The XY

by Virginia Bergin

  She eyes us both, lashes steady.

  “Maternal identity only?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s usually daddies we get asked for.”

  “You can find out who someone’s father was? You can find out his name?” I can’t help myself. I feel the weirdest shiver of astonishment. I’ve never heard of that. I’ve never really thought about my father. I’ve never thought… Does my daddy have a name?!

  “They don’t have names,” she says. “They have numbers.”

  I cannot look at Mason.

  “But, hey,” she says, eyes twinkling, “what’s in a name?”

  “It’s just maternal identity we want,” I tell her, pulling myself together.

  “Uh-huh,” she says, still eyeing us, lashes steady. “The test takes twenty-four hours.”

  “I’ve got vodka too,” I tell her. I am so far, so very far out of my depth now. It scares me so much it hurts—a little like the terror I first felt with Plat when we deliberately rowed out too far on the estuary, knowing—but not really knowing—that the tide would catch us. “It’s horseradish…”

  “Twenty-four hours. You can’t hurry science. Come back in the morning.”

  I can barely nod; I hadn’t anticipated this, that we would have to wait around all day and all night. I offer my freezing hand, shake hers and kiss her warm, perfumed cheek.

  I elbow Mason to do the same—and he does.

  “Come on,” I tell gawping Mason, grabbing him by the arm.

  Ghost babies laugh down at us as we walk out of the shop.

  “Wait!” she calls after us. “Are you the prearrangement?”

  I turn around.

  “My granmumma said—”

  “You?” she says, looking at Mason.

  He nods uncertainly.

  “Well, I’ll be,” she says. “Well, I will be.”

  Chapter 28

  Ascent

  “Come with me,” Diamond says.

  We follow her back through the door she came in, then up some stairs, into a tiny, windowless room with a table—perhaps where the people who sold the pink and blue clothes once sat? Then we go out past two doors, each labeled TOILET, abstract stick figures on them: one figure tiny-waisted, sprouting a triangle from its middle and both with dislocated dots for heads. There’s a blast of freezing air as we go out through a door that says FIRE EXIT on to a wide sidewalk swept clear of snow.

  Ugh! You’re such a hick from the sticks! Kate says to me sometimes. It really annoys me. I know what she means when she says it because I asked her. It means I’m IGNORANT about the world, which I am NOT. I’m in lessons globally and I know things. When Kate was my age—she said so herself!—they were doing things like home economics (i.e., cooking—who doesn’t cook?!) and sports (who’s got time for that on a curriculum?!) and postwar modern history (A subject that is now entirely redundant, in my view. Sorry, Plat). Mainly though, Kate says she was “doing”: boys, makeup, clothes, and bitching—online and off-line.

  Who is the hick?

  I am.

  Our guide turns suddenly, taking us through a glass door. A big glass door with a second set of thick wooden doors behind, insulation in a street with buildings so high it can have zero solar gain. And behind that…

  For a moment, I do not even know what this place is. The huge hall is filled with all kinds of ordinary- and extraordinary-looking people. Some of the extraordinary ones make the person who has led us here look ordinary. I realize I recognize faces from the National Council, and I definitely recognize the Norfolk Rep; she came to our house once on a tour of wind-power projects. This is a hotel. Mumma stays in a hotel when she’s in Birmingham. Mumma could be in this building. My chilled body manages to break into a sweat. I’m so anxious all I can feel is my hand. And I can only just feel that—my hand, holding Mason’s. I turn and I look at him and I see… If I’m not in the village anymore, he’s got to be light-years—light-years—away from the world he knows. Or not. He catches me looking at him and raises his eyebrows at me, eyes crackling with excitement.

  “I’ll show you to your room,” Diamond is saying, nodding at another mumma behind the reception desk, a mumma who is wearing a once-was XY-type suit, very fancy: black trousers, black jacket, black vest (Plat wore one once and looked amazing in it!) with a green bow tie and a very frilly orange shirt.

  I didn’t think we’d actually have to be staying here, and in any case, we most certainly can’t afford a room.

  “We’ve got nothing else to trade except the vodka,” I tell Diamond.

  “Do keep quiet,” she says, ushering us toward a door.

  I follow, dragging Mason by the hand. I just want to get out of this public space. I’m so freaked out right now I’ve even forgotten how cold I am, and one look at Mason gawping tells me he has also forgotten. It is against courtesy to stare, and he’s staring. In my mind, this is just like the train, and I have to remember: no one would think in a million years that Mason could be a boy. The same way I would not have thought in a million years that a quiet-ish person called River could end up killing a man.

  Diamond presses a button at the side of a shiny silver door, and the door slides open, and inside…

  It’s not a bedroom, as my hick self had thought it somehow perhaps could be. This is an elevator. I’ve never been in one.

  “After you,” she says.

  We go in. She follows.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this. Waste of resources etcetera, etcetera, but honestly, my feet are killing me!” she says, pressing another button inside the elevator.

  The doors slide shut and the elevator moves—UP—leaving my stomach down. I’ve flown in planes and Mariam’s Explorer, but I am not accustomed to this pure sensation of vertical acceleration with no view to help my brain understand the movement. My stomach surges up faster than the elevator. I shut my eyes.

  “You’re from the country, aren’t you?” I can hear Diamond saying.

  DING!

  I open my eyes at the sound, see the door slide open, and I’m the first out, bursting out of that elevator. Mason, shrugging his shoulders at me, follows. Diamond strolls out after us, leads us up a flight of stairs.

  Stairs are good. Stairs are solid. The elevator, apparently, only goes up so far, as does the heating, which is a thing Diamond mutters about as we climb and climb and climb, the chill in the air coming back with a vengeance, so fierce not even the work of muscles can truly warm against it.

  The higher we go, the more deserted the place seems until we’re passing hallways so packed with stored junk the rooms cannot possibly be used for guests.

  And still we go higher, until we run out of stairs.

  We stop in a hallway that is different to the others. It is smaller and free of junk. The carpet, though ancient, is plush and soft underfoot.

  “River! Come and look at this!” says Mason.

  From the tall window at the end of the hall, there is the most stunning view of Birmingham: the snowy city laid before us.

  Diamond leans against the glass, her back to the view, studying Mason.

  “I don’t know what you are,” she says.

  Mason looks at me.

  “He’s a boy,” I tell her. It feels like the most gigantic, dangerous confession.

  She gives me the most withering look. “I’m a geneticist.”

  “You’ve been modified, haven’t you?” she says to Mason. “You’ve been created.”

  Mason shrugs, uncomfortable, angry.

  “We just need to find his mumma,” I tell her, gripped by a sudden fear that she might be about to call H&R…but she wouldn’t, would she? Why would she bring us all the way up here just to do that?

  “I had to see you with my own eyes. So, now I’ve seen you,” she says. “You never came here. You need to get out as qu
ickly as possible, and you don’t ever come back. Never speak of this. I’ve destroyed all records. There is no trail. There is no trace. There never would be anyway, but in this case double, triple, quadruple NOTHING. You were never here. Are we clear?”

  I nod. I feel frightened.

  “So you can keep this pretty little diamond,” she says, holding out Kate’s ring. “Payment is refused.”

  I hold out my shaking hand because I don’t know what else to do. She drops the ring into my palm. My palm closes on it. It was—always—a heartbreak of a trade. Too precious.

  “What about his mumma?” I ask her.

  “Every child is our child,” she says. “Even this one.”

  She points at the only door in the hallway.

  “She’s in there?” Mason asks.

  Diamond nods, takes one last look at Mason, turns, and trudges back down the stairs.

  I cannot be more shocked than Mason, but I do feel very shocked. I don’t know what I had thought would happen, but somehow it feels as though this moment has come way too fast…for me, because this is goodbye. Suddenly, I feel I want to do that, to say a proper goodbye to him, but there is no time for that now. No time and no emotional space; he is shaking again, but not from the cold.

  “Go ahead,” I murmur.

  “What if she doesn’t want me?”

  My heart floods with pity. I take him by the hands. “She came here for you.”

  He stares back at me from a place I cannot imagine. His hands slip from mine and he approaches the door. He hesitates.

  He knocks.

  “Yes?” calls a voice from inside. An anxious voice.

  Mason opens the door.

  There is a person standing there, in the middle of the room.

  And I look at her, and in her face…I see Mason’s.

  “My son!” she whispers.

  In her arms, the boy who doesn’t cry cries.

  It is too private a moment. It feels so wrong that I am there. So there will be no goodbye at all. I turn away.

  The journey seems even longer on the way down. The stairs seem to go on forever. I am crying. I am crying for Mason and all the lost boys. And in my tears, I taste the bitterness of the granmummas.

  Chapter 29

  Descent

  There is nowhere to hide from Mumma.

  She is there in the lobby of the hotel. She has seen me; I have seen her. There is nowhere to hide, and I wouldn’t want to anyway—all I want is the hug her open arms offer.

  “River!” she says softly, cradling me as I sob. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong? Darling! What on earth is wrong?”

  Over her shoulder, I see them: Mason and his mumma, hurrying into the lobby. They have rushed after me, Mason scanning this way and that, seeking me out until he sees me—and sees Mumma. He looks at me; I look at him…and I shake my head. It is the tiniest movement. It is enough. He gives a nod.

  He and his mumma leave.

  So there was a goodbye of sorts. There was a goodbye after all.

  “What are you doing here?” Mumma says again, less softly now, easing me away so I face her.

  “I don’t know,” I say, which feels very true somehow. “I just want to go home.”

  She eyes me with concern. And puzzlement. And suspicion.

  “Really, Mumma, I just want to go home. There’ll be a train and—”

  “Is Kate with you?” she asks.

  She might as well be, I’m thinking. She’s the past, and the past is always with us.

  “No. I’m here alone.”

  Now I am. Now I am here alone.

  “Has she… Did Kate send you here?”

  “Mumma, I want to go home.”

  My mumma hugs me. “Then you go home,” she says. She releases me from her embrace. “I can’t come with you, I have to be at the Council. I’ll be home tomorrow, then we can talk. Will you be okay?”

  “Yes.”

  I will be okay. When I am home, I will be okay.

  “River, you have done the right thing,” Mumma says after a pause.

  I stare at her. How could she know about Mason and his Mumma? Kate would never have told her. No granmumma would have told her.

  “Your silence has protected everyone,” she says.

  “I don’t understand…”

  “If you had spoken on record at the court, it wouldn’t only have been your future at stake; it would be everyone’s future. River, the XYs are being traded for a new satellite. Without communication, we are nothing.”

  “The deal. That’s the trade deal with China?”

  “And the rest of the world.”

  My brain feels as though it is landing hard, back into a reality it can just about make sense of. A reality that is meaningful to me: “The Dreambird…”

  We will all help one another. A demonstration of engineering excellence from India. The next time the plane comes here, the visit won’t be such a secret. At the moment, we’re all just working out who plays what part in this.

  “That means you too, River,” she says, as I stand there, brain crackling. “So go home, do—and take care.”

  I nod. Who plays what part? I am River, and I am going to build satellites.

  “Yes, Mumma,” I tell her. “Yes.”

  And I hug her and I kiss her.

  “River, what are you doing here?” she says.

  It feels like my mind just hit the bottom of the stairs and bounced. It went down. It bounced. It went up. It lands in a smush.

  “It’s confidential,” I tell her.

  • • •

  I walk to the station. Birmingham is a blur around me. Inside my head, my mind is also a blur.

  I wait for my train.

  My train arrives.

  My train leaves.

  I am not on it.

  I go back up to the concourse. I stand in line for a turn at a computer. Without communication, we are nothing. There is only one person I want to communicate with right now. I just need her voice to quiet the clamor in my head.

  Plat cannot hide her astonishment as my face pops up on PicChat in the middle of a national discussion she’s attending about…Tess? That book Plat told me about ages ago—they’re still discussing it?

  “Apologies,” Plat announces to the group. “I have to go.”

  She clicks off every face on the screen until we are alone. For a moment, we just look at each other, love in every pixel.

  “Why did you abstain from the court?” I ask her.

  She leans in to the screen. There won’t be anyone else in the study room with her, of that I’m sure; no one else has the time or the brain space to worry about once-was literature. She leans in, I know, because she wants us to be close.

  “I abstained because I’m just not sure—not sure enough—what the right thing to do is. I’m still not sure. I think, perhaps, that wouldn’t stop me from speaking. The whole GM XY trade situation—”

  “You know about that?!”

  “The court was told: we’re trading XYs.”

  “They were told?!” I whisper.

  “They were told. Of course they were told. People needed to understand how Mason was even here alive in the first place. And then there was the question of how…that other XY came to be here. The 150 knows everything—and the 150 decided.”

  “149. You didn’t vote.”

  “148. Nor did you.”

  “I couldn’t, could I? I was asleep.”

  “And now you’ve woken up.”

  “Plat, please—tell me what to do.”

  “Come home.”

  “Tell me!”

  “I’m not your mumma or your granmumma.”

  “I know that!”

  “River, some people might be willing to take thi
s issue further, no matter how much trouble it might cause…but not like this,” she says. “No one wants this trouble. Not when it involves one of us.” When I have nothing to say, she adds, “And I feel the same way. I Agree.”

  “I don’t,” I tell her.

  We stare at each other.

  “Then you’d have to speak to the National Council.”

  She knows as well as I do that I could not possibly stand in front of the National Council, in front of the world, because all proceedings are streamed and accessible, and—

  “Plat—”

  “No. I know what you’re going to ask me, and no. I won’t speak for you. Not even an email. Not even an anonymous email. If this were just—hah! ‘just’!—a question of starting up a discussion about the XYs, I might be prepared to speak, but it isn’t, is it? It’s about you, River. If you want to put a noose around your neck you’re going to have to do it yourself.”

  “And if I did?” I ask her. “If I did speak?”

  “One question first?”

  “Anything.”

  “Is this about love?”

  “What?”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Plat!”

  “Anything. You said anything.”

  “No! I don’t love him!”

  “Liar.”

  “No!”

  “Liar.”

  “Why are you even asking me this?!”

  “Because it’s the first thing the council will think.”

  “I don’t see why!”

  “Because it’s traditional! It’s once-was! It’s girl loves boy! Half the council are granmummas—this is what they’ll think! They’ll think the only reason you’re doing this is because you are in love with him.”

  “Well, they can think what they like—”

  “Plus, it’s written in the case report.”

  “Someone said that?! Someone said—”

  “That it is possible you are in love with him.”

  “Who said it? Who said that? Plat—tell me, or I’ll go and look for myself.”

  “You can’t. The case report is locked.”

  “No case is ever locked!”

  “No case ever involved a situation like this.”