two

The bus was mostly empty, thank gods. I put my tote bag on the seat next to me just in case. The heater was busted, I guess, because it was freezing in there. A boy was sitting four seats up from me. I could see the back of his grimy cap and his red-and-black headphones. He had them at that awful volume where you register the noise, but you can’t make out the music. I opened my laptop with every intention of working on my master’s application, but I already had a headache, and this guy’s noise was just there, grinding away at my nerves.

I checked my tote. Phone, wallet, SSRIs, tarot cards, spironolactone, progynova (in a sheet with the days of the week marked, just like birth control; I liked to fantasise about it falling out of my bag and some cute cis girl handing it to me with a sisterly grin), small-size bottle of Juicy Couture, hairbrush, lavender hand cream, Japanese-language copy of Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon #29, and the free glass drink bottle my laser clinic gave me for Christmas. My main bag was stowed under the bus, so I just had to hope that all my skincare, my toothbrush, and my phone charger were in there. I could clearly recall putting all those items into my rucksack, but it was possible that I was remembering wrong, or that I was just making up the memory. I gritted my teeth and hissed quietly. Of course I packed them. Of course I did. Obviously I did. I closed my laptop and stuffed it into my tote. The boy opened a packet of what sounded and smelled like Doritos.

I tried to sleep off the headache. We stopped four hours in, about halfway, for a thirty-minute lunch break. I wandered around this little town in butt-fuck-nowhere till I found a Chinese takeaway. I ordered a cashew fried rice. The woman at the counter called me dear, and I loved her with my entire heart. The guy waiting for his Number Five Special stared at my pointy little estro-tits. Whatever.

I sat on a bench by the bus and ate my fried rice. The Doritos boy paced and dragged on a vape. He was tall, skinny and kinda hunched, you know how tall guys who don’t want to stand out are sometimes? His right hand was set in a mucky white cast. His greasy red hair and Marilyn Manson hoodie reminded me of Hamish.

The last time I saw Hamish was at John’s fortieth, the year before I ran away to Te Whanganui-a-Tara to be a girl. We dug a hāngī down at the bottom of my folks’ place. Everyone came. Aunty Linda’s husband, Joseph, brought his hāngī irons, food baskets, and know-how. John had thrown his back out, so Joseph and I had to dig the pit and build the fire. At the other end of the section, the aunties and girl cousins were lining baskets with cabbage leaves and peeling potatoes. I didn’t know I was a girl back then, so I was happy to prove myself by doing this quiet manly work with Joseph. Joseph was obviously quicker and stronger and smarter, but he didn’t make me feel bad about it, which was really nice of him.

Hamish turned up later. He looked kinda strung out, spinning his pentagram ring round and round his pinkie finger. The baskets were in the ground, and everyone was spread out over the section, drinking and chatting or catching a nap in the sun. I sat beside the creek, just over the fence from the bottom of the property. There was a small circle of us: older cousins, Hamish, and at least one drop-kick uncle. Hamish rolled joint after joint of really sweet-smelling weed. He passed left to me, the paper wet with his spit. The joint tasted like pineapple. I was still drinking and smoking and everything back then, kind of a lot actually. Too much, really.

Anyway, it was perfect because by the time we got the munchies it was time to dig up the food. I stayed back and watched Joseph and the uncles do this bit. It was serious work, with lots of hot coals and nasty plumes of steam. And now that I wasn’t sitting beside Hamish I started to actually think about Hamish and then I started to shake, even with all the weed and beer in my system, and by the time the food was laid out in its wire baskets on the long grass, I was inside the house, in my old room, door closed, duvet over my head, hyperventilating.

I dropped my fried-rice container in a public bin and followed the Doritos boy up the steps into the bus. I felt a bit better with my belly full of hot rice and oil. My headache was gone. I closed my eyes and slept properly this time.

It was dark by the time the bus pulled into the Kirikiriroa depot. My nose was cold and wet. I’d fallen against the window in my sleep and a cloud of condensation had formed on the glass around my face. I wiped my sleeve over the glass and scanned the bus stops. Hannah! Big cardigan and silk neckerchief and blue Chuck Taylors, there she was, MY big sister! I waved and she waved, and the bus driver pulled into our stop so slowly. My heart was buzzing.

Hannah is twelve years older than me, from Fi’s first marriage, and for a long time her world was my whole world. I moved to Te Whanganui-a-Tara because, when I was still in high school, I used to visit Hannah there. When I was fifteen, I went to stay for a week with her in Lyall Bay. Hannah gave me her precious cast-offs: a Strokes tee and a pair of acid-wash skinny jeans. I wore that outfit around her flat all week. I tried to claim her cardigan too. I wore it every evening. It smelled like mango body butter and Juicy Couture.

Hannah took me out for coffee in the central city and I saw two twinks pashing outside a Burger King. In the middle of the day. And no one said anything. I was the only person staring.

Hannah was on a Lou Reed kick that week and we played her Transformer LP over and over again. When I moved into my first flat, I bought a copy of that vinyl to play on my flatmate’s turntable. He looked worried when I picked up the stylus, but Hannah had taught me how to use a record player years ago. Whenever I was lonely or hungover, I played Transformer.

By the time I’d moved to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Hannah had already left for Tāmaki Makaurau. She photographed magazine spreads of rich people’s houses for a living, and that’s where the rich people and their houses were.

In my first year of uni, browsing Tumblr on the computers in the language learner’s library, I came across a set of black-and-white photos of Lou Reed. He was at a diner slumped against his girlfriend, Rachel Humphreys. The caption said she was a transsexual. Which made sense, I guess. It was glam rock and Warhol and New York in the seventies. So I googled her. I couldn’t believe that my hero, Lou Reed, had loved one of the dolls, and it was all out in the open. It was thrilling.

Then I did a bit more googling. One time, Rachel nearly bled to death from a genital injury because Lou refused to take her to a hospital. I don’t know how she got hurt like that in the first place. Andy Warhol said that everyone, but Lou, called Rachel by she and her. In the nineties, I think, Rachel Humphreys came up in an interview with the rock star. Lou Reed disavowed the relationship and everything. He said he was done with all that faggot shit. I guess that’s what she was to him. Faggot shit.

The driver finally parked the bus and opened the doors, and I practically flew out of them. The Doritos boy hadn’t even got to his feet yet, but I was out on the pavement and I was squealing and Hannah was giving me a big squeeze.

‘I didn’t know you were picking me up!’

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world, sweetpea! Come on, let’s get your bag.’

Hannah grabbed my rucksack from the driver, even though I was bigger than her (although my arms were getting flabbier and flabbier thank the gods and HRT and the Moon, my holy transsexual mother), and she dropped it in the boot of her rusty old mint-green Golf. I climbed in the passenger side and hand-cranked the sunroof open. It was too cold and too dark for the sunroof but also sunroof, am I right? Hannah started the car and handed me the AUX. I plugged my phone in and put on Survival. Cassia Hardy’s wall of sound filled the car, and we were on the road, out of the city, out to my folks’ place in the country.

The drive between the city and my folks’ house is, according to my mum, very dangerous. The corners are poorly cambered, there is only one spot to overtake—so regular commuters always tailgate—and, after dark, cattle tend to wander out into the middle of the road. Before I sold my car and left Kirikiriroa, I’d driven this stretch of road every night.

I used to pretend I was James Hurley, speeding through Twin Peaks. I’d wind down my windows, flick off my headlights, and listen to the road. If I was sticking to the tarmac, I could hear a smooth whoosh. If I started to veer off, there was a popping rattling noise as my front wheel bit into the grit at the shoulder, before the ditch. I timed the straights in my head, keeping my lights off for as long as possible before flicking them on and swerving round the corners.

Fortunately Hannah, and not an angsty sixteen-year-old girl in a sad twink’s body, was behind the wheel tonight.

‘When did you get into town?’ I turned down the stereo.

‘I drove straight down today. Fi’s pretty cut up, obviously.’

Fi raised both of us to call her by her first name. She wanted us to know she was a whole woman, not just our mum. When I first came out, Fi called me and told me that when she was in university, there had been all this pressure to be the right kind of woman, and more importantly the right kind of feminist. Listen, she told me, if you want to shave your legs, shave your legs, if you don’t, then don’t. Just make sure you’re the woman you want to be. No one else gets to decide for you. I finally plucked the mono-brow I’d been keeping in fierce defiance of colonial patriarchal capitalist beauty standards and felt about 600 percent better. It was good advice. I hoped that when Fi saw me in my magical-anime-slut ensemble she remembered it.

‘Nana was pretty out of it,’ Hannah continued. ‘But we’ll see, I guess.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah. I’m fine.’ Hannah breathed out audibly through her nose. ‘I mean, I’m sad, of course.’ She shrugged. ‘But we’re all sad, aren’t we?’

I nodded slowly. I guess we were.

‘I’m just really glad that I can be here for Fi,’ Hannah said. ‘Nana’s our grandmother, but this isn’t really about us, is it? It’s about Fi and the aunties. We’re just here to help, right?’

‘Right,’ I confirmed.

The way Hannah said it, it seemed obvious that we were arriving on the scene to be helpers. And when I looked at Hannah in the driver’s seat, hands at ten and two, that made sense. She looked competent, attentive, like a really helpful person. I peered down at my chipped nail polish, laddered tights and platform creepers. I wasn’t really sure what being helpful might mean in this scenario, but I already felt out of my depth.

Because Hannah was the driver, I had to jump out of the car and open the gate. She parked on the front lawn beside John’s ute. The red bonnet was covered in tiny green leaves from the silk tree. Fi had read The One-Straw Revolution and planted the half-acre according to both the principles of biodynamics and the sale prices at Wairere Nursery. It wasn’t like a magazine garden. It was wild and abundant and permacultural maybe? A lot of trees, a lot of ferns, a lot of flowers, all at once. Standing there beside the car, I took a deep breath in: daphne by the step, silage stacked in the paddock next door, smoke from the wood fire, moss spreading over the concrete pavers. It smelled like, well, it smelled like home.

I walked through the wet and overgrown grass to the front door. The porch light was on. Ratty Birkenstocks, work boots, and torn sandshoes were tucked into a little alcove below a blue Swanndri with a badly singed back from when, John told me, he stood too close to a gas heater. I can’t remember him ever wearing it. I guess Swanndris are expensive, but burnt Swanndris are sort of crap, so it just kinda lived there, on the hook. The laundry door hung open onto the porch, giving off the scent of the same organic eucalyptus liquid I used. There was a red I’m Union sticker on the bare wood front door. When my dad was still at the Young Workers’ Union, I’d taken a roll of those stickers from his office and stuck them up everywhere. I could hear Leonard Cohen playing in the kitchen behind it.

I opened the door.

Fi punched the air, Hurrah!

John was sitting beside her on the floor, at their low kitchen/living-room table. He hopped up. John was big but floppy, like a puppy, with dark brown eyes, close-cropped hair, and a short copper-coloured beard. He set his hand on my shoulder and took a good look at me.

I noted his tortoiseshell spectacles. ‘New glasses?’

‘Two for one.’ He grinned. Fi was wearing a matching pair.

I lifted my arms, and John wrapped me in a tight hug. I had to tiptoe. Thank gods I’d never outgrown him.

‘Good job. You made it.’

John let me go, and then there was Fi. I hugged her tight. Fi’s body is small and strong. She complains all the time about her so-called broad shoulders. Apparently, she’s tall for a woman, but she isn’t taller than me. In my arms, she felt light and architectural.

Now Fi stepped back. She had the same deep-set gothic eyes as me, but where my hair fell into fine ringlets, hers was thick and wild. When Fi got home from the hairdresser, it would be flat and compliant for as long as she could hold off from washing it. I think Fi preferred it like that, before the first wash, but to me she looked most herself at the end of a day’s work in the kiln-shed: clay on her overalls, earth flaking from her fingertips up to her elbows, jaw set with determination, and hair pulled back into two mud-streaked pigtails.

‘It’s good to have you here.’

I smiled, unsure. I was starving.

We sat around the table in the soft light of a floor lamp. Fi reached out and pulled a dusty oil heater closer to her. Me and Hannah ate from the half-empty pots on the table. Moosewood-esque dal and nutty brown rice. Very cheap. Very delicious. Like everything Fi cooked.

John nursed a jug of homebrew. He’d taken up homebrewing at the height of the craft beer craze, learning from Coopers home kits. These days he brewed from scratch and even grew his own hops. The beer, he insisted, tasted much better than the stuff they used to drink when he was a kid and it didn’t even give you the shits. At this point, I guess you would have called his tool shed a microbrewery? As far as I could tell, the salient fact was: a microbrewer, who regularly sampled his product, was an artisan, or at least a passionate hobbyist, but a regular guy, who knocked back a six-pack of Lion Brown every night, was something else entirely. John stretched out on the floor beside the low table and quietly passed out. Hannah poured herself a beer from John’s jug.

‘Are you going back to school next year? Or are you going to stay on at the café?’ Fi presented it as a neutral question. Like both options were equally good.

But they weren’t really, were they? I knew what she wanted for me. I also did actually want to go back to uni, so I launched into an explanation of my thesis as if I’d already been accepted into the master’s programme.

Fi doesn’t watch anime, she doesn’t laugh at memes, and she certainly doesn’t know what a catgirl waifu is. This made it a little challenging to illustrate the links between anime, modern orientalism, and the trans feminine aesthetics that I wanted to study. It didn’t help that I hadn’t really fully developed a cohesive idea of what those links were myself. I pulled up an image of an anime catgirl on my phone and Fi squinted through her reading glasses at it. The catgirl wore a skimpy sailor-style school uniform, and had impossible tits, a tiny waist, huge sparkling eyes, heavy pink blush, cat ears poking through her long purple hair, and a tail.

‘This is the beauty standard for trans girls!’ I sighed. ‘It isn’t enough just to be a woman; we’re supposed to look like some sweaty gamer boy’s wet dream. It’s ridiculous.’

Fi looked from the picture to me and back again. ‘So you don’t want to look like this?’

We both looked down at my short tennis skirt, crop top, choker, and fishnet tights.

Hannah laughed.

‘Okay, okay.’ I shrugged. ‘But I don’t just wanna write about beauty standards. The catgirl thing is one part of it, but more importantly, anime girls, especially magical-girls, are just, like, very appealing to trans girls and queers in general.’ I rummaged through my tote for my hand-translated copy of Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon #29. ‘This high school girl, Usagi, transforms by magic into a beautiful intergalactic warrior! And she’s feminine and powerful and ditsy and heroic, and she has a whole team of other magical girls who support and fight with her, and it’s all written by a Japanese woman, in like, the nineties.’

Fi had kind of a blank look, but I wanted her to get it, so I pushed on. ‘See here, there are even explicitly queer characters! There’s a butch/femme lesbian couple in this volume, and like, in the later ones, there’s a team of galactic soldiers who pretend to be schoolboys but transform into their true form, magical-girls, when it’s time to do battle.’

Fi flicked through the manga. ‘They’re still wearing those tiny little skirts though, aren’t they?’

I closed my eyes. I knew I’d lost the thread of my argument. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what the argument I’d been trying to make was, but I also really really wanted Fi to understand why this was all so important. ‘When they dubbed the anime for the US, they edited all the dialogue to try and turn the femme and her butch into like, uncomfortably intimate cousins instead of lesbian lovers—because obviously that was preferable to having dykes on TV. When you watch the US version, it honestly just looks like incest, which is, coincidentally, one of the most frequently searched keywords on porn sites over there.’

I opened my eyes. The silence was uncomfortable.

Hannah looked from Fi’s face to mine. ‘So did you study that in the English literature half or the Japanese language half of your BA?’

I sighed. ‘Neither.’

‘Well, I’m sure it’s very interesting,’ Fi said.

‘Thanks.’ I rubbed my eyes.

‘Listen, I’m really glad you kids are here.’ Fi smiled. I knew she wished we both lived closer.

I cleared the table, paused at the sink, and decided to act like an adult guest, filling it with hot water and detergent. ‘Is this it, do you think?’ I said, over my shoulder. The hot dishwater bit at my hands. ‘For Nana?’

Hannah got up and began clearing the dishrack beside me.

‘She’s eighty-five.’ Fi pursed her lips. ‘Linda and Jane are staying at Nana’s house tonight, and the rest of the sisters are on their way. It’ll be nice to have you kids out here with me.’ Fi frowned. ‘I don’t know if John’s told Hamish.’

‘Does he need to know?’ Hannah asked. ‘She’s not his nana, I mean.’

I pushed my hands deep into the painfully hot water and closed my eyes.

‘He’s Rosemary’s brother. I’m sure he’ll want to know, even just to help out.’

‘What about your brother?’ Hannah said quietly.

Fi rubbed her face with both hands. ‘I think Linda talks to Mark. I don’t know. He might not even be in the country.’

I pulled the duvet tight around me. After Fi had convinced John to get up and go to bed, I’d taken a shower and washed away the bus ride. The sheets smelled like they’d dried in the sun. It felt so fucking good to finally be naked and clean in a fresh bed.

I had a message from James. It’s impossible to work from home! I can’t go ten minutes without thinking about yesterday . . . and then I can’t get anything done at all

I grinned and bit my lip. You are such a perv!

I also had a new match on Tinder. Thorn: 29yo, Taurus sun, Scorpio moon, Virgo rising, partnered, polyamorous, agender, and autistic. I liked xyr butch mullet and xyr fat body. Plus! Xe’d already messaged me. Hey kitten!! You are such a cutie!!

My gock literally drooled at that—kitten. Okay, Thorn! I typed, Hey hottie~ thank u for messaging! I love your hair

I swiped through profiles. I had my radius set to 80km, with an age range of 25 to 65 years old. Thorn had matched with me before I left for the Waikato, which made sense, because the pickings here were brutally heterosexual.

Barry the sharemilker, 43yo: Hate writing bios. message me if ya wanna find out what I’m all about. Barry’s profile pic had him leaning back on an ATV, wearing Dirty Dog wraparound sunglasses, a beer in one hand, pulling the finger at the camera with the other.

I swiped left through a dozen guys in Swazi singlets squatting by bloodied pigs and limp deer. I’d forgotten about this shit. Sure, a provider is hot, and I am, after all, as a transsexual catgirl, an obligate carnivore, but these guys were not it. Like I’m sure the young guys cum to tgirl porno, and the older dudes had probably wet their dicks on Thai sexploitation tours, but that didn’t mean any of these men would hesitate to bash a real-life-homegrown-in-the-flesh faggot if they got their hands on one.

A face I recognised popped up. Leon, 32yo. He had the same dark hair and wide blue eyes as his younger brother, Tom. Me and Tom both took drama and, cringe, played Theatresports together in high school, while Leon and his friends skateboarded and made art and played in punk bands and were total heroes to us. They were impossibly cool; they didn’t even know what Theatresports was. Me and Tom were both, quote unquote, straight boys who had faggot spat at us from Ford Falcons and lowered Subarus on a semi-regular basis.

Me and Tom used to get high in the long grass behind the rugby field. It was easier to buy weed than drinks if you were underage at our school. Tom always got so high so fast. One time we lay on our backs, out of sight of the C-Block classrooms, and Tom told me he had spoken to God. Fi had given me a copy of Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems for my sixteenth birthday, so Tom talking to God sort of made sense. Tom told me that he had been walking along the beach and God had literally parted the clouds and addressed him, but he couldn’t understand the language they’d spoken. I rolled over in the grass and studied Tom’s profile. Weak chin, slim nose, big blue eyes, and lashes that were long and thick. He could have been a beautiful girl.

I hovered over Leon’s profile. Swipe left or right? I didn’t know if he knew about me. The last time I’d seen him, I was a skinny boy in tight red jeans and an op-shop cardigan. I locked my phone and dropped it beside my pillow.