‘As you can see, we do have food, however, there are more and more people leaving every day. The predictions are that in about a hundred years’ time the city will be a fraction of the size. Even now many suburbs are being returned to farmland as the population decreases. We are just a little behind the times in India: we’re not as advanced as you Gardenians.’
‘Wow, I would say you are way more advanced than Gardenia,’ I said gesturing around me. ‘I mean, the whole country is just a load of trees and gardens; there doesn’t seem to be much going on there. This place is insane – there is so much going on here. It must be an incredible place to live.’
‘Oh we all love Mumbai,’ said Palash, ‘but we have many problems, things that only a city can produce. If you collect this many people in one place you have all sorts of problems. I specialise in sewage. Believe me, I have my hands full.’
This comment was clearly overheard by the many people sitting near us, who, I was suddenly aware, were listening intently to our conversation. It caused much raucous laughter and amusing gestures.
‘So please explain to me then, Palash,’ I said. ‘I understand that Gardenia is a nonecon, but how do you organise things here? I assume there is an economic system working here. Do you have a job?’
‘I deal with jobs, that’s for sure,’ said Palash. This comment aroused more groans and laughter from our immediate neighbours.
‘I suppose you could call it a job. I think of it more as a calling. I have always loved waste – sewage is wonderful stuff. We have an enormous amount of it and we use it very carefully. We have wonderful facilities for treating and reusing it. However, knowing you come from Gardenia I know it is hard to understand. I have what is called a profession. I get credits for my work and these credits allow me to feed and clothe my family and have somewhere to live. I know you have none of these things and I can see a time coming when we will not have them either.’
‘But all these credits,’ I asked. ‘How do you transfer them?’
Palash looked puzzled for a moment, then he shrugged.
‘I have no idea. I just know I have them. It’s all done…’ he waved his hands around ‘…somewhere.’
‘Is it the grid?’ I asked.
‘I suppose it is,’ said Palash. ‘It’s not something I ever think about. There is a system in place. Fully sentient, fully aware, hasn’t made a mistake in over one hundred years.’
‘Does it know I’m here?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ said Palash. ‘You have the grid in Gardenia.’
‘I think so, yes, but we don’t have credits,’ I said.
‘No, but there are arrangements in place,’ Palash explained. ‘We do trade with the nonecons, well, we have arrangements. I know that if I visit Gardenia, I can eat and be looked after with no stress. I suppose that’s what the grid has done since your time. It has removed the stress you may have experienced when you travelled away from home. It has also removed the stress of just living. If, for example, my daughter needs some lovely shampoo to wash her hair, it is delivered to our house by a shampoo wallah.’
‘What, the grid knows when your shampoo runs out?’
‘Yes,’ said Palash. ‘It’s all very simple really.’
I finished my tea and checked the time on my phone.
‘Palash, it’s been wonderful to meet you, but I fear I have to get back to the station, I’m taking a pod back to Gardenia very soon.’
‘It is a tragedy that your visit was so short. I truly hope you can return one day soon.’
‘Please, I would love to come back and meet your family. You have been very kind to take the time to talk to me.’
I stood up and another multi-armed machine approached me at speed. Palash held his hand up. The machine froze, this one had an enormous female face and a shawl over its wobbling head.
‘Don’t be alarmed, it’s just going to assist you, it’s the wipe wallah.’
Palash dropped his hand and the machine moved toward me rapidly, one hand gently held my head in position while another wiped my face with a warm scented cloth. It couldn’t have been more carefully done; the feeling of the movements reminded me of nothing more than my mother wiping my face when I was a child.
‘Happy times,’ said the wipe wallah machine and immediately started clearing away our cups.
We made our way through the heaving streets to the pod terminal, all the time Palash pointing things out to me, explaining about the sewage system and the cleanliness of the toilet facilities.
He gave me a hearty hug and left me outside the station, I entered and sat down in the small waiting area and just breathed in, trying to somehow hold onto something of this incredible city.
It seemed to be functioning very well, however chaotic it looked. The streets were clean and tidy, there were many trees planted in orderly rows and they all looked well cared for. Unlike Beijing I didn’t see signs of vehicles. Certainly in the area I had seen, which was a tiny corner of the city, I had only seen pedestrians.
The last pod trip back to Gardenia was uneventful. I was almost bored by the procedure of being strapped in, I felt utterly exhausted and slept through the whole experience. I can’t believe it now. Travelling around the globe and being weightless in space had become commonplace to me in less than twenty-four hours.
21
I had drained the last of my special juice stuff from the little stainless steel bottle before departure in Mumbai, and when I came out of the pod terminal at Heathrow in Gardenia, my mouth felt like a hollow wound.
I had a headache and my guts clearly weren’t doing well. I felt sweaty and dirty and my clothes seemed to cling to my skin like a badly worn bath flannel. I tried breathing in lungfuls of heady Gardenian air but it didn’t seem to help.
I had lost track of time, and looking at Gardenian time on my perpetually charged phone didn’t help, 5:45a.m. Judging by the light in the forest clearing outside the terminal, it really was early in the morning.
This was far more intense than jet lag, I stood motionless, my body utterly exhausted but my brain going at five hundred miles an hour. If I didn’t have jetlag, what did I have, tether-lag? Pod-lag? I glanced at my phone again, the battery indicator suggested it was charging. I then started to try and work out what had happened to it. I knew it was pointless trying to understand, but it was almost as if my brain wouldn’t let the issue lie. I deduced that when I was in orbit the phone was out of range of the ubiquitous global induction charging, so it actually used some power from the battery. Now I was back on the ground it was picking up the charge. Then I realised that through all the time I’d been in Gardenia, I hadn’t yet discovered how the induction charge actually worked. Was it coming from a wire mesh buried underground, or from power masts strewn across the land? I hadn’t seen anything like that anywhere.
I also didn’t know where the pods got the power from to climb up fifty kilometres of flimsy graphene thread. That had to use some serious kilowatts, but where from?
I yawned and squinted through the haze; for every answer I’d received, I had a backlog of hundreds of thousands of questions. But then I realised that this information would only be of any use to someone if I actually got back to my own time. I started pacing around in a circle, I worked out that if I travelled back two hundred years then I could make use of such knowledge. As it was, here in Gardenia any such detailed information was more or less useless. I could fix diggers, that was about it. My cooking was rubbish, I was dreading the time I’d have to start gardening, I suppose I could teach kids, fix the odd broken gate, but my role was almost guaranteed to be dull and uninteresting.
I’d been around the world, seen that it had left me well and truly behind. I was now like a man who had just created a mechanical adding machine and I had a job as a hardware engineer at Apple headquarters.
I stood looking up the tether as the pod I had arrived in started to climb back up into space. It was normal, this is just what happened, there was nothing I could do to improve it, or come up with another system. I was useless, my whole existence back in the old world was about being useful, about coming up with things that could make the world better, more efficient, make things stronger, lighter, faster. Now I was in a world where everything already was far stronger, lighter, more efficient and faster than I could have ever imagined, and I was going to have to live out my days in a fucking garden growing spuds.
I turned back toward the entrance to the track and saw some figures emerging. Although my eyesight was good, they were a fair distance away and my eyes were almost useless with exhaustion.
I had been wondering if I could get on any old podmibus and if it would take me anywhere near Goldacre Hall when one of the figures came into focus. A woman with a big smile. It was Grace. She walked up to me and stood motionless.
‘Well, how was it?’ she asked.
I didn’t say anything, she was so beautiful I just found it impossible to speak. Even though I was feeling sick and had a headache from hell I wanted to grab hold of her, I wanted to hold her more than anything I’ve ever felt, but everything about her slight physical distance from me and her hands clasped in front of her was telling me to hold back.
‘That bad?’ asked Grace, her eyes sparkling in the morning light.
I took a deep breath, held it for a moment, felt dizzy, let it out and said, ‘Just totally overwhelming, just incredible, amazing, I cannot begin to take it in.’ I pointed up at the pale blue sky. ‘I’ve just been up there.’
‘It is quite spectacular isn’t it?’
I felt I was grinning like a village idiot. Grace handed me a bottle similar to the one I’d been carrying. ‘I thought you might like some of this,’ she said. I took the bottle, popped the weird top off and took some very big gulps. Within a few breaths I was feeling better, still pretty worn out but not quite as battered as I had been moments before.
‘That is so kind, Grace. Thank you.’
‘It was no bother. Are you happy to travel back to Goldacre Hall right now?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go, that’s for sure.’
I touched Grace’s arm gently. We had never been intimate anywhere other than my wonderful room at Goldacre Hall and I didn’t know how appropriate it might be for me to embrace her, which I dearly wanted to do.
Grace responded with a kiss on my cheek and a gentle embrace.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she whispered. I felt dizzy with delight that she had acknowledged our passion for each other in a public place, although to be honest where we were standing wasn’t exactly Beijing or Mumbai; there seemed to be no one else around.
‘What is it?’ I whispered back. I was expecting to hear that she missed me, that she wanted me, that I was her man.
‘I’m pregnant,’ said Grace.
There is no point denying it, I froze. It wasn’t unpleasant, I just didn’t move or say anything. I felt Grace gently stroke my back, reassuring me.
‘It’s okay,’ she said softly. ‘It’s exactly what I wanted.’
‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ was all that came out of my mouth. I stood holding Grace for a long time. I could smell her hair; it smelled so utterly intoxicating, such a wonderful, I suppose natural human smell that I found incredibly comforting.
I must have eventually allowed Grace to lead me down the steps and into the transport tunnel, I really can’t recall exactly what happened. I know a podmibus arrived so quickly it was as if it knew we were ready to travel, which, I was beginning to understand, it probably did.
We climbed on board and chose facing seats; the podmibus was completely empty. I was confused, felt fuzzy and disconnected. The elastic safety band thing came around me and pulled me into the seat, I watched as the same thing happened to Grace. She was somehow very far away from me although in reality I suppose I could have stretched forward and just about touched her. It wasn’t physical distance, it was something else. I didn’t feel close. I didn’t know how to describe that feeling even to myself, but it was a feeling, and not one I liked.
Suddenly and unexpectedly I was missing Beth. I had met her descendants, happy healthy people living all over the world. I wanted to tell Beth about everything I’d seen, I wanted to be with her, I wanted to experience her telling me she was going to have a baby – Beth had wanted babies and she eventually had them, but not from me.
Yet here I was, rattling around in the future with no connection to anyone, to any history, to anything at all and suddenly I was going to be a father. I didn’t even know what that meant.
I wondered if Grace was looking at me as I stumbled blindly through my jumbled up feelings. I didn’t dare check, I couldn’t look at her so I just kept staring at my hands which were not still or calm.
I was very confused on that journey. I scratched my head for a long time – it was something Beth told me I did when I was anxious. I pondered what it would be like to grow up in this world, to be a child of Gardenia. From what I’d seen, it wouldn’t be that bad. It could be a lot worse. There were plenty of periods of history where being born was a complete nightmare. I found myself smiling. Maybe it was a good thing. I was going to be a father – at least I hoped I’d be allowed to be one. Maybe that wasn’t the idea. It was all so different. Did fathers have a role in Gardenia?
I hadn’t seen anyone who lived as a couple in a house with kids, the nearest to that would be Grace and Mitchell but clearly my role in that relationship made it very different from anything I’d known. I’d seen nothing like families as I’d grown up knowing them. They all seemed jumbled up.
Did people love each other? Was there still romance? I’d met people who were clearly couples but there was something very different in the way they mixed together, the way that such relationships were defined was unrecognisable. Did people fall in love at all? I’m sure one of the reasons I felt confused was that I realised Grace didn’t necessarily love me or want me – she wanted what I could give her. Pleasure, which was fine by me, and a baby, which was…Well, maybe it was fine too.
We must have remained in complete silence for almost the entire journey. As I felt the podmibus finally slow down I also felt Grace’s hand touch my arm.
‘I haven’t told anyone yet, so could you be kind and remain discreet about it for a little time?’
‘Of course,’ I said. The pod stopped and we got off. The machine moved off with a barely audible hiss and we climbed the steps back up into the forest. When we got outside, we stood together in the early morning mist.
It was a ridiculously beautiful spot, the birdsong almost painful in its intensity. Without thought, I took a deep lungful of musty forest air and turned to Grace. I found I was smiling again, I was happy. My headache had gone.
‘It’s wonderful news,’ I said. ‘I love you and I’m really truly happy for you.’
‘That’s very nice,’ said Grace. She kissed me gently on the lips and I was shocked at how rapidly I became aroused. I longed for Grace but there was, even with this shared intimacy and the announcement of the baby, still a huge barrier between us. I don’t think it was me, I think it was all from Grace. She had barriers, unspoken but solid. I could not just grab her, kiss her, find a quiet spot in the woods and make crazy, passionate love with her.
As we walked back along the cinder path I felt rain start to fall, a wonderful summer rain, big splats dropping on the ground all around us, very unlike the rain I remember from old England. The noise of the rain on the leaves above us was becoming steadily louder, I immediately quickened my pace and crouched against the cool drips falling from the trees.
‘What’s the matter, are you scared of rain?’ said Grace. I turned to look at her. She continued to walk at the
same pace, the rain slowly dampening her clothes.
‘No, I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t want to get soaked.’
‘The rain is much needed,’ said Grace. She stopped for a moment, looked up and let the water splash on her elegant face. ‘It’s been very hot lately.’
This image really didn’t encourage me to maintain my distance, it was almost like a hair care product advert from the old days, a beautiful woman allowing the rain to wash her. It was, to say the least, intensely erotic and romantic. I desperately wanted to hold Grace, I was losing track of what I was meant to do. I think I wanted to somehow be her man but because there was no clearly defined role for me in this new world I’d kind of forgotten how to do it.
I wanted to be with her; I suppose wanted some kind of acknowledgement of our intimacy. I have no idea how I knew, but I just knew this was not what she wanted, and it would be seen as inappropriate behaviour. I truly hope my decision to keep my distance was correct. I’d hate to think Grace was longing for me to hold her hand and was too shy to make the first move. Somehow I don’t think that was the case; she didn’t come across as in any way shy, just clear about what she wanted and when she wanted it.
However, I didn’t want to repeat the terrible mistake I’d made with Beth. I never wanted to take my leave from a woman I loved without making it painfully obvious that I wanted to connect with her. I wanted to make sure she knew I cared.
When we arrived at Goldacre Hall, I stood at the small gate into the rear orchard. Grace continued walking through the now quite heavy rain.
‘Are we okay?’ I asked.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand you?’ said Grace turning to face me. The rain running down her beautiful face could almost have been tears, but she didn’t look like she was crying.
‘Are we, well, okay? I mean, can I, can I be with you?’
‘Be with me?’ she asked. ‘You are with me.’
News from Gardenia Page 23