Band of Gypsys (42 page)

Ax nodded. Some little thing, yes. The Lavoisier video didn’t seem like much, now. ‘Could anything take you all the way back to where you were? Not the peace you have, which I know about, but to that bizarre brainstate?’

Sage thought, with dread, of a clear glass on a red-gold velvet tablecloth.

‘Say it’s latent.’

‘I can’t get off on your
abyss of non-being
,’ said Ax. ‘It’s not for me. But I’ve been thinking about what I tried to do. My deluded attempt to build a better world, my great discovery that people should live a certain way: a high tech culture of
re-creation
, where our purpose in life is to be ourselves, and to look after each other, like the social animals we… You know that thing Isaac Newton said, about the seashore?’

‘Subsistence living, community service and futuristic toys. I remember. I was sold, babe, I still am. Yeah, I know it. Newton said he’d been like a boy playing on the seashore. “Now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”’

‘That’s how I feel. When I got my big chance, when England first fell apart, all I could see was my pebble, my pretty shell of a grand plan. Now I see everything that happened to us, tiny on the shore of history, and the enormous ocean of human possibility is out there untouched. It’s not consolation, it’s something else. Silence. I gaze at that ocean, it’s my abyss. And he felt like that, he had reached the silence, maybe more my way than yours; and everyone knows Newton was an absolute shite. I—I find that comforting.’ Tears had come to his eyes, he wiped them. ‘I’m not making sense, I’m sorry. I’ll shut up.’

‘You’re making sense.’

They stood, heads bowed, on the shore beside vast silence, under the milk white sky, the naked heath all around. At last they turned to look over the wall: at the garden where the aircrew were remembered. Several wreaths of weather-worn scarlet poppies were propped at the foot of a white cross. Salute, compadres. You were young, you died, and it’s all over now.

‘I am so fucking sorry I got you into this.’

‘Ax, I’m tired of that line. Allow me to know my own mind. I got myself “into this”.
You
rescued me from the miserable state I was in before Dissolution, an’ I have been right by you of my own free will ever since.’ He grinned. ‘Well, ’cept for the slight interval when I was screwing your girlfriend.’

‘You scamp.’

They checked each other over.
God is good
, Sage’s eyes were clear and bright, and not a shadow left of the bruises: at least, nothing you could see through the gypsy tan and the dirt. Sage returned the compliment, smiling: looking very fine, my guitar man. ‘You’re going to keep it, aren’t you?’

‘You mean the tattoo?’ Ax touched the knotwork: it felt like nothing, like skin, but he knew it was there. ‘Oh yes. I’ll wear this as long as I live.’

Right, thought Sage, resignedly. Because you deserve to wear the badge of shame, doncha, ya’ stiff-necked puritan. Ah well, that’s Ax.

‘Wandering Billy did you proud. It’s beautiful. It suits you.’

The kitten woke, and squeaked. ‘C’mon. She’s probably back by now.’

Crow’s Nest Clump

Fiorinda walked and walked, blindfold by the mist, until she struck a stand of Scots pines. She passed between an outer circle of the rough brown pillars, into a very quiet place. Pine trees never look English: whenever she saw one of these clumps, on the horizon or close up, she thought of the Mediterranean, which she had never seen. But the quiet in here was deep, and not foreign at all… She’d been delighting in her creation, the intricate, seductive layers of code in a video-diary track, and the guilt and grief had crawled up inside her, because playing with the 0s and 1s was what it was all about. Just once, when there’d been no other way out of a minor but very tricky situation, she had taken hold of reality that way, handling the code almost casually. But once was enough to tell her how different it was, and how the same it was. Fuck, fuck, fuck, all those people died for me. Anne-Marie, all the campers at Reading. They died for me, because I’m the one the Chinese were looking for, when they slaughtered a forest to kill a leaf.

What if she lost it again? Parietal lobe damage, the world dissolving into a fitful glimmer, it’s frightening when you
recognise
what the casualties try to describe, when you think: ah, I have been there. But I won’t. I have solved my equation, I have people who love me, I am earthed. She set her back against a pine bole and slid down until she was squatting on her heels. A robin flitted and clung to a stub of a branch close by, checking her out. Mist dropped in dew from the fisted needles—

Ammy is dead. Dilip is dead, the Wing children are dead.

The mist falls, I feel myself breathing. So this is where I am, and I can’t pretend to be surprised. Our revolution was boiling with corruption from the start, they always are, it’s a crying shame. Now the clean-up crew has arrived, and the finer points about how the Reich wasn’t actually
guilty
for the mess that is Crisis Europe, we were only trying to help, none of that matters. But they came to England, like a thunderbolt, and in some sense, it seems, with Fred Eiffrich’s blessing. Fred, who would have done anything, sacrificed anything to kill the Neurobomb. What are we to make of that?

There was a phrase General Wang used:
awakening from delusion
. China had come to Europe to waken people from delusion, no more grim fairytales, no more dancing in the streets… Ax said it was a stock expression, a cliché, don’t read too much into it: just basically means (Chinese not being Mother Nature’s democrats) that if the emperor doesn’t like the facts he can change them. But the words had set something ringing in Fiorinda’s soul, like the first time she’d heard Ax’s techno-Utopian manifesto. Is there someone else who believes we are
not
helpless, before the monstrous forces we have created? Someone else who thinks it’s possible to stand in the way of destruction’s tide, and turn that bastard around?

Someone who might free me?

How amazing, people like that are so dangerous—

Longing for the impossible made her shiver. Oh, God, what if I have a miscarriage, the way I lost that pregnancy in Paris? My baby, please don’t leave me, dear little baby, please, please don’t leave me. Shit, I must not get frightened. They pick up on your emotional state, of course they do, we’re sharing a blood supply: so calm down.

…

I won’t lose this one, she thought. It’s the stubborn kind, it will hang on. She sat so quietly that a young rabbit came nibbling at the turf, almost to within reach of her hand. Hey, little Shoot (she called the baby shoot, it was a small thing growing). See the baby rabbit. Maybe it will let us stroke it. She held her breath, feeling as if she were her baby’s eyes. Come here, bunny, I won’t hurt you. But the rabbit knew a hungry predator when it saw one. It gave her a dark look, wise little sideways look, and scooted.

Fiorinda laughed.

She came through the thorns that shielded the ruined cottage, breaking its outline even now the leaves had begun to fall; seeing their shelter with fresh eyes. An upturned bird’s nest suspended from gable to gable, where the kitchen floor had been open to the wind and rain. Heather thatch and hazel-withy walls. What a lot of work. We did this, we wrote songs, and all that code… When did we sleep?

Well, admittedly the tech did most of the coding, far as my stuff and Ax’s was concerned: bless it.

Other shelters she had known rose around her, drawn up by nets of fire. Her bedroom in the cold house. The smoky basement in Lambeth where she’d first shared a bed with Ax Preston. The annexe in Travellers’ Meadow, dancing shadows of oak leaves on sunlit canvas. A trailer park cabin on a cold beach in Mexico, the red bedchamber at Wallingham… The front door of the bird’s nest, a basketwork screen you could shift aside, was open. She tugged off her boots, stowed them under the eaves and ducked inside.

‘Is it over?’

‘Yeah,’ said Sage. ‘All over.’

‘Any more for the casualty list?’

‘No,’ said Ax, quickly: he knew she meant their personal casualty list, not the executions. ‘One to take off. I saw Rox.’

‘You didn’t tell me that!’ exclaimed Sage.

‘It went out of my mind, sorry. It was a glimpse, but s/he seemed fine. Getting out of a taxi in Queen Anne Street, straight indoors, through a Press pack, declining to comment.’

‘How…how normal.’

‘Yeah, it was strange.’

They made room, she sat between them on the heather bed: enhanced by blankets from the empty house. Everything looked different. The water-still, their single blackened cooking pan, the equally blackened kettle. No fireplace, they made their fires outdoors. The generous body and taut-strung throat of Ax’s Les Paul, glowing in shadow. Her tapestry bag; the coloured rags, formerly clothes, stuffed into gaps in the basketweave. Rabbit skins, bones, feathers, ogre debris like a fox’s den. She felt that she had woken from an eerie, compelling dream. Where was I just now? What day is this? The Scots dumped us by the side of the road, and then…?

She knew her lovers were feeling the same. They had fallen asleep, they had been in another world, now it was time to wake up.

‘There’s bread and milk,’ said Ax. ‘Let’s eat.’

They shared the milk, tore up the bread and devoured it. Min dragged his piece off, killed it elaborately and wolfed it down with gusto. He ate anything, and he had weird bower-bird tendencies: he brought pebbles and sticks indoors, hid them in a secret cache and went bananas if anyone touched them. Outside the mist turned to rain. They spoke of the weather-proofing they’d need to do, if they were going to stay here much longer.

It was time to talk about the choice they’d made, and what they should do now. But not just yet. Fiorinda tried to convince Sage to let her at his hair.

‘I’ll do you cane rows, I’ve got a good comb.’

‘You don’t know how.’

‘I’ve seen it done. How hard could a few little plaits be? All right, let me cut it. I have nailscissors. C’mon, it’ll be an improvement on the greasy yellow afro—’

‘Fuck off, evil brat. I am nurturing dreadlocks.’

Ax lay with the kitten on his chest. He felt hollow and exhausted, and for a moment wondered why. Memory cuts out, you live in the present with a vengeance.
For in my day I have had many bitter and shattering experiences, in war and on the stormy seas.
He had a glimpse that this, here and now, was what it might be like to reach the Zen Self. The world is a terrible place, and that’s not going to go away. It’s all still got to be there, in the sweetness of the brimful cup.

We have to decide what to do next, my cats.

Someone coughed.

The rainlight at the doorway was blocked by a stooping figure, a face peered in. ‘Morning all. I was passing, thought I’d drop by, er—?’

It was the poacher, one of those friendly locals they depended on.

‘No problem,’ said Ax.

‘Good to see you, mister,’ added Sage

‘It’s Dave, name’s Dave, Mr Pender.’

‘Come in,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Have a seat. We’re not busy.’

‘I brought some black tea,’ said Dave the Poacher. He ducked indoors, like someone well used to living in a bender, and handed over a paper twist: about a hundred grams, a substantial present. This was the man who had left the rabbits on the post, back in September. Who had made Mr Preston effortlessly at that first encounter, because he had once been in the barmy army,
been within an arm’s length of you, Sir
. He’d served in the Velvet Invasion. Since when he’d taken to living rough and found he liked it.

‘It’s raining a bit.’ He drew out a packet of biscuits from an inner pocket, doubtfully, as if afraid he was overdoing it. ‘Thought I’d say hallo.’

‘We’ll brew up then,’ said Fiorinda. ‘We were just going to.’

The poacher had spoken to Ax, in the dusk of dawn or nightfall, and left his gifts of game, but he had never let himself be seen near the bothy; never come to their door. Nobody referred to the novelty of the visit, or hazarded a guess at the reason for it. Sage boiled a kettle out in the ruins, and they shared a brew of hot Rosie Lee.

The pain and pins and needles of returning life

Dave’s gingernuts didn’t go far. More visitors arrived, by ones and twos, until the headcount had passed thirty: which was a shock. They’d known they had protectors, who might become betrayers; or pay a heavy price for staying loyal. They’d accepted this as fate, but you wondered just how far the whisper had spread. Ah well, too bad, we more or less knew what we were doing. Most came for a few minutes, bringing gifts of food, as is traditional. Others stayed longer, some made a session of it. No one stated what was happening, or why. Conversation was about the Forest, the weather prospects, the habits of wildlife, local affairs. A little, at last, about the events this morning in London, and yesterday in the prison yard in Croydon.

The hosts kept the tea kettle going. Milk and sugar arrived with the company. Cups and mugs were shared, which caused good-humoured problems over differing tastes. Later, the poacher offered to top up the brew with ‘something’. He meant vodka, but finding Fiorinda and Ax demurred he just passed the bottle round. Ax took down his guitar, and started picking. Nobody paid any attention. The visitors behaved as if it was perfectly natural to have Ax Preston playing guitar like that. Sage and Fiorinda acted like it happened all the time; which indeed it did. People spoke more boldly: about the astonishing speed of the invasion and how far away it all seemed.

Degrees of separation. I could have been in London that week, but I wasn’t. My wife’s cousin was killed in Cornwall. My grandad saw them coming in. What about those amazing semi-orbitals? What d’you think they use for fuel? Somebody had heard that the rocket fuel was made out sea-water. The Chinese run everything on sea-water and shit. ‘I think that’s a joke,’ said the younger of the two boys from Stanger’s dairy farm, one of the places where Ax went to siphon news. ‘Hu was making a joke. He meant brackish water, worthless water, only he didn’t know the word.’