Mad Dogs and Englishwomen

Woke up at 4am stuck to the leather couch in Valerie’s sitting room by a combination of my own sweat and the sofa’s weird adhesive properties. Once I’d peeled myself away I found I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I decided to head out. I began to get my stuff together. Pulled my t-shirt, the sleeping owl, part of the first woman’s pyjama set my parents bought me, late last year, away from my body and over my head. Rolled a white cotton sports bra down over the sunburn on my shoulder from Saturday’s Pride parade and around my breasts, which have grown since I started doubling up on my oestrogen dose. Areolae for days, now. Dr Way says they need to ask the endocrinologist about officially upping my dose but I’m pretty confident they will. And when they have I’ll no longer find myself coveting the 1mg sachets Brianna leaves lying around in her room.

Every trans person has thought, at some point, even if only for a moment, about stealing another girl’s hormones. It’s a shitty thing to do, an impulse I’ve never acted on, but I understand the temptation to do it. The rationing out of this shit is oppressive. In conditions of scarcity even the most upright will contemplate theft, and trans people always operate in conditions of scarcity as far as hormones are concerned. The clinics give us just enough to keep us on our leashes, it seems sometimes.

Bev has been a good doctor though, I guess, much better than that Tory bitch back at the start. Of course you’ll have to lose some weight to pass and I thought bitch I live in Scotswood, I’ll walk out of my door and find you a dozen cis women with at least ten pounds on me but I was trying to be good then. Following the ridiculous advice on my ‘speech therapy’ leaflet: smile more. Practise walking with decorum. Ladies never put their hands in pockets thinking none of this sounds much like speech therapy to me.

I go to the kitchen and pour myself a small glass of milk. Valerie and Brianna like the full fat kind, being Americans. I’ll have it on cereal but since my diet last year I prefer fully skimmed. I’m only drinking it now because of the heat, and because I realise I haven’t taken my Lisipronil in a while. I push two tablets out of each blister, 10 and 20mg, swallow them down with the milk. Then I go next door.

‘Oh, hey.’ Valerie is up, lying naked on her mattress and looking at her phone. ‘You having trouble sleeping too?’

‘Yeah,’ I find my jeans in the chaos of Valerie’s floor and pull them on. Black jeans in this heat, a stupid idea but it was night when I came. Finding my trainers I press my bare feet inside them. ‘Thinking I might walk back to my flat. I feel like I wanna move before it gets too hot.’ Mad dogs and Englishmen, I think.

‘I haven’t slept yet.’

‘Wow. Holy shit, that’s, um, wow.’

‘Yeah. Heat’s messing with me too.’

‘Hmm. Do you want Laura today?’ I point to a pendant on Valerie’s desk.

‘Hmmmmmaybe? Haven’t decided what I’m wearing today. You haven’t worn her in a while though.’

‘Yeah, but I know you’re stressed at work.’ Valerie recently started a job at Timeslip Books ‘n’ Coffee, the comics/sci-fi/gamer food paradise which functions as a kind of unofficial day centre for Newcastle geeks. She’s the Assistant Manager. This is the most responsibility she’s ever had to deal with on a day-to-day basis and, like me, she’s perpetually worried she’s fucking it up. I suspect that, again like me, she’s actually probably doing way better than she thinks but I know getting her to see that will be a job and a half. Again, like me.

‘Hmmm. I dunno. Do you think Laura Palmer is a, uh…’

‘An appropriate totem? Yeah, maybe not, unless you want to wind up being killed by some sort of um, otherworldly…’

‘Some dude who needs to spell out his name. Ooh! Do you think maybe in the new season we’ll get to find out the rest of Bob’s name?’

‘Ha! Yeah.’ My memory of Twin Peaks is fuzzy, and I much prefer the film to the show. There are still bits of season two I haven’t seen yet, and my memory of bits of season one isn’t great either. There was something about Bob’s name?

This happens a lot with me and Valerie. She mentions some geek nugget I don’t fully get and I nod and go along with it, not because I’m trying to be smarter than I am but because I don’t want to interrupt her flow. Valerie does a sort of nerd version of the thing Waugh describes Sebastian and his posho chums doing in Brideshead, not doing you the discourtesy of imagining you aren’t entirely familiar with what she’s talking about, though with Val it’s more likely to be the history of the Carol Danvers Captain Marvel than The Waste Land or who Anthony Blanche blew last weekend.

I pick up the pendant by the layered chain and look at Sheryl Lee’s smiling face. ‘I’ll leave her here then. Give you the option.’

‘Thanks. Hey, could you maybe spot a sister a li’l bit of weed?’

‘Sure,’ I reply, ‘find the bag and take what you need.’

‘Okay. See ya.’ Valerie grins and pulls the whole baggy out from under the blanket balled up at the foot of her mattress.

‘Fuck you, bitch,’ I smile.

‘Nah, I wouldn’t do that to ya. Just a scoash.’ She busies herself pulling buds from the clear plastic and I check to see I didn’t leave anything else in her room. Then I head back to the living room, briefly, to put my sweaty t-shirt back on (much as I’d love to not bother with it I think the people of Gosforth will take a dim view of me walking home with my bra on show, especially this rather grotty sports number, bought before my boobs began to grow).

Satisfied I have everything, I go back through to Valerie’s room and pick up the last thing I need. ‘Sure you took enough?’ I ask.

‘Well you know me, I’ll always want more but I’m not gonna deprive ya.’

‘You’re a pal. I’m off now. I hope you get at least some sleep before work.’

‘This’ll help,’ she says, packing the ground buds into her vape. ‘See ya!’

The door to Brianna’s room is open throughout this entire exchange, but neither of us is all that worried about waking her. Brianna is a heavy sleeper. I once put up with listening to an entire episode of some American Gordon Ramsay gubbins blaring out of her laptop before I realised she’d fallen asleep in front of it.

I hate the way Americans always call him ‘Chef Ramsay’. To me, that seems way too respectful to the bad-tempered, abusive, bullying cunt but Brianna loves these macho cooking shows. I can’t really complain while she copies the recipes though, that woman is a damn good cook. And anyway, at least she doesn’t snore.

I close the door behind me and oh my God it’s so much cooler. Val and Brianna’s living room is like a sauna in this heat. It’s double-glazed, it gets the sun, and the bottom windows can’t be thrown open in case Hiro wanders out. A perfect storm.

So many houses on Valerie’s road have every front window thrown open, probably their back windows too. The English don’t cope well with such extremes of heat. A window left open all night brings the risk of moths and burglars but, in this weather, must be done.

I follow the road up to the Asda, buy a couple of pink Lucozades from the kiosk at the front and pay for them at the robot tills, trying as hard as I can not to get under the feet of the staff prepping the store for the morning rush. Twenty-four hour shopping is a godsend if you don’t work in a shop. But I don’t want to make the walk home without something to cool me down and keep my sugars up. I put one bottle on its side in my satchel, and keep the other out. Realistically the one in the bag will probably get a little shook up, but it shouldn’t take me long to make it home. One bottle ought to do it.

Leaving the car park I decide to go left instead of right, to follow Hollywood Avenue instead of making for the High Street. If I’m right, I’ll come out by the footbridge over the Metro line, just down from the depot. Not far to home from there. But first, a walk through Garden Village, built for the workers on a precursor to the Metro, yesterday’s utopia. Past the cemetery which, like pretty much every graveyard in the last ten years, now sports a solemn Commonwealth War Graves sign on its gate. Past the allotments, and the tiny bridge over what Brianna always calls the creek.

I photograph a few things on the way: the slogan on the back of a fishmonger’s van, which I send to Valerie; a sign for Gosforth Depot with the old Metro logo on it, or was it Tyne and Wear Transport and not Metro? That wavy sigil, the chance meeting between a pound sign and a portcullis. Haven’t seen it in years. You’d think they’d get new signage, for the depot. Though maybe not: no passengers will see it. Just the men in hi-viz gilets who let themselves in the gates by the side of the track. Mounting the footbridge I find a gate with tiny concrete pyramids in front of it, the better to put off the casual track invader. For a moment I think that the gate only opens with a simple bolt and I could get onto the track I think, but then I see the padlock. A relief.

Protect me from what I want.

Not far to go now. Coming up on 5am. I pause on the bridge for a moment, looking out towards the depot. Haven’t been up here since the morning after Valerie told me she wouldn’t date me, chain-smoking Marlboros for the first time in a decade. What a day that was.

Turning my gaze toward the never-occupied Northern Rock building by Regent Centre, I find myself happily surprised by a Metro appearing seemingly from behind the building, bound for Pelaw or South Hylton. Something about the whole arrangement, the millennial office block, the moving train, the redbrick depot in the morning light, the snaking lines, it all seems wonderfully busy for a moment. For the duration of this pause the city seems as if it’s working. Newcastle, I think, will never match the tourist bits of London, but at times like this it makes a passable stab at being Deptford or New Cross, the parts of the city where people still live and lights don’t burn in empty speculative buildings. For a moment, I’m glad to be here.

I take a swig of Lucozade, then turn away. There aren’t miles to go, exactly, and I’m not all that sure I’ll sleep when I get home, but I need to keep going. I shoulder my satchel, I hitch up my jeans. I start walking again.