As I paced along the endless corridors I worked out I had slept for over ten hours, something I cannot remember ever doing back in 2011. I’d slept a lot in Gardenia too, maybe it was to do with the pace of life, something in the water, I’ve no idea. As I passed by a huge viewing window near the front of the ship, I noticed the weather outside looked rather different to anything I’d seen on the first leg of our journey.
For some reason the sea looked lower down but it didn’t look calm. There was the most horrendous gale blowing, the waves were gunmetal grey as aggressive rollers approached the ship and disappeared beneath us. I stood still for a moment to see if I could sense any movement. Nothing, not even a mild up-and-down motion. The ship was absurdly stable, while all around us the sea had gone bonkers. I observed the angry ocean for a while and soon understood that the reason the sea looked lower was because the Yin Qui was only in contact with the tops of the huge waves beneath us. I admit that it didn’t really make sense and I would have loved to have had access to the outside to see what was going on, but I knew this was pointless, I’d be blown away in seconds.
I entered the front-facing restaurant or eating area, which was already busy with passengers. Somehow I knew where to go and I sat at a large table looking out over the savage seascape outside the long windows. I was sitting with a lot of people I’d never seen before and was immediately aware of many of their names, dates of birth and family connections. I didn’t want that much information so I felt myself tighten up, I withdrew in some way and the noise of the information stopped. I picked up a small fruit knife from a container before me and started to peel some fresh fruit conveniently piled up in wooden bowls in the centre of the table.
A moment later a tall North African man poured me a cup of coffee, I thanked him and drank with relish. As I put the cup down a name entered my head. Anne Hempstead. I turned to my left and there she was, sitting beside me.
‘Oh, Anne,’ I said trying to cover my shock. ‘How are you?’
‘Congratulations on your speech yesterday.’
‘Oh, well it wasn’t really a speech, I don’t enjoy that kind of thing.’
It felt as if she wasn’t really interested in anything I had to say, her face stern and she wasn’t looking at me.
‘You know you turned the vote,’ she said, as she too started to cut up fruit. I glanced nervously at the knife in her hand, it was big enough to do some serious slashing.
I shook my head. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Yesterday, the vote at the assembly, the proposal was rejected by a majority of one thousand two hundred and fourteen.’
‘Wow, is that good?’
‘I personally don’t think it was good, no, but then what do my opinions mean? You are a man, as long as you’re happy that’s all that counts isn’t it, Gavin?’
I didn’t know how to react. Well, I knew that the best possible reaction was to say nothing, which is what I did.
My silence certainly didn’t stop Anne Hempstead talking.
‘It was neck and neck, there are seventy thousand global delegates with voting rights so a majority of one thousand or so is a close call, but it got through, only a few hundred abstentions.’
‘Wow, seventy thousand! I can’t imagine how that works.’
‘It works very well, oh but wait, of course it can’t work well because men don’t run the system do they, Gavin?’
Again I said nothing in response to this. It seemed pointless, as it was obvious that women were in total control so what was all this whining about men good for?
‘Your presence was seen as decisive,’ said Anne after a short period of silence. ‘How do you feel about that?’
‘I don’t know. How should I feel?’
This response clearly baffled the rather hostile woman, there was something about Anne Hempstead that got on my nerves and I couldn’t work out why it was. Why should I feel annoyed by this woman? Okay, she was making rash assumptions about me based on my gender, but that said so much more about her than it did about me. I finally decided what annoyed me was her assumption that she could just sit next to me and tell me what I thought while I was having my breakfast. Maybe that’s what journalists are like, maybe it was nothing new. I’d never met a journalist back in 2011, I’d never been important enough to warrant their interest.
‘I wondered if you felt good about the fact that you have, in effect, helped ensure the continuation of the oppression of women?’
I smiled at her because I knew this was nonsense. I’d done nothing of the kind, I’d just ummed and ahhed in front of thousands of the most powerful people on the planet, who happened to be women and they’d clapped a bit.
‘The speech Nkoyo gave was far more impressive than anything I muttered,’ I said eventually.
‘Are you having sexual relations with Nkoyo Oshineye?’ she asked. It’s almost pointless to describe the question as blunt. It was like being hit over the head with a brick.
‘Blimey, no! But anyway, it’s nothing to do with you. Who the hell are you?’
‘You know who I am, I’m just trying to get a story.’
‘There isn’t a story. My name is Gavin Meckler…’
‘Yes, I know, you shouldn’t be here but you are,’ she mimicked rather cruelly. ‘Yes, we’ve all heard that before, but why are you really here? That’s what I want to know.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘do you really think I’m part of some kind of conspiracy thing? I’ve been brought through time by some kind of weird unknown technology because I am a man who can father male babies? Is that it?’
‘Do you have a better explanation?’
That stumped me because I didn’t. Nothing made sense anyway, so the fact that I could be a mere pawn in some massive, time-dilating sub-governmental conspiracy was just as possible as the chances that I’d arrived in Gardenia and the Squares of London by pure time-dilation fluke.
‘If the Institute hoped to swing the vote by your presence, then they’ve been remarkably successful don’t you think?’
‘Are you asking me or are you positing questions that have the answer within them?’ I said, feeling rather clever. That feeling didn’t last long.
‘Gavin, you are being used as a dupe, you are being wheeled out at big international gatherings as proof that men from the past weren’t as bad as we’ve been told, but you know the truth don’t you?’
‘Do I?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Anne. There was something unpleasant about the way this woman looked at me. ‘You know that men were far worse than we’ve been told. You cut off young girls’ genitals, you said your male God told you to do it. You threw acid in the faces of young women, you raped women to death and left their mutilated bodies on the street to rot as a way of showing other women what would happen to them if they didn’t obey their patriarchal masters. You know that’s the truth don’t you?’
‘Umm, how about no?’ I said channelling my annoying brother; that was something he always said when I accused him of taking something of mine when we were kids. ‘It wasn’t like that.’ I said in a droning tone. ‘You’re making it up. I wasn’t like that, no man I ever met was like that, blimey, it was anything but like that.’
My response was pointless, Anne Hempstead knew what she knew and she wasn’t going to let me tell her otherwise.
‘Now you’ve landed here and seen that you can’t get away with that kind of thing anymore you’re playing all innocent and surprised and supportive. You are just what the pro-man lobby groups needed, some kind of proof that men aren’t really dangerous. I know you’re dangerous, Gavin Meckler, you are a virus that will spread and destroy everything we’ve built. That’s the truth isn’t it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, and I suddenly felt Nkoyo’s presence.
‘Can I help you, Anne?’ it wa
s Nkoyo’s voice coming from behind me.
‘It’s a bit late for that isn’t it, Nkoyo?’ spat Anne. ‘I’ll leave you with your precious man.’ She gave me one last look of unadulterated hatred then got up and walked away, soon lost in the crowds by the entrance.
‘You okay?’ asked Nkoyo.
‘Um, well, I’m still here,’ I said. ‘I wish I understood what she was on about. Is she one of the mad women who can’t find a man?’
‘No, Gavin, women like Anne Hempstead don’t want to find a man, quite the opposite. She is a prominent worder who supports the Weaver movement, she is very upset about the vote yesterday.’
‘Oh right, she’s an actual Weaver woman.’
‘Oh yes, a very famous one.’
25
A World Built by Women?
For the rest of that leg of the trip on- board the Yin Qui I didn’t catch sight of the spiky Anne Hempstead which was a bit of a relief. I worried about her though. I worried about what she’d said and the contempt she held me in purely because of my gender. I admit this was a new experience for me. I’m not trying to claim total ignorance of the rights of women, votes for women, of feminism and all that stuff. I’d heard plenty about it back in 2011 but it never really had much effect on my life. I just did what I did, tried to get along with Beth – okay I failed at that most of the time and ended up baffled, but at least I tried.
I’d heard about moronic and barbaric practices in parts of the world that cruelly affected women but obviously I didn’t have anything to do with them personally. If I ever happened to read a story about them in the Sunday papers, which was rare, I’d be as appalled about it as the women in the General Assembly building obviously were. Try as I might, I just couldn’t see myself as some big, violent, bullying oppressive patriarch, but maybe I’d been living under an illusion. I’d have assumed that after at least one hundred and fifty years where women ran the joint, all the stuff that men had done in the past would be forgotten.
England had been at war with France a hundred and fifty years before I was born and people weren’t still going on about it. Okay, we’d been at war with Germany forty years before I was born and people went on and on about that all the time, and yes, people in Northern Ireland had been killing each other for donkey’s years and I never really understood that. They seemed obsessed about some weird battle that took place four hundred years before but that was the exception surely?
The situation in 2211 felt different; to see so many powerful, independent women who weren’t oppressed slaves or perpetually pregnant housewives but who were still really angry and anxious about the men around them was really confusing. I kept wanting to say, ‘get over it, love,’ but something told me this probably wouldn’t be constructive.
Where I was maybe having serious problems was in accepting that women had been behind the amazing technological advances I’d seen. Things like the Yin Qui and the Nyumbu trains, the incredible buildings and autonomous transport systems, were they built by women? I admit I kept thinking ‘did a woman really design this?’ and ‘was this really built by a woman?’ I was sceptical that they’d be able to do it and that thought alone made me stop and reconsider. Why did I think it unlikely that an African woman could have come up with the design and development of the Nyumbu train? It was one of the most incredible pieces of technology I’d experienced, right up there with the Gardenian pods and yes, according to everything I could understand it was conceived by an African woman who had been educated in an African university and who had never actually left the continent of her birth. I was baffled, humbled and it has to be said, challenged. In my experience blokes made things, blokes designed cars, buildings, trains and bridges. Women, in my experience just weren’t interested; well, not many of them. I mean Beth could no more have designed the hydraulic pump system on a heavy earth mover than I could have taught history to a small group of over-privileged children in a private school in Oxfordshire. Could it really be that men had just lost interest in everything they used to be driven to do and had given up and did some gardening and cleaned the kitchen? It just didn’t make sense.
I had time to ruminate on these problems because I was on- board a massive ship that was speeding across the tops of the rolling Atlantic waves on route for South America. I had learned from Nkoyo that we were headed for Rio De Janeiro which sounded very glamorous, the only down side was I was yet again going to appear before some vast, braying audience of women.
‘It’s not like the Mkutano Mahali,’ said Nkoyo, ‘this is a much smaller affair, only five or six thousand delegates and they are mostly scientists. You’ll feel right at home I’m sure.’
‘Five or six thousand! For goodness sake, that’s huge. Do I have to talk to them?’
‘No, you don’t have to address an audience, just maybe answer some questions,’ said Nkoyo.
‘I really need help understanding what I’m supposed to be doing this for,’ I said.
I was sitting in my bed pod talking to Nkoyo who was sitting in hers. It was night, I couldn’t tell what the sea was like outside and there was certainly no movement in the ship to give any indication of what the weather was doing.
‘I understand it must be hard for you. I would only ask for your patience as it will become clearer as the days pass. News of your arrival has spread right around the globe, you are effectively the most famous person on earth at the moment.’
‘I really don’t enjoy being famous,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about it, it will pass quickly, some other event will soon take over and you will be forgotten,’ said Nkoyo. I knew she meant it kindly but that also felt a bit deflating. It was true I didn’t really enjoy the attention but also I didn’t particularly want to be forgotten.
‘So, I’m just a blip in the news cycle?’ I said.
Nkoyo smiled at me, something I always enjoyed experiencing. ‘Yes, that is one way of looking at it,’ she said, ‘but as you can see from the effect you had at the Mkutano Mahali your presence is powerful. The way the world has developed over the last one hundred and fifty years or so has been very different from before as I’m sure you’re becoming aware. Your arrival, indeed your body, is of intense scientific interest. If you are amenable, the Rio Institute which is really the centre of medical research in the world, would like to run some more elaborate tests on you than we can do in London.’
I sat in silence for a moment, was I amenable to being tested by a bunch of South American scientists? I wasn’t sure.
‘What kind of tests?’
‘Well, as you will have gathered, due to lobbying prowess of the Weaver women we are having serious problems giving birth to male children.’
‘The scary Professor at the Mkutano Mahali didn’t look like she’d be that bothered.’
‘Professor Heilman, yes, she is a leading voice in the Weavers, she is a very powerful and influential person, she will be in Rio too, in fact she is on-board.’
‘What, on the Yin Qui?’
‘Yes, she is speaking at the Assembleia Geral but you don’t have to attend that, it’s more of a political rally,’ Nkoyo reassured me. ‘You have been invited to help the Rio Institute and I want to say now there is absolutely no pressure for you to do so. You have to do it of your own free will or all the results will be legally invalid. They want to run physical and psychological tests on you to see if there has been any measurable change in the human male since your era. You are the perfect base measure as I may have explained previously.’
‘Yes, you have explained, I know I’m just a brutish caveman, that’s fine, I’m getting used to it.’
Nkoyo stood up, walked over to me and brushed her hand across my cheek very softly. ‘You are neither primitive or brutish, Gavin, I think we both know that.’
She left the room with what I now completely understand to be an eni
gmatic smile. I remembered looking at the old Mona Lisa in the Louvre gallery when I went to Paris with Beth. I stood looking at that painting for hours trying to understand what all the fuss was about. I knew she had an enigmatic smile because I’d been told that, but when I stared at the picture I saw a painting of a woman, it did nothing to me. The look on Nkoyo’s face as she walked out of our cabin left me in no doubt. That was an enigmatic smile. What it meant? I have absolutely no idea. She brushed my cheek, a very gentle and intimate gesture that, coupled with the smile, left me reeling. A smile that said at the same time, ‘I want you’ and ‘I feel sorry for you’. Enchanting.
26
One Second Scan
Stepping from the cool tranquillity of the interior of the Yin Qui and directly into the hectic, dazzling and utterly overwhelming maelstrom of Rio de Janeiro in 2211 was nothing short of meltdown-inducing overload. It was bloody terrifying.
I would imagine for anyone arriving there for the first time it would be a bit of a shock, but the difference for me was they knew I was coming. When I say ‘they’ I mean all of them, like the entire population of this ridiculous mega city.
I accept that may not be technically true, but if the crowd outside the exit of the massive ship was anything to go by a sizeable chunk of the population came to see me. The Beatles landing in America was a small village fete in comparison to this. Even the huge crowd and the drummers waiting for me on the quayside in Lagos were pretty paltry compared to this bunch.
‘Time to wave again,’ said Nkoyo. I did as I was told and this time the cheer actually hurt my ears it was so raucous. It seemed like people were lined up in tiers, the quayside at Rio was right up against substantial mountains and the city appeared to be built into these vertiginous geographic structures. I looked up at dizzying buildings overlooking the sea, they were ridiculously high but they were also built on mountains that were themselves no slouches in the height department.
News from the Squares Page 26
