Child Garden (30 page)

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 sticklike 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 that was 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 suspended. 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.

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.

'Of course,' said Milena. 'There are many precedents in the classical tradition of giant singing beasts — dragons for example. The spaceship will look like a Chinese dragon, in fact. It will land in the main courtyard of the Forbidden City. These will all be holograms created by Thrawn McCartney. Uh. No one has hologrammed scenes on this scale before, or from such a distance. We propose to use Hyde Park as the main stage. This will give us a chance to use to the full the new mind-imaging technology.' Milena coughed. 'The spectacle,' she said hopefully, 'should have some curiosity value.'

'Ms Shibush,' said Charles Sheer. 'I am stunned. You have surpassed yourself. This makes your efforts to stage all of Dante seem almost credible.'

That is the general idea, thought Milena to herself. We understand each other, Charlie. There is a bond between enemies too.

The Minister sat still, without movement, as if the whole universe turned around him. On the hessian screens there were slashes of green, cartoon reeds reduced to one dead message. The screens were covered in blackheads of dust.

For you keepers of the Zoo, everything must be worthy and have high purpose. For you everything must be part of the advancing social schedule.

Me, I'm doing it all for Rolfa. And the Consensus — what does it want?

'It does tie in with what we were discussing earlier,' said Moira Almasy in a low, quiet voice.

All around them, the cartoon reeds slowly rotted.

'I'm going to make a garden,' said Thrawn McCartney, in a voice that was supposed to be like a child's.

There was a new machine. It took images from people's heads and turned them into light. Reformation technology it was called. The Restoration had led to it.

All the light in the Thrawn McCartney's room was muddled, in disorder. It heaved in currents like oil and water that would not mix. An orchid, half-remembered, swam into queasy existence. It attached itself to a bush with branches like serpents. The branches writhed in place then suddenly froze. They and the flower were held in place for a moment, and then faded, forgotten. Grass gathered like a slowly poaching egg, a bleary smudge of green. There was a hedge, a few leaves pinpricked out of the mass of it. The sky was full of impossible sunset colours.

I want to get out, thought Milena the director. She stood with Thrawn in some colourless centre, a point of view. There was no air, no sound, no clarity of image. Is this all you can remember, thought Milena, of trees and plants? Can you really see no more clearly than this?

Milena found it nearly impossible to be honest around Thrawn. She would smile tolerantly, when all she really felt was anger. She would offer compliments as if to placate. She had become frustrated with herself. Why, Milena wondered, can't I speak?

Thrawn placed an image of herself in the garden. At last there was something that Thrawn could see clearly. It was not Thrawn as she was. This Thrawn was tall and lissome and wore a spotless white dress. Her face had been subtly altered. It was beautiful now, and it was backwards. It was a face seen in a mirror, a face with the flaws removed.

What an airy creature she was, this Thrawn, light as a feather, fleshless. The stringy, tormented tendons of her neck were gone, as was the desperate stare of starvation. This is why Thrawn never ate. She thought she could become like this creature. The creature danced, lean as a ballerina, bent over, arms like a swan's neck.

'Now this is beautiful. Isn't this beautiful?' Thrawn demanded.

The trouble with being dishonest is that it requires an ability to act. Milena could not. She shifted inside her quilted winter jumpsuit. 'We can see you quite clearly, yes,' she said.

Thrawn had sensed enough. 'This is a new technology, you know. No one has done this before.'

'Oh, I know, I know,' said Milena, as if no criticism had been implied.

'I mean here, you try it,' said Thrawn. 'Go on.'

She took Milena by the shoulders and stood her in front of the Reformer. You had to stand in the point of view. Milena felt something in her head drain away, as if light, right in the centre of her head was gone. As if it now resided in the machine.

'Don't be scared,' said Thrawn, arms folded, shaking her head in pity at poor Milena. 'Just try to imagine something and see what you come up with.'

Milena had been rendered self-conscious, as she always was in Thrawn's presence. It was difficult for her to imagine anything. So she tried to remember instead.

A garden.

She remembered an autumn day, the smell of loam and fallen leaves, and geese overhead, ducks fluttering their wings against still water. She remembered water, and the rose bushes, with their spotted leaves, their last roses, nibbled by the shorter days.

She remembered Rolfa, in Chao Li Gardens. She remembered the rose Rolfa had picked for her. The shock as Rolfa broke the law. She remembered the weight of the rose as it bobbed in her hand, and the scratching of the thorns against her fingers. She remembered the single, round, focusing drop of dew, catching the light.

And suddenly the
rosa mundi
was in the room. It filled it with huge, dappled shaggy pink petals, curling brown at the tip, but soft and slightly rippled nearer the centre. It bobbed, poised for a moment.

As if something had finally been set free, there was an avalanche of flowers. Milena did not know if she were imagining them in her head or seeing them in the room. What she saw and what she imagined were one and the same thing. She could feel them spill out of her head, as if some great living weight were pushing out flowers, giving birth to them. They tumbled through the room slowly, a turning kaleidoscope of flowers, remembered flowers each one different.

There was a garland of lime blossom in summer, each flower spinning like a star. There were blowzy hollyhocks, liberated from their tall stems, showering their loose, purple petals. Arum lilies lifted up their heads in a chorus, their white hands holding out yellow stamen. They were mixed with tobacco flowers, and crowned with thorny, white ailanthus.

The kaleidoscope turned. There was a tumult of branches overhead in the wind, seem from many perspectives at once all jumbled, fragmented like Picasso, reaching dizzyingly up into a sky, blue behind them, that fell away to heaven. Confusingly, the branches went down below as well as if the sky were the earth. The branches plunged through grass, down into clouds. Somehow the water of the clouds fed them. The grass was blown in waves. The grass came closer with attention. Each cell was revealed in the light. There was a stirring of life within each of the cells, a green movement of protein in and out of their inner structures. There were beetles as polished as jewels, frozen in the attention of the light, waiting for it to swerve away from them. There was a thin crust of earth giving birth to small, wriggling creatures. They were mild magenta. And the green stems of the rose bush rose, like ladders towards the sun.

And suddenly Milena was inside the dew drop, the focus of light. Light burned blearily in it, catching on motes of life, swimming in it. The lens of the surface of the dew drop turned the world upside down. A face was refracted in it. It was a human face with nut brown skin and black, liquid eyes, and there was a smile, and the face was about to speak...

Milena was pushed. With a lurch, it was all snatched away.

Milena looked about her, dazed. She was in a rather small, messy room, with the flowing walls of a Coral Reef shelter.

Thrawn was staring at her, outraged.

'I had no idea you were a horticulturalist.' she said. Her voice was acid, her face sour and straggly with panic. Her chest rose and fell with deep, angry breathing. 'This is my equipment,' she said, very quietly. 'You do not hog my equipment.'

Milena was still confused, snatched from her flowers. 'How long was I on it?' she asked.

'How long does not matter. I let you use delicate, new equipment and you treat it it... like... like.' Thrawn shook her head, at a loss for words.

I was better than she was, thought Milena. Oh God. She's angry because I was better than she was.