Rock art discovered in northern France, around four thousand years old. Depicts the ‘curbing’ procedure – also known as male genital mutilation – in which key nerve endings in the penis are burned out as the boy approaches puberty. After the procedure – which is still practised in several European countries – it is impossible for a man to achieve an erection without skein stimulation by a woman. Many men who have been subjected to curbing will never be able to ejaculate without pain.
CAN’T BE MORE THAN SEVEN MONTHS LEFT
* * *
Allie
Roxy Monke has disappeared. Allie saw her at the party, the staff say they saw her leaving, there’s security camera footage of her car driving out of the city, and then nothing. She was heading north, that’s all they know. It’s been eight weeks. There’s been nothing.
Allie’s spoken to Darrell on videochat; he looks terrible. ‘Just about holding it together,’ he says. They’ve scoured the countryside for her. ‘If they came for her, they could come for me,’ he says. ‘We’ll keep looking for her. Even if what we find is a body. We have to know what’s happened.’
They have to know. Allie has had wild and terrible thoughts. Tatiana’s convinced with a sudden upsurge of paranoia that Roxy has betrayed her to North Moldova and interprets every new turn in the hostilities as a sign that Roxy’s sold her out, even given the Glitter to her enemies. Tatiana is becoming unpredictable. At times she seems to trust Mother Eve more than anyone; she has even signed into law a measure making Mother Eve the de facto leader of the country if she, Tatiana, is incapacitated. But she’s having violent fits of rage, striking and hurting her staff, accusing everyone around her of working against her. She’s giving contradictory and bizarre instructions to her generals and officers. There has been fighting. Some of the revenge bands have set fire to villages harbouring gender-traitor women and men who’ve done wrong. Some of the villages have fought back. There is a war slowly spreading in the country, not declared on a single day between well-defined enemies but spreading like measles: first one spot, then two, then three. A war of all against all.
Allie misses Roxy. She had not known before that Roxy had found a chink in her heart. It makes her afraid. She hadn’t ever thought of having a friend. It is not an item she’d particularly felt the need for, or the lack of, until it was gone. She worries. She has dreams in which she sends out first a raven and then a white dove, looking for good news, but no news returns on the wind.
She would send out scouting parties to comb the woods if she knew where to look within a hundred miles.
She prays to the Holy Mother: Please, bring her safely home. Please.
The voice says: I can’t make any promises.
Allie says in her heart: Roxy had a lot of enemies. People like that, they have a lot of enemies.
The voice says: You think you don’t have a lot of enemies, too?
Allie says: What help are you?
The voice says: I’m always here for you. But I did say this would be tricky.
Allie says: You also said that the only way is to own the place.
The voice says: Then you know what you have to do.
She says to herself: Stop it now. Just stop it. She is just a person like all of the other people. Everything will disappear and you will survive. Cut off this part of yourself.
Shut off this compartment in your heart, fill it with scalding water and kill it. You do not need her. You will live.
She is afraid.
She is not safe.
She knows what she has to do.
The only way to be safe is to own the place.
There’s a night when Tatiana calls for her very late, past 3 a.m. Tatiana’s been having trouble sleeping. She wakes in the night with bad dreams of vengeance, spies in the palace, someone coming for her with a knife. At these times she calls for Mother Eve, her spiritual advisor, and Mother Eve comes and sits on the end of her bed and speaks soothing words until she falls asleep again.
The bedroom is decorated with a mixture of burgundy brocade and tiger skins. Tatiana sleeps alone, no matter who might have been in the bed earlier in the evening.
She says, ‘They’re going to take everything from me.’
Allie takes her hand, feels her way along the jangled nerve-endings to the griping and disquieted brain. She says, ‘God is with you, and you will prevail.’
As she says it, she presses in a careful and measured way on this part of Tatiana’s mind and that one. Nothing you could feel. Only a few neurons fire differently. It’s just a tiny suppression, a minute elevation.
‘Yes,’ says Tatiana. ‘I’m sure that’s right.’
Good girl, says the voice.
‘Good girl,’ says Allie, and Tatiana nods like an obedient child.
Eventually, Allie figures, more people will learn how to do this. Perhaps even now, in some far-off place, a young woman is learning how to soothe and control her father or brother. Eventually, other people will figure out that the ability to hurt is only the beginning. The gateway drug, Roxy would say.
‘Now listen,’ says Allie. ‘I think you’d like to sign these papers now, wouldn’t you?’
Tatiana nods sleepily.
‘You’ve thought it over, and the Church really should have the ability to try its own cases and enforce its own statutes in the border regions, shouldn’t we?’
Tatiana picks up the pen from her bedside table and signs her name jerkily. Her eyes are closing as she writes. She is falling back on to the pillow.
The voice says: How long are you planning to drag this out?
Allie says in her heart: If I move too quickly, the Americans will get suspicious. I’d meant this for Roxy. It’ll be harder to convince people when I do it for me.
The voice says: She’s getting harder to control every day. You know she is.
Allie says: It’s because of what we’re doing. Something’s going wrong, inside her head with the chemicals. But it won’t go on for ever. I’ll take the country. And then I’ll be safe.
Darrell
The shipments are fucked up because of the fucking UN.
Darrell’s looking at the truck that’s come back to him. It dumped its bags in the woods, and that’s three million quid of Glitter bleeding out into the forest floor when it rains, which would be bad enough by itself. Except that’s not the only thing. They got chased from the border, they came rough through the woods to get away from the soldiers. But they gave them a trajectory, didn’t they? If you’re running from the border and you’re heading in this direction, narrows down the options of where you might be, doesn’t it?
‘Fuck!’ says Darrell, and kicks the wheel of the truck. His scar pulls taut, his skein hums angrily. It hurts. He shouts ‘Fuck!’ again, louder than he’d meant to.
They’re in the warehouse. A few of the women glance over. A couple start wandering towards the van to see what’s happened.
One of the drivers, the deputy, shifts her weight from one foot to the other and says, ‘When we had to drop a load before, Roxy always –’
‘I don’t give a fuck what Roxy always,’ says Darrell, a little too quickly. A look passes between the women. He pulls it back. ‘I mean, I don’t think she wants us to do what we’ve done before, all right?’
Another look between them.
Darrell tries to talk more slowly, in a calm, authoritative voice. He finds himself getting nervous around all these women now that Roxy’s not around to keep them in line. Once they know that he’s got a skein himself, it’ll be better, but this isn’t the right time for any more surprises, and his dad’s said he’s got to keep it secret until it’s healed, anyway, until he comes back to London.
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘We’ll lie low for a week. No more shipments, no more border crossings, just let it all go quiet.’
They nod.
Darrell thinks, How do I know you haven’t been fucking skimming? There’s no way to know. Say you’ve dropped a load in the forest, who�
�s to know that you didn’t keep it for yourself? Fuck. They’re not afraid enough of him, that’s the problem.
One of the girls – a slow, thick one called Irina – makes a frown and pushes her lips forward. She says, ‘Do you have a guardian?’
Oh, this old fucking noise again.
‘Yes, Irina,’ he says, ‘my sister, Roxanne, is my guardian. You remember her? Runs this place, owns the factory?’
‘But … Roxanne is gone.’
‘Just on holiday,’ says Darrell. ‘She’ll be back, and for the time being I’m just keeping everything ticking over for her.’
Irina’s frown deepens, her forehead huge and crenellated. ‘I listen to the news,’ she says. ‘If guardian is dead or missing, new guardian must be appointed for men.’
‘She’s not dead, Irina, she’s not even missing, she’s just … not here right now. She’s gone away to … do some important things, all right? She’ll be back eventually, and she told me to look after this all while she’s away.’
Irina turns her head from side to side to absorb this new information. Darrell can hear the gears and bones in her neck clicking.
‘But how do you know what to do,’ she says, ‘when Roxanne is away?’
‘She sends me messages, all right, Irina? She sends me little emails and text messages, and she’s the one who’s telling me to do all the things I’m doing. I have never done a thing without my sister’s say-so, and when you do what I tell you, you’re doing what she tells you, all right?’
Irina blinks. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I did not know. Messages. Is good.’
‘Good, then … so, is there anything else?’
Irina stares at him. Come on girl, dredge it up, what’s in the back of that massive head?
‘Your father,’ she says.
‘Yes? My father what?’
‘Your father has left you a message. He wants to talk to you.’
Bernie’s voice hums down the line from London. The sound of his disappointment makes Darrell’s bowels turn to water, as it always has.
‘You haven’t found her?’
‘Nothing, Dad.’
Darrell keeps his voice low. The walls of his office at the factory are thin.
‘She’s probably crawled off into a hole to die, Dad. You heard the doc. When they get their skeins cut out, more than half of them die from the shock. And with the blood loss, and she was in the middle of nowhere. It’s been two months, Dad. She’s dead.’
‘You don’t have to say it like you’re happy about it. She was my bloody daughter.’
What did Bernie think was going to happen? Did he think Roxy was going to come back home and run the bookies after they did that to her? Better bloody hope she’s dead.
‘Sorry, Dad.’
‘It’s better this way, that’s all. This is the way round things ought to be, that’s why we did it. Not to hurt her.’
‘No, Dad.’
‘How’s it bedding in, son? How are you feeling?’
It wakes him up every hour through the night, squirming and twitching. The drugs they’ve given him, along with the Glitter, are making him grow his own controlling nerves for the skein. But it feels like a fucking viper inside his chest.
‘It’s good, Dad. The doc says I’m doing well. It’s working.’
‘When you gonna be ready to use it?’
‘Nearly there, Dad, another week or two.’
‘Good. This is just the start, boychick.’
‘I know, Dad.’ Darrell smiles. ‘I’ll be deadly. Come along with you to a meeting, no one will expect me to be able to do nothing, then pow.’
‘And if we can get it to work on you, this operation, think of who we couldn’t sell it to. Chinese, the Russians, anyone with a prison population. Skein transplants … everyone’s going to be doing it.’
‘We’ll make a killing, Dad.’
‘That we will.’
Jocelyn
Margot sent her to a psychotherapist because of the shock and trauma of the terrorist attack. She hasn’t told the therapist that she didn’t mean to kill that man. She hasn’t said that he wasn’t holding a gun. The therapist works out of an office paid for by NorthStar Industries, so it seems like it might not be safe. They talk in general terms.
She told the therapist about Ryan.
Jocelyn said, ‘I wanted him to like me because I’m strong and in control.’
The therapist said, ‘Maybe he liked you for different reasons.’
Jocelyn said, ‘I don’t want him to like me for different reasons. That just makes me think I’m disgusting. Why would you have to like me for different reasons than any other girl? Are you calling me weak?’
She didn’t tell the therapist she’s back in touch with Ryan now. He emailed her – from a new address, a burner – after that thing happened at the NorthStar camp. She said she didn’t want to hear from him, couldn’t talk to a terrorist. He said, ‘What. I mean, what.’
It’s taken him months to persuade her that it wasn’t him on those bulletin boards. Jocelyn still doesn’t know who she believes for sure, but she knows that her mother’s got into the habit of lying so completely that she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. Jos felt something curdle inside her when she realized her mom might have deliberately lied to her.
Ryan says, ‘She hated that I love you just how you are.’
Jos says, ‘I want you to love me in spite of my problem, not because of it.’
Ryan says, ‘I just love you, though. All the pieces of you.’
Jos says, ‘You like me because I’m weak. I hate that you think I’m weak.’
Ryan says, ‘You’re not weak. You’re not. Not to anyone who knows you, not to anyone who cares. And what would it matter if you were? People are allowed to be weak.’
But that’s the question, really.
There are advertisements on hoardings now, with sassy young women showing off their long, curved arcs in front of cute, delighted boys. They’re supposed to make you want to buy soda, or sneakers, or gum. They work, they sell product. They sell girls one other thing; quietly, on the side. Be strong, they say, that’s how you get everything you want.
The problem is, that feeling is everywhere now. If you want to find something different to it, you have to listen to some difficult people. Not everything they say seems right. Some of them sound mad.
That man Tom Hobson who used to be on the Morning Show has his own website now. He’s joined up with UrbanDox and BabeTruth and some of the others. Jos reads it on her cellphone when no one else is around. There are accounts on Tom Hobson’s website of things happening in Bessapara that Jos can’t really believe. Torture and experiments, gangs of women on the loose in the north near the border, murdering and raping men at will. Here in the south it’s quiet, even with the growing border unrest. Jocelyn’s met people in this country – they’re mostly really nice. She’s met men who agree that the laws are sensible for right now, while they’re at war. And women who’ve invited her in for tea in their houses.
But there are things she finds easy to believe, too. Tom writes about how in Bessapara, where she is right now, there are people doing experiments on boys like Ryan. Cutting them to pieces to find out what’s happened to them. Feeding them big glops of that street drug called Glitter. They say the drug’s being shipped out of Bessapara, pretty near to where she is. Tom’s got Google maps of the location on the site. Tom says the real reason the US army is stationed where she is, in the south of Bessapara, is because they’re protecting the supplies of Glitter. Keep everything orderly, so Margot Cleary can arrange her shipments of Glitter from organized-crime syndicates to NorthStar, who sell it back to the US army at a marked-up price.
For more than a year, the army had been giving her a small regulation packet of a purple-white powder every three days, ‘for her condition’. One of the sites Ryan showed her said that the powder makes girls with skein abnormalities worse. It increases the highs and the lows. Your system becomes dep
endent on it.
But now she’s OK. She’d say it was like a miracle, but it’s not like anything. It was an actual miracle. She was there for it. She prays every night in the dark in her bunk, closing her eyes and whispering, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ She’s been healed. She’s OK. She thinks to herself, If I was saved, there must be a reason.
Jos goes to look at the unused packets stashed under her mattress. And at the photos on Tom Hobson’s site of the drugs he’s talking about.
She texts Ryan. Secret phone, burner, he changes it every three weeks.
Ryan says, ‘Do you really believe your mom’s made a deal with a drug cartel?’
Jos says, ‘I don’t believe that, if she had the opportunity, she wouldn’t.’
It’s Jocelyn’s day off. She signs a jeep out from the base – she’s just going for a country drive, meeting up with some friends, that OK? She’s the daughter of a Senator tipped to run for the big house at the next election and a major stakeholder in NorthStar. Of course it’s OK.
She consults the print-outs of the maps from Tom Hobson’s website. If he’s right, one of the drug manufacturing centres in Bessapara is only about forty miles away. And there was that weird thing that happened a few weeks earlier: some of the girls from the base chased an unmarked van through the forest. The driver shot at them. They lost it in the end, and reported it as possible North Moldovan terrorist activity. But Jos knows what direction it was heading in.
There’s a lightness in her as she gets into the jeep. She’s got a half-day furlough. The sun is shining. She’ll drive down to where the place should be and see if she can see anything. She’s feeling light-hearted. Her skein is humming strong and true as it always does now, and she feels good. Normal. It’s an adventure. Worst comes to worst, she’ll have had a nice drive. But she might be able to take some photos to put online herself. But it might come out much better than that; she might find something that would incriminate her mother. Something she could email Margot and say: If you don’t back the fuck off and let me go and live my life, these are going straight to the Washington Post. Getting photographs like that … that wouldn’t be a bad day at all.
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