Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  Stifle the dramatics, Milena, this is you, yourself who is remembering. You know what is happening is real. Worry a few moments longer and it will be too late.

  'Oh shit,' says Milena the director and stands up finally. Not I'm sorry, oh God, but oh shit, as if it were the final inconvenience to have someone burn to death in your lacquered rooms. Worried about the rugs, Milena? That's it, stand up, get flustered, panic, pretend it takes a full minute to remember the thick new rug rolled up on the landing. You bought it just last week, your nice thick Tarty rug. Wipe away the distaste for spoiling it, wipe it nobly from your mind. What a sacrifice, Milena. Go to it, girl. Nice new part to play here. Heroine. You'll like this part, except you always were a terrible actress. You are strangely unconvincing in — your concern. But there are no lines to remember, it makes you look good, everything a star can require, including someone else to cry over.

  Somewhere in the midst of the flame, Thrawn is trying to dance, and is laughing. The thing that has hold of her knows that it has won at last.

  ever... ever...

  Fade into silence. The music is over.

  Milena the director runs to hug Thrawn, the new, thick rug between them, to smother the flames. Thrawn is too tall. The rug encircles only her midriff.

  'Get down on the floor! Get down on the floor!' wails Milena the director.

  You weep do you, Milena? thinks her future self. Any animal would weep seeing this. Hitler's guards wept in the camps. The tears mean nothing except that you can feel the horror of it in your belly. You know you will feel that horror for the rest of your life, and that you will remember the tang of burnt hair, burnt flesh in the back of your throat until you die.

  The alcohol burns away, like brandy on a plum pudding. Thrawn looks like a plum pudding. The plum pudding smiles and has bright white teeth, flecked with black. 'Oops,' it says and giggles.

  'We'll get you a doctor,' Milena murmurs, unable to muster enough breath to talk plainly. She wants to scream, not to attract help so much as to express to the world that something terrible has happened. She wants to express it to Thrawn, who does not seem to have realised.

  'Come on,' says Milena. 'Downstairs.' Without thinking, she takes Thrawn's hand. It is sticky.

  'Mmmwhoh!' roars Thrawn, like a deaf-mute. Her nerves are beginning to feel what has happened. She jerks the hand away. The skin remains in Milena's hand like a glove, translucent. Milena keeps holding it, as if the hand were in two places at the same time.

  Thrawn stares at the hand. She is no longer smiling. She looks dazed. 'Let's give the little lady a big hand,' she says, making a joke. She bobs as if floating.

  Milena the director mews like a cat and throws the crisp and blistered skin away.

  'Downstairs,' murmurs Thrawn. She walks ahead of Milena. She looks somehow ordinary, a quiet and somewhat muted person going for a leisurely stroll. Except for the hardened, flaking blackness of her head, Thrawn looks in some way normal for the first time. Her eyes are not bulging out with tension, her smile is not knife-edge sharp, she is not smiling at all. Her arms and legs move with a smooth and simple motion, and her fingers are not extended in a rictus of anger or unease.

  Milena darts ahead of her, and pushes back the screens, one by one, the screens that lead through the Dead Space.

  'Thank you,' says Thrawn, regally. She walks past Milena and out onto the varnished bamboo stairs. Outside the insulated flat, it is February freezing. Is it steam rising off her, or smoke? Milena wants to get her a coat but thinks: a coat on that skin? Her viruses tell her: third degree burns. Thrawn begins to trudge down the steps, like weary What Does at the end of a day.

  'Oooff!' she says, as if exhausted from cleaning floors. She leans onto the handrail and the instant she touches it, she hisses and leaps back as if the rail were fiery hot.

  Still hissing, Thrawn puts her arms over her head, and tries to pull off her vest. Blackened, the vest breaks up, falls away. Her back and shoulders are a mass of rising pink blisters, blackened streaks, and places that seemed to be covered with grit, as if it could be washed away.

  It doesn't look too bad, it doesn't look too bad, Milena the director tells herself. The lower back is hardly touched at all. The breasts are beautiful, they have not been touched. She'll survive. She'll survive. Look, she is walking.

  Thrawn takes another step and howls. Another step and she doubles up.

  'Thrawn,' weeps Milena, helplessly.

  Thrawn starts to scream. She starts to scream like a strangled cat, a harsh, meowing wail that moves in fits and starts but that doesn't stop. Her hands weave over her head, wanting to hold something, finding only pain, moving in a dance of helplessness.

  There is a sound of sliding panels. Ms Will steps out of a Dead Space, and stands below on the rush matting. She stops and stares.

  'There's been a terrible accident,' says Milena.

  'There's been a terrible accident,' says Milena.

  'There's been a terrible accident,' says Milena.

  'There's been a terrible accident,' says Milena.

  'She poured cooking alcohol over herself.'

  Thrawn suddenly rolls forward. She tumbles down the steps, gathering speed, losing flesh, blackening the bamboo. She lies at the bottom of the step. Milena runs after her. Thrawn is on her back, gasping, breath coming in short agonised hops. She looks up at Milena, but does not seem to see her. She starts to shiver.

  'Thrawn,' whispers Milena. 'I'm sorry.'

  And what are you sorry for, Milena? You're sorry because you know you'll be so sorry for the rest of your life. Are you mourning for her? Or mourning for yourself, for the anguish this will cost you?

  Thrawn knows what you are. Thrawn focuses on you and smiles again, the demon smile, rearing up, in a frenzy, but paralysed, her hand a blackened claw, she looks up at you. 'Saviour,' she breathes out in a voice like the wind, smile blazing. She drags her hand along the floor, scraping layers of it away, leaving a blackened mark. 'Saviour?' she says, an angry, wheedling, bitter question. It is a rhetorical question. The answer is known.

  She knows she has won.

  We are coming Milena, says a voice in her head. Someone is coming to help.

  The Consensus in her head.

  The Angels soothe her. It's not your fault, Milena, don't blame yourself. It's not your fault.

  'Isn't it?' asks Milena.

  Do your work, Consensus. Rule the world, heal the sick, build the roads. Breed the viruses. Do anything that you consider to be good.

  Only leave us alone.

  From the top of the Tarty flats, a bell begins to toll. The emergency bell. Ms Will arrives with a blanket, and begins to wrap Thrawn in it. Thrawn's teeth are clicking together as she quakes with cold. Milena winces. It goes against instinct to put rough blankets on skinless flesh.

  The Fire Warden arrives. She is trained to give treatment. In summer, if there was a fire in the floating Ark, pumps would spray water from the Estuary. Fire tugs would arrive, great steam boats that shoot water from cannons. But all the water is frozen now. The pumps don't work.

  The Fire Warden kneels down and opens up her box of viruses and cream.

  'Leave her alone,' says Milena, standing very still and quiet. The Fire Warden doesn't seem to understand that she means it.

  'We'll use open treatment,' says the Fire Warden. She is a brisk and efficient Party Member. She has been trained to do good. She has been waiting for a chance to be needed. Her viruses are speaking, to the viruses of those who hear her, social viruses that know how to help the sick. 'We need to clean the burns, then keep them open to dry. Here.' The Fire Warden passes Milena a syringe. She wants Milena to take a blood sample. 'Test for nitrogen, prothrombin time, electrolyte levels, blood gases, hematocrit...'

  Milena brushes the syringe away.

  'Someone else is coming,' says Milena again. She means someone who can give better treatment than us.

  'Don't see who it could be,' said the Fire Warden, getting out her
creams. 'The Estuary is frozen, the Fire Tugs can't get here.' This was her responsibility, this was why she was trained and designated, so she could do good in the world. It is impossible to do good in the world, impossible that is, without also doing harm. The creams, the swabbing, the painkillers will do harm, relative harm.

  Milena kicks the box over. The creams scatter, the applicators spin. Something made of glass shatters.

  'What the... that is medicine!' wails the woman outraged.

  So are the viruses. Relative harm, relative good.

  The What Does Lady slides back the hangar doors. 'Come see, oh quick!' she says, gesturing to Ms Will. 'A wagon on the ice!'

  Ms Will goes to the door. The Fire Warden bitterly gathers up her medicines. Milena watches over Thrawn. She looks at her shivering jaws and staring eyes.

  And so I'm going to pass you over to them, Thrawn. You could have been beautiful. Maybe you will be. But you will still be theirs.

  She hears the sound of galloping and looks up. Ms Will and the What Does are pushing back all of the great screens. There is a flood of cold air. Galloping across the ice, four great white horses, silvery as if frosted by the cold come pulling a fire wagon. Steam boils up as thick as cream from the boiler, and from the nostrils of the beasts. The wagon thunders up the bank of frozen mud and right into the Tarty flats, into the covered atrium, the horses reined in, snorting, half-turning and coming to a halt.

  And Milena sees them. For the first time she sees the Men in White, the Garda. They are the masters. Their faces are screened by plastic, screened from the rest of us. For them, all of us are diseased.

  'Look at my kit!' the Fire Warden says. 'She kicked it!'

  The Garda do not reply. One of them takes hold of the Fire Warden's shoulders and moves her aside. He wears gloves. The other, with practised motion, peels back the blanket, slices through the clothes. Thrawn lies sad and exposed and barely breathing, looking back up at Milena, sadly, as if asking her a regretful, reasonable question. Why? Pads are stuffed into her nose and ears.

  The Men in White start covering her with spray. Milena looks away, to the horses.

  The horses are huge, white, muscled. The horses wear wraparound mirror-shades. It keeps them looking only at what their masters want them to see. They toss their heads and their smoky yellow manes dance. Horses are beautiful even in slavery, because no one has told them they are ugly. Horses have no demons.

  Milena hears the sound of the spray. Thrawn will grow new skin, a new mind. She will not be Thrawn anymore. There will be someone else, living a quite happy, very limited life, with gaps in her memory. She won't feel any anguish over what happened. A relative good then? Tell yourself it's a relative good, then, Milena.

  The only place Thrawn is alive is here, now, as I remember.

  Saviour.

  hey fish it's me again!!!!!!

  Milena finds a sealed oiled pouch, waiting for her when she returns from space. She remembers the spidery, shaking scrawl.

  — well — they want the old lady to go back and she just doesn't want to go! broke my leg again — well — my hip but it amounts to the same thing — now they want to get the old dam back — thats what they want — get her safely on some old sofa and we'll bring her dinner whenever we remember

  us polar types get old, fish — you don't know what that means — it means you start to fall apart — but what it feels like is that all the world starts dropping away too, piece by piece — it feels like they want to take the sky away from me

  I used to be young — used to lay out all night long, feel the air sting its way over my face like someone touching me and i ud look up into that clear air and all the stars ud seem to look back at me — like all the stars have a face —

  hell, fish, i could trek over forty k to the stores and drink all night hot raw whisky and roll back all in two days with no sleep — there was old betty who used to haul the stuff in on her back — we used to bath in whisky, wash the old tin plates in it and spend all day shooting fire out of our paws — blasting the stones apart and smelt them for metal like we was making hot soup — set up a sound system on the ice —sound system on the ice and we ud dance and blast and boom and batter and hunt penguins with lasers!

  we were so crazy — we ud go fishing underwater in wet suits with music in headphones and whisky in a little tube that went straight into our mouths — shoot that fish! sip that stuff! shake your tail to old Bessie smith, high and pure in the phones — it was like we could make life up like kids playing pretend — they ever tell you about bessie smith, fish??????????? — honey, go ask your virus, go get it to play you old bessie — that's what we mined to in the dry rocks — bessie and satchmo

  — singing to us in the blue blue sea — history alive in your ear singing like the wind on the ice — we ud go swimming up the innards of an iceberg like a smooth glassy cheese all full of holes and glossy light — light going up the cracks, catching in the bubbles and strange dead creatures froze right in the middle of it — fish, i was young — i was young for years fore i met my husband — had rolfa when i was 40 years old — thats how late i left it all that domestic stuff — the wallpaper the curtains the dishes the carpets and the four four walls

  HELL FISH

  they want me back in London — so I can be old — they want me to

  shed the ice like snakeskin — they want me to lose the cold — lose the stars — lose the fire — i could trek baby and blast — they want me still not moving not hearing

  it dont matter being deaf down here home in the cold — theres my dogs — they fetch for me — theres the sun on the ice and the fresh air — theres the post coming to bring letters and to talk

  being deaf in south ken means being shut in with a little shivering squidge who thinks your going to eat her — im deaf fish and i cant walk — broken hip and joints that have ground to a halt — i have to crawl my cold little fish — so theyll ship me home like walrus meat — theyll fix my joints sure — and then say i got to stay in south ken till theres nothing left of me — just some old animated rug barely talking just reaching up for her little tipple with a hand that shakes — some old withered dam rotting like leaf mould just able to lift her head — with no light no sound no dance no cold no warm — nothing where we all head fish — where we all head and ive arrived here so heres what im going to do — im going to crawl — im going to crawl out onto that ice in the night — ill roll over and look up at the stars — i know cold honey — it settles slow — you just go to sleep — im going to go to sleep looking at those stars — by the time you get this fish ill be long gone

  love is a torch you pass it on — tried to give it to my baby — my great singing lump of a kid — opera hell i hate opera — where ud she get it from ?????? just herself — love is a torch and you pass it on like someone passed it to you fish — you never told me about your mama but she must have loved you — or someone must have — so you loved rolfa rolfa loved you — you just dug your heels in — me too kid — this is happy — this is some old dam digging her heels in — into the ice — dont be sad this is the best

  love

  hortensia patel

  Present tense, still present, still tense:

  When?

  This is me, packing for outer space. I'm running around my lacquered rooms with a tremor in my belly. I'm still afraid of Thrawn, of space, of The Comedy.

  I'm worrying about my house plants. Who can I give them to who will not kill them with over-watering, or kill them with neglect? I am worrying over a potted plant of basil, which I use in cooking, and a hydrangea. This is my main concern at the moment, the chewing gum my conscious mind is recycling over and over until all savour of it is gone.

  There is a knock on the sliding panels on my Tarty flat. They rattle in their runners. Is it Thrawn? I am Terminal, I am Terminal, I tell myself, and I throw back the sliding screens, one after another, through the Dead Space that insulates. I pull back the screens, and before I recognise who it i
s, I feel a band of muscle pull tightly across my chest.

  Rolfa standing in my doorway.

  She is covered in fur again, and wears virulently coloured clothes. 'Hullo.' she says. 'No trouble to go away and come back if I'm interrupting.'

  Why now? That is the director's reaction. Yes, I would like to see you, yes I have been meaning to see you, but now is not a good time. Milena runs a distracted hand across her head.

  Well Milena, you have now successfully communicated that it is a tremendous inconvenience, but that you are going to make the most forced effort to be gracious.

  'Just, just packing,' says Milena, stiff smile, closed eyes, angry little shakings of the head.

  Perhaps understandably, Rolfa makes no reply.

  'How are you, Rolfa?'

  'Oh. Not so dusty. Got to keep moving, you know. I won't stay long.'

  Milena the director is relieved. Mentally she is calculating how long she has to pack.

  'It's lovely to see you,' says Milena.

  'But,' says Rolfa, supplying the qualification. She is hunched under the arched and lacquered ceilings. She makes the Tarty flat look like the kind of toy you give to a spoiled child. Rolfa is hunched and covered in fur, and she wears a brightly-printed shirt, brightly printed shorts, clean white tennis shoes and a rather rakish hat. It is a man's hat. She still looks uncomfortable, awkward. My God, she reminds me of Mike.

  'Tea?' Milena offers. Milena has forgotten to ask her in.

  'Beer? Whisky? Gin would suffice, if you had some lemon.' Rolfa shuffles her feet, wiping them on the mat. Her shoes are huge and white and very clean. 'And just a little morsel to munch, if you could see your way to finding it.' Rolfa ducks inside the door and, rather awkwardly, removes her hat. Politesse. She strokes the short, bristly crew cut on the top of her head. 'Needing sustenance. Long boat trip. My God, why did you move all the way out here?'

  Milena doesn't want to answer. She would have to tell Rolfa about Thrawn. 'I like the Slump,' she says. 'Sorry, but I'm going away, and the only thing I have in the place is tea.'