Bold as Love

by Gwyneth Jones

  There can’t be half a million people, she thought. That isn’t physically possible.

  ‘I’m going to open some wine,’ said Allie, ‘I’m sick of being sober. Sun’s over the yard arm, I think I’m off duty. White or red, Fio?’

  ‘Nothing for me. Not til after the show.’

  ‘God,’ said Allie, greatly impressed. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Oh yeah, no problem.’

  If the day belonged to Ax and Sage, it was Fiorinda’s night. When she appeared, having been dead elusive for hours, she was dressed for the stage in a silver and white lace cowgirl dress and red boots, her hair a burnished storm. Sometimes Fiorinda was kooky-pretty, sometimes beautiful, sometimes just a sulky, skinny white girl with a stubborn jaw. Tonight her fickle redhead’s good looks had come out to play: she looked absolutely wonderful and she knew it. The New Blue Lagoon was packed, government suits and other VIPs taking up too much space in their raked seats, canvas walls reefed high to allow the crowd to spill out across the arena; the mosh pit one deliquescent squirming mass, yelling in undamped delight when Fiorinda walked on, picked up her guitar from the piano stool and waited, grinning, for DARK to get settled.

  Charm Dudley, DARK’s frontwoman, had decided she couldn’t make it, which was on the whole a good thing. Friction between Charm and her spinning black hole of a vocalist had been a major problem when they were last together. And away they go, Fiorinda leaping into the attack, from that calm little grin to instantly— In the wings, the Fiorinda Appreciation Society gathered: crew and stars, by no means all of them male, staring like rabbits caught in the headlights.

  ‘How’s that for Sugar Magnolia, Sage?’ murmurs Dilip.

  Sage, beside him, shrugs, ‘All right I suppose. If you like that kind of thing—’

  Skull gives Dilip a little crooked twinkle of acknowledgement, and they both resume concentrating on the rock and roll brat: who has calmed down a little and is singing that Jesus doesn’t want her for a sunbeam.

  Doing it the Vaselines way, but louder.

  DARK had not managed to get to Reading until the day of the concert. That was okay, rehearsal had never been the band’s forte. It only led to trouble. They arrived at the Leisure Centre after their brilliant performance, sweating like pigs, grinning fit to split their faces, accepting with no false modesty congratulations from the non-Few famous. In their shared dressing room they jived around stripping off soaked clothing, sousing each other with cold water from the sinks, gabbing happily about the terrible mistakes they’d made in various songs, the impressive company they were keeping, the thirst they had on them: sniffing up powder, pouring cooling draughts of alcohol down their throats. Fil Slattery raised the bottle on which she had been swigging.

  ‘Absent friends—’

  ‘Absent friends!’ they yelled in chorus.

  ‘Go on,’ said Tom Okopie to Fiorinda, hopefully. ‘Say it. You miss her.’

  Cafren cuffed her boyfriend gently around the head. ‘Eee, Tom, trust you—’

  ‘I miss Charm’s guitar,’ said Fiorinda. ‘On stage. I fucking do not miss Charm. Absent is the way I like her. Sorry, folks.’

  It was Charm Dudley who’d formed the band, with her friends Cafren Free and Tom Okopie, and enlisted Fil Slattery and Gauri Mostel on drums and keyboards. A year of thwarted-ambition hell, shit venues and flashes of genius later, they’d demoted Gauri from lead vocals, and advertised, which was how Fiorinda had come to join them. Cue a different kind of hell, because Fiorinda and DARK were soulmates, utterly right for each other, but the mix was volatile. The kid was in a hurry, far more ambitious than Charm: and the effect of Charm Dudley and Fiorinda jockeying for control had quickly become awful.

  Just awful… Four happy faces fell. They all looked at Fiorinda, and she looked back, the five of them reality-checked, deflated.

  She had wanted DARK so badly, in Dissolution Summer. Wanted DARK and been such a little horror she didn’t see why the fuck she could not have… The sad thing was that she still wanted DARK, just as badly: and they wanted her too. But she was grown up now, so she knew they weren’t going to break up with Charm. Whereas Charm and Fiorinda could not work together. Situation hopeless. Fiorinda sighed, and hunted around for a towel for her hair. She suddenly didn’t want to be here. It was like looking through a window at a life she’d lost, seeing it all going on without her.

  ‘Hey, whose are the flowers?’

  ‘Oh, they were for you,’ said Cafren. ‘Sorry, forgot—’

  ‘Who the fuck sends me flowers?,’ growled Fiorinda. She did not like cut flowers. Who didn’t know that? She tore off the florist’s paper, harbouring a wild idea that Charm might have Interflora’d her a bunch of pink roses, as an insult. There was no card or note. The rose leaves had a sweet scent. No, not these, some other pink roses, long ago… Sweetbriar, what her father used to call her. Oh. Oh no.

  something like a bright, silent explosion in her brain.

  She had walked into one of those waking nightmares, the weird kind of migraine-without-the-headache she’d once suffered occasionally, hadn’t had one for ages, she’d forgotten how bad—

  She put the flowers down, so clumsily they fell to the floor. She felt very sick. Oh. This isn’t migraine, this is me feeling very sick. She felt so dreadful she thought she should shout something like oh shit, I’ve been poisoned: but before she could get that together something started happening, an experience she couldn’t stop, couldn’t escape, couldn’t deny—

  What is going on, does it show, I DARE NOT look in a mirror.

  ‘Are you okay, Fio?’ said Gauri, putting an arm round her.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Fiorinda, drawling, hearing her own voice from a long way off, wondering how she’d got to be sitting on this chair; little snip in time. ‘I’m fine.’

  She told them to let her alone for five minutes, and managed to stay fine until they were gone, which wasn’t long. Thank God for the awkwardness of the Charm issue, which made them probably glad to get away—

  Tom thought Fiorinda was not okay. But there was history that made it difficult for him to pay her special attention. And that red headed kid had changed so much. Her beauty and authority daunted him, daunted all of them. If Fiorinda wanted you to go, you were gone.

  After DARK the show was over. The day-trippers and VIPs were efficiently channeled off, the bands came out and danced with the staybehinds. Cooling breezes flowed through the Blue Lagoon, where Olwen Devi stamped and whirled to highly-evolved bhangra, long ago classical training put to use: thinking of Ax Preston and the future of all this (thinking about the energy audit of stage lighting, in fact). Zen Selfers, notable campers, faces and costumes named and namelessly familiar surrounded her—particularly the lean young giant in the skull mask, who seemed almost to be dancing with her. A sweet boy, once you got past the loutish affectation, but she started to feel a little confused about his motives. This would never do: she left the floor and made her way to the bar. As she waited in the press of bodies, Sage was there again.

  ‘Hi Olwen. You got that boyfriend of yours staying tonight?’

  ‘Ellis? Yes. He was tired, he’s back at the trailer.’

  ‘Shame.’

  Olwen knew the Heads well. They were some of her best converts: genuinely, intelligently fascinated by the project. Their boss (as the band called him) was funny and crude and charming: an A student, a delight. But what was this? The skull’s inviting grin went on giving her the message, while she stared in disbelief.

  ‘Get away with you, you joker. I am old enough to be your grandma.’

  ‘If my gran could dance like what you can,’ he said gallantly, grinning more sweetly than ever. ‘I would want to fuck her too.’

  The bar staff and the people by did not seem to be hearing this. She hoped not!

  ‘Sage, I am afraid you are smashed out of your young brain.’

  ‘I certainly am.’ But there he stayed, waiting, exactly as if he had asked a reasonabl
e question that deserved a civil answer.

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ said Olwen. ‘He’s my husband. We’ve been married nearly thirty years, but we have always spent a lot of time apart. It suits us. He’s a professor at Cardiff, he’ll be going home tomorrow.’

  The mask came off. Sage beamed, pupils so dilated his eyes looked black instead of blue. He nodded, ‘Okay, later.’ The skull snapped back: he plunged into the crowd, vanishing like a seal among the waves of his natural element.

  ‘Hi rockstar,’

  ‘Hi, other rockstar. You look very…interested. What have you been up to?’

  ‘Something I’ve had in mind for a while. Where’s Fiorinda?’

  ‘I was wondering that myself. Let’s go find her.’

  No Fiorinda, anywhere. They found part of DARK, Tom Okopie and Cafren Free: Cafren thought Fiorinda might still be in the Leisure Centre, hob-nobbing with non-Few Big Names. So they set off on this expedition, an adventure, many music biz friends and enemies to avoid.

  ‘Your parents gone?’

  ‘Thank God. I find my dad fucking unendurable, around things like this.’

  ‘I like my parents,’ said Sage, magnanimously, ‘Not both in the same room because that can turn ugly, but separately they are good. I like going to visit them in their lives. I would very much appreciate if they would stay out of mine.’

  ‘Yeah… Sage, If we’re going this far, you could change those trousers. They are getting me down.’ The white singlet was fresh. The trousers were the eye-hurting Bridget Riley rip-offs that Sage had been wearing on stage.

  ‘No. I like ’em.’

  ‘Ah well.’

  The Leisure Centre was empty. They strode along an endless-seeming corridor, feeling equal to anything: never got this whammed in Yorkshire but what if we had, we’d still have been useful. By some dimensional trick they missed (possibly he’d come out of a door, there were doors) Chip Desmond was heading towards them. They advanced with friendly intent, but the kid unaccountably veered away and scuttled off.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Looked as if he thought we were going to eat him. What’s in this stuff you gave me?’

  ‘Nothing special. Bit of MDMA, bit of acid, toad venom, trace elements. Coming up on you now is it, Teflon-head?’

  ‘Yeah. My God, if anyone had told me two years ago I would be taking unidentified candy from Aoxomoxoa… I must be outa my mind.’

  The skull grinned at him beatifically. ‘You soon will be.’

  They came through the door of the dressing room together, laughing, expecting to find it empty, there was obviously nothing going on around here. But Fiorinda was there, still wearing the cowgirl dress. She stood in the middle of the floor, fists pressed to her mouth. She didn’t move. She was staring right at them, but didn’t seem to see them.

  ‘Fio?’ said Ax.

  No reponse. He went up, put his hands on her shoulders—

  ‘Fiorinda? What is it? Sweetheart, what’s wrong?’

  Sage had stayed at the door. As soon as he saw her move, as soon as she came out of that frozen rigidity, he turned to leave, sure he had no place here—

  ‘Sage,’ she wailed. ‘No! Please! Don’t leave me! Please!’

  He shut the door, came swiftly over. ‘Okay, I’m here. I will not leave you.’

  They sat her down. Her eyes were black, her pulse thready and racing, her skin cold and clammy as if she was bleeding inside. Her hands were covered in small red scratches. They looked at each other, the Heads’ patent cocktail dropping out of them like something fallen down a lift shaft, leaving them—for the moment—stone cold sober.

  ‘Fio, what have you taken? Do you remember?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She was clinging to both of them, clutching Sage’s ruined right hand, hanging onto Ax’s shoulder. ‘I didn’t want to be smashed on stage in case I fucked up in front of all those Prime Ministers and things. Not even a glass of wine.’ Her breath was coming in gasps, small breasts heaving under the sweat-soaked lace. ‘We came back here and there were some pink roses, for me: and I didn’t like that. But I managed to be…be okay. I was fine, really. Then the others went off and left me. They can’t be too chummy. They think Charm would smell me on their breath and kill them. And then. What time is it? I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Is it the same night?’

  ‘What’s wrong with pink roses?’ asked Sage.

  ‘I hate pink, and I hate roses.’ She let go of Sage’s hand, grabbed Ax harder, burying her face in his neck. ‘I think my father sent them.’

  Ax wrapped his arms around her, soothing her like a baby, sssh, ssh, don’t be frightened, I’m here. Sage followed a trail of bruised petals to a sink. The remains of a bouquet lay there, torn to tatters. He turned over the fragments, flowers and leaves and stems: natural roses with real old fashioned thorns, dark thorns the colour of old blood, Fiorinda’s scratches explained—

  ‘Who delivered these?’

  ‘I don’t know. They were here, and Caf said they were for me. I have no idea.’

  ‘Was there a card, a message?’

  ‘No. No one told me they were from him. I KNOW BECAUSE I KNOW!’

  ‘Leave it, Sage. The flowers don’t matter. I think we have to get the paramedics. She’s in shock, she’s so cold, this isn’t safe.’

  ‘No!’ Fiorinda jumped up, pushing him away. ‘No! I’ll be okay. No doctors no nurses no injections. Please, no whitecoats not even hippie whitecoats. I just want to get away from here. Please, please Ax. I don’t want anyone to know, if people see me like this they’ll think I’m no good, they’ll think I’m a pathetic hysterical wipe-out—’

  ‘All right, okay.’ He put his arms round her again, ‘Ssh, little cat. You won’t have to see anybody. I’ll take you straight back to London.’

  But she stared at him in new horror, in what seemed wild fear for him: like, how could he suggest anything so insanely dangerous? ‘No, oh no! Not London!’

  ‘What about my van?’ offered Sage, quickly, ‘How d’you feel about the van?’

  ‘Yes! Sage’s van. Let’s go there.’

  She was shivering hard. Ax passed her over to Sage and sought for something to combat that icy chill. He found a thick dark jacket. They put it on her: and a sailor cap from the same heap of DARK’s belongings, pulled down over her eyes. Thus disguised, they tried to walk her to the door, but Fiorinda’s knees buckled.

  ‘I’m gonna get the van,’ decided Sage. ‘I can bring it round.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Better than making her face the public, there are far too many people out there. Fiorinda, I’m going to the Meadow, fetch the van and bring it here. You’re gonna stay with Ax. I will be gone a little while, you’ll look and you won’t see me, but I’ll be back.’

  Fiorinda huddled on the chair, knees to her chin, wrapped in the dark jacket. Ax knelt beside her, holding her hand. She didn’t speak, she was completely out, teeth bared and locked in rictus, dilated eyes unfocused, the tendons in her neck and hands visible and taut as overstrung wire, breath coming fast and shallow. He talked to her softly, but he didn’t think she could hear him. Maybe it had to happen. She’d been so tough for so long. Maybe it wasn’t serious: but he was terrified. Something appallingly precious, appallingly fragile, was breaking in his hands, he was trying to hold it together but no way he could succeed. It was a very long time before the door opened and there was Sage again.

  ‘We’re on. Short corridor, emergency exit, van right outside. Fee, big effort now. You have to pass for normal, for a short walk. Up. On your feet.’

  She stood up, miraculously. ‘I can manage. Do I look strange?’

  ‘You look very cute and brave,’ said Ax, tugging the sailor cap down to shade her face. ‘You look like you’re being rescued from the sinking of the Titanic.’

  ‘I’m sorry about this, Ax. I’m sorry Sage. I am really sorry.’

  ‘Sssh.’ Ax kissed her, hugged her briefly. ‘Let’s
go.’

  The corridor was empty. Fiorinda managed it well, between her bodyguards. Through the emergency exit into the Leisure Centre car park, running the gauntlet of the crowd; to where Sage’s van was waiting. Sage jumped into the cab, Ax lifted Fiorinda, passed her up, climbed after. Sage took the wheel, Ax took the babe, on his knees, holding her tight, and they were out of there, no problem, except for a minor near-miss incident at the exit—

  —involving the rear end of a taxi that was taking on passengers.

  ‘Fuck!’ howled the driver. ‘Who the fuck does he think he is, the crazy fuck!’

  ‘That was Sage,’ Verlaine told him. ‘Cheer up. You can tell your friends you nearly had Aoxomoxoa in the back of your cab.’

  ‘Oh, well—’ said the taxi driver, mollified. ‘Well, he’s a crazy fuck.’

  ‘We’re back to normal then,’ boomed Roxane, as s/he arranged hir silk-lined cloak around hir in the passenger seat; the boys together in the back. ‘For a little while there, I thought we had a grown-up Sage batting for us. Now that would have been bizarre.’

  ‘I saw them, a few minutes ago,’ whispered Chip to Verlaine. ‘Boy, they looked hot. Trust me, tonight poor old Fiorinda is nowhere. She is not even going to get her socks off.’

  ‘You want me to drive you to Notting Hill? Jesus. Don’t you know we got a fuel crisis on? Awright, who am I to argue? It’s your money.’

  The skull turned to Fiorinda. ‘There. The night is ours. What d’you want to do? Wanna drive out to the motorway bridge and chuck cans at the slaves of the evil empire? Or shall we go into town, go people-watching among the common folk?’

  ‘You c-can’t take the van into town, Sage. You know what happened last time.’

  ‘How about visiting the Ancient Britons, see if they died yet—?’

  ‘What Ancient Britons?’ asked Ax, guessing that last time must refer to Dissolution Summer. Fiorinda had escaped, back into the days of their innocence. ‘Tell me, I know nothing. Eyes forward Sage, it is customary although I realise it may not make much odds.’