Bold as Love (26 page)

The sentence stalled. They stared into the red caves between the coals.

Nothing’s really changed, thought Ax. The administration is the same dodgy team that Paul Javert was playing for, same bunch of amoral chancers. The peace in Yorkshire may not hold up. We’re still deep in shit. But Fiorinda calls the police, the hippie-goon regime collapses like a house of cards; and suddenly it feels as if we have a
chance
to make something of this disaster. To pull ourselves out of that swamp where murder is law… Astonishing girl. He had asked DCI Holland
what the fuck
(expletive deleted) did she think she was doing, having a seventeen year old kid interview a murdering paedophile, alone in a room with him? She’d answered: ordinarily you would be right, but this is
Fiorinda.

The girl who told me, the first time we were alone together, the first night I took her to my bed: Pigsty is a childfucker.

In just about that many words. How did she know?

Maybe that was a stupid question.

He’d had a terrible struggle, but tonight his mind quiet in a way it hadn’t been for a long time. A stillness inside. Insh’allah. Whichever way things went, it would be okay. Shit, what do I really want? If I come out of the game with nothing except Fiorinda and Aoxomoxoa, I’ll be well up on the deal.

He just unfolds, this guy—

‘Listen, Sage. Would you do some oxy with me?’

Sage looked up, startled out of deep abstraction. The skull went blank, and stayed blank long enough—measurable seconds—for Ax to get alarmed. It was something he’d been thinking about, doing the intimacy drug, but maybe this really wasn’t the moment. No, it was okay: the mask came back to life and he was getting the
you, beyond belief
grin that he considered his personal property.

‘Yeah,’ said Sage. ‘Yes, I would.’

‘Not now, but if we are ever through this. Next time there’s a good time.’

‘Done.’

‘Good. You were saying—?’

‘Was I?’ Sage shook his head. ‘I’ve forgotten. I was probably going to say, that’s enough about Mary and Marlon. I just wanted to tell you—’

‘Yeah.’

‘C’mon. I came to stop you from moping. Let’s go find some company.’

Sage had been living, in so far as he needed a place to sleep, at the Heads’ studio in Battersea. That weekend he took Fiorinda and Ax to his cottage in Cornwall, a retreat that even the band rarely visited. It was on the north coast, in about twelve acres, up an execrable washed-out track. The Atlantic was on the other side of the hill, a tumultuous small river ran through the land; there was a tiny village two miles away. He had done almost nothing to the cottage since he’d bought it, except to get decent crystal cable laid, set up the parlour as a studio (where he’d written most of the
Arbeit Macht Frei
and
Stonefish
immersions: place should be hideously haunted); and move a big, low bed into the living room. He slept down there, couldn’t be fucked, drunk or sober, to negotiate the narrow, crooked staircase at night. The place was otherwise a miracle of inconvenience, especially for someone with Sage’s hands. Most of the domestic appliances were left over from when it had been a failed holiday let.

The weather was terrible. Sage and Ax did old jigsaws, Ax having discovered a stack of them in a cupboard. Fiorinda read the children’s classics she found in a bookcase upstairs. At twilight, when the rain eased off, they walked to the pub: down the track, the river rushing in spate over its granite boulders beside them, hazel catkins unfurled, shaking under the bare oak branches; primroses shining like milky stars in the high banks along the lane.

On the night they didn’t get astonishingly drunk at what was known (though who was locked out was unclear: it wasn’t the local police) as ‘a lock-in’ at The Powdermill, Fiorinda sat dreaming by the hearth. Ax and Sage had fallen asleep, on the couch and on the bed. There was no sound but the whisper of the flames.

Sage’s property was called The Magic Place. The name was on a stone marker at the turn-off, in Cornish: he’d shown it to her when they arrived. Nothing to do with Sage, it had always been called that. It wasn’t the cottage that was supposed to be magic but a stone, he thought. Or a tree, or a pool in the river.

She had asked him, do you know which word is which?

Don’t get smart with me, brat. Certainly I do. That one’s magic, that one is place.

How do you say it?

I’ve forgotten. Have to ask George.

They’d been alone because Ax, who had driven them down in his precious classic Volvo coupe, had kicked up a big fuss when he saw the track. He was walking up the hill, fuming, to make sure it didn’t get any worse. Fucking perverse, why do I have to put up with this—

I’m glad you’re here, Sage had said, the mask doing enigmatic smile. Always meant to bring you here.

I’m here, she thought, reaching out to the fire. My friend, my brother, I’m here. A handful of flame lay quivering in her palm, and she had that Escher feeling, the two planes sliding into one. She looked round and found Sage, unmasked by sleep, blue eyes wide open. ‘So you can still do that,’ he said.

‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Not
anyone.
’

‘I won’t.’ He turned over, and as far as she knew slept again at once.

Sayyid Muhammad Zayid had come to London and taken a suite at the Savoy (never backward with the panoply, Muhammad). He did not try to influence Ax on the question of Pigsty and the death penalty. Perhaps he even agreed that the perpetrator of such crimes should live out his guilty life. But he’d come down because he was sure Ax would be the next President, and what was on his mind was Shari’a. They had discussions—the Islamic entourage in attendance, Ax alone—which were good and friendly, in which neither of them shifted their position in the slightest. One day Ax arrived at the suite and found to his horror that Fiorinda was there, alone with the Sayyid and his brothers-in-law. Fiorinda, straight backed on the hotel sofa, hands in her lap like a princess in a fairytale, wearing a grey voile shift over glistening cream satin; her hair burning through a grey cobweb scarf. When Ax came in she smiled at him, made her excuses, took her coat and left.

‘So that is your wife,’ said Sayyid Muhammad.

‘Ah—’

‘She’s a charming young woman, intelligent too. You did well there, lad.’

‘Muhammad, could you do me a really big favour. Could you…not use that term, when Fiorinda is around.’

‘She seems like your wife to me. I think I must call her your wife.’

‘Big favour. Please.’

Sayyid Muhammad smiled at the young man’s anxiety. ‘You
are
under that little lady’s thumb: well, it’s natural for a while. But you be careful. You know, the difference between Islam and Christian, on the matter of women—and it’s a real difference, though I’ve never argued with you on the civil rights issue, I’m all for that kind of equality—comes down to the danger of idolatry. We recognise it, we guard against it, the Christians don’t. We’re so weak, where they are concerned, every man is the same. We would put them next to God, and that is not allowed.’

‘How can you talk about the people of God,’ said Ax, ‘and say
we,
when you’re leaving out half of them? What is Fiorinda then, a
djinn
?’

She is a fine lass, thought Sayyid Muhammad. She dresses extravagently, but a sight more modestly than most Christian girls: and she has something very strange in the back of her eyes. ‘There are such beings, in some sense. This is a matter of revelation.’

Ax had been going into
djinn
, and the whole ingenious project of making modern science line up with the magical and supernatural hierarchies of the Qur’anic cosmos. It was interesting stuff.

‘As long as we stick to
in some sense
, and it’s an Islamicized term for autonomic software agents, or mysterious big number behaviour. I can go with that.’

‘Well, mysticism is not for you. But government is, so let us return to that problem.’

Ax sometimes wished his prophet of choice had had the tact to get crucified and bow out of it, instead of sticking around to set up a religio—political state. He sat down, frowning.

‘Muhammad, to me Islam means accepting the will of God, and accepting that the task of the human community is
to become
the presence of God’s mercy and compassion on earth. I’m not interested in the jurisprudence. If you can miraculously square Shari’a with abandoning the death penalty, leaving out the headscarves, and dropping the discussion of how much you have to nick before you get your hand chopped off, good luck to you: but I’m not going to be your ally, even if I was ever in a position to influence the lawgivers.’

‘As long as we’re talking,’ said Sayyid Muhammad, ‘I’m in with a chance.’

Times and times he had crossed London, from Paddington to Battersea, coming up from the cottage—yes, using public transport. Always, why not? I like to see life—without hearing a single English voice, sometimes without hearing a word of English spoken. No chance of that this evening. The Eurostar invasion rolled back. No tourists. No oddly garbed munchkin Japanese girls, no vast middle—aged North American couples. Posters and video clips everywhere about the referendum. He joined the patient crowd on an Underground platform, thinking about the last six or seven years. On tour and gigging, plugged in at the cottage, working with the Heads in Battersea, plenty drugs to paper over the gaps. Could have gone on forever, sitting there in Limbo. On the Circle line he obstinately stayed by the doors, propping up the carriage roof, (
you
can move down, sunshine, you fit better); and played the game of desert island Londoners. The ones he liked the look of, the ones he’d have to feed to the sharks. There’s a clay-coloured soulful, sexless face from the Fertile Crescent. I’ll have hir. A face from West Africa, young but Traditionalist, scarified cheeks like a ripe fruit bursting. She’s okay. One from the Horn,
very
superior profile, but he looks sulky. Sharkmeat. A black haired, pale-eyed, white skinned Irish girl, chatting hard with her sparky hejabed girlfriend whose looks are from the Gulf somewhere, (keep those two). Red braces type, essentially Norman French, standing out still after a thousand years, that hard T junction nose and eyebrows, slab cheeks, keep him on trial: and they are all English. Gingery Scot in a cashmere overcoat, a senior suit of the first order. Don’t usually see those on the Tube, maybe he’s a devout Countercultural suit. Now there is a stunner. What went into that? Vietnamese-Irish-Nigerian? Wonder if she’d like to fuck Aoxomoxoa? And they’re all English. Presumably, pragmatically, since they’re still here. Wonder what they make of me.

Wonder are they feeling merciful.

Change at Baker Street, and here we wait and wait. People looking at each other, saying not a word but what a buzz in the air. Something had happened to London, jerked the whole gross, unspeakably huge mass of human parts into vivid alertness, the brain’s
P300 response
(the very same that Aoxomoxa used for his wicked immersive purposes) New York must have felt like this, he thought, after 9/11. But the Frankenstein here was not the shock of unprecedented injury, no, something far different, something rarely, rarely so powerful as this. Call it
Ax Preston
, call it
hope
, but don’t forget to be afraid.

At some point on Massacre Night, I decided I would stay with this. Not sticking around to get vengeance on the Pig. Perish the thought. Simply because it would be a crime against the Ideology to walk away from something
so fucking strange
. When is it going to end? Trouble ahead, trouble behind. When will the state of affairs formerly known as normal resume? Never, he began to suspect. This isn’t nearly over, it has only just begun.

Green Park, and out into the pale, warm powdery twilight. The gates were open. The hippie guards were outside one of the sentry boxes, deeply involved in a crap game. ‘Hi, Sage.’

‘Hi, slackers. Maybe we should invest in a flock of trained geese. Ax here yet?’

‘Haven’t seen him. Try the North Wing.’

Instead he found Fiorinda, playing the piano alone in a dusty drawing room.

‘What’s that? Scarlatti?’

‘Yeah.’ There was a bottle of wine on the grand piano. He topped up the glass beside it, and took bottle and glass off to a row of chill-out assorted armchairs. Something Insanitude must have been going on in here.

‘Hey, don’t take my wine… Bring it back here.’

He came back and leant there watching, as the serene music spilled out from her hands. ‘You managed to find your way to the polling station?’

‘I did. Very sweet and old fashioned, the whole thing. I had no idea.’

‘Sage, tell me this stupid referendum is going to work out.’

‘This stupid referendum is going to work out.’

‘Are you just saying that because I asked you to?’

‘Aargh.
Don’t do that, Fee. It pisses me off. Have you been out much today? I’ve come across London, looking at people. I think they’ve voted for him.’

‘Then I’m glad. Oh well, why not. The hero of the hour, with a battle-hardened army at his back, having embraced the religion of the coming age, asks the people to elect him king. Sure, of course. Since we are heading for the Dark Ages anyway. It’s romantic, but not what I would call progress.’

‘You been talking like that to Ax?’

‘No, but I’ve been thinking it.
This is not my world
. No matter what the result is, my world ended on Massacre Night. Look what happens to me. You and Ax go off to war, I stay behind to look after Ax’s baby project, and manage the household. Until you get back, and I’m required as a pet again.’

‘Don’t be so snivelling ridiculous.’

‘Okay, what if I had wanted to come with you, join in that killing game?’

‘Fuck, would you
want
to?’

She smiled nastily. ‘Nah, but you don’t fool me. I know exactly how you think. You, and Ax, and all the caring menfolk around here. I’m not built to play Red Sonja, so I’m the lickle princess. There no parts for me as a human being in this movie?’