Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

A tall man in a black coat was coming towards them. He ambled, hands in his pockets. It was a windy day and the tails of his black coat flapped. The Snide had a lean and dreamy face, with hooded eyes and a slight smile. His hair was like a pale mist, disordered and thinning.

Milena forced herself to look away from him, but she still saw the face in her mind. She hated it. It was sly and soft at the same time, sleepy, almost gentle, except for something glinting within the slits of the puffy eyes.

Think of something else! Milena told herself.

Me, an’t shall please you. Milena remembered one of her 13 lines. I am Anthony Dull. Nothing happened. Think of his coat, she told herself, what did it cost, how many labour-hours? Count them. The viral clock in her mind refused to work.

Milena had spent a lifetime beating down the viruses. They now deserted her. In her terror, she could not dredge up one of them.

Shakespeare. T. S. Eliot, Jane Austen. It is a truth universally acknowledged, she recited to herself, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. There was no answering spark of life.

The walkway was elevated and narrow; they would have to pass the Snide. ‘Ack!’ exclaimed the King, loudly. ‘We’ve taken the wrong walkway.’

All the actors turned at once, and walked in the opposite direction. The Snide followed. Milena could hear the clattering of his shoes behind her on the resin surface. Wooden clogs. He wears them so that people will hear and be afraid.

Marx! Milena thought, where is Marx, they must have fed me Marx by the gram. Lenin, Mao, Chao Li Song. All right, music, then. Brahms, Elgar, anything. She began to hum Das Lied von der Erde. That’s not a virus, she remembered, I learned that myself.

‘Milena,’ called the Snide. His voice was light and mellifluous. ‘I’m singing to you, Milena. Can you hear me?’

Milena could feel terror seeping out of her, as if she were a leaking balloon. She heard his shoes, clip-clopping like horses’ hooves. They were beside her now. The actors walked faster, looking at their feet, not knowing what else to do. Surely this was illegal! Of course it was illegal, but where was the Law? The Law was everywhere, invisible and alive. But there were no policemen.

‘Eastern Europe, Milena,’ said the Snide. ‘Do you remember the trip on the train? You went to St Malo. An island with walls. Do you remember the steamer, Milena? Rocking back and forth on the sea? Do you remember the chugging sound and the sailwomen, all in stripes?’

Milena remembered none of it. There was not even a sense of echoing, of familiarity.

Milena glanced to one side and saw him, walking with them, smiling. Her eyes darted back to the ground in front of her like frightened birds.

Me, an’t shall please you. I am Anthony Dull!

‘I can feel you, Milena,’ said the Snide. ‘Do you remember the Child Garden? Do you remember Senior Dodds who taught you English? Do you remember your first day there? June 23rd? It was raining and you were all alone. You were just four years old, and they made you ill with a virus to make you speak. Do you remember that?’

For Milena, the Child Garden had been destroyed. Something had happened to it. All she could remember was being ill at ten years old. She could remember the sudden weight of new knowledge. The old viruses began to stir.

The Princess spoke, angrily. ‘Go away and leave us alone!’

The Snide stepped in front of her. The Princess had to stop walking. ‘Milena?’ the Snide asked, grinning hopefully, leaning down to look into her eyes.

Milena felt giddy. She swayed as she walked. It was as if the ground beneath her lurched. She stood still beside the Princess as if to help her. Instead of fear, Milena had a strange and most complete sensation of maddening ennui. An irritable boredom engendered by viruses rose up all around her like steam from the pavement.

Milena remembered words, German words, badly printed in Gothic lettering.

Milena remembered the reading of them. She remembered someone reading them in a very small, very cold room, smoking cigarettes. She had rolled them herself, straggles of tobacco in thin papers that were held together with spit. Her legs were limply fleshed and useless. She sat in a wheelchair, by a window, on the ground floor of a block of flats. Just outside her window, noisy children were playing with a ball.

Milena began to walk again, but in her mind, she was sitting in a wheelchair.

‘You’re not Milena,’ said the Snide, gently, to the Princess.

Words on top of another page — Chapter One: The Commodity.

A forest of associations sprang up, thoughts and references neatly husbanded, ready for use. The thought came to the person who was reading: this will show the amateurs.

1. THE TWO FACTORS OF THE COMMODITY: USE-VALUE AND VALUE (SUBSTANCE OF VALUE AND MAGNITUDE OF VALUE).

The one who was reading sucked in smoke, past teeth that tasted of tobacco, down a leathery throat. Milena, who did not smoke, coughed.

The Snide looked up at her.

‘Milena?’ he asked.

Badly printed words were scrolling up through her mind, and embedded in them were aching joints and a tight band of nicotine poisoning across the chest and iron determination and icy pride. Embedded in the reading was an entire way of responding to the world, another sense of self. Me, thought the one who read, they chose me to read this. I understand it better than anyone. I am reading it for everyone. No more amateurs, ever again. They will all understand. There was a tingling in the middle of the cortex, a dancing of receptive virus, waiting to be turned into Marx. The one who read let out a triumphant blast of smoke from her nostrils. She was alive again, though she did not know it.

‘I don’t know anyone called Milena,’ said Milena, quite truthfully. ‘My name is Heather. What do you want?’

‘You like Marx,’ said the Snide, to let her know he could read her.

‘Never met him,’ replied Heather. ‘I wouldn’t say I like his books. They’ve eaten up my life. But I do understand them.’

Bourgeois fluff, she thought. God, I could tear you in half.

The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach or the imagination, makes no difference.

The use-value is intrinsic. Like the value of music.

‘Does anyone know anyone called Milena?’ Heather demanded of the actors. Heather’s voice was harsh and her smile, meant to disarm, was fixed and chilling. Milena saw the face in memory, long and freckled with huge front teeth, black-framed spectacles, and a thickness of the neck that was the first sign of the physical distortion below.

‘They do know Milena, but they’re trying not to think,’ said the Snide. Suddenly he chortled. ‘They’re all churning over their lines. They’re all seeing exactly the same play in their heads. Except for you.’

Heather was without pity. She had grown up a cripple in Belfast and pity was her enemy, pity was the thing that had held her back. What she wanted was respect, and if respect was not forthcoming, then she wanted fear. She had learned how to get it.

Heather stared into the eyes of the Snide, and gave him the full blast of her contempt. Crawler, money-snake, you have a talent and what do you do with it? Then she showed him, carefully and clearly in her mind, one of the things that she might do to him if he did not leave. She would hit him in the throat. He would swallow his Adam’s apple, and choke.

‘My God, you’re scary,’ he chuckled. ‘I think I love you.’

Heather was not above being flattered, and she recognised submission when she saw it. She chuckled too, warmly. ‘Fuck off,’ she said using the old word, and made a motion of brushing something aside.