The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  She opened her eyes and she was in another world.

  I know that! I know that place! Milena remembering suddenly sat up and yelled. I know what it is now! I know where I am!

  I’m really ill, thought Milena who had been a director. This is the start of a new sickness. But she didn’t mind. She was smiling.

  The world was made of light, light exchanging light, light going in and out like breath, the breath rising up from the Earth into clouds, clouds edged with all light, light in all colours, white, fading to ice blue, swirls of ice crystals in the breath of the world.

  Hallelujah. Hosanna.

  Shaky, smiling, Milena stood up. She stood up and began to run across the grass. She wore sandals; she could feel the swish of grass against her toes; she could feel the stream of air, fresh from the respiration of the plants, the trees, the grass, the breath folding in and out of her, the light on her skin, striking Rhodopsin, breaking it apart, making sugar, sugar and sodium that sent nerves flashing, her seeing, dancing skin, rippling like waves with the light.

  The ground had knees and elbows, and outstretched arms, and suddenly Milena had fallen forward with delight into them. She stared about her with delight.

  ‘Milena! Ma!’ the adults were calling behind her.

  Everything was shielded, everything was protected by an armour of light. She looked at her arm, and saw the light rising out of her as well as into her. She looked up and she caught the trees, turning away, away from her like the Bees, orienting, disorienting.

  Milena laughed. ‘Whoo-hooo!’ she cried, and kicked with her feet.

  The adults were upon her.

  ‘Ma? Ma? Are you all right?’ cried Cilla.

  Milena rolled over, and the shock of seeing Cilla took her breath away. Cilla’s face had fallen in on itself. It was more of a death’s head than her own. The hollow eyes were exhausted with the strain, the strain of playing nurse. Tell me to fickit off if you want to, thought Milena.

  Berry squatted beside her, leaning into her line of sight. He was grinning now. He looked dead into Milena’s eyes, and Milena who was no longer a director thought: he understands. Milena who had been a director looked at him instead, and smiled. His returning gaze was steady.

  ‘Why did you run like that?’ Cilla demanded. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

  ‘We’re all hurt. But not hurt by the fall.’ She thought she meant her own fall, into the grass, the welcoming grass. Then she thought she maybe meant something else as well. Milena lolled in the grass, ran her bare arms across it. Ohhhhhhh! The beautiful grass.

  The grass knew. It oriented itself towards her.

  ‘I think,’ she said thickly, as if drunk. ‘I thing I’m becoming a Bee.’ She believed it.

  A cure that makes you well, not ill.

  ‘Goddamn viruses,’ chuckled Milena. ‘Why do they feel so good?’

  ‘Oh, Milena,’ said Cilla, weary, worn, taking her hand. It was a lot to bear for Cilla, who had never thought about death or its coming.

  ‘There is a thread, a golden thread, that connects us to Life,’ said Milena. ‘And we keep making it thinner and thinner. If it ever breaks then we all will die, and take the world with us. And we just keep spinning it out, thinner and thinner,’ Milena was grinning. She held up her arms and looked at them.

  Her arms were blazing. They fluoresced with generated light.

  ‘Let’s go back and eat,’ said Cilla. ‘You don’t eat.’ Her voice was clogged.

  ‘Have you ever wanted to be fucked by a tree?’ Milena asked, and giggled.

  ‘Milena!’ hissed Cilla and gave her hand an admonitory shake. The boy was near.

  ‘Trees are so big and beautiful and strong.’

  ‘Peterpaul,’ said Cilla, turning, pleading.

  ‘Listen, listen,’ said Milena, lolling her head. ‘I don’t want to die, but I don’t want their virus either. I don’t want to live forever. I don’t want it, here.’ She formed a cone with her fingers that glowed like embers and tapped her heart. She had not understood before why her body had fought off the cure. ‘This is enough,’ she said, and pointed to the light all around her, and what lay beyond the light, beyond life.

  ‘She’s all bones,’ said Cilla miserably. Together, she and Peterpaul lifted Milena up.

  Let me stay in the garden, thought Milena whose head hung down, looking back at the grass, confused, confounded. The light that shone out of her arms and her face began to ebb.

  Don’t take her! begged the Milena who was remembering, to Peterpaul and Cilla. Don’t let them! she told Milena the director. It’s yours. It’s something you did yourself. You got back! It’s real! They will take it away again! Keep it!

  They helped her back to the chair. They lowered her onto it. To their surprise, little Berry climbed onto her lap, and hugged her and Milena lifted up weak arms, and put them around him.

  Everything was going flat again.

  ‘I think she’s just confused from waking up,’ Cilla said hopefully to Mike. A quick warning gaze to Peterpaul said: don’t tell him anything different.

  It was just a virus, thought Milena. A beautiful virus. But it’s going now. It wasn’t real. Why are the viruses beautiful? She held Berry up to look at them, Berowne’s son, his babe, the son of a friend. She looked into huge round eyes that were in a different proportion to his face than the eyes in an adult’s were. They looked blue-grey, huge and pale against the purple roundness of his face. It was Berry she wanted to defend. But I cannot help you, and I cannot protect you. I will not be with you.

  A cloud passed in front of the sun, and the light was gone. Everything was grey again. So it was sunlight and fever, that was all. And yet it had seemed so real, when I saw it. Another euphoria.

  Berry suddenly frowned, and sat up. He tightened the toggle of his cowboy hat and then turned and stumbled down from her lap.

  ‘I think,’ said Milena, ‘I want to go back inside.’

  It was on the way back, when Milena and Al were talking alone together that the Snide suddenly said: ‘It wasn’t a virus, you know, Milena. What you saw. It was you. It came from you.’ His eyes were red, as if he had been dazzled.

  Milena stopped and looked back at the garden, at the trees and tried to see the light again. The trees were beautiful, but they were adult trees, and it was an adult sky. ‘Come on,’ she called smiling, to Mike Stone. ‘Catch up.’

  Later, the Princess came singing music from Madam Butterfly. She told Milena that she wouldn’t be bringing Berry to see her for a time. Did she understand? ‘It frightens him,’ the Princess sang with shame. ‘You frighten him.’

  But there still was the memory of the welcoming grass; of the turning, curious, tender tress as strong and silent and gentle as fishermen in unvisited villages; of the bouncing, happy clouds; and of the birds that flew without hesitation. Rising up on the breath of the world. There and then, but not now. Only in memory could she see it.

  And the Milena who remembered understood. The silence and the light were one.

  chapter nineteen

  DOG LATIN (AN AUDIENCE OF VIRUSES)

  ‘Life is history,’ said the philosophers. They imagined that life worked as they did, preserving decisions. Thereby they took the life out of history altogether.

  ‘The brain works like a computer,’ said the writers of popular science, as if in unison, when computers seemed to be changing the world. They meant that nerve impulses take one branch of a ganglion as opposed to another. A yes or no, a one or zero code that they could describe if they wished, and they did, as binary. They did not know what made living memory, or how sound or light or even silence could be recalled.

  ‘The brain works like a collection of viruses,’ the Consensus said one hundred and fifty years later, when viruses were difficult to avoid.

  The need to simplify and to put things in a sequence, their devotion to history, made them slaves to whatever was current.

  ‘Time is money,’ said Rolfa’s father, on the last
night of the Comedy. He meant the younger members of the Family had become slack, and did not see the connection between how hard they worked and Family wealth. Zoe had just asked him if he wouldn’t come outside to see the end of Rolfa’s opera. She stood at the door of the starkly tidy room he called his office. Zoe was scowling slightly. Becoming Consul had not been good for her father. It had made him pompous and insecure.

  Rolfa’s father was thinking that it was strange, that of all his children it should be Rolfa who ended up the most like him. Rolfa would have known the opera was there just to glorify the Squidges. She would have known it was more important to get on with work. It had been Rolfa who had invented the time sheets. Every hour a member of the Family worked was supposed to earn forty francs—four marks. This meant that every hour they did not work also cost four marks.

  Rolfa’s father had become Consul of the Family after the Restoration. The Family called it the Emergency. The Squidges had metal of their own now.

  Time is not money. Money is money. Money is a promise, nothing more, an agreement not to doubt. Money is, for example, an exchange of iron ore for promises. The Family were receiving fewer promises for their Antarctic iron, but the time sheets still said they were rich. That kept them happy. Any money being nothing more than a promise, an abstract notion, the Family somehow managed to stay wealthy. Rolfa’s father sat with his whizzing machinery, looking at figures that were pure superstition. Like all superstitions, money was real. It was as real as the gods of ancient Sumer. The gods of Sumer were media of exchange as well—they presided over storehouses for goods. They also were agreements not to doubt. Gods collapse.

  Zoe shook her head. ‘One of us ought to see it,’ she said. She was thinking of Rolfa, who could not see the Comedy, under the clear unshielded skies of Antarctica. She was thinking of Milena and the strangeness of life. ‘The little fish,’ Zoe murmured to herself.

  Her father was busy with an account. Any system of accounting, whether it uses words or numbers, achieves meaning by what it leaves out. Her father’s account left out almost everything that interested Zoe. She and her father spoke in different tongues.

  As Zoe turned away, a cat on the roof over her head slunk down the roof slates. A thin coating of cats moved all over London, some in mid-air leaping, others licking their feet in doorways, others hunched over bowls, eating. Some of them lay on their sides, cold, on the pavements.

  Under the roof of the Family house, seven women and two men were cooking in various kitchens, chopping vegetables or staring at boiling pots without really seeing them. Downstairs, eight Polar teenagers watched their video, each costing the Family a notional two marks an hour. The time of teenagers was given half value.

  In the houses on the other side of the street, a Party Woman was filing her toenails. Another was repairing seat covers. One couple made love, another fought, someone else was washing the leaves of her rubber tree. Outside in the street, two coffee vendors passed each other, pulling their wagons and tureens. One was on his way to Knightsbridge, the other was going home. They smiled and nodded to each other in good fellowship. There was good fellowship among those who plied the new trade, now that the public were safely addicted to caffeine. At the bottom of Rolfa’s street, where the terrace ended, there was a noisy main street full of traffic. A smelly omnibus dragged its low-hanging rear end past the corner, alcohol exhaust billowing up behind it. On the pavement, a woman covered her face with a scarf, to filter the fumes. A sun-blasted drunk was slumped in a doorway and he held up a bottle, saluting the woman in the twilight.

  The shops on the corner were closing early. A plump, bald man, only nineteen years old, but afflicted with the signs of middle age, folded bamboo shutters over his windows. There was no night trade now, with the opera. He lived with other families in rooms above the shop. On the roof, the shopowner’s wife and his children and the What Does cousins were gathering setting up pears or tables, carrying basins of food, preparing a party.

  Two miles away, along the river, fishermen were pulling in lines. There were bonfires on wasteground, where people were gathering to share the last night of the opera. In parks, bamboo platforms had been erected, onto which the Comedy was cubed when there was heavy cloud. Much of the Comedy had been obscured by cloud, but tonight, the sky was autumnal and clear. Even so, technicians were carrying out final checks on the equipment. Holograms of giant roses and human hands flickered in and out of existence. The platforms would serve if there was a sudden front of warm moist air. Overhead there were balloons which would see the advancing front of weather and give warning.

  In Archbishop’s Park one of the workmen finished a bottle of beer. His head tilted backwards to receive the last drop, and overhead he saw the spangle of stars. Another workman was peeing half-seen behind a bush. A tug moved in the direction of St Thomas’s Hospital, with the current of the Thames. It swung up and down in the wash of a bigger barge. Lights from the hospital glowed.

  In London’s two hundred and ninety-two hospitals over fifty women were in labour at that very moment. One of them bit her lip and pushed, and there was a sense of breakthrough, and the head of the newborn was free. Another newborn was slapped, and began to wail. It began to wail, just as Zoe turned in the doorway; as the coffee vendors nodded; and as a laughing man in a pub seemed suddenly to slip and fall, knocking mugs from the counter. His heart had failed. In the kitchen of a kaff, near the Cut, amid a clatter of pots and pans, a twelve year old sharing in the cooking poured boiling water over herself. A man finished positioning his favourite stuffed chair in the middle of the street, to watch the show in the air. Three doors down a young man moved from one foot to another, nervously waiting for a girl he only partly knew.

  It can’t be done. Now cannot be imagined or described, not all at once. We have to string it on a thread, in imitation of the way we view the past. In imitation of the way we view ourselves. If you try to tell the whole truth, you never stop talking. And so we tell stories, histories, instead.

  ‘Time is money,’ said Rolfa’s father.

  ‘Who were you today?’ Mike Stone asked gently.

  Milena was sitting on the balcony of her hospital suite. There were no sharp corners in the hospital suite. It was made of Coral and had grown like flesh. The floor of the balcony flowed upwards to make a wall. The top of the wall rose and fell with a line as natural as that of a tree branch. The walls were covered with plaster because the Coral could sting.

  The Coral had chewed up rubble from the older buildings of St Thomas’s Hospital and laid it in genetically-determined patterns. Milena’s genetic balcony looked over the Thames. There were moored barges strung with lights and full of people. The windows of the West were full of people. The West was a sandy-coloured swelling of Coral where the Houses of Parliament had once been, across the river.

  Below was the embankment pathway that Rolfa and Milena had walked along on their last day together. Milena remembered looking up at the hospital then. Now she was here, ill, and the wide pavements of that walkway were filled with Bees. They sat in respectful silence, looking up at her. Oh well, thought Milena, leave them be, it’s the last night of the Comedy.

  The souvenirs of her life were scattered about her. There were not many. There was her attempt to orchestrate the Comedy. It was bound in a notebook. Music by Rolfa Patel said the first sheet. Orchestrated by Milena Shibush. There was a dirty lump of felt invested with personality called Piglet. There were Rolfa’s papers, and some Coral jewellery that Mike had bought for her. There was the paper Cilla had given her, and the music that Jacob the Postperson had remembered. In a box of earth on the wall, there were herbs. They had been grown out of the wall of the Bulge and Mike had brought them home. They were dying.

  There was a hard, hot swelling in Milena’s stomach, and her arms and fingers were as delicate as a robin’s foot. All her skin was fluorescent now. It gave off a dull, orange glow, with brilliant threads in it where nerves ended in the surface of the skin. There wa
s a huge, gathering knot of flesh just above her shoulder.

  Even the Party had stopped telling Milena that she was going to get well. They still insisted that she had many months to live and refused to accept what Milena herself knew, that she was weakening. As she weakened, her empathy virus grew stronger.

  ‘Who were you today?’ Mike Stone had asked.

  ‘I was…’ she paused, actress-like for effect. ‘One of the attendants downstairs in the laundry. The short one with the wig, I think. I was very tired and had flat feet, but I was in love with Flo. You know Flo, the one who always says hello. I don’t think I really knew it, but Flo made my life worth living. We just talked, folding towels and sheets. The soap on them brought our hands out in a rash. Flo’s family live in the outreaches, did you know that? I didn’t quite hear the name of the place. Oxbridge? Boxbridge?’

  ‘Uxbridge,’ whispered Mike. ‘It’s in the west.’

  ‘Never been that far out,’ replied Milena.

  ‘What about when you went up in the Bulge?’

  ‘That,’ said Milena ‘was moored at Biggin Hill.’

  ‘That’s far out of town.’

  ‘It’s south.’

  Oh, said Mike in silence.

  ‘Then,’ said Milena. ‘I came down with an attack of barge girl. I was a nine year old girl helping my mother on a barge. I ran back and forth along the wood in bare feet, but I knew the varnish would stop me getting splinters. I had lines trailing in the water and I was checking them all for trout or salmon. I had never caught a salmon. I was in love with the idea of catching a salmon. Isn’t that strange? Love is the only word for it. I ached to catch a salmon. Meanwhile, I helped with the sails, and checked the tiller. I whistled for my dog. My dog never slipped or fell into the water. And my mother sang.’

  Milena paused, living another life.

  ‘She’ll make a nice thread,’ Milena said. Milena and Al were making a tapestry of what she empathised. They called it ‘A London Symphony.’ The pattern had music woven into it, the music of Vaughan Williams.