knitted by hand. They were the preservers of history, living together in one Estate in central London.
Milena went for a long walk. She flitted through the City like some kind of ghost feeding on sunlight and other people’s lives. She walked up to Euston and men back down through the trees of Tavistock Square, to Malet Street. The main warehouse for the Restorers was mere. It was called the School. Outside the School’s great grey gates there were stalls of people on the razzle, selling paper, reeds, pipes, shoes — anything the community might need. A Professor of the School sold kidney beans in great heaps. The beans were red and polished like semi-precious stones, and the Professor smoothed the piles of them with anxious hands. There were oxen yoked to the gates. They were sold to carters who hauled stone and great wooden beams. A small boy guarded the oxen, with a switch and a collie dog. He sat on a stone bollard, wearing a kind of toga over his shoulder, smoking a pipe, his face turned towards the sun. From behind the gates came the sound and smell of fresh wood being sawed.
The School had once been part of a university. Now it stored goods and was a workshop. There the elegant plaster moulds were made and carefully loaded for shipment. There the timber was stored and cut to standard lengths. There were the bolts of cloth, the glass works, the vaults that kept the gold, the lead, the mercury and the arsenic. It was the preserve of history and of adults.
The Medicine was the preserve of the young. It was where all the Estate children, orphaned or not, were trained. It had once been a school of tropical medicine. The building stood on a corner of Malet Street. Milena stopped and looked at it, unwilling to go inside.
There were ornamental balconies all across its grey stone face. On the balconies were gleaming Egyptian sculptures of fleas and rats and lice. The children kept them polished. They were one of the few things Milena liked about the Medicine.
On the other corner was the Tacky Shop, where one resin tool could be melted into another. The wife of the Tacky was turning a bamboo pole round and round in her hand, lowering an awning over her display. It was going to be hot; the resin goods might go soft and warp. The Tacky Wife turned and gave Milena a happy grin.
Milena grinned back. It really did seem to her that adults were nicer than children. There was a hiss of steam inside the shop. Then the Tacky’s husband came out, a mask over his face, and heavy gloves over his hands. He held up a newly pressed pitcher. Its mouth had sagged to one side. His wife laughed, and shook her head, and placed a hand on her husband’s hairy chest.
It must be possible to live a life, Milena thought. It must be possible to be happy. Suddenly she wanted to be an adult. Have a nice little Place and a nice little husband. Milena wanted to be like everyone else.
What would her Reading show? A vast blank of ignorance? Would they have her loading garbage sacks? Maybe they would have one final load of virus to burn its way into her. Maybe it would kill her, like her father. Maybe that was it. Maybe Mami had lied. Maybe her father was like her, beyond education, and that’s why they were in hiding in the hills of Czechoslovakia.
Milena did not think of her mother with respect. She thought of her with a kind of exasperated fondness, as if she had been a very foolish woman. Coming all that way to England to find freedom. As if England were free. She had gone to the Restorers looking for the kind of debate and discussion she had so loved back home. She had thought that people who worked with books and history would also have ideas. She did not believe that they could be so mild and so uninterested in life. The loneliness had killed her. She had died, leaving Milena here, alone among the Restorers. Milena had no one else to blame. She turned and went inside the Medicine.
She was late. That was a symptom of Milena’s disorder as well. Other people had a virus which told them the time. The other children were already hard at work. The Medicine was built around a large brick courtyard. It was hot, so classes were being held in it, outside in the shade. Work groups had already claimed tables. They hammered their copper plates, or stitched their leather seat covers. Some of them were cooking their breakfast, boiling gruel on little charcoal stoves, and arguing with their parents about whose turn it was to cook the evening meal.
The children worked at their own speed towards set targets. The School Nurses measured their Development. The children talked to each other as they worked, about sport or sales or sources of cotton cloth. Sometimes a School Nurse would set a Problem Race or lead a discussion. Milena wished she had brought her book to read. Books had been written by people like her. She could sense that in the careful, step by step links they made, and in the simplicity of their thinking.
Milena was in the Physical Development Group — the Lumps. The Lumps were all to some degree mentally retarded. The Nurses did not have high hopes for the Lumps. Most of them would be Placed as humpers. The Lumps were the last to leave the state of childhood. It was not fair to send ten year olds out into the world to drag rocks. After their Placing, they were brought on for a year or two with injections and weight-lifting.
Milena saw them at a table. There was no mistaking the Lumps. One or two of them were huge males, fat but heavily dependent, rather tame. They loomed over the tables, smiling as always. They smiled hopefully, offering the world their good nature until their good nature was disappointed. Then, and only then, the boys would become dangerous.
It was the girls that Milena had the greater difficulty understanding or dealing with. The girls laughed at Milena. They affected a wild superiority; they needed someone to whom they felt superior.
Milena sat down, boldly, on the concrete instead of the bench. The Lumps slapped each other’s shoulders and giggled.
‘There are benches, Milena,’ said one girl called Pauline. Her face was flat.
‘Too tired to climb up here?’
Milena hated the Lumps, hated having to be with them. She knew that she herself could not learn, but she thought that the Lumps were simply stupid.
She could see the congenital damage in their faces; their eyes were sunken, there was a coarseness to their mouths. The poor Lumps. The viruses had filled their heads with Shakespeare and the Golden Stream of philosophy that led to Chao Li Song.
The School Nurse approached. Milena saw that there was someone new with her, another Nurse.
‘Lo, team,’ she said, greeting them by placing her hands on their shoulders. ‘Everybody happy?’
‘Milena’s sitting on the ground!’ exclaimed Pauline, her eyes like goggles, so thick were her artificial corneas.
‘Perhaps she’s more comfortable there,’ said the School Nurse, glancing at Milena. The Nurses were a little frightened of Milena. She could not learn, but she was far from stupid. She would say things that politeness would normally forbid. The School Nurse was called Ms Hazell, and Milena thought she was beautiful. She had sun- deepened purple cheeks and hazel eyes, like her name. She made Milena ache to be like her, to be noticed by her.
The new Nurse with her was very pretty too — blonde curling hair and a scattering of magenta freckles. Milena’s heart sank. Someone else who was pretty and happy and whole — forever beyond Milena’s reach. The new Nurse smiled at her, perfect white teeth gleaming against purple skin. Milena stared back at her bleakly.
‘This is the new Nurse, team,’ said Ms Hazell. ‘Her name’s Rose Ella. Now I know Rose Ella very well because she was a child here herself. She grew up a Restorer, and was Placed here as a Nurse. So it’s very nice for all of us here that she’s joined us.’ The School Nurse bestowed on Rose Ella a smile of real affection. The smile made Milena go desolate with longing. How did people become friends? Why was it so easy for them?
Then a Team Discussion began. It was a kind of group Problem Race, to give the Lumps practice in thinking. The School Nurse introduced the topic.
The mentally retarded, the gravely challenged, were going to discuss Derrida and Plato. It was an exercise to see if the Lumps could apply the Golden Stream to their own lives. I read Plato, thought Milena. I read Derrida. I understood hardly any of it, and can remember less.
‘Now what is Derrida really talking about in his article on Plato?’
‘Writing!’ chorused the Lumps. Then, washed by the same viruses, they remembered other answers. Racing time, they straggled in, one after another. ‘And memory. Writing as tool for memory. What’s wrong with writing.’
The School Nurse smiled indulgently. ‘He was asking, really, how it was that Plato could bear to write when he found writing so artificial. He thought of it as an artificial knowledge that people could lay claim to without really having experienced or learned anything.’
