Running Away From Summer

Content warning:

I was seven when I ran away from summer camp.

The New Church of Abundant Life was an American outfit aiming to turn the bored congregations of rural England into enthusiastic evangelical converts by way of a twice-monthly blowout in a borrowed concert hall in South London and the occasional travelling marquee pitched in church graveyards, village greens, school football fields and anywhere else amenable to a large cheque and a blast of raucous music. My parents never found the money to travel regularly to London but attended their marquee services when they swung through the area, and were surprised but pleased to have been selected to purchase some of a small and exclusive batch of special, affordable tickets to the New Church’s first ever annual summer camp.

In August of that year the New Church rented an empty-for-the-summer boarding school in the English heartlands for a fortnight of outdoor pursuits, arts and crafts, amateur sport and devoted worship. The school campus, home in term-time to the children of the upper class, was a cluster of modern appointments surrounding the sort of English mansion that has just-barely-unfulfilled aspirations towards castledom.

My own school, back home in Baddesham, was at the time still recovering from a fairly major fire, and for almost my entire education up to that point comprised mostly portable wooden shacks — which were freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer — and the surviving gym building, popularly considered too damp and too full of weird mushrooms to burn. Our lunch room was on wheels, our library was a shelf, and when the wind kicked up we got covered in red dust from the brickworks down the road. In comparison, the school at Hartwick Manor was like something out of a fantasy movie, and I found myself scanning the crenellations looking for boy wizards on broomsticks, dodging around the gargoyles and balconies and tumbling ivy, chasing some enchanted object.

The introductory service on the first night only enhanced the sense of opulent unreality. Worship leader Madison, with her Hollywood accent and expensive suits and expansive smiles, was a sight to behold all on her own, and while the experience that night fell short of the promises made on the website — cathedrals of glass! thousands of worshippers! choirs a hundred strong! — it was still revelatory. Every Sunday morning of my life had been spent at the small church in Baddesham, under the wavering gaze of old Reverend Percy, who didn’t have lasers or a smoke machine and whose geriatric choir had never even attempted to dance, and who never invited parishioners up to the pulpit to be cleansed of their sins; I’d always assumed your sins were cleaned automatically, as part of the quiet background machinery of the universe and in accordance with the arrangements re saying your prayers, cleaning your room, eating your vegetables, and so forth. But Madison called up five people to bless on the first night, and one by one as she pressed her hands to their foreheads they collapsed rapt and weeping into waiting arms, empty of sin, pure, whole.

I’d become used to thinking of God as a distant figure, like a prime minister, who set the rules and determined the punishments but didn’t really get involved. To see Him reach out and touch people through His instrument, Madison, to have proof of His magnificence lie crying and shaking on the floor not twenty metres away, was the kind of thing that changes lives. By the end of the night I was so uplifted I didn’t even mind that my bed was in one of the boys’ dorms, nor that it had the other name on it, the one everyone else used for me.

* * *

None of the other kids were quite as enthralled by the service or the setting as I was, but most of them sauntered around the place with accents and attitudes that suggested they viewed an almost-castle surrounded by probably-magical forests and peppered with tennis courts and swimming pools as thoroughly mundane. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like to live a life where an honest-to-God hedge maze is something you disdain.

One other girl, though, didn’t seem like the others. I saw her at morning service on the second day, earbuds in, reading a book instead of singing, and when the music reached one of its regular crescendi she screwed her eyes shut and pressed her hands against her ears. I wanted to say hi, ask if she was okay, but she left as soon as the service ended.

I found her that afternoon, quite by accident. I’d gone for a swim, and afterwards went looking for a quiet and sunny place to air-dry — and to hide from the older children who thought it was terribly funny that I wore a t-shirt in the pool — and there she was, sat in the shade under a tree, earbuds still in place, rhythmically tapping her knee with a pencil. Book open, eyes closed. I dithered, always wary of the consequences of intruding on someone’s space, and was about to leave when the girl opened her eyes.

“Did my mum send you?” she said.

“I was just looking for a place to dry off.”

“Oh. Okay. You want to sit with me?”

“Sure.”

“I’m Pauline.” She pulled out her earbuds and dropped them on the grass next to an old-fashioned cassette player. “What’s your name?”

What was my name? I hated this part, enough that I had, in most circumstances, ways around it. I always let parents or teachers introduce me, and I would nod mutely when they asserted my name and gender to some stranger. To be assigned an identity that wasn’t my own was still preferable to claiming it myself. But here I had to shoulder the responsibility without assistance, and I hesitated. After all, I’d already chosen a new, better name, one I ached to introduce myself with. As for how I came by it…

As a child most of my toys came from car boot sales. Every so often one of the nearby villages turned its largest open space into a sea of hatchback cars and trestle tables, each overflowing with second-hand treasure: electronics, music, video tapes and DVDs, and toys, toys, toys. Havens of capitalist pleasure for kids whose parents were unable or unwilling to buy new. I liked to tour the events on my own as much as I could, with whatever pocket money I’d been able to save, supervised only by the panopticon of volunteered teens on elevated chairs, and I liked to get there as early as possible, because where other children were seemingly content to choose eclectically, I had one mission and one mission only: buy every pony toy I could find. My prized collection of colourful and occasionally misshapen plastic horses was assembled entirely from these events. Sometimes I enlisted my brother to help: with his age, height, girth and ample enthusiasm he could reliably beat the younger kids to the choicest ponies. All I’d had to do was explain that, no, I didn’t want the robots that turn into cars, they’re stupid, but I’d take any human figures of appropriate size and flexibility to ride a horse. Phil, I think, enjoyed the challenge.

After the most recent car boot sale, Phil returned to the car late, with a bag and a broad grin. He wouldn’t show me what he found until after we got home, and then, in my room, door firmly closed against the eyes of my parents and wedged with a chair, he unveiled a pony still in its original box. Never opened! Not a scratch on her plastic body! Never given an unwise haircut or felt-tip tattoo! It had cost him £10, an incredible amount of money; it was fine, Phil said, just pay him back, some time, whenever, and he brushed my hair out of my eyes and left me alone to investigate my prize.

The pony, the box declared, was called Stardust Shimmerwind, which rather showed up the horse-naming schema I’d come up with on my own. The box also contained, in addition to a small pile of accessories, a pre-addressed envelope and a form to fill out and send off to receive a free, special-edition comic, which told the story of Stardust Shimmerwind and promised to introduce more of her many colourful friends.

I already knew I wasn’t like the other boys. The kids at school told me so, and when I responded to challenges to my manhood with confused disinterest they moved on to hurting and stealing from me, to make sure the message really sank in. Boys don’t collect toy horses, they told me, and they mutilated Penelope the Purple Pony to illustrate their point. And my father, who comforted me, suggested that perhaps, if I wanted to make friends, at the next car boot sale I should choose some toys for boys.

They were wrong, all of them, and I knew it, even if I couldn’t articulate quite why. And it was in this mood of quiet rebellion, with my new and very much already beloved pony by my side, that I looked over the form in Stardust Shimmerwind’s box and found that it, too, asserted that the person filling it out would, obviously, inevitably, be something other than a boy.

My name is Miss _________.

If I wanted the comic, I would have to rebel. Only girls can have ponies? Fine! I’d invent one! I’d already come up with names and backstories for over a dozen ponies; it was trivial to create one more new character: the girl who was friends with them. For her it was perfectly normal to play with ponies, to carefully decorate the more battered among them with glue and glitter, and she would have friends to show them to, to share them with. She wouldn’t have to defend her interest against her peers’ belligerent insistence that she enjoyed the wrong things. She wouldn’t feel broken and sad when everyone in her life asks that she behave more like how a boy is supposed to.

And the girl needed a name. To write on the form.

I knew my given name was from the Bible, so I retrieved mine from the bedside table and flicked through the pages, looking for something suitable. In the end, there were few enough girl’s names in the parts I was familiar with that I quickly caved to the inevitable, and wrote Mary in careful letters on the form. I spent quite a long time looking at it before I sealed and posted the envelope.

In the shade under the tree, turning a pencil over and over in her hands, Pauline was still waiting for my answer.

“Tom,” I said. What choice did I have? I’d come to hate the name and everything that went with it, ever since Miranda confiscated my comic, lectured me about ‘playing pretend’, took away all my ponies and left me to think about what I’d done. And so I did: I sat in my empty room that night and every night for weeks after, with no toys to play with but a whole new identity to explore.

Mary was allowed to have whatever toys she wanted. Mary wouldn’t be bullied. Mary would have more than one friend, who she wouldn’t see only at church.

At almost seven years old, playing around in a role I hadn’t been assigned with a name I hadn’t been given, I discovered that my play was more meaningful to me than my whole life as Thomas. Thomas was a shell of expectations and instructions, which I inhabited by default, and the longer I thought about it, the more fragile that shell began to seem. I asked myself, over and over again, for weeks, who it was that I actually wanted to be, and the only answer I could come up with was: Mary.

I realised, after another lecture from my mother about make-believe, that I’d better keep up the Tom act, or even more things might be taken away from me; the other children might hurt me even more. I imitated the boys, and in finally understanding how different I was from them, I got a little better at pretending to be one of them. I could see the contrasts, and took steps to hide them. I even cultivated an interest in the stupid car-robots. Around Rebecca, my friend at church, I was something a little closer to myself, but even then I stuck broadly to the act.

Mary lived on inside me, a triumphant secret, and I kept her safe. You can’t hurt someone for being a girl if you can’t see her.

“Hi, Tom,” Pauline said, patting the ground next to her. I didn’t sigh — expressing dismay when you are named and gendered the way people expect is, I’d learned, dangerous — and sat down.

Pauline was a pale, freckled girl with blonde hair in a messy pony tail. She wore shorts, a t-shirt, and chunky trainers, and in addition to her cassette player and pencil had an illustrated book on woodland animals, a much-chewed multi-colour pen, and a notebook filled with her own drawings and the odd full page of looped circles in all the hues available to her, like if the Olympic logo didn’t know when to stop. She was eight to my seven-and-a-half and when she discovered her seniority immediately elected herself leader of our group of two. I was just happy to make a new friend; the only other kid whose company I actually enjoyed was Rebecca, and I wasn’t going to get to see her again for another two Sundays.

We walked the perimeter of campus together, chatting about our lives back home and sketching the occasional animal that darted past. Rather, she sketched; I admired her skill, and wished I’d brought my flute so I could demonstrate a talent on my own. I did sing her some of the pieces I’d been learning, and described my journey from beginner to early intermediate, at Pauline’s encouragement. And together we ran, giggling, from the teenage boy assigned to youth duty who tried without enthusiasm to get us to go to Bible study.

Andy, the youth leader, tracked us down eventually, scolded us for missing the first study session and made us do the worksheets over dinner. As long as we turned in our answer papers before evening worship, he said, he wouldn’t have to tell Madison or our parents.

We sat together on a warm bench outside the canteen marquee, eating egg and cress sandwiches and reading Bible verses aloud to each other. Pauline’s attitude towards scripture was rather more cynical than mine, and I found myself putting down deliberately wrong answers, because it made her laugh.

* * *

“You know, it’s all lies.”

Absconding from Bible study quickly became a habit. Andy gave up trying to stop us after Pauline got him to admit that, yes, if we handed in the worksheets on time then we were verifiably still learning what we were supposed to learn, and does he really want us making trouble in his classes? She had a way of persistently hammering on the same few points until adults backed down; I was in awe.

Pauline’s family lived in Essex, near the coast. It sounded amazing to me: on a clear day you could see the ships coming in! On a clear day back home in Baddesham, from the apex of the hill in the church graveyard, in Rebecca’s hiding spot halfway up the oldest, sturdiest tree, all you could see was houses, trees, the cloud of dust that occasionally hung over the brickworks, and cows. Pauline’s family attended a larger church than mine, but were still the only ones to attend summer camp. Her family, she said with a curled lip, loved all this happy-clappy crap.

I had to ask what ‘happy-clappy’ meant, and it turned out to be delightful. I decided to tell Rebecca when I got home; she and her family hated the New Church and everything associated with it, so she’d definitely get a kick out of it.

“What’s all lies?” I asked.

“This!” Pauline tapped her pen on the worksheets and books scattered across the grass, tactically positioned out of the way of our dripping bodies; going swimming was more fun than reading about sin.

“The Bible?” I was a little shocked. While I’d borrowed some of Pauline’s attitude, I wasn’t yet ready to slander the whole, actual Bible.

“No. Maybe. But, I mean, this stuff.” Pauline picked up a worksheet and waved it around, tearing the corner with damp fingers. “Pretending there’s one right answer to these questions. Pretending they know everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, okay, you know,” she started, looking around for something to illustrate her point and grabbing one of the Bibles. “These. They’re the idiot version, right?”

I laughed and agreed. The Bibles belonged to the New Church — families weren’t supposed to bring their own — and were written in a simplified and somehow very American language, which contrasted hilariously with the King James translation both their home churches used. “‘Jesus went behind the rock to use the bathroom,’” I quoted, putting on an accent.

Pauline giggled. “Exactly. Our Bibles—” she used the book to tap them both on the head, “—would say that very differently. ‘And thus the rock hid Jesus’ iniquities,’ or something.”

“What’s ‘iniquities’?”

“Don’t know. Heard someone say it once. Sounds gross, right?” She shrugged. “So, you know, if it’s the word of God, like Madison says, why’s the word of God different in every version?”

I couldn’t answer the question, so I just nodded.

“Okay, so, right,” Pauline said, getting into her stride, “remember the verse we had yesterday? About clothes and who can wear them?”

“Yes.” The prior day’s study had focused on the verse, Women must not wear men’s clothes. Men must not wear women’s clothes. God hates everyone who does this. It made me nervous: it was too close to the things I’d been thinking about the last few months. If I was a girl, inside, but a boy on the outside, what even counts as wearing the right clothes?

“I looked it up on the internet last night.” Pauline had her own laptop and a phone that could connect it to the internet because, she said proudly, her father was a geek, with a whole garage full of this stuff, and took the attitude that if she was going to go online, better that he knows about it than she sneak onto her older sisters’ computers. “And I found this.” She pulled a piece of paper out of her notebook and held it up: a printout. I couldn’t begin to guess where Pauline found a printer in this place.

“‘The Anglican Digest’,” I read. I couldn’t make anything else out without getting up and moving close, and I was too comfortable to want to move. “What does the rest of it say?”

Pauline read from the article. It claimed that the verse, for which it used a different and more authentic-sounding translation, applied to ceremonial vestments only, and that it would be an error to cite the verse as proof that, for example, women should not be permitted jeans. It noted that nowhere in the recorded teachings of Jesus was homosexuality or the wearing of inappropriate clothes even mentioned, and moved on to a digression on the dangers of justifying prejudice with scripture.

“What’s a vestment?”

“You know. Robes and stuff. Like your vicar wears, probably.”

Reverend Percy usually wore a heavy velvet robe that looked like curtains. Rebecca once called it a hassock, and her father escorted her out of the church for laughing.

“So, not normal clothes?”

“Nope. Robes. Armour, maybe, back in the old days. Not trousers and skirts or anything we even have. And that’s what I mean: Madison and Andy and the New Family Bible and this whole stupid place—” with a sweep of her arm, Pauline indicated the whole stupid place, “—say one thing, and these people, the ones who write The Anglican Digest, say a completely different thing. They say Jesus never even talked about this stuff!

“So,” Pauline continued, forcing her arms back into a resting position and adopting a very intense look, “I checked online. Turns out, nobody agrees on what the stuff in the Bible means. Or which parts even happened! Even the KJV is a translation, and meanings can change when you translate! I found some people saying all you need to do is be like Jesus, to love and take care of people, and I found other people with this whole big list of rules you have to follow, and if you don’t, they don’t think you’re a Christian! Nobody. Agrees. It’s all lies and guesses and mistakes and people who say they know what everything means, but they’re just pretending, or twisting things to make themselves right.”

I felt like one of those people on stage, on the first night, who fell into the crowd when Madison placed a hand on their head. “You really think so?”

“Yeah. Adults use the Bible to sound important. To make you follow their rules and not someone else’s. I bet that’s why Madison’s church had their own Bible made in the first place: so it agreed with them. They make up the rules, they write them in their Bible, and then—” Pauline paused for a deep breath, having apparently forgotten to pace herself, “—they point to the Bible they wrote to say that only their rules are right!”

I nodded; adults enforcing nonsense rules arbitrarily was something I’d come to expect. Disappointing to realise Madison was the same as all the others.

“I think Madison can’t hear God,” Pauline said. “She just makes it up. So her rules sound good. Better for me if she’s wrong, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

Pauline laughed. “If Madison’s telling the truth, if all this stuff—” she indicated with contempt the soggy worksheets, “—is real, I’m in trouble.” She drew a finger across her throat and made a gurgling, dying sound. “Mum wants me to be a girl, like my sisters, but I won’t do it.”

My head filled with visions of my mother marching around my room with a cardboard box and a furious temper, confiscating everything insufficiently boyish. Dad catching her hand before it could connect with me. “What does your mum do to you?” I demanded. Parents, in my experience, liked gender.

“She’s mostly given up,” Pauline boasted. “Last time she tried to get me in a dress I shouted so loud the whole shop heard. She made me promise to wear one on really special occasions, but the rest of the time I just won’t.”

“Why not?”

Pauline shrugged. “Being a girl is stupid.”

“It’s not stupid!” I said, unable to stop myself.

Pauline rolled her eyes theatrically. “Fine. It’s not stupid. My sisters aren’t stupid. But it’s stupid for me.”

“What do you mean?”

Pauline leaned forward, radiating confidence. “Girls can turn into boys, you know.”

* * *

“Someone’s coming!”

“No-one’s coming. You’re imagining things.”

“And how do you know?”

“It’s my dorm, remember? The stairs creak. You heard them coming up.”

“Really?”

“Yes. But there’s places you can walk where it’s quiet, if you need to go somewhere secret. I can show you.”

“I know I heard something!”

“You’re just scared to be caught in the girls’ dorm.”

“Yes!”

The idea that girls could turn into boys was intriguing in a way I couldn’t possibly hide and Pauline, a mere six months older than me but worldly in the manner of those who have very nearly unmonitored access to television and the internet, spotted it instantly. She beckoned me closer and whispered, “It’s true. This boy in America, Connor, he was a girl just like me but he told his mum he’s supposed to be a boy. When he was seven. And his mum actually helped him become a boy.”

“He was seven?” I was seven!

Pauline nodded emphatically. “But then he tells a friend and they tell someone else and everyone starts picking on him, and his mum finds out and marches right into school and right up to the head teacher and yells at him. She gets Connor out of school and they move. Halfway across America. New school. New church. He gets his hair cut short and no-one knows he was ever a girl.”

I tried to picture my mother standing up for me like that, and failed. She was more likely to find some fault with my performance of boyhood, although she’d laid off a bit as I got better at it.

“How did he hide it?”

“Hide what?”

“Being a girl?”

“It’s easy. Right now the only difference between you and me is down there.” Pauline pointed; I realised after a moment just what she was pointing at, and looked away. “We don’t start to differentiate—” she slowed down so she didn’t stumble over the difficult word, “—until we’re older. Teenagers. Until then it’s mostly just what clothes you wear and how short your mum lets you cut your hair.” She tangled her fingers irritably in the end of her pony tail.

“But what about when he gets older?” I demanded. I didn’t know much about puberty — not even Phil was quite old enough yet, and he was the oldest person I regularly interacted with who was not yet an adult — but I’d observed the contrast between the husbands and wives I saw at church and the vast difference between my parents, and come to some concerning conclusions about what exactly happened to boys and girls when they grew up.

“He got older. He’s fifteen now. And yeah, he would have started a girl puberty but—” she leaned closer still, “—there are drugs.”

“Drugs?”

“Yes! To stop you becoming a woman. And soon he’s going to start on other drugs that will make him grow up like any other man.”

I was having trouble imagining being gifted with girlhood and deliberately choosing another option. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“He was on the news one night. Read about him after. He’s got his own TV show, but you can only see it in America. But you can read about it all and there’s… there’s loads of information.”

“Where did you read about it?” I’d scoured every resource available to me — the church reading room in the annexe basement, Mum and Dad’s bookshelves, the library shelf at school — and found nothing, glumly concluding there was nothing to find. If there’d been anything even close to what Pauline was describing with Connor, I would have found it. If it was real, surely they’d tell us about something so important at school?

“Same place I read about everything. Duh.”

I didn’t want to trespass in a girls’ space, but Pauline’s laptop and phone were up in her dorm, as was the only accessible plug. If I wanted to see Connor’s website, I’d have to come up. So there I was, hovering nervously by the bed, jumping at random sounds, waiting for Pauline to find the cord to connect the phone to her laptop. She’d had it out just the night before…

I couldn’t help noticing a dress that had been tipped onto the bed when she emptied her suitcases. Wrinkled and half-hidden under a pair of khaki shorts, there was nothing special about it. But I knew only girls were allowed dresses. Dresses practically symbolised girlhood; even the girl on the sign for changing rooms and toilets wore a dress! It was a membership badge to a world I wanted, desperately needed to explore, out in the real world and not just in my head. The wardrobe to Narnia in tatty cream-white, with strawberries on.

“Want to try it on?” Pauline said, twirling the phone cord around a finger.

“Huh?”

“I can see you looking at it. Try it on! I don’t mind. It’s not like I want to wear it.”

I bit my lip. “You really don’t mind?”

“Nope. Let me borrow your t-shirt. It looks cool.”

Immediately I shrugged off my top — a generic dark blue tee with the logo of a local business splashed across the chest — and handed it over. Pauline took a sudden sharp breath and grabbed it.

“Someone’s coming!” she said. “For real! Put the dress on!”

“What? Right now?”

“Yes, right now!” Pauline’s voice was muffled by the t-shirt that was half over her head. “Or we’ll be caught!”

“Can’t I just put my—”

“You want to be a boy in here?”

I quickly dropped the dress over my head and, at Pauline’s prompting, took off my shoes and trousers. Pauline rammed something onto my head, and I flinched.

“It’s just a hair band,” Pauline said. “Try and look like you’re not scared.”

The door opened and Pauline yanked me back over to the bed, pressing one of her scattered tops into my hand to make it seem like we were looking through her clothes together. Because I had my back to the door I didn’t see the new arrival until she rounded the bed: it was one of Pauline’s sisters, the one who looked about fourteen or fifteen.

“Hi, kiddiwink,” she said. “Who’s this?” I didn’t know what to say and Pauline seemed to have shut down. The girl stuck out a hand. “I’m Elizara,” she said. “The quiet one there is my sister. You got a name?”

Before I could let myself think too much about it, I said, “I’m Mary.” I was supposed to be a girl in here, after all.

“Hi,” Elizara said, and shook my limp hand. She shot a grin at Pauline and wheeled off towards her own bed. Within a minute she was gone, waving cheerily, sports bag slung over her shoulder, tennis racket dangling from a finger.

Pauline and I fell backwards onto the bed together.

“Mary?”

“Yes.”

“You think of that just now?”

“No.”

“You want to know mine?”

I turned over. “Yes.”

“Cameron.”

“Cameron,” I repeated slowly, testing the name out. I’d never met a Cameron before. “It’s good.”

“You think so? I’ve never told anyone before.”

“Me neither.”

“Mary’s good, too.”

“Thanks. I’ve never told anyone either.”

“Well, come on! Let me show you Connor’s website and we can read all about it together, Mary.”

Cameron said my name with a teasing tone, but when I looked back at him he was smiling, so I smiled back.

* * *

“Pauline!”

Cameron’s mother’s voice echoed in the emptying church and I cringed away from it, trying not to laugh. I was crouched behind a pew in the middle of the building, potential exposure on all sides. Cameron, hidden from his mother’s view behind another pew on the other side of the aisle, made hurry up gestures. I’m coming, I mouthed back.

“Pauline Goodwin! Come out at once!”

She was closer than I thought. I hiccuped in surprise and let a giggle follow it halfway out before I could slap a hand over my traitorous mouth. Across the aisle, Cam struggled not to laugh. I composed myself, and when I was certain I could safely uncover my mouth I dropped quietly into what I hoped was a decent facsimile of a runner’s starting position, with one hand and one knee on the flagstones. Cam started silently to count me down on his fingers, grinning wickedly, and when he closed his fist I burst out of my hiding place and ran across the aisle to meet him. As I got closer he positioned his arms as if holding a flag and waved it as I passed. Running as quietly as I could, I took up position by the door to the vestry and held it open so he could run through.

When I closed the door behind us, Cam was already pulling off the shirt and corduroys he had on.

The New Church organised a trip to the nearby town — a storybook place of wooden-beam houses, narrow streets, and rock walls with shops built right into them that seemed only to sell hot tea, warm scones, cold milk and old clocks — with the apparent intention that the campers discuss the benefits of evangelicalism with the locals. Cameron and I found ourselves dressed up in ways that didn’t conform to our respective genders — Cam’s mother threatened no internet for a month, a new high for punishments — so after the service was done with and while the adults were in the pub garden next to the church, browbeating people with hope and love and DVDs, we swapped clothes and indulged ourselves, talking to some of the local kids in our ‘new’ personae of Cameron and Mary.

Cam even inveigled us into the biscuit rota, an apparently universal post-church ritual that made me nostalgic for home: Rebecca and I usually stole a basket of the best ones and vanished into the graveyard at our earliest opportunity, to dig up cool bugs and eat custard creams.

One of the teens — older than us but too young for the pub garden — called me adorable.

When the families started filing back from the pub, Cam dragged me away from the girl I was chatting with and back into the church in time to evade everyone but his own mother.

“This door doesn’t close properly!” I whispered, fiddling with the broken latch.

“Then hurry up!” Cam replied, already fully disrobed and holding out an expectant hand.

I stepped away from the door to undress; it immediately swung open without me to hold it closed.

Cam made an exasperated face and look my place, so I shucked off the dress as quickly as I could and threw it at him. It landed on his head in such a comical fashion it shattered our brief composure. Cam, struggling to get it off his face, couldn’t keep the laughter in.

“Pauline!” his mother yelled again, closer. “Come out right this instant!”

“Whoops,” I whispered, stepping back over to hold the door shut so Cam could put the dress back on. It looked strange on him.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” he insisted, swapping places again.

I was halfway into my original clothes when the door rattled: Cameron’s mum. A laugh exploded from his chest.

“I can hear you, you know!” Cameron’s mother shouted through the door.

I finished the last button on my shirt and gestured for Cam to step away, which turned out to be a timely decision: the door slammed open and his mother staggered through, as if she’d put too much pressure on a door which suddenly hung open. She got her bearings and looked at us. We set our faces to ‘sweet and innocent’.

“Good morning, Mrs Goodwin,” I said.

“Your mother is looking for you.”

“Ah, sugar,” I muttered, and ran out of the vestry.

“I’ll see you back at camp!” Cam yelled, as the recriminations from his mum began.

It would be a while before that was possible. My mother had been ‘worried sick’ when she couldn’t instantly lay eyes on me after a strange service in a strange town and a stressful exposure to ordinary people in a pub garden, and insisted on family activities for the next several days, which she performed with a desultory stiffness that was unusual even for her. Dad couldn’t make her laugh during Bible Pictionary, despite his detailed and mildly sacrilegious drawings sending a couple of other families into hysterics. I felt her attention on me the whole afternoon and ached to escape. For about the hundredth time since the church vestry I wished Phil had come on holiday with us, hadn’t instead gone to some mysterious football camp near Aunt Lydia’s.

Cam caught my eye across the game room as Pictionary drew to a close. I indicated silently that I couldn’t get away from my mother; he nodded. As we all filed out for dinner he slipped a note into my pocket, which I read in the safety of the dorm: Skip dinner tomorrow and meet me by our tree. Cam. There were little interlocking circles doodled around the edge of the paper.

* * *

There are times when I exist only in this moment. It comes back to me unpredictably. I’m seven again — seven-and-a-half, I might have insisted at the time — and Madison, good Christian woman and lightning rod for the will of God, is striking me with her belt.

We’re in borrowed clothes when we get caught. Cam’s got one of my t-shirts on, with a palm tree on the chest, a relic of some forgotten family holiday. I’m wearing the first of Cam’s dresses I tried, the first dress I ever wore: cream with strawberries. It tickles my calves and flutters when I move and raises its skirt to my knees when I spin around. I get mud on it when Andy’s grip on my arm loosens and I stumble and fall onto the grass. He pulls me up by my wrist, which makes my shoulder hurt. I’d fight him, but he’s almost twenty; it’s pointless. Cam’s being guided by another of the teenage volunteers. He’s not struggling. Instead he looks shocked, his gaze darting around, looking everywhere except at me.

I’m taken round to the back of the school and along a stone path to a small building near the edge of campus. It’s fitted out inside like a small cinema or lecture theatre. Madison’s claimed the office at the back, spacious and plush.

A little while later the other volunteer enters with Cam in tow. He’s been crying. I reach out for him but he looks away and jerks his hands to his sides.

Madison sends the older boys on their way, sits us down, and talks to us about sin.

Cam’s quiet. I argue, borrowing the defiance, the cynicism, the strength I’ve seen in him. I tell her about the other versions of the Bible, about the Anglican Digest and ceremonial robes. About how no-one can know the will of God when so many people have so many different ideas about it.

Madison says, no. The will of God is clear. Homosexuality is a sin, and this, what she calls ‘transvestism’, is a sin, too.

I stop listening. She’s not listening to me; fair’s fair. I move on to imagining what will happen to me afterwards. Mum’s going to go mad: if playing with ponies merits a scouring of my room, what will—

Madison slaps me. Flat palm to my cheek. Pay attention when adults are talking!

God wants to know what Cameron and I plan to do about our sin. I scream at Madison: I don’t care. I don’t think anyone can tell me what God wants. I think Madison is a liar.

Madison kicks the chair out from under me, grabs me by my wrist and yanks me to my feet. My shoulder, already hurt, protests. I twist to unknot it and she slaps me again. Don’t move! She holds me there while she unloops the thin belt from her smart, expensive trousers.

She lifts up the skirt of my borrowed dress, pulls down my underwear and strikes me.

The shock is almost worse than the pain. I’m accustomed to being scolded, to being sent to my room, to having my precious things taken away and my behaviour dictated. And violence from other children is a given. But even Madison’s slaps weren’t enough to prepare me for what it’s like when an adult really wants to hurt a child.

She strikes a second time, and I cry out.

Three.

Four.

She doesn’t make it to five, because Cam rockets out of his chair and tackles her. It’s a rugby tackle, I realise years later, watching Phil at a Saturday game but existing in this moment once again. And it shouldn’t work: Cameron is eight; Madison is an adult. But something about the way she stands, winding up to strike again, all her focus and her vicious delight on me, makes her vulnerable.

Madison falls backwards and Cam takes my hand and, together, we run.

* * *

We made it all the way through the forest surrounding the campus to the village on the other side. Swapped back into our own clothes on the way. I apologised for the rip in the dress, but Cam sneered that he didn’t care. He had no use for it. He’d never wear it. He’d tear it up. He wouldn’t ever do anything they told him to any more.

I admired his bravery, but I never wanted to get hit like that again.

The next morning we were found by a jogger who called the local vicar. We gave him the story we agreed between ourselves overnight: we’d gone looking for wildlife to draw, and got lost. We didn’t want to find out if the villagers had the same opinion on transgender children as the New Church. Best to keep everything a secret.

Delivered back to campus, Madison made with us a furious bargain: she wouldn’t tell our families what she’d seen, if we didn’t tell anyone what she did to me. We got lost in the woods. That was all. Madison kept her word, as far as I could tell; certainly my mother contained her weeks of lectures to the topics of wandering off and not trusting strangers, and never raised the subject of my gender. And so I kept my word, and never told anyone what Madison did.

I sat for dinner gingerly and locked the door when I bathed, hiding the bruises and welts until they faded. And decided on the first night home that I needed to make myself safe: my Thomas act was going to have to get a lot better.

But I couldn’t go back to church. The first week, forced into Sunday best and shiny shoes, coerced once again into boyhood, mother and God glaring down upon me with unified will, was more than I could bear. I waited through the service in silence, begged Dad to take me home as soon as it ended, and refused to return the week after. It took another couple of weeks for Dad finally to persuade Mum that maybe church wasn’t good for me right now, and that Phil, never an enthusiastic churchgoer himself, was old enough to watch me at home on Sunday mornings.

We played games on his computer and enjoyed the quiet time together, and when I wouldn’t say what upset me he was happy to drop the subject.

I did miss Rebecca.

My faith became a writhing parasite with influence over only my nightmares.

My performance of boyhood did actually improve. It helped that a new boy, roughly my age, arrived on our street a little before the start of the next school term. I befriended him, copied him, found my reprieve. I played football and turned out to be quite good at it. I developed an interest in video games, with Phil’s help and Mum’s veto over titles. I started paying attention in class. My mother lapped up the praise from my teachers and from the mothers of the other boys. The general opinion among my classmates was that I’d finally come to my senses.

My misery I reserved for my diary, which I hid behind the chest of drawers and took out nightly, to read old entries, record new ones, and fill whole pages with looped circles in every colour I had, with the pen pressed down so hard that sometimes I ripped the paper.

I signed every entry Mary. It was the only place I got to see my real name.