‘He can feel you at his back,’ murmured Al, without moving his head.
Suddenly Max made a messy, hurried wave in the air. No, no, no, said his hands. The orchestra stopped playing by degrees, the music trailing off into disorder, the musicians looking up in wonder. Max turned around. He looked at Milena. ‘Do you have to be here now?’ he said. His voice was quiet but it still managed somehow to penetrate the curtain of air between them.
‘We’re just listening to the music, Max,’ said Milena. ‘We’d like to talk to you. We’ll wait outside for you.’
‘I’m busy this evening, I can’t.’
‘When are you free?’
‘Talk to me later!’
‘We can never find you, Max. One week, Max. Remember? Two days of it have gone, Max. We need to find the thing that you lost, Max. This gentleman can help you.’ The musicians began to stir in their seats and murmur to each other.
‘Stop,’ said Al. ‘Stop now. Or you’ll kill him.’
‘We will wait outside,’ said Milena, gathering up her coat.
They walked in silence up the corridor.
‘Whoo!’ said Al, expelling air as the doors swung shut behind them.
‘What did you get?’ Milena asked.
Al scowled. The music began again, dimly, behind the doors. ‘It’s like this. He makes a motion one way.’ Al moved his hand like an arrow. ‘But then the motion deserts him, and he’s left stranded, so he makes another motion this way, in another direction, and that stops because he then remembers he meant to go the other way. There’s no centre to give him any weight.’
The music wheedled through the door, sad, aching, the music of ghosts.
‘He’s weightless,’ said Al. ‘There’s no up or down for him. He’s totally lost. Like some poor, huge, overgrown child. He’s been unable to move anywhere since childhood. He was stunned in childhood.’
The music stopped again. They could dimly hear Max talking.
‘That’s why he likes music. It’s all pre-written, it’s all rehearsed. It all flows in one direction for him. It’s the only time he gets any flow. Most of us go swimming through time, with the current like a fish. He just gets lost in it. Except when there’s music. As long as the music doesn’t surprise him. So.’ Al looked up at Milena with an odd smile. ‘He hates new music’
The problem again was time. The music started up again.
Al was still looking at Milena with an odd smile. ‘He hates you. He hates the Comedy. He can’t bear either of you. You make him feel so small.’
After the rehearsal, Max saw them outside in the corridor. The angular violinist was with him and she was pale with fury.
‘How could you do that to me!’ Max said, fists clenched and pale, mouth stretched and desperate.
‘Who are you?’ the violinist demanded, glaring at Milena. ‘Who are you to interrupt a rehearsal like that? This is a very talented musician, and you’re making him very unhappy.’
‘He’s made me very unhappy,’ said Milena. ‘He’s lost the entire score of an opera. The only copy.’
‘Don’t!’ he said, his pink fists bobbing up and down. He shuffled, knees bent, in the posture of weightlessness.
‘He’s lost it,’ said Milena, ‘because it makes him realise that he could never write it himself.’
‘Milena,’ warned the Snide.
The woman smiled bitterly. ‘A new opera,’ she said. ‘God. We get one of those a month. No one can write opera any more. They’re all written by ambitious stumblebums like you, who have no more appreciation than…’ the woman broke off. ‘Oooh! You should be grateful that someone like Max even looked at it.’
‘We don’t want to hurt him,’ said the Snide. ‘Not at all. We would just like a few moments alone with him.’ Al took Max’s hands, and began to coax the fists to uncurl. ‘I’d just like to go back onto the stage with him. Where the instruments were played. The beautiful violins, the harps. The oboes. The place will still be warm from the music. We’ll go there, and you can tell me all about the music you love. Eh, Max? Maybe that will help you remember.’
‘Will she be there?’ Max demanded, looking in terror at Milena. It was as if Milena were his mother, as if he were a naughty little boy.
‘No, Max,’ said the Snide. ‘Just you and me.’
‘If anything happens to him,’ said the violinist, and jabbed a finger towards Milena, ‘I’ll hold you responsible. Max. I’ll be waiting downstairs.’
‘And I’ll be waiting here,’ said Milena.
Max and the Snide went back down, into the theatre. And Milena waited. How long? What was time? She got to know her own fingernails better. They were bitten, right down to the quick. Please, she prayed, though she knew of nothing to pray to, please let him remember.
Finally the door opened, and Al came out, supporting Max. Max was sobbing, rubbing fat hands into his eyes. Milena looked into Al’s eyes.
‘We found it,’ said Al.
Max broke free and began to run. He ran for the stairs. ‘Alice! Alice!’ he cried, stumbling down the steps, covering his face.
Al looked at him as he ran. ‘He really didn’t know that he’d done it, Milena. It was buried deep, well below the Web.’
‘In the Fire,’ said Milena.
‘In his heart,’ said the Snide, and blew out again. ‘He was like a maze, a horrible twisted tangle, everything unsorted.’ Al was staring, looking now at what he had seen, eyes round with fear. ‘I nearly didn’t get out’
Milena touched his arm. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Do you want a drink?’
Al shook his head, no, no. ‘I know what drink does. Oh by all the stars! To be like that. To be trapped in that, forever.’ Al looked back at the stairs and the plush carpet, as if a ghost stood there. ‘At least he gets out. At least he gets out in music’
Milena found that her sympathy was somewhat limited. ‘What did he do with the book?’ she asked.
Al’s eyes turned around slowly to look at her. Al spoke very carefully. ‘He bundled it up with other old books he had borrowed, and returned them. They were books he had borrowed from the British Museum. You know where that is.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘I should know,’ said Milena. There were the merest whispers of memory. It was as if she heard footsteps overhead through a ceiling. ‘I grew up there. I was raised there. On the Estate of the Restorers.’
‘There’s a wall,’ said Al.
Milena looked up.
‘A wall in you. The Museum lies on the other side of it.’
‘I know,’ said Milena. Her childhood lay on the other side of it.
‘And you’re going to go there tonight, now?’ Al could read her thoughts.
‘I’ve got to get that book. The Museum won’t be locked,’ said Milena. ‘Do you know the titles of the other books? That will tell me where to start looking.’
Al touched the tip of Milena’s nose. ‘Careful, Milena,’ he said. ‘You keep thrusting, you could hurt yourself.’
Milena remembered meeting Thrawn. It was her own fault. She kept thrusting.
The Restoration had come. Milena was convinced that people would want holograms, and she wanted the Babes to have them first. She wanted someone who knew about hologramming, someone who came cheap. So she found herself in a hostel, off the Strand. What sort of person is it, she wondered, who lives so far away from her own Estate? Milena knocked on a purple door. What an awful colour, she thought.
‘Come ih-hnnnn!’ sang a woman’s voice beyond the door. It sounded like a caricature.
The room was deep blue inside, full of water. From out of the Coral Reef walls, seaweed sprouted. Schools of thin black fish moved among it with zig-zag precision. White light wriggled like worms over the surface of everything, even Milena’s arms. A clump of seaweed spun around, and smiled with a manic, slightly daffy grin. It looked something like an amused death’s head, all sinew and bone and pop-eyes. ‘We are in a Coral Reef, after all,’ it said.