Child Garden (41 page)

'She said Amen after each set. She said she pumped for Jesus.' He leaned over and peered into the rabbit's cage. 'That picture was taken just before she died. She couldn't lift any more weights by then, Milena. Her hair went white. You know how in the old days, people's hair used to go white? Well, Mama said it was a sign from heaven. She said that soon, people would be able to get old again. That God didn't want us to the so young. He wanted us all to have time to get to know Him before we were called. I tell you, we had a special service for her, all around her deathbed. The whole family was singing.'

In a voice of uncertain power, he began to sing himself. 'Yes Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.'

He gave up pushing lettuce through the mesh of the cage, for the rabbits to nibble. 'I've been very lonely since she died.
^?
He stood waiting, as if for Milena to help him.

'I'm sure you must have been, Mike,' said Milena.

The picture in the air between them faded.

'Will you marry me?' he asked.

'No,' replied Milena.

'Oh,' said Mike Stone, 'Well. That's just the first time.' He turned back to his rabbits.

This is getting serious, thought Milena. Honesty, Milena, if you've learned anything, it's the need to be clear and honest. 'Mike. The answer is going to be no, no matter how often you ask. So please, please don't ask again.'

'I'm very faithful, Milena,' he said, to the rabbits.

'I don't want you to be faithful.' She gathered breath and strength. 'I want you to be silent.'

'Right-o-rooty,' he said. 'I'll be silent.' Then he looked up, and smiled, and the smile said: but I'll always be here.

'This,' chuckled one of the Pears, 'is insane.' He looked delighted. Milena remembering could not now think of his name. He was dead now. She had not known that he was a friend.

'It would work,' Milena told him, quietly.

Charles Sheer was sitting on his hands, his legs crossed, and he was bouncing quietly up and down.

The Minister's office had been repainted. It was mushroom-coloured now, with stripes of subtly contrasting browns and greys running round the walls. The screens were gone. So was the Zookeeper. In his place was the sleek young man, fatter now, in even more wildly printed trousers and shirt. Milton. Milton the Minister. He had gone plump and florid with success, and anxious to show he had something to contribute. The Milena who was living looked at his purple face with its swollen neck and young smile and thought: he's not going to live long.

'Buh!' said Charles Sheer in a sudden plosive burst. The others turned. 'Buh-buh.'

The sound was appalling. There was something about it that made Milena physically queasy.

'Charles?' asked Moira Almasy. 'Are you all right?'

He looked at her with outraged dignity, terror and sickness in his eyes, and anger.

'Nuh! Nuh!' He was trying to say no.

They all went quiet and still. Milena thought: stammering, stammering again. It was over a year since the Princess had started to stammer. It seemed now as if almost everyone did.

Would you believe me, Charles, thought Milena, if I said I was sorry?

'To say anything,' Milena told her enemy. 'You'll have to sing.'

He looked at her with hatred.

'I'm sorry, but other people have caught this, and it's the only way they can talk.' People sang in the streets.

Charles Sheer writhed in place. He hated this. He knew it was true. From now on, he would have to sing to speak. He looked at Milena, and anger fuelled him. All right, his eyes and the creases around them seemed to say. All right. I will do it. You may make me look like a fool. You will not stop me saying anything.

The music and the words had to flow as one. The selection of the melody would always reveal more than words alone would. That was why singing was embarrassing. It was impossible to lie.

Charles Sheer began to sing, slowly.

'I want to make sure that I've got this right,' he sang. 'And that it is the case...'

The melody was unsettling, and slightly childish at the same time. It seemed to stalk something through a wood. Milena's viruses scrambled to identify it. It took them some time, a matter of seconds. The song was buried deep in history.

Charles Sheer was singing 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic'. Without effort, the words took roost on the tune, as if humankind had always been meant to sing instead of speak.

'That you intend to fill the sky

With holograms from space?

You've suggested this and outlined the cost

And the other productions that might be lost

But you haven't said why we should fill the sky

With Dan-te!'

The delighted little man chuckled again and clapped his hands. He was silenced by a glare from Moira Almasy. 'I think,' said Moira, 'that given the circumstances we should confine the discussion to the matter at hand. Milena?'

Milena felt herself placed at a disadvantage. She was very slightly flustered. 'I... I didn't go into the aesthetics in my proposal. The costings were complicated enough, and frankly, they seemed to me to be the main issue. Obviously, the Consensus has some interest in a performance of the opera. The Consensus orchestrated it. But the Comedy lasts over fifty hours. Any performance at all would be very expensive and difficult. I'm proposing that the Comedy be Britain's contribution to the Revolution Centennial. Staged as I suggest, it would become a public event, like fireworks, if you like. We would be saying in effect, here is a great new opera — there hasn't been one in some time — and here is the great new technology to go with it. It would become a tribute to the Revolution itself.'

Moira Almasy was considering something. 'It would do those things, I think, but I worry, for example, about the sick.' She did not glance at Charles Sheer. 'I worry about all the people who won't be able to get away from this, but who might want to very much. Imagine you're ill with a virus. Imagine that you're dying. All you want is quiet, peace. You don't want one hundred nights of an opera to take over the sky.'

'Where else could we stage it?' asked Milena, in a smaller voice. She had to admit, imagining it, that Almasy had a point.

'Down here. You can hologram a whole sky into a tiny room and it will look real.'

'I don't want it to look real. I want it to be real.' Milena knew she was on her weakest ground here. 'At New Year, the streets are full of parades and singing. People are ill then and nobody minds.'

'New Year doesn't last for fifty hours,' said Moira. 'Do we have to stage all of it?'

'The Comedy is not just a string of arias. Every single note refers to something else in the opera. It is a fifty-hour-long, unified piece of music. If it's cut it will make less sense.'

'I know!' exclaimed Milton the Minister, suddenly sitting up. 'I know what we could call it!'

'You want to change the title of
The Divine Comedy?'
Moira Almasy was from Europe and still had a capacity to be horrified by British provinciality.

'There's never been anything like this before, right?' said Milton. He chirps, thought Milena. It's very annoying. Milton's eyes gleamed, his teeth gleamed. 'We need something that's never been thought of before, something mint new. How about...' He paused for effect, his eyes glittering. '
A Space Opera?'

There was an embarrassed silence.

'No one's thought of it before!' he explained.

'I wonder how the Italians would like it?' said Moira Almasy.

'Or, I know!' said Milton struck with fresh inspiration. 'We could call it
The Restoration Comedy!'

Charles Sheer was making nasty snorting noises on his pillow. He was trying to laugh, but the virus wouldn't let him.

'I mean, why does it have to be Dante? Why can't it be something British? If we're paying for it? I know! We could do
Paradise Lost!'
exclaimed Milton.

This idiot is going to cost me the Comedy.

'Certainly,' said Milena. 'If you've got Milton set to music, Milton.'

'I have,' said Milton. 'It's by Haydn and is called
The Creation.'
Milton looked pleased. 'Haydn changed the title too,' he added. He looked so pleased.

'It would at least be shorter,' sang Charles Sheer, gleefully. The melody was from
The Creation.

Milena could begin to feel it slip away. The new Minister grinned like a puppy dog, happy to have been part of things.

Moira Almasy spoke, looking pained. 'We... we seem to be straying from the original point.' Her brows were knitted, fighting back the bouquet of confusion scattered by Milton. 'We know the Consensus is interested in this particular work. Ms Shibush seems to have an unusual idea for presenting it. It is new, and it has a strong international element. If we make it our Centennial contribution, we might be able to ask other theatrical Estates to sponsor it with us. Even those in Europe.'

'There's a German version of
The Creation,'
offered Milton.

'Yes, Minister,' said Moira Almasy, who evidently ran things instead of Milton. 'We can present both ideas to the Consensus.'

Milton sat back, making a generous gesture with his hands. 'I just thought I'd throw a little something into the pot.'

The delighted little man whose name Milena could not remember spoke again. He had greasy hair and a tracery of purple veins on his purple cheeks. He still smiled, but his voice was solemn. 'It's never in anyone's interest to innovate,' he said, and peered at Milena. 'Least of all the innovator. People always think its just a way of advancing someone else's career. Or they worry that they'll be blamed if it fails. We don't live as long as we used to, Comrades. Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky that in our short lives we have a chance to help instead of hinder something as insane but as essentially workable as this. And that,' and he peered at Milena again, 'we are lucky enough to have someone who is willing to pay the cost.'

What cost? wondered Milena the director.

There was silence, and in the silence, things swung Milena's way. The Pears were all looking at Milena as if she were Frankenstein's monster and they were deciding whether or not to create her.

Moira Almasy spoke. 'Milena has now produced roughly one hundred and fifty outside projects. She has no Mainstage experience, but this will not be on a stage. She is one of the few directors we have with experience of Reformation technology. But. There is no guarantee that Reformation will work on this scale. So there will have to be a test. I'd like that to be made part of the proposal. That will mean, Milena, that you will have to go into space.'

The word was like a cold wind.

'The Centennial is only two years away. So there is not much time. You would have to be ready to go up this autumn. Is that all right with you, Milena?'

In the silence, Milena could only nod yes.

'You would have to be made Terminal. And you would probably have to be Read, finally.' Moira's eyes were firmly held on Milena's. Yes, we all knew, Milena. The Consensus was saving you for something.

'What a thing it is,' said Moira bleakly, 'to have a friend in the Consensus.' She was saying it out of pity.

'Speaking of friends,' sang Charles Sheer. The words now fell on the aria 'Nessun dorma' from
Turandot.
'Nessun Dorma' means 'No one's sleeping'. It was a reference to the effect of staging the opera at night.

'Speaking of friends

Is that mad person,

Ms Thrawn McCartney,

part of this project,

part of this mad endeavour?'

'No,' said Milena, tunelessly.

Milena was carrying parcels. She opened the door to her room, and on her bed, in the last of the daylight, sat Thrawn McCartney.

'Get in here and sit down,' said Thrawn.

Oh, that face. The devouring eyes, enraptured now that what Thrawn had wanted to happen had happened. The teeth were bared as if to rend flesh. The face could have been beautiful, if it had ever stopped eating itself. Milena the director felt the feathery brush of fear.

'In a moment,' said Milena, and found herself actually trying to smile. 'Surely you'd be more comfortable on the chair?' Meaning, get off my bed. Milena went towards her sink, to put down the rice and the peppers and the lumps of chicken flesh. She started to fill her bucket.

'What do you think you're doing?' Thrawn demanded.

'Putting my groceries away,' said Milena dismally. What she hated most was the impossibility of being direct as soon as Thrawn was near. Everything was veiled, every gesture she made was masked as another, hiding one part of the truth with another. Milena was afraid, irritated beyond measure, weary and dishonest.

'OK, Milena,' sighed Thrawn. 'You seem to like these little games.'