Sometimes she would remember the terror.
The viruses! she would think and sit bolt upright. She had forgotten about the viruses!
She would think of her dirty hands that had crammed food into her mouth and had rubbed in her eyes. She would think of the cutlery she had not washed, of how dirty her mouth was, of all the risks, the pointless risks she had taken. She would throw off the counterpane in panic. She would shower, even though the water in the middle of a summer night could be freezing cold. She boiled kettles and scalded her sink. She boiled all her plates and all her melting forks. She put salt in boiling water and let it cool for a moment in the mug, puffing at it. Then she would gargle, feeling the salt wither the inside of her cheeks. She would scrub her hands and suddenly cover her face and weep, from lack of sleep, from being stretched too far.
I will give her up, Milena would think. I won’t see her. This is getting silly. And the next day, they would have lunch again.
They took to having picnics, in the garden by the river. They would sit on the grass, and Rolfa would crunch her way through the cooked legs of animals, a huge and filthy napkin tied around her neck. She would look quite jolly then, making cracking sounds and sucking out bone marrow. The Polar Bears had genetically engineered stomachs. They could digest almost anything. Rolfa ate the bones as well. Then she would drink gallon jars of yogurt and water. She didn’t say much. Milena caught the scent of her breath and realised why: Rolfa was no longer drinking.
The GE was the most fascinating irresolution of opposites. She was huge and coy at the same time. Like the fat girl in the Child Garden whom everyone bullies, Rolfa moved with a fearful, tip-toe precision that meant she invariably knocked something over. She was boisterous and coarse and delicate and refined, usually within the same sentence. She talked about art. She talked about how Elgar changed keys. How he would play a joke, start in one direction, stop and go back again, start and stop again, and suddenly pull the rug out from under you by doing it backwards with the simplicity of a conjurer. ‘He’s the funniest ficken composer who ever lived!’ she exclaimed, and laughed, exposing rotten teeth and a roiling mass of half-chewed food.
Elgar? Funny? Milena examined her viruses. That was not something they told her.
‘Where did you learn all this?’ Milena asked.
‘Oh. When I was young,’ said Rolfa, ‘I went into hibernation. I was only about nine or ten years old. It’s something we can do if the weather gets too bad and we have to wait it out. But this time there was no real reason for it. The vet said it was stress.’
Rolfa lay down on her side. She began to graze. Her long pink tongue reached out and seized a fistful of grass, tore it out of the ground and lazed it up into her mouth. There was something comfortable in the way she talked and chewed at the same time.
‘I just curled up and went to sleep for six months. And all the time I was under, I was thinking about music’
Rolfa moved her cud to one side of her mouth.
‘I could play piano quite well by then, and I just went over and over all the pieces I knew. Picking them apart, putting them back together. Didn’t think about anything else. Didn’t dream, didn’t open my eyes.’
‘How did they get you out of it?’ Milena asked.
‘The vet gave me an injection,’ said Rolfa, and smiled with her ruined teeth.
Milena wanted to lie next to her on the grass, in the sun. She wanted to curl up under her arm and go to sleep. But Milena was afraid. All she did was shift closer to her.
‘You can remember your childhood,’ said Milena, looking down at the expanse of Rolfa’s body, wishing she had known Rolfa in childhood, had been part of her life then.
‘Can’t you remember your childhood?’ Rolfa sat up.
Milena shook her head. No, Milena couldn’t.
‘Something happened. I don’t know. I can’t remember any of it. Well, I know I was born in Czechoslovakia — I can sometimes remember parts of that very hazily. Everything else is gone.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t like that at all!’ said Rolfa. ‘There are all sorts of things I remember. I’d hate to forget them.’
‘Like what.’
‘Musk oxen,’ said Rolfa. ‘Especially the calves. They’re like little round balls of fluff on tiny, scurrying black legs. That’s when we lived on the tundra, what was left of it. Forests advancing you see, but we managed to save some of them.’
‘There’s no musk oxen in the Antarctic’
‘No, no indeed, no, we lived in Canada for a while, you see? Papa thought we should go there to make our fortune. North instead of South. Didn’t work. He kept trying to save the musk ox. Herd them north, where there was still some tundra. Strange thing to do really. It makes me think my father might not be so bad after all. He taught them how to play football. They’re terribly intelligent, you see. They played in teams. I used to play with them. I used to dream that one day I’d turn into a musk ox.’ Rolfa’s face was soft and her smile was fond. ‘Don’t you have any childhood memories at all?’
‘No. They gave me a lot of virus when I was ten. Maybe that knocked them all out of me. I don’t remember.’
‘Ah,’ said Rolfa. Something strange seemed to happen to her face. It seemed to melt, and the eyes seemed to pull back, like snails into a shell. ‘Ah yes, of course. I keep forgetting. They give you people viruses, don’t they.’
She smiled again, and the eyes opened out, with a new expression. She was smiling, and the eyes still seemed fond, and the face still seemed happy, but it was pained too. It was a strange, disturbing mixture, like Rolfa’s music. There was something powerful in the eyes, that made Milena draw back. Milena couldn’t understand it. She had no experience. She didn’t know what it meant. The viruses couldn’t help her.
It was routine. Each day, like milk in a pan, about to boil over, Milena would nearly say, ‘I love you.’
Or she would reach for Rolfa, to caress her in a way that would leave no doubt, come so near to the point of doing it that she could feel her own arms or the shadow of her arms, move out and hold her.
But she didn’t do it.
Gradually a new idea began to seep in, so slowly that Milena never knew when she first had it. This idea was also transfiguring.
Rolfa did not need to be cured. Yes, she was immune to the viruses; her behaviour was her own; and Milena had given her a thousand unmistakable signs, she thought, of how she felt; and Rolfa had not responded. Rolfa did not appear to be interested. The great hulking innocent probably had no idea of what had been happening.
They were not going to be lovers. Milena had been wrong. Rolfa’s grammar was undoubtedly strange, but not bad, not bad, no.
When Milena was most alone, in the middle of rehearsals for Love’s Labour’s Lost, she found herself coming to a glum acceptance of that. She sat on the periphery and watched the other actors sleepwalking through their parts.
The young boy with a beard was playing Berowne. He spent the whole of one afternoon glaring. Something had happened to him. Milena knew of it vaguely, something about a girl. That day he did not play the character of Berowne. He played himself, carried away by the words. ‘I who have been love’s whip,’ he said bitterly, spit leaping out of his mouth.
Listening to him, Milena found that she was angry.
’That wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy
This Signor Junior, this giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid.’
Milena listened. They were all listening, as the boy-actor stood rigid, glowering. Milena’s hands had curled into fists.
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,