The XY

by Virginia Bergin

  Crystallized ginger—it’s a lovely, precious thing. I can’t say no to this kindness, so I pick up a lump with a thank you so much and hand it to Mason, who takes it in his hand without looking. He’s too busy staring out in terror at the snowy, moonlit land whizzing past.

  “We had a long journey,” I tell the crowd. “We’ve really got to sleep right now.”

  “Put that in your mouth and suck on it,” I whisper at Mason, tapping the hand that’s clutching the ginger. “Close your eyes. Lean against this.” I pull off my outer fleece (I’ll be warm enough without it, just) and stuff it behind the other side of Mason’s head. “And try, please just try, to at least pretend to sleep.”

  I squash against him, squeezing his hand HARD and hoping he understands: YOU MUST DO THIS! He puts the ginger in his mouth. Lays his head against the fleece.

  “Ut’s hot,” he mumbles, rolling the ginger around his mouth.

  I “snuggle” closer for the purpose of whispering, “Do not spit that out.”

  “I dun’t like it.”

  “Shuddup. Close your eyes.”

  Around me, I listen to the discussion rumble on, and discussion is the right word, because that’s what it becomes. Although these people are all from different 150s, they are so used to talking things through, the element of bicker disperses as soon as there is no longer the possibility of bumping an issue straight up to National Council level. The Train Council forms; advice and information are exchanged; suggestions and solutions are offered. Even the Cornish fishing situation is clarified: only granmummas will go out when winter storms threaten. When every child is our child, who would allow a person to risk death for cod?

  The discussion eases into Agreement: We have to have comms or we have nothing, Crystal-Rose’s Mumma says to murmurs of Agreement as Mason and I “snuggle” in a rigid sort of way—Mason because of the terror of the whizzing-too-fast world (and possibly the ginger), and me from the terror that someone might realize (How can they not?! Isn’t it obvious?!) that my traveling companion is as rare as a rhino, as Kate would say—rarer, in fact, because the last I heard, rhinos and most other once-was endangered species are really doing okay now.

  XY numbers, they have become controlled. Unlike in the early days, when supplies of frozen sperm ran low and the human reproduction rate plummeted, the IVF program has offered choice. Granmummas like Casey were brave and tough enough to step up and give away sons because it seemed to be the only way the human race would survive. Now, it is considered that we are safe. Human beings are no longer in danger. There aren’t yet enough of us for the world to be as it once was, but who would want that anyway? Most things I have ever read or heard about the once-was seem either unbelievable or undesirable (with some exceptions, such as an abundance of chocolate, chicken tikka masala, and Ibiza, because when Kate told me about that holiday she took with her cousins, it did sound like a whole lot of crazy fun).

  You can choose. I will be able to choose: whether to have a child and whether to have a boy. They can be selected for. These days, the choice to have a boy that will have to be given away is made before conception.

  Mason…when was he born? Did his mumma choose?

  My eyes are tight shut, but I cannot sleep.

  Chapter 27

  Pink and Blue

  “River, I think we’re here,” Mason says.

  As if I didn’t know it. As if I have been sleeping. I turn my head a little, and I look up into his face, and my heart lurches—most unexpectedly—with feeling. Pity, I suppose. His eyes—they’re weasel small and bright still. Such fear. Like me, I don’t think Mason has slept at all.

  Our traveling companions have gone already—I was waiting for them to leave—and they are out on the platform, unloading a chaos of goods, so I take us through to the end compartment, where we exit without any further tricky questions being asked. As we walk up the steps into the station, it feels like any confidence I had is still sitting there on the train, waving me goodbye.

  It’s not just that the reality of what I have come to do is closer now; it’s Birmingham. IT FREAKS ME OUT, as Kate would say.

  It isn’t even light yet, but the place is buzzing. The vast station concourse is packed with movement; every kind of person seems to be there, lugging goods, chatting, shouting! BUSY, BUSY, BUSY, and not a single face I know—not that I would want to see a face I know. I clutch Mason’s hand tight and pull him out of the station into the cold, cold air, and I breathe in deeply and nearly choke because the air itself, though cold with snow, is wrong to me. It’s full of strange scents and full of strange sounds, and there are people, hundreds of people, absolutely everywhere—walking, talking, SHOUTING! People on foot, people in bicycle-drawn rickshaws, people pulling carts, people on horses, people leading horses pulling carts, electric cars, motorbikes. The swirl of it all around us, elevated roads swishing up and down to the station, a crisscross of routes where packed streets meet.

  And I look up, and I see Mason grinning—grinning!—at me. Grin so huge it’s like a shout. His hand is no longer in mine.

  “This is where my mumma lives?!”

  “No! I mean…I don’t know. Maybe?”

  “I hope so! This place is amazing!” he says, turning this way and that. “Skyscrapers! Freeways! It’s Grand Theft Auto AND Assassin’s Creed! They got cars AND carts and horses! It’s the business! This place is THE business! Look,” he says, pointing, “they got KFC! They got McDonald’s! I know them signs!”

  Those signs are so once-was they’re filthy and broken and there’s moss growing on them.

  “Can we get a burger?!”

  He looks at me, as excited as a littler one on her birthday.

  “Those places don’t exist anymore.”

  “But there’s signs!”

  I shake my head.

  “Toast?” he says. “If they’re just selling toast, we could get that, couldn’t we? We could get some toast? And soup! I don’t even care if there’s vegetables in it! I don’t even care if there’s insects!”

  There is nothing I’d like better than a pile of toast right now, and a big fat cup of sage tea. And to be back home, in the kitchen, and not in this scary city, and for none of this to ever have happened. But it has happened, and here we stand: the killer no one knows is a killer and the boy no one knows is a boy, and I am so very tired and hungry—and cold. It’s already eating through my coat. Even the cold is hungry.

  My confidence is heading home on the train. My stomach agrees with Mason. My heart is already at home, happy in my own once-was (and eating toast).

  “River…this place is amazing, ain’t it? River…River, you okay?” he says, hopping from one cold foot to another, grinning.

  “Yeah. Sure. Come on.”

  He grabs my hand as I take off down the street. I hardly even notice it; I need to do what I need to do, and what I need to do is ditch him. I will not mess this up.

  It’s barely light. My anxiety is so strong it propels me at speed through the crowds, slipping and sliding, dragging gawping Mason, slipping and sliding behind me. I just need to do this thing. Get it done. Do it. Deal with it.

  We slip and slide, searching, until I realize I am actually going to have to ask someone where the address I’ve memorized actually is. This is me—a person who is too scared to ask a stranger where the place I’m looking for is…until I spot a mumma who looks to be in a terrible hurry. It’s her I ask because I know she won’t have time to ask a single question back.

  I clutch Mason’s hand, willing him to stay silent, as I ask her: Please, where is the Bullring? I do not ask her about the rest of the address: Babyland. Her answer depresses me deeply; I should have asked someone sooner. We need to go back to the indoor market next to the station.

  • • •

  In the countryside, I have a great, easy sense of direction. In this city, I struggle.
It takes longer than it should—and another, excruciating question asked to another hurrying mumma—before we get back there.

  Stalls in once-was shops surround us. Stalls selling food. Food is not at the top of my plan. But the smell of it? I try to resist. I have to resist! And…I’ve got nothing left to trade except a bottle of horseradish vodka, which would be too much payment for some food, plus better to hold on to it in case of emergency. My stomach is telling me this is an emergency, but not one that should require the trade of my last asset. I know, if I asked, any one of the stallholders would feed us. Courtesy would demand it. I just find that I don’t want to ask. It’s not just that I’m too shy and I’ve never had to do that before, to ask strangers. I’m scared that to ask would be to invite questions I don’t want to answer but courtesy would insist I reply to. I don’t want to lie, and I definitely don’t want anyone to realize Mason is a boy, so we walk on—until I see a littler one about to scrape leftover porridge into a pig-swill bin. Our stomachs are growling so loud I can’t even tell whether it’s his or mine.

  “Could we please have that?” I ask.

  “But it’s not nice now!”

  “We don’t mind, really.”

  “You’ve got nothing to trade? Or chip coin?” she asks, a little surprised.

  “No.” I didn’t have a chance—and wouldn’t have dared—to take chip coin from the community allowance for this trip that is in opposition to my community.

  “Granmumma!” she calls. “These people are hungry!”

  She calls so loudly everyone left inside the food place hears. And every granmumma in the food place—we’re in the one called McDonald’s—brings food. A serious amount of food. Kate says that in the once-was many people actually could not afford to eat; now no one would ever go hungry, but the granmummas remember the Time of Crisis, the time that came in the years after the sickness, when there was not enough food to go around. The time when the granmummas learned to hunt, as well as to grow and to farm—all of which, for reasons I don’t understand, had been mainly XY things. You only have to say to a granmumma, “I’m hungry,” and you will be fed until your stomach is fit to burst.

  Within minutes, we are having plates and bowls of food offered. There’s all the usual stuff you’d expect—insect stews and baked potatoes and baked apples stuffed with sugared damsons—plus foods I’ve never even seen or tasted before. There’s something that looks like a meatloaf, which surprises me because it’s unusual to see much meat for sale or trade. It’s very tasty though.

  “You like it?” the granmumma stallholder who must have made it asks us.

  Mason nods enthusiastically, reaches for a second slice.

  “See?!” she calls out to everyone. “They like it!”

  “That’s because they don’t know what it is!” the porridge girl’s granmumma says, and everyone laughs. Someone starts with an old, old song Kate likes—something about swinging from a chandelier—and everyone joins in. Not in some grand, organized way like it’s the choir, but just people singing, how it happens when you don’t mean it to: a patchwork of a song. Everyone adding parts—pretty parts and not-so-pretty parts, but somehow they all get to the chorus.

  “So, what is it?” I ask the granmumma stallholder.

  “Vole!”

  I stop eating. We eat a lot of things Kate considers should not be eaten. The insects are so delicious even she’s okay with them, but there are plenty of foods she refuses to eat, such as rodents. She says she ate them once, because she had to, but now there’s no need she won’t touch them. I’m a little queasy about rodents myself, particularly ones that look as dear as water voles.

  “We had an infestation of them on the crops! Difficult to prepare, but waste not, want not, eh?”

  Mason reaches for a third slice of vole meatloaf. I’m thinking he does not know what a vole is.

  “Thank you so much,” I tell her, kissing her cheeks.

  “This is really, really good,” he mumbles through his stuffed mouth as I drag him away, my stomach churning.

  Signs above once-was shops blast my searching eyes as though they were still lit, and none are what I’m looking for. There used to be so many shops! Clothes and shoes, more clothes and shoes, pharmacies, mobile phone shops, and a place that sold only perfume. Then, up on the floor above us, I see the one I am looking for.

  I drag Mason up the stopped escalator.

  Babyland.

  It looks closed. It’s dark inside.

  I press my desperate hand against one of the glass doors—a gap between and underneath them so huge heat must have just poured out in the once-was—and the door, it opens.

  It looks as though it has been empty for years. Sixty years. It’s full of shelves and rails and hangers thick with dust and empty of clothes. High on the walls are tiny speakers from which music softly crackles down, another tune Kate would probably know. But it’s the walls that draw my attention. The weirdness of the walls.

  On one side: PINK. Pictures of babies and littler ones wearing PINK. PINK. PINK. Bows in hair, flowers on dresses. One even holds a pony dolly, a PINK, impractically long-maned, blue-eyed pony that could not look less like the only little pony I know if it tried.

  Massive pictures. Massive PINK pictures. And one word: GIRLS.

  Other side: BLUE…and one word: BOYS. Are these…supposed to be XY babies?! XY littler ones?! The blue-picture littler ones hold toy boats and trains and rockets. One or two look grubby; they have been messing about in mud.

  PINK.

  AND.

  BLUE.

  AND.

  WEIRD.

  “What in the hell is this place, River?” murmurs Mason.

  “I don’t know…but it must be the wrong place.”

  I look at him and he’s just staring into the gloom…and I have a jolt of almost feeling what this moment might mean to him: no mumma.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  Still, he stares. The music in the shop stops.

  “We have to go now. This can’t be the right place.”

  We’ll walk around, just check there isn’t another Babyland—could there be?!—and if there isn’t, which my sinking heart tells me there probably won’t be, then what?

  “There’s no one here!” I tell him, so loud in this dead place.

  “There is,” he says, still staring.

  A shiver runs down my spine; it’s almost as though I can hear those PINKS and BLUES chuckling. He points through the gloom, where there’s a small, black, glassy dome on the ceiling, and as I look, a red light on it blips.

  “That’s just something someone left on,” I tell him. “That happens. I’ve seen it.”

  I have. Plat, Tamara, and I once found an abandoned house way out in the countryside, a house that was still connected to the grid and was filled with machines that were still gobbling up power after all those years. In Kate’s day, when the grief had melted enough to allow thought to begin, they realized this was going to be a problem. Brigades of people—mainly teens like Kate, there being hardly any littler ones then—were organized to go into empty homes and SWITCH OFF. The mummas praise this event; the granmummas do not like to speak of it. I think they found a lot of dead XYs.

  “That’s a security camera,” says Mason.

  I don’t know what a security camera is, but I do know, “We need to go.”

  “They’re watching.”

  “No one is watching.”

  “They are. I seen it move. You watch. You can see it inside that glass. It’s moving. They’ve seen us.”

  The children on the walls grin and chuckle. I do NOT believe in ghosts. As a door at the back of the shop cracks open, I jump, sending a rail of hangers clattering to the floor. Light floods in as fast as adrenaline floods my body.

  “How can I help you?”

  I’d be
guessing that the person asking the question is having a bit of a wild, dress-up day. Maybe it’s her ha-ha-harvest festival? She is wearing red, shiny shorts and a matching corset, a black leather carrying belt and black fishnet tights (I’ve worn tights like that which belonged to Kate), and boots—boots that are also bright red and are stacked so high you’d think she could fall at any moment.

  I’m speechless—from the fright, from the shock of this amazing costume, from the whirl in my head that is managing to spit out the thought that We’ve got the wrong place.

  “I wanna find my mumma,” Mason says.

  I told him not to speak. I told him. The way he speaks is SO wrong.

  Her huge, black eyelashes (False! We mess around with those too, making them out of feathers) flicker for just one second, taking Mason in.

  “What’s the trade?” she asks him.

  Mason looks at me. I pull myself together and step forward.

  “This,” I tell her, pulling Kate’s ring from the little finger of my left hand, the only one of my fingers on which it would fit.

  I drop the ring into the palm of an outstretched hand with what Kate would call “killer” nails; they are red and long, and the hand weighs the ring, then closes on it, and slides it into the most minute pocket on those shiny red shorts.

  “So, I guess you can call me Diamond,” she says, breaking into a grin. “And, no, I do not want to know your names. Right then,” she says. Out of her carrying belt, she produces the kind of disposable gloves I’ve seen Akesa use. I think her nails must surely puncture them, but she pulls them on with practiced ease, then produces a sample tube. “Open wide,” she says to Mason as she unscrews it.

  Mason, unsure, looks at me.

  “Open your mouth,” I tell him.

  He does, and she swabs the inside of his cheek, puts the swab back into the tube, and screws the lid on, tucks it into her belt.

  “Come back Sunday evening,” she says, pulling off the gloves.

  I feel the breath go out of me. “We haven’t got that long.”