The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  ‘Oh did those feet in ancient times…’

  ‘Swing low…’

  ‘Silence, silence from which we all come…’

  The many songs of mourning seemed to compete. Children stood with their hands raised towards heaven, keening, warbling, tears smeared over their faces. Men stared as if stunned, glancing back behind them at the burdens in the bottom of the boats.

  From out of the Estate of Remembrance, women covered in white waded out into the water. They wore white masks to hide their faces. They held out their arms and with a start, the orphaned children shifted themselves and tried to lift up the hammocks. The women in white took them on their shoulders, and bore the loads on their shoulders. As the hammocks were taken from them, the mourners threw flowers into the air. They called goodbye, they shouted out names, every name it seemed that it was possible to call, as if all the world were dying at once. The women in white stepped up on to the salty banks, their legs glossy with mud. They walked with quick jabbing steps up the slopes of the kilns.

  ‘Go around! Go around!’ they shouted almost as if in panic to Milena’s boatboy. They made circular motions with purple hands. The boatboy shook his head, and pointed between the kilns, and thrust the boat forward in that direction, gliding between masses of rotting flowers. The white petals had gone slimy and brown. It was the flowers that stank of death, rank and gaseous. Milena coughed. Smoke drifted lower over the water, pitch black and sharp in the nostrils. The boat surged into it: it stung Milena’s eyes and made her weep. Then the boat was through it, there was a freshening breeze in her face, and Milena looked up and saw her new home.

  It rose, like a hangar over the water, huge and arched, with four buttressing towers of bamboo at each corner. All the light about it was golden, filtered through smoke. It was made of reed and was a kind of Ark, floating on the surface of the estuary. A wide deck of reed surrounded it, with floating moorings extending out into the water.

  The punt sighed up onto the artificial bank of reed, and the boy slipped over the side of the boat, and pulled it up closer to a small, dry platform. He helped Milena up onto it. He carried her one bamboo suitcase.

  ‘I have never seen inside such a place,’ he whispered.

  ‘Neither have I,’ confided Milena.

  A tiny but rotund woman came down the sloping reed bank towards them.

  ‘Are you the theatre person?’ the woman asked, voice quailing as she walked towards them. Her face seemed settled in gloom.

  ‘Yes. I am. My name is Milena Shibush.’ Milena held out her hand, but the woman stopped where she was on the bank and would come no closer.

  ‘I am Ms Will. There was no one else to do it, so they left me here to show you around.’ She glanced at the boatboy. ‘I suppose he will have to come in too. Isn’t it awful about that horrible smoke? And the singing!’

  Without a handshake, Ms Will turned around and led Milena towards the Tarty house.

  The sliding-panel doors had been left open. The walls were a series of sliding panels that could be shifted according to weather. Ms Will led Milena through them into a large, covered courtyard.

  Inside, there was a cathedral hush. Arches or reed rose up and over them. Sunlight leaked through the walls, as if through a sieve. Sunlight burned in brilliant pinpricks, and spilled in rays on the floor. The floor was made of woven reed. Ahead of them was a tumble of bamboo boxes coated in plaster, and corridors of steps. There was a smell of cooking.

  ‘All the quarter are separated from each other. There’s some kind of resin between the walls. Dead Space, they call it, to absorb the noise. At least we have some privacy. You are up here.’

  Thy climbed a bamboo staircase up a scaffolding of stilts. Milena’s rooms clustered over a water tank. Milena’s door was a series of sliding screens. Ms Will pulled them back, one after another.

  Milena’s rooms were like a series of lacquered bamboo boxes. The winter screens had been folded back, the windows were open, there was a gentle breeze. There were reed carpets as soft as sweaters over the thick reed floors. There were summer shutters that had been woven into illustrative shapes of flamingos and herons and wading farmers. There were beanbags on the floor, there was a desk with a chair, there was a kitchen with a charcoal stove and a hibachi, there were charcoal stoves in every room. Behind a screen, there was a bathroom, a bathroom all of her own with a huge resin tub, and a trough of warm water and a pan for scooping it out and pouring over herself in great gushing plashes. There was a throne toilet, a bamboo box.

  As Milena walked from room to room she cried aloud. ‘Oh look at this! Oh look at this!’ overwhelmed with gratitude at each new revelation. The boatboy walked hushed behind her.

  ‘I have never imagined a house like this,’ he said in awe.

  Milena ran to one of her windows, and looked out. There was a patchwork quilt of green squares, brown pools, ridgeways, stiltways, a crowd of canoes where there was a floating market. There was a great stretch of water. There were flamingos. There was the sound of wind in reeds, birds perched on fenceposts.

  ‘I can’t believe I will live in such a place,’ said Milena. Here, she thought, I can go to rest. Here I can be safe.

  There was the massed singing of Remembrance, and the drifting shadows of smoke.

  It only took one week for Thrawn McCartney to find her.

  A week later, Milena lifted up the lid of her new bamboo box toilet and there was Thrawn’s face inside it.

  Here it begins, thought the Milena who was remembering. This is the July, this is the August, before I went into space. I’m going to have to remember this, too. All part of the story. And the Consensus wants a story.

  Thrawn giggled. ‘Just a head in the head,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to use it, Milena, you’re going to have to use it with me in it. I think that’s a pretty good picture of what our relationship’s been all along, don’t you?’

  Milena stared in horror. The full horror took some time to sink in.

  ‘Pretty new flats courtesy of the Party are no defence, Milena. No defence against a bad conscience.’

  ‘You’re the one who dumped on me,’ said Milena.

  ‘It’s funny,’ said the head. ‘How people who commit injustice always have to fry up one that’s been done to them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to do what they do.’

  Milena closed the lid. She walked through her beautiful lacquered boxes, surrounded by the Dead Space. There was a blaze of sunlight on the floor. It was the Summer of Song, the Summer of Light. It hadn’t rained in two months.

  A hologram of a squat toilet was in the centre of the front room. It was the old kind, that most people had to use, a hole in the floor with footrests. ‘Yoo hoo. Mil-ena!’ called a hollow voice from inside it.

  There was also the carcass of a water buffalo on the floor. It had been skinned and gutted. There were pink and white ribbons of fat and flesh. The carcass stood up and limped, on stumps, headless, towards Milena.

  ‘Here I am,’ the carcass said and whooped. ‘A new Milena Shibush production.’ It spun around on stumps, and then fell. ‘Holograms courtesy of some female or other we can safely chew up into Coral.’

  The carcass sprouted flowers from the stump of its neck. They were generic flowers, blearily imagined. But the flowers were bleeding.

  ‘Poor, poor Milena. Such a hard time she’s having.’ There was a chorus of sentimental sympathy in the air all around her. ‘Ahhhhhhhhhh.’

  Milena saw something out of the corner of her eye, and turned around, and there was Thrawn, holding out a knife towards her.

  ‘Go on, Milena. Why leave the job undone. I am what’s inside your head. You’d like to kill me. Well. Now you can. Without doing me any real harm. Isn’t that what you tell yourself? That you haven’t done me any real harm? Here, slice me into ribbons. There’ll be lots of blood, and I’ll die, right in the middle of your nice Tarty flat.’

  ‘Where are you cubing from?’ Milena demanded.

  T
he image laughed. ‘Maybe I’m here for real and you really can kill me. Or maybe you’re making all of this up.’

  ‘If the Party finds out you’re doing this you’ll be scrubbed so clean even the viruses won’t know you.’

  ‘Will they?’ asked Thrawn with a smile and a confidence that Milena found unnerving.

  Then the hologram of Thrawn McCartney transformed itself into a hologram of Milena Shibush.

  ‘Milton,’ said Milena Shibush. ‘Thrawn McCartney is persecuting me. She puts headless singing cows in my room. She waits for me inside my toilet. I wake up in the middle of the night and her face is smiling at me just in front of my nose. Milton, she’s driving me crazy!’

  The image of Milena Shibush turned and smiled. ‘Now what is Milton going to think?’

  The image of Milena Shibush turned and walked up to a bleary smudge of light that somewhere resembled Cilla.

  ‘Cilla,’ said Milena, her face sour. ‘Get away from me, will you? Your constant social climbing is just too unbearable for someone as talented as me.’

  The image of Milena Shibush turned and batted her eyelids at Milena.

  There was no edge of crackling light where the image joined reality. It cast shadows on the floor in the right direction. I’d believe it was really here, thought Milena, with a sinking heart. She thought very quickly of things she could and could not do, things like cutting the electricity supply. What electricity supply, where? She didn’t know where Thrawn was cubing from.

  It’s an exchange of light, she reminded herself. That means Thrawn can see anything I do, hear anything I say. Anything I do or say will become ammunition. If it gives away a plan, if it shows what I feel, what I’m frightened of, what I’m not frightened of, anything will be used.

  My defence is silence.

  Next to the image of Milena was an image of Thrawn. They began to play a little psychodrama.

  Reality was remade in light.

  This Thrawn looked bright and sweet and pretty. This Milena looked unbearably snotty and smug, squat, untidy and smelly. This Thrawn tolerated Milena, felt sorry for her. This Thrawn was a victim who was held back by pity. This Thrawn was the stronger one really.

  ‘I’ve got some new ideas,’ said this Thrawn. ‘I think they’ll really help the show.’

  Low feral cunning crossed the face of this slightly hunchbacked Milena. ‘Oh really? That’s terribly nice of you Thrawn. But better leave the content to me. After all I am the director.’

  This Thrawn, sighed, and shook her head, full of forbearance. She turned to the real Milena and shrugged, as if to say, poor deluded thing, we have to humour her.

  ‘Of course, Milena, you’ll get credit, don’t worry. But they’re supposed to be fun, these ideas. Now.’ She began to talk slowly and clearly as if to someone very stupid who never understood. ‘People like to laugh. Let’s give them something amusing.’

  ‘Oh dear no,’ said this Milena, nose in the air. ‘That couldn’t possibly be important enough for a Milena Shibush production.’

  It is so banal, thought Milena. Tykes do this. They imitate each other, making each other say the horrible things that would justify hatred. Who is frying up injustice, Thrawn? ‘Now I know you’ll never be a director,’ said Milena, aloud.

  Silence, fool.

  Milena the image said, ‘You’ll never be as talented as I am, Thrawn. No one is as talented as I am. Now then, let’s play this scene as I imagine it. You’ll see. It will be so very much more talented.’

  There was a kind of flicker and the holograms changed places.

  In flounced Milena.

  ‘Thrawn. I need something new and spectacular. I’ve persuaded the Consensus to give us the go-ahead. Connections. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Such a shame about you, Thrawn. If only you could rope yourself in a bit more. All you have to do is pander, Thrawn. All you have to do is exactly what the Consensus wants you to do.’ Milena the mirror image had a face that was crossed with idiot concern. ‘How are things, Thrawn? Working all day in here by yourself. You know how much I worry about you.’

  ‘Then why,’ said Thrawn the image. ‘Do you always make me feel like something squeezed in between the soup and the fish course?’

  Milena the mirror image faltered. ‘Oh. Do I? I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ said Thrawn. This time, thought Milena, the characters are more convincing and the acting is better.

  ‘You always get so tangled in busy-ness,’ said the image of Thrawn. ‘The last time I tried to talk to you, you were washing a chicken. That chicken was the most important chicken I had ever seen. The concentration that you focused on that chicken. I asked myself: what has it got that I haven’t? And the answer was: it’s dead and in pieces. I can still fight back.’

  It’s better, thought Milena, when she imagines herself as me. It’s as if I give her a tone of voice with which she can speak. If I am that important to her, no wonder she is fighting. If I lose and she stays, I will be an appendage for the rest of my life. I’ll be bagpipes round her neck that she needs to make any kind of reasonable noise at all.

  Silence, Milena. Listen and watch. Anything you say gets tied into the knot.

  ‘I don’t mean to do that,’ said Milena the image in mock horror.

  ‘Of course you mean it. You don’t want me to be there, and it’s a way of cancelling me out,’ said Thrawn. It was Thrawn as she would like to be. Milena heard her speak with Milena’s own intonation. ‘You are continually dishonest, do you know that? You’re so dishonest, it’s actually very, very difficult to be direct and honest around you. Everything gets tied up in a sort of knot.’

  She knows what she does, thought Milena. Of course she knows. She’s not insane; she’s not out of touch with reality. She knows what reality is and she hates it, and she sucks it into herself and spews it out backwards. Mirror image.

  And Milena thought: I’ll be very lucky to get out of this. This is very bad indeed. She went back into her Tarty bathroom and used the toilet, knowing what was inside it. Thrawn showed her, hovering in the air just in front of her, exactly what the head was seeing.

  So far the game will be to get me to ignore it all. That is what she wants and expects. Like the chicken. Once she gets me to react with disgust or horror, that’s a victory too. If I pretend to ignore it, she wins. If she gets a reaction, she wins. I have to cut through the Gordian knot. It can’t be untied. And I don’t know how to do it.

  Except that if I stay around people, she can’t do it at all. All it takes is one person to see what I see, see the holograms, and then I can go to Milton and tell him this is happening—and bring witnesses.

  Otherwise, like she says, he’ll think I’m the crazy one.

  Hop skip and jump. Only she’s the one making up the rules.

  ‘It must be comforting to know you’ll never be alone, Milena,’ said a voice.

  I speak, she wins. I don’t speak, she wins.

  Milena had an inspiration. She chuckled and shook her head.

  ‘Tee hee hee,’ said Thrawn, darkly.

  Thrawn didn’t like that.

  Milena stood up, flushed the toilet. The image dissolved, refracted by the water, destabilised. Water, thought Milena. Vampires can’t cross running water.

  Thrawn was standing beside her.

  ‘I’m going to get to know you terribly well, Milena. I’m going to be here all the time. I’ll see every petty little stunt you’re going to pull. When you talk to the little What Does who cleans your Tarty house, I’ll be there. If there is a little fly on the wall, it will be me, watching.’

  Milena in silence knelt under the sink, and pulled out her flask. She suddenly felt exhausted, drained. I feel tired all the time now. Can’t let Thrawn see.

  Milena the director stood up with her flask. She often filled it with tea to take to rehearsals. Now she filled it with water. If I can get her near people and throw water at her, at the image, the light will refract. People will see she is a
hologram.

  Milena walked out of the bathroom. She walked through the image of Thrawn, feeling the light tingling in her Rhodopsin skin. Better not fill anything else up with water, or I will give myself away. It’s July now. I go into space in October. She won’t be able to reach me in space. Sometime before then, they will have to make me Terminal. When they make me Terminal they’ll know everything. I’ll be linked with the Consensus. The Consensus will know, through me, what she has done. They’ll have to pull her in. So I’ve already won. All I have to do is hang on. Until space, until I’m Terminal.

  Until then, I’ll have to be around people. I need to stay with people. Thrawn is the most impulsive, impatient person I’ve ever met. She won’t be able to wait. Unless of course she realises that I am relying on that.

  Work. Lots of rehearsals, lots of recordings, lots of people all the time. She’ll hate that too. She’ll see me cubing the holograms, and she won’t be able to stand it, she’ll see it’s happening without her and she’ll have to act.

  Thrawn, thought Milena with quiet certainty, I am going to have to destroy you. I wonder if that’s what I was supposed to do all along?

  ‘Say goodbye to your old life,’ said Thrawn. ‘Say hello to your new.’

  There was the Dead Space between all the residences, but Milena could still hear the slithering sound of panels being pulled back. Someone else was going out. Milena spun around and immediately went out of her own front door. She did not slide it shut behind her.

  Below, in the public atrium of the house, Ms Will was walking towards the open gate. The sight of Ms Will had never been so welcome.

  ‘Going out?’ Milena asked pleasantly.

  Milena had not made an effort with Ms Will. She was too much like what Milena had imagined a Party wife would be, a kind of overstuffed, throwaway cushion. She was well dressed, hair coiffed, well fed, looked after, and her face carried an expression of settled resignation. Her husband did not really need her. The circles under her eyes were black rings in the full July flush of a Rhodopsin face.