Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

Already, unknown to either of them, they were together. Their animal selves had recognised it. Their whole lives were there to be read in the way they each smiled and moved. They had already Read each other, but their conscious selves had yet to catch up.

‘You,’ said Rolfa, turning, ‘are a ponce.’ It was said with a kind of honest affection. It was true, and Milena the actress needed to know that other people could see the things she tried to hide.

Milena the actress went cold and shy. She had been seen through again. Her masks were paper-thin. The moment for a reply passed and Rolfa turned away. The actress kept seeing Rolfa through a series of paper masks. Polar woman, rough and tumble. The Bear who Loves Opera, a famous Zoo character. Her conscious self was not seeing Rolfa at all.

‘Bastard.’ the GE murmured to herself.

‘Are you talking to me?’ demanded the actress. You know she’s not, Milena! Why are you looking for injustice?

‘No,’ said Rolfa, turning to smile, holding up a bottle. ‘I was talking to this empty whisky bottle.’ She’s saying she sees through you, but likes what’s on the other side. And she wants, she yearns, for you to like her.

Made bold by the force of attraction, Rolfa threw the whisky bottle away and listened to the breakage, as if extraordinary acts and sudden sounds could speak when people could not.

If it was me, now, Rolfa, I’d laugh and ask your name. I’d sit beside you and let you know that I already thought you were wonderful, that I didn’t mind the fur or the teeth or the rotting shoes. We’d sit and talk for hours about music, and I’d say, let’s go out for a drink if you like whisky so much. We’d be friends from the start. And the reason why I could do that now, Rolfa, the reason why I’m different, is you.

I don’t want to remember any more, I don’t want to see the waste and the pain and the waiting. I just want to hold you. I just want to stroke the fur on your arm, and try to save you from what’s coming. And this time I’d do it, this time, I would know how: I wouldn’t let anything go to waste. I’d say, wait until the metal comes and your Family has to make friends with the Consensus. I’d say, be with me from time to time, but don’t run away until you’ve shown them, your father and your sisters, that the music works. And I’d never let you be Read.

Rolfa held up a bottle. ‘God,’ she said, ‘is a distiller.’ She grinned, and Milena the actress saw the horrible teeth and the dandruff and finally relaxed enough to realise that she liked her, liked this strange creature.

‘Do you live here?’ Milena the actress asked, and stepped forward a bit. Amusement suddenly bubbled up through her, and childish wonder, and something sweet that was kept hidden and protected.

Maybe not, maybe I wouldn’t change anything, thought Milena remembering. She ached with love for both of them. Maybe this is the best way for this to happen, as tentative as a spider’s web. Not bold and knowing and businesslike.

A look came over Rolfa’s face, a look Milena remembering now recognised, a look of great tenderness, of simple kindness, of wishing the world were different for them both. Her hair in her eyes made her blink. ‘It would be better if I did,’ she said, ruefully, amused. ‘This is where I hide, instead. Since you don’t like poisoning yourself, perhaps you’d like to look at this.’ She held out the musical scores.

I’d forgotten that, thought the one who remembered. Already the music was being passed between us. The music would unite us and part us and fix us together for all of our lives. The paper was smooth like skin, and still warm from Rolfa’s grasp.

‘I take it the reading of music presents you with no difficulties,’ said Rolfa, meaning that most other things did. It was plain now that Rolfa was the older of the two, plain that she was controlling. I always thought you were a shuffling innocent, thought the Milena who remembered. But you knew so much, Rolfa. You were a genius after all.

Genius is in the shapes your hands make as they move, in every reaching or withholding gesture. You know what you are, and you know that ego is the enemy of what you are, so you defend yourself against it, against pride and ambition, and you are very gently guiding me, and you so very gently want me. You knew who I was, Rolfa, and you knew that you could make my body bloom, and my soul. I still want you, Rolfa. I want your hand on me, on the flower between my legs. Desire is like a blister that needs to be burst. And cunning, you were cunning to sing, knowing that it was the music that would hold me, hold us both. You sang, to show me what you already knew. That music in you had found its elect.

So the ghost began to sing again, out of the past.

Ewig … ewig… ewig…

Promises of forever, with silence in between them.

Suddenly Jacob’s face was smiling at her, eyes weary. ‘I have a message for you, Milena.’

I am Constable Dull, an’t shall please you. No, no, no, no, howled the director.

‘From Ms Patel,’ said Jacob.

‘Want some mitts?’ asked Zoe, not at all unkindly, in the dining-room of the Family. Zoe passed Milena the fingerless indigent gloves of kindness. No, not mitts. Palcaky.

Milena and Rolfa ate again in the riverside park. They walked together to the Buddhist shrine and watched the acrobats. They rode on the back of a dustcart from the night market, listening to the sound of the horses’ hooves.

‘But now,’ said Jacob, ‘because of you and Rolfa, when I dream, I also hear the music’

And Jacob and Milena walked together again out into the sun, regretting Rolfa. The whole river regretted Rolfa, now, and the sky, and the birds. Jacob gave Milena’s hand one last squeeze. This time the crucifix was passed between them. ‘I must run my messages, now,’ he said, and turned away, and Milena saw again the sun reflected in the windows, the fire in each of the rooms. Jacob walked into the fire and was consumed. He made the light burn brighter.

‘Fire!’ Cilia was shouting. ‘Fire!’ A bell was ringing and Milena was outside in the cold again, in the dark.

Each room has one of us in it.

Cilia opened the box and inside was paper, being passed again, like human skin.

‘Oh Cill,’ asked Milena, ‘who did this?’

‘Just us Vampires,’ said Cilia. ‘Just us Vampires of History.’ Her face in the moonlight, in the past, was blue.

A trumpet blast sounded. The fire was over. A trumpet blast sounded. The Comedy started again, and the sky was full of fire: it was the Inferno. The souls roiled within it. The souls had been imagined like dandelion fluff, rolling on invisible wires, toiling through the fire, caught in their own sins and imbalances forever, in a universe made of thought. What made the fire, then?

‘You like dogs?’ a man in a body warmer asked. He was on fire too, a fever. Rolfa turned in rage, drunken, demented with what had been denied to her. Rolfa lifted up a table.

It wasn’t the sweaty man she was going to hit with it, realised Milena.

She was going to hit me.

And it seemed to the Milena who remembered that she could see across the river to a park and a little boy in a cowboy hat ran round and round it, singing, ‘Pi-per! Pi-per!’

And the dog cried out, ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’

I have to. A little while, you shall not see me.

All the Earth seemed to fall away. Milena saw the fields and the village of England in neat patterns, the grain, the pinioned pear trees, and the beehive houses. She wafted up through cloud, into mist, and up into Antarctica, and there, in the light of heaven, in the icy chill, there was life. There, the spiders danced, between crystals of ice. I know where I am, thought Milena, remembering.