The Placement

This is another possible opening of a novel. I was toying with the idea of a future society in which the population needed to be controlled. It got me thinking about the way it’s always women who bear the responsibility for contraception. I guess men might argue that’s how it should be as women are the ones who become pregnant, but this attitude gives men a freedom women can’t enjoy. Also, I mulled over how men controlling women has affected our lives, thinking that for all our progress in this area, there’s such a long way to go.

This piece sits on the predication that little changes, despite that advances we tell ourselves we’ve made. There might be some illusion of things heading in the right direction, but the women here are still controlled by men. Anyway, see what you think…

***

She stared at the old-fashioned calendar fixed on her grandfather’s kitchen wall by a grubby suction hook. Two days until her sixteenth birthday. Two days left. Two days before the Placement.

Laura had pushed her grandmother’s fussing about the day to the back of her mind whenever she could, only considering it when faced with her grandmother’s worried questioning. She didn’t want to think about what her sixteenth birthday would bring, despite accepting she must, for there would be no escaping. Not that she’d thought about that, either. Her friends had gone through it apparently unscathed, so there was no reason she shouldn’t be the same.

But, standing in the warmth of grandfather’s kitchen, Laura allowed herself to address the Placement head on. A ripple of anxiety flowed through her, and she rolled her shoulders to dissipate the sensation. It remained, like a faraway echo of waves crashing on rocks.

No one she knew questioned the sense of going through the Placement; everyone at school, at youth club, in the town centre where she met up with friends not from school – they all tacitly accepted it was ‘the right thing to do.’ There had been no whisperings in corners expressing doubts, no murmured warnings about the dangers. So, why, as Laura looked at the cartoon she didn’t understand on grandfather’s calendar, did her stomach roil? Why did wordless concern blossom in her head? Why did she have the urge to run away?

Laura understood her grandmother’s worrying; hadn’t hers been the first generation of women to go through the Placement? And hadn’t they learned at school how hit and miss it had been in the beginning? But that was decades ago. Science had moved on, techniques had been perfected, and no one had died following the Placement for many years.

It was the intimacy of it that unsettled her, Laura decided, although she couldn’t silence the rumblings of disquiet still fomenting in her mind. When she’d attended the pre-op session the previous week, the doctor’s smooth reassurance hadn’t helped. He’d explained what would happen, how long it would take and how she would feel afterwards in tones designed to put her at her ease, but Laura felt a tightness inside that grew with each utterance. No, she told herself. It wasn’t just the intimacy; it was how she would never be private again.