“Jennie Barrett has a lovely brooch from Switzers,” she said. “Silver and purple. She’s going steady with a fella from Booterstown and he bought it for her.”
“Jennie Barrett is the height of glamour,” I said.
“That she is!” Gran replied.
I didn’t know who Jennie Barrett was – a former work colleague, probably, back when Gran worked in a factory making clothes – but I enjoyed the old lady’s stories, the way she sat on her leather sofa and rattled off details about scenes long past. The anecdotes oscillated around a conclusion that never quite arrived, and then she would say, “Is today Saturday?”
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She thought every day was Saturday – but when you’re an old-age pensioner, it sort of is. Her lapses were entirely forgivable.
It emerged slowly, like a shadow that coloured her but did not yet threaten to take her away. She poured milk over her cornflakes, put them in the microwave and I’d find them hours later, limp and curling. She started losing weight. She became frail. She aged a decade in six months. When the shadow took her, the bed kept her.
Putting her in a nursing home was harder for us than for her. It was a grand, pale-blue building, an old manor on the edge of town with a glass porch. My mother promised to make sure someone visited her every day. “Don’t make such a fuss,” she replied. “At least she’s a widow,” my mother would say. “She doesn’t have a husband depending on her.”
For me, it was one less person to tell. I wasn’t good at telling my family. The words would roll around in my mouth and fall limply to the floor. Mumble, mumble, hormones, mumble, mumble, gender. Where did it all lie in the hierarchy of announcements: was it like a new job, or an engagement, or a terminal diagnosis? Did it need any hullabaloo at all?
Not everyone knew. I hadn’t formally come out at work – some of my colleagues were vaguely aware, but I hadn’t gone all the way with human resources. I was boymoding, as it were. A horrid little term; if it was merely a mode, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it in the first place. To some, I was Evie, and to others, I was something else. (Not Stevie. Wash your mouth out!) It would be a weird Christmas this year. That’s what everyone in the family said, and boy did I know it.
I had always liked the social rituals of the season – the old decorations, the €5 Kris Kindle at work – but in my first year as Evie, I didn’t know what I was doing. More to the point: isn’t Christmas all about giving? Isn’t it about other people? I didn’t feel very festive, wrapped up tightly in all that personal drama, busy labelling myself instead of my gifts.
It was Gran’s first Christmas in the nursing home. She would be well looked after; I kept being told that by my mother, as though to hush a suspicion, though I never doubted it. The guests at the home – they are called guests, like it’s a hotel – would have their turkey and ham together in the afternoon. They would sit around big tables like attendees at a wedding. They would listen to Nat King Cole and pull their crackers and have a wonderful time, so much so that they probably wouldn’t notice their families’ absence.
But something about it gnawed at my mother. “We need to make sure she remembers who we are,” she said. “Friends of mine had parents in nursing homes during Covid – they all forgot who their relatives were in lockdown. The only people they saw for months were the staff, and they all wore masks. They forgot how to interact with people. Non-verbal communication, reading facial signals, recognising a smile. It was the beginning of the end for them.”
The solution, she decided, was a family portrait. Not just us, but all the cousins, all the children and grandchildren, so a picture of us all could sit on Gran’s dresser in the nursing home and never be forgotten. And that meant that I had an announcement to make, to a swathe of my extended family.
My younger cousins all knew. It was only their parents, my aunts and uncles, I needed to inform. Suddenly I felt an acute bravery welling up in me. I texted them one by one. I just told them, I am transgender, like I was telling them where I was waiting to be picked up.
Some of them replied by telling me that they had already figured it out from hints dropped by my mother, or that their kids had told them. Or they would reply with a thumbs-up emoji, the calling card of the aloof and middle-aged, like my decision was one they were fundamentally jaded with. But then an uncle, Liam, replied by asking if I was planning to tell Gran.
“You shouldn’t tell her,” he wrote. “It would only be confusing for her.”
I was a little bit furious. Confusing for her? It was confusing for damn near everyone, even for me, but that wasn’t the point. At the end of the day, it was only a picture. We weren’t planning to test her on pronouns or make her watch Drag Race. But there it was: a veto, or something like a veto, which hung over me. Perhaps he was right. I decided to pack two bags of clothes for the photo shoot. A large one with make-up, the works, and a smaller one with my boymode.
An appointment had been made for us at a photo studio in the depths of the southside, off a neighbourhood of huge detached houses watched over by the Dublin Mountains. There were hugs and kisses in the car park. It was only October, but that didn’t suppress a certain festivity in the air, the atmosphere of the last day of school, everyone relaxed and a little merry.
I inhabited the moment like a bit of thread coming off a jumper. My aunt Marcella looked at me forlornly, because I wasn’t dressed as Evie. “Whatever makes you feel comfortable,” she said. “Don’t worry about today, Evie. Just get through it and then life goes on.”
“Are you sure?” I replied. “I don’t know what to do.”
That elicited a vague annoyance in her, because she didn’t know what I should do either, and she wasn’t about to take responsibility for it. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just do what makes you happiest,” leaving me feeling batted away.
Inside the building, the corridors were all exposed white-painted brick and cheap carpet that smelled funny, the sort of thing that made you feel you were behind the scenes of a concert. We were introduced to the photographer, a short man with a tidy dark beard called Leo.
He asked us why we were there. My sister, Tara, 26 years old with a brown bob, launched immediately into the story of Gran and her dementia, how she was now in a nursing home, us wanting to make sure she remembered us.
There was a glimmer in his eye as he said, “Of course, I knew about your grandmother, I just wanted to see who was the chatty one, and now I know it’s you.” He nodded towards Tara and she gave him a headlights stare.
Is all of this really necessary, I wondered, looking through my two bags of clothes on a wooden bench in the changing room. Does a photography session really need to prod so deeply into our souls? The two sets of clothes looked like the palettes of two completely different paintings: one a dull landscape, continuing off indefinitely, with nothing much to say for itself; the other a vibrant but confusing modern work that has something to say, even if nobody fully understands it.
Then Tara came up to me. “Are you mad?” she said.
“Why would I be mad?”
“You can’t dress in those old clothes for this. You’d never forgive yourself.”
“Uncle Liam said it was best not to confuse Gran.”
“You’re not going to listen to him, are you? Don’t worry about what other people want. Gran would respect it. Or she would, if she was a bit more with it.”
“I just don’t want to impose.”
“Evie, Gran lives in a nursing home. She has Alzheimer’s. Most things confuse her. The fact that I’m not still in primary school doing finger paintings for her confuses her. Don’t be a martyr.”
“I’m not being a martyr,” I said, “I’m being considerate.”
The studio itself was blindingly white, empty but for a scattering of uncomfortable-looking Ikea stools. There was a toy chest off to the side, and the younger children and their parents went off to find something to play with, to create the illusion of candour, so that for a few minutes the room was a muddle of jangling metal rattles and wooden cars travelling across the floor.
I felt out of my body in that moment, the way one might going through a job interview, having learned off rote answers. I looked at the camera when it was asked of me. I sat on the weird stool. I smiled, widely, with my teeth. I was doing a perfect job. I was doing what needed to be done.
I was a brilliant grandson.
I didn’t have a toy to play with, like the children did, but I might have appreciated it, the distraction. I would have preferred to disappear into a group but here I was, in all my glory, being photographed alone. I could only get through the experience by clearing my mind – but then, my mind seemed to come back to me, utterly full of thought and exasperation.
“Can we ... can we pause this?” I asked.
“Sorry?” the photographer replied.
“Just ... I need to change into a different set of clothes. I’ll be, like, 10 minutes at most.”
“Yes, of course, go ahead.”
And I ran, even though I had no good reason to, back to the dressingroom, back to my two stupid bags of stupid clothes. The feeling came back, the one I had been successfully avoiding for so long in the studio. Shame. All I wanted to be was myself, yet being myself seemed inevitably to represent an imposition on other people, the kind I had spent my whole life up to that point avoiding. It seemed a cruel joke the world was playing on me, like I was caught in a hamster wheel of my own emotions, never getting to any kind of resolution yet perversely convinced that I would get somewhere eventually.
Now, though, was different. The shame didn’t stop me. I had got to that point and I wasn’t about to turn back, so I put the clothes on. Tights and flats, bra and blouse. Necklace and make-up and something approximating a smile. I was ready to go out. I felt like I was preparing for combat, like a boxer about to be called into the ring while their signature tune played.
I wondered what my song would be. I imagined Chaka Khan and put aside all thoughts of Aerosmith.
Yet when I entered the room, there was little reaction. A young cousin was crying, and people were waving rattles in her face to entice her to come around. Nobody was looking at me. Until Tara caught a glimpse, and let out a strange kind of applause.
“Yes, here’s Evie! So good to see you again.”
The photographer said he had photographed transgender clients before, and reeled off a list of names of local queer notables I had not heard of. Then he thanked me for being fully present at the photo session.
“Now we will get to capture the real you,” he said, and I smiled, and almost said, Yes.
Here I was, in all my glory.
Our full complement gathered to present Gran with her present, pushed into a side meeting room draped unconvincingly with tinsel. We were given half an hour by the staff, because this is the 24th and the other guests have family too. I sat perched over the edge of a cushioned yet hard wooden sofa, probably an antique.
“A big crowd,” Gran said. “What’s the occasion?”
“It’s Chriiiiistmas,” a cousin said, like Noddy Holder.
My mother took the picture out of its cardboard box. It looked like a series of mirrors, each reflecting a different face back, like a video-game screen where you could choose which character you wish to be, the kind of world I might have craved at one time.
“And who is this for?” Gran asked.
“It’s for you,” Aunt Marcella replied.
“For what?”
“For Christmas. It’s Christmas Eve.That’s why we’re all here in our jumpers.”
“And who is that?” Gran asked, pointing at a small child in the corner of the frame.
“That’s me,” the child, Ava, responded.
“Of course it is. That’s very good of you. You’re so kind.”
Then Tara stepped forward. “And that’s Evie, there, your granddaughter,” she said, pointing at the image of me. “Doesn’t she look wonderful?”
Gran looked at the picture with a studied consternation, like it was a map she was trying to decipher. “Yes,” she said, eventually. “She looks beautiful.”
Christmas Number One is extracted from An Alternative Irish Christmas: An Anthology, published by Tramp Press
