Loverboy Butch, page 10
Thankfully, it seems as though Dean shares at least some of my awkwardness. She blows out a big breath, ousting all the air from her lungs, before answering.
‘It is. At least, not until I know someone.’
‘Oh, okay, so you’re-’
‘Demi. Yes. Shit, why is it so fucking weird to come out as an adult. I’ve seen you arse-naked. I’m pretty sure I have a memory of you peeing your pants.’
‘What?! How is that relevant? And also when?’ I am, impossibly, even more mortified by the surprising direction this conversation has taken.
‘Oh, you were small. What I mean is that I know plenty of shit about you. I know you; this shouldn’t be this weird.’
‘Well, in future, I’d love it if we could leave my infant nudity and incontinence out of adult conversation unless entirely relevant to the point.’
‘Right, sorry.’
‘But, for the record, it’s not just you. In the past two years, I’ve come out to literally hundreds of strangers, and not once have I felt as awkward about it as I did when visiting the little TESCOs by my parents’ house, where I had to explain pronouns to Big Kenny.’
‘Oh my god, how did he take it?’ The question is equal parts fascination and trepidation. We’ve both known Big Kenny for twenty years, and we used to be allowed to walk to the shop hand-in-hand to buy a magazine and chocolate milk each for a sleepover.
‘Pretty well, actually. It turns out he’s got a cousin with a trans kid, although he got their pronouns muddled up a few times, so it was unclear what he was implying.’
‘Sometimes gender is unclear. I mean, look at you.’
‘Look at me?’ I smirk.
‘Well, you look so…classical boy and yet you’re not.’
‘Is that your way of subtly suggesting I might be a trans man, stopping by non-binary as a way station?’
‘Jesus Christ! No! No, sorry, that is not what I meant.’ The panic is clear in her voice, and I realise just how freaked out Dean is by the idea that I don’t think she’s on board with my gender.
‘It’s alright if that’s what you are suggesting. You wouldn’t be the first.’
‘Fuck. Humanity is crap. That’s such a terrible thing for you to be so blasé about.’
‘I won’t argue with that.’
‘I just mean that gender defies clear outlines. It’s fluid for some people but rigid for others. Is it a sliding scale, a graph, a Venn diagram?’
‘Fuck me, you are a nerd. A gender Venn diagram.’ I suppress my laughter to make it through the conversation. ‘I guess you’re right. It’s all a muddle of words and feelings that mean one thing to some people and something else to others. To answer the unintended question. I’m not a boy. I’m just me. Femininity is attractive, but the word “she” makes my skin feel too tight on my body. “He” kinda leaves me indifferent. I don’t hate it, but I’m not sure it’s the most accurate. “They” is just the concise way to refer to me, I guess. Mostly I just identify as butch.’
‘Butch?’
‘Yes,’ I grin. ‘As long as I’m being perceived as butch, everything else is kind of immaterial.’
There are a few moments of tranquillity as my words disperse towards the ceiling. I catch the distant sound of the kids hollering in the garden, and one of the twins arguing with my brother. It’s nice, normal. It’s kind of how I wish my life had always been: Dean and I hidden away together, our families near enough to feel present but not crowding our space, me knowing myself, Dean seeing it, sharing herself with me. I think, fleetingly, that this is the life I should have had if the world were better.
‘You’re so different now.’ Dean says, turning on her side to face me again, and the casual beauty of her knocks the air out of me again. ‘Not your gender. That part tracks. But you know yourself now; you’re so much more confident and worldly. You fit yourself. Your personality… filled out. I like it.’
Without warning, I feel as if my heart might burst, scattering Normandy with thousands of pieces of Dexter confetti. I don’t get a chance to process what that might mean because Rami is calling up the stairs for us to help with dinner, and I bury the feeling down to examine it later from my sleepless holiday chaise.
Chapter Twelve
Dean
Life at the Château is perfection. I have never understood the word blissful until this holiday came along.
Yes, the kids are rolling around on the grass, trying to leapfrog over one another’s bodies like they’re on the Total Wipe Out course, and every few hours, either set of parents gets too lovey-dovey and has to be yelled out to stop snogging, but, if I ignore my family, I am the most at peace I have ever been.
The last two days have included sangria and swimming, and I’m steps away from carving my name into one of the squashy loungers by the indoor pool, where I spend more time napping under my book than I do reading it. It’s glorious.
The kidney-shaped pool is ensconced in a warm bubble of glass, complete with miniature palm trees. It curves completely around, more sunroom than greenhouse, making it the perfect temperature late into the night.
I’m almost entirely contented, almost. There’s still that mild scratching guilt in the back of my mind.
I called Callie after dinner on Saturday and broke whatever we had off. I did it alone, knowing that the girls would ask me why and Dex would look at me with that same frustrating sympathy that makes me wish I could go back to hating them. To say that she took it badly would be an exaggeration, but I also wouldn’t describe it as going well.
There were no tears, no begging or wailing, just a strange, stilted silence from a generally chatty woman. She asked why, and I had no clue what to say. I still don’t. It’s not like there’s someone else; that would be too simple. She didn’t do anything wrong; I didn’t do anything wrong either, although I kinda wish I did just to have something to point at and or blame. I just didn’t care about Callie the way I should.
Which is what I told her. She said she got it, but I could practically hear the wounded puppy dog eyes she was making through the phone. Now, I silently bully myself about it while soaking in the sun or laughing with my extended family.
At present, the mums, Priti, Pom, Cami, Nora, Poppy, and I are all leisurely floating around the Olympic-sized swimming pool. An unofficial conclave of the girls gathered to help my sister contemplate her grand romance with David.
They’ve been together for three years, living with one another for two, and he’s started dropping incredibly unsubtle hints about marriage in the last six months. I foresee an engagement ring by New Year’s, but the room is divided.
‘Twenty-five is too young to get married.’ Pom states with her typical brand of self-righteous assertiveness. ‘You want to know who you are before you sign up to spend forever with someone else.’
Mum clucks her tongue, and I can tell she’s about five seconds away from whipping out my sister’s government name.
‘I don’t know,’ Nora adds, pulling her heart-shaped sunglasses down her nose to look around us. ‘I don’t think you ever truly stop developing as a person. So if you’re sure you love David, you can say yes without rushing into wedding planning right away.’
Nora is nice. We aren’t close because she pretty much started popping out kids as soon as she arrived on the scene, but that is the typical answer of a white woman. I know my family, and the second that one of us is engaged, both sets of grandparents will descend with expectations and family traditions.
Mum and Dad are very lax about faith. They do what my Dad jokingly calls ‘the buffet tasting’ of it all. Given that she comes from a Hindu family and he from a Muslim family, they met in the UK (the land of Christian-leaning atheists), and that neither of them believes much in anything, my childhood was a charming hodgepodge of half-practised faiths. We celebrate everything, but somehow I feel detached from all of it. The girls and I know history, we recognise traditions, but there’s very little indication that we’ll pass those on to our children if we have them.
It was a point of contention with my maternal grandparents when we were all younger. They don’t visit often, Newcastle is a long train ride for two elderly people who refuse to drive, so we used only regularly to see them around Diwali, but I know they were pissed to find out we saw Dada and Dadu every week, and to find out we also celebrated Eid with them. I’m unsure if this was strictly a religious grievance or, more likely, an annoyance that Dad’s parents lived closer and got to see us more often.
Regardless, you can bet that when the family engagements start, the twins and I won’t have the easy, breezy secular time Nora is imagining.
Judging by the way she starts trying to explain how hard it is to hold people off on wedding planning, Poppy feels the same.
She would know. Poppy and Archer might have three kids, but they aren’t married. I was in my early teens when this drama went down, so I don’t recall too many details, but I know that she comes from a strict catholic family, and they still aren’t too happy about the absence of a ring.
‘It’s one thing to know you love someone and another thing entirely to get married, Pri. If you aren’t ready for that step now or aren’t ever, that doesn’t make your love for David mean any less.’
‘Wise words,’ Mum says from the edge of the pool, splashing her feet in the teal water.
Pom and I exchange looks, recognising that, although Mum won’t offer an opinion, she’s weighing the conversation to indicate how she approves.
‘You’re not allowed to get married! You’re our baby, Priti. If you get married, it means we-’ Serena gesticulates a finger wildly between her chest and Mum’s, ‘are old. Are you calling us old?’
We all giggle at that.
‘Speak for yourself.’ Mum says indignantly. ‘I’m still on the ingénue side of sixty.’
‘No one would dare call you old,’ Poppy says from her inflatable chair.
‘Not to your faces anyway.’ Pom and I quip in unison.
Serena whacks her arm through the water, affectionately smothering us with a tidal wave, but poor Cami gets taken down right along with us.
All three of us retaliate until the whole collection of women comes away, drenched, and screaming for a truce.
‘Where was all your care for your babies when you just tried to drown us?’ Pri cries, pulling her damp hair into a bun on the top of her head. ‘Baby my arse!’
‘Yeah,’ Pom mirrors the action but with a French braid instead. ‘What about Cami? She’s the youngest. Isn’t it time we pass that title down?’
‘No, no.’ Serena wraps an arm around her eldest granddaughter’s neck and squeezes her into a surprisingly effective headlock. ‘Cami is my grandbaby. You girls are part of the original babies. Grandbabies get different rules; you all know that.’
It’s strange to watch how Mum and Serena’s lives have differed. They aren’t a full year apart in age, a few years younger than their respective husbands, and remarkably similar, and yet Serena is a firmly established grandmother, with a veritable brood of children to dote on whilst mum’s most reasonable grandchild-bearing prospect is…me? She shouldn’t get her hopes up anytime soon.
At this rate, Priti might be the only one who produces any more Ashraf children. Pom and I are increasingly likely to become the weird old aunts from Practical Magic by the day.
‘Marriage isn’t the final boss of a relationship anyway,’ I conclude, desperate for a conversation change. ‘Look at Dexy.’
‘It’s Dexy again, now is it?’ Pom hisses in my ear, low enough that only I hear, and I bat her away with my palm.
She ducks under the water to avoid the furthest reach of my hand, and I do my best to tune her smug smile out when she re-emerges.
‘What do you mean?’
I’m very aware that the chattering crowd has fallen quiet. Every pair of eyes locked on me. As though they think I’m about to pull back the curtain on some grand secret.
The pressure of saying the right thing, making a good point, but not telling them something Dex would be uncomfortable with the full congregation knowing, squeezes in on me.
‘Accha, listen. Dexy kept listening to what was expected of them; they’d been with Khloe a long time, and marriage felt like the enviable next step, but just because a relationship seems ready for marriage doesn’t mean both people in it are or that it’s the right choice for that love.’
‘And you know this, how Miss I-never-intend-to-settle-down?’ Priti asks.
‘It’s not that I never intend to settle down. I just don’t have time for it.’ My words come out with an unintended edge.
Pom joins the rabble, floating through on an inflatable flamingo.
‘I think you’re both focusing on the wrong part of it. Isn’t it fucked up that we have to ‘settle’ at all?’
Mum rolls her lips and looks at Serena with a melodramatic frown. ‘Re, you’re going to have to let me in on some of that grandchild action. With these three, I might never get an heir.’
‘An heir?!’ the three of us repeat, indignantly.
Just like that, the tension dissipates, and everyone is laughing again. The Carpenter-Browns’ in-laws move on to asking Cami about her boyfriend. We see pictures of a slightly scrawny white boy, his hair long and wildly curly, as he runs across a football pitch and hear about the teenage drama of him being her ex-best friend’s new best friend’s ex-boyfriend’s cousin and how they had to hide their relationship in the third-period maths class they shared with them.
If I’m being honest, I lost the reasoning for the need to conceal the relationship somewhere in the trail of teens involved, but it’s nice to see Cami open up, and teenage angst is reliably amusing.
She’s showing us what she wore to her college farewell drinks, and, sure enough, in the background of a handful of photos is a blonde girl giving the happy graduated couple the filthiest side-eye I’ve seen in years.
We stay in the water until we’re all nice and prunish, the glass-domed ceiling trapping us in a warm bubble of summer heat even as evening sets in. People slowly trickle out to shower or dry off or help with dinner until it’s just me, parked back in my lounge chair, watching the sun decline overhead from the safety of inside.
It strikes me as strange that I have never been on a relaxing holiday. Camping trips used to be yearly, a handful of holidays across the country to visit family and a two-day coach tour of Brussels in year eight. It made me feel so worldly at the time. A hundred children crammed into two coaches that drove overnight, with a single night in a hotel and made again before the following evening. Even sleep deprivation couldn’t stop me from feeling like a baller, the first family member to go abroad alone.
It never occurred to me that my family would surpass my travels with time. Priti and David go on European city breaks at least once a year to see different holiday markets or get away from the dreary British weather. Pom gets sent on all kinds of influencer trips now to sun-soaked resorts and grimy nightclubs in warmer climates.
My parents started taking holidays when the girls moved out. Little trips to bask in their newfound freedom. It’s embarrassing to admit how little I’ve seen of the world. I’ve been so focused on school—my BA, then my MA, then my PhD and spending all my time climbing the work ladder. I went from cashier to banker to training as an accountant during my holidays. There never seemed to be the opportunity to put that all on pause for a week and take myself to a different country to breathe. Shit, there never seemed to be the time to have drinks or make friends or have fun.
I’m trying to think of the last time I did something for myself that wasn’t tinkering around with my truck. I love working on cars; it clears my brain. Locating the problem, examining it, knowing it has to have a clear solution, getting the right part, taking the old one out, replacing it with the new, and watching the machine gain new life again. It’s beautiful. It’s logical. It’s thera-fucking-putic.
It’s how I wish I could spend all of my time. But that isn’t how the world works. I need a job, something that can make real money, something that can pull me out of poverty, whether it makes me happy or not. Accountancy does that, and with my PhD, I could progress to something bigger. Build a career.
That’s what I’ve been telling myself anyway.
That’s why I don’t take holidays and I don’t have time to relax. Except I’m exhausted, and I can’t help but wonder how long I’ve been running on fumes without noticing.
Other people have time to take a break, to make friends, to find a partner if they want one. Most adults have a well-rounded life, boxes they check off and wants that they voice. I have none of that. I have work, school, and a family that begs me to open up to them. I had Callie, and I used her to scratch a sexual itch, and, do you know what? Not once was it worth it. That girl could not find my itch, even with clear and concise directions.
Fuck.
I stretch out my spine, letting my muscles pull and roll as I stand. I cocoon myself in the plush fabric of the towel and turn back towards the house.
I’m gonna need more alcohol to process these kinds of thoughts.
Chapter Thirteen
Dex
‘It looks like Tangled,’ is Parker’s grand observation as we walk around the winding streets of Mont Saint-Michel.
‘Actually,’ Meggie’s ears perk up, and I assume she’s about to monologue on her favourite Disney movie, but she throws us a curveball. ‘The kingdom of Corona was based on the commune of Mont Saint-Michel. As well as providing a key structural influence for Sleeping Beauty’s castle.’
We look at our niece and then glance at each other, eyebrows inching towards our hairlines.
‘When did you become an expert in castles?’
‘And where did you learn that scary tour guide voice?’ I follow up.
I don’t catch what she says as she walks away, but I can feel the weight of her pre-teen exasperation and smirk at my brother.
