a loop at the end of a rope

He was only looking, and not with love. With a little envy maybe but soaking in apprehension. Hanging back from the edge of the pool, just watching. And when he looked, Carl Powers saw. Jim forgets sometimes that he’s there, and that other people can see him.

The plan is elegantly simple; he makes himself scarce, in oversized clothes and dirty trainers (heaven’s sake, Mary, what are you wearing) and then changes at the pool. And oh, how he changes.

Over the course of the day’s play it evolves from a sticky embrace to a torture device. Cutting a red path (he can see it without even seeing it, without undoing the fiddly little metal clip and watching everything unravel) and getting tighter and tighter, when he runs, when he climbs. Maybe he’s done it wrong, but for the first few weeks of battling Hell and Carl Powers, the thought never even crosses his mind, that this isn’t what manhood feels like. Perhaps his ideas need work. But it’s a secret, a delicious secret, and he’s done it all on his own. Not so magnificent as his other achievements but nevertheless. A triumph! A victory, and what he’s really tying down is under the skin. He can’t rout it out with a pair of scissors, it’s more than a little extra fat. He has to kill it. Jim has visions of gangrenous sores, of unwrapping himself one day and what’s underneath looks like something that should be thoroughly disinfected and covered up (let it breathe, it needs to be out in the air, like a scabbed knee). Jim can’t breathe. Jim can’t speak. Loads of piping-voiced boys squeak and croak like rusty hinges, but he’s running out of air before he can finish lying now and he hates it. Breathless. Strangled. But now he’s Jim for real, or not Jim, he’s some other boy, but he’s not Mary and that’s what counts.

Mary was the first to die, before Carl Powers ever thought to laugh, and he hadn’t even had to lay a finger on her. Mary died in the womb, maybe, or he soaked her up in utero (babies can do that, he’s heard all about it), but he has taken the life from her to survive, and it feels good.

In the end, the return is insufficient compared to the effort, stolen freedom is not enough. It’s all in the voice, what’s the good if he can’t speak? When the summer holidays are over, and all the boys have gone back to school, Jim puts the bandages back in the medicine cabinet and surrenders to feminizing puberty. It’s better to be able to talk.