You find the photographs on the front grass among the thriving dandelions, thrown out with the recycling and carried a whole three feet by the wind. Faces of long dead relatives, in wide collar shirts and paisley prints, smile up at you. Your welcome home. The once prim garden is dishevelled, like it's just got home from a wild night out and knocked over the bins before settling down to sleep it off. You pick up the picture nearest your shoe. Its colours have begun to degenerate and a creeping yellow stain from the dew on the grass partially distorts your face. In the cardboard framed photograph edged with gold you sit, in a white bordered library scene, in a standard primary school pose, beside your sister. Your hair is chin short, with a heavy fringe that swamps your face. You are wearing the same white shirts, red ties, grey jumpers. Your sister sits, perky, beside you, grinning at some inane joke told by the second rate photographer, designed to coax a smile from you. But you are not smiling. You put the photograph in the pocket of your jacket.

The house hasn't changed much. Double glazing has been installed. That's about it. It's the kind with a criss crossed lead effect that tries to make the windows look like something they aren't. A slate plaque is attached to the wall and the white number 6 has been painted by hand. The front door, and presumably the locks, have changed too and the now yellowing UPVC replacement sports a hugely ornate knocker. You pause, just briefly, at the front door, to rearrange your breath. You ignore the knocker and tap on the glass panel with your knuckle.

Your sister opens the door and she looks so much like your Mother it makes you think the whole funeral had been a sham. A misprint in the local paper. But it wasn't. The memory of the funeral home and the open casket, the your mother's stone hard face with its short haiir brushed in a way that it had never been in life, hits the back of your head and slides, November cold down your neck.

She just looks at you. Up. Down. Hard faced. Deciding what to say. You feel the creeping discomfort you thought you'd left behind. Every nerve, every fibre cramps and you feel yourself shrink and stiffen under her stare. Her eyes are paler than you remember, more diluted, and her mouth is ringed with deep lines, carefully drawn over time by filter tips. She's wearing worn jeans and an open necked shirt and she looks, defeated. A deep purple stain shadows her eyes and her hair is dull and greying at the temples and she wears it pulled back in a tight ponytail that makes her look more gaunt than she probably is.

'Hello, brother,' she says and the word slaps your cheeks, 'How nice of you to come.' Her voice is bitumen, each syllable sticking to her tongue and thick with sarcasm.

'Hi,' you say. The words you had prepared are stuck in a ball in your throat and you picture yourself hawking them up in a tangle of letters and sounds. You finger the corner of the old school photograph, feeling her smooth printed smile on your finger tip. She continues to stare at you, with the watered down eyes that once belonged to your mother. Taking in every hair, every stitch. Her mouth contorts, its corners drawing down towards her chin and then she says, 'You'd better come in off the doorstep,' and she steps to one side. Just like that. No argument. No yelling. Just that.

She tells you the Council have a new tenant lined up and that the house needs to be cleared by the end of the week. In the living room cardboard boxes are piled and stacked with things you'd forgotten. Boxes that once contained frozen chips and bacon crisps now hold the remnants of your childhood. The house smells of week old mushrooms and dirt and cats, nothing familiar. In one box you find an old 78 record that belonged to your father and you smile and sing quietly to yourself, 'Once upon a time there was a little white bull.' Then she's there beside you, icy and dominant. She takes the old vinyl out of your hand and says, 'They're going on Ebay. You can get your hands off.' Then she's back in the kitchen leaving you like a cartoon character in a pencil drawn whirlwind.

You stand at the kitchen door, leaning on the door frame, watching her as she wraps valueless teacups in week old newspaper. Her mouth is pursed and puckered like a cats behind as she concentrates on her task. She isn't wearing make-up but her eyes are ringed with dirty brown smudges left over from yesterday. Beside her nose, just below her right eye, is a dry, angry patch of skin and you wonder which moisturiser she uses. She isn't what you expected. She was so beautiful when you left. Now she's drab and dusty and aged. 'People change,' she says, as if she knows what you're thinking. Her eyes flick over your face. 'You look well,' she says reluctantly.

You ask about your mother and she tells you that it had been years coming, but quick in the end. She'd had both of her breasts removed, and a hysterectomy, but it still got her. She hadn't suffered though, not pain anyway. The Macmillan Nurses had seen to that. You make a mental note to send a donation, but you know deep down that it won't happened. She says that she gave up her job when the cancer progressed and that she'd been with her until the end. She looks at you, expectantly. You mutter something about work and travel and she waves her hand across the pile of wrapped china and you're not sure if she does it to demonstrate all that she has done, or all that you haven't. You ask if you can help. 'No,' she says, 'It isn't your problem,' and you realise that she thinks you're offering money.

Over mugs of tea and store brand digestives she asks you about your travelling. You tell her about Amsterdam and Milan and Thailand.

'Oh, yes,' she says, 'There's a lot of it out there isn't there? Young boys,' she says, nodding as though she understands.

'Girls,' you say, and you notice her wince, pierced by an invisible pin.

'Do you remember,' she asks thoughtfully, 'When I dressed you up in my ballet things and we put on a show for Mama?'

You nod. Remembering the soft floating pink. The humiliation. The sting on the back of your legs and the inconsolable howling of your sister.

'It wasn't your fault,' you say, and she nods slowly without looking at you.

She's silent then and the air around you solidifies and you're trapped in it.

'I saw the Northern Lights,' you say into the silence, but she isn't listening and she heads back to the kitchen.

You rinse your mug, excuse yourself and head upstairs, running your hand up the patterned paper, slightly higher up the wall than you used to. The stair carpet is worn now, in the places where feet have been, and threads of canvas are visible between the red and orange wool. You stop, momentarily beside your parent's bedroom door. You still consider it to be 'their' room, even though your Father was rarely there. You breathe in deeply, and over the top note of neglect you can still smell her perfume, Chanel No.5, like Marilyn, and you're standing at the open door and listening to her humming as she removes her curlers and dusts on powder and paints on lips, and you remember the warmth of being curled up in her bed in the place where he should have been. How far removed was that Mama, all warmth and melody and woman, from the body laid out in the box lined with ivory satin.

In the bathroom you sit and pee, elbows on knees. At the side of the toilet, a pink knitted lady squats over the spare loo roll beside a long handled brush. She looks miserable. A silver hospital hand rail is secured to the wall beside you and another is fixed on the wall side of the bath. They look out of place beside the knitted doll. You try to picture your mother being so weak that she couldn't stand from peeing, but image won't come.

Beside the door, the full length mirror is still fixed to the wall. Its backing has begun to separate from the glass front at the corners now, and around the screw fixings, and age has seeped in. You stand up, in front of the mirror and you hear her voice.

'What do boys have?'

'Hosepipes,' you say.

'And what do girls have?'

'Flowers.'

'And what do you have?'

'A hosepipe,' you say, and the tears come.

'So what are you?'

'A boy.'

'Louder!'

'A boy!'

'And don't you forget it!'

Then crack, crack, crack across the backs of your legs and bare buttocks and your cheeks are wet with tears and your legs are wet with pee and you can hear your sister howling in her bedroom. When the sting has passed and your sister is quiet you whisper to the mirror, 'But I want to have a flower.'

The bedroom door is open when you've finished and you find your sister sitting on the floor, on the darker thicker island of carpet where the bed used to be. She's pulling pictures and papers from a painted white bedding box that had once doubled as a dressing table seat and the air sparkles with dust. Mama's mirror and make-up is gone, but the bottles have left clean footprints on the dresser. The wardrobe doors are flung open exposing a motley selection of bare hangers and a pair of sensible shoes.

'Here,' she says when she sees you, 'This is you, you should have it.' She holds out a photograph of a baby that you'd forgotten.

' Mama said you were so beautiful that the midwife wrapped you in a pink blanket, and nurses from all the other wards came to look at you and brush your curls,' she sighs a little as you take the photograph, as though you're removing her memory of the words along with the picture.

'I remember Mama bringing you home,' she says, 'I thought you were the most perfect thing. My baby brother.' Her words hang in the air like the dust and the photograph warms your fingers.

She flips quickly though a once pink photograph album. 'I was an ugly baby,' she says, 'Not pretty at all.'

'You grew up pretty,' you say, 'You were beautiful when I left.'

Her breath catches slightly as though in fright.

'It broke her heart you know,' she says, her eyes narrow and her brows drawn together like viciously pulled curtains, 'It literally broke her heart. I know that's just a saying, but it's the honest truth. She never cried, not that I saw at least, but she fell apart on the inside. It was worse even than when he left her.'

You picture her again in the open box, hard and doll like, and you wonder whether, if you'd touched her, she would have crumbled like an old love letter left out in the sun.

'I never meant to hurt her,' you say and the words strangle you and your eyes float in a backwash of denial.

You sit on the cold carpet looking at the photographs she hands you. One of them is of her eighteenth birthday, just before you left. She's wearing a red dress and her hair is big and curly and she's with a group of friends, boys and girls, and you're standing to one side and your fifteen year old face is partially covered by your shoulder length hair. You point to one of the boys, 'Tony Ashton,' you say, 'He was so in love with you!' and she laughs and tells you that she used to bring him home each lunch time to screw him in Mama's bed while Mama was out working dinners at the primary school. You laugh too, a big snort that makes her laugh even more. So you tell her about the club you worked at in Blackpool, where men dressed as women, and you tell her about the punter who used to dress in his mother's clothes and wank into a lace hankie under the table, and about another who cut his own balls off with a Stanley knife. And you remember sucking dirty cock for extra tips and the smell of lube and the feel of nylon lace on your cheeks. But you don't tell her that part. And you're laughing so hard you forget to cry.

You order Chinese food and plug the TV back in, balancing it on a frozen veg box of random videos of 'Fools and Horses' and 'Porridge'. You sit on the floor, cross legged, balancing plates of food and sharing prawn crackers and a bottle of red served in the same mug you drank your tea from, and it feels almost normal. It's a long time since you shared a meal with anyone, and you wear the luxury of company like a chenille wrap. You watch a TV talent show and laugh at the retards and question their families mentality at letting them get that far. A girl and her dog dance to a 'Mack and Mabel' medley and a young boy sings a love song to his girlfriend that catches your attention and she asks you if you've ever been in love.

You think hard before you answer, mentally shelving lovers and sex partners and abusers and re-ordering your carefully guarded emotions. She urges you to share, 'There must've been someone.' So you tell her about Jean and how you thought that he loved you. And you tell her about the house near Rouen with its pretty white shutters and the creamy white chickens who laid eggs everywhere but the hen house, and about cycling to the village each morning for bread with the warmth of the sun as your passenger. You tell her how he said that he loved you just the way you were, but then he booked you in for surgeries to make you look more like a girl, even choosing the size of your tits like picking car accessories. You remember that he fucked you hard before the stitches had dissolved and that he made you bleed so badly that you thought you were going to die. And you remember that when you got home from the hospital again, he'd gone and left you three months rent to pay. But you don't tell her this part.

She tells you about meeting Phil when he came to fit her gas hob and about how they were going to get married and have a honeymoon in Havana. She says that it was all so perfect and he treated her like a lady, always letting her use the bathroom first when they'd finished making love, but then Mama had got ill and he'd said he couldn't handle it and he started screwing a Teaching Assistant from his kids' school, and took her to Havana instead.

You watch the talent show and eat your noodles.

On the second bottle, retrieved from the cupboard under the stairs using a torch, because the bulb is missing, she asks you how you knew that you were a girl. It's a question you've been asked before, and one for which you have a well prepared answer. This is part of your life. Explaining. Like telling someone your name, or where you live.

You ask her how she knows that she is female.

'Because my body is female,' she says instantly.

'What if you were blind,' you say, 'And deaf, and you had no hands to touch yourself with. Would you still feel female?'

She thinks. Her face is lighter because of the wine, the lines around her mouth are less harsh, she looks more feminine.

'Yes,' she says, after a while, 'I think I would.'

You watch the news and the emotionless news reader reports on a house fire and shows pictures of the three young children who have died from the fumes. Their young faces are so pure and so beautiful and so full of life, that your eyes fill with tears and you feel their mother's loss in your stomach and it twists and spasms and reminds you of what you've never had and never will. You ask her if she wants children and you see that she is crying too. You tell her not to worry about Phil. You tell her, 'Plenty more fish in the sea.' But the way that she's sobbing, tears dripping from her chin and a trail of snot from her nostrils, you know there's something more. You want to hold her, to absorb some of her misery, to shelve it away with your own, but you're afraid to touch her in case she rejects you.

When her sobs have quietened and she's stemmed the river of snot with a balled up tissue, she tells you about the 'something more'. She tells you that she's had tests because of Mama's cancer. She tells you that she's at risk. She tells you that the doctor advised her to cut off her breasts to prevent the cancer, to keep her alive. She tells you that she's scared. Scared for her future.

'How will anyone ever love me if I'm so scarred?' she says, 'How can I have a relationship knowing that there's a fair chance I'll get it anyway, somewhere else? And how much of my body have I got to give up to be sure I don't? I won't even be a woman!' She isn't crying now. Her face is empty, wrung out. She looks at you, waiting for emotion. You don't know what to say, then she says, 'You're so lucky.'

It's dark when you order the taxi, using your mobile phone because the house phone's been disconnected. She wrote a local cab firm number on an old white envelope addressed to your mother and you used the number even though you could've found one on your phone. She asks you where you're staying and you tell that her you're staying with friends, even though you're booked in at the Holiday Inn for another two nights.

While you're waiting for the car she says, 'Will you come back tomorrow?'

Automatically you say that you need to be back at work, you took personal days for the funeral, but you need to get back. She looks disappointed. She asks you where you work, where you live, and you find it odd that you've talked to her about your sex life, but not explored the more mundane, functional conversation. Almost like therapy. You tell her that you move around a lot, 'Bright lights, big cities', and she says it must be exciting. You tell her about the theatres and the costumes and you paint her a pretty picture of glamour and adulation and then you think about stag nights and arseholes and you say, 'It's a load of shit really. They pay, we dance. Like monkeys.' But you can see that in her head she perceives you in a way that you used to see her.

She writes her address and phone number on the same envelope as the cab number. She tells you she's got a new flat and she's moved a lot of Mama's furniture into it. She says it's in a bit of a rough area, but each flat has a buzzer so you know who you're letting in, and she says she was quite impressed with it, when she'd looked round, because even the lift didn't smell of wee. She says she's got an appointment at the Jobcentre on Tuesday and that she needs to work, something clerical probably, part time at first, until she gets things sorted. She tells you that she used to run an office for an accounts firm. But she's starting a new chapter now. She's positive and perky. You guess it's the wine.

You ask her if she knows when her surgery will be. Her face darkens and you regret breaking her mood. She says she has an appointment with the surgeon next month some time, to discuss her options. She says the surgeon is the same one who operated on Mama. She says she doesn't know if that's good or bad. You tell her you're sure she'll make the right decision, that it's silly to risk your health for the sake of breasts. She hugs you then. Holding herself tightly against you. Her breasts pushing against yours and you feel uncomfortable, uneasy. You pull away and she's crying again so you find her a clean tissue in your handbag and she says, 'I could get used to having a sister.'

The taxi driver rings the bell and she opens the door. He glances at her briefly then turns his eye to you, the younger, prettier model. You feel sorry for her. As you're leaving she tells you to stay in touch, to let her know where you are and what you're up to. She tells the cab driver you're her sister and that you're an actress and he says, 'Impressive,' and he licks his bottom lip after he says it and you know what he's thinking. She says she'd appreciate a visit, the next time you're in the area and you say that you will. She kisses you on the cheek and her lips are rough and she smells of cheap red and spare ribs. She says that it's been great catching up and that it's been too long and that she wishes Mama could've seen you. You tell her it's been nice to see her too and you tell her to let you know what the surgeon says, even though you know that she doesn't have your number.

As you walk down the path, a little unsteady from the wine and the day, the long dead relatives wave and wink from the grass. Your official send off.

In the taxi, an owner driver Mercedes with a rug on the back seat that smells of damp dogs, you check your make-up in the small vanity mirror you keep in your bag and you know he's watching you. You put the mirror away and you smile at the reflection of his eyes.

You don't look back.