Band of Gypsys (41 page)

She went quietly down the wooden steps that led to her loft, through the cluttered garage where the farmer kept a vintage BMW (up on blocks; it had a petrol engine, never converted) and looked out. He was a slim man, and quite tall. Straight, sheeny dark hair, with a few threads of silver, fell past his jaw. He wore a brown velvet jacket, he had a ring with a red stone in it on his right hand: and now she could see it was a palmtop or pocket-tv sort of thing poised on his knees, and a fine black earphone lead disappearing under a wing of his hair; so she understood what he was doing.

She must have caught her breath. He looked up. Completely fearless. That was her first thought: as if she’d met a wild animal, a fox or a deer, in the woods, and instead of scooting it had faced her, uncannily, look for look. His skin was milky-tea colour, he had high cheekbones, a straight nose, a fine-cut mouth and almond-shaped clear brown eyes; a graceful keel of midnight blue knotwork tattooed above and below the left one. She recognised him at once, of course: except for the Celtic tattoo.

Completely fearless.

He put his tv thing away, unhurried, and stood up: smiling a little.

‘Will you give me some milk?’

‘Oh yes,’ gasped the bonded girl. ‘Oh, oh yes—’

She had to give him yesterday’s milk, because everything was behind; which mortified her. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Please, wait, er, Sir…’ dashed into the back kitchen and came out with a loaf of fresh bread from the crock. The family were in the big room beyond, riveted by the public executions. She thrust the loaf at him, and didn’t know what else to do or say.

‘Thank you,’ said the fearless man. He put the loaf in his bag, jumped at the yard gate and he was gone, over it, into the wood.

‘So that’s him,’ she whispered, staring after, her heart thumping. ‘That’s
him
.’

Up before dawn, shivering in the dim chill air, Sage and Fiorinda had groped their way to the summit of Camp Hill, the highest point in the Forest. Sage had the visionboard, Fiorinda carried Min: the kitten was too young to be left alone. They found a hollow close to the base of the one remaining radio mast: an antique, once belonging to the Diplomatic Corps Radio Station, code-name Aspidistra. They knew about things like that. Starved of connectivity, they surfed the tourist information boards in deserted carparks, feeding on scraps of nature lore and local history. Mist dripped from the yellowed leaves of the brambles: Fiorinda spread a sheet of baling plastic, Sage set down the board, and pulled out a length of slim cable, looping it hand over hand. They sat with their knees drawn up. The kitten wriggled and settled, purring til he shook with pleasure. Silver drops ran together along the rim of Sage’s hood, like a string of pearls.

‘One more look?’

‘Yeah.’

They were about to send their video diary to Paris; where they’d established radio contact with Alain de Corlay. They loved this piece of work. It reminded them of
Bridge House
, the famous multimedia residence created by the Few and friends during the dictatorship. But their diary of the invasion (it had no title) was a leap beyond
Bridge House
. Fragmentary but coherent, hallucinatory but stripped down. Nitpicking in detail, with a perfect finish. Songs come, it’s a habit of mind. The tech to dress them is the other dimension, equally vital, difficult to assimilate: and they knew they’d done it, found another level of their game. They’d used the 3% immix, developed by virtual movie makers, for the arousal triggers. Sage’s much stronger immersion code for the
qualia
—

‘Any requests?’

‘Anything, I don’t mind. Oh, wait.’ The rough-cut came in packets of twelve seconds, it was not, as yet, retrievable except by numbers. She closed her eyes, and rattled off what she thought of as a bar-code. Sage grinned to himself, the coding is childsplay these days but damn it, she catches on fast.

‘Coming up.’

A needle-thin sliver of colour appeared in the air, flickered and unfolded like a Japanese paper flower. Fiorinda imagined the noughts and ones flying into her eyes, a swarm of tiny bees, creating something in her brain that was fractally descended from the painting on the walls of a cave, thirty odd thousand years ago. It was September, in dusty sunlight, we were fixing our roof. Ax and I were on the rooftree, Sage pitching bundles of heather thatch up to us, which we would lash and peg in place. They had their shirts off; their arms and shoulders and breasts, embossed with muscle like living armour, how I loved watching them, how beautiful they were—

We were talking, you can hear us through the music, about that time Ax and Sage did
Liquid Gold
for the Hoorays, and my, I felt naked.

The intimacy of what we do, it’s like a disease. Sometimes it spooks us. There I am, in rags that were my red and blue chiffon print, over the remains of a plum tailored skirt, ripped off to the knees. I wear my clothes like memory, hate to see them go. I’m filthy, we’re all filthy, a patina of grime over sweaty tanned skins where the sun slips: 3% works beautifully on all that. But what you’ll feel most is the dull red of the broken half bricks in the gable. A sycamore leaf, piled with blackberries, a shaving of white birch. They’ll be burned into your brain, because that’s where we put the immix.

‘She needs a tambourine.’

Clearly, then Sage laughs. That was it, paper flower folded, gone.

‘You still happy with it?’

She nodded. ‘I’m extremely pleased with where my career is just now.’

‘Me, same,’ said the maestro, equally without irony.

Ax’s ‘Lay Down’, the Yap Moss song (he wanted to call it ‘Untitled’, they’d stopped him) would be the first single, obviously. They didn’t mind.

What did you do in the invasion, oh fallen idols? We slept with the spiders, and cut ourselves a homemade immix album, which our friend Alain will produce, without massacring it, we hope. We can’t consult him much.

Was that appropriate, when your country was in its death agony?

Don’t know, it’s just what happened.

Like cream poured over the back of a spoon, a layer of smooth over stinging liquor, every track is laid over pain. When your country is being invaded, and you are far from the frontline, you find yourself just
staring
, at whatever stick or stone is in front of your eyes: and that’s where the bodies are buried.

‘Did you know, in World War Two they used to transmit fake German Forces radio from here? Sex scandals about their High Command, to demoralise the Hun.’

‘Only the English… Yes, I did know that, my pilgrim. I read it on the same noticeboard you did.’

‘Hahaha. Well, since Ax has the tranceiver, I shall now knock-up my software, digital radio station again, and bare-wire it to the Aspidistra Mast.’

‘How long will it take to upload the goods?’

‘’Bout ten minutes, if all goes well. Say twenty.’

‘If we took out enough components to make a cavity, could we fix your board so it would work as a microwave oven?’

‘Leave my fucking board alone. My board has had enough.’

‘Only joking, poor Sage. We have no pizza, anyway.’ She leaned against his shoulder. ‘Sage, would you mind taking the kitten?’

‘Yeah, sure, hand him over—’

‘I want to go for a walk. I’ll see you back.’

She disappeared quickly into the mist. Sage held the squirming kitten. ‘You
don’t
want to run off,’ he said to it. ‘You think you do, but you don’t, you’d get wet feet an’ Ax would fucking kill me’. He stuffed Min inside his hoodie; and bent, almost with a shrug of dismissal, to his work.

She’ll come to no harm.

Camp Hill was pocked with Neolithic-looking lumps and hollows, a usefully messy digital landscape to hide in, if he’d been worried about what he was doing. He was not, but he could feel the fatalistic blank of these strange days slipping from him. I’m going to be afraid, soon. I’m going to have to think about my dad, my son, and all the others whose fates we don’t yet know… Refreshingly, the bumps were
not
Neolithic. They were the traces of an army that had camped here in 1793, to meet the threat of the French Revolution… Read that on a board too. Facing the wrong way, as it turned out, because in so far as those blood-daubed compadres of ours ever made it, they landed in Cornwall and Wales—

It was an excuse you got tired of hearing. Oh, we only got trashed because England’s military might was
facing the wrong way.
The air defence region assumes an attack from the north or north-east. To avoid false alarms, the system filters out
exactly
the kind of profile, storm of hail, flock of birds, that the Chinese fleets would have most resembled… And otherwise it would have been a different story? Do they
listen
to themselves?

The board slung on his shoulder, Min the kitten a warm lump against his ribs, he trudged off down the hill. He was sour, irrationally so, because his own homeland had been overrun, and Sussex, so far, had not.

Ax had found himself a hiding place further off, and made do without a picture. He listened until the hard news broke up into talking-heads, verbiage, and then decided to quit. The fields and woods south of the Forest were ghostly, haunted by the munch, munch of looming cattle. He crossed the old B road, and took the footpath onto the heath. As he climbed towards the Airman’s Grave he saw Sage waiting for him: a cut-out figure on the mist. He was sitting right out in the open, on the wall of the stone enclosure that marked the spot where a Wellington had crashed in 1941.

And this seemed right, just as it seemed right that Ax was out in the open himself, not skulking helpless in some cellar or attic hidey-hole: being kept like a troublesome pet, until he was found and dragged out. Fuck that. They watched each other, soberly. As Ax came up, Sage slipped down and they turned to lean against the wall, side by side, looking south.

‘Well,’ said Ax. ‘That’s it, officially. Now the unofficial situation starts.’

Sage nodded.

‘Where’s Fiorinda? Back at the bothy?’

‘Gone for a walk, wanted to be by herself. Don’t panic, I have your kitten safe an’ cosy.’ He unzipped his hoodie, to prove it. ‘I’m not going to be branded a tramp and a no-good, not fit to be a father.’

‘I’ll take him.’

‘Nah, you won’t. He’s keepin’ me warm.’

The woods beyond Fairwarp made a crumpled dragon shadow on the sky. The shoulder of the South Downs was a grey washed line on grey.

‘What about the executions?’

‘That’s over too.’

‘You saw them?’

‘Not really. Either they changed their minds about the live show or they never planned it. The executions were yesterday, at Croydon. Only the Generals and Chinese officials present, but it was recorded, that’s what was on the news this morning. I watched some. I only had sound for the rest, had to move out of the yard. It seemed to be the whole list, no exceptions, Lady Anne included.’

‘So Jack Vries is dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

Ax glanced at him, and saw an odd, fleeting expression cross Sage’s face, almost bewilderment. There’s a need to confront the person who tortured you. You feel you won’t be whole again until you’ve faced them down. He knew about that from his experiences as a hostage. It’s an illusion, nothing will ever make it so those things didn’t happen… He wanted to talk about the shootings, how hurried and brusque they had been. No ceremony. A handful of people. The executioner is some menial, a shock-headed minor officer. He fires at arm’s length and the body is hustled onto a stretcher, while the next in line’s already being hustled, blindfold, to the mark. No, he thought. Lay off. My big cat doesn’t need that.

A red admiral butterfly flew up from the walled garden. Ax watched it settle on a stone by the path, its fresh, enamelled wings folded above its body. He wondered if it was unusual to see a butterfly in October. He knew so little about nature. The grey and brown patterns on the hind wing were like the marbling on the end papers of an old book.

‘They stopped being moderate when they got to the top.’

‘Yeah. Very rational people, the Chinese.’

There’d been no moderation at Reading Site, either… And now Faud Hassim, who had survived that holocaust: Faud, who had kept his word, and protected the Preston family at great risk to himself, and gone on to lead England’s last government; he was dead. He had been dead when Ax got up this morning, and prayed, and went down to Towncreep to watch the Chinese do his dirty work. Ax had not even witnessed it.

Everything seemed muted and far away, under the pale, shrouded sky.

‘Sage? D’you still think about the Zen Self?’

‘Yes,’ said Sage. ‘All the time.’

‘What’s that like?’

‘I dunno what to tell you. It was like lucid dreaming. Being
there
again,
there
again,
there
again, at different moments, myriads on myriads of them, each of them carrying a whole world, layered together, interpenetrating, past present and future. And it’s fractal, so that the first complex four-dimensional object, my entire self, was a gateway—unless I was daring to try and resolve the unresolved shit—to more and more, drawing you to the point where everything turns inside out and you’re here again, but totally aware of the ways beyond. But none of it, what I just said, is strictly conscious, it’s more what you come back knowing, except—’

He broke off, embarrassed. ‘Sorry.’

‘No, don’t be. Please tell me.’

‘It’s not the same now. Say my simultaneity levels are close to normal again. Some little thing like the Lavoisier video can make me tackle the unresolved stuff. But tha’s different, jus’
fucking
hard work—’