followed her when she was summoned to the Reading Rooms, under the purple forest on Marsham Street. Milena was Terminal and she kept asking the Consensus as she approached it: what have you got to tell me? The Consensus stayed silent.
Milena remembered waiting in the white brick rooms and thinking: all the bad things in my life happen here.
The door opened and in came Root, the Terminal.
Root stared at Milena, her shoulders slumped. She kept shaking her head. Root the voluble did not know how to begin. ‘Oh, child,’ she said. From down the corridor came the sound of a garden full of children; the guitars, the kazoos, the clapping hands, and the singing of ten year olds waiting to join the world.
‘You got cancer,’ Root said finally, held up her hands and let them drop.
Milena looked at the white bricks and the bare electric light. ‘How?’ she asked, ‘How is that possible? Cancer’s dead, cancer’s gone.’
‘You got no Candy,’ said Root. She came to Milena, who was sitting on the only chair, and knelt at her feet. She picked up Milena’s hand. ‘You can play around with genes, love, like you was thinking with them. You kept trying till you found a gene that made a new kind of transcriptase. It went to the rungs, and dissolved the sugar round them.’
‘No I didn’t,’ said Milena, pulling away her hand.
‘You didn’t know.’ Root’s mouth formed the word like a kiss. ‘You didn’t know you was doing it.’ Root tried to reach up and stroke her head. Milena leaned away. ‘We’re like a huge ocean, with a leaky boat on top. The boat is all we know of ourselves. The rest is underneath.’
‘This is nonsense,’ said Milena, and tried to stand, but Root was resting across her lap.
‘No, love, it’s not.’ Root’s face was suffused with love for her. ‘You broke Candy, and then so we could see, you changed your genes so the cancer came back. Like you were flying flags of joy, saying Here? See? Milena! You brought the cancer back so that all of us can live!’
Milena succeeded in pushing Root away from her. She stood up, and walked away as if she could escape from what had happened.
‘Because of you, we can all get old again!’ Root said. ‘We’ll see our children grow!’
‘I don’t want people to get old!’ exclaimed Milena, her back towards Root. ‘And I hate children. So why would I do something like that, eh? Eh?’
‘We can copy the new gene you made. We can put it in new retroviruses, we can cure everyone!’
‘After what happened the last time?’ Milena found her two fists were clenched together in rage and were shaking at Root. ‘You’re still going to muck around after what happened last time! Who knows, maybe you’ll kill everyone off straight away, this time!’ She was shouting. She turned back around, and hugged herself. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’
She heard Root rustle up from her feet and swish her way towards her. She felt the warm, plump hands on her shoulder. She was turned around and enveloped in the fatty tissues of Root’s arms and breasts.
‘Oh Milena, love, don’t be worry, don’t be fear. We got the genes that shut off the new blood vessels, we got the genes that stop the growing. We’ll give you those, we’ll make you well!’
‘Will you make me like Lucy, too?’ asked Milena, as cold as ice, and pushed Root away again.
‘We don’t know,’ said Root, shaking her head.
‘I don’t want to be like Lucy!’ Here was a new dark terror. To grow so old that you understood nothing of the world, except that everything and everyone you loved was dead. Milena’s fingers were dug into her hair.
‘Sssh. Sssh. If you don’t want it, then you won’t be. With what you can do? You can change your cells, move things round, cut, splice. Nothing will happen that you don’t want to. You’re Milena, who is immune.’
‘What cancers? What cancers do I have?’
Root looked helpless.
‘Well tell me!’
‘All of them,’ said Root very quietly. ‘All of them we ever knew of.’
The room seemed to hiss all around them, as if the walls were leaking air.
The merry viruses had already known where she was ailing. The merry viruses began to roll off a list.
Skin — squamous epithelium, basal, and pigment cells — squamous and basal carcinoma, malignant melanoma
Alimentary tract — squamous epithelium of lips, mouth, tongue, oesophagus — squamous carcinoma
Alimentary tract — columnar epithelium of stomach, small bowel, large bowel — carcinoma
Milena found she was chuckling.
‘Isn’t that a bit excessive?’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Wouldn’t one have been enough?’
No, replied the merry viruses. The whole balance had to be restored. All the cancers had to be brought back.
‘We’ll be with you, love, all of us.’ said Root, dismayed. ‘The Terminals, the Angels, we’ll be with you all the time, helping you fight, singing in your blood.
Nasopharynx, larynx and lungs — bronchial epithelium — carcinoma
‘I hope cancer likes music,’ said Milena. She was shaking, as if with laughter. She found that her hands were on her face, feeling the flesh. There were pimples on her nose.
‘Oh, Milena, if only you knew how much we all love you for this.’
‘That sure makes all the difference,’ said Milena. ‘I used to wonder why those Mayan maidens let themselves be thrown over the edge of cliffs. Now I know. Everyone loved them for it.’
‘No one’s throwing you over a cliff. You’re going to get well!’ Root exclaimed in anguish.
Urinary system including bladder — urothelium cells — carcinoma
‘Yah,’ said Milena.
‘You have to believe you are,’ said Root, warning her.
Solid epithelial organs — epithelial cells of liver, kidney, thyroid, pancreas, pituitary, etc — carcinoma
‘Shut down!’ Milena said to the viruses, to make them still. It was the viruses that would have told her the meaning of each gene, the function of each protein so that she could change them. There was a kind of hiccup, but the list kept scrolling up through her mind. Part of her wanted to know.
‘So how are you going to cure me?’ she demanded.
‘First, you move into the hospital, St Thomas’s. You live there, you and Mr Stone, he’s pregnant, it’s good for him, too. Then we start, site by site. We cut off the new blood supply. Then we have the retroviruses that infect the tumours with growth inhibitor. They start to regress.’
‘How long before I’m well?’
Root looked helpless again. ‘We’re out of practice with cancer.’
‘You don’t know.’
Root shook her head.
Milena began to feel sick and weak in her stomach. She needed to sit down. She dropped back down onto the one chair.
‘I want to see the baby,’ Milena said. Already life had bargained her down. ‘I never thought I would have a child, and I want to see her. I want to finish the Comedy. We’ve only got backgrounds for two of the books! I want to go up again and finish the Comedy!’
‘And you will,’ said Root, going a little harder. ‘You’ll do all those things and more.’
‘If I the and if Mike dies, then the baby will be an orphan. Just exactly what I didn’t want her to be!’
‘You are not going to the. Why do you think we asked you here? The Doctors, me, the Consensus, we’ve got it all planned, exactly how you’re going to get well.’
