The XY

by Virginia Bergin

  But when it came to the bell, everyone Agreed—even though no one except the granmummas could imagine what it could be useful for. It wouldn’t do any harm. It could only do good—couldn’t it? A signal the whole village could hear. A signal for unspecified and unimaginable emergencies…that would help the granmummas sleep more soundly at night.

  Unspecified and unimaginable emergencies. Two of those in my whole lifetime! Once, years ago, when Hope’s mumma thought she’d seen an adder in the Memory Garden (it was a slowworm), and once again, when there wasn’t an emergency at all: there was just granmumma excitement and joy.

  • • •

  The bell, salvaged from the crumbling church by Lenny, is housed in its very own Kate-built wooden shelter in the middle of our school “playground”—not that all that much playing happens; even the littler ones have their share of chores and duties. The playground is a once-was parking lot for the once-was home for “old people” that is now our school. It could never have looked or felt like any kind of home, but is just perfect as a school because the once-was bedrooms are now small, quiet study rooms. The wooden shelter the bell hangs in is Kate’s most brilliant creation. We students love it. We love that we can hang out in it, breathing the weather, whatever the weather is doing. She didn’t just make a shelter, she made…a pagoda; that’s what we call it. Kate the coffin-maker didn’t just learn to cut wood, she learned to carve, and to consider architecture—and to imagine… And, with Lenny’s help, she made this.

  Our pagoda.

  Such a crazy extravagance of labor—and loved by all. The bell from the church hangs in the middle of it, sheltered by a wide, low-hanging roof on all sides. Enough to protect it from all directions of weather and provide a great spot for students to lounge or play. Even the naughtiest of the littler ones do not mess with this bell. They have all been shown how to ring it, and there are steps, built by Kate, to enable even the tiniest of the tiny to reach it.

  I don’t need to climb up the steps to ring the bell, but I do.

  I somehow need to feel I have full control of the ringing of our alarm.

  I take the rope.

  It has such a pretty sound, that bell. It is sweet and loud—and frightening.

  Everyone comes running. Of course they do.

  My fright eases as the community comes to the pagoda—I register Plat’s face in the crowd, am comforted—but still I keep ringing that bell. I keep ringing it until my mumma shouts, “River! You can stop now!”

  And in what is probably just a moment but feels like an age, my fright wells up again in a different form. I rang the bell: What for? At this most inappropriate time, I feel my anxiety about public speaking clutch and clang me, fear whooshing in my ears, more deafening than the bell.

  Mumma is conferring with Yukiko and Yaz.

  “Students! In school NOW!” Yaz shouts.

  That’s me. That’s me. That’s me.

  “River, you go inside,” my mumma is telling me, and I feel my hands leave the bell rope. I’ve clutched it so hard with my sweating palms its imprint is upon them in vivid red.

  That’s what I’m looking at, staring at my own palms…and then I look up and realize all eyes are on me.

  I am being bombarded by questions I can hardly even hear from the students who have gathered in the community studies room. It seems it’s not just the boy that’s roaming. There’s a pack of rumors running loose too, none more crazy than the truth.

  My brain judders into life. I’m not sure whether some kind of emergency decision has been taken not to tell the students—though that seems unlikely with the whole village frantic around us—or whether everyone is in such a state they forgot.

  Either way, this is the weirdest and most exciting thing that’s ever, ever happened, and the truth of it isn’t even out yet.

  “What’s going on, River?” Plat asks.

  My heart sighs with relief. I need Plat now more than I have ever done before, more than I have ever felt I needed anyone. I know Plat will help me out; I know that’s why she is asking the question, to give me support and encouragement to speak…but I don’t even know where to start, and the room is so hot with excitement I can feel myself starting to sweat.

  “I don’t know,” I mutter.

  “Liar!” Sweet, a littler one who’s not sweet at all, dares to yell. “It’s chocolate, isn’t it?!”

  Two years ago, the granmummas rang the school bell because they had CHOCOLATE. One planeload of unbelievably delicious Mexican chocolate shared across the whole region. It seemed like an outrage at the time, that they had rung the bell about it. Then people tasted it—and it was agreed that if we ever got proper chocolate again, the bell should most definitely be rung.

  “Of course it’s not chocolate!” Hope says. “Is it?”

  “What’s H&R doing here?!” Jade asks, ignoring them both.

  “I…”

  These are my friends. Even Jade. These are the people I have grown up with. But I’m so out of it right now, so wired with exhaustion and weirdness, I can’t form the words to explain.

  “Tell us!”

  “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” I lie.

  “Says who?” Jade calls me out.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  That is definitely the truth.

  “That’s not fair,” one of the littler ones whines.

  “Is it…a new sickness?!”

  Typical of Hope to ask that. She’s always fearing the worst about everything—and speaking it. She gives the littler ones nightmares. Now she’s managed to scare everyone: the hot excitement in the room fizzles with terror. Sickness is a granmumma word for the virus that killed the males. No one ever did find out where it came from, and the possibility that an XX-targeted mutation of the virus that would kill bio-born females could emerge gets whispered in fright—usually by granmummas—every time more than a couple of people get sick with winter flu or tummy upsets. We tend to ignore their panic.

  “Stop it! No!” I cry at them as Hope’s imagination heats others.

  At least I don’t think so, I’m thinking. Surely if there was any worry any of us would catch anything from it… No! What could we possibly catch from a boy? I realize Plat is staring at me, so worried, too spooked by the sight of my whirling mind to help me out.

  “You’re withholding knowledge,” tries Jade.

  The fifth Global Agreement: Knowledge must be shared.

  “I have no knowledge.”

  I’m not sure every girl in the room except Plat folds her arms in disbelief, but it certainly feels like it.

  “Not any real knowledge.”

  Excitement, curiosity, terror…and now this: stonewalled.

  Out of nowhere—but it’s a nowhere that’s vaguely Kate shaped—it occurs to me that this is my moment, when I could instantly become the most popular and important girl in the school. But this does not feel great, and I don’t even know why. It’s not a fear of the consequences of telling—after all, the truth of this is running loose—it’s the telling itself. The words feel too big and strange for me.

  “I found a boy.”

  And…it’s going to be harder than I thought. Everyone is so hyped up no one even laughs at this ridiculous statement. Not even a snigger.

  “As. If.”

  This comes from Hope, whose ability to imagine the worst and the weirdest has apparently just met its limit.

  I don’t lie (much). Everyone knows I don’t lie (much). I’m not a seeker of attention—the opposite: in school, even after all these years, I am quite shy. They all know this. They seem to have all forgotten it. Even Plat is looking at me like she doesn’t know who I am. Like I have gone crazy or something. Which is how I feel.

  “I did! I found an XY! In the woods. It was sick. And now it’s run away.”

  Stonew
all. With an edge of utter disbelief.

  I know—I do know—how the very idea of it is so preposterous as to be beyond shocking, but it could almost make me angry, their disbelief. They know me. They know I wouldn’t lie (much).

  “It’s true! They’re looking for it!”

  As one, my friends’ minds move beyond the room, making sense of the shouting that’s been going on as everyone who can searches.

  “A him?” Sweet says. If I’ve hardly ever thought about what him might mean in reality, the word itself is almost meaningless for Sweet. You can hear the disappointment in her voice, her hopes of an excitement she can understand—chocolate!—dashed.

  “A boy?” says Plat. “You found a boy?”

  “Yes…”

  In the brief silence that follows, Plat’s eyes meet mine. We have known and loved each other all our lives. “Oh, River!” she whispers, because Plat knows I am speaking the truth. And it’s that, her whisper, her knowing for certain that I am telling the truth, that is all the convincing that’s needed.

  “I’ve gotta see this!” says Jade, reaching for her coat. “Who’s coming with me?”

  There’s a roar of chairs scraping, a mass grabbing of coats, a battering of questions that come too fast for me to answer, even if I could. Where’d he come from? How come he’s alive? Is it really an XY? Is it going to die? Have they found a cure? Have the XYs been released? I feel a hand hold mine—Plat’s. It’s shaking. Her eyes are wide with utter amazement. And in the midst of the madness of there being a boy, this is what feels good: me and Plat.

  “WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LEAVE HERE,” Hope, predictably, points out.

  Jade, predictably, ignores her. “If there’s a boy, I wanna see it,” she says. “IF.”

  It seems not even Plat’s certainty that I am telling the truth can convince some people—and I don’t blame her. I can hardly believe it’s the truth myself.

  Jade runs out, girls scrambling after her.

  “No! No! Wait!” I shout at deaf ears. “It might be dangerous!”

  Should I even be saying this? Why didn’t Mumma or Yaz tell me what I should say? I do not want to scare people, but I want to tell the truth!

  It doesn’t matter. My words are heard only by the creaking door of the community studies room and Plat and Hope. Everyone else has left.

  “The XY is dangerous?” Hope asks, eyes wide with fear. “That’s what the mummas always say!”

  “No, they don’t,” says Plat, gripping my hand harder. “Some XYs were dangerous. That’s what they say. You haven’t been listening properly.”

  “The granmummas say it too,” breathes Hope. I dread to think what the terror in her mind is constructing—I dread to think it because my mind could construct it too. I see the boy in my head, admiring my knife, talking of killing.

  “Some. They all say some,” says Plat. Her grip on my hand tightens. “And they mean men, not boys. It was a boy you found, River?”

  “Yes.” I know what Plat is trying to do—calm Hope. It works, but the effect is not what you’d want: Hope snatches up her coat.

  “They shouldn’t be doing this,” she tells us as she pelts after everyone. It seems even Hope is too curious to miss this spectacle.

  I feel Plat’s grip on my hand loosen, but I am still gripping her hand tight. She turns to face me; in her gaze, I become aware of myself—that I am filthy from the night that has passed and that I am shaking: cold, fear, exhaustion? All.

  “River?” she says to me, her sweet face frowning deep with concern. “Is it dangerous? Is the boy dangerous?”

  In my mind’s eye, the blade of my knife glints. I swear to God I’ll kill you.

  “I think it could be. I think it is. It hurt me and—”

  “Why didn’t you say something?!”

  It is not a question. Plat knows me. Plat knows me inside out. Plat thinks fast—and she feels fast too. She already knows, from the grip of my hand alone, what I hardly even know myself at this moment: that I am too traumatized to speak clearly. I would have trouble coping with speaking in public on a normal day. On this day—

  “Go home and stay home!” yells Plat as she runs out of the community studies room.

  And so I am left alone there. I am left alone, stunned, bewildered, and numb. I can hear the excited shouts of the boy hunt all around the village, but I am alone in the room in which, every Friday afternoon, the whole school comes together to discuss our world. We talk about school issues, we talk about village issues, we talk about 150 issues, we talk about regional issues, we talk about national issues, we talk about world issues. We don’t ever talk about boys.

  I have no coat to grab. I wish I did. I am now freezing; the cold of fear has grabbed deep into my very bones—and I think of Kate, and about how she always complains of being freezing, even in the height of summer, and I think of her now, out with all the granmummas searching for this boy. Out searching for the past in the cold and damp.

  And she will have forgotten her inhaler.

  That thought snaps me into instant action. I run.

  I run down our lane. I burst through our front door. I burst into Kate’s empty room—the inhaler is not where it should be (of course!). I burst into the kitchen: there is Kate, calmly making a pot of tea. She turns to me with a most unexpected look on her face: stern but with a twinkle of excitement in her eyes.

  It is the look she had when I told her I’d hit Jade. I was thirteen, I was way, way, way beyond the age when anyone would resort to violence, but when Jade said the only reason I’d been admitted to the 150 was because my mumma was a National Representative, I punched her. I did do that. I punched her not for me, but because I was so angry for my mumma. My mumma works SO hard.

  And then Jade punched me back, and I punched again.

  In front of Mumma, Kate was stern, but with that same twinkle, and then she later drew me aside and quietly said that if I were ever to hit someone again, I should get it right: throw the first punch hard as you can, because you do not want your opponent to get back up. If you’re going to get into trouble, make sure you really get into it, she advised.

  I have no idea what the particular twinkle in Kate’s eye means; it is disturbing to behold—and then I hear Mumma’s voice upstairs, and a tiny smile of triumph joins the twinkle.

  I go upstairs.

  This is when my life as I know it stops.

  Akesa is in my room. So is Mumma, standing there reading my account.

  “Hello, River,” says Mumma.

  It’s in my bed.

  Chapter 7

  XY

  I sit, aghast, at our kitchen table with Mumma and Kate.

  It is an enormous table, ridiculously large to accommodate those who come from all over the region to talk to Mumma and prefer tea and a warm kitchen to discuss concerns. Or, like the Cornish fisherwomen, come in such number they cannot fit into Mumma’s study—the once-was sitting room. It is a place where people come to be listened to, anticipating fairness and justice, which my mumma always delivers.

  We have just come back from a Community Meeting. Not a 150, but everyone—even the grumbling littler ones, who were rounded up to spend the day in school lockdown—got dragged into the community studies room to hear the H&R crew declare the outcome of the day’s boy hunt: the boy is dead. Casey, who’d hunted along the shoreline of the estuary, produced a muddy, cloven-toed shoe. He must have tried to swim for it; that was the conclusion. And if he tried to swim for it from that part of the shore… Not a single one of us doesn’t know how that tide rips. It pulls—hard—one way on the surface. It pulls—hard—another way below. Its pulling makes the water bounce and tear and foam. There are few rocks below, only constantly rearranged sandbanks, but still the water madly dances in a frenzy of certain death.

  Sweet wanted to plant the shoe in the Memory Garden, the mini-a
rboretum the granmummas keep to remember their lost boys. Hope’s mumma wanted to put a lock on her door. Just in case the XY—

  “I think we can safely assume that the boy is dead,” my mumma said.

  The H&R crew, a long, tiring day behind them, agreed. The granmummas agreed—and it was their agreement that put an end to it all. I looked at my boots to avoid looking into Plat’s eyes. When she came pushing her way through the villagers headed home to reach me, I saw Kate glare at me, and so I just hugged Plat, soaking up her very being.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I told her.

  And then Kate pulled me away, and I…I played my part. I slouched away, as though I felt the same way as everyone else. Exhausted. Defeated. Sad.

  But I do not feel the same as everyone else. I feel angry—and very confused. What happened—what is happening—is a violation of everything. That’s what it feels like to me. Everything that makes the village work. Everything that makes the world work…though it occurs to me that there is no specific Agreement about lies or truth or trust. Does everything need to be written to be Agreed?

  “I know this…must be a bit of a shock for you,” Mumma says.

  I manage one small nod because that’s true, but what has happened to truth this past day?

  “And it is shocking to us all in its own way.”

  “In every way,” says Kate with unusual, quiet sincerity. She’s got the apple brandy out and pours a shot for Mumma—who doesn’t drink—and for herself. “Want one?” she asks me.

  I manage one small shake of my head.

  “I am shocked myself,” says Mumma, and she takes a sip from her glass, wincing as she swallows.

  The fire in the stove, softly hissing, is still stoked up high. The kitchen door open. And upstairs, Akesa sitting next to the bed that is not occupied by me, Mariam and samples from the XY dispatched in the helicopter along with yet another lie: that Akesa had left too. Akesa wouldn’t leave the community unattended. She must have said she was sick, got someone to cover…so that’s another lie told. It’s worse than the virus, how fast these lies are spreading. I am baking alive in the heat of this kitchen, waiting and watching Mumma and wanting to understand—because there must be an explanation I can understand. There has to be.