‘Max. Max. It was a great work. It was not your property, it belonged to the Zoo, to everyone. What do you mean, you were busy? Will you answer me please, Max?’
He didn’t, he couldn’t, there was nothing to say. Milena began to ransack his room. She picked up all of his clothes, trousers, shirt and socks, and threw them one after another onto a heap in the middle of the floor. She pulled back the sheet and the under blanket from his bed and dragged the mattress away from the wall, and looked behind it. Max stood over her, hands on his hips.
‘Go on, make a mess,’ he said. ‘It’s not behind the bed.’
‘It’s probably up your arse,’ said Milena. Max went pale.
Milena stood up, and began as neatly as her rage would allow to turn out the contents of his cupboards. She unloaded masses of paper from the upper shelf. It was full of music paper. There was a fortune of paper, and it had all been wasted. Notes were placed aimlessly on it, and crossed out, sometimes in what looked like scrawled fury. The notes sometimes dribbled away into doodles, meaningless patterns, or drawings of faces or women’s genitalia.
‘What I wouldn’t have given to have this paper,’ said Milena, thin lipped.
‘All right,’ said Max, and began to help, as if doing her a favour. He was taller than Milena and could reach the upper shelf. He stepped in front of her, blocking her view and went through the paper, sheaf by sheaf.
As he thumbed through the first sheaf, he said, ‘It’s not there!’ With each subsequent pile of paper, he said, ‘And it’s not there! It’s not there,’ as if to say I told you. Almost as if to say, see? It’s gone forever.
‘It’s not in this room,’ he said, as a finale.
‘So try to remember, Max. A big grey book. What did you do with it Max?’ No answer. ‘How long ago did you last see it, Max?’
‘I don’t know. A long time.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I kept thinking it would turn up.’
‘Max!’ and Milena found that she was almost weeping. ‘Max, how could you do it? How could you do it and keep any self-respect?’
The face was blank again. You don’t have any self-respect, Milena thought. Not really. Your whole life is a mask. What are you trying to hide?
A man like this, Milena thought, has motives that are secret even from himself. Without realising it, Max, you wanted to destroy the Comedy. She thought of sheafs of wasted paper, and the angry scrawls and knew, without quite being able to say why, that part of him had deliberately lost the book.
Milena looked at him. He was so ugly and helpless that she could not yet pity him. She could feel only anger and scorn. Somewhere in that fat head of yours, she thought, is the answer, buried deep, deep down so that even you can’t find it. I need a mind-reader to get at it. I need a Snide. Milena knew then what she was going to do.
‘I’m not going to tell the Minister for a week,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to tell him you’ve lost an entire, very valuable project for one week. Start thinking, Max. I won’t tell him anything about this if I get that book. But I will be back and back and back again until it’s found.’
She left him and went straight to the apothecary woman.
Without her clown make-up, the woman’s face was beautiful but sharp. The nostrils were too flared, the eyes too avid, the precision-painted mouth too perfect. It was a criminal’s face. Milena needed a criminal.
‘I need a Snide,’ Milena told her. ‘Can you find me one?’
If you are sick in conditions of weightlessness, your vomit will keep travelling, spreading very slightly from air resistance until it hits something. It will then cling precariously, held in place only by friction. A cloth can not absorb the moisture or be used to wipe it up. A cloth will simply shunt it free again. Eventually, vomit will coat every surface in the vehicle as evenly as its rather coarse texture will permit.
The main body of Milena’s vomit moved towards an air vent. Suddenly it ballooned backwards, as if it had grown a head and a mind of its own. It wobbled its way back towards Milena, looking rather like an octopus.
Something caught Milena’s ankle. She kicked.
‘Don’t!’ said the voice. ‘Hold still!’
‘Aaaah!’ squawked Milena, about to be enfolded in her own half-digested breakfast. Milena felt herself hauled backwards. The vomit followed tamely, as if unaware that it was not wanted. It was about to give Milena an unwelcome kiss, when she had an inspired idea. She puckered her lips and blew. The octopus reared backwards, rippling. It reared up and over her. Milena arched her neck and ran out of air. She gasped for breath, and pulled the tiling closer towards her.
She kicked and wrenched out of its way. Out of the corner of her eye, Milena saw that a man was trying to hold her. The vomit loomed. She blew out and it burst scattering.
From somewhere there came a sound like peeling fruit. ‘Oh darn,’ said the man, rather mildly. ‘Dislocated my shoulder.’
Milena was released. She and the tiny babies of vomit spun away, perpetually falling.
She spun and seemed to land in a park in winter. Hampstead Heath, she remembered. The expanse of hill sloping away beneath her was covered in snow. She could see her own footsteps. The branches of the trees were coated in ice, as if they had been dipped in glass.
Milena was waiting for the apothecary to catch up with her. The woman climbed the hill, panting, pushing herself up, hands on her knees. Milena could hear the rather satisfying crunching noises the woman’s feet made in the snow.
‘There!’ the apothecary sighed as she reached Milena and the top of the hill. There was a wreathing of vapour from out her mouth. ‘Whoo! That’s it.’ The apothecary pointed to a wagon, a black box on two huge wheels. Black smoke poured out of a stovepipe chimney. Winter ponies were watching the two women. The ponies were small and shaggy creatures, with hair that trailed into the snow. Winter ponies were fiercely loyal. If someone came for their master, they would attack. Their eyes, thought Milena, they have human eyes.
‘Shalom,’ said the apothecary, to the ponies. It seemed to be some kind of codeword. The animals went back to pawing back the snow with their hooves, and chomping the grass. There were other footsteps in the snow, leading to the wagon. The wagon was a mobile club for Snides and empaths. Boites, the wagons were called. The boites were continually moved from place to place. Snides and empaths gathered there, to do what exactly, Milena had little idea, except that it involved illicit viruses. They performed for each other. Mind-dancing they called it.
The apothecary climbed gypsy steps to the door of the wagon and knocked.
‘Ali, Ali it’s me,’ she called.
The door was pushed open. Men and women sat all at the lower end of the wagon, crosslegged on the floor. Milena could feel a current of hot air rise up out of the door. The apothecary pushed Milena in ahead of her and slammed the door shut.
‘Sorry everyone. Sorry,’ she said. ‘Good?’
‘His best,’ said a bearded man, his eyes dim, his speech slightly slurred. ‘He’s weaving all of us into this one.’
The wagon leaned forward on its nose. The wooden floorboards all pointed up the sloping floor towards a man in black, sitting crosslegged on a thin rug.
He was Al, Al the Snide.
His eyes were closed in concentration. Then they opened. They opened and were staring direct at Milena.
‘That’s it ladies, gentlemen.’ he said. ‘That’s all for now.’ There were jars of potheen lined up along the edge of the floor, held in place by a rack. ‘Keep warm, drink something. We’ll complete the tapestry later.’ He stood up with one smooth movement. He was still tall and lithe. The hat and cape had gone. He looked at Milena with sadness.