The phone snaps Morgan out of the dream that had him stretched thin, opaque and high on adrenalin. He thrashes against the mattress to reach the receiver, to stop its screeching.

 “Morry! Hey, dude! Wake up. It’s me.”

 “Jar?” Morgan runs a hand through his hair and rubs his eyes.

 “It’s fucken’ … like what … the middle of the night!”

 “Mor. This is serious.”

 Eyes still closed in a bid to hold on to sleep but ditch the nightmare, Morgan rubs his chest, warm and smooth under the sheet.

 “Morgan! Sit up and listen. It’s about Dad.”

“Why you calling me, like in the middle of the fucken’ night to

talk to me abou—”

 “Dad … He’s … he’s … ”

 Morgan sits up. He grips the phone against his ear.

 “Jar? You there? Dad … he’s what? What’s happened to Dad? Jar?” His heart thuds hard in his throat.

 “Look, Morry, I don’t know how to say this … ” Morgan hears

his brother’s whimper. “Dad’s dead. Mor? Buddy? You’re still with me?”

 Morgan swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Dad? …

Dead?” He rubs his neck.

 “Mum called. It happened an hour ago in the hospi—”

 “Dad’s … Dead? From what? Jarryd?”

 Jarryd sniffs. “Morgan, breathe!” he urges.

 Morgan turns on the light but keeps his eyes tightly screwed shut against it. “I am fucking breathing but like, Dad … he’s dead? You sure?” Maybe it’s not Jarryd’s real voice telling him these things.

Maybe he’s still dreaming.

 “Morgan, please! Don’t go goofy on me. It’s like I said. Mum

called a while ago—”

 Morgan opens his eyes. Phone tucked under his cheek, he steps into his shorts. “I heard you the first time. You’re saying Dad’s … dead, and Mum, she won’t call me?”

 “Hey … Mor, you gotta help me here,” Jarryd insists. “She’s

not gonna call you. You know how she feel—”

“Oh yeah, I know how she feels about me. So … what happened? To Dad.”

 “It’s like, his heart just gave up. Not enough muscle left after,

you know, after the two MIs he’s already had.”

Dan Maddock had been stacking crates of milk in the cold room of the corner shop which the family had bought when they had moved to Hobart from the hills of Tullah, in the Cradle Mountain, when a tremor erupting from the centre of his chest had gripped him, trapping his breath.

 As the blood clot began restricting the blood supply to his heart, the muscles of his heart began a slow death of their own. He no longer felt the dull pain in his right arm, but he heard the chime attached to the shop door. Air hungry, Dan dropped down on one of the crates he had yet to shift inside the cold room and squeezed his eyes tight. Someone’s in the store, he thought. Shouldn’t be left there on their own. He had to watch the till. He had to be of assistance to ... He had to—

 Dan didn’t have time to act on whatever sense of duty had made him push himself up. He collapsed two steps clear of the stock room. The person who had entered the shop was not a customer but Reg-the-bread-man who had stopped by to deliver Dan’s order of muffins, bagels, Lavash and Turkish bread. He was not on familiar terms with the man who ran the Harrington Street corner store, but one look at him had Reg punching 000 on his phone pad.  

Morgan’s brain buzzes but doesn’t grip.

Jarryd persists in his ear. “ … hospital and … funeral … autopsy ... Mor? You still there?”

 “So … Mum, ”Morgan croaks. “How’s she taking it?”

 “She’s taking it like she takes everything that’s contrary.”

 “Meaning what?”

 “Meaning … ” Jarryd’s voice hesitates on the edge of yet

another chasm. “Oh, look … ” he says, lamely, “I don’t know.”

What Jarryd did know was that Mary had announced their father’s passing in the same tone—cold and unyielding—with which she had announced to him, a few months earlier, that his sister would no longer be welcome in the family home. ‘And nothing that your father cares to say about this will make a skerrick of difference! Enough is enough!’

 “So, how you gonna play it, Mor? With Mum, I mean … ”

 Before Mary had made it clear that she would be leaving it to

Jarryd to inform his sister of their father’s passing, he had suggested that maybe she should really make the effort and call him herself.

‘Him?’ she had repeated, piling more ice on those three letters than had sealed the winter pond back in Tullah.

 Jarryd knew this was clearly not the moment to expound on

the issue of Morgan’s gender malaise, but he reminded his mother that his chest operation had clinched the deal not just for Morgan, himself, but for all of them.

 “She’s imagined herself as a boy since she was … since as far back as I can remember, Mum. And … well … It’s like, now that Dad’s not here anymore … It’s up to you and me to give him what support —”

 “Your father was always too weak with her, Jarryd.” Mary’s tone had been brittle in his ear. “And I maintain that if he hadn’t indulged her in her nonsense, she would’ve straightened herself out a long time ago. That goes for you, too, Jarryd Maddock.” Too strung out to argue further, Jarryd had been about to reply conciliatorily when his mother spoke again. “And while we’re on that topic, Jarryd, I’m asking you to be very clear with your sister when you have her on the phone. Do tell her that unless she plans to attend the funeral as the young woman that she is, as her father’s only daughter, tell her … You tell her that I shan’t have her by our side, not when we honour your father’s passing. Not in front of all the people who will come to pay him their final respects.”

Morgan had hung up without knowing how to answer his brother’s question about how he was going to ‘play it’ with their mother on the day of their father’s funeral. How could he possibly think, let alone rationally, while his father’s gentle eyes, his understanding pats on the back when Morgan had to head back to the house to ‘help mother prepare dinner’ … How could he think about how to ‘play it’ when memories and emotions swam behind his eyes in an oozy kaleidoscope of grief?

When Morgan heard his mother’s words passed on through his brother’s voice he almost laughed one of his rare belly laughs. He would have laughed if tears hadn’t picked that particular moment to tackle his throat, brim and overflow. “She’s got to be a bitter and twisted bitch, Jar. There’s no way Dad, of all people, would lay that on me. Not alive. Not fucken dead either.” His voice broke and cracked until his throat became too watery to produce more than strangled whimpers.

“You …know that. How… can she… ”

                                                 ******

 “I’m not!” The answer, that hadn’t come to Morgan in time to reply to Jarryd, manifested itself shortly after. “I’m not going to play ‘it’ out with her. I’m not going. Full stop,” he muttered.

Once crystallized, the decision flipped and flopped in his mind like the trout his father used to catch. Like the trout Jarryd would remove from his father’s hook and toss in a bucket of water.

Morgan was not going to ‘play it’ at all. He was not going to shave his pen-thin goatee. He was not going to attempt shaping what curls he still had into a feminine sweep of any sort, not even a dyke one.

He was not going to wear a padded bra, any more than he was going to wear either skirt or dress, not any more than he was going to squeeze his feet into any sort of feminine footwear, not that he had ever worn any.

Already in Year 3, in Miss Stiple’s class, her sneakers were unisex. More importantly, Morgan knew that he wasn’t about to pretend that his father’s love and tacit understanding had been mere dandelions in the breeze — sweet whenever they sprout, innocuously absent whenever they no longer do.

Inasmuch as going as himself, as a transman, would be the only way he’d ever go, Morgan reluctantly understood that he didn’t have in him what it’d take to impose his issues on his mother. Not on the day she farewelled her husband. Not in front of her relatives. Not in front of her friends. Not even if she were alone. Not anymore. Not now.