The Hunt (3 page)

For although things seemed to have become as bad as possible, it turned out they could get worse. Much worse. On February 16th 2059, three bombs went off in the Oxford Circus tube station during rush hour, resulting in the deaths of more than a hundred people. The following day, at least according to official reports, a militant feminist group calling itself Backlash claimed responsibility for the attack, and issued a manifesto which concluded:
“We can no longer sit back and watch as our sisters are oppressed by the state. We demand equal rights, and if we cannot obtain them peacefully, we will take them by means of violence.” None of the bombers were identified - they'd supposedly perished along with their victims - and Backlash was never heard from again. Indeed, aside from their strikingly banal and cliché-ridden manifesto, there was no concrete proof this mysterious terrorist group had ever existed. But public - which is to say male - fury was carefully stoked by the malinist press: “How Long Must We Live Under the Feminazi Jackboot?” screamed one tabloid headline.

Six days after the attack, Prime Minister Murdoch announced that he felt 'obliged' to take
“unfortunate, but necessary measures to remind women of their collective responsibility for an atrocity which has outraged every decent person.” On May 3rd, the Hunt Act was passed, with the first Hunt scheduled for October. A stadium was constructed from what remained of an abandoned London district called Kilburn, and an announcement made that men interested in participating - and willing to pay for the privilege of doing so - should begin submitting their applications. Each Hunt involved ten men and ten women, and lasted seven days, a new event beginning two hours after the previous one ended. All females between the ages of twenty-one and thirty were declared eligible for the Hunt draft, and every week another ten were selected for compulsory participation. Mara's parents committed suicide by taking overdoses of sleeping pills in 2060, and though they hadn't left a note explaining their actions, Mara suspected the Hunt was to blame: the prospect of living in a society where such a thing could be contemplated, let alone carried out, would have been too much for the idealistic couple. By the time Mara turned twenty-one, the Hunt had been running nearly five years, and despite the nonchalant attitude she'd assumed for Catherine's benefit, thoughts of conscription caused her many sleepless nights.

***

The day after Catherine's departure was Friday, which meant that, as usual, Yuke would be coming over to spend the weekend. Yuke kept a change of clothes in Mara's apartment, and the only reason she hadn't moved in was that Mara worried about the kind of talk two theoretically unattached females living together might encourage. Yuke arrived at five p.m. carrying a pizza, changed out of her uniform, and settled down for a weekend of bad food, good movies and wonderful sex, interspersed with the occasional game of chess. When Mara read Tolstoy's
War and Peace
, she was struck by a passage describing Natasha's friendship with Princess Mary: “They were continually kissing and saying tender things to one other and spent most of their time together. When one went out the other became restless and hastened to rejoin her. Together they felt more in harmony with one another than either of them felt with herself when alone. A feeling stronger than friendship sprang up between them; an exclusive feeling of life being possible only in each other's presence.” That was exactly how she felt about Yuke.

***

Yuke Morishita was the product of a Japanese family which had been living in England for several generations, and thus escaped the mass deportations of 2040. Yuke's parents wanted her to settle down with a nice Japanese boy, and would have had matching heart attacks if they'd even suspected she were sleeping with a Caucasian girl. So Yuke only saw her family at weddings and funerals - she could always tell which ceremony was which, because the funeral guests seemed more cheerful - a situation she was extremely comfortable with.

Yuke
had fallen under the spell of cinema while in her early teens, and quickly used her natural brilliance to establish herself as a critic. She began writing professionally at the age of sixteen, and her articles exposing the flaws in several schools of advanced film theory earned her praise from the most respected names in the field. After her father referred to Yuke's career as a 'hobby' one time too many, she moved out of the family home in Amersham and into a small East Finchley apartment. Here she worked on what was to become her first book, an ambitious study of American cinema in the twentieth century. According to Yuke, classical Hollywood filmmakers challenged the status quo in ways that weren't appreciated at the time. “Look at Douglas Sirk,” she'd demand enthusiastically. “He made commercial melodramas which were looked down on by mainstream critics, but embraced by popular audiences. Yet they subjected the values of small-town America to devastating critiques. Senator McCarthy and HUAC were scared stiff of Leftists sneaking un-American messages into films, yet people like Sirk and Vincente Minnelli were doing this quite blatantly, without anyone even suspecting it.”

Mara loved to hear
Yuke talk like this. It was one of these speeches that inspired her to create Melissa Valance, though her encounters with the censor suggested she lacked Sirk's talent for successful subversion. The Martin Beck novels of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, which used thriller conventions to expose injustice in Swedish society, were another important influence. But her biggest inspiration was Yuke herself. Much as Mara feared being conscripted into the Hunt, she dreaded even more the day when she might have to look on helplessly as Yuke departed to spend a week being pursued and tortured by men who should have considered themselves lucky to live on the same planet as her.

The two women met in 2061, a week after Mara turned eighteen, at a world cinema discussion group she attended regularly.
Yuke, who had just joined the group, was only seventeen, and still permitted to wear her own clothes. This was one of the first times Mara had worn the uniform, and she couldn't help thinking how absurdly conformist she must look in her skirt and blouse, especially when compared with this Japanese goddess in black jeans and a 'Greta Garbo Lives' T-shirt, to whom she hardly dared speak. Yet in the course of talking about the film they'd just watched, Satyajit Ray's
Days and Nights in the Forest
, Yuke took an obvious liking to her, and they started getting together regularly. Mara longed to let Yuke know how she really felt. Her fumbling experiences with men made it obvious there was little point in pursuing heterosexuality, but she lacked the courage to tell any woman, let alone the magnificent Yuke, that she desired her sexually. Her problem was solved in October when she attended Yuke's eighteenth birthday party at Cafe Koha, an underground bar which hosted private events. When Mara went to use the toilet, Yuke followed her, kissed her on the lips, then stood back and looked at her with trepidation, as if fearing Mara might run screaming from the room. Mara did not run or scream. She returned Yuke's kiss so passionately they came close to having sex right there. They somehow managed to contain themselves until the party ended and they'd taken a taxi back to Mara's apartment, where they spent the rest of the night exploring each other's bodies, finally falling asleep in a confused tangle of arms and legs as the light of dawn shone through the window.

When they awoke,
Yuke confessed she'd never made love to a woman before, and apologised for her inexperience. Mara teased her for a few minutes, boasting of the parade of women who'd marched through her bed - so many she could no longer recall the precise number - before collapsing in a fit of laughter and admitting this was also her first time with a woman. Yuke had slept with several men, and liked doing so well enough, but she'd never experienced this kind of passion with any of them. From that day, Mara and Yuke were a couple, and, had they not feared the consequences of exposure, would have been inseparable. Over the next six months, they decided to tell a few close acquaintances about their relationship, and a warmly protective support group grew up around them. Mara was especially pleased to discover how open-minded her male - and, so far as she knew, heterosexual - friends were. It made her suspect that genuine potential for change existed, just waiting for somebody to tap it.

***

Mara and Yuke always spent Friday nights watching a film. Yuke was obviously the expert in this department, but Mara's collection was impressive enough. As she ate the last slice of pizza, Yuke scanned the contents of Mara's DVD shelves, which she knew virtually by heart, and pulled out Max Ophuls'
Letter From an Unknown Woman
. They'd already watched this together three times, but Mara had no objection to doing so again. Afterwards, Yuke seductively removed her clothes and led Mara into the bedroom. When she could feel the slender weight of Yuke's naked body pressing down on her, Mara had everything she wanted, and her world was complete. If only it were possible to forget about the other world, the one outside her sanctuary. For the rest of the weekend, Mara and Yuke tried to do precisely that, spending Saturday ordering takeaway meals, watching DVDs, and making love.

They also cut each other's hair. Neither of them could be bothered with hairdressers, and
Yuke's rough and ready trims were entirely adequate to Mara's needs. It was one more thing she didn't need to leave the apartment for. As Yuke snipped away with the scissors, Mara said, “Careful not to make it too short, honey.” Mara would have preferred a buzz cut, but there were minimum hair lengths for women, just as there were maximum lengths for men, anything less than shoulder length being illegal. Mara was terrified of breaking the law - even such a minor offence would have earned her another visit to the punishment centre - but she suspected her terror was nothing compared to that felt by the men responsible for such absurd regulations, who surely lied awake nights desperately trying to convince themselves there really was an unambiguous line dividing masculinity from femininity. If they ever acknowledged that the differences between men and women were primarily cosmetic - a matter of performance and training - the fragile foundations upon which their malinist ideology was constructed would come crashing down.

Mara had planned to stay in on Sunday, but Michael
Cimino's
Heaven's Gate
was showing at the BFI, and Yuke, who had watched the film numerous times on disc, wanted to see it on the big screen. In the end, Mara was glad she'd let Yuke talk her into coming. Cimino's film spoke directly to the idea that, no matter how terrible things may seem, no matter how certain defeat may appear, there are always ideals and individuals worth fighting for. The appeal to communal values seemed especially powerful when the film was seen as they were seeing it now, with an appreciative cinema audience. Yuke had told Mara that the coda - in which Kris Kristofferson's character is alone on his yacht, surrounded by the emblems of wealth yet unable to forget what he has lost - always made her cry, and Mara deliberately looked at her while the scene was playing. Tears were indeed streaming down her face, and Mara realised she too was weeping, swept away by the power of great art. When the end credits finished rolling, Yuke enthusiastically led the applause, and the two women decided to visit the nearest female-friendly bar, which happened to be the one where Mara had met Catherine three days ago. They drank wine and discussed the film, wishing they could express their affections more directly. They'd almost certainly be safe doing so, surrounded as they were by fellow cinephiles, yet the risk didn't seem worth taking. Eventually, they walked towards Waterloo and caught the tube. Mara changed at Leicester Square, saying farewell to her lover in a casually friendly manner: displays of passion would really be inadvisable here. Yuke remained on the train until it reached East Finchley. As Mara arrived home, she reflected that it had been a perfect day. She had no way of knowing this would be the last good day for quite some time.

Chapter 3

On Monday, Mara awoke around eight and began her morning routine. She made breakfast, checked her email - Yuke had sent a message saying she couldn't wait for next Friday, to which Mara responded in kind - and eased herself into the day by lying on her bed and reading. She'd just started
The Aging Boy
, and wanted to know more about its author. According to Wikipedia, Julian Claman enjoyed a successful career as a television producer, but had only written two books, the other being something called
The Malediction
. Apparently, Larry McMurtry once described
The Aging Boy
as a great lost novel. Mara was grateful for the legal loophole which permitted books printed in the pre-censorship era to still be sold.
The Aging Boy
probably wouldn't qualify for a total ban if submitted to the state censor board, but cuts might be demanded, and even a truncated version would almost certainly receive an Unsuitable For Women rating. Mara had lost count of the times she'd tried purchasing a new novel in Foyles or Borders, only to have her attention drawn to the UFW certificate printed on the spine and back cover. She'd noticed that the female staff in these stores were extremely apologetic - though they could get into as much trouble for selling her an 'inappropriate' book as she could for buying it - while the males tended to be contemptuous and even abusive. She now did her book shopping exclusively via second-hand stores and websites specialising in imported goods.