‘I was coming to that. We’re gonna sell them community service. They’ll accept rockstars as charity work promoters: it looks familiar. We’ll get them cleaning hospital toilets, replanting hedgerows, picking up litter, chatting to old ladies in geriatric wards. God knows there’s enough that needs doing. And they’ll love it. We know they will, because we’ve all been there. Being nice to people is a drug with a very pleasant kick, even when it’s cut to shit. It’s the way we’re wired, we get good juice from caring for each other. So, we’ll give the patients rock and roll for heavy medication, voluntary work as routine antidepressants. If we pitch it with enough conviction, they’ll buy it. As we all know only too well, human beings will do any fucking thing, no limit, if it is seen to be normal and taken for granted, and the role-models say it’s okay.’
‘Circuses,’ said Roxane. ‘Occupational therapy… You left out the bread, Ax. Your people will need to eat. They’ll need the necessities of life.’
‘I do have some plans for that aspect, but for the moment it shouldn’t be our problem. There are rich hippies, rich Greens. We’ll scrounge off them, if the government won’t pick up the tab.’
No one else had any comments.
‘It’s like…shuttering,’ said Ax. ‘We had the industrial revolution, we’ve done that mechanical work. The walls will stand on their own, we can knock away the supports. We can go back to being ourselves—except that we don’t ever go back. We go on, further along Verlaine’s helix of time. If we can just get through this part, this difficult passage, we’ll be there. Overpopulation, from which every other problem stems, will be a pulse that we’ve passed through. The truly liberating tech—for which over—population was in many ways the price we had to pay—will be up and running. There could be, for the first time in history, a genuine human, genuine humane civilisation. For everyone, not the elite few who have always had a sweet life, any time this last however many thousand years. I intend to try and keep things from going to shit, here in England, through this particular shake down, because I want to give the future that could happen a chance. That’s my project, that’s always been my project. To make this turning point the beginning of civilisation, instead of a fall into the dark ages. But the only kind of Good State that’s going to endure is one where nobody has to make an unnatural effort to do the right thing. Utopian revolutions that demand discipline and self-denial turn rotten in about six weeks, because default human nature reasserts itself. Somehow we’ve been given responsibility for the so-called Countercultural masses. Believe me, it’s not what I wanted, but it’s a place to start, and maybe not the worst. I want to give them—to give the whole country, if I get the chance—a model of life where we only take time off from having fun, from making art, from being ourselves, to concentrate on each other, like the social animals we are meant to be. The lesser spotted flycatchers may even be reasonably satisfied, if my ideas come about.
‘And yeah, before anyone says it, I know it won’t work. If I succeed beyond my wildest dreams, it’ll be partial, fucked up and temporary. Partial, fucked up and temporary will be fine. If we can get that going, for just a few years, just here in England, we’ll have made our mark. Something will survive.’
So he’d unveiled the manifesto. He hadn’t meant to do that, and he wished he’d kept his mouth shut, because he could see that not one of them believed a word of it. Oh well. They would still do what he told them, because (like Saul the Pig himself) they badly needed to be told what to do. At least the fountain had responded to his persistence and was rising more strongly: nice touch.
‘But on the way to Ax’s rock and roll café society,’ said Sage, after a polite pause, ‘There is this roadshow—’
‘Yeah. You’ll need help, Mr Minister. You better get on to Allie, she’s the one… Where is Allie, by the way?’
‘Upstairs,’ said Fereshteh. ‘She couldn’t face everyone. I think because she knew, and she didn’t warn us. I mean, I’m not saying she knew there was going to be a massacre, but she knew something.’
‘Well, tell her we need her,’ said Ax. ‘Soon’s she can hack it.’
‘She’s spending time with Anne-Marie and Lola, and the kids. It seems to help.’
Anne-Marie was old lady to Smelly Hugh, the Organs’ second in command. Lola was President Pig’s wedded wife. She usually kept (or was kept) out of the public eye: a side of the Pig’s life that didn’t fit well with the outrageous image.
Roxane and Verlaine glanced at each other.
‘What about Benny Prem?’ said Verlaine.
Ax was looking at Fiorinda. God, she looked terrible, oozing anger and misery, hair tied up in a scarf that resembled a dishcloth. The party frock, fullskirted blue taffeta, sprinkled as if with splinters of emerald, just made her look like a mental patient. Oh, Fiorinda, why are you like this? He couldn’t help comparing her to Fereshteh, who had come through the same ordeal, so serene and strong. He noticed, a change that had passed him by until this moment, that she was no longer wearing the yellow ribbon.
That ribbon, originally a clubbing signal, had been born out of social exasperation: there has to be a way to strike up a conversation, dance, flirt even, without the other person getting narked if you don’t suggest a fuck after thirty seconds… Inevitably it had come to mean other things, inevitably people wore it when they were on the pull, and taking it off signalled some kind of plighting troth with a new partner. Ax suddenly remembered that Sage, sitting beside Fiorinda now, had been wearing the ribbon, on some bizarre whim, before Massacre Night. Not anymore. He clocked this information, and Sage not touching her but very close, with horrified, blinding insight—
‘Prem? He’s a government suit. If they’re happy to keep him on, after what happened, that’s their business. We can live with him. He doesn’t matter.’
The meeting degrouped, and he knew it had gone well enough because everybody (except Fiorinda and Sage) found some reason to come up to him and say a word, touch his sleeve. Even Shane, poor kid: with his heartfelt, justified grief about the band. Ax followed the Heads into the Sunlight Bar, a spacious, grope-dark locale where the de facto senior officers of the barmy army liked to gather. He detached Sage, and took him off to the terrace.
‘How was Wales?’
‘Didn’t look any different.’
‘Did you take a passport?’
‘Forgot. They don’t want passports, anyway. They want national identity cards, and I aren’t got one of those. The border was nothing. But I’m in deep shit at Cwm Gared over this business. Marlon had been seeing his dad on tv, offing the poor sick moo-cows, dumping them in mass graves… Did his head in. Fucking media folk—’
Ax was staring at the righteous Countercultural squalor in the hotel gardens: the teepees, the bare-arsed toddlers, the dogs, the woodsmoke; the heaps of refuse. Silent Spring he thought. The songbirds go first. Magpies, herring gulls, rats. Nothing takes them down.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose I better regard you as some kind of blood brother, since you’ve decided to take me up on my earlier offer.’
‘Huh?’
‘I’m talking about Fiorinda.’
The skull stared, doing a thing that might have raised its eyebrows if it had any. ‘Oh, I get it. I’ve been in your bed, while you was off on tour. Well, thanks. How do you think I managed that? Sneaked back here in my spare time and climbed up a drainpipe?’
‘Don’t care. I said, it’s okay. Just wanted the development out in the open.’
‘Ax, if it’s any of your business, I haven’t touched her. She’s a child, I don’t fuck children. What the fuck are you on about?’
Ax realised he was way out of order. He’d insulted Aoxomoxoa, stupidly, needlessly, and it was the last thing he should be doing. He didn’t know how to recover. ‘Nothing… Forget it. Fact is, I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl. You’ve seen what she’s like, letting herself go. Won’t eat, won’t sleep, she looks like fishbones…’
‘How s
trange. When everything is so hunkydory.’ Sage concentrated on his cigarette for a few moments. ‘Ax, d’you remember that tv show? When I was slagging off the Chosen Few?’
‘I remember.’
‘After which you sought me out, took me on the town, insisted on us talking all night whilst getting me legless drunk, and I couldn’t work out why. You said then that you always tried to listen to the people who made difficulties.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Maybe you should listen to Fiorinda.’
Eventually, freighted with beer and white powder, Ax went back to the house on the Lambeth Road. He wasn’t drunk, he was in the mood where nothing makes you high; just tired. Fiorinda was in bed, wearing a greyish and raggedy underslip, and reading by candlelight (the mains power was having a scheduled brown-out). Her lovely hair—her best feature, in Ax’s opinion—was in such a mess it would soon be dead-cat whitey dreadlocks of no return, a style he hated. The slip hung dismally slack from her skinny collarbones.
He went and sat on the floor in front of his Les Paul, and touched the strings vaguely, without raising a sound. His fingertips were tender from lack of use. All his guitars were valued and respected, but this Gibson was his first love, his favourite instrument, constant companion. In that gleaming, dark red, classic form lived the first big gig, lived the first time he’d seen a crowd go wild: lived everything he most passionately loved to play, everything he’d written (though not the Jerusalem solo). The years of living with the band in a house that had belonged to Milly’s mother, after Milly’s mum and her step-dad moved to Spain; with the overgrown garden where they never did any gardening, the double garage where they had rehearsed. Tours, recognition, critical acclaim. A whole life, a whole world. Gone.
‘Maybe you should set fire to it,’ suggested Fiorinda.
‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea.’
He stubbed out his last cigarette and crunched the empty packet. He’d been smoking tobacco all night, no wonder he felt disgusting. He turned around: on his knees. ‘Fio… I love you. You’re right, I know it. We are fucked, it’s horrible. I’m just trying to stay positive, stupid as that may sound. Please be nice to me.’
‘Ax,’ said Fiorinda, dryly, ‘I begin to suspect you love a lot of people. In your own, deranged, megalomaniac way.’ But she sounded mollified. ‘Oh, come to bed. Come and rest your weary head, idiot.’
He’d known that the word, which he’d never used on her before, would have an effect (although it was a word she would perhaps never use herself). That and telling her she was in the right. People are so easy to handle, as long as you pay attention: problem is that you forget to handle the people who matter most.
The Minister for Gigs proved to have a talent for delegation. The organisation of the Post—Deconstruction Tour was directed by Allie Marlowe, assisted by Ax and Fiorinda and DK. The Heads turned up just about for their spots in a punishing schedule which dragged everyone, sometimes in the same venue, sometimes scattered, all over the country. The rest of the time they kept company with the barmy army. They cooked up batches of home—made napalm on Reading campground, and went crop—spraying the swathes of ‘green concrete’ that the government had purchased for destruction as part of their CCM appeasement. A crowd-pleasing stunt that Ax hated. Sage had never flown an aircraft before, but he picked it up. No more problem than driving the van.
There was no murderous violence in the Cabinet meetings, only the ever-present threat of it, but there was ugly stuff to swallow. In May, President Pig intervened personally to insist on the summary execution of all the prisoners currently sentenced under the restored death penalty (a crowd-pleasing stunt the government had launched a couple of years ago, but never yet had the guts to implement). He wanted them to hang, but had to settle for the lethal injection.
Fired with enthusiasm by the experience, he summoned Ax to the heavily guarded family suite, on the hotel’s first floor, to discuss the formation of a Countercultural justice system. Public hangings, flogging and branding for crimes against Gaia, what did Ax think? He was anxious for approval.
‘We gotta get tough,’ he insisted, alcohol-stunned eyes wandering, unable to fix on Ax’s face. ‘Child molestors, all that kind of shit, we gotta be hardline, take the moral high ground there, as well as on the green agenda.’
The suite was a very disturbing place. It reminded Ax of another thing Fiorinda used to say in the Think Tank. It’s all costume. There’s no distance between the most in your face hippie godfather, and right-wing family values. He began to feel the horror of the trap he was in. The Pig was popular, the country seemed satisfied. There was nothing Ax could do, except walk away, (if Pigsty would let him go); and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.
A few days after this interview he was on the south coast, doing lunch with some ancient ladies hauled out of that other, vastly more numerous death row, for the pilot of the CCM Volunteer Initiative. ‘I’m glad my mother had me,’ said the spry wheelchaired ninety-eight year old next to him. ‘If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here with you now, would I?’ The way she said it, you’d have thought the decade she’d spent dying of boredom between threadbare sheets, sometimes in her own shit, had been wiped clean off the slate by this particular salt-aired sunny day, as she sat gumming her fish and chips for the cameras.
After the publicity lunch he talked to the manager of several long stay care homes in the south coast conurbation, and asked her what was needed. Everything, she said. Economic meltdown had not been easy on the low-income poor-health sector of the geriatric bulge. Donations in kind would be best, as credit was difficult. She’d love some volunteers, nice mature ladies for preference. ‘What about young men?’ said Ax. There were more nice, mature ladies than you’d think among the revolutionaries, but they tended not to be at a loss for occupation. Matron (not her title, but it seemed the natural term) looked down her nose. She knew the kind of young man on offer: but she was desperate. ‘I would consider them. As long as they were clean and tidy.’
‘I’m gonna make you eat that tone of voice,’ said Ax.
The media called them Ax Preston’s Chosen, but that was already the name of his other band, so they quickly became The Few. They moved into a derelict barracks near the Park, that had been standing empty like the Pig’s hotel, and set up their headquarters: a press office, a club venue, studios, a works’ canteen; hostel beds for teenage runaways. They called it The Insanitude. After the national tour, Ax managed to get his friends out of the hostage situation, arguing plausibly that they should spread the message in the regions. The Chosen returned to Taunton; the Heads retired to Reading. But the Pig started to get restive, so the others stayed in town: Chip and Verlaine at Rox’s flat in Notting Hill, Allie, Fereshteh and DK at the Insanitude. Fiorinda and Ax stayed at the Snake Eyes house.
Fiorinda helped DK to run one of the Insanitude nights, keeping him company in his eyrie above the ballroom, while he played merry hell with state-of-the-art IMMix. She wore the new filter glasses to shut out the assault on her visual-cortex: looked down through blood-brown lenses at the huge crowd of dancers swirling around, oblivious of their dolefully decrepit surroundings. Maybe they needn’t bother to redecorate, virtual scenery would be enough.
‘What did it used to be?’ wondered the Mixmaster, mopping sweat and chewing gum at a terrible rate. Forty-something, motormouth Dilip could lose or gain fifteen years in a moment, depending on his mood or the light. He was young tonight, he was flying. ‘This hideous heap, this pile of architectural dung. Was it a factory? A power station, a boot camp a reformatory?’
‘I don’t believe you don’t know. You were living in the Park all last summer.’
‘Was I? Oh, well, I only saw from afar, a big lumpen empty building.’
‘You’re having me on.’
‘Mmm hmmtitum… I’ve never been interested in sightseeing. What a beautiful gown you are wearing,’ He did something that made the dancers shriek, ejected his gum, stuck it on the
underside of the desk, searched in vain for a fresh stick. ‘What do you think of the Pig, Fiorinda?’
‘I think he’s a braindead, brutal creep,’ said Fio, far enough from sober to relish the feeling of speaking dangerous treason.
‘So do I. I also believe Ax did what had to be done, he had no other choice, and he is still doing what has to be done, and all power to him.’
‘Exercising the art of the possible,’ agreed Fiorinda. ‘Same old, same old. Don’t get me wrong, I know Ax is doing his crazy best.’
‘And here are we, torn between Jupiter and Apollo or some East-West lyric that I can’t think of but let’s be shamelessly midAtlantic: you want to come over to the North Wing after this, back to my pad?’
‘Sure.’
‘That is, um, that is—’
‘As long as it would be okay with Ax,’ supplied Fio, resignedly. ‘S’okay. He won’t mind.’
‘Ah, Fiorinda.’ DK swung around and wrapped her in arms like friendly, roving snakes. ‘Sea-green, oceanic, spellbinding, Fiorinda.’ His breath was sweet and hot. She reached over his shoulder, took off her glasses and was plunged into deep water, filled with mysterious shapes that thrummed at her like another kind of sound: then flipped to the roaring surface, stretched over the peaks and troughs of gigantic midocean waves. Dilip was lovely and warm, in the middle of this huge cold sea. ‘Actually,’ he confessed, nuzzling her throat and at the same time leaning back to do something new to the illusion. ‘I was having you on. I know where we are. We’re in Buckingham Palace, for a changing of the guard, what could be more fitting, ah, green-eyed Fiorinda—’
Her eyes were grey, in some lights hazel; or maybe even brown. But it would have been a shame to correct him when he was on a roll.
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