The XY

by Virginia Bergin

  She finds her inhaler on the table and takes a shot.

  “You can run on out of here anytime you want,” she says, tight breath, shot held in lungs. “Your choice, dude,” she says, exhaling. “Door’s there. Or sleep on it.”

  “You’re gonna snitch!” it snarls.

  Kate slams her fist down on the table.

  “DO YOU KNOW HOW OLD I AM?” she roars. “I SAVED YOU. I SAVED YOUR DADDY’S DADDY. I MEAN HOW IN THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU EVEN CAME TO BE HERE?!”

  There is a terrible silence, in which…well, honestly, I grab and stuff more cake. At this rate, Kate’s going to be telling it to clear off herself. Hopefully.

  “Um, she’s right. Really, in a way, she’s right,” Mumma says. “No one here is going to hurt you. Or…snitch. We haven’t told anyone you’re here. And we won’t.”

  “The unit will come looking,” it mutters, wild eyes darting. “The unit will send people. They got operatives.”

  “Operatives?” says Mumma.

  “Wimmin working for the units. They’ll send them. They’ll get me.”

  Kate shoots a fierce look at Mumma.

  “That team was from Help and Rescue!” Mumma says to her.

  “Look, Mason,” Kate says. “People came for you. We hid you. They think you’re dead. Everyone thinks you’re dead. Everyone except us and the damn doctor.”

  I open my mouth to point out that that is not quite right, but Kate is on it: “Plus, there’re the old gals. You’ve seen them, I’m guessing. You know who wiped your forehead and your butt. Who stayed up all night. Who gave you the drugs. Who tended to you like you were their own son. If you think a single one of them old bitches is snitches then, yeah, you had better run. Now—and fast. But I’m telling you: every boy or man there is owes us his life. Code of Honor? No. We don’t expect anything in return and we don’t like to go on about it. In fact, we hardly even ever talk about it. And we don’t EVER snitch.”

  WHOA. Teen Kate is on the loose. Teen Kate is rampaging with pure, red-hot, righteous rage.

  “We’d really like to help you,” says Mumma.

  Well, I wouldn’t, not particularly, I’m thinking. I’m also thinking, NOT NOW, MUMMA, because Kate just sounded so fierce who would want to be helped by her?

  “We’d like to help you and all the…boys in the…units. We’d like to know how things have been for you.”

  The creature snorts.

  “But to start with,” says Kate, “just where did you come from?”

  The creature shuts its eyes.

  “I can’t tell you where I come from because I don’t know,” it says. Its voice—it’s tiny now—and for a moment, I feel for it. I cannot exactly imagine what it must feel like, almost dying and then being told that you wouldn’t die but that others are convinced you are dead, but I do imagine that cannot be straightforward news. You’d probably struggle to believe it.

  “Come on now!” says Kate, her patience totally lost.

  “That’s enough!” says Mumma.

  “Not a word of a lie,” the creature breathes at me. “We never went outside.”

  “But you did. You ran.”

  It’s Mumma who says this, and I’m amazed that she does; it seems too aggressive right now. Too much of a challenge.

  “Not from the unit,” it says. “Not direct.”

  “Then from where?” says Mumma in a gentler tone.

  “This is an in-terror-gation, ain’t it?” the creature says to me.

  Pretty much, I want to say…but I say nothing.

  “If you’re gonna start with the beatings, you’d best get on.”

  The terrible, terrible thing is that it does not appear to be joking.

  “You get on and beat me all you like. I ain’t tellin’ you nothing.”

  And that is how the long, Not Normal day that became night that has now become morning ends. I help the creature back upstairs. I am raging annoyed with Mumma and Kate that they leave me alone to do the job—because what if it is dangerous?—but I also (reluctantly) instinctively get it. Instinctively—and not with my brain—it seems to me that the world is more strange and confusing to the creature than it is to me.

  “You can switch this off if you want to,” I say, demonstrating the switch on my starry night sky celestial globe as it slumps into bed, eyes rolling with exhaustion and who knows what emotions.

  “You ain’t really a girl, are ya?” it asks.

  “If you need anything else, just shout.”

  That’s courtesy. That’s what we’d say to any guest.

  “You don’t look like one,” it mumbles.

  “Well, good night then,” I say politely, as you would with any guest.

  I turn off the main light. Then I snap it on again, just for a second.

  “I am a girl.”

  Why would I even say that? I do not think I’ve ever said that in my life before.

  I snap off the light and shut the door.

  Despite all the appalling hints of untold horrors I’ve just heard…I can’t help myself: I really, seriously, hope it does run away in the night.

  • • •

  I can’t sleep. I feel small. Small and shrinking. Brain flaming. I want my mumma.

  It’s been hours since she and Kate went to bed. Years since I last crept into her room for a cuddle in the middle of the night, but the urge to now—it’s overwhelming. I extract myself from the creaking pit of the cot and creep up the stairs…and I hear him. I hear him crying.

  It’s a hard, choking thing.

  So I knock quietly, and when he doesn’t answer, I open the door.

  “What the FUCK do you want?!” he snarls at me through the darkness.

  “I heard you crying.”

  “I wasn’t FUCKING crying.”

  I do not know how to deal with this.

  I shut the door.

  I breathe on the other side of it.

  I hear him—for a moment, him listening, hearing nothing.

  Then the next sob grabs him. He is crying.

  If a person is crying, you go see them. You go see what’s wrong. Even if you cannot help them (or don’t want to or can’t), it’s the way it is. Even if you caused the crying, you go sit with them.

  I sat with Jade after I’d punched her so hard her nose bled. Though I was crying too, so maybe she was sitting with me?

  All my life, I’ve never left a person crying. Now? I tiptoe away.

  “Mumma?” I let myself into her room.

  “River,” she whispers. “Come here.”

  I clamber straight into her bed and she folds the duvet over me.

  “What’s wrong?” she says, stroking my topknot of dreads. It’s my own creation, my hair: I twiddled and fiddled with it, then got Plat to shave off the sides. Kate says I look like a sea anemone, but I like it.

  “He’s crying,” I whisper. “But he told me to…go away.”

  “Oh dear. What kind of crying?”

  I think, I feel. I reach down past my own feelings to get to it. “Despair,” I say.

  “That’s a serious word.”

  “He’s sad…and frightened,” I tell her, knowing it in my guts. “Should I tell Kate?”

  I don’t exactly want to, but I will. She’s the only one who might—might—know what to do. I hear my mumma breathe, thinking. I’m thinking it too: Kate is exhausted, done in.

  “And he really told you to go away?”

  “Mmm-hmm. Mumma? He’s so…different. He scares me.”

  She is silent for a moment, still stroking my hair.

  “He scares me a bit too,” she says.

  And that’s how it comes to be that Mumma and I creep down the stairs. We pause outside the boy’s room—my room—and my mumma hears the gasping snorts of tears.
r />   We knock softly on Kate’s door.

  “Come in!” she calls immediately, like she’s been waiting.

  We go in. Kate is sitting up in bed, light on, awake, when she should be asleep.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she says.

  “He’s crying,” Mumma tells her.

  “He told me to go away,” I tell her.

  Kate, as soft as she is hard, lifts her duvet aside. Mumma and I, we get in with her.

  “Surely we should go to him?” my mumma says.

  “It’d be best to leave him,” Kate says.

  “But—”

  “Boys are not like girls,” Kate says.

  “That’s absurd,” my mumma says. “Crying is crying.”

  “Not when you’re a boy. Not when you’ve been brought up the way I think he’s been brought up.”

  “We don’t understand,” says Mumma.

  “No.” Kate sighs. “How could you?”

  How I feel won’t let me lie comfortable in this bed.

  “Turn out the light,” says Kate.

  Mumma turns it out.

  Seems as though Mumma can’t lie easy either.

  “I need the curtains open,” she says.

  “For crying out loud,” says Kate.

  We know that tone. It means, okay. Mumma gets up and opens the curtains.

  I wish she hadn’t. With what feels like perfect meteorological timing, a storm is rolling in. This, the weather, so unpredictable and so wild, has been, as far as I’m concerned, the only consequence of the once-was that has seriously continued to affect not just my life, but every form of life on Earth. The weather is wilder than a granmumma and will be wild long after the granmummas have gone. The weather has a looooooooooong memory.

  “For crying out loud,” Kate mumbles, and rolls over.

  Chapter 13

  She-Wolf

  Only Kate could sleep through thunder and lightning.

  When it’s done, my mumma stops stroking my hair and falls asleep too.

  They are both snoring. And I am staring, curtains open to a sky that’s clearing, stars popping in the inky night.

  I creep out of the room. I creep upstairs. I pee. I don’t even know for sure that I exactly mean to, but I go to check on him. I listen at the door, and when I can’t hear a thing, I quietly open it.

  “FUCK. OFF.” It speaks at me through darkness.

  I close the door.

  I check my feelings. My feelings are…INDIGNANT. That means I should probably walk away.

  I open the door.

  “Why are you so rude?” I ask him.

  He rolls over and switches on MY celestial night-light.

  “What happened to the freaking knocking thing? FUCK. OFF.”

  He’s lying in bed—MY bed—looking like a puffy-eyed zombie ghost boy in the dim light.

  I shut the door behind me.

  “Are you deaf?”

  “No. Why are you so rude?”

  “Rude,” he says, and he laughs—he actually laughs. A dry, hollow rattle of a laugh. “What the hell is ‘rude’?”

  “You’re impolite. You’re not courteous at all.”

  “IM-polite. Not cour-teous.”

  “You’re doing it now. You’re being rude.”

  “Oh, wait. I get it. You think I’m an asshole.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Think it though, don’t ya?”

  Pretty much.

  “I just think you’re being somewhat unnecessarily aggressive in your language”—and your behavior—“and that there really is no need for it because—”

  “Christ, kid.” He sighs. “Don’t be vexing me now.”

  I know what vex means. Kate says it. What I would never dare to say to her, I say to him: “Or what?”

  Behind my back, I’ve got my hand on the door handle—a hand that’s wondering what my mouth is up to, risking provoking this dangerous boy.

  “Or nothing,” he says after a time—and then he groans, a strange sort of agonized beast moan of a groan.

  “Are you sick?!”

  “Only in the head. This whole thing…sucks.”

  I don’t know exactly what he means, I just know how I feel; I’m crazy tired yet again, and my whole world, my whole self, is all a little—all very—wrong. My instinct bickers with my brain for a second, then I sink down against the door. “Yeah,” I tell him, “it most definitely sucks.”

  “Oh, gimme a break, would you?” he says, sitting up. “I mean, put me straight if I’m wrong here, but you’re not the one at the mercy of the freakin’ she-wolves.”

  I sort of wish I were still standing with my hand on the doorknob, so I could just say, Kate style, okay, fine, whatever, and make a very fast exit, and I sort of…feel vexed.

  “She-wolves?!”

  “Ah, jeez. C’mon, River! I mean I know you’re supposed to be one and all, but for real?! I mean…these wimmin… I mean, c’mon, River. You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do! Wimmin ain’t supposed to be like this! Wimmin are supposed to be all…you know…femin-ine and female-ish. You know, all ooh and ahh and—”

  “Killers! You said wimmin were killers!”

  “Yeah. I mean, you know. That too. That and the ooh and ahh.”

  Yet again, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Only I can’t be bothered to even act like I do. “What ARE you talking about?!”

  “Sex vids!” he says, as though I should know exactly what he means.

  I stare right back at him. At his alien weirdness.

  “Don’t say you’ve never seen one…” he says, a confused half smirk on his hairy zombie ghost-boy face.

  “I’ve never seen one.”

  “Sure you have!”

  “I haven’t.”

  The smirk transforms itself into a frown.

  “Well, that might explain a few things,” he says.

  “Like what?!”

  “Nuthin’.”

  “LIKE WHAT?”

  “Like you ain’t like a girl’s supposed to be. Like none of these wimmin are! I’ve seen them. I’ve been watching. They’re not right.”

  “According to…”

  “No. Come on! Don’t give me that! If you truly ain’t seen your first sex vid yet—and you shoulda done; how come you ain’t?—you’ve seen game wimmin, right?”

  I squint at him. Global Agreement No. 7 says Everyone has the right to be listened to and I am being tested by it right now, because I have the feeling this is not something I want to listen to.

  “Wimmin in games, they’re pretty much the same, ’cept some of them are kick-ass too. Cruel, kick-ass be-oo-tiful killers. They ain’t hairy in the pits and legs. They look like wimmin, even the ones don’t wear lipstick or got short hair. They’re wardrobed like wimmin. They’ve got nice clothes. You know, that fit tight. And I’ll tell you another thing, River, wimmin wear brassieres.”

  It’s as much as I can do to stop myself banging my head against the door to shake the amazement from my head. What is it—he—talking about?! I pull myself together.

  “Up until I found you, precisely how many women had you met in your life?”

  “Plenty,” he says, lying back down in (my) bed.

  “Actually, physically met?”

  “You ain’t a woman, River. You just ain’t.”

  “How many?”

  “None.”

  It satisfies me immensely, the silence that follows.

  “Wait up,” he says. “Up until you happened to come across me, precisely how many men had you ever met, huh?”

  “You’re not a man.”

  “How many?”

  “None, but at least I know some real facts about them
.”

  “Name ONE.”

  “Men kill.”

  “Okay, name TWO.”

  “Oh, take your pick: rape, guns, knives, prisons, war. How about those?”

  “How about them, eh?” he says, but quietly.

  “It’s true?” I ask. I’m actually astonished; all that stuff I’d half listened to but had somehow lodged in my brain, until this creature arrived, I never thought for one moment that people could have really behaved like that. And now this: that people—that XYs—are still behaving like that?

  “Only fathers have guns. And it’s hard to get a knife. You can make one though, if you have to.”

  “Rape?” I ask the question, almost unable to believe there could be any other answer than no.

  “That happens.”

  I suddenly feel incredibly cold. I’d get a sweater from my—my—chest of drawers, but this—what this boy is saying—is so chillingly shocking to me, I feel I can’t move. I can hardly even speak.

  “Do you know who your father is?” I ask.

  “Father is the father of the unit. The FU! The one with the gun.” He sits up again, looks at me. “River, do you know who your father is?”

  “No! No one does…do they?”

  “No! I mean, there’s guessing. It’s all bullshit. Every boy wants to claim the toughest bastard is his daddy, don’t they?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Yeah, course.” He lies back down, stares at the night-light. “I keep forgetting you ain’t a boy. I keep forgetting that. Say, has the mumma got a gun?”

  “No! Of course she hasn’t!”

  “She’s the boss though, ain’t she? She’s your FU, right?”

  “She’s my mumma!”

  “Big shot—that’s what I heard the old one say. The mumma’s in charge of stuff.”

  “She’s a National Representative.”

  “And that would be?”

  “People voted for her to represent them—you know, at the National Council.”

  “I do not know, River. Indeed, I do not.”

  “But you must have heard of the National Council? I mean…you’re old enough to vote. You are voting, aren’t you?”

  “Swear to God, I do not know what you’re talking about.”