Radiant Garden is a beautiful town. It's one of the few places in this area which still has a king, the others almost exclusively having moved on to local democracies, considering monarchy a relic of a bygone era. But Radiant Garden is that relic, a collection of old brick houses and well maintained public flowerbeds and towering waterfalls two, three, four times my height. Just like Hollow Bastion, it deserves its name.
My new flat is on the outskirts of the town, on the edge of one of the town's many sparkling waterways. It's in the industrial region of the town, the metal stairways to the footpaths clanging beneath my feet as I carry box after box up from the taxi I splashed out on to move us here. Big brass pipes hang overhead, creaking in the wind, obsolete now; weeds of all shapes and sizes grow from cracks in the old architecture. Everything is quiet and peaceful. I breathe deeply, my lungs for once empty of the omnipresent dust of Hollow Bastion.
"Isn't this nice?" I ask Larxene, who has been doing an admirable job of following me around empty handed as I heave luggage up to our new home. She shrugs.
"I guess."
At least she helps me unpack, arguing when I try to call the shots on where our stuff ought to be stored: she wants the wardrobe, even though her clothes take up half the volume that mine do, her toys ought to be in the bedside drawer instead of my books and hygiene products, she wants the medicine cabinet in spite of the fact that all she's got to put in it is a toothbrush. I have long since resigned myself to the fact that my daughter is already a selfish bitch, so all this behaviour elicits in me is a sigh. Larxene's tantrums don't work on me, at least not in public.
We spend the afternoon unpacking until I reach the kettle, and then we make tea (Larxene likes it, but only with about sixty spoonfuls of sugar in it). I habitually save the teabag for later. Then I recede into the bathroom to change.
I've grown a lot since I lived in Traverse Town, in pretty much every direction. I am now an unfeminine six foot and one inch; my shoulders have broadened and my muscles tightened around my bones. I do not look like a woman in the slightest. Even my chest and stomach, swelling now, just makes me look as though I like alcohol a bit too much. I just have to pray that make up and dresses and Larxene will be enough to stop people asking too many questions.
I pull off my jeans and button-down shirt and stow them in a corner, missing them almost as soon as my fingers leave the fabric. I reluctantly put on my new 36A push up bra, which on the packaging promised me that I would have "ultimate cleavage" and "look up to two cup sizes larger". I do not. I look, unsurprisingly, like a man in a bra. I pull on tights to conceal the hair on my unflatteringly defined legs, followed by a long skirt. The fitted blouse and cardigan come last, and then it's time to spend twenty minutes in front of the mirror with foundation and lipstick and mascara and hairbands in an attempt to eliminate the drag-queen air that hangs unpleasantly around me. Eventually I have made myself up so many times that I'm losing track of what I'm even trying to achieve, so I give up, pull my hair around my face to hide my square jaw and Adam's apple, and step outside. Larxene looks up from her ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny between Barbie and Ken.
"How do I look?" I ask. Maybe if I hold my shoulders closer to my chest and stoop a little I can look smaller and more convincingly womanlike.
"You look really silly," Larxene replies sourly after a moment's inspection. Then she asks for the fiftieth time: "Do I have to call you Mummy?"
I run an agitated hand through my hair, but I catch myself and quickly rustle it back in front of my eyes. "Yes. I'm your Mum now. No arguments."
I'd forgotten how much I hated dressing like this. I guess my memories of Traverse Town are too swamped by other things that were going on: but now I'm worrying less about finances and health and bastards at work I am all too acutely aware of how uncomfortable these clothes make me. I fiddle with my sleeves, nervously. Larxene goes back to making Barbie viciously beat her boyfriend. I don't know where she has inherited this morbid fascination with domestic violence; I certainly don't remember doing anything like that when I was a kid. Admittedly, I did have some pretty destructive habits, but it's been a long time since I've hurt either myself or anyone else, and I'm pretty sure things like that aren't genetic.
I leave her to her extremely one-sided battle and inspect the flat instead. It's still just the same two-room deal, but this time the kitchen is hidden by a wall extending into the middle of the room, giving it more of a house-like feel, rather than just a bedsit with everything crammed into one place. There are the usual suspicious stains in inexplicable places, and two of the electrical sockets on the skirting board are broken in. The bed creaks so much that if I so much as breathe loudly on it it lets out an unhealthy groan, but at least the mattress is clean and smells only of foam. The toilet is caked in lime scale; so is the sink. One of the lights above the kitchen counters flickers. The fridge has a freezer compartment. The window opens wide over the metal beasts that are Radiant Garden's old machines, weeds growing on the frame. I stroke one of them affectionately, its little purple flowers shivering in the wind. "Hello, you," I say, wondering vaguely if I could cultivate these hardy specimens into something more beautiful.
"Mummy, you're talking to plants again," Larxene calls from the floor. I look pointedly at her. It's Demyx's fault she always says that.
"I'm allowed."
"Crazy," says Larxene. I ignore her, testing out the windowsill instead. My last one in Hollow Bastion collapsed after Larxene tried to climb on it, but this seems sturdy enough. I am already thinking about what plants will grow in this level of sunlight. Strawberries, maybe. Larxene would like those. We did have a few plants in Hollow Bastion, including but not limited to two spider plants, a miniature avocado tree (cultivated from a leftover stone) and a peace lily, but I had to leave them there. I gave them to my boring next door neighbour, who I expect will kill them all before the week is out.
"How about strawberries?" I ask. Larxene perks up suddenly. A while ago, in the hopes of convincing her to eat more healthily, I told her a fantastic lie that all red fruit and vegetables are that colour because they have been injected with human blood. Ever since then she has adored tomatoes, beetroot, raspberries and strawberries with an almost disturbing abandon. Ditto the carrots that I told her were actually unicorn horns (all horses, of course, being de-horned unicorns). My daughter worries me sometimes; but admittedly, I am not exactly trying to stamp out this behaviour if it means I can trick almost anything into her mouth with a sharp enough mind.
"To eat?"
"To grow."
Larxene flops down again. Ken is dead and Barbie is on the prowl for more victims, having just bayed at the moon. "That's boring," she says. I explain that we can eat the strawberries once we've grown them, but that doesn't impress her. I decide that she doesn't have a choice in the matter and I'm going to grow strawberries just for me, and if she won't help look after them then I'll just eat them all myself in front of her, as punishment. Because this will mean more strawberries for me, I don't press the issue further, instead changing the subject. "So is Barbie a werewolf now?"
"No, duh," Larxene says like I'm stupid, and doesn't deem it necessary to elaborate further. Then she looks at me very critically and says "You should wear high heels like Barbie."
"I'm too tall already," I say. I don't need to stand out any more than I already will. I pick up one of my recipe books and flick through it, wondering what to cook tonight. A recipe for pancakes pops out at me. Pancakes? For supper? Hell yes. It's only four in the afternoon; I can go out shopping for ingredients and acquaint myself with the town, then be back home in good time to put supper on the table (or at least, on our laps) by six. So I wrestle Larxene into her shoes (she hates shoes now), touch up my make up again, and step outside into the fresh August air, Larxene trailing grumpily behind me.
"We can also look for a social group for you to join," I say to her as we pass beneath the aqueduct. "Although it'll have to be a weekend one. You'll be starting school soon."
Most of the reason why I moved to Radiant Garden and not anywhere further afield was because I already had Larxene's name down on a waiting list for a school here. I was always half-expecting a pregnancy (for three years, every single second of every single day, through countless missed periods and false alarms), so I spread my choices as far and wide as possible: and I'm glad of that now, with my blouse hugging the bulge in my stomach and that eternal nausea festering sickeningly inside me. So Larxene is destined for Radiant Garden Primary School; considering its reputation I'm fairly sure I only managed to get her a place because they needed to fill up a socio-economic status quota.
"I don't want to go to school," says Larxene. I don't blame her. I found school singularly loathsome from start to finish (or lack thereof), a festering ground less for education and more for endless bullying. I doubt that Larxene, with her lack of social practice and second-hand charity shop clothes, will fare any better than me. But I have to at least try to convince her that it might help her in later life to do well at school.
"You'll enjoy it," I lie, "And anyway, it means you won't need a childminder any more." This at least makes Larxene pause thoughtfully, and by the time she speaks again it's on a completely different topic. We talk about nothing in particular, mostly because half of what she says doesn't make any sense, until we reach the central hub of the town and my girly whisper can't cut out above the crowds any more, at least not with Larxene's ears several feet below my mouth. Most people's gazes slide over me, but some of them stick; somehow I doubt it's because any of them have spied what they think is an attractive female.
Radiant Garden is the kind of place that has a hundred shops and no supermarket, so I spend longer than I would have liked popping in and out of little corner shops and grocers looking for pancake ingredients. But the florist I stumble across makes up for the pain that the rest of the high street turned out to be: I pull Larxene inside, ignoring her protests, floral scents overwhelming my senses. I gloss over the cut flowers, considering them a luxury I might afford once I have a job again, and head straight to the potted plants, Larxene complaining and complaining behind me. I try so, so hard to resist the miniature ivies but in the end my temptations win out. I buy the sickliest looking plant in spite of the consternations of the till keeper, as something of a personal challenge. And my flat already looks homelier with the plant sitting in the corner of the windowsill, basking in the evening sunlight.
"See? Doesn't that look good?"
Larxene doesn't care. She wants pancakes. If my daughter isn't concocting new ways of making her toys brutally kill each other, she's hungry. So I get her stirring the mix while I add ingredients, then we (mostly I) flip pancakes all evening, filling them with whatever needs eating up from the fridge. This leads to tuna and olive and mushroom pancakes, cheese and lunch ham pancakes, grape and banana pancakes, and several other even stranger combinations.
"Are we going to live here forever?" Larxene asks halfway through me reading her a story (she doesn't really follow along, because books bore her, but I figure it can't hurt to try).
"I don't think so," I reply. "Only until your little brother or sister is born."
"Oh," says Larxene, "How long is that?" I don't know why she's asking. Larxene has no concept of any future more distant than next week, if that. More to the point, I don't know either. Six months, maybe? It's hard to tell at this stage. At this point last time I was just worrying about getting fat. So I tell her it'll be a year, because she's going to forget in ten minutes anyway.
I go to bed when Larxene does, mostly because she finds it hard to sleep if I'm not there with her. Although she's usually a hateful little thing, she still cuddles up close to my chest at night, her fists curled tight into my pyjamas. I stroke her hair, as much to soothe myself as her. Like most nights, she says: "Tell me a story."
"I already did," I protest, glancing at the book still on the bedside table, silhouetted by the moonlight slipping through the cracks in the curtains. But Larxene shakes her head. "Tell me a real story." So, like most nights, I concoct a fantastic and thoroughly false tale where Larxene - the old Larxene - and I solve mysteries and capture evil criminal masterminds, each escapade more ridiculous than the last, until Larxene is asleep and I almost am too.
I dream that the baby inside me climbs out one day and tells everybody in Radiant Garden that I am a man, so I pack up all my things and move to a town where the buildings waver in and out of focus, everything I own weighing down my back, but then the baby tells everyone my secrets again, and again, and again, until with every step I take I hear my spine cracking a little more, my feet tripping over all of these children slithering down my legs, and I wake up in a cold sweat with Larxene still clinging obliviously to me, and when I cry in the bathroom the mascara I forgot to take off drips down my cheeks and turns me into a clown, a hideous parody of a normal human being - and it is Larxene, Larxene, who climbs onto my lap and holds my head against her chest and says "Mummy, mummy, mummy," and who, ultimately, saves my life.