Child Garden (33 page)

The Medicine was the preserve of the young. It was where all the Estate children, orphaned or not, were trained. It had once been a school of tropical medicine. The building stood on a corner of Malet Street. Milena stopped and looked at it, unwilling to go inside.

There were ornamental balconies all across its grey stone face. On the balconies were gleaming Egyptian sculptures of fleas and rats and lice. The children kept them polished. They were one of the few things Milena liked about the Medicine.

On the other corner was the Tacky Shop, where one resin tool could be melted into another. The wife of the Tacky was turning a bamboo pole round and round in her hand, lowering an awning over her display. It was going to be hot; the resin goods might go soft and warp. The Tacky Wife turned and gave Milena a happy grin.

Milena grinned back. It really did seem to her that adults were nicer than children. There was a hiss of steam inside the shop. Then the Tacky's husband came out, a mask over his face, and heavy gloves over his hands. He held up a newly pressed pitcher. Its mouth had sagged to one side. His wife laughed, and shook her head, and placed a hand on her husband's hairy chest.

It must be possible to live a life, Milena thought. It must be possible to be happy. Suddenly she wanted to be an adult. Have a nice little Place and a nice little husband. Milena wanted to be like everyone else.

What would her Reading show? A vast blank of ignorance? Would they have her loading garbage sacks? Maybe they would have one final load of virus to burn its way into her. Maybe it would kill her, like her father. Maybe that was it. Maybe Mami had lied. Maybe her father was like her, beyond education, and that's why they were in hiding in the hills of Czechoslovakia.

Milena did not think of her mother with respect. She thought of her with a kind of exasperated fondness, as if she had been a very foolish woman. Coming all that way to England to find freedom. As if England were free. She had gone to the Restorers looking for the kind of debate and discussion she had so loved back home. She had thought that people who worked with books and history would also have ideas. She did not believe that they could be so mild and so uninterested in life. The loneliness had killed her. She had died, leaving Milena here, alone among the Restorers. Milena had no one else to blame. She turned and went inside the Medicine.

She was late. That was a symptom of Milena's disorder as well. Other people had a virus which told them the time. The other children were already hard at work. The Medicine was built around a large brick courtyard. It was hot, so classes were being held in it, outside in the shade. Work groups had already claimed tables. They hammered their copper plates, or stitched their leather seat covers. Some of them were cooking their breakfast, boiling gruel on little charcoal stoves, and arguing with their parents about whose turn it was to cook the evening meal.

The children worked at their own speed towards set targets. The School Nurses measured their Development. The children talked to each other as they worked, about sport or sales or sources of cotton cloth. Sometimes a School Nurse would set a Problem Race or lead a discussion. Milena wished she had brought her book to read. Books had been written by people like her. She could sense that in the careful, step by step links they made, and in the simplicity of their thinking.

Milena was in the Physical Development Group — the Lumps. The Lumps were all to some degree mentally retarded. The Nurses did not have high hopes for the Lumps. Most of them would be Placed as humpers. The Lumps were the last to leave the state of childhood. It was not fair to send ten year olds out into the world to drag rocks. After their Placing, they were brought on for a year or two with injections and weight-lifting.

Milena saw them at a table. There was no mistaking the Lumps. One or two of them were huge males, fat but heavily dependent, rather tame. They loomed over the tables, smiling as always. They smiled hopefully, offering the world their good nature until their good nature was disappointed. Then, and only then, the boys would become dangerous.

It was the girls that Milena had the greater difficulty understanding or dealing with. The girls laughed at Milena. They affected a wild superiority; they needed someone to whom they felt superior.

Milena sat down, boldly, on the concrete instead of the bench. The Lumps slapped each other's shoulders and giggled.

'There are benches, Milena,' said one girl called Pauline. Her face was flat.

'Too tired to climb up here?'

Milena hated the Lumps, hated having to be with them. She knew that she herself could not learn, but she thought that the Lumps were simply stupid.

She could see the congenital damage in their faces; their eyes were sunken, there was a coarseness to their mouths. The poor Lumps. The viruses had filled their heads with Shakespeare and the Golden Stream of philosophy that led to Chao Li Song.

The School Nurse approached. Milena saw that there was someone new with her, another Nurse.

'Lo, team,' she said, greeting them by placing her hands on their shoulders. 'Everybody happy?'

'Milena's sitting on the ground!' exclaimed Pauline, her eyes like goggles, so thick were her artificial corneas.

'Perhaps she's more comfortable there,' said the School Nurse, glancing at Milena. The Nurses were a little frightened of Milena. She could not learn, but she was far from stupid. She would say things that politeness would normally forbid. The School Nurse was called Ms Hazell, and Milena thought she was beautiful. She had sun-deepened purple cheeks and hazel eyes, like her name. She made Milena ache to be like her, to be noticed by her.

The new Nurse with her was very pretty too — blonde curling hair and a scattering of magenta freckles. Milena's heart sank. Someone else who was pretty and happy and whole — forever beyond Milena's reach. The new Nurse smiled at her, perfect white teeth gleaming against purple skin. Milena stared back at her bleakly.

'This is the new Nurse, team,' said Ms Hazell. 'Her name's Rose Ella. Now I know Rose Ella very well because she was a child here herself. She grew up a Restorer, and was Placed here as a Nurse. So it's very nice for all of us here that she's joined us.' The School Nurse bestowed on Rose Ella a smile of real affection. The smile made Milena go desolate with longing. How did people become friends? Why was it so easy for them?

Then a Team Discussion began. It was a kind of group Problem Race, to give the Lumps practice in thinking. The School Nurse introduced the topic.

The mentally retarded, the gravely challenged, were going to discuss Derrida and Plato. It was an exercise to see if the Lumps could apply the Golden Stream to their own lives. I read Plato, thought Milena. I read Derrida. I understood hardly any of it, and can remember less.

'Now what is Derrida really talking about in his article on Plato?'

'Writing!' chorused the Lumps. Then, washed by the same viruses, they remembered other answers. Racing time, they straggled in, one after another. 'And memory. Writing as tool for memory. What's wrong with writing.'

The School Nurse smiled indulgently. 'He was asking, really, how it was that Plato could bear to write when he found writing so artificial. He thought of it as an artificial knowledge that people could lay claim to without really having experienced or learned anything.'

You always talk down to us, thought Milena. You make us jump through hoops that are nothing to do with us, and then smile so sweetly when we fall over.

'Sounds like the viruses,' said Milena. 'Just like the viruses. Plato would have hated the viruses, too.'

The School Nurse laughed. 'Very good, Milena, yes, yes he would have hated the viruses. As we all know, he and Aristotle founded the Axis of Materialist and Idealistic thinking, both of which the Golden Stream swept away. Plato believed in dictators. He certainly would have hated the Consensus, our democracy.'

The School Nurse looked pleased. Got a nibble, huh? Thought Milena. I bet you tell people there are glimmers of intelligence in my face.

'I agree with him,' said Milena.

The Lumps all laughed.

'Are you an idealist, then Milena? Do you think you are just a shadow on the wall of a cave? Perhaps you disagree with Plato and are a materialist. Perhaps you want a Materialist state, with its choice of dictatorship or capitalist, economic terrorism?' The School Nurse was still smiling. 'Compare that to an idealist state, a theocracy perhaps? Being told you are damned, and that God wants to burn you in Dante's Inferno?'

Milena was neither a materialist nor an idealist. Browbeaten, she withdrew into herself. But I know what Plato meant. All of you get everything you know for free without working for it. It isn't yours. I have to fight for every word. So maybe I am just grumpy old Plato, upset because people have a new tool that makes things too easy.

The School Nurse turned her attention to the other Lumps. 'Now how did Derrida point out how Plato resolved the contradiction of writing against writing?'

The Lumps chorused,
'Pharmakolikon.''

'Yes,' said the Nurse. 'The root for our word pharmacy. Healing drugs. What people used to call medicine. But in Plato's time it meant both poison and cure. So Plato regarded writing as a poison that could also cure.'

Milena remembered something. 'He doesn't use the word!' she yelped.

The Nurse faltered. 'That's not relevant,' she said.

'Derrida says he doesn't! Not once! Plato doesn't call writing
Pharmakolicon.
Not once. He just calls it poison.'

'Anyone like to comment?' the School Nurse said, on firm ground again.

The beaming faces turned to Milena, hunched on the ground.

'It's implicit in the culture,' said one of them.

'It can be in the text without being there.'

Milena dug her hands deeper into her armpits. 'So Derrida can make Plato say anything he wants him to say?'

The School Nurse shook her head. 'No. But he allows himself the freedom to fully understand Plato in context.'

Anger flowered inside Milena, a rich and vital growth. 'I'll tell you why Plato wrote when he hated writing,' she said. 'He wrote because he knew that he had lost. He had lost, and everyone was writing, and so he had to write. But he still hated it.'

Like I hate the viruses. But I need them, now, here, to keep up.

Plato lost? The Lumps laughed. How they laughed. Milena had got it wrong again. Plato, the great voice of Idealism did not lose. He had founded the stream of discourse that ruled for two thousand years and nearly destroyed the planet.

The School Nurse scowled and shook her head at them. 'Remember,' she said. 'Now remember, team,' she said. 'Milena has no viruses. We're to use what the viruses tell us, aren't we? What do we think Derrida would tell us about Milena?'

There was a pause. What was the right line, then? The Lumps waited to be told.

'Milena is speaking from her own personal experience. She thinks of the viruses as Plato thought of writing. She is viewing the text in her own, unique way. This is inevitable, isn't it? Milena is a reader of books, after all. One of the few we've got left, and Derrida was writing about reading as well.'

The School Nurse smiled at her with indulgence. Then she turned to Rose Ella, the new Nurse, and held out her hands, as if presenting Milena to her. The new Nurse smiled again.

Make me smile back. Go on, challenged Milena. See if you can. She turned grimly back to Ms Hazell.

'You always use that word "remember",' said Milena. 'You say, "remember, team". You never tell us to think.'

They all were silent at that. The Lumps knew everyone thought they were stupid. Milena grimly resisted feeling unkind for reminding them of that.

'That's another large topic, the difference between memory and intelligence. Let's break now. Thank you, everyone. That was a very fruitful discussion. I certainly feel like I've learned a lot.'

The Nurse leaned over the table and began to discuss each Lump's individual project. Pauline was knitting a sweater. 'Very good!' exclaimed the School Nurse and held it up.

The new Nurse, Rose Ella, approached Milena.

'Were you measuring how fast we are? I didn't see you counting,' said Milena.

'I wasn't here to time you,' said Rose Ella. She knelt down in front of Milena. She was twelve, thirteen years old. An adult.

'We're too slow, huh?'

'It must be terrible for you,' said Rose Ella, and reached out with her hand. 'You're so intelligent. And not to have a memory.'

Milena rolled her eyes. It must be hell, she thought, to be so pretty and so stupid. Leave me alone.

'Did you specialise in Learning Disabilities?' Milena asked.

Rose Ella turned around and sat on the ground next to her. 'Not particularly,' she said. 'No, there was a new emphasis when I was doing my practicals. You know, the new fashion. There are fashions in everything.'

Milena liked that. It was honest. It seemed to treat Milena with a measure of respect. 'So what's fashionable now?' Milena asked feeling herself going shy.

'Originality,' said Rose Ella. 'They're telling us to look for originality, and Develop that. Nobody's coming up with anything new. Not in science, not anywhere.'