‘No. Why would I think that?’
‘Because you’re smiling again.’ Cilia had been made suddenly self-aware by the shock of the truth. She was not used to being self-conscious and was not very good at it. Her hands were all of a jumble. ‘Why haven’t you been cured? I thought they took sick people like you and cured them.’
‘There’s a reason for that,’ said Milena.
Cilia realised what she had just said and her eyes closed with shame. ‘Milena. I want you to know I did not mean that the way it sounded.’
‘The reason I have not been Read,’ said Milena, holding to the point, ‘is that the Consensus knows perfectly well what I am, and has decided not to Read me. Because it has a use for me as I am.’
Cilia paused. ‘Is that what Bob says?’
God, she’s bright.
‘How can you say you don’t know me,’ said Milena. ‘When you have everything worked out?’
‘Because I can never be sure if it’s me that’s talking or one of my characters. Occupational hazard.’
And a bloody fine actress too.
‘I always catch myself repeating my lines as if I’d just thought of them myself.’ Cilia took a swig of cold coffee and made a face at it. ‘Does Mike know he’s being used as a cover?’
A flash of steel in there somewhere too. I really do like you, Cilia, very much.
‘He wants the beautiful story too,’ said Milena. ‘For him, the story is the reality. I said no a hundred times. I said I am not interested a hundred times. He didn’t even hear. He just kept on acting as if we were courting.’
‘Yuck,’ said Cilia.
‘I said that, too. But after a while, I began to think he was a kind of daffy. Deep down daffy.’
‘Is that why you like me?’
‘Only partly. Don’t worry, Cill. I’ve thought about this a lot. I think it’s the right thing to do.’
Cilia reached across and took more of Milena’s cake. It was made of slump protein and carrots. Milena rescued her glass of what was officially known as milk. People sometimes called it Seepage.
Cilia seemed to be mulling over the cake. ‘Do you know you’re going to be made a People’s Artist?’
‘What?’ Milena’s breath caught.
‘Well, they’ve got to do it. They’re investing more in the Comedy than just about anything else. Not just the British Consensus, but the European Consensus. They can’t do that for any old Vampire. Of course they’ve got to make you a People’s Artist.’
‘Cilia have you heard any rumours about this?’
‘It’s just logic, Milena. It’s how the system works. You know that, you play it better than anyone.’ Another large chunk of Milena’s carrot cake disappeared. Cilia was wrong. Milena did not play the system.
‘I never wanted that Cill. I never asked for that.’ Milena found she still did not want it.
They give you that, they own you, or they think they do.
Outside in the night, more bells began to ring. The sound seemed to be part of the starless sky. Someone else was ill.
Bloody Consensus. I always end up doing what you want.
The horror seeped back into the room, like an inky fluid from out of the corners. Milena thought of Thrawn McCartney. I went to space and thought I had left it all behind me. Now it’s down to earth with a bump. They’re letting people the. They will be killing them next.
Milena stood up. ‘I can’t just sit here,’ she told Cilia.
She walked to Milton’s table. Unease flashed around the uncertain faces. They’re a little bit frightened of me, she realised.
‘Milton,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you.’
‘Sorry, love?’ Again the bulging corneas.
Milena pulled up a chair beside him. Cilia stood next to her, and put a hand on her shoulder.
‘Milton, when I was in space, I worked with an Angel. I was Terminal with him, and I worked with him in the Fifth. I’ve just talked to Billy, who was with me in Love’s Labour’s. He’s a Bee, and he told me what it’s like and I swear to you, that the Bees see something not all that different from what the Angels see. Milton don’t look away, just listen. There’s nothing wrong with the Bees. They’re perfectly healthy. They just see the world in a different way. We can live with them. Point two. A lot of the people who get sick with other viruses are going to be people we know, people from our Estate, Milton. The Zoo has a lot of money. Can’t we set up some kind of hospice, some place to take care of them?’
Milton shrugged and grinned. It really was all beyond him. I’ll have to talk to Moira, thought Milena.
Milton’s girlfriend spoke. Her voice was raw. ‘What’s happening now must be what the Consensus wants,’ she said.
‘What the Consensus wants is wrong,’ said Milena. The sentence came to a point like a dagger.
The girl gave an incredulous smile. ‘You can’t say that!’ She looked around at all the other climbing Vines. ‘You’re saying that everyone in the world is wrong?’
‘Yes,’ said Milena, eyes hard on her. She started to nod, in realisation. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ It was, she now understood, what she had been saying all of her life. The patch of luminous skin on her hand began to glow, fiercely, without her even realising it.
It took a lot of extra work, a lot of sitting on dull committees. It took Moira Almasy to help her. It was not in its details an interesting story. But Milena managed to save the Bees and help the sick. ‘Magic,’ said Cilia.
Milena remembered a dream.
She was weightless in space, strapped to the bed to stop her drifting away. A headband held her down to the pillow.
Out of that uneasy sleep, out of the light and the silence, Heather the Reader of Marx seemed to wheel her way towards Milena. Heather grinned in her wheelchair, amused at herself. Heather was wearing the robes of Virgil.
‘Look who’s here to see you,’ Heather said, beaming behind her pebble-thick spectacles.
There was a voice in the light, in the silence. It spoke without words, but Milena recognised it. In the dream, she felt tears in her eyes, felt herself held in a great warm hug. Without words, the voice seemed to tell her to do Dante in her own way. It was giving her permission.
Milena saw Dante walking along the Embankment Gardens. His eyes, his nose, his chin, were all fierce, dagger-like. He had been made political by the events of his age. He was a Vampire of History. He was going to the Zoo Cafe. He met the Animals of the Zoo, and saw mirrored in their eyes his own greed, his own rage, his own cunning. He climbed up the steps, and the sun rose over the roof of the Zoo; and the Sun was God. Rolfa’s music said it was so.
And Dante moved through steam from the coffee tureen to a bench, and sat across from Cilia, and she judged him. Prissy. Obsessive. Severe, she seemed to say. But she was like a spectre, her high voice ghostly rather than womanly. This was a Virgil who was neither man nor woman. There is a place she said, where there are spare clothes. And she led Dante through a gate, into the Graveyard, and the gate closed and locked. They fought their way through the darkness and the souls of the dead that looked like old and withered clothes, until they found a light.
Rolfa sat singing at a desk. Lucy was with her, swinging her feet.
We’re Beatrice, said the voice.
It really is you, isn’t it, Rolfa? You really are here with me. Who else could orchestrate the Comedy? Who else could come marching back from the dead down a highway in my head? It’s a highway made of scar tissue and it links me to the Consensus. And that’s where you are, isn’t it love? You’re still there somewhere, singing in the dark.