Julia knew she was about to fall into the worst state of grief possible, in which relatives try their best to deny the truth and cling to any theory, however absurd, that offers hope. But what else could she do?

She struck her fist against the glass, kicked the sliding door with her bare foot, rammed it with her knee, yelled Lisa’s name… and got the fright of her life, when the curtains opened.

To reveal her daughter’s face.

64

‘Shahla was a man?’ Elena was growing more confused by the minute. She looked at Martin as if he’d grown a second nose.

Martin answered her in Shahla’s words that he read from the screen of the notebook:

When I refused the put the condom over my penis, she shouted at me that I was a loser. Useless. She said she didn’t love me, that she’d always wanted a girl rather than a smelly boy. She slapped me in the face and let me go away in tears, only to repeat the game the following day. At some point I gave in, put on the condom, and in time slept with her. All the while a single thought dominated my head: I wish I were a girl. I wish I were a girl.

During the sex, during my rape (it took me years to understand what she’d done to me) my personality split. My mind flew off into a girl’s body and stayed there, long after my mother had let me be. I no longer wanted to be the defiled boy, but the girl my mother had always wished for and who would have been spared all that if only I’d been born in the right body.

Four days after my eighteenth birthday my father sold his firm and not long afterwards he and my mother died when their private jet crashed.

The first thing I did with the fortune they left me was to have a sex change, which no responsible surgeon ought to have been allowed to carry out. But I bribed the examining psychiatrist, who certified me to be of perfectly sound mind. As you might imagine, the changes to my body didn’t relieve my emotional suffering. Without a penis, with shattered and reconstructed cheekbones, a more feminine nose and small breasts, I felt dirtier than I ever had in my mother’s arms.

In an online suicide forum, where I was researching suitable methods of suicide, I met by chance a thirteen-year-old girl who’d had similar experiences to me and whose suffering was still ongoing. Her mother forced her to masturbate in front of her.

She wrote that she was about to go on a cruise where she was planning to take her life. It was through this girl that I realised our mistake.

Why should we victims kill ourselves while the real criminals went on living?

That was ten years ago.