‘Isn’t it funny how a Bear likes money,’ Rolfa said, sorting coins. Milena felt her mouth go taut with embarrassment and the danger of it. He will remember us, she thought. They left as a corner of the sky was turning silver and the sound of horses’ hooves announced the city was waking up. Streetsweepers in blue uniform nodded hello as they passed.
It became their new routine. Rolfa went to the market in the mornings in the dark. It was her time out. Milena would get up with her, and help her shave in the showers, a candle planted on the floor. Then Milena would go back to bed and lounge in its warmth. That was her time. When the sky was lighter, she would get up and clean the cooker, and undo whatever damage Rolfa had done with her pre-dawn fry-up.
‘I hope you bought a new alcohol cannister,’ she said once, when Rolfa got back. ‘You used this one up.’
‘You mean the cooker won’t work?’ Rolfa asked in dismay. ‘And I got us something special for breakfast.’
‘What is it?’ Milena asked ruefully. ‘Seal?’
‘No. Penguin.’ Rolfa held it up. It still had its feathers and horny feet, but at least it didn’t kick.
‘Well, I hope you can eat it raw.’
‘I suppose it is all right in a salad,’ said Rolfa, still looking crestfallen.
She’d also bought some peaches and some seaweed, and so they had a peach and penguin seaweed salad for breakfast — or rather, Rolfa did. Milena ate a peach and watched Rolfa bite through sinews as thick as her little finger. The sink was full of feathers. Milena smiled.
‘Pooh,’ she pronounced Rolfa, as if knighting her.
After breakfast, Milena would leave Rolfa for the day, reading a book. At the entrance of the Shell, the cast of the play would be waiting. Milena would walk in their midst to rehearsals at the Zoo, protected by a cloud of thought.
Milena learned things about them. She learned that Berowne was in love with the Princess and wanted to be a father. The Princess did not want to carry a baby. Berowne was thinking of carrying the child himself. The King, handsome, kind, faraway, loved nobody, but was one of those people who are, effortlessly, loved. The girls felt warmth and sympathy for him, as well as loving his blond-green curls and luxuriant beard.
They were all so ambitious. They all had such plans — characters they wanted to play, pictures they wanted to paint. Milena, as always, was quiet among them, but for once she was not full of resentment. She was content to go unnoticed. She found she liked being part of a group. And when she did say something, it would sound obvious and banal to her, but the actors would exclaim, ‘Oh, Milena, you’re always so sensible!’ She would understand that it was not an insult. ‘Not like you butterflies,’ she replied once, with a chuckle. There was a kind of quiet acknowledgement on both sides of who she was.
Then one morning, on the walkway, the Princess whispered, ‘Milena. That’s the Snide!’
It was like swimming in the ocean and seeing a shark.
A tall man in a black coat was coming towards them. He ambled, hands in his pockets. It was a windy day and the tails of his black coat flapped. The Snide had a lean and dreamy face, with hooded eyes and a slight smile. His hair was like a pale mist, disordered and thinning.
Milena forced herself to look away from him, but she still saw the face in her mind. She hated it. It was sly and soft at the same time, sleepy, almost gentle, except for something glinting within the slits of the puffy eyes.
Think of something else! Milena told herself.
Me, an’t shall please you. Milena remembered one of her 13 lines. I am Anthony Dull. Nothing happened. Think of his coat, she told herself, what did it cost, how many labour-hours? Count them. The viral clock in her mind refused to work.
Milena had spent a lifetime beating down the viruses. They now deserted her. In her terror, she could not dredge up one of them.
Shakespeare. T. S. Eliot, Jane Austen. It is a truth universally acknowledged, she recited to herself, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. There was no answering spark of life.
The walkway was elevated and narrow; they would have to pass the Snide. ‘Ack!’ exclaimed the King, loudly. ‘We’ve taken the wrong walkway.’
All the actors turned at once, and walked in the opposite direction. The Snide followed. Milena could hear the clattering of his shoes behind her on the resin surface. Wooden clogs. He wears them so that people will hear and be afraid.
Marx! Milena thought, where is Marx, they must have fed me Marx by the gram. Lenin, Mao, Chao Li Song. All right, music, then. Brahms, Elgar, anything. She began to hum Das Lied von der Erde. That’s not a virus, she remembered, I learned that myself.
‘Milena,’ called the Snide. His voice was light and mellifluous. ‘I’m singing to you, Milena. Can you hear me?’
Milena could feel terror seeping out of her, as if she were a leaking balloon. She heard his shoes, clip-clopping like horses’ hooves. They were beside her now. The actors walked faster, looking at their feet, not knowing what else to do. Surely this was illegal! Of course it was illegal, but where was the Law? The Law was everywhere, invisible and alive. But there were no policemen.
‘Eastern Europe, Milena,’ said the Snide. ‘Do you remember the trip on the train? You went to St Malo. An island with walls. Do you remember the steamer, Milena? Rocking back and forth on the sea? Do you remember the chugging sound and the sailwomen, all in stripes?’
Milena remembered none of it. There was not even a sense of echoing, of familiarity.
Milena glanced to one side and saw him, walking with them, smiling. Her eyes darted back to the ground in front of her like frightened birds.
Me, an’t shall please you. I am Anthony Dull!
‘I can feel you, Milena,’ said the Snide. ‘Do you remember the Child Garden? Do you remember Senior Dodds who taught you English? Do you remember your first day there? June 23rd? It was raining and you were all alone. You were just four years old, and they made you ill with a virus to make you speak. Do you remember that?’
For Milena, the Child Garden had been destroyed. Something had happened to it. All she could remember was being ill at ten years old. She could remember the sudden weight of new knowledge. The old viruses began to stir.
The Princess spoke, angrily. ‘Go away and leave us alone!’
The Snide stepped in front of her. The Princess had to stop walking. ‘Milena?’ the Snide asked, grinning hopefully, leaning down to look into her eyes.
Milena felt giddy. She swayed as she walked. It was as if the ground beneath her lurched. She stood still beside the Princess as if to help her. Instead of fear, Milena had a strange and most complete sensation of maddening ennui. An irritable boredom engendered by viruses rose up all around her like steam from the pavement.
Milena remembered words, German words, badly printed in Gothic lettering.
Milena remembered the reading of them. She remembered someone reading them in a very small, very cold room, smoking cigarettes. She had rolled them herself, straggles of tobacco in thin papers that were held together with spit. Her legs were limply fleshed and useless. She sat in a wheelchair, by a window, on the ground floor of a block of flats. Just outside her window, noisy children were playing with a ball.
Milena began to walk again, but in her mind, she was sitting in a wheelchair.
‘You’re not Milena,’ said the Snide, gently, to the Princess.
Words on top of another page — Chapter One: The Commodity.