The Child Garden

CHAPTER ONE Everyday Life in Future Times (Windows in a Bridge)

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.

Good, right, fine, she thought, sucking her finger, and growing savage. I’ve just injected myself with virus.

Then she dropped the boots. She heard a splash. Oh God, she thought, I’ve dropped them in a puddle of something. Her hand plashed in stale water. She found them, dripping wet, and held them out, well away from her body. She stood up and hit her head on a rack, pushed it over in a rage, got her feet tangled up in dead clothing, dropped the boots again, paddled in the dark to find them, stood up, snarled and took a deep breath.

More than anything else, Milena hated losing her dignity. She forced herself to be calm, and trembling very slightly, began to swing the racks towards her, juddering on their little wheels. She made a more orderly progress.

Milena went on in the darkness until she was lost. Under her hands, she felt the cheap burlap, the frail seams, the loose threads like cobwebs. She felt the scratchiness of dusty sequins in clumps. It was as if all theatre had died around her, leaving only husks behind. What if there isn’t an orchestra? she wondered. Oh come on, Milena, who do you think is making the music, ghosts?

She began to imagine some very strange things. The music was too loud. Music was never that loud. You could stand in the middle of the orchestra next to the kettle drums and it wouldn’t be that loud. And there was a shrill, unnatural tone to it that hurt Milena’s ears.

Distracted, she scraped her head on brick. She crouched blindly under an arch and saw light. Light! Like in a forest just at dawn, grey daylight.

But the music! The music was louder than before, and she could see the rough texture of the bricks in the wall; she was yards away from it. There was no orchestra. There was no room for an orchestra.

But an orchestra screeched at her. The flutes were like knives, slicing into her head, the walls were being beaten like drums. Milena covered an ear with one hand, and moved back a rack of clothing with the other. She ducked down, in a kind of terror, and drew back a velvet dress, like a curtain.

There was a window to the outside world. A window in a bridge? Milena had never seen that. In the light, there were mounds of paper, heaps of it, stacked up in columns or fallen sideways across the floor. Paper was wealth, and Milena’s eyes boggled in her head.

Sitting slumped in front of it was a Polar Bear.

Effendim, excuse me, you’re not supposed to call them that, Milena reminded herself. They are GEs, genetically engineered people.

GEs had been human once. Effendim, are human, now. They had recoded their genes for work in the Antarctic, before the Revolution. It was a sickness, to be pitied. This GE was huge and shaggy, covered in fur of varying chestnut colours, staring ahead, mouth hanging open. The eyes did not blink, but seemed to ripple and glisten with a life of their own, wide and black and unseeing.

The music was coming from nowhere.

The monstrous voice was singing in German, with a voice like a steam whistle.

The viruses knew all the words, knew all the notes. The effect was to make the music wearisome to Milena, like a thrice-told joke. The mystery of where it was coming from simply made her feel very creepy. She looked instead at the posters of beautiful paintings curling on the wall. There were books as well, books turned face downwards on the desk. There was a scattering of what looked like wafers, something to eat. Books, paper, Milena had never seen such wealth or such waste.

Milena knew about the wealth of Bears, GEs. Bears, GEs, lived outside the Consensus. They were deliberate outlaws, selling Antarctic nickel. This one was massive, burly. What a gorilla, thought Milena. This one’s trouble, she decided.

The music settled into silence.

The giant voice throbbed. Earwigs yourself, thought Milena. The GE looked stunned as if the music were a blow to the head. Finally the song fell silent and it was as if the entire building sighed with relief.

The GE moved. It fumbled behind itself without turning, sending a cascade of paper pouring out over the edge of the desk. Out from under it emerged a small, metal box with switches. The GE felt for one of them.

An electronic device.

Milena lived in a world without much electricity. Pulse weapons and poverty, sheer numbers, and a shortage of metal had made domestic electronics a part of history.

‘Where did you get that?’ Milena asked, stepping forward, forgetting herself for once.

Milena had a clock in her mind, a viral calculator. It added up the cost of the metal, and the cost of manufacture, all in terms of labour-hours. The electronic device was the most expensive thing she had ever seen.

The GE squinted at her, as if across the Grand Canyon. Its mouth hung open. Finally it spoke.

‘China, I believe,’ the GE said. The voice was high and rasping. The GE was a woman.

Milena had heard stories of Polar women. They gave birth on the ice, and stood up, and went straight back to work, blasting rocks. Milena’s prejudices lined up in place. The creature spoke again, with a delicious, rambling delicacy.

‘You wouldn’t happen to have any alcoholic beverages about your person, would you?’

‘Milena was by now out of step with the conversation. She had forgotten the question she had asked and was trying to work out what the answer, ‘China, I believe,’ could possibly mean. Distracted, she gave her head a little shake.

‘No,’ Milena said. ‘I don’t like poisoning myself.’

‘Tuh!’ said the GE. It was a chuckle that became a shudder. She stood up. She was nearly twice the height of Milena, and had to shuffle to turn around in the enclosed space. With slow Weariness, she began to ransack her desk. She pushed over more piles of paper, and swept a resin tray of wafers onto the floor.

It occurred to Milena that she was being ignored.

‘Effendim?’ she said, crisply, meaning excuse me, sorry to trouble you. ‘I’ve come to change these boots.’

As she said it, Milena thought: GEs aren’t part of the Consensus. This person does not work here. It’s not her job to find me boots.

The GE lurched around to look at her. ‘You,’ she said, ‘are a ponce.’ The consonant sounds were incised with a laboured precision. Milena was mortified into silence.

I know who this is, thought Milena.

She had heard of the Bear who Loves Opera. GEs were wealthy. This one was wealthy enough to buy a ticket for the first night of each production. She sat in the same seat each time, and left without talking to anyone. Milena never went to the opera herself. Though she did not admit it, Milena did not respond deeply to music. She had never seen the Bear who Loves. It was rather like meeting a legend. Milena watched as the GE began to empty the drawers of her desk, shaking out the contents over the floor. The GE found something.

‘Bastard,’ the GE murmured.

Milena was unaccustomed to harsh language. She herself might have committed an error of social judgement, but enough was enough.

‘Are you talking to me?’ Milena demanded.

‘Oh, no,’ said the GE in blank surprise. ‘I was talking to this empty whisky bottle.’

The GE held up the bottle for Milena to see, and then tossed it aside. It clinked against glass as it shattered. Somewhere in the darkness, there was a mound of broken whisky bottles.

‘Did you know?’ said the GE. ‘This used to be a distillery warehouse? I’ve made the most exciting discoveries.’

She was tugging at a drawer that was stuck. It suddenly came free, sowing its contents about the floor like seed — pens, earrings, more wafers, used handkerchiefs, spools of thread, a shower of loose and rusty needles, and a Georgian silver ear-pick.

Lodged in one corner of the drawer was a full bottle. The GE held it up. ‘God,’ she said, ‘is a distiller.’ She grinned, and her teeth were black and green rotting stumps.

Where did they dig her up? thought Milena.

The Bear was covered in dandruff. Silver flakes of it clung to the tips of her fur all over her body, and she was panting like a dog. A long pink tongue hung out of her mouth, curled and quivering, to cool. She took a great swig of alcohol. ‘Gaaah!’ she exclaimed, as if breathing fire, and wiped her mouth on her arm.

Milena felt a sudden wrench of amusement. She had a vision of the GE leading a troglodyte existence in this nest of paper and music.

‘Do you live here?’ Milena asked.

‘It would be better if I did,’ said the GE. Her fur dangled into her eyes, making her blink continually. ‘This is where I hide instead.’ She hugged the bottle. ‘Since you don’t like poisoning yourself, perhaps you’d like to look at this.’

She passed a thick, broad, bound wad of paper from the desk. Milena needed both hands to accept it from her. The paper was beautiful to touch, heavy and creamy, ochre around the edges. On the cover, printed in large Gothic lettering was its title. Das Lied von der Erde. Song of the Earth.

Milena had never seen a musical score. They were a waste of paper, and cellulose was needed to feed the yeasts and hybridomas that were the cultures of the Party. She flicked through it and found it disappointing. Yes, yes, the notes were all there.

‘I take it,’ the Polar Bear said, ‘that the reading of music presents you with no difficulties.’

‘No,’ said Milena, innocently. Who couldn’t read music?

The Bear smiled wistfully. ‘Of course not,’ she whispered. She reached forward. It was alarming how far she could reach. Gently she coaxed the score out of Milena’s hands. ‘But you haven’t learned how to read music. If you haven’t learned it, it isn’t yours.’ She took a mouthful of whisky and sloshed it around her teeth like mouthwash. She put the bottle down, and seemed to forget that Milena was there. She turned to the end of the score, all its vast bulk over to one side, threatening to tear the ancient binding in half. The GE spat the whisky onto the floor. Then she began to sing.

She sang the end. ‘…ewig blauen licht die Fernen…’

She’s forgotten I’m here, thought Milena.

‘Ewig… Ewig…’

The GE sang better than the electronic device. Her voice was warm and strong, a fine mezzo, clear but weighty as if pushed from behind by something vast. Milena blinked. The GE was singing very well indeed.

There were long periods of silence, when unheard music played. Then Ewig again, each time softer than before, the voice throbbing without going harsh. A technique. Ewig. Unlike the recording, it was not too loud. The GE stared in silence for some moments and then looked up.

‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s a pile of boots over there.’ She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. Milena peered helplessly into the darkness.

‘Golly,’ said the Polar Bear. ‘I keep forgetting you people can’t see in the dark. Shall I find a pair for you?’ Her voice seemed to float, airily.

‘That would be very kind,’ said Milena. ‘Size six. Something less floppy?’

The GE took the pirate boots and shuffled off into the racks. Her feet were bare. The fur on top of them swept across dust and whisky, making streaks on the floor to mark her passage.

Milena didn’t know what to think. She felt she had been humbled in some way, and that made her annoyed. She suspected that she deserved it, and that made her worried.

The GE was gone for some time. ‘Who’s been pushing over all the racks?’ her small voice wondered out of the darkness.

Milena looked at the phantasmagorical waste on the desk and the floor. Books, more books, papers with pawprints across them, old coins. These were real things, the real things that Milena had never seen. She began to feel an ache of jealousy, an ache of nostalgia. This is history, she thought, let the Vampires see this. She picked up a thick black book and opened up its crinkly pages, and realised that it had not been printed. The lettering, in fantastic sweeps and swirls of black ink, had been written by hand.

Penetrating Wagner’s Ring, the lettering said with an excess of eloquent strokes.

‘Not a fortunate title,’ murmured Milena, a smile creeping sideways across her face.

It was an exposition of the Ring cycle. There were drawings of all the characters, slightly amateurish in execution. Each one was identified, not by name, but by a series of notes. The last page said only ‘Conclusion: the Ring cycle is a symphony.’ It was written in gold.

‘That’s not right,’ said Milena. It was not what her viruses told her.

But the clock in her mind told her the labour-hours it must have taken.

‘Bugger,’ said a voice, and a rack of dresses collapsed somewhere in the darkness. Milena hurriedly dropped the book. The GE emerged carrying boots.

‘Typical of me, somehow, that title,’ the GE said.

She’s seen me reading her book, Milena thought, and went rigid with embarrassment.

‘I console myself,’ the GE continued, ‘with the thought that there was a book of piano exercises that really did call itself Fingering for Your Students. Here are your boots. Try them for size.’

Milena pulled one of them on, feeling awkward. She hopped up and down on one foot and thought she was going to fall over. Her cheeks felt full and flushed.

‘Fit?’

‘Yes, yes, I think they do,’ Milena replied. She really couldn’t tell. She pulled the boot off again. The GE belched roughly. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, covering her mouth.

‘You sing very well,’ said Milena, surprising herself. Her viruses told her that the Polar Bear sang quite as well as anyone at the Zoo.

‘Ah,’ said the GE and shrugged. ‘I suppose I do, yes.’ She blinked. ‘Why don’t you take this with you.’

She gave Milena the Mahler score, yellow and plump.

‘You might as well have these too.’ She slapped on a Shostakovich and a Prokofiev. ‘Don’t tell anyone they’re Russian.’ Russians were not in favour.

‘I can’t take them,’ said Milena. She didn’t want them. The GE stared back at her dolefully.

‘Really. I think I’m blocked from taking them.’

She didn’t know if that were true. ‘I think I’m supposed to feel that they belong to everyone.’ She did know that the scores were too valuable to be given away so lightly. Milena held out the scores back towards her. There was a fruity smell of booze and lanolin.

‘Ah,’ the GE said, and blinked, her eyes distant and unfocused. She took the papers, and held them low and level just over the top of the desk before letting them drop.

‘What’s your name?’ Milena asked.

‘My name?’ said the Polar Bear, and sniffed and smiled. ‘Well, let’s see if I remember it. Rolfa.’ She grinned ‘Woof woof.’

‘I’m Milena, Milena Shibush.’

‘Milena,’ said the GE and bowed. ‘Shall I show you the way out?’

‘The door is locked,’ said Milena.

‘Ah! I have the key,’ replied Rolfa. ‘Here, hold on to my hand so you won’t get lost.’

Rolfa’s hand was as large as a cat curled up on a carpet and just as warm. It enveloped Milena’s hand and most of her forearm. It was ridiculous. Milena’s heart was pounding, and when she turned to say goodbye, Milena could only gabble. The words were confused. The Polar Bear just smiled and shut the gate. Milena felt as though she had had some kind of narrow escape.

Walking back alongside the wall of brick, Milena finally saw the windows, high overhead. They had been there all along, but she had never noticed them. Windows in a bridge.

CHAPTER TWO A Dog of a Song (Coming out of the Shell)

People lived in communities called Estates. Estates were based around one economic activity, but each Estate had services of its own: a market and a laundry, plumbers and street cleaners. Amid the vastness of London, Estates helped keep life on a human scale.

Milena lived in the Estate for actors. The dormitory had once been the offices of an oil company, so everyone called it the Shell. It was built around a courtyard, like two vast, sheltering concrete-and-marble arms.

The Shell had its own messenger service. Every morning, every lunchtime, and at six o’clock each evening, Jacob the Postperson called to see if Milena had any messages.

Jacob was a small, finely boned, shiningly gentle black man, and he made Milena feel horrid and mean because he bored her.

‘Good morning, Milena,’ he would say with a delightful smile and dead exhausted eyes.

‘Good morning, Jacob,’ Milena would reply.

‘And how are you today?’

‘Very well, Jacob, thank you.’

‘The weather is looking better.’

‘Yes, Jacob, I suppose it is.’

‘Do you have any messages for me, Milena?’

‘No thank you, Jacob.’

‘Well enjoy your day, Milena.’

‘You too, Jacob.’

His mind had been opened up. He remembered everything, was unable to forget anything. He went from door to door passing messages, reminding people that someone wanted his razor back or that the bus was leaving at three o’clock. He was a way of saving paper. It seemed that he could only talk in an unvarying string of formulae.

‘Good evening, Milena.’

‘Good evening, Jacob.’

That wide enraptured smile as if he were seeing angels.

‘Did you have a good day?’

‘Yes, Jacob. And you?’

‘Oh, very good, Milena, thank you. Do you have any messages for me?’

When his mind was full, it would blank out completely, in a kind of epileptic fit. To avoid lost information, he was cleared at regular intervals.

The day after Milena had visited the Graveyard, Jacob had a message for her. This was an unusual occurrence. Milena did not receive many messages.

‘I have a message for you, Milena. From Ms Patel.’

‘Who? Who is Ms Patel, Jacob?’

‘She is the lady who is covered in fur.’

Oh. Somehow Milena had not thought of Rolfa as a Ms anything.

‘She asks if you would not like to have lunch with her this afternoon. One o’clock by the front steps of the National. Should I tell her that is all right?’

Milena couldn’t think of anything worse. The first meeting had left her disturbed, irritated. Why did Rolfa want to have lunch with her? Milena considered saying that she was busy.

But that would be beneath her high standards.

‘Tell Ms Patel,’ said Milena, ‘that one o’clock will be fine.’

Milena found herself considering what to wear. It was summer and the sky was bright. She would need to shelter from the sun if her complexion was to be preserved. She had two pairs of trousers, one white, one black. She decided to wear the white, with a long-sleeved, high-neck blouse. She also took her gloves and parasol.

Rolfa’s eyes narrowed when she saw her. ‘You’re not taking that thing, are you?’ she said, nodding towards the parasol.

Milena was rather proud of her parasol. It was made of canvas and had thick, brightly coloured stripes and was not at all frilly or mimsy.

‘Of course I’m taking it. It’s part of my job.’

‘Bloody hell,’ murmured Rolfa. ‘Well, there’s nothing for it. Come on.’ She turned and began to lumber off in the direction of Waterloo Bridge. She was wearing nothing but blue running shorts and a pair of very dirty white cloth shoes. One of them had a loose sole. It flapped.

Milena stood her ground. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

Ponderously, the GE turned around. ‘Flitting off to see some of my chums,’ she explained. ‘We are going to a palace of amusement.’

Milena felt an eddy of misgiving. ‘Where?’

‘Across the river. It’s a pub. Do you drink beer?’

‘No,’ replied Milena.

‘Oh, that’s a shame. Perhaps they’ll make you some tea.’ Rolfa turned and began to shuffle on ahead. Milena considered simply staying where she was. No, she thought suddenly, I’m not going to let her think I’m afraid of anything. So she followed.

It was a bit like trying to keep up with a brontosaurus. Rolfa’s arms hung down by her sides, and her shoulders were hunched, and each shuffling step seemed both small and slow, but the distance covered was deceptively great. Milena sheltered from the sun and found she had nothing to say. Next time she asks, Milena promised herself, I will be busy.

They made their way through the ruins of Fleet Street. It was now an Estate for boatbuilders, with its own market.

Tykes with tough, demanding faces pushed burned cobs of corn at them, or cupfuls of roast chestnuts. ‘Miss! Miss! Just take one whiff for luck, Miss!’ Their older brothers and sisters baked straggly chicken in thick lengths of blackened bamboo, which they broke open for customers with chunks of rubble. Whole families lived under the stalls, mothers nursing or knitting. Little boys sat on street corners, turning the wheels of sewing machines, repairing pyjamas or underwear. Their baby sisters tugged at Milena’s sleeve, and she walked past them.

People seemed to find the two of them, Milena and Rolfa, funny. The way Milena walked, as if on slippery ice, her parasol and her gloves, all betrayed her fears and ambition. They made her absurd. Milena heard the children giggle. Life in the Child Garden had taught Milena to hear laughter as the sound of other people’s cruelty. Laughter made her fight.

Milena went cold and awkward. Her parasol caught on an awning and showered dust over a stall. The stall sold old plumbing and dusty glassware, the very dog-ends of history.

The stallowner laughed gracefully, hand over her heart. She meant that her things were so old that dust could not hurt them. To Milena, the laughter was a mystery, and she walked into the knobbed point of her parasol. There was more laughter.

Laughter followed them as they walked westwards to St Paul’s Cathedral, rising like a great domed egg. Then they turned north and walked past the Barbican, towards the Palace of Amusement.

The Palace of Amusement was a pub in the Golden Lane Estate. Milena’s nervousness increased. The Golden Lane Estate was for the Pit’s sewage workers.

The pub was called the Spread-Eagle, and the sign over it showed a man falling on his face. Milena had to step over drunks snoring on the broken pavement outside it. Even semi-consciously, they picked at the little crabs that patrolled their hairy chests. The sun had burned them the colour of bruises.

Inside, the Spread-Eagle was dark and cramped and the floor was made of bare, cracked concrete. It was varnished with spit and beer and dogturd from the street. It was full of skinny, naked men glossy with sweat. The whole place smelled of armpits.

It’s like something out of Dante’s Inferno, thought Milena.

‘Quite jolly once you’re sitting down,’ said Rolfa. ‘There we are. Oyez! Lucy!’ Rolfa shouted and made semaphore-sized signals with her arm.

There was an ugly squawk from the corner and someone jumped up and had to be restrained. Milena couldn’t quite see the people. They sat round a table in front of the glare from a window. They were lost in the light, but there was something horrible about them. Milena’s mind blotted them out and she looked away.

‘I shall wrestle with the bar staff,’ said Rolfa. ‘You go make yourself comfortable over there.’

You’re not leaving me! thought Milena in panic. Rolfa gave her a gentle push. ‘Go on,’ she said.

In a desperate fashion, Milena made her way through the sewage workers towards the shelter of the table. Disease, disease, disease, disease, her mind was ringing in terror. She clamped a gloved hand over her mouth, her nose was pointed at the ceiling, she was trying not to breathe. She could feel how slippery the arms and legs were around her. She was anointed with sweat. A man near the bar roared, his mouth full of cheese, and he picked up a jug of beer and poured it over his own head. Milena caught only a light cool spray from it. The drops clattered onto the floor like applause. She found the table, gripped the edges of a chair, and sat.

‘Hello, love,’ said a warm voice next to her ear.

Milena turned to see a terrible head, framed in unnaturally orange curls. The lips were covered with crumbled red cosmetic, there were only a few teeth in the mouth, and the face had gone soft, like overripe fruit. It was covered in lines and cracks.

‘My name’s Lucy, but my friends call me Loose. Ha-ha-ha!’ the voice barked.

Milena looked about her. A hunched and beaky man leaned around Lucy to look at her, black freckles over his muscular arms. His eyes were a watery blue and his face had collapsed into its own hollows and was veiled by a network of lines like a cobweb.

Milena felt her heart catch. They were old. These people were old. This was what age looked like.

‘Meow,’ said the old man.

‘You mustn’t mind Old Tone,’ said Lucy. ‘He hasn’t been the same since the war. Have you, love?’

War? What war? Milena wondered. Lucy wore a beige jacket that covered her arms. It was splattered in front and grimy around the cuffs. Her fingers were blackened. Across the table sat an identical couple in identical grubby grey suits, their arms linked. Both of them were completely bald. They looked like leaking balloons. One of them leaned forward and spoke to Milena in a low, sensible, confiding voice. She could not understand a single word.

‘OO er oi af ger whuh oi fough veh fink,’ he said with a concluding nod. He had a tiny, very black moustache painted onto his upper lip.

‘That makes sense,’ said Milena. He was speaking with the accent of a hundred years before.

They were Tumours.

Many diseases had cured cancer. One of them sealed the proto-oncogenes in Candy. Others produced proteins that coaxed cancerous cells into maturity and stopped them dividing.

But some of the cancers were new and viral and quick. The cures did not stop infected cells producing new copies of the cancer virus, and the virus spread with the flow of blood. A curious balance was struck in the bodies of some of the people who already had cancer. The cancer virus infected the body cell by cell in an orderly fashion. The cancers differentiated. They matured and ceased to proliferate in wild shapes.

What was left was a systematised tumour in the form of a healthy human being, with its memories, its feelings. As long as it was fed and avoided accidents, it would live. It was immortal.

The Tumours looked at Milena with friendly expectation.

‘Do… do… Have you come far?’ she asked the orange head.

‘In my time, love, in my time,’ Lucy chuckled darkly and gave a hearty wink.

‘And where do you live?’ Milena was wondering if the old creature had fleas. She wondered how far they could jump.

‘In the laundry,’ Lucy replied. ‘The room where they dry the clothes. You know…’ She made a circular motion with a crooked finger that was shiny and blue-grey. ‘I just slip in there of a night. Lovely and warm it is.’

She lived in the Estate laundry. Milena was appalled. She wondered what it meant for the supposedly clean sheets.

‘Don’t they give you a place to live?’

‘Oh. I suppose they would. Whoever they are these days. I wouldn’t be knowing, would I?’

She’s crazy, Milena thought, addled with age. No one could help her.

Lucy was bored, and so she became incensed on Milena’s behalf. ‘Oooh, that Rolfa. Honestly, you’d wait all week for a slup out of her. Here.’ The old creature shoved a mug of beer towards Milena. ‘Go on, have a lick on me.’

Milena gave her head a little shake. ‘Oh no,’ she said. The mug had lipstick all around it.

‘Go on, love, I don’t mind,’ said Lucy. She patted the top of Milena’s clenched fist. Milena thought she was going to be sick. She began to wonder if she could make the door in time.

Then very suddenly, Rolfa was looming over them, streaming beer, lowering the mugs onto the table in front of Milena. Lucy laughed and held out her arms.

‘I wanted tea,’ said Milena.

‘Mwom mwom mwom,’ said Lucy, making motions with her mouth, wanting to be kissed. She looked like a goldfish. Rolfa leaned over and hugged her, and sat next to old Tone, who meowed like a cat. Rolfa barked like a dog, and put him in a headlock under her arm. The old man made gleeful squeaking noises and stamped his foot in merriment. The beer smelled of other people’s kidneys.

The leaking balloon leaned forward. ‘Ghoul,’ he said. ‘Ear. Whuh yer wan, ay? Ay?’

I want, thought Milena, to go home.

The old orange head slapped the table and made Milena jump. ‘Listen. Listen,’ she demanded. ‘Rolfa. Time for a song.’ There was a soft groan of assent.

‘It’s your turn,’ said Rolfa. ‘I believe you owe me a pint as well.’

‘Oh all right then,’ said Lucy. ‘But I warn you, you’ll get the full whack.’

Then she began to climb onto the table. Milena couldn’t think at first what she was trying to do. The old woman simply bent over the table top and worked her legs back and forth, her old crooked hands trying to hold. She finally succeeded in getting one knee onto the table and then clung to it desperately, as if to the wreckage of a ship.

‘Give her a hand!’ roared Old Tone, suddenly furious. Milena shrank back from his voice, shrank back from touching the old woman. Rolfa pushed the old woman’s skinny behind.

‘Whoo-hooo! Ooops!’ cried Lucy. Old Tone helped her to her feet. As she stood, Milena realized that she had smelly knees. How, wondered Milena, do you get smelly knees?

Someone passed Rolfa a squeeze box. A few testing notes announced that a song would begin, and the pub fell quiet, and the skinny purple men turned in anticipation.

An old, worn, squeaky melody began, a homely tune, and the men chuckled in recognition. The old woman gave them a wink and a toothless cackle and began to raise her skirts teasingly over slightly scaly thighs. Oh don’t, winced Milena. Then Lucy began to sing, in a wheedling, bird-like voice.

’It’s a Dog of a Song,’ she began, her voice straining.

‘Just a Dog of a Song

Ambling gently along’

She mimed an amble with her knees. Her fingers, all lumps and shiny patches, tried to trace sprightly patterns through the air. Her old wrinkled face pursed its lips and opened its eyes wide in a caricature of youthful naughtiness.

‘With no ill feelings, no ill will.

Just a Dog of a Song — the voice rose and quavered.

‘But it doesn’t know how to end

And it’s so hard

When you lose a friend — for just a note the voice held the clear tone it must once have had.

‘Just a Dog of a Song

But…’

Her head did a funny sideways jump, as if something mechanical had caught in her neck.

’We all sing along. But…’

Jump.

‘We all sing along. But…’

She did it over and over like a wind-up doll gone wrong. The rest of the song consisted of only that for over three minutes. The men joined in. Part of the fun was trying to make her stop. The men howled like coyotes, they shouted at her, they pounded tables with their mugs. Did they like it? Why were they smiling?

Finally Lucy stopped, and Rolfa took her hand and held it up, and there were derisive cheers. ‘No more. No more.’

‘Where’s my pint? Where’s my pint?’ Lucy challenged and pretended to make a fist.

Rolfa stood back and lifted up her hands and clapped lightly. But somehow, in her mouth, by sucking air through spittle, Rolfa was able to reproduce, exactly, the sound of massed applause. It rose and fell in waves. Milena could almost hear the cheering.

Later, walking back, Milena suddenly understood what the song meant.

Lucy had been imitating a broken record played on a wind-up gramophone. It must have been a shock when the tinny horns replaced the smoothly sliding tapes.

‘They were alive before the Blackout,’ Milena said.

‘Yup,’ said Rolfa.

They were the incandescent people of the electronic age. That was what had become of them. They had seen cities spangled with light, they had laughed in unison, millions all at once watching the same entertainments all together in an electronic net. They had had to learn how to sing songs and play squeeze boxes during the Blackout and they were now — how old? At least 120, maybe 140, years old.

But it doesn’t know how to end, and it’s so hard when you lose a friend…’

‘They were singing about themselves,’ Milena murmured.

‘Yup,’ said Rolfa, her back towards her. Milena noticed that she was abrupt and walking ahead of her.

‘We’ll go again,’ said Milena, to make amends.

‘If they’ll have you,’ said Rolfa. ‘Tuh!’ The chuckle, her chuckle that always died and became a shudder. ‘You looked most of the time like you’d swallowed your bloody parasol.’

That’s when Milena remembered that she’d left it behind.

‘Yup,’ she said, looking away from the river. She had begun, without realising it, to imitate Rolfa.

CHAPTER THREE Love Sickness (Holding a Ghost)

Love’s Labour’s Lost had grown so listless that the director had actually called for a rehearsal that afternoon. Actors did not normally need to rehearse; the viruses told them what to do.

The practice rooms were normally reserved for musicians, and were too small for a full cast. Summer sun streamed in through the windows. It was hot and airless.

‘Me, an’t shall please you,’ said Milena in her own fiercely exact voice. ‘I am Anthony Dull.’

‘No, no, no!’ wailed the director. His only job was to recreate the great production that the viruses remembered. ‘Milena, you know how that line is supposed to sound.’

‘Yes, thought Milena, flat, stupid, dull. She had no interest in it. She felt restless and worried and she did not know why. She did know that she wanted to talk to Rolfa, as if there were some unfinished business between them.

So in the late summer evening, still dressed as Constable Dull, she went to Rolfa’s chamber. A new aisle had been cleared through the racks. It was easier for her to find her way. As Milena walked through the archways of brick, she heard Rolfa begin to sing, alone in the dark.

She’ll stop in a moment, thought Milena. Rolfa didn’t. The song rose and fell wordlessly. It was embarrassing. How could she go up to Rolfa and say, hello, do you always sing to yourself in the dark?

Milena was about to creep away, when the music snagged her attention. A lowering note seemed to seize something in her chest and drag it down. Milena felt a great weight of something like sadness.

But it wasn’t sadness. It was as if someone were walking deliberately, sombre perhaps, but with high purpose. It had the sound of noble music.

What was it? Milena rifled through her viruses, but there was no answer. It wasn’t Wagner or Puccini. What the hell could it be? Milena sat down between the racks.

Milena’s viruses were told to keep track of the themes. They wove a structure in her head. The music kept unfolding out of itself, like a flower blooming. Then there was a slight catch, not in Rolfa’s voice, but in the notes, a slight wavering of uncertainty.

Rolfa stopped. She sang the passage in a new form. Yes! said the viruses. They showed Milena how the three new bars referred to the first notes she had heard.

By all the stars, Milena’s mind seemed to whisper. This is Rolfa’s. This is Rolfa’s music. She’s imagining it, here in the dark. Rolfa began to sing again, from the beginning. Rolfa can do this? This wasn’t bathtub singing or a drunken wallow. I’ve got her wrong, thought Milena. This is someone I don’t know. Why is she singing here? Why don’t people know about her?

Milena tried to remember the music. She told her viruses to remember, but even they got tangled up. The viruses were not used to listening to new music. New music was too alive, it wouldn’t sit still, the themes got tangled up like snakes. Very suddenly, almost with a perceptible click, the viruses gave up.

Milena was not used to listening to unfamiliar music either. It made her feel strange, as if she were in a dream where everything is scrambled but weighted with meaning. Rolfa’s voice suddenly rose to peaks, like a mountain, and Milena felt her eyes bulge. She felt tears start in her eyes. It was as if some great winged thing had taken to the air, rising out of a human body, transcending it. Milena saw it fly.

Rolfa sang for a half hour. The music was a single piece from beginning to end. Toward the end, it faltered. Very suddenly, Rolfa broke off. ‘No. No,’ Milena heard Rolfa say. There was a cough and a sniff, and a small crash.

‘Oh bugger,’ said the light, rasping voice. Milena smiled fondly, with a kind of ache for her. By now it was dark, and no light came through the little window. Milena heard a shuffling come towards her. In the darkness a wisp of fur brushed her, the very tips of it against her cheek, and Milena froze. She waited some minutes more in the dark.

‘Bloody hell,’ she murmured. Then she stood up and slipped out of the Graveyard, arch by arch.

Milena went to the room of her friend Cilia. Like Milena, Cilia lived in the Shell, in another wing. Milena knocked on her door. Cilia was wearing a pinny and was frying sausages on a single-ring cooker.

‘Oh, Lo,’ said Cilia, surprised to see Milena at all, let alone dressed as a Tudor constable. ‘I thought you hated that costume.’

‘I do,’ said Milena and stepped briskly into Cilia’s tiny room. Her sword clanked. ‘Cilia, do you have any paper?’

‘What?’ said Cilia, with an unsteady chuckle. ‘Uh. No. What makes you think I’ve got paper?’

‘I don’t know. You’re in The Mikado.’

’Madam Butterfly. Same country, different opera.’

‘Don’t they give you paper for notes or anything? I mean, being an Animal and all.’

‘Milena, are you all right? We use the viruses for notes, like anybody else.’

‘Can you get paper? Do you have any access to paper?’ Milena suddenly felt the hopelessness of it. ‘I need some paper.’

‘What do you need it for?’ Cilia asked, quietly.

‘I’ve got to write some music down!’ Milena’s hands made a fist.

‘Oh,’ said Cilia, feeling absolved now of the need to be sympathetic. She went back to her sausages. ‘Becoming a composer now, are we?’

‘No, no,’ said Milena, giving her head a distracted shake. She was trying to keep Rolfa’s music going in her head. ‘It’s someone else’s.’

Cilia seemed to find this unexpected. ‘Listen. I’m sure whoever it is can go to Supplies and explain, if the viruses can’t cope. There’s going to be a lot more paper soon, they say. They’ve got the new beaver bugs.’

Milena shook her head. ‘It’s a GE,’ she said.

Cilia went still. ‘Really?’

‘I think,’ said Milena, ‘that she’s the Bear who goes to all the first nights. I just heard her sing. She sings beautifully. And it was new music.’

Cilia took her arm and made her sit down on the bed. ‘U-nique,’ she said, avaricious for news of other people’s doings.

‘She’s rich, she’s got all the paper she needs. But I don’t think she wants it written down. She just sings it, in the dark.’ Milena found that she was really quite disturbed. ‘It’s beautiful. I don’t understand. She just sings it with no one to hear. Why doesn’t she want anyone to hear it?’

‘You want some sausages?’ Cilia asked in a soft voice. ‘I can’t eat them all. I was out in the sun. You want to stay?’

Milena nodded. As the sausages sizzled and filled the room with meaty smells, Milena tried to sing snatches of the music. In her own thin voice they sounded aimless and colourless.

‘How did you meet her?’ Cilia asked, serving the food.

Milena told her the story of how they had met in the Graveyard. ‘She says it’s where she hides.’

‘We ought to keep that a secret then,’ said Cilia. She passed Milena a plate of sausages. They would have to eat with the plates on their laps, sitting on the bed. Cilia did not own a table or chairs. With a snap of the wrist, Cilia held out a twisted, melted piece of resin that had once been a fork.

‘I think this one’s yours,’ Cilia said with a rueful smile.

Milena didn’t notice. She kept talking about Rolfa. As she ate, Milena told Cilia about the Spread-Eagle, and the people in it. Cilia stirred the sausages round and round on her plate and said, ‘Go on, go on.’

Milena talked about the dandruff and the whisky and the cloth shoes and about the voice. Most of all, she talked about the music. As she left, Cilia took her arm, as if she needed support, to help her to the door.

Milena stumbled scowling downstairs to her own bed. Scowling, she slowly undressed. It was as if she had suddenly found herself in a different world. She blew out the candle, and squeezed it between her wetted fingers to hear it hiss. She felt the sausages repeat, and she settled down under her one counterpane.

She could hear Rolfa sing. She had a sudden vision of her as Brunnhilde, winged helmet and spear, with fur sprouting out from the edges of the breastplate. Half-asleep, she grinned. Dreamily, she imagined settling down amid the fur, brushing aside the dandruff. It would be soft and warm, and she would stroke it. She imagined Rolfa’s head in her lap.

Marx-and-Lenin! she thought and sat upright in bed.

I am sexually attracted to her!

Milena had no shorter form of words. Milena lusted after the huge, baggy body. She wanted to do very specific things with it.

No, no, I can’t, Milena thought, and tried to talk herself out of it. She’s got green, rotting stumps for teeth, Milena reminded herself. There was no answering revulsion. The pull was too strong.

She’s huge and hairy. Yes, replied some wicked part of Milena’s mind. Don’t I know?

She’s got dandruff!

All over, came the reply. Tee-hee. The whole thing was one great hoot.

She probably has bad breath and is full to the brim with viruses.

For heaven’s sake, you can’t be in love with a Polar Bear! They hibernate. They moult. Their whole biology is different!

Then a thought came to Milena. The thought was so transfiguring, that it actually knocked her out of bed. She kicked involuntarily, and her legs got caught up in the counterpane, and she slid off the edge of the mattress face down onto the floor. She gave a kind of convulsive wrench and turned to sit up surrounded by fallen pillows.

The thought was this: Rolfa was immune to the viruses. All of the Bears were. Their body temperatures were too high. That was why none of Rolfa’s knowledge came from viruses, why she had to learn things afresh. If Rolfa suffered from bad grammar, then like Milena she might not have been cured.

Suddenly Milena was sure in her gut that this was so. She simply knew it. From the way Rolfa walked, from the way she drank, from her air of displacement, from her wariness of hurt, from her strange combination of strength and weakness — from many things that could never be put into words, Milena knew that Rolfa was like her. Milena had finally found a woman.

Oh Marx, oh Lenin, oh dear. Milena’s belly felt like a corset that had just been unlaced. Everything was loose and wobbly and undone. Her hands shook, her knees were weak. She stood up and walked around her room. She barked her shins on the corner of the bed, and bit a fingernail, tearing it off down to the quick, and finally had to go for a walk.

And her dreams took wing.

They would live together, Rolfa and her, and Rolfa would write great music, she would be a genius. Mozart, Beethhoven, Liszt, they were virtuosos, why not a virtuoso of the voice? And Milena would brush her hair, all of it, and put it up in curls, all of it, for special occasions, hold her at night, cure the dandruff. They would stay together, they would have each other, and Rolfa would bloom. Milena suddenly felt she understood her, understood why she shuffled, hangdog, why she drank, why she looked defeated. No one would think a Bear could sing, no one would ever listen. People thought of GEs as dogs, they hated them, feared them. Milena found that she shook with the injustice of it. She wanted to go to her. She would have walked to the GE house if she had known where it was. The sense of Rolfa all around her was so strong that she knew, she knew how her body would feel, the bulk and heat and softness of it. She knew how her mouth would taste. Her own heart was singing.

She walked for hours in a soft warm drizzle in dark streets that did not need policing. She walked until she was exhausted, her feet crossing in front of each other with each step, walked until the dull morning began to rise. And still she didn’t feel any better, and still she couldn’t rest.

She went to the railway arches and collapsed onto the pavement, and waited for Rolfa. The sun came up under an edge of retreating cloud and she felt it on her pale face. She didn’t care. She saw Rolfa approaching.

Milena stood up, and brushed her clothes and ran her fingers through her short hair, to get rid of the tangles. She waited. Rolfa came up to her.

The fear returned. Milena didn’t know she was afraid. All she knew was that she could not be herself. She would not be able to speak.

‘What are you doing here?’ Rolfa asked, blinking.

‘Oh. Oh,’ said Milena and flung her arms awkwardly about herself.

‘You are in a state. What have you been doing?’

‘Oh. I just went out. You’re a bad influence on me.’

Milena’s eyes were sparkling, almost swollen with unspoken message.

‘I don’t think anyone could have a bad influence on you,’ said Rolfa. ‘You’re immune to it.’

‘Are we having lunch today?’ Milena’s voice was wan and hopeful.

Rolfa stood very still, her fur stirring in the light morning wind. ‘If you like, Little One,’ she said and gave Milena’s head, her hair a very quick stroke, a kind of pat. Then she walked on, down the tunnel.

Milena followed her, thrilled. She’s got a pet name for me! She toddled, feeling small and tender.

‘Another busy day,’ said Rolfa sourly, as she swung open the big yellow doors that never needed to be locked.

As they walked between the racks in the dark, the silence between them became uneasy. Milena had been wanting a flood of revelation, had reached a peak of joy. Now nothing happened. Rolfa, Rolfa, I know you are, you must be. Rolfa, say something about it. Rolfa, give me a sign. But Rolfa had gone dark, silent, like the racks.

Rolfa coughed and shuffled and turned on her alcohol light and seemed to ignore Milena, and simply stared down at her desk, the suddenly shaggy and intolerable mess of it.

‘Tuh,’ said Rolfa, the shudder-chuckle. She sat down, slumped at the desk and Milena’s heart ached for her. Rolfa picked up a score and held it up, looking at it, questioning, as if no longer certain of its worth. Milena made sure that it was printed, not handwritten, not a manuscript.

‘Do you ever write music yourself?’ Milena asked.

Rolfa sniffed and shrugged.

‘I’d like to see some, if you do,’ Milena said.

‘Oh! I get a few snatches descend on me from time to time,’ said Rolfa. She turned and tried to smile. ‘But I don’t write anything down.’ She shook her head and kept on shaking it.

She must simply remember it, thought Milena. But there could be an accident, anything could happen.

Memory. A full score in memory. Milena had another transfiguring idea.

She jumped up. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go now.’ She did a worried little dance. ‘I don’t want to, I just have to.’

‘Toilet’s over there,’ said Rolfa and pointed.

‘No, no you don’t understand. I’ll be back. Lunchtime. On the steps. Don’t forget?’

Rolfa gave her head a shake, meaning no, she wouldn’t forget and a kind of wondering, pale smile was coaxed out of her.

And Milena ran. She had about ten minutes. She ran all the way back to the Shell, up the flights of stairs. She heard a door opening on the landing below her, and spun around, and stumbled back down the steps, legs akimbo. And there he was.

‘Jacob!’ she gasped.

‘Good morning, Milena. And how are you today?’

‘Fine! Fine. I’m great! Jacob! Can you remember music?’

‘Do you mean written music, Milena? Or do you mean the actual sound?’

‘Both. Both.’

‘Yes, if it is part of a message. Yes. I can remember.’ He nodded and smiled with beautiful ivory-coloured teeth.

Milena was still panting, a queasy trail of sweat on her forehead. ‘Fine. Great. Can you come somewhere with me at six this evening?’

Jacob’s face clouded over. ‘Oh. I’m sorry, Milena. I don’t think I can do that. I must run my other messages then. I must go to everyone in the building, and then deliver messages for them. I’m very sorry, Milena.’

‘What if I helped?’

Jacob looked blank.

‘What if you took one half of the floors and I took the other? You’re supposed to come about five, right? So we’ll both start about four thirty, run back and forth until six and men go on. Agreed? Agreed? It’s very important, Jacob.’

He beamed. ‘All right, Milena. I will help you. That will be very good.’

Milena gave a little snarl of delight, and kissed him on his cheek. ‘That’s great.’ And suddenly she was weary.

‘Do you have any messages for me, Milena?’

‘Yes. One for Ms Patel. Tell her I’m too tired. I just won’t be there for lunch.’

Tell her I love her?

‘Tell her I’m not as immune as she thinks.’

And Jacob, for some reason, winked.

That afternoon, Milena ran from room to room on seven floors of the Shell. She had never known mere were so many people living there. Faces she had only glimpsed suddenly became alive for her. She knew what the insides of their rooms looked like, she knew whether or not they made their beds, she could smell what they were cooking. They did not want to give her messages.

‘Um. I’ll wait for Jacob in the morning,’ many of them said.

‘I’m an actress. I’ve got good memory viruses too.’

They might give their heads the slightest of angry shakes. They were angry with Jacob for deserting them, leaving them to this stranger. Milena was embarrassed. She was embarrassed by all this weight of life that was going on without her. The rooms were often full of people lounging together on beds, drinking, talking, playing chess on little resin boards.

Milena went to Cilia’s room and it was full of the Vampires, twenty of them, thirty of them, packed in, talking, agreeing, disagreeing, laughing.

‘What are you doing?’ Cilia asked, rising to her feet.

‘I’m helping Jacob out.’

And Milena explained, breathless. Milena the Postperson, someone called her, smiling. How does he know my name? Milena thought. I don’t know his.

‘Anybody got any messages?’ she asked. ‘I’ll take them.’ She knew then why Jacob always asked. It was nice to be needed.

In the evening she and Jacob hid behind the costumes as Rolfa sang.

‘Can you remember? Can you remember it?’ she asked him, whispering, desperate.

Jacob smiled and nodded, and put a finger to his lips.

It became routine, for a time.

Milena and Rolfa would have lunch together every day. Sometimes they ate in the Zoo cafe. Rolfa would always cringe just before going in. She had to duck to get through the doors, but it was more than that. She did not belong. She looked huge on the narrow benches, ridiculous bunched up under the tiny tables, her knees pressing up under them, dragging them with her when she stood up. Her fur hung into the soup, the cups were too small for her to drink from. Watching Rolfa eat was a fascinating spectacle. For Milena, it was like being in the mead hall with Beowulf. Rolfa’s appetite and manners were of a previous historical era. She munched and belched and slurped and splattered, looking rather forlorn and helpless, as if there was nothing she could do about it. She would have two or three helpings of chips, which she shovelled into her mouth with thick and greasy fingers. She had to stick her long pink tongue down into cups and lap and lick to get anything out of them. She had to lap to drink anything — her tongue got in the way if she tried to sip like a human being. She leant over her soup bowl like a lion over a stream, glancing furtively about her.

Rolfa ate in an agony of embarrassment. Quiet, folded in on herself, a tight false smile and staring, darting eyes. She licked her plates to get the gravy hoping no one would notice. People stared. They chuckled in disbelief when she came back from the buffet with a third helping of stew or lasagne. The place was steamy, with sunlight pouring through windows. When she wasn’t eating, she had to pant, moisture dripping off her long pink tongue.

‘Does she eat the plates as well?’ Milena once heard someone behind them murmur.

Milena didn’t care. She was in love. She kept trying to smell Rolfa. The scent of Rolfa was pungent and a bit doggy, full of lanolin. Milena would haul it into her nostrils, savouring it along with the aromas of the food. She would ask to sample Rolfa’s fish pie.

‘Oooh, fish pie! Oh, please,’ she would say. She hated fish pie. What she wanted was the taste of Rolfa on the fork.

I can’t believe I’m doing this, she thought, sucking on the cutlery as if it were a lollipop.

She found herself wondering if she could lick Rolfa’s plate without anyone noticing. She gave herself a very bad fright indeed when she stole from the cafe a spoon that Rolfa had used. She reached for it and something drew tight and stopped her, but the pull of Rolfa was stronger, and she touched it. It was still warm from Rolfa’s hand. Something taut like wire seemed to snap with a twang, and Milena picked the spoon up and slipped it into her pocket.

This is ridiculous, she thought. What am I going to do with it? Keep it unwashed by my kitchen sink? That was exactly what she did with it.

Milena would deliberately walk into Rolfa to bury her face in her fur. She kept crowding into Rolfa, to feel the inhuman heat of her, to feel the tickle of the fur. Rolfa was highly charged with static. Milena would sometimes get a jolt of electricity from her. When she came near the little hairs on Milena’s arm would stand up.

Rolfa began to get a bit annoyed with being walked into. ‘We’ll have to get you a bigger pavement,’ she said, mystified.

Once Milena elbowed Rolfa into a rank of bicycles. Five or six of them fell over like dominoes in a row, and Rolfa’s fur got caught up between a chain and a chain wheel.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Milena, and knelt to free her. She held the fur and gripped the calf and it was vast, fleshy and warm like someone’s stomach. She fumbled with the chain, which was organically lubricated. Milena’s hands, her nose and most of Rolfa’s lower leg were smeared with thick moss-green.

‘May I enquire, Little One? What are you doing?’

I’m hugging you, thought Milena. Do something.

‘Little… Little One. I’ll do it.’ Rolfa eased her back, gently.

‘Sorry. Sorry,’ said Milena and hopped backwards. Oh God, how embarrassing. What was she doing? Oh Rolfa, Rolfa, please notice, please say something, please do something. I can’t say it!

Rolfa began to take her to the opera. They went to the first night of Falstaff. The Vampires showed up in en masse as the original 1890 London audience. The men wore tails and the women wore bustles. Someone played George Bernard Shaw.

Rolfa seemed delighted. All through the opera she rocked with laughter, throwing herself back and forth in her seat. The whole row rolled with her weight. Milena was entranced by the staging and the lights. She loved the rumble of the great old stage as it began to rotate, and an inn was replaced with a house by the river. She was less moved by the music.

As they stood up at the end, Milena asked. ‘Why weren’t there any arias?’

‘Tuh!’ shuddered Rolfa. ‘Every line in Verdi is an aria!’ Milena thought that was hyperbole, simply a way to emphasise how much Rolfa had enjoyed the performance. It did not occur to her that it might be the literal truth.

The Vampires crowded around Cilia. She had played one of the Merry Wives and she had been delicious. She had made the scheming against old John Falstaff seem light and happy. She had worn the old costumes and had made the old stage moves. ‘Cilia! Cilia!’ said a young man, hopping up and down, forgetting his Vampire role. ‘You were as good as the original.’

‘You were better,’ whispered Milena, as she kissed Cilia on the cheek. Love seemed to spill over everywhere.

Milena and Rolfa walked home along the river, and the alcohol lights were the colour of a low moon in a smoky sky.

‘Oh dear,’ sighed Rolfa. ‘They really shouldn’t try to perform music. No one should. They only ever end up performing part of it. Never the whole.’

‘But people want to hear it, don’t they?’

‘More like the musicians want to play it,’ said Rolfa. ‘They haven’t learned that they can’t. It’s an impossibility. Like trying to tell the whole truth.’

They reached the steps of the Shell. ‘Goodnight,’ said Rolfa. She began to walk backwards. The river glittered behind her, and with each step, she whispered, ‘Good night. Good night. Good night.’ Then she put a finger to her lips for silence.

Milena went to bed alone.

The nights were the worst. Milena would be feverish with love, unsettled, as if Rolfa were in the bed next to her, as if the miles that separated them were nothing, as if she could reach out and feel the warmth and the fur. It was like holding a ghost.

Sometimes she would remember the terror.

The viruses! she would think and sit bolt upright. She had forgotten about the viruses!

She would think of her dirty hands that had crammed food into her mouth and had rubbed in her eyes. She would think of the cutlery she had not washed, of how dirty her mouth was, of all the risks, the pointless risks she had taken. She would throw off the counterpane in panic. She would shower, even though the water in the middle of a summer night could be freezing cold. She boiled kettles and scalded her sink. She boiled all her plates and all her melting forks. She put salt in boiling water and let it cool for a moment in the mug, puffing at it. Then she would gargle, feeling the salt wither the inside of her cheeks. She would scrub her hands and suddenly cover her face and weep, from lack of sleep, from being stretched too far.

I will give her up, Milena would think. I won’t see her. This is getting silly. And the next day, they would have lunch again.

They took to having picnics, in the garden by the river. They would sit on the grass, and Rolfa would crunch her way through the cooked legs of animals, a huge and filthy napkin tied around her neck. She would look quite jolly then, making cracking sounds and sucking out bone marrow. The Polar Bears had genetically engineered stomachs. They could digest almost anything. Rolfa ate the bones as well. Then she would drink gallon jars of yogurt and water. She didn’t say much. Milena caught the scent of her breath and realised why: Rolfa was no longer drinking.

The GE was the most fascinating irresolution of opposites. She was huge and coy at the same time. Like the fat girl in the Child Garden whom everyone bullies, Rolfa moved with a fearful, tip-toe precision that meant she invariably knocked something over. She was boisterous and coarse and delicate and refined, usually within the same sentence. She talked about art. She talked about how Elgar changed keys. How he would play a joke, start in one direction, stop and go back again, start and stop again, and suddenly pull the rug out from under you by doing it backwards with the simplicity of a conjurer. ‘He’s the funniest ficken composer who ever lived!’ she exclaimed, and laughed, exposing rotten teeth and a roiling mass of half-chewed food.

Elgar? Funny? Milena examined her viruses. That was not something they told her.

‘Where did you learn all this?’ Milena asked.

‘Oh. When I was young,’ said Rolfa, ‘I went into hibernation. I was only about nine or ten years old. It’s something we can do if the weather gets too bad and we have to wait it out. But this time there was no real reason for it. The vet said it was stress.’

Rolfa lay down on her side. She began to graze. Her long pink tongue reached out and seized a fistful of grass, tore it out of the ground and lazed it up into her mouth. There was something comfortable in the way she talked and chewed at the same time.

‘I just curled up and went to sleep for six months. And all the time I was under, I was thinking about music’

Rolfa moved her cud to one side of her mouth.

‘I could play piano quite well by then, and I just went over and over all the pieces I knew. Picking them apart, putting them back together. Didn’t think about anything else. Didn’t dream, didn’t open my eyes.’

‘How did they get you out of it?’ Milena asked.

‘The vet gave me an injection,’ said Rolfa, and smiled with her ruined teeth.

Milena wanted to lie next to her on the grass, in the sun. She wanted to curl up under her arm and go to sleep. But Milena was afraid. All she did was shift closer to her.

‘You can remember your childhood,’ said Milena, looking down at the expanse of Rolfa’s body, wishing she had known Rolfa in childhood, had been part of her life then.

‘Can’t you remember your childhood?’ Rolfa sat up.

Milena shook her head. No, Milena couldn’t.

‘Something happened. I don’t know. I can’t remember any of it. Well, I know I was born in Czechoslovakia — I can sometimes remember parts of that very hazily. Everything else is gone.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t like that at all!’ said Rolfa. ‘There are all sorts of things I remember. I’d hate to forget them.’

‘Like what.’

‘Musk oxen,’ said Rolfa. ‘Especially the calves. They’re like little round balls of fluff on tiny, scurrying black legs. That’s when we lived on the tundra, what was left of it. Forests advancing you see, but we managed to save some of them.’

‘There’s no musk oxen in the Antarctic’

‘No, no indeed, no, we lived in Canada for a while, you see? Papa thought we should go there to make our fortune. North instead of South. Didn’t work. He kept trying to save the musk ox. Herd them north, where there was still some tundra. Strange thing to do really. It makes me think my father might not be so bad after all. He taught them how to play football. They’re terribly intelligent, you see. They played in teams. I used to play with them. I used to dream that one day I’d turn into a musk ox.’ Rolfa’s face was soft and her smile was fond. ‘Don’t you have any childhood memories at all?’

‘No. They gave me a lot of virus when I was ten. Maybe that knocked them all out of me. I don’t remember.’

‘Ah,’ said Rolfa. Something strange seemed to happen to her face. It seemed to melt, and the eyes seemed to pull back, like snails into a shell. ‘Ah yes, of course. I keep forgetting. They give you people viruses, don’t they.’

She smiled again, and the eyes opened out, with a new expression. She was smiling, and the eyes still seemed fond, and the face still seemed happy, but it was pained too. It was a strange, disturbing mixture, like Rolfa’s music. There was something powerful in the eyes, that made Milena draw back. Milena couldn’t understand it. She had no experience. She didn’t know what it meant. The viruses couldn’t help her.

It was routine. Each day, like milk in a pan, about to boil over, Milena would nearly say, ‘I love you.’

Or she would reach for Rolfa, to caress her in a way 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.’ She made a kind of waving motion with her hand, brushing something away. Very suddenly it became a slapping motion, in the air. She was dangerous.

‘Let’s…’ Rolfa paused to belch. ‘…go have a good time.’ The smile was a snarl. She spun off, into the night.

I don’t like this, thought Milena and followed, full of misgiving.

They went to another horrible pub across the river. The Comedy Restaurant said art-nouveau lettering on tiles outside it. There seemed to be no one there who Rolfa knew. She rolled her way like a millstone towards the bar, through the men who stopped laughing as she passed, towering over them, jostling them. The men looked small and hard and weasly. The place was as disordered as anything in Britain ever got. The plaster walls were bulging and cracked and stained in streaks. There were harsh alcohol lamps that stank. Milena looked at Rolfa, at her back. Then she felt one of the weasels pressing up against her. He wore skimpy trunks and a sleeveless body-warmer that smelled of sweat and beer.

‘Bow wow,’ he said. His forehead glistened with sweat. He’s got a virus, Milena thought. But which one?

‘You like dogs?’ he asked.

‘No. I don’t like dogs,’ said Milena warily, meaning that she did not like him. He had friends all around them, and they were all sweating. Some of them shook with fever.

Milena did not have time to consider what disease it was they had.

There was a flurry, a scattering nearby, and Milena turned to see Rolfa wading towards her, towards them, her shoulder shrugging from side to side, and Milena thought: she’s going to hit one of them.

That’s what she thought until Rolfa picked up a table. Not a large table, but a small, light one made of bamboo. Mugs rolled off it, beer fell in a gush, men shouted protest, and the table rose up, hit a lamp, and broke it.

Along the very edge of her teeth, Milena seemed to feel something, the thing that made Rolfa rot her own teeth to nothing, and she held up her hands and shouted, ‘Rolfa! Stop!’

Rolfa paused, blearily staring.

‘Rolfa! Nothing happened.’ Rolfa blinked, looked sheepish, defeated, confused.

‘Put the table down, Rolfa,’ said Milena.

Or you’ll kill someone.

‘Just put it down. Please? Nothing happened.’

The table was very gently lowered. Rolfa patted it, as if telling it she was sorry.

Milena pushed her way between the men, and took Rolfa’s arm and pulled. ‘Come on, Rolfa. Come on.’ And Rolfa followed, tamely, out into the night again. The barman followed.

‘What about the light?’ he shouted.

‘Don’t push!’ pleaded Milena, holding up her hands, and something in her voice convinced him.

Rolfa threw off her hand and walked towards the river. Milena called after her. She ran, to catch up, but Rolfa did not turn around or answer. She marched, with long lunging strides. It was dark, there were no lights, and Milena suddenly found she was alone with only just sufficient idea of where she was to find the river again, and the Shell.

Well, she thought forlornly. Well. That’s that. Something, she knew, had finished.

At one o’clock the next afternoon, she went to the steps and Rolfa was not there.

At six o’clock, she and Jacob went to the Graveyard and there was only silence. They waited hidden like mice for the singing to begin. The darkness deepened. Finally they edged their way towards the desk, and peeked out between the costumes.

Papers had been torn or crushed into balls. The musical scores had been ripped in half along their bindings and the pages had been scattered. The electronic device was in a corner; its panel was broken open; wafers were all over the floor; their resin tray was cracked and splintered; book covers had no pages in them.

Milena knelt and picked up what was left of the Wagner notebook. She tried to put its crinkly pages back in order and found spit between them. She wiped her cheeks and gathered up the things.

‘Jacob,’ she said, her voice going thin. ‘Help me back with all of this?’

They piled up the musical scores, and the wafers and carried them back like the honoured dead to Milena’s room at the Shell. ‘Tell her I have them. Tell her she can have them back when she wants them,’ Milena said to Jacob.

And she went to bed, wondering at the maze of rooms that was someone else’s life. She read the score of Das Lied von der Erde.

The last movement told a kind of ghost story. Two old friends meet and one speaks mysteriously of life in the past tense, of finding a resting place. He seems to move on, into eternity, the bright and shining blue. The friend has chosen to leave.

Milena imagined the music. It was not about death. It was about the beauty of the world as it is lived in, and the sadness of having to leave it. It was about the sadness of losing friends, and the necessity of it. Milena remembered Rolfa’s voice singing ewig… ewig. Forever.

The music was hers now. She had learned it. Milena was left at the end hugging the cream paper as if it were skin. She was holding a ghost, an abstraction of what might have been, a possibility.

That night she dreamt of musk ox, running on the tundra. One of them was calling like a seagull.

In the morning, Milena was shaken awake by Jacob.

‘Ms Sibush! Ms Shibush! Oh, look what I have for you!’ he exclaimed, smiling and excited. Then he whispered, ‘from Ms Patel.’ He passed her a fold of paper.

An envelope. It was as if something had been sent to her out of a previous century. Milena carefully lifted up the flap and pulled out a thick white card. It was edged in gold. Jacob waiting, smiling.

The card was engraved in beautifully flowing copperplate script.

‘Do you feel able to tell me what it says?’ Jacob asked her shyly.

‘It’s an invitation,’ said Milena. ‘For dinner at eight o’clock tomorrow evening.’ She passed him the card. ‘With Rolfa’s family.’

CHAPTER FOUR Antarctica (The Indigent Gloves)

The Bears of London lived together in one street in Kensington. It was a Nash terrace, painted cream, with black wooden doors.

Milena was too short to reach the door knocker. She tried jumping and missed and decided to avoid any further risk to her dignity. She pounded on the door with the heel of her hand.

There were shouts and thumpings and suddenly the door was thrown open by a naked Polar teenager. All her fur the length of her body was in braids. There was a blast of icy air from inside. The girl took one hardened look at Milena and yelled. ‘Rolf-a! Your little friend’s here.’ Then she walked away, leaving the door open.

It was bitterly cold inside. All the walls between the houses had been knocked down to make one enormous, barren room that ran the length of the street. A large male GE in a metal mask was squatting over a machine, welding a join. Milena had time to notice that the floor was covered in fur.

‘Shut the door!’ the Polar girl shouted. There was angry thumping, the girl stalked past Milena and flung the door shut. ‘It makes our hair fall out, you little Squidge,’ she snarled. ‘Rolfa! Slump your fat tush down here!’

The room was full of unopened bamboo packing cases. Polar teenagers lounged on them, watching a screen. It was video! It was showing an old movie! Milena couldn’t help but stare in wonder. There was a flash and a mechanical scream, and Milena saw someone torn to pieces before her very eyes. Why on earth, she wondered, have a video and men use it to see something like that?

‘What are you staring at?’ said another GE, a boy, his voice cracking on the edge of puberty like an egg.

‘Nothing,’ said Milena.

‘She’s never seen a video,’ said the girl and rolled her eyes. Some of the Bears were grooming each other, brushing their pelts or braiding them. It was their moulting season, too hot to go outside. They were sullen and dangerous with boredom. Milena hugged herself and tried to stand her emotional ground, but she was still feeling sick from having seen a human being rent into stringy chunks. She began to shiver from the cold. That’s frost, she saw in dismay, that’s frost on the inside of the windows.

Rolfa appeared at the top of the staircase. She was trying to wear a dress, and looked like an unsteady column of crumpled satin. She began her descent, clutching the handrail, stumbling, swaying. Her feet kept catching on the inside of her hem, making frantic motions within it like trapped rabbits.

Rolfa, lift the dress up, Milena willed, silently.

Rolfa’s hair had been brushed back out of her eyes and was held up by two pink resin butterfly clips that looked like lopsided ears. Braving the distance between the staircase and Milena, Rolfa held out something soft and black. It was a fur.

‘We usually dine upstairs,’ Rolfa said, as if to a stranger.

‘Thank you,’ said Milena for the fur, and wrapped it around herself, her teeth chattering.

‘Follow me,’ said Rolfa and began the ascent. She stood once more on the hem of her dress, and had to hold out a hand to catch herself.

‘Rolfa,’ whispered Milena. ‘Up. Hold it up.’

There was a collapse of laughter from the cousins behind them.

There was something majestic about the way Rolfa ignored them. She bent over and lifted up her dress from the bottom, exposing her knees, and climbed the stairs.

There were chandeliers overhead. They blazed with light. There was a chug-chugging noise in the background. A private generator. There were paintings, extravagances of flowers or empty street scenes at dusk. But no people. Thick wires trailed alongside the carpet on the stairs, and from somewhere came the singing of a circular saw. The cold sunk into Milena’s bones.

‘Want to wash your hands?’ Rolfa asked, quickly.

‘I think they’d freeze if I did,’ replied Milena, watching her breath rise as vapour. I wonder, she thought, if my eyebrows are frosted.

‘In here,’ said Rolfa. Her voice was higher and softer than usual, very precise but barely audible as if there was no force of breath or personality behind it. Milena was shown into a room that made her gasp.

Capitalism, she said to herself. Capitalism was what she thought she was seeing. It was the only word she had for it.

There was a polished mahogany table. Little rough wooden boots had been nailed to the bottom of each leg to make it tall enough for GEs. There were more real paintings on the walls, another showerburst of light overhead deflected through crystal. There was an enormous covered dish made of silver on the middle of the table. It was twice as long as Milena was tall. There were silver knives, silver forks, silver candlesticks, matching mahogany chairs and, in the corner, a tin rubbish bin. Even in the cold, it stank of fish. Milena thought: what if we’re all still working for them?

A door swung open and a Polar female walked in backwards. She wore a billowing orange dress and carried a kind of porcelain cistern in front of her, a vat of food.

‘Hiya, Squidge,’ she said to Milena. The tone was not unfriendly. She put the cistern on the table and reached into the bodice of her dress. ‘You want some mitts?’

‘Oh yes please,’ said Milena all in a rush.

‘Thought you might,’ said the GE and rumpled her lip in Rolfa’s direction. ‘Here you go.’ She threw a brown ball of wool at Milena. Fingers trembling, Milena unwound it. They were gloves designed for counting money in Antarctic blizzards. There were no tips to the fingers. They looked utterly indigent, as if they’d been half-eaten by mice.

‘This is my sister, Zoe,’ said Rolfa.

‘You’re Milena,’ said Zoe. Milena was too cold to answer. Zoe left, shaking her head as if it wasn’t Milena’s fault that she’d been brought there. As she went out another sister came in.

She was even bigger, and her cheeks were flexed with the effort of keeping down a grin. She looked at Milena and Rolfa, nearly dropped two tubs of food on the table, and ran out. From behind the swinging door, there came a shriek of laughter. It was followed by spurts and whisperings.

‘That’s Angela,’ said Rolfa.

Milena sat down. The table was on a level with her chin. The two sisters re-entered, a matching pair, batting their long black eyelashes at each other over the top of fluttering Japanese fans. They lowered themselves gracefully onto chairs, spreading napkins over their laps. Zoe’s hair was wrapped around a hoop to make a glossy, flowing arch around the back of her head, Navajo style, Milena’s viruses told her. ‘I like your hair,’ she said.

‘Do you?’ beamed Zoe, lowering her fan. She batted her eyelashes. ‘Do you like my moustache as well?’

Then Milena saw that her moustache had also been wrapped around hoops, one at each end.

‘I used to have the same trouble with mine,’ Milena replied, with a flash of instinct.

The eyelashes stopped batting.

‘Only,’ said Milena with a sigh, ‘now I shave mine off.’

There was a click behind Milena and a kind of surly grunt. Milena turned to see a short GE. He was rotund and bristling like a hedgehog, his cheeks puffed out as if enraged. He was punching keys on a small device that made a whizzing sound and printed out a result on paper.

He climbed up onto an especially high chair, tore off a piece of paper, and attached it to his fur with a hair-grip. He was decorated with bits of paper like a Xmas tree.

‘We gonna eat?’ he asked, and went back to punching keys.

‘Yes, of course, Papa,’ said Angela, standing up. She lifted off the lid of the giant dish with a kind of malicious flair. It rang.

They were going to eat a seal, a whole roast seal. Its eyes had gone white and it was surrounded by a moat of amber fat.

Rolfa’s father reached forward and began to thumb out one of its eyes.

‘Papa!’ exclaimed Angela. ‘Please, remember our guest.’

‘You want an eye, Squidge?’ the father asked Milena.

‘Yes please,’ said Milena, crisply. He passed it to her on a plate. It rolled. Her eyes stonily on Angela, Milena popped it into her mouth. It’s a grape, she told herself, it’s just a grape. It crunched as she chewed it.

‘Of course, we’re on our best behaviour because of you, Ms Smash-puss,’ said Angela, as she began to carve the seal. ‘Usually we tear the hot carcass to pieces with our bare paws.’ With deft aplomb, she lowered a section of seal filet onto Milena’s plate without letting fall a drop of grease.

‘Some wine, Ms Shambosh? We make it ourselves out of leftovers. I do hope you like it.’

‘Oh don’t mind me,’ said Milena. ‘I’ll drink anything.’

‘If you’re friends with Rolfa,’ said Zoe, sounding serious, ‘you probably have to.’

Angela went on serving. ‘Ma chere,’ she said to her sister. ‘You have let slip your nap-kin.’ She sliced the word in half, like an orange, as a joke. They were making fun, of Rolfa, of Squidges, of the way they thought Squidges thought of them. You are merry gals, Milena thought. But that is no reason to let you get away with anything.

‘Do try not to blow your nose on it this time, ma petite. Do you know, Ms Fishfuss, the last time she let slip her nap-kin, she picked it up and blew her nose on it, and it turned out to be the hem of my dress.’

‘Well,’ said Milena, sipping the wine. ‘Better than wiping her arse on it.’

‘You girls want to carry on like that, you can leave the table,’ said the father.

The serious business of eating commenced. It was noisy and prolonged. Handfuls of boiled seaweed were shovelled onto plates and into mouths. There was a side salad of whole raw mackerel. Rolfa’s father held one by the tail and lowered it into his mouth, steadily crunching. Seal paws were another great delicacy.

’Don’t eat the toenails, Zoe,’ said Angela. ‘What will Ms Shitbush think of us?’

‘You seem to be having some trouble with my name,’ said Milena, giving up trying to cut her seal. She had to hold her hands up almost over her head to reach it. ‘My last name is Shibush. My family are from Eastern Europe, but the name itself is Lebanese. I believe your name is originally Asian, too, isn’t it.’

A silence as icy as the room descended.

Rolfa said nothing. She kept her eyes down on the plate and ate with pained, exaggerated good manners that made Milena want to throw the seal cutlet at her. When asked to pass the salt, Rolfa wordlessly reached across the table, moving as slowly as a rusty hinge. Rolfa was in hiding, even here, in what was supposed to be her home.

Her father sniffed and proprietorially brushed some seaweed off the table and into his cupped hand. He then threw it over his shoulder.

‘So you actually work in Toy Town, do you, Squidge?’

‘Were you talking to me?’ Milena demanded.

‘I wasn’t talking to the seal.’

‘My name is Milena. Perhaps no one told you that.’

‘OK. Milly. You work at that place.’

‘The National Theatre of Southern Britain. Yes, I do.’

‘Could you tell my daughter please what the attitude of that place is towards GEs? For instance, are they ever going to let her sing there?’

Was that Rolfa’s ambition? Milena’s heart sank for her. Rolfa, Rolfa, you won’t get to sing at the Zoo by hiding in tunnels. Milena looked at her. Rolfa reached thoughtfully for her wine, eyes focused inwards.

Milena answered the father’s question. ‘They probably won’t, no,’ she said, softly.

‘Hey, Rolfa, we’re talking about you. Did you hear that? Rolfa!’ He slammed the table. Rolfa jumped, along with the glasses and the silverware. ‘Look at yourself, sometime, girl. They’re never going to let you sing, you’re covered in fur.’

Rolfa picked up her silver knife and fork and began to eat again, in silence.

‘Your daughter is a better singer than almost anyone at the National Theatre.’ Milena spoke warily. ‘She could also become a very fine composer.’ Milena looked at Rolfa’s face for any sign of surprise. The face remained a mask. ‘If she ever got any help or training or encouragement…’ Milena broke off. She’s had to do it all by herself, Milena thought. She’s had to do it all alone.

‘Is that true?’ Zoe asked, leaning forward.

Milena’s eyes seemed to swell like small balloons about to burst. She could only nod in answer.

‘Can you tell me why she’s such a fat slob?’ the father asked.

‘Because her father is,’ replied Milena. She felt like spitting at him.

He saw that and liked Milena for it. He laughed, showing his canine fangs. ‘Hell yes,’ he said, and belched.

‘What does she do all day?’ Zoe asked, concerned.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not prepared to talk about Rolfa as if she isn’t here.’

The father answered Zoe’s question. ‘She just hangs around. She thinks something’s going to happen. Some angel’s going to come down or something.’ He looked back at Milena. ‘She’s wasted enough time. And money. End of summer, she goes to the Antarctic’

‘Antarctic? You mean the South Pole?’ Milena was rendered stupid by shock. ‘Why?’

‘Because,’ the father said, his voice going wheedling and sarcastic. ‘That is where we make our money.’

Milena found that she was smiling, smiling with the absurdity of it and with anger. ‘What is Rolfa going to do in the Antarctic?’

‘Work for a change,’ said her father. ‘We’re not like you people. We owe each other things. With us a woman does the same job as a man or we kick her butt until she does. She’s going to Antarctica before the New Year…’ The father began to chuckle, ‘or I tear her head off.’

‘I think that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard,’ said Milena.

‘You’re a Squidge,’ said the father with a shrug. ‘Your mind’s infected. It’s full of germ’s. Nobody infects our minds. Nobody tells us what to do. So. You call us — what — "an intelligent related species". Personally, I think we’re the last human beings left, but that’s OK, because if we aren’t defined as human beings, then we don’t have to obey your crazy laws. We don’t have to have our heads pumped full of disease, we all live to a decent age, and we do what the hell we want when the hell we want to do it. And you know what, Squidge? You people find that very useful. You find it very useful to have people who aren’t part of your little exercise in mind control.’

Milena felt the icy breath of the truth.

The father unclipped a column of adding machine paper from himself and examined it. ‘So,’ he said, slightly distracted. ‘What we’re talking about here is legal definitions. My daughter over there is saying, I want to make bee-ooo-ti-ful music’ His voice was full of scorn. ‘She hangs around with Squidges, she wants to be a Squidge. She gets herself defined as a Squidge, it could mess up our whole little system. You think we’re going to let her do that?’

‘No,’ said Milena, almost inaudibly.

‘Damn right,’ said the father. He was finished with the paper. He crumpled it up and threw it onto his plate.

Rolfa still ate, slowly, carefully, eyes fixed on her food. Well, Rolfa, thought Milena. Do you have anything to say? I can’t stop them, Rolfa. If you let them do it to you, I can’t stop them.

‘Going to Antarctica is like going to school for us,’ said Angela. ‘It’s something everybody does. Maybe meet a nice man.’ She was trying to sound bright and encouraging. Her father began to key in figures. There was a whizz of paper.

Rolfa, you are a great lump. Milena felt betrayed. The meat in her mouth went round and round. Why am I eating this? I don’t need to eat. She spat the seal cutlet out onto her plate. That’s what I think of you all.

‘I can get you an omelette,’ offered Zoe.

I don’t need to talk either. Milena shook her head. She drank. The wine was sour and sharp, which seemed appropriate. May you all freeze in hell. Why am I sitting here?

Milena finished her wine, throwing it back down her gullet, and stood up. Rolfa finally moved, turning suddenly toward her.

‘It’s all right! You don’t need to move,’ said Milena. She looked at the family. ‘Enjoy your meal,’ she told them, and left. As she went down the stairs, she began to run. She ran to the door and threw off the coat. The carpet had crystals of ice along its fibres. Who needs winter? Milena pulled open the front door and left it hanging open, and plunged into human temperatures, the warm blanket of summer air. She still had on the indigent gloves.

She walked, mind raging, so angry she couldn’t think. The tragedy loomed around her, so vast that it seemed part of the iron railings, and the classical Kensington porticos, and chimneys against the sky, part of the other people who passed her, hunched and hesitant, as if the pavements were too narrow. She walked round and round in circles through the unfamiliar streets.

She found herself back in front of the Polar house, all creamy, ice-blue in the summer night. Something broke.

‘Rolfa!’ she shouted. ‘Rolfa! Rolfa!’ Her voice went shrill and she picked up an edge of pavement and hurled it towards the house.

‘I’m here,’ said a voice. ‘Ssssh.’

A shape, a shadow of a head through an open window on an upper floor. Rolfa had been sitting all alone in the dark.

Milena waited in the silence, in the moonlight, hugging herself. She stamped her feet with impatience and to get the blood flowing in her icy toes. Then there was a quiet clunk, and Rolfa stepped out the front door, carrying something, a blanket. She was back in her shorts and cloth shoes.

She came sideways, wary, as if on broken plates, cringing. Frightened of me, frightened of everybody. When Rolfa was close, Milena hit her.

‘You let them! You let everybody. You’re going to let them do it and you don’t have the right. You going to spend your time breaking rocks? What a bloody stupid waste!’

Rolfa looked back at her forlornly, and Milena heard the sound of wind in the trees.

‘Don’t just stand there.’

More silence, and applause from the leaves.

‘Do something!’ Milena’s hands were raised around her head, fingers spread like claws.

Rolfa hugged her. Milena was suddenly enfolded in long, soft, warm arms, and she was pressed against Rolfa’s stomach. ‘Sssh, Little One, ssssh,’ she said.

The edges of Milena’s vision were going black and grainy. I’m going to faint, thought Milena. She meant it as a joke, to make it ridiculous, so it wouldn’t happen. Then her knees gave way. I really am going to faint, she thought. Real people don’t faint.

‘Ooowwgot ta sssip owwn,’ she said. She was trying to say she had to sit down. Suddenly she felt herself lifted up. Her stomach felt weighted down and she thought she was going to vomit. She saw the moon dip and dive about the sky like a swallow, and she felt herself being laid out on the grass. She settled into it and went utterly still.

‘Little Ones shouldn’t drink too much,’ said Rolfa.

Milena wished that her clothing were undone. She wanted to put the very tips of her fingers onto the palm of Rolfa’s hand. She couldn’t find it. All she felt was grass. Then there was darkness.

Had Rolfa kissed the top of her head? Had she run her fingers through Milena’s hair?

CHAPTER FIVE Low Comedy (Just Us Vampires)

When Milena awoke, she was cured. She had had enough.

She woke up in her own bed, in the little room in the Shell. How did I get home? she wondered. She didn’t remember. She sat up in bed. Her back was stiff and there was a comprehensive pain in the bones of her head, all around her eyes and temples.

Milena no longer wanted Rolfa. The very thought of Rolfa, of her smell, of her teeth, now made Milena feel a bit ill. The thought of them had become associated with pain. Sick with love, Milena had now become sick of it.

Nothing like a course of aversion therapy, she thought and was ambushed by a wet, explosive sneeze. She wondered dimly what the time was and her viruses told her. Oh Marx and Lenin! she thought. I’ve got a performance of Love’s Labour’s this morning. I’ve missed it. She felt relieved. Missing a performance was the right thing to do. She groaned, and lay back down on her bed.

Then the door opened and a stranger came in.

She’s made a mistake, Milena thought, all the rooms look alike. She managed a crumpled smile of tolerance and waited for the woman to realise she was in the wrong room. The woman began to use Milena’s towel. She was a doe-eyed female with black hair and black eyes and beautiful nut brown skin, not Rhodopsin. She was enormous.

Then Milena saw that mere was stubble all over the woman’s bare arms and shoulders, and criss cross cuts from a razor.

‘I shaved,’ said the woman, with a forlorn familiar voice.

‘Rolfa?’ Milena sat up in bed.

‘I decided to do a bunk,’ said Rolfa. She shuffled forward and sat on the bottom of the bed. ‘I had to carry you back.’ Shorn of her pelt, Rolfa had an odd face. It was fleshy and somehow chinless, with a very small, thin mouth that seemed too deeply indented between nose and chin. But the black and liquid eyes were the same.

‘They don’t know I’m here,’ said Rolfa. ‘Can I stay?’

Milena was not sure what she felt. ‘Yes, yes of course. What have you brought with you?’ She meant clothes, shoes, toothbrush…

‘Piglet,’ said Rolfa, and picked up a shapeless lump of felt from the floor. It was some kind of stuffed toy. ‘Piglet goes everywhere with me.’ Rolfa sat Piglet on her lap facing her and looked at it fondly. Even from where Milena stood, Piglet smelled of biscuit crumbs.

‘You didn’t bring anything else with you?’ Milena asked softly.

‘Wasn’t anything else to bring.’ Rolfa smiled at her. ‘I took some money. They’ll say I stole it.’ She looked back down at Piglet. ‘I did.’

‘Will they come looking for you?’

Rolfa nodded. ‘They’re scared. Papa will be scared. The Family says his genes are impure because he’s so short. He’ll try to keep me quiet, not let them know. He’ll try to find me himself. We’ll be safe for a while. We’ll be OK for a while.’ She looked at Milena and seemed to be making a promise. ‘After that, they’ll call out the bloodhounds.’

‘I’d better go and tell people not to let anyone know where I live.’

‘There’s a problem,’ said Rolfa and turned. Underneath the cheap new blouse there was a dark swelling of fur. Rolfa held up a razor. ‘I couldn’t reach,’ she said.

Milena came back from the showers with a bucket of hot water. They were silent and awkward with each other. Rolfa took off her blouse, but held it over herself, something she had never done when she had fur. Her skin had been stripped, cut, outraged. There were long straggles of fur that the razor had missed. Milena sawed at the fur on her back with the kitchen knife and used soap from the showers to get up a lather. Then she used the razor. Rolfa mewed quietly as the hair came off in soapy clumps. ‘I’m cold,’ she complained. To Milena, she felt hot, feverish. ‘We’ll put you under a blanket,’ she said. She left Rolfa wrapped up on the bed and looking at her with a trust that made Milena doubt herself.

Well, Milena thought. I’ve got her. Now what do I do with her? The gift had been too sudden, too complete.

Milena went to each of the overstaffed information desks at the Zoo. She asked the Tykes who worked mere not to tell anyone where she lived. ‘Say you’ve never heard of me,’ she told the children. ‘Say there is no record of me.’

Milena did not know the forms that love could take. She lived alone. She could not remember her childhood friends. Her memories of her mother were faint; she saw her mother only as a dim, warm, mauveness. How did people live with love from day to day? Milena was full of misgivings.

Milena came back to her tiny room, with its bed, its sink, its cooker. It was now covered in paper. Rolfa had found the books and papers that had been rescued from her ruined nest. Rolfa lay on her stomach, filling the floor. Broken-backed books and loose sheets of paper filled the sink. They were piled on the cooker. There was a smell of burning. Fire! thought Milena in alarm and went to the cooker. The papers were untouched, though there was an acrid stench of scorching. How, wondered Milena did she manage to do this?

‘Look what I found,’ Rolfa said and held up a book. It looked rumpled, as if it had been left out in the rain, and there were ring stains on the cover.

‘Oh,’ said Milena. The title was unreadable.

‘Do you think,’ Rolfa asked, ‘that you could possibly call me Pooh?’

The word Pooh meant something very specific and unpleasant to Milena. It certainly did not mean teddy bear.

‘Why on earth would you want me to call you that?’ Milena asked.

‘Pooh,’ repeated Rolfa. ‘Pooh. You must have heard of Pooh. He’s a bear. He’s in a book.’

A GE novel? Milena had sudden visions of an entire Polar literature. ‘Is it new?’ she asked.

‘No, no,’ said Rolfa and stood up. ‘Here.’ She showed Milena a drawing of Pooh.

‘He’s not part of the culture,’ said Milena, meaning there was no virus of him. She reads, thought Milena in admiration, unheard-of books.

‘You could call me Pooh. And I could call you Christopher Robin.’

‘Why?’ said Milena warily.

‘Here, look. That’s Christopher Robin.’

There was a drawing of a small neat person with a page-boy bob and shorts and sandals and loose blouse and a large umbrella. There was no doubt. Milena did indeed look exactly like Christopher Robin.

‘No,’ said Milena.

‘I was going to call you Eeyore,’ said Rolfa. ‘He’s grumpy too.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Milena, ‘If I call you Pooh’ — it really was very unpleasant — ‘do you promise, promise not to call me Christopher Robin?’

Rolfa nodded solemnly, up and down. Her hair still dangled into her eyes. She blinked. She saw Milena looking at the state of the room.

‘Pooh’s very untidy,’ said Rolfa.

‘Yes,’ said Milena nodding.

‘But she does have other qualities.’ Rolfa paused and bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry about the beans.’

‘What about the beans?’

‘I was feeling peckish, and all I could find was some bamboo full of beans, so I tried to warm it up.’

Underneath most of the score for Peer Gynt, Milena found her only saucepan. Light, crispy, burned-black beans were now a permanent part of it.

‘I’ll buy you another one,’ said Rolfa.

‘Good,’ said Milena, wiping the charcoal from the tips of her fingers.

She took a deep breath, to calm herself, and began to explain the house rules. Dirty laundry in this bag here. Clean clothes in this bag. Dirty dishes there. Rolfa nodded in eager agreement. Oh yes, they must always wash up, just after dinner. Why, thought Milena, don’t I believe you?

‘I’m hungry,’ said Rolfa, with tame expectation.

They took a water taxi upstream. The tiny steam engine sputtered, and clouds of vapour rolled upwards in the shape of doughnuts. They went to the Gardens beside the river, where no one would think to look for them, on the other side of Battersea.

There was an old Buddhist shrine there, one of the first built in London. Milena and Rolfa ate lunch beside it, under a marquee. It was crowded and noisy, full of steam and the sizzling sounds of woks. People sat on benches, arguing with infants who kept trying to order different kinds of food. ‘You always order for me!’ the Tykes complained. ‘I can do it myself!’ The infants wanted the food to be bland. ‘No wonder you want everything blasted with pepper, you’ve burned your taste buds out!’ complained one babe in arms. Outside, there were acrobats on the lawn. The babes refused to be distracted.

People walked hand in hand or leaned out over the river, shoulders touching. People live with each other, Milena told herself. Most people live with someone else. She felt a new admiration for the way in which they coped. It must be possible, she thought. There must be a way to do it. Watching other people in couples usually made Milena feel like a bottle with a message in it, washed up and left unread. Now, it began to make her feel a kind of kinship.

‘What do we do now?’ Rolfa asked, as if everything in this new world followed a polished routine.

They walked back along the other side of the river. There were children along the embankment, playing with hoops on moored barges. There was a traffic jam of carts heading back to the outreaches full of goods from the markets to be sold again. Young boys on them leaned back onto melons and played harmonicas. A circle of women sat cross-legged on the pavement, shoving slivers of bamboo into shoes. They were cobblers. A small blonde woman with spectacles and a thimble was talking. ‘Well, my Johnny…’ she began, her voice full of pride.

Rolfa and Milena sat in an old church in John Smith Square and listened to a choir rehearsing madrigals. They went to a market outside Westminster Abbey. Rolfa was hungry again. She bought some dried fish and munched it like candy. She bought a new saucepan and vegetables and bread and more fish. They walked through the August dusk, along Westminster Bridge, past fire-eaters, who blew sheets of flame toward the sky as children watched. Fat men in plaid shorts, Party members perhaps, laughed and passed money. There was to be an ostrich race across the bridge. Jockeys were trying to clamber up onto the backs of the birds. Hoods were snatched from the ostriches’ eyes and they sprang forward. One of them spun in circles and then ran off in the wrong direction. There were cheers. For the first time she could remember, Milena felt young. She and Rolfa walked back to the Shell.

They lit a candle in the room and sorted out Rolfa’s papers. They put pages back in bindings and reunited different halves of musical scores. They worked in silence. They were going to have to share the bed.

It was a small bed and Milena, Rolfa and Piglet were all going to have to fit in it. When the time came, Milena was surprised at how straightforward sleeping with Rolfa was. Rolfa simply took off her clothes and slipped under the counterpane. Without any preliminaries, she began to snore. Milena climbed in next to her with only the slightest trembling in her belly.

Rolfa was hot. Her feet stuck out of the end of the bed to cool. Her snoring was dragon-like, great gurgling snorts, agonised asthmatic wheezes, ruffles of sound like a horse blowing through its loose nostrils. Milena stared at the ceiling in the dark, and felt a trickle of sweat on her forehead.

‘Rolfa. Please?’ she asked.

‘Yum. Um.’ said Rolfa.

Milena reached around and pushed shut her mouth. The snoring stopped and then started again. Milena’s hand brushed Rolfa’s shoulder. It was as warm as a radiator, made piquant by the stubble of whiskers.

Piglet, Milena decided, also smelled of childhood sick.

Finally she slept, as if in a fever, a skittish sleep with dreams. She dreamt that Rolfa rose up all around her and covered her and that they made love. It was a bit like being rubbed by warm sandpaper. Milena could feel the bristles against her cheek and with the tips of her fingers. She awoke in the dark, overjoyed, thinking it had been real, and reached out to find the bed empty and cool.

There was a sizzling sound. Milena looked up and saw a flame. Rolfa was frying something in the light of the single-ring stove. There was a smell of fish.

‘You’ve got fleas,’ said Rolfa, huffily.

‘No I haven’t,’ said Milena, sleepily settling back onto her pillow. It was not possible for human beings to have fleas.

‘I’m being eaten alive!’ exclaimed Rolfa.

Milena was dimly aware of a stirring in the bed. She turned her head. There were mites on the pillow. She sat up and examined them.

‘Oh,’ she said, remembering. ‘Oh. That’s my immune system.’

‘What, trained fleas?’ said Rolfa. When she was angry, Rolfa became something of an aristocrat.

‘No,’ Milena said, mortified and miserable. To have forgotten this only showed so nakedly that she had never been in love. ‘No, we call them Mice. They eat fleas. And bilharzia, and hookworm. They live in our skin. They were engineered for us when the weather got warmer. You’re a foreign body. They think you’re a disease.’

‘Charming,’ said Rolfa.

‘They get used to you. It’s what happens to us. It’s what happens when people become lovers.’

Lovers? Oops. Milena’s eyes popped back open in alarm, and she watched Rolfa, waiting for a reaction. Rolfa went on cooking.

‘But. We’re not lovers, are we?’ said Milena, after a little while.

‘No,’ said Rolfa lightly, and looked at her. ‘I’m making fried bread and sardine sandwiches. Want one?’

‘No thanks,’ whispered Milena. She sat up in bed, and propped her head on arm and looked at Rolfa. It wasn’t going to be like her dream, or like the sickness, either. Living with Rolfa was going to be something calmer and more certain.

‘Here, we go, fleas and all,’ said Rolfa and sat cross-legged on the bed and began to munch. The bed, thought Milena, will be full of crumbs and smell of fish for weeks. She didn’t mind.

In the morning, Milena got up and went to rehearsals. She left Rolfa reading one of the torn books. As she went down the stairs and walked along the pavements that reflected the low morning sun, the thought that Rolfa would be in the room when she got back was like a hand-warmer. People carried them in winter, little boxes in which an ember of charcoal smouldered. She didn’t even mind going to Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Inside the bare rehearsal hall, there was an air of high excitement.

‘Oh Milena, you missed it!’ said one of the Princess’s ladies. She and Milena did not normally speak.

‘Missed what?’

‘Oh!’ said the actress, wondering where to begin. ‘We’re not doing the old production any more, we’re doing a new one, our own.’

The director came in. He looked feverish, eyes glistening. Milena thought he might be unwell. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘All ready for the Birth of the New, Part Two. Milena. You weren’t here yesterday. We’re going to do Dull’s first scene. Now.’

Brisk, brisk, thought Milena, what’s got into him? She did Dull as she always did him, but now each time that she spoke there were affectionate chuckles from the cast.’

‘You see what I mean?’ the director said.

‘Dull’s not dumb, he’s smart,’ said Berowne.

What is going on? wondered Milena. They liked my Dull?

And Milena felt a kind of giddiness.

I know this feeling, she thought. I think I know this feeling from childhood. There’s something new, and you don’t understand it, and so there is confusion.

It was the strangest feeling. It was as if Milena were standing at the end of a long, dark corridor. Far down at the other end, someone was talking, but the words were echoing from so far back, were so scattered by echoing, that they made no sense. The person who was speaking from so far back was Milena herself.

It was a scrap of memory. I’m trying to remember something, she thought.

‘Right,’ said the director. ‘Back to Armado and Mote.’ He peremptorily clapped his hands. The cast bustled into place. Milena felt as if she had been awakened from a dream.

I really don’t remember any of it at all. Any of it. Being a child. It’s all gone. Except for very early on.

Something destroyed my childhood.

The play began again.

Out of costume, wearing street clothes, Armado and the boy called Mote entered.

From the first word of the performance, Milena thought: it’s all different.

In the original production which the cast had so hated imitating, Armado was a braggart, arch and florid and wearing a hat full of feathers. The boy Mote imitated him. The boy was arch and florid as well. He was going to become like his master.

It was a subtlety of performance that was beyond these young actors. What this Mote had was innocence. Mote had been allowed to become a child again. He was full of joy. He danced with the joy of the words.

‘…but to jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary it to your feet…’ he said, swaying with each syllable.

When he was done, the cast applauded him.

‘It’s the words,’ he said shyly. ‘They’re virulent.’

They worked long into the afternoon, utterly without realising it. Time had ceased to be a problem for them. Time became something delicious, the medium in which the words and the performances swam. It’s alive, thought Milena. It’s all become alive. She watched as performance after performance fell into place.

The Princess of the play was less superior now, more wary and confused. The King was less of a fool and more a good and quiet man. For the first time, you could believe that they would love each other. As the cast watched each other, all of them squirmed with delight. The whole damn play, thought Milena. It’s like some huge wriggling fish. This is what it’s supposed to be like.

It was late afternoon when they were done, and they burst out of the rehearsal rooms, throwing back the doors. They marched out of the room together, elated, their hands on the shoulders, on the neck, around the waist of their director.

‘Who needs Animals anyway?’ said Berowne. ‘We’re all Animals!’ They walked back to the Shell in a mob, telling each other excitedly how good they had been.

‘You do realise what this means,’ said Milena. ‘It means we’re doing all the plays the wrong way. They should all be like this.’

‘Ulp,’ said the King, covering his mouth and swallowing in mock alarm.

‘So what do we do next?’ Milena asked.

‘Anything we want’ said Berowne.

And as they kissed each other on the cheek, dispersing to their rooms, and as Milena climbed the stairs, silent among a few other cast members who lived in her section of the Shell, Milena felt she had some news. She could feel the news ripen in her like a heavy fruit about to drop. The news had been ripened by the knowledge that Milena had someone to tell it to. She had Rolfa.

Everything is happening all at once, she thought. She was aware that her life had taken wing.

When Milena got back to her room, Jacob was waiting for her. He stood up from the bed and said, ‘Someone’s been hunting for you. You and Rolfa.’

‘A Snide,’ said Rolfa, leaning back on the bed, looking pleased. ‘Papa would have hired him.’

‘A tall, thin man,’ said Jacob. ‘I told him no one of your name lived here.’

Milena listened to the silence in the room. Snides had viruses that helped them sneak and search.

‘They can hear thoughts,’ she whispered in fear.

‘Not exactly,’ said Jacob, with a sideways grin. ‘It’s not like that.’

The air seemed to prickle. ‘What is it like?’ Milena asked quietly. You know, don’t you Jacob?

Still the angelic smile. ‘You catch thoughts. You see things. You feel things in your head. They are very difficult to understand. If you are with many people, the thoughts are jumbled. Milena, you must stay with people.’

So I can still be part of the play.

‘What if he finds me alone?’

Jacob still smiled. ‘You are many people, Milena. The viruses come from many people. Let them talk for you. Let them recite your lines. Let them add up things. Let them read books. You won’t be traced. All these things are not personal.’

‘And Rolfa? She’s here all alone.’

Hood-eyed, Jacob turned, smiling to Rolfa. ‘Oh, Rolfa, her thoughts are not personal.’

So Postpeople are Snides as well. What, wondered Milena, are Postpeople for?

‘We better change rooms,’ said Milena.

Jacob nodded. Rolfa lay on the bed as if none of it mattered.

Milena went to Cilia. ‘We’ve got to trade rooms,’ she told her.

‘Drop anchor. Hold. Why?’ Cilia asked. She was told the story and was thrilled. ‘Right. Right away,’ she said. ‘We move.’

‘A new room?’ Rolfa beamed, and jumped up from the floor. There was a bustling of bags. Rolfa kept cheerfully hitting her head on the lintels of doorways. The beds, the cookers, the pans, the armfuls of paper, were all exchanged in less than an hour.

‘I’ll go buy us all supper. See you,’ promised Cilia.

The new room was even smaller and did not have a view of the river. After the excitement of the move and of being hunted, Rolfa sat staring, disgruntled and pouting.

‘There’s no space,’ she said.

‘There’s space enough. We got everything in.’

‘There’s no space for a piano.’

For a piano?

Rolfa, how much money do you have? Enough to keep you in food for a month? How much money do you think I have? Milena had to tell her that life would be different now. Rolfa would have to live the cramped and constricted life of a human being.

‘We live in little boxes, Rolfa,’ Milena said. ‘For us mere is no buying a way out. We don’t have pianos. We don’t have rooms big enough for them.’

‘Then where can I play?’

‘There are practice rooms, in the Zoo.’

‘They won’t let me into them.’ Rolfa began to pace.

Something is going to have to happen, quickly, Milena realised. We won’t be able to live like this for long. Something is going to have to happen with her music.

‘You can always sing,’ said Milena.

‘Where? Where can I sing? If I try to sing here, people ask me to be quiet. And if there’s a Snide after me, I’ve got to keep quiet.’

Cilia did not come bringing supper. Jacob came instead with a message.

‘He is in your old room,’ said Jacob. ‘The tall, thin man. He will not go away. He is sitting on the bed. Cilia was playing Madam Butterfly over and over in her mind. He knew that. I said, Cilia your friends are waiting at the cafe. So she could leave. She asked him to go, and he shook his head. How long he will stay there I don’t know. But I think he will soon come here.’

They had to move again. To move a second time was not fun. It was wearing. They traded rooms with Cilia’s boyfriend, a well known young actor, who made a great show of condescending. Milena did not like being grateful to him.

They spent the night in their new, glum room and did not even light a candle in case the Snide was watching. They spoke in whispers. Rolfa walked back and forth at the foot of the bed.

‘When I was bad, Papa would lock me in the closet,’ she said. ‘It was very dark and I knew there was no one to come for me. So I used to sing to myself in the dark. And it got so that I would do bad things like not make my bed or make a terrible mess in the kitchen, just so that I could be locked away. The dark was the only place I could sing. But here, I can’t even sing. It’s so small, I can hardly move.’

And Milena felt it again, the echo of memory. I’ve done this before, she thought. It was a habit, a pattern, something she could fall into if she didn’t think about it. It was as if she had been snatched up so quickly and hauled into adulthood that part of her self had been left behind. It was as if only the shell remained, the structure. The strange soft creature she once had been was left behind. The child self did not realise what had happened. Perhaps it was still back there, in the past, still talking.

I don’t remember, but I think that I probably talked to the newcomers. I suppose that in the Child Garden the orphans wept for their lost homes, even homes they had hated. Milena suddenly found the idea of homeless children unaccountably moving. I must have sat with them at night in the dark, like this.

And this is a child I am talking to now. Milena understood Rolfa then. Rolfa was still a child. Milena would have to take care of her for a while.

‘Can you sing in silence? Like reading music?’

‘It’s not the same,’ said Rolfa.

She will have to become part of the Consensus, Milena decided. If she becomes part of the Consensus, she can be Placed in the theatrical Estate. They will let her use the practice rooms at least. At least they will pay her, give her money and a place to live. If nothing happens she will go. She will have to go. What is the difference between this and Antarctica? It is still exile. The thought did not come to Milena that she herself was the difference.

That night she couldn’t sleep again. She was trying to think of what she could do. Could she ask Jacob to sing the music that he remembered? Could she coax Rolfa into one of the rooms of the powerful, and persuade her to sing, cold? Milena finally fell asleep, sitting on the floor, only her head and shoulders resting on the bed.

She sat up suddenly some time later, knowing that she had been asleep. It was still dark outside. The counterpane was over her shoulders.

‘I have been in bed forever,’ said Rolfa. ‘Isn’t there something we can do?’

‘There’s a market open now. It’s for stallowners, open early. We could go there!’

They crept down the unlighted stairs of the Shell, clutching on to each other, dreading a tall thin shadow. They slipped through the streets, their hearts pounding. They followed a butcher’s cart, pulled by a huge and plodding white horse with a beautiful white mane. They reached the gas lamps, with their shining cotton wicks, and they saw the heaps of things to buy. Sparrows in cages had been dyed bright colours. There were whole smoked chickens, old furniture, T-shirts with pictures printed on them, musical instruments, and piles of fruit and vegetables.

‘Pooh wants this,’ said Rolfa. ‘Pooh shall have it.’ She bought a pineapple. The stallowner was looking at them.

‘Isn’t it funny how a Bear likes money,’ Rolfa said, sorting coins. Milena felt her mouth go taut with embarrassment and the danger of it. He will remember us, she thought. They left as a corner of the sky was turning silver and the sound of horses’ hooves announced the city was waking up. Streetsweepers in blue uniform nodded hello as they passed.

It became their new routine. Rolfa went to the market in the mornings in the dark. It was her time out. Milena would get up with her, and help her shave in the showers, a candle planted on the floor. Then Milena would go back to bed and lounge in its warmth. That was her time. When the sky was lighter, she would get up and clean the cooker, and undo whatever damage Rolfa had done with her pre-dawn fry-up.

‘I hope you bought a new alcohol cannister,’ she said once, when Rolfa got back. ‘You used this one up.’

‘You mean the cooker won’t work?’ Rolfa asked in dismay. ‘And I got us something special for breakfast.’

‘What is it?’ Milena asked ruefully. ‘Seal?’

‘No. Penguin.’ Rolfa held it up. It still had its feathers and horny feet, but at least it didn’t kick.

‘Well, I hope you can eat it raw.’

‘I suppose it is all right in a salad,’ said Rolfa, still looking crestfallen.

She’d also bought some peaches and some seaweed, and so they had a peach and penguin seaweed salad for breakfast — or rather, Rolfa did. Milena ate a peach and watched Rolfa bite through sinews as thick as her little finger. The sink was full of feathers. Milena smiled.

‘Pooh,’ she pronounced Rolfa, as if knighting her.

After breakfast, Milena would leave Rolfa for the day, reading a book. At the entrance of the Shell, the cast of the play would be waiting. Milena would walk in their midst to rehearsals at the Zoo, protected by a cloud of thought.

Milena learned things about them. She learned that Berowne was in love with the Princess and wanted to be a father. The Princess did not want to carry a baby. Berowne was thinking of carrying the child himself. The King, handsome, kind, faraway, loved nobody, but was one of those people who are, effortlessly, loved. The girls felt warmth and sympathy for him, as well as loving his blond-green curls and luxuriant beard.

They were all so ambitious. They all had such plans — characters they wanted to play, pictures they wanted to paint. Milena, as always, was quiet among them, but for once she was not full of resentment. She was content to go unnoticed. She found she liked being part of a group. And when she did say something, it would sound obvious and banal to her, but the actors would exclaim, ‘Oh, Milena, you’re always so sensible!’ She would understand that it was not an insult. ‘Not like you butterflies,’ she replied once, with a chuckle. There was a kind of quiet acknowledgement on both sides of who she was.

Then one morning, on the walkway, the Princess whispered, ‘Milena. That’s the Snide!’

It was like swimming in the ocean and seeing a shark.

A tall man in a black coat was coming towards them. He ambled, hands in his pockets. It was a windy day and the tails of his black coat flapped. The Snide had a lean and dreamy face, with hooded eyes and a slight smile. His hair was like a pale mist, disordered and thinning.

Milena forced herself to look away from him, but she still saw the face in her mind. She hated it. It was sly and soft at the same time, sleepy, almost gentle, except for something glinting within the slits of the puffy eyes.

Think of something else! Milena told herself.

Me, an’t shall please you. Milena remembered one of her 13 lines. I am Anthony Dull. Nothing happened. Think of his coat, she told herself, what did it cost, how many labour-hours? Count them. The viral clock in her mind refused to work.

Milena had spent a lifetime beating down the viruses. They now deserted her. In her terror, she could not dredge up one of them.

Shakespeare. T. S. Eliot, Jane Austen. It is a truth universally acknowledged, she recited to herself, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. There was no answering spark of life.

The walkway was elevated and narrow; they would have to pass the Snide. ‘Ack!’ exclaimed the King, loudly. ‘We’ve taken the wrong walkway.’

All the actors turned at once, and walked in the opposite direction. The Snide followed. Milena could hear the clattering of his shoes behind her on the resin surface. Wooden clogs. He wears them so that people will hear and be afraid.

Marx! Milena thought, where is Marx, they must have fed me Marx by the gram. Lenin, Mao, Chao Li Song. All right, music, then. Brahms, Elgar, anything. She began to hum Das Lied von der Erde. That’s not a virus, she remembered, I learned that myself.

‘Milena,’ called the Snide. His voice was light and mellifluous. ‘I’m singing to you, Milena. Can you hear me?’

Milena could feel terror seeping out of her, as if she were a leaking balloon. She heard his shoes, clip-clopping like horses’ hooves. They were beside her now. The actors walked faster, looking at their feet, not knowing what else to do. Surely this was illegal! Of course it was illegal, but where was the Law? The Law was everywhere, invisible and alive. But there were no policemen.

‘Eastern Europe, Milena,’ said the Snide. ‘Do you remember the trip on the train? You went to St Malo. An island with walls. Do you remember the steamer, Milena? Rocking back and forth on the sea? Do you remember the chugging sound and the sailwomen, all in stripes?’

Milena remembered none of it. There was not even a sense of echoing, of familiarity.

Milena glanced to one side and saw him, walking with them, smiling. Her eyes darted back to the ground in front of her like frightened birds.

Me, an’t shall please you. I am Anthony Dull!

‘I can feel you, Milena,’ said the Snide. ‘Do you remember the Child Garden? Do you remember Senior Dodds who taught you English? Do you remember your first day there? June 23rd? It was raining and you were all alone. You were just four years old, and they made you ill with a virus to make you speak. Do you remember that?’

For Milena, the Child Garden had been destroyed. Something had happened to it. All she could remember was being ill at ten years old. She could remember the sudden weight of new knowledge. The old viruses began to stir.

The Princess spoke, angrily. ‘Go away and leave us alone!’

The Snide stepped in front of her. The Princess had to stop walking. ‘Milena?’ the Snide asked, grinning hopefully, leaning down to look into her eyes.

Milena felt giddy. She swayed as she walked. It was as if the ground beneath her lurched. She stood still beside the Princess as if to help her. Instead of fear, Milena had a strange and most complete sensation of maddening ennui. An irritable boredom engendered by viruses rose up all around her like steam from the pavement.

Milena remembered words, German words, badly printed in Gothic lettering.

Milena remembered the reading of them. She remembered someone reading them in a very small, very cold room, smoking cigarettes. She had rolled them herself, straggles of tobacco in thin papers that were held together with spit. Her legs were limply fleshed and useless. She sat in a wheelchair, by a window, on the ground floor of a block of flats. Just outside her window, noisy children were playing with a ball.

Milena began to walk again, but in her mind, she was sitting in a wheelchair.

‘You’re not Milena,’ said the Snide, gently, to the Princess.

Words on top of another page — Chapter One: The Commodity.

A forest of associations sprang up, thoughts and references neatly husbanded, ready for use. The thought came to the person who was reading: this will show the amateurs.

The one who was reading sucked in smoke, past teeth that tasted of tobacco, down a leathery throat. Milena, who did not smoke, coughed.

The Snide looked up at her.

‘Milena?’ he asked.

Badly printed words were scrolling up through her mind, and embedded in them were aching joints and a tight band of nicotine poisoning across the chest and iron determination and icy pride. Embedded in the reading was an entire way of responding to the world, another sense of self. Me, thought the one who read, they chose me to read this. I understand it better than anyone. I am reading it for everyone. No more amateurs, ever again. They will all understand. There was a tingling in the middle of the cortex, a dancing of receptive virus, waiting to be turned into Marx. The one who read let out a triumphant blast of smoke from her nostrils. She was alive again, though she did not know it.

‘I don’t know anyone called Milena,’ said Milena, quite truthfully. ‘My name is Heather. What do you want?’

‘You like Marx,’ said the Snide, to let her know he could read her.

‘Never met him,’ replied Heather. ‘I wouldn’t say I like his books. They’ve eaten up my life. But I do understand them.’

Bourgeois fluff, she thought. God, I could tear you in half.

The use-value is intrinsic. Like the value of music.

‘Does anyone know anyone called Milena?’ Heather demanded of the actors. Heather’s voice was harsh and her smile, meant to disarm, was fixed and chilling. Milena saw the face in memory, long and freckled with huge front teeth, black-framed spectacles, and a thickness of the neck that was the first sign of the physical distortion below.

‘They do know Milena, but they’re trying not to think,’ said the Snide. Suddenly he chortled. ‘They’re all churning over their lines. They’re all seeing exactly the same play in their heads. Except for you.’

Heather was without pity. She had grown up a cripple in Belfast and pity was her enemy, pity was the thing that had held her back. What she wanted was respect, and if respect was not forthcoming, then she wanted fear. She had learned how to get it.

Heather stared into the eyes of the Snide, and gave him the full blast of her contempt. Crawler, money-snake, you have a talent and what do you do with it? Then she showed him, carefully and clearly in her mind, one of the things that she might do to him if he did not leave. She would hit him in the throat. He would swallow his Adam’s apple, and choke.

‘My God, you’re scary,’ he chuckled. ‘I think I love you.’

Heather was not above being flattered, and she recognised submission when she saw it. She chuckled too, warmly. ‘Fuck off,’ she said using the old word, and made a motion of brushing something aside.

Very calmly, deliberately, Heather thought: it’s a good job he doesn’t know that Milena has gone away to Bournemouth.

‘Bournemouth?’ asked the Snide, amused.

‘How did you know that?’ said Heather, grinning her poker smile and failing to sound surprised.

‘I don’t,’ replied the Snide. ‘Know it, I mean.’ He made a brushing-aside motion now. ‘Bournemouth. Perhaps I will go to Bournemouth, perhaps I won’t. But I will be back.’ As if his wooden clogs had suddenly grown roots, he stood still.

The actors walked on quickly, almost scuttling. Heather went back to reading, bound up in the reading, inherent in it.

I only hope, thought Milena safe within a cloud of thought, that I can get her to stop.

She glanced behind, and saw the Snide, still standing, buffeted by wind as if by the thoughts of other people. He was looking at her and smiling a happy smile of discovery.

That night Milena dreamed that Heather was sitting on the foot of her bed. She could see her, with the horse-mouth smile and the tiny legs, folded up under her. Heather, Heather, go away, get out, leave me alone! Heather kept on reading. The words rolled past, projected onto the walls. You will understand. You will get it right. Of course the most useful things are free, like air, and do not require labour. But value is an economic concept, a function of particular social relations.

Yes, yes, Milena answered, rolling her head from side to side.

There was a knock at the door…

Milena woke up, drenched in sweat, feverish, ill.

…a soft insinuating rapping on her door, in the dark.

Milena felt the bed beside her and it was empty. The sky beyond the window was going silver. Rolfa was gone. Rolfa would be at the market, buying food.

And the Snide had come knocking.

Good, good, let him in, let him see the empty room, no Rolfa hidden. Don’t think, she warned herself, don’t think. Milena found clothing in the dark, her hands shaking, and as she dressed, she pushed her own self, her own ego, down into the recesses. Heather floated up to the surface of her mind, like a corpse on a river.

The door opened. This was a culture that did not need locks.

‘Hello, Heather,’ said a soft, mellifluous voice. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

He moved in the darkness, unseen. There was a crumpling of the quilt. He sat on the foot of the bed, where Heather had sat.

‘You could have hit me this morning. None of the others could. You’ve broken the viruses. So have I.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘We’re alike,’ he said.

There came a shy, apologetic rapping on Milena’s door.

What the hell now? Heather snatched her hand away. Rolfa?

‘Oh my God, it’s my boyfriend,’ said Heather. She could hardly say it was her girlfriend. ‘Quick, under the bed.’ It was the only line she could think of.

‘It’s not your boyfriend,’ said the Snide. ‘It’s a girlfriend.’

Heather tried to push him under the bed anyway, and flung open the door before she had time to think.

Cilia stood there in the corridor, clutching a bamboo box. Heather kicked her in the shins, to occupy her mind.

‘The Snide is here,’ Heather told her, smiling with scorn. ‘He’s come to call. I think he’s going to make a pass.’

In the alcohol light of the corridor, Cilia’s eyes went wide with terror. She hobbled away as quickly as she could, rubbing her ankle.

‘I’ve seen this boyfriend of yours,’ said the Snide, lounging on the bed. He actually thought he was being provocative, poor lamb. ‘I saw him in your head. He sleeps right here, doesn’t he?’ The Snide gave the bed a pat. ‘Big, broad shoulders. And a beard?’

Heather just smiled and thought of dialectical materialism.

‘Ah,’ said the Snide, catching a glimpse of something else. ‘But he shaves now.’ He rolled forward onto his knees, wrapping himself in the quilt. ‘Your room is just as I imagined it,’ he said. ‘Lots of books. That’s how you break a virus. You read it for yourself. I knew you hated the viruses too. I know why you’re reading Marx. To be free. I broke the virus for Marx too,’ he boasted. ‘I wouldn’t know it if I saw it.’

He picked up a small, stained volume from the window ledge. ‘The Communist Manifesto?’ he asked. ‘No one reads it now. They want to control it. And they call tins a Marxist state.’

He was holding Rolfa’s copy of Winnie the Pooh.

‘I want you to go,’ said Heather.

‘Not until I know for certain that you do not need me,’ said the Snide, ‘as much as I need you.’

There were bells on each floor of the Shell, linked by ropes. They began to ring now, over and over. From the far end of the corridor, Cilia was shouting, ‘Fire! Fire!’

‘The building is burning down,’ said Heather.

‘No it’s not. Your friend just wants me to go. She brought you some paper so you could write your music’ He crawled towards her on the bed and took her hands. ‘I know people, Heather. I know you’re what I want. We could live together, outside the Law. Blister all the old paint of the walls. You’re a bullshit-stripper, Heather. I am a sneak. I don’t like sucking arseholes. You could save me.’

Oh God, thought Heather, another one who wants his mother.

‘OK. OK. You’re right. I need help.’

Vampire, thought Heather. All around her, across the ceiling, through the walls came the thumpings of people awakened in the night by an alarm.

The Snide looked up, dismayed. Too many people, thinking too many things at once, thought Milena. He won’t be able to read me as clearly. The quilt fell from his shoulders, and he stepped down from the bed. He gazed at her mournfully, as the light grew stronger, tall but frail-boned, not as young as he used to be, afraid.

‘I take people’s thoughts,’ he said, ‘and I weave them into tapestries. And I hang them,’ he said, ‘like in a gallery. There’s no one else to see them.’

‘Stop being a Snide,’ said Heather.

He opened the door, adjusting a broad-brimmed black hat for sinister effect, and stepped into a crowd of people in their underwear. He’s a fool, thought Heather, quite simply a fool. He heard her think it, faltering as he closed the door. The bells kept ringing. But could people love fools?

Heather waited a few minutes, to let him leave. Then she joined the press of people on the staircase. They clutched their most treasured possessions, toothbrushes or saucepans. Cilia was no longer ringing the bells. The alarm had been taken up, by each floor’s fire wardens, according to the drill. No one would be able to trace the false alarm back to Cilia.

Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that.

‘Oh, Cilia. Who did this?’ Milena asked.

‘Just us Vampires,’ said Cilia, shyly, pleased. ‘Just us Vampires of History.’

The all-clear, a trumpet blast, sounded. Elsewhere, in memory, Heather fixed the book to a holder on her wheelchair. Continuing to read, she began to wheel herself round and round her room for exercise.

That morning, Milena intercepted Jacob on the stairs. ‘Look at what I’ve got!’ she said and held up the paper. ‘Jacob! We can write the music down. Can we meet this morning, this afternoon?’

‘You have a performance this afternoon,’ he said.

‘I’ll miss it. Won’t be the first time.’

Jacob went very still, his eyes closed. ‘I get tired, Milena,’ he said.

She could see it in the flesh around his eyes, and she knew she shouldn’t ask again. But without him, the paper would be no use.

‘The Vampires bought it,’ she said, flipping through it. ‘They saved up money and got together and bought it. All of them.’ She didn’t want to manipulate him, but she couldn’t hide the disappointment.

‘I have to sleep in the afternoons,’ he said. ‘If I don’t, I start to forget things.’ The two friends looked at each other. Jacob sighed and shifted on his feet. ‘But they will clean me out soon. I’ll forget everything, then. The music too. I’ll forget the music’ He nodded up and down, almost imperceptibly. ‘All right, Milena. All right. We meet. This afternoon.’

How could she pay all these people back?

‘Thanks, Jacob,’ she murmured.

Life crowded round.

Milena and Jacob met every afternoon in the practice rooms of the Zoo. Milena was not sure why, but she did not want Rolfa to know what they were doing.

Perhaps she thought Rolfa would be angry that Milena had spied on her while she was singing. Perhaps she thought Rolfa might tell her she did not want the music written down. So it was kept a secret.

Everyday Milena and Jacob would sit hunched and whispering over an old wooden table they carried in each day from a storeroom. Jacob dictated the notes in a low worn voice, his head in his hands. When he got too tired to translate them into notation, he sang the melody in a rich but restricted voice. It went as rusty as a rooster’s, and the workings of Milena’s hand began to ache from writing. Then Jacob would stop and look at her silently, and she would nod. And together they would carry the wooden table out again.

People would murmur an explanation to each other as Milena and Jacob passed. It was as if a stone had been dropped in water. Word was spreading. The world was beginning to do its work, finding what it needed. Sooner or later, the Snide would find them too.

‘Are you Milena?’ a girl, a stranger, asked. Green-blonde hair and Vampire make-up. With a kind of heave, Milena hauled the virus to the front of her mind. Heather, I am Heather. She didn’t get around to answering aloud.

‘Good,’ said the girl. ‘Don’t tell me. But we’re all keeping an eye out for the Snide. If he pokes around here while you’re in there…’ the girl nodded towards the practice room, ‘…we’ll keep him talking and send someone to warn you. That fits?’

Milena did not dare even nod in response. The girl left, half-running in black pixie boots. If you really want to help, Milena thought, how about carrying the table?

All the time, she had to battle with Heather. By day, by night, the virus did not stop reading. Heather gripped and Heather held, with powers of organisation and concentration that were beyond Milena, hauling her through the tangled forest that was Marx, pointing out a debt to Locke or Hume, refining a thought with a quote from Engels or Gramsci, always, always, making sure that Milena understood, understood in the same way that Heather did.

What, Milena wondered, have I called up in my mind? Viruses were supposed to be a passive reservoir of information, like your own memory. They were not supposed to drag you through the minutiae of experience. Das Kapital was over three thousand pages long, and Heather was determined to read it all, exploring every last dreary, undeniable nuance. She had no intention of ever finishing, she would go on and on, determined to control, without a shred of self-doubt or pity. God, the woman must have been a pain. When she was alive.

Heather, Irish Heather, if only there were some softness about you, some hidden anguish or pain, then I could feel sorry for you, I could understand, sympathise, but there is something inhuman about you. You wanted to be a disease. The match between you and the virus was perfect. You and the virus both need minds to inhabit, DNA to remould. Like Helen Lane’s tumour, you are immortal, undead, and you have hold of me.

Milena began to think that what she had was an illness, in the old sense of something that did not cure, but wounded. Heather was like arthritis, a continual pain that had to be managed. The boredom was excruciating. Milena managed it by asking herself if it was worse than the boredom she usually inflicted on herself. Was it any worse, for example, than humming over and over to herself a song that she hated? Was it any worse than sitting alone in the Zoo cafe and examining, one by one, all her many faults of personality? If Milena was now infected by a dedicated Marxist philosopher, who had infected her before? Someone who hated Milena, who tormented her; someone who chattered away at her, who kept her distracted with a stream of useless quibbling that she would have tolerated from no one else.

Milena began to yearn for silence. As Heather read, as the music mounted, as Jacob faded, as she wondered what was happening with Love’s Labour’s, as the fear of the Snide continually nibbled at her, Milena developed a most profound and earnest desire for stillness.

She would return each afternoon from the practice rooms to find Rolfa growing distant and wan. Rolfa would smile at her in a soft and hazy way, eyes dim. It was a smile that was too accepting, that was without hope. Milena would know from that smile, and from the pallid sunlight on the walls, and from the shadows grown long from waiting that she did not have much time to do her work.

And there would be a toothbrush in the candleholder and a foundation garment in a saucepan, and the floor underfoot would be both sticky and crunchy at the same time from a meal of toast and honey. Milena would perceive and regret the disruption that had ploughed its way through her life. She would miss it, were it to go.

Then one afternoon, Milena came back, and Rolfa was not there.

Well, this is it, she thought, this is how it begins. One day she simply will not be here and I will never know, never know if she was caught, or simply went away. There is nothing I can do. She slumped onto the bed and closed her eyes and waited, listening for a familiar footfall. She opened her eyes again, and it had grown darker. She stood up and began to tidy things away.

She piled up the papers that Rolfa had disordered. She cleared away the washing up that Rolfa had done, leaving honey on the bottom of the plates. She found chicken bones in her clean clothes bag, and held them up, looking at the traces of Rolfa, the shreds of meat her teeth had left behind. It grew dark, and Milena became more and more certain that Rolfa had gone, and that it had all been for nothing.

Then, sitting in the dark, Milena heard a door slam, far below. She heard a great echoing voice roar up the staircase. Rolfa! Milena jumped up, overjoyed. She listened as Rolfa kept singing, recklessly. For God’s sake, keep quiet! Do you want to post a sign and tell them that you’re here? Rolfa began to whistle. Milena began to feel aggrieved. Why couldn’t you tell Jacob where you were going? Where have you been all this time? The whistling drew near the door. Then there was a thump.

‘I do not seem,’ said Rolfa, in her mellowest tones, ‘to be able to open the door.’

Drunk, thought Milena. ‘Try turning the handle,’ she said.

Rolfa thumped against the door again. ‘Why am I unable to open the door?’ she asked heaven.

Oooh, thought Milena. More low comedy. She went to the door to open it and couldn’t. The handle would not move.

‘Why won’t you open the door?’ Rolfa asked.

‘Because you’re pulling the handle up, Rolfa. Rolfa? Let go of the handle, Rolfa.’ Milena was enunciating very clearly and slowly.

‘How can I open a door by letting go of the handle?’ Rolfa asked. There was a thump as she threw her full weight against it. ‘The door is jammed. I shall have to break it down.’

‘Rolfa, Rolfa please. Just push the handle down.’

‘The handle,’ announced Rolfa, ‘has just come off.’

Then there was a silence. ‘Rolfa?’ Milena asked. The handle of the door was as limp as a dead fish. When Milena pushed the door open, she saw Rolfa, half crouching, with an expression of mingled delight and horror fixed like glaze on her face.

She was looking at her sister Zoe.

‘Oh, Rolfa,’ said Zoe, looking at the shaved arms and face. She glanced miserably at Milena.

Heather, shut up!

‘Do you want to come in?’ Milena asked Zoe, stepping aside.

Zoe shouldered her way through the doorway as if past an obstacle, and stopped, distraught, and stared about the tiny room.

Rolfa followed, swinging a whisky bottle in one hand. The two GEs filled the room like air bladders. Zoe looked for a chair to sit on. There wasn’t one.

‘Do you know,’ said Rolfa, holding up the bottle towards the window and what was beyond it. ‘There are people out there. The whole place. Full of people. Like a string of pearls.’

‘Do you know what the Family would do if they saw you like this?’ Zoe said, enraged. ‘They’d tie a mask soaked in ether over your face and ship you south in a box.’ She turned away, arms folded in front of her stomach.

‘If you break the string,’ Rolfa continued, ‘the pearls all go rolling down down the steps.’ She sank to the floor. ‘Oh God, my bloody beads.’

‘This is the first time she’s been drunk,’ said Milena.

‘We wondered how you were keeping her quiet,’ said Zoe.

Zoe is the one I can talk to, Milena remembered. ‘Would you like something to drink, Zoe? A cup of tea? It’s about all we have.’

Zoe shook her head, and turned towards Milena. ‘How can you live like this?’ she asked. It was an honest, if unguarded question.

‘By limiting our expectations,’ said Milena. An honest answer.

Zoe looked about the bare and tiny room, and did a kind of shrug with her eyebrows. She was wearing a white toga, and her braided hair was piled on her head. ‘I was going to ask you to come home, Rolfa, but you can’t, looking like that. Do you really hate us so much?’

‘Yes,’ replied Rolfa, grinning. ‘Oooops.’ She covered her mouth.

‘The Family doesn’t know yet. Papa hasn’t told them. We managed to get him to call off the Snide. The sneak wasn’t any good anyway, he got all lovesick over some female called Heather.’

‘I suppose he cost too much,’ said Rolfa, and took a swig.

‘Angie and I wanted to give you time!’

‘How does it feel to be an economy measure?’

‘If you came back by yourself, Papa would be more forgiving. He’s nearly given up on you, Rolfa.’ There was a swollen silence between them. Zoe’s face looked limp and puffy, and flesh showed through, as if the fur were patchy. ‘I have.’

That’s good, thought Milena, without quite knowing why. She seemed to feel a way.

‘Zoe,’ Milena said. ‘Would it make any difference if something happened to Rolfa’s music?’

Zoe glumly watched her white sandals as they scuffed the resin-tiled floor. ‘I’d be grateful for anything,’ she murmured.

‘And if it were done in such a way that no one knew it was Rolfa, no one knew it was a GE, not even the Family, would that help?’

Zoe looked at the floor without responding.

‘Look, I don’t understand how the Family works. But I do know that Rolfa is an embarrassment to your father.’

Zoe’s eyes were full of warning.

Tuh.’ Rolfa’s shudder. ‘Pocket Caesar. Wants to be Consul.’

Zoe’s head turned so sharply, the tendons of her neck showed through the fur. ‘He wants to be accepted by his own People, and he never has been!’

Milena intervened. ‘If… if Rolfa’s music came to something and we all stopped the Family finding out…’ Milena sighed with the difficulty and delicacy of what she had to say. ‘Would that be enough?’

‘Enough for what?’

‘Suppose… suppose you simply tell the Family that Rolfa has disappeared. You don’t know where, or why, but she’s always been odd, and she’s gone, somewhere. Now that would have nothing to do with the legal position of the Family in relation to the Consensus. It might not even have anything to do with… oh, I don’t know what to call it… genetic drift back towards the average, or whatever. Which is all they care about.’

‘You are a cold little fish, aren’t you?’ said Zoe.

‘Look, having Rolfa with you is not going to do your father any good either. If she’s a black mark against him now, she always will be. You’re the only one who cares about Rolfa. This is what she wants.’

Something in Zoe relented. ‘It’s not so easy, Ms Shibush, to watch a sister Slide away.’ She said it quietly. ‘Especially when you’re wondering why someone wants to give her such a good push.’

‘Don’t let her go! Just give her time.’

‘Give you time, you mean.’

‘Give her music time. The music is good.’

‘How long?’ Zoe asked abruptly.

Milena felt a prickling. ‘A year,’ she said. She thought she was overestimating.

Zoe leaned against the wall and chewed the inside of her cheek, looking out the window.

‘All right, Ms Shibush. All right.’ She rocked herself away from the wall. She looked at Rolfa, considered, and found that she had nothing to say. The broken door was still open. She walked to it and turned to Milena.

‘Why don’t I hate you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Milena.

‘A year,’ said Zoe, warning her, and left.

Milena closed the door and started to shake. What had she done? How had she done it? Rolfa sat drinking quietly, staring at the bottle with a faraway smile, as if all of it had nothing to do with her. In a sense, it didn’t.

The next morning, Milena bundled up what music she had and took it to the Minister who ran the National Theatre. He was popularly known as the Zookeeper. Even he called himself that at times.

Walking through the upper floor of the Zoo, Milena felt as small and as hard as a nut. There was a groomed young man whose job it was to stop people seeing the Minister. Milena could not afford the luxury of disliking him.

She did not say that she had found an undiscovered genius. She said that she was harbouring a fugitive and that she felt the Minister should know. She explained why. The reason was that the creature was talented. She left the evidence of that talent, the music, as if it were part of a briefing for a policy decision. The young man took a stern line. Why had she not come earlier? He would make sure the Minister saw the papers and attended to her case. He patted them at the corners to make a neat package of them on his otherwise empty table.

Milena devoted the rest of the day to Rolfa. She bought a pack lunch with the last of their money. Roast beef sandwiches and oranges and sticks of celery — things they both could eat. She took Rolfa, who was content and distant, on a ride in an omnibus to Regents Park. The bus stop called it Chao Li Gardens.

It was getting cooler, and there were high, racing clouds in the sky. The leaves were beginning to change colour already, going yellow at the edges, with brown spots. In the centre of the park, there was a rose garden with ornamental ponds. Milena and Rolfa walked beside the artificial waterways. There was a smell of still, dark water. Ducks landed in it, sliding to a halt.

Milena explained what she had done, and Rolfa appeared to be unmoved. Rolfa threw bits of her sandwiches to the ducks on the water. Overhead a flight of greylag geese passed, on their way to the Thames estuary from Iceland. The world had been saved.

Rolfa watched the geese overhead. ‘Everything moves,’ she said. ‘You wonder how it all knows where to go. Einstein wondered how birds knew where to migrate to. He thought they might follow lines of light in the sky. He saw everything as lines of light. That’s how he was built. So we don’t really know how he moved, either. Any more than the birds.’

Rolfa turned and flicked one of her grins towards Milena, as if apologising for what she had just said. ‘Thank you for trying,’ said Rolfa. ‘But I really don’t mind the silence.’ She was admonishing Milena, ever so gently. ‘The music comes out of the silence. I don’t mind if it goes back in. We come out of the silence…’ Her voice trailed off and she traced an arch with her hand. We go back into the silence too.

What is she saying? thought Milena. That she will go away?

‘We have a year, Rolfa.’

‘But we don’t have any food,’ said Rolfa. She threw the last morsel of bread to the ducks. They began to walk back towards the bus stop.

And suddenly Rolfa turned and attacked a rose. She snatched the stem despite the thorns and twisted it, breaking it off. Maybe it was the clumsiness, maybe it was the anger, but Milena was shocked without quite knowing why.

Rolfa turned, and holding the rose perfectly upright, gave it to Milena. She said something slurred and embarrassed. It took a moment for Milena to realise that she had said, ‘A rose for a rose.’

She shouldn’t have been able to do that, thought Milena. That is a public rose. If Rolfa had been anyone else, the viruses would have stopped her taking it. Rolfa is immune as well.

Milena turned the rose round and round in her hand. It was an old-fashioned rose, a very pale pink marbled with magenta. Rosa mundi, whispered the viruses. The petals had gone brown at the edges and had curled back to reveal a fresher core. It must have been recently watered by the gardeners. Fat pearls of water clung to it. Milena thought she ought to be embarrassed being seen walking with a stolen, public rose. Then she found she didn’t care, and carried it boldly. It bobbed on its long stem as if made out of lead, as if heavy with meaning. The public rose was a private valediction.

On the bus back home, Rolfa’s face was smiling, sad and faraway. Milena found herself dunking over and over: Rolfa don’t go, Rolfa don’t go.

Their little room at the Shell was cool and in shadow by the time they returned. September was declining rapidly. Rolfa won’t mind the winter, thought Milena, she’ll like the cold. If she’s still here, said another part of her mind. Milena went up onto the roof of the Shell to sunbathe, to kill her hunger pangs. Cilia brought Rolfa some soup and sausages. Cilia slipped them both into the Zoo to see Madam Butterfly. Rolfa no longer could buy tickets. Her smile was rapt, with the music, with the singing, with the staging, and her eyes were famished and glistening. If only they had let us be ourselves, Milena thought.

The next day Milena tried to rejoin Love’s Labour’s Lost.

She was told at one of the information desks that the director had died. Quite suddenly. Thirty-five. Time-expired. The cast were in mourning. They had asked to have the production discontinued. They didn’t want to work with anyone else. They can’t face going back, thought Milena. They can’t face going back to sleepwalking Shakespeare.

It was just like the play, at the end. Welcome Mercade, Mr Death. You interrupt our merriment. The King your Father is…

Dead, for my life.

It’s a design flaw, thought Milena. We shouldn’t have to the. She thought of the director, called him Harry in her mind. She remembered his feverish eyes. You knew you were going, Harry. This was your last leap. A lifetime of sleepwalking, of making other people sleepwalk, broke you. And then you were free. Harry, if I ever direct a play, she promised him, I will do it as you did.

And they are not going to break me.

Milena did not go back to her chilly room. She walked on, up the stairs, to the upper floor of the Zoo.

Out of the silence, into the silence.

She was going to talk to the Minister, before time.

‘Oh yes, Ms Shibush,’ said the sleek young man, smiling. ‘I’ll go ask.’ He went through a door.

Milena sat down. A row of Postpersons sat next to her, staring ahead with expressions of perfect peace. Lined up like Buddhas in a temple. Their conscious minds were fully occupied with the records of the Zoo. But what of underneath? thought Milena.

Her legs jiggled up and down with nerves. Heather had reached the end of Volume One, the only one that Marx had finished himself. She was fighting against the ending, reading notes and appendices, reading quotes in their original language. She was re-reading the prefaces to all the different editions. It was as if she would the when she finished.

I am ready to welcome scientific criticism.

I don’t really know you, Heather, thought Milena, I only know a virus. You may have loved, you may have been happy.

As far as the prejudices of what is termed public opinion, to which I have never made any concession…

You were dedicated. You were formidable. You gave your life away. Do your motives matter?

…I shall continue to guide myself by the maxim of the great Florentine:

Sequi il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.

Follow your own bent, no matter what people say.

Marx quoting Dante. Heather went on to read the next preface.

As Heather read, Milena thought of Rolfa and the wellspring of music in her, and of the paper from the Vampires, and of what she was going to say to the Minister, and she found that she had no idea.

‘I’m tired,’ she said aloud.

Marx could not enjoy the pleasure of preparing this third edition for the press.

The sleek young man came out again, asked one of the Postpeople to go in, and said to Milena, ‘A few minutes, Ms Shibush. Are you thirsty? Can I get you something?’

So I am in favour, Milena thought, but the thought was bleak. The young man tried to engage her in conversation. It was his job to know what was going on. His combed-back chestnut hair and his busy black and orange shirt all annoyed Milena. His spectacles annoyed Milena; spectacles were a Vampire affectation. Behind the flat resin lenses were the goggle-eyes of a cornea regrowth.

Milena answered his questions with yes or a no, or a yo — a Vampire answer that could mean sometimes or maybe. Yes, she was an actress. Yes, the music was very good. Was she friends with the composer? Yo.

A door opened and the Minister himself asked Milena to come in. Milena followed him into his room.

That mighty thinker…

He slept there. His bed was behind a screen that was painted with green streaks to represent reeds by a river. The walls were covered in cloth that was also decorated with reeds, and a large black sketch of a heron. There was a picture of Marx on the wall. Milena looked at the eyes. They would have been brown and soft. There was a picture of Mao at 25, and of Chao Li Song, the hero of the Second Revolution.

The Minister wore khaki trousers and a khaki shirt. He was a very handsome man of Chinese extraction, with neat black hair, a neat smile, a neat moustache. Milena liked him. There was something informal and direct about him. He had an air of competence and balanced openness, the product of Party training. Was that a virus too?

‘Do you mind if my Postperson stays with us?’ the Minister asked Milena. ‘I like to keep accurate records.’

The Postperson was a woman. She sat on a tiny chair, with her knees pressed together. Her head was wrapped in a kerchief. ‘That’s fine,’ murmured Milena. The Minister held out a hand for her to sit on a large, upholstered chair.

… died on March 14, 1883.

As Milena settled into it, she felt herself enfolded and cushioned by something else, something that supported her and made the room go still.

Like an ear clearing of air pressure or an infection, her mind was suddenly quiet. Heather was gone. Milena was well. There was a hush all around her like a pond.

Outside the big window, everything was blue and hazy. The last of summer, the first of autumn, a jumble of old buildings. Milena could hear voices and horses’ hooves below, as life was made and unmade in ignorance of what was going on behind this one high pane of glass on the top floor of the Zoo. The window was shaded, its frame was supported, by bamboo.

And Milena remembered. The bamboo reminded her of something.

Ice cream sticks.

She remembered that ice cream had come on little bamboo sticks. She saw the bamboo sticks very clearly. They were in sunlight, on a table. There were children with her, little girls, and they were laying out their bamboo sticks to make a picture. They were making a picture of a house.

Milena was making a window.

She saw it so clearly, it was as if the table, with the sticks, was just around some corner, to be found again.

Memory.

Milena heard footsteps in the corridor below. Very slowly, her attention turned to what was around her. She heard a hissing. It was the hissing of molecules of air against her eardrums. Milena was in the silence.

In the silence, nothing was fragmented. There were no separate strands to gather together, to fumble, to compete for attention. In the silence, all of that fell away, and there was only what was here, and what was to be done.

It was as if she, Milena, had finally come into the room and sat down beside her.

‘I am told that you have been missing performances, Ms Shibush.’

Milena saw no reason to reply. Zookeeper.

‘That cannot help your career,’ the Minister said, gently.

‘Nothing could help my career. I am a very bad actress,’ said Milena.

His eyebrows rose and he shifted in his chair and smiled, amused.

‘What do you think of Ms Patel’s music?’ asked Milena.

‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I thought it showed promise. But what I think is of little importance. It may surprise you to learn that we consulted the Consensus on this matter.’

Nothing seemed to surprise Milena. ‘And?’

‘The Consensus is an extraordinarily accurate predictor of the success or failure of an artistic endeavour. It had a complicated response to Ms Patel’s music. But then all its reactions are complicated. It has all of us inside it.’

But not me, thought Milena. It does not have me.

‘Essentially, it liked it, but its more musically adept personalities registered concern over the roughness of what was shown.’

‘Not surprising,’ said Milena. ‘They were shown what Jacob and I could remember of the pieces. They need work.’

‘Exactly,’ said the Minister. ‘There were other problems.’

Milena waited. There was a silence. The Minister’s smile widened and he chuckled. He was beginning to find the interview disconcerting.

‘There does seem to be a balance in life. We have gained in knowledge and order. But that calm and that wealth of information do not lead us to originality. Out of the disorder of this poor woman’s life, something new has come. So.’ He leaned forward, ‘do we as good immaterialist socialists advise that people should live in disorder and ignorance?’

Rolfa? Ignorant? You ignorant man, thought Milena. Aloud, she answered: ‘I think we advise a love of beauty from whatever source.’

‘Even from the Genetically Engineered?’

‘Of course,’ said Milena, engulfed in calmness. ‘We believe that they are human even if they say they do not. We don’t have to tell anyone that she is Genetically Engineered. We can accept her and her work as being human.’

The Minister chuckled again. ‘We cannot do that, you see, without disrupting our wider and quite delicate relationship with the GEs. They do not wish to be defined as being human.’

‘So what we are really talking about is mining in the Antarctic’

The Minister’s smile did not change.

‘I’ve talked to her sister. The Bears are willing…’

‘Please,’ interrupted the Minister, giving his head a little shake of distaste. ‘Don’t call them that.’

Mining and a market for luxury goods, Milena decided. Where, she wondered, am I getting all of this from?

‘The hierarchy of the GEs don’t know that Rolfa is with us. Her immediate family have agreed to keep it from them. It is in their interests to keep it from them. If we pretend that the author of this music is a human being, they will. They have given us a year to do something with her music. They love her that much.’

The Minister corrected her. ‘Well, we have had a representation from her father asking us to return her if she has been found.’ He corrected her, but was still willing to be generous. ‘We did try to return her. We tried to find both of you and no one here would tell us where you were.’ His smile went crooked with amusement. ‘Which told us that if our own people were so intent, perhaps we did not wish to act. Our relationship with the GEs is delicate but not close.’

He’s amused for now, thought Milena, but I mustn’t get too clever.

‘Thank you, thank you very much,’ she said.

I get this, she decided, from my father. From my political mother and father who dealt this way for years. And I also get it from Heather.

‘Did you know she stole from her family?’ the Minister asked.

‘No,’ lied Milena, sounding shocked.

‘Whatever we do must reflect credit on the immaterialist programme, and on Consensus politics. Your friend has had a capitalist upbringing. She will suffer from grave distortions of personality.’

Milena began to get angry. The Minister kept on talking.

‘It is not only that we will have to keep her shaved, or sitting down so she looks smaller.’ The Minister was smiling, confident that he was talking to Milena on her own level. ‘We have no guarantee that Ms Patel’s behaviour will be acceptable. What we must avoid is making any link in people’s minds between talent and childish behaviour.’

‘I agree of course,’ said Milena. ‘But her upbringing has not been capitalist. It is inaccurate to call the GEs capitalists. Capitalists take the surplus value created by other people’s labour. The GEs do all the work themselves. They may amass wealth and live outside the Consensus, but their Family is in fact a classic example of the Estate system as described by Chao Li Song.’

Oh. The Zookeeper’s face was as blank as a nail hit on the head.

‘That is why their economic activity is able to mesh with ours,’ said Milena. ‘Are GEs immune to the viruses?’

‘Yes… unless.’ The Minister made a vague gesture.

So, thought Milena. There is an unless. They can cure Polar Bears, they just choose not to. Of course they can cure them, lower their body temperature, suppress the immune system…

‘She is so talented. There must be some way,’ said Milena.

‘We will give it thought,’ he promised.

‘If she joined the Consensus, was considered human, she could use the practice rooms, take instruction…’

‘Of course,’ he said.

Come on, come on, follow it through. Milena kept her hands still.

He looked wary. ‘Of course, if she joined the Consensus…’ he mused. ‘We could correct for all of that. We could ensure that there would be no bad behaviour. And it would be a shame… it would not be just… if such talent were allowed to wither. All right. We will consider that aspect.’ He leaned back. The interview was over.

No, thought Milena.

‘It has to be done today,’ said Milena. She began to feel fear. She began to be unsteady. It was like waking up. The Minister’s eyes were sombre.

‘Please,’ said Milena, suddenly shorn of her bigger self. ‘She’s hungry. She’s not Rhodopsin, she can’t just go out into the sun. We’ve got no money. If she joins the Consensus, she can have a position here, she can eat!’ Milena found that she had gone tremulous. ‘Otherwise she will leave. Please. Can you arrange it for today?’

The Minister seemed to have a question rise in his mind. He was looking at Milena now, not considering what she said. He was considering her.

‘I will see if it can be done,’ he said, no longer smiling. Milena began to quake. It was a rattling in the bottom of her belly. ‘But what you must do is check with your friend and prepare her. We must make sure that this is acceptable to her.’

I’ve won, thought Milena. I’ve won. She stood up to go. She did not want to speak. She did not trust herself. She nodded yes to whatever he said.

‘Can you come back in an hour?’

Yes, yes. He shook her hand. She walked out of the rooms into the corridors, and began to run. The shaking continued. Her knees wobbled, her hands flapped. There was a sense of fear, of being in a bigger world. She was not who she had thought she was. I may not be a good actress, she thought, but I am good at this. I can arrange things. She had learned in the cushioned silence that every artist is perforce a politician.

CHAPTER SIX Meeting Charlie, Charlie Slide (Surviving in Concert)

The Public Reading Rooms — the rooms in which the public were Read — were underground in bunkers. The bunkers were under what had once been the Department of the Environment. The Department of the Environment had been torn down to plant a forest.

The forest was the Consensus. The Consensus was a garden of purple, fleshy trees that reached up and fed on sunlight. The mind of the Consensus was below. A buttressing marble wall ran around the garden. In the wall, there was an old stone plaque that had been preserved. ‘This is Marsham Street,’ the plaque said, ‘1688.’

Underneath there were corridors of brick. They wound their way through fleshy roots and a gathering of synapses called the Crown. Below, like tubers, there grew mindflesh, on which memories were imprinted, memories and the patterns of response. They were models made of children, Read at ten years of age.

This was the Consensus for the Pit, the central heart of London. In the corridors of brick, painted white, there were air vents and electric lights. Milena stared in wonder at the glowing bulbs and their golden, dazzling filaments. She had always loved light.

The rooms were full of classrooms of children, about to be Read. Their Nurses led them in song, playing on guitars or hand pianos. The children wore their best clothes. The little girls wore printed saris translucent with colour. The boys wore jewellery through their nostrils. They danced in a line, waving their hands like the branches of trees. The lucky ones had parents, who sat on benches and watched with quiet pride.

People in white uniforms danced with them. A huge woman in white saw Rolfa and beamed and worked her way, still dancing, towards them.

‘You’re Rolfa. I’m Root,’ she said. ‘You’re our special case. You’re going to have special treatment from us, I promise you that.’ She led Rolfa to one side. ‘Just a few questions to ask first,’ said Root.

Health. Medical record. Any intoxicating substances lately?

There was a cheer from a class of children. They were praising their own Estate school. Root turned and pressed her hands together. ‘Oh, the little darlings, oh the little flowers. I tell you, this is the happiest place. They come here dancing. They leave here dancing too.’ Root’s grin was wide.

‘Now, love, you have any experiences with the paranormal?’

Instantly, Rolfa’s face looked withdrawn.

‘Have you ever levitated, or had an out-of-body experience? Any poltergeists in your home? Anything of that sort?’

Rolfa shook her head and gave a shy smile. Who me?

‘It’s very important. You’re sure? OK, then, we go in.’

This woman is too used to talking to Tykes, thought Milena. Then Root turned to her. The smile was like a beam of light. ‘You, too, love. You’ve never seen this, and we want you to see how happy it is.’

Milena felt ice in her chest. They know, she thought. They know that they’ve never Read me. It’s been deliberate. They’ve decided not to.

Quiet, she thought, and followed Root.

I thought I was free, Milena thought. Instead, I was being tolerated. Or used. They wouldn’t leave me alone, if there was no reason for it.

Of course they must know they haven’t Read me.

Another mystery, lost in Milena’s history.

Root was holding open a door, and waving to her, come in, come in. Milena followed, in anger, and in fear.

They went down a corridor to a sealed hatch, that hissed when it was opened. Beyond it was a loose and flabby concertina corridor, made of soft resin. It shifted underfoot, floating in flesh. It was wet and smelled of disinfectant and was lit by an ultraviolet light.

‘Got to avoid disease,’ explained Root.

They stepped into a room made of flesh.

The walls were slightly phosphorescent, and they seemed to pull back as they entered.

‘Hello, Baby,’ said Root. ‘Time to go for a walk.’

She’s Terminal, realised Milena. She talks to the Consensus, with her mind. It can talk to her. She can see for it, hear for it. This is the Consensus, here.

‘What’s it like?’ asked Milena, all in one breath.

‘Big,’ said Root the Terminal, warmly. ‘And alive. Come on, now Rolfa love, you sit over here, on the floor, anywhere will do.’

This is what holds me, Milena thought. This is what rules. This is Charlie. This is the Slider, maker of Angels. The beating heart of her culture, and she had never seen it. Machines had imitated life, and now life had returned the compliment. Patterns were repeated. A computer made of flesh, growing new capacity when it needed it, sending mycelia through the earth, sprouting elsewhere like mushrooms, fed by purple gardens.

Milena remembered again.

She had never seen a film, but other people had with viruses in their heads, and she had their memories. They were the memories the Party wished her to have. She remembered a film now, of Chao Li Song.

Milena saw a wry, smiling face, an old gentleman full of good news he could not contain. ‘We will have to accept that we have been superseded,’ he said in a voice like a rusty hinge. ‘We are like parents who have produced a giant baby. It deals in things we cannot conceive of.’

Thought was chemistry moving into electricity, and electricity was unified with the other forces. In the fifth dimension, the master of the eleven dimensions, gravity and electromagnetic phenomena were the same thing. The Consensus could think in gravity. It could imprint personalities in gravity. Angels, they were called. The Angels could slide through gravity. They could slide across space at the speed of light. As predicted, they travelled backwards in time. They travelled backwards in time to other stars.

The highways of gravity were called by the English the Charlie Slide.

‘How will it help?’ asked Chao Li Song, ‘to send thought to the stars, long ago? The answer is that it will mine for wealth. Thought and gravity are one. Gravity pulled the universe into existence, by inflation. It pulled against nothingness, and as it pulled energy was released. There was a flash of heat.’ Chao Li Song smiled, in the past, as if he had travelled at the speed of light. ‘The Angels will unleash blasts of heat. They will smelt the rocks of other worlds. They will lift them, like toffee, and hurl them towards us, out of the past. They will guide them to us, through the long light years back, very slowly.’ He paused to smile privately. ‘We know they will do this, because it has already happened in the past. The blocks of metal. We have seen them coming towards us. We have heard the Angels, in the lines of gravity.’

The universe had been made by inflation, gravity pulling energy out of nothing. The Consensus was mining the vacuum as well. It was plucking it gently, to release floods of heat. The Consensus would soon be making energy by making tiny, pocket universes.

‘You comfy, love?’ Root asked, giving Rolfa a drink of water.

Chao Li Song had other things in store to say. ‘For so long now, we have known the universe was not material. Everything calls up its opposites and achieves a new synthesis. Hegel told us, Marx told us. The time has come now. We had Dialectical Materialism. Now we must have Dialectical Immaterialism. Idea precedes reality.’

He had to flee for his life. The viruses did not tell Milena this. Her mother had, in the name of her father who had died. Because of Chao Li Song, socialism forged an alliance with resurgent religion. Because of him, socialism won. It required only a few compromises, with prudery and common sense. Milena lived in a theological state.

Charlie, the English called him. Charlie Song.

‘Sing a song of Charlie, take you for a ride,’ Root the Terminal was singing, wobbling backwards like a jelly towards Milena. ‘Sing a song of Charlie, down the Charlie Slide.’

We rose out of Africa, thought Milena. We rose out of a drought and survived, not with a bigger jaw, but with a smaller jaw because we had the beginnings of speech. We survived because we worked together. We are designed to survive changes in climate by working in concert. Like music.

Root gripped her hand and shook it. ‘You stay here with me, love, or we get two readings all mixed up, and that’s very weird. You never seen this. You never seen this, you in for a real treat, I can tell you that.’ She chuckled. She was like a balloon full of chuckles.

We survive, thought Milena, because after everything else, we are good. We survive to the extent that we are good.

The thing that was the room chuckled with them. It chuckled and space chuckled, the space containing Rolfa. There was a wave through it, and her.

Rolfa’s head was flung back like a cannonball, and it split into a grin. ‘Yeee-haaa!’ she cried. She roared with laughter. ‘Whooo-eeee!’

‘That’s it, that’s it!’ shouted Root and she jumped up and down with her vast bulk. ‘Oh, yeah. Ride it love, ride it!’

I had heard, thought Milena. I had heard it was wonderful, and I never believed.

Every synapse is engaged at once, every neural pathway, every cell in the brain works together, all at once for the first and only time. Like a national grid, all lit up. Each person a nation, a universe.

The Consensus pulled energy up out of nothing, from quantum vacuum, and it could roar back in time by travelling faster than light. It had been known for a century and a half that gravity in the form of inflation had helped spark the beginning. But how was there a viewpoint, a reference, for gravity to work in before space and time? The answer was that gravity had been imported back to the beginning, thought in the form of gravity.

Humankind, working as the Consensus, was going to make the universe. So loved the world that we made God in our own image.

‘Oh!’ cried Rolfa, in fondness for everything. ‘Oh!’ and her voice broke into a whine of loss and regret and she looked at Milena, smiling and sad.

‘That’s it,’ said Root. ‘Darling, you just been Read.’ She walked to Rolfa, leaned over her, inspected her, stroked her head. ‘So what did you see, love?’ she asked, speaking gently.

‘All kinds of things,’ said Rolfa, faintly.

Root laughed and nodded. ‘Yes, yes, everything comes back.’

‘I saw my mother,’ said Rolfa. ‘She was picking water lilies in a pond; she had her dress, her big orange dress lifted up out of the water, and she was laughing in case she fell.’ She sat up and took hold of Root’s arm. ‘The pond was behind an old white farmhouse. We were staying there. On Prince Edward Island. I was five years old. I got in a fight with my sister. She said she was going to grow bigger than me because she drank tea. And big people drink tea.’

‘I tell you, it’s the same for everyone. I see people, they leave her dancing.’

‘But it doesn’t just come back,’ said Rolfa. ‘It goes forward as well.’

‘Hmmm?’ said Root, turning, as if someone had spoken to her. Someone had. ‘Back to business,’ she murmured, and cupped a hand around an ear, and listened, rapt. Milena was given an uncomfortable chance to think.

Root began to smile. ‘Well you’re quite a character, aren’t you? You’re all over the place. I’ve never seen anyone like you before.’ She chuckled and shook her head. ‘You like your drink, I can tell you that.’

Milena felt a familiar chill. ‘Change as little as you can,’ she said, in a whisper.

‘We do, love. We don’t go mucking around.’

‘She’s a genius. That’s why this is being done.’

‘Is she now?’ Root was amused. ‘Well I wouldn’t be knowing about that.’ She bent down. ‘You feel up to moving now, Rolfa? We’ve got to make space now for someone else.’

Gently, Rolfa nodded. Root helped her to her feet.

‘In and out like a giant lung,’ murmured Rolfa.

Milena took the other arm. She felt Rolfa lean on her, exhausted. They walked through the concertina, down a white corridor to a little room with old chairs. As she was leaving, Root gave Milena a wry grin, and waved her to follow into the corridor, to talk.

‘Your friend, you know, she shakes with both hands.’ Root’s eyebrows were raised, her cheeks were bursting with amusement, her tiny hand on its fat wrist was placed delicately over her breast.

What was the woman talking about? Milena began to have an uncomfortable creeping feeling. ‘I think she’s left-handed, actually.’

‘Now don’t let on you don’t know!’ insisted Root. ‘We see it all here, nothing bothers us.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your friend. She wants to botty-bump with other ladies.’ Root covered her face and hooted with laughter. ‘Oh, the shapes humankind gets in. We see them all! But a little rough justice and it all works out.’

Milena went still and cold. ‘She likes other women.’

‘Oh, loves them, love. Loves you.’

‘Can we stop this?’ Milena asked. Her voice was a croak.

Root shook her head sadly. ‘It’s the law,’ she said. Her vast buttocks made her white skirt rustle as she walked away.

Milena turned and walked into the room. She saw Rolfa sitting, smiling, looking through the whole world to somewhere else.

‘Rolfa,’ Milena said. ‘I love you. I want to sleep with you — I mean — I want to have sex with you.’

Rolfa began to grin. She covered her eyes. ‘This is a fine time to tell me.’

‘I tried before, but I couldn’t.’

Rolfa began to laugh.

‘It’s not funny!’ Milena did an anguished little dance.

‘It’s ficken hilarious! It’s the funniest thing I ever heard.’ Rolfa took Milena’s hand, and shook her head. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘I don’t know. I was afraid. Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘Because you’re a human being, and I thought you’d be cured! You told me. You said. I had all those viruses when I was ten years old!’

Oh merciful heaven. Something so simple. Milena whispered. ‘But I was never Read. They gave me viruses to educate me. But I was never Read. I was never cured.’ And I never talked about not being Read, because I was afraid of being found out. I never said anything because I was afraid. But they knew all along.

I had Rolfa. I had Rolfa all along. And now they’re going to destroy her.

Rolfa was laughing. ‘All those nights! Should I touch her, shouldn’t I touch her, no I mustn’t, they cure these people.’ She looked down at Milena’s hand and played with its fingers. ‘Who needs viruses, when you’ve got fear?’ She looked up at Milena, still smiling. ‘We’ll have some time,’ she promised. ‘However long, we’ll have it.’

Root rustled back into the room. Involuntarily, Milena jumped away. Rolfa pulled her back.

‘A little bit of honey,’ Root said, ‘and a touch of immuno-sup-pression.’ She bounced her hips back and forth with the rhythm of the words. She was wearing pink gloves. ‘Now. Stick out your tongue at me. Going to give you Candy.’

Run away, thought Milena. She contemplated violence, pushing the huge nurse over and running. But where? Where was the way out?

Rolfa stuck her tongue out like a naughty girl. Root said, ‘That’s the spirit,’ and dabbed the tongue with a finger of the glove.

‘And that’s all there is to it. You’ll begin to feel ill in about three hours. Just relax, drink some fluids. No booze, now. Any complications, use your Postperson and let me know, and I’ll be straight around.’ She turned and her eyes flicked towards Milena. ‘This is a main virus,’ Root told her. ‘It’s contagious.’

Milena looked back at her bleakly.

‘Rough justice,’ said Root the Terminal. ‘But less rough than it used to be, I tell you that.’

Then she helped Rolfa to her feet and led her out of the room. Milena followed. There was nothing else she could do.

CHAPTER SEVEN An Ultimately Fatal Condition (Love’s Labours)

Outside, it was Indian Summer, almost warm with patchy sunlight and racing shadows of clouds. Fat pigeons limped across the stretch of green beside Lambeth Bridge. It was mid-afternoon and most people were working. A circle of teenage boys, their shirts open, sat on the lawn drinking and playing a desultory game of cards. On the bridge, a wagon had broken its axle and kegs of beer had split open on the slope of the bridge, sudsy and bitter-smelling. Children paddled in it, kicking at the seagulls that had gathered.

‘I didn’t know about your mother,’ said Milena as they walked.

‘She left us,’ said Rolfa. ‘She didn’t like Papa.’

‘Where did she go?’ Milena asked.

Rolfa turned and gave her a very peculiar smile. ‘Antarctica,’ she said.

They walked on in silence past what had once been the palace of an archbishop. They knew they were going to make love, and Milena knew that she was going to catch the virus. She wanted to catch the virus. She did not want to be left behind. It was not something she needed to think about. Sex complicates, but it is the power of love to simplify.

They walked past the hospital that Florence Nightingale had founded, and past another small park, listening to seagull cries. They passed into the enfolding stone arms of the Shell, its forecourt, and then up the stairs.

Finally, in their small, cold, crowded room, they made love and it was both more ordinary and more strange than Milena had imagined, as ordinary and as strange as rainfall.

Then the shivering began. Rolfa was cold. Milena piled on blankets. Rolfa complained how dry and sore her sinuses were. Milena kept a kettle boiling in the little room, to keep the air moist. The steam hung in the air like a fog.

‘It’s like a buzz,’ said Rolfa. ‘It goes all along your arm and right into your head.’ Milena got her cups of hot water. The steam seemed to help. Rolfa’s voice went smooth again, and she drank the water thirstily, gulping, and sat up on the bed. Milena lay beside her, put her head on her stomach. It gurgled, and they both laughed. Outside, it was growing dark. The city disappeared.

‘I’m going to sing,’ said Rolfa.

Milena fumbled for the candle, fumbled under the bed for the paper and before she found it, the song began. Hold, hold it! she thought and began without the beginning.

It was like the final chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth or the Hallelujah Chorus, simple and powerful and happy. Rolfa smiled as she sang it. She was singing about her life seen whole. Somewhere, Milena was part of it.

‘Give it a rest!’ someone shouted from an upper floor.

Rolfa’s smile was broader, and she raised her voice.

‘Qui—et!’ howled someone else.

Milena slammed open her window. ‘Someone’s dying!’ she roared in fury. For her, it was true.

When it ended, slowly, peacefully complete, Rolfa made a tracing in the air with her hand. She and Milena looked at each other in the unsteady light, in silence.

Then, with a self-mocking smile, Rolfa made, perfectly, the sound of massed applause. To an actor, it is nothing less than the sound of justice being done.

Milena pulled the counterpane up over her, and kissed her, and Rolfa slept, and during the night, the illness passed. In the morning, when Milena tried to kiss her, Rolfa turned her head. Milena passed her a cup of tea. ‘I drink this, I get bigger. Like a big person,’ said Rolfa. That afternoon she said, ‘I think I’m well enough to get out of bed.’ She threw back the counterpane. Her cheeks, her arms, her shoulders were covered in stubble. Slowly, still slightly dazed, she began to pack her few things — the huge cheap clothes, her apron, her frying fork.

She stood by the door and said, feeble and embarrassed. ‘I’d better find somewhere else to live. They will find me somewhere else to live, won’t they?’

Milena sat on the edge of her bed, looking away from her, and nodded. ‘Yes, they will,’ she said. ‘Come back for your books when you’ve got somewhere.’ There was nothing else to be done. She heard the door close, a soft, considerate clicking.

Milena stayed sitting on her bed. She didn’t move. She didn’t think she felt particularly sad. She simply didn’t move. For the last three months, Rolfa had been almost the only thing she had thought of, and without her Milena found she had nothing to do. She could think of nothing to do. She didn’t want to eat, she didn’t want to go outside. Go outside for what? To be an actress? She didn’t want to be an actress. Sunlight poured in through the windows, the room became hot, Milena was as silent as a ghost. This is what it was like when Rolfa was here and I was away, she thought.

When she began to smell herself, she went to the showers and washed. She looked glumly at the trails of stubble around the drains where Rolfa had shaved. Stony-faced, she turned the jet of water on them and washed them down the drain with her foot.

She came back and tried to sleep. There was a stirring in the bed. She sat up and saw that the pillow and the quilt were crawling with purple mites. Her immune system was looking for Rolfa. She saw her Mice, scuttling in a kind of frenzy of alarm over each other, over the rumples in the undersheet.

It was what happened when people lost a part of themselves, an arm or leg. In a kind of panic their Mice would go hunting for what was missing. Where is Rolfa? Where is Rolfa? they seemed to be saying. In the end, exhausted, they would crawl back home.

The mites were particularly thick around the back corner of the bed. Milena felt behind it, and found Piglet, jammed between the mattress and the wall. As if in relief, as if the doll were something alive, the Mice swarmed up and over it.

Milena had always hated the doll. Now I’m stuck with the bloody thing, she thought, and threw it at the cooker. Piglet lay face down on the cold floor. Its eyes seemed to look at Milena. Its eyes seemed to say: don’t leave me here.

Finally Milena picked it up. As if it were alive, she stroked its grubby felt ears. It had been almost the only thing Rolfa had brought with her from her old life and now it was left behind, deserted.

Part of you didn’t want to go, Rolfa. That’s why you left so much of yourself behind, all the books, all the papers. She kept on stroking Piglet’s ears. She began to weep, and then stopped herself, angry with herself. Oh, you weep do you? Well you did it, she told herself. You made it happen.

Milena felt no rage against her oppressors. The Consensus was to do such great and extraordinary things. How could she argue against those? She was the one who had got things wrong. On balance, she still believed that the Consensus was good and just.

Tyranny is a form of perversion. We come to love it. Every government is a tyranny to a degree, and the more evil it is, the more it is loved. The difficulty lies in judging the degree of tyranny under which you live.

Milena had relied on her tyranny. She had believed one day that it would Read her and cure her of her anger and fear and longing. She had hoped that she would catch the virus from Rolfa. But although she now felt just the slightest bit feverish and queasy, she was not ill. She was resistant to the viruses. She was doomed to be herself.

In the morning, and again in the afternoon, Jacob the Postperson called. ‘There is a new play. They want you to act in it,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to say that you are ill?’

‘Yes, Jacob, tell them that,’ Milena said.

The long day passed. She didn’t eat. Milena sat all night on the bed, leaning against the wall, drifting in and out of sleep. The next morning, there was a shy, apologetic rapping on her door. Cilia called in with bread and cheese. Milena told her that she wasn’t hungry. People often were not hungry; Cilia assumed that she had been photo-synthesising in the sun.

‘We’ve heard the news about Rolfa,’ Cilia said. ‘You must be very happy.’

‘Yes,’ said Milena. ‘Very happy.’

‘Listen,’ said Cilia, sitting next to her on the bed. ‘All of us from Love’s Labour’s, we want to set up our own little company of players. Just to do new theatre, you know. Our way.’

Cilia paused and smiled. ‘We want you to help us run it.’

Milena stared back at her. ‘Why me?’ she asked.

‘Why? With what you managed to do with Rolfa? Magic! Complete!’ Cilia waited for a response. ‘Everyone thinks you’ve been gutter top,’ she said, sensing sadness, wanting to make Milena smile.

It was Vampire slang: gutter top. Grate. Great.

‘You’re all gutter top, too,’ murmured Milena.

‘So I can tell everyone you’ll do it?’

‘Yah,’ nodded Milena, looking down at her hands. ‘Yah.’

Cilia leaned forward, her face crossed with a perplexed scowl, knowing there had been a loss and not understanding what it could be. Had the old, withdrawn Milena returned? Cilia took the food away.

In the middle of the afternoon, without knocking, the Snide walked in. He wore his sinister hat at a rakish angle.

‘Lo, Heather, I’m back,’ he said.

His face fell.

‘Heather?’ he asked in horror.

Milena looked at him and shook her head. No. Not Heather. Heather is dead. There’s just me.

He sank down beside her on the bed. ‘She was a virus?’ He covered his eyes. Masked by his hand, sheltered by it, he found again his edged and bitter, nervous smile.

‘And you are Milena,’ he said. ‘That was good. Good trick. You must have laughed.’

‘I was too scared,’ said Milena.

‘I sensed something, you know. It’s just that viruses aren’t usually that complete.’

‘They aren’t usually Heather,’ replied Milena.

‘I’ve stopped being a Snide,’ he said, looking down at the counterpane, beginning to pick at it. The smile had turned inwards. ‘I was going to tell her that.’

I don’t have the time or the energy for this, thought Milena. You must know what was between me and Rolfa, you must know what you tried to do to us and yet you want my help. My help. You’re not just a fool, you’re a shit. You’re a fool because you are a shit.

‘That’s why I needed Heather,’ he said, completing the thought for her. ‘Did… when she was with you… did she ever respond to you. Did… did she ever talk to you?’

Wearily, Milena shook her head. No, she just read. All she did was read. It was all she could do. She needed me to do anything else.

He stood up and went to the door. He turned and looked at her, searching her face, searching her mind. I was Heather, thought Milena. For him, I had Heather’s mind and face.

‘I’m glad you’re unhappy,’ he said.

But I’ll get over it. You won’t.

Reluctantly, pity stirred. Pity, that was Heather’s enemy. Milena showed him Heather’s face, its great freckled length, the pebble spectacles. She thought you were a fool, but I think she could have loved you. She needed someone to manage.

He started to put on his sinister hat, then thought better of it. ‘There’s a bit more to me than that,’ he told her.

‘Then go and find it,’ replied Milena. Like a shadow, he turned and was gone.

She tried to sleep and couldn’t. She picked up one of Rolfa’s books, brown and battered, and it fell open on the last page… at the top of the Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

She would have immediately thrown down the book, except that under each word, or rather, each syllable, there was a tiny, pencilled note of music on a tiny, pencilled stave.

Quickly, she flipped through the other pages. It had all been set to music, the entire book, re-written to be sung.

She had left Rolfa reading all day.

Milena picked up the next book in the stack. It was huge, bound in dirty grey cloth, anonymous and slumped sideways on its over-used binding. The first page was an engraving of Dante. Divina Commedia said words printed in red. Underneath, in pencil, Rolfa had written, ‘FOR AN AUDIENCE OF VIRUSES’.

All three books of the Comedy — Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso — had been bound together in one volume. Underneath all the words, all the way through, there were musical notes. The handwriting was small and neat and crabbed, as if trying to hide. Some of it was in pencil, some of it was in red ink. Some of it was written on pieces of paper stitched into the book with white thread. Some of it was written in gold. There was one note for each word, but in places there were messages: ‘trumpets here’ or ‘Virgil descant’. Milena turned back to the first page.

Then Dante meets the beast. The words were set to the music that Rolfa had sung in the dark the first night Milena had heard her, hidden in the Graveyard.

‘Rolfa!’ said Milena, and shook the book. To do this and keep it hidden! While Jacob and I copied out the rags of what we had heard. You didn’t say anything, I didn’t say anything. Did we ever tell each other a word of truth?

Milena read The Divine Comedy buoyed up by music. Her viruses translated the notes into imagined sounds. Her viruses sang.

Milena began to imagine it, a great abstract opera that would last for weeks if it were ever performed. She saw it staged in the sky, amid stars, with bars of colour and symbolic angels, beasts with human faces, a hell in honeycombs, tunnels of light opening into the heavens.

Suddenly Cilia stepped forward in the robes of Virgil. The part was written for a soprano, to contrast with Dante. For no reason, Lucy, old Lucy of the Palace of Amusement, was Beatrice. She wore the crown of heaven askew, and gave a sideways wink. A comedy after all. Milena closed her eyes and smiled. All right, Rolfa, all right. It is funny. The whole thing is funny — my not speaking, your not speaking, it’s funny. We could have sat down together, and planned what we were going to do with this. You could have orchestrated it, if you’d wanted to. I could have taken it complete and shown it complete and told them, take it or leave it, only leave her alone. Now I’ll have to put it on. I’ll have to get it performed. Thanks a lot. Milena looked at the size of the book, her finger wedged between the pages to keep her place. I’ll have to get this sung, somehow. Not all at one sitting, you understand my love, or the audience would the of starvation or old age. But over several months. But on what kind of stage? What kind of stage could hold this? You knew, damn it, Rolfa, you knew I’d have to do something about this!

Milena went on reading and seeing and hearing while her viruses made a tally. Sometimes she had to go back and re-read for them. This was unfamiliar music. The viruses followed the structure. Milena saw the themes dart and dive and interweave like swallows, fly off and come back, in and out of the silence.

You’ve done it. You’ve done it, Rolfa. It’s better than your bloody Wagner. It’s better put together, the songs are better and it’s even longer. This is Mozart, Rolfa, this is Bach. How could you do it? How could you do it to me? Milena began to feel the terrible weight that genius, like death, leaves behind for other people.

And you won’t be here, Rolfa. You won’t be able to hear it. You’ll be someone else. You’ll be like a ghost, Rolfa. I’ll see you walking through the Zoo, but you’ll be dead, undead. I’ll hear you sing, but it won’t really be you. All of this may have been a comedy, Rolfa, but it hurts, it hurts like slapstick full in the face. So it wasn’t a high comedy, my love. I would call it low.

It was sunset and there was a knock on the door. It was Jacob the Postperson, and he came in singing.

She had forgotten.

‘Happy birthday, Milena,’ Jacob said smiling shyly. ‘I bought you an ice cream.’

The ice cream was on a bamboo stick.

Milena gave a pale, grateful chuckle and reached out for it. Jacob jumped forward to pass it to her. ‘It is very good, Milena. It is very good that you eat. You have not eaten.’

The vanilla was meltingly delicious. Did Milena remember the taste of it from childhood? ‘I’m seventeen years old,’ she said. ‘An old lady.’

Milena felt weak to the point of nausea. Her Rhodopsin skin was itching for sunlight. As she ate, Milena realised something.

‘You take care of us, Jacob.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I carry your messages. I also know when you are ill or unhappy. I am the one who finds you when you the. That is my job.’

‘And you know all of us.’

He smiled. ‘When I dream,’ he said, ‘I dream all your messages, all scrambled up. But now, because of you and Rolfa, when I dream, I also hear the music’

Hunger pangs returned. ‘I need to get some sun,’ said Milena.

So Milena and Jacob walked down the steps of the Shell together. He had to boost her up, help her as if she were old. Her knees felt shivery and weak. This is silly, to do this to yourself, she thought. He took her outside onto the walkways facing the Thames. It was cool, with a strong breeze from the river. Milena’s face was turned towards the wind and towards the last of the sunset sky.

‘I must run my messages,’ said Jacob. Their handclasp became more firm for a moment, and then he left. She watched him as he walked back into the Shell, and the sunset was reflected like fire on the rows of windows. That is how it is for him, she thought. Each room is alive with light. Each room has one of us in it.

Milena went for a short and gentle walk and found herself standing on Hungerford Footbridge, where she had once stood before, and she was shaking, as if the bridge, the river, the city and the sky were all shaking with her. Seagulls were festooned about her, calling, not needing to move their wings in the wind, dropping parcels of waste into the river.

Life was a disease, thriving, and it was given breath by love. That was what it seemed to Milena. Water, clouds, wind, they came at her in a rush. What am I feeling? she thought. It was as if something had pulled her up with it, snatched her up, made her its own.

She looked at the Thames, with its heavy-bodied barges and their thick, waxy sails hanging in crisp folds as if carved out of wood; and at the rowing boats painted in bright colours; and at the brown autumn leaves being gathered up for storage by organised parties from the Child Gardens; and the press of bicycles and horses on the South Bank; and the sun panels on the roofs of the ancient white buildings. Father around the sweep of the river just behind St Paul’s were the Coral Reefs, the new houses looking like giant cauliflowers. They sparkled in the last of the light, as if it had snowed.

How much work had made it? How many billions of hours, to build the roads, the carts, the boats, the embankments? How many billions more to learn how to do it, and to store the information? To write the songs in people’s heads, to tame the horses, to grow the food? Her viral clock began to count.

On the opposite bank, a great green drum was being hauled by dray horses.

It was laying cable. The power would soon be on again. There would be metal, sent back along the Slide. The world was going to be rich again, and hung with light. There would be stages big enough for Paradiso. There would be no need for mines in the Antarctic.

Four billion hours and counting.

And all of this will go, sometime. Here it was, in front of her, history, if only for someone else.

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:

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.