News from Gardenia

by Robert Llewellyn

  I found my clothes and had started getting dressed when there was a light tap on the door.

  I looked around. The wood-panelled walls gave no clue as to where the door was.

  ‘Um, come in,’ I said. One of the panels opened to reveal Grace, the young woman I’d met in the field the day before.

  ‘Good morning, Gavin,’ she said with a broad smile. She had a large pile of folded clothing in her arms. ‘I hope you slept well.’

  ‘I did, thanks. Yeah. Slept really well,’ I said, feeling a little exposed; I was only wearing underpants and my T-shirt and I started to dart about looking for my trousers.

  ‘You seem a little anxious. Is everything okay?’ said Grace kindly.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I didn’t expect to wake up here. I expected to wake up at home, or in a hospital, but I’m here aren’t I?’

  ‘You are definitely here,’ said Grace. ‘What are you anxious about? Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘I don’t even know where to start,’ I said. I sat down on the bed with my head in my hands. Somehow the appearance of Grace made everything worse. If she was real and in the room, it made it more apparent that this was all really happening. You wouldn’t dream of some slightly stern but beautiful woman one day and then dream she came into your room the next.

  ‘Please don’t be upset,’ said Grace. She stood by me and I felt her hand rest softly on my shoulder.

  ‘If what William told me is true, yesterday, in your kitchen, I mean, if none of you are lying or making fun of me, then my wife is dead.’

  ‘You have a wife?’ said Grace, she said the word ‘wife’ hesitantly, it was as if she wasn’t used to the word.

  ‘I don’t know. I did yesterday. We had a row before I left home. I want to ring her and say sorry, you know, tell her I’m okay, but I can’t.’

  Grace sat next to me, keeping a respectful distance.

  ‘No, you can’t. It’s very sad indeed.’

  I looked at her. She seemed genuinely concerned but also very matter of fact. I couldn’t call Beth: she knew it, I knew it. I also heard the sentence I had just uttered repeat in my head. Suddenly it made no sense, ‘I want to ring her and say sorry.’ It was so archaic, it was like saying, ‘I must send a telegram at once.’ I felt like a Victorian standing in an internet café, no, worse, a man who had seen an early steam engine standing by the Japanese bullet train.

  We sat in silence for a while.

  ‘The most likely explanation I can come up with is that I am dead, or in a coma,’ I said eventually. ‘Because nothing else makes sense. For a start, this is all too nice.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, here, now. You all seem so happy and healthy, there’s plenty of food, there’s what seems like ubiquitous energy. I mean, my phone’s battery has been fully topped up ever since I came out of the cloud.’

  ‘I won’t pretend I know what you’re talking about.’

  I picked up my phone and showed it to her.

  ‘Oh, isn’t that lovely,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘My phone,’ I said. I was almost annoyed – as if she wouldn’t know what a phone was! ‘Never mind that,’ I snapped, trying to keep my temper. ‘Look, the battery indicator. A hundred per cent.’

  ‘Is that good?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Well, yes, it’s bloody amazing. That’s what I mean. Everything here seems pretty bloody amazing.’

  ‘Well, it’s not all a bed of roses, Gavin.’

  ‘Okay, I’m sure you’re right, but the future looked pretty grim to some of us back in, well, what do I call it? My day? The old world. All the films and books about the future were always full of mass extinction and destruction, wars, Armageddon, the machines taking over, massive meteors slamming into the earth, the human race coming to an end, invasions by aliens, endless nuclear winters, no food, no fuel, it was all really depressing.’

  ‘Well, I’m not the person to ask, but I think the last two hundred or so years haven’t been exactly easy, and we’ve still got plenty of problems now.’

  I looked at Grace and smiled. ‘Have you? Blimey, it’s almost a relief to hear that.’

  Grace smiled back at me. ‘Nice to see you smile.’ She patted the clothes resting on her lap. ‘Good. Well, let us tackle the practical problems first. I thought to myself this morning, seeing as you found my kettle so impressive, you might be interested to wash your clothes.’

  I couldn’t make an immediate connection but I smiled and nodded.

  ‘And I knew you’d need something to wear while they were being washed, so I brought you some fresh clothing.’ She carefully placed the folded clothes on the bed beside her.

  ‘Oh, great, thanks.’

  I picked up the neat pile; it was heavier than I expected. Grace stood up and looked at me.

  ‘Try them on then?’ she said with a smile, a smile that contained no hint of either malice or flirtation.

  ‘Oh, right. Um, okay.’

  I felt slightly confused as to what was going on. I turned my back to her and stripped off my T-shirt and pants and pulled on the clothes she’d brought. I could feel her staring at me the whole time I was dressing; it wasn’t obviously sexual or even intrusive, it was maybe just a little bit creepy.

  I pulled up the weird trousers she’d given me – maybe breeches would be a better description. Heavy, possibly woollen cloth, good quality but cut in a way I didn’t quite understand.

  ‘Let me assist you,’ said Grace. She knelt down in front of me without hesitation and tied together two strong tapes that were sewn into the waistband of the trousers. No buttons, zips or belts on these clothes – it seemed everything tied together with strong tapes.

  I pulled on a soft slightly creamy-coloured shirt and a short, boxy cut jacket made of the same cloth as the trouser things.

  ‘There, that looks much better. Do they fit you well?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. I glanced around the room for a mirror. I don’t think I’m a vain man, but I felt a little as if I were going to a fancy dress party. I suppose I was very used to my chinos and polo shirts.

  ‘What do you need?’ asked Grace. I was trying to ignore the fact that everything this young woman said sounded a bit like a come on. I wasn’t in the market – at least, the day before I hadn’t been in the market.

  I stood in silence for a moment wondering if I did have a wife. However, it was becoming increasingly possible my wife had been dead for something like one hundred and fifty years. I shook my head. It was nonsense; things like this didn’t happen.

  ‘I was looking for a mirror. I’m just not sure how, well, how weird I look.’

  ‘You look perfectly normal to me,’ said Grace. ‘If anything, you look rather more handsome.’

  She didn’t seem to be flirting when I looked at her; she looked as if she was just stating a simple fact: it’s daytime, or it’s raining. I could discern no more emotional subtext. Mind you, according to Beth, who may or may not have been dead for over a century, that would be nothing new.

  I picked my clothes up and followed her out of the room and into a long, whitewashed corridor, down a flight of stone steps – I could recall none of this from the night before – and through a heavy door into another room. This one was noisy. Large machines lined the walls, and Grace opened a steel door in one of them.

  ‘Put your clothes in here,’ she said and I did so. Inside it looked like a black drum, obviously some kind of washing machine although I’d certainly seen nothing like it before. There was no company logo, no markings or obvious controls on the machine so I watched carefully to see what Grace would do.

  ‘Light wash please,’ she said as if talking to a ticket seller at a train station.

  A small, dull red light appeared above the door and the mac
hine throbbed a little. A high-pitched whine emanated from within the smooth exterior and the dull light went out. Grace pulled out the clothes.

  ‘Don’t tell me they’re done already!’

  ‘I have only washed them. I like to hang things on a line to dry if the weather is suitable, and it’s a warm day today. Follow me.’

  Grace opened the door and an ancient-looking woman entered.

  ‘Morning, Grace darling,’ she said as she walked in.

  ‘Good morning, Francesca,’ said Grace.

  I turned around as I was following Grace, and saw the old woman open a door on the opposite wall and start hauling out some sheets.

  Outside the building the sun was already high and bright, a beautiful English summer’s day. We walked along a neat path, through another hedge and into a small paddock. A series of lines was strung up and most of them were festooned with laundry, drying in the sun.

  ‘Solar drying,’ said Grace with a smile. ‘Low carbon.’

  ‘Oh, so you know about carbon?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I don’t know anything about carbon, I’ve just been reading some old records from your day. Everything had to be low carbon.’ She laughed a little as she pegged my clothes up on the lines.

  ‘They’ll be dry in no time. Go into the kitchen and get yourself some breakfast. There’s someone waiting there who wants to talk to you.’ Grace gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘I’m working in the bow field, where you landed your flying machine yesterday. I’ll see you later!’

  She ran off. I watched her go and realised immediately that I didn’t want her to.

  8

  I stood alone in the garden of the old house staring up at the oddly coloured cladding. It wasn’t exactly pretty – no natural stone in evidence. However, it was very well looked after and the garden was an enchanting place.

  In some ways it was like a dream, and yet I was so aware of the freshness of the air, the slight wind in my hair, the non-existence of background man-made hum, that odd sensation of being unable to discern any mechanical noise.

  I looked around the garden. There was just the sound of the wind in the trees and birdsong. So much birdsong. It was unquestionably beautiful, not something I normally noticed. I realised, as I stared around the blossoming, richly verdant garden, that I quite wanted to stay.

  However, as I contemplated this, imagining myself as an old man pottering around in this garden, I knew this was absurd. I wanted to see the world; I wanted to see what had happened to the world I had been so familiar with.

  From the sound of people’s reactions to my ‘flying machine’ I would have the sky to myself, if only I could take off again.

  I could fly back to Kingham and see what had happened there. I could fly over London. I worked out that due to the lack of planes, there would be no air traffic control and nothing in the sky other than the very obvious tether lines to worry about.

  ‘Mr Meckler,’ said a voice behind me. ‘There’s hot tea and fresh cakes in here.’

  I turned around and saw the heavyset woman that the old man William had pointed out to me the previous evening. She held out her hand; it was enormous. I shook it. Her hand was not only enormous, it was clearly very strong.

  ‘I’m Paula,’ she said. Her voice was deep, not quite like a man’s but very deep for a woman.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Mmm. So, Mr Meckler, tell me, you were born when exactly?’

  ‘June the seventh, 1979,’ I said.

  ‘1979. Indeed. That is an awfully long time ago.’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose, if what I’ve been told is true, it is.’

  Paula smiled briefly. She seemed a little impatient. ‘William suggested I give you a brief rundown of the historical period you have, well, you have not…’

  ‘The bit I missed,’ I said, trying to help.

  ‘Indeed, indeed.’ Paula entered the large kitchen and I followed her. I almost sighed with relief as at last I was in a place I recognised. It was almost familiar except there was no crowd of people in the room. It was very clean and tidy, and only Bal, the very old man with the white beard was in evidence; he was sitting at a table with a cup of tea in front of him. He appeared to be asleep.

  Paula walked to the kitchen area and on top of an old wooden serving table was a tray containing two cups and some small pastries. She carried the tray to the large table, placed it down very carefully and pulled out a chair.

  ‘Please take a seat,’ she said. She pulled another chair out and sat opposite me.

  ‘Not surprisingly,’ she said, ‘a great deal has happened in the period between the time you went into the cloud and the present day.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I was feeling very confused now. More convinced that something utterly inexplicable had happened, which could only end up in lots of feelings. Weird unfamiliar feelings. Not all bad, but basically a little bit terrifying. ‘It certainly looks very different.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, from the glimpses I got yesterday when I was still flying, the whole place looks like a forest.’

  ‘Ah, yes of course. That must be very different from your era. We have been busy planting trees for about a hundred and fifty years.’

  ‘How do you grow food then?’

  ‘We grow food everywhere, either in small highly cultivated plots or in our glasshouses. More or less everyone grows food. That’s what we all do.’

  ‘What, everyone?’

  ‘Everyone who is physically able.’

  ‘So are you all farmers?’

  ‘No, not farmers. I don’t think that is how we see ourselves. Gardeners primarily.’

  ‘But you can’t all do that. I mean, everywhere I look there are signs of what seems like highly developed technology. Your lighting systems, the tether thing, the power grid that seems to be everywhere. Someone is busy doing things other than bloody gardening.’

  ‘There are certainly some who don’t do any garden work. Not many though.’

  ‘But aren’t there, I don’t know, like, specialists, like doctors, scientists, engineers, that kind of thing, people who are too busy doing other things?’

  ‘There are many people who have other interests. For example, I am a historian, but I also work in the gardens every day.’

  ‘Blimey,’ I said, ‘every day! But what about, I don’t know, politicians, trade union bosses, bureaucrats, PR people, civil servants?’

  Paula smiled. ‘That is very amusing, Mr Meckler. We don’t…’ She paused for a moment and I assumed she was gathering her thoughts for some kind of shocking revelation. Maybe I really was dead and she was trying to find the nicest way to tell me.

  ‘How shall I explain?’ she said eventually. ‘There are no people who specialise in those sort of areas now.’

  Okay, so maybe I wasn’t dead and maybe she wasn’t some kind of weird heavy-duty angel.

  ‘None?’ I said incredulously.

  ‘No, not really. Oh, there are people with those kind of tendencies certainly, but they are tolerated, never encouraged.’

  ‘So, does that mean…’ I scratched my very slightly thinning hair. ‘Does that mean there’s no prime minister?’

  ‘This is precisely why William wished me to discuss this with you. Most of the people here would not necessarily know what the term prime minister meant. It’s not a term we are familiar with. It is only my knowledge of history that furnishes me with such information. No, there is no prime minister, no central government, no banking system, no army, navy, air force, no police or judicial system and no civil service.’

  I stared at her. I was now very worried. It sounded like the whole system I’d known, in fact the whole country, had broken down into some sort of anarchist semi-medieval subsistence
-farming backwater.

  ‘Blimey. And this isn’t just here, in this house; you’re talking about the whole country.’

  ‘Pretty much the whole world,’ said Paula. ‘Certainly there are countries who still insist on having governments and armies, but they are few and far between. North Korea is a good example. They still have a government apparently, and an army. Then there’s Midwest, what you would have known as America, at least the central geographic area; they have declared themselves an independent Christian democracy, but all the reports indicate they are anything but Christian and anything but a democracy. This, however, is hearsay; no one I know has actually been there. We don’t hear much about what goes on.’

  ‘So what happened? I mean, when I entered the cloud, the world was full of anxiety about the future. We had over-population, we had energy shortages looming, we had pollution, climate change, corruption in corporate and government circles, we had powerful forces of reaction growing, racism, fundamentalist religion on the boil.’

  Paula was nodding patiently as I spoke. My thoughts were tumbling over each other like rocks falling down a quarry face, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  ‘But we also had incredible global communication systems,’ I said. ‘We knew what was going on in the world, or we could find out instantly. We had the web, the internet, we had incredibly well connected peer review systems in the world of science and engineering, we were developing technology at an amazing rate, surely that hasn’t all just stagnated. You can’t tell me all that stopped overnight.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Paula. She leant down and picked up a small canvas bag. From it she extracted a rather beautiful leather-bound book.

  ‘I decided this would help you. It is a volume of contemporary history I helped to create. It’s also on The Book if you wish to access specific topics in more detail, but I thought you might be more familiar with this format. Many very well read people from around the world contributed to it.’ She pushed it towards me. It looked very old but was of course produced many years after I should have died. It felt weird holding it, but it was a printed, paper book, not a bit of floppy-touch screen plastic.