It was disturbingly reminiscent of Hitler at Nuremberg. This lady knew how to stir up the crowd, and this time she had a lot more support among the delegates although only one of the men was clapping and cheering, the same chap who had clapped before, only this time he was on his feet nodding at the cheering women around him.
I glanced back at Professor Heilman who sat motionless until she turned to me and smiled and gave me a little wink. This I can tell you, was not what I was expecting.
‘Thank you, Professor,’ said the white woman at the centre of the panel. The Professor eventually stood up as the clapping and cheering continued. She didn’t acknowledge the crowd, she walked serenely back to her seat where she was greeted with enthusiasm by a small coterie of similarly dressed women.
Nkoyo leant toward me. ‘Wish me luck.’
The African woman’s voice made the next booming announcement causing the crowd to settle down.
‘The Congressional Investigative Committee on the Future of the Male calls on Doctor Nkoyo Oshineye from the London Institute of Mental Health.’
Nkoyo stood up and across the floor to the large table. She sat down as her face appeared on the screen above the panel.
The white woman at the centre of the congressional panel, for I now understood that’s who they were, an elected group of congress members.
‘Thank you for joining us Doctor Oshineye. We would like to learn what you have discovered since the arrival of the man from the dark times.’
Nkoyo looked relaxed and confident as she sat at the big table.
‘I would firstly like to thank the Professor for a very stirring speech,’ she said calmly. ‘I am sure hearing her words was a revelation to our honoured guest today. The man I have been sitting next to is, as you all know, Gavin Meckler, a man born in the twentieth century. You know his story; you know the strange set of events that brought him to us. What you may not know is the nature of the man, if you like, the soul of the man you see before you today. It has been a fascinating experience to meet and get to know him. As some of you may know, he spent yesterday talking with Olumide Smith in this very city and I am happy to report the meeting was a great success. Both men seemed to understand each other on a deep level. I felt it was important to let you know of this meeting, to let you know that the man you see before you is not a demon, a patriarchal zealot or a religious maniac. It is important for all of us to meet Gavin today. He is very unlike what we might have expected from a man of his historical period and many have seen his arrival as some kind of mystical sign. As Olumide correctly pointed out, this is not the case. Gavin’s arrival into our world is just a currently inexplicable event due to a unique set of cumulative circumstances. As you may recall, there have been other anomalous arrivals through the same portal in the past few years, never, admittedly as large and challenging as Gavin Meckler.’
I was suddenly aware at that moment that eight years before my arrival a number of swallows appeared in the same square I had arrived in. The swallow had apparently been extinct for over a hundred years and so their sudden arrival was very news-worthy. I assumed they had flown in through the same anomaly that I had, although I didn’t realise swallows could fly that high. I’d certainly never noticed any birds above a few hundred meters in my flying experience.
‘What Gavin has shown the members of the Institute in London is that we may have a slightly distorted view of our distant past. I am confident Gavin would agree that there were many aspects of the patriarchy that were negative. I’m sure he would agree that the old system kept women oppressed and that whenever patriarchy and religion died in a particular culture, equality, civil order, technological progress, population stabilisation and improved education emerged. It was never, I would argue, individual men who maintained the old system. It was ingrained into the culture for both men and women. Only the tireless struggle of generations of the enlightened gradually changed the way we live together. That is what we are talking about, the ability to live together in harmony, not against each other or within rigid and oppressive social systems as had been the human habit for millennia. We have learned to live together and through doing so, achieved improved mental health.’
The Chinese woman on the panel leant forward at that moment, she spoke carefully and clearly.
‘I’m glad you mentioned mental health Doctor, this is certainly a concern among those of us not swept away by Weaver rhetoric. Can you give us the long-term mental health implications of a single gender world?’
‘Indeed I can Congresswoman,’ said Nkoyo. ‘Removing men from the timeline of human history is generally thought among mental health practitioners as not conducive to good mental health. It is a fast track to mental pain and disorder. It is what we deal with day in, day out at the Institute in London. The pain women feel over the loss of men has been overlooked. We need men, not, as the Professor rather crudely expressed it because of “the cock”. Not because we need the seed, not because our fathers cared for us, not because we need the companionship of a life partner, no. We need men to maintain the balance within ourselves, the balance of our own male–female personalities. We all understand this, and all the research, all the exhaustive reports from every scientific institution in the world backs this up. Men are part of the human race, without them we will become something else, something unbalanced, something, dare I say it, less than truly human. If there are no men among us, truly no men in the world I suggest that we could be far more susceptible to totalitarianism, to a new form of oppression, not of one gender to another, but from one social grouping to another. The women among us who want to pursue the removal of the male are, I fear, too interested in power and control. I fear they wish to do many of the things we all rightly condemn the old male regime for being obsessed with. We all know in our heart of hearts that it is not men who were or indeed could be the problem. It is us, all of us. It is human beings who, when under pressure, resort to crude means to control the other. If we cannot blame men for all the wrongs of the past because they no longer exist, will we then start to blame each other when we face new problems? Will we start to oppress women who do not fit our worldview? Will we punish women who step out of line? That, sisters – and indeed brothers – is not a world I wish to inhabit. We must live with men, we must know how to live with them, to share our lives with them and accept them as part of ourselves. We need men to grow along with us, to develop more sensitivity and greater understanding of themselves. We cannot do this alone. We need fathers for the balance they bring to our lives, for the richness they can and do impart. A world without men would be barren in more ways than we can imagine. We must turn the situation around, we must let men live.’
Nkoyo stopped there, a silence followed and it was almost unbearable. Then I heard one person clapping enthusiastically, I craned my neck to see if I could spot who it was and I was once again baffled. It was the same man who had clapped so enthusiastically after the scary Professor Heilman. He was soon joined by other delegates in the auditorium. The reaction was slower and more hesitant but it built and built, more and more people stood up and started cheering and whooping and clapping and shouting. Nkoyo’s calm beauty was magnificent. She sat relaxed, arms by her sides, staring around the auditorium in a most regal and yet non-threatening way, a woman whose time had come, a woman who knew she should be where she was. Okay, I was a little bit awestruck but she seemed pretty damn impressive to me at that moment.
When the cheering and applause finally settled, the white woman on the congressional panel leant forward.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ she said softly. ‘That was very illuminating.’
Nkoyo stood up and the applause started again, she walked back toward me and I have to say I felt rather proud. I did a bit of basking in her reflected glory. It didn’t last long.
‘Now it’s your turn,’ she said as she sat next to me. I felt my body spasm with tension. The shock
went through me as if I’d heard a gun go off. This was further reinforced by the booming invisible African woman’s voice.
‘The Congressional Investigative Committee on the Future of the Male calls on Mister Gavin Meckler from 2011.’
I felt a hot flush run over me. It had been bad enough at the press conference in the Institution but this audience was a hundred times bigger. This was an audience of many thousands of people from all over the planet and some incredibly stern-looking ladies who I knew would all be looking at me in the same way the women had done when I arrived in London. Why would they want to hear what I had to say? Then the panic really hit me; I didn’t have anything to say. Nkoyo was looking at me and smiling, she gestured toward the table. The crowd started clapping again, I knew I had to do it but I didn’t know what it was I had to do.
I eventually stood up, bowed a little toward the audience and then for some inexplicable reason I waved. I felt such a fool, why wave? It was pathetic but I was in a blind panic. I eventually found my way to the big table and sat down on the big chair. I felt like a kid, I was a bit short for the huge chair and the table came up to my upper chest. Without warning, the chair rose a little, it was slightly alarming but did mean I didn’t look so much like a six-year-old having his tea.
The applause died very quickly, silence descended, I knew thousands of eyes were on me as I glanced up at the screen. There was my pallid-looking face, full of fear. I swallowed.
‘Um, hello,’ I said. The applause was deafening and for my part very unexpected. I remember thinking that maybe they thought because I came from so long ago I wouldn’t be able to talk, just grunt and kill small furry animals which I’d eat raw. Who knows why they clapped?
‘Thank you, Mister Meckler,’ said the white woman who was now sitting directly in front and much above me. ‘It is very kind of you to join us today, we appreciate this may be a little strange for you.’
‘You could say that,’ I muttered.
‘Please be calm, we wish you no harm, you are not in trouble, we are simply trying to get a fuller understanding of the situation.’
There was a short silence. I assumed they were waiting for me to say something, so I did.
‘I’m very honoured to be invited here today. Thank you. I’m, um, okay, I’m not used to speaking in public like this. I’m just an engineer.’
Without warning another huge round of applause. If only, I thought, if only some of my nerdy engineering colleagues could see me now. Never has anyone said ‘I’m just an engineer’ and had that kind of response.
‘Well, I should say I was an engineer two hundred years ago. Now I’m just a man who’s a bit lost in a world he doesn’t really understand.’
This phrase elicited a sound I had heard before, essentially mass empathy on a scale probably rare in history before this era.
‘Mister Meckler,’ said the Chinese woman on the panel. ‘I would like to know what you think of the idea being proposed.’
‘What idea is that?’ I asked.
‘The idea being put forward by the Weavers among others, that we allow the male members of the human race to die out, to gracefully exit the stage, to be no more.’
‘Oh that, right, yeah, that’s fairly heavy duty,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry, Mister Meckler, that doesn’t translate very clearly,’ said the white woman. ‘Would you care to explain your reaction using alternative phraseology?’
‘I’m sorry, yes. Um, I don’t think it’s a very good idea.’
Another woman, further along the row in front of me to the left was speaking. I turned to look at her; she looked kind of severe and Northern European, very blonde.
‘I don’t think we imagined you would find the demise of your gender to be a good idea, but would you care to tell us why, and maybe explain what life was really like back in the dark times?’
I swallowed and tried to speak slowly and clearly. I would much rather have watched from the sidelines, in fact, I’d much rather be doing pretty much anything other than sitting in front of a panel of the most powerful women I’d ever met trying to justify my existence.
‘Um, well, yeah, okay, I’ve been listening today, um, you know, with great interest. I can see now how things have come to this, how it is seen by your time that someone like me, a man, has been the root cause of a great many problems in our history. I’d never thought about it when I was back in my own time. I was just born a man. I didn’t know that meant anything. I was raised by my mother as most men were back then. I mean I was raised by a woman, my mum was a woman, like you, she was a lady. Yeah.’
There was no discernible reaction from any of the women, I didn’t know what I was saying, words just started to tumble out. I was getting images of my mum and dad when I was a kid, weird flashes of memory, picking raspberries in the garden with my dad on a summers evening, stuff like that.
‘I barely knew my father, he didn’t talk to me much, he didn’t seem to talk to anyone much. He was also an engineer, worked in the nuclear industry, nuclear power, not weapons. So yeah, I can now see how that simple fact affected the way I saw the world and the way I saw women. I definitely can see now that I didn’t really take much notice of women, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate women or anything. Never. I didn’t like the way some men talked about women, you know, as objects, that always offended me. It offended a lot of men but, you know, it just was like that.’
I wanted to shut up more than anything. I didn’t want to blurt out some of the terrible things I’d heard men say, really horrible they were. I didn’t want to say those things, not at that moment. I mean, what could be worse? Then I remembered Olumide, and that made me calm down again.
‘Yeah, so talking with Olumide yesterday made me look at myself, re-assess many things I took for granted. I can see that now, here in 2211, things are very different. I’m not certain they are better, but they are different. Very, very different, yeah. But, but actually I don’t even want to argue for the continuation of men, I can’t, I am one, as far as most of you seem to think I am part of the problem not part of the solution. It’s not for me to say, it’s your world, I shouldn’t even be here much less try and argue that men should be given a fair crack of the whip.’
The white woman leant forward, I don’t know how I knew, but I knew I had to shut up and let her ask me something.
‘Again Mister Meckler, can you use terms that are translatable, we are getting some very confused images here, I’m sure you didn’t mean to say that women should be whipped.’
‘No!’ I said rather too loudly. ‘Oh blimey, fuck.’
My reaction caused a noticeable ripple of distress to surge through the room, I turned and glanced at Nkoyo but she seemed to be above it all, she was just sitting looking calm and serene.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I meant, look, it’s very difficult. All I can say is I think you would be travelling down a dangerous road if you allow men to disappear altogether. Like Nkoyo said, it might lead to a very unbalanced world. I do believe that with all the improvements you’ve made in the world, in many cases despite my gender, you’d be in a sadder, blander world without a few nice blokes knocking around.’
Again I sensed a murmur of confusion.
‘Sorry, is that okay? Do you know what the word “blokes” means? I’m a bloke, a bloke is a word meaning a man, not a nasty, aggressive man, just a regular normal man, a bloke.’
‘That is fine, Mister Meckler,’ said the white woman.
I glanced back at Nkoyo who was now looking at me and smiling. I decided to use my catch phrase again.
‘I thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak, my name is Gavin Meckler. Like all the men on the planet, it seems I really shouldn’t be here, but I am here, we are here and we’d like to help.’
The cheer and the roar of thousands of han
ds clapping made me slightly dizzy, I glanced at Nkoyo who was smiling beautifully, the women on the panel seemed to have lightened up. I think they liked what I said.
24
Lagos to Rio
One of the things I seem to have done a great deal of in 2211 was sleep. When Nkoyo and I had returned to the Yin Qui late that night I felt like I had jet lag. Maybe I had Nyumbu lag, the damn things went much faster than a passenger jet from 2011.
When we emerged from the Nyumbu station at the dockside it was dark, the sky was clear and due to the ingenious nature of the path lighting there was very little light pollution, the stars above us, occasionally visible through the dense canopy of foliage, were breathtakingly intense.
‘Is this the same ship we were on before?’ I asked as we walked across the open quay side towards the massive vessel. It too had very subtle low lighting all over it giving the massive bulk an ethereal quality as if it were a mere cloud of phosphorescent gas.
‘Yes, although it has been across the Atlantic while we’ve been in Lagos.’
We were joined by a small gaggle of people making their way across the open dock area toward the brightly lit entrance of the ship. Once again we were welcomed on-board by Hamisi before we started the long walk through the endless interior of the behemoth of a ship. This time I didn’t have to shake his hand, I guessed I had bought a round trip ticket.
When we finally arrived at our shared cabin I can’t really remember getting into the sleeping pod but that’s where I found myself the following morning. I stumbled out of bed and saw the temporary wall was up between my pod and Nkoyo’s. I made my way along the corridor and into the shower and toilet area. I showered and dressed in my London body suit before heading up to the front restaurant to find some kind of breakfast.
News from the Squares Page 25
