Milena stood her ground. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
Ponderously, the GE turned around. ‘Flitting off to see some of my chums,’ she explained. ‘We are going to a palace of amusement.’
Milena felt an eddy of misgiving. ‘Where?’
‘Across the river. It’s a pub. Do you drink beer?’
‘No,’ replied Milena.
‘Oh, that’s a shame. Perhaps they’ll make you some tea.’ Rolfa turned and began to shuffle on ahead. Milena considered simply staying where she was. No, she thought suddenly, I’m not going to let her think I’m afraid of anything. So she followed.
It was a bit like trying to keep up with a brontosaurus. Rolfa’s arms hung down by her sides, and her shoulders were hunched, and each shuffling step seemed both small and slow, but the distance covered was deceptively great. Milena sheltered from the sun and found she had nothing to say. Next time she asks, Milena promised herself, I will be busy.
They made their way through the ruins of Fleet Street. It was now an Estate for boatbuilders, with its own market.
Tykes with tough, demanding faces pushed burned cobs of corn at them, or cupfuls of roast chestnuts. ‘Miss! Miss! Just take one whiff for luck, Miss!’ Their older brothers and sisters baked straggly chicken in thick lengths of blackened bamboo, which they broke open for customers with chunks of rubble. Whole families lived under the stalls, mothers nursing or knitting. Little boys sat on street corners, turning the wheels of sewing machines, repairing pyjamas or underwear. Their baby sisters tugged at Milena’s sleeve, and she walked past them.
People seemed to find the two of them, Milena and Rolfa, funny. The way Milena walked, as if on slippery ice, her parasol and her gloves, all betrayed her fears and ambition. They made her absurd. Milena heard the children giggle. Life in the Child Garden had taught Milena to hear laughter as the sound of other people’s cruelty. Laughter made her fight.
Milena went cold and awkward. Her parasol caught on an awning and showered dust over a stall. The stall sold old plumbing and dusty glassware, the very dog-ends of history.
The stallowner laughed gracefully, hand over her heart. She meant that her things were so old that dust could not hurt them. To Milena, the laughter was a mystery, and she walked into the knobbed point of her parasol. There was more laughter.
Laughter followed them as they walked westwards to St Paul’s Cathedral, rising like a great domed egg. Then they turned north and walked past the Barbican, towards the Palace of Amusement.
The Palace of Amusement was a pub in the Golden Lane Estate. Milena’s nervousness increased. The Golden Lane Estate was for the Pit’s sewage workers.
The pub was called the Spread-Eagle, and the sign over it showed a man falling on his face. Milena had to step over drunks snoring on the broken pavement outside it. Even semi-consciously, they picked at the little crabs that patrolled their hairy chests. The sun had burned them the colour of bruises.
Inside, the Spread-Eagle was dark and cramped and the floor was made of bare, cracked concrete. It was varnished with spit and beer and dogturd from the street. It was full of skinny, naked men glossy with sweat. The whole place smelled of armpits.
It’s like something out of Dante’s Inferno, thought Milena.
‘Quite jolly once you’re sitting down,’ said Rolfa. ‘There we are. Oyez! Lucy!’ Rolfa shouted and made semaphore-sized signals with her arm.
There was an ugly squawk from the corner and someone jumped up and had to be restrained. Milena couldn’t quite see the people. They sat round a table in front of the glare from a window. They were lost in the light, but there was something horrible about them. Milena’s mind blotted them out and she looked away.
‘I shall wrestle with the bar staff,’ said Rolfa. ‘You go make yourself comfortable over there.’
You’re not leaving me! thought Milena in panic. Rolfa gave her a gentle push. ‘Go on,’ she said.
In a desperate fashion, Milena made her way through the sewage workers towards the shelter of the table. Disease, disease, disease, disease, her mind was ringing in terror. She clamped a gloved hand over her mouth, her nose was pointed at the ceiling, she was trying not to breathe. She could feel how slippery the arms and legs were around her. She was anointed with sweat. A man near the bar roared, his mouth full of cheese, and he picked up a jug of beer and poured it over his own head. Milena caught only a light cool spray from it. The drops clattered onto the floor like applause. She found the table, gripped the edges of a chair, and sat.
‘Hello, love,’ said a warm voice next to her ear.
Milena turned to see a terrible head, framed in unnaturally orange curls. The lips were covered with crumbled red cosmetic, there were only a few teeth in the mouth, and the face had gone soft, like overripe fruit. It was covered in lines and cracks.
‘My name’s Lucy, but my friends call me Loose. Ha-ha-ha!’ the voice barked.
Milena looked about her. A hunched and beaky man leaned around Lucy to look at her, black freckles over his muscular arms. His eyes were a watery blue and his face had collapsed into its own hollows and was veiled by a network of lines like a cobweb.
Milena felt her heart catch. They were old. These people were old. This was what age looked like.
‘Meow,’ said the old man.
‘You mustn’t mind Old Tone,’ said Lucy. ‘He hasn’t been the same since the war. Have you, love?’
War? What war? Milena wondered. Lucy wore a beige jacket that covered her arms. It was splattered in front and grimy around the cuffs. Her fingers were blackened. Across the table sat an identical couple in identical grubby grey suits, their arms linked. Both of them were completely bald. They looked like leaking balloons. One of them leaned forward and spoke to Milena in a low, sensible, confiding voice. She could not understand a single word.
‘OO er oi af ger whuh oi fough veh fink,’ he said with a concluding nod. He had a tiny, very black moustache painted onto his upper lip.
‘That makes sense,’ said Milena. He was speaking with the accent of a hundred years before.
They were Tumours.
Many diseases had cured cancer. One of them sealed the proto-oncogenes in Candy. Others produced proteins that coaxed cancerous cells into maturity and stopped them dividing.
But some of the cancers were new and viral and quick. The cures did not stop infected cells producing new copies of the cancer virus, and the virus spread with the flow of blood. A curious balance was struck in the bodies of some of the people who already had cancer. The cancer virus infected the body cell by cell in an orderly fashion. The cancers differentiated. They matured and ceased to proliferate in wild shapes.
What was left was a systematised tumour in the form of a healthy human being, with its memories, its feelings. As long as it was fed and avoided accidents, it would live. It was immortal.
The Tumours looked at Milena with friendly expectation.
‘Do… do… Have you come far?’ she asked the orange head.
‘In my time, love, in my time,’ Lucy chuckled darkly and gave a hearty wink.
‘And where do you live?’ Milena was wondering if the old creature had fleas. She wondered how far they could jump.
‘In the laundry,’ Lucy replied. ‘The room where they dry the clothes. You know…’ She made a circular motion with a crooked finger that was shiny and blue-grey. ‘I just slip in there of a night. Lovely and warm it is.’
She lived in the Estate laundry. Milena was appalled. She wondered what it meant for the supposedly clean sheets.