He was holding Rolfa’s copy of Winnie the Pooh.
‘I want you to go,’ said Heather.
‘Not until I know for certain that you do not need me,’ said the Snide, ‘as much as I need you.’
There were bells on each floor of the Shell, linked by ropes. They began to ring now, over and over. From the far end of the corridor, Cilia was shouting, ‘Fire! Fire!’
‘The building is burning down,’ said Heather.
‘No it’s not. Your friend just wants me to go. She brought you some paper so you could write your music’ He crawled towards her on the bed and took her hands. ‘I know people, Heather. I know you’re what I want. We could live together, outside the Law. Blister all the old paint of the walls. You’re a bullshit-stripper, Heather. I am a sneak. I don’t like sucking arseholes. You could save me.’
Oh God, thought Heather, another one who wants his mother.
‘OK. OK. You’re right. I need help.’
Vampire, thought Heather. All around her, across the ceiling, through the walls came the thumpings of people awakened in the night by an alarm.
The Snide looked up, dismayed. Too many people, thinking too many things at once, thought Milena. He won’t be able to read me as clearly. The quilt fell from his shoulders, and he stepped down from the bed. He gazed at her mournfully, as the light grew stronger, tall but frail-boned, not as young as he used to be, afraid.
‘I take people’s thoughts,’ he said, ‘and I weave them into tapestries. And I hang them,’ he said, ‘like in a gallery. There’s no one else to see them.’
‘Stop being a Snide,’ said Heather.
He opened the door, adjusting a broad-brimmed black hat for sinister effect, and stepped into a crowd of people in their underwear. He’s a fool, thought Heather, quite simply a fool. He heard her think it, faltering as he closed the door. The bells kept ringing. But could people love fools?
Heather waited a few minutes, to let him leave. Then she joined the press of people on the staircase. They clutched their most treasured possessions, toothbrushes or saucepans. Cilia was no longer ringing the bells. The alarm had been taken up, by each floor’s fire wardens, according to the drill. No one would be able to trace the false alarm back to Cilia.
Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that.
Value therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead, rather it transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic.
‘Oh, Cilia. Who did this?’ Milena asked.
‘Just us Vampires,’ said Cilia, shyly, pleased. ‘Just us Vampires of History.’
The all-clear, a trumpet blast, sounded. Elsewhere, in memory, Heather fixed the book to a holder on her wheelchair. Continuing to read, she began to wheel herself round and round her room for exercise.
That morning, Milena intercepted Jacob on the stairs. ‘Look at what I’ve got!’ she said and held up the paper. ‘Jacob! We can write the music down. Can we meet this morning, this afternoon?’
‘You have a performance this afternoon,’ he said.
‘I’ll miss it. Won’t be the first time.’
Jacob went very still, his eyes closed. ‘I get tired, Milena,’ he said.
She could see it in the flesh around his eyes, and she knew she shouldn’t ask again. But without him, the paper would be no use.
‘The Vampires bought it,’ she said, flipping through it. ‘They saved up money and got together and bought it. All of them.’ She didn’t want to manipulate him, but she couldn’t hide the disappointment.
‘I have to sleep in the afternoons,’ he said. ‘If I don’t, I start to forget things.’ The two friends looked at each other. Jacob sighed and shifted on his feet. ‘But they will clean me out soon. I’ll forget everything, then. The music too. I’ll forget the music’ He nodded up and down, almost imperceptibly. ‘All right, Milena. All right. We meet. This afternoon.’
How could she pay all these people back?
‘Thanks, Jacob,’ she murmured.
Life crowded round.
Milena and Jacob met every afternoon in the practice rooms of the Zoo. Milena was not sure why, but she did not want Rolfa to know what they were doing.
Perhaps she thought Rolfa would be angry that Milena had spied on her while she was singing. Perhaps she thought Rolfa might tell her she did not want the music written down. So it was kept a secret.
Everyday Milena and Jacob would sit hunched and whispering over an old wooden table they carried in each day from a storeroom. Jacob dictated the notes in a low worn voice, his head in his hands. When he got too tired to translate them into notation, he sang the melody in a rich but restricted voice. It went as rusty as a rooster’s, and the workings of Milena’s hand began to ache from writing. Then Jacob would stop and look at her silently, and she would nod. And together they would carry the wooden table out again.
People would murmur an explanation to each other as Milena and Jacob passed. It was as if a stone had been dropped in water. Word was spreading. The world was beginning to do its work, finding what it needed. Sooner or later, the Snide would find them too.
‘Are you Milena?’ a girl, a stranger, asked. Green-blonde hair and Vampire make-up. With a kind of heave, Milena hauled the virus to the front of her mind. Heather, I am Heather. She didn’t get around to answering aloud.
‘Good,’ said the girl. ‘Don’t tell me. But we’re all keeping an eye out for the Snide. If he pokes around here while you’re in there…’ the girl nodded towards the practice room, ‘…we’ll keep him talking and send someone to warn you. That fits?’
Milena did not dare even nod in response. The girl left, half-running in black pixie boots. If you really want to help, Milena thought, how about carrying the table?
All the time, she had to battle with Heather. By day, by night, the virus did not stop reading. Heather gripped and Heather held, with powers of organisation and concentration that were beyond Milena, hauling her through the tangled forest that was Marx, pointing out a debt to Locke or Hume, refining a thought with a quote from Engels or Gramsci, always, always, making sure that Milena understood, understood in the same way that Heather did.
What, Milena wondered, have I called up in my mind? Viruses were supposed to be a passive reservoir of information, like your own memory. They were not supposed to drag you through the minutiae of experience. Das Kapital was over three thousand pages long, and Heather was determined to read it all, exploring every last dreary, undeniable nuance. She had no intention of ever finishing, she would go on and on, determined to control, without a shred of self-doubt or pity. God, the woman must have been a pain. When she was alive.
Heather, Irish Heather, if only there were some softness about you, some hidden anguish or pain, then I could feel sorry for you, I could understand, sympathise, but there is something inhuman about you. You wanted to be a disease. The match between you and the virus was perfect. You and the virus both need minds to inhabit, DNA to remould. Like Helen Lane’s tumour, you are immortal, undead, and you have hold of me.
Milena began to think that what she had was an illness, in the old sense of something that did not cure, but wounded. Heather was like arthritis, a continual pain that had to be managed. The boredom was excruciating. Milena managed it by asking herself if it was worse than the boredom she usually inflicted on herself. Was it any worse, for example, than humming over and over to herself a song that she hated? Was it any worse than sitting alone in the Zoo cafe and examining, one by one, all her many faults of personality? If Milena was now infected by a dedicated Marxist philosopher, who had infected her before? Someone who hated Milena, who tormented her; someone who chattered away at her, who kept her distracted with a stream of useless quibbling that she would have tolerated from no one else.