Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  ‘Yeah, because what’s the fucking point in being near her any other way.’

  ‘It would have had to be in London, not Tyller Pystri, not much of a statement, there in the cottage, nobody to appreciate… What happened to that idea?’

  ‘Let’s do it now,’ said Ax, ‘Let’s do it, consecrate ourselves.’

  ‘Mine’s still longer. Isn’t it Fee? Hey, isn’t it?’

  ‘And mine is the tip of an iceberg, fuckface. I know this conversation, and I don’t know why you even pretend it is about me—’

  ‘Not by much, and mine is fatter, and that’s what counts, heheheh.’

  Sage grabbed him, and they rolled together until Ax, uppermost, glanced over the side. ‘Whooo. Er, I suppose we know how to get down from here?’

  They were lying in the hollow tip of a red pillar, undercut and smooth, that went vertiginous dizzying down, into the abyss. ‘It wasn’t like this,’ said Fiorinda, worriedly. ‘It was not like this. It has grown like a beanstalk.’

  Sage grinned at the white-pricked furnace overhead. ‘I’m gonna fry!’

  Memo to selves. Climbing up the beanstalk is much, much easier than climbing down, and being naked under the influence of hallucinogens is no help. Getting back to earth took them a long time: hard work in the heat of the day.

  Fiorinda went into the cave, in search of supplies. The horses were in the back, where the spring stirred in its puddle like a fairy: looming with whiskers on their rubbery lips, and piano-key teeth. They seemed to her malevolent, invidious. She didn’t like the way they breathed, or the sense of their great barrel-bodied size in the dark. She brought lager and Bombay Mix to the front end. She’d changed out of her glittery dress, Sage and Ax had given up their no-pants ultimatum. They were all dressed and sensible again. The mattress lay where they had left it in the morning, the cover neatly spread by Fiorinda.

  She gave them food and drink, and sat apart.

  ‘I can be a monster,’ she said, ‘Or I can be property. There are no other choices for a woman, no I mean an artist or a woman. I think there was another option, but the way is shut. I’m okay. If you can bite the heads off live chickens, nobody will abuse you much, but there’s no part for me as a human being in this movie. Every man, I mean every manager, that ever looked at me has wanted to piss on me, except for one who swore he wanted to be my friend, but he was lying.’

  ‘It isn’t like that,’ said Sage, miserably. ‘You once told me I wanted the Zen Self so I could have the spooky female power you have. I wasn’t just copying you. I can have reasons of my own. But it’s true I wanted to be with you, to be where you are. All I want is to never leave your side. It comes out not the way I meant.’

  He reached out his hand, Fiorinda severed it with a glance, and the five-fingered spider wriggled around, bleeding copiously.

  ‘There’s supposed to be a difference between how you react to a male or a female body,’ mused Ax, trying to defuse this. ‘That’s how you know your sexual orientation, look at two bodies, which one makes you fire up? Me, I’ve always been the one saying no, I’m sorry, I don’t see the problem. I mainly prefer girls, whatever that means, but I don’t see the problem.’

  ‘Are we trying to tell me this isn’t about sex?’ inquired Fiorinda, coldly.

  ‘I was born at the bottom of a pit,’ said Ax. ‘I was a poor boy, no contacts, no hooks I could use. The people I can feel watching me all the time said come on Ax, don’t be such a loser, you can get out of there. So I climbed as best I could, I tried to be the best I could, and of course the fucking rocks fell on me. So here I am bleeding under these rocks, like a fucking idiot, and so hurt, and I can hear the people who watch me all the time saying, well, you can do anything if you really believe in yourself. It’s his own fault, he has loser genes.’

  ‘Yeah, but I have the definitive loser gene.’

  Shadows had crept over the camping mattress liferaft, as the sun went down. It didn’t seem fair that the problems Utopia itself can’t mend should darken the night, when death and terror, defeat and shame were angels standing guard around that bed; so far from home. But the goblins were there to remind them that evil can never be vanquished, only reduced.

  ‘I want to do something,’ said the alpha male white boy, despondently.

  ‘He wants to teach us to die,’ said Ax. ‘That’s what he did to the folks, before we left them maybe to face the Fat Boy on their own. Zen suicide pills.’

  ‘It shows you how his mind works.’

  ‘It was what came into my head. And so’s this.’

  Sage went into the cave. When he came out he hadn’t changed his clothes but they could see he’d tried to spruce himself up. He set Ax’s phone on a rock, and ‘Heart On My Sleeve’ began to play from the tiny speakers: sounding cheap and brash, after the music of desert silence. The cave entrance was his backdrop, he smoothed a patch of ground, and began to dance. Ax and Fiorinda curled their lips. But they were caught, the way Sage’s body always caught their eyes, and then disbelieving as he turned his back and began to shimmy his workshirt from his shoulders. Fiorinda giggled. Ax snorted. Before the shirt was off (he took his time) they had succumbed to the ridiculous, eyes on stalks, also undeniably horny. He made it last, he milked them until they were helpless—

  —finally dived into their midst, cackling, naked but for one sock.

  ‘You realise,’ he warned them, starfish sprawled, grinning between kisses, ‘You realise, if you ever, ever tell anyone I can do that, I’ll have to kill you both.’

  Fiorinda burrowed down to escape the morning sun and encountered Ax, in the blind world under the covers. ‘Hi, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘How are you?’

  ‘Very good. Maybe, hm, a little bit sore.’

  ‘Me too.’

  They hugged each other, giggling. ‘I love him,’ whispered Ax, ‘I love him. All my defences are down. Every time I see him I want to hold him—’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be telling Sage this? Have you told him?’

  ‘Er, uh.’ Ax sat up and started rummaging, in the bed and under the edge of the mattress. ‘Not in so many words. It’s not a competiton, we’re past that, that’s over: but with Sage, you can’t go letting him know that you have no defences.’

  Hell will freeze over, she thought, before you two stop competing. It didn’t seem to her a bad thing, as long as it stayed within bounds. It meant she had tenure, because she remained the key between them.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Cigarettes.’

  ‘You finished them. Sage might still have some Maryjanes.’

  ‘Fiorinda, I’m not an utter degenerate. I don’t smoke cannabis before breakfast. Are they in his shirt pocket? Pass it over.‘

  Sage had been tending the horses. He flopped down on the side of the mattress, exhibited the pack of nicotine-tainted grass cigarillos, scrunched it and lit the last one. ‘We have to leave, sad to say. Not only is FBI armageddon due, but we’re too low on water… Shit. That was probably some class-A, meet-God spiritual journey powdered mushroom, and we blew it on a sex binge. I’m mortified.’ He touched Fiorinda’s cheek, smiling tenderly, ‘Hiya, my brat. Okay?’

  ‘Am I still your stupid brat?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Hey, lemme have a hit.’

  ‘A hit, now give it back… I’m right in assuming we don’t want to meet the Federales?’ asked Sage.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I don’t trust the white hats. Not if they find me out here, where nobody’s looking.’ She got out of bed. ‘This is where I have to ride the horse, isn’t it. Fuck. I hate riding.’

  ‘I don’t know why. You’re fine at it.’

  ‘I just think if you really cared, you’d have brought a nice helicopter.’

  ‘Oh yeah, so unobtrusive. And likely to fall out of the sky at any moment.’

  They are one person, but they will always need me… Sage lay watching the smoke from the cigarillo: feeling like a snake with a new
skin, like some desert crustacean with a new shell hardening.

  ‘Anyway, we can’t sit around bitching, I have to go back to Lavoisier.’

  ‘Hey! Where did that come from?’

  ‘Why?’ asked Sage, mildly.

  Ax started putting on his clothes. ‘Because I’ve been thinking. Those crazy buggers want to die, they possibly deserve to die, but that’s not the problem.’ He shook out his boots. ‘You two tell me the Fat Boy Apocalypse is cancelled, fine: but if this raid comes off it’ll be eco-warriors as the Manson Family, which is already their reputation down in the valley. If by some miracle the media don’t get hold of it, the people Fiorinda heard about will fucking know what happened, and this will rebound on an extremely volatile situation, that we never really guessed existed. I heard all those things you didn’t say, Fiorinda. So I have to try and talk to them, because… Because I’m here.’

  He shrugged, embarrassed by their grave attention. ‘Oh, okay, same reason as I ever did anything, to prove I don’t have loser genes.’

  ‘You do not have loser genes,’ said Sage. ‘Far fuckin’ from it, Mr Preston.’

  ‘You could be right about the volatile situation,’ said Fiorinda, dead straight. ‘I hate to have to say it, and I hadn’t thought of it, but you’d better try.’

  As they packed up they agreed on a plan. Sage and Fiorinda would go north, and lose themselves for a night or so. Ax would do his errand, fetch the Rugrat, and they would meet at Big Pine, a tiny town at the junction of the 395 and the 168. Fiorinda, unable to admit she was at least partly charmed by the little pinto, said she’d better practice or she would fall off and break her leg, and went for a ride. Ax and Sage loaded gear onto the Appaloosa.

  ‘What is the problem with the horse riding, Ax?’

  ‘I think it’s about Milly,’ explained Ax, in an undertone.

  Milly, the drummer in Ax’s original band, had been Ax’s girlfriend for years, before she switched to his brother Jordan; and before Ax met Fiorinda.

  ‘Milly was the leafy suburban girl, me coloured boy from sink estate. She had her own horse. I decided I had to get into it, and, well, get good. So I did it for Milly, see, and I don’t know why but it’s still a thorn in her paw.’ He slung the empty water bags and the collapsible bucket over the saddle horn.

  ‘Okay. Sorry, an’ I won’t dwell on it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Ax, with a flashing grin: thinking, ooh why did I hand him that?

  Fiorinda and Paintbrush came up. ‘Pull to stop, push to start,’ she said. ‘This saddle’s very odd. How do I get down, again?’

  ‘Same as you would off an English saddle.’ Ax caught her as she slithered. ‘You’re fine. I know you are. What’s all the fuss?’

  ‘I don’t like horses. I don’t think they’re romantic, I don’t think they’re sexy. I think they have big teeth and they will bite me.’

  ‘If you take that attitude,’ he said, kissing her. ‘She probably will.’

  The graded road became very broken up before it reached that pockmarked Lavoisier sign: the earthworks grew in the shimmering heat. Ax was returning by the front door, it seemed more tactful. He thought of islands of civilisation, separated not by scheduled flights and traffic streams but by badlands and desert places; the once and future world. They’d seen him coming. By the time he was within gunshot he had a reception committee: two off-roaders and Lavoisien militia standing by them, four men and two women, armed to the teeth.

  Ax stopped and waited with his white flag, which was a pallid feedbag tied to a stick. The Lavoisiens thought about this, then some of them came down the hill. Madeleine stood her ground. A soft-bellied young man toting a submachine gun got out of the off-roader. He wore an I-Systems teeshirt, desert camouflage pants and a black hat with a skull and crossbones on the band.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  Ax dismounted, and held Madeleine close. She was flicking her ears and showing white in her eye, but thankfully didn’t act up.

  ‘A parley. I need to talk to someone in charge, it’s quite urgent.’

  The kid gave him a smouldering, disgusted look. ‘Aw, if it’s quait eurgent-’ He tugged a little mic out of his collar, his other hand gripping the huge gun, and turned his head to mutter.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘You’re to come in.’

  Ax was frisked and disarmed. The kid did this, his friends stayed in the car. Ax smiled at them and wondered if he had an aura. Maybe he didn’t need one, after the way the commando raid had been concluded. He and the kid set off on foot, Ax leading Madeleine, the off-roader lumbering behind. The second vehicle joined the convoy when they passed it. No one else in sight, but the gun-emplacements had been shored up with more earth and scavenged timber. Barricades in the streets had been reinforced, and gaps between the houses closed with salvage and rubble. Good discipline to get all that done. He looked for the snipers, they were in place, same roosts as before.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘It’s Simon.’

  ‘Hi, Simon, I’m Ax Preston.’

  ‘I know who the fuck you are.’

  ‘Did you have many casualties, the other night?’

  ‘Some dead. We had one girl lost an eye. You shot her in the face.’

  This appeared to be a personal grudge. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  He hoped the bodycount would not affect his chance to get a hearing. Suicide warriors can get unconscionably bitter and worked up over their dead: he remembered that from Yorkshire. Once they were among the buildings, fire damage was obvious. The air stank of smoke, explosive and stinging caustics, they must have pumped out their alkaline springs to control the blaze. Through a gap in the church square barricades. The doors had been repaired, a metal patch and a new lock. Inside, everything had been cleared out. The scanners had gone from the sanctuary; and the queen’s throne. The brainscans remained, false-coloured psychedelic roses. Lavoisien adepts were drawing a pattern on the floor, using sticks of black wax and a can of red liquid, scattering herbs and chanting as they worked. They gave Ax some sour looks.

  ‘You can leave your ride here,’ said Simon.

  He left Madeleine in the charge of a young girl with numb and terrified dark eyes, and followed his escort down to the crypt. The first room was a field hospital: doing brisk business. Ax attracted more bitter stares: Simon opened a door off a passageway beyond.

  ‘Wait in here.’

  Strip lighting. The walls were earth but the floor was brick; the was furniture like an old-fashioned hospital office. A desk with a peeling leather top, a balance bar weighing scale, a photocopier, other chunky old hardware he couldn’t name; a trolley of medical supplies. Inside a supermarket freezer he found a row of large glass jars with a human head in each, fresh as life, suspended in clear liquid. The neck ends were capped in white binding, he could see stitches on their naked scalps. More volunteers, no doubt… He thought of Fiorinda.

  Baal the Black Dragon and Elaine the Morrigan arrived after a few minutes, with an entourage. To his chagrin, Ax recognised none of the other faces. Time was when he’d have had them all nailed and on file after a glance…but that was Ax Preston believing his own legend. The fake Yorkshire veteran was absent: shame, that could have been an interesting conversation. The Black Dragon wore kohl around his eyes, and his lips were still glossy black (must be tattooed), but his hair was pulled into a brusque ponytail and his pallor wasn’t make-up. Elaine wore armoured fatigues, with several heavy ankh and tau crosses, like goth dogtags. Everyone found chairs and sat down, so Ax took a chair himself, facing Baal and Elaine.

  ‘Okay, what do you want?’ said Baal. ‘You want us to put down the Fat Boy and come out of here with our hands up? You have to be fucking kidding.’

  ‘We know about the raid,’ said Elaine, one hand clasping the crosses at her breast. ‘We’ve had intelligence about that. Here we stand.’

  ‘This is our Alamo,’ said Baal. ‘Everyone’s ready to die. There’s nothing you
can offer us, there is no deal, nothing to discuss. So, you have effective magic. We have effective magic, and ours is feeding on blood and pain and terrible sacrifice. Every agonising death we die here will go into the cauldron, which is already brimful, and we’ll find out what happens when they compete. What are you feeding yours on, sell-out? Compromise? MacDisneyfied, feelgood “direct action”? Drowned refugees? Or, hey, changing the system from within?’

  ‘Peace and love?’ muttered somebody, in deep disgust.

  What happens when they compete…oh shit. Oceanic dread washed over him, but show no fear. The outlaws were, understandably, in a poisonous mood, but he wouldn’t be sitting here if there was no chance.

  ‘Has anybody got a cigarette to spare, I mean, if it’s okay to smoke?’

  Baal took out a pack, stone faced, and pushed them over the table.

  ‘Thanks. Look, it’s your legend, not mine, but as I remember, the Alamo was not a victory. It was a massacre of heroic idiots trapped in an indefensible—’

  Elaine smiled. ‘The battle came afterwards, with great slaughter. The Alamo did what it set out to do.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ax. ‘Let’s start with, trust me, you have no Fat Boy. It’s over.’

  The deranged elation in the room did not shift an iota.

  He talked. He didn’t attempt to get closure, he didn’t feel very confident he’d achieved anything when he left. They were drunk on the black majesty of scarifice; on the happy prospect of being blown sky high, ripped apart by shrapnel, nerve-gassed in their underground warren, to the man, woman and child. About the only thing he had going for him was that by definition, the people he was talking to had not been in the front of the suicide queue… At least Madeleine was okay when he got back to her; and she’d been given water, though he’d been told Lavoisier was running dry. The regular trip to get the drinking water tanker filled was overdue, and nobody was leaving for such a trivial reason now. He got his gun back too, which surprised him.

  It was noon when he’d finished with the leaders, too hot to head for the valley floor, so he hung around, talking to anyone who could be bothered to insult him. In the marginally less searing late afternoon he rode off, found shade in a ravine, called Miriam Beaufort’s number and made the case for cancelling. It was much the same as the other conversation… When he looked back, he knew these conversations had always been the same. Like talking down the maniacs on the Deconstruction Tour, when mob violence, in the name of eco-revolution, had been on the rampage throughout England. You do your best, you never know if anything’s going to stick. As often as not, something even worse happens the moment your back’s turned.