The XY

by Virginia Bergin

  Those words hit me like the smack of an ash branch in the face.

  “River, do you want my advice or not?”

  “I want your advice.”

  “Are you sure? Are you listening to me?”

  “I am sure.” I breathe. I try to be calm. “I’m listening.”

  “I think you should drop this,” she says. “I Agree that this discussion—about the XYs, about everything—needs to happen. It must happen, and I’m fairly sure it will happen soon…but this is not the time or the place. If you speak about what has happened, if you speak about killing that man, there will be many, many more consequences than you can possibly imagine. This is about your life and your future, River. Don’t turn it into a cause—a cause that isn’t even yours. Come home, my love.”

  I bow my head.

  “But I think it is my cause,” I tell her. “I think…perhaps…it’s everyone’s cause.”

  She is silent; I look up at the screen. There is Plat, staring back at me.

  “Then good luck,” she whispers, and cuts the call.

  We don’t do that. We don’t wish each other luck. It’s a granmumma thing.

  Chapter 30

  Words

  I remember this place so well from when we came here as a school: Plat so excited and me too, briefly, because I’d never been in a building like it. The National Council is an old place that was not left to crumble—like the Houses of Parliament in London—but adapted to be energy efficient. I was less excited about the politics. I mean, I knew it was important…but you vote for people you trust, don’t you? And you know what decisions they’re going to make because we, the 150 voters, know exactly what is going on…or we could do, if we wanted to. Plat likes to; I’ve never taken that much interest. Everything is online if you care to look, and everything is discussed if you care to listen. My brain has been so full of my own future I haven’t wanted to listen and think about issues that don’t concern me. Why would I? That’s what representation is for, isn’t it? Same as how I wouldn’t expect anyone who climbed on board a plane I’d built to be worrying about how I’d built it. People are trusted to do their jobs.

  In the once-was, Kate says, no one trusted the people who were supposed to represent them.

  There is an elevator, I see, to enable access. I take the stairs. I push open the first door off those stairs. The first balcony is crowded—and feels way too close to the auditorium. I can see the National Council. The 150 of all our 150s: our National Representatives. I can see the bank of screens on which mummas who are too busy to be here in person can join the debate—and so many granmummas too, the ones who are just too old or too sick to come here. Though I remember the spectacle from years ago, I am still dazzled by it—though not so dazzled my eyes don’t immediately see her: my mumma.

  She’s here, sitting, deep in thought, on a raised platform among the representatives who have been able to attend in person. Their chairs form a semicircle, the idea being—Yaz told us on the school visit—that we, the people in the auditorium, are the other half of that circle.

  I go up higher. I walk up and up and up until, the last door I shove open…it’s a fire escape, I suppose. This last door leads onto nothing but slopes of snow, a crazy roof landscape of angles and icicles, turbines still in the low gray of this winter day, cowls of heat-return funnels stand before me: faceless, howl-mouthed giants with dripping icicle hoods.

  And I stand there for a moment, just breathing.

  For the first time in my life, I feel truly alone.

  • • •

  I go back down to the seats at the end of the highest balcony. There is no one much else around up here, and no chance that I will be spotted, lurking in the darkness.

  The council is in discussion: how to manage the crash-risk from dying satellites.

  I should be interested. I am interested. It would be a very good thing to lose myself in this discussion. This important discussion. It is important; so many things are—Crystal-Rose. Health care. Fish. Comms.

  No one except Plat knows I am here. No one but me has put me here. No one—but me?—is thinking I should speak, so I don’t have to.

  And I know I don’t want to.

  Up here, I am so removed from everything…except the Global Agreements.

  They are written in extravagant gold lettering above the bank of screens. They are written so high above the proceedings below it is as though they are speaking directly to me.

  I close my eyes to them. It is no use. I know them by heart, the Agreements that, after grief and decades of struggle, the world decided upon:

  The Earth comes first.

  Every child is our child.

  We reject all forms of violence.

  We will all help one another.

  Knowledge must be shared.

  We Agree that we need to Agree.

  Everyone has the right to be listened to.

  I have grown up with them. We teens, we quote them—even the littler ones do—but usually only when we do not like what is happening to us. It’s so useful to have them to point to when you want to object to something. These Agreements…they are so deeply a part of my life I have never had to truly think about them, any more than I ever had to think about what a “girl” is supposed to be like—or a boy.

  It does seem to me that every single one of the Agreements was broken after Mason arrived. Even The Earth comes first went down the drain with gallons of hot water and endlessly stoked fires. He had never heard of these Agreements. He had never heard of them because he and his kind played no part in deciding them. And a thought more terrible than all those: they do not apply to him.

  In my mind’s eye, he is here with me now.

  Wow, I imagine him saying. Those are the rules?

  “They’re not rules,” I say out loud, opening my eyes to the empty seats around me, realizing I have, in fact, always thought of them that way. “They’re Agreements…they’re more like…things to aim for.”

  We are brought up to think we are part of everything. That power—decisions—belong to everyone.

  Everyone has the right to be listened to.

  I’ve never thought about what that means. I’d thought it meant people should feel free to say what they think—yes—but that others must listen to them.

  What about the voices that are not heard? How can people listen to them?

  I stand up on my feet.

  My heart is in my mouth.

  “My name is River,” I shout.

  The National Council—the faces on the screens, the representatives—the mummas and the granmummas and the teens who have come to witness our democracy in action…all of them look to see who has disrupted the proceedings.

  I am a tiny dot. I am smaller than the smallest, most insignificant star, one of a countless multitude.

  I am almost invisible.

  I see Mumma. I see the shock on her face. I am so scared. I am so scared to speak. I look, and I see my mumma smile. I see that my mumma is scared too…but also, that she is proud of me. I have found my voice.

  “I am River. Daughter of Zoe-River, granddaughter of Thea-Zoe, great-granddaughter of Katherine-Thea. And I have killed a man.”

  She is riding through the woods on what was once a road. The dotted, white line that used to separate the comings from the goings is crumbling. The asphalt is slowly being destroyed by tree roots, and small plants—so strong—sprout up all over, wherever they can. In another few years, there won’t be any road left at all.

  The horse, who is grumpy, pulls a cartload of cider apples: small, hard, bitter things that will be fermented into some fun. The girl has a backpack stuffed with harvest produce on her back; it is easier to carry it than have to clamber off and on Milpy just for a drink of water.

  Her name is River, and she is an apprentice at the airport.
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  She is also an advisor to the National Council on the future of the Sanctuaries. This was the restoration that was decided upon. It is in keeping with the way of things: if you see that there is a problem, then you must try to put it right.

  On her little finger, she wears a diamond ring. An engagement ring, once-was, given by her granmumma in recognition of her bravery.

  It is an autumn evening.

  Dark is coming soon.

  She is miles from home.

  She feels a little afraid.

  That’s when she sees it: the person standing in the middle of the road.

  Not a Guy. Him. He. His. Male. Son. Dude.

  Just a person. Called Mason. Waving hello.

  A Note From the Author

  Dear Reader,

  I thought I couldn’t write this book.

  The idea came about when a teen friend told me she was studying Tess of the d’Urbervilles in school. (“I hate Tess,” she said. “She’s such a sap.”) I studied the same book—more than thirty years ago. It made my heart sink to think of generations of young people reading a story in which women are oppressed victims and men are the oppressors, no matter how much they might be encouraged to analyze it. I wondered whether it would be possible to tell a completely different kind of story.

  And that’s when I got stuck.

  Although I might have had a lot of fun writing it—and exorcised a few of my own demons along the way—I decided I did not want to create a simple “reversal” of the way so much of the world is in terms of relations between the sexes. It felt, paradoxically, reactionary. It felt counterproductive. It felt like such a story would only serve to reinforce binary notions of gender—notions that cause so much difficulty, and pain, for so many of us. Notions that, in my opinion, hold us all back. And I realized that I had no idea what a world run by women would be like…because I do not know what a woman is.

  That was my shock. Biology is biology—nuts and bolts, bits and pieces—but gender? What is it? What does it mean?

  The more I thought about what gender is and the ways in which our ideas about it are created and transmitted—through family and intergenerational influence, through education and other forms of social and cultural transmission—the more I saw gender as an entirely arbitrary construct. I support anyone who challenges that construct in any way…and I also wondered what the world would be like without it.

  So this story is told to you by River, a teenage girl who lives in a world of women but who has never really had to think about gender until the arrival of a boy changes everything.

  I had no idea how River’s story would take shape—and I found the journey of writing it deeply challenging and surprising. Her story made me think about family and society, democracy and power, expectation and prejudice, and it became, for me, a tale about identifying oppression and finding the courage to speak up.

  And it left me with a question: Who runs the world?

  I wonder what your answer would be…

  Virginia Bergin

  March 2017

  A Conversation with the Author

  This excerpted interview was conducted by Caroline Horn with ReadingZone, originally posted June 2017 at readingzone.com.

  Why did you want to write about a society/global order run by women? How did you decide what that world would look like, and what was your key focus and ambition?

  The answer to this question is too big for one interview! I had lots of reasons for wanting to explore this idea; some political and intellectual, some very personal…but in a creative sense, it was the biggest challenge of a what if? I could imagine—in fact, it was almost too much of a challenge.

  I felt a huge amount of pressure to get the world “right” because I felt I wanted to represent women positively…until I realized that, in terms of gender, I don’t even know what a “woman” is (so how could I possibly know what a world run by women would look like?).

  I decided I was free to imagine the world however I chose, so what you have is a mishmash of ideas that interest me and that I felt could have feasibly emerged out of the dying of males.

  To me, the details of how the world run by women works are not so important in the story—what is very important is that it is a world that is free of any of the pressures associated with being “female.”

  In terms of its timing, why did you decide that it would be set two generations down the line?

  I wanted the main character, River, and her peers to be almost free of the prejudices, pressures, assumptions, and stereotypes that affect girls today. Almost—but not quite. As one aspect of considering how our ideas about gender are created and transmitted, I wanted to include the family influence of her granmumma (actually her great-grandmother) and education—although River has barely paid attention to what is said about men as it is history to her, and not relevant to her world.

  Was there also some wish fulfillment in terms of the kind of society that a female-dominated world would create? What for you would be the main positives in this world? And the negatives?

  I anticipate being asked this a lot! The broad answer is NO.

  The world described in the book has had to endure a terrible tragedy. I wouldn’t want to see a world run by women any more than I enjoy living in a world that is currently, for the most part, run by men.

  What I wanted to get at was that if we—all of us, male as well as female—could start over, what kind of a world would we want to live in?

  In this story, it’s women who are able to start over, and I used this to sneak in some values I hoped people might decide upon (the Global Agreements). They are very idealistic. That, for me, is a positive; people agreeing on the basics from which all other decisions flow…and it was also very important that there was a different kind of democracy, in which everyone was actively engaged.

  The negatives? I think those are revealed during the story; ideals are hollow unless inclusive and acted upon—and it might take great courage to do that if everyone around you has a vested interest in not doing so.

  That’s my broad answer. Another answer would be that I would be very, very curious indeed to see how women would run the world. I don’t think it would be perfect—and the world in The XY is no utopia—but right now, at our point in human history, I think we need to do things in a different way. I think people have become very disengaged and cynical about mainstream politics, but what are we going to do about it?

  Why did you decide to make this female-dominated world still imperfect with questions over democracy, power, and second-class citizens?

  See above. And though a huge part of me wanted this world to be perfect, I felt I would be doing a great disservice to us all if I made it so. I felt that:

  1. I would be saying that women are better than men. I’ve lived my whole life hearing the message that men are better than women. I had no wish to invert and repeat a lie.

  2. I would be saying that women are not human. It is very, very hard for people—female or male—to be perfect. Impossible? I suspect that, even in the very best—most fair/democratic/harmonious—societies that have ever existed, people were still people, and so all kinds of human “weaknesses” would have been present. Perfection is not truthful.

  3. In this story, there is a big question mark over the apparent “second-class citizen” status of men. It arose in a time when the whole human race was under threat, when the simple preservation of a male was more important than the quality of life that male had…and it continued in a way that the main female characters have been largely unaware of. Unlike the situation we have today, when a man could easily at least begin to see what women endure, the women in the story have had no access to male reality. Perhaps they should have made more effort? And is it easier not to?

  4. An imperfect world is essential for a story! No conflict = no plot!

  For River,
the lead character, her world is “gender neutral”; she has never seen a boy, an XY, and the boy, Mason, has never seen a girl. What was it like imagining what their meeting would be like?

  Nearly impossible. (It took a lot of drafts, and an earlier version of the story was written in two parts; River told one chapter, Mason the next. From that, I’d had to understand the meeting from both their points of view.)

  We meet two male characters in the narrative—one boy, one man—and the man is immediately very aggressive. Is this portrayal overly negative about men?

  Again, this is a question I anticipate being asked a lot! I think a story like this could be told so many different ways—and I hope people do!—but I wanted to confront the nastiest male stereotypes head-on.

  In the first instance, there’s Mason. Immediately aggressive—the story should explain why—and River immediately associating this aggression with a whole load of ideas about males she has never really paid that much attention to (because she has never had to).

  I wanted to show how even the tiniest scraps of half-remembered “information” can become FACTS when you’re threatened. It’s the start of prejudice, perhaps, this generalizing—which is not to say that River isn’t absolutely right to feel horrified by Mason’s behavior.

  Then there is Killer, the man. Unlike Mason, who has sunk, Killer has managed to rise to the top of a brutal system. He inhales freedom—and exhales violence and death. It is all he knows. Would he be like this if he had been raised differently? I wanted to think about the cultural transmission of expected behavior… (Though I should also point out that Mason and Killer are “Beta.” The implication is that there could be an “Alpha” stream, where, perhaps, life might be different.)

  My intention was to invoke the very worst image of masculinity…and, sadly, I don’t think it’s an unrealistic or unfamiliar image. I think many—too many!—boys struggle with notions of what a “man” should be like, and the story presents an extreme experience of this. What I hope is that readers—particularly boys—will use this story as a way to think and talk about the pressures they are under.