Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  The bi-location phone was a spin off from the Zen Self quest. The technology was unknown in Mexico, so the only phone they possessed was useless for anything except satellite-phreaking: but that was no great loss. They didn’t have anyone they wanted to talk to in the New World.

  ‘Don’t. There might be a real emergency at home and we wouldn’t know. You should have come beachcombing. I found a live sand dollar, and I think I saw a marbled godwit-’

  ‘You’re kidding. Sure it wasn’t a Common Loon?’

  They followed their own footprints through the dunes to the fishing camp called El Pabellón. They’d been staying in one of the cabins for a week or so. It was off season, and sports fishing in steep decline: hard to say what the other campers were doing here, except maybe hiding from creditors; or the police. The painter lady was under her striped awning, catching the morning light like Monet. Nothing moved in the township of middleaged bikers. The little tent belonging to the teenage runaways had fallen down again, leaving them shrouded in green nylon like dead bodies. The Clam Diggers, (locals, here to harvest shellfish for the restaurant trade) were monopolising the standpipe. Nevada and his old lady, proprietors of a wagon-ring of assorted, half-derelict vehicles, were up and about, toting shotguns. The kids were not in sight. The Nevada dogs stood up and woofed.

  ‘Hi, youse guys,’ called Nevada’s buckskinned and gypsy-bloused old lady. ‘You been on the beach already? How’s the world looking?’

  ‘Same as yesterday,’ Fiorinda called back. ‘Sand. Birds. Sky. Sea.’

  ‘She’s a poet, and she don’t know it,’ remarked snaggle-toothed, draggle-haired Nevada, grinning his shit-eating grin. ‘Hope she don’t blow it. You guys coming to the shindig tonight? You’d be very welcome.’

  They laughed, and said maybe, and passed on.

  Sage was reclining on the cabin’s only sunbed, with a sketchpad: but he’d made the coffee and beaten the eggs. They berated him, and agreed between them silently he mustn’t be left alone. The moment you leave him alone he starts doing too much. And so another quietly busy day begins. That’s the last of the cinnamon buns: better review the exchequer. Would you care to initial these accounts for me, Mr Preston? Why certainly, Ms Slater…

  Later, Ax walked up to the Transpeninsular Highway; to the little shack-store beside the Church of the Holy Family. The cinder cones of San Quintín floated over the north west, the cows in the beaten-earth field by the track were contemplating a vivid load of surplus tomatoes that had been dumped for them. Now that’s something you don’t see every day… Wonder if they like the taste? Of course, if you tried to buy tomatoes for human consumption around here it cost an arm and a leg. The death-wish contortions of post-modern agribusiness were no longer Ax’s concern, but he stopped to stare: thinking about a yacht called the Lorien. What a boat, thirty knots under sail, endless other passionate details, whispered through the long hospital nights (the Intensive Care Unit in Cardiff, that was the setting he remembered)…

  I want Sage to have his yacht.

  I’d buy you a jet-plane, baby, I’ve had it with green austerity—

  But they had no money, and soon this was going to be a problem that Ax must address. Sage and Fiorinda must never be asked to go on stage again. Ax would have to make a living. What are my skills? Ex-dictator, some experience of organised violence, not-bad guitarist, horrendously in debt.

  This needs thought.

  Make a list: One pack flour tortillas (NB, not the brand that tastes of soap). Maize meal for Fiorinda’s excellent stove-top corn bread; eggs. Veg, whatever they have fresh. Tinned fruit, any kind but pineapple which we all hate, the cinammon buns she likes. Little elastic bands to mend the Nevada kids’ stunt kite. What’s the Spanish for that?

  I wonder exactly how much a boat like the Lorien would cost?

  Fuck it. We won’t starve. We can live on clams and steal the cows’ tomatoes.

  It dawned on him that he’d started to think in terms of never going back to England. What, just vanish from the screen…? He turned his head, to avoid getting choked by dust as a blue off-roader Compact rumbled by, and looked after it; idly curious. US plates, surfie stickers in the rear window, longboards on the roof. There aren’t any waves, he thought.

  New campers? They better fit in with the ambience.

  The driver of the Compact pulled up at the entrance to the fishing camp, and got out. Above the gateway, which possessed no gates, a marlin leapt in blue and white mosaic: leprous with deleted pixels, flanked by red and yellow butterflies. A hand-painted sign advertised cabins, RV hook-ups, cocktails, firewood, surf-fishing, dry suit hire and Horse rides. Beyond the gateway a row of battered talapas, straw thatched beach umbrellas, stood outside a flat-roofed, pastel building; possibly a bar. Nothing stirred when he peered into the dark interior.

  ‘Anyone home?’

  No answer, only the sound of the ocean.

  Cautiously, he explored. The scurvy RV camp was noontide silent. There were dish-aerials, most of them big enough to be illegal; a recycling plant beside a midden of scrap plastic and metals. Stacks of dessicated clam shells, pyramids of beer bottles, a skeletal thing made of thousands of old pens: ballpoints, felt-tips, gel-tips, rollerballs. A large grey iguana stared him out, sideways, from under one of the trailers; everything had an air of post-futuristic dereliction and outlawry. Two of the dogs in the biggest compound, (command post?) stood up, rattling their chains: a German Shepherd and something like an Irish Setter, but bigger, and having deeply malevolent yellow eyes. He retreated.

  Beyond a giant mutant tamarisk hedge, festooned with sun-drained rainbow pennants, he found a row of cabins. The first had a shiny jeep and a boat trailer outside. The rest were padlocked and clearly unoccupied, except for the one at the end. He listened, glanced around, and moved closer. A towel hanging from a line, a dishpan of murky water, full of submerged underwear. A sketchpad, held down by a slab of plastic-cased hardware, lay on a trailer-park sunbed that had seen better days.

  Doubt assailed him. Why would they be living like this?

  He bent over the pad, careful to touch nothing. On the top leaf he saw an unfinished portrait, male, half profile…and the hardware was a portable videographics desk, of alien but hi-spec design.

  Oh yes. What do the English say?

  Gotcha.

  Out on the beach, beyond the gap in the dunes, there were figures in the landscape. Kids ran around, local people were digging clams. He tipped his straw hat to the back of his head and strolled. A tall, very slender white guy was playing a ball game, with a young woman whose ragged red hair whipped to and fro like the pennants on the tamarisk hedge. She wore a body glove and knee length denims. The man wore a loose white shirt and pants that accentuated his willowy height and languid movements. His hair was cropped yellow curls, eyes invisible behind aviator shades. They each wore a ring on the third finger of the left hand: but he couldn’t get a good look. He watched the game.

  They ignored him, but not in an unfriendly way.

  ‘D’you mind if I ask a question?’

  The young woman turned on him a mask of beaten gold, pierced by a pair of eyes like clear grey stones, so like the cover image on her second solo album that his mouth went dry with excitement. Yellow Girl. It’s really her!

  ‘Go ahead. It’d better not be difficult. We have no brains.’

  ‘Why are you playing cricket, with a softball and a baseball bat?’

  He was pleased with himself for spotting the game.

  ‘Oh, tha’s easy,’ said the languid giant, planting the bat in front of his stumps—stalks of bleached tamarisk root, capped by clam-shell bails. ‘We don’t have a cricket bat, an’ if we used a smaller ball I would never hit it. I’m useless.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ said Fiorinda. ‘We found the bat. We had a proper baseball, which we bought in Ensenada, but our demon bowler, er, pitcher, managed to bury it in the Pacific. It’s over there. If you’d like to fetch it for us, we’d be grateful.�
�� She pointed out into the ocean, smiling at him with great charm, and chilling strangeness.

  ‘You guys are English, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I recognised the accent. We haven’t seen many tourists from Crisis Europe, the last few years. Things have quieted down over there now, I guess?’

  ‘Much quieter,’ she agreed. ‘Practically back to business as usual. Except for Italy and, um, a few other hot spots.’

  ‘England’s still revolutionary, though, isn’t it. But you’re allowed to travel?’

  ‘As long as we promise not to eat at McDonalds.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, nodding politely. ‘The name’s Harry. Harry Lopez.’ He held out his hand. They smiled, but didn’t take it. They didn’t offer their own names.

  He went back to the campground, and looked into one of the toilet blocks. The showers and stalls had plastic curtains, no doors, but everything was clean. He tried a faucet and leapt back, cursing. The water was boiling. A little Mexican girl had appeared at the uncurtained door to the outside, with a black and tan puppy in her arms. She stared at him, scandalised.

  ‘These are dire and troubled times,’ he said to her, shaking his scalded fingers. ‘This could be the end of days. Do you believe that?’

  He tried the other faucet. Something about F and C… Fuck! Also boiling.

  ‘This is the ladies room,’ said the little girl, in Spanish.

  ‘Do you have an office? Oficina?’

  ‘Strange bloke,’ said Fiorinda, meaning the man in the straw hat.

  She had called a halt. Sage was obediently lying on their rug, while she sat beside him on the sand. They watched the world go by.

  ‘I dreamed of Fergal again last night.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  Sage didn’t know what to make of this development. Fergal Kearney was the Irish musician, casualty of the lifestyle, whose dead body had been used by Fiorinda’s father as his instrument of torture. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened to her, she had never known the real Fergal, why had she suddenly started talking about him?

  ‘He was sitting by my bed,’ said Fiorinda softly. ‘I didn’t see him, but he was there. It wasn’t a nightmare, Sage. He was on guard, keeping bad at bay. The strange thing is, I still knew he was really my father: and in my dream I didn’t mind. You know how all the people around you are really just patterns created by firing neurons in your head?’

  ‘Mm,’ said Sage.

  She laughed, cold and sweet, and took his hand with chilling deliberation.

  ‘Hey, I’m not saying you don’t exist. I’m just saying, obviously that’s what ghosts of the dead are, too. My father is dead, and I killed him—’

  ‘Er, as I recall, I killed Rufus, babe.’

  ‘I helped to kill him, and I bloody well think I had a right. But I believe I want him to forgive me. I think when I imagine Fergal by my bed, on guard, it’s my mind’s way of telling me we did okay, that night at Drumbeg. We rescued Fergal from his private hell, and he’s grateful, and we even did Rufus some good, somehow. It’s my closet soppiness, sneaking out.’

  ‘Fee, you are amazing.’

  ‘Thank you so much… Sage, what’ll I do about not wanting to be famous any more? All the time we were trapped being leaders of the revolution I was secretly thinking, fuck this, I need to tour Japan. Now I can’t stand the idea, and I’m scared to have no grand plan. I think I’ll fall apart.’

  ‘Nyah. Remember what you told me, when I was grieving about being old, invalided-out, and never being Aoxomoxoa again? People talk a lot of crap about facing up to big lifechanges. Why bother? Spend a few years in denial, then accept the obvious when it’s old news, and hurts less.’

  ‘Did I say that? I am a vicious brat.’ She sighed, ‘Well, yeah, benign neglect. That’s how I’m dealing with the other major problem, never having a baby—’

  Fiorinda had been sterilised without her consent when she was thirteen, after she’d given birth to her father’s child, the little boy who had died at three months. It was a treatment that could be reversed.

  ‘You don’t know you’re never going to have a baby.’

  ‘Yes I do, Sage. How could a creature like me have a baby? It was okay when I thought my father was just some bastard of a megastar who didn’t mind seducing his own daughter. Now I know what he really was, how could I possibly contemplate passing on those genes?’ She frowned at the sparkling ocean. ‘Unless, um, unless as I sometimes think, I imagined the whole thing? I don’t mean the Crisis, or running the revolution, I mean, the rest of it?’

  She’d let go of his hand. He took hers, ready to back off at the slightest flinch. But she did not flinch, and surely that was a good sign.

  ‘Sorry, babe. It was all real. I was there, trust me.’

  ‘What crocks we are,’ said Fiorinda, after a moment. ‘The three of us. Me with my gross memories and my monster of a dead dad. You, had to turn back at the threshold of heaven, and never going to be the king of the lads again. Ax, with his post-traumatic hostage stress, and what’s worse, he doesn’t believe in saving the world anymore. Sage, can we make him happy? Just you and me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did I say, also completely penniless?’

  ‘I don’t mind being broke. I like it.’

  ‘Oh sure, my one-bowl, one-robe pilgrim. What about the yacht, hm?’

  ‘Tha’s different.’

  She smiled at him tenderly, and took his hand to her face, rubbing her cold cheek against his knuckles. My darling, he thought. My sweet girl. You put on a good act, corny but brave: but you don’t even know I’m here. They folded the rug, collected their bat and the softball, and went to look for Ax.

  On quiet nights they would play and sing on their terrace after dark; for their own amusement. The shindig drove them indoors, but then the hermit crab, which had been lost in the cabin for days, started to make excruciating ragged-claw noises. The whole Baja heaves with geo-thermal power, but the fishing camp electric light was low and peevish. They searched under beds and in corners with their wind-up torch, to no avail, and this woke them up so thoroughly they decided to go back outside. The Clam Diggers chorus was rendering Beatles Greatest Hits, backed by a miserable machine-beat bassline, and deconstructive interference from the old bikers’ Jazz ensemble. The communal bonfire painted orange shadows above the tamarisks, the Nevada dogs howled, the Pacific sighed. The former rulers of England sat shrouded in rugs and watched the bold cactus mice, who’d come out to hunt scraps.

  ‘I don’t know where the fuck it hides,’ grumbled Ax. ‘We haven’t got any furniture. Hey, look at that one. Commando mouse—’

  ‘We should build them an obstacle course,’ said Sage.

  ‘We should join the shindig,’ suggested Fiorinda, cheerfully. ‘Since we’re going to get the benefit of it anyway. I bet Mr Strange with the straw hat will be there. The Nevadas are always looking for new blood.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ said Sage. ‘Don’t feel like it.’

  Ax caught his eye, in the light of the camping lantern. Silently, they’d agreed not to worry about the man in the straw hat. Say nothing to make her anxious. But fear brushed him with a stealthy hand, and suddenly he realised what unbelievable good fortune he still possessed. Just to be with them, to be alive, and loving them—

  ‘Nah, me neither. The claw’s probably asleep by now.’

  Every dusk the firewood arrived in a red pickup. Campers gathered in the town square, an open space with a ring of logs and stones around the bonfire site. The horse-boys and their sister tossed out bundles of hardwood root and scrap timber. Señor El Pabellón, a square-built man with a handsome moustache, took the money. His wife (presumably), who ran the campsite office, stayed in the cab with the old lady who was (probably) her mother-in-law, and made critical observations, in a rapid but none too discreet undertone. The hippie woman is too old to wear her hair down her back, she looks ridiculous, and her children are brats. The painter is
a stupid old lady with no talent. That young man in the straw hat is a strange one. He looks like a debt collector.

  ‘No, you don’t want that one,’ said Señor El Pabellón to Fiorinda, in English, ‘There are nails in the wood, take this one, it’s heavier… You’d like a horse ride tomorrow?’

  ‘Caballo no me gusta,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Caballo demasiado grande, soy pequeño.’

  Señor El Pabellón laughed, and winked at Ax. ‘Ah, she’s learning Spanish! The horse is big, and she is small yes: but my horses are gentle, eh. Tell her that.’

  Fiorinda could ride, but she didn’t like horses. She sleeps with the blond, said the wife. Nah, she sleeps with neither, said the mother-in-law. El guero is some kind of celibate priest, and the Indio is like her brother. It’s a mystery.

  True enough, thought Ax, paying for the bundle without the nails. And you two mean old bats know fucking well I can understand you. But he wasn’t offended. He’d lived in the public eye a long time: you develop a tolerance.

  ‘Hey, are you coming down tonight?’ asked Nevada’s old lady, heaving up her bundles. ‘Free food. We’re laying on barbecue,’ she added persuasively.

  Fiorinda looked at Ax. ‘Shall we?’

  His premonition had faded, and he hated to be the control freak. Whatever she wants, she must have. ‘Okay by me. Let’s ask Sage.’

  Harry had discovered that they were known as Red, Mr Guitar and Blondie. They were liked, their musical talents had been noted, but they were hard to get. By their ladidah accents they came from ‘New England’—which to the campers meant the north eastern seaboard of the USA. Or else they were Canadians, or even Australian; but not Irish. Red and Mr Guitar were seen as the couple, with Blondie tagging along, but there was a minority in favour of Guitar and Blondie, with Red as their ‘beard’. One romantic variant had Red an heiress hiding from the media, Blondie as her dissolute brother dying of AIDS, and Mr Guitar as the trained assassin bodyguard.