The Chrysalis Read online

  “It will be all right, Abbie,” he repeated desperately, though somewhere deep inside, he suspected it wouldn’t.

  Zac retched, then coughed with the violence of it. His stomach bubbled and burned. Doctors were always vague about the cause. Irritable bowel syndrome they always said, reaching for an umbrella term and their prescription pads. Zac reached out his arms, clutching the cold porcelain of the sink and tried to straighten. Mornings were bad. He ran the cold tap and splashed a little water onto his face, watching his reflection in the mirror as the water ran in rivulets down his chalky skin. He looked awful.

  Abbie was still sleeping when he left for work, curled like a child into his pillow, arm stretched across the empty space where he had lain. Their fears had sparked off each other last night, a comforting hug, a chaste hug developing into something more frantic and desperate in a bid to block out what the past was and what the future may hold. Abbie’s fear that her femininity had failed to satisfy him and she would be left alone, that she was useless as a woman; Zac’s fear that his masculinity had failed to satisfy her and he faced a lifetime of loneliness, that he was useless as a man.

  He could never work out the sex. It wasn’t that he couldn’t be aroused as a man, just that emotionally, it wasn’t truly satisfying. The body was wrong, the sexual role was wrong. The mechanics all worked, but he felt trapped inside them. He leant his head against the grimy window of the bus as it trundled out of town towards the care home. Abbie had asked if he was gay but it wasn’t as simple as that. He WAS attracted to men as well as women; that much was true. But he didn’t want to have sex with them as a man himself. That would be just as incomplete as having sex with Abbie. He wanted to have sex with them as a woman.

  It was too confusing. All these labels that people would apply. Was he gay because he liked men? Or bisexual because he could be attracted to both? Or should he really be a heterosexual woman? And if so, did that mean he was having a lesbian affair with Abbie? He couldn’t find the right label. It was as if he didn’t actually fit anywhere.

  A sudden image of his father came into his head and Zac’s cheeks flushed with a sense of shame. Imagine if his father could read his mind right now! If he had proof of how revolting his son really was, instead of just suspecting it. His father always seemed embarrassed when he was with Zac and met colleagues from the station unexpectedly. His police mates usually clocked Zac with a stare that was quizzical and lasted slightly too long for politeness. “Your boy?” one of them had said, once, a mixture of disbelief and amusement spilling out of his voice.

  Zac sensed that his father disapproved of everything about him, including his career choice. Not that it was entirely choice in a rural area like theirs. There was a small fish factory, a few pubs, some shops, a small office for the local council, and a care home. He wasn’t going to spend his life stinking of raw haddock, that was for sure. Shops were fine, easier than a care home in many ways, and occasionally he wondered if he’d made the wrong choice when he was wiping shit from some old man’s backside, but there was a broken bit inside Zac that made him want to heal others.

  Broken but tender.

  Besides, he had never intended staying here this long. He knew he could have gone to university if he’d made an effort. Another year at school and he would have made the grades if he’d forced himself to break sweat. But somehow, half-way through his school career, he just lost heart. It was his intention when he left to break free, leave the country and move to the anonymity of the nearby city where he might blend in more. Then Abbie had come along. Abbie had no intention of going anywhere.

  She was a small town girl, always would be, Zac thought. At times, her complete lack of ambition had exasperated him – frightened him, even. It made him feel there was no escape. Was she, he asked, content to work as an untrained assistant in a small nursery forever? The unasked question inside him was whether that meant he had to stay here, forever, too. Abbie’s eyes had hooded with a mixture of hurt and resentment.

  “What’s wrong with that?” she had demanded.

  Zac had been stricken with remorse when he saw how belittled she felt, and wrapped his arms round her.

  “Nothing,” he had whispered against her hair. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  There was a fear in Abbie, he realised. Not a specific fear, like a fear of spiders or rats or the crack of thunder overhead. Unless it was of life itself, maybe. She was close to her mother and her two sisters and that made her feel safe. She didn’t need to see the bigger, wider world and maybe, just maybe, Zac considered, that was a kind of strength. To know who you were and what you were and what made you happy… Zac, after all, couldn’t answer a single one of those questions.

  The bus jolted suddenly and Zac’s head banged painfully off the window. He sat up. It was so warm this morning, and he still felt nauseous. He needed another shower already. He peered through the grime into a playpark where a small boy was kicking a ball with his dad. Zac watched the man’s delight as the little boy’s foot connected with the ball, the man’s hands shooting into the air in triumph. He smiled in spite of himself. Had his father ever had such an innocent moment of pleasure with him? His father had played football semi-professionally as a young man and now coached the local under-15s with a seriousness that made his young players fear their trainer as well as revere his credentials. Zac had never been one of them.

  He still felt like a child in front of his father: the hopeless, hapless eleven-year-old who claimed he wanted football boots for his birthday. The boots had been flash, black and green with small hints of white. He smelled the leather as he opened the tissue paper in the box and his father grinned at him conspiratorially. It was the best bit of acting Zac had ever done. He grinned back at his father with a kind of desperation. He had asked for them but now he had them, he didn’t know quite how to react. Should he try them on in the house? He took one of the boots out and slipped a foot in. The studded sole felt strange beneath his foot and he was conscious of everyone watching him.

  “Thanks,” he said simply, as if his excitement had made him tongue tied, and his parents smiled hopefully at each other and then at him.

  “Here,” said his dad, as Zac struggled with the never-ending lace, “not like that daftie! I’ll show you…”

  It was one of the few times he could remember affection in his father’s tone.

  “Maybe you’ll play for my team one of these days,” he said.

  Zac remembered how his heart had sunk.

  The bus turned into a quiet avenue lined with trees where Zac had to get off. It was a five minute walk to work, past a row of fine, Victorian sandstone houses with handsome bay windows and embellished glass doors. They were the kind of houses few people could afford any more and some had been converted into student flats. Zac looked across to the playing fields in the distance. The schools were out for summer and there were already some kids kicking a ball around. In his mind as a child, he’d thought the football boots would be the answer to the unresolved question in his mind. Just the act of asking for them, of being a proper boy, would change things.

  But nothing had changed. How could it? Team picking at PE remained what it always was.

  “Jim!”

  “We’ll have Martin, then.”

  “Joe!”

  “Tim!”

  Until there was only one left. Zac, standing in his shiny boots, trying to look unconcerned while staving off sharp tears of humiliation.

  “Okay… Zac then,” the captain who’d drawn the short straw would say reluctantly, and the pack would be off, running across the pitch before Zac could even join them. Then the excruciating ordeal of pushing and shoving and sliding in mud, and being always in the wrong place at the wrong time, and hearing the muttered anger of team mates. “Fuck’s sake, Zac!” “Why do we always get him? “Get out of the fucking way, poofter!”

  Zac’s phone vibrated in his pocket as he turned in at the open wrought-iron gates of the home. Blossoms
from the rhododendron bushes fell over the top of the gate, and there was a low drone from the bees swarming into the heart of the flowers. The noise always felt a little menacing, a distant threat that could become an immediate one at any second. He took out his phone. Sorry. Never heard you leave. Empty here without you. Love you, zac. Ax

  Love you, Zac. The words did something to him. It was the acceptance he craved and yet he knew that it wasn’t the real him that Abbie loved. How could it be? She didn’t know who he really was. It was like reading a message that had actually been written to somebody else and trying to claim it as your own. His stomach twisted and he stopped abruptly on the path, winded by the physical pain.

  Abbie was relieved that there had been rapprochement and Zac knew that she would now pretend the whole episode hadn’t happened. There had been revelation, but no resolution and she would gradually come to terms with it by pretending that there hadn’t even been a revelation. She would make subtle changes to what had happened to enable her not only to live with it, but to go back to the way things were. The morning sun hit his face as he moved forward and Zac squinted in discomfort. Why, he asked himself, was he feeling so despondent? Because he was back in exactly the same place as he had been before - except now he had lost his privacy.

  Abbie was so needy; it vaporised out of her and it made him feel protective because he understood need. It almost matched his own, but as a man, he had become used to hiding his insecurity. It was just a shame, he thought, as he walked through the front doors, that his needs and Abbie’s needs were so entirely contradictory.

  Shona’s office door was open as he passed.

  “Zac!”

  He popped his head round and smiled. He liked Shona. She was a kind woman. He couldn’t understand Marianne’s antipathy to her but then Marianne was a woman of definite impulses and opinions.

  “I want to talk to you about Marianne.”

  “What about her?”

  “Has she ever talked to you about her husband?”

  “Raymond? A little.”

  “Is there a story there?”

  For some reason, Zac felt nervous. A story? His stomach tightened and he looked blankly back at Shona. He felt the same whenever Marianne mentioned Raymond. She always spoke about him as if he should have such significance to Zac, yet he was a dead man he’d never known. There was something almost spooky about it.

  Shona motioned at him to close the door and Zac came properly into the room, pushing the door behind him and leaning back against it.

  “What do you mean? All I know is that he’s dead.”

  “Has she ever mentioned murder?”

  Zac’s dark, almond-shaped eyes widened.

  “What?”

  “Never mind, “said Shona, waving a hand dismissively, as if she had been foolish to mention it. “I… she was probably havering. Forget it. I think she’s deteriorating a bit.”

  “Raymond was murdered?”

  “No… he… I think Marianne got a bit confused, but she said it so deliberately.”

  “Said what?”

  “That Raymond had been accused of murder.” She looked at Zac uneasily, as if looking for reassurance.

  “Oh my God!”

  “She’s a strange woman,” she added. “Don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “She says things that somehow make you shiver, yet you don’t quite know why.”

  “She’s very astute,” said Zac.

  Certainly there was a feeling of some mystery radiating from her, Zac thought, as if there was much you did not, and could not, know about her. But he had always had something of a bond with Marianne.

  “Those glittering black eyes,” Shona said with a slight laugh, and Zac sensed that the laugh covered a feeling of revulsion. “She almost frightens me.”

  “You look sad today,” Marianne said.

  Zac took her hands in his and tried to warm them.

  “It is so hot today and yet your hands are freezing,” he said, rubbing her fingers gently in his.

  “Are you sad?” Marianne persisted.

  “Oh, no more than usual,” Zac spoke lightly.

  “Yes, that’s true. You are often sad.”

  “No Marianne, that’s not what I meant!”

  “Yes. Yes it is. It is exactly what you meant.”

  Her fingers felt like twigs, hard and knobbly beneath Zac’s soft fingers.

  “Sometimes,” she added, “we hide behind the truth rather than lies.”

  Marianne’s gaze was uncompromising.

  “We pretend the truth is a lie,” she continued, but Zac did not speak.

  “How is your young lady?” she asked, after a moment.

  “Fine.”

  “Oh dear.”

  Zac found himself almost irritated. Why could Marianne not simply follow the submissive pattern of the other old ladies? When their strength failed them, their courage went. But Marianne’s assertiveness seemed undimmed by physical frailty. It was hard - physically and emotionally - working here, but Marianne made it challenging mentally too.

  Marianne reached out a finger to Zac’s chin and gently forced it round towards her.

  “Why are you sad, Zac? What troubles you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I understand,” she said, not lifting her eyes from his.

  “Do you?”

  She dropped her hand.

  “Let me tell you something. There was a night, a night with Raymond. The first night I knew.” She stopped, adding almost to herself, “No, not the first night I knew. I always knew. The first night I admitted I knew.”

  Zac held his breath.

  “We were going to a fancy dress party. Everyone else did things half-heartedly. Hastily borrowed items. In my case, an unconvincing moustache, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and an old tuxedo from a charity shop.”

  Zac scanned her face as she spoke, his eyes darting nervously.

  “Groucho Marx,” she said.

  The smile dissolved on her lips when he did not reply. “Of course,” she murmured, “you are too young.”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Raymond,” she said, as if Zac had not opened his mouth, “unlike the rest of us, went to endless trouble. He hired a wig. A costume. He spent an hour locked away getting ready, applying makeup, and when he emerged it made me gasp. He was stunning.”

  “Who?”

  “Marilyn. Marilyn Monroe.”

  Zac’s stomach tumbled.

  “Everyone’s ideal woman,” Marianne continued, “yet he pulled it off. There was a man at the party who spoke to me. He barely looked at me because he could not take his eyes off Raymond, but he thought that underneath my slicked-back hair and grotesquely unconvincing moustache, that I really was a man. ‘Your wife,’ he said, ‘is a very beautiful woman.’”

  “Were you jealous?” Zac asked curiously, before he could help himself.

  Marianne laughed lightly. “Jealous? Murderously so! How could I hope to keep such a beautiful creature? Especially when I was so plain.”

  “Marianne, why are you telling me this?”

  “Because we were talking about being comfortable in your own skin.”

  “No we weren’t.

  “Well,” said Marianne, fixing Zac with a look that made it difficult for him to avert his eyes. “Then we should have been.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Marianne

  It was a year, perhaps eighteen months, after Charpentier’s visit that Raymond relaxed enough to find another outlet. It is human nature. You vow never to do something again, but over time the rock of your resolve is washed away by a tide of longing that simply wears you down like the sea. That is how it was with Raymond. He was not strong enough to resist who he really was. I’m not sure any of us are.

  I disliked Sebastian from the start with his tanned skin – fake, I may say – and his crocodile smile. I doubt his name even was Sebastian; I am fairly certain that was some affectati
on that he had adopted to make himself sound more interesting. He had a brittle, bitchy quality that did not seem to disturb Raymond, but which he turned on me mercilessly. In every way he was a shade off colour, from his pink shirt to the slightly-too-large diamond stud in his ear. No class. I had no idea what Raymond saw in him; he was far too camp to be his usual type. I suspected that he chose someone as far away from Patrice as he could so that he seemed less of a threat to me.

  And the ego! He swanned around the place with the physical confidence of a prize fighter, despite the slight bulge around his middle and the thinning hair. Oh, he was good-looking enough in his way, I suppose, but deeply unattractive. Perhaps someone more generous than I am would put it down to an entrenched defence mechanism, brought about by his ‘otherness’, but his slightly grandiose approach to everything, his air of superiority, made me grit my teeth.

  “What do you do, Sebastian?” I asked, when Raymond first anxiously introduced us.

  “Oh, I’m sort of in showbiz,” he said with an excitable little squeal that characterised his speech and which I would come to loathe. “I work in radio.”

  “Really,” I said. “Where?”

  “I don’t work full time at the moment,” he added. “But things are going well.”

  Raymond smiled encouragingly at him.

  “I see. Where do you…?”

  “I believe you’re a lawyer,” Sebastian interrupted. He said the word with a slight sneer. “Oh my God, Marianne,” he said clutching his hand to his chest, “How do you work in an office all day? It would drive me CRA…azy!” Up the voice soared and then down again. “I’m too creative, I think.”

  I was not to be diverted.

  “So you work where…?” I said.

  “In radio.”

  “Yes, but where?” It was the lawyer in me.

  Sebastian eyed me resentfully.

  “At the moment, I work in hospital radio,” he said archly.

  He meant he was an occasional volunteer. The most creative thing about Sebastian was his imagination.