Child Garden (12 page)

'We better change rooms,' said Milena.

Jacob nodded. Rolfa lay on the bed as if none of it mattered.

Milena went to Cilia. 'We've got to trade rooms,' she told her.

'Drop anchor. Hold. Why?' Cilia asked. She was told the story and was thrilled. 'Right. Right away,' she said. 'We move.'

'A new room?' Rolfa beamed, and jumped up from the floor. There was a bustling of bags. Rolfa kept cheerfully hitting her head on the lintels of doorways. The beds, the cookers, the pans, the armfuls of paper, were all exchanged in less than an hour.

'I'll go buy us all supper. See you,' promised Cilia.

The new room was even smaller and did not have a view of the river. After the excitement of the move and of being hunted, Rolfa sat staring, disgruntled and pouting.

'There's no space,' she said.

'There's space enough. We got everything in.'

'There's no space for a piano.'

For a piano?

Rolfa, how much money do you have? Enough to keep you in food for a month? How much money do you think I have? Milena had to tell her that life would be different now. Rolfa would have to live the cramped and constricted life of a human being.

'We live in little boxes, Rolfa,' Milena said. 'For us mere is no buying a way out. We don't have pianos. We don't have rooms big enough for them.'

'Then where can I play?'

'There are practice rooms, in the Zoo.'

'They won't let me into them.' Rolfa began to pace.

Something is going to have to happen, quickly, Milena realised. We won't be able to live like this for long. Something is going to have to happen with her music.

'You can always sing,' said Milena.

'Where? Where can I sing? If I try to sing here, people ask me to be quiet. And if there's a Snide after me, I've got to keep quiet.'

Cilia did not come bringing supper. Jacob came instead with a message.

'He is in your old room,' said Jacob. 'The tall, thin man. He will not go away. He is sitting on the bed. Cilia was playing
Madam Butterfly
over and over in her mind. He knew that. I said, Cilia your friends are waiting at the cafe. So she could leave. She asked him to go, and he shook his head. How long he will stay there I don't know. But I think he will soon come here.'

They had to move again. To move a second time was not fun. It was wearing. They traded rooms with Cilia's boyfriend, a well known young actor, who made a great show of condescending. Milena did not like being grateful to him.

They spent the night in their new, glum room and did not even light a candle in case the Snide was watching. They spoke in whispers. Rolfa walked back and forth at the foot of the bed.

'When I was bad, Papa would lock me in the closet,' she said. 'It was very dark and I knew there was no one to come for me. So I used to sing to myself in the dark. And it got so that I would do bad things like not make my bed or make a terrible mess in the kitchen, just so that I could be locked away. The dark was the only place I could sing. But here, I can't even sing. It's so small, I can hardly move.'

And Milena felt it again, the echo of memory. I've done this before, she thought. It was a habit, a pattern, something she could fall into if she didn't think about it. It was as if she had been snatched up so quickly and hauled into adulthood that part of her self had been left behind. It was as if only the shell remained, the structure. The strange soft creature she once had been was left behind. The child self did not realise what had happened. Perhaps it was still back there, in the past, still talking.

I don't remember, but I think that I probably talked to the newcomers. I suppose that in the Child Garden the orphans wept for their lost homes, even homes they had hated. Milena suddenly found the idea of homeless children unaccountably moving. I must have sat with them at night in the dark, like this.

And this is a child I am talking to now. Milena understood Rolfa then. Rolfa was still a child. Milena would have to take care of her for a while.

'Can you sing in silence? Like reading music?'

'It's not the same,' said Rolfa.

She will have to become part of the Consensus, Milena decided. If she becomes part of the Consensus, she can be Placed in the theatrical Estate. They will let her use the practice rooms at least. At least they will pay her, give her money and a place to live. If nothing happens she will go. She will have to go. What is the difference between this and Antarctica? It is still exile. The thought did not come to Milena that she herself was the difference.

That night she couldn't sleep again. She was trying to think of what she could do. Could she ask Jacob to sing the music that he remembered? Could she coax Rolfa into one of the rooms of the powerful, and persuade her to sing, cold? Milena finally fell asleep, sitting on the floor, only her head and shoulders resting on the bed.

She sat up suddenly some time later, knowing that she had been asleep. It was still dark outside. The counterpane was over her shoulders.

'I have been in bed forever,' said Rolfa. 'Isn't there something we can do?'

'There's a market open now. It's for stallowners, open early. We could go there!'

They crept down the unlighted stairs of the Shell, clutching on to each other, dreading a tall thin shadow. They slipped through the streets, their hearts pounding. They followed a butcher's cart, pulled by a huge and plodding white horse with a beautiful white mane. They reached the gas lamps, with their shining cotton wicks, and they saw the heaps of things to buy. Sparrows in cages had been dyed bright colours. There were whole smoked chickens, old furniture, T-shirts with pictures printed on them, musical instruments, and piles of fruit and vegetables.

'Pooh wants this,' said Rolfa. 'Pooh shall have it.' She bought a pineapple. The stallowner was looking at them.

'Isn't it funny how a Bear likes money,' Rolfa said, sorting coins. Milena felt her mouth go taut with embarrassment and the danger of it. He will remember us, she thought. They left as a corner of the sky was turning silver and the sound of horses' hooves announced the city was waking up. Streetsweepers in blue uniform nodded hello as they passed.

It became their new routine. Rolfa went to the market in the mornings in the dark. It was her time out. Milena would get up with her, and help her shave in the showers, a candle planted on the floor. Then Milena would go back to bed and lounge in its warmth. That was her time. When the sky was lighter, she would get up and clean the cooker, and undo whatever damage Rolfa had done with her pre-dawn fry-up.

'I hope you bought a new alcohol cannister,' she said once, when Rolfa got back. 'You used this one up.'

'You mean the cooker won't work?' Rolfa asked in dismay. 'And I got us something special for breakfast.'

'What is it?' Milena asked ruefully. 'Seal?'

'No. Penguin.' Rolfa held it up. It still had its feathers and horny feet, but at least it didn't kick.

'Well, I hope you can eat it raw.'

'I suppose it
is
all right in a salad,' said Rolfa, still looking crestfallen.

She'd also bought some peaches and some seaweed, and so they had a peach and penguin seaweed salad for breakfast — or rather, Rolfa did. Milena ate a peach and watched Rolfa bite through sinews as thick as her little finger. The sink was full of feathers. Milena smiled.

'Pooh,' she pronounced Rolfa, as if knighting her.

After breakfast, Milena would leave Rolfa for the day, reading a book. At the entrance of the Shell, the cast of the play would be waiting. Milena would walk in their midst to rehearsals at the Zoo, protected by a cloud of thought.

Milena learned things about them. She learned that Berowne was in love with the Princess and wanted to be a father. The Princess did not want to carry a baby. Berowne was thinking of carrying the child himself. The King, handsome, kind, faraway, loved nobody, but was one of those people who are, effortlessly, loved. The girls felt warmth and sympathy for him, as well as loving his blond-green curls and luxuriant beard.

They were all so ambitious. They all had such plans — characters they wanted to play, pictures they wanted to paint. Milena, as always, was quiet among them, but for once she was not full of resentment. She was content to go unnoticed. She found she liked being part of a group. And when she did say something, it would sound obvious and banal to her, but the actors would exclaim, 'Oh, Milena, you're always so sensible!' She would understand that it was not an insult. 'Not like you butterflies,' she replied once, with a chuckle. There was a kind of quiet acknowledgement on both sides of who she was.

Then one morning, on the walkway, the Princess whispered, 'Milena. That's the Snide!'

It was like swimming in the ocean and seeing a shark.

A tall man in a black coat was coming towards them. He ambled, hands in his pockets. It was a windy day and the tails of his black coat flapped. The Snide had a lean and dreamy face, with hooded eyes and a slight smile. His hair was like a pale mist, disordered and thinning.

Milena forced herself to look away from him, but she still saw the face in her mind. She hated it. It was sly and soft at the same time, sleepy, almost gentle, except for something glinting within the slits of the puffy eyes.

Think of something else! Milena told herself.

Me, an't shall please you.
Milena remembered one of her 13 lines.
I am Anthony Dull.
Nothing happened. Think of his coat, she told herself, what did it cost, how many labour-hours? Count them. The viral clock in her mind refused to work.

Milena had spent a lifetime beating down the viruses. They now deserted her. In her terror, she could not dredge up one of them.

Shakespeare. T. S. Eliot, Jane Austen.
It is a truth universally acknowledged,
she recited to herself,
that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
There was no answering spark of life.

The walkway was elevated and narrow; they would have to pass the Snide. 'Ack!' exclaimed the King, loudly. 'We've taken the wrong walkway.'

All the actors turned at once, and walked in the opposite direction. The Snide followed. Milena could hear the clattering of his shoes behind her on the resin surface. Wooden clogs. He wears them so that people will hear and be afraid.

Marx! Milena thought, where is Marx, they must have fed me Marx by the gram. Lenin, Mao, Chao Li Song. All right, music, then. Brahms, Elgar, anything. She began to hum
Das Lied von der Erde.
That's not a virus, she remembered, I learned that myself.

'Milena,' called the Snide. His voice was light and mellifluous. 'I'm singing to you, Milena. Can you hear me?'

Milena could feel terror seeping out of her, as if she were a leaking balloon. She heard his shoes, clip-clopping like horses' hooves. They were beside her now. The actors walked faster, looking at their feet, not knowing what else to do. Surely this was illegal! Of course it was illegal, but where was the Law? The Law was everywhere, invisible and alive. But there were no policemen.

'Eastern Europe, Milena,' said the Snide. 'Do you remember the trip on the train? You went to St Malo. An island with walls. Do you remember the steamer, Milena? Rocking back and forth on the sea? Do you remember the chugging sound and the sailwomen, all in stripes?'

Milena remembered none of it. There was not even a sense of echoing, of familiarity.

Milena glanced to one side and saw him, walking with them, smiling. Her eyes darted back to the ground in front of her like frightened birds.

Me, an't shall please you. I am Anthony Dull!

'I can feel you, Milena,' said the Snide. 'Do you remember the Child Garden? Do you remember Senior Dodds who taught you English? Do you remember your first day there? June 23rd? It was raining and you were all alone. You were just four years old, and they made you ill with a virus to make you speak. Do you remember that?'

For Milena, the Child Garden had been destroyed. Something had happened to it. All she could remember was being ill at ten years old. She could remember the sudden weight of new knowledge. The old viruses began to stir.

The Princess spoke, angrily. 'Go away and leave us alone!'

The Snide stepped in front of her. The Princess had to stop walking. 'Milena?' the Snide asked, grinning hopefully, leaning down to look into her eyes.

Milena felt giddy. She swayed as she walked. It was as if the ground beneath her lurched. She stood still beside the Princess as if to help her. Instead of fear, Milena had a strange and most complete sensation of maddening ennui. An irritable boredom engendered by viruses rose up all around her like steam from the pavement.

Milena remembered words, German words, badly printed in Gothic lettering.

DAS KAPITAL

Milena remembered the reading of them. She remembered someone reading them in a very small, very cold room, smoking cigarettes. She had rolled them herself, straggles of tobacco in thin papers that were held together with spit. Her legs were limply fleshed and useless. She sat in a wheelchair, by a window, on the ground floor of a block of flats. Just outside her window, noisy children were playing with a ball.