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The kid that we now automatically called ‘Anonymity Smith’ continued to be a source of stress for Petra. In just that one week – the first week back of school – the little ten-year-old was brought to her four times. Each time Petra was in the middle of something, and each time she had to stop what she was doing in order to coach the child through a panic attack or a meltdown.
“I’m the only one that seems to be able to get through to them,” she said on Thursday. “Everyone else has tried, but they don’t take.”
Then on Friday, she arrived home, shut the door and burst into tears.
“Hey, hey, hey, what’s happened? Is everyone okay?” I folded her into a hug, but she was like a plank of wood in my arms, except for the convulsions of her sobbing.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s not my thing to tell.”
“But it’s clearly bothering you,” I protested. “A problem shared is a problem halved, is it not?”
“But ethically, it’s not right to broadcast it.”
“You’re not broadcasting it. You’re offloading to me. One person. Your spouse. And I get the feeling that if you don’t offload it in some way, it’s going to eat you up on the inside until you either explode or disappear entirely.”
“But morally…”
We went around in circles like that for a bit, and I could see she was aching to tell me. Every cajole from me was met with less and less resistance, until she finally flopped onto the sofa, shoes discarded to one side, and put her head in her hands while simultaneously looking up at me.
“Anonymity Smith came out to me as non-binary today,” she said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were swimming.
“Okay,” I said neutrally. “Congratulations to them. Why has that upset you?”
“Because for them, it’s a disaster!” she burst out.
“How come?”
“Their parents are vile to them! We had them in for a meeting just before half term, and they were like English carbon-copies of my parents. So entrenched in small-c conservativism and Catholicism that nothing will pull them out of it. For the longest time I couldn’t get them to see how bad their child’s mental health is, and when I eventually got through to them, they just blamed their child for being weak!”
Ah. Now I got it. Petra was being reminded of her own childhood.
“I gave Anonymity some literature about gender identity. You wouldn’t think there’s so little child-friendly literature on this subject in this day and age, but it’s true.”
“You should write some,” I said. Normally, the proposal of a solution – even a vague long-term one – helped bring her around, but now she sat up straight her eyes suddenly glittered with fury.
“In my spare time, huh? My non-existent spare time? I’m stretched to the maximum, Jean. How do you expect me to write a fucking book?”
“All right, all right!” I threw my hands up and took a step back. “Forget the book, then.”
Now we faced each other, both breathing heavily. I felt on the verge of shaking her, and begging her to come back to me. She looked like she was on the verge of screaming. But neither of us did either of those things. Instead, I turned away and walked into the kitchen, and she stood up and turned towards the stairs. But she must have had second thoughts, because she suddenly appeared behind me in the kitchen.
“And you know the worst part? There’s nowhere for Anonymity to turn. Not until they get older. Not without their parents’ support. So for now, they’re stuck where they are. With no hope of any sort of aid other than what their secondary school can offer when they go there in September. And they won’t have me there, so they’ll need to find a new ‘safe person’ to trust with this stuff.”
She perched on the edge of the table, a look of abject misery on her face.
“If only they were older. There would be more options available to them: hormones, surgery, therapy. For kids, there’s fuck-all. And it’s looking like even less, the way things are going politically.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t have told you any of this, Jean. Forget you ever heard it. I’m… I’m going for a shower.”
“Did it at least make you feel better? Getting it off your chest?”
A pause, while she considered it.
“Not really. Sorry. I just feel guilty now.”
Ah, guilt, that now-familiar companion.
Chapter Forty-One
Later that night, I heard Petra’s voice from upstairs. She was in the music room with the door shut and I was in the kitchen washing up, but when I turned the tap off I could hear her saying something. Then pause, then say something else, and repeat. My first thought was Stella. There was surely nobody else she could be calling late on a Friday evening. With a small part of me hating myself for the slyness of what I was about to do, I slipped off my rubber gloves, walked through the living room and began to creep up the stairs.
