The Child Garden

‘We’ll have two Cow Toms,’ said Milena. ‘No squid in it, or anything like that. Do you have any meat?’

The waitress became exasperated. ‘Meat. What do you think this is, the bloody Zoo?’

‘Chicken?’

‘Yeah, we got some of that.’

‘Chicken. No squid. And no hot sauce, no fish sauce.’

Lucy nodded. ‘Lovely grub. Lamb chops. And a nice cup of tea.’

The waitress nodded.

‘Mind you, none of this gnat’s piss. Proper, lovely, strong tea.’

‘You’ve got the same viruses I have,’ said Milena. ‘She wants tea as in a novel from a hundred and fifty years ago.’

‘Well does she?’ said the waitress, angry.

‘I am a Party member,’ said Milena. She wasn’t because she had not been Read but she was treated like one. ‘I can crunch this place like a plate. You use a lot of tea and you let it steep. Now Slide, child. Slide, Slide, Slide.’

The waitress was frightened now, and went back to the kitchen.

I’ve got a lot of freedom, Milena thought. Now that I don’t care if anyone likes me.

‘Rolfa’s written a show,’ she said to Lucy. ‘And I’m putting together a proposal, you know, sell it to some people.’ Have you heard of Dante? Would it mean anything if I told you that you were going to play Beatrice?

‘Oooh,’ said Lucy, and looked pleased. No, thought Milena, Dante wouldn’t mean anything to her.

‘It’s all music. It lasts weeks and weeks.’

‘Rolfa always had a beautiful voice. Beautiful, I always said.’

‘It’s a bit different this show. It will use a lot of holograms.’

‘Holograms,’ said Lucy, unimpressed. ‘Are people still interested in those? My father took me to see them when they first came out. Boring. They just sat there.’

‘We’re beaming them from outer space,’ said Milena. ‘And we don’t want everyone in it to be actors.’

‘No you don’t,’ agreed Lucy. ‘Bloody little snots. We had one of them in here once with Rolfa. Or was it at the Spread? Terrible little thing she was, nose in the air, face that would sour milk. Came in with gloves and a parasol if you please.’ Lucy giggled. ‘She left it behind and we burned it.’

Milena changed the subject. ‘Would you like to be in the show?’

‘What me? Do one of my turns?’ Lucy was so pleased that her cheeks bunched up into pink apples. ‘I couldn’t. Not any more. I’ve lost my figure.’

‘You’re lovely and slim,’ said Milena, looking at the tiny wrists and lumpy blue veins.

‘Good bone structure,’ said Lucy. ‘Put me under strong lights and nobody will know the difference. Er. Do they have good strong lights these days?’

‘They’ve just come back,’ said Milena.

‘You wait long enough, you come back into fashion.’ Lucy bit her lower lip. ‘So I don’t suppose it will be a problem, then, will it?’ She wrinkled her nose, confidingly. ‘My previous, I mean.’

‘Your previous what?’

‘Convictions,’ said Lucy, and waited.

Her previous beliefs and principles? Milena did not understand.

‘I don’t know why everyone made such a fuss really, it was just a little business on the side with credit cards. Quite innocent. It was how you survived in those days, black economy, payment in cash or kind, turning a few tricks…’

‘Lucy!’ exclaimed Milena in wonder. ‘You’re a criminal!’

Lucy looked offended. ‘I was a cabaret artiste. A bit of snide went with the job. I mean we was very Alternative. We used to do scathing political and social satire. Politicians, the Royal Family. I always played the Queen.’ Lucy drew herself up, smoothed her waist with her hands. ‘We had her in fishnet stockings and roller skates.’ She suddenly launched herself back into the previous subject. ‘I mean, these big companies was all insured. It was the voice-printing that got me. I thought I could imitate the voices, you see, on the phone.’

‘Did you go to prison?’

‘No!’ said Lucy scornfully. ‘They could see I wasn’t the criminal type. Six months suspended and a nosy Probation Officer was all I got.’

The Cow Toms arrived. Translucent bags full of rice and broth and bits of chicken. The waitress opened the bags up. Her face was full of hate. She cracked eggs as if they were heads into the broth, stirred them in, and threw in herbs.

‘Is that good enough for you?’ the waitress asked.

‘Porridge,’ sighed Lucy. ‘That’s all anyone eats. Fried veg and porridge.’ Then she remembered her manners. ‘It’s lovely,’ she told the waitress. ‘My niece takes such good care of me, she’s such a good girl.’ She patted Milena’s hand. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she assured Milena, her face twitching. ‘Raw egg.’

‘It will cook in the broth,’ Milena told her.

‘Thank you, darling,’ Lucy said to the waitress, who was already walking away, her shoulders slightly hunched.

The natives are restless, thought Milena. She suddenly missed the beautiful calm that been the very stuff of London life only two summers before.

‘I know you’re not my niece,’ confided Lucy. ‘But you’re so good to me. And I don’t know who you are.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Milena. ‘Let’s eat it while it’s hot, while we can, before it gets cold.’

The beautiful past, as glimmering and faraway as a star. By winter, everything was covered in snow.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Down to Earth (Magic)

Mike Stone was in love, and so therefore was Christian Soldier. The vessel was by now a real garden. The walls were covered with moss and fern and cedar and bay and baby palm and holly, all improbably mixed. The floor had sprouted grass and ivy had entwined itself around the column that supported Milena’s chair. Most wonderful of all, there were now birds. They rustled within the leaves, and sometimes sang, huge American robins and red-winged blackbirds and tiny English finches. There were other birds, too, that Milena did not know.

The birds of Czechoslovakia.

Milena was playing the first scene of the Comedy over and over in her mind. She didn’t see the flowers. She was trying to find some way of making the first scene work.

The first trial scenes had already been broadcast. Fifteen minutes of Dante in the wood had been seen over half the Earth below, between clouds, over mountains. The Terminals below reported that the broadcast was a success. Reformation worked, even on an astronomical scale. But Milena did not like what she saw. She had thought that Dante’s allegory would work best if the imagery was kept simple and clear and literal. She had loved imagining Dante’s wood. She imagined dead branches, with moonlight glinting on the sinuous, shiny patches where bark had come away. She imagined the soft, thin green coating of lichen on the nodules of broken twigs. There were scuttlings in the darkness, and tiny frightened eyes.

All sides of each object had to be imagined. Milena found that she could do this. All sides swam fragmented in her mind, suddenly focusing on one area of space. She built up an image focus by focus. The swimming fragments reminded her of a cubist painting. Cubism for cubing, she thought. Picasso was simply painting what he saw.

The wood she created was beautiful but it was not evil. Even in darkness it was a garden. Dante’s forest was supposed to be symbol for the corruption of the human soul. To Milena it seemed such a terrible thing to do to a beautiful forest.

And the symbolism was redundant. An audience of viruses would already know what the wood meant. Viruses would supply people with all the necessary references. They would whisper as Dante stumbled through the