Golden Boy (44 page)

The entire time I’m thinking how I went to the hospital with something inside me and I came out alone, with nothing, as if nothing happened, with no choice or thought required from me. I’m a passive observer to the pain around me. I’m the fuse of the bomb. I don’t even light myself. I don’t choose when I go out. I don’t explode. I just am.

After Geography, I go to the common room. When I walk in the door, Olivia and Marc are snogging. I make a sick noise and go over to the lockers to dump my books. Kerry is there. She’s new.

‘Hi,’ she says, and smiles at me.

‘Hi,’ I say half-heartedly.

At first break, Marc and I went into town and got vodka and mixed it with orange, because it’s going to be our last day of term soon, and it’s nearly Christmas, so we thought, why not?

Now he thrusts it at me and we drink it all, going back and forth between us. I get drunk quicker because my stomach is empty. Carl refuses to join in because we have an exam later, even though it doesn’t even count.

Then Marc suggests we play spin the bottle, winking at Olivia like, ‘I can’t wait to see you lezz up’.

I say no at first, but then I see Sylvie. She walks in the door right next to us. I turn away from her quickly.

‘Hey, Sylvie,’ Marc says. ‘Do you want to play spin the bottle?’

My eyes flit over to her and I watch her from beneath my hair.

‘No thanks,’ she says to Marc, looking at me.

Marc shrugs and moves away to Olivia, leaving only Sylvie and me by the door.

Hey,’ she says. ‘Um, how are you?’

‘Great,’ I say. I’m embarrassed, trying to make a joke, but I lose faith halfway through and it comes out sulky.

She hesitates.

‘I meant, do you know what you’re gonna do?’

She looks slightly uncomfortable, and I think about how she reacted, how it was this big deal for her to have such a disgusting boyfriend.

‘I had an operation on Friday,’ I murmur in a low growl, then add sarcastically, ‘So you don’t have to worry about me anymore.’

She nods. ‘I wondered . . . when you weren’t in school. I’m so sorry, Max.’

I start walking away.

‘Wait.’ Sylvie catches my arm and I shrug her off. She looks flustered. ‘Wait, Max! Are you OK?’

‘I said I’m great.’

‘Let’s go somewhere we can talk,’ she says, reasonably, moving towards the door. She clearly expects me to follow, like the little sheep I am.

‘Forget it. It’s over,’ I say, meaning everything. That everything is over. ‘So you can just go back to normal and I’ll go back to whatever the fuck I am.’

‘Shit. I didn’t mean that “normal” thing I said on Thursday. I was just having a panic attack. I get them sometimes.’

‘I feel so sorry for you,’ I say coldly, and she stops talking abruptly. I look her in the eye, aiming at a defiant glare. ‘Have you told anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure? Not even your mum?’

‘No!’

My throat catches and I feel my face curling up miserably. ‘Swear you won’t.’

Sylvie frowns, watching me closely. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘Get lost,’ I reply lamely. I walk over to the game dizzily.

Marc looks up at me and beckons me over. ‘Come on, you twat.’ When I sit down next to him, he says more quietly, ‘What’s up with Sylvie?’

I shake my head. ‘Not going out anymore.’

I knew she couldn’t cope
, I think, taking the drink bottle from Marc. I knew it.

The real problem is me, anyway. Not her. I’m just tired of being in people’s lives. I make everyone hate everyone else. Everyone thinks I’m disgusting. I am disgusting. I’m a catalyst for hate and confusion. I just show up and fuck up everything. Look at Mum and Dad. I’m weak and cowardly and I don’t stand up for myself, just like Dad said. I’m weak.

I get paired up with the new girl, Kerry, in spin the bottle. We have to kiss in front of everyone. She grins afterwards.

‘You’re an incredible kisser,’ she says.

Marc laughs. ‘Practically every girl in our year knows that!’

Olivia looks over at me. It occurs to me that Marc might be jealous.

Good
, I think bitterly.

‘Max, it’s you again,’ Olivia says.

I look up. Kerry is giggling. The bottle has landed on me again, and we get off again.

The whole time Sylvie is watching and I feel bad, bad, bad. But at the same time I hate her. I hate everything that makes me remember.

Anyway. She’s better off not liking me.

‘Kerry’s kind of . . . um . . . a player, Max,’ says Maria, at the end of lunch, as we’re walking to our lockers. ‘I mean, seriously, she cheated on her last boyfriend at her old school loads. My brother told me. He’s friends with a guy who goes there.’

‘So?’ I say.

‘So, what about Sylvie? I thought you really liked her?’

I yank my bag out my locker really hard, so the whole row shakes. ‘What about Sylvie?’

‘You’re totally drunk,’ says Maria.

‘So?’ I ask, and laugh.

‘You’re an idiot,’ Maria says, affectionately but firmly, giving me a sisterly hug. ‘I dunno what’s going on with you, but I’m here if you need to talk, OK?’

I rub my eyes and nod.

‘OK, Max?’

‘OK.’ Maria shakes her head sadly at me and walks away. I hear her feet tap out of the common room and the door creaks shut. I don’t look up as she leaves.

Then I feel pissed at myself because I’m being so horrible to everybody, but I feel like I can’t stop, so I punch my locker really hard and hurt my hand. I look down and there’s blood on my knuckles, and a dent in the locker door, so I get out of there before someones comes to see what the noise was.

Everything seems to be carrying on. Except Mum is staying with her sister, Auntie Cheryl, and her husband, Uncle Charlie. I think she thinks I hate her. It’s half true.

She came back yesterday, on Sunday, to get some of her stuff. My aunt came with her. She clearly knew about everything that has been going on with me. I opened my bedroom door to see what was going on in Mum and Dad’s room, because I could hear whispering and things being moved, and Cheryl was stood at the door to their room. She turned towards me, and her face fell into lines of sympathy.

‘Oh, Max,’ she said. It’s an interesting thing about Mum, that she feels that, because I’m her kid, because I ‘belong’ to her, that she can make very personal decisions about my life, like who to tell my secrets to; when to come in my room without my permission and ‘tidy up’, i.e. mess with my stuff; whether to let surgeons operate on me when I’ve made it clear I don’t want the operation.

I know exactly what I would have done if she had stopped the operation, and she would have got her way in the end. I would have ummed and ahhed about it, like I always do about any decision, tried to talk to her and Dad a bit more about it, then panicked and had it anyway. So it would have been exactly the same as before. I wouldn’t have had the baby. I’d have been too scared and pathetic about how I felt, about wanting it a bit, about feeling so torn, worried about what everybody would think, and I would have freaked out and done what everyone wanted me to do. My body freaks me out, and hence . . . Hence, what? Hence I’m paralysed. I feel like nothing is ever going to change.

A bit later, Mum, again without my permission, pushed open the door to my room. When I saw her head peeking through, it took all my strength not to just jump off the bed and scream at her, shake her, hit her. She took away any control I have over my life. She took away my choice. Just like Hunter took away my control, my choices. Really, which one is worse? Just add her to the list of people who think they know what’s best for me. It’s almost full, with Hunter and all the doctors, but there’s just room for her too.

‘I don’t want to see you,’ I said immediately.

‘Max,’ she said. ‘I’m your mother.’

‘You’re not me.’

‘What?’

‘Are you me?’

‘Max,’ she said, placatively.

‘Fuck off saying my name like that! No! The answer is no! You’re not me! So you don’t know what it’s like. You shouldn’t choose for me, and you shouldn’t come in my fucking room without knocking!’ I shouted, barrelling towards the door. I shoved her out, and slammed it shut, narrowly missing her fingers.

‘Max, please!’ I heard her in tears on the other side of the door. ‘Please come out.’

Her voice sounded lower to the ground. I heard her weeping, and then Cheryl’s voice said softly, ‘Come on, Kaz. He just needs some time, you said so yourself. Come on, love.’

Then I heard the sound of floorboards – my mother getting up – and they shuffled away on the carpet, into Mum and Dad’s room, and shut the door.

I sat down against the wall next to the door and scratched my head back and forth until it hurt. Then I bit my knuckles until they hurt. You don’t know why you’re doing these things when you’re doing them. It just feels like you’re going crazy, that you have no control over what happens in your life or how you feel, and you have to do something to get the energy out, to get back in control. I took deep breaths, huffing them away. I sat on the floor and tightly held my knees with my palms, until I was calm again.

Sometimes when I need to let off steam, when I’m angry or upset or something, I play football. I’ve never been really good at letting out emotion. I’ve been thinking recently that Dad was right, that I don’t like to rock the boat.

I remember Mum leaving when I was little, but I didn’t know it was for two months. I guess the way I remembered it, it seemed like a few days to me. I was terrified she wasn’t going to come back, and afterwards I used to get scared a lot when she left the house, even if she was just driving down to Hemingway to get the shopping. I would sit, totally still, in the window, imagining horrible things, imagining that she would die and never get home or know how much I loved her. I would whisper, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy’, over and over again, like a little prayer. If I could just prove myself by being a good boy, by waiting for her, by not crying, by sitting quietly and whispersaying her name, then she would come back. I realise now that maybe this fear started after she left that time.

But Dad was wrong about one thing, because Mum is not really to blame, not alone. Really, I know I’ve always been scared of rocking the boat, because I always thought that being intersex was the thing that was difficult to cope with, and that if I piled anything else on top of that, everyone would stop loving me. Maybe my parents didn’t talk to me about being intersex because they didn’t want it to be an issue, just in the same way Hunter’s parents were trying to do the right thing when they told him I was intersex when he was young. Maybe they thought by introducing him to it at a young age, he’d grow up OK with it. But you can start out with all the good intentions you like and still everything can go wrong. Hunter and I, we both got confused.

I wish I could let all this out by running onto a muddy field and kicking a ball about, but I’m not playing football until January. Doctor’s orders. Marc and Carl think I had my appendix out. The teachers must know, though, mustn’t they? It feels like my secrets are leaking out as the circle of people who know widens. Mum got a note from Archie and gave it to the school office. I watched it being handed over, one of the last things I did with Mum. It was white and folded and slipped into an envelope, twirling through the air, as Mum presented it to the head teacher. The head teacher looked at it, then back at me, shocked. Her face said,
Oh, that’s why
.

Maybe I was just imagining it. I never asked Mum what the note said. I didn’t say a word to her.

It was going to be my last day on Friday for the Christmas holidays anyway, but after getting drunk yesterday, I get up on Wednesday morning and I get dressed into my uniform, then I sit on the floor in my room with my bag, feeling like nothing, like crap, exhausted. I’m supposed to leave for the bus at ten past eight but I can’t stand up. I physically can’t. I feel so tired.

I think back to what Sylvie said, about only leaving, only letting go when you’re done. I feel so done.

Dad comes in at half past eight. He says it’s OK. That I don’t have to go in if I don’t want to.

He waits.

‘Do you want to?’ he asks.

I shake my head.

He goes downstairs. I think he’s taken a day off work. Lawrence and Debbie aren’t here. No furious planning going on downstairs. Dad just sits in the living room.

At lunch he brings me tomato soup, like I’m sick. I don’t feel like eating, but I eat it because I don’t want him to feel bad. I’m such a hassle. I’m an emotional bomb for him and Mum now. I’m the child that, when they think about me, they think about what’s beneath my pants, they think of me having sex with someone, some stranger. When they think of me they think of gross words like: ‘genitalia’, ‘womb’, ‘phallus’, ‘gonads’. He’s being so nice to me. I feel bad that I can’t feel much for anyone right now. I feel bad that I don’t feel worse that I know Dad is lonely without Mum.

I shrug, in my head. I get selfish.

We’re all lonely
, I think. I’m always going to be alone.

I watch movies, endless DVDs. I don’t wash. My hair gets all greasy and looks almost light brown. I sit about in my boxers and a T-shirt. I lose a bit of weight.

It’s Friday afternoon when one of the movies finishes, and I get up. I’m bored. I think my body wants to move. I think about maybe watching
Con Air
in the living room, like I did with Dad one night.

I stand up out of bed. I’m wearing a grey T-shirt and blue boxers. I look at myself in the mirror vaguely. I hate what I see now. I look rough, and dirty, and ambiguous. Not quite androgynous. It’s not quite the right word. The right word is ambiguous. Once you’re aware of something you see it everywhere. Like how I was thinking about red-haired girls this summer, when everything was normal, when nothing had gone irrevocably wrong, and I saw them everywhere.

My dick in my boxers is too obvious. I put on long cotton jogging trousers. My chest isn’t big enough. I pull on a jumper. I sit on the floor and put on socks, because it’s cold.

‘Max!’

I wait.

‘Max!’

I hear Dad coming upstairs. He opens the door and the bright light from the hallway makes me shield my eyes.