The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  It must be possible to live a life, Milena thought. It must be possible to be happy. Suddenly she wanted to be an adult. Have a nice little Place and a nice little husband. Milena wanted to be like everyone else.

  What would her Reading show? A vast blank of ignorance? Would they have her loading garbage sacks? Maybe they would have one final load of virus to burn its way into her. Maybe it would kill her, like her father. Maybe that was it. Maybe Mami had lied. Maybe her father was like her, beyond education, and that’s why they were in hiding in the hills of Czechoslovakia.

  Milena did not think of her mother with respect. She thought of her with a kind of exasperated fondness, as if she had been a very foolish woman. Coming all that way to England to find freedom. As if England were free. She had gone to the Restorers looking for the kind of debate and discussion she had so loved back home. She had thought that people who worked with books and history would also have ideas. She did not believe that they could be so mild and so uninterested in life. The loneliness had killed her. She had died, leaving Milena here, alone among the Restorers. Milena had no one else to blame. She turned and went inside the Medicine.

  She was late. That was a symptom of Milena’s disorder as well. Other people had a virus which told them the time. The other children were already hard at work. The Medicine was built around a large brick courtyard. It was hot, so classes were being held in it, outside in the shade. Work groups had already claimed tables. They hammered their copper plates, or stitched their leather seat covers. Some of them were cooking their breakfast, boiling gruel on little charcoal stoves, and arguing with their parents about whose turn it was to cook the evening meal.

  The children worked at their own speed towards set targets. The School Nurses measured their Development. The children talked to each other as they worked, about sport or sales or sources of cotton cloth. Sometimes a School Nurse would set a Problem Race or lead a discussion. Milena wished she had brought her book to read. Books had been written by people like her. She could sense that in the careful, step by step links they made, and in the simplicity of their thinking.

  Milena was in the Physical Development Group—the Lumps. The Lumps were all to some degree mentally retarded. The Nurses did not have high hopes for the Lumps. Most of them would be Placed as humpers. The Lumps were the last to leave the state of childhood. It was not fair to send ten year olds out into the world to drag rocks. After their Placing, they were brought on for a year or two with injections and weight-lifting.

  Milena saw them at a table. There was no mistaking the Lumps. One or two of them were huge males, fat but heavily dependent, rather tame. They loomed over the tables, smiling as always. They smiled hopefully, offering the world their good nature until their good nature was disappointed. Then, and only then, the boys would become dangerous.

  It was the girls that Milena had the greater difficulty understanding or dealing with. The girls laughed at Milena. They affected a wild superiority; they needed someone to whom they felt superior.

  Milena sat down, boldly, on the concrete instead of the bench. The Lumps slapped each other’s shoulders and giggled.

  ‘There are benches, Milena,’ said one girl called Pauline. Her face was flat.

  ‘Too tired to climb up here?’

  Milena hated the Lumps, hated having to be with them. She knew that she herself could not learn, but she thought that the Lumps were simply stupid.

  She could see the congenital damage in their faces; their eyes were sunken, there was a coarseness to their mouths. The poor Lumps. The viruses had filled their heads with Shakespeare and the Golden Stream of philosophy that led to Chao Li Song.

  The School Nurse approached. Milena saw that there was someone new with her, another Nurse.

  ‘Lo, team,’ she said, greeting them by placing her hands on their shoulders. ‘Everybody happy?’

  ‘Milena’s sitting on the ground!’ exclaimed Pauline, her eyes like goggles, so thick were her artificial corneas.

  ‘Perhaps she’s more comfortable there,’ said the School Nurse, glancing at Milena. The Nurses were a little frightened of Milena. She could not learn, but she was far from stupid. She would say things that politeness would normally forbid. The School Nurse was called Ms Hazell, and Milena thought she was beautiful. She had sun-deepened purple cheeks and hazel eyes, like her name. She made Milena ache to be like her, to be noticed by her.

  The new Nurse with her was very pretty too—blonde curling hair and a scattering of magenta freckles. Milena’s heart sank. Someone else who was pretty and happy and whole—forever beyond Milena’s reach. The new Nurse smiled at her, perfect white teeth gleaming against purple skin. Milena stared back at her bleakly.

  ‘This is the new Nurse, team,’ said Ms Hazell. ‘Her name’s Rose Ella. Now I know Rose Ella very well because she was a child here herself. She grew up a Restorer, and was Placed here as a Nurse. So it’s very nice for all of us here that she’s joined us.’ The School Nurse bestowed on Rose Ella a smile of real affection. The smile made Milena go desolate with longing. How did people become friends? Why was it so easy for them?

  Then a Team Discussion began. It was a kind of group Problem Race, to give the Lumps practice in thinking. The School Nurse introduced the topic.

  The mentally retarded, the gravely challenged, were going to discuss Derrida and Plato. It was an exercise to see if the Lumps could apply the Golden Stream to their own lives. I read Plato, thought Milena. I read Derrida. I understood hardly any of it, and can remember less.

  ‘Now what is Derrida really talking about in his article on Plato?’

  ‘Writing!’ chorused the Lumps. Then, washed by the same viruses, they remembered other answers. Racing time, they straggled in, one after another. ‘And memory. Writing as tool for memory. What’s wrong with writing.’

  The School Nurse smiled indulgently. ‘He was asking, really, how it was that Plato could bear to write when he found writing so artificial. He thought of it as an artificial knowledge that people could lay claim to without really having experienced or learned anything.’

  You always talk down to us, thought Milena. You make us jump through hoops that are nothing to do with us, and then smile so sweetly when we fall over.

  ‘Sounds like the viruses,’ said Milena. ‘Just like the viruses. Plato would have hated the viruses, too.’

  The School Nurse laughed. ‘Very good, Milena, yes, yes he would have hated the viruses. As we all know, he and Aristotle founded the Axis of Materialist and Idealistic thinking, both of which the Golden Stream swept away. Plato believed in dictators. He certainly would have hated the Consensus, our democracy.’

  The School Nurse looked pleased. Got a nibble, huh? thought Milena. I bet you tell people there are glimmers of intelligence in my face.

  ‘I agree with him,’ said Milena.

  The Lumps all laughed.

  ‘Are you an idealist, then Milena? Do you think you are just a shadow on the wall of a cave? Perhaps you disagree with Plato and are a materialist. Perhaps you want a Materialist state, with its choice of dictatorship or capitalist, economic terrorism?’ The School Nurse was still smiling. ‘Compare that to an idealist state, a theocracy perhaps? Being told you are damned, and that God wants to burn you in Dante’s Inferno?’

  Milena was neither a materialist nor an idealist. Browbeaten, she withdrew into herself. But I know what Plato meant. ‘All of you get everything you know for free without working for it. It isn’t yours. I have to fight for every word. So maybe I am just grumpy old Plato, upset because people have a new tool that makes things too easy.’

  The School Nurse turned her attention to the other Lumps. ‘Now how did Derrida point out how Plato resolved the contradiction of writing against writing?’

  The Lumps chorused, ‘Pharmakolikon.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Nurse. ‘The root for our word pharmacy. Healing drugs. What people used to call medicine. But in Plato’s time it meant both poison and cure. So Plato rega
rded writing as a poison that could also cure.’

  Milena remembered something. ‘He doesn’t use the word!’ she yelped.

  The Nurse faltered. ‘That’s not relevant,’ she said.

  ‘Derrida says he doesn’t! Not once! Plato doesn’t call writing Pharmakolikon. Not once. He just calls it poison.’

  ‘Anyone like to comment?’ the School Nurse said, on firm ground again.

  The beaming faces turned to Milena, hunched to the ground.

  ‘It’s implicit in the culture,’ said one of them.

  ‘It can be in the text without being there.’

  Milena dug her hands deeper into her armpits. ‘So Derrida can make Plato say anything he wants him to say?’

  The School Nurse shook her head. ‘No. But he allows himself the freedom to fully understand Plato in context.’

  Anger flowered inside Milena, a rich and vital growth. ‘I’ll tell you why Plato wrote when he hated writing,’ she said. ‘He wrote because he knew that he had lost. He had lost, and everyone was writing, and so he had to write. But he still hated it.’

  Like I hate the viruses. But I need them, now, here, to keep up.

  Plato lost? The Lumps laughed. How they laughed. Milena had got it wrong again. Plato, the great voice of Idealism did not lose. He had founded the stream of discourse that ruled for two thousand years and nearly destroyed the planet.

  The School Nurse scowled and shook her head at them. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘Now remember, team,’ she said. ‘Milena has no viruses. We’re to use what the viruses tell us, aren’t we? What do we think Derrida would tell us about Milena?’

  There was a pause. What was the right line, then? The Lumps waited to be told.

  ‘Milena is speaking from her own personal experience. She thinks of the viruses as Plato thought of writing. She is viewing the text in her own, unique way. This is inevitable, isn’t it? Milena is a reader of books, after all. One of the few we’ve got left, and Derrida was writing about reading as well.’

  The School Nurse smiled at her with indulgence. Then she turned to Rose Ella, the new Nurse, and held out her hands, as if presenting Milena to her. The new Nurse smiled again.

  Make me smile back. Go on, challenged Milena. See if you can. She turned grimly back to Ms Hazell.

  ‘You always use that word “remember,”’ said Milena. ‘You say, “remember, team.” You never tell us to think.’

  They all were silent at that. The Lumps knew everyone thought they were stupid. Milena grimly resisted feeling unkind for reminding them of that.

  ‘That’s another large topic, the difference between memory and intelligence. Let’s break now. Thank you, everyone. That was a very fruitful discussion. I certainly feel like I’ve learned a lot.’

  The Nurse leaned over the table and began to discuss each Lump’s individual project. Pauline was knitting a sweater. ‘Very good!’ exclaimed the School Nurse and held it up.

  The new Nurse, Rose Ella, approached Milena.

  ‘Were you measuring how fast we are? I didn’t see you counting,’ said Milena.

  ‘I wasn’t here to time you,’ said Rose Ella. She knelt down in front of Milena. She was twelve, thirteen years old. An adult.

  ‘We’re too slow, huh?’

  ‘It must be terrible for you,’ said Rose Ella, and reached out with her hand. ‘You’re so intelligent. And not to have a memory.’

  Milena rolled her eyes. It must be hell, she thought, to be so pretty and so stupid. Leave me alone.

  ‘Did you specialise in Learning Disabilities?’ Milena asked.

  Rose Ella turned around and sat on the ground next to her. ‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘No, there was a new emphasis when I was doing my practicals. You know, the new fashion. There are fashions in everything.’

  Milena liked that. It was honest. It seemed to treat Milena with a measure of respect. ‘So what’s fashionable now?’ Milena asked feeling herself going shy.

  ‘Originality,’ said Rose Ella. ‘They’re telling us to look for originality, and Develop that. Nobody’s coming up with anything new. Not in science, not anywhere.’

  ‘So I’m original, huh?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Rose Ella. ‘I’ve never heard anyone say those things about Plato.’

  Milena’s eyes seemed to go hot and heavy. Praise made her heartsick; she was so unused to it, and needed it so badly.

  ‘Lot of good it does me,’ murmured Milena, looking down.

  ‘You like theatre,’ said Rose Ella gently.

  ‘They briefed you, eh?’ Milena wished she had something to do with her hands, some leather to stitch, some brass to polish. Her hands were always empty. ‘I don’t know. I just like to imagine things on a stage. You know, costumes, lights. I put on the Christmas show.’ Milena was going to tell her about the costumes, the golden shoes, and the brass ice bucket that was supposed to contain myrrh.

  ‘Oh, yes, they told me about that!’ exclaimed Rose Ella, forgetting herself. She pulled her curly blonde hair back behind her ears. That made her ears stick out. ‘It sounded lovely! I was really sorry I missed it.’

  ‘They told you all about it, eh,’ said Milena. She fell silent. For a moment there I thought you were being friendly. Milena shifted where she sat, jerking her buttocks nearer to the wall, sitting up straighter. She would tell Rose Ella nothing else. She answered the next few questions with a yes or a no.

  Rose Ella looked chastened. She had forgotten some of her training. Never tell a Disabled Person that you already know about what they’re going to tell you. Milena could see the new Nurse think that. Milena could see her try to make amends. Rose Ella started to talk about her family. Her father restored furniture. Her mother was a glass-blower.

  ‘Have you ever seen the glass-blowing?’ Rose Ella asked. ‘It’s lovely to watch.’

  ‘Sizing up a future Placing for me?’ said Milena.

  ‘No,’ said Rose Ella. ‘I’m just proud of my mother.’

  ‘Mine’s dead,’ said Milena. ‘She was an idiot. Well, not really. But we ended up here. We were from Czechoslovakia. But you already know that.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Rose Ella, shaking her head.

  ‘Don’t tell me they left something out of my case history,’ said Milena.

  Rose Ella sighed. She looked down at her hands, and then back up at Milena. ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ she said quietly. ‘They don’t brief us like that in case it affects what we think.’ Her eyes seemed quite sincere. ‘Look, let’s go look at the glass-blowing. At least it will get you out of here.’

  Away from the Lumps.

  ‘Fine,’ said Milena, trying to shrug as if it were all one with her. But her eyes were heavy. She wanted to be with Rose Ella.

  Milena had rarely seen inside the School. She did not have relatives or friends who worked there. She had never really felt part of the Estate. Rose Ella pushed open the large, grey gates; they seemed to float backwards on their hinges.

  ‘I love the smell of the wood, don’t you!’ said Rose Ella, looking back over her shoulder as she swung the gates shut behind her.

  Milena felt vaguely as if her own feelings had usurped. ‘It’s all right,’ she said.

  Rose Ella walked briskly to a window in the wall by the gate. She waved for Milena to stand next to her. They peered into the Senate House of the School. It was the timber store. There were honey-coloured planks all in ordered racks. Beyond the doors across the room was a pile of huge logs. Men and women sawed the wood in perfectly straight planks, guided by virus. Men with brooms swept up the chips and yellow shavings.

  ‘What do they do with the sawdust?’ Milena asked.

  ‘Use it for packing. Some old kinds of sofas were stuffed with it. We also use a lot of it to store ice in the ice house. It keeps it all through the summer. Most of the time though, we just use it on the fires. We aren’t supposed to. Don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I don’t have anyone to tell it to,’ said Milena murmuring
shyly. This is how it is for other people, she thought. They talk and find out things. ‘Is the world a great big wicked place then?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Rose Ella, appearing to take her very seriously.

  ‘Is it full of secrets? Little bits of things. Like that. About the wood.’ Damnable shyness overcame Milena, and she stuck her hands in her pockets and could not look at Rose Ella.

  ‘Sometimes. Little things. Such as…’ Rose Ella paused. ‘Such as I really, really like Senior Fenton.’

  The Senior ran the Medicine. He was very old, twenty-two, mature and handsome.

  Milena was overwhelmed. ‘You do? Are you going to marry him?’ It was a wonder to talk to someone about such things.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ It was Rose Ella’s turn to be surprised. She kept her hands behind her back, behind the white uniform, and looked down at her feet. ‘He sings,’ she said. ‘He sings evenings at the Row, when we all get together. Oh! He has such a beautiful voice.’

  ‘Senior Fenton sings?’ Milena asked. She couldn’t imagine it. No, she could. She could see his handsome face open wide with song. She wished she could say she liked Senior Fenton too, but the image of him did not move her. She began to worry, a little. Her heart never rose at the idea of men, or a particular man. Who did she like? No one, she was forced to conclude. She liked no one.

  ‘Is there a lot of music at the Row?’ Milena asked. She had never had time to learn a musical instrument. She sat in the conference room and watched the other children play.

  ‘Ach! Oh yes!’ said Rose Ella. ‘Oh, such music we have at the Row, every evening! Have you never been?’

  ‘No,’ said Milena.

  ‘Well, you come along tonight, then,’ said Rose Ella. ‘Come to supper.’

  Milena found herself hesitating out of habit. She had her laundry to do and her book to read; and then she thought: Milena, why ever not?

  ‘Yup,’ she said, moving her shoulders from side to side, in a way that was supposed to suggest casual acceptance. ‘Thanks.’