‘I’m sorry Faz,’ said Ax, without rancour. ‘If you’ve orders to soften me up, don’t bother. I am not going to top myself. We’re holding on, and you’ll thank us some day. You did what you thought best, but you made a bum choice. Do you really think you can trust those buggers to stick by a deal?’
‘It’s not that.’ Faz spoke in a muttering undertone. ‘I have a word for you, from Babylon. I don’t know what it means, it’s Iphigenia.’
‘Okay,’ said Ax. ‘Thanks.’
The former Assassin stared at them, maybe in horror; maybe in pity. ‘I shall stay beside your mother, Ax,’ he blurted. And he was gone.
They retired to the red bedchamber. They had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room and a small library, besides the blue reception suite. They liked the red chamber best, because it was the biggest. It was draped like the Moon and Stars room (heavily shuttered windows behind the arras), in dark red with an interlocking pattern of golden briars; which was repeated everywhere in the furnishings—this had a quirky resemblance to the bio-hazard sign: appropriate, for a werewolf’s lair.
They hadn’t tried to nail the concealed cameras, there was no point. Be thankful for great mercies, there were no actual guards with them inside the suite. If there was no natural light there was plenty of space, and the lamps were ATP, which meant Sage could control them and feed them.
‘I am shocked at Boris.’ Fiorinda rubbed her arms. It was cold in their prison, the air was musty and tomb-like. ‘How could he fall so far, so fast?’
‘I expect he’s hoping to stay alive,’ said Sage. ‘He was screwed the moment he accepted his invite to the Neurobomb Working Party, now he has no way out. We know how it happens… How shocked, my brat?’
‘Oh, just shocked. I blame myself for that brainstem nonsense, I bet I started them on that track. I’ll swear, when I was trying to blind them with science, most of the class had never previously spotted a Neurobomb, Mass Destruction in human form, might have a funny sort of brain. I’m sorry, Ax.’
‘Don’t beat yourself up, little cat. It sounded like classic Paganoid pseudogook to me. I bet the camps are full of neurological outcastes.’
They’d been in prison for two days and a night, no food or drink provided. Fiorinda and Ax’s phones had been taken, Sage’s eye-socket button had been confiscated, and his wrist implant zapped to death. That was the sum of the depredations so far, but it can always get worse, always, any moment, get horribly worse. But Ax’s lovers were displaying intense relief, their worst fear had not materialised: and Ax’s own spirits rose. This strange lightness that filled them, better enjoy it, it couldn’t last—
Ax sat on the floor with their bags, making an inventory. Fiorinda and Sage wandered, surveying the domain. A curtained fourposter bed. A tall Arts and Crafts armoire, slightly damaged; a couple of red armchairs. There were pictures on the walls, but none of those Wallingham table displays of priceless objets. The chimney in the gothic hearth was wide enough for a full grown sweep, but there was an iron grille cemented inside it.
‘Lady Anne is a hereditary aristo, isn’t she? I mean, she’s Lady Anne something or other, besides the Moonshadow bullshit?’
‘Lady Anne Stanley,’ agreed Fiorinda, peering at pictures. ‘She’s connected with this place, maybe a great-great-niece of the millionaire, not sure how many greats: but I don’t know. I’ve tried never to talk to her, in so far as we’ve met, because I’m afraid she knows, knew, my gran—’
‘Well ladidah,’ said Sage. ‘D’you think she fucks Greg at Beltane?’
‘Augh. Thanks for the charming image. She’s eighty.’
‘And Lord Mursal has the chemistry of a brick with acne,’ countered Fiorinda, ‘You are being ageist Ax, and anyway the Great Marriage is not supposed to be fun.’
‘What does Iphigenia mean?’ asked Sage. ‘Do you know?’
‘She was Agamemnon’s daughter. He was supposed to sacrifice her, to get the Greeks a fair wind for the Trojan Wars.’
‘Right.’
‘And there was hell to pay,’ Fiorinda stared at a murky cottage, set about with dirt-blurred haystacks. Is that a Corot under there? ‘Mourning Becomes Electra and all that. What does it means as a message?’
Sage folded himself into an armchair by the hearth, dust clouding up from the upholstery. Fiorinda drifted over to join him.
‘I suppose it’s some kind of sorry I can’t help, from Fred.’
‘So that means—’
‘Fred can’t chat, but he’s in a position to be handing out obscure Euripidean apologies,’ said Ax. ‘Which I call good news, far as it goes: could be worse.’ There was nothing to eat in the bags. He’d been hoping for an overlooked biscuit, a sweetie or something. ‘I am so fucking hungry.’
‘Everything could be worse. I bet there are rats in these walls,’ Fiorinda settled on Sage’s knees, her cheek against his chest. ‘I have my tinderbox, and there’s wood all over the place. We can have rat au vin. If we had any vin.’
Sage took her chin and lifted her face, ‘Did you curse him?’ he whispered, his mouth against her lips.
‘Did not!’
Ax came to sit at their feet, bringing an untouched litre of mineral water and his smokes tin. Dust rose from the gold-briared carpet, and now they did not seem to be prisoners. They were travellers on a lonely road who had stopped for the night in Dracula’s Castle. Fiorinda and Sage were kissing and whispering: Ax found that his cock was standing. In fact, he had not felt so horny in weeks, the afterburn of peril will do that, sometimes.
‘We don’t need ration water, thank God. Not unless they turn off the stuff in the taps. What are you two muttering about, hm?’
‘Nothing,’ said Fiorinda. ‘He’s insulting me, but its just babytalk.’
‘Shush,’ Sage grinned at the bad brat, and ah, it’s a fine thing to have hands that will unfasten her clothes. ‘I say we live for the moment.’
‘I am doing,’ said Ax.
He filled his lungs with gentle smoke, and got up on the arm of the chair to pour it into her mouth. A three-way snog developed. Ax was totally absorbed, getting near the point when he must have more, when he realised he’d lost them both—
‘What is it?’
No answer. The big cat and the little cat had raised their heads, and were tracking something he couldn’t see: very catlike behaviour. There wasn’t a sound in the room, apart from their breath. Not a rat scratched, not a board creaked, no blustering wind in the chimney. If it had been as quiet as this two nights ago, maybe they’d be in Paris now.
‘All right. I’ll buy it… What the fuck’s up? What can you see?’
The bodhisattva and the magician’s daughter exchanged a cautious glance.
‘C’mon. Don’t tell me there’s a ghost.’
‘Could be,’ said Sage, on a speculative note. ‘You could call it that.’
‘Maybe,’ agreed Fiorinda. ‘There’s something in here with us, anyway.’
‘What’s it look like?’
‘A black shape. Like something, not there, only moving.’
‘Terrific.’ Ax stared hard, and shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t get it. What kind of a ghost? Is it, like, a person…of some kind? Could we turn it?’
Sage shook his head. ‘Dunno. I suppose we could try.’
‘Better let it get used to us first,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I think it’s nervous.’
They moved to the bed and enclosed themselves in the curtains, in a cloud of dust (good job none of us has asthma). Were they still watched? They put the question out of their minds, got naked and pursued the heady bliss of this void, this freedom: no regrets, no obligations, only the threefold knot, their whole world.
‘My angels,’ mumbled Fiorinda, clambering between the cold damp sheets to sleep.
‘Fee, hey, you have to be in the middle.’
Fiorinda claimed she found sleeping in the middle demeaning, it made her feel like a disputed soft toy; also suffocated. But she didn
’t put up much of a fight.
‘We forgot to turn off the lamps,’ said Ax.
He made the expedition, mildly wondering what it would feel like if he bumped into that moving black shape: returned safely to their warm bodies again, in a startling pitch darkness.
‘Oh,’ said Fiorinda. ‘The ghost’s gone.’
‘Yeah, figures,’ Ax was plunging toward sleep. ‘We probably scared it. Remember, Elsie would never stay in the room when we fucked—’
Elsie had been the original little cat, Ax’s pet cat, who’d lived with them on Brixton Hill. She’d been killed, in the Green Nazi time: Ax mourned her still, poor Ax, he falls in love so easily, and never forgets. Sage and Fiorinda were touched to hear her invoked. It seemed like a good omen.
Maybe the ghost came back and watched over them. Maybe they were in shock: and fear for their friends, terror for the way they might die here, locked in these rooms, had yet to reach them. They slept well, anyway.
The next morning breakfast was brought to their dining room by servants in black and white. Their luggage arrived. There were no concealed messages, but they could tell that Allie had chosen the books, the jewellery and toiletries. Allie’s hands had folded their clothes—and their friends should have been getting the hell out of England by now, they were comforted.
Later in the day, Greg and Lady Anne returned to hammer out the details of the contract. Ax’s offer had been accepted.
Rick’s Place
What happens when you take a nation of hard-wired hedonists,
Rick’s Place on Net and Cable, Freetcyungbingliu/g/royalintern.eng/s86730 Star Nippon Oita and Phoenix, also, mYTm Oz and Asia, & US ‘mtv’
The Revolutions Number One: The Deconstruction Tour (also the Hilton regime, from the first Popstar President Saul Burnett’s HQ in the Lonron Hilton)
Number Two: Ax Preston’s Dictatorship (the Rock and Roll Reich)
Number Three: the Green Nazi occupation (Extreme Celtics)
Number Four: Ax Preston’s shortlived Presidency
Number Five: The Wallingham House Arrest
deep in debt and sodden with alcohol, first you knock them down with a massive economic crash, then you feed them for years on a diet of wild green violence and joyous rock; and then you give them license to believe in fairytale monsters? What you get is the England of the Fifth Revolution, the headless chicken on the edge of the map, where the ripe craziness of Crisis Europe is distilled to the nth degree. The epitome of it all is the Palace of Wallingham, eighty kilometres from London in the beautiful country of Kent, where I found Ax Preston and his Triumvirate partner’s holding court. Ax’s government tried to sentence him to assisted suicide a few weeks ago, after an incident involving a high-ranking official. When he refused to co-operate, they gave him a palace to live in and a tv show of his own,
Want to be on Rick’s Place? Buy your ticket when you buy your permit to leave the capital, there are a varying number of places available in the live audience. The club is recorded as live, in the Yellow Drawing Room, Thursday Friday and Saturday, Ax n’ Sage n’ Fiorinda arrive at seven and leave at midnight. Don’t promise your Mum she’ll see you, because the televised show is a mash-up, but expect to hear the hottest new bands and the established greats of English music, besides the Triumvirate and the supergroup known as the Band of Gypsys, Ax’s rock and roll Cabinet. And to rub shoulders with the green and pleasant land’s new high society. Wallingham House is a trip in itself, but at the moment it’s closed to the public. Keep off the subject of politics, but toreign tourists are in no danger. Private hire cars are only for those who enjoy dealing with hostile bureaucracy, but trains from Victoria are frequent; take a shared taxi from Ashurst and agree a price before you get in! DON’T miss the last train back to London. Overnight accomodation in Kent is rare as hen’s teeth, blindingly expensive & you could end up in labour camp if your picked up and can’t prove you have a place to sleep.
on which he’ll continue to criticise government policy. International protest at Ax’s arrest has been muted, maybe because the “Lavoisier video” has left people feeling there’s no smoke without fire. Maybe no one knows WHAT to make of the situation now. But one thing’s for sure: the Ax Preston charisma remains strong as ever. It was my privilege to meet Ax for the first time, at this strange juncture in his extraordinary life: and to interview the three most fascinating, controversial figures in World music…
Fiorinda read through the copy. She held out her hand for a pen, removed one errant apostrophe and corrected ‘country’ to ‘county’. The journalist, a sun-wizened, middle-aged Australian rock expert called Keith Utamore, watched her. Around them, chaos reigned. The Yellow Drawing Room was being set up for the show. This had to happen every week, because Lady Anne insisted it be returned, as far as possible, to its pristine state between gigs. Artists and privileged guests were socialising, while the dancefloor crew manouevred the big turntable onto its bearings, a tricky job, and sound engineers tested their ability to focus on any conversation, at any table. The set for The Gintrap was getting cabled-up for their trademark retro kit.
‘Will there really be Oz tourists pouring in, clamouring for tickets?’
‘Huh?’ Keith looked puzzled, then he laughed. ‘Oh, no, no, that’s our style. Armchair travel, kind of gallows humour? The Rough Guide to places you’ll never see again. I do that a lot, on the World Music Round Up.’
She smiled and nodded. World Music, that puts us in our place. She’d never heard of Keith Utamore before tonight, but this just proved Fiorinda’s ignorance. He was huge in the real world, a friend of Joe Muldur’s, and the interview was for a massive Australasian radio/net show: which had the approval of the Great Peace.
The Yellow Drawing Room roared like the sea in a shell, dark and bright like a tv studio, although it would be summer daylight outdoors. She always looked first at the terrace windows when they came down, but there was never a chink in the heavy curtains. Never a glimpse of sky or lawns or trees. The ON AIR signs were getting tested now, flashing red, and alternating to CASH CROPS KILL in green.
Little of what happened here would get onto the actual show. Fiorinda hadn’t seen it, (she wasn’t sorry); but reports reached them. Even the guest bands’ numbers were faked elsewhere. But the screws liked their make believe to be thorough… There was something sinisterly childish about the whole deal. We had the Insanitude, so they have to have a hot night-club venue, only theirs is better, because it’s on tv, the old holy of holies, politicians’ Mecca. Which proves they won, and we lost.
The journo was looking at his slaughtered apostrophe.
‘The intro’s a first draft. You’ll have full approval before we broadcast. Are we ready to go?’
The Rock and Roll Queen of England looked pointedly at her glass. Keith refilled it with Rick’s Place vodka, yellow and warm as piss. There was no bar, only a stingy ration of wine and water on each table: but the servants would bring liquor, for a price. A snake of cable crawled over his feet, shouts of panic came from the struggling dancefloor. At the next table a man in an evening jacket that he wore with easy grace, with slick, jaw-length dark hair and skin the colour of milky tea, had joined the Scottish party: two bands and hangers-on, who were touring together but didn’t seem to be mates—
Fiorinda knocked back a healthy slug. She could put that stuff away.
‘Sure, but we should move from here.’
Keith wanted to stay close to Mr Preston, ‘This seems a quiet spot.’
‘You’ll talk to Ax later. Trust me, any time you see blokes wearing skirts over their trews, I mean strides, like that, it’s best to give them space. See the unnaturally white guy with the very black hair and, strangely, no tattoos? That’s Phil MacLean. The Sikh woman at the end of the table, her name’s Campbell, although she may not look it. They’re desperate re-enactment nuts, they have a g
rudge going back at least three hundred years, and practically every time the bands run into each other, it gets physical. They’re regulars, so I know. They had a real barney one time.’
Fiorinda snagged the vodka and the glasses. Keith Utamore perforce followed, looking over his shoulder. ‘Then why do they sit together—?’
‘They’re Scottish.’ She signalled to a couple of burly waiters, who carried a table to the outer regions of the universe. ‘There. Now we’ll be fine.’
‘Could we clear up a couple of things first, so I don’t fall over myself? “Rick’s Place”, that isn’t the real name of the show, is it? In the English tv listings, I noticed it’s called “Merry We Meet.”’
‘Mm,’ agreed Fiorinda, screwing up her face.
‘“Rick’s Place” is better, yeah.’ They laughed. ‘Is that a reference to the classic movie, Casablanca? The Café American, Play it again Sam—?’
‘Romance, plots and counterplots on the sidelines of a global war,’ agreed Fiorinda. ‘Haha, yes, of course.’
Mr Utamore nodded, still curious. ‘Okay, who is “Rick”? There’s nobody called “Richard” among the Few.’
‘Ax is Rick. It’s a twisted English joke about incarcerated monarchs.’
‘Ah! The Mediaeval Richard II! Let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings—!’ Keith caught himself, consternated.
‘Gallows humour,’ said Fiorinda, with a charming grin. ‘We do it too.’
‘Shall we begin?’
KEITH UTAMORE: Fiorinda, may I say how wonderful it is to be speaking to you, after having followed your meteoric career, and played so much of your music for the audiences of the Pacrim and the southern oceans… ‘Stonecold’, ‘Sparrowchild’, ‘Wholesale’… Great songs, many great songs, the anthems of an era. And then ‘Yellow Girl’, one of the top female singer songwriter albums of the century. You have the music in you, princess. And for the soundists out there without a picture, let me tell you, I’m a lucky man, sitting beside a very beautiful, gracious lady, in the most amazing English stately home, which is being transformed into a tv studio nightclub, as we speak…
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