What happens next?

If you want to know that, you'll need to read Incidents of Trespass in its final form as a novella, available here in paperback and here on Kindle! As well as the conclusion to the story, the novella features a new opening chapter and expanded entries from the blog. Check it out, then tell me what you think!

Point of Balance

My face hurts, and I can’t tell for sure yet if the spreading warmth that feels so wet around my nose and mouth is blood or sweat, but there isn’t time for me to touch my face to check. I try to roll away from her, more from instinct than anything else at this point, but she gets on top of me and I think great, this is it, I held back from throwing myself under a Metro only to be beaten to death by some white supremacist bitch, go me! I cross my arms in front of my face, anticipating punches. Peering over my crossed arms, I see a weird smile occurring on her face.

When I feel her hand on my crotch my spine goes rigid and my arms turn useless. When I see the shock in her eyes I start trying to push myself away from her, somehow, like I did with Jeanette only this time I’m not trying to phase through the wall of a hotel room but through this shitty concrete path. Surprise reveals never go well.

She looks down at me. It’s hard to read her face. There’s the usual trans panic bullshit going on there but there’s something else as well, disgust. Disgust with me, yes – I mean that’s a given. But something else too. She brings her right hand up. It hovers between us. For a moment it’s the thing which both of us are focused on. She’s looking at it for who knows what reason; I’m thinking that if I grab it quickly, aggressively, while she’s still distracted – it’s a risk but I can maybe break her wrist and that might stop her, slow her down at least, but I am still prone underneath her…

‘OI!’

Oh great, I think. Her mates are here now. That’s it. But when I roll my head in the direction of the shouting I see…Kizz?

‘Caz! Caz! It’s alright Caz, I know her!’

‘Caz?’

She looks down at me. I can tell from the look on her face that she’s racing to process this new information.

‘Ruby! Ruby love, I’m sorry, Caz has…it’s alright Caz! Ruby’s okay! I know her! You don’t have to…’

She trails off. Neither of us responds with you won’t have to what. We neither of us want to say what we were on the verge of. Caz looks back down at me, grabs my wrists and holds them down, across my chest. She looks me in the eyes and she says

‘Ruby.’

By now Kizz is stood beside us. She makes no move to pull Caz off, which means she’s scared as well. Whether more scared that I’ll get hurt or Caz will do something stupid, I don’t know. Caz holds my gaze for a couple more beats, then turns to talk to Kizz. ‘She fuckin’ started it!’

I laugh, involuntarily. It’s such a schoolyard explanation. But she’s right, I guess, I moved first, though I’d call that self-defence. Caz turns back round to look at me again and the laugh dies on my lips. ‘Sorry,’ I squeak.

Kizz smiles lightly then holds up her hands, palms out. ‘I know she did, love, I saw the whole thing, right, but I’m sure it’s a mistake or something.’

‘A mistake.’

‘Isn’t it? Ruby, isn’t it a mistake? You thought Caz was someone else, right?’

‘No. There’s no point lying. I knew who she was.’

Kizz shoots me a look that says work with us here, come on and continues. ‘Okay, but I bet you didn’t expect it to end up like this, right?’

‘I won’t lie. It could have gone better.’

This time, Caz laughs. Just the tiniest intake of breath but I hear it. And I hope it means we can de-escalate this thing.

‘What about you, Caz?’ Kizz asks. ‘You didn’t want this to happen.’

Caz looks back down at me, pushing hard on my arms. ‘I didn’t want a lot of things to happen.’

So much for the healing power of fucking laughter. Caz raises her right fist and is about to bring it down when Kizz moves in and grabs her wrist.

She’s looking Caz directly in the eye. I know she’s scared. The fear breathes around her, Caz and me, we breathe it in. ‘I know that, love,’ she says, as gently as she can. ‘But you’re not the only one things happened to.’

Caz looks back down at me. ‘What? Her?’

Kizz nods. ‘Like you and Mally, Caz.’

Caz looks briefly down at me, then back to Kizz.

‘I don’t believe you.’ She shrugs off Kizz’s grip, is about to bring her hand down again.

‘It’s true!’ Kizz screams. ‘Caz, it’s true! She was raped by some bloke Caz, Ruby, come on, fucking tell her…’

Her eyes flash pleading from my own to Caz and back again. The fist is waiting. If I don’t say the right thing now I’m fucking dead.

‘It wasn’t a man.’

Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

Kizz looks on. Caz looks down. Caz mouths what

and she lowers her arm. 

They Meet

If you happened to be standing in one of the fields between Wansbeck Road Metro station and the roundabout at the bottom of Broadway Avenue, looking south towards a set of six municipal benches, on a particular morning in the summer of 2016, this is what you would have seen.

You would have seen two women, one blonde, one brunette, enter the space between the six benches from opposite directions. The brunette would arrive first, and busy herself taking photographs: walking forward and back, probing the scene from different sides like a boxer trying to find an opening in her opponent’s guard. So busy does she become, walking and standing and kneeling, that she fails, at first, to notice the blonde, who very clearly does see the brunette, and shouts something at her. You can’t quite make out the words. They’re few, and sharp, and short: you can tell that much. You see the brunette’s lips move, watch her shift from a kneel to a kind of half-crouch. You can tell from the bounce of her knees, the size of her body, the way the hand which doesn’t hold the phone is fingers spread in contact with the ground, she won’t be able to hold this pose all that long.

Their lips are still moving: the blonde is snapping, curt, the brunette is talking steady, talking slow, trying to keep the scene calm. But the blonde is moving first to one side then the other. Circling, trying to find the exact point from which she can move in and close the space before the brunette can react. The situation is combustible: you know with certainty it will tip into violence. It does.

The blonde and the brunette both spring at about the same time. This means they almost miss each other, but not quite. The brunette’s shoulder hits the stomach of the blonde, whose right hand grabs the brunette’s ponytail as they fall skittering to the ground. It’s harder now to tell what’s happening at this remove, but neither one will see you stepping closer. The brunette is somewhere between kneeling down and on her back, grabbing at the blonde’s clothes for leverage, trying to reach for her hair. The blonde gets both hands on the ponytail and pushes backward with the muscles of her thighs, pulling the brunette forward, over the edge of her balance, ragdolling her head left and right, half-circles, putting pressure on the neck, wearing her out, making her dizzy. The brunette reaches up with one hand and half-claws, half-pushes the blonde’s face.

When something’s on your face it’s hard to fight the urge to pull it off. When the blonde removes her right arm from the brunette’s ponytail the move is reflex, but she masters herself in almost the same second. The first punch she throws into the brunette’s face is tentative, a faltering feint which chances on its mark. The second is more sure, and the third shocks the fight out of the brunette long enough for the blonde to get back to her feet and begin driving stomping, step-through kicks into the brunette’s side. The woman on the ground attempts to roll away instinctively, but the blonde follows with the speed of a fighter who knows what her opponent’s next move will be, and mounts the brunette before she can react.

At this point, you can tell that it’s all over, mismatched from the start. This is what happens when someone who sees violence so rarely they view it as play encounters one for whom it is a life. The question now is just how much of a beating she will take. Or, at least, that’s how it is until the blonde feels something which makes her suck in her stomach, a shock which has offended, unanticipated, unvoiced insult, and she shuffles back and, with her left hand holding the brunette’s t-shirt for control as she pads her hand back to a point just below the waist of the brunette’s sweatpants, until it comes to rest between her legs and the brunette’s increasingly useless attempts to fight back stop in mid-thrash as she, too, feels an unanticipated threat take hold.

There is a moment in a fight like this, a moment when something merely violent becomes something darker still, when what was quarrel shifts inexorably into enormity. This fight is paused, is poised on such a moment. One wrong move now results in death, results in murder, bodies hidden, absence noted, questions asked. The fights that end in death: the people watching say they didn’t see it happen. But they lie. There is a tipping point, beyond which nightmares lie. There is a point, in fights that end in death, when only willful blindness means the fatal outcome can’t be seen.

And it is only at this point that you decide to intervene. 

Ruby, Suicide

Why do I still write? I resigned from the mag. I’m sick of sharing hot takes with the world. So why can’t I stop? Why do I drag myself to the computer every morning, batter the keys until I’ve written enough to fill three pages of eleven-point single-spaced Georgia?

But that’s bullshit. I know why.

It was maybe, what, a week before Orlando? Maybe a week and a half. I remember that I had just started to get over the whole trying-to-kill-myself thing when the news about Orlando began coming in. Then I was just getting over that when Jo Cox was stabbed. Then after that we had the Referendum result, and we discovered that not only could you get murdered in Britain in 2016 for not agreeing with the Mail and the Express, we found that we were surrounded by people happy to vote alongside her killer.

It's been a fucking cavalcade of shit, is what I’m saying, basically, a real rollercoaster ride of faecal action. I joke that I feel like a character in a novel whose author is trying to draw a heavy-handed parallel between my personal disintegration and that of the nation but I’m not even half-joking. Nothing feels real. Sometimes that’s hilarious. Sometimes it’s terrifiying. It’s always absurd. And absurd if you want to deliberately live your life existentially challenging convention is one thing, but absurd when all you want to do is keep food on the table, transition as soon as you can and maybe write a few things people like is a different thing entirely. It’s tiring.

I was tired when I signed in to our platform a few weeks ago. I hadn’t had time to wash or brush my hair that morning but it didn’t really matter, usually. The benefits of working from home, right? Still, it was feeling pretty matted, so when I got to my desk I ran the brush through my hair a few times to work the kinks out. That’s when Diane Skyped me.

Diane was my editor. She could see I was online. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, but I had to take the call. Her face appeared on my screen, as mine did on hers. If I had only clicked voice call instead of video...

‘Jesus Ruby! What the fuck happened to your eyebrows?’

Working from home meant no-one noticed it when I was ripping clumps of my eyebrow hair out with my own hands. When I ripped out so much I had no brows left, effectively, and had to start drawing them on even though I, personally, find painted-on brows trashy.

This is the first thing I had to explain to Diane. Not that I find it trashy, that every time I paint my brows on I’m reminded of why I have to. It isn’t something I like sharing with her. I get the sense that Diane, who goes on and on about how much she loves the gays, doesn’t extend the same courtesy to trans women, but then fag hags always regard us as a threat. We don’t fit into their weird pseudomasochism, their world of GBFs and going out but never having sex. Fucking weirdos.

I had been planning the jump before this but that pushed me over the edge. I might have let my intentions slip because Diane told me that she was ‘concerned’. Of course she is. She decided to try and do the whole building bridges thing by telling me her son is trans. She misgendered him repeatedly as ‘her’ during the discussion. I pity Diane’s son.

Anyway this all led to me breaking down and explaining my plan. On a walk to Longbenton Metro station the night before I’d noticed that the Metros come in a lot faster than they do at South Gosforth. I couldn’t really tell if they were fast enough to kill me but it seemed that way and I was prepared to risk it. So my plan that day was to finish filing what I had to file, then go to that station and do it. Make the jump. Just a step, really. One step, then impact, then BANG! No more problems, assuming I managed to do it right and didn’t just end up crippling myself.

Diane said she wanted me to go and see my doctor, see the crisis team, anything. I told her that I would. It seemed easier. She let me go. I didn’t talk about Jeanette.

Longbenton Metro is beautiful. A neoclassical station built originally as part of the Loop, the precursor to the modern Metro, even the usual Blairite additions haven’t fucked it up that much. It’s a nice thing to look at while preparing to jump. The first Metro came in too soon for me to make it, but that was fine, another would be along in seven minutes, the digital display informed me. Fair enough.

There was a message from TJ, my flatmate, on my phone:

Could you talk to Valerie please? She seems worried about you.

I’d put a note on Facebook. People were reacting. Additionally I’d texted Valerie asking her not to follow me in taking this action. A friend of ours had died just a fortnight ago (yeah, yet another fucking hammer blow) and at that point we still all thought it was suicide. I love Valerie and I would hate to think my death would send her over that cliff too.

There wasn’t another train for five minutes.

I phoned her.

I don’t really remember what she said. Well, a few things. Don’t do it I guess would have been one of them. I told her there wasn’t any point, that people were going to vote Leave and fuck everything up and then many more people would die, so really I was leaving early to avoid the rush. It’s a Terry Pratchett reference. We both got it. Neither of us laughed.

‘Are you going to give Richard fucking Littlejohn the satisfaction of seeing another trans woman die? Valerie asked.

Let’s say it was that which persuaded me. The actual truth is less cinematic. I missed another Metro because I was talking to Valerie and by this point I guess someone had alerted the station authorities because a dude in a Hi-Viz jacket was inching his way up the platform, probably to restrain me in case I did decide to jump. Two trains late as always. Metro apologises.

So I got on the next train instead of going under it. The woman in the seat opposite me asked why I was crying, if there was anything she could do to help. A Kodak moment, sure, but I shook my head. At that point, I needed to just get it cried out.

I had just tried to kill myself.

Everything after this point, I realised, would be bookended as everything that happened after I tried to kill myself.

That’s a tricky thing to get your head around. I’m still having problems doing that now, to be honest. Even writing this. Like, what the fuck do you do?

Maybe I should talk to Emma about that. She tried it, too. More hardcore than me though, she used a knife. Didn’t outsource the act of attempted self-murder to a public transport worker. I respect that.

The woman who asked if I was alright got off at Shiremoor. There are fields out there, interspersing the housing, as the train loops its way to the coast. They’re not picturesque. They’re not Vaughan Williams. But they’re there. And I swear that I saw a lone fox, bounding through those fields, from the window of the train. A thing you’d roll your eyes at in a movie, but I swear I really saw it.

I followed the loop round to Monument, changed for South Gosforth, walked home and got my weed and a change of underwear, then took an Uber to Valerie’s, where I drank cider, smoked, and helped Val and Brianna pave part of their garden and set up a firepit. Afterwards, we sat around the fire with Jean, made ‘smores and roasted hot dogs. It was a nice night, in the end, I guess. Except for the fact that, hours before, I’d tried to kill myself.

And then, as I say, Orlando and all the rest of it. I don’t know what can go right now, I know that I don’t want to. Something needs to, though. Something needs to. 

Something needs to happen. 

Caz's Story

Mally wasn’t like that, to begin with. We met in 2004. We were working for Littlewoods then, selling credit cards to people already buying on tick. Paying our own debts off by getting other people further into debt. Is it worth it, a bicycle on the boy’s birthday? It wasn’t something that we questioned. It was money.

Mally had ideas then, better ones, ones that weren’t just about who got everything while people like us got the shaft. He wanted to study psychology, took a course at the college, got into university, he was so proud. I was too. He loved the buildings, by the river. Said it was beautiful. Took me there once. The canteen smelled funny and I wasn’t impressed with the food. The bogs were a sauna. He took me to the library. The reading room. Just us.

‘It’s so quiet,’ I remember telling him. Whispering.

He nodded. ‘This is what they’ve had all their lives,’ he said. ‘Toffs. Oxford. Eton. To us, this is amazing. They think it’s normal. Think about that.’

He was always thinking, Mally. That was the problem.

He got on with the Africans, at first. I remember him sitting in the Littlewood’s canteen, laughing with Raymond from Ghana about King of Queens. I said I liked the woman in that show and it was true, I did. She had the cutest face but she was spikey and aggressive.

‘Ah aye?’ He smiled. ‘Bit of a Carrie, are ya?’ Then him and Raymond laughed.

We got talking after that, coffees at break, found out what he was doing with himself.

It was only when I got to know him better that I realised that he wasn’t doing well.

He’d come back home on Monday complaining that it was all numbers.

‘It’s all fucking maths,’ he’d spit. ‘Graphs an’ statistics an’ shite. I wanna know how people think, not how to put dots on a fucking graph!’

Mally struggled with the statistics part of the course. Even the computer program they used to make it easier was hard for him. So he got me to help. I’ve always liked numbers, maths, equations. They’re clean, they’re balanced, they’re evenly matched. They prove things. I would take him through the equations used for the test, explaining how they worked, as much as I could, as much as I could make him see. I would explain how the program allowed him to shortcut, to save on his labour. I got him through and he just scraped a pass in that module.

Looking back, this was maybe the first sign of what he’d become. He would say little things, snap. I could tell that he found it humiliating, him at uni and me with a handful of GCSEs having to help him. Being better at running the numbers than he was. When he got his mark back for the module he looked at it and said Thank fuck that’s over. That isn’t fuckin’ psychology.

There were other signs too. He began to feel the lecturers didn’t like him. The statistics lecturer predictably came in for stick. Patronising yank dyke bitch, he’d call her, coming back from lectures, telling stories of classroom humiliation. It didn’t seem fair to me. I met her, when he took me to the canteen. She seemed alright. I don’t know if she was a dyke. She was warmer to me than to him but she would be, I think. We were both numbers people. Mal wasn’t. And I liked that she came from Charlotte, North Carolina, because that made me think of Ric Flair.

Once, one afternoon, I was alone in the house and he was off in the library, the reading room, I looked at his statistics book and worked out one of the tests by hand, on paper, doing the sums in my head. It took me three hours and four cups of coffee but I did it. It made me feel clean. Clean and safe. Numbers, balanced and matched. Like a spell, like a Tarot card spread.

He came back with another complaint about class. Not the fucking dyke bitch this time but the bearded lefty wanker, the older lecturer who dressed like a geography teacher and quoted people called Popper and Hegel. He’d been talking about patterns in science or some shite like that, and Mal mentioned something he’d read in a business book he’d bought a year ago, NLP bollocks.

‘The guy fucking laughs at us,’ Mally said. ‘Smiles and says while I understand the popularity of that idea I’m afraid I have to say it’s just not even wrong. But that shows that you’re reading around this! That’s great! Just think a little bit more critically and then moves on. Practically patted my head. Fucking cunt.’

Needless to say the dyke and the bearded wanker were now both recruits in the conspiracy against him.

After 7/7 he really began going wrong. He came home from work that day crying. ‘You see what they’ve done?’ he said, nodding his head at the news. He’d began reading stuff about atheism, watching videos online. It didn’t help that there were Asian students on his course, doing better than he was.

‘You know how much they get?’ He’d say. ‘The University? For taking foreign students? More than they get paid for taking me. Now what do you think that means, huh? It means we’re educating foreigners instead of British students. Diabolical.’

I wanted to point out those students were probably paying for him, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. He’d started snapping more now, coming home drunk, bitching about other students. He hadn’t hit me yet, but I was starting to think that he might. I got myself a separate bank account, a new one, unknown to him. I applied for one of our credit cards at staff rates, never used it, kept it hidden. I thought about mum, and dad, and how she’d got away. You need fuck-off money, she’d tell me. In case you have to get away. I dismissed them at first, all her warnings. They start out nice, they start out smiles and love, she said, but you see how they are in the end. Fucking men.

Kizz and my mum would get on, I think. She began to bring home women about a year after dad left. She said they wouldn’t hurt her.

She was wrong about that.

Mally knew about my mum. That put an extra little sting in it, every time he mentioned his dyke lecturer. Even before he’d been funny about it. They say it runs in families, jokes about threesomes. It annoyed me but I used to let it by.

He began saying he was an infidel. He stopped talking to Raymond from Ghana.

‘It’s not a race, it’s a religion,’ he would say, ‘but you have to know who you can trust.’ That meant people like him. White British. The box on the form nobody even wants to tick they’re so ashamed, he’d say.  Bought a badge with a flag on it.

‘You ought to get involved too,’ he told me. ‘You’ve seen what they do to people like your mum. And you.’

He got himself thrown off the course, for swearing at a lecturer, but that wasn’t really what it was about, in his head. ‘When they can’t disprove you then they look for an excuse,’ he spat. ‘I wouldn’t toe the line. I wouldn’t jump through hoops.’

When I asked him what line he was toeing, what hoops he wouldn’t jump through, he explained. ‘Black blokes. They have more mental health problems. You’re supposed to say it’s society’s fault, but what if it’s genetic? I was only asking. But that’s what you get.

’

Only asking. By this point I knew how he’d have been only asking. Only asking again and again, in a different way each time, probing, provoking. Only asking about women I was friends with, about mum. Only asking why I wouldn’t go to protests with him, against mosques. Only asking where Obama had been born.

Why did I stay with him? We didn’t have kids. Partly it was to spite mum. Partly because I thought he’d see the light eventually. He didn’t. Instead, I slowly joined him in the darkness.

‘We need women,’ he’d say. This was after he’d fully signed up to it, got the tattoos, put a flag in his window. ‘People just dismiss this if it comes out of male mouths. And women get less aggro. And the camera loves them, Cazzy, even you! You should do more.’ At first I humoured him, went to the protests but kept a low profile. Then he began getting fired, getting his picture on blogs. He would laugh and call the antifa his fan club, but it meant we were drifting away, into a self-contained world. He got work through some self-employed mates, cash in hand, company names changed so often, personal accounts used to bank the coin and skip the charges, wages in an envelope on Friday. Hi-viz jackets. Working with my hands, he’d tell me, man’s work, not selling some bitch tracksuit bottoms. Got away with this for years, until the crash, until the firms began to fold, until the owners went to prison. He tried going it alone but he just couldn’t deal with the figures. He would shout at me to help, then grumble all the time while I worked it all out, twice, to show I wasn’t wrong. He started going to the pub after our money talks. And hitting me when he got back.

You can only fight so long before you go under. I began to give in, to really hate the people that he hated, to accept his explanations for the way things were fucked up. To laugh with him when he came back from the callcentre, where he got a job after his tree surgery folded, joking about their diversity training. ‘The pink fucking pound!’ He’d sneer. ‘Be nice if we had some of that, huh? Where are you hiding all that pink money from your mum, eh? Or is that just for faggots, not for dykes?’

I started to go on the demos and heckle the antifa, got off on the cheers from our lines, the cries of ‘stick it to ‘em, Caz!’ when I would try to break the standoff, get bundled away by the bizzies. Got tattooed. Became an Angel, at least to the boys in the pubs which had flags in their windows. It wasn’t so much that I believed as that it meant I fit in somewhere. And when Mally and I were on demos he wasn’t hitting me. And I could put my anger somewhere else, at least a little.

Eventually one of the guys at the pub asked about that. Said it wasn’t right, he shouldn’t do it. Said the lads had had a word with Mally and advised him to lay off. He came home that night and apologised, said he hadn’t treated me the way he should. Said he would be better and he was, at least for a while. And for a while I felt closer to those radgies than I ever had, I started siding with them in my heart. Believing? Doesn’t matter. It was us v them now. The people who’d stopped Mally beating me versus smug lefty bitches calling me worse than shite? I’d picked my side.

It didn’t last, of course. The bank began having recorded meetings with him. Points were raised. Some customers complained. He was careful at work, never used the words, told them that, but they said it was more than just words it was values, and Mally was stressed.

He started hitting me again.

This time I didn’t take it. I withdrew the money from the fuck off bank account, saved over twelve years, still less than I liked, but what I would need. After a demo I excused myself from Mally, said I needed to get tampons, bought those and a pay-as-you-go. Threw the box for the phone in the toilet, kept it switched off in my pocket ‘til I needed it.

And then I emailed Mally’s work. 

art brut

I love your body’s sense of being ashlar and marshmallow,

your musclefat, your ripple and your meat;

your tender brawn, the size-up of your squint:

your attitude, your fluency in aggro.

I love the fact your hands can cover mine,

the way you twist my arm behind my back,

the torque with which your muscles wrench my neck;

the way that you, divinely, take your time

before releasing: how your sweat can shine.

I love the way your eyes flash when we fight,

the enormities you whisper in my ear:

dyke, bitch, she-male, faggot, tranny, queer;

the way you bring my vulnerabilities to light,

the capacity your thighs and concrete share,

of standing mute and dramatizing fear.

I love your violent vertu, your brute art:

the way you have me beaten from the start.