Nicholas Royle - First Novel

Jonny kept up the pressure on his GP and at sixteen, after submitting to endless assessments, he — or she — was accepted on to the gender-reassignment programme.

She — Grace — knew how it would go down. Three months of psychotherapy before even taking the first hormones, and then up to two years spent living in her desired gender role before surgery, a period known as the Real Life Experience (RLE). The NHS liked a two-year RLE, since the evidence showed that while many patients made it through the first year, the dropout rate increased during year two. It was the NHS’ insistence on the two-year RLE, they believed, that resulted in such a high satisfaction rating among the post-op transgender population.

Even with the two-year RLE, Grace was hopeful she would be able to complete the process and embark on her new life before her father was released from prison, which he would be, she was confident, after a minimum of fifteen years. Life rarely meant life for parents who killed their own children. They were not thought to represent a danger to members of the public. Whatever impulse had driven them to murder their offspring had most likely been smothered, certainly when the prompt for the impulse was the banal, tedious one her father would presumably have cited — the threat of losing one’s children through the break-up of one’s marriage. Big yawn. Big, big yawn. Little more than an extreme form of midlife crisis, it was in danger of becoming a cliché. An item in brief on page four, relegated to the news ‘where you are’. Had it really become boringly common or was it just that Grace — that I — was oversensitive to such stories?

Whether Grace continues reading when I leave the room, I don’t know. As I’m packing my bag I can hear a murmur of voices from down below. The layout of the rooms is such that I am able to walk downstairs and leave the house without being seen. The car starts first time and I reverse out. At the top of the lane, a sudden flash of white at the windscreen startles me. I brake and the engine stalls, almost causing me to crash into the drystone wall. Quick, shallow breaths steam up the windscreen, but the barn owl is gone.

Careering down the A646 towards Todmorden, I have to fight an impulse to drift over to the wrong side of the road on blind corners. When I reach the M62, I’m lucky the traffic is light, since my lane discipline is non-existent. I know that if I were to be stopped by the police I could end up back inside. A murderer is only freed on licence. At this moment I don’t care if I go back to prison. I join the M60, come off at junction 1 and park the car just off the one-way system in front of a rollover door marked ENTRANCE IN USE 24 HOURS.

The glass sides of the Stockport Pyramid glow blue and green in the purply-orange night. I walk stiffly across the road and force my way through dense foliage, coming up against a blue fence only a little taller than me. I could climb it, but I decide not to. Instead I back away and lean on the parapet over the river. There’s a drop of twenty or thirty feet and the water is as flat as a mirror, any turbulence hidden within. A little way downstream the river turns shallow over scattered rocks and debris brought down by flood waters, but where from? Where do the shopping trolleys and old tyres get tipped in? Whose old clothes are those?

I hear the approach of jet engines and turn around. In the sky to the north-east hangs a pair of white lights, close-set as a spider’s eyes, quickly increasing in size and brightness. By the time the plane passes above my head, it is 1,500 feet from the ground.

I walk around to the path between the river and the road. It leads down to the river’s edge. The bank is heavily overgrown, colonised by Himalayan balsam, its sickly sweet scent invading my nostrils. Bats swoop low over my head. I follow the path down into a dip and then up the other side. A series of steps on the left leads down to a wooden platform over the river. I walk down and stand on the platform, swaying slightly. The river is not especially high, as there’s been little rain, but at this point the waters swirl and eddy. You can drown in an inch. You’d probably die of exposure just wading out in this. All I can see in my mind’s eye is Grace — her face from various angles, the scars on her arms, her forest-trail scalp. I try to see Jonathan’s features in hers and I tell myself that I can, but I don’t know if that’s only because of what I now know (assuming she is telling the truth).

After an indeterminate length of time I climb back up the steps and continue down the riverside path away from the Pyramid. I know that on the flat land beyond the fence on my right, which I have heard referred to more than once as the Valley of the Kings, there have in the past been plans to build two more pyramids, but the money ran out. The path narrows and darkens as trees close over my head. The drop to the river is steep and long. I pass a tubular metal pedestrian bridge and keep going. There are gaps here and there in the wooden fence on my left. Brambles and rowan contest the available space; rosebay willow herb appears among the nettles and shrubs on the right-hand side of the path.

I pass beneath the motorway, the concrete bridge low above my head, graffiti adding sparkle to the supporting wall. Beyond the motorway the path curves and descends, following the course of the river. Bats are my only companions, guiding me. Another aircraft slips by away to the left. The path widens. Horses stand motionless in a field on my right. Erect on the remains of a railway bridge, a heron’s profile is as still as the slender weeds that sprout from the brickwork. I come to a complicated gate with different access points for cyclists and horse riders. I walk a little way along a metalled road and then encounter another similar gate, after which the path rises and winds through high blackberry bushes and low rowan trees. Power lines approach on the right, strung between enormous bristling pylons. A large bird forms an interrogatory silhouette perched on top of one of these. My blind pursuance of this path cannot silence the questions in my head. How long has Grace known who I am — if indeed she does? (She must.) Was it a coincidence that she applied to the institution where I was teaching or was she several steps ahead of me? Why is she writing what she is writing in her novel? What did she hope to achieve by exposing me at Lumb Bank? Did she expose me? Would it have been clear to the other students whom she was talking about? Did my sudden exit confirm suspicions or remove any doubts? What is her motivation? What does she want?

I collapse on a humped rise on the left-hand side of the path overlooking the dark ribbon of the river. The bird on the pylon — its neck in the shape of a question mark identifies it as a cormorant — has not moved.

What does Grace want? What do I want? What are my choices? That they are fewer now is the only thing I feel certain of. Do I have any at all? Is it up to Grace what happens next? Do I stop or go on? Either or. Do we achieve reconciliation or do I let her destroy me (once again, assuming that is what she wants)? Everything is either or, and inside each either or is another either or, like Russian dolls.

I move off the mound and take a couple of steps down towards the river, unsure what I am doing but feeling impelled to do it. Not really thinking beyond the next few seconds. The river is a channel of black ink. With it I will write the rest of my story. I picture my head going under, unseen by anybody. There is a tree on my right, a thicket of brambles, nettles and Himalayan balsam between me and it. A bird sings. Not the cormorant; a songbird, hidden in the tree. The notes slip out on to the soft night air like some kind of benign alarm or unknown signal. My foot slides on a flattened frond of bracken. I put my arms out for balance, look down and see a corner of gabardine emerging from the vegetation. The tail of an overcoat.