The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  The room around now came in only one focused shape, four walls. The wooden table, the wood-burning stove, the rickety chairs, the bean bags on the floor, the string of garlic, were all as the adult remembered them. They showed only one side of themselves at a time. Outside the windows, there was blazing daylight. Milena could now hear the ticking of the clock in all its soulless regularity. Tick-tock time.

  ‘Milena,’ said her mother, quietly. ‘Your father wants to talk to you.’

  Tatinka, her mother called him. The words unleashed a sense of loss. Milena, the adult felt an undertow tug of strangeness, of loss. The adult had lost a language.

  Milena felt another chasm open up under her. Time had hauled her away from her mother and her mother tongue. She felt the vertigo.

  The infant was looking at her mother’s face. There was something very grave and serious in the world. It made her mother quiet and noble, and Milena’s heart swelled with love. Her mother was young and beautiful, and now noble as well. Her mother took her hand, and led her out of her old world, into another one, through the door to her parents’ room. Her parents’ room was where Milena went at night, when darkness frightened her. This room was darkened now. Milena felt panic.

  ‘Is it night?’ she asked. The infant lived in a world where day could become night without warning.

  ‘No, Milena. It’s just the shutters. The shutters have been closed.’

  The room smelled acid like sour lemons. Milena the infant knew that smell. It rose off your body, from the tangle, when the world went sick.

  The walls were brown, the sheets were brown, everything was jumbled, and dirtier than it should be. Her father was brown and jumbled, crucified on the bed. His black hair pasted slick and flat over his forehead. Now that Milena was older, people only had one face at a time. Words, even Czechoslovakian words, gave things only one face. This face had black stubble and dark flesh around the eyes.

  Milena’s mother nudged her toward the bed. She stood next to him, at face-level, and a hot, damp arm was drawn around her. He was burning. Milena knew then that he had the illness. He had the burning and the shaking. He looked at her with eyes that were different, a stranger’s eyes. Milena went wary. They could take your father and give him someone else’s eyes.

  ‘Svoboda,’ he croaked.

  Like Ne, the word meant freedom. But it was a Czech word, and not the same as English freedom, and never could be. Svoboda was something natural like apples, like the earth. Like paradise, the way to it was barred.

  You can fight it, Tato. You think at it, and it changes. You can do that can’t you Tato? Milena wanted to explain, but couldn’t. Then she thought he would know that already. She had already been taught that adults always knew more than she did. Tato took Milena’s hand in his own. Milena could smell the hand. He spoke in a rough and alien voice.

  ‘Be good, Milena.’

  Adults were always telling her to be good. It was not possible to know what good was. It always seemed to change. Milena knew she could not promise to be good; she wasn’t sure what good was. She didn’t want to lie, but she knew she could not say no. So Milena nodded yes. She knew it was a lie, so didn’t say the words. She wanted to be good, but if he had to ask, did that mean she really wasn’t good? What should she do to be good? No one ever seemed to be able to explain it fully. The word good seemed to spread out, diffuse, as part of the brown walls.

  ‘Milena, answer your father.’

  They were going to make her say yes. Yes was the word of acquiescence. It was the word of powerlessness.

  Milena murmured yes. Her mother made her say it again, louder. Her mother’s hand was on her shoulder, pushing her closer to her father, who was sick and who smelled. They both wanted something from her, and she could not think what it could be, however much she wanted to give it. She wanted to give it as long as she was not pushed.

  The future, thought the one who was remembering, they want some promise of the future.

  ‘Kiss your father,’ her mother told her.

  He smelled and was wet, and already he was not her father.

  ‘Milena, don’t be naughty. Your father wants to kiss you.’

  There was something awful in her mother’s voice. It was not her mother’s voice. Her mother had become someone different too. Milena felt the hand on her shoulder like a claw. She was afraid. Any moment she would weep from fear, and that would be bad. She leaned forward, sticking out her lips to give her father a quick nip on the cheek. But his arm pulled, and her mother’s hand pushed, and his hot, wet sticky face seemed to swallow hers, and he smelled of beds and illness, and his wet lips were on hers, coating them with moisture.

  Milena hated it. She stepped back, shaking inside. She wanted above all else to wipe her face, her lips, her forehead stained with someone else’s sweat. Above all else, she wanted to escape the transforming sickness. They let her go, and she ran out into the daylight, from the darkness, out into the garden, into the air.

  Milena remembered standing until her legs ached, outside of a church. She was wearing new white clothes, that her mother had made from sheets. The church was white, small and squat with thick walls and a dome on a spire. There were old lead plates on the roof, and Milena looked at them, sensing how warm they would be in the sun. She loved the dull burnish on them. The lead plates were made of metal and Milena had not seen many things made of metal.

  Milena had asked her mother what the lead plates were and had been shushed into silence. Milena’s mother did not like it when Milena asked questions when other people were around.

  Milena was beginning to discover that she was stupid. Other children, she was beginning to discover, had heads that were crowded full of answers. When Milena asked questions, her mother looked miserable, and her jaw thrust forward in something like anger. Already, when Milena wanted to get back at her mother, she would ask a question. Her mother, she knew, put things in her food, that made her ill, to stop her asking questions.

  Her mother stood next to her now, towering in black. She shook Milena’s hand to draw her attention back to the funeral proceedings, back to the hole in the ground, and the box that had been lowered into it, and the man in black who was speaking.

  The proceedings were endless and had no point. They confused elaboration with importance. There were birds in the air, cawing in a spiral, swept round and around in circles. What kept them together? Were there wires that strung them together, that kept them up? Why could birds fly and not people?

  The birds were important, the light on the roof was important. The fierce, black concentration of the adults on the dead box and the dead hole exhausted importance. By the time the adults were finished, the hole and the box would have no meaning. Milena knew the dead box and the black hole were her father. She knew he was gone. She was sorry. She had said she was sorry once, and meant it. There was no need to go on saying it. Sunlight fell like rain. The rain-light did not grieve. Neither did Milena. That was what adults found terrible.

  Her mother gave her hand another exasperated shake. The box was being lowered. More murmuring, and a shaking of water. Milena watched the light in the water. That was nice. It was like her resin watering can. It was as if her father had become a plant, to be tended.

  ‘She doesn’t understand,’ murmured Milena’s mother, explaining, apologising. Milena, the infant, felt a surprisingly fierce wrenching of anger. I don’t understand, do I? I understand as well as you do, thought the child. I just understand it differently.

  There was much more to endure. Soil was heaped. The villagers came forward, one by one, to say they were sorry, and take Milena’s mother’s hand, and lean down over Milena and say something false. None of them really knew Milena’s family. Milena’s family were strangers to them, mysterious people who lived high on an isolated hill. One of them gave Milena and her mother a lift in a cart up the slopes back to their house. Milena sat in the back with sacks of grain, wanting the adults to go away. She wanted to be alone with her world
.

  Finally the cart left them, and Milena’s mother went inside the house to chance and Milena was left, standing in the garden, in front of a gate. Beyond it was a field.

  Beside the gate, there was a tree. Its leaves glowed with light; the trunk was riddled with deep cracks. Blossom was hung about its branches and the scent of it was like a thread, linking things together.

  Milena and the tree stood poised together, as if to escape.

  Then something spoke.

  ‘Lipy,’ it said, naming the tree. Everything seemed to darken, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. ‘Tilia platyphyllos,’ it said, pushing the tree into a framework of science.

  There had been anxious visits to the house from women in white. They had spoken in hushed voices to Milena’s mother. Whenever the Nurses came, the voices followed. It was Milena’s mother who let them do it to her. There was a silent war between them.

  Milena closed her eyes and groped in the darkness like a blind woman, until she touched them. The viruses were hot and roiling and tightly wound. She sprung them. They leapt apart as if wanting to be free. She silenced them. Milena waited with her eyes closed, to see if they would try to speak again. The viruses could darken the world with words. To Milena, it felt as though she were saving the world, and not herself.

  Slowly she opened her eyes again.

  It was as if Milena and the world had crept out of hiding together. The sun had come out from behind a cloud; colour was sprung from the heart of everything. Everything was encased in light, like a halo. Light went into and came out of everything. Light, like time, moved in two directions at once, an exchange between all things. Light and weight and consciousness itself, they all seemed to pull, steadily, orienting everything towards each other. The trees, the grass, the wooden gate, they were oriented towards Milena because she looked at them. They seemed to come closer to her. The lime tree leaned with all its weight, towards Milena, towards the field. The world glowed in silence.

  And it was as if her father quietly stepped up beside her. He seemed to be in the light, in the silence. He seemed as heavy and silent as the lime tree. He, too, seemed to lean out towards the field. Let me go, Milena, he seemed to say.

  The field was forbidden. It was unsafe. The field dropped off steeply at one end, were a wood began. Lines of larches stood bolt upright along the edge like the tails of squirrels ready to bolt.

  Milena did not believe it was unsafe. She stood on tiptoe, and worked the latch. There was a rising of wind. The gate swung open, as if by itself.

  Birds rose out of the trees into the sky. The long grass in the field waved, seeming to beckon. It was as if Milena and her father walked forward into the world. It was as if Milena’s father were the wind.

  The wind seemed to sweep light and sound with it. The sounds of grass and trees rose out of the ground and bore up the birds, rising up and breathing into the clouds, the clouds shedding light, making highways of dust and haze, everything exhaling warmth, the breath, the song of the earth. It was as if the spirit of her father had been sprung. He seemed to leap out into the world and expand, as if the elements that had made him had finally been set free, to rejoin the world.

  Milena broke into a run. It was as if she were running with her father, a fat and waddling toddle, near to the ground, down the slope at gathering speed. She ran looking upwards. She threw out her arms, squealing, giddy, the world spinning. When she fell down, it was as if the grass had arms, to spread open and catch her. It was as if it caught her, laughing, and held her. Svoboda, said the earth.

  ‘Milena!’ a voice cried behind her. ‘Milena!’

  Fear, like winged monkeys descending.

  Milena felt herself snatched up from the grass, wrenched away from it. The grass seemed to reach out for her as her head tipped down and her bottom tipped up, as if she were weightless. She sickened, see-sawing to a fresh sense of balance. She didn’t want to look, she didn’t want to see, her mother’s face.

  Her mother hit her. This was something new. Her mother hit her across her bottom, her dirty place of indignity and shame. Milena howled at this new and terrible thing. She howled and was tipped back upright. Her mother spoke to her. The voice was full of venom, hatred. Milena’s white leg was seized. Her white shoe was shaken at her. The grass had left green slashes across it, and on the new white trousers. Exchange. You could not expect to move through the world and not let it touch you. What was wrong with the marks of grass? At least the grass had never hit her.

  Milena was whirled up and over the fence, as if by a cyclone. She was dumped, back where she belonged, on the other side of the gate. Her mother swept through it, and closed it, barred it. Milena could only see the columns of her trousered legs. She was struck again, across her bottom, and spun around by her shoulders. Howling with horror, her nose and mouth and eyes clogged, Milena was forced against her will to look at her mother. She looked at her with the mercilessness of a child.

  There was this tall grey thing. Its body worked in completely different ways from Milena’s, all sharpness and angles. When it moved, there was a nauseating, lurching moment of hesitation. It was deciding. Have I moved into the future yet? Am I still in the past?

  Where, where is my Now?

  It never quite located itself. It would stop, start, stop again, flickering in and out of time, as if crossing in and out of it, never quite landing in Now.

  As if in a dream, when the worst thing is about to happen and cannot be prevented, the infant began to look up, tracking up the dry wall of the legs, the lumpy sweater with the long extensors for arms, spider’s arms. And the hands! They were riddled with veins and stick-like inner workings. They were not chubby and soft and round and accepting. The very skin of them was harsh, worn, as if it had grown a shell. The hands looked like crabs, hungry, working.

  Then up to the face.

  And the infant Milena saw all the desolation there, and she burst into fresh wails and cries of horror.

  The face was wrinkled and stretched and bony, blasted with dryness and lipstick. The eyes were dead, as if someone had tied a mask across them. The only thing in them was baffled loss, helplessness, and anger, anger and sorrow. The flesh hung, exhausted by the battle against itself and the world. The flesh began to shake, like the trees.

  And Milena’s mother suddenly crouched down into a tight bundle, as if trying to become a child again herself, as if she herself were a child needing to be comforted. The crabs of her hands scuttled across Milena’s back, and pulled Milena to her. Milena felt slimy tears across her own innocent cheek, and felt her mother quake with a loss that was beyond Milena’s understanding.

  Milena felt the strange, inextricable tangle with her mother, and felt the loss beyond naming, and Milena began to cry too, for everything: for her mother, for her father, for the love and the pain and the warfare between them, and for the world. Beyond the fence, the fields still glowed. The gate was barred.

  ‘It’s called,’ said Milena the director, ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters.’

  She was sitting in the Zookeeper’s office. She was very concerned about her new grey suit. She was sitting crosslegged on stuffed bags, and the knees of her new trousers would bag and crease. She worried about marks on cloth and braced herself for the reaction of the people around her.

  They stared back at Milena, all expression on their faces suppressed. They sat on the bags too. The bags were called Pears, and the people were pear-shaped, pears on Pears, their stomachs ballooning outwards. A large boned-woman sat folded across from Milena. Moira Almasy! thought the one who remembered, startled by the change. The woman’s hair seemed less grey, her face less creased, as if she had suddenly become well after an illness. She was younger.

  Milton the assistant served tea in little cups on lacquered tables. The cups rattled and Milton insinuated with a smile. In the corner sat the Minister, now a scant but formal presence. His eyes were closed and he was perfectly still, his hands resting on his folded knees.

&
nbsp; Courage, Milena the director told herself. ‘The opera is about…’ she said, and hesitated. ‘It’s about an invasion of aliens from outer space. They look like crabs, but can talk. Well, sing. The idea comes from an old video that Thrawn McCartney saw.’

  The expression on the faces of the Pears had curdled from horror.

  ‘People like junk,’ said Milena. ‘In fact, they need junk. Junk is fun and harmless and makes no demands. People are starved of junk. Everything has been so terribly high-toned. I think if you ask the Consensus, it will tell you the same thing.’

  Milena the director glanced at the Minister. He sat unmoved, unmoving.

  ‘It’s best to let the Consensus speak for itself,’ warned Moira Almasy.

  ‘What other social benefits can you claim for this?’ asked a man in the circle. ‘Except for the fact that it is, as you say, junk?’ He had an open, likeable face, a broad smile and hair that flopped over his forehead. Charles Sheer.

  You weren’t so bad, Charlie, thought the Milena who was remembering. You just had other projects you wanted to promote. You wanted the money to go elsewhere. You didn’t think I was very talented. You were probably right.

  ‘First,’ said Milena the director, ‘no one in the cast will use viruses. This should be made very plain. People are going to become very frightened of viruses.’

  That was the easy part.

  ‘Second, it will help people with their feelings of…’ the director prayed for a delicate word, ‘…distrust for the Chinese.’

  Milena felt the room go still. There was an explosion of breath from Charles Sheer. But it is the truth, isn’t it Charlie? ‘I think you will find many people of British descent do not like the Chinese. They feel surpassed by them. Junk makes people feel good. So. This junk…’ Milena paused to gain both breath and spirit. ‘This work will be staged in the manner of classical Chinese opera. The music and the dancing will be classical Chinese opera.’

  ‘The crabs too?’ demanded Charles Sheer.

  Moira Almasy was beginning to smile.