Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  All the time, she had to battle with Heather. By day, by night, the virus did not stop reading. Heather gripped and Heather held, with powers of organisation and concentration that were beyond Milena, hauling her through the tangled forest that was Marx, pointing out a debt to Locke or Hume, refining a thought with a quote from Engels or Gramsci, always, always, making sure that Milena understood, understood in the same way that Heather did.

  What, Milena wondered, have I called up in my mind? Viruses were supposed to be a passive reservoir of information, like your own memory. They were not supposed to drag you through the minutiae of experience. Das Kapital was over three thousand pages long, and Heather was determined to read it all, exploring every last dreary, undeniable nuance. She had no intention of ever finishing, she would go on and on, determined to control, without a shred of self-doubt or pity. God, the woman must have been a pain. When she was alive.

  Heather, Irish Heather, if only there were some softness about you, some hidden anguish or pain, then I could feel sorry for you, I could understand, sympathise, but there is something inhuman about you. You wanted to be a disease. The match between you and the virus was perfect. You and the virus both need minds to inhabit, DNA to remould. Like Helen Lane's tumour, you are immortal, undead, and you have hold of me.

  Milena began to think that what she had was an illness, in the old sense of something that did not cure, but wounded. Heather was like arthritis, a continual pain that had to be managed. The boredom was excruciating. Milena managed it by asking herself if it was worse than the boredom she usually inflicted on herself. Was it any worse, for example, than humming over and over to herself a song that she hated? Was it any worse than sitting alone in the Zoo cafe and examining, one by one, all her many faults of personality? If Milena was now infected by a dedicated Marxist philosopher, who had infected her before? Someone who hated Milena, who tormented her; someone who chattered away at her, who kept her distracted with a stream of useless quibbling that she would have tolerated from no one else.

  Milena began to yearn for silence. As Heather read, as the music mounted, as Jacob faded, as she wondered what was happening with Love's Labour's, as the fear of the Snide continually nibbled at her, Milena developed a most profound and earnest desire for stillness.

  She would return each afternoon from the practice rooms to find Rolfa growing distant and wan. Rolfa would smile at her in a soft and hazy way, eyes dim. It was a smile that was too accepting, that was without hope. Milena would know from that smile, and from the pallid sunlight on the walls, and from the shadows grown long from waiting that she did not have much time to do her work.

  And there would be a toothbrush in the candleholder and a foundation garment in a saucepan, and the floor underfoot would be both sticky and crunchy at the same time from a meal of toast and honey. Milena would perceive and regret the disruption that had ploughed its way through her life. She would miss it, were it to go.

  Then one afternoon, Milena came back, and Rolfa was not there.

  Well, this is it, she thought, this is how it begins. One day she simply will not be here and I will never know, never know if she was caught, or simply went away. There is nothing I can do. She slumped onto the bed and closed her eyes and waited, listening for a familiar footfall. She opened her eyes again, and it had grown darker. She stood up and began to tidy things away.

  She piled up the papers that Rolfa had disordered. She cleared away the washing up that Rolfa had done, leaving honey on the bottom of the plates. She found chicken bones in her clean clothes bag, and held them up, looking at the traces of Rolfa, the shreds of meat her teeth had left behind. It grew dark, and Milena became more and more certain that Rolfa had gone, and that it had all been for nothing.

  Then, sitting in the dark, Milena heard a door slam, far below. She heard a great echoing voice roar up the staircase. Rolfa! Milena jumped up, overjoyed. She listened as Rolfa kept singing, recklessly. For God's sake, keep quiet! Do you want to post a sign and tell them that you're here? Rolfa began to whistle. Milena began to feel aggrieved. Why couldn't you tell Jacob where you were going? Where have you been all this time? The whistling drew near the door. Then there was a thump.

  'I do not seem,' said Rolfa, in her mellowest tones, 'to be able to open the door.'

  Drunk, thought Milena. 'Try turning the handle,' she said.

  Rolfa thumped against the door again. 'Why am I unable to open the door?' she asked heaven.

  Oooh, thought Milena. More low comedy. She went to the door to open it and couldn't. The handle would not move.

  'Why won't you open the door?' Rolfa asked.

  'Because you're pulling the handle up, Rolfa. Rolfa? Let go of the handle, Rolfa.' Milena was enunciating very clearly and slowly.

  'How can I open a door by letting go of the handle?' Rolfa asked. There was a thump as she threw her full weight against it. 'The door is jammed. I shall have to break it down.'

  'Rolfa, Rolfa please. Just push the handle down.'

  'The handle,' announced Rolfa, 'has just come off.'

  Then there was a silence. 'Rolfa?' Milena asked. The handle of the door was as limp as a dead fish. When Milena pushed the door open, she saw Rolfa, half crouching, with an expression of mingled delight and horror fixed like glaze on her face.

  She was looking at her sister Zoe.

  Although capitalist and worker confront each other in the marketplace...

  'Oh, Rolfa,' said Zoe, looking at the shaved arms and face. She glanced miserably at Milena.

  ... only as buyer with money on the one hand and seller, a commodity, on the other....

  Heather, shut up!

  'Do you want to come in?' Milena asked Zoe, stepping aside.

  Zoe shouldered her way through the doorway as if past an obstacle, and stopped, distraught, and stared about the tiny room.

  Rolfa followed, swinging a whisky bottle in one hand. The two GEs filled the room like air bladders. Zoe looked for a chair to sit on. There wasn't one.

  'Do you know,' said Rolfa, holding up the bottle towards the window and what was beyond it. 'There are people out there. The whole place. Full of people. Like a string of pearls.'

  'Do you know what the Family would do if they saw you like this?' Zoe said, enraged. 'They'd tie a mask soaked in ether over your face and ship you south in a box.' She turned away, arms folded in front of her stomach.

  'If you break the string,' Rolfa continued, 'the pearls all go rolling down down the steps.' She sank to the floor. 'Oh God, my bloody beads.'

  'This is the first time she's been drunk,' said Milena.

  'We wondered how you were keeping her quiet,' said Zoe.

  Zoe is the one I can talk to, Milena remembered. 'Would you like something to drink, Zoe? A cup of tea? It's about all we have.'

  Zoe shook her head, and turned towards Milena. 'How can you live like this?' she asked. It was an honest, if unguarded question.

  'By limiting our expectations,' said Milena. An honest answer.

  ... both sides appear constantly, repeatedly, in the marketplace playing the same opposed roles.

  Zoe looked about the bare and tiny room, and did a kind of shrug with her eyebrows. She was wearing a white toga, and her braided hair was piled on her head. 'I was going to ask you to come home, Rolfa, but you can't, looking like that. Do you really hate us so much?'

  'Yes,' replied Rolfa, grinning. 'Oooops.' She covered her mouth.

  'The Family doesn't know yet. Papa hasn't told them. We managed to get him to call off the Snide. The sneak wasn't any good anyway, he got all lovesick over some female called Heather.'

  'I suppose he cost too much,' said Rolfa, and took a swig.

  'Angie and I wanted to give you time!'

  'How does it feel to be an economy measure?'

  'If you came back by yourself, Papa would be more forgiving. He's nearly given up on you, Rolfa.' There was a swollen silence between them. Zoe's face looked limp and puffy, and flesh showed through, a
s if the fur were patchy. 'I have.'

  That's good, thought Milena, without quite knowing why. She seemed to feel a way.

  ... in the course of time everyone assumes all the roles in the sphere of circulation.

  'Zoe,' Milena said. 'Would it make any difference if something happened to Rolfa's music?'

  Zoe glumly watched her white sandals as they scuffed the resin-tiled floor. 'I'd be grateful for anything,' she murmured.

  'And if it were done in such a way that no one knew it was Rolfa, no one knew it was a GE, not even the Family, would that help?'

  Zoe looked at the floor without responding.

  'Look, I don't understand how the Family works. But I do know that Rolfa is an embarrassment to your father.'

  Zoe's eyes were full of warning.

  Tuh.' Rolfa's shudder. 'Pocket Caesar. Wants to be Consul.'

  Zoe's head turned so sharply, the tendons of her neck showed through the fur. 'He wants to be accepted by his own People, and he never has been!'

  Milena intervened. 'If... if Rolfa's music came to something and we all stopped the Family finding out...' Milena sighed with the difficulty and delicacy of what she had to say. 'Would that be enough?'

  'Enough for what?'

  'Suppose... suppose you simply tell the Family that Rolfa has disappeared. You don't know where, or why, but she's always been odd, and she's gone, somewhere. Now that would have nothing to do with the legal position of the Family in relation to the Consensus. It might not even have anything to do with... oh, I don't know what to call it... genetic drift back towards the average, or whatever. Which is all they care about.'

  'You are a cold little fish, aren't you?' said Zoe.

  'Look, having Rolfa with you is not going to do your father any good either. If she's a black mark against him now, she always will be. You're the only one who cares about Rolfa. This is what she wants.'

  Something in Zoe relented. 'It's not so easy, Ms Shibush, to watch a sister Slide away.' She said it quietly. 'Especially when you're wondering why someone wants to give her such a good push.'

  'Don't let her go! Just give her time.'

  'Give you time, you mean.'

  'Give her music time. The music is good.'

  'How long?' Zoe asked abruptly.

  Milena felt a prickling. 'A year,' she said. She thought she was overestimating.

  Zoe leaned against the wall and chewed the inside of her cheek, looking out the window.

  'All right, Ms Shibush. All right.' She rocked herself away from the wall. She looked at Rolfa, considered, and found that she had nothing to say. The broken door was still open. She walked to it and turned to Milena.

  'Why don't I hate you?' she asked.

  'I don't know,' replied Milena.

  'A year,' said Zoe, warning her, and left.

  Milena closed the door and started to shake. What had she done? How had she done it? Rolfa sat drinking quietly, staring at the bottle with a faraway smile, as if all of it had nothing to do with her. In a sense, it didn't.

  The next morning, Milena bundled up what music she had and took it to the Minister who ran the National Theatre. He was popularly known as the Zookeeper. Even he called himself that at times.

  Walking through the upper floor of the Zoo, Milena felt as small and as hard as a nut. There was a groomed young man whose job it was to stop people seeing the Minister. Milena could not afford the luxury of disliking him.

  She did not say that she had found an undiscovered genius. She said that she was harbouring a fugitive and that she felt the Minister should know. She explained why. The reason was that the creature was talented. She left the evidence of that talent, the music, as if it were part of a briefing for a policy decision. The young man took a stern line. Why had she not come earlier? He would make sure the Minister saw the papers and attended to her case. He patted them at the corners to make a neat package of them on his otherwise empty table.

  Milena devoted the rest of the day to Rolfa. She bought a pack lunch with the last of their money. Roast beef sandwiches and oranges and sticks of celery — things they both could eat. She took Rolfa, who was content and distant, on a ride in an omnibus to Regents Park. The bus stop called it Chao Li Gardens.

  It was getting cooler, and there were high, racing clouds in the sky. The leaves were beginning to change colour already, going yellow at the edges, with brown spots. In the centre of the park, there was a rose garden with ornamental ponds. Milena and Rolfa walked beside the artificial waterways. There was a smell of still, dark water. Ducks landed in it, sliding to a halt.

  Milena explained what she had done, and Rolfa appeared to be unmoved. Rolfa threw bits of her sandwiches to the ducks on the water. Overhead a flight of greylag geese passed, on their way to the Thames estuary from Iceland. The world had been saved.

  Rolfa watched the geese overhead. 'Everything moves,' she said. 'You wonder how it all knows where to go. Einstein wondered how birds knew where to migrate to. He thought they might follow lines of light in the sky. He saw everything as lines of light. That's how he was built. So we don't really know how he moved, either. Any more than the birds.'

  Rolfa turned and flicked one of her grins towards Milena, as if apologising for what she had just said. 'Thank you for trying,' said Rolfa. 'But I really don't mind the silence.' She was admonishing Milena, ever so gently. 'The music comes out of the silence. I don't mind if it goes back in. We come out of the silence...' Her voice trailed off and she traced an arch with her hand. We go back into the silence too.

  What is she saying? thought Milena. That she will go away?

  'We have a year, Rolfa.'

  'But we don't have any food,' said Rolfa. She threw the last morsel of bread to the ducks. They began to walk back towards the bus stop.

  And suddenly Rolfa turned and attacked a rose. She snatched the stem despite the thorns and twisted it, breaking it off. Maybe it was the clumsiness, maybe it was the anger, but Milena was shocked without quite knowing why.

  Rolfa turned, and holding the rose perfectly upright, gave it to Milena. She said something slurred and embarrassed. It took a moment for Milena to realise that she had said, 'A rose for a rose.'

  She shouldn't have been able to do that, thought Milena. That is a public rose. If Rolfa had been anyone else, the viruses would have stopped her taking it. Rolfa is immune as well.

  Milena turned the rose round and round in her hand. It was an old-fashioned rose, a very pale pink marbled with magenta. Rosa mundi, whispered the viruses. The petals had gone brown at the edges and had curled back to reveal a fresher core. It must have been recently watered by the gardeners. Fat pearls of water clung to it. Milena thought she ought to be embarrassed being seen walking with a stolen, public rose. Then she found she didn't care, and carried it boldly. It bobbed on its long stem as if made out of lead, as if heavy with meaning. The public rose was a private valediction.

  On the bus back home, Rolfa's face was smiling, sad and faraway. Milena found herself dunking over and over: Rolfa don't go, Rolfa don't go.

  Their little room at the Shell was cool and in shadow by the time they returned. September was declining rapidly. Rolfa won't mind the winter, thought Milena, she'll like the cold. If she's still here, said another part of her mind. Milena went up onto the roof of the Shell to sunbathe, to kill her hunger pangs. Cilia brought Rolfa some soup and sausages. Cilia slipped them both into the Zoo to see Madam Butterfly. Rolfa no longer could buy tickets. Her smile was rapt, with the music, with the singing, with the staging, and her eyes were famished and glistening. If only they had let us be ourselves, Milena thought.

  The next day Milena tried to rejoin Love's Labour's Lost.

  She was told at one of the information desks that the director had died. Quite suddenly. Thirty-five. Time-expired. The cast were in mourning. They had asked to have the production discontinued. They didn't want to work with anyone else. They can't face going back, thought Milena. They can't face going back to sleepwalkin
g Shakespeare.

  It was just like the play, at the end. Welcome Mercade, Mr Death. You interrupt our merriment. The King your Father is...

  Dead, for my life.

  It's a design flaw, thought Milena. We shouldn't have to the. She thought of the director, called him Harry in her mind. She remembered his feverish eyes. You knew you were going, Harry. This was your last leap. A lifetime of sleepwalking, of making other people sleepwalk, broke you. And then you were free. Harry, if I ever direct a play, she promised him, I will do it as you did.

  And they are not going to break me.

  Milena did not go back to her chilly room. She walked on, up the stairs, to the upper floor of the Zoo.

  Out of the silence, into the silence.

  She was going to talk to the Minister, before time.

  'Oh yes, Ms Shibush,' said the sleek young man, smiling. 'I'll go ask.' He went through a door.

  Milena sat down. A row of Postpersons sat next to her, staring ahead with expressions of perfect peace. Lined up like Buddhas in a temple. Their conscious minds were fully occupied with the records of the Zoo. But what of underneath? thought Milena.

  Her legs jiggled up and down with nerves. Heather had reached the end of Volume One, the only one that Marx had finished himself. She was fighting against the ending, reading notes and appendices, reading quotes in their original language. She was re-reading the prefaces to all the different editions. It was as if she would the when she finished.

  I am ready to welcome scientific criticism.

  I don't really know you, Heather, thought Milena, I only know a virus. You may have loved, you may have been happy.

  As far as the prejudices of what is termed public opinion, to which I have never made any concession...

  You were dedicated. You were formidable. You gave your life away. Do your motives matter?

  ... I shall continue to guide myself by the maxim of the great Florentine: