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Love.
Oh, that infernal word!
The root of so many problems between Petra and I these days.
“I have to go,” I said, interrupting whatever obsolete words were still spilling out of Cass’s mouth. “Thanks for the… thanks.”
And with that, I stood up and made a break for it.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
There was a small white box on the front doorstep when I arrived home from work the next day. It was tied with a pink bow, and it had my name on a note on the top. It was cool, so it couldn’t have been there for very long. Curiosity piqued, I picked it up and carried it inside the house.
When I shut the front door, the first thing that hit me was the scent of Petra’s perfume. It smelled fresh, as if she was standing there in the room with me. I froze, but heard no sign of life.
“Petra?” I called, just to be sure. My voice – still loud from being in performance mode – bounced off the walls, but there was no response. I walked cautiously into the kitchen, set down the box on the table, then did a quick tour of the house just to double-check that she wasn’t here.
The first thing I noticed when I went upstairs was that our bedroom door was open. I’d pulled it partially closed before I left in an effort to keep the room as cool as possible, and my heart leapt into my throat as I walked in there. There was no sign that anything had been disturbed until I opened the wardrobe. More of Petra’s clothes and shoes had gone and – as I saw when I went into the bathroom – so had more of her toiletries. But Petra herself wasn’t there. Even if she clearly had been.
Back downstairs, I took the note from beneath the ribbon on the box and turned it over.
Hi Jean,
Coral (my sixteen-year-old alter) baked some shortbread last night. Petra told us how much you love shortbread, and so we thought it would be the perfect apology gift for what happened yesterday, even if it isn’t the authentic Scottish stuff you’re used to! We clearly overstepped, and we – Cass and I – are deeply sorry about that.
We hope you’ll come out again with us sometime. Give us a call or a text?
Heather and Cass
My mouth curved into a smile, but it was a wry one.
Come out with them sometime?
The way things were going, I’d be coming out in more than one way soon enough.
As what, though?
That was the problem. I still wasn’t sure. The one thing that I was completely, one-hundred-percent sure on was that I wasn’t female. At birth, perhaps, but not on the inside. I never had been, but it was only recently that I’d even entertained the notion of being anything but cisgender.
Logically, I knew that it was okay not to know any more than that. It would be absolutely acceptable to go to Petra and tell her how I was feeling. But now she was gone, I wanted to approach her as a whole person. To say “this is who I am”, rather than just “this is who I’m not”. I’d sort of missed the boat for letting her in because I was too busy trying to preserve what remained of her mental health… but, paradoxically, shutting her out had just contributed to the divide between us. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work that out.
I sat down with a thump on the kitchen chair as I realised the brutal truth. I’d approached this all wrong. It was on me to communicate how I was feeling as much as it was on Petra to ask. Like a spoilt, selfish child, I’d been raging away on the basis of ‘if she doesn’t care enough to ask, I don’t care enough to tell’. And look where it had gotten us. Separated. Divorce in the pipelines.
This realisation did not change the current predicament, though. I still felt I needed to figure out exactly what I was. At the moment, the closest I’d gotten to a label was ‘gender non-binary’. But this was a whole category of identities in and of itself, all of which still needed some thinking about. And it scared me.
I decided to leave any actual solid research for tomorrow. I had a full day off, and after a night’s sleep I would be in a much better position to think clearly. Nine hours at work today – my standard shift these days – had turned my brain into mulch. I popped open the lid of the shortbread, bit into one, and chewed mournfully.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. A wee dram just to round off the evening, after a dinner of shortbread, then a supper of microwaved fish pie at about nine o’clock after losing myself in a show called Feel Good. I’d found a blog post which had told me that this was a good show to watch when considering one’s own identity, but by the end of the first season I wasn’t finding it particularly enlightening. It was entertaining though, a good show in general, and that was why I ate dinner so late.
One shot of whisky had taken the edge off the pain and lulled me into an almost-sleepiness. Another shot would send me off to sleep entirely, I thought, so I downed it with a wince before heading up the stairs to bed.
But try as I might, I couldn’t sleep. I changed into my pyjamas and brushed my teeth, then cuddled down into our bed for what (not that I had been counting) would be my seventh night without Petra. The sound of rain outside, whipping itself into quite a storm, would be perfect white noise, I thought.
Up until now, I’d been fairly good at switching off the thoughts when it was time to sleep. However, the alcohol seemed to have broken the off-switch entirely, because in they crowded, like commuters on a London tube carriage, until I had to throw off the thin sheet covering my body because they were sending me into a hot flush.
If only I wasn’t a woman, I’d caught myself thinking. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with this menopausal nonsense.
