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not.’
    ‘I think you’ll find you are.’ I was forcing a smile.
    ‘I’ve been running from this all my life. I can’t run any further, Eilish.’
    And then he began to talk; but it was as though he were speaking in some foreign language because I could get no sense from his words. He kept saying that he was not who I thought he was, he had never been who I thought he was; that he wasn’t unique, that there were others. You must have noticed , he kept saying. You must have suspected . Suspected what? I wondered, my mind racing in terror. Noticed what? Luke was a rational man—sensitive, occasionally depressed, but above all rational. Perhaps he’s had a bang on the head. Or—dear God, maybe he’s had a stroke? Brain tumour? Must get him to a doctor, right away .
    ‘Stop,’ I snapped. ‘You’ve been talking for ten minutes and I still have no idea what you’re trying to say. You seem disorientated. I think I should drive you straight to the hospital.’ As I talked I was hurrying around, looking for my bag, fetching my car keys from their hook beside the fridge.
    ‘I think I was meant to be a woman,’ he said.
    ‘They might keep you in for tests. You’ll need warm, dry clothes. I’ll go up and—’
    ‘Eilish, listen. Please listen.’ Something in his tone made me stop and turn around. He’d pressed a hand across his eyes. ‘I look like a man called Luke. I’m imprisoned inside the body of a man called Luke. But I am not him .’
    I didn’t want to understand. I was afraid to understand. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘just stay calm. Are you in any pain?’
    ‘Eilish.’
    ‘An ambulance might be faster.’
    ‘I’m not ill.’ He sat down heavily, as though his legs wouldn’t take his weight any longer. ‘There’s a name for it.’
    ‘Don’t say any more,’ I begged him. ‘Let’s just—’
    He spoke over me, so loudly that I couldn’t ignore him. ‘It’s called gender identity disorder.’
    Gender identity disorder . I’d heard the term. A couple of years before, at a teachers’ conference, I’d attended a seminar on the subject. We spent an entire day learning about boys who wanted to dress, play and be treated as girls; and about girls who longed to be male. Some had help from a clinic—even took hormones, which shocked me. There was lots of trendy discussion about which toilets they should use; one of the people on the course had been in a legal dispute with some parents because the school wouldn’t let their boy dress in a skirt and call himself Tanya. I like to think of myself as open-minded, but I didn’t really get it. Poor tormented things, I thought. I even—very secretly—suspected that the parents might be to blame.
    And as for adults? Well. We’ve all seen those strange creatures, men with wigs and handbags, lurching along on high heels: the wrong shape, the wrong voice, and always alone. I pitied them—actually, when I was young and cruel I laughed at them—but they had nothing to do with me. They were from another world altogether.
    ‘Enough,’ I said now. ‘This isn’t funny. You aren’t a . . . That’s got nothing to do with you.’
    ‘It has everything to do with me.’
    ‘No, darling, it hasn’t.’ I wanted to talk sense into him, as though he were one of my pupils. I sat down next to him. ‘That’s for children who are still finding their way, their sexuality, maybe trying to please parents who always wanted a boy or a girl. They’re just very, very confused young people. It’s got nothing to do with middle-aged solicitors with wives and families.’
    ‘I’m female. My body looks male, but I am not. It isn’t new, Eilish, I’ve felt this all my life. I was born with the wrong body.’
    He might as well have announced that he was an alien from some far-off galaxy, inhabiting the body of a human. I knew it wasn’t true. I didn’t know why he was putting on this charade, but I knew it wasn’t true.
    ‘I know you,’ I insisted, with a panicky