by Geoff Ryman
'I wasn't talking to the seal.'
'My name is Milena. Perhaps no one told you that.'
'OK. Milly. You work at that place.'
'The National Theatre of Southern Britain. Yes, I do.'
'Could you tell my daughter please what the attitude of that place is towards GEs? For instance, are they ever going to let her sing there?'
Was that Rolfa's ambition? Milena's heart sank for her. Rolfa, Rolfa, you won't get to sing at the Zoo by hiding in tunnels. Milena looked at her. Rolfa reached thoughtfully for her wine, eyes focused inwards.
Milena answered the father's question. 'They probably won't, no,' she said, softly.
'Hey, Rolfa, we're talking about you. Did you hear that? Rolfa!' He slammed the table. Rolfa jumped, along with the glasses and the silverware. 'Look at yourself, sometime, girl. They're never going to let you sing, you're covered in fur.'
Rolfa picked up her silver knife and fork and began to eat again, in silence.
'Your daughter is a better singer than almost anyone at the National Theatre.' Milena spoke warily. 'She could also become a very fine composer.' Milena looked at Rolfa's face for any sign of surprise. The face remained a mask. 'If she ever got any help or training or encouragement...' Milena broke off. She's had to do it all by herself, Milena thought. She's had to do it all alone.
'Is that true?' Zoe asked, leaning forward.
Milena's eyes seemed to swell like small balloons about to burst. She could only nod in answer.
'Can you tell me why she's such a fat slob?' the father asked.
'Because her father is,' replied Milena. She felt like spitting at him.
He saw that and liked Milena for it. He laughed, showing his canine fangs. 'Hell yes,' he said, and belched.
'What does she do all day?' Zoe asked, concerned.
'I'm sorry, I'm not prepared to talk about Rolfa as if she isn't here.'
The father answered Zoe's question. 'She just hangs around. She thinks something's going to happen. Some angel's going to come down or something.' He looked back at Milena. 'She's wasted enough time. And money. End of summer, she goes to the Antarctic'
'Antarctic? You mean the South Pole?' Milena was rendered stupid by shock. 'Why?'
'Because,' the father said, his voice going wheedling and sarcastic. 'That is where we make our money.'
Milena found that she was smiling, smiling with the absurdity of it and with anger. 'What is Rolfa going to do in the Antarctic?'
'Work for a change,' said her father. 'We're not like you people. We owe each other things. With us a woman does the same job as a man or we kick her butt until she does. She's going to Antarctica before the New Year...' The father began to chuckle, 'or I tear her head off.'
'I think that's the worst thing I've ever heard,' said Milena.
'You're a Squidge,' said the father with a shrug. 'Your mind's infected. It's full of germ's. Nobody infects our minds. Nobody tells us what to do. So. You call us — what — "an intelligent related species". Personally, I think we're the last human beings left, but that's OK, because if we aren't defined as human beings, then we don't have to obey your crazy laws. We don't have to have our heads pumped full of disease, we all live to a decent age, and we do what the hell we want when the hell we want to do it. And you know what, Squidge? You people find that very useful. You find it very useful to have people who aren't part of your little exercise in mind control.'
Milena felt the icy breath of the truth.
The father unclipped a column of adding machine paper from himself and examined it. 'So,' he said, slightly distracted. 'What we're talking about here is legal definitions. My daughter over there is saying, I want to make bee-ooo-ti-ful music' His voice was full of scorn. 'She hangs around with Squidges, she wants to be a Squidge. She gets herself defined as a Squidge, it could mess up our whole little system. You think we're going to let her do that?'
'No,' said Milena, almost inaudibly.
'Damn right,' said the father. He was finished with the paper. He crumpled it up and threw it onto his plate.
Rolfa still ate, slowly, carefully, eyes fixed on her food. Well, Rolfa, thought Milena. Do you have anything to say? I can't stop them, Rolfa. If you let them do it to you, I can't stop them.
'Going to Antarctica is like going to school for us,' said Angela. 'It's something everybody does. Maybe meet a nice man.' She was trying to sound bright and encouraging. Her father began to key in figures. There was a whizz of paper.
Rolfa, you are a great lump. Milena felt betrayed. The meat in her mouth went round and round. Why am I eating this? I don't need to eat. She spat the seal cutlet out onto her plate. That's what I think of you all.
'I can get you an omelette,' offered Zoe.
I don't need to talk either. Milena shook her head. She drank. The wine was sour and sharp, which seemed appropriate. May you all freeze in hell. Why am I sitting here?
Milena finished her wine, throwing it back down her gullet, and stood up. Rolfa finally moved, turning suddenly toward her.
'It's all right! You don't need to move,' said Milena. She looked at the family. 'Enjoy your meal,' she told them, and left. As she went down the stairs, she began to run. She ran to the door and threw off the coat. The carpet had crystals of ice along its fibres. Who needs winter? Milena pulled open the front door and left it hanging open, and plunged into human temperatures, the warm blanket of summer air. She still had on the indigent gloves.
She walked, mind raging, so angry she couldn't think. The tragedy loomed around her, so vast that it seemed part of the iron railings, and the classical Kensington porticos, and chimneys against the sky, part of the other people who passed her, hunched and hesitant, as if the pavements were too narrow. She walked round and round in circles through the unfamiliar streets.
She found herself back in front of the Polar house, all creamy, ice-blue in the summer night. Something broke.
'Rolfa!' she shouted. 'Rolfa! Rolfa!' Her voice went shrill and she picked up an edge of pavement and hurled it towards the house.
'I'm here,' said a voice. 'Ssssh.'
A shape, a shadow of a head through an open window on an upper floor. Rolfa had been sitting all alone in the dark.
Milena waited in the silence, in the moonlight, hugging herself. She stamped her feet with impatience and to get the blood flowing in her icy toes. Then there was a quiet clunk, and Rolfa stepped out the front door, carrying something, a blanket. She was back in her shorts and cloth shoes.
She came sideways, wary, as if on broken plates, cringing. Frightened of me, frightened of everybody. When Rolfa was close, Milena hit her.
'You let them! You let everybody. You're going to let them do it and you don't have the right. You going to spend your time breaking rocks? What a bloody stupid waste!'
Rolfa looked back at her forlornly, and Milena heard the sound of wind in the trees.
'Don't just stand there.'
More silence, and applause from the leaves.
'Do something!' Milena's hands were raised around her head, fingers spread like claws.
Rolfa hugged her. Milena was suddenly enfolded in long, soft, warm arms, and she was pressed against Rolfa's stomach. 'Sssh, Little One, ssssh,' she said.
The edges of Milena's vision were going black and grainy. I'm going to faint, thought Milena. She meant it as a joke, to make it ridiculous, so it wouldn't happen. Then her knees gave way. I really am going to faint, she thought. Real people don't faint.
'Ooowwgot ta sssip owwn,' she said. She was trying to say she had to sit down. Suddenly she felt herself lifted up. Her stomach felt weighted down and she thought she was going to vomit. She saw the moon dip and dive about the sky like a swallow, and she felt herself being laid out on the grass. She settled into it and went utterly still.
'Little Ones shouldn't drink too much,' said Rolfa.
Milena wished that her clothing were undone. She wanted to put the very tips of her fingers onto the palm of Rolfa's han
d. She couldn't find it. All she felt was grass. Then there was darkness.
Had Rolfa kissed the top of her head? Had she run her fingers through Milena's hair?
chapter five
LOW COMEDY
(JUST US VAMPIRES)
When Milena awoke, she was cured. She had had enough.
She woke up in her own bed, in the little room in the Shell. How did I get home? she wondered. She didn't remember. She sat up in bed. Her back was stiff and there was a comprehensive pain in the bones of her head, all around her eyes and temples.
Milena no longer wanted Rolfa. The very thought of Rolfa, of her smell, of her teeth, now made Milena feel a bit ill. The thought of them had become associated with pain. Sick with love, Milena had now become sick of it.
Nothing like a course of aversion therapy, she thought and was ambushed by a wet, explosive sneeze. She wondered dimly what the time was and her viruses told her. Oh Marx and Lenin! she thought. I've got a performance of Love's Labour's this morning. I've missed it. She felt relieved. Missing a performance was the right thing to do. She groaned, and lay back down on her bed.
Then the door opened and a stranger came in.
She's made a mistake, Milena thought, all the rooms look alike. She managed a crumpled smile of tolerance and waited for the woman to realise she was in the wrong room. The woman began to use Milena's towel. She was a doe-eyed female with black hair and black eyes and beautiful nut brown skin, not Rhodopsin. She was enormous.
Then Milena saw that mere was stubble all over the woman's bare arms and shoulders, and criss cross cuts from a razor.
'I shaved,' said the woman, with a forlorn familiar voice.
'Rolfa?' Milena sat up in bed.
'I decided to do a bunk,' said Rolfa. She shuffled forward and sat on the bottom of the bed. 'I had to carry you back.' Shorn of her pelt, Rolfa had an odd face. It was fleshy and somehow chinless, with a very small, thin mouth that seemed too deeply indented between nose and chin. But the black and liquid eyes were the same.
'They don't know I'm here,' said Rolfa. 'Can I stay?'
Milena was not sure what she felt. 'Yes, yes of course. What have you brought with you?' She meant clothes, shoes, toothbrush...
'Piglet,' said Rolfa, and picked up a shapeless lump of felt from the floor. It was some kind of stuffed toy. 'Piglet goes everywhere with me.' Rolfa sat Piglet on her lap facing her and looked at it fondly. Even from where Milena stood, Piglet smelled of biscuit crumbs.
'You didn't bring anything else with you?' Milena asked softly.
'Wasn't anything else to bring.' Rolfa smiled at her. 'I took some money. They'll say I stole it.' She looked back down at Piglet. 'I did.'
'Will they come looking for you?'
Rolfa nodded. 'They're scared. Papa will be scared. The Family says his genes are impure because he's so short. He'll try to keep me quiet, not let them know. He'll try to find me himself. We'll be safe for a while. We'll be OK for a while.' She looked at Milena and seemed to be making a promise. 'After that, they'll call out the bloodhounds.'
'I'd better go and tell people not to let anyone know where I live.'
'There's a problem,' said Rolfa and turned. Underneath the cheap new blouse there was a dark swelling of fur. Rolfa held up a razor. 'I couldn't reach,' she said.
Milena came back from the showers with a bucket of hot water. They were silent and awkward with each other. Rolfa took off her blouse, but held it over herself, something she had never done when she had fur. Her skin had been stripped, cut, outraged. There were long straggles of fur that the razor had missed. Milena sawed at the fur on her back with the kitchen knife and used soap from the showers to get up a lather. Then she used the razor. Rolfa mewed quietly as the hair came off in soapy clumps. 'I'm cold,' she complained. To Milena, she felt hot, feverish. 'We'll put you under a blanket,' she said. She left Rolfa wrapped up on the bed and looking at her with a trust that made Milena doubt herself.
Well, Milena thought. I've got her. Now what do I do with her? The gift had been too sudden, too complete.
Milena went to each of the overstaffed information desks at the Zoo. She asked the Tykes who worked mere not to tell anyone where she lived. 'Say you've never heard of me,' she told the children. 'Say there is no record of me.'
Milena did not know the forms that love could take. She lived alone. She could not remember her childhood friends. Her memories of her mother were faint; she saw her mother only as a dim, warm, mauveness. How did people live with love from day to day? Milena was full of misgivings.
Milena came back to her tiny room, with its bed, its sink, its cooker. It was now covered in paper. Rolfa had found the books and papers that had been rescued from her ruined nest. Rolfa lay on her stomach, filling the floor. Broken-backed books and loose sheets of paper filled the sink. They were piled on the cooker. There was a smell of burning. Fire! thought Milena in alarm and went to the cooker. The papers were untouched, though there was an acrid stench of scorching. How, wondered Milena did she manage to do this?
'Look what I found,' Rolfa said and held up a book. It looked rumpled, as if it had been left out in the rain, and there were ring stains on the cover.
'Oh,' said Milena. The title was unreadable.
'Do you think,' Rolfa asked, 'that you could possibly call me Pooh?'
The word Pooh meant something very specific and unpleasant to Milena. It certainly did not mean teddy bear.
'Why on earth would you want me to call you that?' Milena asked.
'Pooh,' repeated Rolfa. 'Pooh. You must have heard of Pooh. He's a bear. He's in a book.'
A GE novel? Milena had sudden visions of an entire Polar literature. 'Is it new?' she asked.
'No, no,' said Rolfa and stood up. 'Here.' She showed Milena a drawing of Pooh.
'He's not part of the culture,' said Milena, meaning there was no virus of him. She reads, thought Milena in admiration, unheard-of books.
'You could call me Pooh. And I could call you Christopher Robin.'
'Why?' said Milena warily.
'Here, look. That's Christopher Robin.'
There was a drawing of a small neat person with a page-boy bob and shorts and sandals and loose blouse and a large umbrella. There was no doubt. Milena did indeed look exactly like Christopher Robin.
'No,' said Milena.
'I was going to call you Eeyore,' said Rolfa. 'He's grumpy too.'
'I'll tell you what,' said Milena, 'If I call you Pooh' — it really was very unpleasant — 'do you promise, promise not to call me Christopher Robin?'
Rolfa nodded solemnly, up and down. Her hair still dangled into her eyes. She blinked. She saw Milena looking at the state of the room.
'Pooh's very untidy,' said Rolfa.
'Yes,' said Milena nodding.
'But she does have other qualities.' Rolfa paused and bit her lip. 'I'm sorry about the beans.'
'What about the beans?'
'I was feeling peckish, and all I could find was some bamboo full of beans, so I tried to warm it up.'
Underneath most of the score for Peer Gynt, Milena found her only saucepan. Light, crispy, burned-black beans were now a permanent part of it.
'I'll buy you another one,' said Rolfa.
'Good,' said Milena, wiping the charcoal from the tips of her fingers.
She took a deep breath, to calm herself, and began to explain the house rules. Dirty laundry in this bag here. Clean clothes in this bag. Dirty dishes there. Rolfa nodded in eager agreement. Oh yes, they must always wash up, just after dinner. Why, thought Milena, don't I believe you?
'I'm hungry,' said Rolfa, with tame expectation.
They took a water taxi upstream. The tiny steam engine sputtered, and clouds of vapour rolled upwards in the shape of doughnuts. They went to the Gardens beside the river, where no one would think to look for them, on the other side of Battersea.
There was an old Buddhist shrine there, one of the first built in London. Milena and Rolfa ate lunch beside i
t, under a marquee. It was crowded and noisy, full of steam and the sizzling sounds of woks. People sat on benches, arguing with infants who kept trying to order different kinds of food. 'You always order for me!' the Tykes complained. 'I can do it myself!' The infants wanted the food to be bland. 'No wonder you want everything blasted with pepper, you've burned your taste buds out!' complained one babe in arms. Outside, there were acrobats on the lawn. The babes refused to be distracted.
People walked hand in hand or leaned out over the river, shoulders touching. People live with each other, Milena told herself. Most people live with someone else. She felt a new admiration for the way in which they coped. It must be possible, she thought. There must be a way to do it. Watching other people in couples usually made Milena feel like a bottle with a message in it, washed up and left unread. Now, it began to make her feel a kind of kinship.
'What do we do now?' Rolfa asked, as if everything in this new world followed a polished routine.
They walked back along the other side of the river. There were children along the embankment, playing with hoops on moored barges. There was a traffic jam of carts heading back to the outreaches full of goods from the markets to be sold again. Young boys on them leaned back onto melons and played harmonicas. A circle of women sat cross-legged on the pavement, shoving slivers of bamboo into shoes. They were cobblers. A small blonde woman with spectacles and a thimble was talking. 'Well, my Johnny...' she began, her voice full of pride.
Rolfa and Milena sat in an old church in John Smith Square and listened to a choir rehearsing madrigals. They went to a market outside Westminster Abbey. Rolfa was hungry again. She bought some dried fish and munched it like candy. She bought a new saucepan and vegetables and bread and more fish. They walked through the August dusk, along Westminster Bridge, past fire-eaters, who blew sheets of flame toward the sky as children watched. Fat men in plaid shorts, Party members perhaps, laughed and passed money. There was to be an ostrich race across the bridge. Jockeys were trying to clamber up onto the backs of the birds. Hoods were snatched from the ostriches' eyes and they sprang forward. One of them spun in circles and then ran off in the wrong direction. There were cheers. For the first time she could remember, Milena felt young. She and Rolfa walked back to the Shell.
