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And from there my thoughts had spiralled. At God-only-knew o’clock, I’d found myself thinking wistfully of the slightly fuzzy state of sleepiness that had cocooned me after that first shot. Perhaps another will do the trick, I thought, and stumbled down the stairs.
I’d had two for good measure, and by then my eyes were stinging. Sitting back down at the kitchen table, my limbs were not quite of their own accord as I blindly reached up onto the shelf and pulled out an album.
Of course it had to be one of mine and Petra’s. Of course. I sniffed and squinted in the semi-darkness at the year on the front of it. 2016. With half a year of marriage under our belts, we’d been confident. This was the year we’d taken on the choir – and the first picture in there was of Petra standing in front of them, arms raised as she conducted at our first rehearsal. I’d taken it from my old position in the second row of the altos. It had taken a little while for us to figure out that it worked better with me conducting and her playing the piano, but in that picture her expression was elated, her arms were blurry with movement and she looked… solid. Her usual tall, confident self. Not the compressed, almost stooped figure I’d become used to without noticing for the last few months.
Perhaps, when the choir resumed for the autumn term, we could make some changes. Give Petra the opportunity to conduct again. Shake things up a bit, get the choir out of the stalemate into which it had fallen over the last term or so.
That was presuming we still had the choir.
My stomach flipped as I remembered what I’d said to Cass the night before. “I can’t stay here, not if she does.” It was true. There was absolutely no way I could stay in the village – hell, even in Cornwall – if Petra did. Not without being her wife. Or spouse. So we’d have to give up the choir. Or I would. Perhaps Petra could keep it, and find someone else to take over. A sudden image flashed in my mind of Petra and an unidentified someone (who slightly resembled Stella McBride) having the time of their lives running our choir, while I sat in an unfamiliar flat somewhere new, alone.
I flipped through the album, not even realising that I had poured myself another whisky and was sipping it slowly. We’d been on holiday to the south of Wales that year. It had been an autumn break when the rates were cheaper, and there were a couple of photos of us bundled up in coats (the weather having been unseasonably chilly for October), crunching through multicoloured leaves, hand-in-hand and flushed with the thrill of being together. I didn’t recognise myself in the pictures, but then I never really had. Tonight, however, my gaze was drawn to Petra.
Her beauty, to me, had always been more than surface-level. Beyond her olive skin and high cheekbones and piercing brown eyes was a brain that was host to quite possibly the most wonderful human being to ever walk the planet. Out of any of the singers we both loved, her personality most resembled Eulalia Gray’s. Oozing with pure kindness, infectious positivity and sensitivity, and at the time I’d felt that I’d found my soulmate. No matter what I thought now, I couldn’t deny how I’d felt at the time. I had loved her. We’d bounced off each other so well, bringing out the best in each other, and tumbling headfirst into whatever we set our minds to.
When had it changed?
I gave a sudden sob.
And when was it coming back?
I suddenly had the urge to call Petra. To hear her mellifluous voice, thick with sleep at this time of the morning, to just chat like we used to. My determination to let her make the first move dissipated as I clutched my phone in one hand and my glass in the over, staring at the old picture of her. I missed her like a physical ache. There was no other way of explaining it. I missed her.
But I quickly realised I couldn’t do anything about it when I tried to turn the phone on, and realised it had died. I was only keeping it on in case Petra tried to call – some hopes, I thought bitterly. Gulping down the final drop of whisky, I put the glass in the sink and headed – staggered, really – upstairs to find my charger.
Even when I plugged it in, it took a few minutes to charge, so I lay on my back on the bed, folding my hands on my stomach and attempting to take a deep, if shaky, breath. In that position I had finally fallen asleep, and woken up the next morning feeling like my eyelids had been glued together.
Nope, definitely shouldn’t have started on the whisky.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The hangover was like nothing I’d ever known before. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment I realised it wasn’t simply an ordinary hangover, but a migraine. At some point, the two twin horrors had segued, and I spent most of Tuesday hunched over the toilet, resting my head on the back of the seat, in the only position that seemed to bring even a degree of comfort. My thoughts jumbled up like a jigsaw puzzle spilling out of a box, and I started in surprise when I opened my eyes to see it was almost dark. I hadn’t even been downstairs that day.
This was where our marriage had practical benefits, I thought grimly. If Petra had been there, she would have helped me. Fetched me water, forced me to eat, persuaded me to try the latest of her Google-found ‘miracle migraine cures’. Or at least, in the olden days she would have done. Perhaps nowadays she wouldn’t have been as bothered. Given that I seemed to mean nothing to her.
The sorrow and love from last night had gone, replaced by the return of my anger. When I eventually found my phone there wasn’t anything from her, even though the one-week anniversary of our split had passed at some point that evening. A small part of me had wondered if she would get in touch to mark it in some way. Some hopes, I thought bitterly again, before moving my head too fast and bringing on another wave of nausea. When it subsided, I took the opportunity to call Josie – the supervisor of my shift tomorrow – and tell her I wasn’t coming in.
“No, you don’t sound very well, you poor thing,” she said.
“I should be all right for my next shift. I just… need a day to recover from this migraine.” Even though I wasn’t fully mentally present, I registered the flatness of my voice, the way it almost slurred.
I never called in sick, which was probably why she didn’t even question it. Which was a good thing, because I had to hang up in a hurry before my vision went again. The thing about migraine aura was that it didn’t go away when I shut my eyes, and so I buried my face in my raised knees in an effort to compress them. It felt as if my eyeball had gone numb, and I wanted to quite simply pluck it out. Somewhere on my drifting subconscious I was aware that the doorbell had gone, but the noise of my pulse roaring in my ears and the crushing pressure in my head joined forces to pin me down onto the bed, and it was in that position that I woke up the next morning.
Wednesday was better, but only marginally. The pain had gone, replaced by an empty, slightly tingly feeling that filled my whole body. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I noted my slightly vacant stare, almost as if I’d taken a hit of some sort of sedative drug – not that I ever had. And my thoughts had dulled, too, which I thanked God for. A temporary release from the turmoil.
A day pottering in the garden seemed like the best possible idea I could have had, I thought with a flash of optimism as I descended the stairs. But first, coffee and food, since nothing had passed my lips since my misadventures with the whisky on Monday night.
Then I entered the kitchen and spotted the photo album. It was still lying open at the last picture I’d viewed: one of us and the choir at our first Christmas concert as their leaders. We had an arm around each other and were wearing matching grins. I had to look twice before I actually recognised myself – my hair had been its former brunette, not a hint of the grey or purple that I sported now, and I had it slightly longer than I preferred these days.
Had that woman, that version of me, felt like this? It was quite a struggle to actually remember. Then it hit me. It had been there. This feeling of dysphoria. For a long, long time. I just hadn’t recognised it. I’d pushed it away.
I’d always had little moments of unreality, but they’d increased particularly in number and severity after Lyndsey had died. The best way I could describe it – not that I had ever had reason to do so – was that it was like being on a train, which pulls up at a station next to another train. After a few moments, the adjacent train starts moving and it feels like your train is moving too, but then the tail end of it passes you by, you can see the platform and you realise with a jolt that you hadn’t been moving at all, you’re exactly where you stopped. That jolt was no stranger to me, but now I thought of it in the context of my gender. I’d be striding through life, firmly ensconced in my own little world in my own little head, and then I’d have the sudden, bone-deep realisation that something’s not right. I’d never known what.
Now I realised… my body wasn’t right. The vessel that held me was wrong. It always had been, but I hadn’t realised it at the time. Now it made perfect sense, and I dropped the album I’d been holding this whole time without realising it, before scurrying over to the drawer, where all my notes on gender were.
Non-binary.
In all my learning, I’d thought that it was an umbrella term, with a billion other identities within it. But could it be an identity on its own? Could a person simply say, ‘I’m non-binary’, and have done with it?
