I am standing in a dim, cigarette-smelling corridor, looking at a lopsided door with peeling paint and a plastic sign nailed on that says "4E". In my hand is a set of keys. Larxene, strapped as usual to my chest, gurgles.
"Me too," I say. I unlock the door and walk into the tiny room behind the door. "Home," I say.
The room doesn't look much like a home. It looks more like part of a crack house, or a brothel. The carpet has a larger area of stains on it than its original colour, which may have been beige. The kitchen area, just a few feet of worktop, a microwave and a rusty pair of gas rings, is caked with a layer of grease visible from across the room. The entire room has a musky odour about it: so the first thing I do is open the windows, wide, to let a fresh breeze roll in while I unpack.
Outside, still in the corridor, is Axel and nine large cardboard boxes.
"You can go now, Axel," I tell him, picking up the first box, the one with the bedding in it (and underneath, my boy clothes, which I'm still hoping to wear again one day), and carrying it in. He nods, saying "See you at work," and disappearing back to his car. I couldn't even get my car, sunk in the dust of the warehouse and rusting inside from the moisture and lack of use, to start. So it's still there, and there it will remain until the warehouse collapses in on itself.
It is September, and I spent all summer boiling in my long sleeves and high necked tops and tights, too afraid of showing more than the absolute minimum of my body to strip off. Axel teased me about this constantly, saying that I was an uptight bitch and whatever other tired insults his limited vocabulary could conjure up, even when I showed him my birthmarks, the ones which cover almost my entire body and make me look like a marble cake. Because no, my genetics were not content with making me a hermaphrodite, they also decided that I needed two-toned skin. I think the doctors who inspected me had a name for this condition, but I always ignored them out of spite because before I went into their offices I was a normal boy, and after I came out I was a freak. And then I was moved somewhere, and moved somewhere again, and my medical records got lost in the system and by the time I got my very last placement, I don't even think my clueless foster family even knew I was intersex.
Now the air outside is restless and misty drops of rain are beginning to splatter the windowsill. I ignore them for as long as I dare, but I give in eventually when I begin to shiver. I unload the boxes one by one, carefully allocating new homes for each item. Larxene's things get an entire drawer to themselves. I keep reshuffling things until I feel satisfied that this is a home well organised, then I make the bed, finishing just as Larxene starts crying again. I take out her bottle, fill it with milk, and plug her in. Larxene's been sick a lot since she was born, and while I promised the doctors that I was doing all I could to protect her from infection I'm sure her illnesses were something to do with the fact that I was washing her bottle up in the sink of the public toilets. I did all my washing up there: I had no other options. Once, the inspection man caught me doing it, but I think he was so surprised to see a hobo scrubbing plates that he just let me finish. But now I have a microwave! I can even buy the cheaper milk and sterilise it at home.
I close my eyes, drinking in this small success. By tightening my budget, leeching off Axel as much as humanly possible, and convincing Mrs Merryweather by way of a prolonged charm offensive to give me a discount so I was not paying her more than I myself was being paid, I managed to save enough money to afford a few months' rent of the cheapest bedsits in town. I'm still going to have to watch my expenditure if I don't want to be kicked out, but I try not to think about that right now, focusing on the positives. I can cook my own food now; I have a fridge, albeit a tiny one with no freezer compartment, so I won't have to throw away as much spoilt food; the lamplight throws all of the darkness in the room into the corners; the bathroom is just as the end of the corridor and not a fifteen-minute bus ride into town; from now on I will be warm and clean and sleep with my legs stretched out. Larxene and I will be able to play together.
Mrs Merryweather, who knows a lot more about babies than I do, keeps me updated on Larxene's daily activities whenever I have time to stop for a cup of her delicious tea. I've been telling her lies about the limitations of where we were living and how much time I spend with her (it's true that the answer is a lot, but I don't tell her that most of the time I am asleep), but I think she knows that I haven't really been paying attention to her over and above her basic requirements. But now I have a whole floor for the two of us to roll safely about on.
"Things are going to be better now," I say to my four month old baby. "You're not going to get sick any more, and we've got this whole bed to sleep on." I stretch my limbs out dramatically. "No more rats. No more dirt and rusty metal."
Somebody clatters into the next room over, and a moment later loud music starts pounding at the walls. I tilt my head up. Larxene, on my chest, reaches up and pats my chin, then begins to cry miserably at the sudden booming noise.
"Less peaceful," I say, sitting up, "But cleaner. And warmer."
The man next door is very fat, and very drunk. He has a goatee, or at least, he had a goatee once; but stubble has grown around it, giving him half a beard. Which is worse than a full beard or no beard at all. I ask him to turn the music down, and he yells "What?" at me. I ask him again, louder. He tells me to piss off. I point to Larxene, who is currently doing a very good impression of an ambulance.
"I have a baby," I say. "You're disturbing her."
The very drunk man looks at Larxene, then leers at me with perverted eyes. My skin prickles and my temper rises. He says; "You some kinda whore or what?" And I want to slap him, but that will probably get me beaten half to death. So I just look him right in the eye and say; "I want you to turn the music down. You're upsetting my daughter."
"You know what else upsets yer daughter?" The man slurs. He begins to gyrate, saying things like "oh, yeah" and "baby, baby". I want to vomit at this disgusting display; instead, I march into his tiny room, and unplug his stereo. The thing itself is fairly small: it's the enormous speakers on each side that were making such a noise.
"Just go the fuck to bed," I say. "You're pissed out of your mind."
The man looks at me, half like he's totally dumbfounded at my courage, and half like what I am doing is turning him on. He says: "You wanna go to bed with me?"
"Not in my worst nightmares," I snap back, trying to leave. His gargantuan, beer-swollen body blocks my path. "Get out of the way."
He says; "Yer a pretty lady," even though nothing could be further from the truth. "I could give you a pretty son to go with yer daughter." I stand corrected: this, actually, is further from the truth. Any offspring of this hideous creature would be so ugly people would wonder if it was human at all. But he still won't let me out, no matter how sourly I rebuke him.
So, with Larxene cradled in the crook of my left arm, I pick the unplugged stereo up, and I throw it at his face.
I am not, and never have been, female. And even not eating enough and having a baby and working all day in a factory packing biscuits haven't totally diminished my strength or my aim. So the stereo hits him right on the nose, makes him reel backwards, clutching at his face, swearing. This makes Larxene start crying again.
"Don't fucking mess with me," I say, pushing him aside. "And don't fucking play your music so loud." I slam the door on him and go back to my room. Peace and quiet again. Until people start coming and going, music playing in other rooms on other floors, too close to be inaudible but too far to locate the source.
"But it's cleaner," I say to Larxene as she grasps my fingers, tugs at my sleeve in wonder, "And it's warmer."
I glance at my watch. It's about seven o'clock. Larxene and I are both tired. So I change into my pyjamas, give Larxene a bath in the sink, and we curl up together to sleep, my legs stretched right out to the end of the bed. The man next door has probably passed out, because I don't hear any more loud music for the rest of the night.
We nap until eleven, when Larxene's nappy needs changing. After that she is wide awake and more interested in touching my face than settling down. So I put her down on the bed and let her play with my mouth while I make up a list of all the things I am going to buy now that I have a home of my own. A saucepan and a frying pan, for example. A kettle. A play blanket and other toys for Larxene. Slippers. And maybe, if I save up enough money, some plants for the windowsill.
I was first fostered when I was six years old, to a very nice, well-to-do family with three adult children and very specific ideas as to how children should be disciplined. This apparently made them Experienced, but the problem was that their children were just like them: well behaved, respectful, and a far cry from anybody like me. I misbehaved constantly. I hated everybody. I broke things and still wet the bed and hid in cupboards when I was angry. The placement didn't last long: one day I peed on their brand new television, and they gave me back. The next family couldn't cope with me either, because although I was beginning to grow out of my peeing-on-things stage, I suddenly suffered from an acute crisis of gender, and apparently stealing my foster sister's clothes - including her underwear - was a step too far. By the time I was eleven I had lost count of the number of placements I'd been through. I was also friendless, miserable, and starting secondary school hardly even able to read. So when my social worker, my fifth social worker, told me that a man who had visited a few times before wanted to foster me, I resigned myself to more proof that what "part of a family" really meant to me was "an outsider".
At this point, I was halfway through puberty and doubly confused as to whether I was supposed to be a boy or a girl. My last placement had ended because one of the girls in the family had let out that I was intersex to a few of her friends, and in two days the entire school knew. Although the insults I received - mostly from boys I had never even spoken to - were varied and imaginative, their favourite one was "go fuck yourself". They didn't know that I was already too afraid to masturbate, in case I got myself pregnant (as it turns out, it makes no difference). Sometimes they treated me like a boy with a pussy, sometimes like a girl with a cock, whatever satisfied their whims at the time. And the most humiliating part of it was that my foster parents did nothing. They told me that everyone had to deal with bullying. My foster father even told me a pathetic story about how he was teased as a boy because he had an embarrassing haircut. I distinctly remember screaming at him that, unlike haircuts, vaginas do not grow out after a few months. I was stuck like this. And the whole school was putting me through hell for it.
At the end of the week, I tried to run away, but I only got as far as the local park, and after a few hours in the pouring rain with nothing but a clean change of underwear, my toothbrush and a ham sandwich, I crawled home again. My foster parents were angry. They did not understand my pain and isolation and crippling self-loathing. So I went back to the children's home with all the other fuck ups, even more broken and alone than before.
My latest foster family, the ones who managed to keep me for the longest, had two biological children, four adopted children, and had fostered so many others that I soon lost count of the smiling people in the photographs on the mantelpiece. They also had a dog. When I moved in with the Wise family, I was the youngest of three (and occasionally four; one of them - the biological son - was at the local university, and came and went with seemingly random abandon) children at home, which was a big detached building on the outskirts of town. But I didn't really care about the house, because backing onto it was an enormous and well-kept garden. Because I arrived during the summer holidays, this was where I spent most of my time. Most afternoons, Mr Wise would join me, and after a while he convinced me to help him out with his gardening projects. It was the first thing I had ever done that I had a natural talent for. My Wise often joked that the plants "liked" me because I was so good at cultivating them. One day he came home with a book of common garden plants, which he gave to me, and every page of which I dutifully memorised (I can still recall most of it now). Eventually he even let me uproot an entire flowerbed to do with it as I saw fit, and with a modest budget, several trips to the local plant nursery and hours upon hours of tireless work I created something beautiful, something that was also mine.
I miss plants. The weeds and brambles in the abandoned lot where the warehouse stood didn't count. As Larxene experimentally puts her hand in my mouth, I move to the next line on my list and write "plants". Larxene pulls at my tongue, laughing as I wriggle it out of her grasp. She grabs again, more tightly, enthralled, especially when I start making "blarb blarb" sort of noises at her. We keep playing this game until she gets bored; then we sleep again until morning when the drunk man from last night calls around to say that I broke his stereo and also his nose. Knowing what it is really like to have a broken nose, I tell him that he is stupid; this probably isn't the best course of action because his Neanderthal face crumples into something furious and he looks ready to hit me. Luckily, however, a heavily made-up woman about his age turns up and begins fussing over him, which soon distracts him from me. As they disappear back into his room she turns to me and says; "Sorry, hun, you know how they are." I don't know if she's referring to drunk bastards or just men in general.
At work, Axel tells me that I left a carton of baby milk in his car and it made it stink, even though baby milk hardly even smells of anything. But for some reason, he is really angry about this, because he sulks all day. Axel is normally pretty jokey, brushing things off as a joke even when I wish he wouldn't. But sometimes really inane, stupid things just set him off. As his sort-of-but-not-really girlfriend, I wonder if I should try to placate him, but I can't be bothered.
"I don't know why you put up with him," one of the girls says as we pack biscuits together. I shrug. Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if it's time to shake him off. I've got my own home now: it's not like I need him any more. So, in an act of spiteful benevolence, I say flippantly: "He's good in bed." This makes the girl titter, but she also glances at Axel with a lot more notice than she normally does.
"If you're not careful, you'll have another bastard kid."
"I'm not making that mistake again,"I I scoff. But it sets me thinking about a terrifying truth I've been ignoring since Larxene was born, too busy to plan ahead for the future: if my body impregnated itself once, then it is only a matter of time before it does it again.