The XY

by Virginia Bergin

  “He needs time to adjust, that’s all,” says Kate. Adjust is a very un-Kate word.

  “He needs to go to school,” says Mumma.

  WHAT?! Wait just a second!

  Kate lays down her knife and fork.

  “He does. They all do,” says Kate.

  “I don’t know about the rest of the Sanctuaries,” says Mumma. “I only know about this boy. But even if we could somehow pass him off as…one of us, I don’t think he’s ready for that.”

  To my utter relief (and astonishment), Kate does not argue. “Zoe-River,” she says, “I think this boy has been living in a bad way. And I don’t think it’s just him. It cannot be just him. You have to find out about it, you have to tell people about it, and you have to stop it.”

  My mumma is staring straight at Kate. The THUMP, THUMP, THUMP stops.

  We all look at the ceiling.

  It’s not 11:00 p.m. It’s only 9:35 p.m., according to the kitchen clock. Always wrong—never this wrong.

  My mumma looks at Kate. “I will try my best,” she tells her.

  There is the sound—most alarming and unexpected—of feet padding down the stairs.

  “I invited Mason to join us for dinner,” Kate says. “You know, so he can adjust.”

  “Perhaps you could have told us?” Mumma whispers.

  “I didn’t think he’d come.”

  The kitchen door creaks open. The boy creature emerges, shuffling into the kitchen in trousers and a blouse that belongs to Kate and his cloven-hoof shoes. He’s all red in the face and sweating, breath rasping louder than Kate’s, like he’s still running.

  “I’m late,” he pants.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kate, who’d screech at me for tardiness, says as she ladles out a delicious plateful of the insect stew, with fat chunks of superfresh vegetables and brilliant dumplings, a dollop of creamy root mash, and a scoop of buttery greens spiced with crushed juniper berries.

  “So…how are you feeling, Mason?” Mumma asks.

  He clears his throat. “What?”

  “Don’t say what. Say pardon,” comes out of my mouth without a thought involved (it’s a standard instruction to littler ones).

  “River! Courtesy!” says Mumma. “How are you, Mason?”

  “Okay, I guess.” He shovels up a spoonful of stew that’s destined never to reach his mouth. “I ain’t puked in days. Lost fitness though. Lost a lot of fitness.”

  “Ah…and how are you feeling?”

  I am beginning to think that the boy creature must be quite stupid because it looks to me as though this isn’t a question he understands. He shifts about in his seat, frowning.

  “You know, emotionally,” Mumma persists, floundering.

  “For crying out loud, let the boy eat,” says Kate. “Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about how he feels right now.”

  I’d expect Mumma to come right back at Kate (who’s a stranger to courtesy of the verbal type), but she doesn’t. I’ve never seen Mumma look so lost and uncertain—and over this! Mumma is the smartest person in our 150, but she’s never been brilliant at the feelings side of things. Nevertheless, she does try, when she remembers, and it’s a kindness to be accepted, isn’t it? It’s a kindness to be asked, sincerely, how you are feeling. The way this boy creature is acting is just… I don’t get it. He must be stupid. Look at him—now he’s staring at his spoon. (As though he’s never seen an insect before?)

  There’s this few minutes in which nobody says anything, but nobody is eating either, and it’s an awkward few minutes because you just know everyone (except the boy creature?) has a lot to say. Me, I don’t speak because I daren’t. It’s like there’s a fire in my head, huge lumps of anger, curiosity, and revulsion being chucked onto it.

  In the silence, the pot of stew on the stove starts to bubble.

  Mumma’s phone rings. It’s Akesa on PicChat. We can all see that. Mumma picks the phone up.

  “I’ve got Mason’s test results!” Akesa says, not in her normal doctor’s voice; she is very excited.

  “What test results?” says Mason.

  “Ah, he’s there with you,” says Akesa. “That’s good. I’ve got questions—well, just one, really.”

  “I’m really not sure this is such a good idea,” Kate gets in.

  “What test results? What tests? I never did no tests here.”

  “Zoe-River…” Kate warns.

  “I never did no tests here. God almighty! Did you steal my sperm already?”

  I should think if any of us were eating, we’d all choke, Mason included; he looks wild with panic.

  “I ain’t been well,” he gibbers.

  “Let me speak to the patient,” I can see Akesa’s face asking, upside down across the table.

  “No one has stolen your sperm,” Kate is saying.

  “What freaking tests?!”

  “LET ME SPEAK TO THE PATIENT!”

  Mason snatches the phone. “I ain’t been well. I’m getting fitness back. I need T, that’s all.”

  Mumma, flustered, gets up to put the kettle on.

  “Not that kind of tea,” Kate bellows at her, and she sits back down.

  “You mean testosterone?” Akesa asks.

  “What else would I mean? I ain’t had an injection for a while. That’s all it’ll be. If I’ve flunked a sperm test, it’s ’cause I need a T-jab! I ain’t been well!”

  It’s like he’s speaking to all of us now, panic and fear and misery rolling in his eyes.

  “You need to calm down, Mason,” Kate says softly.

  He nods frantically at us all. “I’m calm. I’m calm,” he mutters; he is not calm at all. “But you can’t just kick me out of here because I flunked one sperm test!”

  “Is that what would happen in the Sanctuary?” asks Kate, glaring at Mumma.

  “No-sperms get sent to the food factory. That place is just hell with better hygiene. I ain’t ending up in no she-wolf food factory!”

  “That’s not going to happen,” says Mumma. “We don’t do that kind of thing here.”

  “No one’s taken your sperm, and no one’s going to take your sperm,” says Kate. “So let’s just listen to the doctor, eh?”

  He nods—less frantically but most unconvincingly.

  “I’ve checked and rechecked to confirm: you are infected with the virus, but I can find no sign of any reaction to it whatsoever, as all earlier samples showed.”

  The sound of Akesa’s voice—oh, it’s lovely to hear in this room. It’s her calm, sensible, factual words that we ALL need to hear—well, maybe not all of us. Mason’s face is scrunched tight.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Akesa says.

  “Hear that? You’re going to be fine!” Kate says to Mason, the sweetest smile on her face. “He’s going to be fine,” she says triumphantly to Mumma.

  “Although I expect you don’t feel fine right now,” says Akesa.

  “I just need a T-jab,” he says to her, his voice as tense and scrunched as his face and his body.

  “You weren’t being injected with testosterone,” Akesa says.

  “Well, now, see, that’s a lie,” Mason says.

  “The testosterone was in the implant in your arm.”

  “Liar. And I know so. Think I’m a fool?” says Mason, clutching his arm. “That was a transmitter tag! I cut it out myself! Right there in the jungle! That was a transmitter.” He looks up at me. “So they can track you, so they can find your body if you’re dumb enough to run.”

  “It was a testosterone implant,” Akesa says. “The injections you had I think were a tranquilizer. I found traces of it in your blood.”

  “It could have been something we gave him,” says Kate.

  “No,” says Akesa. “I saw what you gave him, and this is some other kind of synthetic opia
te. He has extensive injection scarring.” She pauses. “You were being drugged. How often were you given injections, Mason?” asks Akesa.

  “Every week, same as every boy,” he says, his hand clutching the phone so tight I think it might break.

  “And for how long?”

  “Since they put the tag in.”

  “And when was that?”

  “U-Beta. I was twelve.”

  “This is a disgrace,” breathes Kate at Mumma.

  Akesa clears her throat. “You’ve got the virus, Mason. It’s in every single sample, but you’re not reacting.”

  “This is it,” says Kate. “They’ve found a cure…”

  “Not exactly,” says Akesa. “He’s been…modified.”

  “What?” says Mason.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “I had to search pretty hard to find it, but I’ve looked at your chromosomes, Mason. You’ve got a splice of X in your Y chromosome.”

  “I do not know what you are freaking talking about.” Mason speaks quietly at the phone in his fist.

  “Nor do we,” says Kate.

  “He’s been modified at a genetic level. It has to have been done at the IVF stage. It’s minute, obviously, but it’s there: a tiny section of X chromosome has been introduced into his Y chromosome. It’s utterly brilliant. I have no idea whether he could pass it on to his offspring—and I doubt it—but it is enough to protect him and his sperm. The virus cannot attack him; it’s blocked. I suppose, essentially, the virus reads him as female.”

  Mason turns to me. “What’d she say?” he asks.

  Chapter 17

  Stew

  “That you’re part girl?”

  Now doesn’t seem the time to give Mason a biology lesson, so I say it in uptalk as simply as I can.

  “Well, I wouldn’t quite put it like that,” says Akesa. “Let’s just say, where you’d expect to be entirely male, there is a small female element.”

  Mason hasn’t stopped looking at me. “I’m part girl?” he asks me.

  “Kind of, mm-hmm.”

  The neglected bubbling pot of stew on the stove sends out an angry stink of burning. Mumma—without taking her eyes off Mason, off the phone, off the whole crazy scene—gets up, shoves it off the heat, and sits back down again.

  “If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them as best I can,” Akesa is saying to Mason. He lays the phone down on the table, gets up, and leaves.

  He doesn’t screech or groan his chair. He doesn’t even slam the door. He just stands, turns, and goes.

  “Oh, well done, Doc. Really well done,” Kate says, and reaches a shaking finger out to kill the call.

  “Shouldn’t you be happy about it?” I ask her, though she’s too busy staring at Mumma to listen. “I mean, won’t it mean they can leave the Sanctuaries now?”

  As the THUMP, THUMP, THUMP starts up, the weird and dreadful prospect of hordes of Masons roaming the land again looms large and scary and a little too realistically in my mind.

  “So, we’re making genetically modified boys now, are we?” she says to Mumma. “Until a solution is found. Sixty years, no cure. Now this? How long has this been going on?”

  “I did not know anything about it,” says Mumma.

  “You’re a National Representative,” says Kate.

  “I did not—”

  “What is it you do know about?”

  “Not this,” says my mumma. PicChat rings on the notebook in her study. My mumma doesn’t go to answer it, and then it stops. Notification that a message has been recorded beeps; I know that sound. I’ve heard it so many times. So has Kate. PicChat rings again. No one moves.

  “Sixty years we’ve been waiting for them to come home. Sixty years. If I ever find out you knew anything about any of…this business…” Kate says.

  “Katherine-Thea,” my mumma breathes. “I—”

  The notebook stops ringing.

  “I’m sorry,” Kate manages to say. “It’s stress. It’s… You know. What we went through.”

  THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.

  Mumma does know. Mumma knows especially because her own mumma witnessed the sickness. Her own mumma, Thea, was just a tiny girl who was left alone at the airport. A tiny girl whom Kate saw. Kate, who had just given up her own baby brother, whose broken teen heart still held love. Kate went and asked her, Where’s your mummy? And the tiny girl didn’t know, and there was no one to ask.

  At the side of the deserted motorway, Thea watched, weeping, as Kate’s howls announced her boyfriend’s death.

  Thirty years later, Kate watched, weeping, as Mumma, then a teen herself, announced with howls of grief Thea’s death from breast cancer.

  That night, Kate stopped crying. She put her might behind creating a new future, as all the granmummas were doing.

  And Mumma did too.

  • • •

  “Should someone go and talk to him?” Mumma asks Kate.

  I really, really do not want to, so I am incredibly relieved when Kate says, “No, we should just leave him for a while.”

  “But he seemed upset,” says Mumma.

  “Look—everything about him, everything about the way he behaves, it’s old-school, all right? How boys and men used to be.”

  “Maybe that’s why people wanted to get rid of them.”

  I know I should not be saying it, not now—but I say it. It is out of my mouth and in the room. It’s just a rumor that gets whispered from time to time, that the sickness was a deliberate act, the purposeful introduction of a virus to eliminate the majority of XYs. I’ve even heard granmummas joke about it when some terrible event from the once-was gets mentioned, and there were, as far as I can tell, so very many terrible events. But I’ve never heard Kate joke about it, and she is now looking at me with what you could call disgust.

  “People do say that,” I mutter.

  “Not all of them behaved like this, but a lot did,” Kate says to Mumma.

  “The ones that did gaming?” Mumma asks, struggling to understand. “Blam, blam?”

  “No,” says Kate. “Some, maybe. Don’t get hung up about that. That was just… Things were different. People were different.”

  “You mean men and boys?”

  “No. Everyone,” says Kate, frowning so hard her eyes close in concentration, in the effort of explaining the once-was that neither Mumma nor I can imagine—and I don’t want to either. “Everyone and everything was different, and that boy… To me, it’s like time travel or something. He seems to me like how boys were.”

  “But it’s been sixty years,” Mumma says.

  “I know. Go figure,” says Kate. It’s one of her expressions; it means… Well, I’ve never understood what exactly, but from the way she uses it, it means something like Work it out for yourself, but I think I already know the answer.

  Kate gets up and gets the apple brandy and two glasses. Two. I’m not even going to be offered some. I know I shouldn’t have said what I said, but I found him. I saved him and—okay, so Mumma is lying at a national level, but I am having to lie directly and on a daily basis to our friends and neighbors. And I don’t even drink apple brandy, but I—

  “What about me?”

  Kate sets down the bottle and the glasses.

  “What about you?” she says. “You know, sometimes, you really are one prize brat.”

  “And you…really are one prize bitch.”

  It’s Kate speak, that. Pure Kate speak. Pure Kate-at-her-worst speak, coming out of my mouth. The fact that she doesn’t react to it is even more disturbing.

  The THUMP, THUMP, THUMP stops. I hadn’t even realized I was so aware of it.

  “Eleven o’clock,” I tell them. “I’m going to bed.”

  That’s what I say—and the
sound of my own voice makes me cringe because I know even this simple thing I’m saying is not coming from a good place. And the knowing of that makes me as mad as this whole situation makes me mad. Angry mad and crazy mad and every other kind of mad there is.

  I feel bad. I know everyone is upset. I am, Mumma is, the damn boy is…and so is Kate. I know, in my heart, that her upset is deep and old and s-e-r-i-o-u-s.

  Still, I can’t seem to help myself. I screech my chair and I stomp to my room.

  My room?!

  I insisted Mumma and I move my study desk from my bedroom down to the utility room, even though there is no space in there for it. I squeeze past it, raking clothes—for which there is no chest of drawers or wardrobe or cabinets—to the end of the smelly, old cot and clamber into it, clothes still on because I’m too mad to take them off.

  I’m too mad to even shut my eyes. I’m too mad to even look and see what the sky is doing. I stare through the darkness at the beautiful Kate-made study desk I love so much—my little world within a world: a fold-down desk inside a cupboard filled with shelves and hidden drawers. For your secret things, Kate said when she gave it to me for my seventh birthday. My secret things were my little, fiddly electromechanical projects—things I took apart and struggled to put back together again—the bones of birds, and feathers, feathers, feathers. I imagined that if I ever got to build aircrafts, I wouldn’t just make technically brilliant machines; I would remember the beauty of the birds that inspired human flight. I would make beautiful planes, a whole fleet of them, painted to look just like birds.

  Those secret things? They weren’t really secret at all. I had no secrets.

  Chapter 18

  Games

  I hold out for two days.

  I hold out, clinging to my own bad mood like it’s a life raft. My own bad mood is the only thing that makes sense to me. The feeling of being in a bad mood, that is. The reasons for the bad mood make no sense to me, and that in itself makes the bad mood worse, which is fine; it helps to be clinging on to something large and solid. But I have been brought up to pay attention to thinking as well as feeling, so in spite of myself, I do think too. My conclusion is that I am in a bad mood because there is just too much going on. There is too much emotion in this house. There is too much disruption to too many lives; everyone is in their own state of turmoil: Kate, Mumma, me…and Mason. My bad mood dictates I must act as though I do not care or notice, and I don’t quite know exactly how much I do care. Mainly, I just wish I’d never found him. But I do, most definitely, notice that he has withdrawn. He’s in his—MY—room all the time. I hear Kate and Mumma talk about it, Mumma being concerned and Kate saying to leave him be. Kate pressing Mumma to investigate the Sanctuary situation. Mumma saying she is consulting. Kate telling Mumma she’d better not be snitching, that she will never speak to Mumma again if the boy gets taken. Me, clinging silently to my bad mood…and Mason clinging to his…? Less silently. All you can hear from MY room is THUMP, THUMP, THUMP. Either that or the gaming grunts; he’s eased off on the Noooo!s and Yesss!es.