Brief as the swallow’s flight,
It’s hard to realise
There are those who do not live for love
Drawn to the heated thread
Of human flesh and blood
See this
Turn all my fires on
They say it’s a mark of sanity, to know people don’t see the world you see
To know everyone around you, is living under stra-ange skies
I want to be insane for this, I want to see your coloured stars
Touch you when I touch you take your mind into, your body into mine
We were talking, you can hear us through the music, about that time Ax and Sage did Liquid Gold for the Hoorays, and my, I felt naked.
The intimacy of what we do, it’s like a disease. Sometimes it spooks us. There I am, in rags that were my red and blue chiffon print, over the remains of a plum tailored skirt, ripped off to the knees. I wear my clothes like memory, hate to see them go. I’m filthy, we’re all filthy, a patina of grime over sweaty tanned skins where the sun slips: 3% works beautifully on all that. But what you’ll feel most is the dull red of the broken half bricks in the gable. A sycamore leaf, piled with blackberries, a shaving of white birch. They’ll be burned into your brain, because that’s where we put the immix.
‘She needs a tambourine.’
Clearly, then Sage laughs. That was it, paper flower folded, gone.
‘You still happy with it?’
She nodded. ‘I’m extremely pleased with where my career is just now.’
‘Me, same,’ said the maestro, equally without irony.
Ax’s ‘Lay Down’, the Yap Moss song (he wanted to call it ‘Untitled’, they’d stopped him) would be the first single, obviously. They didn’t mind.
What did you do in the invasion, oh fallen idols? We slept with the spiders, and cut ourselves a homemade immix album, which our friend Alain will produce, without massacring it, we hope. We can’t consult him much.
Was that appropriate, when your country was in its death agony?
Don’t know, it’s just what happened.
Like cream poured over the back of a spoon, a layer of smooth over stinging liquor, every track is laid over pain. When your country is being invaded, and you are far from the frontline, you find yourself just staring, at whatever stick or stone is in front of your eyes: and that’s where the bodies are buried.
‘Did you know, in World War Two they used to transmit fake German Forces radio from here? Sex scandals about their High Command, to demoralise the Hun.’
‘Only the English… Yes, I did know that, my pilgrim. I read it on the same noticeboard you did.’
‘Hahaha. Well, since Ax has the tranceiver, I shall now knock-up my software, digital radio station again, and bare-wire it to the Aspidistra Mast.’
‘How long will it take to upload the goods?’
‘’Bout ten minutes, if all goes well. Say twenty.’
‘If we took out enough components to make a cavity, could we fix your board so it would work as a microwave oven?’
‘Leave my fucking board alone. My board has had enough.’
‘Only joking, poor Sage. We have no pizza, anyway.’ She leaned against his shoulder. ‘Sage, would you mind taking the kitten?’
‘Yeah, sure, hand him over—’
‘I want to go for a walk. I’ll see you back.’
She disappeared quickly into the mist. Sage held the squirming kitten. ‘You don’t want to run off,’ he said to it. ‘You think you do, but you don’t, you’d get wet feet an’ Ax would fucking kill me’. He stuffed Min inside his hoodie; and bent, almost with a shrug of dismissal, to his work.
She’ll come to no harm.
Camp Hill was pocked with Neolithic-looking lumps and hollows, a usefully messy digital landscape to hide in, if he’d been worried about what he was doing. He was not, but he could feel the fatalistic blank of these strange days slipping from him. I’m going to be afraid, soon. I’m going to have to think about my dad, my son, and all the others whose fates we don’t yet know… Refreshingly, the bumps were not Neolithic. They were the traces of an army that had camped here in 1793, to meet the threat of the French Revolution… Read that on a board too. Facing the wrong way, as it turned out, because in so far as those blood-daubed compadres of ours ever made it, they landed in Cornwall and Wales—
It was an excuse you got tired of hearing. Oh, we only got trashed because England’s military might was facing the wrong way. The air defence region assumes an attack from the north or north-east. To avoid false alarms, the system filters out exactly the kind of profile, storm of hail, flock of birds, that the Chinese fleets would have most resembled… And otherwise it would have been a different story? Do they listen to themselves?
The board slung on his shoulder, Min the kitten a warm lump against his ribs, he trudged off down the hill. He was sour, irrationally so, because his own homeland had been overrun, and Sussex, so far, had not.
Ax had found himself a hiding place further off, and made do without a picture. He listened until the hard news broke up into talking-heads, verbiage, and then decided to quit. The fields and woods south of the Forest were ghostly, haunted by the munch, munch of looming cattle. He crossed the old B road, and took the footpath onto the heath. As he climbed towards the Airman’s Grave he saw Sage waiting for him: a cut-out figure on the mist. He was sitting right out in the open, on the wall of the stone enclosure that marked the spot where a Wellington had crashed in 1941.
And this seemed right, just as it seemed right that Ax was out in the open himself, not skulking helpless in some cellar or attic hidey-hole: being kept like a troublesome pet, until he was found and dragged out. Fuck that. They watched each other, soberly. As Ax came up, Sage slipped down and they turned to lean against the wall, side by side, looking south.
‘Well,’ said Ax. ‘That’s it, officially. Now the unofficial situation starts.’
Sage nodded.
‘Where’s Fiorinda? Back at the bothy?’
‘Gone for a walk, wanted to be by herself. Don’t panic, I have your kitten safe an’ cosy.’ He unzipped his hoodie, to prove it. ‘I’m not going to be branded a tramp and a no-good, not fit to be a father.’
‘I’ll take him.’
‘Nah, you won’t. He’s keepin’ me warm.’
The woods beyond Fairwarp made a crumpled dragon shadow on the sky. The shoulder of the South Downs was a grey washed line on grey.
‘What about the executions?’
‘That’s over too.’
‘You saw them?’
‘Not really. Either they changed their minds about the live show or they never planned it. The executions were yesterday, at Croydon. Only the Generals and Chinese officials present, but it was recorded, that’s what was on the news this morning. I watched some. I only had sound for the rest, had to move out of the yard. It seemed to be the whole list, no exceptions, Lady Anne included.’
‘So Jack Vries is dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
Ax glanced at him, and saw an odd, fleeting expression cross Sage’s face, almost bewilderment. There’s a need to confront the person who tortured you. You feel you won’t be whole again until you’ve faced them down. He knew about that from his experiences as a hostage. It’s an illusion, nothing will ever make it so those things didn’t happen… He wanted to talk about the shootings, how hurried and brusque they had been. No ceremony. A handful of people. The executioner is some menial, a shock-headed minor officer. He fires at arm’s length and the body is hustled onto a stretcher, while the next in line’s already being hustled, blindfold, to the mark. No, he thought. Lay off. My big cat doesn’t need that.
A red admiral butterfly flew up from the walled garden. Ax watched it settle on a stone by the path, its fresh, enamelled wings folded above its body. He wondered if it was unusual to see a butterfly in October. He knew so little about nature. The grey and brown patterns on the hind wing
were like the marbling on the end papers of an old book.
‘They stopped being moderate when they got to the top.’
‘Yeah. Very rational people, the Chinese.’
There’d been no moderation at Reading Site, either… And now Faud Hassim, who had survived that holocaust: Faud, who had kept his word, and protected the Preston family at great risk to himself, and gone on to lead England’s last government; he was dead. He had been dead when Ax got up this morning, and prayed, and went down to Towncreep to watch the Chinese do his dirty work. Ax had not even witnessed it.
Everything seemed muted and far away, under the pale, shrouded sky.
‘Sage? D’you still think about the Zen Self?’
‘Yes,’ said Sage. ‘All the time.’
‘What’s that like?’
‘I dunno what to tell you. It was like lucid dreaming. Being there again, there again, there again, at different moments, myriads on myriads of them, each of them carrying a whole world, layered together, interpenetrating, past present and future. And it’s fractal, so that the first complex four-dimensional object, my entire self, was a gateway—unless I was daring to try and resolve the unresolved shit—to more and more, drawing you to the point where everything turns inside out and you’re here again, but totally aware of the ways beyond. But none of it, what I just said, is strictly conscious, it’s more what you come back knowing, except—’
He broke off, embarrassed. ‘Sorry.’
‘No, don’t be. Please tell me.’
‘It’s not the same now. Say my simultaneity levels are close to normal again. Some little thing like the Lavoisier video can make me tackle the unresolved stuff. But tha’s different, jus’ fucking hard work—’
Ax nodded. Some little thing, yes. The Lavoisier video didn’t seem like much, now. ‘Could anything take you all the way back to where you were? Not the peace you have, which I know about, but to that bizarre brainstate?’
Sage thought, with dread, of a clear glass on a red-gold velvet tablecloth.
‘Say it’s latent.’
‘I can’t get off on your abyss of non-being,’ said Ax. ‘It’s not for me. But I’ve been thinking about what I tried to do. My deluded attempt to build a better world, my great discovery that people should live a certain way: a high tech culture of re-creation, where our purpose in life is to be ourselves, and to look after each other, like the social animals we… You know that thing Isaac Newton said, about the seashore?’
‘Subsistence living, community service and futuristic toys. I remember. I was sold, babe, I still am. Yeah, I know it. Newton said he’d been like a boy playing on the seashore. “Now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”’
‘That’s how I feel. When I got my big chance, when England first fell apart, all I could see was my pebble, my pretty shell of a grand plan. Now I see everything that happened to us, tiny on the shore of history, and the enormous ocean of human possibility is out there untouched. It’s not consolation, it’s something else. Silence. I gaze at that ocean, it’s my abyss. And he felt like that, he had reached the silence, maybe more my way than yours; and everyone knows Newton was an absolute shite. I—I find that comforting.’ Tears had come to his eyes, he wiped them. ‘I’m not making sense, I’m sorry. I’ll shut up.’
‘You’re making sense.’
They stood, heads bowed, on the shore beside vast silence, under the milk white sky, the naked heath all around. At last they turned to look over the wall: at the garden where the aircrew were remembered. Several wreaths of weather-worn scarlet poppies were propped at the foot of a white cross. Salute, compadres. You were young, you died, and it’s all over now.
‘I am so fucking sorry I got you into this.’
‘Ax, I’m tired of that line. Allow me to know my own mind. I got myself “into this”. You rescued me from the miserable state I was in before Dissolution, an’ I have been right by you of my own free will ever since.’ He grinned. ‘Well, ’cept for the slight interval when I was screwing your girlfriend.’
‘You scamp.’
They checked each other over. God is good, Sage’s eyes were clear and bright, and not a shadow left of the bruises: at least, nothing you could see through the gypsy tan and the dirt. Sage returned the compliment, smiling: looking very fine, my guitar man. ‘You’re going to keep it, aren’t you?’
‘You mean the tattoo?’ Ax touched the knotwork: it felt like nothing, like skin, but he knew it was there. ‘Oh yes. I’ll wear this as long as I live.’
Right, thought Sage, resignedly. Because you deserve to wear the badge of shame, doncha, ya’ stiff-necked puritan. Ah well, that’s Ax.
‘Wandering Billy did you proud. It’s beautiful. It suits you.’
The kitten woke, and squeaked. ‘C’mon. She’s probably back by now.’
Crow’s Nest Clump
Fiorinda walked and walked, blindfold by the mist, until she struck a stand of Scots pines. She passed between an outer circle of the rough brown pillars, into a very quiet place. Pine trees never look English: whenever she saw one of these clumps, on the horizon or close up, she thought of the Mediterranean, which she had never seen. But the quiet in here was deep, and not foreign at all… She’d been delighting in her creation, the intricate, seductive layers of code in a video-diary track, and the guilt and grief had crawled up inside her, because playing with the 0s and 1s was what it was all about. Just once, when there’d been no other way out of a minor but very tricky situation, she had taken hold of reality that way, handling the code almost casually. But once was enough to tell her how different it was, and how the same it was. Fuck, fuck, fuck, all those people died for me. Anne-Marie, all the campers at Reading. They died for me, because I’m the one the Chinese were looking for, when they slaughtered a forest to kill a leaf.
What if she lost it again? Parietal lobe damage, the world dissolving into a fitful glimmer, it’s frightening when you recognise what the casualties try to describe, when you think: ah, I have been there. But I won’t. I have solved my equation, I have people who love me, I am earthed. She set her back against a pine bole and slid down until she was squatting on her heels. A robin flitted and clung to a stub of a branch close by, checking her out. Mist dropped in dew from the fisted needles—
Ammy is dead. Dilip is dead, the Wing children are dead.
The mist falls, I feel myself breathing. So this is where I am, and I can’t pretend to be surprised. Our revolution was boiling with corruption from the start, they always are, it’s a crying shame. Now the clean-up crew has arrived, and the finer points about how the Reich wasn’t actually guilty for the mess that is Crisis Europe, we were only trying to help, none of that matters. But they came to England, like a thunderbolt, and in some sense, it seems, with Fred Eiffrich’s blessing. Fred, who would have done anything, sacrificed anything to kill the Neurobomb. What are we to make of that?
There was a phrase General Wang used: awakening from delusion. China had come to Europe to waken people from delusion, no more grim fairytales, no more dancing in the streets… Ax said it was a stock expression, a cliché, don’t read too much into it: just basically means (Chinese not being Mother Nature’s democrats) that if the emperor doesn’t like the facts he can change them. But the words had set something ringing in Fiorinda’s soul, like the first time she’d heard Ax’s techno-Utopian manifesto. Is there someone else who believes we are not helpless, before the monstrous forces we have created? Someone else who thinks it’s possible to stand in the way of destruction’s tide, and turn that bastard around?
Someone who might free me?
How amazing, people like that are so dangerous—
Longing for the impossible made her shiver. Oh, God, what if I have a miscarriage, the way I lost that pregnancy in Paris? My baby, please don’t leave me, dear little baby, please, please don’t leave me. Shit, I must not get frightened. They pick up on you
r emotional state, of course they do, we’re sharing a blood supply: so calm down.
…
I won’t lose this one, she thought. It’s the stubborn kind, it will hang on. She sat so quietly that a young rabbit came nibbling at the turf, almost to within reach of her hand. Hey, little Shoot (she called the baby shoot, it was a small thing growing). See the baby rabbit. Maybe it will let us stroke it. She held her breath, feeling as if she were her baby’s eyes. Come here, bunny, I won’t hurt you. But the rabbit knew a hungry predator when it saw one. It gave her a dark look, wise little sideways look, and scooted.
Fiorinda laughed.
She came through the thorns that shielded the ruined cottage, breaking its outline even now the leaves had begun to fall; seeing their shelter with fresh eyes. An upturned bird’s nest suspended from gable to gable, where the kitchen floor had been open to the wind and rain. Heather thatch and hazel-withy walls. What a lot of work. We did this, we wrote songs, and all that code… When did we sleep?
Well, admittedly the tech did most of the coding, far as my stuff and Ax’s was concerned: bless it.
Other shelters she had known rose around her, drawn up by nets of fire. Her bedroom in the cold house. The smoky basement in Lambeth where she’d first shared a bed with Ax Preston. The annexe in Travellers’ Meadow, dancing shadows of oak leaves on sunlit canvas. A trailer park cabin on a cold beach in Mexico, the red bedchamber at Wallingham… The front door of the bird’s nest, a basketwork screen you could shift aside, was open. She tugged off her boots, stowed them under the eaves and ducked inside.
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