I don’t know really what it means. “I don’t think we’ve got one of those.”
“Well, where’d you keep your ’quipment?”
“Equipment?”
“You know, treadmill, weights…”
What on earth is he talking about? “I’m not sure. I’ll find out,” I tell him—preferable to say that than ask what he means. Kate might know.
“I need to get back in training.”
“Okay. Anything else you’d like?”
“Well…d’you think they’d issue me with a game box?”
NO IDEA. WHAT ON EARTH IS IT TALKING ABOUT?
“I’ll find out about that too.”
I try to leave again.
“River?”
“Yup?” I say, over my shoulder.
“Thanks,” he says in a small voice.
You’re welcome or my pleasure would be a more courteous reply, but I’m so surprised to be thanked I can’t get the right words out.
“That’s okay,” I reply, also in a small voice.
Chapter 15
Sanitary
For anyone who’s thinking about keeping a boy, my advice would be: don’t.
Having a boy in your house is no fun at all.
In fact, it’s the opposite of fun.
Please note: I am saying “boy” instead of “XY” or “it” or “thing” or “creature.” I am even trying to think it. I am making an effort. It is not easy.
• • •
Kate could indeed understand every word Mason spoke and said that she would obtain a “game box,” an item several of the granmummas are, apparently, “bound to have,” which is news to me. And I end up at Lenny’s that night, asking whether she’s got such a thing as:
“A treadmill.”
“And what’s that?”
“A running machine.”
“What on earth do you want one of those for?” she asks.
“I want to get fit.” That’s what Kate told me to say. It sounds weird.
“What? Why don’t you just do more work?” says Lenny, genuinely perplexed.
“And it’ll help me study. You know…oxygen…exercise.”
I’m vague on the specifics. It’s biology, isn’t it? Machines are my thing.
“You can always come and muck out Milpy,” she says. “That should focus your mind.”
Lenny takes care of Milpy and machines, animals and broken things. Every young person in this village spends time with her, learning about creatures and how to fix stuff. In the once-was, the granmummas say it was mostly men who did the fixing of things. That seems pretty weird to me, and not just because there were men involved. I mean, why would it be mainly XYs that did that? How did that ever happen? (But I don’t not get it in a way that seriously troubles me; unlike Plat, I’m not interested at all in finding out. It’s just how it was: too bad, so sad, etc.) Then, when all the men had died or gone, if a thing got broken, you’d just go and get another one. When I first heard that, I was shocked because it was so unimaginable, but the population had halved, so there was plenty to go around—and plenty for years to come as the number of people continued to decline. Lots of things that used to get made didn’t get made, and more and more things got broken until Mumma’s generation grew up and got us organized. Reorganized, Kate would say—and that’s right and fair and true, because if it wasn’t for the granmummas, there’d be no “us” to get organized.
Anyway, animal care aside, now no one grows up without knowing how to do stuff, and unlike the ha-ha-harvest experiment, Repair & Maintain is permanent. Cars, washing machines, turbines, solar panels—even littler ones like Sweet know how a plug should be wired. And around here, it’s Lenny who teaches that, because the mummas are too busy and the granmummas…are the granmummas. There’s not a thing that goes on that they’re not running or at least involved in, apart from R&M.
“We did our part,” Kate says every time she hands me whatever broken thing she wants fixed.
To be honest, R&M is a kind of refuge. It’s the next-best thing to our free time on Tuesday nights. It’s the time and place when we just get to do stuff. It’s not like school, where no matter how keen you are, you feel the weight of pressure to do well upon you. We are told it’s an honor to feel that pressure because we will take—we have to take—our world forward. We learn that before we even learn to wire a plug.
“Look, I really don’t know about this,” Lenny says, scooping back the wild curls of her hair as she picks her way through the vast storage barn where she keeps machines and once-was gadgets of all kinds for parts. Kate says it’s like Raiders of the Lost Ark in there. I don’t know what that is, and I’ve never bothered to find out, but Lenny’s barn is a place of once-was mechanical and electronic wonders and curiosities. It’s my idea of heaven.
“River, really, why do you want this?” says Lenny, hunting in her pockets for a hair tie.
“Because of…why…I said.” Kate said to say another thing if things got tricky: “My mumma is fine about it. She Agrees.”
I’ve never done that before, but If Lenny gets funny about it, you’ll just have to play the mumma card, Kate said, and Mumma winced—so hard—and then nodded. Kate told me what to say but—UGH!—this is as weird and as unpleasant as lying to Plat. I feel I could faint—like a boy!—just saying it, I truly do, so I prop myself up on the nearest object.
Lenny studies me.
“Do you even know what a running machine is?” she asks me.
“Yes! Sure! That’s why I want one!”
“You’re leaning on one,” says Lenny.
I spin around. So…that’s a running machine? I must have walked past it a thousand times! Walked past because it just doesn’t look like it’d be useful for anything…other than running, I suppose. And, really, why would you—
“Great!” I tell Lenny, shutting off my own “this thing is ridiculous” thoughts.
“You can’t have that one. It’s electrical,” she says, twisting up her hair and tying it.
“Electrical?!” I am truly shocked. In what world would people use up electricity going for a run?
“Mmm-hmm. The plug’s a bit of a giveaway, I’d have thought. Remind me, what is it you’re studying again?”
I can feel myself burning up, to have been so flustered with the lying I didn’t even notice what’s plain to see.
“There’s a mechanical one somewhere at the back there, so you’re going to have to help me shift all this stuff…if you’re not too unfit.”
AAAAAAAAAARGH! That’s what my arms and my back and my legs have got to say about carrying the stupid weighs-a-ton running machine through the silent village night.
My whole life, I have been surrounded by empathy—that’s what Mumma calls it. To me, it’s just…life. You never get lost in yourself or your worries (e.g., the screaming of your body in muscular pain) because you’d always tell someone—and usually, even before you find the words to tell, there’s always someone around who’ll see how it is—because that’s how life works, isn’t it?
It still is. Sort of. When Lenny feels how I’m struggling—I am too flustered by the situation to speak—she takes more than her fair share of the weight of that thing.
“Where do you want it?” Lenny pants, looking grimly at the stairs; she knows my room is up there.
“That’s okay!” Kate says to her, handing her a granmumma-baked cake. “Thank you so much!”
Lenny looks at me; she knows something is going on.
“Yes, thank you so much!” I chirp. I feel extraordinarily bad.
“I can’t do this,” I tell Kate as she shuts the door.
“Your mumma will help get it upstairs.”
“No, I mean I can’t do this. Lying to everyone.”
“Yes, you can,” says Kate. “It’s easy.”
“It’s awful. It’s impossible.”
“No, it’s not.” She sighs at me.
“It is!”
She points that shaking finger in my face. “It’s not,” she says. “I’ll tell you what’s awful and impossible. Awful and impossible is watching your family die around you. This boy? He’s our legacy—and our hope.”
You can’t argue with that, can you? I mean, you wouldn’t even want to…but, not for the first time in my life, it quietly crosses my mind what the world will be like when the granmummas have all gone, when the anguish and anger and sorrow of the past is no longer standing in front of you, pointing its shaking finger into your face.
The boy was astonishingly unimpressed with the treadmill. He didn’t say anything—not to begin with—but even I could see the confusion and disappointment on his face.
“Is there something wrong, Mason?” Mumma asked, sweating from the effort of getting the thing upstairs.
“No, sir” was all he said.
Then, when Mumma had gone, Kate asked him again:
“What’s wrong, dude?”
“It’s like… Where’s the screen?” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“You know, the screen—so you can see how you’re doing. So you can see where you’re runnin’. I run mountain routes mainly, but I do beaches too—only for the ocean views; the slope angle gets boring. You’re just on a steady up when you’re runnin’ on sand, ain’t you? Hey! How do you even adjust the angle on this machine?”
“You don’t,” said Kate.
“And…heart rate?” he said. “Distance? Fat burn-off?”
“If you’re sweating, you’re running,” said Kate. “This is the best we’ve got.”
And he looked at her, and it was such a look… I don’t know what the boy version of pity looks like, but I’m guessing that was it.
“They said that,” he murmured. “They said you wimmin was lost without us.”
“Who said that?” asked Kate, and I felt myself tense up. I know Kate and I know her tones and I know how she fires questions when she’s angry.
“The fathers,” he said. “The unit fathers.”
I watched Kate battle with herself and make her decision: to remain calm, to not push it.
“We are not lost,” she said calmly. “We are running the world.”
And then she left—before she could flip out, I suspect—and I left too, because I’d practically broken my back dragging that stupid machine into this house, and I didn’t want to hear another word about anything.
• • •
So Kate had been right about Hormones—in her own, antagonistic way. My periods aren’t regular enough yet for me to know how I am with them. Lenny most especially tells us how, yeah, they can be annoying if you get a lot of pain, but periods can also be very useful. She says you’ve got to learn to know them and to use them, and even in my limited, erratic experience of them, I can kind of see how that is right. Me? I’ve already noticed that I focus better before my period, that I design better, and that I get serious bursts of energy. Plat says she’s the opposite; she just wants to snuggle up and read. Last men’s week, Yukiko told us how XYs also have hormonal cycles, also governed by the moon, but that, because they didn’t actually bleed, this was never really talked about in the once-was. I didn’t pay much attention, as usual. But that night, changing my sanitary pad, I thought about it. I thought maybe Mason was at a particular stage in his cycle—and right on cue, he walked into the bathroom.
I was on the toilet. I’d finished peeing. I’d just put a clean pad in my knickers. I’d dumped the used one by the sink. This was the incident:
Mason, sweating from his first “best we’ve got” treadmill run, walked in. We have no lock on the bathroom door—why would we? If the door is closed, the bathroom is occupied (i.e., someone is having a poo). Peeing is hardly private, is it? Pooing is another matter; no one else should be subjected to your smells. So the door wasn’t even closed; I was just changing my pad and having a pee.
“Shoulda knocked!” he says as I get up off the toilet, hauling up my combats. He doesn’t even close the door. (I don’t think doors mean much to him.)
“Yes,” I mutter, as loud as YES! Though my brain is jumbled and jangling; only Kate knows how you’re supposed to behave around XYs. Peeing probably counts as nudity.
“Gotta go,” he says awkwardly, but he doesn’t just go ahead and pee, so maybe Kate has talked to him as well?
And that is when the incident happens:
“Who got hurt?” he says, spotting my used sanitary pad. “They hurt you, kid? Did they?!”
“No more than usual,” I tell him, picking up the used pad. A couple of years ago, we had a bit of a crisis with them; home manufacture of hemp pads broke down after the weather had an angry summer—the cotton producers, suffering because of the same meteorological anger, could not supply, even if we had a trade to offer. All we had was… For nearly sixty years, there had been a mountain of clothes for men and boys. It was, of course, plundered by necessity. Clothes adapted, fabric cut free from design and resewn, but there was still a mountain—an almost untouched, weirdly sacred mountain that had been kept but had no purpose. Until there was one, to which the granmummas agreed. The pad I had worn, the pad I had bled all over, is machine washable. It is made from dead men’s shredded clothes.
His face—it’s all alarm.
“I’m having a period,” I tell him. I expect, to him, I am probably making a face he doesn’t understand either: pity. How could it be, I am thinking, that you could not know what a period is?
Kate appears at the bathroom door; her face is ALARM MAX.
“Get out!” she tells me. A reversal of her usual “Get in!”
I get out. I am not upset. I do not understand. I anticipate another chat.
As I said, having a boy in your house is no fun at all.
Chapter 16
Thump Thump Thump
I wake, every morning, to THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.
I go to school. I get asked and asked and asked questions about the boy, even though he’s officially dead and gone. No one is supposed to do that, to go on about what happened, but everyone except Plat does.
It’s easy for Plat not to. We are painfully, expertly avoiding each other.
I come home, every evening, to THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.
It starts almost as soon as I enter the house. The boy has been told by Kate that he cannot run when I am not home. So I’m thinking he must be watching for me—from my window. No one seems to need to tell him I’m home.
It stops, always, at 11:00 p.m. It starts, always, at 7:00 a.m. There is no break on the weekend; on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, he runs the same as if they were just like any other days. The boy has no weekend.
The only upside is I’ve hooked that machine up to generate electricity. Every THUMP is wired into the village grid.
“He’s used to a routine,” Kate, who hates routine, says.
“This can’t go on,” Mumma says.
Joy. JOY. JOY.
She’s home for dinner, has been quizzing Kate and hearing what I already know (i.e., THE ROUTINE). The boy gets up and does “gym.” THUMP, THUMP, THUMP. He showers (Despite repeated offers, he has yet to take a bath. Can’t swim, he told me.); he has breakfast (toast—he claimed he’d never eaten it before, but now he just loves toast and jam or honey); and does whatever he does with a game box on the personal computer Kate managed to procure. Repeat that—gym (THUMP, THUMP, THUMP), shower, eat (toast), computer—three times over, and then he goes to bed. There’s never any hot water anymore, and even the granmummas who are keeping us supplied with jam and honey are starting to question the quantities involved. Soup has now been introduced to his diet, but it has to be puréed to oblivion; he’s suspicious of any lumps.
It is ANNOYIN
G, and it is BORING. I’d never have thought having a boy would be BORING.
“But what is he doing on the computer?” Mumma asks.
“He’s gaming,” Kate says.
“Gaming? What is that?” says Mumma—clueless as me, I’d say.
I stare hard at my plate.
“Playing games.”
“What kind of games?”
“Shooting people or aliens! Or enemies! You know! Killing stuff! Or blowing them up or, I dunno, just generally zapping them,” says Kate.
Mumma’s jaw is hanging open—mine is too.
“Look, there’s more to it than that,” says Kate. “You had to be smart about it. You have to work out all kinds of things. And it’s good for hand-eye coordination.”
“Hand-eye coordination,” says Mumma.
“Sure.” Kate laughs. “And fun! It was exciting! It was FUN.”
Mumma’s jaw clamps shut. Mine stays hanging. Those “games”? I really want to see them. I’ve slacked off on my “I am the trusted one” duty. I am ready and willing to step back up.
“And that’s it?” asks Mumma. “He plays games?”
“Yup,” says Kate.
“And no studying?”
“Nope.”
“None at all?”
“Seeing as how your mouth’s open, why don’t you put some food in it?” Kate says to me.
I oblige, but it’s hard to chew and swallow when this is all so mind-bogglingly interesting.
“He can’t read. He told us that. I don’t really think he’s ever done much in the way of studying. I don’t think they bothered with it much. I don’t think they bothered with anything much.”
I hear anger and sorrow in Kate’s voice, there so plain Mumma hears it too.
“Oh,” says Mumma.
THUMP, THUMP, THUMP is the boy’s contribution to this fascinating conversation.
“Well…” says Mumma, thinking. And that’s when she says it: “This can’t go on.”
My brain snaps into here-and-now life: as fascinating as this whole “boy” thing has become in the past few minutes, I want it done. BOY GONE. No more questions because NO MORE THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, AND NO MORE BOY. And Plat! River and Plat!
The XY Page 13
