If You Still Recognise Me, page 18
“Oh, we were there too just earlier this month!” I almost shout.
Sabina smiles. “I was there in April. Avoiding the peak season, you know. I visit every few years; it’s become a ritual of mine.”
“You visit it? With Theresa?”
“No, no. Just by myself, usually, but I took my partner with me this year.”
“But you go there because of Theresa?”
“Well, yes, in a way. She had such a love-hate relationship with the place. She talked about it all the time, and I would ask her if she ever wanted to go back, and she’d look at me like it was the worst thing she’d ever heard. After she … ended things with me, I went there on my own, just to see what it was that Theresa had wanted to escape so badly. And I liked it a lot. It was good to paint there, so I kept returning. I’ve lived in Birmingham all my life, and have no intention of living anywhere else, but I must say the sea does have its attraction, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. These paintings really capture it.”
“What’s your friend’s grandmother’s name?”
“Rebecca Lathey.”
“Ah,” Sabina says knowingly.
“Did Theresa talk about her?”
“Yes, but I got the sense it was a thorny subject for her.”
“Do you and Theresa still talk?”
“Not as much as we used to but I still consider her a friend. She doesn’t live near here any more.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
“In Brighton, I believe, unless she’s moved again,” Sabina says. “I wouldn’t put that past her. But she missed the sea too much, in the end. I think I have her address written down in my address book…”
“An address book?”
“Yes, an actual book, would you believe?”
Sabina takes out a small notebook with a purple leather cover from her bag and flips through it. She dictates the address to me as I type it into the Notes app on my phone. And then I remember how little luck I’ve had with addresses in the past, so I ask if she has Theresa’s number, which she does. She gives it to me with a warning that Theresa isn’t the best at picking up her phone.
I have so many more questions but I don’t want to pry too much, either. “Were you and Theresa together for a long time?”
“We were together for several years,” Sabina says. “But we’re much better off as friends. I’m a person who likes to stay put, and she isn’t. I have a wonderful partner called Mo now, though.”
She looks down fondly at a painting of a person in a suit playing with the same white cat as in the other paintings.
“Is that Mo?” Joan asks.
“Yes, that’s Mo and Tapioca. Who was actually Mo’s cat, at first, before she moved in with me.”
“Is that painting for sale?”
“You’d like to buy it?” Sabina says.
“Yeah. I don’t often see butch women in paintings. This is really cool. Is she Asian too?”
Sabina smiles at that. “She’s Korean-American. She moved to the UK about a decade ago. I paint her a lot but most of the paintings aren’t for sale. I don’t think many people would want to buy them, anyway. I’m happy to sell this one to you.”
Sabina shows Joan photos of some of her other paintings of Mo, since Joan seems so interested. There’s a gorgeous portrait of Mo, grey-haired in a dapper waistcoat. Joan’s face goes slack with awe. “Where can I get that waistcoat?” she whispers.
Sabina laughs. “Oh, I should put you in touch with Mo. Anyway, you’ll be getting this painting?”
“Yeah, I love it. And I might get one of the paintings of Cornwall too. They’re lovely.”
Joan asks me which one she should get. I point to the one with the ice-cream cone, and I watch as Joan pays for her paintings, and Sabina packs them up carefully for her.
As we leave the stall, I try the phone number that Sabina gave me but, just as she warned, nobody answers. But it doesn’t matter. I can try again later.
I actually have Theresa’s number.
We head back into the city centre on the bus to find somewhere to eat. We end up in the Bullring, a huge shopping centre next to the train station, where we have sushi for lunch. Joan keeps putting the last slice of sashimi – whatever it is: salmon, tuna, squid – on to my plate, even when I protest. I keep wondering – is it possible? Does she like me? What if I just ask her? Each slice of sashimi melts silently into my mouth, and the words are held there, on the tip of my tongue.
After we’ve eaten lunch, we still have time to kill before we need to catch the train up to Manchester, so we wander round the Bullring mall for a bit, dipping in and out of shops.
My phone buzzes while we’re looking through some clothes racks, and I see it’s a text from Ada.
I knew Ada would be into the orange lipstick.
“This would look good on you, I think,” Joan says, interrupting my thoughts. She’s holding up a white strappy dress with a low back.
It’s cute. Definitely something that would fit right into my wardrobe. But that’s the problem, maybe. The niggling sense that there’s something wrong with the outfits I currently own has been growing.
“Oh, you think so?” I say. “I’m not gonna buy anything, though. I don’t really have much spare money to spend on clothes right now.” I try to redirect the focus of the conversation. “Do you shop in the men’s section?”
“Yeah, mostly. It’s easier to find things that fit me in Hong Kong. I’ve tried looking at clothes here, but I’ve given up.”
“When did you start dressing like this?”
“Oh well, in Hong Kong, a lot of lesbians do. There were girls who wore stuff like this at school. I looked to the TBs, and I thought that I needed to start dressing like them, to broadcast the signal that I’m interested in girls. And it turned out that I actually felt so much more comfortable in these clothes than I ever did in a skirt or a dress, so that was great.”
“TBs?”
“Tomboys.”
“Oh. Like butches?”
“Yeah, I guess. I’m not sure if these identities exactly map on to, well, Western identities. But yeah, that’s probably close. I really look up to butches too, as you can probably tell.”
I flick through hangers without really paying much attention to what’s on them. My heart is deep in this conversation, like it’s taken root in it and is absorbing all the nutrients it needs from Joan’s words. The other day, Joan showed me a picture of her group of friends and pointed out her ex, who was wearing a black lace dress in the photo.
“So your ex-girlfriend, what is she?”
“I think some people would call her a TBG. A tomboy’s girl.”
I giggle. I can’t help it. It just sounds so strange to my ears. But, if I’d grown up in Hong Kong, this would be how I would understand queer women too. Tomboys and their girls.
Joan frowns at me, and I stop laughing. “There are also girls who identify as ‘pure’, so they’re feminine and they’re attracted to other feminine girls.”
“Wait, so TBGs only date TBs and ‘pures’ only date other ‘pures’?”
“Yeah.”
“And TBs? They only date TBGs?”
“Yeah, strictly speaking. But, to be honest, a lot of people I know don’t really fully identify with any of these labels. They feel a bit old-fashioned. ‘No label’ has become another label that a lot of us use instead.”
At first I think I understand. That this is the equivalent of those people who are, like, “No, I don’t want to label myself – I’m just human,” and have inevitably created a category of their own. I respect their choice not to label themselves, and I would be delighted if one day there’s no need for labels at all but, as long as I’m marginalised for being queer, I’m always going to find comfort and strength from knowing that there’s a word for who I am, and people out there who share the same identity. Bisexuality has a history and a community, and that inspires me.
But I suppose this is different to what Joan’s talking about. ‘No label’ seems more like how Ada chooses to identify as queer because she doesn’t wholly vibe with other words in the queer vocabulary, and she likes how the word ‘queer’ celebrates being different and outside the norm, outside the definitions of society.
If all I could choose to identify as was TB, TBG or pure, I would definitely sidestep those and go for ‘no label’ too.
Joan continues. “Personally, I like TB just because something about it resonates with me, and it’s what I started out identifying as because I was dressing like the TBs that I knew at school. But it’s not as if I’m only attracted to girls with long hair who wear make-up and dresses.”
“You’re not?”
My heart feels suddenly as weightless as a moonbeam. What if I don’t want to be so feminine any more? Is it possible that Joan likes me, and would it be possible that she’d still like me if I didn’t have long hair, didn’t wear dresses?
“No,” Joan says, scratching the back of her neck as her shoulders hunch in embarrassment. “I was very into one of the other TBs at school. But she’s mostly only interested in TBGs.”
“Is she the one in the picture you showed me the other day?”
Joan ducks behind a different rack of clothes before answering. “Yeah.”
I make Joan show me the picture again and point out the girl, and I tease her about it. Joan smiles and hides her face behind her hands.
“Her loss,” I say, shrugging.
Joan turns away, feeling the fabric of a blue-and-white striped shirt, rubbing it between her thumb and forefinger.
“Hey, do you remember when we were little, and I was such a … naam zai tau?” I ask.
“How could I forget? You were a little style icon.”
“What? Really?”
Joan laughs. “Yeah. I was like… Wow, I wished I’d dressed like Elsie back then. What stopped me from doing that? I guess my parents just really liked buying all this girly stuff for me to wear, and I never really expressed my own opinion much. Whereas you were probably a tyrant.”
This makes me feel light-headed, like I’ve drunk too much cold, fizzy Coke. It’s a rush of pleasure, I realise, that Joan used to admire me in this way.
“I wasn’t a tyrant.”
But, in truth, I don’t really remember. Until this summer, I’d completely forgotten about being a naam zai tau as a child. I don’t remember telling my parents that I wanted all those boys’ clothes. But I must have. Surely they hadn’t dressed me like that of their own accord. I remember how unrecognisable I was in the old family photos I looked through the other day. I honestly would have thought the child in them was a boy if I didn’t know better. The short hair, the mischievous grins and most of all the posture – I had such arrogantly boyish stances in the photos, feet planted firmly apart and arms crossed, in my baggy cargo shorts and white muscle tee. Honestly, tiny me had some swagger.
“But you recognised me,” I say to Joan. “I must look so different.”
“You recognised me too,” Joan says.
“Yeah. Well. You… I still thought about you a lot. I never imagined you’d grow up to become a butch lesbian – sorry, a TB – but somehow, the moment I saw you, some part of my brain knew, and it seemed instantly right that you should look like this. Sorry, that sounds ridiculous, but… I’m just so glad you are who you are now. You just seem so completely … self-assured. It’s amazing.”
Joan shakes her head, bending down to check out a pair of lemon-yellow trainers. “I… Actually, I searched for you on social media. That’s how I knew what you looked like now. I was thinking about you too. Like I said, I wanted to see you again. I was planning to get in touch.”
“Oh.”
So Joan didn’t recognise me by some magical intuition. Of course not. But she had been thinking about me. I knew that already but I hadn’t really allowed myself to think much about it.
Now I’m picturing her scrolling through photos of me on the internet.
She checks her watch. “Maybe we should think about heading over to the train station?”
I check my watch too. “Oh yeah. Sure. Let’s get going.”
And the whole way to the train station, and on the train, I still can’t stop wondering – does she like me in that way?
Do I like her in that way?
It’s evening by the time we arrive at Uncle Kevin’s place.
It isn’t Uncle Kevin who opens the door, though.
The man in the doorway is tall, white and ginger.
He looks just a little familiar. And then I think, Oh. It’s the stranger in the photos I found of that barbecue years ago in our garden. The summer Joan moved back to Hong Kong.
“Hello! Elsie! And Joan! Hello, hello. Welcome. Oh, Elsie, it is so good to see you again. Do you remember me at all?” His Scottish accent takes me just as much by surprise as his presence.
He spreads his arms, ready to envelope me in a hug, just as Uncle Kevin, in an apron with a photo of a golden retriever on it, steps into view behind this stranger.
“David, I told you to let me answer the door.”
Kevin’s Hong Kong accent has always been a little more pronounced than my parents’. I smile to hear it, even though I’m still confused.
“You were busy with the … salmon or something,” David says. “I wasn’t going to keep our guests waiting.”
Kevin comes forward. “Sorry, sorry. Elsie, so nice to see you. And Joan, lovely to meet you. Elsie, I’m not sure if you remember David?”
David. His Scottish accent… A memory, long buried, unearths itself. This is David, your uncle’s friend. Somebody had said that to me. My mum? The barbecue was so many years ago. I was only eleven. “Um. Kind of? Just a little?”
“Right. Well. David is my … partner.”
Kevin clears his throat but, even before he clarifies his statement, the meaning of it slides through me, a sugar cube dropped into a cup of tea, dissolving into every part of me. There isn’t a cell in my body that thinks David is Kevin’s business partner. But Kevin clarifies, anyway. “My husband.” He bobs his head nervously as he flips my world like a pancake.
Uncle Kevin is married to a man.
Joan’s hand presses against my back. It’s the only thing holding me up, a lone, sturdy pillar supporting a collapsing roof. “Nice to meet you too, Uncle,” she says. “Thank you for letting us stay over.”
“I hope you two haven’t eaten.” Kevin rubs his hands together and cracks his knuckles. He’s still nervous. Because I haven’t said anything yet. “I’ve been cooking.”
“Yes, quite a feast,” David says, also rubbing his hands together. “You girls better be hungry.”
“I’m starving,” Joan says, her voice too cheery and about an octave higher than normal. She pushes me gently. I need it because, without that pressure propelling me, I’m going nowhere, a car with its back wheels stuck in a ditch.
I move beyond the doorway mechanically, nudging my feet out of my soggy black canvas shoes. I’m not taking anything in. David’s freckled and bearded face is superimposed upon everything else in my vision.
Kevin follows me into the living room. Joan’s probably still unlacing her boots, and David’s with her. But Kevin is hovering round me and running his hand up and down his arm with frenetic energy. “Elsie. Hey. I know it’s probably a bit of a surprise…”
“Why did nobody ever say anything to me?” I say.
It’s possible that I’m actually shouting. I don’t know how to control the volume of my voice. I’m not here. I’m enveloped inside my shock, the exploding star of it pulsing and white.
“Your parents didn’t want me to,” Kevin says quietly. “Anyway, we haven’t been married long. Only a year.”
“But you must have been going out with him before that.”
“Yes. We’ve been together for many years. But your mum and dad thought it was best if we didn’t tell you.”
All this time. I hadn’t known. My parents kept it from me.
“You’re upset,” Kevin says.
It occurs to me finally that he probably thinks I’m upset because he’s gay. But of course that’s not why at all. I grapple for the words to tell him this but none come to me, so instead I say, “I’m not upset. Can I please have some water?”
“Of course.” Kevin disappears and reappears with a glass.
I sit down at the table and down the water in one go, suddenly desperately thirsty. I wasn’t intending to slam the glass on the table, but that’s what it sounds like. Slamming.
Joan comes into the living room and carefully sits down next to me, and I manage to say, at last, “I just wish I’d known earlier. I’m happy for you and David. I don’t understand why I couldn’t have been told about this. I should’ve come to the wedding. Wait – did you not invite my parents?”
“We didn’t really have one,” Kevin says. “Just a simple ceremony with a few friends. We’re not the wedding type. I’ve been married before and… Well, you know. But your mum was there.”
I’m shaking. My mum was there but she barred me from something that would’ve meant so much to me. “I would’ve loved to have been there. If I wasn’t told about it before, why am I allowed to know about it now?”
“I’ve always wanted to tell you,” Kevin says, putting his hand on my arm. “And you’re old enough now. You’re eighteen; you’re heading off to uni soon. We shouldn’t be hiding this from you any more. When you messaged me to ask if you could come up here and stay with us, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to tell you everything. I had a chat with your mum, and she agreed that it was time.”
I want to retreat to a dark room and lie down and process this alone. But there are still so many questions in my head.
Joan has acquired a bowl of pistachios from somewhere, and she offers it to me. I take a handful just as David walks in with a steaming mug and sets it down in front of her. He goes to stand behind Kevin, his hands on Kevin’s shoulders, and he looks like a giant.
He’s my uncle too.
I prise a pistachio shell apart. “Does Po Po know?”
