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
‘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
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.
