Bold as Love

by Gwyneth Jones

  Razor into there

  Always be there,

  however small it goes,

  between the bleeding

  space between screaming

  where it doesn’t matter

  Live within the pain,

  Live in the pain,

  Live…for…this moment…

  ‘Oh, Hi Fio!’

  Coming towards her—just emerged from the backstage entrance of a smaller, emerald coloured tent across the way—was a vision of perfection, in a slim black dress and a long grey padded jacket with gauze sleeves. Her skin was misty gold, black curls caught up in a knot behind her head, brow and eyes obscured by a glittery effect like insect wings. Her name was Allie Marlowe, she was a sort of friend of Fio’s.

  ‘Shit,’ muttered Fiorinda.

  She remembered White Van Man’s plan to meet his friends and avoid his enemies. Allie was a music—biz socialite, one of those people you might dismiss as a groupie or hanger—on until you realised (before she noticed your dismissal, if you were lucky) what an important role she played. Right now Fio didn’t want to meet anyone she knew, but she absolutely definitely desperately did not want Allie Marlowe to witness her first meeting with Rufus O’Niall.

  ‘Hi Allie.’ It was too late to flee.

  ‘Fancy meeting you here!’ Allie smirked ironically.

  ‘Fancy meeting you,’ said Fiorinda, deadpan. ‘I’ve just arrived. How’s it going? How’s the boite?’

  Their friendship had been founded when Fiorinda did a gig with DARK at a club in Brussels that Allie was managing. Fio had ended up going home with Allie, they’d talked all night. Since then, Allie had displayed flattering interest and look—through—you indifference, roughly alternately, whenever their paths crossed. She was an excellent barometer, if you were in any doubt about how you were doing. This time she seemed actually embarrassed, which Fio thought was a very bad sign, until she realised that Allie—eyes flicking sidelong under her dainty futuristic veil—was personally embarrassed, nothing to do with Fio, at being caught wandering about by herself. Socialites, like rock-lords, should never be seen without an entourage.

  ‘Oh, I’ve moved on,’ she exclaimed, warmly. With Allie it was always ‘Oh!’, a round-mouthed big-eyed home-alone pause before any possible statement, to give her time for second thoughts. ‘I’m not running the club anymore. Oh, Fio, I must give you one of these—’

  Fio accepted the handout, which Allie had taken from a businesslike grey attaché case: a surprising item for a style-monster, but Allie never made mistakes so it must be right. She peered at it in the half dark, and discovered a list of events called ‘seminars’ and ‘workshops’, with titles like ‘The Death Of State Education’ and ‘Human Rights: Who Needs Them?’

  ‘What on earth’s this? Is politics really the new rock and roll, then?’

  ‘Paul Javert is going to be speaking.’

  ‘Who he?’

  Allie rolled her eyes. ‘The Home Secretary, Fio. Where have you been?’

  ‘Touring. That means he runs the police, doesn’t it.’

  ‘Look, don’t you realise this is serious? If you don’t know who Paul is and what he stands for, I think you’d better come along and find out. Trust me, Fio. Westminster is the place, nothing’s going to happen out here in the sticks. So…’ She glanced at Fiorinda’s bedroll, her boots, her ragged skirts: and winced, visibly. Allie didn’t like Fiorinda’s grunge-waif style, and had tried to persuade her to smarten up, to no avail.

  ‘Are you looking for someone, or—?’

  ‘Looking for Aoxomoxoa,’ Fio improvised. ‘I was supposed to meet him and the lads—’

  ‘Oh! The Braindead Ones. Yeah, they’re here. Unless they’ve been chucked off the site. Apparently Sage arrived completely smashed and got into a fist—fight with the security people within minutes. Look, I’m in a real rush. See you tomorrow, and remember be there.’

  Allie flitted away into the dusk, leaving Fiorinda airkissed, flustered, humiliated, puzzled: and with a vague, wild idea that Allie Marlowe must be having an affair with the Home Secretary. What other explanation could there possibly be for her enthusiasm? Or the attaché case.

  The crowd outside the Blue Lagoon had vanished. The canvas doors to the marquee were roped shut, nothing was scheduled in there tonight. She went and stood listening to the dark and silence inside for a few moments, tasting her anticipation. He is here.

  She wandered on, looking for skulls, wondering if this crowd really was different, revolutionary, dangerous. Digital facemasks, bodymasks. Carnival plumes and banners, the painted and the naked and the students and the straights, all jostling together. Just the normal rockfest scene, far as Fiorinda could see. It would be good if she could find the Heads. She didn’t believe the chucking-out story, that was just Allie’s way of saying she hated Aoxomoxoa.

  Sage and his band had been wearing digital skulls for heads, for years, a mark of deference to their late, great, gurus, the Grateful Dead (an oblique influence on the Heads actual music, which tended to vile noises and weird multimedia tricks). It was no longer so easy to pick them out in a crowd, now that masks were commonplace, but they were sure to be out here among masses somewhere. They liked to see life.

  She spread her sleeping bag that night in an ancient army-surplus mess-tent, next to Sage’s preposterous great van, and woke to the sound of birdsong, leaf shadows dappling the canvas roof. She’d cleared the detritus and arranged the overspill of Heads belongings neatly on her polythene (the Heads’ annexe had no groundsheet), when the chief Head himself appeared at the entrance. He came into the tent: immensely tall, skull mask already in place; and perched himself in one of his giant pixie poses on a stack of hardware.

  ‘I don’t remember asking you to do that.’

  Sage liked chaos. Fiorinda the grunge-waif was secretly, innately neat.

  ‘Yes you did, Sage. You said, “please dear Fio tidy up this jumble sale, as I know you hate mess, and then I will be able to find things, and I will be eternally grateful.”’

  ‘Fuck. I did not.’

  Aoxomoxoa’s name in private life was a relic of the band’s history. They’d originally called themselves Purple Sage, but people had kept thinking it was ‘Purple Haze’: which had pissed them off, so they’d been forced to change it. Fiorinda had met him when the Heads came backstage after a DARK gig, in Amsterdam. They’d been best friends ever since.

  ‘You wouldn’t know any different if you did, you were drunk as a whole stink of skunks. Sage, you didn’t actually hit anyone, over where to put the van, did you?’

  The Heads’ version of Allie’s chucking-out story was that Sage had decided he didn’t have to park his rig in the scummy hospitality area if he didn’t feel like it. Site security had demured. There’d been ‘a pointless argument’; and the van was here in Travellers’ Meadow—otherwise reserved for well-connected hippie clans with live-in wheels. ‘Nah. I never hit the bib people no more, ’tisn’t sporting. I reasoned with ’em. Honest. Where’ve you been, brat? Why’n’t you turn up with DARK? People have been worried. I was too wrecked to think of asking you last night.’

  ‘I had a fight with Charm,’ said Fiorinda gloomily, picking up her sleeping bag and shaking it. ‘Worse than ever. Horrible. I said I’d meet them here…but I think we’re finished, after this. We’ll hack it through the gig, and then I will be fired, or I will quit.’

  Charm Dudley was DARK’s frontwoman.

  ‘What kind of a fight? Didja hit her?’

  Fiorinda ducked her head and retired behind a curtain of red curls. ‘I may have done.’

  ‘Hahaha. So, I think you can fuck off telling me how to behave, young lady.’ The blank spaces that hid his eyes lit on a white, covered bucket standing in a corner. ‘What’s that?’

  Sage’s van was a monster, there was always something wrong with it. Last night she had learned to her despair that the composting toilet was not functional. The Heads didn’t care, indeed she suspec
ted they’d have hated the van if it ever managed the separation from squalor it so falsely promised. Fiorinda had taken the law into her own hands.

  ‘It is a bucket with a lid. I went out and bought it from White Van Man. He’s doing them as a sideline. I knew because he gave me a lift in yesterday.’

  ‘Off of White Van Man, Fio. Not “from”. Watch yourself.’ He went over for a closer inspection. ‘I hope it’s not a chemical toilet. I won’t stand for that. We will fix the composting thing, how could you doubt us.’

  ‘No you won’t. It has never worked properly, and the nearest portaloos are ten hundred miles from here, and if the weather warms up they will get maggots. I cannot cope with maggots squiggling around inches under my bottom. It’s only a bucket. It can be cleansed by organically sound methods. But I insist on the lid. I can’t help it, I’m addicted to civilisation. What are you doing up so early, anyway? Diarrhoea? I’ll go for a little stroll then, if you don’t mind—’

  ‘Nah, we’re off out,’ said Sage, unhooking his one-shouldered dungarees and lifting the infamous lid. ‘Going to town, to the LSE. Some kinda Green Nazi party political conference. You ought to come, Fio. It’s your kind of gig. Lotta long words. I see you’re still wearing the yellow ribbon. You’re a wise girl. But don’t you ever think you might be missing something?’

  ‘True intimacy is not to do with sex,’ said Fiorinda.

  Fio, Sage, Cack and George breakfasted on corn patties and coffee with a heavy shot of cognac, from the White Van; and drove off to London, leaving Bill and Luke to mind the shop (a sixth Head had quit after a severe health scare. You needed a superb constitution to survive the Aoxomoxoa lifestyle). The roads were quiet. Hyde Park, where they left the van, was heaving. So was the LSE. Fiorinda was amazed to see such a crowd, on a Sunday lunchtime, in a place that didn’t even have a bar. There was no one on the door at the main venue. They walked in and stood in the front hall, people—watching: Sage and the lads waxing astonished to find themselves inside an actual seat of learning, admiring the marble mugshots of whosits, wondering if you had to pass some kind of exam to get into the gigs? Fiorinda let them wax, though she considered this performance too stupid to be funny. Tv crews, some of them from proper mainstream channels, were pointing cameras and snatching soundbites. Immense numbers of people, not all of them young, not all of them funky, were peering at handlettered notices, clutching printed handouts, shouting at each other and into phones: purposeful, inspired, throbbing with incomprehensible excitement. I mean, thought Fiorinda, suppose they actually took over the government? Would that be fun? Sending out Income Tax forms, cooking the unemployment figures. Is that thrilling?

  ‘How important is this conference?’ she asked Sage, casually. ‘Do you think any seriously political rockstars will be here?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ His mask, which was something different from the simple fx the other Heads wore, writhed into a boneyard sneer. ‘I’m sure rock and roll’s own Great Pretender to the Countercultural throne is around somewhere. Didn’t know you were a fan.’

  ‘I’m not. Not at all. Just…intrigued. Slightly.’

  She didn’t know who he was talking about. He wouldn’t describe Rufus O’Niall in those terms, would he? Not to Fiorinda. The Heads must know the story about Fio’s baby, it had not been a well-kept secret, but they never mentioned her father to her. They were a tactful bunch of drunken laddish idiots. She couldn’t bear to ask him to be more precise: but it was another sign, oblique and paradoxical, as all real signs are. That made two messages from fate, counting Allie last night. She would find him, he was here. It was just strange that she had yet to hear his name, or see his picture.

  The lads wanted to snag one of the big name speakers, because you might as well. She ended up sitting with them in a heavily raked lecture theatre listening to the President of China talking about the Environment. The Heads were disgusted to find that they were watching a video, even if the video took the form of a free standing moving image. ‘Might as well be watching Michael Jackson jive,’ growled Sage. ‘If yer frontman’s not going to be physically there, it’s okay. But you hafta say so on the tickets,’ complained Cack, shocked by the duplicity of the politicals.

  Also, there was something wrong with the ST earbuttons. Whoever, or whatever, was doing the ST, was comfortable with words like if, and but, and and, not too happy with anything more strenuous.

  The Heads left. Presumably the rest of the audience could understand Mandarin because they stayed. So did Fiorinda, folding the President’s meaningless speech around her like a cloak, composing herself within its shelter—almost like being wrapped in Sage’s music, or whatever you called that stuff of his. Funny that the second most powerful person in the world should have the same appeal as an Aoxomoxoa and the Heads gig. At Question Time, when heavy numbers started filing out, she joined them and went hunting for a VIP lounge, a backstage, a track for insiders. Quite by chance she became lodged in a human gridlock at the foot of a staircase, and saw in the crush ahead of her a silver topknot, a bald knob with an eagle feather scaplock, and those broad shoulders in dark blood red. She reached a desk. Smiling but determined door police, supported by armed security muscle, wanted her name, wanted to scan her. She had to sign something. The smiling but determined ones were turning a lot of people away. Fiorinda got through. She didn’t see what happened to the witches. Reading her handout as she slowly climbed the stairs, she found that she’d signed up for something called New Faces For The Upper Chamber? Enrollment Only: and Paul Javert would be speaking. Explained the security. But what did the man who runs the police have to do with the former House of Lords?

  ‘Complete bastard waste of time,’ said one passing delegate to another.

  ‘Some kinda fuckin’ fake-Green peerage fer fuck’s sake,’ agreed the second. ‘Total sham.’

  ‘All they want is our names and numbers, for later attention.’

  I’m sure you’re right, thought Fiorinda, with a qualm of unease. Could she have just done something dangerous? She didn’t care. She was backstage of this thing and she’d seen the witches again.

  If anywhere, he would be here.

  The workshop (or was this one a seminar?) was in an antique, buttoned—leather armchairs sort of library. There were vistas of London rooftops through the windows, there were hungry tv and webcast folk, there were a lot of vociferous people. As Fiorinda arrived a small posse of men in suits made their entrance, surrounded by a security escort (not literally in suits, but you could tell what they were as easily as if they were policemen). Allie Marlowe, wearing an even smarter black dress but the same grey jacket, was with the party. She saw Fiorinda, and gave her a complicated smile: the smile someone gives you when you have guessed a puzzle that they thought you would not crack.

  ‘Hey, Fio!’

  Sage and Cack and George came up beside her, grinning (they couldn’t help it). ‘We saw you’d signed up,’ explained Cack happily. ‘So we did too. What’s this one?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Fiorinda. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Better ask our beloved leader,’ offered Sage, sourly. ‘There he is, Fio, if you want him.’

  A lot of people had surged after the suits. Over by the windows, another lot of people were pressing around a man in a long leather coat. Fio immediately went over there, blood thundering in her ears.

  It was the person she had glimpsed outside the Blue Lagoon marquee. But it wasn’t Rufus. At close range and without the hat she knew this instantly, but she couldn’t believe it. She circled around, trying to get a good straight look, irrational conviction fighting with the evidence of her eyes. It had to be the Three Witches’ Thane of Cawdor, but it wasn’t Rufus. This man was much younger, much less heavily built and not so tall as he had seemed in the dusk and he wasn’t white but his skin was more milky—tea than chestnut. She stared, unable to believe she could have made such a mistake. She had been so certain. It was the coat that had fooled her. A long brown leather
coat such as Rufus used to wear, in the days when he came and fetched her from school. The big, sleek, soft and expensive animal skin coat had seemed uniquely glamorous, it had become inextricably linked in her childish mind with Rufus O’Niall—

  The not-Rufus caught her eye, raised an eyebrow and smiled wryly. She recognised him, though they’d never met. He was Ax Preston, lead guitar and frontman of The Chosen Few, or more usually just The Chosen—a band from the West Country, not very commercial, not Fio’s kind of music, but adored by the critics. He was supposed to be an ace guitarist, bit old fashioned, bit left wing. Did he really have pretensions? Not that she cared.

  She turned away, glad she wasn’t prone to blushing.

  She saw it all now. Rufus O’Niall wasn’t even in the country. The whole rumour of his entry into post-UK politics was baseless, the idea that he was bound to turn up at Reading a figment of Fiorinda’s imagination. How could she have built so much on so little? She’d have walked straight out, except she’d have had to fight through the crush, and anyway the Heads were here. She might as well stay, hide herself again in a shelter of meaningless noise. Everyone milled around: immensely too many to be seated at the table where the suits had arranged themselves. Organisers imposed some kind of order. The suits’ leader started to make a standard sort of speech, as far as he could be heard above the hecklers.

  ‘We’re going to make England great again,’ he shouted, (against a loud, determined anti-car chant from back in the stacks). ‘But we need your help, your ideas, your input.’

  ‘You mean you need to cut a deal with the Counterculture!’

  Whoever said that had a voice like a foghorn. All eyes, even Fiorinda’s, turned to the speaker, a colourful character with a shaggy bleached crest and—going by what you could see—a full complement of heavy piercings and tattoos. There was a murmur of non—political interest, because it was Pigsty Liver, of Pig Liver and the Organs—a big name, in idiot-commercial terms. The Organs were headlining at the Hyde Park festival. Rockstars all over the shop, thought Fiorinda. But not the only one who counted. The anti-car chanters were being removed. An ardent fan who had climbed the Economics stacks to get a better look at the Home Secretary lost her footing and fell with a crash. The suit who must be Paul Javert leaned forward over his clasped hands, oblivious of all the row, and grinned.