The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  A big Thames barge slipped past them, making waves, making them rock. Root looked around the sail.

  ‘You comfortable now?’ Root asked.

  Yes, yes in a way I am.

  Milena fell asleep.

  She woke up with a familiar, acrid tingling in her nostrils. It was the smell of home. It was the smoke of cremation from the Estate of Remembrance. There was the singing too, the undertakers warbling with their tongues, the mourners passing over their dead, singing old hymns. Milena saw flowers from the boats and biers bob past their boat. She did not look up.

  Bees had been dumped in the Slump, and they had adapted so quickly that they were now a nuisance. They had grown huge flat pads like the giant lilies. They floated on them and fed on them. Milena saw that they had gathered around the graceful hangar of the Party Estate. She groaned and closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  She heard the Slump boys shouting at the Bees and felt the boat turn to the side and the boys push against the rooted human lilypads. ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ she heard Root shout. She felt a scraping of woven reed underneath the boat as it was pulled ashore.

  ‘Here, Lady,’ said one of the boys.

  The slopes of the tiny artificial island were covered in Bees.

  Milena, Milena, Milena, said all the Bees all together, and there was a rustling of their many branches. Milena saw the faces of her neighbours, pinched and unhappy, staring out of their upper windows. The What Does stood guarding the door, a cloth wrapped around her face against disease. A charcoal stove was burning wet reeds to make smoke, to clear away the sickness.

  There was a smell of coffee. The What Does husband was scrubbing the lintels with coffee from a bucket. He turned and looked up, and flung the rest of the coffee on the ground to make a path for walking on.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Root.

  Overhead there was the sound of helicopters.

  Milena stepped out of the boat onto the woven shore. She began to walk towards the Bees.

  ‘Where are you going?’ called Root in dismay. As Milena approached them, the Bees made a sound like many doves and arched their arms over their heads, to cut out some of her thought. Those on the shore waded backwards into the brown water. Milena stood on the shoreline, facing the water, which looked as heavy and golden as oil, a reflection of sunset heaving sluggishly on its surface.

  ‘You’ll have to go,’ Milena told the Bees. ‘If you stay, the Garda will come again, people will be angry. I am not going to be staying here anyway. I will be in hospital and I won’t be well. Try to stay away from me. Try to find places where you are safe and I will try to come to see you when I can.’

  From out of the water two men came wading, one on all fours, carrying roses in his mouth. The other had lost all his teeth, and his golden hair had thinned to nothing on top. Uncombed coils of it hung matted down the side of his head. ‘Hello, Ma,’ he said, in a perfectly ordinary way. He was the King. ‘Remember Piper?’ He stroked the head of the dog-man.

  ‘Yes,’ said Milena, in a whisper.

  ‘He remembers you. He remembers that you saved him. He’s a good dog.’

  Piper dropped the flowers at her feet, and stretched down low, looking up at her, tongue out of his mouth. There was eagerness and love in his eyes.

  ‘Good Piper. Good boy,’ whispered Milena and began to scratch him behind the ears.

  Piper gave a yelp of pleasure and shook his bottom from side to side, trying to wag a tail he did not have.

  ‘He thinks you are his mistress,’ said the King.

  You had to understand Bees to know that it was a sacrifice for them to give up Piper. They loved him. You had to understand Bees to know what a tribute it was for them to give Piper to her.

  Milena sighed with weariness. Here I go again. She knew what she was going to do. ‘Come on then, Piper,’ she said, ruefully. ‘Come on boy. Or girl. Whichever.’

  ‘Home,’ said the Bees, all together, in chorus. ‘She takes him home!’ They were smiling.

  ‘What did I say?’ shouted Root. ‘I said you had to be the one who gets taken care of!’

  ‘You had all better go,’ Milena said to them. She stumbled as she walked up the coffee-washed pathway. Piper tried to caper about her ankles, but his knees were not sprung like a dog’s ankles.

  ‘You’re not taking that thing!’ exclaimed Root.

  ‘He’s not a thing,’ said Milena, and her voice suddenly thickened and she found she was weeping. ‘He’s alive.’ To her that was suddenly the most precious thing.

  The Bees began to withdraw, bowing and stepping onto the lilypads of their brethren. There was commotion in the water as roots pulled themselves free and pushed the lilypads away from the shore. As the helicopters turned back, as Piper nittered and wriggled and tried to pant, and as Root shook her head with misgiving, Milena began to climb the stairs that led to her home. She felt something sluggish in her loins, the ebbing of the life that still washed all about her in waves.

  She opened her door, and Mike Stone came rushing forwards from the balcony, his face full of alarm, full of questions.

  Milena tottered towards him, fell against him. ‘Mike,’ she said. ‘I’ve got cancer.’ It was not until Mike held her that she realised. She had made herself ill, out of love. But Love of what?

  chapter eighteen

  THE ARMOUR OF LIGHT (THE CHILD GARDEN)

  On Milena’s twenty-first birthday, she and her friends went for a picnic in Archbishop’s Park, near St Thomas’s Hospital.

  Al the Snide carried the wine and the fruit juice. Cilla carried the basket of food and Peterpaul carried Mike’s chair. Mike had designed and built it for himself. It supported him from the shoulders and thighs, leaving his swollen buttocks to hang free. Mike had developed a waddle. He walked by shifting his hips from side to side and letting his feet follow. There was a football pitch in the park, covered in vividly red grit. Some boys who were playing on it stopped to laugh at him.

  Milena expended her strength by walking up to the boys. They saw her and fell silent, then shared embarrassed smiles. They knew they were going to be told off but they were nice enough to accept it was their due. They also knew who she was.

  Milena was bald, her head leaned forward insecurely on a thin neck, tendons straining. She had started to wear make-up, like an actress. Cilla put it on for her, giving her skin a lightly tanned, purple colour with a smear of silver around the eyes. The silver suited the purple but could not hide how deep the flesh had sunk into the sockets of her skull. Milena smiled with rose-coloured lips, knowing that she showed too much gum and that the grin made her look like a death’s head.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ she told the boys gently, through the cane screen around the pitch.

  The boys shuffled, looking at their feet. One of them had a nasty graze on his knee that trickled brown-black down his leg.

  ‘Someone had to carry you, before you were born,’ she told them. ‘Who knows, maybe you’ll be pregnant one day.’

  The boys chuckled, shook their heads. ‘Oh, ta. Don’t think so.’

  ‘Maybe your wife will insist.’

  ‘She’ll be lucky,’ murmured one of the boys.

  ‘Are you sorry, lads?’ she asked them.

  They nodded. Milena blew them a collective kiss. The Princess came up behind her, little Berry pulling in another direction. ‘Come with us, Milena,’ she sang, to the beginning of Faure’s Requiem. Requiem eterna. I know, thought Milena, I know she’s a Singer and cannot help her choice of music, but I wish she would sing something other than a requiem. It’s so mournful.

  Little Berry lived with his mother now, and had done since the Princess had met Peterpaul. They were all Singers. Berry never talked. Sometimes now, especially when he was alone with Peterpaul and the Princess, he would not use words at all. When he was eating, he sang. Different foods had different themes. He sang them over and over, even with his mouth full, celebrating.

  He wore a cowboy hat. Milena had
worn one for a time, when her hair had started falling out, so he had wanted one too. The hat was black and red, and had a thong and a toggle that was pulled up tightly under his chin. There was a circle of white cotton bobbles all around the underside of the brim. Berry loved his cowboy hat. For him, it was alive and there were particular songs devoted to it.

  The Princess was trying to help Milena, supporting her by one arm, while pulling Berry, who was leaning with all his weight and all his being towards something he wanted. He sang about it to himself, but the adults couldn’t think what the song was about. The trees? The football pitch?

  ‘It’s Piper,’ said Milena. Terminals were also empaths with people as well, slightly Snide. A Milena weakened, her ability to Read people improved. ‘He wants to ride Piper.’

  The Princess paused and looked up at Milena with a kind of helpless concern. Is she trying to find a song? Milena wondered. There are no songs that ask if a man who thinks he’s a dog can give the virus to your child.

  ‘It’s all right, Anna. I’ve checked. Piper is not infectious, not contagious, nothing.’

  A Speaker could have lied and said that was not a worry. Singers couldn’t lie. Trying to lie clogged the music just as speech clogged the words. The Princess went silent until she could sing something else. ‘What would you do if someone found him, someone who knew who he used to be?’

  ‘Give him back?’ smiled Milena, and shrugged.

  ‘What if it was his wife who found him?’

  ‘That would be sad,’ said Milena, smiling dreamily. ‘Especially as he thinks he’s a female dog.’

  Milena felt calm today, she always felt better with people around her. It was at night the terror came, the cold, clinging sweats, the pacing around the room, the life-devouring fear of death. Mike, poor Mike, would wake and hold her as she quivered next to him, teeth chattering.

  Milena was immune to the cures. She had unstitched the suppressor genes they tried to give her. So they gave her immune suppressants, so she could catch the cure, and the cancers raced ahead. The cancers ached at night with growing pains. She felt them in her mind, and tried to find the spirals, the spirals that could change with thought. But she had never had so many cells to change before. She had never been so tired or confused before. She sometimes thought, that at night while she slept another part of her, obeying the old program, made the cells cancerous again.

  At times, she could find the idea amusing. I can fight off any illness, and so I’m dying, because all the cures are diseases. Haven’t things become just the slightest bit confused?

  The only other cures they had were the ancient ones, and they were illnesses too. They killed cells in your body. They made you queasy or sleepy or confused. They parched your throat and made you so nauseous you couldn’t hold down a glass of water. Your hair fell out.

  Other things were happening. The path of florescent skin on her palm had spread up and over her arms onto part of her face. Parts of her glowed in the dark. She could feel other things happening in her genes, strange attempts at mutation, trying to grow new things altogether.

  All of that was better than the euphoria. When the terror got too bad, happy drugs were given to her. Then she would talk in a loud, swaggering voice of what she would do when she got better. How she would quit the theatre and become a space pilot. She would believe it. The memory of Mike’s face, all its muscles strained, his encircled eyes wincing, told her that he would rather not sleep at night than see her wheeling with joy and mad relief.

  But today was a good day. Today everything was in the most perfect balance.

  ‘Milena. The chairs are up,’ called Mike, already sitting, balanced in a criss-cross bamboo framework. It was Mike who called and not Peterpaul. Peterpaul did not like to call in public, in song. The days of persecution had been brief, but Peterpaul was still wary.

  Milena suddenly felt a nose bump against her hand. She never had to call Piper. He knew when to come. He was more intelligent than most dogs. Perhaps he had been given an empathy virus. When he was human. He had been trained now to wear shorts in public, and slept in a wicker basket in the hall.

  ‘Pi-per!’ sang Berry, and chuckled hoarsely, clambering up on to his back. Milena and the Princess began to walk across the grass, hand in hand. Piper crawled beside them on hands and knees, panting with his tongue hanging out, a wide doggy grin of contentment.

  Oh, it was a beautiful day! Trees and clouds and sky. In one corner of the park, well away from her was a cluster of moving shrubbery. It was Bees, three or four of them. The Bees always followed Milena, keeping their distance, respectful and silent, like mourners. The Bees bored and oppressed and sometimes frightened Milena. Milena could sense how they saw the virus as something golden, an island in her body. The cancer sang to them of life even as it was killing her.

  But today was so beautiful that Milena felt strong enough to give them a smile and a wave. And they smiled and waved back, looking for a moment like normal people, white teeth in purple faces, quick smiles for a friend on a sunny day. Then Milena saw that one of them was the King. She smiled and waved again, to him.

  Milena had not planned to come out. The friends had planned to stay inside, in the Coral Reef room at the hospital. It was comfortable there and warm. There was a kitchen and a bedsitting room and even a small balcony, with a view over the river. The friends had all crowded onto it, and felt the air like a bath around them. It did not seem likely that Milena would get too weary or cold. They must get so tired, Milena thought, of me being ill all the time.

  Peterpaul reached out towards her to help her sit. He took such exaggerated care to lower her gently that Milena wanted to smile. There had been just a little ill will when she had asked Peterpaul to leave the Comedy. Dante was not an Everyman, and could not be played as one. She had worried about it for weeks, losing sleep, before she finally told Peterpaul over lunch at the Zoo. She was replacing him with Jason, the waspish apothecary from the Babes’ production of Falstaff. She explained, and Peterpaul had said nothing for the rest of the meal. She learned later that he wanted to reply in the funeral music from Peer Gynt and was too embarrassed. He was not angry; he was very, very disappointed. He might also have been a little relieved.

  So we’ve all lost the Comedy. Peterpaul didn’t sing it. Mike’s pregnant so someone else is riding the Bulge. And I’m dying. Someone other than Milena Shibush is pumping out the images every night into the sky. There’s not a breath of live performance about it now. It’s a recording. And only the first two books; we only had time to do the first two books. You can’t call it a Comedy if you only do the first two books: it ends in Purgatory. Well, thought Milena with a smile, a lot of people have said watching it every evening is pure hell. She settled onto the chair and reached across to take hold of Mike’s hand. Oh, it was good, just to sit and feel the sun on her face. Her Rhodopsin skin tingled with the light: she could feel the yellow reflection from the arms of the bamboo folding chair and the warm green reflections of the green grass and the sudden stab of orange from the grit of the football pitch. We can almost see with our skins, she thought, her eyes closed. I can almost feel the clouds overhead on my arms.

  Little Berry was singing, a far from aimless song. His voice was like a cherub’s, inhuman. It was an infant’s voice singing complex and beautiful music with perfect pitch, perfect tone. It was not innocent. It was unsettling, the voice of another kind of human being. And the song was so strange, as well. It seemed to be about the day itself, the trees, the sound of the tennis balls on racquets, the sunlight. But there was something wary in it too, something defensive. What, wondered Milena, does little Berry have to defend? He must know Singers are different. But people are not unkind to them, well, hardly unkind any longer. Then Berry stopped singing. Milena opened her eyes, and found that Berry had been looking at her, dead at her, at her face.

  I scare him, she thought.

  He was wide-eyed, solemn, his mouth pulled down at the corners. Was he about to
cry? Milena was about to say to the Princess: Berry’s worried about something. Then she decided to find out what it was. She tried to Read him. Usually infants could not be Read. Either they were too blank, or too different from adults for the Reading to make sense. Milena could only get a dim sense of what Berry was feeling. Berry was a jumble of song. The songs were secret. Berry did not sing them around adults. The songs were about his world, and his world was like an egg that he was hatching. He was trying to keep it warm. This tender world, protected by secret song. Now it was Milena’s turn to be disturbed.

  He’s trying to defend it from us. Well, children always say they have secrets. Milena tried to dismiss it from her mind. She suddenly felt unutterably weary. I have a disease to fight. Little Berry must fight battles of his own. Except that it did not feel in the midst of the tangle of song as though it were his battle alone.

  Milena drifted into sleep, or in a state enough like sleep for her friends to call it that and not feel too disturbed. They spoke in whispers. Berry had been told to stop singing in case he woke Aunt Milena. He kept on singing in his head and Milena heard the music as if in a dream.

  She woke up after a time feeling very thirsty. She had been breathing through her mouth. There was a dull ache, all the way from the surface of her eyes back through to the back of her brain.

  Oh don’t say I’m ill, she thought. Don’t make me be ill. Let me have this day. It is such a perfect day. Please. I don’t want to be carried back, I don’t want to vomit, I don’t want any pain. Not today. Tomorrow. Tomorrow the sky will be grey, and we won’t be all together.

  ‘Are you all right, Milena?’ asked Mike, rising in his chair, giving her hand a little shake.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. No point pretending to sleep.

  She opened her eyes. They were full of a clear, sticky moisture, that refracted the light into rainbows. There were nameless shapes of light, rainbows dancing all around them, swirls of light, beating, like wings.