Band of Gypsys (3 page)

Briefly, the mischief vanished from Mr Preston’s pretty brown eyes.

M. de Corlay sighed, and pressed a banana-shaped yellow buzzer. At its discordant summons some Techno-Green muscle appeared, bizarrely costumed but convincingly armed, or
packing heat
, as they preferred to put it. The delegates stood, disconsolate, and donned their velvet with dignity.

‘Edward II wasn’t killed like that because he was a homosexual,’ exclaimed Mr White. ‘The homophobic element has been unfairly exaggerated.’ (‘
Unbelievable
’ muttered Alain, lighting another bidi.) ‘The issue is to leave an unmarked corpse—’

‘Tha’s
our
kinda meme,’ said beautiful Mr Pender: with such tigerish affection that the White Rose took a sharp step backwards. ‘Hey,
compagnero
You must be one of us.’

When the lunatics had left the room, Alain delivered a small item of secure mail to His Majesty: who glanced at it and stowed it away, still falling about and cackling like a fool with his Minister. ‘You two are abusing my hospitality,’ said the little Breton. ‘This hôtel is a serious centre of techno-green utopian excellence.’

‘If you say so, Monsewer Jupette (
snarf, snarf
—)’

‘Oh yes, very amusing. Mr. Preston, who needs nobody to crown him, gets the rabid dogs to come to
him
, so he knows exactly where they are and what they are up to, and can deal with them at leisure once he’s whipped his bureaucrats into line.’

‘Nah. I’m just pissing around.’

‘What
are
you doing, in God’s name? What are you achieving with this infantile, John Lennon, doll’s house game about concentration camps?’

‘My job, Alain. The job I was hired to do. I’m making the suits look cool, working the margins, and getting something done for my own agenda.’

‘Now you’re talking like a toothless
human rights activist
,’ snapped Alain, and then stared. ‘
Mon Dieu
. You’re reporting back to those devils in Westminster?’

‘Of course.’ Ax retrieved his guitar case from under a chair, and shrugged it onto his shoulders. ‘What else? I’m a Lennonist, not a Marxist, Alain.’

‘You’re an imbecile. They’ll make you sorry.’

‘I’ve been sorry. Now I’m trying what I always knew I should: the art of the possible. C’mon, Sage. Got to get the beer-money in before dark.’

‘Thanks fer the room, and the heavies,’ called Sage, over his shoulder.

In the courtyard, under naked chestnut trees that stood gleaming in the frost like giant, funereal candlebra, Ax stopped dead, transfixed.

‘What’s up, babe?’

‘Sage.
Could
she be pregnant? Tell me, truly… So quickly?’

Fiorinda had been chemically sterilised when she was thirteen, and had just given birth to Rufus O’Niall’s baby—O’Niall the sinister rockstar lord with a taste for young girls: who was her own father, though she didn’t know it. As long as he’d loved her, Ax had dreamed of her having a child, and been afraid it was impossible. Now it
was
possible, but he hadn’t expected anything more than hope. You can live on hope for years… It was dizzying. Fiorinda having a baby!

‘
I don’t know
,’ said Sage, with equal urgency. ‘But it does sometimes happen like that, straight off. There’s reasons why—’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know—’

Naturally they’d been researching the topic.

Alain stared at the walls of the conference room: which was for him a shrine, a time-capsule of the last days of rational materialism. Here we laid our desperate plans, while that lanky blue-eyed alchemist who has just left was turning himself into the New Prometheus, breaking the barrier between Mind and Matter. And how little we understood, then, what that would mean to the future of the world!

What annoyed him most was that
Ax Preston
, of all people, the Captain Sensible of Pre-Dissolution UK radical rock, had become a perfect character in this farce. While he, “Alain Jupette” (Alain Miniskirt had been Alain’s stage name, when he fronted a politically motivated Eurotrash band called
Movie Sucré
), found himself unable to mock a situation that was beyond ludicrous. A world where fossil fuel reserves had been
conjured
out of existence. Where so-called governments scrabbled to own the new occult superweapon, a
magic planet destroyer
in human form—

Thank God for Fiorinda. She, at least, still believed in reason.

A knot of Techno-Greens stood at the windows, looking down. He joined them and saw Ax and Sage: stalled under the sweeping branches of the chestnuts and the first difficult flakes of snow. You would stare at those two if you knew nothing, you would follow them down the street. They shone like golden armour.

‘What can they be talking about?’ muttered someone beside him.

‘Obviously, the exquisite shape of Fiorinda’s left earlobe,’ said Alain sourly.

‘Is it true they’re on the oxy again?’ asked the other, hopefully.

The speaker was a government spook, here by agreement, to keep an eye on the Plantagent delegates: and on Ax Preston. Everyone wants to know how Ax is going to jump. The Techno-Greens had differences, but no major quarrel, with the current French government, a faction of their own movement. There’d been a time when Ax and Sage had been addicts of oxytocin, shoring up the famous love affair with brain-wrecking quantities of the intimacy drug. But they were clean now—thankfully (since Alain was genuinely fond of the fools, and that potion is a brain-wrecker). There was nothing fake about the besotted trefoil infatuation.

‘Drowning in it. But it won’t help you to nail him.’

All real megastars must have crap sex lives, thought Fiorinda; left alone in the nest. It has to be true, because which of us rock musicians, performers, hardwired from birth to be continually starving for love and pleasure, forced by the working conditions to be addicts of excess… Which of us would strut on stage, or fret in a recording studio, a moment longer than we had to, if we were getting what we needed at home? It would be: make the money, take your bow and quit.

And how often does that happen? How often does any of us get clean away?

See, I’m not
really
trapped. I’d be worse off if I was having a brilliant career.

Comforted by this thought, she jumped out of bed as a vicious alarm sounded. Brushed her teeth and dressed briskly and chastely (sorry mates, not going to roll around in sexy underwear, this is not one of those videos). The global stats that ran along the bottom of her out-of-shot monitor screen were gratifying: and here we go. Cribs of the certifiably insane. “Hi everybody, and special hi to anyone who’s looking in for the first time. Welcome to Montmartre, and the rooftops of Paris. This is our garret, acres of space, which is not exactly realistic, but hey, we’re dilletantes, what do you expect? This is our bed, with the personalised coat-bedspread—

Question, is there any heating?

‘Hi, Ian in Rotherham. Yeah, there is, sometimes. We have heating from the arondissement Renewables Grid, this is our dear little radiator. We’re allowing ourselves the same units of energy per day, per person, counting power, heat and sanitation, as we’d get in a camp.
If
we were getting the statutory ration, which a lot of inmates don’t. But it’s Thursday and we’re on a three day week here in Paris…

Question, do you get fleas?

‘We have no personal vermin, Alice in Queens, which is great, and as unrealistic as the wide open spaces, by the way. The lice powder is just in case.

‘Let me show you round. These are my clothes, all hung up on
my
piece of string. These are my boots. These are Ax’s clothes; and Ax’s other hat, his Ned Kelly hat. I
love
this old hat, as long as he doesn’t wear it. The mess is Sage’s stuff. I kick it out of the way, oh, I trod on his board, it’s okay, they’re tough.
Et voila
our tasty tins, the ATP battery
micro-ondes
and that’s the drinking water. My boyfriends fetch the water. Isn’t that sweet of them. You’re wondering if the ag.labour campers really feed on out of date tins. They do. Fresh produce goes straight out the gates.

‘Here behind this screen, yes, do come in! Is our very green chemical toilet, which we don’t have to share with a hundred other people, unlike most of the folks who grow your veg for you. The brown stuff is a big problem in the camps, it spreads diseases: I hope you’re remembering to wash everything before you eat it. The cold winters have helped, tho’ it’s also a problem that the camps are not built for our evil share of climate change, which as you’ll have noticed is a
colder
climate… I’m now going to empty it downstairs. Come along, please.

Do you always get landed with that job?

‘Hey, Sejer in Sweden. Nah, just often. They do fetch the water.’

(Oh, Hi, M. Jouffroy, Il fait encore froid, eh?)

‘That’s our concierge. He doesn’t like the English, but he’s okay.’

Sploosh, sploosh. Swill, scrub—

‘There, that wasn’t too bad. I’m used to it, I don’t even mind the smell of disinfected shit when it’s fresh, after about a million post-civilised rock festivals.

‘Hi,
Adinike
, not sure where you are? No, I didn’t. We don’t wash much. Yeah, well spotted, we’re wired in here, we have interactive digital connections. So do the inmates of course, in that they’re under constant CCTV surveillance. But we do have more control: it’d be a bit of a dumb protest otherwise. No entertainment however: we make our own fun. And no, you can’t watch. Don’t be so pitiful, what did Gaia give you imaginations for?’

Fiona Ward, EB Breakfast News dolly, had booked an interview: for which a portion of the garret would be specially captured, and pasted into the EB Breakfast set. Fiorinda sat demurely on her mark, in the midst of the frowsty bed, grubby hands clasped, thinking of studio interviews in days gone by. Funny how it’s just a different kind of annoying. Funny how often these News-type dollies are called
Fiona
—

‘Yes, Fiona, of course there were agricultural camps in Ax’s dictatorship. But they weren’t locked, there were no guards, and the labourers were volunteers.’

‘Yes, Fiona, the “drop out hordes”, I’m sorry, “elective homeless” were a problem for us, too, right from the start. I just don’t think rounding them up and sticking them in brutal concentration camps is really the decent answer.’

‘Oh, absolutely. Human labour must take the place of agricultural machinery for a while, until techno-green Utopia’s solutions are up and running. That doesn’t require slavery. Did
you
ever think of joining the Volunteer Initiative? You should. It’s great exercise, excellent for body-tone. Communion with nature, very Green
and
a social bonding experience. I could email you an application form?’

Laughter.

At the end of the live session ‘Sparrow Child’ played her out: one of her own, oldest songs. (a recording: Fiorinda didn’t sing a note, for contractual reasons). She’d have prefered ‘Stonecold’, but punk aggression was not the message. We must not accuse, we must smile, and just keep on nagging… Oh my darling Ax, have you turned me?
Stonecold
for years to your vision of Techno-Green Utopia by stealth, your puny plans for improving the situation when the situation has blatantly gone to hell and is not coming back, suddenly I’m believing in it all, what’s come over me?

And so to her desk, remote-accessed at the Volunteer Initiative Office in London; still housed, for a while longer, in the building once known as Buckingham Palace. Here the Volunteer Initiative managed supplies for the drop out hordes, as far as they were still allowed. Scraping the barrels of over-production, tracking down strange customers for strange lost wares; with a view to ending up with five clean litres of water and fifteen hundred calories a day for every man, woman and child, where and when it was needed. Or near as they could make it. They also supplied the camps, as far as they were allowed. Thus Fiorinda, like any starry-eyed high-earning radical rockstar in the past, helps the evil system to function; while protesting against its existence. Nice to know she was keeping up all the old traditions.

Obsolete Sanitary-ware mountain in Bulgaria, I have a customer, powdered porcelain is a soil-cleanser, powdering can be done by hand, doesn’t need machines. More Libyan military apricot jam? Ooh, I’ll have some of that… Oh NO, it’s already gone! So unfair, this was
our
idea, now everybody’s doing it, and can’t complain about other aid agencies, but private brokers, scrabbling for futures in grey-bloomed chocolate bar hoards, have they no fucking shame?

Once, Fiorinda had believed that the end of the world was an event. A spray of bullets at a political reception, red flowers blooming on swanky evening clothes, the smoke of cordite. The Hyde Park Massacre, which she had survived. For years she had looked back on that night as the lethal blow: death was instantaneous.

No, no, not at all.

>
Ruin is the devil’s work, consecutive and slow.

Fail in a moment no man did—

We fell into dark water, now we go on swimming across the river, into which the modern world stumbled way back then. Getting weaker, getting chilled, long ago lost our footing. Tasting the salt on our lips, guessing the awful truth but keeping on, as if we still believe in the other shore, because what else is there to do?

Europe is going to starve. Not this year, not next year; but soon.

Dread grew as she worked, the dry mouth, hollow stomach, the tingling of nerves demanding emergency action, fight or flight: and she wondered why. This was a
good
time. They had made their peace with the Burning World, the Freezing World: someone had to live in times like these, turns out it’s us. You balance like a dancer
en pointe
, and hell dimensions have no power, all is well. Things had been
good
, despite all disasters, since that other night, under desert stars, after the Lavoisier Raid. The chill of the air, the red rocks beating out the furnace heat of the day; Fiorinda reunited with her lovers. The charged, miraculous sex, sweeping them up into a nameless immensity: no answers, no promises, no duration, only the white-out, luminous complexity of
what is
, that opens and opens, and draws you into itself—