Milena was about to creep away, when the music snagged her attention. A lowering note seemed to seize something in her chest and drag it down. Milena felt a great weight of something like sadness.
But it wasn’t sadness. It was as if someone were walking deliberately, sombre perhaps, but with high purpose. It had the sound of noble music.
What was it? Milena rifled through her viruses, but there was no answer. It wasn’t Wagner or Puccini. What the hell could it be? Milena sat down between the racks.
Milena’s viruses were told to keep track of the themes. They wove a structure in her head. The music kept unfolding out of itself, like a flower blooming. Then there was a slight catch, not in Rolfa’s voice, but in the notes, a slight wavering of uncertainty.
Rolfa stopped. She sang the passage in a new form. Yes! said the viruses. They showed Milena how the three new bars referred to the first notes she had heard.
By all the stars, Milena’s mind seemed to whisper. This is Rolfa’s. This is Rolfa’s music. She’s imagining it, here in the dark. Rolfa began to sing again, from the beginning. Rolfa can do this? This wasn’t bathtub singing or a drunken wallow. I’ve got her wrong, thought Milena. This is someone I don’t know. Why is she singing here? Why don’t people know about her?
Milena tried to remember the music. She told her viruses to remember, but even they got tangled up. The viruses were not used to listening to new music. New music was too alive, it wouldn’t sit still, the themes got tangled up like snakes. Very suddenly, almost with a perceptible click, the viruses gave up.
Milena was not used to listening to unfamiliar music either. It made her feel strange, as if she were in a dream where everything is scrambled but weighted with meaning. Rolfa’s voice suddenly rose to peaks, like a mountain, and Milena felt her eyes bulge. She felt tears start in her eyes. It was as if some great winged thing had taken to the air, rising out of a human body, transcending it. Milena saw it fly.
Rolfa sang for a half hour. The music was a single piece from beginning to end. Toward the end, it faltered. Very suddenly, Rolfa broke off. ‘No. No,’ Milena heard Rolfa say. There was a cough and a sniff, and a small crash.
‘Oh bugger,’ said the light, rasping voice. Milena smiled fondly, with a kind of ache for her. By now it was dark, and no light came through the little window. Milena heard a shuffling come towards her. In the darkness a wisp of fur brushed her, the very tips of it against her cheek, and Milena froze. She waited some minutes more in the dark.
‘Bloody hell,’ she murmured. Then she stood up and slipped out of the Graveyard, arch by arch.
Milena went to the room of her friend Cilia. Like Milena, Cilia lived in the Shell, in another wing. Milena knocked on her door. Cilia was wearing a pinny and was frying sausages on a single-ring cooker.
‘Oh, Lo,’ said Cilia, surprised to see Milena at all, let alone dressed as a Tudor constable. ‘I thought you hated that costume.’
‘I do,’ said Milena and stepped briskly into Cilia’s tiny room. Her sword clanked. ‘Cilia, do you have any paper?’
‘What?’ said Cilia, with an unsteady chuckle. ‘Uh. No. What makes you think I’ve got paper?’
‘I don’t know. You’re in The Mikado.’
’Madam Butterfly. Same country, different opera.’
‘Don’t they give you paper for notes or anything? I mean, being an Animal and all.’
‘Milena, are you all right? We use the viruses for notes, like anybody else.’
‘Can you get paper? Do you have any access to paper?’ Milena suddenly felt the hopelessness of it. ‘I need some paper.’
‘What do you need it for?’ Cilia asked, quietly.
‘I’ve got to write some music down!’ Milena’s hands made a fist.
‘Oh,’ said Cilia, feeling absolved now of the need to be sympathetic. She went back to her sausages. ‘Becoming a composer now, are we?’
‘No, no,’ said Milena, giving her head a distracted shake. She was trying to keep Rolfa’s music going in her head. ‘It’s someone else’s.’
Cilia seemed to find this unexpected. ‘Listen. I’m sure whoever it is can go to Supplies and explain, if the viruses can’t cope. There’s going to be a lot more paper soon, they say. They’ve got the new beaver bugs.’
Milena shook her head. ‘It’s a GE,’ she said.
Cilia went still. ‘Really?’
‘I think,’ said Milena, ‘that she’s the Bear who goes to all the first nights. I just heard her sing. She sings beautifully. And it was new music.’
Cilia took her arm and made her sit down on the bed. ‘U-nique,’ she said, avaricious for news of other people’s doings.
‘She’s rich, she’s got all the paper she needs. But I don’t think she wants it written down. She just sings it, in the dark.’ Milena found that she was really quite disturbed. ‘It’s beautiful. I don’t understand. She just sings it with no one to hear. Why doesn’t she want anyone to hear it?’
‘You want some sausages?’ Cilia asked in a soft voice. ‘I can’t eat them all. I was out in the sun. You want to stay?’
Milena nodded. As the sausages sizzled and filled the room with meaty smells, Milena tried to sing snatches of the music. In her own thin voice they sounded aimless and colourless.
‘How did you meet her?’ Cilia asked, serving the food.
Milena told her the story of how they had met in the Graveyard. ‘She says it’s where she hides.’
‘We ought to keep that a secret then,’ said Cilia. She passed Milena a plate of sausages. They would have to eat with the plates on their laps, sitting on the bed. Cilia did not own a table or chairs. With a snap of the wrist, Cilia held out a twisted, melted piece of resin that had once been a fork.
‘I think this one’s yours,’ Cilia said with a rueful smile.
Milena didn’t notice. She kept talking about Rolfa. As she ate, Milena told Cilia about the Spread-Eagle, and the people in it. Cilia stirred the sausages round and round on her plate and said, ‘Go on, go on.’
Milena talked about the dandruff and the whisky and the cloth shoes and about the voice. Most of all, she talked about the music. As she left, Cilia took her arm, as if she needed support, to help her to the door.
Milena stumbled scowling downstairs to her own bed. Scowling, she slowly undressed. It was as if she had suddenly found herself in a different world. She blew out the candle, and squeezed it between her wetted fingers to hear it hiss. She felt the sausages repeat, and she settled down under her one counterpane.
She could hear Rolfa sing. She had a sudden vision of her as Brunnhilde, winged helmet and spear, with fur sprouting out from the edges of the breastplate. Half-asleep, she grinned. Dreamily, she imagined settling down amid the fur, brushing aside the dandruff. It would be soft and warm, and she would stroke it. She imagined Rolfa’s head in her lap.
Marx-and-Lenin! she thought and sat upright in bed.
I am sexually attracted to her!
Milena had no shorter form of words. Milena lusted after the huge, baggy body. She wanted to do very specific things with it.
No, no, I can’t, Milena thought, and tried to talk herself out of it. She’s got green, rotting stumps for teeth, Milena reminded herself. There was no answering revulsion. The pull was too strong.
She’s huge and hairy. Yes, replied some wicked part of Milena’s mind. Don’t I know?
She’s got dandruff!
All over, came the reply. Tee-hee. The whole thing was one great hoot.
She probably has bad breath and is full to the brim with viruses.
For heaven’s sake, you can’t be in love with a Polar Bear! They hibernate. They moult. Their whole biology is different!