The Twopenny Bargain

(A short story)

Accepted by Grindstone Literary, 2021

***

The train to D.C. takes three hours all the way, even at high speed. That’s one hundred eighty minutes underground, looking through scratched-glass windows at the grimy insides of grey-brick tunnels. Our nearest station is half an hour’s walk from the farm. So small, so inconsequential, that it doesn’t even have a name, just a number: #100Pi. That stands, Mother explained to me, for the farming area we occupy, and for what we produce – ‘Pi’, pig meat. The code is to help the Collectors find our farm, to acquire the pig meat, and escort it through the tunnel to either of the big cities – N.Y. or D.C. I’ve been helping the Collectors carry the meat from farm to train since I was eight. Twelve years on, I’m riding the same train as the pig meat.

The carriage is a dull metal oblong. The seats, scratch-blue-hessian, sometimes torn. Two women are sitting far from me, way up at the front of the carriage: a dark head, a blonde head, pointed determinedly forwards. Strangely scentless. No manure here. Not even the blood-warmth of the abattoir. Just old, cold sweat.

The blonde head turns towards me.

They don’t like us, Mother always said. The city people, they think we’re soft.

I look out the window.

We’re going slow now, approaching the terminal stop, and I can see, on the curved bricks, angry black paintwork. ‘Fuck the Twopenny Bargain.’ Three women in overalls, backs to me, approach it carefully, edging slowly, with brushes and hoses.

“Five minutes to D.C. Union. Please take all belongings with you. Have a nice day.”

She sounds friendly, that recorded voice. A warm voice, like Mother’s.

And now I can’t get the image of Mother out of my head. The morning I told her, hands trembling on her coffee cup, grey eyes glazed over, gazing into space. “They’re not like us, Dite. Trust me. Remember how Bronja was? They’re all going to be like that, and you’re going to be so, so lonely…”

My belongings are the envelope addressed to ‘Ms. Aphrodite 100Pi’, and a hessian bag with my new overalls. Blue and green, the colors of the Androlics Institute. “Take a breath,” I tell myself. “You’re a professional now.”

The blonde head turns again, and now her eyes are on me. Black and cold. The same as the Collectors’. The same as Bronja’s. My self-effacing smile ricochets off her iron stare. I should have changed into my overalls. Nothing says ‘conspicuous’ like handmade dungarees on a city train.

The carriage grows lighter as the train moves higher, higher, out of the tunnel, into the bright-grey smog of D.C. I can breathe.

I start down the carriage to the doors.

*

Bronja has her back to me when I see her on the platform, but I know it’s her tufty dark hair, squared shoulders, hand tapping distractedly against her midnight-blue police overalls. I can’t help it. I squeal.

She turns, and before the mask of solemnity comes down, I detect the tiniest smile. She starts towards me. “Shouldn’t do that here, Dite.” We come together, shake hands. My body is quivering. Longing swells, and the tears start to come, but I take a sharp breath. It wouldn’t be proper in the city.

Bronja squeezes my hand once, firm, and then releases it. She studies my body. “I couldn’t believe it when I got your letter. An internship with Androlics, huh?”

“Uh-huh.” I nod, stiffly. I want to add, “Isn’t it great?” I want to throw my arms around her, the way I did when we were kids. She hated it even then. Instead, I hand her the envelope, addressed to ‘Ms. Aphrodite 100Pi’, a farming name, and branded with the circle-arrow Androlics symbol. Bronja doesn’t take the envelope. Instead she peers at it, as if inspecting identification. Her shoulder pads rise and fall under her overalls.

“I just came off duty an hour ago,” Bronja says, seeing my eyes sweep the official, blue fabric. An hour ago. Didn’t go home to change. There are sweat stains under the armpits, around the neckline. “The apartment’s a twenty-minute walk from here. Come on.”

Women, trudging doggedly down the platform, part like water to let us past. Their eyes, like mine, are drawn to the official blue uniform. Unlike mine, they don’t linger.

The escalator carries us into the dark belly of the station – ‘Trust in the Twopenny Bargain’, proclaims every poster we pass on the gray-steel wall.

“It’s good to see you,” Bronja huffs, as we walk side-by-side towards the exit where ticket-women stand in black overalls, ready to inspect the newcomers. Then she gulps, hard. It must have been painful for her to say.

*

Bronja was five when she came to live with us.

I remember her standing in the kitchen, a stiff little soldier-figure with black saucepan eyes fixed straight ahead, an alien beamed down into a world of floral linen and hessian. Mother ushered me to one side and crouched down. “Put yourself in her shoes, Dite. Her poor mother! Do you think she’ll want to make friends straight away?”

Whatever happened to Bronja’s mother? This was never spoken about. I was ten when Mother finally told me about the Twopenny Bargain; this, I realized, was what killed Bronja’s mother. Even then, I didn’t really understand it.

For ten years, Bronja was my shadow. Lurking in the corner of the pig pen, perched stiff on the edge of the bed, hovering next to me at the table to watch what I ate. Always observing my farmer’s life, painfully allergic to participating.

“It’s different in the city,” Mother had once consoled me, brushing dried dirt from my dungarees. Bronja had pushed me in the mud after an unexpected hug-attempt gone awry. “The way they’re brought up there – all friendships, all love, emotion, they’re told all of that is weakness.”

But I have good memories. Making tents from our bed linen in the twin room. Torches under faces, scary stories. Standing next to Bronja by the mirror, two thirteen-year-olds back-to-back, stretching the fabric of our clothes across our bodies, marvelling at the changes. “Are you going to do it?” I asked her. “Take the Twopenny Bargain?”

Bronja had gone rigid. “Of course,” she’d said after a while. “It’s good for society.” Then she’d paused. “I’d never do what my mother did, though.”

“What did your mother do?”

Bronja had glared at the mirror. “She took it twice.”

*

Tight grey streets, growing tighter, darker. Rectangular buildings closing in on us from all angles. Occasionally a woman scuttles past us, head down. Bronja keeps her eyes stoically forward. Her hands clutch keys, turning them over and over. The air is thick, hot. I wish I had some nice cold metal to clutch.

We pass a sky-high billboard: ‘Two pennies to change your life. What a bargain! Find out more at your local Androlics Center.’ The woman on the poster beams down at us. Bronja’s face turns to steel.

She turns sharply up a side-street, and I hurry to keep pace. She takes a step up to a blue wood door, and disappears into the faceless building. I follow.

The room is what I should have expected. A refrigerator, a microwave on a little table. Two wooden chairs, a respectful distance apart, facing a television. Peeling paint, bare-wood floors. The tiny room seems somehow vast.

“Christina!” Bronja is standing at a closed door, which I assume leads to a bedroom. “Dite’s here!”

Christina. Rookie police officer, currently on leave. When Bronja mentioned a housemate in her letter, I felt a twinge of envy. Now the idea of any friendship on Bronja’s part seems laughable.

“You can sit,” says Bronja. She gives me a smile so painfully forced, I wince. “She’ll be out in a minute.”

I perch on one of the chairs. The wood is hard and cold. I feel instantly awkward. Will the chairs at the Androlics Institute be like this, I wonder? Maybe I should invest in thicker underclothes.

“I’ll need your help to set your bed up.” Bronja takes something from the fridge, puts it in the microwave. “It’s sausages tonight, Dite. A taste of home, right?”

I don’t answer. Christina has materialized in the bedroom doorway.

Red hair hangs limply against her pale face. Bags under her eyes. My eyes travel down, alight on her middle.

“Bronja? What’s she staring for?”

The sickeningly swollen abdomen under her pyjamas.

“Dite’s from the country, Christina,” comes Bronja’s voice. “She hasn’t seen a pregnant human before.”

*

We were sat at the kitchen table. Mother held picture cards of her own design. “A male cow is called a bull,” she enunciated. “A female cow is called a-”

“Cow,” I said. Bronja had her head on the table. She raised it a little to eye the cards.

“Good.” Next card. “A male pig is called a-”

“It’s a boar,” shouted Bronja. I giggled. I wasn’t sure whether Bronja had meant the pun, but I liked to think she had. “This is stupid.”

“Bronja.” Mother put her cards down with a sigh. “There is a lot required for living in a city. Meat, dairy produce, fabric from wool. Do you think you would benefit from all of that, if there weren’t people who knew how animals reproduced? The difference between the male and the female, and what the offspring are called?”

“Should do it in a factory,” Bronja said. “This is disgusting.”

“What’s a male human called?” I asked.

Silence.

Bronja looked at me like she was going to throw something. Naughty laughter sparked inside me, and I struggled to keep dead-pan, defiant.

Mother looked at her hands. “Don’t be silly, Dite.” She picked up her cards again. “A male duck is called a drake-”

*

“No taxes. No poverty. Violence?” The woman on the television pauses. “A thing of the past!”

Black-and-white photos of bruised women and crying girls make way for colour pictures of women in overalls, working in offices; police in familiar uniforms.

“Your contribution pays to keep society running. And in return, you could receive the gift of a lifetime. A permanent end to loneliness!”

Cut to a woman holding a vial of something white. Cut to a bloated abdomen. Cut to a woman, looking solemnly down into a basket at – something.

“Don’t delay. Take two pennies to your local Androlics Center today!”

I must have made a noise. Bronja turns around on her chair. “Hey, Dite. How was your first day?”

Does she ever change out of her uniform?

“Why is she just standing in the doorway?” Christina sits awkwardly, legs spread, abdomen hanging between them. A fork protrudes from her packaged meal, which she rests on her knee.

“Come on. We want to hear about it.” The chirpiness in Bronja’s voice sounds alien. Christina frowns at her. She groans, heaves herself up, and shuffles into the bedroom.

Bronja stiffens, but keeps looking at me. That smile will break her face soon. “Come on, Dite. What’s it like at Androlics?”

My legs feel funny. I sit on my mattress – Bronja made it up for me last night, facing the TV so I ‘wouldn’t get lonely’. Bronja gets up, approaches the mattress – and then catches herself, stops, staring down at me.

I try to imagine what her body would feel like, pressed against mine.

“It’s like a big farm,” I say. Yes. That’s just the way to describe it. “Except they’re all sedated. They’re not allowed to move around.”

“Should think not, no.” Bronja pauses. She taps her fingers against her leg.

“Got a question?”

“What… age do you reckon they were?”

Of all the questions-

“Fifteen to thirty,” I say. “The ‘useful’ age.”

Bronja swallows.

“They kill them off at forty. To make room for more.”

Bronja looks at the bedroom door. “Yeah. Well-”

“Don’t you want to know what they look like?”

“Dite, I have to go now, I have a shift-”

“They look like us, Bronja!”

*

I sat on the bed in my floral-wallpapered room, listening to the grunts of the pigs in the barn below. Early spring. The piglets were born, and Mother needed my help herding them outside into the big pen. But that could wait. My hands trembled excitedly on the letter.

‘Dear Ms. Aphrodite 100Pi,

‘We are delighted to accept your application for an internship with the Androlics Institute. As you know, this Institute is vital for the progression of our thriving young society. We feel that your skills will make you a valuable asset to the team.’

It was signed by Eleanor 93And. The Head of Androlics.

I wanted to throw my arms around her and thank her for her praise.

*

Today, Eleanor told me to stop looking at their faces.

Just refill the feeding tubes and check them for infections, she said. You’re a farmer. You should be able to do these things without freaking out, she said. But how could I help it?

Fifteen to thirty years old. I’m twenty.

Sitting at the kitchen table with Mother. She held up the picture-card of a pig. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance of either gender being born: sow, or boar. Of course, the sow has multiple functions. Only one boar is needed to fertilize many sows, so if supplies run low, if you need to cull one, it should be a boar.”

What if I had been born a boar?

Christina’s moans seep through the bedroom wall. A selfish part of me thinks, why did this have to happen tonight?

Two women stand on either side of the bedroom door. They stare down at me and Bronja, sitting side by side on the mattress, with undisguised suspicion. ‘Androlics Institute: Collector’ is printed across their overalls. The third is inside, with Christina. I can hear her harsh bark: “Push, push, push!”

“It will be alright,” says Bronja. At the sound of her choked voice, one guard whispers something to her colleague, but Bronja’s black saucepan eyes stare straight ahead, oblivious.

You didn’t have to call them, I want to say. But I know Bronja. She had to alert Androlics for the same reason she returned to the city, the same reason she hates her mother and not them. The reason she’ll probably take the Twopenny Bargain herself one day.

“Don’t make such a fuss,” scolds the woman in the next room.

“It will be alright,” says Bronja. “It’s a little girl. It will be alright.”

Christina screams. My eyes dart to the black, box-shaped carrier clutched by one of the guards.

“And if it’s not a girl?”

Bronja’s saucepan eyes blink. “Shut up.”

“Would she do what your mother did?”

“Shut up.”

“Will it be too much to live with, seeing them whisk it away?”

Bronja turns sharply to me. Then tears begin to well in her eyes.

The guards look on in disgust. One opens her mouth to say something.

Suddenly, from inside the bedroom – wailing.

The guards turn, push into the room, clutching the carrier. They slam the door behind them.

Bronja’s cries rival the new human’s as she buries her head against my shoulder, tears seeping through my Androlics overalls, turning the fabric dark.

*

Six months. That’s how long I lasted.

The train-ride back home felt somehow longer than it did coming out. Mother met me at the station, quivering lips, hugs and tears. I was silent on the walk home. The sausages we had for dinner tasted like polystyrene.

“Too used to those synthetic flavourings they add in the city,” Mother rebuked me. I nodded. Of course that was the reason.

No bath after dinner. I lay awake in my childhood bed, listening to the sounds of the pigs in the barn beneath. Late winter now. The piglets due any day. I kept my eyes on the ceiling, avoiding glancing at Bronja’s old bed, trying not to cry.

“It’s alright,” Mother kept telling me. “Of course the city would affect you like this. It’s too lonely. They force it on people, you see? If people think affection is wrong, they get lonely, and if they get lonely, they take the Twopenny Bargain. The government gets money. The cycle repeats.”

“Is that why you left?” I asked.

“Yep. As soon as I took the Bargain. Only good thing I got from that place.” She smiled sadly at me, and I winced. Freely-displayed emotion. “We’ve got each other, kid. That’s all we need.”

I told myself to believe her.

I convinced myself I was getting past it.

And now I’ve got this letter.

Sitting on my bed, facing Bronja’s, my hands shake as I read her familiar scrawl.

Christina, Bronja writes, is thinking of moving to the country with her new daughter. This is a relief, Bronja says. No screeching, no midnight feeds, and Christina won’t be tempted to take the Bargain again. There’s a fifty-fifty chance that could be disastrous for her.

My hands stiffen on the paper. Pardon me for not caring.

More writing, meaningless anecdotes. She wants to ask something. I can tell when Bronja is beating about the bush, even in her writing; it was the same when she was trying to invite me to live with her. I scan down the page to the final paragraph. I find it. A question mark.

Reading carefully, I’m impressed that Bronja has written the question out in detail. Even more amazed that she used that word. The one beginning with ‘b’.

Should I lie?

I turn the paper over, take a pen from my overalls pocket.

‘Dear Bronja,

‘I read the information of every male in my department. I don’t know what difference it makes, but can confirm: your brother was not among them.’

I stop. I picture Bronja, alone in her flat, hypnotized by the advertisement repeating on the television. Locked in a room with temptation, and nothing else.

I take fresh paper. Start again.