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
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.
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.
Milena walked backwards to keep her face toward the sunlight, unaware that she was humming to herself.
Jump.
Somewhere else, the voices of the Consensus were falling like rain, calling
