Jonny kept files. He had an ever-growing collection of box files filled with press cuttings on the Shipman case. His copy of Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie’s Prescription For Murder: The True Story of Mass Murderer Dr Harold Frederick Shipman fell apart through overuse.
Puberty hit Jonny like a train. Nicholas or Liz would often find themselves knocking timidly on the bathroom door to ask Jonny if he was all right, he’d been inside for so long. But shaving your legs and your chest and your armpits took a while and so did deliberately cutting your arms and then waiting for the bleeding to stop.
There were no girlfriends. There were no boyfriends. There was a crush on a rather butch English teacher called Miss Fletcher that was never really going to go anywhere, but Jonny took up all her recommendations for books to read. He was behind in some subjects (science, maths), but he excelled in English.
Nicholas and Liz were determined not to spoil Jonny, but what harm could it do to let him have a laptop and a broadband connection in his bedroom? Like any fourteen-year-old boy, Jonny used the Internet to look at porn, but his consumption of it was not straightforward. He didn’t especially like looking at pictures — or videos — of naked women unless they were accompanied by men, and soon he started to wonder if it was the men he actually wanted to look at. So he tried gay sites, but that didn’t make the issue any clearer. He didn’t know what he liked and he felt he ought to like one or the other. But something inside him was stopping him from developing a preference. He wondered if it was grief or anger, but it didn’t seem as direct as that. If he felt desire it was a desire for change, a need to put something right that felt wrong. His dissatisfaction and confusion were linked to what had happened to him, he was sure of that, not so much tied to Nana’s death but to an earlier tragedy that was never spoken of in his adoptive family.
One of Jonny’s box files contained press cuttings on Shipman just like all the others, but only on top. If he delved a little way down, he would find his secret collection of cuttings on the murder of Laura Taylor and the attempted murder of Jonathan Taylor, twins, aged three. There were blurry pictures of his natural father, whom he hadn’t seen since the tragedy. Jonny had been in touch with the Probation Service and found out that his father had spent time in Strangeways and Parkhurst, but since 1999 he had been incarcerated in Wakefield Prison, coincidentally where Shipman ended his days.
When the news broke about Shipman’s suicide, Jonny thought for the hundredth time about his father being within the same prison walls as the mass murderer. Had he and Shipman known each other? Had they ever eaten together or folded sheets in the laundry at the same time? But then Shipman was gone and Jonny found that his interest in his nana’s killer waned. He kept the files only to conceal the one he maintained on his father.
There was love in Jonny’s life; he knew that his adoptive parents were doing their best in difficult circumstances. They cared for him in every sense of the word. They offered affection, which he found impossible to accept. It was like being handed a piece of machinery he didn’t know how to use. He felt nothing. Still there was no attraction to other girls — or boys. His flickerings of desire for Miss Fletcher guttered and died. He had an idea, which he’d had for some time and not expressed to anybody. It bubbled away in the back of his mind like a spring in a cavern. He frequented chatrooms, called helplines, saw the family GP, who refused Jonny’s initial request point-blank and offered to refer him instead to a psychologist. Pragmatically, Jonny took up the referral. He told Nicholas and Liz that he had issues around grief, trauma and bereavement, which of course was true and would always be true, but when he got to see the psychologist he told her what was in his mind and he reminded her that she was bound by the Hippocratic oath. When she looked doubtful, he insisted that he was Gillick competent. In just over a year’s time, he said, he would be sixteen. He had similar discussions with the GP, who said there would be no question of acting before Jonny’s sixteenth birthday, with or without the written consent of his adoptive parents.
What had been an idea became a plan, a project, an obsession. It began to seem to Jonny to represent his only chance at any kind of a life. Not just for him, either. That was the point, really. For his sister.
Why should he have been the one to survive? Why not Laura? Maybe if she had survived and he had not, she would have felt the same as he did, that it wasn’t right, that what had happened wasn’t itself survivable, even for the survivor, without drastic action, fundamental change. Maybe, maybe not. Either or. Either him or her, or her or him. Either one or the other. This was how the cards had fallen — one face up, one face down. All he knew was he couldn’t go on the way things were. There was just a chance that by acting now, he could achieve a kind of resurrection, the twins reunited in a single body, in a state of grace.
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?