Milena looked at the faces of her colleagues. The boy who played Berowne waited dull-eyed in his make-up and the beard he had grown for the part. He had to have a beard, for no other reason than that Berowne in the original production had had a beard. This recreation only served to preserve history. Milena lived in a culture that replicated itself endlessly, but which never gave birth to anything new.
The actors are bored, thought Milena, the children are bored, why, why, why are we doing this?
She muttered one of her thirteen lines. ‘Me, an’t shall please you.’ It plainly didn’t.
At least, she thought, I can change my boots.
It was nearly dark by the time Milena got back home. She walked beside the river on the pavements of the South Bank, which was feebly lit by alcohol lamps. There was still a smoky pinkness in the west.
The National Theatre of Southern Britain loomed out of the darkness and slight haze. Great sweeping buttresses of Land Coral and a cage of bamboo kept the old building on its feet.
The Zoo, it was called affectionately or otherwise. Milena was a registered member of the Theatrical Estate, but she was yet to work on any of the Zoo’s main stages. It had a restaurant that was always open, called the Zoo Cafe. Actors could not sun themselves to feed. It made their skins too purple, too dark, and ruined them for Shakespeare and the classics. Actors had to be pale, for the sake of historical accuracy. They had to eat food and were nearly always hungry.
Milena went to the Zoo Cafe when she was lonely or could not face cooking on her one-ring alcohol stove. It was something of a homeopathic cure for loneliness. Other people sat talking at tables, leaning back to laugh, brilliant young actors or the well-dressed, imperturbable children of Party Members. Milena watched them hungrily as she moved forward one step at a time in the queue for hot water.
The fashion in everything was for history. People’s minds were choked with it. Young people wore black and pretended to be the risen corpses of famous people. The Vampires of History they called themselves. Their virus-stuffed brains gave them the information they needed to avoid anachronisms. It was a kind of craze.
The Vampires only came out at night, when there was no sun to sweeten their blood. They had to eat too, but they could afford meals of historic proportions. Milena could only afford a seafood pasta, cloned squid tissue on cooling noodles. The great, heaped plates of the Vampires turned her shrivelled stomach. She looked away.
Milena saw Cilia, an actress with whom she had achieved a chilly kind of acquaintance, sitting at a freshly vacated table. Cilia had just finished kissing a number of cheeks goodbye. Cilia knew everybody, even Milena.
‘Who are you this evening?’ Milena asked her, putting down her tray.
Cilia was in black, with white pancake makeup and dark vampire shadows around her eyes. ‘Just me,’ answered Cilia. ‘This is supposed to be me when I rise from my grave.’
‘Someone is playing themselves for a change,’ said Milena.
‘At least you know you’re not being cast against type,’ said Cilia, lightly. She was well on her way to becoming an Animal — a well known performer.
‘You know I’m in this boring play,’ said Milena. She began to wash her cutlery in a mug of hot water. ‘Do you know any way I can change my costume? I hate my boots.’
‘You can’t change your costume if it’s part of the original production. You’d be violating history.’
‘The boots squelch. It’s supposed to be funny.’
Cilia shrugged. ‘You could go to the Graveyard.’
A Vampire joke? Milena looked at Cilia, narrow-eyed. Life had taught Milena to be wary of humour.
‘The Graveyard,’ repeated Cilia, in a voice that indicated that Milena knew very little indeed. ‘It’s where they dump the old costumes no one wants. They’re not even on record.’
‘You mean I can just take them out? No director’s approval?’
‘Yup. It’s in an old warehouse under a bridge.’ Cilia was telling Milena how to get there, when two Vampires swept up to the table in twentieth century clothes: a black tuxedo, and a black-beaded dress.
Party Members — Tarries. The boy wore spectacles, another affectation, and had something in his nose to make his nostrils flare. His hair was combed back and his make-up was green, to make him look ill.
‘Good evening,’ he said, looking sour, his accent American. ‘We’ve managed to escape Virginia. She is busying herself listing all the ways in which Joyce is a bad writer. Her jealousy is so nakedly evident, I was embarrassed.’
The woman with him was trying to smile, under a low cloche hat. The smile wavered pathetically. ‘Tom?’ she said. His back was turned towards her. ‘Speak to me. Can’t you speak? Speak?’
‘T S Eliot and Vivien!’ exclaimed Cilia, and complimented them. ‘Instant. Complete.’ The couple did not relax out of their roles. Is there so little of yourselves left? thought Milena.
‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,’ the boy said, holding out his hand towards Milena. It was Vampire sociability. He wanted to know who Milena was playing.
‘Who am I?’ Milena responded with deadpan hostility. She did not take his hand. ‘Oh. In life, I was a textile factory worker in nineteenth century Sheffield. I died at twelve years old. I’m a rather bad vampire because I have no teeth. But I do have eczema and rickets.’
The Vampires made excuses and left. ‘Well. That sent them packing,’ said Cilia.
‘I know,’ sighed Milena. Why did she find so many things unacceptable? ‘Is there something wrong with me, Cilia?’
‘Yup.’ said Cilia. ‘You’re prissy.’ She mused for a moment. ‘And… obsessive.’ She nodded with decision. Then, to make it sweeter, she said, ‘La, la la.’ It was a nonsense expression. It meant that everything was the same, everything was a song.
‘Obsessive?’ questioned Milena. It was a new arrow to her bow of self-recrimination.
‘You’re still washing that fork,’ said Cilia. ‘You melted all of mine. When you visited, remember?’
‘And prissy?’
‘Severe,’ added Cilia, nodding again in agreement with herself.
Milena had gone through a phase of dunking she was in love with Cilia. Oh, woman, if only you knew what was on my mind!
‘I suppose that does sum it up,’ sighed Milena. It was bad enough to suffer from Bad Grammar, but to be called prissy with it! She contemplated her cold squid, and decided that she preferred hunger. ‘Excuse me.’ She stood up and walked rather unsteadily into the night.
‘You did ask me. Milena? You did ask!’ Cilia called after her. Cilia always spoke without thinking. She only acted on stage.
Milena walked out on the Hungerford Footbridge and looked at the river. It churned in the moonlight, muddy and smelling of drains. The eddies made by the pylons of the bridge swirled with garbage and foam. Milena yearned for some leap away from herself, away from the world.
And then over Waterloo Bridge a great black balloon rose up from its mooring by the river. It made no sound except for a whispering of air, like wind blowing over the moors. Its cheeks were puffed out, and it propelled itself gently, by blowing. It was borne up in silence, moving with the grace of a cloud towards — where? China? Bordeaux? Milena wanted to go with it. She wanted to be like it, huge and unthinking with nothing to do but be itself, carried by the wind.
She was young. She thought she was old. On the South Bank, the windows of the Zoo Cafe were full of candlelight and Vampire silhouettes and the sound of laughter. They were all young and soft, and they had no time, and so they hated the silence, the silence in themselves that had yet to be filled by experience.
Some of them were driven to make noise, were kept jumping by something that was alive inside them. Others like Milena, cleared the decks and waited for something to happen, something worthwhile to do or to say. They loathed the silence in themselves, not knowing that out of that silence would come all the things that were individual to them.