Everything is happening all at once, she thought. She was aware that her life had taken wing.
When Milena got back to her room, Jacob was waiting for her. He stood up from the bed and said, ‘Someone’s been hunting for you. You and Rolfa.’
‘A Snide,’ said Rolfa, leaning back on the bed, looking pleased. ‘Papa would have hired him.’
‘A tall, thin man,’ said Jacob. ‘I told him no one of your name lived here.’
Milena listened to the silence in the room. Snides had viruses that helped them sneak and search.
‘They can hear thoughts,’ she whispered in fear.
‘Not exactly,’ said Jacob, with a sideways grin. ‘It’s not like that.’
The air seemed to prickle. ‘What is it like?’ Milena asked quietly. You know, don’t you Jacob?
Still the angelic smile. ‘You catch thoughts. You see things. You feel things in your head. They are very difficult to understand. If you are with many people, the thoughts are jumbled. Milena, you must stay with people.’
So I can still be part of the play.
‘What if he finds me alone?’
Jacob still smiled. ‘You are many people, Milena. The viruses come from many people. Let them talk for you. Let them recite your lines. Let them add up things. Let them read books. You won’t be traced. All these things are not personal.’
‘And Rolfa? She’s here all alone.’
Hood-eyed, Jacob turned, smiling to Rolfa. ‘Oh, Rolfa, her thoughts are not personal.’
So Postpeople are Snides as well. What, wondered Milena, are Postpeople for?
‘We better change rooms,’ said Milena.
Jacob nodded. Rolfa lay on the bed as if none of it mattered.
Milena went to Cilia. ‘We’ve got to trade rooms,’ she told her.
‘Drop anchor. Hold. Why?’ Cilia asked. She was told the story and was thrilled. ‘Right. Right away,’ she said. ‘We move.’
‘A new room?’ Rolfa beamed, and jumped up from the floor. There was a bustling of bags. Rolfa kept cheerfully hitting her head on the lintels of doorways. The beds, the cookers, the pans, the armfuls of paper, were all exchanged in less than an hour.
‘I’ll go buy us all supper. See you,’ promised Cilia.
The new room was even smaller and did not have a view of the river. After the excitement of the move and of being hunted, Rolfa sat staring, disgruntled and pouting.
‘There’s no space,’ she said.
‘There’s space enough. We got everything in.’
‘There’s no space for a piano.’
For a piano?
Rolfa, how much money do you have? Enough to keep you in food for a month? How much money do you think I have? Milena had to tell her that life would be different now. Rolfa would have to live the cramped and constricted life of a human being.
‘We live in little boxes, Rolfa,’ Milena said. ‘For us mere is no buying a way out. We don’t have pianos. We don’t have rooms big enough for them.’
‘Then where can I play?’
‘There are practice rooms, in the Zoo.’
‘They won’t let me into them.’ Rolfa began to pace.
Something is going to have to happen, quickly, Milena realised. We won’t be able to live like this for long. Something is going to have to happen with her music.
‘You can always sing,’ said Milena.
‘Where? Where can I sing? If I try to sing here, people ask me to be quiet. And if there’s a Snide after me, I’ve got to keep quiet.’
Cilia did not come bringing supper. Jacob came instead with a message.
‘He is in your old room,’ said Jacob. ‘The tall, thin man. He will not go away. He is sitting on the bed. Cilia was playing Madam Butterfly over and over in her mind. He knew that. I said, Cilia your friends are waiting at the cafe. So she could leave. She asked him to go, and he shook his head. How long he will stay there I don’t know. But I think he will soon come here.’
They had to move again. To move a second time was not fun. It was wearing. They traded rooms with Cilia’s boyfriend, a well known young actor, who made a great show of condescending. Milena did not like being grateful to him.
They spent the night in their new, glum room and did not even light a candle in case the Snide was watching. They spoke in whispers. Rolfa walked back and forth at the foot of the bed.
‘When I was bad, Papa would lock me in the closet,’ she said. ‘It was very dark and I knew there was no one to come for me. So I used to sing to myself in the dark. And it got so that I would do bad things like not make my bed or make a terrible mess in the kitchen, just so that I could be locked away. The dark was the only place I could sing. But here, I can’t even sing. It’s so small, I can hardly move.’
And Milena felt it again, the echo of memory. I’ve done this before, she thought. It was a habit, a pattern, something she could fall into if she didn’t think about it. It was as if she had been snatched up so quickly and hauled into adulthood that part of her self had been left behind. It was as if only the shell remained, the structure. The strange soft creature she once had been was left behind. The child self did not realise what had happened. Perhaps it was still back there, in the past, still talking.
I don’t remember, but I think that I probably talked to the newcomers. I suppose that in the Child Garden the orphans wept for their lost homes, even homes they had hated. Milena suddenly found the idea of homeless children unaccountably moving. I must have sat with them at night in the dark, like this.
And this is a child I am talking to now. Milena understood Rolfa then. Rolfa was still a child. Milena would have to take care of her for a while.
‘Can you sing in silence? Like reading music?’
‘It’s not the same,’ said Rolfa.
She will have to become part of the Consensus, Milena decided. If she becomes part of the Consensus, she can be Placed in the theatrical Estate. They will let her use the practice rooms at least. At least they will pay her, give her money and a place to live. If nothing happens she will go. She will have to go. What is the difference between this and Antarctica? It is still exile. The thought did not come to Milena that she herself was the difference.
That night she couldn’t sleep again. She was trying to think of what she could do. Could she ask Jacob to sing the music that he remembered? Could she coax Rolfa into one of the rooms of the powerful, and persuade her to sing, cold? Milena finally fell asleep, sitting on the floor, only her head and shoulders resting on the bed.
She sat up suddenly some time later, knowing that she had been asleep. It was still dark outside. The counterpane was over her shoulders.
‘I have been in bed forever,’ said Rolfa. ‘Isn’t there something we can do?’
‘There’s a market open now. It’s for stallowners, open early. We could go there!’
They crept down the unlighted stairs of the Shell, clutching on to each other, dreading a tall thin shadow. They slipped through the streets, their hearts pounding. They followed a butcher’s cart, pulled by a huge and plodding white horse with a beautiful white mane. They reached the gas lamps, with their shining cotton wicks, and they saw the heaps of things to buy. Sparrows in cages had been dyed bright colours. There were whole smoked chickens, old furniture, T-shirts with pictures printed on them, musical instruments, and piles of fruit and vegetables.
‘Pooh wants this,’ said Rolfa. ‘Pooh shall have it.’ She bought a pineapple. The stallowner was looking at them.