‘But anyway,’ she said. ‘That’s not the point. The point is that even if you never leave her, I’m thinking I might like to have a kid before it’s too late. And at my age I’m cutting it a bit fine. So if it was, like,mine– if I promised never to ask you for nothing – would that bother you? Knowing it was yours and what-have-you? Or would that be too weird?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a bit… you know… out of the blue.’
‘We’ve been seeing each other almost three years,’ she said. ‘So it’s not that out of the blue.’
I thought,Christ! Three years?I counted them up, and it was true. It was just that if you took all the days we’d spent together and laid them end to end they’d add up to about two months – less, probably. Whereas Dawn – well, that was thirty years.
‘You know what I mean,’ I said. ‘We’ve never talked about anything like this. We’ve never talked about having a kid and we’ve never talked about me leaving her, for that matter, either.’ We never said Dawn’s name. It was always ‘her’ or ‘she’ or occasionally, when Cheryl was annoyed with me, ‘your damned wife’.
‘No,’ Cheryl said. ‘That’s why I’m talking to you now, innit? But no pressure. And I mean, I could shag any old bloke to make it happen. I could pick up some random on Tinder. It’s just that I’d kind of like it to be you. I keep imagining this gorgeous little mini-you running around. I bet you were super-cute as a kid, weren’t you?’
‘Me?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure.’ Certainly I had no memory of ever being told I was.
I worried about it a lot. I said ‘No,’ and then I said, ‘Yes, maybe,’ before switching to ‘Probably not’. I changed my mind every time I saw her and, understandably, she started to get fed up.
‘You’re just stringing me along,’ she said. ‘I know it’s a “no”. It’s just you won’t say so cos you’re worried I’ll run off with someone else.’
But it wasn’t that – it really wasn’t. It was honestly that I couldn’t decide.
It would have been good to discuss it with someone, I suppose, but there was no one I could tell. I could almost imagine going through it all with Dawn. We got on so well, we argued so rarely, that I could imagine her saying, ‘Well, these are the pros and these are the cons’ and being perfectly rational about helping me choose.
Yes, the only person I wanted to discuss it with was my ‘damned wife’. Hard not to acknowledge everything I was risking.
* * *
One spring day, I turned up at Cheryl’s and it was her mother who opened the door.
‘Oh!’ I said, blinking at the gust of perfume that hit me on the doorstep. ‘Hello! Is Cheryl home?’
‘I’m here,’ she shouted from indoors. ‘Don’t mind Mum. She’s leaving,aren’tyou, Mum!’
‘Don’t worry,’ her mother said as she stepped aside to let me indoors. ‘She’s almost ready. She’s been trying to get me to leave, but in truth I wanted to get a peek at you. Now it’s getting serious and all!’
‘Right,’ I said, forcing a smile and turning to Cheryl.
‘Mum!’ Cheryl protested. Then to me, ‘Don’t take any notice of her. Serious indeed!’ And then to her mother, ‘Honestly, Mum, you’ll scare him off!’
Cheryl’s mother tottered over to the sofa and then lowered herself down gingerly. ‘It’s me knees,’ she said, apparently answering some question suggested by my facial expression. ‘Buggered from a lifetime of wearing heels.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Buggered knees. That sounds inconvenient.’
‘It is,’ she said. ‘It’sbloodyinconvenient.’ I glanced at her shoes then. They were big and pink and had the highest heels I’ve ever seen other than on a catwalk.
‘Oh, I know, I know,’ she said, following my gaze. ‘But I just can’t walk in flats. Plus, they look so much better, don’t they? Feminine, like.’
Once we were finally on our way, I drove in silence, playing the images of Cheryl’s mother over and over on the little screen inside my head. Because she’d shocked me, really, Cheryl’s mum. She’d seemed so much like a man in drag that it was almost impossible to believe that’s not what she actually was.
She’d had big bouffant Long Island hair and slightly off-centre make-up that looked like the printing process might have gone wrong and slipped half an inch to the right. She’d had a gravelly voice, and had been wearing a tight pink Chanel-style two-piece that made her look like a posh sausage. And the shoes, of course, those shoes! She was like the love child of Les Dawson and Eddie Izzard.
‘So is she your birth mother?’ I asked. It was the only way I could think of to ask the question. I mean you can’t really ask,Is your mum trans by any chance?no matter how open-minded you are on the subject. Once you can ask that and no one gets upset, we’ll really know attitudes have changed.
‘What?’ Cheryl asked, hesitating about being offended.
‘You just don’t look much like her,’ I said, by way of an alibi. I assumed that she’d be flattered by that.
‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Really? You don’t think so? Well, good.’ Then, ‘No, she really is my mum, more’s the pity.’
The truth was shedidlook like Cheryl, though. It’s just she looked more like she might be Cheryl’sdad.
