Piper was held back by his collar. He strained against it, gasping. ‘Don’t go!’ he called. ‘Don’t go!’ A gloved hand gently lifted up Milena’s head, as she was shifted further onto the litter.
In the sky Lucy was singing, looking back over her shoulder. ‘
She heard Piper howling as she was carried down the hospital staircase. With a bustle she was carried along the hospital corridors. Light blazed from the hands of the Garda sweeping over the glinting, flowing surface of the Coral, making it yellow, making it flutter. The Coral sang: the Comedy embedded in it, ringing with human voices in some kind of extremity. The walls thumped like an angry neighbour. The monstrous egotism, she thought. The monstrous egotism to put this on, to flood every space in the world with it, to drive out the silence, to hammer the heads of the children, of the fragile, of the ill. Who wants this? Who cares about Naiads and medieval allegory?
The white men carried her into pandemonium.
Bees were pasted, writhing, against the walls of the hospital, held by the tubes. The tubes worked their way blindly along the ground, whiplashing around ankles and arms, hauling Bees up and away in the light from Lucy’s face. Lucy shook her head with a sad smile.
‘Milena!’ the Bees wailed with loss, holding out their arms to her. ‘Don’t go!’
Around the helicopters the Bees had linked arms. Two white men stepped forward. They had things in their hands that looked like frozen lizards. Light leapt from them. The Bees made a sound like falling rain. A passage had been cleared. Briskly, the white men ran, the litter jostling. Deft hands kept tubes in place, deft feet stepped over fallen bodies.
Then a wave of Bees broke around them, hands raised. They struck the Garda full in their clear plastic masks. Both the Garda and the Bees reeled backwards. Any pain the Bees inflicted they also felt themselves. ‘Take the pain. Take the pain,’ they told each other, and broke again against the Garda. A Bee woman was trying to wrest the litter from the grasp of the Garda. She quivered, cowering, hands fluttering, eyes screwed shut.
‘They are taking you! The Consensus wants you. Swallow you!’
All Milena could do was stare, weakly. No, she thought, I don’t want this, no. The cancer in her, hot and heavy and victorious, blazed out at the Bees with terrible life. As Milena came near them, they doubled up or dropped to their knees, as surely as if they had been struck. The woman fell away.
With a wrench and a jostle, Milena felt herself hoisted into the black loading bay. She felt tiny clicks in her spine, as bolts were slid through the supports of the litter, into the floor of the craft, as she was strapped in. The blades overhead began to beat more loudly.
In defeat the Bees began to chant, a chant they had surrendered to silence with Milena’s promise to be with them. Now that she was going, they sang it again.
Very suddenly, the helicopter left the ground, leaning forward, wafting upwards over the roof of the Tarty flats.
And old Lucy was singing too:
The roofs of the flats were in slated pinnacles like bare mountains. The sky was full of light, light glowing in the leaves of Eden. The roofs fell away as Rolfa’s music glinted like the light, sparkling, cool music for paradise and the rivers of paradise. The helicopter turned, slanting, and Milena saw far below her the river of London, old Father Thames.
She saw the garden of her life, whole. She saw the Shell, like a series of building blocks, two great wings open in an embrace, with walkways between them, the walkways she had beaten back and forth at such a pace. She saw the Zoo, held up by bamboo, and the steps of the Zoo where she and Rolfa met for lunch and the park on the embankment where they had eaten.
The Cut was gone. The old buildings had finally been torn down, made into rubble. They were growing again in cauliflower shapes of Coral, hard against the old brick bridge. Leake Street was now closed at one end. Everything changes. The Cut was closed and dark, but the old railway bridge was lit and full of traffic. Milena saw the Hungerford Bridge, where she had stood with Berowne to see the lights come back on. It was crowded with people now, looking up, as if at her, as if she was still down there among them. The same lights still hung in a line along the embankment, making the river glow yellow and green. The whole city flickered green, from the light in the sky, from the Comedy.
Milena looked up too, and the garden in the sky was the same as the garden below. Lucy and Dante walked together out of the chasms of light that was Archbishop’s Park.
They walked past Virgil Street, encased in brick. And from somewhere came a ghostly, floating voice. It was Rolfa’s voice singing out memory, singing on the night when Milena had tried to find her, after the Day of the Dogs.
Beatrice and Dante alluded to their old love. Dante sang:
Rolfa kept singing without words. Her voice would now not leave the rest of the opera, hoarse and enraged, echoing out of Virgil Street. On the Day of the Dogs, Rolfa had been singing the end of the last Canto, alone in the dark.
