The XY

by Virginia Bergin

  “You’ve given him treatment,” says Akesa.

  “Yes,” says Kate. “And he’s responding.”

  The room crackles with it, with the sorrow and the rage. All I can think is, They’ve seen this before. Each and every one of them saw this happen dozens, hundreds, thousands of times in the year the males were almost wiped out. You’d think all that would be left—all that could be left—would be sorrow. But the anger, the anger of the WHY and the anger of the NO, has never ever been forgotten.

  Our whole world was built on this, on the angry suffering of the granmummas—most were just teens, like me, when the world that they knew died with the males. No more war. That was the first thing. That was sorted before the Agreements even happened. That was sorted in the very year the males died. And it wasn’t even because there were no more males to fire guns or explode bombs. Anyone can pick up a gun and fire it. Anyone can explode a bomb. No training or skill required. Only hate, anger, or fear. All wars ended overnight because it didn’t seem to matter much who had killed whom in the past or over what. Everyone’s sons, fathers, brothers were dead. War ended because women had no interest in war whatsoever.

  Nearly half the population of Earth had died. Human beings faced extinction. All disagreements, all old wounds seemed… It was all just totally freaking irrelevant, Kate says.

  Religions crumbled. Governments? Dead mainly, because for some strange reason there was a disproportionately high number of XYs in politics—the same with armies. In the UK, the once-was army, air force, and navy collapsed and merged. They are now one: H&R. Help and Rescue.

  Akesa…she’s mumma age, born in the time when the males had long gone. Born, like my own mumma, in the generation that came after, the generation that started over. So few of them to begin with, but then, as IVF techniques became safer and girls could be selected, more and more. Not enough to stop the population nosediving, but enough, eventually, with the grit and determination to rebuild in a new way. A new world, with new Global Agreements, and all of this done, all of this built, on the aching backs and hearts of the granmummas. The mummas grew up with incredible support. They rose because the granmummas, so deeply wounded by sorrow and anger, decided they wanted the world to be different.

  All this once-was…it’s just stuff I hear. It is not my world. My world is now. The past, my understanding of it, is hazy.

  The reality of the sick, sick, sick creature lies before me—and before Akesa.

  “Let me examine him,” she says.

  The granmummas don’t answer, but in unison, they shift just a little to allow Akesa to get closer to the bed.

  “What have you given him?” she asks, taking its pulse.

  “How do we know we can trust you?” says Kate.

  Akesa looks down at that sick thing. “I’m a doctor,” she says.

  “What about the protocol?”

  “Tell me what you’ve given him, and we’ll work out how to proceed from there.”

  “We know how we want to proceed,” says Heloise.

  “We want you to continue treating him,” says Kate.

  Akesa looks up sharply at Kate. “I can’t believe you’ve done this. You have placed me in an impossible position. He’s responded to whatever on earth you’ve given him, but you know there is no hope. You people of all people know this! They do not survive!”

  “This one has,” says Dora.

  “So far—”

  “Five days,” says Kate. “He’s been alive outside a Sanctuary for five days.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Ask my great-granddaughter. She found him,” says Kate.

  I am hanging around by the door, so ready to run away from this ghastly spectacle. Kate seldom, if ever, would refer to me as her “great-granddaughter.” And I sense that she is being formal on purpose: the granmummas’ views are often clouded by the once-was, but I’m of the now—and the daughter of a representative.

  “I…I did,” I stutter. It’s not just the stress of all eyes on me that makes me stutter; it’s that Kate told me to keep my mouth shut and now she wants me to speak.

  “She wrote it all down,” Kate says. “Everything the boy told her. You can read it if you want.”

  “She spoke to him?!”

  “Five days” is Kate’s answer. “So now what, Doctor?”

  Akesa looks down at the boy. “I will treat him.”

  The granmummas, who have never before had cause to doubt Akesa, heave a collective sigh of relief.

  “Did he tell you his name, River?” Akesa asks.

  Such a simple question, but one no one else has thought to ask. In the granmummas’ minds, I suppose, this boy is called a thousand names, a thousand ghost names of all the boys that were lost.

  “Mason.”

  Chapter 5

  Unicorn

  I feel lost and exhausted.

  I am useless. The granmummas are so expertly busy there doesn’t seem to be a thing for me to do, so I drift in a daze between one offer of help and another, all politely but firmly refused.

  It’s Kate who calls it when she bumps into me yet again in the hall.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Precisely. For crying out loud, River, just go to bed!”

  “Can I call Mumma?”

  “No. Certainly not. No way.”

  “Can I go see Plat?”

  It’s Platinum I long for almost more than Mumma. Her arms and her sweet, sensible, calm-thinking self are just minutes away; she wouldn’t even mind that it was four in the morning—not once I told her what’s going on.

  “You can’t tell anyone else about this. For now, you just can’t tell.” Out of nowhere, she hugs me. I am so shocked—Kate is not a big hugger—I hug back. I feel her skeleton; these days she is more bones than flesh. “Go to bed, eh?”

  I go upstairs and flop down fully clothed on top of my bed.

  And find I cannot sleep.

  Boy. Him. His. Son. He. Male.

  It is astonishing to me to think this boy is someone, somewhere’s son. His mumma won’t know he’s here. She won’t know anything about him. He won’t know anything about her. A boy baby, taken straight into a Sanctuary after a cesarean. A male baby grown up. A son. A boy.

  Those words are so seldom used. I just think of everyone as people, and even everyday terms like mumma and granmumma or even girl or woman have never really seemed to mean that much. It’s just to do with maturity, isn’t it? I mean, mumma doesn’t even mean a person with a child. It just means an adult, doesn’t it? A person who is working rather than studying or training. People just are who they are. People are…however they want to be.

  Boy. Him. His. Son. He. Male.

  What do they mean?

  In my troubled mind, a small, unsure thought starts to form around those strange words. Although I have always been aware of the existence of XYs, and I have always thought in terms of people, perhaps, really, I have always thought of the world as essentially female.

  The heat in my room—the heat in the house—becomes unbearable. The granmummas have piled the stove with wood. They are cooking. I can hear the clank and clatter of it. My brain, also cooking, refuses to sleep. My need to see Plat is almost unbearable—she’d help me cool my thoughts—but I can’t see Plat, can I? The granmummas don’t want the village to know about this. But why? Doesn’t everyone always talk about everything? Doesn’t everyone always know what’s going on?

  An invisible gag has been tied across my mouth. A gag with BOY written on it, under which I feel as though I am suffocating. I need AIR.

  Outside the house, the air is cool and the sky is clear and the stars shine down.

  And that sky—my beloved sky—I breathe it in.

  I can hear Granmumma Heloise singing, chopping wood in the
workshop.

  I feel the sting of not having thought that this was a job that needed doing. That’s how this night has thrown the balance: I didn’t think.

  The fourth Global Agreement: We will all help one another.

  I am, I know, physically exhausted and cannot imagine anything worse than chopping wood right now, but if you know someone needs help… I open the door to Kate’s workshop.

  It is not a place that should exist, but it does. Kate can make all kinds of things because she learned when she was very young. At fifteen, she made her first coffin because there weren’t enough people left alive to make one.

  It was rubbish, Kate says, grim with the memory of it, but it did the job.

  She soon got plenty of practice. She had planned—in as much as she had planned anything—to be a beautician, and instead she became a worker of wood—not just coffins, but also happier things: small and large pieces of custom-made furniture. All strictly unnecessary. All made in her own time. And the coffins? It was Agreed years and years ago that they should no longer be made. It is a waste of wood…but the granmummas like them, so there is still a steady, quiet trade to which everyone turns a blind eye.

  Inside the workshop, I am at least relieved to see that the granmummas haven’t yet started on the special, seasoned coffin planks. Careful to avoid the precious Triumph Bonneville, the vintage motorbike that belonged to Kate’s boyfriend, they are chopping away in earnest at the winter’s supply of logs. Plat and I only collected them last week. At this rate, they’ll be gone in a night—or so my sinking heart says. Our house is already as hot as the sauna we have at the granmummas’ house, to luxuriously roast out winter aches and ills. We will be seriously down on wood.

  “Need some help?” I ask Heloise.

  “Nope, got this,” she says, as Granmumma Rosie tosses another log on to the massive pile and Granmumma Dora splits kindling.

  “Well, just give me a shout,” I tell her as Heloise smacks down the ax.

  Granmumma anger fuels them.

  I feel irrelevant.

  I feel useless.

  I feel agitated.

  I feel lost.

  I don’t want to go back inside. Through the kitchen window, I can see the clattering bustle of the granmummas cooking.

  Who cooks on a night like this?!

  I wander out of the yard…and see the one job I can do.

  Moon and stars shine down on hundreds and hundreds of spilt apples lying in the lane.

  This is my job.

  • • •

  Come dawn, I have filled every container I could lay my hands on. Even the tiniest plant pot is packed with apples, some still slippery with what came out of the XY.

  It had felt soothing and purposeful, sensible, to gather up the apples. I did it, working undisturbed in the dark, with only the universe for company.

  In the gray light of the day that’s coming, it looks a little crazy: a lane full of pots of apples. One more crazy thing in a crazy world.

  Boy. Him. His. Son. He. Male.

  All night long, these weird words have sounded in my head. I could not shut them off. But now they are drowned out by the sound of a car—Mumma!—coming from the east and a helicopter—A HELICOPTER!—coming from the north.

  Even before I get a clear visual on it, I know from the sound alone it’s not a little Explorer like Akesa’s. It’s a MERLIN!

  Wow! Wow! Wow! WOW!

  WOW!

  I’ve never seen one flying before!

  WOW. WOW. OH WOW.

  I look back at the house to share my excitement, and I can see Kate, Yukiko, and Willow peering out of Kate’s bedroom window, Willow’s face so frightened and Kate saying something over her shoulder. Yukiko nodding in agreement. If Yukiko, PhD Yukiko, is agreeing with something Kate is saying, there is big trouble ahead, my instincts tell me, because Kate is hands down the fiercest granmumma there is. (I can’t help it, she says, I’m a born troublemaker. A natural rebel. I’m what we used to call a total pain in the ass.)

  This sight would really worry me, but my mumma is the most calm, firm, fair, and reasonable person you could ever meet. That can actually be a little annoying, when you’re convinced you’re right about something and she gets you to see you’re wrong, but today it’s going to be just what’s needed.

  Mumma’s car pulls up. Mumma gets out.

  “AH! Do they have to land THERE?!” she exclaims.

  The pilot of the Merlin has made a choice and is descending on to the ha-ha-harvest field—a jumble of a garden, where the last cabbages and cauliflowers are still waiting to be picked among dying nasturtiums and marigolds and next year’s broccoli.

  I fling myself at Mumma, and she hugs me tight, as H&R people in jumpsuits (pilot’s orange, doctor’s green, camouflage browns) come clambering and crashing straight over and through the hedge with a ton of equipment.

  “I’d really rather they used the gate,” Mumma says quietly as Yukiko bursts out of our house, rushing past us all, crying, “False alarm! False alarm! Apologies! Everyone’s fine! Kate’s fine!” to the handful of neighbors who have already come running to the top of the lane to investigate this unprecedented spectacle. Among them I spot Lenny—Eleanor—who takes care of Milpy. Even in the mayhem, I flinch when I see her; she’ll have cross questions to ask me about the even crosser horse.

  The H&R people approach, offering hands of greeting, but the two in camouflage browns carry guns strapped across their backs—GUNS!—and some other kind of thing that looks like a weapon at their waists. There’s a round of handshakes and kisses, and Mumma asks, “What on earth are you carrying guns for?”

  She asks it calmly enough, but I know she must be as astonished as I am.

  “It’s only tranquilizer darts. Precautionary, as are the Tasers,” says a camo-person.

  I’m desperate to ask what a Taser is, but now doesn’t seem like the right time.

  “A precaution against what?” Mumma asks.

  “Sometimes they run,” says a camo-person. “If they’ve still got enough life left in them.”

  “Sometimes? How many XYs have you found?”

  “Not so many,” the green doctor says, pecking Mumma on the cheek. “Are you the representative?”

  “Yes,” says Mumma. “It was my grandmother who—”

  “Is this where the XY is located?” another camo-person asks, pointing at the house.

  “Yes, it’s—”

  And that’s as far as Mumma gets, because the camo-people rush at the house.

  The next few minutes go as fast as—faster than any—I have ever known. I run into the house with the green doctor and Mumma, and find the camo-people confronting a steel wall of granmummas in the kitchen. A steel wall and the sweetest of scents: a table packed with fresh-baked cakes, dozens of them, made in the night by hands too anxious to keep still.

  “Unless we have clear assurance that the boy will be treated, we do not agree to hand him over,” Yaz is saying.

  So it’s still alive?! I’m thinking, even as I realize Mumma is telling me to go and ring the bell. It’s the alarm signal for the village, used just twice in my lifetime. The signal for everyone to gather at the school. “I don’t want people to have to see this,” Mumma is saying.

  See what?! Are the granmummas…going to fight H&R?! As though sensing this could be a serious possibility, one of the camo-people releases her Taser from her belt.

  “There really won’t be any need for that,” says the green doctor.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” mutters Kate.

  “River! Go!” says Mumma.

  And I go—almost straightaway. I should have looked last night. I cannot miss my final chance to see the first and the last of an XY. The magnet of the extraordinary weirdness of that makes me shove open the door to Kate’s room for one last peek.<
br />
  Boy. Him. His. Son. He. Male.

  Unicorn. That’s what it might as well be. A unicorn.

  A mythical creature.

  Boy. Him. His. Son. He. Male.

  Window: wide open.

  Bed: empty.

  Unicorn: gone.

  Chapter 6

  Alarm

  The granmummas wanted the bell. Everyone else just agreed because there was no reason not to, and because the granmummas wanted it so much. They were born when there was 999: a number you could call when something bad happened, and in the once-was, as far as I can tell, a lot of bad things happened a lot. It wasn’t just a number for the fire brigade. If there’s a fire here, we’d all deal with it, and we have equipment and key neighbors who are specially trained. A health emergency? Every single one of us is first- (and last-) aid trained to treat and triage. I cannot imagine the once-was world in which people would have to just stand by while someone could die in front of them because they didn’t know what to do. We do what we can—and then we call Akesa, if we need to—or H&R if she is out of range and we need to get a person to the hospital ASAP.

  The bell, the granmummas said, should not be electronic. What if the electricity failed? (Which it used to, apparently.) The bell should be a proper bell. “For emergencies.”

  What emergencies could there be?

  Emergencies that would require the police? This has always been the most baffling thing to me, whenever I have rarely had cause to think about it.

  What were the police for?

  Why would anyone need such a thing?

  It’s not that people don’t do bad things anymore. It’s not that people don’t ever steal, for example. They do! It’s just that the community deals with it. The neighborhood 150 Court sorts out wrongs with restorative justice. And if they can’t, it’d have to go to the regional court. And if they can’t, I suppose it’d end up at the National Council, but I’ve never personally heard of any issue that went that way. I’ve never, personally, heard of any problem a 150 couldn’t deal with.