Golden Boy (42 page)

Mum’s not looking at me. I panic. She’s not looking at me!

I look over to my right. One nurse is above me, leaning against the wall. She is watching me carefully. When I look at her, she comes over to me.

‘Alright, Max?’ she asks.

I open my mouth. I have to say it. I have to tell someone. Fuck. I find it so hard to talk to strangers about this. I never have before. Shit.

Then, suddenly, there is a flash of blue to my left, and Mum is there. Thank fuck.

I give the nurse a small nod and a weak smile. She squeezes my hand, and turns slowly away from me, and I wait until she has walked away, down the other end of the room, watching the doctor.

I turn to my left. ‘Mum,’ I whisper.

She frowns at me questioningly.

I gesture. A minute movement with my head and mouth that signals ‘come here’.

She comes over and dips her head down to me. ‘What, Max?’

She touches my hair. She looks non-human in the mask. My eyes look down.

I have to say something. But no words are coming. I feel myself getting fainter, moving away from consciousness and reality.

I have to say something.

I look up at her.

‘Mum,’ I whisper.

It’s the only thing I can say.

‘Mum . . .’

But she gets it. Her eyes widen, my eyes beg her, and Mum nods. She looks over at the doctors, then back to me.

‘I can’t, Mum. I can’t. I need more time, Mum . . .’ I murmur. She nods again, stroking my hair across my forehead, and I slip off to sleep.

I
am in the recovery room, wearing sweat pants and a hooded jumper, trying to look not like myself.

Max is looking unlike himself too. I’ve always thought of him as such a confident, successful young man: a leader, a reliable person, a mature person, particularly lately, with how he has dealt with all of this, how little he has complained.

But in the bed, he seems to be a child again, his hair ruffled on the pillow, asleep more deeply than simple sleep, pale and vulnerable. His lips are parted, his skin is hairless. He seems to have sunk not simply into the bed, but back through the last five years. He looks eleven to me.

I stroke his hair, feeling a peculiar mix of ownership and intrusiveness, holding my child without his knowing.

I should have been here for the operation, but I couldn’t be, for Max’s sake, because someone would have known me. We were worried, as it was, that someone would recognise Karen. We thought me going would have been too much of a risk. There is always someone who will have a quick visual memory of my face on their paper, or on the evening news broadcast from Oxford. It flits across their face like a shadow, followed by a light, and then they move towards me, shake my hand, look with keen interest at the faces of the people around me. At my family.

Perhaps I should never have run. Perhaps I should have let politics go when I knew I had a family that needed protecting from the limelight, like Karen let go of vying for the top spot when she knew the boys needed her at home. She always found work easier than me, and perhaps we should just have taken each other’s roles. But she was their mother, and somehow, as modern and educated as we were, it seemed to make more sense for Karen to take the more active parenting role. Even when we knew that sometimes she could not handle it. She could have had my job. She could have already been an elected MP. That’s the thing about Karen: logic, academics and objectivity always came easily to her. She never had to try to be the best barrister we had; she just was. But achieving a balance between objectivity and the subjectivity at home was always hard for her. She felt every blow Max felt, but keener than he did, because she saw the bigger picture, knew what it would mean to him growing up, knew how people would treat him. Max’s happiness has always been more important to her than, really, anything.

But this meant that she could not make medical decisions for him when he was born, found it hard to take care of him without worrying she was hurting him and making the wrong choices for him. After those first few years of turmoil, Karen found a coping strategy. When things go wrong, she sits back, being too objective, too cold. It’s not her fault. She didn’t have a real mother figure growing up. She didn’t expect to have an intersex son. Everybody copes in the way they were taught to cope.

Not very many people see it, but cool Karen Walker has a huge, warm, endlessly giving heart, and it beats almost entirely for our children.

She was wary of the campaign, and she was right to be. The work for the campaign is taking me further away from my family when I thought it would bring us closer, and I feel myself using it as a barrier, using it to distance myself when I don’t want to comment on what Max is going through, what he should do.

I am a politician, at the end of the day. I don’t like to announce an opinion until I have properly formed one. The only thing I can honestly say to Max is that I don’t know what he should do – about the hysterectomy, about the gender reassignment procedure, about anything – so I haven’t said anything to him.

It has been Karen driving us towards the operations, because she knows time is running out, and I’ve been thankful to her for taking the reins on this occasion, for being the strong one. As I watch Max sleep, I realise I need to be there more, for my children, for my family. You cannot take your family for granted.

I had thought we would all come together on the campaign. I thought the kids would be proud, I thought Karen would be excited. Perhaps I didn’t think it through enough. Perhaps I didn’t think a lot of things through, as Karen said the other night in bed.

‘Did you ever think about what would happen if Max had children?’ she murmured, her back to me.

‘I wanted him to have the option.’

‘Seriously, Steve?’

‘He could have used a surrogate. He could have grown up wanting to be a girl,’ I offered diplomatically. Then, when she was silent, I said, ‘Karen, I didn’t know this would happen.’

‘We should have made these decisions for him.’

‘I don’t think we should have.’

‘Don’t you? This is our fault.’

‘It’s—’

‘It’s our fault.’

‘These things happen. Teenage pregnancies happen.’

‘This isn’t just a teenage pregnancy.’

‘How is it different, Karen?’

‘Because . . .’

‘Because?’

‘Because he’s a boy!’

‘What do you want me to say, Karen?’ I grunted. ‘Of course I didn’t imagine it like this. Of course I didn’t!’

‘Keep your voice down!’

‘Of course I didn’t want this for him, but now it’s happened, we have to let him make his own choices.’

‘He doesn’t know what he wants. You don’t know what you want.’

‘And what do you want?’

‘I want him to have a good, normal life. I want him to not be treated differently.’

‘Doesn’t that sound so cynical? So awful? Do we care that much about what other people think?’

‘That’s a strange question for
you
to ask.’

I ignored the remark. ‘Making decisions based on what other people think just seems plainly wrong to me.’

‘Plainly wrong? You get to wander around on your high horse being the hero politician and you don’t see how our lives are! You don’t live the day-to-day life of a parent. You’re never here, and when you are here, you’re with Lawrence or Debbie. You don’t live like a regular person. You’re surrounded by sycophants and people who worship you.’

‘I thought you would be proud of me. You knew this is what I wanted. We talked about this years ago, in our twenties.’

‘Well, I was stupid in my twenties, Steve!’ Her voice was low and hoarse. ‘I was ignorant and young and I said things and wanted things without knowing what they would really be like. I had no idea what it would be like to raise a child with an illness, who needed privacy, who needed us both to be there.’

‘It was just an accident, Karen,’ I said quietly. ‘If we did anything wrong, it was not getting the doctors to figure out how Max’s fertility worked. If he had known, then he would have been careful.’

‘Just an accident . . .’ Karen muttered.

We were quiet for a moment, both lost in our thoughts.

I sighed regretfully, and spoke softly, trying to get her to understand how I was feeling and what I had been thinking. ‘I just want the world to accept Max the way he is, for him not to have to compromise one way or another. It’s not his fault he’s born this way. It’s not life-threatening, it’s not something that’s wrong.’ I turned to her. ‘Karen?’

She stood up.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Spare bedroom,’ she muttered.

‘I just want him to—’

‘I
don’t
want to talk about it,’ she snapped, her voice breaking and filled with tears. She left the room with her BlackBerry in hand.

I sigh, in the hospital room.

Max takes a long time to come around, which affords me a lot of time to think. I have not seen Karen here yet. One of the nurses suggested she might be in the canteen. I have a feeling she is avoiding me, and I choose not to disturb her.

Suddenly Max takes a deep breath in, which turns into a yawn, and his eyes open. He blinks, with a particularly unreadable expression in his eyes. I’m sitting back in the chair, slightly behind the head of the bed. He doesn’t notice me. His lips part, and he lowers his hand to his stomach, touches it and frowns, seeming dazed. He lifts the sheet.

‘Max?’ I say.

Karen comes in. She looks beautiful, but older than I remember her. I suppose I look older than I remember me. Her hair shines in the light, the blondes mingling with caramels and chestnut. I wish we wouldn’t fight. I wish I could talk to her. She moves over to Max with trepidation. Then she smiles at him.

‘Did you stop the termination?’ Max says.

‘What?’ I murmur, turning to him.

Karen pauses momentarily, faltering, her hand hovering in the air, halfway towards touching Max. Her hand stops hovering, and she retracts it. She shakes her head.

Max looks confused. ‘But you . . .’ His eyes flit from side to side and frown at Karen. ‘You . . .’ He stutters a little, then seems to realise something and he stares at Karen as if in horror. His mouth slowly opens at the same time as his face changes, the eyebrows frowning deeply in anger, the mouth buckling in sorrow, the eyes boiling from blank to furious.

‘No!’ he says, louder than before. ‘No! But you knew! You knew!’

‘Max!’ Karen says, her hands once again dancing in front of her.

‘NO!’ Max moans now, trying to sit up in the bed, but still groggy, gasping and holding his stomach. ‘NO!’

‘Max, I told them we weren’t going to have the rest of the operations,’ Karen says nervously, quickly, in a shrill voice. ‘I cancelled the appointment for the gender reassignment talk, the hysterectomy, everything. You can choose about all that in your own time. I just, we had to—’

‘I can’t believe you! I can’t believe you!’ Max protests.

‘What’s going on?’ I say, standing.

Karen shakes her head. ‘It’s for the best, honey.’ She stumbles over her words, becoming redder. ‘Now everything can go back to normal, and we can forget all about—’

‘I’m not normal! I’ll never be fucking normal! Can’t you get that into your thick head? Give me up now if you want something normal, because I’ll never be right for you!’ Max leans forward, snarling now, like a dog. ‘You knew what I was asking! You fucking knew!’

As Max is saying these words, I rush over to the door and shut it quickly.

‘Shh!’ I say, but Max and Karen don’t hear me. ‘Max, what’s going on? Everyone can hear you outside. Stop yelling.’

They ignore me, and Karen tries to put both her hands on Max’s yellow mop of hair.

‘Don’t touch me!’ he screams.

‘Please, Max,’ she says desperately.

I turn to her and notice how much she is shaking and how her hand flutters to her mouth and throat and back to try to touch Max, then away from him again.

‘What are you doing, Karen?’ I ask quietly.

‘I want her out,’ growls Max, not taking his eyes off Karen. ‘Get out!’

She shakes her head sadly. ‘I did it for your own good.’

‘I just wanted some fucking time, some breathing space!’ Max shouts. ‘How could you do that? That was my choice to make!’

‘It’s better this way, sweetie,’ Karen says softly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t call me sweetie!’ he says, as she walks towards him. ‘Get away from me.’

‘Max—’ she says, touching his hair.

He pushes her hands away and leans forward and screams so loudly that the water in the glass beside him ripples.

‘GET AWAY FROM ME!’