Who Runs the World?

by Virginia Bergin

  ‘I am a girl.’

  Why would I even say that? I do not think I’ve ever said that in my life before.

  I snap off the light and shut the door.

  Despite all the appalling hints of untold horrors I’ve just heard . . . I can’t help myself: I really, seriously, hope it does run away in the night.

  I can’t sleep. I feel small. Small and shrinking. Brain flaming. I want my Mumma.

  It’s hours since she and Kate went to bed. Years since I last crept into her room for a cuddle in the middle of the night, but the urge to now – it’s overwhelming. I extract myself from the creaking pit of the camp-bed and creep up the stairs . . . and I hear him. I hear him crying.

  It’s a hard, choking thing.

  So I knock – quietly – and when he doesn’t answer, I open the door.

  ‘What the FUCK do you want?!’ he snarls at me through the darkness.

  ‘I heard you crying.’

  ‘I wasn’t FUCKING crying.’

  I do not know how to deal with this.

  I shut the door.

  I breathe on the other side of it.

  I hear him: for a moment – him listening, hearing nothing.

  Then the next sob grabs him. He is crying.

  If a person is crying, you go see them. You go see what’s wrong. Even if you cannot help them (or don’t want to, or can’t), it’s the way it is. Even if you caused the crying, you go sit with them.

  I sat with Jade, after I’d punched her so hard her nose bled. Though I was crying too, so maybe she was sitting with me?

  All my life, I’ve never left a person crying . . . Now? I tiptoe away.

  ‘Mumma?’ I let myself into her room.

  ‘River,’ she whispers. ‘Come here.’

  I clamber straight into her bed and she folds the duvet over me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she says, stroking my topknot of dreads. It’s my own creation, my hair: I twiddled and fiddled with it, then got Plat to shave off the sides. Kate says I look like a sea anemone, but I like it.

  ‘He’s crying . . .’ I whisper. ‘But he told me to . . . go away.’

  ‘Oh dear . . . what kind of crying?’

  I think, I feel. I reach down past my own feelings to get to it. ‘Despair,’ I say.

  ‘That’s a serious word.’

  ‘He’s sad – and frightened,’ I tell her, knowing it in my guts. ‘Should I tell Kate?’

  I don’t exactly want to, but I will. She’s the only one who might – might – know what to do. I hear my Mumma breathe, thinking. I’m thinking it too: Kate is exhausted, done in.

  ‘And he really told you to go away?’

  ‘Mm-hm. Mumma? He’s so . . . different. He scares me.’

  She is silent for a moment, still stroking my hair.

  ‘He scares me a bit too,’ she says.

  And that’s how it comes to be that Mumma and I creep down the stairs. We pause outside the boy’s room – my room – and my Mumma hears the gasping snorts of tears.

  We knock, softly, on Kate’s door.

  ‘Come in!’ she calls – immediately, like she’s been waiting.

  We go in. Kate is sitting up in bed – light on, awake, when she should be asleep.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says.

  ‘He’s crying,’ Mumma tells her.

  ‘He told me to go away,’ I tell her.

  Kate, as soft as she is hard, lifts her duvet aside. Mumma and I, we get in with her.

  ‘Surely we should go to him?’ my Mumma says.

  ‘It’d be best to leave him,’ Kate says.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Boys are not like girls,’ Kate says.

  ‘That’s absurd,’ my Mumma says. ‘Crying is crying.’

  ‘Not when you’re a boy. Not when you’ve been brought up the way I think he’s been brought up.’

  ‘We don’t understand,’ says Mumma.

  ‘No,’ sighs Kate. ‘How could you?’

  How I feel won’t let me lie comfortable in this bed.

  ‘Turn out the light,’ says Kate.

  Mumma turns it out.

  Seems as though Mumma can’t lie easy either.

  ‘I need the curtains open,’ she says.

  ‘For crying out loud,’ says Kate.

  We know that tone – it means, OK. Mumma gets up and opens the curtains.

  I wish she hadn’t. With what feels like perfect meteorological timing, a storm is rolling in. This, the weather, so unpredictable and so wild, has been, as far as I’m concerned, the only consequence of the once-was that has seriously continued to affect not just my life, but every form of life on Earth. The weather is wilder than a Granmumma, and will be wild long after the Granmummas have gone. The weather has a looooooooooong memory.

  ‘For crying out loud,’ Kate mumbles, and rolls over.

  CHAPTER 13

  SHE-WOLF

  Only Kate could sleep through thunder and lightning.

  When it’s done, my Mumma stops stroking my hair and falls asleep too.

  They are both snoring. And I am staring; curtains open to a sky that’s clearing, stars popping in the inky night.

  I creep out of the room. I creep upstairs. I wee. I don’t even know for sure that I exactly mean to, but I go to check on him. I listen at the door, and when I can’t hear a thing, I quietly open it.

  ‘FUCK. OFF.’ It speaks at me through darkness.

  I close the door.

  I check my feelings. My feelings are . . . INDIGNANT. That means I should probably walk away.

  I open the door.

  ‘Why are you so rude?’ I ask him.

  He rolls over and switches on MY celestial nightlight.

  ‘What happened to the freaking knocking thing? FUCK. OFF.’

  He’s lying in bed – MY bed – looking like a puffy-eyed zombie ghost boy in the dim light.

  I shut the door behind me.

  ‘Are you deaf?’

  ‘No. Why are you so rude?’

  ‘Rude . . .’ he says, and he laughs – he actually laughs: a dry, hollow rattle of a laugh. ‘What the hell is “rude”?’

  ‘You’re impolite. You’re not Courteous at all.’

  ‘IM-polite. Not cour-teous.’

  ‘You’re doing it now. You’re being rude.’

  ‘Oh, wait; I get it . . . you think I’m an asshole.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Think it, though, don’t ya?’

  Pretty much.

  ‘I just think you’re being somewhat unnecessarily aggressive in your language –’ and your behaviour – ‘and that there really is no need for it because –’

  ‘Christ, kid,’ he sighs. ‘Don’t be vexing me now.’

  I know what ‘vex’ means. Kate says it. What I would never dare to say to her, I say to him: ‘Or what?’

  Behind my back, I’ve got my hand on the door handle – a hand that’s wondering what my mouth is up to, risking provoking this dangerous boy.

  ‘. . . Or nothing,’ he says, after a time – and then he groans, a strange sort of agonised beast moan of a groan.

  ‘Are you sick?!’

  ‘Only in the head . . . This whole thing . . . sucks.’

  I don’t know exactly what he means, I just know how I feel; I’m crazy-tired, yet again, and my whole world, my whole self, is all a bit – all very – wrong. My instinct bickers with my brain for a second, then I sink down against the door. ‘Yeah,’ I tell him, ‘it most definitely sucks.’

  ‘Oh, gimme a break, would you?’ he says, sitting up. ‘I mean – put me straight if I’m wrong here – but you’re not the one at the mercy of the freakin’ she-wolves.’

  I sort of wish I was still standing, with my hand on the doorknob, so I could just say, Kate-style, OK, fine, whatever, and make a very fast exit – and I sort of . . . feel vexed.

  ‘She-wolves?!’

  ‘Ah, Jeez – c’mon, River! I mean I know you’re supposed to be one, and all, but
– for real?! I mean . . . these wimmin . . . I mean – c’mon, River. You know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do! Wimmin ain’t supposed to be like this! Wimmin are supposed to be all – you know . . . femin-ine and female-ish. You know, all ooh and ahh and –’

  ‘Killers! You said wimmin were killers!’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, you know. That too. That and the ooh and ahh.’

  Yet again, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Only . . . I can’t be bothered to even act like I do. ‘What ARE you talking about?!’

  ‘Sex vids!’ he says, as though I should know exactly what he means.

  I stare right back at him. At his alien weirdness.

  ‘Don’t say you’ve never seen one . . .’ he says, a confused half-smirk on his hairy zombie ghost-boy face.

  ‘I’ve never seen one.’

  ‘Sure you have!’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  The smirk transforms itself into a frown.

  ‘Well, that might explain a few things . . .’ he says.

  ‘Like what?!’

  ‘Nuthin’.’

  ‘LIKE WHAT?’

  ‘Like you ain’t like a girl’s supposed to be. Like none of these wimmin are! I’ve seen them. I’ve been watching. They’re not right.’

  ‘According to . . .’

  ‘No – come on! Don’t give me that! If you truly ain’t seen your first sex vid yet – and you shoulda done, how come you ain’t? – you’ve seen game wimmin, right?’

  I squint at him. Global Agreement No. 7 says Everyone has the right to be listened to – and I am being tested by it, right now, because I have the feeling this is not something I want to listen to.

  ‘Wimmin in games, they’re pretty much the same – ’cept some of them are kick-ass too. Cruel, kick-ass beoo-tiful killers. They ain’t hairy in the pits and legs. They look like wimmin, even the ones don’t wear lipstick, or got short hair. They’re wardrobed like wimmin. They’ve got nice clothes. You know, that fit tight. And I’ll tell you another thing, River, wimmin wear brassieres.’

  It’s as much as I can do to stop myself banging my head against the door to shake the amazement from my head. What is it – he – talking about?! I pull myself together.

  ‘Up until I found you, precisely how many women had you met in your life?’

  ‘Plenty,’ he says, lying back down in (my) bed.

  ‘Actually, physically met?’

  ‘You ain’t a woman, River. You just ain’t.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘. . . None.’

  It satisfies me immensely, the silence that follows.

  ‘Wait up,’ he says. ‘Up until you happened to come across me, pre-cisely how many men had you ever met, huh?’

  ‘You’re not a man.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘None – but at least I know some real facts about them.’

  ‘Name ONE.’

  ‘Men kill.’

  ‘OK, name TWO.’

  ‘Oh – take your pick: rape, guns, knives, prisons, war. How about those?’

  ‘How about them, eh?’ he says – but quietly.

  ‘It’s true?’ I ask. I’m actually astonished; all that stuff I’d half listened to, but had somehow lodged in my brain, until this creature arrived I never thought for one moment that people could have really behaved like that. And now this: that people – that XYs – are still behaving like that?

  ‘Only Fathers have guns. And it’s hard to get a knife. You can make one though. If you have to.’

  ‘Rape?’ I ask the question – almost unable to believe there could be any other answer than no.

  ‘That happens.’

  I suddenly feel incredibly cold. I’d get a jumper from my – my – chest of drawers, but this – what this boy is saying – is so chillingly shocking to me, I feel I can’t move. I can heardly even speak.

  ‘. . . Do you know who your father is?’ I ask.

  ‘Father is the Father of the Unit. The FU! The one with the gun.’ He sits up again, looks at me. ‘River, do you know who your father is?’

  ‘No! No one does . . . do they?’

  ‘No! I mean, there’s guessing. It’s all bullshit. Every boy wants to claim the toughest bastard there is for his daddy, don’t they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Yeah, course.’ He lies back down, stares at the nightlight. ‘I keep forgetting you ain’t a boy. I keep forgetting that. Say, has the Mumma got a gun?’

  ‘No! Of course she hasn’t!’

  ‘She’s the boss, though, ain’t she? She’s your FU, right?’

  ‘She’s my Mumma!’

  ‘Bigshot – that’s what I heard the old one say. The Mumma’s in charge of stuff.’

  ‘She’s a National Representative.’

  ‘And that would be?’

  ‘People voted for her to represent them – you know, at the National Council.’

  ‘I do not know, River. Indeed, I do not.’

  ‘But you’re nearly fifteen, aren’t you? That’s what Kate says.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘So . . . you’re probably voting already?’

  ‘Swear to God: I do not know what you’re talking about.’

  I feel as though my world has just tilted on its axis; if I got up and looked out of the window I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw the stars of the southern hemisphere out there.

  ‘You are joking . . .’

  He does not respond.

  ‘People choose people to represent them. People choose people they trust to make decisions on their behalf. Decisions that will benefit everyone.’ In my mind’s eye I see our ha-ha-harvest field. ‘In the long term.’

  ‘This place is weird as hell,’ he whispers to himself. ‘You’ve been duped, River. No one in this world thinks about anyone but themselves.’

  I can’t take any more. I feel as though I’m sinking where I sit – into a swamp of horribleness. I get up to leave.

  ‘See you later,’ he murmurs.

  I can’t help myself. I want facts. ‘Why did you run away?’

  On the basis of the horrible, horrible insights I’m getting into his horrible, horrible world . . . I’m expecting a Kate answer. A ‘DUH!’ of spectacular proportions, because who would not run from the world he is describing.

  ‘I don’t wanna say about that.’

  Then, ‘I thought I’d die,’ he says, his voice dripping swamp misery.

  The swamp of horribleness, it’s soaking right up to my heart. I should have gone while I had the chance. I can’t move. I am trapped in it.

  ‘I wanted to die. I thought I would. I just kept running because I wanted to see the ocean. Do you know what that is? The ocean! Goddamn endless water! Sooner or later, that’s where we’ll all end up. Did you even know that, River? Did you even know every bit of land we walk on came from under the water and that it’s all going back to under the water? It’s all crumbling . . . right from under our feet.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s quite right,’ I say – and I sigh . . . because, you know what? At this moment it seems as right as anything else. ‘The Himalayas would take a very long time to crumble.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he sighs back. ‘I’m tellin’ ya: it ain’t dust to dust, it’s water. That’s where we all came from; that’s where we’re all gonna go back to.’

  I draw a deep breath. It’s as though I somehow know how this will go. I am tired – so tired – but I cannot withhold knowledge.

  ‘Well, you made it,’ I tell him. ‘The ocean is just over there.’

  ‘Just over where?’

  ‘You saw it, on the map. Not the ocean – the sea. Just over there,’ I point at the bedroom wall.

  ‘How far?’

  ‘It takes about ten minutes to –’

  He’s pulling on his cloven hooves. He’s standing in front of me, in Kate’s big knickers, pulling on my satin dressing gown.

  ‘Show me,’
he says.

  ‘I really don’t think –’

  ‘Show me – or I’ll just go myself. The Old One said I could. The Unit Mother didn’t say different. They said I could leave any time.’

  He takes hold of my arms – and I feel a massive flinch of terror.

  ‘Never gonna hurt you. Code of Honour. Show me the freakin’ sea-ocean. River. Please.’

  I don’t move. I can’t move. In the moonlight I watch a single tear roll from his zombie-ghost-boy eye. The possibility that he might be human blossoms weakly in my tired, tired mind.

  Very weakly.

  ‘No,’ I tell him.

  CHAPTER 14

  A CHAT

  Nudity.

  Over breakfast after not-enough sleep, me and Mumma sit at the kitchen table, faces screwed up with the effort of trying to comprehend what it is that Kate is saying. The ‘chat’ she wanted to have – postponed – is now happening, and it’s the weirdest chat we’ve ever had.

  Kate is saying that it is not OK to go around with no clothes on – not ever – if Mason is around. I do not understand this. Nor does Mumma –

  ‘But . . . why . . . exactly?’ she asks, frowning deeply.

  Kate, who’s already beginning to get a bit tetchy about the chat, screws her face up too, thinking hard, me and Mumma waiting with bated breath. ‘It’s just how things were,’ she says.

  ‘But . . . too bad, so sad, bye-bye?’ I ask. I’m seriously NOT understanding; it doesn’t make any sense at all – and if it once did, it surely shouldn’t now, when nothing else that once-was is.

  ‘No!’ Kate says. ‘Not in this case!’ Ordinarily she’d have a go at me for speaking in uptalk at home, but it doesn’t even seem to have registered. ‘This has got to be a rule,’ she says to Mumma.

  ‘But why?’ says Mumma – and I am thinking the same. I mean, it’s not like we all wander around naked all the time anyway, but if there’s swimming or we’re messing about trying old clothes on or we’re allowed a winter sauna . . . it’s not a big deal, is it, to be naked in front of people? I mean, even if you really, really, really liked someone, even if you were aching, absolutely aching, to be close to them you wouldn’t – ‘Is this to do with rape?’ says Mumma, speaking the shocking thought that has presented itself in my mind too.

  I know what rape is. Some years ago, Astra, a Mumma in a Community just north of here, was raped. The report of the case was public, as all 150 Court cases are. There was shock and there was anger and there was huge sorrow. Gifts were sent to Astra from all over the region, and as part of the restoration she decided upon, as was her right, she will now advise and support in any similar cases. That’s how restoration works; the person and the Community who suffered must decide how the perpetrator must address what they have done – but they will also decide what they need. Astra chose to advise and support on rape – of which there are so few cases. So few it had almost faded in my memory . . . except we girls got a talking-to from the Granmummas about ‘no means no’ – which didn’t make a great deal of sense to us, because what else would ‘no’ mean?