by Geoff Ryman
For just a moment, Milena felt fear. It almost made sense. No. Hold on. I have the approval.
‘The approval,’ said Thrawn, as if reading her mind, ‘has been given for the opera’s good social effects. I could get those same effects in shorter time, less expense. Think about it. You try to cut me out, I cut you out.’
That is delusion, Milena repeated to herself. She has no lead. No one will work with her, they gave her to me as a last resort. What if it’s worked too well? What if they’ve forgotten how she was before? Then they are fools, and will deserve what they get. And I will keep fighting to do it well.
‘Go ahead,’ said Milena. ‘Try it. Say I have the same idea as Milena Shibush, only I’ll do it cheaper and nastier. More giant crabs, more badly imagined dragons. Give me the largest theatrical production that anyone can remember as my first job.’
Those delicious rehearsed lines, lumbering into place like old-fashioned scenery. Then feeling overcame Milena. ‘This is all so boring, Thrawn. You are all so boring. Why do I have to jump through these hoops, just for you.’
‘Because,’ said Thrawn, in a little-girl voice acrid with sarcasm. ‘You owe me something.’
‘I don’t owe you anything.’
‘What about your first success?’
Let me out. Let me breathe.
‘Poor little Milena,’ chuckled Thrawn, and shook her head. ‘Always afraid.’
She came close. Milena could smell her breath, feel her breasts against her.
‘I warned you,’ said Thrawn. ‘I told you that you would hate me.’
Milena could feel the nipples through the shirt. Thrawn’s nose brushed against her forehead, against her hair. Not this again, I am very tired of this too. Milena pushed her back, pushed her away.
‘I could tell them, Milena. I could, of course, tell them about us. About our little peccadilloes, eh? And maybe ask a few questions about you and Rolfa. I wonder if they’d like your opera as much if they knew it was a monument to Bad Grammar?’
Let her have it, thought Milena.
‘I already told them that, Thrawn. They already know, and they don’t seem to care. So go ahead and tell them, my girl, go ahead, and I will tell them how you took the light out of my eyes and threatened to burn out my retina. I will remind them that you somehow escaped your Reading. They will whip you in so fast that you will puke with giddiness. You try that, Thrawn, and I will use the Consensus to squash you flatter than a fly.’ Thrawn was right. Milena hated her. Milena had not known that.
Thrawn looked shocked. Then she giggled. She tore the quilt off Milena’s bed. She pushed it into the sink into the bowl of chicken-pink water.
‘God damn it!’ squawked Milena, and hauled it out, stained and wet.
Hatred gave Milena words. ‘You are firmly ditched, Thrawn. Ditched. The production goes ahead, without you.’
‘I’ll just keep it up,’ said Thrawn, with a false girlishness. She spun around. ‘I’ll just keep coming and coming until you give in.’
People commit murder in circumstances like this.
‘You keep coming, Thrawn. You see what good it does you. You will get nothing out of me, Thrawn, nothing ever again. You’re right. I do hate you.’
‘Then,’ she said, like some horrible sort of doll. ‘I’ve won.’
‘Yeah. Guess so,’ said Milena. ‘Happy birthday, or whatever.’
Thrawn launched herself onto Milena’s bed. Her smile seemed to say, anything is yours, I will take over.
I really do feel like killing you, Milena thought. It really would be the simplest thing to take the kitchen knife that is behind me and cut you up and wrap you in the god-damned quilt and dump you in the river. Is that what you mean by victory?
Milena felt queasy, sick. I want to get away, from all of this. She wanted to hide her face, she wanted to weep, but she couldn’t, not in front of Thrawn. And she saw Thrawn’s face, saw its flatness. Thrawn knew what Milena had been thinking, Milena saw her face watching and waiting—hoping? The face wants me to pull that knife. Then she will scream and call people and destroy me. Or she would let me kill her and destroy me. I need a lock. I am fed up with people coming into my room. I need a lock, and I need to get this woman Read, get her blasted full of virus.
‘We’re both crazy,’ said Thrawn. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go hand in hand to the Reading rooms? They could cure us both.’ It was a plea. She really meant it. ‘You see,’ Thrawn said. ‘If we don’t, something terrible is going to happen. I don’t know quite what. But I do know I can’t let you do this to me. I know that I am pretty clever. I think I’d have to destroy you. I get obsessed by things, Milena. I wouldn’t stop.’
It sounded pretty much like the truth. Milena found she was steeled for it. ‘You don’t scare me, Thrawn. Except for nuisance value, you have no hold over me. My career? I don’t care that much about my career. This room? Not even this room. You don’t know what I care about.’
And Milena turned and left. It was very simple. She just turned around and walked away from it. Thrawn would do something to the contents. Snip off the sleeves from my shirts, pull up the herbs in my window-box, what else could she do? Set it on fire? Good, burn the building down, Thrawn. That will really get you on the production.
They are going to send me into outer space, Thrawn. I will be where you can do nothing to me. Space for three or four months. Can’t touch me there, Thrawn. You can’t touch me at all. And no one else will need you, and no one else will want you.
But there was a leadenness in Milena’s feet and in her mind as she trudged down the stairs. Everything was weary. It was a leadenness that Milena remembering knew well. I wonder if that’s when it began? When I let it in? We destroyed each other Thrawn. No one is invulnerable. No one is immune.
And Milena remembered singing in her own wan, flat little voice.
It’s a dog of a song
The sky above was still fierce and blue and flawless, and from all around the horizon, there came a murmuring of song. The streets and yards were empty; it was high, hot noon and everyone was sleeping in the shade. It had been a beautiful summer. No rain for weeks. Already the air was beginning to smell of the urine of animals.
Ambling gently along
There was a stall, its battered, turquoise shutters closed. Underneath it, out of the sum, a family squatted. The mother with a straw hat and her hair in pigtails smoked a pipe. She rocked on her haunches, singing aimlessly a dawdle of song. The children were naked under blankets, and dirty. The old London, thought Milena the director. It’s going.
Then she saw the sign: a man falling on his face.
The Spread-Eagle, thought the Milena who remembered. Is this before or after I left the Shell? It was about then that I found the Spread again.
The pub was dark inside, and empty too, empty at lunchtime. It was too hot to swarm together in airless pubs. The floor was bare of nutshells, though the tables were still ring-stained. In the corner, someone was sitting. Milena couldn’t quite see her, because of the shadows, because of the dirt. Then the face looked up, pale and lumpy and forlorn.
‘Lucy,’ Milena the director said. ‘Hello. Remember me?’
Lucy was wearing the same coat as the last time, but it was an uneven black and grey now. The old woman looked up. ‘What?’ she croaked. She was crying. Her cheeks were smeared with the tears of the very old, tears that seem to have melted into the face, as if the eyes themselves had melted.
Oh no, though Milena. The face was devastated.
‘Can I buy you a drink, love?’ Milena asked. Now she had money. Now she could offer.
Lucy’s face contorted and she lunged forward. ‘Puke!’ she exclaimed. She looked for a moment like an angry lizard. Then the old face collapsed again. ‘I’m hungry!’ she wailed, and swept a mug off the table.
‘I’ll get you some food,’ said Milena.
She went to the bar. The man behind it was tall, and burly with it. His unfriendly eyes didn’t bl
ink as he looked at her, looked at her white, white clothes and new leather sandals, looked at her hair. It was a look that Milena had seen a lot lately, wearing her new Tarry clothes.
‘Puh! Pay!’ he stammered. ‘Muh! Muh!’
Another one, thought Milena. Someone else who’s got the bug. That’s three in two days. Marx and Lenin, is everyone going to get it?
‘Mug,’ she said, completing the word for him. She paid him twice what the broken mug was worth. As Milena walked away, she could feel his unblinking eyes, boring into her from behind. All these changes, Milena thought. They’re making people angry.
She went back to Lucy. ‘Come on, love,’ Milena said, wrapping her scarf around her neck. ‘Let’s go out to a kaff.’
‘There’s no bloody food,’ said Lucy. ‘Just those little stalls with those filthy black pans full of grease. You blow your guts out, you eat one of them. Wog food. Anyway, none of them are open when it’s too hot. They just fold the place up and sit under it.’
‘Proper sit-down place, love.’
Lucy looked up in complete helplessness. ‘Who are you?’
‘You only met me once before,’ said Milena.
Lucy leaned forward. ‘Where am I?’ she whispered.
Milena told her.
‘And what year is it?’
Milena told her.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Lucy, and her voice trailed off into a whine, and she started to weep again. ‘Bloody hell. Everything just goes on and on.’ Her hands began to turn round and round on themselves.
‘Oh, poor love,’ said Milena, and sat down, and tried to take the hands, to make them still. Even in the heat the hands were ice cold, lumpy, and as light as biscuits.
‘I thought you was my daughter. She’ll be dead, now.’
Where are her friends? thought Milena. Why is she alone? ‘Where’s Old Tone?’ she asked.
Lucy pulled her hands free. ‘He can do what he likes,’ she said, her mouth open with outrage, her head wobbling from side to side. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’
‘No. I thought he was a friend of yours.’
‘I know better where to get my friends from,’ said Lucy.
They’ve had a falling out. That’s why she’s upset.
‘Come on, love, let’s get something to eat.’
Lucy squinted at her. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.
‘I’m a friend of Rolfa’s.’
The old face suddenly went gentle. ‘Aw, Rolfa. She was a dear. Is she dead now?’
‘No,’ said Milena and thought: not exactly. ‘Come on to the kaff, and I’ll tell you all about her.’
‘Oooh, yes. That will be lovely.’ Suddenly Lucy was cheerful. She stood up in stages, in jerks, everything quaking as if it were her bones and not her flesh that was shivering. Milena had to grab her to stop her falling. The terrible orange hair was half muddy grey from the roots. Lucy found her balance, and pulled at the hair.
‘How do I look?’ she asked.
‘Lovely,’ said Milena.
‘Liar.’ Her entire face folded up into a kid of merry wrinkle. Lucy took Milena’s arm. ‘Goodbye, Henry,’ she said to the barman. ‘Or whoever you are. I’m off to lunch with my niece.’ Lucy did not walk. Holding onto Milena’s arm, Lucy hopped. She hopped like a sparrow, both feet together at once.
‘Henry’s such a nice boy,’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t mind them wogs at all, if they’ve got manners.’
‘He’s not black,’ said Milena. ‘He’s got dark skin because of Rhodopsin.’
‘It doesn’t matter what you call it, they never should have let them in. You never see a white face at all these days.’
They stepped out into the sun and both had to shield their faces. ‘Oooh!’ said Lucy, squinting as her eyes adjusted. Milena tried to explain: there was a virus that made people purple.
‘What! We’re all gone black?’ Lucy yelped. She looked down at her own mushroom coloured wrists. They did look bruised now that it was mentioned. She tried to rub it off, the ingrained dirt.
‘Not black. Purple. It’s a chemical that means we can turn sunlight into sugar.’
Lucy sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
They began to walk again. Lucy hopped, looking perplexed. ‘I’ll tell you what it’s like,’ she said. ‘It’s like when I used to work at the post office. Do you know what a post office is?’
‘No,’ said Milena.
‘Well, people used to send lovely bits of paper, to show how much they liked each other. They’d write on them, themselves. I used to take such trouble. I’d make the dots over the eyes look just like hearts. And all the o’s, I’d make them big and round like oranges. Just to make it nice. Like when I was at school. We all used to do it. It was all the rage, you know. All these people sending each other love on paper. Of course it wasn’t always like that. Usually it was just bills and circulars.’
It took all of Milena’s viruses, scrambling frantically, to understand what Lucy meant.
‘But you always went to your front door thinking maybe there was something nice from the postman.’
Postman. That’s where the word comes from. Postpeople. I thought it meant people who used to be people.
‘A little card from my niece or my auntie…’ Lucy started to cry again. ‘They had hearts of gold. And now I can’t even remember their names. It makes you feel so stupid. I thought you was my daughter. I was convinced of it. I was going to tell you off for not coming to see me. She must have been dead for seventy years at least. What year is it?’
Milena told her again. Nearly one hundred years after the Revolution.
‘You see? I just can’t keep up. I went for a walk last week. And do you know? I saw lights. Electric lights! When the bloody hell did they come back, I asked myself. And then I was never sure if they’d ever been gone. And then I didn’t know if this was before or after the Blackout. You can tell me what year it is until your lips fall off. It still won’t tell me where I am. Anyway, what was I talking about?’
‘You were saying,’ said Milena, who had learnt the art of listening. ‘That it’s like your job in the post office.’
‘Exactly what I was going to say,’ said Lucy. ‘Just like in the post office. You’d be sorting the post, and getting really fed up. But they’d be playing this music. Up-pumpity-uppity-pump-uppity pumpity. Well, I figured it out. They played the happy music just to keep you going. You’d be utterly wrung out and miserable, but the music pulled you along. Your hands would keep throwing the letters into little boxes, all you’d want to do is sit down and have a good moan, but the music would drag you out. That’s what it’s all like now. I just want to stop, but the music keeps playing.’
They came to the kaff. Lucy sparrow-hopped into the dark and tiny space, bouncing, unsteady. The shutters were down against the sunlight and the door and windows were left open. There were candles on the tables and steam was rolling across the ceiling. Men and women looked up from mugs of fruit juice, their faces glistening.
‘Phew,’ said one of the women and covered her nose. Lucy smelled.
But they saw Milena’s new sandals and bag and knew what they meant and said nothing.
A waitress came up to the table. She was as sweaty as the walls. Beads of sweat glistened on her upper lip. She was eight or nine years old, working during the siesta break at school. ‘What would you like?’ she said, looking between Milena and the ancient woman.
‘Oh, terribly high-toned,’ said Lucy with approval. ‘I would like…lamb chops with mint jelly, and…brussels, lovely, properly cooked, none of this boiled for a week mush, must preserve the vitamin content…and…oh, just mash. With lots of butter and pepper and a bit of bran sprinkled on it for my bowels.’
The waitress, young, painfully thin, looked helpless and limp, like her jumpsuit.
‘We’ll have two Cow Toms,’ said Milena. ‘No squid in it, or anything like that. Do you have any meat?’
The waitress became exasperated. ‘Meat. What do you think
this is, the bloody Zoo?’
‘Chicken?’
‘Yeah, we got some of that.’
‘Chicken. No squid. And no hot sauce, no fish sauce.’
Lucy nodded. ‘Lovely grub. Lamb chops. And a nice cup of tea.’
The waitress nodded.
‘Mind you, none of this gnat’s piss. Proper, lovely, strong tea.’
‘You’ve got the same viruses I have,’ said Milena. ‘She wants tea as in a novel from a hundred and fifty years ago.’
‘Well does she?’ said the waitress, angry.
‘I am a Party member,’ said Milena. She wasn’t because she had not been Read but she was treated like one. ‘I can crunch this place like a plate. You use a lot of tea and you let it steep. Now Slide, child. Slide, Slide, Slide.’
The waitress was frightened now, and went back to the kitchen.
I’ve got a lot of freedom, Milena thought. Now that I don’t care if anyone likes me.
‘Rolfa’s written a show,’ she said to Lucy. ‘And I’m putting together a proposal, you know, sell it to some people. Have you heard of Dante? Would it mean anything if I told you that you were going to play Beatrice?’
‘Oooh,’ said Lucy, and looked pleased. No, thought Milena, Dante wouldn’t mean anything to her.
‘It’s all music. It lasts weeks and weeks.’
‘Rolfa always had a beautiful voice. Beautiful, I always said.’
‘It’s a bit different this show. It will use a lot of holograms.’
‘Holograms,’ said Lucy, unimpressed. ‘Are people still interested in those? My father took me to see them when they first came out. Boring. They just sat there.’
‘We’re beaming them from outer space,’ said Milena. ‘And we don’t want everyone in it to be actors.’
‘No you don’t,’ agreed Lucy. ‘Bloody little snots. We had one of them in here once with Rolfa. Or was it at the Spread? Terrible little thing she was, nose in the air, face that would sour milk. Came in with gloves and a parasol if you please.’ Lucy giggled. ‘She left it behind and we burned it.’