The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  Milena was left alone on the living room floor. My, but dying is lonely, though Milena. Everyone has to fall away.

  What happens next?

  She remembered Rolfa. This happened to Rolfa. I saw the wave go through her. When does it come? Do you know it? Do you remember, afterwards, all the things you saw, or only some of them?

  Overhead, dim, as if in a dream, Rolfa’s music shook the earth and the stone and the flesh of the Consensus. Rolfa, where is Rolfa now?

  The voice spoke again, gently. It whispered in Milena’s mind.

  What happens next, said the voice, is that you remember. Everything. There is nothing to fear. It seems to go on forever, and only lasts a moment.

  Root? Milena tried to sit up, to look around. Who was talking?

  I have to go now. But modicum et vos vitebitis me

  In a little while you will see me.

  It was Rolfa. It was Rolfa who was talking.

  Overhead, through the stone, the music suddenly ended. The Comedy was over.

  Space shimmered. Suddenly space and time and thought rolled towards her, all together.

  Then the wave struck.

  Somewhere in memory, Milena saw the face of Chao Li Song as a young man. ‘The problem,’ said the outlaw, ‘is time.’

  Milena remembered being on the Hungerford Footbridge and it was crowded with strangers and old friends. She remembered Berowne standing next to her, and he was alive, alive, alive and young, the wind stirring his hair as if with hope, his smile leached of calcium. ‘I want to be part of it,’ he said.

  ‘ZERO!’ the people called. ‘MINUS ONE! MINUS TWO!’

  Lights came on, one after another, and Milena kept splitting into a thousand selves, a thousand moments, each Now a different world, all the moments of her life moving like a bird in flight, each moment separate. Cause and effect were not enough to unite the world.

  Paradise is eternally present and so is hell. Time blurs them, crowds them in so close together that salvation and damnation are one. Memory is like being outside time. It can separate them. Memory shows us what heaven is like, where nothing ever happens. It shows us that moment when desire achieves its end, and stays touching, holding the thing it loves, forever. Memory enslaves us, preserving the horror, bending us to it, moulding us to it. Memory is purgatory. To be saved or damned you have to be outside time. You have to step out of this life.

  ‘Oh!’ Milena howled, lifting up her thin and dancing arms like the branches of a tree. ‘Oh!’ she cried aloud in both pain and joy.

  She met Mike Stone for the first time. She met Thrawn McCartney. The apothecary spun on her heel, and the Bees moved on the tidal mud like a flock of flamingos. Milena faced Max. ‘A big grey book. What did you do with it Max?’ Al the Snide same to help her. ‘A person is a whole universe,’ said Al the Snide. ‘We call memory the Web. Underneath is the Fire. And that just burns.’

  Chinese princesses dancing in orderly rows lifted up fans in unison, before a giant, enthroned crab. The King, from Love’s Labour’s stared at her with a dirty face. ‘The food weeps,’ he said. ‘The coffee screams.’ The Seller of Games was peddling mirror contact lenses, and she was singing in great, clear voice:

  It’s easily done, no mystery

  With this little item from history.

  Milton the Minister fell into the calamari salad. ‘I think of you all,’ said Lucy, ‘like you was flowers in my garden.’ Somewhere there was still the sound of helicopters.

  A spreading fire lit up Milena’s life, blazing through all the branches of her nerves. The nerves branched in yes/no, one/zero code perhaps, but the pattern led to something as dense and as fluid as magma.

  I rise up like a tree in smaller and smaller branches, each tiny twig another self. But the roots are lost, the roots of my whole world are lost. I get nervous and my grammar reverses. Bad Grammar for real.

  ‘Because the Past is you,’ said Root, somewhere. Now?

  The purifying fire burned through her, lighting up memory.

  Purgatory.

  Milena remembered standing on a train platform in Czechoslovakia. She was holding her mother’s hand. At the end of the pink Coral railway, on the edge of the horizon, there was a star. The star was coming for them both. Milena became very excited.

  ‘Ssss Ssss Ssss,’ she called, making the sound of a train.

  The train huffed and squealed and creaked its way into the station on huge rubber tyres with a steam engine between them like a calliope, streaming molecules. Crows rose up cawing from the field behind.

  The train was huge and strong and friendly, like her father had been. It was as if her father had come back. There was a great hearty screeching and a clunk, as if her father had dropped down onto the sofa to play with little Milena. But between Milena and the train, there was a gap. The gap was dark, and Milena could fall down it. The steps leading into the train were as tall as she was, adult steps, not made for children.

  Then her mother hoisted Milena up, as if lifting her into her father’s arms. Her mother spoke. Up we go, one step, two steps.

  ‘Nastupujem! Raz, dva.’

  She’s not speaking English, thought Milena remembering. It came as a shock. She’s speaking Czech and I understand every word. I understand it better than I ever understood English. English is not the same: it doesn’t pick me up and swing me. English is a different universe. Czech tongue, Czech time, Czech feelings. A train is a different thing altogether from a vlak. A train is British and mostly reliable and very run down, déclassé. A vlak is abrupt and powerful, and takes you to the town, where all good things are. And because the vlak is so important it cannot be allowed just to leave. There must be a tremendous fuss made. Handkerchiefs waved. Women sticking hands and heads through windows, clutching each other, giving urgent advice, making urgent demands. Bring me back the books. And tell Juliana not to forget to see Aunty. As if they were going to go away and never come back.

  Milena and her mother enter the carriage and there are rows of faces and a woman with spectacles and a fox fur coat.

  ‘Mami, proc ma ta pani na sobe mrtve zviratko?’

  Mama, why is that woman wearing a dead animal?

  Unanswerable. All the people in the carriage laugh, including the spectacled woman, though her mouth is thin and her eyes narrow. The question is unanswerable, because carefully there is no answer that makes sense. You can hardly say it is because it makes her look better. There is the fox’s dead and wizened face, biting its own tail. So why is she wearing it?

  The burst of laughter alarms the child. She wants people to understand it really isn’t a stupid question.

  ‘Snedla je napred? Mela je ochocene?’

  Did she eat it first? Did it use to be a pet?

  ‘Milena,’ chuckles her mother, and looks around, nervously. No one else ever says her name in the same way.

  Her mother’s voice, rises and falls, caressing the name, in love and pity, embarrassment and distress. Milena gives her mother great pain. The pain is tangled with many feelings. And the way her mother says it, restores the meaning inherent in the name.

  Milena remembered that her name meant Loving One.

  I still have the name, but I had lost its meaning, until now. It was as if her name had taken off a mask, to have its meaning restored, to hear her mother say it again with the sound it first had in Milena’s first world.

  Milena’s mother is pulling her towards a seat, and talking to her, in a voice that other people can hear:

  ‘To nikdy nebylo zviratko, Milena. To narostlo. Pestuji kozesinu jako rostliny.’

  It never was an animal. Milena. It was grown. They grow the fur like a plant.

  Milena wants to know why they do that. But she is afraid, afraid of another burst of laughter. She is deeply chagrined. Obviously, it is a bad thing to ask questions. Questions show that she is stupid. The child already knew that she was stupid, that she must keep quiet, that she must hide. They had given her viruses time after time, bu
t the viruses would not hold. Milena would not learn. She was resistant.

  Her mother lifts Milena up onto a seat. Milena can feel how small and light she is, as if she can flick herself up into the air like a playing card. It is a talent to be so light, so quick, so much like a fire. Time seems so slow and smooth, like honey. Milena’s legs swing high off the floor. Her mother pulls her back into the seat and her legs have to stick straight out in front of her. Nothing is made for children.

  There is a screeching and a sudden lurch forward. Slowly, as if weary and reluctant, the train begins to pull away.

  ‘Zamavej no rozloucenou, Milena.’

  ‘Wave goodbye, Milena. Wave goodbye.’

  Her mother is weeping very silently. Milena the child is perplexed. She had been told they were going away, but she did not believe it. Go away where? What other place to live is there? To Prague? That would be lovely, but wasn’t Prague dangerous? Hadn’t they left Prague to hide?

  The drab little station is hauled away. It is not possible to see the village. There are trees, and the old river, and the cows, dim in the mist, and a steeple with a rounded dome. Gradually, it is all swallowed up in darkness.

  Home, wept, the Milena who was remembering. That’s my home. Milena the child is not weeping. For her it is just a passing landscape. That is the country I have never seen again, throught the one who remembered. That is the place I carry around in my head, unformed, part of me but not remembered. Until now.

  Milena’s mother holds up Milena’s hand in a tiny mitten and waves the hand for her, makes it wave goodbye to no one.

  Not mittens, but palcaky.

  The clothes the people on the train wear, the way their hair is cut and combed, the stockings over trouser cuffs to keep out the cold, the smell of the trains. Mint tea and little sugared cakes in boxes to eat on the way, and that particular resin panelling, and the sound of the train, its low throaty growl, as if it had a beard and sang songs in a wild, strained voice or smoked cigars. As if, like her father, the train talked about freedom until it died.

  Not freedom, not freedom, but svoboda.

  Those aren’t houses, they’re domy.

  Those aren’t fields, they’re pole.

  Those aren’t blackbirds, they’re kosi.

  And I am not Milena Shibush. I never became Milena Shibush. She is elsewhere, in the land that might have been.

  Oh Tato, oh Mami, does it stretch that far away? Does life pull us apart so much, that we stop being real? All of that then was real? How did it fade? And how is it here again?

  Milena remembered childhood.

  She remembered skinning almonds in someone else’s house. Loving One, Loving One, they kept calling her. The almonds came out of a red clay bowl of boiled water and they were hot. Milena kept pushing with both thumbs, and then magically, mysteriously, the almond would slide out of its brown skin.

  It was Easter. She and the other children ran through a huge garden, giggling, in sunlight, to cut chives with scissors. A shaggy horse with feeling lips kissed the chives out of their open hands and Milena gasped in wonder. They found ladybirds and tried to keep them in a bowl of grass, and in the front room of the great old house, which was a warehouse, the girls built a secret room out of boxes. They had a toy piano. They fought the boys out of their secret room, and as they secret music tinkled. Milena remembered pushing a boy over. Milena fought and won, squealing with excitement.

  Milena remembered the faces of the friends she had forgotten. There was a little girl who had almond eyes, beautiful black hair in a ribbon and a pink dress. There was Sophia with blue eyes and brown hair, and a wan little boy, weaker than the girls but who refused to cry and kept bravely coming back to storm the redoubt. Milena’s hand was slammed in a door and she wept and wailed, and then, as soon as the pain subsided, she ran off, laughing again, to be with the others in the garden, hunting chocolates under the leaves.

  I was happy.

  And I have never been at home in England. I have never felt English, I have never felt in the way they do. I know their words but I do not really feel them. I do not really cry in English, or laugh in English, or make love in English. I find the people dull or cruel, bland or pretentious, rude or prim but I never quite get their measure. And I never quite do the right thing or say the right thing, because underneath my grammar is not only bad. My grammar is Czech.

  And Milena remembered later on that same Easter Day, the child beginning the long climb home. There had been an Easter pageant in the domed church, and the child wore white robes now, and wings covered in crinkled resin that caught the light. She was climbing the hill that led up from the village back to the hot limestone house. The path sloped up through a dark wood. The child was holding her father’s hand, and her mother’s hand, and she was dressed as an Angel. Her plump face, flushed purple, looked up.

  The child looked up at Milena.

  She can see me, thought Milena who was remembering. I can see her.

  Her father tried to pull her higher up but the child resisted. She stared glumly right at Milena, at her adult self.

  I remember this! thought the adult.

  And Milena remembered looking at an old woman whose skin seemed to have gone yellow wherever the bones pressed against it as if the bones would break out. The woman was bald, except for a few wisps of hair. The child saw her and felt dread. It was unaccountable dread, as if she knew this wasted spectre was her future.

  And time stood still. The moving hub of the world turned around a point that was still and Milena stood in it, Milena at the beginning and Milena at the end.

  The adult knelt underneath the branches of the trees that had paused for breath, in the sunlight that was not moving, in one instant that was fully apprehended.

  ‘Do you have time?’ the adult asked the child. She wanted to talk to the child, to warn her.

  The child did not understand English. That’s right, of course! thought the adult, and put a hand to her face. She tried to remember the words in Czech. She wanted to warn her, protect her. Warn her against what? Life? Death? Leaving home? The child scowled, perplexed.

  ‘Be happy,’ croaked the adult, whose world it no longer was. She reached for a foreign language and came up with the wrong one. ‘Soyez content.’

  The child tugged at her father’s hand and time began again.

  Stay here! thought Milena the adult. Don’t hurry to be away. Your father will die, your mother will die, you will lose this whole world! You will lose your self!

  Milena remembered seeing an old, desperate, sad face yearning to deliver a message that perhaps no child should understand.

  Loving One turned away. She tugged her father’s hand for a swing up the hill. He laughed, and made her fly up from the ground. She squealed, tickled both by joy and fear, and was lowered down to her feet. She walked on, up the wooded hill, through patches of shade and sun.

  But not lost, not lost in the middle of her life, thought Milena. This is at the beginning, when the wood is full of light, and the way is straight.

  The child turned and looked back at her. And the face showed that the child understood more than she could put into words.

  Ghost, the face said, go home. Ghost, you are nothing to do with me, now. Ghost do you think that just because you are at the end, that you mean more than I do?

  At the still hub of the turning world, Milena saw all of her past. She remembered the Child Garden on the day she met Rose Ella. She remembered the flowers that poured out of her on the day she stood in Thrawn’s room and reformed light. She saw the Earth below through the windows of the Bulge; she saw Archbishop’s Park; she saw the reeds and slow waters of the Slump. She remembered the fire as it danced up Thrawn McCartney’s arm. Did any of it really weigh more than this, here, the child walking between her father and mother, up a hill, through a wood in another land?

  And Milena awoke again on the soft, warm floor of the Reading Room.

  ‘Not again,’ said Root. ‘I told you! I
said don’t fight.’

  ‘Always fighting,’ murmured Milena.

  ‘They don’t have what they want.’

  They want Rolfa.

  ‘The pattern isn’t complete!’

  Mike Stone came crawling. ‘It’s got to stop now, anyway,’ he said. ‘My wife is ill.’

  We get old and lose our selves, thought Milena. Why did I bring the cancer back? So that people would get old? She thought of Hortensia whose calcium-leached bones kept breaking. She thought of the child running through the garden of the great house and of the faces of her childhood friends. They would be her age by now, in their early twenties, in Czechoslovakia. But they would not be dying.

  Why did I do it at all?

  Root strode quickly to Mike Stone. ‘Mike, love, let me explain,’ she said and helped him back into his chair. Milena heard some of what she said. Something about medicine helping. Something about it all being over in an instant.

  The Doctor came. The Doctor was in Whites and carried an applicator. Milena thought of the round, fat, flushed face of the child she had once been before the virus touched her. She thought of the feeling lips of the horse in the garden and the fun of cutting chives.

  Milena understood why she had brought the cancer back.

  ‘People are going to get old now aren’t they?’ Milena asked him. ‘They’re going to live a long time because of the cancer?’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said the Doctor. There was a hiss from the applicator. Another cure to make her ill.

  ‘So if people can get old again, will you let them stay children?’

  Milena Shibush had brought back cancer so that children might be left alone a little while longer to play in the garden, amid the trees, with the light. Who would have thought that Milena Shibush would die out of love for children?

  ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor, his smile still professional and distracted. ‘We’ve cured people of childhood. Children know nothing: they needed to be taken care of; they were naturally cruel. Childhood was a disease.’ He stood up, looking pleased, and shook his head. ‘We’re not going to bring childhood back.’