The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘what this title People’s Artist really means. I’ve always found that I have too little to do with people. My work has taken over my life. I wanted it to take over my life. It was as if I could fold myself up and keep myself safe in a drawer, very tidily, unseen. I wouldn’t have to worry about it then. Or, to be honest, be worried by other people. In the end, I was. Worried by people. So here I am. Out.’

  A mild, concerned chuckle. Just how embarrassing and personal was this speech going to get?

  ‘I suppose the People part means that my work is used for political ends. It makes people feel and think in the ways they are supposed to feel and think. It’s not much different from a virus.’

  An unexpected burst of laughter, then. It swelled.

  ‘Except that I always think of the great socialist ends after everything else.’

  A warmer, but less certain, shorter laugh. Is this going to get dangerous?

  ‘I thought when we were doing the out-plays that they were a way to make people love themselves and the London they live in. It seems to me that London now is at least as interesting as London was then all those plays were written. I wanted all the Estates to be proud of each other: the Reefers, the Cordwainers, the Tugboys, the Slump Bobbers. They’re part of London too. I did not, however, set out to make them love two hundred foot tall Crabs.’

  A grateful laugh now, of relief. This isn’t going to veer off in any funny direction. This is going to work.

  ‘I think people should love giant Crabs, particularly if they sing well.’

  Pause.

  ‘Those of us who work at the Zoo often have to love giant singing Animals.’

  A larger laugh. But the trees whispered, that’s enough.

  ‘You can get too high-minded. People should be easier on themselves. Life isn’t high-minded. If it’s got a mind at all, then it’s out of it. Attack was just fun. It was an excuse to get in as many holograms as we could.’

  We, meaning you and Thrawn, the trees signed in and out.

  ‘Sometimes fun can cost lives. The woman I worked with on Crabs is no longer with us. The woman who set all of Divina Commedia to music is no longer with us either. I used to think I destroyed them both. Now I think that to blame myself is just another way of making myself too important.

  ‘The most socialist thing I ever did, the best thing I ever did, was trying to get people to help the sick instead of shutting them away and burning the bodies. I had a lot of help, from Milton John, from Moira Almasy. And that was nothing to do with being an Artist.’

  Milena stopped, visibly wondering what she was going to say next, taking her time.

  ‘Am I an Artist at all? I don’t know what the word means. I do what I can, in the way I can do it, when I have an idea. I don’t know where the ideas come from, except that I don’t have them. By that I mean the “I” that I know doesn’t seem to have them. The “I” that I know keeps trying to think of ideas and they don’t come. The ideas seem to come of their own accord, in their own time, without me. So I can’t really claim any credit for them. Or responsibility, either. Life just gives them to me. You, my friends, the ones I can see in the front row. You gave them to me. And the city, and the history that made it and made me too. So who is the Artist, then? Is there an Artist at all?’

  Suddenly she grinned.

  ‘Maybe we should be giving this award to each other, just for being here. The only way to be a People’s Artist is to be as private as you can. That’s when you touch something that isn’t just you.’

  And Milena said to herself, to the trees in the wind: Rolfa, I love you. I want to live with you and sleep with you. And I can’t. I don’t tell them that. To do that would be to try to tell them the whole truth. And who can tell the whole truth? You’d never stop talking.

  She said that aloud. ‘Maybe that isn’t the whole truth. But if I tried to tell the whole truth, I’d never stop talking.’

  Another small chuckle. Some of them were still working it out.

  ‘We’re all people. We’re all artists.’ She shrugged with helplessness. ‘Thank you.’

  There was a settled warmth to the applause that followed. Cilla, the Princess, Peterpaul, Moira Almasy, they all stood up. Moira’s jaw was thrust out as she smiled. Cilla was grinning and grinning as if her face could not spread wide enough. Peterpaul was applauding, looking serious, looking straight into her eyes. Toll Barrett was nodding yes. Even Charles Sheer was applauding.

  And a Crab-like voice in Milena’s head said, You’re good at making speeches, Milena. That could be useful.

  And another voice, lowering, slow, said It made you look better than you are. They’ll never guess.

  Milena stood, still and quiet, embarrassed, battling to keep her modesty. Perhaps she was wrong to think that arrogance and pride would destroy talent, but it was what she believed, so she tried to preserve her humility. It was a tactical decision. She exploited herself and had to protect herself from her self.

  And how many selves, how many voices?

  Be easy on yourself, Milena. Here is the sun, here is the applause, and the light, and the silence.

  chapter sixteen

  AN ENDING UP OF FRIENDS (THE DEAD SPACES)

  Milena remembered walking towards St Thomas’s Hospital. A nurse led her. He was a big man, about seventeen years old, calm and smiling. She remembered his sun-bruised skin, dark purple cheeks and clear eyes. The picture of health. He sauntered, at ease with his body and the world.

  ‘We’ll go round this way,’ he said, as they crossed the road. His teeth were perfect and white, and he had golden-green curly hair.

  ‘How did you know to ask for me?’ asked Milena. ‘Did she tell you?’

  ‘The Terminals said she was part of the Centennial and to find you out in the Slump.’ He held open a door, and they entered the Coral Reef.

  The hospital was full of tunnels and dens, like natural caverns. The Coral Reef walls glowed softly, fluorescent, so that there would always be light, so that the dying did not awake in the dark, afraid that they had already gone. The Cancer Ward, it was called. People were dying for the lack of it.

  In each of the dens three or four people lay in beds, young people, thirty or thirty-five years old, suddenly stricken, suddenly dying. Very suddenly they lost weight, fell ill with a variety of diseases as their immune system failed. Their bodies wore out, their hearts, their lungs, their livers, all expiring in concert.

  ‘It’s an epidemic, really, isn’t it?’ Milena said, keeping her voice low.

  ‘There really isn’t a word for what it is,’ said the picture of health. He held a door open for her. Milena smelled, very faintly, the stifled odour of illnesses and drugs and damp bandages and disinfectant.

  The Doctors were still trying to break the Candy that shielded the genes of growth and maturing. The Doctors were still trying to find a way to synthesise the proteins that cancer had made, that had prolonged life. We all forget, thought Milena, we all have to forget that half of our lives has been lost.

  Except for the Tumours, except for Lucy; they can’t die at all.

  ‘What’s wrong with Lucy?’ Milena asked. Lucy had been missing for several months. It seemed likely that she was very ill indeed.

  The nurse stopped and shook his head. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said. ‘She’s getting better.’

  ‘Yes, but from what?’ Milena asked.

  The nurse shrugged. ‘Old age?’ He beamed. ‘The human condition? She also is in—ah—another condition. But maybe that isn’t quite so miraculous.’

  Miraculous?

  The nurse led Milena on down the corridor, and indicated a doorway, and bowed slightly as if presenting Lucy to her.

  Picture of health, thought Milena, looking at his puce and smiling cheeks, even you will be cut off.

  Then she went into Lucy’s room.

  Lucy had a room to herself. She sat up in bed and Milena could see in that instant that she had changed utterly.


  Lucy looked very calm and dignified, perhaps even stern. Her hair was no longer orange. It was the colour of friable, dry soil, a muted grey. It was going darker in a line, along the parting near the scalp. Her leathery old skin looked thicker, smoother. It was a different kind of skin.

  Lucy looked at Milena, with a hint of a smile, and something in that look made Milena’s breath catch. ‘I know you,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Lucy,’ said Milena as if caught off-guard. ‘How are you?’

  ‘You don’t have the time,’ said Lucy, with the same stern smile. She turned away, and looked out of her window, at the river. ‘You don’t have the time that I have.’

  Lucy was rubbing the palms of her hands, and the skin was coming off in thick rolls, as if it were a coating of dried glue. The new skin underneath was brown and thick and spongy, without any lines or creases. No future there, for a fortune teller to read. Milena saw Lucy’s profile.

  She looks, thought Milena, like a head on a Roman coin. Misshapen somehow, but fierce. She looks like something that might have grown up out of the earth, a sort of root vegetable. And she smells, smells delicious, like freshly baked bread.

  ‘One day,’ said Lucy, still watching the river outside, ‘it all comes back, and you’re somewhere else. Now. I can draw any map, right here in my hand. I can light a cigarette with my fingers. I’m not saying that everything will work out by itself, by what we want, mind you. I’m just saying that the eyes are hollow…that the light spreads out inside our eyes and not outside. One day it just added up.’

  Her mind has gone, thought Milena.

  ‘One day, it just all added up. Added up, all the little bits and pieces, and you blank out. No memory. Feels wonderful. Like a warm bath. You don’t need it any more.’

  Or has gone into another state, thought Milena. Lucy. What are you trying to tell me?

  ‘I am five hundred feet tall,’ said the ancient. ‘You could all shelter in my shade—if my leaves was seen by you.’

  She sighed and leaned forward and picked up a tray from the bed. On a plate was a huge lump of meat, its fat all crisp, golden, raised up in crunchy blisters. It was covered in minty sauce, and there was a mound of—what—ice cream?

  No. Mashed potatoes. Lamb and mashed potatoes with a pool of meat juice in a hollow in the middle. And there was a pile of hard, green brussels sprouts.

  It wasn’t there before, thought Milena. I’m sure it wasn’t there before.

  Lucy chewed and swallowed. ‘These little tracks go everywhere,’ she said. She very neatly sculpted a mouthful of mashed potato onto the back of her fork. ‘You can’t see them at first, you’ve got to go blind for fifty or sixty years first. I couldn’t see anything for at least that long, and then one day, there’s an ache from the front to the back of your head, and your eyes are better. They get better and you see different. Everything different. They don’t teach you to see, and it takes time to heal. You have to go blind in order to heal.’

  She raised the forkful of mash in salute.

  ‘What I’d like to do,’ she said, food pushed over to one side in her mouth. ‘Is plant myself for a hundred years or so. I’d just like to settle in like a tree. Feed like a tree on sunlight and rain. Get all those wrinkles in my brain to unravel. I think my bones would heal, then, too. Did they tell you? My bones are getting bigger, stronger. And all the nodules are flaking off, too.’

  There was no archness to her, no mischievousness. She’s lost the old London, thought Milena. She’s shed it, like a skin.

  ‘And,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  She continued chewing the lamb that shouldn’t have been there.

  ‘Metastasis. A little bit broke free and started growing in my womb. One chance in ten million, but how many million chances have I got?’ She coughed and laughed at the same time. ‘As many as I need. She’ll be a cancer, too, my daughter. I have very definite ideas about how to bring her up. I’d like her to be a child for forty or fifty years. I’ll build a raft and we’ll live on it in the middle of the ocean, just catching the fish that leap up when you’re quiet and part of the scenery. I’ll just let her laze. We’ll turn somersaults on tiny islands. We won’t do nothing at all. There won’t be any need. And when she’s fed up being a child—well then. She’ll become something new. We’ll keep on changing, getting thicker and healthier.’

  She looked at Milena in silence, cheeks bulging, in motion. Kerswallow gulp. It wasn’t the time to ask, but it was Milena’s job to know. ‘Lucy,’ she said, pronouncing very slowly and clearly, as if perhaps Lucy had forgotten some of her English. ‘Remember you said you would be in an opera? The Divine Comedy? Remember, you said you would play Beatrice? Will you be able to record your part in the opera?’

  ‘Ohhhhh,’ growled Lucy in pity and fierceness. She reached out and rubbed Milena’s hair rather hard. ‘Oh, you poor little creature.’ Lucy looked at her smiling, as if at a fool. ‘I already have recorded it, can’t you see? In another time.’

  Her mind has gone, thought Milena. We’ve recorded nothing with her. We haven’t been able to find her. She and Lucy looked at each other, each pitying the other.

  And the Milena who was remembering thought: pity her if you like, Milena, but you will go home and find that all her part has been recorded. You’ll see her, singing with Dante, leading him to heaven. And you’ll try to tell yourself that she must have slipped in and done it when you weren’t there. But the rest of the cast won’t remember singing with her. Except in their dreams. The world isn’t what we thought it was. That plate of lamb shouldn’t be there, and her performance shouldn’t be there, and perhaps the world shouldn’t be here either.

  ‘You’re all the same,’ said Lucy, shaking her head. ‘Always worried. I think of you all,’ she said, looking into Milena’s eyes again with a newly unnerving stare, ‘like you was flowers in my garden. Beautiful flowers in a garden. When you’re young, your bodies are so beautiful, all firm and fresh and full of heft. I want to press you in my book, just to keep you. But I open the book, and you’ve all gone grey and brown.’

  Lucy took Milena’s hand. Lucy’s skin was thick, springy, as if upholstered with foam rubber. ‘There’s been some mistake,’ she whispered. ‘I should look into it, if I were you. You weren’t meant to die, you know. Ever.’

  And Milena remembered being young and well, running up the steps of the Shell. There was no Terminal ache along the crown of her head. There was lightness and fire in her feet. She turned a corner, and remembered finding Jacob on the fine spring morning of his death.

  He was lying slightly on one side, his eyes half-open, dry.

  Just for a moment there was the faint hope that he was blanked out again. Postpeople did when their memories were full. ‘Jacob?’ Milena whispered, as if he could awake. Then there was the immediate certainty. ‘Oh. Jacob,’ she said in pity.

  She looked at his shoes. He had put them on that morning, his old worn shoes, quickly ruined in climbing stairs, the sole loose and in peeling layers, a hole with borders of many different shades of grey.

  I am the one who finds you when you die.

  Not this time, Jacob.

  Milena sat down next to him on the staircase, and took his hand. It was still limp and warm, and there was an exhalation. It was not exactly unpleasant, but it made one wary, like the smell of a foreign fruit from a strange land that one is going to have to taste.

  A small gold crucifix fell out of Jacob’s hand into hers, on a broken gold chain. The action seemed so natural it was as if he had passed it to her. Milena looked at the broken chain. He must have grabbed the cross, she thought, as if it could hold him up. He must have felt it coming, like a descending weight. He grabbed the cross and held it and the chain broke and he fell.

  It was not exactly shameful to be a Christian. It meant you were a simple soul. Jacob did not come by a crucifix of gold by himself. It would have been passed from one dying hand to another, through generations. Who did Jacob hav
e to pass it on to? He had his tiny room on the first floor, with his tiny stove and his tiny bed. He was not married. His life had been burnt through in service. The conviction came to Milena, irrational and immovable: the crucifix has been passed to me.

  She stroked Jacob’s head, as if to touch all the memories and all the good faith that had been there. She did not want to leave him, though there were all the usual things to be done: the quiet summoning of the What Does, the speedy gathering up of the dead. Well, someone else could go and get the What Does. Milena would stay there. Milena would stay there and take account of what had happened, pay attention to the death of Jacob the Postperson.

  She took his ankles and pulled him out of the corner of the landing, away from the wall, into what seemed a more comfortable position. She arranged his hands.

  We never had our talk, Jacob, the one in which I asked you what it was like to know so many people so well, to have so much information in your head. But I think it must have been like being smothered, smothered in other people, making demands.

  I made more demands than anyone, Jacob. I cannot remember you making any demands on me. So I’m just going to sit here Jacob, and give you the time you deserve, a bit of time to understand the pattern you made, weaving through space and time, up and down the Shell, over and over, room to room, reminding people about debts and rehearsals, appointments and times to take medicines. Did you pray at night alone? Did you go to a Church, a boisterous singing church that made you happy? Is there a church for Postpeople? And what about the seizures, the way you would blank out?

  People said you were used to blanking out, Jacob. Postpeople do blank out of they don’t take care of themselves. Three times, you blanked out, Jake, three times you let yourself get too full. You told me that it was like dying. Each time it happens, you said, you could feel your mind going cold in sections, like a city turning out its lights. Then they would give you a virus that taught you who you were and who your clients were, and back you went again. Three times you started anew, but it didn’t make you look any fresher. You always looked dead around the eyes.