I am a Wild Rose

Chapter Two - The last supper

I don’t remember going to bed after I’d finished crying Dad opened a bottle of his homemade wine after a few glasses of that a girl can forget pretty much anything. I’m in my party dress and my make up is smeared over my face and pillow. The sun is shining through my curtains so I’m guessing it’s later than I would have liked. I hear the front door bell ring. My Dad is awake. I hear him move from the kitchen to the door and the shrill of excited female voices enters the house as he opens the door and welcomes them in. I move as fast as my sore head will allow me and get into the bathroom, lock the door and manage to turn on the shower before the first of the voices calls my name. Sanctuary. I slowly peel off my clothes and step under the steaming hot water. By laws state that we are only meant to have a shower once a day that may last for only three minutes. For once I ignore the rules and stay under the water for as long as possible, letting the heat from the water soothe my body and the lavender from our home made soap relax my brain. By my reckoning it takes six minutes from the ladies entering the house to one of them coming upstairs and bashing on the door telling me to hurry up.  I purposely ignore her for a minute and then switch the shower off and get changed as quickly as I can. There are two dresses laid out on my bed, one is a beautiful white gown with stunning embroidery and beads which still has its labels on and the second is a plain dull brown dress with scooped neckline and hem that hangs just below the knee. Someone has rather pointedly taken the labels off this one and left out a pair of brown shoes by my bed. The may as well have left a note that laughed in my face and shrieked welcome to the shelf bitch, that’s when I knew it would be my mothers sister who had bashed on the bathroom door. She hates my Dad and me and only visits because she has nothing better to do. The white dress would go back to the store tomorrow and the women in my family would be able to get their money back. It was tradition that when a woman turned twenty five they would have a party and if they were allready married or were about to they would get a beautiful white dress to wear bought for them by the other women in their family. There would be a whole day of feasting and celebration before at the end of the day their husband or fiancé would be brought in and the women would shower him with gifts and compliments on how brave and handsome he was and how much of a good provider he would be. If you were not already married or about to your female relatives buy a brown dress for you and there would be a quite family meal to discuss what your next step in life would be. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I picked up the brown dress and removed my dressing gown and put the dress on as quickly as I could. I hated looking at my white lumpy body. It was no wonder I hadn’t been chosen. The zip of the dress was at the back and I had to push my arm behind my back to reach the zip and do the dress up. I faced the mirror and was surprised at what I saw. Normally I look terrible in clothes. Between the ages of 12 and 25 you are restricted to wearing the colour yellow. Its meant to represent your youth and being in the spring of your life - blooming into womanhood and marriage. White is for when you are chosen, it reflects the purity and grace of your soul. Black is for widows and is designed to hide them away from society’s eyes when the women step out in public. Brown is for ‘shelves’, for me, the un-chosen and unloved woman who will never be bonded. You also aren’t allowed to wear red or green unless you are making a statement, but I wont go into that now. We aren’t really supposed to talk about it. You hardly ever see people wearing red so I guess the reason behind it should be kept hidden as well. I’d never seen myself in brown and was surprised at what I saw. The dress was made from fairly cheap material but it was beautifully cut and made. The dress seemed to hug and flatten the curves at my waist and accentuate my chest. I clipped on my mothers necklace around my neck and piled my hair into a loose bun. My hair was thin and often broke so I had a fringe that hung down by the sides of my face. Normally I'd tuck it behind my ears and do my best to pin it down but I was 25, none of that mattered anymore and I left it where it was. The brown of the dress seemed to accentuate my eyes, skin and hair. For once I looked beautiful and I smiled genuinely at my reflection. Quickly I slipped my feet into my flat brown shoes that my Aunt had left out and raced down the stairs. I jumped down the last two stairs which I hadn’t done since I was a kid, the effort flushed my cheeks and I entered into the living room out of breath. I guess it wasn’t the entrance that they were expecting as they all looked shocked. I just shrugged my shoulders at them and smiled even brighter. I’d spent my whole life conforming to try and get bonded, now that was no longer an option I’d live my life my way and not care what anyone, apart from my father thought. My Aunt cleared her throat and put down her glass of champagne. Well, Martha, please come here and we will begin the ceremony. I walked to my fathers’ side and he took my hand and looked at my Aunt straight in the face. He was showing no shame and neither would I. I took his cue and stared straight ahead defying anyone to feel sorry for me. My Aunt took the ring out of her pocket and placed it onto my finger. If I had been about to get married it would have been made of porcelain to show how perfect and pure I was, because I was now 'on the shelf' it was made of wood. My Aunt smirked when she put it onto my finger and stood back. I held my hand up for the room to see as tradition dictated and my father passed my hand that he was holding to my Aunt. This symbolized for all to see that I was out of my fathers’ protection and was handed into the sisterhood of the rest of the shelves in my family. If my mother had been here it would have been her hand that I had been holding when my Aunt put the ring on and her hand that had passed me out of the protection of my mother and father and into the sisterhood. For once I was glad that she wasn’t hear, it was bad enough that my father had to do this, my mother was such a gentle soul that she would have found it too difficult to bear. Once the ceremony was over we all sat down where we could find space in my fathers cramped sitting room. My father was the last to sit down and before he did so he spoke loudly above the chatter. ‘Before we start. I must speak. It is Martha’s choice to say what happens next in her life. She may stay under my roof with rights to all the money that she earns for as long as she likes.’ He stares hard at each one of the women in the room, all of my single female relatives, some cannot return his gaze and fumble with their champagne glasses to avoid his gaze. When he is sure that everyone has understood his message he sits down and calmly gazes around the room. I am so grateful to him. With those few words he has just cut down the discussions by half and saved me a lot of arguing, heartache and grief. Now, comes the fun bit. I will never be bonded with another. Up until now my sole purpose in life from the age of 12 has been to learn how to be perfect enough so that a man will see me as the pearl in the oysters shell and chose me for his mate.  I have to decide by the end of this day what to do with the rest of my life. Competition for a man has been fierce for the past fifty years and if the newspapers are to be trusted it is only going to get worse. For once I feel grateful that I have no younger brothers or sisters. Fifty years ago the war ended, World War III. Thankfully even though the battles were fierce and many lives were lost no one let off any nuclear weapons. There had been plenty of chemical weapons let off my both sides and history says that this is what caused the sudden changes in population. Rumor says that it had been in decline long before this though because of the use of the contraceptive pill. Hundreds of thousands of women all over the world were taking it and through their urine female hormones got into our water supplies and we drank it. Gradually over time estrogen levels would build up in people and it affected their biology making it easier for female children to survive in the womb. The war had been fought over resources, the oil was basically gone and so was natural gas. Fracking had further affected our water supplies as well as pollution so water was the next precious resource that people were scrapping over. The solution came out of New Zealand. They had plenty of water and rain and were far enough away from the main war zone, which was over America, the UK and the Middle East. I think from the history that I have read that they just got fed up with the way people were treating the world and got really angry about it. It was the Maoris that started it using social media publicizing how people could look after the planet how we were all one and how they could use wind, solar and water power to power their homes so that although with the absence of oil many things would be lost to us we could still live a ‘civilized’ life as westerners called it. The green message had been said may times many ways. Nothing that they said was new. There was this one guy though who seemed to really connect with people and when he spoke people stopped and listened. I’d seen some of his old you tube videos in the museum and I think it was his eyes. They were so intense that it seemed as if he was reaching out of the screen and talking directly to you.  I think also people were just scared and fed up with the fighting and the politicians they would have grasped onto anything that offered hope at that point and…. Just happened to say the right thing at the right time. It took a year for the politicians to cotton on and the message to spread once it did though they didn’t have nay choice but to stop the fighting and start talking. The peace talks were held in New Zealand with … chairing it. He had the majority of the world behind him at the point. Sure there were some that wanted the war to go on for financial reasons, that’s the thing people forget just how much money is actually made because of wars.  The tide of change was so great at that time though that they couldn’t raise their voices for war, as they would have been drowned out by millions of voices that were suffering because of the war and wanted to see a change. Life was peaceful but bumpy after that according to the films in the national museum that Id gone to see on a school trip when I was 8. It took people years to adjust to living with out so many gadgets and well, just stuff I guess. In the museum there was a representation of a house from 2052 that you could walk around and honestly it was jammed with stuff. There was a TV screen that filled nearly one of the sitting room walls, the other three walls were covered with plates and pictures and ornaments. The polished wood floor and four or five rugs over it, it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other started. The kitchen cupboards were stuffed full with tinned and packeted food and the people’s wardrobes were stuffed full of clothes that according to the information panel they wouldn’t wear or would buy clothes in sizes to small for them so that they could slim down into them. The waste was unbelievable. I wasn’t allowed to even think about buying a new pencil to write with until I had used every last scrap of the last one. The main trouble arose though as the men and women who had served in the war started to come home. They had been exposed to so many chemicals that it had messed with their heads and bodies. Everyone was kept in isolation once they came off the ships this meant that people who were a danger to themselves or others were weeded out their and then and didn’t make it out of quarantine. The people who had stayed home had been bombed and gassed as well. As far as I know there was no isolation or treatment for them they just got on with things as best they could I guess. Not much was written about it. Ironically it was the midwives who were the first ones to notice it. Three months after the soldiers came home and everyone started to get back to a new kind of normal there was a baby boom and everywhere you looked their were women glowing with secret smiles on their faces saying that they were quitting their favorite vices in order to get ‘healthy’. It started off as a joke amongst the midwives to start off with. They talked about the pink tide and the invasion of the female. Normally, prior to the war, slightly more males were born than females and what happened over time is that the older the males got the more of them died. This was because boy babies weren’t as strong as girl babies and then as they got older they would do more stupid things and so get injured and die or commit suicide. About hundred years ago more twenty something men died of suicide than they did of cancer. As they got older still men tended to die sooner than women as they didn’t look after themselves as well and tended to be too embarrassed to go to the doctor so didn’t go until it was too late for anything to be done. So by the time you were a female in you 40’s there was roughly two women to every one man. I wish the odds these days were as good as that. Now its roughly ten women to every one man and that’s just counting the ‘shelves’ not the women who were bound or who had made other choices once they hit 25. Three months after the war 75% of the babies that were in their mothers’ tummies were female. The newspapers reported on it but everyone seemed to just think it was a glitch and ignored it. This went on for years and people just seemed to think it was funny. It was only when the first lot of children reached school age that people started panicking and thinking what kind of affect this would have on society. By that time though five years later it was too late. With the end of the oil reserves came the end of a lot of things. Sure they had natural ways to power their homes but huge transporter ships, planes? They couldn’t figure out how to make those run of solar power so less resources were transported around the world and when they were priority was given to food and life saving medicines, Hormone altering medicine and the technology to choose the sex of your baby was the last on the list of priorities. At least that’s what the Museum says. I don’t know how true that is, there were factions at the time who protested at the suggestion of artificially inseminating women with sperm that would produce male children. They argued that it was against the laws of God and nature and that we should let nature decide our fate. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Many of the records were burnt in the great fires of 2082, which swept through our nation destroying homes, government buildings and businesses. It had been a long hot summer and then a lightening storm struck and caused fires up and down the country. There wasn’t enough water or people to fight it and so people just got out the way and let it happen, migrating to the coast if they could to avoid the smoke and flames. Many more died. It was seen as a time or rebirth though, the fires wiped the slate clean and we could all start again and be free to build their homes business and lives in line with the new way of thinking. I remember Mum saying that she had heard her Grandma say once that those whose houses did survive the flames pulled them down anyway. The houses represented the old ways and it was something that people were very keen to forget. Unfortunately with the fires came the destruction of a lot of our knowledge and science, When people really started to panic and wanted science to make more boy babies there just wasn’t the knowledge around to do it and their certainly wasn’t the appetite for it. New houses were built inline with green practices. There just weren’t the same resources around for people to have loads of stuff. People actually enjoyed this new way of living, they found themselves to be free and at peace to live their lives in ways that they wanted to do in quiet pursuits of hobbies rather than buying things to keep up with the neighbors. It was at this time that the Grandmothers wrote the rule book that would form the corner stone of our society and signaled a complete change in society. Listening to my Mum talk about her Mother’s and Grandmothers experiences in life I’m not sure if I would wish things back to where they where previously or if there is a freedom in this time that previous generations of women didn’t have. We are the ones that go out to work, we are judged on our beauty and our bank balance. Men rarely go out to work, they tend to just find another wife if they want more money. When we have children we hire ‘shelves’ to look after them if our husbands do not want to look after the children themselves. They rarely want to spend all day six days a week looking after the children as there are so many other things to do with their time. Gentleman’s clubs have sprung up all over the place since the Grandmothers rules came in place. It’s a place for men to go, make friends with other men relax and just have fun. Women are strictly forbidden from the clubs unless they are employed and even then they are in a uniform that hides their face and shape so that there is nothing untoward going on in the quiet rooms of the club.