Band of Gypsys (28 page)

‘Not so bad. We’re getting the better quality straw now, thanks—’

The landline connection between the Insanitude and the Ile St Louis was standalone, as secure as it gets. He struggled to believe he did not have to censor himself… The conversation shifted into french, Allie didn’t try to follow, but she saw him frown.

Sage put the handset down, looking thoughtful.

‘What is it? New bad news?’

‘No, it’s all good. Except he says they’re going to close “Rick’s Place”.’

‘You only just opened! The ratings are terrific! How does he know?’

‘Rumour mill.’ Sage shrugged. ‘I doubt if it’s true, the bastards love their tv show, but it might not be a bad sign. Maybe we’re getting out.’

‘We hear fifty rumours a day,’ agreed Allie, struggling with a completely irrelevant professional reaction,
what the hell’s going on,
you don’t cancel the Triumvirate
! ‘Good, horrible, plain weird.’

Briefly, their eyes met. It’s more bad news. Don’t dwell on it.

Sage hauled up the bag he’d dumped when he took the spliff, and thumped it onto her desk. ‘Anyway, here’s the correspondence.’

Ax had resumed some of his Presidential workload. His letters and reviewed documents, were taken from the suite in a sealed bag: which was presumably then opened and the contents examined. This time Sage had walked out with the bag untouched. Bizarre.

But who could figure the Second Chamber’s priorities?

‘Where is everybody, do you know?’

‘Not around,’ she said, apologetically. ‘Not til this evening. Everyone’s in Hyde Park, doing Party In The Park.’

The festival season was carrying on regardless, but Sage couldn’t join in. He had to stay away from any place of public entertainment. No meetings with the Countercultural Rebels, either. He wasn’t too cut up about it.

‘But at seven you’re to meet your dad, at the restaurant where he’s taking you for dinner, with some highly useful and important people.’

‘Augh.’

She handed him an e-reader. ‘You get there at seven so he can talk to you before the lawyers arrive, but here’s a briefing. You need to seem very confident, but please don’t pick up the bill. You can’t, it will be huge.’

‘Those days are gone.’

‘Well,
try
not to pick up the bill,’ said Allie, resignedly.

‘Hahaha, I’ll do my best.’

‘Then there’s this.’ She gave him a clear envelope that held a minute gleam of metal. ‘Your mask button: you can have it back.’

‘Oh, really?’ He tipped it out, and held it on a fingertip.

‘What do you think?’

‘I know you’re a fan, but I’m afraid I’m not going to stick this behind my eye right now. I’ll interrogate it a little first.’

‘And this, which is from Ammy for Fiorinda.’

The parcel was messy and not sealed. He looked inside. Packets of herbs, little dropper bottles. A closer look, and his heart turned over. He pushed the parcel back across the desk, shaking his head.

‘No good. That’s not going to get in.’

‘Ammy left it open, so they could see it’s all organic magical stuff.’

‘Ah, tha’s where she was wrong. They don’t give a flying fuck if we smuggle a truckload of mouldering Russian tactical nukes into Wallingham, but organic an’ magical, that’s another story. Tell Ammy thanks anyway.’

The noise outside rose again. Crash, bang, saw, saw… Is someone chopping down a cherry orchard out there?

‘Well,’ said Allie. ‘There’s a lot to discuss.’

‘Yeah. I’ll be back tomorrow, okay? After I do this dinner party. I’m going to head off to Battersea now. I’ll call you in the morning.’

‘Is that where you’re staying, not Brixton?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t fancy Brixton.’

‘I’ll send a car to take you to the restaurant. A
nice
car. About six thirty at yours, okay?’

‘Fine. Hey, have you any idea where I could find some Volvic spring water? I mean, don’t care about the analysis, a bottle with the nice label?’

‘Made in France, by volcanoes?’ said Allie, immediately.

‘Shit. Is this a big girl
thing
? That I ought to have known about?’

‘Sage, Volvic doesn’t exist. Not for years. You won’t even get a good fake: she’s winding you up. Get the princess some Buxton.’

‘I don’t take that kind of risk.’ He stood, unfolding to his full, improbable height. ‘I learned my lesson in Dissolution Summer. The one time in my life I wasn’t there to drive the princess home, thought I had better things to do, and what happens? She goes to Lambeth, fucks Ax Preston, an’ the rest, as they say, is history. God knows what she might bring home next.’

He’s such a bloke, thought Allie. Ax is incredible and unique, and Fiorinda would be different from anyone else in the world, whoever her father was. But once you get past how weirdly clever he is, and what he looks like, and the Zen Self, Sage is such an ordinary, helpless
bloke
.

He’d hoped Allie would take pity on him. He had often been told he didn’t know how to shop, he only knew how to impulse-buy like a five-year-old. He secured liquorice and wine gums, no problem, hunted inefficiently for Volvic water around Belgravia: and decided he might have better luck on familiar territory. The August sun was white in a hot dull sky above the King’s Road, making him wish he’d been taking sunscreen. Yeah, there’s a gym, Allie. It’s a box, no natural light. Guards walk you there, lock you in, let you out, walk you back. No, I don’t believe we’re in immediate danger, not even if Rick’s Place is cancelled. But if I thought this was going to go on for years, my Ax going crazy with remorse, and Fiorinda withering into bitterness: I don’t know, I might welcome a swift way out.

He was institutionalised. London was unreal, all he could think of was the red room. All he wanted was to be back there. There was a tune going through his head, very familiar, what’s that?

Never a frown, with golden brown
…

Hm. Maybe not.

He’d forgotten to ask about Doug. Allie would have told him if there was news, but he must remember to ask.

At Battersea Reach he found Cack, skull-masked, waiting in the hall.

‘I thought you’d be at the Park.’

‘Didn’t fancy it, George and Bill said they’d be okay without me.’

Other Park-refusnik members of the Heads resident circus gathered. Sage gave them what he could, the reassurance of seeing their sacred idol alive and well. When that became too much he dismissed the crowd and retired with Cack to the glade-room, with the singing, ringing trees; a favourite haunt of theirs.

‘There was some barmies here earlier. Wanting to talk to you.’

‘What, in uniform? The fuckers. They know they’re not supposed.’

‘No, but they said they were ISB Crew. I took this off one of them.’

‘This’ was a Yap Moss campaign button. An enamelled circlet of moorland rushes on a cream ground, a beautiful thing: marking the ugly final battle of the Islamic Campaign. Sage turned it over. Every genuine Yap Moss button was engraved on the reverse with a number, and the soldier’s tag: the makers, Lacey and Wear of Gloucester, numbered all their works. This had no mark at all. Quite right: none of the “Insane Stupid Behaviour” Crew had been at the bloodiest battle, far as Sage knew.

He shook his head. ‘Sad and pitiful.’

‘You couldn’t call it a fake, hardly, could you?’

Sage agreed, and they fell into a discussion, which seemed to both of them perfectly natural, of the deficiencies in the greens. The cracked creams were equally poor. They moved to a more general discussion of enamel work, how the chemical changes of heat-firing affected different colours: how this related to shifts in firing and partial firing of individual neurons, in the visual cortex. But light is God, if you want to create synthetic percepts; not colour. Soon they were talking about edge and line, an endlessly absorbing topic. Perfect pitch for luminance is far rarer than perfect pitch for tones of sound: Sage and Cack Stannen were equally matched, equally obssessive—

All the while, Sage knew that Cack was full of something, but you couldn’t rush Aoxomoxoa’s collaborator. He’d get confused, he’d lose the plot. At last they returned, calmly and casually, to the barmies themselves.

‘They were scared of our spooks,’ said Cack. ‘Stupid buggers: spooks never hurt anyone. They’ll be upstairs at that pub on Battersea High Street all afternoon. They know something. It’s about Ax, and some security guards.’

Sage found himself a pack of Anandas. He lit up.

‘Which pub was it?’

‘The one that’s been shut a long time.’

If you hurry Cack all is lost. They established, meditatively, that this pub was not the Castle, nor the Woodsman, nor that strange fancy one, from which Aoxomoxoa got banned. Nor the ill-fated one that used to keep trying to be a gastropub. It was Dwyers, the defunct Irish bar with the chocolate-maroon glazed tiles (a digression to nail the hue code for various angles).

‘Are you going to go?’ asked Cack, hopefully.

It was a long time since they’d taken a walk out together, just seeing the world and discussing how to code it.

‘I might. Want to come along?’

They left by the water frontage. The government spooks occupied a flat just across the road, in the housing blocks that lined the river to the east: but there was no sign of them today, not a wink of a lens. Spooks never do any harm, do they?, repeated Cack. Never, said Sage. It was the Heads’ policy to tell Cack this, so he didn’t get anxious.

Riverside Walk, despite inundations and stinks, and much-disputed flood proofing, had kept its ancient charm. Everyone was living a floor higher up, that’s all. Sage and Cack talked as they walked, remembered fondly the evacuees who had come to stay for a year. The lively Borough of Wandsworth Council meetings, when George and Bill were Councillors. The flood-sink year, when inner London gained some new, pretty wetland, and all the dictatorship prefabs went up.

Today the river was docile in its bed, slipping by, glassy smooth. There’s a fishing cormorant, making great ripples, there’s an interesting post. Here’s the modest beauty of St John’s on its patch of green, sandbag bunkers and the ancient school with its emblazoned shield. No kids around, they must be off harvesting something.

Better Death Than False Of Faith
…

Sage noticed at last how sweet it was to be outdoors, and what a great place Battersea was, how infinitely superior to Brixton. The toytown yellow-brick houses, his funky, endearing psychological landscape that had barely changed, just a few variant details, in a decade of violent upheaval. It was an oft-noted phenomenon. The inner cities thrived on green revolution, fed themselves from allottments, milled and ground the wheat they grew on handkerchief fields; while the rural hinterland fell into the abyss. Ironic, but there were factors that made it inevitable.

It takes one
idiot savant
to ignore another. Eventually he noticed that Cack was still wearing his skull. Head etiquette said Sage should therefore also be skulled-up, but he didn’t have his button in place. Belatedly, he wondered why Cack was masked at all. They didn’t do that any more.

‘Hey, Cack, why the mask?’

Cack’s Hallow’een head grinned, without expression.

‘I thought I should.’

Sage kept walking. Asperger’s is a catch-all. Sufferers with the exact same deficits have their own quirks. Not to dwell on the past, but Peter ‘Cack’ Stannen could have his pants on fire, and he wouldn’t say a word (this has been proved) until you asked him the right direct question. On topic he’s unbeatable. Off topic he thinks you know things when you don’t. He thinks he’s told you things when he hasn’t. He wears the mask when he’s upset.

‘Cack,
why
did you take the button off those barmies?’

‘I thought I should. They didn’t know I took it.’

‘Okay. Was there anything else?’

‘I don’t think they were really barmies. I didn’t like them.’

The defunct Irish bar was coming up. Sage had a momentary glimpse of a figure moving, in one of the grey windows on the upper floor.

Cack looked at the once-bright lettering above the door. ‘That’s a
nasty
lime green,’ he said, severely. ‘I don’t know what gets into people.’

‘Nor me. Peter, my dear, we should take an elementary precaution. You’re to walk on. When you get in range of the public callpoint at Clapham Junction, you call George, and you tell him where I am and why. Don’t call him before, use the public callpoint. Lose yourself in traffic. You got that?’

‘Elementary precaution,’ said the death’s head. ‘I got you.’

The door on the corner was open, the dark inside stank of defeated years. Sage went in, very relieved that he’d realised he shouldn’t bring Cack with him. In the old days he wouldn’t have thought twice: Cack was little, but he was useful. But none of them’d had any respect for Peter’s strangeness, back then. Although they’d loved him dearly. It was the fifteenth of August, full moon tomorrow night, was it a coincidence that he’d been let out at full moon time? They’d wondered about this, but it wasn’t worth turning down what might be Sage’s only chance to meet negotiators. Whatever was waiting he was forewarned, and George would know where he was. He was also in very good shape, if not the Aoxomoxoa of old, and this had a visceral effect, although he had no intention of using violence. Not if he could help it. All his thoughts were on the red room, back in Wallingham.

Let’s see what these fake barmies have to sell—

He went up the stairs, he opened a door, and grasped immediately that he’d better retreat. But if you sup with the devil you should take a long spoon, every pitcher goes once too often to the well, and if he keeps on trying, sooner or later the king of the lads is going to put his fist through the wrong window.

Cack reached the junction of Falcon Road and St John’s Hill. Here there were streams of people, after the friendly quiet of Battersea Village. Crowds in a familiar street didn’t usually bother him, but the “boss in jail” idea had hit him very hard, and having Sage home “for two days” wasn’t easier. How glad is two days’ worth? When do you reach the cut-off point on the curve, the downhill slide to “boss in jail again”? It sounds simple but it isn’t. The crowd didn’t get to him, but the gum stains did. There were gum stains all over the dirty pavement.
Bane of my life
, muttered Cack, and started counting.