Garden City

 

Chapter VII

Garden City

Our view is interrupted suddenly as the train passes alongside honey coloured old stone walls encompassing Hortus Conclusus and my companion and I hurry to gather our things together.

Everyone will alight here says the voice over the tannoy. This for some is a final destination where people come and stay awhile to rest and recuperate inside the cloistered garden city with resorative trips out into the beautiful environs, a taste of peace and paradise to heal and re-energise so that the hardships and strictures of daily life may be resumed with the necessary fervour.  For others, it's a place to give birth. There is accommodation and expertise available for those who need to convalesce and others who are in the last stages of pregnancy. The rest of us who are intending to travel further onwards will stay in a separate quarter. 

We all step out onto the ancient stone of the platform together and take in the fabled high vaulted ceilings painted in the style of the Sistene Chapel but with secular imagery telling the story of our new society's generation and vision. 

The mood is one of subdued joy and wonder. Passengers talk in low hushed voices. Further down the platform, a small child strains at the leash of their pregnant mother's hand and someone else scoops them up onto their shoulders. Other children of various ages who must be weary of being cooped up on a train, wait patiently among the adults, looking at the frescoes, some taking photos with their wrist phones. 

These recent times have instilled something in us all, unspeakable, a softening of the edges of feeling, everything fleeting, a distance from joy as if its light might always be chased closely by shadow. We are held in some aspic of shared shock and grief and peering reluctantly further down the platform to those among us on trolleys and in wheelchairs, some of whom may be travelling further onto Ghia with me soon, I know we all know, even the youngest amongst us, that they are the reason why. 

*