The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  And Senior Fenton sang. Milena looked at Rose Ella, and Rose Ella cast her eyes down, fighting a grin. Senior Fenton sang a story about a delegation from a Tarty official, sent to inspect the family of a Restorer who wanted to marry his daughter. The inspectors saw the goats, and thought they were an honour guard with beards. They saw the old broken furniture and the dirty paintings. They heard the crickets living in the fireplace, commonly called Pipers, and concluded the young man had his own private orchestra hidden behind screens. They slept on straw-stuffed mattresses and declared they were the finest beds. The Tarty official was so impressed, he sent his daughter to live happily among the Restorers, thinking them wealthy indeed. For the last verse, all the Restorers rushed into the middle of the room. Milena found herself pulled by someone she did not know into their midst. She danced as best she could, hugging a book, her clogs making a sound like a factory loom. The Restorers roared with laughter and applauded her. Milena fled, back to the sidelines. She saw Rose Ella dance, her eyes shining, turning under the arched arm of Senior Fenton, like a doll on a music box.

  It was a short walk back to the Gardens, though the Gardens were a different world. Rose Ella walked back home with her. ‘How can I become a Restorer? Is there time to learn?’ Milena asked her.

  ‘If it’s right for you, there will be time,’ Rose Ella said. ‘Now good night, love. You come to see us soon.’

  Who would have thought life could suddenly turn so delicious? In front of the door to her block, Milena looked up at the stars. Rose Ella. Rose Ella, she said, over and over to herself, as she thumped up the stairs, her head wobbling from side to side to the sound of the reels. Rose Ella, Rose Ella, she thought as she lay on her little bed by the window. She could still look up and see the stars. I want to go back there, she thought. I want to be a Restorer and live in the Row. I want to knit glass, and save the old books. I want to learn how to play the pipes and I want to dance.

  It was Rose Ella she wanted to dance with. The stars seemed to spin overhead, and she fell asleep, slipping into darkness with a smile.

  All that summer, Milena visited Rose Ella. She stayed overnight at the Row, sleeping in a guest bedroom, that was stuffed with luxury. It had built-in Chinese cabinets. Milena would sit at a table, reading her books, and look up and see the doors of the cabinets. Ivory people had been inlaid in them. The people hunted or they fished or they carried bundles of grainstalks on their backs. But some of the ivory people had fallen out, leaving a hole behind them, a space that was in their shape, grey and broken, forever. Sometimes, most poignantly, their tunics or their shoes would be left behind, still in their shape, as if waiting for their return.

  Milena remembered the bathroom, which was a wonder. The bathtub was huge and stood on metal legs. The white enamel was wearing through and the great brass taps were lopsided. There was a strange metal plunger, that you had to lift up and turn to keep it raised so that the bath would drain. There was a footbath, and there was a toilet bowl that was moulded in the shape of animals and inside the basin it said in blue lettering ‘The Deluge.’ The Milena who remembered saw all of this as clearly as if she could simply turn a corner and find it all still there, real and solid.

  She remembered exploring a house by High Holborn that was being restored. Its roof had gone, and most of the floorboards. Milena and Rose Ella had to tiptoe on the foundations, the poured concrete, the rows of bricks. Yet colour still clung to the walls. Milena remembered a yellow room, with a broad band of red all around it. In the corners, where some of the ceiling was left, there were spreading plaster fans, mouldings. Just inside one of the doors, there was panelling of wood on all the walls. The wood was grey and weatherbeaten now, open to the sky and the rain. The stairwells were empty. There was only a zigzag tracing up the walls where the stairs had been. A fireplace still had its tiles. They were green with red flowers, twenty-first century Gothic. The grate had gone bright orange with rust.

  ‘People got very rich,’ said Rose Ella, leaning over it. ‘Some people. Just before it all went wrong. They lived in big houses. They had many houses, and travelled all over Britain, all over Europe, to live in them for a week, for a few days. Can you imagine that? Shall we fly my dear to Edinburgh for the weekend?’ She adopted a deep and portly voice.

  ‘Why not? What amusement,’ said Milena, imitating a Tarty wife. Together they stepped arm in arm across the missing floorboards, balancing on brick supports.

  ‘Imagine being this rich,’ said Rose Ella again.

  ‘It’s as if, if we could climb the stairs, and find a way into one of those rooms, we’d find everything back in place, with the people there. Like they didn’t know anything had changed.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Rose Ella and shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t want to end up back there. You and I would just be servants. Coming in miles every day in the train.’

  ‘Breathing poison.’

  ‘Thinking the world was going to end.’ Rose Ella suddenly stepped forward. ‘You’ve got to see this,’ she said. She pulled Milena into the next room.

  Stinging nettles grew high outside the windows. But here in this last room, the floorboards were in place, fitting perfectly. The floor was beautiful. There was no ceiling, just one huge beam all the way across the room. And still clinging to that one beam, by the purest luck, there was a huge light fitting, a kind of frozen fountain of plaster, moulded into leaf shapes, and ending with a small hole in the tip.

  ‘What is it?’ Milena asked. It looked like some kind of wasp’s nest.

  ‘It was for lights,’ said Rose Ella. ‘It was called a rose. A ceiling rose. Now, look at this, too!’

  She pulled Milena with her, into the next room and spun her around. In an arch over a broken door, a wall painting still remained. It showed a man in some kind of chariot, flying through the air, pulled by horses.

  ‘Is that an airplane?’ Milena asked, and knew it was a stupid question as soon as she had asked it. An airplane with horses, sure. But she had no viruses to show her what an airplane had looked like, and had never bothered to find a book about them. Rose Ella kept looking up, pretending that Milena had not said anything out of the ordinary.

  Beyond the broken doorway there was a pile of roof slates, all in a layered heap where they had avalanched, their edges chipped like stone age arrowheads. On the yellow walls someone had written in a kind of flourishing red marker.

  Raisa 2050

  and underneath that, in the same hand, but with smudged charcoal

  Raisa (again!) 2085

  They carefully picked their way over the heap of slates. They jumped and danced through a wall of bitter nettles. Milena stumbled over something and pulled it out. It was a tiny brass bedstead. It was all black and chewed except for one little floral ring around it, bent but still bronze-coloured. Milena suddenly could imagine it new, part of a child’s bed, a child’s bed with a duvet covered in small blue flowers. She imagined the child in it, a little girl with long brown hair, sweet and soft and innocent and privileged. She looked up at the windows, empty now and staring at the sky. What would she have thought, Milena wondered, if she had known what was coming?

  It was as if the building were a train, carrying lives with it like passengers, moving at high speed until it hit the barriers. Then there was wreckage.

  Rose Ella’s father went off one summer morning early, in a wagon train. He and seven other men were off to Cumbria to fetch new stone. All the Row was gathered to see them off. Everyone waved. Milena had come early to wave as well. Rose Ella wept, though she couldn’t say why. She had some kind of bad feeling. Something awful could happen on the road to Cumbria.

  For the next month, there were still dances in the Row, with fewer fathers to dance with. The music became sadder. Milena remembered Mala, playing her fiddle. The fiddle was tucked under her chin, and her eyes were faraway, remembering, and the sound of the fiddle was high and sad and sweet, coaxing out the heart of the old songs.

  It was the music of home. Mil
ena felt she had found a family, a people, a place. She thought she had found a future as well.

  The ocean currents were unstable. The Gulf Stream moved back and forth. Bleak, blasted summers could be followed by howling winters, choked with snow.

  Towards the end of that summer, it rained. Milena spent whole days in the Row, reading books, hearing the rain on the roof while Rose Ella knitted and her sister made immortal flowers. Paving stones dropped underfoot, spurting up mud. The ground was a muddy morass. The turf in the parks were as springy as mattresses. The trees hung their drenched and heavy leaves low, dripping water.

  Then one evening, the bells began to ring. They all began to ring, every bell in the City. There were rivers of sound flowing in the air.

  A pattern of three rings called for a doctor. Two warned of fire, and one chime with a beat of silence signalled a flood. These bells had no pattern. They were a continual ringing of alarm.

  There was a bell at the corner of Gower and Torrington. Milena could see it from her bedroom window. Tykes were still ringing it, when she heard hooves. A crier came galloping out of Gower Street. She did not dismount. The crier stood up in her stirrups and bellowed in a clear and penetrating voice, ‘Everyone please listen. There is a hurricane coming. There is going to be a hurricane tonight.’

  The Tykes asked the woman something. She looked down and looked up, and answered to everyone, ‘The Balloons have seen it, and it is coming. A hurricane is on its way. You have about four hours. Please nail shut all shutters. Remove loose material from the streets. Take shelter. Take supplies of food with you. Thank you.’ Then, vermilion-cheeked, the woman sat down, and hauled on the reins to turn the horse around. Milena heard the hooves retreat.

  The Senior of the Gardens ordered all furniture to be piled up against the windows. Brave Tykes with nails in their mouths, edged along ledges to hammer bamboo over windows. Clothes and bedding were carried down into the lightwells. The doors were closed and locked. Fire drill was observed. Wardens searched each room before hammering shut the doors.

  Then, huddled together in the core of the building, everyone waited. They looked up the lightwells at the sky. The clouds were yellow, full of dust. The wind shook at first, with a sound a bit like a window shaking. Then it began to moan, across the opening of the well, blowing it like some musical instrument.

  The wind slammed down the lightwell with sudden spurts like a fist. There began to be the sound from somewhere of things falling, crashes and booms and spreading tinklings of glass.

  The children gathered together under blankets, holding each other’s hands.

  I should have gone to the Row, thought Milena. I should be with them. And she hoped that Rose Ella, and Mala, and Senior Fenton would all be all right. But most of all, she thought of Rose Ella.

  Milena saw birds overhead against the sky. She saw them in flock, peeling away in spirals. Then she saw that they were four-cornered. They were resin tiles torn away from the roof.

  The network of bamboo poles against the walls began to creak. A Nurse suddenly threw herself against the children, gathering them up. Her wrist caught under Milena’s chin and crowded her backwards. Milena was about to yelp in protest, when all the drainage system rose up from the walls.

  It spilled water. Huge droplets clattered on the concrete. The shafts of bamboo caught on themselves; they were twisted around, wrenched; they split apart in strands. The system rose up in a tangle, and seemed to draw a breath; then fell down into the lightwell, an avalanche of bamboo spears.

  From the safety of the basement corridors, the children squealed.

  The rain began, great lashings of it, moving like ghosts in the air, against a fluorescent sky. Nestled amid the foundations, the children heard things being driven into the walls above them. They could hear a grating sound, and a spreading crackle like lightning moving through stone. They felt a click. The click sounded in their vertebrae, just at the base of their skulls. ‘Ooooh,’ said all the children in wonder.

  Water began to swirl around the drains in the floor of the lightwell, frothing white as it slipped down. Wreckage was swept over the drains. They began to back up. Very suddenly, Milena’s feet were wet. A sheet of water extended itself down the basement corridor. The children made sounds of dismay and disgust. Those who had been sitting, stood up crying or laughing.

  They would have to stand all night. Fear and exhilaration both faded. It was wearisome having to stand, wet and cold. Water rose up over the tops of their shoes. The steady whirring of the wind made them sleepy. They nodded their heads and longed to be able to lie down. Sudden batterings startled them and made them jump. Some of them wept with exhaustion. The Nurses shushed and tutted and held them and called them darlings and babes. Some of them wept too, for their own lost homes, their parents. Their parents seemed to speak out of the howling wind.

  The rain eased, the flood retreated. The children sat down in puddles, too tired to care, and the Nurses stroked their heads until they fell asleep, moaning like the wind.

  Milena thought of Rose Ella and was suddenly awake.

  The sky over the lightwell was a silver-grey, cloudy but full of light. Everyone else was still asleep, a tumble of arms and legs. Milena stepped out from under the arches onto the floor of the well.

  A train wreck. Bamboo lay in twisted heaps. There had been a shower of glass and tiles. The walls were bare in patches. The roof showed naked timber, still looking fresh and cream-yellow at its heart.

  Milena went to the door of the staircase, and when she pulled it open, a shower of glass crystals poured out, down from the staircase, over her feet. She shook her shoes and climbed up over glass and wood and lumps of plaster.

  The walls of the stairwell were cracked in places and there was a light scattering everywhere of dust and rubble. She turned the corner of the stairway, leading to the front door. The corridor was full of leaves and branches, as if invaded by vegetation. A tree had fallen into the Child Garden.

  Milena stood looking at its curtains of leaves at her feet, and the jigsaw-puzzle bark. ‘Oh no,’ she whispered heartstruck. It was her tree, the Tree of Heaven. The wind had pulled it down. Oh no, oh no, she kept thinking, not my tree, not my beautiful tree. She stepped through its broken branches that still smelled of sap and green wood. Leaves brushed her face like tender hands.

  A great gash had been torn through the front of the building where the tree had fallen. The doorway was gone. Stone and brick and bars of twisted metal lay all around the tree. Milena climbed up onto the trunk, where the main branches met and looked down its length. Around the base of the tree, a halo of roots arched up above the ground.

  This far, she thought, it used to be this far down to the ground. When it stood.

  She walked along its trunk, out from under the unsteady wall of the building. She stood in the middle of the street. Her bedroom had been wiped away. Someone’s bedstead lay half buried in rubble, twisted and flattened. Lengths of bamboo had been driven into the walls as if they were hammered nails. The shutters had been torn away, and all the windows broken.

  Milena thought of her tree, how tall it had stood, how it had been the first thing she had seen every day. She murmured for it, out of pity. ‘Tree. Oh, tree.’

  She had not known that a tree could take root in you as well as in the soil, and that when it was uprooted, it was from your life as well as from the ground, as if it were pulled out of your own breast. Poor tree, full of wet leaf, in high wind, in damp weak soil. And you had stood so long, for a century or more so tall.

  Milena wandered dazed in too many clothes, all her clothes worn at once, coat and jumpsuit and squelching boots. All the scaffolding was gone, all the windows. The old weak buildings of London had fallen as well. They lay stretched and broken across the streets. If they still managed to stand, their upper floors were indecently exposed. Disorder embarrassed them, made them look foolish. A cart with no wheels half-hung out of a dignified old room. The polished doors, the moulded pla
ster, the glass of the sash-cord windows were scattered like cards. The work of the Restorers had been undone.

  Milena walked down Gower Street to the Row.

  The roof was gone. There was old furniture all about Bedford Square. Already the Restorers were picking mournfully through it, shaking their heads, scratching them. Women stepped out over rubble, over fallen beams, carrying tea. Oh no, Milena thought again. Not this too. Not the beautiful Row, with its beautiful things. Milena’s feet slipped on wood panelling. Hay from the stables were distributed in drifts, like snow. Two of the fathers stood side by side, unmoving.

  ‘They’ll have to give it all over to the Reefers now,’ one of them said. ‘Bloody Coral.’

  ‘Milena!’ wailed a voice. ‘Oh Milena, Milena!’

  It was Rose Ella. The two girls ran to each other and hugged each other, and encouraged by each other, burst into tears, and sobbed, shaking in each other’s arms.

  ‘Oh Milena, it’s gone. It’s all gone. It’s all broken.’ Rose Ella’s lip was torn, black with dried blood, and tears were like snail trails on her cheeks.

  ‘Our beautiful house!’ exclaimed Milena.

  ‘Come on, my love, have some tea,’ said Rose Ella. They helped each other like two old women, across the ruin of the square to the tea. There was smoke from somewhere. A cooking fire? Milena hoped so. She was hungry and cold.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Rose Ella. ‘You stay here with us, eh?’

  So, under canvas, thrown up to keep out the rain, Milena went to live, finally and briefly with Rose Ella.

  One wing of the Row was still in place. All the children were bundled up together in rooms, to sleep together on mattresses. Milena was shaken, made truly insecure by the blast. Her life had been completely overturned twice before. Somehow, that made her weaker, not stronger. Her teeth rattled. They had not done that since her mother had left her, bereft and alone among strangers. Milena was back in that blank, black unremembered time. Her fingers were dirty, there was no water to wash. She was frightened. She hid from people. She just wanted Rose Ella and her family, no one else. She hid from the Nurses of the Child Garden. She saw them coming, picking their way over the fallen plaster, on the second day. She darted back, and nipped into a cupboard under a staircase. She pulled fallen curtains over herself. She heard Rose Ella say: ‘Oh I’m so sorry! We should have told you, Milena came here to stay with us. Oh, this is awful! You must have been looking all this time.’ Rose Ella called for her. ‘Lena? Milena? I don’t think she’s here.’