Child Garden (19 page)

Everything goes, everything is lost, eventually. But if something is good, it doesn't matter what happens. The ending is still happy.

We might have lived in the Antarctic, my love. We would have visited your mother, and you would still have sung, if only to sled dogs. We might have run away to Scotland and been sheep farmers in smelly old jumpers. Or we could have stayed as we were until we hated each other.

Or there could have been this. You will be great, and I will stand in the wings and hear your music, and the applause will rise up.

Endings don't mean anything. Meanings lie where the world takes its breath, and that is always now. And suddenly, over Waterloo Bridge, the black balloon rose up again, in sunlight this time. Light was reflected from its full black cheeks. It was blowing itself backwards, as it rose into the sky. It blew itself, and was blown. It had been made by others, but it was also entirely itself. That's me, thought Milena. From the gondola that hung underneath it, people waved. There were coloured streamers. Was there a wedding? Milena waved back, and saw herself, as if she were the balloon. She was tiny, standing on the bridge, but the gesture, the wave of greeting, was clear.

Ten billion and counting.

There was a lot to do. Seventeen years old, Milena thought. She only had another seventeen, maybe eighteen years left to live. Time to get busy. She began to walk, as if counting her steps as well. Time was the problem. She thought she could control it. Instead, time swept her up, blew her on her way, through her life, without Rolfa for all her life. But whatever work she did could not be negated, not even by the death of the sun. That would only be an ending.

Twelve billion and counting.

Milena walked backwards to keep her face toward the sunlight, unaware that she was humming to herself.

Just a Dog of a Song. But...

Jump.

Somewhere else, the voices of the Consensus were falling like rain, calling

Rolfa

Rolfa

Rolfa

Rolfa

Rolfa.

They were the voices of children, wounded and anxious and eager for love. And they said:

It wants to hear your music. The Crown of the World wants you to

sing.

And a pattern gathered itself into thought, and seemed to say, in mild surprise. Oh, really? Very well then. It was a pattern that was used to singing in the dark and imagining music out of silence.

There was a blast of imagined light.

It was engulfing, blinding, and the voices scattered like cherubim. With the light, there was the striking of a great chord, made of many voices and instruments, a sound like the beginning of the world, or the end. The sound was sustained. Very faintly at first, like a ringing in the ear, came a voice.

In the end is my beginning.

A hidden thought followed the words like a dart: and this the end of the Comedy, and the music at the end is the same as at the beginning.

The one who had come awake could orchestrate thought and sensation. The blinding light seemed to fade; eyes were adjusting to it. There were clouds, mountainous, rumpled, going off into many layers of distance, with shafts of light and lakes of shadow and cloud-valleys full of icy mist. There was an infinity of light and air, a world without end.

The audience felt wind in its face and a throbbing of blood in its temples and cold air being pulled into its lungs — it felt nostalgia for flesh. And out of the mists, Angels came streaming in black, their round and innocent faces painted white. Their robes and lips and eyesockets were black.

The Angels were the Vampires. They had been a chorus all along. There was T. S. Eliot, his face painted green to make him look ill. There was Madame Curie, glowing with her discovery. T. E. Lawrence had the marks of the lash, and the Brontes coughed, their arms about each other. The Vampires of History held each other back. They bore each other up. The signs of health were indistinguishable from the signs of disease.

The song they sung was this:

All'alta fantasia qui mano possa.. .

Here high fantasy failed

Yet, like a smoothly spinning wheel

Desire and my will were turned as one by Love.

Then everything dropped out. The audience fell into night, into a sky dark and blue and full of stars. The darkness, the sky, had been below the light.

The Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.

Drums beat. The imagined music drew to a firm and conclusive end. The thought came that this was a prediction: we will all live in the spirit. Rolfa was free.

Then, silence.

To run on better water now, the boat of my invention

Shakes its sails and leaves away to stern

That cruel stretch of sea.

And I will sing of this second kingdom

Where the human soul is purged

Made fit to leap up into Heaven.

Here let dead poetry rise again.

Milena remembered the face of Chao Li Song.

His hair and his beard were black and his eyes were narrow, hard and smiling. This was not an old saintly man, but a young Chinese outlaw who attracted women.

'The problem,' said the outlaw, 'is time.'

His two hands moved, one forwards, one backwards. 'Time moves forward with the expansion of space. But space is also contracting, and time is moving backwards.' The two hands met, as if in prayer. 'They intersect at Now. Now is always timeless.'

There was a whirring sound of cameras. 'There is no single flow of time. There is no cause and effect.' The outlaw pulled a face that was childishly sad. 'There are,' he said, 'no stories.'

Four years after Rolfa left her, Milena was Read by the Consensus. She was made into a story. A wave of gravity and thought slammed into her, filling her. All her memories, all her separate selves were inflated, like balloons. Her past was made Now.

She remembered the night the power came back on. She was standing on Hungerford Footbridge, and it was crowded with strangers, crowded with friends.

The cast
of Love's Labour's
were with her, Berowne and the Princess. Cilia was with her as well. They sheltered in a viewing bay on the bridge, a mass of people pressed around them. Along the river, the embankment was full of people. It was late in the summer evening, and the sky was a silver blue. It was warm and mild and the air moved in currents like silk ribbons. The Shell-Mex, a great grey building across the river, stood against the light in the west.

Berowne was pregnant. Most people thought he looked grotesque. The foetus was attached to his bowel, and all the back of his body was swollen with it. He had to sleep in a sling. His beard had gone thin and his teeth were grey and fragile, speckled with white like a dog's coat. He would have to grow new teeth after the birth. If he sat down suddenly, he would the. He would probably the anyway, giving birth.

Milena thought he was very brave. Coming out with her tonight was dangerous. Life itself was dangerous, and there was something in Berowne's acceptance of it that Milena found admirable.

The Princess, the mother of the child, was with them, puce-pale and haggard from wishing she was more heartless. When Berowne had become pregnant, the Princess had tried to pretend that, beyond donating the ovum, she would have nothing to do with it. But she was here, with him.

'Cuh!' she said, trying to speak. 'Cuh-could suh-see.' Her lips trembled against each other, as if they could lose their balance. 'Fuh! From the Shuh-Shell.'

The Princess had begun to stammer in the spring. It was a virus. She had caught a virus, and it stopped her speaking. The only way she could speak smoothly, was to sing, to set the words to music. She refused to sing in public.

'I wanted to be part of this,' said Berowne, and held out his hands towards the spectacle. Even the septum of his nose had gone thin, the calcium leached from it. The wind stirred his thin hair as if with hope. The Princess hugged herself, forlornly.

On the pavements of the South Bank, the mosaic pattern of many people shifted and stirred. Costermen carried barrels of beer on their backs, helped by children. The children turned the taps and filled the mugs, and danced playing bamboo pipes. All along the walkway, there were giant ash trees, and the branches were crowded with people. Beefy workmen sat astride the branches as if they were horses' backs and they lowered mugs on rope, down to the children to fill.

Over it all, dirigibles floated. Gondolas hung underneath them, full of people. Party members, of course. Tarries, thought Milena, the actress. They're up there and we are down here.

Then from underneath Milena, there came singing.

Singing of sort, a kind of humming. The tide had gone out, and the river bed was shingled and muddy, heavy with the broken glass and torn rubber of history. Out from under the bridge came people. They moved across the mud, in fits and starts, like flamingoes. They picked their way, heads bobbing back and forth, arms folded like wings. They stopped at once, all together, and stood on one leg, transfixed. All of them tilted their heads together in one direction, as if listening to something. Then they suddenly scurried forward, all in a flock.

'Don't look at them,' said Cilia, for whom any form of extreme behaviour was only a way of attracting attention.

Mud coated their heads like helmets, and they wore tatters of resin, bound to their bodies by nylon cord.

'Those are Bees,' said Berowne.

Milena had never seen Bees before: they had been only a dim rumour for her. It was said that people's minds were becoming disrupted. Their minds were becoming disrupted in unison.

As Milena watched, all the Bees dropped, like puppets whose strings have been cut. They dropped down all at once onto their knees. They kowtowed as if to an emperor and began to scoop, furiously, more mud over their heads.

'They're supposed to be Snide,' said Berowne, 'but in a funny way.'

'Fuh-funny!' exclaimed the Princess in fear and bitterness. She had not wanted to bear a child for the sake of her career. What career was there now for an actress who stammered?

There had been a change in climate, in many different ways. Behind the sunlight and celebration, everywhere there was an underlying tickle of fear and doubt. There were the Bees; now there was the stammering. People knew that something was going wrong with the viruses. They still did not want to think about it; they still did not know what to do about it; and so they came here to celebrate something new and good.

On the embankment, the hurdy-gurdy men began to grind out fairground music faster than before. The costers began to call out the names of their wares with a gathering clamour, and a breeze began to blow, as if the river itself were stirring with anticipation. On Waterloo Bridge, people were standing up on horsecarts. People were lined up along the roofs of buildings or leaned out of windows. Milena's viruses told her: you are looking at half a million people.

Across the river, on the face of the Shell-Mex, the hands of a giant clock were still. They had been still since the Blackout, the Revolution, ninety-seven years before. Tonight the hands would move, tonight at 10.30. There was enough metal now. The electricity would flow again, at first along the North Bank of the Thames only. But after that?

It was getting late. There was a sudden surge forward on the bridge as people tried to inch forward, to see. Milena pushed backwards. 'Stop shoving!' she said. 'We've got a pregnant man here!'

'Smile,' said Berowne to the Princess, and took her hand. She looked down at his hand, and compared it with hers, and shook her head. Time was running out.

The people began to count, echoing their viruses.

'TEN ... NINE ... EIGHT ...'

In the mud below, the Bees were rocked by each giant number, buffeted by blasts of thought.

'SEVEN ... SIX ...'

Milena thought: the town will be lit up at night. There will be film shows for the public on giant screens in parks. There will be videos. Different Estates will start vying for control of them. All of us are going to have to find different things to do.

'FIVE ... FOUR ...'

Berowne turned to Milena, and nudged her, smiling wanly. This was why they had come. Join in!

'Three,' murmured Milena, wary of joining in a mass.

There will be a lot of sickness, she thought, a lot of new kinds of sickness.

'TWO! ONE!'