The Child Garden

inappropriately tragic. The music revealed her.

Five francs and two yen

The answer came in a lively, happy voice to ‘Alle due al la tre’ — also from Falstaff. That would be the dress seller, the happy young wife. The song revealed her too.

The song whirled around Milena. It drifted out of the open windows above, women humming as they sizzled sausages. It came from the roofs, where people would be lying down and photosynthesizing. From the bar by the butcher’s shop came a steady, frog-like croaking:

Slup, slup, slup, drink it all up, up, up and we won’t go to bed until the morn-ning!

‘All right!’ said the voice in her ears.

Milena removed her hands. Her vision was still slightly blurred but she could see to walk. She could see if the Seller of Games was still there. And if she wasn’t, what then? Go to the Zoo? Crawl into the Graveyard and hide there? Milena found it difficult to think, with all the noise.

The world seemed to spin with song. Old street cries had been revived. ‘Ripe cherries, ripe!’ Insinuating love songs were given like gifts to female customers. ‘Someone as beautiful as you… should buy two.’

Children ran on the ledges of the crumbling old buildings overhead. A woman admonished them, out of a half-open window. ‘Watch out, you be careful! Watch out, you be careful!’ she squawked to a dance tune, her mature authority undermined by the rollicking of her hips.

Song washed up and down the street, as formless as the chorus of Remembrance, as if it were a funeral for things already gone. There were occasional quiet moments and occasional contagions when a particular chorus caught everyone’s fancy. The new viruses then trumpeted their triumph.

We all fall down!

The entire street roared in unison, and then laughed.

And Milena, stumbling, confused, peered half blind at each wagon-stall. There was the seller of paints and brushes, there was the Tacky with his hot, smelly little press, there was the birdman with his cages. Somewhere she heard someone singing:

Have you a chum who’s bum?

‘Turn around, you’re going back,’ said Thrawn in her ear.

‘Can’t hear,’ said Milena, though she could.

The voice in her ear was then pitched to the level of pain.

‘Now it’s too loud!’ said Milena. It was as if she were wading through glue, through the noise, through the people, through the glare, through increasingly panicked voice in her ear, the voice of Thrawn who now had guessed that Milena was playing a brand new game.

Then Milena saw her, the Seller of Games, big boned, hearty, with virulently purple cheeks.

All light was sucked from her eyes.

She groped her way blindly forward. Her hands crawled up and over people’s shoulders.

‘I’m blind,’ she said, ‘Take me to the Seller of Games.’

For some reason, Symphonie Fantastique was taken up by everyone. It was a half-serious prayer for rain. Everyone sang it, the song for a Sabbath, praying for the waters to fall. ‘Oh God, please God, make it rain God.’

The person, a man, murmured something and took hold of Milena’s shoulder to lead her.

Oh God, please God, make it rain!

‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’ Thrawn was howling like a gale in her ears. Milena could hear nothing else. Her hands were clamped over her eyes shielding them. Blindness was replaced by fire all along her arms and hands. Thrawn was burning her skin with light.

She felt the edge of a stall. ‘Am I here? Am I here?’ she shouted.

‘Yes!’ she could barely hear the man howling at her.

‘Sorry, sorry. I’m ill,’ said Milena, unable to see the Seller, unable to hear her. ‘I need your lenses. Your contact lenses, with the mirrors.’

Fire danced on her skin. Milena screamed. The sound of the scream was lost in the chorus.

‘What? What love?’ she could hear the Games Seller wailing.

‘The light burns!’ Milena wailed. ‘I need the lenses!’

Milena rammed her hands into her armpits, to hide them from the light.

The beefy hands of the Games Seller seized Milena’s arms. The Games Seller led her. Milena tripped up; she fell forward. The woman caught her up. Blisters ruptured against her cotton shirt. Her hands wept. The woman led her into Leake Street.

Everything went dark and cool, and Milena could suddenly hear.

‘Put them in please,’ wept Milena.

The woman was over her huge and sheltering. ‘Yes, you are, yes you are, yes you are in a bad way,’ the Gameswoman sang soothingly. It was a lullaby. She kept on singing, soothing, as she forced Milena to open her eyes away from the light.

Thrawn made the worms crawl inside them, but in Leake Street, the light was dull.

First one in. Then the other. Now there really was something in her eyes. Tears welled up to expel them. I will get used to them, Milena told herself. I will have to get used to them. She turned and looked up at the end of Leake Street. Thrawn tried to focus the light. It concentrated into a dull blue circle. Milena moved her head. It took some seconds for Thrawn to find the focus. That would have to be good enough.

The Seller of Games was inspecting Milena’s blistered fingers. ‘Your poor little hand…’ she began. La Boheme. Then she tried to speak. ‘Buh! Buh!’ she stammered, and sighed, and sang again.

‘Bloody viruses! What will they do to us next?’

Milena said she didn’t know. She thanked the Seller, paid for the lenses and stepped out again into the light and the roar of the songs. She rocked her head, very slightly, from side to side. She bought a pair of gloves and some ear plugs.

‘Go and die,’ said Thrawn in Milena’s ear, just before the plugs were inserted.

The game we are playing now, thought Milena, is called Sticks and Stones. Words can never hurt me.

All around her, everywhere around her, people sang.

Slightly less than a year later, Milena married.

She remembered the wedding party, in the forest of the Consensus. That year the summer was clouded and