The prophecy was self-fulfilling. She looked at Mike Stone, at the way he moved. He was very tall, and very slim, with coathanger hips, and his muscles seemed to have been pulled too tight, like piano wire. I had heard Americans were starched, she thought. This one looks like he’s ironed every morning. He’s being so proper and pukka and nice. Milena felt her cheeks clench.
He held up her orange juice in benediction. ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ he said. Then he looked at Milena with the complete seriousness of a child. ‘Wine is the blood of our Saviour,’ he said. ‘We should not drink it or any alcohol except in a spirit of communion.’
‘Ah,’ was all Milena managed to say. She took the drink from him, her arms bobbing in weightlessness like waterwings under water. Poor man, he’ll think I’m laughing at him. He’ll think I’m laughing at his religion. Milena was giddy with a desire to laugh. She turned away, to hide from him. She looked out of a living window, down onto the Earth below.
It was beige and blasted, white plains with blue mountains, discolorations like age spots, dry canyons like crows feet. The Bulge was in orbit over a desert. It moved beneath them, slowly drifting.
Milena thought of production schedules and holograms; she thought of Thrawn McCartney. Even that didn’t make her feel serious. Everything made her want to laugh; everything seemed funny. The weight of her life had been left below.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Mike Stone. Milena had a quick glimpse of him waddling closer to her, as if on slippery ice. He looked like an elongated penquin. ‘I look through this window and I say "Hallelujah!"’.
‘Hmmm?’ said Milena, not trusting herself to speak.
‘In five minutes, we’ll be over Mount Ararat. From up here, the outlines of Noah’s Ark are clearly visible.’
‘Mmmmmm!’ said Milena, trying to sound impressed.
‘Of course, Ararat would have been underwater for most of the Flood. We know how deep the Flood was: two-thirds of the highest mountain. Now. Mount Everest is 8,840 metres high, which means the Flood was 5,893.32 metres deep. Which is very nearly the height of Mount Ararat. Do you believe in reincarnation, Ms Shibush?’
‘Mmmm mmm,’ said Milena, shaking her head.
‘Neither do I,’ he said, and sipped milk through a straw. ‘Post-millenarian Baptists such as myself do not. But I have a thought I’d like to share with you. If only Noah survived, then he is the ancestor of us all. And we would have his memories stored in our racial subconscious. Many is the time that I’ve sat in this spacecraft, Ms Shibush, and felt that I was Noah. If there was another Flood, I could repopulate the Earth, grown by Chris from memory.’
‘Mmmmm,’ said Milena, as if giving the thought serious consideration.
‘I should explain. Chris is my Bulge. The name is short for Christian Soldier Two. The first one died. Would you like to see my snapping turtle?’
Mike Stone reached into the pocket of his jumpsuit and produced a live, suede-coloured snapping turtle. ‘Chris grew him for me. Had one since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.’ He held it out for Milena to examine. ‘He also tried to grow me back my old Army knife, but the blade was soft.’
Milena had to turn around to face him. He loomed over her with round and innocent eyes. A child, she thought, am I talking to a child. She was in extremis. Her cheeks were compressed, her stomach muscles were clenched, her back was held rigid. She did not laugh. But her eyes brimmed full. Tears of mirth slid down her cheeks.
Mike Stone fell silent. He looked at the tears on her face, and then down at the floor. Moved beyond words, he pressed the turtle into her hands. ‘It’s nice to know,’ he said, ‘that someone understands.’
The turtle bit her. It snapped, as it had done in childhood.
And Milena awoke, a child in England.
She woke up in her room in the Child Garden. On the windowsill, there was her candle, gutted and blackened, with a spread of wax on her breakfast plate. She had been reading in the night. The book, old and heavy, had slipped out of grasp, and worked its way down between the bedding and the wall.
It was summer, and there, beyond the old sashcord windows, was her tree.
The tree seemed to greet her every morning. It was very tall, but its long branches were delicate and hung airily down, almost like curtains, its leaves dappled into many colours by the sun. Its trunk was mottled; sections of its bark fell off like pieces of a puzzle. Milena knew its Latin name because she loved the tree: ailanthus altissima. The Chinese called it the Tree of Heaven.
Already it was hot. Sunlight streamed through the window. Behind her there was a sound of someone stirring. Milena turned. The two girls Milena shared the room with, Suze and Hanna, were still asleep. Their faces were as drained of personality as rice pudding. One of them had turned in her bed. They would be up soon. Milena wanted to avoid them.
She pulled back her quilt as quietly as possible and sat up. There was her old room. There were the orange walls; there were the old chipped skirting boards, lumpy with layers of paint. There was the fireplace that no longer fed into a chimney; there were the black urns of the charcoal heaters.
Milena the child did not want to move. Her eyes felt swollen and dusty. She had been reading most of the night. She wanted to fall back into the bed and sleep; but if she did that she would be trapped, with the others. As a kind of compromise, she reached for her book. If the others started to move, she would still be awake and could escape.
The book was a biography of Einstein. A few days before, Milena had heard other children talking about him. The ache had come over her: something else she didn’t know. So she had gone to the Museum and found this book. She opened it up and looked at the photographs. She saw a photograph of Einstein as a child. He already had a slight, amused smile. Beidermeir, the other children had called him — honest, clumsy furniture — because he always said exactly what he thought to his teachers. At sixteen, he pretended to have a nervous breakdown, to get out of Germany.
Suze groaned in her bed and turned away from the sunlight. Milena stood up, and pulled on her jumpsuit that had been laid out flat on the floor. Everything was arranged for a quick escape in the mornings. She pulled on her black slippers, and slipped out of the apartment. The apartment had three large rooms and slept nine girls. There was a blackboard in the front hall. A work rota was written on it: names in English, tasks in Chinese. Milena’s name was not on it. Milena was regarded as disabled, and exempt from tasks.
Milena went down to breakfast without washing first. She was famous for not washing, and was commonly supposed to smell. From the adenoidal way the other children sometimes talked to her, she knew they held their breath when she was near. But there was only one bath in the apartment for nine children. If Milena washed when they did, she would have to stand in line with them and try to think of things to say. Anything she said seemed to reveal the blankness of her memory, how little she knew.
Milena trudged down the steps, all the way to the basement. The other children used the front door of their stairway and walked to breakfast in sunlight. Milena walked the length of the building at its lowest level. Milena liked it there. The old mansion block had been built two hundred and fifty years before around a series of light wells. The light wells were tiled and streaked and looked somewhat lavatorial, but there was blue sky at their summit. Light was shed seven storeys down through the honeycomb of pipes and lift shafts. It was like a hidden city. The Senior kept his bee hives on the roof. Milena could see the bees overhead, plump black dots humming in the air, rising and falling. They were working. Milena liked their faithfulness.