Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  'Puh! Pay!' he stammered. 'Muh! Muh!'

  Another one, thought Milena. Someone else who's got the bug. That's three in two days. Marx and Lenin, is everyone going to get it?

  'Mug,' she said, completing the word for him. She paid him twice what the broken mug was worth. As Milena walked away, she could feel his unblinking eyes, boring into her from behind. All these changes, Milena thought. They're making people angry.

  She went back to Lucy. 'Come on, love,' Milena said, wrapping her scarf around her neck. 'Let's go out to a kaff.'

  'There's no bloody food,' said Lucy. 'Just those little stalls with those filthy black pans full of grease. You blow your guts out, you eat one of them. Wog food. Anyway, none of them are open when it's too hot. They just fold the place up and sit under it.'

  'Proper sit-down place, love.'

  Lucy looked up in complete helplessness. 'Who are you?'

  'You only met me once before,' said Milena.

  Lucy leaned forward. 'Where am I?' she whispered.

  Milena told her.

  'And what year is it?'

  Milena told her.

  'Bloody hell,' said Lucy, and her voice trailed off into a whine, and she started to weep again. 'Bloody hell. Everything just goes on and on.' Her hands began to turn round and round on themselves.

  'Oh, poor love,' said Milena, and sat down, and tried to take the hands, to make them still. Even in the heat the hands were ice cold, lumpy, and as light as biscuits.

  'I thought you was my daughter. She'll be dead, now.'

  Where are her friends? thought Milena. Why is she alone? 'Where's Old Tone?' she asked.

  Lucy pulled her hands free. 'He can do what he likes,' she said, her mouth open with outrage, her head wobbling from side to side. 'Is he a friend of yours?'

  'No. I thought he was a friend of yours.'

  'I know better where to get my friends from,' said Lucy.

  They've had a falling out. That's why she's upset.

  'Come on, love, let's get something to eat.'

  Lucy squinted at her. 'Who are you?' she demanded.

  'I'm a friend of Rolfa's.'

  The old face suddenly went gentle. 'Aw, Rolfa. She was a dear. Is she dead now?'

  'No,' said Milena and thought: not exactly. 'Come on to the kaff, and I'll tell you all about her.'

  'Oooh, yes. That will be lovely.' Suddenly Lucy was cheerful. She stood up in stages, in jerks, everything quaking as if it were her bones and not her flesh that was shivering. Milena had to grab her to stop her falling. The terrible orange hair was half muddy grey from the roots. Lucy found her balance, and pulled at the hair.

  'How do I look?' she asked.

  'Lovely,' said Milena.

  'Liar.' Her entire face folded up into a kind of merry wrinkle. Lucy took Milena's arm. 'Goodbye, Henry,' she said to the barman. 'Or whoever you are. I'm off to lunch with my niece.' Lucy did not walk. Holding onto Milena's arm, Lucy hopped. She hopped like a sparrow, both feet together at once.

  'Henry's such a nice boy,' Lucy said. 'I don't mind them wogs at all, if they've got manners.'

  'He's not black,' said Milena. 'He's got dark skin because of Rhodopsin.'

  'It doesn't matter what you call it, they never should have let them in. You never see a white face at all these days.'

  They stepped out into the sun and both had to shield their faces. 'Oooh!' said Lucy, squinting as her eyes adjusted. Milena tried to explain: there was a virus that made people purple.

  'What! We've all gone black?' Lucy yelped. She looked down at her own mushroom coloured wrists. They did look bruised now that it was mentioned. She tried to rub it off, the ingrained dirt.

  'Not black. Purple. It's a chemical that means we can turn sunlight into sugar.'

  Lucy sighed. 'I don't know.'

  They began to walk again. Lucy hopped, looking perplexed. 'I'll tell you what it's like,' she said. 'It's like when I used to work at the post office. Do you know what a post office is?'

  'No,' said Milena.

  'Well, people used to send lovely bits of paper, to show how much they liked each other. They'd write on them, themselves. I used to take such trouble. I'd make the dots over the eyes look just like hearts. And all the o's, I'd make them big and round like oranges. Just to make it nice. Like when I was at school We all used to do it. It was all the rage, you know. All these people sending each other love on paper. Of course it wasn't always like that. Usually it was just bills and circulars.'

  It took all of Milena's viruses, scrambling frantically, to understand what Lucy meant.

  'But you always went to your front door thinking maybe there was something nice from the postman.'

  Postman. That's where the word comes from. Postpeople. I thought it meant people who used to be people.

  'A little card from my niece or my auntie...' Lucy started to cry again. 'They had hearts of gold. And now I can't even remember their names. It makes you feel so stupid. I thought you was my daughter. I was convinced of it. I was going to tell you off for not coming to see me. She must have been dead for seventy years at least. What year is it?'

  Milena told her again. Nearly one hundred years after the Revolution.

  'You see? I just can't keep up. I went for a walk last week. And do you know? I saw lights. Electric lights! When the bloody hell did they come back, I asked myself. And then I was never sure if they'd ever been gone. And then I didn't know if this was before or after the Blackout. You can tell me what year it is until your lips fall off. It still won't tell me where I am. Anyway, what was I talking about?'

  'You were saying,' said Milena, who had learnt the art of listening. 'That it's like your job in the post office.'

  'Exactly what I was going to say,' said Lucy. 'Just like in the post office. You'd be sorting the post, and getting really fed up. But they'd be playing this music. Up-pumpity-uppity-pump-uppity pumpity. Well, I figured it out. They played the happy music just to keep you going. You'd be utterly wrung out and miserable, but the music pulled you along. Your hands would keep throwing the letters into little boxes, all you'd want to do is sit down and have a good moan, but the music would drag you out. That's what it's all like now. I just want to stop, but the music keeps playing.'

  They came to the kaff. Lucy sparrow-hopped into the dark and tiny space, bouncing, unsteady. The shutters were down against the sunlight and the door and windows were left open. There were candles on the tables and steam was rolling across the ceiling. Men and women looked up from mugs of fruit juice, their faces glistening.

  'Phew,' said one of the women and covered her nose. Lucy smelled.

  But they saw Milena's new sandals and bag and knew what they meant and said nothing.

  A waitress came up to the table. She was as sweaty as the walls. Beads of sweat glistened on her upper lip. She was eight or nine years old, working during the siesta break at school. 'What would you like?' she said, looking between Milena and the ancient woman.

  'Oh, terribly high-toned,' said Lucy, with approval. I would like... lamb chops with mint jelly, and ... brussels, lovely, properly cooked, none of this boiled for a week mush, must preserve the vitamin content... and... oh, just mash. With lots of butter and pepper and a bit of bran sprinkled on it for my bowels.'

  The waitress, young, painfully thin, looked helpless and limp, like her jumpsuit.

  'We'll have two Cow Toms,' said Milena. 'No squid in it, or anything like that. Do you have any meat?'

  The waitress became exasperated. 'Meat. What do you think this is, the bloody Zoo?'

  'Chicken?'

  'Yeah, we got some of that.'

  'Chicken. No squid. And no hot sauce, no fish sauce.'

  Lucy nodded. 'Lovely grub. Lamb chops. And a nice cup of tea.'

  The waitress nodded.

  'Mind you, none of this gnat's piss. Proper, lovely, strong tea.'

  'You've got the same viruses I have,' said Milena. 'She wants tea as in a novel from a hundred and fifty years ago.' />
  'Well does she?' said the waitress, angry.

  'I am a Party member,' said Milena. She wasn't because she had not been Read but she was treated like one. 'I can crunch this place like a plate. You use a lot of tea and you let it steep. Now Slide, child. Slide, Slide, Slide.'

  The waitress was frightened now, and went back to the kitchen.

  I've got a lot of freedom, Milena thought. Now that I don't care if anyone likes me.

  'Rolfa's written a show,' she said to Lucy. 'And I'm putting together a proposal, you know, sell it to some people.' Have you heard of Dante? Would it mean anything if I told you that you were going to play Beatrice?

  'Oooh,' said Lucy, and looked pleased. No, thought Milena, Dante wouldn't mean anything to her.

  'It's all music. It lasts weeks and weeks.'

  'Rolfa always had a beautiful voice. Beautiful, I always said.'

  'It's a bit different this show. It will use a lot of holograms.'

  'Holograms,' said Lucy, unimpressed. 'Are people still interested in those? My father took me to see them when they first came out. Boring. They just sat there.'

  'We're beaming them from outer space,' said Milena. 'And we don't want everyone in it to be actors.'

  'No you don't,' agreed Lucy. 'Bloody little snots. We had one of them in here once with Rolfa. Or was it at the Spread? Terrible little thing she was, nose in the air, face that would sour milk. Came in with gloves and a parasol if you please.' Lucy giggled. 'She left it behind and we burned it.'

  Milena changed the subject. 'Would you like to be in the show?'

  'What me? Do one of my turns?' Lucy was so pleased that her cheeks bunched up into pink apples. 'I couldn't. Not any more. I've lost my figure.'

  'You're lovely and slim,' said Milena, looking at the tiny wrists and lumpy blue veins.

  'Good bone structure,' said Lucy. 'Put me under strong lights and nobody will know the difference. Er. Do they have good strong lights these days?'

  'They've just come back,' said Milena.

  'You wait long enough, you come back into fashion.' Lucy bit her lower lip. 'So I don't suppose it will be a problem, then, will it?' She wrinkled her nose, confidingly. 'My previous, I mean.'

  'Your previous what?'

  'Convictions,' said Lucy, and waited.

  Her previous beliefs and principles? Milena did not understand.

  'I don't know why everyone made such a fuss really, it was just a little business on the side with credit cards. Quite innocent. It was how you survived in those days, black economy, payment in cash or kind, turning a few tricks...'

  'Lucy!' exclaimed Milena in wonder. 'You're a criminal!'

  Lucy looked offended. 'I was a cabaret artiste. A bit of snide went with the job. I mean we was very Alternative. We used to do scathing political and social satire. Politicians, the Royal Family. I always played the Queen.' Lucy drew herself up, smoothed her waist with her hands. 'We had her in fishnet stockings and roller skates.' She suddenly launched herself back into the previous subject. 'I mean, these big companies was all insured. It was the voice-printing that got me. I thought I could imitate the voices, you see, on the phone.'

  'Did you go to prison?'

  'No!' said Lucy scornfully. 'They could see I wasn't the criminal type. Six months suspended and a nosy Probation Officer was all I got.'

  The Cow Toms arrived. Translucent bags full of rice and broth and bits of chicken. The waitress opened the bags up. Her face was full of hate. She cracked eggs as if they were heads into the broth, stirred them in, and threw in herbs.

  'Is that good enough for you?' the waitress asked.

  'Porridge,' sighed Lucy. 'That's all anyone eats. Fried veg and porridge.' Then she remembered her manners. 'It's lovely,' she told the waitress. 'My niece takes such good care of me, she's such a good girl.' She patted Milena's hand. 'It's beautiful,' she assured Milena, her face twitching. 'Raw egg.'

  'It will cook in the broth,' Milena told her.

  'Thank you, darling,' Lucy said to the waitress, who was already walking away, her shoulders slightly hunched.

  The natives are restless, thought Milena. She suddenly missed the beautiful calm that been the very stuff of London life only two summers before.

  'I know you're not my niece,' confided Lucy. 'But you're so good to me. And I don't know who you are.'

  'Neither do I,' said Milena. 'Let's eat it while it's hot, while we can, before it gets cold.'

  The beautiful past, as glimmering and faraway as a star. By winter, everything was covered in snow.

  chapter thirteen

  DOWN TO EARTH

  (MAGIC)

  Mike Stone was in love, and so therefore was Christian Soldier. The vessel was by now a real garden. The walls were covered with moss and fern and cedar and bay and baby palm and holly, all improbably mixed. The floor had sprouted grass and ivy had entwined itself around the column that supported Milena's chair. Most wonderful of all, there were now birds. They rustled within the leaves, and sometimes sang, huge American robins and red-winged blackbirds and tiny English finches. There were other birds, too, that Milena did not know.

  The birds of Czechoslovakia.

  Milena was playing the first scene of the Comedy over and over in her mind. She didn't see the flowers. She was trying to find some way of making the first scene work.

  The first trial scenes had already been broadcast. Fifteen minutes of Dante in the wood had been seen over half the Earth below, between clouds, over mountains. The Terminals below reported that the broadcast was a success. Reformation worked, even on an astronomical scale. But Milena did not like what she saw. She had thought that Dante's allegory would work best if the imagery was kept simple and clear and literal. She had loved imagining Dante's wood. She imagined dead branches, with moonlight glinting on the sinuous, shiny patches where bark had come away. She imagined the soft, thin green coating of lichen on the nodules of broken twigs. There were scuttlings in the darkness, and tiny frightened eyes.

  All sides of each object had to be imagined. Milena found that she could do this. All sides swam fragmented in her mind, suddenly focusing on one area of space. She built up an image focus by focus. The swimming fragments reminded her of a cubist painting. Cubism for cubing, she thought. Picasso was simply painting what he saw.

  The wood she created was beautiful but it was not evil. Even in darkness it was a garden. Dante's forest was supposed to be symbol for the corruption of the human soul. To Milena it seemed such a terrible thing to do to a beautiful forest.

  And the symbolism was redundant. An audience of viruses would already know what the wood meant. Viruses would supply people with all the necessary references. They would whisper as Dante stumbled through the wood, halfway through his life. Remember, the viruses would say, remember Isaiah 38.10, 'In the midst of my days, I shall go to the gate of hell.' The viruses would remember the Aeneid and its forest scenes. It would know that the lake of the heart meant the ventricle in which fear was supposed to reside. Dante limped with sin, the left foot being appetite and will.

  The whole problem was one of redundancy. Rolfa had known that. That's why she decided to leave all the narrative words unsung. Otherwise the chorus could only keep on telling us what we were already seeing.

  The character of Dante was wrong too. Milena had cast one of the Babes, Peterpaul, to play him. He was thick-wristed, beefy, and stomped on firm male legs. Milena had thought he would be a kind of Everyman. But Dante was no Everyman. In all the drawings she had seen, Dante was fierce, with eyes and nose and chin like daggers, a politician in a murderous age. That was the right image. Peterpaul, she realised with reluctance, would have to go.

  Milena let the recording play on, in her mind.

  Here came the animals. They were symbols too. Milena's heart sank when she saw them. The lion, the leopard, the she-wolf and her heavy teats; they were wonderful beasts. Milena did not want them to mean human wickedness. A lion is not murderous, a she-wolf is not greedy. Milen
a stopped the recording, and tried to re-imagine them with human faces.

  Unbidden by her conscious mind, each of the beasts grew the face of Thrawn McCartney. With a shiver in her heart, Milena's mind leapt out of the focus, out of the Comedy. She let Rolfa's music play on, softly. The music was the only part of the opera that worked.

  Milena looked up. Mike Stone was standing over her, holding out his violin as if offering it to her. 'Would you like some music, Milena?' he asked.

  'Why not?' said Milena. The Comedy, it seemed, was beyond help.

  'I've taught Chris how to play Bruch's violin concerto. Would you like to hear that?'

  Milena felt a smile creeping over her face again. She had to admit that Mike Stone had a certain kind of charm. 'You've taught a spaceship to play Bruch?'

  'He takes the cello and drum parts. He grows strings and hums,' said Mike Stone, gangling with enthusiasm.

  From just outside the focus, Milena heard the first sung words of the Comedy. Dante had met the spirit of Virgil and was singing, 'Have pity on me, whether you are ghost or definite man.'

  Mike Stone sat down and tucked the violin under his chin.

  Cilia was playing Virgil. Her high, pure, female voice answered, 'I am not a man, though I was born one.'

  Oh dear, thought Milena. I keep crashing it to the ground. I need to find a different way to do this. She let the Comedy fall into silence.

  Mike Stone played. He sawed and scraped his way through Bruch's only masterpiece. The bow kept skidding off the violin strings with an earnest squeal. Somehow it helped, like someone slipping on a banana in a production of Rossini. Christian Soldier sang all around them, deep and resonating, like a fat man in a bath.

  It's a different world, thought Milena. Spaceships sing and there are Angels sliding between the stars and astronauts grow animals out of memory. The Comedy will have to be new as well.

  Mike Stone's brow was furrowed with concentration. His giant legs were splayed apart; his elbows flailed. Milena found that she forgave him. Whatever mere was to forgive, except awkwardness and a touch of insanity. Milena smiled on him.