The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  I’ve lost, thought Milena. She had not even known there had been a battle. Her life had been spent trying to bring back what she had known in childhood.

  Milena had thought her life had begun with Rolfa. She had thought that she had bloomed when she found Rolfa, and that her life had gone on blossoming even after Rolfa had left. Instead, her life had been finished, in the sense of being accomplished. Its end had been achieved. In Rolfa, with Rolfa, she had found love. And love was the image of everything that had been lost: her home country, her home tongue, the landscape of childhood, her way of seeing it, her father, her mother, her name, the place where she would have been happy. She had lost her self.

  And Rolfa, even she was lost. Rolfa, they even have you. They have your voice, they have your mind, they can make you speak when they want you to. I gave you to them. So why am I holding back my memories of you? Let them have those.

  I am going to have to find another way to fight.

  Milena relinquished her claim. She remembered Rolfa for the Consensus.

  Milena remembered being lost in the dark in the Graveyard. Loose threads of old dead costumes strayed across her face and blistered sequins were rough under her fingers.

  There was music playing, insanely loud. The music was Das Lied von der Erde. The words told a kind of ghost story.

  Milena was sucking her finger, sick at heart with fear, fear of being ill again, of losing more of herself. She was lost in the dark, more frightened than she need be, because it reminded her of all the other ways in which she was lost. It reminded her that no one would notice she was gone. And the voice, high and sweet and sad, was a woman’s voice, reminding her that she needed love.

  So the dark around her was haunted. Don’t be silly, she told herself, what do you think it is, an orchestra of ghosts? She scraped her head on brick, looked through an arch and saw a light on the wall. She saw there was room for an orchestra. It was obvious what was playing; if she could have thought clearly she would have known that it was a recording. But she was too frightened of life and of herself to think clearly. Milena remembering felt pity for Milena the actress. The actress knelt and pulled back a curtain of old clothes.

  Trouble, though Milena the actress. Trouble, thought the Milena who remembered. Trouble, seeing the mound of papers, the mess, the shrieking music, and the slumped, dazed brute of a Polar Bear. There was disorder there.

  Ewig blauen licht die Fernen

  Everywhere and eternally, the distance shines bright and blue.

  In the music, someone who might already be dead was departing with regret and sadness. The dead are more afraid than the living, and in some ways they are more alive.

  Ewig…ewig…

  Ever…Ever…

  The GE stirred herself with a kind of convulsion as if she had almost settled into death herself, following the music there. She knocked over paper and plastic cases, as if she were blind. Sadness hung from her face like lead weights, pulling down the flesh under her eyes and around her jaws. The music had been calling for someone. The paper slid away to reveal a box, a small, crude soundbox, made of metal as thin as paper. No wonder the music had hurt when the volume was full up.

  To the poor starveling of the Consensus the soundbox was a wonder, and it drew her out of her hiding, out of her fear, as did the soul-sadness on the GE’s face.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ Milena the actress asked in wonder, though she could hear music any time she liked. Her viruses would sing it for her, out of memory. It was the metal that drew her, the cost of the thing. It was private metal, something owned and therefore more precious, if only to someone else.

  ‘China, I believe,’ said Rolfa, and Milena could hear the youth in her voice. Youth was plump and fruity, not yet worn by doubt. It still had hope. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have any alcoholic beverages about your person, would you?’

  Milena remembering saw that Rolfa was trying to be raffish. She was already trying to charm. She liked me as soon as she saw me, realised the Milena who remembered. She was signalling in a thousand ways.

  ‘No. I don’t like poisoning myself,’ said the actress, narrow, bitter, expected defeat.

  ‘Tuh.’ Rolfa turned away. She was slightly slimmer then, without the pouches of fat on the small of her back. There was something musical in the way she moved. The clumsiness was stricken with feeling. Feeling grew out of her like fur: she bristled with it. Bleary with love and music, she began in a rather rational way to dispose of the mess on her desk.

  Milena the actress had felt the first tug, the first little spindle thread of love, but she did not know it. ‘Effendim?’ she said, pained at being ignored. ‘I’ve come to change these boots.’

  Already, unknown to either of them, they were together. Their animal selves had recognized it. Their whole lives were there to be read in the way they each smiled and moved. They had already Read each other, but their conscious selves had yet to catch up.

  ‘You,’ said Rolfa, turning, ‘are a ponce.’ It was said with a kind of honest affection. It was true, and Milena the actress needed to know that other people could see the thing she tried to hide.

  Milena the actress went cold and shy. She had been seen through again. Her masks were paper-thin. The moment for a reply passed and Rolfa turned away. The actress kept seeing Rolfa through a series of paper masks. Polar woman, rough and tumble. The Bear who Loves Opera, a famous Zoo character. Her conscious self was not seeing Rolfa at all.

  ‘Bastard,’ the GE murmured to herself.

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ demanded the actress. You know she’s not, Milena! Why are you looking for injustice?

  ‘No,’ said Rolfa, turning to smile, holding up a bottle. ‘I was talking to this empty whisky bottle.’ She’s saying she sees through you, but likes what’s on the other side. And she wants, she yearns, for you to like her.

  Made bold by the force of attraction, Rolfa threw the whisky bottle away and listened to the breakage, as if extraordinary acts and sudden sounds could speak when people could not.

  If it was me, now, Rolfa, I’d laugh and ask your name. I’d sit beside you and let you know that I already thought you were wonderful, that I didn’t mind the fur or the teeth or the rotting shoes. We’d sit and talk for hours about music, and I’d say, let’s go for a drink if you like whisky so much. We’d be friends from the start. And the reason why I could do that now, Rolfa, the reason why I’m different, is you.

  I don’t want to remember any more, I don’t want to see the waste and the pain and the waiting. I just want to hold you. I just want to stroke the fur on your arm, and try to save you from what’s coming. And this time I’d do it, this time, I would know how: I wouldn’t let anything go to waste. I’d say, wait until the metal comes and your Family has to make friends with the Consensus. I’d say, be with me from time to time, but don’t run away until you’ve shown them, your father and your sisters, that the music works. And I’d never let you be Read.

  Rolfa held up a bottle. ‘God,’ she said, ‘is a distiller.’ She grinned, and Milena the actress saw the horrible teeth and the dandruff and finally relaxed enough to realise that she liked her, liked this strange creature.

  ‘Do you live here?’ Milena the actress asked, and stepped forward a bit. Amusement suddenly bubbles up through her, and childish wonder, and something sweet that was kept hidden and protected.

  Maybe not, maybe I wouldn’t change anything, thought Milena remembering. She ached with love for both of them. Maybe this is the best way for this to happen, as tentative as a spider’s web. Not bold and knowing and businesslike.

  A look came over Rolfa’s face, a look Milena remembering now recognized, a look of great tenderness, of simple kindness, of wishing the world were different for them both. Her hair in her eyes made her blink. ‘It would be better if I did,’ she said, ruefully amused. ‘This is where I hide, instead. Since you don’t like poisoning yourself, perhaps you’d like to look at this.’ She held out the musical score
s.

  I’d forgotten that, thought the one who remembered. Already the music was being passed between us. The music would unite us and part us and fix us together for all of our lives. The paper was smooth like skin, and still warm from Rolfa’s grasp.

  ‘I take it the reading of music presents you with no difficulties,’ said Rolfa, meaning that most other things did. It was plain now that Rolfa was the older of the two, plain that she was controlling. I always thought you were a shuffling innocent, thought the Milena who remembered. But you knew so much, Rolfa. You were a genius after all.

  Genius is in the shapes your hands make as they move, in every reaching or withholding gesture. You know what you are, and you know that ego is the enemy of what you are, so you defend yourself against it, against pride and ambition, and you are very gently guiding me, and you so very gently want me. You knew who I was, Rolfa, and you knew that you come make my body bloom, and my soul. I still want you, Rolfa. I want your hand on me, on the flower between my legs. Desire is like a blister that needs to be burst. And cunning, you were cunning to sing, knowing that it was the music that would hold me, hold us both. You sang, to show me what you already knew. That music in you had found its elect.

  So the ghost began to sing again, out of the past.

  Ewig…ewig…ewig…

  Promises of forever, with silence in between them.

  Suddenly Jacob’s face was smiling at her, eyes weary. ‘I have a message for you, Milena.’

  I am Constable Dull, an’t shall please you. No, no, no, no, howled the director.

  ‘From Ms Patel,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Want some mitts?’ asked Zoe, not at all unkindly, in the dining-room of the Family. Zoe passed Milena the fingerless indigent gloves of kindness. No, not mitts. Palcaky.

  Milena and Rolfa ate again in the riverside park. They walked together to the Buddhist shrine and watched the acrobats. They rode on the back of a dustcart from the night market, listening to the sound of the horses’ hooves.

  ‘But now,’ said Jacob, ‘because of you and Rolfa, when I dream, I also hear the music.’

  And Jacob and Milena walked together again out into the sun, regretting Rolfa. The whole river regretted Rolfa, now, and the sky, and the birds. Jacob gave Milena’s hand one last squeeze. This time the crucifix was passed between them. ‘I must run my messages, now,’ he said, and turned away, and Milena saw again the sun reflected in the windows, the fire in each of the rooms. Jacob walked into the fire and was consumed. He made the light burn brighter.

  ‘Fire!’ Cilla was shouting. ‘Fire!’ A bell was ringing and Milena was outside in the cold again, in the dark.

  Each room has one of us in it.

  Cilla opened the box and inside was paper, being passed again, like human skin.

  ‘Oh Cill,’ asked Milena, ‘who did this?’

  ‘Just us Vampires,’ said Cill. ‘Just us Vampires of History.’ Her face in the moonlight, in the past, was blue.

  A trumpet blast sounded. The fire was over. A trumpet blast sounded. The Comedy started again, and the sky was full of fire: it was the Inferno. The souls roiled within it. The souls had been imagined like dandelion fluff, rolling on invisible wires, toiling through the fire, caught in their own sins and imbalances forever, in a universe made of thought. What made the fire, then?

  ‘You like dogs?’ a man in a body warmer asked. He was on fire too, a fever. Rolfa turned in rage, drunken, demented with what had been denied to her. Rolfa lifted up a table.

  It wasn’t the sweaty man she was going to hit with it, realized Milena.

  She was going to hit me.

  And it seemed to the Milena who remembered that she could see across the river to a park and a little boy in a cowboy hat ran round and round it, singing, ‘Pi-per! Pi-per!’

  And the dog cried out, ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’

  I have to. A little while, you shall not see me.

  All the Earth seemed to fall away. Milena saw the fields and the village of England in neat patterns, the grain, the pinioned pear trees, and the beehive houses. She wafted up through cloud, into mist, and up into Antarctica, and there, in the light of heaven, in the icy chill, there was life. There the spiders danced, between crystals of ice. I know where I am, though Milena, remembering.

  Then the window of the Bulge blinked, and suddenly, strung between the clouds were Bees. They had grown great purple wings, veined like leaves, and they hung like bats. There were veins in the sky, clear tubes, full of sluggishly pumping fluids. There were bobbing plants rising up in seaweed tangles, attached to pumpkins full of gas. There were great swirls of bees, throwing themselves between the plants, rising up on spirals of air like Dore’s Angels, living on light and moisture. They attached themselves to the veins that bridged the clouds.

  When was this? Then Milena remembering remembered.

  Rolfa threw her head back and howled with joy.

  It doesn’t just go back. It goes forward as well, Rolfa said in wonder.

  This is the future, thought Milena. I am seeing the future.

  Past and future swirled together, in a vision. Milena was swept higher. The sky overhead went dark and the sea far below was like burnished brass. The Earth and the clouds exchanged light. All of it, the Earth, the clouds, the light, the many Milenas, the future and the past, the net of Bees, the net of nerves, all held in a system of reciprocity.

  I am. I am outside. I am, outside of time. Outside of time, I have always been weightless.

  Afternoon sunlight poured in through the windows. Rolfa’s breasts, shaved, spread almost flat on her chest. Milena was kissing the prickly belly, filling the belly button with her tongue. Then memory took her down further, to where Rolfa had not shaved, to where woman hood lay in folds, and Milena kissed that, slipped her tongue into it, and whipped her own small body around, so that Rolfa could kiss her. It was not harbour or refuge that Milena sought, but the body that was one with the person.

  There was a hiss. The two Bulges parted, the seal broken, and the smaller Bulge fell away from the larger. It was returning to Earth. Milena the director saw Christian Solider, outlined in pure white light falling away from her. It doesn’t matter, don’t regret, she told herself. You’ll be back, you’ll be back here for the Comedy.

  Zamavej no rozloucenou, Milena!

  Wave goodbye, Milena. It was the last thing she could remember her mother saying.

  I’m going home, thought Milena the director.

  And then it was night, in the little room, the Shell. ‘I’m going to sing,’ warned Rolfa, feverish on the bed. Milena fumbled in panic for a pencil to write the music down. Why write it, Milena? No one ever forgets anything. They only try to escape it. You will know this music for the rest of your life, note for note.

  Rolfa began to sing the music that ends Purgatory, that will end all that will be performed of the Comedy. She sang it for Milena, looking all the while at her, the music that was like Handel, like Mozart, like Wagner, notes rescued from the core of the soul that belongs to no one, pulled out of the realm of freedom, the realm in which we all ought to live.

  ‘Give it a rest!’ someone shouted from an upper floor.

  Rolfa smiled, and raised her voice. You’ll remember this, too, the smile said.

  ‘Qu-iet!’ howled someone else.

  Milena went to the window to yell at all of them, all of the people who had blocked the music in Rolfa and in themselves and in her.

  ‘Someone’s dying!’ Milena wailed. For her, it was true.

  Rolfa held up her hands and through some miracle of air and spittle reproduced the sound of applause, the sound of justice. And suddenly they were both in Rolfa’s street, at night, by a park, and the trees were applauding too with their leaves. Milena was wearing the indigent gloves. Rolfa, covered in fur again, hugged her and held her. For some reason, it was snowing. Snow fell like stars. When did it snow?

  Milena looked at the park in the snow and knew it was the London of the future
. This was the crescent outside Rolfa’s house, years after both of them were gone. This was the London in which Milena no longer lived, in which there was no Rolfa to hold her, in which Milena had no flesh to be held.

  It was cold this future and she haunted it as a ghost. There were bootmarks in the snow, but no one walking. There were lights floating in the sky.

  Did it matter that she no longer existed? Did this eternity stretching after her weigh any more heavily than the moments in the garden? The future was utterly without nostalgia or understanding, as cruel and new as a child.

  I’m going to faint, thought Milena. She was cold, shivering. This is ridiculous: real people don’t faint. Neither do ghosts.

  But she felt herself slip away anyway. The moon of the future swam in the sky and Milena let herself fall. She felt herself fall, and was lifted up. For a moment, she thought she was in Rolfa’s arms.

  Time was a dream. The helicopters came again, roaring over the tops of the trees, tormenting them, tearing leaves from the branches, sending flurries through the snow. It was not Rolfa, but Mike Stone who was carrying her now, running with her as he had with Milton the Minister, as if this were her wedding again. People rushed to help him lower Milena to the floor, and from out of pouches in his trousers Mike took a pulse injector and clips. He put them into Milena’s ears and arms.

  This is not the future or the past. This is my Now, she realized, and Now is always timeless.

  She thought the Reading Room was the grass of the park in Rolfa’s street. She wished with all her heart it was that crescent of grass and trees and that she would wake up in the morning in her own room to find that Rolfa was going to live with her.

  Milena felt the grass of her sixteenth summer press against her cheek. She wanted to put the very tips of her fingers in Rolfa’s hand. She couldn’t find it, any of it.

  The grass was gone, and the park, and the infinitude of different Milenas for all her different Nows. The Milena who was remembering felt herself reunited with the Milena who was still alive.