“Yeah, but if we stay for the Lyngford Craters we miss the Heavy Metal Guys on the Legacy stage!”
“The Craters always leave The Day it Rained Hammers ‘til last; I’m not missing that! The Heavy Metal Guys aren’t space rock anyway.” A girl with a Maximum Purity tattoo bangs her fist on the wobbly table.
“The Metal Guys are POETS, man! They transcend genre!” A lad seated across the way calls over; the conflict is rapidly spreading.
“Ripping off Tchaikovsky through big speakers does not mean you transcend genre!” The woman reverts to her native Hochdeutsch here as she doesn’t know enough profanities in English, but hand gestures are a universal language. As Emmy scribbles in shorthand, a preconception is overturned; she’d imagined rock bands hiding out in the V.I.P. and backstage areas, maybe watching disinterestedly from the wings as another act plays, but for the Spiral Vibe the weekend was a noisy holiday to be enjoyed to the fullest and their enthusiasm enabled her to tick off most of Seans’ advertisers in short order. They are due to headline Sunday evening, and Bernadette spends a good hour assembling them backstage; she locates Ehsan only to find Marc has wandered off in the meantime, and so on. Emmy helps as best she can, but it’s like herding cats; the boys had enjoyed themselves very much over the weekend, and were having difficulty adjusting to the concept of doing some work for a bit.
They played four hours straight; there were acoustic sections and the occasional ambient workout, but in the main it was a gruelling show. The band used sound as a weapon, bludgeoning their audience with relentless thudding drums and the weight of a droning detuned su quattro as guitars and electronica screamed. Emmy’s abiding memory of the night would always be Marc reclining atop a wall of speakers in the cold dim light of pre-dawn; he seemed asleep or dead but played on with bloodied fingers, the six string stigmata of one anointed by sound. They closed with Golden Machine, and as that obscene synth rumble filled the valley the laser show went completely mental and the audience roared; even those who had previously called it a night and returned to their tents heeded the call. Marc dropped from his eyrie, ran across the stage and threw himself into the crowd about halfway through.
Helen had OK’d a months’ retainer for Emmy to cover the tour, and a tariff for copy and photos; Sean was in a remarkably good mood for some reason, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Emmy is to sleep in Bernadettes’ room or with her in the Land Rover, depending on facilities.
“The first thing I wanted when I started in this business was a vehicle big enough to sleep in. I could not in all conscience let you bunk down with three boys; they’d be trying all sorts.”
In truth Emmy wouldn’t mind a bit of all sorts with Marc if he’d be amenable to the idea. The band are young lads and as a teenage girl she of course regarded them with a sort of fond pity, but Marc was younger than them all in a way. His innocence and fragility didn’t inflame her on any visceral level; it felt instead like the time she’d briefly considered a schoolfriend in a Sapphic light. To be near him was to bathe in a golden glow, utterly unthreatening and hugely intoxicating; he wrote poetry and for all she knew it was the direst gibberish imaginable, but she loved it when he read to her. The guys were like big brothers to him, she noticed, and although he liked to talk he was a good listener; sometimes they’d all be hanging out and she’d realise he hadn’t spoken for hours.
They have a fortnight playing the Alpha system, before a week’s residency on a tramp streamer en route to Earth. Emmy’s surprised to find the Spiral Vibe have a full set of popular tunes down pat, and pay their way by noodling quietly in the lounge bar for the duration of the journey; Bernie glows with pride for once, as they look very smart in their matching suits. Where Bernie comes from, living in a trailer and washing outdoors in a tin bath is no barrier to looking presentable; she cannot fathom for the life of her why townies slouch around in their bedclothes and underwear all day. Emmy is most amused.
“For the benefit of my readers, how would you explain what I have just witnessed?” Marc is unrepentant, adjusting his tie and cuffs in one of the huge framed mirrors fixed to the art deco walls of the Rankinium Lounge and Ballroom.
“This was our first job straight out of Viscount Tull; my mum’s the music teacher there and she signed us all up. We’d do our own stuff at soundchecks back then; we never thought anyone else would be into it but Bernie was taking the ship one time and she heard a few of those. We’d been around Port Alpha once or twice when the streamer docked, but Bernie took us to the places where they still played Acid Beat; we were blown away by the Heavy Metal Guys. I remember thinking they must be huge stars; I couldn’t believe people like that still got up in the morning and put in a shift, but it made us realise we could do the same thing. We figured if people loved the Metal Guys, they just might like us. Bernie offered to be our manager and we didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded good so we said yes. A year later we had Golden Machine on our hands; crazy.”
The Lisa Marie boasts an extensive sports deck, and Emmy hones her new hobby on the shooting ranges when not working on a new epic travelogue; it is provisionally entitled Around the Three Systems on Precisely Fuck All.
The Earth shows commence with a hometown visit. Ehsan was born in the island village of Attabad in Northern Pakistan, once one of the highest stops on the mountain stretch of the great Karakoram Highway until a landslide dammed the Hunza River. The dam created a lake three hundred feet deep and fourteen miles long, which obliterated fully seven miles of the road. The route remained, serviced by boats until winter when the ice came and human labour carried goods at a painful crawl. Ehsan’s family joined relatives in England when alternative passages to China opened and their village died, but Rankinium had recently been discovered. Overnight, worthless land titles held as little more than mementoes of the Old Country set them up for life; Ehsan’s folks spent equal time in England and Attabad these days.
It’s a low key, intimate show in a small restaurant with maybe thirty patrons in attendance. For Emmy the music is completely upstaged by the view from wide unglazed windows; they’re so high up the clouds are drifting through the building, Lake Attabad sparkling far below. The setting sun casts purple and orange rays and the scent of barley drifts on the air. She has to remember everything; she wants to keep it all in her mind, to come back whenever the need should arise.
Port Louis on the island of Mauritius has an enthusiastic underground rock scene, and they headline an all-dayer atop sixteen local acts. After the show and in the spectacular light of dawn, Emmy photographs the band with their new friends at the twenty foot tall bust of Lenin in Les Salines Garden; one of the shots makes it onto the cover of Maximum Acid Beat under the headline ‘STONERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR MINDS!’[§§§§§]
Back in dear old Blighty, they play the Two Anchors Tavern in Grimmingthorpe, Lincolnshire. Reb and Charlie tele up for the show with news; they arrive early as the crew are setting up, and Reb presents a small but noticeable baby bump for inspection.
“I’m going to be Aunt Em? No way! When’s my Auntieday?”
“If you’re referring to the due date, it’s late November. I hope this ‘Auntieday’ isn’t going to eclipse my child’s birthday for the remainder of your existence.”
“Oh Auntieday will be commemorated long after I’m gone, don’t you worry. Do we know the sex yet? Emmaretta is a very good name for a girl.”
“No, and we’ll see. How’s work going? Do you have a place on Alpha yet?”
“I’m living on the road like a total legend. Why do you ask? Are you already renting my room out?”
“It’s going to be a nursery; you’re welcome to sleep in there, but it’ll contain a baby and either me or Charlie pacing up and down in our undies trying to shut it up.”
“It’ll be Charlie; you sleep like a dead pig.” Reb nods.
“I work hard and I sleep hard; I have pointed out more than once I earn more than him, so if anyon
e’s getting baby sick down their back at three a.m. it shouldn’t be me. If we can’t cope I’ll get a nanny, but Charlie thinks we’ll be OK. Why does everyone in the band call you Tex?”
“Oh I shoot sport guns now; there’s a trail of sorry looking tin cans all the way from here to Port Alpha. I’m thinking of a second career in the Infantry if journalism falls through.”
“Third career; Whoppers is always calling you.”
“That option is never far from my mind; it’s what keeps me going. Everyone still thinks I’m working the Camp de Kamp outlet, right?” Reb looks uncomfortable.
“Yeah, but I’m not happy about straight up lying so I always change the subject, and now they all think we’ve had a row. Why can’t I just tell them what you’re doing?” It’s Emmy’s turn to squirm.
“I didn’t want them thinking I’d got flaky ideas and be back in a month with nothing; it wouldn’t be a big deal if I was just working another branch for a bit.”
“Well the jig is probably up. I know Carrie and Stacey are coming; unless you want to hide in your trailer for the duration you’re going to have some explaining to do.”
“I’ll say I came for the show.”
“Yes; you took a fortnight round trip from Barnards to see a band from Alpha on Earth. Emmaretta Sunbury, I am shocked!”
“Oh all right! I suppose I haven’t done badly; I’ll tell them I swore you to complicity.”
“You’ll tell them I knew nothing about it! I intend to be just as surprised as everyone else, or you can wave goodbye to your second fallback career. My story is Camp de Kamp called to say you never showed, you called to say you were OK, and that’s all I knew.”
“You’d hang your own sister out to dry?”
“On a wire of her own deceit, yes.”
“Fair enough. What do you think of my chances with Marc?”
“You look more like sisters than we do, and he’s the pretty one. Aren’t you a bit old for fancying teenage boy bands?”
“I’m seventeen, which is the optimum age for fancying teenage boy bands; not everyone’s into rippling beefcake.”
“Have you been checking out my man?”
“Charlie’s virtually allergic to shirts; everyone checks him out, it’s unavoidable.” Reb looks to where the father of her child is helping stage hands lift batteries of lighting. Strangers would instinctively approach him for assistance; some universal declaration of capability seemed to emanate from Charlie, and a chorus of ‘scuse mate, can you give us a hand with this?’ was the soundtrack to his life. She rubbed her stomach fondly; he could fill a pram, she could tell you that much.
Back on Alpha, Emmy’s accommodation problems are solved for the immediate future at least; Big is searching through a jangling collection of keys on a chain which is connected to his trousers. This means Big always knows exactly where his keys and trousers are; vital information in these fast-moving times.
“Yeah, we got a massive trailer out on Skenthurp. There’s a room with a lock if you want it; no funny business.” Emmy raises the ticklish question of rent.
“I should mention I have no guarantee of work. If I didn’t still have a British visa from my waitressing job I wouldn’t even have been on the tour.”
“S’not a problem” the lad looks about uneasily, not sure how to proceed “the thing with Marc is he’s quiet, everyone knows that but lately it’s been too quiet; I’ve known the guy since we were four years old, and every year he’s further away. He engages more when you’re around; I like having my buddy back.” Emmy bites her lip.
“I don’t know what to say.” Big waves a hand.
“I make it sound heavier than it is; it’s just me trying to let you know you wouldn’t be imposing. We’d all like you to be here, at least until you get on your feet.”
After a lengthier walk than is ideal from the telestation, the lads and Emmy arrive at the gates of a scrapyard. Piles of rusting pods rise in mountains as far as she can see; a detuned radio somewhere burbles static and snatches of foreign language programmes, and three clearly insane Irish Wolfhounds snarl and foam at the gates. Marc turns to Emmy.
“Give us a D on your harp.” Bemused, she does so and as one the band lift their voices in strident mansong.
Land of hope and glo-ry! Mother of the free! How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?
Immediately the dogs pack it in; three hairy arses hit the floor and three contented animals sit patriotically to attention, tongues lolling and eyes shining. The beasts have known from birth that when Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 is in the air they are in the presence of friends. Forming a protective guard around Emmy and still singing, the band shuffle through a secondary gate and the hounds resume their goshawful fuss as the anthem ends. All dogs are working dogs these days; their ancient bond with mankind remains strong as ever, but keeping animals as pets had long been considered as gauche as dressing them. If you see a dog in the house, you can be sure it’s poorly or retired; manor houses and workman’s cottages alike are often supplemented by a waddling half blind pointer or greying wolfhound. Two well built fellows of the scrapyard variety observe the progress of the group with amusement; Marc introduces their guest.
“New tenant, Mr. Brownlove! This is Tex; she’s a Yank so she doesn’t know the song yet.” The burliest of the pair nodded.
“Well it’s not like you’re going to run out of room any time soon, lad.” Emmy wondered how big this trailer could be until they turned a corner and she saw it.
“We call it the Pineapple Express! What do you think?” Despite a liberal application of the same psychedelic swirls which covered their instruments, the matt yellow undercoat is familiar; Emmy realised she’d ridden one only a month ago.
“Is it a maglev carriage?”
“Certainly is; she’s an old sleeper from before they built the orbital, and there’s an engine further down; you can crash in the cab once we clear it out.” The operators cab is full of drying plants and these are swiftly bagged; once Emmy sweeps out the stems and stalks it isn’t too bad. These Mountbatten Class locomotives had bunks, where drivers would rest in turns on days-long journeys; scavenged solar panels fed working batteries, giving her at least a radio, a couple of interior lights and a twelve volt socket. Sunlight floods the cab in the mornings so she locates a tarpaulin, climbs up and unfolds it over the panoramic windows; bright and early is strictly optional in the book of a freelance media professional.
Life on the Express was rough and ready; a single pipe with a stiff bronze wheel valve stood in the area of cracked concrete they referred to as the yard, the water of which was allegedly drinkable. Toilet facilities were those of the scrap business, which meant performing your ablutions under the watchful gaze of Mr. Brownloves’ ferrets; he keeps their cages in there because he thinks the smell kills fleas. The boys have the dead maglev at minimal rent, as scrap is valuable and you can’t keep dogs out all night; three nocturnal youngsters with guns were worth their weight in security cameras as far as Mr. Brownlove was concerned. As she finishes sweeping out the cab there is a knock on the cab door; it’s Ehsan.
“Tex man, you’ve got to come and help us smoke some of this stuff.” The huge cylindrical carriage had been gutted long ago, and interior rooms and levels have been constructed from whatever the band could find; the overall effect is of a shanty town in a bottle. There is cheap beer and there is music; there is gratuitous verbal abuse and there are drinking game forfeits. There is laughing so hard you think you’re never going to breathe again, and there is naturally an excursion for supplies. The coterie traverses the deserted industrial estate and arrives at a commercial bakery; Emmy checks the time to find it is three thirty in the morning, but a light shines from an open fire door and a little counter has been set up.
“Evening lads, been keeping yerselves out of trouble ‘ave you?”
“We’d not show our faces here if we’d been bad, Mrs. Wesson!” asserts Marc. Alongside the pies and pastries which co
mprise much of the Spiral Vibes’ calorific intake when not on tour, Emmy also notices a box of rolling papers and plectrums. Marc follows her gaze and grins as he pays the baker.
“Yeah, Mrs. Wesson’s like a supermarket; groceries and essential household items all under one roof.” The woman beams.
“You ‘ave to know your customers in this game.”
“Are there enough to justify opening at this hour?” asks Emmy.
“Lord no! I’m ‘ere anyway to get the ovens on, but this place attracts stoners and coppers like flies; I think it’s the cinnamon does it.”
“You have a diverse clientele.”
“Oh, there’s always a truce at the waterhole.” Mrs. Wesson’s voice changes; it seems to drop an octave, and take on an otherworldly resonance “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together!” At this moment Emmy realises exactly how stoned she is, which is very. She simpers in a mildly panicked way and scuttles off after the menfolk, clutching a wrapped chocolate pastry to her pounding heart for protection. As night swallows her fleeing form, Alf arrives for a ciggy break; he observes the departing girl from his seat in the smoking shelter and calls over to Mrs. Wesson.
“Been scarin’ the druggies again, Alice?”
“Aw, it’s only my bit of fun; I could prob’ly pull a gun and they’d be back when they got the munchies, bless ‘em. It’s true what they say about it being a gateway drug.”
“Gateway to cinnamon rolls at four in the morning?”
“Too right” she shakes her head ruefully “what a tragic waste of young life.”
The Only War Page 16