I flipped off my implant, cutting off Lily and the sights and sounds of Piccadilly Circus. In the dark dead space, the four Agents were silhouetted in the beam of my headlights. They had moved together and were standing in a row. I had the odd idea that they wished they could come with us, that they wished that someone would come to meet them with rugs and brandy and hot cocoa.
I got my sister comfortable and started up the car. I was going to drive like she always did, with my implant deactivated, unable to see the consensual traffic. I didn’t like doing it. I knew how arrogant it must seem to the consensuals and how much they must resent it – it was things like that, I knew, that gave us Outsiders a bad name – but I just couldn’t risk a broken axle on the way home on top of everything else.
“Really, we’re no different when you come to think of it,” said Clarrie after a while. Her implant was off at that moment and she looked out at abandoned streets as lonely as canyons on some lifeless planet in space. “That’s the physical world out there, that’s physical matter. But we’re not like that, are we? People are patterns. We’re just patterns rippling across the surface.”
“Have a bit more brandy, Clarrie,” I told her, “and then put the seat back and try to get some sleep. It’s going to be some time before we get back.”
She nodded and tugged the rug up around herself. Her implant switched itself on again and she saw a taxi swerve to avoid us and heard the angry blast of its horn. Briefly the busy night life of the Consensual Field was all around her. And then it was gone again.
“Just the same,” she said sleepily. “Just like the lights in Piccadilly Circus.”
Jazamine in the Green Wood
Memorial Day.
I got out of bed and opened the window. Birdsong rippled through the mild creamy air and a fat old woman pushed her bike up from the allotments with its basket laden with a spring harvest of leeks and sprouting broccoli.
“Morning has broken, like the first morning…”
She was singing that old hymn.
Well, yes, I thought. I suppose it is on days like this that we should thank God for all Her munificence: for light, for air, for sunlight, for the great dance of the planets and stars… But let us not forget to mention tuberculosis too, and beriberi and cholera and TTX.
(TTX. Ah yes, now, there is proof, if any more were needed, that God is truly a She!)
I pulled on my jumper and jeans and struggled into my specially adapted boots.
And do I thank God for my feet? I demanded. Do I thank Her for the curse of being born a boy? Do I thank Her for my good kind reasonable parents, who have cut me off from the whole world with their good intentions, their damned principles?
I closed the door of my flat and hobbled off down the road towards Peace Square, where the Memorial Statues wait under the cherry blossom for the annual speeches and tears.
On the way I met Harry Higgins, a big burly man with a red beard, always wearing the same brown jacket with the little MRP badge on the lapel.
“Going to the ceremony, eh, Jack?”
I nodded guiltily. “Well, yes. My mum and dad, you know…”
He winked.
“Yeah, of course. Don’t worry mate, I understand. But pop over to the Men’s Pub later, eh Jack? At the end of the day we blokes have got to stick together.”
“Yes, sure, I’ll be there.”
“Good man, good man,” Harry said, patting my arm. “Well, enjoy the ceremony. Your mum is sure to make a good speech. She’s a strong woman, your mum. I admire her. Even if we are on opposite sides.”
I noticed he didn’t mention my dad.
Outside the Mother-Church I saw Beatrice walking with a girl-friend: Beatrice with her curly blonde hair and her milk-white teeth, Beatrice with her beads and her many rings and her lacy dresses, so nonchalantly flung together but always so stylish and funny and graceful.
God, she is so beautiful that she makes my blood run cold.
“Morning, Beatrice,” I croaked.
She smiled and waved, “Hello Jack!”
I wanted to say something else. I actually stopped to do it. But before I could think of anything, she’d turned away, slipping her arm through her friend’s and giving her a kiss. They were probably lovers.
Alone in a cruel cage of sunlight and blossom and birdsong, I watched them go.
Under the cherry trees, Mother was giving her customary speech as Town Convenor.
“We’re here to remember the victims of the plague: our husbands, brothers, fathers, sons…”
She touched the statue of the sad woman who looks down at her dead male shadow. Plenty of women there cried. Apart from my father and me, no other men were there. My father was getting ready to speak. I looked away down the square. It was quite empty except for the group under the trees.
“But secondly we’re here to remember the women victims of men in the long centuries before…”
She moved to the second statue: that terrified girl who is groped and clawed eternally by coarse male hands.
“Males are the weaker sex,” my mother said. “More die in the womb, more die as babies and they live shorter lives, perhaps because of the conflict that is hard-wired into their brains. They are not less able, they are not more evil, but they are weaker and for that reason we must never let them take control from us again…”
“Thanks, Mum,” I muttered, and looked away again down the empty square.
But now it was not empty! As if he had fallen from a sky, a young man stood tottering only a few metres from me. He was thin, unshaven, dressed in oddly-cut jeans and a torn blue T-shirt.
There was a faint ozone smell.
“That man is magic, mum,” said a little girl calmly, “He can appear out of the air.” But her mother didn’t hear her.
The stranger looked scared when he saw that the little girl and I had noticed him, so I quickly turned away. I felt as if he was some sort of forest animal who would easily startle.
“It’s not as if we should hate men,” Mum was saying, “I myself love one young man more than I love anyone in the world…”
Here she looked across at me smiling. I blushed and everyone looked at me, knowingly, benevolently. I felt naked, consumed, infantilised.
“But their numbers must be maintained at the present level,” my mother said, “for the good of all of us, men as well as women, boys as well as girls.”
Everyone clapped. Women nearby looked at me as if they expected me to be proud. Some of them glanced at the stranger behind me, but at that moment my father Timothy, with his kindly beard and his twinkly eyes, was climbing up onto the box and they all turned back to see what he would say.
“Thanks my dear,” he said, giving Mum a little kiss as she made way for him.
He is the chair of the Men’s Committee. He and Mum didn’t live together but they were good friends. Now, on behalf of the men of the town, he acknowledged Mum’s speech.
“We men behaved badly in the past,” he said, “but we are learning. Generation after generation, we are learning. And I want to ask all of you to keep your minds open to the possibility that a time will come when men can be trusted again, and our numbers allowed to rise naturally to the proportion that nature intended…”
A middle-aged woman turned to her friend.
“Oh but he is gentle,” she said, “he is a good man. It would be different if they were all like him!”
“What is this place?” the stranger asked, quietly coming up beside me.