Band of Gypsys (16 page)

Festival Season hell was upon them. Fiorinda was in the North East, playing with her old bandmates DARK, in County Durham, Tyneside; all around that cold and beautiful coast. Ax and Sage were back in Brixton, lucky enough to be together for forty-eight hours. In Ax’s office downstairs, after midnight, Sage read documents on a screen. Long time since the Minister for Gigs had done any hands-on management, but the troops out there liked to see Aoxomoxoa’s sig decorating their mountains of dispatches. He didn’t mind the work, it was peaceful. Occasionally he made a note: an email he would send, something he would query.

Ax was practicing his Chinese, copying characters from a book of proverbs. He was
immersing
himself in all things Chinese at the moment, the way only Ax Preston can… It made Sage uneasy.

‘Going to have to give this woman more money, Ax.’

‘Can’t. What woman?’

‘Road manager, Jennifer Lateef. She does not hump boxes, she does the informatics. We’re paying her beer money an’ she’s a star. She’s going to quit, get a real job an’ we’ll never find anyone else.’

‘Well, I can’t help it.’

Sage pushed back, and watched the calligraphy. The brush in Ax’s hand paused, the tip swept down again, making a long, curved stroke—

‘Is China to be your next theatre of operations, Sah?’

‘I’d like to go there. It seems like a happening kind of place.’

I’d like to go
anywhere
, thought Sage. Just roam the streets, only it would upset the fucking spooks. Soft winds and rains of a cool night, outdoors—

‘What’s that one mean?’

‘
Qi huo ke ju
… It means a precious treasure worth cherishing. Merchant Lü identified a hostage prince as a precious treasure worth cherishing, and this was very smart, because with Lü’s wily support the prince became king of Qin, and his son… Who was actually Lü’s son, it’s a long story… Became the first emperor of China.’

‘Was he a good guy? The first emperor?’

‘No!’

‘What happened to Merchant Lü?’

‘It ended badly.’

‘Fuckin’ inscrutable proverb… Ax, please don’t suddenly run off to save the world from the wicked emperor, an’ leave me.’

‘I won’t. This is a beautiful thing to do, you should try it.’

‘Mm. It’s late. Would you care to come over to my side of the fire, at all?’

On cue, his screen chimed. A box opened and there was Marlon on the doorstep. He was in Brixton for the summer holidays, supposed to be observing an 11.30pm curfew but Sage had not been concerned. Mar didn’t know it, but he was under fairly close surveillance. In the old days, the lock on their front door had been biometric, a thing you looked into and it read your iris patterns. They’d moved with the times: Marlon waited for armed guards to check him out and open up.

‘Don’t call him on being in the pub,’ advised Ax.

‘Not tonight. But Mary’ll ban me again, if she finds out I’ve been allowing underage drinking—‘

‘Marlon’s going to ban you himself, if he finds out you’ve had him tailed.’

‘Hey, there’s someone with him,’ said Sage.

The girl was trying to lurk out of sight, a glimmer of long silvery brown hair in the shadows, but they recognised her at once. It was Silver Wing, Anne Marie’s second-oldest, a scarily independent young woman of thirteen: living with Rob and the Babes in Lambeth at the moment, having had a huge fight with her mother.

‘Bugger. What shall we do? Send her home in a car?’

‘That’d be a little draconian. Just call the Righteous Collective, make sure they know where she is. If we send her back the car will get followed, and that’s going to piss the brothers off. Why shouldn’t she stay?’

A dissatisfied silence from Sage.

‘So make up a bed in the music room, if you want to get all Mid-Wales about it. Don’t forget a few rolls of razor wire. They’re probably just good friends, Sage.’

‘She’s far too young.’

Ax laughed. ‘Let’s go upstairs, my big cat.’

Marlon and Silver sat on Marlon’s bed, having negotiated the front door and the guardhouse without attracting the attention of Marlon’s dad and Mr Preston. Silver combed her damp hair, it had been raining gently out there.

‘Shouldn’t we say hello?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It would be childish.’

Silver rolled her eyes. ‘I knew Ax before you did.’

But Marlon outranked her, she had to accept that. Aoxomoxoa’s son had always been at boarding school, far above Anne-Marie’s raggedy campground brats. They sat with an ashtray between them: smoking grass, showing-off; trying out lines.

‘My dad wants to stop me having sex or taking drugs,’ said Marlon. ‘It’s a joke. Thank God Ax is different. And Fiorinda’s my best mate.’

‘When I was eleven Mum and Dad tried to give me to Sage, as his junior wife.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Nah, it’s true. Ask your dad. My parents are totally decadent, without knowing what the word means. They thought being his concubine would be a great career for me.’

‘
Arwan
.’

Maybe he looked like his mum: Silver didn’t know. He didn’t look anything like Sage. No more than Fiorinda’s height, with peaky Welsh features. His eyes were gold under thick black brows, naff-o tattooing round the left one. The dressing on his hair smelled like woodsmoke and hemp oil, which she liked. She wondered how it felt to be a boy who had no chance, not a hope, of outdoing his father. She had grown beyond her parents before she had her first period.

‘I was Fiorinda’s handmaid when Rufus was doing her, in Fergal’s body. We were in and out at Rivermead that winter, Pearl and me—’

‘I don’t think you should talk about it.’

Fiorinda’s ordeal preyed on Marlon. He had sometimes lain awake at night, unable to get horrible images out his head.

Light, powerful footsteps came down the hall. A brisk knock, and Marlon’s dad filled the doorway, rangy and wide-shouldered, light glittering in his hair. ‘Hi Silver. There’s a bed for you in the music room. Don’t stay up too late.’

‘Yeah,’ said Marlon, bored. ‘Fine. G’night Dad.’

‘G’night kids.’

The door closed. The teenagers smothered giggles. They lit another spliff and talked again, going deeper. Bad news always gets out. They didn’t know to call the problem
the Lavoisier video
, but they knew Ax and Sage were in big trouble. All the Reich kids knew, maybe better than their parents, how horrible things were getting: on the streets of London; on the campgrounds that were no longer safe havens. At last Silver glanced around the spare room, once full of Sage’s junk, now made over lovingly for this little prince. She touched his bare foot with her own.

‘What about the plan?’

Marlon nodded and shook his head at the same time. He wondered what it would be like to fall in love with someone his own age… It wouldn’t be this girl. Wanting to have Silver had nothing to do with Silver.

‘I dunno. I think it’s too weird, I mean, yeah, but—’

‘Okay, let’s see if Ax’ll send me back to Lambeth. Let’s ask him.’

The living room was dark and empty. Lamplight trembled out from under the Triumvirate’s bedroom door. Silver wrapped her arms around herself, listening hard. She heard Ax’s familiar voice, a wordless murmur tinged with laughter. Her rightful owner answered, with a crooning, roughened softness—

What would you see if you opened that door? The heart of the Reich, the red dragon and the white. She closed her eyes, wrapped in the heat of that core.
Harm to their enemies. Protection over them. I would give my life, give anything…
When she opened them Marlon was staring at her, through the deep shadow of the hallway.

‘It doesn’t sound like we should knock.’

‘Let’s go back to your room.’

They lay down together like children in Mummy and Daddy’s clothes. They were Sage and Fiorinda, and Ax was watching. They did not mention the make-believe, but they knew it made what they were doing more powerful still.

The Heads were in residence, between Festival dates, at their old headquarters, the converted warehouse on Battersea Reach. A week later Ax went to meet Sage there: he’d managed to spend one night with Fiorinda in the meantime, most of that on stage with their respective bads. It could be September before the three of them were in the same room in the flesh. He was admitted on the first floor, above the flood defences, by Marlon. Techno, ancient or modern (Ax could not tell the difference) crashed down from the floors above, stray immix effects caught your eye like unattached hallucinations. The hallway was full of strangers, in altered states or merely drunk: a proper, old-fashioned debauched rock and roll afternoon clearly in session.

‘Hi Mar. Is your dad about?’

‘I haven’t seen him for hours. Bill’s in charge, upstairs somewhere.’

Marlon went back into the room he’d left. Ax glimpsed an illusory glade of shining branches, the river through a long window. Silver Wing dressed in green brocade, her silvery hair tied up in a complex knot, sitting on a green sofa, beside a red and white chessboard. Like something out of a fairytale.

Bill Trevor was entertaining Gintrap (fresh-faced young divinities, Neo-Feudalist Metal, well-meaning but hungry); plus The Trap’s merry girl and boy entourage. The RA interview had aired, and Sage had indeed been ripped to shreds. Gintrap found this hilarious. They worshipped Aoxomoxoa, they were in awe of someone
so big
he could afford to be ripped up by
Dian Buckley
. Ax declined the alcohol, the other drugs, and affected to enjoy the joke. Dian’s hatchet job did have some fine moments of unintended humour.

‘Hey, Bill? Where’s the boss?’

‘I dunno where they all got to,’ said Bill, looking disgusted. ‘I think they went boating. Down the river for a cup of tea at Greenwich.’

Thereafter Ax took the back stairs to the ground floor, where huge strange stage properties braved the risk of drowning. From thence he was admitted to the
other
back stairs—which didn’t appear on the plans of the building—by Heads crew, who graciously disabled the annoying Cornish password routine for him. Down and down. There had to be a secret passage. Overgrown kids like the Heads couldn’t do without a dungeon chamber in their fortress. They’d never really known what to do with the amenity, but now it had a purpose.

It was named “the annexe”, after a canvas army surplus tent, where the young Fiorinda had spread her sleeping bag among the black boxes, in Traveller’s Meadow at Rivermead, long ago. No bruised grass and immix boxes now. Instead, a suite of white-painted concrete rooms, and in the centre a chamber that housed two of the Zen Self cognitive scanners—bequeathed to the Heads by Olwen Devi, when she went home to Wales. The scanners were not being used for Zen Self experiments, that adventure was over without Olwen. The weird scientists had a new project: less mystic, equally off the wall and out to lunch.

People used to say the Zen Self dome in Reading arena was bigger inside than outside. Ax’d felt the effect of an excellently designed geodesic himself. The new annexe seemed
smaller
than it ought to be, thick white walls crowding in, until getting to the central chamber felt like squeezing into a skull, through channels of bone. You wouldn’t want to be claustrophobic. What if there was a fire? What if there was a raid? There’d just better not be—

A body lay on a trolley bed, in the square room, brilliantly lit, packed with expensive equipment; and full of people. The body was pasted with telltales, a drip in one skinny arm. It was Dilip Krishnachandran, eyes closed, wearing a b-loc headset. The space blanket that covered him rose and fell; his shuttered face was calm. Two Zen Selfers, the postdocs who’d chosen to stay in England, were in attendance.

Chip and Verlaine, Cherry Dawkins, George Merrick, Cack Stannen and Sage occupied the remaining space, along with two English bio-physics graduates who’d hustled their way onto the team, somehow having got wind of a chance to study Mind/Matter applied tech. Another DK was with them, looking much healthier than the one on the bed; except for a touch of transparency.

Only the Zen Selfers—both called Gwyn, one male and one female—acknowledged Ax. Everyone else ignored him.

‘Hi, anoraks. How’s it going?’

‘It’s fine,’ said virtual DK. ‘Glad you made it, Ax. I wanted you to be here.’

Ax propped himself against a server tower beside Chip; there were no spare stools. George, the focus of attention, appeared to be playing an ancient black and white videogame. Cross-stitch trails moved across a tightly hatched grid, changing almost faster than George could nail them.

Chip distractedly offered a spliff.

‘No thanks. It’s still Ramadan.’

‘Oh, sorry.’

‘A technicality, considering the passive smoking effect in here. D’you guys ever stop to think how—’

‘Slight screw up,’ said Chip urgently. ‘We have to re-enter the insertion, George has to key it in, manually, and there’s not much time before we miss the launch window. Could you keep quiet? Please?’

On the wall above the cot, where DK-in the-flesh could watch it without stirring, someone had taped a plastic tv screen. Fiorinda was up there, playing with the Charm Dudley Band in a clear-walled marquee, blunt whaleback hills behind the stage; no sound. The women were dressed in fake animal skins with flirty tails, and painted white-face with blue spots all over; like Hindu cattle dressed for a festival. Ax was not sure if this was an improvement on the torn jeans and safety pins. He couldn’t see her, but he knew Allie would be among the people on side of stage. Was DK looking for her, as he gazed upward, eyes wide open now? No one knew what had happened between those two. It seemed like a crying shame they’d had to break up.

Maybe she couldn’t stand the idea of DK’s shortened lifespan, the constant fear that he would start dying. Maybe that was it—

One day, he thought, love and quarrels between my friends will be all I worry about. I’ll live by the seasons and the door of my house will have a latch, no lock; that only get fastened at night. Right now, I think the cognitive scanners have got to go. This is not safe. Our suits believe those things are Neurobomb-building matériel,
hell
to pay if we were caught in possession.