‘I know. Let’s go down to the river.’
They dropped behind the others, crossed a stile in the hedge and found a place to sit at the water’s edge, by the footpath to Banbury. It was a weekday afternoon. There were boats on the river, people strolling; small children. She took a painted smokes tin out of her backpack—same shabby, tapestry compendium she’d been using since before Dissolution—lit a spliff and handed it to him.
‘You want to talk about it?’ Neither of them had said anything about that aspect of the Islamic campaign. Walked out of the soldier-business and shut the door behind: she’d supposed it was the best way.
‘Didn’t bother me. Not as much as it should have done. There was one occasion, when I had to fight my way.’ The skull grimaced. ‘Well, one occasion was seriously unpleasant. Otherwise, it was contact sport. You or me, brother, nothing personal intended. We couldn’t stay back at HQ keeping our hands clean, so—’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not a pacifist by nature—’
‘No!’ Fiorinda gasped and stretched her eyes. ‘Gosh, really not?’
‘Fuck off. Ax bloody is, though. He has no objection to taking insane risks with his life, or commiting awesome damage to property. But he hated the killing. Hated it. Don’t know how he hacked it. Went on hacking it, day after day… It was horrible to watch.’
‘Well,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I know about one of his brilliant coping strategies.’
‘The smack? He told you, or you just knew?’
‘He told me. And he told me how you harrassed him into seeing the error of his ways. Thank you.’
‘De nada.’
Fiorinda had found a cache of downy swan feathers, in the shining grass beside her. She lined them up and started setting them on the water, one by one. Would the swans belong to Ax, she wondered, when he was President? Or did they still belong to the ci-devant Royals, absentee swan-lords. But Ax wasn’t going to be President. He preferred a different title, and was holding out for it.
‘Is he still saying they have to call him dictator?’
She nodded. ‘The suits think he’s joking, but he isn’t. He’s a jumped-up outsider who can somehow control a dangerous, violent mass-movement… He knows what they see in him. I think he sees insisting they say it out loud as making up for the shame of getting democratically elected.’
‘Hahaha…That didn’t feature on any of the lists.’
‘Absolutely not. Ax doesn’t think much of democracy.’
‘It’s just a word the masters of the universe like us to use. But trust Ax. Fuck, why does he keep doing these things to himself?’ Sage considered, and rejected, an itemised list. Might contain some nasty anxieties Fiorinda hadn’t thought of.
The company that did Ax’s implant had gone bust while they were in Yorkshire. Ax had said, casually, there go my updates: Sage didn’t want to ask how much he knew about the unpleasant possibilities. He was tired of hearing about dislocated risk perception, and generally getting out-Aoxomoxoaed by a soft-spoken, introspective guitar-man. ‘I dunno how he gets away with this Mr Sensible tag. I think he’s the most perfectly reckless person I have ever met: and that’s counting me and you, brat.’
‘So naturally you adore him.’
The skull did a mix of its you beyond belief grin. ‘So naturally I adore him.’
Another feather down the stream, with a freight of silvered water drops. ‘Sage, what’ll I do with my money? Suddenly I have money. I don’t want to give all of it away, I am not that noble.’
‘Ah, now, this is the beauty of hyperinflation. You get a rush of cash, and suddenly all the vanished goodies reappear. Jet planes, diamonds, fresh fish. You could hand it over to me an’ George, let us play the markets for you.’
‘No.’
‘Then cash it. Buy something solid. Not gold: real estate.’
‘No thanks, I hate the idea. I am no fixed abode. You don’t have any property in your name except your hovel in Cornwall and the van.’
‘If ever you have an irate ex after your hide, come to me. I’ll tell you what to do.’
‘She’s not still after you, is she?’
‘Don’t think so. But I’ve found out that this is the way I like to live. I like my hovel. You could buy yourself a decent piano.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sounds good? Then you’d need somewhere to put it.’
‘I’m going to move in with Ax.’
‘Oh yeah. I knew that.’
Ax was buying a place in Brixton, having turned down all the suits’ preferred candidates for the Presidential Residence. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the plash of oars; birdsong from the trees on the other bank. Sage turned to her. ‘While you’re here,’ he said, skull doing something like cautious speculation. ‘Could I look at something?’ He picked up the tapestry bag, hefted it and shook his head sadly. ‘Still luggin’ your pet rock collection around?’
‘It’s my bag, do I ever ask you to carry it? What are you looking for?’
‘This.’ He held the birchwood saltbox in his masked hand. ‘I just wondered, do you ever need to refill it?’
The fallow gold was mantled in carmine: Fiorinda blushing, a rare and lovely sight. ‘Leave me alone, Sage. It’s none of your business.’
‘So that would be a no, I take it.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Of-of course I refill it, just not often, a little salt goes a long way, that’s all.’
‘Okay, different tack. Can we talk about the way you were the night after the May concert?’
The lovely blush had faded. She took the box from his hand, and stowed it away. ‘All right, but I can’t remember much. As far as I can tell you, it was like suddenly, inside, I was somewhere else, best described a tunnel full of monsters. I had to keep fighting them off, but they came thicker and faster, and I knew that in the end, if I got past them, there was just a big black hole. But I was in the van, the whole time. That was what scared me most, almost. Two worlds trying to occupy the same space, like Ver said—’
‘It’s dark ahead,’ said Sage. ‘I’m armed, but it’ll do me no good. The horrors keep leaping out at me, I keep on fighting, but I know that in the end my luck runs out and I die. Me too. I think everybody’s been having that dream—’
‘But I’m the one that crapped herself. Me, the Weakest Link.’
‘I don’t think so, Fiorinda. But I think you ought to tell Ax.’
‘About a nightmare?’ Fiorinda picked at the threadbare, unravelling hem of her green dress. ‘I have told him.’ She looked up, scowling. ‘Hey, I lost the plot. I had a panic attack. Is that such a crime?’
He’d pushed her far enough. ‘Okay, okay. We drop the subject.’
‘Some day soon, you’ll dive into one of your black holes, and Ax won’t like it at all. He doesn’t have the rockstar tantrum gene, and he won’t understand.’
‘What black holes? Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The skull and Fiorinda pulled hideous faces at each other, and laughed: white water fishes, kindred spirits of extreme emotion. Fiorinda sighed. ‘Sage, how did we get into this? I do what Ax puts in front of me because I love him: but I don’t believe anyone can change the world, or save it.’
‘Dunno.’ He drew up his knees, giant pixie style. ‘But I’ve been thinking, about it. I’ve decided I was looking for trouble. Some way to go into the desert, find out what I’m made of; and this glorious opportunity came along.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah, why not?’
‘Oh, please. One of you with a mystical mission is bad enough. Take it back. Tell me going to that fatal seminar was just Sage being wilfully bizarre as usual.’
‘Of course, now I remember. It was just Sage being wilfully bizarre. Fiorinda, I really hate it when you do that to me. Why the fuck do you do it?’
She was dismayed. ‘I’m sorry, it’s a silly game. I’ll stop. I just like to hear you tell me everything’s going to be all right. Especi
ally when we both know it’s nonsense.’ She ducked her head, hiding under the donkey-eaten straw, not knowing how to say it without trespassing: I’m going to live with Ax, I’m not your brat anymore, but I can’t bear it if we’re not best friends—
‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
She risked a glance. The skull was looking at her very kindly. Fiorinda smiled. They got up and walked on, talking about the houses on the other side of the river, which were being squatted, ravaged, dismantled. Some cases, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bijou riverside residence. Others it was a real shame.
Well, I go this way. She left Sage at the gate to the Travellers’ Meadow, and wandered (catching the occasional nudge and glance, hey, there’s Fiorinda: but not much of that, the campers were too cool). Thinking about Ax Preston and early days. When was it he read her the lecture on safe sex? Said lecture received by sixteen year old Fiorinda with indifference and dumb insolence, but she’d had to agree that if they gave up his precious condoms she’d always use protection with anyone else. Oh, all right. I’ll get some of the spray-on stuff Sage uses, that you don’t have to think about. One size fits all, hahaha…(But Ax would be a Durex man until his dying day: such a fogey). It had taken her weeks to realise that he’d finessed her into going steady.
He’s a sneaky bastard.
Oh, it’s never going to be easy. It’s a relationship full of dead ends and winding passages, some of them going right back to that twisty, blocked beginning when I thought he was someone else. Involved is a good word: I can feel it. I’m involved with him, something different from and more vital, more permanent than being in love. Even the sex wasn’t simple. It could be very frustrating, when she held him in her arms and knew he was off on another plane, making love to his china-fragile Fiorinda-of-the-mind. All the more wonderful though, when it worked right. Fiorinda in the front row, Ax Preston with the Chosen in some tiny West Country venue, the Crisis Management show goes on, grimly necessary crowd control: but he looks at her out of the complete mastery of his playing, such a flash of pure, besotted lust. I ought to yell at you, I’M NOT A GUITAR, but I can’t. Knees are too weak, know what you plan to be doing minutes, nay seconds, after you get off that stage, and I can’t wait—
She walked through the fair: Titania wearing a reminiscent grin of ravishing sweetness that turned the coolest heads, counting the changes and the survivals. The wildflowers that the staybehinds had sown, tough pretty weeds in clumps and skeins, right up to the beaten-earth in front of Red Stage. Anansi’s Jamaica Kitchen, the van where she and the Heads used to buy breakfast, gone from its pitch. Rupert the White Van Man must be on tour. A new climbing wall in Violet Alley, where the Megazone Circus lived but the karaoke and amateur-night tents (Bands of the Highly Improbable Future), had vanished. And my hut’s gone, she thought, the one where I lived when I was fighting with Ax last summer. When Luke was dying, and Sage was so miserable, and I got that letter from Carly—
Beyond Violet Alley rose the eau-de-nil geodesic of the ZenSelf tent.
She came to a halt, pretending to watch the kids on the climbing wall, but the beautiful smile had faded. She was twelve years’ old again, and there was something terrible growing inside her. Is it worse at the first shock, or is it worse when it seems as if nothing’s happening, but you know it’s still in there, still growing…? Would anything show on a brain scan? An inoperable tumour, perhaps? Olwen Devi had been trying to get hold of Fiorinda, ever since she dropped out of the gut-bacteria pilot scheme: but Fiorinda had ignored her approaches. Trust Olwen? Tell her, what? That I have very weird nightmares about my father, that I can coax a flame to creep into my hand? Oh, great. Go straight to rehab, Fiorinda, and don’t take your shoelaces—
And what if I could prove it, what then?
She could not remember ever having refilled the saltbox.
It scared her that Sage seemed to take the idea (what idea, Fiorinda? Care to put it into words?) seriously: but at least he would never tell. Never trust Sage when he backs down too easily; but he’d never tell. No, she decided. I did what Sage told me, I took control and I won that round. If ever, for a moment I feel that I’m not winning, I’ll tell Ax and Sage and Olwen Devi the truth, at once.
She turned and quickly walked away.
The weeks after the Mayday concert were incredibly busy. Ax had established that nobody had dibs on Oltech as a domain name or a trademark, and they were pursuing that development. Ax’s old lady friend Laura Preston had told him about a scheme she remembered, back in the nineties, where manufacturers and distributors handed over surplus goods—food, clothes, furniture, anything—and if you were a worthy cause you could go along to a warehouse and take what you could carry; for a nominal price. They were looking at scaling up that idea, trading in surpluses to finance the drop-out hordes welfare schemes. They sent Fiorinda out with a business plan she’d devised.
Since the May concert, rich entrepreneurs were very willing to meet that wild-cat glamour puss, whatever they thought of the CCM. They met her, encountered glacial intelligence, and it was a killer combination.
It was Allie who thought of the banners at the gates of the Insanitude: tall Japanese-style banners, bearing the names and insignia of the Few and friends: DARK’s eclipsed sun, the white-on-black cross of Kernow for the Heads; ZenSelf’s gold infinity-strip figure of eight. Snake Eyes on three pair of dice, held in the loving-cup of two dark hands. The stone axe which had been the Chosen’s logo since their first album; Chip and Ver’s favourite molecule. Those artists and others now eager to get in on the act, could earn the right to have a banner up there, if they proved themselves useful. Everyone loves a competition—
Ax wanted ZenSelf daughter cells in other campgrounds. He thought this would be safe. As long as Oltech tinkered with humans, not crops, no animals were harmed and no fossil fuel employed, he reckoned the CCM masses could be won over. The anti-science hardcore would be left in peace, denied the oxygen of argument. Spinning ATP for the general public was a more difficult project.
‘Whyn’t we tell them it’s a cure for obesity,’ said Fiorinda; who’d never taken the treatment, and never would. ‘That’s something people really care about. Use ATP, and you can be svelte as the next hyperactive anorexic giant rockstar, without compromising your couch potato lifestyle. They’ll love it.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Ax. Who hadn’t taken the treatment either, the fogey, on the poor grounds that his implant (which no one out there knew existed), and his being a Muslim, was enough already; plus though he opposed them, he had to keep the anti-science tendency sweet. ‘You know, that might work.’
Everyone laughed. There was a lot of relief-from-strain and escape-from-panic-laughter at these meetings. Fiorinda giggled to herself, head down and doodling hard. Her bodyguards looked across her shoulders, sharing a grin. She’s fine. Bounced right back from that night of fugue. The babe is magic.
So they were putting up hippie decorations and scrounging, how Countercultural can you get?: but there was another side to things. Some of the bad guys who ran protection for London’s clubs and venues came knocking, letting it be known that the Insanitude needed to think about its security. Negotiations ensued, in which Ax let it be known that on the one hand he was committed to non-violence, but on the other hand he had an army at his back. It ended in a meeting of bizarre formality, in the Ballroom late one night, barmy army staff officers in attendance. The gun-crazy gang leaders were thrilled, feeling so good about themselves that they swore allegiance. For now. How long will that last? And fucking hell, what are we getting ourselves into?
Shouldn’t be driving the car alone. But Ax reckoned he could afford a little personal transport hypocrisy, for the Rural Rides. Here we are at a miserable barracks for multi drug resistant TB treatment, in Shaftesbury. The apparatchiks welcome the rockstar do-gooder (webcam, live global transmission on the cheap, no actual camera people today). Then he became a paramedic volunteer, changing bedlinen, administering
drugs, cleaning up limp and withered bodies. They are prisoners until they manage to get non-infectious, but it isn’t a big issue. Many of them are incapable of coping with the world outside.
Here’s a guy blind all his life, decades on the road. Touring, crusty-style, doing a lot of drugs: picked up one day and dumped in here like a sick old dog. The man has to be cleaned, and his bed changed. They chat, while this gets done: he’s very docile, very apologetic about the stink of piss and the wet sheets.
‘No worries. Happens to friends of mine all the time, hazard of getting smashed, innit.’
‘But I’ve not had a drink. You use yer hands a lot. What d’you do wif ’em?’
‘I play guitar.’
‘Oh right. In yer spare time, eh? Will yer let us touch yer face, lad?’
The face proffered. ‘Where d’you come from?’
‘Taunton.’
‘But you’re coloured, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Wondering how the blind fingers worked that out.
‘I c’n ’ear it in yer voice,’ said the old man proudly. ‘Just very slight. So where d’you come from origerenally?’
‘Oh, originally,’ Touching, reflexively, the place where they cut open his skull. Lift the slack bag of bones, insert arm into fresh pyjama jacket. ‘Originally I’m not human.’ Insert other arm, smooth jacket down, lay him back on his pillow. ‘My people came here from a dying world…’
He stayed half an hour, sitting on the end of the narrow bed, making up answers to the old man’s questions about his home planet. Took out a cigarette at one point and was detected instantly. You can’t smoke that in ’ere lad… Sat rolling it between his fingers, thinking about that meeting with the London Yardies. Ax in his best suit—not flash, but luckily impressive enough for the occasion. His friends ranged around him, including Fiorinda and the Babes. The women had to be present. That’s a vital signal… Thinking of Muhammad’s diwan, that day in Yorkshire. Talking smooth and hard, knowing he has to do these things, despair hammering on the back door, praying to God he can make her understand—
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