“Correct,” says Akesa. “But maybe you hung up before I could say that.”
“Damn right,” says Kate, and ends the call.
The XY is having a shaking fit so massive its whole body convulses. And when it stops, a strange whimpering sound escapes from its lips and its eyes roll open again—just for a second.
I understand what Akesa just said. We can help it to die.
“I’ll get the pack,” I tell Kate.
• • •
It’s hard not to slip on the hundreds and hundreds of spilt apples as I run out in the lane—where there’s no sign of Milpy, but the apple trail tells me she’s lumbered off home, as cross as a horse can be.
I’ve never had to do this before. The pack we need—the death pack—is kept at the house of the granmummas. There is a heart-start, and there is a pack containing the medical tools to maintain life, and there is a death pack: to end life peacefully and painlessly.
My heart is pounding as I open the front door to the granmummas’ huge house, not so much from the exertion of running, but from dread. I don’t know how to handle this—coming to get death—and I don’t know how to handle the granmummas.
There is crazy noise, as usual, coming from inside as I barge through the hall that’s rammed with coats and boots and Casey’s walker and Yaz’s wheelchair, and fling open the door to the granmummas’ vast kitchen, a toasty paradise of sofas, tables, chairs, and comfort. And pumping music.
It is not like anyone else’s kitchen—not just because of its size, but because of how the granmummas like to use it. Card games are being played. Even in the din, books are being read. Manicures and pedicures and makeovers are being administered. Hair is being dyed. Smoke hangs heavy in the air. The rest of the harvest might be a bit of a joke, but the granmummas somehow manage to grow a superb crop of cannabis—not all of which gets traded. They also excel at the production of alcohol from pretty much every fruit, herb, and plant there is; Willow’s horseradish and potato vodka is currently being considered for export trade, though local consumption is high. There are mugs and fancy cups everywhere, few of which will contain tea.
It is their Sanctuary—a small, hard-won handful of happiness—that I am about to destroy.
They all instantly know something is wrong. The music is killed.
“We need the pack,” I tell them.
Courtesy telling. I’m first- and last-aid trained, so I could just take it, but I guess the look on my face tells them something else too: it’s the death pack I’ve come for.
“Oh no—no, no, no! Is it Kate?!” cries Willow as Yukiko flings open the cupboard and shoves the death pack into my arms, grabbing the heart-start and the life pack, and flinging the general first-aid pack at Rosie, who grabs it and hugs it to her chest. At the same time, the rest of the granmummas—all those who are fit and able, and some who really aren’t—are on their feet immediately, rushing to grab coats, to come and assist. Yaz grabbing at everything in her path—walls, cupboards, tables, people—to get to her wheelchair in the hall.
“Who is it?!” Yukiko shouts at me.
“It’s a boy.”
The word explodes. A wave of shock breaks across the room. I’ve seen footage of the weapons people used to have. The word boy is an atomic bomb.
Chapter 4
Protocol
The granmummas descend on our house en masse and in a frenzy of grief and anguish.
When I look around the room in which the boy lies dying, I see so clearly what I have always somehow known about the granmummas but never witnessed. Fury is not a strong enough word for it. There is an unimaginable sorrow that seeps and bleeds and bubbles beneath their toughness, beneath their wild love of fun. Beneath that? There is phenomenal anger. An ancient, complex rage that is beyond my comprehension—yet I feel it.
It is Casey who is most distraught. Casey is pretty much a national legend. In the early days of the in vitro fertilization program, when virus outbreaks in the Sanctuaries threatened to kill the few remaining XYs, there was fear for the very survival of the human race. Casey volunteered for IVF again and again—and again. Three live-born sons. She had three baby boys. No daughter. All three baby boys delivered by cesarean section in a super-sterile IVF clinic right outside the Sanctuary and, once tested to be virus free, immediately handed over into the care of the Sanctuary, as every baby boy must be.
Their mothers are never allowed to hold them. Not even for one second. In the early days, a photograph of the baby was taken and continued virtual contact was allowed—reports of the baby’s development, more photographs, then, as the child grew, direct virtual contact. Exchanges of emails, exchanges of photographs and videos. When the consequences of that became apparent—boys would escape and die—contact between mothers and sons was shut down. It is still an option to have a photograph of the newborn, but granmummas tend to counsel against it. They advise that it is better for the mother not to dwell on it. It is better, they say, to forget. They say this, the generation who cannot and will not forget.
I can hardly look into Casey’s eyes, so great is the pain in them.
They have sedated the boy and administered immediate pain relief. Sweat is still oozing off him; the still-rapid rise and fall of his chest shows his lungs are struggling. Shows his dying-mouse heart is still beating fast enough to burst.
They have to release him. They know it.
The granmummas wordlessly comfort each other with shared, sorrowful looks and hands reaching to touch hands—but, oh, that anger burns.
“He might live!” Heloise breathes, willing it all to be a lie: the now and the past.
Dora, her sister, puts her arm around Heloise.
“He won’t,” she says.
“He might!”
“He won’t,” says Yukiko.
“You know it,” says Dora, holding Heloise close.
She does. They do. All of them know.
“It might have changed. The virus might have…gone away,” whispers Casey, then shudders with tears. Granmummas reach out hands to pat and soothe her.
Rosie softly whispers, “Your boys will be grown men now. Your boys are safe.”
“And this one is a goner,” says Kate.
And this one is a goner. From anyone younger than a granmumma, this would sound despicably insensitive, but Kate lived through the sickness. She was fifteen years old when she gently lifted her youngest brother, baby Jaylen, from the arms of her sleeping mother—the mother who did not want to let him go, thought she could somehow keep him safe from the dying all around. The baby was wrapped in a scarf and held tight—by Kate—on the back of her boyfriend’s motorbike all the way to the airport. One of the last flights to leave. Crowds and chaos. Kate holding up Jaylen shouting, He’s not sick! He’s not sick! Please take him! Take him! Please!
And a stranger, taking him…
And Jaylen gone.
And Kate only realizing when he had gone, watching that plane take off to who knows where, that she still held the bag of his favorite toys, his bottles and nappies, and his little clothes…and the letter that said who he was and when he was born and where he came from. The letter that told who his family was. The letter that told who loved him and to whom he should be returned.
Only he never did return. None of the babies or the boys or the men who survived ever came back.
• • •
“We need to do the right thing,” says Yaz. “You all know it. You all know how it was: no boy or man who caught the virus ever survived for more than twenty-four hours.”
I know (Global Agreement No. 7) Everyone has the right to be listened to, but I’ve always found it fairly (very) terrifying to speak in public. I’m OK at home—with Kate in the house you either toughen up or shut up—but in front of other people, I get tongue-tied. But if there’s one thing I hate, it’s factual errors. My li
fe is math. My future will be NO ERRORS. Errors in engineering kill. If there is one thing that can actually make me talk when I’d rather not, it’s an error. Errors must be corrected.
“Five days,” I say.
For a moment, it’s as though they have not heard me over the din of their own thoughts—but they have.
“What?” says Yukiko.
“Five days,” I say, and I shrug from nerves. “That’s what it said, that it had been running for five days.”
“You…spoke to him?” says Kate.
“Yes.”
“Why…didn’t you say?”
“There wasn’t time.” Fact.
Silence. Horrified silence.
It feels like a 150—like a Community Meeting. No, it feels like a 150 Court—an event, rare, when the one hundred and fifty voting members of our community meet to decide restorative justice. It’s set, very strictly, at 150, because it is thought that is the maximum number of human relationships one person is able to handle in any kind of meaningful way. That’s how any kind of organization works, how industry works—how the whole of democracy works: from community to national level. It’s a gigantic, upside-down pyramid of communication, from the village to the area to the region to the nation to the ever-changing chair of the Global Council. And I avoid contact with it as much as I can.
I’m only having to deal with a tiny—minuscule!—percentage of the world. I’m only having to deal with the granmummas who could make it here, yet I feel as though I am on trial.
All I have done is to be too scared to assist death. I can’t be the first. I won’t, I’m sure, be the last.
“There wasn’t time…” Yaz says, encouraging me to speak.
“There wasn’t! And it…what it said…didn’t seem relevant. I mean…I didn’t really understand what it was saying anyway.”
Kate groans.
“I didn’t! I was scared!”
A roomful of muttering. Kate takes a hit on her inhaler, heading for a serious overdose. I go to take it from her and she bats me away. Bats. It sounds gentle. Kate smacks me in the face with the back of her seventy-five-year-old hand. The force is not deliberate, and she’s too distraught to even notice it. “We need antibiotics and everything else you’ve got. Anything! Everything! All of it! Go get the meds!” Kate shouts at the room.
I’m clutching my face thinking OW! and Meds? Medication?! The granmummas have medication when no one, to my knowledge, ever has anything more than the basics?
“Outside,” Kate barks at me.
Outside. It’s one of our jokes that I really don’t quite get because I can’t quite imagine it. It’s only the sense of it I get. It is, apparently, what a man would say to another man when he wanted to fight him. Kate just says it to me for fun when I complain about something I know I shouldn’t complain about, such as there being too many inedible, crunchy bits in the cockroach stew she’s made.
• • •
“He spoke to you…” Kate is saying to me as granmummas rush past us.
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t understand most of it.”
I can see Kate is in full Kate mode, teetering on the brink of flipping out—a brink from which she pulls herself back.
“What I want you to do,” she says, her hands resting with only slight clawing pressure on my shoulders, “is to write down what he said. Every word that you can remember.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Every word, whether you understood it or not. Understand?”
“Yes.”
Not for the first time in my life, I wish my mumma was here. I love Kate’s love; she’s gruff but understands some things my mumma doesn’t. Things to do with how you feel about people. But my mumma…she’s my mumma.
I sit down at the kitchen table and I write every word I can remember of what happened.
I’m writing it out as the granmummas return almost immediately, depositing drugs on the kitchen table. No one else gets called upon, because these people, they’ve seen it all. Dealt with every situation you could think of. They attend the birth of every girl (and always get absolutely wasted when a child is born healthy), they are on it when anyone falls sick or is injured (if it’s serious—they are scathingly dismissive of minor hurts), but it is death, in particular, that is their specialty.
Thanks to the dying of the XYs, they have seen pretty much every kind of death there is. Even medics like Akesa will consult with granmummas in the event of an illness that is unusual or potentially fatal, and nothing gets more unusual than this: a dying boy they refuse to let die.
A huge sorting out of the drugs happens. Our kitchen table is heaped with boxes and bottles of all kinds of pills and potions. A secret stockpile. It’s confirmation of the granmummas’ spectacular naughtiness and of their will to survive. Not their own survival, no, but children’s and grandchildren’s. Relatively few of the granmummas had children of their own. Every child is our child is their favorite among the Global Agreements. Without it, there would be no future, and it’s that—a future, the very survival of the human race—that they have spent their lives fighting for.
Where normally the granmummas bicker about every single thing—and seem to enjoy it—tonight they are quieter and more efficient than any mumma. Even my own.
They fill the house with their activity.
Drugs are chosen, ground up in the mortar and pestle, mixed with water. A spoon is sterilized to feed the solution into the boy’s mouth. An IV from the life pack is set up. Hanging from our coat stand it feeds water laced with salt, sugar, and a touch of death-pack liquid morphine into the XY’s vein. Its body is stripped of its weird clothes. It is washed, dried, and tucked up in clean sheets and blankets. Two of the granmummas scuttle off to the community washing machines with the soiled linen, then come scuttling back with fresh reserve bedding from their own supply.
My account of the XY’s ramblings written, I now feel useless and helpless. I can only watch, peering around the door to Kate’s room, wincing, stomach churning, as Dora sews up the wound on the arm. Dora, with the best, amazingly neat, needlework skills, elected without dispute to perform the task. Me, not wanting to look but unable to stop myself. I watch her needle puncture flesh. Midstitch, mid-thread-drawing-skin-together, the sound of Akesa’s helicopter.
“So listen up,” Kate tells them all. “There’s a protocol. There’s a no-treatment protocol for boys.”
I see that needle hand momentarily pause, hold itself steady, then continue. Casey softly places a calming hand on Dora’s back.
“Since when?” Yukiko says.
“Since I don’t know when, but that’s what Akesa said.”
“We’ll call Zoe-River,” says Rosie.
Yes, yes, yes! I think at the mention of my mumma’s name.
“Big shot said the same,” says Kate.
“Well, no one’s going to agree with that, are they?” says Casey.
There is a terrible, fraught silence, while outside I can hear the helicopter carrying Akesa landing on the designated spot outside the granmummas’ house, a once-was heated outdoor swimming pool that has been filled in with rubble.
I do agree. I can completely understand the idea of the protocol (because it WILL die anyway), but I find I cannot speak up.
“I’ll head them off,” says Yukiko, leaving, and everyone knows what she means: Akesa is one thing, but “them”—the whole of the rest of the village—is another. Yukiko is not going to stop Akesa, but to stop our community. And I don’t think it’s just because the fuss would escalate if the mummas came—and the teens (even the littler ones). It’s because everyone else in the village would understand the protocol like I do. Because the protocol makes sense. The XY is going to die, because that’s what happens to an XY who leaves a Sanctuary. The XY should not be treate
d, so that doctors can learn from its death. What difference could five days make? It’s doomed.
Everything about this night, this long night, is happening too fast. And too slow. And too weirdly. All at the same time.
I’m pushed farther into the hall by a surge of granmummas. Outside, in the lane, I can hear Yukiko shouting to concerned neighbors, “It’s fine! Everything’s fine! It was Kate! Kate’s fine! Please tell everyone! It’s fine! Kate’s fine!” as Rosie lets Akesa and the pilot, Mariam, into the house.
“You keep your mouth shut, kid. This is not for you to have an opinion about,” Kate hisses at me. It’s not unusual for her to speak harshly to me—so many of the granmummas are almost as blunt—but normally it’s to encourage me to speak up, not shut up.
Mariam, who knows me and knows how much I LOVE aircrafts, shakes hands and kisses a special Hello, how’s it going? on my cheek even as Akesa faces Kate.
“Hello, Doctor,” says Kate—wheezes Kate, because the stress and the sudden flood of damp, wet cold from the open front door and the general goings-on of it all really are playing heavy on her chest. I detect a battle tone in her voice.
Yukiko comes in and shuts the door behind her. “Everyone is glad Kate is well and sends their best wishes,” she announces, i.e., neighborhood invasion averted; mission accomplished.
“Where is he?” Akesa asks.
“Dying,” Kate says, staring her down.
“Let me see him,” says Akesa.
“Why? He’s dying. That’s all you need to know, isn’t it? Protocol,” says Kate.
“Let me see him.”
It’s Casey who calls it. No one stops her or even tries to. She opens the door to Kate’s room, and it’s as though she and the other granmummas inside that room knew that was going to happen. There they all are: posed in defiance. Standing or sitting around the bed. There it is: arm stitched so neatly, IV in hand of other arm, sweat—endless sweat—pouring. Those closed eyes? Not even twitching anymore. That flat, flat chest no longer rising and falling quite so hard or so quickly. Breath…steady. Faster than it should be still but steady.
The XY Page 4