The wind seemed to sweep light and sound with it. The sounds of grass and trees rose out of the ground and bore up the birds, rising up and breathing into the clouds, the clouds shedding light, making highways of dust and haze, everything exhaling warmth, the breath, the song of the earth. It was as if the spirit of her father had been sprung. He seemed to leap out into the world and expand, as if the elements that had made him had finally been set free, to rejoin the world.
Milena broke into a run. It was as if she were running with her father, a fat and waddling toddle, near to the ground, down the slope at gathering speed. She ran looking upwards. She threw out her arms, squealing, giddy, the world spinning. When she fell down, it was as if the grass had arms, to spread open and catch her. It was as if it caught her, laughing, and held her. Svoboda, said the earth.
‘Milena!’ a voice cried behind her. ‘Milena!’
Fear, like winged monkeys descending.
Milena felt herself snatched up from the grass, wrenched away from it. The grass seemed to reach out for her as her head tipped down and her bottom tipped up, as if she were weightless. She sickened, see-sawing to a fresh sense of balance. She didn’t want to look, she didn’t want to see, her mother’s face.
Her mother hit her. This was something new. Her mother hit her across her bottom, her dirty place of indignity and shame. Milena howled at this new and terrible thing. She howled and was tipped back upright. Her mother spoke to her. The voice was full of venom, hatred. Milena’s white leg was seized. Her white shoe was shaken at her. The grass had left green slashes across it, and on the new white trousers. Exchange. You could not expect to move through the world and not let it touch you. What was wrong with the marks of grass? At least the grass had never hit her.
Milena was whirled up and over the fence, as if by a cyclone. She was dumped, back where she belonged, on the other side of the gate. Her mother swept through it, and closed it, barred it. Milena could only see the columns of her trousered legs. She was struck again, across her bottom, and spun around by her shoulders. Howling with horror, her nose and mouth and eyes clogged, Milena was forced against her will to look at her mother. She looked at her with the mercilessness of a child.
There was this tall grey thing. Its body worked in completely different ways from Milena’s, all sharpness and angles. When it moved, there was a nauseating, lurching moment of hesitation. It was deciding. Have I moved into the future yet? Am I still in the past?
Where, where is my Now?
It never quite located itself. It would stop, start, stop again, flickering in and out of time, as if crossing in and out of it, never quite landing in Now.
As if in a dream, when the worst thing is about to happen and cannot be prevented, the infant began to look up, tracking up the dry wall of the legs, the lumpy sweater with the long extensors for arms, spider’s arms. And the hands! They were riddled with veins and sticklike inner workings. They were not chubby and soft and round and accepting. The very skin of them was harsh, worn, as if it had grown a shell. The hands looked like crabs, hungry, working.
Then up to the face.
And the infant Milena saw all the desolation there, and she burst into fresh wails and cries of horror.
The face was wrinkled and stretched and bony, blasted with dryness and lipstick. The eyes were dead, as if someone had tied a mask across them. The only thing in them was baffled loss, helplessness, and anger, anger and sorrow. The flesh hung, exhausted by the battle against itself and the world. The flesh began to shake, like the trees.
And Milena’s mother suddenly crouched down into a tight bundle, as if trying to become a child again herself, as if she herself were a child needing to be comforted. The crabs of her hands scuttled across Milena’s back, and pulled Milena to her. Milena felt slimy tears across her own innocent cheek, and felt her mother quake with a loss that was beyond Milena’s understanding.
Milena felt the strange, inextricable tangle that was her mother, and felt the loss beyond naming, and Milena began to cry too, for everything: for her mother, for her father, for the love and the pain and the warfare between them, and for the world. Beyond the fence, the fields still glowed. The gate was barred.
‘It’s called,’ said Milena, the director, ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters.’
She was sitting in the Zookeeper’s office. She was very concerned about her new grey suit. She was sitting crosslegged on stuffed bags, and the knees of her new trousers would bag and crease. She worried about marks on cloth and braced herself for the reaction of the people around her.
They stared back at Milena, all expression on their faces suspended. They sat on the bags too. The bags were called Pears, and the people were pear-shaped, pears on Pears, their stomachs ballooning outwards. A large-boned woman sat folded across from Milena. Moira Almasy! thought the one who remembered, startled by the change. The woman’s hair seemed less grey, her face less creased, as if she had suddenly become well after an illness. She was younger.
Milton the assistant served tea in little cups on lacquered tables. The cups rattled and Milton insinuated with a smile. In the corner sat the Minister, now a scant but formal presence. His eyes were closed and he was perfectly still, his hands resting on his folded knees.
Courage, Milena the director told herself. ‘The opera is about…’ she said, and hesitated. ‘It’s about an invasion of aliens from outer space. They look like crabs, but can talk. Well, sing. The idea comes from an old video that Thrawn McCartney saw.’
The expression on the faces of the Pears had curdled from horror.
‘People like junk,’ said Milena. ‘In fact, they need junk. Junk is fun and harmless and makes no demands. People are starved of junk. Everything has been so terribly high-toned. I think if you ask the Consensus, it will tell you the same thing.’
Milena the director glanced at the Minister. He sat unmoved, unmoving.
‘It’s best to let the Consensus speak for itself,’ warned Moira Almasy.
‘What other social benefits can you claim for this?’ asked a man in the circle. ‘Except for the fact that it is, as you say, junk?’ He had an open, likeable face, a broad smile and hair that flopped over his forehead. Charles Sheer.
You weren’t so bad, Charlie, thought the Milena who was remembering. You just had other projects you wanted to promote. You wanted the money to go elsewhere. You didn’t think I was very talented. You were probably right.
‘First,’ said Milena the director, ‘no one in the cast will use viruses. This should be made very plain. People are going to become very frightened of viruses.’
That was the easy part.
‘Second, it will help people with their feelings of…’ the director prayed for a delicate word,’… distrust for the Chinese.’
Milena felt the room go still. There was an explosion of breath from Charles Sheer. But it is the truth, isn’t it Charlie? ‘I think you will find many people of British descent do not like the Chinese. They feel surpassed by them. Junk makes people feel good. So. This junk…’ Milena paused to gain both breath and spirit. ‘This work will be staged in the manner of classical Chinese opera. The music and the dancing will be classical Chinese opera.’
‘The crabs too?’ demanded Charles Sheer.
Moira Almasy was beginning to smile.
‘Of course,’ said Milena. ‘There are many precedents in the classical tradition of giant singing beasts — dragons for example. The spaceship will look like a Chinese dragon, in fact. It will land in the main courtyard of the Forbidden City. These will all be holograms created by Thrawn McCartney. Uh. No one has hologrammed scenes on this scale before, or from such a distance. We propose to use Hyde Park as the main stage. This will give us a chance to use to the full the new mind-imaging technology.’ Milena coughed. ‘The spectacle,’ she said hopefully, ‘should have some curiosity value.’