Band of Gypsys (18 page)

She sat among her half-packed clothes and camping gear, nursing her eye, listening to her parents’ early activities around the house, while the breakfast show moved on. Finally, when she was sure they wouldn’t walk in on her (Not that they ever did, they were civilised, at least they would
knock
), she dived into her rucksack and pulled out the battered make-up case. It travelled with her everywhere: it didn’t hold make-up. It was lined with battered green and yellow tissue flames, each flame edged in glitter, patient handicraft she’d done when she was twelve. It was sacred now, she would never change it. Fiorinda’s photograph (on stage, her tiny face a screaming mask in a cloud of red hair) was framed in fragments of Traveller’s Joy, supposed to come from the wreath she’d worn at the Inauguration Concert; the ensemble protected by clear sticky paper. If Mum opened the box it would be okay, she’d see teenage heroine-worship. Dad would spot at once that it was a Pagan shrine, and go beserk. You’re wrong, Dad. The Old Religion doesn’t belong to the bad guys. No more than Islam ever belonged to a bunch of women-hating fanatics—

She took the plaited cord and bound it round her wrist, took the knife in her right hand, and prepared to jab herself in the web between finger and thumb of the left. It’s not Black Magic Dad, it’s no different from Friday prayers. It’s not meant to change God’s will, or anything like that, it’s just praying, something you do to be part of “God”. She intended to ask a blessing on her leaders, to invoke a protection, but she was thinking of how much she hated the Second Chamber, and these were the words that slipped out, silently, as she shed a few drops of blood—

Ruin fall on them

Roxane climbed the stairs to hir rooms in Queen Anne Street, leaning hard on the silver mounted walking stick s/he used with the swagger of a Regency Buck while in public view. Nobody waiting for hir, which still hurt, though s/he hadn’t lived with Chip and Verlaine for years. Ah, how I miss my boys. But how good to have them back in London, and do I detect a trace of broodiness? How late-Roman-empire, s/he thought, divesting herself of outer robes. How superbly grotesque. A middle-aged (sixty is the new fifty) sexual neuter: hoping for grandchildren from a young man to whom s/he was once mentor, substitute parent, lover. And this former child-lover’s current boyfriend; with whom one has also had intimate relations.

Yet these days medically feasible, and
almost
respectable.

A glass, a bottle of good port secured, s/he retired to hir favourite armchair. It was barely eleven o’ clock, but morning tv was such a disaster for hir old bones, and Rox liked the ancient painkillers best. I need a new hip, perhaps a new knee. I’ll travel to the Pacific Rim, have the operations, and I’ll be young again. Maybe the boys will come with me, seeking my modern-miracle grandchild… Pipe-dreams. S/he sipped hir wine, with discrimination, thinking sadly of all the little English gods, going over the hill into oblivion. Soon not a soul on earth would remember why the curate’s egg was
good in parts,
or how it’s on a Monday morning that the gasman comes to call
.
Or know what I mean when I sing:
I am the Vicar Of Bray, Sir
. I defy the winds of change. I will always turn my coat, and survive, and serve the music. I only wish I could have seen Fiorinda’s bright star ascend, and charted her passage, a great artist needs a great critic, but it was not to be—

S/he’d had to distance hirself. Put clear water between “Roxane Smith” and the reckless schemes she feared were hatching. Because, let’s spit it out, if I should be questioned, I am too old and frail to contemplate keeping my mouth shut. So, I do my best, and I am true to you, my old friends, in my fashion.

We have done what we could. No green field shall be broken, Ax. Not for fifty, or a hundred years. Birds will sing in the bushes, sheep may safely graze (a great many of them, but not too many). Generations of charity-school children (our charity: the future’s beacons of excellence) will take with them, out into the wicked world, the culture of music, recreation, and the hard work of compassion, that you created… It isn’t what you wanted, but it ought to be enough, for any one man.

The Mountain’s too big for you, Mohammad. There is
nothing you can do,
this time. Except go down with the ship… Roxane caught hirself, a little horrified. With a turn of hir wrist, s/he flicked a few blood-red drops onto the rug.
Absit omen
.

The old mad woman lay dying, stripped of medical support: she was “comfortable”, nothing could or would be done to delay the last breath. In a corner of the room sat a brawny figure in nurse’s whites, doing a crossword; bright sunlight through the window-blinds striping her brawny arms. The nursing staff in this place all looked like combat-trained bouncers, it wasn’t an ordinary Care Home.

Fiorinda watched gran’s withered hands, the hoops of her rings sagging loose, diamonds and sapphires winking as dying fingers crawled, plucking at the straight-tucked sheet. Was something in there still trying to get out, tear off the bedclothes, throttle the guard and escape…? Puusi Meera, the virtual movie star, had once told Fiorinda,
don’t ever wear a lot of rings
.
It makes you look frustrated
. What a fine compendium of useful, practical information Puusi was. Fiorinda wore only one ring, so she was safe from the imputation. Were you frustrated, Gran? What was it you wanted out of life? You can’t have wanted what really happened.

You
can’t
have, can you—?

My food tastes funny, Gran. I think I’m ill.

‘You’re not ill. If your food tastes funny, Frances dear, that’s the first sign you’re pregnant.’ The grandmother says this to the twelve year old girl; a twinkle in her eye. The girl thinks gran can’t possibly know that Frances, STOP CALLING ME THAT! I’M FIORINDA! I CHOSE IT, IT’S MY NAME!, could be anything like pregnant. She feels superior, because she doesn’t yet know her grown-up lover has scarpered, and it’ll be many more days before she realises,
pregnant
is exactly what she is… Here, in the secure nursing home, older Fiorinda can step back. Looking through those twelve year old eyes, as if through peepholes cut in a picture, she sees the grandmother’s wicked knowledge. She sees herself, a naked young girl with her arms and legs twisted up: greased, glistening, ready for the oven on grandmother’s kitchen table, ready to be served up to her ogre father. Her mother, who escaped him once, has no idea, only dread suspicions, that it’s all started over again—

Oh, no, Frances dear. I can’t tell you! Your mother would skin me alive!

I think you loved him. Of course you worshipped him, he was the Master, but I bet you were in love with him too. She leaned forward, chin on her hands, trying to read the past in that crumpled, secret little face. Gran as a young woman in big skirts with small waists: good-looking, classy connections, no money, and no morals.‘I wasn’t the sort of girl a man marries’, said the grandmother’s voice in her mind, smug and salacious… Your association with Rufus goes way back, you met him when he was one of that rich-as-fuck London rockstar set, “dabbling in the occult”, a taste for young meat, and there you were, the self-styled witch with two juicy young daughters. Fiorinda’s mother had been the ambitious one, had a career in rock-journalism. What was Mum like, in those days? She could only think of Dian Buckley: Shallow Dian, knowing Rufus was a spooky, evil bastard but thrilled to have landed a megastar—

(Probably
exactly
the way Dian thinks of Sage these days. Her rockstar beau who turned spooky, and how cool yet creepy that she’s fucked him.)

I want to believe not, but I’ll never know. Everything I never asked is leaving the world, with this old woman’s last breath.

Frances
dear, I have a little present for you
—

A dry chuckle sounded close in her ear: it made her jump. The clock on the wall said time had passed, she’d been staring at gran for an hour and a half. She got up and went to the bathroom, to look for blood. Her pants-liner was still cornhusk blonde, not a spot, but she could feel the cramps beginning. Wish I could forget I’d ever been de-sterilised, this is torture. But oh, God,
what if it works
?

The pale walls closed in on her. She was twelve again, and
oh God, what if I’m pregnant
? What had she been thinking of? How could she have imagined she could escape, have a normal life? Ploughboys and princes fall for creatures like me but it can’t last. I have to go down again, into the lake, I have to vanish, under the hill.

She stopped at reception to sign herself out.

‘If there should be a change, call me.’

There would only be one change now. ‘All right Ms Slater.’

She was bottling out. She’d missed the moment of her mother’s death, she’d promised herself she’d see this one, but too bad. Soon she was on a train, heading for Central London through the depopulated suburbs. She had sent her car and driver away, without an explanation: shouldn’t have done that! I’ll sort it later, thought Fiorinda: imagining she was a kid again, and nobody really cared where she was, what she did. She’d bought a one day pass for coins, she crossed the maze of overground and underground, mechanically following a route from long ago: staring, vaguely puzzled, at the Greening of the city: brick and concrete jungle riven with new rivers of flowering meadow, birds and butterflies, Queen Anne’s Lace, buttercups and sorrel. In a North London cemetery, where her mother’s ashes had been forked into a rosebed, she wandered helplessly: looking for a small grave she’d never visited. She knew Mrs Mohanjanee, her kind friend, had arranged for the baby (Rufus’s baby) to be buried, under the bizarre impression that the lonely little girl next door was a Christian. She didn’t know where to start, she didn’t know what she was looking for (is there a headstone?). Couldn’t face the cemetery office.

I’d better get back to Brixton, she thought, but her feet took her to the cold house of her childhood. In through the garden gate, under the overgrown laurels, dark tunnel to gran’s old lair. The door was padlocked, but she had the keys in her bag. She’d been planning to come here, to see what state the house was in.

The basement had been cleared. There was nothing left of the witch’s cave where little Frances had fed on spicy gossip, while her mother brooded upstairs. She’d found a dead body in a place like this once, when the Reich was young. Empty basements smell of murdered children. She unlocked another door, into the house above, and mounted through the dusk of boarded windows to her old bedroom. Under the bed there was a secondhand acoustic guitar. In the mattress she would find the split where she had hidden her music—

There was no furniture, only a spotted, dusty mirror propped in a corner. She sat on the floor, where her bed used to be. Me and my useless mutant brain, what good am I to anyone? Ax and Sage don’t need me, they’ve got each other, I always knew how
that
would turn out. The curve of her palm remembered the feel of a downy little skull. She could not wipe her tears, she had to hold him very carefully.

Oh, shit, what if you drop them?

I’ll never forget you, I will
never
forget you.

She woke with an aching head, her face sticky with tear-tracks, curled on her side in the dust, streaks of twilight creeping in from the boarded window. She sat up,
what the hell am I doing here?
, and realised she’d been woken by the sound of intruders. Shit! What’ll I do? The door opened, and who’s this looming dark figure? A man, a big tall grown-up, and he’s brought another even taller man; an accomplice—

They came in and sat down, shadowy in the gloom, unsure of their reception.

‘How did you know where I was?’

‘Masculine intuition,’ explained Sage.

‘Is she dead yet?’

‘Sorry,’ said Ax…‘Your gran was still breathing, when we dropped by.’

‘Bugger.’

The thought that today was all to do again was awful.

‘I sent the car away. I know it was irresponsible—’

‘We narrowed it down,’ said Ax. ‘After we remembered you’d been planning to look at the house. Don’t worry about the car. That’s no problem.’

‘D’you want to talk about it?’ asked Sage, gently.

‘There’s nothing to say… I was waiting for her to die, I started thinking about it all, and I just
crashed out
, fell into my stupid past—’ She stared at them. ‘It was about the baby. My baby, he was such a good baby, he hardly ever cried, until he got sick. He was so sweet, he was my
friend
, and no one remembers him but me—’

The closer you get to someone, the more you understand how memory shapes them. What’s important and what (amazingly) is not… Ax saw a little girl with a baby in her arms, all the bewildered, painful love in that child’s face. File everything else as no account, every illusion I ever had of achieving something good,
this
is what matters, her steely innocence, her courage, her incredible courage.

He took his girl’s hand, too choked to speak.

‘But you
do
remember him,’ said Sage, taking the other. ‘So that’s okay. Sssh, don’t cry, stupid brat—’