Free Child Garden by Geoff Ryman Page A

that would leave no doubt, come so near to the point of doing it that she could feel her own arms or the shadow of her arms, move out and hold her.
    But she didn't do it.
    Gradually a new idea began to seep in, so slowly that Milena never knew when she first had it. This idea was also transfiguring.
    Rolfa did not need to be cured. Yes, she was immune to the viruses; her behaviour was her own; and Milena had given her a thousand unmistakable signs, she thought, of how she felt; and Rolfa had not responded. Rolfa did not appear to be interested. The great hulking innocent probably had no idea of what had been happening.
    They were not going to be lovers. Milena had been wrong. Rolfa's grammar was undoubtedly strange, but not bad, not bad, no.
    When Milena was most alone, in the middle of rehearsals for Love's Labour's Lost, she found herself coming to a glum acceptance of that. She sat on the periphery and watched the other actors sleepwalking through their parts.
    The young boy with a beard was playing Berowne. He spent the whole of one afternoon glaring. Something had happened to him. Milena knew of it vaguely, something about a girl. That day he did not play the character of Berowne. He played himself, carried away by the words. 'I who have been love's whip,' he said bitterly, spit leaping out of his mouth.
    Listening to him, Milena found that she was angry.
    'That wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy
    This Signor Junior, this giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid.'
    Milena listened. They were all listening, as the boy-actor stood rigid, glowering. Milena's hands had curled into fists.
    A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
    With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes.'
    The hatred in it, the violence in it, made Milena jump. Who was speaking? The boy, Berowne, Shakespeare?
    'And so I sigh for her, to watch for her,
    To pray for her! Go to, it is a plague.'
    'Stop,' said the director. He was thirty-five years old, and there were creases in the flesh around his eyes. He sat very still, looking at the boy-actor. 'You know how that's supposed to sound, 'Jonz,' he said. He sat a moment longer. 'I give up,' he said, and stood up. 'Say it how you want to, Jonz, if it makes you feel better.'
    But it does, thought Milena, it does make me feel better. It's meant to hurt, it's meant to bite, it's meant to mean something to us too. We have to act it.
    'All of you,' said the director, looking worn, 'do it how you want to.' Then he turned and walked up the aisle, leaving them.
    'Go home, I guess,' shrugged the blandly cheerful fellow who was playing the King. Berowne still glowered.
    'Your way was better,' Milena told Berowne. He only nodded.
    Outside it was a drab, cloudy English summer afternoon. So fine, she and Rolfa would be friends. Could she accept that? She could accept that. It happens to everyone. Perhaps when she was certain of the friendship, she would tell Rolfa what she had felt just in passing, so that there would be no dishonesty — only friendship and music, until one day Milena would be cured. One day they would remember to Read her, and give her the viruses again. Perhaps she wouldn't be like her father, after all. Perhaps it wouldn't kill her. Why be a pessimist? she thought.
    Until then she and Rolfa would be friends. Nothing would have to change. Even their routine, Milena thought could stay the same.
     
     
    One evening they met for dinner and Rolfa was drunk. She had started to drink again. She arrived drunk, reeking in the middle of the Zoo cafe. She did not duck or cringe. She came up to Milena and prodded her shoulder with a finger the size of a salami sausage.
    'Out,' she managed to say. 'Outside.' Under the fringe of fur, her eyes were baleful. She walked backwards towards the door. 'Come on.'
    'Rolfa? Rolfa?' Milena heard herself, heard her own voice drained, hopeless, frail, and she hated the sound of it. 'Is there something wrong?'
    Rolfa made a kind of twisted, barking yelp. 'Oh no,' she said. 'No, no, no, no.'