The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  ‘I hope you bought a new alcohol cannister,’ she said once, when Rolfa got back. ‘You used this one up.’

  ‘You mean the cooker won’t work?’ Rolfa asked in dismay. ‘And I got us something special for breakfast.’

  ‘What is it?’ Milena asked ruefully. ‘Seal?’

  ‘No. Penguin.’ Rolfa held it up. It still had its feathers and horny feet, but at least it didn’t kick.

  ‘Well, I hope you can eat it raw.’

  ‘I suppose it is all right in a salad,’ said Rolfa, still looking crestfallen.

  She’d also bought some peaches and some seaweed, and so they had a peach and penguin salad for breakfast—or rather, Rolfa did, Milena ate a peach and watched Rolfa bite through sinews as thick as her little finger. The sink was full of feathers. Milena smiled.

  ‘Pooh,’ she pronounced Rolfa, as if knighting her.

  After breakfast, Milena would leave Rolfa for the day, reading a book. At the entrance of the Shell, the cast of the play would be waiting. Milena would walk in their midst to rehearsals at the Zoo, protected by a cloud of thought.

  Milena learned things about them. She learned that Berowne was in love with the Princess and wanted to be a father. The Princess did not want to carry a baby. Berowne was thinking of carrying the child himself. The King, handsome, kind, faraway, loved nobody, but was one of those people who are, effortlessly, loved. The girls felt warmth and sympathy for him, as well as loving his blond-green curls and luxuriant beard.

  They were all so ambitious. They all had such plans—characters they wanted to play, pictures they wanted to paint. Milena, as always, was quiet among them, but for once she was not full of resentment. She was content to go unnoticed. She found she liked being part of a group. And when she did say something, it would sound obvious and banal to her, but the actors would exclaim, ‘Oh, Milena, you’re always so sensible!’ She would understand that it was not an insult. ‘Not like you butterflies,’ she replied once, with a chuckle. There was a kind of quiet acknowledgement on both sides of who she was.

  Then one morning, on the walkway, the Princess whispered, ‘Milena. That’s the Snide!’

  It was like swimming in the ocean and seeing a shark.

  A tall man in a black coat was coming towards them. He ambled, hands in his pockets. It was a windy day and the tails of his black coat flapped. The Snide had a lean and dreamy face, with hooded eyes and a slight smile. His hair was like a pale mist, disordered and thinning.

  Milena forced herself to look away from him, but she still saw the face in her mind. She hated it. It was sly and soft at the same time, sleepy, almost gentle, except for something glinting within the slits of the puffy eyes.

  Think of something else! Milena told herself.

  Me, an’t shall please you. Milena remembered one of her 13 lines. I am Anthony Dull. Nothing happened. Think of his coat, she told herself, what did it cost, how many labour-hours? Count them. The viral clock in her mind refused to work.

  Milena had spent a lifetime beating down the viruses. They now deserted her. In her terror, she could not dredge up one of them.

  Shakespeare. T. S. Eliot. Jane Austen. It is a truth universally acknowledged, she recited to herself, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. There was no answering spark of life.

  The walkway was elevated and narrow; they would have to pass the Snide. ‘Ack!’ exclaimed the King. ‘We’ve taken the wrong walkway.’

  All the actors turned at once, and walked in the opposite direction. The Snide followed. Milena could hear the clattering of his shoes behind her on the resin surface. Wooden clogs. He wears them so that people will hear and be afraid.

  Marx! Milena thought, where is Marx, they must have fed me Marx by the gram. Lenin, Mao, Chao Li Song. All right, music, then. Brahms, Elgar, anything. She began to hum Das Lied von der Erde. That’s not a virus, she remembered, I learned that myself.

  ‘Milena,’ called the Snide. His voice was light and mellifluous. ‘I’m singing to you, Milena. Can you hear me?’

  Milena could feel terror seeping out of her, as if she were a leaking balloon. She heard his shoes, clip-clopping like horses’ hooves. They were beside her now. The actors walked faster, looking at their feet, not knowing what else to do. Surely this was illegal! Of course it was illegal, but where was the Law? The Law was everywhere, invisible and alive. But there were no policemen.

  ‘Eastern Europe, Milena,’ said the Snide. ‘Do you remember the trip on the train? You went to St Malo. An island with walls. Do you remember the steamer, Milena? Rocking back and forth on the sea? Do you remember the chugging sound and the sailwomen, all in stripes?’

  Milena remembered none of it. There was not even a sense of echoing, of familiarity.

  Milena glanced to one side and saw him, walking with them, smiling. Her eyes darted back to the ground in front of her like frightened birds.

  Me, an’t shall please you. I am Anthony Dull!

  ‘I can feel you, Milena,’ said the Snide. ‘Do you remember the Child Garden? Do you remember Senior Dodds who taught you English? Do you remember your first day there? June 23rd? It was raining and you were all alone. You were just four years old, and they made you ill with a virus to make you speak. Do you remember that?’

  For Milena, the Child Garden had been destroyed. Something had happened to it. All she could remember was being ill at ten years old. She could remember the sudden weight of the knowledge. The old viruses began to stir.

  The Princess spoke, angrily. ‘Go away and leave us alone!’

  The Snide stepped in front of her. The Princess had to stop walking. ‘Milena?’ the Snide asked, grinning hopefully, leaning down to look into her eyes.

  Milena felt giddy. She swayed as she walked. It was as if the ground beneath her lurched. She stood still beside the Princess as if to help her. Instead of fear, Milena had a strange and most complete sensation of maddening ennui. An irritable boredom engendered by viruses rose up all around her like steam from the pavement.

  Milena remembered words, German words, badly printed in Gothic lettering.

  DAS KAPITAL

  Milena remembered the reading of them. She remembered someone reading them in a very small, very cold room, smoking cigarettes. She had rolled them herself, straggles of tobacco in thin papers that were held together with spit. Her legs were limply fleshed and useless. She sat in a wheelchair, by a window, on the ground floor of a block of flats. Just outside her window, noisy children were playing with a ball.

  Milena began to walk again, but in her mind, she was sitting in a wheelchair.

  ‘You’re not Milena,’ said the Snide, gently, to the Princess.

  Words on top of another page—Chapter One: The Commodity.

  A forest of associations sprang up, thoughts and references neatly husbanded, ready for use. The thought came to the person who was reading: this will show the amateurs.

  1. THE TWO FACTORS OF THE COMMODITY: USE-VALUE AND VALUE (SUBSTANCE OF VALUE AND MAGNITUDE OF VALUE).

  The one who was reading sucked in smoke, past teeth that tasted of tobacco, down a leathery throat. Milena, who did not smoke, coughed.

  The Snide looked up at her.

  ‘Milena?’ he asked.

  Badly printed words were scrolling up through her mind, and embedded in them were aching joints and a tight band of nicotine poisoning across the chest and iron determination and icy pride. Embedded in the reading was an entire way of responding to the world, another sense of self. Me, thought the one who read, they chose me to read this. I understand it better that anyone. I am reading it for everyone. No more amateurs, ever again. They will all understand. There was a tingling in the middle of the cortex, a dancing of receptive virus, waiting to be turned into Marx. The one who read let out a triumphant blast of smoke from her nostrils. She was alive again, though she did not know it.

  ‘I don’t know anyone called Milena,’ said Milena, quite truthfully. ‘My name is
Heather. What do you want?’

  ‘You like Marx,’ said the Snide, to let her know he could read her.

  ‘Never met him,’ replied Heather. ‘I wouldn’t say I like his books. They’ve eaten up my life. But I do understand them.’

  Bourgeois fluff, she thought. God, I could tear you in half.

  The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach or the imagination, makes no difference.

  The use-value is intrinsic. Like the value of music.

  ‘Does anyone know anyone called Milena?’ Heather demanded of the actors. Heather’s voice was harsh and her smile, meant to disarm, was fixed and chilling. Milena saw the face in memory, long and freckled with huge front teeth, black-framed spectacles, and a thickness of the neck that was the first sign of the physical distortion below.

  ‘They do know Milena, but they’re trying not to think,’ said the Snide. Suddenly he chortled. ‘They’re all churning over their lines. They’re all seeing exactly the same play in their heads. Except for you.’

  Heather was without pity. She had grown up a cripple in Belfast and pity was her enemy, pity was the thing that had held her back. What she wanted was respect, and if respect was not forthcoming, then she wanted fear. She had learned how to get it.

  Heather stared into the eyes of the Snide, and gave him the full blast of her contempt. Crawler, money-snake, you have a talent and what do you do with it? Then she showed him, carefully and clearly in her mind, one of the things that she might do to him if he did not leave. She would hit him in the throat. He would swallow his Adam’s apple, and choke.

  ‘My God, you’re scary,’ he chuckled. ‘I think I love you.’

  Heather was not above being flattered, and she recognized submission when she saw it. She chuckled too, warmly. ‘Fuck off,’ she said using the old word, and made a motion of brushing something aside.

  The discovery of these ways and the manifold uses of things is the work of history.

  Very calmly, deliberately, Heather thought: it’s a good job he doesn’t know that Milena has gone away to Bournemouth.

  ‘Bournemouth?’ asked the Snide, amused.

  ‘How did you know that?’ said Heather, grinning her poker smile and failing to sound surprised.

  The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air.

  ‘I don’t,’ replied the Snide. ‘Know it, I mean.’ He made a brushing-aside motion now. ‘Bournemouth. Perhaps I will go to Bournemouth, perhaps I won’t. But I will be back.’ As if his wooden clogs had suddenly grown roots, he stood still.

  The actors walked on quickly, almost scuttling. Heather went back to reading, bound up in the reading, inherent in it.

  I only hope, thought Milena safe within a cloud of thought, that I can get her to stop.

  She glanced behind, and saw the Snide, still standing, buffeted by wind as if by the thoughts of other people. He was looking at her and smiling a happy smile of discovery.

  That night Milena dreamed that Heather was sitting on the foot of her bed. She could see her, with the horse-mouth smile and the tiny legs, folded up under her. Heather, Heather, go away, get out, leave me alone! Heather kept on reading. The words rolled past, projected onto the walls. You will understand. You will get it right. Of course the most useful things are free, like air, and do not require labour. But value is an economic concept, a function of particular social relations.

  Yes, yes, Milena answered, rolling her head from side to side.

  There was a knock at the door…

  Milena woke up, drenched in sweat, feverish, ill.

  …a soft insinuating rapping on her door, in the dark.

  Milena felt the bed beside her and it was empty. The sky beyond the window was going silver. Rolfa was gone. Rolfa would be at the market, buying food.

  And the Snide had come knocking.

  Good, good, let him in, let him see the empty room, no Rolfa hidden. Don’t think, she warned herself, don’t think. Milena found clothing in the dark, her hands shaking, and as she dressed, she pushed her own self, her own ego, down into the recesses. Heather floated up to the surface of her mind, like a corpse on a river.

  The door opened. This was a culture that did not need locks.

  ‘Hello, Heather,’ said a soft, mellifluous voice. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  He moved in the darkness, unseen. There was a crumpling of the quilt. He sat on the foot of the bed, where Heather had sat.

  ‘You could have hit me this morning. None of the others could. You’ve broken the viruses. So have I.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘We’re alike,’ he said.

  There came a shy, apologetic rapping on Milena’s door.

  What the hell now? Heather snatched her hand away. Rolfa?

  ‘Oh my God, it’s my boyfriend,’ said Heather. She could hardly say it was her girlfriend. ‘Quick, under the bed.’ It was the only line she could think of.

  ‘It’s not your boyfriend,’ said the Snide. ‘It’s a girlfriend.’

  Heather tried to push him under the bed anyway, and flung open the door before she had time to think.

  Cilla stood there in the corridor, clutching a bamboo box. Heather kicked her in the shins, to occupy her mind.

  ‘The Snide is here,’ Heather told her, smiling with scorn. ‘He’s come to call. I think he’s going to make a pass.’

  In the alcohol light of the corridor, Cilla’s eyes went wide with terror. She hobbled away as quickly as she could, rubbing her ankle.

  ‘I’ve seen this boyfriend of yours,’ said the Snide, lounging on the bed. He actually thought he was being provocative, poor lamb. ‘I saw him in your head. He sleeps right here, doesn’t he?’ The Snide gave the bed a pat. ‘Big, broad shoulders. And a beard?’

  Heather just smiled and thought of dialectical materialism.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Snide, catching a glimpse of something else. ‘But he shaves now.’ He rolled forward onto his knees, wrapping himself in the quilt. ‘Your room is just as I imagined it,’ he said. ‘Lots of books. That’s how you break a virus. You read it for yourself. I knew you hated the viruses too. I know why you’re reading Marx. To be free. I broke the virus for Marx too,’ he boasted. ‘I wouldn’t know it if I saw it.’

  He picked up a small, stained volume from the window ledge. ‘The Communist Manifesto?’ he asked. ‘No one reads it now. They want to control it. And they call this a Marxist state.’

  He was holding Rolfa’s copy of Winnie the Pooh.

  ‘I want you to go,’ said Heather.

  ‘Not until I know for certain that you do not need me,’ said the Snide, ‘as much as I need you.’

  There were bells on each floor of the Shell, linked by ropes. They began to ring now, over and over. From the far end of the corridor, Cilla was shouting, ‘Fire! Fire!’

  ‘The building is burning down,’ said Heather.

  ‘No it’s not. Your friend just wants me to go. She brought you some paper so you could write your music.’ He crawled towards her on the bed and took her hands. ‘I know people, Heather. I know you’re what I want. We could live together, outside the Law. Blister all the old paint of the walls. You’re a bullshit-stripper, Heather. I am a sneak. I don’t like sucking arseholes. You could save me.’

  Oh God, thought Heather, another one who wants his mother.

  ‘OK. OK. You’re right. I need help.’

  Vampire, thought Heather. All around her, across the ceiling, through the walls, came the thumpings of people awakened in the night by an alarm.

  The Snide looked up, dismayed. Too many people, thinking too many things at once, thought Milena. He won’t be able to read me as clearly. The quilt fell from his shoulders, and he stepped down from the bed. He gazed at her mournfully, as the light grew stronger, tall but frail-boned, not as young as he used to be, afraid.

  ‘I take people’s thoughts,’ he said, ‘and I weave them into tapestries. And I hang them,’ he said, ‘
like in a gallery. There’s no one else to see them.’

  ‘Stop being a Snide,’ said Heather.

  He opened the door, adjusting a broad-brimmed black hat for sinister effect, and stepped into a crowd of people in their underwear. He’s a fool, thought Heather, quite simply a fool. He heard her think it, faltering as he closed the door. The bells kept ringing. But could people love fools?

  Heather waited a few minutes, to let him leave. Then she joined the press of people on the staircase. They clutched their most treasured possessions, toothbrushes or saucepans. Cilla was no longer ringing the bells. The alarm had been taken up, by each floor’s fire wardens, according to the drill. No one would be able to trace the false alarm back to Cilla.

  Milena found Cilla outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that.

  Value therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead, rather it transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic.

  ‘Oh, Cilla. Who did this?’ Milena asked.

  ‘Just us Vampires,’ said Cilla, shyly, pleased. ‘Just us Vampires of History.’

  The all-clear, a trumpet blast, sounded. Elsewhere, in memory, Heather fixed the book to a holder on her wheelchair. Continuing to read, she began to wheel herself round and round her room for exercise.

  That morning, Milena intercepted Jacob on the stairs. ‘Look at what I’ve got!’ she said and held up the paper. ‘Jacob! We can write the music down. Can we meet this morning, this afternoon?’

  ‘You have a performance this afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll miss it. Won’t be the first time.’

  Jacob went very still, his eyes closed. ‘I get tired, Milena,’ he said.

  She could see it in the flesh around his eyes, and she knew she shouldn’t ask again. But without him, the paper would be no use.