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gagged.
    Martha frowned. She sat beside me with a glass of red wine. She had her dark hair tied back as golden hoop earrings dangled from her ears. She was wearing a long purple dress, which I found a little discomforting because all I could see was Mart in a dress.
    Meh. I was getting used to my trans friend the more time passed.
    “Tired running a smoothie stall?” She raised her well-trimmed eyebrow.
    I shook my head. “Just… just general tiredness. Just… I dunno. Not been sleeping so well.”
    Of course, I was lying. I couldn’t get the images of Denise Scotts out of my head.
    The video of the hosepipe worming its way down her trachea, making her puke.
    The shots of her face being snipped at, the hosepipe tightening around her neck.
    And James Scotts’ desperate voice when he’d called me looking for help.
    What kind of a shitty human being was I?
    “I’ll tell you what you need, babe.”
    “What do I need?”
    “Ecstacia. New herbal sleeping pill that’s all the rage. It’ll have you out like a light and awake in the morning fresher than ever.”
    I gulped on my Fosters and stared out of Martha’s conservatory windows into the darkness of her little garden. “I’ll pass on the sleeping pills.”
    Martha sighed. She shook her head.
    “What?”
    “Just you ain’t in the birthday spirit, that’s all.”
    “It’s your birthday, not mine.”
    “Oh you know what I mean, Blake. What’s up with you? Wait. You ain’t having lady troubles, are you?”
    I looked away. But not quick enough to avoid the turning of her smile.
    “Why didn’t you tell me?” Martha asked. She punched me in the arm with the force that she’d saved over from her Mart days.
    “Exactly this reason,” I said, rubbing at my arm. “I don’t need advice.”
    “Come on, hun. Nothing like a woman’s perspective to solve a few lady problems.”
    I glared at Martha. Stared right into her eyes. Noticed the mole under her left eye that always made me see Mart, no matter what.
    “I just… I don’t think I want any advice from—”
    “From a transsexual?” Martha asked.
    I waved her away. “I didn’t mean that.”
    “Blake, I’m a woman. I always have been a woman. That stubbly old Mart skin I had over me, that was just a disguise. Like a Slitheen. Did you see the episode of Doctor Who with the Slitheen?”
    “I did, yeah. Only they were way more attractive than Mart, to be fair.”
    She punched me again and made me wince.
    “So what’s the problem?” she asked.
    I put my beer down on the hard tiled floor of the conservatory and sighed. I figured a relationship trouble chat was a good way to avoid a conversation about the tapes I’d seen, and the guilt I felt for James Scotts’ suicide. “She… I dunno. She wants more from me. Commitment. I just—”
    “‘She?’ Who are we talking about here? Your girlfriend or some shit you walked in from the street?”
    “And that’s my problem exactly,” I said. “I can’t… I can’t say the right things. I can’t be honest because if I’m honest, she’ll just pull the plug on me.”
    Martha sipped at her wine. “And what is being honest, hmm?”
    I squeezed the near-empty can. “I want my space. My home. I want to keep that and I want to protect that. I like her… Danielle, don’t get me wrong. Like Danielle a lot. But I just… I like my space too.”
    Martha laughed.
    “What’s that snicker for?”
    She shook her head and raised her eyebrows.
    “No, you tell me what that snicker was for. I’ve heard that snicker before and I—”
    “You’re scared of change, aren’t you hun? Scared of growing up?”
    I looked away. Felt my throat tightening. “No. I’m not scared of—”
    “You want to live the rest of your life collecting bloody BlackBerries and Xboxes.”
    “Well, I’m not really a BlackBerry fan, but—”
    “You don’t want to grow up. To ‘settle down,’ to use a term you hate. But now you’ve met someone, you don’t know how to