do you not know the damage your addiction is causing?
