Christmas is not my favourite time. I had an unhappy childhood and it has too much baggage, too many reminders. Most of these arise from a conflict with my paternal parent, though my maternal one could have done more to support me from the bullying, humiliation and occasional beatings I got—from my father. She would come to check on me afterwards, make sure he hadn’t gone too far, but also to make sure I wouldn’t tell anyone about it. Like I was going to add to that humiliation by bringing in an outsider. Actually if I had done, he may have been prosecuted for child abuse and it all stopped, but I didn’t so it didn’t.

We had several areas of conflict. The first was that I was cleverer than he was, or at least better educated. Normally that would mean support from your parent to achieve your potential—not with my dad, he told me that he coped without some poncey university and made good for himself, so I could do the bloody same. So he was downright jealous of my opportunity, and it might have been a poncey university, but it also happened to be one of the top ten in the world, I’m talking Cambridge, the one in East Anglia, not its namesake in Massachusetts, the original founded in the twelfth century, mainly to produce priests for the English wing of the Church of Rome. The college that offered me a place was Christ’s College which was founded in the fifteenth century, so a relative new comer by Cambridge standards and it was the same one at which a certain young theology student was educated, who went on to cause a huge discomfort to the Church of England, for which he was being trained as a clergyman, his name was Charles Robert Darwin.

I’m no Darwin and I was neither studying theology nor biology, I was doing Maths. I know that makes me a geek or a nerd, can never remember which one is associated with anoraks rather than girls, but that was me. A loner with a computer for a brain and difficulties with relationships; especially my family ones.

My elder brother, who was an ordinary kid, played rugby and soccer and so on, got into fights and trouble with the police as a teenager was so unlike me, my dad at one point threatened to have a blood test to see if he really was my parent—he went bald quite young and my brother has thinning locks, whereas mine are in ample supply and I like it long. So I was the family weirdo—didn’t worry me, I lived in my own head anyway.

To say I took after my mother, who was blonde and small was stating the obvious, considering my dad was over six feet tall and my brother, two inches taller than him. I was five feet six, my mum two inches shorter than that. I think I also inherited my love of the logic of numbers from her as well. Dad might have been too thick to get to university, but she wasn’t, but in her day, it just didn’t happen for girls of her background. However, she became an accounts clerk and did Dad’s books until they both retired and gave the family business to my brother.

So the upshot was I took the scholarship exam and passed it and wasn’t as dependent upon my parents to pay for my education or support. It’s all changed since, I mean I’m in my forties, so we got grants in those days—just as well—because Dad and I fell out big time.

I had been accepted at Cambridge and my maths teacher was so proud of me, he even came to speak to my father, who practically threw him out of the house. I told Dad that he was the closest thing to a barbarian we had living in Nottingham, which made him laugh just before he grabbed me by the hair and flung me down the steps at the front door. I broke my arm and it was only just out of plaster when I went off to university.

That was when we really had a scene, my mother found some female clothing in my case and they all knew I didn’t have a girlfriend. He accused me of being a queer and various other synonyms. I wasn’t. Least I didn’t think I was, so I denied it. But I didn’t actually know what I was although I felt happier when I thought of myself as a girl.

I did four years and got my master’s degree and another two got me a PhD. I’d also found some help in the student counselling department for all sorts of things but especially in sorting out my gender uncertainty. I took my doctoral degree as a woman and no one batted an eyelid.

Solitary but never lonely, because I always had some research going on, I tried not to think about home, which was actually no longer my home, my home was now very much Cambridge and I found a house at Sawston which I shared with another girl. It was through her, Julie, that I took my first steps in dating boys. Then a year later, she got herself pregnant, something that couldn’t happen to me, and she went off to live with her lover, Andy. I’d just been offered a teaching post but my salary wasn’t going to pay the rent and I was becoming used to the idea that I’d have to go back into a bedsit, when Adam arrived on the scene and we sort of hit it off. Actually we did more than that, we had a physical relationship that only seemed to happen in the romantic novels I’d read. It finally cooled, but he taught me so much and helped with the rent. When he went, I was much more confident and had two or three relationships before settling down with Malcolm, who I later married.

We were doing all right. Malcolm was a trained architect in a busy practice and with my growing academic reputation as a mathematician, we managed to put down a deposit on a house across the road from the one I’d rented and he then set about improving it, while I wrote a couple of books and presented papers at conferences. We’d never have children and were too selfish to adopt, so we made our dog and cat our child substitutes along with our careers.

Back in Nottingham where I’d originated things were happening. My father who was always so strong, suffered a heart attack and my mother, who’d apparently followed my career from afar wrote to me to say Dad was asking for me. When I discussed this with Mal, he wasn’t sure what to suggest. He had a great relationship with both his parents and so did I, they were lovely people and my past history was never mentioned even though they knew about it.

In some ways I had no positive feelings for my dad—he was a shit of the first order and we’d pretty well disowned each other, but the bastard was still my dad and he was very ill.

I phoned my mother and we spoke for two hours, she desperately wanted to see me, and would have come to Sawston, but Dad was so ill she couldn’t leave him. I had hardly thought about any of them for years except as a contrast with my new family, my in-laws who were so nice to me and I really love them, especially, Pam, my mother in law, who was such a fount of knowledge about all things female and in areas I felt both deficient and embarrassed to ask anyone about. She took me under her wing and I know I grew as a woman with her advice and assistance.

Mum phoned one night, Dad was in coronary care and he was asking for me again, she implored me to go and see him. I didn’t know what to do: part of me wanted to see him, the other just wanted to piss on his grave. I told her I’d ring her back.

Malcolm told me he’d support any decision I made but if it were him, he’d go because he knew he’d regret it if he didn’t. Coincidently, I had to do a presentation at the University of Nottingham the next day, they were having a festival of numbers, or so they called it and I was due to start the thing with a lecture on Sir Isaac Newton and his version of calculus.

I was staying at the house of the professor of Mathematics for the night a rambling old place mentioned in the Domesday Book apparently. I was finishing my packing when Mum had called. I rang her back and said I’d call into the hospital the next afternoon and not to blame me if my presence caused another heart attack. Apparently, my brother blamed the first one on him finding out that my mother had been following my career as a woman academic, but she said Greg, my brother, wouldn’t be there because he had a big meeting about the business—they were builders.

The drive to Nottingham, well Long Eaton, was tedious and it rained all the way. I knew Peter, my host, from Cambridge undergraduate days, he was as big a geek as I was and we were all astonished when he got married and then transferred to Nottingham. That he got the chair eventually, was no surprise, he was cleverer than I and I was really pleased for him. I was even asked to be a godmother to his firstborn a little girl, they called Charlotte, after me. So when he asked me to do a presentation lecture on Newton, as I’d written two books on him, Newton, not Peter, I could hardly refuse.

I arrived eventually at Peter’s house just as it was getting dark and after a drink and a chat with Martha his wife and his two daughters, Charley and Christine, I went up to my room to check over my notes for the morning and get some sleep. The latter didn’t come easily, partly because I was worried about what would happen after the lecture regarding my parents. I had grave misgivings about seeing my father, he still frightened me somewhat and my wrist ached, the one he caused me to break, as I lay in bed.

I must have drifted off because I woke up aware that someone else was in the room. I assumed it was one of the girls coming to cuddle with me but it wasn’t, though it was a girl.

I switched on the light and she simply stood there gazing at me. “Who are you?” I hissed at her, trying not to make much noise.

She looked directly at me. She was about my height, dark haired and quite pretty. “It will be all right,” she said.

“What?” I hissed, not having a clue what she was on about.

“Your meeting with your father, it will be all right.”

“And how would you know that?” I said feeling more irritated than scared by my uninvited visitor.

“Because it will.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“I know lots of things,” she said and smiled.

“So do I, but tomorrow has a great degree of uncertainty about it, so how you can stand there and say otherwise, doesn’t help one bit.”

“You are a very clever lady, far more clever than I ever was,” she said wistfully. For a moment I had to think about what she’d said and the tense she used—the past—what or who was she?

“What d’you mean?”

“You’re a teacher at a university, at Cambridge that means you’re very clever and one day you’ll be a professor, too, like Peter is.”

“I’m not sure that is likely to happen either.”

“Oh it will, but you won’t remember that in the morning.”

“Why won’t I? There’s nothing wrong with my memory.”

“No there isn’t is there?”

“So why will I forget? It’s not every night I have someone like you appear in my bedroom.”

She laughed gently. “We all have destinies to follow.”

“That is total rubbish and in my case especially so.”

She smiled, “Perhaps you don’t know as much as you think.”

“Perhaps you don’t either, especially about me.”

“Oh yes I do, Dr Browning, I know everything there is to know about you.”

‘Bloody facebook’, went through my mind, except I don’t put much on my page. “I’ll bet you don’t?”

“You mean that you were registered as a boy but still became a beautiful woman. Is that what you mean?”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“Malcolm thinks you are and so do his parents. Your mother thinks so too, but she’s too scared to say anything.”

“Scared of what?”

“Making you think she’s just being nice to you.”

“Yeah, that’s as maybe, if my dad says it, then I’ll know he’s delirious.”

“I won’t tell you then because you won’t believe what I say, will you?”

“You mean that I’m probably having some sort of weird vivid dream.”

“I’m not a dream.”

“Of course not, I meet people like you, assuming you are a people, I mean person, every night.”

“If you did you would listen more carefully.”

“Would I, and why is that?”

“Because it is your destiny that these things should happen.”

“Can you give me that as an equation?”

“I am not telling you lies, Charlotte.”

“You know my name, what’s yours?”

“Sybil, but it is of no consequence, I need no name any longer.”

“And why is that, Sybil?”

“I am the spirit of this house. I died here nearly a century ago. I wanted to go to university too, but it wasn’t allowed, or they didn’t give degrees to women.”

“Some universities did.”

“I worked so hard to pass the exams to get there but instead developed a brain fever and died. They rejected my application any way.”

“I’m sorry, very sorry that you were left unfulfilled.” I really felt for her considering how supportive the university was of my wishing to become a woman.

“It’s of no matter now, degrees have no place in my world now.”

“So my cleverness is all a waste of time is it?”

“You misunderstand me. You are fulfilling your destiny.”

“The only destiny I know about is that we are all doomed to die—end of.”

“In the physical world, yes.”

“As a mathematician, I’m counting on it.”

“Please do not mock me, I came to advise you that your father will not turn you away.”

“Why because he’s already dead?”

“No.”

“That’s the only reason I can think of.”

“You must trust me.”

“I think I should need to know you much longer than I have to say I trusted you.”

“Very well, please heed what I say, I am not lying to you.”

“As I’m not going to remember any of this, does it matter what you tell me?”

“You are mocking me again, something you accused your father of doing to you.” She looked genuinely hurt.

“I’m sorry, that was not my intention.” What she had said about my dad made me think very differently about her. I mean the whole thing was surely nonsense anyway, though I don’t remember having any cheese last night. They say that can cause weird dreams, and this was one of the weirdest I’d ever had.

“I believe you, I only wish you’d pay me the same regard.”

“Look I’m sorry, but I deal in data, my world is one of equations and theorems, laws and hypotheses, not fortune telling ghosts, however well meaning they are. It just doesn’t resonate in my world.”

“Very well, I shall leave you then, if you can’t imagine me in your universe, I shall leave it.”

I shrugged. “I’m sorry, I’m not saying this very well...”

“You have expressed your thoughts very clearly. You don’t believe me or in me, you don’t believe in a spirit world or any survival after death.” I nodded, she’d got that right. “So I shall leave you to sleep but I beseech you to go and see your father.”

“Why is that so important to you?”

“I called for my father to come and see me when I was dying—he refused to come—he was angry because he blamed the university for my illness. He didn’t realise I was dying and when he did come, it was too late. He died five years later with a cancer brought on by his regret.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It is of little consequence now, but your life is.”

“Okay, I shall go and see the old buzzard.”

She beamed a most loving smile at me and faded away. Amazingly I went back to sleep and awoke feeling far more confident about things, vaguely remembering I’d had a funny dream but not what it was about.

The next morning we were about to leave when I saw an old photograph on the wall in the hallway, it was of a young woman who looked familiar but she couldn’t be, she was probably long since dead judging by the sepia tints of the picture.

“Admiring our Sibyl, are you?” asked Peter as he pulled on his coat.

“Who?”

“She was the daughter of the mayor of Long Eaton, who lived in this very house and she died very tragically with meningitis or some other such disease at the age of twenty one.”

“She looks quite a character.”

“Oh she was that all right, a suffragist and campaigner for educational rights for women.”

“Is she buried in the cemetery here?”

“Probably, why?”

“I’d like to put some flowers on her grave.”

“If we hurry we may just manage it on the way to the festival, we pass a florist’s if it’s open just before the cemetery.”

“That would be good.”

That is what we did. I’m not sure why but I felt a need to do it and my talk went down very well, I even mentioned Sybil in it saying how things had changed in a few generations compared to Newton’s time. The visit to my father went better than I expected. He didn’t recognise me saying that he wished he’d had a daughter as pretty as me instead of a useless son who disappeared. I told him he could be my dad if he wanted and he went off to sleep with a smile on his face.

I’m hoping since he died that relations with my mother will develop as they should have done years ago. My brother is still a total prick, but that’s his business and I don’t need him nor he me. So we agree to differ, though he did pay me a sort of back handed compliment. “How can a bloke turn into a beautiful wo—nah, you’re not a woman, just a bloke without a dick.”

“Fine, just don’t think about me when you’re pulling your pudding tonight.”

Fortunately he didn’t hear my comment but my mother did and smirked.