Everywhere is an Exit

The station clock turns 22.36. Four minutes until the last train home.

I look around my things, check I’ve got everything. Suitcases, backpack, phone. I see the train guard throwing me a dirty look. Again. He’s bored and uncomfortable - I can tell because he keeps messing with his boxers, pinching his thighs and shifting. Well his approach to his work is as uptight as his underwear, ‘cause he’d already come up to me half an hour ago, asking to see my ticket. Valid. He seemed put out that I was legit.

‘We’ve had loads of trains go to Portsmouth. What are you waiting for, Godot?’

I laugh so he might not come back and, by force of officiousness, compel me onto a train. Or out of the station.

Today, everywhere is an exit. Most of the other first-years are heading off, piling their things into their parents’ cars, first Christmas back since leaving for university. Saw a bunch of them here too, passing by to speed away to London, Cornwall, Manchester. Brighton station is open; you can’t hide from anyone. Frankie kissed me on the nose, a precise little parting peck. Tej gave me a lung-busting hug. Haven’t seen Sylvia because these are her ends - but while I was sleeping through the morning, she’d slipped a poem under my door.

There once was a student called Kaz,

And I’ll miss them with all that I has,

Their know-how? So fiery,

They deny the binary,

But you can’t deny all of that azz

My bones ached for all of them (or was that just the late night?), driven off to places that I was not - well, except Sylvie, who, even more achingly, was just round the corner right now.

Earlier this evening, when the sound of the crowd was too great for me to tune into anyone’s conversation, I focussed on counting the days since I arrived. Eighty-seven. Eighty-seven days is more than long enough for strangers to become lovers, lovers to become housemates, and housemates to become spouses. So that’s more than enough time for me to fall in love with this place. Sure, I can’t legally get married as myself, not in the eyes of the law, so I might as well say yes to a city which said yes to me first.

Eighty-seven days ago was Welcome Week - I mean, the being welcomed itself was a Brand. New. Experience. But the rest of it? Sticky back plastic and slogans at a craftivist workshop, glorious filth of a UV foam party, a queer coffee morning where the bitching was as bitter as the beans, falling out of the city to the rolling South Downs, role play games where I got to be more me than me, and howling, absolutely howling like wolves at films ‘so bad they’re good’.

Where else could I live like this?

Welcome to Brighton.

22.37.

I’m tuning into this place, this evening. I’m present at the train station. Okay, maybe my headphones are dead dead dead. A talented player of Brighton’s resident rainbow-striped piano was throwing out Christmas tunes for most of the early evening: adaptations that had been smartly broken apart and then pieced back together, harmonies that resolved unexpectedly.

Just under two weeks to go until the big JC’s birthday. Maybe it’s the Christmas spirit, or maybe I’m bored to distraction, but when anyone’s sat down next to me I ask them - ‘where are you going?’ It’s a whole Odyssey of journeys. Taking my chow chow to the groomer for her Christmas ‘do. Going on holiday to Mykonos for some real sun. Meeting my first grandchild - want to see her? Going on a TV game show in London.

They’re all honest - I rate that. But none of the options strike a match in me.

‘Where are you going?’ they ask me. ‘Home for the holidays,’ I say to some, and to others just, ‘Away for Christmas’.

Alone now, I open Sylvie’s poem again. There are details on the letters to give them the character of Arabic script, which she’s studying. She showed me my room on the day I arrived; she lives next door. By day two, she’d taken me to a craftivist workshop where we Stanley-knifed slogans into sticky back plastic. A fast-fashion protest stencilled onto a t-shirt. Mine explained Every stitch has a story. hers screamed BOYCOTT BRANDS THAT BLEED.

When she told me her parents took her to protests, I didn’t believe her. If you even try and mention politics, mine evaporate quicker than water dropped on a hot stove.

‘Politics is life,’ Sylvie said. ‘What do you talk about?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

Something buzzes in my pocket. I pull out my phone - phantom buzz. It’s dead. I remember I’d switched it off an hour ago when the battery was at five percent.

At 17.15 I told mum my train was delayed. Now here I am. Still getting ready to replant myself in some strange and salty earth that just eighty-eight days ago was all I knew.

When the 17.15 train came I was playing Connections. When the 17.40 came I was playing with a virtual magic eight ball. When the 18.15 came I was getting a margarita in a can from M&S. Kind of lost track after that.

22.38.

It’s that season for it, isn’t it? Everyone wrapped up in expectations. Little explosions of joy and something only a touch more dangerous, from those who are bursting at the seams. Earlier the pianist played The Wassail Song. Three men pretended to Morris dance, gleefully chanting wassail, wassail, wassail, because they didn’t know the rest of the words. A fully grown adult leapt from the ticket barrier into his dad’s arms, clean knocking them both off their feet. A woman in a ball gown hurtled sideways into the closing train doors, simultaneously tearing a sandwich from its wrapper like she hadn’t eaten since January.

There are so many ways to be going from one place to another. To be neither there or not there, and still to be somewhere.

I guess that’s why student accommodation is called halls. We live between the rooms, from open door to open door. The default is welcome - except in Frankie’s room, as she spilled Frosties on the floor in first week, and still hasn’t cleaned them up. She says, ‘eventually, like all of us, they’ll become dust’.

The most glorious time - Tej’s birthday, when everyone’s costumes were on point and we paraded like it was Mardi Gras at the “Queer icons cafe crawl” - The Babadook (me), Virginia Woolf, Lil Nas X, Sailor Neptune, Freddie Mercury and Nigel the Crab sashayed down The Laines. We mainlined rainbow cake until Nigel the Crab (Tej) ate so much he nearly threw up in Lady Windermere’s Flan. Instead of kicking us out, they got him a bucket and compassion. That was the day our WhatsApp group was renamed: Chosen Family.

‘Cause here it feels like us and us, never us and them. The only them is me: they/them.

With Mum and Dad, I’m them. An embarrassment.

‘Biology’s a stated fact, Kaz.’ Except what Dad spat out was not Kaz, but my deadname. ‘And if you can’t admit that, a Medicine degree’s not going to be much use, is it? I don’t care what you do out there but I’m not playing along with that nonsense.’

22.39.

The train’s on time. I see the headlights growing, undeniably. Today, everywhere is an exit, but not an escape route.

It’s Friday night but the sound dips out of the station. This metal bench knows what I need; it’s not iron but an invitation. I could sleep here. I think of mornings after the nights I did not mean to share with Sylvie. One of our perfectly good rooms, abandoned by choice. Limbs and hair and breath all mixed up. One minute we were chain-watching Twin Peaks into the early hours, and the next minute we’re waking up six episodes ahead, the theme still going, eerie and dreamy and soft.

On or off. There or here. Mum and Dad will see it as either/or: one choice, forever.

I’m still trying to peer into the next minute.

‘Don’t you want this one?’ yelled the fidgety train guard. ‘You’d better run, it’s the last one tonight.’

I won’t turn up uninvited at Sylvie’s, but I know now what I was keeping the five percent for.

22.40.

The lights on the doors go out. There’s no way I can ask for them to be opened.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not tonight.’