The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone (18 page)

‘Dreams?’

I looked at my hands. I really didn’t want to open this box. ‘A baby,’ I said shortly. ‘And a mother. Anyway . . . it’s all in the past. We managed. We had to take care of Simon, who was a preschooler at the time. Later we went on to have another daughter.’ I smiled. ‘Kate. She is very much alive.’

‘And what did you feel when those children arrived?’

I had my stock answer ready. ‘Joy, of course,’ I said. ‘Pure joy.’

It was another lie; just one among the thousands, but it was the one that made me most ashamed. My joy at becoming a
father wasn’t pure at all. It was poisoned. I’ll never forget holding Simon in the moments after he was born. His cheeks were round, and his fingers were perfect, and he was a miracle. The love and wonder seemed too much to fit into my body, and came spilling out of me in tears. I never wanted to let him go. Never. Suddenly a midwife’s hands were around him, taking him away from me, giving him to Eilish. ‘Come on,’ she said, not even looking at me. ‘Let’s see how Mum does with feeding this little cherub.’

Eilish seemed to know instinctively how to breastfeed a baby. The pair of them were warm in the glowing cocoon of mother and child, Simon gazing up at her face as though she were a goddess. I should have adored Eilish at that moment, but all I felt was envy. I’ve never felt such envy. It soured and sickened me as I drove home alone to make proud fatherly phone calls.
Mother and baby doing well; yes, nine pounds four! Yes, she’s tired but very happy.
I despised myself, I ranted at myself, but I couldn’t turn off the bitterness. I felt myself slipping into a trough. It wasn’t Eilish who came down with postnatal depression; it was me. I ended up on antidepressants, seeing a counsellor.

I didn’t tell anyone about that envy—not Eilish, not our doctor, not the counsellor. I didn’t tell Ian Brotherton either. After all, I was lucky to be a parent. Sometimes I wondered whether Charlotte’s death was punishment for my ingratitude.

At last, Brotherton came to the subject of gender. I heard my voice droning on and on, digging up the oldest memories. My childhood seemed closer than it had in years. I was young again. I was confused and lonely. It was my first day at school.

‘You felt the boys’ cloakroom was wrong for you?’ he asked. ‘Why?’

‘Because I knew I was a girl.’

I could hear the laughter. I feared the laughter. I was alone.

‘My elder sister was the only one who didn’t laugh. Oh no, not our Gail. She was livid. At break time she thumped me in the stomach. Doubled me right over. She said if I ever made fools of
our family again, she’d put me down the offal pit on our farm and block up the hole. She said I would die down there and nobody would ever find me. I believed her.’

‘How old was this gentle soul?’

‘Gail? Ten. I was four. She was very big, and I was very small. She knew the offal pit was my nightmare place. When Dad did a home kill he used to drop the heads and guts and skin down there. She said I would rot away.’

He looked sickened. ‘And how did you respond to this threat?’

‘With terror. From then on, I had to hide my real self. I think it was my first bereavement. It didn’t stop me sneaking into my sisters’ rooms to play dress-ups but it had become a frightened, dirty thing. I thought I was the only boy in the world to feel like this. I had no idea there were others. There was no internet.’

I got up out of my chair and wandered to the window. The glass was old; it distorted the sky. There was a tiny courtyard out there where a fountain played. The walls were unusually high. To keep out prying eyes, presumably; or perhaps to keep in the shame.

‘I’m not a man who likes to wear women’s things,’ I said. ‘I
am
a woman. I’m a woman who puts on a man’s clothes, and speaks in a deep voice, and slaps other men on the back, and pees at a urinal through tackle that shouldn’t even be there. All of which, I guess, makes me a freak.’

Behind me, I heard Brotherton put down his pen.

‘Where do you see all of this taking you?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘We both know that there’s a million websites on this subject. There are books. I’m sure you’ve researched. I’m sure you have goals.’

‘I do.’ I turned around to face him. ‘But I’m afraid of being thrown down the offal pit.’

He smiled, and waited for more.

‘I’ve used the boys’ cloakroom—literally and figuratively—for the past half-century,’ I said. ‘Now I look at the life I have ahead
of me and I see that it’s finite. My father died last year. My own generation are starting to go down with heart attacks and cancer. I’m running out of time.’

‘What would you like to do about it?’

I knew the answer. I’d known it for fifty years.

‘I’d like to walk through that other door,’ I said.

Nineteen

Eilish

It was such a beautiful summer. Beauty can be cruel, can’t it? Through August, right into September, the countryside around East Yalton was chocolate-box. Day after day I woke, alone, to indigo skies and fields already baking in the heat. The cool waters of the Thames reflected barges with gardens and bright paintwork, and riverside pubs were full of families making the most of the heatwave. Luke and I should have been doing the same.

It’s the future you mourn most; the road you always thought lay ahead. People say,
You never know what’s around the corner
, and they all nod sagely, but they don’t really believe it. I was just as smug. I thought I knew exactly what lay around the corner for me: a long and contented retirement with Luke by my side. I had such plans! Now I’d rounded the corner, and my road had dropped off a cliff.

Life goes on. It has to. We had a new headmaster at Cottingwith High: Walter Wallis. Why would parents with the surname Wallis call their son Walter? He was
innovative
and
energetic
and
dynamic
. At least, that was how he described himself in his CV, and the interview committee were obviously taken in, because we were now saddled with this megalomaniac. I’d have sworn the man had ADD. And one of the innovative,
dynamic things he did was to insist that all teaching staff come in at the end of the holidays for a day’s professional development. I couldn’t think of a good enough excuse to get out of it. So, at eight-thirty on a September morning that was already promising to be a scorcher, I was sitting in the staff car park, summoning the will to get out of my car. Jim Chadwick, who headed the science department, swung in and parked beside me. I was delighted to see him.

‘Hello, my friend!’ he cried, hopping out of his little green MG. His roof was down. ‘Isn’t this a waste of a glorious day? Shall we play hooky?’

‘That’s very tempting.’

He waited as I fished around for my bag. ‘We could hire a skiff, and I’ll row you down the river. Have lunch at The Lock.’ He was warming to his theme. ‘Or, if you prefer, we could sit in a classroom all day, get dehydrated, and listen to Wally Wallis’s sidekick telling us about learning outcomes.’

Some people question the course their lives have taken. They torture themselves with speculation about what would have happened if they had turned left that day instead of right. What if they’d taken that job they were offered, back in 1995? What if they’d caught that train, been in time for that interview? I know women who’ve ruined their marriages by imagining the idyllic lives they’d be leading if only they’d married that other man. The other one always seems so much more alluring—so much less likely to have a potbelly, or moan about the cost of petrol, or bite their nails—than their ageing, boring husbands.

I never used to play this game. I couldn’t see the point. When I was a young marketing guru, I went with friends to see
Giselle
at the ballet. My ticket was for row K, seat 20. A man called Luke Livingstone happened to be sitting in row K, seat 21. He was embarrassed because the little machine that dispenses opera glasses stole his money. I lent him my set. He bought me a drink during the intermission. If that machine hadn’t been faulty, we might never have spoken; but it was, and we did, and that was
the end of it. I had this old-fashioned idea that marriage was permanent.

If I had been the type to play the
what if
game, though, it would probably have involved Jim Chadwick. There was an unmistakable spark between us, from the very first time he’d walked into the staffroom at Cottingwith High. He was wearing a blue-and-white-checked shirt, I remember, and it intensified the marvellous colour of his eyes. He had energy. I remember thinking he was . . . well, sexy. We gravitated together immediately. I had no intention of acting on this magnetic attraction, but all the same it made me feel alive. It made me feel young.

Years had passed since then, and the spark had turned into an easygoing—if vaguely flirtatious—friendship. Jim had arrived when Simon was in the sixth form, and he’d had a bit to do with both him and Kate. He also played the odd game of squash with Luke, as they were both in a league that used our school courts. He was a natural teacher, popular and able to control classes that defeated everybody else. He championed children with special needs, because he had a brother with Asperger’s. He celebrated with me when Nico was born; I commiserated with him when his marriage came to an end. It doesn’t surprise me that people are tempted to have affairs with their work colleagues—of course they are! They’re the ones who share in our daily lives. They see us in our element, doing what we do best. Our spouses see us with bed hair, in our dressing-gowns, emptying the cat’s litter tray. Domesticity isn’t erotic.

‘How’s your summer going?’ Jim asked now.

‘Too fast.’

‘You and Luke been away? I haven’t seen him on the squash courts for a while.’

‘Nope.’

I’d begun walking, and he fell in beside me. ‘How is the young chap? Still working eighty hours a week?’

Fortunately I didn’t have to answer, because we’d reached the classroom where the training was to be held. A gangly man
was writing an agenda on the whiteboard. It began with
8.45: Welcome and introductions.
The room was full of teachers holding coffee mugs. We greeted one another gloomily; all except Mick Glover, who taught maths and was always unreasonably bouncy. He travelled to school on a powered skateboard.

‘Morning, Eilish,’ he called. ‘Jim. There are a couple of seats over here.’

Jim and I were just sitting down when the headmaster came bustling in.

‘Donald is our facilitator today,’ Wally said, grinning fondly at the gangly chap as though he were some kind of pet. ‘Let’s get started, Don.’

It was a bit like being in an evangelical church. Donald strode up and down, waving his hands around as he talked about ‘facing in one direction’ and ‘tapping energies’. There were around twenty of us in there, and the fan wasn’t up to the job. It was a relief when Donald broke us into pairs, giving out chunky pens and paper, and exhorting us to ‘workshop this one’ before ‘coming back to kick our ideas around.’ He gave each pair a made-up scenario. Ours was about a teacher who lost his cool and grabbed a third former by the ear.

Jim and I managed to commandeer a shady spot on the edge of the quad. I sat at an octagonal picnic bench. He leaned down to use the drinking fountain.

‘
Workshopping
,’ I grumbled. ‘Who uses that word as a verb?’

‘Donald does.’ Jim splashed water on his face, then ducked to put his whole head under the stream. It darkened his fair hair. He sat down, dripping, on the other side of the table. ‘Has your new grandchild arrived yet?’

‘Not due for a couple of months.’ I’d picked up one of the big pens and was doodling as we talked. ‘Kate’s back from Israel. Broken up with the boyfriend.’

‘Great news! And how’s Luke?’

‘Shush. We’re meant to be thinking about this wretched child’s ear, or we won’t get a gold star.’

It took us about two minutes to address the scenario. We scribbled all over the paper in different colours to make it look as though we’d really tapped our energies. Then we got talking about Jim’s younger son, who was teaching in Ghana. It was pleasant to sit chatting in the dappled shade. It stopped me from thinking about Luke, and the road that had dropped off a cliff.

Jim had to nip into town during the lunch break. I fled to my room—a small space in a prefabricated block; not salubrious—and made a start on organising my resources for the coming term.

The afternoon’s session with Donald was more of the same. It finished at four, and was followed by a mass exodus to the car park. By now, I felt weary and low.

‘Well,’ said Jim, as we reached my car. ‘When I arrived this morning I had no idea what we were expecting to achieve today. And I still have no idea.’

‘Team building?’

‘It was certainly that. I’ve never seen such concord. We’re all absolutely as one in thinking that was a lot of old cobblers.’

I smiled half-heartedly.

‘You in a hurry?’ asked Jim. ‘Got time for a drink? It’ll be heaven on earth right now, at one of those riverside tables at The Lock. There’s a white wine spritzer waiting for you in a tall, chilled glass . . . Can’t you see the beads of condensation?’

‘That sounds wonderful. But not today.’

‘Sure you’re all right?’

‘Sure I’m sure.’

He smiled easily, raised his hand, and walked across to his car. I heard the electronic beep as it unlocked. Before getting in, he paused, looking back at me.

‘I’m here,’ he said, ‘when you’re not all right.’

Twenty

Luke

After weeks of heatwave, there was a hosepipe ban. The parks were full of sunbathers. Mirages shimmered above the roads, and the pavements were melting like toffee.

Each morning I put on my Luke mask and took the tube to Bannermans. To the young solicitors there, I was one of the old guard—staid and probably starchy. Each day I battled the urge to phone Eilish just for the selfish comfort of talking to her. And every evening, with the street door locked behind me, I freed Lucia from her hiding place. She was growing in confidence, step by step.