Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Thrawn laughs, helplessly, musically. Out of the corner of her eye, Milena can see her staggering into her field of vision.

‘Milena, just look around, and then I promise, I’ll be out of your life. Out of your life forever!’

Milena looks around. She thinks she sees a hologram of Thrawn McCartney, holding a lighted match. She is used to the perfection of Thrawn McCartney’s images. The fire on the match rises out of gases from the wood. It hovers over the wood, and creeps its way up along it, slowly, towards the fingers.

‘You promised,’ says Thrawn, still somehow looking hopeful. Something thick hangs in strands between her cracked lips. ‘You promised you wouldn’t hate me.’

A whiff of cooking alcohol. I can smell alcohol, why can’t you? asks the Milena who is remembering. If I can smell it, you can.

You can.

You’re telling yourself you think you’re seeing a hologram, thinks the Milena who remembers. Holograms don’t smell. There’s even a whiff of sulphur from the match. And you’re watching the match get closer to her, and you want it to happen, I can remember you thinking, oh for God sake’s go on, I know what’s coming next, as if it’s just one more horrific image in the light. You want to be rid of her, the crazy Fury, so she won’t hound you, this Happy One, so that she will no longer be somewhere alive and betrayed and alone to make you feel guilty.

Look, even now, she’s stopping, holding the match back. She wants you to stop her. She wants you to help. She wants to collapse weeping in your arms so that she can tell you that she’s sorry, tell you she’s hateful, tell you that it’s not your fault.

‘You were supposed to be my Saviour!’ she has to shout, her voice breaking.

And the music wails.

Not hate, not love, but passion of a kind, twisted with lizard eyes. There are such things as demons. They are alive, and they live in the dead spaces between people.

Soft, and sad, Mahler bids another farewell.

The match burns low, too low, while Thrawn waits for you to save her. The flame touches her finger. Her fingers, her arm, are soaked in alcohol.

The flower blooms, pink, flame. An unfocused flicker and a sudden eruption from the hand, along the arm up into the face, coating the flesh like this year’s latest fashion, a crawling, living bloom of flame. Trickles of black smoke waver upwards.

And still Milena, the People’s Artist, hesitates. Can it be real? What if this isn’t just an image? Has she really done this to herself? Dread, horror mixed with an angry wrench of justification: you did it to yourself, Thrawn.

Stifle the dramatics, Milena, this is you, yourself who is remembering. You know what is happening is real. Worry a few moments longer and it will be too late.

‘Oh shit,’ says Milena the director and stands up finally. Not I’m sorry, oh God, but oh shit, as if it were the final inconvenience to have someone burn to death in your lacquered rooms. Worried about the rugs, Milena? That’s it, stand up, get flustered, panic, pretend it takes a full minute to remember the thick new rug rolled up on the landing. You bought it just last week, your nice thick Tarty rug. Wipe away the distaste for spoiling it, wipe it nobly from your mind. What a sacrifice, Milena. Go to it, girl. Nice new part to play here. Heroine. You’ll like this part, except you always were a terrible actress. You are strangely unconvincing in — your concern. But there are no lines to remember, it makes you look good, everything a star can require, including someone else to cry over.

Somewhere in the midst of the flame, Thrawn is trying to dance, and is laughing. The thing that has hold of her knows that it has won at last.

Fade into silence. The music is over.

Milena the director runs to hug Thrawn, the new, thick rug between them, to smother the flames. Thrawn is too tall. The rug encircles only her midriff.

‘Get down on the floor! Get down on the floor!’ wails Milena the director.

You weep do you, Milena? thinks her future self. Any animal would weep seeing this. Hitler’s guards wept in the camps. The tears mean nothing except that you can feel the horror of it in your belly. You know you will feel that horror for the rest of your life, and that you will remember the tang of burnt hair, burnt flesh in the back of your throat until you die.

The alcohol burns away, like brandy on a plum pudding. Thrawn looks like a plum pudding. The plum pudding smiles and has bright white teeth, flecked with black. ‘Oops,’ it says and giggles.

‘We’ll get you a doctor,’ Milena murmurs, unable to muster enough breath to talk plainly. She wants to scream, not to attract help so much as to express to the world that something terrible has happened. She wants to express it to Thrawn, who does not seem to have realised.

‘Come on,’ says Milena. ‘Downstairs.’ Without thinking, she takes Thrawn’s hand. It is sticky.

‘Mmmwhoh!’ roars Thrawn, like a deaf-mute. Her nerves are beginning to feel what has happened. She jerks the hand away. The skin remains in Milena’s hand like a glove, translucent. Milena keeps holding it, as if the hand were in two places at the same time.

Thrawn stares at the hand. She is no longer smiling. She looks dazed. ‘Let’s give the little lady a big hand,’ she says, making a joke. She bobs as if floating.

Milena the director mews like a cat and throws the crisp and blistered skin away.

‘Downstairs,’ murmurs Thrawn. She walks ahead of Milena. She looks somehow ordinary, a quiet and somewhat muted person going for a leisurely stroll. Except for the hardened, flaking blackness of her head, Thrawn looks in some way normal for the first time. Her eyes are not bulging out with tension, her smile is not knife-edge sharp, she is not smiling at all. Her arms and legs move with a smooth and simple motion, and her fingers are not extended in a rictus of anger or unease.

Milena darts ahead of her, and pushes back the screens, one by one, the screens that lead through the Dead Space.

‘Thank you,’ says Thrawn, regally. She walks past Milena and out onto the varnished bamboo stairs. Outside the insulated flat, it is February freezing. Is it steam rising off her, or smoke? Milena wants to get her a coat but thinks: a coat on that skin? Her viruses tell her: third degree burns. Thrawn begins to trudge down the steps, like weary What Does at the end of a day.

‘Oooff!’ she says, as if exhausted from cleaning floors. She leans onto the handrail and the instant she touches it, she hisses and leaps back as if the rail were fiery hot.

Still hissing, Thrawn puts her arms over her head, and tries to pull off her vest. Blackened, the vest breaks up, falls away. Her back and shoulders are a mass of rising pink blisters, blackened streaks, and places that seemed to be covered with grit, as if it could be washed away.

It doesn’t look too bad, it doesn’t look too bad, Milena the director tells herself. The lower back is hardly touched at all. The breasts are beautiful, they have not been touched. She’ll survive. She’ll survive. Look, she is walking.

Thrawn takes another step and howls. Another step and she doubles up.

‘Thrawn,’ weeps Milena, helplessly.

Thrawn starts to scream. She starts to scream like a strangled cat, a harsh, meowing wail that moves in fits and starts but that doesn’t stop. Her hands weave over her head, wanting to hold something, finding only pain, moving in a dance of helplessness.

There is a sound of sliding panels. Ms Will steps out of a Dead Space, and stands below on the rush matting. She stops and stares.