does.’
Milena remembered sitting at her desk in her new flat, working. She has a box that plays music to her.
The shutters of her lacquered rooms are closed against the weather. It is cold and from somewhere below comes the smell of coffee. There is a bleakness in Milena’s belly, fear in the shadows, a tremor of anxiety in her hands. It is winter still, and she is not yet completely free. Thrawn is still out there, somewhere, with her one tiny machine.
‘How’s it going?’ asks a familiar voice.
Milena glances up, quickly, and looks back down. She talks to the map. ‘The Angels will be here soon, so you might as well go.’
Milena is Terminal now. The Consensus knows when it happens, and Angels come to break up the light.
‘Look at me,’ says Thrawn.
Milena pauses and then does look round. Thrawn’s head is shaved; it is covered in stubble and little criss- cross cuts. She is smiling a faraway smile and is dressed only in a white vest and torn trousers. From somewhere, there is the smell of cooking alcohol, from the stove most likely. Thrawn’s arms and knees twitch with cold. My God, thinks Milena, what a state.
‘Look, Thrawn, part of me is very sorry how things have worked out, but I’m hardly likely to ask you to work with me again, am I?’ Milena looks back around at the map.
‘Are you sorry? Oh that’s good.’ Thrawn’s voice is breathy, like a little girl’s. Milena turns up the volume of the electronic box. The music becomes loud, the soprano’s voice like a steam whistle, the flutes like knives. The Dead Spaces between the flats will kill the sound. Must see about that smell of alcohol, thinks Milena, trying to cancel out what stands behind her.
‘Milena!’ shouts Thrawn over the noise. ‘Milena, look around, I’ve got a really good effect.’
Milena ignores her, eyes narrowing.
‘That’s your job, isn’t it? To use my ideas? Please look around!’
Damn it, where are the Angels? I’ve been through all this before; I can’t take any more of it.
Thrawn laughs, helplessly, musically. Out of the corner of her eye, Milena can see her staggering into her field of vision.
‘Milena, just look around, and then I promise, I’ll be out of your life. Out of your life forever!’
Milena looks around. She thinks she sees a hologram of Thrawn McCartney, holding a lighted match. She is used to the perfection of Thrawn McCartney’s images. The fire on the match rises out of gases from the wood. It hovers over the wood, and creeps its way up along it, slowly, towards the fingers.
‘You promised,’ says Thrawn, still somehow looking hopeful. Something thick hangs in strands between her cracked lips. ‘You promised you wouldn’t hate me.’
A whiff of cooking alcohol. I can smell alcohol, why can’t you? asks the Milena who is remembering. If I can smell it, you can.
You can.
You’re telling yourself you think you’re seeing a hologram, thinks the Milena who remembers. Holograms don’t smell. There’s even a whiff of sulphur from the match. And you’re watching the match get closer to her, and you want it to happen, I can remember you thinking, oh for God sake’s go on, I know what’s coming next, as if it’s just one more horrific image in the light. You want to be rid of her, the crazy Fury, so she won’t hound you, this Happy One, so that she will no longer be somewhere alive and betrayed and alone to make you feel guilty.
Look, even now, she’s stopping, holding the match back. She wants you to stop her. She wants you to help. She wants to collapse weeping in your arms so that she can tell you that she’s sorry, tell you she’s hateful, tell you that it’s not your fault.
‘You were supposed to be my Saviour!’ she has to shout, her voice breaking.
And the music wails.
Not hate, not love, but passion of a kind, twisted with lizard eyes. There are such things as demons. They are alive, and they live in the dead spaces between people.
Soft, and sad, Mahler bids another farewell.
The match burns low, too low, while Thrawn waits for you to save her. The flame touches her finger. Her fingers, her arm, are soaked in alcohol.
The flower blooms, pink, flame. An unfocused flicker and a sudden eruption from the hand, along the arm up into the face, coating the flesh like this year’s latest fashion, a crawling, living bloom of flame. Trickles of black smoke waver upwards.
And still Milena, the People’s Artist, hesitates. Can it be real? What if this isn’t just an image? Has she really done this to herself? Dread, horror mixed with an angry wrench of justification: you did it to yourself, Thrawn.
Stifle the dramatics, Milena, this is you, yourself who is remembering. You know what is happening is real. Worry a few moments longer and it will be too late.
‘Oh shit,’ says Milena the director and stands up finally. Not I’m sorry, oh God, but oh shit, as if it were the final inconvenience to have someone burn to death in your lacquered rooms. Worried about the rugs, Milena? That’s it, stand up, get flustered, panic, pretend it takes a full minute to remember the thick new rug rolled up on the landing. You bought it just last week, your nice thick Tarty rug. Wipe away the distaste for spoiling it, wipe it nobly from your mind. What a sacrifice, Milena. Go to it, girl. Nice new part to play here. Heroine. You’ll like this part, except you always were a terrible actress. You are strangely unconvincing in — your concern. But there are no lines to remember, it makes you look good, everything a star can require, including someone else to cry over.
Somewhere in the midst of the flame, Thrawn is trying to dance, and is laughing. The thing that has hold of her knows that it has won at last.
Fade into silence. The music is over.
Milena the director runs to hug Thrawn, the new, thick rug between them, to smother the flames. Thrawn is too tall. The rug encircles only her midriff.
‘Get down on the floor! Get down on the floor!’ wails Milena the director.
You weep do you, Milena? thinks her future self. Any animal would weep seeing this. Hitler’s guards wept in the camps. The tears mean nothing except that you can feel the horror of it in your belly. You know you will feel that horror for the rest of your life, and that you will remember the tang of burnt hair, burnt flesh in the back of your throat until you die.
The alcohol burns away, like brandy on a plum pudding. Thrawn looks like a plum pudding. The plum pudding smiles and has bright white teeth, flecked with black. ‘Oops,’ it says and giggles.
‘We’ll get you a doctor,’ Milena murmurs, unable to muster enough breath to talk plainly. She wants to scream, not to attract help so much as to express to the world that something terrible has happened. She wants to express it to Thrawn, who does not seem to have realised.
