On the river, the horse ferry floated in place, the tillerman and the passengers crowded into its prow. Beside the jetty, in a small barge, two Slump Bobbers gazed up at the sky. Behind them was a cargo of mattresses. Root stepped down into their boat.
‘You get us out of this,’ she said to the two boys, leaving no possibility of denial.
‘What’s that all about?’ the Slumpers asked.
‘Just some bloody Bees,’ said Root and helped Milena step onto the mattresses. ‘You lie down there,’ said Root.
‘Lo, she’s not ill, is she?’ one of the boys asked. ‘We can’t sell them if people think there’s sickness on them.’
‘Oh! Everybody’s ill. Don’t tell anybody and they won’t know,’ said Root, slapping the boy’s shoulder. ‘Go on, now, the Garda’s pulling people in.’
The boys pushed the boat away from the jetty and one of them danced across the mattresses to take the till. A small, dirty sail was unfurled.
Milena lay on her back, listening to the slopping of water under the prow and along the sides of the boat. It was a comforting, satisfying sound. Milena felt more at peace. Looking up she saw the ancient buildings of the embankment and their bamboo scaffoldings. She saw people clinging to the bamboo, leaning out or up to see. Bees dangled from threads in the sky. The helicopters chopped their way through the mix of gases that bore them up. They headed east and south, bound for Epping, or the New Forest or even the South Downs. The Bees would be dumped there. But they would return.
In her hand, Milena still held a human rose. She lifted it up to her nose to smell it. It was perfumed, like freshly washed, soapy human skin. ‘It’s all so bizarre,’ she said. She sat up and leaned on one arm, to look behind the boat.
All along Lambeth Bridge traffic had come to a halt and groups of people singing and marching arm in arm were spreading the news. They talked to people in the carts, animated, waving their hands. The word cancer kept cutting through the air between them. There were threads of song, from Singers no longer able to keep quiet.
But in the quiet on the river it seemed to Milena that she saw something else moving among and through the people on the bridge. Something seemed to impel them forward, sweeping them along with it. It seemed to push behind them, and force its way out of them, pouring out of their eyes and mouths, making their hands leap and their feet spring. It was as if she were seeing the force of life, moving through them.
Milena looked at the people, looked at life, as if she were being borne away from it. What have I done? she asked herself, amid the sound of helicopters and church bells. Life had forced its way through her like a bush through soil. Life has a will. It needs things. It needs us to grow wings, or larger brains, or pads on our elbows, and we do. That’s how it was done, she thought, remembering the foliage growing out of Bees. Life had a need, and need hammered on the door of our genes until the genes were changed by will. That’s how we grew, up from the slime. We needed hands, and made them. Only now, Lord, now we know we can do it. It will all happen faster.
Milena saw the clouds over Lambeth Bridge. That’s how there are spiders in the sky. They thought themselves into that shape. She smiled. Give the Bees time, she told the helicopters. Give them time, and they will live up there, suspended between ice crystals on the tubes. Will you drive them from there too?
That’s what we are becoming. The Bees are our future. Life wants us to be more like plants, there’s not enough room on the planet now for hunters. We’re growing new shoots in so many directions at once, the Consensus will never be able to hold us. The Bees and Lucy and the GEs and the Singers. We’re a new forest growing out of the old. We’re pushing it back.
A big Thames barge slipped past them, making waves, making them rock. Root looked around the sail.
‘You comfortable now?’ Root asked.
Yes, yes in a way I am.
Milena fell asleep.
She woke up with a familiar, acrid tingling in her nostrils. It was the smell of home. It was the smoke of cremation from the Estate of Remembrance. There was the singing too, the undertakers warbling with their tongues, the mourners passing over their dead, singing old hymns. Milena saw flowers from the boats and biers bob past their boat. She did not look up.
Bees had been dumped in the Slump, and they had adapted so quickly that they were now a nuisance. They had grown huge flat pads like the giant lilies. They floated on them and fed on them. Milena saw that they had gathered around the graceful hangar of the Party Estate. She groaned and closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.
She heard the Slump boys shouting at the Bees and felt the boat turn to the side and the boys push against the rooted human lilypads. ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ she heard Root shout. She felt a scraping of woven reed underneath the boat as it was pulled ashore.
‘Here, Lady,’ said one of the Boys.
The slopes of the tiny artificial island were covered in Bees.
Milena, Milena, Milena, said all the Bees all together, and there was a rustling of their many branches. Milena saw the faces of her neighbours, pinched and unhappy, staring out of their upper windows. The What Does stood guarding the door, a cloth wrapped around her face against disease. A charcoal stove was burning wet reeds to make smoke, to clear away the sickness.
There was a smell of coffee. The What Does husband was scrubbing the lintels with coffee from a bucket. He turned and looked up, and flung the rest of the coffee on the ground to make a path for walking on.
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Root.
Overhead there was the sound of helicopters.
Milena stepped out of the boat onto the woven shore. She began to walk towards the Bees.
‘Where are you going?’ called Root in dismay. As Milena approached them, the Bees made a sound like many doves and arched their arms over their heads, to cut out some of her thought. Those on the shore waded backwards into the brown water. Milena stood on the shoreline, facing the water, which looked as heavy and golden as oil, a reflection of sunset heaving sluggishly on its surface.
‘You’ll have to go,’ Milena told the Bees. ‘If you stay, the Garda will come again, people will be angry. I am not going to be staying here anyway. I will be in hospital and I won’t be well. Try to stay away from me. Try to find places where you are safe and I will try to come to see you when I can.’
From out of the water two men came wading, one on all fours, carrying roses in his mouth. The other had lost all his teeth, and his golden hair had thinned to nothing on top. Uncombed coils of it hung matted down the side of his head. ‘Hello, Ma,’ he said, in a perfectly ordinary way. He was the King. ‘Remember Piper?’ He stroked the head of the dog-man.
‘Yes,’ said Milena, in a whisper.
‘He remembers you. He remembers that you saved him. He’s a good dog.’
Piper dropped the flowers at her feet, and stretched down low, looking up at her, tongue out of his mouth. There was eagerness and love in his eyes.
‘Good Piper. Good boy,’ whispered Milena and began to scratch him behind the ears.
Piper gave a yelp of pleasure and shook his bottom from side to side, trying to wag a tail he did not have.
‘He thinks you are his mistress,’ said the King.
You had to understand Bees to know that it was a sacrifice for them to give up Piper. They loved him. You had to understand Bees to know what a tribute it was for them to give Piper to her.
Milena sighed with weariness. Here I go again. She knew what she was going to do. ‘Come on men, Piper,’ she said, ruefully. ‘Come on boy. Or girl. Whichever.’
‘Home,’ said the Bees, all together, in chorus. ‘She takes him home!’ They were smiling.