Child Garden (3 page)

Midway in the journey of our life

 I found myself in a dark wood

For the straight way was lost

It was an audience of children.

They sat on mattresses on the floor of a darkened room in a Child Garden. The children all wore the same grey, quilted dungarees, but they had been allowed to embroider them with colourful patterns. The children were allowed to drift in and out of the room as they pleased. There was no need for externally imposed discipline. On a makeshift stage, actors were trading convoluted Shakespearian wit.

Thou pretty because little!

Little pretty because little. Wherefore apt?

And therefore apt because quick!

It was a production
of Love's Labour's Lost.
The children were bored: they could follow the play with such ease.

Milena Shibush waited in plain sight of the children to make her entrance. There was no proscenium arch to hide behind. She could hear what the children said. She did not expect flattery.

'Another one of these New History things,' sighed a little girl in the front. Her cheeks were purple from the sun. Her voice was sulky, light, breathy. She was about three years old. 'If they're going to try to do the originals, why can't they get it right?'

'I don't know why they bother to send us these plays,' said her little friend. Her voice already had the crackle of adult precision. 'We know them by heart already. And who is that idiot in the floppy boots?'

The idiot was Milena Shibush. Tykes, she thought; it was expected that younger children would be obnoxious. They got everything without effort from the viruses; they had no idea that anything would require effort.

I don't like the boots either, Milena thought, but these are the boots I have to wear.

Milena was playing a constable called Dull.

She had a total of thirteen lines. I am sixteen years old, Milena thought, halfway through my life, and I have thirteen lines in a production that is touring Child Gardens.

Child Gardens were where orphans were raised. There were so many orphans. Milena had been an orphan herself. She had become an actress to escape orphans and Child Gardens. Here she was.

Milena looked at the faces of her colleagues. The boy who played Berowne waited dull-eyed in his make-up and the beard he had grown for the part. He had to have a beard, for no other reason than that Berowne in the original production had had a beard. This recreation only served to preserve history. Milena lived in a culture that replicated itself endlessly, but which never gave birth to anything new.

The actors are bored, thought Milena, the children are bored, why, why, why are we doing this?

She muttered one of her thirteen lines. 'Me, an't shall please you.' It plainly didn't.

At least, she thought, I can change my boots.

It was nearly dark by the time Milena got back home. She walked beside the river on the pavements of the South Bank, which was feebly lit by alcohol lamps. There was still a smoky pinkness in the west.

The National Theatre of Southern Britain loomed out of the darkness and slight haze. Great sweeping buttresses of Land Coral and a cage of bamboo kept the old building on its feet.

The Zoo, it was called affectionately or otherwise. Milena was a registered member of the Theatrical Estate, but she was yet to work on any of the Zoo's main stages. It had a restaurant that was always open, called the Zoo Cafe. Actors could not sun themselves to feed. It made their skins too purple, too dark, and ruined them for Shakespeare and the classics. Actors had to be pale, for the sake of historical accuracy. They had to eat food and were nearly always hungry.

Milena went to the Zoo Cafe when she was lonely or could not face cooking on her one-ring alcohol stove. It was something of a homeopathic cure for loneliness. Other people sat talking at tables, leaning back to laugh, brilliant young actors or the well-dressed, imperturbable children of Party Members. Milena watched them hungrily as she moved forward one step at a time in the queue for hot water.

The fashion in everything was for history. People's minds were choked with it. Young people wore black and pretended to be the risen corpses of famous people. The Vampires of History they called themselves. Their virus-stuffed brains gave them the information they needed to avoid anachronisms. It was a kind of craze.

The Vampires only came out at night, when there was no sun to sweeten their blood. They had to eat too, but they could afford meals of historic proportions. Milena could only afford a seafood pasta, cloned squid tissue on cooling noodles. The great, heaped plates of the Vampires turned her shrivelled stomach. She looked away.

Milena saw Cilia, an actress with whom she had achieved a chilly kind of acquaintance, sitting at a freshly vacated table. Cilia had just finished kissing a number of cheeks goodbye. Cilia knew everybody, even Milena.

'Who are you this evening?' Milena asked her, putting down her tray.

Cilia was in black, with white pancake makeup and dark vampire shadows around her eyes. 'Just me,' answered Cilia. 'This is supposed to be me when I rise from my grave.'

'Someone is playing themselves for a change,' said Milena.

'At least you know you're not being cast against type,' said Cilia, lightly. She was well on her way to becoming an Animal — a well known performer.

'You know I'm in this boring play,' said Milena. She began to wash her cutlery in a mug of hot water. 'Do you know any way I can change my costume? I hate my boots.'

'You can't change your costume if it's part of the original production. You'd be violating history.'

'The boots squelch. It's supposed to be funny.'

Cilia shrugged. 'You could go to the Graveyard.'

A Vampire joke? Milena looked at Cilia, narrow-eyed. Life had taught Milena to be wary of humour.

'The Graveyard,' repeated Cilia, in a voice that indicated that Milena knew very little indeed. 'It's where they dump the old costumes no one wants. They're not even on record.'

'You mean I can just take them out? No director's approval?'

'Yup. It's in an old warehouse under a bridge.' Cilia was telling Milena how to get there, when two Vampires swept up to the table in twentieth century clothes: a black tuxedo, and a black-beaded dress.

Party Members — Tarries. The boy wore spectacles, another affectation, and had something in his nose to make his nostrils flare. His hair was combed back and his make-up was green, to make him look ill.

'Good evening,' he said, looking sour, his accent American. 'We've managed to escape Virginia. She is busying herself listing all the ways in which Joyce is a bad writer. Her jealousy is so nakedly evident, I was embarrassed.'

The woman with him was trying to smile, under a low cloche hat. The smile wavered pathetically. 'Tom?' she said. His back was turned towards her. 'Speak to me. Can't you speak? Speak?'

'T S Eliot and Vivien!' exclaimed Cilia, and complimented them. 'Instant. Complete.' The couple did not relax out of their roles. Is there so little of yourselves left? thought Milena.

'I don't believe I've had the pleasure,' the boy said, holding out his hand towards Milena. It was Vampire sociability. He wanted to know who Milena was playing.

'Who am I?' Milena responded with deadpan hostility. She did not take his hand. 'Oh. In life, I was a textile factory worker in nineteenth century Sheffield. I died at twelve years old. I'm a rather bad vampire because I have no teeth. But I do have eczema and rickets.'

The Vampires made excuses and left. 'Well. That sent them packing,' said Cilia.

'I know,' sighed Milena. Why did she find so many things unacceptable? 'Is there something wrong with me, Cilia?'

'Yup.' said Cilia. 'You're prissy.' She mused for a moment. 'And... obsessive.' She nodded with decision. Then, to make it sweeter, she said, 'La, la la.' It was a nonsense expression. It meant that everything was the same, everything was a song.

'Obsessive?' questioned Milena. It was a new arrow to her bow of self-recrimination.

'You're still washing that fork,' said Cilia. 'You melted all of mine. When you visited, remember?'

'And prissy?'

'Severe,' added Cilia, nodding again in agreement with herself.

Milena had gone through a phase of dunking she was in love with Cilia. Oh, woman, if only you knew what was on my mind!

'I suppose that does sum it up,' sighed Milena. It was bad enough to suffer from Bad Grammar, but to be called prissy with it! She contemplated her cold squid, and decided that she preferred hunger. 'Excuse me.' She stood up and walked rather unsteadily into the night.

'You did ask me. Milena? You did ask!' Cilia called after her. Cilia always spoke without thinking. She only acted on stage.

Milena walked out on the Hungerford Footbridge and looked at the river. It churned in the moonlight, muddy and smelling of drains. The eddies made by the pylons of the bridge swirled with garbage and foam. Milena yearned for some leap away from herself, away from the world.

And then over Waterloo Bridge a great black balloon rose up from its mooring by the river. It made no sound except for a whispering of air, like wind blowing over the moors. Its cheeks were puffed out, and it propelled itself gently, by blowing. It was borne up in silence, moving with the grace of a cloud towards — where? China? Bordeaux? Milena wanted to go with it. She wanted to be like it, huge and unthinking with nothing to do but be itself, carried by the wind.

She was young. She thought she was old. On the South Bank, the windows of the Zoo Cafe were full of candlelight and Vampire silhouettes and the sound of laughter. They were all young and soft, and they had no time, and so they hated the silence, the silence in themselves that had yet to be filled by experience.

Some of them were driven to make noise, were kept jumping by something that was alive inside them. Others like Milena, cleared the decks and waited for something to happen, something worthwhile to do or to say. They loathed the silence in themselves, not knowing that out of that silence would come all the things that were individual to them.

Something, something has got to happen soon, Milena thought. I need something new to do. I'm tired of the plays, I'm tired of the Child Gardens, I'm tired of being me. I'm tired of sitting bolt upright on the edge of my bed all night, alone. I need someone. I need a woman, and there isn't going to be one. They've all been cured. The viruses cure them. Bad Grammar. I love you is Bad Grammar?

Milena suffered from resistance. She thought that in many different ways she was the last of her kind in the world.

The next day she went to the Graveyard, hugging the unwanted boots. Trains to the Continent left from Waterloo. The wooden cars creaked and groaned on rubber wheels that no longer ran on rails, chuffing with steam over the old city on old bridges made of ancient brick.

Through those brick bridges, tunnels ran. One of the tunnels was called Leake Street, and leak it did. Water dripped from the roof. The place smelled of trains, a dry oily itch in Milena's nostrils. The walls were covered with splattered white tiles and all along them was a series of large green doors.

The green doors were locked. Milena tried each one and not one of them would open. To Milena, this was mysterious. What was the point of a door that would not open?

Finally she came to a huge gate that had been left ajar. It was covered with many different layers of flaking paint, out of which emerged the words in old alphabetic script 'White Horse'. From beyond the gates there came the sound of a full orchestra.

It was playing in the dark. Milena peered through the gate. There must be a light, she thought. What kind of orchestra is it that plays in the dark?

She swung the gate open and stepped inside. She had time to see disordered racks of clothing, bamboo rods on bamboo uprights and little rollers. She saw them in a narrow band of dim light from the doorway. The band of light suddenly narrowed. The gate swung shut behind her with a clunk.

It would not open again. This Milena did not believe. She knew nothing of locks. Her culture did not need them. No one ever stole. The old gates did lock however, and Milena pushed them, and slammed them, and shouted 'Hello?' at them. They didn't move.

Fine, she thought in anger. I'll starve to death in here and they'll find me fifty years from now, my fingers clawing at the wood. Why the hell have a door like that? Why the hell can't they light this place? And how the hell am I going to get out of here? Milena felt a sting of frustration in her eyes. She spun around and kicked the door and listened to it shudder. She listened to the music. Her viruses knew it note for note.

Some woman was warbling away to
Das Lied von der Erde.
Another piece by Mahler about death. All I need right now. Couldn't the miserable little turncoat write about anything else?

Still, some Animal or another was singing in the dark. Some Animal or another would know the way out. The music was coming from a corner of the warehouse that was diagonally opposite. Milena simply had to find her way there.

This meant fighting her way through racks of old costumes. There were no orderly aisles between them. The capes, the false chain mail, the nun's habits swung rottenly on their hangers, dry and stiff and booby-trapped with pins. Milena felt a sudden jab of pain.