Chapter Five #2
“Mari,” Roos’ voice wakes me. It’s only after I sit up and look at her that I realise I wasn’t shocked to hear or see her. Somehow, I knew exactly where I was.
“Hey,” I say, a little croaky.
“Drink this.” She hands me a big glass of water.
The lamp on the bedside table is on, next to the other side of the bed, and it casts enough light around the room that I can see the puddles of clothes we left on the floor and a stack of novels we knocked over as we crashed into the room.
The rest of the room is clean but cluttered.
A vanity table is covered in make-up and perfume bottles.
A chest of drawers on the opposite side of the room is bursting with clothes, so much so that a few drawers don’t close properly.
And a wardrobe facing the bed is slightly open due to the same problem.
“Are you okay?” Roos asks as she sits next to me on the bed. She’s wearing a cotton kimono-style dressing gown and has a yellow silk scarf wrapped around her head.
“Yeah. What time is it?”
“It’s nearly one in the morning,” she says. “I didn’t want to wake you, but you needed a drink, and I take my aftercare duties pretty seriously.”
I open my mouth to tell her that it wasn’t a heavy scene. That it was quite short and didn’t have much impact play. But that would be a lie. It felt heavy. In a good way. It felt grounding.
“Are you okay?” I ask. Because aftercare can and should go both ways.
Roos smiles at me, but it lacks a certain something compared with other smiles of hers I’ve seen. “I’m good.”
“Can I ask you a question about your work?” I ask. If I’m going to be made to drink this, I want to make the most of our time together while I do. I want to know as much about this woman as I possibly can.
She looks surprised but nods.
“How did you get into it? You said you run this charity that helps trans kids and adults, that you’re the founder, but how did you start that?”
“That’s the pillow talk you want to have?” She laughs abruptly.
“I wanted to ask you earlier, but we kept talking about other things.” It’s the truth. I also sensed there was a story to it, and earlier in the brown bar, I didn’t feel entitled to it. But now, after what we’ve shared, I want to find out if I’m worthy.
Roos crosses an ankle over the other and plays with the hem of the dressing gown. “This is not a happy story,” she tells me. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”
I reach out and cover her hand with mine. “If you want to tell it, I’m all ears.”
She nods, sighs, and then begins to talk.
“I tried to come out trans three times before it stuck,” she says and then stops.
“What?” I frown.
“When I was four, I told my parents my name was really Linda. And that I wanted to grow my hair. Linda was the name of my first teacher, so my parents just thought I wanted her name because I liked her. They didn’t let me grow my hair.
“When I was seven, I tried again. I started wearing my sister’s clothes. First, just pink or purple T-shirts. But then I wore a skirt one day. I managed to keep it on for the whole afternoon before my dad told me to take it off. The next day I put on a dress. I wasn’t allowed to leave the house.
“I was fourteen when I felt strong enough to try again and really stick to it. I didn’t wear girls’ clothes or ask them to change my name or let me have long hair. I just told them I was a girl. That I’d always been a girl, and that I was going to grow up to be a woman.”
Roos stops talking, and I squeeze her hand. “What happened then?”
“My dad laughed at me and sent me away to muck out the horses. My mum told me I would have to go see a doctor if I kept talking like that. So I kept talking like that. I kept telling them I was a girl and that my body was wrong, not me.
“True to her word, Mum took me to our doctor. I was pleased at first. I had this small hope that a doctor would take my side. Would see me and would explain to me why I felt this way. I didn’t know about trans people at this point.
I wasn’t allowed to go on the Internet at home, but I’d seen films like Freaky Friday, so I had this odd awareness that maybe people could swap bodies.
And I’d seen Ace Ventura, and although that film is so, so horrible to trans people, it made me think I wasn’t the only one who was like this.
“Anyway, we went to the doctor, and he told me and my mum that I was mentally ill. Sick in the head.”
“Jesus, no,” I whisper, rage firing up inside me.
“I was told if I didn’t stop telling everyone I was a woman, then I would have to take medication that would change the way I think.
I still to this day don’t know what drugs they would have been, but it terrified me.
My mum also threatened to take me to a church camp that was for disobedient teenagers.
We weren’t particularly religious, even though a lot of people are in that part of the Netherlands.
But the church was useful now and then, and this was one of those times. ”
“What did you do?”
“What I did to survive. I stopped speaking my truth out loud, and I kept it to myself. The only time I let myself say the words ‘I am a girl’ out loud was when I was in the bathroom by myself. I’d repeat them until I felt a little bit more peace in myself.
And then I’d go to school and be something I wasn’t. ”
“I’m so sorry, Roos,” I say. “That’s brutal.”
“It was shit,” she sniffs, but she’s not crying. “But it gave me time.”
“What do you mean?”
“It gave me time to come up with a plan. To escape. I saved up all the money I made delivering newspapers and working in a bakery on Saturdays for three whole years. I worked hard at school and got good grades. I made contact with a great aunt who lived in Amsterdam and asked her if I could live with her while I did my studies there. It was the only way my parents would consider me leaving. That woman, Tante Klaartje, she saved me when she said yes. And she saved me again when, on the third day I was living there, I told her I was a woman.”
Finally, Roos looks across at me and smiles.
“What did she do?” I ask with bated breath.
“She took me to a doctor, a good one, and the rest is history. Bumpy, slow, messy, painful, traumatising history, but at least it was moving me in the right direction.”
I finish my glass of water and set it on the table beside the bed. I shuffle a little closer to Roos and put my arm around her body. “Fuck, Roos. It shouldn’t have been like that. Your parents...”
“I know, but I’m not the only one. That’s why I do what I do now,” she says. “I become somebody else’s Tante Klaartje. It’s literally the name of the charity.”
“Is it?” I smile with her. “I bet your aunt is so proud.”
“Oh.” Roos’ face falls. “She died. Three years after I moved in with her. Only six months after I started HRT.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Roos sniffs again, and this time there are tears in her eyes. “She did more for me in those three years than anyone else has. And now I get to carry on that… What’s the word, legacy?”
“Yes, legacy. For sure,” I say. “She would be incredibly proud.”
“I hope so,” Roos replies, her voice dimming to a whisper. And then she snuggles down so she can cuddle me back.
We stay like that, limbs entangled and hearts beating the same rhythm, and I feel it again. Hope. Loud and solid and as bright as a star in the sky.