Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

“So… I can’t help noticing…” Hajarean begins.

“Oh no—”

“You’re both girls now,” he observes.

“Oh damn, you noticed,” I joke, and lean right forward to bury my head in my arms. I’m sitting cross-legged on the big comfy chair and I think, suddenly, that my old hips wouldn’t let me do that.

“It’s a little hard to miss.” He chuckles. “How is that working out for you both?”

I sit up straight again and sigh. “Sam’s finding it hard. You know how Lee was such a lad…” Hajarean nods. “She’d go back to being male again like a shot, if she could.”

“Hmm,” Hajarean muses. “You wouldn’t.”

“I…” I stop myself before I give out the old excuses. “No, I wouldn’t,” I say, looking him in the eye.

He nods. “I can’t say I’m surprised,” he says, a touch of humour in his voice. “If memory serves, most of us were waiting for you to tell us what was on your mind.”

“You… You were?”

He smiles.

“Oh God,” I say, burying my head again. I can hear him chuckling.

“If I might say,” he starts gently. I sit up again. “You do seem happier in yourself. You seem more yourself, somehow.”

“I guess. Kerilas said that too.” Remembering that takes some of the happiness away.

Pause.

“You sound like you’re not sure.”

“Oh I’m definitely happier, it’s just the ‘myself’ bit I’m not sure of. Heh.” I watch the stove for a few moments. “I would have done it myself, eventually,” I say. “Back there, I know I would have got my arse in gear sooner or later.”

“The sex-change?” Hajarean asks, just confirming. I nod.

“I just… I wasn’t ready yet, you know? It’s too big. Scary. It’s a lot easier to fantasize than to get on with it; start actually… coming out to people; doing irrevocable stuff to my body; being on drugs for the rest of my life.”

“Drugs?”

“Hormones.”

“Oh, right.” He shrugs. “I don’t know much about the… technicalities, I admit.”

“Oh, I’d been researching this for years.” I give him another long look. “Since college, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing.” That was where I’d met Simon. He was in the year ahead of me. It was coincidence that work took me to live in his home city a couple of years after I graduated. That’s when I got involved with the role playing groups, through him.

He nods.

“I mean, what they can do with hormones and surgery, and laser and voice training and all that. It’s not… It wouldn’t have been perfect. Bone structure, for instance. There’s only so much you can do after the skeleton’s stopped growing, for a start.”

“Who has a perfect body?”

“I know, I know.” Smile. I have, now, I remind myself. “But I know I’d always have looked… I don’t know, frumpy, I think. It always put me off, thinking how… how hard it was going to be even to… even to look okay enough that asking people to call me a she… wouldn’t strain credibility. I mean, I’ve seen some TSs that look fantastic, but… I don’t know. I don’t think I would’ve. Point is, I still would have done it, eventually,” I say again. “I know I would. I already knew I would. Just… not yet.”

“It’s like you said, you weren’t ready yet.”

“And now I never will be, will I? I’ll never have to make that step, and I’ll never be the woman I was going to be. And sometimes I’m just glad I don’t have to go through all that ’cause it was terrifying me, it really was, and here I am instead in this… lovely, perfect little female body and I didn’t have to go through any of that shit. And sometimes I feel like such a fraud, ’cause I haven’t earned any of this, I’ve just stolen this girl’s life, and even if I could give it back—” I stop on the brink, suddenly realising what I’m about to say. I look at him and decide to say it. “Even if I could give it back, I honestly don’t think I would.”

“Had you decided on a name? Back there, I mean?”

“Uh… Not really. Kind of.”

“Which means yes. Come on, what was it?”

“Well it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“I want to know.” There’s that slow grin again. It’s so Simon. I can feel I’m blushing.

“Cathy,” I say. “C-Catherine.”

He nods. “I think it would have suited you.”

I shrug. Still blushing. “It’s beside the point. I can’t ever be her now.”

Silence.

“I named my daughter Catherine,” Hajarean says suddenly. “Well, Katarin, which is about as close as anyone here can pronounce it.” Another grin, then he turns thoughtful. “What you were saying about feeling like you’ve stolen a life. I know what you mean. I still get those thoughts a lot, even now.”

“It doesn’t go away?”

He shakes his head. “Which is ironic, I think, as I’ve lived in this body longer than he did, now.”

“How do you deal with it?”

He looks pensive. “I try to earn it; be worthy of it. I try not to bring dishonour to his name.”

I sigh. “Funny thing is, we two, we’re probably the happiest out of all of us. We’ve come out the best.”

He nods, taking that in.

“Kerilas said something, I remember,” I say. “He said, the thing with me is… Taniel… I wanted to be Taniel. It really was wish-fulfilment. That must have made it easier, because it meant I actually got the chance to be who I wished I could be.”

“Yeah. I think it’s fair to say I was the same there.”

“James never wanted to be Kerilas. He fancied playing an evil character in a game, he didn’t want to be… actually evil. And Sam certainly didn’t want to be a girl.”

“I think I dodged an arrow with Barak dying before we got pulled here,” Hajarean says.

“Heh. For about five minutes we thought you might have turned up as Jalese.”

“That was the N— The girl Lotan found belowdecks, right?”

I nod.

“How come?”

“Because sometimes after a character death a player takes over an NPC in the party—”

“Ohh, right, of course. ’Cause that would have been just what we needed, three of us turned into girls overnight.”

I laugh at the thought. “Oh God, I don’t think I could…” I break up. I’ve got the giggles.

“What?” he wants to know.

“Two of you…” I have to slip the words out through giggles. “Freaking out… about… first period…”

“Ohhh.”

“It’s not funny, it’s not funny, it’s not funny,” I tell myself, three times in quick succession, to make it true. “Poor Sam,” I say, calm now. “It’s not funny. She covers it a lot when other people are around. You know how Lee was…”

“Yeah.”

“Still the same. In private she gets pretty depressed sometimes.”

“Oh, that doesn’t sound so different from Lee,” Hajarean says. “It always was a cover. Didn’t you realise?”

“No. Well, I only ever saw him at the game.”

“He went through some very bad stuff growing up.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, at least Sam does have you to talk to.”

I shrug.

“Maybe she leans on you too hard,” Hajarean suggests.

“No, no, Trust me, I’m the one leaning on her.”

“Does she blame you for what happened to her?”

“No!” I object. “No, I—” My throat blocks up. Suddenly I’m weeping, almost silently, as emotions I don’t understand and hardly suspected feel like they’re crushing my chest.

“I wanted this!” I manage to get out in between tears. “I wanted this… so much! Every day I dreamed of something like this happening to me! So I didn’t have to be that… that thing any more!”

His arm is around my shoulders. My eyes aren’t open but he must be kneeling by my chair. I lean forwards and almost shoulder-barge him in trying to get closer to him. My head rests against his shoulder. He smells nice, of strength and manliness if that makes sense. And humanity. My lost humanity.

“I wished, I wished, I wished,” I say. “I wished that this could be real and not a dream and I wouldn’t have to go back… into that horrible… carcass… Ever. Ever. Ever.”

“Shh.” He rocks me slightly. I don’t know where this strength of feeling has come from. “Do you really think your wishing made this whole world? All the people you’ve known here. The thousands and thousands of years of history. My children… Taniel, do you really think you could have made all this with a little wish?”

“I…” Of course it’s a stupid idea. I know it is. But I’d wished so hard for so long.

“We were all brought here, for whatever purpose or whoever’s design, whoever’s plan it was, chose to prepare the way for us with a… with a game. I have no idea, but it had nothing to do with what any of us might have wished. Some of us…” He sighs. “Some of us were just lucky with the lives we found here.” I nod at that, my hair sliding across his shoulder. “So Sam’s in the mirror predicament of where you were back there. Add to that you’ve lost James and Dave—”

“I know—”

“You’ve heard of survivor guilt, haven’t you?”

I nod again.

“You let yourself be happy for a while and then—”

“Then I fuck something up and—”

“And she gets angry with you. You think you deserve that?”

I sniff. “I don’t know.” I squeeze the material of his sleeve hard. Do I fuck up because I deserve to have Sam angry at me? “I don’t know.”