Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Peterpaul reached out towards her to help her sit. He took such exaggerated care to lower her gently that Milena wanted to smile. There had been just a little ill will when she had asked Peterpaul to leave the Comedy. Dante was not an Everyman, and could not be played as one. She had worried about it for weeks, losing sleep, before she finally told Peterpaul over lunch at the Zoo. She was replacing him with Jason, the waspish apothecary from the Babes’ production of Falstaff. She explained, and Peterpaul had said nothing for the rest of the meal. She learned later that he wanted to reply in the funeral music from Peer Gynt and was too embarrassed. He was not angry; he was very, very disappointed. He might also have been a little relieved.

So we’ve all lost the Comedy. Peterpaul didn’t sing it. Mike’s pregnant so someone else is riding the Bulge. And I’m dying. Someone other than Milena Shibush is pumping out the images every night into the sky. There’s not a breath of live performance about it now. It’s a recording. And only the first two books; we only had time to do the first two books. You can’t call it a Comedy if you only do the first two books: it ends in Purgatory. Well, thought Milena with a smile, a lot of people have said watching it every evening is pure hell. She settled onto the chair and reached across to take hold of Mike’s hand. Oh, it was good, just to sit and feel the sun on her face. Her Rhodopsin skin tingled with the light: she could feel the yellow reflection from the arms of the bamboo folding chair and the warm green reflections of the grass and the sudden stab of orange from the grit of the football pitch. We can almost see with our skins, she thought, her eyes closed. I can almost feel the clouds overhead on my arms.

Little Berry was singing, a far from aimless song. His voice was like a cherubim’s, inhuman. It was an infant’s voice singing complex and beautiful music with perfect pitch, perfect tone. It was not innocent. It was unsettling, the voice of another kind of human being. And the song was so strange, as well. It seemed to be about the day itself, the trees, the sound of the tennis balls on racquets, the sunlight. But there was something wary in it too, something defensive. What, wondered Milena, does little Berry have to defend? He must know Singers are different. But people are not unkind to them, well, hardly unkind any longer. Then Berry stopped singing. Milena opened her eyes, and found that Berry had been looking at her, dead at her, at her face. I scare him, she thought.

He was wide-eyed, solemn, his mouth pulled down at the corners. Was he about to cry? Milena was about to say to the Princess: Berry’s worried about something. Then she decided to find out what it was. She tried to Read him. Usually infants could not be Read. Either they were too blank, or too different from adults for the reading to make sense. Milena could only get a dim sense of what Berry was feeling. Berry was a jumble of song. The songs were secret. Berry did not sing them around adults. The songs were about his world, and his world was like an egg that he was hatching. He was trying to keep it warm. This tender world, protected by secret song. Now it was Milena’s turn to be disturbed.

He’s trying to defend it from us. Well, children always have secrets. Milena tried to dismiss it from her mind. She suddenly felt unutterably weary. I have a disease to fight. Little Berry must fight battles of his own. Except that it did not feel in the midst of the tangle of song as though it were his battle alone.

Milena drifted into sleep, or in a state enough like sleep for her friends to call it that and not feel too disturbed. They spoke in whispers. Berry had been told to stop singing in case he woke Aunty Milena. He kept on singing in his head and Milena heard the music as if in a dream.

She woke up after a time feeling very thirsty. She had been breathing through her mouth. There was a dull ache, all the way from the surface of her eyes back through to the back of her brain.

Oh don’t say I’m ill, she thought. Don’t make me be ill. Let me have this day. It is such a perfect day. Please. I don’t want to be carried back, I don’t want to vomit, I don’t want any pain. Not today. Tomorrow. Tomorrow the sky will be grey, and we won’t be all together.

‘Are you all right, Milena?’ asked Mike, rising in his chair, giving her hand a little shake.

‘Yes,’ she said. No point pretending to be asleep.

She opened her eyes. They were full of a clear, sticky moisture, that refracted the light into rainbows. There were nameless shapes of light, rainbows dancing all around them, swirls of light, beating, like wings.

She opened her eyes and she was in another world.

I know that! I know that place! Milena remembering suddenly sat up and yelled . I know what it is now! I know where I am!

I’m really ill, thought Milena who had been a director. This is the start of a new sickness. But she didn’t mind. She was smiling.

The world was made of light, light exchanging light, light going in and out like breath, the breath rising up from the Earth into clouds, clouds edged with all light, light in all colours, white, fading to ice blue, swirls of ice crystals in the breath of the world.

Hallelujah. Hosanna.

Shaky, smiling, Milena stood up. She stood up and began to run across the grass. She wore sandals; she could feel the swish of grass against her toes; she could feel the stream of air, fresh from the respiration of the plants, the trees, the grass, the breath going in and out of her, the light on her skin, striking Rhodopsin, breaking it apart, making sugar, sugar and sodium that sent nerves flashing, her seeing, dancing skin, rippling like waves with the light.

The ground had knees and elbows, and outstretched arms, and suddenly Milena had fallen forward with delight into them. She stared about her with delight.

‘Milena! Ma!’ the adults were calling behind her.

Everything was shielded, everything was protected by an armour of light. She looked at her arm, and saw the light rising out of her as well as into her. She looked up and she caught the trees, turning away, away from her like the Bees, orienting, disorienting.

Milena laughed. ‘Whoo-hooo!’ she cried, and kicked with her feet.

The adults were upon her.

‘Ma? Ma? Are you all right?’ cried Cilia.

Milena rolled over, and the shock of seeing Cilia took her breath away. Cilia’s face had fallen in on itself. It was more of a death’s head than her own. The hollow eyes were exhausted with the strain, the strain of playing nurse. Tell me to fickit off if you want to, thought Milena.

Berry squatted beside her, leaning into her line of sight. He was grinning now. He looked dead into Milena’s eyes, and Milena who was no longer a director thought: he understands. Milena who had been a director looked at him instead, and smiled. His returning gaze was steady.

‘Why did you run like that?’ Cilia demanded. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

‘We’re all hurt. But not hurt by the fall.’ She thought she meant her own fall, into the grass, the welcoming grass. Then she thought she maybe meant something else as well. Milena lolled in the grass, ran her bare arms across it. Ohhhhhhh! The beautiful grass.

The grass knew. It orientated itself towards her.

‘I think,’ she said thickly, as if drunk. ‘I think I’m becoming a Bee.’ She believed it.

A cure that makes you well, not ill.

‘Goddamn viruses,’ chuckled Milena. ‘Why do they feel so good?’

‘Oh, Milena,’ said Cilia, weary, worn, taking her hand. It was a lot to bear for Cilia, who had never thought about death or its coming.

‘There is a thread, a golden thread, that connects us to Life,’ said Milena. ‘And we keep making it thinner and thinner. If it ever breaks then we all will the, and take the world with us. And we just keep spinning it out, thinner and thinner,’ Milena was grinning. She held up her arms and looked at them.