Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

The discovery of these ways and the manifold uses of things is the work of history.

Very calmly, deliberately, Heather thought: it’s a good job he doesn’t know that Milena has gone away to Bournemouth.

‘Bournemouth?’ asked the Snide, amused.

‘How did you know that?’ said Heather, grinning her poker smile and failing to sound surprised.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air.

‘I don’t,’ replied the Snide. ‘Know it, I mean.’ He made a brushing-aside motion now. ‘Bournemouth. Perhaps I will go to Bournemouth, perhaps I won’t. But I will be back.’ As if his wooden clogs had suddenly grown roots, he stood still.

The actors walked on quickly, almost scuttling. Heather went back to reading, bound up in the reading, inherent in it.

I only hope, thought Milena safe within a cloud of thought, that I can get her to stop.

She glanced behind, and saw the Snide, still standing, buffeted by wind as if by the thoughts of other people. He was looking at her and smiling a happy smile of discovery.

That night Milena dreamed that Heather was sitting on the foot of her bed. She could see her, with the horse-mouth smile and the tiny legs, folded up under her. Heather, Heather, go away, get out, leave me alone! Heather kept on reading. The words rolled past, projected onto the walls. You will understand. You will get it right. Of course the most useful things are free, like air, and do not require labour. But value is an economic concept, a function of particular social relations.

Yes, yes, Milena answered, rolling her head from side to side.

There was a knock at the door…

Milena woke up, drenched in sweat, feverish, ill.

…a soft insinuating rapping on her door, in the dark.

Milena felt the bed beside her and it was empty. The sky beyond the window was going silver. Rolfa was gone. Rolfa would be at the market, buying food.

And the Snide had come knocking.

Good, good, let him in, let him see the empty room, no Rolfa hidden. Don’t think, she warned herself, don’t think. Milena found clothing in the dark, her hands shaking, and as she dressed, she pushed her own self, her own ego, down into the recesses. Heather floated up to the surface of her mind, like a corpse on a river.

The door opened. This was a culture that did not need locks.

‘Hello, Heather,’ said a soft, mellifluous voice. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

He moved in the darkness, unseen. There was a crumpling of the quilt. He sat on the foot of the bed, where Heather had sat.

‘You could have hit me this morning. None of the others could. You’ve broken the viruses. So have I.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘We’re alike,’ he said.

There came a shy, apologetic rapping on Milena’s door.

What the hell now? Heather snatched her hand away. Rolfa?

‘Oh my God, it’s my boyfriend,’ said Heather. She could hardly say it was her girlfriend. ‘Quick, under the bed.’ It was the only line she could think of.

‘It’s not your boyfriend,’ said the Snide. ‘It’s a girlfriend.’

Heather tried to push him under the bed anyway, and flung open the door before she had time to think.

Cilia stood there in the corridor, clutching a bamboo box. Heather kicked her in the shins, to occupy her mind.

‘The Snide is here,’ Heather told her, smiling with scorn. ‘He’s come to call. I think he’s going to make a pass.’

In the alcohol light of the corridor, Cilia’s eyes went wide with terror. She hobbled away as quickly as she could, rubbing her ankle.

‘I’ve seen this boyfriend of yours,’ said the Snide, lounging on the bed. He actually thought he was being provocative, poor lamb. ‘I saw him in your head. He sleeps right here, doesn’t he?’ The Snide gave the bed a pat. ‘Big, broad shoulders. And a beard?’

Heather just smiled and thought of dialectical materialism.

‘Ah,’ said the Snide, catching a glimpse of something else. ‘But he shaves now.’ He rolled forward onto his knees, wrapping himself in the quilt. ‘Your room is just as I imagined it,’ he said. ‘Lots of books. That’s how you break a virus. You read it for yourself. I knew you hated the viruses too. I know why you’re reading Marx. To be free. I broke the virus for Marx too,’ he boasted. ‘I wouldn’t know it if I saw it.’

He picked up a small, stained volume from the window ledge. ‘The Communist Manifesto?’ he asked. ‘No one reads it now. They want to control it. And they call tins a Marxist state.’

He was holding Rolfa’s copy of Winnie the Pooh.

‘I want you to go,’ said Heather.

‘Not until I know for certain that you do not need me,’ said the Snide, ‘as much as I need you.’

There were bells on each floor of the Shell, linked by ropes. They began to ring now, over and over. From the far end of the corridor, Cilia was shouting, ‘Fire! Fire!’

‘The building is burning down,’ said Heather.

‘No it’s not. Your friend just wants me to go. She brought you some paper so you could write your music’ He crawled towards her on the bed and took her hands. ‘I know people, Heather. I know you’re what I want. We could live together, outside the Law. Blister all the old paint of the walls. You’re a bullshit-stripper, Heather. I am a sneak. I don’t like sucking arseholes. You could save me.’

Oh God, thought Heather, another one who wants his mother.

‘OK. OK. You’re right. I need help.’

Vampire, thought Heather. All around her, across the ceiling, through the walls came the thumpings of people awakened in the night by an alarm.

The Snide looked up, dismayed. Too many people, thinking too many things at once, thought Milena. He won’t be able to read me as clearly. The quilt fell from his shoulders, and he stepped down from the bed. He gazed at her mournfully, as the light grew stronger, tall but frail-boned, not as young as he used to be, afraid.

‘I take people’s thoughts,’ he said, ‘and I weave them into tapestries. And I hang them,’ he said, ‘like in a gallery. There’s no one else to see them.’

‘Stop being a Snide,’ said Heather.

He opened the door, adjusting a broad-brimmed black hat for sinister effect, and stepped into a crowd of people in their underwear. He’s a fool, thought Heather, quite simply a fool. He heard her think it, faltering as he closed the door. The bells kept ringing. But could people love fools?

Heather waited a few minutes, to let him leave. Then she joined the press of people on the staircase. They clutched their most treasured possessions, toothbrushes or saucepans. Cilia was no longer ringing the bells. The alarm had been taken up, by each floor’s fire wardens, according to the drill. No one would be able to trace the false alarm back to Cilia.

Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that.

Value therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead, rather it transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic.

‘Oh, Cilia. Who did this?’ Milena asked.

‘Just us Vampires,’ said Cilia, shyly, pleased. ‘Just us Vampires of History.’

The all-clear, a trumpet blast, sounded. Elsewhere, in memory, Heather fixed the book to a holder on her wheelchair. Continuing to read, she began to wheel herself round and round her room for exercise.

That morning, Milena intercepted Jacob on the stairs. ‘Look at what I’ve got!’ she said and held up the paper. ‘Jacob! We can write the music down. Can we meet this morning, this afternoon?’