Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

She dipped her bread into the chowder and watched the fishing fleet busy with nets and sails at the piers across Ocean Boulevard. Years and decades. This election, she would be content with a counsel post. Three years after that would be the time when she would sweep to glory as party leader. Gulls squabbled and wheeled over the open hatches of the fishing boats. Years and decades. Politics was like a sea. The manifesto was the net, the populace the catch, and she the trawlerman.

Raano Thurinnen sat himself down heavily across the table from her.

“How goes the dinner, Miss Q.?”

“Your usual estimable quality, Raani.”

“Grand. You’re on the radio in five minutes if you want to listen.”

“Can’t stand election broadcasts. I sound like a llama on them. Only spoil the folks’ appetites. You voting tomorrow?”

“Of course. For you, Miss Q.”

“Hush now, Raani. Privacy of ballot is a man’s constitutional right.”

“I’m not ashamed for everyone to know. Why, anyone disagrees with me, he can get out of my restaurant.”

“Now, Raani, democratic rights, remember? A man can hold any opinion he chooses.”

“Not in my restaurant. Why, today two punks came wandering in wearing Whole Earth Army badges, started handing out flyers, they did. Well, I’m not having that in my restaurant, so I threw them out. Got quite nasty, they did, had to butt a couple of heads for them. That girl they had with them, she tried to scratch my eyes, imagine that? I don’t know about that Whole Earth Army, Miss Q., I mean, opinions is one thing, but killings and bombings, well, something’s got to be done, hasn’t it? You will do something about that Whole Earth Army, won’t you, Miss Quinsana? Why, I’m half scared they’ll come and burn this place down: I’ve heard they’ve done that. You will do something about them, Miss Q.? You’ve got to stop them, they’re all mad, and that music they play, it isn’t good for the kids. Drives them wild. I won’t have it in here… when you get elected, I know you’ll stop it.”

“I will,” said Marya Quinsana. “You have my word on that.” Then the radio announced that there was going to be a party political broadcast on behalf of the New Party by Miss Marya Quinsana and she wondered as the music played just how many of her other election promises she would keep as surely as her promise to break the Whole Earth Army.

Now that the trees were full-grown and provided a lovely shade, Grandfather Haran spent more and more time in the garden he had made. He loved to spend time in the contemplation of things past. He thought of his boyhood in Thompson’s Falls, he thought of his first wife, Evgeny, he thought of his son’s boyhood and his son’s son’s boyhood. He thought of his adoptive daughter, turned into a wild, animal child, he thought of his granddaughter, turned into a deity against her own will, and his grandson, the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. He wondered if he would ever see him again. He thought the thoughts a man of forty-five thinks. When he thought these thoughts he liked to have his meals brought to him so that he could eat in the tranquility of his garden in undisturbed reminiscence and once or twice the Babooshka had had to come out at dusk to fetch him home.

“You should open it up to the public,” said Rael Mandella, mindful of the stuffed pockets of the pilgrims flocking to see his daughter. “The Grey Lady’s Garden of Serenity. Twenty centavos in.” Of late the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption had taken to calling her the Grey Lady.

“I will do no such thing,” said Grandfather Haran. “It is my garden, for the private personal use of my wife, myself and those guests I choose to invite.” To maintain that privacy he hired a handful of desperately impoverished Poor Children from the shantytown called Faith City that surrounded the great grey basilica and paid them to build a wall around his garden. Pleased with their industry, he erected a gate which he locked with a stout padlock and put one key into his pocket and the other on a long golden chain around his wife’s neck.

When the bustle and rush of the new Desolation Road with its entrepreneurs and vendors of religious gewgaws and rentracking hoteliers grew too much, they would lock themselves in the garden and listen to the singing of the birds and the leaping of the fish in the little stream. They would plant flowers and shrubs, for a garden is never completed while its gardener lives, and as they worked their soily-fingered way along paths and flower beds they seemed to discover parts to it they could not remember having planted: secret dells, tiny waterfalls, groves of cool trees, a maze, a sand garden, a grassy lawn with a sundial at its centre.

“Dearest wife, does it sometimes seem to you that our garden reaches out beyond the walls I have built around it?” asked Grandfather Haran. After walking for almost an hour along an intriguing flagstone path, they had come to a stone bench beneath a willow tree and here they were resting. The Babooshka looked at the sky, which seemed to her strangely soft, not like the harsh blue-black of Desolation Road at all, and full of pillowy clouds.

“Husband Haran, I think that as we have grown this garden, so this garden has grown us, and the unexpected things we are finding in it are the seeds it has sown in our imaginations.”

They sat quietly for a long time on the stone bench beneath the willow, watching the clouds, quiet with the quietness of old people who do not need to speak to communicate. As the world began to turn its face away from the sun they left the stone seat and returned by ways more wild and beautiful than they had ever trodden before to the gate in the wall. There pastry vendors and whey-faced tourists pushed rudely past them in the laneway as they locked the gate behind them.

“I am thinking that if what you say is true, then our garden may be of infinite extent and variety,” said Grandfather Haran. The Babooshka clapped her hands in delight.

“Why, husband Haran, then we must explore! Tomorrow we shall begin, yes?”

Early the next morning, before the lanes and alleys filled with strangers, the Babooshka and Grandfather Haran embarked upon their exploration of the garden. The Babooshka fastened one end of a large ball of twine to the gate and played it out. In her satchel she carried eighteen such balls, her drawing books and pencils, so that she might map the unexplored hinterland of the imagination, and two packed lunches. Grandfather Haran led the way, equipped with opticon, sextant, watch and compass. Within ten minutes of leaving the gate, husband and wife were in unfamiliar territory.

There should be a stand of accelerated-growth beech trees here,” said Grandfather Haran. “I planted them myself, I remember clearly.” Before him was a small wooded valley. Banks of rhododendrons gladdened the slopes and a small stream splashed over stones. “There are no rhododendrons here. They are over by the left of the gate… the garden, I think, must be constantly reshaping itself. Fascinating.”

“Hush,” said the Babooshka, “do you hear a voice?” Grandfather Haran strained his less-acute ears.

“Is it Rael?”

“Yes. Hush, listen. Did you hear what he said?”

“I thought I heard my son shout something about Limaal coming home.”

“He did. So, huband, shall we go back?”

Grandfather Haran let the twine run through his fingers. Behind him he could just discern the iron gate. Before him he saw the new valley and it seemed to him that beyond it a huge, virgin landscape, a land of wooded hillsides and rushing rivers, bright meadows and leaping deer.