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When I was, however, it often had a predictable effect on me – as it did today. I put down the baking tray I was holding and pounced on her, wrapping her up in my arms and smooching her on the cheek. She squeaked.
“Jean!” she yelped. “Stop it! No… no funny business!”
“No?” I said, still holding her tight. “Playing hard to get, are we?”
“Jean-”
“Not even for five minutes while the oven heats up?”
“No!” she said again, wriggling from my grasp. My arms fell to my sides like a lead weight as she made for the door again.
“I’m just not feeling it tonight,” I heard as she walked up the stairs.
This was the first time she’d ever denied me, except for when one of us was ill. Her sex drive was higher than mine, and therefore whenever I’d instigated anything, she’d always jumped at the chance.
Until tonight.
Why does that bother me so much?
Chapter Four
The mystery was solved when she reappeared half an hour later and popped two headache tablets. Despite that, unease continued to needle at me. After dinner, Petra disappeared up to the music room (which doubled as her home office) to carry on with her work. I stayed downstairs in the living room flicking through one of several ring binders that contained all the musical arrangements our choir had done since we took it over six years ago. I was in the middle of singing the always-tricky alto line of one song when I heard Petra’s voice from upstairs.
“Jean, could you keep it down, please? I’m trying to concentrate.”
My voice cut out as if she’d severed my vocal cords with a knife. Anxiety flooded in, filling my veins with adrenaline and prickling at my skin. The first rejection I had just about swallowed, but she knew I’d always battled with insecurity over my singing voice. Running the choir had toned it down, but just like that, I was back in music class in Primary 2, standing up in front of an expectant class ready to sing a solo. Fear had paralysed me and I’d frozen up, run out of the classroom, then proceeded to hold all the tension inside me for the rest of the day until I got home. There, it had manifested in one hell of an argument with my older sister.
My temper had been a hot one when we were kids. Both my parents – and Lyndsey, for the most part – were always very easy-going, so it had been a mystery from where I’d inherited it. Mum had always joked that our village in the Scottish Highlands was so cold that my temper was needed to warm us all up, but that was really a way of skirting around an issue that caused quite a lot of problems. Now I cringed to think of the things I’d said and done, the stress I’d put them all under, and I was glad that my temper rarely flared any more. I’d even call myself easy-going, these days.
As we’d gotten older, Lyndsey had always known how to get me to release my emotions safely. Nobody had been able to do it but her – not even our mother – until Petra. Lyndsey had died the year before I met her, sending me into a tailspin, and I’d often wondered whether she’d sent Petra to look after me, to stop my emotions becoming self-destructive as was their wont. I swallowed down the bitter taste in my mouth and forced myself to sit up, puffing out my chest and picking up the music again.
Half an hour later, I had decided on a new contender for Ave Maria’s replacement and was just clearing up the scattered music when I heard Petra’s footsteps padding down the stairs.
“Sorry I told you to keep it down,” she said from behind me. “I just… really needed to think and I could do without that Beattie Bloom song stuck in my head.”
“I didn’t realise you could hear me. I thought you had the door shut.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t just shut it. I’m sorry.”
I turned around at that point, and was struck by how strained she looked.
“Jesus, Petra. You look exhausted. Sit down. Have you actually stopped working at all since we had dinner? It’s twenty to nine now!”
“I was just… thinking. Not exactly working, although I was thinking about work.”
“There’s a problem, isn’t there?”
“There’s always a problem, Jean. I work with a boss who’s about as warm as an ice sculpture, terrifies the living shit out of everyone without even trying and means that everybody comes to me with their issues. I swear I’m more like a therapist than a deputy headteacher. And I’m not even trained.”
“You are good at it, though,” I said, placing my hand on her back and guiding her towards the sofa. Once she sat down, I sat beside her. “You’re so good with children. And adults. And-”
“Mm. Too good,” she said. “Today I was handed a hysterical Year Six who wouldn’t tell anyone what was wrong.”
“Year Six, that’s… aged ten, right?”
“Yeah. I sat him in my office and gave him water and tissues, but I couldn’t get anything out of him for the longest time. I thought it was just a playground issue, but I eventually drew it out of him. He said he didn’t feel like a boy. But he didn’t feel like a girl either. He said he just felt like ‘a nothing’. Or both. I didn’t know what to say. I’m woefully uneducated in this stuff. For a queer person, I really know fuck-all about gender identity. And it means this little kid’s mental health is probably going to go out the window.”
“That’s not your sole responsibility, though. Can’t you refer him to the youth mental health service?”
