Nothing was spoken. There was nothing to be said. Such a moment just is.
He moved closer.
‘Hey. Want some more?’
Shortly before dawn three Heads came in quietly, deposited Fiorinda’s shoes and her bag, and stood looking at their boss and the babe. ‘If the length of courtship is related to the length of his sexual relationships,’ remarked Bill, ‘they should be together for about a thousand years.’
‘I told him to do that five years ago,’ sighed George. ‘The kid’s wearing the yellow ribbon, so she’s not interested in sex, which does not stop other blokes doing her. He says he can wait, she’s too young and too hurt. I say don’t be a fuckin’ idiot. Be nice to her, romance her a bit and take ’er down. Do it now or you’ll miss your chance. You’ll be forgiven, any fool can see. But would he lissen? He never lissens.’
‘Hell to pay when Ax finds out,’ said Bill.
‘Yeah. Well, at least they had their big night out. Can’t honestly grudge ’im that.’
‘Sometimes the cards aren’t worth a dime,’ said Peter, ‘If you don’t lay them down.’
The other Heads groaned softly and hauled him away.
Fiorinda didn’t mind them coming in. If things had turned out the way maybe they should have turned out, no doubt she’d often have opened her eyes in this bed, in these arms, to find three brother Heads looking kindly down. She pressed herself closer against Sage’s side: so happy in this moment, so completely, hopelessly without any solution for the morning, that really, now would be a good time to go to sleep and never wake up.
But if you have to wake up, in a disaster movie on the wrong side of the end of the world, and with a bone-crushing hangover, it helps, it certainly helps if you can arrange to do so with the Minister for Gigs wrapped around your back, his lovely mouth nuzzling your spine. Eyes closed, without leaving the soft chemistry of sleep, she turned in his arms, skin warm against skin (she’d been allowed to take off her underwear eventually), and slid her knees up his ribs, so she could take his cock inside in one smooth rush—
The spurt of a struck match.
Ax was sitting on the end of the bed.
‘How did you get in here?’ gasped Sage.
‘Talked to George. He wasn’t happy about it, but I persuaded him.’
‘Oh bugger,’ said Fiorinda. ‘We forgot you would be able to do that.’
She had grasped in one icy, drowning instant that the only possible way to handle this was to see the funny side. But no. Not a chance. The two men stared at each other, sheer murder on the one side, sheer horror on the other.
‘I suppose I have only myself to blame,’ said Ax. He stubbed out his newly lit cigarette, in the ashtray he had carefully provided for himself, jumped off the bed and slammed out of the room.
Sage was dressed in twenty seconds, and about to fly out of the door before he spun around. Fiorinda was hunting for her clothes, set mouth and averted eyes saying she’d always known it would be like this. Always known it, and now she’s finally been added to Aoxomoxoa’s mille e tre of course he’s going to leap up and run. No big deal.
‘Ah, shit.’ He flew back, grabbed her, hugged her tight, ‘God. Fee, darling, it’ll be all right. Stay here. Don’t be frightened. I’ll talk to him, I will sort it. I will.’
It was raining. When Sage caught up, Ax was storming along a staybehinds’ footpath through the fields that bordered Travellers’ Meadow, head down, hair flying in dark wings around his jaw. He gave Sage one savage, naked glance and kept going.
‘Ax, hey Ax, listen to me. Look, we were drunk, these things happen—’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Please, Ax. It was a drunken night, nothing serious. Talk to me—’
‘Talk to you? Where the fuck have you been since March, you bastard?’
The path led through pasture where cows were grazing, indifferent to the weather, among the unburied corpses of cars that had been trashed in Dissolution Summer, awash now in grass and flowers, and then swerved into the back of a scrapyard on Richfield Avenue, where indigestible lumps of the old Leisure Centre were lying about waiting to be reused. Nowhere further to go except onto the road. Betrayed, Ax turned in fury and sat on a chunk of concrete, staring ahead of him.
‘I couldn’t help that.’
‘Oh, fuck. Not the fucking giant toddler line. You knew what you were doing. You had it all calculated. You let me give you the spiel, you pretend to go along, because you’ll get to sleep with her, and then you’re off. King of the one night stand, and I don’t care about me, but how could you do that to her—’
‘I did not! That’s not! That is NOT what happened!’
‘If you didn’t plan to leave the next morning, what was your bike doing there?’
‘What? Ax, that is fucking paranoid. Look, the bike was there because I rode it down when we did the Unmasked filming, and I came back in George’s car. Fuck’s sake—’
Ax refused to look at him. The rain fell fine and straight. Sage walked around in a caged circle, wanting to leave, unable to leave: finally sat on another chunk of concrete.
‘Oh God. Ax, listen. When I said yes to you, I meant it. I desperately wanted that to work, but I… I love her too much. I couldn’t stand it. I DID NOT plan to leave like that. I didn’t plan to behave the way I’ve been behaving. I thought I’d be okay. But it was so fucking…painful. I’ve been trying to get back to being normal… Fuck, last night I—’
He didn’t know why he’d come chasing after the guy. This wasn’t going to help Fiorinda. The only way he could truly help Fiorinda was by bowing out, leaving them both the fuck alone. Unfortunately that’s impossible, we’re the Triumvirate.
‘Shit. I don’t feel like getting into this discussion; you don’t want to know, it’s useless, it leads nowhere.’ He doubled over, head propped on his hands to hide the tears. ‘I can’t talk to you. I don’t know why the fuck I’m trying.’
Ax had come to Reading, straight from a very tough night, to find the whole site buzzing with the exploits of the nation’s wild-cat glamour puss and the amazingly transformed Aoxomoxoa. With Ax cast, in their flashy piece of MTV, as the dull, controlling, workaholic cat who has to be away so these fabulous creatures can play. He was cruelly wounded, mortified, furious, and in no mood to be merciful.
‘I suppose I should be grateful the show you put on last night wasn’t being televised. At least I was only publicly humiliated in front of every single person I know.’
Sage’s head came up, indignant. ‘Publicly humiliated? You what? By me dancing with Fiorinda? Oh, fuck that—!’
‘Yeah. When you’ve hardly spoken to me for six weeks. You can say what you like. Nobody who was there last night was in any doubts about what was going on.’
Sage glared at him. ‘Ax, if you were even wondering, let me assure you it was a one-off. She made that very clear. The way you found out was rough, and I’m sorry for that. We were pissed, we didn’t think. But don’t talk to me about… Oh, I know she’s your property. I’ve had that well shoved in my face. You tell me I can play with her sometimes, you let me get into bed with you, but I have to kiss her, this girl I love more than my life, for the first time, under your supervision. I can’t say a word to her of my own. I have to, to m-make love to her, for the first time, with you looking on. What was that about humiliation? Tell me again?’
‘One off?’ Ax curled his lip. ‘Oh give it up. I know how she feels about you. Of course I know, you stupid fuck. That’s not an issue. What d’you take me for? D’you think I’d have ever suggested the fucking threesome if I hadn’t known she loves you? And don’t tell me that night was no good, you destructive shit. I was there.’
‘It felt like playing golf with the boss.’
These words sank into Ax like poison darts. He tried to tell himself Sage would say any nasty thing right at this moment, as long as it would hurt Ax. But all he could hear was the awful pain in Sage’s voice, and all he could see was himself on t
hat morning after, crouched under the frozen thorn hedge crying his eyes out, because he knew he had to share his darling and he couldn’t bear it—
‘Anyway,’ said Sage, viciously pursuing the advantage, ‘I don’t know why this is all about me. What about the way your property was behaving? The Dictator’s girlfriend, wife of the Muslim prince, surely must not act like that. Why aren’t you blaming Fiorinda?’
‘Because Fiorinda is never to blame,’ said Ax, in a terrible voice.
Sage’s turn to back down, defeated by the self-evident truth. ‘Ah, fuck it. Last night was nothing. It’s you she loves, first and last. I’m just a bit of rough trade.’
‘Don’t whine, Sage. It doesn’t suit you.’
They fell silent. Fiorinda, in her peacock mandala frock, was coming across the field, barefoot through the rain, looking like a somewhat bedraggled fairy of the Christmas Decorations Plant. She came up, and saw the tears on both their faces.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘At least you’re not fighting.’
‘That’d be a short contest,’ said Ax bitterly.
She sat down on the wet grass. ‘Listen. You two said let’s be a threesome, and I agreed. I remember that. I don’t remember where I signed anything saying, if I fuck Sage Ax has to be in the room, or vice versa. Correct me if I’m wrong. You both love me, I love both of you. Any fool can see you’re madly in love with each other, or you wouldn’t be sitting out here sobbing like broken-hearted fools. When we all had sex together it seemed to work. One of you tell me, what is the fucking problem?’
‘There’s a problem,’ said Ax. ‘There’s a problem with this manipulative bastard, rewriting history.’
‘Me? Manipulative? How the fuck do you make that out?’
‘Oh God. Well, I don’t care. I’ve got a pitiful hangover, I feel sick and I can’t keep my head up. I’m going to lie down here for a while in this puddle. Wake me up when you’ve finished yelling at each other.’
Fiorinda suited her action to her words. The rain started getting heavier. The Dictator and his Minister sat on their lumps of concrete.
‘Good sex?’ said Ax at last.
‘Brilliant.’
‘She’s amazing, isn’t she?’ said Ax, deliberately.
Their eyes met. There’s nothing either one of them can claim for himself alone. No secret thing she does, that she might not do with the other. It’s horrible. Sage nodded. Yeah, brother. Got the message. They stared at each other, for once contemplating this disaster, this terrible thing that has happened to them, in the centre of their lives: without any colouration, in its naked truth. There is no way out. It can’t be fixed. There is no solution. Unsmiling, but with a strange lessening of tension, they looked away.
Several minutes passed.
Sage wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘God, Ax. I’ve missed you.’
‘Wasn’t my idea.’
Silence.
‘Okay,’ said Ax. ‘I accept that I fucked up. To some extent.’
‘I shouldn’t have run out. But there was provocation.’
‘So what now? Are we going to try and force her to choose between us?’ And break her heart, he added, by means of a glare she couldn’t see.
‘I don’t think we can,’ Sage answered, looking down at Fiorinda. Her eyes were closed, but of course she was listening to every word. ‘I think she’d quit us both. I’d have tried to take her off you years ago if I hadn’t spotted that.’
‘Well, thanks.’
‘No problem.’ He wanted to draw Ax’s attention to the shadow under her lashes, the lovely angle of her cheekbones, to the reckless curve of her sweet mouth, the natural rose-madder still traced in clean scarlet, pomegranate flower. ‘Why stop at two?’ he said fiercely. ‘Every man and woman in the world should worship her. She’s a miracle.’
‘Hm. Maybe we should remember this is purely a diplomatic coma.’
‘Don’t care.’ He poked the rock and roll brat with his foot. ‘Hey. You are amazing and wonderful and wise, and the best fuck in the universe.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ax. ‘All true. Fiorinda? You can wake up now.’
But Fiorinda had grown attached to her coma, and refused to stir. They headed back to Travellers’ Meadow, Sage carrying the babe.
‘So where were you last night, anyway? I brought a copy of Unmasked to the party for you, er, kind of a peace offering—’
‘But then, ironically, decided to screw my girlfriend instead. Makes perfect sense. I was in Hiroshima.’
‘What? Oh God, you did it!’
‘Yeah.’ Ax grinned wearily. ‘Yeah, we hacked the quarantine. Using my chip, and your code, and I don’t know what the difference was but this time it worked. It was fucking draining, and could we talk about it later? After I’ve had about thirty-six hours’ sleep?’
‘You’re mad,’ said Fiorinda, opening her eyes. ‘You’re both insane. You’ll get nicked, and then things will be a million times worse. Put me down, Sage.’
They’d reached the van. She stood looking from one to the other. ‘Well, what’s the verdict? Have you two decided you can handle sharing the meat?’
‘Ouch,’ said Ax. ‘I deserve that. I’m sorry, little cat. I’m just a jealous guy.’
Most unexpectedly, Fiorinda burst into tears and flung herself into her boyfriend’s arms crying, ‘Oh, Ax. I’m sorry too.’
At four in the afternoon Sage and Fiorinda were sitting outside the Continental Breakfast Bar in the arena. They’d just struggled through brunch at the hospitality benders with Dian Buckley—an informal get-together they’d apparently agreed upon at some point during the previous evening. Needless to say, they’d had no idea until Ax told them. In normal circumstances they’d have stood Dian up, without a qualm. She ought to know better than to prey on helpless drunks. After the way they’d behaved, they’d felt they had to go along and mend some fences.
Before brunch they’d organised the getaway, Ax having tearfully refused to organise anything, as he was so crap at it and had fucked up so badly last time. They’d left him sleeping in the van, while they arranged for Allie to look after their diaries, fixed for someone to go to the Brixton flat and pack bags, fixed for someone to drive the Volvo down (Ax had arrived by train this morning). As soon as the car arrived they were going back to Cornwall, to try again.
They’d ordered coffee, bread and jam (neither of them had touched the brunch), but they couldn’t eat. Sage kept catching startled glances from passers-by, amazed that he was still unmasked. Fiorinda sat in a foul miasma of patchouli. She’d had to borrow clothes from Anne-Marie, who lived in the hospitality area with her brood; or she’d have been chatting to Dian in the mandala frock. Her head felt broken and empty, a tub full of chemical fragments that didn’t know what the hell to do with each other. She wrapped her hands around her coffee bowl, trying to get them warm. The coffee was Crisis Blend, mainly ground roasted dandelion roots. It didn’t taste too bad, but it smelled like nothing.
‘Sage.’
‘Hn?’
‘Last night when we were alone, you told me you couldn’t do the threesome, no chance, never. You talked to Ax and it’s happening. Could you explain that?’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘No. I think you and your boyfriend will surely run off and leave me.’
If he’d been wearing the skull she’d have called the look she got weary forbearance, with a mix of bleak resignation. ‘You can trust me. I finally realised, you and your boyfriend are making me the best offer I’ll ever get in my life. I’m sorry it took me so long to grasp the concept.’
‘Hey.’ She grabbed his hand (Sage so lost to vanity he was out here in public not even hiding them: he must be feeling rough). ‘Knock that off. I love you both the same. Don’t you ever believe you come second. Don’t you ever believe that.’
Sage thought of the vision that Ax had forgotten. He had forgotten it himself: snapshot glimpses don’t last, they vanish. Yet he knew where they had been,
though he remembered nothing… What will happen to Olwen Devi’s quest? Is the goal impossible to reach? Is it even desirable? The Zen Self had seemed so important, when he had nothing else. Now the reversal of his fortunes overwhelmed him: the straits he’d been in, even last night when he held her in his arms. The terrible look of that long lonely road ahead. He wanted to kneel at her feet.
‘Fiorinda.’
‘Now what?’
‘About those other sheep… I will be true to you.’
She stared at him, amazed. Then she laughed. ‘Funny Sage.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Give me a break. Aoxomoxoa monogamous? Don’t be silly.’
‘Fuckit, Fiorinda. Why will you never, ever take me seriously—?’
‘Oh! Shit! Did we arrange for someone to feed Elsie?’
‘Yeah, we did. The cat will be fed, don’t change the subject—’
The people of Reading arena passed by. She kept on holding his hand, feeling like driftwood, floating, her heart filled with golden light.
George and Dilip had been visiting the Leisure Centre deconstruction, which had become a Reading sideshow: recycling robotics, seething tanks of plastic-disassembling slime moulds, all kinds of interesting stuff. They came out in time to see the black Volvo handed over, in the alt.tech builders’ yard that used to be a car park. Ax had just arrived. Fiorinda hugs her boyfriend, Sage hugs him too. Ax chivvies them into the car, refusing to be distracted by some last-minute tale they want to tell—
‘Sweet,’ said Dilip.
‘You shoulda been at the van this morning,’ said George grimly. ‘Fuck. I thought there’d be murder done.’
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