Bold as Love (15 page)

There was no murderous violence in the Cabinet meetings, only the ever-present threat of it, but there was ugly stuff to swallow. In May, President Pig intervened personally to insist on the summary execution of all the prisoners currently sentenced under the restored death penalty (a crowd-pleasing stunt the government had launched a couple of years ago, but never yet had the guts to implement). He wanted them to hang, but had to settle for the lethal injection.

Fired with enthusiasm by the experience, he summoned Ax to the heavily guarded family suite, on the hotel’s first floor, to discuss the formation of a Countercultural justice system. Public hangings, flogging and branding for crimes against Gaia, what did Ax think? He was anxious for approval.

‘We gotta get tough,’ he insisted, alcohol-stunned eyes wandering, unable to fix on Ax’s face. ‘Child molestors, all that kind of shit, we gotta be hardline, take the moral high ground there, as well as on the green agenda.’

The suite was a very disturbing place. It reminded Ax of another thing Fiorinda used to say in the Think Tank. It’s all costume. There’s no distance between the most
in your face
hippie godfather, and right-wing family values. He began to feel the horror of the trap he was in. The Pig was popular, the country seemed satisfied. There was nothing Ax could do, except walk away, (if Pigsty would let him go); and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.

A few days after this interview he was on the south coast, doing lunch with some ancient ladies hauled out of that other, vastly more numerous death row, for the pilot of the CCM Volunteer Initiative. ‘I’m glad my mother had me,’ said the spry wheelchaired ninety-eight year old next to him. ‘If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here with you now, would I?’ The way she said it, you’d have thought the decade she’d spent dying of boredom between threadbare sheets, sometimes in her own shit, had been wiped clean off the slate by this particular salt-aired sunny day, as she sat gumming her fish and chips for the cameras.

After the publicity lunch he talked to the manager of several long stay care homes in the south coast conurbation, and asked her what was needed. Everything, she said. Economic meltdown had not been easy on the low-income poor-health sector of the geriatric bulge. Donations in kind would be best, as credit was difficult. She’d love some volunteers, nice mature ladies for preference. ‘What about young men?’ said Ax. There were more nice, mature ladies than you’d think among the revolutionaries, but they tended not to be at a loss for occupation. Matron (not her title, but it seemed the natural term) looked down her nose. She knew the kind of young man on offer: but she was desperate. ‘I would
consider
them. As long as they were clean and tidy.’

‘I’m gonna make you eat that tone of voice,’ said Ax.

The media called them Ax Preston’s Chosen, but that was already the name of his other band, so they quickly became
The Few
. They moved into a derelict barracks near the Park, that had been standing empty like the Pig’s hotel, and set up their headquarters: a press office, a club venue, studios, a works’ canteen; hostel beds for teenage runaways. They called it The Insanitude. After the national tour, Ax managed to get his friends out of the hostage situation, arguing plausibly that they should spread the message in the regions. The Chosen returned to Taunton; the Heads retired to Reading. But the Pig started to get restive, so the others stayed in town: Chip and Verlaine at Rox’s flat in Notting Hill, Allie, Fereshteh and DK at the Insanitude. Fiorinda and Ax stayed at the Snake Eyes house.

Fiorinda helped DK to run one of the Insanitude nights, keeping him company in his eyrie above the ballroom, while he played merry hell with state-of-the-art IMMix. She wore the new filter glasses to shut out the assault on her visual-cortex: looked down through blood-brown lenses at the huge crowd of dancers swirling around, oblivious of their dolefully decrepit surroundings. Maybe they needn’t bother to redecorate, virtual scenery would be enough.

‘What did it used to be?’ wondered the Mixmaster, mopping sweat and chewing gum at a terrible rate. Forty-something, motormouth Dilip could lose or gain fifteen years in a moment, depending on his mood or the light. He was young tonight, he was flying. ‘This hideous heap, this pile of architectural dung. Was it a factory? A power station, a boot camp a reformatory?’

‘I don’t believe you don’t know. You were living in the Park all last summer.’

‘Was I? Oh, well, I only saw from afar, a big lumpen empty building.’

‘You’re having me on.’

‘Mmm hmmtitum… I’ve never been interested in sightseeing. What a beautiful gown you are wearing,’ He did something that made the dancers shriek, ejected his gum, stuck it on the underside of the desk, searched in vain for a fresh stick. ‘What do you think of the Pig, Fiorinda?’

‘I think he’s a braindead, brutal creep,’ said Fio, far enough from sober to relish the feeling of speaking dangerous treason.

‘So do I. I also believe Ax did what had to be done, he had no other choice, and he is still doing what has to be done, and all power to him.’

‘Exercising the art of the possible,’ agreed Fiorinda. ‘Same old, same old. Don’t get me wrong, I know Ax is doing his crazy best.’

‘And here are we,
torn between Jupiter and Apollo
or some East-West lyric that I can’t think of but let’s be shamelessly midAtlantic: you want to come over to the North Wing after this, back to my pad?’

‘Sure.’

‘That is, um, that is—’

‘As long as it would be okay with Ax,’ supplied Fio, resignedly. ‘S’okay. He won’t mind.’

‘Ah, Fiorinda.’ DK swung around and wrapped her in arms like friendly, roving snakes. ‘Sea-green, oceanic, spellbinding, Fiorinda.’ His breath was sweet and hot. She reached over his shoulder, took off her glasses and was plunged into deep water, filled with mysterious shapes that thrummed at her like another kind of sound: then flipped to the roaring surface, stretched over the peaks and troughs of gigantic midocean waves. Dilip was lovely and warm, in the middle of this huge cold sea. ‘Actually,’ he confessed, nuzzling her throat and at the same time leaning back to do something new to the illusion. ‘I
was
having you on. I know where we are. We’re in Buckingham Palace, for a changing of the guard, what could be more fitting, ah, green-eyed Fiorinda—’

Her eyes were grey, in some lights hazel; or maybe even brown. But it would have been a shame to correct him when he was on a roll.

Ax arranged for Fereshteh to get him up to speed on British Islam, or English Islam as they should now say. She and Allie were sharing a suite of Insanitude rooms: a makeshift arrangement, like Ax and Fiorinda living at Snake Eyes, that seemed likely to persist because it was impossible to make plans. No sign of Allie. She was keeping a low profile, functioning okay, but nothing like her old self. He was startled and intrigued to find that Fereshteh still wore the burqa, in her own living room.

‘You’re not a male relative, and I feel more comfortable this way.’

It was certainly interesting to watch her hands, and her eyes, and guess at the shape of that smile in her voice. How old was Fereshteh? Her hands said young, but her rich singing voice had all its growth, which he knew in a woman normally meant late twenties. Was she fat or thin? A little fleshy, he judged, but graceful. They talked about Islamic background, and how Ax would have to learn Arabic if he wanted to get very far: Ax skirting round the obvious, which to Ax was
how can a woman put up with this religion?

‘I don’t get it,’ he said, at last. ‘Okay, I heard about how women get a better deal legally in the Koran than in the Bible, and Muhammad was secretly an early feminist, and wearing the veil is actually liberating, but give me a break. You and I both know that what
happens
, among the faithful, is heavy inequality.’

‘Qur’an.’

‘K’ran’

‘Better. Whenever we say the name of the Prophet, we say
Peace and Blessings of Allah Be Upon Him
.’

‘Muhammad, Peace and Blessings of Allah Be Upon Him. But how can you
agree
to something that says you’re less than a man, and you have go around with a bag over your head because you’re responsible for sexual attraction and he isn’t, all that?’

‘I don’t have to agree, Ax. I only have to accept, to stop fighting with the way things are. Accept the will of God, and be at peace. That’s what Islam means. But not only Islam thinks like this:
In la sua volonte e nostra pace—’

‘That’s not Arabic.’

‘No, it’s Italian. It’s a line from Dante’s Paradiso.
In His will is our peace.’

For himself, he could feel the attraction: some kind of bedrock.
Accept
was a riff that kept playing in his head just now. For a woman, a courageous, competent, talented human being like Fereshteh, it was incomprehensible. He shook his head. ‘Nah, I still don’t get it.’

She straightened the sleek dark braid, tinged with rust—colour, that lay on his shoulder. ‘You’re like a little boy. Your information chip let you down, huh?’

‘It doesn’t help with understanding things, it’s only a stack of facts and some ordering software. So, are you ever going to take that off, while I’m around?’

‘Not until we put out the light.’

In July Fiorinda moved back to Reading. Too many hurtful things had been said and done, since that horrible ride down the Mall. Being with Ax had become an unhappy marriage, they were better apart. She found a vacant hut, sturdily made out of car body panels, in one of the farthest flung camping fields, arranged her possessions and sat looking around, seeking things that dated from before the Ax. Her guitar, a few dresses. My life is over, she thought. This is something else, a useless aftermath. That was the way she’d felt since Massacre Night. It wasn’t Ax’s fault, but maybe it was the reason they’d broken up. She picked up the saltbox and held it in her palm. She felt no nostalgia for the cold house, those years were dreadful to recall, but this double-edged talisman was still precious. A present for a little girl who is going to live beyond the end of the world.

She began to work for Olwen Devi, on a scheme training human gut bacteria to chew up and neutralise shit, wherever it was laid (but not before!). As Sage had predicted, it was getting direly necessary to have a policy for the brown stuff. She didn’t like being a pharm animal, but she knew she had to
be there
. That was what The Few were about. She wasn’t going to let Ax down, just because they had personal differences. There were exercises you did, physical exercises rather like T’ai Chi, which expedited the pharming, due to quantum entanglement or something. She was doing them one morning, while her breakfast tea kettle sizzled, when Sage arrived. When she’d finished he was sitting at her open door.

The skull was chipper enough, but it was lying through its teeth. The rest of him looked bone weary. The Heads had all been ill with some bug or other: and then Luke had gone down with a viral pneumonia. There was nothing a hospital could do for him, and Head Ideology scorned such places anyway. They were nursing him as best they could in the van. Fiorinda was not allowed to help. They said she was too young, and what the fuck would Ax say if she got sick?

‘How is he?’

She didn’t invite him in. He looked as if he needed the sun and air.

‘Okay, sort of, for the moment. George is with him.’

‘Is he going to get better?’

The skull contemplated. ‘No,’ said Sage at last, stonily. ‘I don’t think so.’

She said nothing. Her fire burned with a strong, young, yellow flame, the effect of the exercises made her feel distant and sleepy. So this is what we will do, she thought, as she crouched waiting for the water’s note to change. We will die… Well, that’s not so bad. Without premeditation she reached out, and a flame crept into her hand. It curled there confidingly, the little wild creature, full of life: such a consoling thing, a fire.

Sage moved in the doorway, a boot heel striking—

She looked around. He quickly looked away.

‘There’s a letter for you. I brought it over.’

The campground Post Office was busy, these days. Cellphone networks had collapsed as the hippies chopped down masts all over the place, leaving the utterly, abjectly mobile-dependent English lost and bewildered.

The short letter was from Carly.

Dear Fiorinda, excuse me writing, but I couldn’t get a number for you, you famous person you. I don’t know if you want to know this but I thought you ought to be told—

‘My mother’s sick again,’ she said, when she’d read to the end. ‘Sounds as if she’s dying.’

Summer turned to Autumn. Throughout Europe, Countercultural Revolution flared and smouldered. In England appeasement, the President Pigsty route, seemed to be working: but the conflict between Yorkshire’s Islamic Separatists and the police had reached the proportions of a small war. In the cold house Fiorinda endured the hated company of the dying woman, not knowing if it made any sense to stay, sure she could not leave. At least Carly made no further contact. She thought of Saul the Pig in his hotel suite with his bodyguards, Ax the manager organising everyone, the Few obediently doing whatever he said: and all the barmy army lads, all the campgrounds, all those thousands upon thousands of people who had never gone home. From a distance she could see it happening, Ax’s future, the rock and roll lifestyle written over everything. The nomadic idleness, the greedy self-indulgence, the emotional intensity, the
anomie
, the tantrums… She saw no hope in the development. A certain model of human life becomes accepted: once we were manufacturing workers, then we were venture capitalists, then docile consumers. Now we’re rockstars. So what.

Sometimes she thought about the magic. But Sage had been right to look the other way, because there was nothing to discuss. Magic, when you hold it in your hand, turns out not to mean anything useful. It’s like life, it’s like death: it’s not
for
anything. It just is.

The trouble in Yorkshire was getting very bad. Girls of Pakistani or Bangladeshi extraction were found dead if they had so much as left the house unveiled or without the escort of a male relative. Schools were closed, ‘Anglo—Saxon’ companies attacked, mixed race families harassed. Terrorist bombings and racial firefights were almost daily occurences. People who still had satellite tv started seeing the map of England on Al Jazeera and CNN (shorn of Scotland and Wales: you didn’t even recognise the “headless chicken” shape, first few times you saw it); with Yorkshire outlined in jagged red. People who didn’t were fed a milder version of events.