The Skeleton Cupboard Read Free

state of mind. I inhabit a nonjudgmental space , I reminded myself.
    â€œGender Identity Clinic?” I asked.
    â€œYep. The boys come in because they want to be girls. Prof Winters is their man. They get assessed, and if they can live for five years as the gender of their choice, then they get the op, the deportment classes, the whole works.”
    â€œThe works?”
    â€œAdam’s apple shaved, makeup tutorials, how to dress to suit your shape—you can cut off a penis, but you can’t rebuild a brick shithouse.”
    I looked around and had to agree, as much as I hated the indelicacy of George’s language. There were some who could only be described as pantomime dames. There were also some incredibly good-looking women here.
    There was one mesmerizingly beautiful woman. Slight and delicate, she had the most incredible curtain of straight, shiny black hair hanging down to her waist. She certainly knew how to dress to suit her shape—“classy not brassy,” as “my girls,” my three best friends, would say. She even gestured in a manner that, despite the slight exaggeration of movement and eyelash flutter, was all believable, even if it was sort of hyperfeminized.
    I felt challenged. My clothes—a charity shop man’s suit with crisp white shirt, tight vintage Dior belt and Doc Marten shoes—made me feel frumpy.
    How can a man look a better woman than me?
    I was rescued from this thought by the appearance of two other people coming out of the women’s toilets. The smaller of the two was startling. She was wearing the sort of dress that my late grandmother would put on for a family occasion: good material, generously cut, but staid in its blue navy, with a tight, thin red belt, plunging neckline and cheeky sailor-striped T-shirt subtly covering the décolletage. She wore a wig of the brightest yellow perm, held a tiny red clutch in her enormous hand and tottered on blue wedge heels made out of the material that allows room for bunions—the sort of shoe that can be purchased from a catalogue that also sells lawn-aerating sandals, ladies’ turbans and slow cookers.
    The taller of the two women, at well over six feet tall, was broad, with calves the size of tree trunks and well-defined arms to die for. She wore a tight black dress, lap-dancing shoes with Lucite platforms and vertigo-inducing stilettos, and sported a straight, brown, honey-highlighted Mary Quant bobbed wig with serious attitude.
    She was the Adam/Felicia character in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert , or Tony Curtis as Josephine in Some Like It Hot . The smaller woman, however, only managed Terence Stamp and Jack Lemmon—Bernadette and Daphne.
    I was mesmerized. “Josephine” caught my eye, winked her giant eyelashes, poked the end of her tongue out from between her red, shiny lips and smiled. I felt hot and looked away.
    Someone flew past me singing and then disappeared behind the central lift shaft.
    How do you solve a problem like Maria?
    How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
    â€œThat’s Edith,” George explained. “She’s an RDP.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œA revolving-door patient.”
    â€œAnd that is?”
    â€œShe is admitted by court order and taken into the inpatient ward on the other side of this floor. She is stabilized. She takes her meds independently. She is discharged. Care in the community takes over. There is no care in the community. She drops off her meds, frightens the neighbors, so she comes back in. Revolving door.”
    I looked thoughtfully at George. He was in his seventies, I reckoned, perhaps ex-military, with his white cuffs visible a precise and equal distance under a pristine black sweater.
    â€œHello, Edith,” said George, looking up at the person whose beautiful voice I’d heard.
    â€œWell, hello, George. And who might this pretty lady be?”
    Edith had wandered into the outpatient department and I found