looked thicker, smoother. It was a different kind of skin.
Lucy looked at Milena, with a hint of a smile, and something in that look made Milena’s breath catch. ‘I know you,’ she said.
‘Hello, Lucy,’ said Milena as if caught off-guard. ‘How are you?’
‘You don’t have the time,’ said Lucy, with the same stern smile. She turned away, and looked out of her window, at the river. ‘You don’t have the time that I have.’
Lucy was rubbing the palms of her hands, and the skin was coming off in thick rolls, as if it were a coating of dried glue. The new skin underneath was brown and thick and spongy, without any lines or creases. No future there, for a fortune teller to read. Milena saw Lucy’s profile.
She looks, thought Milena, like a head on a Roman coin. Misshapen somehow, but fierce. She looks like something that might have grown up out of the earth, a sort of root vegetable. And she smells, smells delicious, like freshly baked bread.
‘One day,’ said Lucy, still watching the river outside, ‘it all comes back, and you’re somewhere else. Now. I can draw any map, right here in my hand. I can light a cigarette with my fingers. I’m not saying that everything will work out by itself, by what
Her mind has gone, thought Milena.
‘One day, it just all added up. Added up, all the little bits and pieces, and you blank out. No memory. Feels wonderful. Like a warm bath. You don’t need it any more.’
Or has gone into another state, thought Milena. Lucy. What are you trying to tell me?
‘I am five hundred feet tall,’ said the ancient. ‘You could all shelter in my shade — if my leaves was seen by you.’
She sighed and leaned forward and picked up a tray from the bed. On a plate was a huge lump of meat, its fat all crisp, golden, raised up in crunchy blisters. It was covered in minty sauce, and mere was a mound of — what — ice cream?
No. Mashed potatoes. Lamb and mashed potatoes with a pool of meat juice in a hollow in the middle. And mere was a pile of hard, green brussels sprouts.
It wasn’t there before, thought Milena. I’m sure it wasn’t there before.
Lucy chewed and swallowed. ‘These little tracks go everywhere,’ she said. She very neatly sculpted a mouthful of mashed potato onto the back of her fork. ‘You can’t see them at first, you’ve got to go blind for fifty or sixty years first. I couldn’t see anything for at least that long, and then one day, there’s an ache from the front to the back of your head, and your eyes are better. They get better and you see different. Everything different. They don’t teach you to see, and it takes time to heal. You have to go blind in order to heal.’
She raised the forkful of mash in salute.
‘What I’d like to do,’ she said, food pushed over to one side in her mouth. ‘Is plant myself for a hundred years or so. I’d just like to settle in like a tree. Feed like a tree on sunlight and rain. Get all those wrinkles in my brain to unravel. I think my bones would heal, then, too. Did they tell you? My bones are getting bigger, stronger. And all the nodules are flaking off, too.’
There was no archness about her, no mischievousness. She’s lost the old London, thought Milena. She’s shed it, like a skin.
‘And,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m pregnant.’
She continued chewing the lamb that shouldn’t have been there.
‘Metastasis. A little bit broke free and started growing in my womb. One chance in ten million, but how many million chances have I got?’ She coughed and laughed at me same time. ‘As many as I need. She’ll be a cancer, too, my daughter. I have very definite ideas about how to bring her up. I’d like her to be a child for forty or fifty years. I’ll build a raft and we’ll live on it in the middle of the ocean, just catching the fish that leap up when you’re quiet and part of the scenery. I’ll just let her laze. We’ll turn somersaults on tiny islands. We won’t do nothing at all. There won’t be any need. And when she’s fed up being a child — well men. She’ll become something new. We’ll keep on changing, getting thicker and healthier.’
She looked at Milena in silence, cheeks bulging, in motion. Kerswallow gulp. It wasn’t the time to ask, but it was Milena’s job to know. ‘Lucy,’ she said, pronouncing very slowly and clearly, as if perhaps Lucy had forgotten some of her English. ‘Remember you said you would be in an opera?
‘Ohhhhhh,’ growled Lucy in pity and fierceness. She reached out and rubbed Milena’s hair rather hard. ‘Oh, you poor little creature.’ Lucy looked at her smiling, as if at a fool. ‘I already have recorded it, can’t you see? In another time.’
Her mind has gone, thought Milena. We’ve recorded nothing with her. We haven’t been able to find her. She and Lucy looked at each other, each pitying the other.
And the Milena who was remembering thought: pity her if you like, Milena, but you will go home and find that all her part has been recorded. You’ll see her, singing with Dante, leading him to heaven. And you’ll try to tell yourself that she must have slipped in and done it when you weren’t there. But the rest of the cast won’t remember singing with her. Except in their dreams. The world isn’t what we thought it was. That plate of lamb shouldn’t be there, and her performance shouldn’t be there, and perhaps the world shouldn’t be here either.
‘You’re all the same,’ said Lucy, shaking her head. ‘Always worried. I think of you all,’ she said, looking into Milena’s eyes again with a newly unnerving stare, ‘like you was flowers in my garden. Beautiful flowers in a garden. When you’re young, your bodies are so beautiful, all firm and fresh and full of heft. I want to press you in my book, just to keep you. But I open the book, and you’ve all gone grey and brown.’
Lucy took Milena’s hand. Lucy’s skin was thick, springy, as if upholstered with foam rubber. ‘There’s been some mistake,’ she whispered. ‘I should look into it, if I were you. You weren’t meant to the, you know. Ever.’
And Milena remembered being young and well, running up the steps of the Shell. There was no Terminal ache along the crown of her head. There was lightness and fire in her feet. She turned a corner, and remembered finding Jacob on the fine spring morning of his death.
He was lying slightly on one side, his eyes half-open, dry.
Just for a moment there was the faint hope that he was blanked out again. Postpeople did when their memories were full. ‘Jacob?’ Milena whispered, as if he could awake. Then there was the immediate certainty. ‘Oh. Jacob,’ she said in pity.
She looked at his shoes. He had put them on that morning, his old worn shoes, quickly ruined in climbing stairs, the sole loose and in peeling layers, a hole with borders of many different shades of grey.
Not this time, Jacob.
Milena sat down next to him on the staircase, and took his hand. It was still limp and warm, and there was an exhalation. It was not exactly unpleasant, but it made one wary, like the smell of a foreign fruit from a strange land that one is going to have to taste.
A small gold crucifix fell out of Jacob’s hand into hers, on a broken gold chain. The action seemed so natural it was as if he had passed it to her. Milena looked at the broken chain. He must have grabbed the cross, she thought, as if it could hold him up. He must have felt it coming, like a descending weight. He grabbed the cross and held it and the chain broke and he fell.
It was not exactly shameful to be a Christian. It meant you were a simple soul. Jacob did not come by a crucifix of gold by himself. It would have been passed from one dying hand to another, through generations. Who did Jacob have to pass it on to? He had his tiny room on the first floor, with his tiny stove and his tiny bed. He was not married. His life had been burnt through in service. The conviction came to Milena, irrational and immovable: the crucifix has been passed to me.
She stroked Jacob’s head, as if to touch all the memories and all the good faith that had been there. She did not want to leave him, though there were all the usual things to be done: the quiet summoning of the What Does, the speedy gathering up of the dead. Well, someone else could go and get the What Does. Milena would stay there. Milena would stay there and take account of what had happened, pay attention to the death of Jacob the Postperson.
She took his ankles and pulled him out of the corner of the landing, away from the wall, into what seemed a
