The Wood Between the Worlds

S. Lewis Silverwood

Version 2.4

there is the palest shape.
steady your weeping face.
lay the pillow to your cheek,
we are failing it seems.
this funeral lies inside
my mourning head.
what was between us
is now become a wedge

Shannon Wright
Method of Sleeping

The
Wood Between the Worlds

S. Lewis Silverwood
Version 2.6 Fem

there is the palest shape.
steady your weeping face.
lay the pillow to your cheek,
we are failing it seems.
this funeral lies inside
my mourning head.
what was between us
is now become a wedge

Shannon Wright
Method of Sleeping

Chapter One                              
Black Poplar

I was going to start with a lie but it became true. Now I don’t know where to begin.

I should explain: the Taj Mahal poses on the banks of the river Yamuna in Uttar Pradesh, India. It is one of the wonders of the world; a “tear in the face of eternity”; a siren luring backpackers into the mire of deceit that calls itself Agra. It is also a broken twin. There are supposed to be two.

The Taj was built by Shah Jehan, the Emperor of India. They called him the King of the World. He was man of aesthetic passion who lived for the arts and for things of beauty, like some colossal cross-breed of Ramses II and Toad of Toad Hall. He fell in love at the age of twenty with a Persian girl and decided to marry her even before he learnt her name. But it was discovered that she was not of noble birth. Her beauty was so great that he pursued her regardless. She became his second, and most beloved, wife. They had fourteen children together until, perhaps unsurprisingly, she died in childbirth. 

Shah Jehan ordered the Taj Mahal to be built out of white Makrana marble in honour of his dead wife. The cost was too high but he could not be stopped. He was driven so mad by his grief that he bankrupted the empire in his architectural monomania. He went on to build the Red Fort in Delhi, countless mosques and palaces and insane jewel-encrusted thrones.

He personally squandered a fortune on the renovation of the old fort in Agra. Towards the end of his life, he had to watch his sons tear the ruined dynasty apart in a battle for succession. They may well have been fighting to avoid the inheritance: it was something of a white elephant, after all. The kingdom was on the edge of bankruptcy after a lifetime of his madness. To keep their father out of trouble while they tried to kill each other, his sons locked him in a turret of Agra fort so that he could watch over his precious Taj while he lay dying. They buried him next to his wife.

Before he died, the Emperor drew up plans to build a second monument: the Black Taj. It was to be situated on the opposite bank of the river, facing the White Taj. He designed it as his own mausoleum but the work was never begun. The scholar Travernier wrote that his sons opposed the plans. History does not record their exact words. I doubt there was even any marble left.

I wanted to use the image of the second Taj at the beginning of this book. The missing twin could have been my sister, it could have been a gender thing, it would have been a good way to introduce Brook: how do I introduce him neatly without it? The Black Taj embodied themes of death, love and duality that I wanted to emphasise and it seemed to be a cute way of doing so. I thought it would be clever and novelistic. I was going to fabricate an event whereby an artist had actually built a temporary replica of the Black Taj and I was going to situate my opening scene in this installation. Today is the 16th September 2005. I have just learnt that the Indian artist Sudharshan Patnaik is going to start work on this very project tomorrow.

My only consolation is that it will be made from sand, rather than marble, as there is at least some symbolic mileage in the materials to be used. Sand is such a temporary medium and so unsuited to construction; it is almost too perfect. While the imagery of sand castles and castles built on sand are well established, here is my offering: a monument to dead lovers that is as insubstantial and temporary as the heart by which it was devised. No doubt it will also be more economical for the present rulers of India.

However, my scheme is undone and I am left with nothing but the truth: when I left him, I left him sitting in the boring, white, obvious Taj Mahal. There was nothing symbolic about it, it was just saddening. I will start before, then, in 1999, back in the old house.

I was late. The plane was due out in two hours and where was I? The others had gone on ahead. They were already at the airport: checking in; putting their bags through the machines, tucking their thumbs into their passports, ready to go.
Brook was still sitting in the house on his own, waiting for me. He looked at his watch again. He was worried about missing the flight, disappointed in me for being late and worried I might be lying dead somewhere- in that order.

He cursed himself for trusting me. Why did I always let him down? He crossed to the window and sat on the wooden ledge overlooking the street below. There was nothing he could do but sit and wait for me. It made him feel useless and angry, a bumble bee in a jam jar. The minute hand would not stop chasing circles around his watch-face. There was still time, still time to make the flight. If I would just appear. But the minutes would pass and I would not appear and he would narrow his eyes at the street and wonder where the fuck I was.

He never liked being alone in that house. It was too big and he felt too small. The corridors reminded him of youth hostels; the damp walls gave off tangs of exchange trips, sour pen pals, alienation and flick combs. Somewhere modern and purpose-built would have suited him better. He liked to think of himself as a modern, purpose-built man. His body was built to feed his brain, not the lusts of women, he said. In his weaker moments he confessed to feeling threatened by his own sexuality. I don’t know if this was a fear that I had stirred or whether it was something I softened. There are things about me that would confuse anyone in that way I suppose.

The rooms were huge and white and endless. He had always felt oppressed by the unnecessary scale of the doorways and the cobwebbed remoteness of the ceilings. Now that everyone else had packed up their possessions, the feeling was even worse. He was afraid of them. He never even seemed to have a good basic geography of the house. He rarely ventured upstairs and almost never spent the night in my room. It’s too cold up here, he would say. He expected me to accept this statement as final. There was an implied assumption that I should just move down permanently into his bedroom. Instead, I kept my own room for the whole year. We never discussed it out loud.

All of his things were already packed away. There was nothing left to toy with or to poke through. Most of the boxes were gone. Our lease was up: another academic year to bed. He had packed his life into tea chests and nailed them shut. They were big, heavy wooden boxes, taller than they needed to be. Each of them was labelled carefully with a neat index of contents: textbooks, cutlery, miscellaneous. They were stood waiting in the hallway for his parents to collect. He had arranged everything weeks in advance. I had just left it until the night before.

Brook had wanted me to telephone his parents and thank them for storing my stuff. I told him that it would feel artificial and forced. I refused. He did that thing where his features were frozen and there was no way of knowing he was upset bar the sudden draining of blood from his lips. It had the effect of erasing any sign of emotions. It reminded me of shaking of an etch-a-sketch to clear the crude picture away. I hated it when he did that.

Our housemates had cleared their things away into storage for the summer. It never occurred to me to follow suit. Brook and I had the next few years planned out together as neatly as his boxes in the hallway. It made sense to put all my belongings with his.

Only the basic furniture of the house remained. We had taken the place fully-furnished at the start of our final year. Everything was worn and frayed and the beds were insubstantial but we had not minded at the time. We had all felt too young and too brilliant to care. It just seemed easier to accept whatever the adult world had left out in the rain for us.

Brook sat perched on the fringes of the living room, more than ready to leave it behind. Everything was wrapped in dust sheets for the decorators. The furniture looked shapeless and ghostly beneath the white sheets. Objects lost their silhouettes and then, in turn, their meaning. It changed the room into an abstract installation of a crime scene: here, the corpse of a whale; there, the inevitable shark.

Brook stood and paced the room. His footsteps echoed strangely in the hollow space. “Where are you?” he might have said out loud. His voice would have come back to him dead and unfamiliar. The old acoustics were changed. It would have scared him if he had tried it.

There was the key in the front door. I was back at last. Brook picked up our travelling bags and his sunglasses and burst out into the hallway, calling ahead “Well, I don’t know what you think you’ve been doing but if we don’t leave right this second, we’re going to miss the bloody flight,” he stopped silent at the sight of me.

My name is Violet Kane. I stood in the doorway, my car keys in my hands. I must have looked hellborn, shrouded in my long black overcoat and framed by the dark wooden door behind me. I wore no makeup. My hair was a mess. I had a strange expression on my face; Brook wondered if I might have just killed somebody. He put the bags down carefully “What is it?” he asked.

I exhaled and dropped my jacket onto the floor behind me “We’d better go into the living room. I need to talk to you,” I said.

Brook’s mind flicked over his options like colour-swatches. He was considering whether he would be able to ask me to just tell him about it on the way to the airport. But when he looked into my eyes he knew that it would not wait. I stared out of my skull into nothingness. My eyes were laser beams coming out of my head, scouring the world away in front of me so that I when I stepped forwards it was into a blasted void. Something had happened and nothing else seemed important any more. He led the way back into the living room. I put my hands to the walls as I made my way in after him. The floor sloped awkwardly.

“What’s happened?” he asked again.

I crossed to a chair and sat down on top of the dust sheet “I don’t think we can go,” was all that I could say.

Brook continued standing. He was not sure he had heard me correctly “What are you trying to say?”

I took a cigarette out of the packet and lit it. I took a hard lungful before speaking again “We can’t go to India.”

Brook held out his hands and shook them as if steadying the air in front of him. His voice assumed a shrill edge, stressing each individual word with a shaking hysteria “Everybody-is-at-the-airport. Their stuff has already gone into storage. They are checking in right now. We are going to miss our plane if we do-not-leave right now.”

“My father died.”

“Oh god,” he sat down.

“There was a message for me… my little sister Katy…”

I had visited the university to drop off some paperwork with a tutor. My DPhil application had been approved and we were waiting to hear about the funding. While I was there, they told me that Katy had been phoning the department for days trying to find me. Of course she didn’t have my number. She didn’t even know where I lived. I had not seen her since the night I left home, the night I kissed goodbye to the life I used to call my own. She was only fourteen then. I could not picture her a day older. I wondered if she could picture me at all. I could still see her sitting on the stairs crying with my father throwing my bags down the hall. It was the last time that I had seen him alive and I had told him to go to hell. I realised that I would never see him alive again “She’s been leaving messages about the funeral,” I dropped the cigarette onto the floorboards and crushed it under my heel “It’s next week.”

Brook rose and crossed over to me, one hand resting on his cheek. I thought he was going to sit down and hold me, but he stopped and picked up the cigarette butt. He carried it across the room and dropped it out of the window. While he stood with his back towards me he spoke “Violet, I’m so sorry. I, I don’t know what to say.”

“So I can’t leave now,” I said “We’ll have to drive down there tonight. And then there’s the house. We’ll have to sort out what to do about the house and my sister and everything else. Who’s going to look after her now?”

“Violet,” he did not turn around “I don’t know what to say,” he paused to sequence his words “But the tickets… It’s too late to get a refund now.”

“I know.”

“But we were all supposed to be going together- the whole house- that was the plan. We’ve been talking about it for years. It was your idea. You know, we graduate, we fuck off to India for the summer, you come back and do the DPhil, the whole plan,” Brook crossed the room and sat down next to me. He took my hand in his lap “But if we don’t go today: that’s it. We can’t afford to replace these tickets.”

I pulled my hand back “What are you trying to say?”

Brook lifted his eyebrows in sympathy and tilted his head “I know it’s hard to decide now, but I think maybe we should still go.”

All of my thoughts were drowned out by the rumbling sound in my ears. I could not put my mind back together again “I don’t know what to do,” I said helplessly.

“You haven’t spoken to your family for a long time. It’s not as if they’ve been helping you financially. Surely they don’t suppose you to just drop everything at the last minute and cancel all of your plans.”

I pictured my sister trying to contact me. It was true: my family did not even know my telephone number or where I lived. But they were still my family “Katy’s only a kid. She’s not old enough to sort everything out. She’ll be expecting me to come.”

Brook moved his wrist around carefully so that he could glance at his watch without me noticing. He must have been worried about the time “But they don’t know whether you even got the message, do they? You can always say that you didn’t know about it.”

“It feels wrong,” I said. As I stared at his face I tried to read whether he knew how amoral his suggestion was. If he had said it in innocence without thinking it through, then I would have known that I could still trust him. And if I could trust him then I could follow him and allow him to lead me to safety.

“You need this,” Brook said, taking my hand again “We need this.”

At his emphasis on the word “we”, I understood. Brook was letting me know the truth. He would not stay with me if I decided not to go. I would have to face the funeral alone and I would lose him forever.

“Just come to the airport with me and think it over on the way. Give yourself a chance to work it through before you just throw your whole future away,” he said.
I was too weak to stop it from happening. I knew that I could not face up to the challenge on my own. It was so much easier to fall under his wing and pretend it was not real. I allowed him to steer me into the hallway and out of the door. By instalments and careful guidance, he managed to herd me to the airport and onto the plane. The next day, we were in India.

I sat on the upper roof of the hotel in a deckchair. I could see the whole of Agra spread out below me in the Indian night. It was hard to believe I was really there. India was India. How can I describe it? If you have been to India you will understand already but, if you have never been, then what words could I use that are not clichés? Yes: it reached up and battered my senses with an overload of data. Yes, everything was strong and unfamiliar: the sounds of the traffic and the music on the radios, the smell of the city borne about by the undying heat. I was scorched and reeling. Schoolboy kites danced around the rooftops, dodging in and out of the overhead cables. I could see the Yamuna River in the distance and the domes of the Taj Mahal before it. I sipped at my Kingfisher beer and tried to stay focused on the view. A small group of sadhus passed slowly by in the street below. What can I do? This is how it was. If the sadhus came to London, it would just as likely be wrapped in fog.

Agra was an insane city. It was the most paranoid place on Earth, a weird distillation of espionage into tourism. Everyone was entrenched in a new take on the Great Game. The taxi driver warned us that the hotelier was a crook who would try to poison us. The hotelier asked us if the taxi driver had said anything bad about him. He warned us against the cook of a nearby restaurant. It went on. They were either conmen or they were mad, we could not say. I found it hard enough to think anything at all unless I was sat directly beneath the air conditioning. The heat was heavy in the very light itself. It could boil your brain in your skull if you stood still long enough. I moved across India, crossing from shadow to shadow like a lost vampire in the daylight.

Brook was drinking on the lower roof garden with the other housemates. We had all managed to find each other at the airport and the great summer plan had continued unabated. I could hear them laughing at their youth and joy. They were lost in a crowd of backpackers. A stoned Israeli couple were singing Bob Marley songs on an acoustic guitar while two American girls sat, pretending to juggle. They celebrated their insipid lack of originality. They passed chillums and “Bom Shiva” and lazy ethnographies and genital herpes.

I could see them enjoying the holiday but I could not bear to join them. The thought of my father’s funeral had been rattling at me since we had arrived. I was amazed at Brook’s easy ability to slip the concern away from himself. There was a ruthlessness in his pursuit of the target that I had not seen in him before. It made me feel alone.

The whole situation confused me. I did not love my father and I was not grieving for his death. I did not miss England and would have preferred to stay away forever. It would have been stupid for me to have stayed behind and risk losing everything. But I could not commit myself to the summer. I could not let go of the doubts. I knew that I was supposed to be having the best time of my life. I had thought of nothing but travel for years. It was all that had got me through the difficult end of my studies. But I had not enjoyed an instant of my first day in India. I was deadened to joy.

Two jackdaws padded through the branches of a black poplar in the street below. It reminded me of a legend, half-remembered: Hades changing some reluctant girl into a poplar tree and planting her at the gates of the underworld so that she would always be near him.

There was the sound of movement behind me. I sat up, aware that I was not alone. I felt momentarily foolish, as if I had been caught in the middle of an embarrassing act. If it was one of the housemates, I did not feel I would be able to give a good account of myself. They would want to know why I was sitting alone and I would not be able to find the right words. A figure stepped into view. I steeled myself and looked up. It was the hotel owner, Manoj.

Manoj was only a few years older than me, but he ruled the hotel like a patrician. Everyone responded to his natural authority. I envied him in physical comparison. Where Manoj’s body had a commanding gravity, mine was a willowy tree. While Manoj’s features were smooth and steady, mine seemed long and harsh. His masculinity was secured by a naïve machismo of moustaches and motorbikes that seemed clumsy and elegant at the same time. Back home it would have looked strange, gay even, but he posed with such dogged conviction that it worked. His maleness was boyish and contrived but it was unmistakably male.

Manoj walked to the ledge with sure steps and set his hands down gently on the brickwork. He gazed out at the skyline “Have you ever seen anything like our Taj?” he said “I wonder… will you build a Taj for your love when he dies?”

I put the beer down and stood up next to him. He made me feel lazy for sitting down. He was looking over at Brook and the others “I don’t know,” I said “Maybe.”

Manoj continued “If he had not died without power, the Emperor would have built a second mausoleum, one for himself: the Black Taj, in the same proportions but a negative to the White Taj. They would have faced each other across the river forever like two betrothed stars separated by the Milky Way… but perhaps you are not familiar with that story? No… Can you picture the twin Taj like an opposing force of chess-men?”

I smiled “Yes,” I said, thinking that I had understood the implication “I would probably have just built the Black Taj for myself,” but Manoj’s face showed no reaction. I wondered if I had misinterpreted the meaning of the words. I felt suddenly ashamed of my confession of selfishness “This is a good view,” I said quickly, trying to move away from the issue.

Manoj turned to lean his back against the ledge and waved his hand out towards the body of the hotel “My father left me this hotel when he died. I was in England, reading literature, Mister Shakespeare, but I came home. Yes,” he paused “This is a good thing. It is a powerful transmission. I will expand the business and then pass everything to my son when I retire.”

The words bit into my ears beyond the intentions of his lips. How like fate to throw such a determined and oblivious messenger to deliver its command. I realised that if I stayed in India I would eventually forget about the funeral and start to enjoy myself. Once I did this, my heart would be forever lessened. No matter what the past had done to me and no matter how much it had decided to destroy my future plans, I had a sister that needed me. I would have to return to England and return to the past that I had forsaken. It was the only way to redeem myself “Thank you,” I said “I have to go.”

Chapter Two                              
Churchyard Yew

I wanted to tell Brook straight away but I didn’t know how. I lay awake all night sweating on top of the hotel sheets, trying out different ways to explain myself. I ran the conversations backwards and forwards in my head and none of them worked. I must have used every word I had ever known and by the morning my tongue was still blank. My heart sank into the dirt like a clockwork counterweight to the rising sun. I had nothing.

I woke Brook before the alarm had a chance to ring. We got out of bed and dressed quickly. He ran down the hotel stairs ahead of me to join the others. The only reason to be in Agra was to catch the sunrise over the Taj. I stumbled into the streets behind them with bleary eyes. Other tourists sprouted from doorways and joined the press of untanned skin as we passed through the gates and into the plaza. I don’t think any of us could truly believe that it was real. The domes were larger and more beautiful than I had allowed myself to expect. The vision burned at me, urging me not to leave India. Everywhere I looked, the white marble was coloured amber and gold with the dawn’s light. My breath was taken. It was supposed to be.

As the other housemates posed for pictures before the famous pond, I pulled Brook to one side and steered him around towards the Paradise Gardens and onto the terrace. I was glad to get away from the rest of them. The trip had already begun to reveal the pedestrian nature of their faux-bohemianism and they were becoming embarrassing to be around. When street children were hitting us up for chapattis in the Paharganj, you could hear them above the noise of the traffic: “How old are you? Seven? Wow, that’s amazing.”

Besides, I needed a cigarette and it seemed that we were in the one place in India where this was actually frowned upon. It was a good idea to get some privacy.

We paced before the river. I think Brook knew I was struggling with something but he did not speak. I sat at the base of a chattri and nodded for him to sit next to me “I have to go back,” I said.

I had been so withdrawn since our arrival that I thought he might have been expecting it but the wounded look in his eyes told me otherwise “The funeral? But the return date is fixed- it’s non-refundable,” he said.

“I’ve still got my share of our spending money. It’s enough to buy a ticket home.”

He could not hide the anger in his voice “But that’s all you’ve got- how will you get back here afterwards? What will we do?”

“You could come back with me.”

He moved in closer to me “You could stay.”

I held his hand as he shivered in the final morning breeze. His eyes darted around my face in search of a gap in my armour. It was over. He read it in my face like the instructions in his Lonely Planet.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No. I’m sorry,” I said.

Our apologies lingered during the solitary flight home. I had a long time to consider them. He had truly been sorry that it did not work out, but there had been a crueller subtext. My actions had not engendered any tender emotions in him. Something in his delivery confirmed that he had already begun to stop loving me. And my own apology had been bitter. I felt that he had betrayed me. Not so much in his staying behind but in his act of consuming two years of my life without the will to sacrifice even a season of his own.

It took me a few days to retrieve my boxes and the car. I telephoned Katy to confirm my attendance at the funeral. I contemplated staying with her the night before but decided against it. Just being there at all seemed to be enough of an ordeal. I slept on the sofa of a university friend and drove down in the early morning of the day itself.

                                   
The day had come. I stood under the tree in my funeral clothes. It was hot. I felt awkward. I had not been able to gather a decent outfit. There had been no time. There had been no money. I had done my best to put a suit together but it had not worked. It felt like a bad fancy-dress costume.

I wore a long, black coat. It had to cover for a nonexistent suit jacket. There were subtle militaristic touches about it. I had bought it when I first met Brook. Drunk on my good fortune, I had marched into town and purchased the jacket in a fit of madness. It was the last day I would ever truly believe that the universe loved me. It had an expensive-looking lining that nobody had ever looked at. I was very attached to it.

I looked down at my blouse and tried to pull the jacket sleeves over the cuffs. They were split. The edging was frayed. The colour had been bleached out by cheap detergent. The dye was faded from abuse and neglect. It had slipped irredeemably from charcoal into grey. The buttons were loose and occasional. I couldn’t even remember where it had come from.

There were no smart outfits in my wardrobe so it had to be the black rubber skirt and the seamed hold-ups. They were capped with a worn pair of boots. The yellow stitching had been blackened out by boot polish. I couldn’t bring myself to ruin the look of the hold-ups with socks. This is always a mistake in boots. The hard leather rubbed against my toes.

I was aware that I would eventually have to face the other mourners. I tugged around inside myself for the correct emotional display. So far, my reactions had been as unconvincing as my outfit. I imagined the other family members as professional mourners, seasoned death people. They would have funeral suits at home. They would know what to wear. Their directions would be issued from some unknown authority that I could not access. They would know what to say and they would know how you were supposed to feel.

I didn’t even have a tie. I should explain.

I had been strongly disliked at school. I was bullied. The principal architects of my suffering were a small gang of rough-necks that marked me out as different and made sure my days were full of misery. They seemed to take offence to my aptitude for mathematics and computing. In many ways, I suppose it was probably less than that; I was just weaker than them.

I longed to break free of their shadow. When I was 16, I transferred from my local comprehensive to a sixth-form college in a different town. It presented a great opportunity to reinvent myself.

On my first day at the new college, I decided to style myself as a retro 1950’s Left-Bank intellectual. It was a high-concept look. I wore a vintage suit and a thin tie. I felt good. I felt new. Nobody would know me and I would be able to become whoever I liked. They wouldn’t be able to hold me back from my potential anymore.

When I arrived in the college grounds that first morning, I found the old gang waiting for me there. They had chosen the same college en masse. I hadn’t known. They laughed at my new image. My suit jacket was thrown into a skip and spat upon. They wrestled me towards a tree and knotted the end of my tie around a branch. “This is the hanging tree,” they told me “Where we lynch the freaks like you.”

I dangled by my tie, choking; I nearly died. They laughed at me and went home. I managed to pull myself up so that I could hold on to the branch and support myself. I clutched onto the branch, gasping for breath, my neck raw from the noose. Everybody had gone home. It was the fag-end of a bad day. I held onto the branch for an hour. I couldn’t reach the place where they had tied the knot without letting go. I wasn’t going to let go. There was nothing I could do.

I had a lot of time to think about my future. Eventually the caretaker found me and cut me down. I asked him not to tell anyone about it.

The next day, I dressed in my normal clothes. The gang ignored me. They had decided to become more mature. I always thought that they were just biding their time. I switched all of my A-levels from maths and computers to sociology and politics. I started reading the underground comics and beat poetry that are supposedly such a clichéd part of adolescence and yet were so utterly absent from the lives of my fellow pupils. I put forth radical arguments. Slowly, I began to carve out a new future for myself. I rejected suits and ties as bourgeois. I fell in with a new crowd. They taught me how to smoke dope and I asked them to call me Violet. I even felt comfortable enough to start wearing makeup around them. In the most part they accepted me. Sometimes one of them would ask me about the clothes I was wearing on my first day at college. I used to tell them that it was just a joke. One time, I claimed it had been a situationist prank. Anyway, I got past it.

When I came to write my final sociology essay, I chose the topic “Against Ties: a Symbol of Phallocentric Capitalism.” I never wore one again.

I am a woman of principle. My father’s death would change nothing and a capitulation to convention would not bring him back to life. As I stood beneath the yew tree in the graveyard, I did not honestly know whether I would have wanted to bring him back or not. There would be little of worth to be said to each other if I did. We would argue about my mourning suit. My father would lift the lapels in distaste and let them fall back onto my breast. He would try to offer me a tie. There would be a scene.

I was standing on the top of a landscaped hill, a little distance from the chapel of rest. The yew tree branched over my head, giving shade from the June sun. A line of bushes ran down from behind me towards another part of the cemetery and then out towards the gates. There were rows of cypress and discreet pathways into the graves. Every dab of grey stone was surrounded by evergreens and foliage. They were little vistas of misdirection, polite frames for the plots. The whole effect was one of a stately garden discreetly harvesting the dead.

A stone angel stood next to me under the tree. I tried not to look at it. The face had been eaten away by lichen and moss. It held one hand outstretched in some forgotten gesture and the wings were open and wide. There was an inscription on the plinth but it had faded in the seasons of a century and had become unreadable. I was uncomfortable at the sight of it. The face made me think of decay and my mother.

I was too hot in my jacket. I was sweating and it was still only nine in the morning. There was dew on the statue. It looked like perspiration. I tried not to wonder what it would taste like.

Then there was the chapel at the foot of the hill beneath me. My relatives had arrived early for the ceremony and were waiting for it to begin. I stepped closer to the trunk of the tree and wondered if they had seen me yet. They clustered around the chapel doors, fanning themselves and smoking cigarettes in their suits and dresses. Some of them even wore armbands. I would have thought them slick but their deportment betrayed them. They sighed at the inappropriate weather, tutting at the heat as if it were the centrepiece of the day. They made carelessly cheerful greetings to each other, blithe to the purpose of their reunion. There was no keening and no show of grief. Clearly, I decided, they would not start the performance until the real audience arrived. So they had not seen me yet then after all.

I could see the area of graveyard behind the chapel. As I watched, the backdoor of the chapel opened and the preceding funeral filed out onto the grass. My vantage point on the hill gave the process the appearance of a drive-through.

The strangers walked through the gardens following their own strange coffin to its grave. It was odd to see them in the same suits and dresses as my own family. I felt that they were performing some kind of impersonation, a mockery of a real funeral. I was angry. How could they hold the services so close together? Who were these people: why weren’t they being quarantined? What were they doing in funeral suits? It was my father who had died, not theirs. Their tepid and unknown realities were spilling all over my clean day. I did not want to share my planet with any one else’s bereavement. In spite of the paucity of my actual grief, the feeling of territorial resentment was still powerful. I felt that little enough in my life was discreet, considerate or sacred, I had hoped the funeral would be different. But everything was just as profane and clumsy and fuck-you as the rest of my life. Fine, then. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I heard a jangle of chains coming from the opposite side of the hill. The sound moved towards me. I turned away from the yew and stepped around the statue to see. There was something familiar about the sound that I could not recognise at first. The memory hovered in front of my head, waiting to be swatted. I realised what it meant as soon as the figure came into view: Katy, my sister.

“It’s you!” Katy stumbled as she saw me; she stuck her hand out in greeting.

“Katy,” I felt relieved “You’re here.”

She came to a halt a short distance below me. The jangling from her motorcycle chains stopped “Yeah…” with her worn leather jacket, tight suit and wild black hair, she would have looked dishevelled had her face not been so childish. She had the air of a cherubic rake. Her clothes had aged but the rest of her had grown almost younger. The skin on her face was as white as porcelain; it looked lost amongst the darkness of so much leather and chrome.

My relief at the sight of her began to sour when I considered what she was carrying “You’ve got your chains there with you.”

Katy held the chains up to her eyes, studying them as if they were living, moving snakes “Yeah.”

“You didn’t lock your bike up properly.”

“No,” Katy nodded.

I squinted at her face. Why had she brought them with her? Something was wrong but the diagnosis took a moment to come. Then it clicked “Oh, Jesus Christ, girl!”

“What?”

“You’re on acid?” I tasted the words in disbelief.

“Well, yeah, but…”

“Never take LSD at a funeral.”

“I know.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know.”

I walked down the slope towards her and put my hands on her shoulder. Why would she do something like that? It was bad enough that I had to be there at all. I had not agreed to baby-sit someone demented enough to take hallucinogens at her own father’s burial.

Katy looked up at me. Her eyes were brown and dilated like mismatched conkers. I could see tears forming in their corners. I had to take it easy on her.

I could feel the fragility of the trip. Katy could be pushed either way. I forced myself to ignore my frustration and disappointment at her stupidity. I had to fake enough kindness to keep her stable. I clapped my hands to strike the scene and then I put on a big smile.

“How are you though, I mean, are you okay to go on with this?”

Katy continued to stare. Something passed between us “You never came back home for the holidays,” she said.

“What?”

“Christmas and summer. You never came home to visit us.”

I was stung by the change of attack. It was true. I had left town and I had never returned. I had been someone else then, someone I did not want to be anymore so I had stopped. Coming home was not an option.

Katy plunged down onto the grass. Her movements were abrupt. She let go of the chains and they clanked away, glinting in the light. She threw her legs out in front of her and slumped forwards, tugging at the grass with her fingertips.

I knelt down carefully. I didn’t know whether to put my arm around her or not. I thought that it might help but we hadn’t seen each other in so long that the gesture might have seemed artificial. Looking back around the side of the hill, I saw that we had now been spotted by the other mourners.

 “Christmas was the worst,” Katy said “Just me and Dad. And those fucking paper hats from the fucking crackers.”

I wondered if I could manoeuvre Katy around to the far side of the tree out of view but I dismissed the idea. If Katy struggled, it would backfire and draw more attention to us. The best thing I could do was to try and talk her back to reality while praying that none of the relatives came over to see what was happening.

I put my hands to my coat for a cigarette. I hadn’t even unstitched the pockets yet. I padded my chest and pulled the packet from an inside pocket. I took two out, put one in between my lips and handed the other one to Katy. Katy rolled it around in her hands before letting me light it for her “It feels like a finger,” she said “Like a dead finger.”

I cupped a hand and lit my own “I’m serious, though, I’m… I need to know if you’re going to be okay. We’re going to have to go down there and deal with everybody. Now I can do the talking, you just need to hang back and stay cool, okay. Just try not to say anything, just, just try not to freak out or do anything.”

Katy looked afraid “I don’t want to do this, please.”

“We can’t let Dad down. We’ve got to give him a proper send-off.”

Katy’s expression changed. I couldn’t read it properly. It was singed by something feral. “Fuck Dad,” she said.

“Jesus, Katy, what is wrong with you? I’ve… Oh Christ…” I slumped down against the tree. I held the cigarette between my thumb and index finger, tugging on the filter with pursed lips. It was a tight situation. My gut was telling me to walk away, just leave Katy on her own to embarrass herself. Forget her, it said, you don’t need this. Go and bury your father, make peace with your family, be an adult. But another voice told me to stay, that the living were more important than the dead. After a while, the wood grounded me and my heartbeat began to slow. The bark was warm and solid against my spine.

Katy picked up the chains and wrapped them around her arms “I want to climb the tree,” she said “Like we used to do. You remember.”

I remembered. We had been arboreal children. Every school holiday and summer evening had found us climbing trees. We climbed all the trees that we could find: in the park, on the downs, in neighbouring gardens. There had been a magnificent “pulpit yew” in the churchyard at the end of our block. We passed hours of our childhood hidden together in its branches, camouflaged from the world. Trees were the one place that we could outdistance our parent’s reach and the church yew was our most precious secret “This is a yew tree,” I said “You remember the one in Saint Luke’s?”

Katy stroked the bark. It was a strange shade of purple and felt flaky to the touch, like filo pastry “Yew trees are coffin-nails for the dead. You always see them in churchyards. You know the churches were built over pagan burial sites? They put the yews there to stake the dead into the ground and stop them from walking,” she stood and reached up to the lowest of its seven trunks “Yggdrasil was a yew.”

Katy pulled herself upwards and disappeared into the leaves. She moved quickly and easily. I watched her go “I thought Yggdrasil was an ash,” I called up. If Katy heard me, she didn’t reply. I felt left behind. I had always been the advanced climber when we were young. It felt wrong letting Katy go on ahead of me. I stood up and jumped for one of the trunks. My fingers gripped and I felt the weight of my body like an unfamiliar thing. I swung by one arm for a while. It occurred to me that I had not climbed a tree for several years. How easily we stop being children once we begin to wonder who we are, I thought. The words came from a sunken recess of my mind. Before I could decant their meaning at leisure, I found that I had already hoisted myself up into the tree.

There was a wide seat where the varying trunks divided. It was only about eight feet from the ground but was fully enveloped by the spread of branch and leaf. I slid my body along so that I stood vertically on the point of divergence. I could see her perched on a branch overhead. Her black clothing hung down around her like the wings of a battered raven. I settled down into the tree and let my mind go. My breathing steadied. Katy’s chains chimed against the trunk with the rhythm and weight of a Dickensian metronome.

Time passed.

I opened my eyes, unaware that I had even closed them. Katy was curled up in a foetal ball on the grass below me at the foot of the angel, crying gently. A woman was standing next to the statue, her eyebrows raised.

I sat up and stared down at her “Auntie Janet…” She was a narrow, prissily bourgeois woman with a Breton hat and nasty gold earrings. She worked as a receptionist in a dental surgery.

“Violet?” she lowered her eyebrows and the eyes beneath them disappeared into the folds of her squint “That is what I’m supposed to call you now isn’t it? Violet? Anyway, the vicar says he’s ready for us now. We have to go in. It’s time.”

I stood up quickly. I caught a headrush and put an arm out against the rising trunks. I saw that the hearse had arrived down at the chapel. The mourners milled around the vehicle. They cleared enough room for it to reverse into position. I was too high up to see the coffin inside. But I knew it was there. My heart lurched inside my ribcage. I felt sick. Still staring ahead, I said “Start without me. I’m going to stay and look after Katy.”

Janet’s lips pulled together “What’s wrong with her then?”

I turned my head slightly “What do you think’s wrong with her?”

Janet flinched. I hadn’t meant the words to sound so harsh but some truth of myself was pushing free. I fumbled another cigarette into my mouth. My hands were trembling “I’ll come down to the chapel when she’s feeling better.”

Janet didn’t move. I was too young to ignore her instructions and it made her defensive “Well why don’t you just come down from your little tree-house for a while, pay your respects and then come back and see if she’s any better?”

I continued to face away from her. Smoke drifted over my shoulder “No. I’m going to stay here and look after my sister.”

She shook her head and marched away, her arms folded “Fine,” she said, as if my words made no sense at all.

I finished my cigarette and wondered if they even did.

The reception was held in Janet’s house.

She lived in a suburban street with fussy front gardens and a near total absence of background noise. Lime trees ran in rows along both sides of the street. There was a wide strip of grass between the pavement and the kerb. The tarmac rolled with speed bumps. It was the kind of silent death all of my poorer relatives aspired to. It was a place in which to breed and decay with a stiff look on your face as if the whole world smelt bad.

I parked the car down the street and walked with Katy towards Janet’s house. It was a ridiculous place with fake beams and diagonal mullions in the windows “Look at it,” I said “Look at those fucking Tudorbethan windows. It’s all just so phoney it makes me want to vomit.”

Katy nodded as she disappeared upstairs “I’m going to lie down now.” She didn’t even seem to be paying attention to me at all.

I pushed across the ryalux carpet and made my way to the garden. There was an American porch-swing with a striped canopy and a mechanised awning over the bay windows. I popped a bottle of lager and sat, chain smoking, on the swing. I felt too big for the swing, but it gave me some welcome camouflage. I had been avoiding this very situation for over three years.

For a while I was invisible beneath the shadow of the shade but in due course the other mourners began to spill out of the house towards me. Once I was discovered, my solitude was terminated. Relatives and family friends formed a queue of commiseration that led from the lacquered drinks cabinet indoors up to the swing outside like a string of ants ferrying fallen sugar across the grass. I was not left alone for a second. A succession of vague relatives and family friends, each more tedious than the last, loomed up to me with freshly filled glasses while my beer warmed and dwindled.

They all knew me as Him. I was disappointed to find they all could recognise me at all, let alone so easily. I didn’t mind the thought of people realising I wasn’t born as a woman as much as I disliked being identified as Him. Him in a skirt. I had left Him castrated and discarded but He continued to haunt me, the ghost-face I could never fully slough off. The boy I was born to be, the boy I had killed.

The mourners would come and shake my hand, firmly at first and then softer as their hands slowed in response to mine. Were they expecting me to squeeze their palms like a builder? Not one of them tried to kiss my cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” they would say.

I would nod in response.

“Why weren’t you at the funeral?”

“I was with Katy. She’s not very well.”

“And where is Katy now?”

“She’s lying down.”

“It must be hard for you with her so young.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re the man of the house now.”

“I am a woman. My name is Violet now.”

“And how is university going?”

“I finished. I might be able to go straight into a doctorate if the funding comes through.”

“So tell me, what are you going to do with the house?”

Each one rattled through their platitudes before they settled on the final question of the house: the real order of business. They were wearing me down. I had overestimated them in thinking that my gender would be the focus of their curiosity. No, the vultures were after the carrion of my father’s estate, not the vanished penis of his prodigal son.

After an hour of this, I decided on a change of tactics. I couldn’t escape them in the garden, so I might as well try to hide in the house. I stepped over the begonias and made my way indoors. But I was blocked before the doorway by an elder cousin. The sanctuary was snatched away. I was cast back into the routine.

“There you are, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. I was just going into the house.”

“Why weren’t you at the funeral?”

“I was with Katy. She’s not very well.”

“And where is Katy now?”

“She’s lying down.”

“It must be hard for you with her so young.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re the, the man of the house now.”

“Right.”

“And how is university going?”

“It’s over. I finished last week and I went to India and I broke up with my boyfriend and then I came here today. I don’t want to be here. I’m not even supposed to be here. I should be on my way down to Goa by now. But what am I supposed to do? Katy called and I said that she needed me here. She’s just a kid. Dad left the house to me. It’s in my name. Can you believe that? Last time I saw him he told me that I was a freak and he didn’t even want me to live there anymore. But he left it to me in his will. Now somebody’s got to sort everything out and there’s nobody else and it’s not my fault. It shouldn’t even by my responsibility. I mean, you’re born and you start to discover the world and before you know it they put you in this big institution, this system, this big machine and you’re off on the treadmill and god forbid you if you show any kind of intelligence at all because the other prisoners will hate you and the teachers will mark you out and people start getting expectations of you so you go on to college and you go on to university and there’s no escape and then finally you’re free and your life is suddenly your own but then they grab you and they say, you know, by the way, your dad just died so there’s that part of your life gone and the lights are just going out left, right and centre and it just gets darker and darker and less and less of you is visible and then you realise that you’re dying off, little by little and you sit there in the darkness and it gets to you and you think well, maybe I should just fast-forward the rest of this because it’s just decay now, it’s just rolling downhill into this darkness anyway and what’s going to happen between now and then that could give it any shape or meaning?”

“Yeah, no, so tell me, what are you going to do with the house?”

I sighed and shoved through the bodies towards the French windows. Before I could reach the living room, a hand reached out and grabbed my arm. It pinched the flesh. I looked up to see an aunt I had never liked. She held my arm tighter and whispered into my ear “I think I speak for God when I say that you make him sick.”

I twisted at her grip. She flicked her hand open and my arm popped away from her spiteful talons. The crowd around us shifted and she melted back into the folds before I could even respond.

I was not upset. At least, not enough for her to see. It was the “welcome home” I had been expecting. I should have been ready, I should have prepared a response. Oh fuck it, yes I was upset. Why did I let her get to me? I forced my body through the wall of black suits and dresses and made my way into the lounge.

At first I couldn’t see properly. I waited on the threshold while my eyes adjusted to the light. Then I noticed that the living room was full of expectant faces. A battalion of elderly relatives were scattered around the sofas, their floral print dresses and bad shirts camouflaged against the chintz. They had been waiting for me. It was an ambush of false teeth and sympathy. I was trapped.

“What do we call you?” one of them said.

“I,” the kitchen door was too far away. There was no way I could make it “I’m sorry, pardon?”

“What are we supposed to call you, dear? You won’t use your old name anymore, will you?”

Another one joined in “Are you post-operative yet or are you still pre-operative?”

“Did you get it on the NHS or did you have to go private?”

In my exile I had assumed that they would have grown to consider me some kind of monstrous freak, a betrayer of the family’s normality. But I had not accounted for their minds’ possession by true life stories in gossip magazines and daytime TV chat shows. The tacky truth descended horribly: I was the extreme makeover-story they had been dining out on for the past four years. Having a freak in the family made them more interesting. I was appalled by their curiosity and yet I knew they would expect me to be flattered. I had experienced it before with some of my flatmates: they expect me to be some kind of confessional drama queen diva who revels in the attention. But I’m not gay and I never was. I’m just a girl. The rest of it isn’t my fault and I didn’t want people to make the gap between me and Him by the focus of their prurient fascination. Revulsion would have been easier to bear.

I turned on my boot heel towards the kitchen. There were tuts and sighs of disappointment. I tried to exude a sense of overwhelming grief to assuage them. I did not believe that it had been very effective.

It was not until I was halfway out of the room that I saw Joseph. I stopped dead. The last time I had seen him, I was still a man and he still loved me.