The End of Men(64)
The Home Affairs meeting, mercifully, is downstairs in one of the meeting rooms. Even more mercifully, there are biscuits. As punishment for my sins, almost everyone is late and so I’m stuck with Bernard on my own.
“You’re looking well, Dawn,” he says. Bernard only knows how to compliment women on their looks. It would never occur to him to comment on anything else.
“Thank you. How are things over by Big Ben?”
Bernard’s face takes on a familiar, disgruntled expression. Here we go. “You know, I had the most extraordinary interaction with one of the new MPs, Violet Taylor. She’s only been elected for two minutes—”
“She’s been in office for six months, Bernard.”
“Same thing, I’ve been an MP for over forty years, and she’s on the House of Commons Change Committee, which is a ridiculous thing in the first place, and she has all these ideas. She would not take no for an answer.”
I can only imagine Bernard’s immune because the Plague took one look at him, heard him spouting pseudoscientific misogynistic nonsense and thought, Oh God no, I can’t be dealing with that. If you want proof that nice guys don’t always win, look no further than the fact that Bernard is one of only three surviving male MPs in his party.
“What were her ideas?”
Bernard splutters in outrage. I wipe a bit of spittle off my lapel and fight the urge to throw up on his shoes in retaliation. “She wants more female toilets, she wants to change prime minister’s questions so it’s ‘less adversarial,’ she wants longer maternity leave for MPs, she wants a nursery in the House of Commons. I tell you, female MPs always used to hang around together but they’re awfully noisy now.”
He looks at me as if I’m going to agree that those ideas are truly horrifying when they’re just common sense. “Did your wife stay home and look after your children by any chance, Bernard?”
He looks at me suspiciously. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
But I’m already taking my water and a stash of biscuits to the opposite side of the room to discuss literally anything else with the other MPs who have now arrived.
Within a few minutes the meeting has been called to order and I’m providing updates on various issues that only a few years ago would have been horrifying enough to warrant panic and urgent meetings but are now, frankly, humdrum. The only small plus point is that Gillian is still around; she’s somehow managed to remain home secretary without burning out or fucking up. We have a game each meeting where we try to say a word as many times as possible without Bernard commenting. She chose “plethora” for this meeting. There’s a plethora of food shortages in Scotland causing those living close to the border to cross into England and beg for food, which can’t be given to them because of rationing. Shortages of a plethora of medicines caused a spike in deaths, which in turn caused riots in Leeds and Bristol. I provide our weekly update on draft compliance, which is over 97 percent. Happily, the example set in the US seems to have prepared people for the inevitable. There was so much speculation that a draft would be announced that by the time it was implemented, people were just relieved to have some certainty and the increased likelihood of a paid job. And then, there are the absurd. In particular, the difficulty we’re having releasing prisoners after their sentences. They’re safe in prison—there are no visits and guards wear hazmat suits—and leaving could be a death sentence. Truly, the world is upside down. In a plethora of ways.
RECOVERY
LISA
Toronto, Canada
Day 672
I’ve been working on a vaccine for 657 days and I’m so close to finding it I can almost taste it. The last days of summer are winding down, and I refuse to mark the second anniversary of the Plague unless it’s with the bottle of Dom Pérignon Margot and I have been saving for the day I find it. Endless rounds of testing, testing, testing—I feel like an AV guy sometimes bellowing, “Testing, testing,” into a microphone. Just fucking work. I’m so close. The last vaccine worked in 96 percent of cases. I managed to isolate the female chromosome that was resisting it, and now I’m waiting. Waiting for the test results. Waiting for our lives to change. Waiting to change the world. The chimps have served us well but after killing 253 of them over the past two years, I’d quite like to reduce my monkey kill count. They’re a nightmare to dispose of.
I watch over the office as I wait. It’s probably not much fun working for me, I’m self-aware enough to know that. I’m demanding and insistent and I expect everyone to be as smart and dedicated as I am, which they’re not, and they can’t ever be. As soon as I read the reports of the Plague Ashley compiled for me, I knew we would work on a vaccine the minute we could get hold of a specimen. I said, “That would be interesting to study,” and Ashley looked very sad and said, “Hopefully we never have to. People are dying. It’s a tragedy.”
Ashley doesn’t work for me anymore. Fortunately, the University of Toronto has been producing first-class virology PhDs for the past two decades, many of them women, thanks to me. That’s why we’re going to win this race. We started before anyone else, I’ve been training virologists for years and I’ve always prioritized the hiring of women in my department. Despite many accusations to the contrary, I’ve never prioritized diversity over ability. I’ve always had a simple policy. The best female applicant gets the job. Invariably, she’s as good as, if not better than, the best male applicant. As a community, the scientific world has sexism running through it like gray swirls in marble. It’s deeply woven into the fabric of labs, university departments, hiring panels, boards determining tenure. And guess what? The preponderance of senior male scientists and majority-male teams, specifically in virology, was a disaster when the Plague came, so who’s going to be right in the end? Me. I am.