They Meet

If you happened to be standing in one of the fields between Wansbeck Road Metro station and the roundabout at the bottom of Broadway Avenue, looking south towards a set of six municipal benches, on a particular morning in the summer of 2016, this is what you would have seen.

You would have seen two women, one blonde, one brunette, enter the space between the six benches from opposite directions. The brunette would arrive first, and busy herself taking photographs: walking forward and back, probing the scene from different sides like a boxer trying to find an opening in her opponent’s guard. So busy does she become, walking and standing and kneeling, that she fails, at first, to notice the blonde, who very clearly does see the brunette, and shouts something at her. You can’t quite make out the words. They’re few, and sharp, and short: you can tell that much. You see the brunette’s lips move, watch her shift from a kneel to a kind of half-crouch. You can tell from the bounce of her knees, the size of her body, the way the hand which doesn’t hold the phone is fingers spread in contact with the ground, she won’t be able to hold this pose all that long.

Their lips are still moving: the blonde is snapping, curt, the brunette is talking steady, talking slow, trying to keep the scene calm. But the blonde is moving first to one side then the other. Circling, trying to find the exact point from which she can move in and close the space before the brunette can react. The situation is combustible: you know with certainty it will tip into violence. It does.

The blonde and the brunette both spring at about the same time. This means they almost miss each other, but not quite. The brunette’s shoulder hits the stomach of the blonde, whose right hand grabs the brunette’s ponytail as they fall skittering to the ground. It’s harder now to tell what’s happening at this remove, but neither one will see you stepping closer. The brunette is somewhere between kneeling down and on her back, grabbing at the blonde’s clothes for leverage, trying to reach for her hair. The blonde gets both hands on the ponytail and pushes backward with the muscles of her thighs, pulling the brunette forward, over the edge of her balance, ragdolling her head left and right, half-circles, putting pressure on the neck, wearing her out, making her dizzy. The brunette reaches up with one hand and half-claws, half-pushes the blonde’s face.

When something’s on your face it’s hard to fight the urge to pull it off. When the blonde removes her right arm from the brunette’s ponytail the move is reflex, but she masters herself in almost the same second. The first punch she throws into the brunette’s face is tentative, a faltering feint which chances on its mark. The second is more sure, and the third shocks the fight out of the brunette long enough for the blonde to get back to her feet and begin driving stomping, step-through kicks into the brunette’s side. The woman on the ground attempts to roll away instinctively, but the blonde follows with the speed of a fighter who knows what her opponent’s next move will be, and mounts the brunette before she can react.

At this point, you can tell that it’s all over, mismatched from the start. This is what happens when someone who sees violence so rarely they view it as play encounters one for whom it is a life. The question now is just how much of a beating she will take. Or, at least, that’s how it is until the blonde feels something which makes her suck in her stomach, a shock which has offended, unanticipated, unvoiced insult, and she shuffles back and, with her left hand holding the brunette’s t-shirt for control as she pads her hand back to a point just below the waist of the brunette’s sweatpants, until it comes to rest between her legs and the brunette’s increasingly useless attempts to fight back stop in mid-thrash as she, too, feels an unanticipated threat take hold.

There is a moment in a fight like this, a moment when something merely violent becomes something darker still, when what was quarrel shifts inexorably into enormity. This fight is paused, is poised on such a moment. One wrong move now results in death, results in murder, bodies hidden, absence noted, questions asked. The fights that end in death: the people watching say they didn’t see it happen. But they lie. There is a tipping point, beyond which nightmares lie. There is a point, in fights that end in death, when only willful blindness means the fatal outcome can’t be seen.

And it is only at this point that you decide to intervene. 

Ruby, Suicide

Why do I still write? I resigned from the mag. I’m sick of sharing hot takes with the world. So why can’t I stop? Why do I drag myself to the computer every morning, batter the keys until I’ve written enough to fill three pages of eleven-point single-spaced Georgia?

But that’s bullshit. I know why.

It was maybe, what, a week before Orlando? Maybe a week and a half. I remember that I had just started to get over the whole trying-to-kill-myself thing when the news about Orlando began coming in. Then I was just getting over that when Jo Cox was stabbed. Then after that we had the Referendum result, and we discovered that not only could you get murdered in Britain in 2016 for not agreeing with the Mail and the Express, we found that we were surrounded by people happy to vote alongside her killer.

It's been a fucking cavalcade of shit, is what I’m saying, basically, a real rollercoaster ride of faecal action. I joke that I feel like a character in a novel whose author is trying to draw a heavy-handed parallel between my personal disintegration and that of the nation but I’m not even half-joking. Nothing feels real. Sometimes that’s hilarious. Sometimes it’s terrifiying. It’s always absurd. And absurd if you want to deliberately live your life existentially challenging convention is one thing, but absurd when all you want to do is keep food on the table, transition as soon as you can and maybe write a few things people like is a different thing entirely. It’s tiring.

I was tired when I signed in to our platform a few weeks ago. I hadn’t had time to wash or brush my hair that morning but it didn’t really matter, usually. The benefits of working from home, right? Still, it was feeling pretty matted, so when I got to my desk I ran the brush through my hair a few times to work the kinks out. That’s when Diane Skyped me.

Diane was my editor. She could see I was online. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, but I had to take the call. Her face appeared on my screen, as mine did on hers. If I had only clicked voice call instead of video...

‘Jesus Ruby! What the fuck happened to your eyebrows?’

Working from home meant no-one noticed it when I was ripping clumps of my eyebrow hair out with my own hands. When I ripped out so much I had no brows left, effectively, and had to start drawing them on even though I, personally, find painted-on brows trashy.

This is the first thing I had to explain to Diane. Not that I find it trashy, that every time I paint my brows on I’m reminded of why I have to. It isn’t something I like sharing with her. I get the sense that Diane, who goes on and on about how much she loves the gays, doesn’t extend the same courtesy to trans women, but then fag hags always regard us as a threat. We don’t fit into their weird pseudomasochism, their world of GBFs and going out but never having sex. Fucking weirdos.

I had been planning the jump before this but that pushed me over the edge. I might have let my intentions slip because Diane told me that she was ‘concerned’. Of course she is. She decided to try and do the whole building bridges thing by telling me her son is trans. She misgendered him repeatedly as ‘her’ during the discussion. I pity Diane’s son.

Anyway this all led to me breaking down and explaining my plan. On a walk to Longbenton Metro station the night before I’d noticed that the Metros come in a lot faster than they do at South Gosforth. I couldn’t really tell if they were fast enough to kill me but it seemed that way and I was prepared to risk it. So my plan that day was to finish filing what I had to file, then go to that station and do it. Make the jump. Just a step, really. One step, then impact, then BANG! No more problems, assuming I managed to do it right and didn’t just end up crippling myself.

Diane said she wanted me to go and see my doctor, see the crisis team, anything. I told her that I would. It seemed easier. She let me go. I didn’t talk about Jeanette.

Longbenton Metro is beautiful. A neoclassical station built originally as part of the Loop, the precursor to the modern Metro, even the usual Blairite additions haven’t fucked it up that much. It’s a nice thing to look at while preparing to jump. The first Metro came in too soon for me to make it, but that was fine, another would be along in seven minutes, the digital display informed me. Fair enough.

There was a message from TJ, my flatmate, on my phone:

Could you talk to Valerie please? She seems worried about you.

I’d put a note on Facebook. People were reacting. Additionally I’d texted Valerie asking her not to follow me in taking this action. A friend of ours had died just a fortnight ago (yeah, yet another fucking hammer blow) and at that point we still all thought it was suicide. I love Valerie and I would hate to think my death would send her over that cliff too.

There wasn’t another train for five minutes.

I phoned her.

I don’t really remember what she said. Well, a few things. Don’t do it I guess would have been one of them. I told her there wasn’t any point, that people were going to vote Leave and fuck everything up and then many more people would die, so really I was leaving early to avoid the rush. It’s a Terry Pratchett reference. We both got it. Neither of us laughed.

‘Are you going to give Richard fucking Littlejohn the satisfaction of seeing another trans woman die? Valerie asked.

Let’s say it was that which persuaded me. The actual truth is less cinematic. I missed another Metro because I was talking to Valerie and by this point I guess someone had alerted the station authorities because a dude in a Hi-Viz jacket was inching his way up the platform, probably to restrain me in case I did decide to jump. Two trains late as always. Metro apologises.

So I got on the next train instead of going under it. The woman in the seat opposite me asked why I was crying, if there was anything she could do to help. A Kodak moment, sure, but I shook my head. At that point, I needed to just get it cried out.

I had just tried to kill myself.

Everything after this point, I realised, would be bookended as everything that happened after I tried to kill myself.

That’s a tricky thing to get your head around. I’m still having problems doing that now, to be honest. Even writing this. Like, what the fuck do you do?

Maybe I should talk to Emma about that. She tried it, too. More hardcore than me though, she used a knife. Didn’t outsource the act of attempted self-murder to a public transport worker. I respect that.

The woman who asked if I was alright got off at Shiremoor. There are fields out there, interspersing the housing, as the train loops its way to the coast. They’re not picturesque. They’re not Vaughan Williams. But they’re there. And I swear that I saw a lone fox, bounding through those fields, from the window of the train. A thing you’d roll your eyes at in a movie, but I swear I really saw it.

I followed the loop round to Monument, changed for South Gosforth, walked home and got my weed and a change of underwear, then took an Uber to Valerie’s, where I drank cider, smoked, and helped Val and Brianna pave part of their garden and set up a firepit. Afterwards, we sat around the fire with Jean, made ‘smores and roasted hot dogs. It was a nice night, in the end, I guess. Except for the fact that, hours before, I’d tried to kill myself.

And then, as I say, Orlando and all the rest of it. I don’t know what can go right now, I know that I don’t want to. Something needs to, though. Something needs to. 

Something needs to happen. 

Caz's Story

Mally wasn’t like that, to begin with. We met in 2004. We were working for Littlewoods then, selling credit cards to people already buying on tick. Paying our own debts off by getting other people further into debt. Is it worth it, a bicycle on the boy’s birthday? It wasn’t something that we questioned. It was money.

Mally had ideas then, better ones, ones that weren’t just about who got everything while people like us got the shaft. He wanted to study psychology, took a course at the college, got into university, he was so proud. I was too. He loved the buildings, by the river. Said it was beautiful. Took me there once. The canteen smelled funny and I wasn’t impressed with the food. The bogs were a sauna. He took me to the library. The reading room. Just us.

‘It’s so quiet,’ I remember telling him. Whispering.

He nodded. ‘This is what they’ve had all their lives,’ he said. ‘Toffs. Oxford. Eton. To us, this is amazing. They think it’s normal. Think about that.’

He was always thinking, Mally. That was the problem.

He got on with the Africans, at first. I remember him sitting in the Littlewood’s canteen, laughing with Raymond from Ghana about King of Queens. I said I liked the woman in that show and it was true, I did. She had the cutest face but she was spikey and aggressive.

‘Ah aye?’ He smiled. ‘Bit of a Carrie, are ya?’ Then him and Raymond laughed.

We got talking after that, coffees at break, found out what he was doing with himself.

It was only when I got to know him better that I realised that he wasn’t doing well.

He’d come back home on Monday complaining that it was all numbers.

‘It’s all fucking maths,’ he’d spit. ‘Graphs an’ statistics an’ shite. I wanna know how people think, not how to put dots on a fucking graph!’

Mally struggled with the statistics part of the course. Even the computer program they used to make it easier was hard for him. So he got me to help. I’ve always liked numbers, maths, equations. They’re clean, they’re balanced, they’re evenly matched. They prove things. I would take him through the equations used for the test, explaining how they worked, as much as I could, as much as I could make him see. I would explain how the program allowed him to shortcut, to save on his labour. I got him through and he just scraped a pass in that module.

Looking back, this was maybe the first sign of what he’d become. He would say little things, snap. I could tell that he found it humiliating, him at uni and me with a handful of GCSEs having to help him. Being better at running the numbers than he was. When he got his mark back for the module he looked at it and said Thank fuck that’s over. That isn’t fuckin’ psychology.

There were other signs too. He began to feel the lecturers didn’t like him. The statistics lecturer predictably came in for stick. Patronising yank dyke bitch, he’d call her, coming back from lectures, telling stories of classroom humiliation. It didn’t seem fair to me. I met her, when he took me to the canteen. She seemed alright. I don’t know if she was a dyke. She was warmer to me than to him but she would be, I think. We were both numbers people. Mal wasn’t. And I liked that she came from Charlotte, North Carolina, because that made me think of Ric Flair.

Once, one afternoon, I was alone in the house and he was off in the library, the reading room, I looked at his statistics book and worked out one of the tests by hand, on paper, doing the sums in my head. It took me three hours and four cups of coffee but I did it. It made me feel clean. Clean and safe. Numbers, balanced and matched. Like a spell, like a Tarot card spread.

He came back with another complaint about class. Not the fucking dyke bitch this time but the bearded lefty wanker, the older lecturer who dressed like a geography teacher and quoted people called Popper and Hegel. He’d been talking about patterns in science or some shite like that, and Mal mentioned something he’d read in a business book he’d bought a year ago, NLP bollocks.

‘The guy fucking laughs at us,’ Mally said. ‘Smiles and says while I understand the popularity of that idea I’m afraid I have to say it’s just not even wrong. But that shows that you’re reading around this! That’s great! Just think a little bit more critically and then moves on. Practically patted my head. Fucking cunt.’

Needless to say the dyke and the bearded wanker were now both recruits in the conspiracy against him.

After 7/7 he really began going wrong. He came home from work that day crying. ‘You see what they’ve done?’ he said, nodding his head at the news. He’d began reading stuff about atheism, watching videos online. It didn’t help that there were Asian students on his course, doing better than he was.

‘You know how much they get?’ He’d say. ‘The University? For taking foreign students? More than they get paid for taking me. Now what do you think that means, huh? It means we’re educating foreigners instead of British students. Diabolical.’

I wanted to point out those students were probably paying for him, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. He’d started snapping more now, coming home drunk, bitching about other students. He hadn’t hit me yet, but I was starting to think that he might. I got myself a separate bank account, a new one, unknown to him. I applied for one of our credit cards at staff rates, never used it, kept it hidden. I thought about mum, and dad, and how she’d got away. You need fuck-off money, she’d tell me. In case you have to get away. I dismissed them at first, all her warnings. They start out nice, they start out smiles and love, she said, but you see how they are in the end. Fucking men.

Kizz and my mum would get on, I think. She began to bring home women about a year after dad left. She said they wouldn’t hurt her.

She was wrong about that.

Mally knew about my mum. That put an extra little sting in it, every time he mentioned his dyke lecturer. Even before he’d been funny about it. They say it runs in families, jokes about threesomes. It annoyed me but I used to let it by.

He began saying he was an infidel. He stopped talking to Raymond from Ghana.

‘It’s not a race, it’s a religion,’ he would say, ‘but you have to know who you can trust.’ That meant people like him. White British. The box on the form nobody even wants to tick they’re so ashamed, he’d say.  Bought a badge with a flag on it.

‘You ought to get involved too,’ he told me. ‘You’ve seen what they do to people like your mum. And you.’

He got himself thrown off the course, for swearing at a lecturer, but that wasn’t really what it was about, in his head. ‘When they can’t disprove you then they look for an excuse,’ he spat. ‘I wouldn’t toe the line. I wouldn’t jump through hoops.’

When I asked him what line he was toeing, what hoops he wouldn’t jump through, he explained. ‘Black blokes. They have more mental health problems. You’re supposed to say it’s society’s fault, but what if it’s genetic? I was only asking. But that’s what you get.

’

Only asking. By this point I knew how he’d have been only asking. Only asking again and again, in a different way each time, probing, provoking. Only asking about women I was friends with, about mum. Only asking why I wouldn’t go to protests with him, against mosques. Only asking where Obama had been born.

Why did I stay with him? We didn’t have kids. Partly it was to spite mum. Partly because I thought he’d see the light eventually. He didn’t. Instead, I slowly joined him in the darkness.

‘We need women,’ he’d say. This was after he’d fully signed up to it, got the tattoos, put a flag in his window. ‘People just dismiss this if it comes out of male mouths. And women get less aggro. And the camera loves them, Cazzy, even you! You should do more.’ At first I humoured him, went to the protests but kept a low profile. Then he began getting fired, getting his picture on blogs. He would laugh and call the antifa his fan club, but it meant we were drifting away, into a self-contained world. He got work through some self-employed mates, cash in hand, company names changed so often, personal accounts used to bank the coin and skip the charges, wages in an envelope on Friday. Hi-viz jackets. Working with my hands, he’d tell me, man’s work, not selling some bitch tracksuit bottoms. Got away with this for years, until the crash, until the firms began to fold, until the owners went to prison. He tried going it alone but he just couldn’t deal with the figures. He would shout at me to help, then grumble all the time while I worked it all out, twice, to show I wasn’t wrong. He started going to the pub after our money talks. And hitting me when he got back.

You can only fight so long before you go under. I began to give in, to really hate the people that he hated, to accept his explanations for the way things were fucked up. To laugh with him when he came back from the callcentre, where he got a job after his tree surgery folded, joking about their diversity training. ‘The pink fucking pound!’ He’d sneer. ‘Be nice if we had some of that, huh? Where are you hiding all that pink money from your mum, eh? Or is that just for faggots, not for dykes?’

I started to go on the demos and heckle the antifa, got off on the cheers from our lines, the cries of ‘stick it to ‘em, Caz!’ when I would try to break the standoff, get bundled away by the bizzies. Got tattooed. Became an Angel, at least to the boys in the pubs which had flags in their windows. It wasn’t so much that I believed as that it meant I fit in somewhere. And when Mally and I were on demos he wasn’t hitting me. And I could put my anger somewhere else, at least a little.

Eventually one of the guys at the pub asked about that. Said it wasn’t right, he shouldn’t do it. Said the lads had had a word with Mally and advised him to lay off. He came home that night and apologised, said he hadn’t treated me the way he should. Said he would be better and he was, at least for a while. And for a while I felt closer to those radgies than I ever had, I started siding with them in my heart. Believing? Doesn’t matter. It was us v them now. The people who’d stopped Mally beating me versus smug lefty bitches calling me worse than shite? I’d picked my side.

It didn’t last, of course. The bank began having recorded meetings with him. Points were raised. Some customers complained. He was careful at work, never used the words, told them that, but they said it was more than just words it was values, and Mally was stressed.

He started hitting me again.

This time I didn’t take it. I withdrew the money from the fuck off bank account, saved over twelve years, still less than I liked, but what I would need. After a demo I excused myself from Mally, said I needed to get tampons, bought those and a pay-as-you-go. Threw the box for the phone in the toilet, kept it switched off in my pocket ‘til I needed it.

And then I emailed Mally’s work. 

art brut

I love your body’s sense of being ashlar and marshmallow,

your musclefat, your ripple and your meat;

your tender brawn, the size-up of your squint:

your attitude, your fluency in aggro.

I love the fact your hands can cover mine,

the way you twist my arm behind my back,

the torque with which your muscles wrench my neck;

the way that you, divinely, take your time

before releasing: how your sweat can shine.

I love the way your eyes flash when we fight,

the enormities you whisper in my ear:

dyke, bitch, she-male, faggot, tranny, queer;

the way you bring my vulnerabilities to light,

the capacity your thighs and concrete share,

of standing mute and dramatizing fear.

I love your violent vertu, your brute art:

the way you have me beaten from the start.

Roundabout, roundabout

Usually when my phone flashes it just means one of my girls needs more weed. Usually they’re a little embarrassed, apologetic, so when I get Caz’s message I can tell something’s up:

KIZZ I NEED U HERE QUICK PLZ CUM

I’m meant to be dropping off at Ruby’s place, I’m nearly there, but something about this message seems urgent. I pull into one of the streets by the church.

WHAT’S UP HUN U OK XX

NO TIME PLZ GET HERE HAVE ½ HR MAYBE

WOT U TALKIN BOUT BABE X

I’m already getting ready to drive to Caz’s place. Ruby’s addiction is going to have to wait.

HE HIT ME AGAIN KIZZ IM LEAVIN HIM

‘About fucking time,’ I mutter as I get the car in gear and head off down the High Street. It’s the middle of the day so it isn’t busy; even if it were rush hour the traffic would be mostly the other direction. I go as fast as I legally can, watching out for the cameras – half an hour isn’t a lot of time to get there, but if I get arrested it’s too long.

I speed past Blue House roundabout, the Town Moor, thread the needle through the web of underpasses when you get to town, over the Tyne Bridge, through Gateshead, the Felling bypass, then the road to Washington, roundabouts, roundabouts, roundabouts. Heard from Val that Ruby says this place was built back in the sixties. They had ideas then. No traffic lights was one of them. Roundabouts would keep the cars in order. Pedestrians and cars would never meet. They called it a New Town, though bits of it are old as death.

Roundabout. The big one that crosses the A1 motorway heading to Shields. The sign for that place Terry calls Titty Twisters, the quarry, now a business park. No business though. It’s empty, just about. How we live these days. Little glass and brick deserts, burger vans for the damned. A Little Chef lunch on the Friday. Past the field where they have the Kite Festival.

I met Caz at Pride, couple of years back. The women’s tent, the Drag King Elvis competition, she was laughing but she seemed a little sad. I figured she could use some help. I introduced myself. She looked around and said sorry, I can’t talk. She looked over to the door and I could see him. Looking in, trying to decide what to do, fuming. Is he, I asked her, and she nodded.

Roundabout. One way, the school they turned into a college; the other way to one of the industrial estates, probably a business park too these days. Another big idea: a town made of villages, artificial ones, each one with an industrial estate where the people would work. The idea never did.

I was about to tell her to move out the back, get her away from him, when the bastard comes in. Not all aggro: calm and pleasant. Aye, I know his fucking type. Slimy. Sly. He comes up and says hi. His name is Malcolm, but everybody calls him fucking Mally. Aye, I think, I bet they fucking do. He turns to Caz, says aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?

Roundabout, overpass, roundabout. The big one, passing under the Highway. Turn off here and reach the A19, Middlesbrough, York if you carry on long enough. I’m going straight. Past trees planted to baffle the sounds of the traffic, seeing the Monument for the first time, a black version of those temples down in Greece. That thing gives me the creeps. It was built by some rich bloke, owned all of the mines. And they say you could see it from all of the mines. Fucking creepy weirdo.

Caz is gaping like a trout here because she doesn’t know my name, is worried this Malcolm will think she’s coming on to me, I’m coming on to her, I can see this ending badly, so I make the only move I can. Look, I say, just tell me if I’m being out of order but it’s a hot day and somethin’ about your missus suggested to me she might need something to chill her out, that’s all. I open my jacket, pull out some tinfoil, a ten-spot of green.

You could get in trouble for that, he says.

Roundabout. One way to the Village, one way loops back to the Highway. The joke is nobody can find their way in Washington because the roundabout signs all just say the District Numbers for each Village, which no-one outside of town knows, but no-one who lives here knows either, because they just use the names. This joke is over ten years out of date but they still make it. People like to laugh at ideas from the 60s. ‘Cause we’re so much better. So more modern. With our empty business parks.

I look him in the eye. Probably, I say, but you’ll pay a better price for my stuff than the booze they rip you off for here. He smiles. But if you don’t want any...

Mally? She asks, making puppy dog eyes at him, can I have some, and I watch the smile insinuate its way onto his face. I can see he’s about to ask how much, know he’ll use this as an excuse to barter down, so I change the game. Here, have it, I say, putting the wrap in his hand, pulling a pen from my pocket as quick as I can, sleight of hand, and he fumbles to hide it from view. They always do.

Roundabout. A smaller one, either way leads to old houses. Then the smallest yet, only two exits, the one to the left which leads to the river, the one straight ahead, where I’m going.

And if you need more and I grab hold of her hand, write my number, if you ever need anything and I look her in the eyes when I say anything. He gets the stuff into the pocket of his jeans, well nice to meet you and they’re off. I leave the site by the back entrance, get out of the park quick as I can, lucky I didn’t bring the car, walk zigzag and chaotic through the park, across the road, down to West Jesmond where I take the Metro home.

Roundabout: here. This is the place where I’m turning.

I knew that it’d be him who would text, him who’d come out to pick stuff up from me, but I’d know where they lived. Over time I relaxed him, he’d let her come out, always there, always watching, but she would emerge.

I park outside her house, keep the car running, text her HERE X and she runs out, in a hoodie and trackers, carrying a single holdall. No black eye, no sign of grab marks on her wrist. I know better than to start by asking questions. We drive off.

‘I thought you said he hit ya?’ I have to ask.

‘He’s been hittin us,’ she tells me. ‘But he isn’t like the others, he doesn’t storm off after that. This is my chance Kizz, my window. But if I told you that I didn’t know you’d come.’

‘Jesus babe, you didn’t have to say he’d hit you, y’know – ’

‘I know. Kizz, thanks for coming and I know I was probably being stupid but I had to get you here. I’m glad you are.’ She reaches for my knee.

‘You don’t have to do that to show me you’re grateful,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not fucking him.’ My hands are tight, white-knuckle, gripping the steering wheel. That fucking shitehawk.

Things go quiet for a while. Roundabout, roundabout.

‘So how’d you have a window?’ I ask her.

She smiles. ‘I shopped him to his work.’

‘You what?’

‘Relax, he doesn’t know it’s me. The stupid bastard leaves his Facebook open all the time. I took shots of his posts, in the Infidels group and the EDL pages, all that. I sent an email from the college, on a break from my employability course.’ She smiles. ‘First time that’s ever come in useful.’

‘Jesus, Caz.’

She looks over at me again, and her smile’s going manic. ‘He fucking phones me from work. Hey doll I’m gonna be late,’ she says, miming a phone by her ear. ‘Work found out about my posts and they’ve only called the fuckin’ bizzies.’ She laughs. ‘The fucking police!’

‘Aye well I’m not surprised babe. Some of that stuff that he writes is fucking vile.’ I follow him on Facebook, though he doesn’t know it’s me. I keep an eye.

Truth is, I wish I’d thought of doing this. ‘Did you expect the police to come?’

She shakes her head. ‘I thought he’d get in trouble, they’d maybe keep him back or something, suspend him.’

‘Wouldn’t that mean he’d be around more?’

‘He would at first but I know what he’s like. He’d stew for a week, then start hitting up pubs with the rest of those cunts. I’ve been planning. I knew I’d have a chance to leave sometime. I just didn’t think it’d be today.’

She unzips the bag she’s carrying and shows me what’s inside. Some pants and tampons. An old Nokia. And money.

‘I saved and I saved. I bought this with cash, pay as you go. It’s a burner. I smashed up my old phone just after I texted you, threw the SIM card down the drain. And the rest is for expenses. Some’s for you.’

‘Ah now, bollocks – ’

‘No, I need somewhere to stay and I want to crash at yours, at least for the first couple of days. I can pay you back…’

I shake my head. ‘Keep your money for someone you have to pay. You can crash at mine regardless. I’m just glad you’re safe.’

She looks out the window. ‘Well I’m not safe, not quite, not yet. But I tell you what,’ she looks at me. ‘I’m going to be.’

Roundabout, roundabout.

Incident by the Six Benches

This summer is ridiculous. This year. I can’t sleep. Again. At Valerie’s, on her goddam leather sofa which sticks to my back and my butt and literally fucking sucks. It isn’t her fault and in winter it’s fine but in this heat it’s just intolerable. Take your clothes off to cool down and you stick to the furniture. Put clothes on to stop yourself sticking, sweat your ass off all the more. An unwinnable battle. A double-bind.

Only way out of a double-bind is to say fuck it, so I pull on my clothes, check my make-up. It isn’t on point – whose is, at 4am? – but all it needs is a touch more mascara, a top-up of the brows, and fresh lipstick…after a drag on the pipe, of course. I don’t want to stain it.

The smart thing to do is head home. But I’m bored with that walk, by the cemetery, over the bridge with its cold war suggestions, down to the flats. I feel like taking a different route.

Out to the Co-Op? It’s risky. The shop won’t be open at this hour -though nowhere else will, save the garages – and that way you’re headed to Kenton. Rough country. I don’t know the local patterns. Here, nobody’s out at 4am, except the early shift workers and the truly masochistic joggers. Up Wansbeck Road way might be different. But even when I lived in Scotswood this was quiet time. And I’d get to see St Hugh’s, and the No Golfing sign, and those beautiful flats with the weird orange detailing.

I leave the house and take a rightward turn. A straight shoot from here and sooner or later you’re not in Newcastle no more: and the border starts early. Walking to Valerie’s on Ladies’ Day, scanning the crowd at the Three Mile Inn, the grain of roadside concrete, thinking this is where Northumberland begins. The girl I once got off with, who lived in filth and kept a copy of the Bristol Stool Chart on her wall, who told me her family were Border Country royalty. Her father announced he was gay, and started looking for love in the Telegraph personals. Her disgust: ‘everybody knows you use the Guardian for that’. How the other half cruises.

Catch a bus here and you can make for Morpeth, Alnwick, via Acklington Prison where the mood on the bus really changes depending on what side of visiting you’re riding. A girl I know is in there, detransitioned for her safety. I’d visit, but I only knew her vaguely and I think maybe getting visits from a tranny would be bad for her in-prison rep.

Maybe I’m a bad person.

I’m not going straight today. At the roundabout I turn left, past the postwar houses with their porticos, the nautical curves in their window bays, the new(ish) build flats on the right. This is not a long walk but, being mostly tout droit, it seems longer.

It reminds me of Nunhead station, part of this walk. The part by Wansbeck Road. Passing under the bridge. Meeting Leon there, and Billy Monster. The walk past the pub, over Telegraph Hill. Up Kitto Road and round the corner to the Big Queer House, where we drank and smoked until God knows what hour in the garden. This is the London I miss: not the tourist areas but the places people live. The bust of Olaudah Equiano in the park. The house off Pepys Road with books stacked to the top of the window, spines facing in, skyscrapers of paper. You could see Canary Wharf’s pyramid, light flashing, if you leaned out of Leon’s attic skylight.

The sign says NO GOLFING. Valerie and I both took photos. She wants to come back, borrow a golf glove from someone – or maybe just buy one, there’s a golf shop up the road, under the Indian restaurant whose curry Brianna finds too sweet – and take a photo of a hand wearing it, flipping off the sign. Golf or die, man!

It feels rural to me, this path by the Rugby Club. Nothing but fields in one direction. Val disagrees. Kansas City rural’s on a bigger scale than ours. She describes it as suburban but it’s more than that, out here. Rothbury Avenue, moving to Regent’s Farm Road: that’s suburban. This place…that field could keep going. All the way to the border. Like Christina’s World.

In the Co-Op up the road, they display the Scottish Sunday Post as prominently as the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. They know that we’re in the borderlands, even if the maps pretend they’re far away. ‘Every time something happens there are all these cries to move the border.’ A liminal place. Something could happen.

It’s a liminal time, too. There is no such thing as dawn. There are two kinds of twilight, morning and evening, and three types in each: civil. Nautical. And astronomical. BMNT: begin morning nautical twilight. Military coinages. Fortified language. A killing ground between the night and day.

That French film that Valerie raves about, the Queens of Night and Day. This is a film about magick, she says to me, and I hear her sounding the k. Valerie’s occult enthusiasms, witchcraft as a way out of the white girl trap of cultural embezzlement. I gave her a copy of Hutton, told her that stuff’s all made up. I suspect she won’t read it.

That film is pretty damn good though.

I walk past the topiarised hedges, three houses in a row with greenery so straight you could rule margins with it. I don’t know why just these three houses: I would like to think they’re council in a sea of right-to-buy, that Nick Forbes is sending a man out to shear these things straight, but realistically that isn’t very likely. The new opening times for the Library, an A4 sheet stuck to the back of the door. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the Team Mystic kids who have the place held down must wait outside to troll the gym. Or hit the Quaker Meeting House instead.

What’s more likely is one of the people here just likes his hedge straight, and does his neighbours’ so it isn’t out of place. The Big Society extends as far as next door’s garden. And no golfing.

I come to my favourite bit of the walk: the Six Benches. Municipal, black iron and wood, left right left, a De Chirico promenade, empty each time I’ve seen them. An invitation to musical chairs.

I’ve photographed them once already, put the shots through Pixlr and Prisma, all possible filters, but haven’t quite got it. There’s an angle that I haven’t shot from yet. I have to find it. Magic hour’s coming. If I work, then I can make this really good.

I stand at a distance, walk closer, step back. I hold my cracked phone on its side, hold it up, try Dutch angles. I walk behind the benches, meet them from the other side, I cross the road and shoot from there. I kneel on one knee until it aches, then on the other. It’s taking a while but I feel like I’ve got it.

‘Here!’

Damn. Got so caught up taking the shot I stopped paying attention. Where the Hell is hypervigilance when I actually need it?’

‘Here! Yee!’

Still kneeling, flicking the camera to video in case I need evidence, I look up.

‘I knaa yee!’

By the benches

in the morning’s civil twilight

I see her again

Civil Twilight

By the benches
In the morning's civil twilight
I see her again

Badge of Honour

‘Wait,’ I ask her, ‘this is with women? Cis women?’

She shakes her head. ‘Rarely. Usually it’s crossdressers, drag people, guys with a fetish for spandex and fishnets.’

‘Right.’

‘I mean a couple of cis women, but sort of as favours? There was a dominatrix I knew and…’

‘What was that like?’

‘Pretty good, but she was going for pins, not submissions. She facesat me in a weird way though.’

‘Weird how?’

‘Face down. I had her big thighs either side of my head and my nose and mouth shoved up against this dusty dungeon floor.’

‘Ugh.’

‘It was great. I loved it.’

‘Jesus, Ruby.’

She holds her lighter to the bowl of her pipe and inhales, then passes it to me. Under the first of the ash the powdered buds glow like coal.

‘And Rachel.’

‘Bloody Hell! Wasn’t that when - ?’

‘I was presenting as male then, yeah. She’d dress me in her clothes and make my face up, then kick my ass.’

I raise an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah yeah I know, file under obvious clues.’

I pass the pipe back to her. This is a weird conversation.

‘How did that come about?’

‘I came out to her. About liking…this.’ She gestures to the floor around us, Valerie’s mattress, our clothes scattered over the floor, ripped tights and stretched knickers. Her belly still red where I punched it, her breasts still showing the marks from my fingers.

‘And she was okay with it?’

‘Hmmm. She didn’t take much convincing. It’s a seductive thing, to be told you’re admired for your strength.’

‘You cower before them so invitingly.’

‘Huh?’

‘Nothing. Song lyric. So why on Earth did you and Rachel split up then? I mean if she was willing to indulge your wrestling fetish…’

‘Well, that didn’t last the whole of the marriage.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, dear Emma, if you had ever been in a long-term monogamous relationship instead of standing at the still point of a polyamorous tornado, you’d know that the sexual side of it becomes less…prominent after a while?’

‘Ah. Lesbian bed death.’

‘I guess so, in a way. And also, um, I knocked her out.’

‘Holy SHIT Ruby! How the fuck – ’

‘It was an accident, okay? She was on top of me, I pushed her back – I mean I was struggling but not really struggling, you know? I was enjoying being held down, anyway, I pushed her back a little but I hadn’t clocked the table was above us and…she hit it. Spark out. I had to move to the side to avoid being trapped underneath her.’

‘Jesus!’

‘I was shitting myself. I thought I’d fucking killed her. I was doing the whole movie thing, oh fuck, trying to remember how to do CBT…’

‘How would that help?’

She nods her head from side to side, retracing her steps. ‘CPR. Don’t you die on me, all that…’

‘Did you actually say don’t you die on me?’

‘Just about. Anyway, she wasn’t out long. I don’t know if you’ve ever been knocked out before…’

‘I have not, thankfully.’

‘I haven’t either. I’d really like to be knocked out some day though, that’d be awesome.’

‘You are a very special person.’

‘Ha ha. Anyway, being knocked out does not actually last that long. It’s a few seconds, a minute, not huge amounts of time. She came round pretty quickly.’

‘How did she feel about that?’

‘I think she felt kind of excited about it, actually. She wanted to go again.’

‘Did you?’

She looks at me like I’ve asked her to buttfuck the Pope in full Rangers kit. ‘No! For all I knew she might have had concussion. I told her that was enough for the night and we stopped. And we didn’t do it again, actually.’

‘You were worried you’d hurt her?’

‘Yeah. People don’t realise how dangerous the average living room is as a fighting environment. I mean even here you have to watch out for the desk and the radiator, the shelves at the end, but there isn’t a coffee table. The coffee table is the first thing you get rid of, if you’re going to do this stuff.’

‘Duly noted. So how were things afterwards?’

‘Like I say, she seemed kind of excited. It was a story she’d return to sometimes. Remember that time you knocked me out? It was like a badge of honour, a memory of adventure, taking risks. Like my mum telling the story about my uncle nearly killing her with an axe.’

‘Christ, Ruby, what the fuck is your family?’

‘It’s not actually as crazy as it sounds. I just mean that…I think women don’t get sanction as adventurers, you know? It’s getting better, but especially in the past…I just…I don’t know. She had a quiet life. She was a teacher! She didn’t have many memories of her body being strong, of snapping back, of being tough. Sometimes I think I took that away from her, because I was frightened.’

‘Hmmm. Ruby Ross, you are one weird fucking lady.’

‘Look who’s talking.’

I flip her off and roll up on my knees. ‘Wanna go again?’

She smiles. 

between

Ruby's Game

Here is what you do: you make someone’s acquaintance. Exchange pictures. Discuss what you would like to do. Eventually, if you feel safe enough doing so, you meet. It isn’t so very different from the usual forms of dating these days, except we don’t meet up to kiss and cuddle, but to slap and scratch and bite. We meet to fight.

On Fetlife, which is as close to mainstream as BDSM gets, the term ‘struggle play’ is sometimes used to lend a sense of respectability and separate what I do from competitive fighting. I can see why. There is something tacky about it. Something a little bit redneck, a bit working class. Punishing someone with your own body is churlish. A true gentleman has tools for such specialist work.

And a true lady?

There’s something particularly declassé about women fighting each other. Scrapping isn’t ladylike. Even those who service the fetish connive in the perception: I once saw a video described as ‘the kind of action you might see outside a rough pub on a Saturday night’. Now, my experience of rough pubs is limited, but as I recall they don’t provide rubber mats for aggressive patrons to fight on, even on weekends. Maybe they should.

Yes, I watch this stuff: other women fighting, their bodies colliding in private rooms, in public bars, in rings and pools and cages. And before the Web, before I was able to watch it, I would scan the grainy adverts in the Apter mags, pick up copies of Catspats from the American Magazine Centre on Collingwood street, a haven for hard-copy specialist porn, long since transformed into a lifestyle venue which advertises itself with a giant Buddhist head in the window and the words Hidden bar and secret lounge etched into the glass. An open kind of secret, like the link between violence and sex.

The first person I ever wrestled was…probably my father or one of my brothers. Being raised as a boy gives many opportunities for rough-housing. I sometimes wonder how I would have been different had I been raised as a girl.

One of my earliest memories of school is being beaten up by a gang of girls for some reason or other, some infraction of the playground code, some rule no-one had thought to let me in on. Pointy-toed shoes were the fashion for rough girls in Jarrow in those days, and I remember how painful it was to have those sharp tips digging into my chest and my abdomen as I lay on the ground. A teacher had to intervene to stop them kicking me. Unchecked, I really believe they might well have kicked me to death. I learned at a very early age that girls can be as violent as boys. It’s something I’ve never stopped learning.

I do not consider myself a subscriber to the school of thought which locates sexual fetishism in early traumatic experiences. According to this school, my liking of female violence is a kind of Stockholm syndrome, a pact made at an unconscious level to recuperate the trauma of remembering. I do not refuse to subscribe to this school because I fear it, but because I find it all too simple, too much of a Freudian gotcha! That it is probably partially true on some level I don’t doubt, but where the psyche is concerned nothing is ever simply causal. Reckoning with the unconscious is like wrestling in oil (I have never wrestled in oil, though I would like to).

Reducing this to a trauma-response makes it seem sad and abject, and in fact over the years fighting, being beaten up, choked out, made to give in, has been a source of joy. Feeling helpless excites me, and when I see other women feeling the same way, and the women who make them feel that way, I feel a rush of carnal recognition. I don’t identify, have never identified, with the dominant one in these encounters, but the woman who is dominated, who struggles. I want to fight, and to lose, and to lose badly, at the hands of another woman. And one of the things I want out of transition is to have a body that experiences pain the way cis women’s bodies do, so I can feel that loss fully. I want breasts that hurt like a bitch when someone mauls them; I want a cunt so you can punch me in it.