Chapter 93
It was all going to be okay.Epilogue
10 mins.
I’m nervous, Eli replied, and received a photo of Rob’s face, one eyebrow raised in an unimpressed expression.
U have had tit surgery and a fuckin huge chest tattoo how the fuck r u nervous?
Because this is gonna hurt more!
“Is that Rob?” Mum asked.
It was Sunday evening. Eli always came home for Sunday dinner—something Mum had insisted on, because she was getting proper grandma since Bobby had been born and empty-nested like crazy now—and usually Eli would drive home or Jenny would drop him off. But tonight—
“Yeah. He’ll be here in ten minutes.”
“Ask him what ice cream he wants.”
“We’re not stopping, Mum.”
“Ask him!”
Eli rolled his eyes. Mum says what ice cream dyou want?
Wtf im not stoppin! came the predictable reply.
“Mint choc chip,” Eli lied. “but we’re really not stopping, Mum. Rob wants to get going before it gets dark, you know what the Snake Pass is like…”
“I don’t know why you have to go to Manchester,” Mum complained. “Can’t they do it in Leeds like your top surgery?”
“I’d have had to wait until September for Leeds,” Eli said. “Anyway, Rob’s booked a nice hotel in the city centre, so I can just sleep for a couple of days and not do anything after.”
“And what’s Rob going to do in Manchester while you sleep for a couple of days?” Mum asked, amused.
“I dunno, kick pigeons?” Eli suggested flippantly. “He’ll probably watch the hotel telly for the first day then wander off. You know what he’s like.”
She did now, too. A little bit, anyway. Rob still didn’t come around much, and it was still a crap idea to put him and Dad in the same room for more than half an hour—or ever, if unsupervised—but Rob came out on family stuff sometimes, like the day they’d taken Flora and Bobby to the zoo and made a proper big family day of it. Jenny came round to the flat occasionally, too, to see Eli—although Eli suspected she had a bit of a crush on Danny.
“Are you still anxious?” Mum asked as she rattled ice cream bowls.
“Yeah. Surgery , en’t it?”
It was the long-awaited phalloplasty. Tuesday morning, eleven o’clock. Eli had struggled to find a surgeon willing to do the phalloplasty and the removal of his remaining female parts at the same time—most had wanted him to either keep his vagina and uterus, or remove them and push back the phalloplasty for another year.
And yeah, it was going to hurt, but Eli was mostly excited about finally getting it done. His nerves rested more on…well, more on Rob than the surgery itself.
Still, he wasn’t daft enough to say it.
“It’ll be nice to have a bit of a break though, just the two of you, before you start college, won’t it?”
Eli curled his toes in his converse. “Yeah,” he said, secretly thrilled she was saying it. “Rob got taken on at his gym, too, you know, the one he boxes at. They’re starting this thing for troubled youth or whatever, and the guy who runs it talked to Rob and said he oughta help out, the kids’d respect him more ‘cause he’s been there, and they’re gonna pay him nine quid an hour.”
“Oh that’s good,”Mum said in heartfelt tones. “Oh that’s wonderful, dear, he’s really turning things around, isn’t he?”
Well, mostly. Eli had found an iPod in Rob’s bag the other day that definitely didn’t belong to him. And he still sold a suspicious amount of stuff on Gumtree. But he wasn’t burgling, and he didn’t show up smelling of weed anymore. It was a start, and Eli would take the little starts he could get.
…And anyway, if he wanted Rob out of all criminality ever, Rob wouldn’t fuck him in public places anymore. And that’d be crap.
His phone buzzed as Mum finished serving up the ice cream. A photo of the front of his parents’ house greeted him when he unlocked it. He rolled his eyes. Come inside mum’s put out ice cream. I’ll eat yours ;)
Can we just go alredy????
INSIDE. NOW.
He heard a car door bang.
Mum flitted to the window to pull the curtain back and peer out down the driveway. “Oh, it’s your Rob!” she trilled, just as the bell rang.
Eli laughed as Flora gallumphed out of the living room.
“I’ll get it, Gammar!” she bellowed at the top of her lungs. The door crashed off the wall, and then—”Uncle Eli! It’s your tree man!”
“Seriously, something’s wrong with you,” Rob was telling her gravely when Eli went into the hall to rescue him.