The Child Garden

wood, halfway through his life. Remember, the viruses would say, remember Isaiah 38.10, ‘In the midst of my days, I shall go to the gate of hell.’ The viruses would remember the Aeneid and its forest scenes. It would know that the lake of the heart meant the ventricle in which fear was supposed to reside. Dante limped with sin, the left foot being appetite and will.

The whole problem was one of redundancy. Rolfa had known that. That’s why she decided to leave all the narrative words unsung. Otherwise the chorus could only keep on telling us what we were already seeing.

The character of Dante was wrong too. Milena had cast one of the Babes, Peterpaul, to play him. He was thick-wristed, beefy, and stomped on firm male legs. Milena had thought he would be a kind of Everyman. But Dante was no Everyman. In all the drawings she had seen, Dante was fierce, with eyes and nose and chin like daggers, a politician in a murderous age. That was the right image. Peterpaul, she realised with reluctance, would have to go.

Milena let the recording play on, in her mind.

Here came the animals. They were symbols too. Milena’s heart sank when she saw them. The lion, the leopard, the she-wolf and her heavy teats; they were wonderful beasts. Milena did not want them to mean human wickedness. A lion is not murderous, a she-wolf is not greedy. Milena stopped the recording, and tried to re-imagine them with human faces.

Unbidden by her conscious mind, each of the beasts grew the face of Thrawn McCartney. With a shiver in her heart, Milena’s mind leapt out of the focus, out of the Comedy. She let Rolfa’s music play on, softly. The music was the only part of the opera that worked.

Milena looked up. Mike Stone was standing over her, holding out his violin as if offering it to her. ‘Would you like some music, Milena?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ said Milena. The Comedy, it seemed, was beyond help.

‘I’ve taught Chris how to play Bruch’s violin concerto. Would you like to hear that?’

Milena felt a smile creeping over her face again. She had to admit that Mike Stone had a certain kind of charm. ‘You’ve taught a spaceship to play Bruch?’

‘He takes the cello and drum parts. He grows strings and hums,’ said Mike Stone, gangling with enthusiasm.

From just outside the focus, Milena heard the first sung words of the Comedy. Dante had met the spirit of Virgil and was singing, ‘Have pity on me, whether you are ghost or definite man.’

Mike Stone sat down and tucked the violin under his chin.

Cilia was playing Virgil. Her high, pure, female voice answered, ‘I am not a man, though I was born one.’

Oh dear, thought Milena. I keep crashing it to the ground. I need to find a different way to do this. She let the Comedy fall into silence.

Mike Stone played. He sawed and scraped his way through Bruch’s only masterpiece. The bow kept skidding off the violin strings with an earnest squeal. Somehow it helped, like someone slipping on a banana in a production of Rossini. Christian Soldier sang all around them, deep and resonating, like a fat man in a bath.

It’s a different world, thought Milena. Spaceships sing and there are Angels sliding between the stars and astronauts grow animals out of memory. The Comedy will have to be new as well.

Mike Stone’s brow was furrowed with concentration. His giant legs were splayed apart; his elbows flailed. Milena found that she forgave him. Whatever mere was to forgive, except awkwardness and a touch of insanity. Milena smiled on him.

Mike Stone finished, and looked up at Milena as a little boy would, eyes full of expectant trust.

‘Clown,’ she pronounced him.

The birds of the garden whooped and whistled. Outside, the sun was rising over the Earth, a sudden diamond-burst of light. Christian Soldier lowered a blue-tinged cornea over the window as a filter. A crescent of blue appeared along the rim of the Earth. The sun seemed to have been laid by the Earth. The sun was a round, white, cold blue egg nestling in mist.

Milena found that she wished she could stay there, with the Earth and the birds and the music. The stars looked like a fall of snow, suspended.

Then, down to Earth.

Stars seemed to be falling out of a slate-blue sky. It was snowing. Milena remembered walking along the Cut some time during the week of her return. Snow was filling in the tracks made by the stalls, hissing gently as it landed.

The stalls had been pulled to one side, and folded shut. Only the coffee vendor was still open. He stood in the light of the Cut’s one street lamp, stomping his feet to keep warm, and shouting: ‘Coffee! Coffee for health!’

Everything smelled of coffee. The snow on the ground smelled of coffee. It was splattered with it and stained. A man bustled past Milena, his fawn-coloured coat mottled with coffee. He wore a facemask that was soaked with it.

There was a curious, raucous wail from an upstairs window: the Baby Woman. Everyone knew about her. She and her infant had both become ill with a sudden fever. The baby died in the night, and the mother awoke in the morning with the mind of her child. She lay in bed all day in diapers and howled. Her husband was often seen about the Cut. His stare was hollow and uncomprehending.

The apothecary viruses had mutated. They collected complete mental patterns and transferred them. They were contagious. One personality could obliterate another. It had not been obvious at first. Even the summer before, Milena had heard of an ageing actor of the Zoo who had woken up convinced he was a young and handsome Animal. He had howled, sobbing, when he saw himself in a mirror. The sickness became more noticeable when people began to bark or meow. Someone had tried to fly, leaping off the Hungerford Bridge. The viruses transferred information between species. People thought they were birds, or cats.

The old concrete arcade along one side of the Cut had been demolished. A rhinocerous hump of Coral was growing out of it, amid the stalks of dead nettles. Milena saw a sheet of black resin. There were Bees huddled under it, kneeling as if in prayer. They had lifted up a paving stone and were looking at the earth underneath it, and jittering in place with the cold.

‘Oyster trails,’ one of them whispered, scooping sand and snow aside with his hands..

‘Old cigarettes,’ said a woman’s voice.

‘Cold earthworms!’ they all suddenly yelped together and laughed.

One of them was wearing a sequined jacket, and other Bees licked his ears and murmured to his soft blonde hair. He was the King, the King from Love’s Labour’s Lost.

The Bees flinched as Milena approached. They ducked and almost but not quite looked at her out of the corners of their eyes.

‘Hello, Billy,’ said Milena, gently. ‘Billy, remember me? I’m Milena. Constable Dull, an’t shall please you?’

‘Lo, Ma,’ he said, smiling vaguely, not looking at her. The others clustered more closely about him.

The Bees protected themselves by staying in groups and focusing their attention all together on the same things. They protected themselves from life, too much life all at once. If a horse, a huge and muscled, sweating and snorting beast, passed the Bees and they were unprepared, they could faint. Milena had once seen that happen, a nest of Bees collapsing in unison. She had seen Bees kissing the cobbles where a pigeon had been crushed by the wheels of a cart.

‘What’s it like, Billy?’ Milena asked him.

‘It’s in lines,’ he said, still without looking at her. ‘All in lines.’ He looked up, as if at the stars, snow-flakes on his eyelashes.

An empathy virus had mutated. It stimulated sympathetic imagination. Nurses, Health Visitors, Social Hygienists and, most particularly, actors — they had all bought the virus from apothecaries. The new 2B strain created an almost unbearable oneness with anything that was alive — or had been alive. The Bees could Read the living. They could Read whatever reaction patterns that were in the remains of living things, in the soil, in the stone, in the air.