Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

Milena walked down Gower Street to the Row.

The roof was gone. There was old furniture all about Bedford Square. Already the Restorers were picking mournfully through it, shaking their heads, scratching them. Women stepped out over rubble, over fallen beams, carrying tea. Oh no, Milena thought again. Not this too. Not the beautiful Row, with its beautiful things. Milena’s feet slipped on wood panelling. Hay from the stables was distributed in drifts, like snow. Two of the fathers stood side by side, unmoving.

‘They’ll have to give it all over to the Reefers now,’ one of them said. ‘Bloody Coral.’

‘Milena!’ wailed a voice. ‘Oh Milena, Milena!’

It was Rose Ella. The two girls ran to each other and hugged each other, and encouraged by each other, burst into tears, and sobbed, shaking in each other’s arms.

‘Oh, Milena, it’s gone. It’s all gone. It’s all broken.’ Rose Ella’s lip was torn, black with dried blood, and tears were like snail trails on her cheeks.

‘Our beautiful house!’ exclaimed Milena.

‘Come on, my love, have some tea,’ said Rose Ella. They helped each other like two old women, across the ruin of the square to the tea. There was smoke from somewhere. A cooking fire? Milena hoped so. She was hungry and cold.

‘Stay here,’ said Rose Ella. ‘You stay here with us, eh?’

So, under canvas, thrown up to keep out the rain, Milena went to live, finally and briefly with Rose Ella.

One wing of the Row was still in place. All the children were bundled up together in rooms, to sleep together on mattresses. Milena was shaken, made truly insecure by the blast. Her life had been completely overturned twice before. Somehow, that made her weaker, not stronger. Her teeth rattled. They had not done that since her mother had left her, bereft and alone among strangers. Milena was back in that blank, black unremembered time. Her fingers were dirty, there was no water to wash. She was frightened. She hid from people. She just wanted Rose Ella and her family, no one else. She hid from the Nurses of the Child Garden. She saw them coming, picking their way over the fallen plaster, on the second day. She darted back, and nipped into a cupboard under a staircase. She pulled fallen curtains over herself. She heard Rose Ella say: ‘Oh I’m so sorry! We should have told you, Milena came here to stay with us. Oh, this is awful! You must have been looking all this time.’ Rose Ella called for her. ‘Lena? Milena? I don’t think she’s here.’

Then Milena heard Rose Ella whisper: Not well. Poor thing, she’s taken it badly. Better if she stays with us.

That night, on the mattress they shared, Milena clung to her tightly, as if to drifting wreckage at sea.

‘Milena love, I can’t breathe! Please!’ said Rose Ella.

’Svoboda,’ said Milena. Czech? She was speaking Czech? She had forgotten Czech, surely! Rose Ella rolled over, away from her, and Milena was left alone with terror. The stars were terror, the dark was terror, but most especially the past, the unremembered past was terror. She fell asleep in fear, her hand resting lightly against the back of Rose Ella’s soft, smooth neck.

She woke up some time before dawn. She thought she was seeing a dream. She woke up in a fallen ruin, with strewn familiar objects. There were the four small cannons, too heavy for the wind to take. It seemed to her that she was looking at the ruin of her life. The ruin of her life had always been there, unrealised, since Milena had lost a father, lost a mother, lost a language, lost her very self, lost it forever behind layers of growing up, layers of loss, layers of scorn, self-hatred, ceaseless work, unfulfilled hopes. Lost it where there was no childhood, nothing simple or safe or sweet or whole.

Except that next to her was Rose Ella. Rose Ella was there as in a dream, kissed with the faintest light of early sunrise, the first clear dawn since the hurricane. Milena looked down at Rose Ella, beautiful, asleep, hair fallen from her face, nightrobe fallen open, and there was her beautiful breast. It was young and small, with a dark nipple. Stranded somewhere between sleep and dream, suspended in a kind of stillness in the light, and in the light mist, thinking how much the breast looked like a mother, Milena kissed the nipple. She took the nipple in her mouth.

Rose Ella’s eyes opened with a snap.

She looked round at Milena.

Milena looked at her, dazed loving.

Rose Ella sat up. She pulled the duvet up over herself. She sat there staring, ice cold. Milena began to sense at last that something was horribly wrong.

‘Milena! What are you doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Milena truthfully.

It was said of the orphans that they were sexually advanced. Some of them, after all, were engaged to be married even before Reading. It was said darkly, that some strange things went on in the Gardens, before the orphans were safely Read, safely Placed, safely cured by viruses. Orphans were admired, held up as ideals, the children who became adults first and most completely. They were made ideals in order to help people be less afraid of them.

Orphans reminded people that they would the. Orphans meant their own sudden extinction. Orphans revealed too clearly the forced growth of everyone’s children. People thought the darkness in their own minds was caused by something dark in the minds of the orphans. People feared that orphans would contaminate their own children with precocious thoughts, or sexual adventures. Milena did not know that she had been a test of tolerance.

Rose Ella stood up, still holding the blanket. She jerked it away, from Milena’s grasp. She turned and stalked away. She looked back over her shoulder at Milena. She was crying. She put her hands to her face, and began to walk more quickly. She gave her head a shake. She began to run, over the rubble, hobbling in bare feet.

Milena lay back on the mattress. She let herself realise what had happened. They would say it had happened because she was an orphan. She was an orphan; maybe they were right. They would send her away.

Mala came with her steady smile. Only the smile was strained now, slightly glazed like the grins on the lost porcelain statues.

‘Milena. Hello,’ she said, crouching. ‘You’re very upset by all of this aren’t you?’

Milena was frozen, like some trapped animal. She felt fallen like her tree. She looked at Mala’s knees. She couldn’t bear to look up at her face.

‘You’ve got a lot of problems, Milena. It’s understandable. You’ve lost your parents. And you do have certain disabilities. And we’ve tried to help you with those, for your sake, and to help Rose Ella with her work. And I like to think we’ve done some good. But it’s up to you now, dear. You’re going to have to do some development yourself. You’re going to be Read, and cured of all sorts of things. That’s going to happen very soon now. And, maybe after that, when everything’s settled. Well.’ She paused and touched Milena’s arm, or rather, her sleeve. ‘Well, maybe you would like to come back to see us then.’

‘Where will I go now?’ Milena asked, her voice thin, choked, forlorn.

‘The other orphans are moving into the Medicine. It’s quite a sturdy building. Sturdier than the Row.’ Milena could see the knees twist around to look at the rubble and to regret. Memory of her own grief made Mala more firm.

‘I think you better go now, eh, Milena? Before everyone else starts getting up and wonders why. Here. Here are your boots dear.’

Milena lay still as the boots were forced on her feet.

‘I don’t want to go,’ she whispered.

Mala sighed. ‘I know, dear. But it’s for the best.’

Milena stumbled back through the ruins, as dazed as the last time she was injected with virus, hard virus that had been shoved directly into her veins with a needle. The dosage had nearly killed her. She had thrown up blood. She had tossed on her bed for days, and wandered befuddled for weeks, the genetics of knowledge churning in her head. But even then the viruses did not take hold. The mighty Doctors had examined her, held her flesh in their cold hands and peered at her. They took samples. The mighty Doctors must know why the viruses didn’t work. They had stopped even trying after that final dose: they had stopped making her ill. They left her alone to be unwell in her own way.