Bold as Love

by Gwyneth Jones

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Beethoven, cello and piano. Okay?’

  It was a very old jigsaw, a three masted ship under a lot of complex canvas, the subtle difference between the sails and a faded, cream and golden, rack of sunset clouds going to be a challenge. They worked on it together, drinking the wine, Sage and Ax continuing to snipe at each other gently: softly-barbed play-fighting. Fiorinda sat back to get a better look at the pieces, and suddenly, in the lamplight and the fireglow, she saw them as two animals—as if she’d taken one of those jungle drugs from South America. Sage stretched out at lazy length, uttering harmless threats. That growling sound is really the big guy purring. Ax crouched on one knee, the other leg folded under him, eyes fixed in alert, relaxed calculation on the prey. This pasteboard world, which he will patiently subdue into order: sort it, sieze it, run it to the ground…

  My tiger and my wolf. I wonder what I am to them. Not an animal I think. More like some vital element, like water or fire.

  Or meat.

  The next day was still cold, as if the May heatwave had never been. They spent it as they’d spent their time in March, bickering pleasantly over the chores, playing computer games in Sage’s studio, watching the birds in the garden. They ventured outdoors once, late in the day, to walk up and down the little river Chy from the waterfall pool to the stepping stones, but did not leave the twelve acres of Tyller Pystri, the magic place. Came back to the house to cook together in that inconvenient little kitchen: smoking grass, drinking wine, Fiorinda making chapatti dough, Ax chopping vegetables (not from Sage’s garden: Mrs Maynor, his housekeeper, had brought them from her husband’s allotment); Sage rooting out a tin of chickpeas. ‘Fuck, an actual tin, no ring pull… Oh, Ax, reminds me. Remember the bottle of wine we drank in the van, that night with Fiorinda?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Fiorinda. ‘You were severely out of it, Ax.’

  ‘Look who’s talking. Well, it turns out that was a bottle of wildly expensive irreplaceable Montrachet, given to George by Laurel last Christmas. (Laurel was George’s wife, the potter). He thought it was safe from me because I hate trying to use a corkscrew. I told him it was nectar of the gods, and he’s happy with that, so you will back me up? Hey, isn’t anyone going to open this for me?’

  ‘Nectar of the gods. Sage, last time we were here I recall trying to take an antideluvian tin-opener task away from you, and you were at my throat. Said you fucking come here to get away from being treated like a fucking toddler.’

  ‘Yeah. Sometimes I feel like that… Sometimes I don’t.’

  ‘And we have to guess,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Like Russian roulette.’

  ‘Thas’ right.’

  They ate and settled to a round of Risk, the world domination game. The usual pattern swiftly emerged, Ax and Fiorinda stockpiling their plastic soldiers and plotting: Sage playing go for it until you got no armies left. To Ax’s annoyance, this idiotic strategy swept the board as often as any other plan. Honours in the tournament were even.

  ‘Do you wear the masks when no one else is around?’ asked Ax. ‘Often wondered.’

  ‘Yeah, we do.’

  ‘Can you tell whether it’s on or not? Are you conscious of it?’

  ‘If I think about it. Not usually.’

  ‘So when do you take it off? Are there Head Ideology rules about that? I’m gonna seize China. Two dice.’

  ‘I have to take it off to sleep: but otherwise, lessee, what else? To shave—’

  ‘Right. Brings us up to about twice a year—’

  ‘Fuck off. As a gesture of respect or to make a point, sometimes; and to fuck. But even then,’ The mask switched, grinning evilly, to the freshly rotted version, with tiny crawling maggots, ‘—not always.’

  ‘You don’t scare me,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Do the sicking-up worms. See how Ax likes it.’

  ‘Ha, the Red Army stands firm. Another throw?’

  ‘Yeah. Why d’you have to take it off to sleep?’

  ‘If I don’t, it gives me nightmares.’

  ‘Really?’ said Ax, ‘That’s interesting. My implant gave me horrible nightmares when I had it done. Literally indescribable. It’s a very unpleasant feeling, waking up terrified from an experience for which you have no words, no images. Went on for weeks. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Again… And once more.’

  ‘The things you do to yourselves,’ said Fiorinda. ‘You’re both insane. You must be dead clever, Sage, if you can make a mask that will lift your expressions and copy them in the avatar in realtime. Which we always assume is what it does, at least, when you want it to.’

  ‘Nah. Building an avatar mask is simple, just obsessive. I could teach you. Either of you.’

  Teach, Ax heard. Now there’s an idea. ‘China is mine. I’m stopping there, give me a card.’

  ‘It was my hands that I wanted to hide,’ said Sage, unexpectedly. ‘Call it childish if you like, Ax, but I don’t enjoy looking at them. The skull was a natural extension, then we all had to have one, and it became a game, an addiction. We couldn’t give it up now, for business, the punters would never forgive us. But I won’t wear mine any more when I’m with you two, if you don’t want.’ And his natural face was there with them: eyes lowered, smiling faintly, white skin wheat coloured from heatwave doses of NDog sunscreen.

  ‘Oh, but I love the mask,’ said Fiorinda.

  ‘Hm.’ He grinned. ‘Well, I always thought it was an improvement, myself.’

  ‘I know it’s not a mask, I know it’s you.’

  ‘I don’t mind either way,’ said Ax, ‘It’s all Sage’s face to me.’

  ‘I’ll quit the mask. Fiorinda, I’m attacking Iceland.’

  ‘Hey, I thought we had a pact of non-aggression.’

  ‘We do, we do. I just have to recover my continent. Look at you two, divvying up the world between you. C’mon, let me have one miserable continent.’

  About midnight, Fiorinda said, ‘Are we going back tomorrow?’

  When she spoke they all looked at the landline phone, on the table by Sage’s bed. Allie had that number, and permission to call if she needed to. It had kept quiet. They’d had two days of escape. Couldn’t really ask for more.

  ‘I suppose we’d better,’ said Ax. ‘You okay for that, Sage?’

  ‘Oh yeah, since we must.’ He sounded surprised. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Er…you were having a nervous breakdown two days ago.’

  ‘His tantrums are vile,’ said Fiorinda. ‘But they vanish without trace. You’ll get used to it.’

  Sage went to change the record, giving her topnotes of withering scorn and dire warning, mixed with tender affection: remembered that he was unmasked and started to laugh. No remote controls, only about four tracks to a side, listening to black vinyl entailed a lot of getting up and down, kind of like a religious ceremony. He came back and lay on the couch. Fiorinda and Ax kept on working at the sailing ship jigsaw, although they weren’t going to finish it. Fiorinda in her venerable green dress, her hair aglow. Ax’s guitar-man hands problem-solving as if with their own inbuilt intelligence… Suppose this is it, Sage thought, watching them. She’s mortally afraid of things she can’t tell. Ax is in despair at what’s happening to him, but he can’t quit. I’m no better off, in my trivial personal way. The world out there is fucked to scary shit. What if there’s no way out, and things only get worse? What if this, now, is the best we’ll ever have? After a while Fiorinda looked up, and then Ax. Nothing was spoken.

  Fiorinda returned to the jigsaw, Ax went to look at the vinyl. The lamplit room was filled with a strange and painful tranquillity. Very bitter, very sweet.

  EIGHT

  Rock The Boat

  Strange how much remains unchanged, although the world ended (again) ten days ago. The tv studio, late night and live: very simple, no fx being layered over what you see here. The comfy chairs, the presenter: Fiorinda, Aoxomoxoa and the Heads, and Roxane Smith. Quite a
line up. This was a date scheduled before Ivan/Lara, and postponed. More than half the country still had no tv reception, but they’d decided to go ahead: it might be a while before the proverbial normal service was resumed.

  The presenter is a rising star called Dian Buckley. Thrilled at having the Heads—who so rarely did this sort of thing—on her programme, she’s unwisely decided to kick off with questions about the big break. Did you have any idea that Morpho was going to be so successful?

  ‘No,’ says Aoxomoxoa, unhelpfully.

  ‘So, how did you feel. Suddenly, you were eighteen and world famous?’

  ‘Surprised.’

  ‘What about the rest of you, were you surprised?’

  ‘Nah, we knew,’ says George Merrick, ‘We kept tellin’ ‘im, but he wouldn’t believe us. He thought the record company would dump us in six months.’

  ‘Whereas what happened was that you decided to dump them…and it turned out to be hard work. Do you now think that was a mistake?’

  ‘We’re a live band,’ said Sage, ignoring this, ‘For what we do, do it best, you need a volume of space you can saturate and manipulate, and a couple of hundred sweaty punters. I can’t never really see taking our stuff home and sitting there with a wrap round your head.’

  ‘They shouldn’t be able to dance. The club IMMix stuff you get now is nothing like what we started off with—’

  ‘Uncontrollable vomiting and defecation is okay—’

  ‘It’s useless doing the show in a fucking great field,’ puts in Peter Stannen.

  ‘But we don’t mind taking the money—’

  Moving on to the anomalous situation vis a vis Ax Preston and friends. Fiorinda, now you’re the one who’s eighteen and famous. Before the virus, Friction had bumped the Heads from the top of the European album charts, and you were keeping Ax Preston and the Chosen out of the English singles spot (it’s such a cliche isn’t it, teenage girl beats the heavyweights?), with ‘Stonecold’, the solo version of a DARK track. How d’you feel about people saying it’s only the Ax effect?

  Huh.

  ‘Gutted,’ said Fiorinda cheerfully, and answered some more patronising questions in the vein of, how does it feel to be the kid sister in the gang? with good humour. She had a nerve-free indifference to this sort of interrogation that came of having started when she was fourteen, and so wrapped up in her own little world she ‘did tv’ without a thought.

  ‘It’s her aerobics video what worries us,’ said Aoxomoxoa, leaning back to grin at the teenage star. ‘Once she gets that out, rest of us are totally fucked.’

  Okay, but how long can this go on? We can’t talk about figures, we have no figures at the moment, but is the Ax effect distorting English music? Every month since the Deconstruction Tour there’s been a bigger gap opening. Snake Eyes, DK, the Adjuvants, have seen sales rocketing, non-Few bands are suffering. Is this getting to be like a Rockstar Totalitarian State, where everyone has to um, buy Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book?

  ‘I don’t think you can shoot us for being the latest over-exposed media sensation,’ said Fiorinda. ‘It’ll pass. We’ll be on the scrap heap soon.’

  ‘No one’s forcing them to buy the material objects,’ Peter Stannen pointed out. ‘They could have all our tracks for free if they liked.’

  ‘But isn’t there this atmosphere? You have to have a banner up at the Insanitude gates? Conformity or else—’

  ‘You’d have a point,’ said Roxane, ‘if the artists were of a different class, or the music was totalitarian. But when some of the best musicians in the country—’

  ‘Nah, it’s the B list that goes for charity work,’ Bill reminded everyone dryly. ‘Either crap artists, or flagging-career stadium rockers. Not sure which we are—’

  ‘I’d rather be the crap,’ growled Sage.

  ‘The Ax effect is the kiss of death,’ sighed Fiorinda. ‘For a kid like me. Now I’ll never be taken seriously.’

  ‘Let me finish, children,’ boomed Rox. ‘I repeat, contrary to what happens in commercial music business, in this case there’s no skullduggery. Some of the best rock musicians in the country are selling records simply doing what they do. And even then, most of the money goes back—’

  But here s/he was vehemently shouted down. The Heads and Fiorinda didn’t want to talk about where the money goes. Perversely, as if they couldn’t use the publicity, the Few consistently refused to discuss the Volunteer Initiative, the Crisis, the reason for the giant free concerts, with music media-folk. It was a point of honour. The presenter sat smiling in this lively cage of lions: happy, excited, glad things were getting more relaxed. Moving on. Roxane, as a male to female transexual, with a bisexual boyfriend, is changing sex the way we change our clothes still glamorous, still radical—?

  ‘I’m not female,’ The doyen of rock critique wore a long gown of teal green velvet, under a draped, crimson lined jacket, with a sort of flattened, tassled turban in the same colour scheme: something like Dante in opera make-up. Crossing one long leg over the other, folding much beringed, sadly aged hands around one knee, s/he fixed Dian with a look of stern reproof. ‘Whatever gave you that idea, young lady?’

  ‘Oh, well, er,’

  ‘I’m an ex-man. It’s a long time ago, but I’m sure I never intended to become a woman. That wasn’t, for me, the object of the exercise.’

  ‘So, how would you define, er, your sexual identity?’

  ‘I believe the object of the exercise was to escape from definition.’

  ‘And d’you think you’ve achieved that?’

  ‘Who can say? Perhaps I didn’t need to achieve anything. Sexual identity is a convention that breaks down naturally—behind closed doors, among the rich, among the poor, among artists and their camp-followers. It’s a phenomenon that disappears in any natural society, moral or immoral. Whenever it gets the chance the Great Divide vanishes, collapses into a fractal mosaic.’

  ‘And do you wish you’d known that—?’

  ‘Thirty years ago? No! I made a personal, innate decision. I’d do it again.’

  ‘Your shape in the mosaic… But isn’t this just old-fashioned decadence?’

  ‘It’s the way the cards always fall. That should tell us something.’

  ‘What about you, Sage? You’re king of the lads, you’ve reportedly said you hate gays, here you are in this post-futuristic, post-gendered supergroup, have your opinions mellowed?’

  ‘I don’t hate the idea of blokes fucking blokes. It’s the gay nation. If it’s not Fascist uniforms it’s a shitload of bitchy misogynist wannabes pretendin’ they are girls. Can’t stand ‘em.’

  ‘Sage! That is so crass!’

  ‘And dikes are as bad. Perpetuating the very structures of oppressive gender determinism. Why make a secret society of who you fuck?’

  ‘This would be completely different, of course,’ mused Fiorinda, ‘From four close male friends habitually going around together dressed up as Hallowe’en decorations?’

  The Heads cheered. ‘Let Fio interview ’im, Dian,’ shouted George. ‘She’s up to ’is weight.’

  ‘Ask ’im why he calls hisself a Palindrome, if he don’t go both ways—’

  ‘I don’t like sex,’ announced Peter firmly. ‘I’ve tried it, I don’t like it. Sage c’n have my share.’

  ‘Fiorinda, do you have an opinion—?’

  ‘Me? I’m a phallus-worshipping lesbian. You get those. I read about it.’

  ‘About those masks,’ says Dian, after the laughter, ‘Do you ever feel trapped by them? Stuck with something that was a novelty ten years ago?’

  ‘Wouldn’t do it now,’ agreed George, ‘But ten years is a long time. We’re set in our ways.’

  ‘It’s true, you see a lot of masks around these days.’

  ‘We only like the skull’eads. We think the rest are crap.’

  ‘Sage, yours is different. Now that’s something many people find far more controversial than unorthodox sex, a non-medical implant. Isn’t t
hat unnatural and scary?’

  ‘Nah. It’s a harmless little thing. Look.’ Aoxomoxoa popped the masked fifth finger of his right hand into his mouth, sucked it, held his masked right eye stretched wide with the left index finger and thumb, deftly inserted the sucked fingertip into the corner of his eye and—

  ‘Auwk!’ squawks Dian, recoiling.

  —reaching far inside the eyesocket, brings out a bright, tiny button, resting on the now unmasked fingertip: offers it to the pretty media person. ‘There you go. Don’t drop it.’

  She can’t take it, can’t even look at it—

  The other skulls have vanished too. This is a startling occasion, the Heads au naturel: George Merrick looking splendidly piratical, Bill Trevor splendidly cadaverous, with that elegant hatchet nose, (that’s why Bill’s skull looks too big, the mask having to acommodate the nose); Peter solemn and rosy and bucolic, wearing his glasses for a treat. He hates contact lenses, but the others usually veto hornrims, even hidden. They tell him it’s not the right message.

  ‘That’s why we’ve never let ’im make us avatar masks,’ explains Bill, entirely sympathising with Dian’s reaction. ‘Too fuckin’ intimate, sticking things in yer eyes. And gross. But him, he’ll try anything weird—’

  It has been obvious from the outset that Dian Buckley would not be averse to a twenty-second dancefloor courtship. Aoxomoxoa unmasked, right next to her, all blue-eyed, oversized animal magnetism, puts her in a complete tizz, a situation the bad lad clearly finds most entertaining. (Dian seems to have been forgiven for daring to talk about Morpho). Now, mask button carefully laid on the table, he’s showing her the wrist implant, letting her feel the other little button set into the bone behind his ear. Not weird at all, no no no: rockstars always having to stick different beans in their ears, it gets annoying, this you can programme, makes life much simpler—

  So then Dian tries on George’s digital mask, the countercultural market stall kind, that can be run from a piercing stud, lapel badge, a cufflink, an earring; controlled on a wristband. No, it doesn’t need a battery. Works on ambient. ‘You know,’ she says, skull-masked, intrigued, turning her head this way and that as she looked off the set into a monitor. ‘I can see this! I can see going down the supermarket like this, after a heavy night…’